That's the part that Perl does not have, and never will (though Perl 6 comes as close as a truely compiled language reasonably can)
Ah. ajs, you do know that most lisp's compile to machine code these days (actually, they have for decades), don't you? In fact there are some very, very good optimizing lisp compilers.
So, while you are correct that much of the flexibility of lisp falls out of S-expressions, it's not true that you cannot have that flexibility WITHOUT S-expressions.
This is probably not true. Many languages have tried, and failed. I don't know enough about perl6 to be sure, but it is probably just another in a long line of attempts...
What Lisp *does* have that Perl 5 does not is an excellent macro mechanism (which also falls out of S-expressions).
A fair bit of lisps flexibility and power comes from the macro system, so your statements are fairly reasonable; however there is no a-priori reason to accept that perl6 will be as flexible or as powerful as lisp --- perl5 isn't even close.
''Now, that being said, I would argue that Perl 5 already presents 99% of Lisp's flexibility. Perl 6 leap-frogs Lisp by presenting Lisp's flexibility in a package that is far easier to use (though, as you point out, perhaps not easier to LEARN).''
Ok, thats funny. I can't speak to the flexibility of Perl 6, but you are on some serious chemicals if you argue that perl5 has 99% of Lisps flexibility.
Perl has some real strengths (and real weaknesses, of course), but it is pushing it to claim it even approaches 50% of the flexibility of lisp. I would put it closer to 20%, but perhaps could be argued upward a bit. We are talking about *flexibility* here, not best-language-cause, so here are just a few of the reasons perl is way behind lisp (let alone 20 years ago lisp (cltl1)) in flexibility:
'defmacro (there goes 30% right there)
'defgeneric & 'defclass (don't talk to me about perls alleged object system.)
'compile
closures introspection semantic sanity read/write symmetry applicative programming that works decent numerics
the people who love to code *are* the real hackers.
just because the media coopted the term to mean script-kiddies and crackers doesn't mean the original meaning is lost to the old school.
PG, whatever else you can say about him, is an old school lisp hacker. This can be confusing to people who are too young or uninformed, but I can see why P.G. holds onto the original meaning.
So you hate it when people use the term hacker in its original meaning? How do you think they feel about people using the new bastardized version?
So I have a question, not a flame, and would really like to know the answer to this.
I don't use Gnome/Kde on my machines. However, we set up a few systems in the lab for others to use, and they wanted to give redhat a spin. Fine by me.
I used these machines for a while, and thought I would play with some of the gnome apps, see what they could do... So I used gnumeric, etc. plus some of the little apps like gomecard.
That last one is where the trouble started. I logged in from another building, wanting to check an address. Gnomecard wouldn't run because I didn't have a gnome session running. The gnome session only ran if I was logged into X on that machine. I can't start a session up if someone else using the machine.
WTF? Is this a conspiracy to make these machines useless over the network? I asked around, and KDE seems to have the same problem.
So I diked gnome out of the machines in the lab, so that people don't get tied to these apps.
Anyone have a solution? IMO, this is not one of the 'features' we should be copying from MS. If you think COM/Corba is the way to do code reuse, fine --- but tying people to a 1 machine 1 user model is braindamaged.
I didn't meant that you were certainly wrong... just that you were not clearly right. i.e. 'or not'
you are still missing the point, I think. The extra weight at the lower part is irrelevant; it is designed to take the wobbling of all the floors above it (e.g. high wind). The problem only comes where floors are falling. This only happens when the supports have buckled.
There are two factors to the buckling: 1) how much initial damage 2) heat damage to the steel causes it to lose strength.
*Both* of these are relative to the strength of the floor you hit. All other things being equal, a upper floor will fail earlier than a lower floor.
So I think (and clearly neither of us are experts here) the lower the crash, the *longer* until collapse, and the greater the chance of the fire being put out.
Thus, if you want to take the building out you hit it high up.
I haven't really heard any experts disagree with this (I have heard a couple support it) but I will take your word for it that they exist.
In any case, there is enough controversy around this that my initial point was valid: somebody said 'clearly it would have been worse if the hit was lower', and I replied that it is not clear at all.
Ok, my bad for typing too fast and not being clear.
This guy wasn't an idiot it seems, and nothing you have said actually counteracts his statments...
I concede that I was not very clear in explaining them. You and I are making different assumptions.
"Preliminary reports are that NOBODY escaped from above the floors the planes hit, that means (110
- 60) + (110 - 90) = 70 floors full of people that were trapped. Hitting lower, say the 25th floor, would
have shut the floors off in the same way, and would have been too high for anyone to safely jump
from. "
For how long? You are assuming the building will still collapse. The vast majority of people above the impacted floors may have been basically unaffected until the building collapsed.
" The "experts" I've heard have said that the buildings very likely (95%) would have withstood the
original crash and could possibly have been repaired. What they ALL agree on is that the main (some
say the sole) cause of the collapse is the fire...."
That is exactly what I was saying. And what this `expert' said. The fire will bring the building down, not the impact. So if you want to bring the building down, you need to make sure the fire is not controlled.
There are three possible main factors in controlling the fire.
1) the internal fire control system
2) the ease of access for fire crews
3) the length of time the fire crews have
1) isn't an issue with jet fuel, everyone seems to think.
2) is much harder the higher up you are
3) the lower down you are, the stronger the structure, and the longer the fire has to burn in order to buckle the support.
Now I obviously don't have the expertise to do even back of the envelope calculations on this but it seems absolutely clear that if you hit the building low down it will burn for longer before buckling, and fire crews will have an easier job of putting out the fire. All of the experts seem to agree on this.
My original contention was that it is not *obvious* (as the original poster claimed) that lower down would have been worse.
Lower down could have been (much) worse. On the other hand, they could have put the fire out. Then it could have been much better.
The engineers contention was that the terrorists knew exactly how to *guarantee* collapse, and they pursued it. Seems like a reasonable scenario.
"Now, given that the two buildings were hit thirty floors apart, and the one hit lower fell over in less
time, I'd pretty much say that the expert you quote is an unmittigated idiot. Not only is thirty floors too much of a difference to say "exactly where to hit it..." but it's obvious that
the building hit lower was more damaged. "
Nope, what he said makes sense. THe 30 floors isn't the important part, the important part is hitting in the upper half.
" I'm not enough of an expert to make my own claims as to specifically why the buildings were
weakened in certain ways, but I know enough and am able to use the available information to see that
many of the so-called experts are dead wrong. "
No, you obviously aren't a building engineer. We certainly can't safely say that --- and in fact it is probably wrong. Tells you something about the wisdom of making statements way outside your expertise.
Anyways, NPR/CBC/whatever had an interview with an engineer from the company that built the towers. His statement, paraphrased, "it isn't obvious, but if someone wanted to bring the buildings down with a plane this is exactly where to hit it..."
Basically the issue is this. Big buildings are much stronger at the bottom. You hit the upper part, start a big fire. The sprinklers are out/ineffective and given a little time the steel will start to fail. Once you have 10 + stories collapsing, everything underneath will fail as well.
If the impacts had been lower, the structure could have stayed up much longer, and firefighting efforts would be much easier....
One common thread to the last two days has been millions of ignorant statements; about flying planes, crashing buildings, bombing countries. Sigh.
Here is a case in international court 2000, Germany vs. US.
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/igus/igusc r/ igus_icr2000-31.html
This isn't the only example by any means. The US routinely breaks parts of the Geneva convention (and just about any other international convention or aggreement) when it wants too.
Of course, both inside and outside the US people may argue that international aggrements are not the way to go about things. On the other hand, it is pretty hypocritical to sign them without any true intention of honouring the aggrements. In a way, it is surprising that anyone will still sign international agreements with the US, given the proclivity for ignoring them when it is deemed convenient. This practice seems to be on the increase, and whatever other effects there are it will probably result in the need for huge increases in spending for foriegn policy.
2.4.x wants 2x physical memory for swap. This has been repeated how many times now?
I am not sure what changes have been made to VM in 2.4.7, grovelling through the kernel list should tell you....
Can't really blame the kernel for not RTFM.
S.
Survival Research Labs
on
BYO Battlebot
·
· Score: 2
Battlebots sounds pretty weak compared to the stuff SRL does. Not having/watching a T.V., I am uncertain about the details of these shows, but to me it sounds like SRL takes both Battlebots and Scrapheap-mumble to a whole new level.
Computer graphics aren't art. But neither is canvas and oil-based paint.
It is a medium. So the real question is: Is computer graphics a valid medium for fine art?
Which begs the questions: "Can you define a "valid" medium for fine art"? and "Can you define fine art"?
Anyways, I would argue that the medium is irrelevant, but you are going to fight an uphill battle for a while. The art world can be very conservative, surprisingly enough.
(please feel free to correct me here, but I have never seen truly innovative OS project ? everything seems to be remake of some existing ? usually commercial ? application.)
Ok, here are a few:
- emacs (self explanitory)
- gcc (yes, it was 'just' a c compiler, but nobody had thought of attempting anything that flexible/portible before)
- TeX/LaTeX (still kicks any wordprocessor esthetically, and for highly technical publications is the standard)
- X11 (say what you like about it, but both the design and implementation were innovative)
- mozilla (the innovation isn't in the front end)
etc..
also a large number of softwares that will never see general use, being domain specific, but have benifitted from the OS approach.
The first problem with teaching languages is that you have to decided if you are trying to instill understanding, or marketable skills. A cluefull progammer can pick up a new language quickly --- but someone with bad fundamentals, even with years of experience, cannot pick up new methodologies easily.
So, assuming you want to produce people who actually understand what they are doing and have a few years in which to do this, i sugges something like this:
1st: introduction: basic C.S. theory in conjuction with scheme/haskell/ML.
rational: a) functional languages are more closely tied to C.S., there are things that become obvious in FL's that are very hard to see in procedural languages. b) levels the playing field. If you have an intro java class, you are going to have a handful of poor-quality self-taught programmers in your class. They won't pay attention because they think they know it allready.
2nd: fundamentals: two streams, one in assembly (MIX or MMIX would be ideal) and the other in OO (using a language like smalltalk or preferably something with multiple inheritance, or perhaps CLISP with CLOS is you used lisp in the first stream)
rational: OO design is going to be with us for a while. But programmers who don't understand the underlying machine do silly things in any language. Presenting these streams early, you can ease your way into both.
3rd: from here on out you can concentrate on more practical issues, both in terms of languages used (e.g, introduce 'c' as a high level assmebly, and c++/java as ugly-but-practical compiled languages). You should encourage students to learn a few languages, and especially to work with something like python (with c++ for performance after profiling) for rapid prototyping. Well, for the competent scheme/lisp will allow faster protyping, but there is no sense in insisting on that, if people want to build marketable skills.
oooops i left something out of my statement which completely changes the meaning. What I *meant* to say was:
"If a country wants to democratically institute a non-demonstrably stupid law, all the power to them."
IOW, if you can't prove that it is a bad idea, it doesn't matter that they can't prove it is a good idea.
<EM>It's not like the corporations had carte blanche to remove laws as they pleased.</EM>
This is pretty much what some organizations are pushing for, though. Harm to corporations (especially outside of the country) should be irrelevant. If harm to the citizens can be demonstrated, that is different.
<EM> Um, no. A democracy should never be allowed to pass a law that tramples on the rights of the individual. Why do you think the American Revolution happened to begin with?</EM>
See above. But even under my unintended statement, nobody was talking about trampleing individuals rights. We are talking about corporate power vs. governemnts, and by extension citizens. Corporations, especially multi-nationals, have no place in the legislative process. If harm to citizens can be demonstrated, that is one thing. Not being able to demonstrate benifit under particular measures (perhaps narrow, at that) is not the same thing.
BTW, I agree that "lowest-risk" was a poor choice of words. However, you did not suggest what should be the default position. I stand by the idea that 'most corporate-friendly' is a stupid default, and what is sane is something that involves not making short-sited policy decisions based on profitibility. The track record on this is so bad that more of the same is obviously a bad idea -- an if we overadjust in the low-risk direction, we will still be better off....
From what I've heard, the laws you mentioned were struck down because the governmental arms weren't able to produce reliable evidence that such laws were really neccessary.
This is completely braindamaged. Many of these things are not 'provable' in any rigorous sense under current coditions, so the default should be to the lowest risk behaviour, not to the most corporate-friendly behaviour. The burden of proof should never be on a government to prove the efficacy of its environmental policy, for example, but on the corporations to prove otherwise. Even in the even that this can be shown, unless there is demonstrable advantage to local corporations, or something along those lines, it should be irrelevant. IOW If a country wants to democratically institute a stupid law, all the power to them. If it hurts megacorps bottom line, too bad. Even if you believe that they are a good idea, the *only* thing FTAA or similar should try to address is if it helps localcorp at the expense of megacorp --- and even then you have to be careful.
the idea of corporations being able to even modify policy, let alone dictate it (which is a very real possibililty under some of these agreements) is evil. period.
Ok, for what it is worth, I have two maths degrees, and am working on my third (ph.d). I am afraid either you (likely) or your advisors are sorely mistaken.
If writing and understanding mathematical proofs is so easy, why are there entire graduate courses dedicated to one or two proofs?
Some mathematics is very easy to understand. Some mathematics requires years of background to understand.
After all, much of what mathematics is really about is building abstractions on top of each other. Our only hope of obtaining deep understanding of some maths is to build powerful enough abstractions. This power has a price, and it can take years of study to understand them properly.
Understanding proofs once you have the correct framework is often easy. Creating that framework, especially if it is new work, can be very difficult. Of course it is easy when you have someone to hold your hand through the whole thing, but that is pedagogy, not mathematics. "lateral cognitive leap" doesn't mean much, except the employment of currently vougue buzz: "lateral thinking". mathematics involves many approaches, you may call some of them 'lateral' if you wish -- but it isn't a notable useful characterization...
Actually the 'common wisdom' seems to be correct here. You have to remember that GPL operates under *copyright* law. Thus if you are not copying... there is no restriction at all.
If you modify a GPL and keep it to yourself no problem. If you distribute, you fall under copyright and GPL applies. This has *nothing* to do with licensing in the more common (EULA) sense.
Copyright has nothing to say about what you do with your copies....
This isn't a flame either, but it doesn't sound like you really understand X.
'XFree86 provides almost nothing but the ability to display windows and do input. '
Actually X11 (and hence XFree86) provides an awful lot of things.... just not UI things. The window manager is the (relatively) trivial part --- it is just the part you see, so people tend to think of that as 'X'.
Many people don't understand what X does, because the are used to a 'single user computer' paradigm, and that isn't where X shines....but network transparancy etc. is really pretty amazing.
I don't buy it. Doing something 'just cause I am interested in X' --- and knowing full well that it has a deletorious effect on the rest of society (or on a particular segment or whatever)... is evil.
Making money for the sake of makeing money is not a worthwhile pursuit. This culture has bought into that idea in a big way, but it is fundamentally broken.
If I was interested in cash only, I could quit what I am doing (grad studies) and take a US $150K/yr +stock job ( I don't mean this in an abstact sense, I mean I have the job offer on paper). If I was 'only interested in money' that is, of course, what I would do. However, there is no chance whatsoever that I will take this particular job, as I think that what they do is unethical. We all have these choices to make, in differing degrees.
Essentially what you are saying is that we should say 'don't be too hard on them for being unethical, they are just greedy' at least thats how it translates in my world view.
Now before I get some idiot jumping up and down and making damn-fool 'communism' etc. claims --- please note I am not saying that you shouldn't pursue a financially rewarding career. What I am saying is that financial rewards, in and of them selves are meaningless. If you are optimising for income, your priorities are inane. There is a big difference between making enough to be free to do things that are rewarding to you, and making as much as you can.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. ajs, you do know that most lisp's compile to machine code these days (actually, they have for decades), don't you? In fact there are some very, very good optimizing lisp compilers.
So, while you are correct that much of the flexibility of lisp falls out of S-expressions, it's not true that you cannot have that flexibility WITHOUT S-expressions.
This is probably not true. Many languages have tried, and failed. I don't know enough about perl6 to be sure, but it is probably just another in a long line of attempts...
What Lisp *does* have that Perl 5 does not is an excellent macro mechanism (which also falls out of S-expressions).
A fair bit of lisps flexibility and power comes from the macro system, so your statements are fairly reasonable; however there is no a-priori reason to accept that perl6 will be as flexible or as powerful as lisp --- perl5 isn't even close.
''Now, that being said, I would argue that Perl 5 already presents 99% of Lisp's flexibility. Perl 6 leap-frogs Lisp by presenting Lisp's flexibility in a package that is far easier to use (though, as you point out, perhaps not easier to LEARN).''
Ok, thats funny. I can't speak to the flexibility of Perl 6, but you are on some serious chemicals if you argue that perl5 has 99% of Lisps flexibility.
Perl has some real strengths (and real weaknesses, of course), but it is pushing it to claim it even approaches 50% of the flexibility of lisp. I would put it closer to 20%, but perhaps could be argued upward a bit. We are talking about *flexibility* here, not best-language-cause, so
here are just a few of the reasons perl is way behind lisp (let alone 20 years ago lisp (cltl1)) in flexibility:
'defmacro (there goes 30% right there)
'defgeneric & 'defclass (don't talk to me about perls alleged object system.)
'compile
closures
introspection
semantic sanity
read/write symmetry
applicative programming that works
decent numerics
the list goes and on....
the people who love to code *are* the real hackers.
just because the media coopted the term to mean script-kiddies and crackers doesn't mean the original meaning is lost to the old school.
PG, whatever else you can say about him, is an old school lisp hacker. This can be confusing to people who are too young or uninformed, but I can see why P.G. holds onto the original meaning.
So you hate it when people use the term hacker in its original meaning? How do you think they feel about people using the new bastardized version?
So I have a question, not a flame, and would really like to know the answer to this.
I don't use Gnome/Kde on my machines. However, we set up a few systems in the lab for others to use, and they wanted to give redhat a spin. Fine by me.
I used these machines for a while, and thought I would play with some of the gnome apps, see what they could do... So I used gnumeric, etc. plus some of the little apps like gomecard.
That last one is where the trouble started. I logged in from another building, wanting to check an address. Gnomecard wouldn't run because I didn't have a gnome session running. The gnome session only ran if I was logged into X on that machine. I can't start a session up if someone else using the machine.
WTF? Is this a conspiracy to make these machines useless over the network? I asked around, and KDE seems to have the same problem.
So I diked gnome out of the machines in the lab, so that people don't get tied to these apps.
Anyone have a solution? IMO, this is not one of the 'features' we should be copying from MS. If you think COM/Corba is the way to do code reuse, fine --- but tying people to a 1 machine 1 user model is braindamaged.
S
I didn't meant that you were certainly wrong... just that you were not clearly right. i.e. 'or not'
you are still missing the point, I think. The extra weight at the lower part is irrelevant; it is designed to take the wobbling of all the floors above it (e.g. high wind). The problem only comes where floors are falling. This only happens when the supports have buckled.
There are two factors to the buckling: 1) how much initial damage 2) heat damage to the steel causes it to lose strength.
*Both* of these are relative to the strength of the floor you hit. All other things being equal, a upper floor will fail earlier than a lower floor.
So I think (and clearly neither of us are experts here) the lower the crash, the *longer* until collapse, and the greater the chance of the fire being put out.
Thus, if you want to take the building out you hit it high up.
I haven't really heard any experts disagree with this (I have heard a couple support it) but I will take your word for it that they exist.
In any case, there is enough controversy around this that my initial point was valid: somebody said 'clearly it would have been worse if the hit was lower', and I replied that it is not clear at all.
Ok, my bad for typing too fast and not being clear.
This guy wasn't an idiot it seems, and nothing you have said actually counteracts his statments...
I concede that I was not very clear in explaining them. You and I are making different assumptions.
"Preliminary reports are that NOBODY escaped from above the floors the planes hit, that means (110
- 60) + (110 - 90) = 70 floors full of people that were trapped. Hitting lower, say the 25th floor, would
have shut the floors off in the same way, and would have been too high for anyone to safely jump
from. "
For how long? You are assuming the building will still collapse. The vast majority of people above the impacted floors may have been basically unaffected until the building collapsed.
" The "experts" I've heard have said that the buildings very likely (95%) would have withstood the
original crash and could possibly have been repaired. What they ALL agree on is that the main (some
say the sole) cause of the collapse is the fire...."
That is exactly what I was saying. And what this `expert' said. The fire will bring the building down, not the impact. So if you want to bring the building down, you need to make sure the fire is not controlled.
There are three possible main factors in controlling the fire.
1) the internal fire control system
2) the ease of access for fire crews
3) the length of time the fire crews have
1) isn't an issue with jet fuel, everyone seems to think.
2) is much harder the higher up you are
3) the lower down you are, the stronger the structure, and the longer the fire has to burn in order to buckle the support.
Now I obviously don't have the expertise to do even back of the envelope calculations on this but it seems absolutely clear that if you hit the building low down it will burn for longer before buckling, and fire crews will have an easier job of putting out the fire. All of the experts seem to agree on this.
My original contention was that it is not *obvious* (as the original poster claimed) that lower down would have been worse.
Lower down could have been (much) worse. On the other hand, they could have put the fire out. Then it could have been much better.
The engineers contention was that the terrorists knew exactly how to *guarantee* collapse, and they pursued it. Seems like a reasonable scenario.
"Now, given that the two buildings were hit thirty floors apart, and the one hit lower fell over in less
time, I'd pretty much say that the expert you quote is an unmittigated idiot. Not only is thirty floors too much of a difference to say "exactly where to hit it..." but it's obvious that
the building hit lower was more damaged. "
Nope, what he said makes sense. THe 30 floors isn't the important part, the important part is hitting in the upper half.
" I'm not enough of an expert to make my own claims as to specifically why the buildings were
weakened in certain ways, but I know enough and am able to use the available information to see that
many of the so-called experts are dead wrong. "
or not.
S.
"But few perople would be able to get out..."
Only if they couldn't put it out.
No, you obviously aren't a building engineer. We certainly can't safely say that --- and in fact it is probably wrong. Tells you something about the wisdom of making statements way outside your expertise.
Anyways, NPR/CBC/whatever had an interview with an engineer from the company that built the towers. His statement, paraphrased, "it isn't obvious, but if someone wanted to bring the buildings down with a plane this is exactly where to hit it..."
Basically the issue is this. Big buildings are much stronger at the bottom. You hit the upper part, start a big fire. The sprinklers are out/ineffective and given a little time the steel will start to fail. Once you have 10 + stories collapsing, everything underneath will fail as well.
If the impacts had been lower, the structure could have stayed up much longer, and firefighting efforts would be much easier....
One common thread to the last two days has been millions of ignorant statements; about flying planes, crashing buildings, bombing countries. Sigh.
S.
Here is a case in international court 2000, Germany vs. US.c r/ igus_icr2000-31.html
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/igus/igus
This isn't the only example by any means. The US routinely breaks parts of the Geneva convention (and just about any other international convention or aggreement) when it wants too.
Of course, both inside and outside the US people may argue that international aggrements are not the way to go about things. On the other hand, it is pretty hypocritical to sign them without any true intention of honouring the aggrements. In a way, it is surprising that anyone will still sign international agreements with the US, given the proclivity for ignoring them when it is deemed convenient. This practice seems to be on the increase, and whatever other effects there are it will probably result in the need for huge increases in spending for foriegn policy.
Well, you should have expected those freezes.
2.4.x wants 2x physical memory for swap. This has been repeated how many times now?
I am not sure what changes have been made to VM in 2.4.7, grovelling through the kernel list should tell you....
Can't really blame the kernel for not RTFM.
S.
Battlebots sounds pretty weak compared to the stuff SRL does. Not having/watching a T.V., I am uncertain about the details of these shows, but to me it sounds like SRL takes both Battlebots and Scrapheap-mumble to a whole new level.
S.
Computer graphics aren't art. But neither is canvas and oil-based paint.
It is a medium. So the real question is: Is computer graphics a valid medium for fine art?
Which begs the questions: "Can you define a "valid" medium for fine art"? and "Can you define fine art"?
Anyways, I would argue that the medium is irrelevant, but you are going to fight an uphill battle for a while. The art world can be very conservative, surprisingly enough.
(please feel free to correct me here, but I have never seen truly innovative OS project ? everything seems to be remake of some existing ? usually commercial ? application.)
Ok, here are a few:
- emacs (self explanitory)
- gcc (yes, it was 'just' a c compiler, but nobody had thought of attempting anything that flexible/portible before)
- TeX/LaTeX (still kicks any wordprocessor esthetically, and for highly technical publications is the standard)
- X11 (say what you like about it, but both the design and implementation were innovative)
- mozilla (the innovation isn't in the front end)
etc..
also a large number of softwares that will never see general use, being domain specific, but have benifitted from the OS approach.
The first problem with teaching languages is that you have to decided if you are trying to instill understanding, or marketable skills. A cluefull progammer can pick up a new language quickly --- but someone with bad fundamentals, even with years of experience, cannot pick up new methodologies easily.
So, assuming you want to produce people who actually understand what they are doing and have a few years in which to do this, i sugges something like this:
1st: introduction: basic C.S. theory in conjuction with scheme/haskell/ML.
rational: a) functional languages are more closely tied to C.S., there are things that become obvious in FL's that are very hard to see in procedural languages. b) levels the playing field. If you have an intro java class, you are going to have a handful of poor-quality self-taught programmers in your class. They won't pay attention because they think they know it allready.
2nd: fundamentals: two streams, one in assembly (MIX or MMIX would be ideal) and the other in OO (using a language like smalltalk or preferably something with multiple inheritance, or perhaps CLISP with CLOS is you used lisp in the first stream)
rational: OO design is going to be with us for a while. But programmers who don't understand the underlying machine do silly things in any language. Presenting these streams early, you can ease your way into both.
3rd: from here on out you can concentrate on more practical issues, both in terms of languages used (e.g, introduce 'c' as a high level assmebly, and c++/java as ugly-but-practical compiled languages). You should encourage students to learn a few languages, and especially to work with something like python (with c++ for performance after profiling) for rapid prototyping. Well, for the competent scheme/lisp will allow faster protyping, but there is no sense in insisting on that, if people want to build marketable skills.
S.
oooops i left something out of my statement which completely changes the meaning. What I *meant* to say was:
"If a country wants to democratically institute a non-demonstrably stupid law, all the power to them."
IOW, if you can't prove that it is a bad idea, it doesn't matter that they can't prove it is a good idea.
<EM>It's not like the corporations had carte blanche to remove laws as they pleased.</EM>
This is pretty much what some organizations are pushing for, though. Harm to corporations (especially outside of the country) should be irrelevant. If harm to the citizens can be demonstrated, that is different.
<EM> Um, no. A democracy should never be allowed to pass a law that tramples on the rights of the individual. Why do you think the American Revolution happened to begin with?</EM>
See above. But even under my unintended statement, nobody was talking about trampleing individuals rights. We are talking about corporate power vs. governemnts, and by extension citizens. Corporations, especially multi-nationals, have no place in the legislative process. If harm to citizens can be demonstrated, that is one thing. Not being able to demonstrate benifit under particular measures (perhaps narrow, at that) is not the same thing.
BTW, I agree that "lowest-risk" was a poor choice of words. However, you did not suggest what should be the default position. I stand by the idea that 'most corporate-friendly' is a stupid default, and what is sane is something that involves not making short-sited policy decisions based on profitibility. The track record on this is so bad that more of the same is obviously a bad idea -- an if we overadjust in the low-risk direction, we will still be better off....
To briefly address one of your points:
From what I've heard, the laws you mentioned were struck down because the governmental arms weren't able to produce reliable evidence that such laws were really neccessary.
This is completely braindamaged. Many of these things are not 'provable' in any rigorous sense under current coditions, so the default should be to the lowest risk behaviour, not to the most corporate-friendly behaviour. The burden of proof should never be on a government to prove the efficacy of its environmental policy, for example, but on the corporations to prove otherwise. Even in the even that this can be shown, unless there is demonstrable advantage to local corporations, or something along those lines, it should be irrelevant. IOW If a country wants to democratically institute a stupid law, all the power to them. If it hurts megacorps bottom line, too bad. Even if you believe that they are a good idea, the *only* thing FTAA or similar should try to address is if it helps localcorp at the expense of megacorp --- and even then you have to be careful.
the idea of corporations being able to even modify policy, let alone dictate it (which is a very real possibililty under some of these agreements) is evil. period.
S.
Ok, for what it is worth, I have two maths degrees, and am working on my third (ph.d). I am afraid either you (likely) or your advisors are sorely mistaken.
If writing and understanding mathematical proofs is so easy, why are there entire graduate courses dedicated to one or two proofs?
Some mathematics is very easy to understand. Some mathematics requires years of background to understand.
After all, much of what mathematics is really about is building abstractions on top of each other. Our only hope of obtaining deep understanding of some maths is to build powerful enough abstractions. This power has a price, and it can take years of study to understand them properly.
Understanding proofs once you have the correct framework is often easy. Creating that framework, especially if it is new work, can be very difficult. Of course it is easy when you have someone to hold your hand through the whole thing, but that is pedagogy, not mathematics. "lateral cognitive leap" doesn't mean much, except the employment of currently vougue buzz: "lateral thinking". mathematics involves many approaches, you may call some of them 'lateral' if you wish -- but it isn't a notable useful characterization...
No, you don't have to boot a rescue disk or anything. Here is the fix for redhat 6.2. After you install, reboot as usual
/etc/lilo.conf file, (in the general section at the top) and run lilo.
At the LILO prompt, type
LILO: linux x86_serial_nr=1
and it will boot fine. Then add
append "x86_serial_nr=1"
to the
That's all there is to it.
S.
>Which is all well and good, but then I get to
>access my e-mail using said password via either
>pine on an SSH terminal (safe) or... POP3.
Why not tunnel your POP session through ssh?
S.
Actually the 'common wisdom' seems to be correct here. You have to remember that GPL operates under *copyright* law. Thus if you are not copying ... there is no restriction at all.
If you modify a GPL and keep it to yourself no problem. If you distribute, you fall under copyright and GPL applies. This has *nothing* to do with licensing in the more common (EULA) sense.
Copyright has nothing to say about what you do with your copies....
S.
Perhaps that isn't the point. Many banks will sell this correlated information (with your name/id excised). Some people don't want to be profiled....
S.
GeorgieBoy posted a link to an ftp dir of Dr. Fun commics, but here is a link to an HTML front end for them here Dr. Fun
S.
This isn't a flame either, but it doesn't sound like you really understand X.
'XFree86 provides almost nothing but the ability to display windows and do input. '
Actually X11 (and hence XFree86) provides an awful lot of things.... just not UI things. The window manager is the (relatively) trivial part --- it is just the part you see, so people tend to think of that as 'X'.
Many people don't understand what X does, because the are used to a 'single user computer' paradigm, and that isn't where X shines....but network transparancy etc. is really pretty amazing.
S.
I don't buy it. Doing something 'just cause I am interested in X' --- and knowing full well that it has a deletorious effect on the rest of society (or on a particular segment or whatever)... is evil.
Making money for the sake of makeing money is not a worthwhile pursuit. This culture has bought into that idea in a big way, but it is fundamentally broken.
If I was interested in cash only, I could quit what I am doing (grad studies) and take a US $150K/yr +stock job ( I don't mean this in an abstact sense, I mean I have the job offer on paper). If I was 'only interested in money' that is, of course, what I would do. However, there is no chance whatsoever that I will take this particular job, as I think that what they do is unethical. We all have these choices to make, in differing degrees.
Essentially what you are saying is that we should say 'don't be too hard on them for being unethical, they are just greedy' at least thats how it translates in my world view.
Now before I get some idiot jumping up and down and making damn-fool 'communism' etc. claims --- please note I am not saying that you shouldn't pursue a financially rewarding career. What I am saying is that financial rewards, in and of them selves are meaningless. If you are optimising for income, your priorities are inane. There is a big difference between making enough to be free to do things that are rewarding to you, and making as much as you can.
S.
Have a poke around the ALU site for more stuff, you should find a list of commercial projects here.
S.