I mean, if you're going to devise a device to kill people and blow up stuff, you should make it as efficient as possible, right?
Well, yeah. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here. Believe it or not, this is somewhat good news. Yes, it's designed to blow stuff up - welcome to reality - but it's designed only to blow up the stuff it was meant to. Or, at least, minimize the damage to things it wasn't intended to damage.
While people will whinge about how it's still open to human error (or bad intentions), the fact is war is here: it's a part of life. Perhaps not a direct part of your life or mine, but as part of life for the world as a whole.
So, taking that into account, I think your seemingly sarcastic statement is actually correct, kind of. 'Efficient' is perhaps a bad word for it, as it seems to imply (in the context of your post) that more people will be killed. 'Accurate' I think would be better, as it's made to hit a target - not inflict mass casualty.
And like it or not, the advance of weapons technology by the US are keeping you and I in the world we know. Keeping us in a country where we can do almost anything we want. Yeah, blah blah blah Bush - but it's not That Bad. Not yet.
... VP of a department... laptop suddenly shut down... "I should have known better"... replied by telling him not to worry about it
What? This was an opportune moment for some serious VP 0wnz0ring! No, no, wait - perhaps you were just a little under the weather. Right? Right?
Well just in case, for future reference, feel free to choose from any of the following, much more appropriate phrases:
Don't worry about it, the way you run this company it's no wonder you can't use your computer.
Don't worry about it, I was only getting laid for the first time in twenty years when I got your call.
Don't worry about it, I'm used to dealing with raving spastics such as yourself.
Don't worry about it, now get off your ass and plug it back in.
Ack... turning off the karma bonus for this one, talk about lame...:D
On a more serious note:
Point is, end users aren't stupid, they simply have other things they do, and what we find intuitive, they may not.
Very, very true. People are experts in their own domain. Just because it's not your domain doesn't make it any less important, nor does it give you cause to talk down your nose to them.
It's just not popular, coz...as a society we don't read nearly as much as we watch movies or play games.
Everybody watches movies and plays games more often than they read - I could agree with that. However, I don't think it's a scapegoat. I don't think it's as simple as, "That's why nobody cares."
Quite frankly, I think it's a pain in the ass to have to scroll through each page of text - turning a page becomes some wild swipe of the arm rather than a flick of the wrist. Unless you have the scrolly thing (the technical term, I'm sure), but hey I have one and I think it sucks too.
IMHO, books just aren't suited for computers. At least, not in the formats that seem to be popular (*points at PDF*). Yes, sometimes there's an index which is all groovy for click-and-view goodness, but even then - once you arrive - it's a case of the whole-arm-swipe (or reach-out-of-arm-chair-and-wiggle-scrolly-thing).
That's another thing, too. The comfort factor. You can read books anywhere. In bed, on the bus, in the bath, in the shower if you're a raving fuck. There's no reaching out to command some virtual arrow-like avatar just so you can see the next line of text.
Don't get me wrong, e-books rock, but paper is just convenient. E-books are good for reference texts but I can't imagine sitting down to read a novel in front of the PC.
Finally, offer them your consulting services at $500/hr, minimum 10 hours.
lol - yeah it would be nice wouldn't it?
Just keep in mind that if you tell them you know how to do it and you don't tell them the details, they can just nail your ass anyway and force the details out of you. That will only make a bad guy out of you, and open the way for more problems. At least, that's MHO.
Robert Smith (the man) is a prick. I love his music, but he's a prick.
Ah, right - my mistake. So perhaps we should have used a more aesthetically appealing representative for the forces of light? Ricky Martin perhaps? 5ive?
But seriously dude, Robert Smith runs about kicking robot ass all day - wouldn't you be pissed off if all you ever did was play music and kick ass?
My old high school runs (last I checked) a Red Hat 7.x HTTP (and SMTP/POP??) server.
Then they went and ruined everything by putting up a shitty web site that, for each page, takes half an hour to load:P It was co-developed by a manual arts teacher and the tech head.
Guess that's why they're teachers and not sys admins, huh?:P
I don't think 'Dynamicity' is a word. But hey, enlighten me?
- Flexibility? Java is highly inflexible. Its almost as as inflexible as C.
Nup, not even. See 'instanceof' - which, although considered hackish among OOP elites, gives volumes compared to using void pointers in C. Then there's the whole polymorphism thing, but hey - C is procedural.
- Safety? Given Java's lack of pointer types, it shouldn't need a JVM monitoring it to be safe.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK the JVM acts as a sandbox for Java applications/applets, stopping those which don't have the necessary permissions for privileged operations. This adds volumes to safety.
You also forgot the biggie: portability. C and C++ are portable to a degree, but require recompilation. Java you can compile and deploy wherever the hell you want and it will run. Run, but not necessarily work - hence the "Write once, test everywhere." catch phrase that people love to throw around. However, it's certainly the right approach to take for portable code (i.e. running it on a virtual machine).
Python is actually a little more painful wrt cross platform development, since certain modules tend to have bits and pieces that simply don't exist on other platforms - something I'm yet to encounter with Java. Other modules exist but tend not to work too well. I've never touched Dylan, and have heard very little of it, so I can't comment there.
To cut a long story short, Java can be natively compiled (see gcj - the point of the story, really). But it's generally not. That way, your programs will run in places they otherwise wouldn't run.
If you want speed, get Linux and gcj it (never actually tried gcj trolls - sue me if it sucks) - otherwise, live with it.
I have a degree in computer science. The day you will get a college degree, or at least some formal qualification, you won't need to go around saying: I am a "Java programmer".
Right, and the day you get around to pulling your head out of your own ass - or at least do something to stop you talking so much shit all the time - you won't need to go around pompously saying, "I have a degree in computer science."
Who are you that you can say what can be important in someone else situation?
Has it ever occurred to you that not everybody needs the speed? Anyway, it's you yourself who is trying to say what's important for everyone else.
Because of the startup time issues you can't use Java programs in shell scripts.
Think Bash, think Perl, think Python, think Ruby. You'd use any of the former before you'd think about using Java OR C++. At least, being a CS grad, I hope you would - unless you had good reason to do otherwise.
And just to be picky, it's only the larger Java applications that will noticibly kill your startup times (Tomcat springs to mind).
Because of the size and footprint issues, you can't do embedded with Java. Now you're probably going to say that embedded applications are not important...
I compare browsing to the mechanics of reading a book: Book -> TOC -> Chapters -> Pages... if ya wanna get fancy, then throw in an index or bib.
With that mindset, viewing web pages are the equivalent to turning pages...
Right, except that if the average web site was a book, a third of the pages would be ripped, another third pissed on and finally a third with page after page of "EnglishScript error on line 4 of page 451. Do you want to debug?"
I'm relatively new to the C# framework, so excuse the ignorance, but would it be possible to implement some or all of the C# language on top of the Java runtime? Perhaps not the whole metadata deal, which seems to be specific to VC#, but the rest of the language?
1) In contrast to the rest of Java, you have to remember to explicitly free everything you create.
Yeah that's a pain... I wonder why this is? Anyone?
2) Cross platform stuff goes out the window, unless you can make sure a SWT lib is installed everywhere you want it
There's nothing to stop you distributing the SWT library alongside your applications, and using batch/shell scripts to adjust the classpath at runtime.
:) Clever.
I was actually alluding to a 40-something year-old friend of mine who manages to ace most of his exams and assignments - he never finished high school and has spent the last twenty years of his life on a boat.
Then he comes into university and starts kicking ass as far as picking things up goes. Go figure.
heavy use of objects from the beginning but they never really say why or demonstrate why not.
Let me guess: Java?
I've read about the new generations of programmers being at an advantage when it comes to learning OOP because they don't have to 'unlearn' the old procedural style. 'Great,' think the lecturers, 'Now we can throw big words like "polymorphism" and "inheritance" into the mix without explaining what the hell you'd use it for - that ought to screw them up come exam time!'. And then there's those lecturers who do stress what you can use such things for, but who stress it too much: inheritance over aggregation and all that shit. Well, it's not that they stress inheritance BEFORE aggregation, but that they spend so much time explaining what inheritance/polymorphism/other-big-programmy-word IS, that obvious uses of aggregation - where it would be simpler and/or cleaner to use over inheritance - are just... I don't know... forgotten, I guess.
Anyway, exam for me today - better get some sleep. Thanks for all the interesting posts, and thanks for sharing the opinion of another undergrad, CGS.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO is just upset because the average Linux user gets laid more than them.
In Soviet Russia, the prostitutes pay YOU? :P
Where was Steve Ballmer when these ape videos were shot?
Hehe
SB: "Bananas, Bananas, BANANAS!"
I mean, if you're going to devise a device to kill people and blow up stuff, you should make it as efficient as possible, right?
Well, yeah. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here. Believe it or not, this is somewhat good news. Yes, it's designed to blow stuff up - welcome to reality - but it's designed only to blow up the stuff it was meant to. Or, at least, minimize the damage to things it wasn't intended to damage.
While people will whinge about how it's still open to human error (or bad intentions), the fact is war is here: it's a part of life. Perhaps not a direct part of your life or mine, but as part of life for the world as a whole.
So, taking that into account, I think your seemingly sarcastic statement is actually correct, kind of. 'Efficient' is perhaps a bad word for it, as it seems to imply (in the context of your post) that more people will be killed. 'Accurate' I think would be better, as it's made to hit a target - not inflict mass casualty.
And like it or not, the advance of weapons technology by the US are keeping you and I in the world we know. Keeping us in a country where we can do almost anything we want. Yeah, blah blah blah Bush - but it's not That Bad. Not yet.
So does this mean there will be bombs that only kill one person and cost 20 billion to make. ALRIGHT!!
... how much is a human life worth exactly?
Erm
What? This was an opportune moment for some serious VP 0wnz0ring! No, no, wait - perhaps you were just a little under the weather. Right? Right?
Well just in case, for future reference, feel free to choose from any of the following, much more appropriate phrases:
Ack
On a more serious note:
Point is, end users aren't stupid, they simply have other things they do, and what we find intuitive, they may not.
Very, very true. People are experts in their own domain. Just because it's not your domain doesn't make it any less important, nor does it give you cause to talk down your nose to them.
I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..
Blindfolded. As did any respectable man back then. And we liked it.
It's just not popular, coz...as a society we don't read nearly as much as we watch movies or play games.
Everybody watches movies and plays games more often than they read - I could agree with that. However, I don't think it's a scapegoat. I don't think it's as simple as, "That's why nobody cares."
Quite frankly, I think it's a pain in the ass to have to scroll through each page of text - turning a page becomes some wild swipe of the arm rather than a flick of the wrist. Unless you have the scrolly thing (the technical term, I'm sure), but hey I have one and I think it sucks too.
IMHO, books just aren't suited for computers. At least, not in the formats that seem to be popular (*points at PDF*). Yes, sometimes there's an index which is all groovy for click-and-view goodness, but even then - once you arrive - it's a case of the whole-arm-swipe (or reach-out-of-arm-chair-and-wiggle-scrolly-thing).
That's another thing, too. The comfort factor. You can read books anywhere. In bed, on the bus, in the bath, in the shower if you're a raving fuck. There's no reaching out to command some virtual arrow-like avatar just so you can see the next line of text.
Don't get me wrong, e-books rock, but paper is just convenient. E-books are good for reference texts but I can't imagine sitting down to read a novel in front of the PC.
Finally, offer them your consulting services at $500/hr, minimum 10 hours.
lol - yeah it would be nice wouldn't it?
Just keep in mind that if you tell them you know how to do it and you don't tell them the details, they can just nail your ass anyway and force the details out of you. That will only make a bad guy out of you, and open the way for more problems. At least, that's MHO.
Robert Smith (the man) is a prick. I love his music, but he's a prick.
Ah, right - my mistake. So perhaps we should have used a more aesthetically appealing representative for the forces of light? Ricky Martin perhaps? 5ive?
But seriously dude, Robert Smith runs about kicking robot ass all day - wouldn't you be pissed off if all you ever did was play music and kick ass?
Which one's Barbara Streisand and which one is The Cure's Robert Smith? ;)
My old high school runs (last I checked) a Red Hat 7.x HTTP (and SMTP/POP??) server.
:P It was co-developed by a manual arts teacher and the tech head.
:P
Then they went and ruined everything by putting up a shitty web site that, for each page, takes half an hour to load
Guess that's why they're teachers and not sys admins, huh?
Hey hey,
- Dynamicity? No.
I don't think 'Dynamicity' is a word. But hey, enlighten me?
- Flexibility? Java is highly inflexible. Its almost as as inflexible as C.
Nup, not even. See 'instanceof' - which, although considered hackish among OOP elites, gives volumes compared to using void pointers in C. Then there's the whole polymorphism thing, but hey - C is procedural.
- Safety? Given Java's lack of pointer types, it shouldn't need a JVM monitoring it to be safe.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK the JVM acts as a sandbox for Java applications/applets, stopping those which don't have the necessary permissions for privileged operations. This adds volumes to safety.
You also forgot the biggie: portability. C and C++ are portable to a degree, but require recompilation. Java you can compile and deploy wherever the hell you want and it will run. Run, but not necessarily work - hence the "Write once, test everywhere." catch phrase that people love to throw around. However, it's certainly the right approach to take for portable code (i.e. running it on a virtual machine).
Python is actually a little more painful wrt cross platform development, since certain modules tend to have bits and pieces that simply don't exist on other platforms - something I'm yet to encounter with Java. Other modules exist but tend not to work too well. I've never touched Dylan, and have heard very little of it, so I can't comment there.
To cut a long story short, Java can be natively compiled (see gcj - the point of the story, really). But it's generally not. That way, your programs will run in places they otherwise wouldn't run.
If you want speed, get Linux and gcj it (never actually tried gcj trolls - sue me if it sucks) - otherwise, live with it.
Gee whiz, you're a raving spastic.
I have a degree in computer science. The day you will get a college degree, or at least some formal qualification, you won't need to go around saying: I am a "Java programmer".
Right, and the day you get around to pulling your head out of your own ass - or at least do something to stop you talking so much shit all the time - you won't need to go around pompously saying, "I have a degree in computer science."
Who are you that you can say what can be important in someone else situation?
Has it ever occurred to you that not everybody needs the speed? Anyway, it's you yourself who is trying to say what's important for everyone else.
Because of the startup time issues you can't use Java programs in shell scripts.
Think Bash, think Perl, think Python, think Ruby. You'd use any of the former before you'd think about using Java OR C++. At least, being a CS grad, I hope you would - unless you had good reason to do otherwise.
And just to be picky, it's only the larger Java applications that will noticibly kill your startup times (Tomcat springs to mind).
Because of the size and footprint issues, you can't do embedded with Java. Now you're probably going to say that embedded applications are not important ...
GOOGLE FFS
And I just spent the last two days downloading the DirectX 9.0a SDK over dial-up!!
Why, this is almost as bad as me buying VC#.NET and VC++.NET a mere moment before VS.NET 2003 came out.
Cheaper though.
1. Read about jobs going overseas
... forget I said anything :S
2. Open up the 'post comment' page.
3. ??????
4. Network Function Variable!
Woah
Come now, Osama, time for your medication ;)
Ah don't be silly, that's just Beefcake Barbie.
I compare browsing to the mechanics of reading a book: Book -> TOC -> Chapters -> Pages... if ya wanna get fancy, then throw in an index or bib.
With that mindset, viewing web pages are the equivalent to turning pages...
Right, except that if the average web site was a book, a third of the pages would be ripped, another third pissed on and finally a third with page after page of "EnglishScript error on line 4 of page 451. Do you want to debug?"
what happens if something breaks, or if it turns out one of the components is non-functional?
Columbia.
No Above-average Simians Available
Which obviously won't be easy enough for the average /. ed ;)
I'm relatively new to the C# framework, so excuse the ignorance, but would it be possible to implement some or all of the C# language on top of the Java runtime? Perhaps not the whole metadata deal, which seems to be specific to VC#, but the rest of the language?
1) In contrast to the rest of Java, you have to remember to explicitly free everything you create.
Yeah that's a pain ... I wonder why this is? Anyone?
2) Cross platform stuff goes out the window, unless you can make sure a SWT lib is installed everywhere you want it
There's nothing to stop you distributing the SWT library alongside your applications, and using batch/shell scripts to adjust the classpath at runtime.
:) Clever. I was actually alluding to a 40-something year-old friend of mine who manages to ace most of his exams and assignments - he never finished high school and has spent the last twenty years of his life on a boat. Then he comes into university and starts kicking ass as far as picking things up goes. Go figure.
heavy use of objects from the beginning but they never really say why or demonstrate why not.
Let me guess: Java?
I've read about the new generations of programmers being at an advantage when it comes to learning OOP because they don't have to 'unlearn' the old procedural style. 'Great,' think the lecturers, 'Now we can throw big words like "polymorphism" and "inheritance" into the mix without explaining what the hell you'd use it for - that ought to screw them up come exam time!'. And then there's those lecturers who do stress what you can use such things for, but who stress it too much: inheritance over aggregation and all that shit. Well, it's not that they stress inheritance BEFORE aggregation, but that they spend so much time explaining what inheritance/polymorphism/other-big-programmy-word IS, that obvious uses of aggregation - where it would be simpler and/or cleaner to use over inheritance - are just ... I don't know ... forgotten, I guess.
Anyway, exam for me today - better get some sleep. Thanks for all the interesting posts, and thanks for sharing the opinion of another undergrad, CGS.