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clincal informatics or biomedical informatics. Both of these fields are in dire need of people with a combination of medical and cs backgrounds. My suggestions would be to look at Vanderbilt's biomedical informatics program . You would only need a few pre-reqs and it leads to a M.S. or Ph.D in the field. Further, they have a program that is specifically tailored for a M.D. getting into the field. Stanford, Utah, and Columbia round out the top schools in this field. Further, there is no shortage of jobs as it is still in its infancy!

clincal informatics or biomedical informatics. Both of these fields are in dire need of people with a combination of medical and cs backgrounds. My suggestions would be to look at Vanderbilt's biomedical informatics program . You would only need a few pre-reqs and it leads to a M.S. or Ph.D in the field. Further, they have a program that is specifically tailored for a M.D. getting into the field. Stanford, Utah, and Columbia round out the top schools in this field. Further, there is no shortage of jobs as it is still in its infancy!

Way to make your case. You linked to an article with the following conclusion:

In its review of studies conducted both in areas close to the accident and those further away, UNSCEAR (2000) concluded that no increase in adverse pregnancy outcome could be linked to radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident.

Next time try reading farther than the setup of the article.

I happen to have a link of my own. Chernobyl wasn't the prettiest picture, but it wasn't as bad as many claim or would like to think. Most people want to project the horror of a nuclear blast on Chernobyl. That's just ridiculous. Chernobyl was no worse than any other industrial accident. Chemical spills here in the US have done more damage and killed more people than that!

Oh, and the evacuation and topsoil removal were safety precautions. The study I linked to points out that Norway has a higher natural background radiation level than Chernobyl does today.

Chernobyl

I hate to break it to you, but an industrial accident is an industrial accident whether we're talking chemical spills, molten steel, coal burning, nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion. They all can potentially result in a lot of deaths. Yet we deal with these risks every day and trust that companies will do their best to be safe about handling dangerous materials.

In the case of Chernobyl, the Russian government stole a US design, built a reactor, and assigned engineers who didn't understand how it worked. As a result, they did quite a few things that no sane plant manager would have allowed (such as removing control rods and cutting wires). The end result was a boiler explosion that killed about 30 people on site, and about 14 from chemical contamination of radioactive iodine. (I just recently came across these figures from an official report. Here's a link if you wish to verify.) Modern reactor designs make Chernobyl type situations impossible because a melt down situation will boil away the water that is used to keep the reaction going. In older designs, the water was under pressure and would super-heat instead of boiling.

Perhaps the most telling point is that the Chernobyl design had actually been decommissioned here in the US as being unsafe. Yet the communist government was so intent on getting an atomic bomb that they used the stolen specs just to show that they as well could use nuclear power for "peaceful" uses.

In any case, the other 3 Chernobyl reactors continued running for many years despite the safety problems, so it's not like the entire area was leveled or anything. It takes a very specific shaping of the fissible material to produce a nuclear explosion. That shaping doesn't happen inside a reactor.

Someone just came up with the most recent report on Chernobyl. In short? You're full of shit. Every person on site at Chernobyl is being tracked even to this day. Most illnesses were in small children who developed Thyroid cancer. This is due to radioactive Iodine isotopes taking the place of regular Iodine in the diet. Most of those children were treated, and very few died. (BTW, radioactive fallout was one of the reasons for adding Iodine to salt. If you get enough regular Iodine, your body will ignore the isotopes.)

At this point, people in Norway are getting higher radiation doses than those in the Chernobyl area. As one final check, I asked my wife (who's from Russia) what she knew about "Chernobyl disabilities". She did know a few people from the Chernobyl area, and her opinion was that you're full of crap.

You missed one of the most likely possible cures in your list: Cell Encapsulation.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/News/research/ravf95/rav f95_5.html


Of course, the process requires a zero gravity (or microgravity) environment to work. The leader in this research is Dr. Taylor Wang, a Vanderbilt prof. and former astronaut. The program is an outgrowth (and is still funded by) NASA microgravity research. Dr. Wang also happens to be a former boss of mine, and when I ran into him last year at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts meeting he told me that animal trials had gone well and they were very close to human trials to fix diabetes with cell encapsulation. Don't be so quick to strip money from space research if you want a cure for diabetes.

"A mission to Mars would take about three years from launch to reentry, including 6-12 months of travel each way and a lengthy stay on Mars while the planets reach optimum position for beginning a return flight. (NASA)"

I can detoxify chemical waste in a variety of ways which make it far less hazardous (insoluble arsenic salts, for example)

Fine. You eat a spoonful of "insoluble arsenic salts". We'll see how long you last.

Organics can be incinerated at very high temperatures;

Requiring yet more coal?

With radioactive isotopes

Which are also present in coal ash and flue gases. Aside from obvious stuff like radon and potassium-40, coal also contains uranium-235 and 238, polonium-210, lead-210, and thorium-232. (See this article, or this note for example.) In fact the energy content of the uranium and thorium in coal is greater than the energy you get by burning it.

plutonium, for example, in a soluble form, is the most toxic element known to man

I'm inclined to doubt that, although it may be literally true as far as elements go, but there are far more toxic substances -- most of them organic -- botulism toxin, for one (yeah, the stuff in botox).

- in insoluble form, it is still bad via emission of gamma rays

Nope, plutonium emits alpha particles, not gamma rays. Relatively harmless -- they're stopped by the layer of dead cells on your skin -- unless the plutonium gets into your lungs or bloodstream.

Funny?! WTF? This is serious!

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/0112/msg00409.ht ml

Basically (also from this talk) what NASA is planning is to increase the CPU power of probes and to do more of the data analysis on the probe sending back higher level, more refined data. (This is possible since the current commercial electronics are intrinsically radiation resistant.)

Likewise, all that waste is sitting around in pools (though warm as they are, I wouldn't want to swim in them) because Carter signed an executive order banning reprocessing (known as Presidential Directive 8, subsequently reaffirmed as President Clinton's Presidential Directive 13.) There are certainly issues to consider with reprocessing, but it's a fact that we wouldn't have all this nuclear waste lying around if we recycled it into useful component elements.

Interesting discussion:
PBS Frontline
University of Minnesota Technology newsletter

Actually, the current microchips are inherently rad-hard (radiation resistance). This wasn't the case in the past. It's something about the size of the features being small and also shallow, so that not much charge is deposited as a charged particle passes through. 0.25 and 0.18 microns are apparently especially good. However, as feature size continues to go down, things will get worse again.

You might find this link interesting too.

We're just a few days from bringing up a 300 processor cluster of the exact same type of computers they are using, so maybe I can shed some light. There are several reasons for picking Xeons over Athlons at the moment.

1. If your app uses double precision floating point, and you can recompile your app using SSE2, an Intel will easily beat the AMD. AMD does scalar floating point operations faster per clock. Intel does vector flops faster. Most interesting real-world problems use vector flops.

2. Memory bandwidth. Most chipsets can only deliver a fraction of their theoretical bandwidth. I've seen speed differences of 25% running code on identically configured machines, one having Intel E7500 and the other with a ServerWorks GC-LE (the ServerWorks smokes...) And those are *good* chipsets. I have yet to see an Athlon chipset that wasn't crap.

3. Managability. The x335's are pretty damned slick. I *love* the built-in KVM switch and remote diagnostics. You can daisy chain north of 21 nodes together (I think 35!) and you just have one cable coming off of them.

4. Total cost of ownership. Our previous p3 cluster was assembled (before I arrived) from Pricewatch parts. We initially experienced a 25% failure rate on memory, and spend an inordinate amount of time fixing random problems. 40 of the p3 nodes takes more than three times as much administrator time as 160 IBM x335's. Spending an extra $50,000 on good, quality parts is cheaper than hiring a competent sysadmin. Don't "efficient" yourself to death.

Having said all that, I'm *really* looking forward to Opteron. We're getting some in a week or so. 64 bit + SSE2 support is going hard to beat.

Hint #1: Don't waste your money on a laptop. Spend your money on a good desktop and a high-quality monitor.

Hint #2: Resist the (strong) temptation to install computer games. During my freshman year at Vanderbilt, something like 1/5th of the guys on my dorm did not return for their sophomore year due to bad grades. Nearly every one of these guys (and I was one of them) spent hours a day screwing off on pointless games like SimFarm and Quake and this was back before dorm rooms were networked.

Hint #3: If it's crap, don't bring it to college with you. You'll find that certain dorm rooms tend to be centers of social life. If you want your friends to hang out in yours, make it sophisticated and tasteful. If you can fit it in your room, buy a couch and some cool lighting. My RA built a really cool elevated bunkbed thing above his couch and it held a 40 gallon freshwater aquarium at one end. It was sweet. Invest in a good stereo and TV if you can afford it.

Hint #4: Drink with your friends but not to extreme excess. Stay away from drugs. You'll probably regret your choice someday if you choose to use them.

have fun and work hard.

Substance LD50<br>
Botulinus Toxin A - 5X10E-6 ug/kg<br>
Crystalline Botulinus Toxin - 7X10E-9 ug/kg<br>
Diptheria Toxin - 1X10E-4 ug/kg<br>
Bufotoxin - 390 ug/kg<br>
Curare - 500 ug/kg<br>
Strychnine - 500 ug/kg<br>
Potassium Cyanide - 0.3 mg/l<br>
Hydrogen Cyanide - 1.0 mg/kg<br>
Methyl Mercury - 7 mg/kg<br>
Arsenic Trioxide - 1000 mg/kg<br>
Plutonium - 0.3 mg/kg<br>
1.4 mg/kg<br>
1.3 mg/kg<br>

These values are a lot lower than what you found although they were for exposure by IV injection. The mostly likely to occur and be damaging would be to breath in plutonium dust. It looks like caffeine is higher than plutonium, but plutonium can compete as the most deadly inorganic compound. Botox is a lot worse though, which I have "heard" can kill a single cell with only few or single molecule.

Google begs to differ.

Sarratt Cinema and

Belcourt

Actually, Departments at my school, Vanderbilt University, are forced to pay in the THOUSANDS to show a movie to a classroom or provide to the class a chapter of a book. I'm not sure about the legality of taking clips, but I know we are currently paying to do so.

Actually, the policy at Vanderbilt is 1GB down, .5GB up per day. If you exceed those limits, you get capped to 64kbps each way. This policy seems to be effective in limiting abuse of bandwidth, but still allowing legitimate uses.

I've only heard stories of service being revoked in cases of copyright infringement.

Nader is not "more centrist" he is just "middle ranked". There is a world of difference between the two.

Well, he is the compromise. If my wording was sloppy, I apologize. (of course, he is only a compromise in your contrived universe where Nader is more acceptable than Gore to all people who most prefered Bush -- I don't think that was the real world of the 2000 election though).

No irrationality involved. It just turns out to be the best way for them to get what they want.

Sorry, no, as you represented it, it does not get them what they want, it -- in your words -- "breaks the system" and elects their least favorite candiate. How does that get them what they want? Unless all Bush people really preferred Nader over Gore, in which case I suppose Nader really deserved to be elected.

I read the page regarding Kenneth Arrow's thereom (and have read his stuff before), and I don't see anything in it that contradicts the notion that some form of ranking is far preferable to simple plurality. (keep in mind Arrow's conclusion is that the perfect solution is a dictatorship!) Ranking systems may not be perfect (which is all he proves, and I never stated otherwise), but they are a heck of a lot better, and you've provided nothing indicating otherwise.

I can tell you that in the election methods mailing list , where people debate the differences between all these different systems day in and day out (I don't participate, but I've followed it for a while), there is *no* question that ranking is way better than plurality. If you want to argue that ranking is more flawed than plurality there, you'd have a real tough audience. BTW, see this or this or this which all discuss Arrow's theorem and all conclude that that plurality is bad, and either Borda count or Approval (both ranking based systems) is best.

Is here

Among other results it is shown that Great Britain's coastline has a fractal dimension of 1.24, while that of South Africa is very nearly 1.

If I wrote a C program and started it as

void main(void, void)

struct person {char * name; time_t date_of_birth; colour_type eye_colour; long double height; long double mass; int google_pages;}
main(struct quaternion {long double real, i,j,k;} argc, struct train_schedule {unsigned int stations; struct stationtime {struct station {char * name; long double longitude, latitude;} station; time_t due_intime, due_outtime;} * station_list; unsigned int carriages; struct carriage {int first_seats, second_seats,third_seats;} * carriage_list;} ** argv)

If web designers insist on writing web pages which either do not conform to standards or which misuse deprecated elements (such as <font face="symbol">&yen;</font> (or with an absolute code) for &infin; (Slashdot won't display certain characters, so I've had to literalise them to prevent them being stripped out completely) when many systems don't have a Microsoft symbol font - I see this problem far too often (although that site does warn users)), they should expect their page to fail somewhere.

Of course, the DHTML bug is bad because with it, Mozilla 1.2 is not a conforming implementation of the HTML 4.0 standard and so no company will dare use it (just as few companies (excluding Microsoft) will dare use GCC (any version) due to lack of C99 support.

And you forget the most important problem of Microsoft Internet Explorer - it does not work at all on any Unix system (the Solaris and HP/UX versions have been withdrawn), on any GNU system or indeed on almost all operating systems. Mozilla has the virtue of being somewhat more portable (for example, ports to BeOS and OpenVMS are in the pipeline).

Because you're reading this site, odds are you're better off than most and should be paying proportionally more than most.

Here is a fun little prank that I did back when I was in school (1993-1997):

When I was a freshman at Vanderbilt University, we used the campus VAX to register for classes. It worked like this: you would go to one of several large computer labs on campus and log onto the VAX as user REGISTER (or something). Once you logged in, the registration program would fire up automatically (via the VMS equivalent of .login). Anyway, one day at the beginning of the semester, I was feeling a bit mischevious. I was in one of the larger labs and it was packed to the gills with students trying to register. I logged on to the REGISTER account and did something that was similar to ctrl-z suspending and suspended the registration app. Now I had a command prompt. Next, I used the VMZ equivalent of write(1) (...gosh, what was it?) and sent a message out to everybody else using the REGISTER account--literally hundreds of students...

ALERT: THE REGISTRATION SYSTEM WILL BE CLOSING IN 30 SECONDS. PLEASE MAKE YOUR FINAL CLASS SELECTIONS AT THIS TIME.

The first thing that happened when I sent the message was several hundred PCs beeping loudly all at the same time. And immediately after that...you should have seen the looks of panic on all those sorority girls' faces! :)

I actually used some of these, these and these to build
some of these. They
tried to stop me by using these
and these
but I did not give in!
I know a guy and he helped me to bring these in so we could design and design some more and build some of these and these and fight everyone off and scary the rest.

So finally, I could use more of
these and these and these to get my freakingly cool nuclear powered microprocessor.

We just build a 2 TB fileserver using two 3Ware 7850 controllers, with eight 160 G Maxtor drives per controller. Each controller has RAID 5 across all it's drives. We split each RAID 5 partition into "inner" and "outer" partitions, and striped inner-to-inner and outer-to-outer using software RAID 0. Bonnie++ benchmarks show the "outer" array is getting > 241 MB/sec sustained read, and > 81 MB/sec sustained write.

Click here for the Bonnie++ results

From the article: McManes said IEEE-USA wants companies to rely on foreign nationals only when they cannot find qualified US citizens to fill jobs.

In other words IEEE-USA wants exactly what the H1B program provides, via the INS regulations on how such a visa is obtained. If they know of instances where the law is being broken through the hiring of non-qualifying H1B workers, they should help the INS by providing them with these examples...

Interestingly enough, the H1A visa program (for foreign nurses) was discontinued for several years. It has been re-instated since, but the years when it was not available must have contributed to the current nursing shortage.

Yes! The first part in your response about the axioms is what I meant. Choosing different axioms yeilds different theory (and possibly rubbish); for example the Axiom of Choice is necessary for basically all modern analysis, but you can have a lot of classical analysis without it. It is a requirement for measure theory (a measure cannot be constructed without it). Still the Axiom of Choice allows for some very non-intuitive results: for example you can break the unit sphere (3d) into finitely many (however immeasuralbe) pieces and then proceed to construct two unit spheres out of those (Banach-Tarski Decomposition). The axiom itself is however very intuitive and is part of established mathematics (from 1920s on I think). One can only wonder... Anyway excellent page here. Includes comment by Jerry Bona: The Axiom of Choice is obviously true; the Well Ordering Principle is obviously false; and who can tell about Zorn's Lemma? (the three are equivalent). Luckily the mathematics we now have seems to portray nature rather well, so I think we can rest assured.

You still fail to understand the meaning of axioms. Let's forget the name 'axiom' and talk about just assumptions. For example you might implicitly use some basic assumption when calculating 2+2=4 (at least, you apparently are calculating in Z, not in Z_2 for example). You see, every time you try to set up some proposal or theorem you need to assume something. Without assuming some underlaying construct what is there to deduce (based on nothing)? The reason we talk about 'axioms' is because we wish to emphasize the importance of these basic assumptions. You should go to some mathematician you respect and discuss the matter with him, if cannot convey it over here.

The point however is indisputable: all mathematics is logically based on some set of axioms (or assumptions, if you will). These assumptions need to be correct for the mathematics to be correct. The actual process of axiomatization has got nothing to do with this; here you are mixing history with mathematical constructs to prove something. In mathematics, the most important thing is to completely understand what you are doing. It may be your intuition that is guiding you: intuition is necessary but can just as easily lead you to wrong theorems. Only by complete understanding and carefull verifiying should you be confident on your results. This is however very difficult; recently a friend of mine had to 'cancel' several of his published articles, because he was using an established ten year old result that was proven to be wrong. So mathematics (remember the 'empirical' point) is not unerring.

With your deduction about Gödel Incompleteness theorem you are also mixing things; namely mathematical constructs and mathematicians themselves. As with mathematics (and with all kinds of logic), if you choose a set of assumptions which is allready conflicting within itself you can prove anything. This will have nothing to do with nature however. So, the Gödel Incompleteness (GI) result applies because of the following first-order logic: GI applies to all mathematical constructs which include at least the Peano axioms AND Number Theory as a mathematical construct includes Peano axioms => GI applies to number theory. It couldn't get more simple! (hope I got my assumptions right...)

As to Number Theory being the 'Queen of Mathematics'; this is the general opinion. I myself do think that Complex Analysis is the most beautiful part of mathematics (eloquent proofs, non-intuitive results (at first), all accessible to a first or second year student). Anyway I've allways disliked purely discrete things (such as integers). I don't study complex analysis by the way; I've done research on Markov operators (stochastics stuff) and now I'm back to basic applied stuff (cutting and packing; you even get to see actual results!).

Stromatolites must have also caused a climate change as they removed C02 from the atmosphere. Has anyone studied this change in relationship to what is happening now?

See this page for a timeline of atmosphere activity including the introduction of oxygen. Was there a climate change during that period?

Secondly, after a major incident of mass cheating in intro comp sci, they didn't make the enforcement stricter (like wandering TAs through the isles during tests), they instead changed the honor code. Tests remain same, requiring students to write and sign a testament they didn't recieve unauthorized help, but programming and lab assignments are a different matter. As long as you physically type in the code, you're all good. Next, if you talk with someone else or use a site, book, etc as a reference, you cite it at the top. Note that if you do either of these, there is no penalty against you.

The moral is that if something is wrong, maybe you need to change the laws, not hire more cops. Unfortunately, in gigantic institution like G. Tech, this policy might not work. Our intro CS courses are only about 250 per....

...for there are many good [people] in this world...

Oh nice... our world is so politically correct that we're going to change Dean Sarrat's words so they might not offend any women? I think they would understand that he said this a long time ago, when higher learning was predominantly a male endevour. Yes, it really was.

If you haven't figured it out yet, he said "good men," not "good people".

Hey, a quote is a quote -- whether you like all of the words or not.

Oh, and by the way, I realize it wasn't the Slashdot poster that made the edits, but rather Vanderbilt University itself.

RP

Opera 5 which pretty much outputs the same thing as IE can't get in NS is ok... but Mozilla... built on the same engine is not working... OK if your strategy is to make your propaganda less accessable then go ahead... We've just got to make sure their new customers find alternatives in better software. IE is a good browser... but from now on no site I develop will ever suggest Internet Explorer as a good choice for viewing my work. What else can we do?

So, I hope I've made my point. The most important issue of the coming decade is to what degree the AOL/Time-Warner/bertelsmannAG/megaCorp crowd can impose restrictions on the praiseworthy, human, healthy desire to share with others a good with 0 marginal cost. On the one side are those who want to be able to write free software, those who wish to let others have a copy of their music, librarians, and those who believe in privacy. On the other is the megacorps who are not trying to survive or "pay their bills", but rather they seek to capture a market which does not yet belong to them. Not by offering a cheaper, more convenient alternative, but with the whip of government decrees. You're on the worng side of this one.

WTF? Did everyone forget that there have already been MANY people who've spent more time than this in space?

And that's exactly where the article mentions the information comes from. Those cosmonauts exhibited signs of osteoporosis (Or rather, loss ten times faster than osteoporosis). Combine that with a year of almost 1/3-g between 6 month stints of zero-g, and that on the average the bones of women are less dense than the men to begin with and you end up with an issue that must be considered.

Also, at the moment Valeri Polyakov's record of 14 months in space still stands. Not that much more than 12 months, and he definitely didn't have that extra year of low-g in between.

At another southern university we're going to move in our freshman students in about a week. First thing that helps is to have freshmen move in 3 days ahead of upperclassmen. Next, every new student is mailed/e-mailed lists ordercodes for prebuilt computers at Dell and Gateway that are *already setup to work with our network*! There is a small additional cost by puchasing a preconfigured Dell/GW like this, but I know Dell offers a bulk 2% student discount, so it balances. Next, in every single freshman dorm room there is a folder with generic freshman info, but it also has a CD. On that CD are network drivers for most NICs and a pre-built installation program to configure user's machines, setup a (licenced) free e-mail program, install a (licenced again) anti-virus software, etc. It also has some other things to setup users' network drives (everyone has a 10meg networked drive they can get to from anywhere on campus). We also have a station of about 20-30 people in each of the freshman residence areas. These stations are manned by upperclassman computer-geeks who get a chance to move in early, before the freshmen even. Give the students $50/each for two days of work, and it balances wonderfully. We also have students who work during the school year with our Academic Computing System department to handle tougher calls - they're refered to as "senior staff". All requests for help are logged and checked on so we don't have people sitting around. These people are available for help for over 10 hours a day for the three days of freshman move-in. We have the ACIS phone number on magnets, slips of paper - just about everywhere - to help out students. We let people know about all these resources, such as ACIS, during freshman orientation during the summer, so if people buy new computers, they know what to get. We also discourage people from getting "custom made" computers - the people who know what they're doing will know how to setup network access if they have a custom computer. If someone isn't computer savy, then this just discourages them from getting in over their heads.

I hope this whole list of things helps - give me an e-mail at johann.klemmack@vanderbilt.edu if I can help clarify on anything.

I believe there is a reference to it in this book: Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice. In any case you could contact the author of that book, Edward Fischer, and ask him if he knows of any publiations on the subject. He is the one who discussed this in a class I took.

I looked into this a little bit for my research group at UIUC. We were wanting to buy some more disk space, somewhere between 400GB and 1TB. There were two options I considered.

• Buy a bunch of SCSI disks and put them in our existing SCSI controller which has some free space. We would get a set of 6 drives, either 70GB or 160GB each. One would be redundant.
• Buy an IDE raid server and run Linux on it. We could connect 6 80GB IDE drives to a 3ware IDE SCSI card or some such thing. Since IDE drives are about 1/4 the cost of SCSI drives, and 6 80GB drives cost about the same as the computer to support them, this ends up being half as expensive per GB. Some collaborators at Vanderbilt did this a year ago.

In our situation we wanted to be able to process data as fast as possible. We have a growing collection of dual-PIII "compute servers" and divide our data amongst the computers. Typical jobs will run on a dozen of these computers (24 CPUs) and rip through data in either minutes, hours, or even months depending on the job. We are often I/O-bound.

We went with the SCSI disks for a few reasons:

• SCSI disks have their own internal cache and can read or write chunks out of sequence to minimize head travel. We were only guessing that this could be a big deal since we were often reading and writing a few dozen data streams at once, saturating the server. But we haven't done any tests so I don't know how big a factor this is in reality.
• SCSI disks were hot-swappable - no downtime.
• This solution is more scalable and convenient. One doesn't want to manage several disk servers if it's not necessary.
• Our Sys. Admin. insisted, for these reasons and more.

Of course without the infrastructure of our existing RAID box, the economy would slant much more toward the IDE RAID solution. And for a home environment I think smaller-scale things like the ABIT KT7A-RAID card might also become very handy. Last I heard, the RAID controller it used wasn't fully supported in Linux, but that information is probably out of date by now.

We are currently using OSF1 for our server instead of Linux primarily because of the advanced filesystem: a 64-bit filesystem, ACLs, partitions that span multiple disks, and so on. It's good to hear that most of these advantages are now available to Linux, and XFS looks extremely promising. Keep up the good work, everyone!

The Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Vanderbilt University (where I spent a summer) was doing things back in 1994 that were much more difficult to do than this project without having to resort to GA's (which are generally considered by real algorithmicists to be a last resort (it was in our paper cited above)). And neither of these were the "cutting edge" environments you get at places like CalTech, MIT, or some industrial labs.

And, I wish I could give you a link (but I can't remember the fellow's name) to the research (which may have appeared on Slashdot) being done in simulating evolution in physical environments. The main researcher in question gave a seminar at my former employer (a company which does mathematical modelling of complex phenomena) a year and a half ago showing film clips of "evolved" computer "life forms" which solved physical motion problems in ways eerily similar to extant "real" creatures. Same lab (I've searched for 45 minutes now for a link or an old email about the presentation and am coming up dry so don't ask -- if I find it I'll post it) was doing visualizations of "evolved programs" where they were finding evolved (GA's) redundancies in coding operations similar to those found in actual natural DNA/RNA.

So using 1000 pentiums to make a lego bridge via GA's is newsworthy? Bah! Gimme a break.

The Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Vanderbilt University (where I spent a summer) was doing things back in 1994 that were much more difficult to do than this project without having to resort to GA's (which are generally considered by real algorithmicists to be a last resort (it was in our paper cited above)). And neither of these were the "cutting edge" environments you get at places like CalTech, MIT, or some industrial labs.

And, I wish I could give you a link (but I can't remember the fellow's name) to the research (which may have appeared on Slashdot) being done in simulating evolution in physical environments. The main researcher in question gave a seminar at my former employer (a company which does mathematical modelling of complex phenomena) a year and a half ago showing film clips of "evolved" computer "life forms" which solved physical motion problems in ways eerily similar to extant "real" creatures. Same lab (I've searched for 45 minutes now for a link or an old email about the presentation and am coming up dry so don't ask -- if I find it I'll post it) was doing visualizations of "evolved programs" where they were finding evolved (GA's) redundancies in coding operations similar to those found in actual natural DNA/RNA.

So using 1000 pentiums to make a lego bridge via GA's is newsworthy? Bah! Gimme a break.

The difference in speed while compiling a kernel on this controller/drive vs my SCSI-3 (80 MB/sec) Tekram DC-390U2W controller and a Quantum 9.1 GB SCSI-3 drive is minimal.

The EIDE drive runs much quieter, cooler, and costs only about 1/3 as much per megabyte.

Daniel Butler