A much better alternative is "Chess Around the House", played by Alan Turing and friends over 50 years ago. It was described in GEB and elsewhere.
The idea is simple: make a chess move, start running a (cyclic) track. Your opponent has to make a move before you return. The faster you run, the less time your opponent has. So unlike chessboxing, there's a real, meaningful connection between the two activities. It requires good stamina, chess skills, and some thinking ahead, too (if I sprint now, he'll have less time for this move, but I'll be very tired for the next run and he'll have more time then; etc.)
I was wondering if anyone knows what's the amount of memory required to run Tomcat (under Linux), when using a simple JSP-base site and when using larger-scale EJB projects?
About a decade ago PC Magazine got their first review of a Pentium MMX CPU before it was officially released, because HP (I think it was HP...) sent them a review unit. Only HP didn't tell them it was an MMX CPU; they have hoped the reviewer will be impressed by the unit's great performance (due to increased on-chip cache) without noticing it's an unreleased CPU model.
On the other hand, I review books, and sometimes I get copies from publishers for reviewing. Sadly, however, the review copies I get are never better written, better edited, or have better plots than the copies you could buy in a bookstore.
This is indeed a problem, but the drop-boxes in the Technion's CS faculty -- where I have practiced this -- are theft-proof (very deep, very narrow slots). Only a fellow TA from another course could steal a submission (since the keys are -- strangely enough -- identical for all boxes), but a fellow TA would (by definition) be a graduate students, and this was an undergraduate course.
Here's something I've used while I was a TA. You could say it is a little ugly, but it worked like a charm.
After every assignment in which I have detected cheating, I have published a note (to the course email list) that went something like that:
During the checking of your submissions, some instances of cheating (copying) were detected. In all such cases, both sides (the copier and the source) will be graded zero, unless you approach me and let me know who really solved the assignment, and who copied. In this case, only the cheater will be graded zero; the source will be given his fair grade.
It worked. It worked like a charm. For every submission that I suspected was a copy of somebody else's work, one of the students came up and admitted cheating (they were often pressed to do that by their friends). They had the most pathetic excuses, of course, but that's beside the matter. The bonus part is, many students approached me and admitted cheatings that I didn't detect.
Re:Article - no reg.
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
New moderation reason needed on Slashdot: "-1: Copyright violation".
Like other said before me, if the point is teaching Java, there's no better book than Bruce Eckle's "Thinking in Java", which is available electronically from Eckle's website. (The 3rd edition is new, I haven't read it specifically. My opinion is based on previous editions.)
I suggest, however, focusing on OOP, rather than on Java. A programmer who groks the fundametal concepts of OOP will have a relatively simple time adapting to the specific tidbits of Java. For this purpose, the best teaching language is Eiffel, and the best book is Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer.
For one thing, the "post-link" aspect is meaningful, and allows for some crazy and powerful optimizations that wouldn't be possible otherwise. For another, FDPR wasn't created yesterday. It was around when I started working for IBM in '97. I suspect it's about 10 years old, maybe more. Problem is, IBM were never good in PR, which is why you've never heard of it before.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM Research. This is not inside info.)
The XL line of compilers has a long and glorious tradition. What matters most here is compatibility with existing code. IBM doesn't optimize XLC so you could get a faster kernel, it optimizes XLC so they could recompile DB/2 on AIX and get faster results; and also, obviously, for many of their other products. Another consideration is those clients that have a large codebase used with XLC.
The world of C/C++ is rather sad in that code is not only non-cross-platform in most cases, it is also commonly unlikely to compile using a different compiler on the same platform. Moving from XLC to gcc would mean throwing away an investment of decades in the compiler, not to mention the huge amount of work required to port the source code of products such as DB/2. So IBM helps gcc, and also invests in XLC. There's no conflict here. I would not be surprised if many of the various optimizations employed by XLC will eventually find their way to gcc -- by the very same IBM researchers.
. Now, seeing an open-source version of that would be cool. Not very likely, though, since this is the source for some of the performance edge DB/2 has over its competitors.
Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.
Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.
Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.
Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.
Isn't that why books are dead, too? Once they have perfected the notion, nobody can come up with anything better, so...
In other words: Adventure games also have (had?) plot, unlike space-shooters. Plots cannot be "perfected" -- a new plot can always grab your interest. So the analogy is all wrong.
While working in IBM Research, we were developing a tool to do just that; I do believe it was significantly richer than this one. The first versions were aimed specifically at J2EE, and searched for really 'high-level' bugs -- anything from bad patterns to violations of the J2EE spec. The initial results of this effort are already included in WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.0, as part of the Verifiers. More powerful versions will appear in future releases of WSAD.
Sad to see that the suggested implementation of templates does not include type-specific elements, a-la Eiffel (so, for example, I could declare a SortedList type, where only types that implement Comparable can be used). Java's single-root nature would mean that if you want to accept any type as a parameter, just use Object.
Some of the newer CD drives have two (or more?) 'heads', so they can read simultaneously, effectively doubling the access speed without increasing the speed of spinning. I was wondering: Can't the same be done for hard drives?
Apparently I'm not even the first one to suggest this -- for example, see here.
You're forgetting the other side of the coin. (Some of) RIAA's clients could give bad votes to good files, nullifying positive votes by others, and making the whole rank system worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
A much better alternative is "Chess Around the House", played by Alan Turing and friends over 50 years ago. It was described in GEB and elsewhere.
The idea is simple: make a chess move, start running a (cyclic) track. Your opponent has to make a move before you return. The faster you run, the less time your opponent has. So unlike chessboxing, there's a real, meaningful connection between the two activities. It requires good stamina, chess skills, and some thinking ahead, too (if I sprint now, he'll have less time for this move, but I'll be very tired for the next run and he'll have more time then; etc.)
Very enjoyable!
I was wondering if anyone knows what's the amount of memory required to run Tomcat (under Linux), when using a simple JSP-base site and when using larger-scale EJB projects?
About a decade ago PC Magazine got their first review of a Pentium MMX CPU before it was officially released, because HP (I think it was HP...) sent them a review unit. Only HP didn't tell them it was an MMX CPU; they have hoped the reviewer will be impressed by the unit's great performance (due to increased on-chip cache) without noticing it's an unreleased CPU model.
On the other hand, I review books, and sometimes I get copies from publishers for reviewing. Sadly, however, the review copies I get are never better written, better edited, or have better plots than the copies you could buy in a bookstore.
This is indeed a problem, but the drop-boxes in the Technion's CS faculty -- where I have practiced this -- are theft-proof (very deep, very narrow slots). Only a fellow TA from another course could steal a submission (since the keys are -- strangely enough -- identical for all boxes), but a fellow TA would (by definition) be a graduate students, and this was an undergraduate course.
Here's something I've used while I was a TA. You could say it is a little ugly, but it worked like a charm.
After every assignment in which I have detected cheating, I have published a note (to the course email list) that went something like that:
During the checking of your submissions, some instances of cheating (copying) were detected. In all such cases, both sides (the copier and the source) will be graded zero, unless you approach me and let me know who really solved the assignment, and who copied. In this case, only the cheater will be graded zero; the source will be given his fair grade.
It worked. It worked like a charm. For every submission that I suspected was a copy of somebody else's work, one of the students came up and admitted cheating (they were often pressed to do that by their friends). They had the most pathetic excuses, of course, but that's beside the matter. The bonus part is, many students approached me and admitted cheatings that I didn't detect.
New moderation reason needed on Slashdot: "-1: Copyright violation".
The Microsoft Excel way!? This was used way back in Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was used even in VisiCalc.
Like other said before me, if the point is teaching Java, there's no better book than Bruce Eckle's "Thinking in Java", which is available electronically from Eckle's website. (The 3rd edition is new, I haven't read it specifically. My opinion is based on previous editions.)
I suggest, however, focusing on OOP, rather than on Java. A programmer who groks the fundametal concepts of OOP will have a relatively simple time adapting to the specific tidbits of Java. For this purpose, the best teaching language is Eiffel, and the best book is Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer.
If they can't use Williams's music, how about using his source of inspiration? The Planets by Holst; especially "Mars, The Bringer of War".
For one thing, the "post-link" aspect is meaningful, and allows for some crazy and powerful optimizations that wouldn't be possible otherwise. For another, FDPR wasn't created yesterday. It was around when I started working for IBM in '97. I suspect it's about 10 years old, maybe more. Problem is, IBM were never good in PR, which is why you've never heard of it before.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for IBM Research. This is not inside info.)
The XL line of compilers has a long and glorious tradition. What matters most here is compatibility with existing code. IBM doesn't optimize XLC so you could get a faster kernel, it optimizes XLC so they could recompile DB/2 on AIX and get faster results; and also, obviously, for many of their other products. Another consideration is those clients that have a large codebase used with XLC.
The world of C/C++ is rather sad in that code is not only non-cross-platform in most cases, it is also commonly unlikely to compile using a different compiler on the same platform. Moving from XLC to gcc would mean throwing away an investment of decades in the compiler, not to mention the huge amount of work required to port the source code of products such as DB/2. So IBM helps gcc, and also invests in XLC. There's no conflict here. I would not be surprised if many of the various optimizations employed by XLC will eventually find their way to gcc -- by the very same IBM researchers.
BTW, talking of optimizations, people in IBM Haifa have developed an amazing post-compile optimization tool
. Now, seeing an open-source version of that would be cool. Not very likely, though, since this is the source for some of the performance edge DB/2 has over its competitors.Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.
Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.
Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.
Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.
A detailed review of Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy" can be found here: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
Isn't that why books are dead, too? Once they have perfected the notion, nobody can come up with anything better, so...
In other words: Adventure games also have (had?) plot, unlike space-shooters. Plots cannot be "perfected" -- a new plot can always grab your interest. So the analogy is all wrong.
While working in IBM Research, we were developing a tool to do just that; I do believe it was significantly richer than this one. The first versions were aimed specifically at J2EE, and searched for really 'high-level' bugs -- anything from bad patterns to violations of the J2EE spec. The initial results of this effort are already included in WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.0, as part of the Verifiers. More powerful versions will appear in future releases of WSAD.
IBM solved the Java GUI support problem. Take a look at Eclipse, based on IBM's SWT (Swing replacement).
Here is 5 Volts, by Eran Tromer.
Isn't red/green the most common form of color blindness?
... copies of the article appear verbatim as replies in Slashdot.
How about a new moderation option, "Copyright violation: -1"?
Well, if there's big iron in there, "Ironic" can indeed be a good name for that room.
Sad to see that the suggested implementation of templates does not include type-specific elements, a-la Eiffel (so, for example, I could declare a SortedList type, where only types that implement Comparable can be used). Java's single-root nature would mean that if you want to accept any type as a parameter, just use Object.
When will Microsoft start publishing (fake?) "user success stories" of switching from Linux to Windows?
Some of the newer CD drives have two (or more?) 'heads', so they can read simultaneously, effectively doubling the access speed without increasing the speed of spinning. I was wondering: Can't the same be done for hard drives?
Apparently I'm not even the first one to suggest this -- for example, see here.
Garfield made them re-think that change.
You're forgetting the other side of the coin. (Some of) RIAA's clients could give bad votes to good files, nullifying positive votes by others, and making the whole rank system worthless.