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Comment Re:probably should have been lowered anyway (Score 4, Insightful) 1239

I'm a European and, from where I'm sitting, the problem isn't cultural bias on either side. It's the way any criticism of any aspect of American culture results in "individuals, like you, generally believe they're far more civilized (excuse me--civilised) and above such things".

Suggesting that America is far to the right compared with most other countries isn't about hating America. It isn't even necessarily a bad thing. It's a simple observation. Most of the policies of American democrats look moderate-right in a European context. The current French government is hard right by European standards, despite being more interventionist and more wedded to the public sector than any American politician I have ever heard. Nationalising popular music, anyone? Imposing a legal quota for French music played on private radio stations? Government purchases of old cars about every second year? Social charges that are over a third of income for most people? Five weeks statutory vacation a year plus a dozen national holidays? How much of this is in the Democrat manifesto?

So when right-leaning Americans talk about Democrats as if they are virtually communists, it really is very hard for anyone outside America not to burst out laughing.

Comment Re:Annnnd? (Score 1) 204

I tried really hard to talk myself into Python a few months ago. Bought and read several books, wrote some code... and then discovered that the 2.6/3.0 thing is still a mess, with half the libraries on each side of this enduring divide that the Python community insisted at the time would never exist because the Python community would never have a legacy code problem because, well, it just wouldn't. AFAICS this disaster came about because the most important thing was not to do a single thing the Perl way. Unfortunately, excellent backwards compatibility (as in "works across the decades") was one Perl feature that really was worth copying.

I develop on Linux. The rest of my organisation uses Macs. After wasting several hours trying to get a very simple Python program to run unmodified across both platforms (PIL being the specific problem) we gave up and went back to a mix of older technology, all of which works perfectly across platforms. It's a pity, because Python looks really cute in theory, but in practice it was just an anagram of "long day", at least for our use case.

Software

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."
Image

The World's Smallest Legible Font Screenshot-sm 280

hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"

Comment Re:Don't pick just one (Score 1) 897

> Having seen a fluent southern brazilian portuguese speaker effectively
> navigate the baja peninsula, I know you're overstating your case.

I don't think so. I live in France, in a region with many Spanish immigrants. The French idiomatic expression for "Massacre the French language" is "To speak French like a Spanish cow". In other words, speaking Spanish loudly with a bit of French vocab doesn't cut it, at all.

There's a huge difference between "navigating through" a country and engaging with it. I'm sure your anecdote is true. I'm also sure that fluent Portuguese is of very little use if you want to fill in government forms or even understand the news on the radio. (We have a lot of Portuguese migrant workers here.) I'm reminded of an observation by a colleague working with international youth teams that a Swiss German who says he doesn't speak a language probably knows it better than an American who says he is fluent.

> but that doesn't mean that working in one language and (more importantly)
> understanding the descripting mechanics of it won't dramatically
> help you with another.

Of course! People who master two natural languages pick up other languages much quicker. But the key is "master". Knowing how to order a beer in ten languages doesn't equip you to do anything other than order beer. And knowing how to put a button on a screen in ten programming languages isn't very useful either.

I'm sure that experience of Perl, Lisp, assembler and other languages helped me to pick up C++ faster than would otherwise have been the case. But the differences matter as much as the similarities, and to get the most out of a language you need to embrace rather than work around those differences.

For example, nothing in any other OO language I have used prepared me for what you have to do to get a container with a superclass type in C++, or for the fact that the compiler will happily accept code that is going to throw away all the subclass functionality. I could have worked around that in various ways, but I think finding out what was really happening made me a better C++ programmer.

I can do lookup tables using STL maps in C++, and then my C++ feels just like Perl hash tables. But I'm realising there's a good reason that C programmers use enums in some places. And so on.

Comment Re:Don't pick just one (Score 3, Insightful) 897

> Once you know a paradigm, picking up a new language under that paradigm will
> be just "yet another language", and you can learn one in a week (or 7 in 7
> weeks). Of course, it will take more time to actually become fluent in language
> specific idioms, standard libraries etc, but those are not rocket science either.

I know people who take the same approach to natural language. After all, Spanish and Italian are very very similar, aren't they? The reality with natural languages is that "all languages are the same" thinking enables you to abuse several cultures without actually understanding any of them.

And I think that to a large extent the same thing goes for programming languages. For example, if one of your "paradigms" is "object-oriented", does learning Smalltalk really prepare you for making best use of OO in Java or C++? Or vice versa? The inventor of Smalltalk and OO certainly doesn't think so.

I spent some time a while back trying to explain Scala to a Java programmer. His response was "It's just like Java." Well, Scala *is* just like Java, as long as you ignore the huge and central features that are not like Java. When I started to show him those features, generally in a "replace a page of code with one line" sense, his response was "I don't like it", and that was the end of the conversation. That, in practice, is what "learn 7 languages in 7 weeks" looks like.

My defining experience in this context was observing a government contractor whose preferred language was FORTRAN, who was told he had to code in Lisp. I would not previously have believed that it was possible to write Lisp as if it was FORTRAN, but that contractor proved me wrong. And, to be fair, I find that I have to make a conscious effort not to write C++ as if it is Lisp, eg "everything on the stack and screw the efficiency".

"7 languages in 7 weeks" only works if you stick to programming with the features that can be found or kludged in just about every language. Nowadays that's going to mean procedural code with loads of variables and a bit of OO for accessing libraries. It works, but it's a recipe for terrible, terrible code. But, hey, it will be equally terrible in 7 different languages!

Comment Re:Uh, watever, just migrate to Python, Perl6, Lua (Score 2, Interesting) 641

> Interpreted languages, such as Perl, Python, Lua, Ruby

I'm not sure about the others, but Perl isn't an interpreted language. The script is compiled, and then the compiled code is executed. That's not a million miles from a JIT compiler.

> is trendy at this moment

Maybe I missed somethng, but wasn't Perl running half the Internet before Java was a twinkle in Gosling's eye? There are many things to be said about Perl, but "new-fangled" isn't one of them.

> It is unthinkable for a higher education course to waste both the teacher's and student's time doing vocational training

Right, but why is that an argument for Java? You can teach Java as a way to tick CV boxes, and you can teach other languages as a way to really understand programming.

> If a course is based on a technology which doesn't have a stable basis and which is likely to drastically change due to a project leader's whims.

You're saying that the Perl community rushed into Perl6? Or maybe that a decade-long upgrade cycle for C++ standards is too rapid? And that the future JVM roadmap as of today is very clear to you?

> Then there is the issue of control. If a language is not standardized then you don't have any assurance that your code will run at all in the future.

Not sure why this is an issue for education but, in any case, backwards compatibility in Perl is legendarily good. There are plenty of production sites running Perl code that is decades old.

I can see an argument for teaching CS using C or assembler (because they force you to understand what a computer does under the hood). I can see an argument for teaching CS using functional languages such as Haskell. I can see an argument for using Perl because it's possible to demonstrate a much wider range of programming styles than with Java. ("Whatever the question, the solution is an object" doesn't seem to me to be ideal in an educational context.)

But I can't see offhand why Java is different in kind to any of the other languages in your list as far as suitability for education goes. It's not a very pure implementation of OO programming, it doesn't teach you anything about memory management. If you are not careful, you give students the impression that it's impossible to write code without an IDE. Java has its merits, its fans and its detractors. But it's not self-evidently The One Right Language to use to teach CS.

Security

British Airways Chief Slams US Security Requests 335

Ponca City writes "Reflecting a growing frustration among airport and airline owners with the steady build-up of rules covering everything from footwear to liquids, Martin Broughton, chairman of British Airways, has launched a scathing attack on the 'completely redundant' airport checks requested by the TSA and urged the UK to stop 'kowtowing' to American demands for ever more security. Speaking at the annual conference of the UK Airport Operators Association, Broughton lambasted the TSA for demanding that foreign airports increase checks on US-bound planes, while not applying those regulations to their own domestic services. 'America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do,' says Broughton. 'We shouldn't stand for that. We should say, "We'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential.''' For example, Broughton noted that cutting-edge technology recently installed at airports can scan laptops inside hand luggage for explosives but despite this breakthrough the British government still demands computers be examined separately. 'It's just completely ridiculous,' says Broughton."
Graphics

The First Photograph of a Human 138

wiredog writes "The Atlantic has a brief piece on what is likely to be the first photograph (a daguerreotype) showing a human. From the article: 'In September, Krulwich posted a set of daguerreotypes taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter in Cincinnati 162 years ago, on September 24, 1848. Krulwich was celebrating the work of the George Eastman House in association with the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Using visible-light microscopy, the George Eastman House scanned several plates depicting the Cincinnati Waterfront so that scholars could zoom in and study the never-before-seen details.'"
Google

Google Now Second-Largest ISP 71

bednarz writes "Google is now the second-largest carrier of Internet traffic, accounting for 6.4% of all web traffic, according to data released this week by Arbor Networks. But should IT execs care? Yes, says Craig Labovitz, Arbor's chief scientist, who argues that IT managers need to understand how macro Internet traffic trends will affect the design and management of their own network backbones. 'This will affect how enterprises plan their services... whether they host their own services or whether they use cloud vendors,' Labovitz says. 'The enterprise needs to shift its thinking in terms of [service level agreements] and the way it measures, monitors and secures its networks. That all used to be focused on connectivity, but now it needs to be focused on content.'"
The Courts

Pay Or Else, News Site Threatens 549

WED Fan writes "The North Country Gazette, a news blog, says users who read beyond a single page of an article must pay up or they will be tracked down. They don't have a pay wall. If you go beyond page 1, you owe them. From the article: 'A subscription is required at North Country Gazette. We allow only one free read per visitor. We are currently gathering IPs and computer info on persistent intruders who refuse to buy subscription and are engaging in a theft of services. We have engaged an attorney who will be doing a bulk subpoena demand on each ISP involved, particularly Verizon Droids, Frontier and Road Runner, and will then pursue individual legal actions.'"

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