If you are comparing AOL to the internet and modern ISPs, then you are completely correct. The thing with AOL is that it was around *before* the internet and those other ISPs. AOL came around in the age of the BBS.
AOL was actually a latecomer to the scene. BBSing was popular for about 10 years before AOL. And there were a number of commercial consumer dialup information/chat/email services similar to AOL that started around then. CompuServe and The Source were both about 10 or 11 years older than AOL. Another was Prodigy, about 4 years older than AOL. The Internet predated AOL by about 7 years (or many more years than that, depending on exactly what you want to count). But the Internet was not widely available to the general public until around 1989, which is contemporaneous with AOL. AOL didn't get chat rooms and such until sometime in the 1990s, though.
What this demonstrates is that the cost of isolating programs from each other by using separate memory spaces has a much higher cost than commonly understood. It either has a ~10%-20% overhead and is insecure by design (kernel map includes calling process memory space) -or- it is far slower than even that, but safe (kernel memory is completely separate from process). Computers are already faster than many users need... maybe it's finally time for an OS with a single memory space, like JavaOS or jxos, or even Singularity.
The Lisp Machine (ca. 1977-1999) was a single memory space, and the hardware validated that memory references were to proper objects (including functions); each physical word included several bits of type tag. This approach eliminates bugs such as casting, bad pointers, array bounds, etc. There was no privilge separation or application isolation of any kind. But it is easy to imagine adding a couple more bits to each word to implement that.
We called it the "Lisp" machine, but a better name would have been the "Object Machine", because that's the main feature of Lisp that it was implementing. (The machine had many other cool features I could go on about, but enforcing the object model and type checking in the hardware was really the biggest thing. This went along with the hardware assist for garbage collection, btw.)
Those claims sound like a system that we had on the ARPANET in the late 1970s...if you want to make SMTP a required part of the mix, well, we updated the software when SMTP was invented. I think all the elements in the claim were in the old system I'm thinking of.
On a several hundred mile road trip with my niece, a high school junior who hadn't ever been exposed to computer programming before, we decided to kill some time by learning on the laptop as the cows and outlet malls rolled by. I fired up Emacs for use as the IDE to Common Lisp. She was editing fine within minutes, and before we got home she was writing her own functions. Did some arithmetic and logic stuff, hashtable usage, strings, symbols, and the result was the beginnings of something like the ANIMAL game.
She found the entire experience to be "Oh Cool!" just plenty.
She can't wait to tell her boyfriend that she did some Lisp programming - he's into computers!
I submit that the "best language" depends on the student and on the experience that the teacher can give them, and that you don't even need any graphical interfaces to excite sharp young minds.
While I feel that it would be nice to get a well-rounded introduction to the programming world, I also feel that I am going to come out of school not having the expertise required in a single language to land a good job. After reading the syllabi, all the higher level classes appear to teach concepts rather than work to develop advanced techniques in a specific language. Which method of teaching is going to better provide me with the experience I need, as well as the experience an employer wants to see in a college graduate?"
Learning to program is not about specific languages - it's about those concepts. You're supposed to be able to figure out how to program in any given language all by yourself, having learned the concepts. The instruction they are giving you in particular languages is just to reinforce the concepts, and a little practice in using them.
If you can't figure out how to master the programming languages all by yourself, then you should not attempt a career as a computer programmer.
If you want to work as some low-level "coder" drone, probably using one language, then you don't need anything more than a high school education. Rather than going to college, there are trade schools that can quickly certify you for that kind of work. A few courses at a community college could also fulfill that. Not sure I'd call it a "career", and you're not going to advance very much. I think there is still some demand for such people; not sure how much. We don't hire people like that at my company or any of the companies I've personally worked for. I did see some at one shop where I consulted about 10 years ago, though. They were using Java.
STRESS. The confusion caused when ones mind overrides the body's natural desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole that desperately needs it.
Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page.
In the field of computers, technology also forgets things and loses major winning things, and goes off on weird stupid side-trips.
The GUIs in browsers, and their performance, is not suitable for a wide class of applications. I am familar with Google apps and am not especially impressed by them.
Distributed storage and other web services are nice, but should not necessarily be tied to a conventional browser.
...Or they didn't move as much. I don't think this was carried around in the way that a laptop was but rather this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop, similar to the mini-PCs today like the Mac Mini.
Why do people wildly speculate like this when it comes to vintage computing? The people from back then are still around, and you can just ask them.
Yes, we did carry these around like a laptop. Not from room to room during the day, but commuting between home and office and to other offices/sites.
Yes, the timing of this scoop is suspicious. NASA had already recovered the tapes but was still processing them using advanced digital manipulation techniques (in partnership with ILM and cinematographer Daniel Mindel). This "reboot" to be titled simply "Moon Landing" and released as a summer blockbuster on July 20, 2009.
In this improved version, new fast-paced drama will be introduced and secret relationships revealed, Mission Control looks like the Apple Store, and of course there will be EVEN MORE lens flare...
http://www.clavius.org/lensflare.html
The anonymous reader is wrong. A supernova would be accompanied by a large amount of shockwaves through the star, and a large amount of pressure waves. There would be no sound, in the sense that there would be no neurological interpretations of these phenomena, but they would still happen.
So if a star explodes in the constellation and there's no women on Slashdot to hear about it, is the original poster still wrong?
I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
I suggest a sidebar/RSS that tracks the secret relationship of Cmdr Taco and Jeff to spice things up, and making the front page look like the Apple Store. And use some FLASH to shake the text around. And add lens flare.
This will be a reboot of Futurama with a new cast, and more action (and sex) to excite a younger more modern audience. The Planet Express spaceship's bridge will look like the Apple Store, Leela will be having a secret affair with Bender. It will be shot in realistic shakey-cam. And there will be lots of lens flare...
I could dual-boot Ubuntu, or carry around a Linux-on-a-stick. Or I could embed the computer in my skull. For many reasons, none of these solutions is ideal.
The ideal solution is to combine those ideas: embed Linux-on-a-stick in your skull. Those "friends" will no longer approach you.
Lending your laptop once in a while is OK, specially when you are truly helping someone who's laptop got infected by a virus or some other problem.
If they tell you you are being rude after that, it means they don't know what 'Friendship' means.
Friendship means never having to say, "WTF? You got viruses all over your laptop and now you want to give them to me?"
Tech oriented? Why don't you come up with a solution then? This is not a hard problem to solve.
in my art-oriented institution"
Aaaaaaaaah, OK. I see where you're coming from.
The most obvious solution I can think of (assuming you're on XP/Vista) is for you to set up a second user and Fast user switch whenever someone else wants to use your laptop.
Assuming your classmate's technical competence is below yours, that should be adequate security measures.
I find it ironic that someone would get snarky and denigrate the technical competence of an art student by suggesting that the security of their Windows computer is primarily related to the skill of the guest users. The main security threat does not come from a malicous guest who may or may not know anything about cracking computers. The threat comes from pre-packaged intrusion software, in the form of easy-to-click cracking tools, or more likely from viruses introduced from thumb drives and web sites.
A computer expert would know better than to propogate the myth that computers are breached by teh haxx0rs with elit3 knowledge. Those kind of exploits are available to anyone who can point and click. And the most likely threat is not from your friend in the art class, it's from the viruses he's got on that thumb drive he wants to stick in your computer.
The reason to provide a guest account is to keep someone from accidently deleting your files, messing up your settings, accessing email and the web with your credentials or accidently replacing them, and of course to keep them from reading your personal files.
I let my friends use a guest account on my Mac for the same reasons, even though the exploit and virus factor there is practically nil.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would a slave to a junk dealer need a protocol/translator droid?
I don't know. Why does God need a starship?
These things keep me awake at night.
If you are comparing AOL to the internet and modern ISPs, then you are completely correct. The thing with AOL is that it was around *before* the internet and those other ISPs. AOL came around in the age of the BBS.
AOL was actually a latecomer to the scene. BBSing was popular for about 10 years before AOL. And there were a number of commercial consumer dialup information/chat/email services similar to AOL that started around then. CompuServe and The Source were both about 10 or 11 years older than AOL. Another was Prodigy, about 4 years older than AOL. The Internet predated AOL by about 7 years (or many more years than that, depending on exactly what you want to count). But the Internet was not widely available to the general public until around 1989, which is contemporaneous with AOL. AOL didn't get chat rooms and such until sometime in the 1990s, though.
What this demonstrates is that the cost of isolating programs from each other by using separate memory spaces has a much higher cost than commonly understood. It either has a ~10%-20% overhead and is insecure by design (kernel map includes calling process memory space) -or- it is far slower than even that, but safe (kernel memory is completely separate from process). Computers are already faster than many users need... maybe it's finally time for an OS with a single memory space, like JavaOS or jxos, or even Singularity.
The Lisp Machine (ca. 1977-1999) was a single memory space, and the hardware validated that memory references were to proper objects (including functions); each physical word included several bits of type tag. This approach eliminates bugs such as casting, bad pointers, array bounds, etc. There was no privilge separation or application isolation of any kind. But it is easy to imagine adding a couple more bits to each word to implement that.
We called it the "Lisp" machine, but a better name would have been the "Object Machine", because that's the main feature of Lisp that it was implementing. (The machine had many other cool features I could go on about, but enforcing the object model and type checking in the hardware was really the biggest thing. This went along with the hardware assist for garbage collection, btw.)
Those claims sound like a system that we had on the ARPANET in the late 1970s...if you want to make SMTP a required part of the mix, well, we updated the software when SMTP was invented. I think all the elements in the claim were in the old system I'm thinking of.
These are not normal private residences, but are Government housing where you are sent to live ("sin bins"). Also, the story is from October of 2005.
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=2115
There is NO need for a cell phone in a K-12 classroom. Especially when you consider that every classroom HAS a phone in it! NONE!
No classrooms in the K-12 public schools in all the states I've visited frequently in the last year have a phone in them. What are you referring to?
On a several hundred mile road trip with my niece, a high school junior who hadn't ever been exposed to computer programming before, we decided to kill some time by learning on the laptop as the cows and outlet malls rolled by. I fired up Emacs for use as the IDE to Common Lisp. She was editing fine within minutes, and before we got home she was writing her own functions. Did some arithmetic and logic stuff, hashtable usage, strings, symbols, and the result was the beginnings of something like the ANIMAL game.
She found the entire experience to be "Oh Cool!" just plenty.
She can't wait to tell her boyfriend that she did some Lisp programming - he's into computers!
I submit that the "best language" depends on the student and on the experience that the teacher can give them, and that you don't even need any graphical interfaces to excite sharp young minds.
Be careful what you say,
or they'll take you
to room 404
While I feel that it would be nice to get a well-rounded introduction to the programming world, I also feel that I am going to come out of school not having the expertise required in a single language to land a good job. After reading the syllabi, all the higher level classes appear to teach concepts rather than work to develop advanced techniques in a specific language. Which method of teaching is going to better provide me with the experience I need, as well as the experience an employer wants to see in a college graduate?"
Learning to program is not about specific languages - it's about those concepts. You're supposed to be able to figure out how to program in any given language all by yourself, having learned the concepts. The instruction they are giving you in particular languages is just to reinforce the concepts, and a little practice in using them.
If you can't figure out how to master the programming languages all by yourself, then you should not attempt a career as a computer programmer.
If you want to work as some low-level "coder" drone, probably using one language, then you don't need anything more than a high school education. Rather than going to college, there are trade schools that can quickly certify you for that kind of work. A few courses at a community college could also fulfill that. Not sure I'd call it a "career", and you're not going to advance very much. I think there is still some demand for such people; not sure how much. We don't hire people like that at my company or any of the companies I've personally worked for. I did see some at one shop where I consulted about 10 years ago, though. They were using Java.
STRESS. The confusion caused when ones mind overrides the body's natural desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole that desperately needs it.
The web is not the OS. The web is...the web.
The web isn't what it used to be.
Technology grows, changes, advances - this is especially true in IT. If you go back a dozen years or so there was no way in hell you'd be able to run a word processor through a web page.
In the field of computers, technology also forgets things and loses major winning things, and goes off on weird stupid side-trips.
The GUIs in browsers, and their performance, is not suitable for a wide class of applications. I am familar with Google apps and am not especially impressed by them.
Distributed storage and other web services are nice, but should not necessarily be tied to a conventional browser.
...Or they didn't move as much. I don't think this was carried around in the way that a laptop was but rather this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop, similar to the mini-PCs today like the Mac Mini.
Why do people wildly speculate like this when it comes to vintage computing? The people from back then are still around, and you can just ask them.
Yes, we did carry these around like a laptop. Not from room to room during the day, but commuting between home and office and to other offices/sites.
Yes, the timing of this scoop is suspicious. NASA had already recovered the tapes but was still processing them using advanced digital manipulation techniques (in partnership with ILM and cinematographer Daniel Mindel). This "reboot" to be titled simply "Moon Landing" and released as a summer blockbuster on July 20, 2009. In this improved version, new fast-paced drama will be introduced and secret relationships revealed, Mission Control looks like the Apple Store, and of course there will be EVEN MORE lens flare...
http://www.clavius.org/lensflare.html
The anonymous reader is wrong. A supernova would be accompanied by a large amount of shockwaves through the star, and a large amount of pressure waves. There would be no sound, in the sense that there would be no neurological interpretations of these phenomena, but they would still happen.
So if a star explodes in the constellation and there's no women on Slashdot to hear about it, is the original poster still wrong?
I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
I suggest a sidebar/RSS that tracks the secret relationship of Cmdr Taco and Jeff to spice things up, and making the front page look like the Apple Store. And use some FLASH to shake the text around. And add lens flare.
Seth McFarlane is a fucking hack who talks just to hear the sound of his own voice.
Actually, I believe it's been established that he is an alien who likes to suck your goobrain, and that's just how they roll.
Why not stick a shield in front of the engine
Because the birds will learn to modulate their harmonics and penetrate the shields. Resistance is a futile (and also a drag).
This will be a reboot of Futurama with a new cast, and more action (and sex) to excite a younger more modern audience. The Planet Express spaceship's bridge will look like the Apple Store, Leela will be having a secret affair with Bender. It will be shot in realistic shakey-cam. And there will be lots of lens flare...
Cox
Vulcan is only three minutes from earth, we know that...
I for one welcome our tentacled video-induced braingoo slurping overlords...
The ideal solution is to combine those ideas: embed Linux-on-a-stick in your skull. Those "friends" will no longer approach you.
Lending your laptop once in a while is OK, specially when you are truly helping someone who's laptop got infected by a virus or some other problem.
If they tell you you are being rude after that, it means they don't know what 'Friendship' means.
Friendship means never having to say, "WTF? You got viruses all over your laptop and now you want to give them to me?"
Basically make it visibly and notably hard for them to use. Either use a Linux desktop
I for one welcome our obscure Linux overlords...
Tech oriented? Why don't you come up with a solution then? This is not a hard problem to solve.
Aaaaaaaaah, OK. I see where you're coming from.
The most obvious solution I can think of (assuming you're on XP/Vista) is for you to set up a second user and Fast user switch whenever someone else wants to use your laptop.
Assuming your classmate's technical competence is below yours, that should be adequate security measures.
I find it ironic that someone would get snarky and denigrate the technical competence of an art student by suggesting that the security of their Windows computer is primarily related to the skill of the guest users. The main security threat does not come from a malicous guest who may or may not know anything about cracking computers. The threat comes from pre-packaged intrusion software, in the form of easy-to-click cracking tools, or more likely from viruses introduced from thumb drives and web sites.
A computer expert would know better than to propogate the myth that computers are breached by teh haxx0rs with elit3 knowledge. Those kind of exploits are available to anyone who can point and click. And the most likely threat is not from your friend in the art class, it's from the viruses he's got on that thumb drive he wants to stick in your computer.
The reason to provide a guest account is to keep someone from accidently deleting your files, messing up your settings, accessing email and the web with your credentials or accidently replacing them, and of course to keep them from reading your personal files.
I let my friends use a guest account on my Mac for the same reasons, even though the exploit and virus factor there is practically nil.