I don't expect any teacher to stop my child from misbehaving. I expect my child to stop himself as I know he is capable of doing so. If I put my trust in my child and my effort into raising him correctly he shall do well and if he does not I have only myself to blame.
I agree. Unfortunately, parents like you are in the minority. Taking responsibility for yourself is no longer in fashion.
As one of my mentors in college used to say: "May your tribe increase."
Your geocities C++ tutorial might be of some value. However, there are dozens of good C++ tutorials elsewhere, so the fact that geocities is blocked out doesn't deprive us of much in the way of unique content.
If, however, you produce the hot-damnedest C++ tutorial the world has ever seen, one of two things will happen: 1) your tutorial will get picked up by a bigger, non-blocked site, or 2) we'll add it to the whitelist.
The point is that very few of the good things blocked on the mass-blocked sites like geocities and angelfire are both unique (you can't get similar content anywhere else) and possessing of educational value.
Don't I know it.... We have a very hard time getting and keeping good admins because we can't afford them. Occasionally you find a keeper, though.
I don't typically toot my own horn, but I've got a degree in computer science, I can program C++ data structures like you wouldn't believe (how many people do you know that can program a templatized binary search tree from scratch in one go and have it work the first time?) and am pretty handy with linux, perl, and HTML.
A couple of times a year I get job offers from Tivoli and the like (I live in Austin) wanting to hire me away for 2-3x my current salary. But I really enjoy teaching, and the consistent hours make the rest of my life more sane. So I stay, happily.
On a well-administered network, this shouldn't be possible.
I guess it's time for me to stick up for N2H2 (a.k.a. "Bess") again....
I'm a computer science teacher at a public high school. We have N2H2's filtering "software" installed and I must confess that I like it. In my computer lab, in addition to my C++ compiler, all the computers have internet access. My job is to teach my students computer science, and incidentally programming in C++. As a side effect, I can also be held legally responsible for their actions while under my care. Without filtering software I would spend so much time "monitoring" to make sure they abide by the conduct rules set up by our school board I'd never get any classwork done. N2H2's service frees me up to do my job.
Keep in mind that schools voluntarily subscribe to N2H2's service. Also, though we have a public mandate to provide access to a good education for every child, that mandate does not include "allow the students to download/view whatever the hell they want using the fat internet pipe at school paid for with your hard-earned tax dollars." The internet is not "education". It is merely "raw information". Education is about teaching students how to think and how to filter that information.
Admittedly, part of an education is teaching students how to evaluate information sources themselves, but I don't think being unable to get to playboy.com is going to hamper our ability to do that.
Now, to get back to my original point, here's my understanding of how N2H2's filter works and why it won't be hacked by most twelve-year-olds. This is not your typical client-side dumb censorware.
In exchange for our monthly payment, N2H2 places a linux-based web proxy on our local network. All outbound traffic is funneled though that machine by setting the proxy value in Netscape to proxy through the "Bess" server. A packet filter at the switch discards any outbound traffic with a destination IP other than that of the Bess server, so just removing the proxy or changing it to some other address just gets your packets thrown away. If they're going to leave our network, they've got to go through Bess.
When Bess receives a connect request from a client (HTTP WGET, FTP, etc), it first checks the remote server address against a known-bad list (generated by human employees of N2H2 and updated nightly). If the remote host is on the black list, the connect request is discarded and a standard web page is returned with the message "Bess can't go there" and an option to mail N2H2 requesting the site be unblocked. A few trials indicate that many sites are blocked by IP address and not merely domain name, and those that are IP-blocked are still blocked if you convert the IP to decimal.
URLs which pass the domain screen are also parsed for keywords. For example, I get a reject message for any address containing the word 'fuck', even if no such page exists.
Finally, URLs which pass this screen are requested and the remote page is returned. However, the proxy can be configured to search for dirty words in returned pages and optionally throw away those that pass some frequency threshold or also optionally replace those words with XXXXs. At our high school, this is currently turned off.
Some sites are blocked at the root because of known inappropriate content (e.g. playboy.com). Others are blocked at the root because they allow free web pages and so 1) change too quickly to effectively police and 2) have very little of value anyway (e.g. geocities). Still others are blocked at the page level (e.g. not foo.com but foo.com/users/pr0nboy).
http://ethanjones.homepage.com/ - Campaign Finance Reform is blocked at the root; all of *.homepage.com is disallowed.
http://rosie.acmecity.com/bebe/129/index.html - The Second Amendment is blocked at the root; all of rosie.acmecity.com/* is disallowed.
I don't know why the Minnesota newspaper or the Traditional Values Coaltion are blocked, but we could request a review of these sites or unblock them locally (more on this below).
In addition to the default blacklist, local administrators have the ability to add sites which they want to block even if N2H2 deems them appropriate, OR whitelist sites which they want to allow even though N2H2 blocks them by default.
Sure, it's possible to stick your own redirecting CGI script on your own unblocked web space, but since as a teacher I'm still paying some modicum of attention I'll figure out you're doing it by catching you in class or by reading through the server logs of requested pages and then add your "proxy" to our whitelist. And then send you down to the principal's office for violating our terms of service (which students and their parents must agree to to get any internet access at all).
All-in-all, it's a flexible system that allows each school to determine what level of filtering they want to allow. As I mentioned in another reply, ours is apparently not too restrictive (we are a high school, after all), as I can get to slashdot, freshmeat, kuro5hin, mp3.com, userfriendly, after-y2k and lots of other good stuff that sometimes expresses "fringe" opinions.
This is a product of how your particular school has chosen to set up N2H2's filtering, no doubt because of the young age of the students.
At the school where I teach we use N2H2 as well, and it's far more liberal in what it allows. Though almost all clearly inappropriate sites are blocked, there are still LOTS and LOTS of things which aren't, including slashdot, freshmeat, and userfriendly, just to name a few.
If you're unhappy with the level of filtering your son is receiving, blame the school board or your school's administrators, not N2H2.
Of course, the Quake (I) engine has been GPLed. But you're referring to Quake II and Quake III, which we recently learned are $125,000 and $300,000 respectively.
They suggest sending your info to the Direct Marketing Association indicating you don't want calls from member companies. I remain skeptical of this...
I can vouch for it. I sent letters to the DMA and to the several big address list resellers (Axciom, et al) as per Junkbusters' instructions. I now receive no snail-mail solicitations except the circulars and coupons and such which are put in by the postman himself.
I also started working through the Anti-Telemarketing Script every time I received a telemarketing call. Doing this scrupulously, combined with the letter to the DMA worked. My last such call was 12:35pm, Saturday, 2 Oct 1999.
Though since I got CallerID about a month back, I notice I get about one "OUT OF AREA" call a day while I'm work. I can't complain.
It may be helpful to note for those having telemarketers hang up on them that you should get their name before you otherwise tip your hand. From the Anti-Telemarketing Script, my series of questions is basically this:
"Can I get your full name please?"
"What company are you calling for?"
"Can you give me a number where I can reach that company?" then, pop the question...
"Does [company] keep a list of numbers they've been asked not to call?" (the answer to this must be "yes")
"I'd like you to put my name on that list; can you take care of that now?"
I'm a high school computer science teacher. All my daily assignments as well as larger projects (and solutions, in many cases) are available online. Note that these materials will be archived to my personal home page real soon, as the new school year starts one week from today (that is, on Wednesday, August 9).
Many of these assignments I've done for several years, so I know they're suitable for first-year computer science students.
Looks like this was nearly answered in his PBS Q&A. I see a "history of the net" episode is coming, but I'd still like to know if there's any hope for updates of the things presented in TotN.
One: when in the 70s Xerox execs sat on their thumbs and didn't try to make commercial products out of the astonishing stuff being developed at PARC. They had laser printing, the GUI, email, and ethernet and yet they let everybody else profit. To quote Steve Jobs from TotN: "They snatched defeat from the greatest victory in computing."
Two: when IBM built its PC in 1980 using off-the-shelf parts and then licensed the OS from Microsoft but didn't prevent Microsoft from also licensing the OS to whomever else it wanted. Once their BIOS (basically the only proprietary piece of the whole IBM PC) was reverse-engineered by Compaq, the clone flooded the market and IBM was destroyed by competition. Thus the IBM PC was really "the first Microsoft-Intel PC," in the words of Larry Ellison (also from TotN). "They gave away two-thirds of their market share."
Then again, those are just easy for me because I've seen Triumph of the Nerds more times than should be allowed.
I'm a computer science teacher at the high school level, and every year, I show Triumph of the Nerds to all five classes (one class at a time. I think I've nearly got all three hours memorized by now). However, it being five years later, there are several important developments which the tape doesn't address. I have to pause the tape and explain to them that Steve Jobs is now back, that Larry Ellison was wrong about the whole N.C. thing replacing the PC, little details about Microsoft v DOJ, etc.
Do you have any plans to release an update to the series, picking up where you left off and covering the last five or so years of computer history? Maybe a fourth tape? I for one would like to see it.
Don't know if the projects are related, but there's been a language called C-- at least since 1995. It's basically just x86 assembler with a C-like syntactic sugar. It was used to create the security software I use in my lab.
The original page seems to be long gone, but you can download the language and docs here.
Whilst I applaud any company who's ready to spend substantial wads of cash on OpenSource development, I really think that competitions are the wrong way to go about it:
I thought this at first, too. Seems like a dumb thing for an "Open Source" company to do, since it appears to encourage competition at the expense of the OSS model. But upon reading the webpage I discovered there's more to the story.
It encourages secrecy and non-cooperation between the various people working on projects like this.
Actually, after the initial design phase, finalists are monetarily encouraged to join forces, since they can double their take if they win.
It doesn't encourage the best people to do the work because they'll say to themselves "I could work for six months on this - and then lose the competition and get nothing".
This is not obvious from just reading the blurb, but the biggest part of the competition is purely to design such tools; implementation details are discouraged. Though a good design is quite hard, it doesn't take six months, especially if the designer in question has already bounced around such ideas. Perhaps the money will draw out a designer who's been itching but hasn't yet scratched.
Also, the deadline for the initial design submissions is March 31, so the most one could waste is ten weeks of planning. (And since it's just a design, there's no debugging!)
The wording of the competition seems to prohibit developers from doing the rational thing which is to start with the best parts of the existing autoconf/make system and just fix whatever is perceived to be broken.
From the rules (emphasis is mine): "Designs based on existing tools, written in any language, are welcome. Such designs will be judged on the same basis as those written from scratch." So this is still possible.
Putting money into OpenSource teams has to be done with great care since it can often result in serious internal debates about who contributed most and who deserves what share of the money.
You're right on with this one. The rules of the game change a bit when we're talking about quantities of money rather than merely number of listings in the CREDITS file.
Failing that, break the money up into $20k 'grants' and offer them to people who are already working in the right direction.
As I said, existing projects can compete. And the $100,000 is broken up into $2500 apiece for each of four finalists in the four categories, and then a second award of $7500 for the final winner in those categories and $2500 each for the runners up.
This competition is A Bad Thing.
Again, that's what I thought at first. But after reading the rules I had to agree it's not as dumb as it sounds. They're merely putting some money into trying to find the best design for some new tools (since they're claiming that the inherent design limitations of the existing tools are what they're trying to overcome). Then once the initial submissions are weeded through, they basically let the OSS model take over, even monetarily rewarding finalists who join forces and end up with a better final design.
It's funny. From time to time one of my students will wander by after school and catch me coding something full-screen in vi, with syntax highlighting. Many of my upper-level students who watch for a minute or two will usually cry out:
Student: Hey! How'd you do that? Me: (puzzled) What? Student: Those ten lines just changed indentation level all at once! And you didn't even move! Me: Yeah, that's vi for you. Student: vi can do that? Me: vi can do anything, once you learn how.
You know a text editor is good when people walking by will actually stop to watch you use it. Tom Christiansen was right, vi isn't just an editor, it's a game (a "rogue-variant", to quote him more accurately).
And while I'm at it, another thing I like about vi is that I can have it installed on every machine I own and it looks just the same everywhere. Consistency is good, IMO.
> We've seen this before, actually, and it's still in the process of being dealt with; the release of the Quake source to the hungry open source world.
I know this is slightly offtopic, but a week ago when I read Jeff "Bovine Lawson's.plan of Jan 6 and then his treatise on operational code authentication, I thought I was reading a Slashdot thread on how to correct the problem of cheating in an open-source Quake.
It seems that both distributed key cracking and distributed Quake playing:) face many of the same cheating issues. It's clear Jeff and co. have thought a lot about what problems would have to be "solved" before they can go open source (which they hope to in the future). I highly recommend that anyone interested in the whole Quake cheating problem read Jeff's thoughts first. (He even mentions why Netrek-style blessed binaries won't work in general.)
>What we do need to find is a way for artists to make money off of their labors. The problem is how can we do this [in a way] that's fair for everyone?
RMS addresses this quite convincingly in his article The Right Way to Tax DAT. This article was originally published in Wired magazine in 1992, but still holds quite a bit of relevance for the situation you bring up.
Re:GPL'ing the source code is great but...
on
Quake 1 GPL'ed
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· Score: 1
A little background knowledge would go a VERY long way
Michael Abrash was one of the engine coders at id during Quake development. His Graphics Programming Black Book, Special Edition contains not only most of his stuff on the Zen of ASM but also several (nearly a dozen) chapters on the mathematical and design underpinnings of Quake.
fatbrain claims this book is "out of stock indefinitely", but if you can get your hands on a copy, it should give you a leg up on the rendering engine, at least. Barnes and Noble claims to have it in stock.
I don't think this would happen to the degree you are suggesting. It's true that OSS gets some of its power from programmers who work on something they want to. But the "thousand pairs of eyes" factor is a bigger deal, IMHO, and I think it would ameliorate anything but a horrid first attempt.
You may have answered this already, but what projects are so heinous that no one wants to work on them? I can see nobody wanting to do it bad enough to start in the first place, but to not want to do it at all?
For example, I'd never take a free Saturday to add FireWire support to the Linux kernel. My free time is too precious, and there are other projects I'd rather spend my time on. But if Red Hat approached me and said "We'll pay you 30k/yr to work on adding FireWire support to Linux." I'd get real interested in a hurry.
There are a hundred projects I'd never start on my own which I'd still be interested in if it meant I was quitting my Real Job and had time to work on them.
In addition, I think the "disgruntled Red Hat worker" (to borrow from Booker) is less likely to occur in a free software setting, because many of the Dilbert-esque factors that make programming for a living no fun are far less frequent in such environments:
far fewer clueless pointy-haired bosses
decisions are made by the ones who understand the technical aspects
seldom have to work around someone else's crappy code, since if it's crappy it's probably not adopted by any real distro
don't have to tech support for dumb users (clientele would largely be other developers, who don't ask things like "What do you mean, shift-click?")
...and probably a dozen others which I can't think of since I don't program for a living
Anyway, I love my job, but I think I could find any number of less-popular programming tasks very rewarding even if I wouldn't choose to spend my time on them now, limited as it is.
I'm not really surprised to see that Austin comes in third. Having ubiquitous connectedness makes my job easier, because I can just assume that 1) almost all my students have access to a computer at home and 2) more than half have internet access (probably closer to 75% with the demographic that takes my class).
Thus I can provide DJGPP for my students to download so they can work on projects at home and therefore I get to see higher quality work. Also I keep all my assignments and notes, etc. on a web page rather than using photocopied handouts or having to write quite so much on the chalkboard. And I know that a plurality of students could get to it from home if they are absent, whatever.
The URL to my class web page is linked from my personal home page, in case anyone wants a flashback to high school computer science.
Well, to be honest, I get enough of computers at home and at school, and 1 (yes, one!) computer is enough for me to run my irc and to let me read my email and to browse slahsdot.
I couldn't agree more. Maintaining a lab of twenty-four machines with both Win95 and linux, IP and NetWare, etc. all day at school is enough. I get to play with fun networking stuff at school. But when I come home, the one machine is all I need.
My dad is always messing with his computer at home; installing software, changing settings, changing out hardware, etc; and his machine is down more often than it is up. But he barely uses a computer at work. For me, I don't play with my computer any more than I play with my television or VCR. I got that out of my system my first two years or so of college.
There is definitely a difference between playing with your computer and playing on your computer.
I've probably written more lines of code listening to Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes and Trent's pretty hate machine than any other albums. Used to in college (when those albums were fairly new) just go into the public lab, stick a CD in the CD-ROM drive, and code for fourteen hours at a time. And later when they came out I listened to Under the Pink and Fixed (which I prefer to Broken).
Nowadays I teach high school. I've got a custom mp3 jukebox program that plays whatever albums students vote for that day (coming under the GPL to freshmeat Real Soon Now, as soon as I get the linux client finished), and the albums on it are submitted by students. Before I can put them up, though, I have to approve the albums, so I usually have a steady stream of student-submitted albums that I try to listen to when I code.
Goodness, gracious! I can't imagine listening to talk radio while trying to code. Anything that has some thread to follow (like a conversation) really prevents me from concentrating. I even have trouble paying attention when I'm listening to some band I've never heard before if they're any good; my brain constantly tries to pay attention to the lyrics.
Maybe if I had a cubicle job, but for me, (conversation == no coding).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't expect any teacher to stop my child from misbehaving. I expect my child to stop himself as I know he is capable of doing so. If I put my trust in my child and my effort into raising him correctly he shall do well and if he does not I have only myself to blame.
I agree. Unfortunately, parents like you are in the minority. Taking responsibility for yourself is no longer in fashion.
As one of my mentors in college used to say: "May your tribe increase."
Your geocities C++ tutorial might be of some value. However, there are dozens of good C++ tutorials elsewhere, so the fact that geocities is blocked out doesn't deprive us of much in the way of unique content.
If, however, you produce the hot-damnedest C++ tutorial the world has ever seen, one of two things will happen: 1) your tutorial will get picked up by a bigger, non-blocked site, or 2) we'll add it to the whitelist.
The point is that very few of the good things blocked on the mass-blocked sites like geocities and angelfire are both unique (you can't get similar content anywhere else) and possessing of educational value.
Don't I know it.... We have a very hard time getting and keeping good admins because we can't afford them. Occasionally you find a keeper, though.
I don't typically toot my own horn, but I've got a degree in computer science, I can program C++ data structures like you wouldn't believe (how many people do you know that can program a templatized binary search tree from scratch in one go and have it work the first time?) and am pretty handy with linux, perl, and HTML.
A couple of times a year I get job offers from Tivoli and the like (I live in Austin) wanting to hire me away for 2-3x my current salary. But I really enjoy teaching, and the consistent hours make the rest of my life more sane. So I stay, happily.
...we'll figure out how to break it.
On a well-administered network, this shouldn't be possible.
I guess it's time for me to stick up for N2H2 (a.k.a. "Bess") again....
I'm a computer science teacher at a public high school. We have N2H2's filtering "software" installed and I must confess that I like it. In my computer lab, in addition to my C++ compiler, all the computers have internet access. My job is to teach my students computer science, and incidentally programming in C++. As a side effect, I can also be held legally responsible for their actions while under my care. Without filtering software I would spend so much time "monitoring" to make sure they abide by the conduct rules set up by our school board I'd never get any classwork done. N2H2's service frees me up to do my job.
Keep in mind that schools voluntarily subscribe to N2H2's service. Also, though we have a public mandate to provide access to a good education for every child, that mandate does not include "allow the students to download/view whatever the hell they want using the fat internet pipe at school paid for with your hard-earned tax dollars." The internet is not "education". It is merely "raw information". Education is about teaching students how to think and how to filter that information.
Admittedly, part of an education is teaching students how to evaluate information sources themselves, but I don't think being unable to get to playboy.com is going to hamper our ability to do that.
Now, to get back to my original point, here's my understanding of how N2H2's filter works and why it won't be hacked by most twelve-year-olds. This is not your typical client-side dumb censorware.
In exchange for our monthly payment, N2H2 places a linux-based web proxy on our local network. All outbound traffic is funneled though that machine by setting the proxy value in Netscape to proxy through the "Bess" server. A packet filter at the switch discards any outbound traffic with a destination IP other than that of the Bess server, so just removing the proxy or changing it to some other address just gets your packets thrown away. If they're going to leave our network, they've got to go through Bess.
When Bess receives a connect request from a client (HTTP WGET, FTP, etc), it first checks the remote server address against a known-bad list (generated by human employees of N2H2 and updated nightly). If the remote host is on the black list, the connect request is discarded and a standard web page is returned with the message "Bess can't go there" and an option to mail N2H2 requesting the site be unblocked. A few trials indicate that many sites are blocked by IP address and not merely domain name, and those that are IP-blocked are still blocked if you convert the IP to decimal.
URLs which pass the domain screen are also parsed for keywords. For example, I get a reject message for any address containing the word 'fuck', even if no such page exists.
Finally, URLs which pass this screen are requested and the remote page is returned. However, the proxy can be configured to search for dirty words in returned pages and optionally throw away those that pass some frequency threshold or also optionally replace those words with XXXXs. At our high school, this is currently turned off.
Some sites are blocked at the root because of known inappropriate content (e.g. playboy.com). Others are blocked at the root because they allow free web pages and so 1) change too quickly to effectively police and 2) have very little of value anyway (e.g. geocities). Still others are blocked at the page level (e.g. not foo.com but foo.com/users/pr0nboy).
In addition to the default blacklist, local administrators have the ability to add sites which they want to block even if N2H2 deems them appropriate, OR whitelist sites which they want to allow even though N2H2 blocks them by default.
Sure, it's possible to stick your own redirecting CGI script on your own unblocked web space, but since as a teacher I'm still paying some modicum of attention I'll figure out you're doing it by catching you in class or by reading through the server logs of requested pages and then add your "proxy" to our whitelist. And then send you down to the principal's office for violating our terms of service (which students and their parents must agree to to get any internet access at all).
All-in-all, it's a flexible system that allows each school to determine what level of filtering they want to allow. As I mentioned in another reply, ours is apparently not too restrictive (we are a high school, after all), as I can get to slashdot, freshmeat, kuro5hin, mp3.com, userfriendly, after-y2k and lots of other good stuff that sometimes expresses "fringe" opinions.
This is a product of how your particular school has chosen to set up N2H2's filtering, no doubt because of the young age of the students.
At the school where I teach we use N2H2 as well, and it's far more liberal in what it allows. Though almost all clearly inappropriate sites are blocked, there are still LOTS and LOTS of things which aren't, including slashdot, freshmeat, and userfriendly, just to name a few.
If you're unhappy with the level of filtering your son is receiving, blame the school board or your school's administrators, not N2H2.
Of course, the Quake (I) engine has been GPLed. But you're referring to Quake II and Quake III, which we recently learned are $125,000 and $300,000 respectively.
They suggest sending your info to the Direct Marketing Association indicating you don't want calls from member companies. I remain skeptical of this...
I can vouch for it. I sent letters to the DMA and to the several big address list resellers (Axciom, et al) as per Junkbusters' instructions. I now receive no snail-mail solicitations except the circulars and coupons and such which are put in by the postman himself.
I also started working through the Anti-Telemarketing Script every time I received a telemarketing call. Doing this scrupulously, combined with the letter to the DMA worked. My last such call was 12:35pm, Saturday, 2 Oct 1999.
Though since I got CallerID about a month back, I notice I get about one "OUT OF AREA" call a day while I'm work. I can't complain.
It may be helpful to note for those having telemarketers hang up on them that you should get their name before you otherwise tip your hand. From the Anti-Telemarketing Script, my series of questions is basically this:
then, pop the question...
Who? I certainly have no idea how to....
Oh.
:)
I'm a high school computer science teacher. All my daily assignments as well as larger projects (and solutions, in many cases) are available online. Note that these materials will be archived to my personal home page real soon, as the new school year starts one week from today (that is, on Wednesday, August 9).
Many of these assignments I've done for several years, so I know they're suitable for first-year computer science students.
The Daily Handout - high school computer science assignments
Interesting assignments of note:
Looks like this was nearly answered in his PBS Q&A. I see a "history of the net" episode is coming, but I'd still like to know if there's any hope for updates of the things presented in TotN.
Two easy ones come to mind.
One: when in the 70s Xerox execs sat on their thumbs and didn't try to make commercial products out of the astonishing stuff being developed at PARC. They had laser printing, the GUI, email, and ethernet and yet they let everybody else profit. To quote Steve Jobs from TotN: "They snatched defeat from the greatest victory in computing."
Two: when IBM built its PC in 1980 using off-the-shelf parts and then licensed the OS from Microsoft but didn't prevent Microsoft from also licensing the OS to whomever else it wanted. Once their BIOS (basically the only proprietary piece of the whole IBM PC) was reverse-engineered by Compaq, the clone flooded the market and IBM was destroyed by competition. Thus the IBM PC was really "the first Microsoft-Intel PC," in the words of Larry Ellison (also from TotN). "They gave away two-thirds of their market share."
Then again, those are just easy for me because I've seen Triumph of the Nerds more times than should be allowed.
I'm a computer science teacher at the high school level, and every year, I show Triumph of the Nerds to all five classes (one class at a time. I think I've nearly got all three hours memorized by now). However, it being five years later, there are several important developments which the tape doesn't address. I have to pause the tape and explain to them that Steve Jobs is now back, that Larry Ellison was wrong about the whole N.C. thing replacing the PC, little details about Microsoft v DOJ, etc.
Do you have any plans to release an update to the series, picking up where you left off and covering the last five or so years of computer history? Maybe a fourth tape? I for one would like to see it.
Don't know if the projects are related, but there's been a language called C-- at least since 1995. It's basically just x86 assembler with a C-like syntactic sugar. It was used to create the security software I use in my lab.
The original page seems to be long gone, but you can download the language and docs here.
Whilst I applaud any company who's ready to spend substantial wads of cash on OpenSource development, I really think that competitions are the wrong way to go about it:
I thought this at first, too. Seems like a dumb thing for an "Open Source" company to do, since it appears to encourage competition at the expense of the OSS model. But upon reading the webpage I discovered there's more to the story.
Actually, after the initial design phase, finalists are monetarily encouraged to join forces, since they can double their take if they win.
This is not obvious from just reading the blurb, but the biggest part of the competition is purely to design such tools; implementation details are discouraged. Though a good design is quite hard, it doesn't take six months, especially if the designer in question has already bounced around such ideas. Perhaps the money will draw out a designer who's been itching but hasn't yet scratched.
Also, the deadline for the initial design submissions is March 31, so the most one could waste is ten weeks of planning. (And since it's just a design, there's no debugging!)
From the rules (emphasis is mine): "Designs based on existing tools, written in any language, are welcome. Such designs will be judged on the same basis as those written from scratch." So this is still possible.
You're right on with this one. The rules of the game change a bit when we're talking about quantities of money rather than merely number of listings in the CREDITS file.
Failing that, break the money up into $20k 'grants' and offer them to people who are already working in the right direction.
As I said, existing projects can compete. And the $100,000 is broken up into $2500 apiece for each of four finalists in the four categories, and then a second award of $7500 for the final winner in those categories and $2500 each for the runners up.
This competition is A Bad Thing.
Again, that's what I thought at first. But after reading the rules I had to agree it's not as dumb as it sounds. They're merely putting some money into trying to find the best design for some new tools (since they're claiming that the inherent design limitations of the existing tools are what they're trying to overcome). Then once the initial submissions are weeded through, they basically let the OSS model take over, even monetarily rewarding finalists who join forces and end up with a better final design.
It's funny. From time to time one of my students will wander by after school and catch me coding something full-screen in vi, with syntax highlighting. Many of my upper-level students who watch for a minute or two will usually cry out:
Student: Hey! How'd you do that?
Me: (puzzled) What?
Student: Those ten lines just changed indentation level all at once! And you didn't even move!
Me: Yeah, that's vi for you.
Student: vi can do that?
Me: vi can do anything, once you learn how.
You know a text editor is good when people walking by will actually stop to watch you use it. Tom Christiansen was right, vi isn't just an editor, it's a game (a "rogue-variant", to quote him more accurately).
And while I'm at it, another thing I like about vi is that I can have it installed on every machine I own and it looks just the same everywhere. Consistency is good, IMO.
> We've seen this before, actually, and it's still in the process of being dealt with; the release of the Quake source to the hungry open source world.
I know this is slightly offtopic, but a week ago when I read Jeff "Bovine Lawson's .plan of Jan 6 and then his treatise on operational code authentication, I thought I was reading a Slashdot thread on how to correct the problem of cheating in an open-source Quake.
It seems that both distributed key cracking and distributed Quake playing :) face many of the same cheating issues. It's clear Jeff and co. have thought a lot about what problems would have to be "solved" before they can go open source (which they hope to in the future). I highly recommend that anyone interested in the whole Quake cheating problem read Jeff's thoughts first. (He even mentions why Netrek-style blessed binaries won't work in general.)
>What we do need to find is a way for artists to make money off of their labors. The problem is how can we do this [in a way] that's fair for everyone?
RMS addresses this quite convincingly in his article The Right Way to Tax DAT. This article was originally published in Wired magazine in 1992, but still holds quite a bit of relevance for the situation you bring up.
A little background knowledge would go a VERY long way
Michael Abrash was one of the engine coders at id during Quake development. His Graphics Programming Black Book, Special Edition contains not only most of his stuff on the Zen of ASM but also several (nearly a dozen) chapters on the mathematical and design underpinnings of Quake.
fatbrain claims this book is "out of stock indefinitely", but if you can get your hands on a copy, it should give you a leg up on the rendering engine, at least. Barnes and Noble claims to have it in stock.
To them the letter W = 6 and www is the mark of the beast
You know you've been teaching C++ too long when you immediately think:
"That should be W == 6 . Remember kids, we're comparing, not assigning...."
I don't think this would happen to the degree you are suggesting. It's true that OSS gets some of its power from programmers who work on something they want to. But the "thousand pairs of eyes" factor is a bigger deal, IMHO, and I think it would ameliorate anything but a horrid first attempt.
You may have answered this already, but what projects are so heinous that no one wants to work on them? I can see nobody wanting to do it bad enough to start in the first place, but to not want to do it at all?
For example, I'd never take a free Saturday to add FireWire support to the Linux kernel. My free time is too precious, and there are other projects I'd rather spend my time on. But if Red Hat approached me and said "We'll pay you 30k/yr to work on adding FireWire support to Linux." I'd get real interested in a hurry.
There are a hundred projects I'd never start on my own which I'd still be interested in if it meant I was quitting my Real Job and had time to work on them.
In addition, I think the "disgruntled Red Hat worker" (to borrow from Booker) is less likely to occur in a free software setting, because many of the Dilbert-esque factors that make programming for a living no fun are far less frequent in such environments:
Anyway, I love my job, but I think I could find any number of less-popular programming tasks very rewarding even if I wouldn't choose to spend my time on them now, limited as it is.
As for vote stuffing, reminds me of the time...
Recall when Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf handily won in People's Magazine's Most Beautiful People online poll, and as a write-in, no less.
I'm not really surprised to see that Austin comes in third. Having ubiquitous connectedness makes my job easier, because I can just assume that 1) almost all my students have access to a computer at home and 2) more than half have internet access (probably closer to 75% with the demographic that takes my class).
Thus I can provide DJGPP for my students to download so they can work on projects at home and therefore I get to see higher quality work. Also I keep all my assignments and notes, etc. on a web page rather than using photocopied handouts or having to write quite so much on the chalkboard. And I know that a plurality of students could get to it from home if they are absent, whatever.
The URL to my class web page is linked from my personal home page, in case anyone wants a flashback to high school computer science.
Well, to be honest, I get enough of computers at home and at school, and 1 (yes, one!) computer is enough for me to run my irc and to let me read my email and to browse slahsdot.
I couldn't agree more. Maintaining a lab of twenty-four machines with both Win95 and linux, IP and NetWare, etc. all day at school is enough. I get to play with fun networking stuff at school. But when I come home, the one machine is all I need.
My dad is always messing with his computer at home; installing software, changing settings, changing out hardware, etc; and his machine is down more often than it is up. But he barely uses a computer at work. For me, I don't play with my computer any more than I play with my television or VCR. I got that out of my system my first two years or so of college.
There is definitely a difference between playing with your computer and playing on your computer.
I've probably written more lines of code listening to Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes and Trent's pretty hate machine than any other albums. Used to in college (when those albums were fairly new) just go into the public lab, stick a CD in the CD-ROM drive, and code for fourteen hours at a time. And later when they came out I listened to Under the Pink and Fixed (which I prefer to Broken).
Nowadays I teach high school. I've got a custom mp3 jukebox program that plays whatever albums students vote for that day (coming under the GPL to freshmeat Real Soon Now, as soon as I get the linux client finished), and the albums on it are submitted by students. Before I can put them up, though, I have to approve the albums, so I usually have a steady stream of student-submitted albums that I try to listen to when I code.
Goodness, gracious! I can't imagine listening to talk radio while trying to code. Anything that has some thread to follow (like a conversation) really prevents me from concentrating. I even have trouble paying attention when I'm listening to some band I've never heard before if they're any good; my brain constantly tries to pay attention to the lyrics.
Maybe if I had a cubicle job, but for me, (conversation == no coding).