Perhaps you ought to take the time to read GEB again. There is much more in those short dialogues than meets the eye. It takes some time to figure it all out though.
Obviously the submitter has never attempted to teach introductory computer science with an eye towards theory. Teaching most languages has the effect of reaffirming in many students' minds that Computer Science is all about misplaced semicolons and curly brackets; it reinforces a cut-and-paste view of computer science. This is exactly what you don't want!
But if we want to talk about returning to roots, why don't we teach computer science with the lambda calculus? Actually some schools do use an extended lambda calculus, Scheme. This is actually what teaching Computer Science is all about: abstraction with an eye towards a study of the computable. Not to say that graduates shouldn't also be rigorously trained in how to program, but the best starting point for a computer science degree is in computer science, not programming.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
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Hm. Anti drunk-driving, pro safe driving and seatbelt usage spring to mind immediately. Anti youth smoking too.
When you're as big as the US, sometimes a little advertisement works wonders compared to the equivalent budget spent on enforcement.
Chances are they've confronted this issue before, that's all.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
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Do I need to remind you that despite whatever local enforcement policies are in effect, drug usage is illegal in the US? That's not a political issue ad, it's an ad designed to discourage lawbreaking. If you don't like the fact that the government tries to do such things, lobby against the law.
I find it amazing that a story like this can garner over 100 posts about SCO, yet as far as I can determine nobody is able to view the story. What are you all blathering about?
No, sir, I feel guilt when I don't get my assignment done on time because OpenOffice doesn't like my window manager, and Abiword has too many dependencies, so I wrote it up in Emacs, but the professor complained about the format...
No, guilt is what you feel when using a system that doesn't "just work".
But that's the problem - India's competitive advantage has nothing to do with having better coders, or a greater supply, or even that American coders won't work for that much money - I'd work on interesting stuff for shelter, clothing, food, and internet. It's that India is a poor country. And while I certainly believe that high-tech jobs are a great way to increase the standard of living in a country, it would be better done if the generated wealth stayed in India longer.
Bullshit! No company will pay that low wage in the United States; it would be disproportionate with their entire pay structure and subject to a demand for raise the next time the economy picks up. The only reason it works for outsourcing is that there was no established pay for such a job in India on the level of what it is in the United States.
YES! And tell them how touching it was when they applauded after Bush mentioned that portions of USA PATRIOT will expire.
And how touching it was that they voted for it in the first place? If they were capable of being pressured or mood-of-the-moment'ed into this legislation then they shouldn't have been in office in the first place.
Mine! I mean, I know it's there somewhere. Just gotta move this window... no wait, that's a bunch of emacs windows, let's see, minimize this, close that, don't need that up there anymore...
Hits F11 key... Aah yes, so that's what my desktop looks like. I suppose I should change it. I mean, Christmas has been over for a month now.
I've been in the same situation. I've had Sun replace everything but the power supply on a machine and still have it experience inexplicable lockups. In that time I did not get the impression that Sun support knew what the hell they were doing.
Unfortunatley there are few workstation-side architectural constraints these days that would force the use of a Sun instead of an Itanic, AIX, or G5. All of these computers have excellent I/O bandwidth, where modern Suns have crappy disk controllers. The disk expansion options for Suns are just pathetic - for the price, you might as well just buy a G5 and an Xserve RAID.
I'm a longtime Sun user, and I still own several. But Sun has had a major downward slide in workstation quality over the past few years, esp with my experiences admining a lab of Blade 150s. Hopefully I can replace them with eMacs soon.
Wow. Not actually used a Sun recently, have you? Just as an FYI, the el-cheeso IDE chipset they use in the modern Blades, especially the 150, locks up the machine hard quite often. I've seen other machines that have had random lockups for no good reason, even after most of the hardware is replaced. I'm sorry, but no Sun workstation since the Ultra 60 has offered anything near that level of reliability; today they're just Emachines with SPARCs. It's kind of sad, but at least Apple offers good, reliable UNIX workstations these days.
Valuation is in fact defined as assets minus liabilities; however, the question is in how you place value on those assets and liabilities. There are several schools of thought in investing; some focus solely on the profit the company makes in the hope that the company will share such profit via a dividend; others, like value investing, simply decide to invest or divest based on whether the company is undervalued or overvalued at its current market cap. Warren Buffet's investing methodology is an example of value investing.
I think you are confused. Valuation has nothing to do with yearly profit - it is possible for a company with a very large valuation to do very poorly, just as much as it is for a small company to make a spectacularly large profit. Valuation is simply reflective of the company's assets minus its liabilities - if I'm sitting on the wealth of Ft. Knox but making a profit of only a buck a year, my valuation is still equal to the valuation of Ft. Knox (assuming I have no liabilities).
Whether Google is actually valued at $12 billion is another matter.
Oh, and I forgot to mention - prefix syntax is all the rage now, with XML. And all Lisp web servers that I'm aware of provide HTML-from-S-expression generation, which lets you use the prefix notation of lisp to generate your HTML inline. Very handy, and very relevant to web programming.
Lisp really isn't all that hard - you spend a little time up front getting used to it, and then you're never confused about the semantics of anything again (and if you are, the HyperSpec is there to help, with its clear and precise wording of all the language primitives). This advantage can't be beat - the quality of the ANSI Common Lisp spec really is a cut above anything else, and makes life much easier on a daily basis.
There are enough people using Lisp to sustain it as a community. This means that if you want to use it, you won't really want for support - it's an acceptable choice. So, if you can "turn your head inside out" you'll get a lot of advantages for it.
BTW, I still enjoy using my HP48GX, and HP has their new 49G+ out, with a 75MHz ARM processor and a SD slot. It's far beyond any other calculator on the market. Sometimes the slightly more difficult syntax has great advantages:-)
Why use JIT or a scripting language? You can have all the garbage-collected, dynamic benefits of Perl and Java, with mature native-compilers for an ANSI standard language, Common Lisp. I've written several web applications using the Araneida web server for SBCL, and I love it. Using the SLIME Emacs/Common Lisp interface, you can simply edit the definition of objects, methods, et al, hit Control-Meta-x, and refresh to see your new code compiled and running in the lisp image.
CLiki is a Common Lisp wiki written using Araneida. Other popular web systems for Common Lisp include CL-HTTPD, used for Bill Clinton's 96 campaign and Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, and Franz's AllegroServe.
So why would you pick Lisp for a web server? You said it yourself - "the standards change so fast". Lisp is not a language for AI, it's a language for rapid development in a changing domain, and it provides good-to-excellent performance at the same time (much better than Perl, PHP, and Java). The fact that it's an ANSI standard brings it much closer to "write once, run anywhere" than Java, and the large standard library makes certain programs even more portable than their C counterparts. So, the question is not "why Lisp?", it's "why not Lisp?".
Ugh, no. Your approach leaves out the single most important factor in designing a GUI interface to a program - error handling. When your backend program gets confused, or goes off into an infinite spinloop, your GUI frontend simply becomes confused too - it won't pop up an error; instead, it may pretend to work, or it might hang waiting for a response from the program.
There are two ways to solve this - bring the functionality into the same address space as the GUI (so if it hangs, force quitting won't leave the confused backend around), or use a network-style protocol with a defined ping/pong approach, and when the backend fails to ping, kill it.
But text-based interfaces are always fragile. Just look at any of the millions of cdrecord frontends out there. They never quite work properly, because cdrecord-of-the-week always has some new diagnostic message, or error, and the program gets confused.
Hit pause when the show comes on, and come back 15 minutes later (or set it up to record, and start watching 15 minutes into it). It works out perfectly. I do this all the time with my EyeTV.
Since I've got the EyeTV right-arrow key set up for 30-second skip, I actually stop to watch the interesting commercials too, like the ones for DS9 box sets:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you ought to take the time to read GEB again. There is much more in those short dialogues than meets the eye. It takes some time to figure it all out though.
Obviously the submitter has never attempted to teach introductory computer science with an eye towards theory. Teaching most languages has the effect of reaffirming in many students' minds that Computer Science is all about misplaced semicolons and curly brackets; it reinforces a cut-and-paste view of computer science. This is exactly what you don't want!
But if we want to talk about returning to roots, why don't we teach computer science with the lambda calculus? Actually some schools do use an extended lambda calculus, Scheme. This is actually what teaching Computer Science is all about: abstraction with an eye towards a study of the computable. Not to say that graduates shouldn't also be rigorously trained in how to program, but the best starting point for a computer science degree is in computer science, not programming.
Hm. Anti drunk-driving, pro safe driving and seatbelt usage spring to mind immediately. Anti youth smoking too.
When you're as big as the US, sometimes a little advertisement works wonders compared to the equivalent budget spent on enforcement.
Chances are they've confronted this issue before, that's all.
Do I need to remind you that despite whatever local enforcement policies are in effect, drug usage is illegal in the US? That's not a political issue ad, it's an ad designed to discourage lawbreaking. If you don't like the fact that the government tries to do such things, lobby against the law.
I find it amazing that a story like this can garner over 100 posts about SCO, yet as far as I can determine nobody is able to view the story. What are you all blathering about?
ldd is called "otool -L" on OS X. Hope that helps.
No, guilt is what you feel when using a system that doesn't "just work".
But that's the problem - India's competitive advantage has nothing to do with having better coders, or a greater supply, or even that American coders won't work for that much money - I'd work on interesting stuff for shelter, clothing, food, and internet. It's that India is a poor country. And while I certainly believe that high-tech jobs are a great way to increase the standard of living in a country, it would be better done if the generated wealth stayed in India longer.
Bullshit! No company will pay that low wage in the United States; it would be disproportionate with their entire pay structure and subject to a demand for raise the next time the economy picks up. The only reason it works for outsourcing is that there was no established pay for such a job in India on the level of what it is in the United States.
And how touching it was that they voted for it in the first place? If they were capable of being pressured or mood-of-the-moment'ed into this legislation then they shouldn't have been in office in the first place.
Hits F11 key... Aah yes, so that's what my desktop looks like. I suppose I should change it. I mean, Christmas has been over for a month now.
... and a lot worse than DS9's and Voyager's. You can't judge it against TNG, only against its direct predecessors.
That's gotta be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
I've been in the same situation. I've had Sun replace everything but the power supply on a machine and still have it experience inexplicable lockups. In that time I did not get the impression that Sun support knew what the hell they were doing.
Unfortunatley there are few workstation-side architectural constraints these days that would force the use of a Sun instead of an Itanic, AIX, or G5. All of these computers have excellent I/O bandwidth, where modern Suns have crappy disk controllers. The disk expansion options for Suns are just pathetic - for the price, you might as well just buy a G5 and an Xserve RAID.
I'm a longtime Sun user, and I still own several. But Sun has had a major downward slide in workstation quality over the past few years, esp with my experiences admining a lab of Blade 150s. Hopefully I can replace them with eMacs soon.
Wow. Not actually used a Sun recently, have you? Just as an FYI, the el-cheeso IDE chipset they use in the modern Blades, especially the 150, locks up the machine hard quite often. I've seen other machines that have had random lockups for no good reason, even after most of the hardware is replaced. I'm sorry, but no Sun workstation since the Ultra 60 has offered anything near that level of reliability; today they're just Emachines with SPARCs. It's kind of sad, but at least Apple offers good, reliable UNIX workstations these days.
Valuation is in fact defined as assets minus liabilities; however, the question is in how you place value on those assets and liabilities. There are several schools of thought in investing; some focus solely on the profit the company makes in the hope that the company will share such profit via a dividend; others, like value investing, simply decide to invest or divest based on whether the company is undervalued or overvalued at its current market cap. Warren Buffet's investing methodology is an example of value investing.
Whether Google is actually valued at $12 billion is another matter.
Oh, and I forgot to mention - prefix syntax is all the rage now, with XML. And all Lisp web servers that I'm aware of provide HTML-from-S-expression generation, which lets you use the prefix notation of lisp to generate your HTML inline. Very handy, and very relevant to web programming.
There are enough people using Lisp to sustain it as a community. This means that if you want to use it, you won't really want for support - it's an acceptable choice. So, if you can "turn your head inside out" you'll get a lot of advantages for it.
BTW, I still enjoy using my HP48GX, and HP has their new 49G+ out, with a 75MHz ARM processor and a SD slot. It's far beyond any other calculator on the market. Sometimes the slightly more difficult syntax has great advantages :-)
CLiki is a Common Lisp wiki written using Araneida. Other popular web systems for Common Lisp include CL-HTTPD, used for Bill Clinton's 96 campaign and Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, and Franz's AllegroServe.
So why would you pick Lisp for a web server? You said it yourself - "the standards change so fast". Lisp is not a language for AI, it's a language for rapid development in a changing domain, and it provides good-to-excellent performance at the same time (much better than Perl, PHP, and Java). The fact that it's an ANSI standard brings it much closer to "write once, run anywhere" than Java, and the large standard library makes certain programs even more portable than their C counterparts. So, the question is not "why Lisp?", it's "why not Lisp?".
There are two ways to solve this - bring the functionality into the same address space as the GUI (so if it hangs, force quitting won't leave the confused backend around), or use a network-style protocol with a defined ping/pong approach, and when the backend fails to ping, kill it.
But text-based interfaces are always fragile. Just look at any of the millions of cdrecord frontends out there. They never quite work properly, because cdrecord-of-the-week always has some new diagnostic message, or error, and the program gets confused.
Perhaps if they RFID-tagged Slashdot submissions, they could detect dups at a distance, before they were posted.
Hit pause when the show comes on, and come back 15 minutes later (or set it up to record, and start watching 15 minutes into it). It works out perfectly. I do this all the time with my EyeTV.
:-)
Since I've got the EyeTV right-arrow key set up for 30-second skip, I actually stop to watch the interesting commercials too, like the ones for DS9 box sets