If Perl is postmodern, maybe that explains why it's so fucking ugly. Perl code is about as easy to read as postmodern essays, and much like those essays, other users only pretend to understand each others' works.
But the third one is just beginning: the one which will determine how open the source of the primary OS is. If Microsoft wins it will be completely closed. If Apple wins it will be partially open. And if Linux wins it will be completely open.
OSX and the i*s have made Apple a major player again. This is when it starts to get interesting...
The vote was a referendum on whether to hold an election. There's nothing inherently wrong with this scheme (although it seems unlikely to achive presumed goals of either saving tax dollars or decreasing campaigning) and it could be applied fairly in democratic countries.
Critics of Iraqi politics assert that voting "no" on the referendum is not a rational option and therefore it is not democratic. However most of the news stories about the referendum admit that the punishment for voting "no" is a rumour. These stories cite the previous referendum as being 99.96% in favour of Hussein, yet that suggests that 4 in every 10,000 people were willing to risk the consequences.
No Americans are willing to admit that it could be the Iraqis actually do think that voting "yes" is in their best long-term interests. This is because Hussein's government must be shown to be illegitimate so its soldiers do not have to be considered POWs.
Hey, every IT employee should expect that day to come: the day they can be replaced with technology. It's no different now than in the Industrial Revolution except that the people being replaced now are from the same group that built their replacement. But that's capitalism, and in the long run becoming obsolete is good for society.
Free software will become increasingly valuable to companies because of economies of scale. If every company wrote their own web server in-house, none of them would approach the power of Apache. Now that they're realising the value, we've got to convince companies of two things:
Open source the software that does get made in-house; because if every company did it, then they'd all benefit.
Support open source projects that are valuable to them; because if they think they can get good stuff for free right now, they haven't seen anything yet. (Imagine if whenever software developer was made obsolete by free software the company donated 10% of their wage to the project!)
I worked at Royal Roads University, a small Canadian university with a focus on distance postgraduate degrees. It was common knowledge there that the real value in an education is interaction with your peers and professor. As a result, a lot of their education delivery theory focused around discussion groups.
MIT isn't really giving much of anything away. The valuable part of a university education is discussion with your peers and feedback from your professor. All you're getting on this website is a library of multimedia textbooks.
However this could be very valuable to other, much more modest institutions who can't afford to produce their own multimedia textbooks. To take this poverty to its logical extreme is to create entirely peer-driven classes -- no professor, everything marked by your classmates. Which is a much more exciting idea than just watching reproductive biology lectures naked.
Your opinion supports the theory that hands-on disciplines, like web design and software engineering, don't belong in the ivory tower. And I think that is exactly what will happen with all this free content. Which, amusingly enough, will return universities to their place as institutions only for the wealthy who have the money and time to do philosophy and political science.
The US is occupying many of the countries al Quadia call home. Not in an overt diplomatic sense, but rather through culture and influence. US troops are all over the Middle East declaring some actions just (Isreal vs. Palestine) and some unjust (Iraq vs. Kuwait). And the US military has nowhere near the influence over regular peoples' lives as the capitalist entertainment industry.
But what is more valuable: to lull Microsoft into a sense of security (pun?) so we can pull the rug out from under them once Palladium is widespread or help convince the world that a Palladium-like system is impossible?
Stop! Don't kill yourself! Move your corporeal self to a better place!
If you can't handle a drastic change, may I recommend Canada. Among other benefits, our banking sector is much better regulated than the US's. If the US completely falls apart they'll probably take Canada with them, but by then you will have had time to setup a life in a non-capitalist country.
Do honeypots have any value for teaching security experts? Could the study of crackers and cracking techniques ever belong outside the Sociology Dept. at a university?
I can certainly envision course projects surrounding the analysis of a real honeypot or perhaps a system that has been compramised by the teacher. But would this actually help the students or would they be better off learning in a more theoretical fashion? (Because cracking is too variable and changes too quickly for the study of specific techniques to be of value.)
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Dirty physicist, don't you know that Computer Scientists have no interest in this "reality" you speak of. VMs are better than the real thing, because then you don't have to worry about things like quality of service and storage space. If I wanted to know how a computer would react to certain inputs, I'd read the manual -- it's not some natural phenomenon that we need to gather empirical data on.
I know it's hard to believe, but some languages can actually enforce better code. There are at least three features which give developers this opportunity:
Strong Typing so more errors are caught at compile-time.
Exception Handling so those not caught at compile-time can still be dealt with properly.
No Side-Effects because this makes it much easier to prove program correctness; IOW: "enforce algorithms [and] understand design specs".
Haskell implements at least two of these features, however it is much slower than something like C#. For a company to change its devotion from cheap code to good code would do more than any mere language change. A dedication to good design would also alleviate some of the difficulties resulting in dynamic customers.
The difference with punks tagging bridges is that at least they can pretend they're Stick'n It to The Man. But P2P filesharing networks are anonymous enough to be without social relationships and homogeneous enough to be without a class structure. Clearly Rogerborg's observations are more similar to pissing in pools, which I believe is a much less complex (and therefore much more mysterious?) phenomenon than punks tagging bridges.
As far as I can tell, all copies of Solaris are the same. I got a quote on Sol9 for a 2CPU server yesterday, and in addition to the license it included a media bundle -- exactly the same product they'd sell me for a 1CPU server.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Sun cares naught for making a sysadmin's life easier. If it's not the hideous dtwm.fp config file for setting up CDE, it's the yp/passwd file for NIS accounts, or the joys of pkgadd. As the administrator on a Solaris-only network, I am quite sure that Sun hates me and seeks nothing more than my misery.
What is it with universities and Grid computing? Don't they realise that it scales poorly and is overkill for many applications? Oh right, if they sit up and say "Grid" they get funding...
Slashdot Mirror
If Perl is postmodern, maybe that explains why it's so fucking ugly. Perl code is about as easy to read as postmodern essays, and much like those essays, other users only pretend to understand each others' works.
Can you give us some more information (like references) on "neo-futurism"? Google doesn't return much besides its application to theatre...
The first two OS Wars may be over:
But the third one is just beginning: the one which will determine how open the source of the primary OS is. If Microsoft wins it will be completely closed. If Apple wins it will be partially open. And if Linux wins it will be completely open.
OSX and the i*s have made Apple a major player again. This is when it starts to get interesting...
The vote was a referendum on whether to hold an election. There's nothing inherently wrong with this scheme (although it seems unlikely to achive presumed goals of either saving tax dollars or decreasing campaigning) and it could be applied fairly in democratic countries.
Critics of Iraqi politics assert that voting "no" on the referendum is not a rational option and therefore it is not democratic. However most of the news stories about the referendum admit that the punishment for voting "no" is a rumour. These stories cite the previous referendum as being 99.96% in favour of Hussein, yet that suggests that 4 in every 10,000 people were willing to risk the consequences.
No Americans are willing to admit that it could be the Iraqis actually do think that voting "yes" is in their best long-term interests. This is because Hussein's government must be shown to be illegitimate so its soldiers do not have to be considered POWs.
Hey, every IT employee should expect that day to come: the day they can be replaced with technology. It's no different now than in the Industrial Revolution except that the people being replaced now are from the same group that built their replacement. But that's capitalism, and in the long run becoming obsolete is good for society.
Free software will become increasingly valuable to companies because of economies of scale. If every company wrote their own web server in-house, none of them would approach the power of Apache. Now that they're realising the value, we've got to convince companies of two things:
I worked at Royal Roads University, a small Canadian university with a focus on distance postgraduate degrees. It was common knowledge there that the real value in an education is interaction with your peers and professor. As a result, a lot of their education delivery theory focused around discussion groups.
MIT isn't really giving much of anything away. The valuable part of a university education is discussion with your peers and feedback from your professor. All you're getting on this website is a library of multimedia textbooks.
However this could be very valuable to other, much more modest institutions who can't afford to produce their own multimedia textbooks. To take this poverty to its logical extreme is to create entirely peer-driven classes -- no professor, everything marked by your classmates. Which is a much more exciting idea than just watching reproductive biology lectures naked.
Your opinion supports the theory that hands-on disciplines, like web design and software engineering, don't belong in the ivory tower. And I think that is exactly what will happen with all this free content. Which, amusingly enough, will return universities to their place as institutions only for the wealthy who have the money and time to do philosophy and political science.
The US is occupying many of the countries al Quadia call home. Not in an overt diplomatic sense, but rather through culture and influence. US troops are all over the Middle East declaring some actions just (Isreal vs. Palestine) and some unjust (Iraq vs. Kuwait). And the US military has nowhere near the influence over regular peoples' lives as the capitalist entertainment industry.
But what is more valuable: to lull Microsoft into a sense of security (pun?) so we can pull the rug out from under them once Palladium is widespread or help convince the world that a Palladium-like system is impossible?
Stop! Don't kill yourself! Move your corporeal self to a better place!
If you can't handle a drastic change, may I recommend Canada. Among other benefits, our banking sector is much better regulated than the US's. If the US completely falls apart they'll probably take Canada with them, but by then you will have had time to setup a life in a non-capitalist country.
If a children's toy (PS2 running Linux :) is more secure than your server (running a toy OS), you've got worse problems than a lack of attention!
Do honeypots have any value for teaching security experts? Could the study of crackers and cracking techniques ever belong outside the Sociology Dept. at a university?
I can certainly envision course projects surrounding the analysis of a real honeypot or perhaps a system that has been compramised by the teacher. But would this actually help the students or would they be better off learning in a more theoretical fashion? (Because cracking is too variable and changes too quickly for the study of specific techniques to be of value.)
According to some Australians, package installers already have licensing problems.
Don't space programs tend to be good investments? The technology gained by Cold War launches easily paid for the expenditure.
- Phil Greenspun
Dirty physicist, don't you know that Computer Scientists have no interest in this "reality" you speak of. VMs are better than the real thing, because then you don't have to worry about things like quality of service and storage space. If I wanted to know how a computer would react to certain inputs, I'd read the manual -- it's not some natural phenomenon that we need to gather empirical data on.
Sorry, make that all three. However Haskell is weak when it comes to modular designs that allow customers to smoothly change their requirements. :(
I know it's hard to believe, but some languages can actually enforce better code. There are at least three features which give developers this opportunity:
Haskell implements at least two of these features, however it is much slower than something like C#. For a company to change its devotion from cheap code to good code would do more than any mere language change. A dedication to good design would also alleviate some of the difficulties resulting in dynamic customers.
The difference with punks tagging bridges is that at least they can pretend they're Stick'n It to The Man. But P2P filesharing networks are anonymous enough to be without social relationships and homogeneous enough to be without a class structure. Clearly Rogerborg's observations are more similar to pissing in pools, which I believe is a much less complex (and therefore much more mysterious?) phenomenon than punks tagging bridges.
As far as I can tell, all copies of Solaris are the same. I got a quote on Sol9 for a 2CPU server yesterday, and in addition to the license it included a media bundle -- exactly the same product they'd sell me for a 1CPU server.
Xandros is currently in their second beta period.
To rephrase: how the hell can I get someone to not only trust me but pay me to do such sophisticated work straight out of college?!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Sun cares naught for making a sysadmin's life easier. If it's not the hideous dtwm.fp config file for setting up CDE, it's the yp/passwd file for NIS accounts, or the joys of pkgadd. As the administrator on a Solaris-only network, I am quite sure that Sun hates me and seeks nothing more than my misery.
It has been done at least by Soda Ash, you can find a RA and MP3 at the bottom of http://www.scifilullaby.com/band.html.
What is it with universities and Grid computing? Don't they realise that it scales poorly and is overkill for many applications? Oh right, if they sit up and say "Grid" they get funding...
(At least the NSF and NSERC are consistent.)