Great? I programmed in logo and that was totally useless.
Well, I can't help you there. It's a surprisingly powerful functional/applicative language; most people only know about using it to draw little pictures because that's one of the easiest ways to teach kids.
Logo for third grade? How old were you? 10?
I was 8, like most people in the 3rd grade.
I'd teach someone at that age Basic not Logo.
Basic isn't a functional language. It forms bad habits; too many side effects, and not enough distinction between functions and subroutines.
In Middle School I'd move on to Visual Basic and or C.
Well, first off, this was long before the days of Visual Basic (thank God). Secondly, VB would probably be the worst language to teach someone algorithmic analysis except maybe for Smalltalk. As for C, I did learn that in Middle School, and the teacher was surprised that I used recursion when most people would use iteration (thanks to Logo and Forth), which tended to simplify my programs.
This would be computer science and they'd learn a few concepts which might help them in understanding algebra, it would be part of a pre algebra type of class to learn programming.
Ummm... yeah. Replace "algebra" with "discrete mathematics" and you're basically repeating what I said
Just like a calculator is far more efficient than Pen and Paper, you can learn math just fine with just a calculator, you can learn math with a computer.
Well, we disagree then. I don't think you can learn math very well if you start out using calculators or computers or any "black box" that gives you answers when you give it questions. Kids should develop mathematical discipline first.
Schools tend to take away hours from maths and physics for teaching computer "science", so that would explain enough. Pity that MS Word is considered more important than algebra.
True dat. But only because they teach computer "science" (how to use particular applications, etc.) rather than computer science (creating and analyzing computable algorithms). When I was in 3rd grade (yes, 3rd grade), I was in a Montessori school that had a great computer lab (well, great for 1983). We had a class in computer programming for all the third graders as part of the math class. We programmed in Logo. The first week we got to play with the computers and learned to make squares and stuff (repeat 4: fd 50 rt 90). For the next 2 months we didn't touch the computers; we wrote out algorithms on paper. The next semester was the same way, but with Forth instead of Logo.
The end result? I still design applicative programs, no matter what language I use. I still debug by proving the flaws in my algorithms rather than by examining memory. I still program with pencil and paper before I touch a keyboard. I like programming that way, though it doesn't always go over well with the "we need e-business solutions to leverage our key synergies" crowd.
Who was it that said "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"? Computers can be good tools to supplement pencil-and-paper analysis of algorithms; I haven't seen a school since that used them that way, though. They mostly teach how to research on the Internet (a useful skill, I admit) and how to make pretty slideshows.
Nowadays, I would venture to say that it would make a remarkable film, but not one that Hollywood would (or could) ever produce.
Maybe this is because I'm a composer, but I always thought the Silmarillion needed to be a cycle of operas rather than a movie. I know at least that Beren and Luthien is a story Wagner would have loved to score if he could have read it.
I remember that one. The joke was the same mistake grandparent post made; Rob Schneider et al kept asking if they were 20,000 leagues down yet and Grammer kept trying to convince them that a league is a measure of distance travelled, not of depth.
That was the same SNL, I believe, that had the cat's ass sketch. Funny stuff.
I guess not if it's a no-OS box you're going to put linux on, but there's even an EULA of sorts for that (GNU/GPL).
<pedantry>There is no EULA for Linux; you are free to use it in any way you want. The GPL is a redistribution, not use, license. Personally I have no problem with any of M$'s redistribution licenses. It's use licenses that piss me off.</pedantry>
Last time I used StarOffice, you could write macros in "StarBasic" and JavaScript. Is this still true? Although VBA is probably the worst security hole in history ("Hey, boss, want to let haX0rz call the API from a PowerPoint presentation?" "Yeah, let's get them in on that!"), you can do some pretty cool stuff with it. And, if the thought of writing "code" terrifies you (and let's not forget it terrifies a lot of people, sadly), there's the macro recorder.
Oddly enough, in every office I've worked at, I've been the only person who knows how to use VBA and macros -- I'm not sure why people are willing to pay that much for software and then not even use it to its full potential.
BTW, what is Open Office's macro language? I'd love to get an office suite that would let me write macros in Scheme...
Three others have beat me to this, but I had to respond. The Internet (defined as "a worldwide internetwork of hosts using IP protocols or something like them") was designed by the US Government as a decentralized information exchange medium.
The US DoD wanted an Internet because they didn't want MIT and AT&T having total control of the computing power in the US. And, like many government projects that aren't part of a particular politician's pet initiatives, this one seems to have worked pretty well.
I don't think people should be able to just make up their own standards.
Isn't that the whole point of XML to begin with? That my company and the company we're partnering with can write a simple data-exchange standard without locking both development teams in a conference room for two weeks?
So, in your case, you and whoever your dealing with could pretty easily nail down what kind of namespace smarts you want in your DTD validations and implement it without having to RFC the whole world.
Here's an interesting question though: how often is the net being used at the library because someone is too lazy to look something up in a book?
I study dead languages. My local library does not have the Liddel-Scott Greek-English Lexicon nor Tutti Verbi Graeci. The Perseus Project, however, does, online for free. As much as I make fun of futurists, the idea that anyone in the US who can get to a library can access the Perseus Project et al makes the immense public investment in the Internet worthwhile.
Why not produce lifeforms that can (for example) consume greenhouse gasses and produce energy?
I'm not in principle opposed to the idea. But then again, the people who will be coding the DNA are the same people who can't check IIS buffers for overruns.
I grew up in Mississippi. About 100 years ago, everyone was worried about soil erosion. Somebody came up with a great idea to prevent erosion: introduce a vine from Asia that had really stubborn roots and could hold soil down. The vine? Kudzu. Now the whole deep South is overrun with the damn stuff and they can't get rid of it. The effects of the introduction on the ecosystem were much broader than anyone had anticipated. Something tells me that releasing a life form that eats greenhouse gases would have even greater effects.
The actual text of a news piece is the result of creative effort, so it's copyrightable. The facts it reports are not.
For example, I can read on AP that the US Senate just voted 55-44 to approve Dennis Shedd for the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, and tell that to anyone I want to.
The actual text of the AP report, though, is the product of a staff writer's creative work so I can't simply quote it for any purpose I feel like quoting it for.
Michaelangelo got funded by popes/princes who had independent sources of wealth.
*BUZZ*. Popes and princes got money through taxes. Michelangelo and the other TMNTs were all funded by public money (though, admittedly, public money that was rarely administered in the public interest). Maybe if we want better art we should go back to funding great works of art publicly.
"But proof by authority is the weakest sort, according to Boethius."
--Sum. Theolog., Names of God, Art. 7
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
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· Score: 2, Interesting
We're a great big pattern matching machine. Kasparov has trained his pattern matching machine to take in chess positions and output decent chess moves. He then selects among those decent chess moves based on... exhaustive computation.
Hmmm... I'm not sure I agree. A human chess player's computations are specifically *not* exhaustive. A human player seeks to hold or threaten strategic squares or pieces and works backwards to see which moves make that most likely. Deep Blue runs through tons of moves and sees which moves hold or threaten strategic squares or pieces.
There are chess programs that work like human players work: establishing strategic goals and trying to work out ways to get to them. But none of them are very good.
Kasparov's strategy was to keep DB out of any position that would let it come up with a surprising (to a human) move through exhaustive analysis, which is why all the matches looked like Flanders in WWI. Also, Kasparov is probably the worst GM for a computer/human match... he plays very dramatic, emotional games and wins by humiliating and terrifying the opponent, which wouldn't work against a computer.
Re:Would we want our computers to have feeling?
on
Behind Deep Blue
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The Constitution does not prohibit the statewide plebiscites for the President, but it does not guarantee them either (ie, I can't think of a Constitutional challenge if a state decided to appoint its electors in some manner besides a statewide vote).
Still, the electoral college seems like exactly the sort of thing the article was talking about: a tool to avoid some of the problems of a plurality vote.
No, actually, that was with schools taking old machines as donations, taking that copy of Windows, and using it on a new/different machine.
I'm curious. What defines a "new/different machine"? I've refurbished a lot of boxen for schools and nonprofits and it's not always clear when a refurbishment becomes a "different machine".
What if I take the old hard drive with the Windows installation and put it in a new motherboard. Same machine, or different machine?
they installed all kinds of stuff, the IE on that image never worked the same again.
I've had that problem with DSL and cable. The stupid client software they force on you installs its own IE. Worse yet, the cable software uninstalled IE6 to install IE5.5
Apparantly Windows 2000 doesn't like having its IE6 taken away from it, because *nothing* worked after that... Windows Scripting Host was fux0rzd, Explorer was flakey, etc... Oh well... it was one of the last straws that switched me to Linux (which takes the cable without any problems or software -- eat *that*, Comcast), so I suppose I should be grateful.
Using Mingw32 or lcc-win32 or bcc55 I can use the free (beer) windows API and write windows programs. Contrast that with Carbon or Cocoa (in their earlier days).
Though that story seems to be apocryphal, especially given that much earlier metallurgists than Archimedes already knew ways to test the purity of metal.
Slashdot Mirror
A pity indeed. Composers have been ripping off authors for centuries. What if Schikaneder had stopped Mozart from composing Die Zauberfloete?
Well, I can't help you there. It's a surprisingly powerful functional/applicative language; most people only know about using it to draw little pictures because that's one of the easiest ways to teach kids.
I was 8, like most people in the 3rd grade.
Basic isn't a functional language. It forms bad habits; too many side effects, and not enough distinction between functions and subroutines.
Well, first off, this was long before the days of Visual Basic (thank God). Secondly, VB would probably be the worst language to teach someone algorithmic analysis except maybe for Smalltalk. As for C, I did learn that in Middle School, and the teacher was surprised that I used recursion when most people would use iteration (thanks to Logo and Forth), which tended to simplify my programs.
Ummm... yeah. Replace "algebra" with "discrete mathematics" and you're basically repeating what I said
Well, we disagree then. I don't think you can learn math very well if you start out using calculators or computers or any "black box" that gives you answers when you give it questions. Kids should develop mathematical discipline first.
True dat. But only because they teach computer "science" (how to use particular applications, etc.) rather than computer science (creating and analyzing computable algorithms). When I was in 3rd grade (yes, 3rd grade), I was in a Montessori school that had a great computer lab (well, great for 1983). We had a class in computer programming for all the third graders as part of the math class. We programmed in Logo. The first week we got to play with the computers and learned to make squares and stuff (repeat 4: fd 50 rt 90). For the next 2 months we didn't touch the computers; we wrote out algorithms on paper. The next semester was the same way, but with Forth instead of Logo.
The end result? I still design applicative programs, no matter what language I use. I still debug by proving the flaws in my algorithms rather than by examining memory. I still program with pencil and paper before I touch a keyboard. I like programming that way, though it doesn't always go over well with the "we need e-business solutions to leverage our key synergies" crowd.
Who was it that said "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"? Computers can be good tools to supplement pencil-and-paper analysis of algorithms; I haven't seen a school since that used them that way, though. They mostly teach how to research on the Internet (a useful skill, I admit) and how to make pretty slideshows.
Maybe this is because I'm a composer, but I always thought the Silmarillion needed to be a cycle of operas rather than a movie. I know at least that Beren and Luthien is a story Wagner would have loved to score if he could have read it.
"hoi" means "the". It's "The frivolity of hoi polloi".
I remember that one. The joke was the same mistake grandparent post made; Rob Schneider et al kept asking if they were 20,000 leagues down yet and Grammer kept trying to convince them that a league is a measure of distance travelled, not of depth.
That was the same SNL, I believe, that had the cat's ass sketch. Funny stuff.
Yes, but since Eiffel is French, it's called the Towers of Dien Bien Phu and bails out after 3 recursions.
I guess not if it's a no-OS box you're going to put linux on, but there's even an EULA of sorts for that (GNU/GPL).
<pedantry>There is no EULA for Linux; you are free to use it in any way you want. The GPL is a redistribution, not use, license. Personally I have no problem with any of M$'s redistribution licenses. It's use licenses that piss me off.</pedantry>
Last time I used StarOffice, you could write macros in "StarBasic" and JavaScript. Is this still true? Although VBA is probably the worst security hole in history ("Hey, boss, want to let haX0rz call the API from a PowerPoint presentation?" "Yeah, let's get them in on that!"), you can do some pretty cool stuff with it. And, if the thought of writing "code" terrifies you (and let's not forget it terrifies a lot of people, sadly), there's the macro recorder.
Oddly enough, in every office I've worked at, I've been the only person who knows how to use VBA and macros -- I'm not sure why people are willing to pay that much for software and then not even use it to its full potential.
BTW, what is Open Office's macro language? I'd love to get an office suite that would let me write macros in Scheme...
Dude, to quote Archimedes, give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.
Three others have beat me to this, but I had to respond. The Internet (defined as "a worldwide internetwork of hosts using IP protocols or something like them") was designed by the US Government as a decentralized information exchange medium.
The US DoD wanted an Internet because they didn't want MIT and AT&T having total control of the computing power in the US. And, like many government projects that aren't part of a particular politician's pet initiatives, this one seems to have worked pretty well.
I don't think people should be able to just make up their own standards.
Isn't that the whole point of XML to begin with? That my company and the company we're partnering with can write a simple data-exchange standard without locking both development teams in a conference room for two weeks?
So, in your case, you and whoever your dealing with could pretty easily nail down what kind of namespace smarts you want in your DTD validations and implement it without having to RFC the whole world.
Why not produce lifeforms that can (for example) consume greenhouse gasses and produce energy?
I'm not in principle opposed to the idea. But then again, the people who will be coding the DNA are the same people who can't check IIS buffers for overruns.
I grew up in Mississippi. About 100 years ago, everyone was worried about soil erosion. Somebody came up with a great idea to prevent erosion: introduce a vine from Asia that had really stubborn roots and could hold soil down. The vine? Kudzu. Now the whole deep South is overrun with the damn stuff and they can't get rid of it. The effects of the introduction on the ecosystem were much broader than anyone had anticipated. Something tells me that releasing a life form that eats greenhouse gases would have even greater effects.
No.
The actual text of a news piece is the result of creative effort, so it's copyrightable. The facts it reports are not.
For example, I can read on AP that the US Senate just voted 55-44 to approve Dennis Shedd for the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, and tell that to anyone I want to.
The actual text of the AP report, though, is the product of a staff writer's creative work so I can't simply quote it for any purpose I feel like quoting it for.
Michaelangelo got funded by popes/princes who had independent sources of wealth.
*BUZZ*. Popes and princes got money through taxes. Michelangelo and the other TMNTs were all funded by public money (though, admittedly, public money that was rarely administered in the public interest). Maybe if we want better art we should go back to funding great works of art publicly.
"But proof by authority is the weakest sort, according to Boethius."
--Sum. Theolog., Names of God, Art. 7Hmmm... I'm not sure I agree. A human chess player's computations are specifically *not* exhaustive. A human player seeks to hold or threaten strategic squares or pieces and works backwards to see which moves make that most likely. Deep Blue runs through tons of moves and sees which moves hold or threaten strategic squares or pieces.
There are chess programs that work like human players work: establishing strategic goals and trying to work out ways to get to them. But none of them are very good.
Kasparov's strategy was to keep DB out of any position that would let it come up with a surprising (to a human) move through exhaustive analysis, which is why all the matches looked like Flanders in WWI. Also, Kasparov is probably the worst GM for a computer/human match... he plays very dramatic, emotional games and wins by humiliating and terrifying the opponent, which wouldn't work against a computer.
[user@localhost ~]$gcc -o hello hello.c
bash: gcc: command not found
[user@localhost ~]$which gcc
I don't know. Nevermind.
[user@localhost ~]$wtf?
I shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong...
That's not ad hominem.
Ad hominem is:
"Ayn Rand: Her extramarital affair is proof that no one, not even her, is too ugly to get laid at some point."
True, but ad hominem nonetheless.
The Constitution does not prohibit the statewide plebiscites for the President, but it does not guarantee them either (ie, I can't think of a Constitutional challenge if a state decided to appoint its electors in some manner besides a statewide vote).
Still, the electoral college seems like exactly the sort of thing the article was talking about: a tool to avoid some of the problems of a plurality vote.
No, actually, that was with schools taking old machines as donations, taking that copy of Windows, and using it on a new/different machine.
I'm curious. What defines a "new/different machine"? I've refurbished a lot of boxen for schools and nonprofits and it's not always clear when a refurbishment becomes a "different machine".
What if I take the old hard drive with the Windows installation and put it in a new motherboard. Same machine, or different machine?
they installed all kinds of stuff, the IE on that image never worked the same again.
I've had that problem with DSL and cable. The stupid client software they force on you installs its own IE. Worse yet, the cable software uninstalled IE6 to install IE5.5
Apparantly Windows 2000 doesn't like having its IE6 taken away from it, because *nothing* worked after that... Windows Scripting Host was fux0rzd, Explorer was flakey, etc... Oh well... it was one of the last straws that switched me to Linux (which takes the cable without any problems or software -- eat *that*, Comcast), so I suppose I should be grateful.
Using Mingw32 or lcc-win32 or bcc55 I can use the free (beer) windows API and write windows programs. Contrast that with Carbon or Cocoa (in their earlier days).
Though that story seems to be apocryphal, especially given that much earlier metallurgists than Archimedes already knew ways to test the purity of metal.