More likely the fact that C++ tends to be taught by lecturers more familiar with C. I suspect better training for lecturers would result in better training for students:+)
Odd, one of the problems I've seen is that lecturers concentrate on the C++ aspects of C++ too much and give the C aspects short-shrift. The biggest problem I see in day to day coding maintaining stuff written by people who are poor C++ coders is overuse and misuse of the advanced parts of C++. If I had a nickle every time multiple inheritance was used unneccesarily...
The root of the problem is that most "human interface gurus" design for the novice user. The trouble is that no one is a novice user for very long.
My wife is not a computer person. She uses it for a few set tasks and nothing else. At those set tasks, she is more knowledgable that I am. She won't move to either Linux or the Mac for the simple reason that no interface is as easy as the one you know.
And from what I have seen, most interfaces are pretty much identical when it comes to newbies learning the ropes. I remember the old DOS days, and I remember watching people attempt to learn DOS. Before that, I tutored people on System V machines. In both cases, people seemed to have pretty much the same amount of trouble learning the system as they do with Windows. All this "GUIs helping novices" stuff is just so much crap. They should give it up and just try to make systems usable to people who know what they are doing. Newbies will learn what to do soon enough. The biggest problems people have with things like Windows is when the system tries to do things for you on the assumption that you are too dumb to figure it out. This simply serves to make the system inscrutible, which helps no one, neither the novice nor the expert. Better to make it dumb, and let people figure it out.
The reason that people think that Windows is easy and Linux is hard is not because one is easy and the other is hard. It is because people know Windows and nothing is as easy as the system you know. If you don't believe that, sit a Windows person down at a Mac.
...space and to go grab the paper you have to navigate to it and open it up etc...
The phrase "have to" is interesting choice of words here, and one of the reasons I think none of the 3d models I've seen are likely to fly. At its root, the purpose of a GUI is to make your life easier. None of the 3d models I've seen really do this. I'm not saying that they never will, but that there needs to be some significant shift in the way they are done. Were I a genius, I'd come up with one.
Working off hours: coding something that would help at my job.
Playing off hours: coding something that would be useful to me, at home.
One of the amazing things I've found is that somehow a lot more fun to code something you'll use at home than it is to code something for your job, even if the code itself is similar in style. I spend my days working on a client-server application using sockets. I go home drained, not wanting to think about it. So what caused me to lose track of the time yesterday evening? Why, a client-server application using sockets. Why does this not leave me drained, and instead make me lose track of the time? Because it is what I want to do, not what someone else wants me to do.
It has to do with the selfish part of human nature. I am willing to bet that if you went back in time, and hired Linus and company to create the perfect OS, you'd find that they put in far fewer hours and came up with something much less interesting. Such is the irony of the world. I suspect the only time you can combine the two is to start paying someone for something they would have done for free anyway.
The trouble has always been that GUI developers also get into the either/or thing. My problem with both Macs and Windows isn't so much the GUI but the lack of good command line options. (Though 4NT for Windows isn't too bad.) There are things that the GUI makes easier, but there are many things it makes much harder. Many times I've found myself in the "Click, drag, click yes" loop, wishing I could have just entered a simple command.
GUIs are basically good for doing simple, straightforward stuff. They can be a dream for that. But they are lousy at doing really complex stuff. Command lines are great for that. The key is to have both, and learn when to use each.
I don't like the thought of "standard window manager" because it implies less choice, however, rather than worrying about standardizing the big stuff like look and feel, I'd really like to see the simple stuff standardized. About ten years ago, there was a move towards standard keypresses and the like. It seems to have died. Nothing irritates more than having to remember that it is "Ctrl-F" to search in IE and "Alt-F" to search in Netscape. (And even worse, the "SHIFT-INS" command used to paste in IE seems to crash Netscape on Linux.) What I'd really like to see is standard keys for help, search, copy, paste, del, and pretty much anything else common.
That sort of thing would be far more useful than whether or not minimized icons go to the task bar, or the desktop, or the icon box. That sort of stuff is easy to move back and forth between.
Of course, much of this is more an application thing, rather than a GUI thing. One thing that makes both Windows and the Mac nice is having standard keypresses and standard menu locations. You never have to hunt to find the "Open File" menu option. This is the sort of thing to standardize because in truth, no one really cares about it as long as it is consistant.
The look, on the other hand, is the sort of thing people easily adapt to. I use WindowsNT at work, and Enlightenment at home, and I never have the slightest trouble moving between the GUIs. The reason is that the GUI itself is visual, providing all the clues my brain needs to adapt to things like start bars and task lists. No need to standardize there. It is the unconcious things like different keypresses that'll drive you bats.
Yeah, if grandma wants pen input in her hand-held, she should get cracking on that handwriting recognition kernel mod. Though perhaps we can help her out by giving her "C programming for Dummies" and a link to the LDP.
I probably used a bad example, because I don't think it is so much a matter of barbarism as it is of what a culture finds valuable. Some greek plays are lost us because one of the cultures between us and greek culture found the paper they were written on more valuable as kindling, or to be reused to make a hymnbook, etc, etc. It wasn't so much that those cultures lacked the ability to make use of those greek plays as it was that they simply didn't see them as things of value. There is no guarantee that some future society won't see the steel in those steel disks as more valuable than the symbols written on them in some future age. This is what I was trying to get at. The information will only really survive as long as people find it valuable.
As mundane as it may sound, plain ASCII text will probably never become obselete because there is no real reason to come up with a new standard.
Someone who speaks a language that doesn't use the basic roman character set may beg to differ. There are very real reasons to consider moving to something like Unicode.
It seems to me that trying to generalize a way to archive information just isn't worth the effort. Information that people consider worthwhile will get copied because people want it and will thereby be saved. Information that isn't worth much won't get copied and thus forgotten.
The common response to this is that we may not know what is worthwhile, or that future ages may not take appropriate care. Lost greek plays that would be worth millions now were overwritten by some monk's laundry list in a less enlightened age. We feel we must save our information from that fate. But that is an impossible task. Etch the information on steel disks and some future, more barbaric age may melt those disks down for swords.
So forget about trying to save everything. Just work to save what you think is important. Yes, stuff will get lost, but that will happen anyway. You will never get perfection. More likely is that future generations will curse you for the stuff you thought to trivial for your archive project, while finding the information archived worthless.
I read somewhere, I think slashdot actually, that the "lack of minorities on the web" is based on old statistics, and no longer true as of the last year or so. Today, in fact, Hispanics are actually overrepresented on the net.
And I think there is another possible reason for the lack of minorities in the Seattle protests that ought to be visited. "Progressives" tend to be a more affluent than average. We all know that income isn't evenly distributed ethnically.
A nice little self-referential bit from last weeks "X-Files". They were doing a "COPS" parody:
Cop: "What the (bleep) are you talking about"
(other dialog)
Scully and Mulder walk away, followed by the camera.
Scully: "Is that thing live?"
Mudler: "Nah...She said (bleep)."
The funniest one on "South Park" was when Kyle's brother is kidnapped by aliens. When Kyle confronts them, he starts out talking with one or to bleeps. As he continues, they increase in frequency until there is nothing but bleeping. Had this been actual unbleeped swearing, it wouldn't have been near as funny.
So basically what you are saying is that you don't really care about whether someone else loses their rights, as long as it doesn't effect you...
Sorry, but we all suffer when someone loses their rights. And we all need to know about it.
No such thing as too pessimistic here.
on
Victory in Holland
·
· Score: 3
Some Slashdot posters have commented that I've seemed pessimistic in my reports on the campaign. They've been right. I couldn't read the city's mood very well, not being a native, and based on the coverage and talks I'd seen, I didn't think the chances were very good.
Better to be too pessimistic, and put in too much work to defeat something like this than to be too optimistic and see it pass because you slacked off.
No, but it certainly gives you a good head's up. If you find that the sequence you've got by method A matches the sequence someone else got by method B, it certainly indicates that you should spend some effort looking for a link.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd, one of the problems I've seen is that lecturers concentrate on the C++ aspects of C++ too much and give the C aspects short-shrift. The biggest problem I see in day to day coding maintaining stuff written by people who are poor C++ coders is overuse and misuse of the advanced parts of C++. If I had a nickle every time multiple inheritance was used unneccesarily...
My wife is not a computer person. She uses it for a few set tasks and nothing else. At those set tasks, she is more knowledgable that I am. She won't move to either Linux or the Mac for the simple reason that no interface is as easy as the one you know.
And from what I have seen, most interfaces are pretty much identical when it comes to newbies learning the ropes. I remember the old DOS days, and I remember watching people attempt to learn DOS. Before that, I tutored people on System V machines. In both cases, people seemed to have pretty much the same amount of trouble learning the system as they do with Windows. All this "GUIs helping novices" stuff is just so much crap. They should give it up and just try to make systems usable to people who know what they are doing. Newbies will learn what to do soon enough. The biggest problems people have with things like Windows is when the system tries to do things for you on the assumption that you are too dumb to figure it out. This simply serves to make the system inscrutible, which helps no one, neither the novice nor the expert. Better to make it dumb, and let people figure it out.
The reason that people think that Windows is easy and Linux is hard is not because one is easy and the other is hard. It is because people know Windows and nothing is as easy as the system you know. If you don't believe that, sit a Windows person down at a Mac.
The phrase "have to" is interesting choice of words here, and one of the reasons I think none of the 3d models I've seen are likely to fly. At its root, the purpose of a GUI is to make your life easier. None of the 3d models I've seen really do this. I'm not saying that they never will, but that there needs to be some significant shift in the way they are done. Were I a genius, I'd come up with one.
Playing off hours: coding something that would be useful to me, at home.
One of the amazing things I've found is that somehow a lot more fun to code something you'll use at home than it is to code something for your job, even if the code itself is similar in style. I spend my days working on a client-server application using sockets. I go home drained, not wanting to think about it. So what caused me to lose track of the time yesterday evening? Why, a client-server application using sockets. Why does this not leave me drained, and instead make me lose track of the time? Because it is what I want to do, not what someone else wants me to do.
It has to do with the selfish part of human nature. I am willing to bet that if you went back in time, and hired Linus and company to create the perfect OS, you'd find that they put in far fewer hours and came up with something much less interesting. Such is the irony of the world. I suspect the only time you can combine the two is to start paying someone for something they would have done for free anyway.
GUIs are basically good for doing simple, straightforward stuff. They can be a dream for that. But they are lousy at doing really complex stuff. Command lines are great for that. The key is to have both, and learn when to use each.
I don't like the thought of "standard window manager" because it implies less choice, however, rather than worrying about standardizing the big stuff like look and feel, I'd really like to see the simple stuff standardized. About ten years ago, there was a move towards standard keypresses and the like. It seems to have died. Nothing irritates more than having to remember that it is "Ctrl-F" to search in IE and "Alt-F" to search in Netscape. (And even worse, the "SHIFT-INS" command used to paste in IE seems to crash Netscape on Linux.) What I'd really like to see is standard keys for help, search, copy, paste, del, and pretty much anything else common.
That sort of thing would be far more useful than whether or not minimized icons go to the task bar, or the desktop, or the icon box. That sort of stuff is easy to move back and forth between.
Of course, much of this is more an application thing, rather than a GUI thing. One thing that makes both Windows and the Mac nice is having standard keypresses and standard menu locations. You never have to hunt to find the "Open File" menu option. This is the sort of thing to standardize because in truth, no one really cares about it as long as it is consistant.
The look, on the other hand, is the sort of thing people easily adapt to. I use WindowsNT at work, and Enlightenment at home, and I never have the slightest trouble moving between the GUIs. The reason is that the GUI itself is visual, providing all the clues my brain needs to adapt to things like start bars and task lists. No need to standardize there. It is the unconcious things like different keypresses that'll drive you bats.
Yeah, if grandma wants pen input in her hand-held, she should get cracking on that handwriting recognition kernel mod. Though perhaps we can help her out by giving her "C programming for Dummies" and a link to the LDP.
I probably used a bad example, because I don't think it is so much a matter of barbarism as it is of what a culture finds valuable. Some greek plays are lost us because one of the cultures between us and greek culture found the paper they were written on more valuable as kindling, or to be reused to make a hymnbook, etc, etc. It wasn't so much that those cultures lacked the ability to make use of those greek plays as it was that they simply didn't see them as things of value. There is no guarantee that some future society won't see the steel in those steel disks as more valuable than the symbols written on them in some future age. This is what I was trying to get at. The information will only really survive as long as people find it valuable.
Someone who speaks a language that doesn't use the basic roman character set may beg to differ. There are very real reasons to consider moving to something like Unicode.
The common response to this is that we may not know what is worthwhile, or that future ages may not take appropriate care. Lost greek plays that would be worth millions now were overwritten by some monk's laundry list in a less enlightened age. We feel we must save our information from that fate. But that is an impossible task. Etch the information on steel disks and some future, more barbaric age may melt those disks down for swords.
So forget about trying to save everything. Just work to save what you think is important. Yes, stuff will get lost, but that will happen anyway. You will never get perfection. More likely is that future generations will curse you for the stuff you thought to trivial for your archive project, while finding the information archived worthless.
I read somewhere, I think slashdot actually, that the "lack of minorities on the web" is based on old statistics, and no longer true as of the last year or so. Today, in fact, Hispanics are actually overrepresented on the net.
And I think there is another possible reason for the lack of minorities in the Seattle protests that ought to be visited. "Progressives" tend to be a more affluent than average. We all know that income isn't evenly distributed ethnically.
A nice little self-referential bit from last weeks "X-Files". They were doing a "COPS" parody:
Cop: "What the (bleep) are you talking about"
(other dialog)
Scully and Mulder walk away, followed by the camera.
Scully: "Is that thing live?"
Mudler: "Nah...She said (bleep)."
The funniest one on "South Park" was when Kyle's brother is kidnapped by aliens. When Kyle confronts them, he starts out talking with one or to bleeps. As he continues, they increase in frequency until there is nothing but bleeping. Had this been actual unbleeped swearing, it wouldn't have been near as funny.
Sorry, but we all suffer when someone loses their rights. And we all need to know about it.
Better to be too pessimistic, and put in too much work to defeat something like this than to be too optimistic and see it pass because you slacked off.
So, congradulations!
No, but it certainly gives you a good head's up. If you find that the sequence you've got by method A matches the sequence someone else got by method B, it certainly indicates that you should spend some effort looking for a link.
There are a ton of different ways to listen to music on Linux. And as an added bonus, few, if any, track your listening habits for marketting info.
I'll stick with those.