Home networking equipment will probably not be suitable for installation on any emergency response vehicle due to local codes, standards and rules. Start with cabling, then check EMC, EMR, shock, vibration, temperature, etc.
Mobile broadband will realistically be used for sharing IP surveillance streams with a Operations and Control Centre.
Kit suppliers include Fortress Technologies, Firetide, Aruba / Alcatel Lucent, Moxa, and start at low thousand $.
When I was a teen it was forbidden to eat or to smoke at the movies. My parents used to go often, and even my Grand parents would occasionally go for some light commedy or drama.
The shift to the Multiplex, with hordes of teenagers talking, chewing, sms'ing, smoking and throwing stuff ended the experience for everybody that liked to see movies at the Movies. Due to working hours, we could only attend the late sessions. At a certain point, safety started to be an issue.
A DVD costs the equivalent of 2 tickets. The whole family can watch it as many times as we like, in the peace and comfort of our home(s).
The biggest issue is the lack of quality of most movies, when considering an adult audience. Everything seems to be marketed to the 14-25 y.o. age group. Special effects and loud sound are a drawback for me, as I want to chill out instead of revvvvvving up!
The last family movie outing was Lord of the Rings III, and the next one will be Indiana Jones IV. Those you have to watch on the big screen, the rest is perfectly watchable on DVD. Personally I stopped going to the movies after Star Wars II. Lucas killed what was left of the magic.
BS according to the Economist does not have the same street meaning as in the US. After all, the Economist is a pillar of Capitalism and a bastion of good manners.
Given this, they are staunchly anti-monopolistic. This little article was nothing more than a single column, the reply from the head of the BSA in the UK made it all worthwhile.
As another poster mentioned, having this issue discussed on the Economist (and everybody has this morbid curiosity to read the reader's letters) is great for the anti-BSA lobby - the majority of the world's population. Most CEOs just browse the Economist, but nobody skips the letters to the Editor.
The BSA lost this one, now the Economist's offices are going to be raided. I wouldn't be surprised if they were running Linux on the servers and OS X on the desktops... After all, those three-piece suited know-it-alls like to have the best money can buy;-)
Amen. Thank God somebody moderated you from Funny to Insightful;-) That is the story of my life!
After having lived in showerless depression for a long time, I decided to confront my dark side of Geekdom, and get some professional help. The initial results were not good, but eventually I found a doctor that understood my geekiness and he put me on the right track. Maybe I was served a nice stew of common sense and standard medical practice, but it changed my daily life for good.
In retrospective, I lost some of those dark side of Geekdom traits that make geeks or nerds so unactractive to the general population, but I can now recognise that it is useless to be the smartest guy in the room if nobody understands you.
On the other hand, being smart, a total geek, and being able to interact in normal social circumstances is a very good receipe for success.
As my Father would put it before leaving to his sister-in-law's birthday party, "we all have to make sacrifices to be part of society."
Those are pertinent observations. But "nerds" and "nerds" with mental / behavioural problems is not the same thing! Unfortunately, I would classify myself as the latter type, altough in recovery. A radical overhaul of my life started after some personal problems that seriously affected my performance at work. I am almost the old lovable "nerd" that I was, and in the process I have landed a nice job, and a hot girlfriend. Having found the balance between work and family/personal life did wonders for me. She knows zilch about technology and computers, but likes to have somebody around that can fix stuff and explain her the wonders of the computer world. Nevertheless, I think she values more the long-term relationship and commitment than the 3:24 of pleasure with the pool boy or the drummer...
PS I think the article is total BS, it would only be credible if Carmen Electra would elope to Vegas with RMS and webcast the wedding from inside the Elvis chappel:)
My academic institution pays through the nose for its Matlab licenses. Probably we do make it "free" for student usage, but even the "academic" pricing of Matlab is a problem, when there are 36000 toolboxes...
In EE it is a great tool to teach Communications, and Signal Processing. In CS, I would guess it is not the first choice. It's the MATrix LABoratory, not the MATrix LANGuage. I see it as an application that allows a lazy engineer to do matrix computations without going into deep programming projects.
You can also look at the "pragmatic" approach: a coding contest can be fun. It does not have to be OSS to make you want to solve it or win it! Moreover, most Matlab users I know share their code (unless their contract says otherwise)
Even if I use proprietary Matlab and Xilinx tools, I like Mozilla, Firefox, vim, TeX, gimp and OO (and cigwin and fink:) for my daily computer needs.
Can you tell which hardware you use it on? And can you list the OS and required packages needed to run you Matlab alternative?
My main problem with Matlab alternatives was the centuries needed updating systems and compiling and downloading and compiling some more until you have something that works but still does not work as well as Matlab. But this was a while ago, and from your posts, things have changed a lot for the better.
1. PhD students do not live in the real world, and therefore do not know what software costs in the real world.
2. I have never met anybody that programmed in {Scientific,Numeric,Monty} Python, from which we can conclude that they were not hired. People that keep their skills simple, like Matlab and C, usually get hired.
3. You have not left the university yet, how would you want to be re-using your code already? I did, and I don't want to re-use my code anyway. It want it to be re-used at the university, while I make other nifty projects at my company.
4. In the real world, Matlab is usually the cheapest tool you can buy, besides MS Office (flame at will, secretaries use MS Office, and therefore you use MS Office or your trips are not re-imbursed:) IC design packages are much more expensive...
Dr. Adapt, itching from all the asbestos underwear and flaming graduate students
Ah ha! Ok, a 22 y.o. needs to save all the money he can to buy beer. Beer, helas, is not free;-)
Returning to a serious tone, a PhD student should not care about paying for a software license, his Professor should. If Octave or Something Python is the tool you need, it is the tool that must be used - free or not. If it is Matlab, Mathematica or even Halo 2, you get a license for it. What I don't do is use a cracked version: if there is no budget for the best tool, get the best one that your money can afford. A trip to a conference costs more than a year license, Hell, even the office space you use costs more to your group... (No, not the cookies you steal during the night from the group cookie jar, those are not so expensive:)
I would like to know why Matlab is an outdated inferior tool, and an expensive one. We do pay more than what costs a house per year in licenses, and we don't particularly enjoy it.
Like another poster wrote, a lot of Matlab is done over Linux, by freakish fervent OSS advocates, that have not touched any other piece of proprietary software for ages. In fact, another poster thought that Matlab was OSS, because it is widely used by the Linux+$favourite_editor$+TeX crowd...
I have used Octave and gnuplot on and off, and always had problems with the limited number of available functions. I have read here about the Sourceforge page and its many "toolboxes", and that seems very useful (i.e., I will start using it at home!). My old frustrations with using Octave started with installation / compilation problems, displaying the results in gnuplot, and exchanging code with my colleagues. The nicest features were the ease of use of Octave from any term, and some C-like things that Matlab does not allow you to do...
But... Matlab is very easy to use and to abuse. I have seen students type pages of code that can be handled in a line (albeit a long one:) You can use it to hide your lack of coding skills, but if you remember the underlying philosophy of Matlab and use it for what it was designed for - matrix calculations - you can write code that is very close to what you need when implementing it in hardware. And clear, clean and self-explanatory. A literal translation of an algorithm into a matrix formulation ( block processing ). Mathematica, Maple may be more suited for some problems, but Matlab has its place.
Simulink was a slow and resource-hungry hog, but Moore's law and some bug fixing have made it quite usable.
I upgraded now to R14 with some patches. I think it takes about 10000% longer to load than R13, and 1000000000000000% to use the editors and Simulink browsers. I remember R12 used to crash when you would try to use vim as an editor and the default Matlab editor was running... Or simply try to cut and paste some code between windows.
The point is, when you are in a multi-million $ or project, the 2k for Matlab and a few k for toolboxes are not relevant. In a multidisciplinary project where time to market (or time to publish:) is an imperative, Matlab saves time and can be a glue between teams with very different skills. You can spend your valuable time tweaking your algorithm to run faster and use less resources, or you can try to learn Python, VHDL, and all assemblies for the target DSP architectures - things that can be avoided by using some toolboxes . Yes, these are not ideal but they provide a initial point to your colleagues that are specialists in the field to jump in and optimise it by hand.
So, all in all, Matlab is a very handy tool, which is not meant to be a general purpose programming language. You don't make websites in Matlab - even if the manual says it can be done. It is expensive, but failure and project delays are much more costly.
You should not blast somebody for sharing his code just because Matlab is not free. Other tools such as particle accelerators are not free either, and its engineers still share code and results;-)
That was true in 1974, but nowadays Spain is one of the most dynamic countries in the EU. Valencia and explicitely the UPV should have behaved better and defend transparency, instead of chosing to bow to commercial interests - that might not affect a University. I guess most Unis are still very much state funded and depend very little on private sponsorship... It was a case of respect for the hierarchy - that problem we still have and is very hard to solve.
There are plenty of talented IT professionals on the market searching for tech jobs.
A couple of weeks ago, I logged in Siemens worldwide jobs site, and, in my field, 321 out of 322 open positions were in China.
Most employers could see the benefits of offering job security and paying decent salaries as an effective means of retaining the talent (and all those hours spent in training...). Instead, they hire temps, pay huge fees to temp agencies and recruiters, they "outsource", etc. Without a knowledge base, there is no future in any company.
It is more a problem of "if I pay you less, I can keep more for myself" than a true lack of qualified professionals on the market. If engineers wanted to flip burgers they would have studied at the burger flipping college!:)
I had a French computer magazine from 1985 that tested hardware ruggedness by dropping the computers off desks, and then off windows. The HP Vectra was the absolute winner. The baby would boot after being dropped from the 1st floor (without screen:) This is trivia, but it's useful trivia when you remember the "care" that some cleaning ladies put in their work...
I also want to add that my 181000 km Nissan Micra stills drives better than a Ford, and needs less maintenance.
my E-term that crashed a lot in 1998 never gave me the chance of noticing it:)
anyway, one coder had for sure implemented a desktop with translucent windows. it would not take him too long to put some timer or activity trigger to make them dim or bright. clocks and triggers are even older than computers!
is the trivial application of these two known ideas patentable? like one poster said, "breathing" and "doing things fast" are public domain, but "breathing really fast" is new:))))))))) and could get him filthy rich.
i will now flagellate myself for missing the demonstration against software patents yesterday in The Hague.
Matlab and Simulink and toolboxes are a great start (there are student prices). GSM and IS95 can be modelled fairly accurately (the whole transceiver chain, from analogue signal input to output). It is not cheap, but much cheaper than COSSAP. Octave is not really an option, unless you want to write all the code yourself. The best sellign point is that you can implement any type of receiver algorithm and start playing with UWB. I am not really sure a PC can do real-time decoding, especially in a wideband multiuser scenario...;-)
But this is baseband signal processing, done on PCs. For real time applications, you need DSP or FPGA. Texas has some "entry" or "student" packs with evaluation boards and Code Composer, but it's not cheap for a hobbyist, and there's a learning curve... (read: you have to debug a lot)
The not-so-nice aspect of software radio is the hardware part. Tx and Rx design for wideband communication systems is not easy and definitely not cheap. Some kit is available on the market (for example from Spectrum) as add-on boards, and antennas can be manufactured or bought.
While both reception and transmission would be nice to have, it is much easier to do the reception part, due to strict regulations for transmitters (as dmlb noted, it is something that can land you in jail very fast - or have a van from the local telco come by and do some measurements:)
Books on the topic (all with shortcomings, none with magic bullet solutions):
H. Harada, R. Prasad "simulation and software radio for mobile communications" (CD included), Artech House, London, UK, 2002.
W.Tutlebee "software defined radio" Wiley, 2002.
J.H. Reed "software radio" Prentice Hall PTR, 2002.
J. Mitola III, "software radio architecture" Wiley, 2000.
All in all, this is a great hacking project. A collection box for the $10000 needed for the RF and DSP baseband processing should be set up!
Slashdot Mirror
Home networking equipment will probably not be suitable for installation on any emergency response vehicle due to local codes, standards and rules. Start with cabling, then check EMC, EMR, shock, vibration, temperature, etc.
Mobile broadband will realistically be used for sharing IP surveillance streams with a Operations and Control Centre.
Kit suppliers include Fortress Technologies, Firetide, Aruba / Alcatel Lucent, Moxa, and start at low thousand $.
Don't worry about your job options - HP really needs someone that knows what PCs are for, and Apple has an opening at the very top :)
Jokes aside, thank you for all the daily stories. I have been starting my day at work with /. since the first day on the job, and many jobs ago!
All the best,
Antonio
Amen.
When I was a teen it was forbidden to eat or to smoke at the movies. My parents used to go often, and even my Grand parents would occasionally go for some light commedy or drama.
The shift to the Multiplex, with hordes of teenagers talking, chewing, sms'ing, smoking and throwing stuff ended the experience for everybody that liked to see movies at the Movies. Due to working hours, we could only attend the late sessions. At a certain point, safety started to be an issue.
A DVD costs the equivalent of 2 tickets. The whole family can watch it as many times as we like, in the peace and comfort of our home(s).
The biggest issue is the lack of quality of most movies, when considering an adult audience. Everything seems to be marketed to the 14-25 y.o. age group. Special effects and loud sound are a drawback for me, as I want to chill out instead of revvvvvving up!
The last family movie outing was Lord of the Rings III, and the next one will be Indiana Jones IV. Those you have to watch on the big screen, the rest is perfectly watchable on DVD. Personally I stopped going to the movies after Star Wars II. Lucas killed what was left of the magic.
BS according to the Economist does not have the same street meaning as in the US. After all, the Economist is a pillar of Capitalism and a bastion of good manners.
;-)
Given this, they are staunchly anti-monopolistic. This little article was nothing more than a single column, the reply from the head of the BSA in the UK made it all worthwhile.
As another poster mentioned, having this issue discussed on the Economist (and everybody has this morbid curiosity to read the reader's letters) is great for the anti-BSA lobby - the majority of the world's population. Most CEOs just browse the Economist, but nobody skips the letters to the Editor.
The BSA lost this one, now the Economist's offices are going to be raided. I wouldn't be surprised if they were running Linux on the servers and OS X on the desktops... After all, those three-piece suited know-it-alls like to have the best money can buy
NB I am a subscriber
Ok, pool boy, I know where you live :))))))
Amen. Thank God somebody moderated you from Funny to Insightful ;-) That is the story of my life!
After having lived in showerless depression for a long time, I decided to confront my dark side of Geekdom, and get some professional help. The initial results were not good, but eventually I found a doctor that understood my geekiness and he put me on the right track. Maybe I was served a nice stew of common sense and standard medical practice, but it changed my daily life for good.
In retrospective, I lost some of those dark side of Geekdom traits that make geeks or nerds so unactractive to the general population, but I can now recognise that it is useless to be the smartest guy in the room if nobody understands you.
On the other hand, being smart, a total geek, and being able to interact in normal social circumstances is a very good receipe for success.
As my Father would put it before leaving to his sister-in-law's birthday party, "we all have to make sacrifices to be part of society."
Those are pertinent observations. But "nerds" and "nerds" with mental / behavioural problems is not the same thing! Unfortunately, I would classify myself as the latter type, altough in recovery. A radical overhaul of my life started after some personal problems that seriously affected my performance at work. I am almost the old lovable "nerd" that I was, and in the process I have landed a nice job, and a hot girlfriend. Having found the balance between work and family/personal life did wonders for me. She knows zilch about technology and computers, but likes to have somebody around that can fix stuff and explain her the wonders of the computer world. Nevertheless, I think she values more the long-term relationship and commitment than the 3:24 of pleasure with the pool boy or the drummer...
:)
PS I think the article is total BS, it would only be credible if Carmen Electra would elope to Vegas with RMS and webcast the wedding from inside the Elvis chappel
So I was not alone in envying the guy that gets Doritos. I will trade my attick for his basement if I can get spicy dip sauce :)
Ok, now we do agree on most of the issues.
:) for my daily computer needs.
My academic institution pays through the nose for its Matlab licenses. Probably we do make it "free" for student usage, but even the "academic" pricing of Matlab is a problem, when there are 36000 toolboxes...
In EE it is a great tool to teach Communications, and Signal Processing. In CS, I would guess it is not the first choice. It's the MATrix LABoratory, not the MATrix LANGuage. I see it as an application that allows a lazy engineer to do matrix computations without going into deep programming projects.
You can also look at the "pragmatic" approach: a coding contest can be fun. It does not have to be OSS to make you want to solve it or win it! Moreover, most Matlab users I know share their code (unless their contract says otherwise)
Even if I use proprietary Matlab and Xilinx tools, I like Mozilla, Firefox, vim, TeX, gimp and OO (and cigwin and fink
Can you tell which hardware you use it on? And can you list the OS and required packages needed to run you Matlab alternative?
My main problem with Matlab alternatives was the centuries needed updating systems and compiling and downloading and compiling some more until you have something that works but still does not work as well as Matlab. But this was a while ago, and from your posts, things have changed a lot for the better.
1. PhD students do not live in the real world, and therefore do not know what software costs in the real world.
2. I have never met anybody that programmed in {Scientific,Numeric,Monty} Python, from which we can conclude that they were not hired. People that keep their skills simple, like Matlab and C, usually get hired.
3. You have not left the university yet, how would you want to be re-using your code already? I did, and I don't want to re-use my code anyway. It want it to be re-used at the university, while I make other nifty projects at my company.
4. In the real world, Matlab is usually the cheapest tool you can buy, besides MS Office (flame at will, secretaries use MS Office, and therefore you use MS Office or your trips are not re-imbursed
Dr. Adapt, itching from all the asbestos underwear and flaming graduate students
The one you used in class was most likely paid for by your academic institution. The one used at home was a bootleg of the first one ;-)
Ah ha! Ok, a 22 y.o. needs to save all the money he can to buy beer. Beer, helas, is not free ;-)
:)
Returning to a serious tone, a PhD student should not care about paying for a software license, his Professor should. If Octave or Something Python is the tool you need, it is the tool that must be used - free or not. If it is Matlab, Mathematica or even Halo 2, you get a license for it. What I don't do is use a cracked version: if there is no budget for the best tool, get the best one that your money can afford. A trip to a conference costs more than a year license, Hell, even the office space you use costs more to your group... (No, not the cookies you steal during the night from the group cookie jar, those are not so expensive
I would like to know why Matlab is an outdated inferior tool, and an expensive one. We do pay more than what costs a house per year in licenses, and we don't particularly enjoy it.
Like another poster wrote, a lot of Matlab is done over Linux, by freakish fervent OSS advocates, that have not touched any other piece of proprietary software for ages. In fact, another poster thought that Matlab was OSS, because it is widely used by the Linux+$favourite_editor$+TeX crowd...
Regards,
Dr. Adapt PhD EE
I have used Octave and gnuplot on and off, and always had problems with the limited number of available functions. I have read here about the Sourceforge page and its many "toolboxes", and that seems very useful (i.e., I will start using it at home!). My old frustrations with using Octave started with installation / compilation problems, displaying the results in gnuplot, and exchanging code with my colleagues. The nicest features were the ease of use of Octave from any term, and some C-like things that Matlab does not allow you to do...
... Matlab is very easy to use and to abuse. I have seen students type pages of code that can be handled in a line (albeit a long one :) You can use it to hide your lack of coding skills, but if you remember the underlying philosophy of Matlab and use it for what it was designed for - matrix calculations - you can write code that is very close to what you need when implementing it in hardware. And clear, clean and self-explanatory. A literal translation of an algorithm into a matrix formulation ( block processing ). Mathematica, Maple may be more suited for some problems, but Matlab has its place.
:) is an imperative, Matlab saves time and can be a glue between teams with very different skills. You can spend your valuable time tweaking your algorithm to run faster and use less resources, or you can try to learn Python, VHDL, and all assemblies for the target DSP architectures - things that can be avoided by using some toolboxes . Yes, these are not ideal but they provide a initial point to your colleagues that are specialists in the field to jump in and optimise it by hand.
;-)
But
Simulink was a slow and resource-hungry hog, but Moore's law and some bug fixing have made it quite usable.
I upgraded now to R14 with some patches. I think it takes about 10000% longer to load than R13, and 1000000000000000% to use the editors and Simulink browsers. I remember R12 used to crash when you would try to use vim as an editor and the default Matlab editor was running... Or simply try to cut and paste some code between windows.
The point is, when you are in a multi-million $ or project, the 2k for Matlab and a few k for toolboxes are not relevant. In a multidisciplinary project where time to market (or time to publish
So, all in all, Matlab is a very handy tool, which is not meant to be a general purpose programming language. You don't make websites in Matlab - even if the manual says it can be done. It is expensive, but failure and project delays are much more costly.
You should not blast somebody for sharing his code just because Matlab is not free. Other tools such as particle accelerators are not free either, and its engineers still share code and results
That was true in 1974, but nowadays Spain is one of the most dynamic countries in the EU. Valencia and explicitely the UPV should have behaved better and defend transparency, instead of chosing to bow to commercial interests - that might not affect a University. I guess most Unis are still very much state funded and depend very little on private sponsorship... It was a case of respect for the hierarchy - that problem we still have and is very hard to solve.
Try this one :)a ining/
http://www.media.mcdonalds.com/secured/company/tr
Real men download the specs from the standardisation committee, implement it in FORTRAN, and release an Open Source version.
Burgers are not different from chips.
There are plenty of talented IT professionals on the market searching for tech jobs.
:)
A couple of weeks ago, I logged in Siemens worldwide jobs site, and, in my field, 321 out of 322 open positions were in China.
Most employers could see the benefits of offering job security and paying decent salaries as an effective means of retaining the talent (and all those hours spent in training...). Instead, they hire temps, pay huge fees to temp agencies and recruiters, they "outsource", etc. Without a knowledge base, there is no future in any company.
It is more a problem of "if I pay you less, I can keep more for myself" than a true lack of qualified professionals on the market. If engineers wanted to flip burgers they would have studied at the burger flipping college!
Oh darn, I posted the same question instead of meta-moderating yours to the top.
Sorry for the dupe. I was really interested in finding what he is reading, and what is his favourite book.
What is the best - or most inspiring - book you ever read?
Follow-up question: what are you reading right now?
I had a French computer magazine from 1985 that tested hardware ruggedness by dropping the computers off desks, and then off windows. The HP Vectra was the absolute winner. The baby would boot after being dropped from the 1st floor (without screen :) This is trivia, but it's useful trivia when you remember the "care" that some cleaning ladies put in their work...
I also want to add that my 181000 km Nissan Micra stills drives better than a Ford, and needs less maintenance.
my E-term that crashed a lot in 1998 never gave me the chance of noticing it :)
:))))))))) and could get him filthy rich.
anyway, one coder had for sure implemented a desktop with translucent windows. it would not take him too long to put some timer or activity trigger to make them dim or bright. clocks and triggers are even older than computers!
is the trivial application of these two known ideas patentable? like one poster said, "breathing" and "doing things fast" are public domain, but "breathing really fast" is new
i will now flagellate myself for missing the demonstration against software patents yesterday in The Hague.
I wonder how the life of little Adolf and little Benito is...
/. interview with Frau Rosen, and a reality show with lots of khaki, leather, chains, suffering, and IP rights protection...
We definitely need a
Santa, we want one. Obviously, to test some nice sofware on it.
But this is baseband signal processing, done on PCs. For real time applications, you need DSP or FPGA. Texas has some "entry" or "student" packs with evaluation boards and Code Composer, but it's not cheap for a hobbyist, and there's a learning curve... (read: you have to debug a lot)
The not-so-nice aspect of software radio is the hardware part. Tx and Rx design for wideband communication systems is not easy and definitely not cheap. Some kit is available on the market (for example from Spectrum) as add-on boards, and antennas can be manufactured or bought.
While both reception and transmission would be nice to have, it is much easier to do the reception part, due to strict regulations for transmitters (as dmlb noted, it is something that can land you in jail very fast - or have a van from the local telco come by and do some measurements
Books on the topic (all with shortcomings, none with magic bullet solutions):
H. Harada, R. Prasad "simulation and software radio for mobile communications" (CD included), Artech House, London, UK, 2002.
W.Tutlebee "software defined radio" Wiley, 2002.
J.H. Reed "software radio" Prentice Hall PTR, 2002.
J. Mitola III, "software radio architecture" Wiley, 2000.
All in all, this is a great hacking project. A collection box for the $10000 needed for the RF and DSP baseband processing should be set up!