Re:Does this mean...
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah. The point of the episode was that was is *SUPPOSED* to be bloody, horrible and gruesome, and therefore to be avoided. When a war is fought by mechanical proxies, that aspect fades away, and the concept of war becomes more palatable.
Your first machine had external storage? We had to have the machine electrically shock people to write things down on paper to store them. And we were glad to have it too... you kids with your new-fangled...
Not true. Basic scientific calcs should be acceptable in HS. By that time, you should be able to do basic arithmetic on your own, and that allows you to avoid basic arithmetical errors.
Solvers, and higher functions, no. And there should be NO calculators in elementary or Jr. High.
I actually had a Radio Shack cashier tell me he couldn't sell me a cable because I refused to give him my phone numnber. I haven't darkened their doors since.
Lately I've been getting spam for some sort of pyramid scheme, where you snailmail money to somebody, and they email you a "report" that you then shift everyone up one and email to all your (soon-to-be-ex-) friends.
Since it involves snailmail for sending the $$$, couldn't the USPS get involved for postal fraud?
While OOP has some advantages in a traditional setting, where it really shines is when you use OOA/D (OO Analysis and Design) as well. If you do a traditional functional analysis and design, then you get a procedurally oriented design. Any OOP benefits you get out of that will be minimal.
However, if you do OOA/D, then you come up with an object-based design, and at that point using OOP really helps a lot.
The question then becomes one of how do you want to perform your requirements analysis. If your requirements are strictly functional, then you don't get much benefit.
On the other hand, even with a functional design, you can still benefit from some features of OOP (the Pipe/SquarePipe/RoundPipe examples above come to mind).
As several people have mentioned, if you can factor your problem and find the commonalities (remembering to distinguish IS-A relationships from HAS-A relationships), you may be able to take some advantage.
Many of the problems you mention (Monte Carlo simulation of XXX, finite difference solutions to DiffEqs, etc...) are at too low a level to use OOP. If you look at them, they're really more a means than an end in and of themselves. The question you need to look at is, "What am I using these low-level 'primitives' to do? What is the big picture?"
For example, you mention radiative heat transfer. Maybe you're designing an engine. You could put the (procedurally oriented) radiative heat transfer routines inside the Radiator object (note, I have no background in engineering -- I'm guessing...), and use it that way in an OO manner.
However, in the end, it all comes down to your analysis and design.
Incidentally, there's one more thing to consider: IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT! I know that engineers have tons and tons of debugged, working FORTRAN code. If you use that, you don't have to worry about the typo you made in re-implementing the FFT.... Always a consideration.
I used to have a genuine blue IBM AT-339 in our lab. The thing ran for 10 years before 1) the power supply died (of course, nobody ever checked for lint:-P and we needed to upgrade the PS anyways), and the CMS 30MB drive died. We replaced it with an 80MB IDE drive and controller. IT was still running for about another 4 years before we surplussed it. I kept the keyboard though...
If you work for a place like this, send your concerns to up the chain of command... IN WRITING... IN HARDCOPY. Insist on hardcopy response, and keep copies of all such communications offsite, where you can get at them, but the company (in an attempt to create plausible deniability) can't.
Then, when they try to nail your ass to the wall, you can show that you wanted to fix it, but were overruled.
Just a comment, looks like the answers to 14 and 15 got mixed together by accident. I assume the answer to 14 was the first paragraph only, since the rest was referring to authentication and.NET.
I hate to admit it, but Ms. Aguilera may actually survive... I was watching Jay Leno one night, and she was a guest. She sang the blues... No, let me rephrase that... She SANG THE BLUES...
I don't like her pop stuff, but the girl can sing.
Re:The Lack of an Anti-Spam Lobby
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
But if they ban spam, then how would I learn how to MAKE MONEY FAST, or WIPE OUT CREDIT CARD DEBT, or BUY VIAGRA NOW, or even find out that SUZY IS HOT for me???
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. The point of the episode was that was is *SUPPOSED* to be bloody, horrible and gruesome, and therefore to be avoided. When a war is fought by mechanical proxies, that aspect fades away, and the concept of war becomes more palatable.
Who hasn't? Of course, the autoloaders helped, but I've dealt with those that needed to be hand threaded too...
Your first machine had external storage? We had to have the machine electrically shock people to write things down on paper to store them. And we were glad to have it too... you kids with your new-fangled...
Not true. Basic scientific calcs should be acceptable in HS. By that time, you should be able to do basic arithmetic on your own, and that allows you to avoid basic arithmetical errors.
Solvers, and higher functions, no. And there should be NO calculators in elementary or Jr. High.
I actually had a Radio Shack cashier tell me he couldn't sell me a cable because I refused to give him my phone numnber. I haven't darkened their doors since.
You should have given him a 976 pr0n number!
Slashdot friend/foe system lets you see comments from people you know to be funny or informative
OK, I admit it. I'm clueless. Is there a way to manage friends/foes without clicking on the little gray pearl?
Just a note, fatbrain.com *IS* bn.com.
Is he a Scottish Therapist?
Lately I've been getting spam for some sort of pyramid scheme, where you snailmail money to somebody, and they email you a "report" that you then shift everyone up one and email to all your (soon-to-be-ex-) friends.
Since it involves snailmail for sending the $$$, couldn't the USPS get involved for postal fraud?
While OOP has some advantages in a traditional setting, where it really shines is when you use OOA/D (OO Analysis and Design) as well. If you do a traditional functional analysis and design, then you get a procedurally oriented design. Any OOP benefits you get out of that will be minimal.
However, if you do OOA/D, then you come up with an object-based design, and at that point using OOP really helps a lot.
The question then becomes one of how do you want to perform your requirements analysis. If your requirements are strictly functional, then you don't get much benefit.
On the other hand, even with a functional design, you can still benefit from some features of OOP (the Pipe/SquarePipe/RoundPipe examples above come to mind).
As several people have mentioned, if you can factor your problem and find the commonalities (remembering to distinguish IS-A relationships from HAS-A relationships), you may be able to take some advantage.
Many of the problems you mention (Monte Carlo simulation of XXX, finite difference solutions to DiffEqs, etc...) are at too low a level to use OOP. If you look at them, they're really more a means than an end in and of themselves. The question you need to look at is, "What am I using these low-level 'primitives' to do? What is the big picture?"
For example, you mention radiative heat transfer. Maybe you're designing an engine. You could put the (procedurally oriented) radiative heat transfer routines inside the Radiator object (note, I have no background in engineering -- I'm guessing...), and use it that way in an OO manner.
However, in the end, it all comes down to your analysis and design.
Incidentally, there's one more thing to consider: IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT! I know that engineers have tons and tons of debugged, working FORTRAN code. If you use that, you don't have to worry about the typo you made in re-implementing the FFT.... Always a consideration.
Nah, you hand code it in machine code as a C array of bytes...
unsigned char main[] = {
Assembler is for wimps!
</HUMOR>
Seriously, you use Ada95 or C++.
Good point. You're right. Thank you for the correction.
A Beowulf Clus--aarrruugh!
/.'ers begins lynching him
Drops dead and dies as a mob of angry
But that's security through obscurity!!!!
They should publicly document all their security measures, using an open documentation license, so that everyone could examine the security for flaws!
That's why a *good* CS department teaches theory rather than practice.
I used to have a genuine blue IBM AT-339 in our lab. The thing ran for 10 years before 1) the power supply died (of course, nobody ever checked for lint :-P and we needed to upgrade the PS anyways), and the CMS 30MB drive died. We replaced it with an 80MB IDE drive and controller. IT was still running for about another 4 years before we surplussed it. I kept the keyboard though...
IANAL, but I know about CYA...
If you work for a place like this, send your concerns to up the chain of command... IN WRITING... IN HARDCOPY. Insist on hardcopy response, and keep copies of all such communications offsite, where you can get at them, but the company (in an attempt to create plausible deniability) can't.
Then, when they try to nail your ass to the wall, you can show that you wanted to fix it, but were overruled.
Dude, he was right the second time. 115KiloBIT not KiloByte.
THANK YOU!!!! I've missed my Vulture Central fix while their DNS was down!
I suspect that, should any of this come to SCOTUS, that Scalia would actually be friendly to what we're trying to do. He's a strict constructionist.
I'm not sure friendly is the right word, but I can't think of the proper word at this moment.
Has anyone out there done a Linux port of Steve Shipway's Wanderer?
Just a comment, looks like the answers to 14 and 15 got mixed together by accident. I assume the answer to 14 was the first paragraph only, since the rest was referring to authentication and
His name is "Doody".
I hate to admit it, but Ms. Aguilera may actually survive... I was watching Jay Leno one night, and she was a guest. She sang the blues... No, let me rephrase that... She SANG THE BLUES...
I don't like her pop stuff, but the girl can sing.
But if they ban spam, then how would I learn how to MAKE MONEY FAST, or WIPE OUT CREDIT CARD DEBT, or BUY VIAGRA NOW, or even find out that SUZY IS HOT for me???