Be sure to ask yourself this question in reverse the next time you view a web site using Word, Powerpoint, AVI, Quicktime or some other asinine proprietary format to distribute data over the internet. As far as I'm concerned postscript was/is one of the great standard formats- great for printers, great for display and programmable! So of course it's ditched for pdf...
As a sort-of computer geek and a sort-of excercise geek as well I find that there's an unexpectedly large intersection between these two segments of society.
Bike riding, and by this I mean road bike riding since that's all I do is particularly suited to geeks of all persuasions. If you take it up you will burn vast amounts of calories- like 1,000/hr and get in better aerobic shape than you ever imagined possible.
Bike riding is both solitary- in that you gotta work on your own and a group activity in that if you work together you can accomplish more than you could riding along. Rides are relatively free form and low committment. You can talk if you want or remain absolutely quite for hours and nobody cares. It's a great, low-pressure way to network as well.
You get to look at chicks in spandax (always sweet) and you'll soon be embarassed in to making sure you look good in spandex too. There are lots of gadgets to obsess over and you can waste as much or as little money as you want. It's easy to start out at and easy on the body as you go along. If you like it, you can be cycling well into your elderly years when your non-biking counterparts will be struggling to shuffle down to the mailbox for their social security checks.
I was involved in a study by UNM on the choice of language for entry level computer scienctist (aka the weed-out course). We considered all the options (java, c++, pascal, lisp, etc) and I happened to think it might be useful to ask practicing programmer what language they learned and what language they would recommend new developers to cut their teeth on.
I asked them to consider both the training (aka marketability) and educational aspects of their recommendation. I didn't want the concerns of getting a job to be the overwhelming focus of their recommendation. I wanted them to also think about how much useful experience, insights and language neutral knowledge they gained from the language they first learned.
Not suprisingly, BASIC was the most common language cited as "first learned" followed closely by PASCAL. FORTRAN, Modula II and SCHEME all placed in statistically close proximity to one another. Don't stop reading yet though- the punch line is to come.
A more interesting trend came from these same practicing programmers answer to the question of whether they felt their first language was of great help to them or simply a cross to bear. FORTRAN 77 was overwhelmingly cited as the most worthwhile language to learn from. This was almost universal among the FORTRAN first users and statistically relavent among those who'd taken learned other langauges first and come to FORTRAN later on. Please note this was conducted in '94 before FORTRAN 90 had sort of taken over.
The BASIC developers, once they had a bit of experience under their belt, as the source of many bad habits and of limited income earning and problem solving potential. The PASCAL initiates saw no use for the langauge beyond academia. Modula II was cited as a very educational language but with limited commercial potential. FORTRAN, though, was overwhelmingly cited as a great langauge to learn from.
It's simplicity gave the semantics a low learning curve but the richness of the constructs and the structure they impose avoided the bad habits picked up within BASIC. The respondents (other than the old hats) were also nearly universally suprised by how widespread FORTRAN was not only for legacy code but as an everyday prototyping and general purpose language. They found FORTRAN knowledge mapped easily into other imperative languages.
So, from both a practical, resume building point of view and for the holistic education FORTRAN will provide- go for it. 215 programmers can't be wrong.
I have been working very hard to bring open source not only to the infrastructure but also the curriculum of UMASS. We get students from all over the US enrolled and they are excited to see these topics as part of the official curriculum. As a result, there are now courses at the on-line and classroom portions of UMASS Lowell and UMASS Boston. Intro courses, admin courses, scripting courses, PERL, Web (PHP/Postgresql) and C++ all using only open source tools.
Contact YOUR university and ask why their distance learning platform doesn't support Linux or open source browsers. Ask them when they intend to start offering courses on open source software and why students have to pay astronomical amounts for Visual C++ when the far better g++ is free!
Believe me- they'll listen to students but only if you make yourselves heard
Please notice that while the "goverment" may run on Microsoft the MOD is much more intelligent- their web site runs Linux/Apache. Guess who's more concerned about security?
Justin
Re:Words, words, just words (and what else?)
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever used a Newton Message pad? The introductory screen was designed to take advantge of people's familiarity with "applcation" but you soon left those deas behind.
The message pad was pleasureable, shortly after beginning to use it, the interface disappeared and allowed you to at least partially forget the notion of applications. There was information, links and a few ways to reorganize it's appearance.
Granted it never transitioned to the wireless internet but both the user interface and the ability of the hardware to communicate with other hardware was as big an advance as the MacIntosh and X11 were in their day. I don't know how the interface would scale to a large screen but it does prove there ARE funadmentally different ideas. The question is who will be the first to conceive of them and whether or not those ideas will be captured within a proprietary intellectual property framework.
Justin
Before you run someone else's opinion into the earth perhaps you should examine the validity of your own ideas (windows of glass and all that). There's noting even remotely real-time about this system after the initial digitization of the raw RADAR signal.
Any issues related to the use of the Linux would have to be the standard ones of verification and standardization- not it's real-time performance. Perhaps you should take some time away from your "IT" classes and examine the meaning of your catch-phrases.
Software is NOT an asset. It depreciates MUCH faster than five years and thus you are nearly always better off taking the expense as soon as possible. Same of course with computers.
The US Military has been doing this for quite a while- it's called "education with industry". It's for junior level officers and should result in their coming back to the military with a deeper appreciation for the difficulty of implementing systems, some improved though system-specific technical skills and some industry contacts.
The companies get more sympathetic government counterparts, some more or less free though less productive help and of course brownie points for helping out Uncle Sam. It's not just the traditional defense companies that receive these EWI slots though- they are in many unexpected companies and specialties. Now that our labs are emasculated it's about the only way young officers can get any hands on experience with new technology.
It's probably of no real, quantifiable benefit to either party but it sounds good and the people who've gone through it seem to have enjoyed the experience.
Nonsense- complete and total nonsense. I hear this sort of stuff all the time and yet do I see any specific examples other than a list of meaningless features none of which actually work as advertised? NO! I say this as a field grade (aka relatively senior) officer in the military who is force to use exchange at work. At home I use the KDE and Mozilla. I don't feel hampered at all using the system at home- can't say the same regarding Exchange/Outlook. they are a heavy duty (in terms of resources), slow and awkward "system". They offer no real functional advantages I have ever seen over Mozilla and KDE.
The airlines are worried on a number of fronts:
1) GPS: Airports are located in congested areas which already have to deal with skyscapers, illegal parking garages, etc. Now with UWBs which walk right on L2 (GPS signal band) perhaps not individually but in aggregate it's likely there will be interference issues.
2) The Microwave Landing System widely used in Europe has a 5Ghz signal. This is also reserved band but may be interferred with by UWB. Like GPS this is used for bad weather landings. Not a time you want interference.
So, yes the airlines are rightly concerned and no it doesn't matter in the face of greedy telecoms. Until someone gets hurt...
And what is it exactly that this paradise is supposed to do for us and what exactly is "healing"? We've been hearing this sort of crap for years esp from Microsoft and what has happened in the meanwhile? The operating system has become larger and relatively slower (given the increase in computational power) with no increase in functionality that I can see over something from 15 years ago. I'm talking OS now- not applications.
Microsoft should have had to pay for advertising space to have this article printed.
Considering the quality of the other essays on Mr. Hufschmid's site I think we can safely say his essay on the future of Linux is guilty by association. Please check out his other essays- they will quickly call his objectivity and research into question.
Re:This patent doesn't really affect Plucker..
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
·
· Score: 1
After reading this string of articles I have decided (and I hope you will to) to summarily remove Advantgo from my palmpilot on monday and replace it with plucker. I wasn't aware this alternative existed and given the licensing pressure Advantgo appears to be using and the filing of the patent I no longer feel willing to support them.
I think it's far more likely that ten years from now MSN or some Microsoft funded alternative will have kicked AOL out of the headlines. AOL did well when people were introducing themselves to the Internet but those days are gone. How long do you think AOL can stave off the www.msn.com that automatically pops up when you start internet explorer? RH is better off going it alone.
has been ditching stock at a fairly good clip. He doesn't want to benefit from all those millions... Srangely though there are few other insiders selling so perhaps.
I don't use AOL but are they actually making use of Linux in any fashion already? They don't use it and RH has minimal earnings and lots of competitors.
What exactly is it about Windows 2000 or XP that makes it such a good desktop? I use both and Linux and can't say that Linux is any better or worse than the Microsoft offerings (as a desktop). I can say that Linux cost a hell of a lot less and stays up longer (I count all REBOOTS including those involved with the installation of software and drivers). No fair comparing installation problems (I had less with Linux) for the OS. Once installed, Linux in the form of RH 7.2 or Mandrake is no less an excellent desktop than Windows. It's no less useable, it's no less "advanced", etc. If it's no fair to say Linux is a desktop OS then what OS exactly are you referring to?
I will also bet that Linux users are MUCH more likely than other users to reject the cookies which these sort of tools rely on. As a result, we are probably left on the table.
Do developers really want help in this area? Would they appreciate documentation developed for their code (I mean end user documentation, not architectual or maintenance documentation). If so, why don't I normally see such a request in the code I use or on the banner of the application? I'm just wondering if people think developers would appreciate this or be put out by a suggestion or submittal.
They don't have to do something illegal for us to punish them. We can punish them just "because" if we are able to organize sufficiently to do so. The ONLY punishment for Microsoft is to deny them sales. That means don't use their products and don't use companies that use their products. It doesn't matter if what Microsoft does is illegal, legal, better or worse than any alternatives. We can punish them anyway. Just don't give them a dime!
Netscape may have been a commodity but IE never was.
In my view, the essence of MS's strategy was to make sure neither IE nor anything else produced by them was a commodity but in fact something exclusive to them.
When I hear distance learning product managers saying they haven't "certified" their application to work with a particular browser I want to throw up my hands. They are idiots but it reflects the general understanding as MS has decreed- their stuff will only work with their stuff and they want your stuff to only work with their stuff too.
MS doesn't want commodities and they will fight to remove any threat of standards impinging upon their exclusive rights to your dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
Be sure to ask yourself this question in reverse the next time you view a web site using Word, Powerpoint, AVI, Quicktime or some other asinine proprietary format to distribute data over the internet. As far as I'm concerned postscript was/is one of the great standard formats- great for printers, great for display and programmable! So of course it's ditched for pdf...
Justin
As a sort-of computer geek and a sort-of excercise geek as well I find that there's an unexpectedly large intersection between these two segments of society.
Bike riding, and by this I mean road bike riding since that's all I do is particularly suited to geeks of all persuasions. If you take it up you will burn vast amounts of calories- like 1,000/hr and get in better aerobic shape than you ever imagined possible.
Bike riding is both solitary- in that you gotta work on your own and a group activity in that if you work together you can accomplish more than you could riding along. Rides are relatively free form and low committment. You can talk if you want or remain absolutely quite for hours and nobody cares. It's a great, low-pressure way to network as well.
You get to look at chicks in spandax (always sweet) and you'll soon be embarassed in to making sure you look good in spandex too. There are lots of gadgets to obsess over and you can waste as much or as little money as you want. It's easy to start out at and easy on the body as you go along. If you like it, you can be cycling well into your elderly years when your non-biking counterparts will be struggling to shuffle down to the mailbox for their social security checks.
In short, I highly recommend it.
I was involved in a study by UNM on the choice of language for entry level computer scienctist (aka the weed-out course). We considered all the options (java, c++, pascal, lisp, etc) and I happened to think it might be useful to ask practicing programmer what language they learned and what language they would recommend new developers to cut their teeth on.
I asked them to consider both the training (aka marketability) and educational aspects of their recommendation. I didn't want the concerns of getting a job to be the overwhelming focus of their recommendation. I wanted them to also think about how much useful experience, insights and language neutral knowledge they gained from the language they first learned.
Not suprisingly, BASIC was the most common language cited as "first learned" followed closely by PASCAL. FORTRAN, Modula II and SCHEME all placed in statistically close proximity to one another. Don't stop reading yet though- the punch line is to come.
A more interesting trend came from these same practicing programmers answer to the question of whether they felt their first language was of great help to them or simply a cross to bear. FORTRAN 77 was overwhelmingly cited as the most worthwhile language to learn from. This was almost universal among the FORTRAN first users and statistically relavent among those who'd taken learned other langauges first and come to FORTRAN later on. Please note this was conducted in '94 before FORTRAN 90 had sort of taken over.
The BASIC developers, once they had a bit of experience under their belt, as the source of many bad habits and of limited income earning and problem solving potential. The PASCAL initiates saw no use for the langauge beyond academia. Modula II was cited as a very educational language but with limited commercial potential. FORTRAN, though, was overwhelmingly cited as a great langauge to learn from.
It's simplicity gave the semantics a low learning curve but the richness of the constructs and the structure they impose avoided the bad habits picked up within BASIC. The respondents (other than the old hats) were also nearly universally suprised by how widespread FORTRAN was not only for legacy code but as an everyday prototyping and general purpose language. They found FORTRAN knowledge mapped easily into other imperative languages.
So, from both a practical, resume building point of view and for the holistic education FORTRAN will provide- go for it. 215 programmers can't be wrong.
vr/
Justin
Contact YOUR university and ask why their distance learning platform doesn't support Linux or open source browsers. Ask them when they intend to start offering courses on open source software and why students have to pay astronomical amounts for Visual C++ when the far better g++ is free!
Believe me- they'll listen to students but only if you make yourselves heard
JustinPlease notice that while the "goverment" may run on Microsoft the MOD is much more intelligent- their web site runs Linux/Apache. Guess who's more concerned about security?
Justin
The message pad was pleasureable, shortly after beginning to use it, the interface disappeared and allowed you to at least partially forget the notion of applications. There was information, links and a few ways to reorganize it's appearance.
Granted it never transitioned to the wireless internet but both the user interface and the ability of the hardware to communicate with other hardware was as big an advance as the MacIntosh and X11 were in their day. I don't know how the interface would scale to a large screen but it does prove there ARE funadmentally different ideas. The question is who will be the first to conceive of them and whether or not those ideas will be captured within a proprietary intellectual property framework. Justin
Before you run someone else's opinion into the earth perhaps you should examine the validity of your own ideas (windows of glass and all that). There's noting even remotely real-time about this system after the initial digitization of the raw RADAR signal.
Any issues related to the use of the Linux would have to be the standard ones of verification and standardization- not it's real-time performance. Perhaps you should take some time away from your "IT" classes and examine the meaning of your catch-phrases.
It runs on Solaris / UltraSparcs dual redundent with custom drivers/networking SW. Commercial equipment and OS- custom SW and drivers.
Software is NOT an asset. It depreciates MUCH faster than five years and thus you are nearly always better off taking the expense as soon as possible. Same of course with computers.
The US Military has been doing this for quite a while- it's called "education with industry". It's for junior level officers and should result in their coming back to the military with a deeper appreciation for the difficulty of implementing systems, some improved though system-specific technical skills and some industry contacts.
The companies get more sympathetic government counterparts, some more or less free though less productive help and of course brownie points for helping out Uncle Sam. It's not just the traditional defense companies that receive these EWI slots though- they are in many unexpected companies and specialties. Now that our labs are emasculated it's about the only way young officers can get any hands on experience with new technology.
It's probably of no real, quantifiable benefit to either party but it sounds good and the people who've gone through it seem to have enjoyed the experience.
Nonsense- complete and total nonsense. I hear this sort of stuff all the time and yet do I see any specific examples other than a list of meaningless features none of which actually work as advertised? NO! I say this as a field grade (aka relatively senior) officer in the military who is force to use exchange at work. At home I use the KDE and Mozilla. I don't feel hampered at all using the system at home- can't say the same regarding Exchange/Outlook. they are a heavy duty (in terms of resources), slow and awkward "system". They offer no real functional advantages I have ever seen over Mozilla and KDE.
Justin
The airlines are worried on a number of fronts:
1) GPS: Airports are located in congested areas which already have to deal with skyscapers, illegal parking garages, etc. Now with UWBs which walk right on L2 (GPS signal band) perhaps not individually but in aggregate it's likely there will be interference issues.
2) The Microwave Landing System widely used in Europe has a 5Ghz signal. This is also reserved band but may be interferred with by UWB. Like GPS this is used for bad weather landings. Not a time you want interference.
So, yes the airlines are rightly concerned and no it doesn't matter in the face of greedy telecoms. Until someone gets hurt...
And what is it exactly that this paradise is supposed to do for us and what exactly is "healing"? We've been hearing this sort of crap for years esp from Microsoft and what has happened in the meanwhile? The operating system has become larger and relatively slower (given the increase in computational power) with no increase in functionality that I can see over something from 15 years ago. I'm talking OS now- not applications.
Microsoft should have had to pay for advertising space to have this article printed.
US Government SW was never open source- it simply couldn't be copyright by the government itself- other organizations were free to do so.
Considering the quality of the other essays on Mr. Hufschmid's site I think we can safely say his essay on the future of Linux is guilty by association. Please check out his other essays- they will quickly call his objectivity and research into question.
After reading this string of articles I have decided (and I hope you will to) to summarily remove Advantgo from my palmpilot on monday and replace it with plucker. I wasn't aware this alternative existed and given the licensing pressure Advantgo appears to be using and the filing of the patent I no longer feel willing to support them.
I think it's far more likely that ten years from now MSN or some Microsoft funded alternative will have kicked AOL out of the headlines. AOL did well when people were introducing themselves to the Internet but those days are gone. How long do you think AOL can stave off the www.msn.com that automatically pops up when you start internet explorer? RH is better off going it alone.
has been ditching stock at a fairly good clip. He doesn't want to benefit from all those millions ... Srangely though there are few other insiders selling so perhaps.
I don't use AOL but are they actually making use of Linux in any fashion already? They don't use it and RH has minimal earnings and lots of competitors.
Any insight as to their motivation?
Futurama with the Evil Clause? Come'on that was a classic. "I see, it's fear that brings up together"
Beautiful. You should have been a writer for the show. I'm not being sarcastic :)
What exactly is it about Windows 2000 or XP that makes it such a good desktop? I use both and Linux and can't say that Linux is any better or worse than the Microsoft offerings (as a desktop). I can say that Linux cost a hell of a lot less and stays up longer (I count all REBOOTS including those involved with the installation of software and drivers). No fair comparing installation problems (I had less with Linux) for the OS. Once installed, Linux in the form of RH 7.2 or Mandrake is no less an excellent desktop than Windows. It's no less useable, it's no less "advanced", etc. If it's no fair to say Linux is a desktop OS then what OS exactly are you referring to?
Justin
I will also bet that Linux users are MUCH more likely than other users to reject the cookies which these sort of tools rely on. As a result, we are probably left on the table.
Do developers really want help in this area? Would they appreciate documentation developed for their code (I mean end user documentation, not architectual or maintenance documentation). If so, why don't I normally see such a request in the code I use or on the banner of the application? I'm just wondering if people think developers would appreciate this or be put out by a suggestion or submittal.
They don't have to do something illegal for us to punish them. We can punish them just "because" if we are able to organize sufficiently to do so. The ONLY punishment for Microsoft is to deny them sales. That means don't use their products and don't use companies that use their products. It doesn't matter if what Microsoft does is illegal, legal, better or worse than any alternatives. We can punish them anyway. Just don't give them a dime!
Netscape may have been a commodity but IE never was.
In my view, the essence of MS's strategy was to make sure neither IE nor anything else produced by them was a commodity but in fact something exclusive to them.
When I hear distance learning product managers saying they haven't "certified" their application to work with a particular browser I want to throw up my hands. They are idiots but it reflects the general understanding as MS has decreed- their stuff will only work with their stuff and they want your stuff to only work with their stuff too.
MS doesn't want commodities and they will fight to remove any threat of standards impinging upon their exclusive rights to your dollars.