Your sig bugs me.
Bad commentry *is* worse than nothing. Even better than good comments, is code which needs less commentry.
Perfection would be attained when no comments are necessary at all, but this, like most forms of perfection is unattainable.
http://www.fltk.org has fewer features, doesn't support mac (just unix/win32), has fewer widgets, and yet is still better than QT. I like QT, it's my second favorite toolkit, but fltk (once you get used to it) is more productive than QT. Given a complex UI with about 30 separate user screens, multiple tabbed dialogs, etc etc, you get a working application considerably faster with QT.
You get this with less code, and it runs faster, and you don't have to run through some weird code
conversion program.
It's faster, more elegant, free (LGPL), has better OpenGL support, but isn't well known, and is less feature rich.
Grab cygnus toolset for win32 before you lose your mind. Hamilton c-shell is good too. Forget dos prompt, it's no replacement for a shell.
The gui monkeys have misunderstood something:
Hey language is inefficient... lets go back to scratching pictures in the dirt or hieroglyphics on the wall in order to communicate.
The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yeah, true, they are, until you learn to read that is.
Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read.
unbelievable... how can such a bigoted, uninformed, logically preposterous, virtually fascist, article reach 5 ?
Did you read the articles at all or did you just respond assuming that these "leftist" "terrorists" were opposing sensible law and order ?
1. the police cannot get to this information at the moment
2. if they could, why even bother with the legislation
3. the point of the EU is not that everyone comes under same legislation. It was originally created to increase economic prosperity, but like all organisations quickly took on an agenda of increasing it's size, scope and power until it runs into the barriers caused by other entities pushing back against it.
Purile propoganda tricks like associating one organisation with another to discredit it "same leftist agenda" or invoking bogeymen like kiddie porn to justify any intrusion only impress morons.
Nice to hear some authentic experience. I'm very happy about XP methodology, it's the directon I've been moving in for years, but you meet huge resistence when you can't call it anything except common sense and experience.
After 12 years OO development, and dozens of large successful projects I felt I knew something. In particular I knew that huge hierarchies of interacting ill thought out classes were a far greater pain in the ass than a bunch of flat C code. Then, suddenly you couldn't write OO code without it being designed by a bunch a wankers, with their copies of RR, their GOF Design Patterns book, drawing UML shite everywhere, but knowing fuck all about programming. People would show off their "OO design" skills by proposing 40 classes within 60 minutes of being introduced to the problem. "Ooh, we'll need a Factory here and an Actor there, and..."
> The trouble with games today is that most of the simple, fun ideas were used up years ago
Isn't that the "there's nothing left to invent" argument.
Sounds like bullshit to me. The early games had a more abstract quality - they were not restrained by trying to mimic reality, so this made them more inventive. Best example of this is tetris, but asteroids, space invaders, pacman, defender, qix, tempest are all radically different, excellent in their own way, and almost entirely divorced from reality.
Simplicity isn't the issue - it's effort and imagination. How much inventive power did it take to pack a game like defender into 22345 bytes ? Now games companies spend money on artists, musicians, production managers, etc. At some stage modern games will start to use the power at their disposal to explore different realities again, and maybe interest will return.
Once 3d mounted headsets are common place, we can start playing with 4D universes. In same way that you can project 3d onto 2d screen you can do a reasonable job of projecting 4d onto 3d, but it makes your brain ache initially.
Or someone will produce a game where physics obeys the rules of the quantum level instead of Newtonian, a D&D game in this mold could be fun (with spin 1/2 objects etc). Possibilities are endless, but basic premise is total immersion in an alternate universe. QuakeIII is not an alternate universe, just an alternate situation.
I know what you mean, but I didn't see this as a weakness, more as thought provoking. In fact, it's very much in tune with the way most people live. The characters are mostly amoral, concerned with nothing beyond their own benefit, utterly incapable of considering things from another's perspective - just like real people. It's just that their thought processes are sometimes revealed which makes these flaws more obvious.
Any former CS student from a decent school will probably have done some NP complete proofs. You remember these: you create an algorithm of order O(N^x) to transform from known NP complete problem (A) to NP open (B), proving that if A can be solved in polynomial time then B can to.
If QC is achieved these transformation algorithms will have practical importance. Yet another thing I learnt in school that seemed useless at the time but maybe isn't:-)
> In contrast, libertarian places such as California are attracting all the talent.
You had me up to there, I hate cameras too, but you don't really know what you're talking about. What the hell is libertarian about Ca ? I lived in Ca for 5 years, the weather was great and people were friendly (but vacant, especially in SoCal) but:
You can get arrested for walking down the street drinking a can of beer.
You can get arrested for crossing the street.
You can get arrested for going to the beach at night.
I came close to getting done on all three of these.
One more thing - there are police *EVERYWHERE*. It is enormously striking to a brit how overpoliced Ca is. I don't like cameras but I prefer them to a bunch of neanderthal ex-high school bullies with guns cruising around looking for somewhere to throw their weight around. The police in UK are wonderful in comparison.
Another striking thing is how racially segregated life is. Black people are mostly confined to ghettos or fast food counters, you hardly ever meet any socially. It's hard to quantify, but CA *feels* more racist to me, it seems like race is just less of an issue here.
The proportion of the population kept in jail at any time is a huge in CA. There is no more meaningful judge of freedom than to check how many people are locked up. England is bad by European standards, but CA is in a different league.
In short: England may suck, but lose the complacancy.
You make some good points, except there are java VMs for cell phones, and Amiga is the name of a computer as well as a company.
The main thing wrong with the (3) sentances is that their "astute" readers are wrong on several levels, first - just because something is meant to be platform independent doesn't mean it is, secondly there is no such thing as a platform independent language. It's the instruction set and the operating system that matter - Java is platform independent by virtue of the fact that it runs on a mini OS (which it calls a VM) that has been ported to run on other OSs. The other side is the instruction set, and it's quite possible that the VM hasn't been optimized for P4 yet, ie the VM optimized for PII architecture runs very slowly on P4, which is probably what the Intel exec meant - that would be interesting news.
www.fltk.org is not much use for games, but bloody handy for regular applications. It has good OpenGL integration, and it's LGPL too. So, if you want to write a CAD system portable across w2k/unix, it's the way to go. 2nd best is Qt, which works on windows too, but the windows version costs a bit, (an irrelevent amount for commercial developers) I find fltk faster (both in terms of performance and development time though.)
Yes, not only are students taught Java, but they hear a lot of Sun sponsored propoganda about how it's so much better than C++. This stuff is about as valid as MS's analysis of competing operating systems. You can't really argue against the assertion that C++ has lost a lot of mindshare to java over the last few years. Recently I've noticed that the backlash against this has become more pronounced, particuarly by those who have tried it in large projects and become disenchanted with it. These developers then become Java's mroe adamant critics.
Although I definitely prefer to code in C++ myself, I agree with decision to teach Java as a first language rather than C++, which has too many complications to make sense as a teaching language. If you're trying to get to grips with the basics of programming, you've got enough to worry about already.
However, if you *really* want to get to grips with the basics of programming, I really think its best to learn some simple assembly code. Nothing else can give you an adequate understanding of what goes on after the compiler has done it's job, even if you never use assembly commerically.
IMO Intellectual Property is a socialist invention. It is a restriction on free trade invented to protect the rights of the workers (artists, authors, etc...). In this sense, it serves a similar role to unions, restricting rights to perform certain actions (like copying stuff) to a select group, in order to protect their ability to earn a living from unfettered competition - which in information age reduces natural price of everything to zero.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that - but the problem is that capitalism works as an efficient mechanism for the distribution of scare resources. When the resource is information, the only way capitalist model still works is by enforcing artifical scarcity of information.
The record companies can judge for themselves how much napster has hurt their sales if the majority of former napster users immediately boycot all CD purchases from major record labels.
I believe napster users spent far more on CDs than average. Personally I have vowed to not buy any CDs for at least 3 months. I urge other people who are irritated by the RIAAs handling of this affair to do likewise. If they think they will see a surge in sales as a result of declaring war on their best customers, we need to reeducate them.
people talk about buying their blank cd's from HK. Why bother..., just rent space somewhere without stupid taxes and keep your data there. As long as you have sufficient bandwidth.
Of course, this is no good for many legitamate uses of computer storeage. It would work fine for storing all your bootlegged mp3's though. Make it much easier to share too.
> Technology can only be accepted as long as it does not interfere (now) with the status quo.
Hah ! Come on, you don't really mean that do you ? Technology always interferes with the status quo, that's the whole point.
When my grandmother was a little girl, she went to school in a horse and cart. Cars had been invented but nobody in her town had ever seen one. Since then the growth curve has steepened dramitically, hell it's almost vertical. The changes I see in my lifetime will be more extreme than those she saw. Things change, people have short memories, limited imagination and they deliberately insulate themselves against those changes, but change occurs regardless. The changes one can reasonably expect in 50 years are profound enough to make me scream in terror.
Slashdot Mirror
that'll just about get you a working "hello world" program. It'll be very configurable though.
Your sig bugs me.
Bad commentry *is* worse than nothing. Even better than good comments, is code which needs less commentry.
Perfection would be attained when no comments are necessary at all, but this, like most forms of perfection is unattainable.
http://www.fltk.org has fewer features, doesn't support mac (just unix/win32), has fewer widgets, and yet is still better than QT. I like QT, it's my second favorite toolkit, but fltk (once you get used to it) is more productive than QT. Given a complex UI with about 30 separate user screens, multiple tabbed dialogs, etc etc, you get a working application considerably faster with QT.
You get this with less code, and it runs faster, and you don't have to run through some weird code
conversion program.
It's faster, more elegant, free (LGPL), has better OpenGL support, but isn't well known, and is less feature rich.
there's no comparison. J Random 14 yr old is way smarter than mega-corp
Grab cygnus toolset for win32 before you lose your mind. Hamilton c-shell is good too. Forget dos prompt, it's no replacement for a shell.
The gui monkeys have misunderstood something:
Hey language is inefficient... lets go back to scratching pictures in the dirt or hieroglyphics on the wall in order to communicate.
The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yeah, true, they are, until you learn to read that is.
Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read.
unbelievable... how can such a bigoted, uninformed, logically preposterous, virtually fascist, article reach 5 ?
Did you read the articles at all or did you just respond assuming that these "leftist" "terrorists" were opposing sensible law and order ?
1. the police cannot get to this information at the moment
2. if they could, why even bother with the legislation
3. the point of the EU is not that everyone comes under same legislation. It was originally created to increase economic prosperity, but like all organisations quickly took on an agenda of increasing it's size, scope and power until it runs into the barriers caused by other entities pushing back against it.
Purile propoganda tricks like associating one organisation with another to discredit it "same leftist agenda" or invoking bogeymen like kiddie porn to justify any intrusion only impress morons.
Nice to hear some authentic experience. I'm very happy about XP methodology, it's the directon I've been moving in for years, but you meet huge resistence when you can't call it anything except common sense and experience.
After 12 years OO development, and dozens of large successful projects I felt I knew something. In particular I knew that huge hierarchies of interacting ill thought out classes were a far greater pain in the ass than a bunch of flat C code. Then, suddenly you couldn't write OO code without it being designed by a bunch a wankers, with their copies of RR, their GOF Design Patterns book, drawing UML shite everywhere, but knowing fuck all about programming. People would show off their "OO design" skills by proposing 40 classes within 60 minutes of being introduced to the problem. "Ooh, we'll need a Factory here and an Actor there, and..."
if you're the webmaster, a URL would be nice
The soviets were also smart enough to kick the pants off the US during the first decade of space missions.
> The trouble with games today is that most of the simple, fun ideas were used up years ago
Isn't that the "there's nothing left to invent" argument.
Sounds like bullshit to me. The early games had a more abstract quality - they were not restrained by trying to mimic reality, so this made them more inventive. Best example of this is tetris, but asteroids, space invaders, pacman, defender, qix, tempest are all radically different, excellent in their own way, and almost entirely divorced from reality.
Simplicity isn't the issue - it's effort and imagination. How much inventive power did it take to pack a game like defender into 22345 bytes ? Now games companies spend money on artists, musicians, production managers, etc. At some stage modern games will start to use the power at their disposal to explore different realities again, and maybe interest will return.
Once 3d mounted headsets are common place, we can start playing with 4D universes. In same way that you can project 3d onto 2d screen you can do a reasonable job of projecting 4d onto 3d, but it makes your brain ache initially.
Or someone will produce a game where physics obeys the rules of the quantum level instead of Newtonian, a D&D game in this mold could be fun (with spin 1/2 objects etc). Possibilities are endless, but basic premise is total immersion in an alternate universe. QuakeIII is not an alternate universe, just an alternate situation.
empty post not permitted
I know what you mean, but I didn't see this as a weakness, more as thought provoking. In fact, it's very much in tune with the way most people live. The characters are mostly amoral, concerned with nothing beyond their own benefit, utterly incapable of considering things from another's perspective - just like real people. It's just that their thought processes are sometimes revealed which makes these flaws more obvious.
;-)
Live and don't learn, that's my motto
Any former CS student from a decent school will probably have done some NP complete proofs. You remember these: you create an algorithm of order O(N^x) to transform from known NP complete problem (A) to NP open (B), proving that if A can be solved in polynomial time then B can to.
:-)
If QC is achieved these transformation algorithms will have practical importance. Yet another thing I learnt in school that seemed useless at the time but maybe isn't
It seems like an independent register to keep track of which companies are being assholes about this kind of thing would be useful.
Then just avoid working for those companies.
Perhaps a disgruntled former employee of somewhere particuarly nasty could set it up. Once the word got out, it would be a popular site.
> In contrast, libertarian places such as California are attracting all the talent.
You had me up to there, I hate cameras too, but you don't really know what you're talking about. What the hell is libertarian about Ca ? I lived in Ca for 5 years, the weather was great and people were friendly (but vacant, especially in SoCal) but:
You can get arrested for walking down the street drinking a can of beer.
You can get arrested for crossing the street.
You can get arrested for going to the beach at night.
I came close to getting done on all three of these.
One more thing - there are police *EVERYWHERE*. It is enormously striking to a brit how overpoliced Ca is. I don't like cameras but I prefer them to a bunch of neanderthal ex-high school bullies with guns cruising around looking for somewhere to throw their weight around. The police in UK are wonderful in comparison.
Another striking thing is how racially segregated life is. Black people are mostly confined to ghettos or fast food counters, you hardly ever meet any socially. It's hard to quantify, but CA *feels* more racist to me, it seems like race is just less of an issue here.
The proportion of the population kept in jail at any time is a huge in CA. There is no more meaningful judge of freedom than to check how many people are locked up. England is bad by European standards, but CA is in a different league.
In short: England may suck, but lose the complacancy.
You make some good points, except there are java VMs for cell phones, and Amiga is the name of a computer as well as a company.
The main thing wrong with the (3) sentances is that their "astute" readers are wrong on several levels, first - just because something is meant to be platform independent doesn't mean it is, secondly there is no such thing as a platform independent language. It's the instruction set and the operating system that matter - Java is platform independent by virtue of the fact that it runs on a mini OS (which it calls a VM) that has been ported to run on other OSs. The other side is the instruction set, and it's quite possible that the VM hasn't been optimized for P4 yet, ie the VM optimized for PII architecture runs very slowly on P4, which is probably what the Intel exec meant - that would be interesting news.
is there really such a thing as international law ?
on whose authority is international law written ?
San Jose sucks... a lot
Move: Santa cruz, Scot's valley, San Francisco, and several other places within driving distance don't suck.
Telecommute a couple of times a week to cut down on time wasted in the car.
If your company won't allow telecommuting, find one with a clue.
YMMV
www.fltk.org is not much use for games, but bloody handy for regular applications. It has good OpenGL integration, and it's LGPL too. So, if you want to write a CAD system portable across w2k/unix, it's the way to go. 2nd best is Qt, which works on windows too, but the windows version costs a bit, (an irrelevent amount for commercial developers) I find fltk faster (both in terms of performance and development time though.)
Yes, not only are students taught Java, but they hear a lot of Sun sponsored propoganda about how it's so much better than C++. This stuff is about as valid as MS's analysis of competing operating systems. You can't really argue against the assertion that C++ has lost a lot of mindshare to java over the last few years. Recently I've noticed that the backlash against this has become more pronounced, particuarly by those who have tried it in large projects and become disenchanted with it. These developers then become Java's mroe adamant critics.
Although I definitely prefer to code in C++ myself, I agree with decision to teach Java as a first language rather than C++, which has too many complications to make sense as a teaching language. If you're trying to get to grips with the basics of programming, you've got enough to worry about already.
However, if you *really* want to get to grips with the basics of programming, I really think its best to learn some simple assembly code. Nothing else can give you an adequate understanding of what goes on after the compiler has done it's job, even if you never use assembly commerically.
IMO Intellectual Property is a socialist invention. It is a restriction on free trade invented to protect the rights of the workers (artists, authors, etc...). In this sense, it serves a similar role to unions, restricting rights to perform certain actions (like copying stuff) to a select group, in order to protect their ability to earn a living from unfettered competition - which in information age reduces natural price of everything to zero.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that - but the problem is that capitalism works as an efficient mechanism for the distribution of scare resources. When the resource is information, the only way capitalist model still works is by enforcing artifical scarcity of information.
The record companies can judge for themselves how much napster has hurt their sales if the majority of former napster users immediately boycot all CD purchases from major record labels. I believe napster users spent far more on CDs than average. Personally I have vowed to not buy any CDs for at least 3 months. I urge other people who are irritated by the RIAAs handling of this affair to do likewise. If they think they will see a surge in sales as a result of declaring war on their best customers, we need to reeducate them.
"Give a man a fish he eats for a day, Teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime,"
I prefer this version: "build a man a fire, and he's warm for an hour, set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life"
people talk about buying their blank cd's from HK. Why bother..., just rent space somewhere without stupid taxes and keep your data there. As long as you have sufficient bandwidth.
Of course, this is no good for many legitamate uses of computer storeage. It would work fine for storing all your bootlegged mp3's though. Make it much easier to share too.
> Technology can only be accepted as long as it does not interfere (now) with the status quo.
Hah ! Come on, you don't really mean that do you ? Technology always interferes with the status quo, that's the whole point.
When my grandmother was a little girl, she went to school in a horse and cart. Cars had been invented but nobody in her town had ever seen one. Since then the growth curve has steepened dramitically, hell it's almost vertical. The changes I see in my lifetime will be more extreme than those she saw. Things change, people have short memories, limited imagination and they deliberately insulate themselves against those changes, but change occurs regardless. The changes one can reasonably expect in 50 years are profound enough to make me scream in terror.