I have a friend that went to a very well respected university and majored in math. Oh, and by the way, he was brilliant. Senior year he began to take more and more CS classes as he realized that his job options were limited and he had lost interest in going to graduate school. He told me that he regretted not majoring in CS since he was enjoying it and was able to apply some of his math knowledge. He ran out of time though and didn't take as much CS as he would have liked.
He ended up working for the NSA.
I hear from friends of friends that he hates it.
So what is the moral of this story? The great thing about college is that you get to explore a variety of subjects. Since you will obviously already have college credit going in that will give you that much more freedom to explore. Take classes in CS, engineering, art, dance, whatever. Take CS theory classes rather than programming courses. You might find that you really like it.
As far as what school to go to (it is probably too late for this if you are a senior) I would suggest being an average sized fish in a big pond rather than the big fish in a little pond. The great thing about going to a prestigious university isn't that you get a diploma from such and such U. The great thing is the people that will surround you. I learned more from my peers than from my professors. Living in the dorms was amazing, both my wife and I wish we could go back in many ways. I would not have had the same experience going to the local commuter school, regardless of how good it is.
I don't disagree that software is fundamentally different from other works, but I would like to point out a slight error in your post.
You state that:
Software isn't like a painting, or a book, which you write once and never substantially modify. Sure, a second edition of a book may have some typos fixed, but I've never seen the author go back and make corrections to flaws in the plot (even if they should:-) ).
Now that just isn't true. Remember that I loaned your wife The Mayor of Casterbridge in France? The 30 page preface to the edition that I had explained how the work had evolved and changed substatially over time. There were at least three major editions that differed greatly from one another. A more recent example would be The Hobbit. The way in which Bilbo obtained the his magic ring was changed after The Lord of the Rings was published in order to make it mesh better with the trilogy.
Finally as was mentioned here on/. recently, how many different versions of Bladerunner are there? What about the differences between Almost Famous and Untitled? Does the latter have a separate copyright? I have no idea.
My point is that even in the past authors refined their works. Now that DVD's are popular despite the/. crowds weak efforts to boycott, the existence of many different versions of a work is not spectacular nor is it limited to software. I also have no idea how copyright law treats these works.
BTW, want to borrow my Superman Special Editon DVD? It has some of the cool scenes that were in the ABC edit but not all of them. I KNEW that when I saw it on TV as a kid it was different than it had been in the theater!
If I break the GPL, I can be sued for damages, etc., and must stop distribution. My license is revoked, etc., etc. Can I then go out, download a fresh copy and distribute under the terms of the GPL? Stallman says no, I'm not certain. That's where this case is questionable.
What if mySmallCompany breaks the GPL and it stopped from future distribution of a particular piece of software? I then found myOtherSmallCompany. Can I distribute the software in a compliant manner? Obviously this solution won't work for large companies (IBM) but what if my company has 10 employees?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think tucking is entirely about aerodynamics.
Since you have obviously never skied perhaps the following story will be illustrative:
I was at Alta one day and it was blowing so hard that the only way to get downhill was to get into a tuck. If you stood upright the wind would actually blow you UP the mountain. After two runs they shut down the lifts since the chairs were swinging wildly. I guess I could have simply started at the bottom and skied up the hill with the wind blowing my up and then come back down in a tuck but the ice that had formed on my beard was telling me that I should stay in the lodge.
p.s. What does sort of "rotational momentum" does a object that is not rotating have?
Get to know about John Harrison, who made the first 'accurate' timekeeper, for use at sea to measure longitude. See Harrisons first accurate time peices of the world, H1 thru H4, where H1-H3 still ticks today.
Caldera got $250 million in their settlement. That happens to be a lot of money. If it went to trial Be might get more, but they might be willing to settle as well.
I took his class and it was very interesting. One of the most memorable things that I learned is that there is no single "right amount of sleep" for everyone. Some people need more, others need less. The range that he reports is 2 to 10 hours a night. If you need 6 hours a night then that is what you need and 8 is too much. If you need 9 then you had better get 9 and getting less is harmful. Here is what his website has to say on the subject.
One of the other very interesting things I learned in his class was the concept of sleep latency. He has developed tests that can actually measure how sleep deprived a person is. Once you accumulate sleep debt it doesn't go away until you make that sleep up. Thus if you are a person who needs 7 hours of sleep a night and one night you only get 4 hours of sleep you will be sleep deprived until you make up that 3 hours that you missed. You can do the next night by sleeping 10 hours or you could continue to sleep 7 hours a night and run around sleep deprived for months until you make up the sleep.
I would trust his opinion more than some researchers who do not specialize in sleep and merely noticed a correlation while conducting a study that wasn't related to sleep or sleep disorders. On the subject of life expectancy he actually mentioned in class that life expectancy is correlated with the amount on sleep that you need each night. Someone who needs only 4 hours of sleep each night, he used President Clinton as an example, will have a shorter life expectancy. This directly contradicts the study mentioned in this article.
First of all, you don't have to have the student recite the material in front of the class. They could write it down instead. That way they don't "expose" anyone else in the class to the material they choose.
They could also write an essay on why they choose the passage they did and why it is an important passage to preserve.
If you are going to limit it then you would have to be pretty strict in order to avoid having to make any judgement calls. The easiest way to do is to limit them to memorizing passages from works studied in the class.
I wouldn't try to ensure that the idea wouldn't fly. Instead I would try to insure that it was meaningful to each of the students.
I appreciate that high school isn't college, but it also isn't grade school.
Are you trying to be ironic by listing restrictions? If the student decides that preseving scripture or something indecent is important to them then why shouldn't they preserve it. At the end of the book, what is the work that was memorized?
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I remember that in 1996 or 1997 there was an interesting database class at Stanford. The premise of the class was, "We have a very large database of the the text of a bunch of web pages and of the links between those pages. This class will explore things that you could do with that database." Basically everyone that took the class came up with their own project to do some sort of interesting searches on this data. The group that put the class together had a demo webpage at http://google.stanford.edu.
One of my friends tried to get me to take the class but I refused. I think my reason was that Jeffrey Ullman was associated with the course somehow and I couldn't stand him. His books were ok, but the few times that I went in to get help from him he was totally condescending. I decided never to take a class from him again. Interesting how some people who are so smart think that their smarts makes up for their complete lack of courtesy and/or patience. So that is how I missed out on having something to do with Google. Aren't I lame? Yes Andy, I know you told me to take it.
You have an excellent point. Here's some more food for thought:
How much expertise does it take to understand what the hell is going on in the Win2k code? I have no idea. Maybe it is a bastion of simplicity. How much expertise does it take to understand the Linux source code? Is it harder or easier than Win 2K? Is identifying security issues easier in one than the other?
Are there companies paying people to read the Linux source and make it more secure? IBM? RedHat? The NSA? HP? VA? Ok, that last one was a joke. But seriously, are these full-time developers going to do a good job of finding security issues? If Linux is easier to read/fix/find the bugs in than Windows are these people going to be more productive than their counterparts at Microsoft?
While we're at it, which community of application developers is more security-aware, Linux of Windows? Which OS makes it easier to write insecure applications?
Well no we know what kind of evil hacker you'd be.:) I think that there are plenty of people who would like to see their Outlook virus show up on the national news. There are also plenty of people liek you.
Is it a surprise that there were more vunerabilities DISCOVERED for Linux than for Win 2K? How many people are looking over the source code of Win 2K for bugs? Now how many have access to the couse code for Linux? It seems pretty obvious where you will find more bugs in the short term. Also, do you think that Microsoft "announces" any and all bugs that it finds internally or are these just bugs that were found outside of Microsoft? How easy is it to find these bugs in Windows without the source? How many more would be found if source code was availible?
In the long term Linux will have progressively fewer bugs/vulnerabilities due to its open source nature. Look at the numbers on the same chart for NetBSD. There were 9 vulnerabilities found in 2001, and 42 found in Win 2K. 54 for RedHat and only 2 for TurboLinux.
The author of this/. story asks, "is AmigaXL the one true future of Amiga...?"
An answer your question from the article:
"Is this the future of Amiga computing?," you may ask. Although this package offers a very valuable addition to the options currently available, the future of Amiga computing lies with PPC based Amiga 4.x compatible computers and other AmigaDE enabled solutions.
I am sure that I am not the only person here who has ported an OpenGL game from one platform to another but nobody else has mentioned it so here goes.
For my graphics class in college we had to write an Asteroids program in OpenGL. I decided that it was kind of lame to do all the work to render asteroids and ships in 3-D only to shoot them in a 2-D plane. So I implemented a 3-D space shooter involving asteroids. It soon became apparent that in order for there to be enough asteroids to hit you there had to be A LOT of asteroids. The number that sticks in my head is 400. Since shooting 400 asteroids was pretty dumb I added some Tie-Fighters to the mix and had the objective be to shoot the Tie-Fighters.
All the work in this class was done on Macintosh computers. I was the proud owner of a Mac Performa 6200. It ran at 66 MHz, with no 3-D graphics card. I actually got my little game to run at a reasonable speed on it. Everybody else in the class wrote games that were played in a 2-D plane and many of them didn't run fast even on the brand new G3s that were showing up around campus.
Now for the point of my story. After graduation I went to work for a certain company and they gave my a nice laptop. It ran Windows. I decided it would be nice to try to play my game on it. The port was EXTREMELY easy. I had to add a crappy Win32 main and I had to replace the keypress codes since I hadn't used GLUT for kepresses since it didn't work with multiple keypresses. I also yanked the sound code out since it was Mac specific. But it took only a few hours to have the game up and running.
If you want to see the result you can get it here. Source is there too.
I later loaded Linux on my laptop and ported the game to Linux. It took a bit longer to find working keypress calls. I ended up using SDL without porting the whole game to SDL. The result was a little ugly but the game worked just fine. I haven't invested the time needed to polish up the Linux version is all.
Looking back I know that it would be very easy to write this OpenGL based game in such a way that it would run on all three of these platforms with a simple recompile if I had used #IFDEFs. Being lazy and busy with other things I haven't done that. But it is impressive how portable a game written in OpenGL can be.
Oh, and anyone can explain the Riemann Zeta function after a suitable introduction. What you should shoot for is a child who can explain why it's *important*.
I would think that a child that can explain WHAT is important in life and then his/her life accordingly. I would submit that in the overall scheme of things the Riemann Zeta function is low on the list.
But the should still get a Cringley icon. I recently suggested photos having to do with Dave Letterman and got modded down for it. Because of that evil moderation I won't reproduce the links of the photos, but those willing to do the research will find that they are strangely similar. Dave and "Robert" that is. We don't know his real name do we? Could it be...... Letterman???? Perhaps twins separated at birth?
Back when I first learned Java (1996?) I thought that native compilation would solve some of the speed problems that came with Java. This article makes it look like the speed-up might not even exist. But let me get to my idea.
I also realized that native compilation would destroy the cross-platform capabilities of Java. So I always thought it would be cool to distribute Java apps with both native compiled code for a specific platform and Java bytecode too. That way if you happened to be running the target platform you could get the speedup. If not you could still run the app, and maybe even compile the bytecode to a native app for your platform. This is similar to the fat-binary idea that Macs used when they switched from 68k chips to PPC, allowing a binary to run on either platform.
By/.ing this site we hurt not only ourselves, but many foolish investors that would otherwise be able to see it and learn!
I wonder if the SEC anticipated getting/.ed when they estimated how much of a load this site would need to bear. What are their bandwidth costs? Is this/.ing hurting taxpayers?
There was no flaming hot in the article I submitted. It was actaully very similar to the one that hit the front page.
And I KNOW that the come down frequently. I still thing that there should be a mechanism to control the ones that have parts that can survive re-entry.
I've dropped my thinkpad (actually I dropped the backpack containg my thinkpad) a few times and it still works fine. However, I am wondering how the editors ever put this up. Why would you WANT to stack books on it? Do you ask how many people the roof of your car can support before purchasing a car? Do you ask how many rocks you can throw at your TV before it breaks? My advice is to treat your laptop nicely. Also, I would guess that if you jump up and down on it it might break.
Would it have significantly less energy if it were cold? I don't think so...;^)
While you might be right, it would look better if it were hot. If they made a movie about it afterwards you can be sure that it wouldn't come down cold.
Slashdot Mirror
He ended up working for the NSA.
I hear from friends of friends that he hates it.
So what is the moral of this story? The great thing about college is that you get to explore a variety of subjects. Since you will obviously already have college credit going in that will give you that much more freedom to explore. Take classes in CS, engineering, art, dance, whatever. Take CS theory classes rather than programming courses. You might find that you really like it.
As far as what school to go to (it is probably too late for this if you are a senior) I would suggest being an average sized fish in a big pond rather than the big fish in a little pond. The great thing about going to a prestigious university isn't that you get a diploma from such and such U. The great thing is the people that will surround you. I learned more from my peers than from my professors. Living in the dorms was amazing, both my wife and I wish we could go back in many ways. I would not have had the same experience going to the local commuter school, regardless of how good it is.
I don't disagree that software is fundamentally different from other works, but I would like to point out a slight error in your post.
You state that:
Software isn't like a painting, or a book, which you write once and never substantially modify. Sure, a second edition of a book may have some typos fixed, but I've never seen the author go back and make corrections to flaws in the plot (even if they should :-) ).
Now that just isn't true. Remember that I loaned your wife The Mayor of Casterbridge in France? The 30 page preface to the edition that I had explained how the work had evolved and changed substatially over time. There were at least three major editions that differed greatly from one another. A more recent example would be The Hobbit. The way in which Bilbo obtained the his magic ring was changed after The Lord of the Rings was published in order to make it mesh better with the trilogy.
Finally as was mentioned here on /. recently, how many different versions of Bladerunner are there? What about the differences between Almost Famous and Untitled? Does the latter have a separate copyright? I have no idea.
My point is that even in the past authors refined their works. Now that DVD's are popular despite the /. crowds weak efforts to boycott, the existence of many different versions of a work is not spectacular nor is it limited to software. I also have no idea how copyright law treats these works.
BTW, want to borrow my Superman Special Editon DVD? It has some of the cool scenes that were in the ABC edit but not all of them. I KNEW that when I saw it on TV as a kid it was different than it had been in the theater!
What if mySmallCompany breaks the GPL and it stopped from future distribution of a particular piece of software? I then found myOtherSmallCompany. Can I distribute the software in a compliant manner? Obviously this solution won't work for large companies (IBM) but what if my company has 10 employees?
Since you have obviously never skied perhaps the following story will be illustrative:
I was at Alta one day and it was blowing so hard that the only way to get downhill was to get into a tuck. If you stood upright the wind would actually blow you UP the mountain. After two runs they shut down the lifts since the chairs were swinging wildly. I guess I could have simply started at the bottom and skied up the hill with the wind blowing my up and then come back down in a tuck but the ice that had formed on my beard was telling me that I should stay in the lodge.
p.s. What does sort of "rotational momentum" does a object that is not rotating have?
Leave me out of this!
Caldera got $250 million in their settlement. That happens to be a lot of money. If it went to trial Be might get more, but they might be willing to settle as well.
I took his class and it was very interesting. One of the most memorable things that I learned is that there is no single "right amount of sleep" for everyone. Some people need more, others need less. The range that he reports is 2 to 10 hours a night. If you need 6 hours a night then that is what you need and 8 is too much. If you need 9 then you had better get 9 and getting less is harmful. Here is what his website has to say on the subject.
One of the other very interesting things I learned in his class was the concept of sleep latency. He has developed tests that can actually measure how sleep deprived a person is. Once you accumulate sleep debt it doesn't go away until you make that sleep up. Thus if you are a person who needs 7 hours of sleep a night and one night you only get 4 hours of sleep you will be sleep deprived until you make up that 3 hours that you missed. You can do the next night by sleeping 10 hours or you could continue to sleep 7 hours a night and run around sleep deprived for months until you make up the sleep.
I would trust his opinion more than some researchers who do not specialize in sleep and merely noticed a correlation while conducting a study that wasn't related to sleep or sleep disorders. On the subject of life expectancy he actually mentioned in class that life expectancy is correlated with the amount on sleep that you need each night. Someone who needs only 4 hours of sleep each night, he used President Clinton as an example, will have a shorter life expectancy. This directly contradicts the study mentioned in this article.
They could also write an essay on why they choose the passage they did and why it is an important passage to preserve.
If you are going to limit it then you would have to be pretty strict in order to avoid having to make any judgement calls. The easiest way to do is to limit them to memorizing passages from works studied in the class.
I wouldn't try to ensure that the idea wouldn't fly. Instead I would try to insure that it was meaningful to each of the students.
I appreciate that high school isn't college, but it also isn't grade school.
Are you trying to be ironic by listing restrictions? If the student decides that preseving scripture or something indecent is important to them then why shouldn't they preserve it. At the end of the book, what is the work that was memorized?
One of my friends tried to get me to take the class but I refused. I think my reason was that Jeffrey Ullman was associated with the course somehow and I couldn't stand him. His books were ok, but the few times that I went in to get help from him he was totally condescending. I decided never to take a class from him again. Interesting how some people who are so smart think that their smarts makes up for their complete lack of courtesy and/or patience. So that is how I missed out on having something to do with Google. Aren't I lame? Yes Andy, I know you told me to take it.
How much expertise does it take to understand what the hell is going on in the Win2k code? I have no idea. Maybe it is a bastion of simplicity. How much expertise does it take to understand the Linux source code? Is it harder or easier than Win 2K? Is identifying security issues easier in one than the other?
Are there companies paying people to read the Linux source and make it more secure? IBM? RedHat? The NSA? HP? VA? Ok, that last one was a joke. But seriously, are these full-time developers going to do a good job of finding security issues? If Linux is easier to read/fix/find the bugs in than Windows are these people going to be more productive than their counterparts at Microsoft?
While we're at it, which community of application developers is more security-aware, Linux of Windows? Which OS makes it easier to write insecure applications?
Well no we know what kind of evil hacker you'd be. :) I think that there are plenty of people who would like to see their Outlook virus show up on the national news. There are also plenty of people liek you.
1. Linux systems. They are viewed as relatively secure so it is a "challenge" for the hacker. There aren't that many of them though.
2. Windows systems. Might not be as much of a challenge but if you write a nasty virus/exploit you could make the headlines.
I am sure that there are people attracted to both options.
In the long term Linux will have progressively fewer bugs/vulnerabilities due to its open source nature. Look at the numbers on the same chart for NetBSD. There were 9 vulnerabilities found in 2001, and 42 found in Win 2K. 54 for RedHat and only 2 for TurboLinux.
Obviously everyone should switch to Turbo Linux.
An answer your question from the article:
"Is this the future of Amiga computing?," you may ask. Although this package offers a very valuable addition to the options currently available, the future of Amiga computing lies with PPC based Amiga 4.x compatible computers and other AmigaDE enabled solutions.
For my graphics class in college we had to write an Asteroids program in OpenGL. I decided that it was kind of lame to do all the work to render asteroids and ships in 3-D only to shoot them in a 2-D plane. So I implemented a 3-D space shooter involving asteroids. It soon became apparent that in order for there to be enough asteroids to hit you there had to be A LOT of asteroids. The number that sticks in my head is 400. Since shooting 400 asteroids was pretty dumb I added some Tie-Fighters to the mix and had the objective be to shoot the Tie-Fighters.
All the work in this class was done on Macintosh computers. I was the proud owner of a Mac Performa 6200. It ran at 66 MHz, with no 3-D graphics card. I actually got my little game to run at a reasonable speed on it. Everybody else in the class wrote games that were played in a 2-D plane and many of them didn't run fast even on the brand new G3s that were showing up around campus.
Now for the point of my story. After graduation I went to work for a certain company and they gave my a nice laptop. It ran Windows. I decided it would be nice to try to play my game on it. The port was EXTREMELY easy. I had to add a crappy Win32 main and I had to replace the keypress codes since I hadn't used GLUT for kepresses since it didn't work with multiple keypresses. I also yanked the sound code out since it was Mac specific. But it took only a few hours to have the game up and running.
If you want to see the result you can get it here. Source is there too.
I later loaded Linux on my laptop and ported the game to Linux. It took a bit longer to find working keypress calls. I ended up using SDL without porting the whole game to SDL. The result was a little ugly but the game worked just fine. I haven't invested the time needed to polish up the Linux version is all.
Looking back I know that it would be very easy to write this OpenGL based game in such a way that it would run on all three of these platforms with a simple recompile if I had used #IFDEFs. Being lazy and busy with other things I haven't done that. But it is impressive how portable a game written in OpenGL can be.
Are you sure that I don't?
I would think that a child that can explain WHAT is important in life and then his/her life accordingly. I would submit that in the overall scheme of things the Riemann Zeta function is low on the list.
But the should still get a Cringley icon. I recently suggested photos having to do with Dave Letterman and got modded down for it. Because of that evil moderation I won't reproduce the links of the photos, but those willing to do the research will find that they are strangely similar. Dave and "Robert" that is. We don't know his real name do we? Could it be ...... Letterman???? Perhaps twins separated at birth?
I also realized that native compilation would destroy the cross-platform capabilities of Java. So I always thought it would be cool to distribute Java apps with both native compiled code for a specific platform and Java bytecode too. That way if you happened to be running the target platform you could get the speedup. If not you could still run the app, and maybe even compile the bytecode to a native app for your platform. This is similar to the fat-binary idea that Macs used when they switched from 68k chips to PPC, allowing a binary to run on either platform.
Really, it is annoying.
I wonder if the SEC anticipated getting /.ed when they estimated how much of a load this site would need to bear. What are their bandwidth costs? Is this /.ing hurting taxpayers?
And I KNOW that the come down frequently. I still thing that there should be a mechanism to control the ones that have parts that can survive re-entry.
Now I feel that I have been trolled.
While you might be right, it would look better if it were hot. If they made a movie about it afterwards you can be sure that it wouldn't come down cold.