School is a start. You can't learn everything you ever need to know in 4 years. I was fortunate enough to work with some very good programmers very early in my career. I knew C pretty well, and could structure small applications (as any reasonable CS program should be able to teach you). But the skills to write the larger apps come with time and experience.
There are some amazing bits of code in relatively mundane programs. Seek this out in what you're already working on, and figure out why the programmer did it that way. Ask him, ask if he'd do it differently now. Some people will find this annoying. Others will admire your curiosity and help you out.
That said, I think you'd be surprised what you've already learned at work.
The major problem with their earlier multiplayer games was the complete lack of strategy. It was all based on speed. The first to attack in strength was going to win, period. (As this was often me, I didn't mind:)). Blizzard has claimed to have solved this in one of their news releases during development. To anyone else that's played it, is it timothy's (admitted) lack of skill that leads him to believe it's build up and crush? Or is it still speed kills?
To post a message, it requires at least 3 page views. At the very least, they must view the story page, then the reply page, then submit it. If they're good little posters, they'll read the other comments (as I did, though the signal-to-noise ratio is rather low on this topic) which may require viewing multiple pages, and they'll preview their posting before actually submitting. It probably takes between 5-7 page views to post most comments. Many posters will then check back for replies, possibly replying again.
It again requires several page views to moderate. They must click on the story, then submit their moderations. If they're good moderators, they'll probably view more. Meta moderation also requires extra page views.
Since the above actions are all necessary to the vitality of slashdot, it would seem unfair to count them as page views. I'd rather see one of two alternatives:
The pages that contribute to the site(comment|moderate|story submit) don't count as page views for paying people, possibly still containing the small (unobtrusive) banner ad slashdot currently uses. Keeping this for all users, or just the paying users, or paying users getting no ad at all as a bonus for paying and contributing, would all make sense.
Or going to a flat monthly rate. I understand that you want to those that use slashdot more to pay more. But your frequent users are your frequent posters - those that make slashdot what it is.
who are they going to pick up? the guy with the backpack? or the other guy with lots of pockets? The whole point is that it's something small and easy to carry (thus concellable) not a blinking light on your head.
The problem I see is in getting the whole thing, the range on wireless devices of this sort is fairly short, and the speeds are relatively slow. Even on 100 base T wire it takes a period of time to transfer several megs. On wireless, with dozens of these chattering away, it'll be much longer.
This seems like the idea of beaming a coupon to your cell phone when you walk near a starbucks. Neat, but there's a lot of technical problems to overcome still, if anyone would pay for it anyway.
Actually it already does. The entire western US is on the same power grid, if one particular spot needs more electricity than it produces, it takes it from elsewhere. I live in WA, CA has been drawing power from all of our dams for a long time. But the dams are hitting capacity, and Gov. Locke actually went on TV telling people to conserve electricity.
It doesn't really help that this coincides with all the studies saying that the dams kill the salmon. Kinda sticks the environmentalists in a tough spot. Take out the dams, cause a blackout of a large part of the west. So build new power plants to compensate?
Try contacting alumni of your college. During my college years we occasionally had an alumni come in to speak. They're usually very happy to come back. They won't be the big draw RMS would be, but they'll probably do it for free, and they're not likely to stand you up (see the ESR post above).
In the US, liberals and conservatives are reversed from their definitions in the rest of the world.
This derives from the fact that the US was founded with the belief that man had *all* rights, and gave some selected ones up to the government in return for certain protections.
So while in America, we call Democrats liberals and Republicans conservatives, in general the Democrats are for bigger government and the Republicans are for smaller.
The parties are pretty similar, but our conservitives are actually (sorta) classic liberals.
since i'm postin anyway, bush is a guy who's total life accomplishments come to forgetting his whole life before 40, losing loads of his parents' friends' money in an oil company in texas, and as governer, making texas schools 49th in the US.
it doesn't matter how bad gore is, bush is worse
too much sex and violence on tv? remove the bush and gore ads.
While I can't think of any (profitable) uses in industry for a computer historian, in academia, it'd be a huge bonus.
In my college experience, the professors that were easiest to learn from (and best to take) had extensive knowledge about where computers came from (maybe because they could predict where they were going?).
Like was mentioned in an above post, a good base in computer history can help you with current projects, excellent for beginning computer students. And every university has a required class of some kind to prove that the geeks can string a sentence together (so they can post on slashdot).
Having learned from Tanenbaum's book in my OS class, I may be a bit biased, but i'd much rather have something on the order of Minix than a flavor of BSD or Linux to learn from.
Slightly over half the book is the source code, that's all the room it takes. Linux and BSD both have *FAR* more complicated (read larger) memory managers, file systems, etc. Understanding these monstrosities on code meant to be learned from is hard enough. On something as complicated as the major OSes, it'd be near impossible for a beginner.
Perhaps the strongest argument though, is that my prof chose the book and OS dispite being a NetBSD person. (He's ported it to one machine, and now runs it on *everything*)
Multiple comments above simply take for granted that spam is guaranteed under freedom of speech. First, we'll assume we're dealing with United States law here, since it's a state. The law does not restrict the sending of information (free speech). It simply makes it unlawful to advertise via mass mailings (spam) with false subject lines, fake return addresses or faking the path.
The Supreme Court has upheld the necessity of anomimity of an individual for free speech. But they have not expanded this protection to corporations, and have infact ruled against it (campaign finance, anyone?).
This law only requires they identify their message and themselves. This allows several things. 1) the spam can now be filtered. 2) the recipients now have a way to communticate their desire not to receive any more. It in no way stops spammers from actually sending out large amounts of email.
If the place of residence is not avaliable, the spammer is not covered under the law. Unless they send the mail with 1) a false subject 2) an invalid return address 3) fakes the path it took.
I am a resident of Washington State. I have 2 valid email addresses located on servers within this state. Neither can/will disclose my current residence, as with *most* isps. The second part of the law has no teeth. Its like you said, nearly impossible to compile a list of Washington residents. The spammer in question violated the 3 conditions above that the law also covers.
This isn't a question of what's decent, like your tennessee example (I'd like to see the case on that one, got the link?). It's a question of what's legitiment business.
On the contrary, the lack of a standard compiler is not that much of a problem. There are several open source programs for Windows already. They have 2 avaliable downloads. First, they offer the source code, usually with information on the compiler they used when creating it. The second download is a zip file, a self-extracting zip or best of all, an install program for it.
The fact that we're dealing with 1 os (windows) on 1 platform (x86) is a huge advantage that the *nixes don't have. The source code in that environment is a must, because of the number of different OSes, and even distributions.
As an example, this link http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ is to a program called putty, an open source telnet/ssh client that was posted on slashdot a week(?) ago.
I don't know why, but this site wasn't turning up on my searches. I've been looking for where putty came from from a number of months now.
As a vote of confidence for this particular ssh client, it's a great little program, i've found *no* bugs in it, it's easy to use, and (best of all?) it's open source.
If you really dislike the stories/. posts, don't read them. Read linux.com and linuxworld.com if they have the news you're looking for. I read/. as a way of getting technology news from a source other than the mainstream media. If you've read the articles on here, you'll have noticed how great CNN and fox do with computer news.
As was noted at the beginning of Jamie's series, this is not a little one-of-a-kind case. Blocking software has been or is being considered in many places, and will undoubtly be considered more in the future as more and more places, especially schools and libraries, become wired.
Jamie is doing us a service by informing us of his struggle to keep the computers in the library free of this software. By posting what he is trying, what the pro-blocking side is using, and what works, he will show us how to fight against (or for) the software when it comes to our home town.
Just because it's not you "they" are out to get, doesn't mean you can ignore it. Together we stand, divided we fall.
I appologize as I am reposting something posted by someone else much earlier, but it was deep in replies, and not moderated as high as it deserved.
This isn't going to be resolved on the basis of technical fact (that the filters work poorly at best) it'll be decided on emotion. And even if the no-filter people win, "protecting the children" will return again next year, and the year after that, until they win.
To win, an alternative has to be introduced. Adult/child logins, moving the computers to "high traffic areas" or something else, simply something a parent can vote for without being labelled as corrupting youth. Simply saying this stuff doesn't work won't bring any support from people who don't already understand it.
I appologize as I am reposting something posted by someone else much earlier, but it was deep in replies, and not moderated as high as it deserved.
This isn't going to be resolved on the basis of technical fact (that the filters work poorly at best) it'll be decided on emotion. And even if the no-filter people win, "protecting the children" will return again next year, and the year after that, until they win.
To win, an alternative has to be introduced. Adult/child logins, moving the computers to "high traffic areas" or something else, simply something a parent can vote for without being labelled as corrupting youth. Simply saying this stuff doesn't work won't bring any support from people who don't already understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess they didn't read yesterday's new york times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html
School is a start. You can't learn everything you ever need to know in 4 years. I was fortunate enough to work with some very good programmers very early in my career. I knew C pretty well, and could structure small applications (as any reasonable CS program should be able to teach you). But the skills to write the larger apps come with time and experience.
There are some amazing bits of code in relatively mundane programs. Seek this out in what you're already working on, and figure out why the programmer did it that way. Ask him, ask if he'd do it differently now. Some people will find this annoying. Others will admire your curiosity and help you out.
That said, I think you'd be surprised what you've already learned at work.
The major problem with their earlier multiplayer games was the complete lack of strategy. It was all based on speed. The first to attack in strength was going to win, period. (As this was often me, I didn't mind :)). Blizzard has claimed to have solved this in one of their news releases during development. To anyone else that's played it, is it timothy's (admitted) lack of skill that leads him to believe it's build up and crush? Or is it still speed kills?
To post a message, it requires at least 3 page views. At the very least, they must view the story page, then the reply page, then submit it. If they're good little posters, they'll read the other comments (as I did, though the signal-to-noise ratio is rather low on this topic) which may require viewing multiple pages, and they'll preview their posting before actually submitting. It probably takes between 5-7 page views to post most comments. Many posters will then check back for replies, possibly replying again.
It again requires several page views to moderate. They must click on the story, then submit their moderations. If they're good moderators, they'll probably view more. Meta moderation also requires extra page views.
Since the above actions are all necessary to the vitality of slashdot, it would seem unfair to count them as page views. I'd rather see one of two alternatives:
The pages that contribute to the site(comment|moderate|story submit) don't count as page views for paying people, possibly still containing the small (unobtrusive) banner ad slashdot currently uses. Keeping this for all users, or just the paying users, or paying users getting no ad at all as a bonus for paying and contributing, would all make sense.
Or going to a flat monthly rate. I understand that you want to those that use slashdot more to pay more. But your frequent users are your frequent posters - those that make slashdot what it is.
Charles
In the mainstream browsers (IE, Netscape) hit escape to stop the animation. Don't do this if the page is still loading, it stops that too.
As I post this, the total postings has climbed past 1400, so I've got to add one more.
Congratulations
who are they going to pick up? the guy with the backpack? or the other guy with lots of pockets? The whole point is that it's something small and easy to carry (thus concellable) not a blinking light on your head.
The problem I see is in getting the whole thing, the range on wireless devices of this sort is fairly short, and the speeds are relatively slow. Even on 100 base T wire it takes a period of time to transfer several megs. On wireless, with dozens of these chattering away, it'll be much longer.
This seems like the idea of beaming a coupon to your cell phone when you walk near a starbucks. Neat, but there's a lot of technical problems to overcome still, if anyone would pay for it anyway.
actually the airforce had been quite at home with leaky airplanes for some time at that point.
the common joke about the B-52 among it's crew:
Q: "How do you tell when a B-52 is out of hydralic fluid/gas/oil?"
A: "There's no puddles beneath the aircraft."
Actually it already does. The entire western US is on the same power grid, if one particular spot needs more electricity than it produces, it takes it from elsewhere. I live in WA, CA has been drawing power from all of our dams for a long time. But the dams are hitting capacity, and Gov. Locke actually went on TV telling people to conserve electricity.
It doesn't really help that this coincides with all the studies saying that the dams kill the salmon. Kinda sticks the environmentalists in a tough spot. Take out the dams, cause a blackout of a large part of the west. So build new power plants to compensate?
woodpeckers
Try contacting alumni of your college. During my college years we occasionally had an alumni come in to speak. They're usually very happy to come back. They won't be the big draw RMS would be, but they'll probably do it for free, and they're not likely to stand you up (see the ESR post above).
In the US, liberals and conservatives are reversed from their definitions in the rest of the world.
This derives from the fact that the US was founded with the belief that man had *all* rights, and gave some selected ones up to the government in return for certain protections.
So while in America, we call Democrats liberals and Republicans conservatives, in general the Democrats are for bigger government and the Republicans are for smaller.
The parties are pretty similar, but our conservitives are actually (sorta) classic liberals.
since i'm postin anyway, bush is a guy who's total life accomplishments come to forgetting his whole life before 40, losing loads of his parents' friends' money in an oil company in texas, and as governer, making texas schools 49th in the US.
it doesn't matter how bad gore is, bush is worse
too much sex and violence on tv? remove the bush and gore ads.
Quake doesn't eat up as much bandwidth as napster, i'm sure..but does it really count as better use of an academic network?
:)
not that i never used the network at my school for...less than academic reasons
While I can't think of any (profitable) uses in industry for a computer historian, in academia, it'd be a huge bonus.
In my college experience, the professors that were easiest to learn from (and best to take) had extensive knowledge about where computers came from (maybe because they could predict where they were going?).
Like was mentioned in an above post, a good base in computer history can help you with current projects, excellent for beginning computer students. And every university has a required class of some kind to prove that the geeks can string a sentence together (so they can post on slashdot).
Having learned from Tanenbaum's book in my OS class, I may be a bit biased, but i'd much rather have something on the order of Minix than a flavor of BSD or Linux to learn from.
Slightly over half the book is the source code, that's all the room it takes. Linux and BSD both have *FAR* more complicated (read larger) memory managers, file systems, etc. Understanding these monstrosities on code meant to be learned from is hard enough. On something as complicated as the major OSes, it'd be near impossible for a beginner.
Perhaps the strongest argument though, is that my prof chose the book and OS dispite being a NetBSD person. (He's ported it to one machine, and now runs it on *everything*)
Multiple comments above simply take for granted that spam is guaranteed under freedom of speech. First, we'll assume we're dealing with United States law here, since it's a state. The law does not restrict the sending of information (free speech). It simply makes it unlawful to advertise via mass mailings (spam) with false subject lines, fake return addresses or faking the path.
The Supreme Court has upheld the necessity of anomimity of an individual for free speech. But they have not expanded this protection to corporations, and have infact ruled against it (campaign finance, anyone?).
This law only requires they identify their message and themselves. This allows several things. 1) the spam can now be filtered. 2) the recipients now have a way to communticate their desire not to receive any more. It in no way stops spammers from actually sending out large amounts of email.
If the place of residence is not avaliable, the spammer is not covered under the law. Unless they send the mail with 1) a false subject 2) an invalid return address 3) fakes the path it took.
I am a resident of Washington State. I have 2 valid email addresses located on servers within this state. Neither can/will disclose my current residence, as with *most* isps. The second part of the law has no teeth. Its like you said, nearly impossible to compile a list of Washington residents. The spammer in question violated the 3 conditions above that the law also covers.
This isn't a question of what's decent, like your tennessee example (I'd like to see the case on that one, got the link?). It's a question of what's legitiment business.
On the contrary, the lack of a standard compiler is not that much of a problem. There are several open source programs for Windows already. They have 2 avaliable downloads. First, they offer the source code, usually with information on the compiler they used when creating it. The second download is a zip file, a self-extracting zip or best of all, an install program for it.
The fact that we're dealing with 1 os (windows) on 1 platform (x86) is a huge advantage that the *nixes don't have. The source code in that environment is a must, because of the number of different OSes, and even distributions.
As an example, this link http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ is to a program called putty, an open source telnet/ssh client that was posted on slashdot a week(?) ago.
I don't know why, but this site wasn't turning up on my searches. I've been looking for where putty came from from a number of months now.
As a vote of confidence for this particular ssh client, it's a great little program, i've found *no* bugs in it, it's easy to use, and (best of all?) it's open source.
If you really dislike the stories /. posts, don't read them. Read linux.com and linuxworld.com if they have the news you're looking for. I read /. as a way of getting technology news from a source other than the mainstream media. If you've read the articles on here, you'll have noticed how great CNN and fox do with computer news.
As was noted at the beginning of Jamie's series, this is not a little one-of-a-kind case. Blocking software has been or is being considered in many places, and will undoubtly be considered more in the future as more and more places, especially schools and libraries, become wired.
Jamie is doing us a service by informing us of his struggle to keep the computers in the library free of this software. By posting what he is trying, what the pro-blocking side is using, and what works, he will show us how to fight against (or for) the software when it comes to our home town.
Just because it's not you "they" are out to get, doesn't mean you can ignore it. Together we stand, divided we fall.
I appologize as I am reposting something posted by someone else much earlier, but it was deep in replies, and not moderated as high as it deserved.
This isn't going to be resolved on the basis of technical fact (that the filters work poorly at best) it'll be decided on emotion. And even if the no-filter people win, "protecting the children" will return again next year, and the year after that, until they win.
To win, an alternative has to be introduced. Adult/child logins, moving the computers to "high traffic areas" or something else, simply something a parent can vote for without being labelled as corrupting youth. Simply saying this stuff doesn't work won't bring any support from people who don't already understand it.
CharlesI appologize as I am reposting something posted by someone else much earlier, but it was deep in replies, and not moderated as high as it deserved.
This isn't going to be resolved on the basis of technical fact (that the filters work poorly at best) it'll be decided on emotion. And even if the no-filter people win, "protecting the children" will return again next year, and the year after that, until they win.
To win, an alternative has to be introduced. Adult/child logins, moving the computers to "high traffic areas" or something else, simply something a parent can vote for without being labelled as corrupting youth. Simply saying this stuff doesn't work won't bring any support from people who don't already understand it.