Domain: dal.ca
Stories and comments across the archive that link to dal.ca.
Comments · 72
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OT: NeXSTEP runs in BochsYes, now anyone can run NeXSTEP 3.3! Here's how:
- go to http://suprnova.org/ and click on "Mac Stuff"
- at the bottom of the page is the BitTorrent link for NeXSTEP 3.3 -- grab it
- Now install Bochs if you haven't already
- Then more-or-less follow the instructions on http://www.dal.ca/~nextug/mach_install.html
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Re:Honor CodeThats a really good question.
As for my university, Dalhousie,which makes use of turnitin.com, there are 3 main possibilities with some other less common considerations. First a zero on the paper, which is damn near guaranteed. The second is failure in the course. Thirdly, and the most severe is explusion from the university.
Even if a student was to "get through" the university states that at any given time they may REVOKE the students DEGREE if they are found to have plagarized!
The process is really quite disgusting and strenuous on both profs and students. First, suspected cases have to be turned into the Senate Discipline Committee, which then sets up a hearing and at some point summons you to this hearing.
I can tell you from experience, that many of my professors dread the process and truly hate turnitin.com. They would much rather catch the plagarism themselves and deal with it in their own way. However, the profs career is even at risk if they don't follow university policy and submit to this discipline commitee.
The worst thing about it is the guilty until innocent approach that seems to have been taken. When you have be accused to have plagarized, you must PROVE and EXPLAIN how you didn't. Thank-you democracy.
Lastly, although I haven't plagarized, my friend came really close to undergoing this process. He passed in a history essay, and it was also submitted it to turnitin.com, the result was a bunch of flagged sections. Upon closer observation and discussion with the professor, it turned out that the material was all properly cited. Instead the stupid turnitin.com program/process said the sentence structure was close to other sentences in hundreds of other essays. For example, imagine going to a magazine, and flipping through 45 pages looking for the sentence "The cat is hungry" by piecing together the words for that sentence by grabbing these words over all of the 45 pages in the magazine. Remember that simpsons episode where Homers mom came back (this season I believe) and he got the message from reading the news paper.
Maybe this is why the profs don't like it. All I know is that it has created a really negative atmosphere in the university, that coupled with my $7000 tution sometimes makes me wonder why I pay for this pain.
You guys can check out our discipline thingy here
PLAGARISM The best part is the self-plagarism policy!
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OK, I'll bite
Patrick Lee, the scientist behind all of this, has been researching the reovirus for over twenty years. We (that's the University of Calgary, my alma mater) just lost him to Dalhousie University, and they haven't stopped bragging since.
When the first word of this treatment hit the papers five years ago in 1998, his colleagues at other universities (read: his competitors) were quoted saying (I'm paraphrasing) that if Patrick Lee has published, you know the science has to be solid. The peer-reviewed journals agree: he's been published in Cell, Nature, Science and Nature Cell Biology, among others.
This is the real deal. I've put my money where my mouth is, too: several thousand dollars of my own money is banking on this. -
Come to Canada instead
C'mon up to Canada for your education. The tuition is about half (or less) of what it is in the states, if you're gay you can get married, and we're about to decriminalize marijuana.
Better yet, you don't have to pay to see our rankings:
1 Toronto
2 Queen's
*3 McGill
*3 Western
5 UBC
6 Montreal
7 Alberta
8 Sherbrooke
9 Ottawa
10 McMaster
11 Dalhousie
12 Saskatchewan
13 Laval
14 Calgary
15 Manitoba -
Hexapod robot: same as earlier Slashdot Story
There was an earlier story on Slashdot about RHex, as part of the Aqua project. Videos are available on the ARL website at McGill.
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Layman & Quantum Zeno Effect
I go to school to a well known physics department with a very strong theoretical tradition, and it is now one of the leaders in several branches of physics. And I have just one question: how is what the author says different from the old Zeno's paradox solution, or calculus? His claims truly read like a layman, reading layman books, probably smart, and interested in physics, but without any clue of what physics really is. I know a lot of
/. are very fond of layman book, and I am too, but keep in perspective that they give a very simplified version of the real science. After all, they are motivated by sales (even Hawkins says so in his book). It is very fun to talk about black holes after reading A Brief History of Time, but General Relativity is very hard subject in itself no matter how many cool books you read. Everyone should ponder on these phylosophical subjects, but I find his claims old, derivative, and uninteresting.And now, for some karma, here is a layman link to the Quantum Zeno effect.
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Re:Kipling?
You're right... you are sounding like a broken record.
:)
The story said "a ceremony referred to as Kipling", not "a pre/post iron ring ceremony social activity referred to as Kipling".
Anyways, Dalhousie is boring, and all we get is a post-iron ring exam crunch. :/ It doesn't help that somebody decided that 6 courses per term is a resonable work load.
-legolas -
Others...
The best have been mentioned. A couple not mentioned include:
- GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) Which is a command line driven set of plotting tools that excell in plotting data on a map. There are some GUI's based upon this. The best I have seen for mapping.
- M Map (for Matlab) Also does mapping plots, but from Matlab.
- Guppi (gnome based)
- SciGraphica
- Peakster Simple real time plotting.
- RTP Also very simple real time plotter.
- Biggles Python based plotter.
- GRI Python based plotter.
- GRE Perl based plotter.
I don't know if some of these are MacOS compatible or not. They are Unix compatible though.
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AF photographs were posted FridayIt takes a while to propagate this stuff!
Full size photo, which was linked to the Sensors and timeline There's also a page of general Columbia information.FWIW I've created an intereactive presentation of sensor readings.
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use gig Ether
400 Mbps FireWire makes it sound like you will get 4x better than 100Mbps Ether, but in practice you won't.
Gig Ether will do what you want.
If you still want more info on FireWire networking, visit my research page.
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what I had submitted
Here is a slightly bulked up version of my submission for this story:
Ok first, the official name used to be IEEE-1394, but not surprisingly, eventually they decided to just go with FireWire (which was previously an Apple-only name for the technology). Current version is 1394a which tops out at 400 Mbps, next is 1394b which starts at 800 Mbps.
Apple has been a strong proponent and developer of the technology. Sony also (they like to call it i.Link) Mostly it is used to connect to DV cams, but you can also use it for other peripherals that need high speed. I use it for my external hard drive and an external CD burner. But of course, you could also in theory use it for networking. Hence, IP-over-FireWire (as compared to say, the current IP-over-Ethernet). The standard specifying this is RFC 2734. (To be very technical, this only specifies the IPv4 implementation.)
Microsoft supports 1394 and in particular had an IP1394 stack for a while, in ME and now in XP. The Linux 1394 project has been working on it, but it had a lot of trouble getting off the ground. And now (finally) IP1394 is available from Apple.
It will be interesting to see if the Apple implementation interoperates with the Microsoft one.
My Master's project is on this topic. My school page is sadly out-of-date, I need to update it ASAP.
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Re:DeCSS
The canadian version of the DMCA is still being worked out, so for the time being having DeCSS on a
.ca is still legal. Considering the nature of the internet, the legislation I would really be concerned about would be international DMCA clone. -
Re:Neither 2600 nor the EFF have skin in this gameI'm with you until the last paragraph, where you say
Theoretically if someone on
/. finds out that there is a picture of one of the heads of the MPAA in a comprimizing situation, the MPAA can petition the courts to have /. rephrase the story so that it could read there is a picture of Mr. V in some compromising situation out on the internet now.
So far as I can tell... the foundation for the MPAA's case is that DeCSS was a 'tool' for people who stole their copyrighted works - that was why posting, and then linking to, DeCSS was interpreted as a crime in the first place. The defence was based on at least three central points. First, that DeCSS was legitimate to be in possession of, as it was useful as a tool to use content already paid for; moreso, as it was the only way to access such content on particular players (Linux DVD drives). Second, that computer source code is protected speech (I'm not sure if they only argued for symbolic code (C, C++, Java; assembler for your chip of choice) or bianary code (1100, etc.)) as it was a form of written communication, albeit encoded. Thirdly, linking to other websites from your own site does not just imply that you condone or encourage what the linked-to site has in terms of content.The prosecution would somehow have to argue that the comprimising picture was illegal. Seeing as tabloids flourish (with many a unwanted photo) and there is nothing inherently useful about having a photograph in computer code except for the ease of distribution, the example may be a bit pessimistic. I may be wrong; some places have privacy laws that might cover such distribution. Either way, the disputed data must be illegal in some way. Or so I read it.
On the other hand, IANAL either.
P.S.DeCSS. The US may be the land of the brave, but Canada is the home of the free
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Re:In case you don't read them normally,
Nevermind.. I just have a link to decss. I've been perusing slashdot too much lately..
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Re:Networking over FireFireWire?
In terms of MacOS 9 or MacOS X built-in, RFC2734 standard IP1394 networking, Apple has no plans to build this capability into the OS (as reported to me by Apple development).
You can visit my grad project page for more information on IP1394 and related IEEE-1394 (FireWire) information. -
Linux 1394
Instead of ragging on Apple FireWire, why not at least have a pointer to the Linux 1394 project at SourceForge?
http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/
If ya want more links, I got em at IEEE 1394 links -
Lego
For the Advanced Operating Systems course and Distributed Systems course at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia (Can.), we used a custom kernel called Lego. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the toy -- it is based on the fact that it is a microkernel with modularity similar to Lego building blocks (insert/reuse/replace).
For more information, you can see Dr. Hughes' work (and students') on Lego here. -
Re:Actually, it points out Moody is wrongi have a copy of it here
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
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Re:Easier way to do it...Good point. Last term, I did an experiment to find the band gap of some semiconductors as a function of temperature. For the silicon diode I tested, carrier depletion didn't have much of an effect even at 77K. The band forward voltage at 2mA did increase noticeably, though. OTOH, the LED I used wouldn't conduct more than a few 1/10ths of a milliamp, even at something like 10 volts once it was down to 77K. Figure 5 in the paper I did shows this quite well.
BTW, there are a lot of fun things you can do with liquid nitrogen... If you put it in a pop bottle and screw on the lid, then put the pop bottle under a cardboard box and stand on the other side of the room, it makes a big bang
:) If you pour cola into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, it freezes in mid-fizz, leaving a popcorn-like substance which is fun to eat (don't eat too much at once, or your teeth and tongue won't be happy!). Also fun is pouring nitrogen on the floor and watching it roll along in beads held up by the Leidenfrost effect. (boiling at the bottom creates enough pressure to keep a layer of gas between the liquid and the solid, so thermal conductivity is low. This is the same effect that makes water drops dance on a hot stove top.) Pouring nitrogen on the floor is especially fun if you are a lab TA and there are still a bunch of first year students finishing their lab reports. They scare easily :) (of course, they were sitting on stools, so I didn't give anyone frostbite.)
#define X(x,y) x##y -
Re:Will it work the drive-thru window?I agree fully. I like being able to just pump my gas, and pay the invoice at the end of the month. I can't remember the last time someone pumped my gas...
And anyways, as they said once on The Simpsons, "The wars of the future will be fought in space, or possibly on the top of tall mountains by robots. Your job will be to repair these robots". I mean, at least until AI gets really good, you'll still need people to design them, program them, build them, and repair them, and that's where the summer jobs will be.
so, go go engineering!
;^)
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
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Re:Mp3 player
check out his homepage. He had to write the iso9660 driver (burn it in) and program a PIC for the mp3 id tags. Runs on 12 volts.
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Re:"Only the best is good enough"
Well thanks for the suggestion, I did.
the WWWebster dictionary says...
Main Entry: octopus
Pronunciation: 'äk-t&-p&s, -"pus
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -puses or octopi /-"pI/
... which seems to mean we're both right.
But after searching some more (thankyou very much by the way, now I know loads about erm, 'more than one octopus'!) I found this page.
Essentially, 'octopus' comes from a Greek root, not a Latin one, so it's totally incorrect to change -us to -i. The "correct" Greek plural is 'octopodes' which no-one uses. The accepted English word is 'octopuses'.
Andrew.