Is anyone using any critical thinking? How can a particular combination of bits on a CD crash your computer, much less "cause damage to your computer"?
You know, I read a paper once on the potential of a computer virus randomly evolving. It essentially relied on the fact that if a virus could be written in 1K bytes of asm data, there was a 1:4096 chance of it occuring in randomly executed bits. Of course, that assumes extremely high entropy in the data being executed.
Anyway, the Windows at least has very poor error checking mechanisms. CDs have specific formats and if the format is broken, then Windows may develop a buffer overflow or something.
In all fairness, I have had Linux hang on bad CD-Rs...
So, you want me to tell my boss that our web server is free software and has expired because the people writing the software figured by now it would have a bunch of security holes?
That's gonna be easy to sell. I can just imagine it.
Boss: "Why did our server go down last night!?!?!"
Me: "Well, it expired."
Boss: "It free for Christs sake! How does the d*mn thing expire if we're not paying for it!"
Me: "Well, the authors figured that by now, there would be a bunch of problems in the software so they want us to upgrade it, it's really a good thing."
Boss: "I thought this free stuff was supposed to work, not be full of security holes! We're switching to IIS!"
There is a very simple reason I use Linux. It's the same reason that I just installed Linux on yet another company server today.
It works!
Windows doesn't.
It's just that simply. Screw an 'Open Source' policy, that's not what MS needs. MS needs to worry more about delivering good software first and foremost.
I'll bitch as much as the next guy about MS's unfair bussiness practices because we got stuck with shit because of it. If they had delivered quality software, well, then I probably wouldn't complain.
I can't stress this enough, it's not that MS is evil or bad or not free or whatever, it's just that there software sucks. So for god sakes stop using it and then trying to figure out 'What MS's OS Strategy should be.'
Many, many, moons ago when NS first released the Mozilla code (and the source for the JS API) for a research project I added a bunch of low-level classes to JS in order to allow it to be used for more advanced applications (independent of a browser).
This was long before MSJScript, but anyway, while it worked out pretty cool for the most part, it was horribly painful to add classes and especially painful to map APIs (I was using Win32 at the time) to JS objects.
My second problem was that as a language, JS is just to forgiving. Optional use of semi colons and other things such as that make it a little confusing to distribute and debug.
I always have liked JS though and I'm glad someone wrote a good backend to it. I'll have to check it out...
A Personal License is available for any non-commercial Web site that is less than 5 pages. The one-time licensing fee for a non-commercial Web site is U.S. $29.95.
For the DHTML code that is already in my browsers Window? I didn't sign any EULA by loading the page so what stops me from just modifying the code to my own purposes (and obsfucating it to avoid copyright stuff)?
I don't think this is an April Fool's joke, I just think this guy is smoking crack if he thinks he has any hopes of making money off this.
BTW: The only real news today was that someone wrote a JavaScript menu that works in Konqueror? I usually don't complain about article weakness but come on.
Re:Just one simple question is all I've got....
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April Fools Wrap Up
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The real news, I can tell you that:
1) People are killing each other in the middle east 2) People are killing each other in America 3) Americans are killing people in Afghanstan 4) Various groups are killing each other thorough Asia and Eastern Europe 5) The chinese government has now made killing chinese-muslims part of its contribution to international war on terrorism.
All in all, it's a pretty normal day on planet earth. Same thing has been happening more or less for the past 20,000 years.
I amazed that there are so many people here who actually believe this.. Man, even geeks are suckers. Either way, since according to Taco, noone reads the posts, looks like a good number of people are going to believe this, and Hemos is gonna get flamed like crazy.
I have to say I feel bad for the guy as he seems like a nice guy. Had a problem with one of the ads breaking NS4.7.x and he took care of it right away. Oh well, I have to admit, it is pretty funny:)
Re:Slightly OT: Google and the Google Toolbar for
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Teoma Aims To Kill Google
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Check out mozilla. The address bar _is_ a google search engine:)
We are not going to destroy the planet by global warming. The earth has endured a great deal of meteorological change and life goes on. The fact is that temperatures are going to change whether we like it or not. I almost think that whether we are making the planet warming by.01 degree is irrelavant because natural changes are probably making it warmer by.5 degrees anyway.
There are better reasons to not cut down forests and to reduce emissions. When people argue global warming, they just pollute the issue and reduce their credibility.
With Intel support the opposition to the DMCA, I thought that I should atleast play devil's advocate a bit. I feel I/we owe them that much.
When I first heard this, I thought to myself, "Man, copyright law sucks, but this sorta makes sense. I mean, Yoga Inside does seem to be capitalizing off of Intel Inside." It's not uncommon either for companies in different fields to try and capitalize off of a well-no slogan either.
Then I saw that they provided Yoga lessons to prisoners, and that Inside refers to being inside a prison. I have to believe that once the higher ups hear about this, they'll drop the lawsuit quick. It's unreasonable. When lawyers don't have enough real work to do, they tend to try and find a way to justify the horrific amounts of money they charge. I'm gonna have to give Intel the benefit of the doubt on this one that they'll do the right thing.
Re:p=mv/[1-(v/c)^2]^(1/2)
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Stopping Light
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Doesn't matter anyway though because such equations only apply to particles with mass. Since light travels at the speed of light, it cannot have momentum or mass.
Einstein was a pretty smart guy...
Re:How I learned to love the bomb sorta
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Stopping Light
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That's the problem with quantum mechanics. The mechanisms are so odd, that many words used to describe it give a false idea of what is actually happening. Light is being slowed most certainly, to the point where one could say that it is stopped. Remember though, light does not have mass, so it is not analogous to slowing down a baseball until its caught.
Likewise, thinking of it in terms of an atom absorbing the photon is incorrect. It's not the same as dropping a bit of dye into a glass of water, where the water absorbs the photon. It's also not a trap for the photon.
The first thing in understanding quantum mechanics is to first accept that atoms have no real-world counterpart. One cannot imagine an atom or subatomic particles as we imagine physical objects.
Anyone familiar with FORTRAN or the programming industry would know that FORTRAN is an engineering language. Its hasn't been popular with mathematicians for decades. But many engineering problems use a lot of math, and performance is critical. You're going to get better performance from FORTRAN code than C code if you're writing applications for SDI. Otherwise, everyone else is going to prefer using C/C++, because it better manipulates strings, is more widely known, can better express a programming problem in abstractions, and can afford to take the performance hit! The professor was correct in her statement.
For computer science, C/C++ is a better language than Fortran. Fortran is a niche language. It has it's benefits, but so does assembly.
You incorrectly assume that your professor is wrong, you imply she doesn't know what she's talking about, and then you use your gestalt of stupidity as a basis to make a prejudiced, sexist, and condenscending remark. (BTW, I'm sure as miniscule the representation of females in/., they should all be able to bitchslap your karma to zero.)
I wasn't attacking her in particular but computer science professors on a whole, which I believe is a justified attack. Having learned to program outside of an academic environment, and having worked in an environment with people with tons of professional experience and people straight out of school, I can say that a comp sci degree teachs relatively nothing about computer science in comparision to what say a physics degree or a degree in math teachs.
The female comment was a joke. I even mentioned that it was in my post. Life is meant to be laughed at, you need to losen up a bit;-)
Modern programming??? Computer Science existed before there was computers! Before computers, it was merely a mathematics field that dealt with finite computational problems. Programming concepts derived before the 90's are still valid and relevant, trust me.
That's the problem! The art of programming is not taught in school. Strange low-level concepts are taught instead that are actually too advanced for most students to comprehend. After one semister of C++, do you really expect a student to understand a binary tree or a hash table? There is no progression like there is in other disciplines.
Why don't you ask your professors about their professional experience??? Don't assume mommy and daddy took care of everything for them (like you?). Those that couldn't live off the 'rents had to work day jobs while pursuing their education, and I'm sure they chose programming over flipping burgers. And not every PhD could count on gov't research grants and fellowships. They had to work a couple of years in the real world, before they could put together enough of a stake to head back to academia.
You know, I usually try to just ignore this kind of stuff. Instead of making cheap shots that you have no grounds to make, why don't you try using logic to express your point.
And what constitutes a mature science? I wonder how long before mathematics can be considered a science. CS will be mature long before you will.
Take physics for example. A student learning physics develops a groundwork from relatively simply ideas (classical physics), and then expands those ideas to specific areas of exceptions. There is a deductive flow that governs the entire discipline.
Comp Sci on the other hand usually immerses a student in program with little background into the nature of programming. Very low-level concepts are thrown in almost right away. Instead of following a logical flow, most of the stuff taught in comp sci has little relation to the rest of the stuff taught. The relationships haven't been well defined because it's a new science.
What you need to understand, is that I'm not blasting individuals, or the college system, but I'm stating that the science itself needs to be refined. Now, my question to you is do you really believe that comp sci is as mature as physics or as other engineering disciplines? Do you really think that comp sci majors are as knowledgable about their discipline as other majors?
All it would take to scramble the signal is a piece of aluminum foil or something. I am not an electrical engineer, so I may be wrong about the material, but I know that there are materials that scramble cellular signals.
A lot of folks are saying positive things about this because protects children against abduction.
This system offers a means for someone to totally track every movement of a child. While the parent is intended to receive the data, what prevents someone else from hijacking this data? Wouldn't it become easier than for a potential abductor to observe the habits of the child and choose a time when the band was known to be off?
Let's say that an abductor abducts a child with one of these things. What's to stop him from just wrapping something around the device to block the signal?!? It surely wouldn't be too difficult.
First of all, all that stuff is horribly outdated.
DD(x) is the future of the Navy. The current fleet of battleships run a system called AEGIS which runs on top of HP-UX. NT has very limited use in non-tatical systems. You have to understand, the Navy has a _very_ strict QA and development process and systems don't actually get used tactically for almost 10 years it seems.
The future OS to run on DD(x) is up for grabs right now. MS federal systems has teamed up with the Blue Team so if they win, expect to see MS having a bigger role. That's not necessarily a bad thing though because the system is based on Java so not as many bad things can happen. Either way, with the thorough QA process, they should even be able to configure NT to be secure after 10 years.
In all fairness, XEmacs wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so bloated. It just is too slow compared to GNU Emacs.
2) MSVC++ is better than either (as an IDE). It comes with a built in debugger, a class browser, and little knickknacks like color formatting.
I bring up Emacs with a.C file (or.cpp) and automagically, I'm in C++ mode. In C++ mode, I hit control+x c and then the buffer is color formatted:) Nice thing is I can shut it off real quick so that I don't have to waste time on large files that I'm moving through quickly.
Likewise, I hit control+x n g and gdb is automatically run. I can set conditional breakpoints, and examine the contents of any variable using C++ syntax (very nice especially when casts are needed). When running gdb in Emacs, gdb brings up the source and points to the line that's currently being worked on.
I don't know if there's a class browser, but I have never really found a need for one. I just use grep when searching for definitions... If I need a whole picture of whats going on, then that's what UML is for:)
Something things MSVC++ doesn't have that Emacs does:
1) Keyboard macros - anything can be assigned to a keyboard macro and macros can be executed n number of times. I used to work with a traditional IDE and I cannot even begin to tell you how much time this saves. This is usually the thing that makes people love Emacs.
2) Built in commands for navigating the source by statements or keywords. This lets me write really advanced macros that can say skip five parameters in a function and then do something.
3) Regular expression searching.
4) Fully customizable via LISP. There are incredibly things that can be done with LISP. We have commenting standards at my work and someone just wrote a quick LISP script that inserts the proper comments in all the right places in a C/C++ source file.
I could just keep on going. Emacs isn't like most applications so I think most people don't really understand how powerful it is. Trust me though, once you learn how to use Emacs well, you'll never use anything else.
To imply otherwise is like implying that Linux is a better desktop for endusers.
I won't start a flamewar here but I do prefer Linux to Windows as a desktop. No religious thing, I just like it better.
FORTRAN is better than C in non-text handling situations and in performance. A math oriented problem coded in FORTRAN by a sharp programmer will blow away a similar coded C program. (This is because of C's overhead, and math libraries in FORTRAN benefit from 50+ years of fine tuning.)
Wait a second here. FORTRAN is better than C for math. period. That's it. But noone uses FORTRAN for math anymore. You know why? They use Mathematica! Gone are the days when mathematicians were essentially programmers. Now-a-days, the math guys just hand equations to the programmers. Seems mathematicians prefer pretty GUIs too;-)
It sounds like she will still be a better programmer than you.
I didn't mean to sound overly critical or pretenious but I think it's pretty objective that most professors aren't experienced in the real world. Figure that modern programming has been around, what, a decade? So, one has to figure that it takes at least 8 years to obtain the proper degree. So that leaves 2 years of time to get experience prior to teaching? In reality, how many professors have just started teaching after spending the last ten years in the field? It's not a reflection on them, just on praticality. Comp Sci is gonna take a couple decades before it matures as a science.
This is a sad, but true phenomenon. And the root cause of it is not anything that Microsoft did-- it's the takeoff of Java. This is particularly ironic, because many of the Unix machines being tossed were made by Sun.
Thankfully, we still have Suns but they are starting to adopt Java and while JDK is available on the Suns, Kaffe and JBuilder are being pushed hard by the professors.
The funny thing though is that I had a bit of a debate with the C++ professor as she seemed to think that a) XEmacs is better than GNU Emacs b) MSVC++ is better than both of them. Of course, she also thought that Fortran was better than C:) That's why women don't make good programmer;-) (j/k)
The truth of course, is that she has only really programmed in an academic environment (as most professors really have only done). In such an environment, a pretty editor is nice for writing 20 line sample programs, but they simply don't realize that for heavy duty 60K+ line production programs, other, more useful tools, are needed.
The lack of real professional experience is why I do believe that MS could have success at this. College professors just don't understand the things that are useful in the real world. It's like having someone teach a mechanic school who has only read about taking about cars. It is just silly.
With the rather suspect security record (to say the least...) of the Windows operating system, I could never fathom a security conscious sect of the government ever selecting Windows in lieu of a POSIX compliant OS such as Unix
Lot's of Unices are certified (Solaris, HP-UX, etc.). Windows certification is relatively new and there are specially stripped down versions of Windows that are what actually get certified. Notice the article mentions that MS is in the process of getting 2k certified even though it's been out for a while. Right now, its just NT that is certified (i'm not sure what versions though).
The thought of an NT box with a little red sticker that says "Secret" is a bit scary though isn't it? *shudder*
Allright. What part of All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. [un.org] don't you understand????
Ah! Not natural rights, but civil rights. Everyone has the right to be free, but not everyone has the right to vote. There is a distinct difference in that civil rights are not granted, in any natural law theories, to those in society who are not capable of reason.
My argument is that an educated 17 year old is more capable of reason than an uneducated 18 year old.
If your curious about the distinction between natural rights and civil rights (specifically on the extent of civil rights in society), consult "On Liberty", by John Stuart Mill.
Only in America are students considered to have zero rights, yet all of a sudden, you turn 18, and having sex with a classmate can put you in jail.
Most states have some sort of grace period (NJ is 4 years I believe) where an 18 year old can still legally have sex with a 14+ year old.
The real interesting thing is that the entire idea of a teenager (13-17 as not being an adult) is post-Industrial Revolution. What essentially happened was that all the sudden, there were a lot of 13-17 who didn't have farms to work on (since their parents now worked in factories) and were being put into schools in order to give them something to do until they were old enough to work in a factory like everyone else.
All the sudden, there is a new period of life where one is essentially in limbo, having the body of an adult, but not being part of the adult world. There was an interesting book written on the matter (although I cannot remember the name). I figure that this whole concept of "the teen years" won't last very long considering how our society is shifting to greater intellectual extremes. It just doesn't make sense that an uneducated 18 year old has more rights in society than a very well educated 17 year old.
He's got a good point. They can't use your code. Actually, they can't use your parents code:)
Of course, they could counter sue for you illegally agreeing to their contract (since it was spelled out in the EULA).
The better course of action would be for your parents to sign a letter saying that they forego any rights to the code you right and give permission for Apple to let you see anything and also containing a clause that if your account isn't restored, they wish all code written by you to be removed and recalled from their product.
Actually, just have your parents try and be nice about it, there is a legal way to clean this all up.
I'm currently 13 years old and am an active part of the Mozilla project.
Wow, I'm suprised you have the balls to go around saying that (knowing how people tend to discriminate against younger folks).
Several years ago, I was set to TA at a tech camp that my school was running during the summer, only to find that I couldn't until I was 15 and only then with a work permit. About 8-10 months ago, I got a contract offer (by email) and a possible offer of full-time work from collabnet to do work for them with the Bugzilla bug-tracking system which I am a developer with. Of course, this offer was quickly dispensed with after I told them that I was 12 years old:)
Ok. I don't anything about you, but this is what my opinion on the matter is.
I don't blame the school for the under 15 year old stuff. I know that kids under that age can have moderate tech skills but there are more things involved than just tech skills for most jobs.
What I assume is that your a moderate to good programmer, and being 13, that's incredible. My advice to you though is don't go off and try to get a job just yet. Keep sharpening your skills so that you become one of the best programmers, and then when your 16-18, you can get a real good co-op.
Don't rush off to be part of the cube-farm world. I know the money is tempting, but at the current rate, you could be making massive amounts more of money later in life. There is experience and whatever that is gained in at a job but you have a special oppertunity to increase your base skillset.
Of course, if you are one of the best programmers out there already, then you need proof of it, so I would suggest spearheading (or becoming a _major_ contributor) to some OS project.`
Otherwise, enjoy the rare oppertunity that children have to learn without impedment. I was in a similiar situation to you and looking back, I realize that while I learned a lot from High School co-ops, I built most of my skills on my own and that is what seperated me from everyone else.
Everyone talks about making the Internet _safe_ for kids, but don't we really have to do even more than that?
No, but things like COPA are much different from contract agreements. As far as agreeing to NDAs are concerned, the internet has nothing to do with it. Someone under 18 cannot enter a legally binding contract on their own.
In my opinion, its not a good law, but totally abolishing such protection would probably be worse.
About 3 years ago I called up Comcast asking about cable modems. No dice, Comcast had just acquired Jones Intercable (my former cable company) and were upgrading old software. Scheduled to be available in a year.
Called up a 8 months later when the school that's about a mile down the street got cable. Still not available, the school was an 'experiment' to see how the equipment would work. Wait a few months, we'll call you when it's ready.
About a year later, still call up again. Got nice little run around about it being available and actually signed up but was later called up and told that it turns out it wasn't available but would be real soon.
Finally I decided about 3 months ago to see if it was available yet. What was I told? Will be available in a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone using any critical thinking? How can a particular combination of bits on a CD crash your computer, much less "cause damage to your computer"?
You know, I read a paper once on the potential of a computer virus randomly evolving. It essentially relied on the fact that if a virus could be written in 1K bytes of asm data, there was a 1:4096 chance of it occuring in randomly executed bits. Of course, that assumes extremely high entropy in the data being executed.
Anyway, the Windows at least has very poor error checking mechanisms. CDs have specific formats and if the format is broken, then Windows may develop a buffer overflow or something.
In all fairness, I have had Linux hang on bad CD-Rs...
So, you want me to tell my boss that our web server is free software and has expired because the people writing the software figured by now it would have a bunch of security holes?
That's gonna be easy to sell. I can just imagine it.
Boss: "Why did our server go down last night!?!?!"
Me: "Well, it expired."
Boss: "It free for Christs sake! How does the d*mn thing expire if we're not paying for it!"
Me: "Well, the authors figured that by now, there would be a bunch of problems in the software so they want us to upgrade it, it's really a good thing."
Boss: "I thought this free stuff was supposed to work, not be full of security holes! We're switching to IIS!"
There is a very simple reason I use Linux. It's the same reason that I just installed Linux on yet another company server today.
It works!
Windows doesn't.
It's just that simply. Screw an 'Open Source' policy, that's not what MS needs. MS needs to worry more about delivering good software first and foremost.
I'll bitch as much as the next guy about MS's unfair bussiness practices because we got stuck with shit because of it. If they had delivered quality software, well, then I probably wouldn't complain.
I can't stress this enough, it's not that MS is evil or bad or not free or whatever, it's just that there software sucks. So for god sakes stop using it and then trying to figure out 'What MS's OS Strategy should be.'
Many, many, moons ago when NS first released the Mozilla code (and the source for the JS API) for a research project I added a bunch of low-level classes to JS in order to allow it to be used for more advanced applications (independent of a browser).
This was long before MSJScript, but anyway, while it worked out pretty cool for the most part, it was horribly painful to add classes and especially painful to map APIs (I was using Win32 at the time) to JS objects.
My second problem was that as a language, JS is just to forgiving. Optional use of semi colons and other things such as that make it a little confusing to distribute and debug.
I always have liked JS though and I'm glad someone wrote a good backend to it. I'll have to check it out...
A Personal License is available for any non-commercial Web site that is less than 5 pages. The one-time licensing fee for a non-commercial Web site is U.S. $29.95.
For the DHTML code that is already in my browsers Window? I didn't sign any EULA by loading the page so what stops me from just modifying the code to my own purposes (and obsfucating it to avoid copyright stuff)?
I don't think this is an April Fool's joke, I just think this guy is smoking crack if he thinks he has any hopes of making money off this.
BTW: The only real news today was that someone wrote a JavaScript menu that works in Konqueror? I usually don't complain about article weakness but come on.
The real news, I can tell you that:
1) People are killing each other in the middle east
2) People are killing each other in America
3) Americans are killing people in Afghanstan
4) Various groups are killing each other thorough Asia and Eastern Europe
5) The chinese government has now made killing chinese-muslims part of its contribution to international war on terrorism.
All in all, it's a pretty normal day on planet earth. Same thing has been happening more or less for the past 20,000 years.
I amazed that there are so many people here who actually believe this.. Man, even geeks are suckers. Either way, since according to Taco, noone reads the posts, looks like a good number of people are going to believe this, and Hemos is gonna get flamed like crazy.
:)
I have to say I feel bad for the guy as he seems like a nice guy. Had a problem with one of the ads breaking NS4.7.x and he took care of it right away. Oh well, I have to admit, it is pretty funny
Check out mozilla. The address bar _is_ a google search engine :)
We are not going to destroy the planet by global warming. The earth has endured a great deal of meteorological change and life goes on. The fact is that temperatures are going to change whether we like it or not. I almost think that whether we are making the planet warming by .01 degree is irrelavant because natural changes are probably making it warmer by .5 degrees anyway.
There are better reasons to not cut down forests and to reduce emissions. When people argue global warming, they just pollute the issue and reduce their credibility.
With Intel support the opposition to the DMCA, I thought that I should atleast play devil's advocate a bit. I feel I/we owe them that much.
When I first heard this, I thought to myself, "Man, copyright law sucks, but this sorta makes sense. I mean, Yoga Inside does seem to be capitalizing off of Intel Inside." It's not uncommon either for companies in different fields to try and capitalize off of a well-no slogan either.
Then I saw that they provided Yoga lessons to prisoners, and that Inside refers to being inside a prison. I have to believe that once the higher ups hear about this, they'll drop the lawsuit quick. It's unreasonable. When lawyers don't have enough real work to do, they tend to try and find a way to justify the horrific amounts of money they charge. I'm gonna have to give Intel the benefit of the doubt on this one that they'll do the right thing.
Said it better than I could...
Always curious why people post good stuff AC.
Doesn't matter anyway though because such equations only apply to particles with mass. Since light travels at the speed of light, it cannot have momentum or mass.
Einstein was a pretty smart guy...
That's the problem with quantum mechanics. The mechanisms are so odd, that many words used to describe it give a false idea of what is actually happening. Light is being slowed most certainly, to the point where one could say that it is stopped. Remember though, light does not have mass, so it is not analogous to slowing down a baseball until its caught.
Likewise, thinking of it in terms of an atom absorbing the photon is incorrect. It's not the same as dropping a bit of dye into a glass of water, where the water absorbs the photon. It's also not a trap for the photon.
The first thing in understanding quantum mechanics is to first accept that atoms have no real-world counterpart. One cannot imagine an atom or subatomic particles as we imagine physical objects.
Its whacky stuff.
Anyone familiar with FORTRAN or the programming industry would know that FORTRAN is an engineering language. Its hasn't been popular with mathematicians for decades. But many engineering problems use a lot of math, and performance is critical. You're going to get better performance from FORTRAN code than C code if you're writing applications for SDI. Otherwise, everyone else is going to prefer using C/C++, because it better manipulates strings, is more widely known, can better express a programming problem in abstractions, and can afford to take the performance hit! The professor was correct in her statement.
/., they should all be able to bitchslap your karma to zero.)
;-)
For computer science, C/C++ is a better language than Fortran. Fortran is a niche language. It has it's benefits, but so does assembly.
You incorrectly assume that your professor is wrong, you imply she doesn't know what she's talking about, and then you use your gestalt of stupidity as a basis to make a prejudiced, sexist, and condenscending remark. (BTW, I'm sure as miniscule the representation of females in
I wasn't attacking her in particular but computer science professors on a whole, which I believe is a justified attack. Having learned to program outside of an academic environment, and having worked in an environment with people with tons of professional experience and people straight out of school, I can say that a comp sci degree teachs relatively nothing about computer science in comparision to what say a physics degree or a degree in math teachs.
The female comment was a joke. I even mentioned that it was in my post. Life is meant to be laughed at, you need to losen up a bit
Modern programming??? Computer Science existed before there was computers! Before computers, it was merely a mathematics field that dealt with finite computational problems. Programming concepts derived before the 90's are still valid and relevant, trust me.
That's the problem! The art of programming is not taught in school. Strange low-level concepts are taught instead that are actually too advanced for most students to comprehend. After one semister of C++, do you really expect a student to understand a binary tree or a hash table? There is no progression like there is in other disciplines.
Why don't you ask your professors about their professional experience??? Don't assume mommy and daddy took care of everything for them (like you?). Those that couldn't live off the 'rents had to work day jobs while pursuing their education, and I'm sure they chose programming over flipping burgers. And not every PhD could count on gov't research grants and fellowships. They had to work a couple of years in the real world, before they could put together enough of a stake to head back to academia.
You know, I usually try to just ignore this kind of stuff. Instead of making cheap shots that you have no grounds to make, why don't you try using logic to express your point.
And what constitutes a mature science? I wonder how long before mathematics can be considered a science. CS will be mature long before you will.
Take physics for example. A student learning physics develops a groundwork from relatively simply ideas (classical physics), and then expands those ideas to specific areas of exceptions. There is a deductive flow that governs the entire discipline.
Comp Sci on the other hand usually immerses a student in program with little background into the nature of programming. Very low-level concepts are thrown in almost right away. Instead of following a logical flow, most of the stuff taught in comp sci has little relation to the rest of the stuff taught. The relationships haven't been well defined because it's a new science.
What you need to understand, is that I'm not blasting individuals, or the college system, but I'm stating that the science itself needs to be refined. Now, my question to you is do you really believe that comp sci is as mature as physics or as other engineering disciplines? Do you really think that comp sci majors are as knowledgable about their discipline as other majors?
All it would take to scramble the signal is a piece of aluminum foil or something. I am not an electrical engineer, so I may be wrong about the material, but I know that there are materials that scramble cellular signals.
A lot of folks are saying positive things about this because protects children against abduction.
This system offers a means for someone to totally track every movement of a child. While the parent is intended to receive the data, what prevents someone else from hijacking this data? Wouldn't it become easier than for a potential abductor to observe the habits of the child and choose a time when the band was known to be off?
Let's say that an abductor abducts a child with one of these things. What's to stop him from just wrapping something around the device to block the signal?!? It surely wouldn't be too difficult.
First of all, all that stuff is horribly outdated.
DD(x) is the future of the Navy. The current fleet of battleships run a system called AEGIS which runs on top of HP-UX. NT has very limited use in non-tatical systems. You have to understand, the Navy has a _very_ strict QA and development process and systems don't actually get used tactically for almost 10 years it seems.
The future OS to run on DD(x) is up for grabs right now. MS federal systems has teamed up with the Blue Team so if they win, expect to see MS having a bigger role. That's not necessarily a bad thing though because the system is based on Java so not as many bad things can happen. Either way, with the thorough QA process, they should even be able to configure NT to be secure after 10 years.
1) Haven't used xemacs enough to form an opinion.
.C file (or .cpp) and automagically, I'm in C++ mode. In C++ mode, I hit control+x c and then the buffer is color formatted :) Nice thing is I can shut it off real quick so that I don't have to waste time on large files that I'm moving through quickly.
:)
;-)
In all fairness, XEmacs wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so bloated. It just is too slow compared to GNU Emacs.
2) MSVC++ is better than either (as an IDE). It comes with a built in debugger, a class browser, and little knickknacks like color formatting.
I bring up Emacs with a
Likewise, I hit control+x n g and gdb is automatically run. I can set conditional breakpoints, and examine the contents of any variable using C++ syntax (very nice especially when casts are needed). When running gdb in Emacs, gdb brings up the source and points to the line that's currently being worked on.
I don't know if there's a class browser, but I have never really found a need for one. I just use grep when searching for definitions... If I need a whole picture of whats going on, then that's what UML is for
Something things MSVC++ doesn't have that Emacs does:
1) Keyboard macros - anything can be assigned to a keyboard macro and macros can be executed n number of times. I used to work with a traditional IDE and I cannot even begin to tell you how much time this saves. This is usually the thing that makes people love Emacs.
2) Built in commands for navigating the source by statements or keywords. This lets me write really advanced macros that can say skip five parameters in a function and then do something.
3) Regular expression searching.
4) Fully customizable via LISP. There are incredibly things that can be done with LISP. We have commenting standards at my work and someone just wrote a quick LISP script that inserts the proper comments in all the right places in a C/C++ source file.
I could just keep on going. Emacs isn't like most applications so I think most people don't really understand how powerful it is. Trust me though, once you learn how to use Emacs well, you'll never use anything else.
To imply otherwise is like implying that Linux is a better desktop for endusers.
I won't start a flamewar here but I do prefer Linux to Windows as a desktop. No religious thing, I just like it better.
FORTRAN is better than C in non-text handling situations and in performance. A math oriented problem coded in FORTRAN by a sharp programmer will blow away a similar coded C program. (This is because of C's overhead, and math libraries in FORTRAN benefit from 50+ years of fine tuning.)
Wait a second here. FORTRAN is better than C for math. period. That's it. But noone uses FORTRAN for math anymore. You know why? They use Mathematica! Gone are the days when mathematicians were essentially programmers. Now-a-days, the math guys just hand equations to the programmers. Seems mathematicians prefer pretty GUIs too
It sounds like she will still be a better programmer than you.
I didn't mean to sound overly critical or pretenious but I think it's pretty objective that most professors aren't experienced in the real world. Figure that modern programming has been around, what, a decade? So, one has to figure that it takes at least 8 years to obtain the proper degree. So that leaves 2 years of time to get experience prior to teaching? In reality, how many professors have just started teaching after spending the last ten years in the field? It's not a reflection on them, just on praticality. Comp Sci is gonna take a couple decades before it matures as a science.
This is a sad, but true phenomenon. And the root cause of it is not anything that Microsoft did-- it's the takeoff of Java. This is particularly ironic, because many of the Unix machines being tossed were made by Sun.
:) That's why women don't make good programmer ;-) (j/k)
Thankfully, we still have Suns but they are starting to adopt Java and while JDK is available on the Suns, Kaffe and JBuilder are being pushed hard by the professors.
The funny thing though is that I had a bit of a debate with the C++ professor as she seemed to think that a) XEmacs is better than GNU Emacs b) MSVC++ is better than both of them. Of course, she also thought that Fortran was better than C
The truth of course, is that she has only really programmed in an academic environment (as most professors really have only done). In such an environment, a pretty editor is nice for writing 20 line sample programs, but they simply don't realize that for heavy duty 60K+ line production programs, other, more useful tools, are needed.
The lack of real professional experience is why I do believe that MS could have success at this. College professors just don't understand the things that are useful in the real world. It's like having someone teach a mechanic school who has only read about taking about cars. It is just silly.
With the rather suspect security record (to say the least...) of the Windows operating system, I could never fathom a security conscious sect of the government ever selecting Windows in lieu of a POSIX compliant OS such as Unix
Lot's of Unices are certified (Solaris, HP-UX, etc.). Windows certification is relatively new and there are specially stripped down versions of Windows that are what actually get certified. Notice the article mentions that MS is in the process of getting 2k certified even though it's been out for a while. Right now, its just NT that is certified (i'm not sure what versions though).
The thought of an NT box with a little red sticker that says "Secret" is a bit scary though isn't it? *shudder*
Allright. What part of All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. [un.org] don't you understand????
Ah! Not natural rights, but civil rights. Everyone has the right to be free, but not everyone has the right to vote. There is a distinct difference in that civil rights are not granted, in any natural law theories, to those in society who are not capable of reason.
My argument is that an educated 17 year old is more capable of reason than an uneducated 18 year old.
If your curious about the distinction between natural rights and civil rights (specifically on the extent of civil rights in society), consult "On Liberty", by John Stuart Mill.
Only in America are students considered to have zero rights, yet all of a sudden, you turn 18, and having sex with a classmate can put you in jail.
Most states have some sort of grace period (NJ is 4 years I believe) where an 18 year old can still legally have sex with a 14+ year old.
The real interesting thing is that the entire idea of a teenager (13-17 as not being an adult) is post-Industrial Revolution. What essentially happened was that all the sudden, there were a lot of 13-17 who didn't have farms to work on (since their parents now worked in factories) and were being put into schools in order to give them something to do until they were old enough to work in a factory like everyone else.
All the sudden, there is a new period of life where one is essentially in limbo, having the body of an adult, but not being part of the adult world. There was an interesting book written on the matter (although I cannot remember the name). I figure that this whole concept of "the teen years" won't last very long considering how our society is shifting to greater intellectual extremes. It just doesn't make sense that an uneducated 18 year old has more rights in society than a very well educated 17 year old.
He's got a good point. They can't use your code. Actually, they can't use your parents code :)
Of course, they could counter sue for you illegally agreeing to their contract (since it was spelled out in the EULA).
The better course of action would be for your parents to sign a letter saying that they forego any rights to the code you right and give permission for Apple to let you see anything and also containing a clause that if your account isn't restored, they wish all code written by you to be removed and recalled from their product.
Actually, just have your parents try and be nice about it, there is a legal way to clean this all up.
I'm currently 13 years old and am an active part of the Mozilla project.
:)
Wow, I'm suprised you have the balls to go around saying that (knowing how people tend to discriminate against younger folks).
Several years ago, I was set to TA at a tech camp that my school was running during the summer, only to find that I couldn't until I was 15 and only then with a work permit. About 8-10 months ago, I got a contract offer (by email) and a possible offer of full-time work from collabnet to do work for them with the Bugzilla bug-tracking system which I am a developer with. Of course, this offer was quickly dispensed with after I told them that I was 12 years old
Ok. I don't anything about you, but this is what my opinion on the matter is.
I don't blame the school for the under 15 year old stuff. I know that kids under that age can have moderate tech skills but there are more things involved than just tech skills for most jobs.
What I assume is that your a moderate to good programmer, and being 13, that's incredible. My advice to you though is don't go off and try to get a job just yet. Keep sharpening your skills so that you become one of the best programmers, and then when your 16-18, you can get a real good co-op.
Don't rush off to be part of the cube-farm world. I know the money is tempting, but at the current rate, you could be making massive amounts more of money later in life. There is experience and whatever that is gained in at a job but you have a special oppertunity to increase your base skillset.
Of course, if you are one of the best programmers out there already, then you need proof of it, so I would suggest spearheading (or becoming a _major_ contributor) to some OS project.`
Otherwise, enjoy the rare oppertunity that children have to learn without impedment. I was in a similiar situation to you and looking back, I realize that while I learned a lot from High School co-ops, I built most of my skills on my own and that is what seperated me from everyone else.
Everyone talks about making the Internet _safe_ for kids, but don't we really have to do even more than that?
No, but things like COPA are much different from contract agreements. As far as agreeing to NDAs are concerned, the internet has nothing to do with it. Someone under 18 cannot enter a legally binding contract on their own.
In my opinion, its not a good law, but totally abolishing such protection would probably be worse.
Ha!
:(
About 3 years ago I called up Comcast asking about cable modems. No dice, Comcast had just acquired Jones Intercable (my former cable company) and were upgrading old software. Scheduled to be available in a year.
Called up a 8 months later when the school that's about a mile down the street got cable. Still not available, the school was an 'experiment' to see how the equipment would work. Wait a few months, we'll call you when it's ready.
About a year later, still call up again. Got nice little run around about it being available and actually signed up but was later called up and told that it turns out it wasn't available but would be real soon.
Finally I decided about 3 months ago to see if it was available yet. What was I told? Will be available in a year.
Oh well, no high bandwidth for me