the reason it's an issue is federal agencies will be posting videos to youtube. Just because they get someone else to do something doesn't mean they're not still responsible for the rules governing it.
I still don't see the match. Which federal agency is using persistent cookies to track visitors?
What's the state going to do to people who "accidentily" build a faraday cage around the antenna?
Or to people who "accidentally" build a fake set of GPS satellite transmitters that cause them to only make twisty little drives around town that when you look at on a map spell "BIG BROTHER FUCK OFF"?
That's why many people have started using Macs. Yes, they cost more but they are the best of both worlds.
Yes, but one of those worlds is a steaming pile of shit.:)
I have to agree with LithiumX: OSX isn't nearly as usable as it could be. It needs way more configurability esp with the mouse, Spaces, and "window manager" functionality. I think most users don't know what they're missing or only use Windows as a basis for comparison.
(I'd love to see the mouse tune itself based on usage, but I don't think anyone does that.)
My favorite feature: two-finger scroll. This is excellent. This is the one and only thing I miss when I go back to my Linux laptop.
That being said, the only area where I could imagine Linux eating Apple's lunch is in the $200 three-task netbook department, but Apple won't ever play in that space anyway for price reasons.
People like macs because they look good. This is seriously something to consider esp if you want to cater to the coffee shop crowd. If I were Apple I would definitely not want a cool sub-$400 Linux laptop on the market.
Given that students can get around the restrictions, why restrict their use of the machines you give them?
State law? Liability?
You need a lawyer, not Slashdot.:)
Seriously, what if I sue the school because the school said the machines would be locked down at night, and I find my kid surfing porn sites at 1 am?
Don't worry about the machines being "useless". Be worried about crippling them so much that the students go out of their way to go around the restrictions.
I wonder why you're getting them the machines in the first place, too. Computers can be wonderful teaching tools, but whiteboard-based lesson plans of the 20th century utterly fail to take advantage of them. Hopefully there's a change in teaching styles as well.
Where are you such that you can afford so many computers--macbooks, no less?! And you're giving them to kids who don't own them! Amazing. I would personally get a deal on $100 laptops in bulk, but hey, that's just me.
You answered your own question then. Think about it. Why do people get into computer science programming? Because they want to program a game!
When I took Java, the cool thing was making Pacman, or some other nifty visual thing that was easy to do. Then I could say "sweet! I can make stuff that looks cool!" I didn't say, "Sweet! I can control the computer on the Byte level, and control pixels on my screen!"
I say that now.
I think you're right about this for a certain class of people. I was talking to my brother about programming years ago, and he wanted to make a Norton Commander clone or something. Basically his first reaction was, "I have to do all that shit just to put some text on the screen?" (This was in C, mind you!) "Forget it."
Another class of people get into it to understand the workings of the system... I think those types of people tend to love assembly and the low-level stuff.
I wonder what would happen if schools identified students' motivations up-front, and then put them in specifically tailored tracks that cater to their interests.
First impressions do mean a lot--could some people be better off starting with Scheme, some with Java, and some with assembly?
1. No profanity in any of the code or comments... when I want to say:
printf("WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT!!\n");
I instead command myself to write:
printf("AAAAA\n");
This avoids those cases where the end-user might see something really bad that got left in the code.
2. No easter eggs. Unless you are willing to say that everyone who holds your future contracts in their hands is guaranteed to not look upon the easter egg in a negative light, you're taking a chance. The mere presence of an easter egg might be enough, no matter how innocuous.
That being said, years ago when I was a young student intern, I wrote a telnet client for Windows (before one was bundled with it, of course) that would pop up a dialog box with a picture of a goat and the words "Goats detected!" whenever the string "goats activate" was received. This was my first and last "professional" easter egg, and I consider it a dumb idea that is now good for a small laugh.
Here's one particular usage I'm not sure SVN can keep up with (or maybe it can--I've been out of the SVN loop)...
I go on the road quite a bit for vacation, but sometimes work gets in the way. For the times I'm out of internet range for periods of a few days, (I know; what is this--the South Pole?) it's great to clone the repo to my laptop before I hit the road.
That way I still get version tracking and branching and all that good stuff. I just push it back when I get a net connection. To be safer, you can always back up your local repo to a thumb drive or something.
It totally beats just having a copy of your source files that you check back in later.
Parent is modded funny (because it is), but it's pretty much true, too! How can you trust any of the IDs on that list now? If you assume The Terrorists have the list, you must apply extra scrutiny to everyone on it, not let them pass by security unmolested.
How much boiler plate do I have to put up to write a document conforming to ACM article standards? Bibliography management? Etc?
Two Imperial Assloads. I'm guessing. But I really don't know for certain.
I was having a lot of trouble coaxing plain TeX to do what I wanted, and Unicode was the straw that broke the camel's back in that case. Ease of installation of the document processing system was something to be considered, and Apache FOP is a trivial install.
What I have now is a XML processor written in Python (it used to be XSLT, but I'd had enough of that after a while) that munges my XML code into XSL-FO, and then fop produces PS and PDFs. All the contents and index are generated by the Python processor. (fop doesn't support the XSL-FO 1.1 indexing stuff--at least it didn't the last time I looked--so options are limited and nasty for eliminating duplicate page numbers in the index.)
However, for my needs, it works just fine. (I want to quickly produce A4/US Letter 1-/2-sided from a single source document.) But my typesetting needs are simplistic compared to those of math- and layout-heavy users.
1. Standardized IDE. Everyone use the same thing and you will be able to do builds, deployments, and fix bugs quicker.
How do you get everyone to convert to vim?;-) About a third the projects I've worked on have used a common IDE, and that's because it was the best thing to do, and one's life would be hell if one didn't switch. It didn't matter on the other projects, and everyone just used what they used best. I think it kind of sorts itself out that way.
IM of everyone
IM is excellent. Excellent! Even intra-office!
3. Version control. SVN for me.
I used to use SVN, but for this latest one, I switched to git (though I'm the only dev on this arm of the code for this project). I cloned the repo to my laptop and took my work out of internet range for the weekend. It was cool. (Except for working on the weekend.)
5. Standardized build and deployment. ANT/Bash scripts/whatever
Everyone should be able to do the canonical build if possible. Sometimes it's neat to have multiple build systems to cater to different developer needs, though.
6. Basic development practices (test/commit often), QA methodology/granularity.
I'd love to see more of this, especially built into the schedule.;-)
The definition of "success" I am using in this case is overthrowing a powerful government with full control of the largest and best-funded standing army in the world, through force of arms alone. Apples and oranges, we're talking. I agree that small arms can't take out the Army or fight their way into the White House.
I'm saying the presence of small arms changes the dynamic so that in conflict there is a non-trivial impact politically, socially, and economically. The material impact is rather small in comparison.
So, "through force of guns alone", no. Through result of force of guns, yes--for some definitions of "overthrow". The effects are more likely to be evolutionary than revolutionary, of course.
Consider Waco. Because of the guns and PR disaster, now every time the feds move in on a compound, they are acutely aware that they don't want it to "turn into another Waco". Did the defending force stand a chance? Never. Did they have a long-lasting impact that caused policy change? Absolutely.
Contrast this with the recent bloodless compound grab that made headlines.
I'm not making a statement here about the right- or wrong-ness of any of these events; just that one had a much greater impact. The one with the guns.
Do you really think a handgun would be any use whatsoever against the armour-plated, tank driving army
Well, we have been in Iraq for quite some time now with our mountains of superior technology. A pile of guns is way more a thorn in the side of an oppressor than a pointed stick.
Given the weapons available to the general public right now, no such armed revolt could ever succeed. I disagree, for some definitions of "success". Small arms and homemade bombs are playing a significant role in shaping the future Iraq.
Well, I admit it might have had a few; I didn't go over all the code. But by LOC, the lion's share didn't.
It was on a specialized piece of hardware running a half-inhouse-built OS. Everything was resident all the time and we were very conscious about when objects were created and destroyed (preferably rarely.) Memory limits were a serious issue.
didn't you use lists, vectors, maps etc?
Not the STL variety, no.
I can't imagine a C++ program without at least one template in use.
It's not that far-fetched. Lots of languages get by just fine without using them. (Though they definitely have a use.) In some situations, it's not such a heinous crime to not use STL.
I have to agree to a certain extent. It's a large language to wrap your head around. Compare it to the D language, for example, especially before D 2.0. (No language wars intended. I don't program in D.)
To better understand C++ and know what you're getting into, I recommend the book "Inside the C++ Object Model". Also, "C++ FAQs".
Since the FAQ book weighs in at 566 pages, I think you might have a case.
One of the replies to your post said you'd have these problems in any language if you didn't understand it. This is true, but some languages are easier to understand than others. Look at the online C FAQ. Look at the C++ book compared to K&R2. C and C++ are not in the same complexity class. Therefore, I would argue, it's easier to avoid these types of problems in C than in C++.
That being said, I worked on a major project with a half-dozen other engineers that consisted of about 1 MLOC of C++. It worked absolutely fine, and being OO was great for the application. I can't remember any of us being bitten by C++isms, but we used basic C++, e.g. no templates, no multiple inheritance, and so on. Kept it simple because that's all that was needed.
Don't be afraid of C++. But most definitely read the entire FAQ Book. "Practice, prrractice!"
Firefox crashes on me every time I view a YouTube video thanks to the wonderfully crappy proprietary, closed source Flash plugin for Firefox on GNU/Linux.
Hey--I used to have a problem where Firefox (tried many versions) under Linux (Slackware 12) would hang consistently after viewing a flash movie (tried many plugin versions) then starting to view a second one. I suspected it had something to do with the audio, I found after tracing with gdb, and seeing how non-audio flash pieces didn't crash it.
Turns out that if I start up xmms or audacious on some mp3, then hit pause (has to be pause--not stop) or just let it play, then I can view flash movies to my heart's content without a crash.
It's a kludge, but maybe with a little luck it works for you.
Buy those movies used. It's legal, and you're supporting a local business rather than the MPAA and its cohorts, which, quite frankly, we'd be better off without. (Bring on the 14-year copyright term, I say!)
You might as well exploit the used DVD "loophole" while it still exists.
My memory is poor since it was so long ago, but it seems to me the pool ball was only about 20% more massive, and the risk of damage was worth it to have an track-8-ball.:) In any case, the 386sx died before the trackball did (it retired). I ditched it because it was a 2-button and I hate chording and it didn't do me right in Quake.
But I'd definitely consider one again... if it didn't cost freakin' $100.
Slashdot Mirror
the reason it's an issue is federal agencies will be posting videos to youtube. Just because they get someone else to do something doesn't mean they're not still responsible for the rules governing it.
I still don't see the match. Which federal agency is using persistent cookies to track visitors?
What's the state going to do to people who "accidentily" build a faraday cage around the antenna?
Or to people who "accidentally" build a fake set of GPS satellite transmitters that cause them to only make twisty little drives around town that when you look at on a map spell "BIG BROTHER FUCK OFF"?
Yes, but one of those worlds is a steaming pile of shit. :)
Rereading, I think you might have been talking about Unix and Mac as the two worlds. In that case, neither is a SPOS. Please accept my apology.
I was, of course, attempting to make a Windows joke.
That's why many people have started using Macs. Yes, they cost more but they are the best of both worlds.
Yes, but one of those worlds is a steaming pile of shit. :)
I have to agree with LithiumX: OSX isn't nearly as usable as it could be. It needs way more configurability esp with the mouse, Spaces, and "window manager" functionality. I think most users don't know what they're missing or only use Windows as a basis for comparison.
(I'd love to see the mouse tune itself based on usage, but I don't think anyone does that.)
My favorite feature: two-finger scroll. This is excellent. This is the one and only thing I miss when I go back to my Linux laptop.
That being said, the only area where I could imagine Linux eating Apple's lunch is in the $200 three-task netbook department, but Apple won't ever play in that space anyway for price reasons.
People like macs because they look good. This is seriously something to consider esp if you want to cater to the coffee shop crowd. If I were Apple I would definitely not want a cool sub-$400 Linux laptop on the market.
Given that students can get around the restrictions, why restrict their use of the machines you give them?
State law? Liability?
You need a lawyer, not Slashdot. :)
Seriously, what if I sue the school because the school said the machines would be locked down at night, and I find my kid surfing porn sites at 1 am?
Don't worry about the machines being "useless". Be worried about crippling them so much that the students go out of their way to go around the restrictions.
I wonder why you're getting them the machines in the first place, too. Computers can be wonderful teaching tools, but whiteboard-based lesson plans of the 20th century utterly fail to take advantage of them. Hopefully there's a change in teaching styles as well.
Where are you such that you can afford so many computers--macbooks, no less?! And you're giving them to kids who don't own them! Amazing. I would personally get a deal on $100 laptops in bulk, but hey, that's just me.
You answered your own question then.
Think about it. Why do people get into computer science programming? Because they want to program a game!
When I took Java, the cool thing was making Pacman, or some other nifty visual thing that was easy to do. Then I could say "sweet! I can make stuff that looks cool!" I didn't say, "Sweet! I can control the computer on the Byte level, and control pixels on my screen!"
I say that now.
I think you're right about this for a certain class of people. I was talking to my brother about programming years ago, and he wanted to make a Norton Commander clone or something. Basically his first reaction was, "I have to do all that shit just to put some text on the screen?" (This was in C, mind you!) "Forget it."
Another class of people get into it to understand the workings of the system... I think those types of people tend to love assembly and the low-level stuff.
I wonder what would happen if schools identified students' motivations up-front, and then put them in specifically tailored tracks that cater to their interests.
First impressions do mean a lot--could some people be better off starting with Scheme, some with Java, and some with assembly?
I realize that I would probably not be interested in comp sci if I was thrown assembly the first day.
Can I ask, why is that? What about assembly would have made it uninteresting?
Difficulty? Low-level-ness? Amount of work required to do basic tasks?
(This is an honest and respectful question, for the record.)
A couple of my personal rules are
1. No profanity in any of the code or comments... when I want to say:
printf("WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT!!\n");
I instead command myself to write:
printf("AAAAA\n");
This avoids those cases where the end-user might see something really bad that got left in the code.
2. No easter eggs. Unless you are willing to say that everyone who holds your future contracts in their hands is guaranteed to not look upon the easter egg in a negative light, you're taking a chance. The mere presence of an easter egg might be enough, no matter how innocuous.
That being said, years ago when I was a young student intern, I wrote a telnet client for Windows (before one was bundled with it, of course) that would pop up a dialog box with a picture of a goat and the words "Goats detected!" whenever the string "goats activate" was received. This was my first and last "professional" easter egg, and I consider it a dumb idea that is now good for a small laugh.
Here's one particular usage I'm not sure SVN can keep up with (or maybe it can--I've been out of the SVN loop)...
I go on the road quite a bit for vacation, but sometimes work gets in the way. For the times I'm out of internet range for periods of a few days, (I know; what is this--the South Pole?) it's great to clone the repo to my laptop before I hit the road.
That way I still get version tracking and branching and all that good stuff. I just push it back when I get a net connection. To be safer, you can always back up your local repo to a thumb drive or something.
It totally beats just having a copy of your source files that you check back in later.
Parent is modded funny (because it is), but it's pretty much true, too! How can you trust any of the IDs on that list now? If you assume The Terrorists have the list, you must apply extra scrutiny to everyone on it, not let them pass by security unmolested.
Is there a free implementation for rendering XSL-FO? Using "optimal" formatting (e.g. Knuth-Plass)?
Yes (Apache fop), and... maybe? I can't find a definitive answer, but there is this:
http://wiki.apache.org/xmlgraphics-fop/KnuthsModel
How long is "Hello World"? B/c IIRC XSL-FO is very verbose (not just because of XML, but the language design).
You have to write a "master" for each page type, but it's not that bad:
http://www.renderx.com/tutorial.html#Hello_World
Non-trivial documents do get big fast, though.
How much boiler plate do I have to put up to write a document conforming to ACM article standards? Bibliography management? Etc?
Two Imperial Assloads. I'm guessing. But I really don't know for certain.
I was having a lot of trouble coaxing plain TeX to do what I wanted, and Unicode was the straw that broke the camel's back in that case. Ease of installation of the document processing system was something to be considered, and Apache FOP is a trivial install.
What I have now is a XML processor written in Python (it used to be XSLT, but I'd had enough of that after a while) that munges my XML code into XSL-FO, and then fop produces PS and PDFs. All the contents and index are generated by the Python processor. (fop doesn't support the XSL-FO 1.1 indexing stuff--at least it didn't the last time I looked--so options are limited and nasty for eliminating duplicate page numbers in the index.)
However, for my needs, it works just fine. (I want to quickly produce A4/US Letter 1-/2-sided from a single source document.) But my typesetting needs are simplistic compared to those of math- and layout-heavy users.
1. Standardized IDE. Everyone use the same thing and you will be able to do builds, deployments, and fix bugs quicker.
How do you get everyone to convert to vim? ;-) About a third the projects I've worked on have used a common IDE, and that's because it was the best thing to do, and one's life would be hell if one didn't switch. It didn't matter on the other projects, and everyone just used what they used best. I think it kind of sorts itself out that way.
IM of everyone
IM is excellent. Excellent! Even intra-office!
3. Version control. SVN for me.
I used to use SVN, but for this latest one, I switched to git (though I'm the only dev on this arm of the code for this project). I cloned the repo to my laptop and took my work out of internet range for the weekend. It was cool. (Except for working on the weekend.)
5. Standardized build and deployment. ANT/Bash scripts/whatever
Everyone should be able to do the canonical build if possible. Sometimes it's neat to have multiple build systems to cater to different developer needs, though.
6. Basic development practices (test/commit often), QA methodology/granularity.
I'd love to see more of this, especially built into the schedule. ;-)
I'm saying the presence of small arms changes the dynamic so that in conflict there is a non-trivial impact politically, socially, and economically. The material impact is rather small in comparison.
So, "through force of guns alone", no. Through result of force of guns, yes--for some definitions of "overthrow". The effects are more likely to be evolutionary than revolutionary, of course.
Consider Waco. Because of the guns and PR disaster, now every time the feds move in on a compound, they are acutely aware that they don't want it to "turn into another Waco". Did the defending force stand a chance? Never. Did they have a long-lasting impact that caused policy change? Absolutely.
Contrast this with the recent bloodless compound grab that made headlines.
I'm not making a statement here about the right- or wrong-ness of any of these events; just that one had a much greater impact. The one with the guns.
Do you really think a handgun would be any use whatsoever against the armour-plated, tank driving army
Well, we have been in Iraq for quite some time now with our mountains of superior technology. A pile of guns is way more a thorn in the side of an oppressor than a pointed stick. Given the weapons available to the general public right now, no such armed revolt could ever succeed. I disagree, for some definitions of "success". Small arms and homemade bombs are playing a significant role in shaping the future Iraq.Well, I admit it might have had a few; I didn't go over all the code. But by LOC, the lion's share didn't.
It was on a specialized piece of hardware running a half-inhouse-built OS. Everything was resident all the time and we were very conscious about when objects were created and destroyed (preferably rarely.) Memory limits were a serious issue.
didn't you use lists, vectors, maps etc?
I can't imagine a C++ program without at least one template in use.Not the STL variety, no.
It's not that far-fetched. Lots of languages get by just fine without using them. (Though they definitely have a use.) In some situations, it's not such a heinous crime to not use STL.
I have to agree to a certain extent. It's a large language to wrap your head around. Compare it to the D language, for example, especially before D 2.0. (No language wars intended. I don't program in D.)
To better understand C++ and know what you're getting into, I recommend the book "Inside the C++ Object Model". Also, "C++ FAQs".
Since the FAQ book weighs in at 566 pages, I think you might have a case.
One of the replies to your post said you'd have these problems in any language if you didn't understand it. This is true, but some languages are easier to understand than others. Look at the online C FAQ. Look at the C++ book compared to K&R2. C and C++ are not in the same complexity class. Therefore, I would argue, it's easier to avoid these types of problems in C than in C++.
That being said, I worked on a major project with a half-dozen other engineers that consisted of about 1 MLOC of C++. It worked absolutely fine, and being OO was great for the application. I can't remember any of us being bitten by C++isms, but we used basic C++, e.g. no templates, no multiple inheritance, and so on. Kept it simple because that's all that was needed.
Don't be afraid of C++. But most definitely read the entire FAQ Book. "Practice, prrractice!"
$700? Is this really the best they can do in the era of the $100 laptop?
No! Slackware supports punchcards.
What about cloned human meat? Do you realize what you could charge for that stuff?
I'm going to take back some of the things I've said about you, Bill. You...[handing over candybar] You've earned it.
I'm not sure that it's quite so clear-cut as you're making it out to be, but I can't imagine anyone pursuing MS over this even with their history. Maybe if Flash starts to falter...
Turns out that if I start up xmms or audacious on some mp3, then hit pause (has to be pause--not stop) or just let it play, then I can view flash movies to my heart's content without a crash.
It's a kludge, but maybe with a little luck it works for you.
Believe it. We're willing to pay $260 billion a year on interest on the national debt.
Buy those movies used. It's legal, and you're supporting a local business rather than the MPAA and its cohorts, which, quite frankly, we'd be better off without. (Bring on the 14-year copyright term, I say!)
You might as well exploit the used DVD "loophole" while it still exists.
My memory is poor since it was so long ago, but it seems to me the pool ball was only about 20% more massive, and the risk of damage was worth it to have an track-8-ball. :) In any case, the 386sx died before the trackball did (it retired). I ditched it because it was a 2-button and I hate chording and it didn't do me right in Quake.
But I'd definitely consider one again... if it didn't cost freakin' $100.