I've found most formal training fairly useless.
This is also what I've heard recounted by most of my community and profession peers. I think this is the same whether it is CS, ElecEng (software) or my own personal choice, industrial design. This is from a sample of several hundred software developers, and web developers in the UK, USA and Australia. It has also been my experience as an developers being responsible for looking after new graduate employees.
There is real value in learning how to learn. An in this sense post-grad courses can be of more practical use I'd say, though they still have potential to be as useless.
I realise this is a broad brush stoke, and I would confess my own degree has given me useful skills in team working, usability and an understanding of what a waste of time formal education is, well 95% of it anyway.
They are pretty common in the UK, in all sort of industries.
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
British Museum, The Tate Modern, The London Eye, The Science Museum and Bletchley Park are all great suggestions.
I'd also recommend the natural history museum, Tate Britain, St Paul's cathedral (dome) and the Victorian and Albert Museum.
Have a great trip!
I've been past it in a speed boat, it looks pretty sinister, v big place. They have floating docks that they use to load the nukes into the subs. You can get a wildlife tour from Dunoon, we saw more porpoises that submarines, great trip.
I didn't take up the popular CND pastime of super-glue-ing my hands to the road outside though.
Id recommend the book, Fortress Scotland, by Malcolm Spaven, it has lots of details on cold-war Scotland. It has a fir amount to info on Faslane, including why it was built there and how much it probably cost. The book is a bit dated now, being published in 1983, but its interesting how much has changed since the cold war ended.
...he was going to run his website off it. Nice user experience, click, click, crash.
Bet the guy is using IIS too.
Definitely a spam-tastic link btw, much as I like Mini-ITX stuff, if you we're going to link to an interesting recent mini-itx article, this one at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3032138730.html [linuxdevices.com]LinuxDevices is miles better, 64-way Linux mini-ITX cluster... and it's silent(ish) too!
There is a bit of small print with the XD-1s, they don't actually come with the FPGAs fitted as standard, they may have just sold 15 nice Opteron servers.
As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...
"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).
"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.
More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.
Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.
Where i work our dream softie is someone with a ComSci and an ElecEng degree, though we do more embeded software.
I recon ComSci and pure maths would be a good one for high brow software;) or an ComSci and MBA for business systems.
Pelamis was mentioned back in April last year, including a link to OceanPD. All in a post about three quarters of the way down the comments.
I only mentioned it originally because a mate is a mech eng on the project. Btw, it does seem like a pretty cool plan, I saw a model running in a tank a few years ago, and the progress has been amazingly quick. So, as the man said, nothing to see/sea here.
Sea Snake - Pelamis project seems more interesting
on
The Heavyweight Sea Snail
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This seems an interesting project, though another project in Scotland, the Pelamis seems more interesting and closer to completion. A an old Uni mate of mine works at Ocean Power Delivery which has spent the last few years developing the Pelamis, which is basically a 120m long 3m round articulated snake. A working full-scale prototype is currently getting installed in a channel around the Shetland isles. The software and control systems seem really interesting due to the large amount of backup systems and the use of FPGAs.
Has anyone seen any IP cores for chess? couldn't find any on opencores.
It'd be great to put these designs on some real kickass hardware, like a Nallatech system, we use a BenNUEY board with 3 BenBLUE2 daughter boards a total of 32000000 gates for our AES stuff
Slashdot Mirror
I've found most formal training fairly useless. This is also what I've heard recounted by most of my community and profession peers. I think this is the same whether it is CS, ElecEng (software) or my own personal choice, industrial design. This is from a sample of several hundred software developers, and web developers in the UK, USA and Australia. It has also been my experience as an developers being responsible for looking after new graduate employees. There is real value in learning how to learn. An in this sense post-grad courses can be of more practical use I'd say, though they still have potential to be as useless. I realise this is a broad brush stoke, and I would confess my own degree has given me useful skills in team working, usability and an understanding of what a waste of time formal education is, well 95% of it anyway.
They are pretty common in the UK, in all sort of industries.
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
You don't get that with TCP/IP
British Museum, The Tate Modern, The London Eye, The Science Museum and Bletchley Park are all great suggestions. I'd also recommend the natural history museum, Tate Britain, St Paul's cathedral (dome) and the Victorian and Albert Museum. Have a great trip!
I've been past it in a speed boat, it looks pretty sinister, v big place. They have floating docks that they use to load the nukes into the subs. You can get a wildlife tour from Dunoon, we saw more porpoises that submarines, great trip.
I didn't take up the popular CND pastime of super-glue-ing my hands to the road outside though.
Id recommend the book, Fortress Scotland, by Malcolm Spaven, it has lots of details on cold-war Scotland. It has a fir amount to info on Faslane, including why it was built there and how much it probably cost. The book is a bit dated now, being published in 1983, but its interesting how much has changed since the cold war ended.
...he was going to run his website off it. Nice user experience, click, click, crash.
l [linuxdevices.com]LinuxDevices is miles better, 64-way Linux mini-ITX cluster... and it's silent(ish) too!
Bet the guy is using IIS too.
Definitely a spam-tastic link btw, much as I like Mini-ITX stuff, if you we're going to link to an interesting recent mini-itx article, this one at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3032138730.htm
There is a bit of small print with the XD-1s, they don't actually come with the FPGAs fitted as standard, they may have just sold 15 nice Opteron servers.
Ah, the fame and fortune...
As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...
"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).
"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.
More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.
Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.
Where i work our dream softie is someone with a ComSci and an ElecEng degree, though we do more embeded software. I recon ComSci and pure maths would be a good one for high brow software ;) or an ComSci and MBA for business systems.
Pelamis was mentioned back in April last year, including a link to OceanPD. All in a post about three quarters of the way down the comments. I only mentioned it originally because a mate is a mech eng on the project. Btw, it does seem like a pretty cool plan, I saw a model running in a tank a few years ago, and the progress has been amazingly quick.
So, as the man said, nothing to see/sea here.
This seems an interesting project, though another project in Scotland, the Pelamis seems more interesting and closer to completion. A an old Uni mate of mine works at Ocean Power Delivery which has spent the last few years developing the Pelamis, which is basically a 120m long 3m round articulated snake. A working full-scale prototype is currently getting installed in a channel around the Shetland isles. The software and control systems seem really interesting due to the large amount of backup systems and the use of FPGAs.
Thats download not save
sorry to be a pedant
Has anyone seen any IP cores for chess? couldn't find any on opencores. It'd be great to put these designs on some real kickass hardware, like a Nallatech system, we use a BenNUEY board with 3 BenBLUE2 daughter boards a total of 32000000 gates for our AES stuff