Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:RELIGIOUS? (Score 1) 90

I find that neither emacs nor vi qualifies to be a proper editor; that simplifies discussions very much. More serious contestants for the title include nano and mcedit, but roughly any GUI editor wins from CLI editors if you ask me.

Comment BibTeX (Score 1) 134

It may not be a complete solution, but have you looked at BibTeX? BibTeX itself is only a format for nicely stating the information you have available (which magazine, article title, which pages in the magazine, authors, etc), but in the entire BibTeX ecosystem a number of indexing systems are built. Quite a lot of them are for desktop use (so you can manage your own BibTeX entries), but I'd imagine there would be some web-based system for this as well.

Comment Re:Google shouldn't worry (Score 1) 418

Here in the Netherlands we have a law (of which i'm not sure if it's a European or just a Dutch law) which allows anyone to receive all data broadcast through the airwaves and listen to/read it, as long as it is all unencrypted or plainly audible. Since the networks were open, i'd say it's just a use of that law and nothing illegal happened. If you put anything into the air unencrypted, it is for anyone to receive. Thinking otherwise is stupid and naive (and hence done by 90% of the population)

Comment Qt (and KDE) (Score 1) 393

I'd say Trolltech has managed to make a open-source technology (Qt) profitable. Be it by first making it not 100% completely free open-source (via QPL and later as a GPL-library), but eventually it is not free and by working with a large open source project (KDE), the momentum for using Qt has increased a lot. Without KDE, Qt wouldn't have been where it is now (and vice versa). It's about taking a large collection of open source code, and selling services/support on at least a part of it. If the added value for paying is high enough, companies will pay.

Comment Know how these contests work (Score 1) 407

I have participated in plenty of contests and know enough about the rules to say that you don't have to worry about runtime and memory usage differences between programming language. Depending on the language used, a solution can take longer or use more memory so that the programming language is pretty much moot and the algorithm is the important bit.

Usually, the runtimes are used to filter algorithms to ones that use the correct runtime. If a problem is about sorting, they will want a O(n log n) algorithm. Nearly any O(n log n) algorithm will work and anything higher (usually O(n^2)) will fail.

Now that we've leveled the playing field we can get to the language features. My language of choice for these contests is C++ for two reasons. The first one is personal: i know C/C++ pretty well. The second one is a main advantage: the C++ STL provides a larger number of containers and standard algorithms with runtime guarantees which greatly speed up writing code if you know how to use them. Many of the newer languages do provide these kinds of libraries, but in my limited experience with the other languages i have been unable to like them as much as the STL for this purpose. The fact that you have runtime guarantees in the STL makes it particularly suited for this contests, where runtime is key.

In the end it all depends on what you want to teach tho. I would dare to dive into C++ with new students, as long as they are eager to learn and show a reasonable level of thinking like a programmer. If you know a lot more about python and can explain and use the algorithmic basics of runtime and memory usage well in python, go ahead and use python. Any language which allows you to strictly adhere to runtime instructions will work.

Comment Re:Nothing to see here... (Score 1) 289

I wouldn't actually say they have a window manager. Chrome itself somehow is a window manager for it's own windows, even when not run in their OS. As you can see when you open the options dialog, there is not really a window manager in place. It just puts the new window fullscreen over the other one. This is nothing more than X itself can do without a window manager.

Oh, and they should loose the Gtk. It's ugly and slow.

Privacy

Cambridge, Mass. Moves To Nix Security Cameras 366

An anonymous reader writes "Citing privacy concerns, the Cambridge, Mass. City Council has voted 9-0 to remove security cameras scattered throughout the city. 'Because of the slow erosion of our civil liberties since 9/11, it is important to raise questions regarding these cameras,' said Marjorie Decker, a Cambridge city councilor. Rather than citing privacy, WCBVTV is running the story under the headline 'City's Move To Nix Security Cams May Cost Thousands.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

Working...