uwaterloo.ca · Domains · Slashdot Mirror

suggestions by nconway · 2000-08-02 01:15 · Score: 2 · on Ideas for High School Computer Projects?

Since I'm currently a high school student enslaved in a school without a CS program, I've got some ideas.

Get the students involved in the adminstration of the school's computer systems. They could also design the school's website, or possibly do some dynamic content (e.g. 'online report cards', etc).
Optional programming contests. Like the math department at my school does, give students the possibility to write programming contests. If you're Canadian, the CCC (run by the University of Waterloo) is a good start (and not too difficult). You could also invent your own 'contest', including fun events like Remote Controlled programmable cars, Computer Jeopardy (e.g. 'What does UNIX stand for?'), Quake deathmatch (with student designed levels), etc. These were all features at a recent programming contest I went to, and it was a blast.
Depending on how advanced the students are, you could get each to help out with the development of a Free Software project which interests them. The work woulnd't necessarily be too technical - for example, web designers could help out filing bugs and making testcases @ mozilla.org
Try introducing the students to 'Software Development', not just 'coding' (i.e. how to design a program, not just how to use a specific programming language). If you're enthusiastic, when you ask them for a relatively simple program, get them to write out an outline, object structure, design guidelines, and then finally implement it. There are plenty of books on this (sorry I can't be more specific - I've never been taught it).
A good bookshelf would be a good idea. Personally, I've had to buy more than 20 books, because the CS section of my school's library consists of 'Windows for Dummies'! I would definately appreciate having some reference material available at school. You could also give people class time to read (and possible write up book reports) on some of the books - depending on the level of the students, this might be too simplistic.
Depending on your level of ability, write some code yourself (say, from a University CS curriculm), and take your students through it. I would love a guided tour of a filesystem, for instance. A more simple topic, like Quicksorts (and optimization) would be good for less advanced students.
This isn't so much an activity as something you should be doing all the time. Critique people's coding style and design techniques. Stop bad habits from forming early - don't accept badly written or designed code. As long as the guidelines are reasonable (and don't get into religious issues like bracket placement), students will soon tire of rewriting code, and eventually learn to do things to 'write way'.

suggestions by nconway · 2000-08-02 01:15 · Score: 2 · on Ideas for High School Computer Projects?

Since I'm currently a high school student enslaved in a school without a CS program, I've got some ideas.

Get the students involved in the adminstration of the school's computer systems. They could also design the school's website, or possibly do some dynamic content (e.g. 'online report cards', etc).
Optional programming contests. Like the math department at my school does, give students the possibility to write programming contests. If you're Canadian, the CCC (run by the University of Waterloo) is a good start (and not too difficult). You could also invent your own 'contest', including fun events like Remote Controlled programmable cars, Computer Jeopardy (e.g. 'What does UNIX stand for?'), Quake deathmatch (with student designed levels), etc. These were all features at a recent programming contest I went to, and it was a blast.
Depending on how advanced the students are, you could get each to help out with the development of a Free Software project which interests them. The work woulnd't necessarily be too technical - for example, web designers could help out filing bugs and making testcases @ mozilla.org
Try introducing the students to 'Software Development', not just 'coding' (i.e. how to design a program, not just how to use a specific programming language). If you're enthusiastic, when you ask them for a relatively simple program, get them to write out an outline, object structure, design guidelines, and then finally implement it. There are plenty of books on this (sorry I can't be more specific - I've never been taught it).
A good bookshelf would be a good idea. Personally, I've had to buy more than 20 books, because the CS section of my school's library consists of 'Windows for Dummies'! I would definately appreciate having some reference material available at school. You could also give people class time to read (and possible write up book reports) on some of the books - depending on the level of the students, this might be too simplistic.
Depending on your level of ability, write some code yourself (say, from a University CS curriculm), and take your students through it. I would love a guided tour of a filesystem, for instance. A more simple topic, like Quicksorts (and optimization) would be good for less advanced students.
This isn't so much an activity as something you should be doing all the time. Critique people's coding style and design techniques. Stop bad habits from forming early - don't accept badly written or designed code. As long as the guidelines are reasonable (and don't get into religious issues like bracket placement), students will soon tire of rewriting code, and eventually learn to do things to 'write way'.

Canadian Equivalents... by Christopher+B.+Brown · 2000-07-27 02:16 · Score: 2 · on Ask The NSA About Certain Things

The rough equivalents to major US agencies:

The nearest equivalent to the FBI ... is the RCMP - Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP also provides the services provided in the US by the Treasury Police, including dealing with "crimes about currency," and the protection of heads of state and diplomatic persons.
The RCMP used to also perform services equivalent to the CIA, but this group was spun out, becoming CSIS - Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.
There was a scandal where RCMP "spooks" burned a barn where purportedly nefarious people were planning ill; the "public" view was that this made the RCMP look bad, and so the RCMP wanted no more to do with the "spooky" activities. When they're the "secret service," who can really be sure???. The public face on this was thus:
The establishment of the civilian Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the disbanding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service by an Act of Parliament in 1984 recognized the differences between security intelligence activities and law enforcement work. The 120-year old interlocking of Canada's security intelligence service with the federal police force was brought to a close.
The nearest equivalent to the NSA is the Communications Security Establishment, an "establishment" in the Department of National Defence.
See also the CSE Unofficial Web Page, which has a rather interesting discussion of the organization.
They are a mixed civilian/military group largely devoted to "signals analysis," and include pretty much the same functions associated with the NSA, notably not including having their own chip foundries. (Unless there's one hiding somewhere in Labrador!)
Notable "listening" sites include Gander (a formerly notable airport), Alert (the most northerly inhabited place in the world), Masset, and Kingston. My father used to work next door to CSE headquarters, the Sir Leonard Tilley Building.

Canadian Equivalents... by Christopher+B.+Brown · 2000-07-27 02:16 · Score: 2 · on Ask The NSA About Certain Things

The rough equivalents to major US agencies:

The nearest equivalent to the FBI ... is the RCMP - Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP also provides the services provided in the US by the Treasury Police, including dealing with "crimes about currency," and the protection of heads of state and diplomatic persons.
The RCMP used to also perform services equivalent to the CIA, but this group was spun out, becoming CSIS - Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.
There was a scandal where RCMP "spooks" burned a barn where purportedly nefarious people were planning ill; the "public" view was that this made the RCMP look bad, and so the RCMP wanted no more to do with the "spooky" activities. When they're the "secret service," who can really be sure???. The public face on this was thus:
The establishment of the civilian Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the disbanding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service by an Act of Parliament in 1984 recognized the differences between security intelligence activities and law enforcement work. The 120-year old interlocking of Canada's security intelligence service with the federal police force was brought to a close.
The nearest equivalent to the NSA is the Communications Security Establishment, an "establishment" in the Department of National Defence.
See also the CSE Unofficial Web Page, which has a rather interesting discussion of the organization.
They are a mixed civilian/military group largely devoted to "signals analysis," and include pretty much the same functions associated with the NSA, notably not including having their own chip foundries. (Unless there's one hiding somewhere in Labrador!)
Notable "listening" sites include Gander (a formerly notable airport), Alert (the most northerly inhabited place in the world), Masset, and Kingston. My father used to work next door to CSE headquarters, the Sir Leonard Tilley Building.

Radio Shack: they've got the answer by mr.ska · 2000-07-19 01:44 · Score: 2 · on Low-Powered Radio Stations-Could They Work?

Why fight for the right to buy expensive gear and to consume lots of electricity to broadcast over a small geographic area, when you could reach the whole world by setting up a station on the Internet?

Who says you need expensive gear? Didn't you ever get that electronics lab from Radio Shack as a kid? It had a manual, lots of pre-cut-and-stripped wires of various lengths, and the components were wired underneath the friendly, printed-carboard surface. Just follow the "recipe", and voila - you have [insert simple electronic device here]. One of them, I'm almost certain, was a radio wave broadcaster.

Admittedly, there is a difference between pirating the AM radio in your parent's living room from your bedroom and suddenly talking to 10 000+ of your neighbours. But I can't see the equipment being all that much - unless they're priced to ensure low-powered radio stations don't exists. (Paranoia, anyone?) OTOH, what do you think various campus radio stations all over the continent use? The one I was at certainly didn't get far.

As for an Internet station.. I guess it depends on your audience. Certainly an alternative radio station would be a good fit, but if I wanted to appeal to toddlers, or retirees, or people in vehicles (like the airport radio stations), I'd be much better off broadcasting in the regular fashion.

Re:I wonder if the FBI is reading MY mail? by Adversary · 2000-07-14 00:40 · Score: 2 · on Earthlink Refuses To Install Carnivore

Actually the governement agency responsible for this is the CSE, not CSIS. They are responsible for (at least) SIGINT (signal interception) for the Canadian Government. I infer they are doing our part for Echelon.

The official URL is void of any useful information, however Google turned up an excellent page on the CSE

Just got SBC DSL today... by David+Price · 2000-07-10 06:34 · Score: 3 · on Some Customers Can Roll Their Own DSL

They told me that I'd have to have a technician install my DSL.

Then they ship me the 'customer self-install kit' a few days before my appointment with the technician, which includes a DSL modem, ethernet card, crossover cable to connect the two, and a bunch of filter boxes that connect to the phones on the line with DSL to strip out the noise. I call up and ask if, since i've received the customer install kit, I can in fact do my own installation. No, I'm told, I'll have to have a technician install it, and there must have been some mistake in shipping me the kit.

The technician shows up this morning, and the only thing he does that I couldn't have done with a page of instructions was to plug a signal meter into the line with DSL on it and declare the quality sufficient. Then all he did was monkey around on my Windows machine installing the PPPoE software, signed on in the 'register new user' account, pulled up the online signup page, and let me type in my preferred username and password.

That signal meter reading apparently costs $99, because that's how much a technician install costs. Self-install is free.

So, my non-technical tip of the day: if you get DSL from Southwestern Bell, and they send you a self-install kit, self-install.

The technical tip for the day: PPPoE works just fine with SBC DSL. If you've got a development kernel, build it with 'packet socket' and 'PPP over ethernet' options enabled, and apply this patch to a recent version of pppd.

My /etc/ppp/options looks like this:

defaultroute plugin /etc/ppp/pppoe.so name mylogin

And my /etc/ppp/pap-secrets looks like this:

mylogin * mypass

To bring up the ppp link, i just type pppd eth0.

Re:Compression by Jonathan · 2000-07-07 12:55 · Score: 5 · on Download The Human Genome

Actually, DNA compression is a topic of interest, not only from the standpoint of saving disk space, but also for analyzing the sequence -- areas that compress differently may have different functional roles. You can read a paper on the subject by some people I know here

Re:Perhaps good may come of this - Different now by Zagadka · 2000-06-26 00:35 · Score: 1 · on Afternic Sues ICANN, Claims Unfair Treatment

Almost any USAn educational instituation could get an .edu

The University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, used to be "waterloo.edu". They later changed to "uwaterloo.ca". So it wasn't limited to "USAn" educational institutions, at one point in time.

Re:Mozilla... Mozirra... proper pronunciation? by jesser · 2000-06-14 11:03 · Score: 1 · on Mozilla M16 Released

OK, a while back I was watching a Godzilla movie. I noticed that while I pronounce Godzilla "Godzilla", the actors pronounced it "Gozeera". I am wondering if there are any similar pronunciation conundrums with Mozilla?

I don't think so. There has been a debate over the spelling for several versions, though: "It's spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E, but it's pronounced 'Mozilla.'" I think this was in the readme for one of the 4.x versions (see here).

--

"intelligent" by evil_deceiver · 2000-06-14 04:02 · Score: 1 · on Can You Create An Intelligent Haiku Generator?

A quick web search for "random haiku generator" turned up several worthy m a t c h e s.

However, most of them either recycle the same lines, or string words together based on few criteria other than syllables. One way or another, they make little sense. I wouldn't consider a haiku generator "intelligent" until it escaped both of these traps. Okay, sure, so the beauty of minimalist work is that the human mind gets to fill in the gaps. But they'd better be "gaps" and not massive, yawning chasms.

And if the haiku/senryu is going to be generated from an RDF file, ideally it would say something of some relevance about the contents of said file. That is, it would either synthesize verbally communicated information or form an opinion, which are both extraordinarily tall orders even with the current advancements in AI technology.

I love haiku/senryu, and if I had the hacking skillz, I'd have a go at this myself. But I don't, so I'll merely wish luck to those who try. And if any of you happen to read this, you'll be my hero if you include a --moooose option. Where a normal haiku is a poem in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the seaason, a mooooooose haiku is a poem not quite in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the moooooooose. :P

Re:It's not too OLD to code, but rather too YOUNG. by paulschreiber · 2000-05-29 11:19 · Score: 1 · on Too Old To Code?

Ah, quitcher whinin'. I'm 21 and have roughly two years of full-time work experience under my belt. Why? Co-op. Co-op is your friend.

When I was in high school, I took an unpaid co-op placement at Southam (they own lots of newspapers in Canada). That lead to a (paid!) summer job at KPMG. My Shad Valley job was at Dofasco, a big steel company.

I'm now an undergrad at Waterloo, studying CS. I'm on my sixth and final work term, and I've worked for school board, a university, a tech company, a web dev house and a startup, the latter two in SF.

My point here is if you have the skills, people will hire you, regardless of your age.

If you're going to university ("college" to you US folk), look for one that has a co-op program, internships, a "professional experience year," or something similar.

Paul

The Internet is not borderless by Speare · 2000-05-22 23:15 · Score: 2 · on French Court To Yahoo!: Dump Nazi-Related Auctions

US Interstate Gambling prohibitions
http://www.compar.com/news/news1vs11.html
The United States leaves the legality of gambling (gaming) up to the states. To allow one state to outlaw it while another state condones it, a complex web of federal legislation makes interstate gambling illegal, until the casino lobby petitions for another loophole. This isn't just between casinos, the Feds and you: VISA and MasterCard have been sued for allowing illegal transactions, as if they could monitor it.

International Free Speech prohibitions
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~sha llit/afraid.html
"Here are just a few of the historical limits to freedom of speech that many countries have imposed: Libel and slander. Obscenity. National security. Invasion of privacy. False advertising. Age limits. Solicitation of murder. Fraud."

Providers such as CompuServe and Yahoo! have already become familiar with the technical and legislative issues of geographical censorship. If Yahoo! has a presence as a company in France, the corporate whole will likely move to follow the restrictions that a French court may impose, as far as they're technically able.

It's been said before, but people don't seem to get it. The US Constitution's First Amendment just guarantees that the US Government won't unduly hinder free speech. It says nothing about what your employer or service provider may choose to hinder, it says nothing about what International Law may choose to hinder.

(The Internet is not borderless. =anagram>
Distort the terrible nonsense.)

Finally... a story where this is *not* offtopic... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-19 20:38 · Score: 5 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

Oh well... here it is.
Add your own, and spread this far and wide:

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

Re:Aqua & X11 by new500 · 2000-05-19 02:34 · Score: 1 · on Aqua DP4 Review And Screenshots

How about running a deeply iterative Mandelbrot set render on a postscript printer engine? This has also been done. Some code here but not sure this would do the trick - i havent the time to look at it in detail. First link the guy who did this on LaserWriter IINTX, which had a '30 processor when Apple's best computer had only '020s !!

I dont know about executing this as a virsu like program, but maybe you could just embed it in an innoscent looking document market SecrE7$Ov_cMDrtACO'S_gIRL.PS.GZ and watch as Ghostscript dies or hangs in a multiday caluclation #8-)

WAP is stepping stone to (much) better things by soupdragon · 2000-05-18 16:10 · Score: 1 · on Looking For Wireless Handheld E-Mail And Web?

Okay WAP is currently a bit slow (9.6k) and the content was thin to start with (although rapidly improving), but it works and it is here now. The European GSM infrastructure on which it relies offers coverage almost anywhere plus full roaming capabilities so location is not a problem.

What we have to look forward to in the very near future are a whole series of infrastructure technology refreshes which will offer "always on" connectivity at speeds of up to 114 kbps in the next 12 months (GPRS), then up to 384 kbps in the next 18 months (EDGE) and then approx 2 Mbps (UMTS) in the next 24 months. If you think we will all be using WAP browsers with tiny monochrome screens on conventional phones in that time period, then think again. And don't think that is all this is just vapourware and promises. All the major mobile telcos in Europe are busting a gut to deliver the benefits to their customers as soon as they can. So very soon, who will need a PC to access their content and applications?

Referances by Money__ · 2000-05-16 05:50 · Score: 2 · on Bow Tie Theory: Researchers Map The Web

Adamic and Huberman (1) 99. L. Adamic and B. Huberman. The nature of markets on the World Wide Web, Xerox PARC Technical Report, 1999.

Adamic and Huberman (2) 99. L. Adamic and B. Huberman. Scaling behavior on the World Wide Web, Technical comment on Barabasi and Albert 99.

Aiello, Chung, and Lu 00. W. Aiello, F. Chung and L. Lu. A random graph model for massive graphs, ACM Symposium on the Theory and Computing 2000.

Albert, Jeong, and Barabasi 99. R. Albert, H. Jeong, and A.-L. Barabasi. Diameter of the World Wide Web, Nature 401:130-131, Sep 1999.

Barabasi and Albert 99. A. Barabasi and R. Albert. Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science, 286(509), 1999.

Barford et. al. 99. P. Barford, A. Bestavros, A. Bradley, and M. E. Crovella. Changes in Web client access patterns: Characteristics and caching implications, in World Wide Web, Special Issue on Characterization and Performance Evaluation, 2:15-28, 1999.

Bharat et. al. 98. K. Bharat, A. Broder, M. Henzinger, P. Kumar, and S. Venkatasubramanian. The connectivity server: fast access to linkage information on the web, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Bharat and Henzinger 98. K. Bharat, and M. Henzinger. Improved algorithms for topic distillation in hyperlinked environments, Proc. 21st SIGIR, 1998.

Brin and Page 98. S. Brin, and L. Page. The anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Butafogo and Schniederman 91. R. A. Butafogo and B. Schneiderman. Identifying aggregates in hypertext structures, Proc. 3rd ACM Conference on Hypertext, 1991.

Carriere and Kazman 97. J. Carriere, and R. Kazman. WebQuery: Searching and visualizing the Web through connectivity , Proc. 6th WWW, 1997.

Chakrabarti et. al. (1) 98. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan, and S. Rajagopalan. Automatic resource compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and associated text, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Chakrabarti et. al. (2) 98. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, S. Ravi Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Experiments in topic distillation, Proc. ACM SIGIR workshop on Hypertext Information Retrieval on the Web, 1998.

Chakrabarti, Gibson, and McCurley 99. S. Chakrabarti, D. Gibson, and K. McCurley.Surfing the Web backwards, Proc. 8th WWW, 1999.

Cho and Garcia-Molina 2000 J. Cho, H. Garcia-Molina Synchronizing a database to Improve Freshness . To appear in 2000 ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), May 2000.

Faloutsos, Faloutsos, and Faloutsos 99. M. Faloutsos, P. Faloutsos, and C. Faloutsos. On power law relationships of the internet topology, ACM SIGCOMM, 1999.

Glassman 94. S. Glassman. A caching relay for the world wide web , Proc. 1st WWW, 1994.
Harary 75. F. Harary. Graph Theory, Addison Wesley, 1975.

Huberman et. al. 98. B. Huberman, P. Pirolli, J. Pitkow, and R. Lukose. Strong regularities in World Wide Web surfing, Science, 280:95-97, 1998.

Kleinberg 98. J. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Proc. 9th ACM-SIAM SODA, 1998.

Kumar et. al. (1) 99. R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Trawling the Web for cyber communities, Proc. 8th WWW , Apr 1999.

Kumar et. al. (2) 99. R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Extracting large scale knowledge bases from the Web, Proc. VLDB, Jul 1999.

Lukose and Huberman 98. R. M. Lukose and B. Huberman. Surfing as a real option, Proc. 1st International Conference on Information and Computation Economies, 1998.

Martindale and Konopka 96. C. Martindale and A K Konopka. Oligonucleotide frequencies in DNA follow a Yule distribution, Computer & Chemistry, 20(1):35-38, 1996.

Mendelzon, Mihaila, and Milo 97. A. Mendelzon, G. Mihaila, and T. Milo. Querying the World Wide Web, Journal of Digital Libraries 1(1), pp. 68-88, 1997.

Mendelzon and Wood 95. A. Mendelzon and P. Wood. Finding regular simple paths in graph databases, SIAM J. Comp. 24(6):1235-1258, 1995.

Pareto 1897. V Pareto. Cours d'economie politique, Rouge, Lausanne et Paris, 1897.

Pirolli, Pitkow, and Rao 96. P. Pirolli, J. Pitkow, and R. Rao. Silk from a sow's ear: Extracting usable structures from the Web , Proc. ACM SIGCHI, 1996.

Pitkow and Pirolli 97. J. Pitkow and P. Pirolli. Life, death, and lawfulness on the electronic frontier, Proc. ACM SIGCHI, 1997.

Simon 55. H.A. Simon. On a class of stew distribution functions, Biometrika, 42:425-440, 1955.

White and McCain 89. H.D. White and K.W. McCain, Bibliometrics, in: Ann. Rev. Info. Sci. and Technology, Elsevier, 1989, pp. 119-186.

Yule 44. G.U. Yule. Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary, Cambridge University Press, 1944.

Zipf 49. G.K. Zipf. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Addison-Wesley, 1949.
___

Postscript version by mclearn · 2000-04-22 09:05 · Score: 1 · on Making Your Own Linux

In case anyone wants to print the thing off, here is a postscript version of the file.

Get the PS version

It's a hacked job, so the formatting may be screwy in places -- it looks fine to me. But it beats clicking "next" after 2 lines of text is displayed.

LDPL -- Yes, its modified; it's one big doc now. All rights stay with the author, this is just another medium.

Re:PostScript flexibility by Roger_Wilco · 2000-04-21 21:16 · Score: 1 · on Httpd Written In Postscript? Shell?

I wrote a program to calculate the Mandelbrot set in Postscript, as well as a few simpler fractals. If you're interested, you can find them here.

free online book by evenflow · 2000-04-06 01:28 · Score: 1 · on Information On Cryptography And Effects On Society?

Here is a free online book about crypto: http://cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

Re:Elliptical Encryption (ECC is faster!!) by griffjon · 2000-04-04 05:52 · Score: 2 · on Biggest Public-key Crypto Crack Ever

Good point on the certicom patents, but I've used both ECC and RSA, and shotgun-accurate, ECC is muuuch faster for roughly equivalent strengths. It's also much smaller per key; RSA 1024 is about as strong as ECC 131 or 163 (depending on who you're talking to, both are considered by Certicom to be computationally unfeasible).

Quoting Alfred Menzes, a consultant at Certicom and general ECC god-of-knowledge,in his web page says:

NIST recommended that 256-bit ECC key lengths be used for equivalent security as 128-bit AES, and that 384-bit and 512-bit ECC be used for 192-bit and 256-bit AES. The rough estimates of RSA key lengths for equivalent security are 3072 bits, 7680 bits, and 15630 bits. Imagine the performance degradation incurred with RSA implementations at these key sizes, even with e=3!!

This same paper (written in response to Bruce's discussion of ECC in his Nov99 crypto-gram goes on to say on speed:

It is generally agreed that ECC private key operations (signature generation and decryption) are faster than RSA private key operations. It is also generally agreed that ECC public key operations (signature verification and encryption) are slower than RSA public key operations when a small encryption exponent (such as e=3) is used.

Re:Practical Jokes by gauron23 · 2000-03-31 07:55 · Score: 1 · on MIT Building Hack Ethos

Here is a better one. Who said there's no free beer?

Re:Waterloo Team Selection by Knight+of+the+Sad+Co · 2000-03-21 03:02 · Score: 1 · on ACM World Final Standings Posted

The Guelph team did not beat either of the Waterloo teams, as it solved only two problems. Read the standings for the East-Central North America Region programming contest.

Michael Van Biesbrouck, ECNA Regional Contest Director (1999)

Re:Cool. Another "place." by gorilla · 2000-03-21 01:14 · Score: 2 · on ACM World Final Standings Posted

Don't forget WATFOR the Fortran compiler that an entire generation used at school.

Re:Don't forget the Putnam by paulschreiber · 2000-03-20 09:08 · Score: 1 · on ACM World Final Standings Posted

Yeah, CGL is in DC.

Paul

Re:Tips for similar contests? by prijks · 2000-03-20 08:20 · Score: 1 · on ACM World Final Standings Posted

I'm involved with the programming team here at Notre Dame. We actually went to the regionals, which for our region were held at Waterloo. The guys at Waterloo rocked.

Anyway, some advice:

read over all the problems at the beginning and find the easy ones fast. It's important to get those done first, because that'll help your score a good deal.
practice as a team. Ideally you'll want to download a sample problem set from somewhere, limit yourselves to a few hours, sit down at one computer, and get used to the whole scenario. The biggest problem our team had was a keyboard bottleneck. I had written up on paper code to solve one of the problems, but didn't get enough keyboard time to debug at the end. When all was over and I was back home, I downloaded the code I'd been working on, and it took me about 10 minutes and 5 lines of code to get what I was working on functional. Those 10 minutes would have made the difference between us getting 3 problems right and being in sixth, and getting 4 problems right and possibly getting third place and going to world. This was the first major programming contest for the three of us on our team, so we hadn't practiced using one machine amongst three of us, and it takes some getting used to.
If you're allowed to bring in printed materials, I'd recommend not bringing too much, you will probably want to limit yourselves to a good algorithms book, a calculus book, maybe a geometry book, and maybe printouts of man pages for useful C functions.
Be comfortable with manipulating numbers in different bases, sometimes problems throw a problem at you where input isn't in base 10. If you know how to handle this, it won't be a problem, but if you don't, you'll waste time...
realize that the data sets they test your program with will probably be much larger than the sample data sets, so even if your program seems to run fast, it may not. It doesn't hurt to know basic complexity analysis. I saw a recursive program once that ran quite quick on a sample data set, but after some simple complexity analysis I realized it would run for 10^30 years on a larger data set.
Don't underestimate the powers of the modulus operator (% in C).

That's all I can think of right now. A really good source for sample problems is on Waterloo's webpage: http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~acm00/. Also feel free to look at the page I maintain for the ND programming team: http://prijks.esgeroth.org/puters/acm/
I'll stop now, I think.

University of Waterloo PI day by Anonymous Coward · 2000-03-15 10:56 · Score: 0 · on Happy Pi Day!

Here at the University of Waterloo (Canada), the local math student government MathSoc gave out pie's at 1:59 PM - they got corperate sponsorship and everything.

Is nothing sacred? :-)

AFNI

We have a Pi day! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-03-14 01:43 · Score: 0 · on Happy Pi Day!

We here in the Math Faculty at the University of Waterloo are celebrating Pi day today at 1:59pm EST. We are serving pie with ice cream. It's all sponsored by Nortel. It's advertised at the MathSoc website.

Re:Wishware by jpeters · 2000-03-13 22:09 · Score: 2 · on KDE 2.0 Release Schedule

It sounds like you should try Sawmill. It has GNOME support, and it would be dead easy for you to bind 'lower-window' to whatever key or mouse action you want.

As for your second request (dragging window tabs), I just posted some code to the sawmill mailing list this morning that does just that. You can get the code and a theme that uses it at:

http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/students /jdpeters/

Music notation software: GNU Lilypond by divec · 2000-03-10 21:56 · Score: 3 · on What Is The State Of MIDI Support Under Linux?

the last 1% I need to do is an effective MIDI system that includes [...] notation software (outputting the midi tracks to sheet music)

It's not possible to automate midi-to-sheetmusic perfectly. This is because midi files usually don't contain the information you need - e.g. they contain how long a note *sounds for*, not how long it should be written, so a staccato crotchet (quarter note) might appear to be a semiquaver (sixteenth note).
On the other hand, GNU Lilypond has a midi2ly utility which tries to do this. (Normally to use Lilypond you type the music in a LaTeX-like format). If you're happy with what automated midi typesetting can manage, then give this a try.
To see some Lilypond output, look at the Mutopia project (a sort of musical Gutenberg project).

Re:Favorite language war by DrProton · 2000-03-10 11:28 · Score: 1 · on Perl 5.6 Release Candidate Announced

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
- E.W. Dijkstra

For more of Dijkstra's evaluations of programming languages (Fortran, BASIC, and PL/I) click
here.

University of Waterloo by Muskrat · 2000-03-01 08:09 · Score: 1 · on What's Banned On Your Campus?

Excessive use from a residence-connected computer (I'm not sure if this is accessible outside the uwaterloo.ca domain)

At the University of Waterloo, nothing specific has been banned -- instead they just give us bandwidth limits for resnet (in dorm rooms). For a four month term, we are limited to 2500 MB, with a daily limit of 150MB and a daily average since the beginning of the term of 25MB a day. Apparently, these limits are due to one person who, just after resnet was installed, used 5 gig in one day. I can understand the bandwidth concerns of the sysadmins, but this is a little excessive.

CS at UWaterloo by paulschreiber · 2000-02-16 10:16 · Score: 1 · on Women CS Majors Declining

I've just finished my third year of computer science at the University of Waterloo. In my experience, male students greatly outnumber females. I have walked in to many a CS lecture to find about 90 students, and about six of them are female.

Our school has a Women in Mathematics Committee that deals with this sort of thing. Their stats show that females make up about 20 percent of the math faculty, and that percentage has declined in recent years.

Someone from CMU posted that they have a special intro course for non-computer people. We have one of those too. It's a joke. You learn FileMaker, Word, Excel, and Turing (ever programmed in that?). And yes, the class has a lot of females in it. (An aside: not everyone in there is a CS major; they're all math majors though.)

On the issue of minorities, that's really a non-issue at UW. I'd say the class is an even mixture of white and asian students, with a good number of Indian (from India, not Native American) students as well.

A bunch of friends and I were mulling over the latest recruitment brochure sometime last year. (It's much prettier than the one I got.) We noticed the photographs featured a disproportionately high number of white females, especially in programs where they aren't well represented, like CS. So what's up with that? False advertising? (By contrast, a friend of mine who worked on the brochures at Western said they were told to find as many minorities as possible.)