If you are a high school teacher, may I put in my suggestion here?
For me, if you really want to teach about programming (and I think teaching high schoolers to get certification is plain wrong), a high school teacher should inspire students to want to go into that field (or other scientific fields, as a matter of fact). High schoolers can learn the language syntax just fine, any language, and do the debugging too. You can give an introduction to most languages, and they will pick up and do it. The issue here to make them pick up the interest in doing it, and that's the hard part.
I remember when I was at high school, we had that programming course (optional class), where the teacher was teaching us programming Logo on those 8086 machines without hard disk. We needed to have a boot floppy to boot up, then another floppy for loading the program. The teacher thought he was God, we were a class of 40, and the class lasted one hour and half. He refused to create more boot disks so that everyone can boot at the same time, he just had one, gave it to one student at a time, and waited behind the student until the machine boot up, and passed the floppy to the next student. By the time the last student finished booting up, the class is almost over. None of us had computer at home, that's the only place we had access to computer programming.
Not only that, his moto was "Can't do", you can't do this, you can't do that. A few of us came up with some nice tricks to do things, and he threatened to fail us if we don't program his and his only way. For example, to draw a polygon, you must use his method, can't have anything else. We used the math learned in high school, including sin(), cosin(),etc, to program some fun stuffs, like creating a cube and move it inside a bigger cube, with proper perspective and angle and all that. 3D stuff. Yeah, you can do this with just high school math. Guess what, we would have failed the class, if we didn't accept to draw stupid picture by creating points and link the points together with stupid lines. All he wanted was the pictures so that he can print them, stick them on the walls, so that the principal could see his "achievements".
In that class of 40, all of us hated programming by the end. Only two got into computer science at University, I was one, and that's because I wanted to program a computer that can talk to me, like HAL in "2001 : Space Odyssey" (yeah, I read that book at the time).
A high school teacher can do much more than that, and don't underestimate the intellect of high schoolers, if you can rouse their interests.
I think a competitive project between teams would be great, you not only teach programming, you also teach teamwork at the same time. You don't need fancy textbooks, just some introductory materials. Don't limit their imagination, encourage them to go beyond what you teach.
In contrast, we had a great math teacher. Yeah, Mr. Belleau, if you are reading this, I'd like to say, thank you, although it's more than 20 years ago now.
Following the archiving principle of LOCKS (Lots of Copies Keep 'em Safe) we would replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world with built in magnifiers.
Speak for yourself, man, all the geeks in us already found a better way long time ago. We store our important stuffs for long term archival in newsgroups.
Oh my oh my, where is the spirit of exploration, taking risk, experimenting, building things in this community? I often come here for insight discussion and interesting debate on things that matter, but instead, we got a flame fest.
So, for this forum, anything done in China must be bad, negative, and nothing good could come out of it.
Everyone is ohing and ahing when we talk about Mars terraforming. When China is experimenting a new project, everyone must slam about its politics, and there's nothing worth reading and discussing here.
Tell you what, I'm living in Shanghai, I hate as much as the next guy the corruption, the pollution, the control on free speech, the human rights,... all the negative things here.
But for fuck sake, this is a project where the Chinese government is investing in, taking risk, experimenting, building things,... this is a big project to experiment an alternative way of building human cities, to change the way we work, live, entertain, deal with nature, etc. Where else do you get to experiment at this scale, and with the financial backup like that? Ok, this may be a political show, but I don't see other governments dare to experiment and make a show like that.
It might be a big flop, and it might be a huge success. The lessons learned might be useful for other regions on this planet, and even might be useful when we need to build outer space colony.
And guess what, westerners (the Brits, Americans, French, Italians...) have taken a huge part in designing it too. This is not a one country thing.
For those who only have negative things to say, let's get out of the parent's basement and go out more. Visit other countries, not all is well and perfect, but I'm sure you will learn a lot more too.
You want to make China a better place? Don't whine in the basement, that won't change anything. Come here, bring your grand vision, your next big thing.
We do separate our trash for recycling, and have been doing this for years now. Plastic and glass bottles, aluminum can, carton, newspapers, magazines, etc. We have been separating them into stacks and putting them into different bins for years now. We have been trying to avoid preserved food so that we don't waste resources in those containers.
Besides, China is a crowded place. We don't live in oversized mansion like the USians, with a huge back yard, where we can have huge compost containers to convert organic trash into fertilizer. And we are city dwellers, what do I want to do with the fertilizer anyway?
And I don't think we would like to hand separate those organic trash either. So, even though we produce very minimum trash, but yes, decent garbage bags to keep those flies and smells out are necessary for modern way of city living.
China has just implemented this policy as well, you must pay 0.2 RMB if you want a plastic bag. Stores which still give plastic bags for free will be fined, or worse, shut down.
All in the name of environment.
The cost saved has never been passed to customers. Worse yet, stores have been taking in even more profits, selling at amazing high price all kinds of shopping bags.
The cost is totally transfered to customers. There are other side affects too, as a result. People used to put their garbage in those plastic bags, tied them up before throwing them in the common garbage bin. Now, they just dump the garbage directly in, bringing flies and other insects, and having very stinky neighborhood.
We used to use those as garbage bags as well, and as we are only two, we don't have much garbage. The smallish grocery store bags are just perfect for daily garbage. Now we have to buy those larger black bags, which we can't fill in one day. Since we don't like stinky overnight garbage in house, we throw away a half empty bag, which is a waste. So, for our family of two, this policy does not seem to do any good to environment. Unless we are willing to keep garbage overnight, of course.
The so-called experts on the panel who decided this policy (in closed door, as all other policies in China) admitted they didn't consider any of the social and cost issues before they passed it. As if this is new to any one.
That's exactly the problem with Alfresco, and it's amazing how they can claim to be 100% open source, and yet, only a crippled version is available.
It's a nice product, but that model has alienated quite a few who could be excellent contributors.
Besides, if you want to build a business model around open source software, I would think that you want to give the best first impression possible on people who try it out. And yet, you only provide a crippled version with all kinds of critical bugs. How do you expect people to pay for support, if the bloody thing does not even work when the potential customer is trying out?
Bad move for Alfresco. Bad bad move. Should take a lesson from Red Hat.
Well, I agree with most of your points, and I think CS degree should not teach any programming language, but only in the context of theory and concepts on programming language design. I went to McGill University in Montreal, we had one class in assembly language, and it was the only class in which the prof explained the assembly syntax, and the only reason was so that we could work on the term project to build an assembler in C.
There was no other class where we were taught specifically to program in a specific language, we just went to the computer lab, set up a user account, and started to learn by ourself (when we had to do our programming assignments). We had homeworks in C, C++, assembly, Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Modula, Objective-C, Tcl/Tk, Pascal. We learned about other languages in the context of programming language design.
I have been working in the field for over a decade, working on telecom switches, embedded systesm, financial and trading systems, large scale web systems, etc, and I still think this was the best way to teach CS.
Blasting all CE/CS graduates for not knowing shit because of one supposedly real anecdotal example? And as if making GUI and sending data down a serial port is what computer science all about?
Give me a break. I can give you an example too. My ex-neighbor was an ME (with a master degree beside that), who knows less about his car mechanics than I do (and I'm a CS graduate), and in fact, can't even fix his house's water sink when water is leaking. I have helped fix minor problems in his car more times than he can remember. Computer science is a vast domain, not everyone knows everything. I'm pretty good in data structures and algorithms, I can come up with a good solution to most complex problems, but I'm a lousy GUI programmer too. All those listeners, decorators, etc, drive me nut. What does that speak about me? Nothing, just that GUI is not my cup of tea, I have more interest in other aspects, and most of my works are concentrated on those, that's all.
And I bet you don't know everything about mechanics in other domains either. But I won't go to say that all MEs have learned nothing useful.
Someone please show me where on their web site it states that the education is tuition-free. All I can find is this:
Cost and Financial Aid
You have to get the Olin Scholarship, which has the equivalent amount of the tuition. But it certainly does not say anyone admitted will be qualified. You certainly will have to go through the competitive qualification process, just like any other colleges?
If it's really tuition-free, I'll apply for a graduate engineering degree in a heart beat.
But that's not important whether there was fraud or not. What is important is, the government made a snafu, and there is no way they will say "sorry". So, to save face, they push the charges on. The question is, how far will they go?
the fact that 3 of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun are now squarely behind ODF.
Yeah, I'll be more impressed when these firms ditched MS Office totally, and replace it with OO for internal use, and maybe force their suppliers to also use OO (otherwise, no deal!). I want to see all their sales people use exclusively OO too.
I remember that a few years, when OO was just out, a Sun's product manager was doing a presentation using PPT (surprise, surprise!), while bitching about how MS Office was so bad, and how OO was going to be the future. After listening to half an hour of bitching and moaning, I couldn't stand it anymore, and said:"Listen, if you think that MS Office is so bad, and OO is going to be the future, why are you not using OO? And what are you using right now?" He wasn't amused though.
Seriously, these companies need to eat their own dog food. We use OO internally in our company.
Well, how do you define this as a crime? There is no legislation saying that the government is setting up a firewall or filtering system, and that no one should get around this, otherwise you'd be a criminal. No law is broken here. Sure, this does not mean they can't round you up and "evaporate" you (in 1984 terminology).
Tor and Privoxy would do the trick. BBC and Wikipedia can be accessed that way. Just that sometimes it is a little bit slow to get connected to a tor node.
If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet
Well duh, the so-called firewall is certainly not the same firewall that everyone means, and the researchers should know better. The system was not setup to totally block/filter everything at the gate. Certain groups of users must be allowed to access all contents, regardless of political censorship at the time, this includes: foreigners living in China, certain government departments and agencies (some police departments, NSA-equivalent, CIA-equivalent,...). For example, if you go to places where there is high concentration of foreigners living in China, especially in certain building, you can access everything, there is no blocking/filtering at all. For example, when there is any well-known, well-publicized international conference held in China, the whole block where the conference is held can have non-filtered access, especially in hotels where foreign guests are concentrated.
The system is setup to allow contents in and out, but certain routes are blocked/filtered, while others are not. That's why you see some messages passed through several routers before being blocked. If the system was setup to block/filter everything at the gate, this would not be able to achieve.
I really don't know what to do with that news, obviously, it's a slow news day. But this kind of things just keep on popping up every month or so. So, here's my take, before going out for a bite.
1) Everyone is scanning or hacking everyone else, big deal, get over it. And even my lowly servers get hit by port scanning and hack attempts every minute from US-based IPs, and believe it or not, some IPs are traced back to some.mil or.gov domains (those might be zombies, or they might be some stupid hacking apprentices from those agencies).
2) The US government even has spy satellite scanning every corner of the globe, sending spy and reconnaissance planes to the border of almost every nation on this planet, has spy subs to the public water zones just an inch beside the territory of every sea-bordered nations. Every country which has the capabilities is doing the same, including Russia, UK, France, Japan (Yes, Japan too, even with their constitution and commitment after WWII not to get into military shit), China, India, Canada,.... Is that news to anyone at all?
3) With the huge budget and the amount of human resources that the US DoD has, and if their system is that easy to hack by an outsider, well, too bad. They might as well consider outsourcing system management work to some other countries which might do a better job, such as India or China (doh...)
4) If your system is hacked by an outside without any physical access, shouldn't you first review your security policies first, instead of sending knee-jerk reaction to blame others? Unless this is just a setup for political games.
5) Political games, scapegoating, knee-jerk reactions, stupid employees, stupid politicians, stupid network admins, stupid journalists looking to stir up a storm in a glass of water, stupid/. submitter, stupid this and stupid that,... exist all over the place. So, move over, nothing to see here.
It's not just government agencies, and not after 9/11 either. This kind of practice happened even before 9/11 in corporate world.
In early 2001 (pre-9/11), the investors pulled out of our company and we went belly up. Two weeks later, I got an offer from a new startup, developing high-end IDS. I would be the second software engineer there. The offer was really good, with a good amount of stock options, and 3 weeks vacation. Except one thing: the background check.
The wording of that agreement was amazingly terrible. It is more than invasive. I kept that page until two years ago, finally threw it away with other junks. Basically, it stated that the company could do any background check, any time, on any thing, including but not just my previous and future phone logs (including personal phone), email log (including personal email), bank accounts, trading accounts, 401K, IRA, credit card expenses, credit check, newsgroup, web postings,.... yada yada. Whatever you can name it, it's on that piece of paper. The whole piece of paper is filled with these items. And the funny part was, for some checking, I had to foot up the expenses too, although it didn't say which ones.
I didn't sign, and went to the president, had a nice and polite discussion with him. I told him that I understood their concern about security, but this agreement obviously went overboard. I don't mind "normal" background check, but not those mentioned there. He also agreed that it went a little too far. So he asked me to re-word it so that I could accept. I rewrote the agreement, using standard background check format and wordings from other companies which I could accept. The president thought it was fine with him.
But the corporate attorney, with the support of the investors, didn't want to hear about it. He said that engineers and technical people had too easy an access to implement backdoors in the system. It is this way, or the highway.
I chose the highway. The company recruiter (external hired recruiter, actually) kept calling me for two months, but I already started working at other place for almost two months by then.
Hah, that reminds of a project I was working on in the early 1990s in Canada. We sold a telecom switch to a Singapore customer, they hooked it to their network, connecting to another switch by another vendor.
At one point, the call setup couldn't finish properly. We looked deep into the tracing log, and found that when our switch sent a call setup control packet to the other switch, the packet got sent back right away. Our switch thought, heck, I'll retry, and send the same packet again. The packet is returned again. And the two switches were playing ping pong for no end.
We looked at the packet contents, and revised our call setup workflow, everything seemed to comply to the specs perfectly. And it has no problem with switches from other vendors, just this specific vendor. We got the tech guy from the other vendor to look into their system too. The answer he gave was: The control packet our switch sent over has the two reserved bits set to 1, and their switch must have them set to 0, otherwise the packet is not recognized and returned as it is.
Boy, we were working until 4AM to help the customers resolve the issue, as there are 12 hours difference between eastern Canada and Singapore.
to Stroustrup, but don't you think it's a bit ironic that the creator of such a monstrosity is talking about ideal of programming languages? And don't even get me into the the differences between implementations!
Yeah, go ahead, bring out your flame hose. Even if I had to burn in hell, this thing is still a monstrosity.
Well, let me give you my view from inside China. I'm living in Shanghai.
Sure, favoritism is a big thing, guanxi has to be built. But that's just about the same everywhere, including the US (what do you think those lobbyists do in DC?), it just seems more obvious in China.
However, you have to give Microsoft credit for doing their homework, they invested in building that guanxi. Where are RH, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva, and the gang? I don't see any. They don't even have an office here. Microsoft learned the rules of the game in the US, that's why they have a huge lobbying budget in DC now. And I think they are playing the rules pretty well in China.
If the Linux distros want to have a piece of the cake, they just have to be here. Go ask Motorola, Nokia, GM, Ford, KFC, McDonald... they set up shop here, and now, their chinese division is making tons of money, and has the highest growth rate in the whole entity.
It can manually pick weeds, spray, or remove them using flames or a laser.
I, for one, welcome our flame-spitting and laser-shooting overlord. Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these Linux-running robots, what kind of profitable business plan can you come up with? Or, if you are just a gamer type, imagine a lan party, priceless.
The only thing missing now is a console so that we can issue the command "sudo make me a sandwich".
From our own experience, what Dell is doing is just half-hearted attempt, at best, to gather some good press. Their offer of Linux-based laptop is ridiculous. And anyone who thinks that the move may be the beginning of Linux world domination, well, hate to break it to you, that's pipe dream.
We had bought a few Dell laptops in the last six months, and every one of them is so-called Linux-based laptop. When we open the box, here's the list of what we found:
- The machine and components, the usual suspects (no surprise here) - one CD containing a partial list of different drivers for... guess... that's right, Windows. And I said partial list because you still need to go out tracking some of the most important drivers, such the graphic driver, sound driver, etc. (I'll explain later) - one CD of junk softwares that you will never use, for... guess again... that's right, Windows. - 3 CDs of Red Flag Linux (yeah, in China, that is).
I booted up the machine, half of them came with DOS installed, but you can't do anything much as there's no driver for anything anyway. The other half came with absolutely nothing installed. Empty disk.
Ok, just for the heck of it, to see if they actually tried to install the linux distro themselves. I installed Red Flag Linux, it installed fine, but missing a few drivers, or won't detect properly. I had to mess with it for a while to get it to work, but still the graphics is not working optimally.
Ok, so far, I don't think any buyer is going with Linux here.
So, I installed Windows XP. And the drivers CD is missing some serious drivers, I ended up with a system which was not any better than with Linux. I looked up the support web site, enter the serial number, and the system told me the serial number of that machine does not exist. Who cares, I just downloaded a bunch of drivers to try out, those drivers that are published for the models close to the one I have. Doesn't work.
After half a day of messing around, I called tech support. Nice guy, actually. He told me that the drivers downloaded from the web site don't work, because I have a "pirated" copy of Windows XP. Ok, fine, give me those that work then. He emailed a few links to get those missing drivers. None of these links showed up on their web site.
Go figure. With that kind of so-called "support", I doubt Joe Sixpacks is going to have Linux on that machine.
You bastard, while I was trying to hold my mouth in emergency as I spitted out mountain dew on my shiny 21' LCD, I hit the bottle and spill the god damn thing on my shiny PDA phone as well....
Note to self: never read slashdot while having something in your mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a high school teacher, may I put in my suggestion here?
For me, if you really want to teach about programming (and I think teaching high schoolers to get certification is plain wrong), a high school teacher should inspire students to want to go into that field (or other scientific fields, as a matter of fact). High schoolers can learn the language syntax just fine, any language, and do the debugging too. You can give an introduction to most languages, and they will pick up and do it. The issue here to make them pick up the interest in doing it, and that's the hard part.
I remember when I was at high school, we had that programming course (optional class), where the teacher was teaching us programming Logo on those 8086 machines without hard disk. We needed to have a boot floppy to boot up, then another floppy for loading the program. The teacher thought he was God, we were a class of 40, and the class lasted one hour and half. He refused to create more boot disks so that everyone can boot at the same time, he just had one, gave it to one student at a time, and waited behind the student until the machine boot up, and passed the floppy to the next student. By the time the last student finished booting up, the class is almost over. None of us had computer at home, that's the only place we had access to computer programming.
Not only that, his moto was "Can't do", you can't do this, you can't do that. A few of us came up with some nice tricks to do things, and he threatened to fail us if we don't program his and his only way. For example, to draw a polygon, you must use his method, can't have anything else. We used the math learned in high school, including sin(), cosin(),etc, to program some fun stuffs, like creating a cube and move it inside a bigger cube, with proper perspective and angle and all that. 3D stuff. Yeah, you can do this with just high school math. Guess what, we would have failed the class, if we didn't accept to draw stupid picture by creating points and link the points together with stupid lines. All he wanted was the pictures so that he can print them, stick them on the walls, so that the principal could see his "achievements".
In that class of 40, all of us hated programming by the end. Only two got into computer science at University, I was one, and that's because I wanted to program a computer that can talk to me, like HAL in "2001 : Space Odyssey" (yeah, I read that book at the time).
A high school teacher can do much more than that, and don't underestimate the intellect of high schoolers, if you can rouse their interests.
I think a competitive project between teams would be great, you not only teach programming, you also teach teamwork at the same time. You don't need fancy textbooks, just some introductory materials. Don't limit their imagination, encourage them to go beyond what you teach.
In contrast, we had a great math teacher. Yeah, Mr. Belleau, if you are reading this, I'd like to say, thank you, although it's more than 20 years ago now.
Speak for yourself, man, all the geeks in us already found a better way long time ago. We store our important stuffs for long term archival in newsgroups.
Oh my oh my, where is the spirit of exploration, taking risk, experimenting, building things in this community? I often come here for insight discussion and interesting debate on things that matter, but instead, we got a flame fest.
... all the negative things here.
... this is a big project to experiment an alternative way of building human cities, to change the way we work, live, entertain, deal with nature, etc. Where else do you get to experiment at this scale, and with the financial backup like that? Ok, this may be a political show, but I don't see other governments dare to experiment and make a show like that.
So, for this forum, anything done in China must be bad, negative, and nothing good could come out of it.
Everyone is ohing and ahing when we talk about Mars terraforming. When China is experimenting a new project, everyone must slam about its politics, and there's nothing worth reading and discussing here.
Tell you what, I'm living in Shanghai, I hate as much as the next guy the corruption, the pollution, the control on free speech, the human rights,
But for fuck sake, this is a project where the Chinese government is investing in, taking risk, experimenting, building things,
It might be a big flop, and it might be a huge success. The lessons learned might be useful for other regions on this planet, and even might be useful when we need to build outer space colony.
And guess what, westerners (the Brits, Americans, French, Italians...) have taken a huge part in designing it too. This is not a one country thing.
For those who only have negative things to say, let's get out of the parent's basement and go out more. Visit other countries, not all is well and perfect, but I'm sure you will learn a lot more too.
You want to make China a better place? Don't whine in the basement, that won't change anything. Come here, bring your grand vision, your next big thing.
We do separate our trash for recycling, and have been doing this for years now. Plastic and glass bottles, aluminum can, carton, newspapers, magazines, etc. We have been separating them into stacks and putting them into different bins for years now. We have been trying to avoid preserved food so that we don't waste resources in those containers.
Besides, China is a crowded place. We don't live in oversized mansion like the USians, with a huge back yard, where we can have huge compost containers to convert organic trash into fertilizer. And we are city dwellers, what do I want to do with the fertilizer anyway?
And I don't think we would like to hand separate those organic trash either. So, even though we produce very minimum trash, but yes, decent garbage bags to keep those flies and smells out are necessary for modern way of city living.
China has just implemented this policy as well, you must pay 0.2 RMB if you want a plastic bag. Stores which still give plastic bags for free will be fined, or worse, shut down.
All in the name of environment.
The cost saved has never been passed to customers. Worse yet, stores have been taking in even more profits, selling at amazing high price all kinds of shopping bags.
The cost is totally transfered to customers. There are other side affects too, as a result. People used to put their garbage in those plastic bags, tied them up before throwing them in the common garbage bin. Now, they just dump the garbage directly in, bringing flies and other insects, and having very stinky neighborhood.
We used to use those as garbage bags as well, and as we are only two, we don't have much garbage. The smallish grocery store bags are just perfect for daily garbage. Now we have to buy those larger black bags, which we can't fill in one day. Since we don't like stinky overnight garbage in house, we throw away a half empty bag, which is a waste. So, for our family of two, this policy does not seem to do any good to environment. Unless we are willing to keep garbage overnight, of course.
The so-called experts on the panel who decided this policy (in closed door, as all other policies in China) admitted they didn't consider any of the social and cost issues before they passed it. As if this is new to any one.
That's exactly the problem with Alfresco, and it's amazing how they can claim to be 100% open source, and yet, only a crippled version is available.
It's a nice product, but that model has alienated quite a few who could be excellent contributors.
Besides, if you want to build a business model around open source software, I would think that you want to give the best first impression possible on people who try it out. And yet, you only provide a crippled version with all kinds of critical bugs. How do you expect people to pay for support, if the bloody thing does not even work when the potential customer is trying out?
Bad move for Alfresco. Bad bad move. Should take a lesson from Red Hat.
Wow, that's a first. You managed to invoke Godwin's law in the first post of a new thread. How is the conversation supposed to be carried on?
Well, I agree with most of your points, and I think CS degree should not teach any programming language, but only in the context of theory and concepts on programming language design. I went to McGill University in Montreal, we had one class in assembly language, and it was the only class in which the prof explained the assembly syntax, and the only reason was so that we could work on the term project to build an assembler in C.
There was no other class where we were taught specifically to program in a specific language, we just went to the computer lab, set up a user account, and started to learn by ourself (when we had to do our programming assignments). We had homeworks in C, C++, assembly, Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Modula, Objective-C, Tcl/Tk, Pascal. We learned about other languages in the context of programming language design.
I have been working in the field for over a decade, working on telecom switches, embedded systesm, financial and trading systems, large scale web systems, etc, and I still think this was the best way to teach CS.
Oh wow, I don't know where to start now ...
Blasting all CE/CS graduates for not knowing shit because of one supposedly real anecdotal example? And as if making GUI and sending data down a serial port is what computer science all about?
Give me a break. I can give you an example too. My ex-neighbor was an ME (with a master degree beside that), who knows less about his car mechanics than I do (and I'm a CS graduate), and in fact, can't even fix his house's water sink when water is leaking. I have helped fix minor problems in his car more times than he can remember. Computer science is a vast domain, not everyone knows everything. I'm pretty good in data structures and algorithms, I can come up with a good solution to most complex problems, but I'm a lousy GUI programmer too. All those listeners, decorators, etc, drive me nut. What does that speak about me? Nothing, just that GUI is not my cup of tea, I have more interest in other aspects, and most of my works are concentrated on those, that's all.
And I bet you don't know everything about mechanics in other domains either. But I won't go to say that all MEs have learned nothing useful.
Godwin's Law is a more efficient way :)
Ok, I invoke it now.
Someone please show me where on their web site it states that the education is tuition-free. All I can find is this: Cost and Financial Aid
You have to get the Olin Scholarship, which has the equivalent amount of the tuition. But it certainly does not say anyone admitted will be qualified. You certainly will have to go through the competitive qualification process, just like any other colleges?
If it's really tuition-free, I'll apply for a graduate engineering degree in a heart beat.
But that's not important whether there was fraud or not. What is important is, the government made a snafu, and there is no way they will say "sorry". So, to save face, they push the charges on. The question is, how far will they go?
the fact that 3 of the "big" firms, IBM, Google & Sun are now squarely behind ODF.
Yeah, I'll be more impressed when these firms ditched MS Office totally, and replace it with OO for internal use, and maybe force their suppliers to also use OO (otherwise, no deal!). I want to see all their sales people use exclusively OO too.
I remember that a few years, when OO was just out, a Sun's product manager was doing a presentation using PPT (surprise, surprise!), while bitching about how MS Office was so bad, and how OO was going to be the future. After listening to half an hour of bitching and moaning, I couldn't stand it anymore, and said:"Listen, if you think that MS Office is so bad, and OO is going to be the future, why are you not using OO? And what are you using right now?" He wasn't amused though.
Seriously, these companies need to eat their own dog food. We use OO internally in our company.
Well, how do you define this as a crime? There is no legislation saying that the government is setting up a firewall or filtering system, and that no one should get around this, otherwise you'd be a criminal. No law is broken here. Sure, this does not mean they can't round you up and "evaporate" you (in 1984 terminology).
Tor and Privoxy would do the trick. BBC and Wikipedia can be accessed that way. Just that sometimes it is a little bit slow to get connected to a tor node.
If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet
Well duh, the so-called firewall is certainly not the same firewall that everyone means, and the researchers should know better. The system was not setup to totally block/filter everything at the gate. Certain groups of users must be allowed to access all contents, regardless of political censorship at the time, this includes: foreigners living in China, certain government departments and agencies (some police departments, NSA-equivalent, CIA-equivalent, ...). For example, if you go to places where there is high concentration of foreigners living in China, especially in certain building, you can access everything, there is no blocking/filtering at all. For example, when there is any well-known, well-publicized international conference held in China, the whole block where the conference is held can have non-filtered access, especially in hotels where foreign guests are concentrated.
The system is setup to allow contents in and out, but certain routes are blocked/filtered, while others are not. That's why you see some messages passed through several routers before being blocked. If the system was setup to block/filter everything at the gate, this would not be able to achieve.
I really don't know what to do with that news, obviously, it's a slow news day. But this kind of things just keep on popping up every month or so. So, here's my take, before going out for a bite.
.mil or .gov domains (those might be zombies, or they might be some stupid hacking apprentices from those agencies).
.... Is that news to anyone at all?
/. submitter, stupid this and stupid that, ... exist all over the place. So, move over, nothing to see here.
1) Everyone is scanning or hacking everyone else, big deal, get over it. And even my lowly servers get hit by port scanning and hack attempts every minute from US-based IPs, and believe it or not, some IPs are traced back to some
2) The US government even has spy satellite scanning every corner of the globe, sending spy and reconnaissance planes to the border of almost every nation on this planet, has spy subs to the public water zones just an inch beside the territory of every sea-bordered nations. Every country which has the capabilities is doing the same, including Russia, UK, France, Japan (Yes, Japan too, even with their constitution and commitment after WWII not to get into military shit), China, India, Canada,
3) With the huge budget and the amount of human resources that the US DoD has, and if their system is that easy to hack by an outsider, well, too bad. They might as well consider outsourcing system management work to some other countries which might do a better job, such as India or China (doh...)
4) If your system is hacked by an outside without any physical access, shouldn't you first review your security policies first, instead of sending knee-jerk reaction to blame others? Unless this is just a setup for political games.
5) Political games, scapegoating, knee-jerk reactions, stupid employees, stupid politicians, stupid network admins, stupid journalists looking to stir up a storm in a glass of water, stupid
And why did I bother to post at all? Stupid me!
It's not just government agencies, and not after 9/11 either. This kind of practice happened even before 9/11 in corporate world.
.... yada yada. Whatever you can name it, it's on that piece of paper. The whole piece of paper is filled with these items. And the funny part was, for some checking, I had to foot up the expenses too, although it didn't say which ones.
In early 2001 (pre-9/11), the investors pulled out of our company and we went belly up. Two weeks later, I got an offer from a new startup, developing high-end IDS. I would be the second software engineer there. The offer was really good, with a good amount of stock options, and 3 weeks vacation. Except one thing: the background check.
The wording of that agreement was amazingly terrible. It is more than invasive. I kept that page until two years ago, finally threw it away with other junks. Basically, it stated that the company could do any background check, any time, on any thing, including but not just my previous and future phone logs (including personal phone), email log (including personal email), bank accounts, trading accounts, 401K, IRA, credit card expenses, credit check, newsgroup, web postings,
I didn't sign, and went to the president, had a nice and polite discussion with him. I told him that I understood their concern about security, but this agreement obviously went overboard. I don't mind "normal" background check, but not those mentioned there. He also agreed that it went a little too far. So he asked me to re-word it so that I could accept. I rewrote the agreement, using standard background check format and wordings from other companies which I could accept. The president thought it was fine with him.
But the corporate attorney, with the support of the investors, didn't want to hear about it. He said that engineers and technical people had too easy an access to implement backdoors in the system. It is this way, or the highway.
I chose the highway. The company recruiter (external hired recruiter, actually) kept calling me for two months, but I already started working at other place for almost two months by then.
Hah, that reminds of a project I was working on in the early 1990s in Canada. We sold a telecom switch to a Singapore customer, they hooked it to their network, connecting to another switch by another vendor.
At one point, the call setup couldn't finish properly. We looked deep into the tracing log, and found that when our switch sent a call setup control packet to the other switch, the packet got sent back right away. Our switch thought, heck, I'll retry, and send the same packet again. The packet is returned again. And the two switches were playing ping pong for no end.
We looked at the packet contents, and revised our call setup workflow, everything seemed to comply to the specs perfectly. And it has no problem with switches from other vendors, just this specific vendor. We got the tech guy from the other vendor to look into their system too. The answer he gave was: The control packet our switch sent over has the two reserved bits set to 1, and their switch must have them set to 0, otherwise the packet is not recognized and returned as it is.
Boy, we were working until 4AM to help the customers resolve the issue, as there are 12 hours difference between eastern Canada and Singapore.
to Stroustrup, but don't you think it's a bit ironic that the creator of such a monstrosity is talking about ideal of programming languages? And don't even get me into the the differences between implementations!
Yeah, go ahead, bring out your flame hose. Even if I had to burn in hell, this thing is still a monstrosity.
Well, let me give you my view from inside China. I'm living in Shanghai.
Sure, favoritism is a big thing, guanxi has to be built. But that's just about the same everywhere, including the US (what do you think those lobbyists do in DC?), it just seems more obvious in China.
However, you have to give Microsoft credit for doing their homework, they invested in building that guanxi. Where are RH, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva, and the gang? I don't see any. They don't even have an office here. Microsoft learned the rules of the game in the US, that's why they have a huge lobbying budget in DC now. And I think they are playing the rules pretty well in China.
If the Linux distros want to have a piece of the cake, they just have to be here. Go ask Motorola, Nokia, GM, Ford, KFC, McDonald... they set up shop here, and now, their chinese division is making tons of money, and has the highest growth rate in the whole entity.
... You now get perpetual free power for your vibrator, woohoo! We boys still have to do hand cranking, woooo....
I, for one, welcome our flame-spitting and laser-shooting overlord. Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these Linux-running robots, what kind of profitable business plan can you come up with? Or, if you are just a gamer type, imagine a lan party, priceless.
The only thing missing now is a console so that we can issue the command "sudo make me a sandwich".
From our own experience, what Dell is doing is just half-hearted attempt, at best, to gather some good press. Their offer of Linux-based laptop is ridiculous. And anyone who thinks that the move may be the beginning of Linux world domination, well, hate to break it to you, that's pipe dream.
... guess... that's right, Windows. And I said partial list because you still need to go out tracking some of the most important drivers, such the graphic driver, sound driver, etc. (I'll explain later) ... guess again... that's right, Windows.
We had bought a few Dell laptops in the last six months, and every one of them is so-called Linux-based laptop. When we open the box, here's the list of what we found:
- The machine and components, the usual suspects (no surprise here)
- one CD containing a partial list of different drivers for
- one CD of junk softwares that you will never use, for
- 3 CDs of Red Flag Linux (yeah, in China, that is).
I booted up the machine, half of them came with DOS installed, but you can't do anything much as there's no driver for anything anyway. The other half came with absolutely nothing installed. Empty disk.
Ok, just for the heck of it, to see if they actually tried to install the linux distro themselves. I installed Red Flag Linux, it installed fine, but missing a few drivers, or won't detect properly. I had to mess with it for a while to get it to work, but still the graphics is not working optimally.
Ok, so far, I don't think any buyer is going with Linux here.
So, I installed Windows XP. And the drivers CD is missing some serious drivers, I ended up with a system which was not any better than with Linux. I looked up the support web site, enter the serial number, and the system told me the serial number of that machine does not exist. Who cares, I just downloaded a bunch of drivers to try out, those drivers that are published for the models close to the one I have. Doesn't work.
After half a day of messing around, I called tech support. Nice guy, actually. He told me that the drivers downloaded from the web site don't work, because I have a "pirated" copy of Windows XP. Ok, fine, give me those that work then. He emailed a few links to get those missing drivers. None of these links showed up on their web site.
Go figure. With that kind of so-called "support", I doubt Joe Sixpacks is going to have Linux on that machine.
You bastard, while I was trying to hold my mouth in emergency as I spitted out mountain dew on my shiny 21' LCD, I hit the bottle and spill the god damn thing on my shiny PDA phone as well....
Note to self: never read slashdot while having something in your mouth.