Slashdot Mirror

All they need is the manpower to go through it.

They need brainpower to automate doing it -- once and for all. Many organizations lack that, prefering to "work harder, not smarter" -- especially, government offices...

A generation ago, when I was an undergrad, the Computer Science department at my University was sufficiently pressed finding PhDs that other departments within the University were left to shift for themselves. They had to find the guy or gal within their own ranks who took some computer courses, when they were undergrads, to teach the introductory computer course for Geographers, or English majors. This was a worldwide phenomenon.

Professors who were newly minted PhDs, around here at least, commanded a salary comparable to that of a brand new, starting high-school teacher, who only had a Bachelor's degree and a teacher's certificate. While in industry they could earn at least twice as much.

Isn't this still basically true?

A generation ago, when I was an undergrad, the Computer Science department at my University was sufficiently pressed finding PhDs that other departments within the University were left to shift for themselves. They had to find the guy or gal within their own ranks who took some computer courses, when they were undergrads, to teach the introductory computer course for Geographers, or English majors. This was a worldwide phenomenon.

Professors who were newly minted PhDs, around here at least, commanded a salary comparable to that of a brand new, starting high-school teacher, who only had a Bachelor's degree and a teacher's certificate. While in industry they could earn at least twice as much.

Isn't this still basically true?

No it is not harmless. It adds noice to the source code which decreases the signal to noice ration and makes the code harder to read. That is an unforgivable sin. Code is written just once (or rather in the range 1 to 10 times taking editing into account) by one or a few persons. However code is easily read thousands of times by many many people. Having code that is easily readable is essensial and several orders of magnitude more important than writing the code.

>...because later it could easily look like:

There you hit the nail on the head. You shall not add add commets now that maybe perhaps might be usefull sometime in the future (see YAGNI or here ).

In your example the "// NEED_WHATEVER" comment is acceptable while "// BUG_NOT_FIXED_YET" is not. My personal perception of this is that with more than half a screen height between ifdef and endif, adding comments is ok. With only one line inbetween it is absolutely not.

Better yet, the average drift velocity of electrons in, for example, copper. Electrons bounce around at close to 1/3 * c, but progress in an aggregate manner through the medium at a relatively 'slow' velocity, on the order of mm/sec.

The signal, of course, is propagated much faster.

"I believe he did appear at least once on Letterman as assistant to Penn and Teller, but he's joking to say he's well-known for that. The comment about archery is also a joke of some sort; Pike is a Canadian citizen who has worked in the U.S. for decades, and both Canada and the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics, so you needn't go looking for the records of that year's Olympics to figure this out".

RobPike wrote the following mostly-serious but slightly tongue-in-cheek bio for his 1994 Usenix paper presentation on Acme: "RobPike, well known for his appearances on ``Late Night with David Letterman'', was also a Member of Technical Staff at BellLabs, where he has been since 1980, the same year he won the Olympic silver medal in Archery. In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with BrianKernighan he wrote TheUnixProgrammingEnvironment?. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing." I believe he did appear at least once on Letterman as assistant to Penn and Teller, but he's joking to say he's well-known for that. The comment about archery is also a joke of some sort; Pike is a Canadian citizen who has worked in the U.S. for decades, and both Canada and the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics, so you needn't go looking for the records of that year's Olympics to figure this out. The rest of his bio appears to be true. He now (2004) works for GoogleSearch.

Add in the ability to link different pieces of data (so if I have an appointment with somebody I can tap that person's name to bring up their contact info...

It doesn't work on PalmOS 5 or above, but there's this hack called MegaWiki that does all that linking. Very neat, though it's not as seamless as if it were built into the OS.

Have a look at this list:

Easiest Installable Wiki Contest

Excellent resource to find easy to install Wikis.

Well there's ebay, amazon, google...
continued at:
What have the Romans ever done for us?

WOohoo... Microsoft cometh... ... and bringth the spam.

If wiki's were not getting polluted enough, here comes microsoft into the mix.

How about if I type up a large scientific paper loaded with non-existant links, and then their software will "fix" it by finding the proper material out on the net and pointing the links to it. This could revolutionize the science of hand waving!

The term is Progressive Disclosure. It's basic human interface design. This is why open source projects don't pass these studies with flying colors - rather than ask UI experts to solve UI issues, we ask slashdot. Then we all hash it around until one underrated post manages to reinvent the wheel.

Here's a better question.. how dow we sell open source to HID people?

Similar to Portland's Yellow Bike Program years ago.

In no way, did I mention supply side econ and/or Econ theorys and/or Taxation Rate. I was referring to the lack of planning and responsibility by many politicians. In terms of logic, others may wish to look up Red Herrings.

That's a classic false dichotomy. Suppose you can define a differentiable function r(p) to represent the revenue received at a tax rate p. Now, r(0) will obviously be 0. However, it's pretty clear that r(p) will also be 0 when p reaches a certain high value. For example, if p is "10000%", then you'd be completely insane to earn a single dollar of income since you'd have to pay it back ten-fold. Now, given that you have a function with at least two zeros and at least one point above zero, there must be at least one local maximum on the graph of that function. Call the p-value of that maximum "m".

In a nutshell, Democrats believe that p is currently less than m. Republicans believe that p is greater than m. Now, you can argue back and forth all day about which if either is correct (we could be at a local minimum so that moving in either direction would be a gain), but pretty much every economist believes that you can roughly describe the relationship between taxation rate and revenue in this way.

Implying that cutting taxes to raise revenue is impossibly stupid demonstrates either an ignorance of economic theory or deliberate deception.

From the origional How to Decide if Linux is for you:

Q I am looking for a dummy step by step setup of Linux router using freesco on old PC with windows98, for purposes of setting up a NAT gateway from broadband to two unconnected PCs at home. Also I am interested in a ZoneAlarm? (freeware version) like firewall that can close ports and restrict incoming/outgoing traffic. Please help with a good link, or list simple steps I must take. Thanks -- dl

A Starting with kernel version 2.0 (released 1996, before ZoneAlarm?), linux has filtering and firewalling built-in. From kernel 2.4 (released 2001) the default utility for setting up a firewall is IPFilter. Each distro has its own UI front-end to the ipfilter command.

There are also many antivirus programs for Linux. A Free application is Clam AV. You can google for some proprietary alternatives if you wish.

From the origional How to Decide if Linux is for you:

Q I am looking for a dummy step by step setup of Linux router using freesco on old PC with windows98, for purposes of setting up a NAT gateway from broadband to two unconnected PCs at home. Also I am interested in a ZoneAlarm? (freeware version) like firewall that can close ports and restrict incoming/outgoing traffic. Please help with a good link, or list simple steps I must take. Thanks -- dl

A Starting with kernel version 2.0 (released 1996, before ZoneAlarm?), linux has filtering and firewalling built-in. From kernel 2.4 (released 2001) the default utility for setting up a firewall is IPFilter. Each distro has its own UI front-end to the ipfilter command.

There are also many antivirus programs for Linux. A Free application is Clam AV. You can google for some proprietary alternatives if you wish.

Also bear in mind that Linux was weak areas (eg, games, off-the-shelf software).

I'd actually say that Linux is weak in supporting off-the-shelf games; however, there are numerous fun, high-quality games available Free and/or for free. KDE provides many addictive games and edutainment applications that I can't live without (speaking as a GNOME lover, when using Linux). GNOME also has many high-quality games (my favorites are Mahjongg and Robots). Then there many other favorites like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble (like Snood), and GL Tron (you have to play this one) among others. Another really cool diversion is Celestia, which allows you to zoom around the galaxy and visit planets, moons, comets, astroids, spacecraft (like Hubble, the ISS, or even Friendship 1). And despite my premise, there are also quite a few commercial games for Linux. There are many fun games that run on Linux - some aren't even available for Windows or non-unix platforms! Check your favorite Linux Distribution for more examples.

Also bear in mind that Linux was weak areas (eg, games, off-the-shelf software).

I'd actually say that Linux is weak in supporting off-the-shelf games; however, there are numerous fun, high-quality games available Free and/or for free. KDE provides many addictive games and edutainment applications that I can't live without (speaking as a GNOME lover, when using Linux). GNOME also has many high-quality games (my favorites are Mahjongg and Robots). Then there many other favorites like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble (like Snood), and GL Tron (you have to play this one) among others. Another really cool diversion is Celestia, which allows you to zoom around the galaxy and visit planets, moons, comets, astroids, spacecraft (like Hubble, the ISS, or even Friendship 1). And despite my premise, there are also quite a few commercial games for Linux. There are many fun games that run on Linux - some aren't even available for Windows or non-unix platforms! Check your favorite Linux Distribution for more examples.

Ward's Wiki has a whole page on what to do with cubicle envrionments:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LordOfTheFlies

The only caveat is at least one person involved has to be indispensible.

My favorite one is to build a fort out of the cube walls, and when maintenance comes to put them back, paint your faces with highlighters, go in the fort, and beat on the desks like jungle drums until they go away. I chuckle every time I think about it.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

...comparing him to Hitler...

This is one of those myths that has been busted time and time again, but thick-headed conservatives nonetheless spew the lies and thus perpetuate them.

To make the myth more concrete, conservatives believe MoveOn.org, a 527 group clearly connected in some way with the Democratic party (yes, this is itself wrong, but talk to your Congressman about Campaign Finance Reform if you want something to be done about it) ran an ad comparing Bush to Hitler. Here's what really happened--here's the background the soundbite-obsessed Fox News anchors can't dig into because they aren't real journalists.

MoveOn.org ran a content called Bush in 30 Seconds. It was a content that allows ANYONE to submit an ad to MoveOn.org, and the ads would be showcased on the website while voting took place. The ad with the most votes would be aired by MoveOn.org.

Two of the OVER 1,500 ads compared Bush to Hitler. You can see these two ads here and here.

Now, in case we are forgetting, let me remind you of the correct interpretation of the first amendment--in order for there to be freedom of speech, there has to be freedom of speech even for ideas you don't like . Sure, most people absolutely hate even the mention of Hitler, but by censoring those people who use his image or make comparisons to him, we violate the first amendment right in all cases. There are some legal exceptions (the famous "fighting words" case among others).

That said, I am just reminding you that even these two amateur filmmakers did nothing wrong within the law, which sometimes isn't clear to people who don't truly respect constitutional rights.

The bottom line, however, is that MoveOn.org never aired these ads because people never voted them to the top. So, although you can fault these two amateur filmmakers for this film, you can't fault the democratic party, "democrats" at large, or even MoveOn.org. It would be like faulting Salon.com (or "the liberal media") if on one of their Forums I posted a message that said Bush reminds me of Hitler.

Plus, I find this somewhat ridiculous because one could easily turn this around. Conservative "figureheads" have made the same kinds of comparisons in the past. Look no further than Rush Limbaugh who, at least once, used the term "feminazis" to describe feminists, and called abortion "the modern-day holocaust." This is from his published book in 1992. I am positive that most moral theorists and philosophers would find serious problems with that equivalence claim, regardless of their standpoint on abortion. Contrast this to the two ads posted on MoveOn.org, and you find one very important distinction. The ads on MoveOn.org focus on Hitler's power in using propaganda, his military force abroad and his rhetoric saying that he is driven by God. These particular aspects of Hitler's character could be argued to be found in George W. Bush. However, the comparison is unfair because it seeks emotional manipulation and deception, in that whenever someone thinks of Hitler, one thinks immediately of the holocaust and pure evil (thus, the mental connection, whatever the intention, becomes "Bush is this evil murderous leader"). But you have to admit that Limbaugh's comparison is much worse, because he effectively says that feminists are evil, murderous people, conducting their own holocaust. A clear distinction.

But, I won't fault him for that. After all, he is just one person, one viewpoint. It's his right of speech. And that means I can't say, "because Rush Limbaugh said it, it is mainstream conservati

I did XP in extreme C++ for about a year (by extreme C++, I mean boostified, Alexandrescu'd C++). We used CppUnit for our test framework.

I'm not especially satisfied with the currently available C++ unit testing frameworks. CppUnit and Boost's both have trade-offs. I suspect they'll both get better, though.

The Ant-Contrib project's cc task works pretty well, in my limited experience. I was playing around with it just this weekend. I've yet to set up a tinderbox build process, but I don't see why this wouldn't be easy with either Cruise Control or good ol' cron.

In my mind, the two biggest hurdles with doing XP in C++ are build speed and developer prejudice. You can tackle build speed with a combination of ccache, distcc, good programming principles, and cash. Tackling developer prejudice is harder. A lot of C++ programmers like to write low-level, unsafe, old school C++ code. Modern C++ mostly lets you discard unsafe coding practices without sacrificing efficiency. Whether you can convince an old C++ programmer of this is another matter; it depends on the person. I've had decent success taking Java programmers and teaching them modern C++ via pair programming.

Using Boost helps, indirectly. You write safer code, which gives you a faster development cycle. All in all, I think the basic tools are there. It might be a little harder to get fancy lava lamp integration going with C++, but there's no reason why you can't have a good build process. It's just that a lot of C++ projects haven't evolved (I think this is due, in part, to the fact that the C++ community is late to the internet; a lot of C++ programmers just don't know what's, out there.

cheers,

Jon

This is not a Defence but I would like to point out two things:

First you have violated Godwins Law

And Second that people are very, very inclined to obey. Even when they think what they are doing is wrong. This can be seen in the Milgram experiment. Rebelion comes hard.

It's referred to as the Printer's Triangle or the Law of Incompatible Goals : Good, Fast or Cheap - pick any two

If you want a job done fast and of high quality - it will be expensive.

If you want a job done fast and cheaply - it will be crap

If you want a job done well and cheaply - it will be slow

Microsoft, look out! Soon ye shall be crushed by the likes of Wikipedia.

Say I have an patent from 1970. I can't "extend" it and tack on TCP/IP and then claim I have a patent on the internet.

Oh, but you can!

Not as effectively anymore after a change to the law in 2003, but you still can do it as described. File a patent, keep amending with slightly more detail it to force continuations, and stop amending it once you're happy that existing tech falls under your heavily amended patent.

-% ruby -e 'puts "5" + 6'
-e:1:in `+': cannot convert Fixnum into String (TypeError)
-% php -r 'print "5" + 6;'
11

-% ruby -e 'puts "5" + 6'
-e:1:in `+': cannot convert Fixnum into String (TypeError)
-% php -r 'print "5" + 6;'
11

-% ruby -e 'puts "5" + 6'
-e:1:in `+': cannot convert Fixnum into String (TypeError)
-% php -r 'print "5" + 6;'
11

-% ruby -e 'puts "5" + 6'
-e:1:in `+': cannot convert Fixnum into String (TypeError)
-% php -r 'print "5" + 6;'
11

Sure; Ruby, Python, LISP, SmallTalk, even Perl and PHP; these are dynamically typed languages, although they may also be dynamic in other ways (like with regard to run-time code generation and modification).

Not to be confused with scripting languages, which is more about a language's environment than the language itself; you can make C into a scripting language with the right tools, but you're not going to make it into a dynamic one without changing the language itself.

Sure; Ruby, Python, LISP, SmallTalk, even Perl and PHP; these are dynamically typed languages, although they may also be dynamic in other ways (like with regard to run-time code generation and modification).

Not to be confused with scripting languages, which is more about a language's environment than the language itself; you can make C into a scripting language with the right tools, but you're not going to make it into a dynamic one without changing the language itself.

you mean so on, so Forth, right?

I'm terribly sorry to have to be the one to inform you of this, but PDF sucks. Perhaps it's proprietary existence just isn't well enough understood yet?

Dylan was created in the early 90s. By then other object oriented languages like C++, both Apple, Borland, and maybe even Microsoft at that point had their Object oriented versions of Pascal (Microsoft's was closer to Apple's Object Pascal. Borland made their object model compatible with C++) Also consider that the Gang of Four's book Design Patterns was out around that time. (There is a brief mention of Dylan in the book.)

What made Dylan stand out was an object model that was closer to CLOS, with generics and multiple dispatch. It also was a dynamic language that could compile into something as efficient as C. (between type narrowing that could give hints to the compiler, and implicit typing that could determine how a type was used, it could often optimize out most of the dynamic behavior into a simple subroutine call.) The developers of Dylan were also interested in making the language work well within a Hypercode IDE envionment, where the code was kept in a cross-referenced database.

If you are interested in hints of where Dylan was going, there is a free software project called Gwidion Dylan that has implemented a subset of the language and environment.

The key is to get patents for the sole purpose of choking real inventors out of the market, or at least getting a large cash settlement/substantial royalties from those who actually innovate.

Correct. I should have said "PHP and ASP templates - with HTML - provide many of the same advantages as CSS." Of course, I like using CSS and semantic markup. However, TIMTOWTDI.

The vast bulk of programming is just repetition.

If so, something is wrong. Computers are good at repetition, humans can do better things. If your programming is repetitive, you are using the wrong tool. Heck, you should spend your time developing exactly this missing tool. Build a decent library or a preprocessor, then use it to automate away the repetition. It pays off soon. Compare http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SharpenTheSaw and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreeStrikesAndYouRefactor.

The vast bulk of programming is just repetition.

If so, something is wrong. Computers are good at repetition, humans can do better things. If your programming is repetitive, you are using the wrong tool. Heck, you should spend your time developing exactly this missing tool. Build a decent library or a preprocessor, then use it to automate away the repetition. It pays off soon. Compare http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SharpenTheSaw and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreeStrikesAndYouRefactor.

So, it doesn't even have to be cool, it seems....

The submarine patent is dead.
You can no longer keep a patent in the application phase indefinetely. Patents now last 20 years from the filing date, the date that the invention first gets submitted to USPTO.

Don't go looking for trouble, but if it comes to you, deal with it with sudden ruthless righteous violence. Let it be known you feared for your life, then shut up and take quiet pride in ridding the world of one more worthless waste of oxygen who preyed on decent citizens.

Any formal organization or rules was strictly contrary to anarchy.

Of course it makes a lot of sense. There's a ripe market for a public wiki a la friendster, tribe.net, or linkedin.

There's a ton of wiki engines out there, not least MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. Almost any one would be sufficient to make a good social networking site.

All that's needed is some effort to make it happen.

Submarine patents is the word Submarine patent - but do SCO have anything they actually 'own'?

Yep your spot on here and I did make that point that when it comes to business I didn't think that working with canadians would matter. What I think I was trying to point out was that despite the geographic closeness the cultures of North America and Canadian are pretty different. I can't help smirking as I eat my Strong & Bitey cheese and vegemite sandwich that if you where from Canada we would be swapping monty python cheese shop sketch jibes :)

more like 'taking the piss' out of the comment americans are like canadians and have a lot in common. ps: read the link carefully to see what I mean.

now for this I'd agree. In Diamond Age there's a line that really rings true here ... something about people are the same the whole world over but cultures are totally different.

Ahhh number 2 business as it's called. I'll give you an example of this from and Indian mate who fronted customs in India and was told in no uncertain terms ...this is not your face on you pasport as he was to board a plane. The inference being I'll let you board if you pay me. Charming. But guess what it's there culture and if they don't want to play the Marquess of Queensberry of business in their country so be it; Not much you can do about it.

outsourcing is a serious problem for technical staff this side of the pacific,across the Atlantic in the UK and back in the US. Ff you read tofler for instance you will see that in his powershift ~ knowledge, wealth at the edge of the 21st century you can see that he proposes that less workers will be able to do more. This is a trend is likely to continue. So more to use the ugly phrase *e-workers* (knowledge, meta, creative, digilog workers). Outsourcing could be seen as a way for business to be more efficeint. But why isn't business offshoring to cheap, easy to understand Canada, taking advantage of the stable, legal economy for instance? .... (though I think the revenge of English Raj was the fluency of Indians with english.) The time difference is minimal (maybe whey take advantage of 24 day processing) or is it for some kind of tax minimisation reasons? Have you any opinion on this?

One of the biggest problem is the so-called submarine patent.

It would be nicer where after the patent is issued, they do a follow-up check a year or two later to be sure that you've made progress on actually building/using your invention, otherwise it's invalidated.

Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent. There's too many companies that hold patents and wait until there are a signifigant number of companies to sue before starting anything. While it makes sense from a business standpoint (most bang-for-the-buck), it seems totally against the ideas behind having patents.

He did great stuff in the 1970s inventing SmallTalk, developing graphics GUIs, a formulating the "Dynabook", the early PDA.

This stimulated Jobs and Gates to commercialize graphical computing and OOP-based OS's.

Kay... missed "industrial-strength" OOP

Here's what Alan says about C++: "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

Here's what Alan says about Java (he really has a lot to say about Java).

It seems to me that "industrial-strength" OOP missed the whole point of the OO.

Kay... missed the significance of the Web

Kay... missed the significance of ... PDAs

Kay... missed... cellphones

The Gore-Gates initative to make the Web available in every school and library by year 2000 did far more for children computing access than SmallTalk and eQuariums.

Lets see if the moderators can distinguish a contrarian opinion from troll-bait.

Oh, and if you're actually interested in what Kay has been up to, watch the video linked as Kay's Java comments. The man's been damn busy, and I hear that later this year there will be a public release of his current project, Croquet.