MOBILE phones have been linked to human cancer in a scientific study for the first time
This is not the first time. I've read about several studies that have linked mobile phones to cancer before. None of the results of those studies, however, have been found to be reproducible, and were thought perhaps to result from conditions in specific labs, background radiation etc etc.
Unfortunately I have no references and I'm too lazy to dig some up, so my post is equally meaningless. I do remember reading about these things though.
.. Almost every essary I wrote for school involved somebody dying.. I was usually the murderer.. sometimes the deaths were accidents, sometimes planned.. sometimes people I knew (names changed of course:), sometimes totally fictional.. not one teacher ever thought a thing of it:) Nobody sent me to a therapist, or kicked me out for being "dangerous", or tried to arrest me, or anything of the sort.
Of course, this is South Africa, our schools aren't quite "miniature police states", like it sounds to me it is over in the americas. We don't really have school shootings over here, so we don't have the same witchhunt mentality. Or at least not back when I was in school, which was over 6 years ago.
"He investigated with detectives to identify the hacker."
I don't understand, are they charging him for hacking? None of the articles mentioned anything about the guy having 'hacking into' anything - only that he owned some books on hacking, which means nothing. Sounds like they're just spreading libellous misinformation on the guy to gather support for their corrupt side of the case. Grief, why didn't they just go all out and say "... to identify the paedophile terrorist hacker menace threat-to-society"?
.. are crap. I used to have a bad habit of slamming my mouse down on the desk when I wasn't doing so well in Quake3 (don't do it anymore) but my cheap Logitech PS2 mouse has withstood a huge amount of beating and is still going strong. One day I was playing with a (more costly and supposedly higher quality) MS mouse. I slammed it down *once*, and not even hard - the buttons caved in, some cheap plastic bits fell out of it, and it was permanently out of action.
I still don't see how it could work, free or not. Even if you could get "the source", how would you know that that was exactly the same source code that was used to compile the system that will actually be used? It would be exceptionally easy for some corrupt person involved in generating the binaries to slip in a trojan before the software system is installed all over the country.
This problem would exist whether the software is (GPL-style) free or not, and I can't see how this type of problem can be avoided. Making it opensource would probably make it harder to find exploits (and you can be pretty sure that somebody somewhere *will* find an exploit) but you can't get around the basic problem of corruption.
Hand-counted votes are also open to corruption, of course, but on a much smaller scale - most people would only be able to affect the vote count in, say, their own voting station. But with a full-blown electronic system, somebody somewhere would have the potential to rig the vote on a massive scale.
I think the LAST thing we need is for enemies to have a reason to start classifying passenger liners as "potential threats". Fire one or two blasts at, say, Iraq from a Boeing, and I'm sure they'll start to feel damn nervous whenever a passenger liner from the US enters their airspace.
It's bad enough that it *does* actually happen now and again that passenger liners are destroyed after being mistakenly classified as military threats. One of the more famous such incidents (I can't remember the name of the flight, but they did make a movie about it) there is *still* speculation that the cause involved the US military putting spy cameras on passenger liners in the hopes that they could do spying without being shot down, if it was the case they were wrong. That was just spy cameras. Imagine huge laser cannons. Nobody will know anymore if a passenger liner is a threat or not, so they'll just destroy them for good measure, like they did with abovementioned incident (IIRC the plane was flying *incorrectly* over Russian military airspace, nobody has been able to adequately explain why the plane went there at all.)
Er, I might be mistaken but CD's are not compressed
I think his point was not that it was compressed as such, but that there *is* a finite sampling rate which makes it "less than real life", i.e. "less than perfect" - so that while so many people are raving about how the compression sucks and chanting "CD quality CD quality CD quality", they don't seem to realise that even "CD Quality" is far from perfect.
But what evidence do you have that these concepts lead to good design
Holy cow, did you even read the part of my post you are quoting? I said it DOESNT lead to good design. Good design has nothing to do with the paradigm you're using. You must have been in a seperate universe or something when you read my post, you've missed the whole point.
I think you've misunderstood me, I most certainly was NOT claiming that OOP "invented" polymorphism, or anything of that sort. I was merely saying that polymorphism is one of the three main things that "OO" encompasses (and typically support at a language level). Nowhere does that even vaguely imply "invention". In fact I even rather explicitly stated that encapsulation is quite a natural concept in pretty much any paradigm - so how exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that I (or anyone else for that matter) was claiming that OOP *invented* those things? If you've seen that, its in your own mind, not in my post.
picture the "gtk+" toolkit without all the ugly hacky typecast macros and the hacky inheritance structure
Before anyone flames me for this comment, I just want to stress that I *LIKE* the *design* of gtk+, I think its vastly superior to the Win32 SDK "design" (in "" because Win32 doesn't look designed at all, it looks like an ugly huge blob thingy that evolved to the point it is today, and MFC is godawful too.) Yes, I've used all of them, and gtk+ is by far the cleanest, simplest, easiest-to-learn and most flexible UI toolkit. I just think gtk should have been C++, since it essentially is.
And in cases where code is actually meant to be reused - something which, by the way, some of my smartest friends have told me, after no small amount of experience over the years, never actually happens
Where I work now, we've put a lot of effort into designing reusable components. And it's paying off, bigtime. We've built a powerful, flexible SDK, all our applications use it, and now we save a huge amount of time and money every time we create a new application. Also, by abstracting away a lot of the technical, low-level / difficult stuff, we don't need to hire super-knowledgable people any more to do the applications. Worked for us.
The thing about making reusable code is that it has nothing to do with the language, and everything to do with good software design. The application also makes a difference. We mostly make Virtual Reality training simulators, so building reusable components has worked well.
People also seem to forget the "code reuse" that happens every single day. People will spend a few weeks using re-usable components - e.g. write a gtk+ application, using reusable libraries for image loading, re-usable components in the posix stuff, re-usable components in the C and C++ standard libraries - and then at the end of all that they'll come out and say "geez this code reuse thing is a complete myth".
"If an object is data with functions, then I've been doing object-oriented programming all my life"
Generally when people talk about "OOP" they're referring to three general things you'll find in an OOP language:
Encapsulation: This is what you've been doing, by the sounds of it. Data, along with its associated functions, is grouped into an "object" (called a "class" in C++, I think its called an "object" in pascal, IIRC.) This is called "encapsulation", since both the data and functions are organized into a single entity. This grouping is very easy to do with any imperative language (as well as assembly) and follows traditional seperation of programs into "code" and "data" sections. OOP languages just bring the concept closer to the language by providing constructs like C++'s "class". Something else the languages do is facilitate "data-hiding", by allowing you to specify with language constructs (C++'s "public" "private" and "protected") which members are for general users of the class, and which members are for the class's internal use only. Nothing special here - you can do this in C also. C++ just gives you some language constructs to enforce it at compile-time, and perhaps make things a little more organized and readable.
Inheritance. OO languages typically allow these encapsulated objects to 'inherit' behaviour from other objects. This is quite powerful; with a single line of code specifying what to inherit from, your object gains a whole lot of new functionality "for free". Once again though, there is very little special here, it can all still be done with imperative languages. OO languages just, once again, make this concept more a part of the syntax and constructs of the language. Inheritance also allows you to override methods, so if the object you inherit from has a function, you can redefine that function to behave differently.
Polymorphism. Also called late binding. Probably the most powerful aspect of OOP (although, yes, once again, you can hack something in a language like C that will mimick the same behaviour.) Polymorphism is like inheritance, except the version of an overridden function that gets called is determined at runtime rather than compile time, and uses a table of pointers to methods called a "virtual method table". A little difficult to explain.. if I have a generic "widget" class with a function called "Draw", then specific types of widgets (e.g. scroll bars, buttons etc) would firstly inherit from the general widget, and then override the virtual method "Draw". Now a program that handled the user interface can just have alist of pointers to generic widgets (which will in reality be scroll bars, buttons etc), and it does not have to worry about what sort of widget they are, it just has to call the "Draw" function on each of them when it needs them to be drawn to the screen, and using the vmt, the correct "Draw" will be called depending on what type of widget it is.
Sounds like you've done mostly encapsulation, maybe a bit of inheritance is natural too. Probably not polymorphism though.
The thing about OOP is, although it supports these concepts in the language, it doesn't automatically lead to good design, and that is the point that the author of the article this whole thread is about seems to have missed. You still have to think about your design very carefully to build good reusable components. In general it does make you think a little bit more carefully before you just start coding away, which isn't a bad thing. There is nothing you can do in C++ though that you can't do in C. C++ just lends itself more readily to expressing certain types of ideas within the language's native syntax, e.g. picture the "gtk+" toolkit without all the ugly hacky typecast macros and the hacky inheritance structure.
Presumably there are some OO zealots out there (I personally don't know any but the article author seems to think almost every C++ programmer is an OOP zealot) but in general I think most OOP programmers are more focused on solving real-world problems than on spreading hype. For every rabid OOP zealot, there's a rabid anti-OOP zealot. This guys just one of the rabid anti-OOP zealots. When you really do speak to most people in the business, they *dont* have big issues about programming paradigms. They just use the best tool for the job and are actually mature about it.
Seriously, the way the guy goes on, you'd think OOP was the cause of all world hunger and disease.
In my 4 years of doing comp sci at University (which included learning both OO methodologies and a wide variety of others), I can't remember ever hearing a single one of his supposed "Myth"'s. Where did he get those? Perhaps I missed all the hype, but I sure as hell have never heard anybody claiming that OO was the panacia that he seems to think people claim it is.
OOP doesn't do or solve *anything* *for* you. It doesn't facilitate components/re-use - GOOD DESIGN facilitates reuse. It doesn't make programming easier and faster - GOOD DESIGN does. And garbage collection? Who the hell ever claimed that only OOP languages have garbage collection? Now thats garbage.
All OOP does is provide a few extra constructs that make certain types of things more convenient. It certainly doesn't automatically make your program design a good one. That's still up to the programmer. In fact, learning to make good OO designs takes more programming experience than learning to make good imperative designs. Some software designs really *do* fit better onto a hierarchical inheritance structure.
For goodness sake, OOP isn't trying to "compete" with your (insert your favourite paradigm here.) It's just language support for programs structured in a certain way. Choose whatever suits your needs, but for gods sake, its not a 'battle' of paradigms, they all serve different purposes. Grow up.
It's true, slow drivers are a problem. I don't know about other places really, but here in South Africa we have one of the highest car accident rates in the world. I was in Germany in Munich recently, and I was quite stunned by how *sensibly* most people there drive. I think the problem in South Africa is that the roads are a very heterogenous environment - there are many many people on the road that drive really slowly (70 - 100 km/h on the highway, 40-60 km/h in urban areas) and there are also just as many who like to driver really fast (e.g. 180-200 km/h on the highway.) So on the highway you'll have a bunch of really slow people, a whole lot of "average" people, and a bunch of really fast people dodging everybody else. Also the quality of cars varies a lot. In Germany, it seemed to me that not only was the quality of cars a lot more homogenous, but also the people had a much smaller range of speeds that they travelled. None of the really slow drivers or the really fast drivers - most people just stayed between 110 and 140 km/h.
As you say, slow people are a big danger, even to people who are staying under the speed limit. South Africans drive like crap. There is also a lot of road rage and general aggression on the roads here, people often cut you off, pull in front of you, etc.
Re:Punitive Damages (this is insightful how?)
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Racism At Microsoft?
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Sorry, I misunderstood. My mistake. Who gets the money awarded from punitive damages?
Re:"Plantation Mentality"? Welcome to the IT world
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I think you've been lucky. I think most employers, if they have a decent programmer, will try to get as many hours out of that as possible. I could also only work 40-hour weeks if I was just left to do my work, and I would do a good job. But my boss has a "last-minute" attitude. So if delivery is still a few months away, he seems to think "theres still plenty of time" and comes up with a bunch of other things for me to do, that are suddenly higher priority.
I think most employers in the engineering/programming world are like this, but then, I can only speak from experience and what I've heard from others.
Re:"Plantation Mentality"? Welcome to the IT world
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"If you are forced to work a 60 hour week, you should go seek employment elsewhere"
Easy to say 'move on'.. best of luck to anybody out there who can actually thinks they can find a professional IT job with less than 60 hour weeks.
Re:Punitive Damages (this is insightful how?)
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Racism At Microsoft?
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"People suing over job discrimination can sue for actual damages (lost wages, promotion opportunities, backpay, etc"
So they each could have made $714 million dollars if MS wasn't so racist? Hope they can prove that. If I had 100 lifetimes I doubt I would make that much over all of them combined.
When I bought my last car, I got a buddy at work, who is good with cars, to help me.
South Africans on the whole are pretty apathetic/ignorant about bad service, I'm afraid. They tend to take a "roll with the punches" attitude, which isn't really a good thing. One of the largest computer retailers here is called "incredible connection", but most technical people refer to it as "incredible corruption". Their profit margin is close to 100% and their service is crapper than you could possibly begin to imagine. Yet most people don't even seem to realise that they are being screwed over royally, and even when they do, they tend to just shrug it off, saying something like "what can we do about it?". 'After sales service' is almost unheard of in this country. Somebody else I know bought a computer from Mecer, another large computer retailer here, and it literally wasn't set up properly (this is VERY common when buying computers in SA) - the DVD drive didn't work, there were size copies of the graphics card drivers installed, the computer would freeze up all the time - and yet this person called me before calling the company, because she was under the impression that she had somehow messed the computer up (another common misconception that makes people here afraid to demand service.)
A friend of mine wanted to put a CD drive in his computer, but it had the old red-paint warranty-void crap on the back. Buying a CD drive is simple, right? I mean, buy the drive, get an IDE cable, set the jumpers, and in 10 minutes you're up and running. But this place needed *several days* to install it, and were charging big bucks for so-called labour. He was promised it would be finished by a certain day, when we went there on that day, they hadn't even begun on it. The secretary was rude with us as well. We asked for it to be done while we waited, so we went off to the back to painfully watch a clueless mininum-wage "technician" attempt to install it. After he'd put it in the computer wouldn't start up at all. It was a big mess, but we eventually did manage to escape that place with a working CD ROM drive. But he voided his warranty and never went there again for further upgrades. But that store is still there and going strong, three years later.
It sounds like it's a bit better in the states, but over here, the computer retailers have waaay too much demand to care about little things like service.
this is much like a car- you really give a damn how the gearing system interacts? you just know not to drop it into reverse at 70mph. (i hope:)
I don't know how a car works, and you're right, in general, I don't need to know. Except, of course, when my car needs servicing/repairs - the mechanics sniff out quickly who is clueless, and it's $$$$$. The sad thing is, the computer industry has now gone exactly the same way - probably worse, in fact, because demand outstrips supply by far in the comp industry, so comp businesses have no incentive to behave. Maybe its not so bad in America, but here in South Africa, its almost impossible to buy a computer and not get ripped off. Some places literally don't even sell the system they advertise (e.g. putting a TNT in when the system is specced as GeForce2, or a Celeron, when the system is specced as PIII.) Most people never figure it out, they don't know enough to. And many of the places have that lame open-up-your-own-computer-and-lose-your-warranty red-paint-on-the-screws crap, so all upgrades must go through them.
So if there is one reason for Joe Computer User to know how computers work, its so that they don't get ripped off when buying/repairing a computer. At least in the car sales and repair industry there is a lot more competition at the moment (and in the states I believe 'lemon laws' to protect consumers) and generally more people understand cars. But few people understand computers. So when they're told that its quite normal for computers to crash so often, they believe it, and think computers "just are like that". They don't know any better. These are probably the main reasons for educating computer users.
"Job security" is a poor reason to keep people in the dark, and is exactly the same as the technique of keeping computing standards proprietary as a business advantage. And you're talking about teaching computing "ETHICS" in the same breath!:) My job is fairly advanced, C++, 3d graphics, simulation etc so I doubt that educating more people about computers would threaten my job, personally. In fact I keep telling my boss we need *more* people:)
Speak for yourself. Maybe you didn't belong on Ritalin, but it really irks me when people start trying to decide for other people that drugs are not good for anyone. For many people drugs are basically lifesavers - they help a great many people - where do you get off assuming that these people 'did a bad thing' to Clinton? Do you know *anything* about his ADD case? Why do you assume automatically that his case was anything like yours?
I'm not ADD, but I used to be unipolar (depression), and you see all the same sort of ignorant anti-drug arguments. No two cases are quite the same - some people might not need drugs, but for many people it is the only option. Please don't attempt to be the judge of what is right for other people.
Thats probably one of the only things I miss about my school years - loads and loads of free time. I could spend whole afternoons and evenings just programming, lounging around, whatever. Even sitting in some of the classes at school seems to me now like it was a lot of free time. And it was, really - I *never* did homework, and most of the classes at school, the lessons are dragged out really really slowly for all the average-intelligence people to keep up. Sheez, in school I remember we spent a few weeks just on the basics of differentials.. university was thankfully a far more reasonable pace.
OK I didn't read the article fully. 15 kilometers is a proposed experiment. So how long would something like this need to be? The atmosphere isn't too much thicker than 15 km anyway..
Slashdot Mirror
MOBILE phones have been linked to human cancer in a scientific study for the first time
This is not the first time. I've read about several studies that have linked mobile phones to cancer before. None of the results of those studies, however, have been found to be reproducible, and were thought perhaps to result from conditions in specific labs, background radiation etc etc.
Unfortunately I have no references and I'm too lazy to dig some up, so my post is equally meaningless. I do remember reading about these things though.
This guy's results also remain to be verified.
.. Almost every essary I wrote for school involved somebody dying .. I was usually the murderer .. sometimes the deaths were accidents, sometimes planned .. sometimes people I knew (names changed of course :), sometimes totally fictional .. not one teacher ever thought a thing of it :) Nobody sent me to a therapist, or kicked me out for being "dangerous", or tried to arrest me, or anything of the sort.
Of course, this is South Africa, our schools aren't quite "miniature police states", like it sounds to me it is over in the americas. We don't really have school shootings over here, so we don't have the same witchhunt mentality. Or at least not back when I was in school, which was over 6 years ago.
"He investigated with detectives to identify the hacker."
I don't understand, are they charging him for hacking? None of the articles mentioned anything about the guy having 'hacking into' anything - only that he owned some books on hacking, which means nothing. Sounds like they're just spreading libellous misinformation on the guy to gather support for their corrupt side of the case. Grief, why didn't they just go all out and say "... to identify the paedophile terrorist hacker menace threat-to-society"?
.. are crap. I used to have a bad habit of slamming my mouse down on the desk when I wasn't doing so well in Quake3 (don't do it anymore) but my cheap Logitech PS2 mouse has withstood a huge amount of beating and is still going strong. One day I was playing with a (more costly and supposedly higher quality) MS mouse. I slammed it down *once*, and not even hard - the buttons caved in, some cheap plastic bits fell out of it, and it was permanently out of action.
I still don't see how it could work, free or not. Even if you could get "the source", how would you know that that was exactly the same source code that was used to compile the system that will actually be used? It would be exceptionally easy for some corrupt person involved in generating the binaries to slip in a trojan before the software system is installed all over the country.
This problem would exist whether the software is (GPL-style) free or not, and I can't see how this type of problem can be avoided. Making it opensource would probably make it harder to find exploits (and you can be pretty sure that somebody somewhere *will* find an exploit) but you can't get around the basic problem of corruption.
Hand-counted votes are also open to corruption, of course, but on a much smaller scale - most people would only be able to affect the vote count in, say, their own voting station. But with a full-blown electronic system, somebody somewhere would have the potential to rig the vote on a massive scale.
I think the LAST thing we need is for enemies to have a reason to start classifying passenger liners as "potential threats". Fire one or two blasts at, say, Iraq from a Boeing, and I'm sure they'll start to feel damn nervous whenever a passenger liner from the US enters their airspace.
It's bad enough that it *does* actually happen now and again that passenger liners are destroyed after being mistakenly classified as military threats. One of the more famous such incidents (I can't remember the name of the flight, but they did make a movie about it) there is *still* speculation that the cause involved the US military putting spy cameras on passenger liners in the hopes that they could do spying without being shot down, if it was the case they were wrong. That was just spy cameras. Imagine huge laser cannons. Nobody will know anymore if a passenger liner is a threat or not, so they'll just destroy them for good measure, like they did with abovementioned incident (IIRC the plane was flying *incorrectly* over Russian military airspace, nobody has been able to adequately explain why the plane went there at all.)
Er, I might be mistaken but CD's are not compressed
I think his point was not that it was compressed as such, but that there *is* a finite sampling rate which makes it "less than real life", i.e. "less than perfect" - so that while so many people are raving about how the compression sucks and chanting "CD quality CD quality CD quality", they don't seem to realise that even "CD Quality" is far from perfect.
But what evidence do you have that these concepts lead to good design
Holy cow, did you even read the part of my post you are quoting? I said it DOESNT lead to good design. Good design has nothing to do with the paradigm you're using. You must have been in a seperate universe or something when you read my post, you've missed the whole point.
I think you've misunderstood me, I most certainly was NOT claiming that OOP "invented" polymorphism, or anything of that sort. I was merely saying that polymorphism is one of the three main things that "OO" encompasses (and typically support at a language level). Nowhere does that even vaguely imply "invention". In fact I even rather explicitly stated that encapsulation is quite a natural concept in pretty much any paradigm - so how exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that I (or anyone else for that matter) was claiming that OOP *invented* those things? If you've seen that, its in your own mind, not in my post.
picture the "gtk+" toolkit without all the ugly hacky typecast macros and the hacky inheritance structure
Before anyone flames me for this comment, I just want to stress that I *LIKE* the *design* of gtk+, I think its vastly superior to the Win32 SDK "design" (in "" because Win32 doesn't look designed at all, it looks like an ugly huge blob thingy that evolved to the point it is today, and MFC is godawful too.) Yes, I've used all of them, and gtk+ is by far the cleanest, simplest, easiest-to-learn and most flexible UI toolkit. I just think gtk should have been C++, since it essentially is.
And in cases where code is actually meant to be reused - something which, by the way, some of my smartest friends have told me, after no small amount of experience over the years, never actually happens
Where I work now, we've put a lot of effort into designing reusable components. And it's paying off, bigtime. We've built a powerful, flexible SDK, all our applications use it, and now we save a huge amount of time and money every time we create a new application. Also, by abstracting away a lot of the technical, low-level / difficult stuff, we don't need to hire super-knowledgable people any more to do the applications. Worked for us.
The thing about making reusable code is that it has nothing to do with the language, and everything to do with good software design. The application also makes a difference. We mostly make Virtual Reality training simulators, so building reusable components has worked well.
People also seem to forget the "code reuse" that happens every single day. People will spend a few weeks using re-usable components - e.g. write a gtk+ application, using reusable libraries for image loading, re-usable components in the posix stuff, re-usable components in the C and C++ standard libraries - and then at the end of all that they'll come out and say "geez this code reuse thing is a complete myth".
"If an object is data with functions, then I've been doing object-oriented programming all my life"
Generally when people talk about "OOP" they're referring to three general things you'll find in an OOP language:
Sounds like you've done mostly encapsulation, maybe a bit of inheritance is natural too. Probably not polymorphism though.
The thing about OOP is, although it supports these concepts in the language, it doesn't automatically lead to good design, and that is the point that the author of the article this whole thread is about seems to have missed. You still have to think about your design very carefully to build good reusable components. In general it does make you think a little bit more carefully before you just start coding away, which isn't a bad thing. There is nothing you can do in C++ though that you can't do in C. C++ just lends itself more readily to expressing certain types of ideas within the language's native syntax, e.g. picture the "gtk+" toolkit without all the ugly hacky typecast macros and the hacky inheritance structure.
Presumably there are some OO zealots out there (I personally don't know any but the article author seems to think almost every C++ programmer is an OOP zealot) but in general I think most OOP programmers are more focused on solving real-world problems than on spreading hype. For every rabid OOP zealot, there's a rabid anti-OOP zealot. This guys just one of the rabid anti-OOP zealots. When you really do speak to most people in the business, they *dont* have big issues about programming paradigms. They just use the best tool for the job and are actually mature about it.
Seriously, the way the guy goes on, you'd think OOP was the cause of all world hunger and disease.
In my 4 years of doing comp sci at University (which included learning both OO methodologies and a wide variety of others), I can't remember ever hearing a single one of his supposed "Myth"'s. Where did he get those? Perhaps I missed all the hype, but I sure as hell have never heard anybody claiming that OO was the panacia that he seems to think people claim it is.
OOP doesn't do or solve *anything* *for* you. It doesn't facilitate components/re-use - GOOD DESIGN facilitates reuse. It doesn't make programming easier and faster - GOOD DESIGN does. And garbage collection? Who the hell ever claimed that only OOP languages have garbage collection? Now thats garbage.
All OOP does is provide a few extra constructs that make certain types of things more convenient. It certainly doesn't automatically make your program design a good one. That's still up to the programmer. In fact, learning to make good OO designs takes more programming experience than learning to make good imperative designs. Some software designs really *do* fit better onto a hierarchical inheritance structure.
For goodness sake, OOP isn't trying to "compete" with your (insert your favourite paradigm here.) It's just language support for programs structured in a certain way. Choose whatever suits your needs, but for gods sake, its not a 'battle' of paradigms, they all serve different purposes. Grow up.
It's true, slow drivers are a problem. I don't know about other places really, but here in South Africa we have one of the highest car accident rates in the world. I was in Germany in Munich recently, and I was quite stunned by how *sensibly* most people there drive. I think the problem in South Africa is that the roads are a very heterogenous environment - there are many many people on the road that drive really slowly (70 - 100 km/h on the highway, 40-60 km/h in urban areas) and there are also just as many who like to driver really fast (e.g. 180-200 km/h on the highway.) So on the highway you'll have a bunch of really slow people, a whole lot of "average" people, and a bunch of really fast people dodging everybody else. Also the quality of cars varies a lot. In Germany, it seemed to me that not only was the quality of cars a lot more homogenous, but also the people had a much smaller range of speeds that they travelled. None of the really slow drivers or the really fast drivers - most people just stayed between 110 and 140 km/h.
As you say, slow people are a big danger, even to people who are staying under the speed limit. South Africans drive like crap. There is also a lot of road rage and general aggression on the roads here, people often cut you off, pull in front of you, etc.
Sorry, I misunderstood. My mistake. Who gets the money awarded from punitive damages?
I think you've been lucky. I think most employers, if they have a decent programmer, will try to get as many hours out of that as possible. I could also only work 40-hour weeks if I was just left to do my work, and I would do a good job. But my boss has a "last-minute" attitude. So if delivery is still a few months away, he seems to think "theres still plenty of time" and comes up with a bunch of other things for me to do, that are suddenly higher priority.
I think most employers in the engineering/programming world are like this, but then, I can only speak from experience and what I've heard from others.
"If you are forced to work a 60 hour week, you should go seek employment elsewhere"
Easy to say 'move on' .. best of luck to anybody out there who can actually thinks they can find a professional IT job with less than 60 hour weeks.
"People suing over job discrimination can sue for actual damages (lost wages, promotion opportunities, backpay, etc"
So they each could have made $714 million dollars if MS wasn't so racist? Hope they can prove that. If I had 100 lifetimes I doubt I would make that much over all of them combined.
there were size copies of the graphics card drivers installed
I meant to type, "six copies", not "size copies". Device manager in Win98 listed six copies of the same driver.
When I bought my last car, I got a buddy at work, who is good with cars, to help me.
South Africans on the whole are pretty apathetic/ignorant about bad service, I'm afraid. They tend to take a "roll with the punches" attitude, which isn't really a good thing. One of the largest computer retailers here is called "incredible connection", but most technical people refer to it as "incredible corruption". Their profit margin is close to 100% and their service is crapper than you could possibly begin to imagine. Yet most people don't even seem to realise that they are being screwed over royally, and even when they do, they tend to just shrug it off, saying something like "what can we do about it?". 'After sales service' is almost unheard of in this country. Somebody else I know bought a computer from Mecer, another large computer retailer here, and it literally wasn't set up properly (this is VERY common when buying computers in SA) - the DVD drive didn't work, there were size copies of the graphics card drivers installed, the computer would freeze up all the time - and yet this person called me before calling the company, because she was under the impression that she had somehow messed the computer up (another common misconception that makes people here afraid to demand service.)
A friend of mine wanted to put a CD drive in his computer, but it had the old red-paint warranty-void crap on the back. Buying a CD drive is simple, right? I mean, buy the drive, get an IDE cable, set the jumpers, and in 10 minutes you're up and running. But this place needed *several days* to install it, and were charging big bucks for so-called labour. He was promised it would be finished by a certain day, when we went there on that day, they hadn't even begun on it. The secretary was rude with us as well. We asked for it to be done while we waited, so we went off to the back to painfully watch a clueless mininum-wage "technician" attempt to install it. After he'd put it in the computer wouldn't start up at all. It was a big mess, but we eventually did manage to escape that place with a working CD ROM drive. But he voided his warranty and never went there again for further upgrades. But that store is still there and going strong, three years later.
It sounds like it's a bit better in the states, but over here, the computer retailers have waaay too much demand to care about little things like service.
this is much like a car- you really give a damn how the gearing system interacts? you just know not to drop it into reverse at 70mph. (i hope :)
I don't know how a car works, and you're right, in general, I don't need to know. Except, of course, when my car needs servicing/repairs - the mechanics sniff out quickly who is clueless, and it's $$$$$. The sad thing is, the computer industry has now gone exactly the same way - probably worse, in fact, because demand outstrips supply by far in the comp industry, so comp businesses have no incentive to behave. Maybe its not so bad in America, but here in South Africa, its almost impossible to buy a computer and not get ripped off. Some places literally don't even sell the system they advertise (e.g. putting a TNT in when the system is specced as GeForce2, or a Celeron, when the system is specced as PIII.) Most people never figure it out, they don't know enough to. And many of the places have that lame open-up-your-own-computer-and-lose-your-warranty red-paint-on-the-screws crap, so all upgrades must go through them.
So if there is one reason for Joe Computer User to know how computers work, its so that they don't get ripped off when buying/repairing a computer. At least in the car sales and repair industry there is a lot more competition at the moment (and in the states I believe 'lemon laws' to protect consumers) and generally more people understand cars. But few people understand computers. So when they're told that its quite normal for computers to crash so often, they believe it, and think computers "just are like that". They don't know any better. These are probably the main reasons for educating computer users.
"Job security" is a poor reason to keep people in the dark, and is exactly the same as the technique of keeping computing standards proprietary as a business advantage. And you're talking about teaching computing "ETHICS" in the same breath! :) My job is fairly advanced, C++, 3d graphics, simulation etc so I doubt that educating more people about computers would threaten my job, personally. In fact I keep telling my boss we need *more* people :)
Speak for yourself. Maybe you didn't belong on Ritalin, but it really irks me when people start trying to decide for other people that drugs are not good for anyone. For many people drugs are basically lifesavers - they help a great many people - where do you get off assuming that these people 'did a bad thing' to Clinton? Do you know *anything* about his ADD case? Why do you assume automatically that his case was anything like yours?
I'm not ADD, but I used to be unipolar (depression), and you see all the same sort of ignorant anti-drug arguments. No two cases are quite the same - some people might not need drugs, but for many people it is the only option. Please don't attempt to be the judge of what is right for other people.
It seems to me like its gotten worse as well. When I was in school we learnt programming skills (e.g. Logo.) Why dumb it down?
Thats probably one of the only things I miss about my school years - loads and loads of free time. I could spend whole afternoons and evenings just programming, lounging around, whatever. Even sitting in some of the classes at school seems to me now like it was a lot of free time. And it was, really - I *never* did homework, and most of the classes at school, the lessons are dragged out really really slowly for all the average-intelligence people to keep up. Sheez, in school I remember we spent a few weeks just on the basics of differentials .. university was thankfully a far more reasonable pace.
OK I didn't read the article fully. 15 kilometers is a proposed experiment. So how long would something like this need to be? The atmosphere isn't too much thicker than 15 km anyway ..