Also... How can something military be open source at all?
Lot's of software written by the military is not secret. For example, I believe the Army ran some sort of engineering competition for kids, where the participants had to "design and test" a bridge using a computer bridge simulator. The software was freely available (Windows only), and there were calls for them to release it as open source. They actually said they were considering it. I can't see how that could compromise our national security. Also, they recently released the source to a 3D modeler application they were using for many years to do some sort of simulations. I don't remember the details, but I think you should be able to find it on Freshmeat.
That reminds me of a story that was supposed to happen sometimes in late 80's in Prague. The police tried to confiscate a dissident's computer (I believe the dissident was actually Vaclav Havel). They took the keyboard and the monitor, writing them down in the report as "computer" and "TV". They left the main body on his desk, telling him that "he can keep the amplifier".
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1
but if you don't know what command you need to run your stuck (dir? catalog? oh, ls...that was my next guess!).
I have number of very similar experiences. I live in Michigan, and have several extended family members in New England that I visit quite often. The shortest way to drive from Michigan to New England is through Canada. I have traveled his way number of times in past several years. It's always the same: when entering Canada, you are welcomed by a pleasant officer, who asks the usual questions you get asked on any other border crossing, plus if you have any firearms in the vehicle. Then they let you in the country with a smile. When entering back into the USA, the officer is invariably grumpy, with an attitude like "you are lucky if I let you back in the country, punk!", for both Americans and foreigners.
I have a memory from my childhood that I can almost recall at will, at almost any time. When I was 6, my father took me on a week long canoeing trip. I remember standing on a road, looking through some trees down to the river onto some cool rapids which we were about to go down. I can see in my mind what seems to be a perfect picture: the side of the road, the wooded slope covered with dry leaves, trees, and the river. It seems that I could just sit down a draw the scene from my memory. The funny thing is, every time I try to focus on some detail, for example when try to identify the trees, or look at a number on a mile-post next to the road, or something like that, the whole picture completely disappears, and I have hard time recalling it again. The details are simply not there at all.
Now if I were to draw the scene, I would undoubtedly substitute some sort of simplified shapes, or maybe just a pattern of shades of green, for the leaves. But you could look at the details of the drawing and see how it was done. You probably would be unable to identify the trees by their leaves, the drawing would not contain that much details, but you would be able to see the way the image is rendered on paper. I cannot do that with the mental image. I believe that in my mind I am able to render the overall image without actually rendering the details at all, not even as some sort of impressionist jumble of colors and shades. If that's the case, transferring this image onto paper would require filling in all the details in some way, which, IMHO, is exactly the hard part of drawing or painting.
Anybody teaching networking would know what the heck Unix
In my experience, you are rather naive here.
is unless he has been thrust into that job with no background.
which is exactly what happens all the time, all over the place.
The truth is if your story was in the least part true then what we have is a failure to educate. If someone teaching a networking class doesn't know what Linux is then the community really needs to work harder educating people about.
Considering that there are crowds of elementary school math teachers who do not know how to multiply and divide fractions (not to even mention addition), I would say yes, we really do need to work harder.
If you don't distribute it, there is no way it will be available to anyone else besides you, unless someone steals it from you. In which case you can go after them, they have no right to do that. Your code is your, nobody can force you to do anything with it.
This attitude is common with the older generation who aren't used to the net. "Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
Has he never volunteered for anything? Has he never helped his neighbor to shovel his driveway when his neighbor was sick? I don't think it has anything to do with older generation, or the net.
I also don't believe that NEA has anything to do with the moronic attitude of the teacher described in the article. I am an NEA member, and I try to avoid microsoft software as much as I can. I know a number of NEA members who have very poor opinion about microsoft, and very high about Linux, and free software in general.
I think mentioning NEA in the letter was somewhat unfortunate, as it politicizes the whole problem, which seems to be not one of politics, but rather of stupidity.
Re:That marks my end of use for Python
on
Python 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Funny
So what are you going to do, take all your existing Python applications and rewrite them in a different language, in order to avoid the "significant amount of work to maintain existing functionality with new language version"?
I am not sure about that. I seem to recall, from my old attempts to do some work with Informix databases, that there was absolutely no connection between the software and the instruction book that was supposed to describe it. The most mysterious thing was that sometimes, although very rarely, the software actually did behave in the way described in the book. Maybe this new research will shed some light onto this mystery.
What I was getting at is that it actually does work both ways. An understanding of our real world (physics), often constrains what real mathematicians do once they leave the university. You will not make it very far as an actuary, for example, if you do not understand at least the basic physics of what happens when someone experiences an automobile crash or a myocardial infarction.
What you are saying is that a part of a training of an actuary should be physics. However, someone working in the areas like mathematical logic, set theory or model theory, categories, or geometry really does not need much knowledge of physics. Any of them can benefit from some knowledge of physics, but no more than they can benefit from knowledge of say biology or psychology. Philosophy would definitely be more appropriate for these disciplines. As far as analysts go, they usually learn enough physics while studying differential equations and continuum mechanics, so a separate physics class is in my opinion unnecessary.
I was just looking at the propeller kit in a mint box at thinkgeek last night. I was thinking about getting it for my daughter, but now I think I may look at arduino first.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of scriptable document. The main difference between an electronic document and a paper document is that an electronic document is viewed on the screen, which gives you a lot of possibilities. Having an option to interact with the document, for example to highlight or hide certain part of an illustration or a diagram, etc.
There is, or *should* be, a fundamental difference between document macros as found for example in MS Office, but also used by other software into some extent (e.g. vim modelines), and a scripting language embedded in a document reader. Macros are supposed to help editing and creating the document. For that they usually have access to everything your wordprocessor, spreadsheet or editor can access, including your filesystem. A scripting language in a document viewer should be able to modify the way the document is displayed. That's it, there is no reason for it to access the filesystem or the network. That is where Adobe messed up big time.
No javascript in pdf is an excellent solution. It's a DOCUMENT, not a video game or word processor or anything else. You don't get javascript on a paper printout; you don't need javascript in the electronic version of a paper printout.
Except that PDF document is not always an electronic version of a paper printout. Many use it that way, but I think that's actually pretty dumb. It is an electronic document, not an electronic version of a paper document. That makes a lot of differences. If a document is primarily intended for reading on screen, you want to design it differently than one thats intended for print. Page size, font, etc. And there is nothing wrong about giving the reader an option to interact with the document in some way, for example give them a way to emphasize certain parts of an illustration, manipulate a 3d CAD object etc.
I agree with you that 99% of web pages use javascript in a totally stupid way. I also browse with javascript off. However, as a math teacher I like the possibility to embed a Java applet in a page, and give user the possibility to interact with it using elements on the page.
Actually, that makes sense. What Microsoft software produces is not HTML. Calling it Microsoft HTML makes a clear distinction. Although "garbage" may be more appropriate.
I don't know about bash, but zsh does make ssh connections. It also looks at a contents of a tar ball when you type something like tar xjf tarball.tar.bz2 blah
But he was *making money*, get it? Coin - money...
Anyway, the interesting thing here is not that he designed something with free software, people do that all the time, but that his design won. Of course I didn't read the article, but A assume his was not the only entry, and that at least some other entries were prepared with proprietary software.
So it wouldn't be "an author wrote a book using OpenOffice" but rather "a book written using OpenOffice won some prize". Of course books created by free software regularly win top places at typography contests, so it would still not be that unusual.
There is, however, certain feeling among both professionals and public that in the area of graphics design, proprietary software rules, and using free software gives you a serious handicap. That is what makes this interesting.
Actually, the original saying, as I learned it sometimes in mid 80's, did not have the word "therefore", it was just a simple conjunction.
Also, the conclusion is obviously correct. I can easily replace any program by a single NOP instruction, which will not do what the program was supposed to do, and therefore will be buggy. Except for programs that are supposed to do nothing, you would have to use a different instruction for those.
I've never really understood the opposition to rote learning, myself. Sure it's tedious to, say, have to memorize historical dates, but it has a point to it: once you reach a critical mass of dates, you can start to associate them with respect to one another.
This seems to be one of the most recent theories in "education psychology" or "psychology of learning" or whatever is it called. We are told that this is the way people learn, first you have to build up a critical amount of data, and then you start drawing connections.
According to this theory, I must be some sort of alien. I always found it impossible to memorize things without drawing connections between them first. I first have to figure out how something connects to other things I know before I can remember it. Lately I have been getting better, but for a long part of my life I was unable to memorize my own phone number, addresses and names of people, birthdays etc. As far as historical dates go, I nearly failed high school history all three years we were required to take it. I barely made it through with Ds.
I have a PhD in mathematics, and I teach mathematics, and if I had to learn calculus as a rote memorization of facts and techniques, I would have never became a mathematician.
Maybe rote memorization works for some people, but it never worked for me.
Slashdot Mirror
When I saw the subject, I thought you were going to tell us that you name your servers after famous idiots.
Also... How can something military be open source at all?
Lot's of software written by the military is not secret. For example, I believe the Army ran some sort of engineering competition for kids, where the participants had to "design and test" a bridge using a computer bridge simulator. The software was freely available (Windows only), and there were calls for them to release it as open source. They actually said they were considering it. I can't see how that could compromise our national security. Also, they recently released the source to a 3D modeler application they were using for many years to do some sort of simulations. I don't remember the details, but I think you should be able to find it on Freshmeat.
That reminds me of a story that was supposed to happen sometimes in late 80's in Prague. The police tried to confiscate a dissident's computer (I believe the dissident was actually Vaclav Havel). They took the keyboard and the monitor, writing them down in the report as "computer" and "TV". They left the main body on his desk, telling him that "he can keep the amplifier".
but if you don't know what command you need to run your stuck (dir? catalog? oh, ls...that was my next guess!).
man -k "list directory"
I have number of very similar experiences. I live in Michigan, and have several extended family members in New England that I visit quite often. The shortest way to drive from Michigan to New England is through Canada. I have traveled his way number of times in past several years. It's always the same: when entering Canada, you are welcomed by a pleasant officer, who asks the usual questions you get asked on any other border crossing, plus if you have any firearms in the vehicle. Then they let you in the country with a smile. When entering back into the USA, the officer is invariably grumpy, with an attitude like "you are lucky if I let you back in the country, punk!", for both Americans and foreigners.
I have a memory from my childhood that I can almost recall at will, at almost any time. When I was 6, my father took me on a week long canoeing trip. I remember standing on a road, looking through some trees down to the river onto some cool rapids which we were about to go down. I can see in my mind what seems to be a perfect picture: the side of the road, the wooded slope covered with dry leaves, trees, and the river. It seems that I could just sit down a draw the scene from my memory. The funny thing is, every time I try to focus on some detail, for example when try to identify the trees, or look at a number on a mile-post next to the road, or something like that, the whole picture completely disappears, and I have hard time recalling it again. The details are simply not there at all.
Now if I were to draw the scene, I would undoubtedly substitute some sort of simplified shapes, or maybe just a pattern of shades of green, for the leaves. But you could look at the details of the drawing and see how it was done. You probably would be unable to identify the trees by their leaves, the drawing would not contain that much details, but you would be able to see the way the image is rendered on paper. I cannot do that with the mental image. I believe that in my mind I am able to render the overall image without actually rendering the details at all, not even as some sort of impressionist jumble of colors and shades. If that's the case, transferring this image onto paper would require filling in all the details in some way, which, IMHO, is exactly the hard part of drawing or painting.
Anybody teaching networking would know what the heck Unix
In my experience, you are rather naive here.
is unless he has been thrust into that job with no background.
which is exactly what happens all the time, all over the place.
The truth is if your story was in the least part true then what we have is a failure to educate. If someone teaching a networking class doesn't know what Linux is then the community really needs to work harder educating people about.
Considering that there are crowds of elementary school math teachers who do not know how to multiply and divide fractions (not to even mention addition), I would say yes, we really do need to work harder.
If you don't distribute it, there is no way it will be available to anyone else besides you, unless someone steals it from you. In which case you can go after them, they have no right to do that. Your code is your, nobody can force you to do anything with it.
This attitude is common with the older generation who aren't used to the net. "Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
Has he never volunteered for anything? Has he never helped his neighbor to shovel his driveway when his neighbor was sick? I don't think it has anything to do with older generation, or the net.
I also don't believe that NEA has anything to do with the moronic attitude of the teacher described in the article. I am an NEA member, and I try to avoid microsoft software as much as I can. I know a number of NEA members who have very poor opinion about microsoft, and very high about Linux, and free software in general.
I think mentioning NEA in the letter was somewhat unfortunate, as it politicizes the whole problem, which seems to be not one of politics, but rather of stupidity.
So what are you going to do, take all your existing Python applications and rewrite them in a different language, in order to avoid the "significant amount of work to maintain existing functionality with new language version"?
I am not sure about that. I seem to recall, from my old attempts to do some work with Informix databases, that there was absolutely no connection between the software and the instruction book that was supposed to describe it. The most mysterious thing was that sometimes, although very rarely, the software actually did behave in the way described in the book. Maybe this new research will shed some light onto this mystery.
how did the bismuth samarium ferrite get to the university's A. James Clark School of Engineering?
What I was getting at is that it actually does work both ways. An understanding of our real world (physics), often constrains what real mathematicians do once they leave the university. You will not make it very far as an actuary, for example, if you do not understand at least the basic physics of what happens when someone experiences an automobile crash or a myocardial infarction.
What you are saying is that a part of a training of an actuary should be physics. However, someone working in the areas like mathematical logic, set theory or model theory, categories, or geometry really does not need much knowledge of physics. Any of them can benefit from some knowledge of physics, but no more than they can benefit from knowledge of say biology or psychology. Philosophy would definitely be more appropriate for these disciplines. As far as analysts go, they usually learn enough physics while studying differential equations and continuum mechanics, so a separate physics class is in my opinion unnecessary.
I was just looking at the propeller kit in a mint box at thinkgeek last night. I was thinking about getting it for my daughter, but now I think I may look at arduino first.
Ehm, that's not funny!
There is nothing wrong with the concept of scriptable document. The main difference between an electronic document and a paper document is that an electronic document is viewed on the screen, which gives you a lot of possibilities. Having an option to interact with the document, for example to highlight or hide certain part of an illustration or a diagram, etc.
There is, or *should* be, a fundamental difference between document macros as found for example in MS Office, but also used by other software into some extent (e.g. vim modelines), and a scripting language embedded in a document reader. Macros are supposed to help editing and creating the document. For that they usually have access to everything your wordprocessor, spreadsheet or editor can access, including your filesystem. A scripting language in a document viewer should be able to modify the way the document is displayed. That's it, there is no reason for it to access the filesystem or the network. That is where Adobe messed up big time.
No javascript in pdf is an excellent solution. It's a DOCUMENT, not a video game or word processor or anything else. You don't get javascript on a paper printout; you don't need javascript in the electronic version of a paper printout.
Except that PDF document is not always an electronic version of a paper printout. Many use it that way, but I think that's actually pretty dumb. It is an electronic document, not an electronic version of a paper document. That makes a lot of differences. If a document is primarily intended for reading on screen, you want to design it differently than one thats intended for print. Page size, font, etc. And there is nothing wrong about giving the reader an option to interact with the document in some way, for example give them a way to emphasize certain parts of an illustration, manipulate a 3d CAD object etc.
I agree with you that 99% of web pages use javascript in a totally stupid way. I also browse with javascript off. However, as a math teacher I like the possibility to embed a Java applet in a page, and give user the possibility to interact with it using elements on the page.
Actually, that makes sense. What Microsoft software produces is not HTML. Calling it Microsoft HTML makes a clear distinction. Although "garbage" may be more appropriate.
I don't know about bash, but zsh does make ssh connections. It also looks at a contents of a tar ball when you type something like tar xjf tarball.tar.bz2 blah
But he was *making money*, get it? Coin - money...
Anyway, the interesting thing here is not that he designed something with free software, people do that all the time, but that his design won. Of course I didn't read the article, but A assume his was not the only entry, and that at least some other entries were prepared with proprietary software.
So it wouldn't be "an author wrote a book using OpenOffice" but rather "a book written using OpenOffice won some prize". Of course books created by free software regularly win top places at typography contests, so it would still not be that unusual.
There is, however, certain feeling among both professionals and public that in the area of graphics design, proprietary software rules, and using free software gives you a serious handicap. That is what makes this interesting.
Actually, the original saying, as I learned it sometimes in mid 80's, did not have the word "therefore", it was just a simple conjunction.
Also, the conclusion is obviously correct. I can easily replace any program by a single NOP instruction, which will not do what the program was supposed to do, and therefore will be buggy. Except for programs that are supposed to do nothing, you would have to use a different instruction for those.
ISO is significantly more important than record companies.
I've never really understood the opposition to rote learning, myself. Sure it's tedious to, say, have to memorize historical dates, but it has a point to it: once you reach a critical mass of dates, you can start to associate them with respect to one another.
This seems to be one of the most recent theories in "education psychology" or "psychology of learning" or whatever is it called. We are told that this is the way people learn, first you have to build up a critical amount of data, and then you start drawing connections.
According to this theory, I must be some sort of alien. I always found it impossible to memorize things without drawing connections between them first. I first have to figure out how something connects to other things I know before I can remember it. Lately I have been getting better, but for a long part of my life I was unable to memorize my own phone number, addresses and names of people, birthdays etc. As far as historical dates go, I nearly failed high school history all three years we were required to take it. I barely made it through with Ds.
I have a PhD in mathematics, and I teach mathematics, and if I had to learn calculus as a rote memorization of facts and techniques, I would have never became a mathematician.
Maybe rote memorization works for some people, but it never worked for me.
You mean a 7th grader would put the second sentence together in a better way? You are right, I suspect the kid is actually a 6th grader.
Thank you!
I wish I had some mod points.