I'm not sure if it is true, but new CS students at MIT used to have to learn Scheme as their first language.
I'm starting my 1st year in CompSci at Oxford, UK and we do nothing but Haskell for the whole first term, and then the most of the more theoretical courses (design and analysis of algorithms, for one) seem to be in Haskell for majority of the course.
Rest of the course is in a couple other languages including Java for the OO course and Oberon (I'd never heard of it either) for Imperative/Procedural course. After an afternoon working in Oberon, a language which provides the bare minimum of tools for anything, functional programming looks oh so pretty. I'd programmed in Java and Python and things before uni, but functional programming just has a really different way of looking at things, and it's really quite nice. If you want to try coding in a new way, I'd definitely go for it.
In other news, piracy is causing huge profit losses to 'big media', more DRM for all!
Boycotting 'big media' isn't enough, it makes them assume you're still watching, just not buying. Prove there's money in it, just not for them. Support the people doing the right thing. Donate to TPB, buy EMI's DRM free downloads, buy cd's from unsigned artists in pubs and rather than not spending at all, move your spending from the people who's actions you disagree with to those who do the right thing(s).
If they see the whole industry losing money, it doesn't seem to be the fault of something they're doing. If they're losing money while lots of others get rich, they'll copy those others.
Note this is talking about Compiz Fusion by the way, which is what the Compiz and Beryl projects merged to become!
Gutsy includes the latest gnome (2.19.9 as of Gutsy Tribe 5) which has a new control panel called appearance where all the settings for themes etc are. This also has a 'desktop effects' tab, where you can turn effects off, effects on, or turn _all_ effects on, which I believe includes scale and similar. (Where effects essentially means compiz fusion).
This, at least, is the state of play in Tribe 5, where if you do want to turn the wobbles off, it's one radio button.
In other news, I've found compiz fusion really stable on my Macbook 1.83Ghz Rev 1, which has an integrated intel something, which I think is what all this stability fuss is about?
Oh, and the USB connection acts as a mass storage device. Although on mine it only lets you read the internal 4GB memory, not the 40mb ish core phone storage. Don't know why. Does anybody know anyway I can sync (calendar/contacts etc) w950i with linux btw?
Tim.
There's a single (I think SE specific) connector on the bottom of my W950i and my brothers K750i. This connector fits the charger, the USB connector and there's a 50cm ish headphone adapter with a play/pause button, and a mike so you can take phone calls, included (with mine at least, not sure about my brother's). Works quite well.
Can these things just be stuck strait into USB slots?
Looks like it; Those four contacts at the top of the card in your image look exactly like standard usb layout (look closely inside a connector some time). You just put the card into the slot on a USB (again, have a look:-) ). Looking at my USBs right now, that thing is small!
Surface has been optimized for 52 touches--enough for four people to use all 10 fingers at once and still have 12 objects sitting on the table.
Seems reasonable decision. Although why four people would be touching it with all their fingers is anyone's guess.
An interesting idea - combine this with those charging panels I keep hearing so much about. If I can plonk my laptop/phone down on my coffee table and have it charge (and for extra marks backup & sync via its wifi/bluetooth) I'll be no end of impressed.
Only problem is, how locked down is it? As a Microsoft product its doubtlessly Windows + bits (MCE style) but will they let me write stuff on it? And can I use as if 'twas a normal Windows PC with a strange touchscreen?
Why is Ruby suddenly the big buzz these days? My internets inform me it's a high level server-side language (python for websites). Isn't the most important thing in a server side language fast performance rather than quick development time? I found an article on coding horror in the depths of my RSS reader talking about how Twitter are having no end of problems scaling their system, as they're using Ruby and it just isn't made for big, high traffic sites.
If the main reason for writing server side software is web based applications, or at least dynamic content, isn't a huge factor in this how well it scales? Nobody makes sites to be used by 20 people.
Finally, if anybody can explain it's popularity to me, should I learn it? I'm currently doing freelance web dev mostly in PHP, would it be useful? How? In my spare time I'm writing a AJAX web app with PHP back-end at the moment and it's mostly for my personal use (task tracking from anywhere), is Ruby good here with the limited audience the site'll have?
It's only 4 faces (by default), the top and bottom generally display a logo because, as you say,you can't easily show a square on an 4:3 screen
Also you can't end up with the screen at any angle (you just can't) but straight up (try looking at one of many youtube videos to get an idea of it works. Lots of workspaces in general is something I find really useful (software & web dev), and although not visible in the video, there's a 'pager' which shows thumbnails of each screen on the panel (think taskbar) with large icons of each program running.
Does anyone understand why the make or break of a new OS this year is whether you can view different workspaces (multiple desktops, whatever you call them) imposed onto a cube which you can twist about?
It does seem that way doesn't it? This in Linux, Leopard has spaces, and I know there are plugins for Vista that'll do it. True story.
I have a power monitor thing on the socket for my home server (it's just a box, no screen keyboard etc) and right now it's using 132 Watts downloading torrents and web serving (mostly as a web dev test site, so probably not really doing any work). It's a 3Ghz P4 too, so it's probably not as power efficient as it could be.
...Russian News Service say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin.
Doesn't sound like the media trying to influence society, sounds like the government trying to increase their power and control over society. Media having control isn't quite as bad, there's more than one media outlet. If that media outlet becomes too heavily liberal/conservative people disagreeing with that will start their own conservative/liberal newspapers and TV shows and similar and the overall media balances out (YMMV). This is considerably harder to do with governments, particularly when they censor all mention of any opposition to the people in power.
The idea is to have the news accurately represent what is happening. Concentrating on the good only, like here, gives people a false impression of the state of the country, and the world, and defeats the point of watching the news (to find out what's going on). Western news is famous for moving the other way; More people watch worrying news than interesting news, so you scare people to keep them watching, and give them a false impression of their world.
Obviously neither approach is good, but at least in the west it's being happening to attempt make people interested, and news outlets do it independently depending on their personal morals, rather than it being a Government masterminded plan to keep the country in control and keep people in power in power (YMMV depending on Bush conspiracy theories).
I'd rather watch news attempting to keep me watching it than watch news attempting to keep me from revolution.
You've got to wonder, with all that effort into finding good news, why not simply put it into making something good happen? If there's a depressing story of an earthquake, send record breaking aid and show pictures a grateful, rapidly recovering people! Not only would they get good news, it might improve the country's (and the world's) opinion on Putin and keep him back into power without censoring details of his competition.
Anyway, it's not all bad (yet). If they were in true censorship, Russian News wouldn't be able to tell people (the American media no less!) that they're being told to do all this. There's some freedom there at least. And if all else fails they can always go on air with "Unfortunately we're now unable to tell you about the recent successes of the West against famine in Africa. Here's Vladimov with details of what exactly it is you're missing."
Even better, you can now see through your walls! Hunt the pesky kids down! (On the other hand, they can see when you're out, and nab all your bandwidth)
"An better solution might be to let the AJAX application explicit handle sessions by storing the session id, and sending it in the post part of all it's requests."
That's what I meant:).
All cookies are are files with text in that identifies you session. Since the JS checks the cookies not the server, any request must include data to validate the session anyways. Think about it, you go to a page it generates a cookies with you session auth data in it. The javascript then requests appointment data for user X. The javascript MUST be including some sort of validation data, or otherwise the server will just be giving out this data to anybody who requests it, and assuming the javascript has checked the cookie. AJAX can just store it in the javascript, rather than reading it from the cookie every request. It's the same stored session data (or it can be), its just stored in a javascript variable rather than a cookie.
I can prove it:D. Install the Firebug extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/184 3 into firefox and click console. It shows AJAX requests including parameters. All of them have a session identifier of some sort. For example I just tried Gmail, you get a 16 character SID (session id presumably) paramater send with every request.
"In an example attack, a victim who has already authenticated themselves to an Ajax application, and has the login cookie in their browser, is persuaded to visit the attacker's web site. This web site contains JavaScript code that makes calls to the Ajax app. Data received from the app is sent to the attacker."
So essentially it means that the attacker can use the authentication cookie of the user to authenticate them again, and then run javascript with that authentication. But why are AJAX apps storing authentication in cookies? If you need to store authentication (User session id's etc), store them in a variable within the javascript. That'll stay there until a page refresh clears variable status, and how many page refreshes occur with AJAX?
AJAX apps do not need to (and should not!) store user authentication in cookies. Cookies are useful for keeping a continual session open between pages. AJAX needs no continual session. If they don't use cookies, then other sites cannot use that authentication.
Enjoy. But even though the kid really shouldn't be expelled from his school, kicking him off the net till he learns how to design a page would be nice. Reminds me of geocities...
Just think! With an index like google's an AI would end up thinking some wonderful things. Ohhh would it laugh at the french military... And it's indexed wikipedia too. Just think, some troll changes an article to say that Bush eats fat kiddies for breakfast and 'the google overmind' starts ddos'ing the white house...
The BROKE THE LAW. Read the words. Not only EU law, but US law. It's not like it's opinion it's something that _has_ happened. The EU is not extorting anybody, it's simply following it's own (and many places') regulations to the letter.
Where in that can you POSSIBLY say the EU is moronic? It's (unlike microsoft) just following the rules!
No, you're not. BUT if you're in a monopoly position, meaning everybody else in the market needs to be able to work with you (particularly important in the all-connected computer industry) then you need to give them enough details to be able to work with you.
and my programs become popular enough that people want to connect to them for reasons I didn't intend (and don't want to have to support)
Firstly, samba at least is not 'a reason they didn't intend'. They're trying to find out how to connect to a windows pc in EXACTLY the same way a windows pc would, so there are no extra support issues, providing microsoft gives over the api.
Imagine if a phone company became THE phone company, everybody bought phones from them, and then they started inventing their own ways of working. Yeah fine. Say they start their own exchanges and change the way phone calls are transmitted totally. Almost everybody uses them and it's just made their service better! But then, they don't tell the other phone companies how their calls are transmitted. So if you're not on this company then you can only call phone that are also not on this company.
This is where it moves from ok to BAD. You've got 90% of the market. But now, nobody can buy another type of phone service other than yours, because if they do, they can't talk to 90% of the population. So your market share grows and grows because PEOPLE CAN'T CHOOSE ANYTHING ELSE. Remind you of anybody? This is what abusing your monopoly means.
Not exactly giving them the key to your tank, more like taking your hand of the big red button.
back then you also had the small computer shops where the people who actually knew a thing or two built your machine to custom specs if you asked for it.
I work in one of said shops. Theres 3 shops like us in town fighting it out (we're winning;-)) and a huge PC World, the main UK pc retailer, 2 miles down the road. One of the main things keeping us afloat is repair jobs on PC World computers. Walk into pc world, tell them your pc doesn't start when you press the button and nobody will mention £20 power supply. They'll mention £1000 new computer.
In actual sales rather than repairs though, they do beat us. We're a tiny tiny tiny shop (3 employee's including me) and so sales tends to be a fairly personal thing. Our prices tend to be about £50-100 over PC World regardless of how we source or anything. PC world just sells things at our COST price. We can't keep up. They've just got too many deals to cut their costs that a small company can't manage. The only thing we can beat them on is a more personal service with nicer warranties (1 year parts and labour, 3 years labour!/advertising) and simply being better at repairs. Almost all our customers have been our customers for years because they know us know. That's all any small business can really keep going for them around the big retailers like this!
The thing is, for the margins of your average retailer, you can't afford quality staff. And that's not just computers, that's everything.
Not strictly true... With computers at least theres a HUGE pool of cheap labour in the form of teenage geeks and such. I'm 17 so i'm cheap to employ which is a good thing for the retailer, and i'm headed for the computer industry as is after uni next year so I need experience for my cv too. Win-win. And theres LOTS of teenagers who want jobs better than stacking shelves and who have lots of experience with pc's. A little training in customer service and that's it. Cheap labour with a fair bit of the skills.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm starting my 1st year in CompSci at Oxford, UK and we do nothing but Haskell for the whole first term, and then the most of the more theoretical courses (design and analysis of algorithms, for one) seem to be in Haskell for majority of the course.
Rest of the course is in a couple other languages including Java for the OO course and Oberon (I'd never heard of it either) for Imperative/Procedural course. After an afternoon working in Oberon, a language which provides the bare minimum of tools for anything, functional programming looks oh so pretty. I'd programmed in Java and Python and things before uni, but functional programming just has a really different way of looking at things, and it's really quite nice. If you want to try coding in a new way, I'd definitely go for it.
In other news, piracy is causing huge profit losses to 'big media', more DRM for all!
Boycotting 'big media' isn't enough, it makes them assume you're still watching, just not buying. Prove there's money in it, just not for them. Support the people doing the right thing. Donate to TPB, buy EMI's DRM free downloads, buy cd's from unsigned artists in pubs and rather than not spending at all, move your spending from the people who's actions you disagree with to those who do the right thing(s).
If they see the whole industry losing money, it doesn't seem to be the fault of something they're doing. If they're losing money while lots of others get rich, they'll copy those others.
Note this is talking about Compiz Fusion by the way, which is what the Compiz and Beryl projects merged to become! Gutsy includes the latest gnome (2.19.9 as of Gutsy Tribe 5) which has a new control panel called appearance where all the settings for themes etc are. This also has a 'desktop effects' tab, where you can turn effects off, effects on, or turn _all_ effects on, which I believe includes scale and similar. (Where effects essentially means compiz fusion). This, at least, is the state of play in Tribe 5, where if you do want to turn the wobbles off, it's one radio button. In other news, I've found compiz fusion really stable on my Macbook 1.83Ghz Rev 1, which has an integrated intel something, which I think is what all this stability fuss is about?
Oh, and the USB connection acts as a mass storage device. Although on mine it only lets you read the internal 4GB memory, not the 40mb ish core phone storage. Don't know why. Does anybody know anyway I can sync (calendar/contacts etc) w950i with linux btw? Tim.
There's a single (I think SE specific) connector on the bottom of my W950i and my brothers K750i. This connector fits the charger, the USB connector and there's a 50cm ish headphone adapter with a play/pause button, and a mike so you can take phone calls, included (with mine at least, not sure about my brother's). Works quite well.
Looks like it; Those four contacts at the top of the card in your image look exactly like standard usb layout (look closely inside a connector some time). You just put the card into the slot on a USB (again, have a look
Finally! My current tin foil hat is getting rusty...
An interesting idea - combine this with those charging panels I keep hearing so much about. If I can plonk my laptop/phone down on my coffee table and have it charge (and for extra marks backup & sync via its wifi/bluetooth) I'll be no end of impressed.
Only problem is, how locked down is it? As a Microsoft product its doubtlessly Windows + bits (MCE style) but will they let me write stuff on it? And can I use as if 'twas a normal Windows PC with a strange touchscreen?And finally, will it run Linux?
I'd like to apologise for being a damn fool with no idea what he's talking about.
Ruby != Rails. Who'd of guessed it.
Yep. Smoothly done on my part.
Sorry =P.
Why is Ruby suddenly the big buzz these days? My internets inform me it's a high level server-side language (python for websites). Isn't the most important thing in a server side language fast performance rather than quick development time? I found an article on coding horror in the depths of my RSS reader talking about how Twitter are having no end of problems scaling their system, as they're using Ruby and it just isn't made for big, high traffic sites.
If the main reason for writing server side software is web based applications, or at least dynamic content, isn't a huge factor in this how well it scales? Nobody makes sites to be used by 20 people.
Finally, if anybody can explain it's popularity to me, should I learn it? I'm currently doing freelance web dev mostly in PHP, would it be useful? How? In my spare time I'm writing a AJAX web app with PHP back-end at the moment and it's mostly for my personal use (task tracking from anywhere), is Ruby good here with the limited audience the site'll have?
Also you can't end up with the screen at any angle (you just can't) but straight up (try looking at one of many youtube videos to get an idea of it works. Lots of workspaces in general is something I find really useful (software & web dev), and although not visible in the video, there's a 'pager' which shows thumbnails of each screen on the panel (think taskbar) with large icons of each program running.
It does seem that way doesn't it? This in Linux, Leopard has spaces, and I know there are plugins for Vista that'll do it. True story.
I have a power monitor thing on the socket for my home server (it's just a box, no screen keyboard etc) and right now it's using 132 Watts downloading torrents and web serving (mostly as a web dev test site, so probably not really doing any work). It's a 3Ghz P4 too, so it's probably not as power efficient as it could be.
400 watts has got to be way off.
Doesn't sound like the media trying to influence society, sounds like the government trying to increase their power and control over society. Media having control isn't quite as bad, there's more than one media outlet. If that media outlet becomes too heavily liberal/conservative people disagreeing with that will start their own conservative/liberal newspapers and TV shows and similar and the overall media balances out (YMMV).
This is considerably harder to do with governments, particularly when they censor all mention of any opposition to the people in power.
The idea is to have the news accurately represent what is happening. Concentrating on the good only, like here, gives people a false impression of the state of the country, and the world, and defeats the point of watching the news (to find out what's going on). Western news is famous for moving the other way; More people watch worrying news than interesting news, so you scare people to keep them watching, and give them a false impression of their world.
Obviously neither approach is good, but at least in the west it's being happening to attempt make people interested, and news outlets do it independently depending on their personal morals, rather than it being a Government masterminded plan to keep the country in control and keep people in power in power (YMMV depending on Bush conspiracy theories).
I'd rather watch news attempting to keep me watching it than watch news attempting to keep me from revolution.
You've got to wonder, with all that effort into finding good news, why not simply put it into making something good happen? If there's a depressing story of an earthquake, send record breaking aid and show pictures a grateful, rapidly recovering people! Not only would they get good news, it might improve the country's (and the world's) opinion on Putin and keep him back into power without censoring details of his competition.
Anyway, it's not all bad (yet). If they were in true censorship, Russian News wouldn't be able to tell people (the American media no less!) that they're being told to do all this. There's some freedom there at least. And if all else fails they can always go on air with "Unfortunately we're now unable to tell you about the recent successes of the West against famine in Africa. Here's Vladimov with details of what exactly it is you're missing."
Even better, you can now see through your walls! Hunt the pesky kids down!
(On the other hand, they can see when you're out, and nab all your bandwidth)
var SessionID = "asdaszxc2130123ashsad";
I D);
Stored.
sendRequest("type='appointmentList'&SID="+Session
Requested (+ auth)
Cookies complicate this. You only need them to keep data when moving between pages. But you're not moving between pages!
It's like storing stuff on HDD so it's still there next boot, vs saving to RAM. Sort of.
PimTerry.
"An better solution might be to let the AJAX application explicit handle sessions by storing the session id, and sending it in the post part of all it's requests."
:).
:D. Install the Firebug extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/184 3 into firefox and click console. It shows AJAX requests including parameters. All of them have a session identifier of some sort. For example I just tried Gmail, you get a 16 character SID (session id presumably) paramater send with every request.
That's what I meant
All cookies are are files with text in that identifies you session. Since the JS checks the cookies not the server, any request must include data to validate the session anyways. Think about it, you go to a page it generates a cookies with you session auth data in it. The javascript then requests appointment data for user X. The javascript MUST be including some sort of validation data, or otherwise the server will just be giving out this data to anybody who requests it, and assuming the javascript has checked the cookie. AJAX can just store it in the javascript, rather than reading it from the cookie every request. It's the same stored session data (or it can be), its just stored in a javascript variable rather than a cookie.
I can prove it
In summary, hell is in the cookies.
"In an example attack, a victim who has already authenticated themselves to an Ajax application, and has the login cookie in their browser, is persuaded to visit the attacker's web site. This web site contains JavaScript code that makes calls to the Ajax app. Data received from the app is sent to the attacker."
So essentially it means that the attacker can use the authentication cookie of the user to authenticate them again, and then run javascript with that authentication. But why are AJAX apps storing authentication in cookies? If you need to store authentication (User session id's etc), store them in a variable within the javascript. That'll stay there until a page refresh clears variable status, and how many page refreshes occur with AJAX?
AJAX apps do not need to (and should not!) store user authentication in cookies. Cookies are useful for keeping a continual session open between pages. AJAX needs no continual session. If they don't use cookies, then other sites cannot use that authentication.
Where's the problem? (What am i missing?)
PimTerry
The post they threatening to expel him for is here and the post that they apparently were threatening him to try and make him remove is here.
Oh and the school's website is here.
Enjoy. But even though the kid really shouldn't be expelled from his school, kicking him off the net till he learns how to design a page would be nice. Reminds me of geocities...
Pim Terry
Just think! With an index like google's an AI would end up thinking some wonderful things. Ohhh would it laugh at the french military... And it's indexed wikipedia too. Just think, some troll changes an article to say that Bush eats fat kiddies for breakfast and 'the google overmind' starts ddos'ing the white house...
PimTerry
The BROKE THE LAW. Read the words. Not only EU law, but US law. It's not like it's opinion it's something that _has_ happened. The EU is not extorting anybody, it's simply following it's own (and many places') regulations to the letter.
Where in that can you POSSIBLY say the EU is moronic? It's (unlike microsoft) just following the rules!
PimTerry
Imagine if a phone company became THE phone company, everybody bought phones from them, and then they started inventing their own ways of working. Yeah fine. Say they start their own exchanges and change the way phone calls are transmitted totally. Almost everybody uses them and it's just made their service better! But then, they don't tell the other phone companies how their calls are transmitted. So if you're not on this company then you can only call phone that are also not on this company.
This is where it moves from ok to BAD. You've got 90% of the market. But now, nobody can buy another type of phone service other than yours, because if they do, they can't talk to 90% of the population. So your market share grows and grows because PEOPLE CAN'T CHOOSE ANYTHING ELSE. Remind you of anybody? This is what abusing your monopoly means.
Not exactly giving them the key to your tank, more like taking your hand of the big red button.
PimTerry
In actual sales rather than repairs though, they do beat us. We're a tiny tiny tiny shop (3 employee's including me) and so sales tends to be a fairly personal thing. Our prices tend to be about £50-100 over PC World regardless of how we source or anything. PC world just sells things at our COST price. We can't keep up. They've just got too many deals to cut their costs that a small company can't manage. The only thing we can beat them on is a more personal service with nicer warranties (1 year parts and labour, 3 years labour!
PimTerry