Until one is proven objectively better, teach *all* paradigms equally: Procedural, Relational, Functional, OOP, etc........
The right tool for the job!
For most jobs OOP is suitable. Naturally you'll have some procedural stuff thrown in as well, but that goes with the territory.
First off, you have to start somewhere. It seems like OOP would be a good place to start, since you'll get a feel for procedural languages as well, and it's usable. If you want to learn other types of languages later that's possible at most larger schools. But you can't introduce all types at first. And some like functional programming is pretty hard to wrap your brain around, quite a lot harder than OOP I'd say.
How many NON-OO pattern books/articles do you know about? Why so few?
Well an idea would be to consider why books are printed and articles written. Generally to get sold, or in the case of articles to sell a magazine. You can't walk into a normal bookstore and expect to find books on exotic computer topics. I bet it's hard to find books on Verilog nad VHDL as well, that doesn't mean that the languages are insignificant, just that the books don't sell through those chanells. Likewise with articles in magazines. Most computer magazines are aimed at gamers or at people who can't find the on switch. Don't expect to find cool stuff here.
If you want the fun stuff look at academic papers. They tend to do stuff "because they can" and often you'll find new ideas years before even advanced magazines. For functional programming eg look at AI research, they use Lisp all the time.
OOP might not be the best tool for a lot of stuff that it's used for. (Although I think it is in most cases.) But it is a good "common denominator" as it can be succesfully applied to most problems.
And if you want to get all Zen about it you just need to realize that in the end it all comes down to pretty much the same thing. Mapping your thoughts to some bits. How you do it is irrelevant, but you have to do it in some way.
Well perhaps the "acecdotal evidence" is because that's the experience of a lot of teachers at universeties? Many of them used to teach smalltalk at one point, and they can compare to how it is now when they use Java or (heaven forbid) C++.
It's not like you're going to put 10 people in one room and teach them Java/C++/whatnot and 10 in a different room and teach them Smalltalk and then see which group are best able to solve some random experiment. There's just not much of a point.
And while people think differently I think that's besides the point. The issue was to compare languages which teach OO. If a person is more "apt" at procedural or functional programming is besides the point. It would seem as if the hypothesis that "If you want to teach something, try to teach it with as few distractions as possible." would be valid. And that would be the point of teaching Smalltalk.
(Note: I haven't learned Smalltalk and have only studied it a little "for historical reasons".)
Yeeeeeeees. I know that from my OS classes as well.
And you would say that having the GUI and a file browser running as the same task would be a good idea? Probably not. Anyways the only thing you need for it to not crash is to have a small program which makes sure that services (such as GUI) are running. If they are not they are restarted. These have been available as 3rd party stuff for older Win32 versions. I guess the problem was now recognised as a big one and the "feature" was included in the OS.
Nevertheless, a crashing file browser shouldn't bring down the GUI. That's just bad design. And it just shows that my point is made, the explorer is thightly integrated in the OS. (Which iexplorer isn't. Well, not/as/ integrated anyways.)
That's just my experience. If the file browser goes down it takes the task bar and all that with it. In WinXP this service is restarted after a short time, but it still goes down for a few seconds.
Naturally this doesn't have to mean that the file browser is a central part of the OS, but it sure as hell has some ties pretty far down the system. In any case the behaviour is inexusable.
I believe the idea is to make these people understans programming and other issues involved. The idea is not to "let them slide through". The idea is to make them understand programming.
Yes they could, and they do. But for most definitions of "Operating System" it's incorrect.
Usually OS is used to refer to the kernel and central libraries. The OS takes care of the low level stuff and adds hooks so you can run programs.
IE is not part of the OS for Win32 any more than eg Windows Media Payer. "Explorer" however is, this is easily witnessed when your file browser crashes and takes the GUI with it.;-)
BTW the system in the article does in fact tightly integrate things. It seems like most of the kernel is in fact in the libraries. Also the language handle a lot of kernel/OS stuff at compile time. (Like memory management.)
Other examples of OS which tightly integrate applications and OS are "exo-kernels". These basically tack a small kernel onto an application and let them run as one. (But it's not as useful for multitasking.)
The HURD is also an example of an OS which makes the distinction between OS and user application less obvious.
Basically, claiming that IE is tightly integrated into Win32 only makes sense if you define OS as "The stuff you get when you buy the box". This is not the definition most by people "In the know".
I don't see how a joystick type input is ever going to compete with a mouse for FPS. The big point with the mouse is that it's more or less instant and hte movement is absolute. After a bit of training you'll find yourself whipping the mouse to aim at any spot in your view. (Naturally how far off you are depends on your skill.) With a joystick you have to "ramp" the movement in order to make the change quickly. And it still takes a lot more time to do than with the mouse.
Likewise is it for movement with a joystick. Although it might seem as if it would be a good idea to have the "gradual distinction" of a joystick for moving around you'll find that it's mostly useless. In todays games you almost always need to go at maximum speed, otherwise you're dead. That requires a discreet input, like a keyboard. (Although I bet you could make a better input device for the movement part than a keyboard, but it is quite sufficient.)
So far I have yet to see a FPS controller that has the upper hand on mouse+keyboard. But it's always good that they keep trying.
I was thinking about this too. Since I've seen those before. But I think this is a new model.
The old one didn't use a camera, it had one of those "electric fenses" you dig down. Put it a few inches into the ground and the mower detects it when it gets close.
Those were on all the time though. And were solar powered. (They were programmed to stop if it rained and such though. And could "go home" to recharge if needed.)
They have some stuff on their page about it in Swedish and in English. (The Swedish version contains more info, and a flash demo to boot.)
Last I saw they were developing a vacuum cleaner as well. Well, there are working prototypes, but I haven't heard of any available for purchase.
Well it hasn't seemed to stop Lucas when he made Sound of Music sequences in Ep 2. Or Spielberg from butchering "AI" and "Minority Report". It doesn't like talent is much of a requirement when it comes to making movies these days.
And I realize that what I and other people can do is at most to make "Phantom Edits" of current movies. The making of a complete movie is quite another issue. But the state of the art when it comes to story telling these days are not really what I'd classify as impressive.
I would think that the hardest part would be modelling and animation. There are quite a lot of good stories made by amateurs. (That is, short stories on paper.)
But those are not available for the homeowner. (Well they are, but you don't want to pay that much.) sATA could help out people like me who want to have a box in the closet with a bunch of drives. Standard ATA makes this hard as after ~6 drives it's virtually impossible to put in more and still maintain some sort of order. (That is, not stack them all in the bottom of the tower.)
Andrew Wiles was hardly a person operating out of his garden shed. He is a professional mathematician and he worked on the problem/as his job/ for several years. It just so happened that he tended to take work home with him as well.
What I think the point was that you're not likely to see someone without academical training to solve problems like this.
No, the Apple Superdrive is DVD-R. (At least according to other people in these threads, and Apple only sell DVD-R media.)
And Sony apparently ship their Vaio with DVD-R. (Which is probably big corporation syndrome, but still.)
I'd say that here in Sweden DVD hasn't taken off yet because there's not much need for it. CDR hold as much music as you could want. Compressed video can be stored on one or two CDR typically. So there's not much use spending 3 times as much on a DVD-R writer and more than 10 times more on the media.
And here The price for DVD+R is about double that of DVD-R. To boot there's a lot more manufacturers for DVD-R. (But that will change if DVD+R comes out on top.)
But since both formats are compatible with each other and with DVD readers I don't see the point in getting a DVD+R today. Get the cheaper DVD-R and cheaper DVD-R media today. When it's time to upgrade that slow-ass DVD recorder in a few years you can choose the one that's on top then. (And the DVD's you've burned in the time between is still compatible with your new drive. You can just not use any of your left over blank media.)
Personally I don't have a DVD[+-]R. I'm getting increasingly keen on getting one though. If I were to buy one today I'd get a DVD-R. (For the reasons outlined above.)
The last diesel car I drove (My parents Volvo.) behaved just like a normal petrol car in this aspect. And I think the point is that since newer cars don't have the waiting period you've just added to his point. (That people don't want to wait for unnecessary things.)
Almost like the one in Star Trek Voyager, or the "intrusion friendly operating system". Seems like the system is optimized so that while you can't actually activate any defence mechanisms it's easy as one two three to enable self destruct or the "generally annoying plot elemtent of the week."
Which is the book Coppola based his movie "Apocalypse Now" on. But they're not very similar other than the underlying theme. (HoD takes place in Africa during the colonialization, Apocalypse in Vietnam during the war.)
Regarding watermarks, there are algorithms which can survive most types of tampering. You could print the image, fax it, and then rescan it and the watermark would still be intact. AFAIK it's not trivial to remove the watermark "by hand" neither.
I'll agree with you that the "copyright" thing is odd. If it was back in the old days this site would have been "TSR'ed" before it'd been slashdotted.;-)
Which is why you should just get the Tokyopop versions in any case. Personally I think it's better when they do as little as possible. Because they will always miss some details.
In some of the "Blade - of the immortal" (No not the wimpy vampire.) the action gets confusing because all of a sudden the fighter who was hit in the left leg is now hurting in the right leg and such.
It takes about 10 seconds to adjust to reading right to left, and IMHO it adds a certain "geekiness" to the books as well. (In a good way.)
I just don't see why they bother so much flipping the pages. It's not like you can fail to notice that it's Japanese anyways.
The GF4 4200 is listed at $130, the 8500 at $90. But when I went to the online store it was the LE edition of the 8500. AFAIK it is on the same level as a GF3 500TI, so it's not in direct competition with a 4200.
According to the horse's mouth (Carmack) current cards will play Doom3 "fine". Naturally this means that you can't do 1600x1400 maximum graphics but with reasonable settings it will play.
He warns of the GF4MX though, but I think everyone knows that that is not a good card for a gamer anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
The right tool for the job!
For most jobs OOP is suitable. Naturally you'll have some procedural stuff thrown in as well, but that goes with the territory.
First off, you have to start somewhere. It seems like OOP would be a good place to start, since you'll get a feel for procedural languages as well, and it's usable. If you want to learn other types of languages later that's possible at most larger schools. But you can't introduce all types at first. And some like functional programming is pretty hard to wrap your brain around, quite a lot harder than OOP I'd say.
Well an idea would be to consider why books are printed and articles written. Generally to get sold, or in the case of articles to sell a magazine. You can't walk into a normal bookstore and expect to find books on exotic computer topics. I bet it's hard to find books on Verilog nad VHDL as well, that doesn't mean that the languages are insignificant, just that the books don't sell through those chanells. Likewise with articles in magazines. Most computer magazines are aimed at gamers or at people who can't find the on switch. Don't expect to find cool stuff here.
If you want the fun stuff look at academic papers. They tend to do stuff "because they can" and often you'll find new ideas years before even advanced magazines. For functional programming eg look at AI research, they use Lisp all the time.
OOP might not be the best tool for a lot of stuff that it's used for. (Although I think it is in most cases.) But it is a good "common denominator" as it can be succesfully applied to most problems.
And if you want to get all Zen about it you just need to realize that in the end it all comes down to pretty much the same thing. Mapping your thoughts to some bits. How you do it is irrelevant, but you have to do it in some way.
Well perhaps the "acecdotal evidence" is because that's the experience of a lot of teachers at universeties? Many of them used to teach smalltalk at one point, and they can compare to how it is now when they use Java or (heaven forbid) C++.
It's not like you're going to put 10 people in one room and teach them Java/C++/whatnot and 10 in a different room and teach them Smalltalk and then see which group are best able to solve some random experiment. There's just not much of a point.
And while people think differently I think that's besides the point. The issue was to compare languages which teach OO. If a person is more "apt" at procedural or functional programming is besides the point. It would seem as if the hypothesis that "If you want to teach something, try to teach it with as few distractions as possible." would be valid. And that would be the point of teaching Smalltalk.
(Note: I haven't learned Smalltalk and have only studied it a little "for historical reasons".)
Yeeeeeeees. I know that from my OS classes as well.
/as/ integrated anyways.)
And you would say that having the GUI and a file browser running as the same task would be a good idea? Probably not. Anyways the only thing you need for it to not crash is to have a small program which makes sure that services (such as GUI) are running. If they are not they are restarted. These have been available as 3rd party stuff for older Win32 versions. I guess the problem was now recognised as a big one and the "feature" was included in the OS.
Nevertheless, a crashing file browser shouldn't bring down the GUI. That's just bad design. And it just shows that my point is made, the explorer is thightly integrated in the OS. (Which iexplorer isn't. Well, not
You have intro and outro as well. That's another 5 minutes or so.
That's just my experience. If the file browser goes down it takes the task bar and all that with it. In WinXP this service is restarted after a short time, but it still goes down for a few seconds.
Naturally this doesn't have to mean that the file browser is a central part of the OS, but it sure as hell has some ties pretty far down the system. In any case the behaviour is inexusable.
I believe the idea is to make these people understans programming and other issues involved. The idea is not to "let them slide through". The idea is to make them understand programming.
Yes they could, and they do. But for most definitions of "Operating System" it's incorrect.
;-)
Usually OS is used to refer to the kernel and central libraries. The OS takes care of the low level stuff and adds hooks so you can run programs.
IE is not part of the OS for Win32 any more than eg Windows Media Payer. "Explorer" however is, this is easily witnessed when your file browser crashes and takes the GUI with it.
BTW the system in the article does in fact tightly integrate things. It seems like most of the kernel is in fact in the libraries. Also the language handle a lot of kernel/OS stuff at compile time. (Like memory management.)
Other examples of OS which tightly integrate applications and OS are "exo-kernels". These basically tack a small kernel onto an application and let them run as one. (But it's not as useful for multitasking.)
The HURD is also an example of an OS which makes the distinction between OS and user application less obvious.
Basically, claiming that IE is tightly integrated into Win32 only makes sense if you define OS as "The stuff you get when you buy the box". This is not the definition most by people "In the know".
I don't see how a joystick type input is ever going to compete with a mouse for FPS. The big point with the mouse is that it's more or less instant and hte movement is absolute. After a bit of training you'll find yourself whipping the mouse to aim at any spot in your view. (Naturally how far off you are depends on your skill.) With a joystick you have to "ramp" the movement in order to make the change quickly. And it still takes a lot more time to do than with the mouse.
Likewise is it for movement with a joystick. Although it might seem as if it would be a good idea to have the "gradual distinction" of a joystick for moving around you'll find that it's mostly useless. In todays games you almost always need to go at maximum speed, otherwise you're dead. That requires a discreet input, like a keyboard. (Although I bet you could make a better input device for the movement part than a keyboard, but it is quite sufficient.)
So far I have yet to see a FPS controller that has the upper hand on mouse+keyboard. But it's always good that they keep trying.
I was thinking about this too. Since I've seen those before. But I think this is a new model.
The old one didn't use a camera, it had one of those "electric fenses" you dig down. Put it a few inches into the ground and the mower detects it when it gets close.
Those were on all the time though. And were solar powered. (They were programmed to stop if it rained and such though. And could "go home" to recharge if needed.)
They have some stuff on their page about it in Swedish and in English. (The Swedish version contains more info, and a flash demo to boot.)
Last I saw they were developing a vacuum cleaner as well. Well, there are working prototypes, but I haven't heard of any available for purchase.
Well it hasn't seemed to stop Lucas when he made Sound of Music sequences in Ep 2. Or Spielberg from butchering "AI" and "Minority Report". It doesn't like talent is much of a requirement when it comes to making movies these days.
And I realize that what I and other people can do is at most to make "Phantom Edits" of current movies. The making of a complete movie is quite another issue. But the state of the art when it comes to story telling these days are not really what I'd classify as impressive.
I would think that the hardest part would be modelling and animation. There are quite a lot of good stories made by amateurs. (That is, short stories on paper.)
But those are not available for the homeowner. (Well they are, but you don't want to pay that much.) sATA could help out people like me who want to have a box in the closet with a bunch of drives. Standard ATA makes this hard as after ~6 drives it's virtually impossible to put in more and still maintain some sort of order. (That is, not stack them all in the bottom of the tower.)
Andrew Wiles was hardly a person operating out of his garden shed. He is a professional mathematician and he worked on the problem /as his job/ for several years. It just so happened that he tended to take work home with him as well.
What I think the point was that you're not likely to see someone without academical training to solve problems like this.
No, the Apple Superdrive is DVD-R. (At least according to other people in these threads, and Apple only sell DVD-R media.)
And Sony apparently ship their Vaio with DVD-R. (Which is probably big corporation syndrome, but still.)
I'd say that here in Sweden DVD hasn't taken off yet because there's not much need for it. CDR hold as much music as you could want. Compressed video can be stored on one or two CDR typically. So there's not much use spending 3 times as much on a DVD-R writer and more than 10 times more on the media.
And here The price for DVD+R is about double that of DVD-R. To boot there's a lot more manufacturers for DVD-R. (But that will change if DVD+R comes out on top.)
But since both formats are compatible with each other and with DVD readers I don't see the point in getting a DVD+R today. Get the cheaper DVD-R and cheaper DVD-R media today. When it's time to upgrade that slow-ass DVD recorder in a few years you can choose the one that's on top then. (And the DVD's you've burned in the time between is still compatible with your new drive. You can just not use any of your left over blank media.)
Personally I don't have a DVD[+-]R. I'm getting increasingly keen on getting one though. If I were to buy one today I'd get a DVD-R. (For the reasons outlined above.)
The last diesel car I drove (My parents Volvo.) behaved just like a normal petrol car in this aspect. And I think the point is that since newer cars don't have the waiting period you've just added to his point. (That people don't want to wait for unnecessary things.)
Almost like the one in Star Trek Voyager, or the "intrusion friendly operating system". Seems like the system is optimized so that while you can't actually activate any defence mechanisms it's easy as one two three to enable self destruct or the "generally annoying plot elemtent of the week."
Yeah but your "silly version example" is not code you'd see in reality.
Which is the book Coppola based his movie "Apocalypse Now" on. But they're not very similar other than the underlying theme. (HoD takes place in Africa during the colonialization, Apocalypse in Vietnam during the war.)
Regarding watermarks, there are algorithms which can survive most types of tampering. You could print the image, fax it, and then rescan it and the watermark would still be intact. AFAIK it's not trivial to remove the watermark "by hand" neither.
;-)
I'll agree with you that the "copyright" thing is odd. If it was back in the old days this site would have been "TSR'ed" before it'd been slashdotted.
Which is why you should just get the Tokyopop versions in any case. Personally I think it's better when they do as little as possible. Because they will always miss some details.
In some of the "Blade - of the immortal" (No not the wimpy vampire.) the action gets confusing because all of a sudden the fighter who was hit in the left leg is now hurting in the right leg and such.
It takes about 10 seconds to adjust to reading right to left, and IMHO it adds a certain "geekiness" to the books as well. (In a good way.)
I just don't see why they bother so much flipping the pages. It's not like you can fail to notice that it's Japanese anyways.
I've seen a preview of the first ep of GITS2 in manga form. From that I assume that it will be manga, and possibly anime afterwards.
Actually it's "Poäng", and there's a point with that.
The GF4 4200 is listed at $130, the 8500 at $90. But when I went to the online store it was the LE edition of the 8500. AFAIK it is on the same level as a GF3 500TI, so it's not in direct competition with a 4200.
The non-LE version of 8500 cost about $120.
BTW, when I said "here" before I ment "Sweden".
Ok so it depends on your definition of "fine". I'd expect 800x600 with low-medium effects or something like that.
Now if you're a serious gamer that isn't really "fine" but for a lot of people it is.
According to the horse's mouth (Carmack) current cards will play Doom3 "fine". Naturally this means that you can't do 1600x1400 maximum graphics but with reasonable settings it will play.
He warns of the GF4MX though, but I think everyone knows that that is not a good card for a gamer anyways.
Why not compare the prices? At least here the 8500 have been in the same price range as the GF4 cards for the last few months.
Most people don't care how old the card is, if the performance is lower then the price should be too. (Blatently disregarding the issue of features.)