What sort of degree would you want for someone in this so called WEB industry? The ability to type? Clearly design is not primary as we can see from the high quantity of really nasty looking poorly behaved web pages. Clearly no technical skill is necessary as there is negligible difficulty in producing web pages that are no more than glorified word-processed desktop published contentless dribble.
I'd suggest literature with a minor in art history. Perhaps then so many Web pages won't be so ugly and so poorly written.
The question I used to ask in the days when I interviewed job candidates was to write a routine to print a number in octal. The answer was to be in Pascal or C (printf was allowed!). You'd be suprized how many graduates, some with masters degrees, didn't have a clue. Ugh...
This is pretty funny, like the old "telephone" game. Balmer must've been having lunch with some journalist and asked someone to "open the souce on the window", the guy from ZDNet, heard "Open Source of Windows", wrote an article, then Slashdot had it's discussions, which caused ESR and friends to write the open letter to M$. And all Balmer wanted was some jelly for his toast.
Hmm. I'm not positive, but wasn't "Elements of Programming Style" written before there was C? The RATFOR preprocessor made FORTRAN look more like a dialect of Pascal (1969).
I'm reading TPoP right now and I like it, especially the examples. But I agree with you that they are concentrating on low-level programming, without that much consideration for building larger systems.
...richie
This is too good to be true.
on
Java for EGCS
·
· Score: 1
There was already at least one native Java compiler, called TowerJ from Tower Technology (see http://www.twr.com). However TowerJ is not open source or free.
On the other hand TowerJ suports dynamically loaded classes. Does the Cygnus compiler?
But overall, sharing is a GOOD THING.... Weren't we supposed to learn this in kindergarten? ...richie (I'm having trouble taking these kinds of essays seriously)
E.B. White has offered the immortal advice, "if you don't know how to say a word, say it loud!"
Was it really E.B. White who said this? As far as I know this was to help people to learn how to pronounce words, it was not a statement of philosophy.
E.B. White was a meticulous writer and would not be impressed by this essay. One of the things he said in "The Elements of Style" was: Edit ruthlessly.
Sigh! If you liked it can you summarize the main idea of this essay in once sentence for the rest of us.
As far as "remote viewing" etc., you are just repeating what advocates of paranormal have been saying for centuries. Don't tell us that our minds are closed, show us the evidence.
...richie
"I don't believe in psychics, 'cause you have to make an appointment"
Crackpots in particular do this a lot. And I don't mean just online either....
For a good introduction to history of "crackpotery" see Martin Gardneer's book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" or his most recent "Science, Good, Bad and Bogus".
Read a bit about Set Theory especially Cantor's theory of the infinite. There is lots of good stuff there, very simple yet profound truths. Like one farmer can tell whether he has more sheep than another even if he can't count, (he can just match the sheep up one by one and who ever owns the left over sheep has the most). This same method can be used compare the sizes of sets. By doing this we find that some infinite sets (the real numbers) are larger than others (the integers) As I thought little more about it, my orginal comment about infinitely manu monkeys wasn't right. After all all the monkeys could type the letter "A" and the entire text would consist of an infinitely long sequence of "A"s. In any case the original point was about a finite number of monkeys banging randomly on a bunch of typewriters for a really long time.... Another way to consider this problem is to write a program that will generate every possible page of text by simply going through all the combinations of letters on a 80 columns by 100 lines page. There is only finitely many such pages, but they include all the written works that were produced or ever will be produced.......richie
It's long been said that an infinite number of monkeys, pounding away at an infinite number of typewriters, would eventually recreate the works of William Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know that this is not true. ~Brandzburg v. Hayes
Clearly he doesn't understand infinities. As soon as infinitely many monkeys typed one letter each on infinitely many typewriters, the resulting text would include *all* the works of Shakespere.
These people would be much happier if they were not running Windows. My computer doesn't crash at all, when it runs Linux.:-)
Last year NY Times had whole section about people placing crystals next to their computers so that their computers wouldn't crash. Naturally they were from California...;-)
Regarding 'the web' you write that you 'fell in love with it the moment I went online eight years ago'. That's pretty cool. How was that NexT box you were using? Because in 1991, the only OS that had a 'web browser' per se was NexT.
Oh, grow up! Being "online" is not the same thing as the Web. I've been "online" and using Internet for over 15 years. I started when I got a high-speed modem (1200bps) and a serial card for my Apple II. I had an account at a University...
Intel is ticked becasue Linus has once again told them to take a hike with there Open Driver Interface. What does Intel do. They fork the linux kernel and add the desired Open Driver Interface themselves. These changes are then re-released under the GPL. This is perfectly legal, the GPL allowes for such a code fork. There is nothing Linus can do to stop them!
I can understand "do something nice, give it away". But "stop restricting people's freedom"? Come
Having access to source code is good. It doesn't mean that you are giving anything away. Here is a little story, years ago I worked at a bank that had a bunch of PDP-11/70s that were used to send messages to many other systems. At one point I had written a job that read a tape backwards to remove some messages from the end of the tape and sent them via comm lines.
Then we upgraded the O/S to a new version and as soon as we try to run my job the system crashed (this was a nightly job). Since the old PDP-11s came with the source to the operating system and all the drivers, I was able to find the problem (it was in the tape driver), fix it and have everything working in about a day.
I then send my fix to DEC (via snail-mail) and it was published in the next set of monthly patches.
Way to go Jon! I think the idea that the Web provides a way for an artist to connect directly with the audience is something that many people don't get. Perhaps the idea is too obvious.
A similar phenomena is taking place with music and MP3.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest literature with a minor in art history. Perhaps then so many Web pages won't be so ugly and so poorly written.
I'm reading TPoP right now and I like it, especially the examples. But I agree with you that they are concentrating on low-level programming, without that much consideration for building larger systems.
On the other hand TowerJ suports dynamically loaded classes. Does the Cygnus compiler?
But overall, sharing is a GOOD THING.... Weren't we supposed to learn this in kindergarten? ...richie (I'm having trouble taking these kinds of essays seriously)
Use the net, Luke! (or should I say Lisa). you can start with the USENET group "misc.writing", or just go to Yahoo and do a search on "writing".
Was it really E.B. White who said this? As far as I know this was to help people to learn how to pronounce words, it was not a statement of philosophy.
E.B. White was a meticulous writer and would not be impressed by this essay. One of the things he said in "The Elements of Style" was: Edit ruthlessly.
OK. I'm stupid. What did he say?
As far as "remote viewing" etc., you are just repeating what advocates of paranormal have been saying for centuries. Don't tell us that our minds are closed, show us the evidence.
"I don't believe in psychics, 'cause you have to make an appointment"
For a good introduction to history of "crackpotery" see Martin Gardneer's book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" or his most recent "Science, Good, Bad and Bogus".
Read a bit about Set Theory especially Cantor's theory of the infinite. There is lots of good stuff there, very simple yet profound truths. Like one farmer can tell whether he has more sheep than another even if he can't count, (he can just match the sheep up one by one and who ever owns the left over sheep has the most). This same method can be used compare the sizes of sets. By doing this we find that some infinite sets (the real numbers) are larger than others (the integers) As I thought little more about it, my orginal comment about infinitely manu monkeys wasn't right. After all all the monkeys could type the letter "A" and the entire text would consist of an infinitely long sequence of "A"s. In any case the original point was about a finite number of monkeys banging randomly on a bunch of typewriters for a really long time.... Another way to consider this problem is to write a program that will generate every possible page of text by simply going through all the combinations of letters on a 80 columns by 100 lines page. There is only finitely many such pages, but they include all the written works that were produced or ever will be produced.... ...richie
It's long been said that an infinite number of monkeys, pounding away at an infinite number of
typewriters, would eventually recreate the works of William Shakespeare. Thanks to the
Internet, we now know that this is not true.
~Brandzburg v. Hayes
Clearly he doesn't understand infinities. As soon as infinitely many monkeys typed one letter each on infinitely many typewriters, the resulting text would include *all* the works of Shakespere.
Infinity is big.
;-)
...richie
These people would be much happier if they were not running Windows. My computer doesn't crash at all, when it runs Linux. :-)
;-)
Last year NY Times had whole section about people placing crystals next to their computers so that their computers wouldn't crash. Naturally they were from California...
...richie
Regarding 'the web' you write that you 'fell in love with it the moment I went online eight years
ago'. That's pretty cool. How was that NexT box you were using? Because in 1991, the only OS that
had a 'web browser' per se was NexT.
Oh, grow up! Being "online" is not the same thing as the Web. I've been "online" and using Internet for over 15 years. I started when I got a high-speed modem (1200bps) and a serial card for my Apple II. I had an account at a University...
...richie
Intel is ticked becasue Linus has once again told them to take a hike with there Open Driver
Interface. What does Intel do. They fork the linux kernel and add the desired Open Driver
Interface themselves. These changes are then re-released under the GPL. This is perfectly legal,
the GPL allowes for such a code fork. There is nothing Linus can do to stop them!
Hmm... and what would Intel gain by doing this?
...richie
I can understand "do something nice, give it away". But "stop restricting people's freedom"? Come
Having access to source code is good. It doesn't mean that you are giving anything away. Here is a little story, years ago I worked at a bank that had a bunch of PDP-11/70s that were used to send messages to many other systems. At one point I had written a job that read a tape backwards to remove some messages from the end of the tape and sent them via comm lines.
Then we upgraded the O/S to a new version and as soon as we try to run my job the system crashed (this was a nightly job). Since the old PDP-11s came with the source to the operating system and all the drivers, I was able to find the problem (it was in the tape driver), fix it and have everything working in about a day.
I then send my fix to DEC (via snail-mail) and it was published in the next set of monthly patches.
Do that with Windows NT.
...richie
I use "strings" to extract the relevant content from word documents people send me. Then I reply with gzipped postscript. :-)
...richie
A similar phenomena is taking place with music and MP3.
...richie
But the source to MegaZeux exists and it's been GPLed...
...richie