I'm frankly a big fan of the Georgia Tech approach (or at least what was the Georgia Tech approach when I was there, a few years ago).
The first real language used in the CS curriculum (the first class uses a made-up language that theoretically has no compiler or interpreter) is Java. The reason is simple: Java is OOP without being obstructive about it (*cough*Smalltalk*cough*), and it's a pretty good language. The theory goes that it's easier for students to learn OOP first, then learn procedural (and functional, etc.) programming. In my experience, this seems well borne out... most people I know who learned procedural programming first really struggled (in some cases, still struggle) with OOP. Those who learned OOP first had no real problem picking up procedural.
I think a lot of posters here are ignoring the fact that no sane human would teach an entire CS curriculum in one language or even one paradigm. It's also worth noting that we're not talking about teach a language so much as we are about using a language in the course of teaching computer science concepts. Maybe it's the GT student in me, but I find that an important distinction.
I've mostly forgotten Java. I've also forgotten a lot of C specifics, and I can barely remember what little C++ I learned. Smalltalk is something I'm happy to have dropped from memory. I once knew BASIC, I've seen some FORTRAN and some COBOL, and at some point I even knew MOO.
I've forgotten most of these languages because I can. When I sit down to read them (as I occasionally do) or to use one (as sometimes happens), it takes me little to no time to get back up to speed and get to work. The reason is simple: I was taught the ideas that form the basis of computer science and of computer programming. The languages were just tools, and still are.
Dude, it's not like you take just the one CS course... when I was in college, the second CS course was taught using java, and a systems programming course was taught using C. Both were required. And guess what? Even the class that used Java taught us not to be sloppy.
It's not the language's fault if the idiots you work with don't know what they're doing. Maybe you need to find a new crowd.
Well, the good news is CTS is a "syndrome", which just means "collection symptoms that go together frequently". So no matter what caused the symptoms, if they're all extant simultaneously and all go away simultaneously, then by definition it sure as hell was CTS.:)
Yes. But the term "media" is often used to represent the media industry or the products of that industry. In that sense, "media" is singular, the same way "flock" or (perhaps more accurately;) "herd" is singular.
It depends on what you're referring to... if you want to refer to the individual media rather than the overall "media" group, you would use "are". Else, you'd use "is".
For instance, "Those are proud people" means that, taken individually, each person in the group you're referring to is proud. "That is a proud people" means the nation or ethnic group in question is, taken as a whole, proud. That is, the majority of the people are proud, but any given individual in the group may or may not be proud.
Same deal with media. (This doesn't fly with most plurals, incidentally... just those which double [no pun intended] as mass names.)
Sweet merciful crap! Every two-bit, pinheaded, self-proclaimed Security Expert has rehashed the Common Wisdom for years that fingerd is FUCKING DEADLY! And damned if you aren't going to trot right into line, am I right?
Tell me... aside from a hole in Joe Random's Nifty-Keeno New-Fangled Finger Daemon and Lemon Peeler (Debian exclusive! As Seen On TV!) this year, and FreeBSD's "oops, we let it read the filesystem... as *nobody*" bug last year, what evil lurks in the hearts of finger daemons that should strike terror into the hearts of men?
God... next you'll be bitching that people leave (horror of horrors!) telnetd running.
Build or buy a box that you can put the machines in. A glass-fronted cabinet would work pretty well.
I'm thinking of doing so for my machines... I have a Playstation 2, and it has a loud-as-hell fan. So when I went looking for a TV stand, I got one that had sliding glass doors on the front, and put the PS2 in that. That cut the noise level to almost nil... when you slide the door open, you definitely notice the difference.
Doing this today, I got 1,261 patents, but some of them don't apply here.
Er, that is to say, I got 1,261 search results each representing a patent. I don't have 1,261 patents myself.:-)
Thanks for clearing that up... with the USPTO's track record, I wouldn't have been much surprised to learn that you actually obtained 1,261 patents in the course of looking up some patents.;)
This is just based on my experience with a handful of architectures and a handful of OSes on a few of those, including PowerMacs...
But it seems to me that GCC builds much slower code on powermacs than whatever it is Apple builds their binaries with. (If Apple's using a modified GCC, which wouldn't much surprise me, I sure wish they'd throw us their patches.)
Now, if I'm right, and GCC produces relatively unoptimized binaries, shouldn't you compile GCC itself (and maybe even the rest of the system) with another compiler before pitting machines against each other in a compiling race? It seems to me that you're using a slow, badly-compiled GCC binary, otherwise.
Granted, this seems an excellent real-world test, since nobody does that. But I can't help but feel that we're (by "we", I mean the Community[TM] )currently incapable of exploiting the PowerPC, and it seems unfair to blame the chip.
Maybe I'm wrong. I would love to see some discussion from the GCC team. I just thought since nobody else seemed to have brought this up...
How long did it take you to find the flaw? Probably longer than the few seconds it took NASA...)
Be fair... my bugs don't explode in a giant supersonic fireball and rain shrapnel on the test site. So it takes me a few minutes to notice 'em sometimes.;)
I'm afraid I still don't see the point. You've got to send the entire password to the server you're connecting to, so it can split it up in the first place. And transmission of the full password isn't the weak link in password schemes anyway, nowadays, what with PK-encrypted login sessions and all. If you're not using an encrypted login session, this still buys you nothing, because there's still a single place to sniff the password.
And you've still got the problems I outlined before. And how are the login servers interchangeable? They can't all store all the pieces of the passwords, because that defeats your scheme entirely by storing the entire password, unencrypted, on every server.
Full usernames do need to be known, because you're dealing with a multiuser system where users like to interact with each other. What happens if you run 'w' on a system like the one you're describing? Using uids for most things would work, but remember that humans use this stuff, and people like to have names, not numbers. If I do an 'ls -l', I don't want to see that a file is owned by user 11203, especially if for the sake of security I don't get to look up who the hell user 11203 is.
Your system could work if applied to the passwords, but it would gain you nothing. Any sane system already uses a hidden password scheme, most commonly shadow. The system never stores the actual password anyway. What it stores is a hash (MD5 usually, these days) that it can verify another (dynamically generated) hash against. Your system does not remove this dependancy on having the hash accessible on each authentication server. You have to have the sum there to verify against. How else would your systems verify that there is a string with "those two letters in that particular position... associated with that particular cryptographic sum"? In fact, your system would have to store the two letters in question and their position to do so.
Bam. You've created a less secure system than the currently existing one, because you've just fed a brute-force password cracker two of the characters it needed for each password, if that file is compromised.
Grab protopkg from the Slackware FTP site and write a prototype that wraps the install process. (No, protopkg doesn't care how the software is installed, or even that you're installing software... it just watches the system change and packs up whatever's new. How the system changes is left to you, the prototype author.)
Or, (protopkg trick of the week, kids), write a prototype that just has "sleep 10" in the compile() function. When protopkg goes to sleep, hit ctrl-z to stop it, and do whatever you want to manually. Then when you're done, give that shell an 'fg' to let protopkg finish its work.
Idunno about monitoring the network sockets... that's kinda weird.
Re:It's only ENTERTAINMENT!
on
Voyager Eulogy
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· Score: 2
You'll notice that nobody's complaining that Voyager had torpedoes made of photons (or whatever), or that there are holographic projections that can be touched... they're complaining that consistency is not maintained. And they're right, that's distracting and annoying, and tends to make a story uninteresting.
Science fiction and fantasy rely on a suspension of disbelief to keep the audience engaged. Well-written sci-fi establishes a world that may contain things that are impossible in the real world, but as long as internal consistency is maintained such things are easy to accept and aid the story rather than hinder it. If that is lost, well, so is the audience's attention, because the author has clobbered them with unimportant details.
For instance, say on page 50 of a certain book it is explained that one can travel backward in time, but not forward. You, the reader, choose to accept that for the sake of the story. If on page 130, however, a character who could really use some forward time travel suddenly hops in a Time Car and zips ten years into the future, or discovers a Future Travel Particle, well...
I'll grant you that some people take it too far, and go *looking* for inconsistencies that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and never bothered anyone. But as a rule, once a writer establishes some ground rules, he should stick to them.
My guess is they felt like getting a couple of mouse pads and putting them on the shelves. Looking at the photo, it seems they accomplished that mission. I'll bet it wasn't even hard.
Your design acumen is absolutely stunning, though.
A grand jury and a trial jury are not the same thing. The grand jury is responsible for determining whether there is enough evidence to sustain a case against someone, issuing an indictment, and sending the case to trial.
It makes sense that a trial jury not be allowed to investigate on their own, because it's not their job. Their job is to judge whether the evidence presented warrants a guilty verdict. It is the job of the prosecutor and defense lawyer to provide the evidence upon which the jury will base their decision. If everyone does their part, and the judge doesn't sabotage the trial with weird rulings on admissability, then the system should work well.
I may have been a little touchy. But wow, I get tired of hearing the same thing over and over from people who think they're somehow hipping us all to their remarkable insight. I think I'll just take that sleep now.
I'm fairly sick of seeing posts from "average users" who have decided to descend from on high and enlighten the "geeks" as to what it is they need. So I'm going to postpone sleep for a few minutes and address those posts, which go something like this:
I'm a Typical User, and what you geeks just don't get is that we Typical Users don't care about our OS or our window manager. All we're interested in is whether the applications we need exist and help us do our jobs more efficiently.
Yeah, we know.
We get it. You only care about the apps. Freaking great. You know what? You still need an OS, and you still need a GUI. In fact, you need an OS and a decent GUI/toolkit before you can seriously even consider writing applications.
Well, we've got the OS part more or less licked, but it's an interesting realm for us "geeks", so we're going to continue to work on it, continue to talk about it in our little net-centric communities, and maybe even continue to recommend that you Typical Users use a decent OS. The GUI is also interesting, it's shiny, and it's where a lot of development is happening now... so we're going to work on it and talk about it and maybe even recommend a good one of those to you as well. Get over it.
We know you need applications. We need them, too, because we aren't all full-time "geeks". So don't feel the need to interject into every OS or GUI discussion with some crap about applications, and don't pretend as if we're just too stupid to realize you need them. It's irritating and repetitious beyond belief.
I took a class in software design where Squeak was used, so I think I can answer this. Smalltalk is horrible.
Previous posters have already mentioned the "wall" between the environment and the host system, and while I can understand the reasoning behind it, it is dated reasoning.
The bigger issue I have with Smalltalk (or perhaps just with Squeak) is that there is no syntax. Everything is an object, including such tradition keyglyphs as '='. That's swell, except that it means syntax is defined wholly by the object in question. Various classes had their own ideas of how they wanted their parameters arranged when they were instantiated or their methods called. It was horribly inconsistent. I spent more time reading "library" code in that language than I have in any other, and I remember almost none of it because it was so often conflicting.
It was a cute idea... pure OOP from the ground up. But it sure did turn into a nightmare.
it appears to have been written for SMAC. A google search turns up references to it only in the context of SMAC, and it is always attributed to the game character.
But the public school system basically teaches kids to do this with all their papers, so it's no wonder that people think it's okay.
Odd, I've gone to public schools for the entirety of my academic career, and every teacher who has ever said anything to me about research has said that plagiarism in any form is not okay and will not be accepted.
Be careful when making generalizations about a system that is actually very different from place to place.
Well, keeping resources from other students is pretty low. But turning in cheaters, I think, is not so much. The fact is that most classes in most schools grade on a curve. If people do well by cheating, it screws up the curve for people who did decently without. Also, it's worth considering that the more undereducated people your institution turns out (because they skated by), the less your degree will be worth. It's in your interest to protect the reputation of your school, the integrity of your classes, and your position on the curve.;)
Slashdot Mirror
The first real language used in the CS curriculum (the first class uses a made-up language that theoretically has no compiler or interpreter) is Java. The reason is simple: Java is OOP without being obstructive about it (*cough*Smalltalk*cough*), and it's a pretty good language. The theory goes that it's easier for students to learn OOP first, then learn procedural (and functional, etc.) programming. In my experience, this seems well borne out... most people I know who learned procedural programming first really struggled (in some cases, still struggle) with OOP. Those who learned OOP first had no real problem picking up procedural.
I think a lot of posters here are ignoring the fact that no sane human would teach an entire CS curriculum in one language or even one paradigm. It's also worth noting that we're not talking about teach a language so much as we are about using a language in the course of teaching computer science concepts. Maybe it's the GT student in me, but I find that an important distinction.
I've mostly forgotten Java. I've also forgotten a lot of C specifics, and I can barely remember what little C++ I learned. Smalltalk is something I'm happy to have dropped from memory. I once knew BASIC, I've seen some FORTRAN and some COBOL, and at some point I even knew MOO.
I've forgotten most of these languages because I can. When I sit down to read them (as I occasionally do) or to use one (as sometimes happens), it takes me little to no time to get back up to speed and get to work. The reason is simple: I was taught the ideas that form the basis of computer science and of computer programming. The languages were just tools, and still are.
It's not the language's fault if the idiots you work with don't know what they're doing. Maybe you need to find a new crowd.
The underlying cause is another matter entirely.
It depends on what you're referring to... if you want to refer to the individual media rather than the overall "media" group, you would use "are". Else, you'd use "is".
For instance, "Those are proud people" means that, taken individually, each person in the group you're referring to is proud. "That is a proud people" means the nation or ethnic group in question is, taken as a whole, proud. That is, the majority of the people are proud, but any given individual in the group may or may not be proud.
Same deal with media. (This doesn't fly with most plurals, incidentally... just those which double [no pun intended] as mass names.)
Sweet merciful crap! Every two-bit, pinheaded, self-proclaimed Security Expert has rehashed the Common Wisdom for years that fingerd is FUCKING DEADLY! And damned if you aren't going to trot right into line, am I right?
Tell me... aside from a hole in Joe Random's Nifty-Keeno New-Fangled Finger Daemon and Lemon Peeler (Debian exclusive! As Seen On TV!) this year, and FreeBSD's "oops, we let it read the filesystem... as *nobody*" bug last year, what evil lurks in the hearts of finger daemons that should strike terror into the hearts of men?
God... next you'll be bitching that people leave (horror of horrors!) telnetd running.
I'm thinking of doing so for my machines... I have a Playstation 2, and it has a loud-as-hell fan. So when I went looking for a TV stand, I got one that had sliding glass doors on the front, and put the PS2 in that. That cut the noise level to almost nil... when you slide the door open, you definitely notice the difference.
My apologies for the confusion if it seemed so.
Er, that is to say, I got 1,261 search results each representing a patent. I don't have 1,261 patents myself. :-)
Thanks for clearing that up... with the USPTO's track record, I wouldn't have been much surprised to learn that you actually obtained 1,261 patents in the course of looking up some patents. ;)
But it seems to me that GCC builds much slower code on powermacs than whatever it is Apple builds their binaries with. (If Apple's using a modified GCC, which wouldn't much surprise me, I sure wish they'd throw us their patches.)
Now, if I'm right, and GCC produces relatively unoptimized binaries, shouldn't you compile GCC itself (and maybe even the rest of the system) with another compiler before pitting machines against each other in a compiling race? It seems to me that you're using a slow, badly-compiled GCC binary, otherwise.
Granted, this seems an excellent real-world test, since nobody does that. But I can't help but feel that we're (by "we", I mean the Community[TM] )currently incapable of exploiting the PowerPC, and it seems unfair to blame the chip.
Maybe I'm wrong. I would love to see some discussion from the GCC team. I just thought since nobody else seemed to have brought this up...
If he'd simply put "G4/450" and "P3/733" in the tables, I for one would have been suspicious about the amount of RAM, etc.
Be fair... my bugs don't explode in a giant supersonic fireball and rain shrapnel on the test site. So it takes me a few minutes to notice 'em sometimes. ;)
And you've still got the problems I outlined before. And how are the login servers interchangeable? They can't all store all the pieces of the passwords, because that defeats your scheme entirely by storing the entire password, unencrypted, on every server.
I'm sorry, I just don't think this will fly. :]
Full usernames do need to be known, because you're dealing with a multiuser system where users like to interact with each other. What happens if you run 'w' on a system like the one you're describing? Using uids for most things would work, but remember that humans use this stuff, and people like to have names, not numbers. If I do an 'ls -l', I don't want to see that a file is owned by user 11203, especially if for the sake of security I don't get to look up who the hell user 11203 is.
Your system could work if applied to the passwords, but it would gain you nothing. Any sane system already uses a hidden password scheme, most commonly shadow. The system never stores the actual password anyway. What it stores is a hash (MD5 usually, these days) that it can verify another (dynamically generated) hash against. Your system does not remove this dependancy on having the hash accessible on each authentication server. You have to have the sum there to verify against. How else would your systems verify that there is a string with "those two letters in that particular position... associated with that particular cryptographic sum"? In fact, your system would have to store the two letters in question and their position to do so.
Bam. You've created a less secure system than the currently existing one, because you've just fed a brute-force password cracker two of the characters it needed for each password, if that file is compromised.
Presumably their security consulting team does not manage sourceforge. I'd imagine the two have little to do with each other.
Or, (protopkg trick of the week, kids), write a prototype that just has "sleep 10" in the compile() function. When protopkg goes to sleep, hit ctrl-z to stop it, and do whatever you want to manually. Then when you're done, give that shell an 'fg' to let protopkg finish its work.
Idunno about monitoring the network sockets... that's kinda weird.
You'll notice that nobody's complaining that Voyager had torpedoes made of photons (or whatever), or that there are holographic projections that can be touched... they're complaining that consistency is not maintained. And they're right, that's distracting and annoying, and tends to make a story uninteresting.
Science fiction and fantasy rely on a suspension of disbelief to keep the audience engaged. Well-written sci-fi establishes a world that may contain things that are impossible in the real world, but as long as internal consistency is maintained such things are easy to accept and aid the story rather than hinder it. If that is lost, well, so is the audience's attention, because the author has clobbered them with unimportant details.
For instance, say on page 50 of a certain book it is explained that one can travel backward in time, but not forward. You, the reader, choose to accept that for the sake of the story. If on page 130, however, a character who could really use some forward time travel suddenly hops in a Time Car and zips ten years into the future, or discovers a Future Travel Particle, well...
I'll grant you that some people take it too far, and go *looking* for inconsistencies that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and never bothered anyone. But as a rule, once a writer establishes some ground rules, he should stick to them.
Do you have anything, at all, to add to the discussion? Or do you just like to talk?
Your design acumen is absolutely stunning, though.
It makes sense that a trial jury not be allowed to investigate on their own, because it's not their job. Their job is to judge whether the evidence presented warrants a guilty verdict. It is the job of the prosecutor and defense lawyer to provide the evidence upon which the jury will base their decision. If everyone does their part, and the judge doesn't sabotage the trial with weird rulings on admissability, then the system should work well.
I may have been a little touchy. But wow, I get tired of hearing the same thing over and over from people who think they're somehow hipping us all to their remarkable insight. I think I'll just take that sleep now.
Yeah, we know.
We get it. You only care about the apps. Freaking great. You know what? You still need an OS, and you still need a GUI. In fact, you need an OS and a decent GUI/toolkit before you can seriously even consider writing applications.
Well, we've got the OS part more or less licked, but it's an interesting realm for us "geeks", so we're going to continue to work on it, continue to talk about it in our little net-centric communities, and maybe even continue to recommend that you Typical Users use a decent OS. The GUI is also interesting, it's shiny, and it's where a lot of development is happening now... so we're going to work on it and talk about it and maybe even recommend a good one of those to you as well. Get over it.
We know you need applications. We need them, too, because we aren't all full-time "geeks". So don't feel the need to interject into every OS or GUI discussion with some crap about applications, and don't pretend as if we're just too stupid to realize you need them. It's irritating and repetitious beyond belief.
Previous posters have already mentioned the "wall" between the environment and the host system, and while I can understand the reasoning behind it, it is dated reasoning.
The bigger issue I have with Smalltalk (or perhaps just with Squeak) is that there is no syntax. Everything is an object, including such tradition keyglyphs as '='. That's swell, except that it means syntax is defined wholly by the object in question. Various classes had their own ideas of how they wanted their parameters arranged when they were instantiated or their methods called. It was horribly inconsistent. I spent more time reading "library" code in that language than I have in any other, and I remember almost none of it because it was so often conflicting.
It was a cute idea... pure OOP from the ground up. But it sure did turn into a nightmare.
it appears to have been written for SMAC. A google search turns up references to it only in the context of SMAC, and it is always attributed to the game character.
Odd, I've gone to public schools for the entirety of my academic career, and every teacher who has ever said anything to me about research has said that plagiarism in any form is not okay and will not be accepted.
Be careful when making generalizations about a system that is actually very different from place to place.
Well, keeping resources from other students is pretty low. But turning in cheaters, I think, is not so much. The fact is that most classes in most schools grade on a curve. If people do well by cheating, it screws up the curve for people who did decently without. Also, it's worth considering that the more undereducated people your institution turns out (because they skated by), the less your degree will be worth. It's in your interest to protect the reputation of your school, the integrity of your classes, and your position on the curve. ;)