There's no value in acquiring land anymore -- it's all about solidifying control of access to the important global resources. That's the ultimate power. Don't be surprised when they put the pipeline through Afghanistan.
If this is the case, I'm glad to hear it. It wasn't all that bad working with GTK+. It would leave my only knock being trying to create custom widgets in a non-OO language, but since Gnome being C-based is part of its original conceit, it's not really a productive complaint.
A question though. Is it normal for a library set to surpass the 1.0 version but still continue changing APIs?
Not really ironic, it's the way that empires maintain authority on a global scale. When they're not pounding rubble into dust in countries like, oh, say, Afghanistan.
What would actually be ironic would be if the rhetoric was the same, and people openly believed it.
This might sound like trolling, but I'd wait a bit until the GTK libraries are settled before beginning to seriously develop for Gnome. One of the big problems with GTK from version 1 to 2 was how certain widgets went through two or three different revisions, namely that very attractive treeview widget. With bonobo architecture on the way, stuff might change even more.
On the other hand, Linux is far from dead in the water, and is in fact giving Microsoft a run for its money in the Web server market, where it is the second most popular OS after Windows.
Windows is the most popular OS in the web server market? wtf? This has long been Unix's claim, no? I just checked netcraft but I could only find stats for the server application, not the OS.
(sorry if this sounds like I'm talking down to you -- I don't mean to, I'm just giving the same shpiel I give to my students when they want to know generally about what OO is about)
Object Orientation is really great when you want a complex system of different components working together, and you need to design the entire thing from scratch. Also, knowing OO is great when you have to repair or upgrade a system that's already OO.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, from a systems design point of view, there's little these days that's as complicated as your high-end software application, which is the purview of OO. Some systems try to do this without OO (or quasi-OO, like Gnome with C), and it often ends up looking muddled.
But just because your proposed system has a lot of components doesn't mean it's a good candidate for OO. What you need to do is start thinking in terms of the complexity of the individual components themselves. Do each of these components keep track of lots of state variables? Do the components have lots of different ways of accessing them? Do some of the components share a common design parentage? Do you want to keep some component information hidden? Do they need to communicate with each other using a unique protocol? Do you think you might want to reuse these components in other applications? If you can see that this might be the case, you might have a candidate for OO.
There's also something that a prof told me once -- that 97% of all C++ programs aren't OO. I don't know how valid the stat is, but it highlights the problem that an OO language doesn't necessarily translate to an OO setup, so seeking out an OO system to look at isn't necessarily as simple as finding some C++ source code.
For the problems that you've outlined, you're talking about pretty simple math, and by "simple" I mean, can probably be solved using a few lines of code, a few recursive functions, a couple of complex data structures, etc. This stuff can be solved in any number of high-end languages -- at worst, you might want to learn C. If, on the other hand, you want to develop a software application around these calculations, to streamline the input and output of data, you might potentially have something that can take advantage of what OO is all about. For instance you might have objects that have private attributes for the different operators and public methods for doing the calculations or redirecting the results to a database or graphing suite, etc. You might also have an abstract base class so that all the objects have the same feel to them, even though they do different calculations...
And on top of things, I always loved various things about Java. I just did not love the Java combo that you were supposed to give or take.
How do any Java developers here feel about this? Ultimately, I think the success of.NET is going to be on whether or not it can do what Java does better than how Java does it. I've always hated coding in Java, myself (clunkiness of the language, slowness of compilation and execution), but I've always avoided it just because I never have to produce platform-independent binaries and I can just stick with C. Given the choice between Java and.NET, what are people thinking these days?
Without assembly, John Carmack and Michael Abrash wouldn't be putting out cutting-edge gaming engines. There's a lot of money going through them based on the various Quakes and Dooms and the licensing of those engines to other projects. People love those engines based on performance, and good performance means knowing assembly -- otherwise we'd need 2GHz machines to do what Id was able to do on 400MHz (or whatever). So, assembly can still be relevent even if we aren't the one's coding it.
That said, with the evolving speed of chips it isn't the CPU that's the big bottleneck anymore. So, if you're thinking games at all, you might want to consider looking at chip programming for video cards and leave the rest of it in C/C++.
As for the rest of us... I don't really know. Being a specialist in a specific chip architecture really lets you flex your geek and might lead to a specialist's salary and sort of lets you in on that whole nebulous zen of programming out there, but it's not really needed (IMO) if you're only working with APIs on small task-based things, and not building or refining high-performance engines (servers, databases, games, whatnot), and arguably even in those cases assembly programming should only be the last stage once the prototype's been worked out. Plus, there's the possibility that we really are on the verge of seeing the death of the desktop machine, in which case all our x86 knowledge might be useless in the next five to ten years...
Now, those PDAs would probably be fun to get at the guts of. I can imagine that there's a need for performance at that level, given the low amounts resources (RAM, Hz, etc) available. I'm sorry to say I know nothing about these things. Is there chip-level programming available for those? That might be an interesting side discussion.
I'm surprised this oversensitive rant got modded up so high. Perhaps a few too many touchy people with university degrees needing to feel good about a decision that took four years out of their life and didn't advance them much further than a one-year pro college would have? Maybe it's not the case for this guy, but it is a valid question for others who are skeptical about, or even not capable of, investing time or finances in a full-time program.
It takes a heck of a lot more than a university degree to filter through a pack of lies in an election, a courtroom or as the next-of-kin. Want proof? I HAVE a university degree and I'd be the biggest dummy in the juror's box or the hospital waiting room, and my ability to tell when a politician is bullshitting me comes from experience that has nothing to do with my degree.
Let's face it -- you can learn three programming languages and the basis for systems analysis and OOP design in under a year. Universities obviously offer more than that, and I'd encourage the guy to attend fulltime because of the extra benefits over and above what you get in class, but don't tell us that even in your time at university you didn't know anybody who just wanted to get through the material and out into the real world as quickly as possible. And further to that, don't try to tell us that many of those speedy students aren't in fact doing quite well for themselves in their career. (Or do you find their admirable drive insulting as well?)
His question is hardly insulting. Universities are about getting what knowledge you want out of them. He wants enough to get his piece of paper. And as a side-benefit, he probably won't end up one of those permanent Student Union Building residents desperately trying to figure out how to stay on another year because they're too afraid to cut the educational umbilical cord.
That said, to the original Ask Slashdotter, I'd recommend enrolling at university but taking your time. If you've been programming since 12, you obviously love it, and university will offer you so many ways to explore that -- not to mention giving you time away to do so without the pressure of trying to fit it into a life already busy with a fulltime job. If it's something you're passionate about, it's worth going into debt over. If you're interested only in CS and that's it, there will be clubs and contests and time to host a few Freshmeat projects. If there are other subjects you like, you can take electives in them.
There's also a great social scene at universities -- even the bad ones can be pretty good. Tons of cute girls, too. Just remember that you only have one liver.
If your point involves making sure you can glue several languages together, why not just use one of the other languages for the dll? Visual Basic itself is going to mean a performance hit over and above dll usage, and not using ActiveX limits your choice of references (including no ado) and pretty much eliminates the visual controls.
In the meantime, using ActiveX actually opens up a bunch of options, because an ActiveX dll, once created, can be called from within VB, VC++, ASP...
EZBoards is the only site I know of that actually filters your words, and that differs from moderator to moderator (turns swear words into #$%@! style expressions).
Every one of the other ones has allowed me to use profanity and yell anti-establishment slogans. Hell, if terrorists can communicate to each other in library terminals, you know big brother isn't going to bother little ol' you.
It will get your heart rate and adrenaline going, strengthen your throat muscles and improve your throwing arm. Not to mention that yelling at the computer is great stress relief.
Young man,
there's no need to feel down
Because your plane
back home can't get off the ground
I said young man,
Get comfy in your new town
There's no need to be unhappy.
Young man,
There's no place you can go
I said young man,
Until you cough up some dough
You will stay here
until you've served all your time
For your insignificant crime.
It's fun to stay in the U S of A,
Because of that old grand D M C A
For cracking DVD's,
Or an e-book or three,
You'll get jailed for eterniteeeee...
It's fun to stay in the U S of A
Because of that old grand D M C A
For proving to the world
That our encryption's a toy
You'll get jailed with all the boyyyyyyys...
"My side" wrt Linux is a place where things really ARE modular and logical.
"Logical" how? It may seem logical to some to have the sum of an operating system be a massive collection of different parts, but look how long it's taken for there to be any sort of standardization with Linux because of it. Meanwhile, most people would tend to think that it would be "logical" to locate all main administration tasks in one umbrella, and subdivide from there.
Your "our side" seems to be that awful "I want Linux to be a better Windows than Windows!" garbage.
My side is the same side as yours, my anonymous little friend (missed karma points, too -- should've posted under your own steam). I just want to see the operating system be the best that it can be, and that sort of thing only gets accomplished with more work and more eyes criticizing it.
And there's nothing that says that modularity has to come at the expense of user-friendliness -- but unfortunately, historically, that's been our case.
If people use it, it's because they want a free Unix-like operating systems, they've done their research, and they WANT to use it.
Oh. Well, just in case you care, I started using it because I wanted an alternative to Windows. Didn't know a damn thing about Unix beforehand, and I was really happy with what I got. I still see some shortcomings -- the topic of this discussion being one of them -- but on the whole I think the OS is definitely worthy of trying to win over my friends, many of whom are growing skeptical at Microsoft's business practices and the crappy OS they put out.
LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS.
Now, to me, this sounds like rationalizing one's way into an excuse not to grow and evolve. One might as well start this sort of argument regarding different kernel versions. Linux today is not the same OS as it was last year, nor is Windows today the same OS as it was last year. That there's some convergence in the tasks that the two OS's perform is not pure happenstance. The two don't exist in a vacuum. To not try to steal the best aspects of a competitor is silly, to justify it because it rocks your comfort level is at best willfull ignorance, at worst dangerous.
This is one of the core problems with Linux. Someone comes out charging money so we can do something as menial as print documents, and we actually have to take it seriously.
It's part of the basic problem with the degree of modularization (a supposed "Good Thing") that we have, I guess. Still, it'd be nice if we could have all this sort of basic admin stuff thrown into a central location with other peripherals, instead of one for the OS, one for the GUI, etc.
IMO, this is something Windows did right. I've been working with Linux for a long time so this isn't a surprise to me, but I can just imagine the look I'd get from newbies I'm trying to win over to our side when I try to give reasons for why Linux doesn't have a true equivalent for the Control Panel.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no value in acquiring land anymore -- it's all about solidifying control of access to the important global resources. That's the ultimate power. Don't be surprised when they put the pipeline through Afghanistan.
If this is the case, I'm glad to hear it. It wasn't all that bad working with GTK+. It would leave my only knock being trying to create custom widgets in a non-OO language, but since Gnome being C-based is part of its original conceit, it's not really a productive complaint.
A question though. Is it normal for a library set to surpass the 1.0 version but still continue changing APIs?
Sob.
I suppose it really is karma if it shows up when you least expect it.
Not really ironic, it's the way that empires maintain authority on a global scale. When they're not pounding rubble into dust in countries like, oh, say, Afghanistan.
What would actually be ironic would be if the rhetoric was the same, and people openly believed it.
anyone think it cool that this is hosted on the ibm site?
They're probably hoping this sort of thing will help lead to a return on their investment.
Yup, I totally took it out of context. Although I don't agree with the scenario the guy put forward, he wasn't saying what I thought he was saying.
Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.
I'm probably taking this out of context, but this is a silly thing to say:
1. Corporate failures are not directly tied to bad software.
2. You can still learn something from the source code of bad software, even if it's only what not to do.
This might sound like trolling, but I'd wait a bit until the GTK libraries are settled before beginning to seriously develop for Gnome. One of the big problems with GTK from version 1 to 2 was how certain widgets went through two or three different revisions, namely that very attractive treeview widget. With bonobo architecture on the way, stuff might change even more.
On the other hand, Linux is far from dead in the water, and is in fact giving Microsoft a run for its money in the Web server market, where it is the second most popular OS after Windows.
Windows is the most popular OS in the web server market? wtf? This has long been Unix's claim, no? I just checked netcraft but I could only find stats for the server application, not the OS.
(sorry if this sounds like I'm talking down to you -- I don't mean to, I'm just giving the same shpiel I give to my students when they want to know generally about what OO is about)
Object Orientation is really great when you want a complex system of different components working together, and you need to design the entire thing from scratch. Also, knowing OO is great when you have to repair or upgrade a system that's already OO.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, from a systems design point of view, there's little these days that's as complicated as your high-end software application, which is the purview of OO. Some systems try to do this without OO (or quasi-OO, like Gnome with C), and it often ends up looking muddled.
But just because your proposed system has a lot of components doesn't mean it's a good candidate for OO. What you need to do is start thinking in terms of the complexity of the individual components themselves. Do each of these components keep track of lots of state variables? Do the components have lots of different ways of accessing them? Do some of the components share a common design parentage? Do you want to keep some component information hidden? Do they need to communicate with each other using a unique protocol? Do you think you might want to reuse these components in other applications? If you can see that this might be the case, you might have a candidate for OO.
There's also something that a prof told me once -- that 97% of all C++ programs aren't OO. I don't know how valid the stat is, but it highlights the problem that an OO language doesn't necessarily translate to an OO setup, so seeking out an OO system to look at isn't necessarily as simple as finding some C++ source code.
For the problems that you've outlined, you're talking about pretty simple math, and by "simple" I mean, can probably be solved using a few lines of code, a few recursive functions, a couple of complex data structures, etc. This stuff can be solved in any number of high-end languages -- at worst, you might want to learn C. If, on the other hand, you want to develop a software application around these calculations, to streamline the input and output of data, you might potentially have something that can take advantage of what OO is all about. For instance you might have objects that have private attributes for the different operators and public methods for doing the calculations or redirecting the results to a database or graphing suite, etc. You might also have an abstract base class so that all the objects have the same feel to them, even though they do different calculations...
"Yah, you do that"
Miller's Crossing?
And on top of things, I always loved various things about Java. I just did not love the Java combo that you were supposed to give or take.
.NET is going to be on whether or not it can do what Java does better than how Java does it. I've always hated coding in Java, myself (clunkiness of the language, slowness of compilation and execution), but I've always avoided it just because I never have to produce platform-independent binaries and I can just stick with C. Given the choice between Java and .NET, what are people thinking these days?
How do any Java developers here feel about this? Ultimately, I think the success of
Right here
Covers Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, con artistry, politics and more.
If you're worried about how to deal with a power-hungry supervisor, there are chapters in that book covering that exact situation.
Without assembly, John Carmack and Michael Abrash wouldn't be putting out cutting-edge gaming engines. There's a lot of money going through them based on the various Quakes and Dooms and the licensing of those engines to other projects. People love those engines based on performance, and good performance means knowing assembly -- otherwise we'd need 2GHz machines to do what Id was able to do on 400MHz (or whatever). So, assembly can still be relevent even if we aren't the one's coding it.
That said, with the evolving speed of chips it isn't the CPU that's the big bottleneck anymore. So, if you're thinking games at all, you might want to consider looking at chip programming for video cards and leave the rest of it in C/C++.
As for the rest of us... I don't really know. Being a specialist in a specific chip architecture really lets you flex your geek and might lead to a specialist's salary and sort of lets you in on that whole nebulous zen of programming out there, but it's not really needed (IMO) if you're only working with APIs on small task-based things, and not building or refining high-performance engines (servers, databases, games, whatnot), and arguably even in those cases assembly programming should only be the last stage once the prototype's been worked out. Plus, there's the possibility that we really are on the verge of seeing the death of the desktop machine, in which case all our x86 knowledge might be useless in the next five to ten years...
Now, those PDAs would probably be fun to get at the guts of. I can imagine that there's a need for performance at that level, given the low amounts resources (RAM, Hz, etc) available. I'm sorry to say I know nothing about these things. Is there chip-level programming available for those? That might be an interesting side discussion.
Here endeth the offtopicness.
I'm surprised this oversensitive rant got modded up so high. Perhaps a few too many touchy people with university degrees needing to feel good about a decision that took four years out of their life and didn't advance them much further than a one-year pro college would have? Maybe it's not the case for this guy, but it is a valid question for others who are skeptical about, or even not capable of, investing time or finances in a full-time program.
It takes a heck of a lot more than a university degree to filter through a pack of lies in an election, a courtroom or as the next-of-kin. Want proof? I HAVE a university degree and I'd be the biggest dummy in the juror's box or the hospital waiting room, and my ability to tell when a politician is bullshitting me comes from experience that has nothing to do with my degree.
Let's face it -- you can learn three programming languages and the basis for systems analysis and OOP design in under a year. Universities obviously offer more than that, and I'd encourage the guy to attend fulltime because of the extra benefits over and above what you get in class, but don't tell us that even in your time at university you didn't know anybody who just wanted to get through the material and out into the real world as quickly as possible. And further to that, don't try to tell us that many of those speedy students aren't in fact doing quite well for themselves in their career. (Or do you find their admirable drive insulting as well?)
His question is hardly insulting. Universities are about getting what knowledge you want out of them. He wants enough to get his piece of paper. And as a side-benefit, he probably won't end up one of those permanent Student Union Building residents desperately trying to figure out how to stay on another year because they're too afraid to cut the educational umbilical cord.
That said, to the original Ask Slashdotter, I'd recommend enrolling at university but taking your time. If you've been programming since 12, you obviously love it, and university will offer you so many ways to explore that -- not to mention giving you time away to do so without the pressure of trying to fit it into a life already busy with a fulltime job. If it's something you're passionate about, it's worth going into debt over. If you're interested only in CS and that's it, there will be clubs and contests and time to host a few Freshmeat projects. If there are other subjects you like, you can take electives in them.
There's also a great social scene at universities -- even the bad ones can be pretty good. Tons of cute girls, too. Just remember that you only have one liver.
If your point involves making sure you can glue several languages together, why not just use one of the other languages for the dll? Visual Basic itself is going to mean a performance hit over and above dll usage, and not using ActiveX limits your choice of references (including no ado) and pretty much eliminates the visual controls.
In the meantime, using ActiveX actually opens up a bunch of options, because an ActiveX dll, once created, can be called from within VB, VC++, ASP...
I still see plenty of room for the little guy, you know.
Geocities, EZBoards, USENET, email, listservs, Slashdot, Pathfinder discussion boards...
EZBoards is the only site I know of that actually filters your words, and that differs from moderator to moderator (turns swear words into #$%@! style expressions).
Every one of the other ones has allowed me to use profanity and yell anti-establishment slogans. Hell, if terrorists can communicate to each other in library terminals, you know big brother isn't going to bother little ol' you.
It will get your heart rate and adrenaline going, strengthen your throat muscles and improve your throwing arm. Not to mention that yelling at the computer is great stress relief.
Young man,
there's no need to feel down
Because your plane
back home can't get off the ground
I said young man,
Get comfy in your new town
There's no need to be unhappy.
Young man,
There's no place you can go
I said young man,
Until you cough up some dough
You will stay here
until you've served all your time
For your insignificant crime.
It's fun to stay in the U S of A,
Because of that old grand D M C A
For cracking DVD's,
Or an e-book or three,
You'll get jailed for eterniteeeee...
It's fun to stay in the U S of A
Because of that old grand D M C A
For proving to the world
That our encryption's a toy
You'll get jailed with all the boyyyyyyys...
It got 5 vampyre teeth.
You are confusing converse and contrapositive when you claim to be contradicting yourself.
Either that, or I'm just making a joke.
Woo, someone got your panties in a bunch.
"My side" wrt Linux is a place where things really ARE modular and logical.
"Logical" how? It may seem logical to some to have the sum of an operating system be a massive collection of different parts, but look how long it's taken for there to be any sort of standardization with Linux because of it. Meanwhile, most people would tend to think that it would be "logical" to locate all main administration tasks in one umbrella, and subdivide from there.
Your "our side" seems to be that awful "I want Linux to be a better Windows than Windows!" garbage.
My side is the same side as yours, my anonymous little friend (missed karma points, too -- should've posted under your own steam). I just want to see the operating system be the best that it can be, and that sort of thing only gets accomplished with more work and more eyes criticizing it.
And there's nothing that says that modularity has to come at the expense of user-friendliness -- but unfortunately, historically, that's been our case.
If people use it, it's because they want a free Unix-like operating systems, they've done their research, and they WANT to use it.
Oh. Well, just in case you care, I started using it because I wanted an alternative to Windows. Didn't know a damn thing about Unix beforehand, and I was really happy with what I got. I still see some shortcomings -- the topic of this discussion being one of them -- but on the whole I think the OS is definitely worthy of trying to win over my friends, many of whom are growing skeptical at Microsoft's business practices and the crappy OS they put out.
LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS.
Now, to me, this sounds like rationalizing one's way into an excuse not to grow and evolve. One might as well start this sort of argument regarding different kernel versions. Linux today is not the same OS as it was last year, nor is Windows today the same OS as it was last year. That there's some convergence in the tasks that the two OS's perform is not pure happenstance. The two don't exist in a vacuum. To not try to steal the best aspects of a competitor is silly, to justify it because it rocks your comfort level is at best willfull ignorance, at worst dangerous.
This is one of the core problems with Linux. Someone comes out charging money so we can do something as menial as print documents, and we actually have to take it seriously.
It's part of the basic problem with the degree of modularization (a supposed "Good Thing") that we have, I guess. Still, it'd be nice if we could have all this sort of basic admin stuff thrown into a central location with other peripherals, instead of one for the OS, one for the GUI, etc.
IMO, this is something Windows did right. I've been working with Linux for a long time so this isn't a surprise to me, but I can just imagine the look I'd get from newbies I'm trying to win over to our side when I try to give reasons for why Linux doesn't have a true equivalent for the Control Panel.
Hm... on second thought, maybe not. I'm not getting much productive work done lately and I still don't care about either of the above...
This is a definite must read.