"OOP makes people lazy and gives them less of an understanding of what's actually going on."
I've noticed that people who critise OOP rarely understand what it is and tend to think it's tied to a particular type of language. OO is a way of thinking about a problem at a higher level than functional decomposition. You can code an OO solution in whatever language you like. Done properly it leads to elegant solutions eg; many of the examples in K&R exhibit the features of OO design and they were created before the term "object orientated" was coined. I assume when K&R used function pointers as elements of a struct they "understood what's going on", right?
"All that OOP code you write gets translated back into something procedural, you know."
Perhaps that's because...you know...OOP is procedural.
That only applies if (like the hooker) you're a low level worker in a two bit outfit, I'm 50 and have been in "IT" for 20yrs, the guy who sits next to me is a 35yr veteran, in fact where I work we don't hire developers with less than 10yrs experience.
"If I secured my company's assets this way, I'd lose my job."
The ability to secure a few servers does not make you a military strategist. If you secured your nation by giving away troop movements as you are demanding then you would lose more than your job. "Loose lips sink ships" and all that...
"For what I pay for this stuff, I should be able to reasonably expect a level of service and security that includes the possibility that the enemy may have the information above."
So your suggestion is to turn that possibility into a certainty? In that case why bother developing stealth technology? - It would be much cheaper to paint a great big bulls-eye on the planes and taunt the enemy to death.
The bodyless loop can be replaced with "i=strlen(s);", if it has a body then pre-assign a variable instead of calling strlen() at each iteration (which a modern compiler would do automatically anyway). But what is that supposed to prove? That stupid people can write stupid code? That stupid people didn't exist 20yrs ago?
What is "fucking sad" is that you don't realise 's' is an "object" and strlen() is a "string method" that hides it's implementation details behind an API. The creation of standard C libraries lead to scalable code and faster development, which is exactly the same point the OP was making.
"While we all know that computer software validation is hard if not impossible. It's not something we readily admit here on slash dot."
Rubbish, anyone trained in CS (such as myself) will tell you that, what is less commonly heard is that the same theory applies to mechanical systems and since mechanical sytems are analog by nature it makes the task of validation even more impossible.
"For example they often used triple redundant computers and if one of them disagreed the other two would vote it off the island and stop listening to it. From what I've read it's now suspected that the latest airbus crash in the pacific had one of it's root problem in the voting nexus where a superior computer over ruled a more primitive safety system."
I'm not saying a computer glitch didn't cause the accident, but what I will say is that you do not understand what the term "triple redundant computer" means. There is no "superior" computer in such a system. It's designed to overcome hardware failures not software failures. Basically it works as follows, there are three identical computers running identical software, all three computers "vote" on the correct output and compare their vote to the other two, if one computer goes insane (has a different answer to the the other two) the other two sane computers shut it down.
The odds of two computers going insane in exatly the same manner at exactly the same time and voting to shut down the sole sane computer are such that the pilot winning the lottery every week for a year is more plausible. The few occassions where these sysytems have been known to fail were all due to external factors such as non-redundant power supply systems failing and taking all three computers offline.
To summarise your post you are saying that "new systems designed to overcome old problems may run into new problems". That has always been the price of progress and the comet (the first true airliner) is a perfect example.
I'm sure your dad has forgotten more about aircraft safety than I ever knew but if safety was the only concern then monkeys wouldn't fly and your dad would be out of a job. For relatively safe progress to take place you also need people who concentrate on performance, economy, efficientcy, infrastructure, communications, and all the other things that got us from the Wright brothers to jumbo jets in less than 100yrs.
"How can we check paper votes are counted right? How can we check the ballot results are added correctly? Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?"
Paper ballots are put on a table and representatives from all the political parties start sorting them into stacks. When they are all sorted the reps swap stacks with each other to check and throw out those which they think are incorrectly sorted or unreadable. Rinse and repeat until all reps have inspected all stacks. The discarded ballots are then resorted and the process continues until all ballots have been counted. Independent observers watch the whole process and the competing reps watch each other. This is done at the polling station and a result is normally declared within 12hrs.
Now the machines in Victoria print a ballot that you can check before you put it into a ballot box, they may even speed up the counting with an electronic reader and if all reps agree with the readers result then it's fine, if not then they count them manually as outlined above.
"Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes. Political parties and organizations who are concerned with elections must evolve with the times and develop new ways of checking election results in an electronic world. Those concerns about electronic voting that are presented every time the subject is discussed are becoming rather tiresome."
It's tiresome to keep explaining this to people who do not understanding the relative risk/reward for different types of electrol fraud. Compare the two systems outlined above to the Diebold system where the machine counts your vote with no auditable paper trail and no possibility to question the results of the machines. The first two can be trusted by a reasonable person, sure you may get low level fraud such as ballot stuffing but it would take a massive conspiracy between competing political parties to rig an entire election. A Diebold type system cannot be trusted by a reasonable person, a single fraudster could rig an entire election by simply changing a number in the central server's database.
This is NOT a diebold type system which the AEC has repeatedly stated will not be introduced into Australia. It's the same system they used for blind people at the last election. The machine simply prints the ballot, if you're NOT blind you can check it, if you are blind you're truted companion can do that. The printed ballot still goes into a ballot box. The supposed purpose is to eliminate unreadable ballots and donkey votes, personally I think it's a waste of money but it's not a threat to democracy.
"Learning out of a book in high school or college isn't obviously the same as hands-on building and programming."
It was 1964 and I had just started school when a teacher showed me how to light a torch bulb with a battery and a piece of wire, I felt like a caveman who had just been shown how to make fire! To imply that school is just book learning and no hands-on is just plain nonesense. OTOH, I totally agree with the rest of your post.
Most folks who have learned C++ learned it in a classroom with a real teacher. Most folks who learned BASIC learned by banging away on a computer keyboard at home.
Most people aren't very good at teaching themselves. I've seen this a lot with people trying to learn Morse code and giving up in frustration.
I stand as an exception to your rule. I learnt Basic and Pascal myself then was taught C, COBOL, LISP, etc at uni, then learnt C++ by myself mainly because C++ was still new in the late 80's. If you learnt C via the K&R route then C++ is fairly obvious, classes are just data structs with function pointers. In fact the the Watcom C++ I leant with was just a set of #define statements on top of Watcom C.
As for learning morse code that's just a boring memory excercise that cannot be ported to anything else. For example most C programmers have more or less memorised ascii codes but that doesn't help them one bit if they want to memorise morse or ebcdic codes.
I would hazzard a guess that frayed sticky cables are much more common than the sticky electronic type. I had one jam on my motorbike in the late seventies, not a big deal since it had a clutch.
As for your assertion that cars were less problematic in the 70's that is simply nonesense. The only way in which a 1970's car was superiour is that it was easier to do your own servicing and repairs.
"Do they have to earn this respect? What do they have to give up for it?"
Forget about teachers, why in your eyes does someone have to give up something to earn respect? What did Eienstien, Newton, Gahndi, Washington, ect give up to earn the enormous respect they still hold? - Nothing, they were true to themselves, and DIDN'T give an inch. Those who are not true to themselves and mearly act out a role they don't believe in are called hypocrites.
Don't know what the trains are like in the US but trains in most other places are not meant to replace cars, they are meant to replace some cars for the daily commute in and out of the main bussiness district(s). This is why train stations in the burbs have large car parks that are full by 8.30am on on weekdays but empty on the weekends.
Cars are not "the solution", but neither are trains.
This is where your reasoning has gone astray. Your post is built on the falasy of binary choice. Trains do one or two things well as do cars, busses, tractors, ice-cream vans and unicycles. If I applied the same reasoning to cars I would be complaining that cars aren't sufficiently versatile because 500 passengers in the back seat is an inconvienience.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers. And shutting down infrastructure projects that will last 200 years to start another failed experiment in teaching seems foolhardy at best.
The best teachers I ever had weren't making that much money. The highest paid teachers I've had, A) seldom taught, B) did a horrible job, and C) used a lot of TAs to actually do the work while the prof was out D) selling his book.
"1984, orwell, big brother: it would all make sense if the state had a monopoly on technological advance. it doesn't. as such, 1984, orwell, big brother: failed, dead meme, useless way of thinking about your world."
Wow, and you critisize others for not understanding Orwell?
As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out Orwell was the only intellectual writer in the first half of the 20th century to correctly identify and attack all three of the major ideological diseases of the 20th century, Imperialisim, Communisim, and Facsisim. And he did a damned fine job of it too!
I suggest you get yourself a copy of Hitchens aptly titled book Why Orwell matters.
Slashdot Mirror
"OOP makes people lazy and gives them less of an understanding of what's actually going on."
I've noticed that people who critise OOP rarely understand what it is and tend to think it's tied to a particular type of language. OO is a way of thinking about a problem at a higher level than functional decomposition. You can code an OO solution in whatever language you like. Done properly it leads to elegant solutions eg; many of the examples in K&R exhibit the features of OO design and they were created before the term "object orientated" was coined. I assume when K&R used function pointers as elements of a struct they "understood what's going on", right?
"All that OOP code you write gets translated back into something procedural, you know."
Perhaps that's because...you know...OOP is procedural.
No, we also train our testers to become developers if they show an interest and apptitude.
Point #2, I know it's illegal to upload but is it also illegal to download copyrighted stuff in the UK?
That only applies if (like the hooker) you're a low level worker in a two bit outfit, I'm 50 and have been in "IT" for 20yrs, the guy who sits next to me is a 35yr veteran, in fact where I work we don't hire developers with less than 10yrs experience.
"If I secured my company's assets this way, I'd lose my job."
The ability to secure a few servers does not make you a military strategist. If you secured your nation by giving away troop movements as you are demanding then you would lose more than your job. "Loose lips sink ships" and all that...
"For what I pay for this stuff, I should be able to reasonably expect a level of service and security that includes the possibility that the enemy may have the information above."
So your suggestion is to turn that possibility into a certainty? In that case why bother developing stealth technology? - It would be much cheaper to paint a great big bulls-eye on the planes and taunt the enemy to death.
Ok I'll feed the AC troll...
The bodyless loop can be replaced with "i=strlen(s);", if it has a body then pre-assign a variable instead of calling strlen() at each iteration (which a modern compiler would do automatically anyway). But what is that supposed to prove? That stupid people can write stupid code? That stupid people didn't exist 20yrs ago?
What is "fucking sad" is that you don't realise 's' is an "object" and strlen() is a "string method" that hides it's implementation details behind an API. The creation of standard C libraries lead to scalable code and faster development, which is exactly the same point the OP was making.
I'm sure there are plenty of people in high places who want to keep extra-marital affairs secret but I doubt they would resort to treason to do so.
"While we all know that computer software validation is hard if not impossible. It's not something we readily admit here on slash dot."
Rubbish, anyone trained in CS (such as myself) will tell you that, what is less commonly heard is that the same theory applies to mechanical systems and since mechanical sytems are analog by nature it makes the task of validation even more impossible.
"For example they often used triple redundant computers and if one of them disagreed the other two would vote it off the island and stop listening to it. From what I've read it's now suspected that the latest airbus crash in the pacific had one of it's root problem in the voting nexus where a superior computer over ruled a more primitive safety system."
I'm not saying a computer glitch didn't cause the accident, but what I will say is that you do not understand what the term "triple redundant computer" means. There is no "superior" computer in such a system. It's designed to overcome hardware failures not software failures. Basically it works as follows, there are three identical computers running identical software, all three computers "vote" on the correct output and compare their vote to the other two, if one computer goes insane (has a different answer to the the other two) the other two sane computers shut it down.
The odds of two computers going insane in exatly the same manner at exactly the same time and voting to shut down the sole sane computer are such that the pilot winning the lottery every week for a year is more plausible. The few occassions where these sysytems have been known to fail were all due to external factors such as non-redundant power supply systems failing and taking all three computers offline.
To summarise your post you are saying that "new systems designed to overcome old problems may run into new problems". That has always been the price of progress and the comet (the first true airliner) is a perfect example.
I'm sure your dad has forgotten more about aircraft safety than I ever knew but if safety was the only concern then monkeys wouldn't fly and your dad would be out of a job. For relatively safe progress to take place you also need people who concentrate on performance, economy, efficientcy, infrastructure, communications, and all the other things that got us from the Wright brothers to jumbo jets in less than 100yrs.
In other words. What has sexual orientation got to do with security?
"How can we check paper votes are counted right? How can we check the ballot results are added correctly? Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?"
Paper ballots are put on a table and representatives from all the political parties start sorting them into stacks. When they are all sorted the reps swap stacks with each other to check and throw out those which they think are incorrectly sorted or unreadable. Rinse and repeat until all reps have inspected all stacks. The discarded ballots are then resorted and the process continues until all ballots have been counted. Independent observers watch the whole process and the competing reps watch each other. This is done at the polling station and a result is normally declared within 12hrs.
Now the machines in Victoria print a ballot that you can check before you put it into a ballot box, they may even speed up the counting with an electronic reader and if all reps agree with the readers result then it's fine, if not then they count them manually as outlined above.
"Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes. Political parties and organizations who are concerned with elections must evolve with the times and develop new ways of checking election results in an electronic world. Those concerns about electronic voting that are presented every time the subject is discussed are becoming rather tiresome."
It's tiresome to keep explaining this to people who do not understanding the relative risk/reward for different types of electrol fraud. Compare the two systems outlined above to the Diebold system where the machine counts your vote with no auditable paper trail and no possibility to question the results of the machines. The first two can be trusted by a reasonable person, sure you may get low level fraud such as ballot stuffing but it would take a massive conspiracy between competing political parties to rig an entire election. A Diebold type system cannot be trusted by a reasonable person, a single fraudster could rig an entire election by simply changing a number in the central server's database.
This is NOT a diebold type system which the AEC has repeatedly stated will not be introduced into Australia. It's the same system they used for blind people at the last election. The machine simply prints the ballot, if you're NOT blind you can check it, if you are blind you're truted companion can do that. The printed ballot still goes into a ballot box. The supposed purpose is to eliminate unreadable ballots and donkey votes, personally I think it's a waste of money but it's not a threat to democracy.
"Learning out of a book in high school or college isn't obviously the same as hands-on building and programming."
It was 1964 and I had just started school when a teacher showed me how to light a torch bulb with a battery and a piece of wire, I felt like a caveman who had just been shown how to make fire! To imply that school is just book learning and no hands-on is just plain nonesense. OTOH, I totally agree with the rest of your post.
Most folks who have learned C++ learned it in a classroom with a real teacher. Most folks who learned BASIC learned by banging away on a computer keyboard at home. Most people aren't very good at teaching themselves. I've seen this a lot with people trying to learn Morse code and giving up in frustration.
I stand as an exception to your rule. I learnt Basic and Pascal myself then was taught C, COBOL, LISP, etc at uni, then learnt C++ by myself mainly because C++ was still new in the late 80's. If you learnt C via the K&R route then C++ is fairly obvious, classes are just data structs with function pointers. In fact the the Watcom C++ I leant with was just a set of #define statements on top of Watcom C.
As for learning morse code that's just a boring memory excercise that cannot be ported to anything else. For example most C programmers have more or less memorised ascii codes but that doesn't help them one bit if they want to memorise morse or ebcdic codes.
No, not less problems. MORE problems but they were problems you could fix at home with a set of spanners.
It was a joke. dickhead.
Diesel is the name of the guy who invented the diesel engine.
:)
BTW: Funny sig.
I would hazzard a guess that frayed sticky cables are much more common than the sticky electronic type. I had one jam on my motorbike in the late seventies, not a big deal since it had a clutch.
As for your assertion that cars were less problematic in the 70's that is simply nonesense. The only way in which a 1970's car was superiour is that it was easier to do your own servicing and repairs.
"Or perhaps it would be just a different kind of crap?"
Yep. Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own but if it comes out of someone else then it stinks.
For an Australian family on $100K/yr UHC costs $1,500/yr. I told that to an American a little while ago and he called me a liar...
"Do they have to earn this respect? What do they have to give up for it?"
Forget about teachers, why in your eyes does someone have to give up something to earn respect? What did Eienstien, Newton, Gahndi, Washington, ect give up to earn the enormous respect they still hold? - Nothing, they were true to themselves, and DIDN'T give an inch. Those who are not true to themselves and mearly act out a role they don't believe in are called hypocrites.
Don't know what the trains are like in the US but trains in most other places are not meant to replace cars, they are meant to replace some cars for the daily commute in and out of the main bussiness district(s). This is why train stations in the burbs have large car parks that are full by 8.30am on on weekdays but empty on the weekends.
Cars are not "the solution", but neither are trains.
This is where your reasoning has gone astray. Your post is built on the falasy of binary choice. Trains do one or two things well as do cars, busses, tractors, ice-cream vans and unicycles. If I applied the same reasoning to cars I would be complaining that cars aren't sufficiently versatile because 500 passengers in the back seat is an inconvienience.
There is no evidence that paying more will produce better teachers. And shutting down infrastructure projects that will last 200 years to start another failed experiment in teaching seems foolhardy at best.
The best teachers I ever had weren't making that much money. The highest paid teachers I've had, A) seldom taught, B) did a horrible job, and C) used a lot of TAs to actually do the work while the prof was out D) selling his book.
Paying more won't work but paying less does?
"a new conspiracy theory could be born every second!"
Youtube has got that covered, no need to go to mars.
Of course, but it was your bagging of Orwell's work I objected to not the fact he is overused and abused.
"1984, orwell, big brother: it would all make sense if the state had a monopoly on technological advance. it doesn't. as such, 1984, orwell, big brother: failed, dead meme, useless way of thinking about your world."
Wow, and you critisize others for not understanding Orwell?
As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out Orwell was the only intellectual writer in the first half of the 20th century to correctly identify and attack all three of the major ideological diseases of the 20th century, Imperialisim, Communisim, and Facsisim. And he did a damned fine job of it too!
I suggest you get yourself a copy of Hitchens aptly titled book Why Orwell matters.