LOGO. I'm not kidding. It's the most accessible, instantly gratifying language to learn basic programming structures from.
And now, there's StarLOGO, developed by the MIT Media Lab. It's an OOP version of logo, where you can have tons of turtles running around. Each is an instance of a turtle object whose behavior you define. Individual patches of territory are incarnations of objects, also. You make up rules for how turles and territory affect each other. It's terrific fun, and has even been used for scientific simulation.
There's no better way to introduce a youngin' to programmin.
Alta Vista used to be the last serious search engine that didn't throw a bunch of extraneous crap at you. Then they joined the portal bandwagon.
Thankfully google came along and likely stole a lot of Alta's disillusioned followers. Now they want us back with a 'minimal' search engine that is not as feature rich or effective as google.
They're going to put voice recognition in all palms. I can't think of a worse idea. Isn't it bad enough that we can't go anywhere without having to endure listening to people yell into their cel phones to affirm their perverted self importance, or walk through an office without passing at least one fool listening to voicemail over speakerphone? Now we're going to have a whole new breed of idiots speaking loudly and s-l-o-w-l-y into their handhelds, repeating everything because the first try didn't work.
I'm one of the biggest ORA fans out there. Their books are superb. They tend to present twice as much information in half the space and far more clearly than anyone else out there. I have a huge O'Reilly library and they're all show much wear. The small bookshelf next to my desk is almost exclusively inhabited by O'Reilly. The huge bookshelves I keep in the next room is where I keep other technical publishers (along with 10 years of novels). O'Reilly books are the best, bar none.
Except for _mSQL and MySQL_.
This book was a dog. A major disappointment. In trying to cover both DBs, they managed to cover neither. It was all over the map, and while the first two chapters have some nice general db-design theory, they aren't worth the price of admission.
>Actually, the Handspring Visor's expandability is great, but finding one is a bit difficult.
I ordered my Visor deluxe from Handspring recently and arrived via UPS ground in exactly one week. Last weekend I saw that the local Best Buy has a bunch in stock.
However, we were supposed to have a bunch of modules by now, but there still is little you can do with a Handspring addon that's not yet attainable with a 3com palm. There's no mp3 player, no wireless internet, IDEO's camera still isn't out, nor is the promised universal remote control (but how many people would buy that, anyway), there's no radio receiver, no clic drive, none of the cool stuff that's been mentioned. You have a decent modem (which you can get for a 3com), memory expansion and backup and Tiger Woods golf. Woo-hoo.
I don't mean to sound too negative, I really like my Visor deluxe, but it's primarily because the USB cradle syncs real fast, the price was right, and most importantly, it's blue.
Instant Music by Electronic Arts is the best music program for amateurs I've ever used. Unfortunately, EOA only released it for the Commodore-64 (remember the cool EOA logo that would be displayed when one of their programs was loading?).
Jazz++ looks like it has a couple of similarities, and it's certainly more powerful than Instant Music was, but it doesn't seem to have the same cool interface features.
What I find most remarkable is how insightful and technically correct the ruling appears. I remember a lot of folks around here griping about whether a middle-aged judge without much computer experience could be made to 'get it'.
This project was not stopped on the basis of legal grounds. It was stopped because AOL was afraid Time Warner would throw a hissy-fit when it learned that AOL programmers created a decentralized file sharing system that can potentially be used to pirate media.
The fact is, I've read nothing that indicates this protocol or its implementation (through gnutella or any other system) is inherently illegal.
I'm curious if software licenses in Japan (or elsewhere, for that matter) can be created to legally require upgrades whenever the producer decides to throw one out. Obviously software is often sold with a time-limited license, but these are typically agreed to up front.
Are people who refuse to upgrade the software in this case subject to legal liability, either from being in violation of the software license or for possessing an (oh dear!) illegal DVD decoder?
Look at it from this way. Suppose the PS2 was mistakenly shipped to the U.S. with the same capability as that afforded by deCSS. Would those who bought one and never took it back to be hobbled once the mistake became known be in violation of DMCA or, possibly in the future, UCITA?
This will not be a test of the validity of GPL. If courts rule that this software is illegal, the type of license it was published under is irrelevant.
Certainly Netpliance should be taken to task if it pulled a bait and switch as indicated in the article.
However, a lot of anger seems to have been building toward them around/. for trying to force customers to use its ISP when buying its computer. The fact is, Netpliance sells the computers at a loss and has to use the ISP service to turn a profit. I would love to see them sell these nifty machines at a higher price (I figure a 10% profit margin is reasonable) and without any internet service tacked on, but until their production ramps up, I don't expect to see it, if ever.
They put so many restrictions on speach, France cannot call itself a free country.
From demands on what language may be used to bans on encryption, I pity anyone with tech savvy who has to live there.
And to think we had to bail them out twice last century.
About Banks and Culture
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 1
I've been an avid sci-fi reader for close to fifteen years and Banks is my favorite writer in the genre by a good margin. The Culture universe he has crafted is enormously large and Banks has used it beautifully. In the process, I feel he used Culture to capitalize on sci-fi's greatest strength: namely freeing great authors from the constraints inherent to realistic settings. Sadly, I read an interview where Banks claimed he was abandoning Culture for fear of being pigeon-holed into it. I doubt that would ever have happened and, regardless, he was well on his way to creating a vision as expansive as Niven's, a goal I feel he ought to strive for rather than avoid.
I agree that Use of Weapons is his best book. Actually, it is my favorite sci-fi work, period. It took me two reads to really absorb it and subsequent passes never fail to reveal more. I almost never read a book twice, but I don't know how many times I've read UoW. I strongly recommend against making this an introduction to Culture, however. I think the experience would be too overwhelming. A more appropriate starter is Banks' collection of short stories entitled _State of the Art_.
The author claims nearly 50% of game players are women, which is extremely suspect. This is based on an IDSA study that claims 35-45 (console-pc) percent of game players are women and ~50% of game buyers are women (must be a lot of moms buying games).
I'm very suspicious of these numbers. Having lived in coed college dorms where video/pc games are played a ton and having spent far more time than I would like to admit in the game aisles of computer stores, these numbers are simply ridiculous.
The only thing I can figure is that they're counting things like playing solitaire in the pc game category and sales of MS Windows as game sales.
If they were to chart hours of play in the $40+ game market, I would be surprised if women clock in at over 5-10%, a fact they should be proud of.
With that said, I think this is merely a case of the advertising being targeted to the overwhelming demographic. I have absolutely no problem with it, just as I have no problem with the Dr. Pepper ads that show women ogling a man with a body far better than mine every day at the same time.
Today Transmeta announces a processor that will be competing with Motorola in the portable domain (maybe not directly, but it's a market they both want a piece of). The biggest claim made by Transmeta is that the Crusoe will draw teeny amounts of power in comparison with other processors marketed toward this niche, thus extending battery life.
Motorola comes out and says "Less powerful processor? Bah! We'll just make a higher energy-density power-source".
Motorola may have the advantage, as their innovation will extend the life of all components from a single recharge, not just the processor.
I'm not insulted. Such screeds are often produced by the ignorant.
Obviously he did not submit this slashdot, I never said he did; however, this long piece of nonsense was obviously targeted at Slashdot types who like warm fuzzy visions of a technology utopia. Whether he 'gives a shit' what we think, as you so eloquently stated, is irrelevant.
The reason I have so much more respect for Stephenson is not because he's a better fiction writer (which he proves in Cryptonomicon), but because he can write an essay about technology and its shaping of society without spouting a bunch of aphorisms and general dribble.
As you point out, one needs to look no further than In the Beginning was the Command Line to see this. The essay initially seems to be about operating systems and the whole MS monopoly mess, but it evolves into an in depth thesis on the development, control, sale and use of technology. It deals with the issues of how people can retain control of technology instead of allowing businesses to pervert things the other way around. ITBWTCL weighs in at 215K compared to Sterling's little three page dandylion. More than anything, it shows how lacking Sterling is in pontificating on these issues.
Obviously, it is Sterling who doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about.
In college, there were kids who lived in my dorm who obviously wished they'd been born 20 years earlier so they could have 'experienced the sixties'. They uttered a lot of fuzzy feel good babble that this discourse is surprisingly similar to. A bunch of general aphorisms for a telly tubby utopia. The author decries the intelligentsia and ivory towers, but the entire column is targeted at slashdotters who have nothing in common with the majority of America (where the average yearly wage is around $20K and most people work in rote service jobs) much less the world.
If Sterling wants to propose concrete social objectives, I'd like to hear them (although I'd give more credence to Stephenson). Meanwhile, if all he's after is a bunch of glazed-eye followers, he might try spouting this absurdity with a bong in his hand.
What you propose is essentially security through obscurity, a practice routinely dismissed by those with basic knowledge of cryptographic algorithms and protocols. Perhaps steganography can be used to make such a system valid, but I doubt it.
Moreover, this discussion only pertains to private conversation between two individuals. Even if I perform all data exchanges with my bank, doctor and insurance company via encrypted channels, it doesn't mean squat once they decide to share information with each other or anyone else willing to pay for it. I'd much rather do sensitive business with a company that has poor data protection but a strong privacy policy than the other way around.
With the U.S. FBI forcing surveillance measures down the throats of cell phone users (instant wire taps and location tracking possible w/o warrent), this could be a great end-run around around these Orwellian measures. If all this surveillance hardware becomes pointless, maybe they won't install it to start with.
On the other hand, Congress's response will probably be to push through legistlation requiring that all cell phone buyers show id and be registered in a database (as is becoming the case to buy a plane ticket). *sigh*
I'm already envisioning teenagers diving into trashcans at the mall trying to find a cell phone with 0:30 left in it so they can call their moms to pick them up.:)
Given that the administration and congress appear unable to refrain from placing absurd restrictions on how we do math, how optimistic are you that the courts will consistently act sensibly in this matter? Much like CDA could only be defeated through legal challenge, should free crypto activists be turning their attention to the Judicial branch? What do you feel our chances are in this arena and who shall carry the torch?
In the name of fairness, Kasparov should offer a draw. Obviously, what is transpiring is an insult to the noble game to which he has devoted his life.
This would be a great opportunity for a Linux-related company (VALinux, RedHat, etc.) to approach Kasparov and try to persuade him to give this a second chance, with a more thought-out voting system, and an open adjudication process. It would be a heck of a PR coup for Linux, and a case study in debunking Microsoft's "Linux Myths".
You'd be just as well off with backlit high resolution photographs. Whenever you move your head, you'll notice that the scene doesn't shift as it should, and the illusion will be lost.
Unless you mount a position sensor to your head that gets the display to dynamically update its image depending on where you're looking from, stick with posters.
It never ceases to amaze me that my government has essentially decided it can regulate math. I cannot specify a sequence of simple mathematical operations and send that sequence to anyone I choose.
It's like Congress deciding they want to rewrite the Law of Gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
LOGO. I'm not kidding. It's the most accessible, instantly gratifying language to learn basic programming structures from.
And now, there's StarLOGO, developed by the MIT Media Lab. It's an OOP version of logo, where you can have tons of turtles running around. Each is an instance of a turtle object whose behavior you define. Individual patches of territory are incarnations of objects, also. You make up rules for how turles and territory affect each other. It's terrific fun, and has even been used for scientific simulation.
There's no better way to introduce a youngin' to programmin.
Alta Vista used to be the last serious search engine that didn't throw a bunch of extraneous crap at you. Then they joined the portal bandwagon.
Thankfully google came along and likely stole a lot of Alta's disillusioned followers. Now they want us back with a 'minimal' search engine that is not as feature rich or effective as google.
I'll stick with the folks from Stanford.
They're going to put voice recognition in all palms. I can't think of a worse idea. Isn't it bad enough that we can't go anywhere without having to endure listening to people yell into their cel phones to affirm their perverted self importance, or walk through an office without passing at least one fool listening to voicemail over speakerphone? Now we're going to have a whole new breed of idiots speaking loudly and s-l-o-w-l-y into their handhelds, repeating everything because the first try didn't work.
"FIND MOM'S PHONE NUMBER
...
no
...
FIND MMMOMMM'S PHONE NUMBER"
over and over again.
please help me
I'm one of the biggest ORA fans out there. Their books are superb. They tend to present twice as much information in half the space and far more clearly than anyone else out there. I have a huge O'Reilly library and they're all show much wear. The small bookshelf next to my desk is almost exclusively inhabited by O'Reilly. The huge bookshelves I keep in the next room is where I keep other technical publishers (along with 10 years of novels). O'Reilly books are the best, bar none.
Except for _mSQL and MySQL_.
This book was a dog. A major disappointment. In trying to cover both DBs, they managed to cover neither. It was all over the map, and while the first two chapters have some nice general db-design theory, they aren't worth the price of admission.
I'm going to give MySQL a try.
>Actually, the Handspring Visor's expandability is great, but finding one is a bit difficult.
I ordered my Visor deluxe from Handspring recently and arrived via UPS ground in exactly one week. Last weekend I saw that the local Best Buy has a bunch in stock.
However, we were supposed to have a bunch of modules by now, but there still is little you can do with a Handspring addon that's not yet attainable with a 3com palm. There's no mp3 player, no wireless internet, IDEO's camera still isn't out, nor is the promised universal remote control (but how many people would buy that, anyway), there's no radio receiver, no clic drive, none of the cool stuff that's been mentioned. You have a decent modem (which you can get for a 3com), memory expansion and backup and Tiger Woods golf. Woo-hoo.
I don't mean to sound too negative, I really like my Visor deluxe, but it's primarily because the USB cradle syncs real fast, the price was right, and most importantly, it's blue.
Instant Music by Electronic Arts is the best music program for amateurs I've ever used. Unfortunately, EOA only released it for the Commodore-64 (remember the cool EOA logo that would be displayed when one of their programs was loading?).
Jazz++ looks like it has a couple of similarities, and it's certainly more powerful than Instant Music was, but it doesn't seem to have the same cool interface features.
Boy, I wish EOA would release Instant Music 2000.
What I find most remarkable is how insightful and technically correct the ruling appears. I remember a lot of folks around here griping about whether a middle-aged judge without much computer experience could be made to 'get it'.
I think the ex cerpts from ABCnews show that he definitely 'gets it'.
Hats off to the Justice Department attorneys for a job well done.
This project was not stopped on the basis of legal grounds. It was stopped because AOL was afraid Time Warner would throw a hissy-fit when it learned that AOL programmers created a decentralized file sharing system that can potentially be used to pirate media.
The fact is, I've read nothing that indicates this protocol or its implementation (through gnutella or any other system) is inherently illegal.
I'm curious if software licenses in Japan (or elsewhere, for that matter) can be created to legally require upgrades whenever the producer decides to throw one out. Obviously software is often sold with a time-limited license, but these are typically agreed to up front.
Are people who refuse to upgrade the software in this case subject to legal liability, either from being in violation of the software license or for possessing an (oh dear!) illegal DVD decoder?
Look at it from this way. Suppose the PS2 was mistakenly shipped to the U.S. with the same capability as that afforded by deCSS. Would those who bought one and never took it back to be hobbled once the mistake became known be in violation of DMCA or, possibly in the future, UCITA?
This will not be a test of the validity of GPL. If courts rule that this software is illegal, the type of license it was published under is irrelevant.
Certainly Netpliance should be taken to task if it pulled a bait and switch as indicated in the article.
/. for trying to force customers to use its ISP when buying its computer. The fact is, Netpliance sells the computers at a loss and has to use the ISP service to turn a profit. I would love to see them sell these nifty machines at a higher price (I figure a 10% profit margin is reasonable) and without any internet service tacked on, but until their production ramps up, I don't expect to see it, if ever.
However, a lot of anger seems to have been building toward them around
I forget what the case was about, but the Supreme Court has ruled that anonymous speech is protected
They put so many restrictions on speach, France cannot call itself a free country.
From demands on what language may be used to bans on encryption, I pity anyone with tech savvy who has to live there.
And to think we had to bail them out twice last century.
I've been an avid sci-fi reader for close to fifteen years and Banks is my favorite writer in the genre by a good margin. The Culture universe he has crafted is enormously large and Banks has used it beautifully. In the process, I feel he used Culture to capitalize on sci-fi's greatest strength: namely freeing great authors from the constraints inherent to realistic settings. Sadly, I read an interview where Banks claimed he was abandoning Culture for fear of being pigeon-holed into it. I doubt that would ever have happened and, regardless, he was well on his way to creating a vision as expansive as Niven's, a goal I feel he ought to strive for rather than avoid.
I agree that Use of Weapons is his best book. Actually, it is my favorite sci-fi work, period. It took me two reads to really absorb it and subsequent passes never fail to reveal more. I almost never read a book twice, but I don't know how many times I've read UoW. I strongly recommend against making this an introduction to Culture, however. I think the experience would be too overwhelming. A more appropriate starter is Banks' collection of short stories entitled _State of the Art_.
The author claims nearly 50% of game players are women, which is extremely suspect. This is based on an IDSA study that claims 35-45 (console-pc) percent of game players are women and ~50% of game buyers are women (must be a lot of moms buying games).
I'm very suspicious of these numbers. Having lived in coed college dorms where video/pc games are played a ton and having spent far more time than I would like to admit in the game aisles of computer stores, these numbers are simply ridiculous.
The only thing I can figure is that they're counting things like playing solitaire in the pc game category and sales of MS Windows as game sales.
If they were to chart hours of play in the $40+ game market, I would be surprised if women clock in at over 5-10%, a fact they should be proud of.
With that said, I think this is merely a case of the advertising being targeted to the overwhelming demographic. I have absolutely no problem with it, just as I have no problem with the Dr. Pepper ads that show women ogling a man with a body far better than mine every day at the same time.
Lighten up, babe.
The timing of this is interesting.
Today Transmeta announces a processor that will be competing with Motorola in the portable domain (maybe not directly, but it's a market they both want a piece of). The biggest claim made by Transmeta is that the Crusoe will draw teeny amounts of power in comparison with other processors marketed toward this niche, thus extending battery life.
Motorola comes out and says "Less powerful processor? Bah! We'll just make a higher energy-density power-source".
Motorola may have the advantage, as their innovation will extend the life of all components from a single recharge, not just the processor.
I'm not insulted. Such screeds are often produced by the ignorant.
Obviously he did not submit this slashdot, I never said he did; however, this long piece of nonsense was obviously targeted at Slashdot types who like warm fuzzy visions of a technology utopia. Whether he 'gives a shit' what we think, as you so eloquently stated, is irrelevant.
The reason I have so much more respect for Stephenson is not because he's a better fiction writer (which he proves in Cryptonomicon), but because he can write an essay about technology and its shaping of society without spouting a bunch of aphorisms and general dribble.
As you point out, one needs to look no further than In the Beginning was the Command Line to see this. The essay initially seems to be about operating systems and the whole MS monopoly mess, but it evolves into an in depth thesis on the development, control, sale and use of technology. It deals with the issues of how people can retain control of technology instead of allowing businesses to pervert things the other way around. ITBWTCL weighs in at 215K compared to Sterling's little three page dandylion. More than anything, it shows how lacking Sterling is in pontificating on these issues.
Obviously, it is Sterling who doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about.
In college, there were kids who lived in my dorm who obviously wished they'd been born 20 years earlier so they could have 'experienced the sixties'. They uttered a lot of fuzzy feel good babble that this discourse is surprisingly similar to. A bunch of general aphorisms for a telly tubby utopia. The author decries the intelligentsia and ivory towers, but the entire column is targeted at slashdotters who have nothing in common with the majority of America (where the average yearly wage is around $20K and most people work in rote service jobs) much less the world.
If Sterling wants to propose concrete social objectives, I'd like to hear them (although I'd give more credence to Stephenson). Meanwhile, if all he's after is a bunch of glazed-eye followers, he might try spouting this absurdity with a bong in his hand.
What you propose is essentially security through obscurity, a practice routinely dismissed by those with basic knowledge of cryptographic algorithms and protocols. Perhaps steganography can be used to make such a system valid, but I doubt it.
Moreover, this discussion only pertains to private conversation between two individuals. Even if I perform all data exchanges with my bank, doctor and insurance company via encrypted channels, it doesn't mean squat once they decide to share information with each other or anyone else willing to pay for it. I'd much rather do sensitive business with a company that has poor data protection but a strong privacy policy than the other way around.
With the U.S. FBI forcing surveillance measures down the throats of cell phone users (instant wire taps and location tracking possible w/o warrent), this could be a great end-run around around these Orwellian measures. If all this surveillance hardware becomes pointless, maybe they won't install it to start with.
:)
On the other hand, Congress's response will probably be to push through legistlation requiring that all cell phone buyers show id and be registered in a database (as is becoming the case to buy a plane ticket). *sigh*
I'm already envisioning teenagers diving into trashcans at the mall trying to find a cell phone with 0:30 left in it so they can call their moms to pick them up.
Given that the administration and congress appear unable to refrain from placing absurd restrictions on how we do math, how optimistic are you that the courts will consistently act sensibly in this matter? Much like CDA could only be defeated through legal challenge, should free crypto activists be turning their attention to the Judicial branch? What do you feel our chances are in this arena and who shall carry the torch?
Going to wired and slashdot to generate negative publicity regarding comdex is a very reasonable strategy to get them to change an inane policy.
In the name of fairness, Kasparov should offer a draw. Obviously, what is transpiring is an insult to the noble game to which he has devoted his life.
This would be a great opportunity for a Linux-related company (VALinux, RedHat, etc.) to approach Kasparov and try to persuade him to give this a second chance, with a more thought-out voting system, and an open adjudication process. It would be a heck of a PR coup for Linux, and a case study in debunking Microsoft's "Linux Myths".
You'd be just as well off with backlit high resolution photographs. Whenever you move your head, you'll notice that the scene doesn't shift as it should, and the illusion will be lost.
Unless you mount a position sensor to your head that gets the display to dynamically update its image depending on where you're looking from, stick with posters.
It never ceases to amaze me that my government has essentially decided it can regulate math. I cannot specify a sequence of simple mathematical operations and send that sequence to anyone I choose.
It's like Congress deciding they want to rewrite the Law of Gravity.