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While the basic premise of your post stands, let's look at the core concepts as they apply to the issue at hand. To start with, let's examine a couple of images:

1. Scrabulous screenshot

2. Scrabble board (photo)

Okay, they look pretty similar, right? Here's the thing, though: they're not identical. Let's consider clones of popular video games: Supertux vs. Super Mario Brothers, Jazz Jackrabbit vs. Sonic the Hedgehog, etc. They're similar in appearance and follow the same rulesets, but do they represent copyright violations?

I believe that 6,000 to 12,000 people are diagnosed with this every year and the death rate for GBM is 100% with an average LE of only 4 - 18 months with successful treatment. All joking aside, anything that can help is welcome.

This is not the first virus found that can kill cancer. The "Reovirus" (commonly found in human respiratory and enteric tracts) also seems to work pretty well. See the following: Curing Cancer? Patrick Lee's Path to the Reovirus Treatment and Reovirus to target cancer

"We injected the tumours directly with the virus," he said. "We were able to see tumour regression within three to four weeks. The regression appears to be complete and the mice are still living after five to six months.
The tumour tissue seems to have been completely eliminated. The next step is tests in human patients.

Well, don't get your hopes up. Microsoft is buddy-buddy with Waterloo.

We get Windows, and host of other MS programs, for "free".
MS has bought the ECE intro to programming course. They use C# now, instead of C++.
You "need" IE. (I get around this by changing my user agent.)

OpenOffice is installed on ECE computers (lab staff cite licensing costs being the primary reason), but you wouldn't believe how inflexible/brainwashed some of my classmates (computer engineering students, no less) are, that they MUST have MS Office.

Well, don't get your hopes up. Microsoft is buddy-buddy with Waterloo.

We get Windows, and host of other MS programs, for "free".
MS has bought the ECE intro to programming course. They use C# now, instead of C++.
You "need" IE. (I get around this by changing my user agent.)

OpenOffice is installed on ECE computers (lab staff cite licensing costs being the primary reason), but you wouldn't believe how inflexible/brainwashed some of my classmates (computer engineering students, no less) are, that they MUST have MS Office.

I always found it odd that people think the U of Waterloo is so great. In fact, I did a comparison of programs: U of Waterloo vs U of Calgary Computer Science programs. They are in essence the same. Take a look at fourth year courses and see what is required

In some cases, it is almost comical what is covered at U of W compared to U of C. Take, for example, a fourth year Distributed Systems course

UW: http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/admin/curric/CS436outline.html
  - closest to a course outline I could find
  - looks like a networking course
  - OSI model with a few weeks of security and remote procedure calls

UC:
  - time and clocks, snapshots, leader election, critical sections, introduction to memory consistency and fault tolerance

Which of those two look like a real distributed systems course? Would you hire a UW student who claimed to have distributed systems knowledge if you had looked at that syllabus?

My impression is that U of Waterloo students are only bolstered by the historically good program at U of Waterloo. As such, the top students go there because people seem to think that it is a better school. In reality though, the majority of the top schools across Canada have very very similar Computer Science programs. The only benefit to the U of Waterloo Computer Science program is that due to the marketing, there is likely to be other top students from across Canada in your class.

That said, students are wising up and realizing that U of Waterloo is not the _only_ good CS school in Canada. UofC and UofAlberta are attracting top students in the west, rather than those students moving out to Ontario. Take for example the 16 year old that helped the UofC get to the finals at the ACM programming competition. There are some top networking researchers that are foregoing UW for PhD programs as well. The research at UW is just not all that amazing.

It is only a matter of time before industry realizes that there are a limited number of quality graduates from U of Waterloo, and all the rest are just the same as the other average students from every other university in Canada.

Well, in all fairness, we should probably compare networking courses then.

If anybody is interested in further reading, the campus newspaper did a story on this a couple of months ago, as well as the engineering newspaper.

If anybody is interested in further reading, the campus newspaper did a story on this a couple of months ago, as well as the engineering newspaper.

OTR, despite its name, does nothing to prevent either you or your fellow conversant from keeping a record of the transcript.

I watched the OTR presentation video (about 1 hour long). The point of OTR is that with its deniable authentication, it allows ANY of the listeners to fake a conversation (a shared encryption key is sent after each message, meaning anyone that reads it could fake it afterwards).

In other words, it proves nothing. Anyone could have faked it.

PGP on the other hand, uses certificates, which means that you can't deny what you wrote. This is the very reason why certificates are good for online contracts.

The inability for random people to call themselves software engineers in Canada is because the Real Engineers objected to the proliferation of people with MCSE's and the the like doing a discredit to the standards of the profession, both in terms of training and work results.

So go to university for 4 or so years and you'll get the respect you crave. And the nifty IRON ring, much sexier then token ring any day.

I use Doxygen for C code, and it is really helpful. One of its most useful features is that it generates caller and callee graphs for all functions. You can also browse the code itself in the generated HTML pages, and the function calls are turned into links to the implementation. Data structures and file includes are also pictorially graphed for easy browsing.

If the system you need to understand has a really big undocumented architecture, then this presentation might be useful to you (there is a research paper, but it's not free yet). In it, the authors present a systematic method of extracting the underlying architecture of the Linux kernel.

I get my numbers from an actual measurements. Where do you get yours? If you don't have an meter, play with this for a bit.

if your interested in how it works you can read this or a less technical WIKI

Older Processors used lots of power too, and the old power supplies were usually less than 70% efficient

A 25 watt P3 with 3 10 watt (idle) hard drives with no video and a super efficient 10 watt mother and memory and no fans will still use 65 watts, but with the efficiency of 70% that means 85 watts for a best case scenario for an older pc.

Since the pc does little real "work" virtually all of that is expressed as heat in your house. Fine in winter, but in summer that takes another 100 watts to cool that hot air.

-----

and another from 2004>

But most likely these are going to be machines from the last 2 years that can't play the new games, and will likely use far more power.

For reference, my SLI game setup (AMD64 5600 X2, 2 Raptors, 2 Asus 6600 GTS's) pulls 520 real watts playing half life.

I can only afford to play in winter. :P

If the number of parallel processors is small (like in multicores) parallel programming is not as difficult as you might think.

There is a great talk by Bjarne Stroustrup (http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/C++0x%20-%20An%20Overview.html) about the new version of C++ coming out and some of the difficulties getting things added. Essentially, if a new feature will only help 100,000 developers, it isn't important enough to be implemented. With such a huge developer community all the "little" things get left for non-standard API implementations, only big, almost everyone will find useful features get added. That is probably why this version or the next of C++ probably will get a standard tread library, because almost everyone has access to a multicore system. Oh yeah, also, and it sucks, anyone with a few thousand dollars to waste can get added to the committee, but most people don't care enough to go get their feature implemented for that much money (you also have the travel/time off to attend the meetings) except big business, so guess who runs the show (I don't expect anyone to be suprised).

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/1989%20Bill%20Gates%20Talk%20on%20Microsoft.html

I remember when 20 Megs for a hard drive was more than enough for anyone, people thought I was nuts getting an 80 megs one, but soon after I was running out of space.

22425 spams in my quarantine. 747.83333 spams/day.

A mere trickle.

The organization that is serving the talk has a wecbcam ( http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/office/webcam.html ) in there office. Despite serving an avi file linked directly from the slashdot page, there doesn't seem to be fire :P

This slashdot story, just days before a talk about how the csclub servers handled slashdot the last time.

It does not matter if the communication is encrypted and broken down into packets if all that is needed is to intercept the complete communication at one (or both) ends. Under Windows, this can probably be accomplished trivially, since most apps run with administrator privileges under most Windows machines. And, running as a Windows administrator, Skype will alter your firewall configuration. Ooops.

What's more, most Internet packets these days pass through one of the MAE. And guess what? Most telecom companies who run the MAEs have agreed to cooperate with the NSA, including to the point they have built special facilities to allow NSA specialists to install eavesdropping equipment right there.

Finally, if you can intercept let's say 70% of a Skype communication, you probably have enough to determine if Alice and Bob should be put under further surveillance... Or maybe to disrupt their "nefarious" plans.

I just noticed the userfriendly.org page today has a on topic link of the day. IT is a good read an would have been excellent to include in the original article.

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Privacy%20by%20Design.html
http://userfriendly.org/

More recent clients are supporting encryption by default as users are becoming painfully aware of the problems of poor privacy. Compromised online privacy is a big issue now that it has become dangerous.

PeopleSoft 'implementations' have been making life miserable for those of us at UW (University of Waterloo) for years now. I'm guessing it's mostly due to vendor lock-in. It's not surprising to me that they're doing poorly elsewhere. Their systems are used for our co-op job system and our student information system (choose classes, view grades/transcripts, etc). Finally, as I'm about to graduate, they are using the talent we have at Waterloo to hire some co-op students to write our own system, at least for the job portion of it. Sigh.

PeopleSoft 'implementations' have been making life miserable for those of us at UW (University of Waterloo) for years now. I'm guessing it's mostly due to vendor lock-in. It's not surprising to me that they're doing poorly elsewhere. Their systems are used for our co-op job system and our student information system (choose classes, view grades/transcripts, etc). Finally, as I'm about to graduate, they are using the talent we have at Waterloo to hire some co-op students to write our own system, at least for the job portion of it. Sigh.

There is a webcam of the place up at http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/office/webcam-streaming.html with whom I can only assume is the sysadmin staring at some machines :P Also, the office number is 1-519-888-4567 x 33870 (according to http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/about/ )

There is a webcam of the place up at http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/office/webcam-streaming.html with whom I can only assume is the sysadmin staring at some machines :P Also, the office number is 1-519-888-4567 x 33870 (according to http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/about/ )

There is a webcam of the place up at http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/office/webcam-streaming.html with whom I can only assume is the sysadmin staring at some machines :P Also, the office number is 1-519-888-4567 x 33870 (according to http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/about/ )

If you're interested in seeing the graphs of the servers, you can take a look over here. They've got the graphs for most of the servers, along with the core routers of the university. Lets see what slashdot does to it :P. Also, there seems to be a bunch of shifty hobos sitting in there offices right now :P

If you're interested in seeing the graphs of the servers, you can take a look over here. They've got the graphs for most of the servers, along with the core routers of the university. Lets see what slashdot does to it :P. Also, there seems to be a bunch of shifty hobos sitting in there offices right now :P

There seems to me some (a lot?) of FUD mixed up in this article. (surprise surprise...)

It starts out with the fact that public key encryption relies on the existence of one trapdoor one-way functions. Now in practice we mainly instantiate these functions with the RSA function (f_e(x):=x^e mod n with trapdoor p,q such that pq=n). But there is no reason to believe this is the only possible example of trapdoor OWF! Admitedly in the 80s when this concept was first being explored there were quite a few failures when trying to base implementations on NP-Complete and/or NP-Hard problems (think knapsack for example). But since we already had RSA with all it's nice properties (efficiency, elegance and simplicity) the research community was not overly motivated to find others.

There have been and to this day still are other lines of research. Take Ajtai and Dwork's work in the direction of basing PKE on worst-case hardness of the shortest vector problem (SVP) or Micciancio's work on generalizing the knapsack problem such that average-case hardness of approximating the answer can be reduced to worst-case hardness of certain lattice based problems.

Another general direction has been to come up with groups and fields over which solving the DLP is difficult. (For example torus-based crypto and generalized Jacobian groups). AFAIK for most of these candidates there are no (known efficient) reductions from the DLP problem over Z_p or elliptic curves to the DLP in these new groups. Thus it is not immediately clear how or if Schorr's algorithm would break such systems.

In any case there is reason to believe that there can not be (or that we can't find) good candidates for trapdoor OWFs in the quantum computational model. After all there is such a thing as Quantum P and Quantum NP. Though the inequality of these set's of problems doesn't directly imply the existence of quantum trapdoor OWFs it is a good indication there of.

So basically the message is : Relax! The PKE world is by no means on the brink of an apocalypse. At most (and best in my opinion) we're in for a bout of some serious foundations research. to me that just sounds like more funding for applied mathematicians and complexity theorists from various corners and a WHOLE bunch of new candidates and interesting results. :-) i'm down with that.

Actually, there is a proof: Kurt Godel (you know, the guy who turned modern mathematics on its head after Whitehead tried to create a complete model of Mathematical processes by showing Consistent and Comlete were not mutually cooperative goals, and created a true revolution, basically by showing that provable and true were not the same thing. The fellow Cantor and Einstein called the greatest mathematician since Euclid, etc.) Actually devised a formal proof of the existence of God. It's sometimes referred to as his third great proof, with the incompleteness theorem counting as his second.

http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology.ht ml

      If they don't already have a PhD in Math, or at least some real familiarity with the specific area of modal logic, it will probably take 6 months to a year of work acquiring the basic concepts for the average person who would give a damn to check this out.
      I haven't done any of you Atheists a favor by pointing this out. Many of you will dismiss it. Some will follow through, and end up believing they are now saved, part of a special group of really bright people who know the truth, but they will be believing in the kind of God who sits around in heaven, surrounded by only a few mathematically brilliant saints. A formal religion based only on Godel's 3rd proof would be the most emotionally sterile 'faith' I can imagine. Posting this link to you was, in a very literal sense, damnable, and I will feel the burden of having done it for at least the rest of my life, but now all of you get to share that weight too.

According to the article, the idea originated not from the telecommuter but from his boss, Glenn Paulley, who has a PhD in CS (his dissertation was on query optimisation). However, the article suggests that the idea was further refined by another employee, Ian McHardy, who I think is a database programmer. The article says that Dr Paullie (the boss) thought of installing a webcam under a blimp after seeing a TV ad for a remote control toy blimp, and McHardy (the other employee) suggested using a robot instead. McHardy then spent some time research telepresence and other projects, eg a project about robots allowing hospitalised students to attend classes. What I would like to know is whether these are the people who had the original idea of using a robot for helping telecommuters communicate with other office employees. The telecommuter will speak at UoWaterloo on 15 October. Perhaps I could send my telepresence robot there and ask him, but I'm not sure whether the robot will survive a body search by the security at the airport after it passes the metal detector. Maybe one day the standard security officer's training will include instructions on how to bodysearch a robot without disconnecting any wires!

Adding to the shrug factor, the twelve-semitone pitch system as a whole is a human invention.

No offense, but that's bullshit. "it" is not a noun, therefore the quoted use of the apostrophe is not valid. "it's" is short for "it is", "its" is the correct possessive form.

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/its.html

Please use the torrents, and keep those torrent up and running after you're done d/l'ing.

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.ogg.to rrent Ogg/Theora (Recommended)
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.avi.to rrent XviD
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mp4.to rrent MP4
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mpg.to rrent MPEG

AC to prevent karma whoring.

Please use the torrents, and keep those torrent up and running after you're done d/l'ing.

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.ogg.to rrent Ogg/Theora (Recommended)
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.avi.to rrent XviD
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mp4.to rrent MP4
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mpg.to rrent MPEG

AC to prevent karma whoring.

Please use the torrents, and keep those torrent up and running after you're done d/l'ing.

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.ogg.to rrent Ogg/Theora (Recommended)
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.avi.to rrent XviD
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mp4.to rrent MP4
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mpg.to rrent MPEG

AC to prevent karma whoring.

Please use the torrents, and keep those torrent up and running after you're done d/l'ing.

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.ogg.to rrent Ogg/Theora (Recommended)
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.avi.to rrent XviD
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mp4.to rrent MP4
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/stroustrup.mpg.to rrent MPEG

AC to prevent karma whoring.

if it was a pittance that decided whether you ate that day or not what would you choose?

I'd say 80% of artists hardly have enough to eat nevermind clothe themselves.
10% make lots of money on a few good songs/art/movies and pish it against the wall till they end up back with the 80%
5% get constant coverage on their creations due to media hype, backhanding and chest size
and the last 5% couldn't give a flying fvck because they made their millions 40 years ago, have never created since, and probably make more now on royalties than they ever did as a performer.

I do believe the whole system is screwed....

I admit that RMS has some social issues that should maybe be addressed (like most geeks?) but I REALLY think the madman has a very valid point in what he says here:
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Copyright%20v s%20Community%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Computer%20N etworks.html

I never realised before that Steamboat willie (the birth of mickey mouse) was a derivative of another artists work... Shame on Disney for trying to promote perpetual copyright on something that they never even came up with!

There are way more files there than the tracker would let you know:
http://taurine.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/

But you probably noticed.

Fine here now - did you get Nagiosed? Must be pretty late in Ontario. As an ex-SysAdmin who was on a NetSaint bleeper for 5+ years I can afford a chuckle. I DO hope everyone downloading IS using an open-source Bittorrent client - there are plenty of seeds on both files (only 1 for the 1989 Bill G talk though (my he looks tiny in the photo - guess that's not a fav publicity shot).

Bill G http://natural-flavours.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/ bill-gates-1989-big.jpg/

BT http://bittorrent.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/
/. HTTP bad BT good!

Fine here now - did you get Nagiosed? Must be pretty late in Ontario. As an ex-SysAdmin who was on a NetSaint bleeper for 5+ years I can afford a chuckle. I DO hope everyone downloading IS using an open-source Bittorrent client - there are plenty of seeds on both files (only 1 for the 1989 Bill G talk though (my he looks tiny in the photo - guess that's not a fav publicity shot).

Bill G http://natural-flavours.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/files/ bill-gates-1989-big.jpg/

BT http://bittorrent.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/
/. HTTP bad BT good!

Please kindly ignore the incorrect link. The correct one is here. (Damn tabs)

An architect not understand the math or physics? Huh? Really? http://www.ucalendar.uwaterloo.ca/COURSE/course-AR CH.html

Principles of Structures
Fundamental concepts of mechanics and structures, as related to architectural design, study of loading conditions, forces, moments, systems of forces, conditions of equilibrium for two and three dimensional structures, centre of gravity of loads and areas, bar forces in trusses, simple frame analysis, moment of inertia. Concepts of simple stress and strain; shear and bending moments in simple beams; shear and moment diagrams, qualitative deflected shapes, flexural and shearing stresses, deflection calculations; compression members; Euler's formula.

Architects know how to calculate whether or not a bridge will mostly stand. Architects have to know the essential calculations because otherwise architects would not be allowed to design houses. Where an engineer is needed is when the building in question requires the signature of an engineer. For example sky-scrapers require the signature of an engineer because the calculations are quite a bit more complex and require more math. Yet an architect could calculate whether or not the sky-scraper would stand mostly...

In other words, an iMac with the built-in Apple Remote Desktop client.

I can't believe anyone is taking this idea seriously. Hardware that can run basic office applications is very inexpensive, provided you run a modest operating system. If you can afford to equip one employee with a Windows XP or Vista machine, you can afford to equip at least two people running Linux and Open Office.

It means that our graduates are in demand despite it being a pretty lousy educational venue (it also meant that I can grok algorithms despite being a math major -- try finding high paying work in pure mathematics :)

BHouston continues to use the US definition of "libel, the spreading of false information that is designed to cause harm to a person's reputation".

This is neither the English common law nor the operative BC definition in the Crookes cases. Accordingly all his "analysis" has been wrong so far, and allowing it to be modified "+5, insightful" is extremely misleading.

In BC and anywhere else deriving its law from English common law, spreading TRUE statements CAN be found to be libellous. Accordingly all the rest of his statements and legal views are completely WRONG and should disappear to avoid misleading others.

The real issue here is not "libel", by whatever definition, but whether political critics of power figures can remain anonymous when they are criticizing only political acts. If you don't believe they can, you don't believe in secret ballots or heckling at political rallies either. And you want every dissident in North Korea, Iran, China or Russia handed over to their oppressors just for the price of a BC libel suit, which will be happily filed by Bob Kasting and served by Wayne Crookes' company West Coast Title Search (yes they do this!), as Dermod Travis speaks out on your behalf to the global press. As the chocolate ration drops and Travis claims it's been "raised" for y'all.

You do NOT want the Canadian definition of libel spread all over the net.
    http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/libel3.html
    http://www.lawyersweekly.ca/index.php?section=arti cle&articleid=371&rssid=4
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_libel