Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.
My first contact with programming about around 1986 was with Logo. My parents subscribed me to a private computer course and for us the small kids (I was 5 years old!) the teacher used Logo, for older guys he used Basic and even COBOL and FORTRAN. But It was Logo what made me really *understand* computers in the sense of how the famous Hacker's Manifesto explains, it is a very interesting machine which *you* can manipulate to do EVERYTHING!
However, when you are referring at LOGO in your comment you are surely referring to the turtle-guided drawing interpreter of the language, which yeah can not compare with what BASIC was at that time. However, there are *plenty* of interpreters and other programs that use Logo as its underlying language. Lots of them are actively used in research for agent-based modeling such as NetLogo, StarLogo, or about StarLogo TNG which tries to go a step further to teach the basic concepts of programming by using building blocks.
I think Logo is one of the *best* programs to begin computer programming for kids because it is very easy to make the computer *do* things, and with these new implementations it does not need to be as "boring" as just drawing lines.
Your URL plugged in the story where we announce the auction winners.
Hi, I am doing a chip-in money collection to win the link plug in order to put the goatse man! imagine putting goatse *in the homepage* of slashdot, that would be hilarious teehehe.
I assume that the editors agree to put *any* kind of link. I won't be surprised if one of those online casinos actually won the auction.
Hey, now that we are at it, it was not long since Microsoft embraced our beloved Tux!, yup, I just stumbled upon Tux in MSDN, and guess what, it is used as a benchmark for Windows (they use a really high mark as benchmark no?).
Well, they are not different than all the posts I get in slashdot when I say that something specific is broken in my Linux installation, I always get lots of replies telling me how Ubuntu works wonders for them (when it does not completely work in my laptop). It is just that for some people it will do what they want and for others it just wont. The same thing happen with OSX, Solaris, Irix and whatnot...
It's difficult to find a post with not too much karma from you Sir. I wanted to ask you this question... haven't you considered using that re-captcha technology instead of the simple captcha you've got for the anonymous cowards post? I think it would be very nice as a site with so many traffic as slashdot can help a lot in such noble task of OCR help to digitize books.
I know a story was run on slashdot some time ago (and a dupe was also reported earlier this month IIRC;-) ). I just wanted to give you the idea so you might (or not) consider it. cheers
Just yesterday I was looking for a list of USA people who have been killed after found guilty with the death penalty. I found a lot of interesting people in other pages but could not find everyone of them. Also one interesting thing I found in pages other than Wikipedia was the last words of several of those people.
IMHO there's still a looooong way to go until they can say they have most of the knowledge. A lot of that also is dude to the language barrier, as there are some really good articles in Spanish (my main language) which in the English Wikipedia does not exist or are very lacking.
Walmart competes on price, and its pretty successful. Target, knowing that it can't beat Walmart on price, competes by having brighter stores, and higher quality goods
Yeah, I have heard that those rocks that Target sells are quite HiFi. However, I am not sure how "portable" they might be...
Mmmmh well, about the lying, isn't it some kind of nasty crime to in court? as in under oath of something in the USA? and secondly, if she did all that trickery, wouldn't it be plausible that she did shared *knowing* that it was illegal?
I know we all here are all about blasting the RIAA, but this was a jury veredict of independent people. And as the guy said in the article, they wanted to send YOU the message "STOP PIRATING MUSIC OR YOU WILL GET FUCKED". In the long term, it might help as people will see that something *does* happen after downloading illegally and they will stop committing such crimes.
Do not misunderstand me, I am as anti-RIAA as anyone else here (and maybe more... I was the guy who compiled the first list of Sony CDs with rootkits) but it seems quite clear that she committed a crime and if you see it, the fines are in the "low" side of the possible spectrum (from $750 to $150,000). Just consider she could have faced a $3'600,000 fine... now THAT would be outrageous.
1. Time 0: Universe has time and is normal.
2. Time 1: Universe suddenly flips and now has 0 time, 4 space.
3. Time ??: No time, but now where did the past go?
4. Profit!
I would die to make a prank to one of the many parties by paying some girls to get into the bar and look for a bunch of nerd/techie looking guys talking about slashdot and then flirt with them. I would love to see the reaction of all those geeks hahaha. [yes, I do have a real-nonplastic-lovely girlfriend:-)]
"Market share" only counts MONEY, not "free" installs. If I download ubuntu and install it on my laptop, how do they know? They don't - and they don't care, because there are no beans for the bean counters to count.
But it is important for Linux, or at least for some part of the community (YOU might not care personally, but that is another thing), because.001% more of Linux means one less Windows XP contract and one more Linux service contract or whatnot. Some distributions might not get any profit from sales, but a bigger Linux market share means more services around Linux and this means more companies *eager* to consider Linux as for example, hardware manufacturers (think drivers) and software (think, games).
It sounds quite plausible to make an appeal, however after reading some articles about the woman and the overall case I find it very difficult that she is going to proceed, mainly because of the money.
The problem with the appeal I guess is that she still does not know if she is going to *win* the appeal, and, if she loses the appeal then she will have to pay the attorneys fees plus the fine she must pay now.
However, I would really like to see this case continue, I myself do not know if she is guilty or not, and from all the information I have got, it seems everything seems to show that she indeed performed the file sharing. However, I would really like an appeal because I believe there are several issues that must be brought forward with regards of the state of the laws and the verdicts and the only way to do that is to continue litigating.
Please correct me if I am wrong but isn't it the case that, when doing the appeal, it is done to a higher court?, or specifically to some place which has higher law status than the ones that made the decision?
Therefore, the idea is the same (I think) in that, if the lower courts in the USA are still corrupted by the hand of the RIAA, it may still be possible to appeal to higher courts, until there is someone who can really hold the law.
About your wife... no, not that kind of stuff...
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
I just want to know, I know Rob's wife has an account on slashdot. My question is, does she still reads it? and what is her POV about you being a "high profile" geek? and what is her opinion about slashdot?
Add me to this question...
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
As I posted elsewhere already, slashdot has been falling from an interesting news site to this speculative non-stories yellow journalism in the time I have been here (and as you can see from my UID, it's been too long). I really wonder why is that? is it because the "old" slashdot does not "sell" as well as this new one?, if that is the reason, then I would really prefer the old non famous slashdot than this new one...
What I find worrisome is that this might convince some (perhaps innocent) people to settle out of court much more quickly, seeing as how the average there is around $3500.
Or, what could be worst is that seeing how they can get $200,000 after the court, they might increment the settlement fees, they could easily increment them to $10,000 and it will be just 5%.
Of course it is. But then again, one of the comments in the story was about the low payment for the repairing industry and I concur with it. I watched all the video, and there were 3 persons who diagnosed the problem correctly, but they were charging more. The video kept telling you that the problem could be fixed by $25 bucks (I suppose it is the price of the 256MB DIMM).
Coincidentally just some days ago I read a story which of a man charging $1,000,000 to fix a mainframe by turning a screw, and when he was asked to justify the cost, he wrote in the bill:
Turning one screw................. $1 Knowing what screw to turn..$999,999
And that is the problem, people believe that it is so easy and, of course it is easy if you KNOW what you are doing... And that will of course cost more, whether it is reflexed int he price of the item or in the price of the visit.
I believe the best way to solve this kind of problems (for non techies) is to look for a techie friend and ask him to look at you computer FOR A FEE!, and that is very important, instead of paying an unknown person who might take your personal data, you could ask a cousin, neighbor or any other person you know and trust a bit to have a look at your computer and fix it.
As a software engineer, the one thing I hate about playing the guitar is that every time I pick it up I have to tune it, otherwise I won't get the same results as I did last time I sat down to strum. Is a little determinism too much to ask?
I do not know about the physics of that stuff, but I play guitar as a hobby (classical, flamenco and heavy metal [acoustic and electric) and from what I know, the amount of tunning you have to do depends on the material of the guitar (at least for acoustic) and the quality of the strings. Also, one of the things they told you to do after you just replaced a string is to stretch it a lot and loosen it to make it expand all the material has to expand, otherwise you will tune it but as the new string expands, you will have to tune it again in five minutes.
I think this would be more appropriate for the likes of Joe Satriani or Steve Vai when in a concert they use a different tuning for some different songs... but I still like it more if they showcase different kinds of guitars and maybe it might be useful when/if they have to change tuning "on the fly".. but of course, it might not be possible to re-tune the guitar as fast as it is needed...
"...Know what I think- freakin' sweet. Only technology will guarantee my sucking on the electric will at least be reasonably in-tune suckiness. Dear Gibson, Slashdot really needs to review your guitar. We'll need several review units and we lost your return address..."
Yeah, and since slashdot is made by its community, we will need 900,000 test units =o) (sorry 900000+ id noobs =oP no testing for you)
They accept those who apply. Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don't want to go to grad school.
When I was finishing my Undergrad.in Mexico and started looking for information for a postgraduate degree I went to see a professor at my university which I estimate a lot to ask him about his point of view on the different post-graduate possibilities (studying the post in the same Uni, studying in another Uni in Mexico or studying abroad). He told me something which I believe is one of the best pieces of advice I got about the postgraduate. Paraphrasing him it was something like this:
"When you go to the postgraduate, you usually do not go just for the 'quality' of education, but you go for the cultural baggage that the place where you study can provide you. If all you want is 'good' education, you can go the Mexico's UNAM, which is very prestigious and has really good quality. However, what you want is a combination of good prestige [for a PhD], a completely different culture in which you can learn and a different place which you can know. Therefore, if you can go to Japan [figuratively, the other side of the world] you should do it"
And hence, this is partly why I am doing my PhD in the UK and as he said, I have learned quite a lot in the 3 years I have been here. I have met a lot of interesting people and I have seen places and known issues I would have never known if I had stayed in Mexico.
Therefore, I would suggest any of the USA postgraduates to try and go to another country to study their postgraduate, even a Master. There are some countries where the postgraduate studies are cheaper than in the USA (for example, France). And if they do not speak English, you could even learn a new language.
Overall I think it is not a bug, but a feature (as we like to say), even in my department in the UK for example, in my office we are about 7 persons (big office =o)) there are Syrians, Chinese, Americans, Sudanians, etc. And there are very few English PhD students in the Department (I believe the rate is about 70%-30%).
This was reported in slashdot about a year ago, and after I read about it I setup a captcha in my page to reveal my email...
other than that, it is really nice:) and for the people that want to participate you just have to "hide" your email behind a link which will show a captcha (with the two phrases)
Now that it is the best chance I will have to post this question "on topic" for this story, I have always wondered what was the name of the "infamous" slashdot ID that was auctioned on ebay?
I feel so relieved that I did not discovered slashdot when I first heard about it (like 8 years ago when I was in the University, a friend of mine asked me [Norman, de la U. Baja California Sur...] "do you have an account in slashdot... it is the place where all the geeks discuss tech things") because I would have lost still more time than what I lose right now...
But hey, 10 years is quite a lot, I would like to congratulate Rob and the team for what they have achieved here. I would also like to be interested if some of the people being here before could make sort of a summary about the interesting issues that happened *inside* discussions, as for example the fact that a guy like NewYorkCountryLawyer is in slashdot, or the Scientology issue or the Sony rootkit (those all the ones I know... but I am fairly new, I am *sure* there sould be more interesting thigns in the discussions of slashdot).
Slashdot Mirror
"my hello.c is so 1337!"
Ha, you think ur hello.c is leet?? wait to see my hello.asm!
Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.
My first contact with programming about around 1986 was with Logo. My parents subscribed me to a private computer course and for us the small kids (I was 5 years old!) the teacher used Logo, for older guys he used Basic and even COBOL and FORTRAN. But It was Logo what made me really *understand* computers in the sense of how the famous Hacker's Manifesto explains, it is a very interesting machine which *you* can manipulate to do EVERYTHING!
However, when you are referring at LOGO in your comment you are surely referring to the turtle-guided drawing interpreter of the language, which yeah can not compare with what BASIC was at that time. However, there are *plenty* of interpreters and other programs that use Logo as its underlying language. Lots of them are actively used in research for agent-based modeling such as NetLogo, StarLogo, or about StarLogo TNG which tries to go a step further to teach the basic concepts of programming by using building blocks.
I think Logo is one of the *best* programs to begin computer programming for kids because it is very easy to make the computer *do* things, and with these new implementations it does not need to be as "boring" as just drawing lines.
Symbolism, the word you are looking for is Symbolism!
Your URL plugged in the story where we announce the auction winners.
Hi, I am doing a chip-in money collection to win the link plug in order to put the goatse man! imagine putting goatse *in the homepage* of slashdot, that would be hilarious teehehe.
I assume that the editors agree to put *any* kind of link. I won't be surprised if one of those online casinos actually won the auction.
Hey, now that we are at it, it was not long since Microsoft embraced our beloved Tux!, yup, I just stumbled upon Tux in MSDN, and guess what, it is used as a benchmark for Windows (they use a really high mark as benchmark no?).
Well, they are not different than all the posts I get in slashdot when I say that something specific is broken in my Linux installation, I always get lots of replies telling me how Ubuntu works wonders for them (when it does not completely work in my laptop). It is just that for some people it will do what they want and for others it just wont. The same thing happen with OSX, Solaris, Irix and whatnot...
It's difficult to find a post with not too much karma from you Sir. I wanted to ask you this question... haven't you considered using that re-captcha technology instead of the simple captcha you've got for the anonymous cowards post? I think it would be very nice as a site with so many traffic as slashdot can help a lot in such noble task of OCR help to digitize books.
;-) ). I just wanted to give you the idea so you might (or not) consider it.
I know a story was run on slashdot some time ago (and a dupe was also reported earlier this month IIRC
cheers
Just yesterday I was looking for a list of USA people who have been killed after found guilty with the death penalty. I found a lot of interesting people in other pages but could not find everyone of them. Also one interesting thing I found in pages other than Wikipedia was the last words of several of those people.
IMHO there's still a looooong way to go until they can say they have most of the knowledge. A lot of that also is dude to the language barrier, as there are some really good articles in Spanish (my main language) which in the English Wikipedia does not exist or are very lacking.
Sorry for asking this here, I hope I do not get modded offtopic as, it in fact is related to this story (see tags).
I have seen in some slashdot stories this !Ellobo , but I have absolutely no idea of what does it mean. Does anyone knows the reference?
Thank you in advance
Walmart competes on price, and its pretty successful. Target, knowing that it can't beat Walmart on price, competes by having brighter stores, and higher quality goods
Yeah, I have heard that those rocks that Target sells are quite HiFi. However, I am not sure how "portable" they might be...
Mmmmh well, about the lying, isn't it some kind of nasty crime to in court? as in under oath of something in the USA?
and secondly, if she did all that trickery, wouldn't it be plausible that she did shared *knowing* that it was illegal?
I know we all here are all about blasting the RIAA, but this was a jury veredict of independent people. And as the guy said in the article, they wanted to send YOU the message "STOP PIRATING MUSIC OR YOU WILL GET FUCKED". In the long term, it might help as people will see that something *does* happen after downloading illegally and they will stop committing such crimes.
Do not misunderstand me, I am as anti-RIAA as anyone else here (and maybe more... I was the guy who compiled the first list of Sony CDs with rootkits) but it seems quite clear that she committed a crime and if you see it, the fines are in the "low" side of the possible spectrum (from $750 to $150,000). Just consider she could have faced a $3'600,000 fine... now THAT would be outrageous.
1. Time 0: Universe has time and is normal.
2. Time 1: Universe suddenly flips and now has 0 time, 4 space.
3. Time ??: No time, but now where did the past go?
4. Profit!
There, fixed it for you.
I would die to make a prank to one of the many parties by paying some girls to get into the bar and look for a bunch of nerd/techie looking guys talking about slashdot and then flirt with them. I would love to see the reaction of all those geeks hahaha. [yes, I do have a real-nonplastic-lovely girlfriend :-)]
"Market share" only counts MONEY, not "free" installs. If I download ubuntu and install it on my laptop, how do they know? They don't - and they don't care, because there are no beans for the bean counters to count.
.001% more of Linux means one less Windows XP contract and one more Linux service contract or whatnot. Some distributions might not get any profit from sales, but a bigger Linux market share means more services around Linux and this means more companies *eager* to consider Linux as for example, hardware manufacturers (think drivers) and software (think, games).
But it is important for Linux, or at least for some part of the community (YOU might not care personally, but that is another thing), because
It sounds quite plausible to make an appeal, however after reading some articles about the woman and the overall case I find it very difficult that she is going to proceed, mainly because of the money.
The problem with the appeal I guess is that she still does not know if she is going to *win* the appeal, and, if she loses the appeal then she will have to pay the attorneys fees plus the fine she must pay now.
However, I would really like to see this case continue, I myself do not know if she is guilty or not, and from all the information I have got, it seems everything seems to show that she indeed performed the file sharing. However, I would really like an appeal because I believe there are several issues that must be brought forward with regards of the state of the laws and the verdicts and the only way to do that is to continue litigating.
Please correct me if I am wrong but isn't it the case that, when doing the appeal, it is done to a higher court?, or specifically to some place which has higher law status than the ones that made the decision?
I ask this, because, in Mexico happened something similar (bear with me and read a bit more), where a woman (Lydia Cacho) unveiled a pedophile ring where a lot of very powerful Mexican people was and they tried to put her in jail and whatnot. She (and her lawyers) started fighting legally, but, as we all know in corruption in Mexico is very high and they had to go appealing all the way up to the Supreme Court because all the lower courts were indeed corrupted.
Therefore, the idea is the same (I think) in that, if the lower courts in the USA are still corrupted by the hand of the RIAA, it may still be possible to appeal to higher courts, until there is someone who can really hold the law.
I just want to know, I know Rob's wife has an account on slashdot. My question is, does she still reads it? and what is her POV about you being a "high profile" geek? and what is her opinion about slashdot?
As I posted elsewhere already, slashdot has been falling from an interesting news site to this speculative non-stories yellow journalism in the time I have been here (and as you can see from my UID, it's been too long). I really wonder why is that? is it because the "old" slashdot does not "sell" as well as this new one?, if that is the reason, then I would really prefer the old non famous slashdot than this new one...
What I find worrisome is that this might convince some (perhaps innocent) people to settle out of court much more quickly, seeing as how the average there is around $3500.
Or, what could be worst is that seeing how they can get $200,000 after the court, they might increment the settlement fees, they could easily increment them to $10,000 and it will be just 5%.
Of course it is. But then again, one of the comments in the story was about the low payment for the repairing industry and I concur with it. I watched all the video, and there were 3 persons who diagnosed the problem correctly, but they were charging more. The video kept telling you that the problem could be fixed by $25 bucks (I suppose it is the price of the 256MB DIMM).
..$999,999
Coincidentally just some days ago I read a story which of a man charging $1,000,000 to fix a mainframe by turning a screw, and when he was asked to justify the cost, he wrote in the bill:
Turning one screw................. $1
Knowing what screw to turn
And that is the problem, people believe that it is so easy and, of course it is easy if you KNOW what you are doing... And that will of course cost more, whether it is reflexed int he price of the item or in the price of the visit.
I believe the best way to solve this kind of problems (for non techies) is to look for a techie friend and ask him to look at you computer FOR A FEE!, and that is very important, instead of paying an unknown person who might take your personal data, you could ask a cousin, neighbor or any other person you know and trust a bit to have a look at your computer and fix it.
As a software engineer, the one thing I hate about playing the guitar is that every time I pick it up I have to tune it, otherwise I won't get the same results as I did last time I sat down to strum. Is a little determinism too much to ask?
I do not know about the physics of that stuff, but I play guitar as a hobby (classical, flamenco and heavy metal [acoustic and electric) and from what I know, the amount of tunning you have to do depends on the material of the guitar (at least for acoustic) and the quality of the strings. Also, one of the things they told you to do after you just replaced a string is to stretch it a lot and loosen it to make it expand all the material has to expand, otherwise you will tune it but as the new string expands, you will have to tune it again in five minutes.
I think this would be more appropriate for the likes of Joe Satriani or Steve Vai when in a concert they use a different tuning for some different songs... but I still like it more if they showcase different kinds of guitars and maybe it might be useful when/if they have to change tuning "on the fly".. but of course, it might not be possible to re-tune the guitar as fast as it is needed...
"...Know what I think- freakin' sweet. Only technology will guarantee my sucking on the electric will at least be reasonably in-tune suckiness. Dear Gibson, Slashdot really needs to review your guitar. We'll need several review units and we lost your return address..."
Yeah, and since slashdot is made by its community, we will need 900,000 test units =o) (sorry 900000+ id noobs =oP no testing for you)
They accept those who apply. Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don't want to go to grad school.
When I was finishing my Undergrad.in Mexico and started looking for information for a postgraduate degree I went to see a professor at my university which I estimate a lot to ask him about his point of view on the different post-graduate possibilities (studying the post in the same Uni, studying in another Uni in Mexico or studying abroad). He told me something which I believe is one of the best pieces of advice I got about the postgraduate. Paraphrasing him it was something like this:
"When you go to the postgraduate, you usually do not go just for the 'quality' of education, but you go for the cultural baggage that the place where you study can provide you. If all you want is 'good' education, you can go the Mexico's UNAM, which is very prestigious and has really good quality. However, what you want is a combination of good prestige [for a PhD], a completely different culture in which you can learn and a different place which you can know. Therefore, if you can go to Japan [figuratively, the other side of the world] you should do it"
And hence, this is partly why I am doing my PhD in the UK and as he said, I have learned quite a lot in the 3 years I have been here. I have met a lot of interesting people and I have seen places and known issues I would have never known if I had stayed in Mexico.
Therefore, I would suggest any of the USA postgraduates to try and go to another country to study their postgraduate, even a Master. There are some countries where the postgraduate studies are cheaper than in the USA (for example, France). And if they do not speak English, you could even learn a new language.
Overall I think it is not a bug, but a feature (as we like to say), even in my department in the UK for example, in my office we are about 7 persons (big office =o)) there are Syrians, Chinese, Americans, Sudanians, etc. And there are very few English PhD students in the Department (I believe the rate is about 70%-30%).
This was reported in slashdot about a year ago, and after I read about it I setup a captcha in my page to reveal my email...
:) and for the people that want to participate you just have to "hide" your email behind a link which will show a captcha (with the two phrases)
other than that, it is really nice
Now that it is the best chance I will have to post this question "on topic" for this story, I have always wondered what was the name of the "infamous" slashdot ID that was auctioned on ebay?
I feel so relieved that I did not discovered slashdot when I first heard about it (like 8 years ago when I was in the University, a friend of mine asked me [Norman, de la U. Baja California Sur...] "do you have an account in slashdot... it is the place where all the geeks discuss tech things") because I would have lost still more time than what I lose right now...
But hey, 10 years is quite a lot, I would like to congratulate Rob and the team for what they have achieved here. I would also like to be interested if some of the people being here before could make sort of a summary about the interesting issues that happened *inside* discussions, as for example the fact that a guy like NewYorkCountryLawyer is in slashdot, or the Scientology issue or the Sony rootkit (those all the ones I know... but I am fairly new, I am *sure* there sould be more interesting thigns in the discussions of slashdot).
Hey and do not forget about breasts!
A short lived meme but IMHO one of the best =O)