Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
I think the idea is that one shouldn't HAVE to learn `how the computer thinks'. One should be able to program in the `problem domain' rather than the `solution domain', and object-orientated languages such as C++ are a step towards being able to do that.
I think that generally speaking that's not true. Applications programs, perhaps, but certainly not systems software. Anything that deals directly with hardware or is otherwise speed-performance limited needs to be done with more than a passing nod to computer architecture.
Knowing how the hardware works is key to speed in most instances. OOP methodologies make life easier for the programmer, certainly. I would be the first to agree. But that ease comes at a price. Anything that adds overhead to the finished product-- the executable that hardware understands -- slows that product down. Jeff
Shoot, you beat me to the Englebart thing. I tell you, Doug Englebart is probably one of the most visionary people in computing history. He pretty much developed the way we use computers today all by himself-- thirty-five years ago!
No evidence has surfaced that suggests any connection to espionage, despite Rush Limbaugh's rants to the contrary.
Wen Ho Lee is not even Chinese-- he's from Taiwan (is that spelled right?). Do you think that people from that island have any positive affect for the mainland Chinese? I certianly don't think so. If anything, he was probably working harder than anyone to make sure that China couldn't get to our stuff!
Does this mean that we're going to see nationalization of the net, where we'll go through border checkpoints when leaving the country? Or DNS entries for outside our country won't work?
Kimberly-Clark has a similar situation with several of their products. Who asks for a soft-paper tissue to blow your nose into? Rather, most ask for a Kleenex, which is a trademark of Kimberly-Clark.
The problem is not trademarking a common word, as some have postulated. Instead, it's the word coming into common use after getting trademarked.
Elevator and escalator I think fall into this category as well. Wasn't "elevator" once an Otis trademark?
This present case is one here I think Mattel has a legitimate complaint in that their trademarked product and the video game share the same target audience, and Mattel already market video games for girls with a Barbie motif.
I think that this is not reported accurately. This whole thing reminds me of the little thought experiments that we used to go through concerning spinning beacons or closing gigantic scissors.
As the beacon turns, the beam can have a linear velocity (wr, w=angular velocity, r=radius of measurement) perpindicular to itself in the plane of rotation greater than c. Does this transmit information? No.
With a large enough pair of scissors, closing them will cause that point where the blades cross to move away from the pivot at a speed faster than c. Note that nothing physically moves faster than c, but only the point of contact between the blades.
Furthermore, superluminal displays have been available for years. I have an English "How-it- works" encyclopedia at home that has a picture of a blue glow generated by particles exiting a nulcear reactor core submerged in water. These particles exiting the core are travelling faster than c in water (dielectric constant of water is 76.7 -- Pozar "Microwave Engineering") That means that the speed of light through water is c*sqrt(76.7) = 34.3e6 m/sec!
Every time I talk to a vendor of microwave substrate materials, they tell me about their high-Er products. They tell me how great they are for shrinking microwave circuits, where the size of circuit features are all scaled to be fractions of wavelengths. *I* always ask for lower and lower dielectric constant materials, as they don't know how much trouble they're causing me from a manufacturing standpoint. Sometimes I joke and ask for sub-unity dielectric constants. That way I could make a millimeter-wave board with geometries that aren't microscopic!:)
This law is based on a false premise, but one that has received more and more credance as the years go on. That premise, in a nutshell, says:
People are idiots. Government must save them from themsevles
Where I work, we are slaves to M$. I use Outlook as my mail reader. You should see my rules list. I only see SPAM once from any domain. Sorry about any of you that happen to have legit accounts at AOL (smirk), MCI, Excite, Hotbot, or any other of a galaxy of domains, or countries for that matter (no mail from.nl,.br,.jp). I'll never see your mail.
Did I need help setting these rules up? Nope. Is it perfect? Nope. But every time I get SPAM, it gets better.
Upset that you can't mail me from your account in these domains? Just talk to your system administrator. Every so often I clean out the rules list, and maybe you can try then.
Really, I get more upset with frilly things in mail more than SPAM. I know people that like to include background graphics and use HTML in their mail. Yech. I just wish I could whap people that don't mail in just plain ASCII.
Incidentally, it may have been a 'pissing contest,' but it meant the difference between slavery and liberty, as the citizens of Georgia or Eastern Europe could attest.
I grew up in post-reconstruction Georgia, and I never saw any slaves in Atlanta:) Just remember what brought down the Soviet Union: Regean's Strategic Defense Initiative. The Soviet's quixotic scramble to keep up cost them so much economically that their country imploded!
Your average home users, like my parents, would gain no benefit and most likely would have a harder time
Actually, I just got my mom hooked up with a Mac. I had been trying to get her to look at one for a while now; she's been wanting a computer at home to do email and look at the Ty Beanie Baby home page, but didn't want the hassles that her sisters have been having with DLL conflicts, running out of IRQs, scanners that won't work with printers (both on the parallel port, of course), etc.
While I am not a Microsoft apologist in any way, I can only see bad things coming from this. Other than people like us that have favorite systems that don't come from Redmond and the government, there is no outcry against them.
Furthermore, my largest concern stems not from their market dominance (hey, we live in the land of VHS, don't we?), but rather in their preditory and downright fraudulent business practices, eg the way Stac, Inc. was treated.
All commands should have keyboard shortcuts. Those shortcuts should be the same for all applications.
I think that these shortcuts should be tied to the OS, and not individual applications. When I hold down CTRL-and press P (or Splat-P for Macs), the OS should trap this, and the application gets a message that is identical to what it would get if the user went File|Print from a menu.
I consider myself a "power user," in several respects. First, the work I do requires a large machine-- EM analysis. 1GB of RAM is a normal requirement for a run. (That sounds so wierd, '1GB of RAM.' I couldn't have imagined that when I got my first computer-- a Sinclair ZX-81!)
Secondly, I've written my own programs that I've released to the public. Mostly Amiga stuff, a long time ago. I enjoyed the Amiga API, it was so simple to open a window and draw stuff into it. I didn't even use MUI or anything else that wasn't part of the regular shipped OS. Asl.library was about it.
My wife got me a book on Win32 programming a while back. Ugh. How ugly.
My grandparents have a computer that was given to them by my aunt. Neither of them make much use of it for different reasons: Grandpa can't see well enough to read the monitor (macular degeneration), and grandma isn't strong enough to use a mouse (muscular atrophy).
Any new OS needs alternate UI systems. Keyboards and CRTs are fine, but howbout voice I/O for others? Maybe a bitmapped braille display? These should be available, and transparent to both user and software.
Finally, the API needs to be simple. Not sparse, but simple. DLLs in the microsoft sense should be avoided, but shared libraries, in the Amiga sense, are fine.
I've been very disallusioned with computers of late!
A 6-year-old really has no business with a computer in school.
I couldn't agree more. Computers would be (are?) a distraction in the classroom invironment. I'm struggling through a computer hardware class with some high school kids. [We're going to use a 68306 to make a multichannel timer for their school's swim team.] These guys are bright, but they have zero attention span. I can't imagine what kids that grew up with connectivity in the classroom would be like...
They'd have nothing of anything that wasn't Doom, Tomb Raider, or whatever the game-o-the- day might be.
Classrooms should be engaging, not entertaining. There's a difference. Classrooms should draw out the talents that the children have, not cover them up with an artificial dependence on technology.
I'm afraid that we're going to grow a generation of kids that don't know how to build computers-- or anything for that matter. They won't understand FETs, because the don't have the math background. They won't understand their adolescent feelings because they've not read the great literature-- the foolish young love of Romeo and Juliet (actually, I'm a big Shakespeare fan; my wife just doesn't understand why I giggle so much when I read the Tempest or Midsummer Nights' Dream). The wickedness and cruelty of mankind through Dickens. The dark humor and prophetic irony of Huxley. They won't understand the evil of communism because they've never studied history. They won't understand why eastern Europe and the middle east are such powder kegs-- didn't Rodney King ask us why we can't just get along? (Wait, Rodney King is Ancient History by now...)
Technology is for the betterment of mankind, but more often that not it ends up just making people less inventive and just plain dumber.
If you're going to use computers in elementary school they should be used to teach kids how computers work, how to plug in peripherals, how to use a word processor or spreadsheet.
What use does a grammar school student have for a spreadsheet? For a word processor? Zip. Grammar school kids are learning how to WRITE using pens and pencils. They're learning to READ (hopefully). Their math skills don't go past fraction reduction. Yes, some might be more precocious and do more, but those have parents to provide the extras to keep their children engaged and learning. It's the parent's job, ultimately, to educate-- not the state's.
If I as a parent want my second grader to be able to assemble an x86 box from a pile of parts, fine. My kid's going to be smart enough to do it. Others are going to need more work on their more important skills- literacy. Arithmetic. Things that computers only distract from.
Kids don't learn math from typing answers on a computer. They learn math by study and practice.
I couldn't have said this better myself!
High school kids need to have a required class on using office software (preferably touching on several packages, and not just MSOffice), and a required class on basic programming.
I disagree. Typing perhaps, since typewriters are hard to come by anymore. In any case, I don't know of any office application that can't be picked up to a usable level of proficency in more than fifteen minutes.
Computers remain a fairly esoteric area of expertise. This is going to cause a big wage gap unless kids get out of high school with a good technical foundation.
Wage gap? The point of education is not to get a beter job. Education makes you a better person. Anyone can work. Only the educated are enlightened (outside of supernatural revelation). History is just as important, as an example, as computer skills in becoming a good citizen.
Nanotechnology is an extremely wide category for one paper, isn't it?
Do you mean MEMS (Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems), or the stuff of science fiction where small machines get injected into our bodies to do things? Do you mean the advances in electronics?
At work we're looking into MEMS to build "low-cost" RF and microwave components-- phase shifters, specifically.
You're posting to/., so you know about the advance in electronics.
Both of these have little social consequences.
As far as the ethical and social ramifications of other nanotechnology uses, what worries do you have? fortunately, we're shielded from many of them by scale-- there's a limit at which mechanical devices can't be made any smaller due to molecular effects. Things that are smooth at our sensory scale are unimagineably rough on microscopic scales. We have to deal with surface roughness in microwave electronics, as it can significantly change design parameters from what the classical (read: simple) analysis says they should be.
Don't want to sound too negative, but I don't see it as exciting as many people.
...that if you put something up on the web, you've made it publicly available for people to link to.
There is clearly a limit to this. Just because my financial institutions make it possible or me to conduct business via the web does NOT make it ok to deep link to my bank account information.
I would imagine that these types of pages are not static HTML, but are instead built on demand by a CGI script or something. I seriously doubt that my bank (which does have a web presence), has a page for each of its members (it's really a credit union).
Neither is it ok to deep link to sites that provide content on a fee paid basis. People providing content that are paid through advertisements rightly view some types of deep linking as a danger to their economic life.
Most of these sites have access controls that don't allow this. I imagine that people running these kinds of places have thought of that "loophole," and have taken measures to make sure it's not open.
Yes, but do you think that a Columbine-style mass murder would be possible with a kitchen knife?
Why do people always focus -- fixate -- on these extremely rare behaviors? There's not a thing in the world that would have stopped those kids, or Tim McVeigh, for that matter. There will always be a means for acting out violence.
People are evil. Plain and simple. They (we) are corrupt to the very core. To disagree is to only show blindness to the problem. At our heart we are rebels and renegades. No man-made law is going to change this. That is the original message of, "you can't legislate morality." No law is going to fix the broken condition of man's heart.
A gun is no more evil than a rock. A knife is no more murderous than a bag of fertilizer. It is the man that wields these objects that makes them dangerous. In this whole world, only man has the ability to form intent.
A man that I respect quite a lot says that this evil is proof that man is of God's image-- only such an image could be so diametrically opposite.
Until people have a change in their internal condition -- a change of heart -- nothing will change. Cain needed no gun to kill Abel, did he? David needed no "assault rifle" to dispatch Uriah the Hittite, did he? Nothing you can hold in your hand is more dangerous or evil than the heart that is the very core of your being.
I really don't understand what this will prove to anyone. Do these sysadmins think that by taking away IRC, these guys won't be able to plan their next strike?
Hey, let's show the commies in Cuba and China how much we don't like thier policies-- by copying them here in the USA!
Like most (all?) protests, this is all fluff and no substance. By taking some action, no matter how silly, these guys make themselves feel better about the situation. A better course of action would be to work out a solution to prevent DDoS attacks from succeeding.
We think ALAR on apples is dangerous for kids, so we're going to protest its use by spraying it on all other fruit crops too!
On a related topic, I was reading an article about some scientists that had successfully slowed down light. They drop a certain chemical compound to near absolute zero and pass photons through it. They say they can fire off some photons, go for a cup of coffee, come back, and the photons are still moving through the apparatus.
I slow down light every day-- Well, EM signals, anyway. Passing EM signals through dielectric materials slow them down, as compared to passing them through a vacuum. Specifically, it slows them down by the square root of the relative dielectric constant. For example, EM passing through alumina (Er=10) only travels 94.87x10^6 m/sec, as opposed to a vacuum, where c = 3.0x10^8 m/sec. I've seen other dielectrics, BST for instance, with Er's on the order of 100-500. Higher Er's are certainly possible. BST also has the interesting property that its Er changes with applied static bias voltage-- it's a natural phase shifter.
It's my understanding that the events you call the '74 and '82 recessions are infact the same event that began with the 1973 oil embargo and ended with the turnaround under Reagan. Carter certianly didn't help the economy, did he?
Bush's problem: he wasn't economically conservative enough; he buckled under.
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I think that generally speaking that's not true. Applications programs, perhaps, but certainly not systems software. Anything that deals directly with hardware or is otherwise speed-performance limited needs to be done with more than a passing nod to computer architecture.
Knowing how the hardware works is key to speed in most instances. OOP methodologies make life easier for the programmer, certainly. I would be the first to agree. But that ease comes at a price. Anything that adds overhead to the finished product-- the executable that hardware understands -- slows that product down. Jeff
Shoot, you beat me to the Englebart thing. I tell you, Doug Englebart is probably one of the most visionary people in computing history. He pretty much developed the way we use computers today all by himself-- thirty-five years ago!
Does this mean that we're going to see nationalization of the net, where we'll go through border checkpoints when leaving the country? Or DNS entries for outside our country won't work?
OK, I'm a doofus. I should have left out the last paragraph. This guy's page is not for kids, it was for his wife... It's early MOnday morning, OK?
The problem is not trademarking a common word, as some have postulated. Instead, it's the word coming into common use after getting trademarked.
Elevator and escalator I think fall into this category as well. Wasn't "elevator" once an Otis trademark?
This present case is one here I think Mattel has a legitimate complaint in that their trademarked product and the video game share the same target audience, and Mattel already market video games for girls with a Barbie motif.
As the beacon turns, the beam can have a linear velocity (wr, w=angular velocity, r=radius of measurement) perpindicular to itself in the plane of rotation greater than c. Does this transmit information? No.
With a large enough pair of scissors, closing them will cause that point where the blades cross to move away from the pivot at a speed faster than c. Note that nothing physically moves faster than c, but only the point of contact between the blades.
Furthermore, superluminal displays have been available for years. I have an English "How-it- works" encyclopedia at home that has a picture of a blue glow generated by particles exiting a nulcear reactor core submerged in water. These particles exiting the core are travelling faster than c in water (dielectric constant of water is 76.7 -- Pozar "Microwave Engineering") That means that the speed of light through water is c*sqrt(76.7) = 34.3e6 m/sec!
Every time I talk to a vendor of microwave substrate materials, they tell me about their high-Er products. They tell me how great they are for shrinking microwave circuits, where the size of circuit features are all scaled to be fractions of wavelengths. *I* always ask for lower and lower dielectric constant materials, as they don't know how much trouble they're causing me from a manufacturing standpoint. Sometimes I joke and ask for sub-unity dielectric constants. That way I could make a millimeter-wave board with geometries that aren't microscopic! :)
Where I work, we are slaves to M$. I use Outlook as my mail reader. You should see my rules list. I only see SPAM once from any domain. Sorry about any of you that happen to have legit accounts at AOL (smirk), MCI, Excite, Hotbot, or any other of a galaxy of domains, or countries for that matter (no mail from .nl, .br, .jp). I'll never see your mail.
Did I need help setting these rules up? Nope. Is it perfect? Nope. But every time I get SPAM, it gets better.
Upset that you can't mail me from your account in these domains? Just talk to your system administrator. Every so often I clean out the rules list, and maybe you can try then.
Really, I get more upset with frilly things in mail more than SPAM. I know people that like to include background graphics and use HTML in their mail. Yech. I just wish I could whap people that don't mail in just plain ASCII.
While I am not a Microsoft apologist in any way, I can only see bad things coming from this. Other than people like us that have favorite systems that don't come from Redmond and the government, there is no outcry against them.
Furthermore, my largest concern stems not from their market dominance (hey, we live in the land of VHS, don't we?), but rather in their preditory and downright fraudulent business practices, eg the way Stac, Inc. was treated.
All commands should have keyboard shortcuts. Those shortcuts should be the same for all applications.
I think that these shortcuts should be tied to the OS, and not individual applications. When I hold down CTRL-and press P (or Splat-P for Macs), the OS should trap this, and the application gets a message that is identical to what it would get if the user went File|Print from a menu.
Make it transparent to the application.
Secondly, I've written my own programs that I've released to the public. Mostly Amiga stuff, a long time ago. I enjoyed the Amiga API, it was so simple to open a window and draw stuff into it. I didn't even use MUI or anything else that wasn't part of the regular shipped OS. Asl.library was about it.
My wife got me a book on Win32 programming a while back. Ugh. How ugly.
My grandparents have a computer that was given to them by my aunt. Neither of them make much use of it for different reasons: Grandpa can't see well enough to read the monitor (macular degeneration), and grandma isn't strong enough to use a mouse (muscular atrophy).
Any new OS needs alternate UI systems. Keyboards and CRTs are fine, but howbout voice I/O for others? Maybe a bitmapped braille display? These should be available, and transparent to both user and software.
Finally, the API needs to be simple. Not sparse, but simple. DLLs in the microsoft sense should be avoided, but shared libraries, in the Amiga sense, are fine.
I've been very disallusioned with computers of late!
I couldn't agree more. Computers would be (are?) a distraction in the classroom invironment. I'm struggling through a computer hardware class with some high school kids. [We're going to use a 68306 to make a multichannel timer for their school's swim team.] These guys are bright, but they have zero attention span. I can't imagine what kids that grew up with connectivity in the classroom would be like...
They'd have nothing of anything that wasn't Doom, Tomb Raider, or whatever the game-o-the- day might be.
Classrooms should be engaging, not entertaining. There's a difference. Classrooms should draw out the talents that the children have, not cover them up with an artificial dependence on technology.
I'm afraid that we're going to grow a generation of kids that don't know how to build computers-- or anything for that matter. They won't understand FETs, because the don't have the math background. They won't understand their adolescent feelings because they've not read the great literature-- the foolish young love of Romeo and Juliet (actually, I'm a big Shakespeare fan; my wife just doesn't understand why I giggle so much when I read the Tempest or Midsummer Nights' Dream). The wickedness and cruelty of mankind through Dickens. The dark humor and prophetic irony of Huxley. They won't understand the evil of communism because they've never studied history. They won't understand why eastern Europe and the middle east are such powder kegs-- didn't Rodney King ask us why we can't just get along? (Wait, Rodney King is Ancient History by now...)
Technology is for the betterment of mankind, but more often that not it ends up just making people less inventive and just plain dumber.
If you're going to use computers in elementary school they should be used to teach kids how computers work, how to plug in peripherals, how to use a word processor or spreadsheet.
What use does a grammar school student have for a spreadsheet? For a word processor? Zip. Grammar school kids are learning how to WRITE using pens and pencils. They're learning to READ (hopefully). Their math skills don't go past fraction reduction. Yes, some might be more precocious and do more, but those have parents to provide the extras to keep their children engaged and learning. It's the parent's job, ultimately, to educate-- not the state's.
If I as a parent want my second grader to be able to assemble an x86 box from a pile of parts, fine. My kid's going to be smart enough to do it. Others are going to need more work on their more important skills- literacy. Arithmetic. Things that computers only distract from.
Kids don't learn math from typing answers on a computer. They learn math by study and practice.
I couldn't have said this better myself!
High school kids need to have a required class on using office software (preferably touching on several packages, and not just MSOffice), and a required class on basic programming.
I disagree. Typing perhaps, since typewriters are hard to come by anymore. In any case, I don't know of any office application that can't be picked up to a usable level of proficency in more than fifteen minutes.
Computers remain a fairly esoteric area of expertise. This is going to cause a big wage gap unless kids get out of high school with a good technical foundation.
Wage gap? The point of education is not to get a beter job. Education makes you a better person. Anyone can work. Only the educated are enlightened (outside of supernatural revelation). History is just as important, as an example, as computer skills in becoming a good citizen.
Do you mean MEMS (Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems), or the stuff of science fiction where small machines get injected into our bodies to do things? Do you mean the advances in electronics?
At work we're looking into MEMS to build "low-cost" RF and microwave components-- phase shifters, specifically.
You're posting to /., so you know about the advance in electronics.
Both of these have little social consequences.
As far as the ethical and social ramifications of other nanotechnology uses, what worries do you have? fortunately, we're shielded from many of them by scale-- there's a limit at which mechanical devices can't be made any smaller due to molecular effects. Things that are smooth at our sensory scale are unimagineably rough on microscopic scales. We have to deal with surface roughness in microwave electronics, as it can significantly change design parameters from what the classical (read: simple) analysis says they should be.
Don't want to sound too negative, but I don't see it as exciting as many people.
There is clearly a limit to this. Just because my financial institutions make it possible or me to conduct business via the web does NOT make it ok to deep link to my bank account information.
I would imagine that these types of pages are not static HTML, but are instead built on demand by a CGI script or something. I seriously doubt that my bank (which does have a web presence), has a page for each of its members (it's really a credit union).
Neither is it ok to deep link to sites that provide content on a fee paid basis. People providing content that are paid through advertisements rightly view some types of deep linking as a danger to their economic life.
Most of these sites have access controls that don't allow this. I imagine that people running these kinds of places have thought of that "loophole," and have taken measures to make sure it's not open.
Why do people always focus -- fixate -- on these extremely rare behaviors? There's not a thing in the world that would have stopped those kids, or Tim McVeigh, for that matter. There will always be a means for acting out violence.
People are evil. Plain and simple. They (we) are corrupt to the very core. To disagree is to only show blindness to the problem. At our heart we are rebels and renegades. No man-made law is going to change this. That is the original message of, "you can't legislate morality." No law is going to fix the broken condition of man's heart.
A gun is no more evil than a rock. A knife is no more murderous than a bag of fertilizer. It is the man that wields these objects that makes them dangerous. In this whole world, only man has the ability to form intent.
A man that I respect quite a lot says that this evil is proof that man is of God's image-- only such an image could be so diametrically opposite.
Until people have a change in their internal condition -- a change of heart -- nothing will change. Cain needed no gun to kill Abel, did he? David needed no "assault rifle" to dispatch Uriah the Hittite, did he? Nothing you can hold in your hand is more dangerous or evil than the heart that is the very core of your being.
I really don't understand what this will prove to anyone. Do these sysadmins think that by taking away IRC, these guys won't be able to plan their next strike?
Hey, let's show the commies in Cuba and China how much we don't like thier policies-- by copying them here in the USA!
Like most (all?) protests, this is all fluff and no substance. By taking some action, no matter how silly, these guys make themselves feel better about the situation. A better course of action would be to work out a solution to prevent DDoS attacks from succeeding.
We think ALAR on apples is dangerous for kids, so we're going to protest its use by spraying it on all other fruit crops too!
I slow down light every day-- Well, EM signals, anyway. Passing EM signals through dielectric materials slow them down, as compared to passing them through a vacuum. Specifically, it slows them down by the square root of the relative dielectric constant. For example, EM passing through alumina (Er=10) only travels 94.87x10^6 m/sec, as opposed to a vacuum, where c = 3.0x10^8 m/sec. I've seen other dielectrics, BST for instance, with Er's on the order of 100-500. Higher Er's are certainly possible. BST also has the interesting property that its Er changes with applied static bias voltage-- it's a natural phase shifter.
Bush's problem: he wasn't economically conservative enough; he buckled under.