11/15   I wasn't all that excited when I learned that Times ranked Cal #2,
        until I found today that Stanfurd ranked #7.
           \_ Granted the criterea, Cal's rank following Harvard sounds right.
           I don't know about the sciences or the professional schools, but
           the truism in the humanities & the social sciences is that
           less status-obsessed schools like Cal and UChicago are good places
           to be productive, while Harvard is a good place to die. --elizp
              \_ URL, please. And it kills me that Cal football is #4.
                 Still doesn't guarantee a Big Game win.
                 \_ http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings.  -tom
                    \_ is there an open login? csuamotd/csuamotd doesn't work
                       \_ http://www.bugmenot.com
                 \_ http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/newsroom/index.html
                    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1343642,00.html
                    I lost the link to the .pdf file that lists the scores of
                    all 500 universities.
                    \_ ETH, ANU, LSE and especially Singapore are way overrated
                       here. UCSF and Caltech are hard to compare to large
                       universities.
        \_ "... academics worldwide regard Harvard as an excellent institution,
           although they rate Berkeley more highly.
           "... Harvard has reached the pinnacle by doing well in both of
           our most highly weighted criteria - peer review and the number
           of paper citations per faculty member"
           Granted the criterea, Cal's rank following Harvard sounds right.
           I don't know about the sciences or the professional schools, but
           the truism in the humanities & the social sciences is that
           less status-obsessed schools like Cal and UChicago are good places
           to be productive, while Harvard is a good place to die. --elizp
        \_ in terms of what? academics? sports? prestige?
           \_ Academics.
              \_ URL, please. And it kills me that Cal football is #4.
                 Still doesn't guarantee a Big Game win.
                 \_ http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings.  -tom
                    \_ is there an open login? csuamotd/csuamotd doesn't work
                       \_ http://www.bugmenot.com
                 \_ http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/newsroom/index.html
                    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1343642,00.html
                    I lost the link to the .pdf file that lists the scores of
                    all 500 universities.
                    \_ ETH, ANU, LSE and especially Singapore are way overrated
                       here. UCSF and Caltech are hard to compare to large
                       universities.

11/14   So Safire is retiring from NYT.  I certainly hope they pick another
        conservative.  Who are the (intelligent, sane, eloquent) conservative
        commentators out there today?
        \_ he had his old man dementia moments too
           \_ OK, I'll grant 'mostly sane'
        \_  He's it.
        \_ Safire is stupid.  George Will.
        \_ michelle malkin!
           \_ No!  Ann Coulter!
              \_ I am so waiting for Ann-on-Michelle.
                 \_ "Michelle!  Your strap-on is so LARGE and TAX-FREE!"
        \_ Jerry Falwell
           \_ That would be a conflict of interest when he gets appointed
              to the Supreme Court.

11/14   So including Agriculture and Energy, how many Bush cabinet people have
        retired?  Is this the normal amount?
        \_ Aschcroft, now Powell, probably some more people will retire. I'd
           say at the end of it all we'll see six-seven people go. This is
           quite normal. Some presidents shake up the whole cabinet after
           the first term so everyone goes.
           \_ Why do presidents do that?  If they get re-elected, doesn't it
              usually mean there was something good about what their cabinets
              did?
           \_ Really? Who has done that? No one in the last 30 years.

11/14   What's the largest single torrent you've ever completed a download of?
        >10GB:.
        2-10GB:.....
        <2GB:
        Torrent?: ..
        \_ I read there was a study which said 35% of all internet traffic is
           BitTorrent.  Why haven't we seen BitTorrent lawsuits?
           \- do you have a ptr to this study? my numbers are pretty much
              pre-BT ... ~psb/MOTD/InternetFlows. this would suggest a big
              increase in traffic, not just a shift in composition. --psb
                \_ http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html
                   Google, Partha.  -John

11/14   what is a good color printer for photos for around $500?
        \_ One of the new Canon Pixma's maybe
        \_ Epson Stylus Photo 12xx I guess.  I have a 5-year old Stylus Photo
           1200, and the output still beats many of today's "photo" inkjets.
        \_ If you don't need bigger than 10x8, the R200 for $99 will serve
           just as well as the 1280.

11/14   Mass civilian death in Fallujah?  Sadly, there is not a single US
        media outlet that I can find covering this story.
        http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4004873.stm
        http://csua.org/u/9z2 (reuters.co.uk)
        http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1350926,00.html
        \_ If we fought WWI or WWII like this we might as well let
           the enemy win.
           \_ What are you blathering about?  WWI and WWII weren't entered
              on false pretenses and without a plan to win.
        \_ Not to be unsympathetic, but what the heck are they still doing
           there?  We warned them for months ahead of time.
           \_ Fallujah is a city of 200 to 300,000 people.  Apparently most
              of them got out, but there were about 30,000 that were still
              there when the attack began.  The biggest problem seems to be
              that these people have no food or clean water, and the army
              is still not allowing the red cross to go in and supply
              food and water.
              \_ I can see the reality of the situation, but that doesn't
                 answer my question.
                 \_ It's tough to say.  Human beings are funny creatures.  If
                    a big army invaded your country and then told you to leave
                    the home you grew up in because they were going to blow it
                    up, would you leave?  I don't think it's such an easy
                    question to answer.  Humans are very good at denial.
                    \_ Then they will die.  Psychological illness is very bad
                       in a warzone. -- darwinist
                       \_ No need to use an alternate sig, ilya.
                       \_ Many Floridians stayed at home because they could no
                          longer afford to stay in a motel.  What if the people
                          can't afford to leave, are too frail to leave, have
                          no where they can stay, etc.?
                          \_ Are you familiar with the concept of a refugee?
                             If folks with big ass guns tell you to leave for
                             a couple of weeks, you should probably leave.
                             If you honestly have no better choice than to stay
                             at a place that's about to get bombed into
                             the stoneage, you are in deep trouble.  I am not
                             sure what you expected from a military
                             operation.  Would you rather the torture/kidnapping
                             rigs operating in Fallujah kept going?
            \_ Imagine a city the size of Oakland, with higher crime.  Now some
               foreigners are telling you to leave.  If you do leave, anything
               you don't bring will get looted, and violent gangs will use your
               house to take pot-shots at men with 155mm cannons.
               \_ Put like this, I have a hard time believing the US is going
                  to get out of this without a bloody nose.
                  \_ BUD DAY doesn't like your tone, son.
                     \_ Heh, it's always Bud Day in East Oaktown.

11/14   I need a digital camera capable of taking close up pictures that
        look good when I print it out on an 8.5 x 11 paper.  How many
        megapixels do I need for that?  I'm trying out http://shutterfly.com's
        photobook service and it's smart enough to warn me that my 3.2
        megapixels pictures are no good when I want to place it on one
        big page by itself.  I currently have a 3.2m Canon SD10.  Thanks.
        \- depending on what you mean by "closeup" this may be more of a
           lens question than pixel question. 3mp should be ok for 8x10.
           of course 5mp on a dSLR != 5mp on a point and shoot. --psb
           of course 5mp on a dSLR >> 5mp on a point and shoot.
           BTW, it's not just a matter of the quality of the lens but
           the DoF you shoot with ... on macro shots you can have DoF
           just be a couple of millimeters ... i have had the wings of
           a bug in focus but the bugs feet out of focus. and again,
           "closeup" can mean ... 3 feet or 3 inches. --psb
           \_ And use raw mode if you can.  Quality of a tiff from your
              raw image >> jpeg quality.  -meyers
              \_ Could you provide an example of a RAW/TIFF file that looks
                 an order of magnitude better than an otherwise equivalent
                 top-quality JPEG? -tom
        \_ "look good" is a relative term; it's possible to print at 8x10
           with 2 megapixels, and it looks fine for typical viewing distance
           (picture hanging on wall).  As psb notes, the lens is probably
           more important to think about than the megapixel rating; the lens
           on the Canon SD10 is tiny and probably isn't appropriate for
           macro work.  -tom

11/14   what is wrong with soda?
        \_ can you be more specific? (a lot is/could be wrong with soda.)
           if you are talking about slow interactive response and high
           packet loss it seems to be an eecs network problem. it will
           be reported shortly. it only seems to be causing problems for
           larger packets so we've adjusted the mtu on soda. you can
           thank mconst for troubleshooting this. - erikk
           \_ What's "MTU" as mentioned in motd.official?  Thx.
              \_ Maximum Transmission Unit; basically, packet size.
                 1500 bytes was a typical figure at some point.
                 \_ Though you typically want something a little bit smaller
                    like 1470, because some device 'in the middle' could
                    encapsulate your packet and thus go over 1500.
                    \_ Path MTU discovery should lower your MTU in this
                       case, shouldn't it? Isn't the explicit MTU just a
                       starting point/cap? -gm
                       \_ In theory this is correct.  In practice, many
                          systems/networks do stupid things that break Path
                          systems/networks do stupid things that break path
                          MTU discovery.  One of the more common ones is
                          dumbly blocking all ICMP traffic.  See:
                          http://www.netheaven.com/pmtu.html
                          (first link I clicked on after obGoogling) for
                          some discussion of this.  Also, that 1500 byte
                          figure wasn't pulled out of thin air, it's the MTU
                          for ethernet.  Notably, PPPoE links and network
                          tunnels typically have an MTU of 1492 bytes, and
                          invariably are used between systems and networks
                          with broken Path MTU discovery implementations.
                          with broken path MTU discovery implementations.
                          -dans
                          \_ So when you have one of these systems in between
                             you and your destination, what's the best way to
                             to a MTU discovery?  TCP ping?  Something like
                             'bing'?
                             \_ Could you rephrase that?  Are you asking what
                                to do if you have a tunnel or PPPoE link
                                between you and your destination?  Or are you
                                asking how to do path MTU discovery in spite
                                of a network or host that breaks path MTU
                                discovery? -dans
        \_ I can't seem to access webpages on soda.

11/14   Is there a reliable way to use a SIGCHLD handler to figure out when
        all the children a parent has forked have terminated? I find that
        sometimes some SIGCHLDs seem to be dropped, which results in the
        parent waiting for a child that has already terminated. AFAIK,
        standard signals that arise while blocked can be queued, but only
        one such signal will be queued, whereas any others will be dropped.
        I know there are POSIX "realtime" signals that guarantee queueing,
        but as SIGCHLD isn't a realtime signal, I don't see how that would
        apply to my problem. I'm sure what I'm trying to do is not all that
        uncommon; what's the canonical way to do it reliably? Thanks.
                  \_ read up on the wait() variations.

11/15   I can't access webpages on Soda.
        \_ Looking at the logs, it appears things stopped working a little
           after 7:00PM Sunday because of nfs problems at the time.  Can
           someone give apache a kick ("apachectl restart")?
           \_ Fixed.  Is anything going to work today? - root
              \_ Thanks. U = awesome.

11/15   Slavery in the North
        http://www.slavenorth.com/index.html
        \_ I'm curious what point you were trying to make by posting this.
           I thought it was common knowledge.

11/14   The EECS network is experiencing packet loss for large packets.
        I've mailed networks@eecs; I've also turned down soda's MTU, which
        has helped a lot for interactive stuff and for outgoing email.
        Incoming email and NFS are still affected.  --mconst
        \_ EECS has fixed the problem, and I've set the MTU back to normal.
           Please let me know if anything still seems broken.  --mconst

11/15   I'm pretty amazed this Wizard of ID made it past the censors.
        http://featurepage.creators.com/washpost.html?name=wiz
        \_ Uh, yeah, that's pretty fucking racy...where do you live, Iran?
           \_ Dude, the word "dork" won't make it past the newspaper comic
              censors.  It's worse than Iran.
         \_ What a depressing and retrograde attitude towards sex
            these assholes betray. SEX IS DIRTY AND BAD! Fucking pathetic.
            \_ YOU MUST WEAR A HAT TO HIDE YOUR SHAME AT HAVING SEXUAL
               THOUGHTS!
                \_ And if you're not ashamed?
                   \_ then you must REPORT TO THE NEAREST REEDUCATION
                      FACILITY
            \_ What a depressing and retrograde attitude towards depressing
            and retrograde attitudes about sex you betray. DEPRESSING AND
            RETROGRADE ATTITUDES ABOUT SEX ARE DIRTY AND BAD! Fucking
            pathetic.

11/15   The administration continues it war on poor people:
        http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/11/12/epa.pesticidestudy.ap/index.html
        \_ Huh?
           \_ Can't get a job?  Need to pay the rent?  Just poison your
              kids and get a thousand bucks and a camera to document your
              child's suffering!
              \_ Did you read the article?  That's why they're delaying
                 the study.

11/15   If Rice gets the Secretary of State position, it will be the one where
        she can do the least damage.  Dubya really wants to keep her on, but
        my guess is she's gonna get out.
        \_ oh well, the freepers are saying Peter Jennings just scooped Condi
           for State.  It would be funny if Rice said, "hey, I said I was
           still THINKING about it" -op
        \_ Of what alternatives is this "the one where she can do the
           least damage"?  As National Security Advisor, her only
           power was her (apparently considerable) influence on Bush.
           Presumably, Bush will still listen to her whatever her
           title is, so wouldn't giving her a position with actual
           executive powers to boot strictly *increase* the amount of
           damage she can do?
           \_  Why do you guys particularly hate Rice?  Is this just general
               hatred of Bush and neocon wingnuts in general, or is there
               something particularly evil about Rice?  She seems to me to
               be one of the less crazy members of the first term Bush
               administration (although that's not saying much.)
               \_ Who said anything about hating Rice?
                  She just strikes me as having been incompetent in her role
                  in Dubya term 1.
               \_ I personlly don't hate Rice at all. Of all the members of
                  Bush's inner circle, I think she is the most reasonable.
                  I won't go on about the rest. She deserves Secretary
                  of State. -liberal
        \_ Is Condoleeza Rice a perfect example of why Stanford is evil?

11/15   In excel, how do I make the first row a header row? ie, each page
        printed will contain the first row again. thanks.
        \_ File/ Page Setup/ Sheet/ "Rows to Repeat at top" and then
           select the row you want to repeat in the spreadsheet.
           \_ Thanks!

11/15   Can someone tell me why 64 bit machines are the future? I
        program a lot of things and I rarely need 2^32 memory.
        My guess why people move to 2^64 is because of RAM usage, but
        how the heck do you use up 2^32? And regarding addressing and
        page tables, wouldn't the size just blow up with 64 bit machines?
        \_ It's mostly in high-end engineering practices. Our ASIC CAD
           tools, for example, use memory like there's no tomorrow.
           Simulation waveforms and netlists take up a lot of space
           and many of our tools crap out on a 32-bit platform.
        \_ You don't write code to use up 2^32 memory.  The stupid people in
           Redmond who wrote your OS do.
           \_ Umm... high-performance computing has been wanting more than
              4GB of memory for a long time now, and that's because it needs
              that much, not because it's bloatware.
           \_ It'a conspiracy between M$ and Intel.  If M$ doesn't keep on
              producing bloatware, nobody would be upgrading their hardward
              again and again, and Intel will be out of business.
        \_ The consumer doesn't need it right now, but industrial and
           scientific users do, and they use much the same chips you do.
           Also, games are using more and more memory, not from pure bloat
           but from the need to have hundreds of megs of textures cached.  A
           single 3D scene can use half a gig of textures.
        \_ A lot of things can use more than 4GB memory. 4GB isn't that
           large anymore. Think of the size of hard drives and media file
           sizes. There is a need for 64-bit engineering tools and so forth.
           Sure it's not "needed", right now, by the vast majority of
           consumers. But it is an enabling technology and you're stupid if
           you can't see why it's "the future". With multitasking, I consider
           1GB my personal minimum on my home machine and I don't do anything
           special.
           \_ Well, it really depends on your apps, but I rarely go over 512MB.
              -!op
        \_ Everyone is talking about memory, but memory is just one
           aspect. Being able to execute 64-bit operations natively is
           a very nice thing if you need to do that sort of thing. Lots
           of scientific and engineering apps do this and performance is
           much better with a 64-bit chip.
           \_ true enough but what about other things? Adding 64 bit
              integers take up much more ALU space and a bit more time
              than adding 32 bits. 64 addressing takes up more space
              for your cache and longer comparator for the TAG and
              other hardwares. 64 bit doesn't come free you know.
              \_ It's a net gain over 32 bit.
        \_ "640K of memory should be enough for anybody"
           \_ But that clown is still the richest man in the world.  What can
              we say.
              \_ Well, wasn't he right? For the time it came out, to succeed
                 it didn't need to support more than that. From a short-term
                 business perspective it was fine. Long-term, it was fixable.
                 DOS was crap in a variety of ways, why focus on that.
        \_ AFAIK, no one supports addressing the entire 64bit memory
           space directly (the memory to store the page table would
           be crazy)
           be crazy). There are other advantages to 64bit addressing
           for ordinary people. Imagine being able to open several 8
           mp photos in ps and then being able to stitch them together
           without having to wait for stuff to load from disk.

11/15   http://www.gigapxl.org 4000 megapixel photographs

11/15   Canadians love Arafat too!
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/11/12/710607.html

11/15   What's a typical salary for an entry-level web app developer in the
        SFBA?
        \_ Two dollahs and fifteen cents
        \_ $50 if you can suppress the gag reflex
        \_ what kind of "web app developer"? if you're just some code monkey,
           probably 12.50-20, but if it's "software engineering", then it
           should probably be more like 25-30.
           \_ are we talking about hourly?
              \_ of course, no one talks about yearly as 12.50.

11/15   I got a ticket for 92 in a 65. Won't give me traffic school because
        of that extra 2mph I think. How screwed am I with that on my record?
        Besides losing my good driver insurance thing.
        \_ I think that's 1 point because you are 8 shy of 100 (where it is
           automatic 2 points and traffic misdemeanor - also traffic school
           ineligible - i know cuz that was my frist ticket)
        \_ As long as you didn't get written up for "reckless driving"
           I think you are okay. -IANAL

11/15   Canadians love Arafat too!
        http://tinyurl.com/42bqr

11/15   Most of you will probably not know who I'm talking about, but for those
        who do, John Balance of Coil is dead.
        http://www.thresholdhouse.com/index.html

11/15   What's better, Platoon or Full Metal Jacket.
        \_ "lean forward and choke yourself"
        \_ from FMJ: "This is my rifle, this is my gun (gestures at dick),
           this is for fighting, this is for fun (gestures at dick again)."
           \_ "Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from 2,000 meters. And that
               guy at the University of Texas shot(those students) from
               a thousand feet away. What did they have in common? THey're
               both Marines!"
               \_ "Hell, I like you. You can come over to my house and
                   fuck my sister."
            \_ "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every
                Gook is an American trying to get out."
        \_ Neither. Watch BAT21.
           \_ Who said that?  Who the fuck said that?!  Who's the slimy
              little communist shit twinkle toed cock sucker who just
              signed his own death warrant?!
              \_ http://www.rleeermey.com

11/15   What's a good place to buy a custom computer online?  I'm looking for
        a high degree of configurability and a sane price.  Dell is too
        limiting, and Falcon Northwest is $$$.
        \_ how is Dell limiting your configurability options?
           \_ No ability to pick a motherboard, few AMD options, no choice of
              component brands, few chances to get a 10kRPM drive, etc, etc...
        \_ Thunderbox
           \_ It seems they all look like rice-rockets.
              I guess what I'm looking for is "If Newegg sold systems..."
              \_ Company run by a white guy. Maybe he just has an Asian fetish
                 \_ I don't mean rice-rocket in the sense of souped-up asian
                    cars, but in the sense of computers built to *look* fast.
        \_ How about Monarch?  Dunno anything about their quality, though,
           but their prices do look reasonable and they're very flexible
           on the configs.
           \_ I like http://sysbuilder.com and I've bought two computers through them now.
           \_ Nice.  Thanks.  How's their customer service? -op
              \_ From what people have told me they can be slow to
                 respond (they seem to be a pretty small operation), but
                 they will get around to you.
        \_ I haven't tried them, but http://armsystems.com has quite the range
           of configurability. They specialize in low-noise boxes.