Umm, not sure which device you are talking about, but RIM950s get around a month per AA battery. I don't turn mine off at night either, it stays on 24/7.
I remember trying to get GnuStep to work a few months back. The code compiled pretty cleanly, and I played around a bit with the development framework for GNUStep (which is rather cool btw, makes writing build files for apps extremely clean, and ObjectiveC is an extremely nice language).
I just wish there was a better way of integrating GNUStep, KDE, and Gnome. I really think a concerted effort by all three teams to support a common base (common component interfaces, clipboard, look&feel configuration files) would be beneficial for all involved.
GNUStep brings with it a good, tried&true development framework.
KDE & Gnome are both more evolved, with more and better applications.
Getting these to work together would be a worthwhile proposition.
First of all: nicely written, Katz. The media, due to several factors (one of which is the ability to deliver news instantly and frequently) has been getting much more alarmist and irresponsible recently. This point either seems to be missed, ignored, or misconstrued by most people.
But perhaps this is not necessarily all bad. Hopefully, the mainstream media (which is generally seen as having a responsibility to deliver relavent and truthful news) will lose a bit of credibility in the eyes of the common person, due to crying wolf one too many times. I think American media has for a long time been reporting one-sided and skewed news. For example: "International news" in mainstream US media is a joke, usually focusing on a couple US-focused events that happen to occur outside of US borders. It's pathetic. So the media flushing their own credibility down the drain is not necessarily a bad thing.
Now, the question is, how much credibility will mainstream media lose in the eyes of the people, and will it be enough to cause any sort of change in the general perception of reported events?
I have a bit to comment on this. I've heard way too many people equate jobs where you get to do whatever you want, with jobs that are fun. Job enjoyability very little to do with a lot of the things tech guys harp about.
For me anyway, an funfactor of a job has very little to do with foosbal tables, or nerf guns, or anything like that. A job is enjoyable if I get to do work that's enjoyable. For the past few months, I've been working at an embedded tech company that's somewhat prosperous.
At the beginning of the term, the boss just came over, dropped a couple specification manuals on us (me, co-worker), and told us to implement it. That was cool. No micro-management - we went to him when we had questions or doubts. For starting from scratch, and not knowing the hardware or the codebase, we got a decent amount of work accomplished.
The answer to your question is YES. There are really nice, enjoyable jobs out there. Find a company that's doing interesting work - no, not the next e-business we're going to revolutionize the world with our web-frontend loss-leader 'solution' funded on venture capital and no chance of profit.
It's about the work man. I became a programmer because I love programming, because solving hard problems using logic (I love math too;)) makes me feel good.
So what sets you off? compilers? virtual machines? optimization? datbase? graphics? ai? infrastructure? app-coding? embedded systems? low-level?
There's tons of companies out there doing interesing stuff, that need good people to work on interesting problems. So find one and get in.
If you're not into your work, no amount of nerf playing will take away the fact that you don't enjoy your work - it just means you'll get less done, and be dead weight for your company and get fired, or not be fired (which indicates bad management and that the company is headed nowhere fast).
-Laxitive
Taking a look at Raster's EVAS (Neon Genesis? Perhaps he's trying for GUI instrumentality) - it looks like a less ambitions version of Apples' DisplayPDF and NeXT's DisplayPS. Both of those systems go further than what raster suggests with evas.
Evas proposes "canvases" as core objects that store information about the state of a graphical object - so that when redrawing needs to be done, the graphics displayed by a window may be easily and quickly redrawn without the client application worrying about it.
This is exactly what DisplayPDF/PS does in a more elegant way. Postscript is a powerful complete (as in turing complete) language which is optimized to express the structure of graphical objects.
In the interview, Raster calls OSX "pretty". Either he doesn't know about Apple's display technology, or he doesn't want to comment on their system - which is very similar, and more advanced, than what he is suggesting with evas.
I think what you WANT to say was that Alicia Silverstone was great in Clueless, and that Reese Witherspoon was great in Election, and that Reese Witherspoon's version of Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless was great!
Thankfully, the dubbing on CB is actually passable.
But I'm still afraid of massive cuts that'll leave the show a bleeding gutter carcass. The first episode features drug trade, and a seemingly pregnant woman shooting her own husband (fiancee? boyfriend?) in the head before being killed herself.
Redeye, toxic mushrooms, crossdressers, hermaphrodites, blood, little boys (I know, I know, he's not a little boy dammit) that kill, death, organized crime syndicates, sword+throat and sword+eyes action, cigarettes. And they're gonna fuck up the ending I BET, I mean, how can the hero not live happily ever after?!?!
It's low on the explicit sex factor, so that may tender it some goodwill from Toonami.
But remember people: Cowboy Bebop has violence where people end up getting hurt, and where several people die.
North American media only tolerates violence where no appreciable consequence comes of it. A million bullets are fired, a thousand bombs set off, but everyone comes out alive in the end (and really, isn't that the way Jesus would want it?).
Wow, the opponents of the GPL are becoming extremely vocal.
This is my view of what the GPL does, and why it does it, and why that is good:
The GPL is constructed on one basic principle: all software should be Free (note capital F). Now, I dont necessarily agree with that principle, but that is RMS's view of software - the view from which he designed the GPL. This is, in some ways, the 'natural state' of software. If there were no software copyright laws, then when a person bought a piece of software, they would be able to freely modify and redistribute it. However, in the current capitalist state, that is not possible - because software copyright laws restrict people from doing what they would be able to do quite naturally.
The GPL, then, is designed to create an island of software that obeys the rule of the 'natural state' inside the current system by using copyright laws. And the GPL is designed such that this island of software will always remain free, and never grow smaller.
Regardless of wether you disagree with RMS's ideal of a natural state of software or not, you can still agree with the GPL - if you beleive that free software should remain free. This is what the GPL ensures. If someone has taken their time and produced a useful software work and released it under the GPL, then they can be assured that their work, and modifications to their work, will remain free, and that it will continue to benefit the free software community.
Other licenses (such as BSD) allow software that was free, to be used and extended in ways that in no way benefits (and perhaps even harms) the free software community. Others can use the BSD works, without giving anything to free software in return. In essence, it allows greedy individuals to stand on the shoulders of free software, pick the high-hanging fruit, and walk away with it, whistling blithely. I dont like that.
I think you are wrong here, and fall into a common trap - the "technical" trap. You assume that any law is true to it's fullest technical interpretation, and that anything that can be interpreted as meeting those technical considerations, is affected by the law.
But laws are human, and are meant to be interpreted by a human, and not a robot. A human (judge) can take a look at a situation, and make value judgements about the validity of the law or not.
A good example is the Napster case - the judge decided that Napster was illegal because it was aiding in piracy. But all Napster is, is an online opt-in search engine/database. Does that mean that all search engines are now illegal, because they too can be used for piracy? No - because as humans, we can see the difference between Napster and search engines, even though someone can make a claim that Napster == Search engine.
Likewise, it's kind of obvious that this product pretty much relies on GPL code to be useful. Perhaps it offers some token functionality without the GPL code, but, that functionality is pretty irrelavent. A human can take a look at it, and make a value judgement on the situation.
Laws are not interpreted by turing machines (nor are they expressed in lambda calculus) - and that's a very good thing indeed.
I think you're underestimating the popularity of python. Python still has to ramp up a decent 'community module' system like perl has. Check out 'the Vaults of Parnassus' (google is your friend). It has not existed for too long, but there's a good set of useful modules there.
The fact is, when you see python, there is'nt "one magic application" that suddenly jumps out as "the perfect thing" to use python for. I think that's because sucn an application does not exist. Python is a bit like C - it's an extremely good general purpose programming language that does a lot of things well.
C is a simple, efficient, fast and portable low-level language for doing generic system programming.
Python is a simple, object oriented, modular, clean language for doing generic application programming.
Have you ever tried to do a large-scale project in perl? Something with a few ccomplicated nested data structures, a multiple threads modifying the same data model, some serious io handling? All of that rolled into one farm fresh breakfast unit. It's hard to do in perl - because perl was not designed with such uses in mind. It'd be LONG and annoying in C, because BSD sockets are a pain to work with, and C generally makes many things long and tedious (if you want to do them "right" anyway). C++ would be quite a bit better than C, but you'd still have to deal with the C system APIs, which will still be annoying. Java would probably give you quick development cycles, but nowhere near as quick as python.
I consider python as lying somewhere in between scripting languages and compiled languages. It lets you do structured programming and gives you a powerful OO structure and modules galore, but keeps the syntax simple and clean. To me, it's a lot closer to Java than Python (this stand is supported a bit by Jython).
It fulfills the 'glue' properties more than perl does for me. I see perl as sed with better syntax and modules (and I like perl, and use it quite a bit, dont get me wrong). Python is something you can use to quickly and painlessly write good, maintainable, modular, portable code.
I'm sure many other people are thinking the exact thing that you are - to do a feature map from GNOME to KDE and vice versa. Come up with a combined model, where people could target either GNOME or KDE by writing to one.
It'd be nice if the component models could be made to work together as well, so that people could use the best of both worlds - but that would require some serious cooperation (I think.. anyway).
Uh. All science is not computer science.
The article essentially says that a lot of scientific fields rely on massive computations performed by computers.
Massive computations != computer science.
CS has a lot more in common with logic and math, and formal theories of computation. Fundamentally, it has nothing to do with vanilla number crunching.
Following the lead of this article, one might as well say "all science is engineering", because nearly all the sciences rely on well-engineered pieces of equipment to test their theories, gather their data, and a myriad of other things.
I think a better way of phrasing it would be that 'computers have become a fundamental part of modern science (and modern life for most of the western world)'
-Laxitive
Maximum Linux was actually a pretty bad magazine.
It didn't really cover anything in technical details, it was full of product reviews, and none of the articles really grabbed your gut. They had neither good social nor good technical commentary. Overall, it was a pretty mediocre, and not worth your money.
I remember picking up an early copy of MaximumLinux, and reading a column by this gal named Mae Ling Mak. I read the first 3 or 4 paragraphs of her article before putting the magazine down in disgust - it was such a fucking piece of groupie crap, it made me embarassed to even be holding the magazine in my hands.
The only hard-copy Linux mag that I've run across that really covers the stuff, in technical detail, and does articles on interesting issues, is Linux Journal. That mag is worth all of your money - it reminds me of the old PC mags before they all turned pansy and product-oriented (does anybody remember the old BYTE magazines? They used to ROCK, had programming articles, assembly code, and all sorts of cool mojo. Nowadays, BYTE is just another ad-filled shit-for-news publication).
Anyway, dont mourn the loss of MaximumLinux, pick up a copy of Linux Journal. They've been covering Linux from the start, and they're still as good as their first print.
-Laxitive
The thing is, there are cases when speeding outweighs the cost of not speeding. A good example is a dying person who is being driven to the hospital, or a pregnant woman about to give birth. In certain cases, you want to let people speed, because they have justifiable reasons for doing so. Putting a mandatory enforceable limit on how fast cars can go is bad.
Even if they think about doing this, a better idea would be to not restrict the car's speed, but use the tracking information to deliver speeding tickets without having traffic cops posted all over the place.
The author is restating an extremely valid point that is realized by most decent programmers: use a language where it is appropriate.
I learned python before perl, and thought it was one of the coolest languages around (still do), and for about a year, did all my scripting in it. Then I had to debug some perl code, and doing so, managed to teach myself some perl. After learnign a bit more, I said to myself "hey, perl rocks!", and then proceeded to script solely in perl for the next 6 months or so.
Then I started noticing how each had advantages in certain domains. Doing any sort of work with serious data structures in perl is annoying. Perl's pseudo-typing, and automatic flattening of lists (because lists can only hold scalars.. dontcha know), really makes it annoying to handle heirarchical data. You have to start using references, which makes code ugly and hard to read. Python is much more suited for that sort of thing.
On the other hand, doing stuff like traversing the the filesystem quickly, munging text, ad-hoc parsing, is extremely sweet in perl. Python is just too verbose when it comes to those kind of things. My home machine is littered with perl scripts that automate administrative tasks.
Use a language where it's fit, and dont take it personally when people point out that a language is not fit for particular task (they're usually right).
Voice over IP is cool stuff.
The thing is, unless inet protocols change, there are some serious problems with it. The current courtesy system of the internet makes TCP back off when it notices that high priority UDP packets want space.
This could cause some problems. A friend who uses VoIP said once that since he is on a subnet which sees a lot of traffic, he initially gets delays of up to 2 seconds for his datagrams to get where they are going.. but as TCP notices the UDP packets, and backs off, he gets a solid stream.
Any decent hacker will notice potential to use and abuse this feature to get priority bandwidth.
Should VoIP be regulated because it 'infringes' on traditional telcos? No.. if the telcos become irrelavent, then they become irrelavent. It's happened before, and it will happen in the future.
Should VoIP be investigated further, because the 'polite' nature of the internet allows possible abuse of bandwidth resources? yes
-Laxitive
From the article:
"
More recently, the plan has been attacked by Richard Stallman, a pioneer in the "open-source" movement to develop free software in collaboration, and by Red Hat and other companies that sell or support Linux, a computer operating system that is available at no charge on the Internet.
"
Kind of illustrates why Stallman is so picky about distinction between 'open-source' and 'free software'.
Free software > Open Source. Free software != Open source.
Both Vyper and Stackless Python offer some extremely cool features that I would definitely like to see in CPython.
Python 2.0 saw the introduction of assignment-operators ( +=, -=, *=, etc.), and list comprehensions (a quick steal from Haskell). Both of these are cool, but there are still nagging usability problems:
The fact that lambdas are fundamentally broken because you cannot do anything really powerful with them. Adding lexical scoping to python would alleviate this problem, and let me do nifty 'map' and 'filter' stuff in python a LOT easier.
And continuations are damned powerful. Right now you can hack up a semblance of continuations using the fact that you can divorce instance-methods from their instances, and use them as normal methods, which means methods can have a static state, and use a 'if/elif/else' statement block to choose a continuation.. but hat is a horrible hack.
Python is an excellent language, but the cool thing about it is that there are so many obvious things that need to be fixed, it can only get better:)
You might want to look at StegFS.
It's a stegagnographic filesystem. It supports multiple "levels" of security, and the nifty thing is that nobody can tell exactly how many levels of encrypted filesystems there actually are. I.e., you can have 3 levels of encryption, and even if the first level is broken, there is no way for the cracker to get to the other levels, or even find out exactly how many levels of encryption there are.
Check out stegfs by clicking on this link .
-Laxitive
Hmm, just a comment on the Linux debian potato release, which I downloaded and tried to get working.
Most of the stuff is written in python, and god is it badly set up. There's obvious bugs that make the system completely non-working. Shell scripts that look for executable.py files where there are none. Python modules that "import" themselves into their own namespace, and other modules that import the module and try to call it as a function.
Goddamn, this code sucks. I'm trying to get this thing to work, and I've already fixed about 20 spelling errors which cause calls to functions that dont exist all over the code.
This is so schweet. I've heard that you can debug solaris kernel while you're running under it. I bet this kind of thing in Linux offers many possibilities for seeing exactly what's going on inside the black box when something goes wrong. Too nifty.
Not to mention the fact that her teacher teaches C (you can see printf statements on the board when he is teaching).
And, even cooler, when Lain is browsing through code on her little hand-held computer, you can see that it's actually lisp code. I managed to make out a couple of 'defun's and a LOT of parenthesis. It wasn't scheme, but it was still cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, not sure which device you are talking about, but RIM950s get around a month per AA battery. I don't turn mine off at night either, it stays on 24/7.
Disclaimer: I work at RIM.
-Laxitive
I remember trying to get GnuStep to work a few months back. The code compiled pretty cleanly, and I played around a bit with the development framework for GNUStep (which is rather cool btw, makes writing build files for apps extremely clean, and ObjectiveC is an extremely nice language).
I just wish there was a better way of integrating GNUStep, KDE, and Gnome. I really think a concerted effort by all three teams to support a common base (common component interfaces, clipboard, look&feel configuration files) would be beneficial for all involved.
GNUStep brings with it a good, tried&true development framework.
KDE & Gnome are both more evolved, with more and better applications.
Getting these to work together would be a worthwhile proposition.
-Laxitive
First of all: nicely written, Katz. The media, due to several factors (one of which is the ability to deliver news instantly and frequently) has been getting much more alarmist and irresponsible recently. This point either seems to be missed, ignored, or misconstrued by most people.
But perhaps this is not necessarily all bad. Hopefully, the mainstream media (which is generally seen as having a responsibility to deliver relavent and truthful news) will lose a bit of credibility in the eyes of the common person, due to crying wolf one too many times. I think American media has for a long time been reporting one-sided and skewed news. For example: "International news" in mainstream US media is a joke, usually focusing on a couple US-focused events that happen to occur outside of US borders. It's pathetic. So the media flushing their own credibility down the drain is not necessarily a bad thing.
Now, the question is, how much credibility will mainstream media lose in the eyes of the people, and will it be enough to cause any sort of change in the general perception of reported events?
-Laxitive
About 'Sympathy for the Devil' being dropped:
I think the title may have been a bit too risque. Also, it involves what at least -looks- like a kid in some violent material.
It's a pity though.. the harmonica music in that episode is just sweetness.
-Laxitive
I have a bit to comment on this. I've heard way too many people equate jobs where you get to do whatever you want, with jobs that are fun. Job enjoyability very little to do with a lot of the things tech guys harp about.
;)) makes me feel good.
For me anyway, an funfactor of a job has very little to do with foosbal tables, or nerf guns, or anything like that. A job is enjoyable if I get to do work that's enjoyable. For the past few months, I've been working at an embedded tech company that's somewhat prosperous.
At the beginning of the term, the boss just came over, dropped a couple specification manuals on us (me, co-worker), and told us to implement it. That was cool. No micro-management - we went to him when we had questions or doubts. For starting from scratch, and not knowing the hardware or the codebase, we got a decent amount of work accomplished.
The answer to your question is YES. There are really nice, enjoyable jobs out there. Find a company that's doing interesting work - no, not the next e-business we're going to revolutionize the world with our web-frontend loss-leader 'solution' funded on venture capital and no chance of profit.
It's about the work man. I became a programmer because I love programming, because solving hard problems using logic (I love math too
So what sets you off? compilers? virtual machines? optimization? datbase? graphics? ai? infrastructure? app-coding? embedded systems? low-level?
There's tons of companies out there doing interesing stuff, that need good people to work on interesting problems. So find one and get in.
If you're not into your work, no amount of nerf playing will take away the fact that you don't enjoy your work - it just means you'll get less done, and be dead weight for your company and get fired, or not be fired (which indicates bad management and that the company is headed nowhere fast).
-Laxitive
Taking a look at Raster's EVAS (Neon Genesis? Perhaps he's trying for GUI instrumentality) - it looks like a less ambitions version of Apples' DisplayPDF and NeXT's DisplayPS. Both of those systems go further than what raster suggests with evas.
Evas proposes "canvases" as core objects that store information about the state of a graphical object - so that when redrawing needs to be done, the graphics displayed by a window may be easily and quickly redrawn without the client application worrying about it.
This is exactly what DisplayPDF/PS does in a more elegant way. Postscript is a powerful complete (as in turing complete) language which is optimized to express the structure of graphical objects.
In the interview, Raster calls OSX "pretty". Either he doesn't know about Apple's display technology, or he doesn't want to comment on their system - which is very similar, and more advanced, than what he is suggesting with evas.
-Laxitive
I think what you WANT to say was that Alicia Silverstone was great in Clueless, and that Reese Witherspoon was great in Election, and that Reese Witherspoon's version of Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless was great!
See? Much clearer.
-Laxitive
Thankfully, the dubbing on CB is actually passable.
But I'm still afraid of massive cuts that'll leave the show a bleeding gutter carcass. The first episode features drug trade, and a seemingly pregnant woman shooting her own husband (fiancee? boyfriend?) in the head before being killed herself.
Redeye, toxic mushrooms, crossdressers, hermaphrodites, blood, little boys (I know, I know, he's not a little boy dammit) that kill, death, organized crime syndicates, sword+throat and sword+eyes action, cigarettes. And they're gonna fuck up the ending I BET, I mean, how can the hero not live happily ever after?!?!
It's low on the explicit sex factor, so that may tender it some goodwill from Toonami.
But remember people: Cowboy Bebop has violence where people end up getting hurt, and where several people die.
North American media only tolerates violence where no appreciable consequence comes of it. A million bullets are fired, a thousand bombs set off, but everyone comes out alive in the end (and really, isn't that the way Jesus would want it?).
-Laxitive
Wow, the opponents of the GPL are becoming extremely vocal.
This is my view of what the GPL does, and why it does it, and why that is good:
The GPL is constructed on one basic principle: all software should be Free (note capital F). Now, I dont necessarily agree with that principle, but that is RMS's view of software - the view from which he designed the GPL. This is, in some ways, the 'natural state' of software. If there were no software copyright laws, then when a person bought a piece of software, they would be able to freely modify and redistribute it. However, in the current capitalist state, that is not possible - because software copyright laws restrict people from doing what they would be able to do quite naturally.
The GPL, then, is designed to create an island of software that obeys the rule of the 'natural state' inside the current system by using copyright laws. And the GPL is designed such that this island of software will always remain free, and never grow smaller.
Regardless of wether you disagree with RMS's ideal of a natural state of software or not, you can still agree with the GPL - if you beleive that free software should remain free. This is what the GPL ensures. If someone has taken their time and produced a useful software work and released it under the GPL, then they can be assured that their work, and modifications to their work, will remain free, and that it will continue to benefit the free software community.
Other licenses (such as BSD) allow software that was free, to be used and extended in ways that in no way benefits (and perhaps even harms) the free software community. Others can use the BSD works, without giving anything to free software in return. In essence, it allows greedy individuals to stand on the shoulders of free software, pick the high-hanging fruit, and walk away with it, whistling blithely. I dont like that.
-Laxitive
I think you are wrong here, and fall into a common trap - the "technical" trap. You assume that any law is true to it's fullest technical interpretation, and that anything that can be interpreted as meeting those technical considerations, is affected by the law.
But laws are human, and are meant to be interpreted by a human, and not a robot. A human (judge) can take a look at a situation, and make value judgements about the validity of the law or not.
A good example is the Napster case - the judge decided that Napster was illegal because it was aiding in piracy. But all Napster is, is an online opt-in search engine/database. Does that mean that all search engines are now illegal, because they too can be used for piracy? No - because as humans, we can see the difference between Napster and search engines, even though someone can make a claim that Napster == Search engine.
Likewise, it's kind of obvious that this product pretty much relies on GPL code to be useful. Perhaps it offers some token functionality without the GPL code, but, that functionality is pretty irrelavent. A human can take a look at it, and make a value judgement on the situation.
Laws are not interpreted by turing machines (nor are they expressed in lambda calculus) - and that's a very good thing indeed.
-Laxitive
I think you're underestimating the popularity of python. Python still has to ramp up a decent 'community module' system like perl has. Check out 'the Vaults of Parnassus' (google is your friend). It has not existed for too long, but there's a good set of useful modules there.
The fact is, when you see python, there is'nt "one magic application" that suddenly jumps out as "the perfect thing" to use python for. I think that's because sucn an application does not exist. Python is a bit like C - it's an extremely good general purpose programming language that does a lot of things well.
C is a simple, efficient, fast and portable low-level language for doing generic system programming.
Python is a simple, object oriented, modular, clean language for doing generic application programming.
Have you ever tried to do a large-scale project in perl? Something with a few ccomplicated nested data structures, a multiple threads modifying the same data model, some serious io handling? All of that rolled into one farm fresh breakfast unit. It's hard to do in perl - because perl was not designed with such uses in mind. It'd be LONG and annoying in C, because BSD sockets are a pain to work with, and C generally makes many things long and tedious (if you want to do them "right" anyway). C++ would be quite a bit better than C, but you'd still have to deal with the C system APIs, which will still be annoying. Java would probably give you quick development cycles, but nowhere near as quick as python.
I consider python as lying somewhere in between scripting languages and compiled languages. It lets you do structured programming and gives you a powerful OO structure and modules galore, but keeps the syntax simple and clean. To me, it's a lot closer to Java than Python (this stand is supported a bit by Jython).
It fulfills the 'glue' properties more than perl does for me. I see perl as sed with better syntax and modules (and I like perl, and use it quite a bit, dont get me wrong). Python is something you can use to quickly and painlessly write good, maintainable, modular, portable code.
-Laxitive
It's a good idea too.
I'm sure many other people are thinking the exact thing that you are - to do a feature map from GNOME to KDE and vice versa. Come up with a combined model, where people could target either GNOME or KDE by writing to one.
It'd be nice if the component models could be made to work together as well, so that people could use the best of both worlds - but that would require some serious cooperation (I think.. anyway).
Laxitive
Uh. All science is not computer science. The article essentially says that a lot of scientific fields rely on massive computations performed by computers. Massive computations != computer science. CS has a lot more in common with logic and math, and formal theories of computation. Fundamentally, it has nothing to do with vanilla number crunching. Following the lead of this article, one might as well say "all science is engineering", because nearly all the sciences rely on well-engineered pieces of equipment to test their theories, gather their data, and a myriad of other things. I think a better way of phrasing it would be that 'computers have become a fundamental part of modern science (and modern life for most of the western world)' -Laxitive
Maximum Linux was actually a pretty bad magazine. It didn't really cover anything in technical details, it was full of product reviews, and none of the articles really grabbed your gut. They had neither good social nor good technical commentary. Overall, it was a pretty mediocre, and not worth your money. I remember picking up an early copy of MaximumLinux, and reading a column by this gal named Mae Ling Mak. I read the first 3 or 4 paragraphs of her article before putting the magazine down in disgust - it was such a fucking piece of groupie crap, it made me embarassed to even be holding the magazine in my hands. The only hard-copy Linux mag that I've run across that really covers the stuff, in technical detail, and does articles on interesting issues, is Linux Journal. That mag is worth all of your money - it reminds me of the old PC mags before they all turned pansy and product-oriented (does anybody remember the old BYTE magazines? They used to ROCK, had programming articles, assembly code, and all sorts of cool mojo. Nowadays, BYTE is just another ad-filled shit-for-news publication). Anyway, dont mourn the loss of MaximumLinux, pick up a copy of Linux Journal. They've been covering Linux from the start, and they're still as good as their first print. -Laxitive
The thing is, there are cases when speeding outweighs the cost of not speeding. A good example is a dying person who is being driven to the hospital, or a pregnant woman about to give birth. In certain cases, you want to let people speed, because they have justifiable reasons for doing so. Putting a mandatory enforceable limit on how fast cars can go is bad.
Even if they think about doing this, a better idea would be to not restrict the car's speed, but use the tracking information to deliver speeding tickets without having traffic cops posted all over the place.
-Laxitive
The author is restating an extremely valid point that is realized by most decent programmers: use a language where it is appropriate.
I learned python before perl, and thought it was one of the coolest languages around (still do), and for about a year, did all my scripting in it. Then I had to debug some perl code, and doing so, managed to teach myself some perl. After learnign a bit more, I said to myself "hey, perl rocks!", and then proceeded to script solely in perl for the next 6 months or so.
Then I started noticing how each had advantages in certain domains. Doing any sort of work with serious data structures in perl is annoying. Perl's pseudo-typing, and automatic flattening of lists (because lists can only hold scalars.. dontcha know), really makes it annoying to handle heirarchical data. You have to start using references, which makes code ugly and hard to read. Python is much more suited for that sort of thing.
On the other hand, doing stuff like traversing the the filesystem quickly, munging text, ad-hoc parsing, is extremely sweet in perl. Python is just too verbose when it comes to those kind of things. My home machine is littered with perl scripts that automate administrative tasks.
Use a language where it's fit, and dont take it personally when people point out that a language is not fit for particular task (they're usually right).
-Laxitive
Voice over IP is cool stuff. The thing is, unless inet protocols change, there are some serious problems with it. The current courtesy system of the internet makes TCP back off when it notices that high priority UDP packets want space. This could cause some problems. A friend who uses VoIP said once that since he is on a subnet which sees a lot of traffic, he initially gets delays of up to 2 seconds for his datagrams to get where they are going.. but as TCP notices the UDP packets, and backs off, he gets a solid stream. Any decent hacker will notice potential to use and abuse this feature to get priority bandwidth. Should VoIP be regulated because it 'infringes' on traditional telcos? No.. if the telcos become irrelavent, then they become irrelavent. It's happened before, and it will happen in the future. Should VoIP be investigated further, because the 'polite' nature of the internet allows possible abuse of bandwidth resources? yes -Laxitive
From the article:
"
More recently, the plan has been attacked by Richard Stallman, a pioneer in the "open-source" movement to develop free software in collaboration, and by Red Hat and other companies that sell or support Linux, a computer operating system that is available at no charge on the Internet.
"
Kind of illustrates why Stallman is so picky about distinction between 'open-source' and 'free software'.
Free software > Open Source. Free software != Open source.
-Laxitive
Both Vyper and Stackless Python offer some extremely cool features that I would definitely like to see in CPython.
Python 2.0 saw the introduction of assignment-operators ( +=, -=, *=, etc.), and list comprehensions (a quick steal from Haskell). Both of these are cool, but there are still nagging usability problems:
The fact that lambdas are fundamentally broken because you cannot do anything really powerful with them. Adding lexical scoping to python would alleviate this problem, and let me do nifty 'map' and 'filter' stuff in python a LOT easier.
And continuations are damned powerful. Right now you can hack up a semblance of continuations using the fact that you can divorce instance-methods from their instances, and use them as normal methods, which means methods can have a static state, and use a 'if/elif/else' statement block to choose a continuation.. but hat is a horrible hack.
Python is an excellent language, but the cool thing about it is that there are so many obvious things that need to be fixed, it can only get better
-Laxitive
WHoops.. messed up the link specification. Should have previewed
go HERE
-Laxitive
You might want to look at StegFS. It's a stegagnographic filesystem. It supports multiple "levels" of security, and the nifty thing is that nobody can tell exactly how many levels of encrypted filesystems there actually are. I.e., you can have 3 levels of encryption, and even if the first level is broken, there is no way for the cracker to get to the other levels, or even find out exactly how many levels of encryption there are. Check out stegfs by clicking on this link . -Laxitive
Hmm, just a comment on the Linux debian potato release, which I downloaded and tried to get working.
.py files where there are none. Python modules that "import" themselves into their own namespace, and other modules that import the module and try to call it as a function.
Most of the stuff is written in python, and god is it badly set up. There's obvious bugs that make the system completely non-working. Shell scripts that look for executable
example:
SystemTest.py:
TransactionManager.TransactionManager(...)
TranscationManager.py:
import TransactionManager
does someone see a problem here?
Goddamn, this code sucks. I'm trying to get this thing to work, and I've already fixed about 20 spelling errors which cause calls to functions that dont exist all over the code.
-Laxitive
(Yes, I know it's misspelled. Whatever)
This is so schweet. I've heard that you can debug solaris kernel while you're running under it. I bet this kind of thing in Linux offers many possibilities for seeing exactly what's going on inside the black box when something goes wrong. Too nifty.
-Laxitive
(Yes, I do know it's spelled wrong)
Ah.. I dont get the faye obsession. It is quite obvious to see that HANDS DOWN, Ed is the coolest character in Bebop.
-Laxitive
Not to mention the fact that her teacher teaches C (you can see printf statements on the board when he is teaching).
And, even cooler, when Lain is browsing through code on her little hand-held computer, you can see that it's actually lisp code. I managed to make out a couple of 'defun's and a LOT of parenthesis. It wasn't scheme, but it was still cool.
-Laxitive