For the most part, end users of a unix system experience the same behaviour. cd is cd is cd, cdup is cdup is cdup. cp, mv, vi/pico/emacs are all there, etc. etc.
$ which cdup $ which emacs $ which pico $ uname Linux $
On a different note, UNIX has a "philosophy": everything is a file,
Except of course that not everything in Unix is a file. That's Plan 9. If everything was a file, you would not have open and pipe and socket with friends. If everything is a file, you'd have one API. Unix doesn't.
The unix philosophy has allowed me to do things that no one has ever really been able to do in NT without breaking out Viual C++. I mean seriously; things like sed, awk, grep, emacs and other things are god sends for being able to do almost anything you want.
NT can surprise you. I once wrote a long, complicated shell script that would install and upgrade objects in databases. All our clients would use it. It used all kind of shell tricks, and tools like sed, awk and grep. It was developed on Solaris. Then I had to port it to HP. Which required some changed. (I remember that grep under Solaris had options not supported by HP's grep; but they both claimed to be POSIX compliant). That program was later ported to NT. It required one change: a different directory than/tmp was used as scratch place.
There can be a zillion reasons to hate NT (I would never use it myself). But lack of standard Unix tools isn't an appropriate reason - they have been ported.
Errm, OK I'm a little biased, but Perl is more suited to quick hacks and text processing than full-blown applications.
...we've got a scripting module as part of our application which is roughly 3-4 Mb of Python code which I can maintain and extend quite easily.
Of course, the Perl equivalent of the 4 Mb of Python code take only 30 lines, giving it the image of a "quick hack and text processing" language not capable of doing "full-blown applications".
Python doesn't have the speed of C, or even of Perl and C++. Python doesn't have the robustness of Ada. There's no Python standard. There isn't the strictness and implementation hiding of Eiffel. Python is a nice language, but like any other language, it isn't suitable for everything. Only zealots claim so.
I would like them to be flexible and recognize a good thing when they see it.
ASCII has been around for quite a while, and is based on letters that have been around for even longer. From the point of PG, that is the good thing. I fail to see why ASCII isn't flexible. No format is supported more than ASCII.
As for ascii being a subset of unicode -- yes, of course. And web browsers still can view HTML 1.0.
There never was "HTML 1.0". The Project Gutenberg has been around 3 times as long as web browsers. I fail to see your point - you don't find e-texts of PG with "designed for barfwowser 7.XXX - download now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". That's a good thing.
and offered all of us jobs. he says what his company does is rapid prototyping and on-site tweaking to said prototypes, and that it is not unlike contest coding.
I don't know about you, but I rather not work for a company where I'd have deadlines measured in hours while I have to share my workstation with two other people. I'd run away from any company that says "oh, our working environment looks just like a programming contest".
and you say "some test inputs" as if to imply that the programs are not well tested... try it some time, the judge data is usually very good,
I've been there. On both sides of the fence; as a participant, and as a organizer/judge. It's not that the programs aren't very well tested, but the test input will confirm to very specific specifications. It doesn't have to survive the typing monkey test.
Maybe you can argue that since it isn't capitalized in your domain name, it doesn't infringe upon their trademark.
I bet Coca-Cola doesn't just hire stupid people. Someone overthere will now that host and domain names are case insensitive, and that Coke.ch will resolve as coke.ch.
Even if Coke is trademarked, they can't block the use in unrelated areas. You can have Coke softdrinks and Coke shoes for example.
Sure, but what does that have to do with domain names? There isn't a set of domain names for softdrinks, and another set of domain names for shoes. Nor is there an internet for shoes, and a different, unrelated internet for softdrinks.
There is just one, big internet. Everything is related.
SGML would be better. Librarians invented SGML for exactly such purposes (long-term data storage). It allows you to encode all sorts of things, like hyperlinks, proper footnotes, typesetting/formatting information, etc.
First of all, SGML annotates content and no typesetting or formatting information. It's done so on purpose. Formatting is done with style sheets.
Having footnotes and such would be a problem for PG. Footnotes are the work of someone else. And hence copyrighted. Which means you cannot put them on PG. (Unless your footnotes themselves would be old enough).
I think a lightweight SGML variant would be ideal for PG.
I don't think so. It already takes a lot of work to turn dead trees in error free flat files. Even if a scanner is used, one still needs countless hours of error correcting. Marking up more information means even more work - and since it requires tools, knowledge of the tools, and knowledge of the meta language used to mark up the text, means less people to do the job. More work with less people, just to create things PG hasn't been aiming for the past 30 years doesn't seem like a good deal to me.
Once you have the content in a decent markup language (something nice and simple like HTML, perhaps) it can be converted to other nicely-formatted pages. With plain ASCII, you just plain don't have the formatting information -- it's essentially a lossy way of storing books.
Here's a question for you. The Project Gutenberg started in 1971. In which format, for which free, crossplatforms tools existed in 1971 would you like to see the Project Gutenbergs e-texts?
As a side point -- Unicode will make ASCII obsolete...
Odd. ASCII used to be a subset of Unicode. Did they change the first 128 characters of Unicode recently? That's quite shocking news.
I rather see the ACM contest use python and/or perl than Java.
There was once a programming contest that allowed the use of Perl. I think it was in one of the contests to gain access to a regional final of the ACM contest, but I might be mistaken. There was a one-man team. Who solved all problems correctly within an hour. Using Perl. The team finishing second (not using Perl) solved half of the problems.
Perl is no longer allowed in ACM programming contests.
What surprises me is the number of people here complaining about problem F, describing in detail how the dealt with it, but noone said they submitted a clearification request.
They must be getting job offers like crazy... And if they arent, they should.
I doubt they will get job offers, and I doubt any company is foolish enough to offer them jobs based on such a contest. I've participated twice in the European finals (once missing a trip to the world finals because despite ending high enough to earn a ticket, all the teams in front of us were from the same country, and there was a 2 team/country limit), and I've organized regional finals. The exercises to be solved are merely puzzles. You have limited time, and limited resources. There's a decent amount of luck involved. If you instantly recognize a problem and map that to a fairly standard problem, to gain valuable time. Or to interpret the wording of the exercise the same way as the organizers intended, and not have to wait for your clearification request to be processed. (Or worse, having to redo part of the program because another team submitted a clearification request, and it turns out your interpretation wasn't correct.) Even losing 20 minutes can be the difference between solving 4 and 7 problems! The contest doesn't judge the quality of the program, or its efficiency, maintainability, or anything that's actually important for a program. All it needs to do is compile, and produce the correct output on some test inputs. Of course it helps if you are a good programmer, but other important skills are typing speed, and the skill to avoid typos.
...and then someone could come take it all and make their modifications to it proprietry.
Well, no, they can't. Sure, they can take a copy, make a trivial modification to it, and make that proprietary, but so what? They can't take away the license on what's released, all that code is still available. Red Hat BSD cannot remove code they don't own from the available pool of code. If the modifications are insignificant, who cares whether there's a proprietary version? If the modifications are substancial, with lots of new features, you would be better off if the proprietary stuff was open, sure. But if the alternative was no new features, you are off worse, as you have less choices.
For my part, I have always found the GPL more fair. I don't mind giving things away, but I do mind people misusing my gifts for their own profit, instead of giving something away to the world themselves.
The GPL doesn't force people "borrowing" your code to release their modifications to the world. It's only that if they distribute the modifications, they have to provide source. But if the modifications remain in a closed circle, so can the sources of those modifications.
The bomb was dropped in answer to a World War, something that (thankfully!!!) the last two generations have not had to deal with. Millions dead, war without end...until the Manhattan Project delivered the Bomb. The alternative was Universal Facism/Militarism with only the Third Reich (the Germans), the Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere (the Japanese) and a _very_ isolated North/South American Hegemony left to duke it out. Who do you think would have won?
Please check some elementary facts. Germany capitulated in May 1945. Nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan on August 1945, three months after Germany was defeated. By then, Japanese troops were kicked out of most of Asia, and what they still occupied outside of Japan wouldn't last long. The Soviet Union, without whom Germany would not have been defeated, was preparing to enter the war in Asia as well. After losing the race to Berlin, the USA wanted to win the race to Tokyo. It wanted the presence near the Soviet Union. Yes, shortly after the bombs were dropped, Japan capitulated. But they might as well have done so without bombs being dropped. Or for that matter, they might not have capitulated untill the last Japanese city was nuked.
The Japanese were in development of 'heavy water' bombs, as well as the Germans.
The first nuclear bombs were not 'heavy water' (fusion) bombs. Neither Germany nor Japan was close to producing an atomic bomb, nor would they have had the means to deliver them. Germany lost their dominance in the sky shortly after losing the Battle for Britain, and Japan in early 1942 after loss of their heavy aircraft carriers. (The battle in the Coral Sea, IIRC). Yes, Germany did have the V2 rocket at the end of the war, but having an atomic bomb and having a rocket are two things. It's non-trivial to have the bomb actually explode after the rocket trip.
The use of the bombs has been very dubious, and certainly lead to the fact they were never used again. I'm not argueing it was a bad decision to drop them (nor am I saying it was a good one), but it isn't as simple as you present.
The point behind this little thought exercise is to get you to think about tools and materials and where they come from. Humans have spent all of our existance (from rocks to rockets) perfecting their use, and I doubt my Lego mindstorm can pull it off.
It would be an interesting exercise to build a robot out of Lego pieces, that, when placed in the middle of a heap of Lego pieces, can build a copy of itself.
The next exercise would be to have the robot build a close approximation of itself when not all the right pieces are available. (Mutant robots!)
Therefore, given enough time, they should take over the entire galaxy, if not the universe.
Interesting reasoning. Two points however:
Some society taken over by out of control robots has to be the first. It could be us.
With the same reasoning, in the 13 billion years this galaxy existed, we haven't been taken over at all - not by robots, not by lifeforms. With the similar reasoning, there is no other advanced life in the galaxy. Which would invalidate the postulates.
You can be absolutely certain that all intelligent robots or computers will always have these or similar laws built in.
Aside from the fact that those rules are very difficult to formalize, what makes you think all (if any) robot and/or computer maker/programmer will want to build this in? What fun would it be to make smart bombs if they have Asimovs robot laws build in? Not even Robocop obayed rule 1.
Don't you consider the creation of a computer that no human can beat at chess a "significant advance in AI"?
No. In fact, it shows we have barely made the first steps. Chess is an utterly trivial process compared to what goes on in humans. It's small, bounded domain, which can be formalized easily. It took decades to match humans - and that in an area where computers should excell compared to humans. And also note that the computations done by chess computers in no way simulate the thinking process of humans behind the boards. Another small, bounded domain with trivial rules is Go. There's no Go equivalent for Deep Blue, and it isn't likely there will be one anytime soon. Humans wipe the floor with computers, in what should be the computers home turf.
The human brain and though process have been studied for longer and by more people, than the concept of automated computing. We still understand little of it, and there's no useful formal model.
The effort and time it took to create Deep Blue makes me think that noone reading slashdot right now will ever see a computer(program) passing the Turing test.
So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design.
Excuse me? Bottom up design isn't a magic wand. If you don't understand the problem, no design, whether bottom or top down will work. If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it.
Slashdot Mirror
$ which cdup
$ which emacs
$ which pico
$ uname
Linux
$
Does that make Linux a Windows variant?
-- Abigail
Except of course that not everything in Unix is a file. That's Plan 9. If everything was a file, you would not have open and pipe and socket with friends. If everything is a file, you'd have one API. Unix doesn't.
-- Abigail
NT can surprise you. I once wrote a long, complicated shell script that would install and upgrade objects in databases. All our clients would use it. It used all kind of shell tricks, and tools like sed, awk and grep. It was developed on Solaris. Then I had to port it to HP. Which required some changed. (I remember that grep under Solaris had options not supported by HP's grep; but they both claimed to be POSIX compliant). That program was later ported to NT. It required one change: a different directory than /tmp was used as scratch place.
There can be a zillion reasons to hate NT (I would never use it myself). But lack of standard Unix tools isn't an appropriate reason - they have been ported.
-- Abigail
Of course, the Perl equivalent of the 4 Mb of Python code take only 30 lines, giving it the image of a "quick hack and text processing" language not capable of doing "full-blown applications".
-- Abigail
-- Abigail
Yeah, for sufficient values of "new". Perl 5.005 could do that. Noone used it though...
-- Abigail
But there is coke.com and coke.ch - or should, as said before, we just ditch those TLD's, and go straight for www.coke?
coke.com is for shoes and coke.ch is for softdrinks?
No! There is a reason for TLD's!
Ah, I get it. Only Switzerland has cocaine addicts, right?
-- Abigail
ASCII has been around for quite a while, and is based on letters that have been around for even longer. From the point of PG, that is the good thing. I fail to see why ASCII isn't flexible. No format is supported more than ASCII.
As for ascii being a subset of unicode -- yes, of course. And web browsers still can view HTML 1.0.
There never was "HTML 1.0". The Project Gutenberg has been around 3 times as long as web browsers. I fail to see your point - you don't find e-texts of PG with "designed for barfwowser 7.XXX - download now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". That's a good thing.
-- Abigail
and offered all of us jobs. he says what his company does is rapid prototyping and on-site tweaking to said prototypes, and that it is not unlike contest coding.
I don't know about you, but I rather not work for a company where I'd have deadlines measured in hours while I have to share my workstation with two other people. I'd run away from any company that says "oh, our working environment looks just like a programming contest".
and you say "some test inputs" as if to imply that the programs are not well tested... try it some time, the judge data is usually very good,
I've been there. On both sides of the fence; as a participant, and as a organizer/judge. It's not that the programs aren't very well tested, but the test input will confirm to very specific specifications. It doesn't have to survive the typing monkey test.
-- Abigail
I bet Coca-Cola doesn't just hire stupid people. Someone overthere will now that host and domain names are case insensitive, and that Coke.ch will resolve as coke.ch.
-- Abigail
Sure, but what does that have to do with domain names? There isn't a set of domain names for softdrinks, and another set of domain names for shoes. Nor is there an internet for shoes, and a different, unrelated internet for softdrinks.
There is just one, big internet. Everything is related.
-- Abigail
First of all, SGML annotates content and no typesetting or formatting information. It's done so on purpose. Formatting is done with style sheets.
Having footnotes and such would be a problem for PG. Footnotes are the work of someone else. And hence copyrighted. Which means you cannot put them on PG. (Unless your footnotes themselves would be old enough).
I think a lightweight SGML variant would be ideal for PG.
I don't think so. It already takes a lot of work to turn dead trees in error free flat files. Even if a scanner is used, one still needs countless hours of error correcting. Marking up more information means even more work - and since it requires tools, knowledge of the tools, and knowledge of the meta language used to mark up the text, means less people to do the job. More work with less people, just to create things PG hasn't been aiming for the past 30 years doesn't seem like a good deal to me.
-- Abigail
Here's a question for you. The Project Gutenberg started in 1971. In which format, for which free, crossplatforms tools existed in 1971 would you like to see the Project Gutenbergs e-texts?
As a side point -- Unicode will make ASCII obsolete...
Odd. ASCII used to be a subset of Unicode. Did they change the first 128 characters of Unicode recently? That's quite shocking news.
-- Abigail
Not new at all. That rule existed when I participated in the '80s, and when I organized a contest in 1992, we had that rule as well.
-- Abigail
There was once a programming contest that allowed the use of Perl. I think it was in one of the contests to gain access to a regional final of the ACM contest, but I might be mistaken. There was a one-man team. Who solved all problems correctly within an hour. Using Perl. The team finishing second (not using Perl) solved half of the problems.
Perl is no longer allowed in ACM programming contests.
-- Abigail
What surprises me is the number of people here complaining about problem F, describing in detail how the dealt with it, but noone said they submitted a clearification request.
-- Abigail
I doubt they will get job offers, and I doubt any company is foolish enough to offer them jobs based on such a contest. I've participated twice in the European finals (once missing a trip to the world finals because despite ending high enough to earn a ticket, all the teams in front of us were from the same country, and there was a 2 team/country limit), and I've organized regional finals. The exercises to be solved are merely puzzles. You have limited time, and limited resources. There's a decent amount of luck involved. If you instantly recognize a problem and map that to a fairly standard problem, to gain valuable time. Or to interpret the wording of the exercise the same way as the organizers intended, and not have to wait for your clearification request to be processed. (Or worse, having to redo part of the program because another team submitted a clearification request, and it turns out your interpretation wasn't correct.) Even losing 20 minutes can be the difference between solving 4 and 7 problems! The contest doesn't judge the quality of the program, or its efficiency, maintainability, or anything that's actually important for a program. All it needs to do is compile, and produce the correct output on some test inputs. Of course it helps if you are a good programmer, but other important skills are typing speed, and the skill to avoid typos.
-- Abigail
Well, no, they can't. Sure, they can take a copy, make a trivial modification to it, and make that proprietary, but so what? They can't take away the license on what's released, all that code is still available. Red Hat BSD cannot remove code they don't own from the available pool of code. If the modifications are insignificant, who cares whether there's a proprietary version? If the modifications are substancial, with lots of new features, you would be better off if the proprietary stuff was open, sure. But if the alternative was no new features, you are off worse, as you have less choices.
-- Abigail
The GPL doesn't force people "borrowing" your code to release their modifications to the world. It's only that if they distribute the modifications, they have to provide source. But if the modifications remain in a closed circle, so can the sources of those modifications.
-- Abigail
Please check some elementary facts. Germany capitulated in May 1945. Nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan on August 1945, three months after Germany was defeated. By then, Japanese troops were kicked out of most of Asia, and what they still occupied outside of Japan wouldn't last long. The Soviet Union, without whom Germany would not have been defeated, was preparing to enter the war in Asia as well. After losing the race to Berlin, the USA wanted to win the race to Tokyo. It wanted the presence near the Soviet Union. Yes, shortly after the bombs were dropped, Japan capitulated. But they might as well have done so without bombs being dropped. Or for that matter, they might not have capitulated untill the last Japanese city was nuked.
The Japanese were in development of 'heavy water' bombs, as well as the Germans.
The first nuclear bombs were not 'heavy water' (fusion) bombs. Neither Germany nor Japan was close to producing an atomic bomb, nor would they have had the means to deliver them. Germany lost their dominance in the sky shortly after losing the Battle for Britain, and Japan in early 1942 after loss of their heavy aircraft carriers. (The battle in the Coral Sea, IIRC). Yes, Germany did have the V2 rocket at the end of the war, but having an atomic bomb and having a rocket are two things. It's non-trivial to have the bomb actually explode after the rocket trip.
The use of the bombs has been very dubious, and certainly lead to the fact they were never used again. I'm not argueing it was a bad decision to drop them (nor am I saying it was a good one), but it isn't as simple as you present.
-- Abigail
It would be an interesting exercise to build a robot out of Lego pieces, that, when placed in the middle of a heap of Lego pieces, can build a copy of itself.
The next exercise would be to have the robot build a close approximation of itself when not all the right pieces are available. (Mutant robots!)
-- Abigail
Interesting reasoning. Two points however:
-- Abigail
Aside from the fact that those rules are very difficult to formalize, what makes you think all (if any) robot and/or computer maker/programmer will want to build this in? What fun would it be to make smart bombs if they have Asimovs robot laws build in? Not even Robocop obayed rule 1.
-- Abigail
No. In fact, it shows we have barely made the first steps. Chess is an utterly trivial process compared to what goes on in humans. It's small, bounded domain, which can be formalized easily. It took decades to match humans - and that in an area where computers should excell compared to humans. And also note that the computations done by chess computers in no way simulate the thinking process of humans behind the boards. Another small, bounded domain with trivial rules is Go. There's no Go equivalent for Deep Blue, and it isn't likely there will be one anytime soon. Humans wipe the floor with computers, in what should be the computers home turf.
The human brain and though process have been studied for longer and by more people, than the concept of automated computing. We still understand little of it, and there's no useful formal model.
The effort and time it took to create Deep Blue makes me think that noone reading slashdot right now will ever see a computer(program) passing the Turing test.
-- Abigail
Excuse me? Bottom up design isn't a magic wand. If you don't understand the problem, no design, whether bottom or top down will work. If you don't have a deep understanding of what you want to simulate - you won't simulate it.
-- Abigail