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The decline in EE degrees makes sense though. My school saw a decline during that period too. The shift was to Mechanical and Chemical Engineering big time. But now Computer Engineering (my field) is gaining popularity and things will swing back. In fact, well over 50% of my EE graduating class was in Computer Engineering last year.

Well Condor does (and has been doing for quite a while) exactly this with C. Assuming you follow the link, now you can believe it. Basically you link with condor's library and it intercepts i/o calls and sends them back to a central controller. Keep in mind this is distributed processing not distributed i/o.

Since the Metet was re-defined in the 50s to be some multiple of a wavelength of a specific electromagnetic emission, the definition of an inch to be exactly 2.54 cm or a foot to be .3048 meter changed the length of the foot. To maintain consistency with all the previous surveys that had been performed this was named the International Foot and a US Survey foot was created with a length to be 0.304800609602 (12 sig digits from the sources below).

Add to this difference the fact that some survey calculations are done in State Plane coordinates and even survey calculations done in plane coordinate systems can easily have 8 significant digits, the difference between the two definitions of Foot can be very significant.

Wisconsin Coordinate Systems Handbook Summary of Terms

Mentor Software FAQ

"Trash-80" ??? I don't really know of any of the 8-bit machines that came close to the multi-user, muti-tasking ability of the TRS-80 Color Computer 1/2/3 with the OS-9 Operating System. We poked fun at 386's running Desqview :)

Phil Agre, a professor at UCLA sent out a message on the Red Rock Eater mailing list debunking the "Gore invented the Internet" myth. He doesn't seem to have it up on his web site yet, so I've put up a temporary copy

that depends entirely on the pressure. The lowest pressure that CO2 can exist as a liquid is 5.1 athmosphere, at a temperature of about -57C.

check out this diagram

//rdj

See the bottom of this for the phase diagram, which indicates that at room temperature you need 30 plus atmospheres of pressure, or more than 450 lbs per square inch.

Here is a demo/video of dry ice turning into liquid CO2! (get rid of the space after the L near the end of the URL. Sorry, the submission form is wrapping it.)
Ask A Scientist - Liquid CO2
Liquid Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Surfactant System For Garment Care

Why CO2 in Fire Suppression Systems
CO2 Snow Cleaning and what it's best used for.

I want to know how they know that liquid CO2 has a slightly acidic taste and odor!! Did they get inside a 30 atmosphere room temperature container with some liquid CO2 and take a taste?

And finally - test your knowledge of Liquid CO2

See the bottom of this for the phase diagram, which indicates that at room temperature you need 30 plus atmospheres of pressure, or more than 450 lbs per square inch.

Here is a demo/video of dry ice turning into liquid CO2! (get rid of the space after the L near the end of the URL. Sorry, the submission form is wrapping it.)
Ask A Scientist - Liquid CO2
Liquid Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Surfactant System For Garment Care

Why CO2 in Fire Suppression Systems
CO2 Snow Cleaning and what it's best used for.

I want to know how they know that liquid CO2 has a slightly acidic taste and odor!! Did they get inside a 30 atmosphere room temperature container with some liquid CO2 and take a taste?

And finally - test your knowledge of Liquid CO2

An STM is an interesting gadget. You have a very sharp probe (the point is a single atom) which hovers over the sample. Everything is electrically conductive except for the gap between the probe and the sample, typically a few nanometers. The gap is an insulator except for the ability of electrons to tunnel across the gap. The current flow due to tunneling is quite sensitive to the gap size.

Set up a servo to control the height of the probe, holding the tunneling current constant (the probe is moved with piezoelectric crystals). Horizontally sweep the probe in a TV-like raster pattern, recording the probe's height as a function of horizontal position, add false color, and voila, you've imaged atoms.

Here is a more detailed description.

Even assuming we can reach 35nm gate lengths (that's a .035um process), the speed of the wires will be problematic because (to a rough approximation) the delay of a wire increases as 1/scale factor squared. In other words, decrease the feature size of your chips by a factor of 0.5, the delay of global wires goes up 4x. (Transistors are roughly sped up by 2x, however.)

Global wires are used to connect big functional blocks of a uP, like the ALUs, Cache, register file, etc.

The delay of small little wires (connecting adjacent gates, for example) stays about the same, but this still poses a problem since the transistors will have to wait for the wires as they get even faster.

Wiring is already responsible for much of the delay of a uP, and is only going to get worse. Even if transistors get to 35nm (which the SIA predicts will happen in 2014), they only get 7x faster. This corresponds to a 15% annual improvement rate, well short of Moore's law 58%.

A bunch of this is described here.

Imagine a plot of the relative performances of the fastest uniprocessor machine on earth compared to the fastest uP, graphed vs. time. see paper. What you'd see is that, in fact, the fastest computers in the world have been improving at a rate closer to 12-14% annually. uP's got a late start and were many orders of magnitude slower. uP's have been catching up, borrowing technologies from minis and supercomputers which have been resulting in yearly advantages of 50-60% over the last 20 years or so. But uP's are about to hit the same hurdles that have been bothering supers for a long time. (Supercomputers have been communication bound for some time.) Until something fantastic happens (optical? organic?) uPs and supercomputers may be very similar in performance.

One last thing to note is that the bad news about future growth of uPs places an assumption on the microarchitecture--that it remain largely the same as today's. There are other possibilities being researched, for example, the RAW group at MIT. They may be able to cope with the wire delays in ways that a conventional uP cannot.

-Ed

Even assuming we can reach 35nm gate lengths (that's a .035um process), the speed of the wires will be problematic because (to a rough approximation) the delay of a wire increases as 1/scale factor squared. In other words, decrease the feature size of your chips by a factor of 0.5, the delay of global wires goes up 4x. (Transistors are roughly sped up by 2x, however.)

Global wires are used to connect big functional blocks of a uP, like the ALUs, Cache, register file, etc.

The delay of small little wires (connecting adjacent gates, for example) stays about the same, but this still poses a problem since the transistors will have to wait for the wires as they get even faster.

Wiring is already responsible for much of the delay of a uP, and is only going to get worse. Even if transistors get to 35nm (which the SIA predicts will happen in 2014), they only get 7x faster. This corresponds to a 15% annual improvement rate, well short of Moore's law 58%.

A bunch of this is described here.

Imagine a plot of the relative performances of the fastest uniprocessor machine on earth compared to the fastest uP, graphed vs. time. see paper. What you'd see is that, in fact, the fastest computers in the world have been improving at a rate closer to 12-14% annually. uP's got a late start and were many orders of magnitude slower. uP's have been catching up, borrowing technologies from minis and supercomputers which have been resulting in yearly advantages of 50-60% over the last 20 years or so. But uP's are about to hit the same hurdles that have been bothering supers for a long time. (Supercomputers have been communication bound for some time.) Until something fantastic happens (optical? organic?) uPs and supercomputers may be very similar in performance.

One last thing to note is that the bad news about future growth of uPs places an assumption on the microarchitecture--that it remain largely the same as today's. There are other possibilities being researched, for example, the RAW group at MIT. They may be able to cope with the wire delays in ways that a conventional uP cannot.

-Ed

The University of Wisconsin - Madison has developed tools which allow this type of bandwidth management. BTW, the King letter aparently made it there as well, but I haven't heard the response.

Coming from a school where most of the classes require some (if not all) work to be done on or based on the web, knowing I'm paying $30k and I'm not gonna be able to do my homework because a bunch of slackers who won't be there next semester because they're d/ling music truly pisses me off.

Ok, I finally found the paper I was citing. It's in postscript, but it's really worth reading at least once, even if it is from '95...

It's a good paper, but I'd like to see current results for the testing, too. I guess I should hunt down a copy of the FUZZ tools. I don't have a copy of NEXTSTEP, but it looks like they were using NEXTSTEP 3.2.

However, NEXT had the worst failure rate, at 43%. If they switched to the GNU tools later, well, that's fortunate, 'cause they were the best, at only 6%...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

printf(gettext("usage: %s filename\n"),argv[0]);
[...]
Here the output of the gettext(3) function is not validated and passed directly to printf(3).

A malicious, unprivileged, user can build and install a bogus messages database and instruct the vulnerable program to use it, thus controlling the output of gettext() and force-feeding formatting characters to printf(3).

FilterProxy can successfully remove web bugs.

This message has been brought to you by Blatent Plug-O-Matic(tm)

--Bob

I'm involved with a part of the Human Genome Project, and we run (around) 100 linux boxen under Condor for our often quite large computations.

This is not what everyone wants from a cluster; the focus is on large amounts of computation over time, not particularly fast computation over a few minutes. And it can take some work to break a task into jobs it will distribute effectively. Perhaps I should be clearer: it's intended to distribute jobs not cycles. And it can be hard to control how local file access and networked file access interact, if you need to. And it does some tricks with user priority which don't fit with some models of shared access.

Nevertheless, it works, and it's a wonderful thing to see a giant numbercrunch you've been running as one process split up and run in parallel, my goodness. And Condor has allowed us to do that without getting involved in any tricky parallel programming or even changing code: jobs run on their own box, happily unaware that they're part of a cluster at all, essentially.

So while I've had my issues with it, it has certainly been useful to us and is worth checking out. It's easy to find faults with anything; this has allowed us to get our work done, which is the main thing. I should also mention that Condor is continually improving, and the new version we've just installed seems to resolve at least some of our problems.

I'm interested to see what else is out there...

I hate to /. this poor sucker, but get them here. They're in real video, but you can almost make out the action through the shifting blocky-ness and crap sound quality.
--

For a more pessimistic view, check out this journal paper.

--

• You can get the Win32 Platform SDK here.
• You can get a Win32 compiler here.

Um, maybe it's just me, but I thought that Shannon's law had been prove n within the bounds of mathematics.

Secondly, the article gives _no_ information that Shannons law has been broken.

In fact, it hasn't. All Shannons law says is the relationship between the signal to noise ration, and the size of the channel, to how much data you can put through it.

In this case, Shannons law allows this to happen. But requires powers of something like (quick mental sums) 280dB.

That's, like, stupidly high.

hmm, not really. thats a story about how the sea level in tuvalu, a small island in the pacific, has fallen just enough over the last years so that it seems to be taking longer to vanish ... quoting from the article:

>Hilia Vavae, the Metereological Service's director, said: "This is certainly a bit of a shock for us because we have been experiencing the effect of rising oceans for a long time."

(...)

However, scientists both on and off the island believe such concerns will be short term because the sea level falls are coming to an end and the oceans will soon resume their inexorable rise.

these are the facts we face:

• global sea levels have been rising in the last century. quoting from this article: After the last ice age, the rapid melting of glaciers rapidly raised sea level. That melting tapered off about 6,000 years ago, and sea level -- compared to land -- became fairly stable. However, over the past century, sea level over much of the United States has risen by 25 to 30 centimeters relative to land.
• while the sea level has risen and fallen at many times in the past, the areas endangered by rising sea levels have certainly never been populated by i-dont-know-how-many-hundreds of millions of people.

Dev tools and information are available online here, here and here.

The hardware's inexpensive (very cheap compared to PCs).

You can introduce abstract concepts like pointers and pipelining without boring them, because they can see where it's leading.

MIPS assembly language is quite sane, and there's an excellent text book which teaches architecture and assembly programming using MIPS.

Splitting up a large project like a game into managable chunks, then sitting down and writing one of them in C/assembler and seeing how your decisions affect the game as a whole will be a much better introduction to OO analysis and design than cramming Java down their throats.

The amount of performance you can get out of 2 Mb of RAM and a 33 MHz processor should make them think a bit about OS bloat.

Last but not least, when they finish their project they'll have something to play with.

(You'll need to fit the Playstations with mod chips if you want to test CDR copies of your game. For simpler/earlier testing a MIPS simulator is available here.)

Anyway, a little teeny tiny effort and of course comprehension is necessary to find out about Condor and Globus. Condor utilizes idle workstation resources for parallel applications. Kind of like PVM or MPI, but designed for clusters of workstations. It provides a mechanism to link several computers together. Globus, built on Nexus, it is a GPL system that runs on just about any grid (such as what Condor/MPI/PVM can be). It provides a consistent API and is useful for much more than standard parallel work. It is still being developed, but you can get the tools and server stuff.

Most people around here including the asker of the question obviously don't know a parallel app from Microsoft Word. I see this alot. "I will run SETI in parallel!" Huh? Not exactly.

I'll explain... I am all for running process independent stuff by rsh script, but it is not a true use of distribution. That is the whole point. SETI is allocated chunks of non-dependent data out to systems. You then send back results, no messaging. It is simplicity and not a multipurpose distributed system. It is pre-distributed and requires only a yes or no result. This is fine and great for embarassingly parallel applications such as number searches. Your adding more monkeys on typewriters, but they're only monkeys.

Real message passing like that of a Beowulf class server is when there is boundary data required between processes. One computer changes a row on a matrix that row is the boundary so it must send the process it shares the boundary with the updated row. This is usually the real crap, what people buy 100's of nodes to do. See MPI and PVM. These programs must be explicitly written in parallel to be efficient and utilize parallel code structures. They are built on top of message passing libraries (MPI/PVM) that are pre-ported to systems.

Systems like Mosix are OK and they exist now. They give you use of a network of linux workstations with process migration. However, it is very low level and will remain so since it works on x86 process explicitly. It also must have non-I/O bound process to export or it will be limited in utilization. A great project they are working on is the utilization of the networks memory space for large processes. If you ran a 2000x2000 matrix you could solve it using just plain Matlab and 4 256MB systems. It distributes the process state to where the data is. Mosix also is quite useful in dynamic scheduling. PVM and MPI both have very limited use of dynamic scheduling, but thanks to Mosix's peer to peer load balancing it can be utilized as a dynamic scheduler. PVM and MPI issue static process allocation to the nodes, as usage fluxes (finished or waiting process nodes) Mosix can move loads to increase efficiency.

Condor is used on groups of workstations and is heterogenous (NT is getting a port). You can build parallel apps for it just like MPI or PVM, it uses other technologies than them however.

Now Globus, Globus is a huge project utilizing a message passing/thread library called Nexus it can run on any grid. That grid then will connect to other distributed grid resources across the net. The user is presented with a web interface and a secure login. They upload the program and request an allocation of resources. They get the results back when done. It uses whatever servers are availible and can use explicit parallelism through the thread library to make it faster. It is for all purposes a worldwide supercomputer. It goes beyond this to also share all data resources available to the system by database through its directory system. This system allows anyone to join, but you have to be allowed to use other peoples resources.

So if you seriously are thinking about playing with this stuff, figure a real use, figure how much power usage you will be using (NODESx250W 24x7 can be quite a power bill). Then decide what parallel system PVM/MPI/Mosix/Condor you want to use. If you have a whole department of computers Condor might be good, if you have a specific parallel app and a few non-workstation nodes use pvm/mpi. If you run lots of processes or have lots of people logging on, Mosix code be useful. Also, Mosix on MPI/PVM would give probably an efficient cluster. Then you could submit it to Globus so others could utilize it. However, it sounds rather elitest and probably won't use two P133s when they got Cray T3Ds. Also, don't think about actually using Globus yourself. Hey, I guess it would be just about like SETI and others. You could be helping science or at least some grad-student piddle around.

If you've been accepted into just about any Ph.D. program in an engineering/CS school, your tuition is getting paid, and they're giving you money to live on (albeit not as much as you'd get at your lucrative start-up).

It sounds to me like what you want is a suggestion for "how to save money to maintain (some) lifestyle", not "how to save money to afford to attend graduate school." (Although, if you're that set on a particular lifestyle, the two may be synonomous.)

With "lifestyle maintenance" as an objective, here's my advice: A Roth IRA is a great deal for a retirement account, but you can only put $2000 per year in it. If you're planning on going back to graduate school soon -- when you're still current on the research -- that's not going to be enough, and it's not going to grow enough. If you're used to academia, you won't have any problem living on $30k/year and saving $50k, especially if you're single and have no kids. (That's assuming a fairly lean -- by industry standards -- salary.) Put that $50k in an index fund, or even a money market account. Be sure to check the penalties for early withdrawal. (That sounds pretty obscene, no?)

• Here is a page at fidelity.com describing how to invest for growth.
• Here is "Vanguard University."
• Vanguard's recommended links

Good luck with the company, and if you're interested in databases, allow me to suggest an excellent program for your return to academia. (I may be a little biased, though.)

best,
~wog

...are you going to have two engines? A hydrogen engine and a gasoline engine for fallback when hydrogen isn't available?

Well, you could use a gas/electric hybrid which are not in great use yet but, I heard that they are supposed to get something like 70mpg.

Hmmm. Try this. The demo looks cool, though it's a windows-only app and requires Matlab and some Simulink program. I know there's Octave but I don't know what Simulink is or if there is a free replacement for *nix for it.

------------

It's not exactly charity, but the most fulfilling computer-related not-for-profit work I've done is to create a simple web page on stars and constellations. It started as a hobby, but it turned into a service when I put my email address on the page. For a while I was answering up to 50 email questions per week, mainly from students and curious adults. It had some ego-boo too (I was referenced in a textbook, and my pages are often linked from Astro Pic of the Day) but the best part is the gratitude I get from people whose questions I answered.

Lately, I've had to remove my email address from the page while I am finishing up my thesis (and to avoid spam), but I hope to get back to it soon.

If you have a particular area of knowledge or passion, share it with others online. It's rewarding in both you and your readers. A particular area that seems to be in BIG demand is online lesson plans for elementary school teachers. I used to get constant requests for such tools.

Ross Perot started EDS on borrowed time on mainframes... Businesses has tons of need, but just haven't tapped into commodity computing (i.e. lots of desktop machines.)

Besides, you don't necessarially need to have a specialized format like SETI or RC5 to do distributed computing... like I said earlier Condor works on lots of platforms -- including Linux (and even Alpha Linux too).

We also have been used (using loads and loads of Linux machines, I might add) to solve some extremely massive optimzation problems (using over 1000 non-dedicated -- i.e. desktop -- machines at one time.) The problem in question has been around for 32 years, and was solved using Condor in 7 days!

So anyway, on all of those platforms we support checkpointing (restarting a job on another machine) and remote procedure calls (having a job on a remote machine think its on your machine).

Plus you can download Condor right away and get it up and running! Its cool stuff, but then again I might be biased :)

We also have been used (using loads and loads of Linux machines, I might add) to solve some extremely massive optimzation problems (using over 1000 non-dedicated -- i.e. desktop -- machines at one time.) The problem in question has been around for 32 years, and was solved using Condor in 7 days!

So anyway, on all of those platforms we support checkpointing (restarting a job on another machine) and remote procedure calls (having a job on a remote machine think its on your machine).

Plus you can download Condor right away and get it up and running! Its cool stuff, but then again I might be biased :)

People need to stop looking at the d.net/Seti@home problems as the only model for Internet computing. They're not that hard of problems. What makes them neat is that they've got lots of CPU's. (SETI is cool because it's space and aliens and everything, but RC5-64 is just plain stupid - they're proving that 64 bit RC5 is 256 times harder to crack than 56bit RC5. Yawn.)

Numerical accuracy is a concern. Latency is a concern - but not for a a huge set of problems. You don't need a T3E for Monte Carlo simulations, and you shouldn't try and put your finite-element simulations all around the world. Networks are getting faster and faster, so code size is really not an issue today for anyone on a real network (ie vBNS.) Data size can be a problem, but again, networks are getting faster, and you can prestage a lot of the data. If your code is too sensitive to risk distributing, then no amount of technological progress is going to change it. User security is not that difficult of a problem - it's not too hard to sandbox an application on a decent OS. And as for FORTRAN, I don't see what the problem is. Processors don't run C or FORTRAN or Pascal, and the FORTRAN compilers still produce some pretty tight code.

The Internet makes great sense for high-performance computing, for the right problems.

Using screensavers is a cool idea and all - but you can only have one screensaver set to run at a time, no? Can I run SETI@home and distributed.net simultaneously? (Not that I'd want to - but I might want to schedule some priorities so each would get equal time while I'm gone for a weekend).

Maybe if condor shipped with linux distribs, it'd make it easier for this technology to take off?

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Ghostscript is an open-source implementation of PostScript and PDF. I use it rather than Acrobat for producing PDFs. (I still use Acrobat Reader for viewing them, though, simply because I prefer its interface over Ghostscript's viewer, Ghostview.) You can find it at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost.

IV

.. is the tongue. I couldn't find any precedent on the web for this idea as an input device but it has been tried as an output device for the blind. It's private too (although there might be interesting opportunities for hacking someone's tongue-keyboard when involved in an intimate encounter ...).

"Michael Quanlu Wang of Argonne National Laboratory used a computer simulatation to compare the use of electric and gasoline cars in four large U.S. cities. The results showed that electric vehicles would reduce hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide by 98%. (Hydrocarbons create ground-level ozone, which causes cardiac and respiratory disease.) Emissions of nitrous oxides, another cause of ozone and acid rain, also fell.

But Wang found that emissions of sulfur oxide (a key cause of acid rain), and particulates would actually increase. (The health effects of these ultra-fine soot particles are now under increasing suspicion.)

The story for carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that's taking heat for causing global warming, was more complex. At slow speeds, electric vehicles greatly reduced carbon dioxide; the effect was less dependable at higher speeds. And as you read them, remember that all calculations of pollution trade-offs will depend on the age and pollution controls of the gasoline autos and the electric-generating plants in question.

Clean? That depends on where you live... (Sound Familiar?)
To urbanites, electric vehicles truly produce"zero-emissions," Wang says, since they move all pollution to the power plant. Overall, he suggests, electric vehicles would benefit the environment by reducing hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions, and thus ground-level ozone. And while more particulates would be produced (particularly if the electricity came from coal), Wang observes that most electric generators are "away from populated areas, so there would be less population exposure."

Electric vehicles also offer a way to use "green electricity" (from solar, wind and geothermal sources), as clean transportation power.

Finally, electric cars may be less energy-intensive: A recent study by Ford Motor researchers found that electric vehicles with experimental sodium-sulfur batteries would use 24 percent less energy over their life cycle compared to similar gasoline cars."

information source

Randal Schwartz's really simple proxy was what I used as a framework for a one-shot "slashdot munger" to fix a particularly crack-addled wide layout this site was using for a while, and this one looks full-featured but still under development. (Abigail's didn't come up in a perl.com search though.)

--Bob

http://tinf2.vub.a c.be/~dvermeir/manuals/autotools/tutorial.html

These may help ya out a bit, the first is just formal documentation on automake and the second is a nice url that I've used a few times going through a few different GNU development tools.

My only gripe is that the statement about pdf. This is a closed,and with-held format.

I agree with you completely! If only that damned Adobe would open the file specification. Obviously they are trying to get a stranglehold on the market and blight out the common man.

We need open programs that can read and create pdf files. Without such programs, the PDF format is useless.

So let's fight the power and boycott Adobe until they free the format!

There is in fact two noticable examples of distributed network monitoring/Intrusion Detection Tools out there already that sound very similar to Sandia's new tool. They include the HummingBird System and MOM

The Hummer Project led by Dr. Deborah Frincke has been around since early 1998 and their main project, the HummingBird System is now in version 3.4. It is a complex toolkit that gives an administrator the power to distribute security and intrustion detection information between several hosts (including Solaris and NT machines as well as Linux) in which multiple attackers and targets are mixed and matched.

The other example I know of is MOM which unfortunately been out of further development for over a year now.

The main similarity between the two's functionality is that they both have:

• A main process that runs on a central machine that gathers, sorts, and reports on data received from children on other hosts.
• On other hosts, a child client process runs which reports anomalies to the central host and;
• On all hosts, agents run that perform various maintenance, diagnostic, and intrusion detection tasks.

Keep up the great work.

Back in the 1920's, a species of lamprey invaded the Great Lakes following the construction of a canal. The lamprey population exploded, destroying populations of other fish, especially trout (Which they feed on by sucking on to like leeches). Since then, they've been brought under control by use of chemical lampricides and other means such as special dams or releases of sterile males.

For some more info and pictures of Lampreys, see this page at Fish of the Great Lakes.

FilterProxy can do most of the things you require, including removing layer-style ads, and stripping "web bugs" which are those 1x1 gifs that pages use to track pageviews and track you across many sites. (see link on the FilterProxy page)

Because I strip the ad rather than just block the gif, most pages get a significant facelift. Wired looks great (for one). So does slashdot... ;) For sites that break up the article into many "pages", they almost always have a "printable version". If you can figure out the parameters encoded into the URL, it should be relatively straightforward to map the request for the original page-broken article to the "printable version", and add this to a proxy.

In general, I think it's not realistic to write a "HOWTO" on this since it's a complicated process to block user-tracking stuff, and it can change often (as advertisers find ways to defeat the blockers...and blockers find ways to defeat the advertisers...again). Rather the best way to deal with it is in software (usually a proxy, but it could be built into the web browser). There are many banner-blocking/stripping proxies out there, besides mine. You really should try one. They make the web MUCH more pleasant. ;)

--Bob

it would help if i actually knew how to talk...

Not just fish or sticks.
There are brilliant people too,
from which this name comes.

I actually prefer Octave, the open source Matlab clone. Check it out at: www.che.wisc.edu/octave/

ReqNG:

• is GPL
• is written mostly in Perl
• captures email between tech support and users
• keeps data in text files
• has tcl/tk (TkReq) and web (WWWReq) interfaces

I created my own HTML forms to generate formatted email input and some perl scripts to generate weekly reports. ReqNG has it's own summary report that's suitable for distributing via email.

ReqNG http://reqng.sycore.net/reqng/
TkReq http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/tkreq/
WWWReq http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~cvarner/wwwreq/

If anybody is interested in a little bit of further information, check out the Smith group web site for a bit of background and a brief description of the sequencing process. Also, that biotech company is Third Wave Technologies.

• FilterProxy
• Cut The Crap
• Junkbuster
• WebFilter/NoShit
• Muffin
• Proxomitron

Everyone go out and try an ad filtering proxy today! It makes your browsing experience so much more tolerable!

--Bob