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Shhh... Don't you know its fashionable here to be blindly pro-(anti-MS) and ignore other stuff?

How about any one of the top 10 algorithms? My fave is the Fast Multipole Method.

like Bob Metcalfe did when he predicted "gigalapses" of the internet?

There used to be journals for every concievable area of comp-sci. They all seem to have died in the 90s.

Check out any of these places for a start:

• ACM Publications
• IEEE Computer Society Publications Center
• CiteSeer

Have you ever coded a hash table? Or understand how they work? ... hash tables can have an O(2) or O(3) worse-case lookup time.

We all know what a hash table is. You apparently don't know that O(f(n)) = { g(n) : \exists k . \forall n . g(n) <= k f(n) }, thus O(1) = O(2) = O(3). Using this definition, the statement "g(n) = O(f(n))" is an overloaded synonym for "g(n) \in O(f(n))".

Explain the difference between a reference and a pointer.

They are essentially the same thing. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that you can't perform arithmetic operations on the address associated with a reference in languages like C++ or Java. But that's a property of the language's type system, not of the English words "reference" and "pointer."

So far no one mention this report from ACM/IEEE.

It is on computer science curriculum and it describes several approaches to introductory courses -- object-first, procedural-first, hardware first, etc.

My opinion is that it does not matter whether you start with high level or assembly as long as all levels are covered.

And many people mentioned Knuth and TAOCP. But this is not an introductory textbook for beginners. The reason he used assembly is to describe and analyse EXACTLY the cost and complexity of different algorithms. No one now could be called CS expert without reading this seminal work. So in some sense, expert programmers would know assembly but programmers who know assembly are not necessarily expert.

My experience started with Pascal in highschool, scheme in first year college and C++ in second year. I encountered assembly, and binary gates and hardware, in second year basic architecture course. So can I cal myself expert?:)

Anyway, computer science at UBC is quite good! (I am kind of sad when they change first year courses from scheme to java. Not that it is a bad choice, but I am not sure why I feel that way.)

The IEEE Computer Society is the largest of the IEEE's 37 societies. And it's been around for 58 years. Besides its own voice in Washington, it has the IEEE's voice behind it.

Finally I should point out that there is a lot of corporate funding for organizations like the IEEE, USENIX (SAGE), ACM and so forth. In some respects it's kind of ridiculous, it would be like having HMO's pay for and to some extent control the AMA.

IEEE's funding is almost entirely from product sales and membership dues.

-h-

This is considered a standard portion of a CS curriculum. Every CS grad should be expected to have had some exposure to those topics. Here is the the ACM guidelines showing coverage of digital logic and architecture. I think Patterson and Hennessy covers most of this, except maybe for digital logic.

Too bad Compaq & HP killed off the Alpha (the 364 is still a 264 (and was untill last year still kicking ass.) and scales better than almost anything) the 464 was to be the first new core, and was up to a 5X performance increase because of the 1st major addition to the alpha arch (Brief overview) It has been speculated that the reason HP doesn't release Alpha 364 scores, it that it doesn't want to embarass intel (& cause more ummm... stuff to fall on the pro IA-64 group of which HP is the only major OEM), which may or may not be true.

Ode to Alpha

The first 2004 issue of IEEE Computer has a similar story DakNet: Rethinking Connectivity in Developing Nations (need membership to access). It even shows a nice picture of MAP-enabled Honda bike and an ox cart!

While the parent was indeed a plagiarist, and I do agree that the size comparisons that people make are silly, why can't we call IFF a form of RFID? IFF *is* RFID. You can't divorce the two. I can easily find dozens of credible sources that cite IFF as a form of active RFID. IEEE websites, rfidprivacy.org, several university sites, all agree that IFF was the first developed RFID technology. The only key difference in what Wal*Mart's using is in the fact that it's a passive system. It's radio frequency identification, right? Why wouldn't identify-friend or foe qualify?

Rojas showed that Zuse's electromechanical Z3 (and by inference, the mechanical Z1 of the same architecture) is universal in the Turing sense in a 1998 IEEE article.

Great find, thank you. But the abstract states:
"This is done by simulating conditional branching and indirect addressing by purely arithmetical means". So indeed the branching is no inherent feature of the machine but rather a hack.

I know a similar hack exists for the ENIAC to allow branches. But the ENIAC does not even execute something like a program as we know it today. IMO the ENIAC is massively overrated.

Btw. mod parent up!

Rojas showed that Zuse's electromechanical Z3 (and by inference, the mechanical Z1 of the same architecture) is universal in the Turing sense in a 1998 IEEE article.

I agree. A better solution would be to push for Professional Engineer style licensing. The IEEE Computer Society is pushing for this very thing, through their "Certified Software Development Professional" program. Besides helping keep jobs, this is a good way to show mastery of fundamental skills and ensure public safety.

We should push for Professional Licensing to be recognized as a legal standard, with licensed professionals required for development projects and networks where public privacy and safety are important. If we require licensing for Electricians, Civil Engineers, and even Beauticians, we should require licensing for Software and Network professionals.

And next year, we're going to do 3-D calculations.

Yeah, but Bob's now the pacesetter for Internet-Is-Dying predictions. He's the go-to guy for any journalist looking for a juicy story about its imminent demise (at least when he isn't writing about it himself in his InfoWorld editorials), and he's been saying the same thing since 1995. At least he was true to his word; when his prediction of a 1996 "catastrophic collapse" proved untrue, he literally ate his own words at the WWW6 conference.

But then he predicted it again in 2000.

- A.P.

He did eat his column afterwards.

A more practical alternative is energy scavenging--the use of alternative energy sources available in the node's environment.

One example is the use of piezoelectric techniques to recover energy from vibration (the famous shoe generator). (Electromechanical and magnetomechanical conversion means may also be used.) Others have already suggested photoelectrics. Other possibilities include changes in air temperature and pressure (which powers the Atmos clock) and even consumption of sugar.

A book on energy scavenging, authored by three Berkeley wireless sensor network researchers, will soon be published.

I wonder how many IT gurus are members of ACM or IEEE Computer Society? The % of /. members who are in ACM must be very small because ACM only has 75,000 members in total.

I recommend the IEEE Computer Society as well as a subscription to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.*.

Why not use Piezoelectrics? :)

. As for databases being slower than file access, have you ever heard of In Memory Databases?

Sheesh. Talk about arrogant, closed-minded recipe followers!

However, this single biggest problem also has an easy solution. Sun merely needs to jettison its SPARC processor R&D team and to adopt the SPARC64-V and the SPARC64-VI. The latter is a dual-core chip just like the well-regarded Power4. Sun could easily redesign its server boards within a month to accept the SPARC64 chips.

The SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI are radically different from the UltraSPARC III. The former were designed and built almost exclusively by native talent (i. e. Japanese citizens). The UltraSPARC III was built by H-1B workers because Sun, Intel, and other companies claim that they cannot find enough native talent (i. e. American citizen) who are good enough -- even during a period 8% unemployment in Silicon Valley.

The issue here is mismanagement at Sun. Specifically, the management up to Scott McNealy himself refuses to adopt the SPARC64-V/VI. Why would any company refuse to adopt a processor that outperforms its own processor, that is readily available, that executes an identical instruction set , and that would immediately boost the performance of all the servers sold by said company? Why? The answer is deliberate mismanagement at Sun.

... from the desk of the reporter

I've been waiting for a vi v's emacs thread for this one. Stuff both of them OpenBsd uses Ed.

For those more interested in technology (than flames) read this article with Bill Joy about Ed.

The documentary Revolution OS explores the human side of the open source and free software movements, illuminating the behind-the-scenes story of the hackers and programmers rebelling against the corporate machine.

This 90-minute film begins with Richard Stallman's quest to create a free operating system. It then follows the movement through its two-decades-long evolution in interviews with Stallman, Linus Torvalds (creator of the open-source operating system Linux), Eric Raymond (author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar), Bruce Perens (author of the Open Source Definition), Brian Behlendorf (leader of the Apache Web server project), Michael Tiemann (founder of the first open source company) and Larry Augustin (founder of VA Linux Systems). Revolution OS also depicts the culture of the open source movement by documenting the Installfest parties where people can bring their computers to get free, expert Linux tech support; and the Refund Day protest marches, where Linux users demand reimbursement of the extra fees that get tacked onto the purchase price of new computers for pre-installed Microsoft applications.

Didn't even stop to think about the new Sinbad movie from Dreamworks either. Or IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) Sorry FYI

Linux Storms Hollywood

Linux in Hollywood a Star is Born

That's the same crap as can be found e.g. here. I.e. "use software patents to regulate competition and enforce standards". You might as well opt for introducing socialism, with the patent office becoming the ruling communist party, and M$, Sun, IBM, and, of course, Eolas, becoming state-approved monopolies.

If the guy honestly believes that he does the software industry as a whole any good by forcing it to adhere to a single "technology" that tries to put EJBs, .NET, DCOM, SOAP, agents, browser plugins and whatnot under one hood, he's a complete lunatic.

But of course, he doesn't mean anything he says. He wants to squeeze as much money as possible out of the patent system without looking too much like a bad boy, and that's about it.

Of course. Check out this link for details.

Houston Chronicle article on court case.

Novell wins one in Illinois.

The National Society of Professional Engineers doesn't want riff-raff.

IEEE Computer Society sasy NO, at least in Texas.

ACM editorial saying we shouldn't call it engineering anyhow.

Two years ago, I had the privilage of participating in the IEEE Computer Soceity International Design Competition 2001, which gave university students (such as myself) the opportunity to build something useful out of Bluetooth. Back then, Bluetooth had been The Next Big Thing (tm) for maybe a year. The competition gave me a first-hand look at why Bluetooth is still The Next Big Thing (tm), two years later.

Two years ago, Bluetooth seemed to be doing everything right. Created by Ericsson, and supported by 3Com, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia and Toshiba, it couldn't help but succeed. In the buzzword-compatible trade press, Bluetooth, and the Personal Area Networks it creates, are destined to change the way our handheld computing devices communicate with each other. That's great -- I'd love to use my Visor to read Slashdot headlines, using my wireless phone for its Internet connection. Bluetooth has a great vision, but (at least two years ago) it lacks something far more important: superior development tools. Without worthwhile development tools, and the documentation to back them up, only those with large pockets and iron wills will succeed. Curious students (like myself two years ago) will turn away sadly, wishing there were more, but doubting anything will ever happen.

Why is it important that the small developers get involved? Palm created the handheld market not only by having a low-cost, easy-to-use handheld, but by allowing any kid in his parents' basement to develop PalmOS applications. Ninty-five percent of them may have been crap, but five percent of all the world's Palm-programming geeks is still a whole lot of stuff to attract the Palm-using masses.

ZigBee looks fascinating, and it's something I'll keep my eye on, but unless they learn from Bluetooth's mistakes, it'll be a lot of radio noise for nothing.

The History of Posix: A Study in the Standards Process,

See IEEE computer society 4th annual international design competition for the winning team's project report. They (from National Taiwan University) had a system which did this, but allowed two-way interaction with the lecturer and facilitated collaboration. I think something like this could actually be useful.

The only way I can see getting around this would be for Google to add "Did you mean 'apple' as a _fruit_, _computer company_, or _fiona apple_?" to the top of the listings, to drill down more specifically.

HotBot used to do exactly this, they were using the Cyc AI engine (from Cycorp) to do it. Read more about it here

Ah, but how many will you find?

You can download come code off this Japanese page. Just click the first link in the right column.

TOPPERS is a GPL implementation of the ITRON (Industrial TRON) specifiction for embedded computers. You can find more information about it in this paper.

Developers in the US, in addition to not working for 4K/year, do not generally get the benefit of a methodology. While nobody in their right mind would send work offshore without a very clear statement of what they expected, careful management of requirements and deliverables, and a detailed plan for implementation, the same people will expect their local team to produce a product with none of those benefits.

A quick study of the decades old literature of Software Engineering would reveal that if US developers worked to the conditions of foreign development groups huge amounts of money (50-75%) could be saved. That would reduce the difference between off and on shore projects by so much it would make little sense to send most work offshore. With both wage and efficiency differences against them, US developers will watch their marketshare decline.

What do I think US developers should do? Well, first of all, start or at least support efforts to get project management, methodologies, and other efficiency improvements implemented. Learn architecture, requirements management, design skills, and other elements of Software Engineering. Get your employer to pursue CMM or other standards-driven objectives. Then, continue to work like H*ll (but smarter this time) and the erosion may well reverse.

I disagree with Dave Thomas in that I think the trend can be reversed if only we can adopt processes that improve efficiency and quality. I am not ready to concede our livelihood to others when I know that it needn't be that way.

Remember that the US car makers lost huge amounts of market share until they improved their quality and adopted the originally US-invented (AT&T) quality processes that the Japanese had implemented so very well. Now, the Japanese are building cars here, using their processes and our people to compete with the US manufacturers. That, alone, should show that it is not the pay difference but the process difference that matters.

Software Engineering started in the 60s and 70s and has been ignored by too many for two long. What is Software Engineering, you say? look at computer.org and swebok.org for the Software Engineering Body of Knowlege (SWEBOK) for a not so quick overview.

If you have access to IEEE papers you can read an article about codesign with Constraint Satisfaction, or if not you can always ask Google about the subject.

I'm not an algorithms expert, so I'll not try to explain the jargon in the preceding paragraph. Instead, I'll just cop out and say that now you know what terms feed a search engine. I will, however, provide this link to bwtzip an experimental compressor covered by the GNU General Public License that uses the Burrows-Wheeler transformation, and this link page, mostly about suffix trees.

I wish I could find it, but I recently read a paper that showed a pretty impressive comparison between some compressor that used a Prediction by Partial Match variant and arithmetic coding (probably not truely free, due to software patents on arithmetic coding) versus gzip and some other compressors.

How google works. Enjoy.

If you want to get started, start by securing your home Internet connection. This will benefit you and the Internet community in general. I have a page with some information on home broadband security.

When you move to security in a business environment, in my opinion you need to frame security as a tool for risk management. CERT provides good information on handling security professionally, including their book The CERT Guide to System and Network Security Practices and a large collection of Articles, reports and papers.

Information Security Magazine will give you a sense of where the infosec business is going. On the academic side there's the new IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. Also on the academic side there are the more established journals from compsec online.

There was an IEEE Computer magazine article on this in March 2001.

It was titled: Sketching Interfaces: Toward More Human Interface Design

Go to the The IEEE Computer Society and search the title in the Digital Library if you want more info. (IEEE membership required).

There was an IEEE Computer magazine article on this in March 2001.

It was titled: Sketching Interfaces: Toward More Human Interface Design

Go to the The IEEE Computer Society and search the title in the Digital Library if you want more info. (IEEE membership required).

Yes, but if you have several trillion copies of your program you can run them all in parellel. Think of cytography....you could make a bioprogram that's designed to find the 128 bit key. There's 2^128 possible solutions. So if you have a whole bunch of these 2^1000 bio-programs in a solution, you can quickly find the 128 bit key. Look here under DNA computing for an example of why this stuff is useful, even if it is slow compared to silicon.

Not - necessarily. I can speculate but. I dont know the exact details about the emulation but I can guess what is happening. Over the past few years, dynamic compilation, optimization and dynamic execution layer interface projects and papers have been doing the rounds in academic community. For example dynamo where a dynamic optimizer (which takes code and performs run time optimization on it - not emulation or translation) showed that the apps in fact ran *faster* even counting the overhead of optimization. This idea spawned DELI or dynamic execution layer interface which can dynamically translate instructions *as well as* perform optimizations on them using run time information. Researchers claim that execution is *faster* than running the same app on the native machine. All these are somewhat software equivalent of transmeta.

Now the interesting thing, both dynamo and DELI are from HP labs. So was HPL-PD an architecture that is the superset of itanium, invented and evaluated by HP waaaaaaay back (itanium is in fact based on HPL-PD). Now can the dynamic execution layer emulating x86 be based on DELI ? that is a speculation.

It's funny, I was at Princeton as a coach during my grad studies and I was amazed at the network in place on campus. Not only was it blazingly fast, but everyone connected to the network had shared drives.

I'm a former Princeton employee and I'm not that surprised at the caliber of the network that's there. It was one of the original bitnet sites (more info here, and managed to maintain it's connectivity. For the record, I worked there from the end of 1988 (9600 sytek cabling on dos machines) to 2002 (/10baseT/100baseT to the machine, 100baseT hubs, and fibre optic backbones).

The IEEE is trying to take SE to this level with the Certified
Software Development Professional exam. It definitely reminds one of the PE exam.

Additionally, the title requires more than the exam...there are
college degree requirements, hours on the job, etc.

I have not taken the exam, but it looks promising.I am just not sure how well it will be respected or if it will add any value to a job interview.

Info can be found at http://www.computer.org/certification/

The Stiquito book and this site offer plans for converting a parallel port output to useful digital signals for driving actuators including relays and muscle wire.
Or you can just find some similar plans using a ULN2803 chip (including how to use it to switch LED's) online(PDF) I like your idea. If I get time, I may build one and mail you the plans.

Contrary to popular belief, ENIAC was not the first general-purpose computer. In 1973 the patent for ENIAC was invalidated by the Judge Earl Larson of the US District Court in Minneapolis. Larson found that ENIAC was based on the ideas of John Vincent Atanasoff, who constructed ABC, the first electronic computer, around 1940 [1].

John Atanasoff was finally acknowledged as the true inventor of the electronic computer. However, ABC also wasn't the first general-purpose computer, because actually it wasn't general-purpose, as it wasn't programmable. It was hardwired for solving systems of linear equations [2].

The real first ever digital programmable general-purpose electronic computer was built around the same time in Germany. In 1941 Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, built Z3, a binary computer, controlled by perforated strips of film. The machine was fully programmable and in fact it contained almost all features of a modern computer, as defined by John von Neumann in Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronical Computing Instrument (1946) [3]. The only exception was that the program was not stored in the internal memory of Z3, but on the perforated film strip. However, ENIAC also did not posess this ability - the programming was done by manually rewiring part of the computer.

Now let's give our due respect to Konrad Zuse [4].

Sources (to back my claims):
1 http://www.computer.org/history/development/1973.h tm
2 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff_Berry_Comp uter
3 http://www.epemag.com/zuse/part4a.htm
4 http://www.bionomics.org/text/resource/articles/ar _015.html

Sorry while I rant, but you just stomped on one of my nerves. (Unless your comment about neededing that much RAM was a complaint about Adobe or their direct *cough* compeitors -- sucks to be you.)

<Old Geezer Mode> In one case, not long ago, a fellow lab-rat Eric Mortenson had sold his research and tools to Adobe, but part of the poorly-written agreement said that he couldn't upgrade his work station. So he finished his Ph.D on a 386 with 32-MB of RAM, while the rest of us in the lab were using Pentium 3's, DEC Alpha's, and various SGI boxs. Eric's algorithms ran great on the newer PC's even though he couldn't develop them on the new boxes. Other with Adobe (NOT on that web site interestingly enough) needed the DEC Alphas (64-bit machines) with scads of memory and much more running time to do a similar implementation of Eric's algorithms. </Old Geezer Mode>

3D rendering doesn't take that much RAM. As a 3D graphics researcher and developer, I have worked with models where individual objects were multi-gigabytes (meshes+textures and volumes) but even then, having 1GB of RAM was more than enough for us to reach 20-30 FPS realtime on a box with NT4 and first- and second-generation 3D cards. Software rendering with very realistic detail was a little slower (3-5 fps) but was fine for writing movies. Progressive geometry & texture transmission, continuously calculated view-dependant detail levels, and other current and not-so-current research would solve the memory problems in 3D. Don't believe me? Go to Visualization 2003 and see if the leading researchers are finding RAM as their primary bottleneck. It is a bottleneck of course, but processing speed, caches, and the system BUS limitations are far more troubling.

As for video editing, you only need enough memory for the tools, a few frames, and whatever operations you are performing. In every case that I've had to do video editing, I've seen two classes of tools -- those that take gobs of memory and try to copy the entire video clip into RAM and end up thrashing for memory -- and those that intellegently figure out what is needed and use only the memory needed for the app.

An example of the first, an Adobe AfterEffects rendering a simple math function over time was only able to render 30-seconds because it wanted to buffer the AVI file in memory and ran out of RAM (2GB) after a several-hour rendering. An example of the second, a simple home-brew compositor that used the Windows multimedia API to write the AVI to disk -- the same machine and the same set of images required about 45 minutes to render the entire clip.

So instead of saying:

I need more than 4GB RAM (3.5 if I want it stable) for video editing and 3D rendering.

I would suggest you say " I need to buy tools that are properly designed and implemented for my class of computer. "

Frob.

Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft--a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.

It does make you curious as to what the exact arguments of these people against Linux are. Especially since Linux has become such a fine platform for desktop environments (KDE, Gnome) nowadays. In most people's experience, Linux has been more reliable on the desktop as well as the server for quite some time.

OTOH, Firewire supplys up to 60W, I can't find the voltage info, but it's much more.

This page has more info about the firewire spec and power requirements.

Intel had one called i860. Currently we're held up by Microsoft waiting to implement windows64. Microsoft wants to preserve their monopoly on the desktop and leverage their power into server space. Whoever Microsoft backs will probably benefit and that's likely to be their buddies Intel.