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Are the U Waterloo mathies releasing a distro optimized for Maple? Why else would there be a Pink Tie Linux?

Are the U Waterloo mathies releasing a distro optimized for Maple? Why else would there be a Pink Tie Linux?

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rfmobile@swbell.net, kevin@unif.com trident5@bigfoot.com Erik_Osterholm@ieee.org, tmunson@houston.rr.com, alessi_brand@hotmail.com, rballa1@lsu.edu, wasted@kewlhair.com, jofficer@martinapparatus.com, idiot@mylinuxisp.com, j0sh01@ev1.net faust@wintermarket.org bouncer@hotmonkeyporn.com tk-mozparty_@perljam.net janisch@students.zcu.cz, aha@pinknet.cz kuzi@atlas.cz scat@reboot.cz, petr@dousa.cz, ruzicka@core.cz, roman@management.cz, hojan@students.zcu.cz, tille@soti.org, cas.tuyn@hetnet.nl, aeon@pandora.be, sensi_millia2000@yahoo.com, crypto@shiftat.com, jan.fabry@vsknet.be, monkeyboy@fruru.com, adulau@foo.be, johan@linux.be, karu@pobox.com, soggie@soti.org nick@tomkinet.com, why_are_you_too_lazy_to_drive_1_hour_to_toronto@yo u_lazy.com try_grammer_class_a_while@get_a_life.com john@interlynx.ca asharp@axo.cc, unionstation@ryder.ca, prade@hotmail.com, 2600@hamilton2600.ca, chris.lozano@myrealbox.com, dantrevino@wrevolution.org, jksteinhauer@netscape.net, i_love_junk_email@yahoo.com, 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thefl74@netscape.net, elbardo@libero.it, clem131@libero.it, t-i-e@bigfoot.com, gng74@libero.it, moz.party.20.gnes@spamgourmet.com, ema.cerqui@libero.it, ubertob@tin.it, mozparty.20.anagoor@spamgourmet.com, gianpaolo@preciso.net, ian@deepsky.com, marco@porciletto.org, planetx2100@hotmail.com, billabong@tiscalinet.it, piofree@libero.it, skunkyboy@tiscalinet.it, vincenzo@mondopiccolo.net, macmatteo@interfree.it, contreras@jce.it, hereandnow@libero.it, pza@students.cs.mu.oz.au, caedwa@students.cs.mu.oz.au, mgi@students.cs.mu.oz.au, bah@humbug.net, mfp@cs.mu.oz.au, nospamplease@indevelopment.org, peter@simplyit.screaming,net, pmj@users.sf.net, xanni@sericyb.com.au, agh@kalcium-is.com, felicityconsult@ozemail.com.au, lucas@lucaschan.com, andrewg@nopninjas.com, andym@abnormal.com, ts@meme.com.au, jasonpell@hotmail.com, syngin@gimp.org, mhammond@skippinet.com.au, szutshi@devraj.org, rmoonen@bigpond.net.au, fawad@fawad.net, ufs@softhome.net, kotrade@yahoo.com, ben@benscorp.com, 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on University of Waterloo's we page like some boob did with the xabre video card shit. Our network is so lame that I can't even check email on campus without having 300 baud modem flashbacks.

If you post another mirror, I will hire the freaks in the realtime lab to ass-rape you with that stupid minitrain set they got in there. Also, I will lock you in the comfy lounge and tape 'Magic: The Gathering' cards to your buttocks.

right you are. anyone with a bit of a background in classical music knows that there are piles of stuff waiting out there that most of the game-playing world hasn't heard. most of the *world* in fact. midifying some of it would be an excellent idea.

i wonder if there isn't already a companion project to lilypond or mutopia for MIDI or other simple versions of classical tunes..?

nalfy.

(and some extra stuff to keep the lameness filter at bay.)

The New Yorker article says that Farnsworth finally got his TV "invention" working on 7th September 1927.

This Canadian article says that Scotsman John Logie Baird officially demonstrated working TV on 26th January 1926 (and actually had it working 4 months earlier than that).

Nice to see that Americans like to believe they invented TV - it was actually the Scots ! This makes the entire "Myth of the Lone Inventor" stuff rather tainted - Farnsworth did *not* invent TV ! Shamefully, most of America has been brought up on this lie - I visited a Science Museum in the US and was shocked to see no mention of Baird in its "inventor of TV" section.

I'm posting this in class at the best engineering school in Canada and I can tell you one of the best things about the program is the work experience. Through school I get to learn the stuff you won't get in the field like the queuing theory and probability behind networks and all that. Through work I get to drop the academics and get my hands on racks of switches, routers and servers. There are always lots of jobs for sysadmins (at least the 4+ years I've been here) and you get to learn a lot, move between companies and advance (quickly!) in position and pay.

Look to a co-op university, it's the best of both.

Go do your post-secondary education.

First reason: There will never be a better time for it, and going back to school usually only gets harder as you get older.

Second reason: Post-secondary education will also give you the theoretical grounding behind your chosen field(s) of endeavour, which you will find extremely useful once you get out into the Real World[TM] and start doing work. After all, if you know your stuff, picking up tool skills is trivial. Case in point: I am a technical writer. Since I started working, I've used all that abstract stuff I learned in university in practical ways, like through using software I learned on the job.

Third reason: When most employers (mine included) want a minimum of a 3 year degree for data entry jobs (that is to say, scutwork), suddenly that piece of paper can be your best friend.

Fourth reason: Universities and colleges provide excellent opportunities to not only socialize, but to network, pick people's brains, and get into mentoring relationships, co-op programmes, and other helpful Good Things[TM]. Post-secondary education provides a rare combination of opportunities to advance yourself that you just can't get in the workplace, but you have to be smart enough to know where to look and what to do when you find them.

Fifth reason: Work experience! I got a whole year's worth of work experience while doing my one year Master's degree, and my school has co-op programmes in practically everything. There are also a lot of student-oriented part-time jobs around, as well as work-study programmes and the like.

(Shameless plug: Incidentally, if you're concerned about finances, and who isn't, you may want to consider UWaterloo, if you don't mind moving away for awhile. Their CS programme is very good, the tuition is cheap -- especially if you're paying in US$ -- and they offer lots of co-op, bursaries, and other student financial support, as well as a great learning environment.)

Interrobang, BA, MA, future PhD

The speech culminated with RMS putting on what was supposed to be a nimbus (it was an old HD platter as far as I can tell) and proclaiming his religion. Unlike most religions, celebacy is not required. But you must use only Free Software on your computer. Like GNU/emacs. Using proprietary software is a sin.

audience: what about vi?
RMS: using vi is not a sin, it's a punishment.

Anybody here remember the band "Led Zepplin" (think: Stairway to Heaven)? Guess where they got their name from?

In any case, I remember the University of Alberta Civil Engineers used to participate in annual concrete tobbogan races. (the page also makes references to earlier concrete canoe races). The hard part, of course, was dragging the thing up the hill for a second run. :-)

1. The Beagle tool is the work of my (recently graduated) M.Math student, Qiang Tu, done under my supervision. We reused the PBS landscape viewer as part of it (which is the work of my colleague, Prof Ric Holt; hence the confusion). More info about Beagle can be found in this paper.
2. The study of Linux's growth and evolution is best documented in this paper, not the much shorter paper given in the salon.com article and elsewhere in these postings.
3. The systems my group has looked at in some detail include the Linux kernel, GCC, and VIM. fetchmail was a quick one and the results were not terribly interesting.
4. I am not an open source evangelist; I am a researcher :-) I did not say that "large system development is best handled in an open-source manner". I said something more along the lines that open source development seems to work very well for certain classes of systems, especially large, service-based, infrastructure-ish systems like operating systems and compilers. I might have said that I thought open source development might be the best way to engineer these kinds of systems. That would be a personal opinion, tho.

1. The Beagle tool is the work of my (recently graduated) M.Math student, Qiang Tu, done under my supervision. We reused the PBS landscape viewer as part of it (which is the work of my colleague, Prof Ric Holt; hence the confusion). More info about Beagle can be found in this paper.
2. The study of Linux's growth and evolution is best documented in this paper, not the much shorter paper given in the salon.com article and elsewhere in these postings.
3. The systems my group has looked at in some detail include the Linux kernel, GCC, and VIM. fetchmail was a quick one and the results were not terribly interesting.
4. I am not an open source evangelist; I am a researcher :-) I did not say that "large system development is best handled in an open-source manner". I said something more along the lines that open source development seems to work very well for certain classes of systems, especially large, service-based, infrastructure-ish systems like operating systems and compilers. I might have said that I thought open source development might be the best way to engineer these kinds of systems. That would be a personal opinion, tho.

The study by Mr. Godfrey and Mr. Tu can be found at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~migod/papers/iwpse01.pdf . (4 pages in a PDF file).

Wasn't someone working on embedding a Perl interpreter in the Linux kernel a while ago? And/or rewriting all of /bin as Perl scripts using the kernel-based interpreter?

I haven't ever heard about it, until I read your comment. After a quick Google searching I found some info about it.

In the Summer 2000 issue of The Perl Journal, Simon Cozens wrote Perlix, The Perl Operating System article:

It started, as so many of these things do, with one of those interminable debates between programmers. You know what I mean. They usually end up with one party shouting something like "Well, fine, I don't care if it's impossible, I'm going to do it anyway!"

This time around, it was me, and the topic in question was an operating system user-space comprised of non-GNU components. An operating system consists of two components: the kernel, like Windows or Linux, which talks to the hardware and directs the action, and the user-space, which is all the programs that you see and use: a shell, Explorer, programs to list directories, move files, read your mail, play games, and so on.

On "free" operating systems, a sizeable proportion of the essential user-space - not the really high-level things like web browsers, but the basic stuff that gets the system up and running - comes from the GNU project, and it was these programs that I wanted to replace.

Don't get me wrong. This wasn't an anti-GNU jihad. But someone had told me it wasn't possible, which was precisely the incentive I needed to get stuck into an idea I'd had a while ago.

Any sensible person would use BSD code here -- the BSD project derived their utilities from de-commercialized sources of Unix, and evolved independently of GNU. But that would be easy. And it wouldn't be fun. If you're going to prove a point, do it with style. So I was going to do it with Perl. [...]

Very interesting text, he mentions Tom Christiansen's Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project - "Our goal is quite simply to reimplement the classic Unix command set in pure Perl, and to have as much fun as we can doing so." I like the simple version of cat:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print while <>;

Simon Cozens also writes about Gregor Purdy's Perl Shell (psh) - "The Perl Shell is a shell that combines the interactive nature of a Unix shell with the power of Perl. The goal is to eventually have a full featured shell that behaves as expected for normal shell activity. But, the Perl Shell will use Perl syntax and functionality for control-flow statements and other things." - and about Claudio Calvelli's Linux filesystem written in Perl (PerlFS), but the link is dead and I couldn't find the new PerlFS home page (anyone knows it?).

On 2000-09-26 the SF Project: Perlix Kernel was registered by Bill Dahab. The Perlix.sf.net homepage is empty, the Development Status is Planning. The stats show more activity a year ago. Here's the summary:

Perlix is to be an POSIX compliant operating system based on the more graceful language of Perl, in stead of the uglier C. This specific project is to make a kernel written in Perl, and other core components for this operating system

Let me also quote the latest news about Perlix:

Posted By: rydor
Date: 2001-08-05 14:19
Summary: Ok, the deal with perlix

For one thing, work has not yet really begun on the perlix kernel, at most it's been in speculation. The main thing, is that this project really needs Perl6 to go ahead. Also, is needed (i don't really know if Perl6 will allow it) is direct memory writing via perl. If anyone wants to hack it into Perl 5, that would be great. One thing that may be very helpful, is to load Perl into system memory. From there Perl should run fast enough on a more high end computer to support a kernel. Another thing that has been thought about is since a Perl kernel would be relatively dynamic, have on the fly kernel upgrades, via a special script to be written. So if you want to swap in a new network driver that works better, you use this script, and the script would somehow through that driver in quickly. Anyway, If anyone is interested in joining for planning this out, either email me at Rydor@dahab.com or post to the board here, but posting to that board will probably take me a lot longer to figure out that you've done so. Anyway, hopefully we can get this figured out enough to get off the ground, and I hope the project will be lots of fun.

I also found Greg McLearn's Perl Operating System: Initial Planning Stage from 2001-11-23:

The first order of business is to make a bootable Perl kernel. Basically, this will consist of the Perl 4 core components being hacked into a state whereby it can be loaded into memory after booting and executed. In the initial stages, any Perl code to be executed will be stored as a string and handed to the interpreter module. In later stages, the Perl code will be executed from an arbitrary memory buffer.

Making the Perl 4 core components bootable is easier said than done. A memory-management system will have to be created to replace that found in a standard Unix system. As well, any dependency on the I/O subsystem will have to be removed or replaced.

I am basing the initial design on Perl 4 because the source code is far easier to understand and modify. Perl 4 does not contain many oddities currently found in the Perl 5 runtime (such as OOP and macro-hell). [...]

It sounds very interesting and I'm going to find out more about the current stage of Perlix/PerlOS development (if any). If anyone knows something interesting, please let us know.

Wasn't someone working on embedding a Perl interpreter in the Linux kernel a while ago? And/or rewriting all of /bin as Perl scripts using the kernel-based interpreter?

I haven't ever heard about it, until I read your comment. After a quick Google searching I found some info about it.

In the Summer 2000 issue of The Perl Journal, Simon Cozens wrote Perlix, The Perl Operating System article:

It started, as so many of these things do, with one of those interminable debates between programmers. You know what I mean. They usually end up with one party shouting something like "Well, fine, I don't care if it's impossible, I'm going to do it anyway!"

This time around, it was me, and the topic in question was an operating system user-space comprised of non-GNU components. An operating system consists of two components: the kernel, like Windows or Linux, which talks to the hardware and directs the action, and the user-space, which is all the programs that you see and use: a shell, Explorer, programs to list directories, move files, read your mail, play games, and so on.

On "free" operating systems, a sizeable proportion of the essential user-space - not the really high-level things like web browsers, but the basic stuff that gets the system up and running - comes from the GNU project, and it was these programs that I wanted to replace.

Don't get me wrong. This wasn't an anti-GNU jihad. But someone had told me it wasn't possible, which was precisely the incentive I needed to get stuck into an idea I'd had a while ago.

Any sensible person would use BSD code here -- the BSD project derived their utilities from de-commercialized sources of Unix, and evolved independently of GNU. But that would be easy. And it wouldn't be fun. If you're going to prove a point, do it with style. So I was going to do it with Perl. [...]

Very interesting text, he mentions Tom Christiansen's Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project - "Our goal is quite simply to reimplement the classic Unix command set in pure Perl, and to have as much fun as we can doing so." I like the simple version of cat:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print while <>;

Simon Cozens also writes about Gregor Purdy's Perl Shell (psh) - "The Perl Shell is a shell that combines the interactive nature of a Unix shell with the power of Perl. The goal is to eventually have a full featured shell that behaves as expected for normal shell activity. But, the Perl Shell will use Perl syntax and functionality for control-flow statements and other things." - and about Claudio Calvelli's Linux filesystem written in Perl (PerlFS), but the link is dead and I couldn't find the new PerlFS home page (anyone knows it?).

On 2000-09-26 the SF Project: Perlix Kernel was registered by Bill Dahab. The Perlix.sf.net homepage is empty, the Development Status is Planning. The stats show more activity a year ago. Here's the summary:

Perlix is to be an POSIX compliant operating system based on the more graceful language of Perl, in stead of the uglier C. This specific project is to make a kernel written in Perl, and other core components for this operating system

Let me also quote the latest news about Perlix:

Posted By: rydor
Date: 2001-08-05 14:19
Summary: Ok, the deal with perlix

For one thing, work has not yet really begun on the perlix kernel, at most it's been in speculation. The main thing, is that this project really needs Perl6 to go ahead. Also, is needed (i don't really know if Perl6 will allow it) is direct memory writing via perl. If anyone wants to hack it into Perl 5, that would be great. One thing that may be very helpful, is to load Perl into system memory. From there Perl should run fast enough on a more high end computer to support a kernel. Another thing that has been thought about is since a Perl kernel would be relatively dynamic, have on the fly kernel upgrades, via a special script to be written. So if you want to swap in a new network driver that works better, you use this script, and the script would somehow through that driver in quickly. Anyway, If anyone is interested in joining for planning this out, either email me at Rydor@dahab.com or post to the board here, but posting to that board will probably take me a lot longer to figure out that you've done so. Anyway, hopefully we can get this figured out enough to get off the ground, and I hope the project will be lots of fun.

I also found Greg McLearn's Perl Operating System: Initial Planning Stage from 2001-11-23:

The first order of business is to make a bootable Perl kernel. Basically, this will consist of the Perl 4 core components being hacked into a state whereby it can be loaded into memory after booting and executed. In the initial stages, any Perl code to be executed will be stored as a string and handed to the interpreter module. In later stages, the Perl code will be executed from an arbitrary memory buffer.

Making the Perl 4 core components bootable is easier said than done. A memory-management system will have to be created to replace that found in a standard Unix system. As well, any dependency on the I/O subsystem will have to be removed or replaced.

I am basing the initial design on Perl 4 because the source code is far easier to understand and modify. Perl 4 does not contain many oddities currently found in the Perl 5 runtime (such as OOP and macro-hell). [...]

It sounds very interesting and I'm going to find out more about the current stage of Perlix/PerlOS development (if any). If anyone knows something interesting, please let us know.

My alma mater had quite a bit to do with converting the OED to the digital medium.

Generally, the data for one time pads is collected from random natural sources. Point a radio receiver at some used portion of the sky, record some data, wash it with some hashing algorithms to make sure it is random. apply some randomness tests and save it for later use. A karma whore would link to The Handbook of Applied Cryptography Section 5.2 (Random bit generation).

Yeah, I know how UW is funded, I went there. :-) I said "think state school" for our American friends. UW is a lot closer to a state school (UC Berkley) than a private one (Stanford) in terms of its funding model.

If you read the UW overview, you'll see that it is described as a public university where the provincial government pays 55 percent of the cost of the education.

Which, if you're a foreign student, costs $24 000 a year, instead of the $5 400 Canadian students pay (our government subsidizes half of the cost of tuition)

You're off by a factor of two. International tuition fees are CAD$13,700 (USD $8500).

You might want to recheck your facts. And tuition isn't deregulated in Ontario yet. :P

It is, for certain programs, like computer science, medicine, law and some engineering disciplines. See this Gazette article from 1998.

Check your facts.

Paul

Yeah, I know how UW is funded, I went there. :-) I said "think state school" for our American friends. UW is a lot closer to a state school (UC Berkley) than a private one (Stanford) in terms of its funding model.

If you read the UW overview, you'll see that it is described as a public university where the provincial government pays 55 percent of the cost of the education.

Which, if you're a foreign student, costs $24 000 a year, instead of the $5 400 Canadian students pay (our government subsidizes half of the cost of tuition)

You're off by a factor of two. International tuition fees are CAD$13,700 (USD $8500).

You might want to recheck your facts. And tuition isn't deregulated in Ontario yet. :P

It is, for certain programs, like computer science, medicine, law and some engineering disciplines. See this Gazette article from 1998.

Check your facts.

Paul

Comment not meant as flamebait - just pointing out that your intro is as "insufficient and vague" as the previous posters was "deceptive and incorrect". Sorry for any offense.

Anyway, details of NFS being applicable to DLP can be found in e.g. pg 262 Applied Crypto 2nd Ed by Schneier, or in the crypto bible Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Menezes et al. A complete copy of this definitive text is available online in PDF format here. See pg 128/129.

NFS is not applicable to ECC at all....

UW CS tution is about CAD$5400/year. MIT tuition is about US$26,000 (CAD $40,000) per year.

Paul

Origami math is cool... (check out the galleries!)
hyperbolic paraboloids are actually pretty easy and fun to make (and they drive the ladies wild ;).
The Five Intersecting Tetrahedra are neat too but can get really hard when you're putting in the last couple.
And there's plently of theoretical stuff; for example, you can axiomitize origami, and trisect angles and double cubes and stuff.
Some people have even made origami/combinatorial geometry courses.

Origami math is cool... (check out the galleries!)
hyperbolic paraboloids are actually pretty easy and fun to make (and they drive the ladies wild ;).
The Five Intersecting Tetrahedra are neat too but can get really hard when you're putting in the last couple.
And there's plently of theoretical stuff; for example, you can axiomitize origami, and trisect angles and double cubes and stuff.
Some people have even made origami/combinatorial geometry courses.

Think you'll find them reporting stories like this one? I doubt it.

And even when they're reporting about things unrelated to christian science, I don't need to hear what they have to say! Read this and come back here. Do you want to read news written by people deny that medicines can have any effect on their own, but instead work entirely through placebo? ("[A] drug has no efficacy of its own, but borrows its power from human faith and belief. The drug does nothing, because it has no intelligence." (Science and Health, p. 12)).

If you want to read the news as it's seen through the eyes of christian science wackos, go for it. But you're not going to convince me that CSM is a respectable newspaper.

It's hosted by the Centre For Applied Cryptography Research (CACR) at the University of Waterloo. Anyone in southern Ontario who liked the book might consider attending.

Info:
Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way
Gary McGraw, Cigital
Mar 20 (Wednesday), 2:30 pm, DC 1302

As far as I know, my university (Uinversity of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, eh?) does no such thing. Faculties maintain their own banks of papers, projects and programs, and compare the students' submissions when they are handed in. They're suprisingly good at catching students (and the students are suprisingly stupid - I heard that once half a class handed in the same assignment), and I've heard no mention of subscribing to any knid of centralized system where other universities' projects are also considered.
This makes me wonder as to how big a problem this is. Are a lot of universities doing this? Are they small ones or big ones? Do schools like MIT do it? It seems to me that this is some sort of an attempt at a cost-effective, effortless solution that smaller schools would go for, and would factor into the quality of education they provide. As long as big schools do their own thing, the glorious, presigious ideal will remain to stay away from such crap and students will know what they're getting into when they end up at Smith & Sons U.

If you don't need to stay local, or even in the country you might want to try University of Waterloo

There's a math faculty (you get a BMath) which includes a Pure Math department. It's a pretty nice place, and you get to drink real (Canadian) beer when you're only 19. Plus almost all of the math faculty is in co-op, which means that you also do work terms where you get paid... very handy.

The lumber companies in Canada have been using GIS to better map their harvesting. They also have reduced the impact by being able to better utilize the mesh of old bush roads. Plus they get a better idea of the size and age of trees by looking at IR images.

GIS has also been used on farming with large farms - a farmer couldn't possibly monitor 1000's of hectres.

Check the Faculty of Environmental Studies page at the University of Waterloo. They have all kinds of cool uses for GIS - sea ice studies are pretty interesting.

The lumber companies in Canada have been using GIS to better map their harvesting. They also have reduced the impact by being able to better utilize the mesh of old bush roads. Plus they get a better idea of the size and age of trees by looking at IR images.

GIS has also been used on farming with large farms - a farmer couldn't possibly monitor 1000's of hectres.

Check the Faculty of Environmental Studies page at the University of Waterloo. They have all kinds of cool uses for GIS - sea ice studies are pretty interesting.

A friend of mine wrote a paper on this topic:

Limitations of Colour Management.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-835602.html

To mitigate this vulnerability OULU (the guys that found this a year ago) has some good links at http://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/ouspg/protos/testin g/c06/snmpv1/

Securing SNMP on Solaris
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/security/howto/2000-10-04/
Securing SNMP in Windows
http://www.sans.org/infosecFAQ/incident/SNMP.htm
Securing your Cisco Router when using SNMP
http://www.sans.org/infosecFAQ/netdevices/router.h tm
SNMP - simple management tool for hackers?
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/sec/1004sec1.h tml
Windows 2000, SNMP and Security
http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/microsoft/2k/sn mp.html

Well if i look at his CV I think we will end up with C++. Not to mention he names it twice in the languas he looked at.

Next question:
what runtime libraries? What IDE?

Using CMOS sensors, it is possible to get both linear and logarithmic responses from pixels, depending on your biasing conditions.

For a linear sensor, the photosite is generally a floating N+ diffusion, that makes up one side of an NMOS transistor. At reset, the voltage here is set to VDD. As incident light generates electron-hole pairs, the electrons are collected in the diffusion, lowering the voltage in a linear fashion, dependent upon the parasitic capacitance of the photosite. When the integration time is up, this charge/voltage is sampled, and you have a linear sensor.

For logarithmic response, the reset level of the photosite is actually even with the biasing of the gate to that transistor (minus the Vt, of course). Incident light generates electrons, and the transistor operates in the sub-threshold region, making the voltage at the photosite vary as the logarithm of the current being generated and flowing through the gate region. Sample that voltage, and tah-dah, you've got a logarithmic response to light.

I admit, this is much easier to understand with diagrams of the diffusions, so if you want, here is a pdf of a paper discussing a sensor that has combined linear-logarithmic response:

CMOS Active Pixel Sensor With Combined Linear and Logarithmic Mode Operation

Scientist Says: Disease, famine, and malnutrition require more complicated solutions, all of which have a technological component.

Which obviously involves the development of artificial wombs. Yeah, right. The issue isn't science vs. anti-science, the issue is the focus of the scientific effort. Developing artificial wombs to "treat the childless" when there are so many starving children in the world already is just plain stupid. and it smacks of eugenics.

The reason we don't get Cholera, dysentery, giardia, tapeworms and so forth in New Zealand is basic sanitation, not fancy drugs. The reason we export food rather than import it is because first off we don't breed like bloody rabbits (thanks to the education and long-standing suffrage for women here) and second of all, the scientific effort is heavily weighted toward agricultural and fisheries research--not developing artificial wombs to treat the childless. The solution to the problems associated with overpopulation are very low-tech (like, uh, using a condom? DUH!)-- to devote resources to developing artificial wombs to "treat the childless" is just an insult to a starving and suffering world. My alma mater Cornell should really be ashamed of itself.

...prosecuting the corrupt government officials that divert foreign aid into their own pockets when it was intended to feed starving women and children.

Scientist Says: Who do you want to prosecute them?

Haven't been listening to the BBC lately have we? The latest fad in NGOs, including the IMF and the World Bank believe it or not, is to withhold aid and debt relief from countries that can't demonstrate transparency. When funds are diverted, corrupt third world officials are being hauled into court and thrown behind bars, just like any other thieves would be.

So, it's already happening -- Wasn't my idea--if you don't like it, go complain to the NGOs that are already doing it.

Scientist Says: Disease, famine, and malnutrition require more complicated solutions, all of which have a technological component.

Which obviously involves the development of artificial wombs. Yeah, right. The issue isn't science vs. anti-science, the issue is the focus of the scientific effort. Developing artificial wombs to "treat the childless" when there are so many starving children in the world already is just plain stupid. and it smacks of eugenics.

The reason we don't get Cholera, dysentery, giardia, tapeworms and so forth in New Zealand is basic sanitation, not fancy drugs. The reason we export food rather than import it is because first off we don't breed like bloody rabbits (thanks to the education and long-standing suffrage for women here) and second of all, the scientific effort is heavily weighted toward agricultural and fisheries research--not developing artificial wombs to treat the childless. The solution to the problems associated with overpopulation are very low-tech (like, uh, using a condom? DUH!)-- to devote resources to developing artificial wombs to "treat the childless" is just an insult to a starving and suffering world. My alma mater Cornell should really be ashamed of itself.

...prosecuting the corrupt government officials that divert foreign aid into their own pockets when it was intended to feed starving women and children.

Scientist Says: Who do you want to prosecute them?

Haven't been listening to the BBC lately have we? The latest fad in NGOs, including the IMF and the World Bank believe it or not, is to withhold aid and debt relief from countries that can't demonstrate transparency. When funds are diverted, corrupt third world officials are being hauled into court and thrown behind bars, just like any other thieves would be.

So, it's already happening -- Wasn't my idea--if you don't like it, go complain to the NGOs that are already doing it.

Why don't they try treating the starving children already born, those without clean water to drink or wash in, those orphaned by war, drought, famine, pestilence and death FIRST?

The Pharmaceuticals Researcher Says Because to solve those problems you need scientists, and the simple fact is that a baby born in to a upper middle class/rich first world country has one heck of a higher chance of being a scientist than one born to a poor third world farmer.

So...the fact that University science faculty are racist and classist means we should pay out enormous amounts of money to develop the technology to breed more of them? Logical!

I can just see the headlines now...

Heroic White Suburban Scientist-Men Save the Planet By Breeding More Like Selves! (sound of Die Valkyrie in the background...) O, Superman!

That sounds like a much better idea than digging wells, digging latrines downhill from them, developing graywater systems for irrigation, educating women (known to bring down the birth rate in developing nations) and prosecuting the corrupt government officials that divert foreign aid into their own pockets when it was intended to feed starving women and children.

No, what we need is Big Science!!! Keeping the price of patented pharmaceuticals well above what any third world nation can afford! Developing Lifestyle Drugs that Only The Rich Need! Botox! IVF Drugs! Xenical! Viagra! That'll save the world!

Yeah, there are courses like that at my school. They're often referred to as joke courses, easy-ass crap, skip classes, etc.

People take them to fill in slots in their schedules that would normally be filled with horrible math courses on propositional logic or real analysis. [shudder]

Where is the news here? Don't all Engineering Universities have Aerial Robotics projects? I think the have competitions and stuff as well...

E.g. My old school has one....
http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~warg/

It is possible to get a job in computers without majoring in Computer Science, but you'll have to demonstrate your interest (and competence) through hobby projects or extracurricular activities.

I'd estimate that a fairly large number of people in the computer profession have come out of other disciplines. A co-worker of mine was a physics major. He does networking support and software programming. I majored in History (and took several CS electives) and am doing database and web work. Hobby projects I did while at university, good luck, and connections helped me get the job.

One of the things I didn't like about the engineering disciplines at UWaterloo was their lack of electives. Majoring in something that gives you more electives is one option; another is to take the classes you want, knowing that it will take more than 4 years to graduate.

I also believe that, in the long run, a good worker with many interests is better off in the job market than someone who just concentrated on computers. Your career will demand more flexibility than you think.

hmm. I don't think the resources are 'unimaginable', just ridiculously, ridiculously big. A (really) rough back of the envelope type of calculation on what storage resources might be required:

- Let's say a DVD holds 8 hours of acceptable quality video.
- this translates to 15.9 gigs I think? (someone please correct me on the specs if incorrect, I don't even own a DVD player)(what the heck, it'll only be an order of magnitude error or so)
- TV is what, 75 years old?
- Assume there have been 1000 channels in the history of tv, even though there are doubtless more now, but obviously less in 1950.

So 3 DVDs or 48gigs = 1 day of storage for 1 channel.

48gigs* 365 * 75 * 1000
= (hmm, where's that calculator)

1,314,000,000 gigs
=1314000 terabytes
=1314 petabytes
=1.3 exabytes

(I think. Ahem. Please correct any gross errors in translation/calculation. Don't ask me to land the Mars Observer.)

For comparison, George Gilder notes that a study showed that the total traffic for the Net was about 1 petabyte a month. (I know, the real figure for comparison would be, 'how many terabytes does the Net contain?' I don't have time for that search! Anyone?)

Terabyte servers are in use now; it's within the realm of possibility to imagine a million of them. Chuck in the hard drive equivalent of Moore's Law, a breakthrough in holographic techniques, ("Windows 2010 requires a minimum of 1 terabyte of hard disk space...") and hey, you could maybe make some half-assed attempts at this 10 years down the road.

Of course that's just the storage calculation. I've ignored the gross problems of:
-digitizing all the historical stuff on tape
-indexing it all with at least an IMDB-style header of metadata. Full text search would be nice too :-) (hey, a bonus from closed captioning)
-providing adequate last-mile bandwidth so that 200 million americans can surf different tv programs simultaneously (trust George Gilder!)
-the IP issues: how hollywood, the courts, and popular sentiment will interact to drive this thing forward.

I saw a talk presented by the scientific computation group at the University of Waterloo about 5 years ago on the advantages of implementing a fluid flow solver in C++ vs. FORTRAN.

The conclusion was that you lost a tiny bit of performance (about 3%) but your code maintainability went *way* up. The example presented was a simple 2D navier-stokes solver, and adding a new element type to the C++ version took a few hours of effort, but adding a new element type to the FORTRAN version took a couple of days.

on their webpage they say that they are now doing all of their scientific computation work in C++

first off. i wouldn't consider a LED any less dangerous than a laser. yes, a laser will generally generate a higher powered and more focused beam, but the "dangerous" lasers used in telecomm very often will not exceed 5 to 10dBm.

5mW = 6.99dBm. i wouldn't trust looking at anything with +dbm fairly concentrated source... would you?

on that note, there's lots of info on laser safety at google

a nice pretty chart courtesy of waterloo pointing out what's at risk: your retina, your colour vision, night vision, and skin burns. it's skin burns that are unlikely at such low levels, not eye dammage.

here's an abstract from a ubc page:
"Laser light in the visible to near infrared spectrum (i.e., 400 - 1400 nm) can cause damage to the retina resulting in scotoma (blind spot in the fovea). This wave band is also know as the "retinal hazard region"."

STORY TIME:
i had a co-worker that used to tell me not to worry about the 1500nm range, as "it's only the 1310nm range that you have to be worried about, sheesh." i was nutorious for turning off the laser every time was changing connections.

i probably had a over a mil worth of devices and test equipment on my bench. had a nice automated test (LabView) running. 5dBm Tx laser (MZ pumped up to 10gig internal modulation - yeah baby!), a few km (miles, whatever) of fiber, variable attenuator (VOA), and a nice 10gig Rx (APD).

so anyways, the freeking comm cables (HPIB) controlling the VOA went skitzoid or something. the VOA reset to ZERO attenuation. only a few seconds later, and the APD was fried. (currents jumped from low double/tripple digits to four digits. in mA. so yes, that's amps.)

my stomach sank as i saw the bit error rate (on the BERT) go to 100%. several grand. poof. gone... just like that.

THE POINT OF THE STORY:
i got the idea pretty quick that even components designed to handle that stuff get very cranky very quickly. let alone your eyes. you've only got 1 chance with 'em... don't muck it up.

SIDENOTES:
- from then on in my very short distance tests had a 12dB fixed optical attenuator (less than $20?) instead of relying on a VOA (probably a few grand).
- oh... and i stuck to what i was supposed to be testing: over a few hundred km instead of a few km. heh heh hah... oops.

The reason I object to the term "software crisis" is because those who use it almost invariably go on to suggest "solutions" to this crisis which don't recognize basic realities of the underlying situation. You're doing exactly the same thing.

A paper was recently discussed here on Slashdot that gives an interesting take on the subject, and some excellent insights: Mathematical Limits to Software Estimation. One interesting observation quoted in the paper is "The creation of genuinely new software has far more in common with developing a new theory of physics than it does with producing cars or watches on an assembly line". Many people, apparently including yourself, would like to deny this; but until it is acknowledged, those who refuse to acknowledge it will continue to perceive a "software crisis", and continue to pursue solutions which don't ever achieve what they want, because, as has also been famously observed in the software industry, there is no silver bullet. That seminal paper says, "Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any--no inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity what electronics, transistors, and large-scale integration did for computer hardware."

Before I go any further, I should qualify what I'm talking about. There are many classes of applications that are pretty much solved problems, because they have been developed over and over, and software frameworks have been developed which make it much easier to churn out variations on that particular kind of application. No-one is suggesting that no improvements in software productivity can be made - over time, the range of problems which are well-solved will certainly increase. However, the issue is that of dealing with new problems. And new problems arise more frequently than you might imagine. When it comes to simple business form-based applications, for example, the basics of such applications were essentially solved by the 1980's. However, any application written in the 1980s would have been written for environments which are now obsolete. Greater abstraction was nearly impossible back then, because the hardware simply didn't have the necessary resources. So the evolution of computers and software as a field itself creates new problems, as just one example.

The fields is still incredibly young and immature, there's no question of that. In just the last five years, things have fallen into place that were never possible or practical before, and that trend will continue for the forseeable future.

On its commercial side, plenty of "lying" takes place - it's called marketing. But there are millions of honest people, myself amongst them, who are doing our best to implement best practices and further the state of the art.

You're trying to do that too, which I applaud, but I don't applaud your attitude. Since I don't know you, I don't know what background has led you to be so antagonistic to the computer "industry". The industry is really an incredibly large and diverse ecosystem, which only superficially moves with one mind. The many languages you were complaining about earlier are a reflection of all the people who are trying hard to improve levels of abstraction and make computing a better place.

All of this has very little to do with the specific project you're apparently working on.

There is no rule of knowledge or of putting things together that says I need to study all written works ever existing in order to be smart enough to be able to put things together.

There is, in fact, a common-sense rule that's so widespread that it has a name: "reinventing the wheel". Another common sense rule is that it's dangerous to ignore a large body of work in the field in which you're attempting to innovate: can you really afford to dismiss the work of the large number of smart people that have gone before you? Are you saying that you don't need to know about prior art in order to advance the state of the art? There's another "rule of knowledge" that boils down to a single word: hubris.

I'm going to leave it at that. I wish you luck in your endeavours. If you're actually developing code, you will eventually learn some truths about software development, even if it has to be the hard way. Some reading and research could save you from a lot of dead ends.

Adolscence of P1", by Thomas Ryan, in 1977 described software that would reside on a single computer (IBM mainframe) and use a straightforward AI algorithm to go across computer networks and attempted to break into the next computer, copy itself onto that next computer, and "root" itself (actually hijack the PSW - these were IBM mainframes) on that next machine. Eventually, P1 infects most of the mainframes in America, giving the programmer the ability to (among other things) avoid payment on his credit card. Unfortunatley, P1 gets widespread enough to start hogging noticeable resources and piss off the sys ops and other powers that be.

In short, Ryan mapped out both the structure and effect and an efficient internet virus in 1977. Given that P1 was
widely read by com. sci types, and some friends and I actually toyed with writing a P1 style virus in the early 80's (we were too lazy/lame to figure out how to hijack the PSW), I assume there are computer viruses now that are the direct descendant of P1.

The greatest problem with having an accreditated program is that is requires the university to follow guidelines set by an external organization. This can be good, but when it prevents innovation and enforces scads of really stupid stuff it becomes most frustrating.

The greatest problem with having an accreditated program is that is requires the university to follow guidelines set by an external organization. This can be good, but when it prevents innovation and enforces scads of really stupid stuff it becomes most frustrating.

is being taken in Ontario.
Really, most engineers start out as engineering students...
from the site:

Accreditation of the Software Engineering progam
Waterloo's Software Engineering program is designed to be accredited as both an engineering and a computer science program, but it cannot be officially assessed before Fall 2005, which is the final year of the first Software Engineering class, and it cannot be accredited until after the first class graduates (Spring 2006). The first class whose program is successfully assessed will be considered to have graduated from an accredited program, even though that program is not officially accredited until after the class graduates.

The professional engineering societies in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia have developed criteria for registering Professional Engineers who specialize in Software Engineering.

Here is the PEO press release from this two-year old announcement.

I believe that the Texas Board of Professional Engineers is the only organization in the United States to create this designation, as of now.

Personally, I'm in the midst of my first term enrolled in the Software Engineering program at the University of Waterloo, here in Ontario. We are learning a combination of math, science, computer science, and engineering design principles. I am greatly enjoying it so far, although some days I wish I was in computer science (where they actually have first year electives). Two other universities in Ontario, McMaster and Ottawa, also have such a program up and running.

So although Professional Software Engineers are not commonplace today, the ball is rolling. This is a good thing in my heavily biased opinion and grossly unqualified opinion.

Canada already has software engineering as a true engineering discipline. McMaster University which I currently attend in S.E. has a program that has been accredited by the Professional Engineers Ontario. Our department is led by Dr. David Parnas, one of the fathers of software engineering (read the Mythical Man-Month by F. P. Brooks or Software Fundamentals by D. Parnas) Many other canadian universities are following with their own S.E. programs including the very strong in computer science University of Waterloo, the world renowned McGill University of Montreal and many others.