The only word of caution to teachers is if you are copying and pasting something - give your students time to recopy it in their notes.
You're teaching Mathematics, not note-taking, right?
Why not just say at the outset of the class something to the effect of "I'll be saving the notes I'm going through at $LOCATION where you can all download them when we're done, so you don't need to take notes"?
I've heard that writing things down helps you remember them, because it lets the brain... well, I didn't hear that part because I was busy writing things down to help myself remember them. So maybe you-the-student want to just look, listen and think, and skip the writing because the nice 'fessor has already done it for you:)
I guess it's up to MS to make a easy to use idiot-proof threaded framework for crappy programmers to use.
Simon Peyton-Jones is woking on Haskell and Software Transaction Memory. Instead of specifying "lock here" and "unlock here" you say "this block should be executed atomically", with the posibiity of aborting, pausing or retrying the transaction (say, if you're waiting for a queue to be nonempty).
I won't call it idiot-proof, but it's more human-fallibility-proof than threads and locks (I guess: I haven't tried it).
Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
I count that as eight different platforms (assuming we only count integer-valued version numbers). How many desktop OSes are in use, discounting those used by less than 0.1% of the market? Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone OS, and uhm... yeah?
So when you think about creating an application and you worry about porting it between different clients, the decision "let's make it a web app! We'll have to test fewer platforms" runs counter to your purpose, right? In other words: people have turned the web into something it wasn't meant to be---a portability nightmare.
Yeah, writing desktop apps exposes you to differences between OSes. Okay, but all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth: they do the same things but in slightly different ways. Wrap the differences in libportability and get over it.
Maybe my attitude betrays my lack of coffee, but isn't it basically right? You don't have worse portability for desktop applications than you do for web applications.
Business took a page from science and said, "If I can't measure it, it doesn't exist."
I think of science saying something much closer to "If I can't measure it yet, I defer judgment until I can, and try to enable that. If it's inherently unmeasurable, I defer judgment forever."
Business people tend to not measure, and also not try harder at measuring, because they don't know the payoff of measuring harder, because they never measured that either, because [...].
They're interested in getting the most effort out of their employees for the least possible reward.
I would say they're interested in getting as much output as possible, for as little expenditure as possible.
They don't mind how rewarding you find whatever they give you---in fact, they want you to be happy (because hiring a replacement if you're unhappy enough to leave is expensive).
And they also don't mind how much effort it requires on your part to make the output, they just want the 500 new widgets every day.
Well, every time that happens the game will pause. If it's disconnected for too long, it will quit and you lose your progress. You don't get the option to save.
"Well, they do say to save early, save often!"
I think you should have emphasized the fact that Ubisoft could have decided to build the game in such a way that he wouldn't _ever_ lose his save games just for disconnecting from the net, but they didn't because by inconveniencing him, they believe they can get more money out of people. Emphasize that Ubisoft has a choice, and they choose against your interests for their own greedy motives.
I think that might work well. People don't like being taken advantage of, or being under the power of someone else. It's just that they don't always know they are.
Pirating the game sends the same message. The publishers do have some idea of the numbers of peopls who are copying their games, and if there are many more than expected, then the DRM scheme will be made worse!
Yeah, pirates should worry about not encouraging nasty DRM, because the nastier the DRM, the fewer paying customers there are to freeload our DRM-free version off of.
I have a masters in computer science. And this is the shit they expect your regular consumer to figure out.
No! An emphatic no!
They don't expect regular people to figure this shit out. They expect people to become annoyed, give up and buy more of their stuff, because paying more money "makes the annoy go away".
That of course just "a side effect" of the battle against those evil pirates whom the good regular customers should blame for the rising prices.
That is the mean thing here, the vaccination system can support a certain number of freeloaders, so on an individual level these do not select themselves out of the genepoop.
Yo mama... erm... dammit, I'm not going to sink that low. Those jokes would just stink...
Back in the early 80s, RMS decided the world needed Free Software.
A rather simple plan would seem to suffice:
Build it
Advocate it
Since a lot of people work on free software, the FSF has decided it doesn't need to focus its efforts on that any longer, but should rather advocate its viewpoints.
Building it required an understanding of software. Advocating it requires an understanding of people.
Us nerds are often more plentifully endowed with technical competency compared to our skill with people. RMS even more so.
And yeah, maybe he's not calling all the shots, but the FSF probably attracts a large concentration of nerds. The selling points that go well with those who get into FSF by themselves might not be those you should use on the general public.
Similarly, Linux tends to attract tech savvy (and perhaps not so people savvy) people. Those inmates tend to run the asylum, when it comes to usability, and they know what they want, which might not be the same thing as what everybody else wants (... in some cases, at least).
"Secondly, what is the need for keeping the same phone number?"
It's O(n_friends) telling your n_friends to change your entry in their hosts.txt file. It's O(1) work keeping the same number, and 1 < n for many values of n.
There's really something wrong on slashdot when I tell other people about having an active social life.
[It's sad to see] how the world has changed in recent 150 years.
Why? Because the mass centre of freedom has moved to somewhere different from where it was before (why is that bad...)? Or because there's less freedom in the world? Or because there's less freedom where you are?
This when I've been a Linux kernel developer for 10+ years now which is 100% procedural ANSI C.
If you'd said 99% I might have agreed.
But no, Linux isn't 100% procedural. The file systems are object oriented---each file systems presents a vtable to the vfs layer, which is then used to translate the `read' system call into, say, the reiserfs `read' call, or the ext3 `read' call, or the [...].
In other words, the vfs layer invokes the read method of the class corresponding to the file system in question.
(And no reductionistic arguments, unless you want to argue that programs aren't procedural either, because there are no procedures but only a bunch of GOTOs with a stack...)
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 80s, I remember someone saying that a paperless office would be about as useful as the paperless toilet.
At least you know the guy advocating paperless toilets isn't full of shit :)
I've never had my desk crash, losing all pieces of paper on it. Contrast that to Windows.
Yeah, but you don't hand-write your notes on used toilet paper either, do you? ;-)
The only word of caution to teachers is if you are copying and pasting something - give your students time to recopy it in their notes.
You're teaching Mathematics, not note-taking, right?
Why not just say at the outset of the class something to the effect of "I'll be saving the notes I'm going through at $LOCATION where you can all download them when we're done, so you don't need to take notes"?
I've heard that writing things down helps you remember them, because it lets the brain... well, I didn't hear that part because I was busy writing things down to help myself remember them. So maybe you-the-student want to just look, listen and think, and skip the writing because the nice 'fessor has already done it for you :)
I guess it's up to MS to make a easy to use idiot-proof threaded framework for crappy programmers to use.
Simon Peyton-Jones is woking on Haskell and Software Transaction Memory. Instead of specifying "lock here" and "unlock here" you say "this block should be executed atomically", with the posibiity of aborting, pausing or retrying the transaction (say, if you're waiting for a queue to be nonempty).
I won't call it idiot-proof, but it's more human-fallibility-proof than threads and locks (I guess: I haven't tried it).
I bet every ISP wants to be a Superior Carrier of Utmost Magnificence ;-)
Does it rhyme with sinned or blind ?
Wined and dined.
You winned!
Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
I count that as eight different platforms (assuming we only count integer-valued version numbers). How many desktop OSes are in use, discounting those used by less than 0.1% of the market? Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone OS, and uhm... yeah?
So when you think about creating an application and you worry about porting it between different clients, the decision "let's make it a web app! We'll have to test fewer platforms" runs counter to your purpose, right? In other words: people have turned the web into something it wasn't meant to be---a portability nightmare.
Yeah, writing desktop apps exposes you to differences between OSes. Okay, but all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth: they do the same things but in slightly different ways. Wrap the differences in libportability and get over it.
Maybe my attitude betrays my lack of coffee, but isn't it basically right? You don't have worse portability for desktop applications than you do for web applications.
I'm fascinated by your set of ideas and would like to subscribe to your holy scripture.
Business took a page from science and said, "If I can't measure it, it doesn't exist."
I think of science saying something much closer to "If I can't measure it yet, I defer judgment until I can, and try to enable that. If it's inherently unmeasurable, I defer judgment forever."
Business people tend to not measure, and also not try harder at measuring, because they don't know the payoff of measuring harder, because they never measured that either, because [...].
As long as nobody puts on their robe and wizard hat during the interview, I'm happy :)
They're interested in getting the most effort out of their employees for the least possible reward.
I would say they're interested in getting as much output as possible, for as little expenditure as possible.
They don't mind how rewarding you find whatever they give you---in fact, they want you to be happy (because hiring a replacement if you're unhappy enough to leave is expensive).
And they also don't mind how much effort it requires on your part to make the output, they just want the 500 new widgets every day.
Well, every time that happens the game will pause. If it's disconnected for too long, it will quit and you lose your progress. You don't get the option to save.
"Well, they do say to save early, save often!"
I think you should have emphasized the fact that Ubisoft could have decided to build the game in such a way that he wouldn't _ever_ lose his save games just for disconnecting from the net, but they didn't because by inconveniencing him, they believe they can get more money out of people. Emphasize that Ubisoft has a choice, and they choose against your interests for their own greedy motives.
I think that might work well. People don't like being taken advantage of, or being under the power of someone else. It's just that they don't always know they are.
Pirating the game sends the same message. The publishers do have some idea of the numbers of peopls who are copying their games, and if there are many more than expected, then the DRM scheme will be made worse!
Yeah, pirates should worry about not encouraging nasty DRM, because the nastier the DRM, the fewer paying customers there are to freeload our DRM-free version off of.
I'm waiting for a game that doesn't ram stuff up my ass that I dunno where it's been before.
People could insert a fire hydrant in my ass if they told me on which street corner it had been standing.
No wait... that doesn't sound right...
People could... uhm... no, I don't really like have stuff inserted in my ass.
I have a masters in computer science. And this is the shit they expect your regular consumer to figure out.
No! An emphatic no!
They don't expect regular people to figure this shit out. They expect people to become annoyed, give up and buy more of their stuff, because paying more money "makes the annoy go away".
That of course just "a side effect" of the battle against those evil pirates whom the good regular customers should blame for the rising prices.
(... My ass!)
That is the mean thing here, the vaccination system can support a certain number of freeloaders, so on an individual level these do not select themselves out of the genepoop.
Yo mama... erm... dammit, I'm not going to sink that low. Those jokes would just stink...
2010: Year of the Linux Tabletop?
Sure. I have Linux running on my Nokia N40000.
Back in the early 80s, RMS decided the world needed Free Software.
A rather simple plan would seem to suffice:
Since a lot of people work on free software, the FSF has decided it doesn't need to focus its efforts on that any longer, but should rather advocate its viewpoints.
Building it required an understanding of software. Advocating it requires an understanding of people.
Us nerds are often more plentifully endowed with technical competency compared to our skill with people. RMS even more so.
And yeah, maybe he's not calling all the shots, but the FSF probably attracts a large concentration of nerds. The selling points that go well with those who get into FSF by themselves might not be those you should use on the general public.
Similarly, Linux tends to attract tech savvy (and perhaps not so people savvy) people. Those inmates tend to run the asylum, when it comes to usability, and they know what they want, which might not be the same thing as what everybody else wants (... in some cases, at least).
More so, how badly do you need a phone at all?
"Hi. Can I have your number?"
No... wait...
"Secondly, what is the need for keeping the same phone number?"
It's O(n_friends) telling your n_friends to change your entry in their hosts.txt file. It's O(1) work keeping the same number, and 1 < n for many values of n.
There's really something wrong on slashdot when I tell other people about having an active social life.
But why is is that the HR bitch is by default the dragon of the company everyone would slay if they had half a chance of getting away with it?
Because there's a positive correlation between being being sociopathic and being promoted.
Well-documented in the scientific literature, if I remember correctly. No link, sorry :(
Let me see if I get this right:
Brooks is saying that you should let everybody look at source code, due do Linus' Law (bug shallowness goes to 100% for eyeballs going to 6e9).
Parnas is saying that you should encapsulate things behind loosely coupled interfaces.
And you're saying "if everyone has to know what everyone else is working on [...]"
And then I'm saying there's a difference between having to know the innards of a module, and being allowed to know said innards.
I also think being allowed to know---without having to---is what makes open source software what it is.
Don't forget his last name, --. As in Ahmed');Drop Table No_Fly_List; --
That name makes anything who follows him rather insignificant ;-)
[It's sad to see] how the world has changed in recent 150 years.
Why? Because the mass centre of freedom has moved to somewhere different from where it was before (why is that bad...)? Or because there's less freedom in the world? Or because there's less freedom where you are?
Most genocides had higher approval ratings than that.
Maybe the Council needs to be enabled?
Godwin was on to something. Just like Hitler and the Naz... no, wait, that was the other thing ;-)
This when I've been a Linux kernel developer for 10+ years now which is 100% procedural ANSI C.
If you'd said 99% I might have agreed.
But no, Linux isn't 100% procedural. The file systems are object oriented---each file systems presents a vtable to the vfs layer, which is then used to translate the `read' system call into, say, the reiserfs `read' call, or the ext3 `read' call, or the [...].
In other words, the vfs layer invokes the read method of the class corresponding to the file system in question.
(And no reductionistic arguments, unless you want to argue that programs aren't procedural either, because there are no procedures but only a bunch of GOTOs with a stack...)