First, who the hell wants a 500,000 RPM anything sitting in their lap? The high squeal resonant frequencies will be hell once it is about two weeks old.
I don't know a lot about resonant frequencies, but I can't imagine that you'll end up with many audible frequencies in the range of human hearing from a turbine running at 500kHz. CRT monitors used to squeel at a very high pitch-- let's say 10kHz just for the sake of argument-- and they were running at ~80kHz refresh rates? Where's that put the squeel of a device running at 6.25 times the frequency?
If all portable devices accepted 12V power, somebody would come out with a single brick with multiple 12V plugs, which would be a godsend to travellers who currently schlep one wall wart for each device.
Guitar players have just such a device for stompboxes. The vast majority of stompboxes run off a 9V DC, from a battery or wallwart, so there are several bricks you can purchase with just that. Of course, you still have to be careful around those oddballs which call for 5V, 12V, 18V, or inverted power, so it's not an ideal situation.
for instance, did you know that "walking the plank" is fictional?
Not fictional, simply uncommon. Reference "Under The Black Flag" by David Cordingly, page 131, and quite a few other books on the subject. To quote:
It is possible that other examples of walking the plank may be found, but the fact remains that it was never the common pirate punishment suggested by so many books, films, and comic strips.
And the money the "useless ad people" give to slashdot and other sites in exchange for page space, what does that go towards, spoons?
Yes, I think that if you consider that personal income is pooled and distributed to individual needs, then one may assert that some money does go towards spoons. Unless of course, Taco et. al. eat their soup with chopsticks... in which case, I'm duly impressed.
I set off down to the local dealer to get me some supplies.
Not to pick on you, but posts like this get under my skin. Many people seem to be under the impression that Gonzo journalism (or HST's writings specifically) were all about drugs. This is a simplification, akin to saying the Shakespeare wrote about disfunctional royal families.
HST wrote about the "American Dream". He wrote about freedom and euphoria, and the extreme lengths people will go to achieve it. Drugs are just one mechanism, and were a prominent theme. Sport is another, as well as gambling and political power (as both aquiring it and escaping it). In general, about the high of the "win" and the depth of the "lose".
A quick crib sheet: Better Than Sex (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 4) Hell's Angels Hey Rube
Read those, and tell me that HST deserves such a one-sided characterization.
He didn't say "Mum", he said "Mom". In some localities, the "o" in mom is pronounced the same as the "au" in aunt... sort of an "aw" sound. And in each, the "aw" is the loudest part of the word, burying the "m"s in mom and the "nt" in aunt.
Speaking as someone who currently works for one of the afore-mentioned shortlisted companies, and also as someone who has worked for another company whose BPM package which did not make the list, I can tell you that you don't have a good grasp on the situation.
Yes, the first and foremost question to ask is "what is my business case", but that's for a business analyst to address. What makes you think a business analyst would even bother posting to Slashdot? Did you consider that, perhaps, he's tasked with evalulating the technical aspects of BPM software, and that, perhaps, his company wants more information than a business analyst would have to offer?
In particular:
* To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions.
Huh? Whatever do you mean? Its a process. A process is not necessarily instantiated in software. Or to put it another way, if your a real business guy, you do what it takes, not what you prefer to peruse.
My previous employer's product was a complete mess when it came to understanding the actual process implementation. The package came with a thousand "script blocks", all of which looked identical on a map, and many of which were coded so as to only work effectively with a particular prepackaged sample application. The script was a tangled nightmare. I sure as hell wouldn't want to end up with that kind of package, yet it exists. But the business analyst wouldn't know about that, and might recommend just such a package.
* To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes.
This is trivially simple, whats the issue? Do you really need a consultant to hold your watch and tell you the time?
Proper goal management is not trivial, nor something that can be done with a watch. If the software package doesn't have the proper reporting tools, you're going to have to write up your own, which isn't exactly something a BPM systems engineer would be able to do. Or perhaps you think he should manually scan logfiles for start/end timer reports?
A process step could involve a wide variety of factors. Do you want to track how long it takes for an offline or out-of-process task to completely, or which user completes a particular interactive task the slowest? Different kinds of goal management, and they would need different kinds of reporting.
Beyond that, goal management is massively helpful in evaluating the process for ongoing optimization. What, perhaps you thought implementing a BPM enterprise was a one-shot deal? It's an on-going process, involving regular maintenance and observation. Businesses and business needs change, the BPM had best be able to react, and that includes being aware of past data to best predict effective changes.
* To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later.
Why do you expect software errors, before you have even selected a package? If a business process has a genuine fault, and is broken, continuing the process and hoping to fix it somehow later sounds like a dumb business move to me.
All software contains bugs. When your business process is on the line, knowing how the BPM software will address those bugs is important.
Do you think they're going to stop their entire business process while the business analyst comes up with an answer? The process has to continue in some form. It takes months for them to come up with the original plan, what makes you think that fixing an error will take a short amount of time? The "dumb business move" is to turn off the process, and leave customers hanging. That's how you loose customers. Having a software package that allows for failure and failure recovery is absolutely important.
Nice job, there, chief. Glad to see you're striving to raise quality of Slashdot responces.
I've always found support for hardware in FreeBSD to be far more painless than in Linux, and has supported almost everything I've thrown at it...
Perhaps things have changed in the last few weeks, but last I checked, audio hardware was severely lacking in FreeBSD. Drivers for professional-grade audio hardware was almost nil. Not saying that FreeBSD is better/worse than Linux, just that your expirience is different than mine.:)
It would be nice to have more power strapped to my hip though.
Speaking of sex, it's nice to know that Jean-Louis Gassée hasn't strayed from his habit of making titillating comments:
"I want to see the two CEOs of RIM and [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs working together," he said. "The thought of this ménage à trois is absolutely hilarious."
Gassée is seriously one of the most quotable guys in the business...
The collaboration features will be too complicated for the majority of office workers.
Just out of curiosity, how do you know this? I haven't seen the tour referenced in the article, but I attended the Office (SharePoint) conference in Bellevue last week, and with some clever app designers, the collaboration tools could go a long way.
No, I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but I am impressed by some of what they've got going on.
I am a large guy. I am over six feet tall -- and I have large hands. I find the Alphagrip to be uncomfortable because it was designed for use by smaller hands.
Damnit damnit damnit. I suppose I should still try to find one in a brick'n'mortar store to try out, but still, disheartening. Although I don't have a problem with RSI (yet), I'd like to find an inexpensive keyboard to prevent it as much as possible. I'm guessing that an input device like this would help.
And if it confounds my coworkers at the same time, well, that's just sheer entertainment value.
So, where should I buy my music? The answer is, I don't buy it at all. I would pay for it. I want to pay for it. I used to pay for it. But, I don't like my toys to be broken by greedy strangers...
I'm in the same boat. Well, I used to be in the same boat.
The last time that Slashdot ran a story like this, I activated a free trial of eMusic. I strongly suspect that when the trial is over, eMusic will not get a cancellation notice, that eMusic will get ~$190 to pay for 90 mp3s/month for 12 months, and that I will happily get what I want-- legitimate, paid-for music without restriction.
Language is merely how we express ourselves, if an IDE is equiped to simplify that process of expression with auto-completion and what not, it is non the less changing that form of expression thus changing the language.
I disagree. Whether I manually type public class AnalogWatch : UserControl, or its generated by a wizard, it's the same expression. The language is the same.
Since we're talking about language as a means of expression, are you going to tell me that a sentence written on paper is different than the same sentence delivered via morse code?
No, but being kept from seeing or knowing what's actually going in to your program because all you did was click on widgets and select choices from drop-downs does mean you aren't going to understand them.
OK. Let's say that you're writing a program because you need to remove all files from a directory and all subdirectories with the extension ".backup". You can code the entire thing by hand, absolutely. Or you can use a wizard to give you the boilerplate code.
No wizard is going to give you the code to iterate through the file system, do string comparisons, etc. And that's the "real" program. Not the UI (whatever form that might be), or the library inclusions, or whatever. The programmer is going to have to understand the "real" problem-- how to manipulate files. The problem has nothing to do with how public class FileSearch arrived. Later, when the programmer has some experience with the language, he/she should start to learn how a message pump works, and how to attach an event to a control, etc. But start with the basics in a meaningful way. A programmer who can write the most elegant UI skeleton is worth little next to the programmer who uses wizards to write the UI for most elegant search routine-- the skeleton doesn't do anything; the search does.
Not specifically directed at you, HappyHead, but a lot of people in this discussion talk about "real programmers". Real programmers are the ones who solve real problems. A problem is no less solved whether some code was templated out for the programmer or not, or if it was written in notepad, Visual Studio, or Word.
A new programmer should start with small command-line programs, and grow into coding bigger things *by hand* at first.
Wizards and IDEs are not the exclusive domain of GUI apps. Visual Studio will happily give you boilerplate code for a command line app. I agree that starting small is important.
When new users start using wizards, bad code WILL result.
New users will often generate bad code regardless of whether they're using wizards or not-- they don't have the experience to produce good code yet. Practice will change that, not the use or non-use of a wizard.
COMPREHNSION is a process in and of itself it happens independently.
So it doesn't matter if the programmer is using an IDE, the programmer will still understand or not understand. So why not use the IDE?
Let us assume that in the most ideal of situation... that a programmer uses an IDE so simplistic and easy to use that it completely changes the language that it is meant to work with...
Shouldn't someone who's really interested in becoming a programmer be able to make it interesting for themselves (or find someone who knows what they're doing to help them)?
First impressions last a very long time, and you want the first impression to be a good one. You want people to believe that they can achieve something interesting. And if they're really interested in programming, they will go beyond the scope of that first project on their own. When they come to their first serious project, they will expirience "real grit" sure enough, but at least at that point they've have some confidence and experience with their tools.
Coding everything by hand does not mean you understand the basics.
Given that almost all images are stored with x-adjacent pixels being stored in consecutive memory locations (or nearly interleaved, with other data between them), the first example stands a much better chance of minimizing cache misses.
Thank you-- I'm going to try to keep that in mind. I appreciate the tip.
But if they tried to teach that stuff in programming 101 (regardless of the language), the students would leave at the end of the semester complaining that they didn't get to do anything fun, and are less likely to want to continue. A new student will have a hard enough time getting a project working. If you teach complex subjects first, they're more likely to make simple mistakes, rather like the typo you had in your initial example.
Let them get passionate about the subject by completing small tasks right away, then move on to the heavy material.
For that matter, in your example, the first code was not a "bad idea", it was simply less efficient. It would have been less efficient regardless of the language complexity, and the concept or cache-misses can be taught regardless of language.
No matter what language a programmer programs in, it is the understanding of programming concepts and logical REASONING that makes a good programmer, no amount tool-tips or auto-completion can change that.
Indeed, that's true. But we're not talking about a good programmer, we're talking about a beginner programmer. The transformation from beginner programmer to good programmer can be aided by tooltips, auto-completion, and other IDE-related tools.
Given two beginner programmers, one using an well-rounded IDE, the other just notepad, and a programming task, I think that the one with the IDE will be well into the debugging stage before the one with notepad has written all his code. Neither of them will grasp the Windows message loop yet, but the IDE user will at least have some hands-on experience with the "other half" of programming. And that goes a long way toward concrete understanding programming concepts and logical reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
First, who the hell wants a 500,000 RPM anything sitting in their lap? The high squeal resonant frequencies will be hell once it is about two weeks old.
I don't know a lot about resonant frequencies, but I can't imagine that you'll end up with many audible frequencies in the range of human hearing from a turbine running at 500kHz. CRT monitors used to squeel at a very high pitch-- let's say 10kHz just for the sake of argument-- and they were running at ~80kHz refresh rates? Where's that put the squeel of a device running at 6.25 times the frequency?
If all portable devices accepted 12V power, somebody would come out with a single brick with multiple 12V plugs, which would be a godsend to travellers who currently schlep one wall wart for each device.
Guitar players have just such a device for stompboxes. The vast majority of stompboxes run off a 9V DC, from a battery or wallwart, so there are several bricks you can purchase with just that. Of course, you still have to be careful around those oddballs which call for 5V, 12V, 18V, or inverted power, so it's not an ideal situation.
...Imagine a Beowolf cluster of those!
That thing IS a Beowolf cluster!
Not fictional, simply uncommon. Reference "Under The Black Flag" by David Cordingly, page 131, and quite a few other books on the subject. To quote:
You throw walls out of windows? Impressive!
And the money the "useless ad people" give to slashdot and other sites in exchange for page space, what does that go towards, spoons?
Yes, I think that if you consider that personal income is pooled and distributed to individual needs, then one may assert that some money does go towards spoons. Unless of course, Taco et. al. eat their soup with chopsticks... in which case, I'm duly impressed.
Quads it is then...
AMD, is that you?
I set off down to the local dealer to get me some supplies.
Not to pick on you, but posts like this get under my skin. Many people seem to be under the impression that Gonzo journalism (or HST's writings specifically) were all about drugs. This is a simplification, akin to saying the Shakespeare wrote about disfunctional royal families.
HST wrote about the "American Dream". He wrote about freedom and euphoria, and the extreme lengths people will go to achieve it. Drugs are just one mechanism, and were a prominent theme. Sport is another, as well as gambling and political power (as both aquiring it and escaping it). In general, about the high of the "win" and the depth of the "lose".
A quick crib sheet:
Better Than Sex (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 4)
Hell's Angels
Hey Rube
Read those, and tell me that HST deserves such a one-sided characterization.
He didn't say "Mum", he said "Mom". In some localities, the "o" in mom is pronounced the same as the "au" in aunt... sort of an "aw" sound. And in each, the "aw" is the loudest part of the word, burying the "m"s in mom and the "nt" in aunt.
I'd give my left arm to be ambidexterous
HAH! I've got to remember that one...
Speaking as someone who currently works for one of the afore-mentioned shortlisted companies, and also as someone who has worked for another company whose BPM package which did not make the list, I can tell you that you don't have a good grasp on the situation.
Yes, the first and foremost question to ask is "what is my business case", but that's for a business analyst to address. What makes you think a business analyst would even bother posting to Slashdot? Did you consider that, perhaps, he's tasked with evalulating the technical aspects of BPM software, and that, perhaps, his company wants more information than a business analyst would have to offer?
In particular:
* To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions.
Huh? Whatever do you mean? Its a process. A process is not necessarily instantiated in software. Or to put it another way, if your a real business guy, you do what it takes, not what you prefer to peruse.
My previous employer's product was a complete mess when it came to understanding the actual process implementation. The package came with a thousand "script blocks", all of which looked identical on a map, and many of which were coded so as to only work effectively with a particular prepackaged sample application. The script was a tangled nightmare. I sure as hell wouldn't want to end up with that kind of package, yet it exists. But the business analyst wouldn't know about that, and might recommend just such a package.
* To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes.
This is trivially simple, whats the issue? Do you really need a consultant to hold your watch and tell you the time?
Proper goal management is not trivial, nor something that can be done with a watch. If the software package doesn't have the proper reporting tools, you're going to have to write up your own, which isn't exactly something a BPM systems engineer would be able to do. Or perhaps you think he should manually scan logfiles for start/end timer reports?
A process step could involve a wide variety of factors. Do you want to track how long it takes for an offline or out-of-process task to completely, or which user completes a particular interactive task the slowest? Different kinds of goal management, and they would need different kinds of reporting.
Beyond that, goal management is massively helpful in evaluating the process for ongoing optimization. What, perhaps you thought implementing a BPM enterprise was a one-shot deal? It's an on-going process, involving regular maintenance and observation. Businesses and business needs change, the BPM had best be able to react, and that includes being aware of past data to best predict effective changes.
* To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later.
Why do you expect software errors, before you have even selected a package? If a business process has a genuine fault, and is broken, continuing the process and hoping to fix it somehow later sounds like a dumb business move to me.
All software contains bugs. When your business process is on the line, knowing how the BPM software will address those bugs is important.
Do you think they're going to stop their entire business process while the business analyst comes up with an answer? The process has to continue in some form. It takes months for them to come up with the original plan, what makes you think that fixing an error will take a short amount of time? The "dumb business move" is to turn off the process, and leave customers hanging. That's how you loose customers. Having a software package that allows for failure and failure recovery is absolutely important.
Nice job, there, chief. Glad to see you're striving to raise quality of Slashdot responces.
I've always found support for hardware in FreeBSD to be far more painless than in Linux, and has supported almost everything I've thrown at it...
:)
Perhaps things have changed in the last few weeks, but last I checked, audio hardware was severely lacking in FreeBSD. Drivers for professional-grade audio hardware was almost nil. Not saying that FreeBSD is better/worse than Linux, just that your expirience is different than mine.
I'm a little confused though....who is the third? Or is Gassée hoping to be the meat in the RIM/Jobs sandwich?
Apparently, RIM has 2 CEOs...
It would be nice to have more power strapped to my hip though.
Speaking of sex, it's nice to know that Jean-Louis Gassée hasn't strayed from his habit of making titillating comments:
"I want to see the two CEOs of RIM and [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs working together," he said. "The thought of this ménage à trois is absolutely hilarious."
Gassée is seriously one of the most quotable guys in the business...
The collaboration features will be too complicated for the majority of office workers.
Just out of curiosity, how do you know this? I haven't seen the tour referenced in the article, but I attended the Office (SharePoint) conference in Bellevue last week, and with some clever app designers, the collaboration tools could go a long way.
No, I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but I am impressed by some of what they've got going on.
I am a large guy. I am over six feet tall -- and I have large hands. I find the Alphagrip to be uncomfortable because it was designed for use by smaller hands.
Damnit damnit damnit. I suppose I should still try to find one in a brick'n'mortar store to try out, but still, disheartening. Although I don't have a problem with RSI (yet), I'd like to find an inexpensive keyboard to prevent it as much as possible. I'm guessing that an input device like this would help.
And if it confounds my coworkers at the same time, well, that's just sheer entertainment value.
So, where should I buy my music? The answer is, I don't buy it at all. I would pay for it. I want to pay for it. I used to pay for it. But, I don't like my toys to be broken by greedy strangers...
I'm in the same boat. Well, I used to be in the same boat.
The last time that Slashdot ran a story like this, I activated a free trial of eMusic. I strongly suspect that when the trial is over, eMusic will not get a cancellation notice, that eMusic will get ~$190 to pay for 90 mp3s/month for 12 months, and that I will happily get what I want-- legitimate, paid-for music without restriction.
Seems like a great deal to me.
Language is merely how we express ourselves, if an IDE is equiped to simplify that process of expression with auto-completion and what not, it is non the less changing that form of expression thus changing the language.
I disagree. Whether I manually type public class AnalogWatch : UserControl, or its generated by a wizard, it's the same expression. The language is the same.
Since we're talking about language as a means of expression, are you going to tell me that a sentence written on paper is different than the same sentence delivered via morse code?
No, but being kept from seeing or knowing what's actually going in to your program because all you did was click on widgets and select choices from drop-downs does mean you aren't going to understand them.
OK. Let's say that you're writing a program because you need to remove all files from a directory and all subdirectories with the extension ".backup". You can code the entire thing by hand, absolutely. Or you can use a wizard to give you the boilerplate code.
No wizard is going to give you the code to iterate through the file system, do string comparisons, etc. And that's the "real" program. Not the UI (whatever form that might be), or the library inclusions, or whatever. The programmer is going to have to understand the "real" problem-- how to manipulate files. The problem has nothing to do with how public class FileSearch arrived. Later, when the programmer has some experience with the language, he/she should start to learn how a message pump works, and how to attach an event to a control, etc. But start with the basics in a meaningful way. A programmer who can write the most elegant UI skeleton is worth little next to the programmer who uses wizards to write the UI for most elegant search routine-- the skeleton doesn't do anything; the search does.
Not specifically directed at you, HappyHead, but a lot of people in this discussion talk about "real programmers". Real programmers are the ones who solve real problems. A problem is no less solved whether some code was templated out for the programmer or not, or if it was written in notepad, Visual Studio, or Word.
A new programmer should start with small command-line programs, and grow into coding bigger things *by hand* at first.
Wizards and IDEs are not the exclusive domain of GUI apps. Visual Studio will happily give you boilerplate code for a command line app. I agree that starting small is important.
When new users start using wizards, bad code WILL result.
New users will often generate bad code regardless of whether they're using wizards or not-- they don't have the experience to produce good code yet. Practice will change that, not the use or non-use of a wizard.
COMPREHNSION is a process in and of itself it happens independently.
... that a programmer uses an IDE so simplistic and easy to use that it completely changes the language that it is meant to work with ...
So it doesn't matter if the programmer is using an IDE, the programmer will still understand or not understand. So why not use the IDE?
Let us assume that in the most ideal of situation
How does an IDE change a language?
Shouldn't someone who's really interested in becoming a programmer be able to make it interesting for themselves (or find someone who knows what they're doing to help them)?
First impressions last a very long time, and you want the first impression to be a good one. You want people to believe that they can achieve something interesting. And if they're really interested in programming, they will go beyond the scope of that first project on their own. When they come to their first serious project, they will expirience "real grit" sure enough, but at least at that point they've have some confidence and experience with their tools.
Coding everything by hand does not mean you understand the basics.
Given that almost all images are stored with x-adjacent pixels being stored in consecutive memory locations (or nearly interleaved, with other data between them), the first example stands a much better chance of minimizing cache misses.
Thank you-- I'm going to try to keep that in mind. I appreciate the tip.
But if they tried to teach that stuff in programming 101 (regardless of the language), the students would leave at the end of the semester complaining that they didn't get to do anything fun, and are less likely to want to continue. A new student will have a hard enough time getting a project working. If you teach complex subjects first, they're more likely to make simple mistakes, rather like the typo you had in your initial example.
Let them get passionate about the subject by completing small tasks right away, then move on to the heavy material.
For that matter, in your example, the first code was not a "bad idea", it was simply less efficient. It would have been less efficient regardless of the language complexity, and the concept or cache-misses can be taught regardless of language.
and it is the syntax of [VB.Net] that makes people say it is a bad choice for learning programming.
Can you give me a concrete example?
No matter what language a programmer programs in, it is the understanding of programming concepts and logical REASONING that makes a good programmer, no amount tool-tips or auto-completion can change that.
Indeed, that's true. But we're not talking about a good programmer, we're talking about a beginner programmer. The transformation from beginner programmer to good programmer can be aided by tooltips, auto-completion, and other IDE-related tools.
Given two beginner programmers, one using an well-rounded IDE, the other just notepad, and a programming task, I think that the one with the IDE will be well into the debugging stage before the one with notepad has written all his code. Neither of them will grasp the Windows message loop yet, but the IDE user will at least have some hands-on experience with the "other half" of programming. And that goes a long way toward concrete understanding programming concepts and logical reasoning.