Slashdot Mirror

I wouldn't worry about it, all the smartest people in Denmark seem to be doing computer science, which is good. (Somehow the latter page omitted Danvy.) I recommend outsourcing your garbage handling to a dumber country.

Hi Thomas,

Your homepage is not correct, it should be http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/zensonic / :-)

Oh, I can imagine a lot of things. Here at the department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen there is a running prank called pyxling. It's basically making anagrams of the signs (which have those little lego-like letter bricks).

I'd give examples, but they're in Danish, so no fun for the majority of you. Use your imagination :)

The big advantage of FP is its clearness and rigidness. To an experiences functional Programmer, its exactly clear what a piece of Haskell Code means, since the code is half general functions that are easy to understand (map, zip, fold et.al.) and half problem-specific functions that are about as easy. The solution is built from simple bricks everywhere, other than in imperative Programming.

Another thing is, we're talking about functions aren't we? And shouldnt the First Class Citizens of our Language be functions then?

Besides, Functional Programs are very much easier to prove, and thats a thing that will be very important in some time in the future (or so I pray... or everyone in IT buisiness will go nuts over the giant pile of bugs that accumulates). For a little introduction into the theory behind this check this document about The Curry Howard isomorphism (at the very Bottom of the page). Besides, this is a fundamental link between programming and philosophy (intuitionistic reasoning)

"Excel" type spreadsheets are very useful too, maybe not for everyday programming but for short and programs intended for quick use by non-programming coworkers. In fact Excel is the one Program that tells me that not everyone in Microsoft can be a moron.

Have you considering using python? researchers at DIKU have created a benchmark tool for . It seems usefull. Python is also excellent for gluing modules together.
A wellthought example on how to setup your code for experimental work is the lemur toolkit from CMU. This toolkit has a concept of "parameter" files that is very handy :) Generally I would recommend against exporting directly to spreadsheet formats - I tend to export to flat files (with field separators). Postgres' COPY command is extremely handy from scripts. I also find gnu-plot handy. Remember .. these tools might seem un-intuitive at first .. but when you have used them for earlier experiments you can re-use code between experiements :) I hope this helps

Asus S1 Series
Got everything you wanted, is thin & light and still got a 13,3" screen and you can purchase it without a OS. A internal WLAN nic is available,too.
Linux seems to work without (big) problems: Howto from Linux-on-laptops

Yes. Karma-whoring, here I come :-)

The best land generator I've found is Torben Mongensen's "planet.c". You can find it here. It's not GPL, but you can see the source and learn of it, at least :-) The results are quite good, though there's a few limitations: it doesn't do erosion and rivers, for example, which is something that could be very, very important if you want to use a map for a RPG setting. Rivers are the places where many cities are built, and crossing of rivers are always fertile lands. Well, anyway it's the only gripe I have about this program. For the rest, I like it very much :-) It can do a lot of different projections, and magnification, so you can really see the world from every point of view.

There's other nice terrain generator here. This does erosion and rivers, and the source is also available. It's for Windows, though the creator says that should compile well in Linux or related. I haven't tried yet O:-) The problem is that, besides not being "readily available" for Linux, I don't like the maps generated by it too much. And it doesn't plenty of projections, as Mogensen's program does (or, to be precise, I think it doesn't; I'm not a expert with this program). It runs fine under Wine, btw ;-)

Another fine tool: TerraGen. Shareware, but free for personal use. Great. The results of this program are awesome. I'm sure that it's easy to use the output of Mogensen's program to renderize it (some small part, I mean) with TerraGen, but I haven't tried a lot and consequently I don't know how :-/ This runs somewhat well under Wine, too.

The program that looks great for all this, anyway, is MojoWorld. And not forgetting, of course, all of ProFantasy Products. But these cost quite a few bucks, so I don't have and can't speak about them O:-)

Fractal terrain generation is something I'm quite interested, though only from the user point of view. I don't know how to even program something to output a simple Mandelbrot fractal O:-) If you know something more about all this, don't make me check for every /. post: mail me at ask4it (at) gpul.org :-)

Now back in the old days of '91 when I took the course, we actually implemented a whole kernel in 68000 assembler on old eurocard-based Motorola machines named after dead greek philosophers... but those machines have by now sadly passed away. One was auctioned off as parts at a party, one went to the internal museum of ancient computer parts and one was used as the Danish analog to a piñata at our local analog to Halloween :)

here is a site with some pictures of some of the major players, starting with Babbage and going up to the DEC VAX 11/780

on the home user end of things, this site has some useful information and links about old atair systems and their kind..
hope that helps
---

consists of two functionally independent, hierarchical stages: An early, pre-attentive stage that operates without capacity limitation and in parallel across the entire visual field, followed by a later, attentive limited-capacity stage that can deal with only one item (or at best a few items) at a time. When items pass from the first to the second stage of processing, these items are considered to be selected. (Theeuwes 1993, p. 97f, original italics)

Now wether or not this researcher is refering to the first or second stage is not clear from the article. As the reasearch had the subjects looking for a red or green block with a nick in it, I assume he is not making a claim about the first stage. This stage has always been considered parallel and he would have to prove it is not with a single feature task, not a multiple one like he used. However, from the tone of the article and the quote, it seem that he IS making this claim.

If the author is making the claim that single feature detection is serial, I feel that his experiment will be soundly ripped apart by most Psychological researchers as we have a large convincing body of evidence that this stage is parallel. If he is not making this claim, then he really wasn't adding anything new to the scientific body because we already KNEW that the second stage was serial.

Click here for more info JT