Slashdot Mirror

Neither? Seriously though, there are plenty of crap doctors out there. For example: Andrew Wakefield.

Like any field there are good ones but most aren't that good. So far I've mostly encountered bad GPs. The specialists do know a fair bit within their field and often outside it. The GPs mostly seem relatively like call center "first level support" albeit a lot more knowledgeable ;).

If you're a real slashdot nerd do some research yourself and then ask the relevant medical specialist about the issue.

If you're not, hopefully you have some doctor friends who can find you someone who actually knows a lot about the particular problem. If it's a common problem, why'd you need to ask a doctor about it anyway? ;)

Only if that doesn't work resort to this: http://findzebra.compute.dtu.dk/

At least for physics...

Solid state
Quantum espresso
Abinit
GPAW

Particle physics
The famous Geant4

Molecular dynamics
LAMMPS
Amber

etc... etc.. etc... I could post links all day.

I'm not really sure who this article is directed at, biologists I guess...

The odds are 10,000 to 1 against this unexpected link between cosmic rays and the variable state of the biosphere being just a coincidence, and it offers a new perspective on the connection between the evolution of the Milky Way and the entire history of life over the last 4 billion years,’ Dr Svensmark comments.

So I Googled it and found this article containing a refutation and further examples of over-reaching. I leave it to /. to comment on the accuracy of these links.

this (more direct) link any better? http://orbit.dtu.dk/getResource?recordId=253339&objectId=1&versionId=1

They're using active appearance models that (AFAICT) work quite differently from the Viola-Jones method.

There's also an open source C++ implementation.

get at me when you've got something significant to say.

There's a large literature on non-thermal microwave effects. But here's an example that gets directly at proteins:

http://www.fys.dtu.dk/English/Service/Phonebook.aspx?lg=showcommon&id=177161

Molecules wiggle all the time above 0 kelvin...

Your statement mostly shows that you're completely ignorant of how proteins fold or function.

DTUsat-I, a CubeSat attempted this a few years ago. Unfortunately contact was never established with the satellite so it has not actually been tested, but the physical construction is fairly simple.
More info.

One of my dorm friends, Jakob Husum, wrote his dissertation on ways of optimizing cement productions.

One of the rather impressive/scary things about that, is that it is responsible for about 2% of the world's energy consumption. That's an insane amount of energy for something that isn't even an end product.

The first paragraph of the paper actually grabs you by the balls and twists firmly:

Production of cement is one of the most energy
intensive industrial processes, consuming up to 2 % of the worlds electricity due to several low eciency processes. The grinding of cement clinker from the kiln is the most inefficient process in the manufacturing, with an efficiency of 1 % (Benzer et al., 2001).

Can't quite remember how much of the energy if spent on the last bit, but I think it was something like 25%. That's 0.5% of the world's energy usage spent on a 1% efficient process. Now imagine you could up the efficiency to 10% or even 5%. That'd be a reduction of the world's energy usage of 0.45 or 0.4% respectively, simply by improving a single process.

Now, there are a lot of arguments for saving energy. Saving the environment, less pollution etc., but it's hard to overlook the economic incentive of cutting back energy costs of a production, where a large part of the process is 1% efficient.

Well stated and correct. I've unfortunately been thrown the task (as many in the IT world get daily) more than once to recover deleted files from a employee no longer with the company, or just recover files from a damaged system or hard drive. Usually the option of paying a recovering shop $2000 - $5000 to retrieve the data isn't even a consideration for an option, although definitely preferred. First and foremost I make an exact copy of the drive using the dd utility, such as the following: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 conv=noerror,sync Then all recovery is done on the copy made, so worst case scenario and everything including the cat goes south, it's no harm - no foul, since you can just make another copy and try again. Which tool to use really depends on what type of data your trying to recover, as each program targets specific functionality. Many do just try to repair partition tables, which is generally not what you want. I've had great success using ddrescue, and is probably my preferred - again, depending on what your goal in recovery is. Another great tool is http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk (Testdisk) which works well. Others that are a little more involved to operate and setup are http://www.student.dtu.dk/~s042078/magicrescue/manpage.html (magicrescue) and http://www.sleuthkit.org/sleuthkit/ (the sleuthkit) and there is some good information at http://dftt.sourceforge.net/ (http://dftt.sourceforge.net/) which might provide help and insight. No matter how you look at it though, your in for a fun ride, so best to stock up on pain killers and red bull.

Installation, and the basics of LaTeX are not terribly hard. Graphics support is a pain--it helps to have something like Illustrator that can make high quality EPS files out of anything. Then again, Word support for EPS has been pretty crappy also (dunno about 2008, however). Mathmode produces stunning results, but is a seriously nasty bit of code to read. Going from tex to a camera-ready pdf is fairly nasty, I write a makefile for this, which pretty much puts setting up an efficient LaTeX workflow out of reach for any non-programmer. Some of the command line tools don't have sensible defaults either (e.g. partial font embedding). There are enough differences in installations that steps for going from dvi to pdf can vary wildly from one installation to the next.

Getting LaTeX to comply with a template can be a pain--editors may be more accustomed to submissions from Word users, and not aware of LaTeX-specific problems. Sometimes the templates don't even comply with their own requirements. Some editors don't have standard bibliography formats either, and editing Bibtex templates seems to be a black-art, so one can't always count on that tool being available.

LaTeX has a few default settings that are rather silly... like over-eager hypenation and an insane idea of how much space a figure should be allowed to take up. This page got me past some of the more tedious problems: http://dcwww.camd.dtu.dk/~schiotz/comp/LatexTips/LatexTips.html

Overall I'd say its a fairly horrible experience--the only thing worse is MS Word.

The science article where the approach is described in detail is this one: "A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function", http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175 It has just come out in PLoS Biology, - an open access journal. The researchers/wikipedians have constructed a script called "Protein box bot" that runs on (the real) Wikipedia. It creates images and writes text, for example links to NCBI. The bot can do this both for existing articles, such as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR2A, or it can create new articles with a the box, a small summary and references. The "gene wiki" is making an impact on the science part of Wikipedia. I counted the number of outbound scientific citations from Wikipedia, and the new ones that the bot has created are now the majority. The details of this count are here: http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?id=5666

You may want to take a look at this paper, my MsC Thesis which builds exactly on the problem you mention:

Preserving cybercrime evidence:

http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.p hp/2555/pdf/imm2555.pdf

It is based on a Bruce Schneider paper regarding secure logging and tamper proofing via cryptography.
Best regards

The way I see it most journals (even the closed access ones) actually require that you make your data available. This is especially true for DNA microarray studies, where you will be required to deposit the data in a public database - for example ArrayExpress or the Gene Expression Omnibus at NCBI. Personally I see the publication of the data as a very important way to drive citation of your papers. When I link to data on the department webserver, I group the data into specific directories depending on the area of research - that way a person look for data from one particular paper will also find data and reference to our other papers within that area (for example see: Probe Design datasets and Cell Cycle datasets).

Regarding the fee for Open Access publication: In my personal experience this has not really been a problem - performing the experimental work behind the datasets has always been the expensive part and the Open Access fee has been paid using the same grant as the one paying of the experiment. For non-experimental papers ("pure" Bioinformatics) the department or the University pays the fee (of cause it may not be as easy everywhere - I work at the Technical University of Denmark).

It should also be notes that for some new grants your are actually required to publish your finding in an Open Access journal (I think this may the true for the EU grants, but I am not completely sure).

The way I see it most journals (even the closed access ones) actually require that you make your data available. This is especially true for DNA microarray studies, where you will be required to deposit the data in a public database - for example ArrayExpress or the Gene Expression Omnibus at NCBI. Personally I see the publication of the data as a very important way to drive citation of your papers. When I link to data on the department webserver, I group the data into specific directories depending on the area of research - that way a person look for data from one particular paper will also find data and reference to our other papers within that area (for example see: Probe Design datasets and Cell Cycle datasets).

Regarding the fee for Open Access publication: In my personal experience this has not really been a problem - performing the experimental work behind the datasets has always been the expensive part and the Open Access fee has been paid using the same grant as the one paying of the experiment. For non-experimental papers ("pure" Bioinformatics) the department or the University pays the fee (of cause it may not be as easy everywhere - I work at the Technical University of Denmark).

It should also be notes that for some new grants your are actually required to publish your finding in an Open Access journal (I think this may the true for the EU grants, but I am not completely sure).

If you spin liquids in a cylinder, you can produce very regular geometric shapes:

http://www.metafilter.com/51516/spooky-fluids

http://dcwww.fysik.dtu.dk/~tbohr/RotatingPolygon/s ubalbum_1.html

http://dcwww.fysik.dtu.dk/~tbohr/RotatingPolygon/i mg/3/RotatingPolygon.avi

Either that, or it's part of a giant alien communication dish.

If you spin liquids in a cylinder, you can produce very regular geometric shapes:

http://www.metafilter.com/51516/spooky-fluids

http://dcwww.fysik.dtu.dk/~tbohr/RotatingPolygon/s ubalbum_1.html

http://dcwww.fysik.dtu.dk/~tbohr/RotatingPolygon/i mg/3/RotatingPolygon.avi

Either that, or it's part of a giant alien communication dish.

My question is, how trivial is it to create, say, a binary that features the command "take over user's computer" whilst keeping the same hash as the original.

These algorithms are block oriented. As soon as you have two blocks that collide, you can use those two blocks to make a code path decision. If you have one of the two colliding blocks, the 'good' path is chosen. If you have the other of the two colliding blocks, the 'evil' path is chosen. It doesn't matter what the two blocks are. Any two blocks will do.

Sure the 'good' path and the 'evil' path are both in the same binary. But if you can manage to get them into the binary instead of the source, the will never be found by review. If, for example, you are an evil Debian packager this isn't that hard.

Here is an example of this technique using Postscript.

Making society independent of fossil fuels - Danish researchers reveal new technology

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News.aspx?guid =%7BE6FF7D39-1EDD-41A4-BC9A-20455C2CF1A7%7D

This i do remeber from at least half a year ago. Never got much press though. Did even submit this to the Green Party over here in Antwerp, no effect. Sigh.

Some better photos can be found here, along with a video. Unfortunately the video seems to show the vortex from its side rather than the top. Pretty cool though!

http://dcwww.camp.dtu.dk/~tbohr/RotatingPolygon/

>For a game, the best way to solve ODEs is numerically. Since you don't need the >precision of the exact solution, the solutions are considerably simpler >computationally once you've linearized them. Doing RK4 on the fly is precisely >the best solution to the problem.


While RK4 is a good general purpose integrator, it's better to use embedded methods that will speed up the runtime due to adaptive stepsizing.

http://beige.ucs.indiana.edu/B673/node54.html


Also, I would speculate that most games might involve functions that evolve with a steady stiffness. For such methods, it's faster better to do a Jacobian based Rosenbrock Method (Kaps Wanner basically) on large intervals and then do a Bulirsch-Stoer rational extrpolation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_integration

I can't find any good references to this online, but I'm just parrotting Numerical Recipes Chapter 16.


>solving a linearized ODE is just plain ol' ordinary matrix math, very >parallelizeable

Well linearization will only work well near a fixed point of the phase space. Generic ODEs are not as simple to parallelize it as one may think. Data parallelization is trivial (provided your libraries/subroutines are thread-safe). However, really solid function parallelization of the integration of a particular set of IC's across one time interval is very difficult as a differential equation evolves causally through time. Thus, in order to know what's what at time T, you'll need to know all the values at earlier times t<T so a parallel thread has to wait for those other parallel threads to finish, making it pointless.


What you CAN do of course is parallelize the step incrementation process itself, however you run into the same problem during the calculation of each term in a particular RK step increment. If you look at the formulae (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Runge-KuttaMethod.ht ml)

You need k1 to calculate k2, k2 to calculate k3 & so on. Thus, the k2 calculating thread has to wait for the k1 thread to finish etc etc.

So I don't think parallelizing this will help much.

I'll admit that I have never done any functional parallelization of ODE's myself, as I use GSL/numerical recipes that are not multithreaded (though thread-safe) , so I do not have any first hand info on how much it's going to speed up the program .

There has been some talk of parallelizing GSL itself

( http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/~jw/para04/Abstracts/enriqu e_s_quintana/enrique_s_quintana.html
)

though again I don't know if there has been any concrete progress.

For reference:

Previous story on SlashDot about micro satelites:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/3 1/0451217&tid=160

... and some sattelites lauched before (from russia):

(30. June 2003)
http://dtusat.dtu.dk/
http://www.cubesat.auc.dk/
http://www.utias-sfl.net/nanosatellites/CanX1/CanX 1Index.html

I had a physics lecture this morning at my university (Technical University of Denmark) and the teacher asked us whether we had seen today's newspapers about this invention. He then told us about this and that this was a project here at the university. Also he told us that he was one of the researchers for this project. So as far as I know this is indeed correct. Unfortunately he didn't go into any details about how this works but I'll be sure to ask him in a weeks time if I haven't seen any details :) Quite impressive I must say :)

Take a peek at http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News/Making%20 society%20independent%20of%20fossil%20fuels%20-%20 Danish%20researchers%20reveal%20new%20technology.a spx

I quote, for those too lazy to click, "the tablet consists solely of ammonia absorbed efficiently in sea-salt". Doesn't contain much more information, but gives a source for the claims made in the initial comment...

Like most of /. I was looking for some more information on the hydrogen process. Here's a link from the Technical University of Denmark, where Amminex researchers work: http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News/Making%20 society%20independent%20of%20fossil%20fuels%20-%20 Danish%20researchers%20reveal%20new%20technology.a spx

A better link of the same or similar article in English was given above at http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News.aspx?guid =%7BE6FF7D39-1EDD-41A4-BC9A-20455C2CF1A7%7D

According to this danish press release from the research team at DTU (Danish Technical University) who developed this, it is not flamable at all. Take a look at the picture in the artical.

This press release of the Danish Univeristy may shed some light on the material:
http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News.aspx?guid =%7BE6FF7D39-1EDD-41A4-BC9A-20455C2CF1A7%7D

Nyh

From their site they are a spinoff from the Denmark Tech Univeristy who do a lot of research into storing hydrogen in Metal Hydrides here

From their site they are a spinoff from the Denmark Tech Univeristy who do a lot of research into storing hydrogen in Metal Hydrides here

There's a lot of info missing! The company is working together with The Danish Technical University (DTU) and they made a Danish only press release with a lot more information:

http://www.dtu.dk/Nyheder/Pressemeddelelser/DTU-fo rskere%20opfinder%20brintpille.aspx

Here's a rough translation. Pardon any errors:

DTU scientists invent hydrogen pellet

Scientists at the Danish Technical University has figured out a technology that can allow civilization to be independent of fossile fuels: A hydrogen pellet which securely and cheaply can store hydrogen with an unseen efficiency.

With the Danish hydrogen pellet, everyone can take advantage of the environmentally friendly energy of hydrogen.

Hydrogen can deliver a completely pollution free energi, but since it's a form of gas, it takes up too much space and is a firehazard. Efficient and safe storage of hydrogen is a problem that scientists have attempted to solve over the past 25 years. Now we have a solution. Scientists at DTU have managed to make a hydrogen pellet, which makes it possible to transport and store hydrogen, completely without the risks normally attributed with hydrogen.

"Should one drive a car 600 km with hydrogen in gas form, it would require a gas tank the size of 9 cars. With our solution, it's possible to store the same amount of hydrogen in a normal gas tank", explains Claus Hviid Christensen, professor at the Chemical Institute at DTU.

DTU's hydrogen pellet is completely safe and very economic. Thereby it's different from other technologies. You can litterall carry it in your pocket without any safety devices. The reason is that the pellet consists only of ammonium absorbed in ordinary seasalt. Ammonium is stored catalytically by the combination of the hydrogen and nitrogen, and DTU's hydrogen pellet binds large amounts of hydrogen this way.

The pellet can store hydrogen for as long as it takes. First when the ammonium is directed through a catalyst, the hydrogen is released. When the hydrogen is gone, you can give it another shot of ammonium and it's ready for use again.

The technology is a step towards a society where we are independent on oil. This is the message from Jens Nørskov, centre leader at NANO-DTU. He as well as Claus Hviid Christensen, Tue Johannessen, Ulrik Quaade and Rasmus Zink Sørensen are the five scientists behind the hydrogen pellet. The advantages of using hydrogen as a fuel is many: For example, it's CO2 neutral and can be made by wind power.

"We have achieved a very important goal in a process towards a hydrogen based society; namely to achieve a very cheap base technology. Under all circumstances, we can see today that fossile fuels will not last and without fuel, there's no reason to discuss anything else. Without energy, no modern society can function, because this is what civilization is based on," says Jens Nørskov.

In cooperation with DTU and SeeD Capital, researchers have created the company Amminex A/S, which will be the place to develop and commercialize the technologi.

PICTURE CAPTION:

Director of the new hydrogen pellet company Amminex A/S, Tue Johannesen, is attempting without success to ignite the hydrogen pellet. The pellet is the world's safest way to store hydrogen in, today.

I don't know where he found the information but at this time it's cirulating the danish press as this was developed by DTU (Danish Technical University). This was the story i submited to slashdot just a few minutes ago. All of the below articles are in danish:

A research team at DTU (Danish technical University) have solved the number one obstacle in making hydrogen fuel feasable in the automotive industry namely how to store hydrogen. Their solution is to chemicaly bind hydrogen in the form of amonium to salt in the shape of a small asprin pill. According to the research team an ordinary 50 liter fuel tank would allow a hydrogen fueled car to drive 500km using this technology and the pills cannot be ignited in this form as the image in the above article illustrates. According to this article the technology will be revealed tomorrow at a large press conference in Chicago and in the science journal of Materials Chemistry.

I don't know where he found the information but at this time it's cirulating the danish press as this was developed by DTU (Danish Technical University). This was the story i submited to slashdot just a few minutes ago. All of the below articles are in danish:

A research team at DTU (Danish technical University) have solved the number one obstacle in making hydrogen fuel feasable in the automotive industry namely how to store hydrogen. Their solution is to chemicaly bind hydrogen in the form of amonium to salt in the shape of a small asprin pill. According to the research team an ordinary 50 liter fuel tank would allow a hydrogen fueled car to drive 500km using this technology and the pills cannot be ignited in this form as the image in the above article illustrates. According to this article the technology will be revealed tomorrow at a large press conference in Chicago and in the science journal of Materials Chemistry.

How flammable are these things?

http://www.dtu.dk/Nyheder/Pressemeddelelser/DTU-fo rskere%20opfinder%20brintpille.aspx
This site is in Danish, and i cant find a babelfish translator with danish support. But it does show the
director om Amminex trying to ignite a pellet with a lighter. The article also metions that the pellets are re-useable, and the hydrogen is released using a catalyst.

A bit of background info found doing a quick google:

http://lww.kt.dtu.dk/pdf_publications/department/D TU_04.pdf

Not much there but adds a bit more ligitimacy to the claims. Its a university annual report from the Technical University of Denmark, see pages 24-26.

I did post this several hours ago but it was rejected. Her is another link to DTU news section

I did post this several hours ago but it was rejected. Her is another link to DTU news section

direct link to the original source, it is however in danish. http://www.dtu.dk/Nyheder/Pressemeddelelser/DTU-fo rskere%20opfinder%20brintpille.aspx however there aint many details there eighter but i think those will come soon, they have after all made this pill around 6 months ago and kept it secret since.

Denmark has all ready send two micro satellites. They measure only 10x10x10 cm!

They were send up 30. June 2003, along with some commercial satellites and were created as student experiments from "Danmarks Tekniske Universitet" (DTU) and "Aalborg Universitet" (AAU). The goal was to see if you could bring them up there and communicate with them.

You can read more about the two satellites here:

http://dtusat.dtu.dk/
http://www.cubesat.auc.dk/

But I suspect that's a bit overly hostile. Depends on the environment of course. Still might be a good idea for people going to a hard-to-get-into technical school to knock them down a peg or two and convince them that there's stuff they don't know.

This was exactly what happened when I started at the Technical University of Denmark in 97. During the first semester we were taught a great deal of programming, all in Standard-ML, which being a functional language really set the scores even for people with and without previous programming experience. This was certainly good, but failed miserably when the rest of the courses expected that you already knew some other languages, but none of these were being taught. So everything was back to a state where those who knew some language were a lot better off.

At this point I think they dropped the SML in favor of teaching Java in the initial courses and sticking with that through the entire education (unless you decide to learn another language yourself). I really don't think this is the best way, since I believe understanding the concepts of programming is easier when you try applying it to different languages.

/Spiff

this must be the best SID tune I have ever heard !
Even better than Pole Position II !

It *is* possible to get 3D sound with just two speakers/headphones. Headphones are of course much preferable. Finally, humans have just two ears, not five or six. Trick is in the processing - the feeling of space is achieved not only by using intensity but also phase of the sound. The algorithms to do that are known, just Google for HRTF (head-related transfer function) - e.g. here.

If you have a good HRTF and a geometrical model of the space, you can recreate very accurate sound reproduction, with just two speakers/headphones.

EAX and DirectSound took a very rough approximation of HRTF and some rough approximation of the space (e.g. concert hall, church, etc.) and give you list of filters. The effects have nothing to do with reality and you will not get better spatial feeling using even twenty speakers. You do not take into account reflections, material on the walls, standing wave effects etc.

For people interested in accoustic, have a look here. I had a short course with prof. Rindel, who is one of the authors of the ODEON software (there is a free demo on the page) and the stuff is really impressive. It beats things like EAX or very expensive 5.1 setups hands down. If modelling of this sort was supported by hardware, that would be the real revolution in computer audio. BTW, this technology was used as a part of CAHRISMA EU project, which we participated in (for the virtual reality part), the stuff is pretty much usable in real time already ( CAHRISMA at DTU, CAHRISMA at our lab, Something on the VR aspects of the project

It *is* possible to get 3D sound with just two speakers/headphones. Headphones are of course much preferable. Finally, humans have just two ears, not five or six. Trick is in the processing - the feeling of space is achieved not only by using intensity but also phase of the sound. The algorithms to do that are known, just Google for HRTF (head-related transfer function) - e.g. here.

If you have a good HRTF and a geometrical model of the space, you can recreate very accurate sound reproduction, with just two speakers/headphones.

EAX and DirectSound took a very rough approximation of HRTF and some rough approximation of the space (e.g. concert hall, church, etc.) and give you list of filters. The effects have nothing to do with reality and you will not get better spatial feeling using even twenty speakers. You do not take into account reflections, material on the walls, standing wave effects etc.

For people interested in accoustic, have a look here. I had a short course with prof. Rindel, who is one of the authors of the ODEON software (there is a free demo on the page) and the stuff is really impressive. It beats things like EAX or very expensive 5.1 setups hands down. If modelling of this sort was supported by hardware, that would be the real revolution in computer audio. BTW, this technology was used as a part of CAHRISMA EU project, which we participated in (for the virtual reality part), the stuff is pretty much usable in real time already ( CAHRISMA at DTU, CAHRISMA at our lab, Something on the VR aspects of the project

Sounds very similar to Active Shape Models. If you've never heard of these, they are very cool things that allow you to classify objects in N dimensional space and then apply probability rules to find likely matches. I used them working on a project to convert speech to sign-language (amongst other techniques).

Bob

There are tons of free solutions out there on the web that you can freely download for generating PDFs. PDFCreator (all apps - installs vitual printer) and Ghostview (office only) come to mind.

At this conference I heard a lawyer call it "semi-legal". I suspect it's just cause no one paid him to give a firm opinion.

As far as I'm concerned, I already downloaded Robbie Williams' "Escapology". Picked "256kbit .ogg" - works like a charm. I think Robbie should get more than the microcent or so he got of the 50 cent I paid - but then again I don't really feel sorry. I was in the record store, had the record in my hand - and then I saw the copy protection label. If I can't really own what I buy it's not worth it in any way. Now if only there was some allofmp3-style thing in Denmark - with fair compensation to the artists - I'd be their customer in a heartbeat. As it is, I'm stuck waiting for certain executives to retrieve their heads from certain orifices.

At my university, DTU, the rules for cheating are very strict. If caught cheating, you will loose every ECTS point for that semester. I really can't see why cheaters shouldn't be punished severely. They reduce the value of my education that I'm taking the hard way!

There are 2 more free packages! GhostWord and GS4Word. Both create PDFs reasonably well, but on my machine GhostWord doesn't export bookmarks and GS4Word doesn't export hyperlinks. Seems that you can't have everything after all. That's still better than a RedMon/PDFCreator/whatever solution. GS4Word is lincensed under the GPL. Both solutions also support Excel and Powerpoint and create the necessary links in presentations and sheets...

Still, I don't know about OpenOffice, but the biggest problem with the GhostScript ps2pdf - solution is that it doesn't support pdfmark out of the box. pdfmark is what makes the bookmark menu, clickable hyperlinks and forms in PDFs possible. Does that work reasonably in OpenOffice?

I'd guess that most people buy Acrobat for the sole reason that they need to create the bookmark outline.

I find that the people who advocate C over C++ have really done nothing but use C++ as a glorified C. Even the people who claim that they are using C++ properly with high falutin' OO methodologies are still writing code that can be transformed into C with a minimum of effort. Code written generically with C++ templates cannot trivially (in a precisely definable sense) be transformed into C code and hence can be used to efficiently solve problems that are a nightmare in C.

1) Indentation instead of bracing. Yes, I know some people hate it but for me it makes the structure so clear.

2) Object orientation. I did OO with C++. I actually understood it with Python.

3) The smoothest ever integration to low level languages like C. Gotta love it.

4) Easy to learn. Write ab initio code with C/Fortran and never-programmed-before people interface it with Python. Then, grind out those MSc and PhD theses...