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Or maybe its the university you went to? I went to RGU and while the sport certainly wasn't pushed in our faces - the idea of 'pep rallies' actually comes across really twisted btw - you'd have to be wilfully blind or ignorant to not see the sports teams going around in their uniforms, or hearing about the latest victory for the rugby or rowing team.

It might have something to do with the location the students come from - ours were mostly from more rural areas of Scotland and Ireland where sports are still very big on the agenda, whereas the city dwellers like myself (despite 4 years of rugby at high-school level) just couldn't muster the same level of competitiveness. Or it may just be the culture of the university you were at, i.e. they chose to spend funds on more traditional academia or on new tech - whereas RGU actually gave a fair amount of money to our sports council (which would've bothered me if academic areas were doing without, but they really weren't).

Perhaps I should have been more precise - In Scotland, there is an Honours year, and students can start at university when they are 17.

Here is the link to the undergraduate course selection list with the "Honours year" courses listed. The listing for the computer science course:


          Computer Science
Degree BSc/BSc (Hons)
UCAS Code G400 No. Places 120
Duration 5 years (sandwich course 4 years + 1 year placement in year 3) Study Options Full time

The Heavyweight Sea Snail

Scotland, like many European countries, must comply with regulations requiring that a mandatory percentage of the energy it uses comes from renewable sources. For Scotland, this percentage will be 18% in 2010 and 40% by 2020. In "Tidal farming's new wave," Red Herring explains this why Scotland is very supportive of Ian Bryden's sea "Snail" program. The Snail is a 30-ton anchoring device which uses hydrofoils -- wings that "fly" in the water -- to generate enough power from tidal waves to service 10,000 homes by 2007.

Here is the introduction of Red Herring's article.

After losing the wind wars to the Danes in the early '80s, Scotland is on the verge of owning a small, yet significant new power market -- tidal energy.

Inventors have long dreamt of harnessing energy from the daily ebb and flow of ocean tides using underwater windmills. Yet a large-scale tidal farm has remained elusive -- at least, until now. Making use of Scotland's geographic assets and answering a renewed call for an energy alternative, Aberdeen scientist Ian Bryden is putting his new invention, "the Snail," to work.

So what exactly is the "Snail"?

At Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University, Mr. Bryden has circumvented traditional turbine designs. His brainchild, the Snail, is a 15x12 meter (roughly 49x39 feet) anchoring device that uses hydrofoils -- what scientists describe as wings that "fly" in water -- to generate more than 200 tons of downward force to the seabed. Six dragon-like wings attach the unit to the national grid.

Here is a picture of a prototype of the Snail with its six wings (Credit: Robert Gordon University)

Red Herring also says that the Snail will cost less than traditional technologies relying on turbines. So when will the Snails invade the seas?

The first experimental tidal farm, to be launched in 2007, will yield just 5MW at first, enough for around 10,000 homes. While possessing only enough energy to power less than one quarter one percent of Scotland's population, it would mark a significant first step for the emerging technology.

Scotland has identified Orkney's Pentland Firth and Shetland's Yell Sound -- about 330 miles north of Edinburgh -- as its best sites for harnessing tidal power. Both have sea channels and are exposed to the Atlantic, making the area a prime location for capturing big tidal movements. An energy test site has already been built using a local investment of 5 million pounds ($9.18 million).

Providing that this technology is licensed to one or several developers, other European countries will also be able to use Snails to produce clean energy at reasonable costs.

For more information, you might want to check this news release from Robert Gordon University, "University Research Team Poised for SNAIL launch."

Sources: Red Herring, March 25, 2004; Robert Gordon University

You don't say which side of the pond you're on, so I'll make the reasonable assumption that you're on this side. [Old joke, to make a point.]
Try Robert Gordons - they have a course in Network Engineering and Management (run by the School of Engineering, not the Computing Science Department - can't trust these silly CS people with some important engineering like a network). Prospectus at RGU.

I'm writing an open source DVD Player for my project at university (I'll post the code up somewhere sometime in the future). Now although the DeCSS stuff is really hampering in the US, it seems like in Europe there is nothing to stop us developing open source players. I trawled through all sorts of law cases and the only one's were from the US.

Talk about the poopy end of the stick...

$ Stu --help

There was also part of the HND course which gave them the ECDL (European computer driving license), but to be honest, that was a waste of space.

You can use PPM compression for this.

Say you have samples of the works of N authors and a text T that has to be identified. Compress the text N times, each time the system is initialized with the samples from another author. T will usually compress best when the system was initialized with the samples from its own author.

See Bill Teahan's PhD thesis.

When I started my CS course the OOP teaching language was C++. By the time we started the OOP section of the course it had changed to Java. The dedicated programmers on the course self taught themselves C++ during the holdays anyway and we were fine. Java is clean OOP language and is great for teaching OOP principles and good OOP coding habits.

My OOP skills in C++ benefited as a result. I enjoyed the Java course and even those students that are not programming minded thought it was a cool language.

The lecturers enjoy teaching it too as far as I know. Overall it has done no harm to the graduating CS students at my University (RGU in the UK SCMS@RGU ).

And the number of Java jobs out there is a bonus :)

Ryszard

For those interested, I'll be updating the Solaris plugin to work with 1.0.x releases either today or by Monday at the latest (disasters at work notwithstanding).
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About my only contribution to open source software has been adding Solaris support to XMMS; I've put a fair bit of work into it, but others have been forthcoming with patches, modifications and rewrites. Nobody has tried to claim excess credit for work or tried to fork it off, perhaps because I've been willing to accept that (a) I am not a brilliant programmer and (b) others can do it better. Noone has insulted me or called me names (one person said the code was a mess, but I agreed with him; he was one of the coders who supplied fixes). In short, my only experience within open source software has been good.

Open source projects can be very successful; just look at Apache, which has scores (hundreds?) of developers. However, the larger the project, the larger the requirement for a core developer or small core team to coordinate efforts.

In this case above, the maintainer perhaps couldn't devote as much time as he would have liked to the project (or as much as it deserved?) resulting in Mr J. trying to take over.

The world is full of jerks, and unfortunately some of them use computers. Try to make the world a better place by not being one of them.
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