No way. I'll be the first to say, that in _some_ cases, the professor speaking the words is the originator of the knowledge that is being passed on...professors, are as a profession, naturally involved in a lot of research.
Statistically speaking, however, 99.99% of what a professor spews is not their original research. (Disclaimer, I am not a statistician!) And where do you think they're getting this "Intellectual Property"? Most likely, from the same bloody book that the students are reading from. Either that, or the knowledge has been passed onto them from their own professors, or from other readings.
Oh, and I don't know about you guys, but I _rarely_ took verbatim notes in college. Most of what i wrote down simply paraphrased what the professor said. Which their paraphrasing from someone else, who paraphrased it from other people, and so on and so forth. I have no objection to this "knowledge-passing via the web". It's just too bad the Universities didn't get involved in it on their own.
Who cares if it's done behind the universities' backs? Students are paying to attend, and the university provides them with an education. The 'contract' between 'student' and 'school' ends at that.
As an aside, I agree with the originator of this thread...college professors are some of the most out-of-touch people on the planet (except, of course, for most of my comp sci professors;). Half of them have never even been out of school since they started. And with regards to the poster who asked for "proof" that college professors are out of touch...well, this is exactly the type of response i would have expected from a professor him/herself! Unfortunately, I'm sorry, but I seem to have misplaced my copy of "The Definitive Study of the Out-of-Touchness of College Professors", so I'll have to rely on the anecdotal evidence I accumulated over the 4 years I spent in a state university.
"All changes to the Red Hat Linux OS will be delivered freely to the entire open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL)"
This says nothing about additional software added to the system, such as Motif. I'd doubt that we'll see a free version of Motif anytime soon. Not that I'd especially want to, except maybe to run the dynamically-linked version of Netscape. Then again, Mozilla's doing just fine w/o Motif.
Personally, I'm more interested in the "Java Support" the article mentions. Kudos to the Blackdown and the Kaffe people, no doubt, but they can always use more help.
Well, there might be plenty of Linux experts around here, but hardly any "Corel Linux" experts...give us some time, they haven't even "officially" released it yet.
I'm a Debian user, but two days ago I would have recommended either Mandrake or Red Hat to a newbie. Then you could "upgrade" to Debian later. However, if we're lucky, you could end up getting the best of both worlds with Corel right here.
Actually, IIRC, the clause refers not to "routinely shipped libraries" but instead to "essential system libraries"...to me, the distinction is vital.
There is absolutely nothing "essential" about QT for Linux...I can rm that tree, and my system will reboot just fine. You can't however simply remove the Windows\System directory, and expect anything to work properly.
Before this degenerates into yet another GPL vs. the world flamewar, let me take this opportunity to stand in the pulpit. Those who release their code under the GPL are doing so because, just possibly, they believe in certain ideals about the way software (especially their software!!!) should be used. We _must_ respect those ideals, or else we open the Gates of Troy wide open to those who would love to pillage the jewels that Open Source has produced.
Now we are growing at a tremendous rate, and perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the GPL's details to assure that it has strengthened, and not weakened, with age. I won't make a case for or against, but as the topic seems to spark such fire, there may definitely be some benefit to an objective analysis of the whole situation.
Nonetheless, right now the strongest thing that stands in the way of a marauding band of corporate source-code raiders and the work we've done over the past few years _is_ the GPL. We must not betray it.
Hmm, what's with this MacOS 9 stuff I'm reading about? Granted, I'm not at all a Mac follower, but with that incredibly sweet cinema display I've seen, I was thinking about picking one of those G4s up once MacOS X client was available for it. I didn't even know there was going to be a MacOS 9.
Anyone know if 9 is closer to 8 or is closer to X?
In my experience, most of the true "geeks" I've met are remarkably open-minded about such things. Just reading the previous posts has confirmed my beliefs; most of us care...we may differ on the hows and the whys, but I haven't seen any "women belong in the kitchen"-type posts.
The problem is that most of the people that the rest of the world interacts on a daily basis are non-geeks. And it's these non-geeks that hold the myths about where men and women belong most dearly.
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that every non-geek holds these old world ideals, just that those ideals are mostly prevalent outside the geek community. And since our lot in life generally keeps us from having impact on people when they're most impressionable, there's little "we" can do about it, except keep welcoming women into the fold with open arms.
As much as I love Linux, I hate to be the one to have to point this out, but the "reason" Linux may not be mentioned is that Linux may not actually be used.
Beowulf is an OS-independent architecture; PVM and MPI, for example, both run on multiple OSes (even including Win32, IIRC). Now, I'm sure that it's probably running on some form of Unix, but it could just as well be FreeBSD or Solaris as Linux.
That is perfectly fine for them to say with their code. But the Linux Kernel is definitely out of "beta-test", and has been for quite some time. And the only people who can say that it's in a beta test are those who develop it (and I mean _all_ of those). BTW, so is X-windows, so is the GIMP, so is KDE, and the list goes on and on.
Corel has no right to take developers code published under the GPL, say, "Oh it's in beta test!" and restrict the users. If I want to take the Linux kernel off of a Corel distribution beta, they have no right to stop me.
Anyone who signs that contract and violates it by posting software already released under the GPL is no warez kiddie, but simply a Linux software distributor, just like we can all be.
Our influence is measured by the code we can write, and who needs money to tell M$ that they have done the world wrong when we can better spend our time doing the world right?
Dude, before the Visor, I would never even consider buying any Palm except for the IIIx...I _need_ the RAM, baby! I've seen sites online that you can buy Palm IIIx's upgraded with 16MB of RAM! Screw those Palm V's with 2MB...and the VII's too...I think they also only have 2MB. Maybe 4, but it's not upgradeable.
But if the Visor is upgradable, that's acceptable. And then again, even if it isn't the deluxe model has 8MB. I _guess_ that's good enough for me.
Also, one difference between the new Collections and the pre-existing collection classes such as Vector and Hashtable is that the older classes were entirely threadsafe, while the newer ones are not. Thus, if you can guarantee that your collection will only be exposed to one thread at a time, you can gain a slight performance benefit by using them.
IMHO, software should be written _primarily_ with "solving the problem" in mind, with readibility/maintainability/reusability also as the foremost concerns. "Optimizing for performance" should be pretty far down on the list. That's why Java's relative slowness doesn't bother me at all.
As far as I'm concerned, the primary place one should look to improve the speed of an app is hardware. We always joke that if you want speed, don't write in Java, use C! Then some other yuckster says, "Be a real hacker, only write Assembly!"
Certainly, an experienced coder can avoid most of the common pitfalls associated with writing an app in a lower-level language. However, experienced coders are a scarce resource, and even they aren't perfect. And when you choose a language because you are optimizing _for_ performance in software, that programming style is more likely to result in buggy systems than optimizing for maintainability.
Higher-level languages generally come about to address deficiencies in the lower-level languages, and almost without exception, they carry with them a performance penalty. But, in Java's case, provided that you don't have a buggy JVM, you can be guaranteed that an app written in Java is immune to such problems as buffer overflows that are prolific in the C-application world.
So, when people tell me, "Don't use Java, it's slow," my immediate response usually starts with, "So What?"
As much as I absolutely _love_ everything that Blizzard has put out, and I'm totally looking forward to this game, there has been only one RTS game that has stood the test of time with me: Age of Empires. And there is no game I'm looking more forward to than AOE 2.
Yes, yes...I realize that my purchase of that game ends up with me putting more money into the Evil Empire's coffers, but I can't help myself! The detail, the units, the buildings...I'm drawn to it like a moth to flame!
If I understand you correctly, this sort of thing is rather easy using Java's reflection capabilities. I've never done a template before, but I think I have an idea of what you're looking for. The basic procedure goes like this:
The first time an object is added to the list, you'd get a reference to the object's class, using it's getClass() method...even if the function takes an "Object" as a parameter, this method will get the instance's exact class. This "Class" reference can be stored in the list.
From then on, you only have to compare any other objects that are added...as in: if(newObject.getClass() == listClass) { //add to list } else { throw new SomeCustomException(); }
>- Can't use aggregate function in WHERE clause. For example, the following statement is legal with MySQL : >SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE id = max(id);
Hmm...IIRC, you can't do this in SQL92. So it's actually a symptom of PostgresQL's stricter adherence to SQL.
Of course, with my luck, I'm totally wrong about this, and deserve every flame I get because of it.
(For the record, I dual boot Linux and Be, and love Open Source)
1) I haven't seen a Be zealot badmouth Open Source anywhere in this thread. I've seen them say that it's not the most important thing in the world, yes. But there's a world of difference in between those two statements. Please don't be so reactionary.
2) Be may have some wanna-be UNIX roots, but it's hardly washed-up, and media is not make-believe. Some people in the world actually work with the stuff, believe it or not. Just because I spend my days programming and reading/., doesn't mean everyone does.
3) I share your pain with the "If you just TRIED it" nonsense, even though I am a Be user. Try to remember that most of these folks are Windows/Mac refugees. Some that try it, love it (as I do), some don't.
4) As far as impressing you goes, you may not care about the particular demo that you ran, but I have never seen an OS take such advantage of my processor power with media applications. But if the only things that impress you are multiuser capability and a rock-solid TCP/IP stack, hell stick with Linux.
5) Be users are not the most obnoxious of any group. Almost without exception, Be users have tried one OS (whichever), and taken that serious plunge into trying another. That alone separates them from the Mac or Windows One True Way crowd.
6) Open Source is important, even if you've never personally hacked the kernel code. I'll quote you on that, and even add to it. It's important if you've never hacked any code, or even seen any code. Nothing saddens my day more than to see a new Be app come out as *gag* cripple-...er shareware; as if I'm gonna pay $15 for an MP3 player.
I have a _great_ deal of respect for the open source community...far more than I have for the Be community taken on the whole. But be a little more forgiving of them, huh? They're new here:)
There are immature people in all walks of life. There are zealots in all walks of life. And yes, indeed, there are immature zealots.
I'm not even beginning to excuse the behavior that these people have shown, however, I just have to say that this looks like a nicely wrapped example of the kind of (dis)information that companies like Mindcraft like to spread. They've received hundreds/thousands of emails with regards to this test, and they've provided their own sample "statistically representative" of the Linux community. Sure. Do they honestly expect me to believe that this is the _usual_ type of correspondance that they received? My guess is that the overwhelming majority of those emails were along the lines of "I disagree with your results.....The particular benchmarks sound like they were chosen to specifically target Linux's weaknesses...I have been working with Linux for years and it soundly outperforms NT...etc etc etc". Instead, Mindcraft posts a page with 5 or 6 flames. As if the Windows/Mac/Prolife/Prochoice/Catholic/Protestant crowds are made up of a better stock than Linux users....oh yeah, those people don't flame anyone.
My Borders in NJ carries the Debian Installation Guide, which (of course) includes a CD. Unfortunately, it's version 2.0. So no included "apt" to do an easy upgrade to 2.1 or 3.0 unstable.
Slashdot Mirror
No way. I'll be the first to say, that in _some_ cases, the professor speaking the words is the originator of the knowledge that is being passed on...professors, are as a profession, naturally involved in a lot of research.
Statistically speaking, however, 99.99% of what a professor spews is not their original research. (Disclaimer, I am not a statistician!) And where do you think they're getting this "Intellectual Property"? Most likely, from the same bloody book that the students are reading from. Either that, or the knowledge has been passed onto them from their own professors, or from other readings.
Oh, and I don't know about you guys, but I _rarely_ took verbatim notes in college. Most of what i wrote down simply paraphrased what the professor said. Which their paraphrasing from someone else, who paraphrased it from other people, and so on and so forth. I have no objection to this "knowledge-passing via the web". It's just too bad the Universities didn't get involved in it on their own.
Who cares if it's done behind the universities' backs? Students are paying to attend, and the university provides them with an education. The 'contract' between 'student' and 'school' ends at that.
;). Half of them have never even been out of school since they started. And with regards to the poster who asked for "proof" that college professors are out of touch...well, this is exactly the type of response i would have expected from a professor him/herself! Unfortunately, I'm sorry, but I seem to have misplaced my copy of "The Definitive Study of the Out-of-Touchness of College Professors", so I'll have to rely on the anecdotal evidence I accumulated over the 4 years I spent in a state university.
As an aside, I agree with the originator of this thread...college professors are some of the most out-of-touch people on the planet (except, of course, for most of my comp sci professors
"All changes to the Red Hat Linux OS will be delivered freely to the entire open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL)"
This says nothing about additional software added to the system, such as Motif. I'd doubt that we'll see a free version of Motif anytime soon. Not that I'd especially want to, except maybe to run the dynamically-linked version of Netscape. Then again, Mozilla's doing just fine w/o Motif.
Personally, I'm more interested in the "Java Support" the article mentions. Kudos to the Blackdown and the Kaffe people, no doubt, but they can always use more help.
Well, there might be plenty of Linux experts around here, but hardly any "Corel Linux" experts...give us some time, they haven't even "officially" released it yet.
I'm a Debian user, but two days ago I would have recommended either Mandrake or Red Hat to a newbie. Then you could "upgrade" to Debian later. However, if we're lucky, you could end up getting the best of both worlds with Corel right here.
Aesthetics and Pentium optimizations may be based on Mandrake's example, but the heart of this bad boy is pumping Debian blood.
Hmm, but in a BSD-style license, can I not just take your code, and sublicense it under the GPL?
Actually, IIRC, the clause refers not to "routinely shipped libraries" but instead to "essential system libraries"...to me, the distinction is vital.
There is absolutely nothing "essential" about QT for Linux...I can rm that tree, and my system will reboot just fine. You can't however simply remove the Windows\System directory, and expect anything to work properly.
Before this degenerates into yet another GPL vs. the world flamewar, let me take this opportunity to stand in the pulpit. Those who release their code under the GPL are doing so because, just possibly, they believe in certain ideals about the way software (especially their software!!!) should be used. We _must_ respect those ideals, or else we open the Gates of Troy wide open to those who would love to pillage the jewels that Open Source has produced.
Now we are growing at a tremendous rate, and perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the GPL's details to assure that it has strengthened, and not weakened, with age. I won't make a case for or against, but as the topic seems to spark such fire, there may definitely be some benefit to an objective analysis of the whole situation.
Nonetheless, right now the strongest thing that stands in the way of a marauding band of corporate source-code raiders and the work we've done over the past few years _is_ the GPL. We must not betray it.
Hmm, what's with this MacOS 9 stuff I'm reading about? Granted, I'm not at all a Mac follower, but with that incredibly sweet cinema display I've seen, I was thinking about picking one of those G4s up once MacOS X client was available for it. I didn't even know there was going to be a MacOS 9.
Anyone know if 9 is closer to 8 or is closer to X?
To quote the fine print on the bottom of your slashdot page:
Comments are owned by the Poster
In my experience, most of the true "geeks" I've met are remarkably open-minded about such things. Just reading the previous posts has confirmed my beliefs; most of us care...we may differ on the hows and the whys, but I haven't seen any "women belong in the kitchen"-type posts.
The problem is that most of the people that the rest of the world interacts on a daily basis are non-geeks. And it's these non-geeks that hold the myths about where men and women belong most dearly.
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that every non-geek holds these old world ideals, just that those ideals are mostly prevalent outside the geek community. And since our lot in life generally keeps us from having impact on people when they're most impressionable, there's little "we" can do about it, except keep welcoming women into the fold with open arms.
As much as I love Linux, I hate to be the one to have to point this out, but the "reason" Linux may not be mentioned is that Linux may not actually be used.
Beowulf is an OS-independent architecture; PVM and MPI, for example, both run on multiple OSes (even including Win32, IIRC). Now, I'm sure that it's probably running on some form of Unix, but it could just as well be FreeBSD or Solaris as Linux.
Just thought I'd clarify the point a bit.
2: They do have the right to sublicense
Erm, no they don't. Not unless they got the approval from everyone that every published GPL'ed work in their distribution.
I don't buy that argument, not for one second.
That is perfectly fine for them to say with their code. But the Linux Kernel is definitely out of "beta-test", and has been for quite some time. And the only people who can say that it's in a beta test are those who develop it (and I mean _all_ of those). BTW, so is X-windows, so is the GIMP, so is KDE, and the list goes on and on.
Corel has no right to take developers code published under the GPL, say, "Oh it's in beta test!" and restrict the users. If I want to take the Linux kernel off of a Corel distribution beta, they have no right to stop me.
Anyone who signs that contract and violates it by posting software already released under the GPL is no warez kiddie, but simply a Linux software distributor, just like we can all be.
Our influence is measured by the code we can write, and who needs money to tell M$ that they have done the world wrong when we can better spend our time doing the world right?
Dude, before the Visor, I would never even consider buying any Palm except for the IIIx...I _need_ the RAM, baby! I've seen sites online that you can buy Palm IIIx's upgraded with 16MB of RAM! Screw those Palm V's with 2MB...and the VII's too...I think they also only have 2MB. Maybe 4, but it's not upgradeable.
But if the Visor is upgradable, that's acceptable. And then again, even if it isn't the deluxe model has 8MB. I _guess_ that's good enough for me.
Also, one difference between the new Collections and the pre-existing collection classes such as Vector and Hashtable is that the older classes were entirely threadsafe, while the newer ones are not. Thus, if you can guarantee that your collection will only be exposed to one thread at a time, you can gain a slight performance benefit by using them.
IMHO, software should be written _primarily_ with "solving the problem" in mind, with readibility/maintainability/reusability also as the foremost concerns. "Optimizing for performance" should be pretty far down on the list. That's why Java's relative slowness doesn't bother me at all.
As far as I'm concerned, the primary place one should look to improve the speed of an app is hardware. We always joke that if you want speed, don't write in Java, use C! Then some other yuckster says, "Be a real hacker, only write Assembly!"
Certainly, an experienced coder can avoid most of the common pitfalls associated with writing an app in a lower-level language. However, experienced coders are a scarce resource, and even they aren't perfect. And when you choose a language because you are optimizing _for_ performance in software, that programming style is more likely to result in buggy systems than optimizing for maintainability.
Higher-level languages generally come about to address deficiencies in the lower-level languages, and almost without exception, they carry with them a performance penalty. But, in Java's case, provided that you don't have a buggy JVM, you can be guaranteed that an app written in Java is immune to such problems as buffer overflows that are prolific in the C-application world.
So, when people tell me, "Don't use Java, it's slow," my immediate response usually starts with, "So What?"
As much as I absolutely _love_ everything that Blizzard has put out, and I'm totally looking forward to this game, there has been only one RTS game that has stood the test of time with me: Age of Empires. And there is no game I'm looking more forward to than AOE 2.
Yes, yes...I realize that my purchase of that game ends up with me putting more money into the Evil Empire's coffers, but I can't help myself! The detail, the units, the buildings...I'm drawn to it like a moth to flame!
I hear about this all the time, and I'm really curious as to what it looks like. Are there screenshots of this wm posted anywhere?
If I understand you correctly, this sort of thing is rather easy using Java's reflection capabilities. I've never done a template before, but I think I have an idea of what you're looking for. The basic procedure goes like this:
//add to list
The first time an object is added to the list, you'd get a reference to the object's class, using it's getClass() method...even if the function takes an "Object" as a parameter, this method will get the instance's exact class. This "Class" reference can be stored in the list.
From then on, you only have to compare any other objects that are added...as in:
if(newObject.getClass() == listClass)
{
}
else
{
throw new SomeCustomException();
}
>- Can't use aggregate function in WHERE clause. For example, the following statement is legal with MySQL :
>SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE id = max(id);
Hmm...IIRC, you can't do this in SQL92. So it's actually a symptom of PostgresQL's stricter adherence to SQL.
Of course, with my luck, I'm totally wrong about this, and deserve every flame I get because of it.
(For the record, I dual boot Linux and Be, and love Open Source)
/., doesn't mean everyone does.
:)
1) I haven't seen a Be zealot badmouth Open Source anywhere in this thread. I've seen them say that it's not the most important thing in the world, yes. But there's a world of difference in between those two statements. Please don't be so reactionary.
2) Be may have some wanna-be UNIX roots, but it's hardly washed-up, and media is not make-believe. Some people in the world actually work with the stuff, believe it or not. Just because I spend my days programming and reading
3) I share your pain with the "If you just TRIED it" nonsense, even though I am a Be user. Try to remember that most of these folks are Windows/Mac refugees. Some that try it, love it (as I do), some don't.
4) As far as impressing you goes, you may not care about the particular demo that you ran, but I have never seen an OS take such advantage of my processor power with media applications. But if the only things that impress you are multiuser capability and a rock-solid TCP/IP stack, hell stick with Linux.
5) Be users are not the most obnoxious of any group. Almost without exception, Be users have tried one OS (whichever), and taken that serious plunge into trying another. That alone separates them from the Mac or Windows One True Way crowd.
6) Open Source is important, even if you've never personally hacked the kernel code. I'll quote you on that, and even add to it. It's important if you've never hacked any code, or even seen any code. Nothing saddens my day more than to see a new Be app come out as *gag* cripple-...er shareware; as if I'm gonna pay $15 for an MP3 player.
I have a _great_ deal of respect for the open source community...far more than I have for the Be community taken on the whole. But be a little more forgiving of them, huh? They're new here
There are immature people in all walks of life.
There are zealots in all walks of life.
And yes, indeed, there are immature zealots.
I'm not even beginning to excuse the behavior that these people have shown, however, I just have to say that this looks like a nicely wrapped example of the kind of (dis)information that companies like Mindcraft like to spread. They've received hundreds/thousands of emails with regards to this test, and they've provided their own sample "statistically representative" of the Linux community. Sure. Do they honestly expect me to believe that this is the _usual_ type of correspondance that they received? My guess is that the overwhelming majority of those emails were along the lines of "I disagree with your results.....The particular benchmarks sound like they were chosen to specifically target Linux's weaknesses...I have been working with Linux for years and it soundly outperforms NT...etc etc etc". Instead, Mindcraft posts a page with 5 or 6 flames. As if the Windows/Mac/Prolife/Prochoice/Catholic/Protestant crowds are made up of a better stock than Linux users....oh yeah, those people don't flame anyone.
Please.
Man, if you can't remember that it came out of the Holy Trilogy, you definitely need to clone some more brain cells.
My Borders in NJ carries the Debian Installation Guide, which (of course) includes a CD. Unfortunately, it's version 2.0. So no included "apt" to do an easy upgrade to 2.1 or 3.0 unstable.