This isn't really a new idea. For instance, the SPIN OS offers extensibility which permits web servers to operate within the kernel. Additionally, exokernel systems offer the same potential. Still, it's good to see it finally happen - I'm surprised it hasn't shown up sooner in the more popular OS options.
I'm a UW TA, and think the move is a positive thing, even though it means I'll have to go back and review Java if I TA the first-year class...
While C/C++ is probably most common, it doesn't represent the "majority" of programming. Java is not a fringe player in industry.
More importantly, however, an undergraduate CS curriculum is not dedicated to churning out professional code monkeys. The idea is not just to learn how to "do stuff", but how to code _properly_. C/C++ are just too messy. Java is a far more elegant language, and demonstrates the fundamental precepts of OO programming better than C++ does. Later on, you'll probably wan't to pick up C/C++, but after experience in Java, that's not so difficult.
I would say that IDEs are mainly useful for developing UIs, not necessarily for actual coding. I use Glade to design UIs in GTK, and then code the rest. GTK bindings exist for several different languages - C, C++, Guile (Scheme), Python, etc.
Point taken, but there are still good reasons for governments not to take on proprietary software - in particular, issues of national security. It is in the interest of everyone that the government's systems be entirely secure. While open-source software is certainly not bulletproof, its operations are observable. It may seem paranoid to say so, but there's no reason Microsoft couldn't rig Windows NT to send information back to Redmond. Would it? Probably not, but the possibility exists. (Argentina may be more concerned about this than us, as Microsoft is a foreign company; thus being dependent on foreign software could be construed as a security risk.)
I would thus argue that it is not necessarily in the best interests of the public for the "best" product, meaning the one of highest observable quality, to be used by the government, if it may compromise security. One might argue otherwise, but it seems like a solid rationale for this sort of legislation.
Is this "flamebait"? I kind of have to admit he's got a point here. While HB certainly put out some great stuff, they also spewed out a fair amount of garbage. Anyone remember the MC Hammer cartoon? Or Jabberjaw?
"I once held an informal poll among the undergrads and concluded that almost all of them chose courses they could get high marks in, and almost all of them would opt to get a high mark than to
focus on learning."
I'd say this is frequently inevitable, unfortunately. At my current school, the University of Washington, competition to be accepted into the computer science department is so absurdly fierce that students with haggle with their TAs for an eternity over a few points on a homework, and live in fear of getting a 3.8 instead of a 3.9 in a course, and thus running the risk of not getting into the major. It's easy to say that these students should be concerned about knowledge, but not grades, but when a teensy fraction of a point makes the difference between success or failure, who can blame them for it?
they're US-centric. I went to the Nike ID site and tried to create shoes that said "CHILD" on one side and "LABOR" on the other. It was rejected. However, change the back to "LABOUR", and it's accepted. Any Canadians/Brits/Aussies out there want to make a statement about Nike?:-)
Re:School Children saw it.
on
The Challenger
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· Score: 1
Man, that brought back some memories... I, too, like many other people my age, were huddled into their cafeteria in their formative elementary school years (third grade, in my case) to watch this. Then we see a blast, and suddenly Principal Taylor gets up and jabs at the POWER button on the TV, and we are escorted back to our classrooms. Definitely one of the more disturbing incidents in my relatively happy childhood.
You can't live in the past dumbass. The question wasn't if the US had "ever been", but if it still is.
No, the question WAS, in fact, if the US had "ever been" the best choice for quality of life. I made no statement on the current-day situation.
Nonetheless, feel free to rant about the US as you see fit. Clearly, many immigrants to the US disagree. (BTW, I'd say comparing the situation in Denmark, Scandivanian countries, etc. is inappropriate. There are cultural issues in the US that don't exist in homogenous nations like these that make the things you suggest more difficult.)
Err, the US might have not been ravaged by war every decade but it's the only country in the world who has been actively at war be it directly or indirectly on almost every decade since the civil war
True enough. I was not declaring the US a "peaceful" nation. I was speaking in particular of war as noticed by civilians, and as it affects the quality of life of citizens. While the rest of Europe had huge portions of its infrastructure damaged by war in the earlier 20th century, the US was largely unaffected - indeed, WWII helped the US economically if it affected it at all. The US hasn't had a war on its own soil since the 1860's.
This is not meant inflammatory but I'm really irritated by this statement: Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?
Do you really mean that? What led you to believe that this ever was the case?
What led you to believe that it wasn't? In which nation would you prefer to have spent time in before WWII? Americans enjoyed a higher standard of living, higher per capita income, and more freedom than most Europeans did, with the added bonus that we weren't ravaged by war every decade or so. However bizarre this "US sense of patriotism" may be, and however much stupidity may manifest itself here, it's hardly jinogistic to say that, in general, Americans have had it better than most.
if the aim of the Board is to teach true object oriented programming they ought to teach/endorse SmallTalk where EVERYTHING is either an object or a message between objects.
I don't think that's necessarily what they're seeking. After all, some of those students will need to move beyond the OO paradigm at some point in their programming work - convenient and popular though it may be, there are those times when LISP, or Prolog, or scripting languages, etc. would be preferred.
Java is a good choice because it nicely balances utility with structural elegance - it's not as rigid and geared towards one Right Way to Program as languages like Smalltalk or Prolog, but also isn't as freewheeling as Perl, which probably provides way too much freedom to the novice programmer. C++, while certainly flexible and useful, is also - hopefully this won't start a flamewar here - a bloated mess of a language with waaaaaay too much syntactic sugar and general weirdness.
Basically, Java is flexible enough to program anything you need in a syntactically acceptable manner. It's a good move on the part of the AP board to do this.
Roger Penrose is perhaps the latest of a long line of individuals who have argued the brain has powers beyond a Turing Machine. Despite his claims, the jury is definitely still out on this.
Well, it depends on what sort of Turing machines you're talking about. You are correct when you say that nondeterministic TMs have the same computational ability as deterministic ones (although we believe that they cannot perform the same tasks in polynomial - read "a reasonable amount of" - time.) However, there is another theoretical construct, the "oracle Turing machine", which has an oracle which it can query regarding a particular problem on a particular input, including problems TMs can't normally deal with.
For instance, you can create a TM with an oracle for the acceptance problem which, given any TM and a string, can determine whether the machine will accept that string. Real (or "real") TMs can't do this.
Of course, these are just imaginary constructs and have little to do with everyday utilitarian computing - as I suspect this 8-bit Java VM doesn't either.
Re:Surely the vast majority of geeks are loaded?
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Geek Charities?
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No kidding. I always thought the primary source of geek charity was stupid tech IPOs...
Nader is actually Lebanese, I believe.
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Should You Vote?
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It's the least any decent American can do to go out and vote for the patriarchal, northern European descended Ivy League education candidate of your choice, Gore, Bush or Nader.
But point taken anyway.:-)
Money rules. Lawers are bought and sold like whores and judges.
If money rules the world, then geeks should be able to conquer it with all their post-IPO riches.
It's sad but true: Geeks need to learn to lobby more. There's enough money floating around in techieland for us to get what we want. Groups like the EFF need more support.
It seems much more likely that cars will run on proton emission membrane fuel cells, powered by ethanol. A company called Ballard Power produces them for automobiles, and they have made deals with both Ford and Daimler-Chrysler. These cars will be environmentally friendly, and are much further ahead in development than any nitrogen-powered car engine. (IIRC, Ballard is currently testing its fuel cells on buses in Chicago.)
That said, it would probably also help to put the terminals in a position where the contents of the screen are prominently visible to other patrons of said laundromat. Public embarassment can be a reasonably good deterrent.
A few months ago there was an unfortunate incident in a Toronto public library branch when a web surfer refused to stop surfing for naughty stuff, and actually became violent about it. This was a mighty bizarre situation, of course, but it's not really true that public embarassment is an effective deterrent. Believe it or not, there are people with the gall to surf for pr0n with kids around.
I would suggest just using flexible censorware which permits you to exempt certain sites at the request of users.
If you boycott RIAA records on the grounds that they persecute Napster, then you will be directly contradicting the "Buycott" Napster is attempting to organize, to demonstrate that Napster is not about stealing sales from the record industry.
Of course, if you just want to boycott the RIAA labels 'cuz they're a bunch of wankers and parasites, that's just fine.
"But I'm guessing it's not on the list because it's not an algorithm. It's a lack of an algorithm. It's simple enough to multiply two large primes together. The reason public-key crypto works is that there is no known algorithm to turn the product back into its constituent primes in reasonable time. "
Not quite. Public-key encryption is certainly an algorithm. The lack of an algorithm is what makes it _useful_. And isn't the real significance of algorithms found in how useful they are, in either a literal or more theoretical sense?
I'm amazed that RSA wasn't on this list. It's an incredibly seful security tool; it makes secure e-commerce plausible and has produced no small amount of headaches for government officials.
"and say (as an example) algorithms for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem?"
Well, not to be anal, but there are no "feasible" algorithms in existence for the TSP. I presume you mean approximation algorithms, or heuristics, of which there are many to solve this particular problem in a reasonble amount of time with some degree of error.
Let me make this clear: I LIKE books. I HATE reading a screen for extended periods of time. Even a small, handheld one. If I have to use software without a manual, I usually print out its docs. This is irritating; I would rather have a preprinted copy, particularly if I'm forking out money for this software. While electronic media offer the potential to save many a tree, paper still has a place in the world, and will for quite some time, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't really a new idea. For instance, the SPIN OS offers extensibility which permits web servers to operate within the kernel. Additionally, exokernel systems offer the same potential. Still, it's good to see it finally happen - I'm surprised it hasn't shown up sooner in the more popular OS options.
I'm a UW TA, and think the move is a positive thing, even though it means I'll have to go back and review Java if I TA the first-year class ...
While C/C++ is probably most common, it doesn't represent the "majority" of programming. Java is not a fringe player in industry.
More importantly, however, an undergraduate CS curriculum is not dedicated to churning out professional code monkeys. The idea is not just to learn how to "do stuff", but how to code _properly_. C/C++ are just too messy. Java is a far more elegant language, and demonstrates the fundamental precepts of OO programming better than C++ does. Later on, you'll probably wan't to pick up C/C++, but after experience in Java, that's not so difficult.
I would say that IDEs are mainly useful for developing UIs, not necessarily for actual coding. I use Glade to design UIs in GTK, and then code the rest. GTK bindings exist for several different languages - C, C++, Guile (Scheme), Python, etc.
Point taken, but there are still good reasons for governments not to take on proprietary software - in particular, issues of national security. It is in the interest of everyone that the government's systems be entirely secure. While open-source software is certainly not bulletproof, its operations are observable. It may seem paranoid to say so, but there's no reason Microsoft couldn't rig Windows NT to send information back to Redmond. Would it? Probably not, but the possibility exists. (Argentina may be more concerned about this than us, as Microsoft is a foreign company; thus being dependent on foreign software could be construed as a security risk.) I would thus argue that it is not necessarily in the best interests of the public for the "best" product, meaning the one of highest observable quality, to be used by the government, if it may compromise security. One might argue otherwise, but it seems like a solid rationale for this sort of legislation.
Is this "flamebait"? I kind of have to admit he's got a point here. While HB certainly put out some great stuff, they also spewed out a fair amount of garbage. Anyone remember the MC Hammer cartoon? Or Jabberjaw?
"I once held an informal poll among the undergrads and concluded that almost all of them chose courses they could get high marks in, and almost all of them would opt to get a high mark than to
focus on learning."
I'd say this is frequently inevitable, unfortunately. At my current school, the University of Washington, competition to be accepted into the computer science department is so absurdly fierce that students with haggle with their TAs for an eternity over a few points on a homework, and live in fear of getting a 3.8 instead of a 3.9 in a course, and thus running the risk of not getting into the major. It's easy to say that these students should be concerned about knowledge, but not grades, but when a teensy fraction of a point makes the difference between success or failure, who can blame them for it?
... when they pry my dumb terminal from my cold, dead fingers.
they're US-centric. I went to the Nike ID site and tried to create shoes that said "CHILD" on one side and "LABOR" on the other. It was rejected. However, change the back to "LABOUR", and it's accepted. Any Canadians/Brits/Aussies out there want to make a statement about Nike? :-)
Man, that brought back some memories ... I, too, like many other people my age, were huddled into their cafeteria in their formative elementary school years (third grade, in my case) to watch this. Then we see a blast, and suddenly Principal Taylor gets up and jabs at the POWER button on the TV, and we are escorted back to our classrooms. Definitely one of the more disturbing incidents in my relatively happy childhood.
You can't live in the past dumbass. The question wasn't if the US had "ever been", but if it still is.
No, the question WAS, in fact, if the US had "ever been" the best choice for quality of life. I made no statement on the current-day situation.
Nonetheless, feel free to rant about the US as you see fit. Clearly, many immigrants to the US disagree. (BTW, I'd say comparing the situation in Denmark, Scandivanian countries, etc. is inappropriate. There are cultural issues in the US that don't exist in homogenous nations like these that make the things you suggest more difficult.)
Err, the US might have not been ravaged by war every decade but it's the only country in the world who has been actively at war be it directly or indirectly on almost every decade since the civil war
True enough. I was not declaring the US a "peaceful" nation. I was speaking in particular of war as noticed by civilians, and as it affects the quality of life of citizens. While the rest of Europe had huge portions of its infrastructure damaged by war in the earlier 20th century, the US was largely unaffected - indeed, WWII helped the US economically if it affected it at all. The US hasn't had a war on its own soil since the 1860's.
This is not meant inflammatory but I'm really irritated by this statement: Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?
Do you really mean that? What led you to believe that this ever was the case?
What led you to believe that it wasn't? In which nation would you prefer to have spent time in before WWII? Americans enjoyed a higher standard of living, higher per capita income, and more freedom than most Europeans did, with the added bonus that we weren't ravaged by war every decade or so. However bizarre this "US sense of patriotism" may be, and however much stupidity may manifest itself here, it's hardly jinogistic to say that, in general, Americans have had it better than most.
if the aim of the Board is to teach true object oriented programming they ought to teach/endorse SmallTalk where EVERYTHING is either an object or a message between objects.
I don't think that's necessarily what they're seeking. After all, some of those students will need to move beyond the OO paradigm at some point in their programming work - convenient and popular though it may be, there are those times when LISP, or Prolog, or scripting languages, etc. would be preferred.
Java is a good choice because it nicely balances utility with structural elegance - it's not as rigid and geared towards one Right Way to Program as languages like Smalltalk or Prolog, but also isn't as freewheeling as Perl, which probably provides way too much freedom to the novice programmer. C++, while certainly flexible and useful, is also - hopefully this won't start a flamewar here - a bloated mess of a language with waaaaaay too much syntactic sugar and general weirdness.
Basically, Java is flexible enough to program anything you need in a syntactically acceptable manner. It's a good move on the part of the AP board to do this.
Roger Penrose is perhaps the latest of a long line of individuals who have argued the brain has powers beyond a Turing Machine. Despite his claims, the jury is definitely still out on this.
Well, it depends on what sort of Turing machines you're talking about. You are correct when you say that nondeterministic TMs have the same computational ability as deterministic ones (although we believe that they cannot perform the same tasks in polynomial - read "a reasonable amount of" - time.) However, there is another theoretical construct, the "oracle Turing machine", which has an oracle which it can query regarding a particular problem on a particular input, including problems TMs can't normally deal with.
For instance, you can create a TM with an oracle for the acceptance problem which, given any TM and a string, can determine whether the machine will accept that string. Real (or "real") TMs can't do this.
Of course, these are just imaginary constructs and have little to do with everyday utilitarian computing - as I suspect this 8-bit Java VM doesn't either.
No kidding. I always thought the primary source of geek charity was stupid tech IPOs ...
It's the least any decent American can do to go out and vote for the patriarchal, northern European descended Ivy League education candidate of your choice, Gore, Bush or Nader. :-)
But point taken anyway.
Money rules. Lawers are bought and sold like whores and judges. If money rules the world, then geeks should be able to conquer it with all their post-IPO riches. It's sad but true: Geeks need to learn to lobby more. There's enough money floating around in techieland for us to get what we want. Groups like the EFF need more support.
It seems much more likely that cars will run on proton emission membrane fuel cells, powered by ethanol. A company called Ballard Power produces them for automobiles, and they have made deals with both Ford and Daimler-Chrysler. These cars will be environmentally friendly, and are much further ahead in development than any nitrogen-powered car engine. (IIRC, Ballard is currently testing its fuel cells on buses in Chicago.)
That said, it would probably also help to put the terminals in a position where the contents of the screen are prominently visible to other patrons of said laundromat. Public embarassment can be a reasonably good deterrent.
A few months ago there was an unfortunate incident in a Toronto public library branch when a web surfer refused to stop surfing for naughty stuff, and actually became violent about it. This was a mighty bizarre situation, of course, but it's not really true that public embarassment is an effective deterrent. Believe it or not, there are people with the gall to surf for pr0n with kids around.
I would suggest just using flexible censorware which permits you to exempt certain sites at the request of users.
If you boycott RIAA records on the grounds that they persecute Napster, then you will be directly contradicting the "Buycott" Napster is attempting to organize, to demonstrate that Napster is not about stealing sales from the record industry. Of course, if you just want to boycott the RIAA labels 'cuz they're a bunch of wankers and parasites, that's just fine.
Napster's lost revenue over this time will be a big fat goose-egg. They have no revenues beyond venture capital investments yet.
"But I'm guessing it's not on the list because it's not an algorithm. It's a lack of an algorithm. It's simple enough to multiply two large primes together. The reason public-key crypto works is that there is no known algorithm to turn the product back into its constituent primes in reasonable time. "
Not quite. Public-key encryption is certainly an algorithm. The lack of an algorithm is what makes it _useful_. And isn't the real significance of algorithms found in how useful they are, in either a literal or more theoretical sense?
I'm amazed that RSA wasn't on this list. It's an incredibly seful security tool; it makes secure e-commerce plausible and has produced no small amount of headaches for government officials.
"and say (as an example) algorithms for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem?"
Well, not to be anal, but there are no "feasible" algorithms in existence for the TSP. I presume you mean approximation algorithms, or heuristics, of which there are many to solve this particular problem in a reasonble amount of time with some degree of error.
Always a personal favorite of mine.
Let me make this clear: I LIKE books. I HATE reading a screen for extended periods of time. Even a small, handheld one. If I have to use software without a manual, I usually print out its docs. This is irritating; I would rather have a preprinted copy, particularly if I'm forking out money for this software. While electronic media offer the potential to save many a tree, paper still has a place in the world, and will for quite some time, I think.