The GNU project's initial goal of producing a free Unix-like system has long been met. While of course maintenance and enhancement of the necessary components of GNU continues, what should be the project's strategic goal now?
My point was nothing to do with adoption - in fact I was pointing out that people used programming languages even when then did not intend to use or write a compiler for them.
Lack of a stack doesn't imply a machine is not a von Neumann architecture. For example, if I recall correctly, the Cray Y-MP series had no stack for procedure activation records and yet still had a shared instruction/data storage.
It's like compilers. Sure we can't imagine computing without them nowadays, but for 10-20 years in the early days of computing, there WERE NO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. It wasn't until computers were powerful and "cheap" enough to make the concept of an abstract language cheaper to code than raw machine code that the compiler and programming languages really took hold.
Your estimate is a bit too high. Plankalkül was developed between 1943 and 1945, and published in a paper in 1948. FORTRAN was implemented in around 1955. I ripped these dates from Wikipedia's History of programming languages article.
For that matter, Turing's famous and influential 1936 paper On Computable Numbers paper introduces an abbreviation system ("Inst{...}") for building Turing Machine configurations (on page 260) which might loosely be described as a higher-level language.
If by "scares" you mean manufactured, misleading hyperbole, you're wrong. There are tens of thousands of adverse drug interactions annually in the UK (and more in the USA). Many of these are avoidable (they're not just drug-drug interactions, adverse drug-condition or drug-{age,procedure} interactions occur too) and key to avoiding this is delivering timely, accurate information to your healthcare providers.
Keeping yourself off the relevant clinical databases is a choice and a compromise of risks; on the one hand the risk that your data will be leaked and on the other hand that your choice to equip your clinicians with less information will cause you to get less effective treatment in the future.
In some senses this is a balancing of benefits to do different people; first, your healthy, vigorous, young self. Second, your elderly, sick, incapacitated self. The latter cares most about the privacy angle but I'm pretty sure the latter cares most about the quality of care. But it would too late for the elderly you to benefit their treatment by reversing the decision made by their younger self.
Google's infrastructure is too large to hire system administrators that do anything manually. This means even the "system administrators" are software developers.
The alternative to doing the research to identify which job opening appeals to you most is that they interview you for a job _they_ think might suit you, which isn't a good match for your skills, and so you don't get the job. Which one is it you prefer again?
If a major hospital is letting people roll up and connect personal (i.e. uncontrolled) laptops to their internal networks, the information security team/officer there is either incompetent or being ignored. They should take responsibility for making sure neither of those things is happening.
As for the OP, they seem to me to be recklessly endangering the security of patient data. People's personal laptops have all kinds of scary cruft on them. Seventeen different kinds of malware, if they run Windows, probably.
The Altos 586 I used to own also had a QIC tape drive in it (it's in the front of the unit). It also had an Ethernet connector - blanked off in the case of my machine, the Ethernet controller wasn't installed. But check yours.
The filesystem format is UFS and is intelligible by Linux (I verified this in the case of the 5.25" floppies, but the hard disk should be the same).
The original poster didn't read the article carefully, I think. The executives were convicted in Italy, but they weren't Italian executives. In fact, they don't (or in the case of Reyes, didn't; he left) even work there.
- complexity theory (and some 'concrete' mathematics) - functional programming - lisp - domain specific language design - concurrent systems design and implementation - graph algorithms - large-scale OO design (i.e. how to design a framework rather than a program) - DFAs
That's after I eliminated the things I already knew I didn't understand when I graduated in 1993 (language parsing, compiler design and implementation, database theory, unit testing,...).
Goodness, how did that person get hired as a programmer if they weren't already fully familiar with arrays? I wouldn't hire anybody as a programmer unless they were able to select an appropriate data structure for a problem, and explain why they selected that particular one. (Well, at my current employer, the bar is much higher than that, but I'm speaking in general).
"I am traveling to London from Washington state for two weeks in December for pleasure (use-it-or-lose-it vacation scenario) and was wondering if I should bother bringing my laptop. I know that I would have to change the region code on my wireless amongst other things and the power cord would have to be changed for a UK outlet.
Why bother? Just get a travel adaptor, like everyone else does. They're cheap, even if you buy them in the most expensive place possible - the airport. Most laptops do not require voltage conversion (and have power supplies that explicitly state that they accept 230V). Check.
Would I be better off not bringing my laptop and just using Internet kiosks (do they exist in London?) or would having my laptop be a better choice to keep in touch, off-load my digital images etc?
London is no different to (say) New York in this way. You can use Internet kiosks, but you'd be crazy to do so for banking transactions, just as for internet cafes anywhere in the world. As for how you work with digital images, it depends on the value of the images and the volume of data, doesn't it? When on vacation myself I generally produce more image data than it's convenient to burn to DVD, so I don't really have that option. Hence I take a laptop + an external drive, so that I can keep two copies of the data. One goes in the checked luggage, the other is carry-on.
I plan on hitting the British Museum but was wondering what geeky things to do that are in London that might be worth going to and any tips hints on overseas travel for geeks? I travel quite a bit in the states but this will be my first trip overseas and want to make the best of my stay in merry old England. What words of advice do you travel seasoned geeks have for me?"
You won't see much "Merrie Olde England" in London. It's a city.
As for stuff to do there, you haven't indicated what you enjoy doing. People could recommend you landmarks etc., but that would make your stay awfully generic. Here's a list of non-generic things you'll probably hate because they don't suit your (unstated) tastes:
The London Silver Vaults
Camden Lock (when the market's on)
Dickens House Museum
Sigmund Freud's House
Highgate Cemetery
Greenwich Foot Tunnel
Royal Observatory, Greenwich (correct pronunciation is "grenitch", that is, one of the Es and the W are silent)
Almost any of the London Walks company's walks (recommended guide: Richard with the red hat)
Tate Modern
The Museum of London (which is a museum about the city itself)
Horseguards
The Cabinet War Rooms
Belowzero
Harrod's (esp. the barber's and the Green Man)
The Clink Prison Museum
St. Paul's
The Thames Barrier
The umbrella shop on New Oxford Street
The Skinny house at the junction of Devonport Road and Goldhawk Road (in the UK, never leave out the "Road" or "Street" part, there are often duplicates - "Foo Street" and "Foo Road" likely both exist and are sometimes far apart)
The Old Bailey - drop in quietly on a random trial to see how it all works
... so, research them to select the things you'll find interesting.
It's interesting that a technical writer wouldn't bother to learn anything about his toolkit. Word doesn't do anything to backticks, but it will, by default, change straight quotes to curly quotes.
Perhaps you misunderstand. I wasn't using Word. It wasn't part of my "toolkit". I didn't say that the backticks were changed to single quotes by some default behaviour. Nevertheless, there they are in the published book.
I published a book with Sams. Never again. There were two main problems. The first was that they published my material in two books and to start with only paid me for the first (until I pointed out that they had 'forgotten' to pay me). The second problem is that they have a publication process totally based on MS Word. That's very common in publishing. However, in my case the result was that quite a bit of the content got screwed up. The shell commands for example had back-ticks turned into single quotes. Gah. So I won't use Sams or any of the other impressions of Macmillan Computer Publishing again (this is not the same publisher as Macmillian, confusingly). Another thing that would give me pause is the number of completed pages per day they expect. I don't believe an individual author could come within a factor of 3 of that and maintain any level of quality.
Now for the good news. Next time around I would engage with any publisher who has a workflow that either produces camera-ready copy (e.g. with LaTeX for example) or uses something like DocBook -- essentially, any workflow that limits the opportunity for people who don't understand those funny symbols to accidentally mess them up (in my case I don't know if the people or Word messed up my shell code). I'd talk to O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley first, though there are other publishers who are equally accomodating.
OTOH I suggest you take your existing computer science bookshelf, give each book a score out of say 5, and sort them by score. That should give you a shortlist of publishers to talk to.
RMS holds fast to a number of principles, about software freedom and nomenclature. He is not frequently known to compromise a whole lot (actually it does happen, but most often in pursuit of a more important goal). These aspects of RMS's personality - and the fact that he is apparently not motivated by many of the things other people are motivated by - for example, money - make other people uncomfortable. They don't know how to deal with him, and they don't know what tools to use when negotiating with him (if you want to negotiate, you have to control something the other party wants).
The point many people often miss is that if RMS was easily given to compromise, or if he were not so very determined, then he would have given up long ago. Don't forget that the GNU manifesto was published in 1985. RMS for a long time was a voice crying in the wilderness. Most people would not give up a paying job to work on the "software freedom" thing when nobody else has even heard the phrase. To keep on doing that when everybody else thinks this free software thing is nuts takes a special kind of single-mindedness and determination.
Why anybody thinks RMS would stop being single-minded now is beyond me.
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Well, they already have Spanner, MySQL and Postgres. And that's just their relational database offerings. They have Cloud Bigtable too.
The GNU project's initial goal of producing a free Unix-like system has long been met. While of course maintenance and enhancement of the necessary components of GNU continues, what should be the project's strategic goal now?
My point was nothing to do with adoption - in fact I was pointing out that people used programming languages even when then did not intend to use or write a compiler for them.
Lack of a stack doesn't imply a machine is not a von Neumann architecture. For example, if I recall correctly, the Cray Y-MP series had no stack for procedure activation records and yet still had a shared instruction/data storage.
It's like compilers. Sure we can't imagine computing without them nowadays, but for 10-20 years in the early days of computing, there WERE NO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. It wasn't until computers were powerful and "cheap" enough to make the concept of an abstract language cheaper to code than raw machine code that the compiler and programming languages really took hold.
Your estimate is a bit too high. Plankalkül was developed between 1943 and 1945, and published in a paper in 1948. FORTRAN was implemented in around 1955. I ripped these dates from Wikipedia's History of programming languages article.
For that matter, Turing's famous and influential 1936 paper On Computable Numbers paper introduces an abbreviation system ("Inst{...}") for building Turing Machine configurations (on page 260) which might loosely be described as a higher-level language.
The city of Çatalhöyük existed from about 7500BCE with a large population (thousands). This is apparently several thousand years older than the wheel.
Are you actually looking for a new job? Doing what?
Drat, too much haste.
s/do different people/two different people/
s/The latter cares most about the privacy angle/The former cares most about the privacy angle/
If by "scares" you mean manufactured, misleading hyperbole, you're wrong. There are tens of thousands of adverse drug interactions annually in the UK (and more in the USA). Many of these are avoidable (they're not just drug-drug interactions, adverse drug-condition or drug-{age,procedure} interactions occur too) and key to avoiding this is delivering timely, accurate information to your healthcare providers.
Keeping yourself off the relevant clinical databases is a choice and a compromise of risks; on the one hand the risk that your data will be leaked and on the other hand that your choice to equip your clinicians with less information will cause you to get less effective treatment in the future.
In some senses this is a balancing of benefits to do different people; first, your healthy, vigorous, young self. Second, your elderly, sick, incapacitated self. The latter cares most about the privacy angle but I'm pretty sure the latter cares most about the quality of care. But it would too late for the elderly you to benefit their treatment by reversing the decision made by their younger self.
~/source/GNU/coreutils/coreutils$ git log | grep -c '^Author: Jim Meyering'
23652
~/source/GNU/coreutils/coreutils$ git log | egrep '^(Date:|Author: Jim Meyering)' | tail -n 2
Author: Jim Meyering
Date: Sat Oct 31 20:42:48 1992 +0000
That's a false dichotomy.
Google's infrastructure is too large to hire system administrators that do anything manually. This means even the "system administrators" are software developers.
The alternative to doing the research to identify which job opening appeals to you most is that they interview you for a job _they_ think might suit you, which isn't a good match for your skills, and so you don't get the job. Which one is it you prefer again?
Indeed, Google already published a paper describing their approach:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CA8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcode.google.com%2Fspeed%2Farticles%2Ftcp_initcwnd_paper.pdf&ei=xUciTKhpmOiUB_HL8bAP&usg=AFQjCNET-zahhIxtRlXe28xn_8QSXXLx6A&sig2=0mlyaOW1btaj7hUjlL1Opw
Writing an allegedly Windows-compatible OS to resolve cyber-security concerns? Are they also developing lead aircraft?
If a major hospital is letting people roll up and connect personal (i.e. uncontrolled) laptops to their internal networks, the information security team/officer there is either incompetent or being ignored. They should take responsibility for making sure neither of those things is happening.
As for the OP, they seem to me to be recklessly endangering the security of patient data. People's personal laptops have all kinds of scary cruft on them. Seventeen different kinds of malware, if they run Windows, probably.
The Altos 586 I used to own also had a QIC tape drive in it (it's in the front of the unit). It also had an Ethernet connector - blanked off in the case of my machine, the Ethernet controller wasn't installed. But check yours.
The filesystem format is UFS and is intelligible by Linux (I verified this in the case of the 5.25" floppies, but the hard disk should be the same).
The original poster didn't read the article carefully, I think. The executives were convicted in Italy, but they weren't Italian executives. In fact, they don't (or in the case of Reyes, didn't; he left) even work there.
My list:
- complexity theory (and some 'concrete' mathematics)
- functional programming
- lisp
- domain specific language design
- concurrent systems design and implementation
- graph algorithms
- large-scale OO design (i.e. how to design a framework rather than a program)
- DFAs
That's after I eliminated the things I already knew I didn't understand when I graduated in 1993 (language parsing, compiler design and implementation, database theory, unit testing, ...).
Goodness, how did that person get hired as a programmer if they weren't already fully familiar with arrays? I wouldn't hire anybody as a programmer unless they were able to select an appropriate data structure for a problem, and explain why they selected that particular one. (Well, at my current employer, the bar is much higher than that, but I'm speaking in general).
Hmm. Best not go to Horseguards on the first day, then.
Why bother? Just get a travel adaptor, like everyone else does. They're cheap, even if you buy them in the most expensive place possible - the airport. Most laptops do not require voltage conversion (and have power supplies that explicitly state that they accept 230V). Check.
London is no different to (say) New York in this way. You can use Internet kiosks, but you'd be crazy to do so for banking transactions, just as for internet cafes anywhere in the world. As for how you work with digital images, it depends on the value of the images and the volume of data, doesn't it? When on vacation myself I generally produce more image data than it's convenient to burn to DVD, so I don't really have that option. Hence I take a laptop + an external drive, so that I can keep two copies of the data. One goes in the checked luggage, the other is carry-on.
You won't see much "Merrie Olde England" in London. It's a city. As for stuff to do there, you haven't indicated what you enjoy doing. People could recommend you landmarks etc., but that would make your stay awfully generic. Here's a list of non-generic things you'll probably hate because they don't suit your (unstated) tastes:
True enough. If they've fixed the quality issues in their production process, then good for them.
It's interesting that a technical writer wouldn't bother to learn anything about his toolkit. Word doesn't do anything to backticks, but it will, by default, change straight quotes to curly quotes.
Perhaps you misunderstand. I wasn't using Word. It wasn't part of my "toolkit". I didn't say that the backticks were changed to single quotes by some default behaviour. Nevertheless, there they are in the published book.
I published a book with Sams. Never again. There were two main problems. The first was that they published my material in two books and to start with only paid me for the first (until I pointed out that they had 'forgotten' to pay me). The second problem is that they have a publication process totally based on MS Word. That's very common in publishing. However, in my case the result was that quite a bit of the content got screwed up. The shell commands for example had back-ticks turned into single quotes. Gah. So I won't use Sams or any of the other impressions of Macmillan Computer Publishing again (this is not the same publisher as Macmillian, confusingly). Another thing that would give me pause is the number of completed pages per day they expect. I don't believe an individual author could come within a factor of 3 of that and maintain any level of quality.
Now for the good news. Next time around I would engage with any publisher who has a workflow that either produces camera-ready copy (e.g. with LaTeX for example) or uses something like DocBook -- essentially, any workflow that limits the opportunity for people who don't understand those funny symbols to accidentally mess them up (in my case I don't know if the people or Word messed up my shell code). I'd talk to O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley first, though there are other publishers who are equally accomodating.
OTOH I suggest you take your existing computer science bookshelf, give each book a score out of say 5, and sort them by score. That should give you a shortlist of publishers to talk to.
RMS holds fast to a number of principles, about software freedom and nomenclature. He is not frequently known to compromise a whole lot (actually it does happen, but most often in pursuit of a more important goal). These aspects of RMS's personality - and the fact that he is apparently not motivated by many of the things other people are motivated by - for example, money - make other people uncomfortable. They don't know how to deal with him, and they don't know what tools to use when negotiating with him (if you want to negotiate, you have to control something the other party wants).
The point many people often miss is that if RMS was easily given to compromise, or if he were not so very determined, then he would have given up long ago. Don't forget that the GNU manifesto was published in 1985. RMS for a long time was a voice crying in the wilderness. Most people would not give up a paying job to work on the "software freedom" thing when nobody else has even heard the phrase. To keep on doing that when everybody else thinks this free software thing is nuts takes a special kind of single-mindedness and determination.
Why anybody thinks RMS would stop being single-minded now is beyond me.
The video game KNOT in 3D was a 3D version of the lightcycle game from Tron. It was released in 1983 and ran on the ZX Spectrum.