Way to go, Slashdot. Now that you've aimed a giant spotlight on this site, how long do you think it's going to be before all those companies' lawyers descend on this poor kid like a pack of rabid hyenas?
...has an interesting look at the 'fundamentals of how memory is constructed and managed' in the Linux memory module...
Lordy, I could stand to learn how to construct more memory myself! I can't even remember what I did last weekend...
Good introductory game -- Smess
on
Chess for Kids?
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· Score: 2, Informative
As a child I learned a game called Smess (The Ninny's Chess) first. Check out ChessVariants for information. It's a great introductory game that gets you started thinking along chess lines. The transition from Smess to Chess is relatively simple to make, even for a child.
That sounds like a pretty killer app to me! If it could support even half the arcade platforms of MAME, I would buy one of these in a heartbeat. Until then the PSP is too expensive as a mediocre movie player with a bunch of pretty, but uncompelling games.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the m200 here. I got one for school and was addicted in no time flat.
It has GREAT battery life (4.5 hours in its long life mode), and GREAT screen (1400x1050, and the extra resolution REALLY counts for the look and feel of the electronic ink), 40GB drive, 512MB memory, 1.5GHz P-Mobile, built in modem-ether-wireless, and comes with OneNote.
I hate saying anything good about M$, but OneNote is the ultimate electronic legal pad. It even indexes your handwriting for text search! I use it exclusively for note taking in class now.
Don't knock the convertibles. The m200's ability to be a tablet and laptop makes it extremely versatile.
If you've got a pile of money laying around (yes, it's expensive), this is the only Tablet to consider. Nothing else on the market holds a candle to it, if for no other reason than the fantastic resolution of the screen.
Nope, that ain't the way it works. His name is Mike Rowe, so "mikerowe.com" would be fine. However, he said outright he was spoofing Microsoft's name in order to attract attention to his skill, for monetary gain. That fails the nomitive test, hence he broke the law.
The fact that it was willful actually makes him more liable, usually by an order of magnitude.
Sorry gang, I don't like being on MS's side in anything, but the kid was wrong, and MS was well within their rights to call bullshit on him.
IANAL, but he was clearly in violation with his domain name, especially by admitting that he was doing it to get attention for his contracting skills (which would make him money). Any way you cut it, his domain name did not pass the nomitive test for fair use, and MS was well within their legal rights to go after him. Glad it turned out okay for Mike, but he was wrong.
Anyone else think Slashdotting is criminal?
on
Build Your Own HERF Gun
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· Score: 4, Insightful
/. has willingingly just exceeded this guy's bandwidth. He now owes his ISP money (and probably lots of it) because/. linked.
Now, does anyone else think that the Slashdot Effect is getting to be criminal? C'mon, people, we GAVE IT A NAME. It's not like we don't know what posting to/. is going to do to someone's servers.
Editors of Slashdot: you guys are getting criminally negligent. If no one has sued you so far, you better start getting the lawyers ready.
The need for a flexible programming language that can handle everything from high-level abstraction to bit-twiddling, all unified within the same language, isn't going away anytime soon.
C'mon, there is absolutely no need for a language like that! You should use the right tool for the job, and lemme tell you, C++ is not necessarily the right tool. To whit, applications that should not be written in C++:
high-performance embedded applications
text processing applications
Hello, World!
Seriously, though, an programmer who has only one tool in their toolbox is a waste of space. I swear, the world must look like it's made of nothing but nails to this guy, 'cuz all he has in his toolbox is a big freakin' hammer...
MSDN is a great resource, to be sure. But it won't get you started on how to write Windows applications. Once you get the hang of that, you'll live and die by MSDN!
As for how to write Win32 apps: First of all, Charles Petzold is the god of Windows programming books. Check out his book "Programming Windows: The Definitive Guide to the Win32 API".
After that, I'd check out "Win32 Programming" by Rector and Newcomer, published by Addison-Wesley. It has served me well.
Gods, you/. editors, stop sounding like the ignorant bigots you are!
Office is one of the precious few things MS has done well! The suite is amazingly powerful, amazingly flexible, and as long as you avoid the VBA scripting, works very well!
The Linux community hasn't produced anything comparable to date, and in fact, they never will, because the Linux community is missing the Machiavellian organization that it needs to effectively compete with MS (RMS's deluded efforts notwithstanding).
If you're going to be anti-MS, which is a laudable opinion to be sure, at least sound intelligent and educated about it. Stop acting like ignorant bigots.
That wasn't an interview. That was Stanley's pet sycophant putting words into his mouth. ("Yessss, my preciousssss... The Stroustrapses is wanting to take away our language, preciousss...")
I would really have liked to get a real straight answer as to VC++'s role in Microsplat's future. As it is, I'm just as confused as ever. Vague promises that it will be the power language of choice for.NET? But what is it now?
I'll tell you what it is: it's the arcane black magic that the entire.NET system is built on!.NET is all about protecting the programmers from C++. Duh.
I really would like to see a real interview with this guy--when he gets a grip on his task. For now, Stanley appears as confused as the rest of us.
Ultimately, Ray used this to try to evolve complex parallel processing programs.
The evolutionary process will be introduced into the context of the global computer network, internet. The objective is to evolve complex MIMD distributed processes.
In all the teams I've run, I've made it clear to the Powers That Be that the developers will run and maintain their own machines.
When a new developer came on board, his/her first job was to build their box out, roughly according to the instructions that IT laid down (like how to access your corporate email, where message boards were, etc.). But after that, the box was HER OWN MACHINE to do with as she pleased.
Now we also put the entire dev and dev-testing network on its own subnet/domain that could be literally unplugged from the corporate net with literally one disconnected CAT-5 cable. (Yes, we had a good switch behind it.:-) This seemed to mollify the IT staff. And besides, a good test system must be able to be disconnected sometimes.
The upshot of the whole thing was that we were indeed an island of chaos in an ocean of relative infrastructure calm. And you know what? It works great! Any developer worth her salt will know how to do basic box and network admin.
Oh yeah, and remember to get static IP's for your developers' boxes. Makes Internet development work a lot easier!
What it really comes down to is convincing the Powers that developers must have free reign over their own systems. Your biggest friend and enemy will be the IT department. Make friends with them; negotiate and compromise an acceptable solution to the problem with them. If you can get IT behind you, the Powers will have a lot of trouble denying you.
If you go perusing through Donald Knuth's work (in this case, Digital Typography), you will see him mention a killer program he wrote for TeX. I'd cite the program name and page number if I had my copy, but I lent it out. In any event, this single TeX program/script/file tested every little nuance of the system abusively. In and of itself it was a gorgeous piece of work.
Shifting gears for a moment, most QA types will tell you that the best time to devise test cases is when a project is in late requirements or early design. You doubtless have a grammar for your "C-plus-or-minus" language--I would call that a great high-level design document!
Now putting this all together, shouldn't it be relatively straightforward to construct a C program (or set of C programs) that goes through every state of your grammar?
Sounds like a fun project for some undergrad students to work on in Compiler Design. (In fact, it might even be fun to generate a C program generator from that grammar to do it for you; but I digress...)
The Constitution protects everyone from being criminally tried under a so-called "retroactive" law for something they did before the law was passed. Can't be done.
What I suspect is going on here is that they want to build a DNA database of "hackers" who committed crimes before this law was passed. Hey, says Ashcroft, we aren't jailing them, so we're constitutionally okay. DNA database != legal punishment.
(For now we'll ignore the gray area in which this obviously resides...)
If Frank Herbert wrote the book, and then Frank Herbert was deeply involved in a cinematic retelling, don't you think that that movie is probably pretty true to Frank Herbert's vision? There is only one canonical cinematic interpretation of Dune, and that, at least because of Herbert's involvement, is Lynch's film (for all its weaknesses).
Who cares what's believable or not? In a universe that takes place 10,000 years in the future, you accept the universe for what it is. And frankly, Lynch's interpretation of Herbert's universe was miles better than the dreck perpetrated on Herbert's memory by Sci-Fi.
God that series was bloody awful. What is it with us geeks and the rampant ignorance of the concepts of production values?
Best thing to ever happen to the Python community
on
Apocalypse 2
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· Score: 1
After digging through this Apocalypse, I really wonder where my Perl is going. It must be going away, because what I'm seeing in A2 is certainly not my Perl.
Perl6 is probably going to be the best thing that ever happened to the Python community. If you're going to learn an entirely new language, might as well learn one that is already stable and has a large support base.
(I will grant, though, that for a new language, Perl6 looks pretty cool.)
Cliff asks...what would it take to start up another company that issues CAs?...
The biggest problem with starting up a low-cost SSL certificate authority is getting the corresponding root certificates distributed with the Big Browsers. Until you can get distributed, you're not a "real" CA. Users get awfully antsy when they get the ol' "This certificate isn't trusted blah blah blah" dialog box when they visit a site.
Python is used pretty much across the board, much more across the board than Perl.
Who is he kidding? In my years as a professional programmer of financial applications, data servers, ecommerce frameworks, embedded systems, and web sites, I have seen a plethora of projects successfully that used Perl, and exactly zero that used Python. Python ain't exactly the ubiquitous standard the Python community thinks it is.
There are a lot of application developers using Python in Web development. Even more using Perl, to be sure.
The other examples given--glue applications, database applications--have been successfully served by Perl for a long, long time. Honestly, who hasn't written a simple protocol server in Perl before? Who hasn't written basic databases in Perl?
I think Guido might be eating a little too much of his own dog food. Python may be a rising star (who remembers Objective C?), but Perl is still king.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a nice site...
Give it a try!
C'mon, people, we have a posting about cancer nearly being cured, and the postings that get modded up are jokes about the cat. Typical Slashdot.
Grow up, people, and maybe everyone else will take us seriously as a demographic.
That sounds like a pretty killer app to me! If it could support even half the arcade platforms of MAME, I would buy one of these in a heartbeat. Until then the PSP is too expensive as a mediocre movie player with a bunch of pretty, but uncompelling games.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the m200 here. I got one for school and was addicted in no time flat.
It has GREAT battery life (4.5 hours in its long life mode), and GREAT screen (1400x1050, and the extra resolution REALLY counts for the look and feel of the electronic ink), 40GB drive, 512MB memory, 1.5GHz P-Mobile, built in modem-ether-wireless, and comes with OneNote.
I hate saying anything good about M$, but OneNote is the ultimate electronic legal pad. It even indexes your handwriting for text search! I use it exclusively for note taking in class now.
Don't knock the convertibles. The m200's ability to be a tablet and laptop makes it extremely versatile.
If you've got a pile of money laying around (yes, it's expensive), this is the only Tablet to consider. Nothing else on the market holds a candle to it, if for no other reason than the fantastic resolution of the screen.
Nope, that ain't the way it works. His name is Mike Rowe, so "mikerowe.com" would be fine. However, he said outright he was spoofing Microsoft's name in order to attract attention to his skill, for monetary gain. That fails the nomitive test, hence he broke the law.
The fact that it was willful actually makes him more liable, usually by an order of magnitude.
Sorry gang, I don't like being on MS's side in anything, but the kid was wrong, and MS was well within their rights to call bullshit on him.
IANAL, but he was clearly in violation with his domain name, especially by admitting that he was doing it to get attention for his contracting skills (which would make him money). Any way you cut it, his domain name did not pass the nomitive test for fair use, and MS was well within their legal rights to go after him. Glad it turned out okay for Mike, but he was wrong.
/. has willingingly just exceeded this guy's bandwidth. He now owes his ISP money (and probably lots of it) because /. linked.
/. is going to do to someone's servers.
Now, does anyone else think that the Slashdot Effect is getting to be criminal? C'mon, people, we GAVE IT A NAME. It's not like we don't know what posting to
Editors of Slashdot: you guys are getting criminally negligent. If no one has sued you so far, you better start getting the lawyers ready.
Isn't that statistically a little improbable? Maybe a lot improbable?!
C'mon, there is absolutely no need for a language like that! You should use the right tool for the job, and lemme tell you, C++ is not necessarily the right tool. To whit, applications that should not be written in C++:
- high-performance embedded applications
- text processing applications
- Hello, World!
Seriously, though, an programmer who has only one tool in their toolbox is a waste of space. I swear, the world must look like it's made of nothing but nails to this guy, 'cuz all he has in his toolbox is a big freakin' hammer...It rocks--check it out.
MSDN is a great resource, to be sure. But it won't get you started on how to write Windows applications. Once you get the hang of that, you'll live and die by MSDN!
As for how to write Win32 apps: First of all, Charles Petzold is the god of Windows programming books. Check out his book "Programming Windows: The Definitive Guide to the Win32 API".
After that, I'd check out "Win32 Programming" by Rector and Newcomer, published by Addison-Wesley. It has served me well.
Good luck!
Gods, you
Office is one of the precious few things MS has done well! The suite is amazingly powerful, amazingly flexible, and as long as you avoid the VBA scripting, works very well!
The Linux community hasn't produced anything comparable to date, and in fact, they never will, because the Linux community is missing the Machiavellian organization that it needs to effectively compete with MS (RMS's deluded efforts notwithstanding).
If you're going to be anti-MS, which is a laudable opinion to be sure, at least sound intelligent and educated about it. Stop acting like ignorant bigots.
That wasn't an interview. That was Stanley's pet sycophant putting words into his mouth. ("Yessss, my preciousssss... The Stroustrapses is wanting to take away our language, preciousss...")
I would really have liked to get a real straight answer as to VC++'s role in Microsplat's future. As it is, I'm just as confused as ever. Vague promises that it will be the power language of choice for .NET? But what is it now?
I'll tell you what it is: it's the arcane black magic that the entire .NET system is built on! .NET is all about protecting the programmers from C++. Duh.
I really would like to see a real interview with this guy--when he gets a grip on his task. For now, Stanley appears as confused as the rest of us.
Check out http://www.isd.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra/ to read about Tierra, the first time evolution was used to grow programs.
Ultimately, Ray used this to try to evolve complex parallel processing programs.
The evolutionary process will be introduced into the context of the global computer network, internet. The objective is to evolve complex MIMD distributed processes.
Neat stuff. Check it out.
In all the teams I've run, I've made it clear to the Powers That Be that the developers will run and maintain their own machines.
When a new developer came on board, his/her first job was to build their box out, roughly according to the instructions that IT laid down (like how to access your corporate email, where message boards were, etc.). But after that, the box was HER OWN MACHINE to do with as she pleased.
Now we also put the entire dev and dev-testing network on its own subnet/domain that could be literally unplugged from the corporate net with literally one disconnected CAT-5 cable. (Yes, we had a good switch behind it. :-) This seemed to mollify the IT staff. And besides, a good test system must be able to be disconnected sometimes.
The upshot of the whole thing was that we were indeed an island of chaos in an ocean of relative infrastructure calm. And you know what? It works great! Any developer worth her salt will know how to do basic box and network admin.
Oh yeah, and remember to get static IP's for your developers' boxes. Makes Internet development work a lot easier!
What it really comes down to is convincing the Powers that developers must have free reign over their own systems. Your biggest friend and enemy will be the IT department. Make friends with them; negotiate and compromise an acceptable solution to the problem with them. If you can get IT behind you, the Powers will have a lot of trouble denying you.
Fight for it--it's totally worth it! Good luck!
If you go perusing through Donald Knuth's work (in this case, Digital Typography), you will see him mention a killer program he wrote for TeX. I'd cite the program name and page number if I had my copy, but I lent it out. In any event, this single TeX program/script/file tested every little nuance of the system abusively. In and of itself it was a gorgeous piece of work.
Shifting gears for a moment, most QA types will tell you that the best time to devise test cases is when a project is in late requirements or early design. You doubtless have a grammar for your "C-plus-or-minus" language--I would call that a great high-level design document!
Now putting this all together, shouldn't it be relatively straightforward to construct a C program (or set of C programs) that goes through every state of your grammar?
Sounds like a fun project for some undergrad students to work on in Compiler Design. (In fact, it might even be fun to generate a C program generator from that grammar to do it for you; but I digress...)
What I suspect is going on here is that they want to build a DNA database of "hackers" who committed crimes before this law was passed. Hey, says Ashcroft, we aren't jailing them, so we're constitutionally okay. DNA database != legal punishment.
(For now we'll ignore the gray area in which this obviously resides...)
Let's think about this.
If Frank Herbert wrote the book, and then Frank Herbert was deeply involved in a cinematic retelling, don't you think that that movie is probably pretty true to Frank Herbert's vision? There is only one canonical cinematic interpretation of Dune, and that, at least because of Herbert's involvement, is Lynch's film (for all its weaknesses).
Who cares what's believable or not? In a universe that takes place 10,000 years in the future, you accept the universe for what it is. And frankly, Lynch's interpretation of Herbert's universe was miles better than the dreck perpetrated on Herbert's memory by Sci-Fi.
God that series was bloody awful. What is it with us geeks and the rampant ignorance of the concepts of production values?
Perl6 is probably going to be the best thing that ever happened to the Python community. If you're going to learn an entirely new language, might as well learn one that is already stable and has a large support base.
(I will grant, though, that for a new language, Perl6 looks pretty cool.)
Was anyone else completely nonplussed by these answers? I'm not sure anything was said!
Mr. Warner, have you tried contacting EFF to see if they can represent you? Or perhaps they could get you in contact with someone who could?
The biggest problem with starting up a low-cost SSL certificate authority is getting the corresponding root certificates distributed with the Big Browsers. Until you can get distributed, you're not a "real" CA. Users get awfully antsy when they get the ol' "This certificate isn't trusted blah blah blah" dialog box when they visit a site.
Who is he kidding? In my years as a professional programmer of financial applications, data servers, ecommerce frameworks, embedded systems, and web sites, I have seen a plethora of projects successfully that used Perl, and exactly zero that used Python. Python ain't exactly the ubiquitous standard the Python community thinks it is.
There are a lot of application developers using Python in Web development. Even more using Perl, to be sure.
The other examples given--glue applications, database applications--have been successfully served by Perl for a long, long time. Honestly, who hasn't written a simple protocol server in Perl before? Who hasn't written basic databases in Perl?
I think Guido might be eating a little too much of his own dog food. Python may be a rising star (who remembers Objective C?), but Perl is still king.