Microsoft seems to operate using a very simple scheme whenever they encounter a market they are not familiar with: 1) Deny it, ignore it 2) Belittle it 3) OK, 1) and 2) don't seem to work, let's turn it into what we know already - PC! With some creative branding the customer won't see a difference!
This is going on for decades already. Basically, they are trying to turn everything into the only thing they know, where they have a strong market position and what they could leverage to conquer that market for themselves. That is PC and DOS/Windows. They don't really have a profitable market share elsewhere.
Good example of this was the Sun's NetPC (basically thin clients) vs Microsoft's Network PC (regular Windows PC booting over the network - no advantages of the NetPC, but all the disadvantages of the Windows PC), XBox (basically a PC with a proprietary/non-standard hw), PDAs with Windows CE (transplanting a desktop UI on a PDA with a stylus really didn't work too well), tablets with a desktop OS (even Windows RT is regular Windows, just crippled and running on ARM), etc.
Unfortunately, the above strategy worked probably only for the XBox, where it the customer didn't really care and it made development simpler. The rest were/are flops, because people don't want a crappy PC instead of a phone or a tablet. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't get that, they have an uncanny knack to take exactly the one feature that makes the device actually attractive to the user (usability, speed, battery life, portability, etc.), remove it or completely hose it up, but you do get the "Windows experience" instead! This, when combined with their frequently brain-dead UI implementations designed by someone who has likely never had to use their own products, is a deadly combination for any product.
Well, that is just a cover-your-ass excuse for the manager so that he or she doesn't have to go to the under-performer and tell it them face to face. "Oh, see, I am sorry that we have to fire you, but you are bellow this (arbitrary) line."
With that style of "management" you will be always firing someone just for the sake of firing them, regardless of the actual performance. If you want your best people to leave in a hurry and the rest of the team waste time trying to backstab each other, it is a wonderful way to achieve that. It makes no difference whether you set the cut-off at 1% or 10% - it is still only an arbitrary bullshit number made up out of thin air with some piss-poor application of statistics to make it look legit.
Someone wrote that grading on a curve works in academia but not in industry. Why should it work for grading exams when it doesn't for ranking the workers? Especially the academics that are using it should know better.
Grading on a curve (or the MS stack ranking, which is the same) is one of the most unfair and vile ranking/grading systems invented. Why? Because your actual skills don't matter. What matters is how many better (or worse) colleagues you have. If you have are in a large team (or class) of good performers, you are screwed, even if you are good - someone will be given the short end of the stick only because there are only so many "good marks" available. An extreme example are students "hacking" their exams by handing in blank sheets. Even if they all (or sufficiently many) do that, with curve grading they are guaranteed some 75% chance that they will pass - by doing nothing, because only the low 15-20% fails. Shouldn't we be marking their skills and knowledge instead?
This system also demotivates the good learners/workers - what is the point of trying to work hard, when you will not get that good mark only because there is only a limited amount given out and simply too many comparably good candidates. Essentially the system forces (undeserved) bad marks on people even though they performed equally well as the best ones. This sort of thing does wonders for morale.
Finally, the second fallacy why this is fundamentally broken is the assumption that the skill distribution in a work team or class is normal (follows a bell curve). There is absolutely no guarantee of that, because, heck, you aren't hiring the idiots, are you? I am sure that the company is hiring only "rock star" developers. Same with the students - they have to pass stringent exams and fulfill admission criteria that the majority of the population isn't able. So you have a sample here that isn't representative of the entire population (where the bell curve would be valid) and all bets are off, because the system was built on an invalid assumption. The most extreme example of this is the constant distribution - the case when all students turn in blank sheet of paper (identical "skill" level) for their exam and still pass. You would have to pick the students or hire employees randomly out of the entire population if you wanted to have a normal distribution of skill. Not very practical, though.
To conclude, if you are responsible for examining students or for evaluating employees, for the grace of God, stop using relative ranking schemes like this. Comparing people to each other is certainly easier than to evaluate their "absolute" skill, but it isn't fair, doesn't represent what you think it does and it creates a toxic environment for everyone.
It is a pity that the poster has never actually read the description of the auction, otherwise they would have found that:
"The pictures depicted from this auction show some of the early prototypes from the project; however, it should be noted that none of that hardware will be included in this auction as I had a non-intentionally set fire:) that transpired at my house in the storage area where my prototypes were, that destroyed most if not all of the prototype hardware from the initial project development with Lockheed. Those pictures were taken during the development process at one of Lockheed's SCIFs located in Northern Virgina, as is evidenced by the yellow caution tape you see on the floor there in the first few pictures. The last picture was one of the sample images generated from a RockCam installed across the street from one of the engineer's house."
and
"
1) Microhard Spectra 910 900MHz serial line radio with power supply (this was a prototype 900MHz radio that I believe went on to become the current generation of ZigBee-based XBee radios;
2) A collection of PC104-based enclosures and motherboards, with various interfacing such as serial ports, USB ports, etc;
3) A Mobile Wireless Technologies RM1000g AVS vehicle transponder with WWAN and GPS tracking support;
4) Novate wireless prototyping board;
5) GNU X-Tools cross compilation software;
and
6) A CD filled with backup materials during several years of the company (the most valuable part of this auction obviously)"
So still some nice hw and docs, but certainly no "spy rocks" included.
RTFA, guys!
The high CPU usage is normal - all the processing is done by your PC by the Leap SDK libraries and they don't even use some GPU acceleration for the image processing. The device itself is nothing else but two cameras and few LEDs (that's why it gets warm).
We have two Leaps at the office, I had a chance to play with it and look at the SDK. Unfortunately, as the recent CNN article points out, it is a solution looking for a problem.
The device is nothing else but two cellphone cameras with an USB interface and 3 infrared LEDs behind an IR filter. It tracks the infrared reflections off your fingertips (or a pencil or whatever) in 3D using stereoscopic vision. It does work, as much as that technology allows (nothing really revolutionary there), but the device and mainly its software have some serious issues:
The device is way too small - the consequence is that the cameras are too close together and thus the tracked working volume is tiny. If you use both hands at the same time, you can barely move before you run out of space and the camera stops tracking your hand.
It is very sensitive to occlusions - if the fingers (or some reflection) aren't visible, no tracking. E.g. making a grabbing gesture is really hard, because closing the hand into a fist hides the fingertips and the software gets confused. Rotating a closed hand is outright impossible - the software doesn't know how to distinguish the top and the bottom of the hand unless it can see the fingers (i.e. you are holding the palm open and spread out)
The API is more targeted towards emulating a mouse or a multitouch desktop than actual 3D interaction. Unfortunately, a real mouse or a proper touchscreen are way more comfortable, accurate and robust to use for such tasks than the Leap, with its glitchy tracking and buggy software. There is no way to get the raw video from the SDK, so no custom algorithms are possible.
The available software is crap. There is no way around it. The very buggy "Airspace store" is full of paid apps that are often little more than a buggy demo that you would throw away after 5 minutes once the novelty of wiggling your fingers at the screen wears off. Yay for drawing with your finger in the air... Many of the apps are things that could be hacked together in Flash in a few minutes. Furthermore, many of the available apps try to do things that would be way better handled using a simple mouse or some other controller, thus there is little benefit from using the Leap.
So all in all - unless you are the type of person that wants to show off at the next Powerpoint presentation by changing slides by waving one's hands (and be a laughing stock when the device won't work or skip several slides instead), there isn't much to be excited about. It is really a solution looking for a problem.
Guys, you do realize that CORDIS is the name of the web portal for EU-funded research projects and not a research team nor institution?
It is a portal website for the grant-related bureaucracy - like publishing calls for proposals and aggregating information on projects being funded. Saying that "CORDIS is working on something" is like saying that Google Scholar is working on a research project.
The project above is actually being done by University College London, it is even in that damn article!
This is second time in two days I see this sort of idiocy - the first article was on Gizmodo on another project. I didn't know that stupidity is contagious.
Ubuntu isn't the only Linux here and Gnome isn't the only desktop available. Some people do forget this and then this sort of sensationalism arises.
There are plenty of other choices - both for Linux distros and desktops, many specifically targeted towards the old hardware. Furthermore, if you are running so old hw that has AGP or some ARM devices, you probably don't want to run a full-blown Gnome/Unity on that anyway.
Switching to Open Access journals is great - except when a major journal asks you to pay 3000 USD (as an author) if you want your article accessible under their Open Access policy. Otherwise it goes behind the expensive subscription/paywall. Guess which option I am going to take if my boss pressures me to publish in a high-impact journal...
Yes, it was an Elsevier journal, but this is not specific to them, others do this as well.
Researchers get stuck between a rock and hard place - we have to publish in high impact journals (otherwise our funding is cut, low impact factor publications don't count), but ideally open access (few high impact journals are Open Access) to save expenses for the library and you can bet that nobody will give me the 3k to pay that extortionist fee above, especially not if I am to publish at least twice a year in such journal. So what am I to do?
Honestly, this does suck. Wearing my engineering hat, it is next to impossible to pay all the IEEE, ACM, what-not subscriptions I would need to access papers in my field as a private company - that's why there is so much reinventing the wheel and patenting the obvious. We had the ACM and IEEE membership and there was always a journal or a conf that was not covered. With outfits like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis etc. it gets even worse, because the subscriptions are per journal. It is completely impossible situation for a small company to deal with.
That's a red herring. For majority of Linux applications you *do have* source code, thanks to the OSS licensing. And you won't even have to recompile, there are distros targeting ARM already. The only exception are proprietary applications like Oracle, SAP or Exchange, but this machine isn't designed for such workloads (Oracle needs more memory, SAP and Exchange are Windows-only).
Regarding development - development for Linux on ARM is exactly the same as development for Linux on x86 and very similar to any other Unix. Most people do not write in assembler anymore and the platform differences from the point of view of a business application writer are negligible at best.
FYI - ARM is well supported by Linux since ages ago, not only by Android. These CPUs have been around for a very long time, probably longer than Intel's Xeon. So while you probably won't run your Exchange or IIS on such machine in the near future, it will do just fine for everything else. There are plenty of uses for non-Windows servers...
Easy - ARM doesn't yet have 64bit cores available, they were only recently announced. It will take a while until the manufacturers license them, integrate them into their products and only then can HP buy them and build a server around them.
From the looks of it, this prototype machine is unlikely to be built for databases (4GB of RAM per chip is not a lot for something like Oracle), so the 32bit limit is not really an issue. On the other hand, this screams HPC cluster/supercomputing or some other well parallelizable load, such as web servers. 32bit CPU is plenty enough for that. 64bit on a server buys you only more RAM, not much else.
It would be *very* interesting to see performance comparison between this solution and the traditional Intel one. If it is only 50% as fast, it should give Intel a lot to worry about - the higher installation density, the power savings will easily outweigh the raw power advantage Intel may have.
If you read the article, they kept functional programming in parallel with imperative one, with focus on proving validity of programs. So part of that is there.
On the other hand, you must balance theory with practice, because otherwise the students will a) leave b) not be able to do practical projects while studying the theory. So teaching only logic programming (which is great, IMO - it helped me a lot!) is not practical.
From the position of someone who used to teach basic programming courses to freshmen, I can only applaud the decision.
Many kids coming to colleges these days do not have any programming experience or a very shaky one at best. Picking up concepts like classes, inheritance, the entire idea behind OO modelling is difficult if you are lacking basics such as how memory is managed, what is a pointer, how to make your program modular properly, etc. From the course description they are going to use a subset of C, I think that is a good starting basis for transitioning to something else (C/C++/C#/Java/... ) later on.
What is worse, many of these introductory courses were given in Java - producing students who were completely lost when the black box of the Java runtime and libraries was taken away - e.g. when having to transition to C/C++. We are talking engineering students here who could be expected to work on some embedded systems later on or perhaps do some high performance work. Even things like Java and C# still need C/C++ skills for interfacing the runtime with external environment.
I wonder why anyone still takes this Florian Mueller guy seriously.
His fantasy claims were debunked several times already, his blog posts (yes, it is a blog!) are poorly researched sensationalist junk and he still gets the attention of the press? Reminds of the SCO saga reporting:(
This guy is just sensationalist troll seeking attention. Remember how he has recently claimed that he has a "proof" that Google violated Sun's copyrights in Android? It was very soundly debunked. He is just using this "secret" to attack RedHat for no reason - spin alert, guys!
Not exactly a credible source to report...
Umm, why not make the WP7 actually useful for being used on a phone first? It's cool to have a mobile gaming console in the pocket, but then I would probably buy a PSP and not Windows smartphone...
Software patch cannot fix signal attenuation from a hand. Why does this look like only an attempt to make the complaints and bad press go away by making the problem harder to notice? If you have no bars displayed, you wouldn't notice that you are losing signal from holding the phone, because you would be under the impression that the coverage is poor. And in an area with a strong signal you do not see the issue anyway, because the signal level is strong enough to saturate the meter even if your hand is over the antenna.
It looks more like a clever way to disguise the problem and push the blame on the carrier by hiding behind poor coverage, nothing more.
It reminds me of Sony (I think it was them) who "fixed" one of their overheating laptop series by having users download a "patch" that would turn off the power management in Windows and make the fans go non-stop. It certainly stopped the overheating, but at the price of shortened fan life and a very noisy machine...
I have taught several introductory CS courses and to be honest, I was not interested in playing policeman and checking whether students are cheating or not. Instead, I have established a two tier system:
- For homeworks that had to be turned in, these were corrected by the students themselves. I did some spot checks to warn those who were cheating and to ensure that the corrections are up to par, but didn't really put much effort into chasing cheaters. The homeworks were primarily a feedback for the students and an opportunity to learn. However, to give them an incentive to actually do them, they could pass the exam orally in advance instead of a practical programming exam if they had 80% of homeworks right. That was strong motivation for many of them, because they perceived the oral exam as easier (even though in reality they had to do much more work over the semester for it).
Now, the purpose of the oral examination was simple - to establish whether the homeworks were actually done by that student or not. In my experience, if someone was cheating, he didn't have a clue whatsoever what the code he has handed in does. At best, he could memorize some superficial stuff and do some hand-waving over it. One or two targeted questions over the details of the assignment has always uncovered this. No need for any computerized code comparison tool (which would be always gamed) or tiresome reviews of the homeworks.
- For the regular exam which was always written, practical programming assignment on a computer in the lab (CS exam on paper?? WTF?), I have allowed the students to bring their own code snippets (e.g. from homeworks), use their books, even internet. This essentially makes all what would usually be considered cheating allowed, lessening the burden on me - I did not have to spy on them whether or not they are cheating.
My reasoning was that the students should demonstrate practical knowledge how to solve problems, not whether or not they have memorized stuff (which is what the exam would be about if the books were forbidden). Now, of course, if the student didn't learn anything, the books will not help - they would spend most of their time searching for information and run out of time.
One disadvantage of this approach is obvious - it puts a bigger onus on the examiner to prepare meaningful exams. Assignments like "Implement quicksort" are useless, because the students can find them ready made online or in the book. On the other hand, I do not think it makes much sense to examine whether or not a person can implement quicksort - it is not a real-world problem. Better give them an assignment where the quicksort needs to be used - the clueless one will not find it online so he cannot readily cheat and the smarter one will see the similarity and solve the assignment without problem.
To conclude, I do not believe in the various software to catch cheaters. Especially not in CS - the students are very smart and will be always able to game it. If the teacher is doing their job, this is not needed.
This whine is getting a bit old. It seems that the only developers having problems and difficulties on Linux are people who want to produce closed source products distributed as binary blobs. Of course, then they are going to have issues, because different distros have different libraries, packaging conventions etc. and it adds up in platform support costs. Developers unwilling to learn different tools than their Visual Studios also do not help.
Well, tough. Calling for "standardization", uniform GUI and what not is not going to help - different companies would like the standard to match what *they* need and nobody would be happy anyway. Furthermore, I do not see why Linux should change to match the (terrible) development practices on Windows.
The solution is to try to release as much code as open source as possible and let the distro packagers do the integration work for you. Or, if you must keep it proprietary, work with the major distros at least. Their developers will be happy to help - unless one is providing the OS as well, the user will likely need an OS to run the super-proprietary application anyway and it is a win-win situation for both sides. This works a lot better than whining about how terrible Linux is...
And to answer the poor soul that asserted that Ubuntu is the standard Linux - I am sorry for you. I can as well say that standard way of using a computer means using Windows, making your argument completely irrelevant (number-wise, the Windows desktops dwarfs all Linux installs combined..). Make yourself a bit better informed next time - Ubuntu is far from standard, it just happens to be popular in US. Not so much in Europe and elsewhere.
Emagin Visor z800 - 800x600, built in tracker, ~1600 USD
If you want better resolution, look at Kaiser Electro-Optics HMDs. However, this is pro-stuff, not for playing games at home or watching video. The prices start at ~20000 USD and higher, without trackers (the built-in trackers are crap - if you are spending this much, you have an external magnetic/optical tracker anyway).
With all respect to this colleague of mine, he probably didn't get what teaching is about. If all your teaching is about droning for a few hours in front of a nameless crowd, then you can record it and let students download your slides and and recorded lecture... Unfortunately, if this is all that you do, you are not doing your job as a teacher. The student may be equally or even better off with a textbook.
Teaching is about helping students learn, not about delivering content. And that will not be achieved by listening to a non-interactive lecture from an iPod. We are doing both self study, various face-to-face time teaching and online lectures via videoconferencing, and the students are learning the most from the face to face time and practical exercises. That is all according to their own feedback.
I have seen this idea about replacing teaching by pre-recorded stuff few times already. Usually from people who do not know how to teach and whose lectures are, frankly, crap:(
Unfortunately, the author doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. He seems to be talking about sending a probe, collecting information and then building an offline environment to explore, not a real-time remotely-controlled robot. That is actually a potentially feasible task. It has only one major flaw - it is not telepresence.
For telepresence ("feeling being present in a remote place") you need to be able to have real-time response to your actions, not only watching what essentially amounts to a souped up QuicktimeVR. The interactivity is not optional and that doesn't come from VR goggles and gloves but from the realtime feedback look. Which is obviously missing, unless your want to do something like use alien planet data for playing CounterStrike or be happy with 6.47*10^11 ms ping... (that is the roundtrip time to Epsilon Eridani mentioned in the article - 10.5 light years away).
It is a pity that people talk about virtual reality and related fields without even understanding the basics - but that is the consequence of media hype surrounding this field, together with people calling non-immersive, often even non-interactive applications "virtual reality". Computer games, SecondLife, QuicktimeVR are not VR, period - you cannot really achieve meaningful feeling of presence there. Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box...
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft seems to operate using a very simple scheme whenever they encounter a market they are not familiar with:
1) Deny it, ignore it
2) Belittle it
3) OK, 1) and 2) don't seem to work, let's turn it into what we know already - PC! With some creative branding the customer won't see a difference!
This is going on for decades already. Basically, they are trying to turn everything into the only thing they know, where they have a strong market position and what they could leverage to conquer that market for themselves. That is PC and DOS/Windows. They don't really have a profitable market share elsewhere.
Good example of this was the Sun's NetPC (basically thin clients) vs Microsoft's Network PC (regular Windows PC booting over the network - no advantages of the NetPC, but all the disadvantages of the Windows PC), XBox (basically a PC with a proprietary/non-standard hw), PDAs with Windows CE (transplanting a desktop UI on a PDA with a stylus really didn't work too well), tablets with a desktop OS (even Windows RT is regular Windows, just crippled and running on ARM), etc.
Unfortunately, the above strategy worked probably only for the XBox, where it the customer didn't really care and it made development simpler. The rest were/are flops, because people don't want a crappy PC instead of a phone or a tablet. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't get that, they have an uncanny knack to take exactly the one feature that makes the device actually attractive to the user (usability, speed, battery life, portability, etc.), remove it or completely hose it up, but you do get the "Windows experience" instead! This, when combined with their frequently brain-dead UI implementations designed by someone who has likely never had to use their own products, is a deadly combination for any product.
Well, that is just a cover-your-ass excuse for the manager so that he or she doesn't have to go to the under-performer and tell it them face to face. "Oh, see, I am sorry that we have to fire you, but you are bellow this (arbitrary) line."
With that style of "management" you will be always firing someone just for the sake of firing them, regardless of the actual performance. If you want your best people to leave in a hurry and the rest of the team waste time trying to backstab each other, it is a wonderful way to achieve that. It makes no difference whether you set the cut-off at 1% or 10% - it is still only an arbitrary bullshit number made up out of thin air with some piss-poor application of statistics to make it look legit.
Someone wrote that grading on a curve works in academia but not in industry. Why should it work for grading exams when it doesn't for ranking the workers? Especially the academics that are using it should know better.
Grading on a curve (or the MS stack ranking, which is the same) is one of the most unfair and vile ranking/grading systems invented. Why? Because your actual skills don't matter. What matters is how many better (or worse) colleagues you have. If you have are in a large team (or class) of good performers, you are screwed, even if you are good - someone will be given the short end of the stick only because there are only so many "good marks" available. An extreme example are students "hacking" their exams by handing in blank sheets. Even if they all (or sufficiently many) do that, with curve grading they are guaranteed some 75% chance that they will pass - by doing nothing, because only the low 15-20% fails. Shouldn't we be marking their skills and knowledge instead?
This system also demotivates the good learners/workers - what is the point of trying to work hard, when you will not get that good mark only because there is only a limited amount given out and simply too many comparably good candidates. Essentially the system forces (undeserved) bad marks on people even though they performed equally well as the best ones. This sort of thing does wonders for morale.
Finally, the second fallacy why this is fundamentally broken is the assumption that the skill distribution in a work team or class is normal (follows a bell curve). There is absolutely no guarantee of that, because, heck, you aren't hiring the idiots, are you? I am sure that the company is hiring only "rock star" developers. Same with the students - they have to pass stringent exams and fulfill admission criteria that the majority of the population isn't able. So you have a sample here that isn't representative of the entire population (where the bell curve would be valid) and all bets are off, because the system was built on an invalid assumption. The most extreme example of this is the constant distribution - the case when all students turn in blank sheet of paper (identical "skill" level) for their exam and still pass. You would have to pick the students or hire employees randomly out of the entire population if you wanted to have a normal distribution of skill. Not very practical, though.
To conclude, if you are responsible for examining students or for evaluating employees, for the grace of God, stop using relative ranking schemes like this. Comparing people to each other is certainly easier than to evaluate their "absolute" skill, but it isn't fair, doesn't represent what you think it does and it creates a toxic environment for everyone.
It is a pity that the poster has never actually read the description of the auction, otherwise they would have found that:
"The pictures depicted from this auction show some of the early prototypes from the project; however, it should be noted that none of that hardware will be included in this auction as I had a non-intentionally set fire :) that transpired at my house in the storage area where my prototypes were, that destroyed most if not all of the prototype hardware from the initial project development with Lockheed. Those pictures were taken during the development process at one of Lockheed's SCIFs located in Northern Virgina, as is evidenced by the yellow caution tape you see on the floor there in the first few pictures. The last picture was one of the sample images generated from a RockCam installed across the street from one of the engineer's house."
and
" 1) Microhard Spectra 910 900MHz serial line radio with power supply (this was a prototype 900MHz radio that I believe went on to become the current generation of ZigBee-based XBee radios; 2) A collection of PC104-based enclosures and motherboards, with various interfacing such as serial ports, USB ports, etc; 3) A Mobile Wireless Technologies RM1000g AVS vehicle transponder with WWAN and GPS tracking support; 4) Novate wireless prototyping board; 5) GNU X-Tools cross compilation software; and 6) A CD filled with backup materials during several years of the company (the most valuable part of this auction obviously)"
So still some nice hw and docs, but certainly no "spy rocks" included. RTFA, guys!
The high CPU usage is normal - all the processing is done by your PC by the Leap SDK libraries and they don't even use some GPU acceleration for the image processing. The device itself is nothing else but two cameras and few LEDs (that's why it gets warm).
The device is nothing else but two cellphone cameras with an USB interface and 3 infrared LEDs behind an IR filter. It tracks the infrared reflections off your fingertips (or a pencil or whatever) in 3D using stereoscopic vision. It does work, as much as that technology allows (nothing really revolutionary there), but the device and mainly its software have some serious issues:
So all in all - unless you are the type of person that wants to show off at the next Powerpoint presentation by changing slides by waving one's hands (and be a laughing stock when the device won't work or skip several slides instead), there isn't much to be excited about. It is really a solution looking for a problem.
Guys, you do realize that CORDIS is the name of the web portal for EU-funded research projects and not a research team nor institution? It is a portal website for the grant-related bureaucracy - like publishing calls for proposals and aggregating information on projects being funded. Saying that "CORDIS is working on something" is like saying that Google Scholar is working on a research project.
The project above is actually being done by University College London, it is even in that damn article!
This is second time in two days I see this sort of idiocy - the first article was on Gizmodo on another project. I didn't know that stupidity is contagious.
There are plenty of other choices - both for Linux distros and desktops, many specifically targeted towards the old hardware. Furthermore, if you are running so old hw that has AGP or some ARM devices, you probably don't want to run a full-blown Gnome/Unity on that anyway.
Yes, it was an Elsevier journal, but this is not specific to them, others do this as well.
Researchers get stuck between a rock and hard place - we have to publish in high impact journals (otherwise our funding is cut, low impact factor publications don't count), but ideally open access (few high impact journals are Open Access) to save expenses for the library and you can bet that nobody will give me the 3k to pay that extortionist fee above, especially not if I am to publish at least twice a year in such journal. So what am I to do?
Honestly, this does suck. Wearing my engineering hat, it is next to impossible to pay all the IEEE, ACM, what-not subscriptions I would need to access papers in my field as a private company - that's why there is so much reinventing the wheel and patenting the obvious. We had the ACM and IEEE membership and there was always a journal or a conf that was not covered. With outfits like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis etc. it gets even worse, because the subscriptions are per journal. It is completely impossible situation for a small company to deal with.
Regarding development - development for Linux on ARM is exactly the same as development for Linux on x86 and very similar to any other Unix. Most people do not write in assembler anymore and the platform differences from the point of view of a business application writer are negligible at best.
FYI - ARM is well supported by Linux since ages ago, not only by Android. These CPUs have been around for a very long time, probably longer than Intel's Xeon. So while you probably won't run your Exchange or IIS on such machine in the near future, it will do just fine for everything else. There are plenty of uses for non-Windows servers ...
Easy - ARM doesn't yet have 64bit cores available, they were only recently announced. It will take a while until the manufacturers license them, integrate them into their products and only then can HP buy them and build a server around them.
From the looks of it, this prototype machine is unlikely to be built for databases (4GB of RAM per chip is not a lot for something like Oracle), so the 32bit limit is not really an issue. On the other hand, this screams HPC cluster/supercomputing or some other well parallelizable load, such as web servers. 32bit CPU is plenty enough for that. 64bit on a server buys you only more RAM, not much else.
It would be *very* interesting to see performance comparison between this solution and the traditional Intel one. If it is only 50% as fast, it should give Intel a lot to worry about - the higher installation density, the power savings will easily outweigh the raw power advantage Intel may have.
On the other hand, you must balance theory with practice, because otherwise the students will a) leave b) not be able to do practical projects while studying the theory. So teaching only logic programming (which is great, IMO - it helped me a lot!) is not practical.
Many kids coming to colleges these days do not have any programming experience or a very shaky one at best. Picking up concepts like classes, inheritance, the entire idea behind OO modelling is difficult if you are lacking basics such as how memory is managed, what is a pointer, how to make your program modular properly, etc. From the course description they are going to use a subset of C, I think that is a good starting basis for transitioning to something else (C/C++/C#/Java/... ) later on.
What is worse, many of these introductory courses were given in Java - producing students who were completely lost when the black box of the Java runtime and libraries was taken away - e.g. when having to transition to C/C++. We are talking engineering students here who could be expected to work on some embedded systems later on or perhaps do some high performance work. Even things like Java and C# still need C/C++ skills for interfacing the runtime with external environment.
I think it is a good move, indeed.
I wonder why anyone still takes this Florian Mueller guy seriously.
His fantasy claims were debunked several times already, his blog posts (yes, it is a blog!) are poorly researched sensationalist junk and he still gets the attention of the press? Reminds of the SCO saga reporting :(
This guy is just sensationalist troll seeking attention. Remember how he has recently claimed that he has a "proof" that Google violated Sun's copyrights in Android? It was very soundly debunked. He is just using this "secret" to attack RedHat for no reason - spin alert, guys! Not exactly a credible source to report ...
It feels more like - "Well, we know it doesn't work so well as a phone, but LOOK! YOU CAN BLING OUT YOUR AVATAR!!!! OMG!"
Umm, why not make the WP7 actually useful for being used on a phone first? It's cool to have a mobile gaming console in the pocket, but then I would probably buy a PSP and not Windows smartphone ...
It looks more like a clever way to disguise the problem and push the blame on the carrier by hiding behind poor coverage, nothing more.
It reminds me of Sony (I think it was them) who "fixed" one of their overheating laptop series by having users download a "patch" that would turn off the power management in Windows and make the fans go non-stop. It certainly stopped the overheating, but at the price of shortened fan life and a very noisy machine ...
I have taught several introductory CS courses and to be honest, I was not interested in playing policeman and checking whether students are cheating or not. Instead, I have established a two tier system: - For homeworks that had to be turned in, these were corrected by the students themselves. I did some spot checks to warn those who were cheating and to ensure that the corrections are up to par, but didn't really put much effort into chasing cheaters. The homeworks were primarily a feedback for the students and an opportunity to learn. However, to give them an incentive to actually do them, they could pass the exam orally in advance instead of a practical programming exam if they had 80% of homeworks right. That was strong motivation for many of them, because they perceived the oral exam as easier (even though in reality they had to do much more work over the semester for it). Now, the purpose of the oral examination was simple - to establish whether the homeworks were actually done by that student or not. In my experience, if someone was cheating, he didn't have a clue whatsoever what the code he has handed in does. At best, he could memorize some superficial stuff and do some hand-waving over it. One or two targeted questions over the details of the assignment has always uncovered this. No need for any computerized code comparison tool (which would be always gamed) or tiresome reviews of the homeworks. - For the regular exam which was always written, practical programming assignment on a computer in the lab (CS exam on paper?? WTF?), I have allowed the students to bring their own code snippets (e.g. from homeworks), use their books, even internet. This essentially makes all what would usually be considered cheating allowed, lessening the burden on me - I did not have to spy on them whether or not they are cheating. My reasoning was that the students should demonstrate practical knowledge how to solve problems, not whether or not they have memorized stuff (which is what the exam would be about if the books were forbidden). Now, of course, if the student didn't learn anything, the books will not help - they would spend most of their time searching for information and run out of time. One disadvantage of this approach is obvious - it puts a bigger onus on the examiner to prepare meaningful exams. Assignments like "Implement quicksort" are useless, because the students can find them ready made online or in the book. On the other hand, I do not think it makes much sense to examine whether or not a person can implement quicksort - it is not a real-world problem. Better give them an assignment where the quicksort needs to be used - the clueless one will not find it online so he cannot readily cheat and the smarter one will see the similarity and solve the assignment without problem. To conclude, I do not believe in the various software to catch cheaters. Especially not in CS - the students are very smart and will be always able to game it. If the teacher is doing their job, this is not needed.
Well, tough. Calling for "standardization", uniform GUI and what not is not going to help - different companies would like the standard to match what *they* need and nobody would be happy anyway. Furthermore, I do not see why Linux should change to match the (terrible) development practices on Windows.
The solution is to try to release as much code as open source as possible and let the distro packagers do the integration work for you. Or, if you must keep it proprietary, work with the major distros at least. Their developers will be happy to help - unless one is providing the OS as well, the user will likely need an OS to run the super-proprietary application anyway and it is a win-win situation for both sides. This works a lot better than whining about how terrible Linux is ...
And to answer the poor soul that asserted that Ubuntu is the standard Linux - I am sorry for you. I can as well say that standard way of using a computer means using Windows, making your argument completely irrelevant (number-wise, the Windows desktops dwarfs all Linux installs combined ..). Make yourself a bit better informed next time - Ubuntu is far from standard, it just happens to be popular in US. Not so much in Europe and elsewhere.
Good overviews are here: http://www.stereo3d.com/hmd.htm http://www.est-kl.com/aufbau_general/index_hard_hmd.html?http://www.est-kl.com/hardware/hmd/kaiser/pv4050stm.html
Emagin Visor z800 - 800x600, built in tracker, ~1600 USD If you want better resolution, look at Kaiser Electro-Optics HMDs. However, this is pro-stuff, not for playing games at home or watching video. The prices start at ~20000 USD and higher, without trackers (the built-in trackers are crap - if you are spending this much, you have an external magnetic/optical tracker anyway).
Teaching is about helping students learn, not about delivering content. And that will not be achieved by listening to a non-interactive lecture from an iPod. We are doing both self study, various face-to-face time teaching and online lectures via videoconferencing, and the students are learning the most from the face to face time and practical exercises. That is all according to their own feedback.
I have seen this idea about replacing teaching by pre-recorded stuff few times already. Usually from people who do not know how to teach and whose lectures are, frankly, crap :(
For telepresence ("feeling being present in a remote place") you need to be able to have real-time response to your actions, not only watching what essentially amounts to a souped up QuicktimeVR. The interactivity is not optional and that doesn't come from VR goggles and gloves but from the realtime feedback look. Which is obviously missing, unless your want to do something like use alien planet data for playing CounterStrike or be happy with 6.47*10^11 ms ping ... (that is the roundtrip time to Epsilon Eridani mentioned in the article - 10.5 light years away).
It is a pity that people talk about virtual reality and related fields without even understanding the basics - but that is the consequence of media hype surrounding this field, together with people calling non-immersive, often even non-interactive applications "virtual reality". Computer games, SecondLife, QuicktimeVR are not VR, period - you cannot really achieve meaningful feeling of presence there. Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box ...