I don't know who came up with that size, but it
cannot be right -- or else it just isn't current.
I looked at the disk usage for our web sites
(my group runs a not-for-profit web publishing
service), and we use about 1Tb of space
for our content.
I do not blame them for wanting to target that 90% -- but I do think it's a problem if they don't code well enough to not crash browsers in the other 10%. And, just to be clear, I'm not angry with them. I just won't use the site.
I don't happen to know or write JS at work (we are a web publishing group), but we have some people here who do. It seems like our general philosphy has been that we'll use JS if there is absolutly no other way to achieve a desired functionality in the UI. The folks that do the JS really have to test on a bunch of different platforms to make sure it doesn't break browsers.
As you said, it's a pain in the ass if a browser is not compliant. They almost always find some small problem which requires a tweak in the JS. I remember at least once where we simply couldn't make it reliable, and had to drop the idea. That makes for a UI which isn't as clean, but gets the job done without crashing someone's browser.
The main point is that we don't use JS for anything vital to the operation of the site. A user with JS off will lose some functionality, but won't sutffer their browser crashing. While the JS folks don't test every browser under the sun, they have a bunch of both new and old ones on different machines they have to test.
Thank you for pointing out a good reason for students to stay at Drexel. I'd like to point out that paid internships are not that uncommon though. If students feel this benefit is somehow binding them to Drexel, they might have other options:
My tiny liberal arts college had a program which I took advantage of, and it gave me two years of full time experience as a systems administrator while providing for two classes per semester. As you point out, I ended up spending 5 years instead of 4 at college, but the job on the resume made it worth it.
While I never attended Stanford, I know they have research assistant jobs, which are essentially paid internships. In my department I know of three students we hired as Research Assistants, and whom we then asked to come work for us full time when they graduated.
I grew up in Madison, WI, and I know that UW Madison's Comp Sci groups hire students to work as developers and administrators. I know that because I worked there one winter break -- they were willing to hire a student from another college for the 1 month winter break.
Given that they are the only three academic environments I've been at, I was always assuming most large, and even some small, institutions provide for this kind of real experience which is so vital for the resume when you first graduate.
I disagree. Drexel, in this block of 300+ domain names, bought drexelsucks.com. IMHO, their only reason to aquire it pre-emptively, is to block student free speech.
I'm afraid I was saying that I agree a University ought to be allowed to do this. In my opinion, they have a right to protect themselves from obvious avenues people might use to criticize them.
Let me put it this way: why should a University not spend the $70.00 bucks or whatever it is these days to buy up a domain like drexelsucks.com in order to prevent someone from using it to possibly drive away potential students? A University is there to teach, and in many places to perform research. But they need income to do both, and of course students to do the former. It is not in their interests to let prospective students know about any of the flaws at their University.
They will naturally do everything legally possible to prevent people from cutting off their potential supply of new students. And of course, they are allowed to block free speech. It is not nice, but it is real life.
Indeed, companies should be allowed to advertise if they want to. But I'm not going to be visiting their site again.
What I find really objectionable is javascript which breaks my browser. If I have windows open to APIs, my CVS tree, etc., I don't want it all crashing on me if I need to go look up an article on a site which uses a broken pop up.
If a company says they are going to keep using javascript ads, and won't let me see content if I don't allow javascript, then I'll find my information elsewhere. I'm not going to let them kill my browser sessions because they want to target the Windows IE users out there.
If people do not believe they are getting an education at Drexel which is commensurate to the very high tuition, why do they continue to attend? With that amount of money being spent, and the quote that financial aid is poor, I imagine students should be able to afford a different school.
Censorship is always a touchy issue, but a private school is in fact allowed to practice it. The first amendment is protecting us from the government imposing censorship. A private company is still able to warn employees: either you stop saying that or you will be fired. A school is still able to tell students that they can't print something in a school funded paper.
An example: Chelsea Clinton attended Stanford from 1997 to 2001. I hear that Stanford takes a strict view on enforcing privacy for its students, and in this case they apparently enforced a ban on stories about Chelsea. Well, a student columnist was fired for writing a story about the ban the University had put in place. Doesn't sound very fair does it? But it's within their rights.
You can always bring pressure on the school, and I assume such has happened in the past. But I don't agree with arguments that a school should not be allowed to buy up domain names in an attempt to keep the most obvious avenues of criticism closed.
If it's a private university then I'd be arguing that nobody other than the governing body of the school has any say in how that money is spent. If people are getting their education, but don't like the fact that the university is spending money on domains, they can either a) stop going to the school or b) talk to the governing body.
I assume the original poster just wanted to know about other policies, but the above argument seems to lean toward the claim that taxpayers somehow have a right to micromanage how a university spends its money. With a private university, the argument just doesn't fly in my book.
If the money from the government was in the form of a grant, and that grant was delivered and isn't associated with some sort of bilk attempt, then the money has properly passed hands. It's no longer the concern of any oversight from the giver of the grant. A grant is payment for a service, usually in the form of research, the results, and perhaps prototypes depending on the field. So what if some of the money, after it's passed hands from the research group back to main accounting eventually gets used to buy a domain name?
Sure, you have a right to argue to your lawmakers that you shouldn't have to pay taxes for X, Y, or Z, but I'd be wary if anyone stepped forward and said they have a right to manage how a university spends grant money.
And from what I've read it sounds like the Newton was a very big hit for those who used it to track their patients. The pilot strikes me as too small to use for this purpose. I bought one a few years ago, right before they started to really catch on. I ended up ditching it and hunting down a used Newton MessagePad 2000.
For those interested in a very good article about the use of a PDA in medical settings, I highly recommend reading A Day in the Life of my Newton.
100K per day sounds awful low to me. I've never run a big apache server off an intl/linux box, but the group I work for runs a small web farm on ultrasparc/solaris/apache boxes.
I'm looking at one of our solaris boxes, a U450 with 4 gigs of ram, and we've processed 2,048,607 raw requests (this includes graphics) today. Actual page hits, all of which have some dynamic content, comes out to 439,026. And there are 6 more hours left in the day.
A four processer machine with 4 gigs of memory is a big box, but it's not huge. I'm wondering what kind of processor/ram configuration the PC that DELL tested on was. I don't believe a comparable machine on an Intel/Linux box could only handle 100k a day.
Over 11 machines with similar configurations (a few only have 2 processors), we serve around 300,000,000 page hits a month. I find it hard to believe that Apache on Linux/Intel hardware would fare so much worse.
Refute could mean more than refused. It could
also mean to prove in error. That means that
the film could prove the patent to be in error,
while saying nothing about whether or not the
patent office accepted this proof.
The whole point of the post on slashdot is that Cerf *isn't* qualified to give an endorsement. The Wall Street Journal and other papers are carrying articles about how Cerf says Carnivore is OK. The FBI PR department and the big papers are pushing to the public that Cerf's opinion should somehow matter.
Did you bother to read the blurb above? It ends with 'This is nearly as reassuring as the Justice Department's decision to change the name of Carnivore...' I mean really, the WSJ headline I mentioned reads 'Web Guru Cerf Defends FBI's Use of Carnivore.' It goes on to claim Cerf is 'widely regarded as the the "father of the internet."'
Methinks you have misdirected your post against slashdot instead of against the mainstream press...
Just a note, the reason you didn't see sample source code was that the 3-floppy distro was just a sample to see if the system would work on your hardware.
For Plan 9 v2 you had to buy the CD and manuals in order to get the source code. It was around 350 US when I bought it one and a half years ago. It's really nice that they managed to open-source v3.
And a note for "faeryman" who was writing that "Forte was the pre-curser to Plan 9": I think you are mixing up your references. Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a complete OS all written by Bell Labs folks (Lucent now, AT&T Bell Labs back then). From the looks of if, Forte is some sort of virtual application environment. Nothing to do with Plan 9.
The definitive examples of Literate Programming are two of Knuth's own works: "TeX, The Program" and "Metafont: The Program." Knuth wrote these using his original LP tool, WEB. That means he wrote the code part in Pascal, which in itself amazes me. =) These are available as books, and of course in the original source code format tex.web and (I'm guessing) metafont.web. You can get tex.web off any of the CTAN sites (http://www.ctan.org/). The output is really quite beautiful.
Knuth now uses CWEB, an LP tool for writing programs in C, and C++ (though from everything I've read, it isn't all that hot at C++). You can get a copy of the program, which is itself an example of literate programming, at
ftp://labrea.stanford.edu:/pub/cweb
Look at common.w, ctangle.w, and cweave.w. When you run 'make doc' you get dvi files for the programs, which you can read with xdvi or kdvi.
Many people who post to the LP Usenet group comp.programming.literate seem to use an LP tool called Noweb. It was developed as a language independent tool, and it does not do the pretty-printing WEB or CWEB do. However, it uses LaTeX as it's default typesetting language (which is simpler to use then raw TeX), and it can output indexed HTML pages.
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb/
There are examples of Noweb code on that page. Noweb is what I use for my perl and Java programming.
The concept is not quite the same as Javadoc. I actually embed Javadoc comments in my own Java code even though I'm using noweb. The Javadoc is excellent at detailing API for the black box that is a method, or giving an overview on a class, but it isn't as good for detailed explanations. And the best thing about LP is that you can take a section of code, and abstract it into a sentence that you later expand into real code. At times, it is nice to be able to use that instead of a function.
This is an example of some bits and pieces for an apache module I wrote
Now that we're hooked into the \Apache\ module list, we define [[check_uptime]]. This method takes a [[request_rec *]] and returns a status-code declaring whether or not the request is allowed to proceed.
<<define module functions>>= /* * returns HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR if the time elapsed between * this request and the server start-up time is not greater than * warmup_time; otherwise return DECLINED. */ int check_uptime(request_rec * r) { <<declare [[check_uptime]] variables>> <<set [[warmup_time]] from env variable [[MOD_WARMUP_SEC]]>> <<return DECLINED if [[warmup_time]] == 0 or if this is not a/cgi/ request>> <<set up shared memory segment [[shm_id]]>> <<set [[startup_time]] from [[shm_id]] or [[r->request_time]]>>
/* * This code returns a ``Temporarily Unavailable'' * page on HW servers */ return HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR; } } @ [...]
And the other parts are expanded with their own sections. Noweb will auto-index this because it's a C program, and I end up with an indexed program that has a TOC and nicely formatted explanations with each unit of code.
I can take each unit of code and write, in however much detail I want, an explanation detailing the what and why (and even use a proof if it's a complex algorithm). TeX/LaTeX also allow you to put in real book references if you are implementing someone else's idea out of a book or paper.
Many times, just having the ability to use a real sentence is a help. Using "return DECLINED if [[warmup_time]] == 0 or if this is not a/cgi/ request" is much nicer than using "check_early_decline()" or something. It's clear to the reader what is going on. They don't have to jump down to the function or section or whatever just to read the details of what that method does. Each unit of code is very readable by itself, and concentrates on one or two specific ideas.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once wrote that the right to be left alone is the beginning of all freedom. That's bad news, because privacy as we've come to understand the idea is over, and tracking software -- now widely deployed on the Web and in businesses from banking to supermarkets -- helped to kill it.
"I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated communism, now seems about to do the same to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not."
I prefer this quote:
"They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men."
Justice Louis Brandeis Olmstead v. United States (1928)
But for one in the/. article, I found this interesting piece on the net (http://www.wulaw.wustl.edu/WULQ/76-1/761-22.html) :
"In 1977, the Supreme Court first recognized a constitutional right to informational privacy in Whalen v. Roe.[96] The Whalen Court upheld a New York law under which the State recorded the names and addresses of all patients obtaining prescriptions for certain dangerous drugs in a centralized computer file.[97] Whalen recognized two aspects of a right to privacy:[98] the right to avoid disclosure of personal matters;[99] and the right to personal privacy in decisionmaking.[100] While the Whalen Court did not find a constitutional invasion of privacy, Justice Brennan's concurring opinion opened the door to future claims against information gathering technologies like Intellidata.[101] Further, Whalen's patient information discussion is analogous to Intellidata because both involve the use of computerized databases to retrieve and store personal information."
I think it's clear that while we have a right to privacy from the government, and we have the right to withhold information on personal matters, we don't have a right to force a company to not work with data mining applications. We have the choice to a) not do business with them, or b) avoid leaving them with data they can use.
Each time, some program is tracking our every move, compiling elaborate marketing profiles, often collating the information with vast databases and selling the resulting information without our knowledge.
Unless you use a proxy like Internet Junkbuster, or take active steps to deny the use of cookies for tracking you *as an individual.*
According to the Interagency Financial Institution Web Site Privacy Survey, conducted by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), all of the 50 largest financial institutions online collect three or more pieces of personal or demographic information about users. The FDIC says that only eight of the 50 largest institutions meet minimal privacy data standards. That is, they fail to explain what data is being collected, allow consumers to opt out, permit access to the information, provide secure storage for the data, and provide customers a way to contact the company regarding privacy issues.
Let's see: 1) name, 2) contact phone, 3) mail address. That's three pieces of information right there, and they need all of those if you want to do business in any reasonable matter. I can't imagine too many people object to having their name associated with their account, and you can always get a second phone line hooked into an answering machine if you don't want calls from the Bank. The the mail, there is always the P.O. Box, favored by so many privacy-conscious individuals
My point is that you control what information you give out to companies. If you don't want VISA to know that you tend to spend $40.27 a week at the super-market, learn to withdraw cash from an isolated ATM on a regular basis and pay with that. Don't fill out a real name on an online form, and set up a dummy e-mail account on yahoo or deja or any of the other thousand locations available.
We have a right to privacy from the government -- they can't just randomly open up our mail or tap our phones without a warrant. Our protection from companies is in our hands, and it's best to leave it there. Don't people realize that putting the power of privacy into a law makes the government that much more powerful? Relying on the government to "keep us safe" is the lazy way out, and it leads to dangerous waters: the belief that government can "fix" all our worries.
Now, some groups argue that the private company has the right to use their data in any way they see fit. I don't quite agree with that, but I think we have the power to prevent it ourselves. We shouldn't ask the government to handle it. After hearing about doubleclick's work we installed Internet Junkbuster, we didn't go off and write to our congressman.
So, pay cash instead of using plastic. Get a P.O. Box and a private line. Avoid giving out personal information online, or falsify that information (if it's legal to do so). Use anonymous e-mail accounts and anonymous proxy servers that you trust. It's all in your hands -- don't trust the government to do a better job then you can. They'll use it against you in the future. =)
That's odd because he seemed to indicate it was basically to help pay for services that would not normally be self supporting -- some sort of special programs the USPS provides. It sounded like a subsidy to me. But I guess if they have to pay it back, it's not as bad as I thought.
I'd be the first to say that I think the Postal Office has improved greatly over the past five years. It used to take six days or more for me to get a piece of mail from WI to MA. Nowdays, it takes maybe three days to get mail from WI to CA.
However, I don't think it's right to say that postage of thirty-three cents is all you ever have to pay to mail a letter. Remember that the tax money you pay goes in part to susbsidize the Postal Office.
I did a quick search on the approperations committee web site, and I see a document that has the Postmaster General asking for $100,195,000 for Fiscal Year 1999. That's quite a chunk of change, and it comes from tax dollars. I'll assume they didn't actually get all they asked for, but I'm sure there are reports available that show exactly how much was given to the Postal Office to help them keep running. But my point is that it is NOT just thirty-three cents.
It seems like half the people posting comments have some sort of blind rage when it comes to anything John Katz posts...
Anyway, I would have to disagree with anyone who thinks that flaming forces people to think about their opinion. In most cases, the flames aren't good enough for that. I think that inducing blind rage in someone is not likely to get them to sit down and reanalyze their opinion.
I think it's misleading for Amphigory to state that because the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law..." doesn't mean it "grants them some magical right to say any kind of idiocy that crosses their mind." In fact the constitution does not grant this right to us because we already have it. The Bill of Rights are those that are absolute (at least in theory). However, we also have implicit rights: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." One of those implicit rights is that of saying whatever you like to society as long as you are willing to take the consequences when society reacts.
It used to be that if you insulted someone, they had the option of calling out out for a duel. They got the chance to shoot (or cut) at you, and you at them. Of course that doesn't happen anymore, and sometimes I think mores the pity. =)
> Note: Unicode is not just useful in foreign languages. Some punctuation > signs like the ellipsis, or, as I mentioned above, the em-dash and the > quotes, are to be found in Unicode. As a matter of fact, Unicode is more > useful for English than for French,
As a developer in the online publishing business, I have to say I ache for the day we can assume that all browsers understand and display Unicode.
One of the first projects I had at my current job was to render as GIFs all the various symbols used in scientific articles (medical, biomedical, and other sciences). It was a major pain, and while the results are not bad, I'm told it's still a bit of a problem to position the images properly in relation to the other characters. Unicode would solve this.
I hope that one of the developments with graphical browsers will be Unicode support! I'm a fan of Plan 9, and sometimes wish Linux had the same Unicode abilities!
As much as I dislike the interface and services that AOL has, and as much as I dislike the spam that comes from AOL users, I have to admit that the company has grown to it's current size because they are smart at marketing. They saturate prospective customers with free CDs of their software, they have dial-up available everywhere (in and out of the US), and they provide an interface that is very easy for non-computer oriented people to use.
This is a good example of how to win a market. You get a large number of people who don't know how to do something, and provide a way for them to do it easily. They can send e-mail and browse the web (after a fashion), and don't worry about their PPP login scripts or how to configure their mail software to use the proper POP or IMAP server. They don't have to worry about downloading any of the software or whether or not they can install it -- it's simple to use and new copies arrive in the postal mail every month (we use our AOL CDs as coasters).
One person I know told me that the reason she used AOL was because she didn't care to learn anything about being online or the Internet -- she "just wanted to use it." Thankfully, after a few years of using them, she has moved to a normal ISP. She put it "I'm getting annoyed with AOL, so I am phasing it out."
I can see this happening with other people as well. They get "online" via AOL, use it for awhile and "discover the Internet." Then they start to realize that AOL puts a lot of limitations on what they can do on the Internet, so they drop it for a normal ISP service.
In any case, the reason AOL does so well is that they provide an easy entry to basic net services for the millions of people out there who don't want to learn anything about the Internet, but "just want to use it." =(
There's a lot to what you say. I think the real use of these certifications is so that a manager who does not know the field he or she is hiring for may have some assurance that you know at least something about the field. That's not necessarily a good thing! (makes me think of Dilbert)
I think the question people should ask themselves is this: Do I know that at least my co-workers are knowledgeable? If you're being hired by someone who only asks for a certification, and doesn't seem to require anything else, I'd be suspicious. I would not want to work for some place that used the certification as the main requirement for checkinging off the "knows X, Y and Z" box.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know who came up with that size, but it cannot be right -- or else it just isn't current. I looked at the disk usage for our web sites (my group runs a not-for-profit web publishing service), and we use about 1Tb of space for our content.
I don't happen to know or write JS at work (we are a web publishing group), but we have some people here who do. It seems like our general philosphy has been that we'll use JS if there is absolutly no other way to achieve a desired functionality in the UI. The folks that do the JS really have to test on a bunch of different platforms to make sure it doesn't break browsers.
As you said, it's a pain in the ass if a browser is not compliant. They almost always find some small problem which requires a tweak in the JS. I remember at least once where we simply couldn't make it reliable, and had to drop the idea. That makes for a UI which isn't as clean, but gets the job done without crashing someone's browser.
The main point is that we don't use JS for anything vital to the operation of the site. A user with JS off will lose some functionality, but won't sutffer their browser crashing. While the JS folks don't test every browser under the sun, they have a bunch of both new and old ones on different machines they have to test.
Jim Robinson
Given that they are the only three academic environments I've been at, I was always assuming most large, and even some small, institutions provide for this kind of real experience which is so vital for the resume when you first graduate.
I disagree. Drexel, in this block of 300+ domain names, bought drexelsucks.com. IMHO, their only reason to aquire it pre-emptively, is to block student free speech.
I'm afraid I was saying that I agree a University ought to be allowed to do this. In my opinion, they have a right to protect themselves from obvious avenues people might use to criticize them.
Let me put it this way: why should a University not spend the $70.00 bucks or whatever it is these days to buy up a domain like drexelsucks.com in order to prevent someone from using it to possibly drive away potential students? A University is there to teach, and in many places to perform research. But they need income to do both, and of course students to do the former. It is not in their interests to let prospective students know about any of the flaws at their University.
They will naturally do everything legally possible to prevent people from cutting off their potential supply of new students. And of course, they are allowed to block free speech. It is not nice, but it is real life.
Jim Robinson
What I find really objectionable is javascript which breaks my browser. If I have windows open to APIs, my CVS tree, etc., I don't want it all crashing on me if I need to go look up an article on a site which uses a broken pop up.
If a company says they are going to keep using javascript ads, and won't let me see content if I don't allow javascript, then I'll find my information elsewhere. I'm not going to let them kill my browser sessions because they want to target the Windows IE users out there.
Jim Robinson
Censorship is always a touchy issue, but a private school is in fact allowed to practice it. The first amendment is protecting us from the government imposing censorship. A private company is still able to warn employees: either you stop saying that or you will be fired. A school is still able to tell students that they can't print something in a school funded paper.
An example: Chelsea Clinton attended Stanford from 1997 to 2001. I hear that Stanford takes a strict view on enforcing privacy for its students, and in this case they apparently enforced a ban on stories about Chelsea. Well, a student columnist was fired for writing a story about the ban the University had put in place. Doesn't sound very fair does it? But it's within their rights.
You can always bring pressure on the school, and I assume such has happened in the past. But I don't agree with arguments that a school should not be allowed to buy up domain names in an attempt to keep the most obvious avenues of criticism closed.
Jim Robinson
I assume the original poster just wanted to know about other policies, but the above argument seems to lean toward the claim that taxpayers somehow have a right to micromanage how a university spends its money. With a private university, the argument just doesn't fly in my book.
If the money from the government was in the form of a grant, and that grant was delivered and isn't associated with some sort of bilk attempt, then the money has properly passed hands. It's no longer the concern of any oversight from the giver of the grant. A grant is payment for a service, usually in the form of research, the results, and perhaps prototypes depending on the field. So what if some of the money, after it's passed hands from the research group back to main accounting eventually gets used to buy a domain name?
Sure, you have a right to argue to your lawmakers that you shouldn't have to pay taxes for X, Y, or Z, but I'd be wary if anyone stepped forward and said they have a right to manage how a university spends grant money.
Jim Robinson
And from what I've read it sounds like the Newton was a very big hit for those who used it to track their patients. The pilot strikes me as too small to use for this purpose. I bought one a few years ago, right before they started to really catch on. I ended up ditching it and hunting down a used Newton MessagePad 2000.
For those interested in a very good article about the use of a PDA in medical settings, I highly recommend reading A Day in the Life of my Newton.
Jim
100K per day sounds awful low to me. I've never run a big apache server off an intl/linux box, but the group I work for runs a small web farm on ultrasparc/solaris/apache boxes.
I'm looking at one of our solaris boxes, a U450 with 4 gigs of ram, and we've processed 2,048,607 raw requests (this includes graphics) today. Actual page hits, all of which have some dynamic content, comes out to 439,026. And there are 6 more hours left in the day.
A four processer machine with 4 gigs of memory is a big box, but it's not huge. I'm wondering what kind of processor/ram configuration the PC that DELL tested on was. I don't believe a comparable machine on an Intel/Linux box could only handle 100k a day.
Over 11 machines with similar configurations (a few only have 2 processors), we serve around 300,000,000 page hits a month. I find it hard to believe that Apache on Linux/Intel hardware would fare so much worse.
Jim
Refute could mean more than refused. It could also mean to prove in error. That means that the film could prove the patent to be in error, while saying nothing about whether or not the patent office accepted this proof.
The whole point of the post on slashdot is that Cerf *isn't* qualified to give an endorsement. The Wall Street Journal and other papers are carrying articles about how Cerf says Carnivore is OK. The FBI PR department and the big papers are pushing to the public that Cerf's opinion should somehow matter.
Did you bother to read the blurb above? It ends with 'This is nearly as reassuring as the Justice Department's decision to change the name of Carnivore...' I mean really, the WSJ headline I mentioned reads 'Web Guru Cerf Defends FBI's Use of Carnivore.' It goes on to claim Cerf is 'widely regarded as the the "father of the internet."'
Methinks you have misdirected your post against slashdot instead of against the mainstream press...
Jim
WSJ and the FoxNews article are listing the award as 250 million.
Just a note, the reason you didn't see sample source code was that the 3-floppy distro was just a sample to see if the system would work on your hardware.
For Plan 9 v2 you had to buy the CD and manuals in order to get the source code. It was around 350 US when I bought it one and a half years ago. It's really nice that they managed to open-source v3.
And a note for "faeryman" who was writing that "Forte was the pre-curser to Plan 9": I think you are mixing up your references. Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a complete OS all written by Bell Labs folks (Lucent now, AT&T Bell Labs back then). From the looks of if, Forte is some sort of virtual application environment. Nothing to do with Plan 9.
The definitive examples of Literate Programming are two of Knuth's own works: "TeX, The Program" and "Metafont: The Program." Knuth wrote these using his original LP tool, WEB. That means he wrote the code part in Pascal, which in itself amazes me. =) These are available as books, and of course in the original source code format tex.web and (I'm guessing) metafont.web. You can get tex.web off any of the CTAN sites (http://www.ctan.org/). The output is really quite beautiful.
...Intro deleted... ]
/cgi/ request>>
/*
/*
/cgi/ request" is much nicer than using "check_early_decline()" or something. It's clear to the reader what is going on. They don't have to jump down to the function or section or whatever just to read the details of what that method does. Each unit of code is very readable by itself, and concentrates on one or two specific ideas.
Knuth now uses CWEB, an LP tool for writing programs in C, and C++ (though from everything I've read, it isn't all that hot at C++). You can get a copy of the program, which is itself an example of literate programming, at
ftp://labrea.stanford.edu:/pub/cweb
Look at common.w, ctangle.w, and cweave.w. When you run 'make doc' you get dvi files for the programs, which you can read with xdvi or kdvi.
Many people who post to the LP Usenet group comp.programming.literate seem to use an LP tool called Noweb. It was developed as a language independent tool, and it does not do the pretty-printing WEB or CWEB do. However, it uses LaTeX as it's default typesetting language (which is simpler to use then raw TeX), and it can output indexed HTML pages.
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb/
There are examples of Noweb code on that page. Noweb is what I use for my perl and Java programming.
The concept is not quite the same as Javadoc. I actually embed Javadoc comments in my own Java code even though I'm using noweb. The Javadoc is excellent at detailing API for the black box that is a method, or giving an overview on a class, but it isn't as good for detailed explanations. And the best thing about LP is that you can take a section of code, and abstract it into a sentence that you later expand into real code. At times, it is nice to be able to use that instead of a function.
This is an example of some bits and pieces for an apache module I wrote
[
\section{Module Structure}
A module is made up of the following parts
<<*>>=
<<include system header files>>
<<include apache module header files>>
<<preprocessor definitions>>
<<declare functions>>
<<define module hook-in>>
<<define module functions>>
@
[...]
\section{The [[check_uptime]] function}
Now that we're hooked into the \Apache\ module list, we define
[[check_uptime]]. This method takes a [[request_rec *]] and returns a
status-code declaring whether or not the request is allowed to proceed.
<<define module functions>>=
/*
* returns HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR if the time elapsed between
* this request and the server start-up time is not greater than
* warmup_time; otherwise return DECLINED.
*/
int check_uptime(request_rec * r)
{
<<declare [[check_uptime]] variables>>
<<set [[warmup_time]] from env variable [[MOD_WARMUP_SEC]]>>
<<return DECLINED if [[warmup_time]] == 0 or if this is not a
<<set up shared memory segment [[shm_id]]>>
<<set [[startup_time]] from [[shm_id]] or [[r->request_time]]>>
* if warmup_time seconds have elapsed decline; else deny
*/
sec_left = ( warmup_time - ( r->request_time - startup_time ) );
if ( sec_left <= 0 )
{
return DECLINED;
}
else
{
<<write log entry>>
* This code returns a ``Temporarily Unavailable''
* page on HW servers
*/
return HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR;
}
}
@
[...]
And the other parts are expanded with their own sections. Noweb will auto-index this because it's a C program, and I end up with an indexed program that has a TOC and nicely formatted explanations with each unit of code.
I can take each unit of code and write, in however much detail I want, an explanation detailing the what and why (and even use a proof if it's a complex algorithm). TeX/LaTeX also allow you to put in real book references if you are implementing someone else's idea out of a book or paper.
Many times, just having the ability to use a real sentence is a help. Using "return DECLINED if [[warmup_time]] == 0 or if this is not a
Jim
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once wrote that the right
to be left alone is the beginning of all freedom. That's bad news,
because privacy as we've come to understand the idea is over, and
tracking software -- now widely deployed on the Web and in businesses
from banking to supermarkets -- helped to kill it.
"I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated
communism, now seems about to do the same to democracy. The market is
doing splendidly, yet we are not."
I prefer this quote:
"They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let
alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most
valued by civilized men."
Justice Louis Brandeis
Olmstead v. United States (1928)
But for one in the
on the net (http://www.wulaw.wustl.edu/WULQ/76-1/761-22.html
"In 1977, the Supreme Court first recognized a constitutional right to
informational privacy in Whalen v. Roe.[96] The Whalen Court upheld a
New York law under which the State recorded the names and addresses of
all patients obtaining prescriptions for certain dangerous drugs in a
centralized computer file.[97] Whalen recognized two aspects of a right
to privacy:[98] the right to avoid disclosure of personal matters;[99]
and the right to personal privacy in decisionmaking.[100] While the
Whalen Court did not find a constitutional invasion of privacy, Justice
Brennan's concurring opinion opened the door to future claims against
information gathering technologies like Intellidata.[101] Further,
Whalen's patient information discussion is analogous to Intellidata
because both involve the use of computerized databases to retrieve
and store personal information."
I think it's clear that while we have a right to privacy from the
government, and we have the right to withhold information on personal
matters, we don't have a right to force a company to not work with
data mining applications. We have the choice to a) not do business with
them, or b) avoid leaving them with data they can use.
Each time, some program is tracking our every move, compiling
elaborate marketing profiles, often collating the information with vast
databases and selling the resulting information without our knowledge.
Unless you use a proxy like Internet Junkbuster, or take active steps
to deny the use of cookies for tracking you *as an individual.*
According to the Interagency Financial Institution Web Site Privacy
Survey, conducted by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),
all of the 50 largest financial institutions online collect three or
more pieces of personal or demographic information about users. The
FDIC says that only eight of the 50 largest institutions meet minimal
privacy data standards. That is, they fail to explain what data is being
collected, allow consumers to opt out, permit access to the information,
provide secure storage for the data, and provide customers a way to
contact the company regarding privacy issues.
Let's see: 1) name, 2) contact phone, 3) mail address. That's three
pieces of information right there, and they need all of those if you
want to do business in any reasonable matter. I can't imagine too many
people object to having their name associated with their account, and
you can always get a second phone line hooked into an answering machine
if you don't want calls from the Bank. The the mail, there is always
the P.O. Box, favored by so many privacy-conscious individuals
My point is that you control what information you give out to companies.
If you don't want VISA to know that you tend to spend $40.27 a week at the
super-market, learn to withdraw cash from an isolated ATM on a regular
basis and pay with that. Don't fill out a real name on an online form,
and set up a dummy e-mail account on yahoo or deja or any of the other
thousand locations available.
We have a right to privacy from the government -- they can't just
randomly open up our mail or tap our phones without a warrant.
Our protection from companies is in our hands, and it's best to leave it
there. Don't people realize that putting the power of privacy into a law
makes the government that much more powerful? Relying on the government
to "keep us safe" is the lazy way out, and it leads to dangerous waters:
the belief that government can "fix" all our worries.
Now, some groups argue that the private company has the right to use
their data in any way they see fit. I don't quite agree with that,
but I think we have the power to prevent it ourselves. We shouldn't
ask the government to handle it. After hearing about doubleclick's
work we installed Internet Junkbuster, we didn't go off and write to
our congressman.
So, pay cash instead of using plastic. Get a P.O. Box and a private
line. Avoid giving out personal information online, or falsify that
information (if it's legal to do so). Use anonymous e-mail accounts
and anonymous proxy servers that you trust. It's all in your hands --
don't trust the government to do a better job then you can. They'll use
it against you in the future. =)
Jim
That's odd because he seemed to indicate it was basically to help pay for services that would not normally be self supporting -- some sort of special programs the USPS provides. It sounded like a subsidy to me. But I guess if they have to pay it back, it's not as bad as I thought.
I'd be the first to say that I think the Postal Office has improved greatly over the past five years. It used to take six days or more for me to get a piece of mail from WI to MA. Nowdays, it takes maybe three days to get mail from WI to CA.
However, I don't think it's right to say that postage of thirty-three cents is all you ever have to pay to mail a letter. Remember that the tax money you pay goes in part to susbsidize the Postal Office.
I did a quick search on the approperations committee web site, and I see a document that has the Postmaster General asking for $100,195,000 for Fiscal Year 1999. That's quite a chunk of change, and it comes from tax dollars. I'll assume they didn't actually get all they asked for, but I'm sure there are reports available that show exactly how much was given to the Postal Office to help them keep running. But my point is that it is NOT just thirty-three cents.
Jim
It seems like half the people posting comments have some sort of blind rage when it comes to anything John Katz posts...
Anyway, I would have to disagree with anyone who thinks that flaming forces people to think about their opinion. In most cases, the flames aren't good enough for that. I think that inducing blind rage in someone is not likely to get them to sit down and reanalyze their opinion.
I think it's misleading for Amphigory to state that because the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law..." doesn't mean it "grants them some magical right to say any kind of idiocy that crosses their mind." In fact the constitution does not grant this right to us because we already have it. The Bill of Rights are those that are absolute (at least in theory). However, we also have implicit rights: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." One of those implicit rights is that of saying whatever you like to society as long as you are willing to take the consequences when society reacts.
It used to be that if you insulted someone, they had the option of calling out out for a duel. They got the chance to shoot (or cut) at you, and you at them. Of course that doesn't happen anymore, and sometimes I think mores the pity. =)
> Note: Unicode is not just useful in foreign languages. Some punctuation
> signs like the ellipsis, or, as I mentioned above, the em-dash and the
> quotes, are to be found in Unicode. As a matter of fact, Unicode is more
> useful for English than for French,
As a developer in the online publishing business, I have to say I ache for
the day we can assume that all browsers understand and display Unicode.
One of the first projects I had at my current job was to render as GIFs
all the various symbols used in scientific articles (medical, biomedical,
and other sciences). It was a major pain, and while the results are
not bad, I'm told it's still a bit of a problem to position the images
properly in relation to the other characters. Unicode would solve this.
I hope that one of the developments with graphical browsers will be
Unicode support! I'm a fan of Plan 9, and sometimes wish Linux had the
same Unicode abilities!
Jim
As much as I dislike the interface and services that AOL has, and as much as I dislike the spam that comes from AOL users, I have to admit that the company has grown to it's current size because they are smart at marketing. They saturate prospective customers with free CDs of their software, they have dial-up available everywhere (in and out of the US), and they provide an interface that is very easy for non-computer oriented people to use.
This is a good example of how to win a market. You get a large number of people who don't know how to do something, and provide a way for them to do it easily. They can send e-mail and browse the web (after a fashion), and don't worry about their PPP login scripts or how to configure their mail software to use the proper POP or IMAP server. They don't have to worry about downloading any of the software or whether or not they can install it -- it's simple to use and new copies arrive in the postal mail every month (we use our AOL CDs as coasters).
One person I know told me that the reason she used AOL was because she didn't care to learn anything about being online or the Internet -- she "just wanted to use it." Thankfully, after a few years of using them, she has moved to a normal ISP. She put it "I'm getting annoyed with AOL, so I am phasing it out."
I can see this happening with other people as well. They get "online" via AOL, use it for awhile and "discover the Internet." Then they start to realize that AOL puts a lot of limitations on what they can do on the Internet, so they drop it for a normal ISP service.
In any case, the reason AOL does so well is that they provide an easy entry to basic net services for the millions of people out there who don't want to learn anything about the Internet, but "just want to use it." =(
Jim
There's a lot to what you say. I think the real use of these certifications is so that a manager who does not know the field he or she is hiring for may have some assurance that you know at least something about the field. That's not necessarily a good thing! (makes me think of Dilbert)
I think the question people should ask themselves is this: Do I know that at least my co-workers are knowledgeable? If you're being hired by someone who only asks for a certification, and doesn't seem to require anything else, I'd be suspicious. I would not want to work for some place that used the certification as the main requirement for checkinging off the "knows X, Y and Z" box.
Jim