Sun's Fortress language allowed you to use real, LaTeX-formatted math as source code. They reasoned, correctly I think, that for the mathematically literate, this would make the programs far clearer. Google for Fortress Programming Language Tutorial.
I got 10 or 15 mod points a few times. I have no idea how or why. Since the last site update, I'm getting mod points much less frequently as well, although I think my karma is the same.
The summary makes it sounds like the US is doing a favor and donating generously to the rest of the world by funding foreign PhDs. A more accurate description would be that we taking the extreme cream of the crop, educated at great expense in other countries, and then luring them to the United States, where they further strengthen our already best-in-the-world universities, and the great majority stay permanently. The article describes a slight moderation in this trend, with a few more scholars choosing to return (although also describing the obstacles they face when they do).
The overall benefits of this system continue to be overwhelmingly in the favor of the United States. Even those who do return to their home countries go back with a much deeper understanding of the US, not to mention greater English fluency.
The restrictions on foreign students in the aftermath of 9/11 stood out among the other security-theater policies for their active harmfulness.
Long term, heavy-academic-contribution stuff was exactly what he choked off. He was bad for America's research base and bad for big-picture American security, IMHO. Apologies for the gratuitous Dubya swipe (as you say, mod-bait on/.), but I do feel that Tether and GWB shared a disdain for academia, which was no problem for the president, but had terrible consequences for what is supposed to be the blue-sky research arm of the DoD.
Also, you're aware that this not some hindsight Bush-bashing here, right? I mean, they actually had Senate hearings on the Tether/DARPA mess back in 2005.
Read the TFA. There would have been unimaginably more cool stuff if Tether hadn't choked off academic funding for anything not directly usable in the current wars. DARPANet/ARPANet/the Internet definitely is not something that could have happened on his watch.
No mention of the disastrous Bush-era reign of Tony Tether at DARPA? With an incurious, aggressive president, we got an incurious, aggressive DARPA head, who cut long-term and academic research in favor of short-term corporate research. His dumping by Obama led to joy and celebrations (OK, cautious hope) across the land.
Google did maps, it was okay but not #1, they bought Keyhole(now google earth) and advanced their tech to become #1
They hired the guys who made the Google Maps precursor, but it was a separate acquisition (and technology) from Keyhole / Google Earth. They only recently got the two systems to use the same imagery data, I think.
I was going to add the same comment. The point of a botnet is that the computers, being hijacked consumer/corporate pcs, are from all over the world and indistinguishable from random traffic IPs. If you're getting attacked by an all-China botnet, just cut off a well-defined set of addresses and the threat vanishes.
It goes further than that. Try Googling "how old is Britney Spears" and "what is the population of iceland" (without quotes). The answer appears at the top, separately from the search results.
Nope. Win32 is emphatically not Unix. If anything, it's closer to the old DEC VAX VMS OS (Dave Cutler's earlier OS). While there are POSIX compatibility adapters, the native OS provides services that look pretty different from the classic UNIX ones (process creation, IPC, security, etc.).
I recommend Windows System Programming by Hart if you want to get a feeling for it. It's arguably a better (and certainly more modern) API than the classic UNIX set. I mean, fork() is a pretty weird way to create a new process, if you think about it.
This is _not_ an endorsement of the entire Windows OS, which has miles-deep layers of cruft and crap on top -- just talking about the kernel and core system services.
Are you referring to the drug use he had himself described in detail in his best-selling book? The drug use which, when the NYT investigated back in February, interviewing his peers of the time, he turned out to have probably exaggerated?
Steve Bellovin (granddaddy of IP firewalling) gives his (strongly negative) opinion here. He points out that it would be in seeming contradiction to the UN Charter.
Picasaweb (Google's photo-sharing website) does the facial recognition, not the Picasa application. On the Picasaweb site, you can opt-in to the facial recognition stuff, and it will bulk process your uploaded photos. To use it you have upload some photos to the web first, using the Picasa app.
"Advanced Placement" or AP courses are advanced courses (supposedly college level) that are offered at some high schools. Unlike the rest of the local- and state-controlled curriculum, AP courses are administered by a national organization, the College Board.
A number of the tests are offered at different difficulties, including Computer Science with the A and AB levels, and Calculus with AB and BC levels.
The College Board has announced that they're dropping four tests, three language tests plus the AB CS class. Since it was short notice with little consultation, and the AB test was the only one with any content that would really be considered computer science (e.g. data structures), teachers are up in arms.
The broader issue is that primary and secondary education vary enormously in quality and funding over the US. This is partly because different states want to do it differently (good), and partly because education is funded almost entirely out of local property taxes, so rich areas have super-schools, and poor areas have lousy schools (bad). The cycle reinforces as rich people move to areas with good schools.
Thus the complaint that only rich high schools can afford to teach AP classes, and AP classes are necessary to get into the best universities.
Oh, and varsity: in American high school and college sports programs, the Varsity team for a sport is the best team, which represents the school in competition with other schools. So if you're not very good at football, you might still be able to play on the Junior Varsity team, but probably not for the the Varsity team. Teacher is claiming that AB-Test-Takers = Varsity CS Team.
My biggest fear for wireless is the push for more laws to regulate "network neutrality," which I am against vehemently. I believe that paying for access tiers makes more sense than forcing the market to all stay at a certain level of service for everyone at a flat price. It doesn't make sense to me (neither as a businessman, nor as an individual). I'm hoping to see Google offer the bandwidth in markets they can't reach in a relatively unregulated and openly competitive atmosphere. In an adjoining town to mine, Libertyville, Illinois, there are numerous WiFi Internet providers who are doing gangbusters sticking access points on leased towers and giving people in the region what they want (including even free WiFi at a throttled speed) at the price they're willing to pay. The old media companies (AT&T, Comcast, etc) have fought tooth and nail to shut down these hooligans, but the city has held its ground in allowing them to compete. My own town won't allow this to happen (although we do have a bunch of WiFi sharing groups on within 2 blocks of me), so I'd love to see a national push by a major new media company to open bandwidth for all to play with to see what the market can provide with reduced FCC rules created by the old monopolists. You do not understand what network neutrality is. The issue is not whether providers can offer can offer different tiers of service for different prices. Of course they can -- they do it now and will continue to do so in the future. The question of network neutrality is whether, after you pay for a certain level of service, the ISP can vary your service based on the destination or content of a given packet. The canonical example is internet service provided by a telco choosing to block or cripple VOIP internet packets, since those compete with its core revenue stream. Without network neutrality, providers would be free to slow down or drop traffic to Google services while speeding up traffic to their in-house services.
Er... No. "standard libraries... without resorting to Win32 calls"? It's not the Win32 part that's the issue, it's the DirectX part, a high-level, high-performance interface to 3D hardware. OpenGL is somewhat comparable, and in the mid-90s was the polished alternative to the weak hack that was DirectX. However, OpenGL evolves by committee, and has many conservative stakeholders such as CAD firms, while MS totally controls DirectX, and has been pushing hard for it to be used as widely as possible. Each iteration has made it much more powerful and better suited to games programming, as well as tracking the rapid advances in consumer 3D hardware. Further, if your PC game uses DirectX, it's much easier to port it to the Xbox360, and vice versa.
Both Parallels and VMWare are working on cloning the DirectX API so VM applications can have accelerated 3D, but it's a big task. The DirectX libraries are massive, and each version has major differences with the previous one. VMWare is working hard just to get DirectX 8.1 compatibility, i.e. two revisions ago.
Some of the big graphics engine makers continue to support OpenGL, but even so, how do they financially justify spending the time and money to port their games to a platform with a tiny desktop market share, and where a significant percentage of the users expect everything on their machine to be free and open source?
This is a passionate and well-argued plea for mainstream developers to develop for Linux, but I don't think he convinced too many game company CFOs.
I would refer you to the sad post from John Carmack, regarding the disappointing sales of the Linux version of Quake III back in 2000. So far, not too many companies have wanted to risk seeing if things have changed.
Unfortunately, it also lets fanboys/shills for platform/company/philosophy X hide comments critical of platform/company/philosophy X. And they do, with great regularity. Are you saying this as a knee-jerk reaction, or are there actual, recent incidents you can cite? As someone who moderates pretty frequently, I almost always browse comments at -1. Not to rain on your tin-foil hat, but my experience is that flamebait/troll/offtopic ratings are generally accurate. Good information, well-argued opinions, and funny jokes tend to rise to the top. Of course, you could unmask this conspiracy by just browsing at -1 yourself, and reveal the secret information about the 200mpg carburator that we've been trying to hide from you...
It's often difficult to succinctly describe the difference between democracy as actually practiced in the USA, most of Europe, etc., and the pseudo-democracies seen in many countries that seem to have all the trappings, but don't quite work.
In a country with a functioning civil society, the weak can use the law to defend themselves against the strong (sometimes, with varying success, etc., but it is possible and does happen). In most countries without a well-developed civil society, it's unthinkable that a random civilian could win a suit against a rich, well-connected individual or company. In practice, their legal systems put power and money over the letter of the law.
In the rich democracies, businesses generally don't bother with overt criminality, because they'd just have to give up the money anyway. In countries without well-developed civil society, citizens don't bother going to the legal system in cases of crime or injustice committed by the rich and powerful.
It's cute to be cynical, and I'm not trying to argue that e.g. the U.S. legal system isn't skewed towards rich and powerful players, or that big companies are always perfect citizens. But the fact that she will probably win this case points to a deep, significant difference between "the west" and the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. See http://www.dataliberation.org/
Sun's Fortress language allowed you to use real, LaTeX-formatted math as source code. They reasoned, correctly I think, that for the mathematically literate, this would make the programs far clearer. Google for Fortress Programming Language Tutorial.
I got 10 or 15 mod points a few times. I have no idea how or why. Since the last site update, I'm getting mod points much less frequently as well, although I think my karma is the same.
The overall benefits of this system continue to be overwhelmingly in the favor of the United States. Even those who do return to their home countries go back with a much deeper understanding of the US, not to mention greater English fluency.
The restrictions on foreign students in the aftermath of 9/11 stood out among the other security-theater policies for their active harmfulness.
Also, you're aware that this not some hindsight Bush-bashing here, right? I mean, they actually had Senate hearings on the Tether/DARPA mess back in 2005.
Read the TFA. There would have been unimaginably more cool stuff if Tether hadn't choked off academic funding for anything not directly usable in the current wars. DARPANet/ARPANet/the Internet definitely is not something that could have happened on his watch.
No mention of the disastrous Bush-era reign of Tony Tether at DARPA? With an incurious, aggressive president, we got an incurious, aggressive DARPA head, who cut long-term and academic research in favor of short-term corporate research. His dumping by Obama led to joy and celebrations (OK, cautious hope) across the land.
They hired the guys who made the Google Maps precursor, but it was a separate acquisition (and technology) from Keyhole / Google Earth. They only recently got the two systems to use the same imagery data, I think.
I was going to add the same comment. The point of a botnet is that the computers, being hijacked consumer/corporate pcs, are from all over the world and indistinguishable from random traffic IPs. If you're getting attacked by an all-China botnet, just cut off a well-defined set of addresses and the threat vanishes.
It goes further than that. Try Googling "how old is Britney Spears" and "what is the population of iceland" (without quotes). The answer appears at the top, separately from the search results.
I recommend Windows System Programming by Hart if you want to get a feeling for it. It's arguably a better (and certainly more modern) API than the classic UNIX set. I mean, fork() is a pretty weird way to create a new process, if you think about it.
This is _not_ an endorsement of the entire Windows OS, which has miles-deep layers of cruft and crap on top -- just talking about the kernel and core system services.
There are several. Search for "rotary dialer" in the iTunes App Store.
Oh, and when asked about his drug use back in October 2006 said "Of course I inhaled. That was the point". On video.
No, I have no idea why the media would not want to spend reporting resources and column inches covering this repeatedly.
And would you agree that Obama has been far more open about his illegal substance abuse than certain other presidents?
Steve Bellovin (granddaddy of IP firewalling) gives his (strongly negative) opinion here. He points out that it would be in seeming contradiction to the UN Charter.
Picasaweb (Google's photo-sharing website) does the facial recognition, not the Picasa application. On the Picasaweb site, you can opt-in to the facial recognition stuff, and it will bulk process your uploaded photos. To use it you have upload some photos to the web first, using the Picasa app.
Weave does not, in fact, do everything that Google Browser Sync does. Aside from bookmarks, GBS synced passwords and cookies. Weave does neither.
I'll second this. It's like a next-gen Aeron. I love mine.
I'd also like to see them. (phil) at \1gross.com (backreference)
Be on the lookout for mysterious air/spacecraft crashes...
A number of the tests are offered at different difficulties, including Computer Science with the A and AB levels, and Calculus with AB and BC levels.
The College Board has announced that they're dropping four tests, three language tests plus the AB CS class. Since it was short notice with little consultation, and the AB test was the only one with any content that would really be considered computer science (e.g. data structures), teachers are up in arms.
The broader issue is that primary and secondary education vary enormously in quality and funding over the US. This is partly because different states want to do it differently (good), and partly because education is funded almost entirely out of local property taxes, so rich areas have super-schools, and poor areas have lousy schools (bad). The cycle reinforces as rich people move to areas with good schools.
Thus the complaint that only rich high schools can afford to teach AP classes, and AP classes are necessary to get into the best universities.
Oh, and varsity: in American high school and college sports programs, the Varsity team for a sport is the best team, which represents the school in competition with other schools. So if you're not very good at football, you might still be able to play on the Junior Varsity team, but probably not for the the Varsity team. Teacher is claiming that AB-Test-Takers = Varsity CS Team.
Pity the poor five-digit ID, low enough to show I'm an aging geek, but not low enough to actually impress anyone...
Er... No. "standard libraries... without resorting to Win32 calls"? It's not the Win32 part that's the issue, it's the DirectX part, a high-level, high-performance interface to 3D hardware. OpenGL is somewhat comparable, and in the mid-90s was the polished alternative to the weak hack that was DirectX. However, OpenGL evolves by committee, and has many conservative stakeholders such as CAD firms, while MS totally controls DirectX, and has been pushing hard for it to be used as widely as possible. Each iteration has made it much more powerful and better suited to games programming, as well as tracking the rapid advances in consumer 3D hardware. Further, if your PC game uses DirectX, it's much easier to port it to the Xbox360, and vice versa.
Both Parallels and VMWare are working on cloning the DirectX API so VM applications can have accelerated 3D, but it's a big task. The DirectX libraries are massive, and each version has major differences with the previous one. VMWare is working hard just to get DirectX 8.1 compatibility, i.e. two revisions ago.
Some of the big graphics engine makers continue to support OpenGL, but even so, how do they financially justify spending the time and money to port their games to a platform with a tiny desktop market share, and where a significant percentage of the users expect everything on their machine to be free and open source?
This is a passionate and well-argued plea for mainstream developers to develop for Linux, but I don't think he convinced too many game company CFOs.
I would refer you to the sad post from John Carmack, regarding the disappointing sales of the Linux version of Quake III back in 2000. So far, not too many companies have wanted to risk seeing if things have changed.
It's often difficult to succinctly describe the difference between democracy as actually practiced in the USA, most of Europe, etc., and the pseudo-democracies seen in many countries that seem to have all the trappings, but don't quite work.
In a country with a functioning civil society, the weak can use the law to defend themselves against the strong (sometimes, with varying success, etc., but it is possible and does happen). In most countries without a well-developed civil society, it's unthinkable that a random civilian could win a suit against a rich, well-connected individual or company. In practice, their legal systems put power and money over the letter of the law.
In the rich democracies, businesses generally don't bother with overt criminality, because they'd just have to give up the money anyway. In countries without well-developed civil society, citizens don't bother going to the legal system in cases of crime or injustice committed by the rich and powerful.
It's cute to be cynical, and I'm not trying to argue that e.g. the U.S. legal system isn't skewed towards rich and powerful players, or that big companies are always perfect citizens. But the fact that she will probably win this case points to a deep, significant difference between "the west" and the rest.