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So if I make a page about my school, good or bad, I shouldn't use the colors that the whole town is plastered in? His site was about the school, I don't see why he shouldn't use the colors associated with the subject matter...

"made a site with a name that could be confused with the school's main site, "

As far as I know, official college sites belong in the .edu domain. IMO it has become standard not to expect much from .com sites.

"and even put links to the main site for further confusion (deliberate or not)."

Now this and the location of his disclaimer may be misleading... but... it seems as though he intended for the site to be informative, so why not provide links to relevant matter (a.k.a. the school's official information) As for the disclaimer, I noticed it almost immediately when I visited the page.
Also, this is taken from the "about" page which is the first link on the top of the page...

"If you want boring facts about the school, read the catalog; if you have questions about the school, this site, or the meaning of life, email me; if you have suggestions for improvements to this site, go here.

Seriously, this site is the creation of one law student at a prominent Louisiana Law School. This site represents the views of that student and many of his classmates."

I think that this is a rediculous waste of resources, and that this student was well within his rights to publish the site. As stated in other comments, this page was not commercial in any sense, just one student's criticisms/mockery of the school he attends.

I shall now go and stand in a corner wearing a dunces cap for half an hour

The Site in Question is lsulaw.com

OK, let's do a quick comparison.

• Clear layout, loads fast
• Consistent navigation
• Clearly labelled links to all major departments of the School
• Clearly labelled links to information about the school
• Clear links to other Web resources of use to law students
• Works well in all browsers including text browsers

• Flash intro screen, doesn't work on all browsers, alternative redirect doesn't work on all browsers..
• Gaphics-heavy site, takes for ever to load.
• No links to other web resources of use to students
• All navigation is graphics without appropriate alt text, so unusable on text browsers or by visually disabled users

In other words, his is a reasonably competent, reasonably professional Web site, accurately describing the school, and theirs is an incompetent, unusable pile of dross.

I think that's what the quarrel is about, actually.

It's worth pointing out that because of the poor provision for disabled access, http://www.law.lsu.edu/ would be illegal in most of Europe.

The Site in Question is lsulaw.com

OK, let's do a quick comparison.

• Clear layout, loads fast
• Consistent navigation
• Clearly labelled links to all major departments of the School
• Clearly labelled links to information about the school
• Clear links to other Web resources of use to law students
• Works well in all browsers including text browsers

• Flash intro screen, doesn't work on all browsers, alternative redirect doesn't work on all browsers..
• Gaphics-heavy site, takes for ever to load.
• No links to other web resources of use to students
• All navigation is graphics without appropriate alt text, so unusable on text browsers or by visually disabled users

In other words, his is a reasonably competent, reasonably professional Web site, accurately describing the school, and theirs is an incompetent, unusable pile of dross.

I think that's what the quarrel is about, actually.

It's worth pointing out that because of the poor provision for disabled access, http://www.law.lsu.edu/ would be illegal in most of Europe.

The design of the site isn't amatuer at all (a hell of a lot better than some University sites I've seen) it doesn't have a tag line that would help a random reader understand at first glance.

So, by your standards, a person making a web site about his school or about any "official" organisation should make his website look crap for the viewers to easily make the difference?

And about the tag line, there's a line on the bottom of the site stating "Not affiliated with the Paul M. Hebert School of Law" just like the one present on the official site that states (on the bottom too) "Official website of Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center." I think that's enough to make a difference. Why would a "non official" website need to make its "not being official" clearer than the official one?

Why is there a need to say that you're not the official website anyway? Not to mislead people? AFAIK, that applies only if the website is (intentionaly?) misleading, which doesn't seem to be the case here...

My dissertation research involves developing a software system that will allow a computer to acquire a lexicon grounded in visual experiences. Thus words to a computer start to have some "meaning" rather than just being based on other words.

I'm working through the Robotics Research Lab at LSU.

My thesis project involved building a visualization system for sensor fusion - how boring! Did have an applet though.

My thesis project involved building a visualization system for sensor fusion - how boring! Did have an applet though.

In the mean time, the folks at places like CAMD have had coherent xrays for a while. There are supposed to be about five other labs like this around. I supose you could try to miniturize this technology. If someone comes up with something better, great, but the techniques that can take advantage of it ARE being worked out today.

I suppose it's okay for 5,000 people to die so some asshole like you can have access to information you don't need.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Amen. That was one of the points of the Revolutionary War in which, coincidentally enough, approximately the same number of people died (4,435 according to this statistical summary of America's major wars). America's history is one of people giving up their lives to secure what we consider to be our basic freedoms. Sadly the average American seems to have forgotten this fact.

Now, it is true that the people killed in the WTC attack were non-combatants, but this reaction by the U.S. government shames their memory. They were the victims of a craven attack by people who would love nothing better than to see our free society become just as tightly controlled as their own insane regimes.

And our degenerate leadership is obliging them.

Five or six thousand people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It is a horrid tragedy and I would never try to minimize it, but it pales to the number of people who have died defending democracy. In three of these defining wars, as tabulated below, there were over 350,000 deaths.

Revolutionary war: 4425
World War I: 53513
World War II: 292131
Total: 350069

There are also 40,000 deaths per year in the US, not through terrorism, but through automobile accidents. Would you also suggest that for safeties sake we ban the automobile?

For those of you that might be interested, I just launched a new site dedicated to models of human language acquisition. Over time I hope to provide a repository of relevant news on researchers, conferences, papers, and books from fields including A/I, computational linguistics, developmental psychology, machine learning, and cognitive science.

I will also use the site to share information about my own work. Like HAL, my model learns (and "learn" should always be taken with a grain of salt) from the bottom-up, but the words it acquires are grounded in visual perception. The basic idea is to resolve nouns to objects and verbs to actions/relationships in short spatial-motion videos. My work is based on work by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, David Bailey, Jan Norris, and Katherine Nelson.

Upon completion of my dissertation, I hope to release some or all of the Java code for my model on the site.

For those of you that might be interested, I just launched a new site dedicated to models of human language acquisition. Over time I hope to provide a repository of relevant news on researchers, conferences, papers, and books from fields including A/I, computational linguistics, developmental psychology, machine learning, and cognitive science.

I will also use the site to share information about my own work. Like HAL, my model learns (and "learn" should always be taken with a grain of salt) from the bottom-up, but the words it acquires are grounded in visual perception. The basic idea is to resolve nouns to objects and verbs to actions/relationships in short spatial-motion videos. My work is based on work by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, David Bailey, Jan Norris, and Katherine Nelson.

Upon completion of my dissertation, I hope to release some or all of the Java code for my model on the site.

You might want to check your facts first. There were almost 60,000 killed in Vitenam and 153,000 casualties. We're all saddened by the events but please don't add to the misinformation.

To be specific, most companies and patent lawyers have years of experience in circumventing copyrights. The large companies routinely use two attacks to destroy the copyright. First, they throw money at it and hope the developer is too poor to fight. Second, they assume that small developers do not keep good documentation.

There is not much that can be done about the money. Lawyers must be hired; expert witnesses paid; bonds must be negotiated. In a more cynical world, congressmen and judges must be bought.

There are things that developers can do for documentation. For instance, in olden times developers snail mailed themselves copies of their designs. The postmark dates a design until the seal is broken. On a more sophisticated level, laboratory notebooks can be kept that have approval space and perforated copies. (Of course, I am not a lawyer, so I say this only as an example of why we would expect the DMCA to be ineffective and how I have seen people deal with it in the past.) Look at it this way. If I published a book remarkably similar to the "Confederacy of Dunces" a few years before Toole's mother allegedly 'found' the manuscript, who would own the copyright?

Check out their creepy orange teeth.

Cooking nutria.

A lot of C could be written in something better, but C (or C++) is pretty much mandatory for a lot of tasks.

Ask Linus.

Ask Larry Wall.

If you're involved in a LARGE project (millions of lines of code across dozens of large packages) it's pretty much a necessity to use something like C++. (Eiffel and Ada probably fit the bill here too, but I have no hands-on experience with either )

P.S. Pascal isn't high level. Pascal is C, simplified for teaching, but much much worse.

OK, I've decided to share my secrets. ;-)

Go here for the configuration used in the screenshot.
Ever notice . . .
Microsoft and its allies assume everyone is stupid.

I've already seen some complaints about NS 4.7, Motif, and XAW. (Here and attached to other articles.) I don't see what the problem is. I've provided a screenshot of a prepared desktop.

(It appears that my department's server doesn't feed PNG's properly, you may have to your box and display locally. A JPEG was too big for my taste.)

My window manager is UDE. My workspaces/virtual desktops/whatchamacallits are just color schemed and minimal. What apps I use that use xrm always match (colors, fonts, etc.) the workspace in which they are opened, so the desktop is consistent. The screenshot has three windows:
(1) At the bottom of the stack (top left of screen) is Netscape 4.7 after running a bit of my own JavaScript. This is the mode which I usually use for reading long documents, except that the window would be maximized. All the functions of NS that I need are available through keystrokes and button 3.
(2) In the middle (stack and screen) is GNU emacs running the ansi-term from which I took the screenshot.
(3) At the top of the stack, in the bottom right of the screen is NS 4.7 again; this time without my JavaScript. I don't like any thing that uses vertical space since I'm used to reading paper that is taller than it is wide. (Though I may have to get my hands on a green-and-white line printer someday.)

I'm a minimalist (I suppose) so I've cut down on the windowing fluff as much as possible. The screenshot was taken at 1024x768 on my 12" external monitor. That's right 12" external; it can be a relief from running 800x600 on the 10.4" laptop LCD. (No cricks in the neck either.)

What I'd like to figure out is how to make my little JavaScript execute whenever a new browser window is opened. I imagine there's something in preferences.js or netscape.ad that would make it possible, but I haven't found it yet (probably for lack of trying).

Sometimes I think that people who complain about these things are waiting for a magic desktop. That makes me wonder why they don't use CLX.
Ever notice . . .
Microsoft and its allies assume everyone is stupid.

I've been wondering...instead of just making apps themable, would it be possible to make them modular/skinable/etc.?

More generally, how far can non-rectangular apps go? For example, could one create a word processor whose main window is a circle? I don't mean just the outer frame with menus or toolbars, but the actual text entry window. Of course, most language don't work that way, but is there the possibility of a meta- or para-language that could utilize such a display?

Granted, it would be weird/alien/scary for a while, but is anyone even considering such things?

I can think of three apps that 'break out of the box'. There's the Hyperbolic Tree apps from Inxight, The Brain from I don't know who, and the file manager I started to write 'FxM' which is currently on hold while I do more planning.

I had some trouble getting the document so I've put a copy here.

I remember reading about this back around 1994, 5, or 6. I thought the bill had been killed in Congress, but clearly I was wrong. From what I recall it is a very bad bill, but I haven't read it in over a year. If I can I will submit a review or an annotated version to TECHNOCRAT.NET or SlashDot. Of course, I have no idea if it will go through on either site.

The only thing Y2K did was cost me a night of sleep, as I had to work (as I'm sure many of you did).

So what was the funniest (or most exciting) thing that happened to those working the night shift? There wasn't much where I was, although it was kind of amusing watching the LSU web site show the year as 19100, then 192000, and finally 2000 :-).

The UNROLL macro you show there is a loop unroll like "Duff's Device". I'll explain why you'd want to do this while I talk about Duff's incarnation (because it's related but more interesting :).

Duff's Device was a contruct created by Tom Duff as a way of manually unrolling a for loop in a highly optimal way. The story goes that he was writing a multimedia application and noticed through profiling that he was spending a lot of time in his tight loops. In these loops he was doing a simple operation (copying from a buffer to a port).

The problem was that for each copy, he would do a compare. so he came up with this code (Tom Duff is a professional and is it not recommended you try this at home):
send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{
register n=(count+7)/8;
switch(count%8){
case 0:do{*to = *from++;
case 7:*to = *from++;
case 6:*to = *from++;
case 5:*to = *from++;
case 4:*to = *from++;
case 3:*to = *from++;
case 2:*to = *from++;
case 1:*to = *from++;
}while(--n>0);
}
}
Yes it compiles. 7 compares are removed.

Modern optimizers have learned from Mr. Duff and will unroll loops for you (if you choose speed over size), so you no longer have to subject people to this kind of heinousness. It is notable though that the TIFF code does an op1 to every 8 times, so this construct may not be removable from the code where op1 isn't NOP.

For Tom Duff's commentary on Duff's Device, Go here

I agree with the assertion that there should be a standard statement of ethics for software engineers. In fact, I believe that a Professional Engineering certification should be mandated by law before anyone can refer to themselves as Software Engineer". Software has assumed an all important role in our society. People responsible for designing, developing, and deploying software systems should demonstrate some minimal level of competence. If you are interested in this topic, I have some links on the subject available at this site. Also check out Construx for other sources.