Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it, pliz, 'research'.
I agree. Okasaki's book is wonderful. I learned so much from it and still pick it up from time to time and learn a bit more. Indeed, it is on my "frequently used" shelf of CS books.
Yup, I'm an academic - but I've also done real programming. Learning the functional programming mindset took some time, and learning to really program in functional languages (I like Haskell as it makes it hard to program non-functionally) took some serious work. I can pick up most algol family/imperative languages in a couple of days, at least enough to feel comfortable and be able to code real problems. Haskell took more than a month to master (maybe about a week to get the basics) but then it finally really clicked (and I suspect the click was probably audible, it was so sudden and revelatory). And my program analysis skills and my programming skills have been all the stronger since.
Okasaki's book not only helped me understand the functional programming model, it helped convince me that there was more to it than just fun languages.
I recommend this book highly for those who are interested in functional programming, or who are interested in learning more about data structures and algorithms on many levels.
I've been programming for a while now. Spent quite a bit of time coding in C, enough to wire the imperative model happily into my brain.
I learned and programmed in other languages as well - mostly imperative - including Fortran, various assemblers, smalltalk, algol, apl, C++, perl, python, java....
And then I learned Haskell. Haskell is one of the simplest languages around, and it can be great fun to use as well. If you want complicated, try C++ or java or perl.
If this looks interesting, it may be worth looking into John McPhee's piece (originally in the New Yorker) "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed". That was about a "slightly heavier than air craft" (SHAC?) with the external frame being a delta wing to provide more lift. A good read even if nothing came of it - kind of a shame too as it seemed (to this aerodynamics novice) to be a cool idea with a lot of potential.
I talked to someone at Sun about making NeWS open source in the mid nineties and was stonewalled about it pretty badly.
I'd love to see it become open source - if for no other reason than to give people who want to consider alternatives to X another data point to look at. After all it has much of what seems to be a problem for some of the folks who dislike X - stroked fonts to provide for anti-aliasing, a way to build a basic toolkit in the server - and a toolkit that is very flexible - and it does provide for networked windowing for those of us who like that. As a further temptation I think
that 3D extensions could be built into the postscript model and used quite efficiently.
I'd have thought that Sun might have learned something about opening source by now. NeWS, the rather radical window system that sun built in the late 80's probably failed mostly because it was kept proprietary (at least many who used it thought so).
When X was openly and freely available, it was tough for even the excellent technical solution NeWS was to compete.
<offtopic>
Does anyone know if there are implementations of NeWS available as open source now? Has anyone working on one of the "X Is Icky - I have a Better Way" window systems looked at NeWS for a model? Enquiring minds (however enfeebled) want to know.
</offtopic>
Here (don't let the rather garish site design put you off) is a site on banning car alarms in NYC. They have some
information (sadly the complete report is only available in PDF - "Bad Web Designer!") that fairly convincingly (to me anyway) makes the point that car alarms are pretty close to useless and cause other problems as well. Of course, it also turns out that the car alarm manufacturers are lobbying hard against any such move.
Oh, maybe not directly, but its still likely. A defense contractor will take on a big cost plus contract. Many of their employees will need clearances, but they'll decide after a bit that they need a package to build Wodgets. Wodgets, conveniently enough, dont do anything that requires a clearance so the spec will be shopped out to the lowest bidder. In Bangalore.
And in many cases I'd expect that 80 percent or so of the contracts could be outsourced with nothing sensitive ever revealed.
Quoting shamelessly from a Tom Paxton song :
You can eat dog food! You really ought to try it.
You can fricassee it! You can deep fry it!
Flip it on over, eat it any way.
Eat along with Rover - three times a day!
Clearly all of us are too stupid, drunk, evil or whatever to make reasonable choices for ourselves. So, they should (because they have been elected and are thereby the "voice of the people", imbued with superior wisdom, intelligence and wonderfulness) make them for all of us.
And of course we should ban the internet. Thats been on the table for years.
Just think of all the evil on the internet :
Support for terrorists
Child porn
Pirated music
Slashdot
Porn in general
Drug information
Information about elected officials that they don't control
And the list goes on and on and on. Don't forget the CDA, it comes back over and over in slightly different forms - all aimed at making sure you do the right thing.
Sunset provisions are a great thing. However, predictable timing on them is not so good as it gives the people in favor of the law advance warning that it might expire, so they can go around and find/manufacture reasons to keep it in effect.
Most especially, think of the effect of having a sunset law for various pieces of the bureaucracy. If Department of Redundancy Department knows that their funding/enabling legislation will expire in the next year, they would then take all their time to find reasons why they are indispensable and ever so valuable. Veritable bulwark of democracy. , they are (or so you'd believe if you listened to them).
I don't quite know how it should work, but I'd propose having a "Law Lottery". Every year 20 percent of the laws would be picked at random and reviewed (really random!). This means laws would probably be reviewed relatively quickly on average. If the legislature did not vote to retain the law within one month it would be tossed out. The law would need at least a 3/4 positive vote of the legislature (both houses in the case of bicamerality) to remain in place (but no executive approval). A law could continue on an "emergency" basis for one year with a 2/3 majority but would then expire completely. The short time frame is to make it tougher to plan/fund campaigns of special interests to support it.
If nothing else it would keep our idiot bastard legislators busy enough so they'd not have as much time to meddle in everything else.
Sadly, it would not work. Someone would rig the lottery. The well funded special interests would pay well to have instant notification of a review and would have lobbyists ready to jump in at a moments notice where the citizens would probably never get notified so would not have an opportunity to speak. (I know, what else is new.)
Legislatures would pass hundreds of junk laws just to reduce the probability that real laws would be picked.
I predict that if it comes to the point where we pay for email that personal email will be charged at something like $0.50 (fifty cents) per email (or more) and that organizations like AOL and MSN and Yahoo will be selling bulk email to companies at $0.01(one cent) per pop and we will hear endlessly about how they have to have the bulk email in order to support our personal email.
This article is really just a piece of propaganda aimed at supporting the Moon/Mars (M&M) drive put forward by the current administration. It dismisses the notion of supporting the Hubble because of the risk involved and only really suggests a private foundation as a straw man.
I think the important part of the thing is in the next to last paragraph where he says "a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there." And he implies it is only ten years off - though putting a permanent presence on the moon is probably 10 years off at best and expanding that to a good astronomical telescope would probably stretch another 10 or 20 years. If it even goes through and is not abandoned after the election.
(Any bets on Republican support for such an endeavor if a Democratic president is supporting it?)
Oddly enough, I can't recall having seen anything in the M&M proposals saying anything about putting a telescope on the moon (though it is an option that I've heard astronomers favor).
Before the Do Not Call list I got phone calls at all hours from telemarketers. Dinner time not excluded. (They at least had the sense to not call in the middle of the night.)
Should I then keep my phone turned off all the time?
I pay for the phone service for my own reasons and purposes. I do not pay for it for someone else to use to sell me something.
You say: "I don't recall ad-free telephones being some sort of fundamental human right."
I don't recall telemarketing being a fundamental human right either and for you to imply that telemarketers have more right to use my phone line than I have to say they should not seems to me shortsighted, ignorant and generally pretty damn stupid. Come to think of it you are probably an MBA. And what kind of twisted logic allows you to claim that their right to profit somehow trumps my right to privacy?
Tell you what. Post your phone number here. I have some used books I'd like to sell. Be glad to call you about them.
</rant>
Sorry for the rant, but I feel so much better now.
Slow SCO at McDonalds
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The last time I got something at a McDonalds their computers were running very, very slowly. I asked how frequently this occurs and the counter person said it was a recurrent problem - a couple of days a week their system gets really really flakey for a couple hours then gets better for no apparent reason.
Undoubtedly this is the intellectual property that SCO put into Unix.
I much prefer LaTeX and Gnuplot myself. Faster, produces good looking output, handles bibliographies simply and easily and lots of conferences/journals have style definitions so all the papers can look about the same.
Best of all its EASY to author. (Well, once you've done one anyway.)
However, I'm finding more and more places that only want stuff in MS Word format.
And in my university everything, and I mean everything, is in MS Word format. No other format is allowed. Not PDF, not PS, not even RTF in many cases. And sure as hell no text, sgml/xml/html or TeX. A while back I got a list of people, email, phone numbers etc that the department circulated. Not in csv format which would be the most sensible. Not in XML which would have been flexible and useful. Not in Excel format which could have been useful. In Word format. Completely useless.
And the CS department teaches computer literacy. Which translates to "Demonstrate that you can use MS Office".
I've found that an effective technique to keep meetings under an hour is to schedule them right. Scheduling a meeting for 4pm doesn't work as people don't seem to mind sticking around late. But schedule a meeting for 11am and everyone wants to get out to lunch. Works like a charm.
Is the internet telescope (also here) observing any DOS related activity? I've googled for information and not found anything that displays current (updated on the order of minutes/hours rather than days) data.
Out of curiousity I'm compelled to ask just what in Microsoft's business model requires their website to stay up. This certainly won't interfere with their sales of software through OEM's, nor with their sales of Office and the like which I don't think you can even buy on their website.
I can see that it might cut into the public perception of MS as a company - but is their website really a major factor in their business?
Campus bookstores are only rarely about selling books. They rent them to students (it looks like a sale followed by a buy back) and generally make money off both ends of the transaction.
But the big profit item in bookstores is almost always sweatshirts and t-shirts and hats and all that junk.
Probably they'll give you 10,000 shares of SCO stock and tell you it will be worth $250K when they win their lawsuit against IBM and take over the world. Er, unix.
... is that everyone complains about how big it is.
If you look at the FAQ they note (and I quote) : "The two-page Schubert song on our web site takes up 223K in its uncompressed form, but compresses to only 8K using WinZip. This is even smaller than the MIDI representation, which is 9K, and the XML contains much more data about the music."
Binary formats are nice for speed, but a serious pain to use/document/extend. XML is far easier to extend, there is a growing and powerful toolset available to deal with XML files in most languages and on most systems, and DTD's/XSchema tend to be fairly carefully thought out and documented.
Given a choice I'll take the XML format pretty much any time - but then too I can look back and tell you just how much fun I've had coping with binary formatted files (especially those that are un- or under- documented). (No, really, often it has been fun. OK, so I may have a seriously twisted notion of fun, and the fun has often been mixed with serious frustration and pain.)
Slashdot Mirror
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it, pliz, 'research'.
Shamelessly researched from a Tom Lehrer song.
Yup, I'm an academic - but I've also done real programming. Learning the functional programming mindset took some time, and learning to really program in functional languages (I like Haskell as it makes it hard to program non-functionally) took some serious work. I can pick up most algol family/imperative languages in a couple of days, at least enough to feel comfortable and be able to code real problems. Haskell took more than a month to master (maybe about a week to get the basics) but then it finally really clicked (and I suspect the click was probably audible, it was so sudden and revelatory). And my program analysis skills and my programming skills have been all the stronger since.
Okasaki's book not only helped me understand the functional programming model, it helped convince me that there was more to it than just fun languages.
I recommend this book highly for those who are interested in functional programming, or who are interested in learning more about data structures and algorithms on many levels.
I've been programming for a while now. Spent quite a bit of time coding in C, enough to wire the imperative model happily into my brain. I learned and programmed in other languages as well - mostly imperative - including Fortran, various assemblers, smalltalk, algol, apl, C++, perl, python, java ....
And then I learned Haskell. Haskell is one of the simplest languages around, and it can be great fun to use as well. If you want complicated, try C++ or java or perl.
If this looks interesting, it may be worth looking into John McPhee's piece (originally in the New Yorker) "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed". That was about a "slightly heavier than air craft" (SHAC?) with the external frame being a delta wing to provide more lift. A good read even if nothing came of it - kind of a shame too as it seemed (to this aerodynamics novice) to be a cool idea with a lot of potential.
I'd love to see it become open source - if for no other reason than to give people who want to consider alternatives to X another data point to look at. After all it has much of what seems to be a problem for some of the folks who dislike X - stroked fonts to provide for anti-aliasing, a way to build a basic toolkit in the server - and a toolkit that is very flexible - and it does provide for networked windowing for those of us who like that. As a further temptation I think that 3D extensions could be built into the postscript model and used quite efficiently.
<offtopic>
Does anyone know if there are implementations of NeWS available as open source now? Has anyone working on one of the "X Is Icky - I have a Better Way" window systems looked at NeWS for a model? Enquiring minds (however enfeebled) want to know.
</offtopic>
Here (don't let the rather garish site design put you off) is a site on banning car alarms in NYC. They have some information (sadly the complete report is only available in PDF - "Bad Web Designer!") that fairly convincingly (to me anyway) makes the point that car alarms are pretty close to useless and cause other problems as well. Of course, it also turns out that the car alarm manufacturers are lobbying hard against any such move.
Oh, maybe not directly, but its still likely. A defense contractor will take on a big cost plus contract. Many of their employees will need clearances, but they'll decide after a bit that they need a package to build Wodgets. Wodgets, conveniently enough, dont do anything that requires a clearance so the spec will be shopped out to the lowest bidder. In Bangalore.
And in many cases I'd expect that 80 percent or so of the contracts could be outsourced with nothing sensitive ever revealed.
Quoting shamelessly from a Tom Paxton song :
You can eat dog food! You really ought to try it.
You can fricassee it! You can deep fry it!
Flip it on over, eat it any way.
Eat along with Rover - three times a day!
They're doing it all for your own good.
Clearly all of us are too stupid, drunk, evil or whatever to make reasonable choices for ourselves. So, they should (because they have been elected and are thereby the "voice of the people", imbued with superior wisdom, intelligence and wonderfulness) make them for all of us.
And of course we should ban the internet. Thats been on the table for years.
Just think of all the evil on the internet :
Support for terrorists
Child porn
Pirated music
Slashdot
Porn in general
Drug information
Information about elected officials that they don't control
And the list goes on and on and on. Don't forget the CDA, it comes back over and over in slightly different forms - all aimed at making sure you do the right thing.
Most especially, think of the effect of having a sunset law for various pieces of the bureaucracy. If Department of Redundancy Department knows that their funding/enabling legislation will expire in the next year, they would then take all their time to find reasons why they are indispensable and ever so valuable. Veritable bulwark of democracy. , they are (or so you'd believe if you listened to them).
I don't quite know how it should work, but I'd propose having a "Law Lottery". Every year 20 percent of the laws would be picked at random and reviewed (really random!). This means laws would probably be reviewed relatively quickly on average. If the legislature did not vote to retain the law within one month it would be tossed out. The law would need at least a 3/4 positive vote of the legislature (both houses in the case of bicamerality) to remain in place (but no executive approval). A law could continue on an "emergency" basis for one year with a 2/3 majority but would then expire completely. The short time frame is to make it tougher to plan/fund campaigns of special interests to support it.
If nothing else it would keep our idiot bastard legislators busy enough so they'd not have as much time to meddle in everything else.
Sadly, it would not work. Someone would rig the lottery. The well funded special interests would pay well to have instant notification of a review and would have lobbyists ready to jump in at a moments notice where the citizens would probably never get notified so would not have an opportunity to speak. (I know, what else is new.) Legislatures would pass hundreds of junk laws just to reduce the probability that real laws would be picked.
But still, its a fun idea.
I predict that if it comes to the point where we pay for email that personal email will be charged at something like $0.50 (fifty cents) per email (or more) and that organizations like AOL and MSN and Yahoo will be selling bulk email to companies at $0.01(one cent) per pop and we will hear endlessly about how they have to have the bulk email in order to support our personal email.
I think the important part of the thing is in the next to last paragraph where he says "a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there." And he implies it is only ten years off - though putting a permanent presence on the moon is probably 10 years off at best and expanding that to a good astronomical telescope would probably stretch another 10 or 20 years. If it even goes through and is not abandoned after the election. (Any bets on Republican support for such an endeavor if a Democratic president is supporting it?)
Oddly enough, I can't recall having seen anything in the M&M proposals saying anything about putting a telescope on the moon (though it is an option that I've heard astronomers favor).
You, sir, to put it simply, are a fool.
Before the Do Not Call list I got phone calls at all hours from telemarketers. Dinner time not excluded. (They at least had the sense to not call in the middle of the night.)
Should I then keep my phone turned off all the time?
I pay for the phone service for my own reasons and purposes. I do not pay for it for someone else to use to sell me something.
You say: "I don't recall ad-free telephones being some sort of fundamental human right."
I don't recall telemarketing being a fundamental human right either and for you to imply that telemarketers have more right to use my phone line than I have to say they should not seems to me shortsighted, ignorant and generally pretty damn stupid. Come to think of it you are probably an MBA. And what kind of twisted logic allows you to claim that their right to profit somehow trumps my right to privacy?
Tell you what. Post your phone number here. I have some used books I'd like to sell. Be glad to call you about them.
</rant>
Sorry for the rant, but I feel so much better now.
Undoubtedly this is the intellectual property that SCO put into Unix.
Best of all its EASY to author. (Well, once you've done one anyway.)
However, I'm finding more and more places that only want stuff in MS Word format. And in my university everything, and I mean everything, is in MS Word format. No other format is allowed. Not PDF, not PS, not even RTF in many cases. And sure as hell no text, sgml/xml/html or TeX. A while back I got a list of people, email, phone numbers etc that the department circulated. Not in csv format which would be the most sensible. Not in XML which would have been flexible and useful. Not in Excel format which could have been useful. In Word format. Completely useless.
And the CS department teaches computer literacy. Which translates to "Demonstrate that you can use MS Office".
I've found that an effective technique to keep meetings under an hour is to schedule them right. Scheduling a meeting for 4pm doesn't work as people don't seem to mind sticking around late. But schedule a meeting for 11am and everyone wants to get out to lunch. Works like a charm.
I've seen a couple places with some information, but not anything with any good amount of detail.
I'd rather like to encourage my students to read about it.
I was wondering the same thing and googled for information. Here's one article on the subject that gave me some good info.
Is the internet telescope (also here) observing any DOS related activity? I've googled for information and not found anything that displays current (updated on the order of minutes/hours rather than days) data.
I can see that it might cut into the public perception of MS as a company - but is their website really a major factor in their business?
But the big profit item in bookstores is almost always sweatshirts and t-shirts and hats and all that junk.
Probably they'll give you 10,000 shares of SCO stock and tell you it will be worth $250K when they win their lawsuit against IBM and take over the world. Er, unix.
If you look at the FAQ they note (and I quote) :
"The two-page Schubert song on our web site takes up 223K in its uncompressed form, but compresses to only 8K using WinZip. This is even smaller than the MIDI representation, which is 9K, and the XML contains much more data about the music."
Binary formats are nice for speed, but a serious pain to use/document/extend. XML is far easier to extend, there is a growing and powerful toolset available to deal with XML files in most languages and on most systems, and DTD's/XSchema tend to be fairly carefully thought out and documented.
Given a choice I'll take the XML format pretty much any time - but then too I can look back and tell you just how much fun I've had coping with binary formatted files (especially those that are un- or under- documented). (No, really, often it has been fun. OK, so I may have a seriously twisted notion of fun, and the fun has often been mixed with serious frustration and pain.)
There's more than one way
In Perl, to do it. But all
Are unreadable.