Slashdot Mirror

And, btw, anyone care to speculate what the power-off stall speed of a direct-lift non-autorotating rotary wing aircraft might be?

My answer would be either NaN or null. 1) It has no wings, just the ducted fans, so the only airfoil that could stall would be the propellers. 2) If the power is off, the props aren't providing any appreciable lift (since it doesn't auto-rotate). 3) Therefore, the concept of "power-off stall speed" doesn't really apply.

If the power is off, you're making like a brick until/unless you deploy the ballistic recovery chute.

The internet isn't really a place to gain an informed opinion over things.

Yes, you are correct. Opinions should all be tossed out. Pure info is what the Internet is all about. Pick a language and a FOSS project, develop away, it's a great learning process that I've found much more "educational" than formal education.

Teach yourself C++: C++ Annotations, C++ Language Tutorial... ... or Perl: Perl programming documentation, or JavaScript,
or Java.

Just search the web, you'll find everything that any professor will ever be able to teach you online. Need guidance, clarification, or to ask a question? There are free online forums for that too... Yes, the Internet on average, much like the FM band, has more signal than noise, but similarly you can easily tune your into the signal you need.

Consider this: My Java "professor" gave an assignment where we read in rows of data from standard input, and output the table sorted by a certain column's value. He offered extra credit for proper alignment and justification of the table's cells... "WTF? Really?", I thought.

I used the Collections framework along with Swing to provide a GUI w/ sortable & justified JTable columns instead of doing character counting and sending extra spaces with the text to the standard output. He gave me a C. Another student used the Formatter to provide printf style formatting... also got a C, WTF! Go beyond the prof's teachings & expectations to meet a requirement, get a poor grade... That's dumb and counter productive.

In the real world, you try not to re-invent the wheel, this college course was not teaching practical programming; It was so far beneath what I learned already online, on Java's own website, I dropped the course (waste of time). Sure I can write a merge sort, or programatically align console text output, but that was not what the assignment said: "Provide a tabular output sorted by the 'Name' column." We learned merge sort 2 weeks prior, but the "professor" would not move on.

Not having a "degree" myself, I frequently answer questions that "Degree" holding graduates ask in online forums... Why? Because they didn't learn what they needed to know in their courses.

You would be hard pressed to find a programmer that doesn't have some form of documentation open in another window, screen, or context menu while coding. IMO, besides learning about algorithms and complexity, the language specs & online tutorials are all you really need. I find paper books pale in comparison to down-loadable, copy&paste-able free, online resources. Also note: As a programmer you will be expected to keep up to date with the ever changing languages you learn. All of these changes are easily accessible online too.

There's a lot of noise and very little quality signal to use and without having a degree to start with it's pretty much futile in terms of knowing what is and is not reliable information.

I call bullshit. See esp. the Java link above, your arguments are ill-informed, and reek of FUD. Search google for "java tutorial", or "$any_lang tutorial" and you get some pretty damn reliable, pure "signal" information about what you searched for.

Are you really arguing that Language specs & Tutorials from IBM, Microsoft, etc, and docs from a language's main website (such as http://perldoc.perl.org/

I wouldn't recommend Websense to anyone. They have a long history of stealth web robots which intentionally disobey the robots.txt standard.

i just wrote some script to handle anchor tag clicks globally. firefox, fine. opera, fine. ie, fine. safari: doesn't work in safari, because safari insists on doing the default action no matter what

http://codingforums.com/archive/index.php?t-30983.html

you can't cancel dom events in safari! fuck safari. so now i have to completely write off safari support, or completely alter my programming model because of its stupidity, and do some really guly hacks

or perhaps, no hacks possible!:

http://www.peterblum.com/SafariBugs/CancelKeyPress.html

The event model is painful to work with cross browser. That is why we have to have our own code abstracting things away, or using the good frameworks out there that do this (Dojo, Zimbra, ...).

You're better off with addEventListener. Pretty much every browser except IE supports it at this point. If you use this patch, you can bring IE up to code until Microsoft fixes it.

Not that event frameworks are a bad idea, mind you. It's just good to know that all the code is future proof. :-)

There are lots of features such as offline capabilities, browser side caches, etc... but the most bang for the buck is just getting the browsers to actually implement all of the standards correctly. This is in DOM, CSS, HTML, JavaScript.

If this gap can keep closing (it is a lot better now than a few years ago) then I will be happy.

Indeed. The offline capability is sort of already there with MHT and HTA files. The moment we can get other browsers to support these (or develop a similar standard) is the day we can stop developing Desktop Applciations all together.

Thankfully, the cross browser gap is minor. IE still has problems with PNG files, but that should be resolved soon. There's not too much else I can think of that can't be avoided by simply following the DOM and JavaScript 1.3 standards.

And a nice JavaScript VM (HotSpot-able), that doesn't leak memory would be great too.

Mozilla has already got a great engine. I think we'll be seeing Microsoft overhaul theirs as FireFox steals more market share. :-)

javascript != functional programming? What does that mean? You can't do functional programming in javascript? Javascript functions are first class objects. Javascript supports closures. Now, javascript isn't a pure functional language, but neither is Lisp or ML (or any of their dialects), but nobody claims Lisp or ML are not functional languages.

Oh, I get it. Javascript isn't a functional language because Wikipedia doesn't mention it as a functional language. Yeah, that must be it.

Disclaimer: I don't program in javascript and I don't know javascript very well, but I do know that javascript supports the functional paradigm rather nicely.

the links to PDF's are 404's... why? well, developer.netscape.com was taken down.. I forget the exact reasons but here is a post about it on mozillazine [devedge went down, then came back, but is now down again]:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=5 709

and here is a post I made on a forum with links to the pdf's[if the links are broken, I suggest googling the filename].
http://www.codingforums.com/showpost.php?p=243691& postcount=15

Well, here's one I developed based on another's starting point. It's a single external library which defines a class and is called via a constructor which accepts an element or its element ID. The element should be a simple, standard select control, which is then augmented via this script to act like a combobox. The bit of functionality for accepting values that don't exist in the options is togglable at the time of construction. I have yet to have a problem with it in any installation of my user base.