Epitonic features legal tracks from signed bands, with a comprehensive set of "suggestions" and "similar atists".
I've found a lot of good stuff through them, but Epitonic is limited to a few specific genres: indie, electronic, jazz, and other progressive type styles.
Vote for one of two corrupt major political parties? Vote for a nutty left or right wing third party with little or no hope of winning? Quit our jobs and start our own nutty left or right wing party with no hope of winning? Write to our congressmen hoping they'll bother to read something without a check enclosed? Blow something up in the name of freedom? Say fuck it and move to... wait, where's any better? Maybe Europe?
The important point to me was about training methods. The training and study methods used in the arts could be a useful addition to the art and/or science of programming.
I have close friends in medicine. In their training, they are organized into teams based on a specialty, or subspecialty -- pediatrics, ob/gyn, surgery, etc. As a 3rd or 4th year med student, they are at the bottom of the line, under a first year resident, who in turn is under a few more advanced residents, who are lead by the chief resident. At the top, is the attending physician. At first this struck me as an overly rigid almost military style hierarchy, or something archaic like a guild or apprenticeship system. But, one benefit is copious amounts of mentoring along their progression through the hierarchy. This is great for transferring the hands-on practical knowledge and skills that are a necessary companion to theory.
If you ask me, critical review of your own code with the aid of a talented and experienced developer, or critical review of code written by talented developers is entirely too rare, and most of us would benefit greatly. This kind of thing facilitates the transfer of good ideas and creative energy.
There's a really cool science & technology museum in Milan if you're ever there with an afternoon to kill. Florence has a neat museum of renaissance technology including some of the very early telescopes and some old nautical instruments. Italy is packed with cool "technology" of an older sort like bricks, arches, domes, bridges, aquaducts...
If you're ever around DC, the Chesapeake Bay bridge is kinda cool.
If you've got serious bank, take a flight on the Concord while you still can. They are back in service, right? Just seeing one on the runway at JFK made me drool.
Finally, for the travel nut who's been everywhere, there's always Antarctica.
This book is pointless unless you see value in a hard copy of the JavaDocs. The best Java books I know of are: Thinking in Java and Effective Java. Other strong contenders are: The Java Cookbook and Java Examples in a Nutshell.
All of these books explain the thinking behind the design of the language, the APIs, and common idioms. This is much more valuable information to express in the form of a book than is an API reference. A clickable API reference is freely available from Sun here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/api/
p.s.
# comment processor while ( <> ) {
if (/(.*)(java sucks)(.*)/ ) {
$uninformed_opinion=$1;
$pointless_flamebait=$2;
$blahblahwaaawaaa = $3;
if ( do_i_care( $uninformed_opinion ) or
do_i_care( $blahblahwaaawaaa ) ) {
print "That comment was insightful and thoughtful.\n";
}
else {
print "Piss off.\n";
last;
}
} }
sub do_i_care( ) {
# not implemented yet, but this is a close
# first approximation
return 0; }
I like John Varley's Titan/Wizard/Demon series, as well as his other work. Steel Beach has one of the funniest first lines ever: "In five years, the penis will be obsolete." The "Central Computer" in Steel Beach is reminiscent of the AI's in Iain Bank's Culture books.
Other good stuff: Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks.
What makes good sf? Imagination. The ability to start with the here and now, twist it a little, and extrapolate to the logical or illogical conclusion the effects on humanity of that twist, be it a new technology or whatever.
All I know is what they taught me in econ101. Monopolies come about because barriers exist to the entry of competitors. In the MS case, some obvious barriers come to mind: Restrictive licensing schemes, proprietary file and disc formats, proprietary API's.
One might ask, why can I run a perl script on anything from Solaris to a good wristwatch, and can't do the same with Visual Basic. Or why can I open a jpeg or play an mp3 on any computer I own, but can't do the same with a Word document or Excel spreadsheet? Why doesn't every PC from Dell come with the latest release of the Java VM? Are there legal impediments to writing a linux (or Solaris, MacOS, etc.) driver to read and write to NTFS? I could go on.
What the courts should have done, and maybe tried to do, is to address these barriers. It looks like it got watered down to the point where it'll never do any good.
Why don't they force MS to make freely available the file formats for Office apps, and the spec for NTFS? I seems clear to me that the public benefit of this would greatly outway MS's freedom to remunerate (themselves).
I've written software for several clients under a works-for-hire basis. I tend to reuse a personal library of base level components for each new project, sometimes modifying them to a greater or lesser degree. In general, does this practice violate the typical pile of legalese that constitutes works-for-hire or contract employment? If I wanted to contribute to an open source project, would it be legally very risky to use those same components? Even if they were substantially modified? Is there anything I can do to protect my ownership of my components, which I consider sort of like tools of the trade? Specifically, is there anything that I would have a ghost of a chance of getting a client to agree to?
I think they should stick a pole in the equator with a few hundred TitanV rockets on the end. That way, we could slow down the rotation of the earth to about a 27 or 28 hour day and get a couple extra hours of sleep every night.
I have to give Microsoft credit for good support of alternate character sets, especially in Win2K, which is my OS of daily use.
Programming for Unicode or alternate code pages is still a little arcane, even in Java which claims to support it natively.
What exactly is the extent of multi-character-set support in linux, gnome, KDE, etc.??
Also, from my limited experience Star Office can read MSOffice formats fairly well.
-chris
Slashdot Mirror
Epitonic features legal tracks from signed bands, with a comprehensive set of "suggestions" and "similar atists".
I've found a lot of good stuff through them, but Epitonic is limited to a few specific genres: indie, electronic, jazz, and other progressive type styles.
So now what do we do?
Vote for one of two corrupt major political parties? Vote for a nutty left or right wing third party with little or no hope of winning? Quit our jobs and start our own nutty left or right wing party with no hope of winning? Write to our congressmen hoping they'll bother to read something without a check enclosed? Blow something up in the name of freedom? Say fuck it and move to... wait, where's any better? Maybe Europe?
Ug.
The important point to me was about training methods. The training and study methods used in the arts could be a useful addition to the art and/or science of programming.
I have close friends in medicine. In their training, they are organized into teams based on a specialty, or subspecialty -- pediatrics, ob/gyn, surgery, etc. As a 3rd or 4th year med student, they are at the bottom of the line, under a first year resident, who in turn is under a few more advanced residents, who are lead by the chief resident. At the top, is the attending physician. At first this struck me as an overly rigid almost military style hierarchy, or something archaic like a guild or apprenticeship system. But, one benefit is copious amounts of mentoring along their progression through the hierarchy. This is great for transferring the hands-on practical knowledge and skills that are a necessary companion to theory.
If you ask me, critical review of your own code with the aid of a talented and experienced developer, or critical review of code written by talented developers is entirely too rare, and most of us would benefit greatly. This kind of thing facilitates the transfer of good ideas and creative energy.
Please, can we let the native americans bury it?
There's a really cool science & technology museum in Milan if you're ever there with an afternoon to kill. Florence has a neat museum of renaissance technology including some of the very early telescopes and some old nautical instruments. Italy is packed with cool "technology" of an older sort like bricks, arches, domes, bridges, aquaducts...
If you're ever around DC, the Chesapeake Bay bridge is kinda cool.
If you've got serious bank, take a flight on the Concord while you still can. They are back in service, right? Just seeing one on the runway at JFK made me drool.
Finally, for the travel nut who's been everywhere, there's always Antarctica.
All of these books explain the thinking behind the design of the language, the APIs, and common idioms. This is much more valuable information to express in the form of a book than is an API reference. A clickable API reference is freely available from Sun here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/api/
p.s.
I like John Varley's Titan/Wizard/Demon series, as well as his other work. Steel Beach has one of the funniest first lines ever: "In five years, the penis will be obsolete." The "Central Computer" in Steel Beach is reminiscent of the AI's in Iain Bank's Culture books.
Other good stuff: Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks.
What makes good sf? Imagination. The ability to start with the here and now, twist it a little, and extrapolate to the logical or illogical conclusion the effects on humanity of that twist, be it a new technology or whatever.
Godel, Escher, Bach
"The Advent of the Algorithm" - David Berlinksi
A quirky, very accessible treatment of the link between mathematics and computation.
"Concrete Mathematics" - Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik
If you're hard-core about the mathematical aspect.
"Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications" - Grady Booch
If you're interested in OO.
Books by or about:
alan turing
godel
noam chomsky
claude shannon
Fuck the RIAA. Give money to the EFF.
Anti-globalization protest degenerates into mass orgy as cops deploy KY-Jelly on rioters.
Hmmm... maybe I should start going to protests.
Well, we already have these:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bioskills/
and
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/begperlbio/
All I know is what they taught me in econ101. Monopolies come about because barriers exist to the entry of competitors. In the MS case, some obvious barriers come to mind: Restrictive licensing schemes, proprietary file and disc formats, proprietary API's.
One might ask, why can I run a perl script on anything from Solaris to a good wristwatch, and can't do the same with Visual Basic. Or why can I open a jpeg or play an mp3 on any computer I own, but can't do the same with a Word document or Excel spreadsheet? Why doesn't every PC from Dell come with the latest release of the Java VM? Are there legal impediments to writing a linux (or Solaris, MacOS, etc.) driver to read and write to NTFS? I could go on.
What the courts should have done, and maybe tried to do, is to address these barriers. It looks like it got watered down to the point where it'll never do any good.
Why don't they force MS to make freely available the file formats for Office apps, and the spec for NTFS? I seems clear to me that the public benefit of this would greatly outway MS's freedom to remunerate (themselves).
-chris
This guy is my new hero.
I've written software for several clients under a works-for-hire basis. I tend to reuse a personal library of base level components for each new project, sometimes modifying them to a greater or lesser degree. In general, does this practice violate the typical pile of legalese that constitutes works-for-hire or contract employment? If I wanted to contribute to an open source project, would it be legally very risky to use those same components? Even if they were substantially modified? Is there anything I can do to protect my ownership of my components, which I consider sort of like tools of the trade? Specifically, is there anything that I would have a ghost of a chance of getting a client to agree to?
I think they should stick a pole in the equator with a few hundred TitanV rockets on the end. That way, we could slow down the rotation of the earth to about a 27 or 28 hour day and get a couple extra hours of sleep every night.
I have to give Microsoft credit for good support of alternate character sets, especially in Win2K, which is my OS of daily use. Programming for Unicode or alternate code pages is still a little arcane, even in Java which claims to support it natively. What exactly is the extent of multi-character-set support in linux, gnome, KDE, etc.?? Also, from my limited experience Star Office can read MSOffice formats fairly well. -chris