Well, often the differences do not fall neatly into sub-type taxonomies. Real world things don't chop up nicely into taxonomies for the most part I find (at least not lasting ones). See the Employee example.
As I said, it's very rare that you find two OO designs for the same project that do agree where the boundaries are. However this is not a problem, if you took any two OO designers and gave each the design or code of the other designer, each would be able to rapidly understand the design of the other without too much difficulty; something that seems to be extremely difficult to manage using other methodologies. I regard the PRIMARY purpose of a design as the ability to communicate the ideas of that design to others so that they can understand and implement it, and in that regard OO works with the minimum of hassle.
You appear to object to OO because at some points there are not hard and fast rules about how a class/function should be implemented in all cases; I say that it doesn't matter if there is some arbitrary choice and freedom provided the design ideas can be communicated simply and easily to others.
I agree with you that real world examples do not often split neatly into sub-type taxonomies. It is at those points where I have to make some design decisions and hope they work out. I often find that in the event I do screw up and have made a bad decision, that OO has set some boundaries that limit the effect my bad decision has had on the rest of the design and make it easier to reengineer the bad components.
You are talking about shop-specific conventions (method per file), not paradigm differences.
Yes, but OOD seems a method which encourages, without using brute force and thousands of pages of "standards" (which do make me hurl), those shop conventions which do make for good maintainability.
For a code example, suppose we have an application that calculates taxes for individuals. A common object oriented approach is to create a Person class and a Tax class...
Nope, I'd just add a calcTax function to the Person class I already had. Maybe this explains why my objects seem to have a lot of functions....
:-)
To take the Tax and People example you have given, you have overlooked the fact that an object oriented approach allows inheritance and lots of other stuff. For example, if there was more than one type of tax T on a person P, one could still call a generic function T.calcTax(P) for both InheritanceTax and IncomeTax classes which inherited from the basic Tax class.
Object Orientation is not an answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. And you often find that one persons idea of an object oriented approach to a problem is totally different from another persons idea. But having said that, I find that it is easier to work out what someone has done if they have used an object oriented approach than if they haven't. For one thing, most people implement all functions of each class in a single file named after a class, something you're never quite sure of with a parameter approach.
Object orientation simplifies maintainability, by encouraging people to write in a style which may be easily understood, something many other methodologies have singularly failed to address.
10GB drives are about 70 UK pounds, but I suspect you'll pay $70 in the US, which coincidentally is about 30x2.49:-) !!
I was using some poetic license, but AFAIK noone buys a 10GB drive nowadays, so the bottom should fall out of the prices any time now, as it has done with smaller drives, where you have to go to a secondhand store to find them....
NO you can't mail your TIVO to a friend, but the day is not too far off when you can record to your TIVO like device and save the resulting program to a removeable disk, e.g. DVD-RW, optical or dismountable hard drive.
Actually the cost of some hard drives less than about 10G is not hugely more than the cost of a video tape, and their size is smaller than the footprint of a standard video tape. With falling prices the era of tape will probably be over within 5 years.
I'm not a genius. I know I couldn't have written DeCSS. You don't have to be a genius. I couldn't break the CSS encryption system, but once I know how something works I have no problem writing a program to do it.
AFAIK, no encryption system is unbreakable, it just takes an infeasibly large time to break it with current computing technology. Who is to say what is possible 5 years down the line.
Also, there exists the possibility of reverse engineering either the TV decoder or the recorder to provide a short cut.
Day 0: Start boiler at set time, note time to get to temperature (x mins)
Day 1: Start boiler x mins before set time !!
Actually its probably more sophisticated than that in the sense the system may start heating the room depending on how cold it is (i.e the difference between the required and current temperature). Doesn't really require a neural net, just some means of averaging how long the system takes to effect a change in temperature when the system is calling for heat.
Dr. Jakob Neilsen has alot of interesting things to say about micropayments, but take it with a grain of salt because "In an ideal world" there would be no need for money."
IIRC, they used to say there was no money in Star Trek, till they introduced the Ferengi and gold-plated latinum or whatever.:-)
You can ensure that they never need see a bash prompt by booting straight into X. On RH systems I believe you can do this by elevating the system into runlevel 5 instead of 3 on bootup.
I believe, as others have stated that this change, and other like it is a good thing. We ought to ensure that it is possible to hide all the confusing stuff under the hood, so your granny can turn on your Linux box without feeling intimidated by these messages scrolling past, most of which just indicate Linux is booting normally
..my Intray seems to have received much more spam ever since I was daft enough to put my email address on a couple of websites I set up. Next time I'll remember to use hotmail addresses or similar. Anyone got any better suggestions ?
Re:A year of Linux : Summery
on
A Year of Linux
·
· Score: 1
"Summery" is about when we'll get version 2.4 of the kernel!!
(I think Summary was the word you were looking for)
Actually I must say that the parent post had a great deal of true words spoken in jest. I hope next year is the year that Linux becomes easy to use for everyone, especially as I said in many posts to/. that 2001 would be when Linux would become competitive with Windows in terms of user friendliness, visual and application quality. I'd like to know whether I was right or whether I'm going to have to say 'just wait till 2002!'....
..as long as on the way it gives us some decent photos of Jupiter and its moons on its assisted route to Pluto, and possibly some other objects on its way, then this project should go ahead.
I think that spending close to $1 Billion ($1000 Million) on a target with a mission to what appears to be a relatively uninteresting lump of rock would not be so. More interesting would be if the mission comes back with some decent information about the Kuiper belt.
One question I would like answered is what information is a small probe going to bring back that a damn big telescope (Hubbles successor perhaps) won't ?
.. a sort of best of breed Linux installation, which occupies less than 1CD, and doesn't fill your hard disk up with five different programs that all do the same thing. The problem is that noone agrees with what is the best application for a given purpose, as the following ongoing wars prove:
a) which browser (NS, IE, Konqueror, Lynx...)
b) which X-Window desktop ( KDE, Gnome, fvwm)....
c) which email handler (sendmail, qmail....)
d) which editor (Vi/Emacs...)
However if someone has the cojones to do what in their opinion amounts to the best set of Linux apps in a simple CD then I think they may be on to a winner.
Apologies if I've missed someones favourite product or war in the lists above.
...a number of posters have commented that Seti@Home is a waste of time and energy. Perhaps it is, but it is a waste of time and energy to an altruistic project, and it sounds so much better than giving your free cycles to some brute force encryption project. Another cause mentioned was protein folding research, but you've got to admit this sounds boring to the possibility of your computer being the one to find an alien broadcast signal. Everyone knows that the chance of finding a signal is virtually zero, but even the act of ruling out alien broadcasts is worthwhile.
Whilst trying out new code breaking algorithms on distributed.net et al is a worthy cause, recent code breaking attempts do not seem to be in the cause of improving methodology.
Since its the only one out there, they can afford to give it an extortionate price. Basically this is aimed at the "Geeks with money" market to pay off the development cost, then they can later let everyone else buy it for about $20....
You are forgetting that most new hi-tech mobile phones are initially extremely expensive, but sink rapidly in price when offered as part of a deal by some service provider or after about 12 months when they are no lnger leading edge highly desirable toys.
Goldeneye: Yes, but its just another FP shooter.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Yes, but I never got addicted to collecting golden rings.
Final Fantasy VI: Nope, not played.
None of the above IMO qualify for the title of truly addictive, and also I don't regard any of the above as revolutionary in any sense of the term. To be honest I haven't seen anything on a console that's made me want to go out and buy one, although I may be tempted into buying a Playstation 2 if I can ever lay my hands on one.
I also missed out arcade games too, and then I would have to include Space Invaders, BattleZone, PacMan, and Dragons Lair in the role of honor.
Alioth wrote:
I think the follow-ons are better, particularly Frontier: First Encounters. Frontier: First Encounters was let down IMO by the fact it was particularly buggy and unreliable. It did boast some good features, but it was not a revolutionary game in the sense the first Elite was.
Thank you for pointing me to Shades - I'll give it a whirl.
Tetris, along with Solitaire and Minesweeper, belong IMO to a category of games which are not the most awesome in terms of addiction, graphics and sound, but boast the widest appeal to all ages from 4 till death.
The fact that they are available on almost every Windows and Linux computer mean they allow you to waste thousands of hours doing something totally unrewarding with your brain switched off whilst waiting for your latest programming masterpiece to crash during compilation.....:-)
...as computers have become more sophisticated and graphics have got flashier, yesterdays super-addictive game simply fades away into obscurity.
However, a pick of three of high points in my experience of computing would be
MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) A text only multi player adventure played at University of Essex (UK). I believe that this was the first MUD ever (pre-1982); does anyone know better ? This was so addictive that I dedicated all my allocated mainframe time to playing this and I had to buy a BBC Micro to do my real computing projects... which leads to...
Elite for the BBC micro; one of the first wire frame 3D graphic space trading games. As you gained experience and graduated from "Harmless" through to the ultimate accolade of "Elite", you could send off to Acorn for badges to prove your prowess. Despite playing this once for 72 hours with only meal breaks I only got as far as Dangerous.... unfortunately the follow-ons to this game simply didn't deliver.
Doom I still believe that despite its age, Doom is the best 1st person shooter ever. I still play it occassionally and the sound combined with the graphics still have the power to make me leap out of my seat when something unexpected happens. Whilst Quake et al bought undeniably better effects, the magic atmosphere seems to be somewhat lacking in these games. One can only hope that the promised Doom 3 brings them back.
...nope, but a company producing such a product would become the market leader.
I would actually expect the manufacturer of a flash upgradeable product to charge for upgrades, since it is entirely possible that the new features may include patentable stuff for which the manufacturer would have to pay royalties, and thus charge the consumer.
..is what we need, so that when some new CD/DVD disk standard comes out next week the manufacturer can just put an upgrade on the web so your player can read the latest version of shiny disk...
...course, it would be even better (but unlikely) if it was Open Sourced too....
Then, write some code so that after 1000 hits, it switches over to a redirect....
You can do this without CGI. Client side Javascript can do something similar. Implement a normal Client Javascript static page which detected either the source of the page request or the system time and changed the page accordingly.....
The British though they'd negotiated an opt-out on the working hours directive, but IIRC, found they'd signed up to health and saftety legislation which a judge ruled superseded their negotiated opt-out.
I'm sure if you found the right EC judge you could find a way of ruling the French cultural opt-out invalid in the case of DVDs too...
If you are French, buy your DVDs in a neighbouring EU country (this is easy in France, as IIRC all countries bordering it are in the EU bar Switzerland). Once bought in an EU country, it is against the law to prevent personal imports. We British have been giving the finger to our government that way over beer and cigarettes for a few years now.
Then, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, you can have your cake and eat it!:-)
In an otherwise extremely informative comment, Russ Steffen stated:
Many receivers will say they have 5 or 12 channels - what they mean is that they can track 5 or 12 satellites simultaneously. This comment is not quite true; systems with only 5 channels can track as many satellites as you like by using one or more of the channels on a time sharing basis. Normally a 5 channel receiver will use 4 channels to track the 'best' constellation of four satellites on a continous basis, whilst the other channel is used to multiplex between the other satellites to reduce seek time in the event it has to switch one of the best ones out of the constellation it's using. Other time multiplexing algorithms are also used.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, often the differences do not fall neatly into sub-type taxonomies. Real world things don't chop up nicely into taxonomies for the most part I find (at least not lasting ones). See the Employee example.
As I said, it's very rare that you find two OO designs for the same project that do agree where the boundaries are. However this is not a problem, if you took any two OO designers and gave each the design or code of the other designer, each would be able to rapidly understand the design of the other without too much difficulty; something that seems to be extremely difficult to manage using other methodologies. I regard the PRIMARY purpose of a design as the ability to communicate the ideas of that design to others so that they can understand and implement it, and in that regard OO works with the minimum of hassle.
You appear to object to OO because at some points there are not hard and fast rules about how a class/function should be implemented in all cases; I say that it doesn't matter if there is some arbitrary choice and freedom provided the design ideas can be communicated simply and easily to others.
I agree with you that real world examples do not often split neatly into sub-type taxonomies. It is at those points where I have to make some design decisions and hope they work out. I often find that in the event I do screw up and have made a bad decision, that OO has set some boundaries that limit the effect my bad decision has had on the rest of the design and make it easier to reengineer the bad components.
You are talking about shop-specific conventions (method per file), not paradigm differences.
Yes, but OOD seems a method which encourages, without using brute force and thousands of pages of "standards" (which do make me hurl), those shop conventions which do make for good maintainability.
For a code example, suppose we have an application that calculates taxes for individuals. A common object oriented approach is to create a Person class and a Tax class...
Nope, I'd just add a calcTax function to the Person class I already had. Maybe this explains why my objects seem to have a lot of functions....
:-)
To take the Tax and People example you have given, you have overlooked the fact that an object oriented approach allows inheritance and lots of other stuff. For example, if there was more than one type of tax T on a person P, one could still call a generic function T.calcTax(P) for both InheritanceTax and IncomeTax classes which inherited from the basic Tax class.
Object Orientation is not an answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. And you often find that one persons idea of an object oriented approach to a problem is totally different from another persons idea. But having said that, I find that it is easier to work out what someone has done if they have used an object oriented approach than if they haven't. For one thing, most people implement all functions of each class in a single file named after a class, something you're never quite sure of with a parameter approach.
Object orientation simplifies maintainability, by encouraging people to write in a style which may be easily understood, something many other methodologies have singularly failed to address.
10GB drives are about 70 UK pounds, but I suspect you'll pay $70 in the US, which coincidentally is about 30x2.49 :-) !!
I was using some poetic license, but AFAIK noone buys a 10GB drive nowadays, so the bottom should fall out of the prices any time now, as it has done with smaller drives, where you have to go to a secondhand store to find them....
NO you can't mail your TIVO to a friend, but the day is not too far off when you can record to your TIVO like device and save the resulting program to a removeable disk, e.g. DVD-RW, optical or dismountable hard drive.
Actually the cost of some hard drives less than about 10G is not hugely more than the cost of a video tape, and their size is smaller than the footprint of a standard video tape. With falling prices the era of tape will probably be over within 5 years.
I'm not a genius. I know I couldn't have written DeCSS.
You don't have to be a genius. I couldn't break the CSS encryption system, but once I know how something works I have no problem writing a program to do it.
AFAIK, no encryption system is unbreakable, it just takes an infeasibly large time to break it with current computing technology. Who is to say what is possible 5 years down the line.
Also, there exists the possibility of reverse engineering either the TV decoder or the recorder to provide a short cut.
Day 0: Start boiler at set time, note time to get to temperature (x mins)
Day 1: Start boiler x mins before set time !!
Actually its probably more sophisticated than that in the sense the system may start heating the room depending on how cold it is (i.e the difference between the required and current temperature). Doesn't really require a neural net, just some means of averaging how long the system takes to effect a change in temperature when the system is calling for heat.
Dr. Jakob Neilsen has alot of interesting things to say about micropayments, but take it with a grain of salt because "In an ideal world" there would be no need for money."
:-)
IIRC, they used to say there was no money in Star Trek, till they introduced the Ferengi and gold-plated latinum or whatever.
..that it was Excalibur that appeared in the middle of a lake, not Monoliths!
You can ensure that they never need see a bash prompt by booting straight into X. On RH systems I believe you can do this by elevating the system into runlevel 5 instead of 3 on bootup.
I believe, as others have stated that this change, and other like it is a good thing. We ought to ensure that it is possible to hide all the confusing stuff under the hood, so your granny can turn on your Linux box without feeling intimidated by these messages scrolling past, most of which just indicate Linux is booting normally
..my Intray seems to have received much more spam ever since I was daft enough to put my email address on a couple of websites I set up. Next time I'll remember to use hotmail addresses or similar. Anyone got any better suggestions ?
"Summery" is about when we'll get version 2.4 of the kernel!!
/. that 2001 would be when Linux would become competitive with Windows in terms of user friendliness, visual and application quality. I'd like to know whether I was right or whether I'm going to have to say 'just wait till 2002!'....
(I think Summary was the word you were looking for)
Actually I must say that the parent post had a great deal of true words spoken in jest. I hope next year is the year that Linux becomes easy to use for everyone, especially as I said in many posts to
..as long as on the way it gives us some decent photos of Jupiter and its moons on its assisted route to Pluto, and possibly some other objects on its way, then this project should go ahead.
I think that spending close to $1 Billion ($1000 Million) on a target with a mission to what appears to be a relatively uninteresting lump of rock would not be so. More interesting would be if the mission comes back with some decent information about the Kuiper belt.
One question I would like answered is what information is a small probe going to bring back that a damn big telescope (Hubbles successor perhaps) won't ?
.. a sort of best of breed Linux installation, which occupies less than 1CD, and doesn't fill your hard disk up with five different programs that all do the same thing. The problem is that noone agrees with what is the best application for a given purpose, as the following ongoing wars prove:
a) which browser (NS, IE, Konqueror, Lynx...)
b) which X-Window desktop ( KDE, Gnome, fvwm)....
c) which email handler (sendmail, qmail....)
d) which editor (Vi/Emacs...)
However if someone has the cojones to do what in their opinion amounts to the best set of Linux apps in a simple CD then I think they may be on to a winner.
Apologies if I've missed someones favourite product or war in the lists above.
...a number of posters have commented that Seti@Home is a waste of time and energy. Perhaps it is, but it is a waste of time and energy to an altruistic project, and it sounds so much better than giving your free cycles to some brute force encryption project. Another cause mentioned was protein folding research, but you've got to admit this sounds boring to the possibility of your computer being the one to find an alien broadcast signal. Everyone knows that the chance of finding a signal is virtually zero, but even the act of ruling out alien broadcasts is worthwhile.
Whilst trying out new code breaking algorithms on distributed.net et al is a worthy cause, recent code breaking attempts do not seem to be in the cause of improving methodology.
Since its the only one out there, they can afford to give it an extortionate price. Basically this is aimed at the "Geeks with money" market to pay off the development cost, then they can later let everyone else buy it for about $20....
You are forgetting that most new hi-tech mobile phones are initially extremely expensive, but sink rapidly in price when offered as part of a deal by some service provider or after about 12 months when they are no lnger leading edge highly desirable toys.
Goldeneye: Yes, but its just another FP shooter.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Yes, but I never got addicted to collecting golden rings.
Final Fantasy VI: Nope, not played.
None of the above IMO qualify for the title of truly addictive, and also I don't regard any of the above as revolutionary in any sense of the term. To be honest I haven't seen anything on a console that's made me want to go out and buy one, although I may be tempted into buying a Playstation 2 if I can ever lay my hands on one.
I also missed out arcade games too, and then I would have to include Space Invaders, BattleZone, PacMan, and Dragons Lair in the role of honor.
Alioth wrote:
I think the follow-ons are better, particularly Frontier: First Encounters.
Frontier: First Encounters was let down IMO by the fact it was particularly buggy and unreliable. It did boast some good features, but it was not a revolutionary game in the sense the first Elite was.
Thank you for pointing me to Shades - I'll give it a whirl.
Tetris, along with Solitaire and Minesweeper, belong IMO to a category of games which are not the most awesome in terms of addiction, graphics and sound, but boast the widest appeal to all ages from 4 till death.
:-)
The fact that they are available on almost every Windows and Linux computer mean they allow you to waste thousands of hours doing something totally unrewarding with your brain switched off whilst waiting for your latest programming masterpiece to crash during compilation.....
...as computers have become more sophisticated and graphics have got flashier, yesterdays super-addictive game simply fades away into obscurity.
However, a pick of three of high points in my experience of computing would be
MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) A text only multi player adventure played at University of Essex (UK). I believe that this was the first MUD ever (pre-1982); does anyone know better ? This was so addictive that I dedicated all my allocated mainframe time to playing this and I had to buy a BBC Micro to do my real computing projects... which leads to...
Elite for the BBC micro; one of the first wire frame 3D graphic space trading games. As you gained experience and graduated from "Harmless" through to the ultimate accolade of "Elite", you could send off to Acorn for badges to prove your prowess. Despite playing this once for 72 hours with only meal breaks I only got as far as Dangerous.... unfortunately the follow-ons to this game simply didn't deliver.
Doom I still believe that despite its age, Doom is the best 1st person shooter ever. I still play it occassionally and the sound combined with the graphics still have the power to make me leap out of my seat when something unexpected happens. Whilst Quake et al bought undeniably better effects, the magic atmosphere seems to be somewhat lacking in these games. One can only hope that the promised Doom 3 brings them back.
...nope, but a company producing such a product would become the market leader.
I would actually expect the manufacturer of a flash upgradeable product to charge for upgrades, since it is entirely possible that the new features may include patentable stuff for which the manufacturer would have to pay royalties, and thus charge the consumer.
..is what we need, so that when some new CD/DVD disk standard comes out next week the manufacturer can just put an upgrade on the web so your player can read the latest version of shiny disk...
...course, it would be even better (but unlikely) if it was Open Sourced too....
Then, write some code so that after 1000 hits, it switches over to a redirect....
You can do this without CGI. Client side Javascript can do something similar. Implement a normal Client Javascript static page which detected either the source of the page request or the system time and changed the page accordingly.....
The British though they'd negotiated an opt-out on the working hours directive, but IIRC, found they'd signed up to health and saftety legislation which a judge ruled superseded their negotiated opt-out.
I'm sure if you found the right EC judge you could find a way of ruling the French cultural opt-out invalid in the case of DVDs too...
If you are French, buy your DVDs in a neighbouring EU country (this is easy in France, as IIRC all countries bordering it are in the EU bar Switzerland). Once bought in an EU country, it is against the law to prevent personal imports. We British have been giving the finger to our government that way over beer and cigarettes for a few years now.
:-)
Then, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, you can have your cake and eat it!
Bon Chance!! Viva la Revolution!!
In an otherwise extremely informative comment, Russ Steffen stated:
Many receivers will say they have 5 or 12 channels - what they mean is that they can track 5 or 12 satellites simultaneously.
This comment is not quite true; systems with only 5 channels can track as many satellites as you like by using one or more of the channels on a time sharing basis. Normally a 5 channel receiver will use 4 channels to track the 'best' constellation of four satellites on a continous basis, whilst the other channel is used to multiplex between the other satellites to reduce seek time in the event it has to switch one of the best ones out of the constellation it's using. Other time multiplexing algorithms are also used.