In 1975 at "The" Ohio State University on an Amdahl 470 coding PL/C , a horrible "teaching" language version of PL/I that auto corrected syntax errors. That meant that the errors you got on compilation were not the errors you coded, but the ones the compiler added for you. Lots of fun.
Anyway, when you started a class you were given an account with a certain amount of "money". Money was required as each compilation "cost" a certain amount of cash to compile and run. The more resources you used (not just CPU time or memory but also things like disk space ) the more you had to pay. If your account ran dry, you couldn't run any more jobs. You had to go beg your TA for more money so you could finish your programs. This of course affected your grade.
I will never forget sitting in the hallway of the computer center watching the monitors for when my job ran, literally praying that the damn thing would run this time and running to the A-Z mailbox for my output to see if I got what I was looking for.
Good question. Actually I had the sitting desk already so it was kind of natural to keep it.For example, when I'm meeting with people it is convenient to sit and talk.
However, I have to say that when discussing code, it is really nice to be standing as it is easier to gather around the screen with others and look at things. I'm a prof, so this is great for teaching a couple of people at once.
Also, I had some extra money at the end of a semester and bought a muvman stool. It is really great . The center post sits in a stiff ball-and-socket joint at the bottom and allows you to move around while you kind of sit/lean. Only thing is the price.
I got a standing desk about a year ago and it has been great. I have a pretty small office and manage to fit in a standing desk and a small, "sitting" desk. Coding/writing when standing is actually pretty good, but you do get tired at which point you sit down for awhile. I have a simple setup with a laptop so if I sit I can still work. While standing you just naturally move around, shifting your weight etc. so you get some constant movement in.
Some tips:
get a good, solid standup desk, one you could lean on. There's a lot of cheap crap out there. Mine is a 4'x3' wood top, lots of space. Something like this but not this
get one that's adjustable. There are all kinds of weird things out there (motorized for example), but mine has a simple crank to set the height. It isn't clear for awhile what the height should be and you should be able to adjust it.
get a standing mat. I just picked one up a Sears like this but you can get one anywhere. This made standing a lot easier. In the beginning, my feet hurt much more than anything else
By the way, I'm 57 and have had operations on both knees. Not a problem.
Come on, who could forget the twiddler ( http://www.handykey.com/ ). It's a chord keyboard, its a severe carpal tunnel generator and its a foul verb, as in: "Hey, who have you twiddled today" or "Twiddle me when you get home". Nice!
Graduated HS in 75, ditto on never seeing one in school. However, one of my buddies older brother was an electronics hobbyist and he built an IMSAI that we got to play with. The keyboard was scary, a board with delicate little stubs for each key. Storage was cassette tape, which was slow as hell. However, the brother had an account at UC (Cincinnati) and an acoustic coupler modem (150 baud). We played the original Adventure over that crappy hardware and I don't think I ever had so much fun. I can still remember the time, in total frustration, I attacked a dragon and responded "yes" to the question "with your bare hands?". I got the response "Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)". I was basically hooked at that point.
First real programming experience was my junior year of college, running PL/C on cards on an Amdahl at Ohio State. Now *that* was quite an experience. Each program cost money to run, and you got a certain amount at the beginning of the quarter to do you work. Had to beg the TA if you ran out. Waiting at 2am for your job to come through. PL/C would "fix" your compiler errors, generating errors for code you never wrote!
The relativity calculator at http://www.1728.com/reltivty.htm gives a relativity factor of 1.0000000016077795 for a speed of 17km/sec. If you multiply that all out for the approximate 33 years of travel (back of the envelope style, 33*525600*60), you get about a 1.67 second difference.
Of course, with the aliens towing in the spaceship, that might be off a bit:-)
TiVo, in my humble opinion, is based on a fairly flimsy premise: that television is so important to watch that you are willing to spend time and money to make sure you get to watch all of some part of it. Really? Seriously, what is on television that you couldn't miss? Frankly, very little. I'm not trying to be a hater, I watch TV all the time. I just don't care if I miss something. Because whatever I miss I can find later, and if I can't I didn't miss much. It's mind candy, mostly, and we could all do with losing a little "weight".
I live in the sticks where my options are few. Too far away from anything for cable or DSL and satellite is just a joke. I finally bit the bullet and bought a mobile card from sprint. I plug it into a cradlepoint (mbr1000 cellular, wireless N) router and the mobile card provides wireless service for the house. Yes, there is a 5Gb limit but the service is quite good. 200-300Kb down, 100Kb up on average. Sometimes quite a bit better, occasionally poorer but not often. Streaming video is not terrible and music seems good.
Anyway for rural use it is far and away the best solution
The recurrent cry of "we need more technology in the classroom" is nothing more than a panacea for all things labeled education. Instead of focusing on educational issues, technology is a convenient place to thrown money and "address" the problem. A computer does not make you smarter, does not make you more job worthy, does not make you a better problem solver. It is just a big lump of junk unless someone can teach you how to use it as a tool. Few presently can. Instead, the fact that young people "use" their computers makes educators feel like they are making big progress.
What do young people do with their computers? Read Systems Software is Irrelevant by Rob Pike. Written in 2000 and somewhat dated, the "Grandma" effect is still clear. People, read young people, typically use computers for three things: networking (blogs, web pages, chat, twitter,...), entertainment (music, videos, games) and maybe, MAYBE, word processing.
I teach introductory computer science and encourage students to bring their laptops. For the small percentage, it works great. Everyone else is off playing around. They may be "literate", but they are not better educated. They are, however, much more distracted. That is what computers have brought this generation
Back in the 80's on a Xerox Dandelion (a dedicated Lisp machine, which by the way was an AWESOME development environment), the ethernet connection, which was kind of a new thing, would occasionally go south requiring a restart. The error message was, as above, "Burdock killed the Ether kludge". My favorite.
We used to fight to get to use the two machines that had a whopping 4Mb of memory (the crappy ones only had 1Mb). Ah, those were the days
I was amazed at the following the the original Hellboy garnered. I took my kids to see it, and we ALL hated it. To the point that, when we see a movie we don't like, we all recant "Well, at least it wasn't as bad as Hellboy". And my son is a real movie person!
I don't really know the comic, and I suspect that clouds a lot of peoples opinions of the movie, but as someone who came in fresh, Hellboy was just awful-terrible.
Hard to imagine the sequel being better (actually, I really can't imagine it being worse).
As a comparison, loved Wall-E, thought Ironman was just OK.
Any chance you could send me pointers to the talk? We are doing some research on how people (lay people) form opinions on controversial topics. We are looking at nano as one possible topic. Any help would be appreciated.
What confuses me is why people think that their slogan means anything? Perhaps when the "boys" started Google "do no evil" did mean something, but it is quite different now. Google is estimated to be worth $80 billion dollars (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4072772.stm), and they are beholding to many people. They may have been driving the bus for awhile, but they (and many others) are now just riding the ride, at least from a business point of view. If business is good in China, then they need to find a way to be in China. And they did, within the laws of the US and China. That is what a company does, makes money, hopefully within the law. To expect different from them seems, well strange.
What seems absolutely ridiculous, frightening really, is that our Congress is bringing these companies up to the Hill to yell at them. What is that saying, something about living in glass houses? Come on people. Get Congress to get its act together first, then tell me about Google.
We teach "computer ethics" in the senior design class. Here are some of the scenarios we use:
Napster/music stuff and the idea of copyright.
Privacy issues. Can email be examined? Can one "tap" a network to discover information? Can a disk account be examined. What are the conditions. Are they any different than mail/phone?
Ownership issues. If I work for a company/university, do they own all the code I write or only "some" of it. What are the conditions?
Hacking. Should "innocent" hacking (non-damaging, no gain by hacker) be prosecuted. What about someone identifying security problems.
Also, what is unusual, in general, about technology unique in comparison to previous work in ethics? Anything?
I did exactly what you are describing using Debian 2.2. The machine is an old laptop with a Cyrix 486 (which is really a 386 equivalent), 4Mb of memory and a 100Mb disk. I couldn't get any connection process to work, so I did it all by floppy. I gave it to my 10 year old daughter to play with (she just wanted the BSD games). If she wants something new, I download it, put the package on the floppy then installed it . She doesn't really need it, but I did it just to see if it could be done. Oh, and X11? No way, couldn't get it to work with that little space (but I didn't reach back to very old X11 distro's either).
As for her learning about computers, that wasn't the goal. But she at least knows there is something there besides the family windows box.
The following is an excerpt from an article by Drew McDermott about the "Red Herring Test". I always thought it pointed out quite well why the Turing Test seems like such a waste of time.
What confuses most people is that they mistake Turing's attempt to avoid
the question for an attempt to answer it. But anyone who believes that
Turing's test is an interesting test for intelligence is guilty of
behaviorism, not a crime in itself, but shameful in anyone who believes
in cognitive science, the antithesis of behaviorism. Of course, it
is probably true that a system that could fool a trained panel of
experts into believing it intelligent would in fact be intelligent,
but it is blatant waste of experts' time to have them sit on such
panels, when they should be inquiring about how minds actually
work.
Compare the following hypothetical case: Human explorers land on a
planet whose inhabitants are somewhat technologically backward. The
locals are impressed by human gadgets, especially radio. They decide
to try and understand it, so they rustle up some philosophers in order
first to arrive at a criterion for something's being a radio. Their
first cut is that a radio is a device that emits sounds whenever
similar sounds are made in the control room of the earthlings'
spaceship. But others object that this criterion does not rule out
ordinary telephony, so the criterion is modified. Perhaps they arrive
at something like, ``A radio is a device that emits sounds similar to
those made in the earthlings' spaceship while suspended from the
ceiling by a nonconducting string.''
This is all amusing, but a waste of time if the aliens really want to
understand radio. No one needs an ironclad behavioral criterion for
``radiohood,'' assuming that there are plenty of indisputably genuine
radios around to study. Such a study might eventually lead to a deeper
definition of radio as ``A receiver of signals encoded as modulated
electromagnetic waves,'' but by the time the definition was available
it would be relatively unimportant, when stacked up against the theory
of electromagnetism.
Similarly with intelligence. If we ever have a theory that explains
it, we will no longer care about distinguishing bogus understanding
from the real thing. We will have a rich theory based on concepts we
can now barely imagine, just as radio is based on something as unlikely
as invisible electromagnetic waves.
Macsyma is THE symbolic math package, predating all others and the standard to which all others were often held. While I haven't worked with the derivative Maxima version, I still remember working with Macsyma and being very impressed. In fact, many (older) AI texts used to talk about it as a standard for early AI work. Been around more more than 20 years now.
One way (one of many I suppose) to divided object-oriented languages is based on a kind of philosophical choice. On the one hand are languages that rely on "generic functions" such as C++ and CLOS (of Lisp), and on the other hand are those language that use "message passing" such as Smalltalk, Objective C and others.
While it isn't clear that it has a great effect on the user, each has a very different flavor. Smalltalk sends a "message", with typed arguments, to the "object" for the object to disambiguate what to do next. C++ creates a "generic function" which indexes the appropriate function based on that function's typed arguments (name mangling).
1) Is that a fair distinction?
2) If so, do you think the differences are important?
3) If so, why did you go the route you did with C++?
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In 1975 at "The" Ohio State University on an Amdahl 470 coding PL/C , a horrible "teaching" language version of PL/I that auto corrected syntax errors. That meant that the errors you got on compilation were not the errors you coded, but the ones the compiler added for you. Lots of fun.
Anyway, when you started a class you were given an account with a certain amount of "money". Money was required as each compilation "cost" a certain amount of cash to compile and run. The more resources you used (not just CPU time or memory but also things like disk space ) the more you had to pay. If your account ran dry, you couldn't run any more jobs. You had to go beg your TA for more money so you could finish your programs. This of course affected your grade.
I will never forget sitting in the hallway of the computer center watching the monitors for when my job ran, literally praying that the damn thing would run this time and running to the A-Z mailbox for my output to see if I got what I was looking for.
However, I have to say that when discussing code, it is really nice to be standing as it is easier to gather around the screen with others and look at things. I'm a prof, so this is great for teaching a couple of people at once.
Also, I had some extra money at the end of a semester and bought a muvman stool. It is really great . The center post sits in a stiff ball-and-socket joint at the bottom and allows you to move around while you kind of sit/lean. Only thing is the price.
By the way, I'm 57 and have had operations on both knees. Not a problem.
Come on, who could forget the twiddler ( http://www.handykey.com/ ). It's a chord keyboard, its a severe carpal tunnel generator and its a foul verb, as in: "Hey, who have you twiddled today" or "Twiddle me when you get home". Nice!
Graduated HS in 75, ditto on never seeing one in school. However, one of my buddies older brother was an electronics hobbyist and he built an IMSAI that we got to play with. The keyboard was scary, a board with delicate little stubs for each key. Storage was cassette tape, which was slow as hell. However, the brother had an account at UC (Cincinnati) and an acoustic coupler modem (150 baud). We played the original Adventure over that crappy hardware and I don't think I ever had so much fun. I can still remember the time, in total frustration, I attacked a dragon and responded "yes" to the question "with your bare hands?". I got the response "Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)". I was basically hooked at that point.
First real programming experience was my junior year of college, running PL/C on cards on an Amdahl at Ohio State. Now *that* was quite an experience. Each program cost money to run, and you got a certain amount at the beginning of the quarter to do you work. Had to beg the TA if you ran out. Waiting at 2am for your job to come through. PL/C would "fix" your compiler errors, generating errors for code you never wrote!
God I'm old. Oh yeah, get off my lawn
>>bill
Of course, with the aliens towing in the spaceship, that might be off a bit :-)
>>>bill
TiVo, in my humble opinion, is based on a fairly flimsy premise: that television is so important to watch that you are willing to spend time and money to make sure you get to watch all of some part of it. Really? Seriously, what is on television that you couldn't miss? Frankly, very little. I'm not trying to be a hater, I watch TV all the time. I just don't care if I miss something. Because whatever I miss I can find later, and if I can't I didn't miss much. It's mind candy, mostly, and we could all do with losing a little "weight".
I live in the sticks where my options are few. Too far away from anything for cable or DSL and satellite is just a joke. I finally bit the bullet and bought a mobile card from sprint. I plug it into a cradlepoint (mbr1000 cellular, wireless N) router and the mobile card provides wireless service for the house. Yes, there is a 5Gb limit but the service is quite good. 200-300Kb down, 100Kb up on average. Sometimes quite a bit better, occasionally poorer but not often. Streaming video is not terrible and music seems good.
Anyway for rural use it is far and away the best solution
The recurrent cry of "we need more technology in the classroom" is nothing more than a panacea for all things labeled education. Instead of focusing on educational issues, technology is a convenient place to thrown money and "address" the problem. A computer does not make you smarter, does not make you more job worthy, does not make you a better problem solver. It is just a big lump of junk unless someone can teach you how to use it as a tool. Few presently can. Instead, the fact that young people "use" their computers makes educators feel like they are making big progress.
What do young people do with their computers? Read Systems Software is Irrelevant by Rob Pike. Written in 2000 and somewhat dated, the "Grandma" effect is still clear. People, read young people, typically use computers for three things: networking (blogs, web pages, chat, twitter, ...), entertainment (music, videos, games) and maybe, MAYBE, word processing.
I teach introductory computer science and encourage students to bring their laptops. For the small percentage, it works great. Everyone else is off playing around. They may be "literate", but they are not better educated. They are, however, much more distracted. That is what computers have brought this generation
Back in the 80's on a Xerox Dandelion (a dedicated Lisp machine, which by the way was an AWESOME development environment), the ethernet connection, which was kind of a new thing, would occasionally go south requiring a restart. The error message was, as above, "Burdock killed the Ether kludge". My favorite.
We used to fight to get to use the two machines that had a whopping 4Mb of memory (the crappy ones only had 1Mb). Ah, those were the days
I was amazed at the following the the original Hellboy garnered. I took my kids to see it, and we ALL hated it. To the point that, when we see a movie we don't like, we all recant "Well, at least it wasn't as bad as Hellboy". And my son is a real movie person!
I don't really know the comic, and I suspect that clouds a lot of peoples opinions of the movie, but as someone who came in fresh, Hellboy was just awful-terrible.
Hard to imagine the sequel being better (actually, I really can't imagine it being worse).
As a comparison, loved Wall-E, thought Ironman was just OK.
Any chance you could send me pointers to the talk? We are doing some research on how people (lay people) form opinions on controversial topics. We are looking at nano as one possible topic. Any help would be appreciated.
bill
What seems absolutely ridiculous, frightening really, is that our Congress is bringing these companies up to the Hill to yell at them. What is that saying, something about living in glass houses? Come on people. Get Congress to get its act together first, then tell me about Google.
- Napster/music stuff and the idea of copyright.
- Privacy issues. Can email be examined? Can one "tap" a network to discover information? Can a disk account be examined. What are the conditions. Are they any different than mail/phone?
- Ownership issues. If I work for a company/university, do they own all the code I write or only "some" of it. What are the conditions?
- Hacking. Should "innocent" hacking (non-damaging, no gain by hacker) be prosecuted. What about someone identifying security problems.
Also, what is unusual, in general, about technology unique in comparison to previous work in ethics? Anything?As for her learning about computers, that wasn't the goal. But she at least knows there is something there besides the family windows box.
Macsyma is THE symbolic math package, predating all others and the standard to which all others were often held. While I haven't worked with the derivative Maxima version, I still remember working with Macsyma and being very impressed. In fact, many (older) AI texts used to talk about it as a standard for early AI work. Been around more more than 20 years now.
While it isn't clear that it has a great effect on the user, each has a very different flavor. Smalltalk sends a "message", with typed arguments, to the "object" for the object to disambiguate what to do next. C++ creates a "generic function" which indexes the appropriate function based on that function's typed arguments (name mangling).
1) Is that a fair distinction?
2) If so, do you think the differences are important?
3) If so, why did you go the route you did with C++?