The Glasgow Branch of the British Computer Society has rather foolishly invited me again to present their Christmas Lecture ;-)! Even more foolishly, I accepted!

The event is open to everyone, not just members of the BCS. So feel free to come along at 6pm for 6:30pm in the The Lord Todd - University of Strathclyde, on Monday, 3rd December. Light refreshments will be served.

Two years ago my presentation was on The Ubiquitous Chip [no, not the restaurant (for those familiar with Glasgow)!].

This year the Glasgow Branch suggested that the theme of the talk should be along the lines of "The Current Place of the Silicon Chip in Society". But don't let that put you off! I am researching the subject now but would like to take this opportunity to invite suggestions and comments from my friends and colleagues, students, and the general riff-raff that read my personal weblog - Duncan's Jotter ;-)

I'd be very interested to hear your views of what you think is "The Current Place of the Silicon Chip in Society". Opinions from my students past, present, and future, would be especially welcome as they have the enthusiasm of youth on their side. They are also, presumably, most in tune with the rapid developments they have seen in the past few years and can probably extrapolate into the future. After all, the future belongs to the younger generations of computer scientists and not boring old fogeys like me ;-)

Naturally, I will acknowledge all contributions that are used. Here are some questions to act as a catalyst:

• What do you think has been the greatest positive impact of the silicon chip on society?
• What do you think has been the greatest negative impact of the silicon chip on society?
• Do you think that, in the future, the impact of the silicon chip on society will be positive or negative? Why?
• Could you live without these 'silicon life-forms'? If not, why not?
• How many 'silicon life-forms' do you think you come into contact with on an average day? What are they?
• Do you know of any really good "chips in society" web-sites? If so, where are they ;-)?
• Anything else you can think of!

[I know some/all of these questions are probably too reminiscent of exam questions for my students liking but rest assured they won't come up in any of my exams this year ;-)]

Like the [BCS Talk] BCS Glasgow Branch Talk - 6th December 1999... I'll be putting up my presentation on the web after the event. I'll try not to re-use too much of the old stuff!

Many thanks,

Duncan

PS If you are reading this on Duncan's Jotter then please just reply to this message there or, if you'd prefer, just e-mail me. Thanks

PPS If there are a couple of students that would like to 'volunteer' to help me take over some of the historical artefacts and set up at about 5:30pm on the day then please let me know. Thanks again.

Google Directory - Computers > Ethics

via HtP - JRockit

JRockit is a family of superior Virtual Machines for server-side JavaTM that can be integrated, optimized and independently configured and managed for their unique operating environments

Check out the JRockit Whitepaper for the technical skinny.

Like David (Carter-Tod) I am bemused at the reaction of Dave (Winer) to the a long-standing supporter of Frontier - David (Bayly). As David B says in User(land) Relations.

After I was publicly accused of shipping 'pirate-ware" by Dave Winer of Userland Software, I said I would publish the emails from and to Userland which had anything to do with this issue. This page is the result.

Looks like Dave (W) is in pre-shipping mood.

Develop Java apps in OS X using Borland JBuilder 6

November 27, 2001 3:10 pm ET

Borland Software Corp. today announced the availability of Borland JBuilder 6. It's the latest major release of the company's Java development environment, and it's been developed to support Mac OS X.

OpenOSX.com

Install the World's most Popular and Powerful UNIX Applications - Macintosh Style

Moss

Moss (for a Measure Of Software Similarity) is an automatic system for determining the similarity of C, C++, Java, Pascal, Ada, ML, Lisp, or Scheme programs. To date, the main application of Moss has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes. Since its development in 1994, Moss has been very effective in this role. The algorithm behind moss is a significant improvement over other cheating detection algorithms (at least, over those known to us).

I am ashamed to say that I know almost nothing about CVS. Therefore, what I am about to write may be complete tosh. Hopefully, there will be some kind souls that put me right on the most obvious gaffes.

The few people I have told about my idea to use CVS as an aid to discourage, and/or detect plagiarism in terms of the provenance of files, think it's a cool idea. I am not claiming that the idea is original. In fact, I seem to recall some mention in an e-mail or on a web page recently that got me to thinking along these lines. For the life of me I can't track it down with a Google search. So, what follows are uninformed - perhaps harebrained - ideas.

Questions:

• Is CVS appropriate!?
• Is it reasonable to require students to initiate, revise, and submit (some) assignments using a CVS repository?
• Is it easy to administer, and protect, such repositories from deliberate attempts to forge check-outs and check-ins, for example?
• Are there CVS clients for most/all platforms we could reasonably expect students to use?
• Are these CVS clients sufficiently mature and unobtrusive to encourage (or at least not discourage) their use by students?
• Can students use such clients to access their files outside of the Departmental intranet?
• Is CVS agnostic as far as the type/contents of the files are concerned so its use is not restricted to programming assignments?
• Are there any restrictions on the type/format of files supported by CVS? E.g do the files need to be plain ASCII text? What about Word docs, etc.?
• Are there alternatives to CVS we should consider> WebDAV?
• Would CVS be appropriate for other taks? For example, version control of departmental web-pages, etc.?
• Are there any legal technicalities that would preclude the use of CVS? For example, legislation that prevents the monitoring of an individual's performance?

I will try and find out answers to the above questions.

If it transpires that CVS is appropriate here are some thoughts on the benefits:

• It would encourage students to get their assignments started early - in fact it may be a requirement that they initiate the CVS process very early on as an initial phase of the assignment.
• It would allow members of staff to monitor the (interim) progress of students.
• It would alert members of staff to anomalous patterns of behaviour - e.g. submission of a perfect solution without any evidence of prior revision(s).
• It would help the students to recover from major mistakes made during editing/revising - they could just go back to an earlier revision.
• It may allow members of staff, for example, to seed the code tree with sample files and have these incorporated into the students' work.
• It would expose students to an example of best practise and help prepare them for work in project teams that use such technology for change management.

One criticism that could made of this proposal is that it may seem to smack of a 'big brother' approach to monitoring students and their (approach to) work. This criticism is understandable. However, is it unfair of the University, the Department, and the staff, to expect that students undertake their formal, assessed, work in a structured and controlled environment? After all, we expect students to attend and participate in tutorials and practicals which are controlled environments. Given the likelihood that more and more of our students will take advantage of PCs off-campus and/or laptops to research and prepare their work, there is no control over the provenance of submissions, etc.

Lots of questions. So far, few answers.

The Register: PowerPC G5 enters 'volume production'

The PowerPC G5 has been passed for full-scale manufacture, a source close to Apple has claimed.

Computer Humor

Interesting question. Could CVS be used to help prevent plagiarism? I think so. Time to ponder.

As I mentioned in early November - see JISC conference - Constructing a Managed Learning Environment - I was in Edinburgh today. I have to say that the I was very disappointedin the event. I learnt very little. About two-thirds of the attendees were 'suits',

A fuller report will follow once I have got my exam questions submitted.

As I type this I can hear the scratching sound of a timorous wee beastie in the ceiling. Sounds like we have a moose about the hoose! I just hope the wee thing doesn't gnaw through any wiring up there before we catch it!

via HtP - Self-generating processors advance

Design tools are becoming so deft they may one day put designers out of a job. Hewlett-Packard Co. has just turned out a processor around its self-generating VLIW core, and is advancing the technology in anticipation of a day when a machine will be able to design a machine. Tensilica Inc. is also experimenting with ways to let a compiler choose the optimal processor architecture using only C-language inputs. It recently demonstrated a tool that takes less than a minute to generate gates for a fast Fourier transform algorithm.