This is exactly how I learned C while working on an elaborate game. I happened to be writing it with a co-worker. We would lunch together and fight about the details and think about it separately at work.
Then we would get together in the evening and code (one watching over the shoulder of the other). I still can't believe how much we accomplished in something like 12 days. And it was a total boon to me, having someone say "if you do it that way, you'll mess up later because... and you won't be expecting that". It really introduced me to the programming habits that you foster to prevent later mistakes.
> but make sure you teach dull stuff like orders of complexity of algorithms
I'd have to describe that as the fun stuff. Often the actual coding of the algorithms is way more dull than figuring out if they work and if they will work well.
I have been happy with Working Assets for some time, but you never know when you are going to have a run-in with some long distance carrier you don't even do business with.
To point, yesterday I recieved my telephone bill with a $3.39 collect call charge on it from ATT. A collect call was refused (by my wife--wrong number) during the month, but apparently the automated system connected it anyway.
Do you think ATT (supposedly famous for their customer service) would fix this charge? Not a chance. I don't know how their phone service is, but I'll tell you, if you aren't their customer, they are stubborn as bulldogs.
I can think of no other business that can operate like this. You think Walmart is crooked, you don't walk into their store, and that's that. But even if you don't do business with them, ATT can call you at home, have you refuse their service, and they charge you anyway. I haven't been this offended by a company in a long time.
I'd sure like to talk to an ATT tech. Obviously they could use my wife's voice in the pattern recognition software. The customer service people seem to believe that the automated collect call software never makes a mistake. And if they make $3.39 every time it goofs, I don't see them changing their mind on this any time soon.
Here's one reason this could work. Those who site Newtons 3rd law do so on the assumption that nothing "leaves the engine". It's a closed system. Conventional engines push on their exhaust or leave a trail of energized ions (that have mass), etc.
Well, something does leave this engine. Electromagnetic radiation (you are turning on and off a magnet yes?). Recall duality of matter to mind for a moment and remember that waves are particles as well and have mass. So Newton's 3rd law can be satisfied.
As for Conservation of Energy, you are using energy to run the magnets (and leaking off this radiation) that does not come from nowhere. It comes from batteries and the like which are going to run down because of the EM radiation you project into space. Now you may have solar panels, etc, but we are back in the realm of conventional energy ideas.
So maybe this can work without breaking laws of physics. You just have to think a little bigger. Am I an expert? No. But I've seen thought experiments that suggest you might be able to do this, and they have been reasonably compelling.
I have had the same experience as you when it comes to the reliability of floppies. I.e. I can't use them on the machine in my office and take them home an hour later and expect them to work. Both of my machines have clean drives even (in fact both are relatively new).
When I am working under Linux (and I am), I use a little program called fdecc to improve my odds. It uses the secondary FAT to record error correcting data. On a 1.44M floppy I can have several bad sectors and the disk is still recoverable. This has been a real convenience many, many times.
You really have to check it out for yourself if you use floppies:
Actually, the single most important feature for me is being able to put that "X" on the left (i.e. to close a window). In every other WM, I inadvertantly hit close when I want to maximize.
So I use fvwm/fvwm2. Just define, for example, right click in the LEFT corner to be close for example and we're good to go.
Magazines don't always include a lot of free stuff with their subscriptions. And if they, do, the point is that it is FREE STUFF. If you received a free poster with your Sys Admin magazine, they can hardly send you a letter next week changing the license on your poster (and requiring you to post it in prominent places of business for example).
Yeah, watching my money exponentially decay (yes just like radiactive substances) has been the single thing that kept me from being really interested in e-gold.
Why is it that so many non-Debian people feel like they have to write about Debian's shortcomings anyway? It seems that every time I read something about Debian it becomes immediately apparent that the author is not actually a user of the system.
Just recently, Linux Magazine had an article about package managers. The author said he would talk about rpm's, deb's, and tgz's. Later in the article, (I am paraphrasing here) after a lengthy discussion of rpm's was a statement that "deb's probably work about the same way". In other words, the author never really uses them. Just once in a mainstream article I would like someone jump up and down and in bold print say "the recursive dependency checking of deb's, etc., is just outstanding". It is solid, reliable, and works.
Alas, here I am, not really an expert with rpm's. But my colleagues would seem to be at least as expert with rpm's as I am with deb's, and I can say that deb's seem to offer fewer problems than rpm's over the course of time. (I.e. I have never had a deb decide to break my copy of dpkg and then my copy of gcc leaving me with a machine on which I can no longer compile packages and for which I can no longer install a working compiler).
I use both rpm-based systems and deb-based systems where I work. My bias is obviously toward Debian (I am writing this). But I never - never - have to clean-install my Debian system.
OK, I am running out of wind. So I end with my small but fervent opinion: Debian is a good.
I realize that openness and security are always at odds, but I have always preferred world readable directories for convenience. Most of the generic files in my directory (.cshrc,.login, etc.) are files that a relative new person could learn a lot by perusing. I create private directories for the things I don't want to share.
I am probably a little more vulnerable because I don't close everything and open only what I want; but I want most everything open and I like the good atmosphere of it.
I don't know why everyone is so hard on dselect.
Except for the fact that it is always dumping up
annoying help screens, it works very, very well.
It gives you a convenient list of what can be
installed, it shows you dependencies and suggests
packages to install. You can see what you have
installed quickly if you want to clean things up.
And it will tell you what is going to break if you
remove a package.
Apt and dpkg and rpm are fine when you want to
quick install a single package, and apt is
terrific for getting up-to-date fast. But for
getting a whole picture of what is going on, you
can't beat dselect.
It is one of the best things about Debian if you
use it well.
In general, I have found Debian to be much more
self-contained than you describe Red Hat to be.
The dependencies tend to be less sweeping--more
what I would expect they should be.
I think there is something significant about it being on paper myself. If I am having a problem with a problem, I inevitable go to paper. Sometimes it's notes, sometimes it's printouts. But it's almost always paper.
Actually, what I would like to see the USPS do is validate GPG keys. I would love to take my GPG key to the nearest post office with appropriate ID and have it "signed" by the Post office.
This could work especially well with the recent digital signature legislation that was passed.
Clueful maybe, but the documentation is in MS Word format. So it may be great that all of the bindings exist for your favorite language, and the software is written for Linux in Perl; but there is still a little non-Unix bias there.
They would simply reply "screw you". Well, actually they would word it more politely, but it would just that. Don't believe me? Just look at this story. And, never forget that it's somewhat hard to hand out your log files if your disk has just crashed...
Actually the story you link to was not a court order, only a request from a large corporation. There is no reason to believe that an actual court order would be treated at all the same.
Instead, these electronic signatures are a "sound, symbol, or process". By the simple act of pressing a telephone keypad that makes a sound ("press 9 to agree or 7 to hear this menu again"), clicking a hyper-link to enter a web site, or clicking "continue" on a software installer, the consumer consents to be bound to an electronic contract.
What you say may be correct, but as I read the bill (and I did read it) it just says that signatures shall not be challenged soley on the basis of their electronic form.
There is room in this law for genuine digital signatures. I would say a very fair description of a digital signature is a "process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record". Straight from Sec. 106.
Maybe I'm too old to even comment here, (my Windows programming is actually DOS). The best thing I found when moving to Unix was that when my programs crashed, I was left with a clean useful core-file which I could open up and see what happened. No hangs, no reboots, just a prompt, a core, and ready to check it out.
I used to trace programs in DOS of course, but when you aren't tracing, or something happens in the 10,000th iteration, having that core file was just splendid.
I have contributed to open source projects, and I have had other people contribute to my projects. And I can tell you this. Both of them have made me a better programmer.
The project that I contributed to was a graphical email client. I had been toying with writing my own, when I found one that looked like it had good potential. Unfortunately it would not work with my mail server. I checked out the SMTP code in it and it was completely hacked together--not really following the RFC. I sent the author a complete rewrite of that section, and if he used it he will have learned a lot. (The experience also made me realize that I am not about to ever use that mail client since the rest of it looked equally hacked together and the author was reluctant to consider advice.)
In another case, I published one of my own programs as open source. In less than a day, I had a reply from someone telling me that I had used an "older" style of signal handling, and he sent me a rewrite of some of it. Naturally I was following textbook examples from somewhere and it was out of date. I now have a modern example of good signal-handling to work from when I write new programs.
You may agree or disagree that OS projects are better, but I can tell you this: YOUR projects will be better if you open the source.
I regularly give exams in a computer classroom. After some thinking about it, I concluded that cheating is probably not a serious concern.
If there is some randomization of the questions and enough work in the test to be challenging, the limiting factor will be that they don't have enough time to cheat effectively.
> In any case, all of these are really not > necessary, and could even be considered harmful. ... > You aren't even supposed to look at the > keyboard when typing.
I can almost go along here, but I have been typing on Dvorak for about 4 years and I can say without a doubt that you should relabel the keys or move the keycaps (I did the latter). It isn't a matter of wanting to look at the keyboard. It is the fact that as you are working on something you will sometimes see the keys. For example when looking down at your desk or copy, or placing your hands on the home row. It is quite disorienting to your brain to know you are typing an O for example and accidently look down and see an S. You can learn to sort of convert in your head when this happens, but that kind of thing will slow your retention of the new layout.
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This is exactly how I learned C while working on an elaborate game. I happened to be writing it with a co-worker. We would lunch together and fight about the details and think about it separately at work.
... and you won't be expecting that". It really introduced me to the programming habits that you foster to prevent later mistakes.
Then we would get together in the evening and code (one watching over the shoulder of the other). I still can't believe how much we accomplished in something like 12 days. And it was a total boon to me, having someone say "if you do it that way, you'll mess up later because
> but make sure you teach dull stuff like orders of complexity of algorithms
I'd have to describe that as the fun stuff. Often the actual coding of the algorithms is way more dull than figuring out if they work and if they will work well.
I have been happy with Working Assets for some time, but you never know when you are going to have a run-in with some long distance carrier you don't even do business with.
To point, yesterday I recieved my telephone bill with a $3.39 collect call charge on it from ATT. A collect call was refused (by my wife--wrong number) during the month, but apparently the automated system connected it anyway.
Do you think ATT (supposedly famous for their customer service) would fix this charge? Not a chance. I don't know how their phone service is, but I'll tell you, if you aren't their customer, they are stubborn as bulldogs.
I can think of no other business that can operate like this. You think Walmart is crooked, you don't walk into their store, and that's that. But even if you don't do business with them, ATT can call you at home, have you refuse their service, and they charge you anyway. I haven't been this offended by a company in a long time.
I'd sure like to talk to an ATT tech. Obviously they could use my wife's voice in the pattern recognition software. The customer service people seem to believe that the automated collect call software never makes a mistake. And if they make $3.39 every time it goofs, I don't see them changing their mind on this any time soon.
Here's one reason this could work. Those who site Newtons 3rd law do so on the assumption that nothing "leaves the engine". It's a closed system. Conventional engines push on their exhaust or leave a trail of energized ions (that have mass), etc.
Well, something does leave this engine. Electromagnetic radiation (you are turning on and off a magnet yes?). Recall duality of matter to mind for a moment and remember that waves are particles as well and have mass. So Newton's 3rd law can be satisfied.
As for Conservation of Energy, you are using energy to run the magnets (and leaking off this radiation) that does not come from nowhere. It comes from batteries and the like which are going to run down because of the EM radiation you project into space. Now you may have solar panels, etc, but we are back in the realm of conventional energy ideas.
So maybe this can work without breaking laws of physics. You just have to think a little bigger. Am I an expert? No. But I've seen thought experiments that suggest you might be able to do this, and they have been reasonably compelling.
I have had the same experience as you when it comes to the reliability of floppies. I.e. I can't use them on the machine in my office and take them home an hour later and expect them to work. Both of my machines have clean drives even (in fact both are relatively new).
When I am working under Linux (and I am), I use a little program called fdecc to improve my odds. It uses the secondary FAT to record error correcting data. On a 1.44M floppy I can have several bad sectors and the disk is still recoverable. This has been a real convenience many, many times.
You really have to check it out for yourself if you use floppies:
Actually, the single most important feature for me is being able to put that "X" on the left (i.e. to close a window). In every other WM, I inadvertantly hit close when I want to maximize.
So I use fvwm/fvwm2. Just define, for example, right click in the LEFT corner to be close for example and we're good to go.
Magazines don't always include a lot of free stuff with their subscriptions. And if they, do, the point is that it is FREE STUFF. If you received a free poster with your Sys Admin magazine, they can hardly send you a letter next week changing the license on your poster (and requiring you to post it in prominent places of business for example).
Yeah, watching my money exponentially decay (yes just like radiactive substances) has been the single thing that kept me from being really interested in e-gold.
I don't want my money to have a half-life.
Why is it that so many non-Debian people feel like they have to write about Debian's shortcomings anyway? It seems that every time I read something about Debian it becomes immediately apparent that the author is not actually a user of the system.
Just recently, Linux Magazine had an article about package managers. The author said he would talk about rpm's, deb's, and tgz's. Later in the article, (I am paraphrasing here) after a lengthy discussion of rpm's was a statement that "deb's probably work about the same way". In other words, the author never really uses them. Just once in a mainstream article I would like someone jump up and down and in bold print say "the recursive dependency checking of deb's, etc., is just outstanding". It is solid, reliable, and works.
Alas, here I am, not really an expert with rpm's. But my colleagues would seem to be at least as expert with rpm's as I am with deb's, and I can say that deb's seem to offer fewer problems than rpm's over the course of time. (I.e. I have never had a deb decide to break my copy of dpkg and then my copy of gcc leaving me with a machine on which I can no longer compile packages and for which I can no longer install a working compiler).
I use both rpm-based systems and deb-based systems where I work. My bias is obviously toward Debian (I am writing this). But I never - never - have to clean-install my Debian system.
OK, I am running out of wind. So I end with my small but fervent opinion: Debian is a good.
I realize that openness and security are always at odds, but I have always preferred world readable directories for convenience. Most of the generic files in my directory (.cshrc, .login, etc.) are files that a relative new person could learn a lot by perusing. I create private directories for the things I don't want to share.
I am probably a little more vulnerable because I don't close everything and open only what I want; but I want most everything open and I like the good atmosphere of it.
I don't know why everyone is so hard on dselect.
Except for the fact that it is always dumping up
annoying help screens, it works very, very well.
It gives you a convenient list of what can be
installed, it shows you dependencies and suggests
packages to install. You can see what you have
installed quickly if you want to clean things up.
And it will tell you what is going to break if you
remove a package.
Apt and dpkg and rpm are fine when you want to
quick install a single package, and apt is
terrific for getting up-to-date fast. But for
getting a whole picture of what is going on, you
can't beat dselect.
It is one of the best things about Debian if you
use it well.
In general, I have found Debian to be much more
self-contained than you describe Red Hat to be.
The dependencies tend to be less sweeping--more
what I would expect they should be.
If you like lynx, then let me really recommend
w3m. It renders tables and frames much more
naturally in my experience.
I think there is something significant about it
being on paper myself. If I am having a problem
with a problem, I inevitable go to paper.
Sometimes it's notes, sometimes it's printouts.
But it's almost always paper.
Actually, what I would like to see the USPS do
is validate GPG keys. I would love to take my
GPG key to the nearest post office with
appropriate ID and have it "signed" by the
Post office.
This could work especially well with the recent
digital signature legislation that was passed.
Clueful maybe, but the documentation is in MS Word format. So it may be great that all of the bindings exist for your favorite language, and the software is written for Linux in Perl; but there is still a little non-Unix bias there.
Actually the story you link to was not a court order, only a request from a large corporation. There is no reason to believe that an actual court order would be treated at all the same.
What you say may be correct, but as I read the bill (and I did read it) it just says that signatures shall not be challenged soley on the basis of their electronic form.
There is room in this law for genuine digital signatures. I would say a very fair description of a digital signature is a "process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record". Straight from Sec. 106.
Well, if you don't mind an auto-generated name
(i.e. auto#####) you can have an email account
at hushmail
without giving up any personal information.
I program in Postscript too!
Maybe I'm too old to even comment here, (my
Windows programming is actually DOS). The best
thing I found when moving to Unix was that when
my programs crashed, I was left with a clean
useful core-file which I could open up and see
what happened. No hangs, no reboots, just a
prompt, a core, and ready to check it out.
I used to trace programs in DOS of course, but
when you aren't tracing, or something happens
in the 10,000th iteration, having that core file
was just splendid.
You're kidding of course. The knapsack problem
has a long history of cracks. Look it up.
I have contributed to open source projects, and I have had other people contribute to my projects. And I can tell you this. Both of them have made me a better programmer.
The project that I contributed to was a graphical email client. I had been toying with writing my own, when I found one that looked like it had good potential. Unfortunately it would not work with my mail server. I checked out the SMTP code in it and it was completely hacked together--not really following the RFC. I sent the author a complete rewrite of that section, and if he used it he will have learned a lot. (The experience also made me realize that I am not about to ever use that mail client since the rest of it looked equally hacked together and the author was reluctant to consider advice.)
In another case, I published one of my own programs as open source. In less than a day, I had a reply from someone telling me that I had used an "older" style of signal handling, and he
sent me a rewrite of some of it. Naturally I was following textbook examples from somewhere and it was out of date. I now have a modern example of good signal-handling to work from when I write new programs.
You may agree or disagree that OS projects are better, but I can tell you this: YOUR projects will be better if you open the source.
I regularly give exams in a computer classroom.
After some thinking about it, I concluded that
cheating is probably not a serious concern.
If there is some randomization of the questions
and enough work in the test to be challenging,
the limiting factor will be that they don't have
enough time to cheat effectively.
> In any case, all of these are really not
> necessary, and could even be considered harmful.
...
> You aren't even supposed to look at the
> keyboard when typing.
I can almost go along here, but I have been typing on Dvorak for about 4 years and I can say without a doubt that you should relabel the keys or move the keycaps (I did the latter). It isn't a matter of wanting to look at the keyboard. It is the fact that as you are working on something you will sometimes see the keys. For example when looking down at your desk or copy, or placing your hands on the home row. It is quite disorienting to your brain to know you are typing an O for example and accidently look down and see an S. You can learn to sort of convert in your head when this happens, but that kind of thing will slow your retention of the new layout.