"Are these very strange requirements/wishes or would other people be willing to sacrifice ratified standards compliance and possibly performance for orthogonality of language/platform availability? I would like to be able to write code for Linux/Unices/Windows in my languages of choice (for me this would be Perl, Java and C++) without having to use multiple implementations on the different platforms."
I work for an academic institution, and let me tell you, WE have wierd requirements. Our it shop is going full steam on CORBA and Java. Basically all client pieces we are writing and will be writing will be written in Java for heterogenous campus machines (you can never tell what's out there). Our middle tier is also Java, while our third tier is native or an ugly native/Java hybrid. It all works lovely though because we use CORBA and anything can talk to anything. We use Visigenic's orb product VisiBroker. I've heard of OmniOrb, an open source orb, as well as other custom ones for other open source applications (like Gnome and AllianceOS orbs).
Java's great because you have the exact same codebase pretty much wherever you run it. We can swap our objects around, load share them, etc. Our middle tier ties in to web servers running servlets, so we can present applications in browser if we want. The performance hit is really not that big a deal. It is certainly worth the automatic portability and flexibility. Plus Java bring some other cool stuff with it that is great for distributed computing (serialization for one).
I don't know if it will fit your requirements, but CORBA and Java is the basis for our distributed heterogenous system.
Isn't it bogus to claim that using a "mag-lev"/"railgun"/whatever technology would save money? Maybe it's just me, but it would seem that this would take an absolutely enormous amount of energy to accelerate a multiple-ton spacecraft out of this thing. Isn't a big gun, like someone else suggested, a better idea? Problem with guns though, is that the spacecraft itself needs SOME sort of propellent or it won't be able to manoeuver (however you spell that).
"The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers."
Well, no, it also makes sense because you can immediately know the order of magnitude of something simply by counting the 0s. I/know/ 1000000 is 100 times larger than 10000 just by looking at it. I can't tell automatically how much larger 0xF4240 is than 0x2710.
And the metric system doesn't make sense for time (note we haven't switched over), because the number 60 is in tune with our bodies and intuitive perception of "beat". Ask anybody to demonstrate how long a second is, or to start making a "beat" (i'm not a musician, I don't know the terminology), and they will usually be pretty close. Under a second we usually aren't that intuitive so we just arbitrarily chop it up into a decimal 1000 milliseconds. Anyway 24 hours fits rather nicely in a day. That's better than 86.4 kiloseconds.
"I don't understand either how anyone could be bored when you are constantly learning cool things that you can use on your own projects."
Constantly learning/what/? I wasn't/learning/ anything. I was having the same old boring reference material regurgitated to me over and over. That's not learning.
"If I wasn't taught C in first year, then how could I use it now for my own projects?"
Yes, but what if you already knew C, and had read a 600 page sophomore level algorithms and data structures textbook well before you even went to college. I'd say you probably wouldn't be learning much.
"Yes it can be done, but at nowhere near the speed of in a course."
FUD.
"Do you get personal feedback from experienced programmers when you teach yourself?"
There was basically no chance of personal feedback from experienced programmers/professors, in the classes I took, except of course maybe 5 minutes after lecture. I had some really great professors, but usually they did research and really didn't care.
"If the lectures are boring, don't go."
I didn't. And my grades showed it. And I thought "what the heck am I even paying for?".
"Don't just give up because the lectures aren't lively enough. That's the lecturers fault, not the material's."
I found "Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures" interesting in my -1st year, but it was far from lively when it was regurgitated for a grade to wide-eyed [junior/senior] classmates a year later.
"When the prof is reiterating stuff I already know, then I either ignore him and think about my own projects and ideas, or listen and take note of what everyone else supposedly now knows, or if I feel like being a prick, I correct the prof."
Well I did think about my own projects and ideas. Sometimes I'd just write pseudocode because I was so bored to tears. And I did sometimes speak up and debate with the prof. But it would really annoy me to see over and over people finally "getting" some facile concept and being lauded...I knew I was in the wrong place.
"I view school as a time to expand myself socially and ideologically, and justification to allocate time to learn a new skill."
Me too! I thought "COLLEGE", WOW, I can finally learn stuff/at my own pace/ without the rigid schedule of high school. I'd have TIME to do what I want. Boy was I wrong.
"Say I want to learn low level x86 assembly. Well, I can't justify spending the time on that because of all my other projects, but if I'm in a class that requires this, then I can justify spending the time on it, and even go a little overboard"
Ok, I'll grant that I learned a bit in the CPU design/assembly class I took (patterson and hennessy), but other than that all my other classes were dreadfully and painfully boring. How the heck can I possibly keep my mind busy in an intro to algorithms and data structures class (which was a bloody 400-level course itself! senior level...just an intro! Linked list, duh, what's that?? my God).
You have a point about things other than the default not necessarily being free. The user would have to choose to spend time downloading and configuring Mozilla. This, to me is a negligable price to pay for a much better (and moral IMHO;) product...but to random user, there just might not be an incentive. Maybe when users start realizing how often things really break and what IE does to their system they may be open for an alternative. Hopefully Mozilla's merits will bring the users. If standards compliant pages start rendering incorrectly in their "compliant" IE browser, then they'll switch perhaps.
Well, what everybody could be genetically engineered for intellegence (or whatever), if we had robots to do all the automated "production" work. Everything would be fine then. Until of course the robots network and evolve their own superior intellegence and unleash a genocidal rampage of mass carnage upon us, wiping us out entirely.:)
I don't want to sound like a bigot or something, but I think right now it is working the other way around. I think statistically "smart" people are having relatively fewer, or no children, while people who could be lumped in the "not-so-smart" category are having more and more. Actually, the distinction shouldn't be made between "smart" and "not-smart", but "knowledgeable" and "not-knowledgeable" or "ignorant"...but both correlate a good amount. The problem is, that there is no natural selection for intelligence any more...and the artificial selection that exists promotes fewer offspring.
Basically the genetic line will be based on economics...the richest people will be the only ones able to afford it, and thus will have all the genetically "enhanced" offspring, while everybody else will just be mediocre.
Yes, that's a story I wasn't fond of my mother retelling...;) I guess I thought if you threw stuff around and broke everything up that in the next scene it would be all together again...but like the other poster said, kids are like on acid...
I wonder if microsoft has a service for centrally locating everybody's soul...you know, to keep them "safe". I sure wouldn't want anybody [but Microsoft] to have my precious soul. They could do something evil with it...um, like, extortion or something. In fact, I should give all my possesions and right of attorney to microsoft for safekeeping. I'm just glad there is a noble company like microsoft to stand up for us poor mindless sheep who can't control our own possesions.
I think this is a really bad idea. Health records are personal information and property. You carry them around with you. When the doctor wants to see them you show them to him. The medical establishment shouldn't own these things any more than educational institutions should own academic information (they don't usually, you can have them "locked" or made "private" so they can't give out any info). I think this is really intrusive. There are just so many bad things this could cause. What's the big deal with keeping records anyway...are people so stupid they can't even file something away? What about their social security card or birth record...who owns those?
Also, am I the only one who thinks those look incredibly tacky, like Pez or lighters...20 years from now we'll say, "Man, did we wear weird clothes, and what about those funky computers!?".
I too, looked at Debian, as my choice for Linux distro, but I'm a bit ignorant about it. What exactly is "potato" ("I run a Debian-/potato/ machine..."), and "slink" (code-name for the kernel??). It sounds like the kernel has some modifications or something...does that mean I can't just download a new kernel and recompile? Am I locked down to Debian's package system entirely?
I'm also looking at Stamped for pentium optimizations. Is it worth it? Can I just recompile another distro's kernel with pgcc or something??
In reference to parental controls...I think these are silly sometimes. How does it help a child to see that when he murders people there are no disgusting side effects? Which is worse, actually showing the gore, or allowing the child to believe that when he axes his schoolmate, his schoolmate will just spawn in another area of the playground.
This discussion though is entirely irrelevent because it is the parents' responsiblity to ensure that their children don't play games that they have objections to in the first place. To make an analogy, censored porn is still not good for kids (depending on who you speak to I guess) even if it is censored.
P.S. I used to watch popeye when I was a child and then be horrified later when I threw my toys down the stairs and they wouldn't fly back together after they were smashed.
Really, this is getting thought-police-like. Really, source code is just an imprint of an idea. Can't one just print out the source and send it out? If you actually CAN do that (and I can't see why you shouldn't), then this is just really bogus. WAKE UP government, the cat is already out of the bag...everybody has encryption, you're just making it a pain in the butt.
Well, it's true (IMO) that Mozilla looks ugly and klunky. The operative word here is _LOOKS_. While Microsoft has X number of people to paint on a pretty (gimmicky) interface, people at Mozilla are actually tackling the tough core stuff first. Who cares about the interface just yet? They can clean that up in a few days I'm sure. What matters is that work is being done on the all important unseen core of Mozilla. Besides the annoying b0rked textareas, the Mozilla renderer is really cool (actually the native widget viewer.exe doesn't have the textarea probs). A great interface is not worth anything if the software doesn't do anything. Anyway, a lot more than a browser is coming out of Mozilla. Mozilla is many cases is simply the first real implementation of some standards. In conclusion, if you don't contribute, don't gripe, just buy your $50 IE and be happy.
Yeah...there should be some sort of post log or something that they can grep to check if their story has been posted already. Funny, don't they work in the same building, if not room??
Slashdot Mirror
In the NT ResKit there is a cheesy SU.exe function. It's a goddamn vb 3 app!!! Must be a hangover from NT3.5
"Dingus clicking"
I'd love to see that enter the vernacular:
"Launch Netscape"
"no, you have to click the dingus"
"no, click"
"here"
"the DINGUS!, click the DINGUS!"
"good"
"Are these very strange requirements/wishes or would other people be willing to sacrifice ratified standards compliance and possibly performance for orthogonality of language/platform availability? I would like to be able to write code for Linux/Unices/Windows in my languages of choice (for me this would be Perl, Java and C++) without having to use multiple implementations on the different platforms."
I work for an academic institution, and let me tell you, WE have wierd requirements. Our it shop is going full steam on CORBA and Java. Basically all client pieces we are writing and will be writing will be written in Java for heterogenous campus machines (you can never tell what's out there). Our middle tier is also Java, while our third tier is native or an ugly native/Java hybrid. It all works lovely though because we use CORBA and anything can talk to anything. We use Visigenic's orb product VisiBroker. I've heard of OmniOrb, an open source orb, as well as other custom ones for other open source applications (like Gnome and AllianceOS orbs).
Java's great because you have the exact same codebase pretty much wherever you run it. We can swap our objects around, load share them, etc. Our middle tier ties in to web servers running servlets, so we can present applications in browser if we want. The performance hit is really not that big a deal. It is certainly worth the automatic portability and flexibility. Plus Java bring some other cool stuff with it that is great for distributed computing (serialization for one).
I don't know if it will fit your requirements, but CORBA and Java is the basis for our distributed heterogenous system.
I thought shopping was already patented...
Isn't it bogus to claim that using a "mag-lev"/"railgun"/whatever technology would save money? Maybe it's just me, but it would seem that this would take an absolutely enormous amount of energy to accelerate a multiple-ton spacecraft out of this thing. Isn't a big gun, like someone else suggested, a better idea? Problem with guns though, is that the spacecraft itself needs SOME sort of propellent or it won't be able to manoeuver (however you spell that).
It'll run Mozilla too:
e =850
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?articl
"The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers."
/know/ 1000000 is 100 times larger than 10000 just by looking at it. I can't tell automatically how much larger 0xF4240 is than 0x2710.
Well, no, it also makes sense because you can immediately know the order of magnitude of something simply by counting the 0s. I
And the metric system doesn't make sense for time (note we haven't switched over), because the number 60 is in tune with our bodies and intuitive perception of "beat". Ask anybody to demonstrate how long a second is, or to start making a "beat" (i'm not a musician, I don't know the terminology), and they will usually be pretty close. Under a second we usually aren't that intuitive so we just arbitrarily chop it up into a decimal 1000 milliseconds. Anyway 24 hours fits rather nicely in a day. That's better than 86.4 kiloseconds.
"I don't understand either how anyone could be bored when you are constantly learning cool things that you can use on your own projects."
/what/? I wasn't /learning/ anything. I was having the same old boring reference material regurgitated to me over and over. That's not learning.
Constantly learning
"If I wasn't taught C in first year, then how could I use it now for my own projects?"
Yes, but what if you already knew C, and had read a 600 page sophomore level algorithms and data structures textbook well before you even went to college. I'd say you probably wouldn't be learning much.
"Yes it can be done, but at nowhere near the speed of in a course."
FUD.
"Do you get personal feedback from experienced programmers when you teach yourself?"
There was basically no chance of personal feedback from experienced programmers/professors, in the classes I took, except of course maybe 5 minutes after lecture. I had some really great professors, but usually they did research and really didn't care.
"If the lectures are boring, don't go."
I didn't. And my grades showed it. And I thought "what the heck am I even paying for?".
"Don't just give up because the lectures aren't lively enough. That's the lecturers fault, not the material's."
I found "Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures" interesting in my -1st year, but it was far from lively when it was regurgitated for a grade to wide-eyed [junior/senior] classmates a year later.
"When the prof is reiterating stuff I already know, then I either ignore him and think about my own projects and ideas, or listen and take note of what everyone else supposedly now knows, or if I feel like being a prick, I correct the prof."
/at my own pace/ without the rigid schedule of high school. I'd have TIME to do what I want. Boy was I wrong.
Well I did think about my own projects and ideas. Sometimes I'd just write pseudocode because I was so bored to tears. And I did sometimes speak up and debate with the prof. But it would really annoy me to see over and over people finally "getting" some facile concept and being lauded...I knew I was in the wrong place.
"I view school as a time to expand myself socially and ideologically, and justification to allocate time to learn a new skill."
Me too! I thought "COLLEGE", WOW, I can finally learn stuff
"Say I want to learn low level x86 assembly. Well, I can't justify spending the time on that because of all my other projects, but if I'm in a class that requires this, then I can justify spending the time on it, and even go a little overboard"
Ok, I'll grant that I learned a bit in the CPU design/assembly class I took (patterson and hennessy), but other than that all my other classes were dreadfully and painfully boring. How the heck can I possibly keep my mind busy in an intro to algorithms and data structures class (which was a bloody 400-level course itself! senior level...just an intro! Linked list, duh, what's that?? my God).
You have a point about things other than the default not necessarily being free. The user would have to choose to spend time downloading and configuring Mozilla. This, to me is a negligable price to pay for a much better (and moral IMHO ;) product...but to random user, there just might not be an incentive. Maybe when users start realizing how often things really break and what IE does to their system they may be open for an alternative. Hopefully Mozilla's merits will bring the users. If standards compliant pages start rendering incorrectly in their "compliant" IE browser, then they'll switch perhaps.
I would like a side of infrared vision with that order.
Well, what everybody could be genetically engineered for intellegence (or whatever), if we had robots to do all the automated "production" work. Everything would be fine then. Until of course the robots network and evolve their own superior intellegence and unleash a genocidal rampage of mass carnage upon us, wiping us out entirely. :)
I don't want to sound like a bigot or something, but I think right now it is working the other way around. I think statistically "smart" people are having relatively fewer, or no children, while people who could be lumped in the "not-so-smart" category are having more and more. Actually, the distinction shouldn't be made between "smart" and "not-smart", but "knowledgeable" and "not-knowledgeable" or "ignorant"...but both correlate a good amount. The problem is, that there is no natural selection for intelligence any more...and the artificial selection that exists promotes fewer offspring.
Basically the genetic line will be based on economics...the richest people will be the only ones able to afford it, and thus will have all the genetically "enhanced" offspring, while everybody else will just be mediocre.
> Wow. What an idiot.
;)
Yes, that's a story I wasn't fond of my mother retelling...
I guess I thought if you threw stuff around and broke everything up that in the next scene it would be all together again...but like the other poster said, kids are like on acid...
I wonder if microsoft has a service for centrally locating everybody's soul...you know, to keep them "safe". I sure wouldn't want anybody [but Microsoft] to have my precious soul. They could do something evil with it...um, like, extortion or something. In fact, I should give all my possesions and right of attorney to microsoft for safekeeping. I'm just glad there is a noble company like microsoft to stand up for us poor mindless sheep who can't control our own possesions.
I think this is a really bad idea. Health records are personal information and property. You carry them around with you. When the doctor wants to see them you show them to him. The medical establishment shouldn't own these things any more than educational institutions should own academic information (they don't usually, you can have them "locked" or made "private" so they can't give out any info). I think this is really intrusive. There are just so many bad things this could cause. What's the big deal with keeping records anyway...are people so stupid they can't even file something away? What about their social security card or birth record...who owns those?
check out tatung's site...they sell plenty of other normal computers
Cyrix K6 = AMD K6
Also, am I the only one who thinks those look incredibly tacky, like Pez or lighters...20 years from now we'll say, "Man, did we wear weird clothes, and what about those funky computers!?".
I too, looked at Debian, as my choice for Linux distro, but I'm a bit ignorant about it. What exactly is "potato" ("I run a Debian-/potato/ machine..."), and "slink" (code-name for the kernel??). It sounds like the kernel has some modifications or something...does that mean I can't just download a new kernel and recompile? Am I locked down to Debian's package system entirely?
I'm also looking at Stamped for pentium optimizations. Is it worth it? Can I just recompile another distro's kernel with pgcc or something??
man, you can really tell segfaulters...
This isn't a question, don't flame.
In reference to parental controls...I think these are silly sometimes. How does it help a child to see that when he murders people there are no disgusting side effects? Which is worse, actually showing the gore, or allowing the child to believe that when he axes his schoolmate, his schoolmate will just spawn in another area of the playground.
This discussion though is entirely irrelevent because it is the parents' responsiblity to ensure that their children don't play games that they have objections to in the first place. To make an analogy, censored porn is still not good for kids (depending on who you speak to I guess) even if it is censored.
P.S. I used to watch popeye when I was a child and then be horrified later when I threw my toys down the stairs and they wouldn't fly back together after they were smashed.
Really, this is getting thought-police-like. Really, source code is just an imprint of an idea. Can't one just print out the source and send it out? If you actually CAN do that (and I can't see why you shouldn't), then this is just really bogus. WAKE UP government, the cat is already out of the bag...everybody has encryption, you're just making it a pain in the butt.
Well, it's true (IMO) that Mozilla looks ugly and klunky. The operative word here is _LOOKS_. While Microsoft has X number of people to paint on a pretty (gimmicky) interface, people at Mozilla are actually tackling the tough core stuff first. Who cares about the interface just yet? They can clean that up in a few days I'm sure. What matters is that work is being done on the all important unseen core of Mozilla. Besides the annoying b0rked textareas, the Mozilla renderer is really cool (actually the native widget viewer.exe doesn't have the textarea probs). A great interface is not worth anything if the software doesn't do anything. Anyway, a lot more than a browser is coming out of Mozilla. Mozilla is many cases is simply the first real implementation of some standards. In conclusion, if you don't contribute, don't gripe, just buy your $50 IE and be happy.
a Xerox machine AND a photocopier?
Yeah...there should be some sort of post log or something that they can grep to check if their story has been posted already. Funny, don't they work in the same building, if not room??