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Quoth the poster:

I'm interested in what you just said.. but you gave no argument and no way to follow up on it.. if it isn't stealing what is it? I would definately like to learn the facts so if you could tell me why its not stealing and where I can go to verify I will definately follow up on it... thanks in advance!!

Sigh...

Copying music is not stealing, it is infringement and the two are very different in the eyes of the law. Copying a Metallica song is not the same as breaking into Lar's bungalow and stealing his toaster. The arguments that this is indeed the case are just plain wrong, and they play into the hands of the IP industry cartels.

Copyright is not a natural right. It is an artificial right that has been extended and abused by the RIAA and MPAA to the detriment of the average person. I find it sad and disgusting that most of the people posting here buy into their lies.

Someone is infringing copyrights? My God! What would Thomas Jefferson say?

the correct link is http://legion.virginia.edu/

They are the real and true fathers of hypertext (and thus hyperlinks). If anyone should benefit it should be them (or in case of Bush his estate), not some lameass monopolist who probably stole their ideas and filed a patent for it (and that goes neatly with what I said on the Mir discussion that inventors and creators rarely benefit from their idea's, it is always some corporatist shark who files a patent for the idea and becomes the sole benefitor).

Here is some reading about it, for those not in the know:

Vannevar Bush

Ted Nelson and Xanadu

Douglas Engelbart

They are the real and true fathers of hypertext (and thus hyperlinks). If anyone should benefit it should be them (or in case of Bush his estate), not some lameass monopolist who probably stole their ideas and filed a patent for it (and that goes neatly with what I said on the Mir discussion that inventors and creators rarely benefit from their idea's, it is always some corporatist shark who files a patent for the idea and becomes the sole benefitor).

Here is some reading about it, for those not in the know:

Vannevar Bush

Ted Nelson and Xanadu

Douglas Engelbart

They are the real and true fathers of hypertext (and thus hyperlinks). If anyone should benefit it should be them (or in case of Bush his estate), not some lameass monopolist who probably stole their ideas and filed a patent for it (and that goes neatly with what I said on the Mir discussion that inventors and creators rarely benefit from their idea's, it is always some corporatist shark who files a patent for the idea and becomes the sole benefitor).

Here is some reading about it, for those not in the know:

Vannevar Bush

Ted Nelson and Xanadu

Douglas Engelbart

The problem with anything based on a microprocessor is the pathetic main memory bandwidth. If your program blows out the cache, the performance goes to hell.

A vector supercomputer is designed to have massive memory bandwidth, enough to keep the vector processing units operating at high efficiency. No cache or VM to slow things down. An engineer once told me that a Cray was a multimillion dollar memory system with a CPU bolted on the side.

See the STREAM benchmark web page for some measurements of sustained memory bandwidth. This separates the real computers from the toys.

That's me.

Building a graph is quite straightforward

If you've taken a algorithms course (and passed) you, too, could probably write an Oracle of Bacon.

I believe that this was done on a single computer. Pretty sure it wasn't a cluster of 4,000 ;)

The Oracle takes up about 10% of the CPU time on a single Sun Ultra 5/300. (I didn't pick the machine. The Oracle also runs on my Linux 2xP2/350 at home.) It takes around 80 MB of memory -- 25 for the actors and movies and the rest for a cache of recent queries. Each query consumes 0.6 seconds of CPU time, or 0.02 seconds if it comes from the cache. 90-95% of queries get served from the cache, so the Oracle should withstand 10+ queries per second, sustained.

The task is trivially parallelizable across big clusters (UVA has a 256-node cluster that would do the trick), but the need for that has never arisen... :)

--Patrick

Actually, I was looking through some articles linked to from their site, and the original claim (from the inventors of the game, I think) was that no actor has a Bacon number > 4. The UVa guys a) disproved for the set of all actors (as I mentioned) and b) actually proved for American actors- i.e., everyone who has a Bacon number > 4 is from IMDB's big foreign film section. BTW, there are actually actors who satisfy the seven degree rule- Christo pher Lee and Anthony Quinn, for example.
~luge(I'm asking the friend who owns oracleofbacon.org what kind of hardware they used... no answer yet)

Actually, I was looking through some articles linked to from their site, and the original claim (from the inventors of the game, I think) was that no actor has a Bacon number > 4. The UVa guys a) disproved for the set of all actors (as I mentioned) and b) actually proved for American actors- i.e., everyone who has a Bacon number > 4 is from IMDB's big foreign film section. BTW, there are actually actors who satisfy the seven degree rule- Christo pher Lee and Anthony Quinn, for example.
~luge(I'm asking the friend who owns oracleofbacon.org what kind of hardware they used... no answer yet)

Actually, computing the Kevin Bacon problem from IMDB info is not that computing intensive. Building a graph is quite straightforward, and traversing it (at least for specified names, as opposed to all names, which I guess might take a while) is also reasonably straightforward. Check out the Oracle of Bacon- when a friend of mine was at UVa, they did the conversion to a graph and set up this web interface to it. In particular, you might be interested to note the Bacon Numbers, which indicate that of the 390,027 actors who can be linked to Kevin Bacon, 390,023 can be linked to in 7 steps or less. The other 4 can be linked to in eight steps. I believe that this was done on a single computer. Pretty sure it wasn't a cluster of 4,000 ;) ~luge(ahh, the continuing quest to confuse the moderators... is this OT or "interesting?" Only time will tell :)

Actually, computing the Kevin Bacon problem from IMDB info is not that computing intensive. Building a graph is quite straightforward, and traversing it (at least for specified names, as opposed to all names, which I guess might take a while) is also reasonably straightforward. Check out the Oracle of Bacon- when a friend of mine was at UVa, they did the conversion to a graph and set up this web interface to it. In particular, you might be interested to note the Bacon Numbers, which indicate that of the 390,027 actors who can be linked to Kevin Bacon, 390,023 can be linked to in 7 steps or less. The other 4 can be linked to in eight steps. I believe that this was done on a single computer. Pretty sure it wasn't a cluster of 4,000 ;) ~luge(ahh, the continuing quest to confuse the moderators... is this OT or "interesting?" Only time will tell :)

• First, here are lecture notes from a college course on operating system design.
• Second, some more meterial from another university (it's not clear to me that this is from a course).
• Third, a terse document detailing broad set of features common to operating systems of different periods (also part of an operating sytems course).
• Fourth, another page, which seems to be part of college course, with a section on the history of operating systems.
• Fifth, a web-slideshow on the topic.
• And Finally, a smattering of other links to the same topic by even more authors: another lecture from a college course, chapter 3, section 1 from the book Introductory Information Protection by Fred Cohen & Associates, Operating Systems - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and Evolution of Operating Systems User Interface Design

Congratulations on NOAA, BTW. As a former UVA CS student, its nice to see your work with Legion and beowulf systems continue to succeed. For people outside of the clustering community, take a look at http://legion.virginia.edu .

Recently I have been seeing the beginnings of business adoption of beowulf style systems, as they are finally realizing the benefits which the scientific community has been enjoying for years ;). Up to now, however, most of the tools for beowulf work, such as schedulers, message passing APIS's, administrative tools, and file systems have been geared towards scientific problems, often lacking such features as fault tolerance or security. Has there been an anti-business bias within the beowulf community? And, if so, what do you think will be needed to change it?

And, as an unrelated question, if you could see one advance in beowulf technology happen tommorrow, what would it be?

Yes, MHz does make a difference, but people need to please stop touting SPEC results without taking into account other factors when comparing CPU performance...

SPEC benchmarks are designed with minuscule datasets to reduce RAM and Cache bottlenecks... some interesting articles found at the STREAM homepage discuss how some CPU manufacturers boosted L2 cache on their chips, while ignoring RAM bandwidth considerations, simply to get higher SPEC results...
Memory bandwidth results (MByte/s) for recent HP, RS/6000, and esp. Alphas single-CPU workstations show they can play around with much more data located in RAM alot quicker than a 733 PIII, even at low clock speeds (400MHz for POWER3 and PA-RISC 8500... the Alphas were 21264s clocked at equal to or slightly less than 733MHz, with results being about double those of the PIII)... note that the PIII wasn't a xeon... shouldn't make a big diff though, because the architecture is similar (nearly identical) for PIII and PIII-xeon... look at the results yourselves, it's innarestin...

that being said, all Sun Ultra workstations performed a little worse than 'equivalent' HP, IBM, and DEC(Compaq) workstations regarding RAM bandwidth... Ultra60-360s perform so poorly that the PIII 733 gets twice as many MFLOPS on a particular test (but the lead is much less on two others... a 450MHz-Ultra might tie or surpass them)...

And ALL that to say that SPEC is only useful if you're comparing systems which will be doing computations on teeny tiny datasets. At least that's the case for SPECcpu95, I don't know about SPECcpu2000. Furthermore, the SPECfp benchmarks focus mainly on double-precision floats, to the expense of single-precision floats... this might indicate why results for SGI machines make them look pokey, considering some of their CPUs (r5000) are optimized for single-precision MADD instructions, because of their ubiquity in doing 3D work...

Here are some sites that contain benchmark results and/or link to sites with benchmark results:
SPEC website
the CPU Info Center
FutureTech SGI info

Chapter 16 of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a book analysing the state of American society, published in 1831, is entitled, "Causes which Mitigate the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States". The first cause is, "ABSENCE OF CENTRALIZED ADMINISTRATION. The national majority does not pretend to do everything--Is obliged to employ the town and county magistrates to execute its sovereign will." The passage is so excellent I'm tempted to reproduce more of it here, but you've got the link...

Anyway, I think that the present problem threatens more than gun rights, and out to be seen in context. A large Federal bureaucracy, IMHO, is unnecessary save to enforce laws which pass beyond the proper scope of the Federal Government. And in that connection, the threat to freedom is clear... the Brady Law, the CDA and the Clipper Chip initiative are all obviously beyond the Ennumerated Powers of the Federal Government, and ought not, IMO, to be seen as wholly seperate issues.

Chapter 16 of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a book analysing the state of American society, published in 1831, is entitled, "Causes which Mitigate the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States". The first cause is, "ABSENCE OF CENTRALIZED ADMINISTRATION. The national majority does not pretend to do everything--Is obliged to employ the town and county magistrates to execute its sovereign will." The passage is so excellent I'm tempted to reproduce more of it here, but you've got the link...

Anyway, I think that the present problem threatens more than gun rights, and out to be seen in context. A large Federal bureaucracy, IMHO, is unnecessary save to enforce laws which pass beyond the proper scope of the Federal Government. And in that connection, the threat to freedom is clear... the Brady Law, the CDA and the Clipper Chip initiative are all obviously beyond the Ennumerated Powers of the Federal Government, and ought not, IMO, to be seen as wholly seperate issues.

For how things work:

How Things Work by Louis A. Bloomfield, Professor of Physics, The University of Virginia

Great site, in-depth answers - lots to get a person thinking!

The dictionary kind of corporatism is a representation scheme: shareholders elect their board of directors, companies elect a sector representative, and the representatives meet in a council to allocate resources. It was one of the the theoretical basis of Fascism (not Nazism, please note!), and was intended to place the control of the economy in the hands of people who would be motivated to "make the trains run on time".

This is echoed in modern times by the heads of companies meeting in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and making decisions about the economy in some particular context, and those NGOs being part of larger government/business organizations. The World Trade Organization is an example of the latter.

The behavior of a corporatist community of businesses is rather close to Jon's definition, but only in the absence of a "policeman". Of course, a wise corporatist community will wish to avoid the state having police powers, and will campaign for the disentanglement of the state from business, specifically from issues like pollution, which they consider would be better dealt with by economic forces.

This campaigning is often mistaken for normal right-wing politics, with slogans like "smaller government", but it is different in nature.

This kind of mimimal government, government without police powers, is not necessarily wanted by people who are not part of that community, which is restricted to the owners or shareholders of the corporations. In a corporatist state, one can vote only in proportion to the number of shares of stock you own...

This is in contrast to the traditional kind of government, which we established to protect us from robbers, murderers, and other governments. In traditional governments, we choose people to protect us. The people who wish us to lack that protection naturally disapprove of this, and argue for different kinds of governments. The corporatist form is just one of these. (Be glad they're not pushing Industrial Feudalism!)

What to do about it? That's an open question, but there are some classical answers. Classical as in "ancient greek" classical

A readable book on the ethical relationship between business and government was written a few years back by Jane Jacobs of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" fame. It's Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce & Politics, a recorded discussion/debate between a group of characters. (Like most of Jane's books it's fun and readable, not an academic treatise). It raises all the basic questions about commerce and government that we've had since Plato, and I daresay it is one direct answer to "what's to be done?"

--davecb

Microwaving a CD is pointless, CDs cannot (the best of my knowledge) be heaten by our ovens' 2.45 GHz microwaves. Better break the CDs to tiny pieces and throw it in the plastic section of selective trash, for burning it would cause more harm to the environment than Metallica is worth.

Um... Some guys at the University of Virginia did that a LONG time ago too... They put on up on the Rotunda (you can see it in the background. Of course, you can also see a statue of Jefferson in the foreground... Interesting since that statue is located nowhere near where it had to have been i that picture was "taken" rather than peiced together...

However, US iodine deficiency has quadrupled to 12%. Are people who are "eating healthy" by avoiding salt causing a problem?

For that matter, this New Scientist article caught my eye. This research shows that sperm count decrease may be simply due to iodized salt. What really caught my attention was the mention that iodine deficiency causes smaller brains. We may be smarter than our ancestors 80 years ago.

I knew that iodine is added to salt to prevent goiter, but had missed the medical knowledge that it also prevents cretinism. Iodine is needed for proper brain development. The high incidence (17-60%) of goiter in affected areas indicates the level of the problem (still 43 million people).

So until the 1920s, perhaps half of the world population was less intelligent than now. Is it a coincidence that as the first iodized generation suffused society we had many fields boom in the 1960s?

However, US iodine deficiency has quadrupled to 12%. Are people who are "eating healthy" by avoiding salt causing a problem?

For that matter, this New Scientist article caught my eye. This research shows that sperm count decrease may be simply due to iodized salt. What really caught my attention was the mention that iodine deficiency causes smaller brains. We may be smarter than our ancestors 80 years ago.

I knew that iodine is added to salt to prevent goiter, but had missed the medical knowledge that it also prevents cretinism. Iodine is needed for proper brain development. The high incidence (17-60%) of goiter in affected areas indicates the level of the problem (still 43 million people).

So until the 1920s, perhaps half of the world population was less intelligent than now. Is it a coincidence that as the first iodized generation suffused society we had many fields boom in the 1960s?

• Electronic Content and Civilization's Discontent (1994)
• Fighting some of Slashdot's battles in 1996 by opposing some WIPO treaties
  

• 
  Some AT&T corporate PR outlining a few of the Library's Digital initiatives
• Remember when the GAO told him he wasn't authorised to disburse or use funds given by foreign libraries in cooperative projects?

• Withdrawing a travelling show of slavery-era photographs
  

__________

What's wrong with LClint?

Nice Palm VII review :)

--

I wrote an article very similar to this for a short-lived, now-defunct website called Cyberdelia. Cyberdelia was a tech/geek humor site, and I, well, interviewed the Ask Jeeves search engine for it. I'm not at all surprised that someone might have the same idea that I did, but I am surprised that they would have it this far into Ask Jeeves' existence (our article was written about the time the Ask Jeeves hype started).

Maybe I'm just paranoid... or maybe I'm just pissed I didn't post my article to Slashdot a year ago.

Bah,

-x1r0k3wl

P.S. Oh and for the record, none of Jeeves' answers were altered for my article... I always just took his first response.

I wrote an article very similar to this for a short-lived, now-defunct website called Cyberdelia. Cyberdelia was a tech/geek humor site, and I, well, interviewed the Ask Jeeves search engine for it. I'm not at all surprised that someone might have the same idea that I did, but I am surprised that they would have it this far into Ask Jeeves' existence (our article was written about the time the Ask Jeeves hype started).

Maybe I'm just paranoid... or maybe I'm just pissed I didn't post my article to Slashdot a year ago.

Bah,

-x1r0k3wl

P.S. Oh and for the record, none of Jeeves' answers were altered for my article... I always just took his first response.

I think you are underestimating the number of base pairs on the Y chromosome. Yes, it is the smallest chromosome, but it should only take about 32 unique sites on the chromosome to identify every male on the planet (or at least every male lineage on the planet) 2^32 = 4,294,967,296.

Two examples I recall from news stories in the last few years:

- With a very high level of certainty, it was determined that at least one of Sally Hemmings descendents had a male ancestor related to, if not one and the same as, President Thomas Jefferson. There was a fairly unique mutation on the Y chromosome. http://www.people.virginia.edu/ ~rjh9u/jeffhemm.html

- A report in Nature determined that jews with the last name Kahn, Cohen, Cohn, and Kohn, (which translates as priest) share a common gene on their Y-chromosome unique to this group of surnames. http://www.fullfeed.com/~scribe/dig est19973.htm

A simple search (e.g., "free compilers for windows"), yields a lot of pertinent hits, including this one http://www.thefreecountry.com/d evelopercity/cc.html which lists several C/C++ compilers for windows.

(And that's just C/C++).

You didn't research point #1 very hard, now did you?

The reason microwave radiation heats up food and liquids isn't the power output,

Try again. My experiments with microwave attenuation, S band 2.4GHz and X band 10GHz, show otherwise. I found most organic things absorb high frequencies into heat. Here's a quote from this link that looks into microwave behavior:

It's a common misconception that the microwaves in a microwave oven excite a natural resonance in water. The frequency of a microwave oven is well below any natural resonance in an isolated water molecule, and in liquid water those resonances are so smeared out that they're barely noticeable anyway.

Here are some more unwise things to do with microwave ovens and a link to microwave myths.

More interesting stuff:

Here are some more ways to destroy your microwave oven (not recommended!)

No. Once you've got the codec, the rest is not very difficult to create (theoretically). You can basically rely on the usual transport protocols (that are in fact in the application layer), that is:

• RTP (Real Time Protocol) for the actual transport
• RTCP (Real Time Control Protocol) for controlling the bit-rate, and possibly do some dynamic adjustment of the encoding scheme
• RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) which is a sort of "remote" control (it's sort of like HTTP/1.1 applied to a different context)

RTP, RTCP and RTSP's designs are not proprietary, and are described in RFC's 1112, 1889 (I've myself given a tutorial for a class on that, any interested parties can get the slides there).

They are used in the Real Players of all sorts.

As for the person who pointed out that Real doesn't scale well, I think it depends on what you call scaling. Typical implementations tend to be unicast, but people tend to switch to multicast (e.g., broadcast.com) which should scale better (less congestion). Unfortunately having scalable AND reliable multicast is still a topic of ongoing research.

Many people have been working on this since Deering's thesis in 86 (there is no Multicast TCP for obvious reasons), and so far, the results are so-so.

In short, the challenges are multi-fold:

• What kind of streaming protocol do we want to use?
• Do we aim at multicast or unicast transmission?
• What codec do we want to use (RTP, RTCP, and other streaming protocols do not provide any information on how to compress the data, it's NOT their job - their job is to provide mechanisms for shipping the data and being able to reassemble it, but you've gotta specify which kind of compression scheme you want to use, thus there's no conflict between using RTP and MPEG for instance).
• Which format would be best under X? (I've gotta admit I'm unsure...)

This was redundant with some other posts, but it seems like most people don't make a difference between encoding scheme and transport protocol. Hopefully, I helped clarify this!

--Nick

This source of funding isn't that unusual -- the University of Virginia Centurion cluster was funded by two $450,000 MRI grants.

http://etext.lib.virginia. edu/modeng/modengM.browse.html

Do a search on "coffee" "java", etc. and you won't find any mention of Starbuck liking coffee, unless there's some other synonym for it.

Try and find Lysistrata, the Sex Play.
Voila.
Canterbury Tales
here
Offtopic? Not a bit of it. These illustrate the fact that the web is a powerful force for good, and that loners who spend a lot of time surfing are at least as like to come out the other end as erudite, interesting members of society as sociopaths.

So very right, but at the same time, so very wrong. In an ideal world, you are perfectly right: a democracy is ruled by the majority(who are presumably right, kind, and just) delegating their powers to representatives(who are presumably even kinder and juster). However, in practice things don't always work out this way. Sometimes, you have what is known as "tyranny of the majority", where the majority uses their democratic power to oppress the minority. The Jim Crow laws that sprang up after the Civil War typify this. Certainly this was pure democracy in action -- the legislators doing what their constituents wanted. These laws, coupled with the resurgence ofThe KKK, made it very uncomfortable to be a political(and, in this case, racial) minority in much of this country for quite a time. Democracy in Action!

However, the founders of the US had thought of this, and set down the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is specifically intended to preserve individual liberty, even at the cost of pure majority rule.

Of course, in practice, this hasn't always worked so well (see above). It seems that no matter how many times freedoms are written down, even on real paper, they can be stolen by the government and/or antagonistic fellow citizens.

Only one thing stands between the black sharecropper and the Klan, between the Warsaw Jew and the Nazis, between any oppressed minority and the pogrom. It is the one thing the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto tried desperately to aquire, the one thing that was immediately taken from free blacks in the South, the one thing that every tyrant fears: a gun.

All too often, in America and elsewhere, personal weapons have meant the difference between liberty and slavery, between life and death. Remember the words of Martin Niemoller: "In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Do you think this would have happened if every Communist, Jew, trade unionist, Catholic, and Protestant had had a gun and ammunition? Of course, one of the first things Hitler did was register, and then later confiscate, almost every priately-owned firearm in Germany.

Maybe I'm just another crazy American obsessed with guns. Maybe this time, for real, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, government is really kind and benevolent. Maybe you will put your faith in them, and vote, and hope that this time, they won't take away quite so many of your rights.

And maybe, it will be because you have no other choice.

-----------

My limited experience has been that large datasets will blow out the cache on PCs and send the performance into the crapper.

High-performance memory systems cost money. PC vendors don't seem to be interested in building balanced systems.

It doesn't replace Beowulf; it's better for... certain (OK, many many) applications. If you need to run across a larger network than a Beowulf, Legion is for you. If you need non-physical layer security, Legion is for you. If you need supercomputing power doled out to your academic office, but aren't at a cluster yourself and don't know which one elsewhere has time available, Legion is for you. If you're in a university research lab and you want to put your machine to even better use than distributed.net or seti@home, Legion is for you - you can run Legion jobs in the wee hours of the morning. If you need to work across platforms, whether Linux or SGI Irix, etc., Legion is for you. (although I'm told the NT build is deliberately broken :-)

Legion doesn't work at the kernel level, so it's quite different from Beowulf. AFAIK a legion machine can itself be a Beowulf cluster though. Woo woo!

I wonder how many people die in the states each year for not having a socialist policy like 'universal health care'. There's many ways to mistreat a populace, don't fool yourself into thinking that a democratic government cares as much about the individual as you think it does. Remember, by the very nature of democracy, the desires of the big group outweigh the desires of individuals. Problem is though that people (big group plural) typically have a poor idea of what's best for them in the long-term... not that letting the government tell us what's what is any better, just a choice between two evils, with the lesser being left up to individuals' ideas of freedom, civic virtu, and trust levels in their government representatives.

I don't equate condemning communism with McCarthyism. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Here's point form in small words so you can grasp my point:

• 'Communist' countries aren't. They may call themselves Communist, and perhaps even base some of thier political/legal systems on those principles, but in practice they're about as close to the ideal of Communism as the American republicanism is to Utopia (ie: Not very!)

• McCarthyist "Commie witchhunts" weren't. Most of the people who were dragged before the hearings had nothing to do with communism. They were persecuted either as part of a big pass-the-buck political finger pointing exercise, or (for the conspiracy minded) based on racism (such as julius & ethel rosenberg, the only two people put to death during the whole Red Scare). There's numerous texts, analyses and thesis of the McCarthy era, not to mention some decent movies including one pretty damn sweet made-for-tv style called Citizen Cohn (about Roy Cohn, McCarthy's right-hand who could have a substantial portion of the damage of the McCarthy era attributed directly to him). Read, watch, and learn.

• Communism needs no apology. It's just an ideology. Countries that claim to be communist but that are really totalitarian in nature deserve no apologies, and you won't get any from me. I live in Vancouver, I know what happens to folk when they start complaining and the government gets uppity about it.

[This is getting increasingly off-topic]

--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

The camera's that is. I'm from Richardson, but now I live in Fort Collins, CO, where they now have cameras all throughout the city including parked, unmarked police vehicles that take snapshots of speeders and mail them tickets.

oh, and Disneyworld(TM,c,a,t) is very much it's own country. Walt got the state of florida to bend way over when he showed them how much money he was willing to invest and would eventually add to the states economy. IIRC they even have the right to build their own nuclear reactor. here's a quick link

Now, I wouldn't want to have to wade through tons of these, but I do have to admit that it totally cracked me up. The fact that some people (not you) actually believe that they're serious posts, and the fact that I could actually see stuff like that getting published, just goes to show you the sorry direction that education has taken due to the prevailing liberal nepotism. Kinda reminds me of the classic Sokal's Experiment.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

It's definitely worth it. Imagine never having to remove your contacts while drunk again. Or putting both contacts in the same eye when you wake up drunk. ;)

With Lasik, your vision fluctuates for a couple months afterwards, but Lasik can correct more drastically than RK. You see haloes at night because your iris opens up enough for light to pass through the scarred cornea. It's a lot like the effect you'd pay lots of $$$ for in a good graphics card. (But it's real.)

The link above takes you to a web page showing the before and after topology of my eye, for both procedures. It also relates the experience step-by-step -- the Lasik was more nerve-racking than I expected.
------------------------------------------------ -------
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words

There are programming contests, such as the ICFP contest that are based on writing a certain competitive program within a set amout of time. These things are almost more fun than should be allowed!

BTW, does anyone know the final results of the ICFP contest? I had an entry that was in the running for the judges prize.

later,
mike

Girls of the E-School Calendar idea from UVA. A little out there, I think. But... :)

BTW, there is also a fair amount of string copying in the benchmark.

Byte-manipulation isn't one of Alpha's strong points, especially if you're compiling with GCC. (One reason why using an Alpha as a web server is probably a waste of money.)

If you want a real idea of memory bandwidth, use a benchmark designed for the purpose, like STREAM. Or, even better, benchmark using the applications and data that are important to you.

In any case, it's irresponsible to post benchmark results without making the benchmark available. Show us the code! I strongly suspect that what you are measuring isn't memory bandwidth at all.

-Ed

Another interesting URL is the ICFP Programming Contest. The preliminary results report that two of the finalists used Haskell. None of the finalists used C.

Absolutely. This is NOT a Beowulf cluster.

Beowulf refers to the tools created at NASA Goddard CESDIS

This cluster uses MPI and tools developed by the University of Virginia's Legion Project

Beowulf has become, to some, a generic term for a Linux cluster, like Kleenex to tissues.

Mark Vernon HPTi

interact(map(toEnum.foldl(((+).(+ -48)).(2*))0.map fromEnum).words)

It's a little longer than the Perl version, but therefore satifies a nice static type system and is actually quite easy to formally prove correct. So, now if you only knew which language it is...ok, a hint: It is the same one used to write the killer entries in this years ICFP programming contest (check the preliminary results).

Chilli

PS: If anybody is wondering where the lambdas are or why there are no variables, the above code is essentially in point free notation, ie, a bunch of functions combined in the right way.

As another poster said, you will want to go to a school that has a group that is doing interesting work in an area that you're excited about. This is true, but there are a lot of other factors.

It is important to not only be excited about the reserach, but also to get along with the professor(s) who run the group. Many professors are not good managers - it's important to realize this early on. A big department can be an advantage since there's a better chance that there are other profs doing research that you're interested in if you decide that you can't work with the advisor with whom you originally wanted to work.

If you have two years of undergrad study left, there is a lot you can do to help figure out what you want to do in grad school, and to increase your chances of getting in. First of all, try to take a couple of graduate level CS classes in areas that you're interested in. See if you like them, and if you're comfortable with the workload. Second, you should definitely try to work for a professor in your current department. There are two ways that undergrads can be compensated for their work: money and credit hours. You will end up doing grunt work for a research group, but it's a great way to get to know the professors and grad students, and to start to understand how research works.

Read _A PhD is Not Enough_ by Peter Feibelman.

The cost of applying to a grad school is the application fee plus the time it takes to fill out the forms, have GREs and transcripts sent, get letters of recommendation, etc. Apply to as many schools as possible, given these costs. I know a little bit about how admission committees work, and there is a fair amount of randomness - hedge your bets.

Think about why you want to go to grad school. Remember that after a few years of grad school, your stock option loaded ex-undergrad-classmates will be laughing at you.

This is a good time to be applying to grad school in CS. The job market is great, so grad schools are competing for students. Will this still be true in two years? Probably so, but keep an eye out.

After you get accepted at a number of schools, talk to your professors about the schools, and talk on the phone or email professors at the other schools. Visit the ones whose offers you are seriously considering accepting. Go out to lunch with some grad students there, and learn some dirt about the department. It would be a mistake to enter a department without visiting first.

Be sure to read Olin Shivers's advice to graduate students. Also check out my reading list for computer scientists.

I've started a collection. (Hey, even Alan Cox allowed me to use his Heathrow Airport picture!)

Check it out
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"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words