ljdickey@watmath.UUCP (10/15/83)
I think that we have evidence of a big screw up in the mail system between watmath and utzoo. This message appeared on our system today. It is message number 710 in the "net.math" section. It is a repeat of something that I posted a more than a month ago. Notice that the first part of the message is missing. Two problems: part of the message missing about two month's delay What is going on? The fix for the first problem has been posted around the net. Why is it still happening? From ljdickey@watmath.UUCP Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 Relay-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watmath.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watmath.UUCP Path: watmath!utzoo!watmath!ljdickey From: ljdickey@watmath.UUCP Newsgroups: net.math,net.lang.apl Subject: Matrix Inverses Message-ID: <5644@watmath.UUCP> Date: Sun, 21-Aug-83 11:51:26 EDT Article-I.D.: watmath.5644 Posted: Sun Aug 21 11:51:26 1983 Date-Received: Fri, 14-Oct-83 16:39:20 EDT Sender: ljdickey@watmath.UUCP Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 24 e always found an invertible matrix. No singular matrices so far. So, I have this question: Given an N by N matrix with integer entries chosen (with replacement) from the set of integers {1, 2, 3, ..., K}, what is the probability, as a function of N and K, that the determinant of the matrix will be zero? -- Lee Dickey (ljdickey@watmath) University of Waterloo -- Lee Dickey, University of Waterloo. (ljdickey@watmath.UUCP) ...!allegra!watmath!ljdickey ...!ucbvax!decvax!watmath!ljdickey
dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (10/16/83)
The system is not "sloppy". What happened is that utzoo collected all of the news that came in for the week that watmath was down, plus or minus a little, and then wrote it on a tape to send to us. It was intended that we would get the tape shortly after watmath came back up, within the one-month expiry period, and thus any duplicate articles generated by this would simply get thrown away. Due to various problems, we didn't get the tape until this week. The contents of the tape was then fed into the news system anyway. None of these articles should have been sent back to the rest of the Ontario subnet; only Waterloo sites should see duplicates. It's something we can do little about, since we don't have history information dating back that far. Yes, a special check could be made for stuff posted from waterloo, but it's not worth the effort.
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/16/83)
The missing chunk at the beginning of the article is probably the result of some system out there that hasn't fixed the truncation bug. Yes, there are systems that haven't. The re-appearance of an old article is either a question of flakey software somewhere or else simply a matter of a loop in the network. The "history" file news keeps is partly intended to make sure that looping articles get bounced, but the history data is not kept forever and therefore an article that takes a long time to loop can sneak back in. This has happened before. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry