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Well, it seems you don't know much about the market then. Otherwise you would know that there are two players in it.

GPS (first launch in 1978) and GLONASS (first launch in 1982). Both still operational (although GPS is the better system now due to lack of money for GLONASS)

Here is a comparison

Since ICFP = "International Conference on Functional Programming" one wouldn't be surprised that they like a functional language such as OCaml best, however the 2003 2nd place winner received this judge's proclamation:

"C++ is a fine programming tool for many applications."

And the 1st place winner landed:

"C++ is the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers!" 2003 ICFP results here

...just FYI

[but Perl 6 is really where it's at]

The slashdot descripton mentions that OCaml is the best. ...But when you follow the link, and look at the bottom of the page regarding the first prize winner, This is the proclamation.

It's not OCaml.

I am starting to pick up on clicking the end of the URL, ^U and then middle click. Or, click the middle of the URL, and ^K to kill the rest of the line.

At home (on Windows) I use the True X-Mouse Gizmo which makes Windows mouse more X-like(select = copy, middle = paste, raise/lower window). One thing nice about it is if you explicitly hit ^C (as opposed to select copy) it knows to not copy the next time you select some text. You can also middle-click while dragging to turn on/off copy.

Here's what some of the Swedish candidates had to say about software patents http://mnemo.nu/publicerat/2004/may/candidates.php . FFII Sweden also put together information brochure, which is perfect to print out and leave in strategic places around the office (coffee tables, lunch room etc.)

VS-OFCDM (variable spreading factor orthogonal frequency AND code division multiplexing) is a special case of MC-CDMA (multi-carrier CDMA).

CDMA has lots of advantages for ease of frequency-reuse, as you can have a lot of people on the same frequency, but each one spread with different codes.

OFDM has a lot of resistance against fading (i.e. signal going in and out as you move through diffracted and relected signal peaks and valleys), because you are putting out your signal on a wide range of frequencies. You also get additional frequency diversity from OFDM.

Put them together by doing CDMA spreading first and OFDMing the result, and as much like in the combination of peanut butter and chocolate that results in peanut butter cups, you get an excellent result!

This paper and this paper gives some background.

VS-OFCDM changes the spreading factor adaptively based on cell structure, channel load, radio link conditions, etc.

They do, in their business line of printers. Consumers don't really want stuff that will last forever, they want to have the latest and greatest of almost everything, not just computer hardware. Businesses want reliability and ROI.

> HP's screwed us before with their DVD writers and other products...

I was curious about this so I checked to see if you can use open source tools to write to HP dvd writers. Turns out you can. So if you don't mind, please elaborate on the alleged screwing that took place.

Here is a technical comparison. They seem more alike than different to me.

I know of a few very high-powered geologists who cross-check GPS with GLONASS. Having a third system would seem to only help.

The Motly Fool has some interesting comments on R&D. From the article:
"Still, not all companies are the same. Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) metes out only 2% of sales on R&D, but continues to keep investors very happy"
"However, patents don't necessarily translate into money-making products. Think of Xerox (NYSE: XRX). For years, the company's PARC research center developed one breakthrough technology after another, but failed to make money on them. Its inventions, like the laser printer and the mouse, are now in the hands of competitors."

This is not strictly true. (I was at Xerox PARC when they spun off SpectraDiode and still have my Alto manual)
Xerox had(has) MANY successful spinoffs, as well as many dismal failures. But thats another story.

Companies may do very well through acquisitions of technology in liu of R&D of their own.

Interesting study in Sweden:
"The study reported in this thesis describes and analyzes technology-related acquisitions and spin-offs. The basic idea is that an economic system where large and small firms interact through technology-related ownership changes is highly conducive to overall innovativeness and long-term growth, given certain conditions"

Cisco certainly is successful at acquiring technology through acquisition, though they do a lot of their own R&D also..
I could go on with lots more examples.
The question is whether Dells model will hold up in the long run.
So far they seem to be doing ok with their 'Business Partner' model. Only time will tell.

I was born in Sweden but has studied at some other universities around the world (Switzerland, Japan) but I must say that I get more and more impressed with Swedish universities (especially the engineering faculties).

Most beginner universities offer Master's programs given in English, for bioinformatics there is for instance this
one.

By law higher education is free of charge in Sweden (!), ie no tuition fees (this applies to foreigners as well). For foreign student's I think there are various scholarship to cover living expenses as well.

Finland might be another good option, there are definately some world class universities overthere.

what experiences does people have with using DVD+RW for packet-writing under Linux

I use dvd+rw-tools but still have to find proper DVD+RW media for my drive. See previous post on same issue...
I use cdrecord for CD+RW and have no problem even doing multisessions.
My main concern is to find the proper DVD+RW media that my drive will support...
Cheers!

Xine has already been mentioned, but don't forget ogle for dvd playback. It's looks shit but works very well.

I burn dvds with growisofs, if you want to point and click instead, check out KDE's k3b.

There's some (small but cool) video of it in action on the page.

/August.

The results and strong entries for this competition are always an interesting read, so best of luck to everyone entering.

Just one niggle, though: last year, the first and second places were actually taken by entries using C++. I hope this year's proclamations won't suffer another unfortunate delay if the winner happens to be a non-functional language.

You can judge for yourself whether that pun was intended. :-)

Rules of the Game Is your favorite programming language the best? Does it lead to better and faster programs? Does it make programs easy to write and modify? Are you and your friends the best programmers in the world? Then prove it! All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams. The contest offers direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes for the winners: cash awards, books, invitations to the conference for students, and, of course, unlimited bragging rights. The prizes will be awarded at ICFP 2003 in Uppsala this August.

Check this presentation. Page 2.

use dvdbackup to get a decrypted copy on your hard drive, then use dvd+rw tools to burn the disk.

does anyone know of an effective DVD burner that runs under Linux

All the burners I've tried work fine for .iso under Linux so long as you use this software.

growisofs works well for DVD+R(W). It's supposed to support -R(W)s now too, but I haven't test that yet.

nr.1. DVD-R
DVD-R is 100% compatible with the DVD-ROM standard. The DVD-ROM standard is actually closely analoge to the CD-ROM standard upon which the very popular CD-R recordable is based.
burningtools :

• cdrtools-2.0x : cdrecord-prodvd, oss dvd, dvdrecord
• dvd+rw-tools : growisofs

• dvd+rw-tools : growisofs + mkisofs

no.3. DVD-RW
DVD-RW is mostly an analog standard to CD-RW. I use it when designing/creating and debugging new iso's.
burningtools :

• cdrtools-2.0x : cdrecord-prodvd, oss dvd, dvdrecord

no.4. DVD+RW
DVD+RW is where i touch in the dark. Basicly i would assume that DVD+RW is just a DVD+R which can be 100% erased, and thus be used again as Multi-track/Multi-volume archive disc.
burning tools:

• dvd+rw-tools : growisofs + mkisofs

Urls :
dvd+rw-tools: http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/
cdrecord-prodvd: ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/
cdrtools: http://www.fokus.fhg.de/research/cc/glone/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
oss dvd: http://crashrecovery.org/oss-dvd.html

Robert

This site helped me get my Sony DRU-510A DVD+/-RW+/-R DVD up and burning data dvds in no time. I haven't tried video, but then again, I bought it for data.

1. Why functional programming matters by John Hughes. An oldie but goodie, this can get you motivated to actually learn the language.
2. Hal Daume's Haskell tutorial is very complete, free and much better than the "Gentle Haskell Introduction" which isn't very gentle at all.
3. The Haskell Language definition is the official language description.
4. GHC's library reference, which you will use constantly on anything non-trivial.
5. The foreign language interface manual. Since Haskell has a small library you will probably need to call functions written in C a lot to get anything done. Luckily, Haskell's foreign function interface is quite nice.

Just use xtraceroute!

I bought an ATA DVD burner largely for data backups and had it direct-attached to my Linux machine. I used it this way for months. I also have a Powerbook G4. At some point, I borrowed an ieee1394 (Firewire) camcorder, and I got iLife so I could make home-movie DVDs. Transferring my home video to the powerbook was a breeze. iMovie was very easy to use for editing the video. I anticipated that I would use iMovie/iDVD to master an ISO that I could scp to the Linux box for burning.

Alas, iDVD claimed it wouldn't even start without the "correct hardware present". I assumed that meant a DVD burner. So I bought a firewire enclosure for the drive, and a ieee1394 card for the linux machine, and I was all set up to share the DVD drive. Except that really, iDVD won't run without an Apple Superdrive present. (The error message didn't tell me that; I had to google for that.")

In the end, I used Kino, dvdauthor, and growisofs to make my first home-DVD. The fact that I bought the ieee1394 enclosure was a waste of money caused by Apple's insistence on iron-fist control.

Sure, iMovie and iDVD are easier and quicker to learn than the open-source tools. But the open source tools wouldn't have caused me to waste time and money buying hardware, and hours editing video with a tool that ultimately I had to abandon (iMovie). It took some doing to learn how to use kino and dvdauthor to do what I wanted. But less time than it took to ship the DVD enclosure and reconfigure all my hardware.

Check out:

man growisofs

or go to.

If you're new to the command line try this tutorial

Good luck.

Not GUI, though.

I do this every time I rent a DVD I like. On Linux, or most any *nix system:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=/movies/filename.img

You can watch them with ogle

Only problem is, DVDs are 3-5G each so extract them as mpegs with transcode

Don't forget to share them on gnutella

Don't worry about the RIAA. Tell 'em you share your wireless bandwidth, must have been someone else. Or maybe someone spoofed your IP address. They can go and fuck themselves.

do a search for window managers on google, or try xwinman.org a site about window managers. I find that while gnome and KDE look much like what most people would expect, some other window managers put a new twist on how you interact with the computer.
also look at 3dwm.org a 3d window manager that's used at the 3D-CUBE

another good one is the Mozilla based desktop over at OEONE.com

I thought Litestep just replaces the shell (ie explorer.exe). Is there any way I can change the click-to-front behavior of Windows to use the Amigas (or WindowLabs) click-to-focus but not click-to-front model.

TxMouse can almost do this. Its default settings are focus on hover but not bring to front; bring to front is accomplished by clicking on the window decoration (titlebar).

TxMouse can also be set to autoraise after a settable delay.

TxMouse can emulate an X-Windows mouse including copy-on-select and paste-with-third-button.

It works a bit better than the PowerToys version too; the PowerToys one regularly screwed up one app (Microspell) when that app was activated by hotkey. TxMouse doesn't screw it up.

On the assumption that a lot of you will want this, I'm going to go into some gory details not included in TxMouse's documentation now. If you have no desire to use TxMouse, you can skip the rest of this post in good conscience; I promise you won't be missing any anti-Ashcroft zingers.

TxMouse also changes the mouse cursor change when select is copying, and allows you to turn off copying by pressing the third button.

On my mouse, turning off copying doesn't work with the middle button, as the middle button gets physically trapped down until the left button is released. TxMouse allows you to set it up so that the right mouse button does all the work the middle would normally do, for people with two-button mice, but a better solution to my problem was to re-assign middle to right and right to middle in the Microsoft Intellimouse driver. So now the middle button drop down context menus, and the right button pastes, except in the browser, where the right works as a "back" button.

The TxMouse mouse cursor that indicates text is being copied does not show up if the "Link Select" cursor is the default (the pointing finger); in that case the copy indicator is the "Handwriting" cursor. So you can customize what shows up on copy if you don't customize "Link Select", and vice-versa.

TxMoue is free but not open source (which sucks, as I'd like to modify it -- any pointers to source for MS_Windows Mouse drivers is appreciated so I can replicate it), and can be found here. Get it while Ashcroft still lets you connect web sites in socialist Sweden.

I suppose the text book publishers would try quite hard to prevent these from being used. "Oh, your school district is going to use the public-domain trigonometry textbook? Well, I'm afraid we can't give you the usual 12% discount on your purchase of organic chemistry textbooks."

Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" a story about his participation in textbook selection in California high schools, in which the publisher got the committee to approve a book before the content was even available to review.

"Surely..." also gives one example of the serious problems with content he found in most textbooks.

Try ogle.

You can make mpegs from dvds with transcode

Don't forget to share them on your favorite P2P network.

You misspelt 'scam'.

No he did not, he just knows more English than you do.

A while ago I bought Plextor's top-of-the-line DVD+-RW drive and I still can't write DVDs in Linux.

First of all, I had to download the Schilly's closed-source dvdrecord because RedHat's fork doesn't even recognize the drive.

But even the closed-source version refused to blank a DVD+RW disc (get this for doing that) and crashed when it's tried to fixing a DVD-R disc. Even today I have to do all the DVD burning in Windows. CD-RW burning works just fine under Linux.

I can only assume that by fp the poster means functional programming.

Offtopic, you may cry!

I would argue that it is not.

As long as the business world continues to hold the position that coding is a low skill job: 'Low-skill jobs like coding...' software will continue to suck (be unusable, buggy, insecure, incorrect). Now I don't argue that american software developers are any more qualified to write good software, in fact, I would argue that in the most important aspect [Mathematics education] they are some of the most under qualified. This is just to say that the business world seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what goes into writing good (correct) software and doesn't particularly care to put forth the time and effort to do so.

--Isaac

There are many papers proving such protection. Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes.

By the way, if Haskell, the purest functional programming language is on its way to aquire many practical real-life libraries, OCAML has already passed most of that way and already used in may practical cases for network programming.

But I would advise Erlang - that way your kernel will be distributed, fault-tollerant and load-balanced by default. No need to mention it will be free from many C-typical bugs. And Erlang is already used for real-life high-perfeomance-required system applications in many telecommunication companies.

A much better solution is to use the regular cdrecord with growisofs, which lets you lay down and grow an ISO9660 file system on (as well as to burn an arbitrary pre-mastered image to) all supported DVD media.

I pasted the URL on the subject line because I don't expect to be modded up. The URL points to the second most popoular DVD burning backend on Linux, dvd+rw-tools. Most uninformed Linux users will point to dvdrecord, which is basically just a patch applied to the opensource version of cdrecord (cdrecord-proDVD is a binary-only release). It's also availabe here, as a pure patch. The author of cdrecord, Joerg Schilling, is well-known for his dislike of dvdrecord, which he considers "illegal" as it purportedly violates certain provisions of the GPL. Andy Polyakov's dvd+rw-tools, on the other hand, is a totally independent implementation, at least as far as the burn strategy is concerned. For the creation of the burn data, it uses mkisofs as a backend. Despite the name, dvd+rw-tools can also burn -R/W!

From reading the cdwrite@other.debian.org mailinglist this seems to be the best option for now, although Joerg Schilling (author of cdrecord) is actively working on cdrecord again as well, amongst others to add DVD+ support.

Lourens

How'd you come up with that definition?

Hey thanks for questioning my presuppositions, and I'm not above admitting when I'm wrong. "Revenue" is almost always defined in terms of tax income, as seen in these definitions:

1
2
3
4
5

However, I disagree that it's like your landlord: you entered into contract with your landlord willingly after considering your options. I was born here. (And as other respondents have pointed out, "I can just move" is not a valid response to people who are discussing how to change the democracy for the better.)

As a newbie, the most difficult thing I find about Linux is knowing about the programs you need. Case in point, I've been trying for about 2 weeks to get DVD's to play in Xine with no success. Then by chance I happened to come across Ogle and about 30 minutes later (plus turning on DMA on my DVD-ROM) I was up and running. No problems whatsoever with the install unlike trying to get Xine to do it.
My point is that there's lot's of software for Linux to do whatever you want but the difficult part is knowing what the software is called and where to get it.

Last time I looked (but please, correct me if this has changed) there was very little in the way of DVD authoring software for *nix...

There are a few projects, mostly towards the stable end of beta, that I've used without many hassles.

Maybe not seminal or classic like many of the already cited papers, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned it yet. I'm learning Lisp and I was curious about what exactly is "functional programming" in practice. The 1984 paper was a great introduction, along with Graham's book On Lisp.

The first thing that struck me when reading the question is that "great" is a subjective term. I'm sure many people would acknowledge the very well known things, such as "Goto considered harmful", as great.

I imagine others would consider a much broader spectrum. For example, one of the most insightful papers I've ever read is John Hughes's Why functional programming matters . It took a subject I'd seen briefly, in introductory lectures during a CS course, and put a perspective on it that motivated what I'd already seen -- something no other book or paper I had found did.

Perhaps to an experienced user of functional programming languages, this paper would offer little or nothing new. Nevertheless, to a relative newbie interested in the subject, it provided a very useful second step on the path. In that sense, from my perspective, that was also a great paper.

That's already happening. Scrupleless companies are exploiting holes in IE to install software and 'shortcuts' on peoples desktops.

See this video demonstration.

Note that this works on FULLY PATCHED IE! It is reported that a clean install of XP, updated as far as it goes on Windows Update is still vulnerable. Only by disabling "Navigate Sub-frames over different domains" in Security Settings can you stop it and that probably only works because the crap is loaded from a different server in this case!

ive seen stereoscopic pong before, but an OS? youd have to have an inch of waste on each side of the screen just for the background, not to mention text would be impossible to read. still, it sounds like fun. maybe bolt it on to FVWM or something equally plain and it might work.

Somethign nobody has mentioned yet (at least with a high rating) is that this is the contest for the International Conference on Functional Programming, and not only that, from the rules page:

First prize: $1000, free conference registration for two student team members, and the satisfaction of hearing the judges proclaim your programming language "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."

Second place language gets: "the consolation of hearing us proclaim your programming language "a fine programming tool for many applications." "

So, I want to make sure this is clear: At the International Conference on Functional Programming, the judges had to get up a proclaim that "C++ is the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."

I would've loved to be there. Anybody who was at ICFP care to comment?

This contest concerned virtual racing tracks. The winner was the one who submitted the trace which would pilot the car as fast as possible around the track. (See the problem description for more information.)

Thus the judges never ran the program on their computers, and in theory could have judged the contest without even looking at source code. To me this seems a bit unfair because the winner could just be the one with the fastest computer, not the best code. I noticed that the first prize team used 16 dual Xeons.

So did anyone here compete? In practice are the results greatly influenced by how much hardware the contestants had access to?

Does anyone have any information about Sweden? Chalmers comes to mind as being somewhat famous in the area....

Now I think I'm going out on a limb here; but just maybe it could be used to read / play DVDs. Don't quote me:

AMEN! I run Win98. It does everything that WinXP does, with exceptions such as stability and security, which don't bother me all that much (I use it for games, etc). It also uses far fewer resources, leaving more for my games. Why should I pay my hard-earned money for an OS that requires more resources for the same functionality? It's like buying a new car because it has a prettier coat of paint, even though it gets worse gas mileage.

You can't tell me that I need to get a new hard drive just because Longhorn will take 3GB on my hard drive for all those pretty backgrounds and pictures for your MP3 player.

I'll just stick with my OS that takes 200 MB...before I strip it down under 5 MB