Delphi is _much_ better. The DB controls in Delphi are wondrous. I have put together some pretty nice database applications without having to write hardly any code at all. In fact, I hardly had to write any SQL code, either.
The syntax for Object Pascal is much nicer than VB. OP supports true inheritance. VB might support that now, too, but during the wars between the two of them, they didn't.
I've used Delphi and VB, and at the time I used them (Delphi 3 and VB 5/6), Delphi had VB beat hands down.
"Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money."
Not much. You can get a book published and on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the other internet bookstores for under $500, assuming you have all of the talent to produce the content. Basically, all you _have_ to have are ISBN's ($350 for 10, I think) and a lightningsource.com account ($150 per ISBN), and everything is taken care of. Well, you need to promote it:) But I'm just talking about getting a book into print. Not much to it.
Actually, if you don't care about which distribution channels you go through, you can do it through CafePress.com for free (they don't care if you don't have an ISBN).
I think the big issue is that just like code, books need to undergo several rewrites because the first version usually doesn't cut it. I wrote my book over a period of three years. I would put it down for a few months and come back to it, and find all the ways in which it needed to be improved. That was followed by a rewriting of that section, much the same way we refactor and replace code to make it more beneficial within the system.
Making money is not wrong. The price of textbooks is often because of the small print runs. However, I can see print-on-demand making these costs go down. The technology exists today through companies like CafePress.com and LightningSource.com to make as few as 1 copy of a book for very low prices.
Of course, my book isn't expensive. In fact, it's the least-expensive book on assembly language that is available (see my sig).
Actually, this would be great for authors of textbooks to get educators from states like NY and TX to make customizations (i.e. - forks) that match their state's requirements.
"And this is where the liberals differ GREATLY from the conservative broadcasters."
I get the feeling you have never listened to conservative broadcasters. Of the ones I listen to, I can't think of _any_ that really like the president (Hannity does, but he's not one I listen to). Let's see -
Michael Savage: no. Rush Limbaugh: don't listen to him much these days, but he's been very critical of the president historically. Basically, he said the conservatives got hoodwinked when Bush said he was a conservative. Laura Ingram: no
Most of these people agree with the president on two issues - the tax cut and the war on terror. And yes, they like him a lot better than Kerry (I have yet to have _anyone_ point out a positive attribute of Kerry, except that they hate Bush). All of them agree that Bush has been horrible on border control, don't like Bush's protectionism, and think that he spends too much money. On other issues they vary between agreeing and disagreeing with the president.
All I can say is that if this is your opinion, then it's obvious you've never listened to conservative broadcasting.
I'll tell you what I like about Rush. If you listen through all of what he says, you'll find two underlying themes:
1) _you_ can do it. yourself. yes, you can. I believe in you
2) I'm having a lot more fun than the people criticizing me
That's basically what he says all day on the radio. I don't see why he is so hated. He puts it all in the frame of conservative politics, sure, but really those two points are the core of his program.
Re:journalistic credibility?
on
Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 1
"O'Reilly? WTF? I'll give you the other two, but O'Reilly? He lies almost as much as Limbaugh."
I haven't seen what you're referring to, but everything I've heard from O'Reilly seems to be okay, at least from a factual basis. I often disagree with O'Reilly, but I don't see him doing anything that isn't credible. Do you have links to online critiques? I'd be interested in taking a look. I don't care a whole lot - I think his show is pretty boring. Dennis Miller is the only one of those I really watch. I usually find the most informative stuff on the Food Network:)
Re:journalists
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"The very fact that Jayson Blair (and others like him) are found, fired, and publicly condemned for unethical journalism is proof that the industry does not tolerate such practices."
The fact that it took so long to find him out shows that the industry's editors believe anything and aren't doing their jobs.
However, we're not talking about people falsifying reports. The inability to use logic and accurately report multiple sides of the story are characteristic of modern journalism (if you've researched multiple sides of the story, you'll almost always find that one of them is horribly misrepresented every time - which side it is varies by the journalist).
Re:journalistic credibility?
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 1
Have you watched TV news lately, on any channel?
It's like the news shows just run press releases by whatever side they like, and don't actually question the claims made there, except superficially. They take most any pronouncement by anyone semi-famous and report it as "news".
Most reporters seem to be lacking in logic, and unable to tell when their guests or interview subjects are just giving them unsubstantiated BS. There's a slight exception there. Anytime someone is doing a story that agrees with their political persuation, they will give the opposition some decent questions but let those on "their side" get away with murder.
As an example of this happening on both sides of the ball, I give you "Hannity and Colmes". It's like they've both been lobotomized and can't process any thought or logic except to say that the other person is wrong.
There's three guys that I think have much less BS than anyone, and they are John Stewart, Dennis Miller, and O'Reilly. Unfortunately, these are all commentators, none of them really news guys. However, they all do a good job of doing good _analysis_ (you know, using logic and stuff:] ), and not pushing a particular agenda.
Other than that, I haven't found anything else but crap on TV.
"You act like people wanting easy solutions is a negative thing."
It's not negative. It's the hubris that assumes that there _must_ be an easy solution, and whoever presents a solution and calls it "easy" must have found the right answer.
"Not everyone is a security expert."
I'm not saying they are. The point is that they assume that people who tell them what they want to hear _are_ security experts.
"The less time we spend worrying about things we don't care about, the more time we can spend on things we do."
This is true. However, we do need to know enough about the things we don't care about to make good decisions on them and know how it affects what we do care about.
I think that's because automatically patching is not the solution either. The problem is that many computer users want "easy" solutions to difficult problems. They would rather take an easy road that claims to work rather than one that actually solves the problem.
My Dad is a perfect case-in-point. He's an upper-level manager of a company. He was telling me about a piece of software he was planning on purchasing. I asked him about security. His answer was, simply, that the salesperson said it was secure.
There's two things wrong with this:
1) He took the salesperson's word. In previous generations, people's words meant something. Trying to train them to think skeptically is difficult. In addition, by what yardstick would he, a non-technical manager, measure security? What's worse is that I've met his IT staff, and I wouldn't trust them to measure security, either.
2) He thinks that security is a yes/no option. Security is nothing like that. If someone were to be honest with him, and tell him that nothing is truely secure and it's all trade-offs, and then explain the trade-offs of their particular product, I'm sure he would have thought they were weaseling, when in fact they were telling the truth.
Actually, HP's Dynamo project showed how JIT'ing a machine code into itself (like JIT'ing x86 code INTO x86 code) can give you speed advantages. The reason is that the JIT can look at the runtime characteristics of the code and do optimizations based off of that. It can move code so it's on the same page as other code that is called in sequence, optimize branches so that there is a higher chance of branch prediction and to save the pipeline.
Haven't read Concrete Mathematics. TAOCP says that it assumes that the reader is familiar with how to program at least one machine/assembly language. That's what my book is for - to teach how to program, and do so using assembly language.
I've got a few more goals than just that, as I want to teach the programmer how the program interfaces with the operating system. My book includes an example malloc() implementation, talks about raw system calls using int 0x80, discusses calling conventions, and shows a little bit about how dynamic linking works.
You need to know the low-level stuff for a few reasons:
1) You are a programmer, and knowing how the computer functions is your job
2) Many of the high-level constructs are better understood when you know what it is they are trying to abstract. It will also keep you from doing stupid things like making everything in java a BigNum or whatever that is.
3) The idea of references and pointers are a lot more fuzzy for programmers who never learned assembly language. The difference between a pointer and a value is harder to grasp.
4) Debugging is a lot easier when you know assembly language, because you know how the parts fit together. You understand what a calling convention is, you understand how memory mapping works, you understand how the stack works - you just can see the whole picture of how the machine is processing your data.
There's even some optimizations that you can do still in higher-level languages that you get from knowing assembly language. For example, in C, the first member of a struct is accessed faster because the compiler can just do straight indirect addressing rather than base pointer addressing. It might also convince you to rewrite your loops so they have a better chance of fitting entirely into the instruction cache. But even without these things, knowing assembly language is useful for the four reasons I outlined above. It's also useful for people who are having trouble learning to code, because it forces them to think on a much more exacting, step-by-step, concrete level.
Much more useful in most systems is knowledge of the system components at a level higher than the CPU--details about how the OS works (scheduler, memory management, etc.), how the language you're programming in is designed (is tail-recursion done without a stack?
Of course, some of these, even if you don't HAVE to know assembly language to understand them, knowing assembly language makes it easier to understand. Most people who know assembly language have a much more concrete view of the differences between pointers and values. When you have personally had to think about whether to push the value or the memory location, when you have to think about which addressing mode you need to use in that situation, it makes the idea of pointers and stacks and calling conventions a TON more concrete. It also makes many of the ideas of sequencing and linearity a lot more concrete. This is something that I've found a lot of new programmers have difficulty with - they have trouble thinking in straight linear fashion, and assembly language absolutely forces you to think that way.
Anyway, that's the reason I wrote my book on assembly language. See my sig for more info. Randall Hyde actually wrote me a pretty good review on barnesandnoble.com. I got a good one from Joel Spolsky, too.
"Unfortunatly, I doubt that we are going to see many people switching to assembly language, but we can hope."
I don't think there's many people hoping for a complete return to assembly language. However, a return to _understanding_ assembly language and how a computer works underneath is what is needed. I wrote a book on assembly language for just that purpose. The code I write professionally is usually Perl, Python, PHP, or C. However, knowing assembly language makes me a much better coder in all of those languages.
The way I got around the "magic" in my book is by starting out using the exit code to "print" out the values. You run the program and then do echo $? to get the value. This way you don't have to say "trust me" too many times. The programmer gets a feel for doing real code, and then eventually I get to an input/output chapter where I tell them how to print stuff out for real. And then later I teach how dynamic libs work.
Oklahoma State University seems to be at least phasing it out of some of their programs. OSU-Okmulgee doesn't even teach it at all. How they plan on truly educating their students in their new security training when they don't know how code works at the assembly level I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I predicted this two years ago (see prediction #2 - the rest weren't so accurate).
You can actually do this with any object-oriented programming language, although it takes more code.
Delphi is _much_ better. The DB controls in Delphi are wondrous. I have put together some pretty nice database applications without having to write hardly any code at all. In fact, I hardly had to write any SQL code, either.
The syntax for Object Pascal is much nicer than VB. OP supports true inheritance. VB might support that now, too, but during the wars between the two of them, they didn't.
I've used Delphi and VB, and at the time I used them (Delphi 3 and VB 5/6), Delphi had VB beat hands down.
I've actually met someone who was known as the "Cobol Evangelist". It's sad, really.
"Apparently, they intend to publish something on paper. That costs money."
:) But I'm just talking about getting a book into print. Not much to it.
Not much. You can get a book published and on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the other internet bookstores for under $500, assuming you have all of the talent to produce the content. Basically, all you _have_ to have are ISBN's ($350 for 10, I think) and a lightningsource.com account ($150 per ISBN), and everything is taken care of. Well, you need to promote it
Actually, if you don't care about which distribution channels you go through, you can do it through CafePress.com for free (they don't care if you don't have an ISBN).
I think the big issue is that just like code, books need to undergo several rewrites because the first version usually doesn't cut it. I wrote my book over a period of three years. I would put it down for a few months and come back to it, and find all the ways in which it needed to be improved. That was followed by a rewriting of that section, much the same way we refactor and replace code to make it more beneficial within the system.
Making money is not wrong. The price of textbooks is often because of the small print runs. However, I can see print-on-demand making these costs go down. The technology exists today through companies like CafePress.com and LightningSource.com to make as few as 1 copy of a book for very low prices.
Of course, my book isn't expensive. In fact, it's the least-expensive book on assembly language that is available (see my sig).
Actually, this would be great for authors of textbooks to get educators from states like NY and TX to make customizations (i.e. - forks) that match their state's requirements.
Mine's finished (see my sig). It's GFDL.
"And this is where the liberals differ GREATLY from the conservative broadcasters."
I get the feeling you have never listened to conservative broadcasters. Of the ones I listen to, I can't think of _any_ that really like the president (Hannity does, but he's not one I listen to). Let's see -
Michael Savage: no.
Rush Limbaugh: don't listen to him much these days, but he's been very critical of the president historically. Basically, he said the conservatives got hoodwinked when Bush said he was a conservative.
Laura Ingram: no
Most of these people agree with the president on two issues - the tax cut and the war on terror. And yes, they like him a lot better than Kerry (I have yet to have _anyone_ point out a positive attribute of Kerry, except that they hate Bush). All of them agree that Bush has been horrible on border control, don't like Bush's protectionism, and think that he spends too much money. On other issues they vary between agreeing and disagreeing with the president.
All I can say is that if this is your opinion, then it's obvious you've never listened to conservative broadcasting.
I'll tell you what I like about Rush. If you listen through all of what he says, you'll find two underlying themes:
1) _you_ can do it. yourself. yes, you can. I believe in you
2) I'm having a lot more fun than the people criticizing me
That's basically what he says all day on the radio. I don't see why he is so hated. He puts it all in the frame of conservative politics, sure, but really those two points are the core of his program.
"O'Reilly? WTF? I'll give you the other two, but O'Reilly? He lies almost as much as Limbaugh."
:)
I haven't seen what you're referring to, but everything I've heard from O'Reilly seems to be okay, at least from a factual basis. I often disagree with O'Reilly, but I don't see him doing anything that isn't credible. Do you have links to online critiques? I'd be interested in taking a look. I don't care a whole lot - I think his show is pretty boring. Dennis Miller is the only one of those I really watch. I usually find the most informative stuff on the Food Network
"The very fact that Jayson Blair (and others like him) are found, fired, and publicly condemned for unethical journalism is proof that the industry does not tolerate such practices."
The fact that it took so long to find him out shows that the industry's editors believe anything and aren't doing their jobs.
However, we're not talking about people falsifying reports. The inability to use logic and accurately report multiple sides of the story are characteristic of modern journalism (if you've researched multiple sides of the story, you'll almost always find that one of them is horribly misrepresented every time - which side it is varies by the journalist).
Have you watched TV news lately, on any channel?
:] ), and not pushing a particular agenda.
It's like the news shows just run press releases by whatever side they like, and don't actually question the claims made there, except superficially. They take most any pronouncement by anyone semi-famous and report it as "news".
Most reporters seem to be lacking in logic, and unable to tell when their guests or interview subjects are just giving them unsubstantiated BS. There's a slight exception there. Anytime someone is doing a story that agrees with their political persuation, they will give the opposition some decent questions but let those on "their side" get away with murder.
As an example of this happening on both sides of the ball, I give you "Hannity and Colmes". It's like they've both been lobotomized and can't process any thought or logic except to say that the other person is wrong.
There's three guys that I think have much less BS than anyone, and they are John Stewart, Dennis Miller, and O'Reilly. Unfortunately, these are all commentators, none of them really news guys. However, they all do a good job of doing good _analysis_ (you know, using logic and stuff
Other than that, I haven't found anything else but crap on TV.
"You act like people wanting easy solutions is a negative thing."
It's not negative. It's the hubris that assumes that there _must_ be an easy solution, and whoever presents a solution and calls it "easy" must have found the right answer.
"Not everyone is a security expert."
I'm not saying they are. The point is that they assume that people who tell them what they want to hear _are_ security experts.
"The less time we spend worrying about things we don't care about, the more time we can spend on things we do."
This is true. However, we do need to know enough about the things we don't care about to make good decisions on them and know how it affects what we do care about.
I think that's because automatically patching is not the solution either. The problem is that many computer users want "easy" solutions to difficult problems. They would rather take an easy road that claims to work rather than one that actually solves the problem.
My Dad is a perfect case-in-point. He's an upper-level manager of a company. He was telling me about a piece of software he was planning on purchasing. I asked him about security. His answer was, simply, that the salesperson said it was secure.
There's two things wrong with this:
1) He took the salesperson's word. In previous generations, people's words meant something. Trying to train them to think skeptically is difficult. In addition, by what yardstick would he, a non-technical manager, measure security? What's worse is that I've met his IT staff, and I wouldn't trust them to measure security, either.
2) He thinks that security is a yes/no option. Security is nothing like that. If someone were to be honest with him, and tell him that nothing is truely secure and it's all trade-offs, and then explain the trade-offs of their particular product, I'm sure he would have thought they were weaseling, when in fact they were telling the truth.
Great! Let me know when you get through how you liked it and what I could do to improve it. Always looking for feedback.
:)
Of course, telling all your friends about it is a good idea, too
Actually, HP's Dynamo project showed how JIT'ing a machine code into itself (like JIT'ing x86 code INTO x86 code) can give you speed advantages. The reason is that the JIT can look at the runtime characteristics of the code and do optimizations based off of that. It can move code so it's on the same page as other code that is called in sequence, optimize branches so that there is a higher chance of branch prediction and to save the pipeline.
Perl isn't faster than C, Perl is faster than _you_ writing C (no offsense to you personally, I mean you in the generic).
Haven't read Concrete Mathematics. TAOCP says that it assumes that the reader is familiar with how to program at least one machine/assembly language. That's what my book is for - to teach how to program, and do so using assembly language.
I've got a few more goals than just that, as I want to teach the programmer how the program interfaces with the operating system. My book includes an example malloc() implementation, talks about raw system calls using int 0x80, discusses calling conventions, and shows a little bit about how dynamic linking works.
You need to know the low-level stuff for a few reasons:
1) You are a programmer, and knowing how the computer functions is your job
2) Many of the high-level constructs are better understood when you know what it is they are trying to abstract. It will also keep you from doing stupid things like making everything in java a BigNum or whatever that is.
3) The idea of references and pointers are a lot more fuzzy for programmers who never learned assembly language. The difference between a pointer and a value is harder to grasp.
4) Debugging is a lot easier when you know assembly language, because you know how the parts fit together. You understand what a calling convention is, you understand how memory mapping works, you understand how the stack works - you just can see the whole picture of how the machine is processing your data.
There's even some optimizations that you can do still in higher-level languages that you get from knowing assembly language. For example, in C, the first member of a struct is accessed faster because the compiler can just do straight indirect addressing rather than base pointer addressing. It might also convince you to rewrite your loops so they have a better chance of fitting entirely into the instruction cache. But even without these things, knowing assembly language is useful for the four reasons I outlined above. It's also useful for people who are having trouble learning to code, because it forces them to think on a much more exacting, step-by-step, concrete level.
Much more useful in most systems is knowledge of the system components at a level higher than the CPU--details about how the OS works (scheduler, memory management, etc.), how the language you're programming in is designed (is tail-recursion done without a stack?
Of course, some of these, even if you don't HAVE to know assembly language to understand them, knowing assembly language makes it easier to understand. Most people who know assembly language have a much more concrete view of the differences between pointers and values. When you have personally had to think about whether to push the value or the memory location, when you have to think about which addressing mode you need to use in that situation, it makes the idea of pointers and stacks and calling conventions a TON more concrete. It also makes many of the ideas of sequencing and linearity a lot more concrete. This is something that I've found a lot of new programmers have difficulty with - they have trouble thinking in straight linear fashion, and assembly language absolutely forces you to think that way.
Anyway, that's the reason I wrote my book on assembly language. See my sig for more info. Randall Hyde actually wrote me a pretty good review on barnesandnoble.com. I got a good one from Joel Spolsky, too.
"Unfortunatly, I doubt that we are going to see many people switching to assembly language, but we can hope."
I don't think there's many people hoping for a complete return to assembly language. However, a return to _understanding_ assembly language and how a computer works underneath is what is needed. I wrote a book on assembly language for just that purpose. The code I write professionally is usually Perl, Python, PHP, or C. However, knowing assembly language makes me a much better coder in all of those languages.
Anyway, see my sig for the book I wrote on this.
The way I got around the "magic" in my book is by starting out using the exit code to "print" out the values. You run the program and then do echo $? to get the value. This way you don't have to say "trust me" too many times. The programmer gets a feel for doing real code, and then eventually I get to an input/output chapter where I tell them how to print stuff out for real. And then later I teach how dynamic libs work.
Oklahoma State University seems to be at least phasing it out of some of their programs. OSU-Okmulgee doesn't even teach it at all. How they plan on truly educating their students in their new security training when they don't know how code works at the assembly level I have no idea.