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Stories and comments across the archive that link to utk.edu.

Comments · 333

  1. Re:Nothing changes... by rjkimble · · Score: 5, Informative · on Web Profits in the Gutter

    According to this and this, Gutenberg's second book was the Psalter, a collection of the Psalms of the Old Testament, printed by themselves. So I think you're correct to question the assertion that Gutenberg's second book was a collection of erotica. Besides, it just doesn't make sense when you consider the time and place.

  2. Re:The real problem by Graff · · Score: 2 · on Paging Eliza: Patenting IM Bots
    Last week I was on an 1842 Steam Locomotive and noticed that the butterfly hindged doors on the coal feed was granted patent #3.
    As an aside to this, you can find the following information on the first US patent at this site:
    "First US patent in 1790 for making potash and pearl ashes was signed by George Washington"
  3. Re:computational chemistry? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Informative · on Undergraduate Computational Chemistry Conference

    Leave simulation and computers in physics where they belong.

    Nonsense. Physics is done with nothing more sophisticated than a slide rule for calculations. If the problem can't be done with a slide rule, just make a few simplifying assumptions and try again. Even the great Enrico Fermi used nothing more than a slide rule.

    Chemists, on the other hand have a much more difficult world. They can't simplify everything down to a trivial case because the atoms they deal with have their properties determined by their complex electonic structures, and the molecules are made up of assemblies of thousand and more atoms. To understand the behaviour of these structures you must have powerful computers.

  4. Re:mirrors by dotgod · · Score: 0, Redundant · on Mandrake Linux 9.0 Beta 1
    Oops...these are the real ones

    Austria

    ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake-iso/i586/ (Vienna)
    Czech Republic

    ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake-iso/i586/

    ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/OS/Linux/Dist/Mandrake/m andrake-iso/i586/ (Prague)
    Estonia

    ftp://ftp.aso.ee/pub/os/Linux/distributions/mandra ke-iso/i586/
    France

    ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake-iso/i586/ (Lyon)

    ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake-iso/i586/ (Nancy)

    ftp://ftp.proxad.net/pub/Distributions_Linux/Mandr ake-iso/i586/ (Paris)

    ftp://linux.ups-tlse.fr/Mandrake-iso/i586/ (Toulouse)
    Germany

    ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/Mandra ke-iso/i586/ (Esslingen)

    ftp://ftp.join.uni-muenster.de/pub/linux/distribut ions/mandrake-iso/i586/ (Muenster)

    ftp://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/pub/linux/Mandrake-iso/i 586/ (bayreuth)
    Hungary

    ftp://ftp.linuxforum.hu/mirror/Mandrake-iso/i586/
    Netherlands

    ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/Man drake-iso/i586/

    ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/M andrake-iso/i586/
    Russia

    ftp://ftp.chg.ru/pub/Linux/mandrake-iso/i586/ (Chernogolovka)
    Sweden

    ftp://ftp.chello.se/pub/Linux/Mandrake-iso/i586/

    ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/os/mandrake-iso/i586/ (Dalarma)
    Taiwan

    ftp://linux.cdpa.nsysu.edu.tw/pub/Mandrake/mandrak e-iso/i586/
    United Kingdom

    ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/pub/un ix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake-iso/i586/ (Canterbury)
    United States

    ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandrake/mandr ake-iso/i586/ (NY)

    ftp://ftp.orst.edu/pub/mandrake-iso/i586/ (Oregon)

    ftp://ftp.software.umn.edu/pub/linux/mandrake/Mand rake-iso/i586/ (Minnesota)

    ftp://helios.dii.utk.edu/pub/linux/Mandrake/Mandra ke-iso/i586/ (Tennessee)

    ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake-iso/i586/ (Illinois)

    ftp://mirrors.secsup.org/pub/linux/mandrake/Mandra ke-iso/i586/

    ftp://raven.cslab.vt.edu/pub/linux/mandrake-iso/i5 86/ (Virgina)

    ftp://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke-iso/i586/ (Hawaii)

  5. mirrors by country... by neo8750 · · Score: 4, Informative · on Mozilla 1.1 Beta Out And About
    lets be nice to the main site! .at .au .be .bg .ca .ch .com/.net/.org/.edu .cz .de .dk .ee .es .fi .fr .gr .hk .hu .ie .il .jp .kr .no .pl .pt .ru .se .sg .sk .tw .uk
  6. Re:Escape from Silicon Valley by YanceyAI · · Score: 2 · on Sili-Hudson Valley?
    Actually, I moved to Knoxville, TN from Los Angeles. We don't have clean air (10th worst in the nation, worse than NYC), light traffic, or jobs. And the labor pool is small (pop. 250,000). We also have terrible public education. Also, if you decide to leave the company you're working for, forget finding much else in the tech field.

    We do have broadband, though. And UT football.

  7. Re:How many BogoMips can your Mac do? by olafva · · Score: 1 · on Mac Users May Be Smarter
    I agree, computer benchmarks, whether MIPS, BogoMips, MFLOPS, Dhrystones or whatever can be very misleading and outright wrong, especially for "real life" scientific or engineering applications.

    For example, LINPAK can solve a sparse matrix (say 95% of the matrix is populated with zeros) at a very high MFLOP rate :), but since LINPAK spends most of its time on needless zero mutiplies, the actual LINPAK solution time is likely to be hundreds or thousands of times longer than a faster sparse solver (that avoids needless storage or multiplies by zeros). Such sparse matrices occur in nearly all structural analyses of buildings, aircraft, automobiles, etc. as well as many electromagnetic applications. Thus, the ultimate "true" benchmark (in this case) is the actual time to solve the sparse matrix, despite excellent LINPAK MFLOPS (most of which are unnecessary zero multiplies).

    Benchmarks, especially those involving MIPS or MFLOPS, are almost useless in such practical scientific and engineering applications.

  8. LONG LIVE QWERTY! by newerbob · · Score: -1, Offtopic · on Making Computing More Human-Centered
    Unless you can plug an I/O interface directly to my brain, you are not going to beat the keyboard for computer access. 100+ keys in approximately 1 1/2 foot range. We are very adroitness as mammals with our fingers. Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page are perfect examples of this ability. You will never see one of our nearest mammalian cousins, the chimpanzee, do "Stairway to Heaven" without pissing everyone off at the local guitar store sound room.

    The common human can manage the 1 1/2 foot distance of a keyboard fairly well as evidenced by the number of God awful personal web pages on Geocities. Even though I use the most "gooey" Graphical User Interface, Apple's Mac OS X [apple.com], if I want to manage data, files, etc., I jump to the "Terminal" and do it through the Command Line Interface. Even with Mac OS X's speech control and IBM's Via Voice software, I can still type faster than I can talk -- in an intelligible manner.

    I always find it funny in "near future" films how complicated the input interfaces are. They are dancing their hands in a virtual space acting like data had a form that you could grab and move. What a waste of effort. If you have to flail your arms around for 8 hours, you are going to be exhausted...but at least you will only have to buy one ticket to fly Southwest [washtimes.com]. The amount of effort required to manipulate the 100+ keys of a standard QWERTY keyboard is minimal. Though I have never had problems, I am sure the keyboard design can be improved to prevent repetitive injuries to certain users. We are all different shapes and sizes in various regions of our anatomy. Its hard to pick the "average human being" for a generic device.

    The keyboard is a powerful input device. Even with the 130 year-old QWERTY keyboard [earthlink.net], human kind has been able to create wonders -- without it, we would have never made it to the moon. Compared to the original 1872 keyboard layout by C. L. Sholes, my clear plastic keyboard that came with my Dual G4 is not much different. I know it so well, I don't think I will ever use the Dvorak keyboard [utk.edu] but my future kids might.

  9. The QWERTY keyboard is still king! by toupsie · · Score: 5, Insightful · on Making Computing More Human-Centered
    Unless you can plug an I/O interface directly to my brain, you are not going to beat the keyboard for computer access. 100+ keys in approximately 1 1/2 foot range. We are very adroitness as mammals with our fingers. Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page are perfect examples of this ability. You will never see one of our nearest mammalian cousins, the chimpanzee, do "Stairway to Heaven" without pissing everyone off at the local guitar store sound room.

    The common human can manage the 1 1/2 foot distance of a keyboard fairly well as evidenced by the number of God awful personal web pages on Geocities. Even though I use the most "gooey" Graphical User Interface, Apple's Mac OS X, if I want to manage data, files, etc., I jump to the "Terminal" and do it through the Command Line Interface. Even with Mac OS X's speech control and IBM's Via Voice software, I can still type faster than I can talk -- in an intelligible manner.

    I always find it funny in "near future" films how complicated the input interfaces are. They are dancing their hands in a virtual space acting like data had a form that you could grab and move. What a waste of effort. If you have to flail your arms around for 8 hours, you are going to be exhausted...but at least you will only have to buy one ticket to fly Southwest. The amount of effort required to manipulate the 100+ keys of a standard QWERTY keyboard is minimal. Though I have never had problems, I am sure the keyboard design can be improved to prevent repetitive injuries to certain users. We are all different shapes and sizes in various regions of our anatomy. Its hard to pick the "average human being" for a generic device.

    The keyboard is a powerful input device. Even with the 130 year-old QWERTY keyboard, human kind has been able to create wonders -- without it, we would have never made it to the moon. Compared to the original 1872 keyboard layout by C. L. Sholes, my clear plastic keyboard that came with my Dual G4 is not much different. I know it so well, I don't think I will ever use the Dvorak keyboard but my future kids might.

  10. Re:Small scopes by dpp · · Score: 1 · on "Winking" Star Thought to Harbor a Disk
    Other solution: double up on observations. Different recievers can be attached to a telescope. IR, ultra-violet and visible can be observed at the same time.

    Not easily: much of the UV window is very strongly absorbed by the atmosphere, so you can't use it from ground-based telescopes anyway and have to use spacecraft. It's also not so easy to observe two wavelengths at once: you need a lot of complicated optics, and you don't want to waste any of those precious photons. In addition, if the wavelengths are very different, you could have very different design requirements on the rest of the telescope.

    So why not double up one projects that are located in the same space in the sky.

    They'd have to be really close in the sky. It works for some projects where you're looking at a sample of objects in a patch of sky, like the Hubble Deep Field. However, for many instruments on telescopes like the Keck and Subaru, the field of view is less than 30 arcminutes, which is only the angular diameter of the full moon. Also, the instrument and observing mode you use are strongly dependent on exactly what sort of object you are investigating, and how, and may not be suitable for anything else that happens to be in the field of view.

    Also, with image enhancement, you can look at a wider section of sky and view multiple objects, while using computers to examen your specific project.

    Image processing and general number-crunching are essential to astronomers already, in order to transform raw data into a final image ("data reduction"). I spent the majority of my Ph.D. working on ways to process a particular type of data, so we're already doing what we can. :-)

    Essentially, research-class telescopes are all oversubscribed, and so people tend to make whatever optimisations they can already.

  11. Re:Java != .NET by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 2 · on Microsoft Case Proceeds
    Java limited people to one language, a language that many coders didn't like.

    Which language would that be, then? Would it be BASIC, or COBOL or ADA or Python or FORTH or PASCAL or C or PERL or FORTRAN or LISP or Scheme or Smalltalk or one of these?

    In fact, surprise, surprise, there are over 200 different programming languages you can use to write Java VM programs in.

  12. Our experience by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 5, Informative · on Building a Wireless Network for an Apartment Complex?
    We deployed the largest campus wireless (to date) network here. Which involved a lot of the issues you bring up and then some. Was it a pain? Yup. Did we have to backtrack and reengineer (esp. security and client access)? Yup. Check out this stuff for some info:



    I hope this helps. Our wireless guys pulled this off in 130 buildings over a several square kilometer area. Good Luck!

    PS. Cracks about Redneck Rocky Top and such ilk should be modded -1! ;-p
  13. Our experience by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 5, Informative · on Building a Wireless Network for an Apartment Complex?
    We deployed the largest campus wireless (to date) network here. Which involved a lot of the issues you bring up and then some. Was it a pain? Yup. Did we have to backtrack and reengineer (esp. security and client access)? Yup. Check out this stuff for some info:



    I hope this helps. Our wireless guys pulled this off in 130 buildings over a several square kilometer area. Good Luck!

    PS. Cracks about Redneck Rocky Top and such ilk should be modded -1! ;-p
  14. Our experience by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 5, Informative · on Building a Wireless Network for an Apartment Complex?
    We deployed the largest campus wireless (to date) network here. Which involved a lot of the issues you bring up and then some. Was it a pain? Yup. Did we have to backtrack and reengineer (esp. security and client access)? Yup. Check out this stuff for some info:



    I hope this helps. Our wireless guys pulled this off in 130 buildings over a several square kilometer area. Good Luck!

    PS. Cracks about Redneck Rocky Top and such ilk should be modded -1! ;-p
  15. Our experience by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 5, Informative · on Building a Wireless Network for an Apartment Complex?
    We deployed the largest campus wireless (to date) network here. Which involved a lot of the issues you bring up and then some. Was it a pain? Yup. Did we have to backtrack and reengineer (esp. security and client access)? Yup. Check out this stuff for some info:



    I hope this helps. Our wireless guys pulled this off in 130 buildings over a several square kilometer area. Good Luck!

    PS. Cracks about Redneck Rocky Top and such ilk should be modded -1! ;-p
  16. Our experience by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 5, Informative · on Building a Wireless Network for an Apartment Complex?
    We deployed the largest campus wireless (to date) network here. Which involved a lot of the issues you bring up and then some. Was it a pain? Yup. Did we have to backtrack and reengineer (esp. security and client access)? Yup. Check out this stuff for some info:



    I hope this helps. Our wireless guys pulled this off in 130 buildings over a several square kilometer area. Good Luck!

    PS. Cracks about Redneck Rocky Top and such ilk should be modded -1! ;-p
  17. Re:Centrifugal Force Does Not Exist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Establishing the Maximum Speed of a CD-ROM Drive

    I'll bet you think you're hot shit.

    Newton's Third Law:

    III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

    You speak of a centripetal force, what is the opposite force called? The one that would be pushing out? The one that would send pieces of the disc flying OUTward?

    Geez, go to college.

  18. Re:Hari Seldon by Danny+Rathjens · · Score: 1 · on Simulating Societies

    Plenty of Newtons but no Kepler.
    Perhaps you meant to say; plenty of Keplers, but no Tycho Brahe.
    You can find many sources for this info, I just did a quick google search to find this:
    Brahe compiled extensive data on the planet Mars, which would later prove crucial to Kepler in his formulation of the laws of planetary motion because it would be sufficiently precise to demonstrate that the orbit of Mars was not a circle but an ellipse.
    Brahe and Kepler Observations of Tycho Brahe

  19. Re:SNMP by Pauly · · Score: 3, Insightful · on Security in UPS Software?
    You do know you're not likely to get to use anything better than SNMP v1. That's at least as big a security issue. SNMP v1 is rightly derided as Security is Not My Problem.

    My advice is to carefully firewall that machine with iptables. Block any network activity on the port that doesn't originate from the localhost. Also, be sure to filter spoofed packets.

    Or simply write your own damn software. How hard can it be to snoop the traffic on the serial line that connects to the UPS and reverse engineer the protocol?

  20. Albedo and CO2 and Solar Constant by meehawl · · Score: 2 · on Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses

    While replying to yourself is probably some form of onanism, I was wondering exactly how the difference in solar constant levels due to distance would affect temperature on earth and venus.

    The answer? Not much -- it's really all down to CO2 and albedo. Without atmospheres, Earth would have a mean temperature of Earth (-12C) and Venus (-23C).

    More here, and here is the key:

    The atmosphere would finally stablilize at a still higher temperature and pressure after all the carbon dioxide had been driven from the rocks. In fact, we believe that if this sequence were to take place on the Earth, the resulting temperature and pressure of the atmosphere left behind would not be very different from that for present-day Venus: the atmospheric termperature would be hundreds of degrees Celsius and the pressure would be maybe 100 times greater than it is today. Thus, we believe that in the case of Venus the initial solar heating kept oceans from forming, or kept them from staying around if they did form, and the subsequent lack of rainfall and failure of plant life to evolve kept the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rather than binding it in the rocks as is the case for the Earth; thus, Venus has an environmental disaster for an atmosphere. The sobering warning for us is obvious: we have to be extremely concerned about processes such as burning of fossil fuels in large volumes that might (we don't know for sure because the scientific questions are complex) have the potential to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and produce on the Earth atmospheric conditions such as those found on Venus.

  21. Albedo and CO2 and Solar Constant by meehawl · · Score: 2 · on Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses

    While replying to yourself is probably some form of onanism, I was wondering exactly how the difference in solar constant levels due to distance would affect temperature on earth and venus.

    The answer? Not much -- it's really all down to CO2 and albedo. Without atmospheres, Earth would have a mean temperature of Earth (-12C) and Venus (-23C).

    More here, and here is the key:

    The atmosphere would finally stablilize at a still higher temperature and pressure after all the carbon dioxide had been driven from the rocks. In fact, we believe that if this sequence were to take place on the Earth, the resulting temperature and pressure of the atmosphere left behind would not be very different from that for present-day Venus: the atmospheric termperature would be hundreds of degrees Celsius and the pressure would be maybe 100 times greater than it is today. Thus, we believe that in the case of Venus the initial solar heating kept oceans from forming, or kept them from staying around if they did form, and the subsequent lack of rainfall and failure of plant life to evolve kept the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rather than binding it in the rocks as is the case for the Earth; thus, Venus has an environmental disaster for an atmosphere. The sobering warning for us is obvious: we have to be extremely concerned about processes such as burning of fossil fuels in large volumes that might (we don't know for sure because the scientific questions are complex) have the potential to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and produce on the Earth atmospheric conditions such as those found on Venus.

  22. Re:revolutionizing voyeurism by wsloand · · Score: 1 · on Sensitive UV Detector Ignores Visible Light

    Actually, this would not help at all in looking through the neighbor's curtains. You would want lower wavelengths (your link is for infrared-- the opposite direction of UV).

    Check out this link for some more information on the em spectrum.

  23. Who is Glenn Reynolds? by rtos · · Score: 5, Informative · on Fox Explains Why SSSCA Is Bad
    The article was written by Glenn Reynolds. He also maintains a rather cool weblog at Instapundit.com. More information about him can be found here, from which I will blockquote:
    " WHO IS GLENN REYNOLDS? I'm a law professor at the University of Tennessee. I write various law review articles, opeds, and other stuff. My most recent book is The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society, (The Free Press, 1997) coauthored with Peter W. Morgan. For something completely different, see Environmental Regulation of Nanotechnology: Some Preliminary Observations, from the April, 2001 Environmental Law Reporter. (Sorry, but most law review articles aren't on the Web).

    I'm interested in everything, but my chief interest is in the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty. The vast majority of my writing touches on this in one way or another.

    I'm also very interested in music. I produce, write for, or perform with a number of bands (but not "Pachyderm Party" -- that's a different Glenn Reynolds), including Mobius Dick, The Nebraska Guitar Militia, and the Defenders of the Faith. I own a small record company (it's not organized as a nonprofit, but it might as well be) with my brother and another guy, called WonderDog Records. Some of my favorite acts are Cecilia Noel and the Wild Clams, BT, The Supreme Beings of Leisure, and, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival."


    And he may be one of the few columnists out there that hates the RIAA as much as the Slashdot crowd.


    I thought a little background on him would be appropriate since all the claims of conservative bias and such started being flung around.

  24. Re:10 to 100 million what?? by payslee · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Every Species on Earth

    The technique they use to estimate this is called a species-area curve. As others have explained, you intensely survey a very small piece of land, and can statistically correlate that to how many species you'll find in a larger area.

    Some regions, like the tropical rainforest, are very high in species. You might have a certain type of plant that has five insect species that can only survive on that plant, and those insects might have little parasite wasps in them that specialize only in that insect, etc.

    That's why instinctions rates of species can be confusing. A few types of ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots. You might find ten thousand distinct speies in a cubic meter. Whether these species are as "important" as a less-specialized species that is more widespread and adaptable is a matter for debate. But in terms of estimating the total number of species, the species area curve holds across different types of ecosystems. As you spread out from the small plot you surveyed in detail, you encounter new species and repeat species at a predictable rate, until you hit a new type of ecosystem.

    A really good article called How many species are there on Earth?" explains all of this in much greater and more accurate detail.

  25. Lotsa Bugs, but also lotsa fungi and such by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 2 · on Every Species on Earth

    If ever in Tennessee/North Carolina, drop in to Cosby and give a day or two to help.

    The All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of the Smokies!

  26. Re:Lond distance comms by Erazmus · · Score: 2, Informative · on Happy 30th Birthday, Pioneer 10

    Check out The Speed of Light for a reference to the fact that light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation are the same thing, and therefore travel at the same speed.

    Now, if they're travelling through different mediums, then their speed is different. An interesting chart showing the different speeds through different mediums can be found here.

  27. JVM is not language neutral. by dannannan · · Score: 1 · on What is .NET?

    If this poster had read the original article more closely, he would have noticed a link to this page, which is the work of someone who actually took the time to closely analyze everything on the list at the site that the poster provided a link to.

    A closer inspection of this list at tu-berlin.de reveals that the vast majority of the items listed are not actually claiming to be compilers that produce Java byte-code. They are merely tools or compilers or interpreters written in Java. Of the few which claim to produce Java byte-code, even fewer are actually available for use (some were abandoned before completion) or have any additional information available about them.

    A handful of items in the list translate source code from language subsets into Java source code first, which you can then run JAVAC on to build actual byte-code. (For example, Canterbury claims to have such a thing for Pascal, Oberon-2, and Modula-2. There is also one for translating C code to Java code, and Fortran code to Java code. Perhaps the most promising and truly byte-code producing tools on the entire page are the assemblers at the bottom.

    It is worth pointing out that this still doesn't make the JVM a language-neutral platform. (Again, see the discussion at http://www.objectwatch.com/issue_33.htm.) While there are ways of producing Java byte-code from other languages, you've still got to write all of your code in whatever single language you choose. For example, there's no good way on the JVM to implement a class in Modula-2 code and derive from it in Pascal code, or throw an exception in C code and catch it in Fortran code. i.e. You've still got to have language affinity on the JVM. Not so on the CLR.

    D

  28. RMS and writing free software by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 2 · on Slashback: Public, Anecdotes, Conclusions

    Bullshit. You can work for a university and write free code. We do it here and have no problems. Of course, I release everything under the BSD license. No. I won't tell you what I work on as the university doesn't endorse it.

  29. Re:We do it in Condor by dsouth · · Score: 5, Informative · on UNIX Process Cryogenics?

    As the poster said, there are plenty of others:

    • SGI IRIX and Cray UNICOS provide kernel-level checkpoint-restart.
    • Condor provides user-level checkpoint restart and process migration by manipulating libraries at runtime.
    • esky provides user-level checkpoint restart under Solaris and Linux via runtime library manipulation.
    • crak provides kernel-level checkpoint restart for linux.
    • cocheck provides user-level checkpoint-restart.
    • libckpt provides user-level checkpoint-restart.


    I'm sure I left serveral out. Checkpoint-restart has been part of the high-performance computing scene for years. Having been a systdmin on large, high-performance, computing platforms for the last few years of my professional life, my experiences with checkpoint-restart have been a mixed bag. All of the existing systems have limitations. Depending on the application, those limitations can be no problem, or they can be deal-breakers.
  30. UBASIC by honcho · · Score: 1 · on Programming Mathematics?
    Take a look at UBASIC. From the documentation:
    Version 8 of UBASIC has the high precision real and complex arithmetic (up to 2600 digits) of previous versions, but adds exact rational arithmetic and arithmetic of polynomials with complex, rational, or modulo p coefficients, as well as string handling and limited list handling capabilities. In addition UBASIC has context-sensitive on-line documentation (read ubhelp.doc for information).
    It doesn't give the greatest performance it the world, but I've used to for everything from prime searching to looking for narcissistic numbers.
  31. Re:Thermionics? Environmentally friendly?! by greenrd · · Score: 2, Informative · on Waste Heat to Electricity?
    Thermionics are not chemicals, you moronic troll.

  32. Has Slasdot been InstaPundited yet? :) by David+Hume · · Score: 2, Informative · on Saudi Arabia's 'Great Firewall'


    This story has been mentioned on one of my favorite websites, Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit.com.

    Glenn is a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law. The majority of his writing is on the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty. One example is Environmental Regulation of Nanotechnology: Some Preliminary Observations, from the April, 2001 Environmental Law Reporter.

  33. Has Slasdot been InstaPundited yet? :) by David+Hume · · Score: 2, Informative · on Saudi Arabia's 'Great Firewall'


    This story has been mentioned on one of my favorite websites, Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit.com.

    Glenn is a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law. The majority of his writing is on the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty. One example is Environmental Regulation of Nanotechnology: Some Preliminary Observations, from the April, 2001 Environmental Law Reporter.

  34. Re:Unconventional gifts. by kzinti · · Score: 2 · on Geek Gift Ideas 2001

    Decent origami paper and a couple of books on the subject.

    Paper critters are indeed cool, but the well-rounded geek also needs to know how make unit origami:

    http://www.pro.or.jp/~fuji/origami/unit.star-eng.h tml

    http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/pics/origami/or igami.html

    And BTW, I'd love to know how to fold your Pierson's Puppeteer!

    --Jim

  35. Mathematics by sohp · · Score: 2, Informative · on Texts for Autodidacts?
    Here are a couple of sites I have in my bookmarks for learning about math. Hope this helps!
  36. Liberal Arts by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 1 · on Is A "Well-Rounded" Education a Good One?
    I didn't have a major in college. My alma mater only had concentrations which were interest classes other than the core curriculum. The core curriculum was rigid, difficult and focused on the fundamentals (language, science and mathematics) as well as reasoning, value inquiry and understanding global issues. You had to synthesize, analyze and verbalize or you were failed. No bones. My grades sucked but so did the majority. If you were average you got Cs. If you were great you went right to a Phd program at the school of your choice. The average grads were sharp as well.


    My liberal education allowed me to learn on my feet (that's the way I learned to code) but to also understand all that underlying stuff around my profession (IT) and its origin.


    Unfortunately, a lot of engineering schools give short shrift to the liberal arts. My current employer has made a conscious effort to stem that trend. I'd rather have a focused, yet "well-rounded" engineer than a problem-set nerd who can't talk about the implications of IT on the world stage. Those guys bore the shit out of me and usually suck as engineers anyway.

  37. Athlon (and P3/P4?) cache issues by Alejo · · Score: 1 · on Slashback: Memory, Constancy, Triumph

    There are some issues with post 2.95 gcc with newer CPUS, specially with Athlons.

    Those are explained here. Cache handling seems to be the big problem.

  38. Re:Wondering by AllenAtUT · · Score: 1 · on Dorm Storm?

    I'm a student at this particular large southern university myself, and I'm pretty involved in technology issues... The big thing about the routers and infrastructure being tested is that we're in the process of upgrading our entire network in addition to adding the wireless and other technologies. If we had equipment that had been around for a while, then no problem, but some of this stuff hasn't even come close to being tested under typical fall / spring loads. With our previous problems with BearShare, Napster, etc, our admins have a reason to be stressed. (We even had a DS-3 installed specifically for the residence halls after the main DS-3 was maxed out. The new one quickly hit 100% utilization. And that's not peak, that's constant.) The problem with the main post is that the admin didn't necessarily elaborate, for brevity's sake. Well, I hope this maybe clears things up a little bit.

  39. Re:Wondering by AllenAtUT · · Score: 1 · on Dorm Storm?

    I'm a student at this particular large southern university myself, and I'm pretty involved in technology issues... The big thing about the routers and infrastructure being tested is that we're in the process of upgrading our entire network in addition to adding the wireless and other technologies. If we had equipment that had been around for a while, then no problem, but some of this stuff hasn't even come close to being tested under typical fall / spring loads. With our previous problems with BearShare, Napster, etc, our admins have a reason to be stressed. (We even had a DS-3 installed specifically for the residence halls after the main DS-3 was maxed out. The new one quickly hit 100% utilization. And that's not peak, that's constant.) The problem with the main post is that the admin didn't necessarily elaborate, for brevity's sake. Well, I hope this maybe clears things up a little bit.

  40. Re:ORBS == tool, not violation of freedon of speec by derF024 · · Score: 1 · on ORBS Forks

    you've been awfully vocal about your distaste for orbz and other spam blocking filters.. i wonder why. could it be that you write spam software?
    http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/software.html

    honestly, orbz is not a system that's forced on people. it's used by a group of people who can't stand getting 100 pieces of crap in their inbox everyday, all from open relay mail servers. when my mailserver moved over to maps/orbs, the flow of unsolicited email decreased to a bit under one a week. i got zero complaints from people who said they couldn't send me email. i think that's pretty effective.

  41. How about ASCI Red BLAS,FFT+Extended Precision? by Wills · · Score: 3 · on "Cplant" Parallel Computing Tool

    Will the x86-optimised ASCI Red BLAS, FFT and Extended Precision libraries also be open-sourced and licensed under the GPL instead of the binary-only releases to-date?

  42. Re:Before the Brits pass out...(sunburn) by The+Ape+With+No+Name · · Score: 1 · on Australia Develops Space Program With Russia
    3)All Brits will be horribly sunburnt.

    I think that might be a general Northern European affliction.

  43. Re:does this.... by Elbelow · · Score: 2 · on First Observation Of Aurora On Jupiter

    The Earth's magnetic field acts sort of like a funnel diverting charged particles from the solar winds to the magnetic poles. So it probably concentrates particles there which would otherwise have been distributed more uniformly, making the aurorae at the poles more intense.
    Anyway, it is known that Jupiter has a very powerful and huge magnetosphere, which indeed tells us something about its interior.

  44. Rational Programming vs Semantic Web by Baldrson · · Score: 4 · on Berners-Lee On The Semantic Web
    As I posted to Slashdot a year ago on the topic:

    The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

    When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

    Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

    Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

    This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

    We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

    The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

    Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

    Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

    And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

    The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

  45. Engelbart tried this by The+Cunctator · · Score: 2 · on Head-Mounted Mouse
    Doug Engelbart (doug@bootstrap.org), the inventor of the mouse, experimented with a head-mounted mouse. As he put it,

    About that time I also rigged up a mechanism that utilized a lightweight helmet for the user to wear: turning his head from side to side would move the cursor horizontally, and nodding the head
    up and down would move the cursor vertically. This looked a bit strange, but it worked. AND this also gave me cramps, in the neck, after ten minutes or so.

    He also tried a knee-cursor, which was very popular with new users, as well as a foot-mouse, etc. He settled on a mouse and a 5-key chording keyset. NLS (aka AUGMENT) is an impressive thing in action.

    --

  46. Re:So? by AllenAtUT · · Score: 1 · on Georgia Tech Implements Wireless Campus Net

    Heck, even "good 'ole Rocky Top" has it. Yes sir, the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus is implementing a campus-wide wireless initiative. Currently, the school of Information Science, the Computer Science Building, the MBA program, the Library, and the University Center are wireless-capable, with more on the way. If you want to check it out, head to the VolNet site. Enjoy. -AC
    Allen Cain

  47. Re:close, but no cigar by seanr · · Score: 1 · on Changing Earth's Orbit Proposed

    The fact that the gravitational force the sun exhibits on the moon is greater than the gravitational force the earth exhibits on the moon is irrelevant. The sun exerts a force on both the earth and moon and causes a (rougly) equal acceleration on the two bodies.

    Tidal forces are a result of differences in gravitational forces from one side of a body to another. Since the sun is so far away these differences are much smaller than those the earth experiences from the moon, and those that the moon experiences from the earth. It isn't the strength of the gravitational field that matters, but rather the field gradient that is important. Because of the proximity of the earth to the moon, this gradient is much greater so the tidal forces of the earth on the moon and vice versa are much more pronounced.

    Check out the following links.

    From the astronomy department at the university of Arizona Check the bottom of the page.

    From the physics and astronomy department at the University of Tenessee

    From the physics department at UNLV. There is a good discussion here about why the tidal bulge leads the moon. It also touches on the effect of the solar tidal forces. It isn't to pull the moon away though, but instead to tidal lock to the sun.

    You are correct about the length of the day during the dinosaurs, I don't know where I got that number, but loosing 10 hours in a few hundred million years does seem too rapid in hind site.

  48. you're misunderstanding the use of the term by Preposterous+Coward · · Score: 1 · on Changing Earth's Orbit Proposed
    In the term "runaway greenhouse effect", "runaway" doesn't mean "rapid" or "imminent". It means something more like "self-perpetuating chain-reaction".

    The "greenhouse effect" is not itself a bad thing. It merely refers to the fact that some energy reflected off the earth's surface is captured by the atmosphere and re-radiated toward the earth rather than lost into space. Without it, the earth would not be hospitible to life as we know it.

    A "runaway" greenhouse effect occurs when temperature warms up beyond equilibrium, to a point where the oceans start to evaporate at a significantly higher rate. Since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, this is the beginning of a nasty feedback loop: as the temperature causes water to evaporate, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise, which causes more water to evaporate... i.e., it becomes a runaway positive-feedback effect. Here is a good description of the ultimate runaway greenhouse doomsday scenario.

  49. Re:The subjunctive by datacide · · Score: 1 · on What If Yahoo Was Acquired?

    Well, Hemos could be just realizing the possibility of an acquisition and asking if it has already taken place. :-/

    (However alive or dead the subjunctive construction may be, if the term baffles you, it's never too late for a brief lesson or two.)

  50. Most people don't realise how easy it is. by ThePurpleBuffalo · · Score: 2 · on Beowulf For Dummies?

    'Supercomputer on a CD' software is supposed to make it so easy to put a Beowulf cluster together

    I've wanted to build a cluster for a long time. I was given that chance at school & work. School(U of C) allowed me to do it as a term project that is still ongoing. Work allowed me to use a pile of spare machines that were waiting for new users.

    So, early one Saturday morning, I sit down with the O'Reilley book "Building Linux Clusters" and the CD that came with it. I followed the instructions in the book, and was frustrated beyond belief. The CD contained all the Beowulf software that was required. The downside was that the software had all been thrown over top of Red Hat 6.2. Being the second time I had ever installed Red Hat, I wasn't sure what the magic sequence was to get everything to work.

    I first had problems with unsupported video cards... I tried 3 different cards. Each time, I needed to re-install Red Hat. Why wouldn't it let me install all the drivers for all the cards?

    DHCP? Why? You only need to set the IPs once. Don't force me to do this... oh wait, I don't know Red Hat's weird config script structure... sigh.

    The book mentioned nothing about re-compiling the kernel. But, in order to add support for the network cards, this is what I needed to do. Oh wait, where are the kernel sources?

    This is when I got sick of this "wonderful" Beowulf CD.

    I went to Slackware 7.1.

    Installed it on the master no problem. Enabled frame buffer support for the video card so that it would work on ANY video card. Enabled native support for the network cards I was using.

    Next step, I went to THE beowulf site, did a search for PVM and PVMPOV. I downloaded all the source code I needed.

    Now, without the help of the book, I was at a bit of a loss. Luckily, there was this site that explained EVERY STEP in about a page and a half. The how-to was written by Christopher Johnson and I must say, he did an excellent job. I found only one thing that was lacking, you may also need to set PVM_DPATH=/home/pvm3/lib/pvmd in your profile.

    Now the purpose behind all of this was to get PVMPOV running, well, with a little searching, I was able to find everything I needed here.

    Conclusions:
    Use a Linux distro you are used to.
    Get a book if you want to know the theory.
    Always remember that some PVM Books are free.

    I hope this will help someone out there.
    Beware TPB