Ptolemy is a good tool for modelling and simulation.
From their website:
"The Ptolemy project studies modeling, simulation, and design of concurrent, real-time, embedded systems. The focus is on assembly of concurrent components. The key underlying principle in the project is the use of well-defined models of computation that govern the interaction between components. A major problem area being addressed is the use of heterogeneous mixtures of models of computation."
$5 for MathCAD is a much better deal than my $100 for Matlab:) but they are very different tools.
nevertheless, outside the US where universities have less muscle to get good deals, student licenses are still expensive for the less-priviledged students. therefore, people go the GNU/Linux way.
Ptolemy is a good tool if you want to model and simulate systems.
yes, MS sells campus licenses at EXTREME discounts (like $20 for Office and less for the OSs), but the hardware requirements are heavier.
most people in academia are not swimming in cash, so this means old hardware, and an array of diverse machines connected to a server. linux is the ideal software partner for a small research group, in my opinion.
the other factor, as somebody else pointed above, is that GNU or public tools are used by almost everybody. most papers are swapped in.ps format and written in TeX on (insert favourite editor here:). in windows you can do the same, but integrated tools like Scientific Workplace cost money, and they are not really needed after you learn some shell and vi tricks.
still, the crucial factor that made me wipe out windows for linux was stability. when you do not have a double Xeon crunching numbers, you appreciate the fact that linux will not crash during the 3 days it must be ON.;-)
while you can get Octave for free with most Linux dists. and you can contact the Octave people for tips about installation. the US student version of Matlab is cheap and does not have matrix size limitations AND there is a Linux version in the package. also, if you check Matlab website [mathworks.com , mathtools.net] , they have a huge ftp site of free goodies, i.e. Matlab toolboxes, that probably can be used with Octave too.
since i installed my student version of Matlab at home, i have used less my Octave. Matlab also can be bought at academic prices, which are still too expensive for cash-strapped academia.
as for linux vs. windows, if you have to leave you computer on for 10 days for a simulation, then linux stability is a nice bonus...
I remember becoming absorbed with programming because of RPN and my HP28S, brought by a friend from the US. Its cost back then in Europe was above minimum wage and far beyond the savings of a highschool kid.
It was great to play with complex numbers before college, plotting functions, doing matrix computations without Matlab, etc. Eventually, the usage of that faithfull piece of engineerign faded in the last years of university, being replaced by a Pentium running Matlab. But I would never replace my HP 28S with another calculator. All my highschool geek buddies with HPs eventually went into real scientific carreers, while the Ti and Casio crowds became Windows users and live a normal (i.e. management) existence.
I started using it again, as a complement to my PIII. It's much greater fun to get the old HP28S out of the drawer and do some intermediate calculations than opening some calc. window on the PC desktop. It's still a good complement for Matlab. Those keys still feel like the first day I had it, and it's rugged and engineered to suffer all real-world hazards like hitting co-workers and resisting coffee flooding. I never bothered to upgrade to a HP48 that came mid-college as the 28S had enough functions and power to get the work done. And the flip cover/keyboard (disliked back then) proved to be a very useful feature for keeping the screen alive all these years...
Stuff like the HP28S, the first Vectras that you could drop on the floor and they'd keep working, those amazing ink-jet printers that you could actually afford to have at home and use to make good-looking documents back in the dot-matrix era... HP used to be a real company making really great stuff, real instruments for professionals. I do not remember a recent product of HP that I would like to buy, or something that the competition did not have. Except an Agilent Network Analizer that costs several years of salary, but that seems a bit over-engineered to have at home for some occasional measurements... Still, over-engineered stuff makes you drool.:)
Hacking is about learning. It's about getting to know how things work and make them work better. My parents always let me disassemble stuff around the house to learn how it worked. And they gave me computers to play with and to do things with. They knew the other kids and the teacher *supposedly* watching over us at the computer club were the *curious* kind, not the evil kind. It was great to have that patient mathematician to sit with us and teach us tricks, all sorts of things that made our life easier in *normal* school, and gave us the mindset to pursue scientific careers.
It is and always will be about learning to do things. Hacking, craking, white hat, black hat, security holes, etc., there's more to the world than computer networks, and programming is a nice mental exercise that prepares you for school and for work.
dude, Amsterdam tolerates any kind of attitude, even people like you that are disgusted by sex and by drugs. Truth is, the worst of all are the Americans that come here to smoke our dope and fuck our chicks just because they have money and live in a repressive puritan country. I don't blame them, I welcome them as long as they follow some basic rules.
If you want to understand the concept of tolerance and of Freedom, jump on a plane and come have a look around.
As for the pr0n, all the *Made In Amsterdam* pr0n you see on the net comes from San Fernando Valley, Hamburg or Budapest.
You forgot the cherry on top of the cake: become the envy of all the top management. They simply loathe to have someone so much younger, so much brighter, and especially so much RESPECTED by the young engineers...
Anybody can pull rank, but when somebody that can pull rank never does it, and looks at your code and changes just one little thing and the whole piece of junk just turns into a masterpiece, that's when you know why your boss is your boss. He might not be able to pull all-nighters, but he *knows* the Force inside out...
The fact that he is hacking right now downstairs while I am wasting my time on/. also helps to build his reputation.;-)
I am too young to be in your shoes but I have one example on why you should do it ( and everybody else around has 1000 exaples of pointy-haired-bossization to discourage you from doing it;-)
My technical supervisor is a rather youngish guy, totally tech-head, extremely accomplished in his field. The progression of his carreer forced him to go into management, i.e., being the project leader and manager in two of our projects. The face of our lab to the outside world, in other words. Although complaining all the time about not having time to do real reseach and relying on the young guys to write papers and getting things done, he shields us from the bullshit meetings and keeps us on track by making time to follow our research and telling us how to do things the right way - when we are cutting corners... If he were not around, I would have taken another job by now, but the fact there is a project leader with an untouchable technological background makes us proud to work for him. Also, the lessons he teaches and the advice he gives are priceless. The drawback is that you have to buy a tie, and move from xfig to powerpoint, but those are small trade-offs. It's time to pass your experience on to the younger techies, it's time to make all that wisdom benefit the others, to make the kids proud to work for you and especially with you.
A cdma2000/WCDMA/GSM phone will in theory give you global roaming. Probably even a GSM/WCDMA will do, but there are still places where GSM-type networks are not available.
How about throwing in a new standard every couple of years and make old phones obsolete?
Currently, most of us use GSM for our mobile telephony addiction. In 2001-2003, the new third generation networks are going to be deployed. This creates a huge new market, as the early adopters will buy the new multimedia-enabled phones immediately, and, after a while the average joe will trade his GSM for a GSM/WCDMA double standard phone. The drop in pure-GSM phone sales will then be matched by the increase in smart phones sales and in 3rd generation phones.
Another niche to be explored is the travellers' one. (Software reconfigurable) phones that work in the US and Europe/Japan will be very nice for people that don't like to own a couple of phones and like to travel light. A terminal with cdma2000 and WCDMA and maybe GSM will make me drool anytime...;-)
In fact, this is the University, it's a ad-hoc graduate students' group of EE in TUDelft. I suppose the usage of the French language glues us together, and we realised that most of the Mediterranean countries taught French as a second language for a long time (and that our latin languages family allows us to multitask better). Sometimes English is not elegant enough, or just too tainted with movie and tv slang -- and tech words -- to have a nice discussion.
In my research group, the de facto working language was English but quickly we reverted to French. We found out that a couple Belgians, a Frenchman, a Catalan, a Portuguese, a Syrian and a lot of Moroccans would simply speak much better French than they did English. The good part was having the Germans brush up their French to be able to socialise;-), and also see the boss try his french language skills once in a while, just to follow the coffee-room chit chat.
Disclaimer: we don't work in France, but in our line of business the French are the real McCoys and we have lived/studied for some periods in ze Hexagone, as zey call it.
Recently Fortune published an article of Bill Joy about the "Design for the Digital Revolution:" As computers change the world, we need to make sure the new world works for humans.
I enjoyed much more the one in Wired, but in Fortune the issues are much more down to Earth, and the visionary mode is off (thank God, we would not want to scare Management!). It's about changing the landscape AND making it beautiful, with a light discussion of technology issues. These discussions are not moral like in Wired, but rather practical ones.
I saw the result of the measurements done by the Dutch radioastronomers , that even made it to CNN and the campus newspaper (in Dutch;-) , and, as predicted, there was no signal there. Just a stripe in a nearby frequency that could be anything...
I did not see the following ones, where they would try to point to another spot on the sky and check for the same signal again, and try to prove its Earthly origin...
You can see the radiotelescope here , the staff, and the equipment, but the data analysis was done afterwards at the university. They managed to produce some extremely cool plots but no traces of the lander.:-(
The next cool thing to do in the computer field might not be perceived as a computer. It might be the small OS that you don't know the name that is inside the smart phone or inside the set top box or powering your wearable computer. It might be a stripped Linux, a stripped BeOS, a PalmOS-like, or a new design. But given the speed of this field, Linux will not be the *hot* new technology (even if for some of us it's a *hot* old acquaintance) for many years to come. Maybe the pressure from magazines, journalists and hipsters will fade away and we'll happily keep doing it, maybe we'll move to something totally new taking Linux and its teachings in the baggage. Who knows?
The sites attacked are not half of the top 10 most visited sites on the www? We are talking about yahoo! ebay amazon cnn and friends, the guys responsible for the average joe being connected and for most of the traffic on the net. They cannot be slashdotted, they live on slashdotted mode. To take them down needs some skills and a devious mind. Why would somebody do it? I think here the plain stupidity of the challenge manages to be bigger than the skills of the guy(s) that pulled it.
I also had the same reaction as the top comment. An attack like this one, so beautiful yet so meaningless, can only come from that place that does not exist, the no-such-agency. No cracker is so stupid as to pull this one to brag to his pals, this must be some kind of world domination plan from the good ol' US of A...
2. To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
Tolerance, my friend, is what allows people like us to live with people like you. And what part of your African-American heritage troubles you when you read/. ?
I know I deserve to be down-moderated, but this guy has got some nerve. The typical con-artist crying at the police station about his three starving children and collecting some money from the cops to bring dinner home.;-)
And this obcession with LinuxOne has no connection with the fact that everybody is tired of bashing M$ and uncle Bill. You just pissed too many nice people. That's not the way to do business with these nice folks that write free software or open source software.
I'd agree with the general trend of around fl.4000 per month or fl. 50 000 per year before taxes. Unfortunately, those eat 40% of it, unless the guys that hire you are smart enough to put you into some kind of tax plan for IT and high-skills professionals, under which you pay only 12%. This goes for most IT and telecom companies desperate to get new blood (I did not know about it and the management at my place sucks). Experience gets you more money, and a consultant job also. Ah, and as in a nice social democracy, you work 38 hours and have 2 months of holidays...
Anyway, the Netherlands is a very nice place to live. The Dutch speak English with less accent than the Irish, and you don't need to learn a new language (which is a bonus for the anglo-saxon crowd:-). The cost of living is much less than London or Paris, but decent accomodation is difficult and expensive to find.
The bad points are the omnipresent rain and the eating habits: sandwiches at lunch, potatos for dinner. As I hate rain and put food above anything else, I am bound to move again soon.;-)
I am not a business programmer. I live and will live on campus for a while. My colleagues, my friends, and even I when I decide that it's time to program, only use Matlab. Does that count as a language?
When for speed matters we don't use Matlab or Octave, we go to C. One guy uses Fortran and another likes C++, but they are exceptions. And this is valid for any kind of platform, from win95, to Win NT, to Linux, to Solaris, to IRIX, to HP-UX. I personaly use Matlab for everything, you can even build a GUI for your input parameteres now. Easy, powerful and almost like C.
I thought BASIC was the ZX Spectrum language where most of us started to play... Is it now aitec?
Slashdot Mirror
From their website:
"The Ptolemy project studies modeling, simulation, and design of concurrent, real-time, embedded systems. The focus is on assembly of concurrent components. The key underlying principle in the project is the use of well-defined models of computation that govern the interaction between components. A major problem area being addressed is the use of heterogeneous mixtures of models of computation."
$5 for MathCAD is a much better deal than my $100 for Matlab
nevertheless, outside the US where universities have less muscle to get good deals, student licenses are still expensive for the less-priviledged students. therefore, people go the GNU/Linux way.
Ptolemy is a good tool if you want to model and simulate systems.
yes, MS sells campus licenses at EXTREME discounts (like $20 for Office and less for the OSs), but the hardware requirements are heavier.
most people in academia are not swimming in cash, so this means old hardware, and an array of diverse machines connected to a server. linux is the ideal software partner for a small research group, in my opinion.
the other factor, as somebody else pointed above, is that GNU or public tools are used by almost everybody. most papers are swapped in
still, the crucial factor that made me wipe out windows for linux was stability. when you do not have a double Xeon crunching numbers, you appreciate the fact that linux will not crash during the 3 days it must be ON.
since i installed my student version of Matlab at home, i have used less my Octave. Matlab also can be bought at academic prices, which are still too expensive for cash-strapped academia.
as for linux vs. windows, if you have to leave you computer on for 10 days for a simulation, then linux stability is a nice bonus...
So long, and thanks for all the fish... :)
It was great to play with complex numbers before college, plotting functions, doing matrix computations without Matlab, etc. Eventually, the usage of that faithfull piece of engineerign faded in the last years of university, being replaced by a Pentium running Matlab. But I would never replace my HP 28S with another calculator. All my highschool geek buddies with HPs eventually went into real scientific carreers, while the Ti and Casio crowds became Windows users and live a normal (i.e. management) existence.
I started using it again, as a complement to my PIII. It's much greater fun to get the old HP28S out of the drawer and do some intermediate calculations than opening some calc. window on the PC desktop. It's still a good complement for Matlab. Those keys still feel like the first day I had it, and it's rugged and engineered to suffer all real-world hazards like hitting co-workers and resisting coffee flooding. I never bothered to upgrade to a HP48 that came mid-college as the 28S had enough functions and power to get the work done. And the flip cover/keyboard (disliked back then) proved to be a very useful feature for keeping the screen alive all these years...
Stuff like the HP28S, the first Vectras that you could drop on the floor and they'd keep working, those amazing ink-jet printers that you could actually afford to have at home and use to make good-looking documents back in the dot-matrix era... HP used to be a real company making really great stuff, real instruments for professionals. I do not remember a recent product of HP that I would like to buy, or something that the competition did not have. Except an Agilent Network Analizer that costs several years of salary, but that seems a bit over-engineered to have at home for some occasional measurements... Still, over-engineered stuff makes you drool. :)
Good troll, dude.
Hacking is about learning. It's about getting to know how things work and make them work better. My parents always let me disassemble stuff around the house to learn how it worked. And they gave me computers to play with and to do things with. They knew the other kids and the teacher *supposedly* watching over us at the computer club were the *curious* kind, not the evil kind. It was great to have that patient mathematician to sit with us and teach us tricks, all sorts of things that made our life easier in *normal* school, and gave us the mindset to pursue scientific careers.
It is and always will be about learning to do things. Hacking, craking, white hat, black hat, security holes, etc., there's more to the world than computer networks, and programming is a nice mental exercise that prepares you for school and for work.
adapt
If you want to understand the concept of tolerance and of Freedom, jump on a plane and come have a look around.
As for the pr0n, all the *Made In Amsterdam* pr0n you see on the net comes from San Fernando Valley, Hamburg or Budapest.
doei, adapt
Anybody can pull rank, but when somebody that can pull rank never does it, and looks at your code and changes just one little thing and the whole piece of junk just turns into a masterpiece, that's when you know why your boss is your boss. He might not be able to pull all-nighters, but he *knows* the Force inside out...
The fact that he is hacking right now downstairs while I am wasting my time on /. also helps to build his reputation. ;-)
adapt
I am too young to be in your shoes but I have one example on why you should do it ( and everybody else around has 1000 exaples of pointy-haired-bossization to discourage you from doing it ;-)
My technical supervisor is a rather youngish guy, totally tech-head, extremely accomplished in his field. The progression of his carreer forced him to go into management, i.e., being the project leader and manager in two of our projects. The face of our lab to the outside world, in other words. Although complaining all the time about not having time to do real reseach and relying on the young guys to write papers and getting things done, he shields us from the bullshit meetings and keeps us on track by making time to follow our research and telling us how to do things the right way - when we are cutting corners... If he were not around, I would have taken another job by now, but the fact there is a project leader with an untouchable technological background makes us proud to work for him. Also, the lessons he teaches and the advice he gives are priceless. The drawback is that you have to buy a tie, and move from xfig to powerpoint, but those are small trade-offs. It's time to pass your experience on to the younger techies, it's time to make all that wisdom benefit the others, to make the kids proud to work for you and especially with you.
All the best, adapt
A cdma2000/WCDMA/GSM phone will in theory give you global roaming. Probably even a GSM/WCDMA will do, but there are still places where GSM-type networks are not available.
Thanks for the Motorola ad! ;-)
adapt
How about throwing in a new standard every couple of years and make old phones obsolete?
Currently, most of us use GSM for our mobile telephony addiction. In 2001-2003, the new third generation networks are going to be deployed. This creates a huge new market, as the early adopters will buy the new multimedia-enabled phones immediately, and, after a while the average joe will trade his GSM for a GSM/WCDMA double standard phone. The drop in pure-GSM phone sales will then be matched by the increase in smart phones sales and in 3rd generation phones.
Another niche to be explored is the travellers' one. (Software reconfigurable) phones that work in the US and Europe/Japan will be very nice for people that don't like to own a couple of phones and like to travel light. A terminal with cdma2000 and WCDMA and maybe GSM will make me drool anytime... ;-)
adaptIn fact, this is the University, it's a ad-hoc graduate students' group of EE in TUDelft. I suppose the usage of the French language glues us together, and we realised that most of the Mediterranean countries taught French as a second language for a long time (and that our latin languages family allows us to multitask better). Sometimes English is not elegant enough, or just too tainted with movie and tv slang -- and tech words -- to have a nice discussion.
In my research group, the de facto working language was English but quickly we reverted to French. We found out that a couple Belgians, a Frenchman, a Catalan, a Portuguese, a Syrian and a lot of Moroccans would simply speak much better French than they did English. The good part was having the Germans brush up their French to be able to socialise ;-), and also see the boss try his french language skills once in a while, just to follow the coffee-room chit chat.
Disclaimer: we don't work in France, but in our line of business the French are the real McCoys and we have lived/studied for some periods in ze Hexagone, as zey call it.
Example on Matlab 5.3:
>> why
The bald not very good mathematician knew it was a good idea.
>> why
A young programmer told me to.
>> why
The rich and rich smart kid told me to.
>> why
To fool some tall system manager.
>> why
Loren suggested it.
>> why
Because a not very terrified young engineer wanted it.
>> why
I told me to.
>> why
Because a rich hamster suggested it.
>> why
A smart programmer told me to.
>> why
The customer is always right.
>> why
You insisted on it.
>> why
A system manager obeyed the not very tall mathematician.
>> why
Pete obeyed a engineer.
Recently Fortune published an article of Bill Joy about the "Design for the Digital Revolution:" As computers change the world, we need to make sure the new world works for humans.
I enjoyed much more the one in Wired, but in Fortune the issues are much more down to Earth, and the visionary mode is off (thank God, we would not want to scare Management!). It's about changing the landscape AND making it beautiful, with a light discussion of technology issues. These discussions are not moral like in Wired, but rather practical ones.
Check it out when the boss in not around.I saw the result of the measurements done by the Dutch radioastronomers , that even made it to CNN and the campus newspaper (in Dutch ;-) , and, as predicted, there was no signal there. Just a stripe in a nearby frequency that could be anything...
I did not see the following ones, where they would try to point to another spot on the sky and check for the same signal again, and try to prove its Earthly origin ...
You can see the radiotelescope here , the staff, and the equipment, but the data analysis was done afterwards at the university. They managed to produce some extremely cool plots but no traces of the lander. :-(
The next cool thing to do in the computer field might not be perceived as a computer. It might be the small OS that you don't know the name that is inside the smart phone or inside the set top box or powering your wearable computer. It might be a stripped Linux, a stripped BeOS, a PalmOS-like, or a new design. But given the speed of this field, Linux will not be the *hot* new technology (even if for some of us it's a *hot* old acquaintance) for many years to come. Maybe the pressure from magazines, journalists and hipsters will fade away and we'll happily keep doing it, maybe we'll move to something totally new taking Linux and its teachings in the baggage. Who knows?
Yours and ours, the FreeSpeechNet! ;-)
The sites attacked are not half of the top 10 most visited sites on the www? We are talking about yahoo! ebay amazon cnn and friends, the guys responsible for the average joe being connected and for most of the traffic on the net. They cannot be slashdotted, they live on slashdotted mode. To take them down needs some skills and a devious mind. Why would somebody do it? I think here the plain stupidity of the challenge manages to be bigger than the skills of the guy(s) that pulled it.
I also had the same reaction as the top comment. An attack like this one, so beautiful yet so meaningless, can only come from that place that does not exist, the no-such-agency. No cracker is so stupid as to pull this one to brag to his pals, this must be some kind of world domination plan from the good ol' US of A...
2. To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
Tolerance, my friend, is what allows people like us to live with people like you. And what part of your African-American heritage troubles you when you read /. ?
I know I deserve to be down-moderated, but this guy has got some nerve. The typical con-artist crying at the police station about his three starving children and collecting some money from the cops to bring dinner home. ;-)
And this obcession with LinuxOne has no connection with the fact that everybody is tired of bashing M$ and uncle Bill. You just pissed too many nice people. That's not the way to do business with these nice folks that write free software or open source software.
I'd agree with the general trend of around fl.4000 per month or fl. 50 000 per year before taxes. Unfortunately, those eat 40% of it, unless the guys that hire you are smart enough to put you into some kind of tax plan for IT and high-skills professionals, under which you pay only 12%. This goes for most IT and telecom companies desperate to get new blood (I did not know about it and the management at my place sucks). Experience gets you more money, and a consultant job also. Ah, and as in a nice social democracy, you work 38 hours and have 2 months of holidays...
Anyway, the Netherlands is a very nice place to live. The Dutch speak English with less accent than the Irish, and you don't need to learn a new language (which is a bonus for the anglo-saxon crowd :-). The cost of living is much less than London or Paris, but decent accomodation is difficult and expensive to find.
The bad points are the omnipresent rain and the eating habits: sandwiches at lunch, potatos for dinner. As I hate rain and put food above anything else, I am bound to move again soon. ;-)
I am not a business programmer. I live and will live on campus for a while. My colleagues, my friends, and even I when I decide that it's time to program, only use Matlab. Does that count as a language?
When for speed matters we don't use Matlab or Octave, we go to C. One guy uses Fortran and another likes C++, but they are exceptions. And this is valid for any kind of platform, from win95, to Win NT, to Linux, to Solaris, to IRIX, to HP-UX. I personaly use Matlab for everything, you can even build a GUI for your input parameteres now. Easy, powerful and almost like C.
I thought BASIC was the ZX Spectrum language where most of us started to play... Is it now aitec?
A.