My proposal from August 2018, developing on an idea from February 2016.
I don't suppose that they got the idea from me, but it surprises me that it has taken this long to consider doing it this way.
Spot on. Microsoft could prove the value of the programme if it implemented something like the the Reproducible Builds project by Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/Reprod... 'Course, that would probably be an openness too far for them...
It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.
This is irresponsible marketing, and with continuing cuts in education, stands a very good chance of not being challenged by educators before politicians base policy on it.
How many times have you contacted news and commentary organisations to correct their description of you as a patent lawyer? How often have they made the correction?
Quite often we hear a legislator (both in the US and Ireland, where I live) tell us about the next best legal scheme to handle the scourges of spam or child pornography. Nearly always their assumptions about how the internet works are so off-base that it's difficult to see where they are coming from. The most common failure in their thinking, of course, is the notion that the internet can be regulated like a utility (e.g. electricity, 'phone communications). What do you think is the best means to educate legislators and their advisors on how the internet actually works?
Ow. That was mean. Slashdot is also rampant with people shooting their mouths off without a modicum of research. At least I try.
I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but here we go...
While I'm ignorant of a great many things, illiterate I am not. In fact, one of my chief interests is history. I also have a tendency to include a certain flippancy into most comments I write. This makes it more likely that I "it" was intended, don't you think?
I'm also a pedant, and something of what you call a "grammar nazi" (horrible term).
Go easy, and if you're going to utter a stereotype, make sure your subject is a member to the class.
I remember the glory days of NS, back before IE was even a player on the market.
So do I. Though only as an event in history. Netscape Communicator is gone. Dead. Arising from its ashes, however, is a top class browser that leaves netscape communicator and internet explorer coughing in its dust. Let go of netscape. AOL had no problem doing so.
Believe it or not, RFID (or something similar) was proposed for livestock agriculture some time ago. When I was in college in the early nineties, a classmate of mine worked on a project to develop a better polymer to encase a unique radio transmitter. The job of the material was to protect the transmitter from disgestion as it rested at the bottom of one of the cow's stomachs (for the city slickers among you, cows have four stomachs -- one for each food group). Each cow could then be uniquely identified. I don't know how the technology [PDF] developed from then, but I'm sure the less intrusive the means of keeping track on the cattle (for both the cattle and the farmer), the better.
ibhear
I have a feeling that this is less an attempt to force IBM to settle and more an attempt on SCO's part to confuse the market. SCO could stand to make some money if people thought they would be sued if they used Linux. FUD is the word. The irony is that IBM is the pioneer of FUD. The irony turns to cynicism when you notice that another side-player here is the high-priestess of software intellectual property: Microsoft.
I echo the sentiments of a number of posters here that IBM should call SCO's bluff. It's likely that the deadline will be extended to midnight on Friday in Hawaii. Then we'll here an announcement at 11:59 that SCO and IBM came to an agreement, the details of which will remain confidential. SCO will drop the Unix-in-Linux-or-is-it-really-Linux-in-Unix allegations. Within a month press releases will come from IBM further emphasising their redurced commitment to Unix and that Linux will be their main platform. By the time the Unix licence is up for renewal (in 5 years or so), neither SCO, nor IBM's interest in the licence, will exist and the whole thing will become an episode in future TV documentaries on the history of operating systems.
In the meantime, Apple will have vanished from the face of the earth because they thought they could get away with saying their new operating system was based on Unix. Such cheek!
As a heavy user of cygwin on a slow desktop PC, I was delighted to see that someone had ported rxvt to that environment. It gives quite a lot of the top-class features of xterm, and little of the unnecessary bells, whistles and complete brass, woodwind and percussion sections that come with xterm.
However, for your purposes, it can also be installed and used without X11, as in the case of the cygwin environment.
What's best about rxvt is it supports what you describe as "xterm mousing". This feature alone is why I always stuck with xterm until I discovered rxvt. That rxvt has it is why I won't use any other terminal emulator for a long time into the future.
Mind you, none of this is useful if rxvt hasn't been ported to Mac OS X, but it certainly is worth checking to see if it is.
Is any of that enforceable? If it came to a law suit, what courts would uphold this clause? Honestly, I don't know the answer. But surely at least one lawyer in Xtra knows that this is an abusive clause. Whatever happened to "...the above in no way effects your statutory rights..."?
I once had it out with a few people in a meeting. I was working for the software development organisation for an internet bank. Not once in my first five months there was the opportunity to use "resources" instead of "people" passed up. It most annoyed me when it was used in the singular: "We have a new resource starting on Monday..."
During a meeting, therefore, upon the third or fourth time the word was used to describe people, I ask that we stop doing that and return to the employees their humanity. No one of the 4 or 5 others in the meeting would agree that lumping people with PCs and meeting rooms was less than fair. In fact, they all agreed it was acceptable for the word to be applied even to them.
It wasn't until I pointed out that if they were throwing a party, they wouldn't invite 12 resources, or that their children were, therefore, resources or that they wouldn't refer to the CEO of the company as a resource that they began to see what I was talking about.
My tactic that day didn't create much effect, but at least I think I impressed enough one of the people present.
Some organisations in some companies could have a reasonable policy about what can or cannot be said in an internal web log environment. I would be interesting to see what boundaries can be stretched and by how much. It's one thing to disagree lucidly with your manager, another altogether to flamebait the LOB director who was thinking of promoting you. (The Beware-The-Voices ad campaign from Monster springs to mind.)
On security, can a slashcode administrator restrict the sections a user can (read) access?
Another (similarly inclined) option would be COSE. It uses an educational model based on that in the UK, but probably has most of what you're looking for. Also, it's free. It's not open source, but watch this space.
Here's what I plan for the summer (actually, these books and more that I can't remember are sitting beside my desk -- I've put a moritorium on buying book until the pile is at least 10% of its current size)
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic; Erich S. Gruen
The Punic Wars; Can't remember who wrote it.
In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster, and the Price of Neutrality; Robert Fisk
Artemis Fowl; Eoin Colfer
The Arrogance of Power : The Secret World of Richard Nixon; Anthony Summers
The Catcher in the Rye; J.D. Salinger.
A Dead Man in Deptford; Anthony Burgess
Some Hunter S. Thompson books:
The Great Shark Hunt
Generation of Swine
Songs of the Doomed
A strange list, I agree. And I suspect there's more beside my bed. The emphasis on recent history is merely my theme for the summer. (Republican Roman history is an on-going interest).
If anyone knows of a good book to counter Summers' above, giving a favourable history of Nixon's career, can you let me know?
My suggestion to you would be to set a goal that is generic. Decide on a system that whould be built. This can be something graphics based (e.g. a simple calculator that does addition, subtraction, division and multiplication), information based (e.g. building a time tabling system), networking (e.g. a system where input occurs on a client, and processing on a server).
However, the trick is not to specify technology. In fact, you could make it quite clear that it doesn't matter what development paradigms that are used. What is important, though, is that the goal be described as something that is useful. (I remember being brilliant with my repeating print out on my ZX81, but realising that no one wants to see "Eibhear was 'ere" 10, 100, 1000 or any amount of times.)
In short, decide what you would like to be produced by the entrants, and let them decide how they do it.
With respect to judging it, you could devise a set of qualitative criteria that can easily be assessed by judges with a modicum of technical experience. Criteria could include:
Extent of completion - how much of what was required was provided by the entry.
Ease of use - How difficult or not is the entry to learn to use.
Ease of access to potential users. - How many potential users are excluded or not from use due to a lack of peripheral resources (libraries, OS, hardware, etc.)
Presentation - How good it looks.
Perceived simplicity - How simple it seems in it's execution.
Readability of the code - How easily some one else can understand the code as entered.
Elegance of the programming - How "clever" or succinct the coding is.
Ease of access to build environment - How easy and/or inexpensive it would be for some one to gather the necessary environment to build the entry from the source.
These criteria are somewhat subjective, and to ensure fairness for all entrants, there would have to be a panel of judges, like in the figure skating competitions.
Then there is a set of quantitative criteria, which would enclude:
Disk-space taken up by deployed solution - how much disk space is required by the bare minimum of the entry to get it to run. This could include, but I would exclude, the system requirements.
Speed of response or operation - How long would the task that is set out in the requirements take to be completed.
Etc.
The point is to make the competition such that one geek with a linux and a C/C++ compiler and years of programming experience will not have an advantage over a kid with access to and a preference for HTML/javascript/VB/perl/etc. By making the requirements of the competition non-technical, the entrant will focus on the means best used by herself, and judgement will not be prejudicial.
Slashdot Mirror
My proposal from August 2018, developing on an idea from February 2016.
I don't suppose that they got the idea from me, but it surprises me that it has taken this long to consider doing it this way.
Spot on.
Microsoft could prove the value of the programme if it implemented something like the the Reproducible Builds project by Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/Reprod...
'Course, that would probably be an openness too far for them...
It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.
For example: http://davidsortino.blogs.pres...
This is irresponsible marketing, and with continuing cuts in education, stands a very good chance of not being challenged by educators before politicians base policy on it.
How many times have you contacted news and commentary organisations to correct their description of you as a patent lawyer? How often have they made the correction?
Not wholly Open Source, but have a look at COSE from Staffordshire University. They plan a FOSS release in the future.
Éibhear
"...are still trying to understand what caused it"
I suspect that Spirit stopped at a light on the wrong side of the planet and it went green while the locals were replacing those wheels with blocks.
Mind you, NASA's never going to admit that...
Éibhear
Sure there is. It's where people go to buy vapourware, freeware and shareware.
Where's Tom?
I'd have thought he'd have been a primary resource for information on modern warfare.
Quite often we hear a legislator (both in the US and Ireland, where I live) tell us about the next best legal scheme to handle the scourges of spam or child pornography. Nearly always their assumptions about how the internet works are so off-base that it's difficult to see where they are coming from. The most common failure in their thinking, of course, is the notion that the internet can be regulated like a utility (e.g. electricity, 'phone communications).
What do you think is the best means to educate legislators and their advisors on how the internet actually works?
Eibhear
Do we have to put blinkers on the little fella?
Eibhear
Score: 2.5, funny
Ow. That was mean. Slashdot is also rampant with people shooting their mouths off without a modicum of research. At least I try.
I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but here we go...
While I'm ignorant of a great many things, illiterate I am not. In fact, one of my chief interests is history. I also have a tendency to include a certain flippancy into most comments I write. This makes it more likely that I "it" was intended, don't you think?
I'm also a pedant, and something of what you call a "grammar nazi" (horrible term).
Go easy, and if you're going to utter a stereotype, make sure your subject is a member to the class.
Eibhear
So do I. Though only as an event in history. Netscape Communicator is gone. Dead. Arising from its ashes, however, is a top class browser that leaves netscape communicator and internet explorer coughing in its dust. Let go of netscape. AOL had no problem doing so.
ibhear
Believe it or not, RFID (or something similar) was proposed for livestock agriculture some time ago. When I was in college in the early nineties, a classmate of mine worked on a project to develop a better polymer to encase a unique radio transmitter. The job of the material was to protect the transmitter from disgestion as it rested at the bottom of one of the cow's stomachs (for the city slickers among you, cows have four stomachs -- one for each food group). Each cow could then be uniquely identified. I don't know how the technology [PDF] developed from then, but I'm sure the less intrusive the means of keeping track on the cattle (for both the cattle and the farmer), the better. ibhear
South Korea harbours weapons of mass competition.
Must.... Des...troy...
I have a feeling that this is less an attempt to force IBM to settle and more an attempt on SCO's part to confuse the market. SCO could stand to make some money if people thought they would be sued if they used Linux. FUD is the word. The irony is that IBM is the pioneer of FUD. The irony turns to cynicism when you notice that another side-player here is the high-priestess of software intellectual property: Microsoft.
I echo the sentiments of a number of posters here that IBM should call SCO's bluff. It's likely that the deadline will be extended to midnight on Friday in Hawaii. Then we'll here an announcement at 11:59 that SCO and IBM came to an agreement, the details of which will remain confidential. SCO will drop the Unix-in-Linux-or-is-it-really-Linux-in-Unix allegations. Within a month press releases will come from IBM further emphasising their redurced commitment to Unix and that Linux will be their main platform. By the time the Unix licence is up for renewal (in 5 years or so), neither SCO, nor IBM's interest in the licence, will exist and the whole thing will become an episode in future TV documentaries on the history of operating systems.
In the meantime, Apple will have vanished from the face of the earth because they thought they could get away with saying their new operating system was based on Unix. Such cheek!
As a heavy user of cygwin on a slow desktop PC, I was delighted to see that someone had ported rxvt to that environment. It gives quite a lot of the top-class features of xterm, and little of the unnecessary bells, whistles and complete brass, woodwind and percussion sections that come with xterm.
However, for your purposes, it can also be installed and used without X11, as in the case of the cygwin environment.
What's best about rxvt is it supports what you describe as "xterm mousing". This feature alone is why I always stuck with xterm until I discovered rxvt. That rxvt has it is why I won't use any other terminal emulator for a long time into the future.
Mind you, none of this is useful if rxvt hasn't been ported to Mac OS X, but it certainly is worth checking to see if it is.
Ãibhear
Thinking of Oracle buying SUN. If it did, would Oracle it rename it Apollo?
Éibhear
Is any of that enforceable? If it came to a law suit, what courts would uphold this clause? Honestly, I don't know the answer. But surely at least one lawyer in Xtra knows that this is an abusive clause. Whatever happened to "...the above in no way effects your statutory rights..."?
Astounding stuff...
Éibhear
I once had it out with a few people in a meeting. I was working for the software development organisation for an internet bank. Not once in my first five months there was the opportunity to use "resources" instead of "people" passed up. It most annoyed me when it was used in the singular: "We have a new resource starting on Monday..."
During a meeting, therefore, upon the third or fourth time the word was used to describe people, I ask that we stop doing that and return to the employees their humanity. No one of the 4 or 5 others in the meeting would agree that lumping people with PCs and meeting rooms was less than fair. In fact, they all agreed it was acceptable for the word to be applied even to them.
It wasn't until I pointed out that if they were throwing a party, they wouldn't invite 12 resources, or that their children were, therefore, resources or that they wouldn't refer to the CEO of the company as a resource that they began to see what I was talking about.
My tactic that day didn't create much effect, but at least I think I impressed enough one of the people present.
Éibhear
Some organisations in some companies could have a reasonable policy about what can or cannot be said in an internal web log environment. I would be interesting to see what boundaries can be stretched and by how much. It's one thing to disagree lucidly with your manager, another altogether to flamebait the LOB director who was thinking of promoting you. (The Beware-The-Voices ad campaign from Monster springs to mind.)
On security, can a slashcode administrator restrict the sections a user can (read) access?
Éibhear
Another (similarly inclined) option would be COSE. It uses an educational model based on that in the UK, but probably has most of what you're looking for. Also, it's free. It's not open source, but watch this space.
Here's what I plan for the summer (actually, these books and more that I can't remember are sitting beside my desk -- I've put a moritorium on buying book until the pile is at least 10% of its current size)
A strange list, I agree. And I suspect there's more beside my bed. The emphasis on recent history is merely my theme for the summer. (Republican Roman history is an on-going interest).
If anyone knows of a good book to counter Summers' above, giving a favourable history of Nixon's career, can you let me know?
Éibhear
Indeed.
My suggestion to you would be to set a goal that is generic. Decide on a system that whould be built. This can be something graphics based (e.g. a simple calculator that does addition, subtraction, division and multiplication), information based (e.g. building a time tabling system), networking (e.g. a system where input occurs on a client, and processing on a server).
However, the trick is not to specify technology. In fact, you could make it quite clear that it doesn't matter what development paradigms that are used. What is important, though, is that the goal be described as something that is useful. (I remember being brilliant with my repeating print out on my ZX81, but realising that no one wants to see "Eibhear was 'ere" 10, 100, 1000 or any amount of times.)
In short, decide what you would like to be produced by the entrants, and let them decide how they do it.
With respect to judging it, you could devise a set of qualitative criteria that can easily be assessed by judges with a modicum of technical experience. Criteria could include:
These criteria are somewhat subjective, and to ensure fairness for all entrants, there would have to be a panel of judges, like in the figure skating competitions.
Then there is a set of quantitative criteria, which would enclude:
The point is to make the competition such that one geek with a linux and a C/C++ compiler and years of programming experience will not have an advantage over a kid with access to and a preference for HTML/javascript/VB/perl/etc. By making the requirements of the competition non-technical, the entrant will focus on the means best used by herself, and judgement will not be prejudicial.
Hope this helps.
Éibhear.