Here I am, loading Slashdot hoping to find something newsworthy on the front page. This is "News for nerds, Stuff that matters" after all, right? Instead what do we find? Taco posts an article that, by his own admission, is hardly worth mentioning whatsoever. Servers go down sometimes. Sometimes those servers are DNS servers. Wow. All this article amounts to is a blatant flame/troll on MS, and yet another scar on the integrity and professionality of this site as a whole.
We all know this isn't a Microsoft fan club, but the front page doesn't need to be littered with bigotry and flames. If Redhat had some problems, Taco would never have had posted an article saying "Redhat's FTP site is down -- Uh oh, since Redhat users have to patch their kernels on a weekly basis, they're all f*cked!" I would expect the same respect for any other competitor in the industry, even if you don't appreciate their methodology, or software, or paradigm, or logo, or...
I understand a lot of people may have been submitting this. Fine. Some people think that a server going down for a while is a big deal. MS's site wasn't hacked, Time-Warner didn't get bought out by Nabisco, and Linux Torbalds is still alive. Have there been frivoulous articles in the past? Sure. That's pretty much the entirety of the "Laugh, it's funny" section. But this is labeled as "real" news in some fashion, I guess, and under any kind of standard it fails to be good reporting. There's no link, there's no information, it's just Taco saying "Damnit stop sending me submissions on this MS DNS thing. MS sux0rs!" in different words. We can do better that this. Please.
The efficiency argument against OOP is quickly wearing thin given moderm processors. Realistically, function calls are NOT killing your performance; poorly written code and hitting the disk/swap file too much is going to slow you down more than anything else. The main thing people *should* gain from OOP is safety. In the book "Writing Solid Code" (no ISDN/author, look it up yourself) the author points out (from the perspective of a procedural coder using C) that the most important thing about software is removing bugs, which, if done properly, is easier and more reliable under OOP. Despite all the cycles you may save without OOP, every single performance gain you made will be lost in just one crash; speaking in terms of how well the software works for the user. I think any of us could stand waiting for our *nix/*BSD/Win* box for an extra 30 seconds or even 5 minutes on boot if we knew that it wouldn't crash once it was loaded, the same going for any other program used for creating content or doing something useful. The point here is that OOP's main point beyond data structuring is safety, which can be far more easily obtained if done properly.
Disclaimer: Badly done OOP projects are doomed to fail miserably, far worse than their procedural equivilents. TANSTAFL.
Sorry, but this is just a big load of carp. The command line is *not* intuitive for anyone unless they've been immersed in it for so long that they've forgotten what the sun looks like. If I had to tell someone how to build a guitar, I wouldn't give them just words, I would have tons of diagrams to more quickly convey how things should be set up. When I want to move things on my desk, I move them with my hands. I don't think of the equililent lingual syntax for how I want them arranged, I just do it. This is the same way decent GUI's can handle file management - if you want a file moved, drag it from point A to point B. I don't know what world you live in, but if you can describe a process quickly and efficiently with *only* words, it's not that complicated of a process.
There are times where a command line is more *efficient*, but this is not the same thing as natural. The lack of efficiency in most of the GUI's today isn't because a GUI is inherently bad, it's just not flexible enough. Ideally I should be able to hit a key, punch in a perl script, and have the OS run it right there, or at the exact same prompt be able to drag things around and have the OS know what I "mean".
If you've ever tried to fix someone's computer over the phone, or played pictionary, it's clear that only having text, or only having pictures, is not sufficient.
The same researchers who came up with this study went into other fields hoping to improve efficiency, and came up with these remarkable statistics:
- In the food service industry, waiters and waitresses are spending a distressingly small percentage of the time serving food. In fact, more time on average was spent simply taking the order. The median time to get a meal to a customer was just 10 seconds, showing that the food servers have mastered the art of taking food from a tray to a table, but are still lacking in doing this efficiently
- Engineers were found to spend a considerable amount of time "testing" their potential designs, hurting their cost-effectiveness when their products could have gone straight to the market without this in-between step.
- In a very disturbing trend, medical doctors seemed to only be treating their patients a remarkably small percentage of the time. However, new techniques may make the "diagnosis" stage a thing of the past. Future patients may be treated for a disorder before they knew they had one (including glitches like broken bones, decapitation, ebola, and autoerotic asphyxiation). The fact still remains that doctors have a 100% failure rate among patients when viewed in the long term
I did a report on mandatory censorware in libraries as part of a composition class, and what I found out made me extremely suspicious of all filtering software in general. A certain filtering program (I can't remember which, check http://www.peacefire.org for great info) was filtering the National Organization of Women's website. TIME magazine's website wrote an article about this, and the company updated it's blocked list to include TIME's website. The question of "who watches the watchers?" becomes extremely relevant when a community appoints a single entity to decide what is appropriate and what isn't, especially when that entity routinely censors its critics.
Oh, hogwash. Musicians have no right to prevent anyone from hearing their music. They are not graciously allowing other people to hear their music - in fact, any real artist would like every human being on the planet to hear their work.
I may not be an "artist" of the kind you refer to, but I think if a software program allowed people to download commercial software I wrote for free under the premise that "any good programmer would want to give away their work," I would have them in court faster than you can say "intellectual property"
Even under today's copyright law, artists have no legal power to decide how people use and obtain their work, other than preventing unauthorized copies and collecting performance royalties. I can play recordings of their songs for my friends, I can perform their work in public or private, I can buy and sell used recordings.
Is Napster NOT unauthorized copying? Did I miss something here? Who authorized it? You? Also, you can't perform their material in public without paying royalties. Cover bands who pay their liscensing fees can tell you about that.
I like Napster as much as the next guy. I downloaded 2 Disturbed mp3's after hearing them once on our (crappy) local radio station, then went out and bought the CD. But if they want to tell me I can't download songs that other people are actually paying money for, I'm not going to get down on them for not allowing their work (yes, work, they do spend time energy and money on making their product) to be copied.
Slashdot Mirror
Here I am, loading Slashdot hoping to find something newsworthy on the front page. This is "News for nerds, Stuff that matters" after all, right? Instead what do we find? Taco posts an article that, by his own admission, is hardly worth mentioning whatsoever. Servers go down sometimes. Sometimes those servers are DNS servers. Wow. All this article amounts to is a blatant flame/troll on MS, and yet another scar on the integrity and professionality of this site as a whole.
We all know this isn't a Microsoft fan club, but the front page doesn't need to be littered with bigotry and flames. If Redhat had some problems, Taco would never have had posted an article saying "Redhat's FTP site is down -- Uh oh, since Redhat users have to patch their kernels on a weekly basis, they're all f*cked!" I would expect the same respect for any other competitor in the industry, even if you don't appreciate their methodology, or software, or paradigm, or logo, or...
I understand a lot of people may have been submitting this. Fine. Some people think that a server going down for a while is a big deal. MS's site wasn't hacked, Time-Warner didn't get bought out by Nabisco, and Linux Torbalds is still alive. Have there been frivoulous articles in the past? Sure. That's pretty much the entirety of the "Laugh, it's funny" section. But this is labeled as "real" news in some fashion, I guess, and under any kind of standard it fails to be good reporting. There's no link, there's no information, it's just Taco saying "Damnit stop sending me submissions on this MS DNS thing. MS sux0rs!" in different words. We can do better that this. Please.
The efficiency argument against OOP is quickly wearing thin given moderm processors. Realistically, function calls are NOT killing your performance; poorly written code and hitting the disk/swap file too much is going to slow you down more than anything else. The main thing people *should* gain from OOP is safety. In the book "Writing Solid Code" (no ISDN/author, look it up yourself) the author points out (from the perspective of a procedural coder using C) that the most important thing about software is removing bugs, which, if done properly, is easier and more reliable under OOP. Despite all the cycles you may save without OOP, every single performance gain you made will be lost in just one crash; speaking in terms of how well the software works for the user. I think any of us could stand waiting for our *nix/*BSD/Win* box for an extra 30 seconds or even 5 minutes on boot if we knew that it wouldn't crash once it was loaded, the same going for any other program used for creating content or doing something useful. The point here is that OOP's main point beyond data structuring is safety, which can be far more easily obtained if done properly.
Disclaimer: Badly done OOP projects are doomed to fail miserably, far worse than their procedural equivilents. TANSTAFL.
Sorry, but this is just a big load of carp. The command line is *not* intuitive for anyone unless they've been immersed in it for so long that they've forgotten what the sun looks like. If I had to tell someone how to build a guitar, I wouldn't give them just words, I would have tons of diagrams to more quickly convey how things should be set up. When I want to move things on my desk, I move them with my hands. I don't think of the equililent lingual syntax for how I want them arranged, I just do it. This is the same way decent GUI's can handle file management - if you want a file moved, drag it from point A to point B. I don't know what world you live in, but if you can describe a process quickly and efficiently with *only* words, it's not that complicated of a process.
There are times where a command line is more *efficient*, but this is not the same thing as natural. The lack of efficiency in most of the GUI's today isn't because a GUI is inherently bad, it's just not flexible enough. Ideally I should be able to hit a key, punch in a perl script, and have the OS run it right there, or at the exact same prompt be able to drag things around and have the OS know what I "mean".
If you've ever tried to fix someone's computer over the phone, or played pictionary, it's clear that only having text, or only having pictures, is not sufficient.
The same researchers who came up with this study went into other fields hoping to improve efficiency, and came up with these remarkable statistics:
- In the food service industry, waiters and waitresses are spending a distressingly small percentage of the time serving food. In fact, more time on average was spent simply taking the order. The median time to get a meal to a customer was just 10 seconds, showing that the food servers have mastered the art of taking food from a tray to a table, but are still lacking in doing this efficiently
- Engineers were found to spend a considerable amount of time "testing" their potential designs, hurting their cost-effectiveness when their products could have gone straight to the market without this in-between step.
- In a very disturbing trend, medical doctors seemed to only be treating their patients a remarkably small percentage of the time. However, new techniques may make the "diagnosis" stage a thing of the past. Future patients may be treated for a disorder before they knew they had one (including glitches like broken bones, decapitation, ebola, and autoerotic asphyxiation). The fact still remains that doctors have a 100% failure rate among patients when viewed in the long term
I did a report on mandatory censorware in libraries as part of a composition class, and what I found out made me extremely suspicious of all filtering software in general. A certain filtering program (I can't remember which, check http://www.peacefire.org for great info) was filtering the National Organization of Women's website. TIME magazine's website wrote an article about this, and the company updated it's blocked list to include TIME's website. The question of "who watches the watchers?" becomes extremely relevant when a community appoints a single entity to decide what is appropriate and what isn't, especially when that entity routinely censors its critics.
If you trained a parrot to post news to /., would it have better spelling/grammar than CmdrTaco?
Oh, hogwash. Musicians have no right to prevent anyone from hearing their music. They are not graciously allowing other people to hear their music - in fact, any real artist would like every human being on the planet to hear their work.
I may not be an "artist" of the kind you refer to, but I think if a software program allowed people to download commercial software I wrote for free under the premise that "any good programmer would want to give away their work," I would have them in court faster than you can say "intellectual property"
Even under today's copyright law, artists have no legal power to decide how people use and obtain their work, other than preventing unauthorized copies and collecting performance royalties. I can play recordings of their songs for my friends, I can perform their work in public or private, I can buy and sell used recordings.
Is Napster NOT unauthorized copying? Did I miss something here? Who authorized it? You? Also, you can't perform their material in public without paying royalties. Cover bands who pay their liscensing fees can tell you about that.
I like Napster as much as the next guy. I downloaded 2 Disturbed mp3's after hearing them once on our (crappy) local radio station, then went out and bought the CD. But if they want to tell me I can't download songs that other people are actually paying money for, I'm not going to get down on them for not allowing their work (yes, work, they do spend time energy and money on making their product) to be copied.