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compare the straight lines of a road

Straight roads? Are you from a country that makes cars that corner like sacks of wet sand, by any chance?

I seem to think that after reading his CV (Resume) linked on http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~nkm/ that McBride is not really in the position to be able to comment on such topics. His experience with Computer Sciences is minimal and his real world experience of Computer Science is very minimal. He does however seem to be able to write articles that are subjective and biased toward outdated development approaches. (SSADM for instance).

It seems that the article he wrote is neither accurate or credible. The amount of damage that he is causing to DMU students following CS related subjects at is unacceptable and should not go away quietly. I know for sure that if I was a student studying a CS related subject at DMU I would not be happy and would also be forwarding him an invoice for my full course tuition costs, seeing as he has in effect has devalued any DMU CS related degree immensely.

I call upon the staff and principles within the DMU CS department to come forward, debunk his comments and then terminate his involvement with the university post haste.

http://www.dmu.ac.uk/aboutdmu/history/index.jsp

The article a large element of "look at all the useful stuff we do here, not like the useless theory they do at places like Cambridge".

Sadly, both government and students (not just in the UK) increasingly want two things:

1. Vocational degrees as directly related to jobs as possible
2. Easy degrees: the government to makes the stats look better, students because its less work

There is nothing new about this. There are proportionately for more students far more money going into easy and "useful" subjects like media studies. De Montfort University offers a degree in lingerie design as well as "humanities" degress in dance, journalism and arts management.

There is less and less interest in hard and non-vocational subjects like maths, English, physics, classics, etc.

http://www.dmu.ac.uk/aboutdmu/history/index.jsp

The article a large element of "look at all the useful stuff we do here, not like the useless theory they do at places like Cambridge".

Sadly, both government and students (not just in the UK) increasingly want two things:

1. Vocational degrees as directly related to jobs as possible
2. Easy degrees: the government to makes the stats look better, students because its less work

There is nothing new about this. There are proportionately for more students far more money going into easy and "useful" subjects like media studies. De Montfort University offers a degree in lingerie design as well as "humanities" degress in dance, journalism and arts management.

There is less and less interest in hard and non-vocational subjects like maths, English, physics, classics, etc.

http://www.dmu.ac.uk/aboutdmu/history/index.jsp

The article a large element of "look at all the useful stuff we do here, not like the useless theory they do at places like Cambridge".

Sadly, both government and students (not just in the UK) increasingly want two things:

1. Vocational degrees as directly related to jobs as possible
2. Easy degrees: the government to makes the stats look better, students because its less work

There is nothing new about this. There are proportionately for more students far more money going into easy and "useful" subjects like media studies. De Montfort University offers a degree in lingerie design as well as "humanities" degress in dance, journalism and arts management.

There is less and less interest in hard and non-vocational subjects like maths, English, physics, classics, etc.

I watched a documentary about the damming of a river in the amazon. No tree felling, animal rescue or anything. There were just a bunch of environmentalists going around in boats to save what primates and other assorted creatures they could from the above-water treetops. It was a long time ago, and late at night, so the details are a bit fuzzy.

The commentator was going on about how the trees would rot, acidify the water, release methane and corrode the turbines, thus shortening the lifespan of the dam. There was also a bit about how the siltation rate was 10X or so what had been anticipated, which was going to render the reservoir useless in 20-50 years IIRC. Sorry for being vague.

Here in Scotland, there's generally negligable siltation, no trees, no large animal life that can't get out of the way itself and the temperature keeps methane production low (thus why all our peat bogs don't decompose faster than they form).

Despite all the advantages to hydro in this country, it still only makes about 10% of our electricity, and I doubt if there's much room for expansion on that. Still, criticising any energy source for not delivering 100% of our needs isn't going to get us anywhere. We have the best wind resource in Europe (40% of European wind potential is in the UK), and are deploying off-shore wind farms to minimise environmental disturbance (we don't want to scare away the tourists).

http://www.iesd.dmu.ac.uk/wind_energy/sustainable_ dev/wcwind.html

Most of our current production comes from nuclear, though the plants are gradually being decomissioned. We haven't had very good experiences here with the first generation reactors, and they've proved far more costly than expected.

http://www.bopcris.ac.uk/bopall/ref20494.html

Hopefully, the new reactor designs will prove to be better value for money. The rest of Europe lacks our renewable resources, so nuclear power will be essential for making up the difference.

heh. Depends what you mean by "binary". Obviously everything on a modern computer is "binary" in some sense. It's due to this confusion that it's better to say "native instructions" when you want to distinquish the output of something like GCC to a compiler like javac (which you would say produces "bytecode instructions") or a pascal compiler (which produces "pcode instructions"). So no, not all compilers produce native instructions. Some compilers don't even produce instructions, for example, a database schema might be "compiled" into a listing of tables and foriegn key constraints. Quake mapping tools often have a compiler which converts brush information into bsp trees. A compiler is simply any tool which converts data from a "high" level of abstraction to a "low" level of abstraction. A decompiler does the opposite of a compiler. With that definition the more interesting question is: what is abstraction? Martin Ward has the answer.

That's easy. They use an Agora server.

Nobody can "own" what a word means.

True, but irrelevent. The meanings of the words are public domain, but the written definitions as expressed in a fixed form by the dictionary are entirely copyrightable. One is free to create new definitions expressing the same meaning, but to copy&paste another's definition is illegal.

If your argument held true, then NO non-fiction books could be copyrightable. (Of course, that's already been explained to you, and you didn't care then, so I shouldn't bother to repeat it now... Even the authoritative rules you paste into your own posts show that you're wrong...)

which is a reference of acronyms and their meanings, as well as their history.

That's NOT ANY DIFFERENT. That history is also factual and uncopyrightable. The idea itself is free, but the specific expression of the idea is owned, regardless if it's the definition of "cat" or a 1200-page veterinary textbook.

the actual words and their definitions are not subject to that copyright

Maybe you don't understand that "meaning" and "definition" are different things.

You've already admitted that newspaper reports are copyrightable. But they are (ideally) purely factual, just as a dictionary definition is. Both involve a little creativity in wording the expression but the difference between them is of degree, not kind. You are maintaining multiple contradictory beliefs... doesn't it hurt?

The FreeBSD fanboys remind us of that Hacking guy in Salt Lake City who killed his wife. He flipped out and checked into a psych ward. He is suffering from cognitive dissonance, also a common problem among FreeBSD fanatics.

The FreeBSD fanboys remind us of that Hacking guy in Salt Lake City who killed his wife. He flipped out and checked into a psych ward. He is suffering from cognitive dissonance, also a common problem among FreeBSD fanatics.

How easily provoked you must be to get so upset about something on a message board that didn't even refer to you personally in the first instance. Go take a deep breath. Then hold it - for about 4 years.

I'll tell that to some of the parents who list a child in Iraq. I'm sure they'll feel much better.

Reading your posts has been interesting. I always like seeing Cognitive Dissonance in action. If you're confused, think on this: you hate Kerry for god knows what, but you see what GWB has done and you don't hate him (you are "irked").

Steepening the curve?

If it's the trivial "receiver makes it right" technique (endian architecture identified in packet so swapping is required only in dissimilar cases), it would be especially ironic since the prior art is (at a minimum) from the 1980s when it was used by the OSF RPC design - back when the Unix world was divided into Sun/AT&T vs. nearly everyone else.

Uh-huh.

Rob

The FreeBSD fanboys remind us of that Hacking guy in Salt Lake City who killed his wife. He flipped out and checked into a psych ward. He is suffering from cognitive dissonance, also a common problem among FreeBSD fanatics.

Given that appearing on TV can make you a crap load of money doing random shit, I think no one is going to care a rats ass about piracy except the networks worrying about advertising figures.

Now that's some damn good trolling, AC. Gotta hand it to you. You tipped your hand with the Buchanan reference though. Other than that, not bad.

Cognitive dissonance is more than just a buzzword.

"Lying", "witholding information", and "going insane" are not computer problems. They are phychological problems generically labled as "cognitive dissonance". None of these would bother anybody (or anything) if they were not self aware. Something going against the 'nature' of his programming is a bug, it happens everyday, but I've never seen a machine act like HAL.

I'd speculate that possibly diversity and extreme specialisation will result. But don't think steady state. It's a dead idea. Try Chaotic or non linear. (ps: always be skeptical of economists that try to explain something by saying , assuming a steady state something . Behind the assumptions are those untidy chaotic bits that cannot be explained using conventional theories.

Think about rain forests and birds that survive by eating particular foods (plants, insects). Insects that only survive in the leaves of particular trees. etc. You get the idea. Spend any time in the bush and you can see this.

One question that extends from this idea is what happens when distruption occurs in the market? Is this where new business can make a start ... and possibly end? think economic bubbles.

btw I also posted info on how *insects organise chaos* just this week pretty much along the same lines.

Isn't that pretty much what is covered by the term Cognitive Dissonance and how some people have a real problem whereas others are not bothered by inconsistencies.?

• The main practical difference between ODBMS and RDBMS is that ODBMS is good for object persistence, not for querying.

ZODB does not support queries, and relies entirely on an indexing engine (ZCatalog) layered above it.

• On the other side RDBMS is better to store arrays of data of the same structure (same relational model) - millions (even billions) of records in few (dozens) tables. RDBMS is not good to store few records each in billions of tables. That's why it requires OR-mapping for persisting arbitrary application objects, and that translation makes it work slower.

If your relational model requires billions of tables, you have designed it wrong. The difference between RDBMS and ODBMS models have nothing to do with size differences, but with the models themselves.

• ... in PostgreSQL relational model is implemented being based on a object model since the beginning, without OR-mapping

This still does not eradicate the impedance mismatch between objects and tables. Objects can be implemented in the relational model, and probably should, but modern database systems, PostgreSQL included, implement the model badly. To store object-like structures in PostgreSQL, you still have to map sequences and associative arrays to tables, for example. In short, you cannot implement a typical application object model in PostgreSQL without resorting to relational constructs such as many-to-many tables.

• Coming back to the practical life, I see one of the main ZODB problems in a lack of ability of being integrated with legacy systems.

The phrase "legacy systems" implies a system that is using outdated and deprecated technology. If your goal is to integrate with such databases, use Zope's relational database support (Z SQL Methods etc.). What's the point in massaging a legacy system into being the persistence storage for Zope? It's like saying you have this 20+ old mainframe, and Zope is crap because it can't store its data in it. That's silly.

You seem to have sucked up the wrong kind of terminology. PostgreSQL is not a "legacy" system. That is not the issue.

• But the main problem of ZODB - it reinvents the wheel. It must be implemented on a top of PostgreSQL since the beginning.

"Must" is a strong word. Why must the ZODB do the things you want? It already solves the problems it's designed to solve. This sounds like cognitive dissonance to me; it's seems to me that you're desperate to use your PostgreSQL database, even if it's not useful. Have you studied the internals of the ZODB? Can you honestly say that PostgreSQL would do a better job? Exactly which wheel does the ZODB reinvent? It's not an RDBMS. The only functionality overlap with PostgreSQL is its ability to store data persistence. But the data it stores is wildly different from the data models that PostgreSQL support.

I wrote a paper about a year ago about ethics in software project management, and found a couple useful articles. They may not be perfect matches for what you need, but might help.

Rogerson, S., and D. Gotterbarn. "The Ethics of Software Project Management." The International Computer Ethics Conference. Ed. Göran Collste. Sweden: Linkoping University, 1997. 278-296.
http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/staff/Srog/teaching/ sweden.htm

Collins, W. Robert, et al. "How Good is Good Enough?: An Ethical Analysis of Software Construction and Use." Communications of the ACM. N.p., 1994. 81-91.
http://www.bunkmonkey.com/p81-collins.pdf (personal server, will be deleted in a couple days)

Well, if you paid for a version of Opera before you tried Phoenix or Mozilla, then there's a two word explanation that might be appropriate: Cognitive Dissonance.

Tim

Oops, More and better pictures of glove boxes can be found here on google image search.

This one is especialy clear.

Do Cyberterrorists have matching PowerBalaclavas to match their PowerGloves ?

You mean this?

Here is an article that explains why this device may be nothing more than two simple overlaid workspaces but not true stereoscopic 3-D. In particular, it says in bold red: "For Stereoscopic-3D you'll need special Stereo-3D software in any case, whether it's photography, film, tv, video or computer software. You will never get a real 3D experience out of standard material. There are products which claim to do this, especially pseudo3D-television devices, but those offerings are bogus! - You can't get 3D out of thin air." From what I have previously heard about stereoscopic vision, and confirmed by what the article says, one needs two slightly different points-of-view of a 3-d object (or simulated points-of-view in case of flat images) for the brain to correctly synthesize the notion of depth. That is why one typically uses glasses with accurately sync'ed shutters (so that one frame is delivered to one eye and the next frame to the other---there are any number of schematics available on the web to roll your own provided the display hardware/software can support this). Alternate techniques for generating stereo vision include polarization techniques, etc.

Dear Linus,

I have always felt that Linux is a nice operating system (for hobbyists and geeks), but there are some areas where it is seriously lacking, especially when compared to its main competitor, Microsoft Windows.

• File sharing. Windows has long been superior when it comes to making large amounts of files available to third parties. Even early versions of Windows automatically detected and made available all directories thanks to the built in NetBIOS-powered file sharing support. But Microsoft has realized that this technology is inherently limited and has added even better file sharing support to its Windows XP operating system. "Universal Plug an Play" will make it possible to literally access any file, from any device! I think universal file sharing support needs to be built into the Linux kernel soon.
• Intelligent agents. With innovations like Clippy, the talking paperclip and Microsoft Bob, Microsoft has always tried to make life easier for its customers. With Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft has built a framework for developers to create even smarter agents. Especially popular agents include "Sircam", which automatically asks the users' friends for advice on files he is working on and the "Hybris" agent, which is a self-replicating copy of a humorous take on "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves" (the real story!). Microsoft is working on expanding this P2P technology to its web servers. This project is still in the beta stage, thus the name "Code Red". The next versions will be called "Code Yellow" and "Code Green".
• Version numbers. Linux has real naming problems. What's the difference between a 2.4.19 and a 2.2.17 kernel anyway? And what's with those odd and even numbers? Microsoft has always had clear and sophisticated naming/versioning policies. For example, Windows 95 was named Windows 95 because it was released in 1995. Windows 98 was released three years later, and so on. Windows XP brought a whole new "experience" to the user, therefore the name. I suggest that the next Linux kernel releases be called Linux 03, Linux 04, Linux 04.5 (OSR1), Linux 04.7B (OSR2 SP4 OEM), Linux 2005 and Linux VD (Valentine's Day edition). Furthermore, remember how Microsoft named every upcoming version of Windows after some Egyptian city? Cairo, Chicago and so on. I think that the development kernels should be named after Spanish cities to celebrate Linux' Spanish origins. Linux Milano or Linux Rome anyone?
• Multi-User Support. This has always been one of Microsoft's strong sides, especially in the Windows 95/98 variants, where passwords were completely unnecessary. Microsoft has made the right decision by not bothering the user with a distinction between "normal" and "root" users too much -- practice has shown that average users can be trusted to act responsibly and in full awareness of the potential consequences of their actions. After all, if your operating system doesn't trust you, why should you trust it? (To be fair, Linux is making some progress here with the Lindows distribution, where users are always running as root.)

  With Windows XP, Microsoft has again improved multi-user support. Not only does Windows XP come with a large library of user pictures that are displayed on the login screen, such as a guitar and a flower, it also has "quick user change". This makes it possible to login as a different user with a simple keyboard shortcut, and the good news is: programs from the old user keep running in the background! Beat that, Linux!

• Programmability. Microsoft has always been known for making computer machine power accessible to end users. The operating system comes with many helpful tools such as VBScript, a programming language especially useful for developing intelligent agents as mentioned above, and QBASIC, a truly innovative "hacker" tool that makes it possible to develop even sophisticated applications without much foreknowledge. Scripts can even be embedded into documents such as Word files. This together with the mind-blowing Windows XP shell, which now also has amazing features like "autocompletion" (you no longer have to type all those long paths) and a scrollback buffer, makes Windows XP the "hacker's choice". Linux should stop "dumbing down" users with pretty pictures such as in KDE or GNOME. Also, I think that a BASIC interpreter should be an unremovable component of the Linux kernel.

I also find it disappointing that Linux has not embraced new technologies such as Digital Rights Management which will finally make it profitable for artists to sell their intellectual property on the web. The content industry has calculated that it loses about 450 trillion dollars per day to piracy. If this continues, the economic effects will be devastating. Richard Stallman has supported DRM for years and made it a fixed part of his GNU/Hurd operating system -- Linux should not hold back progress in this important area. DRM should be made part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB), and Linux distributors should put "DMCA-Compliant" buttons on their websites. We all know that Linux would never have been created without strong intellectual property protection as enforced by the FSF, so let's not be hypocritical.

On the plus side, I have found Linux an absolutely superior operating system for viewing pornography. Porn is loading much faster than on Windows, especially with the Cox and Love kernel patches and powerful porn browsers such as Pornzilla. This is truly an operating system written by geeks, for geeks!

Sincerely,

Bruce.

Does anyone remember the original Power Glove for the NES? I'd guess you would.

Now, does anyone know what happened to it? Most people don't. But Mattel got sued for patent violation. Turns out they used the same technology in their $75 PowerGlove that the makers of the $10,000 DataGlove owned.

A lot of people have been wiring these things up for use with General PCs for regular use

There's a sourceforge project to write some Linux drivers, but they are in the 'planning' phase. There are some other drivers here (readme). Scroll down until you get to 'powerglove.tgz'

The Nintendo/Mattel PowerGlove

Sourceforge project to create Linux drivers

The ultimate in 3d control!# the POWER GLOVE!@#

hehehe

Some more information can be found at the FAQ.
And some images are located there:

Development info and software available

Adapted uses of the Power Glove to VR world navigation

History of the Power Glove

(no one's tried to hack this for the Linux ... yet).

I do believe you're wrong... :-)


http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/hardware/driver s/ linux-powerglove.README
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/hardware/drivers/ linux-powerglove.tgz
http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~cph/menelli.html

These links are the README, driver files, and schematic for the Menelli box interface (Which looks a LOT like the one mentioned in your links) for the PowerGlove...

Powerglove anyone?

Dancin Santa

This group is using the technique to extract depth using a single HDTV camera. That makes sense, although the approach is somewhat low-res. Depth extraction from stereo images is commercially available, and is an alternative to this approach.

Since, when we at slashdot ask for an "unbiased, Non-FUD benchmark" what we really want is something that gives the versimilitude in Linux superiority. Eh, well, here are some links anyway. Take what you want.

First off, some general info (not a benchmark, so it actually contains Truth!)

It may be slightly out of date now that w2k is out, but unix-vs-nt has what appears to be relatively honest benchmarks.
Likewise, PC Week did a review last year shortly after the Mindcraft one

Not a benchmark either, but article on LinuxToday about Linux in the Enterprise.