Any definition you look at is entirely untrue. There are no factories and few companies close by that could be considered âblue collarâ(TM). Seth attempted to paint us in a âFalse Lightâ(TM) of living in squalor, which is entirely untrue. The East side of Madison is quite affluent and white collar if nothing else.
As somebody who lives in Madison I had to laugh when he wrote that about the east side. Quite affluent? Hmm, maybe he was thinking of the west side. The city breaks down like this:
Far west side & suburbs: well to do, families, soccer mom's, that sort of scene.
Downtown: Lots of college kids and young working people. And the ladies are hot.
Near east side: Starting to leave any area of affluency, but at least the people there are cool about it. Hippies (both burnt out and still going), hipsters, generally a funky area of town.
Farther east (where he says he is from): One of the two seedy areas of town, the other being the south side. Most buildings (with the notable exception of the mall) are run down. Not a lot of development, as opposed to downtown and the west side where there is a lot. If there are blue collar places to work in this city, this is where you go. Hell, you can find the headquarters of Oscar Mayer on the east side. There's one major factory, and there are plenty more around it. This is where you go if you live in Madison but can't afford to live closer to downtown or on the West side.
Anyway, all i meant to say is that, perhaps he meant the *West* side of madison is affluent and white collar, and the *East* side is visibly poor and blue collar.
"The most powerful weapon in your toolbox is comprehensive unit testing"
It's this kind of thinking that causes too many of the problems you are trying to prevent.
According to _Programming Productivity_ by Capers Jones, unit testing, will only find 25% of the defects. At its best, unit testing finds 50% of the problems. Compare this to, for example, formal inspections, which find 60% of defects on average, 70% at best. Modeling and prototyping (build one to throw away) can find up to 80% of defects.
None of these methods will build a completely defect-free program, but by combining a number of them, you can get extremely close (99%).
My apologies, but you appear to have mistaken this place for a serious discussion forum. Please, keep your posts down to a few lines and try not to say anything too much related to the article. What was it about, anyway? I haven't looked yet..
"My eyes are open. And from what they can see, the folks at Microsft are as responsible for "inventing" the spreadsheet as they are for "creating" DOS, or Al Gore forming the internet..."
Nobody claimed MS invented the spreadsheet; he clamied the *person* who invented the SS is now working with MS.
"Do you seriously plan on renting software?"
.NET has absolutely nothing to do with renting software. Nothing. MS does want to rent software, but the.NET framework has nothing to do with this.
"Essentially another language with the same power as C/C++ but more nuisances."
When I got here, I realized you have absolutely no idea what.NET is. It's not a language. It's a framework. C# is a language that has the ability to compile to the.NET framework, but it's separate from the.NET framework. Many other languages also compile to it.
I suggest you read up on the subject more before writing it off. It's really incredible, from a developers point of view. If you don't believe me, just look around at the world in 5 years and ask yourself whether you were right.
fuckin a dude
pre election day drinking
one last drunken chance to to change each others mind
total madness
my ankle is twisted and my front teeth are sore
also burned a massive container of slim jims
As the other poster pointed out, MFC is not an API, it is a class library. Not to sound trollish here, but you claim that it is poorly laid out... Have you studied object-oriented design? By no means am I saying it is the best OO on earth, but it is certainly intuitive, at least to me.
I understand that if a person can only program MFC, that's not really "real programming". But it's a great tool that can be used to develop GUIs for Windows. There is nothing wrong with making use of it.
As for using Win32 API calls within an MFC program, could I ask exactly what the problem is? I do is all the time... The bigger app that I maintain (~40,000 lines) used to use the raw Winsock API (not raw sockets, just plain Winsock), until I moved it to CAsyncSocket. Both worked fine; I only switched because using the socket class allowed the code to be organized better. Then again, if you're talking about CSocket... stay away from CSocket!
That said, I'd agree that there is absolutely no excuse for using MFC in a college course, especially one with "Operating Systems" in the title. I think it is much better to learn how to actually program with the languages; then using class libraries like MFC will be a piece of cake.
One thing that might help out if you're interested. If you haven't read anything on Windows programming and you intend to be doing any of it, I'd highly recommend Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows". It's priceless.
Visual SourceSafe is an excellent example of a product that is completely stagnant for lack of competition If you're developing in a purely Windows environment, you're right that it's going to be expensive to buy all the tools. But just because you develop Windows apps doesn't mean you can't use free stuff. The only Microsoft tools you really need are Windows and Visual Studio. CVS works just fine run off a UNIX server with Windows clients (I prefer it to SourceSafe because it can be accessed over TCP (ssh) by default). A free program named WinCVS makes it easy. For bug tracking, there are a few web-based UNIX systems out there, including Jitterbug. Personally, I would find it quite imprudent to pay for an expensive SourcSafe license when CVS is free and does the same job (IMHO, better).
"I agree that it's a good thing that he is donating to charity, but a company that does something damaging and then makes a big show of donating to charity (or, as Kodak is doing here, of reminding people about past donations) just doesn't sit right with me, somehow."
Funny thing is, Gates doesn't make a huge deal of it. Did you know a few months ago he gave over $5 billion dollars away? Or even more recently, $100 million to AIDS research? Probably not. It only appeared in a few news outlets, because Gates and MS didn't make a big deal of it. On the other hand, when Ted Turner gave away $1 billion (over 10 years), he was on the cover of every news magazine in the country. That's not to diminish Turner's donation, of course, just to say that Gates' donations are not exactly all about bragging.
Unfortunately, I think the U.S. government is still for the people. We are strongly against crypto restrictions, and for good reason. But ask the average person on the street; if they even know what cryptography is, they will be completely apathetic. So it goes.
The government is only our friends when they protect our liberties. They have long since stopped doing that.
Sadly, this is correct. The easiest thing to conclude from this is that the government is no longer "of the people," but more and more I am becoming convinced that the government *is* still of the people.
Each of us chooses who we associate with, so our perceptions of what people think tend to be skewed. For instance, civil libertarians probably associate more with civil libertarians than others, and so believe that most people really do want liberty, and the government is out to restrict it. Being a member of the internet community, and specifically the open source community, can give a person the impression that most people have at least similar attitudes as them.
But try communicating with others sometime about politics and liberty. It can be quite shocking at first. Something that seems entirely obvious to us, something we cannot find a reason for people to disagree with, they will be against. The subject can be something as obnoxious as crypto restrictions - "well, they should be able to read anything so they can prevent terrorism" - never taking the moment to think that the chance of export restrictions preventing encryption from being used by a terrorist is 0.
I think this level of apathy towards liberty is widespread in our society. The question was posed by another a few days ago on Slashdot, but here it is again: honestly, if the first amendment were being considered today, would it pass? Would it even have mild public support? And why would it be so surprising to us that the government was actually doing something to promote liberty, instead of taking it away?
The current state of public opinion makes it impossible to reinstate liberties through the government. A political "revolution", something like electing better representatives, is impossible without first having a more difficult revolution; one that makes people start thinking; one that makes people want rights. There are plenty of organizations who want this to happen - ACLU, EFF, etc., but their positions are hardly mainstream. Hopefully someday, they will be.
Slashdot Mirror
As somebody who lives in Madison I had to laugh when he wrote that about the east side. Quite affluent? Hmm, maybe he was thinking of the west side. The city breaks down like this:
Far west side & suburbs: well to do, families, soccer mom's, that sort of scene.
Downtown: Lots of college kids and young working people. And the ladies are hot.
Near east side: Starting to leave any area of affluency, but at least the people there are cool about it. Hippies (both burnt out and still going), hipsters, generally a funky area of town.
Farther east (where he says he is from): One of the two seedy areas of town, the other being the south side. Most buildings (with the notable exception of the mall) are run down. Not a lot of development, as opposed to downtown and the west side where there is a lot. If there are blue collar places to work in this city, this is where you go. Hell, you can find the headquarters of Oscar Mayer on the east side. There's one major factory, and there are plenty more around it. This is where you go if you live in Madison but can't afford to live closer to downtown or on the West side.
Anyway, all i meant to say is that, perhaps he meant the *West* side of madison is affluent and white collar, and the *East* side is visibly poor and blue collar.
"The most powerful weapon in your toolbox is comprehensive unit testing"
It's this kind of thinking that causes too many of the problems you are trying to prevent.
According to _Programming Productivity_ by Capers Jones, unit testing, will only find 25% of the defects. At its best, unit testing finds 50% of the problems. Compare this to, for example, formal inspections, which find 60% of defects on average, 70% at best. Modeling and prototyping (build one to throw away) can find up to 80% of defects.
None of these methods will build a completely defect-free program, but by combining a number of them, you can get extremely close (99%).
My apologies, but you appear to have mistaken this place for a serious discussion forum. Please, keep your posts down to a few lines and try not to say anything too much related to the article. What was it about, anyway? I haven't looked yet..
"You shouldn't pay for the software, you should pay for the effort it took to give it to you."
So, does this effort include the millions of dollars spent on research and development of the system? Or are the supposed to do that for free too...
"My eyes are open. And from what they can see, the folks at Microsft are as responsible for "inventing" the spreadsheet as they are for "creating" DOS, or Al Gore forming the internet..."
.NET framework has nothing to do with this.
.NET is. It's not a language. It's a framework. C# is a language that has the ability to compile to the .NET framework, but it's separate from the .NET framework. Many other languages also compile to it.
Nobody claimed MS invented the spreadsheet; he clamied the *person* who invented the SS is now working with MS.
"Do you seriously plan on renting software?"
.NET has absolutely nothing to do with renting software. Nothing. MS does want to rent software, but the
"Essentially another language with the same power as C/C++ but more nuisances."
When I got here, I realized you have absolutely no idea what
I suggest you read up on the subject more before writing it off. It's really incredible, from a developers point of view. If you don't believe me, just look around at the world in 5 years and ask yourself whether you were right.
fuckin a dude
pre election day drinking
one last drunken chance to to change each others mind
total madness
my ankle is twisted and my front teeth are sore
also burned a massive container of slim jims
MFC 4.2 is the current version of MFC... Visual C++ is on v6, but MFC is 4.2. The author is wrong.
Or perhaps, there a civilizations all around us still communicating with actual smoke signals.
As the other poster pointed out, MFC is not an API, it is a class library. Not to sound trollish here, but you claim that it is poorly laid out... Have you studied object-oriented design? By no means am I saying it is the best OO on earth, but it is certainly intuitive, at least to me.
I understand that if a person can only program MFC, that's not really "real programming". But it's a great tool that can be used to develop GUIs for Windows. There is nothing wrong with making use of it.
As for using Win32 API calls within an MFC program, could I ask exactly what the problem is? I do is all the time... The bigger app that I maintain (~40,000 lines) used to use the raw Winsock API (not raw sockets, just plain Winsock), until I moved it to CAsyncSocket. Both worked fine; I only switched because using the socket class allowed the code to be organized better. Then again, if you're talking about CSocket... stay away from CSocket!
That said, I'd agree that there is absolutely no excuse for using MFC in a college course, especially one with "Operating Systems" in the title. I think it is much better to learn how to actually program with the languages; then using class libraries like MFC will be a piece of cake.
One thing that might help out if you're interested. If you haven't read anything on Windows programming and you intend to be doing any of it, I'd highly recommend Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows". It's priceless.
Visual SourceSafe is an excellent example of a product that is completely stagnant for lack of competition If you're developing in a purely Windows environment, you're right that it's going to be expensive to buy all the tools. But just because you develop Windows apps doesn't mean you can't use free stuff. The only Microsoft tools you really need are Windows and Visual Studio. CVS works just fine run off a UNIX server with Windows clients (I prefer it to SourceSafe because it can be accessed over TCP (ssh) by default). A free program named WinCVS makes it easy. For bug tracking, there are a few web-based UNIX systems out there, including Jitterbug. Personally, I would find it quite imprudent to pay for an expensive SourcSafe license when CVS is free and does the same job (IMHO, better).
"I agree that it's a good thing that he is donating to charity, but a company that does something damaging and then makes a big show of donating to charity (or, as Kodak is doing here, of reminding people about past donations) just doesn't sit right with me, somehow."
Funny thing is, Gates doesn't make a huge deal of it. Did you know a few months ago he gave over $5 billion dollars away? Or even more recently, $100 million to AIDS research? Probably not. It only appeared in a few news outlets, because Gates and MS didn't make a big deal of it. On the other hand, when Ted Turner gave away $1 billion (over 10 years), he was on the cover of every news magazine in the country. That's not to diminish Turner's donation, of course, just to say that Gates' donations are not exactly all about bragging.
Unfortunately, I think the U.S. government is still for the people. We are strongly against crypto restrictions, and for good reason. But ask the average person on the street; if they even know what cryptography is, they will be completely apathetic. So it goes.
The government is only our friends when they protect our liberties. They have long since stopped doing that.
Sadly, this is correct. The easiest thing to conclude from this is that the government is no longer "of the people," but more and more I am becoming convinced that the government *is* still of the people.
Each of us chooses who we associate with, so our perceptions of what people think tend to be skewed. For instance, civil libertarians probably associate more with civil libertarians than others, and so believe that most people really do want liberty, and the government is out to restrict it. Being a member of the internet community, and specifically the open source community, can give a person the impression that most people have at least similar attitudes as them.
But try communicating with others sometime about politics and liberty. It can be quite shocking at first. Something that seems entirely obvious to us, something we cannot find a reason for people to disagree with, they will be against. The subject can be something as obnoxious as crypto restrictions - "well, they should be able to read anything so they can prevent terrorism" - never taking the moment to think that the chance of export restrictions preventing encryption from being used by a terrorist is 0.
I think this level of apathy towards liberty is widespread in our society. The question was posed by another a few days ago on Slashdot, but here it is again: honestly, if the first amendment were being considered today, would it pass? Would it even have mild public support? And why would it be so surprising to us that the government was actually doing something to promote liberty, instead of taking it away?
The current state of public opinion makes it impossible to reinstate liberties through the government. A political "revolution", something like electing better representatives, is impossible without first having a more difficult revolution; one that makes people start thinking; one that makes people want rights. There are plenty of organizations who want this to happen - ACLU, EFF, etc., but their positions are hardly mainstream. Hopefully someday, they will be.