"'We had expected to find a much higher incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome in the heavy computer users in our study because it is a commonly held belief that computer use causes carpal tunnel syndrome,' said J. Clarke Stevens, a neurologist at the prestigious clinic.... 'The findings are contrary to popular thought but nobody has studied the problem carefully,' Stevens said. 'I'd like computer users to know that prolonged use of a computer does not seem to lead to carpal tunnel.'... Because the syndrome is a common condition in the population -- one in 10 will develop symptoms -- some computer users will develop it, Stevens said."
(Edward Shorter -- upon whom another poster cast aspersions, perhaps rightly, perhaps not -- is not mentioned in this story. Stevens, quoted above, is the researcher mentioned in the National Post article.)
Google's cached copy of page
on
LED Flashlights
·
· Score: 3
A friend of mine has made several flashlights out of LEDs, potentiometers (as dimmers), and short lengths of PVC. They're great for providing very low levels of light during star watching parties; you can read maps, tweak screws, etc., without destroying your night vision (or that of the people around you). Some people prefer red (lowest energy wavelength); some prefer green (dim light goes further).
Mr. Mundy, you talked about how horrible it would be if software whose development was funded by the U.S. govenment was "Open Source" (presumably GPL'ed). Such software is always public domain, which means there are no restrictions on how Microsoft or anyone else can use it.
Were you just being disingenuous, or did you actually have a point?
(I'd have posted this to ora.com, but it wouldn't accept a request from behind a proxy server.)-:
I agree 100% with the idea that using fake From: and Received: headers should be enough for spammers to be swatted like the insects they are.
But read what the appeals court complained about:
First, the State alleged that Heckel had violated RCW 19.190.020(1)(b) and, in turn, the CPA, by using false or misleading information in the subject line of his UCE messages. Heckel used one of two subject lines to introduce his solicitations: 'Did I get the right e-mail address?' and 'For your review--HANDS OFF!'... In the State's view, the first subject line falsely suggested that an acquaintance of the recipient was trying to make contact, while the second subject line invited the misperception that the message contained classified information for the particular recipient's review.
I think that misleading Subject: lines are rude, crude, socially unacceptable... but (IMH-IANAL-O) speech, and should be protected.
As its second cause of action, the State alleged that Heckel had violated RCW 19.190.020(1)(a), and thus the CPA, by misrepresenting information defining the transmission paths of his UCE messages. Heckel routed his spam through at least a dozen different domain names without receiving permission to do so from the registered owners of those names. For example, of the 20 complaints the Attorney General's Office received concerning Heckel's spam, 9 of the messages showed '13.com' as the initial ISP to transmit his spam.... The 13.com domain name, however, was registered as early as November 1995 to another individual, from whom Heckel had not sought or received permission to use the registered name. In fact, because the owner of 13.com had not yet even activated that domain name, no messages could have been sent or received through 13.com.
There's two issues here:
He forged Received: lines. BZZZZZZT! Thank you for playing, Mr. Heckle; you lose.
He routed through open relays. I think that's immoral, and maybe violates anti-cracking laws; but it's not fraudulant.
I'm worried the court confused these two.
Finally:
... the State alleged that Heckel had violated the CPA by failing to provide a valid return e-mail address to which bulk-mail recipients could respond.
Sounds good so far; but it immediately continues:
When Heckel created his spam... he used at least a dozen different return e-mail addresses with the domain name 'juno.com' (Heckel used the Juno accounts in part because they were free)....
This may mean that the From: address, and/or the "to be removed please reply to" address, were real Juno addresses, at least when the messages were sent.
None of the Juno e-mail accounts was readily identifiable as belonging to Heckel; the user names that he registered generally consisted of a name or a name plus a number (e.g., 'marlin1374,' 'cindyt5667,' 'howardwesley13,' 'johnjacobson1374,' and 'sjtowns')....
This supports the concern that anonymity is forbidden. It's not quite that bad, but it's not good.
During August and September 1998, Heckel's Juno addresses were canceled within two days of his sending out a bulk e-mail message on the account. According to Heckel, when Juno canceled one e-mail account, he would simply open a new one and send out another bulk mailing. Because Heckel's accounts were canceled so rapidly, recipients who attempted to reply were unsuccessful. The State thus contended that Heckel's practice of cycling through e-mail addresses ensured that those addresses were useless to the recipients of his UCE messages. During the months that Heckel was sending out bulk e-mail solicitations on the Juno accounts, he maintained a personal e-mail account from which he sent no spam, but that e-mail address was not included in any of his spam messages. The State asserted that Heckel's use of such ephemeral e-mail addresses in his UCE amounted to a deceptive practice in violation of RCW 19.86.020.
Now I'm really nervous.
The state is arguing the Juno addresses were fraudulant because it was cancelled. Yes, in this case, the spammer probably expected them to be cancelled; but the law is an ass, and I worry about precedent. If I use a Hotmail account on eBay, and my Hotmail account gets cancelled, that's fraud? If I don't give out some other e-mail address, such as the one my employer provides, that's fraud?
Heckel developed a 46-page on-line booklet entitled 'How to Profit from the Internet....' Heckel marketed the booklet by sending between 100,000 and 1,000,000 UCE messages per week.... Charging $39.95 for the booklet, Heckel made 30 to 50 sales per month.
So, for those of you who were curious, he made $1,200 to $2,000 per month, probably a little under $20,000 per year; not enough to "fire your boss," but not chicken feed. He also had a success rate of between 0.01% and 0.001%... but it didn't really matter, because he wasn't paying for the spam. Not until he got nailed for bogus headers, anyway.
OTOH, when the original court ruling went against Washington State:
On March 10, 2000, the trial court entered an order granting Heckel's motion and denying the State's cross motion. The court found that the Act violated the Commerce Clause (U.S. Const. art. I, sec. 8, cl. 3) and was 'unduly restrictive and burdensome....' The order permitted Heckel to 'present a cost bill for recovery of his costs and statutory attorneys fees....' Heckel then moved the court for a fee award of $49,897.50. Denying Heckel's request for fees under RCW 19.86.080 of the CPA, the court limited Heckel's award to statutory costs under RCW 4.84.030.
He tried to use the case against him to Make Money Fast from Washington State!-)
If I want to get Sun's C++ compiler for SPARC Solaris, I need to get a purchase order, I need to wait for the software to arrive, I may need to wait for a CD-ROM to arrive, I certainly need to wait 24 hours for my host-specific licensing information to be processed by Sun. As the project grows, I need to ensure we have enough licenses; if we don't, I need to go through the whole deal all over again. That's a lot of my time. (I've done this on several projects.)
If I want to get g++, I download it.
I can assure you that at least two Fortune 500 companies use gcc/g++ as their production compiler for commercial software. (Only LGPL libraries are used; great care is taken to avoid GPL libraries.) Sorry, no names.
For the first, I forget the title. But it was about an unspecified era in which aliens try to 'help' us by giving us replicators.
"Business As Usual, During Alterations" by Ralph Williams; first appeared Astounding in 1958; anthologized in Prologue to Analog, Tomorrow, Inc. , and One Hundred Years of Science Fiction.
One member of our group (we saw it on Saturday), during the attack scene, was about to ask the gentleman behind her to please shut up already until she realized what he was saying:
"Yes, that's how they came in."
"Yes, that's just the way it looked."
"No, they didn't hit that."
"Yes, I remember that."
The rest of us didn't hear this story until dinner. I wish we could have asked the vet how he felt about the movie.
Eiffel was one of the "gee, I can do better than Stroustrup" languages of the late 1980s and early 1990s, pretty much contemporary with Objective C. It may have suffered from insisting, before people were ready for it, on automatic memory management (garbage collection).
Most interesting aspect, to my mind: You can add assertions about the state of an object. (Imagine a complex number in polar notation. The radius is always non-negative, the angle is in a certain range, if the radius is zero than the angle is too, if only by convention.) This is more then assert() from C/C++, since that state must be maintained by *any* publicly visible function. The compiler enforces this.
This in turn supports "programming by contract": insisting that certain conditions must be true in a valid program (e.g., square root function is never passed a negative number), but that as a result, certain other conditions are guaranteed to be satisfied. This isn't automated programming proof (the pipe dream of programming languages in the late 1970s), but it works very well with formal correctness proof (supports the style both at design/code time and run time, instead of claiming testing is irrelevant).
It didn't catch on in a big way, because... there were *so* many languages trying to catch on, and only a very few (C++, Perl, VB, eventually Java) could gather a critical mass. Part marketing, part competition, part survival of the fittest, part pure luck.
The Russians were part of "The Expert Group of Protection Against Hackers." (Are gangsters "The Expert Group of Protection Against Bricks Being Thrown Through Your Storefront Window Panes"?) No doubt about it, if these really are the guys the FBI says they are, they needed to be shut down.
Let's see: The theory is, "reverse hacking" is good, because it's done by law enforcement; but had a/.'er done the same thing, to shut down the same Black Hats, it would have been just plain old "hacking" (cracking), and would have been bad. Or that's the idea. Let me get back to you on this one....
Defendent "Gorshkov's attorney, Kenneth Kanev, said it was illegal for the FBI to obtain Gorshkov's username and password and use them to access potentially incriminating data from computers halfway around the world without a search warrant." Interesting point. Does this mean the FBI guys are in trouble? Does it mean the evidence is inadmissable? Are these questions independent?
U.S. Attorney "Schroeder says Gorshkov was using someone else's computer and had no reasonable expectation of privacy." If the Russians broke into third party computers, the FBI broke into them, too? (If the evidence is all from the FBI computer the Russians hacked into, and perhaps through, then it's a clean bust, IMHO.)
"They and associates who remain in Russia are believed to have made tens of thousands of probes and intrusions into computer systems, usually through a vulnerable version of Microsoft Windows NT." Is anyone suprised?-)
"ArsDigita, an e-commerce company in the midst of layoffs and a major product overhaul, is bucking the trend of comrades selling open-source software.... The company laid off 29 employees in the last week, and the company's founder and former chairman, Philip Greenspun, has left to pursue other interests..."
Note that the story quotes a current executive as saying Greenspun's departure was voluntary; Greenspun says, "last fall... my services as a full-time employee of ArsDigita Corporation became unwanted."
This page at the ArsDigita site still lists Greenspun as chairman. I guess it's too much for a Web content company to correctly list its chairman in its own Web content?-)
NIST (formerly the National Bureau of Stanards) is also the home of Expect, a Tcl-based tool for automating all sorts of stuff. It was designed as a system administration tool, but has become incredibly popular for test automation.
When asked when music publishers might actually distribute songs on the Internet, Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen responded, "Real Soon Now." When pressed how this might be expidited, they elaborated, "Well, we're shipping tons of ice to Napster, so when they go to Hell everything will freeze over faster."
I think that working in pairs would provide just enough distraction to never get into the zone.
Two people working together in a pair treat their shared time as more valuable. They tend to cut phone calls short; they don't check e-mail messages or favorite Web pages; they don't waste each others time.
Two people working together will have their shared time treated by others as more valuable. If I'm sitting at my computer, or just staring into space (thinking hard!), no one will think twice about interrupting me. On the other hand, if I'm busily working with someone, anyone who needs me will interrupt me briefly if at all.
Put a less experienced person together with a more experienced person, and the former will be more likely to stretch. Instead of sticking to familiar, comfortable tools and techniques, he or she will try things he or she only knows a little about, ask dumb questions... grow. If the less experienced person doesn't volunteer to stretch, the more experienced person is likely to suggest better ways to do something, which the less experienced person wouldn't normally have been exposed to.
Put two people together, and you'll get more than twice as many ways to solve a problem. Each person will have his or her own ideas (there'll be some overlap), plus some half-baked ideas he or she wouldn't normally think hard about, plus the completed ideas of the other person, plus ideas sparked by their other person's, plus... it adds up fast.
One of the tricks of people working with each other is giving them an opportunity to learn how to work with each other. Programming In Pairs supports that better than trust falls or high ropes (which still have their uses, too).
P. J. Plauger [was] using buddy-system programming at Whitesmith's. The original reason was lack of seats, but the surprising result was better productivity than when both bodies had access to keyboards and screens.
... whoever was riding "shotgun" became extremely bored while the fellow "driving" became frustrated that the guy riding shotgun would come up with ideas in the middle of the driver's typing.
If it doesn't feel good, you're not doing it right.
The person not at the keyboard should be coming up with ideas, constantly (certainly often enough to stave off boredom). If he or she can't communicate them, he or she says, "Let me drive." Pairs change "drivers" frequently, and should.
I see paired programming as fairly wasteful of my time.
They were incredibly efficient, but Thompson couldn't understand why they worked. (He suspected such things as electromagnetic coupling and communication through the power supply.)
I think I remember reading about something like that - a guy removed "islands" from the circuit and it stopped working, and when he put them back in it worked. Crazy:-)
Genetic algorithms (in software) tend to be like that. Evolution doesn't value parsimony or maintainability; it only cares about what works. Turns out genetically evolved software desperately needs "junk DNA" (as safe places to recombine bits from two parent algorithms).
On the other hand, much of the same thing seems to be true for the large C++ application I'm working on.-(
These are the same folks who've been saying, "We'll come up with a legit electonic music distribution mechanism, Real Soon Now," for, what, five years? How long do you think they'll take to approve opt-in requests?
They want digital music dead, so the only market that exists is the one they understand and control. If not dead, then delayed.
Do not break the seal on this CD until you have read and agreed to this license. (We have placed this license underneath the seal, in order to protect our intellectual property.) If you do not agree to this license, please apply 1500 PSI to the entire package and kiss your fifteen bucks goodbye.
The party of the first part, known hereafter as the Screwed, agrees to the following provisions as stipulated by the party of the second part, known hereafter as the Screwer:
o The Screwed agree the that Screwer may employ any legal, technical, moral, or immoral means to protect the intellectual property of the creative artists who are so critical to the success of the industry. (By "creative artists," we refer not to the scribblers or performers, but the truly creative: the bookeepers and executives who serve the stockholders. You think that's not creative? You have no idea how long it took us to come up with just this license.)
o The Screwed will chose one (1) device, approved by the Screwer, to play the product recorded on this medium. (It's called a "medium" because it's neither well done nor rare. Yes, it's an old joke. We said we were creative; we didn't say we were original.) Screwer reserves the right to un-approve a device after it has been chosen. If the Screwed does not chose a device, the Screwer reserves the right to chose a player for the Screwed.
o The Screwed will chose one (1) person, approved by the Screwer, to listen to the product recorded on this medium. If any other person or persons listen to this product, Screwer will charge Screwed a performance fee to be determined after our next "business" trip to Las Vegas.
o This product is not guaranteed against manufacturing defects or any other flaws. We don't promise that there's even a medium in the package, that if there is, that it has anything but zero bits on it, or that any so-called "music" corresponds in any way to the label on the outside of the package. If our copy protection schemes make it impossible for you to listen to the so-called "music"... tough.
o Screwed has the right to listen to the product as many times as he or she likes... unless Screwed decides otherwise.
o We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. We control the treble, and all your bass are belong to us, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer Users Not at Higher Risk of Carpal Tunnel
... Because the syndrome is a common condition in the population -- one in 10 will develop symptoms -- some computer users will develop it, Stevens said."
"'We had expected to find a much higher incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome in the heavy computer users in our study because it is a commonly held belief that computer use causes carpal tunnel syndrome,' said J. Clarke Stevens, a neurologist at the prestigious clinic.... 'The findings are contrary to popular thought but nobody has studied the problem carefully,' Stevens said. 'I'd like computer users to know that prolonged use of a computer does not seem to lead to carpal tunnel.'
(Edward Shorter -- upon whom another poster cast aspersions, perhaps rightly, perhaps not -- is not mentioned in this story. Stevens, quoted above, is the researcher mentioned in the National Post article.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2F www%2Edansdata%2Ecom%2Fledlights%2Ehtm
A friend of mine has made several flashlights out of LEDs, potentiometers (as dimmers), and short lengths of PVC. They're great for providing very low levels of light during star watching parties; you can read maps, tweak screws, etc., without destroying your night vision (or that of the people around you). Some people prefer red (lowest energy wavelength); some prefer green (dim light goes further).
Stuff released under GPL is NOT public domain.
Right; and stuff released into the public domain is not GPL (though derivatives can be).
Mr. Mundy, you talked about how horrible it would be if software whose development was funded by the U.S. govenment was "Open Source" (presumably GPL'ed). Such software is always public domain, which means there are no restrictions on how Microsoft or anyone else can use it.
Were you just being disingenuous, or did you actually have a point?
(I'd have posted this to ora.com, but it wouldn't accept a request from behind a proxy server.)-:
But read what the appeals court complained about:
First, the State alleged that Heckel had violated RCW 19.190.020(1)(b) and, in turn, the CPA, by using false or misleading information in the subject line of his UCE messages. Heckel used one of two subject lines to introduce his solicitations: 'Did I get the right e-mail address?' and 'For your review--HANDS OFF!'
I think that misleading Subject: lines are rude, crude, socially unacceptable
As its second cause of action, the State alleged that Heckel had violated RCW 19.190.020(1)(a), and thus the CPA, by misrepresenting information defining the transmission paths of his UCE messages. Heckel routed his spam through at least a dozen different domain names without receiving permission to do so from the registered owners of those names. For example, of the 20 complaints the Attorney General's Office received concerning Heckel's spam, 9 of the messages showed '13.com' as the initial ISP to transmit his spam.... The 13.com domain name, however, was registered as early as November 1995 to another individual, from whom Heckel had not sought or received permission to use the registered name. In fact, because the owner of 13.com had not yet even activated that domain name, no messages could have been sent or received through 13.com.
There's two issues here:
I'm worried the court confused these two.
Finally:
Sounds good so far; but it immediately continues:
When Heckel created his spam
This may mean that the From: address, and/or the "to be removed please reply to" address, were real Juno addresses, at least when the messages were sent.
None of the Juno e-mail accounts was readily identifiable as belonging to Heckel; the user names that he registered generally consisted of a name or a name plus a number (e.g., 'marlin1374,' 'cindyt5667,' 'howardwesley13,' 'johnjacobson1374,' and 'sjtowns')....
This supports the concern that anonymity is forbidden. It's not quite that bad, but it's not good.
During August and September 1998, Heckel's Juno addresses were canceled within two days of his sending out a bulk e-mail message on the account. According to Heckel, when Juno canceled one e-mail account, he would simply open a new one and send out another bulk mailing. Because Heckel's accounts were canceled so rapidly, recipients who attempted to reply were unsuccessful. The State thus contended that Heckel's practice of cycling through e-mail addresses ensured that those addresses were useless to the recipients of his UCE messages. During the months that Heckel was sending out bulk e-mail solicitations on the Juno accounts, he maintained a personal e-mail account from which he sent no spam, but that e-mail address was not included in any of his spam messages. The State asserted that Heckel's use of such ephemeral e-mail addresses in his UCE amounted to a deceptive practice in violation of RCW 19.86.020.
Now I'm really nervous.
The state is arguing the Juno addresses were fraudulant because it was cancelled. Yes, in this case, the spammer probably expected them to be cancelled; but the law is an ass, and I worry about precedent. If I use a Hotmail account on eBay, and my Hotmail account gets cancelled, that's fraud? If I don't give out some other e-mail address, such as the one my employer provides, that's fraud?
The court ruling said:
... but it didn't really matter, because he wasn't paying for the spam. Not until he got nailed for bogus headers, anyway.
Heckel developed a 46-page on-line booklet entitled 'How to Profit from the Internet....' Heckel marketed the booklet by sending between 100,000 and 1,000,000 UCE messages per week.... Charging $39.95 for the booklet, Heckel made 30 to 50 sales per month.
So, for those of you who were curious, he made $1,200 to $2,000 per month, probably a little under $20,000 per year; not enough to "fire your boss," but not chicken feed. He also had a success rate of between 0.01% and 0.001%
OTOH, when the original court ruling went against Washington State:
On March 10, 2000, the trial court entered an order granting Heckel's motion and denying the State's cross motion. The court found that the Act violated the Commerce Clause (U.S. Const. art. I, sec. 8, cl. 3) and was 'unduly restrictive and burdensome....' The order permitted Heckel to 'present a cost bill for recovery of his costs and statutory attorneys fees....' Heckel then moved the court for a fee award of $49,897.50. Denying Heckel's request for fees under RCW 19.86.080 of the CPA, the court limited Heckel's award to statutory costs under RCW 4.84.030.
He tried to use the case against him to Make Money Fast from Washington State!-)
If I want to get Sun's C++ compiler for SPARC Solaris, I need to get a purchase order, I need to wait for the software to arrive, I may need to wait for a CD-ROM to arrive, I certainly need to wait 24 hours for my host-specific licensing information to be processed by Sun. As the project grows, I need to ensure we have enough licenses; if we don't, I need to go through the whole deal all over again. That's a lot of my time. (I've done this on several projects.)
If I want to get g++, I download it.
I can assure you that at least two Fortune 500 companies use gcc/g++ as their production compiler for commercial software. (Only LGPL libraries are used; great care is taken to avoid GPL libraries.) Sorry, no names.
For the first, I forget the title. But it was about an unspecified era in which aliens try to 'help' us by giving us replicators.
"Business As Usual, During Alterations" by Ralph Williams; first appeared Astounding in 1958; anthologized in Prologue to Analog, Tomorrow, Inc. , and One Hundred Years of Science Fiction.
Stretching by Bob and Jean Anderson seems to be the book on various kinds of stretches for flexibility, strength, etc.
One member of our group (we saw it on Saturday), during the attack scene, was about to ask the gentleman behind her to please shut up already until she realized what he was saying:
"Yes, that's how they came in."
"Yes, that's just the way it looked."
"No, they didn't hit that."
"Yes, I remember that."
The rest of us didn't hear this story until dinner. I wish we could have asked the vet how he felt about the movie.
Eiffel was one of the "gee, I can do better than Stroustrup" languages of the late 1980s and early 1990s, pretty much contemporary with Objective C. It may have suffered from insisting, before people were ready for it, on automatic memory management (garbage collection).
... there were *so* many languages trying to catch on, and only a very few (C++, Perl, VB, eventually Java) could gather a critical mass. Part marketing, part competition, part survival of the fittest, part pure luck.
Most interesting aspect, to my mind: You can add assertions about the state of an object. (Imagine a complex number in polar notation. The radius is always non-negative, the angle is in a certain range, if the radius is zero than the angle is too, if only by convention.) This is more then assert() from C/C++, since that state must be maintained by *any* publicly visible function. The compiler enforces this.
This in turn supports "programming by contract": insisting that certain conditions must be true in a valid program (e.g., square root function is never passed a negative number), but that as a result, certain other conditions are guaranteed to be satisfied. This isn't automated programming proof (the pipe dream of programming languages in the late 1970s), but it works very well with formal correctness proof (supports the style both at design/code time and run time, instead of claiming testing is irrelevant).
It didn't catch on in a big way, because
The Russians were part of "The Expert Group of Protection Against Hackers." (Are gangsters "The Expert Group of Protection Against Bricks Being Thrown Through Your Storefront Window Panes"?) No doubt about it, if these really are the guys the FBI says they are, they needed to be shut down.
/.'er done the same thing, to shut down the same Black Hats, it would have been just plain old "hacking" (cracking), and would have been bad. Or that's the idea. Let me get back to you on this one....
Let's see: The theory is, "reverse hacking" is good, because it's done by law enforcement; but had a
Defendent "Gorshkov's attorney, Kenneth Kanev, said it was illegal for the FBI to obtain Gorshkov's username and password and use them to access potentially incriminating data from computers halfway around the world without a search warrant." Interesting point. Does this mean the FBI guys are in trouble? Does it mean the evidence is inadmissable? Are these questions independent?
U.S. Attorney "Schroeder says Gorshkov was using someone else's computer and had no reasonable expectation of privacy." If the Russians broke into third party computers, the FBI broke into them, too? (If the evidence is all from the FBI computer the Russians hacked into, and perhaps through, then it's a clean bust, IMHO.)
"They and associates who remain in Russia are believed to have made tens of thousands of probes and intrusions into computer systems, usually through a vulnerable version of Microsoft Windows NT." Is anyone suprised?-)
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-202-5522429.html
..."
... my services as a full-time employee of ArsDigita Corporation became unwanted."
"ArsDigita, an e-commerce company in the midst of layoffs and a major product overhaul, is bucking the trend of comrades selling open-source software.... The company laid off 29 employees in the last week, and the company's founder and former chairman, Philip Greenspun, has left to pursue other interests
Note that the story quotes a current executive as saying Greenspun's departure was voluntary; Greenspun says, "last fall
This page at the ArsDigita site still lists Greenspun as chairman. I guess it's too much for a Web content company to correctly list its chairman in its own Web content?-)
(It has to be asked every once in a while.)
Any movement away from Tkinter, and toward something else, as the pretty-much-standard programming interface for graphical user interfaces?
Any movement towards a Tk library that *doesn't* use Tcl?
NIST (formerly the National Bureau of Stanards) is also the home of Expect, a Tcl-based tool for automating all sorts of stuff. It was designed as a system administration tool, but has become incredibly popular for test automation.
Expect is not GPL'ed; by law, it's public domain.
http://www.libsdl.org/games_db/games.php3
(Are you sure you included a URL? Didja test them for typos?)
When asked when music publishers might actually distribute songs on the Internet, Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen responded, "Real Soon Now." When pressed how this might be expidited, they elaborated, "Well, we're shipping tons of ice to Napster, so when they go to Hell everything will freeze over faster."
I think that working in pairs would provide just enough distraction to never get into the zone.
... grow. If the less experienced person doesn't volunteer to stretch, the more experienced person is likely to suggest better ways to do something, which the less experienced person wouldn't normally have been exposed to.
... it adds up fast.
Two people working together in a pair treat their shared time as more valuable. They tend to cut phone calls short; they don't check e-mail messages or favorite Web pages; they don't waste each others time.
Two people working together will have their shared time treated by others as more valuable. If I'm sitting at my computer, or just staring into space (thinking hard!), no one will think twice about interrupting me. On the other hand, if I'm busily working with someone, anyone who needs me will interrupt me briefly if at all.
Put a less experienced person together with a more experienced person, and the former will be more likely to stretch. Instead of sticking to familiar, comfortable tools and techniques, he or she will try things he or she only knows a little about, ask dumb questions
Put two people together, and you'll get more than twice as many ways to solve a problem. Each person will have his or her own ideas (there'll be some overlap), plus some half-baked ideas he or she wouldn't normally think hard about, plus the completed ideas of the other person, plus ideas sparked by their other person's, plus
One of the tricks of people working with each other is giving them an opportunity to learn how to work with each other. Programming In Pairs supports that better than trust falls or high ropes (which still have their uses, too).
P. J. Plauger [was] using buddy-system programming at Whitesmith's. The original reason was lack of seats, but the surprising result was better productivity than when both bodies had access to keyboards and screens.
This happened back in the 1970s, and was written up in Constantine on Peopleware. (See also "Strengthening the Case for Pair-Programming" (Google text version).
... whoever was riding "shotgun" became extremely bored while the fellow "driving" became frustrated that the guy riding shotgun would come up with ideas in the middle of the driver's typing.
r ammingcostbene/pairprogrammingcostbene.htm for a study with evidence to the contrary. (Pairs took slightly more than half as long to "complete" a problem, but did so with so many fewer bugs as to more than make up for it.)
If it doesn't feel good, you're not doing it right.
The person not at the keyboard should be coming up with ideas, constantly (certainly often enough to stave off boredom). If he or she can't communicate them, he or she says, "Let me drive." Pairs change "drivers" frequently, and should.
I see paired programming as fairly wasteful of my time.
See http://members.aol.com/humansandt/papers/pairprog
Then again, I'm prone to minimal laziness in my work.
"The three principle virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why."
They were incredibly efficient, but Thompson couldn't understand why they worked. (He suspected such things as electromagnetic coupling and communication through the power supply.)
:-)
I think I remember reading about something like that - a guy removed "islands" from the circuit and it stopped working, and when he put them back in it worked. Crazy
Genetic algorithms (in software) tend to be like that. Evolution doesn't value parsimony or maintainability; it only cares about what works. Turns out genetically evolved software desperately needs "junk DNA" (as safe places to recombine bits from two parent algorithms).
On the other hand, much of the same thing seems to be true for the large C++ application I'm working on.-(
These are the same folks who've been saying, "We'll come up with a legit electonic music distribution mechanism, Real Soon Now," for, what, five years? How long do you think they'll take to approve opt-in requests?
They want digital music dead, so the only market that exists is the one they understand and control. If not dead, then delayed.
Do not break the seal on this CD until you have read and agreed to this license. (We have placed this license underneath the seal, in order to protect our intellectual property.) If you do not agree to this license, please apply 1500 PSI to the entire package and kiss your fifteen bucks goodbye.
... tough.
... unless Screwed decides otherwise.
The party of the first part, known hereafter as the Screwed, agrees to the following provisions as stipulated by the party of the second part, known hereafter as the Screwer:
o The Screwed agree the that Screwer may employ any legal, technical, moral, or immoral means to protect the intellectual property of the creative artists who are so critical to the success of the industry. (By "creative artists," we refer not to the scribblers or performers, but the truly creative: the bookeepers and executives who serve the stockholders. You think that's not creative? You have no idea how long it took us to come up with just this license.)
o The Screwed will chose one (1) device, approved by the Screwer, to play the product recorded on this medium. (It's called a "medium" because it's neither well done nor rare. Yes, it's an old joke. We said we were creative; we didn't say we were original.) Screwer reserves the right to un-approve a device after it has been chosen. If the Screwed does not chose a device, the Screwer reserves the right to chose a player for the Screwed.
o The Screwed will chose one (1) person, approved by the Screwer, to listen to the product recorded on this medium. If any other person or persons listen to this product, Screwer will charge Screwed a performance fee to be determined after our next "business" trip to Las Vegas.
o This product is not guaranteed against manufacturing defects or any other flaws. We don't promise that there's even a medium in the package, that if there is, that it has anything but zero bits on it, or that any so-called "music" corresponds in any way to the label on the outside of the package. If our copy protection schemes make it impossible for you to listen to the so-called "music"
o Screwed has the right to listen to the product as many times as he or she likes
o We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. We control the treble, and all your bass are belong to us, too.
See:
"An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl"
Kernighan and Pike's The Practice of Programming (reviewed here), especially chapter 7 on performance
This comparison (just popped up from a Google search).
Obvious advice: Measure your current system, find out where it's really spending it's time.
If programmer productivity is irrelevant, you'll be hard pressed to beat well-written C. (And if wishes were horses, beggars would fly.-)