Wasn't reverse engineering, or something very similar, the whole point of the GNU project? I thought they originally intended to build a Unix clone (hence "GNU's Not Unix") that could be distributed openly when the various Unix flavors that existed were all proprietary...
I wonder how they'd be treated if they tried to start that kind of project today. Would it be a DMCA violation to clone a system that was once open?
Of course Bill Gates called for increased security. His announcement, in addition to happening while everybody is trying to settle a multitude of lawsuits against Microsoft, coincided with an announcement from (I believe) the National Academy of Sciences which called for legislation to punish companies who sell buggy, insecure software. He was just trying to protect himself...
Now, I know he's also sending thousands of employees into security training for a while. But the training doesn't mean they'll be perfectly secure anyway - think of all the "trained" MCSEs who are supposed to be networking experts but stlil get mocked for their incompetence by supposedly more experienced Unix admins. Getting a pretty certificate at the end of some training course doesn't guarantee that you've truly learned from it...
The Simpsons didn't have its own ratings in the very beginning. IIRC, it debuted as part of the Tracy Ullman Show, so Fox probably knew that it would be safe to give it half an hour of prime time based on previous experience. The Tick didn't have that advantage...
They did leave out
this first mention in 1991 of a certain kernel, though, which Linus obviously remembered just a few months later in his own first.
To quote another/. poster via the article about how embarrasing things like this are, "It's like having naked baby pictures of yourself stapled to your forehead when you walk around"...
Since you're in the USA, you might as well check out the USA Computing Olympiad, the competition which leads to the previously mentioned IOI. It's language-specific (C, C++, or Pascal), but that doesn't matter - the problems are hard enough that you should be spending significant amounts of time thinking and working stuff out so that you can hopefully code in 20-30 minutes (per program) regardless of what language you choose. The language won't have a big effect on programming ease or time if the problems are well written.
I am one of several student sysadmins at my fairly high-tech high school. We run a very nice computer lab with 30 workstations, a 16-machine cluster, and some servers and extra machines. With the exception of our BSD fileserver, all are Linux boxes and all except one or two experimental machines are running Slackware.
We've debated switching from Slackware to Debian because of its alleged ease of use (at least compared to Slackware) and because our younger sysadmins are all fans of that particular distro. But we're not going to do it, at least in the foreseeable future, because we decided that being student sysadmins should be a learning experience and there's no better way to learn Linux than by using Slackware's do-it-yourself mentality. (Well, Linux from Scratch might be better, but we can't afford to make our own distros in case they crash in the middle of a class.)
When I finally installed Linux on my former Win95 box at home, I also went with Slackware for the learning experience. I learned the vast majority of what I know about Linux from trying to install it, getting my HP Deskjet 720C (for which HP only released Windows drivers) to work via pnm2ppa, recompiling the kernel every time something went horribly wrong at that level, installing useful software, and so on. I had to actually configure almost everything by hand, and it taught me a lot more than package installers and other niceties would. And I'm sure there are lots of others out there who want the same thing. As long as people actually want to get to know from experience what their computer is doing, Slackware will thrive.
That's because the number 10^100 is actually spelled "googol". The search engine's name supposedly has nothing to do with that (and no, they haven't indexed nearly that many pages).
Yes. But you'll be eating GNU/eggs (a rare delicacy, I'm sure), and if you want a cold beverage later on you'd better wait for Coca-Cola to finally open-source their secret formula...
Someone out there should just go register a patent for "certified security technologies". Imagine the manufacturers' reactions when they're being charged a $10000 or so fee for each device that implements it - I'd guess that most corporate support would vanish pretty quickly!
As someone who went through the whole bar mitzvah thing at a time when I still believed in it, let me tell you another secret: we basically had to learn how to lead a service. It took a year to learn all of the necessary prayers in Hebrew (which none of us spoke), and it was nothing more than rote memorization.
Now, four years later, I can assure you that none of my classmates actually attends services regularly; they worked toward their bar mitzvah and then basically stopped coming. And I realize it's not an Orthodox synagogue (it's Conservative), but not one of maybe 30 students comes every week, much less every month... I've since become an atheist (and I strongly believe that at 13, almost everyone is too young to seriously decide whether or not they accept a religion as true), and I find it frighteningly funny that not a single student there actually understood what they were chanting after all that hard work. (Did I mention that everybody got tons of gifts from their friends and relatives to mark the occasion? They were bribed!)
Don't defend the idea that Judaism (or any other religion) is an exercise of the mind - if any of the students in my class had actually exercised their minds, they wouldn't have gone through with this insulting process.
I attend the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in northern Virginia. While most of our school's machines are running Windows, our most advanced computer lab, the computer systems lab, has some thirty workstations, a 16-machine cluster (sorry, but it's not Beowulf), and some nice servers which provide standard services such as mail and the school web site. Everything is running Slackware, so students wishing to take advanced computer science courses will be given an introduction to Linux (as well as Lisp if they take the AI class!) here.
But we've made it even easier to maintain this network - the system administrators are mainly students (a team of 7 or 8, with some assistance from teachers in the lab). This way, the students can also learn a thing or two about system administration (although some prior knowledge is a requirement) and Linux in general, maintenance is absolutely free except for new equipment and a rare piece of software such as Mathematica, and we can show off our high-tech skills to the rest of the world.
It seems from my experience that not only does Linux work in schools, it can work when run by students. The school featured in this article apparently has its share of high-school students; maybe some of the more tech-savvy ones who would normally be bored by schoolwork would appreciate the chance to help run their new network.
You may be right (and I should know, since I took the exam two or three years ago during the "Bigint Case Study"), but it's getting worse. The year I took it, a number of students at my school took the AP exam after a somewhat accelerated intro programming class (instead of the 2nd year AP course). They knew all of the important concepts except file I/O (using fstreams) and for a lot of them who were on the border between 4 and 5 (and ended up getting 4), that may have cost them the points they needed for a 5 because they were expected to know how to do it.
If they had been told "You will receive input from the function int GiveMeANumber()," as the Java students will be told, a few of their scores could have improved...
It's not just universities... Java is becoming the official language of AP Computer Science in 2003-2004, so now high school students throughout the US will be exposed to it.
The only problem is that they're not being exposed to the language. The syllabus is available here; according to it, the following things (among others) are considered "potentially relevant but not tested" (translation: you don't have to learn them):
short, long, byte, char, float
Bitwise operators (&, |, etc.)
Any type cast that isn't (int) or (double)
Any input functions (e.g. System.in) at all
public static void main
do/while, switch, break, continue
Importing packages with wildcards (import x.y.*)
Note especially the lack of any input functions or public static void main - it seems that students could easily get a 5 (the highest possible score) on the AP exam without being ever able to write a working program.
Given the many shortcomings of the new curriculum, I'm guessing that the most motivated students - the ones who plan to study computer science - are going to go out and learn stuff on their own anyway. The American students who only know what they learned in AP Computer Science aren't going to be getting the best programming jobs because they haven't learned enough programming...
12.3 You agree that your use of the Service and the Internet, without limitation, is your sole responsibility, is solely at your own risk and is subject to all applicable local, state, national and international laws and regulations.
Attachment B, part 3:
You may not use the Service as follows:... (q) to use your VIS account for the purpose of operating a server of any type, unless you are an DSL customer;...
I am a Verizon DSL customer. Therefore I can operate a server if I want. And 12.3 says that my use of the Internet is "without limitation" and "solely at my own risk". The way I see it, this means I should be able to run my own server on port 80 without Verizon being able to block it; I'm more than willing to take the risk of getting Apache infected with Code Red. And if I find I'm getting hammered by infected machines on the Verizon network, I'll get the IPs of the offending users and tell them to stop playing Solitaire and install the fscking patch.
I already sent Verizon tech support a message asking why they didn't announce this (at best I found a vague message on their site that didn't mention specific services being blocked) and asking if they can get me around it. They say they'll respond within 24 hours to any messages; I sent it at about noon EST yesterday, and it's 9 AM now, so they've only got about three hours left...
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You can't - Linux is just a kernel. It's Emacs that can be configured to be an OS...
Wasn't reverse engineering, or something very similar, the whole point of the GNU project? I thought they originally intended to build a Unix clone (hence "GNU's Not Unix") that could be distributed openly when the various Unix flavors that existed were all proprietary...
I wonder how they'd be treated if they tried to start that kind of project today. Would it be a DMCA violation to clone a system that was once open?
Of course Bill Gates called for increased security. His announcement, in addition to happening while everybody is trying to settle a multitude of lawsuits against Microsoft, coincided with an announcement from (I believe) the National Academy of Sciences which called for legislation to punish companies who sell buggy, insecure software. He was just trying to protect himself...
Now, I know he's also sending thousands of employees into security training for a while. But the training doesn't mean they'll be perfectly secure anyway - think of all the "trained" MCSEs who are supposed to be networking experts but stlil get mocked for their incompetence by supposedly more experienced Unix admins. Getting a pretty certificate at the end of some training course doesn't guarantee that you've truly learned from it...
How do you determine if it's really a perpetual motion machine?
Get one of these, sit back, and watch it operate!
The Simpsons didn't have its own ratings in the very beginning. IIRC, it debuted as part of the Tracy Ullman Show, so Fox probably knew that it would be safe to give it half an hour of prime time based on previous experience. The Tick didn't have that advantage...
They did leave out this first mention in 1991 of a certain kernel, though, which Linus obviously remembered just a few months later in his own first.
To quote another /. poster via the article about how embarrasing things like this are, "It's like having naked baby pictures of yourself stapled to your forehead when you walk around"...
And Netcraft also says that www.whitehouse.com is running Apache on BSD.
Not that any of whitehouse.com's visitors care or anything...
Since you're in the USA, you might as well check out the USA Computing Olympiad, the competition which leads to the previously mentioned IOI. It's language-specific (C, C++, or Pascal), but that doesn't matter - the problems are hard enough that you should be spending significant amounts of time thinking and working stuff out so that you can hopefully code in 20-30 minutes (per program) regardless of what language you choose. The language won't have a big effect on programming ease or time if the problems are well written.
I am one of several student sysadmins at my fairly high-tech high school. We run a very nice computer lab with 30 workstations, a 16-machine cluster, and some servers and extra machines. With the exception of our BSD fileserver, all are Linux boxes and all except one or two experimental machines are running Slackware.
We've debated switching from Slackware to Debian because of its alleged ease of use (at least compared to Slackware) and because our younger sysadmins are all fans of that particular distro. But we're not going to do it, at least in the foreseeable future, because we decided that being student sysadmins should be a learning experience and there's no better way to learn Linux than by using Slackware's do-it-yourself mentality. (Well, Linux from Scratch might be better, but we can't afford to make our own distros in case they crash in the middle of a class.)
When I finally installed Linux on my former Win95 box at home, I also went with Slackware for the learning experience. I learned the vast majority of what I know about Linux from trying to install it, getting my HP Deskjet 720C (for which HP only released Windows drivers) to work via pnm2ppa, recompiling the kernel every time something went horribly wrong at that level, installing useful software, and so on. I had to actually configure almost everything by hand, and it taught me a lot more than package installers and other niceties would. And I'm sure there are lots of others out there who want the same thing. As long as people actually want to get to know from experience what their computer is doing, Slackware will thrive.
That's because the number 10^100 is actually spelled "googol". The search engine's name supposedly has nothing to do with that (and no, they haven't indexed nearly that many pages).
Yes. But you'll be eating GNU/eggs (a rare delicacy, I'm sure), and if you want a cold beverage later on you'd better wait for Coca-Cola to finally open-source their secret formula...
Someone out there should just go register a patent for "certified security technologies". Imagine the manufacturers' reactions when they're being charged a $10000 or so fee for each device that implements it - I'd guess that most corporate support would vanish pretty quickly!
You can read the story here, no registration required, courtesy of the Washington Post.
As someone who went through the whole bar mitzvah thing at a time when I still believed in it, let me tell you another secret: we basically had to learn how to lead a service. It took a year to learn all of the necessary prayers in Hebrew (which none of us spoke), and it was nothing more than rote memorization.
Now, four years later, I can assure you that none of my classmates actually attends services regularly; they worked toward their bar mitzvah and then basically stopped coming. And I realize it's not an Orthodox synagogue (it's Conservative), but not one of maybe 30 students comes every week, much less every month... I've since become an atheist (and I strongly believe that at 13, almost everyone is too young to seriously decide whether or not they accept a religion as true), and I find it frighteningly funny that not a single student there actually understood what they were chanting after all that hard work. (Did I mention that everybody got tons of gifts from their friends and relatives to mark the occasion? They were bribed!)
Don't defend the idea that Judaism (or any other religion) is an exercise of the mind - if any of the students in my class had actually exercised their minds, they wouldn't have gone through with this insulting process.
But Linus was one of the Swedish speaking Finns...
Grattis pa fodelsedagen!
I attend the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in northern Virginia. While most of our school's machines are running Windows, our most advanced computer lab, the computer systems lab, has some thirty workstations, a 16-machine cluster (sorry, but it's not Beowulf), and some nice servers which provide standard services such as mail and the school web site. Everything is running Slackware, so students wishing to take advanced computer science courses will be given an introduction to Linux (as well as Lisp if they take the AI class!) here.
But we've made it even easier to maintain this network - the system administrators are mainly students (a team of 7 or 8, with some assistance from teachers in the lab). This way, the students can also learn a thing or two about system administration (although some prior knowledge is a requirement) and Linux in general, maintenance is absolutely free except for new equipment and a rare piece of software such as Mathematica, and we can show off our high-tech skills to the rest of the world.
It seems from my experience that not only does Linux work in schools, it can work when run by students. The school featured in this article apparently has its share of high-school students; maybe some of the more tech-savvy ones who would normally be bored by schoolwork would appreciate the chance to help run their new network.
You may be right (and I should know, since I took the exam two or three years ago during the "Bigint Case Study"), but it's getting worse. The year I took it, a number of students at my school took the AP exam after a somewhat accelerated intro programming class (instead of the 2nd year AP course). They knew all of the important concepts except file I/O (using fstreams) and for a lot of them who were on the border between 4 and 5 (and ended up getting 4), that may have cost them the points they needed for a 5 because they were expected to know how to do it.
If they had been told "You will receive input from the function int GiveMeANumber()," as the Java students will be told, a few of their scores could have improved...
It's not just universities... Java is becoming the official language of AP Computer Science in 2003-2004, so now high school students throughout the US will be exposed to it.
The only problem is that they're not being exposed to the language. The syllabus is available here; according to it, the following things (among others) are considered "potentially relevant but not tested" (translation: you don't have to learn them):
Note especially the lack of any input functions or public static void main - it seems that students could easily get a 5 (the highest possible score) on the AP exam without being ever able to write a working program.
Given the many shortcomings of the new curriculum, I'm guessing that the most motivated students - the ones who plan to study computer science - are going to go out and learn stuff on their own anyway. The American students who only know what they learned in AP Computer Science aren't going to be getting the best programming jobs because they haven't learned enough programming...
Direct quotes from the Verizon TOS:
Section 12, Limitations on Use and Warranties: Attachment B, part 3:I am a Verizon DSL customer. Therefore I can operate a server if I want. And 12.3 says that my use of the Internet is "without limitation" and "solely at my own risk". The way I see it, this means I should be able to run my own server on port 80 without Verizon being able to block it; I'm more than willing to take the risk of getting Apache infected with Code Red. And if I find I'm getting hammered by infected machines on the Verizon network, I'll get the IPs of the offending users and tell them to stop playing Solitaire and install the fscking patch.
I already sent Verizon tech support a message asking why they didn't announce this (at best I found a vague message on their site that didn't mention specific services being blocked) and asking if they can get me around it. They say they'll respond within 24 hours to any messages; I sent it at about noon EST yesterday, and it's 9 AM now, so they've only got about three hours left...