I see it's time to start the letter-to-Congress process...
Fuck that. We've gone through this before with every other anti-technology bill; SSSCA, DMCA, clipper, carnivore, software patents.
It's time to implement technology to make these stupid laws obsolete, since they're just going to keep coming. Why should we let governments decide how we use our computers, when we could use anonymous IP and data havens.
At least for organizing mail, procmail is the best way to go. It uses egrep-compatible regular expressions, scoring, and comes with header reformatting utilities, plus it integrates nicely with the unix environment.
Once you have procmail set up, it would be trivial to extract names and addresses into a MySQL database and use it from there.
Some argue procmail syntax is difficult to understand, but so do all beautiful, powerful languages appear to the benighted.:)
real-time design techniques always seem to improve system performance.
Making kernel threads preemptible by user processes requires additional management overhead. This overhead translates into less cpu time for processes overall, and hence less throughput. So while high-priority user processes are more responsive with the patch, fewer processes will run to completion in a given amount of time (less throughput).
To instantiate this, you might notice that your mp3s get interrupted sometimes when heavy kernel processes, like a lot of disk reads, are going on. This patch would prevent the kernel from switching out your mp3 player as readily, leading to a smoother desktop experience. However the overhead of managing this new feature means that a heavily-used server will not service a given amount of jobs as quickly.
So if responsiveness is important (desktop) apply the patch. If your apps just need raw cycles (server) the patch either won't have much effect or could slow things down.
"According to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems.
NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navy's chief information officer calls for all new applications to run under NT.
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown.
"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."
The open source debate is about keeping secrets. Completed (written) software is often locked by its programmer, hiding the underlying code from its user.
Not so sure about this... I think we've all met programmers whose binaries were more readable than their source.
"Open Source Programmers" is a bit of a misnomer. As has been pointed out, many programmers who contribute to free/Open source software do not work on it fulltime, and have primary jobs that either pay them through their service as a programmer or through licensure of commercial software.
While the FSF believes all software should be free of restrictions and government should contribute money towards it, those are not the only economic models that have been suggested. Personally, I believe having unrestricted access to software is increasingly important, comparable in ways to other generic services: telephone, water, etc. It seems reasonable that governments would consider switching to an unrestricted, open, and generic form of software.
(Does anyone else feel that government should also provide free beer?;)
I suspect these little quarrels between ICANN, South Africa, and other groups are harbingers of major DNS conflicts in the future. For example, what if Microsoft, instead of South Africa, demanded a particular TLD?
It's not a prospect anyone is looking forward to, but I think we should accept the fact that our system of TLDs and DNS hierarchy is going to fall apart. Our current system demands too high a level of political and economic consistency; eventually some large, politically powerful groups will break away and form their own system; or (perhaps more in line with current trends) the system will fall under the power of large corporations and people will break away and form their own roots.
So what needs to happen is the development of a system whereby multiple DNS roots can be easily used and DNS conflicts are resolved by the end-user rather than a commitee. It's unfortunate, but the Internet spans too many political and cultural boundaries for a "cathedral" model to be effective.
These claims are circumstantial, arising primarily from the slew of pro-MS memos among their publications, and the testimony ADTI submitted on Microsoft's behalf at the Dept. of Justice trial. To quote another source:
I have not found a specific link between Microsoft and ADTI... but Microsoft is known to be funding similar conservative organizations. See:
This group also claimed, during Congressional probes into tobacco company fraud, that cigarettes and tobacco products were not harmful to your health. From this
memo by a director of the World Health Organization:
"In addition to creating front groups and contributing funds to groups that have a mission broad enough to carry some of the tobacco industry's goals, the tobacco companies also use publications by allegedly independent think tanks, such as the Virginia-based Alexis De Tocqueville Institution. This group's 1994 report "Science, Economics, and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination" criticizes the US Environmental Protection Agency's risk assessment methods in 4 areas: environmental tobacco smoke, radon, pesticides, and hazardous cleanup. It dismisses in its first chapter the agency's risk assessment of environmental tobacco smoke, using arguments similar to the tobacco industry's "junk science" arguments described by Ong and Glantz. "
It seems Microsoft is making some strange bedfellows.
I have a different learning style than what the university wants me to have
Certainly its masochistic to expect students to do everything without assistance at the higher levels. Teacher: "Next week you will have to write an entire POSIX-compliant OS from scratch!" Most universities (mine at least) emphasized skill-type stuff at the lower levels and we're allowed to work together more at the higher levels.
There's something to be said for universities emphasizing working with others too. Its hard to work with existing code when you're used to writing everything yourself.
I'm much better now at solving things on my own from first principles,
Exactly.
Results are all that matter. Effort is for masochists.
The objective in introductory CS courses is to develop general problem-solving skills, not to memorize solutions to particular problems. Yes, the effort is important, because this is how general skills are acquired. Do you think the Fortran taught to CS grads 20 years ago learned is useful today? Probably not really, but the concepts of how to code are useful. The general problem solving skills are useful. And if someone is guiding you through the problem, you miss out on developing these problem solving skills.
IF I ask someone answer & how they got there -- and procede to incorporate that lesson into my skills & knowledge, I have learned that lesson.
The view this expresses on knowledge and scholarship is decidedly short-sighted. While all the coursework you encounter has been solved before, you miss out on many concepts and ideas by getting the solution from others rather than developing it on your own. Again, it is the general skills which will benefit you years down the road, not specific solutions gleaned from other people.
If they learn from each other
In Computer Science, much of the work revolves around problem-solving techniques, which cannot be learned second-hand. In an introductory CS course, the objective is to develop these general skills, not to memorize particular solutions. And you can't learn how to code by reading someone else's code, or even discussing a coding solution. You can't learn how to develop algorithms by looking over someone else's algorithm. By working with other people (which usually means some people guiding the others through things) you miss out on learning how to problem-solve.
And the real purpose of the CS degree is to endow you with these learning skills. Its not to teach you how an FFT works, or the syntax of C++, but the general skills and concepts by which you can learn things on your own. These are skills which can be applied time and time again, long after programming language X that you studied in college is dead. Students who collaborate frequently on projects often miss out on developing these skills.
So basically CS can't be approached like other disciplines - I can learn history from another history student, and I can learn approaches to a particular CS problem from another CS student, but I can only acquire problem solving skills by working by myself.
I'm a senior in Computer Science, graduating this term. When I was a freshman I was penalized for Academic Dishonesty, and I have to say it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I stood up and took responsibility in my classes, and developed self-discipline to do stuff myself.
too many students are lazy bastards
One might amend this to "CS students". The vast majority of incoming CS students have little or no experience programming and think CS is the means by which they can make big bucks being an expert on Microsoft Windows, administering a network, or coding HTML.
Realistically most of the people in those classes don't belong, and this is evidenced in the number of people who flunk out. However some learn to get by copying other people's work, barely passing the tests, etc. (Yes I was one) Most introductory computer science work is not incredibly complicated, and doesn't require any degree of collaboration. If you need to collaborate on low-level programs, you probably don't belong in CS. That is, if you lack the self-discipline to do elementary homework, you probably won't succeed as a programmer in industry.
I basically learned as a pre-CS student that the people who collaborated were the people who bombed their tests, because they usually only had an incomplete knowledge of what they were doing. Also once I asked a student who cheated a lot why he didn't bother to just learn the stuff and he said companies "teach" their employees what to do anyway, so why learn it in school. This attitude is bullshit, if you've ever interviewed for a job at Intel or Microsoft you'd know that yes they _do_ care what you know...:)
So lets face it: 8/10 times, group work is a waste of time. People try to hype it up in education, but three clueless people working together just breeds more confusion, unless they're people you work well with. I've put up with 4 years of working with randomly-appointed teams of students and the end result has usually been part of the team doing most of the work and the other student(s) not caring, or making feeble attempts to do stuff.
Learning isn't supposed to be fun, and while its cool, probably unavoidable to discuss stuff with people, you don't need to, and you'll probably learn more if you don't.
Yeah that's my favorite part.:)
Rei's voice is really weird in that part, however... it sounds like a man talking or something, not the regular Rei voice.
Mmmm.... Misato.
The second to last and third to last episodes are very good, provided you have seen the prior ones. The last episode essentially consists of flashing white lines and ends with the whole cast of characters applauding Shinji, sappy stuff and an unfortunate ending.
Evangelion does not employ the best animation, and indeed recycles animation sequences and music a lot. So why watch it? Hard to explain. If you've ever seen (and liked) Princess Mononoke you'll be similarly hard pressed to come up with an explanation.
But, the ending is no exception; there are good and bad episodes (the one with the volcano comes to mind) in Evangelion; I'd peruse the DivXs of the series before investing in DVDs.
As for dubbing in American voices, forget it. I'd wager most people (anime geeks at least) prefer subtitles. Btw, has anyone else noticed how the subtitles in the opening song are sometimes (about 50% of the time) in Japanese ?
PS Little Rei is really freaky.
Most tides are caused by the earth being attracted to the moon (The sun exerts some tides, but they are negligible). When the moon approaches the earth more closely in its orbit, and as the earth itself rotates, the distance between the two bodies changes and hence the land and especially the water rise or fall.
Thus, while tides are a side effect of planetary motion, the force of the tides itself arises from the mass and distance of the moon, and not from the moon's motion around the earth.
So harnessing the tides won't affect the earth's rotation, or the orbit of the moon. You may be confused with the "slingshot" technique, whereby spaceships are swung around a planet in order to bank off their natural rotation, which does indeed slow the rotation of the planet slightly.
Slashdot Mirror
> cat /tmp/mama | mail -s
t ml
Couldn't this be done more efficiently with the redirection operator instead of cat? Maybe this guy deserves a Useless use of Cat award:
http://laku19.adsl.netsonic.fi/era/unix/award.h
Fuck that. We've gone through this before with every other anti-technology bill; SSSCA, DMCA, clipper, carnivore, software patents.
It's time to implement technology to make these stupid laws obsolete, since they're just going to keep coming. Why should we let governments decide how we use our computers, when we could use anonymous IP and data havens.
Once you have procmail set up, it would be trivial to extract names and addresses into a MySQL database and use it from there.
Some argue procmail syntax is difficult to understand, but so do all beautiful, powerful languages appear to the benighted. :)
Making kernel threads preemptible by user processes requires additional management overhead. This overhead translates into less cpu time for processes overall, and hence less throughput. So while high-priority user processes are more responsive with the patch, fewer processes will run to completion in a given amount of time (less throughput).
To instantiate this, you might notice that your mp3s get interrupted sometimes when heavy kernel processes, like a lot of disk reads, are going on. This patch would prevent the kernel from switching out your mp3 player as readily, leading to a smoother desktop experience. However the overhead of managing this new feature means that a heavily-used server will not service a given amount of jobs as quickly.
So if responsiveness is important (desktop) apply the patch. If your apps just need raw cycles (server) the patch either won't have much effect or could slow things down.
"According to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems.
NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navy's chief information officer calls for all new applications to run under NT.
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown.
"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."
The open source debate is about keeping secrets. Completed (written) software is often locked by its programmer, hiding the underlying code from its user.
Not so sure about this... I think we've all met programmers whose binaries were more readable than their source.
;)
"Open Source Programmers" is a bit of a misnomer. As has been pointed out, many programmers who contribute to free/Open source software do not work on it fulltime, and have primary jobs that either pay them through their service as a programmer or through licensure of commercial software.
;)
While the FSF believes all software should be free of restrictions and government should contribute money towards it, those are not the only economic models that have been suggested. Personally, I believe having unrestricted access to software is increasingly important, comparable in ways to other generic services: telephone, water, etc. It seems reasonable that governments would consider switching to an unrestricted, open, and generic form of software.
(Does anyone else feel that government should also provide free beer?
I suspect these little quarrels between ICANN, South Africa, and other groups are harbingers of major DNS conflicts in the future. For example, what if Microsoft, instead of South Africa, demanded a particular TLD?
It's not a prospect anyone is looking forward to, but I think we should accept the fact that our system of TLDs and DNS hierarchy is going to fall apart. Our current system demands too high a level of political and economic consistency; eventually some large, politically powerful groups will break away and form their own system; or (perhaps more in line with current trends) the system will fall under the power of large corporations and people will break away and form their own roots.
So what needs to happen is the development of a system whereby multiple DNS roots can be easily used and DNS conflicts are resolved by the end-user rather than a commitee. It's unfortunate, but the Internet spans too many political and cultural boundaries for a "cathedral" model to be effective.
These claims are circumstantial, arising primarily from the slew of pro-MS memos among their publications, and the testimony ADTI submitted on Microsoft's behalf at the Dept. of Justice trial. To quote another source:
m m t ml
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/public/29 / tc-00028697.htm
I have not found a specific link between Microsoft and ADTI... but Microsoft is known to be funding similar conservative organizations. See:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cti306.ht
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cth989.ht
http://www.prospect.org/print/V11/16/marshall-j.h
This group also claimed, during Congressional probes into tobacco company fraud, that cigarettes and tobacco products were not harmful to your health. From this memo by a director of the World Health Organization:
l ous.htm
"In addition to creating front groups and contributing funds to groups that have a mission broad enough to carry some of the tobacco industry's goals, the tobacco companies also use publications by allegedly independent think tanks, such as the Virginia-based Alexis De Tocqueville Institution. This group's 1994 report "Science, Economics, and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination" criticizes the US Environmental Protection Agency's risk assessment methods in 4 areas: environmental tobacco smoke, radon, pesticides, and hazardous cleanup. It dismisses in its first chapter the agency's risk assessment of environmental tobacco smoke, using arguments similar to the tobacco industry's "junk science" arguments described by Ong and Glantz. "
It seems Microsoft is making some strange bedfellows.
Sources:
http://www.smokefreeforhealth.org/studies/YachBia
ZDNet Post
I have a different learning style than what the university wants me to have
Certainly its masochistic to expect students to do everything without assistance at the higher levels. Teacher: "Next week you will have to write an entire POSIX-compliant OS from scratch!" Most universities (mine at least) emphasized skill-type stuff at the lower levels and we're allowed to work together more at the higher levels.
There's something to be said for universities emphasizing working with others too. Its hard to work with existing code when you're used to writing everything yourself.
I'm much better now at solving things on my own from first principles,
Exactly.
Results are all that matter. Effort is for masochists.
The objective in introductory CS courses is to develop general problem-solving skills, not to memorize solutions to particular problems. Yes, the effort is important, because this is how general skills are acquired. Do you think the Fortran taught to CS grads 20 years ago learned is useful today? Probably not really, but the concepts of how to code are useful. The general problem solving skills are useful. And if someone is guiding you through the problem, you miss out on developing these problem solving skills.
IF I ask someone answer & how they got there -- and procede to incorporate that lesson into my skills & knowledge, I have learned that lesson.
The view this expresses on knowledge and scholarship is decidedly short-sighted. While all the coursework you encounter has been solved before, you miss out on many concepts and ideas by getting the solution from others rather than developing it on your own. Again, it is the general skills which will benefit you years down the road, not specific solutions gleaned from other people.
If they learn from each other
In Computer Science, much of the work revolves around problem-solving techniques, which cannot be learned second-hand. In an introductory CS course, the objective is to develop these general skills, not to memorize particular solutions. And you can't learn how to code by reading someone else's code, or even discussing a coding solution. You can't learn how to develop algorithms by looking over someone else's algorithm. By working with other people (which usually means some people guiding the others through things) you miss out on learning how to problem-solve.
And the real purpose of the CS degree is to endow you with these learning skills. Its not to teach you how an FFT works, or the syntax of C++, but the general skills and concepts by which you can learn things on your own. These are skills which can be applied time and time again, long after programming language X that you studied in college is dead. Students who collaborate frequently on projects often miss out on developing these skills.
So basically CS can't be approached like other disciplines - I can learn history from another history student, and I can learn approaches to a particular CS problem from another CS student, but I can only acquire problem solving skills by working by myself.
I'm a senior in Computer Science, graduating this term. When I was a freshman I was penalized for Academic Dishonesty, and I have to say it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I stood up and took responsibility in my classes, and developed self-discipline to do stuff myself.
too many students are lazy bastards
One might amend this to "CS students". The vast majority of incoming CS students have little or no experience programming and think CS is the means by which they can make big bucks being an expert on Microsoft Windows, administering a network, or coding HTML.
Realistically most of the people in those classes don't belong, and this is evidenced in the number of people who flunk out. However some learn to get by copying other people's work, barely passing the tests, etc. (Yes I was one) Most introductory computer science work is not incredibly complicated, and doesn't require any degree of collaboration. If you need to collaborate on low-level programs, you probably don't belong in CS. That is, if you lack the self-discipline to do elementary homework, you probably won't succeed as a programmer in industry.
I basically learned as a pre-CS student that the people who collaborated were the people who bombed their tests, because they usually only had an incomplete knowledge of what they were doing. Also once I asked a student who cheated a lot why he didn't bother to just learn the stuff and he said companies "teach" their employees what to do anyway, so why learn it in school. This attitude is bullshit, if you've ever interviewed for a job at Intel or Microsoft you'd know that yes they _do_ care what you know...
So lets face it: 8/10 times, group work is a waste of time. People try to hype it up in education, but three clueless people working together just breeds more confusion, unless they're people you work well with. I've put up with 4 years of working with randomly-appointed teams of students and the end result has usually been part of the team doing most of the work and the other student(s) not caring, or making feeble attempts to do stuff.
Learning isn't supposed to be fun, and while its cool, probably unavoidable to discuss stuff with people, you don't need to, and you'll probably learn more if you don't.
Yeah that's my favorite part. :)
Rei's voice is really weird in that part, however... it sounds like a man talking or something, not the regular Rei voice.
Mmmm.... Misato.
The second to last and third to last episodes are very good, provided you have seen the prior ones. The last episode essentially consists of flashing white lines and ends with the whole cast of characters applauding Shinji, sappy stuff and an unfortunate ending.
Evangelion does not employ the best animation, and indeed recycles animation sequences and music a lot. So why watch it? Hard to explain. If you've ever seen (and liked) Princess Mononoke you'll be similarly hard pressed to come up with an explanation.
But, the ending is no exception; there are good and bad episodes (the one with the volcano comes to mind) in Evangelion; I'd peruse the DivXs of the series before investing in DVDs.
As for dubbing in American voices, forget it. I'd wager most people (anime geeks at least) prefer subtitles. Btw, has anyone else noticed how the subtitles in the opening song are sometimes (about 50% of the time) in Japanese ?
PS Little Rei is really freaky.
Most tides are caused by the earth being attracted to the moon (The sun exerts some tides, but they are negligible). When the moon approaches the earth more closely in its orbit, and as the earth itself rotates, the distance between the two bodies changes and hence the land and especially the water rise or fall. Thus, while tides are a side effect of planetary motion, the force of the tides itself arises from the mass and distance of the moon, and not from the moon's motion around the earth. So harnessing the tides won't affect the earth's rotation, or the orbit of the moon. You may be confused with the "slingshot" technique, whereby spaceships are swung around a planet in order to bank off their natural rotation, which does indeed slow the rotation of the planet slightly.
The report can be found in its entirety at: http://cryptome.org/dod-npr.htm This site is a good resource for classified documents.