Who would want huge bloated X on a handheld. Windows CE is much better hands down.
Putting X on a handheld does seem silly, I'll admit, but I'm doubting that WinCE is much better. I haven't used it much myself, other than store demos, but the interface seemed quite clunky. Apparently this is the most common complaint from users, that Microsoft tried to squeeze the desktop interface into a whole new paradigm. (Although the new version, not called WinCE any more, is supposed to be better.)
Secondly, WinCE isn't what I would call stable. A friend of mine has a Jornada, and it crashed several times while we were using it. Recently, the Registry got corrupted (?!?!!!!) and it then crashed, taking his data with it.
>your servers can't handle the current demand so you put a link to it
>on Slashdot!?
Okay, good point... =) Seriously, though, our servers were fine (the "crushed" was metaphorical, and meant to show how I thought it was nifty-neato that the unwashed masses can still act of their own volition, without an actual/. link). The main thing was bandwidth, and the people here did a great job getting the connection upped. I wasn't really involved in that, but I did get to look at pretty network load graphs.
Do you really think this guy or his employer has anything to do with the "Main Gnutella site?" Want to lay odds this guy is really a RIAA/MPAA Stooge?
I have nothing to do with Gnutella. My employer has nothing to do with it, either, except that we host it. And most of the employees know the people involved (I don't really, since I'm kinda new there).
I hate this sort of thing, but I might as well point out that I am speaking personally and not as an agent of my employer, that my employer is merely hosting the data and not supporting it, cigarettes cause cancer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Why would anyone involved with the Gnutella site pose such a question to Cliff, especially worded in this rather odd fashion?
See above. And I posted it because I am genuinely interested... The only MP3s I have are ripped from my own CDs or from MP3.com, and I have never used Napster or Gnutella. But it's interesting, and I think the social effects could be far-reaching. Or not.
This is unrealistic. Most high school CS kids can't even program linked lists correctly!
I was doing that in junior high. Granted, I was definitely a "computer dork", but it's not that hard to learn.
You all are forgetting that these students are beginners, and that most of them aren't computer dorks!
Um, if they're taking a CS class, they had better be prepared to learn! If you were teaching physics, would you be satisfied with a student who said, "Okay, I'll learn about linear travel, but not acceleration"?
Good idea. I just got started with SQL several months ago when I needed it for my job, and I've found it to be a lot of fun.
Here's a couple of other ideas:
Have them play with different styles of programming... Procedural, functional, object-oriented. Languages such as Lisp, Prolog, BASIC, and Java would be good to illustrate similarities and differences.
For the advanced (read: willing to tackle something challenging) students, learn 'em some real-mode x86 assembly and let them write a simple operating system. Minimum requirement should be that it boots off of a disk and does something interesting. (Note: I did this by myself in junior high, so it can't be that hard...)
Sockets. Playing with network communication can be a lot of fun. Java, for example, has a fairly easy-to-use socket API, and pretty much any language has APIs for it.
The biggest thing is not to chain your students to a curriculum. Programming is mostly exploring, and you don't want to squash that. For example, don't say "Use SQL to create a database for Bob's Bookstore, and then use servlets and JDBC to create a simple front end. Make sure to use the following keywords or methods:...". Say "Create a simple online ordering site for an imaginary business. Choose appropriate tools for each portion of the project, and make sure to allow for failed transactions and concurrent connections. Be prepared to explain the decisions you made in designing your system." The only problem is that you, as a teacher, have to have some idea what you're talking about as well.
No one that says stupid things like, "Unix types should check out the rcp utility!" (you dumbfuck, what UNIX user doesn't already know that standard commands? get a life.)
Especially considering that anyone who uses the r-utilities deserves to have their box 0wn3d.
That's probably also due to the nature of the geek world itself. Most link self-esteem to technical knowledge, and sometimes the easiest way to elevate yourself is to belittle someone else.
Dude, that's how most people work in general. They feel insecure, so people they feel threatened by get slapped down.
The geek community is no exception, of course, but I also think part of it comes from simple obsession with the topic being discussed. So you'll have geek guys going "vi forever! vi's X rules!" and "Emacs is soooo better than vi, because it has Y blah blah blah".
So a wannabe geek girl shows up, and immediately hits this seemingly antagonistic environment. Due to the societal prejudices, or maybe just cause she is the only girl there, she assumes it's directed toward her, rather than just being the way the group normally acts.
Not only that, you trolls have ruined slashdot, and trolls are getting worse. the signal to noise ratio have driven many away.
Two points:
If you are a new user who happens to stumble across Slashdot, you will not see the trolls. They are moderated down. So as a practical matter, there is no "slander". Newbies don't see it, and the clueful people who do know what it is and can just ignore it.
If the "signal to noise ratio" bugs you, up your threshold. I don't mind scrolling through pages of beer, Natalie Portman, and penis birds, so I browse at -1. If it bothers you, you don't have to. This is what moderation was designed for, and it works.
It is obvious we are quickly moving into a high-bandwidth network where consumers will routinely have access to multi-megabyte streams. The TCP protocol is, by design, limited to a mere 780kb/s. You cannot go faster due to network latency and the max size of the RWIN buffer. Therefore, it's obvious this protocol needs to be UDP.
Then you say:
we need a reliable file transfer protocol... [emphasis mine]
Signal 11, are you insane? TCP was specifically designed for reliability. UDP was designed for unreliable connections. Non-guaranteed. No assurance. Unreliable.
So maybe TCP needs an overhaul. Maybe another protocol would be better. But UDP? If you're going to "ditch TCP", don't build your new protocol on TCP's just-as-old cousin/brother/whatever.
XML is very slow. A typical transmission might be as verbose as this:
But doesn't XML have abbreviated forms as well? Like:
<stream-length/65535/
et cetera. So it's a little bit of a savings. Plus, there's two other factors. First, if this is just control data, it's still going to be tiny compared to the actual content. Second, I wouldn't be at all surprised if these XML-based protocols use a gzip-encoded stream or something.
In other words it's turning into a pile of useless, moronic shit just like the crap the said corporations churn out in their TV and print media. Oh, hooray, that is an improvement.
You want to see something pathetic? Go to Pizza Hut's Web site. Two "front pages", one of which is Shockwave. I don't even see why they have a Web site; it's not like they let you order pizza online or anything.
It is now the domain of the corporations that have turned the web from a text-based, dull place into the multimedia experiance that people want to see today.
Remember back in the day, when there weren't that many domain names, a.com didn't run out and grab.org and.net as well, and most personal sites were of the form www.someplace.edu/~thatguy?
With the whole issue of the trampled namespaces, plus the many legal issues, I wonder if this may push people away from registering a bazillion more domains. Hmm... Nope. "It doesn't end in.com? That ain't a real Web site!"
Excellent post... The first part of it reminded me of the little countries in Snow Crash. Sounds like a lot of fun.
On a more serious note, I've seen the problem you mentioned brought up before in Lani Guinier's essay "The Tyranny of the Majority". She has fewer suggestions, though, and is reduced to saying we should all "take turns".
Too bad we already tried your idea. Seemed to work fairly well, too, but the masses so idealize the big central government method that we'll never get it back.
Usually, this is the sort of thing that makes software developers run screaming down to the pub.
Really? It actually seemed like a pretty decent job to me, especially in the area of where to draw the line between the 2 environments. Like, MacOS programs won't delete a file that's in use, but BSD can. Which is all well and good, because if you crack open a terminal window and start rm-ing stuff, you had darn well better know what you're doing!
Heh... I remember some guy's review of MacOS X. He complained that if he did "cd directory-of-dock; ln -s ~/*.", the dock slowed down and became hard to see. (This with like 2000 files in that directory.) It was pretty funny, assuming he was joking. Well, it was pretty funny period; if he wasn't kidding, it was just funny in a different, more pathetic way. =)
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the RIAA brief is full of Micros~1 sm**tq**tes.
Looks like GTK.
What?!?!?! All the Linux AIM clients I know of use TOC, which was designed by AOL specifically to allow third-party clients.
I use the base LinuxPPC 1999 system, with most everything compiled from source and a much more recent kernel.
Okay, obligatory plug over... =)
Putting X on a handheld does seem silly, I'll admit, but I'm doubting that WinCE is much better. I haven't used it much myself, other than store demos, but the interface seemed quite clunky. Apparently this is the most common complaint from users, that Microsoft tried to squeeze the desktop interface into a whole new paradigm. (Although the new version, not called WinCE any more, is supposed to be better.)
Secondly, WinCE isn't what I would call stable. A friend of mine has a Jornada, and it crashed several times while we were using it. Recently, the Registry got corrupted (?!?!!!!) and it then crashed, taking his data with it.
EveryBuddy compiles fine on my iMac...
This was an excellent troll. I bow and scrape before you.
Okay, good point... =) Seriously, though, our servers were fine (the "crushed" was metaphorical, and meant to show how I thought it was nifty-neato that the unwashed masses can still act of their own volition, without an actual /. link). The main thing was bandwidth, and the people here did a great job getting the connection upped. I wasn't really involved in that, but I did get to look at pretty network load graphs.
I have nothing to do with Gnutella. My employer has nothing to do with it, either, except that we host it. And most of the employees know the people involved (I don't really, since I'm kinda new there).
I hate this sort of thing, but I might as well point out that I am speaking personally and not as an agent of my employer, that my employer is merely hosting the data and not supporting it, cigarettes cause cancer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
See above. And I posted it because I am genuinely interested... The only MP3s I have are ripped from my own CDs or from MP3.com, and I have never used Napster or Gnutella. But it's interesting, and I think the social effects could be far-reaching. Or not.
I was doing that in junior high. Granted, I was definitely a "computer dork", but it's not that hard to learn.
Um, if they're taking a CS class, they had better be prepared to learn! If you were teaching physics, would you be satisfied with a student who said, "Okay, I'll learn about linear travel, but not acceleration"?
Here's a couple of other ideas:
The biggest thing is not to chain your students to a curriculum. Programming is mostly exploring, and you don't want to squash that. For example, don't say "Use SQL to create a database for Bob's Bookstore, and then use servlets and JDBC to create a simple front end. Make sure to use the following keywords or methods: ...". Say "Create a simple online ordering site for an imaginary business. Choose appropriate tools for each portion of the project, and make sure to allow for failed transactions and concurrent connections. Be prepared to explain the decisions you made in designing your system." The only problem is that you, as a teacher, have to have some idea what you're talking about as well.
What, they still haven't fixed their memory management?
Especially considering that anyone who uses the r-utilities deserves to have their box 0wn3d.
Um, the NeXT Cube, anyone?
Dude, that's how most people work in general. They feel insecure, so people they feel threatened by get slapped down.
The geek community is no exception, of course, but I also think part of it comes from simple obsession with the topic being discussed. So you'll have geek guys going "vi forever! vi's X rules!" and "Emacs is soooo better than vi, because it has Y blah blah blah".
So a wannabe geek girl shows up, and immediately hits this seemingly antagonistic environment. Due to the societal prejudices, or maybe just cause she is the only girl there, she assumes it's directed toward her, rather than just being the way the group normally acts.
Two points:
That second page is pretty screwed up (broken tags and formatting); there's a PDF available too.
I was curious to find out what these terms meant, so I hopped over to Google:
Then you say:
Signal 11, are you insane? TCP was specifically designed for reliability. UDP was designed for unreliable connections. Non-guaranteed. No assurance. Unreliable.
So maybe TCP needs an overhaul. Maybe another protocol would be better. But UDP? If you're going to "ditch TCP", don't build your new protocol on TCP's just-as-old cousin/brother/whatever.
But doesn't XML have abbreviated forms as well? Like:
<stream-length/65535/
et cetera. So it's a little bit of a savings. Plus, there's two other factors. First, if this is just control data, it's still going to be tiny compared to the actual content. Second, I wouldn't be at all surprised if these XML-based protocols use a gzip-encoded stream or something.
You want to see something pathetic? Go to Pizza Hut's Web site. Two "front pages", one of which is Shockwave. I don't even see why they have a Web site; it's not like they let you order pizza online or anything.
By "multimedia experiance" you mean "crap".
With the whole issue of the trampled namespaces, plus the many legal issues, I wonder if this may push people away from registering a bazillion more domains. Hmm... Nope. "It doesn't end in .com? That ain't a real Web site!"
On a more serious note, I've seen the problem you mentioned brought up before in Lani Guinier's essay "The Tyranny of the Majority". She has fewer suggestions, though, and is reduced to saying we should all "take turns".
Too bad we already tried your idea. Seemed to work fairly well, too, but the masses so idealize the big central government method that we'll never get it back.
Really? It actually seemed like a pretty decent job to me, especially in the area of where to draw the line between the 2 environments. Like, MacOS programs won't delete a file that's in use, but BSD can. Which is all well and good, because if you crack open a terminal window and start rm-ing stuff, you had darn well better know what you're doing!
Heh... I remember some guy's review of MacOS X. He complained that if he did "cd directory-of-dock; ln -s ~/* .", the dock slowed down and became hard to see. (This with like 2000 files in that directory.) It was pretty funny, assuming he was joking. Well, it was pretty funny period; if he wasn't kidding, it was just funny in a different, more pathetic way. =)