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That is hardly plausible because that would make it use 900 grams of lithium per kWh. That would be outrageously poor usage of lithium in a field where around 200 grams per kWh is the norm, depending on battery chemistry used. See page 16 here.

Seems like there is some research out there about this sort of thing already, found this in one try: Digital Communication over Speech Compressed Channel (Sverrisson 2008). I think the main problem would be that the baseband processor generally has direct control of the microphone, so you'd have to do some trickery, or use a phone where this simply isn't true.

Great. Then we will continue to middle click paste in Windows then. Oh wait...

http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/

I get the impression that CUDA/OpenCL is still the best option. This thesis on Obsidian presents, a Haskell set of binding which might be easier and also covers the basics quite well. Haskell lends itself really well because the language inherently is designed for parallelism because of purity and out of order computation. That being said, I think Obsidian is a bit rough around the edges but if you are looking for a real alternative, this is one.

Some other related links:

* Chalmers' press release
* The EU project's official website
* Job openings in the project

Thanks, I reacted strongly to this myself. This is a very big deal for Chalmers University of Technology who are the ones who actually "won" anything here, and it would be nice to at least mention them in an article summary since they are the driving force behind the project. Nokia is one partner out of many.

Chalmers have been at the forefront of experimental nano science in Europe since their big investment in the MC2 building with a state-of-the-art clean room, with a particular focus on materials science and microwave electronics. They have a theoretical department to go with this, and the head of the theoretical division, Jari Kinaret, is the one who will commandeer this project.

This months-old article lays out the thoughts before the big project landed, where they originally budgeted for a ~€80M project. Now they actually got an order of magnitude more funds which will expand the project greatly, but it's still the same focus.

A more recent article that even more clearly lays out the circumstances.

(CAPTCHA: "electron" - how fitting)

Thanks, I reacted strongly to this myself. This is a very big deal for Chalmers University of Technology who are the ones who actually "won" anything here, and it would be nice to at least mention them in an article summary since they are the driving force behind the project. Nokia is one partner out of many.

Chalmers have been at the forefront of experimental nano science in Europe since their big investment in the MC2 building with a state-of-the-art clean room, with a particular focus on materials science and microwave electronics. They have a theoretical department to go with this, and the head of the theoretical division, Jari Kinaret, is the one who will commandeer this project.

This months-old article lays out the thoughts before the big project landed, where they originally budgeted for a ~€80M project. Now they actually got an order of magnitude more funds which will expand the project greatly, but it's still the same focus.

A more recent article that even more clearly lays out the circumstances.

(CAPTCHA: "electron" - how fitting)

Thanks, I reacted strongly to this myself. This is a very big deal for Chalmers University of Technology who are the ones who actually "won" anything here, and it would be nice to at least mention them in an article summary since they are the driving force behind the project. Nokia is one partner out of many.

Chalmers have been at the forefront of experimental nano science in Europe since their big investment in the MC2 building with a state-of-the-art clean room, with a particular focus on materials science and microwave electronics. They have a theoretical department to go with this, and the head of the theoretical division, Jari Kinaret, is the one who will commandeer this project.

This months-old article lays out the thoughts before the big project landed, where they originally budgeted for a ~€80M project. Now they actually got an order of magnitude more funds which will expand the project greatly, but it's still the same focus.

A more recent article that even more clearly lays out the circumstances.

(CAPTCHA: "electron" - how fitting)

I'm one of those who dislike click-to-focus and raise-on-focus, and prefer the z order to be independent on the focus. It just makes more sense to me to be able to do things like cut from and paste into partially obscured windows without changing which windows are on top.
Click border to raise, or ALT-F1 if you can't see an exposed bit of border. But most of the time, there's just no need to raise.

Windows users have a harder time getting X mouse functionality, but thankfully there's True X-Mouse, from http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/

But for some reason random data testing is less popular for the other languages I'm familiar with.

you can have a bit X feeling (middle mouse)on windows :-)
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/

http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a .pdf with a huge list of ebook sites (and one for how to swear in all languages!). Haven't tried any of them, but go for it:
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww

Well the new standard has threading support which is also very important. But I am completely in agreement with you - removal of concepts is a major setback for generic programming. Concepts put templates on a solid theoritical ground, which will now be sorely lacking. This is now the *3rd* big feature which was dropped from the standard citing lack of time, other 2 being modules and GC.

For those interested, this paper compares C++ concepts and templates with Haskell typeclasses: A comparison of c++ concepts and haskell type classes

See also an interesting paper on the history of Erlang, by Armstrong, and Erlang, The Movie.

the ogle project is abandoned. it's better to use VLC or something similar. latest official release of ogle is from 2003. source: http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/dist/

No multi-threading is going to help you if you keep implementing quicksort.

Others disagree

There is a relatively small but active community of open source functional programming languages. The big names (for this relatively small group) are Scheme, Haskell, ML and Ocaml, and Erlang. Lisp and the new open source JVM language Scala also support functional-only programming styles. So does Microsoft's language F#. (But Lisp, Scala, and F# can be used in non-functional ways.)

There are some great discussions on the advantages of functional programming. Here's one on the Haskell website: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction Another one is this paper on the subject: http://www.md.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf

I am not very experienced with functional programming at all. But if I understand it correctly, one of the ways functional programming makes parallel processing easier is the fact that variables are immutable. That is, variable values can't be changed once they are assigned.

So if you want to do a String reverse in a functional style with immutable variables, it could be (Java):
public String reverse(String s) {
if (s == null || s.length() < 2) return s;
else return (s.substring(s.length() - 2, s.length() - 1) + reverse (s.substring(0,s.length() - 2);
}

That's awkward an inefficient in Java, but you hopefully see how it works. A lot of the difficulties with parallel programming come from having multiple threads accessing and changing shared mutable (changeable) variables. You have to coordinate access carefully or there can be big problems. With immutable variables, that particular source of bugs does not exist.

Best Use of Light and Spheres:

        Anders Gavare
        Gibraltargatan 82-156
        SE-412 79 Gothenburg
        Sweden

        http://www.mdstud.chalmers.se/~md1gavan/

Judges' Comments:

        To build:

        make gavare

        To run: ./gavare > ioccc_ray.ppm

        For users of systems that distinguish between text and binary mode
        (you know who you are), add a library call that specifies binary mode
        for stdout as the first statement of main(),
        or use freopen("ioccc_ray.ppm", "wb", stdout) and do not use redirection.

        A freely distributable command-line version of Microsoft Visual C
        exhibits an optimizer bug when compiling this entry. Disable /Og for
        best results.

        The judges were able to figure out how to control position
        (in all 3 coordinates), size, and color (to some extent) of the balls.

Selected Author's Comments:

        It is possible to write some kinds of programs in C without using reserved
        words. For very short and trivial programs, it usually isn't very hard to
        write a variant using no reserved words, but with this program I want to
        show that also non-trivial programs can be written this way. This IOCCC
        entry contains no reserved words (I don't count 'main' as a reserved word,
        although the compiler gives it special meaning) and no preprocessor
        directives.

        The program is a small ray-tracer. The first line of the source code may
        be modified if you want the resulting image to be of some other resolution
        than the predefined. The 'A' value is an anti-alias factor. Setting it to
        1 disables the anti-aliasing feature (this makes the output look bad), but
        setting it too high makes the trace take a lot more time to complete.

        The ppm image can then be viewed using an image viewer of your own choice.
        (Running the ray-tracer may take several minutes, even on fast machines,
        so be patient.)

        I am very much aware about the fact that I'm breaking the guidelines. For
        example, the word 'int' is a reserved word and therefore all variable
        declarations are implicit. There will no doubt be _lots_ of warnings,
        no matter which compiler is used. Still, the source code should be word-
        length-independent and endianess-independent.

        Another reason for writing code without using reserved words is that many
        text editors will make all reserved words turn BOLD when printed on
        paper. Since I care for the global environment, we shouldn't waste any
        more laser toner, or ink, than necessary. Everyone should write C code
        with no reserved words, and our world will be a better place.

I play Genesis http://genesis.tekno.chalmers.se/ LPMud. been playing for a long time since around the time it opened i think. really love it. always changing and new things to explore and do.

How exactly can you write the code to "do lazy evaluation" in these languages?

Lets look at a practical example (taken from the old and famous Why Functional Programming Matters article).

Lets say you're implementing the alphabeta algorithm. In a lazy language, you can say something like:

solution = alphabeta . cutTree 5 . fmap gameValue . generateGameTree initialState

Where "cutTree 5" will cut the tree's branches to depth 5. In Python, or various other languages, you'd end up passing some "depth" variable to the recursion itself (in this case, generateGameTree), which would have to be decreased at each call. In a lazy language, the solution remains modular. You can re-use existing components like "cutTree" without having to write them yourself!

Modularity is the basis of programmer productivity, and laziness allows exciting new ways to actually achieve modularity.

Here is a classic paper on the style and advantages of functional programming:

http://www.math.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.htm l

Also, John Backus' Turing Aware lecture, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style?"

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backu s.pdf

What's the over/under that this technology will be bought by ford / gm and killed in development?

• Research, publications at Lund University
• Research at Chalmers University of Technology
• Research at Stanford University
• Research, publications at University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Research at University of California, Berkeley

Here's a video of a human-sized vehicle that operates on the same principle, generally called a dicycle/diwheel. If it accelerates or brakes too hard, it just flips over, with no harm done. (though the alarm clock seems to do more flipping than actual moving... does it have any sort of sense of how much forward momentum it's got?)

The only annoyance is that I sometimes switch to look at the other screen without making the application there active, and then start typing

What you can use is focus-follows-mouse. No more need to click on windows to activate. True X-Mouse Gizmo. A tiny app that does the magic on Windows (~50KB).

-P@

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

Set XP to classic windows.

  Launchy is a popup (default alt-space) which finds and launches an app based on a)what you use the most and b) the first few letters of its name. You never need the start menu except for the rare things whose name you can't remember. Unintrusive install.

Task switch is alt-tab with a mini-view of the window so you can see where you are going, and you can choose with the mouse,

TXmouse is what the lame MS attempt should have done.

disclaimer: no relation to the devs; just an admirer of great free software

If you are that clear about who and what you want, make a very obvious sign "This is what we're recruiting right now". List specific positions with job descriptions and all, and put a box beneath it with forms "Contact me about ___ position". And include internships, thesis opportunities as well.

Sadly, many of the companies that go to the job fairs I've been to don't really have a very specific goal of being there, it's more like a public relations thingie. It's almost like using a job fair as an opportunity of recruiting seems like a novel idea...

Worst example I have is Ericsson, who for several years went to the job fair at Chalmers, claiming they had no job openings, no possibilities of thesis writing at the company, and no summer internships.

Linux drives are a software issue, not a hardware issue. See this doc. I have a standard dual layer drive on my linux box and it works fine reading dual layer disks or writing single layer disks, I just can't write dual layer disks.

I imagine it's the same with Lightscribe which allows you to print on the disk using the dvd drive.

(If you're stuck on Windows, try the TX-Mouse Gizmo for "true" X-like mouse behavior. Type in windows that aren't on top, lower windows with the right mouse button, X-like copy-and-paste. It's free to download & use, but I don't think it's free software.)

On the other hand, I don't think any major UI idea is ever lost, it just becomes another Free software project...

Mondrian is also the name of an experimental functional language for the .NET platform written by Nigel Perry.
It's also a Haskell dialect described in this 1997 paper.
I really don't think it's anything worth getting worked up over. This is an inhouse program that was started as a side-project and is unlikely to be released (if at all) for quite some time, I think it's quite likely he just picked the name since it already had a Google-fied logo (they've used that before for their frontpage on (the artist) Mondrian's birthday).

Any ass monkey can right a book of criticisms... I would like to see his attempt at a software development methodology that is better.

If that's all it was, then why has no one else been able to create an equivalent tool to Joerg's?

True, but a simple modification (piping the output of tar to a simple script that reads input and writes them to chunk files, then uses growisofs to write those directly to disc) means you only need a media-size of scratch space.

Using a DVD+RW in block mode (yes, they support that: see Linux kernel patch here) means you need no temporary space.

But it's all a little academic, as the poster was looking for a Windows solution, which this isn't.

Personally, I like monadic parser combinators, like those provided by the Parsec library for Haskell. You can parse arbitrary context free grammars, and even many sensible context-sensitive ones with little difficulty, you get to write your parsers in the language (Haskell) and you get meaningful parse error reports for free.

A major downside to the approach is that Parsec itself lacks a symmetric choice combinator, having only left-biased conjunction, together with a combinator which causes a parser not to consume input when it fails. Though other libraries, like Koen Claessen's ReadP rectify this, the associated performance costs tend to be higher.

I tend to use Parsec even for some tasks where many people would use regular expressions. It might not be quite as fast as statically building your parser, but it's possible to get really quite decent performance out of it, and the convenience level is quite high.

Another interesting thing to look at are arrow-based parser combinators, like PArrows -- these allow for a greater level of optimisation at runtime, so you can get really good performance while allowing for things like symmetric choice. They also can allow for cool features like the ability to inspect the parser and emit code in various languages for that parser. (The one I linked to has the ability to compile parsers to JavaScript code in fact.) The downside is that arrows tend to be a little more inconvenient to program with than monads.

I know by itself thermite and similar methods have difficulty penetrating the outer case reliably, but I would think drill+thermite injection to fill the internal cavity of the system would be effective..

Takes too long to drill the disks and insert the thermite, while your spy plane is spiralling down.

/August.

I know by itself thermite and similar methods have difficulty penetrating the outer case reliably, but I would think drill+thermite injection to fill the internal cavity of the system would be effective..

Takes too long to drill the disks and insert the thermite, while your spy plane is spiralling down.

/August.

I know by itself thermite and similar methods have difficulty penetrating the outer case reliably, but I would think drill+thermite injection to fill the internal cavity of the system would be effective..

Takes too long to drill the disks and insert the thermite, while your spy plane is spiralling down.

/August.

Probably cause the chances that a DVD burner doesn't work in Linux (or any other OS) is pretty small these days; the drives are almost always MMC compliant. There might be a few features on the more expensive drives (e.g. Plextor with GigaRec, etc.) that aren't supported by burning software, but it'll almost certainly still burn DVDs, which is what it's supposed to do...

I've played with a number of various multimedia applications, and I always come back to mplayer. Personally, I use KMplayer when I want a GUI, since it has a few nice features that GMplayer doesn't (drag and drop playlist, maintains the correct aspect ratio of the file when resizing, nicer integration with KDE). I still occasionally use Ogle for DVDs, but I'm eagerly anticipating MPlayer supporting DVD menus.
For those of you who might have stuck with Xine based players and haven't played around much with MPlayer, there are a few reasons I really like it:
The largest reason is that it plays bloody everything. I've personally never come across a file that I couldn't open with MPlayer. The worst I've ever run into is in some files that are slightly corrupted I've had to use the -idx flag to reindex the file so that I can gracefully skip over bad sections of the file instead of the video just stopping playing. I find this particularly handy when I'm downloading television shows off bittorrent and the seeders all go away when I'm at like 90%.
Mplayer also seems more lightweight ot me than Xine. Most of the time, if I'm watching video at my computer, it's because I'm doing something that's taking long enough that I'm sitting at the desk waiting for it to finish (compiling a lot of software, doing 3D rendering, etc.) so it's nice to be able to dedicate more cycles to whatever real work is getting done while still being able to relax with a video.

Cygwin
TXMouse
Virtuawin
gvim
proTeXt

No, the just computer generated it. A couple of fellow students of me at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, did make a transformer, though (warning, MOV video file link).

"The FOSS community have been working on features like this since at least early 2004."

3Dwm is much older than that. From the PDF available on their web page:

"Initiated in 1999 by Niklas Elmqvist and Robert Karlsson at Chalmers Medialab"

The idea is simply to define the "space" of legal inputs for each module and the correctness criterion for each input, and then generate random inputs based on the spec. This is far more effective than traditional hand-coded test data at both unit and system test levels, and as an added bonus the test spec doubles as a formal specification of the correct behavour that coders can actually work from. This is similar to the XP practice of "test-driven development".

Paul.

• Is it shit?
• Is it already in use?
• Is it also a word with negative connotations?
• Will it get me shut down by the trademark police?

You won't find any numbers in this game, it and its ilk are what I consider to be among the world's first mmorpg:

Genesis, The Original LP MUD

http://genesis.tekno.chalmers.se/

Regards

Update:

• This page indicates that Windows does *not* have UDF write support without the use of a third party program, like DirectCD or Nero's offering, InCD.
• Linux does have write support for UDF filesystems, but it's not turned on in the default kernel config.
• It's difficult to find anything definitive about OSX, but the consensus from the interweb is that OS X can't currently handle writing to UDF without third party software.

So this probably won't work as a universal filesystem unless some pressure is put on MS and Apple to get native support for writing to UDF, unfortunately :\

bleh. links:
2
2
3 (bonus, the disputation. Parts understandable even if you don't know Swedish, because it is partly translated...)

Lots of pranks are done at Chalmers too. My favorite is when a couple of chalmerists went to the city public parking dept and asked to buy a park bench. The answer, of course, was no. But after some nagging, ultimately, the students got to buy a bench. They got a receipt and all.

The students started to carry the bench all over the city. Of course, the suspicious behavior made the police stop them. Multiple times... Finally, there was a broadcast on the police radio "there are two chalmerists carrying a park bench. DO NOT stop them - they have bought it and have a receipt". Of course, the radio amateur students were listening to the police radio at the time, and all the park benches in the city were carried by two students each (not the original ones) and all put on Götaplatsen...

There are many other good pranks from Chalmers though, like welding a tram to its track (if that hadn't cost really lots of money as the tram broke catastrofically it would have been great), or exchanging the messages of the speed radar notifications (mere notification, no speed cameras) outside town in the eighties for references to Woody Woodpecker, the mascot of the newly started computer engineering programme. And there probably is a whole bunch of them that I totally forgot, too.