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I'm running a Knoppix-STD mirror at the Virginia Tech CS Dept Mirror. I've emailed them back and forth, but they haven't added me to their site. Try not to pound the K-STD site; they don't have a lot of bandwidth. And if you want to download it, I'm probably as reliable, if not more so, than the other mirrors listed.

~Will

He spells out how bacteria acquire their antibiotic resistance: The runoff of tainted feedlot manure, containing millions of pounds of diluted antibiotics, enters rivers and watersheds where the world's free bacteria dwell. In cities, municipal sewage systems are giant petri-dishes of diluted antibiotics and human-dwelling bacteria. Bacteria are restless. They will try again, every twenty minutes. And they never sleep.

If you haven't read it already, click the link - it is well worth it. It still scares the hell out of me, and it looks like his dark vision is coming true...

Virgina Tech is doing the same thing starting next year. Currently they are stongly recommended, but will become mandatory this fall.
http://www.compreq.vt.edu/specs.html

Others are cited additional universities with similar programs. The only other one I had previous knowledge of is at Northern Michigan University, where students are required to lease a laptop from the university. Is there some sort of qualifier I missed that makes Indiana State first at something? Such as 'first to require laptops in the state' or 'first to require laptops with capable of playing the latest FPS'.

While I agree with you in fact regarding the Colossus, I don't think it gets the mark for being first, either.

Konrad Zuse was first, by a number of years, with the Z3. Fully programmable, Turing-complete -- a computer by practically any definition of the term. Unfortunately he wasn't recognized until recently (when the machine was rebuilt) since it was destroyed during an Allied aerial bombardment of Berlin. It's actually arguable whether this distinction ought not go to his earlier prototype (the Z1) in 1938/39, which embodied many of the same principles, but didn't work too well due to the method of construction. (It was electromechanical.)

It's also worth pointing out that it wasn't created for any cryptographic purpose. It was built as a general-purpose machine, my understanding is that Zuse's background was in logistics and the Post Office. The Nazis were apparently underwhelmed and didn't support the project particularly well; if they had, computing history (and all modern history) might be quite different.

More references:
http://www.epemag.com/zuse/part4a.htm Article written by Konrad Zuse's son.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Zuse.html Bio and C.V. of Konrad Zuse, and writings on information theory.

This reaseach is a very grave finding, certainly for the sharks, but also more importantly for the health of the biodiversity of the oceans as a whole. The role of the sharks in the general health of the oceanic eco-systems very well documented. Ie, we'll certainly miss them when they're gone.

However, there are signs that shark numbers ARE depleting. Take for example the grey nurse shark. There are now less than 300 grey nurse sharks on the entire east coast of Australia.

So disregard the many comments here poo-pooing the content of the article. The article is highlighting a very important finding.

Because all software patches must be validated through an FDA audit procedure. You can't just go patch a computer that someone's life depends on. This case makes this procedure look funny, but you can't just put any software on medical equipment. I'm sure most people are aware of the case of the Therac-25. http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html I'm not sure what the real solution is, but I am sure who the criminal is. If the students didn't release malicious software, that network would still be up.

Which is true, no doubt. However, we're to a certain extent talking apples and oranges here.

The FDA approval procedure applies to something like a cardiac monitoring system. These systems, incidentally, have no reason to be connected to the Internet in any form, or to any other machine that isn't explicitly part of that network. In other words, they should talk to the monitors, and the physician analysis station (usually a SUN box) which is hooked up to it.

What these twits apparently did was hook their Windows machines into the network, make it accessible to the Internet, and made vulnerable everything including their keycard access system. That is stupid in so many ways, that it boggles the mind. There should have been two separate networks, and the monitors should have been isolated. Now this is the tricky part: If it wasn't the monitors that were hosed, then I can't think of a way any sane, rational person who knows how ICUs are typically run can think that the computer failure endangered lives.

What they should have done was something like this: One network to handle the monitors. One network to handle the medical records. One network to handle day-to-day activities like browsing UpToDate or MEDLINE, or word processing -- and that could run Linux and OpenOffice firewalled out the ass, and in the darkness bind them. In other words, the network engineers should have used a bit of sense here. If you need "bridge" systems which can access the Internet and the internal hospital systems, then for God's sake don't run a notoriously insecure and highly targetted OS.

Because all software patches must be validated through an FDA audit procedure. You can't just go patch a computer that someone's life depends on. This case makes this procedure look funny, but you can't just put any software on medical equipment. I'm sure most people are aware of the case of the Therac-25. http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html

I'm not sure what the real solution is, but I am sure who the criminal is. If the students didn't release malicious software, that network would still be up.

*Sigh* Every year or two for the past ten years, I get into an argument with some European professor about the qualifications of American graduated students, Usually on their knowlege of engineering of computer programs.

Thanks to this discussion, this year, I am going to have a much harder time defending them, I think.

Safety critical systems is a branch of computer science, routinely taught in the better European universities. The book I first learned it from was Safety Critical Computer Systems http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/~neil/safebook.htm

The field really got impetus after the Therac-25 failure http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html
where a group of people got radiated to death because of a minor (in a computer sense) error in some code, thus adding new meaning to the term "execution error".

Its a vast field (google "safety critical") with large numbers of interesting published papers and few good books. I really can't remmend a current book, I haven't seen one I liked in years. I don't think you can learn it fast enough to be useful.

You also need to know a fair amount of higher math to be really competant, or at least even understand whats going on... most of the true experts in the field apparently regard english as a required second language (Math being the first language, not that I can blame them, but often it is overused)

The field seems to have suffered since the recession. and fragmented, but there is a good starting point at http://vl.fmnet.info/safety/

It also seems to be rapidly migrating to India as well, because of the resistance of American "cowboy" programmers. This time, it is possible the game of "cowboy and indians" may end up with the Indian's winning, inasmuch as the techniques are going to be essential to the new multicore programming models. (I heard a rumor Herb Sutter is investigating that, but thats just a rumor. If so, however, he would be the person to talk to about safety critical C/C++)

One of the techniques used in the field is formal verification. McGee and Kramer are coming out with a second edition of thier incredible book, Concurrency, http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jnm/ early this year (last time I emailed them). The book is an gentle introduction to the field of formal verification and model checking, among other things. There are other books (a new one came out on the Spin Model checker, for example) but this is by far the most penetrable.

Much more interesting is the use of model checkers behind UML or BPEL/SOA tools.
Most of the really interesting stuff is still behind university walls, but tools should be appearing soon. I am trying to develop an open source grid based one but it's been slow going due to committments and resources.

could be...pretty much all of our measurements are bullshit. its all based off of human perception but human perception is inisgnificant in the grand scheme of things.

If you measure the length of the coastline of great britain. It depends on the length of your ruler. If your ruler is a mile long then it wont go around all the corners if your ruler is a centimeter long it will go around more corners but still not ALL a centimeter does not measure around pebbles. If your ruler truly measures all of the atomic mass of the coastline it is much much longer. It could be infinite. Look at these examples:

http://www.math.vt.edu/people/hoggard/FracGeomRepo rt/node2.html

Time is just another measurement.

I cannot personally vouch for the veracity of Gates' early history provided at this site but it seems to show that the events El Reg mentions happenned but that the time between them was several years. Basically they got in trouble in prep school in 1968 and then did the digging through code around that time as well. They wrote Altair Basic in 1974, 6 years later. So while they might have kept the code and copied it, it's also possible they didn't. I have no idea which is true, but it sounds like The Register decided to sensationalize their version a bit.

Personally I can't stand Gates', but I try to be fair. Both seem to indicate that they used PDP-10 time at Harvard to simulate the Altair 8080 in order to make their Altair Basic but nothing says Harvard was upset about it. It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it.

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Gates.Mirick.html

In the fall of 1968, Computer Center Corporation opened for business in Seattle. It was offering computing time at good rates, and one of the chief programmers working for the corporation had a child attending Lakeside. A deal was struck between Lakeside Prep School and the Computer Center Corporation that allowed the school to continue providing it's students with computer time. [Wallace, 1992, p. 27] Gates and his comrades immediately began exploring the contents of this new machine. It was not long before the young hackers started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the computers security system. They even altered the files that recorded the amount of computer time they were using. They were caught and the Computer Center Corporation banned them from the system for several weeks.

I want Xeon.

Almost all the stuff I work with at my new job is Dell/Xeon. We've got about a half rack of poweredge 1800's with dual xeons running our clusters, and all attaching to the Dell/EMC Fiberchannel SAN.

I don't have a problem with AMD chips. I use them at home, and on non-production servers, etc. And maybe I've bought into the Intel market hype. But, I don't think so - my experience colors my current opinion (or what's experience for?), and it's telling me that the reason I use Intel on production servers is simply this: Intel chipsets.

Yes, the NForce4 or the VIA whatever, or the AMD-brand dual-proc Athlon MP-based chipset offers whiz-bang feature #19145, but for server stability, I'll take Intel chipsets, thankyouverymuch.

Having said that, if we were to replace our 140 lab machines with newer models, and the models we got happened to be AMDs, that'd be fine with me. They're lab machines - they sit there and allow the students to compile whatever Fortran95 program or gd/php image transformer they're churning out this week.

~Will

I haven't tested reiserfs4, but recently I've been trying to figure out which iSCSI initiator is best for my purposes. I've used iozone for the benchmarks, and the results are at http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/dom/iscsi/testing

Pretty graphs would help, and eventually I'll get them finished.

Recently I've been doing some benchmarks to test iSCSI initiators on linux. So far [until 2.6.15], XFS is the only filesystem that got damaged after some kernel panics. On 2.6.15 I've damaged JFS almost everytime I got a kernel panic, very frigthening.

Anyway, for anybody interested, the results are at: http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/dom/iscsi/testing

A decade later I still lived in Blacksburg (and still do today). I happened to get into a conversation on the bus with a freshman who lived in Pritchard. He told me the same story about the Coke machine, including the fact that it was "a couple years ago".

I'm fascinated with the story's persistence. A coworker who went lived in Pritchard in the mid 1970's told me that he had heard the same story at that time. Some kids in my church who live in Pritchard this year have heard the same story (including the "couple years ago" part). The legend has lasted thirty years now.

A couple years ago my friend Tom Angleberger, a columnist for the Roanoke Times, asked his readers for help on tracking down the legend. He got some reliable appearing (but not fully verifiable) evidence that the incident happened in the early 1970's. He even tracked down the alleged culprit (who, supposedly, was expelled for the prank), but the guy wouldn't return Tom's phone calls. Can't say I blame him, really.

So... it's not like it was a very good prank, but somehow it's survived the test of time.

There's no reason to be frightened. The Wikipedia section you quoted does not address it. On the other hand, many easily found university style guides do address it. There are more. Feel free to browse.

A friend of mine was a graduate student in philosophy and was TA'ing for a Morality and Justice section. This class was centered around take-home essay responses to prompts.

When grading one of the responses from one of a rather lackluster student my friend found that the essay was unusually good. In fact, not only was it really good, it was uncannily familiar too. It finally dawned on him why.

It was his own paper that he had written when he took the section two years earlier! Apparently, the student had taken it upon himself to hack into Virginia Tech's student fileserver and download other students' works. And yet, after all that effort, he never noticed that the paper's owner was the TA himself!

-Grym

> > The idea that the 'dvorak' keyboard is somehow superior is a myth.
> One thing that ISN'T a myth is that your fingers travel a fraction of the
> distance typing on Dvorak than they do on QWERTY. That is a demonstrated fact.

Anyone who types a lot may know that qwerty is not a very good layout, it's merely the one everybody uses -- just like VHS.

I have used Dvorak since December 2004, and after a few days of adjustment I really like it. The biggest challenge, to be honest, was getting Windows to accept a third-party Norwegian Dvorak layout, but that's another story.

One really nifty page I came across shows the (standard US) qwerty and Dvorak layouts side-by-side. Feed it some text and it displays some statistics -- it very clearly shows how most hits on a qwerty keyboard are on the top row while Dvorak scores between half and two thirds of all hits on the home row:

http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/keyboard.ht ml

Try it. Myth or not, the Dvorak layout does mean much less finger movement. Having tried it myself, I can say it really is noticeable.

Your links are fucked. Hint: you don't type the domain shit in []'s. That's added by slashcode automatically (or not, as the user's preferences dictates.) Line breaks would be a good thing to have too, otherwise your text just looks like a jumbled mass of crap.

http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dvo rak_powerbook.jpg
http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software .asp?id=94
http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html

I'm 21-years-old and typed in QWERTY for seven years starting at age 12, ultimately reaching 130+ words per minute. Rather than study for a test at uni two years ago, I decided to start learning DVORAK. For the rest of the semester lab reports were hard to write and after a week, I was a steady 40 wpm on Dvorak but my QWERTY speed dropped to about 50 wpm--after such a loss, there was no turning back! After four months exclusively on Dvorak I was at 90 wpm and by the half-year mark I was at 120 wpm. As for people who compare switching back-and-forth between keylayouts to bilingualism, they either (a) do not speak from experience or (b) do not type fast on either layout. Occasionally switching back to QWERTY is a REAL PAIN. The only words I can type fast on QWERTY include the URL to my uni's webmail page, my first and last name (email login), and email password. I've found that I only reach tolerable QWERTY speeds if I'm going back to QWERTY on a daily basis. I also think it helps to use the EXACT SAME KEYBOARD IN THE EXACT SAME LOCATION to really rev up QWERTY rates quickly. Of course, the latter statement sounds like psychobabble, but my muscle memory seems to benefit from these constants. If you haven't garnered these from DVORAK fan sites, here are some little tidbits: * 'a' and 'm' are the only keys that are not moved between QWERTY and ANSI Dvorak (more on ANSI later...) * the Dvorak home row includes aoeu ih htns - (spaces insert for readibilty) * as an OS X user, I find Dvorak much more amenable to common keyboard shortucts. Quit is cmd+Q and Close Window is cmd+w, which makes for easy muscle-memorisation on a Powerbook keyboard with the keys physically rearranged for Dvorak (http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dv orak_powerbook.jpg [geocities.com]) As for ANSI mentioned above, here's the real doozey: August Dvorak initially proposed an alternate number-row layout in his book Typewriting Behavior (1936, I think?). Rather than 12345 67890, Dvorak liked 75319 02468 (again, spaces inserted for readability). In theory, I don't know how much this helps. In practice, it's kinda useful these days since the '@' character is easily accessed with the index finger. This alternate number layout was NOT included in the standard ANSI Dvorak layout, but keymap files may be easily modified by true fanatics. On OS X, I highly recommend Ukelele (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_softwar e.asp?id=94 [sil.org]). I'm two-weeks into learning the alternate layout and am finally getting good at it. In sum, the Dvorak layout markedly reduces finger movement for standard English text (http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePag e.html [vt.edu]); it seems to not be so helpful to developers. If you type fast on QWERTY now, you'll lose a lot of it after learning Dvorak. You may be able to get good enough at QWERTY but it won't be soon after learning Dvorak and it won't be fast and your boss will look at you funny when you're hunting and pecking. Hope this helps. Jon

Well, since Unix has *NEVER* had an objective study of it's desktop done, you will make history as a pioneer. Since it's survived so many smear campaigns, yours will, unfortunately, just add to the hot air. What, exactly, is the *point* of such a study, anyway? What does it change? I have yet to read a single such study that swayed my choices one iota.

Sadly, you're off on the wrong foot already. KDE-vs-Gnome. Hey, Dr Kinsey, there's just a few other test subjects you're failing to interview: http://xwinman.org/. So actually, you're flunking already. You are not doing a "Unix desktop study". You are doing a "KDE-vs-Gnome" study, and your results will no more be applicable to Unix in general than a study of Coke-vs-Pepsi would apply to all beverages.

It does not go without saying: Don't be paid Microsoft shills. Don't be paid by *anybody* for that matter.

Now, if I studied dogs, I wouldn't start with everything I know about cats and try to fit it all around that by comparing dogs with cats at every possible point. Similarly, Unix never gets taken as an operating system on it's own right. Everything is instead stated "It is not as good as or just like or better than Microsoft." How about judging something just once based on it's own merit, the way anybody studying anything else is expected to do in any other field? Consider your subject as if other operating systems did not exist. God knows, Microsoft is talked about in this manner.

Unfortunately, the focus will of course be on KDE and Gnome, the Heckyl and Jeckyl whose sole point of contention is "I'M a perfect clone of the Windows environment!" "No, I am!" "No, me!" "NO, ME!" So in fact, you're not the least bit interested in considering even KDE or Gnome on it's own right - this will be a Windows-impersonator contest. Never mind that counting from the invention of computers: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.html, computers have been around for one hundred and eighty-two years, and only the last 20 years http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/windows.ht m has seen the existence of a desktop system known as Windows. For a ratio of 0.10989011 of computer's history, you are going to compare the one system whose sole claim is that it made a lot of money in the United States to two other desktops expressly written to mimic it.

I'm really sure the world will be enlightened.

It is sad to see geeks deriding what is, in essence, an alpha of A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This is hardware that is plentiful for many things (it is more capable than the computers we were using less than ten years ago), and that, judging by the people involved (Seymour Papert, Alan Kay), will come with great software, too. I live in a third world (although not miserable) country, where poor people can climb the social ladder. Hopefully a thing like this laptop will help more people do it.

Energy source for the SSME is combustion (Hydrogen and Oxygen)

Energy source for this engine is electricity, or rather an energy potential... solar cells, nuclear power plant, etc.

Two different concepts. Two different ballparks. While the article states that this method will deliver "many times more thrust" than ESA's "SMART-1" thruster (70 mN, thats mili-newtons) http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~cdhall/Space/archives/00034 3.html ... even 10*5 times more thrust is only 5 newtons (read: not much). Scale it up to a SSME sized engine and your talking maybe 25-50 newtons. SSME thrust is measured in MILLIONS of newtons.

So basically, different tech that won't scale to drive a vehicle out of a gravity well. But it is useful for orbital/stationkeeping/interplanetary maneuvers if you have the time.

-everphilski-

You should look up Constructionist learning sometime.

Or maybe something on situating constructionism or it's applications. It's cog-sci + AI, done by folks who're definitely way smarter than you ever will be.

I mean, all those folks from MIT and elsewhere with degrees in AI and Cog Sci who're recognized the world over, what do they know, right?

But don't worry, though - your ignorance is amusing.

I don't think the Nintendogs will do well in the "Good 'ol United States". It's very Japanese. And it shows.

Are you kidding? I made the mistake of waiting until days before our anniversary to buy this game for my girlfriend as a gift... It was completely sold out--and that was weeks after the game had already been released! I visited any store that even remotely had an electronics section and it was to no avail. In the end, I had to eventually order it online and get 2-day air shipping.

You don't think it will do well? It already has done well!

In Japan, most households do not have dogs, so they need video game simulations. In America, nearly half (or more) of the population has one or more dogs. I don't think our youth have become connected to video games so much that they will choose a simulation over the real thing.

See the funny thing is, my girlfriend already has a dog.

The beauty of Nintendogs is it even appeals to dog owners--especially dog owners! Because dog owners, (hopefully) by definition, love animals. Moreover, they appreciate more than the layman the differences between breeds, which are crucial to the enjoyment of the game--otherwise there'd be no point in having any more than one Nintendog or advancing through the game.

The last point shouldn't be overlooked. A big appeal of Nintendogs is in owning a purebred dog of a particular breed. Not everybody has either the time or money to do that. Getting the breed you want can be very difficult--especially if it's rare. I managed to find a breeder for the breed I like the most, Bernese Mountain Dogs. But do you know how much time an effort it took to find a good, ethical breeder for such a rare breed? It was ridiculous! I literally did research for over a year and drove for hours on end visiting multiple breeders before I finally found what I was looking for.

In the end, I got Misha (Pics). But, after my experience, I can definitely empathize with simply buying the Nintendogs. In fact, if you're not willing to do the legwork to get a good purebred dog ethically, I would recommend getting Nintendogs instead.

-Grym

Hot iron branding have progressed little since the days of cowboys.

There's always cold brass iron branding.

LK

On a semi related note, we actually have an 'IT Production Lead' position opened, which a person with your experience and qualifications would be possibly interested.

When it comes to the entry/mid level sys admins, I'm not sure what the cause for lack of interest is. Whether it's a tad too specific job description [I'm starting to think it should be trimmed down], this area [not exactly the world's center for technology], or the timing [holidays, end of the year, snow, full moon, etc].

You may find more at https://www.vbi.vt.edu/careers

We're hiring :) jobs.vt.edu [ or https://www.vbi.vt.edu/careers ]. I'm looking for people with roughly that amount of experience: enough to get them started, and the rest will be learning on the job.

Regarding that internship/college dillema, my usual advice is: work study and/or bugging the college's network admins to help them, even if it means doing it for free. If you're willing enough, you can get great experience, right where you study.

I would be more fun to fry it instead.

Apple has this technology called XGrid, which lets you perform cluster computing tasks very easily. The client is installed with OS X, and takes zero setup beyond checking off a box in the system preferences and making sure your firewall is open on a specific port. Now, whenever you go onto a network, your Mac searches for an XGrid project to participate in, requests a work unit, and starts using those spare processor cycles. Or you can connect to an existing XGrid Server over the Internet.

Apple also makes a rack-mounted computer specifically designed for clustering. This has been used to great effect by Virginia Tech with their SystemX.

So, yeah, their supercomputing software is included with their PCs and notebooks, for a very good reason.

But our supercomputer, System X is the top supercomputer in academia! :-D (Man, it's already been slashdotted!) -Acercanto You can have only two of the following three qualities when developing a product: cheap, fast or good. You can produce something cheap and fast, but it won't be good, good and fast, but it won't be cheap, good and cheap, but it won't be fast.

But our supercomputer, System X is the top supercomputer in academia! :-D (Man, it's already been slashdotted!) -Acercanto You can have only two of the following three qualities when developing a product: cheap, fast or good. You can produce something cheap and fast, but it won't be good, good and fast, but it won't be cheap, good and cheap, but it won't be fast.

Dr Stephen Edwards teaches about this in his classes. He's written an interesting paper "Using Software Testing to Move Students from Trial-and-Error to Reflection-In-Action" about his experiences with test driven design at VA Tech. You can see his home page here and that paper is the third one in the list.

I've recently been working on a BlueJ extension for PMD and he's quite active on the bluej-discuss list.

a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual

The phrase about buggy software was coined by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She discovered the moth that crawled into the computer and causing the error. There's a small exhibit showing her picture and holding a moth at the Pentagon.

You can find a sample article Here

I am waiting for a case where a software maker gets sued for releasing buggy code, but they will probably cover their ass with the long license agreements that nobody ever reads.'

The Therac-25 had flaws that killed people. Also read the IEEE article.

Have mercy on my tracker.... Here is a torrent for an .ogg.

I've edited out the hour long performance after it (never liked I Love Lucy anyway), so it's 53 minutes.

Leonard Nimory is good, but Orson Wells is excellent, and overall I like the original much better. Even the scratchiness of the reproductions adds to the realism (AM radio then). I would everyone get the original (linked below) and listen to it instead, or at least get both and decide for yourself.

I'll remove the link when KPCC does.

btw, does anyone know a way to create a firefox keyword to search the with this? It seems to need a session id to work, but maybe there's a way round?

I just made a GDS "Quick Search" for Firefox. Here's what I did:
1) Do a blank search with GDS in Firefox.
2) Bookmark it and open up its properties page.
3) The URL should look something like this --> http://127.0.0.1:4664/search&s=FGJsWAKx2-kWjzxnpdJ wgjkb5lU?q=&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Search
4) Insert a "%s" after the "q=" in the URL.
5) Enter something memorable in the Keyword box (I used "gd")
6) Look here for clarification --> http://filebox.vt.edu/s/seiglert/images/clipboard0 1.jpg
Now, whenever you want to search for something on your desktop in Firefox, just go to the Address bar, and type "gd" and whatever you want to search for! :-D

--Acercanto

You paid 82k for a redundant 2 TB RAID 10 server? What were you thinking? I built a 1 TB RAID 5 Array out of 300 gig disks (with a hot spare to boot) for under two thousand dollars, and it can scale to 4 TB by just adding additional disks and controllers. The fact of the matter is, you can build rather large storage systems (10+ TB), with great redundancy provided you know what you are doing that will undercut anything any large data vendor has out there.

Take your car into the shop, spend $1000, 80% of which goes towards labor. Do it yourself will always be cheaper but there are times when you still should bring in the experts (like building a new engine from scratch, or replacing the one you had, unless you are REALLY talented).

Also, see:

http://www.xav.com/scripts/misc/1016.html
http://www.accs.com/p_and_p/TeraByte/
http://vtwug.w2k.vt.edu/pdf/chubtoad.pdf
http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/HEP/sanders_chep03.pdf
http://staff.chess.cornell.edu/~schuller/raid.html

Note: Many of these were done years ago and costs and software have only gone down and improved. I would strongly suggest to go the cheap way, which if done right would result in cost savings in the hundreds of thousands if not millions for this project.

• The original proposal of the WWW
• HTTP, HTML and URLs
• History of the WWW

Therefore, following the logic shown by the above author when saying We *did* invent the damned thing... it is ours, there's no good reason to give it away! CERN should not have 'given away' control over WWW right?
Perhaps they ought to have patented the whole thing and prevent others from using it freely?

What about telephone? Who maintains world-wide numbering?

I am actually curious to see what yet another narrow-minded, self-serving isolationism will do to further the widening drift between the world and a certain country.

Because, Java has had a special purpose since its inception - to be cross-platform without code changes. The Java Runtime Environment is something like an Operating System - more accurately, an Operating Environment that can run on multiple Operating Systems. Or, it can be an Operating System on its own if implemented that way.

C is executed by the Operating System. Java is executed by the JRE - Operating Environment. GCC is a compiler. JRE is a byte-code interpreter. Now who's talking apples and oranges?

A more accurate comparison would be running a C program under an Operating System (mostly written in C) and a Java programming running under an Operating System/Environment (mostly written in C or in Java). I wouldn't know the purpose for it... but, it would've been apples to apples. GCC != JRE.

The next stipulation you'll demand is that Java should operate without hardware.

= 9J =

The parent has said some of the most important things about high-availability, and load balancing includes HA as well. The nugget of the logic driving this is that with redundancy outside servers, you don't need redundancy *within* a server. Then whiteboxes will do, RAIDs are less important, and a reboot on one machine will not take you down (you can actually kill the correct half your machines without a hitch). Add in redundant, seperate UPSs and network switches - my pager is *so* quiet these days - and you sleep well at night. A rack of properly configured cheap boxes beats the big iron that is out of your budget any day ($30k from the submitter's earlier answer).

If you have no linux admins, I'm sure there is a Windows load balancer out there, or you could shell out the big money on a hardware load balancer.

My credentials can be served up by any of the 2 peers that are currently live (the others are being reconfigured and are in testing, then I'll switch to the 3 not up today and reconfigure the other 2). It's a LVS, using Direct Routing, with linux HA on the front and back end. The servers inside the dashed rectangle are all either older boxes or simple 1Us. The expensive component is the shared storage, and if you can get by on a few hundred GB, you can do this for a lot less (soon to be replaced with one of these, fully redundant).

Another advantage of this logic (which grew from 2 machines in a Linux HA setup) is the possibilities for growth. Got an box that's too slow for a desktop? Make a peer out of it!

And one day I'll get the darn thing slashdotted and see how it holds out. ;)

Except of course that java is completely insuitable for writing an operating system in,

Really? What makes you say that?

Java works just fine for Operating Systems, just like LISP did before it. It's just that the idea of *needing* assembly/C for OSes is so ingrained that people can't get over it.

running an OS written in java we would need the average machine from five to ten years from now

Bull. In fact, Java OSes have the potential to be *faster* than today's OSes. Why? Because no hardware protection is needed from code. It's all handled in the memory model, making it impossible for GPF/segfaults to occur.

What we should be focusing on is improving the security of native code execution through mecahnisms such as pro-police, systrace, chroot/jails, improvements in memory guards for instance see the recent changes to openbsd for the way it should be done.

Dead. End. Until you can absolutely control the code, someone will always find a way out of your little cage.

No its not hyperbole, look at eclipse it needs (with the jvm) 450MB of ram and is miserably slow to work with, all of other software running on my machine at the same time has a smaller footprint and is much more responsive.

It is hyperbole. Eclipse is a development environment, not a regular desktop app. Comparing footprints there is just silly. I can find you plenty of "native" development environments with very similar footprints.

What needs to happen is the realization that software development cannot be undertaken by the lowest common denomitator, bridge design isn't, java, C#, are not a panacea, they are a bandage for a social problem not a technical one.

As long as you trust the programmer instead of a system that makes the problem impossible, you WILL have security holes. Not because the programmer is lazy (though that doesn't help), but because he's human and makes mistakes.

Virginia Tech does this, and their grads are quite well-placed in the job market.

2) Besides, why should CS degrees be undesirable? All the stories these days are about CS departments losing enrollment. Seems like a good time to "buy in."

3) The money isn't in coding...it's in management. You are *far* more likely to land a management position with a degree. Granted, the profit motive isn't the only consideration, but still...

No, not that Big Mac ...

This Big Mac

Mmm, Big Mac is right.

old info, actual figures should be a lot higher today.
By one estimate, hurricane preparation can cost $670,000 per mile. The figure includes the expense of moving Navy warships out to sea, business and personal losses and the government's tab.

the longer you wait, the more precisely you know which areas to evacuate (=cheaper)
you might ask why property is still more valuable than lives, tho' ...

Having participated extensively in both, I can confirm that neither golf nor pool should ever be considered a sport. Although both games require skill to be played at a high level, they are simply social activities which give men something to do while drinking a lot of beer and telling lies. The main difference between the two is that in pool your object is to pick up women and in golf it is to avoid the women you previously picked up. You may notice a few similarities with yet another ball game in which one drinks a lot of beer and tells lies - bowling. Bowling is generally practiced by men and women who are hopelessly trapped in a relationship with each other. The fact that bowlers have the bigger balls is a sad conundrum.

On the other hand, skydiving falls under my personal definition of sport:
Sport - an individual or group competitive activity involving physical exertion and skill, sometimes practiced while wearing a helmet which provides little or no protection from massive trauma if one fucks up.

Having also participated in the sport of skydiving, I can confirm that beer and lies are universal. Hell, skydiving has Beer Rules. http://www.skydiving.org.vt.edu/Beer.htm Skydiving is certainly more fun than either golf or pool and the sport is full of attractive, fit women, unlike bowling or video games. It's also not uncommon for three female skydivers to approach a male skydiver when looking for someone to fill out a four-way formation called a horny gorilla!

Honestly, does anyone use an Apple server?

Why wouldn't they? You make it sound like there is something horribly, obviously, wrong with them, but fail to indicate what that might be. Remember: just because you wouldn't choose to use one, for whatever vague reason, doesn't mean that it isn't useful to someone.

For instance, lots of small-to-large music, video, and design studios use them as file servers, render nodes, directory servers, etc. These are traditionally Mac-heavy markets, so it should be no surprise.

They also sell a lot as part of clusters. the US Army uses one, and Virgina Tech's is pretty well-known. There are also a lot of other, much smaller clusters (say, under 10 nodes) used in universities around the world, commonly for bioinformatics.

I don't know, maybe?

The CAVE doesn't have a moving floor, though. That sounds like it would be very hard to implement, especially since the CAVE uses a rear-projection screen on the floor. You'd need some kind of transparent treadmill, which would probably reduce the immersion somewhat.

Here's more CAVE info for the original poster.

Yeah, but who do you think invented Apple? A couple of HP employees, that's who.