But dk made that statement because he/she was fed up with the wasted time and effort they have to go through to develop for Internet Explorer. Believe me, I understand dk's fustration. IE can add tens of hours to front-end website development. I've implemented *very* complex designs (basically, the designer gave me a big Photoshop image and said "code this!") which required almost no tweaking for Firefox, Safari and Opera (in fact I didn't even target Opera, but it worked flawlessly) but required tens of hours of extra work to get working correctly in IE (often a change which fixed IE would break the others, so conditional CSS was needed. etc). Actualy "tens of hours" is a bit of an understatement, it was more like a full-time week for a site that took a month. Someone has to pay for this - either you absorb the cost, or the client pays for it. Either way, Microsoft's incompetence (or unwillingness) to develop a standards compliant browser probably costs the industry MILLIONS per year.
If you haven't expereinced deveoping for IE count yourself lucky. Designers will often complain loudly if some element is a few pixels too far to the left, or if there is a one-pixel gap between a border and image etc. etc. etc. If we only had to develop for standards compliant browsers, this wouldn't be such a problem. But with IE, it's sometimes almost impossible to fix those layout problems in such a way that it works on both standard compiant browsers, the current version of IE AND the previous version of IE. And if you think that these problems are not important, designers see this very differently! And of course they should - just as a good programmer strives for bug free software that performs well and is easy to maintain, designers strive for designs which are attractive, usable and meet the communication goals of the client.
*This* is why dk doesn't want to go near any of Microsoft's other products or services. If you've had a similar experience with Google, then you would he justified in s/Microsoft/Google. Otherwise, your post makes absolutely no sense.
I've always been annoyed by this phrasing. "Safe", here, is just another way of saying "kill more efficiently". The best way for soldiers to be safe, is to not be fighting in wars in the first place.
Most institutions teach java, C#, or C++ in their core curriculum. Programmers simply know the syntax better.
I've always found this the most bizarre reason to to dismiss a technology. Any decent programmer should be able to pick a new syntax/language/technology etc. relatively quickly. It happens though, which I just don't understand.
Hear hear! Most non-programmers I have got to use open source alternatives have done so because of the free is in beer aspect. Almost all of them have eventually understood the free as in speech advantages too. Especially those in small business, who begin to realise that not only do updates to the software come for free, they can also pay programmers to improve the program or fix a critical bug if they choose to.
I thought "algorithm" came from the name of an acient Arabic mathematician whose last name was something like Al Jehrithm? Or maybe it's development is more recent, and comes from Al Gore-ithm? He invented the Internet, after all.
We get a lot of those in Australia, of course.. but where are you talking about there? I would find it so funny to be in a foreign country and see slick-talking Aussies peddling wares on shopping channels! Even funnier if there were crappy souvieners!
Good point!:) It would be best if the funding would go to the same bright students, but at institutions where they can pursue the same research with the motives of furthering their field. Imagine if Einstein's work was only applied to nuclear power and not blowing things up on a grand scale?
Sure, military research does produce useful knowledge. The Internet is one great example. BUT, the main purpose of a lot of this research is to create things that kill, or things that protect you from others trying to kill you. I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it if it only ever was for the latter kind, but a lot of this fundamental reserach is going to go in to more efficient weapons. Why else would the Navy be funding it?
I'd prefer this funding go to the research that you are clearly interested in with peaceful intentions. If you want to research about evanescent waves that's great and I would be happy to see you being funded for it. But when the military is involoved there's only one of two reasons they are interested in it - to create better weapons, or better protection from weapons.
You should use your intelligence to advance your field, not create better weaponry.
I don't know whether this is a troll or not, but this attitute really annoys me. While it is true that global warming proponents first reaction often is to link any unusual climate phenomenon with global warming, it makes little sense to pretend there isn't a problem either.
It's all too easy to just ignore the possibility that we might be screwing up the planet so we can happily go on and do whatever the hell we want.
Sure, it being a hot day today might have absolutelty nothing to do with what we have done to the planet over the last 100 years in particular, or it might. I'm not that cluely with the natural sciences, but it makes sense that curning out CO2 which was previously locked away in fossil fuels would increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and that in turn could have other effects, like warming up the planet.
Wny can't we just think rationally about issues like this instead of spewing out crap like the parent post?
Modded troll because the truth hurts? Name one that even approaches half the market penetration. How does market penetration have anything to do with seriously completing with Microsoft? By "seriously compete" I take that to mean "is in the same leauge as", in which case there are several, and they would have higher market share if it wasn't for Microsoft keeping their formats closed and users not knowing about this. "But Product X changed the formatting on my Word Document! This Office suite is crap!".
Few things annoy me more than someone sending me.doc attachments, and few things are more amusing than seeing someone try and write a 100 page structured document like a thesis, technical report or a user manual in Word! If it eats their file, all the better!
I'd love to see it done with lots of design patterns, sort of a contrast between the old and new! You could even go nuts and over apply them just for the hell of it. Actually, the GoF Design Patterns book uses a maze example to illustrate the various creational patterns, so we already know we need a AdventureFactory in there somewhere:)
I was going to quit coding C++ when I discovered Boost and wxWidgets. Now I don't want use anything else. In my case I was avoiding C++ until I came across Boost and wxWidgets, and that's what got me into it! How's that for coincidence!
D looks very very interesting. I just had to use C++ for my current project for a few reasons (needed to work with wxWidgets and create a library which is accessable from as many languages as possible - so a C++ and maybe a Python wrapper a some point (using SWIG, or Boost.Python, I suppose).
Recently, I've just started getting into C++, and I can't understand why so many people hate the language with such a passion. The thing is, if you need/want to write your program in a compiled language with plenty of library support, then aside from C, what options are there? I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I figure if I want to say use C (or other C++) libraries and a compiled language then I feel C++ is much better option than C. One very smart and experienced C programmer I know hates C++ with a passion complaining that "it's too complex" and just rejecting it outright.
I haven't yet written (or debugged) any large programs in C++, so that could be why I'm still enthusastic. Perhaps after some time with the language I might see what everyone is so worked up about.
I'm reading through "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers, and although the language seems like it has its warts and complexity, it also offers a great deal of power and is a hell of a lot more fun to program in than C because you get the abstraction support of objects, namespaces etc. Streams - awsome. Shared (reference counting) pointers - awsome. Less need for the preprocessor - awsome. And the standard library (plus Boost too) is so vast... containers, algorithms, it's all there.
Python is still my favourite general-purpose language, but if I need something compiled, then I don't see what is so bad about C++. Sure, Objective-C is a far better approach to the "lets-make-a-better-C" idea, but I'm not sure how to use it (and the standard library) outside of OSX or GNUStep.
Slashdot Mirror
But dk made that statement because he/she was fed up with the wasted time and effort they have to go through to develop for Internet Explorer. Believe me, I understand dk's fustration. IE can add tens of hours to front-end website development. I've implemented *very* complex designs (basically, the designer gave me a big Photoshop image and said "code this!") which required almost no tweaking for Firefox, Safari and Opera (in fact I didn't even target Opera, but it worked flawlessly) but required tens of hours of extra work to get working correctly in IE (often a change which fixed IE would break the others, so conditional CSS was needed. etc). Actualy "tens of hours" is a bit of an understatement, it was more like a full-time week for a site that took a month. Someone has to pay for this - either you absorb the cost, or the client pays for it. Either way, Microsoft's incompetence (or unwillingness) to develop a standards compliant browser probably costs the industry MILLIONS per year.
If you haven't expereinced deveoping for IE count yourself lucky. Designers will often complain loudly if some element is a few pixels too far to the left, or if there is a one-pixel gap between a border and image etc. etc. etc. If we only had to develop for standards compliant browsers, this wouldn't be such a problem. But with IE, it's sometimes almost impossible to fix those layout problems in such a way that it works on both standard compiant browsers, the current version of IE AND the previous version of IE. And if you think that these problems are not important, designers see this very differently! And of course they should - just as a good programmer strives for bug free software that performs well and is easy to maintain, designers strive for designs which are attractive, usable and meet the communication goals of the client.
*This* is why dk doesn't want to go near any of Microsoft's other products or services. If you've had a similar experience with Google, then you would he justified in s/Microsoft/Google. Otherwise, your post makes absolutely no sense.
I've always been annoyed by this phrasing. "Safe", here, is just another way of saying "kill more efficiently". The best way for soldiers to be safe, is to not be fighting in wars in the first place.
I've always found this the most bizarre reason to to dismiss a technology. Any decent programmer should be able to pick a new syntax/language/technology etc. relatively quickly. It happens though, which I just don't understand.
Hear hear! Most non-programmers I have got to use open source alternatives have done so because of the free is in beer aspect. Almost all of them have eventually understood the free as in speech advantages too. Especially those in small business, who begin to realise that not only do updates to the software come for free, they can also pay programmers to improve the program or fix a critical bug if they choose to.
Slashdotters don't have girlfriends, so there's not much chance of that happening.
Interestingly enough, they sound perfectly fine in Japanese - kibibaito, mibibaito and gibibaito. So maybe those terms will be big in Japan!
Sort of like bootstrapping solar power!
That's a fantastic idea!
You swear to the Finite State Machine?
And a very good one too!
I thought "algorithm" came from the name of an acient Arabic mathematician whose last name was something like Al Jehrithm? Or maybe it's development is more recent, and comes from Al Gore-ithm? He invented the Internet, after all.
Add DeusEx to that list!
We get a lot of those in Australia, of course.. but where are you talking about there? I would find it so funny to be in a foreign country and see slick-talking Aussies peddling wares on shopping channels! Even funnier if there were crappy souvieners!
Good point! :) It would be best if the funding would go to the same bright students, but at institutions where they can pursue the same research with the motives of furthering their field. Imagine if Einstein's work was only applied to nuclear power and not blowing things up on a grand scale?
Sure, military research does produce useful knowledge. The Internet is one great example. BUT, the main purpose of a lot of this research is to create things that kill, or things that protect you from others trying to kill you. I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it if it only ever was for the latter kind, but a lot of this fundamental reserach is going to go in to more efficient weapons. Why else would the Navy be funding it?
I'd prefer this funding go to the research that you are clearly interested in with peaceful intentions. If you want to research about evanescent waves that's great and I would be happy to see you being funded for it. But when the military is involoved there's only one of two reasons they are interested in it - to create better weapons, or better protection from weapons.
You should use your intelligence to advance your field, not create better weaponry.
I don't know whether this is a troll or not, but this attitute really annoys me. While it is true that global warming proponents first reaction often is to link any unusual climate phenomenon with global warming, it makes little sense to pretend there isn't a problem either.
It's all too easy to just ignore the possibility that we might be screwing up the planet so we can happily go on and do whatever the hell we want.
Sure, it being a hot day today might have absolutelty nothing to do with what we have done to the planet over the last 100 years in particular, or it might. I'm not that cluely with the natural sciences, but it makes sense that curning out CO2 which was previously locked away in fossil fuels would increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and that in turn could have other effects, like warming up the planet.
Wny can't we just think rationally about issues like this instead of spewing out crap like the parent post?
Few things annoy me more than someone sending me
Just a guess, but probably something to do with not damaging the rock you are climbing.
I'd love to see it done with lots of design patterns, sort of a contrast between the old and new! You could even go nuts and over apply them just for the hell of it. Actually, the GoF Design Patterns book uses a maze example to illustrate the various creational patterns, so we already know we need a AdventureFactory in there somewhere :)
D looks very very interesting. I just had to use C++ for my current project for a few reasons (needed to work with wxWidgets and create a library which is accessable from as many languages as possible - so a C++ and maybe a Python wrapper a some point (using SWIG, or Boost.Python, I suppose).
Recently, I've just started getting into C++, and I can't understand why so many people hate the language with such a passion. The thing is, if you need/want to write your program in a compiled language with plenty of library support, then aside from C, what options are there? I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I figure if I want to say use C (or other C++) libraries and a compiled language then I feel C++ is much better option than C. One very smart and experienced C programmer I know hates C++ with a passion complaining that "it's too complex" and just rejecting it outright.
I haven't yet written (or debugged) any large programs in C++, so that could be why I'm still enthusastic. Perhaps after some time with the language I might see what everyone is so worked up about.
I'm reading through "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers, and although the language seems like it has its warts and complexity, it also offers a great deal of power and is a hell of a lot more fun to program in than C because you get the abstraction support of objects, namespaces etc. Streams - awsome. Shared (reference counting) pointers - awsome. Less need for the preprocessor - awsome. And the standard library (plus Boost too) is so vast... containers, algorithms, it's all there.
Python is still my favourite general-purpose language, but if I need something compiled, then I don't see what is so bad about C++. Sure, Objective-C is a far better approach to the "lets-make-a-better-C" idea, but I'm not sure how to use it (and the standard library) outside of OSX or GNUStep.
Venus has always scared the crap out of me.
You must have been a humanities student!