... I am being sued by advertisers for tippexing my eyeballs in the space normally occupied by banner ads in slashdot.
not_cub
Re: "most of the /. crowd build their own boxes"
on
PC Prices to Rise?
·
· Score: 1
I built a computer last summer, when part prices were low apparently (I hadn't looked until this thread popped up). I already have a great 21" Sony monitor from my job, and a Dvorak keyboard. I use Linux, not Windows. If I neeeed to use Windows for something, I have a copy of 98 that came with my last computer (which is now unused. That's legal right?). So for me, on a student budget, the choice was £500 for a bottom of the range Dell computer, a windows coaster and a monitor I'll chuck in the bin, or £500 for the fastest Athlon, half a gig of RAM and a 40gig 7200rpm hard drive with quality components. Going the build route is going to be even more economical next time, because I will be able to use my case, psu and so on. But then, I don't think Dell are aiming at scavengers like me.
Designed to lift the Soviet moon lander into space, the N1 was a titanic feat of engineering
Titanic in more ways than one. Maybe this is a reflection on the bigger is better mentality. Or maybe a (un)lucky choice of words.
I think the best analogy I heard about Napster is this: Imagine if we had a duplicator. So lets say we could duplicate apples from one original apple. Farmer's would be out business. Would we stamp out such technology on the basis that we are pirating apples and destroying a farmer's ability to make an income?
Not that you don't make a fair and reasonable point, but in the EU, farmers often receive subsidies to leave their fields fallow to prevent a glut, to keep the prices high enough to support the other farmers. So in that sense, government is guaranteeing the success of a business proposition that no longer works. Shame, it appears government will support you to do something that only makes sense 50 years ago.
not_cub
My favourite Taco comment....
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I joined the IRC channel, and read up to this point, when I left in disgust: A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand.
The value of comments is questionable.
Considering the percentage of readers who care.
Amazing... Slashdot is composed of two things, the front page, with all the spelling errors and factual mistakes, and the comments pages, with all the user submitted corrections. Now, if you take away the comments pages, you are left with the front page alone, and to me, slashdot becomes almost worthless. With the current levels of fact checking, I could never believe anything posted.
The value of comments is questionable. If the value of comments is less than the cost of transmitting pages to people, then slashdot will ultimately fail, because it will throw money away with every page served. This is true whether the cost is paid by advertising or by paypal. However, the value of the frontpage alone, is a lot less than it is allied with the comments. The value of the frontpage is almost certainly less than the cost of transmitting it.
Taco comments clearly indicate that he does not see this value. That he sees comments.pl, not as an integral and important part of slashdot, but as a burden on bandwidth and processing power. Wake up, Taco: you are not the only person with valuable content contributions to make to slashdot.
As to hemos, he comes across as a guy seriously unable to do his job. If you've ever worked with one, you know what he mean. He does not seem to be contributing at all to helping slashdot stay afloat. He doesn't have any idea of what to do, or what direction to take. Taco seems to be carrying him.
Good luck keeping slashdot going guys, but I doubt you are the people to keep it afloat. It will probably die when the.com cash runs out, maybe before if VA kills it first.
If I could trade in 25 of my 50 karma for a hundred page views I think I would. Then I could keep posting witty and insightful comments, and/. would remain a great site.
Bzzzz. If you do this, you instantly give karma points a nominal value of 2 cents. This value, although tiny, instantly dominates the value of saying "this post is good, or this post is bad". I am going to use myself as an example, but obviously I am a very ethical person so I would not even think of this:) . In this system, if I get mod points, I will assign them to my friends old posts, and he do the same to mine, and a few weeks later, we have advert-free slashdot. Meanwhile the posts content of slashdot has gone downhill because we have not assigned our modpoints to posts that deserve them.
Slashdot's karma system is in very delicate balance. You cannot make wholesale changes to it without expecting to drive people away, and even very little changes may be dangerous.
See, I tend to think the opposite. Life on earth has spent millions of years adapting to our environment, adapting to be more and more efficient at doing bad stuff to us.
European settlers in America gave the natives all sorts of nasty diseases that they had no natural immunity too. Just as they had no natural immunity to our diseases, so we might not have to "space-diseases". In addition, earth virii tend to moderate their lethality. If a virus kills too quickly then it will not be passed on before it has done so. If it kills too many then it will wipe its hosts. Alien virii have not had a chance to tailor themselves to us. Ok, so these are remote possibilities, but you'd only need to be wrong once for it to be a big problem.
not_cub
MS advertising on /. consequences?
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 2
Lots of.NET stories in the news today and yesterday; it's a total coincidence that Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot.
I find this interesting in light of the easy ride advertisers and sister companies get:
Yesterday Taco described Sourceforge's licence change as "not a big deal."
I find it hard to tell if the editors do this of their own volition, or under team orders.
Nonetheless, if Microsoft are going to be doing adverts on slashdot, are slashdot going to hold off on Microsoft. And if they do, then what stories are they going to run? A good 10% of the stories and 50% of the regular users (90% of the trolls:) ) are rabidly anti-Microsoft right now. I doubt they'll be able to pull in new users faster than they'll alienate old in that case. I'd say they should reject the MS money because in the long run it can easily hurt them.
The Recording Industry Association of America, which spearheaded the fight against Napster, is reportedly looking at ways it can tackle these new methods of file-sharing
Does this include sending reports of security holes to high-profile news sites?
I think you underestimate the importance of a lack of adverts. The BBC show no adverts.
I think you underestimate the importance of choice. If you like your no-advert TV service so much, then you can pay market price for it. For me, I am quite happy to pay the same money to Sky or a cable company to receive recent episodes of The Simpsons and Enterprise. The current status quo requires me to pay for the BBC as well. I would quite happily forgo all BBC services in exchange for the money I spend on them, but I do not have that option. To see the absurdity, imagine the reversed situation: In order to receive the BBC channels legally, you had to pay Sky 8 pounds a month. I do not have a problem with the existence of the BBC, I have a problem with their legislated tax on TV owners.
To the AC who called them a uniquely successful company: I would hate to see what a company would have to do not to be a success with 10 million households sending then 100 quid a year (that's one billion pounds).
Great, a chance to make some Britain-centric comments on slashdot for once.
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world. Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that. 2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
And we get the Perfect Day advert from a few years back. The BBC spent a huge wad of cash recording various artists singing one sentence each of Perfect Day, and then paid to have this played in Cinemas. An advert for a non-commercial service that you have to buy anyway. AMAZING!
Realistically, the BBC's time has come. 50 years ago, it was reasonable to stimulate growth in TV (and fitted in nicely with the more socialist Britain). Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
I would really like this guy to be wired up to something that may or may not be emitting low-level electromagnetic signals he claims hurt him so much. Say a series of mice that may or may not have had every piece of conductor ripped out of them. If he can successfully guess 20 times (odds of 2^20:1 ~ a million to one), which shouldn't be so difficult if these things physically hurt him. Until then, I don't think I am alone in thinking this guy is a nut-bar.
Not to mention that if he tries to stifle my broadband internet access, I'll hook him up to some very high-voltage mice indeed.
not_cub
With rights come responsibility. PJ O'Rourke said something along the lines of "Everyone has the right to do whatever they want, and the responsibility to accept the consequences."
Increasingly we are seeing laws aimed at reducing our responsibility. I don't know about where you might be, but in this country, it is the law that you have to wear a seatbelt in a car. More dramatically, modern VW Golfs (Rabbits in the States) weigh the better part of a tonne more than early models, entirely due to the safety devices that now have to be incorporated by law. The government is trying to legislate against dying if you drive stupidly. Don't get me wrong, these safety devices are very noble, but legislating they inclusion will continue until we have to drive at 5mph in cotton wool cars.
Laws to punish insecurity in software are precisely the same. I will not guarantee that my software will not blow up. I will not guarantee that it will not eat your enterprise. If you want me to guarantee these things, then you will not be able to afford the cost of my software, that I need to charge to pay my insurance bill.
You can legislate against all the responsibility in the world, but in the end, you will just have abdicated all your rights instead.
This rambling was bought to you by not_cub
If you put premium commodity (PC) components in a diddy little case, you will generate just as much heat, but you will need to use smaller fans, running faster to dissipate the heat. These fans, will be both noiser and higher-pitched, where we are more sensitive to sound.
As an example, as I type, my girlfriend's laptop (K6-350 or so) is in the room, and I am typing on my mid-tower Athlon (which I have fitted low noise fans to). If you stand in the middle of the room, the screech of her computers fans is far more offensive than the low whirr of mine.
You may make your computer as small as you want, but if it makes a noise like a jet engine, it's still going to be an offensive object to work around.
Does any one really notice the difference in speed between even 1.7GHz and the 2.0Ghz? I know it will scrape time from a kernel re-compile, but what non-IT consumers care about this? On the contrary. I think most non-IT consumers will care about it. When I walk into a consumer electronics store to buy, say, a stereo, all the components have little tags on them with meaningless quantifications like "frequency response: 20-25000hZ", "power output: 240W". These numbers are all meaningless. They will not have been measured in a meaningful way (most likely the power output is measured across a resistor than the speakers themselves). There is no mention of whether it sounds good qualitatively. Everything in the shop probably sounds terrible, compared to an audiophile hi-fi.
Similarly, your average punter in the shop on a Saturday to buy a computer because he read so much about the internet, or because he thinks he should get one for his kids, is going to look at the first number past the first bullet point on the thing and buy the one with the biggest number. This is why Intels policy of cranking up the number as high as possible with the P4, and not worrying about actually making it go faster, is such a good marketing move.
But unlike the PS2 and XBOX, piracy isn't gonna happen on the NGC any time soon. Nintendo has *ALWAYS* tried to keep piracy to a minimum with their proprietary formats.
It's interesting to bear this in mind while thinking about the claim that piracy leads to higher prices. I don't keep track of console game prices too hard, but whenever I've bought them for my little brother who has a PS1, PS2, N64 and a PC it always seems that the console games are about the same price, while PC games are cheaper. I would be surprised if the PC games weren't the most heavily pirated given the widespread availibility of CD-burners.
Your problems are too small and specialized to realize any significant advantages of OOP.
Why the hell did this get modded up as funny? It *is* insightful, if a little terse.
I am currently in my final year of an undergraduate Maths course in Britain. We have to do a series of computer projects to solve mathematical problems, ranging from applied, engineering/physics type problems (for example fluid dynamics). Between school and university I worked as a programmer on a product for several financial companies.
For the projects for my course, the programs just use a computer as a big calculator, and the goal is to have it spit out a number at the end. If I have the time, and the answer isn't obviously wrong or right, I can write the program again from a slightly different perspective, and if it spits out nearly the same answer that is fine. Most of the work is purely getting the computer to plug the numbers into formulae. It is a waste of my time to use OOP for this. You might as well ask if OOP is a good solution for a scientific calculator.
For the project for the big companies, the most important thing was that they worked 24-7, that any of the values being calculated could be altered at any time, or the calculatons themselves and that each value calculated was recorded (if it miscalculates and someone is out by a million pounds, they will want to go back over it afterwards). To this end, it is a good idea to use objects because it is critical to know you are keeping track of all your data structures all the time. Compared to that, the calculations themselves are pretty insignificant (just like I bet the programmers for excel didn't spend as much time sweating about the SUM function, as they did about the object tree for the sheets, cells, etc).
not_cub
Multi-function devices not so good
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The biggest barrier remains the cost of the multifunction gadgets (quote - But until consumers -- and not just gearheads -- show a liking to these technologies,
No, no, no, no, no. Multi-function devices are not good. I had a nokia 9110 mobile phone that allowed access to the internet(proper internet, not just wap). It was too big to be carried, and too small to do any proper surfing. I had a 200 cd changer. It didn't play cds as well as a single cd player, and it changed them considerably worse than me (tended to get white goo all over them when it dropped them in the wrong place, and then scratch them to death). Shoes and lightbulbs are individually good devices, but the shoe lightbulb is unlikely to take off, because generally it is better to keep devices with seperate functions seperate.
Exposure here one/. aside, watch for just how much press this, as well as the recent XP hole, get's in the "mainstream" mailout periodical press.
Just two days ago, my mother asked me if I had seen about that big security problem in the latest version of windows. My mother has used a computer for a grand total of less than an hour in her life, and has no interest in them. She saw it in The Times. So, yes, this latest bug in windows really is getting through to the sort of people who don't have the time or the inclination to read slashdot.
not_cub
Re:Kazaa/Morpheus port throttling by universities
on
Kazaa to be shut down?
·
· Score: 1
Not ontopic, but I have a strange tale of university bandwidth throttling.
Strangely, my university (Cambridge, England) or possibly just my college seems to be limiting in-college transfers. It is possible to get transfer rates from sites like Microsoft of >400kb/sec, and I have seen Morpheus transfer at above 100kb/sec, but transfers to friends within the college are limited to 30kb/sec. This happens on any type of data transfer, whether it is http on port 80, ftp on port 23, icq file transfer on whatever, and quite a few others. This only happens on transfers across subnets though (ie I can transfer to people on the same subnet as me at up to 600k/sec, but am throttled to others), so I guess this is done at the gateways. This policy seems particularly crazy because the university is billed quite a high rate for daytime transatlantic file transfers, but the throttling makes people more likely to get that latest Enterprise episode from Morpheus (and most likely the States), than from their friend down the corridor. Are there any network administrators out there that can make sense of this policy?
A random reader writes "All the "convergence" devices I've seen so far are great, but they all miss a feature or two.
Taco adds: Excluding a color screen, what more could one want in a toy?
Fantastic. So this thing is great, except for the missing feature. Doh. Do the editors even read the submissions or their comments any more, or is slashdot nothing more than a glorified random number generator?
SCiFi is for smart people, not for the retard who watched "Jerry" or the pop culture people who watch "will and grace" or "Survivor"
This type of comment is just more masturbation in the style of "is code art?". Code is for monkeys. Sci-fi is for people who are impressed by make-up. Books are for clever people (they also contain less adverts.
Disclaimer: I write code, I watch Star Trek, I read very few books, and I know I am not Stephen Hawking.
Hopefully this will get modded down as redundant as hundreds of people read the link. (Or not). From the article:
DataSync Program Only Available in MS Windows Platform
Um, so this "linux pda" requires me to use windows on my real machine. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having linux on a pda in the first place (ie cater to us geeks on slashdot)? What is the company thinking to release a product with such a benefit-destroying feature. Reminds me of a dilbert strip where Dilbert is asked to add a standby light to a battery operated product.
Slashdot Mirror
not_cub
not_cub
... for every slashdotter if a part of this falls on the beer can I have placed outside in my garden. not_cub
That was the april fool right? Taco the troll?
Oh.
not_cub
Titanic in more ways than one. Maybe this is a reflection on the bigger is better mentality. Or maybe a (un)lucky choice of words.
not_cub
Not that you don't make a fair and reasonable point, but in the EU, farmers often receive subsidies to leave their fields fallow to prevent a glut, to keep the prices high enough to support the other farmers. So in that sense, government is guaranteeing the success of a business proposition that no longer works. Shame, it appears government will support you to do something that only makes sense 50 years ago.
not_cub
A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand.
The value of comments is questionable.
Considering the percentage of readers who care.
Amazing... Slashdot is composed of two things, the front page, with all the spelling errors and factual mistakes, and the comments pages, with all the user submitted corrections. Now, if you take away the comments pages, you are left with the front page alone, and to me, slashdot becomes almost worthless. With the current levels of fact checking, I could never believe anything posted.
The value of comments is questionable. If the value of comments is less than the cost of transmitting pages to people, then slashdot will ultimately fail, because it will throw money away with every page served. This is true whether the cost is paid by advertising or by paypal. However, the value of the frontpage alone, is a lot less than it is allied with the comments. The value of the frontpage is almost certainly less than the cost of transmitting it.
Taco comments clearly indicate that he does not see this value. That he sees comments.pl, not as an integral and important part of slashdot, but as a burden on bandwidth and processing power. Wake up, Taco: you are not the only person with valuable content contributions to make to slashdot.
As to hemos, he comes across as a guy seriously unable to do his job. If you've ever worked with one, you know what he mean. He does not seem to be contributing at all to helping slashdot stay afloat. He doesn't have any idea of what to do, or what direction to take. Taco seems to be carrying him.
Good luck keeping slashdot going guys, but I doubt you are the people to keep it afloat. It will probably die when the .com cash runs out, maybe before if VA kills it first.
not_cub
Bzzzz. If you do this, you instantly give karma points a nominal value of 2 cents. This value, although tiny, instantly dominates the value of saying "this post is good, or this post is bad". I am going to use myself as an example, but obviously I am a very ethical person so I would not even think of this
Slashdot's karma system is in very delicate balance. You cannot make wholesale changes to it without expecting to drive people away, and even very little changes may be dangerous.
not_cub
European settlers in America gave the natives all sorts of nasty diseases that they had no natural immunity too. Just as they had no natural immunity to our diseases, so we might not have to "space-diseases". In addition, earth virii tend to moderate their lethality. If a virus kills too quickly then it will not be passed on before it has done so. If it kills too many then it will wipe its hosts. Alien virii have not had a chance to tailor themselves to us. Ok, so these are remote possibilities, but you'd only need to be wrong once for it to be a big problem.
not_cub
I find this interesting in light of the easy ride advertisers and sister companies get:
Yesterday Taco described Sourceforge's licence change as "not a big deal."
I find it hard to tell if the editors do this of their own volition, or under team orders.
Nonetheless, if Microsoft are going to be doing adverts on slashdot, are slashdot going to hold off on Microsoft. And if they do, then what stories are they going to run? A good 10% of the stories and 50% of the regular users (90% of the trolls
not_cub
Does this include sending reports of security holes to high-profile news sites?
not_cub
I think you underestimate the importance of choice. If you like your no-advert TV service so much, then you can pay market price for it. For me, I am quite happy to pay the same money to Sky or a cable company to receive recent episodes of The Simpsons and Enterprise. The current status quo requires me to pay for the BBC as well. I would quite happily forgo all BBC services in exchange for the money I spend on them, but I do not have that option. To see the absurdity, imagine the reversed situation: In order to receive the BBC channels legally, you had to pay Sky 8 pounds a month. I do not have a problem with the existence of the BBC, I have a problem with their legislated tax on TV owners.
To the AC who called them a uniquely successful company: I would hate to see what a company would have to do not to be a success with 10 million households sending then 100 quid a year (that's one billion pounds).
not_cub
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world. Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that. 2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
And we get the Perfect Day advert from a few years back. The BBC spent a huge wad of cash recording various artists singing one sentence each of Perfect Day, and then paid to have this played in Cinemas. An advert for a non-commercial service that you have to buy anyway. AMAZING!
Realistically, the BBC's time has come. 50 years ago, it was reasonable to stimulate growth in TV (and fitted in nicely with the more socialist Britain). Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
Hmm, that came out longer than expected.
not_cub
I would really like this guy to be wired up to something that may or may not be emitting low-level electromagnetic signals he claims hurt him so much. Say a series of mice that may or may not have had every piece of conductor ripped out of them. If he can successfully guess 20 times (odds of 2^20:1 ~ a million to one), which shouldn't be so difficult if these things physically hurt him. Until then, I don't think I am alone in thinking this guy is a nut-bar.
Not to mention that if he tries to stifle my broadband internet access, I'll hook him up to some very high-voltage mice indeed.
not_cub
With rights come responsibility. PJ O'Rourke said something along the lines of "Everyone has the right to do whatever they want, and the responsibility to accept the consequences."
Increasingly we are seeing laws aimed at reducing our responsibility. I don't know about where you might be, but in this country, it is the law that you have to wear a seatbelt in a car. More dramatically, modern VW Golfs (Rabbits in the States) weigh the better part of a tonne more than early models, entirely due to the safety devices that now have to be incorporated by law. The government is trying to legislate against dying if you drive stupidly. Don't get me wrong, these safety devices are very noble, but legislating they inclusion will continue until we have to drive at 5mph in cotton wool cars.
Laws to punish insecurity in software are precisely the same. I will not guarantee that my software will not blow up. I will not guarantee that it will not eat your enterprise. If you want me to guarantee these things, then you will not be able to afford the cost of my software, that I need to charge to pay my insurance bill.
You can legislate against all the responsibility in the world, but in the end, you will just have abdicated all your rights instead.
This rambling was bought to you by not_cub
If you put premium commodity (PC) components in a diddy little case, you will generate just as much heat, but you will need to use smaller fans, running faster to dissipate the heat. These fans, will be both noiser and higher-pitched, where we are more sensitive to sound.
As an example, as I type, my girlfriend's laptop (K6-350 or so) is in the room, and I am typing on my mid-tower Athlon (which I have fitted low noise fans to). If you stand in the middle of the room, the screech of her computers fans is far more offensive than the low whirr of mine.
You may make your computer as small as you want, but if it makes a noise like a jet engine, it's still going to be an offensive object to work around.
not_cub
Does any one really notice the difference in speed between even 1.7GHz and the 2.0Ghz? I know it will scrape time from a kernel re-compile, but what non-IT consumers care about this?
On the contrary. I think most non-IT consumers will care about it. When I walk into a consumer electronics store to buy, say, a stereo, all the components have little tags on them with meaningless quantifications like "frequency response: 20-25000hZ", "power output: 240W". These numbers are all meaningless. They will not have been measured in a meaningful way (most likely the power output is measured across a resistor than the speakers themselves). There is no mention of whether it sounds good qualitatively. Everything in the shop probably sounds terrible, compared to an audiophile hi-fi.
Similarly, your average punter in the shop on a Saturday to buy a computer because he read so much about the internet, or because he thinks he should get one for his kids, is going to look at the first number past the first bullet point on the thing and buy the one with the biggest number. This is why Intels policy of cranking up the number as high as possible with the P4, and not worrying about actually making it go faster, is such a good marketing move.
not_cub
But unlike the PS2 and XBOX, piracy isn't gonna happen on the NGC any time soon. Nintendo has *ALWAYS* tried to keep piracy to a minimum with their proprietary formats.
It's interesting to bear this in mind while thinking about the claim that piracy leads to higher prices. I don't keep track of console game prices too hard, but whenever I've bought them for my little brother who has a PS1, PS2, N64 and a PC it always seems that the console games are about the same price, while PC games are cheaper. I would be surprised if the PC games weren't the most heavily pirated given the widespread availibility of CD-burners.
not_cub
Your problems are too small and specialized to realize any significant advantages of OOP.
Why the hell did this get modded up as funny? It *is* insightful, if a little terse.
I am currently in my final year of an undergraduate Maths course in Britain. We have to do a series of computer projects to solve mathematical problems, ranging from applied, engineering/physics type problems (for example fluid dynamics). Between school and university I worked as a programmer on a product for several financial companies.
For the projects for my course, the programs just use a computer as a big calculator, and the goal is to have it spit out a number at the end. If I have the time, and the answer isn't obviously wrong or right, I can write the program again from a slightly different perspective, and if it spits out nearly the same answer that is fine. Most of the work is purely getting the computer to plug the numbers into formulae. It is a waste of my time to use OOP for this. You might as well ask if OOP is a good solution for a scientific calculator.
For the project for the big companies, the most important thing was that they worked 24-7, that any of the values being calculated could be altered at any time, or the calculatons themselves and that each value calculated was recorded (if it miscalculates and someone is out by a million pounds, they will want to go back over it afterwards). To this end, it is a good idea to use objects because it is critical to know you are keeping track of all your data structures all the time. Compared to that, the calculations themselves are pretty insignificant (just like I bet the programmers for excel didn't spend as much time sweating about the SUM function, as they did about the object tree for the sheets, cells, etc).
not_cub
The biggest barrier remains the cost of the multifunction gadgets (quote - But until consumers -- and not just gearheads -- show a liking to these technologies,
No, no, no, no, no. Multi-function devices are not good. I had a nokia 9110 mobile phone that allowed access to the internet(proper internet, not just wap). It was too big to be carried, and too small to do any proper surfing. I had a 200 cd changer. It didn't play cds as well as a single cd player, and it changed them considerably worse than me (tended to get white goo all over them when it dropped them in the wrong place, and then scratch them to death). Shoes and lightbulbs are individually good devices, but the shoe lightbulb is unlikely to take off, because generally it is better to keep devices with seperate functions seperate.
not_cub
Exposure here one /. aside, watch for just how much press this, as well as the recent XP hole, get's in the "mainstream" mailout periodical press.
Just two days ago, my mother asked me if I had seen about that big security problem in the latest version of windows. My mother has used a computer for a grand total of less than an hour in her life, and has no interest in them. She saw it in The Times. So, yes, this latest bug in windows really is getting through to the sort of people who don't have the time or the inclination to read slashdot.
not_cub
Not ontopic, but I have a strange tale of university bandwidth throttling.
Strangely, my university (Cambridge, England) or possibly just my college seems to be limiting in-college transfers. It is possible to get transfer rates from sites like Microsoft of >400kb/sec, and I have seen Morpheus transfer at above 100kb/sec, but transfers to friends within the college are limited to 30kb/sec. This happens on any type of data transfer, whether it is http on port 80, ftp on port 23, icq file transfer on whatever, and quite a few others. This only happens on transfers across subnets though (ie I can transfer to people on the same subnet as me at up to 600k/sec, but am throttled to others), so I guess this is done at the gateways. This policy seems particularly crazy because the university is billed quite a high rate for daytime transatlantic file transfers, but the throttling makes people more likely to get that latest Enterprise episode from Morpheus (and most likely the States), than from their friend down the corridor. Are there any network administrators out there that can make sense of this policy?
not_cub
A random reader writes "All the "convergence" devices I've seen so far are great, but they all miss a feature or two.
Taco adds: Excluding a color screen, what more could one want in a toy?
Fantastic. So this thing is great, except for the missing feature. Doh. Do the editors even read the submissions or their comments any more, or is slashdot nothing more than a glorified random number generator?
not_cub
This type of comment is just more masturbation in the style of "is code art?". Code is for monkeys. Sci-fi is for people who are impressed by make-up. Books are for clever people (they also contain less adverts.
Disclaimer: I write code, I watch Star Trek, I read very few books, and I know I am not Stephen Hawking.
not_cub
DataSync Program Only Available in MS Windows Platform
Um, so this "linux pda" requires me to use windows on my real machine. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having linux on a pda in the first place (ie cater to us geeks on slashdot)? What is the company thinking to release a product with such a benefit-destroying feature. Reminds me of a dilbert strip where Dilbert is asked to add a standby light to a battery operated product.
not_cub