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You've never flown a rotor kite,have you?

Vignettation Removal

By the way, in an Orwellian society, language would most likely be verbose and meaningless, not simplified.

I'm not sure that can be done, but ImageMagick is a set of command line tools that allow you to do amazing things.

But the frst part could be Edge detection, from there you're on your own...

Imagemagick is good stuff, ive used it for a while now. Although I didn't buy a book to learn how, i just went here, for some great samples of uses:
http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/graphics/imagick 6/
PIL isn't too shabby either http://www.pythonware.com/library/pil/handbook/ind ex.htm
Powerful stuff, maybe the book is not that great i don't know, but imagemagick and PIL are!

At first I thought you were stark raving mad to suggest that C should be a beginners language; however following your argument that assembler would be the best way to teach optimisation, I have to elaborate.

You are stark raving mad - but you're also sublime in your madness. The insight of your statement is magnificant.

Beginners? Learn assembler! Indeed, the best would of it use learn how to use the virtual PDP-8

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/teaching/1507CIT/Pdp8/pdp 8.htm

Oh, wait.. It's written in Java!

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~davidt/tech_comm/Orwell_ Politics.htm

If you're interested, this is an industry-based (albeit, mainframe oriented) degree that I'm studying in Australia as part of an industry-sponsored mainframe traineeship. I think you need to be careful not to do a pure computer science degree. Soft skills are now more valued than technical skills, at least to begin with, because technical skills can be picked up on the job, whereas soft skills, such as good documentation, management, and leadership skills, take longer to learn and are important from the beginning. In short, make sure your degree is well balanced.

there is nothing available, at all, regarding MOS circuitry.

Interesting... perhaps due to having multiple CMOS/VLSI specialists as lecturers, MOS and low-level semiconductor theory and applications had a significant presence.

And from what you would describe it sounds like they're missing out on one of my favourite experiments, which was turning a CRO into a black&white television... lots of fun with PLLs etc. (it's hard to say which subjects are purely digital and which are analogue - that same subject had us modulating binary data over the wire and air in BPSK/QPSK etc. and analysing performance experimentally). Here is the degree I'm doing.

Zilch in signal propogation.
I find this odd, the justification for teaching the "Computer Systems" stream this stuff (along with the electro-magnetic physics and maths subjects, and Finite Element Model analysis) was that high-speed digital circuitry would need careful consideration of transmission line effects.

I hate to break the news to you, but that background you have in "computer systems" puts you ahead of about 999 out of a thousand working electrical engineers as an analog wonk.

I don't know what to say... perhaps I should hold my University in higher regard than I do, or maybe the American Universites are aimed at being more vocational than academic as many have suggested.

Then again, perhaps my Unviersity is just old fashioned; Verilog content was only introduced this year for bachelor students...

What the fuck is a "homicide bomber"?

Say what you mean.

Read Politics and the English Language and say that again.

As far as I can see the only really revolutionary part is the chemical substrate used on the crystals.
When I was still an undergrad (in 1991) I did a final year project for Dr David Thiel, Griffith University to build a device very similar to this.

The first version I built and programmed used an MC68HC11E2 microcontroller and two unsealed 10Mhz crystals mounted externally in a ZIF socket, with one crystal coated with chemicals used in gas chromatography. A beat frequency was generated from the two crystals, which was low enough to be sampled using one of the realtime input captures on the controller. This also helped to remove variances caused by temperature and other factors, because both crystals would be affected and cancel those sorts of influences.

As in the device in the article, the chemical substrate would bind to whatever the target type of compound was that you wanted to detect, changing the mass (hence resonant frequency) of the crystal.

A later version that I built when working in the lab as a research assistant after I graduated incorporated a multiplexer, a serial port, and several more oscillators, so that up to 4 differently coated crystals could be used at once. Later work afer I left to go and work overseas plugged the device into an expert system on a PC so that it could recognise different things ( like apples & bannanas etc) from the different chemical sugnatures from the combind sensors.
One of the major problems with the device was relative insensitivity due to the relatively small recepotor surface area, but I believe there was other work going on to research different base coatings and etching etc. that would increase the surface area of the crystal and hence give a larger surface area for the coating chemicals.
Another problem was that the coatings used to saturate with whatever chemical they bonded to, and the base signal would drift as a result. Also, after a reading it would take a while for the sensor to release whatever chemicals had been detected, so the response of the device was slow.

Sounds like these guys have done some great work - especially in finding signature chemicals for cancer that can be detected, but the underlying technology isn't that new at all.
Unfortunately I left science behind to ride a desk in banking, writing boring ass databases, and I haven't had as interesting a job since.

AFAICT, making copies for back-up, bugfixing or security testing is still excepted in the Australian copyright law.

Sorry, when I waded my way through the Copyright Act 1968(ugh!), I kind of mixed things up in my mind.

So, YES, archival copies of a computer program(extremely specific, a WAV file is NOT a program), is allowed under Section 47C.(1)

It's the archival of sound recordings which is limited to (mainly) the National Archives.

Interestingly, both the 1968 act(Broadcast Decoding Devices)) and 1988 act(Digital Rights Management) have provisions making copy protection circumvention devices illegal to make, sell, import, advertise or supply, unless used for the purposes you describe above.(2) You can still USE them legally, however. Doing something illegal with the decoded media is still illegal, though.

Ref: (1) COPYRIGHT ACT 1968
(2) Short Summary of Changes to the Copyright Act - See second point in What else is changing?

This all sounds much like the degree I'm doing, where after two years of a common program you can spend the remaining two years on either "computer systems" or "communications".

http://www.gu.edu.au/ua/aa/pccat/program/1149_01.h tm

(go to "program stucture" down the bottom)

At least here, 3G etc. is treated like any other standard in communications; we're taught all the fundamental theory, as well as practical applications and important working examples, so that we can pick up anything else fairly easy if we have to, such as CDMA, GSM, bluetooth, 802.x, etc.

BTW I had a lecturer who was the guy who did the speech compression for GSM mobile phones ;)

- Paul

Our University, Griffith UNI, AU Uses 2yo PC's for student common use computer labs. Our UNI has trouble keeping a SQUID server up and running so i hope they don't make any drastic changes like this. Our enrollment software server falls over all the time, The server that serves our timetabling info is rarely up when you need it.

You guessed it, The computer policy is Windoze, Although the system programmers are starting to implement their own policy based on RedHat.

Where I work (I know not a UNI environment) uses thin clients - everyone hates them because they are so slow. The same company uses pIII computers to run windows software to control Gas Chromatographs. Talk about major overkill.

Not quite - you are learning from the code of professional programmers, not the programmers themselves. The big difference doesn't show up in your code but in your documentation, design and process skills. Initial coding is only a very minor part of the battle of creating great software, the rest is in the design and maintenance and looking at code will teach you very little about documentation requirements.

You can certainly pick up some aspects of design from code directly, but don't fool yourself into thinking you are competent at design if you have only learnt from code - it really is an artform. Probably the biggest failing of open source software is in it's documentation (ie: there is extremely little and documentation is almost always behind). I am definitely not one to support producing copious amounts of wasted paper but I am well aware of how much difference a solid design, fully planned before any code is written, can benefit productivity in the long run.

So by all means participate in open source development and learn from the code, you will learn vast amounts about code that way but don't stop there. Go out and get a degree in software engineering (or something else that focusses on design and maintenance since you already know how to code well), read as many books and white papers on software design as you can or better yet, do both (and whatever else you can find).

I know there are always people better than me, and things to learn

That's the spirit! There is some really cool stuff coming out in white papers these days both relating to code and design - keep an eye out for Genetic Software Engineering from the Software Quality Institute they're doing some really cool stuff.

Maybe if we all go out and study up on design and management (yes, yes, but it's important even in opensource) the next survey will show that open source developers are brilliant at code, design and make the best managers.... Or maybe that's pushing it.....

until hot chimneys were discovered at the bottom of the Atlantic, most scientist took for granted that life needed oxygen, and a narrow range of pressure and temperature.

Nowadays, we know that the organisms that live near the chimneys don't need oxygen, live in waters heated at 350 centigrades and seem pretty happy at pressures well over 100 atmospheres (they actually die when they're brought back to the surface due to the lack of pressure).

Non-oxygen-breathing does not equate with non-carbon-based.

Please wait until you've finished your 10th grade biology class before making this proposal.

The archaea (or archaebacteria) are an interesting group of organism. They look like bacteria, but are more closely related to plants and animals than to bacteria, even though they have the circular DNA of bacteria rather than the straight DNA of animals/plants. The can also survive in a remarkable range of hostile environments. Two interesting pages on them are:

• Domain Archaea
• Recent excitement about the Archaea.(Archaebacteria)

You could start by having a look at the SF MOMA which has an exhibition on at the moment about art and technology. See also

• exhibition details
• web site in conjunction with exhibition

And then there are the more modern art colleges that focus on graphic design but include a fine art component. These include the Academy of Art College in San Fran and the Queensland College of Art, just to start with two.

Explore...

Ralf

______________________________________________

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Let me shed a little light on how you can pick up concepts that you hilighted were missing and that can be learned from Java:

• Pointers - Java actually has support for pointers and you need to understand them to be able to use Java. The catch is that Java doesn't call them pointers. Java calls them references. eg:
  Object obj = new Object();
  will return a reference, or pointer to an object. If you pass it as a parameter to a function any changes made to the object will affect the calling method. It's the same deal in C, but Java doesn't use the difficult syntax.

• Memory Allocation - Java uses memory and as such memory allocation is important to understand. Again, it's simpler than in C, but it does exist. Where you declare a variable affects how it's memory is allocated and you have to be careful that all references to Objects are "released" when they're no longer required to avoid memory leaks. Avoiding recursive references to Objects requires some advanced memory management techniques at times.
  

• Linking object files - Seriously, how hard is that to understand? Java uses the same idea again though, classes link to each other. The difference is when the links are made, C does it at compile time, Java does it at runtime.

The IT world moves rapidly, if you need someone to teach you everything you'll go nowhere fast. If you think for yourself and seek understanding not knowledge, you'll go a long way in this business.

Adrian Sutton
adrian_sutton@users.sourceforge.net

And if you were skeptical about my turning down jobs, here's my currently accepted ones:

IT with Advanced Studies Student
Griffith University

Software Engineer
Software Quality Institute

Systems Analyst and Software Engineer
Griffith University

Contracted Software Engineer
ElementalPower

Let me shed a little light on how you can pick up concepts that you hilighted were missing and that can be learned from Java:

• Pointers - Java actually has support for pointers and you need to understand them to be able to use Java. The catch is that Java doesn't call them pointers. Java calls them references. eg:
  Object obj = new Object();
  will return a reference, or pointer to an object. If you pass it as a parameter to a function any changes made to the object will affect the calling method. It's the same deal in C, but Java doesn't use the difficult syntax.

• Memory Allocation - Java uses memory and as such memory allocation is important to understand. Again, it's simpler than in C, but it does exist. Where you declare a variable affects how it's memory is allocated and you have to be careful that all references to Objects are "released" when they're no longer required to avoid memory leaks. Avoiding recursive references to Objects requires some advanced memory management techniques at times.
  

• Linking object files - Seriously, how hard is that to understand? Java uses the same idea again though, classes link to each other. The difference is when the links are made, C does it at compile time, Java does it at runtime.

The IT world moves rapidly, if you need someone to teach you everything you'll go nowhere fast. If you think for yourself and seek understanding not knowledge, you'll go a long way in this business.

Adrian Sutton
adrian_sutton@users.sourceforge.net

And if you were skeptical about my turning down jobs, here's my currently accepted ones:

IT with Advanced Studies Student
Griffith University

Software Engineer
Software Quality Institute

Systems Analyst and Software Engineer
Griffith University

Contracted Software Engineer
ElementalPower

Let me shed a little light on how you can pick up concepts that you hilighted were missing and that can be learned from Java:

• Pointers - Java actually has support for pointers and you need to understand them to be able to use Java. The catch is that Java doesn't call them pointers. Java calls them references. eg:
  Object obj = new Object();
  will return a reference, or pointer to an object. If you pass it as a parameter to a function any changes made to the object will affect the calling method. It's the same deal in C, but Java doesn't use the difficult syntax.

• Memory Allocation - Java uses memory and as such memory allocation is important to understand. Again, it's simpler than in C, but it does exist. Where you declare a variable affects how it's memory is allocated and you have to be careful that all references to Objects are "released" when they're no longer required to avoid memory leaks. Avoiding recursive references to Objects requires some advanced memory management techniques at times.
  

• Linking object files - Seriously, how hard is that to understand? Java uses the same idea again though, classes link to each other. The difference is when the links are made, C does it at compile time, Java does it at runtime.

The IT world moves rapidly, if you need someone to teach you everything you'll go nowhere fast. If you think for yourself and seek understanding not knowledge, you'll go a long way in this business.

Adrian Sutton
adrian_sutton@users.sourceforge.net

And if you were skeptical about my turning down jobs, here's my currently accepted ones:

IT with Advanced Studies Student
Griffith University

Software Engineer
Software Quality Institute

Systems Analyst and Software Engineer
Griffith University

Contracted Software Engineer
ElementalPower

I did my Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering last year. In australia we did things kinda different to they way the US seems to do things.

While all the Comp Sci. and IT ppl were getting out after 3 years - we were doing an extra year of more advanced topics. Seriously, most of those that graduated the year earlier didn't even come close in formalised construction and Engineering software that worked. It seemed by default that we also built better code because we actually THOUGHT about what we were doing rather than just hacking up a piece of crud.

The degree I did is also recognised by The Institute of Engineers of Australia (which means I'm recognised in the US aswell - at least that'a what they tell us) as engineers (It really ticks me off when people call themselves engineers when they really aren't).

As far as I'm concerned, a Software Engineering degree is the only way to go - not only do you get a far better concetptual grounding, but as a result, you WILL stand out from the crowd as someone who knows what they are doing and WILL get the job done properly.

have a look here:Griffith University - and make the right choice.

Perhaps though we should look at one of the more common complaints that the author has brought up apart from the anti-Apple comments which are being refuted time and time again.

Lets look at his views on computers becoming obsolete. If you buy a computer in 1995 and it does what you want, why does it not do you want in 1997? Does the fact that you can't run the latest OS mean that your computer is obsolete? Surely not. Is the computer getting slow in it's old age? Probably not. Perhaps then, the problem isn't actually with the computer, but with the user. Perhaps, the user has discovered the joys of MP3s, multiprocessing, surfing the web and running the Java applets and Flash animations etc. Perhaps, the user wants to do more with their computer than they ever conceived possible before. Can we reasonably expect that if we buy a computer now we will be able to use it to do everything computers can do in 10 years time? 5 years time? 1 years time? No, and I for one am thrilled because of this.

The fact that computers become obsolete so often indicates that we're finding more ways to use comptuers and integrating them into the average user's computing experience. Notice the price of computers is the same as or cheaper than 2-5 years ago? Anyone stopped to think that we're getting more for our money now than before?

Sure code these days isn't as efficient as it was when RAM and CPU power was exceptional limited, but that has resulted in software reaching the market faster and the benefits of it being acheived sooner - and in most cases, has made new software applications economically feasible.

Lets not complain because PCs keep getting faster and because there's software which uses that extra speed, lets be happy that our computers keep running and do what they could when we bought them and upgrade when we want to do something new and exciting.

If you really think your old computer is outdated, try taking it to your local school and see what they can do with it - in many schools it's likely to nestle in amoung a range of computers from 386s and Mac classics to the latest G4s and PIIIs and all of them are still have undiscovered potential.

A computer which can't run OSX isn't obsolete or useless, it's just not going to run OSX.

Adrian Sutton.

By looking at the tech/user ratio from an attitude perspective, if you solve each case as quickly and as easily as possible you save yourself a lot of time! :)

(note: this is not my true opinion)

If you don't want to jump backwards and forwards, all the graphs are accessible from
this link

Statisticians have said for ages that not all data follows the normal (a.k.a. gaussian) distribution. We even have names for the ways in which distributions differ from the normal. Skewness describes distributions where one tail is stretched out in one direction longer than the other like this, or this more extreme example.

Kurtosis describes the "thickness" of the tails in comparison to the height of the centre of the distribution. (i.e. this has more kurtosis than this.

So, with some distributions, the chance of rare events is greater than some others.

Secondly, in the financial times (not my usual choice of statistical literature) articles there seems little link between the "universal curve" stuff and the distribution other than the normal.

Statisticians have said for ages that not all data follows the normal (a.k.a. gaussian) distribution. We even have names for the ways in which distributions differ from the normal. Skewness describes distributions where one tail is stretched out in one direction longer than the other like this, or this more extreme example.

Kurtosis describes the "thickness" of the tails in comparison to the height of the centre of the distribution. (i.e. this has more kurtosis than this.

So, with some distributions, the chance of rare events is greater than some others.

Secondly, in the financial times (not my usual choice of statistical literature) articles there seems little link between the "universal curve" stuff and the distribution other than the normal.

Statisticians have said for ages that not all data follows the normal (a.k.a. gaussian) distribution. We even have names for the ways in which distributions differ from the normal. Skewness describes distributions where one tail is stretched out in one direction longer than the other like this, or this more extreme example.

Kurtosis describes the "thickness" of the tails in comparison to the height of the centre of the distribution. (i.e. this has more kurtosis than this.

So, with some distributions, the chance of rare events is greater than some others.

Secondly, in the financial times (not my usual choice of statistical literature) articles there seems little link between the "universal curve" stuff and the distribution other than the normal.