I agree, but it's totally irrelevant in this situation. This is a homebrew TiVo, and you just don't get nice quality video in a TV signal.
For movies, you're right, and you'd want to keep any recorded movies on the hard drive or burn them onto multiple disks (if you don't mind the break in the action, probably not a big deal if recorded from commercial TV). For TV shows though, which I'm pretty sure is what the article is talking about, once you edit out the commercials you're looking at on average 42 minutes for a "1 hour" show, which will certainly fit on a CD-RW at a quality higher than the source.
BTW, broadcast is actually the highest quality TV signal you'll find, provided you are close to the transmitter. Cable is the best quality most people will get at their homes, though it isn't very good, and Digital Satalite comes in last. The movie channels (HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc) seem to be especially bad. And yes, I am a trained professional.
If you go to webster [webster.com] you'll easily find that plural from virus is viruses...
You will find nothing of the sort, since webster doesn't list a plural form of "virus". "Virii", which is correct according to the rules of the english language, is not listed at all, and "viruses" produces the page for "virus", not "viruses".
If you're going to play spelling nazi, you need to start checking your sources a little better.
This method doesn't require another device besides the pen.
Wrong.
It requires special paper, MSIE, and.NET.
At $200 for the pen and $10 per notebook of the special paper, its far more expensive than a regular pen, regular paper, and a cheap USB scanner, which is its real competition.
As an added bonus the pen exports data in a proprietary format and is dependent on proprietary software, which makes the user dependent on continued vendor support (tried finding drivers for a serial mouse lately?). Oh yeah, and the cheap scanner has better resolution, and can be used on all your old documents as well.
Touchpad devices do work if a thin layer of material is between the surface and the user's finger; you could use a piece of thin, tough white plastic (less than 1/16th inch) and seal it into one side of the keyboard tray. If it's waterproof, it can be wiped with a soapy rag like the rest of the kitchen.
You can do the exact same thing to a touchscreen, just use clear plastic instead of opaque. In many cases, the clear plastic will actually be easier to find than the white plastic.
Additionally, a touch screen is much easier to sell to a non-geek wife than a solution that will make it look like there is a computer in the kitchen, which any sort of external pointing device will definately do. It was quite clearly stated in the article that it must not look like there is a computer in the kitchen.
A thin client with a touch screen is what I would do. Elo TouchSystems makes some nice touchscreens, and they provide Linux drivers. You can get their 12" LCD touchscreen for under $900, and you can avoid all the potential hazards of being dependent on a mouse in such a messy environment.
You'll need VGA and serial connections to make it work. Any random sub-$100 motherboard/CPU combo should cover your needs there, just grab the cheapest you can find on pricewatch. You'll also need an ethernet card that has a boot PROM socket.
I would mount the motherboard on stand-offs in the back of a cabinet, or maybe behind some (short) drawers. Put a wire cage over it so you don't accidentally shove some tin cans into it or something (ouch!), and it will have more than adequate ventilation.
An industrial keyboard is a good idea as well, I would look for a mini keyboard as opposed to a full sized one, since it would be easier to hide in a drawer. If you're mostly just browsing, you probably won't need the keyboard that much.
Of course, you'll also need a Linux box to act as a server. If you don't have one you'd have to add the cost of a hard drive, but I don't expect that would break the bank.
Anyway, that's how I would do it. The only thing visible would be the LCD touchscreen, and most of them are easy enough on the eyes for even my wife! It's bound to be more aesthetically pleasing than some of your regular kitchen appliances, anyway.
A mechanics lein prevents (more or less) the leined property from being sold. If it was purely an internal project then this wouldn't be the way to go. If the project was intended to be marketed, though, the company would have to settle with him before they would be able to sell it.
I don't know if a lein allows one to take posession of the affected property at any point, but that would certainly up the ante!
Since you are apparently unable to read the actual question, I'll repost it here for you. As an added convenience, I've highlighted in bold text the parts I believe apply to your post:
Typically contractors are considered unsecured creditors, and if a company is having financial problems it is the unsecured creditors that usually lose out the most, or at least that's my understanding. Is it possible for a contractor that did software design and programming work to file a lien against a company for not paying for work performed? My searches have revealed references to mechanic's liens against land and property, but nothing directly with technology/computer related areas. Anyone have any links to sites or pages with this information? Or references to good (CA) lawyers in this field that can explain things (and has a reasonable initial consultation fee since obviously money is in short supply).
I hope that helps, and I sincerely hope that you are able to sort out the problem your browser is apparently having with displaying the actual text of slashdot articles.
The physical size limit at this point probably depend more on the BIOS.
However, the OP was asking about legacy systems. I deal with win95's fdisk and QNX 4.x on modern hardware everyday, and I am quite sure that neither of them can handle a physical drive larger than 8.4GB. BIOS support for larger drives is all well and good, but if the OS can't address the space, BIOS support means precisely dick.
This all just looks very pathetic to me. M$ are trying to build something that has been there for years, and works just great.
That's how MS has always done things. Why would they change now, when it's obviously worked out so well for them?
What was Microsoft's first product? AFAIK it was a BASIC compiler. They didn't invent the language, IIRC they didn't even write the compiler. Their only real innovation was charging money for it! Everyone else in the PC software community was giving their stuff away.
And what makes you think this guy won't get help fighting MS from, oh say, everybody that would have to pay the MS licensing fees?!
It's a pretty common, and very sad, misconception about the US judicial system that the one with the most money always wins. The guys with the money only fight the battles they can win. If they don't think they can win, they very quietly settle out of court for enough money to keep it quiet, and you never hear about it.
A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive.
IIRC, that's exactly what Mandrake did to get their bootable CD to work in at least one of their 7.x releases: it somehow would trick the BIOS into thinking the CD drive was the floppy drive. Wierd, but kind of a cool hack since it generally worked great. The only problem was that sometimes it wouldn't change things back when it was done...
As for storage limits, I know that pre-FAT32 DOS and Windows have a partition size limit of 2GB, and I believe a physical drive size limit of 8.4GB. QNX 4.x has a partition size limit of 8.4GB, and I strongly suspect that the physical drive size limit is also 8.4GB.
Which explains why I heard J.T. Snow screaming "FUCK!" very loudly after screwing something up last week? I'm often surprised at what gets on the air on baseball broadcasts.
That's pretty funny!
Anyway, any bleeping is done by a human, and they're bound to make mistakes, especially since they're just sitting in front of a switcher waiting for a good time to cue the commercials. I doubt a professional announcer would do something like that if he didn't think there was somebody manning the button, they can get in serious trouble for that.
DirecTV MPEG processing was the only other thing I could think of that might affect it.
Actually, the MPEG processing is probably happening at KTVU. That's pretty much the state of the industry at this point. DirecTV might further compress it in their facility (or recompress it, I guess), but that would add any significant delay.
The playback delay would be at both sites, though, and there are a lot of reasons for it. The 2 most practical reasons I've already listed, but when I'm testing the servers I usually delay playback up to 40s. Sometimes you can have some wierd issues if the playback starts too soon. I wouldn't expect that in a real world situation it would be nearly as critical, though, since I run them at or slightly above the maximum sustainable bandwidth of the RAID controllers for a minimum of 2 days.
All professional TV broadcasters have equipment that does MPEG processing in realtime (I'm one of the techs that fixes it when it breaks). Yeah, I guess maybe it could contribute a few ms of delay, but nothing you couldn't compensate for with the delay setting in a good reciever, and it is still probably less than the delay introduced by retransmitting, which still doesn't account for the 13-15s your talking about (6s + typical 7-8s delay on live radio).
It's much more likely that KTVU has a playback delay set on their video server, mainly for the same reason that radio has one: bleeping out profanity before it hits the air.
DirecTV certainly has a playback delay of at least 4s, which gives their automation system (which I also service) time to switch to an alternate stream if something goes wrong with the current one.
Anyway, my point is your placing blame on the wrong parts of the process. That doesn't help with your case, of course. But my suggestion is to do exactly what the broadcasters are doing (except a lot cheaper):
Run sound from your reciever to the line in on your soundcard. Record that with any sound recording program (the default Windows Sound Recorder will work just fine). Have a player up with the record target file ready to play, and start playback manually when you think the time is right.
I haven't tried this so it might not work if Windows locks the record file during recording, but essentially that's exactly how it's being done on the video servers the broadcasters are using. I'm sure there's a better way to do this in Linux, but I haven't got around to playing with any of the Linux media tools yet.
Hard to say. I personally suspect it displays the most negative, as I've had comments with, say, 3 "Interesting" and 1 "Flamebait" and it displays "Flamebait".
Well, I've been planning to mess with slashcode after this semester is over, I guess that's something to look for.
I know a court has ruled deCSS to be in violation of the DMCA, but that was because the judge was stupid, and the MPAA was smart enough to convince him that the utility is "primarily intended for circumvention of a protection mechanism". The keyword there is "primarily".
First of all, DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA, it has nothing to do with the judge being stupid or the MPAA being smart. The whole purpose of DeCSS is to circumvent CSS, which is a protection mechanism. That's not it's primary purpose, or even it's secondary purpose; that is it's only purpose. Since that is specifically what the DMCA was crafted to make illegal, I don't see how anyone who isn't completely ignorant can say that DeCSS doesn't violate the DMCA.
Furthermore, the judge was not stupid at all, he was corrupt, which is a different thing entirely. He was one of the authors of the DMCA, and as such the ethical thing for him to do would have been to pass the case on to another judge due to his obvious conflict of interest. However, he knows that law as well as anyone does, and he is certainly capable of spotting a blatant violation of it, which DeCSS is, on his own.
The only question in the case was whether the source code to DeCSS was criminal under the DMCA or protected speech under the First Amendment. This is where Kaplan's corruption took hold, and he declared that the functional use of the code took precedence over it's educational or informative value.
That's pretty much my policy. Unless they've done at least 2 things that have impressed me I vote against them.
It's not hard to impress me, either. All they have to do is actually represent the wishes of their constituents! (That last sentence was aimed directly at Diane Feinstein)
I think the guy I'm taking C from has it right. He doesn't waste any class time on environments, he only deals with C code, which he writes on the whiteboard. He's familiar with most environments, and if you want to ask him a question about yours after class he can usually answer it, even down to specific library quirks. He doesn't require that your code compile on any specific compiler, but he does require that you tell him what compiler you're using.
IMHO, a teacher who requires a specific compiler shouldn't be teaching that language, because they obviously don't know it.
Actually, teaching both in the same class would be the most beneficial, because people would more easily see - in a structured environment - how similar basic GUI systems and concepts are.
You've never taught an intro class, have you?
Showing multiple ways to do the same thing is the last thing you want to do, unless you really want to spend an entire class period explaining renaming files to the middle-aged-former-secretary-going-back-to-school who won't let you get a word in on any other topic until she has a single, inflexible, step-by-step procedure in her notes, including exact keystrokes (and no shorthand, either; she has to write something like "Press the mouse button on the right hand side of the mouse and click on Rename...", and the rest of the class is just going to have to wait until she's finished).
That isn't exclusive to intro classes, either. I've got 3 of those people in the VB.NET class I'm taking this semester, and it has Intro to Computing and Intro to Programming as prereqs, so you'd think they would have learned something by this point.
Would you honestly have us believe that learning in say, GCC would teach you more (or better) problem solving skills than MSVC++?
He might not, but I would. VC++ tries to do a lot of stuff for you, generally basic stuff that you really need to understand, and the only way you will is by doing it yourself. Yeah, this might make it a little easier on the professional, who already has a firm grasp of the language, but it's confusing as hell for the beginner.
When I took my first C++ class about 4 years ago (Intro to Programming) I started off using VC++ 6, and I honestly couldn't figure out how to start a basic project from within VC++. I ended up having to start all my projects in Notepad, renaming them to.cpp, and then opening them in VC++. Fortunately I discovered Borland (can't remember the version), which I found much easier to use.
So, based on my experience as a beginning CS student, I think VC++ is actually a hinderance to the learning process, as compared to other compilers.
Currently I use gcc, and I do actually find it much easier to learn on. The error messages are more meaningful (with a few exceptions), and it doesn't try to take such an active role in design time as the VC++ IDE does. It gets out of my way and lets me learn the language directly, and only the language, instead of having to try and second-guess the IDE.
All VC++ comments I've made are based on my experiences with VC++ 6.0. However, based on my experiences so far with VB.NET, I can't imagine they've improved the situation any.
VC++ certainly has it's place, it just isn't in the classroom. It's really set up for Software Engineering, which is not at all what is going on in a language class. Using it in that context is kind of like trying to draw a picture of a flower using AutoCAD.
Universities are supposed to teach theory. That's what sets them apart from trade schools. If a university class is teaching only applied design, then that class is a waste of university (and student) resources. If all you want to learn is applied design, then go to a trade school and get it done in 12-18 months and enjoy your job placement assistance, because a university is not the place for you.
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nice quality video doesn't fit on a 700MB cd-rw.
I agree, but it's totally irrelevant in this situation. This is a homebrew TiVo, and you just don't get nice quality video in a TV signal.
For movies, you're right, and you'd want to keep any recorded movies on the hard drive or burn them onto multiple disks (if you don't mind the break in the action, probably not a big deal if recorded from commercial TV). For TV shows though, which I'm pretty sure is what the article is talking about, once you edit out the commercials you're looking at on average 42 minutes for a "1 hour" show, which will certainly fit on a CD-RW at a quality higher than the source.
BTW, broadcast is actually the highest quality TV signal you'll find, provided you are close to the transmitter. Cable is the best quality most people will get at their homes, though it isn't very good, and Digital Satalite comes in last. The movie channels (HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc) seem to be especially bad. And yes, I am a trained professional.
If you go to webster [webster.com]
you'll easily find that plural from virus is viruses...
You will find nothing of the sort, since webster doesn't list a plural form of "virus". "Virii", which is correct according to the rules of the english language, is not listed at all, and "viruses" produces the page for "virus", not "viruses".
If you're going to play spelling nazi, you need to start checking your sources a little better.
This method doesn't require another device besides the pen.
.NET.
Wrong.
It requires special paper, MSIE, and
At $200 for the pen and $10 per notebook of the special paper, its far more expensive than a regular pen, regular paper, and a cheap USB scanner, which is its real competition.
As an added bonus the pen exports data in a proprietary format and is dependent on proprietary software, which makes the user dependent on continued vendor support (tried finding drivers for a serial mouse lately?). Oh yeah, and the cheap scanner has better resolution, and can be used on all your old documents as well.
My only disagreement is here:
Touch-screen is out.
You provide the solution here:
Touchpad devices do work if a thin layer of material is between the surface and the user's finger; you could use a piece of thin, tough white plastic (less than 1/16th inch) and seal it into one side of the keyboard tray. If it's waterproof, it can be wiped with a soapy rag like the rest of the kitchen.
You can do the exact same thing to a touchscreen, just use clear plastic instead of opaque. In many cases, the clear plastic will actually be easier to find than the white plastic.
Additionally, a touch screen is much easier to sell to a non-geek wife than a solution that will make it look like there is a computer in the kitchen, which any sort of external pointing device will definately do. It was quite clearly stated in the article that it must not look like there is a computer in the kitchen.
A thin client with a touch screen is what I would do. Elo TouchSystems makes some nice touchscreens, and they provide Linux drivers. You can get their 12" LCD touchscreen for under $900, and you can avoid all the potential hazards of being dependent on a mouse in such a messy environment.
You'll need VGA and serial connections to make it work. Any random sub-$100 motherboard/CPU combo should cover your needs there, just grab the cheapest you can find on pricewatch. You'll also need an ethernet card that has a boot PROM socket.
I would mount the motherboard on stand-offs in the back of a cabinet, or maybe behind some (short) drawers. Put a wire cage over it so you don't accidentally shove some tin cans into it or something (ouch!), and it will have more than adequate ventilation.
An industrial keyboard is a good idea as well, I would look for a mini keyboard as opposed to a full sized one, since it would be easier to hide in a drawer. If you're mostly just browsing, you probably won't need the keyboard that much.
Of course, you'll also need a Linux box to act as a server. If you don't have one you'd have to add the cost of a hard drive, but I don't expect that would break the bank.
Anyway, that's how I would do it. The only thing visible would be the LCD touchscreen, and most of them are easy enough on the eyes for even my wife! It's bound to be more aesthetically pleasing than some of your regular kitchen appliances, anyway.
A mechanics lein prevents (more or less) the leined property from being sold. If it was purely an internal project then this wouldn't be the way to go. If the project was intended to be marketed, though, the company would have to settle with him before they would be able to sell it.
I don't know if a lein allows one to take posession of the affected property at any point, but that would certainly up the ante!
Since you are apparently unable to read the actual question, I'll repost it here for you. As an added convenience, I've highlighted in bold text the parts I believe apply to your post:
Typically contractors are considered unsecured creditors, and if a company is having financial problems it is the unsecured creditors that usually lose out the most, or at least that's my understanding. Is it possible for a contractor that did software design and programming work to file a lien against a company for not paying for work performed? My searches have revealed references to mechanic's liens against land and property, but nothing directly with technology/computer related areas. Anyone have any links to sites or pages with this information? Or references to good (CA) lawyers in this field that can explain things (and has a reasonable initial consultation fee since obviously money is in short supply).
I hope that helps, and I sincerely hope that you are able to sort out the problem your browser is apparently having with displaying the actual text of slashdot articles.
Yes, I know.
The physical size limit at this point probably depend more on the BIOS.
However, the OP was asking about legacy systems. I deal with win95's fdisk and QNX 4.x on modern hardware everyday, and I am quite sure that neither of them can handle a physical drive larger than 8.4GB. BIOS support for larger drives is all well and good, but if the OS can't address the space, BIOS support means precisely dick.
This all just looks very pathetic to me. M$ are trying to build something that has been there for years, and works just great.
That's how MS has always done things. Why would they change now, when it's obviously worked out so well for them?
What was Microsoft's first product? AFAIK it was a BASIC compiler. They didn't invent the language, IIRC they didn't even write the compiler. Their only real innovation was charging money for it! Everyone else in the PC software community was giving their stuff away.
The GPL is for copyright. It has nothing to do with patents, which work completely differently.
And what makes you think this guy won't get help fighting MS from, oh say, everybody that would have to pay the MS licensing fees?!
It's a pretty common, and very sad, misconception about the US judicial system that the one with the most money always wins. The guys with the money only fight the battles they can win. If they don't think they can win, they very quietly settle out of court for enough money to keep it quiet, and you never hear about it.
A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive.
IIRC, that's exactly what Mandrake did to get their bootable CD to work in at least one of their 7.x releases: it somehow would trick the BIOS into thinking the CD drive was the floppy drive. Wierd, but kind of a cool hack since it generally worked great. The only problem was that sometimes it wouldn't change things back when it was done...
As for storage limits, I know that pre-FAT32 DOS and Windows have a partition size limit of 2GB, and I believe a physical drive size limit of 8.4GB. QNX 4.x has a partition size limit of 8.4GB, and I strongly suspect that the physical drive size limit is also 8.4GB.
That's 10 hours of video on a cell phone screen. Video takes up a whole lot less space at that low resolution.
Which explains why I heard J.T. Snow screaming "FUCK!" very loudly after screwing something up last week? I'm often surprised at what gets on the air on baseball broadcasts.
That's pretty funny!
Anyway, any bleeping is done by a human, and they're bound to make mistakes, especially since they're just sitting in front of a switcher waiting for a good time to cue the commercials. I doubt a professional announcer would do something like that if he didn't think there was somebody manning the button, they can get in serious trouble for that.
DirecTV MPEG processing was the only other thing I could think of that might affect it.
Actually, the MPEG processing is probably happening at KTVU. That's pretty much the state of the industry at this point. DirecTV might further compress it in their facility (or recompress it, I guess), but that would add any significant delay.
The playback delay would be at both sites, though, and there are a lot of reasons for it. The 2 most practical reasons I've already listed, but when I'm testing the servers I usually delay playback up to 40s. Sometimes you can have some wierd issues if the playback starts too soon. I wouldn't expect that in a real world situation it would be nearly as critical, though, since I run them at or slightly above the maximum sustainable bandwidth of the RAID controllers for a minimum of 2 days.
All professional TV broadcasters have equipment that does MPEG processing in realtime (I'm one of the techs that fixes it when it breaks). Yeah, I guess maybe it could contribute a few ms of delay, but nothing you couldn't compensate for with the delay setting in a good reciever, and it is still probably less than the delay introduced by retransmitting, which still doesn't account for the 13-15s your talking about (6s + typical 7-8s delay on live radio).
It's much more likely that KTVU has a playback delay set on their video server, mainly for the same reason that radio has one: bleeping out profanity before it hits the air.
DirecTV certainly has a playback delay of at least 4s, which gives their automation system (which I also service) time to switch to an alternate stream if something goes wrong with the current one.
Anyway, my point is your placing blame on the wrong parts of the process. That doesn't help with your case, of course. But my suggestion is to do exactly what the broadcasters are doing (except a lot cheaper):
Run sound from your reciever to the line in on your soundcard. Record that with any sound recording program (the default Windows Sound Recorder will work just fine). Have a player up with the record target file ready to play, and start playback manually when you think the time is right.
I haven't tried this so it might not work if Windows locks the record file during recording, but essentially that's exactly how it's being done on the video servers the broadcasters are using. I'm sure there's a better way to do this in Linux, but I haven't got around to playing with any of the Linux media tools yet.
Hard to say. I personally suspect it displays the most negative, as I've had comments with, say, 3 "Interesting" and 1 "Flamebait" and it displays "Flamebait".
Well, I've been planning to mess with slashcode after this semester is over, I guess that's something to look for.
Mirriam-Webster (the site I linked) offers the same spelling correction.
It's interesting that, of all the moderations applied to your comment, slashdot picks "Offtopic" as the one to display.
What does "depreciate" have to do with anything?
The arguement is whether "deprecate" is spelled "depricate" or "depracate", both of which are wrong.
I know a court has ruled deCSS to be in violation of the DMCA, but that was because the judge was stupid, and the MPAA was smart enough to convince him that the utility is "primarily intended for circumvention of a protection mechanism". The keyword there is "primarily".
First of all, DeCSS is illegal under the DMCA, it has nothing to do with the judge being stupid or the MPAA being smart. The whole purpose of DeCSS is to circumvent CSS, which is a protection mechanism. That's not it's primary purpose, or even it's secondary purpose; that is it's only purpose. Since that is specifically what the DMCA was crafted to make illegal, I don't see how anyone who isn't completely ignorant can say that DeCSS doesn't violate the DMCA.
Furthermore, the judge was not stupid at all, he was corrupt, which is a different thing entirely. He was one of the authors of the DMCA, and as such the ethical thing for him to do would have been to pass the case on to another judge due to his obvious conflict of interest. However, he knows that law as well as anyone does, and he is certainly capable of spotting a blatant violation of it, which DeCSS is, on his own.
The only question in the case was whether the source code to DeCSS was criminal under the DMCA or protected speech under the First Amendment. This is where Kaplan's corruption took hold, and he declared that the functional use of the code took precedence over it's educational or informative value.
That's pretty much my policy. Unless they've done at least 2 things that have impressed me I vote against them.
It's not hard to impress me, either. All they have to do is actually represent the wishes of their constituents! (That last sentence was aimed directly at Diane Feinstein)
Then the Java experts are fucking idiots, too.
So are you, apparently. Perhaps you should try learning to spell from a fucking dictionary rather than programmers, who are notoriously bad at it.
I think the guy I'm taking C from has it right. He doesn't waste any class time on environments, he only deals with C code, which he writes on the whiteboard. He's familiar with most environments, and if you want to ask him a question about yours after class he can usually answer it, even down to specific library quirks. He doesn't require that your code compile on any specific compiler, but he does require that you tell him what compiler you're using.
IMHO, a teacher who requires a specific compiler shouldn't be teaching that language, because they obviously don't know it.
Actually, teaching both in the same class would be the most beneficial, because people would more easily see - in a structured environment - how similar basic GUI systems and concepts are.
You've never taught an intro class, have you?
Showing multiple ways to do the same thing is the last thing you want to do, unless you really want to spend an entire class period explaining renaming files to the middle-aged-former-secretary-going-back-to-school who won't let you get a word in on any other topic until she has a single, inflexible, step-by-step procedure in her notes, including exact keystrokes (and no shorthand, either; she has to write something like "Press the mouse button on the right hand side of the mouse and click on Rename...", and the rest of the class is just going to have to wait until she's finished).
That isn't exclusive to intro classes, either. I've got 3 of those people in the VB.NET class I'm taking this semester, and it has Intro to Computing and Intro to Programming as prereqs, so you'd think they would have learned something by this point.
Would you honestly have us believe that learning in say, GCC would teach you more (or better) problem solving skills than MSVC++?
.cpp, and then opening them in VC++. Fortunately I discovered Borland (can't remember the version), which I found much easier to use.
He might not, but I would. VC++ tries to do a lot of stuff for you, generally basic stuff that you really need to understand, and the only way you will is by doing it yourself. Yeah, this might make it a little easier on the professional, who already has a firm grasp of the language, but it's confusing as hell for the beginner.
When I took my first C++ class about 4 years ago (Intro to Programming) I started off using VC++ 6, and I honestly couldn't figure out how to start a basic project from within VC++. I ended up having to start all my projects in Notepad, renaming them to
So, based on my experience as a beginning CS student, I think VC++ is actually a hinderance to the learning process, as compared to other compilers.
Currently I use gcc, and I do actually find it much easier to learn on. The error messages are more meaningful (with a few exceptions), and it doesn't try to take such an active role in design time as the VC++ IDE does. It gets out of my way and lets me learn the language directly, and only the language, instead of having to try and second-guess the IDE.
All VC++ comments I've made are based on my experiences with VC++ 6.0. However, based on my experiences so far with VB.NET, I can't imagine they've improved the situation any.
VC++ certainly has it's place, it just isn't in the classroom. It's really set up for Software Engineering, which is not at all what is going on in a language class. Using it in that context is kind of like trying to draw a picture of a flower using AutoCAD.
Universities are supposed to teach theory. That's what sets them apart from trade schools. If a university class is teaching only applied design, then that class is a waste of university (and student) resources. If all you want to learn is applied design, then go to a trade school and get it done in 12-18 months and enjoy your job placement assistance, because a university is not the place for you.