Most of the people who work here have mathematical/engineering backgrounds rather than programming/software development backgrounds. Most research papers are based on a image processing pipeline composed of 10-20 stages (a one page script in Matlab). As we have a site-license and tutorials for Matlab, and demand from employers to learn this application, this becomes the default for development. Learning to maintain and enhance an open-source application would probably take more effort that writing the original script program.
lazy academics who don't like coding, aren't any good at it themselves and would much rather be teaching their pet research area are the problem.
They have no choice - supervisors I know, have to frequently travelling up and down by plane to London (more carbon emissions!) to apply for research funding (no funding == no research lab or job), organising research conferences in order to keep up to date with the bleeding edge (if your not organising a research conference, your not keeping up to date). Then again, half the final year students only seem to be there for the cheap beer, and couldn't be bothered attending tutorials or handing in coursework assignments - they see going to university as a 'right of passage' to 'where the money's at', not because they have any enthusiasm for the technology they are working with.
Being given assignments that are way over the students heads, like creating advanced 3D graphics demos when they don't understand basic stuff like recursion or build systems. This regularly led to something like 25-30% of all assignment submissions being impossible to compile.
Is that a surprise? From the original article...
We look to games programming for our salvation, designing games programming courses and reducing a wide-ranging industrial discipline to a set of geeks programming computers to zap spacecraft and dismember aliens.
And the knock on effect is that the first generation programmers find themselves pushed away from the work they enjoy doing simply because there is someone else willing to do the same work at a cheaper price, and so they leave to set up their own companies - leading to the fragmentation of the industry into lots of small companies.
the "programming" assignments tended to become writing assignments.
That happened 10 years ago as well - one undergraduate group project team (the only one out of eight), spent the first three months of a six month project doing the specification and consultation, figuring they could the coding in two months, and the write up in the last month. In the they end, they only submitted the specification and write-up.
It seems that - at least in the UK where there are no equivalents to MIT or Stanford - university education is largely worthless.
The universities had a massive expansion because of the dot com boom. Where a department used to have a single class of 30 students (Computer Science) 10 years ago, teaching the basic of ADT and OO progamming, they will now have 5 or 6 different targeted courses with 60 students each (E-Business Computing, Multimedia Internet Science, Business Information Systems, Computer Animation for the Internet). Common courses such as C++ programming will be taught in a large lecture hall with 300+ students. The only way to bring in more funds is to take on more students...
How about imaging research (stuff like using image processing to learn about the state of food stuffs with infrared cameras), or the hard problems that need to be solved to get to the Semantic Web?
Our research group is moving towards using off-the-shelf mathematical packages such as Java Imaging, Matlab, Mathematica (both with the image processing libraries) to develop new algorithms. No large-scale programming here.
With over 32 km of tunnels spread over an area of twelve square kilometres, the 60 residential and commercial complexes comprise 3.6 square kilometres of floor space, including 80% of all office space and 35% of all commercial space in downtown Montreal. Services include shopping malls, hotels, banks, offices, museums, universities, seven metro stations, two commuter train stations, a bus terminal and the Bell Centre. There are more than 120 exterior access points to the underground city. Some 500,000 people use the underground city every day, especially to escape the traffic and/or Montreal's harsh winter or hot summer.
At that time, we had a cold air mass come down from the Arctic - everyone seemed to rush off home when they heard this deep rumbling noise that didn't stop - I was told this was due to massive blob of cold air displacing the warmish air in the way. I made the mistake of trying to walk home without a winter anorak - by this time temperatures were -10C, and my only option was to create a hood out of a couple of plastic bags I had in my pocket - next day I went shopping for a thick padded duck feather anorak.
If the suggestion is that the Sun has changed energy output by a small amount, then wouldn't this show up in the energy output logs of the solar panels of orbiting satellites (particularly those in geostationary orbits). At least this should up the effect of sunspot activity (if there are any satellites that are in service for over 20 years).
During the Summer I was in Canada, there was an Indian summer - temperatures were at least 30C for over a month. My attic apartment thermometer measured 34C. Lake Ontario tends to increse the humidity - I'd consider the range from -25C to +34C fairly extreme. I once had the brilliant idea of sunbathing against the roof shingles beside the sundeck, then quickly changed my mind after painfully discovering they were made of metal coated with a plastic pattern.
I'd do that in Summer - even at 2am it was still warm enough to walk home in a T-shirt, but not in Winter when the winter temperature is -15C with a wind chill factor of -25C - To walk outside meant dressing up like the Chinese guy in Blade Runner.
... who are constantly looking at ways of gaining property taxes from new office blocks and shopping malls, but unwilling to allocate land for housing and schools. They will build a new business park on the border with one of their neighbours, and leave it up to the neighbour to upgrade/widen the roads to provide access.
How long before Google gets together with some of the other tech companies in the area to run a shared service?
There are various public transport systems available. These include Caltrain - a train service which runs all the way from San Francisco to San Jose in around 3 hours. Caltrain also provides various shuttle services, but the problem with this service was that so many people used to crowd into each shuttle that it became near impossible to get out when it was your stop. I was told that attempts to extend the service to cover more company offices were cancelled due to the overwhelming demand (ie. the employees from one company would completely fill the shuttle before anyone else from other companies could get on).
There was also the VTA tram system which ran from Mountain View to the Convention Centre and out to Diridon.
VTA also operates a good number of bus services, but you really need to know the exact timetable of each service to be able to make long distance journeys. However, they did have rendezvous points beside Caltrain stations, so you could get from the suburb of one city to another with some effort.
Consequently, company funded shuttle services remain the best choice.
Toronto had those - an oversurplus of office space combined with a shortage of rental units led the city to relax the zoning laws. Most office blocks already had underground/ground floor shopping malls (supermarket, fitness centre, etc...) due to the extremes of hot and cold weather. Having rented apartments as well meant that anyone could just about live their entire weekly life without ever having to go outside..
I knew some people who had a 2 minute bus commute - they bitched about how long it took to get downstairs to the bus stop.
My personal belief is that it is the electronics and data mining companies who want to create new markets for their data analysis tools, which would allow data to be resold to all sorts of markets (insurance companies, retailers, security agencies).
You might be right. According to this article, and another article, increasing fuel efficiency is leading to declining tax revenues from existing fuel taxation, that by 2014 would not be sufficient to maintain the road network in Oregon.
Why didn't the British govt need this in the 70's and 80's when IRA bombings were several times a year?
Because the IRA mainly concentrated on London and other cities. Because they weren't suicidal and had a desire to carry out repeat attacks, setting up a CCTV system acted as a deterrent. Once you knew the identity of the individual planting an explosive device, you could look out for them in the Underground and the road/train network. Thus the high density of CCTV cameras in England.
Give the ballot box a try first. And seeing as there's been a rash of gun violence in London, I doubt it would be that difficult for the population to arm themselves if need be.
It's rather ironic that the reason the UK is becoming a surveillance obsessed banana republic is because they lost control of border controls in the first place, and now have to monitor the communication of half a million people, track the journeys of every single car in the country, yet fail to give our armed forces all the armour, ammunition and support that they need when abroad, let alone decent accomodation.
Seeing as most people can't be bothered to vote, I can't see there ever being a violent uprising.
Just wait until they implement road tax pricing by GPS/Galileo - it will be like the poll tax and water metering all over again. The poll tax attempted to make the residents of accomodation responsible for the payment of property tax on a per day basis - for rented properties with transient populations (students, DHSS, casual labour), it was nearly impossible to collect, especially if they changed location every month. The worst PR was when bills were sent out to mourning claiming the tax for several days of occupation by their now their deceased relative. With water metering, middle class house owners just poured cement over their meters. Now with this system, cars will be fitted with tracking devices from the manufacturer, presumably wired into the electrics. It will be a criminal offence to tamper with this device - so even swapping fuses in the fuse box will be illegal, removing cables from the battery/distributor will also be illegal. Is this system going to be extended to rickshaws, amphibious vehicles, and cyclists? How will it be able to handle complex road systems such as Spaghetti junction. Given that there is over 250,000 miles of road in the UK, how are the operators going to be able to index and price every segment of road? Either method is going to require wireless communication that can be jammed, and create a black market in either jammers or untracked vehicles.
A more civilised approach would have been for the editors to have run an article on the issue and offered to invite both parties (the blogger and the political candidate) for interviews. The purpose of the CCTV system is to protect the staff of the advertising office, not to publicly expose people the editors have taken a dislike to.
I should have added more detail - in the case of our room, we have medium sized locked cabinet mounted about 12 foor above the floor. Inside are there are couple of Nortel Network Baystack switches. Whenever a machine is added or removed from the room, the technicians come in, unlock the cabinet and connect a cable from the switches to the distributor box. We don't have the alarm system in our room, but the public computer rooms do... people get confused between the fire alarm and the 'someone's unplugged a computer from the network' alarm.
What's wrong with DHCP and dynamically updated DNS?
You don't want users connecting their own systems onto the network whenever they feel like it. All PC's in our university have static IP's. And an alarm goes off whenever anyone as much as removes a single computer from the network. Even the cables from the router to the wall sockets are manually connected and disconnected. There are however, Wi-Fi areas for anyone who wishes to connect their laptops to the network, and users are free to use USB memory keys, CD/DVD burners and external drives. Tech-support still have painful memories of when someone tried and failed to smuggle a PC out through the small bathroom windows in the block.
That trick with diapers is also done in China to avoid the toilets in overcrowded trains with long journey times. Going by state of some train toilets in the UK, and the risk of someone nicking your seat if you walk over to somewhere like the buffet car to get a drink/sandwich I can't blame them.
Microsoft have a policy of not employing software engineers over 30 - apparently, according to Bill Gates, a software engineers skills peak at age 26, and goes downhill from then on.
In our town outside of Chicago, my daughter's grade school PE teacher makes over $100,000/year
Don't underestimate how much money parents are willing to spend in order to make sure their children can win the Little League baseball/football or chearleading competitions.
Re:right....
on
DIY Laptop
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
That's something I would like to do as well - having repaired laptops several times (broken LCD fluorescent tube/hard disk drive/inverter circuit/sleep switch), a system that is completely modular would be extremely welcome. Have the LCD display detachable and could be used as a seperate LCD screen (having a video-in socket like monitors have).
The problem with modern laptops is that the chassis components (brackets/heatpipes/insulators/conductors/shields/ gaskets) are munged together with the electronic components. For a desktop, you just buy a chassis, power supply/motherboard and audio/video/network/memory cards.
TI's TMS34020 (a programmable 2D rasterisation chip), had the TMS34082 coprocessor (capable of vector/matrix operations) (Some pictures here. Up to four coprocessors could be used.
Now, both of these form the basis of a current day CPU and GPU (vertex/geometry/pixel shader units).
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the people who work here have mathematical/engineering backgrounds rather than programming/software development backgrounds. Most research papers are based on a image processing pipeline composed of 10-20 stages (a one page script in Matlab). As we have a site-license and tutorials for Matlab, and demand from employers to learn this application, this becomes the default for development. Learning to maintain and enhance an open-source application would probably take more effort that writing the original script program.
lazy academics who don't like coding, aren't any good at it themselves and would much rather be teaching their pet research area are the problem.
They have no choice - supervisors I know, have to frequently travelling up and down by plane to London (more carbon emissions!) to apply for research funding (no funding == no research lab or job), organising research conferences in order to keep up to date with the bleeding edge (if your not organising a research conference, your not keeping up to date). Then again, half the final year students only seem to be there for the cheap beer, and couldn't be bothered attending tutorials or handing in coursework assignments - they see going to university as a 'right of passage' to 'where the money's at', not because they have any enthusiasm for the technology they are working with.
Being given assignments that are way over the students heads, like creating advanced 3D graphics demos when they don't understand basic stuff like recursion or build systems. This regularly led to something like 25-30% of all assignment submissions being impossible to compile.
Is that a surprise? From the original article...
We look to games programming for our salvation, designing games programming courses and reducing a wide-ranging industrial discipline to a set of geeks programming computers to zap spacecraft and dismember aliens.
And the knock on effect is that the first generation programmers find themselves pushed away from the work they enjoy doing simply because there is someone else willing to do the same work at a cheaper price, and so they leave to set up their own
companies - leading to the fragmentation of the industry into lots of small companies.
the "programming" assignments tended to become writing assignments.
That happened 10 years ago as well - one undergraduate group project team (the only one out of eight), spent the first three months of a six month project doing the specification and consultation, figuring they could the coding in two months, and the write up in the last month. In the they end, they only submitted the specification and write-up.
It seems that - at least in the UK where there are no equivalents to MIT or Stanford - university education is largely worthless.
The universities had a massive expansion because of the dot com boom. Where a department used to have a single class of 30 students (Computer Science) 10 years ago, teaching the basic of ADT and OO progamming, they will now have 5 or 6 different targeted courses with 60 students each (E-Business Computing, Multimedia Internet Science, Business Information Systems, Computer Animation for the Internet). Common courses such as C++ programming will be taught in a large lecture hall with 300+ students. The only way to bring in more funds is to take on more students...
How about imaging research (stuff like using image processing to learn about the state of food stuffs with infrared cameras), or the hard problems that need to be solved to get to the Semantic Web?
Our research group is moving towards using off-the-shelf mathematical packages such as Java Imaging, Matlab, Mathematica (both with the image processing libraries) to develop new algorithms. No large-scale programming here.
Thanks for the link to the movie - it definitely seems a movie that I'd like to see.
Montreal also has an Underground city
With over 32 km of tunnels spread over an area of twelve square kilometres, the 60 residential and commercial complexes comprise 3.6 square kilometres of floor space, including 80% of all office space and 35% of all commercial space in downtown Montreal. Services include shopping malls, hotels, banks, offices, museums, universities, seven metro stations, two commuter train stations, a bus terminal and the Bell Centre. There are more than 120 exterior access points to the underground city. Some 500,000 people use the underground city every day, especially to escape the traffic and/or Montreal's harsh winter or hot summer.
At that time, we had a cold air mass come down from the Arctic - everyone seemed to rush off home when they heard this deep rumbling noise that didn't stop - I was told this was due to massive blob of cold air displacing the warmish air in the way. I made the mistake of trying to walk home without a winter anorak - by this time temperatures were -10C, and my only option was to create a hood out of a couple of plastic bags I had in my pocket - next day I went shopping for a thick padded duck feather anorak.
If the suggestion is that the Sun has changed energy output by a small amount, then wouldn't this show up in the energy output logs of the solar panels of orbiting satellites (particularly those in geostationary orbits). At least this should up the effect of sunspot activity (if there are any satellites that are in service for over 20 years).
During the Summer I was in Canada, there was an Indian summer - temperatures were at least 30C for over a month. My attic apartment thermometer measured 34C. Lake Ontario tends to increse the humidity - I'd consider the range from -25C to +34C fairly extreme. I once had the brilliant idea of sunbathing against the roof shingles beside the sundeck, then quickly changed my mind after painfully discovering they were made of metal coated with a plastic pattern.
I'd do that in Summer - even at 2am it was still warm enough to walk home in a T-shirt, but not in Winter when the winter temperature is -15C with a wind chill factor of -25C - To walk outside meant dressing up like the Chinese guy in Blade Runner.
... who are constantly looking at ways of gaining property taxes from new office blocks and shopping malls, but unwilling to allocate land for housing and schools. They will build a new business park on the border with one of their neighbours, and leave it up to the neighbour to upgrade/widen the roads to provide access.
How long before Google gets together with some of the other tech companies in the area to run a shared service?
There are various public transport systems available. These include Caltrain - a train service which runs all the way from San Francisco to San Jose in around 3 hours. Caltrain also provides various shuttle services, but the problem with this service was that so many people used to crowd into each shuttle that it became near impossible to get out when it was your stop. I was told that attempts to extend the service to cover more company offices were cancelled due to the overwhelming demand (ie. the employees from one company would completely fill the shuttle before anyone else from other companies could get on).
There was also the VTA tram system which ran from Mountain View to the Convention Centre and out to Diridon.
VTA also operates a good number of bus services, but you really need to know the exact timetable of each service to be able to make long distance journeys. However, they did have rendezvous points beside Caltrain stations, so you could get from the suburb of one city to another with some effort.
Consequently, company funded shuttle services remain the best choice.
Toronto had those - an oversurplus of office space combined with a shortage of rental units led the city to relax the zoning laws. Most office blocks already had underground/ground floor shopping malls (supermarket, fitness centre, etc...) due to the extremes of hot and cold weather. Having rented apartments as well meant that anyone could just about live their entire weekly life without ever having to go outside..
I knew some people who had a 2 minute bus commute - they bitched about how long it took to get downstairs to the bus stop.
Gordon Brown
My personal belief is that it is the electronics and data mining companies who want to create new markets for their data analysis tools, which would allow data to be resold to all sorts of markets (insurance companies, retailers, security agencies).
You might be right. According to this article, and another article, increasing fuel efficiency is leading to declining tax revenues from existing fuel taxation, that by 2014 would not be sufficient to maintain the road network in Oregon.
Why didn't the British govt need this in the 70's and 80's when IRA bombings were several times a year?
Because the IRA mainly concentrated on London and other cities. Because they weren't suicidal and had a desire to carry out repeat attacks, setting up a CCTV system acted as a deterrent. Once you knew the identity of the individual planting an explosive device, you could look out for them in the Underground and the road/train network. Thus the high density of CCTV cameras in England.
One IRA bombing was in 1993 when the City of London was attacked, causing 1 billion pounds worth of damage. The response to this was to make the City a pedestrian only zone. The most recent bombing was in August 2001.
Give the ballot box a try first. And seeing as there's been a rash of gun violence in London, I doubt it would be that difficult for the population to arm themselves if need be.
It's rather ironic that the reason the UK is becoming a surveillance obsessed banana republic is because they lost control of border controls in the first place, and now have to monitor the communication of half a million people, track the journeys of every single car in the country, yet fail to give our armed forces all the armour, ammunition and support that they need when abroad, let alone decent accomodation.
Seeing as most people can't be bothered to vote, I can't see there ever being a violent uprising.
Just wait until they implement road tax pricing by GPS/Galileo - it will be like the poll tax and water metering all over again.
The poll tax attempted to make the residents of accomodation responsible for the payment of property tax on a per day basis - for rented properties with transient populations (students, DHSS, casual labour), it was nearly impossible to collect, especially if they changed location every month. The worst PR was when bills were sent out to mourning claiming the tax for several days of occupation by their now their deceased relative. With water metering, middle class house owners just poured cement over their meters. Now with this system, cars will be fitted with tracking devices from the manufacturer, presumably wired into the electrics. It will be a criminal offence to tamper with this device - so even swapping fuses in the fuse box will be illegal, removing cables from the battery/distributor will also be illegal. Is this system going to be extended to rickshaws, amphibious vehicles, and cyclists? How will it be able to handle complex road systems such as Spaghetti junction. Given that there is over 250,000 miles of road in the UK, how are the operators going to be able to index and price every segment of road? Either method is going to require wireless communication that can be jammed, and create a black market in either jammers or untracked vehicles.
A more civilised approach would have been for the editors to have run an article on the issue and offered to invite both parties (the blogger and the political candidate) for interviews. The purpose of the CCTV system is to protect the staff of the advertising office, not to publicly expose people the editors have taken a dislike to.
I should have added more detail - in the case of our room, we have medium sized locked cabinet mounted about 12 foor above the floor. Inside are there are couple of Nortel Network Baystack switches. Whenever a machine is added or removed from the room, the technicians come in, unlock the cabinet and connect a cable from the switches to the distributor box. We don't have the alarm system in our room, but the public computer rooms do... people get confused between the fire alarm and the 'someone's unplugged a computer from the network' alarm.
What's wrong with DHCP and dynamically updated DNS?
You don't want users connecting their own systems onto the network whenever they feel like it. All PC's in our university have static IP's. And an alarm goes off whenever anyone as much as removes a single computer from the network. Even the cables from the router to the wall sockets are manually connected and disconnected. There are however, Wi-Fi areas for anyone who wishes to connect their laptops to the network, and users are free to use USB memory keys, CD/DVD burners and external drives.
Tech-support still have painful memories of when someone tried and failed to smuggle a PC out through the small bathroom windows in the block.
Here's another comment on Microsoft
That trick with diapers is also done in China to avoid the toilets in overcrowded trains with long journey times. Going by state of some train toilets in the UK, and the risk of someone nicking your seat if you walk over to somewhere like the buffet car to get a drink/sandwich I can't blame them.
Microsoft already has research centers in Bangalore, Beijing and Cambridge,
not forgetting Redmond and Silicon Valley.
Microsoft have a policy of not employing software engineers over 30 - apparently, according to Bill Gates, a software engineers skills peak at age 26, and goes downhill from then on.
A tax deductible expense...
In our town outside of Chicago, my daughter's grade school PE teacher makes over $100,000/year
Don't underestimate how much money parents are willing to spend in order to make sure their children can win the Little League baseball/football or chearleading competitions.
And the other half is spam...
That's something I would like to do as well - having repaired laptops several times (broken LCD fluorescent tube/hard disk drive/inverter circuit/sleep switch), a system that is completely modular would be extremely welcome. Have the LCD display detachable and could be used as a seperate LCD screen (having a video-in socket like monitors have).
/ gaskets) are munged together with the electronic components. For a desktop, you just buy a chassis, power supply/motherboard and audio/video/network/memory cards.
The problem with modern laptops is that the chassis components (brackets/heatpipes/insulators/conductors/shields
Werent the first co-processors FPUs. Arent they now integrated into the CPU?
The Intel 8086 had the Intel 8087
A whole collection of Intel FPU's is at Intel FPU's
TI's TMS34020 (a programmable 2D rasterisation chip), had the TMS34082 coprocessor (capable of vector/matrix operations)
(Some pictures here. Up to four coprocessors could be used.
Now, both of these form the basis of a current day CPU and GPU (vertex/geometry/pixel shader units).