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Sucks, because it didn't used to be that way.

Actually, it's been better, and it's also been worse.

Back in the day, less people used the web, and search engines weren't as good, so it was less likely that people you talked about would stumble onto your site. The same goes for usenet. There was more of the sense of a throwaway comment.

But on the other hand, in the mid-90s, political correctness and aggressive feminism were still fairly mainstream. Thus you got stuff like the Babes on the Web controversy. People actually used to be very upset over that webpage, but nowadays most people have learned to put that sort of thing into perspective.

The most technical link is here. Though the author avoids discussing exactly what Netgear offered the University beyond the technical team it's apparent from the solutions that they would be installing hardware. Unfortunately my original source for the statement came from a paper copy of one of those trade mags (eWeek? Network Magazine? Inforworld?) that's long since recycled.

The BOFH has made sure the helpdesk never runs out of excuses: "The Bastard Operator From Hell"-style excuse server.

Searching Google for "PDF printer" yields a few promising results. One is Expert PDF 2. The standard edition appears to include the integrated-font and graphic-compression features you want. I've never heard of it before.

On Windows 2000, I use RedMon in conjunction with Ghostscript. RedMon is a generic port redirector, but it includes instructions on piping Postscript output from any Windows program into Ghostscript, which can export PDFs.

I don't know what RedMon's support system is like, but on the other hand, I haven't really needed it since it worked right away -- at least the first time, anyway.

I believe that if your printer driveris configured to include the fonts in its output, then Ghostscript will include them. It can compress graphics, and line art does not get pixelated.

Setting up Ghostscript for this purpose is simple; just accept the installer's defaults. RedMon is a little trickier since you need to set up the redirected port, the PDF script, and the printer driver yourself. It's not rocket science, but it's hardly the pinnacle of convenience, either.

When you print something on the indicated printer, a file-selection dialog box appears to prompt for the PDF destination file. Enter a file name (with the extension -- there are no defaults), and you're finished.

As I mentioned above, everything worked fine for me on Windows 2000. Windows XP is another story. RedMon seems to have problems with fast user switching. I think the file-selection dialog always appears on the first desktop, which isn't necessarily the desktop of the currently active user. The source appears to contain code to account for multiple desktops, but it's commented out, and I really haven't felt like tinkering with to investigate further.

RedMon and Ghostscript have all the functionality, but the system lacks the polish of a professional product. On the other hand, you can't beat the price, and it's not Acrobat.

Searching Google for "PDF printer" yields a few promising results. One is Expert PDF 2. The standard edition appears to include the integrated-font and graphic-compression features you want. I've never heard of it before.

On Windows 2000, I use RedMon in conjunction with Ghostscript. RedMon is a generic port redirector, but it includes instructions on piping Postscript output from any Windows program into Ghostscript, which can export PDFs.

I don't know what RedMon's support system is like, but on the other hand, I haven't really needed it since it worked right away -- at least the first time, anyway.

I believe that if your printer driveris configured to include the fonts in its output, then Ghostscript will include them. It can compress graphics, and line art does not get pixelated.

Setting up Ghostscript for this purpose is simple; just accept the installer's defaults. RedMon is a little trickier since you need to set up the redirected port, the PDF script, and the printer driver yourself. It's not rocket science, but it's hardly the pinnacle of convenience, either.

When you print something on the indicated printer, a file-selection dialog box appears to prompt for the PDF destination file. Enter a file name (with the extension -- there are no defaults), and you're finished.

As I mentioned above, everything worked fine for me on Windows 2000. Windows XP is another story. RedMon seems to have problems with fast user switching. I think the file-selection dialog always appears on the first desktop, which isn't necessarily the desktop of the currently active user. The source appears to contain code to account for multiple desktops, but it's commented out, and I really haven't felt like tinkering with to investigate further.

RedMon and Ghostscript have all the functionality, but the system lacks the polish of a professional product. On the other hand, you can't beat the price, and it's not Acrobat.

You didn't specify OS, though I reckon it's probably an open source one. However, I'll post this anyway, in case it can help anyone:

Under Windows, you can add the driver for the "Apple Color LW 12/660 PS" printer, pointed at the FILE: port (i.e., it prints to a file). The resulting files are PostScript. You can then install GhostScript (either on its own or as part of Cygwin) and use the ps2pdf utility to convert it to PDF. It's not very featureful (e.g., it can't generate document indices or anything), but it looks sharp.

Also, ps2pdf.com apparently allows you to upload a .ps file and download a .pdf file without having to install GhostScript on your machine.

Good luck!

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
The alt.comp.virus FAQ
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

Can I buy a put?

Here at the UWisconsin Madison we have a SNAP-TRIGA rxr with 70% enriched fuel. Tech. Info and Photos Of course, there isn't enough material to make a bomb (takes more to go fast-critical than thermal-critical).

Follow-up: good (but highly technical) info on why this works is available here. Basically, the fuel is constructed so that as it gets hotter, it gets less reactive.

I'm a chemical engineering senior at the UofWisconsin Madison. Two years ago I took a nuclear reactor lab class here at the UW where we learned about and operated the college's reactor (1 megawatt thermal -- lots of good info at this site). It was one of our lab exercises to rapidly remove the control blades (flat plates in this reactor -- not rods) all the way to create a pulse. A *pulse*. That is, even with the blades removed, the reactor would not melt down. (can see it at this site) Since the rxr was water-moderated, there is no conceivable mode of operation which would allow the core to melt. In fact, it's so safe that it was built right in the middle of campus. And this was designed back in the day...

Unless I'm mistaken, fission plants just boil water with the heat generated by the reactor, and drive turbines. It's a new way of generating energy, but not electricity.

gsview and ghostscript provide native win32 PS/PDF viewing. gv is much better, but it's not available outside X11/unix.

Not sure that it handles forms and whatnot but for basic viewing of PDF files it works great and starts faster than Acrobat. You can even set up a Postscript printer to print to a file and convert that .ps file to a .pdf yourself.

Isn't this a variation of a classic El Farol Problem?.

Thanks to slashdot User urbazewski.
My understanding would lead me to believe that a fully informed public would not neccesarily yield less congestion.

Here's a good list of the more common apps I have in there:

AbiWord, AstroGrep, Audacity, BitTorrent, CDex, Cygwin, Enzip, Filezilla, Gaim, Gimp, GSview, LAME, mIRC, Mozilla, Mplayer, Nero 5.5, QuickTime, TweakUI, WinAmp, winLAME

Wasn't there a study on code using a robot to find exploits that stated OSS code was more vulnerable than even that of MS?

Never heard of such a thing. Perhaps you were thinking of one of the many studies that show the opposite, such as UWisc's Fuzz Testing study which showed Gnu and Linux code to be more reliable in the face of random input than equivalent code from commercial Unix vendors?

We use req which is an email based request tracking system. It has several interfaces including command line, X Windows (tkReq) and emacs. While fairly easy to get up and running, we've found it is a little bit limited as our dept's needs/expectations have grown. Good for smaller organisations who want something simple and straightforward; maybe not so good for larger groups.

There is a redirector which will redirect a printer port to a ghost script process, which is essentially a free version of distiller.

I think a good destruction technique would have been to melt a hole through the cpu with a thermite reaction while playing Quake3.

A good replacement for C, eh? How 'bout C? Or, say, C?

Honestly, though: For low-level programming, there *is* no good replacement for C, for a simple reason: the same power that makes it dangerous is also the power that makes it useful. For high-level programming, there are lots of good replacements -- and you just mentioned, and wrote off, two of the best of them.

Java is getting better (witness the presence of the NIO API in 1.4), and I've got strong hopes for C# and its kin -- but part of what makes C# so useful is its simple API for access to C libraries, something that Java makes much harder. That said, for almost all of the high-level programming I do, I use Python (except at work, where I don't always get to pick; in the cases where I don't have the choice, I write Java).

Sure, Python and Java aren't suitable for low-level work -- but that's what C is good for. And since calling from Python down to C is simple, writing optimized versions of performance-sensitive routines is easy, in the rare event that it actually needs to be done (which has, in my five or so years of writing Python, happened all of once, when I needed some efficient drawing routines which were most readily available from a C library without preexisting python bindings).

Compiling Java to native code with GCJ also decreases the startup-time and runtime performance penalty without sacrificing type-safety -- and works for applications using an increasingly large subset of the available APIs.

Scheme is another language that many folks are too quick to write off. Not only does the language have the expected type-safety goodness -- but compiled scheme can be *very* fast. (On the down side, the lack of a useful standard runtime library is very disappointing).

So, yes, for high-level stuff, there are lots of alternatives... but what are you going to write your Python interpreter or low-level libraries in? For some jobs, there's still no good replacement for C. (Further, I'm not by any means convinced that low-level work *should* be done in an OO language... but that's a different conversation).

Back in the early days of the US space program, when rockets ran on Hydrazine, there was a poor fellow who's job was to go up to the rocket, stick his head in a vent port and sniff to see if any of this horribly Hyrdrazine was leaking. If not, the launch proceded. If it was leaking, he was _that_ close to dying.

But there's even worse: how would you like to be the poor sap who has to go pull the dead crew out of a malfuntioning nuclear reactor that has already exploded and thrown fatal amounts of radiation. Somebody's got to get the bodies out.

Oh yeah, sign me up.

That's got to be one of the most gruesome ways to die I've ever heard of... impaled to the ceiling by reactor control rods and irradiated. Hopefully he died quickly.

Links:

• Globus FAQ
• Python Globus (pyGlobus)
• The Condor Project
• Beowulf FAQ

Slashdot has recently been warning mozillabird users about some incompitbillites in the site. It is due to the fact the the gecko engine has a serious bug that allows slashdot to break.

Here is a screenshot of the warning. Does anybody else have this problem, or is my version of mozillabird (13/9 CVS) just broken?

But not as happy as they would be with their cars (we know this, because the vast majority of people, fully acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of both, prefer personal transport over public).
Nope. Economy is not additive and Pareto-optimal doesn't mean the best solution. Americans are trapped with the cars. There might be millions of options, but they can't be reached without making their position worse temporarily. That's why market can't help.

If it's what people want, by definition it's not crap.
25% or so of all Americans are complete idiots. That's the fact.
Please read this. Idiots are idiots. There are things I know better indeed.

Sure--but there are many times more other people than there are Gateses. It balances out.
You can't call it fair when one person (Gates) is billions of times more important than another (some poor fellow in Africa). Not by using any sensible definition of "fair".

To sum it up, you believe that market is the best solution by defintion. This is simple brainwashing by the American propaganda machine and there is simply nothing that I can do. I don't have time and resources to explain to you why this is stupid to believe that market is good because it is market and the market is good. You wouldn't listen to me either (long enough for this to have any effect). It looks like you can't even comprehend that market might not be the best and optimal solution. Well, bad for you.

Amazingly, I've been able to obtain this confidential photograph of their prototype.

Not quite the same, but there is a sketch rendering engine for Quake. Quite interesting, and I would love a game based on this that was not a shooter - a comic book adaptation, for example.

Don't do anything...whatever you are thinking of, don't do it!

I'm not even sure I was supposed to take a picture of it...

I would like to think that all the CS admins at UW are pretty good, hehe

DoIT I can't speak for, but some of them do know what they're doing, and some of them don't.
In case you're curious at all what our comp sci department is like, there's more info at the CSL Homepage.

There's a lot of info there about the CS department, like all of the instructional labs and stuff like that. It's how a university CS department should be run, hehe.

Well written articles are to be expected from pro's like Dave Plonka, he's all about network traffic analysis. He gave a presentation on flowscan at a previous USENIX LISA event.

Actually, Netgear was using a stratum 2 time server, namely ntp1.cs.wisc.edu.

As for spending $500 on hardware to service their own customers, as the wisconsin people can tell you, it is costing them a little more than that. It's isn't just the hardware, it's the pipe to which it's attached.

I agree that Netgear should have been the ones to provide a time server if they were going to hard-code one. On the other hand, what if they weren't the ones who wrote the code? Maybe they just bought a "router kit" from some small company, slapped a "Netgear" logo on it, and shipped it out? That small company probably wouldn't know what NTP server NetGear provides. They may also have lots of other customers who each would need their own time server. Obviously though, the answer is not to hard-code the value.

As for the Good Old Days when it was considered polite to ask, the policy for UWisc's time server was "open access", not "open access; please send a message to notify". So... they didn't ask to be notified. Now I'm sure they're going to change that policy, and I'm also sure they would have wanted to know if their site was being set as the default on tens of thousands of routers.

Routers are standalone devices that are meant to operate without user input, so it doesn't make sense to require the user to manually configure the NTP server. On the other hand, there's currently no good way of providing a default NTP server, unless you provide it yourself. For commercial devices like a router, providing it yourself is reasonable. The bandwidth cost of providing a time server should be offset by the profits they make on the hardware. I suppose the other option is to provide a one-time service that will provide a random NTP server. Each time you hard-reset the router, and out of the box, it would check that service and then know what NTP server it should use.

want to see what the usage graph for a slashdotting looks like?

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/cricket/grapher.cgi ?target=%2Fweb-servers%2Fwww;ranges=d%3Aw;view=Acc ess

Yeah, I work at the CSL at UW Computer Sciences, and the tracking of this netgear issue was quite an interesting tale. Had us stumped for quite some time.

Although IBM encouraged researchers to download the GameGrid-enhanced Quake 2 application, only 870 did so. In a stress test performed Wednesday, only 80 players were on the map at any one time.

There is supposedly one substance found in quantity only on the moon that would be incredibly useful here on earth - Helium-3. He3 is not radioactive (and here's the good part) - neither are its fusion products. Imagine essentially radiation-free fusion power! See this list of resources, specifically this article.

There is supposedly one substance found in quantity only on the moon that would be incredibly useful here on earth - Helium-3. He3 is not radioactive (and here's the good part) - neither are its fusion products. Imagine essentially radiation-free fusion power! See this list of resources, specifically this article.

I'm a bit surprised at the number of universities hit hard by the virus. Here at the University of Wisconsin, our peering router has been blocking ports 135-139 and 445 since August 1. All students were notified by email to update their systems, for whatever good that may do.

I suppose all it takes is a single infected laptop connected behind the router to render port blocking moot, though... At least it gave administrators of the various department networks a chance to patch their systems and mitigate damage.

Please use www.slashdot.com for shit like this.

Please make www.slashdot.org worth looking at.
Smoke ring stuff

Cooler toy stuff

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Realize that even as reliable as GPS is, satellites can give false information. There's a system to counteract this problem, called RAIM, but it requires 4 birds to be visible to detect a problem, and 5 to remove the faulty signal from nav calculations, assuming you have a redundant, GPS-compatible, digital barometric altimeter on board. Otherwise, you need 6 birds visible.

Guidance seems to be relatively straightforward: figure out where you are (with 95% confidence), and aim toward your next waypoint. Here's a quick overview of what that entails:

1. Determine lat/lon for you and the waypoint
2. Determine true (ground) course
3. Determine magnetic course after correcting for the aforementioned deviation
4. Determine magnetic heading after correcting for wind
5. Determine compass heading after correcting for onboard instrument magnetic interference
6. Issue commands to the flight control system to head that way

That leaves flight controls. You need to maintain proper attitude, keeping in mind that there's gonna be turbulence. In order for any magnetic navigation system to properly realigned (remember gyroscopic precession?), you need to be flying straight and level, which requires extensive compensation for unsteady flight dynamics. It's not as simple as saying "pitch up" when your speed gets too high or your altitude is too low. What if you get inverted? It can happen. Even human pilots don't do so well flying instruments only -- see the NTSB findings in the JFK junior crash. Maintaining stability and control over dynamical systems is a hard problem, which is why many colleges offer entire majors in CDS.

Disclaimer: I am a Space Shuttle enthusiast and a student pilot (hopefully, that will change in two weeks). I know that NASA have the expertise to overcome these problems, and I'm willing to give these engineers the benefit of the doubt. I wish them good weather and no system malfunctions.

4 comments in one:

1. Why Linux?
True, the eetimes article is discombobulated and provides little explanation of why Linux should matter at all for wargaming simulations. And the explanation it implies (that Linux helps data compatibility) is nonsensical.

However, I've seen several military simulation projects that run on Linux. The obvious reasons: The Pentagon isn't a fast or flexible software developer. These games may take decades of to produce and shape into something workable, and we can't throw them out just because new OSes (Windows XP, etc) come along.

So many projects that were first written for big iron SGI or Solaris machines are now running on Linux desktops. I've heard several ancedotes of software getting a 5x speed boost alongside a 10x drop in platform cost when changing hardware vendors from SGI to Dell.

One major simulation project is OneSAF ("One Semi-Automated Force"). You can go read the PowerPoint they gave at a Linux conference years ago. (The "CCTT" project mentioned in the article is an ancient fork of OneSAF)

2. 100 entities is small
The article says they will be reaching the point of simulating 100 entities in their exercise, up from 20 in the previous test. And it'll take place at 3 different locations.

That is tiny compared to the number already used in a military simulation last year. Millenium Challenge 2002 took place on ~15 sites around the US, and involved 13500 human participants, many of them controlling more than one "entity" in the game.

3. The Pentagon is trending back towards DIS
The article mentions this project is using the IEEE 1278 standard DIS (Distributed Interactive Simulation). That is a fairly old specification- finalized at least 10 years ago. It worked well back then, and still does. However, it fell out of popular use in the late 90s because a vantity project from Defense Modeling & Simulation Office mandated that all simulations be switched to use their new improved HLA infrastructure, which is IEEE 1516.

The HLA was a traditional example of Fred Brook's Second-System effect. That is, when a person first makes a project of a certain type, he will be conservative and careful to make something that works and he can understand. (In this case, the DIS protocol). But once the first system works well, programmers tend to get overconfident and decide to fill the second system will all manner of elaborate stuff that distracts from the real purpose. That is what happened with the HLA protocol.

HLA is a real kitchen-sink system, addressing all uses but satsifying none. Only in the past year has DMSO's political power been reduced so that wargame developers can stop using the bad, unpredictable HLA and get back to the clean, efficient, and comprehensible DIS.

4. HLA does have one advantage over DIS
The DIS protocol is a global publication system. Each computer controlling simulated entities broadcasts their position to ever other computer. (Originally this used ethernet broadcast, now it might change to internet multicast UDP). That meant that in a large exercise, people out-of-range from each other would still recieve positional updates clogging their network card. HLA included specifications to describe, geographically, who should recieve which packets. This allowed for world-spanning scenarios to be played with thousands of vehicles spread around.

The article suggests that new projects (DFIRST? I haven't heard of that before) will bring some of this capability to DIS.

Lots of people have been doing this for years.

Check the University of Wisconsin's WiSA project. And, of course, the commercial solution

Standing on the shoulders of giants... ;)

A terror campaign through the office works wonders to convince people that Fscking around with your systems is not encouraged. I imagine that my hero, the BOFH, would do no different. You have your choice of chainsaw, stick with impaled head, or flamethrower.

I remember when we finally got the systems in a locked room at our current place. Someone tried to slip in the door behind me as I was rushing out. Turned around, slammed it shut as they about to step across, and told them "I don't f*cking think so." Guy never tried it again.

This reminds me of the (now rather old) Fuzz papers.

Hi, I work for this project (or rather its successor, IceCube) and I have to clarify something. I believe the sky map shown is a map of neutrino BACKGROUND events, not a map of neutrino sources. Background events occur when energetic cosmic rays strike the earth and produce neutrinos which travel through the earth and trigger the detector. Any extraterrestrial neutrino sources would show up as "hot spots" in the sky map under discussion (with the exception of diffuse sources). At this point, AMANDA is NOT claiming the detection of any extraterrestrial source, AFAIK. Most predicted sources are thought to require a larger detector, which is currently under construction.

I assume it's because it's not considered gambling. It's a prize, and it's treated differently. This seems to cover it.

Right here.

Interesting application of Ghostscript

Don't forget ghostscript and ghostview or GSview, which are available to both windows and Linux users.

The more autos it's installed in, the less effective it becomes. Giving people access to identical information about conditions can even increase traffic congestion, a phenomena we also observed in a computer model of decentralized agents learning to solve a simple coordination game. The paper has references to the transportation literature, where this result has been known for some time.

Here's a link to .pdf of the paper Coordination Failure as a Source of Congestion, the abstract is here.

Don't diss da phrases, foo', or you gonna get tossed!

Excessive perhaps, for just the room, but if their dorm is anything like mine was with a den down the hall or a study room in the basement or grassy areas out in front, a wireless connection like this would be pretty sweet.