Upfront: I am against manned space flight at the current state of the art.
Cost. Manned space missions are an order of magnitude more expensive than unmanned missions. This means that for the price of (God forbid) a manned space mission to Mars, ten or so smaller missions such as stated in the article could have been performed.
Effectiveness. Manned space missions are not as effective as often thought. The extra weight that the Space Shuttle has to carry just to accommodate the astronauts in space already consumes a significant part of its available payload capacity. This is at cost of available room for experimental equipment. Most experiments can be designed such that they can be done by robots.
Danger. Why risk lives?
I know that GWB in his Great Vision would like to see the flag of the U.S.A. proudly wave on Mars. This would cost billions of dollars - if it is possible at all (for starters, two years of accumulated radiation would surely kill the astronauts). And the main reason would be prestige, just like it was for the moon missions, as NASA admits:
2. Never heard of "Whedon's innovative space western series" before.
3. The extensive introduction fails to explain what it is actually about.
4. The extensive introduction is not enticing, rather boring.
5. The article is submitted by someone heavily involved with the project.
6. Firefly is called a "seriously underappreciated show". Red flag goes up.
7. From the site: " "Firefly" is a television program that aired on FOX Network from October to December of 2002. After low ratings, more than $25 million dollars, and 11 episodes, the program has been cancelled."
8. Even on the site, it does not become clear what is so great about Firefly.
9. How is this "news" for nerds", how is this "stuff that matters"?
10. This whole thing looks like someone carried away too much by his own dying project and trying to get some attention.
I liked my hp 11c very much. Unfortunately it was stolen during a burglary. The nice thing about the hp 11c was its lay-out: wide instead of tall, like a normal calculator only rotated by 90 degrees. Perfect for one handed operation, and all keys were easy to find.
One little tale of me in highschool: during an exam, a guy next to me asked if he could borrow my calculator for a minute, and, concentrating on my test, thoughlessly handed him my 11c. I realized my mistake when, after a minute or so, I heard him mumble in frustration "how the hell does this thing work!!" I recommended him to borrow someone else's calculator.
Almost all manned space missions are a prestige matter and hence a waste of money for as much as science is concerned. Yes, in the sixties the U.S.A. put men on the moon to show the world how advanced they were, ahead of the rest of the world. It was a political statement in the cold war: look, Russia, we can walk on the moon, we are technically superior to you.
But what is the use in 2003 to start planning a mission to put men on Mars? Such a mission would cost billions of dollars, money that could much better be used for more interesting things, such as:
- Is there life on Venus? Although surface temperature at Venus seems to hot for live, there might well be cooler spots where bacterial life may exist. Bacteries are found alive and multiplying on earth at temperatures of 120 degrees celsius under high pressures. Who knows, there are live forms possible at higher temperatures and more, what we would call, extreme circumstances, than we so far imagined to be possible.
- More missions to moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are hints that liquid water exists at some of the moons. Let's try to land on a few of them.
- A bigger space telescope. Yes, I know, another space telescope is already being build. But why not make it a little bit better, bigger, more advanced, more versatile?
- More budget for research on rocket ion-engines or other ways to propel a spacecraft. The speeds that we can reach with current technologies are not very impressive.
All this and more can be done for the costs of a manned Mars mission. In the name of science, lets forget about manned space flight for a while.
First of all, near movie theaters you can most often watch trailers playing on the television screens around the theater. But let's pretend I manage to look over that. Then:
Point & shoot with my mobile to a movie poster near my favourite theater, and pray to be lucky enough that it is one that responds with sending a URL back to my phone? A one-in-a-thousand chance. And I am already getting annoyed when a url in my browser does not work. This will not encourage its use.
But suppose I get lucky. Download a movie trailer on my 28k8 bps mobile phone which may take 30 minutes even for a low resolution one? I think not.
Ok, suppose we go this far. But, watch a movie trailer on a 220 x 160 (at most) pixel display? No thank you.
Now let's say am a person with no life, that got lucky enough to be able to download a trailer. What's that you say? I have to pay $$$ for the mb's I've downloaded? Oh I see, I guess that made me a loser now as well in front of my buddies.
I am somewhat sceptic. Also for its other uses ($$$).
(And why use expensive, unreliable infrared transmission? I'd say put RFID-tags into posters etc. instead, no power required and much cheaper. If this is such a good idea, mobile phone makers will be sure to make their phones able to read . But I'm not holding my breath.)
Re:no, i think you are wrong
on
Space Blog
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, you think tax dollars are better spent to make some astronomers giddy about this nebula or that galaxy they can see?
I implied that it would be better to explore Venus or Io (or other objects within reach), instead of doing expensive manned spaceflights. There might be lifeforms elsewhere in our solar system, for instance. A bigger Hubble could discover planets around other stars. I find that much more interesting than reading the blog of an astronaut getting giddy about floating around in space. NASA has a tight budget, why waste it on manned missions? So we can read blogs from space? Get real.
This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to see more of out of NASA!
Count me out. Manned space flight is very expensive and risky. I'd rather see NASA explore Venus or Io or put more budget into their space telescopes a la Hubble.
This is a classic security vs. usability tradeoff. It does not mean, ofcourse, that companies wouldn't like to do business with blind people. Instead of throwing away money to lawyers and starting lawsuits, it might be more productive to help think up possible solutions.
One solution could be to have offered goods or services also orderable through other means such as a voice response system. Blind people can use that instead; problem solved. (IANAL, but I take it that as long as a company enables everyone, sane, deaf, dumb or blind, to buy their goods in any reasonable way, they are in line with the law. IOW, I assume that companies are not forced to, let's say, enable deaf people to be able to buy through a voice-response system without using any additional tools, as long as they offer an alternative way to purchase the goods or services.)
I'm quite sure that in this case there is a relatively easy one (I must admit I did not RTFA - host is slashdotted). I am confident that a voice saying "twohundredeightysix-A-B-ninetythree" accompanied by background music, is just as safe as the graphical type-in-the-visible-letters-in-an-image method that is used now.
Doing away with the human factor in these judgments is the greatest benefit, even if the calls may not agree 100% with that of a human judge. No more arguing, consistency for everyone.
The red banner has gone, as is the note below the submission, which stated, in a small font, that in case you have a problem with the story, you can mail the editor-on-duty.
My wild guess is that there exists a flag, maybe called "controversial" or "infomercial" that might be used in the future but which was turned on accidently for this story.
Apple is getting more and more behind speed-wise compared to PC's. This results in Apple hardware being more expensive and performing less than PC hardware. It is now at a point where it really starts to hurt. For example, not so long ago Adobe had a page up named 'pcpreferred.html' stating that the PC is preferred to run Adobe products.
Intel also has much more differentiation: power-hungry pentiums up to 3.06 GHz, powerful Pentium 4-M for "transportable" notebooks, Celeron and more recently Pentium-M (Centrino) for notebooks with long battery life. Not to forget the Intel-compatible offerings from Transmeta, VIA and AMD, driving the price further down.
Apple has almost no other choice than start using Intel-compatible cpu's in the future in order to stay competitive.
Future NEWS: Novell sends "Letter to Linux Customers" stating that unnamed entities incorporated Novells intellectual property into Linux without its authorization.
This item is another example of the pointless anti-MS sentiments of Slashdot. The item is not that newsworthy, and certainly not for the OSS minded community that frequents Slashdot.
Instead of feeling satisfied about how superior OSS is comparing to MS and how it doesn't suffer from these problems (which is not true, BTW), wake up, smell the coffee and get coding, because OSS has a lot of catching up to!
Walk the street at night, point it at any visible TV-set and turn the volume to the max. Then watch how they frantically search for the remote and struggle to turn the volume down as fast as they can. Bonus points when they are watching pr0n.
Neptune and Earth are in direct line of sight for the large majority of the time. Imagine: only when the sun, a Neptune moon or a planet happens to be in the way, the line of sight is blocked. Does not happen that much.
Your suggestion of sending the signal through Jupiter - Mars - "Venus" (useless as it is closer to the sun than Earth) to Earth will not work, since planets rotate around the sun and will almost never be lined up such that they can be effectively used as communication hubs.
It is nice that NASA is developing a communication protocol for use in their missions. It seems to have some advantages: only low-power transmitters are needed on space crafts if you have a retransmitting satellite hub around. (This is in fact done already - in missions that use a lander, the part of the ship that stays in orbit retransmit signals of the lander). Using a standardized protocol, the hubs can be used for many missions, even simultaneously.
I wish the article on space.com had focussed on this a bit more instead of popularising it by mentioning Vint Cerf and the Internet. Everyone will realize that the infrastructure is not connected to the Internet (imagine - hacked satellite, DoS attacks). Also, the protocol, which can handle large delays, will have significant differences to regular TCP/IP.
Also, I'd like to know how to NASA will solve a few problems that jump to mind. The communication hubs are only useful if they are close to the sending spacecraft. The hubs can not be put halfway earth and a planet, because of the planets rotation around the sun. So the hub would have to circle around a planet in order for future missions to that particular planet can use it.
But then NASA faces the following problems: on planets with an atmosphere, the hubs will tend to fall to the surface, so in many cases they need fuel to keep their altitude.
Secondly, the hub will only be visible from one side of the planet at the time.
Thirdly, the hub needs power, where to get it from for an extended period of time? Or are the hubs only short lived? In that case, why bother at all?
What I really don't get is why the Linux-community gets all carried away by having a game ported.
I couldn't care less under which OS a game runs. For CPU intensive games, the OS is even in the way, hurting performance. Yes, Linux as well, albeit maybe marginally less than Windows.
There is a reason you don't find many games under Linux. Graphic card drivers are much better optimized for Windows systems. Porting a graphics intensive game to Linux is a waste of resources.
In the long run PHP has as much chance to be a Java killer as.NET does.
I don't think so. As one of the first posters with +5 comment score points out, you will run into the wall when doing big projects with a scripting language. And despite all the nice OO-like features that have been thrown in to PHP, it still is essentially a script language.
I have been working on a project where we built a not-too-complex site using Cold Fusion. It started out simple: read in form fields, throw them in the database, read them and present them as a web-page. Cold Fusion or PHP are great for this.
Not much later, the application became more complex. We got more tables, and backoffice people needed to be able to do fairly complex mutations. We ran into the wall with CF. We hired professionals that spent about EUR 500,000 to try to write our back-office system in CF. They never delivered anything (also due to the fact that they were not the most professional company - if they were, they wouldn't have started off using CF).
Now why is it that scripting languages blow up when projects get bigger? You'd say that all you do is showing forms and pumping around data in the database.
We moved over to dotNet (there goes my Karma). Suddenly things became a lot easier. Why? Because we were able to program object oriented, for one thing. (So - java would have been similar order of magnitude improvement over scripting. You may mod me up now.:-)
We were now able to cleanly seperate our code in distinct building blocks, without any overlap. Each class (an OO-building block) had a very clear job. Changes on a class that for instance handled sessions, did not cause other parts of the code needing adaptions. There were just a few isolated classes doing database transactions. Logging, error trapping and user tracking were much easier - we didn't need to pollute many files in our code with LOG messages - we could centralize them using exceptions.
Now some of you may say: "PHP also has this". But PHP is not a pure OO language.
To all who are not convinced that OO-programming is adding any benefit: Get a copy of Bertrand Meyers hallmark book Object Oriented Software Construction right now. It will explain what OO really is about and explains quite scientifically why procedural programming is inferior when programming larger projects that do not need to squeeze the most out of every clockcycle (for instance, backoffice projects, web sites). The book is over 1300 pages, but you can be sure that you will not want to program non-OO anymore before you have even reached page 100. Then it will also become clear PHP is lacking many OO features.
In short, there are many criteria before a language can call itself fully OO (the book mentions 15!). The main benefits OO brings you are reusability of code, and being forced to use a certain structure in your code. PHP does not qualify as OO, despite the OO-like features that were thrown in.
To finish the story: our CF scripts were quickly replaced by C# (the.net language of choice - a somewhat improved java).
There is one other consideration though, that I must mention. Not unimportant: economic considerations. OO-programmers are more expensive and harder to find than procedural programmers. This may lead companies to decide to go for non-OO techniques. But they shoot themselves in the foot as soon as they want to build even a moderately complex back-office.
You can also turn this around: learn OO, be more productive, and have a higher salary as a bonus.
It's great to see that this project is making such wonderful progress. It will be fantastic to have a fully functional Windows 95 running under Linux 4.0 in ten years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
Upfront: I am against manned space flight at the current state of the art.
.
Cost. Manned space missions are an order of magnitude more expensive than unmanned missions. This means that for the price of (God forbid) a manned space mission to Mars, ten or so smaller missions such as stated in the article could have been performed.
Effectiveness. Manned space missions are not as effective as often thought. The extra weight that the Space Shuttle has to carry just to accommodate the astronauts in space already consumes a significant part of its available payload capacity. This is at cost of available room for experimental equipment. Most experiments can be designed such that they can be done by robots.
Danger. Why risk lives?
I know that GWB in his Great Vision would like to see the flag of the U.S.A. proudly wave on Mars. This would cost billions of dollars - if it is possible at all (for starters, two years of accumulated radiation would surely kill the astronauts). And the main reason would be prestige, just like it was for the moon missions, as NASA admits:
"the most persistent justification for the moon race was the matter of prestige"
NASA's budget is crippled by the costs of the manned space station ISS - which are between 60 and 100 billion dollars. Enough is enough!
1. Never heard of "project Firefly" before.
2. Never heard of "Whedon's innovative space western series" before.
3. The extensive introduction fails to explain what it is actually about.
4. The extensive introduction is not enticing, rather boring.
5. The article is submitted by someone heavily involved with the project.
6. Firefly is called a "seriously underappreciated show". Red flag goes up.
7. From the site: " "Firefly" is a television program that aired on FOX Network from October to December of 2002. After low ratings, more than $25 million dollars, and 11 episodes, the program has been cancelled."
8. Even on the site, it does not become clear what is so great about Firefly.
9. How is this "news" for nerds", how is this "stuff that matters"?
10. This whole thing looks like someone carried away too much by his own dying project and trying to get some attention.
I liked my hp 11c very much. Unfortunately it was stolen during a burglary. The nice thing about the hp 11c was its lay-out: wide instead of tall, like a normal calculator only rotated by 90 degrees. Perfect for one handed operation, and all keys were easy to find.
One little tale of me in highschool: during an exam, a guy next to me asked if he could borrow my calculator for a minute, and, concentrating on my test, thoughlessly handed him my 11c. I realized my mistake when, after a minute or so, I heard him mumble in frustration "how the hell does this thing work!!" I recommended him to borrow someone else's calculator.
Almost all manned space missions are a prestige matter and hence a waste of money for as much as science is concerned. Yes, in the sixties the U.S.A. put men on the moon to show the world how advanced they were, ahead of the rest of the world. It was a political statement in the cold war: look, Russia, we can walk on the moon, we are technically superior to you.
But what is the use in 2003 to start planning a mission to put men on Mars? Such a mission would cost billions of dollars, money that could much better be used for more interesting things, such as:
- Is there life on Venus? Although surface temperature at Venus seems to hot for live, there might well be cooler spots where bacterial life may exist. Bacteries are found alive and multiplying on earth at temperatures of 120 degrees celsius under high pressures. Who knows, there are live forms possible at higher temperatures and more, what we would call, extreme circumstances, than we so far imagined to be possible.
- More missions to moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are hints that liquid water exists at some of the moons. Let's try to land on a few of them.
- A bigger space telescope. Yes, I know, another space telescope is already being build. But why not make it a little bit better, bigger, more advanced, more versatile?
- More budget for research on rocket ion-engines or other ways to propel a spacecraft. The speeds that we can reach with current technologies are not very impressive.
All this and more can be done for the costs of a manned Mars mission. In the name of science, lets forget about manned space flight for a while.
You mean, just like Microsoft?
First of all, near movie theaters you can most often watch trailers playing on the television screens around the theater. But let's pretend I manage to look over that. Then:
Point & shoot with my mobile to a movie poster near my favourite theater, and pray to be lucky enough that it is one that responds with sending a URL back to my phone? A one-in-a-thousand chance. And I am already getting annoyed when a url in my browser does not work. This will not encourage its use.
But suppose I get lucky. Download a movie trailer on my 28k8 bps mobile phone which may take 30 minutes even for a low resolution one? I think not.
Ok, suppose we go this far. But, watch a movie trailer on a 220 x 160 (at most) pixel display? No thank you.
Now let's say am a person with no life, that got lucky enough to be able to download a trailer. What's that you say? I have to pay $$$ for the mb's I've downloaded? Oh I see, I guess that made me a loser now as well in front of my buddies.
I am somewhat sceptic. Also for its other uses ($$$).
(And why use expensive, unreliable infrared transmission? I'd say put RFID-tags into posters etc. instead, no power required and much cheaper. If this is such a good idea, mobile phone makers will be sure to make their phones able to read . But I'm not holding my breath.)
So, you think tax dollars are better spent to make some astronomers giddy about this nebula or that galaxy they can see?
I implied that it would be better to explore Venus or Io (or other objects within reach), instead of doing expensive manned spaceflights. There might be lifeforms elsewhere in our solar system, for instance. A bigger Hubble could discover planets around other stars. I find that much more interesting than reading the blog of an astronaut getting giddy about floating around in space. NASA has a tight budget, why waste it on manned missions? So we can read blogs from space? Get real.
This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to see more of out of NASA!
Count me out. Manned space flight is very expensive and risky. I'd rather see NASA explore Venus or Io or put more budget into their space telescopes a la Hubble.
This is a classic security vs. usability tradeoff. It does not mean, ofcourse, that companies wouldn't like to do business with blind people. Instead of throwing away money to lawyers and starting lawsuits, it might be more productive to help think up possible solutions.
One solution could be to have offered goods or services also orderable through other means such as a voice response system. Blind people can use that instead; problem solved. (IANAL, but I take it that as long as a company enables everyone, sane, deaf, dumb or blind, to buy their goods in any reasonable way, they are in line with the law. IOW, I assume that companies are not forced to, let's say, enable deaf people to be able to buy through a voice-response system without using any additional tools, as long as they offer an alternative way to purchase the goods or services.)
I'm quite sure that in this case there is a relatively easy one (I must admit I did not RTFA - host is slashdotted). I am confident that a voice saying "twohundredeightysix-A-B-ninetythree" accompanied by background music, is just as safe as the graphical type-in-the-visible-letters-in-an-image method that is used now.
Doing away with the human factor in these judgments is the greatest benefit, even if the calls may not agree 100% with that of a human judge. No more arguing, consistency for everyone.
Can anyone explain why apparantly 802.11b wireless connections do *not* pose a problem in planes?
Ok, now I get it. We're supposed to give feedback (is it a duplicate, are there errors in the story, does the story make sense etc.)
On the basis of the feedback, what will Slashdot do? Will they go as far as to retract stories that turn out to be "problematic"?
The red banner has gone, as is the note below the submission, which stated, in a small font, that in case you have a problem with the story, you can mail the editor-on-duty.
My wild guess is that there exists a flag, maybe called "controversial" or "infomercial" that might be used in the future but which was turned on accidently for this story.
Where is slashdot heading?
Apple is getting more and more behind speed-wise compared to PC's. This results in Apple hardware being more expensive and performing less than PC hardware. It is now at a point where it really starts to hurt. For example, not so long ago Adobe had a page up named 'pcpreferred.html' stating that the PC is preferred to run Adobe products.
Intel also has much more differentiation: power-hungry pentiums up to 3.06 GHz, powerful Pentium 4-M for "transportable" notebooks, Celeron and more recently Pentium-M (Centrino) for notebooks with long battery life. Not to forget the Intel-compatible offerings from Transmeta, VIA and AMD, driving the price further down.
Apple has almost no other choice than start using Intel-compatible cpu's in the future in order to stay competitive.
Future NEWS: Novell sends "Letter to Linux Customers" stating that unnamed entities incorporated Novells intellectual property into Linux without its authorization.
This item is another example of the pointless anti-MS sentiments of Slashdot. The item is not that newsworthy, and certainly not for the OSS minded community that frequents Slashdot.
Instead of feeling satisfied about how superior OSS is comparing to MS and how it doesn't suffer from these problems (which is not true, BTW), wake up, smell the coffee and get coding, because OSS has a lot of catching up to!
Walk the street at night, point it at any visible TV-set and turn the volume to the max. Then watch how they frantically search for the remote and struggle to turn the volume down as fast as they can. Bonus points when they are watching pr0n.
So, if you want to have Microsoft software for free, you know what to do!
And exactly how could a million camera's have prevented the september 11 terrorist attacks?
Neptune and Earth are in direct line of sight for the large majority of the time. Imagine: only when the sun, a Neptune moon or a planet happens to be in the way, the line of sight is blocked. Does not happen that much.
Your suggestion of sending the signal through Jupiter - Mars - "Venus" (useless as it is closer to the sun than Earth) to Earth will not work, since planets rotate around the sun and will almost never be lined up such that they can be effectively used as communication hubs.
It is nice that NASA is developing a communication protocol for use in their missions. It seems to have some advantages: only low-power transmitters are needed on space crafts if you have a retransmitting satellite hub around. (This is in fact done already - in missions that use a lander, the part of the ship that stays in orbit retransmit signals of the lander). Using a standardized protocol, the hubs can be used for many missions, even simultaneously.
I wish the article on space.com had focussed on this a bit more instead of popularising it by mentioning Vint Cerf and the Internet. Everyone will realize that the infrastructure is not connected to the Internet (imagine - hacked satellite, DoS attacks). Also, the protocol, which can handle large delays, will have significant differences to regular TCP/IP.
Also, I'd like to know how to NASA will solve a few problems that jump to mind. The communication hubs are only useful if they are close to the sending spacecraft. The hubs can not be put halfway earth and a planet, because of the planets rotation around the sun. So the hub would have to circle around a planet in order for future missions to that particular planet can use it.
But then NASA faces the following problems: on planets with an atmosphere, the hubs will tend to fall to the surface, so in many cases they need fuel to keep their altitude.
Secondly, the hub will only be visible from one side of the planet at the time.
Thirdly, the hub needs power, where to get it from for an extended period of time? Or are the hubs only short lived? In that case, why bother at all?
What I really don't get is why the Linux-community gets all carried away by having a game ported.
I couldn't care less under which OS a game runs. For CPU intensive games, the OS is even in the way, hurting performance. Yes, Linux as well, albeit maybe marginally less than Windows.
There is a reason you don't find many games under Linux. Graphic card drivers are much better optimized for Windows systems. Porting a graphics intensive game to Linux is a waste of resources.
Hello this is Dr. Cooper. Can you call me back please because my batteries are running emp
In the long run PHP has as much chance to be a Java killer as .NET does.
:-)
.net language of choice - a somewhat improved java).
I don't think so. As one of the first posters with +5 comment score points out, you will run into the wall when doing big projects with a scripting language. And despite all the nice OO-like features that have been thrown in to PHP, it still is essentially a script language.
I have been working on a project where we built a not-too-complex site using Cold Fusion. It started out simple: read in form fields, throw them in the database, read them and present them as a web-page. Cold Fusion or PHP are great for this.
Not much later, the application became more complex. We got more tables, and backoffice people needed to be able to do fairly complex mutations. We ran into the wall with CF. We hired professionals that spent about EUR 500,000 to try to write our back-office system in CF. They never delivered anything (also due to the fact that they were not the most professional company - if they were, they wouldn't have started off using CF).
Now why is it that scripting languages blow up when projects get bigger? You'd say that all you do is showing forms and pumping around data in the database.
We moved over to dotNet (there goes my Karma). Suddenly things became a lot easier. Why? Because we were able to program object oriented, for one thing. (So - java would have been similar order of magnitude improvement over scripting. You may mod me up now.
We were now able to cleanly seperate our code in distinct building blocks, without any overlap. Each class (an OO-building block) had a very clear job. Changes on a class that for instance handled sessions, did not cause other parts of the code needing adaptions. There were just a few isolated classes doing database transactions. Logging, error trapping and user tracking were much easier - we didn't need to pollute many files in our code with LOG messages - we could centralize them using exceptions.
Now some of you may say: "PHP also has this". But PHP is not a pure OO language.
To all who are not convinced that OO-programming is adding any benefit: Get a copy of Bertrand Meyers hallmark book Object Oriented Software Construction right now. It will explain what OO really is about and explains quite scientifically why procedural programming is inferior when programming larger projects that do not need to squeeze the most out of every clockcycle (for instance, backoffice projects, web sites). The book is over 1300 pages, but you can be sure that you will not want to program non-OO anymore before you have even reached page 100. Then it will also become clear PHP is lacking many OO features.
In short, there are many criteria before a language can call itself fully OO (the book mentions 15!). The main benefits OO brings you are reusability of code, and being forced to use a certain structure in your code. PHP does not qualify as OO, despite the OO-like features that were thrown in.
To finish the story: our CF scripts were quickly replaced by C# (the
There is one other consideration though, that I must mention. Not unimportant: economic considerations. OO-programmers are more expensive and harder to find than procedural programmers. This may lead companies to decide to go for non-OO techniques. But they shoot themselves in the foot as soon as they want to build even a moderately complex back-office.
You can also turn this around: learn OO, be more productive, and have a higher salary as a bonus.
It's great to see that this project is making such wonderful progress. It will be fantastic to have a fully functional Windows 95 running under Linux 4.0 in ten years from now.