The course wasn't harder for me, but I sort of came in already knowing the material. Basically, they both leave out stuff I consider critical, which always will happen when you design something like this by committee. My school let you take the A or AB, even though it was one class taught to the AB. The kids who didn't know what they were getting into took A. The real geeks or just skilled coders did AB. If you read slashdot, odds are you could've done AB. Then again, YMMV.
This all depends on whether you took the A test or the AB test. Sounds like you took A. You can't really get through AB without classes (for the case study, bigint my year) or new and delete because they're part of the case study also. However, real memory such as malloc, free, and pointers etc. are reserved until later. Don't ask why. I guess they don't want to overwhelm kids, though it probably holds them back.
I took this test in the 1998-1999 school year (AB to be precise). The test was in C++ and it was definitely object oriented. Half of the test revolved around various classes, especially a study about arbitrary length integers implemented as a new class.
Also, Java has a few oddities that I think may make it worse than C++ and possibly encourage sloppiness among the students. This is of course the biased view of me, but it's not worth getting into a language war anyway.
I used to listen to this line all the time, then I went away to college. Why did that stop me? It costs a lot to call from here in Illinois, but back in Brooklyn it's a local phone call.
It is safe to assume the latest this story could have been submitted was actually the 31st of October, since on the 1st of November Slashdot actually carried the story that IBM has actually released the source code. Howver, given the time-sensitivity of the comment, I'd suspect they would be checking the OpenAFS site on a relatively frequent basis, and hence the submission is from the 30th of October or earlier. I would estimate the 27th, since "almost over" usually means a few more days... But hey, what do I know?
A method of keeping obvious ideas to oneself for financial gain, without needing to protect a trade secret. An application is filed for said patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, who will then approve said patent regardless of obviousness. Henceforth, Patentee has the exclusive right to an obvious idea, barring intervention by another party in a court of law, whereupon we spend more money than aformentioned third party in court such that our patent remains.
In english: We're patenting filing obvious patents. We're also patenting outspending our opponents in court.
The title of this post is misleading, as I'm going to rant about many things relating to google. I'll try and keep repetition from the article down to a minimum.
First off, I'd like to say I absolutely love google. In case you didnt know, not only do they have a big mega-search, but they also have a Linux search and BSD search. That makes it very easy to use them to find information on all sorts of software, because if you use those subsearches you can often enter a chunk of an error message verbatim and get back truly relevant results.
I think google has a great look-and-feel. While spartan, it's truly functional, and I love the way they change the google logo to relevant holidays and events. They have great contests, and on fathers day I actually won a T-shirt! While they do have ads, they dont have many. Their ads are no more invasive than slashdot's, and if they want to try and keep the site funded and themselves comfortable, that's cool with me. Note that they also have a number of different options for sites who want to use their search; the more customizable ones are googles other revenue stream. I think that their page-rank technology is great; it gets you more relevant results than many other search engines, because people will tend not to link to the pages that aren't very good. What google isnt always good for is searching for something in joe-random-company's tech support, because people tend not to link to those pages, and so altavista can sometimes return the better results. Nevertheless, google is a great search engine. I'd say you should put the google Slashbox on your slashdot page and never look back!!
Sybase got a lot of respect from me when they open sourced their ASE database software, especially when they expanded the license to include the BSDs in addition to Linux. Now, I'm starting to like them even more.
Watcom is a great C compiler, that has a great deal of good optimization tricks that other compilers could benefit from. While GCC has been gaining ground rapidly, certainly you can always benefit from looking at someone else's code.
Watcom is what you use on microsoft when you need something better than ms visual studio products. (note, not a flame, those compilers are good for things, they just arent very optimizing). I've heard of people writing code in the MS suites and then compiling on watcom. Never underestimate the advantages of seeing someone else's ideas, we can always gain something
If I went up to my mother and said bit-for-bit copying, she wouldn't get it AT ALL. In fact I did, and she didnt. The best way to explain this sort of thing is probably metaphor.
If I were to have someone write a message in swahili, could I read it? No. If I made a photocopy, could I read it? No. Would I need to be able to read it to make the photocopy? No, of course not. If I gave the photocopy to someone who knew swahili, could they read it? You bet they could.
With a slight change, this method worked on my 5 year old brother. Why doesn't Kaplan get it? I don't know...
There are going to be a number of things holding back C# that could've been solved if Microsoft had been designing a real language instead of trying to create a market for their visual studio line:
True innovation: As this article makes clear, C#'s changes are purely incremental, nothing revolutionary is there that justifies the learning curve that a language will always include
Clear, consistent design: C# is like a schizophrenic gerbil. It is stuck half way between Java and C#, and instead of extending them in a reasonable way they change the use of features such as structs.
Non-open runtime librarys: Part of the reason C++ has taken off is because of the libstdc++, and java has taken off because sun has a JVM available for pretty much all platforms. C# doesn't, and the lack of a clear and free standard will relegate it to MSdom the same way VB was. (see my next point)
No Real Standard: If Microsoft treats this like most of their products, each version will make frivolous and yet code-breaking changes to the standard. This means not only can you not keep emulation up to speed easily, but old C# code wont even work in say MSVisualC#3.666
And that's why I'm sticking with C, C++, perl, PHP, sh, and learning Java.
SCO now offers ancient Unix source licenses (though it's really not that ancient). With them you can have the source to BSD4.3 and back, plus the SysVs. Kirk McKusick sells a CD set with a number of the Berkely Revisions for like 90 bucks, but you need the ancient source license which AFAIK is now free, to get it.
Actually, UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group. They license it to others like Sun and SCO I think, but it is there's along with Motif and some other things.
The problem with Microsoft OSs, MacOS, etc. is that they try and keep us from doing certain things. Unix takes a much better approach. You can do anything on Unix, and doing anything won't even take the system down with it. Sure it might be a little bit easier for a newbie if we could present one interface and say "this is Linux" or "this is FreeBSD" but it's better to say, "this is RedHat with KDE" and if you don't like it, change it. Why should I be stuck with gnome or kde or twm when I can switch at will? What we need is easy to use newbie configurations that will hide all the choices; distributions like Corel have tried but aren't there yet. I refuse to give up my choices just so a newbie can use Linux, especially when we can accomodate the newbie AND keep our freedom.
That said, Miguel has a point about code reuse, and my guess is that many people reinvent the wheel because they enjoy the challenge of coding. We certainly are on the way to reuse with things like Bonobo, and I think we'll see more reuse in major projects than we have in the past because it makes architectural sense.
Miguel also should have picked a better title. "Unix sucks" is *not* going to get the mainstream to read the article, they're too used to one-line sound bytes.
Blackholing spammers and their ISPs is key
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 1
We've been dealing with the spammers for long enough with email to know what the solution is. We get filters in our gnutella clients alla procmail, which will eventually mature to the point where they can stop these morons. We can also implement something like MAPS RBL or ORBS (note:The little "disagreement" between them aside, it is a good idea) that will blackhole them from Gnutella by not taking traffic on their IPs. If they don't stop, you blackhole their ISPs. ISPs are *very* quick to respond to this sort of thing. a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) has pretty much always solved the problem of uncooperative ISPs.
What the record companies have been doing all these years is not unlike the OEM deals Microsoft would make with people. Those deals fixed prices for them if they agreed to specific terms. The Minimum advertised price, or MAP, was just a way to hurt consumers. While the record labels use the defense that the wholesale price is the same without MAPS, they fail to take into account the advertising and promo subsidies. Given those, most stores are forced to agree to the MAP deals.
I'm glad they're going after the companies, and I hope that when the states win the class action suit against the companies that will follow can get each of us a couple of bucks for each CD we bought. We've all known that 17 bucks was way too much for something whose production costs so little, and things like Napster are mostly the result of the absurd cost of CDs.
Not quite. If you know that someone obtained the information in violation of an agreement, and you spread that, you can be held liable to damages equivalent to what they are required to pay in their NDA etc. While that doesn't provide inherent protection of all trade secrets, it goes a long way. The great Russel Crowe movie, the insider, explains:
Alright, I thought we'd get together
because there's a legal concept that has
been getting some new attention recently,
"tortious interference."
(beat)
If two people have an agreement, like a
confidentiality agreement, and one of
them breaks it because they are induced
to do so by a 3rd party, the 3rd party
can be sued for damages for
interfering...hence, "tortious
interference."
So if this was leaked from a person with an NDA, which it probably was, then they can be liable. I don't think they should, but they could be... (IANAL)
If you go to the actual Publius site you'll see the information on how the system works. It kind of reminds me of steanography, in that technically all the servers appear to have is random data. The difference is the key retrieval method.
The publisher takes the key, K that is used to encrypt the file and splits it into n shares, such that any k of them can reproduce the
original K, but k-1 give no hints as to the key. Each server receives the encrypted Publius content and one of the shares. At this point, the server has no idea what it
is hosting -- it simply stores some random looking data. To browse content, a retriever must get the encrypted Publius content from some server and k of the shares.
Mechanisms are in place to detect if the content has been tampered with. The publishing process produces a special URL that is used to recover the data and the
shares.
I'm wondering just how that cryptography is implemented, whereby having less than n of n shares still permits us to read the document. The pdf on their site seems to involve MD5 hashes in the process, but I was wondering if someone more cryptographically inclined could elaborate. Of mathematical note, they generate d*ln(d) shares, where d is the number of servers. This has something to do with the coupon collector problem, and that if you check d*ln(d) servers you get to every "unique" server.
All in all it seems a really good system; hopefully the common carrier concept will be better applied. Since the pages can be retrieved with special (CGI based I think) URLs, they could probably be indexed by standart search engines such as Google. I hope this works out
First I'd like to say that while I agree with Libertarians at times, I'm not a hardcore libertarian and I'm certainly not an Objectivist. In fact, I find much of Ayn Rand's philosophy to be somewhat morally bankrupt.
One place; however, where I agree with libertarians is social security. Let it be known that I also agree with the socialists on social security. I think a working social security system would be great. It would do many people a great deal of good; in this regard I agree with the socialists. The problem is that social security in its current state will not survive, and Bush and Gore seem to be in a race as to who can do the stupidest things to it while it goes bankrupt. As comedy central said "Bush's plan would link social security to the stock exchange...meaning your retirement would be linked to the success or failure of pets.com" Given that I have no faith that the system will be saved, I want the government to stop wasting my money; I'd rather give my mom the money directly, and not let social security waste it. I want to help the poor, so I'll donate to charities that help them; social security is going to leave us all out in the cold. At this point I'm saving for my retirement as if I'll never see any of it.
Who will I vote for now? Probably the libertarians, or maybe Nader (I told you I was a walking contradiction). Not No-Brain-Bush, not Robotic-Freak-Gore.
I've been seriously considering this for a while, and given how all these decisions appear to go, I think it may be time to execute. What does anyone think of getting a class action together and suing the makers of ziploc baggies?
The makers of this heinous product have given the common criminals of the world a fairly powerful method of drug storage and distribution. Ziplocs not only keep the drug in, but also keep out moisture! They help you to avoid being caught by limiting the odors that the drug emits. They can be used as a protective device when smuggling drugs in your intestinal tract!
It's about time they were sued for contributory drug trafficking. Either A) They'd lose, and we'd no for sure that freedom is dead or B) They'd win, and we'd have proved the absurdity of the Napster suits. A manufacturer or programmer should be held liable for direct damage from the product. (Ziplocks coated with benzene before packaging would kill people, and it'd be there fault, but it would be your fault if you stored crack in it.) Likewise, Napster should be responsible if their software is actually a virus, but not if other people violate the law. What happened to the common carrier concept?
The way telephone companies preserve their rights and avoid liability is by not censoring anything. As soon as they do, they become liable for anything they don't censor. By simply carrying any sound, they aren't forced to be police. That's what the police are for.
Sue ziploc!! together we will win the battle against stupid lawsuits (or possibly just get lots of cash from ziploc).
While I agree that my code and your code should be expressive free speech under the law, it's important to note that such a standard has not been established in court per se. The ruling cited above says:
"C. Concluding comments. We emphasize the narrowness of our First Amendment holding. We do not hold that all software is expressive. Much of it surely is not. Nor need we resolve whether the challenged regulations constitute content-based restrictions, subject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny, or whether they are, instead, content-neutral restrictions meriting less exacting scrutiny. We hold merely that because the prepublication licensing regime challenged here applies directly to scientific expression, vests boundless discretion in government officials, and lacks adequate procedural safeguards, it constitutes an impermissible prior restraint on speech."
That doesn't say one way or the other whether DeCSS is free speech, it says it doesn't say. I hope Kaplan is moved enough by all the testimony to actually give us the precedent we need.
While I think that using analogies is often misleading, I think that we need to realize that this one isn't even clear. As I see it a gun might make you less likely to starve (you can hunt) and cornflaked would do the same (last I checkd you could *eat* cornflakes). So yes it will work...
It's not quite the same thing. IANAL, but I figure mp3.com at least had some ground to stand on, since you were supposed to own the cds it let you listen to. This, on the other hand, doesn't appear to make an attempt to confirm you legally receive that tv channel. But since mp3.com lost anyway, it just means that this service is beyond doomed. Too bad, it's a cool concept.
FreeBSD is sold at compusa as the FreeBSD powerpack, which includes the 4CD FreeBSD set, the 6 CD toolkit, and the Complete freebsd book by greg lehey. You can of course buy all this at Walnut Creek CDROM.
FreeBSD does ship with Kerberos on the CDs IIRC. it should be in/cdrom/des/, and is available as an install time option or can later be installed from/stand/sysinstall. Even thought they ship international, they put it on CDs. Apparently there's some precedent for allowing this in the part of California where Walnut Creek is, and they've supposedly consulted lawyers on this issue a number of times. Can anyone provide a link to the legal issue perhaps?
The reason tools like this are so important are of course variables. I mean what programming language is complete without something as basic as variables? Unfortunately, the default mindstorms "language" doesn't really have variables, and we had to pull off some rather absurd tricks in my high school robotics class to emulate them. It was unfortunate that the teacher wouldn't let us use something different like pbForth. I don't know what his problem was:(, then again he also loved NT.
I think I'm going to try and convince him to use pbForth for future classes, anyone know of other schools (highschools in particular) doing such a thing now? Our problem is that the classes primarily contain normal students with no programming knowledge, so this might sharply increase the learning curve. Any ideas on how to make programming simpler to the non-geek/techie?
Slashdot Mirror
The course wasn't harder for me, but I sort of came in already knowing the material. Basically, they both leave out stuff I consider critical, which always will happen when you design something like this by committee. My school let you take the A or AB, even though it was one class taught to the AB. The kids who didn't know what they were getting into took A. The real geeks or just skilled coders did AB. If you read slashdot, odds are you could've done AB. Then again, YMMV.
This all depends on whether you took the A test or the AB test. Sounds like you took A. You can't really get through AB without classes (for the case study, bigint my year) or new and delete because they're part of the case study also. However, real memory such as malloc, free, and pointers etc. are reserved until later. Don't ask why. I guess they don't want to overwhelm kids, though it probably holds them back.
I took this test in the 1998-1999 school year (AB to be precise). The test was in C++ and it was definitely object oriented. Half of the test revolved around various classes, especially a study about arbitrary length integers implemented as a new class.
Also, Java has a few oddities that I think may make it worse than C++ and possibly encourage sloppiness among the students. This is of course the biased view of me, but it's not worth getting into a language war anyway.
Bottom line, the test already is object oriented.
I used to listen to this line all the time, then I went away to college. Why did that stop me? It costs a lot to call from here in Illinois, but back in Brooklyn it's a local phone call.
Shouts to Bklyn!
It is safe to assume the latest this story could have been submitted was actually the 31st of October, since on the 1st of November Slashdot actually carried the story that IBM has actually released the source code. Howver, given the time-sensitivity of the comment, I'd suspect they would be checking the OpenAFS site on a relatively frequent basis, and hence the submission is from the 30th of October or earlier. I would estimate the 27th, since "almost over" usually means a few more days... But hey, what do I know?
A method of keeping obvious ideas to oneself for financial gain, without needing to protect a trade secret. An application is filed for said patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, who will then approve said patent regardless of obviousness. Henceforth, Patentee has the exclusive right to an obvious idea, barring intervention by another party in a court of law, whereupon we spend more money than aformentioned third party in court such that our patent remains.
In english: We're patenting filing obvious patents. We're also patenting outspending our opponents in court.
First off, I'd like to say I absolutely love google. In case you didnt know, not only do they have a big mega-search, but they also have a Linux search and BSD search. That makes it very easy to use them to find information on all sorts of software, because if you use those subsearches you can often enter a chunk of an error message verbatim and get back truly relevant results.
I think google has a great look-and-feel. While spartan, it's truly functional, and I love the way they change the google logo to relevant holidays and events. They have great contests, and on fathers day I actually won a T-shirt! While they do have ads, they dont have many. Their ads are no more invasive than slashdot's, and if they want to try and keep the site funded and themselves comfortable, that's cool with me. Note that they also have a number of different options for sites who want to use their search; the more customizable ones are googles other revenue stream.
I think that their page-rank technology is great; it gets you more relevant results than many other search engines, because people will tend not to link to the pages that aren't very good. What google isnt always good for is searching for something in joe-random-company's tech support, because people tend not to link to those pages, and so altavista can sometimes return the better results. Nevertheless, google is a great search engine. I'd say you should put the google Slashbox on your slashdot page and never look back!!
Watcom is a great C compiler, that has a great deal of good optimization tricks that other compilers could benefit from. While GCC has been gaining ground rapidly, certainly you can always benefit from looking at someone else's code.
Watcom is what you use on microsoft when you need something better than ms visual studio products. (note, not a flame, those compilers are good for things, they just arent very optimizing). I've heard of people writing code in the MS suites and then compiling on watcom. Never underestimate the advantages of seeing someone else's ideas, we can always gain something
hoorah for sybase
With a slight change, this method worked on my 5 year old brother. Why doesn't Kaplan get it? I don't know...
And that's why I'm sticking with C, C++, perl, PHP, sh, and learning Java.
SCO now offers ancient Unix source licenses (though it's really not that ancient). With them you can have the source to BSD4.3 and back, plus the SysVs. Kirk McKusick sells a CD set with a number of the Berkely Revisions for like 90 bucks, but you need the ancient source license which AFAIK is now free, to get it.
That said, Miguel has a point about code reuse, and my guess is that many people reinvent the wheel because they enjoy the challenge of coding. We certainly are on the way to reuse with things like Bonobo, and I think we'll see more reuse in major projects than we have in the past because it makes architectural sense.
Miguel also should have picked a better title. "Unix sucks" is *not* going to get the mainstream to read the article, they're too used to one-line sound bytes.
We've been dealing with the spammers for long enough with email to know what the solution is. We get filters in our gnutella clients alla procmail, which will eventually mature to the point where they can stop these morons. We can also implement something like MAPS RBL or ORBS (note:The little "disagreement" between them aside, it is a good idea) that will blackhole them from Gnutella by not taking traffic on their IPs. If they don't stop, you blackhole their ISPs. ISPs are *very* quick to respond to this sort of thing. a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) has pretty much always solved the problem of uncooperative ISPs.
I'm glad they're going after the companies, and I hope that when the states win the class action suit against the companies that will follow can get each of us a couple of bucks for each CD we bought. We've all known that 17 bucks was way too much for something whose production costs so little, and things like Napster are mostly the result of the absurd cost of CDs.
I'm wondering just how that cryptography is implemented, whereby having less than n of n shares still permits us to read the document. The pdf on their site seems to involve MD5 hashes in the process, but I was wondering if someone more cryptographically inclined could elaborate. Of mathematical note, they generate d*ln(d) shares, where d is the number of servers. This has something to do with the coupon collector problem, and that if you check d*ln(d) servers you get to every "unique" server.
All in all it seems a really good system; hopefully the common carrier concept will be better applied. Since the pages can be retrieved with special (CGI based I think) URLs, they could probably be indexed by standart search engines such as Google. I hope this works out
One place; however, where I agree with libertarians is social security. Let it be known that I also agree with the socialists on social security. I think a working social security system would be great. It would do many people a great deal of good; in this regard I agree with the socialists. The problem is that social security in its current state will not survive, and Bush and Gore seem to be in a race as to who can do the stupidest things to it while it goes bankrupt. As comedy central said "Bush's plan would link social security to the stock exchange...meaning your retirement would be linked to the success or failure of pets.com" Given that I have no faith that the system will be saved, I want the government to stop wasting my money; I'd rather give my mom the money directly, and not let social security waste it. I want to help the poor, so I'll donate to charities that help them; social security is going to leave us all out in the cold. At this point I'm saving for my retirement as if I'll never see any of it.
Who will I vote for now? Probably the libertarians, or maybe Nader (I told you I was a walking contradiction). Not No-Brain-Bush, not Robotic-Freak-Gore.
The makers of this heinous product have given the common criminals of the world a fairly powerful method of drug storage and distribution. Ziplocs not only keep the drug in, but also keep out moisture! They help you to avoid being caught by limiting the odors that the drug emits. They can be used as a protective device when smuggling drugs in your intestinal tract!
It's about time they were sued for contributory drug trafficking. Either A) They'd lose, and we'd no for sure that freedom is dead or B) They'd win, and we'd have proved the absurdity of the Napster suits. A manufacturer or programmer should be held liable for direct damage from the product. (Ziplocks coated with benzene before packaging would kill people, and it'd be there fault, but it would be your fault if you stored crack in it.) Likewise, Napster should be responsible if their software is actually a virus, but not if other people violate the law. What happened to the common carrier concept?
The way telephone companies preserve their rights and avoid liability is by not censoring anything. As soon as they do, they become liable for anything they don't censor. By simply carrying any sound, they aren't forced to be police. That's what the police are for.
Sue ziploc!! together we will win the battle against stupid lawsuits (or possibly just get lots of cash from ziploc).
While I agree that my code and your code should be expressive free speech under the law, it's important to note that such a standard has not been established in court per se. The ruling cited above says:
"C. Concluding comments. We emphasize the narrowness of our First Amendment holding. We do not hold that all software is expressive. Much of it surely is not. Nor need we resolve whether the challenged regulations constitute content-based restrictions, subject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny, or whether they are, instead, content-neutral restrictions meriting less exacting scrutiny. We hold merely that because the prepublication licensing regime challenged here applies directly to scientific expression, vests boundless discretion in government officials, and lacks adequate procedural safeguards, it constitutes an impermissible prior restraint on speech."
That doesn't say one way or the other whether DeCSS is free speech, it says it doesn't say. I hope Kaplan is moved enough by all the testimony to actually give us the precedent we need.
While I think that using analogies is often misleading, I think that we need to realize that this one isn't even clear. As I see it a gun might make you less likely to starve (you can hunt) and cornflaked would do the same (last I checkd you could *eat* cornflakes). So yes it will work...
It's not quite the same thing. IANAL, but I figure mp3.com at least had some ground to stand on, since you were supposed to own the cds it let you listen to. This, on the other hand, doesn't appear to make an attempt to confirm you legally receive that tv channel. But since mp3.com lost anyway, it just means that this service is beyond doomed. Too bad, it's a cool concept.
FreeBSD is sold at compusa as the FreeBSD powerpack, which includes the 4CD FreeBSD set, the 6 CD toolkit, and the Complete freebsd book by greg lehey. You can of course buy all this at Walnut Creek CDROM.
FreeBSD does ship with Kerberos on the CDs IIRC. it should be in /cdrom/des/, and is available as an install time option or can later be installed from /stand/sysinstall. Even thought they ship international, they put it on CDs. Apparently there's some precedent for allowing this in the part of California where Walnut Creek is, and they've supposedly consulted lawyers on this issue a number of times. Can anyone provide a link to the legal issue perhaps?
The reason tools like this are so important are of course variables. I mean what programming language is complete without something as basic as variables? Unfortunately, the default mindstorms "language" doesn't really have variables, and we had to pull off some rather absurd tricks in my high school robotics class to emulate them. It was unfortunate that the teacher wouldn't let us use something different like pbForth. I don't know what his problem was :(, then again he also loved NT.
I think I'm going to try and convince him to use pbForth for future classes, anyone know of other schools (highschools in particular) doing such a thing now? Our problem is that the classes primarily contain normal students with no programming knowledge, so this might sharply increase the learning curve. Any ideas on how to make programming simpler to the non-geek/techie?