It's still a fun game. Bungie puts out good software.
Heck, most Game Boy Advance software could be considered to be roughly ten or more year old computer software, but it's still entertaining.
That being said, I can see Microsoft not having a lot of interest in improving PC Halo. They made a promise to do a release, but have little interest in really polishing it. And, frankly, PC Halo is in many ways (frame rate, lack of sitting next to your best friend and playing in cooperative mode in front of the TV, driving the vehicles with a mouse) not as nice as the X-Box release.
Don't touch computers when you're drunk. I had a friend that locked his before heading off to a bar, since he could never remember the password when he was really drunk. Computers generally have email clients, and email clients let you send email (frequently to someone who can't figure out that you're drunk -- with a phone call, it's pretty clear) and that just causes all kinds of misery later on when people are pissed and you can't figure out *why*.
IIRC, except for comparisons and a few other specific exceptions, numeric representations of numbers should not be used in English text.
The tidbit "...in 10th grade." would then be "...in tenth grade", and "Finding 30 grammatical errors..." would be "Finding thirty grammatical errors..."
In addition, the subject if your third sentence is "mistakes". The subject is plural, and hence "it" in the second clause of that sentence should be "they".
Of course, all this really goes to show is that it's very difficult to write correct English.
Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?
It's simpler, and has lighter client interface and system requirements. It's pretty fast. It's easier to implement a gopher client properly (one of the reasons I liked gopher back in the day was because lynx was so blinking unstable).
Wow...I'm pretty sure that the Mac OS TurboGopher supported bookmarks.
I was really into getting a gopher server going a few years back. It took some work to even get one to compile on a current Red Hat system, and the setup is a pain in the ass compared to, say, Apache. There's been some resurgence of work on gopher recently, oddly enough, so it may be possible to use gopherd without trouble.
As someone else pointed out, gopher would be *phenomenal* for cell phones. It's lightweight, it doesn't push the capabilities, it uses text, arrow keys, and number keys...it's really pretty much perfect for cells. Unfortunately, there's enough Web-based infrastructure in place that I don't think that that's going to happen.
the only superior replacement for telnet is secure telnet.
As you pointed out to another poster -- it's been a long week. Get some rest.;-)
There _is_ no obviously-superior replacement for NNTP yet...
Well, let's see. Funny that this should come up in such close temporal proximity (there must be a less awkward phrase for this) to my bringing it up, but IMAP supports of a set of extensions to provide "bboards". CMU actually provides access via a bboard gateway to Usenet. This is *somewhat* more superior, as secure IMAP is pretty common...but SSL-tunneled NNTP is not. Of course, almost nobody *uses* this interface, but it's still worthwhile to consider.
I'd say that it's kind of appalling that NNTP doesn't support compression and encryption (or at *least* that SSL-tunneled NNTP was standard). These are pretty obvious extensions to the thing, and don't need to be implemented Internet-wide to be useful.
It'd also be a be neat if PGP signature use was a bit more common on Usenet.
I think the reason NNTP has gone to the dogs a bit is:
* The flow of money toward the Web.
* The relegation of many NNTP users to mail clients. Sorry, but a dedicated newsreader is much better than a mailreader in every instance that I've seen.
* No HTML support. People like their pink-on-green text, and people on Usenet get cranky when people try posting HTML.
* A few killer features that Web forums like Slashdot support are not present on Usenet. The big one, of course, is moderation.
* Usenet was used shamelessly for email address harvesting for a long time.
I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.
Conclusion does not necessarily follow.
The guarantee that functionality is within a subset has value in and of itself.
Gopher links are a single column of text without frames. I can easily navigate a gopher system with just a single hand on the arrow keys while munching a sandwich. Heck, an NES controller would be sufficient. That cannot be done on the Web, because there are no such constraints on design.
I do miss gopher, but there's a reason that it went away. It wasn't notably better than http for most things. The protocol and setup was more complex than they should be, and the code wasn't necessarily written with security in mind.
I *still* miss archie and used it up until a year or so ago when the final public archie server went down. Archie was, for legitimate files, something on the order of eDonkey. You needed a file, a server was slow, you found a better one. However, almost everyone made files that might be needed available via FTP. Few files are placed on eDonkey -- if I want to download an arbitrary file, there's a good chance that I can't get it with eDonkey. There is a Web-based archie-style FTP interface that used to be based in Norway and now appears to be part of alltheweb.com that I use occasionally, but it seems that even the day of FTP is slowly drawing to a close -- Apple has shut down their vast FTP archives, and more and more people just use HTTP servers.
The passing of finger will be missed. It really doesn't make sense in this less-trusting world on the Internet today, but I remember that it was incredibly valuable for trying to help get ahold of someone in an emergency.
I do still remember that first day when I found gopher, and was told that I could use it for free. I clicked "Other Gopher Servers", and a list came up: "North America", "South America", "Australia", etc. Doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in that day, it just seemed incredible.
Other tips -- it's extremely hard to transfer into certain majors, like ECE, and almost impossible to transfer into CS. Don't get into school A because school B didn't accept you and hope that you can eventually get into school A. I *have* seen it happen, but it's not worth the (high) risk. Choose another school.
Should read: "It's extremely hard to transfer into certain majors, like ECE, and almost impossible to transfer into CS. Don't enroll in school A at CMU because school B at CMU didn't accept you and hope that you can eventually transfer into school B. It's very tough to do, and risky. Choose a different university."
CMU is a good school, but you have to be ready for...well, you may not expect everything there.
(Note that I picked up a bachelor's in CS there and liked it quite a bit.)
I found that the school tends to be a bit racially cliquish. There are a phenomenal number of students from wealthy families overseas that attend, and a (surprisingly, to me at least) number of recent immigrants. I never really ran into any bad spirits (with the possible exception of a Saudi student who seemed quite put-upon immediately after September 11th), but Indians tended to hang out with other Indians, Chinese with other Chinese, etc. It *is* a neat way to pick up other culture -- I'm not a huge fan of travel or picking up other cultures other than my monthly National Geographic, but I really enjoyed some of what I learned about folks there.
CMU has a few *extremely* highly-rated schools. For example, their computer science program and their drama programs are both extremely good. This may *sound* really nice. However, it also has drawbacks. When you are going to university with these people, they are really, really, really good. They not infrequently have done decent work in their major. You can't just decide to pick up a drama double major if you're a typical computer science major, because (a) you would probably never be accepted, and (b) if you did get in, you would be decidedly out of your depth unless you had serious prior experience. CMU is a pretty awful place to be if you don't know, for Pretty Darn Certain what you want to do. Changing majors is generally a pain in the ass. (Note that drama is a particularly nasty case -- there are a very few classes for out of majors that generally have a waiting list many times the size of the class). All this *does* mean that you can generally get a very good education in the field you choose, but it is difficult to seriously explore other things.
CMU is not what you would call a party school. It is next to U Pitt, and, in any event, you can find friends on any campus, but I'd call it socially toned down.
CMU (at least CS and ECE) has a decidedly non-Windows bias, which is quite refreshing if you like working on UNIX systems. This takes root in a number of issues (Microsoft hiring a number of professors away, political issues, etc).
CMU is notable for a lot of different research. I'd say that their computer vision stuff is extremely prominent, as is their robotics works. There are some good language people there. Speech synthesis and recognition is big. The philosophy department has a strong AI/symbolic logic slant, which can be very good if you're into that, and bad if you like classical philosophy. They have networking work, but I don't see the network folks being as prominent as at some other universities. There (at least a while ago) was a significant project working on ad-hoc wireless networking. This is a pretty incomplete list. If you take CS up at CMU, be *sure* to take Professor Steven Rudich's Great Ideas In Computer Science class. It is, without compare, the finest class I've ever taken. It gives your brain a *throrough* workout, is a huge amount of fun, and is inspiring as all hell. Prof. Rudich also gives great assignments -- basically, he gives all the information required to figure some past significant idea in computer science out, then gives you the problem as an assignment. It feels *great* when you do it. I wish to God that more profs gave assignments like this. I and other people have even gone back to sit in on lectures he's given for classes we've already taken.
CMU has awful parking. A car will cause you a good deal of grief. Even in university terms, CMU has bad parking.
CMU is in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's average age is extremely high (expecially given the number of universities in the thing). There are a *lot* of old people there. This means that the city shuts down quite early. 24 hour grocery stores and similar are not common. On the other hand, Pittsburgh also has phenomenal
Okay, laptops are a special case. Size and space are a *premium*, and a 3.5" square is a pretty big deal.
On desktops, I don't believe the OEMs are generally shipping floppyless computers (I haven't been looking, but I haven't heard anything about it) other than Apple. Apple (a) likes to make press waves about being forward-looking and (b) doesn't have some PC hardware architecture cruft where booting from floppies is still a significant benefit.
Ever been in the situation where you wanted to flash your BIOS only to find out you ran all out of (working) floppy's, or you didn't have a windows bootdisk at hand, or even worse, you didn't have a (working) floppy drive?
You too? I'll go one better -- my darn-I-don't-have-a-floppy experience was on a dorm floor at Carnegie Mellon University (i.e. CS geek central) and I couldn't find anyone on the floor with a working 3.5" floppy disk to use. I had to run down to the campus computer store to buy floppies. Ah, AOL floppies, how we miss you...
Ah, I see. I suppose I got the wrong idea from your original post. Your idea was that people should, even if at a very high level, know the fundamentals of a field. I had assumed that you wanted them to know it at a low level, and know all the mechanics involved.
I suppose I can agree here. I think that, if nothing else, knowing facts and being able to link them to other facts assists memory and understanding greatly. Knowing, as the student did in the example you listed, only the relationship between sqrt(4) and 2 via Mathematica is a problem.
I suppose that I am a bit biased. My degree is in computer science, and I do not work in signal processing or any fields where anything more than basic calculus is particularly useful. I do remember being frusterated, however, with the amount of time spent in Calculus II and later calculus courses with techniques of integration. Not what integration *meant* mathematically, but simply approaches to hand-integrate functions. The tasks I performed in these classes were largely not "There is a problem -- figure out how to model it mathematically and solve it." or even "find the fallacy in this reasoning", but "manually pattern-match on a set of formulae that we will give you to determine the proper formula to use, and manually apply it."
This most definitely can be implemented with apt or yum, either with multiple repository entries (probably most appropriate, especially with apt, where signature checking is per-repository). There was an RPM that I remember that downloaded and installed Microsoft Webfonts as part of the installation process, so this can also be done at the packaging level.
Just because most apt and yum users *do* happen to get packages from a single source does not mean that the system constrains you to doing so.
Every now and then, I run across a really, truly interesting comment on Slashdot. Your simple, elegant, anti-alternative-medicine argument is one. Bravo.
This really highlights what a megalomaniac Wolfram is. While he may be remembered after his death, I imagine it will be for his insufferable ego, not for his scientific achievements.
I suspect that many people said this about Sir Newton, who was also supposed to be an amazingly arrogant asshole. (This is not to suggest that Dr. Wolfram is Sir Newton's equal, just that someone being arrogant has hardly kept them from fame before.)
Oh, and regarding Mathematica: its use by students should be banned until they are able to outperform it in terms of mathematical sophistication. Its overuse in universities is leading to an intellectually-stunted generation.
I cannot agree.
I agree that it is producing a more highly specialized generation. I assume that you are acquiring or have graduated with a computer science or mathematics degree. When you started on your degree, were you required to learn the philosophical foundation of mathematics? How about the physics and chemistry required to build the computer that any practical implementation of your work would require use of?
At one point, a well-educated man could encompass most of the known fields of work. Later, it was still possible to understand a single field well. You could literally be simply a chemist, a physicist, or a mathematician. As the knowledge present in each field has exploded, the sliver of that field that can be fully known and understood by each person has dwindled. That is not necessarily bad -- it's simply a phenomenon that was abound to happen. It would be ideal for someone to fully understand, from the ground up, the field they work in, but that is less and less practical.
I can cook a nice side of garlic bread. However, I have no knowledge of how to grow garlic itself, or of what processes and safety measures are involved in the production of the flour used in the bread. I don't even really know what goes into the bread. I don't know how to ward off insects from the grain used in the bread. If you removed me from society, I would die. I simply cannot function -- I am too specialized -- without society.
Furthermore, given that knowledge has been increasing, each generation in a field will tend to have less an understanding of the fundamentals than their predecessors. This makes interdiciplinary knowledge sharing more difficult, and easier to make foundational mistakes, but is a prerequisite for the degree of advancement that we have achieved.
For example -- I have never manually determined a square root. I simply have never had the need to to so, and schools no longer taught one how to find one by the time I went through school. My parents needed to learn this information, but I did not. If you took away all my computers and calculators, I could not determine a square root for you. Oh, I might be able to come up with an inefficient algorithm and manually, slowly, come up with an answer, but I would really be, to some degree, unable to function without my computing devices.
If I needed to implement a calculator one day (and, incidently, calculators use different methods than the manual method we do to obtain numerical approximations of square roots), I could look up how people once did things by hand. However, generally, a specialized profession (calculator designer) has managed to take over and handle much of my work for me.
Using Mathematica to do, say, advanced integration, makes perfect sense to me. Running through a vast collection of tricks to get a stubborn formula to integrate is, frankly, a waste of human time. A phenomenal amount of human time is wasted memorizing and trying to apply integration tricks. Why bother? Sure, it's not inconcievable that one day, I might do something sub-optimally because I lack knowledge in the area. However, if I *know* that I need to know something, I can track down an expert who does know. In the meantime, I will enjoy *known* significant time savings.
I'm sure every generation has complained about this as specialization increases. It isn't new, and I don't believe that it's particularly negative.
I dunno. Weiss seems to get a real kick out of finding ways to make himself look smarter than Wolfram. Most of these claims are "X was not included", which is the sort of thing that person A might think of, but not person B. Writing a 1K page theory book with zero errors is not bad.
I haven't read Wolfram's work. For all I know, it might not be that great. But it does seem to me that Weiss was out to shoot down Wolfram. You can find flaws with *any* body of work the size of Wolfram's.
If Weiss was really interested in an objective review to help others out, he'd have no interest in attacking Wolfram's character or in being rabid over what he saw as self-aggrandization.
Can I buy a work that isn't all original work and enjoy it? Sure. Most CS works are *not* particularly original. They contain a specialization of something, or a restating or reformatting of that. There's too much pressure to publish for folks to publish for someone to put out no more than the one or perhaps two truly new and revolutionary ideas they have during their lifetimes. I think few PhDs can reasonably produce a hundred worthwhile papers in their lifetime.
When it comes to window programming, object-oriented is the way to go.
Man, I hear this a lot from MFC programmers. GNOME/GTK's lowest level API is not in C++. It is written in C. However, there are well-supported C++ bindings, which I have written code with and been happy with. This is particularly funny, since you're talking about MFC as being an example of what you want -- and the same thing is true of Win32 (C) and MFC (C++ sitting on top).
Not *only* that, but even the C-level code is object-oriented. It's not "half assed" object orientation either, as I see a lot of claims of. I have the ability to use either, and I'e chosen to use the C-based approach. Really, the only people I know of who yell and scream about the fundamental GNOME/GTK API are those who (a) program most of the time in Java and don't like using C and simply complain at the sight of it or (b) program most of the time in C++ (frequently ex-MFCers) and don't like using C and again complain at the sight of it. All this is *doubly* funny since there are a *ton* of language bindings. If you like a language, support is probably there in at least GTK. If you want to use Java to write your GNOME apps, if you really feel that you need a language that requires you to use OO interfaces (which C++ is *not*), then by all means, go ahead and do it.
Come to think of it, I don't believe I've used a procedural style GUI API since coming to UNIX. Actually, no, there's Tk. And I've used Xlib.
3. Konqueror has domain-specific plug-in permissions. No more annoying forced flash ads from some websites. Although I'll admit I'd like to see the same for images, like in Mozilla.
LOL. It's been a long time since I've literally laughed out loud, but this did it. I've been frusterated about the exact opposite -- that *Mozilla* doesn't have domain-specific *plugin-in* permissions. Ah, funny.:-)
Re:Dont forget to check the Window Manager.
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 1
such as kool keys
Somebody needs to hunt down every KDE developer and break their "K" key.
KDE, does by the way have its own window manager, its just that it is transparent to the user, and in KDE 3.2 it has a really good one.
I'm dubious. I haven't used the 3.2 release, but I have a really low opinion of the dumbed-down out-of-box window managers that have shipped with KDE and GNOME in the past.
I like sawfish (and was estatic when GNOME briefly adopted it), but apparently it had too much of a learning curve. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. The logic in your post is so twisted that I'm not even sure where to begin.
Should Hitler get the same prize for unifying countries and eliminating tension-causing influence (i.e. Jews?)
Yes. It's also not the greatest system in the world, for a number of previously-discussed-on-Slashdot reasons. Though it is better than, say, SPF.
It's still a fun game. Bungie puts out good software.
Heck, most Game Boy Advance software could be considered to be roughly ten or more year old computer software, but it's still entertaining.
That being said, I can see Microsoft not having a lot of interest in improving PC Halo. They made a promise to do a release, but have little interest in really polishing it. And, frankly, PC Halo is in many ways (frame rate, lack of sitting next to your best friend and playing in cooperative mode in front of the TV, driving the vehicles with a mouse) not as nice as the X-Box release.
Don't touch computers when you're drunk. I had a friend that locked his before heading off to a bar, since he could never remember the password when he was really drunk. Computers generally have email clients, and email clients let you send email (frequently to someone who can't figure out that you're drunk -- with a phone call, it's pretty clear) and that just causes all kinds of misery later on when people are pissed and you can't figure out *why*.
IIRC, except for comparisons and a few other specific exceptions, numeric representations of numbers should not be used in English text.
The tidbit "...in 10th grade." would then be "...in tenth grade", and "Finding 30 grammatical errors..." would be "Finding thirty grammatical errors..."
In addition, the subject if your third sentence is "mistakes". The subject is plural, and hence "it" in the second clause of that sentence should be "they".
Of course, all this really goes to show is that it's very difficult to write correct English.
Are there any benifits of Gopher over http/html at all?
It's simpler, and has lighter client interface and system requirements. It's pretty fast. It's easier to implement a gopher client properly (one of the reasons I liked gopher back in the day was because lynx was so blinking unstable).
Wow...I'm pretty sure that the Mac OS TurboGopher supported bookmarks.
I was really into getting a gopher server going a few years back. It took some work to even get one to compile on a current Red Hat system, and the setup is a pain in the ass compared to, say, Apache. There's been some resurgence of work on gopher recently, oddly enough, so it may be possible to use gopherd without trouble.
As someone else pointed out, gopher would be *phenomenal* for cell phones. It's lightweight, it doesn't push the capabilities, it uses text, arrow keys, and number keys...it's really pretty much perfect for cells. Unfortunately, there's enough Web-based infrastructure in place that I don't think that that's going to happen.
the only superior replacement for telnet is secure telnet.
;-)
As you pointed out to another poster -- it's been a long week. Get some rest.
There _is_ no obviously-superior replacement for NNTP yet...
Well, let's see. Funny that this should come up in such close temporal proximity (there must be a less awkward phrase for this) to my bringing it up, but IMAP supports of a set of extensions to provide "bboards". CMU actually provides access via a bboard gateway to Usenet. This is *somewhat* more superior, as secure IMAP is pretty common...but SSL-tunneled NNTP is not. Of course, almost nobody *uses* this interface, but it's still worthwhile to consider.
I'd say that it's kind of appalling that NNTP doesn't support compression and encryption (or at *least* that SSL-tunneled NNTP was standard). These are pretty obvious extensions to the thing, and don't need to be implemented Internet-wide to be useful.
It'd also be a be neat if PGP signature use was a bit more common on Usenet.
I think the reason NNTP has gone to the dogs a bit is:
* The flow of money toward the Web.
* The relegation of many NNTP users to mail clients. Sorry, but a dedicated newsreader is much better than a mailreader in every instance that I've seen.
* No HTML support. People like their pink-on-green text, and people on Usenet get cranky when people try posting HTML.
* A few killer features that Web forums like Slashdot support are not present on Usenet. The big one, of course, is moderation.
* Usenet was used shamelessly for email address harvesting for a long time.
I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.
Conclusion does not necessarily follow.
The guarantee that functionality is within a subset has value in and of itself.
Gopher links are a single column of text without frames. I can easily navigate a gopher system with just a single hand on the arrow keys while munching a sandwich. Heck, an NES controller would be sufficient. That cannot be done on the Web, because there are no such constraints on design.
I do miss gopher, but there's a reason that it went away. It wasn't notably better than http for most things. The protocol and setup was more complex than they should be, and the code wasn't necessarily written with security in mind.
I *still* miss archie and used it up until a year or so ago when the final public archie server went down. Archie was, for legitimate files, something on the order of eDonkey. You needed a file, a server was slow, you found a better one. However, almost everyone made files that might be needed available via FTP. Few files are placed on eDonkey -- if I want to download an arbitrary file, there's a good chance that I can't get it with eDonkey. There is a Web-based archie-style FTP interface that used to be based in Norway and now appears to be part of alltheweb.com that I use occasionally, but it seems that even the day of FTP is slowly drawing to a close -- Apple has shut down their vast FTP archives, and more and more people just use HTTP servers.
The passing of finger will be missed. It really doesn't make sense in this less-trusting world on the Internet today, but I remember that it was incredibly valuable for trying to help get ahold of someone in an emergency.
I do still remember that first day when I found gopher, and was told that I could use it for free. I clicked "Other Gopher Servers", and a list came up: "North America", "South America", "Australia", etc. Doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in that day, it just seemed incredible.
Wow -- I badly mangled the logic here:
Other tips -- it's extremely hard to transfer into certain majors, like ECE, and almost impossible to transfer into CS. Don't get into school A because school B didn't accept you and hope that you can eventually get into school A. I *have* seen it happen, but it's not worth the (high) risk. Choose another school.
Should read: "It's extremely hard to transfer into certain majors, like ECE, and almost impossible to transfer into CS. Don't enroll in school A at CMU because school B at CMU didn't accept you and hope that you can eventually transfer into school B. It's very tough to do, and risky. Choose a different university."
CMU is a good school, but you have to be ready for...well, you may not expect everything there.
(Note that I picked up a bachelor's in CS there and liked it quite a bit.)
I found that the school tends to be a bit racially cliquish. There are a phenomenal number of students from wealthy families overseas that attend, and a (surprisingly, to me at least) number of recent immigrants. I never really ran into any bad spirits (with the possible exception of a Saudi student who seemed quite put-upon immediately after September 11th), but Indians tended to hang out with other Indians, Chinese with other Chinese, etc. It *is* a neat way to pick up other culture -- I'm not a huge fan of travel or picking up other cultures other than my monthly National Geographic, but I really enjoyed some of what I learned about folks there.
CMU has a few *extremely* highly-rated schools. For example, their computer science program and their drama programs are both extremely good. This may *sound* really nice. However, it also has drawbacks. When you are going to university with these people, they are really, really, really good. They not infrequently have done decent work in their major. You can't just decide to pick up a drama double major if you're a typical computer science major, because (a) you would probably never be accepted, and (b) if you did get in, you would be decidedly out of your depth unless you had serious prior experience. CMU is a pretty awful place to be if you don't know, for Pretty Darn Certain what you want to do. Changing majors is generally a pain in the ass. (Note that drama is a particularly nasty case -- there are a very few classes for out of majors that generally have a waiting list many times the size of the class). All this *does* mean that you can generally get a very good education in the field you choose, but it is difficult to seriously explore other things.
CMU is not what you would call a party school. It is next to U Pitt, and, in any event, you can find friends on any campus, but I'd call it socially toned down.
CMU (at least CS and ECE) has a decidedly non-Windows bias, which is quite refreshing if you like working on UNIX systems. This takes root in a number of issues (Microsoft hiring a number of professors away, political issues, etc).
CMU is notable for a lot of different research. I'd say that their computer vision stuff is extremely prominent, as is their robotics works. There are some good language people there. Speech synthesis and recognition is big. The philosophy department has a strong AI/symbolic logic slant, which can be very good if you're into that, and bad if you like classical philosophy. They have networking work, but I don't see the network folks being as prominent as at some other universities. There (at least a while ago) was a significant project working on ad-hoc wireless networking. This is a pretty incomplete list. If you take CS up at CMU, be *sure* to take Professor Steven Rudich's Great Ideas In Computer Science class. It is, without compare, the finest class I've ever taken. It gives your brain a *throrough* workout, is a huge amount of fun, and is inspiring as all hell. Prof. Rudich also gives great assignments -- basically, he gives all the information required to figure some past significant idea in computer science out, then gives you the problem as an assignment. It feels *great* when you do it. I wish to God that more profs gave assignments like this. I and other people have even gone back to sit in on lectures he's given for classes we've already taken.
CMU has awful parking. A car will cause you a good deal of grief. Even in university terms, CMU has bad parking.
CMU is in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's average age is extremely high (expecially given the number of universities in the thing). There are a *lot* of old people there. This means that the city shuts down quite early. 24 hour grocery stores and similar are not common. On the other hand, Pittsburgh also has phenomenal
the teacher had us prepared...We basically all collaborated to subtly mock him for half an hour.
;-)
Interesting teacher.
Much like the other respondent, I found the addition of "MIT and DeVRY" together to be pretty funny. Those are definitely odd bedfellows.
Okay, laptops are a special case. Size and space are a *premium*, and a 3.5" square is a pretty big deal.
On desktops, I don't believe the OEMs are generally shipping floppyless computers (I haven't been looking, but I haven't heard anything about it) other than Apple. Apple (a) likes to make press waves about being forward-looking and (b) doesn't have some PC hardware architecture cruft where booting from floppies is still a significant benefit.
Ever been in the situation where you wanted to flash your BIOS only to find out you ran all out of (working) floppy's, or you didn't have a windows bootdisk at hand, or even worse, you didn't have a (working) floppy drive?
You too? I'll go one better -- my darn-I-don't-have-a-floppy experience was on a dorm floor at Carnegie Mellon University (i.e. CS geek central) and I couldn't find anyone on the floor with a working 3.5" floppy disk to use. I had to run down to the campus computer store to buy floppies. Ah, AOL floppies, how we miss you...
Ah, I see. I suppose I got the wrong idea from your original post. Your idea was that people should, even if at a very high level, know the fundamentals of a field. I had assumed that you wanted them to know it at a low level, and know all the mechanics involved.
I suppose I can agree here. I think that, if nothing else, knowing facts and being able to link them to other facts assists memory and understanding greatly. Knowing, as the student did in the example you listed, only the relationship between sqrt(4) and 2 via Mathematica is a problem.
I suppose that I am a bit biased. My degree is in computer science, and I do not work in signal processing or any fields where anything more than basic calculus is particularly useful. I do remember being frusterated, however, with the amount of time spent in Calculus II and later calculus courses with techniques of integration. Not what integration *meant* mathematically, but simply approaches to hand-integrate functions. The tasks I performed in these classes were largely not "There is a problem -- figure out how to model it mathematically and solve it." or even "find the fallacy in this reasoning", but "manually pattern-match on a set of formulae that we will give you to determine the proper formula to use, and manually apply it."
This most definitely can be implemented with apt or yum, either with multiple repository entries (probably most appropriate, especially with apt, where signature checking is per-repository). There was an RPM that I remember that downloaded and installed Microsoft Webfonts as part of the installation process, so this can also be done at the packaging level.
Just because most apt and yum users *do* happen to get packages from a single source does not mean that the system constrains you to doing so.
Every now and then, I run across a really, truly interesting comment on Slashdot. Your simple, elegant, anti-alternative-medicine argument is one. Bravo.
Of course, if he really is so incompetent, that does raise the question of why you feel that you need to rely upon his software. ;-)
This really highlights what a megalomaniac Wolfram is. While he may be remembered after his death, I imagine it will be for his insufferable ego, not for his scientific achievements.
I suspect that many people said this about Sir Newton, who was also supposed to be an amazingly arrogant asshole. (This is not to suggest that Dr. Wolfram is Sir Newton's equal, just that someone being arrogant has hardly kept them from fame before.)
Oh, and regarding Mathematica: its use by students should be banned until they are able to outperform it in terms of mathematical sophistication. Its overuse in universities is leading to an intellectually-stunted generation.
I cannot agree.
I agree that it is producing a more highly specialized generation. I assume that you are acquiring or have graduated with a computer science or mathematics degree. When you started on your degree, were you required to learn the philosophical foundation of mathematics? How about the physics and chemistry required to build the computer that any practical implementation of your work would require use of?
At one point, a well-educated man could encompass most of the known fields of work. Later, it was still possible to understand a single field well. You could literally be simply a chemist, a physicist, or a mathematician. As the knowledge present in each field has exploded, the sliver of that field that can be fully known and understood by each person has dwindled. That is not necessarily bad -- it's simply a phenomenon that was abound to happen. It would be ideal for someone to fully understand, from the ground up, the field they work in, but that is less and less practical.
I can cook a nice side of garlic bread. However, I have no knowledge of how to grow garlic itself, or of what processes and safety measures are involved in the production of the flour used in the bread. I don't even really know what goes into the bread. I don't know how to ward off insects from the grain used in the bread. If you removed me from society, I would die. I simply cannot function -- I am too specialized -- without society.
Furthermore, given that knowledge has been increasing, each generation in a field will tend to have less an understanding of the fundamentals than their predecessors. This makes interdiciplinary knowledge sharing more difficult, and easier to make foundational mistakes, but is a prerequisite for the degree of advancement that we have achieved.
For example -- I have never manually determined a square root. I simply have never had the need to to so, and schools no longer taught one how to find one by the time I went through school. My parents needed to learn this information, but I did not. If you took away all my computers and calculators, I could not determine a square root for you. Oh, I might be able to come up with an inefficient algorithm and manually, slowly, come up with an answer, but I would really be, to some degree, unable to function without my computing devices.
If I needed to implement a calculator one day (and, incidently, calculators use different methods than the manual method we do to obtain numerical approximations of square roots), I could look up how people once did things by hand. However, generally, a specialized profession (calculator designer) has managed to take over and handle much of my work for me.
Using Mathematica to do, say, advanced integration, makes perfect sense to me. Running through a vast collection of tricks to get a stubborn formula to integrate is, frankly, a waste of human time. A phenomenal amount of human time is wasted memorizing and trying to apply integration tricks. Why bother? Sure, it's not inconcievable that one day, I might do something sub-optimally because I lack knowledge in the area. However, if I *know* that I need to know something, I can track down an expert who does know. In the meantime, I will enjoy *known* significant time savings.
I'm sure every generation has complained about this as specialization increases. It isn't new, and I don't believe that it's particularly negative.
On the other hand, Skeptic Magazine also hasn't given us Mathematica.
I dunno. Weiss seems to get a real kick out of finding ways to make himself look smarter than Wolfram. Most of these claims are "X was not included", which is the sort of thing that person A might think of, but not person B. Writing a 1K page theory book with zero errors is not bad.
I haven't read Wolfram's work. For all I know, it might not be that great. But it does seem to me that Weiss was out to shoot down Wolfram. You can find flaws with *any* body of work the size of Wolfram's.
If Weiss was really interested in an objective review to help others out, he'd have no interest in attacking Wolfram's character or in being rabid over what he saw as self-aggrandization.
Can I buy a work that isn't all original work and enjoy it? Sure. Most CS works are *not* particularly original. They contain a specialization of something, or a restating or reformatting of that. There's too much pressure to publish for folks to publish for someone to put out no more than the one or perhaps two truly new and revolutionary ideas they have during their lifetimes. I think few PhDs can reasonably produce a hundred worthwhile papers in their lifetime.
When it comes to window programming, object-oriented is the way to go.
Man, I hear this a lot from MFC programmers. GNOME/GTK's lowest level API is not in C++. It is written in C. However, there are well-supported C++ bindings, which I have written code with and been happy with. This is particularly funny, since you're talking about MFC as being an example of what you want -- and the same thing is true of Win32 (C) and MFC (C++ sitting on top).
Not *only* that, but even the C-level code is object-oriented. It's not "half assed" object orientation either, as I see a lot of claims of. I have the ability to use either, and I'e chosen to use the C-based approach. Really, the only people I know of who yell and scream about the fundamental GNOME/GTK API are those who (a) program most of the time in Java and don't like using C and simply complain at the sight of it or (b) program most of the time in C++ (frequently ex-MFCers) and don't like using C and again complain at the sight of it. All this is *doubly* funny since there are a *ton* of language bindings. If you like a language, support is probably there in at least GTK. If you want to use Java to write your GNOME apps, if you really feel that you need a language that requires you to use OO interfaces (which C++ is *not*), then by all means, go ahead and do it.
Come to think of it, I don't believe I've used a procedural style GUI API since coming to UNIX. Actually, no, there's Tk. And I've used Xlib.
3. Konqueror has domain-specific plug-in permissions. No more annoying forced flash ads from some websites. Although I'll admit I'd like to see the same for images, like in Mozilla.
:-)
LOL. It's been a long time since I've literally laughed out loud, but this did it. I've been frusterated about the exact opposite -- that *Mozilla* doesn't have domain-specific *plugin-in* permissions. Ah, funny.
such as kool keys
Somebody needs to hunt down every KDE developer and break their "K" key.
KDE, does by the way have its own window manager, its just that it is transparent to the user, and in KDE 3.2 it has a really good one.
I'm dubious. I haven't used the 3.2 release, but I have a really low opinion of the dumbed-down out-of-box window managers that have shipped with KDE and GNOME in the past.
I like sawfish (and was estatic when GNOME briefly adopted it), but apparently it had too much of a learning curve. Sigh.