Opt-in mail doesn't work. Just as one tiny example, it would prevent me from receiving ispell bug reports. Any solution that allows a random user in Poland to send me a bug report also allows that same person to send me spam.
Just wait until these bozos start getting tons of "political" e-mail from nut cases like McElwaine. I suspect that then they'll start saying "Oh, political spam is only OK if it comes from a legitimate candidate."
There's no hope, though. The junk-fax laws and the anti-telemarketing laws already exempt political appeals. Never mind that a ban would be perfectly constitutional (under the time, manner, and place doctrine). There's no way the politicians are going to write a law that makes it harder for them to "communicate with their constituents".
Fortunately for me, DCC is apolitical. It doesn't give a hoot what the content is, as long is it's unsolicited and bulk.
All day I've been wondering why my connection to the world is messed up. Can't get to ebay, can't get to Slashdot. I finally pulled out the modem card I use when traveling and dialed in through an ISP. Poof, everything works.
Given the unsolicited-mail rule, we'll have to sucker them into buying something. But that shouldn't be too hard.
Write a shrink-wrap license that says, "If you are a member of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, by opening this package you agree to cast all future legislative votes according to the wishes of shrink-wrap license owner."
Either the courts have to decide shrink-wrap licenses are invalid, or we own the world. Either way we win. Heh heh.
Banks are required to collect SSNs for interest-bearing accounts, because interest is taxable (and thus reportable) income.
I suspect that they're also required to collect SSNs for regular checking accounts. It helps the Fed catch those nasty money-laundering drug-dealing kid-porno-peddling terrorists.:-)
The simple truth about the ID requirements is that they are not there to prevent terrorism. They are there to prevent you the consumer from selling your ticket to somebody else.
That's why the airlines never fought the rules, even though they are clumsy and inconvenient for ticket agents to enforce.
I suppose this is off-topic, but Personal Rapid Transit has some pretty serious social problems. Vandals and muggers like nothing better than privacy.
The only technological solution I can see is remote monitoring combined with an override system that could let a security guard send any capsule straight to the police station. But constant monitoring of every capsule is pretty expensive.
Somehow, Americans have managed to convince themselves that any elevated railway must necessarily be a monorail. Anybody smart enough to type http://slashdot.org into a browser will have little difficulty seeing that the two concepts are entirely separable.
A moment's thought about the forces involved will also reveal that a single-rail design is much more difficult to get right. In fact, every "monorail" system I've ever seen has a very wide track, and the trains have wheels on both sides. They are really very narrow-gauge dual-rail systems in which the two rails are connected by a web of excess material that contributes a lot of weight and very little structural integrity.
So why are we so enamored of monorail? Simple: in the 1950's, Walt Disney was looking for a way to make part of his park "futuristic". He was so successful that the entire country has bought into the idea that monorails are clever technology. Not.
As a Vegas ride, this project makes perfect sense. For any other city, we should stick with promoting above- or below-grade transportation systems, and let the engineers decide on the rail count.
Does a professor at a 4-year college count as a
teacher? How about at a Ph.D.-granting university? How about a grad student who is a T.A.?
My experience is that quite a few Slashdot readers are teachers of some flavor, from junior high through top universities. I'm a professor at a very good undergraduate institution. Windows is almost nonexistent in the CS department. We use it mostly under duress.:-)
I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at
all.
Before I decided that teaching would be a lot more fun than the dot-com butterfly chase, I spent 15 years in industry. I won't bore you with my resume, but I have to say that the people I have encountered in academia are generally just as "savvy" as those outside, if not more so. However, the savviness is of a different sort, because the needs are different. If you want to know which video card works best on a PCI bus, don't ask me. I don't have a clue. The time that someone else spends learning that information, I spend learning about the latest research in schedulers or file systems.
I make no value judgments here. Both types of knowledge are useful. Just don't make the error of assuming that because another person's knowledge isn't a precise superset of your own, he is ignorant.
I'm really the wrong guy to answer this (the right ones work down the hall from me), but given the dearth of responses I thought I'd take a stab at it.
Our math department is carrying out a faculty search right now. IIRC, they are expecting 200-300 applications for the job. Purely on statistics, it beats the hell out of the lottery but you shouldn't quit your day job.
However, the statistics are a bit pessimistic. About 50% of the applications are pretty wildly unqualified (the extreme example being MS holders applying for a Ph.D. position). If the search is looking for particular expertise and you have it, another 50% of the survivors will get tossed out.
Obviously, it's still tough, but not impossible -- especially if (a) you're good at what you do and (b) you persevere.
You can also do research outside universities. In fact, if you don't have a desire to teach, it can be better to avoid academia. Some industrial research labs want mathematicians. There are also pure industry spots: for example, I think Wall Street is quite fond of math right now (though a lot of it might not be research, depending on how you define "research").
A lot of the above applies to other "paper and pencil" disciplines, such as CS theory.
An upcoming bright spot is biology. After centuries of trying to get a handle on a complex topic, the bio folks have finally started to develop models that are tractable with the help of computers. If you develop an interest in that particular sort of math, you might discover that there is huge demand by the time you graduate.
The field is hot enough that we've added a new
bio/math major.
Above all, though, my advice to all people seeking a career is the same: follow your heart. You're going to be doing it for 40 years or so, and that's a lot easier if you're having fun.
Also, getting from high school to a math Ph.D. is going to take around 8 years, maybe more (I took 13, not counting time spent working, but I'm in a time-consuming field). Who knows what the job situation is goinig to look like 8 years from now? Maybe Enron Jr. will be hiring all the mathematicians it can get its hands on to develop models of how to scam the energy market.:-)
What everybody seems to be missing is the effect of tolls on user psychology (although one person came close in discussing cell phones).
It's been shown repeatedly, most recently in ISP and cell-phone pricing, that flat-rate pricing is the best way to encourage casual use of a resource. The obvious converse is that per-use pricing will discourage use. For cell phones and the Internet, encouragement has turned out to be generally good for society.
For cars, there's certainly something to be said for discouraging use. The trouble with the current proposal is that the pricing isn't income-based. Since an expensive car causes just as much traffic as a cheap one, the pricing model should discourage use based on car count (or size), not on income. As proposed, low-income people will stop driving but high-income ones will still clog the roads. If (fixed) tolls are set high enough to get the richer people off the roads, the poor ones won't be able to afford to get to work, and the economy will suffer in unintended ways.
Larry Lessig is one of my heroes. Brilliant, eloquent, erudite -- and he doesn't even make grammatical errors!
This article should be required reading for anybody interested in intellectual property. No black-and-white stuff here. But the people who most need to read it, and the ones that I sincerely hope will, are the seven old men and two old women who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
If you don't care about milliseconds, a cheap GPS with NMEA outputs can be a good solution.
However, I'm told that cheap GPS units often have feeble processors with pretty lousy software that
gives low priority to some things that really ought to be important. I seem to recall mention on the navigation mailing list that some units have errors of as much as 4 seconds on their LCD time displays.
I guess that the moral is you should be careful what you buy. If I were going to go the GPS route, I'd hook my shiny new Garmin up to the serial port of a machine running NTP to a level-1 or level-2 server. Then I'd whip up a little test program that compared the NMEA time to the NTP-synced time. If it was accurate over a period of several days, then I'd trust the setup. If not, I'd return the damned thing and try another.
I'm a Netflix lover. We hardly ever go to the video store any more, although my wife picks up a couple of classics at the library each week (I think she doesn't like having me in control of all the movie selections!).
I've found that the trick to getting movies quickly is to never rearrange the queue. I keep about 60 movies on the list. When an interesting new movie shows up in the theaters, I use the Netflix "Save" button to tell them I want to see it someday. When it comes out on DVD, it goes at the bottom of the queue.
Since my queue is 60 deep and we watch 2-3 movies per week, it takes 20-30 weeks for a new release to work its way to the top. The result is that the "long wait" problem has pretty much disappeared because the faddish types are all crowding around for a movie that's just been released. But what do I care that it took me 6 months to see the flick? I already waited 3-6 months to have it come out on DVD; if I was eager I would have gone to the theater instead.
As a general rule, we see movies within a year of their theatrical release. That's plenty fast for me -- and a lot quicker than the 70 years it took me to see Hitchcock's first talkie (which I got from Netflix, BTW).
Meanwhile, we always have a few unwatched movies on the shelf. If we get the movie urge at 11 PM, we just plug one in. No half hour running to the store (if it's opened) and trying to pick. And any time I think "It'd sure be great to see X", I can slap it on the queue and someday it'll be at my front door.
There was a review of noise-cancelling headphones in the LA Times a year or two ago. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the expensive ones worked better. But the most interesting comment in the story was a social one: on airplanes, everybody talks louder than normal. With the 'phones on, the writer could clearly hear conversations 3 rows back. He found it annoying -- but not nearly as annoying as the guy just behind him who hummed "Do you know the way to San Jose" over and over throughout the flight. Without the 'phones, he was inaudible, and I'm sure he had no idea anybody could hear him. Drove the writer nuts.
Because you can never place the noise cancelation generator at the exact same place as the noise source, you will always end
up with places where the noise caceling device makes the noise twice as loud.
In a word, no. You neglected to note that you can have a sensor involved. Active noise cancellation involves having a microphone to pick up the signal, a bit of circuitry to adjust the phase (varying by frequency, to allow for the physical separation between the mike and the speaker), and a speaker to emit the cancellation signal. The relative position of the source doesn't matter at all. What does matter is the periodicity of the signal. True noise is
hard to cancel, especially at high frequencies. Periodic signals and low-frequency random signals are quite easy to handle.
I'll guess I can get an adequate Linux box for $300. Then I need power to run it, special hardware to handle the chemicals, and of course about $500 worth of my time (at best) to set it all up.
When I'm done, I can get rid of that $5 timed-release dispenser that has kept my chlorine levels stable for years. The chemical costs will remain about the same, of course, but hey, I can get a geekiness award.
As to the timer, if I were going to waste my time to create elaborate software that knows the daylight schedule, why not just wire up a few SCR switches to a photocell? Or better, run the pump at night when evaporation is lower and never have to change the timer settings?
I figure he'll earn his money back in about 2 decades. By which time the PC will have long since rotted.
OK, this kind of project can be fun for its own sake. But let's not pretend it makes economic sense.
The standard response to suggestions of storing data in RAM is, "That's dumb; just let the cache do the work."
But it turns out that caching doesn't do nearly as well. The overheads involved (such as the cost of finding the block in the cache) make caching significantly worse than using RAM more wisely.
You can learn a bit more about these results from our short paper (PDF) just presented at FAST, or wait for the June Usenix conference to see a longer paper.
The subject line of this article is misleading. Analysis of a system isn't the same as building the system. But in many cases, the analysis of a system has demonstrated that it made sense to attempt building it. I could cite many examples -- not only in CS; the same principle applies to bridges and space elevators. As a general rule, the analyst gets credit for the original idea.
Kleinrock's analysis...is ignored
Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Analysis has been a major part of networking from the very beginning, in no small part due to Kleinrock's influence.
Kleinrock is like a guy who invents a great network...that never gets turned on, but who still claims credit
Again, wrong. UCLA was one of the first three nodes on the ARPANET
These issues have been discussed in great detail on the computer history mailing list. The general consensus as I recall it is that all of Kleinrock, Baran, and Larry Roberts made major contributions. None can really claim to be the sole inventor. All can claim that without them, the ARPANET wouldn't have happened.
Here's the message I use, which is a combination of RMS's second version (without the polemics) and the version I was using until now. First, though, here's my procmail recipe. I have it inside a group that causes it to reply only to messages sent to college-wide mailing lists, which are the worst offenders in my case. The file "wordattach" contains the message; the file "wordok" is a list of people who are allowed to send me word attachments without complaint (such as a colleague who likes to write papers in Word). The message still comes to me in any case, but I'm saved composing a complaint. Any particular sender gets only one complaint (almost).
Many modifications are possible, of course. (P.S. The indentation is nicer in my file, but the lameness filter won't allow it. Sorry.)
# Autoreply to anything that has an MS-Word attachment :0
* ^Content-Type:
{
:0 c
* ? $FORMAIL -x From | fgrep -i -f $MAILDIR/wordok
{
}
# Mark that the message has gotten an auto-response :0 f
| ${FORMAIL} -A"X-Autoresponse: MS-Word attachment"
}
}
Now, my message:
This message was automatically generated by my mail filter.
You have sent a message containing an MS-Word attachment. You may be
unaware that Word attachments are not readable by all of your
recipients. In addition, Word-formatted mail attachments are often
vehicles for viruses, worms, and other malicious software (see
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/acro.ht ml. Word
attachments may also contain information that you may not have
intended to send (see http://www.microsystems.com/Shares_Well.htm).
I have found that most documents sent in Word format could have been
sent as plain text without losing any of their contents or meaning.
If that is the case, please re-send your document in plain text.
One way to send a Word document in plain text is to select all of the
text in the document (Edit->Select All), copy it to the clipboard
(Edit->Copy) and then paste it into your e-mail message (Edit->Paste).
An alternative is to save the file as text: open the document, choose
File->Save as, and in the "Save As Type" strip box at the bottom of
the dialog, choose "Plain text" or "Plain text with line breaks."
Then click "Save". You can then attach the new text document in a safe
format that is readable by everyone.
If your formatting is important, you can chose "HTML Document or Web
Page" instead of "Plain text" (but again, you will find that some of
your recipients have difficulty reading your message).
I find that when I am getting lots of exercise, I need less sleep. I hypothesize that good health iis helpful. Of course, there's a tradeoff there, since the exercise takes time itself (but of course it has other benefits!).
However, even with exercise I need a lot of sleep. I think it's just genetics. I've found that I really need 9 hours rather than the canonical 8. Guess I'll never be prez...and never have my own how-to-make-a-quilt-from-fallen-leaves show.
It's much harder to avoid giving root privileges to nasty software than you think. A chrooted jail won't help unless you never use the software outside that jail, which sort of defeats the purpose of downloading stuff.
It's easy to write a virus that starts completely unprivileged but gradually infects more and more stuff, sitting dormant until eventually something that it infected gets run by root. To keep from helping script kiddies, I won't describe the details, but many Slashdot readers will have no trouble figuring it out.
Ten years ago,
I wrote a proof-of-concept virus to demonstrate this idea, based on some vague comments by Klaus Brunnstein.
The most straightforward way to deal with part-time experience is to just state it as such. You're already doing that on your resume. If you want to quickly summarize, say "I've worked 3 years part-time and 2 years full-time." I'd suggest that you count full-time summers as part-time work. I didn't do that when I was young, but I'm wiser now. They'll be far more impressed by somebody who understates stuff than by somebody who adds up 4 full-time summers to get an extra year of experience. If they want to calculate it that way, they can do the arithmetic.
Back in the 60's, there was the Michigan Terminal System, out of the University of Michigan. Their filesystem was DB-based. That was before relational became the "in" thing, so it was ISAM.
It was an interesting idea. I think that the problem they had in MTS will be the same with your idea: not everything fits neatly into the DB model. In fact, some things really have to be shoehorned in.
The insightful reader will be saying, "But wait! You also have to shoehorn stuff into the conventional FS model." True enough. The question is how much fits naturally and how much has to be shoehorned.
My contention is that the conventional model is a better fit for most stuff. That's especially (perhaps sadly) true because of legacy software that expects the conventional model. Perhaps a ground-up OS and application implementation would be able to rethink some of those issues and find new insights. But I'm naturally skeptical.
There is also the issue of performance. I know little about DBs (my loss), but it seems to me that if the FS is stored in an existing relational system, you're going to have to warp some stuff to make it fit. I'd suspect that either you're going to have to make every file be a different table, or you're going to have to store the contents of every file as a variable-length text field. Either option is going to have really nasty effects on the efficiency of the DB, which has been highly optimized under the assumption that each table contains tons of highly homogeneous records.
I wouldn't want to dive into that kind of can of worms as an "I want to use it in production" project. It might make interesting research on a 5-year horizon, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Opt-in mail doesn't work. Just as one tiny example, it would prevent me from receiving ispell bug reports. Any solution that allows a random user in Poland to send me a bug report also allows that same person to send me spam.
BTW and FWIW, in several weeks of running both DCC and Razor, I never got a Razor hit. So now I just run DCC (well, I also use a rule-based filter).
Just wait until these bozos start getting tons of "political" e-mail from nut cases like McElwaine. I suspect that then they'll start saying "Oh, political spam is only OK if it comes from a legitimate candidate."
There's no hope, though. The junk-fax laws and the anti-telemarketing laws already exempt political appeals. Never mind that a ban would be perfectly constitutional (under the time, manner, and place doctrine). There's no way the politicians are going to write a law that makes it harder for them to "communicate with their constituents".
Fortunately for me, DCC is apolitical. It doesn't give a hoot what the content is, as long is it's unsolicited and bulk.
Moral: never install big new things on Friday.
Given the unsolicited-mail rule, we'll have to sucker them into buying something. But that shouldn't be too hard.
Write a shrink-wrap license that says, "If you are a member of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, by opening this package you agree to cast all future legislative votes according to the wishes of shrink-wrap license owner."
Either the courts have to decide shrink-wrap licenses are invalid, or we own the world. Either way we win. Heh heh.
I suspect that they're also required to collect SSNs for regular checking accounts. It helps the Fed catch those nasty money-laundering drug-dealing kid-porno-peddling terrorists. :-)
That's why the airlines never fought the rules, even though they are clumsy and inconvenient for ticket agents to enforce.
The only technological solution I can see is remote monitoring combined with an override system that could let a security guard send any capsule straight to the police station. But constant monitoring of every capsule is pretty expensive.
A moment's thought about the forces involved will also reveal that a single-rail design is much more difficult to get right. In fact, every "monorail" system I've ever seen has a very wide track, and the trains have wheels on both sides. They are really very narrow-gauge dual-rail systems in which the two rails are connected by a web of excess material that contributes a lot of weight and very little structural integrity.
So why are we so enamored of monorail? Simple: in the 1950's, Walt Disney was looking for a way to make part of his park "futuristic". He was so successful that the entire country has bought into the idea that monorails are clever technology. Not.
As a Vegas ride, this project makes perfect sense. For any other city, we should stick with promoting above- or below-grade transportation systems, and let the engineers decide on the rail count.
My experience is that quite a few Slashdot readers are teachers of some flavor, from junior high through top universities. I'm a professor at a very good undergraduate institution. Windows is almost nonexistent in the CS department. We use it mostly under duress. :-)
I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at all.
Before I decided that teaching would be a lot more fun than the dot-com butterfly chase, I spent 15 years in industry. I won't bore you with my resume, but I have to say that the people I have encountered in academia are generally just as "savvy" as those outside, if not more so. However, the savviness is of a different sort, because the needs are different. If you want to know which video card works best on a PCI bus, don't ask me. I don't have a clue. The time that someone else spends learning that information, I spend learning about the latest research in schedulers or file systems.
I make no value judgments here. Both types of knowledge are useful. Just don't make the error of assuming that because another person's knowledge isn't a precise superset of your own, he is ignorant.
However, the statistics are a bit pessimistic. About 50% of the applications are pretty wildly unqualified (the extreme example being MS holders applying for a Ph.D. position). If the search is looking for particular expertise and you have it, another 50% of the survivors will get tossed out. Obviously, it's still tough, but not impossible -- especially if (a) you're good at what you do and (b) you persevere.
You can also do research outside universities. In fact, if you don't have a desire to teach, it can be better to avoid academia. Some industrial research labs want mathematicians. There are also pure industry spots: for example, I think Wall Street is quite fond of math right now (though a lot of it might not be research, depending on how you define "research").
A lot of the above applies to other "paper and pencil" disciplines, such as CS theory.
An upcoming bright spot is biology. After centuries of trying to get a handle on a complex topic, the bio folks have finally started to develop models that are tractable with the help of computers. If you develop an interest in that particular sort of math, you might discover that there is huge demand by the time you graduate. The field is hot enough that we've added a new bio/math major.
Above all, though, my advice to all people seeking a career is the same: follow your heart. You're going to be doing it for 40 years or so, and that's a lot easier if you're having fun. Also, getting from high school to a math Ph.D. is going to take around 8 years, maybe more (I took 13, not counting time spent working, but I'm in a time-consuming field). Who knows what the job situation is goinig to look like 8 years from now? Maybe Enron Jr. will be hiring all the mathematicians it can get its hands on to develop models of how to scam the energy market. :-)
It's been shown repeatedly, most recently in ISP and cell-phone pricing, that flat-rate pricing is the best way to encourage casual use of a resource. The obvious converse is that per-use pricing will discourage use. For cell phones and the Internet, encouragement has turned out to be generally good for society.
For cars, there's certainly something to be said for discouraging use. The trouble with the current proposal is that the pricing isn't income-based. Since an expensive car causes just as much traffic as a cheap one, the pricing model should discourage use based on car count (or size), not on income. As proposed, low-income people will stop driving but high-income ones will still clog the roads. If (fixed) tolls are set high enough to get the richer people off the roads, the poor ones won't be able to afford to get to work, and the economy will suffer in unintended ways.
This article should be required reading for anybody interested in intellectual property. No black-and-white stuff here. But the people who most need to read it, and the ones that I sincerely hope will, are the seven old men and two old women who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
However, I'm told that cheap GPS units often have feeble processors with pretty lousy software that gives low priority to some things that really ought to be important. I seem to recall mention on the navigation mailing list that some units have errors of as much as 4 seconds on their LCD time displays.
I guess that the moral is you should be careful what you buy. If I were going to go the GPS route, I'd hook my shiny new Garmin up to the serial port of a machine running NTP to a level-1 or level-2 server. Then I'd whip up a little test program that compared the NMEA time to the NTP-synced time. If it was accurate over a period of several days, then I'd trust the setup. If not, I'd return the damned thing and try another.
I've found that the trick to getting movies quickly is to never rearrange the queue. I keep about 60 movies on the list. When an interesting new movie shows up in the theaters, I use the Netflix "Save" button to tell them I want to see it someday. When it comes out on DVD, it goes at the bottom of the queue.
Since my queue is 60 deep and we watch 2-3 movies per week, it takes 20-30 weeks for a new release to work its way to the top. The result is that the "long wait" problem has pretty much disappeared because the faddish types are all crowding around for a movie that's just been released. But what do I care that it took me 6 months to see the flick? I already waited 3-6 months to have it come out on DVD; if I was eager I would have gone to the theater instead.
As a general rule, we see movies within a year of their theatrical release. That's plenty fast for me -- and a lot quicker than the 70 years it took me to see Hitchcock's first talkie (which I got from Netflix, BTW).
Meanwhile, we always have a few unwatched movies on the shelf. If we get the movie urge at 11 PM, we just plug one in. No half hour running to the store (if it's opened) and trying to pick. And any time I think "It'd sure be great to see X", I can slap it on the queue and someday it'll be at my front door.
There was a review of noise-cancelling headphones in the LA Times a year or two ago. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the expensive ones worked better. But the most interesting comment in the story was a social one: on airplanes, everybody talks louder than normal. With the 'phones on, the writer could clearly hear conversations 3 rows back. He found it annoying -- but not nearly as annoying as the guy just behind him who hummed "Do you know the way to San Jose" over and over throughout the flight. Without the 'phones, he was inaudible, and I'm sure he had no idea anybody could hear him. Drove the writer nuts.
In a word, no. You neglected to note that you can have a sensor involved. Active noise cancellation involves having a microphone to pick up the signal, a bit of circuitry to adjust the phase (varying by frequency, to allow for the physical separation between the mike and the speaker), and a speaker to emit the cancellation signal. The relative position of the source doesn't matter at all. What does matter is the periodicity of the signal. True noise is hard to cancel, especially at high frequencies. Periodic signals and low-frequency random signals are quite easy to handle.
I'll guess I can get an adequate Linux box for $300. Then I need power to run it, special hardware to handle the chemicals, and of course about $500 worth of my time (at best) to set it all up.
When I'm done, I can get rid of that $5 timed-release dispenser that has kept my chlorine levels stable for years. The chemical costs will remain about the same, of course, but hey, I can get a geekiness award.
As to the timer, if I were going to waste my time to create elaborate software that knows the daylight schedule, why not just wire up a few SCR switches to a photocell? Or better, run the pump at night when evaporation is lower and never have to change the timer settings?
I figure he'll earn his money back in about 2 decades. By which time the PC will have long since rotted.
OK, this kind of project can be fun for its own sake. But let's not pretend it makes economic sense.
You can learn a bit more about these results from our short paper (PDF) just presented at FAST, or wait for the June Usenix conference to see a longer paper.
Kleinrock's analysis...is ignored
Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Analysis has been a major part of networking from the very beginning, in no small part due to Kleinrock's influence.
Kleinrock is like a guy who invents a great network...that never gets turned on, but who still claims credit
Again, wrong. UCLA was one of the first three nodes on the ARPANET These issues have been discussed in great detail on the computer history mailing list. The general consensus as I recall it is that all of Kleinrock, Baran, and Larry Roberts made major contributions. None can really claim to be the sole inventor. All can claim that without them, the ARPANET wouldn't have happened.
Many modifications are possible, of course. (P.S. The indentation is nicer in my file, but the lameness filter won't allow it. Sorry.)
Now, my message:
However, even with exercise I need a lot of sleep. I think it's just genetics. I've found that I really need 9 hours rather than the canonical 8. Guess I'll never be prez...and never have my own how-to-make-a-quilt-from-fallen-leaves show.
It's easy to write a virus that starts completely unprivileged but gradually infects more and more stuff, sitting dormant until eventually something that it infected gets run by root. To keep from helping script kiddies, I won't describe the details, but many Slashdot readers will have no trouble figuring it out.
Ten years ago, I wrote a proof-of-concept virus to demonstrate this idea, based on some vague comments by Klaus Brunnstein.
The most straightforward way to deal with part-time experience is to just state it as such. You're already doing that on your resume. If you want to quickly summarize, say "I've worked 3 years part-time and 2 years full-time." I'd suggest that you count full-time summers as part-time work. I didn't do that when I was young, but I'm wiser now. They'll be far more impressed by somebody who understates stuff than by somebody who adds up 4 full-time summers to get an extra year of experience. If they want to calculate it that way, they can do the arithmetic.
It was an interesting idea. I think that the problem they had in MTS will be the same with your idea: not everything fits neatly into the DB model. In fact, some things really have to be shoehorned in.
The insightful reader will be saying, "But wait! You also have to shoehorn stuff into the conventional FS model." True enough. The question is how much fits naturally and how much has to be shoehorned.
My contention is that the conventional model is a better fit for most stuff. That's especially (perhaps sadly) true because of legacy software that expects the conventional model. Perhaps a ground-up OS and application implementation would be able to rethink some of those issues and find new insights. But I'm naturally skeptical.
There is also the issue of performance. I know little about DBs (my loss), but it seems to me that if the FS is stored in an existing relational system, you're going to have to warp some stuff to make it fit. I'd suspect that either you're going to have to make every file be a different table, or you're going to have to store the contents of every file as a variable-length text field. Either option is going to have really nasty effects on the efficiency of the DB, which has been highly optimized under the assumption that each table contains tons of highly homogeneous records.
I wouldn't want to dive into that kind of can of worms as an "I want to use it in production" project. It might make interesting research on a 5-year horizon, though.