Recently we realized that some sites run a FILEMAXL limit ^= 10,000 and this
caused 'surprises' to some people. I would like to ask you to notify me of any
possible nonstandard MAIL/FILEMAXL setting on your LISTSERV so that I can upda-
te the PEERS NAMES accordingly. If your setting is really too small I'll have
to remove your server from PEERS NAMES so that it doesn't get used by DISTRIBU-
TE. 10,000 was intended as a limit for files sent from the local node and dis-
tributed to the local node, but I'd like to keep the network limit around 5,000
if at all possible. 3,000 is not enough I think.
We've had some power problems on our CPU, which tends to power off itself at
unpredictable intervals. Maybe it will do it before I finish this piece of mail
... :-( Needless to say this didn't help V1.5c to come out :-(
I realize I've forgotten to mention an important thing in my search for grad
schools. I've got a lot of replies and would like to thank you for your time.
However I recently had an "interview" with the 3rd-year-in-the-States people of
my school, an interview to which everybody is subjected and which is supposed
to help them identifying people who should not be allowed to go to the States
for their last year of studies (usually people who don't speak a word of en-
glish but think they'll be able to do without it *sigh*). This "interview"
looked exactly like the series of questions at the police headquarters that we
see on the TV ;-) Well, the lamp was missing, they were not smoking and they
were being polite, but the questions were the same and every word you uttered
was written down. They ended up with more than one page of notes after 10
minutes. Where did you learn english? Do you think you have a good level? Where
do you plan to go? How will you pay? Do you really think you'll be able to get
yourself a job?? It's very difficult. How do you expect these universities to
accept you? Did you get a firm proposal? Not yet? You should hurry up. You did
not answer the question. Be more precise. How did you contact those universi-
ties? What were your studies before Supelec? etc, etc.
At the end they pointed out that considering my marks they doubt I could find
a university willing to accept me. They usually accept only bright people. Also
the school doesn't want to send people who don't have a good level because it
would give a bad image of the school (yeah...) I tried to express politely that
I only aim as CS, in which all my marks are 20/20, while the bad marks are in
"%!$+!%$$!"%! thermodynamics and mass-power energy and similar unrelated fields
and it seemed to mollify them to some extent. Still I got the feeling that they
might decide to block my requests unless I got some realistic proposal very
soon. They are not on EARN (but -- see below), have no idea what BITNET is and
my story sounded so complicated and incredible that it left them sort of doubt-
ing whether I was inventing it or not... :-)
Also, Harold recently got a definitive, permanent veto from the Head "$%!"$%
at his university while all the intermediate people had said "no problem". As I
said the problem is that (as I understood it) nobody can ENTER a graduate cour-
se unless he has done 4 years of studies before. By the end of the year I WILL
have done 4 years but that "!%!"$+%$!"/+$% school just doesn't want to give me
a !"$"!%!+%!+ official piece of paper saying that. All they will give is a
paper saying I'll get a diploma equivalent to bachelor within 10 months of the
date the paper was signed. So, please forget about the courses I might take and
the assistantships and similar base details -- what I need is to know whether
the Head Master Chief Office of the university can be made to accept the condi-
tions imposed by my (suppressed insults same as above) school. If not, *sigh*,
I'll have to stay in France I guess.
About my school getting on EARN... I've heard that considering the political
influence my school has been submitted to, they are maybe perhaps probably
going to connect to EARN in the future. The computer they chose is this micro-
VAX they don't know what to do with. I think it has 3 terminals. I can under-
stand about their irresolution... First, the nearest EARN site is located more
than 100 meters away. I think that, taking the devious winding path of the pho-
ne lines into account, there may be nearly half a mile of cable between my
school and FRORS31... A leased line would be awfully expensive under those con-
ditions. Also, EARN is mostly an IBM network. Vade retro, satanas!!! We won't
connect our nice PDP11s to your unhallowed lines!!! ;-) In case you didn't know
Supelec is a DEC-only school, and all the teachers keep repeating how nice DEC
machines are and how powerful VAXes are, and some of it is even in the written
stuff they give us (all examples are about VAXes). When I heard about this 3-
terminals affair I thought that maybe I should buy myself a ZX81 for Christmas
and create my own node, FRERIC11... *sigh* ;-)
I can't resist mentioning what we have been told in the last CS lesson (we
have 14*1h30 a year of boring, meta-philosophical reflexions on computer and
programming structures). The teacher was introducing the powerful concept of
'programmer efficiency', which is, the number of instructions a programmer can
write a day. Of course only instructions that *work* are taken into account,
and similarly, uncommented instructions count for naught. The average efficien-
cy of a programmer, which YOU will have to reach by the end of the year (fright
ened silence in the classroom), is... (drum rolls)... 30 instructions a day,
regardless of the programming language being used. The reaction was very funny.
30% of frightened "gosh.... that's a lot", 50% of "uh?" and 20% of people laugh
ing, thinking it was a joke... but it was not!!!!!!!!! Then he said that of
course, some programmers are more efficient than standard. The record in the
school was someone, about 10 years ago, who could write *ninety* instructions a
day, but that's really a limit... (my, it reminded me of an advertisement we
got at Share about a certain lady who processed up to 25-30 notes a day and
scanned her reader up to twice a day ;-) ). I then understood why our CS les-
sons consist in 80% of computer meta-politico-philosophy (what is a bit, really
... intrinsically, the structure and concept of a program lies entirely within
the program, not within the bits that it manipulate... etc) and 20% of under-
standable, non-useless information :-)
Oh well, enough blabbered for today...
Eric
PS: Hmm... I'd enjoy an official publication of the instructions/day rates of
the various people who roam about near the central node of BITNET... ;-)
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