I just went to sprint's site, they offer 450 mins for $39.99, and their data rates are $39.99 for 40MB or $59.99 for unlimited. I'm near Atlanta, GA, so maybe it's just geography:(
Miguel has been a leader in several projects I've used a lot; first Midnight Commander, then Gnome, and now Mono, so I care about what he says (not that I agree with him on everything). He appears also as a reasonable guy, so I listen, and then make my own opinion.
Virtual desktops are also great for two other things:
1. Context switches !. I'm a prof. A student comes to ask me a question, I switch to an empty virtual desktop, open whatever programs we need, explain, solve etc; when I'm done, easily go back to whatever I was doing !
2. Doing several things at once. When I was doing my thesis research, I had one desktop for running the experiments, another one for Latex (writing the thesis), and another one for email, browsing etc. Can move to either one, work for an hour on something, switch to another one.
I think the main issue is that in Unix, we tend to use many different programs rather than an integrated suite, and the virtual desktops allow you to almost convert any set of programs into a suite:)
Actually, on many issues (Immigration and Abortion immediately come to my mind), you can get about 15% on either side; and many times they're not the same people for each issue:). If you consider the number of issues, it's probably closer to 90% (or 100?) who can't think rationally about at least one issue. So, what's your issue ?
After the government buys the machines, XO can't do a thing about them. And I think MS PR guys could find several ways to spin it so it looks good (assuming that people in US and Europe give a hoot about the countries these machines are going to:)
I don't think the price for a *legal* copy of Windows is 'below $1' anywhere in the world. And piracy studies usually take numbers out of thin air1. I don't know much about the third world, but I lived in Mexico; even 10 years ago, most of the business software was legal; of course, people pirated everything for their home machines.
That emulates OS, not all specific HW, so there may be (is?) a way for WinXP to distinguish from real HW, especially from XO HW. For example, VMWare will NOT run inside another VMWare VM.
I guess it depends on where you are:) I'm a college prof in Georgia; here we have HOPE scholarships that cover full tuition at public colleges (if not, tuition is about $1800/semester for full time, and won't increase after 12 credit-hours), plus some extra for books (probably not enough). You can definitely live on 1K/mo, which you can get even working at McDonalds. So, in GA, many people can get a full education for much less than those $30K (and if you're worried about cost, consider AP and CLEP exams, and community college classes, which are way cheaper)
In Lisp, your programs are just lists and look like it, so it makes it much easier. I don't remember how it was in Logo, but I assume it basically helps you with the tokenizer, but parsing is still a pain. In Lips your code is incredibly easy to parse.
Smalltalk is alive !! (I'll feed the troll :)
on
Forty Years of LOGO
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· Score: 2, Interesting
First, smalltalk is very much alive. Second, learning different programming languages helps you THINK in different ways. Smalltalk is incredibly nifty and has things that C++ doesn't (for example, EVERYTHING is an object, which means you can add a method to the equivalent of the int class), it also has the idea of an image. Basically, you save a *running* program, with all its data etc), which is incredibly nifty.
I'm not a Smalltalk programmer and have just dabbled in it, but can tell you how other languages have helped my thinking. Learning Scheme made me really understand first-order functions, which made me able to efficiently use C pointers to function, and later many 'patterns' for event handling. Learning Haskell helped me really understand templates.
So, learn the languages to help you learn to think, and who knows, maybe you'll even get a job using them (I've seen postings for Haskell, Smalltalk and Scheme)
Most public libraries have some form of book fair; they sell their retired books plus donations, usually incredibly cheap. You can usually find some older college textbooks, especially if you go to to one from a university library rather than the county one.
My county's (Cobb, in GA) was this past weekend, and I got a genetics textbook (probably 5 years old) for $1. Basic math hasn't changed that much, so a 5-10 year old book is still great, but very cheap.
As an aside, the best pricing scheme I saw was in New Orleans; they sold the books by the inch ! you stack them and they measure them !. I don't know if they still do those, but I loved it.
Actually, I think English (at least American:) puts a very low barrier to accepting new words that are created according to the standard rules. I would definitely consider memorizable a valid word.
Depending on your situation, a public college or university may be right for you. Community colleges are great and really cheap, but you normally get what you pay for:). Many universities will do a much better job on the basic math classes (especially calculus), and if you already got a previous degree, entrance should be really easy. They are usually more expensive, but public universities are usually affordable, no matter what (I live near Atlanta, and teach at SPSU, one of several metro-Atlanta public universities, we charge about $450 per class for GA residents, which is not bad at all; online classes are about $700; a community college around here would be $75 to $100).
So it depends more on which options are available near you.
I don't know what exactly are they doing now, but many MS Office features appear first on the mac versions:) MS Office 2008 for Mac will probably have a *different* feature set than MSO 2007 for Windows, including some not on the Windows version.
Kexi IS open source; however, there is a company that builds it for Windows and charges you for it (I'm not sure how that works if it's GPL licensed but...). Similar to what RedHat etc do with Linux
Keep in mind this is mainly cultural. The judeo-christian tradition uses 12 as the age of reason, and up until a hundred years ago or so, people were functioning as adults at that age (and they probably still do in some parts of the world).
For a more current example, I grew up in Mexico. There you do not normally leave home to go to college (you go to a college in the same city). Most students behave much more maturely that our traditional freshmen or sophomores. The US tradition of partying your first 2 years of college is mainly just a US tradition.
Yes and no:) To tell you the truth, I've not used a tablet regularly, and I'm sure if I did, I'd appreciate its advantages, but pencil and paper have its advantages, including ubiquity, cost and resilience (I'm sure I'd eventually break my tablet if I used one as much as I use pencil and paper:). BTW, I can scan and photocopy, if I need to:)
I don't regularly use Windows, but when I did, I was always afraid of messing up my install when dual-booting, especially if I needed to repartition the drive. A friend of mine is having virus/spyware problems and, since I don't use Windows killing all the bestiary in her computer would take me a while. Her needs are simple, so I was thinking about having her boot a LiveCD and store her stuff in USB. I think I'll try this now (actually, Wubi which was pointed by somebody).
Mass transportation sucks in most (at least many:) American cities, especially in the suburbs. I live in an Atlanta suburb, and it takes me almost the same time (and distance) to get to a MARTA station (subway) than to my work. I can't take a bus from my home, would need to take my car to go to the bus:)
I lived in Mexico, and mass transportation there is much more useful, or at least more widespread. In the US, it seems the only useful mass transportation is city trains (subways etc), but you need to live very close to a station.
Does anybody lives in a US city with good, citywide mass transit ?
I think the program used for email depends on when did they start using email. I started using email on MSWin 3.1, and Eudora was a great, free client. I then moved to Solaris and Pine:), but many people who stayed on Windows kept using Eudora (why change ?).
I teach at SPSU, and many of my colleagues still use Eudora. Up until last year it was officially supported by our IT guys ! Why ? it was the best thing when they started, it works, so why change ?
You probably want to check Wikipedia or something like that for the intro:) Many functional languages are relatively similar, so you may want to go with Haskel or even scheme (although scheme has completely different syntax).
The functional block is about as easy to understand, once you know FP:), the first one is easier for you because it looks closer to what you know.
So, let me try to explain: compose2 = lambda F, G: lambda x: (F(G(x))
This makes compose2 denote a new function (lambda creates new functions), this function takes two arguments, F and G (which are functions by the way !) and returns a new function. This new function takes one argument, x and returns the result of applying F to G(x)
This is actually incredibly nifty, since it lets you compose ANY functions of one argument! Compare that with function pointers in C or all the extra stuff we add in OO (say to add an event handler).
Now, second line; map is a function that takes two arguments, a list and another function, and returns a new list containing the result of applying that other function to all elements of the original list.
So target = map(compose2(F,G), source_list)
means make target denote the result of applying the composition of F and G to all elements in the source_list. Isn't that beautiful ?
Actually, this is really nifty but may be hard to get the first time (or the first ten:), OTOH, procedural programming is also hard at first:) if you actually have time, google for 'the little haskeller' or 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (for scheme)
You know, you can get slides from Latex, and it actually makes math relatively easy. I've used it when I taught Theory of Computation, and it allows me to produce readable formulas (my handwriting sucks, much more on the board, and trying to do greek letters is even worse:).
I have an intel mac and run Windows and Linux under VMWare, plus use X11 to connect to a Linux server. My worst problem is that my fingers keep typing the wrong keys for cut and paste (you use the 'apple' key on the mac, control for Windows and Linux). Well, actually, X11 on the mac kinda sucks. Depending on how I ssh to my server, I either get the wrong cursor (just the caret, and yellow !) or can't cut-n-paste. Oh well, works well enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I just went to sprint's site, they offer 450 mins for $39.99, and their data rates are $39.99 for 40MB or $59.99 for unlimited. I'm near Atlanta, GA, so maybe it's just geography :(
Miguel has been a leader in several projects I've used a lot; first Midnight Commander, then Gnome, and now Mono, so I care about what he says (not that I agree with him on everything). He appears also as a reasonable guy, so I listen, and then make my own opinion.
Virtual desktops are also great for two other things:
:)
1. Context switches !. I'm a prof. A student comes to ask me a question, I switch to an empty virtual desktop, open whatever programs we need, explain, solve etc; when I'm done, easily go back to whatever I was doing !
2. Doing several things at once. When I was doing my thesis research, I had one desktop for running the experiments, another one for Latex (writing the thesis), and another one for email, browsing etc. Can move to either one, work for an hour on something, switch to another one.
I think the main issue is that in Unix, we tend to use many different programs rather than an integrated suite, and the virtual desktops allow you to almost convert any set of programs into a suite
Actually, on many issues (Immigration and Abortion immediately come to my mind), you can get about 15% on either side; and many times they're not the same people for each issue :). If you consider the number of issues, it's probably closer to 90% (or 100?) who can't think rationally about at least one issue. So, what's your issue ?
After the government buys the machines, XO can't do a thing about them. And I think MS PR guys could find several ways to spin it so it looks good (assuming that people in US and Europe give a hoot about the countries these machines are going to :)
I don't think the price for a *legal* copy of Windows is 'below $1' anywhere in the world. And piracy studies usually take numbers out of thin air1. I don't know much about the third world, but I lived in Mexico; even 10 years ago, most of the business software was legal; of course, people pirated everything for their home machines.
:)
1 With the air coming from their behinds
That emulates OS, not all specific HW, so there may be (is?) a way for WinXP to distinguish from real HW, especially from XO HW. For example, VMWare will NOT run inside another VMWare VM.
I guess it depends on where you are :) I'm a college prof in Georgia; here we have HOPE scholarships that cover full tuition at public colleges (if not, tuition is about $1800/semester for full time, and won't increase after 12 credit-hours), plus some extra for books (probably not enough). You can definitely live on 1K/mo, which you can get even working at McDonalds.
So, in GA, many people can get a full education for much less than those $30K (and if you're worried about cost, consider AP and CLEP exams, and community college classes, which are way cheaper)
In Lisp, your programs are just lists and look like it, so it makes it much easier. I don't remember how it was in Logo, but I assume it basically helps you with the tokenizer, but parsing is still a pain. In Lips your code is incredibly easy to parse.
First, smalltalk is very much alive. Second, learning different programming languages helps you THINK in different ways. Smalltalk is incredibly nifty and has things that C++ doesn't (for example, EVERYTHING is an object, which means you can add a method to the equivalent of the int class), it also has the idea of an image. Basically, you save a *running* program, with all its data etc), which is incredibly nifty.
I'm not a Smalltalk programmer and have just dabbled in it, but can tell you how other languages have helped my thinking. Learning Scheme made me really understand first-order functions, which made me able to efficiently use C pointers to function, and later many 'patterns' for event handling. Learning Haskell helped me really understand templates.
So, learn the languages to help you learn to think, and who knows, maybe you'll even get a job using them (I've seen postings for Haskell, Smalltalk and Scheme)
Most public libraries have some form of book fair; they sell their retired books plus donations, usually incredibly cheap. You can usually find some older college textbooks, especially if you go to to one from a university library rather than the county one.
My county's (Cobb, in GA) was this past weekend, and I got a genetics textbook (probably 5 years old) for $1. Basic math hasn't changed that much, so a 5-10 year old book is still great, but very cheap.
As an aside, the best pricing scheme I saw was in New Orleans; they sold the books by the inch ! you stack them and they measure them !. I don't know if they still do those, but I loved it.
Actually, I think English (at least American :) puts a very low barrier to accepting new words that are created according to the standard rules. I would definitely consider memorizable a valid word.
Depending on your situation, a public college or university may be right for you. Community colleges are great and really cheap, but you normally get what you pay for :). Many universities will do a much better job on the basic math classes (especially calculus), and if you already got a previous degree, entrance should be really easy. They are usually more expensive, but public universities are usually affordable, no matter what (I live near Atlanta, and teach at SPSU, one of several metro-Atlanta public universities, we charge about $450 per class for GA residents, which is not bad at all; online classes are about $700; a community college around here would be $75 to $100).
So it depends more on which options are available near you.
I don't know what exactly are they doing now, but many MS Office features appear first on the mac versions :) MS Office 2008 for Mac will probably have a *different* feature set than MSO 2007 for Windows, including some not on the Windows version.
Kexi IS open source; however, there is a company that builds it for Windows and charges you for it (I'm not sure how that works if it's GPL licensed but ...). Similar to what RedHat etc do with Linux
It gives you HTML that you can then import in word (from latex, not the PDF)
Keep in mind this is mainly cultural. The judeo-christian tradition uses 12 as the age of reason, and up until a hundred years ago or so, people were functioning as adults at that age (and they probably still do in some parts of the world).
For a more current example, I grew up in Mexico. There you do not normally leave home to go to college (you go to a college in the same city). Most students behave much more maturely that our traditional freshmen or sophomores. The US tradition of partying your first 2 years of college is mainly just a US tradition.
I just went and checked, and on my zip (30060) their cheapest data plan is $39.99
Yes and no :) To tell you the truth, I've not used a tablet regularly, and I'm sure if I did, I'd appreciate its advantages, but pencil and paper have its advantages, including ubiquity, cost and resilience (I'm sure I'd eventually break my tablet if I used one as much as I use pencil and paper :). BTW, I can scan and photocopy, if I need to :)
I don't regularly use Windows, but when I did, I was always afraid of messing up my install when dual-booting, especially if I needed to repartition the drive. A friend of mine is having virus/spyware problems and, since I don't use Windows killing all the bestiary in her computer would take me a while. Her needs are simple, so I was thinking about having her boot a LiveCD and store her stuff in USB. I think I'll try this now (actually, Wubi which was pointed by somebody).
Mass transportation sucks in most (at least many :) American cities, especially in the suburbs. I live in an Atlanta suburb, and it takes me almost the same time (and distance) to get to a MARTA station (subway) than to my work. I can't take a bus from my home, would need to take my car to go to the bus :)
I lived in Mexico, and mass transportation there is much more useful, or at least more widespread. In the US, it seems the only useful mass transportation is city trains (subways etc), but you need to live very close to a station.
Does anybody lives in a US city with good, citywide mass transit ?
I think the program used for email depends on when did they start using email. I started using email on MSWin 3.1, and Eudora was a great, free client. I then moved to Solaris and Pine :), but many people who stayed on Windows kept using Eudora (why change ?).
I teach at SPSU, and many of my colleagues still use Eudora. Up until last year it was officially supported by our IT guys ! Why ? it was the best thing when they started, it works, so why change ?
You probably want to check Wikipedia or something like that for the intro :) Many functional languages are relatively similar, so you may want to go with Haskel or even scheme (although scheme has completely different syntax).
:), the first one is easier for you because it looks closer to what you know.
:), OTOH, procedural programming is also hard at first :) if you actually have time, google for 'the little haskeller' or 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (for scheme)
The functional block is about as easy to understand, once you know FP
So, let me try to explain:
compose2 = lambda F, G: lambda x: (F(G(x))
This makes compose2 denote a new function (lambda creates new functions), this function takes two arguments, F and G (which are functions by the way !) and returns a new function. This new function takes one argument, x and returns the result of applying F to G(x)
This is actually incredibly nifty, since it lets you compose ANY functions of one argument! Compare that with function pointers in C or all the extra stuff we add in OO (say to add an event handler).
Now, second line; map is a function that takes two arguments, a list and another function, and returns a new list containing the result of applying that other function to all elements of the original list.
So
target = map(compose2(F,G), source_list)
means make target denote the result of applying the composition of F and G to all elements in the source_list. Isn't that beautiful ?
Actually, this is really nifty but may be hard to get the first time (or the first ten
You know, you can get slides from Latex, and it actually makes math relatively easy. I've used it when I taught Theory of Computation, and it allows me to produce readable formulas (my handwriting sucks, much more on the board, and trying to do greek letters is even worse :).
I have an intel mac and run Windows and Linux under VMWare, plus use X11 to connect to a Linux server. My worst problem is that my fingers keep typing the wrong keys for cut and paste (you use the 'apple' key on the mac, control for Windows and Linux).
Well, actually, X11 on the mac kinda sucks. Depending on how I ssh to my server, I either get the wrong cursor (just the caret, and yellow !) or can't cut-n-paste. Oh well, works well enough.