I am skeptical, and any video of the incident would remove my skepticism. Assuming everyone is either a raving loon or your ideal liberal BFF is not a wise presumption, and certainly not a valid argument.
Regardless of my personal stance though, in this era of information, especially on a site like this, I would hope everyone would share some level of agreement on the intrinsic value of knowledge and information... When we weaves the 2010s into the tapestry of our societies history, what is gained by depriving our descendants the full, un-abridged, and uncensored truth? What is gained by our forbearers telling us Washington had wooden teeth, or the Native-Americans and the Pilgrims got along famously? What would be gained by leaving footage of JFK's assassination out of historical records?
Unless you consider information to be, by default, an un-necessary evil, the question shouldn't be "Why share information?", but "Why NOT share information?". The sharing of information is one of the biggest advantages humans have over less successful species. Okay, you might not want to see some dead guy shot in the fact. You might think it some form of barbaric, gratuitous, exhibition indicating poor moral fiber. It may be true that many of the people that want to see the images are either doing so as a political move or are looking for some cheap thrill while swilling a PBR and shouting, "Fuck yeah! He got what he deserved." --But, I believe the flaws of the lesser should not deter the aspirations of the greater. By that I mean, just because some people might want the images released for less than stellar reasons, that you might not agree with, shouldn't be the basis for an opinion, IMHO. I believe there is almost always a greater good to be served by the free and open distribution of information.
The argument about retribution is an excuse. It's true that some people won't be satisfied with the images, just as some people weren't satisfied with the moon-landing footage, or 9/11 footage. I know that many people resist the average emotional reaction of the masses, to glorify the death of Bin Laden, on moral grounds. I will make no attempt to argue that glorifying the death of another person is reasonable, not because I don't care, but because I don't think it plays into this discussion. In the grand scheme of things, these are all petty arguments of the month. 50 years from now, is anyone going to care that a handful of wackos didn't believe the images were real, or are they going to be more concerned that valuable information about their ancestor's history was lost forever; are they going to care that a few people got their jollies off the imagery, or are they going to care that the prevailing government of the time was with-holding information from the people who instituted them? What was more important about the Vietnam Conflict? The fact that prostitution ran rampant, or the fact that public visibility was kept at a minimum? That was a crude metaphor, but I hope you can see where I'm coming from.
Tablets have been around nearly as long as laptops, and have historically done terrible outside of specific business applications. Craig Mundie's response seems a well tempered response based on historical perspective.
Not only that, but Microsoft has always lead the Tablet charge, so this article doesn't even seem to make sense. Basically all full-sized commercial tablets come standard with a multi-touch Microsoft operating system. Microsoft has been spamming commercials as of late about their new tablet hardware...
Googling "haddock array" comes-up with bupkis. If such a thing does in-fact exist, you must make a wikipedia page for it before referring to it on the inter-web-o-sphere. If you can't at least do that you are no better than Egypt.;)
Network communication is a vast and popular societal service, almost everyone uses it, and yet it is dominated on the consumer-end by Natural Monopolies. Coming-up with an idea that can not only compete with net discrimination, but also the natural monopolies created by physical lines, would be quite a feat. For the same reasons roads aren't owned by companies, network lines shouldn't either.
Major network mediums should be owned and controlled by the state/federal governments in the same way roads typically are, then service providers would sell their services over that medium like cab drivers, to extend the road analogy. If the comcasts of the world didn't own the lines, there would be some tough questions that would need answers, but open-market competition would be a viable and most likely excellent solution to the problem. Net Neutrality would become a selling-point of providers, and if it truley was superior to Net Discrimination, then it would thrive in a fair market.
As a knowledgeable community of technical experts (slash-dotters), it is in-fact our responsibility to push forward these ideas. If technically inclined and concerned members of our society like us don't take action to correct this chronic and looming problem, who will... I believe the real solution to this problem is for us to get proactive about "socializing" communication lines. I understand "socializing" has a negative connotation for most, due to it's implied link to socialism. Yet, if you evaluate my argument, you will notice it is actually an argument FOR capitalism. The problem is a break-down of capitalism in disguise. Capitalism can solve this problem if governments did their jobs properly and broke-up monopolistic tendencies by ensuring fair markets of exchange. To do that, governments need to erect and own the physical medium, just as they do with roads. WE, as concerned and knowledgeable member of society need to influence our governmental bodies to do so. THAT, is the solution.
A solid and simple start would be for people to write their local representatives regarding this issue.
A distributed search feature is great, but the Trible software is bereft of features. I recommend sticking with uTorret, and hoping uTorrent developers implement a similar feature.
S.C.A.R.A.B. owned by EA This game had great game play mechanics in general and in some cases ingenious game-play mechanics. Giving it quite addictive game play, but lacked 3 major things to make it big. 1. fairly poor graphics (it was released in 1997, so that one is pretty obvious) 2. non-standard controls (it was also before FPS controls were standardized, and the controls scheme it chose was cumbersome) 3. bandwidth (this game had a great multi-player setup, but again it was hindered by the shotty internet connections and poor server selection standardization of the 1990s)
All things instantly fixed by something like a source, unreal, or unity port. (if EA didn't hold the rights to it, I probably would have already ported it.:/ )
Cellphones already support wifi, bluetooth etc., why not simply combined WiFi and paypal, into a smartphone-app to pay for things? (assuming you don't hate paypal)
If a store wants to support cellphone purchasing, they don't need new RFID scanners and service fees, they just need a wireless router, and a corresponding app to handle the smartphone-app's transnational messages. ( patent pending;P )
I take it as a compliment that you presumed I copied this from someone else and took it upon yourself to google it. However, if you were thorough with your investigation, you may have noticed that the poster on that blog has the EXACT same user name as myself.
On a related note, I find it amusing how many people took my post seriously as if it wasn't completely tongue-in-cheek. Granted, I do think JavaScript is probably the 3rd or 4th worst language I've ever used, but I wouldn't have suspected anyone would have thought that that "poem" was anyone's idea of a proper critique of JavaScript's follies.
P.S. Sorry about the spelling error, but I can't edit my previous post, so...
JavaScript is truly a horrifyingly discussing, intrinsically retched, soul darkening, succubus from the abysmal depths of conceivable depravity.
To know its stench is to know the crippling limitations of our future. To recognize its sloven decadence and remain indifferent is to burn the righteous.
No faith, however moving and spectacular, could light a path of its continuation. No argument, however complex and equivocated, could elevate such a encumbering and wearisome burden.
There is no failure so inadequate, or stagnation so bereft of utility as that of JavaScript.
Unicode programming?! I get pissed when programming languages include shift-accessed characters in their standard syntax. Like PHP using '->' instead of '.' . Unicode programming sounds about as irrational as the natural language programming ideals of COBOL.
slashdot.binspam.add(this);
Quick, concise, logical, objective... Too bad parenthesis and curly brackets are shifted...
What an abysmally dreary name. Why you you ever want to associate your product with a name that conjures up mental images of being in an office on weekends?!
I believe this is the url of the last virus I obtained: www.opengl.org/documentation/red_book/
I'm pretty sure it's a legitimate site, so the virus may have come from an ad, in which case there isn't a 100% chance that going to that sight will work, but if it does that would be a good option. It delivered one of those obnoxious and ironic viruses that had pop-ups pretending to "detect a virus". It was a trojan, but it was easy to clean-off by hand, it was an older virus, so all anti-virus software should find it, and the location the virus is linked to was shut-down a long time ago, so it is low risk.
With all the big metal parts and solid chunks of plastic, that must be the heaviest mouse I've ever seen. The heft probably feels nice in the hand, but it is definitely not ideal for gaming, where mouse inertia is your enemy.
I think Unity3D would be a good idea. Do their platformer tutorial yourself using all their stand-in content. Modify the end result for your purposes. Break the students up into groups, where each group gets to make their own platformer game. Have them all use your code, and let them make their own story-line, models, animations, textures, levels, music, etc.
HTML is a horrible way to depict graphical content, and wasn't made to.
JavaScript is a terrible language, but how do you fix a language which everyone has already created their own implementation for, and which no one person has any control over.
CSS is a mess built on top of a mess.
Rigging them all together is like trying to create Frankenstein with jellyfish and hair-pins.
Now if only we could get a object/vector-based graphics system hooked-up to a solid OO language, and give it a flashy name.;)
--but seriously, a vector graphics driven web browser running a good scripting language, or at least a popular scripting language like ActionScript3, Python, Ruby or c#, could create some brilliant results.
Making Objects and Orienting a language to Objects are quite different.
JavaScript uses what is called Prototyping, which is arguably the bastard step sibling of a proper class system.
Many of the powerful features inherent to classical class based system are hard to produce with JavaScript's prototyping system, which has it's own flaccid pros, but arguably quite inferior to a strong class based system.
Python is a fair suggestion with something like pygame. It has the upside of teaching them a language they can use in future endeavors, AND will seem interesting to a youngster by peaking their interest with graphics and sound. How ever, there is some overhead to using pygame, and python's syntax isn't all that similar to other standard oop languages.
I'd suggest starting with a language that can easily offer graphics/sound/etc. for sandbox play, AND uses a syntax simular to the ECMA java-like standard. I believe that will help with the transition to OOP C++.
ActionScript is probably the most enticing language you could teach to a youngin' since it is tide to a graphical editor. If you start with AS2, you can skip all the complications and make a game by jamming a few small lines of code in strategic locations in a few minutes. You can then continue to concentrating on key rudimentary ideas while making playable games, or extending a game by expanding on previous example. You can slowly start bringing in proper structural elements that make make it more and more like AS3, until you basically ARE using AS3.
As languages go, AS3 has a very nice structure, so it's a good environment to teach proper practices. and it is easy to start AND complete projects that would actually seem interesting to a younger audiences. As an interpreted language that also compiles, there's quite good error handling, both at compile time and during run-time. Troubleshooting can be a major deterrent to a learner's progression, so useful error messages for all errors is important. Also, having the ActionScript help bible embedded into the IDE is quite handy.
Downsides: You need to buy the Flash Suite to get the proper experience out of it. ActionScript isn't a very applicable language in that, you can't use it anywhere other than in Flash applets. It doesn't have a very simple file IO system, which is often helpful in many teaching examples.
Still, it got your foot in the door. The teaching process often involves learning bad things first, and then re-learning better things later when you. You can't teach a pupil good habits if you don't have a pupil to begin with. I think working the graphical angle to start with to cultivate interest is more important that starting the learner with excellent habits. Good fundamentals and habits are very important but, would anyone waste there time learning football if they had to spend there first 3 years doing nothing but learning how to throw the perfect spiral before they could play the game? Nope.
Ruby is a great choice because of it's ease of use, but it is also a bad choice because of the expansive nature of the language. Ruby has too much acceptable syntax for a beginner, IMO. It's needlessly complex in its exhaustiveness, and isn't strict enough to encourage proper structure.
Javascript is probably one of THE worst languages of all time. Shame on you for even suggesting it in jest.
Not only does it use bad syntax and force the user to use bad syntax, its lack of proper structure encourages bad programming practices. It uses prototyping chains as apposed to classes, which makes it a bad language for transition. It is made to integrate with many other technologies such as HTML/CSS/PHP/etc., which makes it more difficult to pick-up and run with. It doesn't handle syntax and logic errors well enough to be helpful for a beginner. It's full of quirks like, foreach not being suitable for array traversal, and functions being passed by value. It's built-in libraries are laughably bad. It can't do simple file IO directly, which is a major tool for teaching early programming concepts. It doesn't even do simple user input that well.
Slashdot Mirror
I am skeptical, and any video of the incident would remove my skepticism. Assuming everyone is either a raving loon or your ideal liberal BFF is not a wise presumption, and certainly not a valid argument.
Regardless of my personal stance though, in this era of information, especially on a site like this, I would hope everyone would share some level of agreement on the intrinsic value of knowledge and information... When we weaves the 2010s into the tapestry of our societies history, what is gained by depriving our descendants the full, un-abridged, and uncensored truth? What is gained by our forbearers telling us Washington had wooden teeth, or the Native-Americans and the Pilgrims got along famously? What would be gained by leaving footage of JFK's assassination out of historical records?
Unless you consider information to be, by default, an un-necessary evil, the question shouldn't be "Why share information?", but "Why NOT share information?". The sharing of information is one of the biggest advantages humans have over less successful species. Okay, you might not want to see some dead guy shot in the fact. You might think it some form of barbaric, gratuitous, exhibition indicating poor moral fiber. It may be true that many of the people that want to see the images are either doing so as a political move or are looking for some cheap thrill while swilling a PBR and shouting, "Fuck yeah! He got what he deserved." --But, I believe the flaws of the lesser should not deter the aspirations of the greater. By that I mean, just because some people might want the images released for less than stellar reasons, that you might not agree with, shouldn't be the basis for an opinion, IMHO. I believe there is almost always a greater good to be served by the free and open distribution of information.
The argument about retribution is an excuse. It's true that some people won't be satisfied with the images, just as some people weren't satisfied with the moon-landing footage, or 9/11 footage. I know that many people resist the average emotional reaction of the masses, to glorify the death of Bin Laden, on moral grounds. I will make no attempt to argue that glorifying the death of another person is reasonable, not because I don't care, but because I don't think it plays into this discussion. In the grand scheme of things, these are all petty arguments of the month. 50 years from now, is anyone going to care that a handful of wackos didn't believe the images were real, or are they going to be more concerned that valuable information about their ancestor's history was lost forever; are they going to care that a few people got their jollies off the imagery, or are they going to care that the prevailing government of the time was with-holding information from the people who instituted them? What was more important about the Vietnam Conflict? The fact that prostitution ran rampant, or the fact that public visibility was kept at a minimum? That was a crude metaphor, but I hope you can see where I'm coming from.
Singular applications will take advantage of the extra cores for increased processing power in process heavy applications like games and web browsers.
Tablets have been around nearly as long as laptops, and have historically done terrible outside of specific business applications. Craig Mundie's response seems a well tempered response based on historical perspective.
Not only that, but Microsoft has always lead the Tablet charge, so this article doesn't even seem to make sense. Basically all full-sized commercial tablets come standard with a multi-touch Microsoft operating system. Microsoft has been spamming commercials as of late about their new tablet hardware...
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=407&name=Tablet-PCs
Googling "haddock array" comes-up with bupkis. If such a thing does in-fact exist, you must make a wikipedia page for it before referring to it on the inter-web-o-sphere. If you can't at least do that you are no better than Egypt. ;)
Natural Monopolies of network service providers.
Network communication is a vast and popular societal service, almost everyone uses it, and yet it is dominated on the consumer-end by Natural Monopolies. Coming-up with an idea that can not only compete with net discrimination, but also the natural monopolies created by physical lines, would be quite a feat. For the same reasons roads aren't owned by companies, network lines shouldn't either.
Major network mediums should be owned and controlled by the state/federal governments in the same way roads typically are, then service providers would sell their services over that medium like cab drivers, to extend the road analogy. If the comcasts of the world didn't own the lines, there would be some tough questions that would need answers, but open-market competition would be a viable and most likely excellent solution to the problem. Net Neutrality would become a selling-point of providers, and if it truley was superior to Net Discrimination, then it would thrive in a fair market.
As a knowledgeable community of technical experts (slash-dotters), it is in-fact our responsibility to push forward these ideas. If technically inclined and concerned members of our society like us don't take action to correct this chronic and looming problem, who will... I believe the real solution to this problem is for us to get proactive about "socializing" communication lines. I understand "socializing" has a negative connotation for most, due to it's implied link to socialism. Yet, if you evaluate my argument, you will notice it is actually an argument FOR capitalism. The problem is a break-down of capitalism in disguise. Capitalism can solve this problem if governments did their jobs properly and broke-up monopolistic tendencies by ensuring fair markets of exchange. To do that, governments need to erect and own the physical medium, just as they do with roads. WE, as concerned and knowledgeable member of society need to influence our governmental bodies to do so. THAT, is the solution.
A solid and simple start would be for people to write their local representatives regarding this issue.
A distributed search feature is great, but the Trible software is bereft of features. I recommend sticking with uTorret, and hoping uTorrent developers implement a similar feature.
S.C.A.R.A.B. owned by EA
This game had great game play mechanics in general and in some cases ingenious game-play mechanics. Giving it quite addictive game play, but lacked 3 major things to make it big.
1. fairly poor graphics (it was released in 1997, so that one is pretty obvious)
2. non-standard controls (it was also before FPS controls were standardized, and the controls scheme it chose was cumbersome)
3. bandwidth (this game had a great multi-player setup, but again it was hindered by the shotty internet connections and poor server selection standardization of the 1990s)
All things instantly fixed by something like a source, unreal, or unity port. (if EA didn't hold the rights to it, I probably would have already ported it. :/ )
Cellphones already support wifi, bluetooth etc., why not simply combined WiFi and paypal, into a smartphone-app to pay for things? (assuming you don't hate paypal)
If a store wants to support cellphone purchasing, they don't need new RFID scanners and service fees, they just need a wireless router, and a corresponding app to handle the smartphone-app's transnational messages. ( patent pending ;P )
Is it just me or did anyone else think the title meant something sensationally different when they read Ada instead of ADA?
I take it as a compliment that you presumed I copied this from someone else and took it upon yourself to google it. However, if you were thorough with your investigation, you may have noticed that the poster on that blog has the EXACT same user name as myself.
On a related note, I find it amusing how many people took my post seriously as if it wasn't completely tongue-in-cheek. Granted, I do think JavaScript is probably the 3rd or 4th worst language I've ever used, but I wouldn't have suspected anyone would have thought that that "poem" was anyone's idea of a proper critique of JavaScript's follies.
P.S. Sorry about the spelling error, but I can't edit my previous post, so...
JavaScript is truly a horrifyingly discussing,
intrinsically retched,
soul darkening, succubus from the abysmal depths of conceivable depravity.
To know its stench
is to know the crippling limitations of our future.
To recognize its sloven decadence
and remain indifferent
is to burn the righteous.
No faith,
however moving and spectacular,
could light a path of its continuation.
No argument,
however complex and equivocated,
could elevate such a encumbering and wearisome burden.
There is no failure so inadequate,
or stagnation so bereft of utility
as that of JavaScript.
Thankyou.
Unicode programming?! I get pissed when programming languages include shift-accessed characters in their standard syntax. Like PHP using '->' instead of '.' . Unicode programming sounds about as irrational as the natural language programming ideals of COBOL.
slashdot.binspam.add(this);
Quick, concise, logical, objective... Too bad parenthesis and curly brackets are shifted...
What an abysmally dreary name. Why you you ever want to associate your product with a name that conjures up mental images of being in an office on weekends?!
I believe this is the url of the last virus I obtained: www.opengl.org/documentation/red_book/
I'm pretty sure it's a legitimate site, so the virus may have come from an ad, in which case there isn't a 100% chance that going to that sight will work, but if it does that would be a good option. It delivered one of those obnoxious and ironic viruses that had pop-ups pretending to "detect a virus". It was a trojan, but it was easy to clean-off by hand, it was an older virus, so all anti-virus software should find it, and the location the virus is linked to was shut-down a long time ago, so it is low risk.
With all the big metal parts and solid chunks of plastic, that must be the heaviest mouse I've ever seen. The heft probably feels nice in the hand, but it is definitely not ideal for gaming, where mouse inertia is your enemy.
I think Unity3D would be a good idea. Do their platformer tutorial yourself using all their stand-in content. Modify the end result for your purposes. Break the students up into groups, where each group gets to make their own platformer game. Have them all use your code, and let them make their own story-line, models, animations, textures, levels, music, etc.
Agreed.
HTML is a horrible way to depict graphical content, and wasn't made to.
JavaScript is a terrible language, but how do you fix a language which everyone has already created their own implementation for, and which no one person has any control over.
CSS is a mess built on top of a mess.
Rigging them all together is like trying to create Frankenstein with jellyfish and hair-pins.
Now if only we could get a object/vector-based graphics system hooked-up to a solid OO language, and give it a flashy name. ;)
--but seriously, a vector graphics driven web browser running a good scripting language, or at least a popular scripting language like ActionScript3, Python, Ruby or c#, could create some brilliant results.
Making Objects and Orienting a language to Objects are quite different.
JavaScript uses what is called Prototyping, which is arguably the bastard step sibling of a proper class system.
Many of the powerful features inherent to classical class based system are hard to produce with JavaScript's prototyping system, which has it's own flaccid pros, but arguably quite inferior to a strong class based system.
In JavaScript, easier said than trolled.
Python is a fair suggestion with something like pygame. It has the upside of teaching them a language they can use in future endeavors, AND will seem interesting to a youngster by peaking their interest with graphics and sound. How ever, there is some overhead to using pygame, and python's syntax isn't all that similar to other standard oop languages.
I'd suggest starting with a language that can easily offer graphics/sound/etc. for sandbox play, AND uses a syntax simular to the ECMA java-like standard. I believe that will help with the transition to OOP C++.
ActionScript is probably the most enticing language you could teach to a youngin' since it is tide to a graphical editor. If you start with AS2, you can skip all the complications and make a game by jamming a few small lines of code in strategic locations in a few minutes. You can then continue to concentrating on key rudimentary ideas while making playable games, or extending a game by expanding on previous example. You can slowly start bringing in proper structural elements that make make it more and more like AS3, until you basically ARE using AS3.
As languages go, AS3 has a very nice structure, so it's a good environment to teach proper practices. and it is easy to start AND complete projects that would actually seem interesting to a younger audiences. As an interpreted language that also compiles, there's quite good error handling, both at compile time and during run-time. Troubleshooting can be a major deterrent to a learner's progression, so useful error messages for all errors is important. Also, having the ActionScript help bible embedded into the IDE is quite handy.
Downsides:
You need to buy the Flash Suite to get the proper experience out of it.
ActionScript isn't a very applicable language in that, you can't use it anywhere other than in Flash applets.
It doesn't have a very simple file IO system, which is often helpful in many teaching examples.
Still, it got your foot in the door. The teaching process often involves learning bad things first, and then re-learning better things later when you. You can't teach a pupil good habits if you don't have a pupil to begin with. I think working the graphical angle to start with to cultivate interest is more important that starting the learner with excellent habits.
Good fundamentals and habits are very important but, would anyone waste there time learning football if they had to spend there first 3 years doing nothing but learning how to throw the perfect spiral before they could play the game? Nope.
Ruby is a great choice because of it's ease of use, but it is also a bad choice because of the expansive nature of the language. Ruby has too much acceptable syntax for a beginner, IMO. It's needlessly complex in its exhaustiveness, and isn't strict enough to encourage proper structure.
Javascript is probably one of THE worst languages of all time. Shame on you for even suggesting it in jest.
Not only does it use bad syntax and force the user to use bad syntax, its lack of proper structure encourages bad programming practices. It uses prototyping chains as apposed to classes, which makes it a bad language for transition. It is made to integrate with many other technologies such as HTML/CSS/PHP/etc., which makes it more difficult to pick-up and run with. It doesn't handle syntax and logic errors well enough to be helpful for a beginner. It's full of quirks like, foreach not being suitable for array traversal, and functions being passed by value. It's built-in libraries are laughably bad. It can't do simple file IO directly, which is a major tool for teaching early programming concepts. It doesn't even do simple user input that well.
If you ask me. Slashdot is the anonymous coward. How dare it log me out without telling me! ;)