Slashdot Mirror

you're such a piece of shit bureaucracy

Some of the papers being described can be found PDF on web page of Kathrin Bringmann (one of the two authors):http://www.math.wisc.edu/~bringman/. While it doesn't include the very latest, it includes some from last year on the topic.

It was looked at years ago. From "1997-1998 Annual Report - EPRI HVAC&R Center - Thermal Storage Applications Research Center" (University of Wisconsin, Madison" From the report (somewhere at http://www.hvacr.wisc.edu/index.htm)

Electrical Demand Reduction in
Refrigerated Warehouses
Sponsors: Alliant Energy, University-
Industry Relations, and a
Wisconsin warehouse
Status:
Complete
Graduate student Joy Altwies, with
faculty advisors Reindl and Klein,
conducted a scoping study of
demand-shifting techniques as
applied to refrigerated warehouses.
Refrigerated warehouses tradition-
ally utilize large built-up industrial
systems to cool stored products.
The refrigeration systems operate
on demand throughout the daytime.
Their highest demand usually
occurs coincidentally with the
electric utilities' peak demand. The
investigation explored the potential
of utilizing stored product as
thermal mass to shift refrigeration
loads from on-peak to off-peak
periods. The techniques developed
were tested on a pilot scale at a low-
temperature warehouse. Consider-
able energy cost savings were
achievable with minimal facility
upgrades and no degradation of
stored products.

So this is not a particularly new idea. I ran across this while looking for something about the frozen storage in Chicago. A utility facility near the Sears Tower (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=sears+tow er&ie=UTF8&z=17&ll=41.8762,-87.635536&spn=0.003531 ,0.010182&t=k&om=1 http://tinyurl.com/2tge83)
described here: http://www.esdesign.com/projects_centralplant.htm
For those who won't follow the links:

  Exelon, District Cooling Plant #1, located in Chicago's Central Loop, is a 25,000 ton, chilled water generation plant consisting of three 5,000 ton electric motor driven centrifugal chillers and 5,500,000 pounds (66,000 ton-hour) of ice storage.

The gist of this is that they will use off peak power to make ice and then use the ice to provide cooling during peak times. Apparently a side benefit is the reduction in HVAC plants for the buildings which get their chilled water from the central plant.

20 years ago I worked in the largest steel mill in the US and they regularly scheduled production around peak demand to reduce costs, so demand management is hardly a new idea.

Yes, power generation is considered a long term goal,
largely due to the fact that the closest HE-3 available
in large quantity is the moon.

Also thus why china and other countries have it marked
down as a long term goal to return there.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/potential_uses.htm

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/on_wis0604.pd f

Yes, power generation is considered a long term goal,
largely due to the fact that the closest HE-3 available
in large quantity is the moon.

Also thus why china and other countries have it marked
down as a long term goal to return there.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/potential_uses.htm

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/on_wis0604.pd f

They just might be closer than you think ...

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPicsII.htm

Personally, I think so. A friend of mine sent me that link, and we were like 'we should make a higher quality version' so I could post it on my door and stuff, so we did. Also made a few changes and additions to the boxes, including moving Java up to next to C#. (And added an arrow back from C++ to C, added Smalltalk, ML, and a couple others.) This is the revised version.

I have a rather "complicated" set up, but it mostly works:

I set up 'redmon'*, add a postscript printer from the windows printer drivers database, and redirect the output to ghostscript which has a ps2pdf utility.

* http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/

http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5175
It's interesting as wine approches 1.0 microsoft newest operating system has compatibility issues with win32 applications. new vista pc sales will slump even after vista's service pack is released. My prediction is computer oem's whom are not offering linux pre-installed will suffer and pressure from isv's not abandonning win32 will only make vista less attractive. Microsoft's will not be able to get the "pawns" to ditch win32 and this will be the death of microsoft's monopoly over win32 co-insiding with a http://winehq.com/ 1.0 release. wine will keep microsoft honest and keep them in the win32 business for the long haul.

Nvidia have paid people on the job, with the relevant experience. What makes people think that the oss community can do a better job than nvidia's own people, when they can't even keep their own codebases bugfree?

You were asking the right question up until the last bit. Nobody can keep their codebases "bug free". Humans make mistakes. I assume you're human, ergo you make mistakes too, right? There's probably no program on Earth bigger than twenty lines that's bug-free. Not even LaTeX, though it's been quite a while since anyone's found one.

But as to why "people think that the oss community can do a better job than nvidia's own people", it's because OSS development has, when comparisons have been possible, proven to be better-written than the commercial alternatives. There are objective tests that illustrate this, over and over.

(Note, I still think this Fluendo stuff or something like it is a good idea. But I still want the OSS work to go on, too.)

Or just use Linux?

There is a nice mini-howto explaining how to access grants.gov through Linux:

Grants.gov Howto

It's not pretty, but I have a feeling a more streamlined solution will eventually emerge.

And just how are we supposed to know that [...] the results were not influenced by the Third World filth [...]

[...] get these results reproduced in America. [...]

• Design by contract
• Implement scientifically [so you design a correctness proof with the software.]
• Formally verify your software.
• make many real test cases and test them
• Fuzz test your software

Oh, and if you find anyone who's actually writing software that way, let me know, I may want a job there.

Read this article from the March 2005 article in Scientifc American titled "How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?"

http://ccr.meteor.wisc.edu/News/0305046.pdf

Given evidence gathered thus far we SHOULD have entered a period of glaciation already...but we didn't

To provide a brief summary of the authors conclusions... Human activiy has already altered the natural climate cycle through the advent of agriculture and its affect on CO2 as well as Methane levels...you will see that we haven't begun to enter the hottest parts of the axis tilt induced cycle....

Enjoy.

Is a million gallons a lot? Hm. Daily per capita water use in the US is 1400 gallons, though I don't know how much of that is, for instance, water running through a coolant loop and tossed back out into a river. Petroleum usage is 840 million gallons per day, which is about 2.8 daily gallons per capita. Of course, I may be comparing apples to oranges here (fuel is single-use; water isn't), so let's skip that. (Evaporation losses can be cut or eliminated by growing the algae in an enclosed system, as another poster has pointed out.)

Isn't seawater usable for this sort of thing? It's not free to pump a million gallons of seawater over to the farm, but it's certainly not a dealbreaker, is it? Ah, but where do all the salts go? Would they accumulate in the bodies of the algae? If so, it would likely be quite possible to pull out accumulated minerals at the refining stage, wouldn't it?

Similar tricks were played with object oriented databases, although to perform pointer swizzling. If I recall correctly, it turned out that it was as fast or faster to instrument code (have the software keep track of which pages it writes) than it was to play tricks with the MMU and dirty page bits. That was a while ago; and hardware has changed, so it may be worth looking at it again.

Also, note that they use page faults to lazily modify pages as they are accessed; your approach simply reads the dirty bits after the fact and sounds more efficient. Here's a link to a relevant performance study:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dewitt/includes/oodbms/qui ckstore.pdf

(It's > 40 pages, and I read it years ago, my description is based on what I remember...)

You can also point out that, when bugs are found, they tend to be fixed very rapidly, frequently within hours of their discovery. Since the source code is available to everyone, anyone affected can create an update to fix the problem. This happens exceedingly rarely in the closed-source world, despite the large numbers of bugs encountered.

Stonn she is yours. After a time you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting.
It is not logical--but it is often true.--Spock, Amok Time

IAFS (I am a fusion scientist) Your comments about the size of the heating equipment is ill posed. If we put a coal mine next to the coal furnace then apparently it wouldn't work either? It does, currently, take a substantial amount of hardware and external power to heat a tokamak plasma, but that is by design. None of the current experiments were designed to be self-sustaining, which is the main focus of the ITER experiment. The power density of a fusion reaction is not easy to comprehend when you're used to burning wood/oil/coal, but a small increases in plasma volume can mean large absolute gains in output power that offset such "HUGE" equipment. Your claim that heating and current drive techniques destablize the plasma is just plain wrong and I don't know where you're getting this. The H-mode or enhanced confinement regime is accessible at higher input powers (when you put more power in, you use it more efficiently) and has been achieved using RF heating alone on serveral tokamks.

Lastly, your love of the Farnsworth fusor as a power device is odd. Electrostatic conefinement devices cannot achieve the power densities necessary to be a commercial power source (several GW). If you look at current experiments (http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/ftisite1.htm) the applications are many and important, but none are commercial power. I like these devices but mainly because their simplicity allows them to be portable.

The tokamak is not without its problems (alpha-ash, exhaust heat flux, steady-state operations), but it also has no competitors when you look at the absolute plasma pressures achieved. Overall, people should still realize that ITER is an experiment and not a demo reactor. While there is confidence that ITER can be run at it's target Q=10 (10 times more fusion power than input), this is formed from scaling previous experiments and needs to be verified.

Linux had a lot of that rep even before it was 'portable' to anything but an x86. And there's research to show that the code itself is just plain well written. But yeah, that certainly helps.

"Yes, this is what I would think as well, but imagine you are a big insurance company (...) there seems to be a trend (see google data center post) that opposes intelligent use of computer resources as maybe SETI does."

Don't think so. Banks, insurance companies and the like are not making such big profits by being dumb.

As an example here you have one of biggest Spanish banks using distributed computing for financial computations: https://lists.cs.wisc.edu/archive/condor-users/200 6-November/msg00063.shtml

As they explain, the resulting reduction on cost per Gigaflop was from 44 to 4EUR over a standard SMP solution (big iron).

Plagiarism by Adult Learners Online: A case study in detection and remediation

Or look here.

this was too much, found it a few days ago:

http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/mp3s/fourie r.html

You just can't make this stuff up! here's the text, reproduced, but as my friend said, it puts Weird Al to shame (sorry Al!), the song itself sounds really, really good! So, this is your Nerd Moment of Zen for the Week (for sure!):

Table 4.1: Properties of the Fourier Transform
(or, Fourier's Song)

Integrate your function times a complex exponential
It's really not so hard you can do it with your pencil
And when you're done with this calculation
You've got a brand new function - the Fourier Transformation
What a prism does to sunlight, what the ear does to sound
Fourier does to signals, it's the coolest trick around
Now filtering is easy, you don't need to convolve
All you do is multiply in order to solve.

From time into frequency - from frequency to time

Every operation in the time domain
Has a Fourier analog - that's what I claim
Think of a delay, a simple shift in time
It becomes a phase rotation - now that's truly sublime!
And to differentiate, here's a simple trick
Just multiply by J omega, ain't that slick?
Integration is the inverse, what you gonna do?
Divide instead of multiply - you can do it too.

From time into frequency - from frequency to time

Let's do some examples... consider a sine
It's mapped to a delta, in frequency - not time
Now take that same delta as a function of time
Mapped into frequency - of course - it's a sine!

Sine x on x is handy, let's call it a sinc.
Its Fourier Transform is simpler than you think.
You get a pulse that's shaped just like a top hat...
Squeeze the pulse thin, and the sinc grows fat.
Or make the pulse wide, and the sinc grows dense,
The uncertainty principle is just common sense.

If you're just looking to print the letter, you can use GSView http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ to nicely avoid the print restrictions you find in acrobate etc. (or at least the windows version of GSView does in my experience).

Fully aware of that, thanks, considering I talked about it[1] in my session at WWDC.

I'm not talking about the product "Mac OS X Server". I'm talking about "Mac OS X". (And yes, for those who immediately want to pounce and say "They're the same thing, you moron!" I'm intimately familiar with Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, what they are, and the differences between them. The point is that people seem to go out of their way to justify using Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware when Apple forbids it in the license agreement, and laws in your jurisdiction may expressly prohibit it (either via copyright, DMCA-type circumvention, etc.). For everything I list, someone says "What if I go out and buy a Mac mini and then decide I don't want to use OS X on it any more and then want to 'reuse' that OS X license on my Gateway laptop?" or "Mac OS X Server 10.4.7 retail is Intel-compatible" or "I don't agree with Apple or any legal framework that might prohibit me from doing this, so I'm going to do it anyway, and further, I think it's GOOD for Apple, so I'm going to universally decide that it's okay to do." I mean, is a retail copy of Mac OS X not being available really the only barrier that you think exists to using Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware? It's STILL equally prohibited by the EULA; the EULA is the only thing stopping you from just outright pirating Mac OS X in the first place, and since you disagree with it, why buy it at all? Or is it because you think buying a copy of it is indeed moral, but then after that any other aspect of the EULA can be selectively ignored because you think it's "wrong"? What happens if people think being required to buy it is "wrong", en masse?)

Of course, whemn Leopard ships, you'll also be able to buy standalone retail copies of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server that run on Intel.

However, even then, all of my other points still stand, and that's why I said "at present". You may not *agree* with they other points, but they're still valid and correct. Since no business/corporate/institutional customer would buy Mac OS X and use it in this way for a wide, wide variety of reasons, it's going to continue to be relegated to the hacker/hobbyist community, who will either still pirate it, or actually buy a retail copy of Mac OS X because they thing it's the "right" thing to do.

Also, it's not any "10.4.7 Server" that is Intel-compatible; it has its own, separate part number, and is technically referred to as "Mac OS X Server 10.4.7 (Universal). (Mac OS X Server (PowerPC) was still available and orderable for a time from retailers.)

[1] Not actually mentioned in the slides; but brought up during the course of the session.

Yes, but the problem is that when you're living in a university-owned building and using a university network connection, you fall under the university's Appropriate Use Policy (Housing AUP).

This only allows for academic usage of the connection (which can encompass a *wide* variety of things, no doubt), and only allows for de minimus personal usage. All on campus traffic is unlimited, and any academic off-campus use can be unlimited. Everything else can be used, too, but counts against a 5GB/week bandwidth cap. And yes, there are lot of things that people can come up with as "what if I was doing X Y and Z for academic usage" or "downloading such and such distro's DVD image", well, 1.) if it's for academic usage, it's meets the unlimited exception, 2.) we mirror just about every large thing under the sun on campus and have a local farm of Akamai servers, and 3.) See 1.

Really the only people who have problems are people who want to use P2P with copyrighted content, period. It's a very small number of people, and often the same people. It's rare when people using the network legitimately run into problems, and if they're using it legitimately, the limits don't count. So, ultimately , the limits work for their intended purpose. If, as legitimate use things get larger or start bumping into limits themselves, the limit will need to be revisited, or that service/protocol/whatever can be put into an unlimited use category (like iTunes Music Store and Ruckus, for example).

I realize some people who are really anti-copyright (or anti-current-copyright-system) will say "they should still be able to download even copyrighted content [to which they don't have rights]". Well, I'm sorry, but I disagree with you, and so do most of the legal frameworks that govern the nation this university exists in. Further, the university's wireless (which is pretty ubiquitous) isn't limited in any way, nor are hardwire ports in libraries, public spaces, etc. Of course, the lion's share of the university's means for internet connectivity are outside of residential facilities, and those are all not limited in any way. Aside from that, if it's *really* that important for someone to have a cable modem style connection with cable model style bandwidth that doesn't have any limits, they probably shouldn't live in university-owned housing.

Yes, but the problem is that when you're living in a university-owned building and using a university network connection, you fall under the university's Appropriate Use Policy (Housing AUP).

This only allows for academic usage of the connection (which can encompass a *wide* variety of things, no doubt), and only allows for de minimus personal usage. All on campus traffic is unlimited, and any academic off-campus use can be unlimited. Everything else can be used, too, but counts against a 5GB/week bandwidth cap. And yes, there are lot of things that people can come up with as "what if I was doing X Y and Z for academic usage" or "downloading such and such distro's DVD image", well, 1.) if it's for academic usage, it's meets the unlimited exception, 2.) we mirror just about every large thing under the sun on campus and have a local farm of Akamai servers, and 3.) See 1.

Really the only people who have problems are people who want to use P2P with copyrighted content, period. It's a very small number of people, and often the same people. It's rare when people using the network legitimately run into problems, and if they're using it legitimately, the limits don't count. So, ultimately , the limits work for their intended purpose. If, as legitimate use things get larger or start bumping into limits themselves, the limit will need to be revisited, or that service/protocol/whatever can be put into an unlimited use category (like iTunes Music Store and Ruckus, for example).

I realize some people who are really anti-copyright (or anti-current-copyright-system) will say "they should still be able to download even copyrighted content [to which they don't have rights]". Well, I'm sorry, but I disagree with you, and so do most of the legal frameworks that govern the nation this university exists in. Further, the university's wireless (which is pretty ubiquitous) isn't limited in any way, nor are hardwire ports in libraries, public spaces, etc. Of course, the lion's share of the university's means for internet connectivity are outside of residential facilities, and those are all not limited in any way. Aside from that, if it's *really* that important for someone to have a cable modem style connection with cable model style bandwidth that doesn't have any limits, they probably shouldn't live in university-owned housing.

I should note that I agree with the sentiments in your post. At the University of Wisconsin, we also do not censor or block any traffic, and only use traffic shaping and bandwidth limits in the residence halls, because it was deemed a necessity in terms of the way the housing division here manages bandwidth and usage; still, nothing is blocked.

I would like to say that QuickTime, while proprietary, is often a reasonable tool to use to generate and view content that utilizes open international standards (such as MPEG-4 and H.264). Part of that thinking went into this IP video delivery project for us (more reasoning in a recent presentation here), and ultimately, QuickTime allowed us to do things with open standards and protocols that Windows Media, Real, and VideoFurnace simply couldn't, and at a cost that was (and still is) much, much less than dedicated industrial video encoders and other equipment.

I should note that I agree with the sentiments in your post. At the University of Wisconsin, we also do not censor or block any traffic, and only use traffic shaping and bandwidth limits in the residence halls, because it was deemed a necessity in terms of the way the housing division here manages bandwidth and usage; still, nothing is blocked.

I would like to say that QuickTime, while proprietary, is often a reasonable tool to use to generate and view content that utilizes open international standards (such as MPEG-4 and H.264). Part of that thinking went into this IP video delivery project for us (more reasoning in a recent presentation here), and ultimately, QuickTime allowed us to do things with open standards and protocols that Windows Media, Real, and VideoFurnace simply couldn't, and at a cost that was (and still is) much, much less than dedicated industrial video encoders and other equipment.

"Private" university. And I'm guessing a smaller school.

But no, this isn't common at all, at least at public universities (and most larger private/research institutions). In residential housing, sometimes traffic shaping and bandwidth limits are used to try to curb/dissuade inappropriate usage (and even then, nothing is blocked, and services like iTunes Music Store are added to unlimited use categories)[1], but most universities, especially public research universities, see non-censorship of network traffic and protocols as a matter of academic freedom, and a critical one at that.

Even during the heyday of Napster, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, for example, made a critical decision, and decided not to censor or limit network traffic based on protocol, port, application, or tool. We viewed the increase in traffic as part of the "cost of doing business" as an academic institution, and viewed censorship of protocols or ports as a slippery slope that was an affront to academic interests.

[1] Some people still might say that's a form of "censorship". I can assure you it's not. When no limits are in place, people use services that can use port 80 and/or tunnel traffic in SSH, and a very small number of users can saturate the network for everyone else. Packet/traffic shaping equipment cannot keep up with the number of flows, so a common practice at large schools with several thousand residents in university-owned housing is bandwidth limits. Anyone can get an exception for acceptable purposes. Remember, this applies ONLY to housing; residents are still expected to follow acceptable use policies for the network that make it accessible and usable by all. Further, these are separate judgments made by the housing divisions at most schools.

"Private" university. And I'm guessing a smaller school.

But no, this isn't common at all, at least at public universities (and most larger private/research institutions). In residential housing, sometimes traffic shaping and bandwidth limits are used to try to curb/dissuade inappropriate usage (and even then, nothing is blocked, and services like iTunes Music Store are added to unlimited use categories)[1], but most universities, especially public research universities, see non-censorship of network traffic and protocols as a matter of academic freedom, and a critical one at that.

Even during the heyday of Napster, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, for example, made a critical decision, and decided not to censor or limit network traffic based on protocol, port, application, or tool. We viewed the increase in traffic as part of the "cost of doing business" as an academic institution, and viewed censorship of protocols or ports as a slippery slope that was an affront to academic interests.

[1] Some people still might say that's a form of "censorship". I can assure you it's not. When no limits are in place, people use services that can use port 80 and/or tunnel traffic in SSH, and a very small number of users can saturate the network for everyone else. Packet/traffic shaping equipment cannot keep up with the number of flows, so a common practice at large schools with several thousand residents in university-owned housing is bandwidth limits. Anyone can get an exception for acceptable purposes. Remember, this applies ONLY to housing; residents are still expected to follow acceptable use policies for the network that make it accessible and usable by all. Further, these are separate judgments made by the housing divisions at most schools.

Several people responded to you saying that it was not racism, etc.

I grew up in the south. I was taught in elementary school that the South should have won the civil war. My boyscout troop leaders discussed the "proud history" of the KKK. There were half a dozen private schools in my city that did not allow blacks. (They later changed this so that blacks athletes could attend.)

I agree that the south still has a LOT of racism. It varies though. The worse the education system and job market the more racism that is present.

One of your responders even said that democrats must feel "they will get the criminal vote". Well 1 in 10 black males are in jail. 30 percent of black men will spend part of their life in prison. (stats from http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACIAL/Reports/MUM handoutsMarch19-2002.ppt) I would say it safe to say that current law means that blacks have only 70% of a vote. Also anyone who has studied the war on drugs will note that the higher minimum sentences are often conveyed for drug offenses of types most common among minorities. Back in college I ran a study and read many books (including http://www.amazon.com/Smoke-Mirrors-Drugs-Politics -Failure/dp/0316084468) on how the drug war was often directed to maximize political benefit for the party in power. The whole marijuana == illegal drug thing was started as a convenient way to criminal hippies protesting the war. Why yes democrats may get more of the vote, but part of why the criminals are not given the vote is their high inclination to vote against the lawmakers.

I think these facts are much more relevant to your post than the responses from your responders. My parents complained the other day of "literacy tests" at the polling place. They (white) were asked to read a simple passage from a book, the black guy behind them has to read a parable from the bible and explain it to the satisfaction of the poll worker. *sigh* Racism is in fact live and well despite what people would like to think.

But it is not just the US and not just the south. It is visible in the south because there are so many blacks and poor people that acts of racism are more common. Racism is probably as common anywhere, but in Norway there are no blacks for people to call names. (I recall no dark skin in my travels around Norway) Just something to think about. It may be just as present but not surface as much because there are less targets forcing the bigotry out into the open.

We're providing commercial TV channels, university content, and some foreign language channels to the University of Wisconsin - Madison community (in cooperation with our local cable operator):

http://tv.wisc.edu/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/

The project was a pilot that turned into a production service, and is in the (slow) process of being expanded to 78 channels and adding more foreign content, including recorded foreign content so international students can watch programming that might be on at odd times in the US.

We also created a player with TV-like controls, dynamically updated channel listing, and closed captioning support:

http://tv.wisc.edu/player/

And, for about three years, we've been doing a pilot of capturing all closed captioning content and still image thumbnails every minute from all channels, and making it searchable. It's an excellent research tool. Through a new partnership with the UW General Library System, we just added 7TB of storage and will begin archiving the video for academic use as well. (This has already been cleared by the University's legal services group, as we fundamentally believe we have the right to store content that we have already paid for (for the same population) for academic/research/library purposes.)

Information about the project, and a PDF of a recent presentation with much more information, is available here:

http://tv.wisc.edu/about/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/DATN_WWDC_2006.pdf

We're providing commercial TV channels, university content, and some foreign language channels to the University of Wisconsin - Madison community (in cooperation with our local cable operator):

http://tv.wisc.edu/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/

The project was a pilot that turned into a production service, and is in the (slow) process of being expanded to 78 channels and adding more foreign content, including recorded foreign content so international students can watch programming that might be on at odd times in the US.

We also created a player with TV-like controls, dynamically updated channel listing, and closed captioning support:

http://tv.wisc.edu/player/

And, for about three years, we've been doing a pilot of capturing all closed captioning content and still image thumbnails every minute from all channels, and making it searchable. It's an excellent research tool. Through a new partnership with the UW General Library System, we just added 7TB of storage and will begin archiving the video for academic use as well. (This has already been cleared by the University's legal services group, as we fundamentally believe we have the right to store content that we have already paid for (for the same population) for academic/research/library purposes.)

Information about the project, and a PDF of a recent presentation with much more information, is available here:

http://tv.wisc.edu/about/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/DATN_WWDC_2006.pdf

We're providing commercial TV channels, university content, and some foreign language channels to the University of Wisconsin - Madison community (in cooperation with our local cable operator):

http://tv.wisc.edu/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/

The project was a pilot that turned into a production service, and is in the (slow) process of being expanded to 78 channels and adding more foreign content, including recorded foreign content so international students can watch programming that might be on at odd times in the US.

We also created a player with TV-like controls, dynamically updated channel listing, and closed captioning support:

http://tv.wisc.edu/player/

And, for about three years, we've been doing a pilot of capturing all closed captioning content and still image thumbnails every minute from all channels, and making it searchable. It's an excellent research tool. Through a new partnership with the UW General Library System, we just added 7TB of storage and will begin archiving the video for academic use as well. (This has already been cleared by the University's legal services group, as we fundamentally believe we have the right to store content that we have already paid for (for the same population) for academic/research/library purposes.)

Information about the project, and a PDF of a recent presentation with much more information, is available here:

http://tv.wisc.edu/about/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/DATN_WWDC_2006.pdf

We're providing commercial TV channels, university content, and some foreign language channels to the University of Wisconsin - Madison community (in cooperation with our local cable operator):

http://tv.wisc.edu/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/

The project was a pilot that turned into a production service, and is in the (slow) process of being expanded to 78 channels and adding more foreign content, including recorded foreign content so international students can watch programming that might be on at odd times in the US.

We also created a player with TV-like controls, dynamically updated channel listing, and closed captioning support:

http://tv.wisc.edu/player/

And, for about three years, we've been doing a pilot of capturing all closed captioning content and still image thumbnails every minute from all channels, and making it searchable. It's an excellent research tool. Through a new partnership with the UW General Library System, we just added 7TB of storage and will begin archiving the video for academic use as well. (This has already been cleared by the University's legal services group, as we fundamentally believe we have the right to store content that we have already paid for (for the same population) for academic/research/library purposes.)

Information about the project, and a PDF of a recent presentation with much more information, is available here:

http://tv.wisc.edu/about/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/DATN_WWDC_2006.pdf

We're providing commercial TV channels, university content, and some foreign language channels to the University of Wisconsin - Madison community (in cooperation with our local cable operator):

http://tv.wisc.edu/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/

The project was a pilot that turned into a production service, and is in the (slow) process of being expanded to 78 channels and adding more foreign content, including recorded foreign content so international students can watch programming that might be on at odd times in the US.

We also created a player with TV-like controls, dynamically updated channel listing, and closed captioning support:

http://tv.wisc.edu/player/

And, for about three years, we've been doing a pilot of capturing all closed captioning content and still image thumbnails every minute from all channels, and making it searchable. It's an excellent research tool. Through a new partnership with the UW General Library System, we just added 7TB of storage and will begin archiving the video for academic use as well. (This has already been cleared by the University's legal services group, as we fundamentally believe we have the right to store content that we have already paid for (for the same population) for academic/research/library purposes.)

Information about the project, and a PDF of a recent presentation with much more information, is available here:

http://tv.wisc.edu/about/
http://tv.wisc.edu/about/DATN_WWDC_2006.pdf

Bah. I once saw CNN mislabel Syria as Iraq on a map graphic once.

Not surprising, seeing as how they stumble over the concept of high-school physics.

National Briefing | West: California: Support For Condit Challenger

Sens Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein will support Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, one of several Democrats, in California primary for candidate to run against incumbent Republican Repr Gary Condit for House seat
January 26, 2002 News web site:

Some knowledge for you:

http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/jcesoft/cca/CCA2/MAIN /ALKALI/CD2R1.HTM

If you are who you say you are, you're frigging ugly. Please get a decent haircut.

http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~moshovos/ACA05/read/A kkary.1998.MICRO.pdf
http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mfrank/pubs/Malik-2006-T R2208.pdf
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/sohi/papers/1995/isca.multis calar.pdf

Our restrictions for the residence halls really just come down to bandwidth restrictions.

Residents get 5GB/week off-campus (unlimited on-campus). If they go over this limit, their off-campus connectivity speed is reduced until their traffic usage goes below a 4GB for the previous 7 day period. Campus traffic is never affected.

We haven't had any complaints about usability of the residence hall connections. All other connections on campus (non-residence halls) are generally unrestricted, and almost all are 100mbit.

More info: http://www.housing.wisc.edu/resnet/aup.php

BitTorrent, like any other technology, protocol, or tool, can be used for things that are legal, illegal, or questionable in various jurisdictions. Are you prepared to continue quashing a protocol or service simply because it may be abused?

On the other hand, almost all (or at least a great deal) of the BitTorremt traffic may be currently used for sharing copyrighted materials. We all know that to be the case. Is it responsible to open up the pipes for what you know is almost exclusively illegitimate usage, within the context of the law (regardless of how you or anyone else feels about copyright infringement, and so on)?

On yet another hand, what happens if BitTorrent usage becomes largely legitimate because some large legitimate service begins using it? (And yes, to those reading this, I'm more than aware BitTorrent is used for a variety of legitimate large downloads.) In that event, can you afford to continue treating any protocol or service as if it's illegitimate, just because some level of it is now?

During the heyday of Napster (1999-2000), UW-Madison estimated that Napster accounted for over half (!) of our inbound and outbound traffic. There was a lot of talk about how to deal with this. Ultimately, UW-Madison decided that as a large public research university, we can't afford to police a particular kind of traffic wholesale: any network protocol can be abused, used for illegal purposes, and so on. We felt that the academic arguments and responding to usage demands of the campus trumped making judgment calls about the appropriateness of the use. Granted, the appropriate use policy of the university forbade some of the things people were using the network for, but we didn't actively police (or restrict) traffic. In the end, this provided the university with the impetus to examine ways of meeting increased demand and come up with novel solutions to our neverending bandwidth needs. One interesting example is that we now locally host a collection of Akamai's servers on our own network, which serves UW-Madison, the 25 other UW System Schools, and WiscNet. However, some of the smaller schools couldn't afford to make those same determinations: they either restricted or blocked Napster (and other things, like Gnutella) completely.

Today, the university does shape and restrict traffic to the residence halls in various ways; but it's designed to do so in a way such that users almost always won't notice any impact and allows equal access for all. All of our residence halls feature 100mbit ethernet, and that full pipe may be taken advantage of. Some users do use the network for inappropriate purposes, and those cases are dealt with individually when needed. Still, there is no proactive policing unless there are clear abuse/misuse issues. For what it's worth, BitTorrent (and all other protocols) are fully usable here.

If you can afford it, politically and financially, I'd say you should be looking into opening this up. The school does not bear responsibility for the actions of its users unless there is a lack of good faith attempts to stop abuse when requested by, e.g., copyright holders. There always is the argument of customer satisfaction, as well, that must be responded to - whether some students' use is appropriate or not.

BitTorrent, like any other technology, protocol, or tool, can be used for things that are legal, illegal, or questionable in various jurisdictions. Are you prepared to continue quashing a protocol or service simply because it may be abused?

On the other hand, almost all (or at least a great deal) of the BitTorremt traffic may be currently used for sharing copyrighted materials. We all know that to be the case. Is it responsible to open up the pipes for what you know is almost exclusively illegitimate usage, within the context of the law (regardless of how you or anyone else feels about copyright infringement, and so on)?

On yet another hand, what happens if BitTorrent usage becomes largely legitimate because some large legitimate service begins using it? (And yes, to those reading this, I'm more than aware BitTorrent is used for a variety of legitimate large downloads.) In that event, can you afford to continue treating any protocol or service as if it's illegitimate, just because some level of it is now?

During the heyday of Napster (1999-2000), UW-Madison estimated that Napster accounted for over half (!) of our inbound and outbound traffic. There was a lot of talk about how to deal with this. Ultimately, UW-Madison decided that as a large public research university, we can't afford to police a particular kind of traffic wholesale: any network protocol can be abused, used for illegal purposes, and so on. We felt that the academic arguments and responding to usage demands of the campus trumped making judgment calls about the appropriateness of the use. Granted, the appropriate use policy of the university forbade some of the things people were using the network for, but we didn't actively police (or restrict) traffic. In the end, this provided the university with the impetus to examine ways of meeting increased demand and come up with novel solutions to our neverending bandwidth needs. One interesting example is that we now locally host a collection of Akamai's servers on our own network, which serves UW-Madison, the 25 other UW System Schools, and WiscNet. However, some of the smaller schools couldn't afford to make those same determinations: they either restricted or blocked Napster (and other things, like Gnutella) completely.

Today, the university does shape and restrict traffic to the residence halls in various ways; but it's designed to do so in a way such that users almost always won't notice any impact and allows equal access for all. All of our residence halls feature 100mbit ethernet, and that full pipe may be taken advantage of. Some users do use the network for inappropriate purposes, and those cases are dealt with individually when needed. Still, there is no proactive policing unless there are clear abuse/misuse issues. For what it's worth, BitTorrent (and all other protocols) are fully usable here.

If you can afford it, politically and financially, I'd say you should be looking into opening this up. The school does not bear responsibility for the actions of its users unless there is a lack of good faith attempts to stop abuse when requested by, e.g., copyright holders. There always is the argument of customer satisfaction, as well, that must be responded to - whether some students' use is appropriate or not.

BitTorrent, like any other technology, protocol, or tool, can be used for things that are legal, illegal, or questionable in various jurisdictions. Are you prepared to continue quashing a protocol or service simply because it may be abused?

On the other hand, almost all (or at least a great deal) of the BitTorremt traffic may be currently used for sharing copyrighted materials. We all know that to be the case. Is it responsible to open up the pipes for what you know is almost exclusively illegitimate usage, within the context of the law (regardless of how you or anyone else feels about copyright infringement, and so on)?

On yet another hand, what happens if BitTorrent usage becomes largely legitimate because some large legitimate service begins using it? (And yes, to those reading this, I'm more than aware BitTorrent is used for a variety of legitimate large downloads.) In that event, can you afford to continue treating any protocol or service as if it's illegitimate, just because some level of it is now?

During the heyday of Napster (1999-2000), UW-Madison estimated that Napster accounted for over half (!) of our inbound and outbound traffic. There was a lot of talk about how to deal with this. Ultimately, UW-Madison decided that as a large public research university, we can't afford to police a particular kind of traffic wholesale: any network protocol can be abused, used for illegal purposes, and so on. We felt that the academic arguments and responding to usage demands of the campus trumped making judgment calls about the appropriateness of the use. Granted, the appropriate use policy of the university forbade some of the things people were using the network for, but we didn't actively police (or restrict) traffic. In the end, this provided the university with the impetus to examine ways of meeting increased demand and come up with novel solutions to our neverending bandwidth needs. One interesting example is that we now locally host a collection of Akamai's servers on our own network, which serves UW-Madison, the 25 other UW System Schools, and WiscNet. However, some of the smaller schools couldn't afford to make those same determinations: they either restricted or blocked Napster (and other things, like Gnutella) completely.

Today, the university does shape and restrict traffic to the residence halls in various ways; but it's designed to do so in a way such that users almost always won't notice any impact and allows equal access for all. All of our residence halls feature 100mbit ethernet, and that full pipe may be taken advantage of. Some users do use the network for inappropriate purposes, and those cases are dealt with individually when needed. Still, there is no proactive policing unless there are clear abuse/misuse issues. For what it's worth, BitTorrent (and all other protocols) are fully usable here.

If you can afford it, politically and financially, I'd say you should be looking into opening this up. The school does not bear responsibility for the actions of its users unless there is a lack of good faith attempts to stop abuse when requested by, e.g., copyright holders. There always is the argument of customer satisfaction, as well, that must be responded to - whether some students' use is appropriate or not.

This has been I think in Squeak Alice for a long time.

Also in OpenCroquet via TPainter

http://opencroquet.org/
https://lists.wisc.edu/read/messages?id=1385929

and Impara has a beautiful commercial 2D/3D drawing program based on similar technology:

http://impara.de/projekt_plopp_engl.html

Most PDFs can be viewed with gsview, the old Postscript previewer. It doesn't have all that crap Adobe put in like WebBuy, but nobody uses that anyway. Gsview will display PDFs that older versions of Adobe Reader won't.

The nearly featureless PostScript viewer GhostView ( http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ ) does me fine for most PDF viewing chores. If a document needs more attention than can be read on screen in a few minutes, I'm just going to send it to a printer anyway.

If it's full of "interactive content," then, well, you shouldn't have made it a PDF, since I'm pretty unlikely to jump through hoops to discover what you're trying to say. Use HTML or PowerPoint or what have you if you really need interactivity. My distrust of active content is high when it's not running in a sandbox like a well-configured browser. Simple hyperlinks are a possible exception, as long as there's no attempt to obfuscate the URI and action.