A more worthwhile goal is just to reduce the power consumption of your PC. The computer referred to in TFA draws 45 W, which is nice and low. I would just call that a victory and stop there. When I built my most recent machine, I decided to go for low power, and without using any particularly exotic hardware, I managed to get it down to 98 W, including the monitor, when the CPU is idle. It's a nice, snappy computer, with a dual-core AMD x64 CPU. If you're shopping for a power supply, make sure and get an 80PLUS model. Another reasonable thing to do, if you're concerned about your impact on the environment, is if you're just going to do word processing, programming, and web browsing, don't buy a gaming machine with a video card that gets hot enough to fry an egg.
The solar thing being discussed in the article is clearly a silly gimmick. You'd get more environmental bang for the buck by installing photovoltaics on the roof (and that's an option for businesses as well as homeowners). YMMV, but where I live in Southern California we get a lot of sun, and my roof faces south, so photovoltaics ended up being a good deal for me. (It's hard to estimate how long the investment will take to pay for itself, because it depends sensitively on how much electric rates go up in the future. The historical trend has always been up, but it's hard to predict exactly how much more rates will go up in, say, the next 10 years.) There is at least one theoretical situation in which a special-purpose solar panel for a specific device can make sense, and that's where you have a device that uses a lot of power, and can run on DC. The classic example is pool pumps. Pool pumps tend to be insane power hogs, and they use DC motors, so you can actually be more efficient by using special-purpose photovoltaics than plugging into the AC from a general-purpose PV system's inverter. A computer can also run on DC, and I believe in some big data centers they do use hardware that runs on DC, because it saves the electricity that would have been wasted by inefficiency in the individual computers' power supplies. If you were running such a center in an area with a lot of sun, and you had some roof space available, it could certainly be smart to get a big PV system installed, without an inverter, to supply DC to the machines.
You'd typically install multiple versions of python on the same machine. On Unix-like systems each Python version's executable will be named in the manner of python2.4, python2.5, and so on, with a symbolic link from/path/python to (usually) the newest version. Scripts can call for a specific version of Python by starting with a hash-bang line like #!/usr/bin/env python2.5.
Wow, they break compatibility with every dot release? That sounds crazy to me. It means you have to have a ton of versions of the languages installed (I checked, and I have 3 versions of python installed on my ubuntu box), and I would think it would produce huge problems with libraries. What if you write an open-source library using python 2.4, it's done, it's solid and debugged -- then python 2.5 comes out, and programmers start complaining because they can't use it with their python 2.5 projects. Are you just expected to keep on fiddling with your code for the rest of your life, whenever a new dot-release of python comes out? And you also presumably end up maintaining the old versions of your library as well, since some people are depending on those...? Ouch.
One thing I don't understand about Eckel's original article is that he says breaking compatibility isn't a big deal, because the programmers who don't want to use the new version will just stay with the old one. How does that work for the users? Do they (a) end up having to pick which version of the language to install on their machine, and lose the ability to run half the world's python software, (b) have to install multiple versions of python on their machine, or (c) ??? Eckel is comparing with Java, but since Java is a compiled language, it's much less of an issue; syntactical changes don't affect the end user who just wants to run the code. How would python handle this? Perl 6, for instance, will automatically detect if the code you're running is perl 5, and will run it correctly in a compatibility mode.
Why's everyone using linux if it sucks so much? Because Linux sounds cool, while BSD sounds geeky.
I use both Linux and BSD every day. I think there are some sane reasons to prefer BSD, and some sane reasons to prefer Linux. For a desktop user, one really good reason to prefer Linux is that there's no ubuntu for BSD. I've gotten spoiled by the very high quality of work that goes into packaging desktop apps for ubuntu. I used to run BSD on my desktop, and I was always running into hassles getting all my apps to work. There are also, however, some perfectly good reasons for picking BSD. One of the biggest, IMO, is that an OS like FreeBSD is a single operating system, not a variety of distributions like Linux, so you can buy a book about BSD, and it's documenting the exact system you're using. None of this stuff about "do this if you're using Debian, or this if it's Mandriva, or..." As far as the schedulers, I've had problems with some of the Linux schedulers, and problems with some of the FreeBSD schedulers. Both have been in a very rapid state of flux in the last 5-10 years. MS has taught us how bad a monoculture can be, so I think we should all be happy that both Linux and the BSDs exist and are in good health.
I was an Ameritrade customer. Soon after setting up an account with them, I started getting pump-and-dump spam sent to the single-purpose email address that I'd created only for use with them. A simple google search showed that this had been going on for years at Ameritrade. I run Linux, and am fairly careful about keeping my box secure, so I was pretty sure the address hadn't been leaked by malware on my end. In the past, they've claimed that the addresses might be getting found by dictionary attacks, but the address I was using had 13 characters before the @ sign, didn't have dictionary words in it, and had an obscure domain name after the @, not yahoo or hotmail or anything like that.
I decided that I wasn't going to entrust the bulk of my life's savings to a company that was that clueless about security, so I transferred my account to Scottrade. When I did the transfer, I explained in an email to the Ameritrade people that the security problem was the reason I was leaving them. The responded with a phone call, and the phone rep was completely in denial about the spam problem, which was had been publicly known and discussed for years.
The other reason I wanted to get away from them was that some of the functionality of their web interface didn't work on Firefox in Linux, so I had to do certain things (e.g., withdrawing money) on a Mac or Windows machine instead. (When I called to report it as a bug, they said they didn't support Linux.)
TFA also has some interesting comments about OOXML:
There are a lot of people who have raised a great many issues which we don't think have a lot of practical merit, but serve the purpose of creating some anxiety during this process. Many of the comments that were submitted had common threads and were put together by people who oppose this activity.
So given all of that, we were actually quite positive about the fact that we came within literally a couple of countries of having the thing ratified even at this point.
It's interesting that this is both similar to, and different from, Miguel de Icaza's recent comments. It's similar in that they both completely deny the validity of the main criticism that's been leveled at OOXML, which is that it says a lot of things have to behave like certain MS products, without saying what that behavior is. It's different in that Miguel seems to have emphasized his opinion that some other aspects of the criticism of the standard has helped to improve the standard and make it something that really would allow other people to implement it, whereas Mundie seems to be saying that the entire ISO debate was a worthless FUD attack on poor little MS, and that MS simply intends to win the vote through politics, without making changes in the standard in response to the criticisms.
FYI: Debian's graphical installer is way, way ahead of the ubuntu installer u-bug-quity in terms of features and functionality. This is one of the many great things going on in Debian right now.
Tell me more! I haven't actually run into any bugs in the ubuntu installer. What are the commonly occurring bugs? What features and functionality are betterin the Debian one?
So in practical terms, does this mean that they can install Debian on a Windows box without having to burn a CD? That could be useful on systems that don't have a CD burner, and could also be easier in terms of cutting down on the number of steps, and eliminating the need to own CD-writing software. It would be totally cool to have an Ubuntu installer that you could download and double-click on, and that would automatically resize your partitions and leave you with a double-boot system; I think there would be a *lot* of people I could convince to try Linux if it was that easy. Although the normal Ubuntu install CD (not the alternate install) already has a live CD feature so you can run Linux without installing it, I've always hesitated to suggest to people that they try Linux from a live CD, because the performance is so horrible that I'm afraid they'll get a bad impression. Of course a live CD can be useful if you want to find out how much of your hardware is supported. Realistically, I think the main obstacle these days for someone wanting to install Linux isn't the need to burn a CD and boot from it, it's issues with (a) printing, wifi, and winmodems, and (b) being committed to file formats that are only supported on Windows.
Here's what my own experiences have taught me: Get a Dobsonian. [...] The scope I eventually got is an Orion XT10 Intelliscope, but you may not want the computerization with your budget.
That's good advice. On the OP's budget, he can afford a good pair of binoculars, plus a non-computerized Dob. BTW, I'd suggest avoiding Meade Dobsonians, which have a long history of quality problems. I have a Meade Dob, which came with a defective (optional) finderscope, and I had to rebuild it with PVC pipe and duct tape. A couple of years later, I saw a review of the same scope in Sky & Telescope, and they said they found the same problem -- evidently Meade still hadn't fixed it, years later.
You seem to have answered a lot of questions that nobody thinks are the main questions, while not answering the important ones. The main issue is that the spec says implementations have to document the behavior of particular versions of MS products, but it doesn't spell out what that behavior is.
I did a fair amount of pascal programming in the 80's, and it seemed all right I guess, but IIRC there were some problems with the language:
The standardized language was very small, so there was a tendency for it to fracture into many incompatible languages.
At that time, the implementations represented a string as a length byte followed by the string data, so you were limited to strings of length 255.
I don't think there was any (standard) way to defeat the strong typing in cases where you needed to.
Was there garbage collection? If so, I don't recall it as being an idiomatic part of the language, except maybe for strings...? Well, most languages back then didn't have it (and gc's sucked back then, so gc languages tended to be slow), but today...
I was always annoyed by the gotchas in the syntax -- the language seemed unnecessarily picky about periods and semicolons.
Has any of this changed? Has modern pascal settled on a single standardized version of the language? Is gc easy, idiomatic, and consistently supported in libraries and language constructs? Is there good unicode support? It seems to me that today, if I wanted a typesafe language I'd use java, and if I wanted a language that compiled to native code I'd use C or OCaml.
It's conceivable that at some point in the future there would be some kind of memory that would become popular on general-purpose PC's for which this technique would work. But even then, there are some other reasons why I'm thinking you wouldn't want to use this technique for a PC (as opposed to an RFID):
Users don't want to power-cycle their machines several times, and modify their BIOSes, so that they can install someone's crypto software.
The code to use this technique would either work or not work for various users at various times in the future, depending on what types of memory were being used at those times.
Part of purpose of the technique is to fingerprint your machine, but on a general-purpose PC (as opposed to an RFID chip), people often upgrade their memory, in which case all your fingerprints would change.
I hate being involuntarily subjected to video, e.g., in the dentist's office, the airport, and the supermarket. The good news is that when it comes to ads on web sites, the power is ultimately mine. When a lot of sites started using animated GIFs, which I found distracting and annoying, it motivated me to start using adblock. When I came across a site that used those incredibly annoying adbrite ads, that motivated me to add adbrite to my adblock ads (http://*.adbrite.com/* is the pattern that works). If google is smart, they'll serve up their video ads from urls that fit some pattern like http://video.googlesyndication.com/*, so that users will be able to block the video ads without blocking all google ads. I've never been annoyed by a google text ad, so I've never been motivated to block them. I wish I had the same power to get rid of the TV ads in the checkout lane at Albertson's.
If you can then direct them toward science fiction, such as Tom Swift or Heinlein's juveniles, an interest in math and science becomes a likely side-effect.
In the 1970's, I grew up on the Heinlein juveniles, and would read a Tom Swift book when I couldn't find anything better, although they were terribly dated even by then. The trouble is that the Heinlein juveniles are getting dated as well, and are disappearing from library shelves, and in general young adult SF is getting to be an endangered species. Walk into a Barnes and Noble and look for SF on the YA shelves -- you'll have a very hard time finding any. Part of this may just be that there are fashions in fiction, and right now the fashion has swung toward fantasy. Another issue may be that crewed space travel used to be the most important trope in SF, and we're now finding out that it's much, much more difficult than anyone imagined ca. 1950. To kids these days, I think crewed interplanetary travel comes off like kind of a corny joke, like ray guns, flying cars, and world government. It's one of those things that just didn't happen. Kids these days also have a lot more options, including movies and video games. When I was a kid, Star Trek was about it; there was such a paucity of SFnal options on TV that I'd watch Creature Features on broadcast in a desperate attempt to get my SF fix.
Here are my notes from the most recent time I tried it:
Uses rtf as native format. Can read many Word docs. Only prints to ps. Seems small and fast. To convert its ps output to pdf, use ghostscript. Yech, tried it, and it crashed within a few minutes. Also, the control keys don't work! And when I open rtf files written by Word or OOo, it displays them incorrectly, with no spaces between words.
fluxbox - a lightweight window manager that has great performance even on old hardware
mg - a tiny emacs clone that I use as my default editor; supports every emacs feature I ever actually use, and starts up instantly, even on older hardware
xpdf - It drives me nuts when people whine about how PDF is evil because documents take a really long time to pop up when they click on a PDF link in their browser. Just set your browser to use xpdf instead of Adobe Reader as your default app. Opens instantly.
dillo - nice fast web browser, works great in cases where you don't care about JS or CSS
I often find it's quicker and easier to use command-line tools rather than GUIs:
cdrecord
mutt for email
ImageMagick for a lot of tasks that would be more hassle to do with Gimp
when for my calendar (I'm the author, so I'm biased:-)
Can anyone suggest a really lightweight WYSIWYG wordprocessor for Linux, preferably one that doesn't make bloated files? I'd also like an alternative to kaddressbook that wouldn't take 9 seconds to start up on my 2.2 GHz dual-core x64.
I teach physics. One classic use of computers in physics education is to help students check answers to their homework problems. Before computers, this was done by giving the answers to odd-numbered problems in the back of the book. Computerized answer checking can be superior to that in a couple of ways. With problems that have a numerical answer, many students tend to start from the answer in the back of the book, and then try to work backwards to figure out how they could get that answer; the result is that they don't learn how to solve problems from first principles. Some of them will just write a bunch of wrong stuff on their paper, and then append the answer to it as if that was the answer they found:-) With problems that have a symbolic answer (e.g., x=mv^2/2F is the answer to the problem), the same problem gets even worse. Assigning problems with symbolic answers is very important IMO, because we're trying to instill good problem-solving habits, which means solving problems algebraically, and only plugging in numbers at the very end. Also, it can teach them how to interpret an algebraic result, which is something most of them have never done. Another advantage of doing answer checking on the computer is that I can require my students to use the answer checker if they want to get credit, and tell them that if the computer gives them the feedback saying that their answer is wrong, and they can't figure out how to fix it, they should come to my office hours to get help. This is very different from the usual ethos, which is to turn in a paper with lots of wrong answers and whine for partial credit. The system I use is an open-source one I wrote, called Spotter; its web page has links to a bunch of other free-as-in-something software that does similar things.
Eric Mazur's book Peer Instruction is worth checking out if you're teaching physics. He's a physic prof at Harvard who pioneered the technique of giving students multiple-choice questions to ponder, polling them, and then if there isn't a clear consensus for the right answer, having them discuss it in groups. I think he originally implemented it with cardboard cards, but most people these days to it using the electronic clickers. Personally, I tried the technique and wasn't that happy with it, but it still helped me to get outside the box of straight lecturing. It seems to be mainly a technique that's useful in huge lecture classes, which isn't what I teach at a community college, and isn't what the OP teaches in high school. I've also heard a lot of students complain bitterly about the clickers -- partly about the cost (which I think is a valid complaint) and partly about nontraditional instruction (which I think just indicates that they're conservative and reluctant to take responsibility).
There are lots of free college and high school textbooks out there, and you should consider using them. See my sig for a catalog of free books that you can search for math and physics books.
Sorry about the reply-to-self, but considering how incredibly annoying and misleading these adbrite ads are, I thought some slashdotters might be interested to know that adding http://*.adbrite.com/* to your adblock patterns seems to get rid of them completely -- the spam links don't even show up with the double underlining, which I imagine is because they're being inserted dynamically by a JS script served up from an adbrite server.
What the heck? I clicked on the link to TFA. It sent me to a page at techrythm.com, where there is an extremely short article, giving hardly any more information than the slashdot summary. In it are a lot of links double-underlined in green. When I move my mouse over the links, I get an ad floating around. When I click on a link, I go to some lame spam page that doesn't seem to have anything to do with what the link claims it is.
USA is going towards a capitalistic extreme,
Historically, the US in 1900 was a capitalistic extreme. We haven't done laissez faire capitalism since Roosevelt. The top federal income tax bracket has ranged around 35% in recent years, and although that may be small by Scandinavian standards, it's nothing like laissez faire capitalism. We have a big, huge federal government, which spends lots of money on social programs, and lots of money on a gigantic military that we use for invading people.
witch can become just as bad as the communism they hate so much.
Please don't employ negative stereotypes of an entire group of people. I'm an American, and I don't hate communism.
Judging by this poll most people can not get wireless working at all
There's a major issue in the accuracy of this poll, which is that the people who come across the poll are people who came across it on the networking and wireless section of ubuntuforums.org, and typically the reason they went there is because it didn't work. The people (like me) for whom it Just Worked will typically never see the poll.
Finding laptops that were fully supported used to be hard, so this was a valid complaint, but now that even Dell sells fully supported laptops this is simply user error just like any other "unsupported hardware" complaint.
It's not just a problem on laptops. I have never found a single desktop machine on which ACPI worked correctly, and I've tried it on a lot of very ordinary, vanilla desktops.
Well, I'm not sure what the GP's printer is
It's a Brother HL-1440.
I've found that if I bypass the printer config tool and just use the CUPS web-based tool, the printer works perfectly.
Yeah, I've given up editing the config files by hand, and have found that using the browser-based interface to cups works as well as anything else. But it still doesn't work well for me. The printer freezes up frequently, and needs to be power-cycled. Also, there's a usability problem, because there's a large number of drivers for this printer that the browser-based cups interface presents to you, and it's not obvious which is the right one. There's one marked "recommended," which is what I'm using (and doesn't work very well). There's another, different one that's presented as the default, which doesn't seem to work.
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any non-trivial program that gets used for anything relevant will have to be constantly maintained to fix bugs anyway.
A counterexample: TeX.
Yeah, the system I was describing is a desktop system, but in general, pretty much any laptop uses way less power than pretty much any desktop.
A more worthwhile goal is just to reduce the power consumption of your PC. The computer referred to in TFA draws 45 W, which is nice and low. I would just call that a victory and stop there. When I built my most recent machine, I decided to go for low power, and without using any particularly exotic hardware, I managed to get it down to 98 W, including the monitor, when the CPU is idle. It's a nice, snappy computer, with a dual-core AMD x64 CPU. If you're shopping for a power supply, make sure and get an 80PLUS model. Another reasonable thing to do, if you're concerned about your impact on the environment, is if you're just going to do word processing, programming, and web browsing, don't buy a gaming machine with a video card that gets hot enough to fry an egg.
The solar thing being discussed in the article is clearly a silly gimmick. You'd get more environmental bang for the buck by installing photovoltaics on the roof (and that's an option for businesses as well as homeowners). YMMV, but where I live in Southern California we get a lot of sun, and my roof faces south, so photovoltaics ended up being a good deal for me. (It's hard to estimate how long the investment will take to pay for itself, because it depends sensitively on how much electric rates go up in the future. The historical trend has always been up, but it's hard to predict exactly how much more rates will go up in, say, the next 10 years.) There is at least one theoretical situation in which a special-purpose solar panel for a specific device can make sense, and that's where you have a device that uses a lot of power, and can run on DC. The classic example is pool pumps. Pool pumps tend to be insane power hogs, and they use DC motors, so you can actually be more efficient by using special-purpose photovoltaics than plugging into the AC from a general-purpose PV system's inverter. A computer can also run on DC, and I believe in some big data centers they do use hardware that runs on DC, because it saves the electricity that would have been wasted by inefficiency in the individual computers' power supplies. If you were running such a center in an area with a lot of sun, and you had some roof space available, it could certainly be smart to get a big PV system installed, without an inverter, to supply DC to the machines.
One thing I don't understand about Eckel's original article is that he says breaking compatibility isn't a big deal, because the programmers who don't want to use the new version will just stay with the old one. How does that work for the users? Do they (a) end up having to pick which version of the language to install on their machine, and lose the ability to run half the world's python software, (b) have to install multiple versions of python on their machine, or (c) ??? Eckel is comparing with Java, but since Java is a compiled language, it's much less of an issue; syntactical changes don't affect the end user who just wants to run the code. How would python handle this? Perl 6, for instance, will automatically detect if the code you're running is perl 5, and will run it correctly in a compatibility mode.
Why's everyone using linux if it sucks so much?
Because Linux sounds cool, while BSD sounds geeky.
I use both Linux and BSD every day. I think there are some sane reasons to prefer BSD, and some sane reasons to prefer Linux. For a desktop user, one really good reason to prefer Linux is that there's no ubuntu for BSD. I've gotten spoiled by the very high quality of work that goes into packaging desktop apps for ubuntu. I used to run BSD on my desktop, and I was always running into hassles getting all my apps to work. There are also, however, some perfectly good reasons for picking BSD. One of the biggest, IMO, is that an OS like FreeBSD is a single operating system, not a variety of distributions like Linux, so you can buy a book about BSD, and it's documenting the exact system you're using. None of this stuff about "do this if you're using Debian, or this if it's Mandriva, or ..." As far as the schedulers, I've had problems with some of the Linux schedulers, and problems with some of the FreeBSD schedulers. Both have been in a very rapid state of flux in the last 5-10 years. MS has taught us how bad a monoculture can be, so I think we should all be happy that both Linux and the BSDs exist and are in good health.
I was an Ameritrade customer. Soon after setting up an account with them, I started getting pump-and-dump spam sent to the single-purpose email address that I'd created only for use with them. A simple google search showed that this had been going on for years at Ameritrade. I run Linux, and am fairly careful about keeping my box secure, so I was pretty sure the address hadn't been leaked by malware on my end. In the past, they've claimed that the addresses might be getting found by dictionary attacks, but the address I was using had 13 characters before the @ sign, didn't have dictionary words in it, and had an obscure domain name after the @, not yahoo or hotmail or anything like that.
I decided that I wasn't going to entrust the bulk of my life's savings to a company that was that clueless about security, so I transferred my account to Scottrade. When I did the transfer, I explained in an email to the Ameritrade people that the security problem was the reason I was leaving them. The responded with a phone call, and the phone rep was completely in denial about the spam problem, which was had been publicly known and discussed for years.
The other reason I wanted to get away from them was that some of the functionality of their web interface didn't work on Firefox in Linux, so I had to do certain things (e.g., withdrawing money) on a Mac or Windows machine instead. (When I called to report it as a bug, they said they didn't support Linux.)
TFA also has some interesting comments about OOXML:
It's interesting that this is both similar to, and different from, Miguel de Icaza's recent comments. It's similar in that they both completely deny the validity of the main criticism that's been leveled at OOXML, which is that it says a lot of things have to behave like certain MS products, without saying what that behavior is. It's different in that Miguel seems to have emphasized his opinion that some other aspects of the criticism of the standard has helped to improve the standard and make it something that really would allow other people to implement it, whereas Mundie seems to be saying that the entire ISO debate was a worthless FUD attack on poor little MS, and that MS simply intends to win the vote through politics, without making changes in the standard in response to the criticisms.
Tell me more! I haven't actually run into any bugs in the ubuntu installer. What are the commonly occurring bugs? What features and functionality are betterin the Debian one?
So in practical terms, does this mean that they can install Debian on a Windows box without having to burn a CD? That could be useful on systems that don't have a CD burner, and could also be easier in terms of cutting down on the number of steps, and eliminating the need to own CD-writing software. It would be totally cool to have an Ubuntu installer that you could download and double-click on, and that would automatically resize your partitions and leave you with a double-boot system; I think there would be a *lot* of people I could convince to try Linux if it was that easy. Although the normal Ubuntu install CD (not the alternate install) already has a live CD feature so you can run Linux without installing it, I've always hesitated to suggest to people that they try Linux from a live CD, because the performance is so horrible that I'm afraid they'll get a bad impression. Of course a live CD can be useful if you want to find out how much of your hardware is supported. Realistically, I think the main obstacle these days for someone wanting to install Linux isn't the need to burn a CD and boot from it, it's issues with (a) printing, wifi, and winmodems, and (b) being committed to file formats that are only supported on Windows.
Here's what my own experiences have taught me: Get a Dobsonian. [...] The scope I eventually got is an Orion XT10 Intelliscope, but you may not want the computerization with your budget.
That's good advice. On the OP's budget, he can afford a good pair of binoculars, plus a non-computerized Dob. BTW, I'd suggest avoiding Meade Dobsonians, which have a long history of quality problems. I have a Meade Dob, which came with a defective (optional) finderscope, and I had to rebuild it with PVC pipe and duct tape. A couple of years later, I saw a review of the same scope in Sky & Telescope, and they said they found the same problem -- evidently Meade still hadn't fixed it, years later.
You seem to have answered a lot of questions that nobody thinks are the main questions, while not answering the important ones. The main issue is that the spec says implementations have to document the behavior of particular versions of MS products, but it doesn't spell out what that behavior is.
- The standardized language was very small, so there was a tendency for it to fracture into many incompatible languages.
- At that time, the implementations represented a string as a length byte followed by the string data, so you were limited to strings of length 255.
- I don't think there was any (standard) way to defeat the strong typing in cases where you needed to.
- Was there garbage collection? If so, I don't recall it as being an idiomatic part of the language, except maybe for strings...? Well, most languages back then didn't have it (and gc's sucked back then, so gc languages tended to be slow), but today...
- I was always annoyed by the gotchas in the syntax -- the language seemed unnecessarily picky about periods and semicolons.
Has any of this changed? Has modern pascal settled on a single standardized version of the language? Is gc easy, idiomatic, and consistently supported in libraries and language constructs? Is there good unicode support? It seems to me that today, if I wanted a typesafe language I'd use java, and if I wanted a language that compiled to native code I'd use C or OCaml.It's conceivable that at some point in the future there would be some kind of memory that would become popular on general-purpose PC's for which this technique would work. But even then, there are some other reasons why I'm thinking you wouldn't want to use this technique for a PC (as opposed to an RFID):
I hate being involuntarily subjected to video, e.g., in the dentist's office, the airport, and the supermarket. The good news is that when it comes to ads on web sites, the power is ultimately mine. When a lot of sites started using animated GIFs, which I found distracting and annoying, it motivated me to start using adblock. When I came across a site that used those incredibly annoying adbrite ads, that motivated me to add adbrite to my adblock ads (http://*.adbrite.com/* is the pattern that works). If google is smart, they'll serve up their video ads from urls that fit some pattern like http://video.googlesyndication.com/*, so that users will be able to block the video ads without blocking all google ads. I've never been annoyed by a google text ad, so I've never been motivated to block them. I wish I had the same power to get rid of the TV ads in the checkout lane at Albertson's.
In the 1970's, I grew up on the Heinlein juveniles, and would read a Tom Swift book when I couldn't find anything better, although they were terribly dated even by then. The trouble is that the Heinlein juveniles are getting dated as well, and are disappearing from library shelves, and in general young adult SF is getting to be an endangered species. Walk into a Barnes and Noble and look for SF on the YA shelves -- you'll have a very hard time finding any. Part of this may just be that there are fashions in fiction, and right now the fashion has swung toward fantasy. Another issue may be that crewed space travel used to be the most important trope in SF, and we're now finding out that it's much, much more difficult than anyone imagined ca. 1950. To kids these days, I think crewed interplanetary travel comes off like kind of a corny joke, like ray guns, flying cars, and world government. It's one of those things that just didn't happen. Kids these days also have a lot more options, including movies and video games. When I was a kid, Star Trek was about it; there was such a paucity of SFnal options on TV that I'd watch Creature Features on broadcast in a desperate attempt to get my SF fix.
Here are my notes from the most recent time I tried it: Uses rtf as native format. Can read many Word docs. Only prints to ps. Seems small and fast. To convert its ps output to pdf, use ghostscript. Yech, tried it, and it crashed within a few minutes. Also, the control keys don't work! And when I open rtf files written by Word or OOo, it displays them incorrectly, with no spaces between words.
My list on linux:
I often find it's quicker and easier to use command-line tools rather than GUIs:
Can anyone suggest a really lightweight WYSIWYG wordprocessor for Linux, preferably one that doesn't make bloated files? I'd also like an alternative to kaddressbook that wouldn't take 9 seconds to start up on my 2.2 GHz dual-core x64.
I teach physics. One classic use of computers in physics education is to help students check answers to their homework problems. Before computers, this was done by giving the answers to odd-numbered problems in the back of the book. Computerized answer checking can be superior to that in a couple of ways. With problems that have a numerical answer, many students tend to start from the answer in the back of the book, and then try to work backwards to figure out how they could get that answer; the result is that they don't learn how to solve problems from first principles. Some of them will just write a bunch of wrong stuff on their paper, and then append the answer to it as if that was the answer they found :-) With problems that have a symbolic answer (e.g., x=mv^2/2F is the answer to the problem), the same problem gets even worse. Assigning problems with symbolic answers is very important IMO, because we're trying to instill good problem-solving habits, which means solving problems algebraically, and only plugging in numbers at the very end. Also, it can teach them how to interpret an algebraic result, which is something most of them have never done. Another advantage of doing answer checking on the computer is that I can require my students to use the answer checker if they want to get credit, and tell them that if the computer gives them the feedback saying that their answer is wrong, and they can't figure out how to fix it, they should come to my office hours to get help. This is very different from the usual ethos, which is to turn in a paper with lots of wrong answers and whine for partial credit. The system I use is an open-source one I wrote, called Spotter; its web page has links to a bunch of other free-as-in-something software that does similar things.
Eric Mazur's book Peer Instruction is worth checking out if you're teaching physics. He's a physic prof at Harvard who pioneered the technique of giving students multiple-choice questions to ponder, polling them, and then if there isn't a clear consensus for the right answer, having them discuss it in groups. I think he originally implemented it with cardboard cards, but most people these days to it using the electronic clickers. Personally, I tried the technique and wasn't that happy with it, but it still helped me to get outside the box of straight lecturing. It seems to be mainly a technique that's useful in huge lecture classes, which isn't what I teach at a community college, and isn't what the OP teaches in high school. I've also heard a lot of students complain bitterly about the clickers -- partly about the cost (which I think is a valid complaint) and partly about nontraditional instruction (which I think just indicates that they're conservative and reluctant to take responsibility).
There are lots of free college and high school textbooks out there, and you should consider using them. See my sig for a catalog of free books that you can search for math and physics books.
Sorry about the reply-to-self, but considering how incredibly annoying and misleading these adbrite ads are, I thought some slashdotters might be interested to know that adding http://*.adbrite.com/* to your adblock patterns seems to get rid of them completely -- the spam links don't even show up with the double underlining, which I imagine is because they're being inserted dynamically by a JS script served up from an adbrite server.
What the heck? I clicked on the link to TFA. It sent me to a page at techrythm.com, where there is an extremely short article, giving hardly any more information than the slashdot summary. In it are a lot of links double-underlined in green. When I move my mouse over the links, I get an ad floating around. When I click on a link, I go to some lame spam page that doesn't seem to have anything to do with what the link claims it is.
USA is going towards a capitalistic extreme,
Historically, the US in 1900 was a capitalistic extreme. We haven't done laissez faire capitalism since Roosevelt. The top federal income tax bracket has ranged around 35% in recent years, and although that may be small by Scandinavian standards, it's nothing like laissez faire capitalism. We have a big, huge federal government, which spends lots of money on social programs, and lots of money on a gigantic military that we use for invading people.
witch can become just as bad as the communism they hate so much.
Please don't employ negative stereotypes of an entire group of people. I'm an American, and I don't hate communism.
Judging by this poll most people can not get wireless working at all
There's a major issue in the accuracy of this poll, which is that the people who come across the poll are people who came across it on the networking and wireless section of ubuntuforums.org, and typically the reason they went there is because it didn't work. The people (like me) for whom it Just Worked will typically never see the poll.
Finding laptops that were fully supported used to be hard, so this was a valid complaint, but now that even Dell sells fully supported laptops this is simply user error just like any other "unsupported hardware" complaint.
It's not just a problem on laptops. I have never found a single desktop machine on which ACPI worked correctly, and I've tried it on a lot of very ordinary, vanilla desktops.
Well, I'm not sure what the GP's printer is
It's a Brother HL-1440.
I've found that if I bypass the printer config tool and just use the CUPS web-based tool, the printer works perfectly.
Yeah, I've given up editing the config files by hand, and have found that using the browser-based interface to cups works as well as anything else. But it still doesn't work well for me. The printer freezes up frequently, and needs to be power-cycled. Also, there's a usability problem, because there's a large number of drivers for this printer that the browser-based cups interface presents to you, and it's not obvious which is the right one. There's one marked "recommended," which is what I'm using (and doesn't work very well). There's another, different one that's presented as the default, which doesn't seem to work.