I mean, come on, Microsoft owns the desktop world and wants to own the rest, so let's just all be happy campers and jump on the bandwagon for common goals *twinkle* *grin*....
In order for MS and HP to make this successful, they will have to add some kind of entertainment value that makes this better than everything else. It will be interesting to see what kind of "value" MS and HP have in mind for the consumer. There's going to be a lot of hype for this, and you can't hype crippled hardware as well as you can crippled software.
what if the signal drops due to interference (like cell phones)? or someone could jam the signal while I'm sitting there doing some work, thereby locking it up--plain ole DoS....
Twenty or thirty years ago, computer science and programming was limited to the academic circle and a few elite corporations. You needed to be a real expert to do the job. Nowadays, thanks to industry demands, the task is no longer the academic exploration of "what can we do with this technology?" but rather "make more widgets!" Companies like Microsoft have even made it easier to program (crap out more widgets) without even knowing how to properly type the code--simply click the button that describes the task you are trying to do.
Consulting agencies were great before the dot-com bubble burst, but now they are about as great as temp agencies, not doing much more than providing code monkeys to sit on the project assembly line and crap out more widgets.
If this is your ideal career, then more power to you. You can one day become a manager and supervise the code monkeys on the assembly line.
If you want to get into an academic, mentally-challenging career like CS used to be, then study the hard sciences (physics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, etc.). Those are really the only careers that most people shy away from because of the work.
Let's face it, though, either you slave away for a few years in school, or you slave away for half your lifetime as a codemonkey subject to corporate whims.
I don't mind e-books, but I hate that I can't add in my own notes. It would be nice if I could order a book just on a cd-rom that would allow me to copy the file to my pc so I could add in my own notes. Or, if you are worried about piracy that way, you could perhaps keep the book in a proprietary format and install an open source reader that lets me add my notes page by page in reference to the book.
Now, for my book suggestion, I would like to see more books with "exercises" that maybe all tie together in one grand project or something. The themes can be games (design a game beginning with landscapes and skins, and then define the rules and wrap it up), custom database interfaces (creating the widget buttons, linking them to commands, then enhance the interface to allow users to do more advanced stuff), dynamic web sites, defining new devices and writing custom drivers for anything, etc.
You know, I really don't understand the logic of banning such internet activity. Terrorism is pretty much illegal in the first place, so if someone posing as a tourist in Canada anonymously posts such a message, what are they going to do? Send the Mounties to Afganistan to arrest him for an illegal posting? By the time investigators figure out who it was, the guy is long gone! Do they not see the stupidity in having such a law? It's not like this kind of posting is also a popular teenage prank or anything. Banning such activity will not do a DAMN thing to curtail terrorism.
We support, contribute to, and use open source because we all thrive on the increased knowledge base. A good analogy could be when you have friends and family over for dinner. Most people don't go the cheap route when entertaining, and we don't charge admission. However, the idea stands that those people will do likewise at some point and invite you over for a nice dinner. With open source, it's like a buffet of knowledge, and most of the items are very decent. I can go to this buffet of knowledge and expand my own mind--what a high that is! As my knowledge grows, my contribution back to the buffet is greater. In the end, everyone dining at this knowledge buffet has become a more intelligent person, and not just through coding--we have social interactions at conferences, via email & chats, etc., so we learn about other people as well.
We all want a better world to live in, and many of this believe the way to get there is for people to become more educated. Open Source software is but one approach to this (although it is a major one, given how automated the world has become and how much more automated it will continue to become). Companies who hoard their knowledge and code are analogous to the scribes during the Medieval Times who were the only ones who knew how to read and write, and refused to share that knowledge in the belief that commoners lacked the capacity to learn (hoarding this knowledge was a tool to maintain power, as well).
I have a TuxTop laptop, which I believe is based on Chembook. It's much beefier than my desktop at home, but I got it for school so I could work on programming projects between classes. I know TuxTops is no longer doing laptops, and that they've licensed the line of products to another company (see www.tuxtops.com for more info). Nevertheless, I am very happy with my purchase, and I recently wiped out the original install and replaced it with RH 7.1. It installed perfectly right away, and even auto-configured my cd-rw properly.
My wife & I just bought our first house. Our agent had told us there was nothing new on the market that day, and that didn't sound right to me. So I went onto www.realtor.com and put in the area and criteria for the house we wanted, and emailed our realtor the listing. One of the houses on that listing was the first house we bid on, and that's the one we got. I think these sites are good supplemental tools to buying/selling property.
1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it express?
2600's lawyers are entirely familiar with Touretzky's Gallery, so forget about those.
Assume you have some C or perl staring at you, any random block of code in any
random print-out. What does it express? Why should that code be protected expression?
A computer program can be defined as a set of instructions telling a machine what to
do and how to do it. One can build upon that idea, logically, and say that a better
program will have better instructions that allow a machine to work more efficiently;
and a poor program will have a machine going around in circles to accomplish simple
tasks. Examples of both good and poor programs are very necessary in academics, because
they allow students to learn good programming methodology by example. The challenge then
in the professional world of programming is to write the most efficient code possible.
Just like many other career fields, there is [mostly] friendly rivalry in the programming
world where one programmer tries to outdo another (perhaps similar to one salesman trying
to outdo another for the "Salesman of the Year" title). They may even be working on the
same project together. Programming grows on a person until it feels more like an art form.
When programmers are given a task to build computer instructions for, it is much like
being commissioned to do a sculpture or a painting. In the end, programmers must be
satisfied with their work before releasing it (aside from sales or marketing setting
mandatory deadlines whether a program is finished or not).
Take the word 'computer' out for a minute and think about a person--say, a new
employee being given a handbook of how to file certain documents and how to handle
calls. Or think of the rules attorneys are given as to how to conduct themselves
in the courtroom. Either way, those are a set of instructions that can easily be
viewed as algorithms (or more basically, procedural, routine tasks). These sets
of instructions can be reprinted, spoken, sung, cut&pasted, arranged into a poem, etc.
These instructions were expressed in such a way as to be clear and concise so that
anyone reading them would understand how certain tasks are to be done.
A computer program tells a machine how to do a procedural task. The task is
"assigned" to the machine when someone actually selects the program and runs it. The
machine must "read" the instructions in order to do the task(s). The reading can be
done a couple of different ways (compiled vs. interpreted), but the instruction set
being read by the computer is not the same instruction set viewed by the programmer, in
the visual sense. The actual set of instructions a programmer types must be "translated"
into binary for a computer to be able to read. (A quick statement about binary, for judges
and attorneys who may not know: computers work as a series of "on" or "off" switches. Having
only two signals means that instructions we humans give the computer must be translated
to an arrangement of "on" and "off" signals.) To us humans, binary is just a random bunch
of zeros and ones--so programmers MUST be free to work with the human-readable form of a
program.
Slashdot Mirror
the site's been /.'d
I mean, come on, Microsoft owns the desktop world and wants to own the rest, so let's just all be happy campers and jump on the bandwagon for common goals *twinkle* *grin*....
pulleeese...
In order for MS and HP to make this successful, they will have to add some kind of entertainment value that makes this better than everything else. It will be interesting to see what kind of "value" MS and HP have in mind for the consumer. There's going to be a lot of hype for this, and you can't hype crippled hardware as well as you can crippled software.
what if the signal drops due to interference (like cell phones)? or someone could jam the signal while I'm sitting there doing some work, thereby locking it up--plain ole DoS....
Twenty or thirty years ago, computer science and programming was limited to the academic circle and a few elite corporations. You needed to be a real expert to do the job. Nowadays, thanks to industry demands, the task is no longer the academic exploration of "what can we do with this technology?" but rather "make more widgets!" Companies like Microsoft have even made it easier to program (crap out more widgets) without even knowing how to properly type the code--simply click the button that describes the task you are trying to do.
Consulting agencies were great before the dot-com bubble burst, but now they are about as great as temp agencies, not doing much more than providing code monkeys to sit on the project assembly line and crap out more widgets.
If this is your ideal career, then more power to you. You can one day become a manager and supervise the code monkeys on the assembly line.
If you want to get into an academic, mentally-challenging career like CS used to be, then study the hard sciences (physics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, etc.). Those are really the only careers that most people shy away from because of the work.
Let's face it, though, either you slave away for a few years in school, or you slave away for half your lifetime as a codemonkey subject to corporate whims.
what if i've only got 200 smuckers?
I don't mind e-books, but I hate that I can't add in my own notes. It would be nice if I could order a book just on a cd-rom that would allow me to copy the file to my pc so I could add in my own notes. Or, if you are worried about piracy that way, you could perhaps keep the book in a proprietary format and install an open source reader that lets me add my notes page by page in reference to the book.
Now, for my book suggestion, I would like to see more books with "exercises" that maybe all tie together in one grand project or something. The themes can be games (design a game beginning with landscapes and skins, and then define the rules and wrap it up), custom database interfaces (creating the widget buttons, linking them to commands, then enhance the interface to allow users to do more advanced stuff), dynamic web sites, defining new devices and writing custom drivers for anything, etc.
You know, I really don't understand the logic of banning such internet activity. Terrorism is pretty much illegal in the first place, so if someone posing as a tourist in Canada anonymously posts such a message, what are they going to do? Send the Mounties to Afganistan to arrest him for an illegal posting? By the time investigators figure out who it was, the guy is long gone! Do they not see the stupidity in having such a law? It's not like this kind of posting is also a popular teenage prank or anything. Banning such activity will not do a DAMN thing to curtail terrorism.
We support, contribute to, and use open source because we all thrive on the increased knowledge base. A good analogy could be when you have friends and family over for dinner. Most people don't go the cheap route when entertaining, and we don't charge admission. However, the idea stands that those people will do likewise at some point and invite you over for a nice dinner. With open source, it's like a buffet of knowledge, and most of the items are very decent. I can go to this buffet of knowledge and expand my own mind--what a high that is! As my knowledge grows, my contribution back to the buffet is greater. In the end, everyone dining at this knowledge buffet has become a more intelligent person, and not just through coding--we have social interactions at conferences, via email & chats, etc., so we learn about other people as well.
We all want a better world to live in, and many of this believe the way to get there is for people to become more educated. Open Source software is but one approach to this (although it is a major one, given how automated the world has become and how much more automated it will continue to become). Companies who hoard their knowledge and code are analogous to the scribes during the Medieval Times who were the only ones who knew how to read and write, and refused to share that knowledge in the belief that commoners lacked the capacity to learn (hoarding this knowledge was a tool to maintain power, as well).
I have a TuxTop laptop, which I believe is based on Chembook. It's much beefier than my desktop at home, but I got it for school so I could work on programming projects between classes. I know TuxTops is no longer doing laptops, and that they've licensed the line of products to another company (see www.tuxtops.com for more info). Nevertheless, I am very happy with my purchase, and I recently wiped out the original install and replaced it with RH 7.1. It installed perfectly right away, and even auto-configured my cd-rw properly.
My wife & I just bought our first house. Our agent had told us there was nothing new on the market that day, and that didn't sound right to me. So I went onto www.realtor.com and put in the area and criteria for the house we wanted, and emailed our realtor the listing. One of the houses on that listing was the first house we bid on, and that's the one we got. I think these sites are good supplemental tools to buying/selling property.
1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it express?
2600's lawyers are entirely familiar with Touretzky's Gallery, so forget about those.
Assume you have some C or perl staring at you, any random block of code in any
random print-out. What does it express? Why should that code be protected expression?
A computer program can be defined as a set of instructions telling a machine what to
do and how to do it. One can build upon that idea, logically, and say that a better
program will have better instructions that allow a machine to work more efficiently;
and a poor program will have a machine going around in circles to accomplish simple
tasks. Examples of both good and poor programs are very necessary in academics, because
they allow students to learn good programming methodology by example. The challenge then
in the professional world of programming is to write the most efficient code possible.
Just like many other career fields, there is [mostly] friendly rivalry in the programming
world where one programmer tries to outdo another (perhaps similar to one salesman trying
to outdo another for the "Salesman of the Year" title). They may even be working on the
same project together. Programming grows on a person until it feels more like an art form.
When programmers are given a task to build computer instructions for, it is much like
being commissioned to do a sculpture or a painting. In the end, programmers must be
satisfied with their work before releasing it (aside from sales or marketing setting
mandatory deadlines whether a program is finished or not).
Take the word 'computer' out for a minute and think about a person--say, a new
employee being given a handbook of how to file certain documents and how to handle
calls. Or think of the rules attorneys are given as to how to conduct themselves
in the courtroom. Either way, those are a set of instructions that can easily be
viewed as algorithms (or more basically, procedural, routine tasks). These sets
of instructions can be reprinted, spoken, sung, cut&pasted, arranged into a poem, etc.
These instructions were expressed in such a way as to be clear and concise so that
anyone reading them would understand how certain tasks are to be done.
A computer program tells a machine how to do a procedural task. The task is
"assigned" to the machine when someone actually selects the program and runs it. The
machine must "read" the instructions in order to do the task(s). The reading can be
done a couple of different ways (compiled vs. interpreted), but the instruction set
being read by the computer is not the same instruction set viewed by the programmer, in
the visual sense. The actual set of instructions a programmer types must be "translated"
into binary for a computer to be able to read. (A quick statement about binary, for judges
and attorneys who may not know: computers work as a series of "on" or "off" switches. Having
only two signals means that instructions we humans give the computer must be translated
to an arrangement of "on" and "off" signals.) To us humans, binary is just a random bunch
of zeros and ones--so programmers MUST be free to work with the human-readable form of a
program.