yeah... i've been thinking a lot about this as a future professional sadist (i.e. comp. sci. prof). i've come to the conclusion that i don't want my students touching a compiler until they've had at least one semester of being forced to program (and debug) on pencil and paper. when they do get a chance to use a compiler, i want it to be the most pedantic, strict compiler ever (kinda like having to go through lint on steroids as the front end to gcc). that or find a machine on the other side of town that uses punchcards and make them target that (nothing quite like it to force people to be diligent from the beginning)...
hrm... maybe what's true for how we learn human languages is true for how we learn computer languages, that is the earlier on we start to learn multiple languages, the easier it is to fully master them... maybe i should have started lisp a couple years ago so that it wouldn't seem like such a bitch now;-)
i used some ic... the problem is that what i wanted to implement was significantly more complicated than dead reckoning. there was all kinds of interesting stuff like minkowski sums to help with path planning, neural networks to help figure out where the (*#@ the robot really was, etc. the ram for the neural nets alone was more than could fit on the handyboard;-) that said, robot side, there were also a bunch of relatively sophisticated behaviors programmed in -- things like scanning for a flame and then reorienting the robot and such like.
i remember helping to maintain a lab of these things in 8th grade... first machine i started to cut my teeth on programming... basic no less. the irony is that the brains in the robotics projects i've been toying with has about the same computing power as a ][e and i can barely fit a serial communications library and a virtual machine in that much memory (the vm acts as a dispatch for commands recieved over the serial line via radio modem from a pc, where i'm not constrained to 32k of RAM)... i have to wonder to what degree the power of the machines available to young protogeeks affects their coding skills later in life... i suspect that the less harsh the initial computational conditions in a programmers life, the less inclined those programmers are to be artful and elegant in their solutions. pure speculation, but still something i wonder about...
disk space for gigabytes worth of data is a relative non-issue --- it's possible for home machines to hold a terrabyte or more worth of data. the question is, how much does it cost to back that data up? my dad sells storage area networks and tape backup systems and i can tell you that there's a lot more than just having some monkey cpio / tar the filesytem --- there's a lot of potentially very expensive hardware and software involved for full backup stuff. just my $0.02
Other competitions
on
RoboCup 2003
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For the HS crowd, there's Botball, which had it's DC area competition this weekend at UMCP, sponsored by the K.I.S.S. Institute for Practical Robotics. KIPR also puts together neat kits if you're looking for something to play with (a word of advice, Interactive-C blows and it's type checking system is flakey at best).
Also, if you're interested in the simulation league, you may be interested in checking out this paper which was written by one of the profs in my department.
Grrr... I keep on forgetting that = < in HTML. So, as I was saying, cameras are cheap ($100) and you can get a decent camera for not too much; however, except for the incredibly expensive IR and UV cameras (which cost tens of thousands of dollars), these cameras all have the same Achilles Heal: light. When the lights go off (and I imagine you turn them out when you sleep), noise increases exponentially and you end up with images that are essentially useless. Vision systems can also be fooled; if you move slowly enough, it's entirely possible that the system won't notice. Finally, there's the problem of what to do with pets...
This all said, there's a lot of very cool stuff coming out of vision; this morning I watched a master's thesis defense that centered around a visual mouse system that used hand tracking and gesture recognition instead of a traditional rodent --- very cool. I've seen systems that are able to track body parts in relatively real time, detect a person's irises, track groups of moving people and detect when objects are added to / removed from a scene, etc.
I do research in this area and I can't begin to tell you how many things can go wrong. The paint on the walls, the kind of lighting you use (quick mental experiment: halogen light cycles brightness at ~60Hz, video streams come in at say, ~15Hz. Think you can get them to synchronize? Good luck.), shadows, reflections, etc. etc. etc. are all a huge problem so large that I still have a job. Yes, there are cheap (
Schaum's aren't designed to be used as primary texts (believe me, if they were they'd cost a lot more); they're meant to serve as supplementary texts. Having seen the light I'd say skip the college algebra and take a crack at abstract and linear algebra first but that's just me...
That all said, take a gander at DMOZ's listing of online math texts. My general experience with people publishing online math / science texts is that they're really glad when people report errata.
check into s.w.e. (society of women in engineering). i work closely with them through a.c.m. and there are a lot of people who are members of both organizations. i'd also talk to upsilon pi epsilon if you have a chapter on campus.
xp's wireless seems flakey
on
How Stable is WEP?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
i've found that the problem goes away with a quick reboot; given that i'm using ad hoc mode since the bloody wireless router died and the replacement was d.o.a. this may not be entirely relevant; however, i am using WEP and my experience is that 2k ironically is much solid for wireless. just my $0.02
think about it: anonymous domain registration is a boon to all the spammers out there for the exact same reasons you want the anynomyity -- no real way to trace back to the source of their pollution. i think a different approach is warranted in this case, something like asking your mom to register the domain using her maiden name and giving you a piece of paper saying that you hold all rights to (and responsibilities for) the domain.
Sounds like version of Qt but with a much heavier emphasis on the game side of development (Qt doesn't do DirectX last I checked --- "only" OpenGL which is only available as part of its Enterprise Edition, according to Assistant for Qt 3.0.5). Still, it doesn't run on Linux, which does me absolutely no good since all my work focusses around doing real time digital video processing under Linux.
b~
I believe that MySQL does ISAM and I know it has JDBC stuff, so I'm thinking that if worst comes to worst, you can convert MySQL's ISAM stuff into Java. However, my gut instinct says that maybe it would be better do to something like use Sleepy Cat's Berkeley DB Java API and write something to convert the ISAM files into Berkeley format.
Slightly OT, but still worth mention: Let's say that this TIA thing gets instituted, big deal. What are the terrorists going to do? The obvious thing is a two path approach: analyse whatever data they can get their hands on and act as unobtrusively as possible and generate as much static and noise as possible to confuse the system.
... are the key problem here. Her assertions are predicated on conditions that simply do not exist: can the government guarantee that it won't abuse its powers? Can the government guarantee that it won't misuse technology? The answer, in both cases, is a resounding no. Sorry, but if you can't prove the hypothesis, you can't prove that the conclusions, regardless of how much hand waving you do. The most disgusting part of this is that MacDonald is advocating is the bastard child of MacCarthyism, technology, and the Alien and Sedition Act which has been dressed up in an attempt to fool people. A+ for rhetoric M(r?)s MacDonald, F for logic: you have used fallacious arguments to prove nothing.
... not a software engineer, programmer, code monkey, etc. with emphasis on the word scientist. it's an important distinction, one which i'm particularly well able to appreciate as i work on my graduate degrees. about 70% of the people in my classes have the words "software engineer" somewhere in their title and after having had to work on group projects with these people, i can guarandamntee that they may be many things, but engineer is certainly not one of them. i'll set my issues with professionalism and technical ability aside for a moment to harp on my major issues: accountability and ethics. being licensed means that you can be held to a certain minimum level of professional ethics (e.g. the acm / ieee joint code of ethics) and discipline. i am sick of being forced to use packages that have disclaimers that essentially say something along the lines of "you indemnify us to the maximum extent under the law for anything that may go wrong, even if it is our fault. you also understand that we make no guarantees that this piece of software will even work, never mind do what we claim it does." personally, i think it would be beautiful if i had the same guarantees when buying software like office that come when i buy a toaster -- i.e. if it doesn't work, i'll get my money back or something that does work.
boost.org seems to have some pretty neat stuff; however, i've never used thier stuff...
fwiw (and moderately on topic), clr ("introduction to algorithms", but i suppose with the new edition that should be clrp...) has a boatload of string searching algorithms in it, including (i *think* -- i haven't flipped through much more than the graph section recently) the knuth-morris-pratt algorithm. i've generally found their pseudo-code to be reasonably readable (certainly more so than 90+% of the freely available code that i've tried to read).
Personally, I really don't think that an undergraduate classes should discuss the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology until the students have all the tools necessary to understand how the technology works. It's hard to really appreciate the power of things like Paradigm X and Technique Y until you've had to do it the hard way. Likewise, it's hard to know how to apply Paradigm X and Technique Y in appropriate ways if you haven't seen any alternatives.
This all said, I don't think it's a bad thing to discuss these things in class. I found the case studies of Solaris, WinXP, BSD, Linux, etc. in my OS text to be invaluable, but that was only after I understood the driving principles. However, a comparison between threading models on these platforms is essentially useless until you know the difference between 1:1, N:1 and N:M threading models are.
As an additional plus, this could be used to recognize and weed out subversive political and religious views, and stop people from looking at questionable material in those veins.
Hrm... Big Brother said the same thing about putting cameras in every room.
... about the patch model of updates being an unviable solution. I see two logical outcomes from this: in the perfect world, this would be seen as a call to do more extensive testing (including hiring your own personal crackers & skr1pt k1dd13s to try to break your products several months before release). However, what this will probably mean is that there'll be a push for continuous automagic updates. Quite frankly, I find that latter option... frightening to say the least. Let MS (or any other company for that matter) updload patches willy nilly to my system (patches which have traditionally, in MS's case broken as many things as they've fixed)? I don't think so, especially if they're going to pull their license switch tricks again.
I'm more curious as to why this worm is as much of a problem as it appears to be. Surely a properly designed firewall would have stopped this thing? If so, why wasn't it done? Are sysadmins really that overworked / busy with more important problems / lazy / inept? Or am I missing a bigger problem here?
You assume that same sex couples do not have children, which is false. There are many same sex couples who have adopted children, there are also many same sex couples who are raising thier own biological children. There are also many same sex couples who want to adopt but face almost insurmountable odds against them, largely based on the fact that they don't have the same parenting rights as heterosexual couples. You are, however, right that with a lot of paperwork many of the same protections and rights as marriage can be achieved, but not all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah... i've been thinking a lot about this as a future professional sadist (i.e. comp. sci. prof). i've come to the conclusion that i don't want my students touching a compiler until they've had at least one semester of being forced to program (and debug) on pencil and paper. when they do get a chance to use a compiler, i want it to be the most pedantic, strict compiler ever (kinda like having to go through lint on steroids as the front end to gcc). that or find a machine on the other side of town that uses punchcards and make them target that (nothing quite like it to force people to be diligent from the beginning)...
hrm... maybe what's true for how we learn human languages is true for how we learn computer languages, that is the earlier on we start to learn multiple languages, the easier it is to fully master them... maybe i should have started lisp a couple years ago so that it wouldn't seem like such a bitch now ;-)
i used some ic... the problem is that what i wanted to implement was significantly more complicated than dead reckoning. there was all kinds of interesting stuff like minkowski sums to help with path planning, neural networks to help figure out where the (*#@ the robot really was, etc. the ram for the neural nets alone was more than could fit on the handyboard ;-) that said, robot side, there were also a bunch of relatively sophisticated behaviors programmed in -- things like scanning for a flame and then reorienting the robot and such like.
i remember helping to maintain a lab of these things in 8th grade... first machine i started to cut my teeth on programming... basic no less. the irony is that the brains in the robotics projects i've been toying with has about the same computing power as a ][e and i can barely fit a serial communications library and a virtual machine in that much memory (the vm acts as a dispatch for commands recieved over the serial line via radio modem from a pc, where i'm not constrained to 32k of RAM)... i have to wonder to what degree the power of the machines available to young protogeeks affects their coding skills later in life... i suspect that the less harsh the initial computational conditions in a programmers life, the less inclined those programmers are to be artful and elegant in their solutions. pure speculation, but still something i wonder about...
disk space for gigabytes worth of data is a relative non-issue --- it's possible for home machines to hold a terrabyte or more worth of data. the question is, how much does it cost to back that data up? my dad sells storage area networks and tape backup systems and i can tell you that there's a lot more than just having some monkey cpio / tar the filesytem --- there's a lot of potentially very expensive hardware and software involved for full backup stuff. just my $0.02
For the HS crowd, there's Botball, which had it's DC area competition this weekend at UMCP, sponsored by the K.I.S.S. Institute for Practical Robotics. KIPR also puts together neat kits if you're looking for something to play with (a word of advice, Interactive-C blows and it's type checking system is flakey at best).
There's also Trinity Colleges's Autonomous Robotics Firefighting Contest which has a league for just about anybody. Qualifying alone is an impressive feat.
Also, if you're interested in the simulation league, you may be interested in checking out this paper which was written by one of the profs in my department.
</karmawhoring>
Grrr... I keep on forgetting that = < in HTML. So, as I was saying, cameras are cheap ($100) and you can get a decent camera for not too much; however, except for the incredibly expensive IR and UV cameras (which cost tens of thousands of dollars), these cameras all have the same Achilles Heal: light. When the lights go off (and I imagine you turn them out when you sleep), noise increases exponentially and you end up with images that are essentially useless. Vision systems can also be fooled; if you move slowly enough, it's entirely possible that the system won't notice. Finally, there's the problem of what to do with pets...
This all said, there's a lot of very cool stuff coming out of vision; this morning I watched a master's thesis defense that centered around a visual mouse system that used hand tracking and gesture recognition instead of a traditional rodent --- very cool. I've seen systems that are able to track body parts in relatively real time, detect a person's irises, track groups of moving people and detect when objects are added to / removed from a scene, etc.
I do research in this area and I can't begin to tell you how many things can go wrong. The paint on the walls, the kind of lighting you use (quick mental experiment: halogen light cycles brightness at ~60Hz, video streams come in at say, ~15Hz. Think you can get them to synchronize? Good luck.), shadows, reflections, etc. etc. etc. are all a huge problem so large that I still have a job. Yes, there are cheap (
Schaum's aren't designed to be used as primary texts (believe me, if they were they'd cost a lot more); they're meant to serve as supplementary texts. Having seen the light I'd say skip the college algebra and take a crack at abstract and linear algebra first but that's just me...
That all said, take a gander at DMOZ's listing of online math texts. My general experience with people publishing online math / science texts is that they're really glad when people report errata.
check into s.w.e. (society of women in engineering). i work closely with them through a.c.m. and there are a lot of people who are members of both organizations. i'd also talk to upsilon pi epsilon if you have a chapter on campus.
i've found that the problem goes away with a quick reboot; given that i'm using ad hoc mode since the bloody wireless router died and the replacement was d.o.a. this may not be entirely relevant; however, i am using WEP and my experience is that 2k ironically is much solid for wireless. just my $0.02
think about it: anonymous domain registration is a boon to all the spammers out there for the exact same reasons you want the anynomyity -- no real way to trace back to the source of their pollution. i think a different approach is warranted in this case, something like asking your mom to register the domain using her maiden name and giving you a piece of paper saying that you hold all rights to (and responsibilities for) the domain.
unfortunately i'm already married to 6 months worth of stuff developed under qt.
Sounds like version of Qt but with a much heavier emphasis on the game side of development (Qt doesn't do DirectX last I checked --- "only" OpenGL which is only available as part of its Enterprise Edition, according to Assistant for Qt 3.0.5). Still, it doesn't run on Linux, which does me absolutely no good since all my work focusses around doing real time digital video processing under Linux. b~
I believe that MySQL does ISAM and I know it has JDBC stuff, so I'm thinking that if worst comes to worst, you can convert MySQL's ISAM stuff into Java. However, my gut instinct says that maybe it would be better do to something like use Sleepy Cat's Berkeley DB Java API and write something to convert the ISAM files into Berkeley format.
Slightly OT, but still worth mention: Let's say that this TIA thing gets instituted, big deal. What are the terrorists going to do? The obvious thing is a two path approach: analyse whatever data they can get their hands on and act as unobtrusively as possible and generate as much static and noise as possible to confuse the system.
... are the key problem here. Her assertions are predicated on conditions that simply do not exist: can the government guarantee that it won't abuse its powers? Can the government guarantee that it won't misuse technology? The answer, in both cases, is a resounding no. Sorry, but if you can't prove the hypothesis, you can't prove that the conclusions, regardless of how much hand waving you do. The most disgusting part of this is that MacDonald is advocating is the bastard child of MacCarthyism, technology, and the Alien and Sedition Act which has been dressed up in an attempt to fool people. A+ for rhetoric M(r?)s MacDonald, F for logic: you have used fallacious arguments to prove nothing.
... not a software engineer, programmer, code monkey, etc. with emphasis on the word scientist. it's an important distinction, one which i'm particularly well able to appreciate as i work on my graduate degrees. about 70% of the people in my classes have the words "software engineer" somewhere in their title and after having had to work on group projects with these people, i can guarandamntee that they may be many things, but engineer is certainly not one of them. i'll set my issues with professionalism and technical ability aside for a moment to harp on my major issues: accountability and ethics. being licensed means that you can be held to a certain minimum level of professional ethics (e.g. the acm / ieee joint code of ethics) and discipline. i am sick of being forced to use packages that have disclaimers that essentially say something along the lines of "you indemnify us to the maximum extent under the law for anything that may go wrong, even if it is our fault. you also understand that we make no guarantees that this piece of software will even work, never mind do what we claim it does." personally, i think it would be beautiful if i had the same guarantees when buying software like office that come when i buy a toaster -- i.e. if it doesn't work, i'll get my money back or something that does work.
i lied -- i was thinking of "practical algorithms for programmers" by binstock & rex.
too many text books all merging into one --- i still have patterson & hennessy stuck in my head (which must explain the p)
also, fwiw, "algorithms in c" (i think the book is called -- i'm not sure, it's sitting on my shelf at home) has a bunch of string searching stuff.
boost.org seems to have some pretty neat stuff; however, i've never used thier stuff...
fwiw (and moderately on topic), clr ("introduction to algorithms", but i suppose with the new edition that should be clrp...) has a boatload of string searching algorithms in it, including (i *think* -- i haven't flipped through much more than the graph section recently) the knuth-morris-pratt algorithm. i've generally found their pseudo-code to be reasonably readable (certainly more so than 90+% of the freely available code that i've tried to read).
Moderate the parent comment up!
Personally, I really don't think that an undergraduate classes should discuss the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology until the students have all the tools necessary to understand how the technology works. It's hard to really appreciate the power of things like Paradigm X and Technique Y until you've had to do it the hard way. Likewise, it's hard to know how to apply Paradigm X and Technique Y in appropriate ways if you haven't seen any alternatives.
This all said, I don't think it's a bad thing to discuss these things in class. I found the case studies of Solaris, WinXP, BSD, Linux, etc. in my OS text to be invaluable, but that was only after I understood the driving principles. However, a comparison between threading models on these platforms is essentially useless until you know the difference between 1:1, N:1 and N:M threading models are.
Hrm... Big Brother said the same thing about putting cameras in every room.
... about the patch model of updates being an unviable solution. I see two logical outcomes from this: in the perfect world, this would be seen as a call to do more extensive testing (including hiring your own personal crackers & skr1pt k1dd13s to try to break your products several months before release). However, what this will probably mean is that there'll be a push for continuous automagic updates. Quite frankly, I find that latter option... frightening to say the least. Let MS (or any other company for that matter) updload patches willy nilly to my system (patches which have traditionally, in MS's case broken as many things as they've fixed)? I don't think so, especially if they're going to pull their license switch tricks again.
I'm more curious as to why this worm is as much of a problem as it appears to be. Surely a properly designed firewall would have stopped this thing? If so, why wasn't it done? Are sysadmins really that overworked / busy with more important problems / lazy / inept? Or am I missing a bigger problem here?
You assume that same sex couples do not have children, which is false. There are many same sex couples who have adopted children, there are also many same sex couples who are raising thier own biological children. There are also many same sex couples who want to adopt but face almost insurmountable odds against them, largely based on the fact that they don't have the same parenting rights as heterosexual couples. You are, however, right that with a lot of paperwork many of the same protections and rights as marriage can be achieved, but not all of them.