not that we had perfect imagination:)
my faves: complex, fairlight, razor1911, andromeda... and all the great crews.
once we (bronx) released a discmag called "Auschwitz" and flamed badly for doing nazi propoganda. I'm still not sure why we'd picked that name:)
Beowulf means parallel processing and distributed queueing mainly. Not at all HA, which is more suited to "new-economy" business types anyway.:)
For a real beo, go for Debian.
Those so-called "beowulf specific" distros just won't cut it.
Thanks,
All Text Editors on Linux and Windows SUCK!
on
Shortcomings Of OSS?
·
· Score: 1
I personally use only xemacs, but the fact is that it sucks big time, too. All I want is a decent programmer's editor that's fast and has all the features I want. Not one that I've seen; there's latte but that's... whatever.
The 180th entry in freshmeat is going to be mine, I'll just write an editor with all the features of ced and golded from amiga.:)
thanks!
Re:That's why mathematicians != computer scientist
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
Dear Keith,
That's why I don't read vaporware papers. I know what an algorithm is, my research area is algorithms. Anyway, I hope you find these remarks useful; I'll try to be helpful despite your disrespectful attitude.
* heuristic algorithms are also algorithms that have a finite running time. and there are optimal algorithms (preferred to "complete solutions"). heuristic algorithms may be optimal or not. in GP, they are approximate. Actually in all NP-complete problems we try to find approximate heuristic algorithms (because exact algorithms have exponential running time)
* What I'm saying is that, without an accompanying program it is not possible to convince anybody that P=NP including me. (this is most probably just another false proof, or as I said valid only for a special case)
* What I suggest does not require infinite time. He just has to take a couple of graphs at varying sizes, run his program and show that the running time is at worst O(n^6) and that it is indeed optimal.
Please read others' claims more carefully before responding. Your flames may bounce back.
Thanks,
That's why mathematicians != computer scientists
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
I am a CS grad. student, working on state-of-the-art heuristic solutions for graph partitioning and related problems, which are NP-complete. Our approximate solutions are slightly superlinear, like in Kumar & Karypis's work.
The thing is we don't present an algorithm without an experiment that verifies its running time in such prominent problems. Let him run this on arbitrary graphs, verify correctness and running time, then I may have some time to read his paper. Probably solves only a special case by the way as I looked at various representational transformations.
Programming languages are borne out of mathematics rather than natural languages. This is a very stupid question. Mathematics however, *is* a natural language, and you may question what would happen if mathematics were conceived otherwise.
QT is an imposter. of MFC. and every real C++ programmer out there knows how flawed MFC is. Duplicating parts of standard library is sufficiently ugly, anyway...
The best OS distribution on the face of the planet. I've been using potato for more than a year now, and it's proved to be the most complete development platform I've seen. Debian simply rocks.
I think it looks all fine and dandy, but will these efforts be a duplicatio of what companies like Eazel or HelixCode is trying to do? Or are people going to go for a close co-operation in the trafidition of free software?
Oh, and by the way, it's going to be free software isn't it?
Whatever it is, I'm pleased to see IBM in these efforts, they've released some really nice free software and they seem to be well committed to overthrow the MS desktop empire.
I wrote a few simple programs with gtk--. I can say that its design does have some flaws, but you could still write some nice code with it.
First, the program you wrote was plain C++, that's one advantage over poor QT and MFC. That meant you weren't constrained by a foolish macro/preprocessing system. (The preprocessor that was used building the library is no problem, IIRC) The signaling system also was not at all bad, although it is another bloated C++ hack.:) Sorry, but I implemented expression templates and I just don't like ugly compile-time hacks any more. Hard to maintain.
OTOH, I found a lot of things that gtk-- simply didn't care covering. I've had to plug in lots of C calls in my proggys to get the right behaviour. Anyway, it seemed to work. But try writing a drawing program in gtk-- and you're going to blow up. Another very disappointing mistake is in the apparent lack of documentation. This goes for the GTK+/GNOME people on their high horses as well:
NO LIBRARY WITHOUT COMPLETE DOCUMENTATION!!
Get it? That's why Qt still seems to hold the edge despite the zillion disadvantages that it entertains. When you're writing with Qt, if you have a bit of experience with MFC, you can have your browser at your documentation and dive right in.
So, what's really bad about this Silicon Valley? The thing is, now that Silicon Valley is no more a nice and green californian town with ranches and farms... CAN A DECENT ENGINEER LEAD A HAPPY LIFE IN SILICON VALLEY? From what I've read in Slashdot, it seems that rents are fatal, there are no girls around, and almost everything else seems to suck in the Valley.
Is then the proper choice to forget about the valley, and leave it to "web" people?
As is Gelertner. Not only OS's and browsers are obsolete, but so are our thinkers. The internet is a pile of junk inscribed in a primitive documentation language. And yeah, Java is an alias for "stupid fu*k".
It seems to me that Gelertner, Jon Katz, and every moron who'd be willing to try to put the whole computing on the freakin' "web" are equally idiot. Your shi**y "web" browser is never going to make it into some cyberspace dream.
Flames? I see "web sites" like hotmail and i-drive and I curse them every moment I have to use such services. I mean, programs aren't supposed to work on html pages, right?:I Get me some solid ground for distributed computing and I might buy it.
Ha BTW, if there's a revolution to come it's not going to be some sort of UI + trivial programming + wacky slow and foolish internet technologies like java/php/whatever. Without AI, none of this comes close to realization; I speak to stupid programmers who should've been retired a decade ago.
The internet is anarchy in failure for the most part. The free software community was born out of the net, but I believe remains almost as an exception. But check GNU's http service, I don't think you'll meet a lot of foolish "web" stuff like "sign in", "visit our sponsor", "click here to...".. wtf? the http was meant to be as "open" as possible. Today, I told my friends that I wanted to destroy the internet. Hopefully, the internet will eat itself. I'd personally like to see that internet once again belongs to people.
List is definitely biased towards that more numerical side of CS. I would personally like to see search algorithms, graph algorithms, advanced data structures, etc. Here is an assortment of more realistic CS stuff (in no specific order), I tried to put in stuff not talked about in previous posts.
1. A^* search and variants. Simulated annealing, heuristic repair, etc. You know, GOFAI search algorithms.
3. Data structures: heap (the usual one, and the variants such as binomial fibonacci), tree structures(bst, r-b, avl, b+, bsp, quad-, oct- etc.), disjoint sets, hash tables.
4. I don't wanna admit it, but perhaps back propagation algorithm for ANN:)
5. LR(1) parsing algorithms, without which you can't write decent compilers!
6. Round-Robin scheduling algorithm. Where're you heading without pre-emptive multitasking?:)
7. Median-of-medians. Power of recursion!
8. LCS (Longest common subsequence), demonstrative of dynamic programming. And you used some diff program surely...
9. RSA and similar public key crypto-algos.
Hope you like this slightly alternative supplement;)
And probably way better. AFAIK, IBM AS/400, and its direct ancestor possess the only proven HAL ever devised. That's how IBM delivers stunning performance on the AS/400 without changing a line of code. It's not a lame dynamic translator with cache.. Guys from the big blue come, change your hardware, but your software continues to work. Yeah, so they can use custom CPU design to tackle certain application bottlenecks.
Seriously though, I never understand how someone can get a patent for such a silly thing. It's just so evident; there's no invention here. So, if you manufacture a laser device when nobody has an idea of what laser is, I could probably appreciate it... But isn't this something that every system programmer knows by heart? So wtf?
Re:Laughing all the way to the bank
on
Inside Transmeta
·
· Score: 1
I'd rather throw away the lame x86 emulation code which they call code morphing.. it seems to me a trivial interpreter with dumb caching. take the VLIW core, write a real compiler for it, and then you might be heading at something. BTW, I don't think that we'll see 16/32 way machines that soon, because those have to be NUMA, and there's no real OS / PL environment and apps that can take advantage of that. (you couldn't be more pessimistic;) I'm doin' my Msc. on parallel programming....)
* I started by writing small programs and games in Atari 800 XL's BASIC.
* I tried to learn Assembly, but I just couldn't understand all those wacky mnemonics. Though, I did write some hardware code.
* I wrote with AmigaBASIC on the Amiga500. My next language was AMOS, which I still find to be pretty good as a BASIC variant.
* Then I learnt 680x0 Assembly, and I wrote intros/demos with that, and learnt hardware access. 3d gfx was my fave.
* I learnt C and Pascal on the Amiga. I was using a pirated version of the SAS/C:P C and C++ came very natural after assembly!
* I was forced to program in Pascal and Java in Comp. Sci. undergrad. But I insisted on C++. I also enjoyed LISP/Prolog a lot, I think LISP could also be a good starter after assembly!!
* I now code mainly in C++, but have an interest in new / interpreted languages and lang. design...
So, that'w how my evolution went. I strongly suggest *clean* and *featureful* BASIC variants with which they *won't* be making GUI's but plain graphics and games. That's how you get to learn real programming (He he, demo scene rullaz!)
Then, the kids will want to check out networking, and they can practice with Perl about TCP/IP stuff, I guess. (Not so scary)
Java may seem like a pedagogic device, but avoid at all costs! It sucks. It will distract kids from the joy of programming, too dry... (Juice is what we're after, right?) [Java zealots write to my e-mail addy and if you're a Sun executive you get special treatment!]
Don't tell them that C is the ultimate language; it isn't. Let them play with the following paradigms in the evolutionary order
That will get them to understand why that language is done that way. The best is to pick one language from each generation of languages... BTW, as you see there isn't another generation after oo/generic languages, because there isn't.
If you show them a RAD tool, they will think that programming is all about GUI's and databases and trivial networking. It isn't. It isn't. It isn't. Get them to read some computer science stuff, like sorting algorithms (even consider some excrepts from Knuth!)
I've just set up a Beowulf cluster for parallel programming research at our CS dept., and I wonder which installation software and administration tools you have been using on your alpha based Beowulf.
I patched FAI for our needs so that I get around with only a magic floppy to install a node from scratch. Is your installation/maintenance tools developed in-house or do you prefer free software? And which tools have you found most useful?
This is a shame. I haven't used the Amiga for many many years. I still own my lovely Amiga 1200 anyway; unfortunately it's in my family's house.
I must have been confused because of the ever increasing size of RAMs these days. On the Amiga500 we used to do quite well with 512K of RAM, and I could compile C++ proggys on Amiga1200 with only 2 megs of RAM!
Bertrand Meyer is a thousand miles off. I must throw in some points that he will probably never be able to understand with his corporate mind-set.
* I couldn't use a UNIX system at my home computer if it were commercial software. Most software I use has better quality than all of Windows software, and I am grateful for all this.
* I am a software engineer, and I think that most commercial software producers are quite evil given that they produce low quality and overcostly stuff. Example: medical imaging/archiving software. If high quality products would be available freely, all patients would benefit. [So I made my DICOM3.0 implementation free!]
* Free software means that you can take it and modify it. [Sucker] If you have a problem with GCC on Windows (whatever that means), perhaps he means on Cygwin32, I don't know, you take the source, and fix the damned thing. The original authors of a free software package have no control on its evolution, so they can't put some known deficiencies to make money out of service. Someone can always come up with an alternative that makes it obsolete, or patch those deficiencies...
* A company can earn money from developing free software, and nothing is wrong with that. And one more thing. think of it like this. An OS should be free, because it has general utility...
* Why is he making things personal? RMS isn't an easy person to get along and ESR is a maniac. So what? Shut up and check the code!
I think that's enough. I could say a lot more but I don't have the energy to refute every idiot's every claim on the planet.
Well, the Amiga 1000 surely had a graphical interface, and way back in 85. AmigaOS "graphics.library" and other UI layers on top were pretty excellent, and almost a breeze to code with. That I felt when I first coded in xlib and xtoolkit. I was thinking how easy it was to get good looking and functional interfaces on the Amiga. Any X program would look brain dead to me. That is especially true if you're using emacs or axe as your editor:) Then, I remember the slickest editor was Cygnus Ed on the Amiga. I used assembler "IDE"s, but there were a lot of apps that rocked. Some of the best computer graphics were drawn with DPaint for sure. That was so great then! None of the Photoshop/GIMP belly aches. And I think DevPac was great. Hmm, hey who can forget DOpus? Those x86 users had the poor norton commander. That used to feel good. When they saw an Amiga desktop, they would go *gasp*. And those great DTP programs. I'm afraid there's just too many to tell...
Not forgetting that Amiga had a bunch of very cool graphics primitives that you could play with. The design of Amiga UI's have always seemed very logical, and I think wb3.0 looked sweet. You had your gadgets, and once you put a gadget that was it. Contrast with Win32 or X-windows.
The real story is, however, the underlying OS. When I got hold of ROM Kernel Reference Manual - Exec, I was kind of overwhelmed. It took time to understand what was going on there. The fast message passing, pre-emptive multitasking lightweight kernel, dynamic device drivers and libraries. Thanks to Carl Sassenrath! Man, you could not possibly ask for more then. And it all was packed in 512K of ROM. It sure went up to 1MB but it was worth it. If the Amiga hadn't gone down due to the stupidity of Commodore it would still stand straight in the world of multi-user OS's. And possibly POSIX compliant. Those were the days...:\
I also remember an object oriented programming model in the recent versions of AmigaOS, what was that called?
I guess there will always be some desire to find some "quantum magic" out there. As a computer scientist however, I am less inclined to find that operation of the mind has anything to do with quantum properties of matter.
Anyway, recalling those incredible experiments that involved "collective mind control" over random number generators, and claims that statistical evidence had been gathered at "nodal" events such as the new year's eve, y2k, I am quite skeptical about the scientific accountability of this "branch" of research.
To me, it makes little more than no sense to spend research resources on para-psyhchology or a plain wrong interpretation of quantum mechanics.
One wonders what they have in mind next; a TCP/IP connection to God? Amusing.
.
....
homebox$ telnet www.rab.com/heaven Connecting to 198.133.17.230 IBM AIX on RS/999000 heaven login: exa password:....
Welcome to IBM's wonderful ethereal connection to the almighty! Here you will find great resources on religion, and have the chance to talk to dead people. Meet famous artists, scientists and all alike.
As I write, I am trying to write a small ANN program for my graduate NN course's homework. I am very interested in AI. I have taken many AI related courses and have become a member of ACM SIGART. However, one thing has been worrying me about Neural Networks for some years.
Although Neural Networks seem to be quite capable at pattern matching tasks such as OCR, their problem-wise scalability is a mystery. In particular, I fail to see how Neural Networks satisfy the hard questions raised by the Philosophy of Mind. Although PDP has been introduced as somewhat a magical way of dealing with intelligence (that is to say claiming to solve intelligence without substantiating any theory of intelligence), and a unique way of computation (that is to say computing without knowing anything about algorithms/data structures/complexity etc), I view it as merely a Programming Paradigm. I can understand why it would appeal to a non computer-scientist because of its look-this-is-magic, or illusionist approach, but I have difficulty in understanding its place in search of strong AI. It is, to me, only another type of machine. And it can at most be only another incarnation of the Universal Turing Machine.
Of course, there is also the recent findings about actual animal brains, and why traditional ANN's are inapt at simulating it. All the findings about these ion channels, protein memories and other fancy mechanisms discovered in our brains...
Contemplating these problems, do you think that Neural Networks are obsolete?
Hasn't the IEEE standard been dropped? I thought that's just --Apple-- now. And haven't some ppl been taunting USB2.0 over Firewire for video stuff? (since that's really an open standard and so forth...)
Slashdot Mirror
not that we had perfect imagination :)
my faves: complex, fairlight, razor1911, andromeda... and all the great crews.
once we (bronx) released a discmag called "Auschwitz" and flamed badly for doing nazi propoganda. I'm still not sure why we'd picked that name :)
Beowulf means parallel processing and distributed queueing mainly. Not at all HA, which is more suited to "new-economy" business types anyway. :)
For a real beo, go for Debian.
Those so-called "beowulf specific" distros just won't cut it.
Thanks,
I personally use only xemacs, but the fact is that it sucks big time, too. All I want is a decent programmer's editor that's fast and has all the features I want. Not one that I've seen; there's latte but that's ... whatever.
:)
The 180th entry in freshmeat is going to be mine, I'll just write an editor with all the features of ced and golded from amiga.
thanks!
Dear Keith,
That's why I don't read vaporware papers. I know what an algorithm is, my research area is algorithms. Anyway, I hope you find these remarks useful; I'll try to be helpful despite your disrespectful attitude.
* heuristic algorithms are also algorithms that have a finite running time. and there are optimal algorithms (preferred to "complete solutions"). heuristic algorithms may be optimal or not. in GP, they are approximate. Actually in all NP-complete problems we try to find approximate heuristic algorithms (because exact algorithms have exponential running time)
* What I'm saying is that, without an accompanying program it is not possible to convince anybody that P=NP including me. (this is most probably just another false proof, or as I said valid only for a special case)
* What I suggest does not require infinite time. He just has to take a couple of graphs at varying sizes, run his program and show that the running time is at worst O(n^6) and that it is indeed optimal.
Please read others' claims more carefully before responding. Your flames may bounce back.
Thanks,
I am a CS grad. student, working on state-of-the-art heuristic solutions for graph partitioning and related problems, which are NP-complete. Our approximate solutions are slightly superlinear, like in Kumar & Karypis's work.
The thing is we don't present an algorithm without an experiment that verifies its running time in such prominent problems. Let him run this on arbitrary graphs, verify correctness and running time, then I may have some time to read his paper. Probably solves only a special case by the way as I looked at various representational transformations.
Thanks,
Programming languages are borne out of mathematics rather than natural languages. This is a very stupid question. Mathematics however, *is* a natural language, and you may question what would happen if mathematics were conceived otherwise.
Period
QT is an imposter. of MFC. and every real C++ programmer out there knows how flawed MFC is. Duplicating parts of standard library is sufficiently ugly, anyway...
The best OS distribution on the face of the planet. I've been using potato for more than a year now, and it's proved to be the most complete development platform I've seen. Debian simply rocks.
I think it looks all fine and dandy, but will these efforts be a duplicatio of what companies like Eazel or HelixCode is trying to do? Or are people going to go for a close co-operation in the trafidition of free software? Oh, and by the way, it's going to be free software isn't it? Whatever it is, I'm pleased to see IBM in these efforts, they've released some really nice free software and they seem to be well committed to overthrow the MS desktop empire.
I wrote a few simple programs with gtk--. I can say that its design does have some flaws, but you could still write some nice code with it.
:) Sorry, but I implemented expression templates and I just don't like ugly compile-time hacks any more. Hard to maintain.
First, the program you wrote was plain C++, that's one advantage over poor QT and MFC. That meant you weren't constrained by a foolish macro/preprocessing system. (The preprocessor that was used building the library is no problem, IIRC) The signaling system also was not at all bad, although it is another bloated C++ hack.
OTOH, I found a lot of things that gtk-- simply didn't care covering. I've had to plug in lots of C calls in my proggys to get the right behaviour. Anyway, it seemed to work. But try writing a drawing program in gtk-- and you're going to blow up. Another very disappointing mistake is in the apparent lack of documentation. This goes for the GTK+/GNOME people on their high horses as well:
NO LIBRARY WITHOUT COMPLETE DOCUMENTATION!!
Get it? That's why Qt still seems to hold the edge despite the zillion disadvantages that it entertains. When you're writing with Qt, if you have a bit of experience with MFC, you can have your browser at your documentation and dive right in.
Thanks,
you know, i'd done the same mistake in person. :) __ exa
So, what's really bad about this Silicon Valley? The thing is, now that Silicon Valley is no more a nice and green californian town with ranches and farms... CAN A DECENT ENGINEER LEAD A HAPPY LIFE IN SILICON VALLEY? From what I've read in Slashdot, it seems that rents are fatal, there are no girls around, and almost everything else seems to suck in the Valley.
Is then the proper choice to forget about the valley, and leave it to "web" people?
As is Gelertner. Not only OS's and browsers are obsolete, but so are our thinkers. The internet is a pile of junk inscribed in a primitive documentation language. And yeah, Java is an alias for "stupid fu*k".
:I Get me some solid ground for distributed computing and I might buy it.
It seems to me that Gelertner, Jon Katz, and every moron who'd be willing to try to put the whole computing on the freakin' "web" are equally idiot. Your shi**y "web" browser is never going to make it into some cyberspace dream.
Flames? I see "web sites" like hotmail and i-drive and I curse them every moment I have to use such services. I mean, programs aren't supposed to work on html pages, right?
Ha BTW, if there's a revolution to come it's not going to be some sort of UI + trivial programming + wacky slow and foolish internet technologies like java/php/whatever. Without AI, none of this comes close to realization; I speak to stupid programmers who should've been retired a decade ago.
The internet is anarchy in failure for the most part. The free software community was born out of the net, but I believe remains almost as an exception. But check GNU's http service, I don't think you'll meet a lot of foolish "web" stuff like "sign in", "visit our sponsor", "click here to...".. wtf? the http was meant to be as "open" as possible. Today, I told my friends that I wanted to destroy the internet. Hopefully, the internet will eat itself. I'd personally like to see that internet once again belongs to people.
List is definitely biased towards that more numerical side of CS. I would personally like to see search algorithms, graph algorithms, advanced data structures, etc. Here is an assortment of more realistic CS stuff (in no specific order), I tried to put in stuff not talked about in previous posts.
:)
:)
;)
1. A^* search and variants. Simulated annealing, heuristic repair, etc. You know, GOFAI search algorithms.
2. Minimum Spanning Tree algorithms. Shortest path algorithms. Graph partitioning algorithms.
3. Data structures: heap (the usual one, and the variants such as binomial fibonacci), tree structures(bst, r-b, avl, b+, bsp, quad-, oct- etc.), disjoint sets, hash tables.
4. I don't wanna admit it, but perhaps back propagation algorithm for ANN
5. LR(1) parsing algorithms, without which you can't write decent compilers!
6. Round-Robin scheduling algorithm. Where're you heading without pre-emptive multitasking?
7. Median-of-medians. Power of recursion!
8. LCS (Longest common subsequence), demonstrative of dynamic programming. And you used some diff program surely...
9. RSA and similar public key crypto-algos.
Hope you like this slightly alternative supplement
And probably way better. AFAIK, IBM AS/400, and its direct ancestor possess the only proven HAL ever devised. That's how IBM delivers stunning performance on the AS/400 without changing a line of code. It's not a lame dynamic translator with cache.. Guys from the big blue come, change your hardware, but your software continues to work. Yeah, so they can use custom CPU design to tackle certain application bottlenecks.
Seriously though, I never understand how someone can get a patent for such a silly thing. It's just so evident; there's no invention here. So, if you manufacture a laser device when nobody has an idea of what laser is, I could probably appreciate it... But isn't this something that every system programmer knows by heart? So wtf?
I'd rather throw away the lame x86 emulation code which they call code morphing.. it seems to me a trivial interpreter with dumb caching. take the VLIW core, write a real compiler for it, and then you might be heading at something. BTW, I don't think that we'll see 16/32 way machines that soon, because those have to be NUMA, and there's no real OS / PL environment and apps that can take advantage of that. (you couldn't be more pessimistic ;) I'm doin' my Msc. on parallel programming....)
I started programming when I was 12.
:P C and C++ came very natural after assembly!
:)
* I started by writing small programs and games in Atari 800 XL's BASIC.
* I tried to learn Assembly, but I just couldn't understand all those wacky mnemonics. Though, I did write some hardware code.
* I wrote with AmigaBASIC on the Amiga500. My next language was AMOS, which I still find to be pretty good as a BASIC variant.
* Then I learnt 680x0 Assembly, and I wrote intros/demos with that, and learnt hardware access. 3d gfx was my fave.
* I learnt C and Pascal on the Amiga. I was using a pirated version of the SAS/C
* I was forced to program in Pascal and Java in Comp. Sci. undergrad. But I insisted on C++. I also enjoyed LISP/Prolog a lot, I think LISP could also be a good starter after assembly!!
* I now code mainly in C++, but have an interest in new / interpreted languages and lang. design...
So, that'w how my evolution went. I strongly suggest *clean* and *featureful* BASIC variants with which they *won't* be making GUI's but plain graphics and games. That's how you get to learn real programming (He he, demo scene rullaz!)
Then, the kids will want to check out networking, and they can practice with Perl about TCP/IP stuff, I guess. (Not so scary)
Java may seem like a pedagogic device, but avoid at all costs! It sucks. It will distract kids from the joy of programming, too dry... (Juice is what we're after, right?) [Java zealots write to my e-mail addy and if you're a Sun executive you get special treatment!]
Don't tell them that C is the ultimate language; it isn't. Let them play with the following paradigms in the evolutionary order
* Procedural (BASIC, Assembly)
* Functional - Symbolic (LISP, PROLOG!)
* Data driven - (FORTRAN, C)
* Object Oriented/Generic (C++, Ada...)
That will get them to understand why that language is done that way. The best is to pick one language from each generation of languages... BTW, as you see there isn't another generation after oo/generic languages, because there isn't.
If you show them a RAD tool, they will think that programming is all about GUI's and databases and trivial networking. It isn't. It isn't. It isn't. Get them to read some computer science stuff, like sorting algorithms (even consider some excrepts from Knuth!)
This will get you going
Hi,
/maintenance tools
I've just set up a Beowulf cluster for parallel
programming research at our CS dept., and I wonder
which installation software and administration
tools you have been using on your alpha based
Beowulf.
I patched FAI for our needs so that I get around
with only a magic floppy to install a node from
scratch. Is your installation
developed in-house or do you prefer free software?
And which tools have you found most useful?
Thanks,
This is a shame. I haven't used the Amiga for many many years. I still own my lovely Amiga 1200 anyway; unfortunately it's in my family's house.
I must have been confused because of the ever increasing size of RAMs these days. On the Amiga500 we used to do quite well with 512K of RAM, and I could compile C++ proggys on Amiga1200 with only 2 megs of RAM!
Bertrand Meyer is a thousand miles off. I must throw in some points that he will probably never be able to understand with his corporate mind-set.
* I couldn't use a UNIX system at my home computer if it were commercial software. Most software I use has better quality than all of Windows software, and I am grateful for all this.
* I am a software engineer, and I think that most commercial software producers are quite evil given that they produce low quality and overcostly stuff. Example: medical imaging/archiving software. If high quality products would be available freely, all patients would benefit. [So I made my DICOM3.0 implementation free!]
* Free software means that you can take it and modify it. [Sucker] If you have a problem with GCC on Windows (whatever that means), perhaps he means on Cygwin32, I don't know, you take the source, and fix the damned thing. The original authors of a free software package have no control on its evolution, so they can't put some known deficiencies to make money out of service. Someone can always come up with an alternative that makes it obsolete, or patch those deficiencies...
* A company can earn money from developing free software, and nothing is wrong with that. And one more thing. think of it like this. An OS should be free, because it has general utility...
* Why is he making things personal? RMS isn't an easy person to get along and ESR is a maniac. So what? Shut up and check the code!
I think that's enough. I could say a lot more but I don't have the energy to refute every idiot's every claim on the planet.
Well, the Amiga 1000 surely had a graphical interface, and way back in 85. AmigaOS "graphics.library" and other UI layers on top were pretty excellent, and almost a breeze to code with. That I felt when I first coded in xlib and xtoolkit. I was thinking how easy it was to get good looking and functional interfaces on the Amiga. Any X program would look brain dead to me. That is especially true if you're using emacs or axe as your editor :) Then, I remember the slickest editor was Cygnus Ed on the Amiga. I used assembler "IDE"s, but there were a lot of apps that rocked. Some of the best computer graphics were drawn with DPaint for sure. That was so great then! None of the Photoshop/GIMP belly aches. And I think DevPac was great. Hmm, hey who can forget DOpus? Those x86 users had the poor norton commander. That used to feel good. When they saw an Amiga desktop, they would go *gasp*. And those great DTP programs. I'm afraid there's just too many to tell...
:\
Not forgetting that Amiga had a bunch of very cool graphics primitives that you could play with. The design of Amiga UI's have always seemed very logical, and I think wb3.0 looked sweet. You had your gadgets, and once you put a gadget that was it. Contrast with Win32 or X-windows.
The real story is, however, the underlying OS. When I got hold of ROM Kernel Reference Manual - Exec, I was kind of overwhelmed. It took time to understand what was going on there. The fast message passing, pre-emptive multitasking lightweight kernel, dynamic device drivers and libraries. Thanks to Carl Sassenrath! Man, you could not possibly ask for more then. And it all was packed in 512K of ROM. It sure went up to 1MB but it was worth it. If the Amiga hadn't gone down due to the stupidity of Commodore it would still stand straight in the world of multi-user OS's. And possibly POSIX compliant. Those were the days...
I also remember an object oriented programming model in the recent versions of AmigaOS, what was that called?
I guess there will always be some desire to find some "quantum magic" out there. As a computer scientist however, I am less inclined to find that operation of the mind has anything to do with quantum properties of matter.
....
Anyway, recalling those incredible experiments that involved "collective mind control" over random number generators, and claims that statistical evidence had been gathered at "nodal" events such as the new year's eve, y2k, I am quite skeptical about the scientific accountability of this "branch" of research.
To me, it makes little more than no sense to spend research resources on para-psyhchology or a plain wrong interpretation of quantum mechanics.
One wonders what they have in mind next; a TCP/IP connection to God? Amusing.
.
....
homebox$ telnet www.rab.com/heaven
Connecting to 198.133.17.230
IBM AIX on RS/999000
heaven login: exa
password:
Welcome to IBM's wonderful ethereal connection
to the almighty! Here you will find great
resources on religion, and have the chance
to talk to dead people. Meet famous artists,
scientists and all alike.
Launching IBM Heaven/Menu...
Please wait...
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exa
Prof. Pollack,
As I write, I am trying to write a small ANN program for my graduate NN course's homework. I am very interested in AI. I have taken many AI related courses and have become a member of ACM SIGART. However, one thing has been worrying me about Neural Networks for some years.
Although Neural Networks seem to be quite capable at pattern matching tasks such as OCR, their problem-wise scalability is a mystery. In particular, I fail to see how Neural Networks satisfy the hard questions raised by the Philosophy of Mind. Although PDP has been introduced as somewhat a magical way of dealing with intelligence (that is to say claiming to solve intelligence without substantiating any theory of intelligence), and a unique way of computation (that is to say computing without knowing anything about algorithms/data structures/complexity etc), I view it as merely a Programming Paradigm. I can understand why it would appeal to a non computer-scientist because of its look-this-is-magic, or illusionist approach, but I have difficulty in understanding its place in search of strong AI. It is, to me, only another type of machine. And it can at most be only another incarnation of the Universal Turing Machine.
Of course, there is also the recent findings about actual animal brains, and why traditional ANN's are inapt at simulating it. All the findings about these ion channels, protein memories and other fancy mechanisms discovered in our brains...
Contemplating these problems, do you think that Neural Networks are obsolete?
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Eray Ozkural
CS, Bilkent Univ.
Hasn't the IEEE standard been dropped? I thought
that's just --Apple-- now. And haven't some ppl been taunting USB2.0 over Firewire for video stuff? (since that's really an open standard and so forth...)
Excuse me? QT 2 what? You mean the MFC ripoff is better than BeOS C++ api? That means BeOS GUI stuff sucks ass!
Though I'd agree that QT smells a bit better
than MFC...
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exa