Domain: liv.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to liv.ac.uk.
Comments · 46
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You don't mind if it's online.Do you mind UK-based
If you're interested in a MSC online and don't mind if it's from a UK university, you might want to check out the University of Liverpool. I think they will accept you on this one. Price was around 18,000 GBP 4 years ago. Some modules are a breeze but others are a PITA; the modules involving group work can be an interesting experience or a really painful one, depending on your group. Their collaboration tools were message boards and crappy Java-based chats and whiteboards; a few fellow students couldn't use voice chat or better collaboration tools because of Internet censorship in their countries, and some other students were rather incompetent. Once you start a module, you're committed to turn out weekly assignments for eight consecutive weeks. They claim you can complete it dedicating between 10 and 20 hours a week, but prepare to work more if you're unlucky.
So I'm not exactly selling it but if you're interested don't be put off; my experience is anecdotal and their website looks pretty different now, everything might have changed. Ask around if you can (I think they have a forum on LinkedIn).
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Nothing new.
A distributed Javascript project has been running for years here:
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Independent evaluations of mosquito repellents
The risk is imminent that these methods are as much scam as most previous methods, however well meant they may be.
For a really nice overview and analysis of electronic mosquito repellents, please see http://eprints.liv.ac.uk/665/1/Enyati_electronic_mosquito_repellents.pdf
Here is the summary:
"Electronic mosquito repellents for preventing mosquito bites and malaria infection
Malaria is a major health problem that particularly affects people living in sub-Saharan Africa and other tropical parts of the world. It
often causes considerable morbidity and mortality especially in children under ve. It is transmitted by mosquito bites from infected
female mosquitoes. Several strategies and approaches are available for preventing mosquito bites and malaria infection, including
repellents, and these approaches will be considered by those living in affected areas and by travellers to areas where there is high risk
of infection. Electronic mosquito repellents (EMRs) are designed to repel female mosquitoes by emitting high-pitched sounds almost
inaudible to the human ear. EMRs are claimed by their manufacturers to be effective in repelling mosquitoes and preventing disease.
No randomized controlled trials were found, but 10 eld studies looking at the number of mosquitoes caught on the bare body parts
of humans were assessed. These studies were conducted in various parts of the world with different species of mosquitoes and were
controlled for factors such as locality and timing. One study used just one observer with seven observations, while the highest assessment
included 18 observers with 324 observations. There was no evidence in the eld studies to support any repelling effects of EMRs, hence
no evidence to support their promotion or use. Future randomized controlled trials are not proposed as there was no suggestion in the
eld studies that EMRs show any promise as a preventive measure against malaria."Gates uses his money for good research. Still, that article does show that Gates needs to have several independent evaluators, unknown to each other, too.
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The BBP Algorithm
The algorithm used to do this sounds like it may be this one: BBP Formula.
This is also the same algorithm used in the browser based Distributed Pi project.
The only difference between using the BBP formula to generate Pi or Pi^2 is the use of different constants.
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sshdfilter?
you can always use iptables and hashlimit module to limit the number of connections to port 22 as well as using sshdfilter
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Re:High-fat, but no carbsThis was modded "insightful", huh? Interesting.
AFAIK carbohydrates in any form are not required nutrients. At least, there are plenty of documented cases of people living long, happy, healthy, productive lives without ever tasting them. The Inuit, for instance, used to regard plants as unfit for human consumption, and would never touch them unless they were starving. OTOH there is evidence that excessive carbohydrates (or possibly the wrong kind) can gradually bring about insulin resistance, obesity, and eventually diabetes.
The best comment I've ever read on so-called "paleo" diets came from Alan Aragon:
"Paleo nuts will insist that ancestral eating patterns were optimal. This is just as speculative as insisting that their hygiene habits were optimal, too."
You might be interested in some actual historical review on this topic as well: http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~gowlett/GowlettCJNE_13_03_02.pdfAgain, there is ample evidence to show that some people (as in many thousands) have consumed well under 2000 calories a month for decades, in the form of carbohydrates, while doing hard physical work - and wound up grossly obese. Just as others (usually much wealthier) have eaten far more than 2000 calories a day for years, while doing little or no physical work, and remained lean and fit.
Body weight is determined by energy balance (calories in vs. calories burned). Are there some people so small that 2000 calorie diets are way over budget, even with exercise? You bet. That doesn't change the equation. Here's the state of research on the topic:
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/heart/obesity/wecan/learn-it/balance.htm
Some things in nutrition science are unknown or controversial. This isn't -- except among quacks and people with books to sell.
As far as carb restriction and weight loss, you should know the recent research on the topic shows no difference between carb restriction and non-carb-restriction, once energy balance is controlled.Consider, if it's not too challenging, the possibility that human bodies treat different nutrients in different ways. Ask yourself why - if constant weight can be maintained only by making sure that "energy in equals energy out" - most human beings (and other animals) keep their weight within a pound or two for decades on end.
It seems to me you're confusing "simple" with "easy". Body weight and energy balance are indeed simple things. Keeping energy balance where you want it isn't. In fact, even among people who count calories, studies say there's a tendency to grossly underestimate calories consumed (20% or more).
Yes, that's right - join the bulk of the scientific, medical, and political establishments - and the big food manufacturers who fund them - and blame the victims.
And yet you swallow the junk nutrition myths from people with books to sell you hook, line and sinker.
You seem to have little understanding of scientific research, disclosure of bias and how to deal with it, etc. -
Re:What does "guessable" mean here?
SSHDFilter may help in this regard. Everyone should be taking steps to limit brute-force ssh attacks even without this current issue.
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Re:Lawful reason
"They" won't "ban" everything that is misused by drunken children. What they will do to some extent is license things where the risk of people carrying them outweighs the benefit.
Ultra high power laser pointers are a special category - they can blind someone permanently from a distance but there is no legitimate reason to carry one in your pocket. Thus carrying them without a license should be illegal and people that break the law should be punished. The rationale for that is the otherwise kids will shine them in people's eyes either deliberately or accidentally (maybe they were aiming at balloons) permanently blind them.
From what I've read, there are people that need these things for their jobs, and they will get a license to have one and training on how to use it.
In the UK there is similar legislation recommended
http://www.liv.ac.uk/radiation/pdf/laserpointers.pdf
The HPA considers the professional use of a Class 1 or Class 2 laser pointer as a training aid in the workplace to be justified, and regards these Classes of laser product as being generally adequate for such use. The use of Class 3R laser pointers up to 5 mW may be justified for some applications in the workplace where the user has received adequate training.
The HPA advises that the sale of laser products to the general public for use as laser pointers should be restricted to Class 1 or Class 2 devices which should be classified in accordance with the requirements of the current British Standard and should be sold with sufficient accompanying information to enable the user to operate the product in a safe manner. Toys should be Class 1 or of such low output that they do not need to be classified.
After seeking advice from NRPB (now the Radiation Protection Division of the HPA) the Department of Trade and Industry urged Trading Standards Authorities to use their existing powers under the General Product Safety Regulations 2005 5 to remove laser pointers of a Class higher than Class 2 (as defined in the British Standard) from the general market. Such devices are too powerful for general use as laser pointers and present an unacceptable risk in the hands of the consumer because they may cause eye injury in normal reasonably foreseeable use.
Now lots of other things are potentially lethal but are mostly used legitimately. Cars for example. And at least in America guns are protected by the Second Amendment.
High power laser pointers seem to be popular with idiots who use them for tricks in an unsafe way - other posters have talked about kids zapping drivers at stop lights and TFA talks about people shining them at pilots in planes. I once went to a computer user group meeting at a pub where someone had a HeNe laser and was shining out at people on the street. Later on he actually said it would cause blindness if you looked into it. Unbelievable.
I think for that reason they should be controlled by a license. If you need one for your job, apply for a license. If not, expect a prison term if you carry one around in most countries. -
NP-Complete Problems
A good list of NP-complete problems can be found here.
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Re:CS-type degree course?
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Old News, blah, blah, blah...
This isn't a new information at all. This is just a repeat of other studies done using the same methods. For example, this one was published in 2004: http://www.liv.ac.uk/evolpsyc/2004_face_ovulation
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Shameless plug
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/sshdfilter/
Get this and your ssh brute force attack worries will be over. They're only popular because ssh tends not to block repeated attempts by default, and many other avenues have been closed to the crackers. So make sure you block this particular route. -
Re:Is this good or bad?
I agree, as much as I hate Microsoft or some of its very bad software, here at the University of Liverpool Bill Gate's fundation has given a huge amount of money ( $50.7 million ) to improve research in Malaria disease.
A lot of people could be pissed of about Microsoft's practices but, it would be nice to compare the 10 first billionaries from Forbes (from which the 3rd one is a Mexican [as I am BTW]) and see what is the amount of money these people has donated. It does not matter if the donations are tax deductible or whatever, the only thing that matters is that, from the *corporate-evil* borg, I believe Bill Gates is one of the less evil around there.
Personally, I admire him from what he is doing, and from his vision. And for all of the people that says he is not a true geek or whatever, I believe he was more "geek" as more than the half of geeks that consider themselves "geeks" nowadays. If you think it like that, a lot of people that program in kiddos languages like Python, Pearl and javascript/html would explode at the idea of programming a programming-language at an emulator. -
Re:And in the next release....
For anyone who needs it, a simple description of why the "Halting Problem" is computationally undecideable.
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ped/teachadmin/algor/hal t.html -
Re:University of Liverpool
Just to add to the previous comments:
I've just spent three years doing an online masters from the University of Liverpool. Trust me it's a real place !
And yes they do make you work. Try several hours a day, 7 days a week for best part of 3 years. This was much harder than my undergraduate degree in Mathematics, as you would expect from a Masters course.
See http://www.liv.ac.uk/ for info, click the 'Online Masters Course' box if you're interested. -
Re:Classes offered onlineIt is becoming more common for red brick universities with excellent reputations to offer online study equivalents for some of their degrees, particularly the Masters level degrees.
I've recently finished an online MBA with the University of Liverpool, England (they also offer a online MSc in IT) and in my opinion this is THE way to study when you have a full time job already. Taking 3 years off to study while paying a mortgage and building my career was just not an option.
I am much the richer for taking this course, in many ways. You need more discipline to study online as you have to manage your time yourself, but this is quite liberating compared to a traditional course. Don't expect an online course to be less work than a traditional course. My MBA took me 3 years (including my dissertation) and I had to put in several hours work each evening after work, 7 days a week for most of that period.
My advice for choosing an online course would be:
- Choose one offered by an established University with a good reputation.
- Make sure the degree you will be awarded is identical to those issued to traditional students.
This ensures the University has a good incentive to keep the online course up to the same level as the traditional courses.
I would still recommend traditional study for your first degree (BSc, BA, etc), the experience of meeting other students while living away from home is an essential part of growing up in my opinion.
Then, when you are in a job and have some experience under your belt consider taking an online masters course in something you find interesting and relevant to where you want to go with your career. Heck, even ask your company if they'll pay for it !
Hope this helps. If anyone is interested in the University of Liverpool Masters courses take a look here http://www.liv.ac.uk/ and click the 'Online Masters Programmes' box -
slides for lecture on open-source
The following might be of use
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~sphelps/teaching/comp221 /lecture7.pdf -
Re:America has a choice..
Actually, the Arabs didn't invent the zero. That was the Indians. (The ones with the dot, not the feathers.) Other than that, you're right on.
Indians "with feathers", ie Native American Indians, did have the concept of zero.
Falcon -
sshdfilterI'm surprised nobody has mentioned sshdfilter:
sshdfilter blocks the frequent brute force attacks on ssh daemons, it does this by directly reading the sshd logging output and generating iptables rules, the process can be quick enough to block an attack before they get a chance to enter any password at all.
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Re:DenyHosts
I recently stumbled upon sshdfilter. It analyzes sshd output in real time by running sshd in with the -e option and adds attempts to login with invalid usernames to an iptables chain to drop all packets from that host. I've only been running it for a week or so, but it seems to be working well.
Seems like a similar idea to DenyHosts, just a different implementation. -
Let your vendor do it? Novell?
People keep saying Novell is dead. I keep on telling them that Netware is little more than glorified policies, and it's questions like this that reenforce my view.
Netware is a great product for controlling users. Netware is a great product (fantastic, in fact) for application role outs over a network, on demand
Netware is also a fantastic 'suite' of programs.
Check out,
http://www.liv.ac.uk/csd/mobile/netstore.html
My uni, clearly, uses Novell.
Sometimes it's easier to user what your vendor supplies than it is to craft your own. I say this, am I am 'the' () foremost interoperativity bloke, hacking qmail, imap courier, apache and sqmail into a bespoke single login system. The problem with my usual apporach, is although it's exactly what I want, it takes time. My time is better spent on other issues, and therefore, I rely on vendors to do the best they can.
Has anyone seem Mandrake/Madrivalyswhatever's server install? Advx, their high-performance apache install is fantastic.
http://www.advx.org/
It does what I would have made myself, but I didnt, and thus, I used my time wisely.
Matt -
Re: My uncle
The students have to take out loans now - most end up with debts of 10K pounds or more. Top-up fees of 3K per year are also being introduced. Although there were plans to scrap that and have a "pot" where everyone would be given a grant, and require to pay the money back once they found a job.
The student population of Liverpool is estimated to be 50,000 Manchester also has a student population of 65,000. So you can guess that the student population brings in millions of pounds to the area.
Changing the subject, minimum wage of £5/hr sounds pretty goood!
But you have to include the cost of living. I could rent a flat in Ontario for 750 Canadian dollars (property tax, electricity and water included).
In the UK, the monthly rent for a good two bedroom flat in Edinburgh is around 450 pounds, Liverpool is 650 pounds, and Brighton 850 pounds. Council tax is 1000 pounds/year, Electricity is 1000 pounds/year, and food is 40 pounds/week. And landlords typically require two months rent in advance. And a car will cost another 3000 pounds/year.
To rent your own place in the South, you would need at least 20K/year. If you were to share a flat with another person, you could just about break even. A minimum wage job, would only bring in 10K/year at 40 hours/week (most of which are part-time anyway).
There are many stories of people taking jobs in the London area, and leaving again once they find that they are actually loosing money by staying there. -
Something needs to be done
I get to see lots of bad/stupid driving everyday, all day. People take their driving test, then just do what they want when they've passed. The instructors don't even seem to correct bad behaviour when they are training people. It seems that automatic "cars" as portrayed in Minority Report or I Robot will be the only way to go if the number of vehicles is allowed to grow unchecked.
I am all in favour of an inbuilt electronic system much like the Tachographs we have in large goods vehicles in Europe. It would have to be electronic for car use, because you wouldn't be able to trust the average car driver to change the paper disks every day.
For those who don't know, tachographs record speed against time and also rest periods. So if the vehicle has moved, that fact is recorded. In an electronic version, the device would record speed in much the same way, but would be impervious to user intervention. That way, if there were an accident, the device could be read via a scanner and report the actual conditions at the time of the crash. Also, it would require the driver to assume responsibility for the way they drive, which is something that seems to have been forgotten. Any time law enforcement had occasion to stop a vehicle, they would be able to see the recent driving history of that vehicle and prosecute infringments as neccessary. This is not big brother, this is common sense. No location details need to be recorded. Combined with sensors on the steering wheel to determine blood alcohol levels (which would disable the car if you were over the limit) a system like this would require people to pay attention to what they were doing while driving.
The car these days is no longer simply a transportation device, it has become a fashion item / portable entertainment system, and the skill of the drivers has decreased as a result. Most people I see have difficulty reversing, staying in a designated lane or even steering ! I can always tell when some people have accelerated, because the car veers to the right ?!
There was a funny experiment shown on tv recently, where, on a perfectly straight piece of road, they painted a "wiggle" in the white centre lane markings. Then they filmed the results. Most of the cars driving past actually swerved to follow the line of the "wiggle" !
In brief, if people are going to reject public transport (where the driver is more highly qualified) then they must be forced into compliance. The car is not a toy, it is a machine, and a large, heavy, deadly one at that.
Links:
Representative image of a used tacho disk
Digital tachograph system -
Re:Some points...
Since when is HTML a programming language?
Actually, it is a non-touring complete declarative language. Not all languages need imperative style execution of the code from start to finish. -
Not the study, but another interesting one.
Check your paws guys (yes, I know women read
/. too, but this one is a study on males). This study correlates depression with the relative length of the ring finger to your height. It then correlates this to prenatal testosterone, prenatal testosterone to more growth of the right hemisphere of the brain (at the expense of the left), and therefore to some aspects of intelligence (susceptability to autism, etc).
Interesting stuff.
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Re:Another..Good site. There's an unnecessary space though. Here's a link.
= 9J =
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I love F90
I've been coding a lot of vector, matrix, tensor stuff for hydrodynamic research. F90 is friendly for that.
For example you can move matrix blocks in one statement, or set them all to zero at once. It's almost like using a math package but fast.
This online manual is teh goodness:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/HPC/HTMLF90Course/HTMLF90Cour seSlides.html
If they exist I want to buy a Fortran related T-Shirt. Also one about TI-994A's but not the ones in cafepress. -
Re:Archaeologist... Grave robber....
Well, I am an archaeologist
... and every-time I excavate a grave I deal with serious moral problems. But archaeology today (real one, not fancy stories like this one) is mainly about saving graves from bulldozers. The only dilemma we face in reality is weather ancient ground will be excavated by archaeologist (which treat and study human remains with respect and share the knowledge) or destroyed by capital driven bulldozers, preparing ground for new shopping mall.However, I do believe that right of indigenous societies to leave their dead undisturbed -- which in consequence means that they have right to their own past, not "scientific" one -- should be respected.
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The past RPN of
Reverse Polish notation was invented by an Australian in response to Polish notation, which was invented (gasp!) by a Pole.
The whole story here is
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An Idea
I don't know, but the following may be a bad idea: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ullrich/teaching/MScPro
j ects/#spam-filter -
Computing Comes Full Circle
Interesting, this story reminded me of the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard Loom used punch cards to control the designs it embroidered into clothing material.
Herman Hollerith was hired to automate the 1890 US Census because it was apparent that information processing techniques simply weren't keeping up with the burgeoning US population. When it came time to do the 1890 census, they weren't yet finished processing teh previous census.
When Hollerith encountered the Jacquard loom and realized the significance of its punch card method he realized that he had stumbled on a method for automating the input of information for later processing.
He then took his information processing techniques and founded the Hollerith Corporation. This company later underwent a name change and eventually came to dominate in the computing field. -
Re:explain
I've heard (no, I don't have actual links to articles) that 10% of peak performance on a cluster is considered really good.
Sounds like Cray marketing articles. For example, Daniel Katz at JPL wrote in 1997:
it is possible to construct a 16-node machine with a theoretical peak performance of 3.2 GFlop/s and a typical sustained performance of 1.2 GFlop/s
which is > 35% of peak. Or consider this from the Universiry of Liverpool:The current Beowulf cluster can deliver a theoretical peak performance of about 100 Gigaflops (billions of floating point operations per second) and has been observed to deliver about 60 Gigaflops.
The observed performance was based on LU decomposition.
For sustained/peak of about 60%.
I have no doubt that one could find problems where a Beowulf cluster has 10% efficiency, but there are real many problems that are good to go on a cluster. And even if you only got 10% it would be worth it if the cluster cost 5% of what a vector computer costs. Not to mention that performance/$ on commodity hardware increases by a factor of 2 every 12-24 months. It takes years to develop a supercomputer, and they are stuck at their level of technology for several years since they are so expensive to redesign.
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Re:USA? How about other countries?
I wonder, is US Goverment the only one in the world keeping such stupid laws or other countries have same or similar stupidy in place?
It's not just us (US), it's endemic to all bureacracies. It's quite possibly caused by the toxic side effects of Administratium. -
Re:OT, but...Neurocomputers
Vector subtraction implemented neurally: A neurocomputational model of some sequential cognitive and conscious processes
Artificial synapses copy brain dynamics
Computing and Learning with Dynamic Synapses (1999)
Computing at the Tissue / Organ Level
From neurobiology to silicon
Principle of Neuroinformatics and Neuroinformation Coding
In short. The synapse is a computer in it's own right. -
TertaNeutron? BAH - I've got that beat
4 neutrons in a clump - HAH! I've had that beat for ages:
Behold the wonder that is Administratium
And the wonderful (uhhh, awful???) thing is that most of you can see this element in operation yourselves. -
Irish???
If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.
Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?
The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry :-)
but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.
However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.
Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were :-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .
Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.
*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland. -
Re:Unfortunately, they are using AdaThat's sad, why couldn't they use C, C++ or even Java for such projects
Because for mission critical applications the US Department of Defence consider C, C++ and Java to suck.
See here for a brief history about why the US Department of Defence found that they were using 450 odd languages and needed to standardise on one common one that did everything right.
They produced a specification of what the language should do and found that nothing out there did what was required well enough. So a competition was born and ADA was the language that won it.
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quoted reference
From http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ped/teachadmin/COMP202/
a nnotated_np.html -- a list of selected np-complete problems
Number: 27
Name: Travelling Salesman [ND22] 3-4
Input: A set C of n cities {c1,...,cn}; for each pair of cities (ci,cj) (1
Question: Is there an ordering of the n cities such that the value sum from i=1 to n-1 dpi(i),pi(i+1)+dpi(n),pi(1) is no more than B?
Comments: In effect what this problem is asking is whether there is a tour of the given collection of cities that visits each city exactly once and takes up total distance no more than B. There is a huge volume of literature concerning approximation methods, search heuristics, special case methods, etc for this very well studied problem. A bibliography has been compiled. -
TCL ImplementationAs there isn't one in the above list, I put together a TCL implementation at:
http://gondolin.hist.liv.ac.uk/~cheshire/tclgoogl
e . tmlEnjoy!
-- Azaroth
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A few favourites we useIn the past few years I converted our lab over to Linux and here are some of the tools we use for analysis:
- GCC for C/C++/FORTRAN coding. It's free, it's not the fastest in the world but it's competent.
- Octave is a great, free replacement for Matlab. For general data manipulation it seems fine, where it really lacks relative to Matlab is in the GUI.
- Gnuplot is a great all-round, all-purpose, scriptable plotting tool that can also do fitting. For general everyday tasks gnuplot gets used a lot in our lab.
- SciGraphica is a great 2d/3d/vector/polar/ plotting and analysis package. It is a little like an Origin clone so is pretty easy to pick up, and can be extended with Python plugins. I am one of the developers
;0) (although far too busy atm to contribute, anyone want to help?). More suitable for publication-quality plots and still heavily in development. A new release is imminent. Plug ;0). - teTeX is the main (La)TeX distribution for Linux and you'll most probably have it in Debian anyway but for writing reports, articles, books, theses, even letters you shouldn't need to use anything else. Really.
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OpenOffice if you have to deal with mad, crazy, annoying
.doc using people.
There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.
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Re:Finally!
You play on a simple field (often times an 80x25 terminal window). Your intreped hero has no weapons (sometimes he has a single shot sonic screwdriver) and if any robot touches him he dies. You can only kill the robots by making them run into each other (where they'll leave piles of debris behind--and running into debris is also deadly for the robots!). The robots are very stupid, they always head in a bee-line to the player (at least as much as they can being constrained to moving in ordinal directions). Your hero's primary weapon is a teleporter that randomly teleports him to somewhere else in the playing field (including occasionally next to a robot). The game is over when a robot touches the player (usually when you teleport in right next to a robot). A somewhat feature lacking version can be compiled from here:
Hpux -
Repackaging the futureJust to be cynical for once - this sounds like a "user centric" repackaging of a whole bunch of hard AI research: learning, reactive planning, goal driven behaviour and autonomous agent work in particular.
In the end it turns out that the most complex problem arise in trying to coordinate a collection of "autonomic" (?) components. Distributed systems with unrully objects... This is what the autonomous agent community is mainly concerned with ( see the UMBC agents page or this very useful overview paper for example).
Of course IBM pushing this it might mean a kick up rear for the academic to actually get some of this potentially cool stuff working. Chances are you never want the end user to know how it works anyway.
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Re:Manchester has had this for a year nowSame as University of Liverpool. The adverts here at least are for dotcoms
... notably ebay.co.uk. The screensavers are on the NT/Win2K network, so all machines that connect to this get to share the fun. The adverts are full screen, but the background is still configurable when using the computer.
Someone said that screensavers kick in when no one is using the machine.... imagine a computer lab with glass doors full of flashing Buy at EBay! screens... People walking past In The Corridor are affected by the glow, let alone actually at the machine.
Note that 'student computers' means university owned computers available to students, -not- the students personal machines. Also not staff machines installed with Linux ;)
-- Azaroth
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Re:Manchester has had this for a year nowSame as University of Liverpool. The adverts here at least are for dotcoms
... notably ebay.co.uk. The screensavers are on the NT/Win2K network, so all machines that connect to this get to share the fun. The adverts are full screen, but the background is still configurable when using the computer.
Someone said that screensavers kick in when no one is using the machine.... imagine a computer lab with glass doors full of flashing Buy at EBay! screens... People walking past In The Corridor are affected by the glow, let alone actually at the machine.
Note that 'student computers' means university owned computers available to students, -not- the students personal machines. Also not staff machines installed with Linux ;)
-- Azaroth
-
The actual link's here...http://www.liv.ac.uk/~asawyer/wyndham.ht ml
There's lots of interesting SF information available at the Science Fiction Foundation Collection site, which is hosting the Wyndham archive.
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The actual link's here...http://www.liv.ac.uk/~asawyer/wyndham.ht ml
There's lots of interesting SF information available at the Science Fiction Foundation Collection site, which is hosting the Wyndham archive.