There have been quite a few comments about Perl 6 gaining too much syntax, but I can't help but think that you could make the same argument about the English language. There are many words out there that most of us don't need, but for some people, they greatly simplify communicating within their field. I think Perl 6 will actually be easier to learn than Perl 5, because a Learning Perl book would not need to even touch on some of the more advanced areas, and the simple areas have been, well, simplified.
I don't know about everyone else, but I saw way more advertising for Spider-Man than AotC. Star Wars may have had the hype of all that's behind it, but it also had to win back the fans it lost with Episode 1.
Oh yeah, I remember Icons. We used them at Waterloo Oxford DSS for Grade 11 Comp Sci class as late as '93, when I took the class. The classes consisted of self-directed units on the fundamentals of programming using BASIC.
I remember I would complete the two week lessons in a day or two and spend the rest of the time getting into trouble, such as the time I recreated the entire login screen, ASCII art and all, in a BASIC program. Using a friend's account, a few of us installed it all around the lab and waited for people to log in at which point their passwords were logged to a file. The only problem was we had nowhere to go after that, so the program just displayed some lame message asking the user to reboot their computer. Almost everyone did, except for the guy whose computer backed towards mine. Needless to say I was caught, chastised, and never hacked anything again.;)
What you are proposing does not make sense. X is simply for drawing primitives, and the whole point of an optimized X server is that it calls the hardware optimized functions of your graphics card to draw those primitives. I assume when you say that GNOME and KDE should be implemented in hardware you mean Gtk and Qt, since the majority of GNOME and KDE are non-graphical libraries.
Just saw this at the Jakarta (Java stuff for for the Apache project) site:
Alexandria, which says it is "a CVS/Javadoc/Source code/Documentation management system meant for use within Open Source projects. It's goal is to create a global documentation and source organization system to help people understand source code and to share code across projects."
Good point, but many of the studies I was referring to were not corelational studies but true experiments involving the random assignment of subjects to porn and no-porn conditions.
Since I am currently studying for my Social Psychology exam that deals with such issues, I must ask: Where is the evidence for the claims you make? We were taught to be very critical of one person experiences like the one you relate, and look for true scientific evidence.
What you are saying sounds much like the theory of catharsis which was originally proposed by the Greeks and popularized by Freud. It's the old argument that watching violence is a release that reduces violent actions. Unfortunately, my textbook describes study after study that prove that violence breeds violence -- even if it was just something passively seen.
Now, I completely realize the studies I am talking about deal with violence and not pornography. More experiments need to be done to see if long term pornography use leads to damaged male-female relationships, derregation of women, and/or violence toward women. There are studies that show violent pornography does increase violence to women, and even non-violent pornography can lead to the objectification of women.
If you're interested, I can provide references for some of these studies. But maybe not until after my exam!
Oh, one other part of the XP philosophy that I found interesting is this:
You only code the functionality you need. Don't bother making something more abstract than you need at the moment. As your needs grow, you modify your code to handle the next cases, and occasionally clean up your code. This is the "refactoring" process that the article refers to.
It's interesting in that it runs counter to the way most of us are taught to program. We're told to make sure we consider how things could be used in the future so we don't code ourselves into a corner.
It would be interesting to know which method actually requires more work in the long term.
Hmmm... strange that we should get two articles on Extreme Programming in one day.
Just wanted to point a couple things:
Extreme Programming (XP) is more than just coding in pairs. Among other things, it also involves writing very short procedures (about 20 loc) and giving them long names that describe everything they do, such as ReturnNextValueAndRemoveFromStack().
It is not that new. I first learned about it over a year ago in a software engineering class, and examples of its use were given then. Some projects have really worked well with the concept, but not all.
Actually, I was surprised that there were so many yankee teams in the top ten. It's be a while (if I remember correctly) since there have been any American teams in the top ten.
Of course, I wasn't surprised to see Waterloo up there. They've been in the top ten (including at least a couple firsts) for years.
Wow... that must be the best science I've ever heard! I mean, my profs in my scientific courses always say things like 'This is our best model for understanding what we have observed, but it doesn't necessarily mean it is the truth.'
I guess the stuff I learn in University just isn't good science.
I was having trouble installing new RPMs, particularly those from Rawhide, because they were packaged with the new versions of RPM. Upgrading to rpm-3.0.5 will allow you to install rpm-4 packages.
The enduring value of the Watcom C compilers have been their optimizations. Having worked at Sybase/Watcom on a co-op term, I know the Watcom compilers were preferred over Microsoft ones because of the smaller/faster code produced. Sybase eventually decided to give up once began Microsoft pushing technologies that required compiler changes -- like the latest COM stuff.
In theory, we should be able to take some of the smarts from the Watcom compiler and put them in GCC. I bet this won't be very possible in practice simply because of architectural differences in the compilers.
The controversy was caused because the judges had incorrect test data. Although the question stated that the graph was connected, one of the test sets tested an unconnected graph. This wouldn't have been too bad, except for the fact that teams were forced to realize on their own what was going wrong, and guess at what kind of output the judges wanted for such a graph.
I'm unsure whether there's any hope for a good spinoff or not. I agree that this episode stank, partly becuase they didn't do their research, and partly because the plot fell into cliches.
You do have to admit that the Lone Gunmen in LA was a good episode, though.
Actually, overall, I've been pleasantly surprised with this season. Other than this episode and maybe "Hungry", they have really pulled things up from last season. The episodes about that lucky guy, the magicians, and the speed ones were particularly good.
I think Katz's response to the Christian's question is great. Why are many Christian's so easily offended? Why are they so concerned (especially in the US) about their rights and their agenda?
As a follower of Christ myself, I realize I'm involved in something spiritual. Christ demonstrated, more than anyone else ever could, the concept of giving up your rights (God becoming human) for the sake of others. While my relationship with God is not a closet thing that I should carefully hide from everyone else, the way I share it should be in a way that frees others the most, not enslaves them.
Christ said himself, "I have come that you may have life, and have life to the fullest" and it was "For freedom that he has set us free." I hope, in every interaction with others, I might be able to free them to get just a little closer to God.
Postscript isn't going away any time soon, and the glitches you mentioned will be eradicated over time in classic open-source style.
Unfortunately, I don't think even the power of open source will overcome the problem mentioned. It's been proven that the halting problem is not computable.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
The problem most have is not the behaviour of Christians, but the fact that they condemn others for their actions, even when the others don't think said actions are wrong.
Yeah, I agree with you. As Christians, we're not called to judge others. We are called to live in truth, which means not ignoring something that is obviously wrong. It has a lot to do with motivations; the Bible says to say "only that which is uplifting to others." In other words, if someone is doing something that will obviously lead to their destruction or others', we're called to say something that can draw something better from them, start a fight.
Of course, if a person chooses to be offended and reject what is said, it isn't necessarily the fault of the messenger.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
More proof that Open Source isn't necessarily taking paying jobs away from programmers. It seems more opportunities are opening up to make a living working with our favorite software.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
The field of cryptography seems to be characterized both by steady progress and large upsets. Where do you think steady progress will take us in ten years, and what are some possible upsets that might occur during that time?
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
It's probably too late for this comment to get noticed or moderated up, but I'm gonna make it anyway. [sigh]
God is primarily interested in refining a person's character, not their behaviour. Behaviours are just a reflection of character. The character God desires for us is the best possible character for us, for others, and for him.
That being said, each individual Christian has a huge amount of freedom in their behaviour. There are infinitely many ways to live the Christian life, which is nothing more than: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love others as yourself."
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
I spent many years thinking that we should respect the religions of others; that people have the right to worship what and/or who they want. As I've grown older (and more dogmatic), I see this atitude as harmful.
This is the same reasoning that many Christians have come to -- that by respecting the beliefs of others, people think there is no problem with them. What is the balance between being unloving or unrespectful to someone, and spreading the truth (which can sometime be offensive).
Hands up all the Christians out there who turn the other cheek? Hands up the christians who've never copied someone else's CD (Thou Shalt Not Steal)?
Though far from perfect, I rarely attack someone back, and do not have any pirated software of CDs.
hypocrisy displayed by most Christians (the religion with which I'm most familiar. I'm Irish)
I spent several months working with a small church in Dublin recently, and I can see where you see the hypocrisy. In some ways, Ireland's religous heritage is a curse -- there is so much religion (behaviours) that have remained while the relationship with God has disapeared (in many areas). There are some amazing followers of God both in the Protestant and Catholic churches, and outside of the church in Ireland, but there are far more people in "the Church" that do it because of tradition and not love.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
Religion and freedom have never really gotten along
In the words of Jesus: "[God] has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed." (Luke 4:18)
I can truly say that following Jesus has freed me more than I ever could have done by my own pilosophies.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
The arrival of the first Christian computer action game opens a whole new chapter in the never-ending struggle between technology and the self-proclaimed forces of morality.
It always amazes me how many people talk about Christianity as if it's a big corporation, or a giant collective. People talk as if an action taken by a single Christian is representitive of all Christians. I could see how someone might get that impression in the States (from what I hear) because there are large, politically minded Christian organizations.
At its heart, Christianity is following a leader, Jesus Christ. The act of following Jesus is subject to all of the human failings that apply to following anything else. If God was interested in making his followers robots that only do his will, he could have made all humans that way. Instead, he chooses to give us the choice to follow him, and even creativity in the way we follow him.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
I'm sure almost everyone will agree with me that the first book to read on the subject is Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier. It does not contain much history, but it does cover many, many different cryptographic techniques and implementations. The math required isn't too bad, and is covered in part of the book.
Best of all, it is a real pleasure to read. Schneier really captures the interesting aspects of the field.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been quite a few comments about Perl 6 gaining too much syntax, but I can't help but think that you could make the same argument about the English language. There are many words out there that most of us don't need, but for some people, they greatly simplify communicating within their field. I think Perl 6 will actually be easier to learn than Perl 5, because a Learning Perl book would not need to even touch on some of the more advanced areas, and the simple areas have been, well, simplified.
I don't know about everyone else, but I saw way more advertising for Spider-Man than AotC. Star Wars may have had the hype of all that's behind it, but it also had to win back the fans it lost with Episode 1.
I remember I would complete the two week lessons in a day or two and spend the rest of the time getting into trouble, such as the time I recreated the entire login screen, ASCII art and all, in a BASIC program. Using a friend's account, a few of us installed it all around the lab and waited for people to log in at which point their passwords were logged to a file. The only problem was we had nowhere to go after that, so the program just displayed some lame message asking the user to reboot their computer. Almost everyone did, except for the guy whose computer backed towards mine. Needless to say I was caught, chastised, and never hacked anything again. ;)
What you are proposing does not make sense. X is simply for drawing primitives, and the whole point of an optimized X server is that it calls the hardware optimized functions of your graphics card to draw those primitives. I assume when you say that GNOME and KDE should be implemented in hardware you mean Gtk and Qt, since the majority of GNOME and KDE are non-graphical libraries.
Alexandria, which says it is "a CVS/Javadoc/Source code/Documentation management system meant for use within Open Source projects. It's goal is to create a global documentation and source organization system to help people understand source code and to share code across projects."
Remember correlation is not causation!!
Good point, but many of the studies I was referring to were not corelational studies but true experiments involving the random assignment of subjects to porn and no-porn conditions.
Since I am currently studying for my Social Psychology exam that deals with such issues, I must ask: Where is the evidence for the claims you make? We were taught to be very critical of one person experiences like the one you relate, and look for true scientific evidence.
What you are saying sounds much like the theory of catharsis which was originally proposed by the Greeks and popularized by Freud. It's the old argument that watching violence is a release that reduces violent actions. Unfortunately, my textbook describes study after study that prove that violence breeds violence -- even if it was just something passively seen.
Now, I completely realize the studies I am talking about deal with violence and not pornography. More experiments need to be done to see if long term pornography use leads to damaged male-female relationships, derregation of women, and/or violence toward women. There are studies that show violent pornography does increase violence to women, and even non-violent pornography can lead to the objectification of women.
If you're interested, I can provide references for some of these studies. But maybe not until after my exam!
You only code the functionality you need. Don't bother making something more abstract than you need at the moment. As your needs grow, you modify your code to handle the next cases, and occasionally clean up your code. This is the "refactoring" process that the article refers to.
It's interesting in that it runs counter to the way most of us are taught to program. We're told to make sure we consider how things could be used in the future so we don't code ourselves into a corner.
It would be interesting to know which method actually requires more work in the long term.
Just wanted to point a couple things:
Of course, I wasn't surprised to see Waterloo up there. They've been in the top ten (including at least a couple firsts) for years.
Hmmm, that sounds kinda cocky. Oh, well.
I guess the stuff I learn in University just isn't good science.
I was having trouble installing new RPMs, particularly those from Rawhide, because they were packaged with the new versions of RPM. Upgrading to rpm-3.0.5 will allow you to install rpm-4 packages.
In theory, we should be able to take some of the smarts from the Watcom compiler and put them in GCC. I bet this won't be very possible in practice simply because of architectural differences in the compilers.
The controversy was caused because the judges had incorrect test data. Although the question stated that the graph was connected, one of the test sets tested an unconnected graph. This wouldn't have been too bad, except for the fact that teams were forced to realize on their own what was going wrong, and guess at what kind of output the judges wanted for such a graph.
You do have to admit that the Lone Gunmen in LA was a good episode, though.
Actually, overall, I've been pleasantly surprised with this season. Other than this episode and maybe "Hungry", they have really pulled things up from last season. The episodes about that lucky guy, the magicians, and the speed ones were particularly good.
As a follower of Christ myself, I realize I'm involved in something spiritual. Christ demonstrated, more than anyone else ever could, the concept of giving up your rights (God becoming human) for the sake of others. While my relationship with God is not a closet thing that I should carefully hide from everyone else, the way I share it should be in a way that frees others the most, not enslaves them.
Christ said himself, "I have come that you may have life, and have life to the fullest" and it was "For freedom that he has set us free." I hope, in every interaction with others, I might be able to free them to get just a little closer to God.
Unfortunately, I don't think even the power of open source will overcome the problem mentioned. It's been proven that the halting problem is not computable.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
Yeah, I agree with you. As Christians, we're not called to judge others. We are called to live in truth, which means not ignoring something that is obviously wrong. It has a lot to do with motivations; the Bible says to say "only that which is uplifting to others." In other words, if someone is doing something that will obviously lead to their destruction or others', we're called to say something that can draw something better from them, start a fight.
Of course, if a person chooses to be offended and reject what is said, it isn't necessarily the fault of the messenger.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
More proof that Open Source isn't necessarily taking paying jobs away from programmers. It seems more opportunities are opening up to make a living working with our favorite software.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
The field of cryptography seems to be characterized both by steady progress and large upsets. Where do you think steady progress will take us in ten years, and what are some possible upsets that might occur during that time?
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
God is primarily interested in refining a person's character, not their behaviour. Behaviours are just a reflection of character. The character God desires for us is the best possible character for us, for others, and for him.
That being said, each individual Christian has a huge amount of freedom in their behaviour. There are infinitely many ways to live the Christian life, which is nothing more than: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love others as yourself."
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
This is the same reasoning that many Christians have come to -- that by respecting the beliefs of others, people think there is no problem with them. What is the balance between being unloving or unrespectful to someone, and spreading the truth (which can sometime be offensive).
Hands up all the Christians out there who turn the other cheek? Hands up the christians who've never copied someone else's CD (Thou Shalt Not Steal)?
Though far from perfect, I rarely attack someone back, and do not have any pirated software of CDs.
hypocrisy displayed by most Christians (the religion with which I'm most familiar. I'm Irish)
I spent several months working with a small church in Dublin recently, and I can see where you see the hypocrisy. In some ways, Ireland's religous heritage is a curse -- there is so much religion (behaviours) that have remained while the relationship with God has disapeared (in many areas). There are some amazing followers of God both in the Protestant and Catholic churches, and outside of the church in Ireland, but there are far more people in "the Church" that do it because of tradition and not love.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
In the words of Jesus: "[God] has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed." (Luke 4:18)
I can truly say that following Jesus has freed me more than I ever could have done by my own pilosophies.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
It always amazes me how many people talk about Christianity as if it's a big corporation, or a giant collective. People talk as if an action taken by a single Christian is representitive of all Christians. I could see how someone might get that impression in the States (from what I hear) because there are large, politically minded Christian organizations.
At its heart, Christianity is following a leader, Jesus Christ. The act of following Jesus is subject to all of the human failings that apply to following anything else. If God was interested in making his followers robots that only do his will, he could have made all humans that way. Instead, he chooses to give us the choice to follow him, and even creativity in the way we follow him.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
Best of all, it is a real pleasure to read. Schneier really captures the interesting aspects of the field.
For more info, check out the Slashdot review.
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."