raising *deep* sounding questions isn't all there is to philosophy... believe it or not, philosophers actually do a pretty good job of addressing, and coming up with *answers* to these questions, which the matrix movie does not.
I don't like the philosophy in the matrix movies, or in almost any movie, because the constraints of the medium dictate that nothing more can happen other than a few brief sketches of questions are made, and that there just isn't *time* to address them. This is just a cheap trick used to inject the sensation that the movie is "deep," without actually making the writers go to the trouble of saying anything original or meaningful.
is a monster of a language, and stroustrups knows it, but sometimes it takes an ugly monster of a language to get a job done.
Nothing will ever replace c++, except another language like c++ that provides all of its low level power. That said, I'd like to see a few outstanding issues in c++ fixed.
1. compile times. headers should be discarded, and a single implementation file approach used by java and c# adopted. 2. templates should be cleaned up a little bit. c# style generics are generally preferable (although runtime instantiation is probably impossible for a compiled language.) 3. 1st class lambda's and bindings would be nice. the stuff provided through boost is pretty awkward right now...
It would be nice if there was a language that was to c++ as c# is to java, a language that fits the same niche, but doesn't have to be compatible so that core language issues can be learned form and cleaned up. To some extent D fills this void, but I'm waiting for a more fleshed out toolchain (IDE, 3rd party libs and bindings, etc) to become available for it before I mess with it for anything more than for fun projects.
They've put out quite a few interesting experimental languages for the.NET platform.
In particular f# (ocaml with.NETified classes) looks pretty cool.
Can anyone in the know comment on how doing research for a company like microsoft compares to doing CS research at a university? I'd imagine the pay would be somewhat better, but are there other tradeoffs like reduced freedom?
As a couple of posters have mentioned, setting up the hardware is a big part of what slows systems down during boot.
One way to increase speed this up is to perform a lot of tasks in parallel. For instance, DHCP tends to take a lot of time on some systems, particularly if the network is lousy. Most linux distros I've seen tend to block on that operation, waiting for it to complete before starting the next step of the boot script. Load time could be improved in that and other cases if this operation were performed asynchronously.
The main problem with this and most other techniques to speed up boot times, like loading a saved boot image directly into ram, is that this increases the complexity of the boot process, which increases the likelihood of failure. For instance, if services/deamons are starting in parallel, then services that depend on one another must be set up to block until the services that they depend on start up. This becomes a problem, because 99% of the time a service which depends on another could just start later naturally and testers might not even realize that this service depends on the earlier one, but on a multi proc machine, or just on a bad day, the service that depends on the earlier service might boot later.
Basically, doing things in parallel wrecks the determinism that computers normally exhibit, which as any computer scientist, philosopher, or physicist will tell you, is something that injects a lot of uncertainty into our reasoning.
At the very least if boot times are sped up with techniques like this, then computers need a "slow and safe" fall back boot script.
It's high time everyone else learned English anyway.
Seriously though, having lots of character sets is a stupid idea. Suddenly, you can only even type in a website's name if you have the right language pack/keyboard.
English is the dominant international language right now, and it is only sensible that there be a standard English, or at least latin character set, interface to everything. It's one thing to provide support for other languages, but moving too far away from the standard will only increase the segmentation of the internet and decrease the information available to any one person.
Latin domain names insure that there's a standard and simple way for anyone running any OS with any language pack to type in any domain name, if only to run it through babelfish. Most major foreign languages (japanese, chinese) have systems for writing in the latin character set anyways, which are certainly sufficient for the short strings used in *domain names*.
Here are the math classes that are traditionally required for CS majors in order of importance. 1. linear algebra (if you ever want to do graphics you need this). 2. discrete mathematics (usually 2 courses on this covering various topics, such as graph theory, proofs, etc). 3. stats. (Honestly I haven't taken the course yet, but stats comes up enough in other courses, like AI, that I wish I had.) 4. calc. (primarily because taking calc guarantees you can do all the little bits of arithmetic and geometry you will need. also, being able to differentiate a function is handy occasionally.)
There are people who will argue that calc should be number one, and I'm not saying it isn't absolutely essential *for some problem spaces*, but for the core problem spaces associated with computer science, you won't need it.
That said, all the math classes that are required for CS deps (at least the ones I've listed) are pretty handy tools to have in your box, and I don't feel like calculus was a waste of my time. It's just that if you absolutely had to scratch one of the four out of the curriculum, you'd probably pick calc.
>Uh, the idiomatic "right to..." phrase typically means "moral justification to...". I have nothing more to say to that other than it is patently false, and you should learn how to speak english.
Absolutely right. If Samba doesn't want their code to be used like this, then they shouldn't have put it out under a license that *explicitly gives Novell the right to do whatever they want with it*.
If anything the samba post just goes to show that they have little understanding of the GPL and the philosophy behind the free software movement. The samba developers should know that they retain no right whatsoever to tell any company what they can and cannot use their software for, as they have already given them a license for unlimited use.
The fact is, they don't have to like or approve of what novell does with their software, as long as novell follows their legal agreement, they have every right to do whatever they want with it.
>Remember Vader's lines: "I am altering the terms of our agreement. Pray that I do not alter them again."
*rolls eyes* Why don't you just compare microsoft to Hitler while you're at it? Jesus, this is software development, not freaking star wars you *child*.
I will not dignify the content of your post by addressing it directly. I will just say that it was a total load of shrill, nonsensical, and ignorant bullshit, and that you should feel ashamed for having written it.
"Novell donates, code to firefox, and now Microsoft can sue the mozilla foundation for patent infringements,"
That's a totally illogical and ignorant statement. Whether or not someone is in violation of a patent has *nothing* to do with who wrote their code. Such an idea totally confuses patents and copyright.
I can't believe the amount of bullshit that's been posted on slashdot since the novell microsoft deal. The deal is something that in no way shape or form puts microsoft in any position to threaten the open source movement (how could it?!), if anything it does the exact opposite. Yet, since it happened slashdot has been filled with fear mongers and bigots who can do nothing but spew shrill and incoherent microsoft bashing, and "deal with the devil" arguments.
The reasons that microsoft has been allying with various opensource companies like Novell and Xensource, and releasing open source software (wtl, wix, etc) are entirely clear and make total business sense. There's no need to construct some legally impossible and nefarious scheme about microsoft trying to sue open source companies, especially considering that part of the legal agreement microsoft made with Novell was to *not sue based on patents*.
The information I've read on the microsoft novell deal provided scant details. Does anyone know if microsoft will be providing any support for further development of mono? After all, it is one of novells projects. Microsoft would also obviously have a lot to gain by having a decent implementation of.NET on linux servers.
Now, I'm aware that anti competition laws usually only apply to monopolies, which sony certainly is not. However, it seems like there should be *some* law against "you can't use any of our competitors products in conjunction with this" licenses.
Furthermore, how is it that anyone needs a license? Isn't the format and technology well understood, or if not, couldn't it be reverse engineered? Are there patent constraints that I don't know about?
This summary and article, which I list complaints about below, is symptomatic of the sparse and incredibly poor science reporting that has been coming out of slashdot. This "news for nerds site" has better coverage of battlestar galactica, and whatever RMS and linus torvalds has for breakfast this morning than anything substantive about the sciences. I for one would like to see some effort to improve on the part of the editorial staff. If you are with me on this and would like slashdot to become a more informative and less glitzy news site, please post replies outlining problems you've seen and possible solutions.
The article mentions that more neanderthals lived in europe than africa, and that distribution of this gene that may or may not have come from neanderthals corresponds to that. However, the article also mentions that *70% of the human population* has this gene. If the gene's presence in africa is lower, they don't say how much lower. The data mentioned in the article gives no indication whether the gene is present in a majority or a minority of africans.
Given all of these qualifications present in the article, the submitter was obviously trying to spice up his submission to get it posted by playing up the race element and drawing a strong connection between this gene and race *that the original article doesn't actually show*.
Personally, I would be curious to see more of the data that these people collected; maybe even see the actual distribution of this gene by geographic location. However, lately a lot of incredibly poor science reporting has been posted on slashdot. By poor science reporting, I mean articles that include a lot of fantastic speculation (often primarily in the summary...) but no hard data.
This is a site for news for nerds! We want numbers graphs and PI charts! Not some f*cking cnn article with incredibly vague details about research the submitter obviously doesn't understand. Let's see some positive change hear.
At this point in time there have been a number of projects from microsoft that have released their sources under some license or another. Some of them have been true open source licenses, and remarkably those have been hosted on sourceforge along with all the other oss stuff. I'll list the few I know about here and maybe others can mention a few.
WTL: An extension to the ATL. Probably the best toolkit for developing win32 guis in c++ (lightweight and powerful). It's hampered by the fact that documentation for it is scatered around the net (mostly on the code project) and so mostly people usually end up learning about it by reading through the largely uncommented source. license: cpl (alternately available under a different, maybe equiavent license if downloaded from microsofts site) http://wtl.sourceforge.net/
Rotor: A cross platform implementation of the.NET runtime developed by microsoft. Runs on windows and BSD I believe, and has been ported to linux by third parties. I don't believe it includes the.NET framework, and is more designed as a reference implementation of "how to get.NET working on other platforms" than anything else. License: shared source http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/roto r/
Licenses: So far microsoft seems to use the shared source license and the CPL license.
The shared source license is relatively restrictive, and generally leaves microsoft with most of the power over issues of reditribution and use of source. Shared source seems to be largely used to distribute code for educational, debugging, and customization uses.
The CPL is a full blown open source/free software license that was actually written by IBM and I believe is the license that eclipse is distributed under (only under a different name). Community projects like Wix and WTL are being handled under this license.
My impression from talking to microsoft guys and from working there briefly is that the antipathy felt towards linux and open source is not particularly pervasive in the company. I've met a few people who had negative misconceptions about open source, but whatever the average slashdotter might think microsoft tends to hire smart people who are aware of industry trends and best practices including oss.
Without knowing your exact skill level, it's difficult to give you advice. However, I can mention a number of things that I see a lot of coders doing wrong.
1. Not knowing when to use gotos in c: Notice that I didn't say not to use gotos. Anyone who says that gotos are just "bad" hasn't programmed in c enough.
Strictly speaking gotos should be used, and *only* should be used in exactly two classes of programming problems.
1.1. Deeply nested loops that must be broken out of entirely on some condition of the inner most loop. 1.2. Error handling. In languages that support exceptions, they can and should be used, but in c gotos should be used in this way: result = function1(); if (result == ERROR) goto error; result = function2(); if (result == ERROR) goto error;...
goto cleanup: error://log error message here cleanup://cleanup dynamically allocated memory and close files here before returning.
As you can see the error section of code is equivalent to a catch block and the cleanup section of code is equivalent to a finally block. There really is no better way to do this in c (without macros wrapping longjmp like objective c does). Be sure not to get too fancy with your gotos here.
2. Learn object oriented programming techniques. A lot of people learn the very basics in school, and don't go much further. I'll list some areas to look into. 2.1. If you haven't already, implement some of the basic ADT's (most people did this in school). 2.2. Learn the special object oriented semantics of your language of choice. Every language has it's own funky way of being object oriented, and you need to know all the gotchas and the best workarounds. 2.3. Learn about various design patterns. Skim through the Design Patterns book, and try applying various patterns that catch your eye. The important thing that design patterns should teach you is how to write your code as a bunch of loosely coupled components.
3. Learn about functional langauges and generics. Both functional and generic programming revolve around a set of techniques and programming constructs that are increasingly supported in mainstream c based languages like c++, c#, and java.
Probably the best way to do this is to learn SML, or ocaml, as these languages are both functional and generic. Many people will recommend learning scheme or LISP, which is a language that is functional, but not generic. Personally, I think that scheme is a poor language, but it has a few interesting features like continuations that are worth learning about.
All these languages are academic languages not really suitable for real world projects (with the exception of maybe ocaml). The point of learning them is that they do a good job of introducing concepts that are becoming increasingly important in programming.
Aside from specific skills to learn, the most important thing that you do when you write code is to think about all the different possible ways it could be written, and choose the best one. Also, pay attention to the overall structure of your program. The best kind of program to have is made up of a bunch of components that individually perform very simple and well defined tasks. As a rule it's better to have lots of small classes than a very few big ones.
There's a lot more that can be said... but I think that should get you started.
So they've *finally* gotten file transfer working on aim? I'm glad that they did this, but why the hell did it take so long? This is a bread and butter feature... Now how long will we have to wait for working voice chat that all the proprietary clients already support?
For such a widely used utility, I've always wondered why gaim development progressed so slowly. Since it doesn't support things like aim file transfers and voice chat, most people I know still stick with an old (and lighter weight) version of AIM, even though it sends them ads. Maybe once gaim 2.0 comes out of beta, I'll be able to finally convince them to switch.
As the above poster mentioned, monodevelop is actually nowhere near being usable for.NET development. This goes doubly so on a mac.
Personally, I don't really understand why the community is spending so much effort on putting together another IDE for linux, when several already exist and could be easily extended to work for mono development.
The most obvious environment would be eclipse, which is highly extensible. A well written plugin for eclipse would do wonders for the mono community. I suspect that the primary reason for wanting to write a IDE from scratch had more to do with wanting to have the development environment be done in.NET top to bottom, but at this point in the development of.NET that just isn't realistic. Right now we need a stable bootstrap solution that is better than makefiles.
Are there any plans to make IE javascript more compatable with what's standard/available on other browsers.
Probably the biggest issue I'd like to see fixed is support for the standard event model. It's more powerful and virtually everything needs to use events, so it makes writing a web app that works with both IE and everything else a pain.
Also, has there been any discussion of supporting the canvas tag at some point in the future? All the other browsers that I know of have adopted this, and if there were uniform adoption it would make the need to resort to flash less prevalent. At some point in the future it would be nice if I weren't *just* using my browser to launch the flash plugin.
these people are such media whores. Their project is such nonsense.
When the parts for laptops get cheap enough that someone could manufacture a $100 laptop, *then the market will be flooded with $100 laptops*. There are a dearth of hardware manufacturers out there already competing to make the cheapest laptop they can.
As far as I can tell the guys at MIT are mostly just stirring up news coverage to further their own prestige. I mean, please, recruiting hackers to fix the security model? That's obviously targeted to get them on slashdot, as are a lot of their other moves.
Furthermore, saying that they will have the largest computing base in history seems like congratulating these guys for something they haven't even done yet (if ever).
Slashdot Mirror
raising *deep* sounding questions isn't all there is to philosophy... believe it or not, philosophers actually do a pretty good job of addressing, and coming up with *answers* to these questions, which the matrix movie does not.
I don't like the philosophy in the matrix movies, or in almost any movie, because the constraints of the medium dictate that nothing more can happen other than a few brief sketches of questions are made, and that there just isn't *time* to address them. This is just a cheap trick used to inject the sensation that the movie is "deep," without actually making the writers go to the trouble of saying anything original or meaningful.
is a monster of a language, and stroustrups knows it, but sometimes it takes an ugly monster of a language to get a job done.
Nothing will ever replace c++, except another language like c++ that provides all of its low level power. That said, I'd like to see a few outstanding issues in c++ fixed.
1. compile times. headers should be discarded, and a single implementation file approach used by java and c# adopted.
2. templates should be cleaned up a little bit. c# style generics are generally preferable (although runtime instantiation is probably impossible for a compiled language.)
3. 1st class lambda's and bindings would be nice. the stuff provided through boost is pretty awkward right now...
It would be nice if there was a language that was to c++ as c# is to java, a language that fits the same niche, but doesn't have to be compatible so that core language issues can be learned form and cleaned up. To some extent D fills this void, but I'm waiting for a more fleshed out toolchain (IDE, 3rd party libs and bindings, etc) to become available for it before I mess with it for anything more than for fun projects.
They've put out quite a few interesting experimental languages for the .NET platform.
.NETified classes) looks pretty cool.
In particular f# (ocaml with
Can anyone in the know comment on how doing research for a company like microsoft compares to doing CS research at a university? I'd imagine the pay would be somewhat better, but are there other tradeoffs like reduced freedom?
As a couple of posters have mentioned, setting up the hardware is a big part of what slows systems down during boot.
One way to increase speed this up is to perform a lot of tasks in parallel. For instance, DHCP tends to take a lot of time on some systems, particularly if the network is lousy. Most linux distros I've seen tend to block on that operation, waiting for it to complete before starting the next step of the boot script. Load time could be improved in that and other cases if this operation were performed asynchronously.
The main problem with this and most other techniques to speed up boot times, like loading a saved boot image directly into ram, is that this increases the complexity of the boot process, which increases the likelihood of failure. For instance, if services/deamons are starting in parallel, then services that depend on one another must be set up to block until the services that they depend on start up. This becomes a problem, because 99% of the time a service which depends on another could just start later naturally and testers might not even realize that this service depends on the earlier one, but on a multi proc machine, or just on a bad day, the service that depends on the earlier service might boot later.
Basically, doing things in parallel wrecks the determinism that computers normally exhibit, which as any computer scientist, philosopher, or physicist will tell you, is something that injects a lot of uncertainty into our reasoning.
At the very least if boot times are sped up with techniques like this, then computers need a "slow and safe" fall back boot script.
It's high time everyone else learned English anyway.
Seriously though, having lots of character sets is a stupid idea. Suddenly, you can only even type in a website's name if you have the right language pack/keyboard.
English is the dominant international language right now, and it is only sensible that there be a standard English, or at least latin character set, interface to everything. It's one thing to provide support for other languages, but moving too far away from the standard will only increase the segmentation of the internet and decrease the information available to any one person.
Latin domain names insure that there's a standard and simple way for anyone running any OS with any language pack to type in any domain name, if only to run it through babelfish. Most major foreign languages (japanese, chinese) have systems for writing in the latin character set anyways, which are certainly sufficient for the short strings used in *domain names*.
in porn, is that there would be nothing but a lot of one man shows.
That's a very intelligent way to put it.
I usually just say that strippers do what they do because they are ho-bags.
In any case, you sound like a prick.
First IAACSM.
Here are the math classes that are traditionally required for CS majors in order of importance.
1. linear algebra (if you ever want to do graphics you need this).
2. discrete mathematics (usually 2 courses on this covering various topics, such as graph theory, proofs, etc).
3. stats. (Honestly I haven't taken the course yet, but stats comes up enough in other courses, like AI, that I wish I had.)
4. calc. (primarily because taking calc guarantees you can do all the little bits of arithmetic and geometry you will need. also, being able to differentiate a function is handy occasionally.)
There are people who will argue that calc should be number one, and I'm not saying it isn't absolutely essential *for some problem spaces*, but for the core problem spaces associated with computer science, you won't need it.
That said, all the math classes that are required for CS deps (at least the ones I've listed) are pretty handy tools to have in your box, and I don't feel like calculus was a waste of my time. It's just that if you absolutely had to scratch one of the four out of the curriculum, you'd probably pick calc.
People often say many things which are patently incorrect when they are being irrational and stupid. That's not an idiom dumbass.
Also, I'm not on a high horse (that's an idiom!), I just think you are stupid.
what argument? you just made some hysterical shrieking noises. I'm saying you are beneath my contempt.
>Uh, the idiomatic "right to ..." phrase typically means "moral justification to ...".
I have nothing more to say to that other than it is patently false, and you should learn how to speak english.
Absolutely right. If Samba doesn't want their code to be used like this, then they shouldn't have put it out under a license that *explicitly gives Novell the right to do whatever they want with it*.
If anything the samba post just goes to show that they have little understanding of the GPL and the philosophy behind the free software movement. The samba developers should know that they retain no right whatsoever to tell any company what they can and cannot use their software for, as they have already given them a license for unlimited use.
The fact is, they don't have to like or approve of what novell does with their software, as long as novell follows their legal agreement, they have every right to do whatever they want with it.
>Remember Vader's lines: "I am altering the terms of our agreement. Pray that I do not alter them again."
*rolls eyes* Why don't you just compare microsoft to Hitler while you're at it? Jesus, this is software development, not freaking star wars you *child*.
I will not dignify the content of your post by addressing it directly. I will just say that it was a total load of shrill, nonsensical, and ignorant bullshit, and that you should feel ashamed for having written it.
"Novell donates, code to firefox, and now Microsoft can sue the mozilla foundation for patent infringements,"
That's a totally illogical and ignorant statement. Whether or not someone is in violation of a patent has *nothing* to do with who wrote their code. Such an idea totally confuses patents and copyright.
I can't believe the amount of bullshit that's been posted on slashdot since the novell microsoft deal. The deal is something that in no way shape or form puts microsoft in any position to threaten the open source movement (how could it?!), if anything it does the exact opposite. Yet, since it happened slashdot has been filled with fear mongers and bigots who can do nothing but spew shrill and incoherent microsoft bashing, and "deal with the devil" arguments.
The reasons that microsoft has been allying with various opensource companies like Novell and Xensource, and releasing open source software (wtl, wix, etc) are entirely clear and make total business sense. There's no need to construct some legally impossible and nefarious scheme about microsoft trying to sue open source companies, especially considering that part of the legal agreement microsoft made with Novell was to *not sue based on patents*.
The information I've read on the microsoft novell deal provided scant details. Does anyone know if microsoft will be providing any support for further development of mono? After all, it is one of novells projects. Microsoft would also obviously have a lot to gain by having a decent implementation of .NET on linux servers.
and like you mentioned, microsoft made a deal with novell to not pursue patent violations. Obviously their projects are protected...
your son's (computer) is already dead.
NOOOOooooo
Now, I'm aware that anti competition laws usually only apply to monopolies, which sony certainly is not. However, it seems like there should be *some* law against "you can't use any of our competitors products in conjunction with this" licenses.
Furthermore, how is it that anyone needs a license? Isn't the format and technology well understood, or if not, couldn't it be reverse engineered? Are there patent constraints that I don't know about?
This summary and article, which I list complaints about below, is symptomatic of the sparse and incredibly poor science reporting that has been coming out of slashdot. This "news for nerds site" has better coverage of battlestar galactica, and whatever RMS and linus torvalds has for breakfast this morning than anything substantive about the sciences. I for one would like to see some effort to improve on the part of the editorial staff. If you are with me on this and would like slashdot to become a more informative and less glitzy news site, please post replies outlining problems you've seen and possible solutions.
The article mentions that more neanderthals lived in europe than africa, and that distribution of this gene that may or may not have come from neanderthals corresponds to that. However, the article also mentions that *70% of the human population* has this gene. If the gene's presence in africa is lower, they don't say how much lower. The data mentioned in the article gives no indication whether the gene is present in a majority or a minority of africans.
Given all of these qualifications present in the article, the submitter was obviously trying to spice up his submission to get it posted by playing up the race element and drawing a strong connection between this gene and race *that the original article doesn't actually show*.
Personally, I would be curious to see more of the data that these people collected; maybe even see the actual distribution of this gene by geographic location. However, lately a lot of incredibly poor science reporting has been posted on slashdot. By poor science reporting, I mean articles that include a lot of fantastic speculation (often primarily in the summary...) but no hard data.
This is a site for news for nerds! We want numbers graphs and PI charts! Not some f*cking cnn article with incredibly vague details about research the submitter obviously doesn't understand. Let's see some positive change hear.
At this point in time there have been a number of projects from microsoft that have released their sources under some license or another. Some of them have been true open source licenses, and remarkably those have been hosted on sourceforge along with all the other oss stuff. I'll list the few I know about here and maybe others can mention a few.
.NET runtime developed by microsoft. Runs on windows and BSD I believe, and has been ported to linux by third parties. I don't believe it includes the .NET framework, and is more designed as a reference implementation of "how to get .NET working on other platforms" than anything else.o r/
i censing/WindowsCE.mspx
Wix:
A toolset for building installer packages on windows. Supposedly one of the better ones.
license: cpl
http://wix.sourceforge.net/index.html
WTL:
An extension to the ATL. Probably the best toolkit for developing win32 guis in c++ (lightweight and powerful). It's hampered by the fact that documentation for it is scatered around the net (mostly on the code project) and so mostly people usually end up learning about it by reading through the largely uncommented source.
license: cpl (alternately available under a different, maybe equiavent license if downloaded from microsofts site)
http://wtl.sourceforge.net/
Rotor:
A cross platform implementation of the
License: shared source
http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/rot
Windows CE:
Mentioned in article. I think they release it under this license for custimization and debuggin purposes.
License: shared source
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/L
Licenses:
So far microsoft seems to use the shared source license and the CPL license.
The shared source license is relatively restrictive, and generally leaves microsoft with most of the power over issues of reditribution and use of source. Shared source seems to be largely used to distribute code for educational, debugging, and customization uses.
The CPL is a full blown open source/free software license that was actually written by IBM and I believe is the license that eclipse is distributed under (only under a different name). Community projects like Wix and WTL are being handled under this license.
My impression from talking to microsoft guys and from working there briefly is that the antipathy felt towards linux and open source is not particularly pervasive in the company. I've met a few people who had negative misconceptions about open source, but whatever the average slashdotter might think microsoft tends to hire smart people who are aware of industry trends and best practices including oss.
Without knowing your exact skill level, it's difficult to give you advice. However, I can mention a number of things that I see a lot of coders doing wrong.
...
//log error message here //cleanup dynamically allocated memory and close files here before returning.
1. Not knowing when to use gotos in c:
Notice that I didn't say not to use gotos. Anyone who says that gotos are just "bad" hasn't programmed in c enough.
Strictly speaking gotos should be used, and *only* should be used in exactly two classes of programming problems.
1.1. Deeply nested loops that must be broken out of entirely on some condition of the inner most loop.
1.2. Error handling. In languages that support exceptions, they can and should be used, but in c gotos should be used in this way:
result = function1();
if (result == ERROR) goto error;
result = function2();
if (result == ERROR) goto error;
goto cleanup:
error:
cleanup:
As you can see the error section of code is equivalent to a catch block and the cleanup section of code is equivalent to a finally block. There really is no better way to do this in c (without macros wrapping longjmp like objective c does). Be sure not to get too fancy with your gotos here.
2. Learn object oriented programming techniques. A lot of people learn the very basics in school, and don't go much further. I'll list some areas to look into.
2.1. If you haven't already, implement some of the basic ADT's (most people did this in school).
2.2. Learn the special object oriented semantics of your language of choice. Every language has it's own funky way of being object oriented, and you need to know all the gotchas and the best workarounds.
2.3. Learn about various design patterns. Skim through the Design Patterns book, and try applying various patterns that catch your eye. The important thing that design patterns should teach you is how to write your code as a bunch of loosely coupled components.
3. Learn about functional langauges and generics. Both functional and generic programming revolve around a set of techniques and programming constructs that are increasingly supported in mainstream c based languages like c++, c#, and java.
Probably the best way to do this is to learn SML, or ocaml, as these languages are both functional and generic. Many people will recommend learning scheme or LISP, which is a language that is functional, but not generic. Personally, I think that scheme is a poor language, but it has a few interesting features like continuations that are worth learning about.
All these languages are academic languages not really suitable for real world projects (with the exception of maybe ocaml). The point of learning them is that they do a good job of introducing concepts that are becoming increasingly important in programming.
Aside from specific skills to learn, the most important thing that you do when you write code is to think about all the different possible ways it could be written, and choose the best one. Also, pay attention to the overall structure of your program. The best kind of program to have is made up of a bunch of components that individually perform very simple and well defined tasks. As a rule it's better to have lots of small classes than a very few big ones.
There's a lot more that can be said... but I think that should get you started.
So they've *finally* gotten file transfer working on aim? I'm glad that they did this, but why the hell did it take so long? This is a bread and butter feature... Now how long will we have to wait for working voice chat that all the proprietary clients already support?
For such a widely used utility, I've always wondered why gaim development progressed so slowly. Since it doesn't support things like aim file transfers and voice chat, most people I know still stick with an old (and lighter weight) version of AIM, even though it sends them ads. Maybe once gaim 2.0 comes out of beta, I'll be able to finally convince them to switch.
As the above poster mentioned, monodevelop is actually nowhere near being usable for .NET development. This goes doubly so on a mac.
.NET top to bottom, but at this point in the development of .NET that just isn't realistic. Right now we need a stable bootstrap solution that is better than makefiles.
Personally, I don't really understand why the community is spending so much effort on putting together another IDE for linux, when several already exist and could be easily extended to work for mono development.
The most obvious environment would be eclipse, which is highly extensible. A well written plugin for eclipse would do wonders for the mono community. I suspect that the primary reason for wanting to write a IDE from scratch had more to do with wanting to have the development environment be done in
Are there any plans to make IE javascript more compatable with what's standard/available on other browsers.
Probably the biggest issue I'd like to see fixed is support for the standard event model. It's more powerful and virtually everything needs to use events, so it makes writing a web app that works with both IE and everything else a pain.
Also, has there been any discussion of supporting the canvas tag at some point in the future? All the other browsers that I know of have adopted this, and if there were uniform adoption it would make the need to resort to flash less prevalent. At some point in the future it would be nice if I weren't *just* using my browser to launch the flash plugin.
these people are such media whores. Their project is such nonsense.
When the parts for laptops get cheap enough that someone could manufacture a $100 laptop, *then the market will be flooded with $100 laptops*. There are a dearth of hardware manufacturers out there already competing to make the cheapest laptop they can.
As far as I can tell the guys at MIT are mostly just stirring up news coverage to further their own prestige. I mean, please, recruiting hackers to fix the security model? That's obviously targeted to get them on slashdot, as are a lot of their other moves.
Furthermore, saying that they will have the largest computing base in history seems like congratulating these guys for something they haven't even done yet (if ever).