Yes, the draft existed in WWII, but unlike Vietnam, it basically wasn't needed. People were signing up before they got drafted.
I don't know if the same was true for WWI.
At the local High School, here in rural south Georgia where just about everybody has a pickup that could scale Mt. Everest without so much as breaking a sweat, the parking lot is in the middle of a field whose elevation change can be measured in microns. Just an island of asphalt with a sea of grass lapping at its black beaches. There one two-lane asphalt road leading up to the parking lot, similarly drenched in fields.
There is no seawall, no fence, no border of any sort. Except where the road meets the lot, however. Here there is a small aluminum swinging gate which is faithfully unlocked and opened half an hour before school starts and ends, and locked back half an hour before school starts and after school ends.
It is there, of course, to keep students from skipping class by driving off campus...
I've never used lint or any of the other tools being talked about, but I have experience with the ML family of languages (OCaml, mainly), which have type-inference. Type inference is static analysis and catches, in my experience, a great deal of the bugs caught by those other tools, and better yet it's a core part of the language.
Having to be aware of types forces you to catch the bugs before you make them, and your code won't compile until you've fixed the bugs. It, of course, doesn't solve logic bugs, but just about everything else gets caught.
Obviously, this doesn't work for existing an codebase (and so this post is OT), but for greenroom projects, it is worth investigating.
I had a similar idea:
Keep one (or two) building -the most historically significant of them- as a museum, and rent out/sell the rest with the stipulation that the actual buildings must remain intact. Remodeling's ok, but no tearing down anything. The site as a whole should be preserved, even if only part is an actual museum.
Except that John C. Stennis, as in the John C. Stennis Space Center, is from there (I actually met him by chance at a nursing home in Madison near the end of his life). And Fred Haies on Apollo 13 was from Biloxi, Mississippi. So it's not _totally_ unprecedented for someone to from Mississippi to be associated with space...
I think that this case might be a little silly because the parents should have root/Administrator access and the child should have a user account, but there is a real question here: how can someone who isn't able remember a password identify themselves to a computer? For example, in a situation where all of the students at an elementary school have individual accounts. First graders cannot be expected to remember a password, but they do have an expectation of privacy. Or maybe the case of someone who has had a traumatic brain injury and suffers from severe memory loss. Despite the framing, the core question I think still stands.
The CS program at my University is a joke and apparently it is as I have always feared: my University is on par with CS programs at other Universities. Partially you can blame the Universities, but mostly you have to blame the students. Let me tell you why:
I've been programming since I was 8 when my father (who has worked for IBM since before I was born) taught me C (I am now 25). My Junior year in high school (10 years ago), I stopped using Windows and started using Linux, and have never turned back because I immediately fell in love with Bash.
When I went to school, I started as a Music Major and actually stayed one for quite a while, but I was never very good at it since, instead of practicing my sax for three hours a day like I was supposed to be doing, I was coding about six hours a day. In my first three years of college, I taught myself Java, Lisp, Ruby, and OCaml, and not just the languages but the libraries as well. I read everything I could find about algorithms, data structures, software engineering (URL, Design Patterns, etc.), compilers, theory (FSAs/PDAs/TMs), and even some true graphics programming (ray tracing). All of this I learned from the internet, completely isolated from any direct contact with other computer science professors or students. I did it because I wanted to learn it because it was interesting, and not because anyone told me I had to.
When I realized I was going to starve as a musician I decided to get a minor in CS, since it was something I had always just done for fun, and it would look good on my resume. My first month into the minor, I was already tutoring seniors in their classes, and simultaneously laughing at how easy their assignments were and being horrified that they couldn't do them. I had done more complex projects for fun and threw away the code because I didn't think anyone would want such trivial junk. I quickly found out that I had essentially put myself through a CS degree on my own and completely by accident!
The next semester, I changed majors, was in senior level classes and was actively involved in a research project with one of the professors. Whenever I got an assignment due in two weeks, I would complete it in class, and then spend the next two weeks implementing it in other languages and extending it to something that isn't incredibly trivial. For example, we had two weeks to implement a Turing machine, and because the majority of the class couldn't do it, it got extended to almost a month. I wear shirts from ThinkGeek and my peers don't get the jokes. When I pull up a terminal their eyes glaze over, as if I'm performing some mystical black magic.
The point is that any and all the information for the CS degree is out there and publicly available, but the students are simply not willing to go out and find it. I think the only positive thing I have gleaned out of the CS degree is what they are stripping from the degree programs: being forced to take the advanced math classes. My math classes taught me how to think formally about something that has always been intuitive and have been the most enlightening classes I have ever taken in college!
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Yes, the draft existed in WWII, but unlike Vietnam, it basically wasn't needed. People were signing up before they got drafted. I don't know if the same was true for WWI.
It's pretty hard not to hit a 90,000 foot tall cliff. From TFA: "Mammoth Lakes is about 10,000 feet, or 30,400 meters, above sea level."
Last year, Microsoft had $51bn in revenue and IBM had $98bn. So if it's about money, IBM is twice as important as Microsoft.
Actually, I think that would be @trendy_language_of_the_moment...
At the local High School, here in rural south Georgia where just about everybody has a pickup that could scale Mt. Everest without so much as breaking a sweat, the parking lot is in the middle of a field whose elevation change can be measured in microns. Just an island of asphalt with a sea of grass lapping at its black beaches. There one two-lane asphalt road leading up to the parking lot, similarly drenched in fields.
There is no seawall, no fence, no border of any sort. Except where the road meets the lot, however. Here there is a small aluminum swinging gate which is faithfully unlocked and opened half an hour before school starts and ends, and locked back half an hour before school starts and after school ends.
It is there, of course, to keep students from skipping class by driving off campus...
I think there's a story about ITS and its passwords in the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/other-books/hackers I can't remember for sure though... I haven't read it in a while...
I've never used lint or any of the other tools being talked about, but I have experience with the ML family of languages (OCaml, mainly), which have type-inference. Type inference is static analysis and catches, in my experience, a great deal of the bugs caught by those other tools, and better yet it's a core part of the language. Having to be aware of types forces you to catch the bugs before you make them, and your code won't compile until you've fixed the bugs. It, of course, doesn't solve logic bugs, but just about everything else gets caught. Obviously, this doesn't work for existing an codebase (and so this post is OT), but for greenroom projects, it is worth investigating.
Hey! I'm less than thirty and I remember coding for OS/2 Warp! Of course, I was 11 at the time...
I had a similar idea: Keep one (or two) building -the most historically significant of them- as a museum, and rent out/sell the rest with the stipulation that the actual buildings must remain intact. Remodeling's ok, but no tearing down anything. The site as a whole should be preserved, even if only part is an actual museum.
I meant from Mississippi, not implying that Stennis was a Rebel from Oxford. I know that rivalry runs _deep_
Except that John C. Stennis, as in the John C. Stennis Space Center, is from there (I actually met him by chance at a nursing home in Madison near the end of his life). And Fred Haies on Apollo 13 was from Biloxi, Mississippi. So it's not _totally_ unprecedented for someone to from Mississippi to be associated with space...
I think that this case might be a little silly because the parents should have root/Administrator access and the child should have a user account, but there is a real question here: how can someone who isn't able remember a password identify themselves to a computer? For example, in a situation where all of the students at an elementary school have individual accounts. First graders cannot be expected to remember a password, but they do have an expectation of privacy. Or maybe the case of someone who has had a traumatic brain injury and suffers from severe memory loss. Despite the framing, the core question I think still stands.
Oh yeah, and first post...
I have the first edition, and it is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it.
The CS program at my University is a joke and apparently it is as I have always feared: my University is on par with CS programs at other Universities. Partially you can blame the Universities, but mostly you have to blame the students. Let me tell you why:
I've been programming since I was 8 when my father (who has worked for IBM since before I was born) taught me C (I am now 25). My Junior year in high school (10 years ago), I stopped using Windows and started using Linux, and have never turned back because I immediately fell in love with Bash.
When I went to school, I started as a Music Major and actually stayed one for quite a while, but I was never very good at it since, instead of practicing my sax for three hours a day like I was supposed to be doing, I was coding about six hours a day. In my first three years of college, I taught myself Java, Lisp, Ruby, and OCaml, and not just the languages but the libraries as well. I read everything I could find about algorithms, data structures, software engineering (URL, Design Patterns, etc.), compilers, theory (FSAs/PDAs/TMs), and even some true graphics programming (ray tracing). All of this I learned from the internet, completely isolated from any direct contact with other computer science professors or students. I did it because I wanted to learn it because it was interesting, and not because anyone told me I had to.
When I realized I was going to starve as a musician I decided to get a minor in CS, since it was something I had always just done for fun, and it would look good on my resume. My first month into the minor, I was already tutoring seniors in their classes, and simultaneously laughing at how easy their assignments were and being horrified that they couldn't do them. I had done more complex projects for fun and threw away the code because I didn't think anyone would want such trivial junk. I quickly found out that I had essentially put myself through a CS degree on my own and completely by accident!
The next semester, I changed majors, was in senior level classes and was actively involved in a research project with one of the professors. Whenever I got an assignment due in two weeks, I would complete it in class, and then spend the next two weeks implementing it in other languages and extending it to something that isn't incredibly trivial. For example, we had two weeks to implement a Turing machine, and because the majority of the class couldn't do it, it got extended to almost a month. I wear shirts from ThinkGeek and my peers don't get the jokes. When I pull up a terminal their eyes glaze over, as if I'm performing some mystical black magic.
The point is that any and all the information for the CS degree is out there and publicly available, but the students are simply not willing to go out and find it. I think the only positive thing I have gleaned out of the CS degree is what they are stripping from the degree programs: being forced to take the advanced math classes. My math classes taught me how to think formally about something that has always been intuitive and have been the most enlightening classes I have ever taken in college!
Whenever I get frustrated with my University or my peers, I just reread theses and remind myself that there are others out there:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html[The Story of Mel]
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html[Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal]
Also, the point of the above article is by no means a new idea. Edsger Dijkstra said it over a decade ago in one of my favorite EWDs:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html[On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science]