Actually it is in reverse for webcams: initially USB webcams required proprietary vendor drivers but now more and more webcams support UVC - USB video class.
* vendor-specific package patches.. If you found a bug please submit upstream or fork it, don't create a situation where documentation and project source say one thing but the software does something different (goes double for messing with KDE or Gnome).
* speaking of packages - why exactly is there such a need to split everything in tiny little chunks and then put them in weird locations ? Yes, I know about meta packages - not every package has them, and, worse of all, there is no way to get the installation exactly as if one was installing from source. Which makes tweaking original package source and then installing it very tricky.
This is a very serious point - the whole idea of GPL is to let you tweak things. If the distribution obfuscates installation procedure to the degree it is a major pain to install customized version from pristine project source this not only goes against the spirit of free software but also discourages contributions. If people can't easily install a modified version of KDE or X11 components where do you think new developers will come from ?
Yes, I do understand that with closed source software there is a separation between developers and users - this is not how GNU/Linux is supposed to work.
* there should ALWAYS be a manual override. I had a perfectly working camera (Panasonic Lumix LX-2) until gphoto upgraded and started recognizing it as TZ-3 and simply refusing to do a plain usb storage mount. The workaround is to either kill hal - which breaks other things - or hunt down the silly configuration file several script layers deep to turn this off. And, of course, the latter solution gets obliterated after upgrade. And no, you can't do mount/dev/sdb/tmp/camera because/dev/sdb does not even exist as hal tells the kernel not to create the device.
By contrast, if I encounter an issue manifesting in CoreFoo, Cocoa, some kext or library or wherever else on OS X, Apple will offer to take ownership of it even if it isn't directly their problem (and then work on it in the background)
Keep in mind that Linux is developed in large part by volunteers ! The reason to do it is to enjoy writing code and finding solutions. Thus "ownership" goes automatically to the person reporting the bug. The reason to post to the mailing list/bugzilla/etc is to announce that you found it, check whether anyone else is working on it or has an "Aha" solution and then enjoy improving the project with other developes. Unless it is something trivial (like a typo) you will be given space to work on it.
For example, the insufficient screen height (which I also observed on EeePC) is not something you can fix with one setting change and requires review of various software pieces.
One way to solve this is to enable maximus to move windows larger than the screen. Alternatively one can enable scrollbar - but
it is difficult in some applications, like xfig, though kde configuration panels can certainly be adapted.
Having no patenting system would make the whole market far too volatile. If you could start over and rebuild the whole thing, what would you do?
The problem with patent system is that it tries to reward the invention before its worth has been proven and, on top of that, does it with granting specific legal rights (to exclude others) which is not a liquid tradable item.
A much better system would be to grant the applicant a kickback from increases in government taxes that were made possible by the invention/activity.
This would solve the problem of measuring worth (the applicant would have to prove they increased taxes - this is a much easier task than figuring out whether a gimmick X is worth 20 years patent protection), disentangle inventors and producers (old system was designed for the case when they are the same) and apply to non-patent cases as well (consider education for example).
You can view this as regularization of existing practice of rewarding companies with tax breaks and grants.
My wife (a math degree and former teacher) suggested throwing out the "calculus path" of mathematics entirely and retool math education to a "discrete math path". It sounded heretical to me initially, but I've come to believe that she's correct.
Calculus is about reasoning with well-known errors. I.e. given X known with precision delta and a known function f(x) what is the precision of f(X) ? It is essential to understanding physical systems and analytical reasoning.
A person that cannot make proofs from definition of the limit has no idea what calculus is.
What passes for "calculus" courses in US (for at least a decade) is better called differential algebra - using prescribed rules to compute derivates and integrals of some functions and, indeed, it is of doubtful value to students who cannot tell ellipse from parabola by looking at the equation.
Speaking of cool, Star Control II is now known as Masters of Ur-Quan - and it was made GPL in 2002. (The change of name was due to Star Control trademark being separated from the game).
It is quite enjoyable to play still, and whoever wrote it spent a good deal of effort making space travel details realistic: with star colors, marked habitable zones and even reasonable approximation to spaceflight dynamics.
Of course, for now you need to wear a funky headband to make it work (the headband "uses laser diodes to send near-infrared light through the forehead at a relatively shallow depth â" only two to three centimeters â" to interact with the brain's frontal lobe," according to Tufts.)
2-3 cm seems to be rather large, especially since it has to go through the skull - can anyone comment on this ?
Solid State Hard drives are better off than spinning ones for sure, but still suffer from the same problems with an EM field AFAIK.
This is not quite correct. Sure, if you zap them with a large enough static charge it will burn out the chips - but this is more likely to apply to the interface chips rather than the flash that carries data. Flash is also susceptible to radiation. Otherwise it is pretty robust.
Holographic storage however, likely relies on some sort of photo-sensitive dye or phase change material - which will have big problems if you leave it inside a car during a hot summer day.
You could also use electromagnets and push against Earth magnetic field - though, in practice, you might have problems doing it as poorly controlled magnetic field might focus incoming charged particles in the wrong place..
X and the graphical system in general is clearly the weakest point of modern-day Linux. It is an userland program, yet it has the same stability requirement than a kernel, and fails to live up to them. This is on top of various annoyances, like being apparently unable to switch the bit depth of the screen at runtime (affects at least Wine) and having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes.
X itself is very stable - I am writing this from machine that has not rebooted (or restarted X) for 4 months now (139 days to be precise). The weak point however are proprietary video drivers and hardware. Video cards do not have anywhere near the stability of CPUs, disk drivers and sound cards.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to get fixed, because it only affects the desktop users and not the Important Server Guys.
The Important Fun-loving Hardware Driver Guys can do very little if the hardware is poorly documented and prone to lockups in the first place. I would gladly trade a few (or even 20%) of fps in Quake for a graphics card with the stability of the CPU (Starting with feature #1: regardless of which instructions are thrown at the CPU it does not enter "HALT UNTIL REBOOT" state).
Sounds like a great way for big corporate interests to stamp out little competitors. Just force them to overvalue their IP (so they are at a disadvantage in servicing it) or buy it out from under them.
Starting with GPL software. Imagine the change in MS stock price if suddenly Linux and GNU software becomes free to make binary editions of with "added value".
For two cameras covering the same scene the one with more pixels will have the smaller angle.
That's just plain wrong, sorry.
I have a canon 10D DSLR. It has a 6MP APS-C sized sensor 22.7mm x 15.1mm. A much newer Canon 40D has a 10MP sensor which is also APS-C sized. When using the same lenses at the same spot, both cameras will get an identical viewing angle. The 40D will, however, be able to capture more detail doe to its higher resolution. This extra detil could in post processing be used to crop the image and effectively zoom in while still matching the resolution of my 10D.
If I has a spare $6,000 I could buy a Canon 1Ds and have 16MP images on a full frame 35mm sensor. It has almost three times as many pixels as my camera, but at the same spot using the same lens will capture a significantly wider angle of view than my 10D which has an effective 1.6x magnification over the 1Ds due to my camera's smaller sensor size. I guess I should have given a numeric example:
Assume you are 7 meters away from a 2 meter person that you take a full length picture of. This means the vertical angle is 16.6 degrees.
Assume that the camera you are using takes standard format 4:5 ratio pictures. This means the vertical resolution is sqrt(MPres*4/5) where MPres is the megapixels.
So for 2MP camera one vertical pixel corresponds to an angle of 16.6/sqrt(2e6*4/5)=0.013 degrees. For 5MP camera the angle is 0.0083 degrees and
for 10MP camera it is 0.0058 degrees.
If you camera is 15cm wide these angles can be achieved by rotational movement of 30 microns for 2MP camera, 20 microns for 5MP one and 15 microns for 10 MP camera.
Suppose your exposure time is 1/125 seconds. Then these movements correspond to velocities of 3.75 mm/sec, 2.5 mm/sec and 1.8 mm/sec correspondingly. These are achievable with a steady hand and heavy camera body. If you had to go to 1/30sec exposure time you better use a tripod. Optical image stabilization on the hand can cope with these just fine and lets you take pictures with 1/15 sec exposure time and no flash.
I would like to say this is absolute bull. How on earth does the image resolution have anything to do with sharpness etc of the image? IMHO, nothing at all.
I use 12Mp Nikon D2x and on sort focal lengths, all my lenses are of the non Images Stabilised type and I get perfectly sharp images with it handheld.
It is really quite simple - when you tilt camera by a certain angle the image would shift by 1 pixel. For two cameras covering the same scene the one with more pixels will have the smaller angle. Thus for the extra pixels to actually make a difference you need the camera to move less than that angle during the exposure.
To test this put a thin black hair on a letter or A4 size piece of paper and take an image. Ideally it should be 1 pixel wide, but 3 antialiased pixels is probably to be expected with todays cameras. If you see more than 5 pixels the camera was shaking too much relative to the object and the same quality could be achieved with a sensor of 1/2 resolution (and thus 1/4 of megapixels).
As for your shots, yes I can easily believe that with large wideangle (corresponding to 0.5 zoom) you can make use of 10 MP without stabilization. However, none of pocket sized cameras have lenses that can do that - and I find the ability to have the camera always with me quite useful.
Digital is an easy choice - just from the point of view of durability of media and ease of acquiring lots of pictures
4-5 megapixels is the minimum to take a full 1:1 picture of a page and be able to read indices in formulas (this was you can use your camera instead of Xerox).
Anything with more than 5 megapixels needs digital image stabilization - otherwise your extra resolution will be smeared out by natural shaking of your hands (or even your tripod - but this takes effect later).
Similarly large "tele" zoom is useless - if you zoomed in 10x closer to your subject you have 10 times the effect of shaking (and thus need a good tripod or very short exposure time).
Good wideangle on the other hand is great - not only you can get more of the scene in a small room but it also reduces the effect of shaking.
Thus you want a camera with digital image stabilization, as good wideangle as possible and at least 5 megapixels. Last time I did the round up (a few months ago) there were surprisingly few cameras that met these conditions - mostly because most of what is on the shelves in "Best Buy" (not best for at least several years) does not have any wideangle whatsoever.
My purchase was Panasonic Lumix LX-2 which, at the time, was not available in any store in Boston so I had to order it from Vahns. I was not disappointed and even found the movie mode to be useful - it has a higher resolution than my camcorder (which is NTSC like) and, best of all, the movie files are mpeg4 encoded and play readily on my Kubuntu systems.
It probably isn't a perpetual energy thingie but how does it do what it does?
I am pretty certain that this is not a perpetual motion machine, but I did find the movies quite enjoyable. Obviously a lot of effort went into making a concise and transparent presentation.
Without having direct access to the machine it is hard to investigate the details, but two likely effects suggest themselves:
First of all, note that the motor is quite powerful. These are often used for ventilation. I was very surprised to see the wheel turning as slowly as it did. Where does the energy go ? One likely answer is that a lot is absorbed by the steel armature of the coils due to histeresis and eddy currents. The latter lose power through resistive heating of steel. When the coils are short circuited a portion of eddy currents is induced in the copper wire instead of steel. But copper has a smaller resistance so the losses decrease and the wheel spins up.
Secondly, there is a neat little demo where a magnet brought close to the drive shaft causes a decrease in current consumption. My guess this is due to the electronic regulator being used to supply power to the motor (I don't know the electronic regulator was used as this was not made explicit in the video). What likely happens is that the magnet induces a static field in the rotor. As the rotor moves the distance between poles changes slightly which induces an oscillating current at a multiple of main power feed frequency. This can easily have an effect on the power regulator which was likely not designed to be precise when exposed to such feedback. Also, it could be that the measuring equipment (definitely electronic) is being affected.
I would say that watching MS languish in the mire that is Vista is a lot satisfying because time and again Microsoft put business considerations (of the most unclean kind) ahead of making good software and now it is biting them back.
Not following standard protocols or common concepts in computer science is what leads to all the complexity that caused then to scrap Longhorn and botch Vista right after that.
Mind you, Vista is still not large enough that the multitude of programmers MS can afford to employ cannot go through the bugs on a case by case basis and patch them up. So we have not seen the end...
Maybe college is starting to realize they need to prep people for the "real" world versus the theoretical one. I'm not saying advanced math is bad or not important, but years of C, fortran, calculus whatever doesnt really correlate in the business world where most companies are using java, C# etc. Now if we are talking someone becoming a software engineer versus say a systems analyst there is a big difference.
Preparing people for the "real" world in a university is actually very bad idea. Why ?
Because you don't really know what the world is going to be like in 5 years from now. Will we still use single/double/quad core machines ? Will our network connections be still limited by 1 Gbit ? Will people be done with coding web applications and move to something else (like video, CAD or realtime control) ?
Spending 4 years to acquire knowledge that will last for the next 5 is not efficient at all. If, on the other hand, you became fluent with math you can adapt pretty easily.
- these cameras typically have no filters or can only shoot one filter at a time. This gives better sensitivity and resolution at the expense of being able to make simultaneous multi-spectrum shots.
Also take a look at this image - the scattering of pixels in the top left part if the picture is not dust on your monitor but actual stars as seen by the spacecraft ! I wonder if it is possible to find out from this when the shot was taken and where the camera was pointing.
I also have only made 4 layer boards, $250 for 5 copies. The problem, as you mention, is yield. BGA chips can't be easily reworked, so if any got screwed up the entire board is toast. With FPGA and PHYs being more than $30 each this quickly adds to cost and difficulty - and reduces the number of people who would want to replicate the project.
From the website: base module $299 (for early adopters) and 4 more modules (GPS, camera, accelerometer, screen) for $50-100 each. Buy all: $595.
How is this different from the many embedded boards you can buy or even a PDA/phone (e.g. openmoko) ? The only new feature is fancy packaging. It does not appear you can connect more these four modules or link bases together easily.
I wish they actually made something that let you do new things. For example, I would be delighted to shell out $299 for one of these:
A Spartan FPGA board with 1 GB MAC+PHY (or PHY alone). Spartan must be largest that WebKit supports, with all connections routed to nice high-speed connectors (with more than 40 usable pins !). Current best: www.digilent.com, 40 pins, USB 2.0 interface (limited to 10-20MB/sec due to the way they hooked up FX2 chip). Such a board is possible (and relatively easy) to design by an amateur - but very expensive to make as it would have to be 6 layers and require soldering BGA chips. Price can only go down when many are made at the same time. Possible hobby applications: software radio, software oscilloscope, home made projectors, photonics.
Same, but with connector for SPF modules instead of built-in MAC/PHY
Same, but capable of usable 10Gbit per second
10/100 and/or 1Gbit and/or wireless board with 8 or more 1 Mhz 16bit ADC inputs and equal number of 12-16bit DAC outputs, plus digital I/O. Should be easy to design and medium hard to make - mostly because 10/100 MAC/PHYs and FPGAs do not come in convenient packaging and Digilent board (and similar) do not have enough I/O. Applications: MEMs closed loop control (make a tiny robot/device and get it to move using piezos, static electricity or plain electromagnets), sensing of electrical signals from muscles/brain, environment monitoring, ultrasound.
Hackers PDA: a PDA with large Hex buttons and auxiliary buttons around the screen (one can enter ASCII letters with two keypresses - beats phones and writing), with several multimeter channels (using TI chips for example), several relay controls, and multiple digital I/O ports that double as compact flash or SD slots.
A true programmer is a person capable of controlling computers.
By control here I mean a closed feedback loop - not only they are able to push buttons, but can also explain in minute detail what happens when they do it.
There is only one computer science language - mathematics. C, Pascal, Lisp are just different written forms of it. Any sufficiently rich form is capable of expressing the entirety of mathematics (example: Turing machine). However, "capable" does not mean "easy". One can, for example, do functional programming in C, but you will find out that it is most convenient to write a mini-Lisp interpreter first and then hook into it.
Thus I don't think the "damage" comes from knowing only one language, but rather from resigning to knowing only the easy parts of one language and unwillingness to push the boundary.
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Actually it is in reverse for webcams: initially USB webcams required proprietary vendor drivers but now more and more webcams support UVC - USB video class.
Missing from analysis - how much said asset depreciates a month.
I agree completely.
My other grudges are:
* vendor-specific package patches.. If you found a bug please submit upstream or fork it, don't create a situation where documentation and project source say one thing but the software does something different (goes double for messing with KDE or Gnome).
* speaking of packages - why exactly is there such a need to split everything in tiny little chunks and then put them in weird locations ? Yes, I know about meta packages - not every package has them, and, worse of all, there is no way to get the installation exactly as if one was installing from source. Which makes tweaking original package source and then installing it very tricky.
This is a very serious point - the whole idea of GPL is to let you tweak things. If the distribution obfuscates installation procedure to the degree it is a major pain to install customized version from pristine project source this not only goes against the spirit of free software but also discourages contributions. If people can't easily install a modified version of KDE or X11 components where do you think new developers will come from ?
Yes, I do understand that with closed source software there is a separation between developers and users - this is not how GNU/Linux is supposed to work.
* there should ALWAYS be a manual override. I had a perfectly working camera (Panasonic Lumix LX-2) until gphoto upgraded and started recognizing it as TZ-3 and simply refusing to do a plain usb storage mount. The workaround is to either kill hal - which breaks other things - or hunt down the silly configuration file several script layers deep to turn this off. And, of course, the latter solution gets obliterated after upgrade. And no, you can't do mount /dev/sdb /tmp/camera because /dev/sdb does not even exist as hal tells the kernel not to create the device.
Keep in mind that Linux is developed in large part by volunteers ! The reason to do it is to enjoy writing code and finding solutions. Thus "ownership" goes automatically to the person reporting the bug. The reason to post to the mailing list/bugzilla/etc is to announce that you found it, check whether anyone else is working on it or has an "Aha" solution and then enjoy improving the project with other developes. Unless it is something trivial (like a typo) you will be given space to work on it.
For example, the insufficient screen height (which I also observed on EeePC) is not something you can fix with one setting change and requires review of various software pieces.
One way to solve this is to enable maximus to move windows larger than the screen. Alternatively one can enable scrollbar - but it is difficult in some applications, like xfig, though kde configuration panels can certainly be adapted.
Ahh... I see. I'll take one for $100.
The problem with patent system is that it tries to reward the invention before its worth has been proven and, on top of that, does it with granting specific legal rights (to exclude others) which is not a liquid tradable item.
A much better system would be to grant the applicant a kickback from increases in government taxes that were made possible by the invention/activity.
This would solve the problem of measuring worth (the applicant would have to prove they increased taxes - this is a much easier task than figuring out whether a gimmick X is worth 20 years patent protection), disentangle inventors and producers (old system was designed for the case when they are the same) and apply to non-patent cases as well (consider education for example).
You can view this as regularization of existing practice of rewarding companies with tax breaks and grants.
Calculus is about reasoning with well-known errors. I.e. given X known with precision delta and a known function f(x) what is the precision of f(X) ? It is essential to understanding physical systems and analytical reasoning.
A person that cannot make proofs from definition of the limit has no idea what calculus is.
What passes for "calculus" courses in US (for at least a decade) is better called differential algebra - using prescribed rules to compute derivates and integrals of some functions and, indeed, it is of doubtful value to students who cannot tell ellipse from parabola by looking at the equation.
It is quite enjoyable to play still, and whoever wrote it spent a good deal of effort making space travel details realistic: with star colors, marked habitable zones and even reasonable approximation to spaceflight dynamics.
2-3 cm seems to be rather large, especially since it has to go through the skull - can anyone comment on this ?
This is not quite correct. Sure, if you zap them with a large enough static charge it will burn out the chips - but this is more likely to apply to the interface chips rather than the flash that carries data. Flash is also susceptible to radiation. Otherwise it is pretty robust.
Holographic storage however, likely relies on some sort of photo-sensitive dye or phase change material - which will have big problems if you leave it inside a car during a hot summer day.
You could also use electromagnets and push against Earth magnetic field - though, in practice, you might have problems doing it as poorly controlled magnetic field might focus incoming charged particles in the wrong place..
There are still patents on it though..
Gyros need to be heavy - eliminating them saves mass.
X itself is very stable - I am writing this from machine that has not rebooted (or restarted X) for 4 months now (139 days to be precise). The weak point however are proprietary video drivers and hardware. Video cards do not have anywhere near the stability of CPUs, disk drivers and sound cards.
The Important Fun-loving Hardware Driver Guys can do very little if the hardware is poorly documented and prone to lockups in the first place. I would gladly trade a few (or even 20%) of fps in Quake for a graphics card with the stability of the CPU (Starting with feature #1: regardless of which instructions are thrown at the CPU it does not enter "HALT UNTIL REBOOT" state).
Baen Webscriptions, Baen free library
Starting with GPL software. Imagine the change in MS stock price if suddenly Linux and GNU software becomes free to make binary editions of with "added value".
Assume you are 7 meters away from a 2 meter person that you take a full length picture of. This means the vertical angle is 16.6 degrees. Assume that the camera you are using takes standard format 4:5 ratio pictures. This means the vertical resolution is sqrt(MPres*4/5) where MPres is the megapixels.
So for 2MP camera one vertical pixel corresponds to an angle of 16.6/sqrt(2e6*4/5)=0.013 degrees. For 5MP camera the angle is 0.0083 degrees and for 10MP camera it is 0.0058 degrees.
If you camera is 15cm wide these angles can be achieved by rotational movement of 30 microns for 2MP camera, 20 microns for 5MP one and 15 microns for 10 MP camera.
Suppose your exposure time is 1/125 seconds. Then these movements correspond to velocities of 3.75 mm/sec, 2.5 mm/sec and 1.8 mm/sec correspondingly. These are achievable with a steady hand and heavy camera body. If you had to go to 1/30sec exposure time you better use a tripod. Optical image stabilization on the hand can cope with these just fine and lets you take pictures with 1/15 sec exposure time and no flash.
It is really quite simple - when you tilt camera by a certain angle the image would shift by 1 pixel. For two cameras covering the same scene the one with more pixels will have the smaller angle. Thus for the extra pixels to actually make a difference you need the camera to move less than that angle during the exposure.
To test this put a thin black hair on a letter or A4 size piece of paper and take an image. Ideally it should be 1 pixel wide, but 3 antialiased pixels is probably to be expected with todays cameras. If you see more than 5 pixels the camera was shaking too much relative to the object and the same quality could be achieved with a sensor of 1/2 resolution (and thus 1/4 of megapixels).
As for your shots, yes I can easily believe that with large wideangle (corresponding to 0.5 zoom) you can make use of 10 MP without stabilization. However, none of pocket sized cameras have lenses that can do that - and I find the ability to have the camera always with me quite useful.
Thus you want a camera with digital image stabilization, as good wideangle as possible and at least 5 megapixels. Last time I did the round up (a few months ago) there were surprisingly few cameras that met these conditions - mostly because most of what is on the shelves in "Best Buy" (not best for at least several years) does not have any wideangle whatsoever.
My purchase was Panasonic Lumix LX-2 which, at the time, was not available in any store in Boston so I had to order it from Vahns. I was not disappointed and even found the movie mode to be useful - it has a higher resolution than my camcorder (which is NTSC like) and, best of all, the movie files are mpeg4 encoded and play readily on my Kubuntu systems.
I am pretty certain that this is not a perpetual motion machine, but I did find the movies quite enjoyable. Obviously a lot of effort went into making a concise and transparent presentation.
Without having direct access to the machine it is hard to investigate the details, but two likely effects suggest themselves:
Not following standard protocols or common concepts in computer science is what leads to all the complexity that caused then to scrap Longhorn and botch Vista right after that.
Mind you, Vista is still not large enough that the multitude of programmers MS can afford to employ cannot go through the bugs on a case by case basis and patch them up. So we have not seen the end ...
Preparing people for the "real" world in a university is actually very bad idea. Why ?
Because you don't really know what the world is going to be like in 5 years from now. Will we still use single/double/quad core machines ? Will our network connections be still limited by 1 Gbit ? Will people be done with coding web applications and move to something else (like video, CAD or realtime control) ?
Spending 4 years to acquire knowledge that will last for the next 5 is not efficient at all. If, on the other hand, you became fluent with math you can adapt pretty easily.
Also take a look at this image - the scattering of pixels in the top left part if the picture is not dust on your monitor but actual stars as seen by the spacecraft ! I wonder if it is possible to find out from this when the shot was taken and where the camera was pointing.
I also have only made 4 layer boards, $250 for 5 copies. The problem, as you mention, is yield. BGA chips can't be easily reworked, so if any got screwed up the entire board is toast. With FPGA and PHYs being more than $30 each this quickly adds to cost and difficulty - and reduces the number of people who would want to replicate the project.
How is this different from the many embedded boards you can buy or even a PDA/phone (e.g. openmoko) ? The only new feature is fancy packaging. It does not appear you can connect more these four modules or link bases together easily.
I wish they actually made something that let you do new things. For example, I would be delighted to shell out $299 for one of these:
By control here I mean a closed feedback loop - not only they are able to push buttons, but can also explain in minute detail what happens when they do it.
There is only one computer science language - mathematics. C, Pascal, Lisp are just different written forms of it. Any sufficiently rich form is capable of expressing the entirety of mathematics (example: Turing machine). However, "capable" does not mean "easy". One can, for example, do functional programming in C, but you will find out that it is most convenient to write a mini-Lisp interpreter first and then hook into it.
Thus I don't think the "damage" comes from knowing only one language, but rather from resigning to knowing only the easy parts of one language and unwillingness to push the boundary.