My background is a BS at the University of Wyoming, and more recently a MS at the University of Colorado.
I'm proud to say that all CS majors at UW had to take a senior level programming languages course, which taught some history of computing in addition to the concepts of programming languages. For example, we talked about Babbage and Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Wirth, etc, in addition to Pascal, Prolog, Ada, C, LISP, etc. I don't know if the undergraduate program at CU also covers the history, but I hope it does.
I also remember students complaining that they never got to do any Windows programming at UW. Now I'm glad I didn't. (There were a few topics classes that used VB for GUI stuff, but they were few and far between). For the most part all programming was done on unix boxes. Or, for introductory courses, on PCs using the Borland compilers. Almost all of the graduate courses at CU were unix based, or tended to be platform independent, but all the CS labs are unix or linux.
As a graduate student, I met very few people who had the "I want to program to make me rich" attitude, but that's not suprising at the graduate level. There weren't too many of those in my undergrad CS classes either... but that may have been a bit before the big software boom.
Right before I got my BS, I ended up doing workstudy in the computer labs, and running severl lab sessions for the intro courses. I saw a lot of wannabes drop out after they found out that programming wasn't the "easy" path to riches they thought it would be.
Maybe these differences are produced by beign from a different part of the country. Or maybe they are just an artifact of getting my undergrad degree a few years before you did. Either way, I'm glad I got the broad, trans-windows experience I did. And I hope that the academic community returns to a quality education that isn't just about churning out windows apps for a quick buck.
Actually, I'm proud to say that Babbage, Lovelace, and Hopper all showed up as important names in the Programming Languages class I took as an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming (of all places!). The text, ("Foundations of Programming Languages" by Sebest I think) actually went into a lot of history of each of the languages it touched on (including flowmatic), and the history of computing in general.
I think it's a bit ironic that the only 4 year university in the entire state of Wyoming (considered by many to be the armpit of the US) actually taught something of value that many other (possibly even more prestigious) schools have neglected.
Besides my bit of history, and the fact that I never touched a MS compiler (almost all unix based!) during my years at UW, I wonder what other benefits I've unknowingly collected over an education elsewhere?
Unfortunately the book is somewhat dated, relying on kernel 2.2(.14?). And while most of the exercises are decent, I think learning about VFS and the filesystem code by hacking together a FAT driver was a waste of time.
The possibility of having lecture notes available online is an interesting exercise, but I'm not sure of what general relevance or use it might be. The textbook always contains superiour information, that is why they USE textbooks after all, and lecture notes are, in fact, often useless without the text and only needed to make sure you might have some niggling little tidbit that * that professor, in THAT course, is likely to sneak into a TEST.*
Except, I've a number of classes where the textbooks were strictly optional. Why? Because the professor thought they only provided good background information. Or, the textbook only supplied a convenient reference... all the "real" learning was based upon the lecture. There are numerous reasons this could happen - here are just a few:
1) There aren't any appropriate textbooks. For example, I took "Linux Kernel Interals". It was all hands on, looking at the code. All the lectures were based upon the professor's and students' personal knowledge. Or how about "Computer Architecture", where our studies were based on architecture principles realized in the PDP-8? (A machine with a decent architecture without being too complex to completely understand.) The only thing available was the lecture notes (which have subsequently been published in textbook form, I believe).
2) It's a topics/research class. You don't find many textbooks for "Current Topics in MiddleWare". Or in "Current trends in Organo-Metallic Chemistry Research", if you want to leave the computer science field. Sure, you can reference some of the appropriate journal articles, but they won't don't give you the comprehensive view and insights that lecture notes give.
3) It's a subjective field. How about all those humanities classes? (I'm sure even MIT students have to take a few of these.) Sure, you can list the "Norton Anthology of American Poetry" as a text book, but that by itself won't give you any insight into the cultural and historical forces that shaped a given poem. And it certainly won't help you when the test asks you to expound upon how the author makes an emotional connection with the reader through his careful selection of language.
I think I've expressed my point. I've usually found lecture notes to be infinitely more valuable than some textbooks. I will admit that there is occasionally a textbook that beats out the lecture notes, but usually that's been because of a lousy lecturer. There's a lot more worth here than you are giving MIT credit for.
Re:Postal was never a good game in the first place
on
Loki Goes Postal
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· Score: 2
Nope, not on Linux. I got this for the mac several years ago, and had no idea it was still around. I just assumed that when it went off the shelves it died a quiet death.
Re:Postal was never a good game in the first place
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 2
I agree that Postal does have some very funny levels, but it also takes a bit of a warped sense of humor to see that.;-)
On the other hand, I agree with the original poster that it wasn't a great game. After a few weeks I had to turn down the sound because I just couldn't take one more voice saying "I can't feel my legs..." And eventually I couldn't get past a couple levels without cheating, so they game has been shelved for a couple of years.
Maybe I'll go get it back out and blow away the marching band again...
When I was in school, most of the projects were individual as well. But the CS department also realized the disadvantages to working in a void.
Therefore, it was not considered cheating to work out algorithms, etc, in a group provided that that group was attributed in the source code. For example, if I ask Joe Coder for help with a method, my comments had better give him some credit. And if I work out an algorithm as part of a group, I'd better have a big comment at the top of the file listing the members of the group.
It's hard to enforce the attribution of help from individuals, but if it's a group attribution, you can just cross-reference the members' credits. And if someone has the same code that isn't listed in the group, you have a list of people to check with (it's not impossible a name got left out by accident).
Of course, this doesn't mean that all the code will be verbatim. You still want students to avoid wholesale copying, but sharing in ideas is fostered. And it becomes fairly obvious if a student has a bunch of group attributions to all of his code, and very little code written on his own.
Lemmings qualifies as non-violent? The game where those cute little guys can fall off cliffs, be fried by flamethrowers, blown up, drowned, decapitated, and squished? That Lemmings?:-)
That's exactly what I thought. I suppose if you held it up against Doom, Quake, etc, it's much less violent. Though I also remember having contests to see who could wipe out an entire group of Lemmings the fastest (without pushing the Nuke button)...
But that takes the position that Bush is personally responsible for anything that his administration does... I doubt he signs off on every decision made by every person in Washington acting as part of the "Bush Administration".
Unless I see a quote from him, a report that he personally approved it, or that he personally pushed for it, I doubt he even knows about it.
Bush isn't mentioned in either CNN or BBS article... The only explanation I could find is that The decision was made in order to obtain a "prompt, effective and certain relief for consumers", said the DoJ in a statement.
I don't know about you, but this has had exactly the opposite effect on me. Relief? No. Disbelief? Yes.
Though you still have to be careful with a few things...
like "sudo sh" or "sudo su" where the only log you get is that a particular person ran sh/su, but not what they did after that point.
But IIRC, you can configure sudo access to specific programs/commands, and can block access to ones that cause problems like this.
And as long as you send your syslogs to a remote/secure machine you don't have to worry about a sudoer editting the logs to cover up after themselves either.
True, this will tell you if you are *infected*, but it doesn't tell you if you are *vulnerable* (but not yet infected).
Re:OT: pedantic correction
on
Code Redux
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· Score: 2
Yeah, yeah I know 'boxen' is plural.
I was typing too fast and my "any Win boxen" became "a Win boxen"...
Code Red Self Test
on
Code Redux
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· Score: 5, Interesting
While out and about looking for the latest Code Red statistics, I found this link to a Code Red Self Test which is supposed to tell you if you are vulnerable, and if you have been infected.
I don't know if it works, I don't have a Win boxen to test it on...
I've had a number of laptops, all of varying degrees of performance, depending on what my employer thought I needed (or had available).
I started with a Toshiba model several years ago, which was decent at the time (when it was one of the few NT approved laptops), but quite heavy, and slow by modern comparison.
Last summer I moved into a HP Omnibook 9000, which was really pretty sweet, but it tended to run hot if I left dnetc running all the time. (Not a problem if you put it on a desk/table, but when you unhook it from you monitor, keyboard, etc, and plop it on your lap, it can be a bit uncomfortable.) My only complaint about this one was that the disk was a touch small, and the default partitioning was really poorly laid out.
Since then I've switched companies, and I'm living in a Gateway Solo Pro 9300. A decent machine, but I can max out the memory on it pretty easily. The DVD player is entertaining, but I haven't had any real "business" use for it yet.;-) And something happened to the sound drivers when the SysOps upgraded it to Win2K SP2. (Don't flame me, it's company policy to use Win2K even though it makes an expensive X-Term.)
And if not the entire ACM Portal, at least look at the ACM's digital library.
It provides the ability to search on a variety of fields (title, author, keywords, full text, etc) and to download in PDF if available.
Searching is free, but you need a subscription or pay-per-use to get the full text. With membership, you also get access to a useful "My Bookshelf" tool where you can save and organize search results and individual papers.
My only complaint is that for some older articles, the PDF seems to be generated from an image scan of the text, rather than the text itself, resulting in huge files for only a few pages.
Reading the articles, (linked here and at newsforge), they are not including any user patches. Though they also stated that there were not many user supplied patches, the main addition from users were the race maps.
For some background, I'd been working at a company with a small US office, and a large Australian office. All the SysAdmins were in Oz, and so some of us engineers ended up doing all the "emergency maintenance" when anything broke or didn't work during the US work hours.
The two questions I really remember asking at the last SysAdmin interview I took part in were:
How do you feel about 'sudo'? (This company just tended to let everyone in the US have root and use su blindly - despite my objections.)
What are some common problems with 'samba' in a mixed unix/NT/Win98 network and how can you avoid them? (We had recurring problems with Win98 refusing to play nicely with unix shares.)
Since these were real-world problems that we'd experienced, I knew this kind of thing would come up again. Also, they indicated how broad the candidate's experience was, whether he had worked with mixed networks, knew what sudo was, etc. He had great answers, but then our hiring budget dried up...
Several of the companies I've worked for are trying to require users to have a.sig that automatically attaches the legal blurb to every email. I doubt they intended for it to prevent the loss of proprietary information due to viruses, but it's a nice side benefit.;-)
However, I've always tried to fight this "requirement" for all email. Sure, it makes sense if I'm actually attaching a document that could have IP or whatnot, but if I'm sending an email that says "Hey, let's go for beers after work" I really hate having a legal disclaimer attached to it. Especially when the disclaimer is longer than the message.
easyDNS.com, one of the OpenSRS companies, just sent me a reply about the next step in transferring away from Network Solutions (and I still haven't heard back from Network Solutions).
When easyDNS receives notification that the transfer has timed out from a pending registry approval (9 days), they can resubmit the request to Network Solutions. I guess I'll have to wait and see what Network Solutions does this time...
Slashdot Mirror
My background is a BS at the University of Wyoming, and more recently a MS at the University of Colorado.
I'm proud to say that all CS majors at UW had to take a senior level programming languages course, which taught some history of computing in addition to the concepts of programming languages. For example, we talked about Babbage and Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Wirth, etc, in addition to Pascal, Prolog, Ada, C, LISP, etc. I don't know if the undergraduate program at CU also covers the history, but I hope it does.
I also remember students complaining that they never got to do any Windows programming at UW. Now I'm glad I didn't. (There were a few topics classes that used VB for GUI stuff, but they were few and far between). For the most part all programming was done on unix boxes. Or, for introductory courses, on PCs using the Borland compilers. Almost all of the graduate courses at CU were unix based, or tended to be platform independent, but all the CS labs are unix or linux.
As a graduate student, I met very few people who had the "I want to program to make me rich" attitude, but that's not suprising at the graduate level. There weren't too many of those in my undergrad CS classes either... but that may have been a bit before the big software boom.
Right before I got my BS, I ended up doing workstudy in the computer labs, and running severl lab sessions for the intro courses. I saw a lot of wannabes drop out after they found out that programming wasn't the "easy" path to riches they thought it would be.
Maybe these differences are produced by beign from a different part of the country. Or maybe they are just an artifact of getting my undergrad degree a few years before you did. Either way, I'm glad I got the broad, trans-windows experience I did. And I hope that the academic community returns to a quality education that isn't just about churning out windows apps for a quick buck.
Actually, I'm proud to say that Babbage, Lovelace, and Hopper all showed up as important names in the Programming Languages class I took as an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming (of all places!). The text, ("Foundations of Programming Languages" by Sebest I think) actually went into a lot of history of each of the languages it touched on (including flowmatic), and the history of computing in general.
I think it's a bit ironic that the only 4 year university in the entire state of Wyoming (considered by many to be the armpit of the US) actually taught something of value that many other (possibly even more prestigious) schools have neglected.
Besides my bit of history, and the fact that I never touched a MS compiler (almost all unix based!) during my years at UW, I wonder what other benefits I've unknowingly collected over an education elsewhere?
I took that Linux Kernel Internals class at CU (Univ. Colorado) Boulder from Dr. Gary Nutt who turned his lecture notes and assignments into a lab manual Kernel Projects for Linux.
Unfortunately the book is somewhat dated, relying on kernel 2.2(.14?). And while most of the exercises are decent, I think learning about VFS and the filesystem code by hacking together a FAT driver was a waste of time.
The possibility of having lecture notes available online is an interesting exercise, but I'm not sure of what general relevance or use it might be. The textbook always contains superiour information, that is why they USE textbooks after all, and lecture notes are, in fact, often useless without the text and only needed to make sure you might have some niggling little tidbit that * that professor, in THAT course, is likely to sneak into a TEST.*
Except, I've a number of classes where the textbooks were strictly optional. Why? Because the professor thought they only provided good background information. Or, the textbook only supplied a convenient reference... all the "real" learning was based upon the lecture. There are numerous reasons this could happen - here are just a few:
1) There aren't any appropriate textbooks. For example, I took "Linux Kernel Interals". It was all hands on, looking at the code. All the lectures were based upon the professor's and students' personal knowledge. Or how about "Computer Architecture", where our studies were based on architecture principles realized in the PDP-8? (A machine with a decent architecture without being too complex to completely understand.) The only thing available was the lecture notes (which have subsequently been published in textbook form, I believe).
2) It's a topics/research class. You don't find many textbooks for "Current Topics in MiddleWare". Or in "Current trends in Organo-Metallic Chemistry Research", if you want to leave the computer science field. Sure, you can reference some of the appropriate journal articles, but they won't don't give you the comprehensive view and insights that lecture notes give.
3) It's a subjective field. How about all those humanities classes? (I'm sure even MIT students have to take a few of these.) Sure, you can list the "Norton Anthology of American Poetry" as a text book, but that by itself won't give you any insight into the cultural and historical forces that shaped a given poem. And it certainly won't help you when the test asks you to expound upon how the author makes an emotional connection with the reader through his careful selection of language.
I think I've expressed my point. I've usually found lecture notes to be infinitely more valuable than some textbooks. I will admit that there is occasionally a textbook that beats out the lecture notes, but usually that's been because of a lousy lecturer. There's a lot more worth here than you are giving MIT credit for.
Nope, not on Linux. I got this for the mac several years ago, and had no idea it was still around. I just assumed that when it went off the shelves it died a quiet death.
I agree that Postal does have some very funny levels, but it also takes a bit of a warped sense of humor to see that. ;-)
On the other hand, I agree with the original poster that it wasn't a great game. After a few weeks I had to turn down the sound because I just couldn't take one more voice saying "I can't feel my legs..." And eventually I couldn't get past a couple levels without cheating, so they game has been shelved for a couple of years.
Maybe I'll go get it back out and blow away the marching band again...
When I was in school, most of the projects were individual as well. But the CS department also realized the disadvantages to working in a void.
Therefore, it was not considered cheating to work out algorithms, etc, in a group provided that that group was attributed in the source code. For example, if I ask Joe Coder for help with a method, my comments had better give him some credit. And if I work out an algorithm as part of a group, I'd better have a big comment at the top of the file listing the members of the group.
It's hard to enforce the attribution of help from individuals, but if it's a group attribution, you can just cross-reference the members' credits. And if someone has the same code that isn't listed in the group, you have a list of people to check with (it's not impossible a name got left out by accident).
Of course, this doesn't mean that all the code will be verbatim. You still want students to avoid wholesale copying, but sharing in ideas is fostered. And it becomes fairly obvious if a student has a bunch of group attributions to all of his code, and very little code written on his own.
Lemmings qualifies as non-violent? The game where those cute little guys can fall off cliffs, be fried by flamethrowers, blown up, drowned, decapitated, and squished? That Lemmings? :-)
That's exactly what I thought. I suppose if you held it up against Doom, Quake, etc, it's much less violent. Though I also remember having contests to see who could wipe out an entire group of Lemmings the fastest (without pushing the Nuke button)...
Hmmm. Nuke button. Yep. Nonviolent, Heh.
Umm. DOJ is not on the judicial branch.
I didn't post this... /. downtime fuckup.
Another present form the
But that takes the position that Bush is personally responsible for anything that his administration does... I doubt he signs off on every decision made by every person in Washington acting as part of the "Bush Administration".
Unless I see a quote from him, a report that he personally approved it, or that he personally pushed for it, I doubt he even knows about it.
How did this get rated "funny"?
Bush isn't mentioned in either CNN or BBS article... The only explanation I could find is that The decision was made in order to obtain a "prompt, effective and certain relief for consumers", said the DoJ in a statement.
I don't know about you, but this has had exactly the opposite effect on me. Relief? No. Disbelief? Yes.
Find out if sudo will be sufficient. Sudo can be setup to allow any given user to have "rootly powers", except that everything is logged.
Check out the related Ask Slashdot Keeping Audit Trail of Activities from Root Login?.
Information about sudo, including docs, downloads, and mailing lists, is available at http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/index.html.
Though you still have to be careful with a few things...
like "sudo sh" or "sudo su" where the only log you get is that a particular person ran sh/su, but not what they did after that point.
But IIRC, you can configure sudo access to specific programs/commands, and can block access to ones that cause problems like this.
And as long as you send your syslogs to a remote/secure machine you don't have to worry about a sudoer editting the logs to cover up after themselves either.
True, this will tell you if you are *infected*, but it doesn't tell you if you are *vulnerable* (but not yet infected).
Yeah, yeah I know 'boxen' is plural.
I was typing too fast and my "any Win boxen" became "a Win boxen"...
While out and about looking for the latest Code Red statistics, I found this link to a Code Red Self Test which is supposed to tell you if you are vulnerable, and if you have been infected.
I don't know if it works, I don't have a Win boxen to test it on...
I've had a number of laptops, all of varying degrees of performance, depending on what my employer thought I needed (or had available).
;-) And something happened to the sound drivers when the SysOps upgraded it to Win2K SP2. (Don't flame me, it's company policy to use Win2K even though it makes an expensive X-Term.)
I started with a Toshiba model several years ago, which was decent at the time (when it was one of the few NT approved laptops), but quite heavy, and slow by modern comparison.
Last summer I moved into a HP Omnibook 9000, which was really pretty sweet, but it tended to run hot if I left dnetc running all the time. (Not a problem if you put it on a desk/table, but when you unhook it from you monitor, keyboard, etc, and plop it on your lap, it can be a bit uncomfortable.) My only complaint about this one was that the disk was a touch small, and the default partitioning was really poorly laid out.
Since then I've switched companies, and I'm living in a Gateway Solo Pro 9300. A decent machine, but I can max out the memory on it pretty easily. The DVD player is entertaining, but I haven't had any real "business" use for it yet.
And if not the entire ACM Portal, at least look at the ACM's digital library.
It provides the ability to search on a variety of fields (title, author, keywords, full text, etc) and to download in PDF if available.
Searching is free, but you need a subscription or pay-per-use to get the full text. With membership, you also get access to a useful "My Bookshelf" tool where you can save and organize search results and individual papers.
My only complaint is that for some older articles, the PDF seems to be generated from an image scan of the text, rather than the text itself, resulting in huge files for only a few pages.
Reading the articles, (linked here and at newsforge), they are not including any user patches. Though they also stated that there were not many user supplied patches, the main addition from users were the race maps.
For some background, I'd been working at a company with a small US office, and a large Australian office. All the SysAdmins were in Oz, and so some of us engineers ended up doing all the "emergency maintenance" when anything broke or didn't work during the US work hours.
The two questions I really remember asking at the last SysAdmin interview I took part in were:
How do you feel about 'sudo'? (This company just tended to let everyone in the US have root and use su blindly - despite my objections.)
What are some common problems with 'samba' in a mixed unix/NT/Win98 network and how can you avoid them? (We had recurring problems with Win98 refusing to play nicely with unix shares.)
Since these were real-world problems that we'd experienced, I knew this kind of thing would come up again. Also, they indicated how broad the candidate's experience was, whether he had worked with mixed networks, knew what sudo was, etc. He had great answers, but then our hiring budget dried up...
Several of the companies I've worked for are trying to require users to have a .sig that automatically attaches the legal blurb to every email. I doubt they intended for it to prevent the loss of proprietary information due to viruses, but it's a nice side benefit. ;-)
However, I've always tried to fight this "requirement" for all email. Sure, it makes sense if I'm actually attaching a document that could have IP or whatnot, but if I'm sending an email that says "Hey, let's go for beers after work" I really hate having a legal disclaimer attached to it. Especially when the disclaimer is longer than the message.
easyDNS.com, one of the OpenSRS companies, just sent me a reply about the next step in transferring away from Network Solutions (and I still haven't heard back from Network Solutions).
When easyDNS receives notification that the transfer has timed out from a pending registry approval (9 days), they can resubmit the request to Network Solutions. I guess I'll have to wait and see what Network Solutions does this time...