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Comment Re:How about Alice? (Score 3, Informative) 214

My father teaches a college course using Alice. It's sort of a programming for non-computer-science majors class. I've sat down with him a couple of times and played with the program. I suspect that for someone who doesn't have any programming experience Alice is really fun (creating movies, making things move onscreen), but for someone with any experience its all just a hassle. Too many mouse clicks and drags are needed to get simple things done, and sometimes the natural-language style of the program isn't as natural-language as you want it to be.
But if it's a free program it can't hurt to try it out yourself.

The Media

Saving Journalism With Flash and Java 206

An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"
The Internet

New .tel TLD Now In Use 175

rockwood reports that the .tel top level domain has been deployed, "in a first attempt at pushing the recently approved .tel... The top-level domain .tel was approved by ICANN as a sponsored TLD launching on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 to trademark owners of national effect and on February 3, 2009 to anyone who wishes to apply. Its main purpose is as a single management and publishing point for 'internet communication' services, providing a global contacts directory service by housing all types of contact information directly in the DNS."

Comment Re:!(Infinity == Infinity) (Score 2, Informative) 683

Clearly, both series are infinite. Just as clearly, there are "more" even integers than there are odd integer multiples of seven.

Actually, both of those series have the same "number" of numbers. Just take each even integer, add one and multiply by seven, and you will have the second series. Because each number in the first series maps to exactly one number in the second series, they both have the same magnitude.
Read up on cardinality on Wikipedia for more information.

Image

Dead Parrot Sketch Is 1,600 Years Old 276

laejoh writes "Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot sketch' — which featured John Cleese — is some 1,600 years old. A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece. A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave. It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service. His companion replies: 'When he was with me, he never did any such thing!' The joke was discovered in a collection of 265 jokes called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which dates from the fourth century AD. Hierocles had gone to meet his maker, and Philagrius had certainly ceased to be, long before John Cleese and Michael Palin reinvented the yarn in 1969."
Linux Business

How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users? 272

Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"
Patents

Halliburton Applies For Patent-Trolling Patent 244

An anonymous reader writes "Halliburton, the company many folks know as Dick Cheney's previous employer, has apparently taken an interest in methods of patent trolling. In fact, according to Techdirt, the company has applied for a patent on patent trolling. Specifically, it's applied for a patent on the process of finding a company that protected an invention via trade secret, figuring out what that secret is, patenting it ... and then suing the original company. Hopefully, the patent office rejects this patent, because I somehow doubt that Halliburton is trying to get the patent as a way to block others from patent trolling."
Programming

(Useful) Stupid Regex Tricks? 516

careysb writes to mention that in the same vein as '*nix tricks' and 'VIM tricks', it would be nice to see one on regular expressions and the programs that use them. What amazingly cool tricks have people discovered with respect to regular expressions in everyday life as a developer or power user?"

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