Web logs are amazingly convenient for people who don't have the skills to edit from the command line.
Woah, back up there a moment, cowboy. People like that really exist? I mean, how do they set up cron jobs and stuff?
Re:An indictment of the Python programming languag
on
The Python Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
Indeed, Python now has the dubious distinction of being the first language since FORTRAN 66 and SNOBOL to assign semantic significance to white space.
You mean, apart from the most popular functional programming language, Haskell 98? Which, by the way, is strongly typed but doesn't have variable declarations. And doesn't have any flow control either (obviously). You need to get yourself a new paradigm.
In terms of core Unix skills, I'd suggest there are three: vi (the One True Text Editor), Bash (the One True Shell), and Perl (the One True not-just-a-scripting-Language).
After that, the best advice has to be go with what interests you: you'll learn faster and be more productive. If you really enjoy networking, you'll want to find out how to use all the tools around that subject. Same goes for programming, webservers, security, e-mail...whatever floats your boat. It's all good, and you will pick up whatever else you need along the way.
Schools have no business selling access to their students' minds in this fashion.
It sucks that academic institutions are increasingly becoming commercialised - whether this manifests as corporate sponsorship or downgrading their teaching standards to attract more fee-paying students.
It's hard to see what other reason there would be to teach C#, beyond the chance of MS sponsorship. If purity of OO was required, Python or Ruby or Smalltalk 80 would demonstrate the principles admirably. If the need is to "give the kids skills they can use in the workplace", then Java or C++ would be a better choice.
Nope, in this case, it was just the possibility of corporate money that drove the decision.
The Real Holy Grail for Linux will be developed for Linux and in Linux.
Definitely. I am very wary of relying on corporate support to move Linux and its application portfolio forward, especially for end users. The last time something like this happened was the Internet itself, where a universal, open set of standards became the subject of "the browser wars" when the tech-corporations weighed in.
(From the BBC article) Broadband advocates and activists frustrated by the slow roll-out of wired options are looking to wi-fi to plug the gap, even though 802.11b suffers from reduced reliability in heavy rain.
This might make things tricky. As they say in Wales, "If you can't see the hills, it's raining. And if you can see the hills...it's about to rain."
I'd probably do a master's degree in the liberal arts at St John's in Anapolis, before buying a farm in Iceland and raising ponies, from which I'd launch my campaign for high political office.
I'd greatly recommend Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table", which is not so much about the elements of the table, so much as his life as a working chemist.
For a geek-level work, Jerry March's "Advanced Organic Chemistry" holds the same place in organic chemists' hearts as Bjarne Stroustrup's "C++ Programming Language" holds for programmers. It's a graduate level book, but one which is accessible to anyone with an interest in its subject.
You may perceive it as abuse, but it is also a chance to put across your side of the story.
The first thing to do is to route the incoming mail correctly. Many mail systems permit redirection of mail "by rule", including by content of the body of the message.
The first step is to do this is to ask all the people affected by this feedback campaign to forward these mails to a single mailbox, and then to analyse the messages for words they use. Typically, with campaign-type mails, people use very similar phrases to those used by the writer of the campaigning website. So, if the writer says, "Write to corporation X, and tell them to stop oppressing the natives of Peru", a shedload of people will write in and include the phrase, "Stop oppressing the natives of Peru!" in their message.
Set up a rule and reroute the messages to a "Unsolicited comment" file. Keep an eye on what gets through and what doesn't, and refine the approach.
The second thing to do is to take all these e-mail addresses, and create a mailing list for issues connected to your company. Get a note or two pumped out saying, "We at Megacorp X take your comments very seriously and are doing A and B about them. Please mail me, Mr Bigcheese if you have any other concerns you'd like to raise."
Set up a website yourself and engage these people in debate.
If you just ignore what is happening, it is likely that a number of the correspondents will take the time and trouble to trash your reputation in the market place. Much better to manage the feedback and reach out to its senders.
The sad thing about mental illness is that it has such a terrible effect on people's lives, not just because of the confusion caused by the disease, but by the fear and social ostracism that comes with it.
Through the combination of drug- and talking-therapy, it is usually pretty treatable and most people recover pretty fully over time. It's just that employers, family and friends want people to be "normal", in a way that they wouldn't if the ailment was physical, like a broken leg or cancer.
I'm hoping they do a Star Trek TNG thing with it - keep the original premise but update the plotline, characters and effects. Except, you know, no Wesley (though Wil rules).
Heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Saphire and Steel have been assigned.
There is a corridoor. And the corridor is time. It surrounds all things and it passes through all things. Sometimes time can break in and take things. And people. There are creatures from the very beginnings of time and the very ends of time. They have access to the corridor and are forever searching for tears in the fabric in order to gain access.
Echelon is an important device, a weapon as powerful as a nuclear or chemical bomb, which unless stopped by encryption could be a threat to the safety of the United Sates President, Congress and people.
Happily it is
keyword-list based.
At this point, I'd like to welcome those good people from Maryland to Slashdot...very mighty defenders of freedom..let's give it up for the NSA woowoowoo! Actually, you gotta admit, they are the world's super-geeks. I love those guys.
I use my Treo180 alot for checking my e-mail when I find myself waiting around, like before a meeting to start or when stuck in a traffic jam. Unfortunately, my boss does the same thing, and generally gets me to do stuff: it so sucks to be me.
Re:Nobody here is upset at the system crackers?
on
California Hax0red
·
· Score: 2
I'm with you on this. It's one thing dealing with security if you are a professional in it (which I was for a while), it's another if you are a much less well-paid admin, who are typically under a lot of pressure just getting the systems to work.
Security is really all about people management, whether thats procedures, training, communication. That's got to translate into system stuff at some point, sure, but to expect an admin to be able to manage all that and keep the metal running is really just dumping the problem on people who are hard-pressed anyway.
He makes the good point that mandatory "digital rights management" built into hardware would be an end to general purpose computing. The machines we have, which can currently do anything and can be built however we please, would have legal restrictions placed on their design and operation. It would be an offence to own a machine that did not have these restrictions, which places computers in the same league as guns or fighter aircraft. All because business dollars for political campaigns talk louder than the interests of regular people.
In games like go and shogi where the branching factor is much higher, long-term strategy counts much more, and brute-force is relatively useless, computers are nowhere near the best humans.
Certainly in Go, the best computers can't yet even beat a good club player. In situations where they can use a play-book (such as fusekis, openings), or on small boards (9x9 instead of 19x19), computers play pretty well. With the full game, they just suck. I think part of the problem is that it's hard to write down good mathematical rules to determine whether stones are live or dead, or what "good shape" looks like. So, whereas a human player will just intuitively put their stones in the right place, the computer blunders about and loses quickly.
It's nice to be superior to machines, at least in one field of endeavour.:)
I've got a Treo 180 and I have to say, I love it. It's loaded up with e-mail, AIM, a web browser, SMS and works well as a regular phone, with good reception and battery life. I find the keyboard and screen just the right size, its just as thin as a regular phone, and weighs no more than a regular PDA. I've added some favourite Palm apps with no compatability problems at all.
It has brought net connectivity to traffic jams, walks in the park, waiting for friends in bars...fish it out, press a button and you are good to go.
If I ever find my life resembling a bad Hollywood paranoia movie, I'm pretty confident I can hack the bad guys system with this thing and save the day in time for the closing credits.
C++ syntax makes perfect sense. There are no arbitrary relationships. As a multi-paradigm language it allows you to choose a subset of features for a given product, depending on what you need.
Bless you. As far as I am concerned, C++ is still the greatest open standard we have. There will always be "best of breed" languages which are stronger in their own field of affairs: its hard to beat Perl for text, or Haskell for maths. But as a resolutely general-purpose language, which is owned by nobody except its users, C++ remains the first and best of its kind.
I still don't think we have explored even half its potential: it'll be interesting to see what contribution a truly standard-compliant compiler makes to this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's in the pipe, five by five.
Web logs are amazingly convenient for people who don't have the skills to edit from the command line.
Woah, back up there a moment, cowboy. People like that really exist? I mean, how do they set up cron jobs and stuff?
You mean, apart from the most popular functional programming language, Haskell 98? Which, by the way, is strongly typed but doesn't have variable declarations. And doesn't have any flow control either (obviously). You need to get yourself a new paradigm.
In terms of core Unix skills, I'd suggest there are three: vi (the One True Text Editor), Bash (the One True Shell), and Perl (the One True not-just-a-scripting-Language).
After that, the best advice has to be go with what interests you: you'll learn faster and be more productive. If you really enjoy networking, you'll want to find out how to use all the tools around that subject. Same goes for programming, webservers, security, e-mail...whatever floats your boat. It's all good, and you will pick up whatever else you need along the way.
It sucks that academic institutions are increasingly becoming commercialised - whether this manifests as corporate sponsorship or downgrading their teaching standards to attract more fee-paying students.
It's hard to see what other reason there would be to teach C#, beyond the chance of MS sponsorship. If purity of OO was required, Python or Ruby or Smalltalk 80 would demonstrate the principles admirably. If the need is to "give the kids skills they can use in the workplace", then Java or C++ would be a better choice.
Nope, in this case, it was just the possibility of corporate money that drove the decision.
Definitely. I am very wary of relying on corporate support to move Linux and its application portfolio forward, especially for end users. The last time something like this happened was the Internet itself, where a universal, open set of standards became the subject of "the browser wars" when the tech-corporations weighed in.
This might make things tricky. As they say in Wales, "If you can't see the hills, it's raining. And if you can see the hills...it's about to rain."
I'd probably do a master's degree in the liberal arts at St John's in Anapolis, before buying a farm in Iceland and raising ponies, from which I'd launch my campaign for high political office.
Hell - I might just do those things anyway...
>> It's not like the Seatle Starbucks running out of coffee or something serious like that. Now, that would be real terror. ;)
Oh, great ... thankyou for that nightmare :)
Old hackers never die...they simply sell out to the corporations.
I'd greatly recommend Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table", which is not so much about the elements of the table, so much as his life as a working chemist.
For a geek-level work, Jerry March's "Advanced Organic Chemistry" holds the same place in organic chemists' hearts as Bjarne Stroustrup's "C++ Programming Language" holds for programmers. It's a graduate level book, but one which is accessible to anyone with an interest in its subject.
...and "Party On, Dudes"!
You may perceive it as abuse, but it is also a chance to put across your side of the story.
The first thing to do is to route the incoming mail correctly. Many mail systems permit redirection of mail "by rule", including by content of the body of the message.
The first step is to do this is to ask all the people affected by this feedback campaign to forward these mails to a single mailbox, and then to analyse the messages for words they use. Typically, with campaign-type mails, people use very similar phrases to those used by the writer of the campaigning website. So, if the writer says, "Write to corporation X, and tell them to stop oppressing the natives of Peru", a shedload of people will write in and include the phrase, "Stop oppressing the natives of Peru!" in their message.
Set up a rule and reroute the messages to a "Unsolicited comment" file. Keep an eye on what gets through and what doesn't, and refine the approach.
The second thing to do is to take all these e-mail addresses, and create a mailing list for issues connected to your company. Get a note or two pumped out saying, "We at Megacorp X take your comments very seriously and are doing A and B about them. Please mail me, Mr Bigcheese if you have any other concerns you'd like to raise." Set up a website yourself and engage these people in debate.
If you just ignore what is happening, it is likely that a number of the correspondents will take the time and trouble to trash your reputation in the market place. Much better to manage the feedback and reach out to its senders.
The sad thing about mental illness is that it has such a terrible effect on people's lives, not just because of the confusion caused by the disease, but by the fear and social ostracism that comes with it.
Through the combination of drug- and talking-therapy, it is usually pretty treatable and most people recover pretty fully over time. It's just that employers, family and friends want people to be "normal", in a way that they wouldn't if the ailment was physical, like a broken leg or cancer.
Although I'll happily diss the corps, I'd much rather see this than a new law or something. They're fighting technology with technology - fair enough.
I'm hoping they do a Star Trek TNG thing with it - keep the original premise but update the plotline, characters and effects. Except, you know, no Wesley (though Wil rules).
There is a corridoor. And the corridor is time. It surrounds all things and it passes through all things. Sometimes time can break in and take things. And people. There are creatures from the very beginnings of time and the very ends of time. They have access to the corridor and are forever searching for tears in the fabric in order to gain access.
Dang temporal script kiddies.
Echelon is an important device, a weapon as powerful as a nuclear or chemical bomb, which unless stopped by encryption could be a threat to the safety of the United Sates President, Congress and people. Happily it is keyword-list based. At this point, I'd like to welcome those good people from Maryland to Slashdot...very mighty defenders of freedom..let's give it up for the NSA woowoowoo! Actually, you gotta admit, they are the world's super-geeks. I love those guys.
Telnet and vi for a PDA. Dang, why didn't I think of that? World domination just got one step closer.
I use my Treo180 alot for checking my e-mail when I find myself waiting around, like before a meeting to start or when stuck in a traffic jam. Unfortunately, my boss does the same thing, and generally gets me to do stuff: it so sucks to be me.
I'm with you on this. It's one thing dealing with security if you are a professional in it (which I was for a while), it's another if you are a much less well-paid admin, who are typically under a lot of pressure just getting the systems to work.
Security is really all about people management, whether thats procedures, training, communication. That's got to translate into system stuff at some point, sure, but to expect an admin to be able to manage all that and keep the metal running is really just dumping the problem on people who are hard-pressed anyway.
He makes the good point that mandatory "digital rights management" built into hardware would be an end to general purpose computing. The machines we have, which can currently do anything and can be built however we please, would have legal restrictions placed on their design and operation. It would be an offence to own a machine that did not have these restrictions, which places computers in the same league as guns or fighter aircraft. All because business dollars for political campaigns talk louder than the interests of regular people.
Certainly in Go, the best computers can't yet even beat a good club player. In situations where they can use a play-book (such as fusekis, openings), or on small boards (9x9 instead of 19x19), computers play pretty well. With the full game, they just suck. I think part of the problem is that it's hard to write down good mathematical rules to determine whether stones are live or dead, or what "good shape" looks like. So, whereas a human player will just intuitively put their stones in the right place, the computer blunders about and loses quickly.
It's nice to be superior to machines, at least in one field of endeavour. :)
I've got a Treo 180 and I have to say, I love it. It's loaded up with e-mail, AIM, a web browser, SMS and works well as a regular phone, with good reception and battery life. I find the keyboard and screen just the right size, its just as thin as a regular phone, and weighs no more than a regular PDA. I've added some favourite Palm apps with no compatability problems at all.
It has brought net connectivity to traffic jams, walks in the park, waiting for friends in bars...fish it out, press a button and you are good to go.
If I ever find my life resembling a bad Hollywood paranoia movie, I'm pretty confident I can hack the bad guys system with this thing and save the day in time for the closing credits.
Bless you. As far as I am concerned, C++ is still the greatest open standard we have. There will always be "best of breed" languages which are stronger in their own field of affairs: its hard to beat Perl for text, or Haskell for maths. But as a resolutely general-purpose language, which is owned by nobody except its users, C++ remains the first and best of its kind.
I still don't think we have explored even half its potential: it'll be interesting to see what contribution a truly standard-compliant compiler makes to this.