Slashdot Mirror

I guess you have never heard of SystemX at Virginia Tech. It is a supercomputer originally built with off the shelf Mac G5s. It was even written about in Slashdot when it made the #3 spot in the list of the fastest supercomputers.

A 10 base T port wouldn't be faster than a decent wireless connection, but I was under the impression that there weren't many of them left on campus, that almost all the ports were now either 100-base Tx or gig-e.

I run the CS department's mirror (http://mirror.cs.vt.edu) at VT, and I have contacted the Knoppix folks about becoming an official mirror. I never got a response, and got lazy and never set up my mirror server to mirror knoppix. I'll look into it; you could then download it off of my server at (presumably) 10 megabytes per second if you get full linespeed.

I use the local university computing center mirror to load fedora core - I just get the iso for the network boot, and boot it up, and point it at mirror: mirror.cc.vt.edu, path /pub/fedore/linux/core/6/i386/os/ and it downloads the installer and runs everything from the network, at roughly 7 or so megaBytes per second - far faster than I ever could via CD and without swapping the CD's out. I also try to set up a Fedora repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ to use the local vt mirror. Still not 100% sure how that all works, though.

Anyway, if you need linux distros, almost all the popular ones are mirrored by either the computing center ( http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/ ) or by me ( http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ ).

~Wx

A 10 base T port wouldn't be faster than a decent wireless connection, but I was under the impression that there weren't many of them left on campus, that almost all the ports were now either 100-base Tx or gig-e.

I run the CS department's mirror (http://mirror.cs.vt.edu) at VT, and I have contacted the Knoppix folks about becoming an official mirror. I never got a response, and got lazy and never set up my mirror server to mirror knoppix. I'll look into it; you could then download it off of my server at (presumably) 10 megabytes per second if you get full linespeed.

I use the local university computing center mirror to load fedora core - I just get the iso for the network boot, and boot it up, and point it at mirror: mirror.cc.vt.edu, path /pub/fedore/linux/core/6/i386/os/ and it downloads the installer and runs everything from the network, at roughly 7 or so megaBytes per second - far faster than I ever could via CD and without swapping the CD's out. I also try to set up a Fedora repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ to use the local vt mirror. Still not 100% sure how that all works, though.

Anyway, if you need linux distros, almost all the popular ones are mirrored by either the computing center ( http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/ ) or by me ( http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ ).

~Wx

Here is the answer to that oft-posed question, "What's a Hokie?" and an explanation of other Tech traditions. What is a Hokie? The origin of the word "Hokie" has nothing to do with a turkey. It was coined by O. M. Stull (class of 1896), who used it in a spirit yell he wrote for a competition.

Your ignorance is that you seem to be so willing to attack religion that you'll use any possible argument, however illogical and inane, to do so.

An economics professor at Penn State is charged with murdering his wife. Should we attack spending on economics because clearly economists are murderers?

Over the past couple of years there have been numerous cases of teachers sleeping with their underage students. This isn't exactly a new trend, I remember when I was in school there were concerns and in one case legal action taken against teachers behaving in this way. Should we attack education for being evil and rant about cutting spending?

You betray your real motives with statements like The morons in Kansas who elected the religious freaks
Here's a story about a nuclear physicist who likes child porn. Cut off funding to nuclear physics?

The Catholic church's sex scandal was a complete mistake on their part. They made a huge error in judgment that damaged lives and cost the church a lot of money that could have been spent on helping the poor and in need.

I don't support teaching intelligent design as a complete and unified scientific theory in public schools. I do however support teaching students about the inherent limitations of science, the specific limitations of evolutionary theory (it doesn't attempt to speak about the actual origins of life), and any serious challenges to the theory.

You'd agree with me on that though right, that science is limited in it's capability to know, that evolution doesn't explain the origins or the universe or life, and that there are still many challenges and questions that scientists are trying to figure out with the theory? We should be honest with students and communicate that?

The name of it escapes me right now, but I did take a class where we reviewed certain classic software failures. (A good class for me since I'd already read about them :).

If you'd like to read a few, check out:
Therac-25 (Race conditions, software lockouts in lieu of hardware)
London Ambulance Service (Poor software design and design process)
Ariane 5 (Cutbacks on testing procedures, inappropriate software re-use, variable overflows, flight hardware allowed to generate error output)

then there's the Denver airport baggage system, the Mars Climate Orbiter, etc.

In general, you may want to read the Risks Digest, where stuff like this happens every month!

Grace Hopper brought us oh so much and she was a great speaker too. It's a damn shame so little is online. Here's two items. Who's got more? C'mon folks, let's get a link thread going.

http://tennessee.cc.vt.edu/~hopl/hopper.html
http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~cs4624/spring_2001/histo ry_of_prog_lang/hopper.html

Grace Hopper brought us oh so much and she was a great speaker too. It's a damn shame so little is online. Here's two items. Who's got more? C'mon folks, let's get a link thread going.

http://tennessee.cc.vt.edu/~hopl/hopper.html
http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~cs4624/spring_2001/histo ry_of_prog_lang/hopper.html

Lets trust the military! Because they have never mislead us before.

It is funny the way people think, isn't it? When Saddam was using the money from the Oil for Food program to buy weapons and build palaces instead of buying food, and ordinary Iraqis suffered, the so-called "Peace movement" blamed the United States for the suffering of the Iraqi people, and not Saddam for misspending the money. There seems to be a lot of that sort of thinking out there, kind of like the claim that Saddam didn't have ties to terrorists, even though he did, lots of them. Maybe they are just well meaning but badly informed, and only occasionally avert their eyes from uncomfortable truths. As to the military, I can't help but wonder if some of the problem comes from the people doing the reporting.

"We're going to go after a lunar base," said Scott Horowitz, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. The lunar base will be the central theme in NASA's going back to the Moon effort, he said, in preparation to go to Mars and beyond.

"Reporting" hasn't been about "facts" in a long time. No one cares about "facts" any more. You're out of step with the times.

A timely observation.

Bush's War

Well, I helped design and build what was the third fastest (public) computer in the world three years ago, System X. That was pretty cool. I'm still not done with doing stuff like that yet. ;-)

Over the ocean, there are no such restrictions.

Here's another link http://www.eng.vt.edu/fluids/msc/gallery/gall.htm for more cool fluid mechanics photos.

As a side issue, what was BigMac used for?

I'm not sure what it's used for primarily, but I found this list.

Exactly what of value is there in having many languages? It's a sentimental hold-over from when travel and communication were difficult as far as I'm concerned.

Have you ever heard of the Pacific Yew tree or of Taxol? Taxol is a drug derived from the Pacific Yew tree used in the treatment of Breast as well as other cancers. Medicine men of American Indians living in the Pacific Northwest knew it could be used as a "drug" to cure illnesses. The study of a language may reveal a potential cure for other illnesses or diseases. This is one reason ethnobotany is studied. The W R Grace company used local knowledge from Indians to make a pesticide from the neem tree. They did this by studying what the Indians did, and was granted a patent, however because they relied on common local knowledge the patent has been contested as a form of biopiracy. When locals loose their language they loose much more than the language, they could potentially loose a life saving drug or something else beneficial to them and to others.

According to her analysis, the ideal slashdot web design is this.

After he put a link to the forum post (which is getting slashdotted now as well), I've put a full mirror of the original forum posts, complete with the images on my university servers. Amusing read, especially for seeing just how many users will blindly hit "OK" before getting all this crap.

http://iddl.vt.edu/~jackie/ie7/

Enjoy!

p.s. Any Google ad credit is still his, as I've copied and pasted his code from the original post to help him deal with his huge bandwidth bill coming up. Mine is on the University tab, so I don't need that money, and I have no ad account. Please check the code for a match is you desire. Karma Whoring is not as bad as ad whoring when you've had your account shut down.

The author has permission to link to my copies of the images, or contact me to have me post a proper mirror (of more than just the front page.

Speaking of which -- remember when ".com" meant "executable program" and not "company website"? I almost forgot.

I ran a BBS, WWIV heavily modded, which was telnet-accessible and thus had about 800 users. It got up to over 250 messages a day. This is a lot for a single-access BBS. Offline readers helped multi-task things by allowing multiple people to be typing up their messages at once, because they were offline.

Find the last state of the BBS here: On Earth As It Is In Hell ... As It Is On The Internet.

Also, I have some BBS-related links saved: http://del.icio.us/ClintJCL/BBS. BBSMates is truly the best.

Anyway, I actually started on a dumb terminal with a NON-Hayes compatible 2400bps modem. This was government issued [Dad was an analyst at the postal service headquarters -- I grew up on money earned from coding in BASIC, for chrissakes!]. DEC VT-220 terminal. Most of the BBSes were 300bps or 2400bps and plenty of Commodore BBSes were around.

The damn modem could store only 10 numbers, so you had to manually type in a lot of BBS numbers to dial. And it wasn't "ATDT", it was "Control-T". Non-Hayes, remember? Of course, I couldn't download because THERE WAS NO OPERATING SYSTEM OR DISK DRIVE. Just a monitor, keyboard, a modem.

A friendly sysop of the RE BBS gave me a free 1200bps modem for the PC, and the downloading started. It never stopped. (Seriously.. Not a day goes by that I don't download at least 2 gigs.)

I ultimately met my wife that way, by determining via local BBS that we went to the same school, and meeting and hooking up in a semi-normal way: I invited her over to see how much better Telemate is than Q-Modem. 14.5 yrs later, we're still happy, except now our 2 computers are in the same room, and I run a blog instead of a BBS. In fact, a blog with RSS comment feeds and active reader-participants is the closest feeling I've had since running a BBS; it took us 13 years to get back to where we started.

Mike Focke was the Google of 1990. His BBS list was the only way to KNOW where to start (assuming you had the list . . .) And the phonenumber file used by Telemate? It was flat text. I started putting personal numbers in it. I still use it today. It no longer obeys the telemate .FON file format, BUT IT IS THE SAME FILE I'VE BEEN EDITING SINCE THE 1980S. And thus, I even have the phone numbers of girls I knew in middle school. Quite useless, but it's on my thumbdrive and on a [password-proteced] webpage, of course. I don't have a cellphone so this is useful for me.

I fucking love technology. It's the politics related to technology that scares the crap out of me. I talk about these various issues, sometimes, at my blog . . . [shameless plug]

One of my high school classmates died in one of these in 1994 off the coast of North Carolina.

1 351326 37.75% DA 5.5
2 204586 21.98% urlgrabber/2.9.6
3 98507 10.59% urlgrabber/2.9.8
4 52375 5.63% libwww-perl/5.65
5 33563 3.61% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)
6 30354 3.26% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.co
7 19440 2.09% urlgrabber/2.9.7
8 16261 1.75% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) G
9 10651 1.14% DA 7.0
10 9632 1.04% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
11 7263 0.78% Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified)
12 6241 0.67% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
13 4495 0.48% Mozilla/4.05 [en] (Win98; I))
14 3793 0.41% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/200
15 3755 0.40% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) G

+1 and a "me too" to this. Some of the Virginia Tech Linux/Unix Users Group members and I just gave a two-day crash course in using Linux. The presentations were created with OpenOffice and presented both with OOo and Evince. The presentations were distributed to our audience before-hand and remain downloadable as PDFs, created via OOo, of course. See the VTLUUG site for yourself.

"Last month [that would be July 1997], Jerold Mackenzie was awarded an astounding $26.6 million by a Milwaukee jury who said he'd been wrongfully terminated. Mackenzie was fired by Miller Brewing Company because he'd discussed a "Seinfeld" episode with a female co-worker. Although the "Seinfeld" anecdote in fact accounted only for a small portion of the phenomenal verdict, this case provides some important insights into the handling of sexual harassment complaints."

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/Workplace /jlsein.html

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/csonline/SE/Lessons/Spira l/Lesson.html

However, when American Airlines (AA) decided to use DIA as its second-largest hub airport, AA commissioned BAE Automatic Systems to develop an automated baggage-handling system efficient enough to allow AA to turn aircraft around in under thirty minutes. As the construction of the airport progressed, a larger vision emerged "for the inclusion of an airport-wide integrated baggage-handling system that could provide a major improvement in the efficiency of luggage delivery." To accommodate the vision, DIA negotiated a new contract with BAE to develop the airport-wide baggage system. This new plan, however, "underestimated the high complexity of the expanded system, the newness of the technology, and the high level of coordination required among the entities housed at DIA that were to be served by the system" [Montealegre 1996]. Despite the enormous change in the specifications of the project, no one gave any thought to risk assessment. Had the developers considered the risks involved with changing the system requirements radically at a late stage of development, they may have concluded that the expanded plan was infeasible. In the end, DIA had to settle with a much less ambitious plan, and Montealegre reports that "six months after the de-scaling of the system, the airport was able to open and operate successfully."

These guys might have something to say about that, they've got a supercomputer of 1100 dual G5 Xserves running OS X 10.3.9. There are other OS X supercomputer and distributed cluster projects you can read about here.

Many thanks indeed! I was happy to see that the folks at Virginia Tech (Dr Edwards, specifically) are doing the same thing as part of their WebCat automated grading gizmo; more on all that here.

" I never much cared for the Macintosh line of computers ; they seem more toys than anything, but that's just one person's opinion."

Yes it is clearly just your opinion.

Apple actually includes a vectorised implementation of LaPACK with every Mac sold, even the Mac Mini. Say what you want about LaPACK, but a toy it is not.

Well, I could think of a lot of ways to speed it up under Linux using various combinations of rsync, and... well, really just rsync. See if there's a good rsync clone for Win32 that will preserve your precious file attributes. Even running it under cygwin may be better in the long run, especially because inevitably (speaking from experience) your large copy will be interrupted halfway through by an "unreadable file" or some such rubbish, and you'll find yourself having to try to fix it and start the copy all over again from the beginning, or else trying to just transfer the remaining directories you think you're missing.

Using cygwin's rsync via ssh: (after running "ssh-host-config" on your new box and setting a "passwd" as Administrator )

rsync -azve ssh --progress /cygdrive/c/pr0n/ Administrator@newxpbox:/cygdrive/c/pr0n/

will do the trick, and you can just keep running it over and over again until all the files are mirrored. It will take a long time to buld a list of all the files you need to transfer, but it will only tranfer the files you're missing, and will attempt to do some compression (which should help because you're more IO bound than CPU bound, but just remove the -z if your CPU is pegged). Plus, you'll find rsync & scp damn useful for many other common tasks you take on.

The bottleneck is probably your windows filesystem, and cygwin's extra abstraction layer will only make that worse. But using rsync under cygwin means you only have to transfer the files once - which will be a much bigger time saver than trying and failing to do the entire transfer several times.

If you were doing this often, I'm guessing you might see an improvement if you defragment your old drive first, but you obviously don't really want to waste time on that for a once and final transfer.

Also, the Windows TCP/IP stack is typically tuned for 2 - 10Mbps links. Here's some information on how to fix that: http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.h tm It's mainly geared towards improving throughput on high-capacity WAN links, but parts are also relevant to achieving decent performance on 100Mbps+ networks as well. Also remember that a lot of network drivers suck too and are incapable of pushing the throughput even to a fraction of its rating... that's been a factor too, especially on cheap windows crap. An updated NIC driver /might/ get your net transfer to catch up with your firewire transfer somewhat.

Since you're getting 40Mbps / 400Mbps firewire, you're really not doing too bad. Converting to bytes, 5MB/s is a decent fraction of the 20MB/s to 50MB/s raw speed of your older hard drives, and actually seems reasonable given that you're sending lots of small files and not a few big ones where you can actually make good use of your drive's readahead cache.

Yeah. It's the ten worst of all time because they included the Vasa.

They also failed to include such obvious gaffes as the Titanic (although it failed only in part due to engineering), the Quebec Bridge, about 1/5 of the bridges built for various American railroads during the 1800s, the Soviet nuclear submarine "Kursk", and of course, Microsoft Windows.

I am not an expert, but I recently read that the making of ammonia (which we need a lot of for the purpose of creating inorganic fertilizer for agriculture) is a pretty energy hungry process. It is estimated that about 1% of the total world energy output is consumed by the Haber-Bosch Process. So, in its current form, these pellets would be kind of impractical as you need ammonia to put the hydrogen in.

That being said, its a renewable process and not dependent on a precious metal. All you need is a huge energy source to start the process, or some improvement in the efficiency of making ammonia, as is envisioned by some sort of biotech or artificial photosynthesis process.

I can't speak to it running a customized kernel, but it's still running PPC based Macs
http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html so closing the Intel kernel would not effect that system.

What has been your experience with Apple's XServe Clusters ?

But regareding your hard facts and your experience, what do you know that the technicians who built the following systems don't?

• The Virginia Tech Terascale Computing Facility containing 1100 Xserve G5 cluster nodes running OS X Panther
• The Human Genetics Grid Cluster with 250 PPC G5's running OS X
• The COLSA MACH 5 Cluster using 1566 cluster nodes, which should be running OS X as well. More info here .
• Additionally, the following people using OS X clusters to do biomedical research, and having won awards from Apple. But of course Apple wouldn't be unbiased in their opinions of OS X.

So can you describe your experience with Xgrid and why you think it's so bad. And regarding software, what problems do you see with the following software packages, or have you not used any?

• iNquiry bioinformatics
• grid Mathematica
• MATLAB's Distributed Computing Engine

I've made a working torrent, and replied to the usenet thread with it as well:
http://iddl.vt.edu/~jackie/IDE-3.1.2.iso.bz2.torre nt

Ok, one thing that I know has not appeared in the threads yet, is that Boot Camp is "Public Beta" software. It says so right in the header graphic of the page, http://www.vbc.vt.edu/SystemX_pgs/SystemX_md.html

To point out its limitations as intentional and say that it's some conspiracy against Windows users to get them to switch is a bit thin. Especially, when there is talk that Apple has revived the "Red Box" component from the Rhapsody development days (pre-Mac OS X), and the "Yellow Box for Windows". The Red Box was supposed to be a complete set of Windows APIs built for Mac OS X that would allow any Windows application to run natively without emulation or virtualization. The Yellow Box for Windows is the exact opposite. It is the complete set of Cocoa/Carbon APIs for Windows so that any Mac OS X application would run natively under Windows.

This development effort would require a great deal of cooperation between the two companies, I know. I also know that the two haven't exactly been friendly lately (and the new Apple ads don't help that cause). BUT, there is significant advantage in the marketplace for both companies to work toward the Red Box for Mac OS X and Yellow Box for Windows. Why? It would possibly increase the number of Mac hardware sales and it would certainly increase the number of Windows licenses for Microsoft. One other thing it does is to finally do away with two versions of applications. Developers for the Mac could now choose to use EITHER development environment they were comfortable in (Xcode/Mac OS X or Windows .Net) and produce a single binary that would run everywhere. Microsoft would stand to gain from that as well, as they could do away with the Mac BU all together. Apple could penetrate into the Windows market with their creative tools (iLife and the Final Cut Studio suite) and stand to make significant inroads in software sales.

Yes, there are some potential bad outcomes as well, I realize. But, the possibilities of such a move are quite enticing. Does Apple want people to switch to their platform? Of course, they believe its better and I happen to agree, but making that transition happen a bit smoother and offering an opportunity to run all the apps you need during the transition is a much better way to entice novice users (i.e., average home PC users). Advanced users will switch or not switch, period. That crowd is pretty resistant to change and there won't be a mass exodus from one platform to another from them...ever.

Obvious:

CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise, with a :s/RedHat/CentOS/g on the code. They download the RHEL Source RPMs and compile and release it. FYI.

Not so obvious:

They also recompile for additional arches, most notably Alpha (I have a couple of faculty members who don't want to be rid of their Digital machines; this makes a great alternative to paying $1000+/year for a True64 license to HP who hasn't looked at the code for 4.x since they bought it).

Get it here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.ph p?id=13
There are a LOT of mirrors, and being on the listserv, I see more and more being added all the time. Including lots of tier 1 mirrors at Universities, if you're on Internet2. There are also lots of local mirrors around the world, so if you're not a USAian, check for one in your locale; you may get better speeds than a general mirror.
Best mirror? http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ =)

~Will

It's a little more complicated than that, but, yeah.

I work for the Technical Staff of the CS department at Virginia Tech. Our department is not responsible for the university infrastructure (that's these guys). However, we are closely tied in with them. Way "back in the day", there was no CNS, and the Computer Science department did run the campus infrastructure (when there were something on the order of 20 terminals on campus). One of the people that works with me helped to run the first network here at VT - it was thicknet of some sort, the big fat orange stuff you hit with a vampire tap and a $15,000 box from DEC. We ran DECnet for a while before we switched to TCP/IP and moved away from Vax/VMS to DEC/Ultrix, I think.

Granted, that has been quite a while ago, and the folks that were here long ago gave control to CNS. But, many CNS employees were once CS employees of one sort or another, and they value our opinion.

We also have all of our own infrastructure, partly because our faculty at one point complained (so I'm told, this was before I was hired) about the campus email server going up and down like a [write your own joke here and submit to reader's digest]. So, we have insulated ourselves from occurances like university brain fart and switch to MS Live Email Super XXP or whatever. We have our own web services, email with pop3/imap-ssl/webmail, our own backup system with 2 6TB disk arrays and a tape autoloader, our own SAN, etc. In some ways, I envy the infrastructure that CNS can provide. In others, we're ahead of them, because the economics of scale work against them.

And on that note, I doubt that this MS Live thing will be rolled out at (as a grandparent said) Div-1A schools. When you're the size of VT, or Penn State, or UT, or Umich, your email is an order of magnitude more vast than Oral Roberts God Fearing U, or whatever the GP said. We have half a million university PIDs, including one for each of the 33,000 students currently enrolled, one for each staff and faculty member, and one for every alumnus in the past 10 years, and at last I heard, we were attempting to work out something at the university level where people could (don't quote me) keep their @vt.edu email address forever, and maybe at some point it would become a forward only, but it would be the same address forever. Anyway, however you look at it, that's a crapload of email addresses, which we currently provide pop3, imap, and webmail, and in some cases exchange functionality, with. Without pop3, the disk space requirements would become so vast so quickly it would be hard to keep up. From what CNS says, the university receives and sends something like 2-3 million emails an hour on average, and 10 mil on peak times. I know they use this live thing for hotmail, but I just don't see it working out on this scale - at least not if people want the same level of functionality.

~Will

Wait, we're not talking about code modification here. We're talking about code use. Documentation for code use (not modification) should be addressed to the lay person with a minimum of systems experience, i.e. they are familiar with a command line or GUI installer process and basic system administration. And, I'm sorry, I teach students how to take complex technical subjects and present them so that the average person walking off the street, with maybe a few questions, can understand the topic being presented, ESM 4714: Scientific Visual Data Analysis and Multimedia. So you can't tell me it's not possible. I've been involved in the class either as an instructor or providing technical and advisory support for more than a decade.

As far as the point of your comment, yes, I agree code should not be modified by just anyone, but we're not talking about code modification. We're talking about the ability to install and use a code to get work done, not code modification.

"Mr. Wallace [the NTP lawyer] maintained that Mr. Goodfellow was retained because he had been mentioned in news articles from the early 1990's "regarding a product called RadioMail" -- his effort to commercialize the wireless e-mail idea -- but that Mr. Goodfellow "could not locate any documentation beyond these articles regarding the product.""

Wow, it's a good thing google wasn't around at the time to help.

Sheesh, I knew that RIM was getting some of their own medicine, so I was only partially sympathetic (both companies deserve a good legal slapping for pursuing such ridiculously obvious patents), but I had no idea NTP was THAT scummy. They knew about prior art. They hired the guy that was practically the embodiment of that prior art -- a guy that didn't merely have something on paper, but actually once ran a business on the principles NTP claimed to be a novel invention at the time of its patents. And they paid him to sign a contract to shut up.

Can this Mr. Wallace be disbarred for such unethical behaviour?

JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ON-LINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

Why not ask The Woz ?

Depending on what your current degree is in, you might want to follow it up with a degree in Computer Science with a heavy emphasis on Computer Security and Information. A while back, when I was applying to graduate schools, I found that there were very few universities, on the list that I had created, that specialized in Computer Security; albeit, I was more concerned with their EE/Computer Engineering than Computer Science.

With that said, I do know that there are a variety of courses available at places like Johns Hopkins University (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/academics_catalog_grad_cour ses.html), New York University (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/web/Academic/Graduate/cours es.html), George Washington University (http://cs.seas.gwu.edu/academics/graduate/courses /), Virginia Tech (http://www.cs.vt.edu/site_pages/courses/), and the University of Florida (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/student_services/grad/cou rses/) that might suit your needs. While computer forensics is useful for a variety of agencies and institutions, the fundamentals behind those methods are important, as it governs how new tools can be created. MIT (http://student.mit.edu/@5675354.9107/catalog/m6a. html) also has a very interesting course selection, and the techniques and research coming out of there are very top-notch. If I had the time, I'd attend more lectures there, as the content is very diverse and alluring, especially when a grade is not on the line.

http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/faq/quasars.html

If you're thinking of quartz crystals, then you're probably thinking of digital timing devices. I'm pretty sure that quasars are totally different.

Yeah, for sure... this was written in Ruby. It's a stand-alone win32 executable for hashing files, strings, etc...

And if you consider intermediary methods of storing energy, fusion power for home heating goes back much further.

Untested, but in theory you should be able to upgrade from 4.2 via:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/CentOS/4.3/os/i386/Cen tOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-3.2.i386.rpm

yum -y upgrade

reboot

Don't blame me. Should work, no guarantees.

~Will

(screwed up the parent post, i meant yum and not rpm in the 2nd bit)
(fixed link, i think i got it this time)

Untested, but in theory you should be able to upgrade from 4.2 via:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/CentOS/4.3/os/i386/Cen tOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-3.2.i386.rpm

yum -y upgrade

reboot

Don't blame me. Should work, no guarantees.

~Will

(screwed up the parent post, i meant yum and not rpm in the 2nd bit)

Untested, but in theory you should be able to upgrade from 4.2 via:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/CentOS/4.3/os/i386/Cen tOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-3.2.i386.rpm

rpm -y upgrade

reboot

Don't blame me. Should work, no guarantees.

~Will

Speaking of updates: http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ - updates 4x per day, 622 mbits.

Yay, I run an official CentOS mirror.

~Will

Suse I actually used for the first time today; and I was immediately annoyed by their package management system (the system I was working on didn't have rsync (the command, not the server) installed, and I ended up compiling from source).

But, I have used Mandriva. In fact, I used to mirror the /current/ version at http://mirror.cs.vt.edu/ which I administer. Lately, though... I really don't like the Mandriva philosophy, I don't like the way their website deceptively tries to get you to buy the distro by hiding the free stuff (it's not the paying, it's the deception), and I don't like what they've done with their guy that they fired earlier this week.

Aside from that, though, Mandriva is a CLUNKY server. There are hardly any administration tools, and the package management sucks.

Trust me, I've used all the major ones. RedHat is the best of an odd bunch; it seems suited to do all the tasks I need it to do.

Still, though. God, when will they make yum not suck. All I want is a package management system that works like "emerge". Blah blah funrollloops gentoo etc, but NOTHING rivals emerge for ease of use and availability of packages, except maybe apt-get, and I'm still not sure on that count.

Example:
emerge ghostview. Emerge says: OK, here are the packages I need to merge. No problem.

#yum install ghostview. THINKING PARSING THINKING UPDATING THINKING 5 minutes later NO matching packages, nothing to do. Crap.
#Yum search ghostview. Oh!!! Here's ELEVENTY BILLION DIFFERENT PACKAGES FOR GHOSTVIEW, NONE OF WHICH ARE ACTUALLY THE PROGRAM. Goddamnit.
#yum info ghostview. No matching packages.
--Google ghostview. Package is called gv. Oh, that explains it. No problem.
#yum install gv. THINKING PARSING THINKING UPDATING 52 of 72812 files parsex UPDATING REPOSITORY.XML 5 minutes later No matching packages. wtf.
#yum search gv. Shipboard computer Eddie: HERE YOU GO BUDDY, HERE'S EVERY PACKAGE ON THE PLANET WITH THE LETTERS G AND V NEXT TO EACH OTHER IN THE PACKAGE NAME OR DESCRIPTION. Thanks.
#yum info gv. Package gvv not installed. Damn you.
#yum install gvv. THINKING PARSING UPDATING DOWNLOADING IS THIS OK?!? Y/N Y OK INSTALLING... UPDATING.... done.

I could have mailed away for a copy.

~Will

Ditto for USians.

Mirror.cc.vt.edu

622 Mbits.

Also: CentOS just released 4.3 two days or so ago.

What happened is simple: Everyone else is now as "easy to use" as Mandrake claimed to be back in the day.

I remember my first linux kick - I had played around with it in 1999 (RedHat 6.x, I believe), but hadn't really made the switch. So, I bought a copy of Mandrake 7.2 at Best Buy, along with a hardware serial port modem, and installed it. I only had one computer at the time, and I completely removed my windows partition. I told myself that the only way I would learn was by doing, and forcing myself to learn.

Well, it helped that Mandrake 7.2 was so radically easy - I mean, it had a graphical installer (woah). It detected some of my hardware (wow, working graphics at 1024x768). It knew what my modem was (well, it understood "serial port that way" and "Hayes standard").

Now, though, excepting the most modern hardware, any linux distro will boot and install and give you that much usability.

What really screwed mandrakeiva was their seeming focus on making people buy the support. They offer it for free, but you kind of have to dig around on their site to find it (unlike, say, fedora, archlinux, centos, ubuntu, debian, gentoo, etc etc). They're really pushing their pay products. And I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to make money. What I am saying is that people often are resentful of companies which try to trick them into paying; making them believe that payment is the only option.

So, in short, they've alienated their customers through trickery, and they're now no easier than any other distro. Their market niche has dried up. Time to move out. ... and this from someone who runs a Mandriva Mirror.

~Will