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Maybe, the thing we need is sTEM, or even just TEM.

How I got taught about how governments determine shortages is, they look at other markets or economies, ones which they'd like to imitate, and see what sectors that market is stronger at. Then compare to their market, and see where the shortages and over supplies are. Strong economies that do well, are going to tend to have high productivity with decent exports of innovative products.

So, the reason we keep hearing for more STEM is not because there actually is a shortage, but because they think the economy would be better with more of it. It's a matter of, "train" them up and they'll find jobs, rather than jobs and careers are there waiting to be filled. In some sectors, sure there are shortages, but in others, not so much. I'm in Australia, and I keep hearing about engineer shortages, but it's very difficult to find jobs at the moment. Companies aren't training, and just want someone with years of experience immediately. Statistics I keep on hearing that the majority of engineering graduates don't work in engineering here, they end up doing sales or other things where by virtue of completing an engineering degree, likelihood of having a dope is much lower than say an arts degree.

Science degrees for the most part aren't very useful (in Australia) unless you're aiming to get into academia, or one of the incredibly few research jobs. Because of the loans program for students (no upfront costs for study, minimal interest rate for repayment [below inflation iirc], and minimum income before you have to pay it off), a lot of people study, because they might as well. The issue with it is, a lot of people study things that really won't get them a career. Science is one of those areas of study which has many students, but not many careers afterward.

Best example I can give is from my university statistics. Science has the worst employment rate for graduates and postgraduates. https://www.uts.edu.au/...

No, in Australia if the alleged defamatory statement is substantially true then that is a complete defence.

Justification: It is a complete defence to an action for defamation to prove that the defamatory statement is substantially true.Substantial truth means that provided the justification meets the substance of the imputation, minor inaccuracy will not exclude the defence. The publisher’s motive is irrelevant, if the publisher can show that the imputation is true then it does not matter that he/she was motivated by malice. http://www.law.uts.edu.au/comslaw/factsheets/defamation.html

I don't see how publishing an unfaked photograph of two people together can be defamatory: every police or court official caught in a photo with a criminal would have a defamation case. However, I can see it is as defamatory of the caption you associate with the published picture says, "Bloggs is bosom buddies with a gangland boss." if that statement is not true. I could also see a technical argument for defamation in returning that image as a search result for "best friends of gangland figures" but I recognise the boundary of stupidity when it comes to the real world. This litigation seems misdirected... but it was launched at the biggest cash cow not the sanest target.

Farah (a footballer) has demanded new laws and the Prime Minister (a lawyer) and Attorney-General (also a lawyer) agreed. It took journalist John Birmingham to point out to them there are already laws against this: Section 474.17 of the Commonwealth criminal code creates an offense, punishable by imprisonment for three years, of using a carriage service, and yes the internet counts, in such a way that a reasonable person would consider it “menacing, harassing or offensive”.. People have gone to jail. What more do they want? http://m.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/time-to-take-a-deep-breath-before-jumping-on-trolls-20120910-25o81.html

Free Speech is weak in Australia because there is no bill of rights and defamation laws are so tough you can't say anything bad about anyone which is a real problem if you are a journalist, let alone a twitterer.
https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/defamation.html
http://www.thenewsmanual.net/Resources/medialaw_in_australia_02.html
http://www.law.uts.edu.au/comslaw/factsheets/defamation.html

I recently read an article in a international-edition newspaper (sorry - can't remember which) by an apologist writer for the Chinese government censorship. He claimed that the Chinese government doesn't have an issue with reporting corruption by local government officials - indeed they see this as a useful public service and a vent for the public - and so won't censor these stories, but he did say they will censor stupid rumours (sham cures for radiation) but primarily anything that might cause a public gathering to take place. (After all, that's how revolutions get started! ;-) This project will find a way to verify this, though what happened with T^2 and the blind dissident GC obviously doesn't fit his model.

But don't pretend for a moment we are any better. The news is heavily censored everywhere, even in liberal western democracies:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/google-getting-more-requests-from-democracies-to-censor/

Libel laws are a very effective way to cause self-censorship by the media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-censorship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britains-libel-laws-are-stifling-free-speech-says-un-894519.html
http://overland.org.au/blogs/loudspeaker/2012/03/defamation-laws-the-real-threat/
http://www.law.uts.edu.au/comslaw/factsheets/archivedfactsheets/freespeechanddefamationpre2010.html
http://www.studentatlaw.com/articles/130/1/Defamation-and-Freedom-of-Speech/Page1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/12/opinion/self-censorship-at-cbs.html
http://www.japanlaw.info/law2003/2003_LIBEL_LAW_AND_CORRUPTION.html

There's also soft self-censorship too even in the US: "Sure you can print that... if you are prepared for consequences... Ah wonderful. I knew we could find common ground."
http://rt.com/usa/news/editor-at-top-us-newspaper-resigns-over-censorship/
http://cofcc.org/2011/03/new-york-times-editor-confesses-to-censoring-information-about-black-crime/
http://usmediaandisrael.com/intimidation-at-the-new-york-times/
http://omnologos.com/watch-out-for-self-censorship-at-the-new-york-times/

"Tell the truth and run." - Yugoslav proverb

Do you understand the concept of "summary"? If this were a blog about materials engineering, I might agree with you that such detail is needed. As it is, most people here probably read the summary, thought, "Cool!" and continued reading other articles. Had they had more detailed information, they would have read the summary, thought, "Um... Okay..." and continued reading other articles.

If you're counting on Slashdot to give you detailed technical information in its summaries, perhaps you're reading the wrong blog. If you happen to be a materials engineer and want more detailed technical information, well, that's what TFA is for. The article, which, incidentally, is actually yet another summary of another article from the University of Technology in Sydney, which is a summary of an article in the Journal of Applied Physics, which in turn is a summary of probably a very detailed thesis or dissertation backed by metric craptons of research data by Ali R. Ranjbartoreh, Bei Wang, Xiaoping Shen, and Guoxiu Wang.

See how it works? You start with "10 times stronger!" and it's up to you to dig as deeply as you want to in order to find the level of technical detail and/or interest that suits you. Personally, given that I'm not a materials engineer and that "10 times stronger!" is good enough to suit my level of interest and make me say, "Cool!", I'm actually glad that more technical details were not provided.

Sounds like the OP is suggesting we respond to trolls with Eliza.

Please go on.

Over the weekend for a laugh I modified Eliza to sound like Charlie Sheen. It's only a quick hack job and could be greatly improved but the nonsense he was sprouting was just so amusing I couldn't resist.

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/charlie/charlie.html

I've managed good photos using a point and shoot digicam with it's lens similar in size, using small cheap telescopes. You do need to have manual controls and manual focus on the camera, and have some idea how to use them. You also need to be willing to try different settings and ways of focusing.

Here's what I did years ago with a 3MP camera, and my first scope which is worse than what you described:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/Moon8567.jpg
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/MoonInDaylight.jpg

Here's one of my latest images, through a 10" dobsonian telescope - animated gif comparing to Virtual Moon Atlas:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/IMG_1488_OverlayAnimationSmall.gif

I've managed good photos using a point and shoot digicam with it's lens similar in size, using small cheap telescopes. You do need to have manual controls and manual focus on the camera, and have some idea how to use them. You also need to be willing to try different settings and ways of focusing.

Here's what I did years ago with a 3MP camera, and my first scope which is worse than what you described:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/Moon8567.jpg
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/MoonInDaylight.jpg

Here's one of my latest images, through a 10" dobsonian telescope - animated gif comparing to Virtual Moon Atlas:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/IMG_1488_OverlayAnimationSmall.gif

I've managed good photos using a point and shoot digicam with it's lens similar in size, using small cheap telescopes. You do need to have manual controls and manual focus on the camera, and have some idea how to use them. You also need to be willing to try different settings and ways of focusing.

Here's what I did years ago with a 3MP camera, and my first scope which is worse than what you described:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/Moon8567.jpg
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/MoonInDaylight.jpg

Here's one of my latest images, through a 10" dobsonian telescope - animated gif comparing to Virtual Moon Atlas:
http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/photography/IMG_1488_OverlayAnimationSmall.gif

they are. and they are in EVERY country. they all 'like' this. they will not give this 'rule' back.

Not every country. Some of our us have customs services with clear rules as outlined by our customs act. As AQIS are a branch of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) they have to operate under the same rules, restrictions and oversight as the rest of the AFP with regards to detention and treatment of the public but have to follow the Customs act with search and seizure.

AQIS may only seize 1) dutiable goods 2) excisable goods 3) prohibited goods under Australian law. Contrary to popular opinion, when you enter Australia (passed the passport inspection checkpoint) you have the rights of a visitor, resident or citizen of Australia (whichever is applicable) and are protected under law. This means you are also bound by Australian law, in particular our Customs Act which states what you may or may not bring into the country, so you have the rights but also the responsibility as it is a crime to fail to declare anything you bring into the country.

That being said, AQIS is more interested on weather you're trying to get fruit, chicken bones or animal skins into the country or if you've got an aerosol can in your luggage (aerosol cans don't like pressure changes, it tends to make them explode).

Here a link to a paper on the subject [PDF] and google's HTML version. I don't know if it's the same group.

Note: the first is marginally safe for work, because they've been rather, er, "discrete" about the presentation of their sample images. The second is laundered of all images, of course.

As other people have surmised based on previous work, converting the images to HSV space instead of RGB helps in the detection process, but I really wonder about the other premises in the paper. For example:

"The software calculates the percentage of human skin colour in an image and produces an assessment that indicates if it is predominantly skin (pornography) or has an acceptable level of skin colour content."

How is that supposed to work? Skin percentage might correlate with whether or not something is pornography, but there are plenty of non-pornographic images (in most people's definition) that could be >80 or 90% skin (say, a portrait with the face and shoulders filling most of the image, or someone wearing a skimpy bathing suit). Likewise, there would be pictures that most people would probably regard as pornography that would be largely non-skin (let's just say it doesn't take much exposure to constitute pornography, if the exposure is in key places). Finally, a nice, pink hog/pig might qualify as mostly skin, but isn't human. Yes, I realize that doesn't preclude it being pornographic :-)

Anyway, the algorithm this paper describes doesn't look very reliable, and I doubt the one in the article is any better.

If you program in Java and have access to Netbeans try my little hacked piece of software here:

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/javaGUIConver ter.html

Basically you just drag and drop components onto a Java Swing form, and write a handful of lines of code to run that form and have it spit itself out in the form of HTML and CSS.

It's quick and dirty and not standards compliant. It uses absolute positioning and puts everything in its own DIV. At this stage it's a hack and a proof of concept with the concept being to convert existing application layouts to another GUI layout such as HTML/CSS.

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~whophd/itunes-phone .html

Too late for us. Marcus, one of our resident arsehats, decided to kindly point this out to us:

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/lists/progsoc/curren t/msg02608.html

Here's a shameless plug for you. Here's my code for converting Java Swing or AWT to HTML and CSS. It's primitive, but it may be useful to someone. It should be easy to modify this to convert any running Swing/AWT application from Java to HTML/CSS. Oh and of course its GPL.

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~sammy/javaGUIConver ter.html

I'm trying to find the link. I'm remember the last one a couple of months ago being the based on research by university I suffered at. http://www.sustainability.uts.edu.au/research/npr/ eematerials.html The major difference from what I remember was there system used a flexible polymer tube, that has the same total internal reflection effect as fibre optics, yet is easier to handle and much cheaper.

I suspect both general purpose and scientific computing can benefit from nested data parallelism.
The Nepal Project at the University of New South Wales concentrates on Multiple Program Multiple Data (MPMD). In a nutshell, any problem that can be specified as array operations can be flattened, unrolled, and automatically parallelized. This is not the holy grail of general purpose transparent parallelization of purely functional programs, but instead nested data parallelism. This extends research done in data parallel languages such as Nesl, Sisal, and really nifty algorithm shape research done in FISh.
This is the best approach to transparent parallelism that I've seen yet. Anyone know anything better?

Metacrawler has a page ( Metaspy ) that shows what people are using metacrawler for at the time. Awhile ago , I wrote a screensaver for OSX that scraped this page and used its contents.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone search for "porn" - they tend to be quite a good deal more specific. The oddball, useless, generic search that keeps popping up over and over and over again is, strangely "food". Guess there's a lot of hungry folks out there in Corporate America. The other weird one is people searching for fully qualified URL's. Guess they're trying to see who's linking to who.

Quote: According to English common law, your ownership of your law extends to the center of the Earth and upwards infinitely.

You are factually wrong.

That was the test used by the English common law (as well as in the U.S. because, with the exception of Louisiana, we adopted their common law). However, I know that test has since been abandoned as absurd.

The English case that I found was Bernstein v Skyviews & General.

Specifically, Bernstein said that a land-owner's rights extended to as high as they would reasonably and ordinarily use. You can find a little bit about the case from this Australian law school professor's page. (Scroll down the table a little ways.)

I know the corresponding U.S. case came to a similar conclusion, although I don't have the time this morning to find that case.

In regards to the article topic, these land-use tests would probably not give someone carte blanche to engage in private space flight over their property. After all, private space flight is not "reasonable and ordinary" (or whatever the exact legal phrase would be).

- Neil Wehneman

Note: See my sig for disclaimer.

There is also a history of entire mud brick communities being wiped out by earthquakes. Deaths in the tens of thousands.Better Mud Bricks To Save Lives, Iran Asks: Why Are Our Earthquakes So Deadly?

You want to afford poor people the opportunity to own their own homes, give them the freedom to do with their own property as they see fit. Set appropriate national MIMIMUM standards for sanitation and structural integrity and set barriers to local communities mandating higher, purely politically motivated, standards.

The U.S. climate ranges from the sub-tropical to the high Attic. The Gulf Coast does not present the same problems for a builder as the desert Southwest. San Francisco is not New York. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

I don't quite see myself sitting at my office going,(read out loud)
if parenthese parenthese invar bitwiseor zero x three parentheseend equals

No, but I can sure see myself saying

mesh spark-spot slat usr slat bin slat perl

I'd learn all those good old Intercal names for the ASCII characters and have myself an office with a door within a week.

Many folks seem to launch into the misinterpretation that 'unencrypted' == 'insecure'. It does not. Just because your box can talk at layer 2 or layer 3 on my wireless network doesn't mean it's going to be of any earthly use to you.

Case in point: wander around pretty much anywhere in the Haymarket, Ultimo and Broadway areas at the south end of the City of Sydney, Australia - you'll find literally dozens of open, unencrypted wilress access points, all with SSID "UTS WLAN". Natural next step for a geek is "Whoah! open wlan! I'm there!", fire up laptop, connect...

It's shortly after that that you realise that you've just helped yourself to an open, unencrypted, and completely useless wireless network belonging to the University of Technology, Sydney. You know this because no matter *where* you point your web browser, you always get the same page: "Welcome to UTS WLAN, enter your username/password to continue". If you manage to guess a username/password, then you'll get the same page, with red writing, saying something to the effect of "oops, no IPSEC tunnel, no cigar".

That network is opened, unsecured in that you can get your machine to talk on it without authentication, but you can't talk off of it without additional rights.

Now granted, there's holes in my story. One day, some clever kid is going to figure out that he can use the wlan as his own private routed trunk from one side of the city to the other, and then the owners of the network will have to block that. Second, how hard can it be to get a username/password pair out of a drunk undergraduate? Third, this lot isn't *really* in the spirit of the story - I've built the chinese cookware, I've found, literally, hundreds of wireless nets that really are open for all to see, most of them quite likely unintentionally so.

So yes, there are a lot of unencrypted wireless networks out there, but they're not all unsecured.

Many folks seem to launch into the misinterpretation that 'unencrypted' == 'insecure'. It does not. Just because your box can talk at layer 2 or layer 3 on my wireless network doesn't mean it's going to be of any earthly use to you.

Case in point: wander around pretty much anywhere in the Haymarket, Ultimo and Broadway areas at the south end of the City of Sydney, Australia - you'll find literally dozens of open, unencrypted wilress access points, all with SSID "UTS WLAN". Natural next step for a geek is "Whoah! open wlan! I'm there!", fire up laptop, connect...

It's shortly after that that you realise that you've just helped yourself to an open, unencrypted, and completely useless wireless network belonging to the University of Technology, Sydney. You know this because no matter *where* you point your web browser, you always get the same page: "Welcome to UTS WLAN, enter your username/password to continue". If you manage to guess a username/password, then you'll get the same page, with red writing, saying something to the effect of "oops, no IPSEC tunnel, no cigar".

That network is opened, unsecured in that you can get your machine to talk on it without authentication, but you can't talk off of it without additional rights.

Now granted, there's holes in my story. One day, some clever kid is going to figure out that he can use the wlan as his own private routed trunk from one side of the city to the other, and then the owners of the network will have to block that. Second, how hard can it be to get a username/password pair out of a drunk undergraduate? Third, this lot isn't *really* in the spirit of the story - I've built the chinese cookware, I've found, literally, hundreds of wireless nets that really are open for all to see, most of them quite likely unintentionally so.

So yes, there are a lot of unencrypted wireless networks out there, but they're not all unsecured.

"Under many eyes, all bugs are trivial"

I know that this goes against the Slashdot groupthink, but that saying doesn't apply to OSS anywhere near as much as people seem to think. Info here. (PDF, 600 kB)

First, I will take cheap, livable housing for the masses over beautiful housing any day of the week. The inhabitants can always redecorate it later.

Second, to my eyes, this technology allows you to build all kinds of crazy looking houses that would have had prohibitive labour costs in the original.

A very exciting idea! I am really looking forward to this new era of computer aided fabrication technology - my alma mater, UTS, has recently purchased two Statasys 3D printers, so if those cheapskates are getting into it, surely the commodotisation boom is not far away.

When the time does come, I look forward to seeing napster like services for three dimensionsional objects. "Six people for dinner? I better download some new forks."

I just read an article about this,
the x86 design was all based on minimizing chip real estate and not in on providing the best way to do every function. RISC and now IA-64 is a consequence of this philosophy where all tough problems and complexity is pushed onto higher level compilers. On the higher level it becomes to complicated to take care of the problems and it is pushed further up to the operating systems and script languages of today.

Four principles that will inevitably lead to a failed project:
PRINCIPLE 1. If you can't solve a problem, give it to someone else.

PRINCIPLE 2. If you can't choose an alternative, let the user get access to all.

PRINCIPLE 3. If there's an adaptable tool, use it rather than developing a new one.

PRINCIPLE 4. If a bug is found during implementation, try to get around it instead of solving it.

These were formulated in 1976 and translated from the article in Swedish

Not knowing anything about Parrot, there seems to be some support for identifying what programs really does and solve the problems at a really low level. Redundant OP's was a bad thing by the same principles, but an underlying hardware implementation might be able to divide the problem even further.

Other work by Bud Lawson Proper function distribution in computer system architectures, Open complex based systems, (I might even read them some time...)

We were brainstorming cool stuff to put on a website for our band, RSMinc. Inspired by the Star Wars monopoly set, we decided to come up with our own branded board - RSMinc Monopoly. Just set the resolution really high in Photoshop so you can print it really large, add your band photo to the centre of the board, et voila. We had a contact at Kinkos who printed it up on A2 and laminated it for free. We just use the standard notes from another monopoly set for the cash. You can see this flagrant infringement of intellectual property here.

62 Dams in one night? What the heck happened?

I think its just terrible. China is worse then the Soviet Union used to be. Thankfully, in this age of information, news leaks quickly over international borders. The Firewall of China has Been hacked before, and It'll happen again.

David Hicks
Mamdouh Habib

This is in spite of calls by the Australian Senate for their release.

I believe that New Zealand still retains some degree of self-respect.

I live in a new apartment block (lovingly called a Mansion) in Fukuoka, Japan. Having being built less than a year ago I'm luckly to have NTT fibre to the building, and network ports in my apartment running at 100Mb. Okay, so I might not get LAN speeds, but it's the fastest I've seen since being at Uni. But the best part, it costs about USD$10 a month, unlimited.

This is the only link I could find.

There was a package developed by Don Herbison-Evans at the Univesity of Sydney (Australia) some time ago called NUDES that did exactly this. Have a look at Dance and the Computer: A Potential for Graphic Synergy.

Try a Google search for "nudes" "dance" "software" "university".

Graham

There's tons out there. The best I've found is this document. There's plenty of work revolving around binary hyperlinks in the 80s. This patent is just bogus.

Any LISP interpreter that referred to a remote object is also prior art for this patent. Not to mention any prior knowledge management structure that did so.

Here are two articles that relate to the work done with NMDA receptors (from late '96). IMHO they are rather convincing of the role that synaptic strengthening plays in the process of learning.

The first article also tells that they were able to translate the activation pattern in hippocampus to the spatial location of the mouse (while it was swimming in Morris water maze).

1. The essential role of hippocampal CAI NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity in spatial memory.
2. Building a Brainier Mouse

Like this?

Telstra hasn't shut down (hehe), however they recently added a 3Gb limit to their 'Freedom' (a.k.a. "unlimited") plans. /. has done some articles.

My friend Louis deserves the credit for this link to A UTS student's personal page where he liberates the hardware that they may want back someday. *smile*

There's more of a revenge angle here, as opposed to utilising it as a web server.

The Science News article credits Heinlein with exoskeletons, in Starship Troopers. I was surprised they didn't mention Waldos, essentially a networked version of the same thing, which he is better known for.

Having just completed a Master of Interactive Multimedia we did quite a bit of study around the nature of Art, Art Theory, Semiotics and everything else. But on ABC TV last night I saw this on The 7:30 Report. It was an interview with the new Australia Council boss discussing how New Media is the next revolution ...

As other /.'ers have mentioned, art is by defition what you define it as. There are a fwe art prizes around and orgainsation that will take your work, eg http://www.siggraph.org/.

Now, I don't want this to sound like a stoopid question, but as a student doing a Masters of Interactive Multimedia a lot of our discussion is based around what is New Media, or more specifically Multimedia.

If I ask a design person about multimedia they think it's the use of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, HTML, etc, etc. It's the design elements and how a product looks. A multimedia project is a design project with some techie stuff at the end to make it work.

A technical person will see it as the software that drives the product, maybe Director or for a web based project Java/Perl/PHP, etc. A multimedia project is a software development project with a nice front end.

From a content producers point of view it's (obviously) the content. A script, the text and all copy for the site.

The list goes on for marketing, sales, user interface designers, hardware engineers, project managers and educationalists.

I believe it's all these things put together. To be a New Media specialist you need to be a "renaissance" man/woman with skills in all the different areas. What do you think?

you're right of course. it's only confusing when you're talking about bytes, not any other SI measurement.

a few years ago, in an effort to bring "bytes" back to the SI norm, the units kibibyte, megibyte, and gigibyte where introduced. nobody seems terribly interested in following this standard, but for what it's worth:

1 Kilobyte (KB) = 1000 bytes
1 Megabyte (MB) = 1000 KB
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1000 MB

1 kibibyte (KiB) = 1024 bytes
1 Megibyte (MiB) = 1024 KiB (1,048,576 bytes)
1 Gigibyte (GiB) = 1024 MiB (1,048,576 KiB)

there used to be a site on the 'net about all this, but the only references i could find in a quick google search was this page (at the bottom) and this message.

so needless to say, it's not commonly used :)

- j

> since a client can't add interfaces, the library writer need to enumerate I think this is the worst thing about c++. If my memory serves, theres a good deal about it in the C++ critique at this link.

Here are a couple of links to try:
(I can't comment on any of them except PCB, which, although very simple, works fairly well and is quite intuitive to use).
MUCS-PCB
PCB
SATCAD

Also try Scientific Applications on Linux

--

"Without the guarantee of that protection, a Warner Brothers executive testified in court, the industry would never have begun releasing movies in digital format."

Then why doesn't Warner Brothers sue the MPAA (or dvdcca) for selling them a dodgy protection mechism that could never have worked? They did get that "guarantee" they're talking about, right?

No matter how hard you try, you can't prevent people from making perfect copies of digital data. You can however prevent people from reading it if you have a brain to use encryption properly (why the heck are they making keys available before people are allowed to use them?)

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~rheise/

Bertrand Meyer claims that Eiffel could prevent Ariane 5 crash, bashes Java, and warns managers against hiring "C Hackers" (in his Object Success) -- the latter bit is nicely rebutted by Robert C. Martin here.

Oh well. For the record: I don't like Eiffel. It's your typical "one idea" language. Inheritable contracts are nice, but the rest is mediocre at best.

I'm not sure Bertrand Meyer is someone we should be listening to on matters of ethics. In his book Object Success Meyer expressed what I find to be an extremely unethical position when he expressed the opinion that C (and presumably C++) programmers, having learned too many bad habits, shouldn't be considered for "real" OO development projects. Hiring managers should look on them with suspicion, he suggested. In spite of his weasel words about "human betterment", I find this to be little more than an expression of prejudice about C/C++ programmers, and I find it unethical in the extreme.

Robert Martin, of Object Mentor, wrote a nice rebuttal to Bertrand Meyer, which he posted to comp.object and comp.lang.c++, among other Usenet groups.

--Jim

I agree with you in part, but pigeonholing all of OO as obscurantist and overcomplicated is as erroneous as overhyping it as if it were the Second Coming. There is nothing wrong with the motivation behind OO itself; the problem lies mainly in implementation. Specifically, what we now consider to be "OO programming languages" and "OO design practices" goes far beyond the original concept of both, and much of it is indeed obscurantist nonsense, which induces a huge amount of needless overhead, both of the conceptual kind on the designer and of the practical kind on the implementer. This is especially true in the case of small to medium software projects, even more so because often designer and implementer are one and the same.

Case study 1: C++. An extensive critique of C++ as an OO language for production systems, from the point of view of an Eiffel-cheerer, can be found here; in my opinion, it suffices to say that, given its status as just one step up from a C add-on, and given that, when building on such a shoddy conceptual infrastructure as C's, it's hard to conceive how one could do any better, C++ should be considered to be outside the scope of this discussion.

Case study 2: Java. Now, Java is built from head to toe for maximum OO. This is incredibly intrusive to anyone who wants to do some real work using it, as opposed to just drawing nice schemes and writing UML models. Java is built to enforce those styles and concepts of programming which the designer felt to be correct. It's languages like this which give OO a bad name, and they should be shunned.

Case study 3: Perl. Perl was built to be a scripting language - in Osterhout's original conception, a "glue" language. Thus, practicality being the most important goal in it, it's easy to understand why Perl's OO is as it is. Specifically, it doesn't exist per se; no special syntax or semantics is enforced for OO programming, in fact all of it is built upon simpler, pre-existing constructs - specifically, taking advantage of an isomorphy between modules and classes, objects and references (via abuse of the bless() and ref() functions), methods and namespace-local subs. This makes a transition to OO practices easier as a project grows. It also allows one to implement the concept of an object as he sees fit - usually the slot approach is used, using hashrefs, but there other approaches for specialised cases - including objects as indices into class-wide property arrays, an approach described in "Advanced Programming with Perl" and which is useful for when you need many objects and creating a hash table for each would be a waste of space. The discussion of OO in Perl could be extended further, but it suffices to say that, in true Perl form, it restrains from imposing a paradigm on the programmer, trusting instead that he knows better.

Case study 4: Smalltalk. Smalltalk is widely considered to be the godfather of modern OO (yes, Modula had something called "OO" before Smalltalk, but a quick glance at both languages will make it clear right away that most of what we call OO today was fathered by Smalltalk); this, combined with the widespread availability of "OO software design tools" for the environment, could lead to some people blaming it unfairly for their current issues with the paradigm. In reality, when using Squeak, a computing environment integrated with a derivative of Smalltalk, I've found the use of OO in programming the system to be perfectly natural, in contrast to the uncomfortable feeling that you get from using, e.g., Java. Part of this comes from language design itself, which makes the concept ubiquitous in a very straightforward and graspable way, but most of it comes from the environment, which is fully built on objects. In the Morphic system, you can "see" and "touch" - inspect, manipulate, delete - all objects alike. The user- and programmer-levels are intertwined, and so instead of programs, methods are the elementary user-level executable unit; this removes one unnecessary level of encapsulation, leaving all objects free to talk to each other, without being first streamlined into the procedural mold enforced by the "program" concept. All of this, plus the elegance of the Smalltalk language, makes for a system which is very easy to program, and which leaves relatively little to be desired. Thus, I consider Squeak to be a paradigm of well-used OO.

Hell, I think I've said more than I set out to... I hope at least some of it is of any use.

Don't get me wrong: C++ surely gets the job done, but I think it could be better and cleaner - mostly by removing some C compability and rethinking some other issues. Of course, this break the downward compability, and I'm pretty sure it'll never be done.

One recommendation: try reading Stroustrup's D&E and Ian Joyner's Critique of C++ in parallel.

Quite honestly, though the interview is obviously humorous in nature, the criticisms of C++ in it are all too accurate. I have programmed in C and C++, and it is far easier to hack objects into C (which is what GTK+ does marvelously) than to use the so-called object-oriented features of C++. Granted, one could also use a language that actually _is_ object-oriented, like Java or Common Lisp instead.

But enough of my ranting. Check out this critique of C++ from the point of view of a computer scientist very well-versed in programming languages.

I went along to the talk when he was in Sydney, here is a
summary I posted and his follow up.