One thing that is good with students is assigning real projects - have them pick a local community based NGO and build something for them - a CMS, or Blog (check sourceforge for software projects). The SQLClinic project is a management/tracking system for small psychiatric clinics but it or something like it could be useful to many small agencies and would serve as a model of what needs to be done at a larger level for larger agencies.
Some evolve or merge into others, as you suggest, but many others actually do disappear leaving at most the names of a few geographic locations as the only part "merged" into other languages. Hundreds of American Indian languages disappeared when the populations were decimated by disease or war and the few remaining members were either separated from each other or subjected to language "re-education". I've talked to a number of American Indians who went through "re-education" (supposedly for their own benefit) in the 1950s - they got beaten or had to eat soap if they were caught speaking their own language. Languages not only disappear, they get killed off.
a language that's worth anything doesn't naturally face extinction.
Um, yeah right, having 90% of the population wiped out by foreign diseases and then being put in a boarding school where you get whipped for speaking in your native tongue, those have got nothing to do with the language becoming extinct. Instead it's the language's "worth" that determines extinction. How exactly is that measured, with a "lingo-worth-o-meter"? Where can I get one?
Having a wide diversity of natural languages to study impacts future computer science in many ways beyond simply providing a stock of examples to copy.
For one thing, the study of natural languages will teach us about cognition in general and it is those results which are likely to filter into programming rather than direct borrowing from a language's syntax or structure.
For another, think of Larry Wall developing Perl out of his understanding of English (and whatever other natural languages he's been exposed to). Suppose fifty years from now a young Swahili-speaking student develops a new programming language - what insights might she have gained from being brought up speaking Swahili? (and etc. for every other language that manages to survive another 50 years).
Now I don't believe that languages totally determine the way we think. It's possible to think *anything* in *any* language, but some things are easier or less ambiguous in one language or another. In English "He dropped to the ground" - does that mean he jumped, fell by accident, or was pushed? Some languages don't let you get away with that kind of ambiguity of causation (though they have ambiguity of different sorts). So differential ambiguity and ease of expression - those aren't such bad things to look forward to in programming languages of the future.
And, lastly, as the article referenced on Panini's Sanskrit grammar illustrates, native grammarians may develop rule-based grammers of their own languages and what we can learn from them is the structure of those rules in addition to the structure of the language itself.
The fact that you enjoy what you are doing should not factor at all into how much you are getting paid.
Yes it should. Someone doing what they enjoy is at the top of their form. Employer's can't buy "being in the zone" for love or money. Charge as much as you can get and feel good about it - they're getting their money's worth.
This is OSS so the company isn't just buying your expertise, they're buying the expertise of the whole community that supports your software. So charge 'em extra for that and pay back the community with more of your good code.
If a company expects to use the OSS community as a substitute for an R&D department of their own, they should expect to pay for it.
Wouldn't it be great if state governments...
Did you read about Oregon's open source bill? It didn't make it through the legislature but it came pretty close. One great thing about the bill is that the actual wording mentioned not only cost savings, but the issues of local control, of keeping public information resources accessible, of preventing spyware or adware being installed and others. More info here
I was told there would be a world shortage of things for anonymous cowards to feel self righteous about unless I bought a pocketpc, so I did. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.
Not that I know about. There are certainly a number of other remote control/emultors that will let you run the ppc device from a remote (windows:-() box. I was just pointing out that some open source solutions exist for the platform, not implying that it is as flexible as a linux install on the same device would be.
will running linux on your pocket pc really be useful?
I'm someone who didn't pay enough attention to that question a few months ago and is way sorry now, here's my story:
1. I purchase the Toshiba e740 with pocketPC 2002 for $600
2. Six months later pocketPC 2003 comes out and Toshiba declinces to make it available to e740 users.
I now have no possibility of any kind of upgrade for any of my software. I am stuck with what was available pre-2003 for the rest of the life of the device. Now if Toshiba leaks out enough information about their hardware to allow someone to port linux to it, I could eventually upgrade the software.
This idea, with obvious commercial applications, and clearly not in use anywhere else, should be patented by the Moken tribe. Otherwise, some industrialized country will patent it and sell it to the grandchildren of the current Moken. The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity supports the idea that indigenous people should be able to patent their discoveries. Go for it!
it's an important part of browser history. It started the movement
Erm, what exactly did it start? The CERN browser started browsers. NCSA Mosaic started graphics browsers. I believe the Spry version of Mosaic was the first commercial browser though maybe that distinction goes to Netscape. I do agree it's an important part of browser history because it served as the lightning rod for MS bolts, but not because it was at the begining of anything other than the commercialization of the web.
Ok, then obviously it was wrong of me to assume that you don't know the joking from the underside. Your points about other institutional reasons for lack of women in programming are well taken. I hope my daughter develops the same thick skin as your younger brother. I still disagree with you about the nature of joking on slashdot, but thanks for discussing the situation.
Perhaps some day you'll be a minority in a group of people whom your job requires you to associate with and who make a regular practice of making fun of that minority and then come to know the difference between a joke and a verbal assault.
In person, the intent and impact of a joke is tempered by other cues such that the butt of the joke can tell whether it is told "in good fun" or with intent to harass. In a forum like this one, no amount of smilies conveys those cues. The constant gay-bashing and mysogyny on slashdot are truly ugly and offensive.
Is it an accident that there are more women doctors and scientists than there are women programmers even though all three fields require technical skills? Do you feel no sense of responsibility to provide a welcoming atmosphere to encourage more women to join our field? Whether or not you consider the "jokes" funny, surely you can understand that they do not provide a welcoming atmosphere.
Imagine for a minute that you are my fifteen year old daughter surfing the net while trying to figure out what field to enter. Do you think these jokes, whatever their intent, will encourage her to become a programmer?
American Indian tribes have many many different approaches to intellectual property. Along much of the Northwest Coast stories and artistic images are considered to be associated with specific clans and there are sanctions for use without permission. A family has rights to the myths and images that define them as a family. These are the same tribes that had the potlatch - an institutional way of ensuring that property was not hoarded.
Another approach was that of Chief Joseph, who although he fought to protect the land of his tribe still denied that his tribe "owned" that land or that anyone could "own" land. He prefered to say that he and his tribe had *guardianship* of the land.
So perhpas we could think about IG instead of IP, talk about the guardianship of ideas that *belong to everyone*. This allows for protection of author's rights -- they are guarding the ideas that they put forth and no one should be able to deny that the author is the guardian of their own work or that someone else should be able to mangle the work and distribute it as though from the original author. But it also allows for treating human progress as the property of all and provides a basis for insisting that laws protecting guardianship do not become a form of intellectual hoarding.
You are disgusting little idiots. Your stupid remarks about celebreties are just plain ugly. When you bring this to the realm of people in our own community you move to the level of maggots.
Go ahead and mod me down for flaming, I'll gladly take the hit.
The unfortunate thing about this From field spoofing is that it hits hardest those who have produced most. I have built a dozen medium load sites and foolishly put my email in the metadata of the pages (which was a good thing at first since some people did contact me through it with legitimate reasons to contact me). Now anyone who visits those sites has my email on a page in their local cache and the viri find it and mail out more viri as if from me. Success is its own punishment I guess.
1. I have a friend who uses the same kinds of words as I do and who uses Outlook (ok, an aquaintance, because friends don't let friends...)
2. An email virus attacks this person, snarfs up his Ham, runs a Bayesian filter on it and comes up with Spam specifically tailored for this person's aquaintances.
There's a science fiction book waiting to happen in here somewhere. If so, I own the SCOpyright on it.
That same thought was in my mind as I typed:-( Also the thought that "civilization" is rather a misnomer for the current state of affairs in the world. Also the thought that "civilization" was, like OSS ideas, born many places (e.g. China, Mexico, etc.). Oh well, can't say everything at once.
See my reply to someone else below on why the 33 number is bogus. But even if only 1 item was stolen, let's say the Mono Lisa (though we have lots of other works by Da Vinci, unlike the archaelogical treasures which are entirely one of a kind), it is still valid to say that an international public treasure was destroyed.
I wasn't commenting on the orignal claims of 170,000, I was commenting on the/.er's claim that only a few were stolen, so in that context, yes it is the part that struck me.
The Guardian reports "33 major items and around 2,000 minor works have gone". So to use the 33 number as the "real" number of items stolen is almost as bogus as the original claim (an exageration factor of 65 compared to a factor of 81 for the original claim). Over 33 major pieces and 2,000 pieces minor pieces from a museum in the birthplace of civilization is NOT inconsequential however it may relate to the original claim. Civilization is not about to be reborn again anytime soon so there is no replacing those items. Toss the numbers around however you'd like, there was a significant loss.
Thanks for the link. The line that stuck with me, was this one:
major treasures have been stolen and there is still no clear answer to just how much has been taken
In other words, as the rest of the article makes clear - 30 were *reported* stolen because that is all they have records for but that no one has any idea how much was actually stolen since the records are in such poor shape. It's like if someone took *lots of stuff* from your house but you could only produce receipts for some of it to prove what you had owned for insurance. The fact that you couldn't prove it doesn't mean it wasn't stolen.
(off-topic: anyone remember the old SNL gig where Belushi suddenly remembers his golf clubs were stolen:-)
he basically called theft of IP "stealing"? Isn't this what we've been fighting in the music area, that it's breaking copyright etc, but not stealing?
Something like the shard of pottery with the earliest known human writing is a treasure that belongs to everyone so the looters in Iraq were taking something that belongs to everyone and trying to make it private. In that sense the analogy with SCO is a good one.
Also, if you take Thomas Jefferson's famous analogy that "he who lights a candle from mine gains illumniation without diminishing me" (from memory so don't quote me:-)... the equivalent for SCO would be someone that takes the candle everyone was lighting off of and locks it away where no one can see it or light off it.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that is good with students is assigning real projects - have them pick a local community based NGO and build something for them - a CMS, or Blog (check sourceforge for software projects). The SQLClinic project is a management/tracking system for small psychiatric clinics but it or something like it could be useful to many small agencies and would serve as a model of what needs to be done at a larger level for larger agencies.
Some evolve or merge into others, as you suggest, but many others actually do disappear leaving at most the names of a few geographic locations as the only part "merged" into other languages. Hundreds of American Indian languages disappeared when the populations were decimated by disease or war and the few remaining members were either separated from each other or subjected to language "re-education". I've talked to a number of American Indians who went through "re-education" (supposedly for their own benefit) in the 1950s - they got beaten or had to eat soap if they were caught speaking their own language. Languages not only disappear, they get killed off.
a language that's worth anything doesn't naturally face extinction.
Um, yeah right, having 90% of the population wiped out by foreign diseases and then being put in a boarding school where you get whipped for speaking in your native tongue, those have got nothing to do with the language becoming extinct. Instead it's the language's "worth" that determines extinction. How exactly is that measured, with a "lingo-worth-o-meter"? Where can I get one?
Having a wide diversity of natural languages to study impacts future computer science in many ways beyond simply providing a stock of examples to copy.
For one thing, the study of natural languages will teach us about cognition in general and it is those results which are likely to filter into programming rather than direct borrowing from a language's syntax or structure.
For another, think of Larry Wall developing Perl out of his understanding of English (and whatever other natural languages he's been exposed to). Suppose fifty years from now a young Swahili-speaking student develops a new programming language - what insights might she have gained from being brought up speaking Swahili? (and etc. for every other language that manages to survive another 50 years).
Now I don't believe that languages totally determine the way we think. It's possible to think *anything* in *any* language, but some things are easier or less ambiguous in one language or another. In English "He dropped to the ground" - does that mean he jumped, fell by accident, or was pushed? Some languages don't let you get away with that kind of ambiguity of causation (though they have ambiguity of different sorts). So differential ambiguity and ease of expression - those aren't such bad things to look forward to in programming languages of the future.
And, lastly, as the article referenced on Panini's Sanskrit grammar illustrates, native grammarians may develop rule-based grammers of their own languages and what we can learn from them is the structure of those rules in addition to the structure of the language itself.
The fact that you enjoy what you are doing should not factor at all into how much you are getting paid.
Yes it should. Someone doing what they enjoy is at the top of their form. Employer's can't buy "being in the zone" for love or money. Charge as much as you can get and feel good about it - they're getting their money's worth.
This is OSS so the company isn't just buying your expertise, they're buying the expertise of the whole community that supports your software. So charge 'em extra for that and pay back the community with more of your good code.If a company expects to use the OSS community as a substitute for an R&D department of their own, they should expect to pay for it.
Wouldn't it be great if state governments ...
Did you read about Oregon's open source bill? It didn't make it through the legislature but it came pretty close. One great thing about the bill is that the actual wording mentioned not only cost savings, but the issues of local control, of keeping public information resources accessible, of preventing spyware or adware being installed and others. More info here
I was told there would be a world shortage of things for anonymous cowards to feel self righteous about unless I bought a pocketpc, so I did. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.
yes, but can you run a VNC server on PPCOS?
:-() box. I was just pointing out that some open source solutions exist for the platform, not implying that it is as flexible as a linux install on the same device would be.
Not that I know about. There are certainly a number of other remote control/emultors that will let you run the ppc device from a remote (windows
Now waiting for the obligatory soon-to-be-Slashdotted "I'm running Apache on my Axim!" news item ...
Why wait, Apache runs on WinCE.
Using the Axim as a X client on a wireless network would be kind of like having a kick ass linux remote control.
You don't need linux for that. You can run VNC from pocketpc OS.
will running linux on your pocket pc really be useful?
I'm someone who didn't pay enough attention to that question a few months ago and is way sorry now, here's my story:
1. I purchase the Toshiba e740 with pocketPC 2002
for $600
2. Six months later pocketPC 2003 comes out and Toshiba declinces to make it available to e740 users.
I now have no possibility of any kind of upgrade for any of my software. I am stuck with what was available pre-2003 for the rest of the life of the device. Now if Toshiba leaks out enough information about their hardware to allow someone to port linux to it, I could eventually upgrade the software.
This idea, with obvious commercial applications, and clearly not in use anywhere else, should be patented by the Moken tribe. Otherwise, some industrialized country will patent it and sell it to the grandchildren of the current Moken. The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity supports the idea that indigenous people should be able to patent their discoveries. Go for it!
it's an important part of browser history. It started the movement
Erm, what exactly did it start? The CERN browser started browsers. NCSA Mosaic started graphics browsers. I believe the Spry version of Mosaic was the first commercial browser though maybe that distinction goes to Netscape. I do agree it's an important part of browser history because it served as the lightning rod for MS bolts, but not because it was at the begining of anything other than the commercialization of the web.
Dude, I'm a Muslim Indian.
Ok, then obviously it was wrong of me to assume that you don't know the joking from the underside. Your points about other institutional reasons for lack of women in programming are well taken. I hope my daughter develops the same thick skin as your younger brother. I still disagree with you about the nature of joking on slashdot, but thanks for discussing the situation.
Perhaps some day you'll be a minority in a group of people whom your job requires you to associate with and who make a regular practice of making fun of that minority and then come to know the difference between a joke and a verbal assault.
In person, the intent and impact of a joke is tempered by other cues such that the butt of the joke can tell whether it is told "in good fun" or with intent to harass. In a forum like this one, no amount of smilies conveys those cues. The constant gay-bashing and mysogyny on slashdot are truly ugly and offensive.
Is it an accident that there are more women doctors and scientists than there are women programmers even though all three fields require technical skills? Do you feel no sense of responsibility to provide a welcoming atmosphere to encourage more women to join our field? Whether or not you consider the "jokes" funny, surely you can understand that they do not provide a welcoming atmosphere.
Imagine for a minute that you are my fifteen year old daughter surfing the net while trying to figure out what field to enter. Do you think these jokes, whatever their intent, will encourage her to become a programmer?
How do other cultures define IP?
American Indian tribes have many many different approaches to intellectual property. Along much of the Northwest Coast stories and artistic images are considered to be associated with specific clans and there are sanctions for use without permission. A family has rights to the myths and images that define them as a family. These are the same tribes that had the potlatch - an institutional way of ensuring that property was not hoarded.
Another approach was that of Chief Joseph, who although he fought to protect the land of his tribe still denied that his tribe "owned" that land or that anyone could "own" land. He prefered to say that he and his tribe had *guardianship* of the land.
So perhpas we could think about IG instead of IP, talk about the guardianship of ideas that *belong to everyone*. This allows for protection of author's rights -- they are guarding the ideas that they put forth and no one should be able to deny that the author is the guardian of their own work or that someone else should be able to mangle the work and distribute it as though from the original author. But it also allows for treating human progress as the property of all and provides a basis for insisting that laws protecting guardianship do not become a form of intellectual hoarding.
You are disgusting little idiots. Your stupid remarks about celebreties are just plain ugly. When you bring this to the realm of people in our own community you move to the level of maggots.
Go ahead and mod me down for flaming, I'll gladly take the hit.
No, it's more like "show how the cart is being designed so you can help build it and/or begin to use it with the perl6ish pragma in perl5".
The unfortunate thing about this From field spoofing is that it hits hardest those who have produced most. I have built a dozen medium load sites and foolishly put my email in the metadata of the pages (which was a good thing at first since some people did contact me through it with legitimate reasons to contact me). Now anyone who visits those sites has my email on a page in their local cache and the viri find it and mail out more viri as if from me. Success is its own punishment I guess.
Suppose
...)
1. I have a friend who uses the same kinds of words as I do and who uses Outlook (ok, an aquaintance, because friends don't let friends
2. An email virus attacks this person, snarfs up his Ham, runs a Bayesian filter on it and comes up with Spam specifically tailored for this person's aquaintances.
There's a science fiction book waiting to happen in here somewhere. If so, I own the SCOpyright on it.
Yep.
:-(
That same thought was in my mind as I typed
Also the thought that "civilization" is rather a misnomer for the current state of affairs in the world. Also the thought that "civilization" was, like OSS ideas, born many places (e.g. China, Mexico, etc.). Oh well, can't say everything at once.
See my reply to someone else below on why the 33 number is bogus. But even if only 1 item was stolen, let's say the Mono Lisa (though we have lots of other works by Da Vinci, unlike the archaelogical treasures which are entirely one of a kind), it is still valid to say that an international public treasure was destroyed.
I wasn't commenting on the orignal claims of 170,000, I was commenting on the /.er's claim that only a few were stolen, so in that context, yes it is the part that struck me.
The
Guardian reports "33 major items and around 2,000 minor works have gone". So to use the 33 number as the "real" number of items stolen is almost as bogus as the original claim (an exageration factor of 65 compared to a factor of 81 for the original claim). Over 33 major pieces and 2,000 pieces minor pieces from a museum in the birthplace of civilization is NOT inconsequential however it may relate to the original claim. Civilization is not about to be reborn again anytime soon so there is no replacing those items. Toss the numbers around however you'd like, there was a significant loss.
Thanks for the link. The line that stuck with me, was this one:
:-)
major treasures have been stolen and there is still no clear answer to just how much has been taken
In other words, as the rest of the article makes clear - 30 were *reported* stolen because that is all they have records for but that no one has any idea how much was actually stolen since the records are in such poor shape. It's like if someone took *lots of stuff* from your house but you could only produce receipts for some of it to prove what you had owned for insurance. The fact that you couldn't prove it doesn't mean it wasn't stolen.
(off-topic: anyone remember the old SNL gig where Belushi suddenly remembers his golf clubs were stolen
he basically called theft of IP "stealing"? Isn't this what we've been fighting in the music area, that it's breaking copyright etc, but not stealing?
:-) ... the equivalent for SCO would be someone that takes the candle everyone was lighting off of and locks it away where no one can see it or light off it.
Something like the shard of pottery with the earliest known human writing is a treasure that belongs to everyone so the looters in Iraq were taking something that belongs to everyone and trying to make it private. In that sense the analogy with SCO is a good one.
Also, if you take Thomas Jefferson's famous analogy that "he who lights a candle from mine gains illumniation without diminishing me" (from memory so don't quote me