Most major schools have a written IP policy. The school may use a generous IP policy as part of its compensation scheme for professors and graduate students.
For example, at CMU the intellectual property policy seems to say that by default inventors own 50% of whatever they create. But this is only if the university decides to commercialize an idea. If the university declares itself to be uninterested (ie, the university doesn't want to take the risk of spinning off a business) then the inventor owns 85% of any proceeds after the first $25000 of profit.
Note that this applies to work that you do while sponsored by a research grant. For non-sponsored work (such as classwork), a student owns 100% of their work, and the university has no claim on it.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am just talking about my non-professional interpretation of the rules.)
I think you left out one of the main reasons why Amiga users needed RAM disks. Back when I had an A500, it only had the internal floppy drive, and no hard drive. If you had enough RAM to copy your critical system files into a RAM disk, you no longer needed to play the "disk swapping game" whenever you wanted to load a program off of another disk.
This game quickly forced me to buy a second floppy drive -- on the Amiga, you pretty much always needed the system disk in the drive...
Has anyone done any benchmarks for these boxes yet? Our research group currently has a few SGI Origin 200 systems (178MHz R10000 based, 4 processor), and I am curious how these new systems stack up in comparison.
Looking over their web pages, I notice that they are careful to never even mention what clock rates the R12000 and R14000 configurations are available in. Is this because they have not decided which parts they are using, or they fear negative PR due to low clock rates? (MIPS cpus get a lot of computation done per clock, and typically run at lower rates than, say, Intel chips).
As far as Beowulf clustering: why bother? SGI already ships some excellent software for running these large configurations with every box. It works as soon as you turn the system on (no tedious setup). We use our current systems as build and simulation servers, and they do an excellent job of load balancing tasks and running parallel makes very quickly...
What deja does, even in their normal use, probably exceeds that implicit license, and fair use. Anyway, I have just sent them a digitally signed formal takedown notice under DMCA asking them to take down all my posts from their site, and preventing their site to include my further postings.
Even after giving implicit permission to display your posts through a news reader (and I would argue that Deja is a web based news reader), you believe you can make specific exceptions for particular readers of your posted works?
Ok. Please do not read this response. It is mine, I hold copyright to it, and I do not grant you a license to read it. I know I posted it on slashdot, but I find your computer offensive, and don't want my text copied into your computer's RAM -- and since I hold the copyright on this posting, I can stop you from doing that. Ewww, get my bits out of your machine!!
What would it take for slashdot to remove a posting?
If I were to write a perl script that uuencodes a copy of MSOffice and posts it to slashdot as a seriess of postings, would slashdot remove the postings? Why? Is each posting only a small excerpt, and hence qualifies as "fair use"?
If slashdot really takes the opinion that "all postings will be archived forever, and never removed", then perhaps I should write a backup tool that archives my hard drive into slashdot posts...
I have to disagree with the main thesis of this article. Inspecting the source code does not guarantee that code is backdoor free. You have to inspect the object code (not source code) of your compiler as well, to ensure it doesn't insert a backdoor.
Ken Thompson brought this up quite clearly in his 1983 Turing award lecture, which has also been discussed in comp.risks. If you want to insert a backdoor into Linux, just booby trap a binary gcc distribution somewhere in such a way that the backdoor is reinserted when you re-compile gcc.
Open source is a good start, but it does not guarantee a lack of backdoors.
The IEEE 802.11 standard is effectively a medium access control (MAC) standard. The airwaves are only in use when a card is transmitting. So even though only 3 or 4 devices can transmit at once, many of them can exist in the same area, since they arbitrate for control of the airwaves. Sort of like ethernet -- you can have a bunch of devices, and they fight over who gets to speak.
There is a vital detail missing from this article: what kind of machine is it? The actual processors being used are only one factor. What about the machine itself? Is it a cluster of workstations, and if so, what kind of network is it on?
Alternatively, is it a "real" supercomputer, with a scalable high bandwidth low latency interconnect?
If so, it makes me wonder why they just don't buy a Cray...
I have found that the signal to noise ratio has gotten so high that I only read slashdot at a level of 2 or higher. This means I miss out on the majority of posts.
When I moderate, this means that I never even see posts at a level of 1 or 0 that my deserve to be moderated up. It is just not worth plowing though all of the garbage.
Perhaps we could have a two tiered moderation system: posts can still be moderated up/down, but users should also have a built in moderation level. So if a user tends to make intelligent posts that get moderated up, start their new posts off at a higher moderation level. If a user tends to flame a lot, start them off at a lower level. This rewards intelligent, interesting discussion without putting too much of a burden on the moderators. Instead of constantly having to raise good posts, they just have to "adjust" the levels up or down of posts that are inappropriate.
This could also work for anonymous posts. If a user is logged in, but chooses to post anonymously, then their post can start off moderated up to the level of the user. If people don't like the content of the anonymous post (such as an inappropriate flame), then the user who posted it gets negative moderation points tacked onto their account. Either disallow anonymous posts from non-logged-in users, or start them off at such a low moderation level that they will be rarely used.
Is the current system broken? No. But there is definately room for improvement...
Beowulf was definately not the first clustering project, and also not the first clustering project on Linux. But they are currently the most popular. Some other clustering projects that preceeded Beowulf include:
At the University of Toronto, it is traditional that the graduating engineering classes errect some sort of prank for people to remember them by. Every year, the mechanical engineers seem to find some creative place to put an old car. But one year they came up with the ultimate hack.
Walking up the main road into campus one day, I noticed that a tree was growing up through the centre of a parked car. Doing a double take, I realized that this maple tree was at least 10 years old, and unlike the car, it had been there the day before.
It took very close examination to figure out how this car came to be parked with a tree through it. The facilities staff assigned to getting rid of the car didn't figure it out, and ended up chopping the car in half with cutting torches in order to remove it.
The car had no engine in it. The frame had a tree-trunk sized slot cut through it, starting at the centre of the front bumper. But before cutting this slot, the hood, front grill, windsheild, and bumper were removed. So to install this work of art (late at night), the perpetrators simply had to wheel the U-shaped car around the tree, and then quickly re-install the windshield, hood, grill and bumper. They did this quickly enough that the regular campus police patrols never even noticed.
The main advantage of the Alpha over the x86 is speed. One reason why DUX is better than Linux on the Alpha is because of the reasonably powerful compilers available for DUX. Compaq can really show their support of Linux by making a complete development environment available...
Slashdot Mirror
For example, at CMU the intellectual property policy seems to say that by default inventors own 50% of whatever they create. But this is only if the university decides to commercialize an idea. If the university declares itself to be uninterested (ie, the university doesn't want to take the risk of spinning off a business) then the inventor owns 85% of any proceeds after the first $25000 of profit.
Note that this applies to work that you do while sponsored by a research grant. For non-sponsored work (such as classwork), a student owns 100% of their work, and the university has no claim on it.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am just talking about my non-professional interpretation of the rules.)
I think you left out one of the main reasons why Amiga users needed RAM disks. Back when I had an A500, it only had the internal floppy drive, and no hard drive. If you had enough RAM to copy your critical system files into a RAM disk, you no longer needed to play the "disk swapping game" whenever you wanted to load a program off of another disk.
This game quickly forced me to buy a second floppy drive -- on the Amiga, you pretty much always needed the system disk in the drive...
Chris
Has anyone done any benchmarks for these boxes yet? Our research group currently has a few SGI Origin 200 systems (178MHz R10000 based, 4 processor), and I am curious how these new systems stack up in comparison.
Looking over their web pages, I notice that they are careful to never even mention what clock rates the R12000 and R14000 configurations are available in. Is this because they have not decided which parts they are using, or they fear negative PR due to low clock rates? (MIPS cpus get a lot of computation done per clock, and typically run at lower rates than, say, Intel chips).
As far as Beowulf clustering: why bother? SGI already ships some excellent software for running these large configurations with every box. It works as soon as you turn the system on (no tedious setup). We use our current systems as build and simulation servers, and they do an excellent job of load balancing tasks and running parallel makes very quickly...
Chris
Even after giving implicit permission to display your posts through a news reader (and I would argue that Deja is a web based news reader), you believe you can make specific exceptions for particular readers of your posted works?
Ok. Please do not read this response. It is mine, I hold copyright to it, and I do not grant you a license to read it. I know I posted it on slashdot, but I find your computer offensive, and don't want my text copied into your computer's RAM -- and since I hold the copyright on this posting, I can stop you from doing that. Ewww, get my bits out of your machine!!
© Copyright 2000 Christopher Colohan. May not be reprinted, reused or displayed on any computer belonging to Kristian Köhntopp.
What would it take for slashdot to remove a posting?
If I were to write a perl script that uuencodes a copy of MSOffice and posts it to slashdot as a seriess of postings, would slashdot remove the postings? Why? Is each posting only a small excerpt, and hence qualifies as "fair use"?
If slashdot really takes the opinion that "all postings will be archived forever, and never removed", then perhaps I should write a backup tool that archives my hard drive into slashdot posts...
I have to disagree with the main thesis of this article. Inspecting the source code does not guarantee that code is backdoor free. You have to inspect the object code (not source code) of your compiler as well, to ensure it doesn't insert a backdoor.
Ken Thompson brought this up quite clearly in his 1983 Turing award lecture, which has also been discussed in comp.risks. If you want to insert a backdoor into Linux, just booby trap a binary gcc distribution somewhere in such a way that the backdoor is reinserted when you re-compile gcc.
Open source is a good start, but it does not guarantee a lack of backdoors.
The IEEE 802.11 standard is effectively a medium access control (MAC) standard. The airwaves are only in use when a card is transmitting. So even though only 3 or 4 devices can transmit at once, many of them can exist in the same area, since they arbitrate for control of the airwaves. Sort of like ethernet -- you can have a bunch of devices, and they fight over who gets to speak.
Alternatively, is it a "real" supercomputer, with a scalable high bandwidth low latency interconnect?
If so, it makes me wonder why they just don't buy a Cray...
Chris
I have found that the signal to noise ratio has gotten so high that I only read slashdot at a level of 2 or higher. This means I miss out on the majority of posts.
When I moderate, this means that I never even see posts at a level of 1 or 0 that my deserve to be moderated up. It is just not worth plowing though all of the garbage.
Perhaps we could have a two tiered moderation system: posts can still be moderated up/down, but users should also have a built in moderation level. So if a user tends to make intelligent posts that get moderated up, start their new posts off at a higher moderation level. If a user tends to flame a lot, start them off at a lower level. This rewards intelligent, interesting discussion without putting too much of a burden on the moderators. Instead of constantly having to raise good posts, they just have to "adjust" the levels up or down of posts that are inappropriate.
This could also work for anonymous posts. If a user is logged in, but chooses to post anonymously, then their post can start off moderated up to the level of the user. If people don't like the content of the anonymous post (such as an inappropriate flame), then the user who posted it gets negative moderation points tacked onto their account. Either disallow anonymous posts from non-logged-in users, or start them off at such a low moderation level that they will be rarely used.
Is the current system broken? No. But there is definately room for improvement...
And 300000 numbers were stolen? Either the story has a bug, or this help page is out of date...
At the University of Toronto, it is traditional that the graduating engineering classes errect some sort of prank for people to remember them by. Every year, the mechanical engineers seem to find some creative place to put an old car. But one year they came up with the ultimate hack.
Walking up the main road into campus one day, I noticed that a tree was growing up through the centre of a parked car. Doing a double take, I realized that this maple tree was at least 10 years old, and unlike the car, it had been there the day before.
It took very close examination to figure out how this car came to be parked with a tree through it. The facilities staff assigned to getting rid of the car didn't figure it out, and ended up chopping the car in half with cutting torches in order to remove it.
The car had no engine in it. The frame had a tree-trunk sized slot cut through it, starting at the centre of the front bumper. But before cutting this slot, the hood, front grill, windsheild, and bumper were removed. So to install this work of art (late at night), the perpetrators simply had to wheel the U-shaped car around the tree, and then quickly re-install the windshield, hood, grill and bumper. They did this quickly enough that the regular campus police patrols never even noticed.
The main advantage of the Alpha over the x86 is speed. One reason why DUX is better than Linux on the Alpha is because of the reasonably powerful compilers available for DUX. Compaq can really show their support of Linux by making a complete development environment available...