Actually, while that is of note, it's not necessarily 'the most important', and probably not the most difficult or interesting. We do pretty well with e-mail and web-pages stored on remote locations. That's definitely a starting point. Data services fit into the ubiquitous computing model like any other. Don't like where your data is stored? Migrate it. Have this done automatically. The ideas mooted here do make the ownership issue more acute, but they hardly raise the questions for the first time.
This is *exactly* right. Having terminals everywhere isn't the point, but having computers everywhere *is*. We're not far away from a situation where (initially only in localised areas) a computing substrate is ubiquitously available to all at all physical locations: the infrastructure might as well be wired/wireless Internet. The middleware is the key because processes are no longer tied to a particular computer. Processes and the underlying hardware can be supplied by separate vendors, and the process can migrate itself to another platform transparently - at a cost.
And there's the interesting bit. How do we automate the interaction and composition of processes in a market environment? How do we allow services to submit bids to some consumer, and have it choose the best bid; thousands of times a second? How do we arbitrate and regulate such an environment?
Turing is one of the reasons that I'm heading to King's College to take my PhD (although the Turing room there is hardly a suitable tribute to his memory).
The end to his story is extremely tragic (although this must all be taken with a pinch of salt) - apparently, had Turing's involvement in the war effor been known, he would have been saved the indignity of the trials and medical procedures that were foisted upon him. Given that he arguably won the war for us, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Unfortunately the paranoia surrounding the country after the war meant that Turing's involvement had to remain a secret until the 1970s which was clearly far too late. As a result, the intolerance of the time lost us the service of one of the finest minds and most decent men we've seen.
OpenGL has changed focus a good deal since the last edition, and as such it is particularly good to see this updated. Driven by concerns such as ATI, NVidia and Microsoft (I *think* they're still involved), a lot of work has been done on modernising, streamlining and orthoganalising (like that's a word!) the API and it is now a good deal more useful. We're now in a situation where OpenGL combines the modern feature set of Direct3D with the rigorous review process implied by the ARB, while the extension mechanism, for all its drawbacks, is an elegant way of staging expansion of functionality.
This book is really one of a pair - it's not the OpenGL Programming Guide (the Red Book) and as such is not supposed to educate a newcomer to OpenGL on how to make use of the API and accomplish simple tasks. This would explain much of the lack of tutorial code. This book really is supposed to be a dictionary, an expanded set of documentation and assuming it sticks to the format of the previous editions will become just as well-worn occupant of my shelf as its predecessor.
The comments are again basically composed of a bunch of software engineers shouting "I don't use calculus!" as if becoming exactly like them were the sole purpose of taking a Computer Science degree.
God damn.
Look, a Computer Science degree is an end in itself, and should present a *superset* of skills and knowledge needed to become a software engineer. Maths is super-important. Want to do graphics? Calculus is a big thing if you want to mess with Kajiya's equation. Machine learning? Linear algebra's all important to those embedding linear classifiers like SVMs. Set-theory, predicate calculus, all sorts of symbolic logics and discrete maths are incredibly useful for understanding language theory, algorithms and AI.
For god's sake, view university as more than an exercise in getting a job and getting laid. You might enjoy it more.
and the number of mainstream cards with fully featured (or even half-featured) OpenGL ICDs at that time?
hint: small number.
Microsoft made an effort to bring unifying APIs to the gaming world, especially because mostly at the time OpenGL was still considered a CAD / workstation level API with far too much cruft to be truly useful. Add to that the short lifecycles of a DX API (so rapid feature aggregation) and a featureful set of input libraries amongst other things, and you can see at least why DX exists.
Now all these swords are double-edged. Microsoft killed off the MCD model so a full featured OpenGL implementation was the minimum price of entry (although 3dfx kinda worked around it). DX before 5 was shocking. John Carmack wrote a famous.plan update on the subject. DX got bloated quickly, and because it was locally optimised it went down a lot of blind alleys in terms of architecture. OpenGL is now an extremely viable alternative, and the ARB have benefitted from the driving influences of Microsoft, NVidia and ATI. But would such streamlining and development have happened without DX to prime the pump? Would we all be stuck with Glide? grab your own clue on the way out;)
The problem with speech recognition is that as soon as you mention it, people bundle in a whole lot of ideas about what such a system should be able to do that are not only gilding the lily, but downright impossible on today's technological substrate.
Very high 90s % recognition rate on untrained voice with unlimited vocabulary in noisy environment: not going to happen.
Context dependent response of the system to arbitrary commands: not going to happen (we all knew this, otherwise there are a few Turing awards coming your way).
The current issue with speech recognition is in the *implementation*. Given that we can do limited vocabulary recognition, or pretty good wide vocab. recognition on trained voices we need to create systems that take advantage of that. I suspect a large problem with the uptake of these things is that people equate the modality of interaction with conversation with a human. If somehow they can be convinced to train themselves to use a system sensibly I am certain that very effective systems can be devised.
For example, commands should always be confirmed somehow in order to verify recognition accuracy. Simple little UI touches like this massively improve the user experience.
We're so far away from HAL it's not even funny. But we can do an awful lot with limited domain systems.
This is Cambridge computer lab we're talking about - where Microsoft research have the very next building over.
I live with one of the guys in the systems group and hope to go back there to do my PhD soon, and they do do very cool things there. Microsoft give them all the help they need, because academia is an excellent ideas feeder for the real world. Cambridge, being in a position of power with its serious reputation and fantastic set of minds, gets the benefit of the Microsoft help without any of the assumed costs.
Seriously, I know that a lot of it is Microsoft's fault because of their whack-on-an-acronym marketing dept, but is it really so hard to figure out what.NET is about?
"As soon as we solve a problem," said Pollack, "instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system."
This is the most interesting comment to me. Because we understand the nature of the process that produces supposedly 'intelligent' results, (and we don't understand the same process in ourselves), we perhaps rightly just view the resulting system as just an application.
Seems like Minsky is throwing all his toys out of the pram because he doesn't want to admit to what everyone else has been saying for a while: that whether a computer can think is at best an astonishingly difficult question to answer and at worst meaningless. I'm a grad student who's just spent a year looking at computational linguistics and semantics (amongst other things), and the most debilitating restriction on the semantic side of things is the problem of so-called 'AI-completeness', which essentially says that if you solve this problem you have a, externally at least, thinking computer. Really simple things like anaphora resolution are AI-complete in the general case. If we could have solved this problem by now, I think it's fair to say we would have done, given its massive importance. However, we know that the brute-force case is ridiculously intractable, and we can't figure out how to do it any more cleverly. Roger Penrose argues that this is due to the fundemental Turing-style restrictions that we place on our notion of computing. Until we get a paradigm shift at that level, we're likely never to solve the general case.
And I'm sure that Minsky is aware that attempts to solve constrained domain inference and understanding have been taking place for a good long time now. I just don't see why he's so upset that the field of 'AI' (which is a nebulous catch-all term at best) has shifted its focus to things that we stand a cat in hell's chance of solving, and that have important theoretical and practical applications (viz. machine learning). Replicating human thought is not the be-all and end-all, and you can argue that it's not even that useful a problem.
Robots, though, I agree with. Can't stand the critters;)
While this woman doesn't look like a scientist, this is quite an interesting problem for Machine Learning, I guess.
We can use learning and classification techniques to have a proper go at something like this. Rather than work out the supposed 'best' film, we can look at proposals and decide whether they're going to be a success.
See, in the vast array of films that have been produced, and their box-office takings (the metric I assume we'd use for measuring success) we have an annotated training set to train a learning algorithm with. We then run candidate films past that algorithm, and see what it decides. Might work.
The interesting thing, as with many of these classification problems, is the 'feature vector' representation we use to describe a film. I suppose we'd need things like release date, budget, some kind of 'star-quality' rating (average Kevin Bacon distance?;), these alleged 'percentages' that this woman is talking about... could be a fun research project on the side.
First Symbian phone that Nokia shipped was the 9210 (at least in Europe) - towards the back end of 2001. The next Symbian phone is the 7650, which is only just shipping in the last month or so. Nokia's numbers are made up of the huge quantities of 32**, 33**, 62** etc. phones which run a Nokia OS. There is no one to one correspondance between Nokia phones and Symbian powered devices.
So that gives you a really small radius around your PC to take pictures, if you're transmitting to a desktop PC
Yeah. Still a bit better than a cable. Plus you don't need line of sight - shove your camera in your bag and have it automatically upload the pictures when you get home.
The bluetooth technology really gets on my nerves. The range is horrible, and should be replaced by something better
Which shows how little of the technology you know. Certain devices can hit 100m and over with their range (and interoperate at that distance with the 10m class devices).
It's vapor
I'll bite my tongue, but you should really know that vapour-ware is typically understood to be non-existant technology. Bluetooth isn't. There are shipping mobile phones that are Bluetooth enabled, laptops as well. I work with Bluetooth everyday, and would be pretty pissed off to find it din't actually exist.
Ok, lets say I have a Ericsson mobile phone, and it can intercept and store blootooth signals. I doubt there is a phone out there which will store massive uncompressed image data on a tiny memory block. Totally useless. I can see no further applications within the next couple of years.
Oh, you better call Nokia, Sony and a bunch of others then to deliver your grand vision into their hands. They'll be ever so grateful. Phones do exist that can store images at *medium* quality, although certainly not lossless 1024*768 images in any quantity. But the point of the phone is to *forward* images, say to friends.
Only class 3 (I think) radios are limited to 10m. Class 1 devices (such as the access point sitting on my desk right now) have 100m range - and can therefore be contacted by class 3 devices.
(plus my 7650 can actually deal with ranges of about 25m).
Actually, you're wrong. It's really counter intuitive, and people take forever to be convinced, but you should switch (assuming this is your only chance, Monty is unbiased etc.).
Monty opening the door and revealing a goat tells you nothing. You already know that there's a goat behind one of those doors.
Here's a better example. Imagine a pack of cards. Monty asks you to choose which card is the Ace of Spades. You choose one at random. Now, Monty asks whether you'd like to stick, or change your decision to whether the Ace of Spades lies in the other 51 cards. Once you have made the decision, Monty then throws away 50 cards from the pile which aren't the Ace of Spades. Have the probabilities changed? Not at all. You'd still go with choosing the larger pile.
I was actually at Symbian on Wednesday night at their Cambridge office. One of the things that struck me about the new things they are talking about is that application installation will be a lot easier on the newer phones they are working with. This will help with the PDA / cellphone merge, since the behaviour of the phone is no longer "hard-baked" with the release. If nothing else, it may mean that bug-fixes may become available without having to send off your phone.
Some of the new phones look very cool indeed. Japan is a good indicator, as it tends to be about 1.5 years ahead of Britain (and, ooh, a decade or so ahead of the U.S.:)
That's one of the reasons they've introduced their 'Student Consultant' program in Europe (and I believe in the States). Microsoft are aware that students often have very strong opinions about Linux and Microsoft, and have been trying to forge a relationship with students to improve matters.
So two years ago a lecturer I knew at my university in England put me forward for a student consultantship. Microsoft were taking between one and four students from the best Comp. Sci. universities in Britain. I got a reasonable sum of (tax-free) money, a laptop, an Aero PocketPC (the precursor to the Ipaq, which I have also received), a couple year's MSDN subscription, and trips to TechEd '00 and '01 in Amsterdam and Barcelona. In return I was to do some research vaguely involving Microsoft technologies over my summer break. It was a pretty sweet deal, and I'm typing this from my free laptop:)
Microsoft have also pushed the 'Academic Alliance', which serves to give Comp. Sci. students at various universities free copies of practically every bit of Microsoft software (they exclude Office) in return for the University handing over a nominal fee. There have also been various deals regarding free games for completed Web Services, and such like.
Of course, in an ideal world, students will leave university with a completely objective viewpoint, ready to pick the software that best fits their (and their company's) needs with respect to price, performance, stability, features etc. Most CS students I know don't really care about the software they use - this reflects the fact that CS degrees should have very little software-specific content. However, there are always a vocal few who are pro- or anti- this or that. They're kinda boring:)
I have ported Prolog to the CLR. (A very naieve implementation, more a proof of concept). It was work done as part of my Microsoft student sponsorship dealie this summer.
It worked fine. Backtracking, lists, the lot. I implemented a marshaller to move data types from the CLR to Prolog, and extended Prolog with a couple of predicates to allow object instantiation from classes and method invocation. Syntax was a little ugly, but that can be fixed up. I think the semantics were fine.
I was in D.C. centre round about the time the plane hit the Pentagon. I'm a Brit, and flew out for two weeks holiday here to visit some friends yesterday. Getting out of D.C. was not easy - various subway stations were closed. For those of you who don't know D.C., the Mall area (where the Pentagon and Capitol are) is surrounded by government buildings. The streets were full of scared people, trying to play the odds on a macabre game of chance as they decided which buildings would be least likely to be hit. It was terrifying - everybody was certain another strike was coming. There were rumours flying around - a car bomb had hit the Capitol, another plane was incoming, all sorts. The roads became gridlocked very quickly. I got talking to a lady who was just standing around outside the agriculture department. Turns out her husband was in the Pentagon. We hitched a lift down to Crystal City - I owe the driver of that black van a beer. From there we picked up a couple of other ladies and got a meal in McDonalds. We went our separate ways, since some guy said he could get me to Tyson's Corner - which was near where I wanted to go. After half-an-hour stuck in traffic, not moving, I heard that some subway stations were open, and took my chances. I got lucky, and got home.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, while that is of note, it's not necessarily 'the most important', and probably not the most difficult or interesting. We do pretty well with e-mail and web-pages stored on remote locations. That's definitely a starting point. Data services fit into the ubiquitous computing model like any other. Don't like where your data is stored? Migrate it. Have this done automatically. The ideas mooted here do make the ownership issue more acute, but they hardly raise the questions for the first time.
Henry
This is *exactly* right. Having terminals everywhere isn't the point, but having computers everywhere *is*. We're not far away from a situation where (initially only in localised areas) a computing substrate is ubiquitously available to all at all physical locations: the infrastructure might as well be wired/wireless Internet. The middleware is the key because processes are no longer tied to a particular computer. Processes and the underlying hardware can be supplied by separate vendors, and the process can migrate itself to another platform transparently - at a cost.
:)
And there's the interesting bit. How do we automate the interaction and composition of processes in a market environment? How do we allow services to submit bids to some consumer, and have it choose the best bid; thousands of times a second? How do we arbitrate and regulate such an environment?
Welcome to my PhD
Henry
Turing is one of the reasons that I'm heading to King's College to take my PhD (although the Turing room there is hardly a suitable tribute to his memory).
The end to his story is extremely tragic (although this must all be taken with a pinch of salt) - apparently, had Turing's involvement in the war effor been known, he would have been saved the indignity of the trials and medical procedures that were foisted upon him. Given that he arguably won the war for us, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Unfortunately the paranoia surrounding the country after the war meant that Turing's involvement had to remain a secret until the 1970s which was clearly far too late. As a result, the intolerance of the time lost us the service of one of the finest minds and most decent men we've seen.
henry
OpenGL has changed focus a good deal since the last edition, and as such it is particularly good to see this updated. Driven by concerns such as ATI, NVidia and Microsoft (I *think* they're still involved), a lot of work has been done on modernising, streamlining and orthoganalising (like that's a word!) the API and it is now a good deal more useful. We're now in a situation where OpenGL combines the modern feature set of Direct3D with the rigorous review process implied by the ARB, while the extension mechanism, for all its drawbacks, is an elegant way of staging expansion of functionality.
This book is really one of a pair - it's not the OpenGL Programming Guide (the Red Book) and as such is not supposed to educate a newcomer to OpenGL on how to make use of the API and accomplish simple tasks. This would explain much of the lack of tutorial code. This book really is supposed to be a dictionary, an expanded set of documentation and assuming it sticks to the format of the previous editions will become just as well-worn occupant of my shelf as its predecessor.
Henry
The comments are again basically composed of a bunch of software engineers shouting "I don't use calculus!" as if becoming exactly like them were the sole purpose of taking a Computer Science degree.
God damn.
Look, a Computer Science degree is an end in itself, and should present a *superset* of skills and knowledge needed to become a software engineer. Maths is super-important. Want to do graphics? Calculus is a big thing if you want to mess with Kajiya's equation. Machine learning? Linear algebra's all important to those embedding linear classifiers like SVMs. Set-theory, predicate calculus, all sorts of symbolic logics and discrete maths are incredibly useful for understanding language theory, algorithms and AI.
For god's sake, view university as more than an exercise in getting a job and getting laid. You might enjoy it more.
Henry
and the number of mainstream cards with fully featured (or even half-featured) OpenGL ICDs at that time?
.plan update on the subject. DX got bloated quickly, and because it was locally optimised it went down a lot of blind alleys in terms of architecture. OpenGL is now an extremely viable alternative, and the ARB have benefitted from the driving influences of Microsoft, NVidia and ATI. But would such streamlining and development have happened without DX to prime the pump? Would we all be stuck with Glide? ;)
hint: small number.
Microsoft made an effort to bring unifying APIs to the gaming world, especially because mostly at the time OpenGL was still considered a CAD / workstation level API with far too much cruft to be truly useful. Add to that the short lifecycles of a DX API (so rapid feature aggregation) and a featureful set of input libraries amongst other things, and you can see at least why DX exists.
Now all these swords are double-edged. Microsoft killed off the MCD model so a full featured OpenGL implementation was the minimum price of entry (although 3dfx kinda worked around it). DX before 5 was shocking. John Carmack wrote a famous
grab your own clue on the way out
all of the latest DirectX 9.0 game titles
;)
what, both of them?
Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'm here all week. Available for weddings, bahmitzvahs and light-hearted funerals.
This is absolutely a typical example of a two geeks talking about a girlfriend.
;)
Everything is true of the null set
Henry
The problem with speech recognition is that as soon as you mention it, people bundle in a whole lot of ideas about what such a system should be able to do that are not only gilding the lily, but downright impossible on today's technological substrate.
Very high 90s % recognition rate on untrained voice with unlimited vocabulary in noisy environment: not going to happen.
Context dependent response of the system to arbitrary commands: not going to happen (we all knew this, otherwise there are a few Turing awards coming your way).
The current issue with speech recognition is in the *implementation*. Given that we can do limited vocabulary recognition, or pretty good wide vocab. recognition on trained voices we need to create systems that take advantage of that. I suspect a large problem with the uptake of these things is that people equate the modality of interaction with conversation with a human. If somehow they can be convinced to train themselves to use a system sensibly I am certain that very effective systems can be devised.
For example, commands should always be confirmed somehow in order to verify recognition accuracy. Simple little UI touches like this massively improve the user experience.
We're so far away from HAL it's not even funny. But we can do an awful lot with limited domain systems.
Henry
This is Cambridge computer lab we're talking about - where Microsoft research have the very next building over.
I live with one of the guys in the systems group and hope to go back there to do my PhD soon, and they do do very cool things there. Microsoft give them all the help they need, because academia is an excellent ideas feeder for the real world. Cambridge, being in a position of power with its serious reputation and fantastic set of minds, gets the benefit of the Microsoft help without any of the assumed costs.
Henry
They do. CLR runtime and compilers are available free for download. Visual Studio and .NET enabled business servers remain pay to play.
.NET is about?
Try here for example.
Seriously, I know that a lot of it is Microsoft's fault because of their whack-on-an-acronym marketing dept, but is it really so hard to figure out what
Henry
"As soon as we solve a problem," said Pollack, "instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system."
;)
This is the most interesting comment to me. Because we understand the nature of the process that produces supposedly 'intelligent' results, (and we don't understand the same process in ourselves), we perhaps rightly just view the resulting system as just an application.
Seems like Minsky is throwing all his toys out of the pram because he doesn't want to admit to what everyone else has been saying for a while: that whether a computer can think is at best an astonishingly difficult question to answer and at worst meaningless. I'm a grad student who's just spent a year looking at computational linguistics and semantics (amongst other things), and the most debilitating restriction on the semantic side of things is the problem of so-called 'AI-completeness', which essentially says that if you solve this problem you have a, externally at least, thinking computer. Really simple things like anaphora resolution are AI-complete in the general case. If we could have solved this problem by now, I think it's fair to say we would have done, given its massive importance. However, we know that the brute-force case is ridiculously intractable, and we can't figure out how to do it any more cleverly. Roger Penrose argues that this is due to the fundemental Turing-style restrictions that we place on our notion of computing. Until we get a paradigm shift at that level, we're likely never to solve the general case.
And I'm sure that Minsky is aware that attempts to solve constrained domain inference and understanding have been taking place for a good long time now. I just don't see why he's so upset that the field of 'AI' (which is a nebulous catch-all term at best) has shifted its focus to things that we stand a cat in hell's chance of solving, and that have important theoretical and practical applications (viz. machine learning). Replicating human thought is not the be-all and end-all, and you can argue that it's not even that useful a problem.
Robots, though, I agree with. Can't stand the critters
Henry
While this woman doesn't look like a scientist, this is quite an interesting problem for Machine Learning, I guess.
;), these alleged 'percentages' that this woman is talking about... could be a fun research project on the side.
We can use learning and classification techniques to have a proper go at something like this. Rather than work out the supposed 'best' film, we can look at proposals and decide whether they're going to be a success.
See, in the vast array of films that have been produced, and their box-office takings (the metric I assume we'd use for measuring success) we have an annotated training set to train a learning algorithm with. We then run candidate films past that algorithm, and see what it decides. Might work.
The interesting thing, as with many of these classification problems, is the 'feature vector' representation we use to describe a film. I suppose we'd need things like release date, budget, some kind of 'star-quality' rating (average Kevin Bacon distance?
Henry
"You have seen the stupid Passport hole in an earlier story; also the iLoo, although that hasn't stopped you from submitting stories about it, oh no."
;)
With all due respect, it never stopped you posting stories about them either
Henry
*sigh* Fools, damn fools and statistics.
First Symbian phone that Nokia shipped was the 9210 (at least in Europe) - towards the back end of 2001. The next Symbian phone is the 7650, which is only just shipping in the last month or so. Nokia's numbers are made up of the huge quantities of 32**, 33**, 62** etc. phones which run a Nokia OS. There is no one to one correspondance between Nokia phones and Symbian powered devices.
Henry
Oooh, dissection! Scalpel, please....
So that gives you a really small radius around your PC to take pictures, if you're transmitting to a desktop PC
Yeah. Still a bit better than a cable. Plus you don't need line of sight - shove your camera in your bag and have it automatically upload the pictures when you get home.
The bluetooth technology really gets on my nerves. The range is horrible, and should be replaced by something better
Which shows how little of the technology you know. Certain devices can hit 100m and over with their range (and interoperate at that distance with the 10m class devices).
It's vapor
I'll bite my tongue, but you should really know that vapour-ware is typically understood to be non-existant technology. Bluetooth isn't. There are shipping mobile phones that are Bluetooth enabled, laptops as well. I work with Bluetooth everyday, and would be pretty pissed off to find it din't actually exist.
Ok, lets say I have a Ericsson mobile phone, and it can intercept and store blootooth signals. I doubt there is a phone out there which will store massive uncompressed image data on a tiny memory block. Totally useless. I can see no further applications within the next couple of years.
Oh, you better call Nokia, Sony and a bunch of others then to deliver your grand vision into their hands. They'll be ever so grateful. Phones do exist that can store images at *medium* quality, although certainly not lossless 1024*768 images in any quantity. But the point of the phone is to *forward* images, say to friends.
Henry
Only class 3 (I think) radios are limited to 10m. Class 1 devices (such as the access point sitting on my desk right now) have 100m range - and can therefore be contacted by class 3 devices.
(plus my 7650 can actually deal with ranges of about 25m).
Henry
Actually, you're wrong. It's really counter intuitive, and people take forever to be convinced, but you should switch (assuming this is your only chance, Monty is unbiased etc.).
Monty opening the door and revealing a goat tells you nothing. You already know that there's a goat behind one of those doors.
Here's a better example. Imagine a pack of cards. Monty asks you to choose which card is the Ace of Spades. You choose one at random. Now, Monty asks whether you'd like to stick, or change your decision to whether the Ace of Spades lies in the other 51 cards. Once you have made the decision, Monty then throws away 50 cards from the pile which aren't the Ace of Spades. Have the probabilities changed? Not at all. You'd still go with choosing the larger pile.
Henry
I was actually at Symbian on Wednesday night at their Cambridge office. One of the things that struck me about the new things they are talking about is that application installation will be a lot easier on the newer phones they are working with. This will help with the PDA / cellphone merge, since the behaviour of the phone is no longer "hard-baked" with the release. If nothing else, it may mean that bug-fixes may become available without having to send off your phone.
:)
Some of the new phones look very cool indeed. Japan is a good indicator, as it tends to be about 1.5 years ahead of Britain (and, ooh, a decade or so ahead of the U.S.
Henry
That's one of the reasons they've introduced their 'Student Consultant' program in Europe (and I believe in the States). Microsoft are aware that students often have very strong opinions about Linux and Microsoft, and have been trying to forge a relationship with students to improve matters.
:)
:)
So two years ago a lecturer I knew at my university in England put me forward for a student consultantship. Microsoft were taking between one and four students from the best Comp. Sci. universities in Britain. I got a reasonable sum of (tax-free) money, a laptop, an Aero PocketPC (the precursor to the Ipaq, which I have also received), a couple year's MSDN subscription, and trips to TechEd '00 and '01 in Amsterdam and Barcelona. In return I was to do some research vaguely involving Microsoft technologies over my summer break. It was a pretty sweet deal, and I'm typing this from my free laptop
Microsoft have also pushed the 'Academic Alliance', which serves to give Comp. Sci. students at various universities free copies of practically every bit of Microsoft software (they exclude Office) in return for the University handing over a nominal fee. There have also been various deals regarding free games for completed Web Services, and such like.
Of course, in an ideal world, students will leave university with a completely objective viewpoint, ready to pick the software that best fits their (and their company's) needs with respect to price, performance, stability, features etc. Most CS students I know don't really care about the software they use - this reflects the fact that CS degrees should have very little software-specific content. However, there are always a vocal few who are pro- or anti- this or that. They're kinda boring
Henry
The very existence of GNOME is the direct result of our ideals of freedom, precisely what the open source movement was founded in 1998 to reject.
:)
So open source rejects your ideals of freedom, and has done since its foundation?
Someone better notify the press
Henry
I have ported Prolog to the CLR. (A very naieve implementation, more a proof of concept). It was work done as part of my Microsoft student sponsorship dealie this summer.
It worked fine. Backtracking, lists, the lot. I implemented a marshaller to move data types from the CLR to Prolog, and extended Prolog with a couple of predicates to allow object instantiation from classes and method invocation. Syntax was a little ugly, but that can be fixed up. I think the semantics were fine.
So it can be done. Pretty easily, in fact.
Henry
"It can load X and rexec X apps with 16mb RAM for Pete sakes!"
:)
Great, now all I need to do is change my name by deed poll... software usability at its best
Henry
This is how you educate people about piracy :)
(not porn, not goatse.cx)
Henry
I was in D.C. centre round about the time the plane hit the Pentagon. I'm a Brit, and flew out for two weeks holiday here to visit some friends yesterday. Getting out of D.C. was not easy - various subway stations were closed. For those of you who don't know D.C., the Mall area (where the Pentagon and Capitol are) is surrounded by government buildings. The streets were full of scared people, trying to play the odds on a macabre game of chance as they decided which buildings would be least likely to be hit. It was terrifying - everybody was certain another strike was coming. There were rumours flying around - a car bomb had hit the Capitol, another plane was incoming, all sorts. The roads became gridlocked very quickly. I got talking to a lady who was just standing around outside the agriculture department. Turns out her husband was in the Pentagon. We hitched a lift down to Crystal City - I owe the driver of that black van a beer. From there we picked up a couple of other ladies and got a meal in McDonalds. We went our separate ways, since some guy said he could get me to Tyson's Corner - which was near where I wanted to go. After half-an-hour stuck in traffic, not moving, I heard that some subway stations were open, and took my chances. I got lucky, and got home.
Many didn't.
I have never been so scared.