Maybe the ps3 costs more than the rest of the consoles, and maybe Sony has sold less than its competitors, and maybe alot of game developers aren't producing games for the system... But just because the demo model ps3's are crashing doesn't mean that this isn't part of Sony's long term strategy. When they say "next generation" console. They really mean it.
Why should someone who wants a product, a dell computer, be forced to pay for another product, Windows, that they don't want? If I want a pizza, and I don't want any onions, the pizza place won't tell me that they're sorry, but the convicted onion monopoly company says we can only sell pizza with onions in accordance with our anti-competative contract. If I puchase 10 dell pc's that I want to put linux on, why must they come with windows. I'm pretty sure they'll refuse me that convienance, much less a discount for not including a "$100" product.
I admit I'd be quite impressed if IE actually went and rendered things absolutely according to standard. In fact, if they did, I'd probably be more annoyed at firefox for being the slacker. While complete standards compliance is great, it's more important that a product implements the features that the users will most frequently want to use. Firefox does a good job of that, and it does it well (namely it handles javascript and dom manipulation quickly). Honestly, the same could be said about the companies trying to comply with SQL. They tend to not absolutely conform to the standard, although they all do to a good degree, and they hit the features that the users want well. I was actually surprised to learn that microsoft's current jdbc drivers work pretty well.
If you look at what's big now, AJAX and all kinds of javascript dom manipulation for GUI, microsoft has finally gone and supported what most developers want. I've brought IE6 to a significant slowdown on higher end systems with some javascript dom experimentation, where firefox handled it without a hickup. It will probably be a bit before I really test IE7's mettle. But if their past behavior remains a constant, my hopes of those wonderfully convienant features of CSS3 won't be supported till IE9, shoving the ability of a web developer to round edges in a simple way and handle opacity for the majority of users to like, 2020. If microsoft starts to lose its monopoly status, and people start to use real competition, these kinds of developments will be useable on the web much sooner, say 2009. If there was a fair ground of competition, microsoft would either support the standards, or they'd go down in flames. With how they're future's been looking, they just might go down in flames.
"correct" support is one thing... attempting to support at all is another.
The CSS 2 was a W3C Recommendation on 12-May-1998. Last I heard CSS 2 was not something supported in IE till IE7. IE6 supported CSS1 (albeit not "correctly"). So, if we are going by official release, IE finally supported CSS2 on October 18, 2006. So it only took them a bit over 8 years and 4 months to actually support a web standard. I'm kind of greatfull they're trying to force everyone to update, because it seems their plan was to try to hold everyone in the stone age...
I think we could easily compare this to the SQL ISO/ANSI standard. If Microsoft were to mirror this progress with IE's support of CSS, this means that SQL2000 would have finally supported SQL2 from 1992, which had already been replaced by SQL3 in 1999. Yet, this didn't happen. Why? Maybe it had something to do with fierce competition from companies like IBM and Oracle (well it's arguably more their market than Microsoft's). None the less, if Microsoft took that long to generally match the standard of SQL, they'd be king of SOL in the db market.
So just because none of the browsers render html "correctly", does not mean the way they handled standards is excuseable.... and the fact that you *could* render.png's with a hack call to directx makes it rather obvious it wouldn't be too hard for the largest software company in the world to have put in the backend to handle the transparencies in IE6 when tons of people were asking...
I'd imagine many high school students will not be very interested or they might be turned off by what they perceive as something that will not be useful to them. I would argue it might be best for a highschooler's first programming class to spend a good bit of time initially going over all the various things that they themselves find interesting (perhaps you could run an anonymous survey on what they would like to do with programming). Maybe they want to hack or program games or start the next google... You should further emphasize and demonstrate that C is an excellent language to learn for both practical uses and similarities to other languages. You could dazzle them at first by showing them things like game programming, security (focus on perhaps decryption/encryption and viruses), robotic vision, databases (emphasis on size and predictions via data mining), robotics, etc... not to mention computer related jobs, the big companies pushing them, and all the money behind it. If interest seemed generally low, you could even test them on their knowlege of such things, or do a week of group presentations on various points of interest.
Next I'd say foundations are of key importance. They should refreshed / taught on what integers vs. real numbers are and how the computer emulates them. They should be taught binary, and the concepts of different base numbering systems. They should be given a refresher on order of operation, and also taught the modulus operation. Either get them on a simple ide, or set them up with a good simple text editor like editpad and an installed gcc compiler. Get them to code Hello World, get them to code some mathematical operations, get them to code something that takes input(input to give them that power, not confuse them with memory addresses)... Go through the different variable types; go through the core of structured programming: if/else/while. Maybe you could craft a program with such a crafty structure it would take some understanding in terms of getting it to exit and return the right result...
I've gone on longer than I should, but a good late project could be to have them make a small and simplified old school text based adventure.
No kidding! As a programmer, I have a general distaste for Microsoft. Maybe that's because of some of the ugliest code I've seen in my life came from their media player API. I swear they either had a competition to see who could make the worst code function for their sample code, or that they used some sort of reverse compiler and just renamed a few things.
As a web developer, I fucking hate Microsoft. Now I haven't started testing with IE7, but they apparently didn't feel it was important to support portable network graphics (.png) natively in IE. It's bad enough that.gif's were burdened by a patent, but the kicker is that.gif's don't support levels of transparency. Want to put an image that blends smoothly into the background? You'd better choose the background color in advance and if you change the.css it's going to look like shit. That or you can do an escape hack and a directx call to display the png - along with some other mess of code. Never mind not supporting CSS2 display properties or CSS2 for that matter. They clearly have had the resources to support these things that common web developers are using, but instead they just dug their heels into the ground. They added in all kinds of redundant crap to their DOM. Fact of the matter is I don't see how they can expect a web developer to use crap like ActiveX (who uses VBScript again?) on a site when the environment is laden with gaping security holes. I certainly don't want a client to have to open themselves up to gaping security holes if they want to use my site. I thought that maybe MS was colluding with Adobe as it seemed like using costly Macromedia was the best alternative, but apparently they're just as happy to burn Dreamweaver to the ground... But no need to fear, there's IE for the Mac... I hear it works GGrrrrrrreat! I'm glad that when using something as worldly as the internet, that I can use a standard that everyone can view in pretty much the same way.
I suppose it's now obvious through my comment that I don't hate microsoft at all. It's all you linux fans that are causing the problems. If ya'll could just learn to accept the fact that good global standards cost money to use (and more money to tweak), you'd find Microsoft's not that bad.
I love Microsoft, and Bill Gates is my personal hero. Have you not seen the power of Visual Basic? Why use something more complicated? Bunch of whiney haters, the lot of you!
"Forecasting Dangerous Inmate Misconduct:"
The great thing about forecasting is you can make a living off being completely wrong. Perhaps they should start forecasting if the criminal forecasters will do better than the weather forecasters. This makes me wonder: which is more profitable - forecasting criminal behaviour or forecasting stock prices?
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Maybe the ps3 costs more than the rest of the consoles, and maybe Sony has sold less than its competitors, and maybe alot of game developers aren't producing games for the system... But just because the demo model ps3's are crashing doesn't mean that this isn't part of Sony's long term strategy. When they say "next generation" console. They really mean it.
Why should someone who wants a product, a dell computer, be forced to pay for another product, Windows, that they don't want? If I want a pizza, and I don't want any onions, the pizza place won't tell me that they're sorry, but the convicted onion monopoly company says we can only sell pizza with onions in accordance with our anti-competative contract. If I puchase 10 dell pc's that I want to put linux on, why must they come with windows. I'm pretty sure they'll refuse me that convienance, much less a discount for not including a "$100" product.
I admit I'd be quite impressed if IE actually went and rendered things absolutely according to standard. In fact, if they did, I'd probably be more annoyed at firefox for being the slacker. While complete standards compliance is great, it's more important that a product implements the features that the users will most frequently want to use. Firefox does a good job of that, and it does it well (namely it handles javascript and dom manipulation quickly). Honestly, the same could be said about the companies trying to comply with SQL. They tend to not absolutely conform to the standard, although they all do to a good degree, and they hit the features that the users want well. I was actually surprised to learn that microsoft's current jdbc drivers work pretty well. If you look at what's big now, AJAX and all kinds of javascript dom manipulation for GUI, microsoft has finally gone and supported what most developers want. I've brought IE6 to a significant slowdown on higher end systems with some javascript dom experimentation, where firefox handled it without a hickup. It will probably be a bit before I really test IE7's mettle. But if their past behavior remains a constant, my hopes of those wonderfully convienant features of CSS3 won't be supported till IE9, shoving the ability of a web developer to round edges in a simple way and handle opacity for the majority of users to like, 2020. If microsoft starts to lose its monopoly status, and people start to use real competition, these kinds of developments will be useable on the web much sooner, say 2009. If there was a fair ground of competition, microsoft would either support the standards, or they'd go down in flames. With how they're future's been looking, they just might go down in flames.
"correct" support is one thing... attempting to support at all is another. The CSS 2 was a W3C Recommendation on 12-May-1998. Last I heard CSS 2 was not something supported in IE till IE7. IE6 supported CSS1 (albeit not "correctly"). So, if we are going by official release, IE finally supported CSS2 on October 18, 2006. So it only took them a bit over 8 years and 4 months to actually support a web standard. I'm kind of greatfull they're trying to force everyone to update, because it seems their plan was to try to hold everyone in the stone age... I think we could easily compare this to the SQL ISO/ANSI standard. If Microsoft were to mirror this progress with IE's support of CSS, this means that SQL2000 would have finally supported SQL2 from 1992, which had already been replaced by SQL3 in 1999. Yet, this didn't happen. Why? Maybe it had something to do with fierce competition from companies like IBM and Oracle (well it's arguably more their market than Microsoft's). None the less, if Microsoft took that long to generally match the standard of SQL, they'd be king of SOL in the db market. So just because none of the browsers render html "correctly", does not mean the way they handled standards is excuseable. ... and the fact that you *could* render .png's with a hack call to directx makes it rather obvious it wouldn't be too hard for the largest software company in the world to have put in the backend to handle the transparencies in IE6 when tons of people were asking...
I'd imagine many high school students will not be very interested or they might be turned off by what they perceive as something that will not be useful to them. I would argue it might be best for a highschooler's first programming class to spend a good bit of time initially going over all the various things that they themselves find interesting (perhaps you could run an anonymous survey on what they would like to do with programming). Maybe they want to hack or program games or start the next google... You should further emphasize and demonstrate that C is an excellent language to learn for both practical uses and similarities to other languages. You could dazzle them at first by showing them things like game programming, security (focus on perhaps decryption/encryption and viruses), robotic vision, databases (emphasis on size and predictions via data mining), robotics, etc... not to mention computer related jobs, the big companies pushing them, and all the money behind it. If interest seemed generally low, you could even test them on their knowlege of such things, or do a week of group presentations on various points of interest.
Next I'd say foundations are of key importance. They should refreshed / taught on what integers vs. real numbers are and how the computer emulates them. They should be taught binary, and the concepts of different base numbering systems. They should be given a refresher on order of operation, and also taught the modulus operation. Either get them on a simple ide, or set them up with a good simple text editor like editpad and an installed gcc compiler. Get them to code Hello World, get them to code some mathematical operations, get them to code something that takes input(input to give them that power, not confuse them with memory addresses)... Go through the different variable types; go through the core of structured programming: if/else/while. Maybe you could craft a program with such a crafty structure it would take some understanding in terms of getting it to exit and return the right result...
I've gone on longer than I should, but a good late project could be to have them make a small and simplified old school text based adventure.
No kidding!
.gif's were burdened by a patent, but the kicker is that .gif's don't support levels of transparency. Want to put an image that blends smoothly into the background? You'd better choose the background color in advance and if you change the .css it's going to look like shit. That or you can do an escape hack and a directx call to display the png - along with some other mess of code. Never mind not supporting CSS2 display properties or CSS2 for that matter. They clearly have had the resources to support these things that common web developers are using, but instead they just dug their heels into the ground. They added in all kinds of redundant crap to their DOM. Fact of the matter is I don't see how they can expect a web developer to use crap like ActiveX (who uses VBScript again?) on a site when the environment is laden with gaping security holes. I certainly don't want a client to have to open themselves up to gaping security holes if they want to use my site. I thought that maybe MS was colluding with Adobe as it seemed like using costly Macromedia was the best alternative, but apparently they're just as happy to burn Dreamweaver to the ground... But no need to fear, there's IE for the Mac... I hear it works GGrrrrrrreat! I'm glad that when using something as worldly as the internet, that I can use a standard that everyone can view in pretty much the same way.
As a programmer, I have a general distaste for Microsoft. Maybe that's because of some of the ugliest code I've seen in my life came from their media player API. I swear they either had a competition to see who could make the worst code function for their sample code, or that they used some sort of reverse compiler and just renamed a few things.
As a web developer, I fucking hate Microsoft. Now I haven't started testing with IE7, but they apparently didn't feel it was important to support portable network graphics (.png) natively in IE. It's bad enough that
I suppose it's now obvious through my comment that I don't hate microsoft at all. It's all you linux fans that are causing the problems. If ya'll could just learn to accept the fact that good global standards cost money to use (and more money to tweak), you'd find Microsoft's not that bad.
I love Microsoft, and Bill Gates is my personal hero. Have you not seen the power of Visual Basic? Why use something more complicated? Bunch of whiney haters, the lot of you!
"Forecasting Dangerous Inmate Misconduct:" The great thing about forecasting is you can make a living off being completely wrong. Perhaps they should start forecasting if the criminal forecasters will do better than the weather forecasters. This makes me wonder: which is more profitable - forecasting criminal behaviour or forecasting stock prices?