If the citizens of the USA pay for research, and then somebody copies that research, it doesn't cost the citizens of the USA any more at all.
Ultimately tax payers pay for the military advantage that classified research can give them. True, they pay the same amount whether or not a copy is made. However, the value of what they spent their money on is diminished if the information falls into the wrong hands.
Wow... the Dutch Parliament reversed a European Council of Ministers vote that had been in favor of throwing out the European Parliament's efforts to keep software patents out of Europe.
In other news, my best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.
Remember Blaster Master? That was the first game that made me realize that I could play video games for 36 hours straight! Impossibly difficult... no saving your game part way through. I can't remember how many times I spent hours trying to get to the end, only to be killed and have to start all over from the beginning!
The history of the United States is punctuated by times when its people were underestimated:
1. The American Revolution - England underestimates the ability of a rag-tag militia made up mostly of civilians to free the peoples of the colonies.
2. WWII - Japan delivers what they thought would be a cripling blow (the bombing of Pearl Harbor), underestimating America's ability to recover and fight back.
3. Desert Storm - Iraq underestimates America's ability to mobilize a world force to take back Kuwait.
4. September 11, 2001 - Terrorists turn four commercial airliners into weapons, killing thousands. America unites and fights back.
I think America is underestimated because outsiders view freedom of religion, freedom of speech, tolerance of different opinions, and open debate as a sign of disunity. Americans agree to disagree, and are passionate about defending the freedoms that allow such diversity.
In my opinion, the Spanish language doesn't have to be worried because the Net is the protector of many cultures and languages, and the Spanish language doesn't have to worry about anything. Now, I don't know much about Spanish but I think that a language is a beautiful and marvelous thing, and I wouldn't want to see only a single language on the Net.
Since you only have the OS, a web browser, TCP/IP software suite, NFS, web server, C compiler, vi, emacs, and Scheme interpreter, why not throw in a Napster client and perhaps a SETI@home screen saver with what's left of the 1 MB?!
Emacs on my Slackware 7.1 box by itself takes up about 2.7 MB!!!! Maybe you confused "emacs" with the venerable "ed", which is only about 67K.:-)
When I voted I didn't have to produce any form of identification. I simply walked in and told them who I was. Hacking free votes under the current system (at least in my district) would be easy!
Given the shitty state of the current system, it shouldn't be too difficult to produce a better computerized one.
Eric
BTW, under the current system, when someone asks "Did you vote yet?", you could tell them: "At least twice so far"!
"If it takes two seconds to find an entry in a sorted array, how long will it take if the list is ten times the size it presently is?"
That depends on your search method. Yes, a binary search will be log_2(n) (that's log base 2 of n... log(n) implies log base 10 of n, which is incorrect). If you are doing a linear search then it depends on where the item is in the array. If you set up a hash then lookups may be practically immediate, depending on how good your hash function is (i.e. is it guaranteed to return unique indices into the array, and if not then how have these conflicts been handled?) and system resources/performance. The typical answer to most computing questions is "it depends".
I'm a Computer Science major at Western Washington University. This stuff is all part of the lower-division courses. I don't know where your interviewees are getting their degrees! Perhaps via mail order??:-)
Eric R. Turner
BTW, your quote reminds me of the one from Dijkstra (my hero) who said: "Computer Science is no more about computers than Astronomy is about telescopes".
VNC is nice for controlling Windows boxen remotely, but almost every feature of Linux can be controlled from a command line (which, in my opinion, is how every OS should be). I'm a minimalist in that I try to avoid running very many daemons on my workstations, and VNC is not necessary in a Linux/Unix environment. The Viking
I prefer "GNU/Linux" to just "Linux" because Linux is just a small piece (the kernel, specifically) of the overall OS puzzle. Without the GNU software that is typically bundled in a distribution, Linux (the kernel) wouldn't be of much use. If your CTO is so "tech-savvy", then he/she should realize that a name means nothing. What counts is what's under the hood. Any software should be evaluated on its ability to solve whatever problem you are facing. Patrick has done an awesome job with Slackware, and the product quality speaks for itself. "GNU/Linux" is not trying to gain a professional image. Some companies, such as Red Hat, are trying to put a professional image to their distribution of Linux. Typical open-source developers (who develop and distribute their products for free because they enjoy doing so) don't give a fsck what some corporate bigwig dweeb in a suit thinks about the name of their software, or whether or not said dweeb "respects" their software. While I'm at it, contrary to what ignorant newswriters report, GNU/Linux is not trying to gain any sort of market share. Rather, various companies (e.g. Red Hat) are trying to gain market share by selling software that you can get for free. Reporters would be more correct in saying "Linux distributors" are trying to gain market share, or "Linux distributors" are trying to gain a professional image.
A user interface is a tool, [hopefully] used to accomplish some task. Tools can be simple or complex, depending on the task for which the tool was designed. The tools I use to maintain and repair my bicycle would not be appropriate for repairing and maintaining a jet engine. If you wish to repair a jet engine, you will certainly need very specialized tools and comprehensive training for even the most basic repairs. On the other hand, I could probably show you in an afternoon most of what you need to know to repair a bicycle. My point is this: there is always a tradeoff between simplicity and power. To think that there can be one user interface which meets the needs of every user, from novice to expert, is irrational. My needing to grep through syslogs for certain types of activity on my server has little bearing on my Grandma's desire to surf the web for carnival glass. The user interface that each of us chooses should reflect our abilities and needs.
I'm no expert, but three things come to mind: 1. An open standard that defines ways that content is indexed, and defines a standard interface to the indexed content, no matter how that data is stored (i.e. relational database, XML, text, etc...). 2. A new language for searching the indexed content (in much the same way that SQL was developed to access relational databases). 3. A distributed system which allows each site to be authoritative for the content of the site (much like DNS). Each site could be responsible for providing a "search server" which would expose the standard interface to the indexes mentioned in my first idea. There could be "root servers" that are specific to certain types of content, where each root server could refer clients to the "search servers" that expose the type of data the client is seeking. This has the advantage of distributing the processing load, which should allow it to scale well. Am I totally out in left field or what? It just seems like we need a basic paradigm shift from the current [klunky] search methods. I see parallels between the problems that led to DNS, and the problems we face dealing with the rapidly growing quantity of available content on the Net.
Slashdot Mirror
...car chases on COPS. "He's heading for the intersection. He isn't stopping! Oh, wait, nobody stops anymore."
If the citizens of the USA pay for research, and then somebody copies that research, it doesn't cost the citizens of the USA any more at all.
Ultimately tax payers pay for the military advantage that classified research can give them. True, they pay the same amount whether or not a copy is made. However, the value of what they spent their money on is diminished if the information falls into the wrong hands.
Wow... the Dutch Parliament reversed a European Council of Ministers vote that had been in favor of throwing out the European Parliament's efforts to keep software patents out of Europe.
In other news, my best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.
If they had a Mr. Fusion and a flux capacitor for my Delorian, then I'd really be interested!
Remember Blaster Master? That was the first game that made me realize that I could play video games for 36 hours straight! Impossibly difficult... no saving your game part way through. I can't remember how many times I spent hours trying to get to the end, only to be killed and have to start all over from the beginning!
$ echo "" | /usr/games/caesar 13
Muuhhhaaaaa!
>An error occured while loading >http://www.petswarehouse.com/:
>
>
>Timeout on server
>Timed out while waiting to connect to >www.petswarehouse.com
How is reducing choices from two desktops to one desktop a "great gift"? Oh, and FIRST POST!
The history of the United States is punctuated by times when its people were underestimated:
1. The American Revolution - England underestimates the ability of a rag-tag militia made up mostly of civilians to free the peoples of the colonies.
2. WWII - Japan delivers what they thought would be a cripling blow (the bombing of Pearl Harbor), underestimating America's ability to recover and fight back.
3. Desert Storm - Iraq underestimates America's ability to mobilize a world force to take back Kuwait.
4. September 11, 2001 - Terrorists turn four commercial airliners into weapons, killing thousands. America unites and fights back.
I think America is underestimated because outsiders view freedom of religion, freedom of speech, tolerance of different opinions, and open debate as a sign of disunity. Americans agree to disagree, and are passionate about defending the freedoms that allow such diversity.
In my opinion, the Spanish language doesn't have to be worried because the Net is the protector of many cultures and languages, and the Spanish language doesn't have to worry about anything. Now, I don't know much about Spanish but I think that a language is a beautiful and marvelous thing, and I wouldn't want to see only a single language on the Net.
>...emacs...
Since you only have the OS, a web browser, TCP/IP software suite, NFS, web server, C compiler, vi, emacs, and Scheme interpreter, why not throw in a Napster client and perhaps a SETI@home screen saver with what's left of the 1 MB?!
Emacs on my Slackware 7.1 box by itself takes up about 2.7 MB!!!! Maybe you confused "emacs" with the venerable "ed", which is only about 67K. :-)
When I voted I didn't have to produce any form of identification. I simply walked in and told them who I was. Hacking free votes under the current system (at least in my district) would be easy! Given the shitty state of the current system, it shouldn't be too difficult to produce a better computerized one. Eric BTW, under the current system, when someone asks "Did you vote yet?", you could tell them: "At least twice so far"!
"If it takes two seconds to find an entry in a sorted array, how long will it take if the list is ten times the size it presently is?"
That depends on your search method. Yes, a binary search will be log_2(n) (that's log base 2 of n... log(n) implies log base 10 of n, which is incorrect). If you are doing a linear search then it depends on where the item is in the array. If you set up a hash then lookups may be practically immediate, depending on how good your hash function is (i.e. is it guaranteed to return unique indices into the array, and if not then how have these conflicts been handled?) and system resources/performance. The typical answer to most computing questions is "it depends".
I'm a Computer Science major at Western Washington University. This stuff is all part of the lower-division courses. I don't know where your interviewees are getting their degrees! Perhaps via mail order?? :-)
Eric R. Turner
BTW, your quote reminds me of the one from Dijkstra (my hero) who said: "Computer Science is no more about computers than Astronomy is about telescopes".
VNC is nice for controlling Windows boxen remotely, but almost every feature of Linux can be controlled from a command line (which, in my opinion, is how every OS should be). I'm a minimalist in that I try to avoid running very many daemons on my workstations, and VNC is not necessary in a Linux/Unix environment. The Viking
I prefer "GNU/Linux" to just "Linux" because Linux is just a small piece (the kernel, specifically) of the overall OS puzzle. Without the GNU software that is typically bundled in a distribution, Linux (the kernel) wouldn't be of much use. If your CTO is so "tech-savvy", then he/she should realize that a name means nothing. What counts is what's under the hood. Any software should be evaluated on its ability to solve whatever problem you are facing. Patrick has done an awesome job with Slackware, and the product quality speaks for itself. "GNU/Linux" is not trying to gain a professional image. Some companies, such as Red Hat, are trying to put a professional image to their distribution of Linux. Typical open-source developers (who develop and distribute their products for free because they enjoy doing so) don't give a fsck what some corporate bigwig dweeb in a suit thinks about the name of their software, or whether or not said dweeb "respects" their software. While I'm at it, contrary to what ignorant newswriters report, GNU/Linux is not trying to gain any sort of market share. Rather, various companies (e.g. Red Hat) are trying to gain market share by selling software that you can get for free. Reporters would be more correct in saying "Linux distributors" are trying to gain market share, or "Linux distributors" are trying to gain a professional image.
A user interface is a tool, [hopefully] used to accomplish some task. Tools can be simple or complex, depending on the task for which the tool was designed. The tools I use to maintain and repair my bicycle would not be appropriate for repairing and maintaining a jet engine. If you wish to repair a jet engine, you will certainly need very specialized tools and comprehensive training for even the most basic repairs. On the other hand, I could probably show you in an afternoon most of what you need to know to repair a bicycle. My point is this: there is always a tradeoff between simplicity and power. To think that there can be one user interface which meets the needs of every user, from novice to expert, is irrational. My needing to grep through syslogs for certain types of activity on my server has little bearing on my Grandma's desire to surf the web for carnival glass. The user interface that each of us chooses should reflect our abilities and needs.
I'm no expert, but three things come to mind: 1. An open standard that defines ways that content is indexed, and defines a standard interface to the indexed content, no matter how that data is stored (i.e. relational database, XML, text, etc...). 2. A new language for searching the indexed content (in much the same way that SQL was developed to access relational databases). 3. A distributed system which allows each site to be authoritative for the content of the site (much like DNS). Each site could be responsible for providing a "search server" which would expose the standard interface to the indexes mentioned in my first idea. There could be "root servers" that are specific to certain types of content, where each root server could refer clients to the "search servers" that expose the type of data the client is seeking. This has the advantage of distributing the processing load, which should allow it to scale well. Am I totally out in left field or what? It just seems like we need a basic paradigm shift from the current [klunky] search methods. I see parallels between the problems that led to DNS, and the problems we face dealing with the rapidly growing quantity of available content on the Net.