Slashdotters will be interested to know someting that wasn't mentioned in the article: NIST is a hotbed of Beowulf cluster activity. Dr. Mark Edwards, who is working on Bose-Einstein condensates while on leave from my universisity, has built a multi-layered cluster of over 100 nodes using 266 MHz PII machines acquired from the Bureau of the Census. With encouragement and seed money from Edwards (or more precisely, from the National Science Foundation), a group of undergraduates at Georgia Southern University has built a 16-node cluster out of junk P-Ones, and is planning another one. (I know about this because I am one of the project's faculty advisors.) The success of the cluster has attracted enough attention from the university administration that Linux is being seriously taken into account here for the first time.
It's remarkable that this sort of heavy-duty research effort is being carried out by undergraduates -- this is what Linux and other free software make possible. The tools are there if you have the ambition. Have a look at our Georgia Southern Beowulf Cluster website.
Dr. Davis Robinson
Associate Professor
Dept. of Literature and Philosophy
Re:Action failed: copyright reg was prerequisite!
on
Napster Ruling Stayed
·
· Score: 1
At the risk of being redundant, I would recommend that everyone read this stay document. The judges refute every single point the the RIAA has been making, and that Slashdot readers have been worrying about, including (most importantly) the danger to all ISPs if they suddenly are responsible for the content they transmit. But the astonishing thing is that Judge Patel could apparently do nothing right: she was flippant, she was unfair, she misinterpreted the law in many different cases, she imposed absurd and arbitrary remedies, she was not consistant in her own rulings, and on and on. If the reasoning of this opinion prevails, Napster is not only off the hook, but ALL non-commercial copying/distribution appears to be legal. Have fun!
I agree that Jon Katz does a pretty good job, despite any irritating mannerisms that have been exhaustively catalogued by previous posters. I am not a (paid, professional) techie either, and I don't mind seeing somebody here with a grasp of more general levels of communication. In fact, Katz is not really so unusual on/. -- most of the posts aren't really technical, tending instead toward techno-gossip. Something else is going on when people suddenly start pounding their chests and asking to see CS degrees. I see no evidence that technical training gives people ANY insight into politics or art or human relations. I don't know what the actual/. demographics are, but Katz really seems to bring out the segment of the community that spends too much time slurping Coke in a monitor-lit room while avoiding high school homework. Get a life, people, and don't read him if you don't like him.
On the other hand, I gave up on SuSE 6.2 and went back to Mandrake when I couldn't get X to work. SaX wouldn't even load. I never had a chance to find out if it was idiot proof or not. The other configurators YAST offered didn't help that much, either. It is unfortunate that a normal install using a major distro CAN lead to disasters like this. I'm glad I had good luck the first time I installed Linux, with RH 5.2. I had to do a little research on the web to optimize my laptop display, but that was that.
Sounds like we are dealing with a second-rate white male geek who likes to imagine his own mediocre success is caused by female, racial, and communist conspiracies. Dream on. It's just YOU. As for proving deep human truths, this character is good evidence that proficiency with computers doesn't give much insight into causes and effects in the real world. You've been squinting at that screen too long, brother.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotters will be interested to know someting that wasn't mentioned in the article: NIST is a hotbed of Beowulf cluster activity. Dr. Mark Edwards, who is working on Bose-Einstein condensates while on leave from my universisity, has built a multi-layered cluster of over 100 nodes using 266 MHz PII machines acquired from the Bureau of the Census. With encouragement and seed money from Edwards (or more precisely, from the National Science Foundation), a group of undergraduates at Georgia Southern University has built a 16-node cluster out of junk P-Ones, and is planning another one. (I know about this because I am one of the project's faculty advisors.) The success of the cluster has attracted enough attention from the university administration that Linux is being seriously taken into account here for the first time.
It's remarkable that this sort of heavy-duty research effort is being carried out by undergraduates -- this is what Linux and other free software make possible. The tools are there if you have the ambition. Have a look at our Georgia Southern Beowulf Cluster website.
Dr. Davis Robinson
Associate Professor
Dept. of Literature and Philosophy
At the risk of being redundant, I would recommend that everyone read this stay document. The judges refute every single point the the RIAA has been making, and that Slashdot readers have been worrying about, including (most importantly) the danger to all ISPs if they suddenly are responsible for the content they transmit. But the astonishing thing is that Judge Patel could apparently do nothing right: she was flippant, she was unfair, she misinterpreted the law in many different cases, she imposed absurd and arbitrary remedies, she was not consistant in her own rulings, and on and on. If the reasoning of this opinion prevails, Napster is not only off the hook, but ALL non-commercial copying/distribution appears to be legal. Have fun!
I agree that Jon Katz does a pretty good job, despite any irritating mannerisms that have been exhaustively catalogued by previous posters. I am not a (paid, professional) techie either, and I don't mind seeing somebody here with a grasp of more general levels of communication. In fact, Katz is not really so unusual on /. -- most of the posts aren't really technical, tending instead toward techno-gossip. Something else is going on when people suddenly start pounding their chests and asking to see CS degrees. I see no evidence that technical training gives people ANY insight into politics or art or human relations. I don't know what the actual /. demographics are, but Katz really seems to bring out the segment of the community that spends too much time slurping Coke in a monitor-lit room while avoiding high school homework. Get a life, people, and don't read him if you don't like him.
On the other hand, I gave up on SuSE 6.2 and went back to Mandrake when I couldn't get X to work. SaX wouldn't even load. I never had a chance to find out if it was idiot proof or not. The other configurators YAST offered didn't help that much, either. It is unfortunate that a normal install using a major distro CAN lead to disasters like this. I'm glad I had good luck the first time I installed Linux, with RH 5.2. I had to do a little research on the web to optimize my laptop display, but that was that.
Sounds like we are dealing with a second-rate white male geek who likes to imagine his own mediocre success is caused by female, racial, and communist conspiracies. Dream on. It's just YOU. As for proving deep human truths, this character is good evidence that proficiency with computers doesn't give much insight into causes and effects in the real world. You've been squinting at that screen too long, brother.