Eliminating the SAT is a move of ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, it is not designed to test how much you know or what you learned in high school. The test under discussion here, the SAT I, was designed to predict the taker's GPA in college. It does so remarkably well. Although I lost the notes from a psychology class where the prof went into great depth discussing the SAT's validity, I seem to recall that the correlation between SAT scores and college GPA was something like 0.7 (which is really high)---obviously after some formulas and conversions were applied.
If we want to discuss tests that test actual academic knowledge, that's what the SAT IIs are for. But that's a whole different issue.
Oh, and BTW: Stuy doesn't have letter grades or 1-4 scale GPAs. As of the class of 1999 at least, grades were on a scale of 55-100.
Why is everyone so impressed with this new PowerBook G4? I personally find it immensely disappointing. Video? Same old ATI Rage 128 crap. Maximum resolution? 1152x768. A genuine, great improvement over their old limit of 1024x768. Other than that, all they changed was the CPU and the form factor. Sure, the titanium case is cool. It's also nice that it's pretty slim. But quite honestly, IMO the G3 PowerBooks look better. As for the CPU: well, two years after the release of the G4, it's nice to see it going into portables! Wasn't the G4 the CPU with the ultralow power consumption? Shouldn't that have made it easier to get a laptop to market quickly?
Now, let's compare this powerbook with a real x86 laptop. The VAIO Jobs compares the G4 powerbook to is a very cheaply-made piece of trash with a known unreliability record. Let's look instead at the IBM ThinkPad T21. Display size: G4 wins with 15". Unfortunately, screen size doesn't mean better screen real estate. The T21 is capable of 1400x1050 resolution, which translates into far more practical use. In terms of size, the thinkpad is lighter at 4.5 lbs, though slightly thicker at 1.3". More to the point, the T21 was on the market for about two months now, and the T series in general (which is almost identical) was in production for the last seven or eight months. I bought a T20 this summer after getting sick of waiting for apple to get their act together with a new laptop. (And I should of course mention that it runs Linux way better than it runs Windows:) )
Bottom line? The PowerBook G4 is a disappointing laptop. Had they pushed this out the door a year ago, it'd have been awesome. Now the competition is way ahead. Notice how Jobs was pushing all the iTunes and iMovie software on people: that's because the hardware just plain sucks. Oh, and it isn't shipping with OS X? What a shame. So now it's what, three years late? Apple's market is shrinking, even among diehard fans and OS X is probably the last thing that could propel Apple's market and mindshare forward as they offer the first genuine mainstream OS that doesn't suck.
Well, to go back to my original examples, I was exposed to Turing's Halting Theorem in freshman fall (at Dartmouth). The class I took was CS18, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which was awesome. It was based on the excellent Abelson and Sussman book, and Turing's theorem was one of the last topics. The class covered proofs of correctness in great depth, and we went into some algorithm design (but not much---that's a separate class I'm taking this fall). We also covered metacircular evaluation and had to write our own interpreter (Dylan in Dylan). Very cool stuff.
Most people taking that class have already had the intro CS class, which I placed out of. So if someone is following the normal CS sequence would probably have taken it in their freshman winter or sophomore fall. The reason I said people could really do all the things I listed (and lots lots more) by the end of sophomore year is that they should by then have had a class in discrete math, algorithms, software engineering, and maybe an elective (like graphics or AI).
... I'd like to clarify the points I made originally.
I applaud the folks who did not go to college, and yet have a strong theoretical background in CS. I especially liked kbonin's comments about game developers. I did not mean to imply that such folks do not exist. I meant to say that they are relatively rare in the great mass of IT workers out there. I meant that someone who does not have a college degree is far less likely to know, understand, or care about theoretical CS. (In fact, working in an IT department in a financial firm, I must say that there are an awful lot of people here who only have a vague understanding of computers---but that is a different issue.)
I was not criticizing every single programmer who doesn't have a formal education. I was specifically criticizing the great mass (some of whom may even have degrees) that knows its Perl or its HTML or even its C and can put together some network apps or maybe even administer a UNIX box, but has no understanding of the underlying concepts. These people are worse hires than those coming out of college with this knowledge.
aiken_d's comments about real-life managerial experience show that he must have been dealing with an entirely separate issue: workers who don't want to work. People he worked with who missed deadlines because they objected to an API are deplorable and obviously unsuited for their jobs---but that's a whole different issue. But if he was hiring someone to write up a mission-critical e-commerce system that has to handle thousands of transactions a second, would he hire a high school kid who maybe claims to understand issues in concurrency and real-time systems et cetera or someone who has published research in database and operating system theory and a background in sound software engineering practices?
Finally, to those folks who say that their particular college experience was worthless, and to those who went into CS just for the money: I pity you. I go to Dartmouth, and it's an unbelievable place. The people are sharp, and all of the curriculum is fantastic, including CS. I don't think I've yet met a single CS major who is in it purely for money, and I guarantee there are no graduates who come out with no knowledge of multithreading, who have to consult pseudocode to write up a bubblesort, or who have no idea how to do proofs. Copying is out of the question, because academic integrity is very important (and people who do get caught are quite simply expelled)... And one of the things I got from talking to graduates who work in industry, is that their preparation as computer scientists has made them the top-notch candidates for any IT job.
Everyone who says that going to college is falling behind in the field is adding to my growing list of reasons to bring back clinical lobotomies. Pure and simple.
They think that learning to hack out a shopping cart is what CS is about. Sure, they can learn that without college. They probably learned to do all these things from ``Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours'' or some other shit book.
This sentiment infuriates me. They think they're not going to learn anything by going to college... Okay, then, these 37331 boyz know how to write CGI scripts. It'll land them their dream $70K webmaster jobs. Now, maybe they could explain to me briefly Turing's Halting Theorem and present an informal proof in a paragraph or less. Or maybe explain the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm and present a proof of correctness. Or... how about implementing user-level multithreading with continuations and briefly explaining what basic problems need to be overcome once the basic operators (fork et al.) are implemented.
These people can't do those things, whereas a college undergrad could, probably starting around sophomore year. And guess what, that college kid knows more about better coding and theoretical CS than the high-school dropouts ever will. College educations make for much better programmers, even if graduates do not choose to become computer scientists per se. Having a college education is not about falling back by four years, it's about spending four years learning about how to be very very good at what you do.
Sadly, these 18-year old high school kids are probably more likely to get hired than a 23-year old college graduate for some jobs. The reasons are that (1) they don't need to be paid as much, and (2) that they know all the latest buzzword languages (Java, C#, Delphi, etc.). The college kid will have the background to pick up this buzzword crap quickly, but will not necessarily have it on his resume. Very sadly, that makes a huge difference when it comes to hiring, though the college graduate will be doing a far better job simply because he will have learned e.g., good coding techniques.
Aside from these purely practical considerations, the kids who go from high school into the workforce are missing out on other things. Ever hear the phrase ``well-rounded?'' Well, I personally know of no more boring entity than someone who can only talk about computers. A college graduate will at least have been forced to learn something about art, history, literature, and science (other than CS). That makes for far better people.
I know it's awfully popular here on/. to say that all information should be free, particularly music. I'll ignore all the ideological arguments, and reduce it to what the issue really is: every Napster advocate out there is just too cheap to pay for music.
Notice how the local population, trolls and otherwise, loves to pounce on anyone who uses GPLed code, or even unlicensed (and therefore just plain copyrighted code) without permission. Around here, that's a stoning offence.
Don't you people think that musicians have rights to their music, too?! Juicy quote from that article:
"Radio is free! What about radio?"
"We have the right to control our music!"
"Fuck you, Lars. It's our music too!"
They're kidding, right? Last I checked, music belongs to whoever wrote it. Same with books. Same with software. Whoever wrote it may then choose to share it. And they always choose to share it under their terms. Most of the Slashdot crowd seems to desparately want to ensure that their creations (for the small handful that actually has done anything for open-source/free software) are only distributed on their terms. They spit on Metallica for wanting to do the same.
I can understand disliking the RIAA for imposing ridiculous contracts on musicians. But in articles like this one, I see that the hatred is focused primarily on the handful of artists who decided to stand up for their rights. If you hate the RIAA because it forces musicians to sign their souls away, then that is a very legitimate concern. But do not fight the recording industry by stealing works that properly belong and should be bringing profit to artists.
Everyone who makes the argument that the RIAA is not losing money from Napster and its ilk must be smoking crack. The only reason revenues are increasing is because the consumer economy is fueling a faster rate of growth than anything Napster kiddies can do to destroy it. For now. Music piracy grows by leaps and bounds, every day. If things were to continue as they are now, I guarantee that in two years time, maximum, the music industry will be posting catastrophic losses. And guess what happens then? No one will get recorded. Independent labels are few and far between for one very good reason: it takes a fucking lot of money to make a good recording. (Granted, most of the stuff that gets recorded these days by major labels is utter shit, both musically and acoustically, but that is a different issue. Plenty of labels, particularly classic ones, release good quality recordings.)
Radio is not free. Radio pays royalties for every single track they air, so the comparison with radio is ludicrous. They finance this by airing hours of advertisements (except NPR, who finance their existence by begging for money from listeners 4 times a year).
Finally, I sincerely hope that record stores do not disappear from the face of the earth. Speaking as a music lover, I'll say that lossy compression codecs suck. I dislike the MP3 standard, because the quality loss, for me, is unacceptable. I find that the only MP3s remotely listenable to are ones I make myself, encoded at 192kbps or more. And even so they do not match the quality of CDs or MDs, let alone vinyl or DAT. It will be a sad day when everyone moves to recording stuff as MP3s, or Ogg Vorbis, or whatever the latest and greatest codec is, and physical media designed for genuine high fidelity is abandoned.
Sorry about the long rant, but the article was sufficiently inflammatory that I had to get this out. Fortunately I have the karma to spare for the inevitable bashing it's going to take:)
During the trial, did you make any arguments that brought up the issue of the MPAA acting as a monopoly in the case of their outright control of how the DVD standard can be played back?
I'm not quite sure how any of this is on-topic, but I feel like ranting, so here goes:
There is truly no reason to be surprised about either of the two phenomena, as long as you understand the concept of reinvesting 100% of your productivity gains.
That may be so, except that in the case of IT, you don't end up simply reinvesting 100% of your productivity gains. The reality of what happened when people started moving to computerized environments is less rosy: once all the secretaries that kept paper records were fired, they had to be replaced with a veritable army of system administrators, database administrators, programmers, and sundry (collectively named Information Technology, or perhaps Enterprise Technology). (Here sundry refers to those people who still don't know what a mouse is and purport to work on all sorts of ``important projects''---scary, but very common.)
That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the proliferation of computers has taken us, even as we are still far far far away from a paperless office. Computers are so fickle and unreliable and require so much maintenance that they cannot replace humans for doing menial tasks. At best they can complement, and in the case of corporate computer use, they necessitated hiring thousands more people (in a large firm) to replace the hundreds that computers were meant to replace. Computers also necessitated that technology budgets of fundamentally non-technology companies skyrocketed.
The bottom line is that the technology revolution has done nothing to slash enterprise costs; in fact, it has done the opposite. And it will continue doing so until computers become self-sufficient, or at least reliable enough to set themselves up and then be left alone (which I certainly don't forsee happening anytime soon).
I don't quite see where you found that Deutsche Grammophon (or whatever it's a subsidiary of) isn't making classical music any longer. I buy a couple of DG CDs a month, including some new releases (as in July 2000). They most definitely are releasing new stuff, including some under their Archiv Produktion sublabel.
As other people have pointed out, Ani DiFranco's label is independent. Also, if you're into Celtic music, Loreena McKennit's label, Quinlan Road is independent as well...
To people who recommend looking for overseas labels, I must note that a lot of foreign music is distributed through RIAA-affiliated labels. For example, Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical music label, distributes in the US through Universal Classics.
All that said, I think that boycotting the RIAA because it's trying to shut down a pure piracy operation like Napster is ludicrous... The RIAA deserves a boycott for pushing Britney Spears, 'NSync, and the Backstreet Boys to the top...
I just hope that this project includes some security considerations. Otherwise it's just all about writing a fabulous tool for virus-writing. Imagine a nice attachment in your fancy integrated mail-reader with scripting enabled that says ``Run me!'' and then proceeds to trash your home directory. Tres uncool.
Remember that all of this will (unfortunately) propagate to some idiot-user's desktop sooner or later. And that user's files will get trashed---at which point everyone will start screaming that Linux/*BSD/whatever is insecure, has virus issues, was overhyped as being immune, etc.
I am not saying that there is no place for scripting-enabled applications. But a casual perusal of the project's web page did not reveal any information about what the authors are doing to build security into their app. Not good.
One big theme I notice in all the comments on this topic: Functional languages didn't take off because there are (were) no good implementations.
Wrong.
I will speak only about Common Lisp and its direct predecessors, because of all the functional languages I know it is the most flexible and useful for real-life development.
In the 1970s and 1980s there were Lisp Machines. Read up on them sometime---I claim that they were the most advanced and powerful workstations of their time. They had graphical development tools and environments that were mere dreams in the minds of other programmers at the time. They had hardware specialized to run Lisp, and they did so very, very well. Lisp Machines (Symbolics et al.) went out of fashion at around the time when general-purpose hardware began to pick up a lot of momentum and the personal computer began to gather popularity.
Their place was taken by implementations of Lisp running on workstation-class computers. Digital, Sun, IBM, and HP boxes all had third-party Lisp implementations. Most of these implementations are alive today, and available for most UNIXes, as well as Windows and MacOS. These would be Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL, and Xanalys' (formerly Harlequin) LispWorks. Both are robust and powerful. In fact, well-written Lisp will outperform comparable C code with either of those compilers. The real issue here is that there are no free Lisp implementations that compare to the commercial offerings in quality and ease of use. There are CMUCL and CLISP, but neither holds a candle to ACL or LispWorks, for example.
The lack of popularity of functional languages stems mainly from ignorance. As several other people have pointed out, it takes some effort to learn the paradigm, and most people, even those with CS degrees, do not choose to make that effort. Lisp hackers tend to have a strong background in language theory and other topics too complicated for the average ``geek'' whose competence ends at some Perl shopping cart script.
I don't understand the author's argument that some third party to whom the GPLd software is distributed is not privy to the contract. He says that some recipient of the software may not agree with the terms of the GPL. However, the user does agree to the license by using the software, correct? How is agreeing to the GPL as the terms by which software is distributed different from agreeing to the terms of some click-wrap agreement made by Microsoft or Adobe?
I do not understand why the lawyers make a distinction between these two end-user agreements:
One which says: ``You cannot do anything with this software except use it under the following restricted conditions.''
And another which says: ``You can use this software, as long as you realize that it comes with no warranty. Further, you can distribute and modify this software, as long as you distribute it under this exact license and include all the source code to your modifications.''
In the case of GPLd code, everyone who uses it is privy to the agreement. The only difference between the case of Microsoft selling to the consumer and the FSF distributing software is that (legally) only Microsoft is allowed to distribute its stuff, whereas anyone can distribute GPLd code.
Of course intra-state commerce is taxed. Here in New York State, for example, the tax is something like 8.5%. Some goods are exempt.
The deal with the Internet tax moratorium is that there is no Internet tax. In other words, if Congress were to decide to institute one, then purchases over the Internet would be taxed simply because they were made over the Internet. This would be in addition to any other sales taxes.
The original poster confused this with thinking that all Internet purchases were automatically exempt from sales taxes. This is not true. Buying over the Internet is like buying over a phone: if you're in the same state as your customer, you pay, and if you're in different states, then interstate commerce laws apply (i.e., no sales tax).
What do you mean by program invariants and proofs? If you are talking about proofs of correctness, then Lisp should be right up your alley. It's relatively easy to write up a rigorous proof of an algorithm (e.g., quicksort), which is completely impossible in an imperative language like C.
Oh, and BTW, in Lisp you don't usually have to deal with the sort of C nonsense you pointed out before.
Which isn't to say C doesn't have a place---it most certainly does, in systems programming---but the fact remains that it's ridiculously hard and timeconsuming to do all the idiotic bookkeeping it requires for application programming.
Good job, IBM. It's wonderful that support is so forthcoming. Though naturally, when someone says ``available for Linux,'' they really mean ``available for Intel Linux.''
Users of all other Alpha Linux are screwed. PowerPC Linux. UltraSPARC Linux.
Oh well, that's the real world, isn't it? It'd be nice if there at least was some source code to play with on other architectures. But that, naturally, isn't forthcoming.
Slashdotters know everything there is to know about psychology when it comes to writing about video games! Hey, Jon Katz writes that the instances of violent crime have gone down instead of up as the popularity of violent games increased! Hey, there must be a correlation!
Bullshit.
On average,/. readers know next to nothing about anything except computers. A cool shopping cart CGI script? Easy. Perl poetry? Easy! A raytracer? Maybe not that easy, but doable. A relationship? Forget it! So why do people all of a sudden think they are experts in a social science? Face it---the vast majority of this audience is not.
Numerous studies in the field have shown that there exists an undeniable correlation between viewed violence and acts of violence. I know about the criticism about cause and effect. Studies have been performed that do indeed check that correlation. This is exactly the sort of thing controlled lab experiments are for. In 1961, Albert Bandura (et al.) found that preschool children were more likely to attack an inflated doll after watching an aggressive adult model than after watching a nonaggressive model. More recently, a 1988 study (Schutte et al.) found that children are more likely to hit another child after playing Karateka than after playing Jungle Hunt (a nonviolent game). Wood et al. (1991) show that exposure to aggressive models increases aggression.
I wish I could post links to the studies above, but they are not recent enough to be archived anywhere I know of on-line (at least free of charge---I'm sure most university libraries will have these articles in both paper and electronic form).
Folks, I know that no one here wants to believe that Quake causes anyone to kill. I play Quake, and I strongly suspect that it will never cause me to pick up a gun and blast everyone in sight. We are not talking about individuals here. We are talking about trends, i.e., average kids will on average be more inclined to hit someone after playing a game of deathmatch. Let's face it and stop denying this simple fact. Most/. readers strongly believe that game violence is OK, but hopefully most people here are intelligent enough to realize that the intensity of a belief should not be confused with its validity.
Sources
Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575--582
Wood, W., Wong, F. Y., & Chachere, J. G. (1991). Effects of media violence on viewer's aggression in unconstrained social interaction. Psychological Bulletin, 109, 371--383
Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Post-Gorden , J.C., & Rodasta, A. L. (1988). Effects of playing videogames on children's aggressive and other behaviors. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18, 454--460
I am, as usual, stunned at Slashdot. These are the people who are privacy freaks, I mean a lot of people here are all for encrypting every little byte of data on their drives. The sheer number of venomous comments directed at ``Big Brother,'' the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, Congress, corporations, or whatever else Jon Katz decided ``threatens geekdom'' leaves me amazed.
But a lot of people are huge fans of JenniCam! Seems like a huge privacy violation. Granted she's doing it voluntarily, but still---we never want anyone spying on out private lives, no sir, absolutely not! But spying on other people's lives? Hehe. Sounds like fun, to all the voyerism fetishists in this audience. Everyone else's privacy can go to hell.
A reason that ``academic'' languages don't make it out of academia? The reality of the situation is that many many people just bought into C++. They were used to programming in C---a good language for low-level work---and they said, ``Oh! A C-like object-oriented language! Cool!'' Most so-called academic languages are purely academic simply because they are only research projects in language theory or implementation. They are not designed for production use. Such is not the case with Eiffel or Common Lisp.
Your example of Pascal is completely out of context. Pascal was designed purely as a teaching language. It was never intended for production code. It was not an academic research language. And Pascal is still a hundred times better for teaching beginners than C++. The fact that damn near every school in the US teaches C++ as an introductory CS class is absolutely criminal.
Anyway, I will simply address your other arguments one by one. First, what exactly do you mean by a language not telling me what to do? C++ is pretty damn restrictive in my book. Sure, it lets you manipulate pointers all you want---but is this real freedom? Seems to me real freedom would be a mechanism like anonymous functions and closures.
Second, are you kidding? 65% of all software bugs are due go memory leaks, and writing code in C++ is one fool-proof way to fall victim to this rule. (This is actually is problem with C, but as long as some wonderful designer like Stroustrup was working on improving C, he might as well have built in garbage collection.) If you want a language that encourages fast development, you cannot beat Lisp. Period. Many major projects are first prototyped in Lisp just to get something working off the ground fast, and then their OS interface parts are usually re-written in C (mainly because of the lack of user interface libraries). If you want a more concrete example, AutoCAD and Mathematica's internals are written in Lisp. Same with Emacs. I myself was amazed at a sample program included with Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp, a fully-functional ray tracer. It was fairly limited, of course, but I wrote a simple ray tracer about a year ago, and it was ten times the length of the Common Lisp implementation.
If your statement referred to execution speed, then there are numerous studies that show that properly optimized Lisp with a good compiler matches, and in some cases exceeds, C's execution speed.
Finally, if you actually bothered to read the critique I linked to in my original post, you would have seen that Ian's critique had nothing to do with changing C++. It's pretty obvious that Stroustrup will defend his bad design decisions to his dying day, and Ian was merely pointing out the defects.
Quite honestly, though the interview is obviously humorous in nature, the criticisms of C++ in it are all too accurate. I have programmed in C and C++, and it is far easier to hack objects into C (which is what GTK+ does marvelously) than to use the so-called object-oriented features of C++. Granted, one could also use a language that actually _is_ object-oriented, like Java or Common Lisp instead.
But enough of my ranting. Check out this critique of C++ from the point of view of a computer scientist very well-versed in programming languages.
Quite honestly, why?! Why does everyone who posted on this thread insist that Linux must be for the masses, that my grandmother must be able to use it, and that it must supplant every other operating environment? What is the gain?
Don't get me wrong. I like UNIX systems. I use *BSD on my servers, I use Linux on my desktop, and I am probably going to spend some time playing with HURD in the near future. But I honestly don't see why we need to convert the masses.
Do you think the masses give a damn about conceptual theory like Open Source (or Free Software or whatever you want to call it)? No! I guarantee that if you talk to the average buyer at CompUSA, they will have no idea that they are paying for Windows 95/98/2000 separately from the computer. I have yet to see a single vendor (barring on-line retailers) separately say to the customer, ``oh yeah, that laptop is $2500, and $150 of that goes to Microsoft.'' So the argument that Linux is ``free'' holds not water, not only from the ideological point of view, but from the practical point of view of the consumer, as well.
So my question is, why cast pearls before swine? You hopefully all realize that we use Linux because it is technologically superior, and it makes our needs different from the needs of the average user, because the average user does not give a damn about technological superiority. For the techie crowd, the UNIX-based environment already offers everything that Windows ever did, and we like it better. (I've been typesetting documents in (La)TeX for years, I can also use to make slides, there were spreadsheets like oleo for years, databases are taken care of by MySQL, Postgre, or Sybase and Oracle if you're willing to pay...) For John Q. User, Windows is exactly what the doctor ordered.
The UNIX user interface right now is exactly what it should be. A good command line, the best of any OS that I have ever seen, and a damn good window system (X). That's really all that's necessary---a window system. Let's face it: I'm sure most UNIX users mainly use X to have a bunch of xterms on our displays. I toss GNOME in for the extra eye-candy and to have a better mail notify program than xbiff around. I quite honestly don't give a damn about drag-and-drop and all the other excess baggage that people seem to be clamoring for ``so my mother can use it.''
We all think we are an elite crowd because we are UNIX users. So why the blazes are so many of us trying so desperately to change that?
Star Office is released under a license Sun claims is Open Source, correct? I am well aware that it does not really meet the standards of Open Source software, but in theory Sun is supposed to make the source code available under their own license, correct?
So where is the source code? I use Linux on an Alpha platform and would like to run Star Office, if only to read the Word documents that people tend to like mailing out these days. If the source was out there, I think compiling it would be trivial. However, a scan of Sun's site does not show it up anywhere obvious.
The last paragraph really tells the story, doesn't it? Even if we lost this time, we are regrouping and will have a go at this again.
``Linux file- and Web-server performance appears to be bottlenecked in the operating system kernel, not in Samba or Apache. This was demonstrated best when the Red Hat engineers ran the Zeus Web server. Zeus performance topped out at about the same place as Apache, using fewer resources. The major performance problems are with the TCP stack, which is single threaded in the 2.2.x Linux kernels, and with large-grained kernel locks that degrade multiprocessor performance. The Linux community is addressing these performance problems and others in their 2.3.x kernel series.''
Let's keep up the good work and we can be sure that even if this benchmark is unfavorable, no one can really match the flexibility of the Open Source development model, and that even if we don't win now, there is always tomorrow.
I partially agree with this, and I am _not_ Christian. (As a matter of fact I am atheist, but that is beside the point.)
I completely agree that South Park is an inappropriate movie to take children to. I watched it with a couple of friends and was stunned at the number of kids (7 to 12) that came to see it with their parents. Most of the humor revolved around how many times the script contained the words ``fuck'' and ``shit.''
_However,_ the movie made several valid points. The quote from Kyle's mother that ``remember what the MPAA says: blood and violence are OK as long as no one uses naughty words'' was right on point. It is absolutely ridiculous that a movie is perfectly all right if it shows someone's head getting blown off, but is a social taboo if there is a glimpse of a nude human figure.
There is one important thing to say to that: _neither_ of these things is all right as far as showing the movie to little kids is concerned! I am not saying people grow up to become murderers and rapists because they watch violent movies. Nor am I advocating a strict age-limit for watching that type of film. However, the decision to watch or not watch these movies is something that should be made by the kids' parents. It is the parents who are responsible for what their kids turn out to be, and they had better start to learn to take responsibility.
In Katz's story, the parents _chose_ to let their kids watch that movie. That makes them far worse parents as far as I am concerned (that, and leaving them with a complete stranger who just lied to get them into a movie theater for no apparent reason), but it was their decision and the theater should not have had anything to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Eliminating the SAT is a move of ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, it is not designed to test how much you know or what you learned in high school. The test under discussion here, the SAT I, was designed to predict the taker's GPA in college. It does so remarkably well. Although I lost the notes from a psychology class where the prof went into great depth discussing the SAT's validity, I seem to recall that the correlation between SAT scores and college GPA was something like 0.7 (which is really high)---obviously after some formulas and conversions were applied.
If we want to discuss tests that test actual academic knowledge, that's what the SAT IIs are for. But that's a whole different issue.
Oh, and BTW: Stuy doesn't have letter grades or 1-4 scale GPAs. As of the class of 1999 at least, grades were on a scale of 55-100.
RANT
Why is everyone so impressed with this new PowerBook G4? I personally find it immensely disappointing. Video? Same old ATI Rage 128 crap. Maximum resolution? 1152x768. A genuine, great improvement over their old limit of 1024x768. Other than that, all they changed was the CPU and the form factor. Sure, the titanium case is cool. It's also nice that it's pretty slim. But quite honestly, IMO the G3 PowerBooks look better. As for the CPU: well, two years after the release of the G4, it's nice to see it going into portables! Wasn't the G4 the CPU with the ultralow power consumption? Shouldn't that have made it easier to get a laptop to market quickly?
Now, let's compare this powerbook with a real x86 laptop. The VAIO Jobs compares the G4 powerbook to is a very cheaply-made piece of trash with a known unreliability record. Let's look instead at the IBM ThinkPad T21. Display size: G4 wins with 15". Unfortunately, screen size doesn't mean better screen real estate. The T21 is capable of 1400x1050 resolution, which translates into far more practical use. In terms of size, the thinkpad is lighter at 4.5 lbs, though slightly thicker at 1.3". More to the point, the T21 was on the market for about two months now, and the T series in general (which is almost identical) was in production for the last seven or eight months. I bought a T20 this summer after getting sick of waiting for apple to get their act together with a new laptop. (And I should of course mention that it runs Linux way better than it runs Windows :) )
Bottom line? The PowerBook G4 is a disappointing laptop. Had they pushed this out the door a year ago, it'd have been awesome. Now the competition is way ahead. Notice how Jobs was pushing all the iTunes and iMovie software on people: that's because the hardware just plain sucks. Oh, and it isn't shipping with OS X? What a shame. So now it's what, three years late? Apple's market is shrinking, even among diehard fans and OS X is probably the last thing that could propel Apple's market and mindshare forward as they offer the first genuine mainstream OS that doesn't suck.
Well, to go back to my original examples, I was exposed to Turing's Halting Theorem in freshman fall (at Dartmouth). The class I took was CS18, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which was awesome. It was based on the excellent Abelson and Sussman book, and Turing's theorem was one of the last topics. The class covered proofs of correctness in great depth, and we went into some algorithm design (but not much---that's a separate class I'm taking this fall). We also covered metacircular evaluation and had to write our own interpreter (Dylan in Dylan). Very cool stuff.
Most people taking that class have already had the intro CS class, which I placed out of. So if someone is following the normal CS sequence would probably have taken it in their freshman winter or sophomore fall. The reason I said people could really do all the things I listed (and lots lots more) by the end of sophomore year is that they should by then have had a class in discrete math, algorithms, software engineering, and maybe an elective (like graphics or AI).
... I'd like to clarify the points I made originally.
I applaud the folks who did not go to college, and yet have a strong theoretical background in CS. I especially liked kbonin's comments about game developers. I did not mean to imply that such folks do not exist. I meant to say that they are relatively rare in the great mass of IT workers out there. I meant that someone who does not have a college degree is far less likely to know, understand, or care about theoretical CS. (In fact, working in an IT department in a financial firm, I must say that there are an awful lot of people here who only have a vague understanding of computers---but that is a different issue.)
I was not criticizing every single programmer who doesn't have a formal education. I was specifically criticizing the great mass (some of whom may even have degrees) that knows its Perl or its HTML or even its C and can put together some network apps or maybe even administer a UNIX box, but has no understanding of the underlying concepts. These people are worse hires than those coming out of college with this knowledge.
aiken_d's comments about real-life managerial experience show that he must have been dealing with an entirely separate issue: workers who don't want to work. People he worked with who missed deadlines because they objected to an API are deplorable and obviously unsuited for their jobs---but that's a whole different issue. But if he was hiring someone to write up a mission-critical e-commerce system that has to handle thousands of transactions a second, would he hire a high school kid who maybe claims to understand issues in concurrency and real-time systems et cetera or someone who has published research in database and operating system theory and a background in sound software engineering practices?
Finally, to those folks who say that their particular college experience was worthless, and to those who went into CS just for the money: I pity you. I go to Dartmouth, and it's an unbelievable place. The people are sharp, and all of the curriculum is fantastic, including CS. I don't think I've yet met a single CS major who is in it purely for money, and I guarantee there are no graduates who come out with no knowledge of multithreading, who have to consult pseudocode to write up a bubblesort, or who have no idea how to do proofs. Copying is out of the question, because academic integrity is very important (and people who do get caught are quite simply expelled)... And one of the things I got from talking to graduates who work in industry, is that their preparation as computer scientists has made them the top-notch candidates for any IT job.
RANT
Everyone who says that going to college is falling behind in the field is adding to my growing list of reasons to bring back clinical lobotomies. Pure and simple.
They think that learning to hack out a shopping cart is what CS is about. Sure, they can learn that without college. They probably learned to do all these things from ``Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours'' or some other shit book.
This sentiment infuriates me. They think they're not going to learn anything by going to college... Okay, then, these 37331 boyz know how to write CGI scripts. It'll land them their dream $70K webmaster jobs. Now, maybe they could explain to me briefly Turing's Halting Theorem and present an informal proof in a paragraph or less. Or maybe explain the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm and present a proof of correctness. Or... how about implementing user-level multithreading with continuations and briefly explaining what basic problems need to be overcome once the basic operators (fork et al.) are implemented.
These people can't do those things, whereas a college undergrad could, probably starting around sophomore year. And guess what, that college kid knows more about better coding and theoretical CS than the high-school dropouts ever will. College educations make for much better programmers, even if graduates do not choose to become computer scientists per se. Having a college education is not about falling back by four years, it's about spending four years learning about how to be very very good at what you do.
Sadly, these 18-year old high school kids are probably more likely to get hired than a 23-year old college graduate for some jobs. The reasons are that (1) they don't need to be paid as much, and (2) that they know all the latest buzzword languages (Java, C#, Delphi, etc.). The college kid will have the background to pick up this buzzword crap quickly, but will not necessarily have it on his resume. Very sadly, that makes a huge difference when it comes to hiring, though the college graduate will be doing a far better job simply because he will have learned e.g., good coding techniques.
Aside from these purely practical considerations, the kids who go from high school into the workforce are missing out on other things. Ever hear the phrase ``well-rounded?'' Well, I personally know of no more boring entity than someone who can only talk about computers. A college graduate will at least have been forced to learn something about art, history, literature, and science (other than CS). That makes for far better people.
I know it's awfully popular here on /. to say that all information should be free, particularly music. I'll ignore all the ideological arguments, and reduce it to what the issue really is: every Napster advocate out there is just too cheap to pay for music.
Notice how the local population, trolls and otherwise, loves to pounce on anyone who uses GPLed code, or even unlicensed (and therefore just plain copyrighted code) without permission. Around here, that's a stoning offence.
Don't you people think that musicians have rights to their music, too?! Juicy quote from that article:
They're kidding, right? Last I checked, music belongs to whoever wrote it. Same with books. Same with software. Whoever wrote it may then choose to share it. And they always choose to share it under their terms. Most of the Slashdot crowd seems to desparately want to ensure that their creations (for the small handful that actually has done anything for open-source/free software) are only distributed on their terms. They spit on Metallica for wanting to do the same.
I can understand disliking the RIAA for imposing ridiculous contracts on musicians. But in articles like this one, I see that the hatred is focused primarily on the handful of artists who decided to stand up for their rights. If you hate the RIAA because it forces musicians to sign their souls away, then that is a very legitimate concern. But do not fight the recording industry by stealing works that properly belong and should be bringing profit to artists.
Everyone who makes the argument that the RIAA is not losing money from Napster and its ilk must be smoking crack. The only reason revenues are increasing is because the consumer economy is fueling a faster rate of growth than anything Napster kiddies can do to destroy it. For now. Music piracy grows by leaps and bounds, every day. If things were to continue as they are now, I guarantee that in two years time, maximum, the music industry will be posting catastrophic losses. And guess what happens then? No one will get recorded. Independent labels are few and far between for one very good reason: it takes a fucking lot of money to make a good recording. (Granted, most of the stuff that gets recorded these days by major labels is utter shit, both musically and acoustically, but that is a different issue. Plenty of labels, particularly classic ones, release good quality recordings.)
Radio is not free. Radio pays royalties for every single track they air, so the comparison with radio is ludicrous. They finance this by airing hours of advertisements (except NPR, who finance their existence by begging for money from listeners 4 times a year).
Finally, I sincerely hope that record stores do not disappear from the face of the earth. Speaking as a music lover, I'll say that lossy compression codecs suck. I dislike the MP3 standard, because the quality loss, for me, is unacceptable. I find that the only MP3s remotely listenable to are ones I make myself, encoded at 192kbps or more. And even so they do not match the quality of CDs or MDs, let alone vinyl or DAT. It will be a sad day when everyone moves to recording stuff as MP3s, or Ogg Vorbis, or whatever the latest and greatest codec is, and physical media designed for genuine high fidelity is abandoned.
Sorry about the long rant, but the article was sufficiently inflammatory that I had to get this out. Fortunately I have the karma to spare for the inevitable bashing it's going to take :)
During the trial, did you make any arguments that brought up the issue of the MPAA acting as a monopoly in the case of their outright control of how the DVD standard can be played back?
I'm not quite sure how any of this is on-topic, but I feel like ranting, so here goes:
That may be so, except that in the case of IT, you don't end up simply reinvesting 100% of your productivity gains. The reality of what happened when people started moving to computerized environments is less rosy: once all the secretaries that kept paper records were fired, they had to be replaced with a veritable army of system administrators, database administrators, programmers, and sundry (collectively named Information Technology, or perhaps Enterprise Technology). (Here sundry refers to those people who still don't know what a mouse is and purport to work on all sorts of ``important projects''---scary, but very common.)
That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the proliferation of computers has taken us, even as we are still far far far away from a paperless office. Computers are so fickle and unreliable and require so much maintenance that they cannot replace humans for doing menial tasks. At best they can complement, and in the case of corporate computer use, they necessitated hiring thousands more people (in a large firm) to replace the hundreds that computers were meant to replace. Computers also necessitated that technology budgets of fundamentally non-technology companies skyrocketed.
The bottom line is that the technology revolution has done nothing to slash enterprise costs; in fact, it has done the opposite. And it will continue doing so until computers become self-sufficient, or at least reliable enough to set themselves up and then be left alone (which I certainly don't forsee happening anytime soon).
I don't quite see where you found that Deutsche Grammophon (or whatever it's a subsidiary of) isn't making classical music any longer. I buy a couple of DG CDs a month, including some new releases (as in July 2000). They most definitely are releasing new stuff, including some under their Archiv Produktion sublabel.
As other people have pointed out, Ani DiFranco's label is independent. Also, if you're into Celtic music, Loreena McKennit's label, Quinlan Road is independent as well...
To people who recommend looking for overseas labels, I must note that a lot of foreign music is distributed through RIAA-affiliated labels. For example, Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical music label, distributes in the US through Universal Classics.
All that said, I think that boycotting the RIAA because it's trying to shut down a pure piracy operation like Napster is ludicrous... The RIAA deserves a boycott for pushing Britney Spears, 'NSync, and the Backstreet Boys to the top...
I just hope that this project includes some security considerations. Otherwise it's just all about writing a fabulous tool for virus-writing. Imagine a nice attachment in your fancy integrated mail-reader with scripting enabled that says ``Run me!'' and then proceeds to trash your home directory. Tres uncool.
Remember that all of this will (unfortunately) propagate to some idiot-user's desktop sooner or later. And that user's files will get trashed---at which point everyone will start screaming that Linux/*BSD/whatever is insecure, has virus issues, was overhyped as being immune, etc.
I am not saying that there is no place for scripting-enabled applications. But a casual perusal of the project's web page did not reveal any information about what the authors are doing to build security into their app. Not good.
One big theme I notice in all the comments on this topic: Functional languages didn't take off because there are (were) no good implementations.
Wrong.
I will speak only about Common Lisp and its direct predecessors, because of all the functional languages I know it is the most flexible and useful for real-life development.
In the 1970s and 1980s there were Lisp Machines. Read up on them sometime---I claim that they were the most advanced and powerful workstations of their time. They had graphical development tools and environments that were mere dreams in the minds of other programmers at the time. They had hardware specialized to run Lisp, and they did so very, very well. Lisp Machines (Symbolics et al.) went out of fashion at around the time when general-purpose hardware began to pick up a lot of momentum and the personal computer began to gather popularity.
Their place was taken by implementations of Lisp running on workstation-class computers. Digital, Sun, IBM, and HP boxes all had third-party Lisp implementations. Most of these implementations are alive today, and available for most UNIXes, as well as Windows and MacOS. These would be Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL, and Xanalys' (formerly Harlequin) LispWorks. Both are robust and powerful. In fact, well-written Lisp will outperform comparable C code with either of those compilers. The real issue here is that there are no free Lisp implementations that compare to the commercial offerings in quality and ease of use. There are CMUCL and CLISP, but neither holds a candle to ACL or LispWorks, for example.
The lack of popularity of functional languages stems mainly from ignorance. As several other people have pointed out, it takes some effort to learn the paradigm, and most people, even those with CS degrees, do not choose to make that effort. Lisp hackers tend to have a strong background in language theory and other topics too complicated for the average ``geek'' whose competence ends at some Perl shopping cart script.
I don't understand the author's argument that some third party to whom the GPLd software is distributed is not privy to the contract. He says that some recipient of the software may not agree with the terms of the GPL. However, the user does agree to the license by using the software, correct? How is agreeing to the GPL as the terms by which software is distributed different from agreeing to the terms of some click-wrap agreement made by Microsoft or Adobe?
I do not understand why the lawyers make a distinction between these two end-user agreements:
In the case of GPLd code, everyone who uses it is privy to the agreement. The only difference between the case of Microsoft selling to the consumer and the FSF distributing software is that (legally) only Microsoft is allowed to distribute its stuff, whereas anyone can distribute GPLd code.
Of course intra-state commerce is taxed. Here in New York State, for example, the tax is something like 8.5%. Some goods are exempt.
The deal with the Internet tax moratorium is that there is no Internet tax. In other words, if Congress were to decide to institute one, then purchases over the Internet would be taxed simply because they were made over the Internet. This would be in addition to any other sales taxes.
The original poster confused this with thinking that all Internet purchases were automatically exempt from sales taxes. This is not true. Buying over the Internet is like buying over a phone: if you're in the same state as your customer, you pay, and if you're in different states, then interstate commerce laws apply (i.e., no sales tax).
What do you mean by program invariants and proofs? If you are talking about proofs of correctness, then Lisp should be right up your alley. It's relatively easy to write up a rigorous proof of an algorithm (e.g., quicksort), which is completely impossible in an imperative language like C.
Oh, and BTW, in Lisp you don't usually have to deal with the sort of C nonsense you pointed out before.
Which isn't to say C doesn't have a place---it most certainly does, in systems programming---but the fact remains that it's ridiculously hard and timeconsuming to do all the idiotic bookkeeping it requires for application programming.
Good job, IBM. It's wonderful that support is so forthcoming. Though naturally, when someone says ``available for Linux,'' they really mean ``available for Intel Linux.''
Users of all other Alpha Linux are screwed. PowerPC Linux. UltraSPARC Linux.
Oh well, that's the real world, isn't it? It'd be nice if there at least was some source code to play with on other architectures. But that, naturally, isn't forthcoming.
Flamebait Material Ahead
Slashdotters know everything there is to know about psychology when it comes to writing about video games! Hey, Jon Katz writes that the instances of violent crime have gone down instead of up as the popularity of violent games increased! Hey, there must be a correlation!
Bullshit.
On average, /. readers know next to nothing about anything except computers. A cool shopping cart CGI script? Easy. Perl poetry? Easy! A raytracer? Maybe not that easy, but doable. A relationship? Forget it! So why do people all of a sudden think they are experts in a social science? Face it---the vast majority of this audience is not.
Numerous studies in the field have shown that there exists an undeniable correlation between viewed violence and acts of violence. I know about the criticism about cause and effect. Studies have been performed that do indeed check that correlation. This is exactly the sort of thing controlled lab experiments are for. In 1961, Albert Bandura (et al.) found that preschool children were more likely to attack an inflated doll after watching an aggressive adult model than after watching a nonaggressive model. More recently, a 1988 study (Schutte et al.) found that children are more likely to hit another child after playing Karateka than after playing Jungle Hunt (a nonviolent game). Wood et al. (1991) show that exposure to aggressive models increases aggression.
I wish I could post links to the studies above, but they are not recent enough to be archived anywhere I know of on-line (at least free of charge---I'm sure most university libraries will have these articles in both paper and electronic form).
Folks, I know that no one here wants to believe that Quake causes anyone to kill. I play Quake, and I strongly suspect that it will never cause me to pick up a gun and blast everyone in sight. We are not talking about individuals here. We are talking about trends, i.e., average kids will on average be more inclined to hit someone after playing a game of deathmatch. Let's face it and stop denying this simple fact. Most /. readers strongly believe that game violence is OK, but hopefully most people here are intelligent enough to realize that the intensity of a belief should not be confused with its validity.
Sources
Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575--582
Wood, W., Wong, F. Y., & Chachere, J. G. (1991). Effects of media violence on viewer's aggression in unconstrained social interaction. Psychological Bulletin, 109, 371--383
Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Post-Gorden , J.C., & Rodasta, A. L. (1988). Effects of playing videogames on children's aggressive and other behaviors. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18, 454--460
Warning: Flamebait material ahead.
I am, as usual, stunned at Slashdot. These are the people who are privacy freaks, I mean a lot of people here are all for encrypting every little byte of data on their drives. The sheer number of venomous comments directed at ``Big Brother,'' the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, Congress, corporations, or whatever else Jon Katz decided ``threatens geekdom'' leaves me amazed.
But a lot of people are huge fans of JenniCam! Seems like a huge privacy violation. Granted she's doing it voluntarily, but still---we never want anyone spying on out private lives, no sir, absolutely not! But spying on other people's lives? Hehe. Sounds like fun, to all the voyerism fetishists in this audience. Everyone else's privacy can go to hell.
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned.
A reason that ``academic'' languages don't make it out of academia? The reality of the situation is that many many people just bought into C++. They were used to programming in C---a good language for low-level work---and they said, ``Oh! A C-like object-oriented language! Cool!'' Most so-called academic languages are purely academic simply because they are only research projects in language theory or implementation. They are not designed for production use. Such is not the case with Eiffel or Common Lisp.
Your example of Pascal is completely out of context. Pascal was designed purely as a teaching language. It was never intended for production code. It was not an academic research language. And Pascal is still a hundred times better for teaching beginners than C++. The fact that damn near every school in the US teaches C++ as an introductory CS class is absolutely criminal.
Anyway, I will simply address your other arguments one by one. First, what exactly do you mean by a language not telling me what to do? C++ is pretty damn restrictive in my book. Sure, it lets you manipulate pointers all you want---but is this real freedom? Seems to me real freedom would be a mechanism like anonymous functions and closures.
Second, are you kidding? 65% of all software bugs are due go memory leaks, and writing code in C++ is one fool-proof way to fall victim to this rule. (This is actually is problem with C, but as long as some wonderful designer like Stroustrup was working on improving C, he might as well have built in garbage collection.) If you want a language that encourages fast development, you cannot beat Lisp. Period. Many major projects are first prototyped in Lisp just to get something working off the ground fast, and then their OS interface parts are usually re-written in C (mainly because of the lack of user interface libraries). If you want a more concrete example, AutoCAD and Mathematica's internals are written in Lisp. Same with Emacs. I myself was amazed at a sample program included with Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp, a fully-functional ray tracer. It was fairly limited, of course, but I wrote a simple ray tracer about a year ago, and it was ten times the length of the Common Lisp implementation.
If your statement referred to execution speed, then there are numerous studies that show that properly optimized Lisp with a good compiler matches, and in some cases exceeds, C's execution speed.
Finally, if you actually bothered to read the critique I linked to in my original post, you would have seen that Ian's critique had nothing to do with changing C++. It's pretty obvious that Stroustrup will defend his bad design decisions to his dying day, and Ian was merely pointing out the defects.
Quite honestly, though the interview is obviously humorous in nature, the criticisms of C++ in it are all too accurate. I have programmed in C and C++, and it is far easier to hack objects into C (which is what GTK+ does marvelously) than to use the so-called object-oriented features of C++. Granted, one could also use a language that actually _is_ object-oriented, like Java or Common Lisp instead.
But enough of my ranting. Check out this critique of C++ from the point of view of a computer scientist very well-versed in programming languages.
Quite honestly, why?! Why does everyone who posted on this thread insist that Linux must be for the masses, that my grandmother must be able to use it, and that it must supplant every other operating environment? What is the gain?
Don't get me wrong. I like UNIX systems. I use *BSD on my servers, I use Linux on my desktop, and I am probably going to spend some time playing with HURD in the near future. But I honestly don't see why we need to convert the masses.
Do you think the masses give a damn about conceptual theory like Open Source (or Free Software or whatever you want to call it)? No! I guarantee that if you talk to the average buyer at CompUSA, they will have no idea that they are paying for Windows 95/98/2000 separately from the computer. I have yet to see a single vendor (barring on-line retailers) separately say to the customer, ``oh yeah, that laptop is $2500, and $150 of that goes to Microsoft.'' So the argument that Linux is ``free'' holds not water, not only from the ideological point of view, but from the practical point of view of the consumer, as well.
So my question is, why cast pearls before swine? You hopefully all realize that we use Linux because it is technologically superior, and it makes our needs different from the needs of the average user, because the average user does not give a damn about technological superiority. For the techie crowd, the UNIX-based environment already offers everything that Windows ever did, and we like it better. (I've been typesetting documents in (La)TeX for years, I can also use to make slides, there were spreadsheets like oleo for years, databases are taken care of by MySQL, Postgre, or Sybase and Oracle if you're willing to pay...) For John Q. User, Windows is exactly what the doctor ordered.
The UNIX user interface right now is exactly what it should be. A good command line, the best of any OS that I have ever seen, and a damn good window system (X). That's really all that's necessary---a window system. Let's face it: I'm sure most UNIX users mainly use X to have a bunch of xterms on our displays. I toss GNOME in for the extra eye-candy and to have a better mail notify program than xbiff around. I quite honestly don't give a damn about drag-and-drop and all the other excess baggage that people seem to be clamoring for ``so my mother can use it.''
We all think we are an elite crowd because we are UNIX users. So why the blazes are so many of us trying so desperately to change that?
Star Office is released under a license Sun claims is Open Source, correct? I am well aware that it does not really meet the standards of Open Source software, but in theory Sun is supposed to make the source code available under their own license, correct?
So where is the source code? I use Linux on an Alpha platform and would like to run Star Office, if only to read the Word documents that people
tend to like mailing out these days. If the source was out there, I think compiling it would be trivial. However, a scan of Sun's site does not show it up anywhere obvious.
Anyone have an explanation?
The last paragraph really tells the story, doesn't it? Even if we lost this time, we are regrouping and will have a go at this again.
``Linux file- and Web-server performance appears to be bottlenecked in the operating system kernel, not in Samba or Apache. This was demonstrated best when the Red Hat engineers ran the Zeus Web server. Zeus performance topped out at about the same place as Apache, using fewer resources. The major performance problems are with the TCP stack, which is single threaded in the 2.2.x Linux kernels, and with large-grained kernel locks that degrade multiprocessor performance. The Linux community is addressing these performance problems and others in their 2.3.x kernel series.''
Let's keep up the good work and we can be sure that even if this benchmark is unfavorable, no one can really match the flexibility of the Open Source development model, and that even if we don't win now, there is always tomorrow.
I partially agree with this, and I am _not_ Christian. (As a matter of fact I am atheist, but that is beside the point.)
I completely agree that South Park is an inappropriate movie to take children to. I watched it with a couple of friends and was stunned at the number of kids (7 to 12) that came to see it with their parents. Most of the humor revolved around how many times the script contained the words ``fuck'' and ``shit.''
_However,_ the movie made several valid points. The quote from Kyle's mother that ``remember what the MPAA says: blood and violence are OK as long as no one uses naughty words'' was right on point. It is absolutely ridiculous that a movie is perfectly all right if it shows someone's head getting blown off, but is a social taboo if there is a glimpse of a nude human figure.
There is one important thing to say to that: _neither_ of these things is all right as far as showing the movie to little kids is concerned! I am not saying people grow up to become murderers and rapists because they watch violent movies. Nor am I advocating a strict age-limit for watching that type of film. However, the decision to watch or not watch these movies is something that should be made by the kids' parents. It is the parents who are responsible for what their kids turn out to be, and they had better start to learn to take responsibility.
In Katz's story, the parents _chose_ to let their kids watch that movie. That makes them far worse parents as far as I am concerned (that, and leaving them with a complete stranger who just lied to get them into a movie theater for no apparent reason), but it was their decision and the theater should not have had anything to do with it.