Seriously Taco, all your stories are references to WoW.
It's not a good game. It's insanely popular because so many people who have never played one of these games got into it because it's a blizzard game
The classes stink, the balance is off and the general setup is carebear garbage.
Some of the dungeons were OK but overall it's a game that has you doing a lot of mundane things to get crappy items.
Please stop posting these stories. It's not "news for nerds" as it's news for lusers because any real nerd has better things to do and better games to play than WoW.
It's not "stuff that matters" because it doesn't matter.
This game is a waste of time. Mainly because of the users in it. May, many, many morons and twits. It's what you expect though, being as large as it is.
Lets just say I stopped playing this game after a month when I found at level 45 I could dominate most of my competition and in multiples, usually of higher level. This was due to hvaing a poor community of gamers and of being able to easily put together great PvP characters which apparently many people couldn't figure out. Also, you could win fights with algorithms so that took challenge out. If me and a few friends were together we could take out groups of 10. This is pathetic. Most people just start running, etc. there is next to no competition in this game.
Luckily DOTA is available for people that actually enjoy playing a game in their games. It's also free. Oddly it's modded off of WC3. Also leveling is for lusers.
You're actually wrong. The problem with many business apps is that they are designed so poorly and shortsightedly it may appear that OOP is a poor choice. But good OOP requires good design and a real understanding of what OOP is.
A good design requires understanding your problem domain, being able to generalize so you can write easily extensible software and understanding patterns, etc.
I know what you mean though. I've worked on enough projects making updates that were brutal. This was because the system was designed poorly to begin with. I've also worked on well designed systems that were easy to modify with some changes to a configuration file (hello business logic!) and popping off a few new classes.
But yeah, if you're into hard coding and writing bad software (which most people are believe it or not) then OOP might not be the best choice.
"There are very limited UNIX-type tools included, such as there is no gcc, make, and X11."
If you install the free compiler tools you now have gcc and make. Apple has made their own port of X11 you can download from their site. Before this there were other distributions of X11 available.
Get a package manager like Fink. There you will find just about every program you can get on Linux or any other UNIX like distribution.
And OS X being to UNIX as Windows 98 is to DOS is a rather bad analogy. Darwin, which is in fact open source, is a pure UNIX kernel. What OS X uses that is not open source is the windowing environment and some API's. Many of the independent system processes are not open source either. But the kernel is fairly "pure".
Sure, you can save $500.00 with a Dell/Linux but for the extra $500.00 you get a more complete operating system for day-to-day consumer use and fabulous tools. I think the Macintosh is worth the extra money but anyone who would rather use Linux I could understand too.
Yeah, yeah I know that's why light ca be thought of as both a wave and a particle, etc and why things look different through glass, etc.
But, in this scenario even in a vacuum you have our "c" and then you have the new "c" which raises "c" to a new velocity relative to itself. What a pain.
No doubt. Coming out of school I had to learn COBOL and the Tandem Non-Stop operating system. It's was a bitch trying to pick up a language where everything is global, has no stack etc but I think if you understand the fundamentals of a compiler and basic things like branching, selection, iteration, memory management etc then picking up a language isn't that hard.
I studied ML and Prolog in school and they were no doubt "strange" but it wasn't impossible. I picked up Objective C and Cocoa as well in my spare time in College and that was definitely more tricky because you're picking up a language with a different type of memory management than I had used and the late late late binding of Obj-C objects was different. But along with this you're picking up the Cocoa API all at once so it is definitely tricky. But, being that it's a typical iterative language it wasn't the worst thing on Earth. It made picking up Python a lot easier anyways in terms of object bindings.
But I think overall it's not impossibly for a good coder to pick up a language and start writing decent programs in it rather quickly. you figure most libraries do the same things (lists, string manipulation, various data structures, some algorithms like sorting, etc) and you know where to search when you need to do something.
I mean, when you break programming into data structures and algorithms, it becomes a rather remedial task in any language. It's figuring out how the particular language deals with the above mentioned things (branching, selection, iteration, memory management etc) so you can implement it.
I have to admit though that since a language like ML relies on recursive functions so much it *makes* you think differently about what you're doing.
So, in summery I would agree with you. It may take a bit longer for more exotic, noncommercial languages, but I think a fundamental knowledge of computer languages, compilers and type systems, etc make for an easy transition into any language. Any CS degree should allow a student to experiment with imperative, functional and logical languages.
Obviously you're going to DeVry not because of your passion for mathmatics and computer science but because you want to learn how to program and try and get a job being a programmer. For this reason alone I would pick up C# as there is a ton of market opportunities for C# programmers right now.
Really it doesn't matter. Anyone I would hire I would expect to be able to pick up a language and be good with it in a few weeks, including the general libraries, etc.
Is that there is a decline in men enrolling in Women's Studies degrees.
The point is, often girls like certain thing and boys like certain things. It has nothing to do with a social standard or any other kind of garbage these people make up to get grants. It has to do with the same reason more men are found roaming around best buy looking at electronics than girls.
Why do we constantly have this mission from some groups to force 50-50 on everything? Why is it that we have to take natural patterns out and force things on people. So now what, if a girl wants to study CS they make it free to encourage more girls to do it? Who cares who studies it! Race and sex don't matter!
On these same grounds have you seen any studies advocating to get more boys in school? The numbers are going way down for males while females continues to rise. Why don't we see a coalition focused on getting boys into colleges. Especially white boys who are showing the sharpest decline in enrollment?
Sure I'm going overboard here but my point is this: It's not a *problem* that fewer girls are going into CS. It's a fact. And that's all it is. They make guesses as to why and this is fine but do not try and manipulate things and make them unfair for everyone else to strike some unnatural balance. To me, it's irrelevant if fewer girls are going into engineering and CS programs.
I guess one major difference is you can create objects in C# that you can get an actual pointer to and directly manipulate memory. VB does not allow this. Also, VB and C# have different semantics for overloading, virtual methods and how shadowing works. I believe they also have inheritance differences as well, but these are all rather subtle
I thought there was a difference in using a "For Each" loop (thought VB created new objects on every iteration and C# didn't, but they both do...that's bad semantics in general in my opinion...let the programmer choose to make copies, eh?).
Also, it has been shown that identical code generally compiles better with C#, although it's not the greatest improvement.
You're right a lot though because they both use the same framework and libraries so most of the code they are really using is identical. There are subtle differences in the semantics, however. I'd use whatever makes the programmer comfortable I guess. I think VB is too verbose but I'm forced to use it often at work.
And different semantics. VB.NET creates objects everywhere! You can control this some in C# but in VB every little thing creates boatloads of objects. You actually have to be really careful in VB. Unfortunately many people are not and usually VB is used in the hands of unskilled developers. It's really, really easy to write garbage in VB than it is in C#.
All in all, I think C# should be wasy enough for unskilled developers (read, MIS majors, etc) to use daily. The benefits include a better compile, even to MISL, and all around cleaer semantics. You have to know a bit more but it's also clear what you're doing as opposed to VB where the smallest, most innocent thing can end up terrorizing an entire code base.
The last thing we need is more people who don't know what they're doing working on software. It's hard enough as it is and when you get these people involved all hell breaks loose.
I'm not trying to be elitest here or anything, but some guy who goes and learns a little C++ and VB at the community college is not ready to design, develop and test complex or even semi-complex software. Even MIS students with a 4 year degree don't have a clue about these things, but trust me; they are everywhere.
All I'm saying is if they want to go to trade school and learn how to fix some computers, maybe do some admin work and set up networks in a business then fine. But stop teaching these people a little bit about programming so they think they can go off and code for a living. Some may have the talent but most don't.
Most systems are designed poorly and not made modular enough to be easily extended. So, when a new feature needs to be put in it gets crammed into other things and before you know it you have all types of functionality co-mingling and things are a mess. Of course, there is no documentation.
Most places have way too many MIS types who don't really understand software design or anything. Just programming...and poor programming at that because they don't know of a design pattern or what OOP really is, etc. Many CS folk suffer from this as well. Really, not many people can design a system come to think of it....
Nah, bad analogy. Light and sounds speeds have nothing to do with each other and where as one is a matter of technology, the other is a scientific impossibility. Look at the speed of light like this: The speed of light is for all intents and purposes infinity. In math class when talking about limits and how things approach infinity, well that's the speed of light. The main reason we can never go the speed of light is because we will keep getting closer, and closer, and closer but you will never get there because it is an untouchable wall. The only thing faster is the speed of lint.
Have they ever heard of "Non-Stop"? You know, the Tandem kernel? These machines have 99.99% up-time. They don't perform great always but they are bullet proof....and essentially non-hacked because....well, they don't really make root-kits for these things.
In case you never heard of them, they are a mainframe based computing system that is used heavily in stock markets, banks and ATM devices. Basically in places where up-time and reliability is rather important. I personally don't like programming on them too much (COBOL anyone!..language with no stack...just wrong) but it can be a fun learning experience. At least there is a program called "OSH" that emulates the bash shell, rather poorly I'll admit...but nice for a guy like me anyways.
I guess a neat thing about Tandem, that also makes them awkward to use initially, is that they don't have a typical file structure. Everything is "Volumes" and you write all these "Servers"....just different. In the end, there is a one-to-one mapping of their file system to something most of us find traditional.
But wouldn't you assume newspapers, with their might and "insight" into the news, would have been on top of this right from the start. I mean, they had every advantage.
Hurts. Hurts, real bad. Ramoana? Is that you Ramoana?
Peiper: Yes, please here me out!.. It's not really my problem...we were bitten...by a snake in the grass!! It's evilC:\ C:\ C:\++
But seriously folks, I do read the Times when I see one lying around.
"A Class is a struct with some members that are pointers to functions."
I think it goes beyond that, really. OO is not just classes, as I'm sure you know. And really function pointers are nothing more than memory addresses for a beginning of some text section of your target.asm.
OO extends well beyond classes and is guarded by the principals of encapsulation, reuse through inheritance, interfaces and generic types, which in general is just a typing concept. Then there is a result of this which is polymorphism, which of course allows for methods to execute depending on the type of the caller.
I think in the end, OO comes down to an organization and type system that gets away from static and dynamic and goes into more abstract concepts.
I would say for someone like the parent, learning OO is indeed very difficult. They are used to structured programming and write software with the hardware very close in mind. OO on the other hand allows for expression that removes itself from hardware and concentrates more on types. The result of this idea of types allows for many of the features of OO programming.
With that, I suggest anyone really interested in OOP write a compiler for a small OO language. It's a lot of fun getting to the code generation part which makes you deal with dispatch, type checking (harder than it sounds because of the nature of inheritance, interfaces and how they create less types, etc) and then of course the basic parts of translating nodes on your abstract syntax tree into text sections of.asm, or whatever your target is.
"If you don't understand the MVC Pattern, using a GUI RAD can lead to some pretty nasty code."
They would laugh your argument right out of the courtroom. And yes, the first amendment allows rights to speech, but if you say the wrong things, it can be held against you. You can speak out agaisnt the president, but you cannot talk about ways to kill him.
It definitely does. I bought my girlfriend one and after the first or second use it had a scratch near the top of the screen. She kept it in a sweatshirt pocket with nothing else in it so ideas about keys and other things found in pockets is baseless here. She was a bit upset (especially because finding cases is really hard right now) but we both agree it doesn't matter much. It works fine and the screen is 99.9% readable still so no real worry. It would be cool if there was a problem and Apple replaced the screens, however.
I use mine often as it is secure and I am some what protected. Not to mention I get a fancy statement I can query whenever to see exactly how and where I'm spending my money, except the loads of porno I buy which is cash only because that's how the black market works.....ok, that's a joke..made me laugh anyways.
I'm just sayin', credit card companies and credit card users should probably be a bit more careful. I have a credit card, it's a great tool and I understand it is a tool that has limits. Those limits are of course my income.
A credit card allows you to more easily balance your budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously Taco, all your stories are references to WoW.
It's not a good game. It's insanely popular because so many people who have never played one of these games got into it because it's a blizzard game
The classes stink, the balance is off and the general setup is carebear garbage.
Some of the dungeons were OK but overall it's a game that has you doing a lot of mundane things to get crappy items.
Please stop posting these stories. It's not "news for nerds" as it's news for lusers because any real nerd has better things to do and better games to play than WoW.
It's not "stuff that matters" because it doesn't matter.
This game is a waste of time. Mainly because of the users in it. May, many, many morons and twits. It's what you expect though, being as large as it is.
Lets just say I stopped playing this game after a month when I found at level 45 I could dominate most of my competition and in multiples, usually of higher level. This was due to hvaing a poor community of gamers and of being able to easily put together great PvP characters which apparently many people couldn't figure out. Also, you could win fights with algorithms so that took challenge out. If me and a few friends were together we could take out groups of 10. This is pathetic. Most people just start running, etc. there is next to no competition in this game.
Luckily DOTA is available for people that actually enjoy playing a game in their games. It's also free. Oddly it's modded off of WC3. Also leveling is for lusers.
You're actually wrong. The problem with many business apps is that they are designed so poorly and shortsightedly it may appear that OOP is a poor choice. But good OOP requires good design and a real understanding of what OOP is.
A good design requires understanding your problem domain, being able to generalize so you can write easily extensible software and understanding patterns, etc.
I know what you mean though. I've worked on enough projects making updates that were brutal. This was because the system was designed poorly to begin with. I've also worked on well designed systems that were easy to modify with some changes to a configuration file (hello business logic!) and popping off a few new classes.
But yeah, if you're into hard coding and writing bad software (which most people are believe it or not) then OOP might not be the best choice.
"There are very limited UNIX-type tools included, such as there is no gcc, make, and X11."
If you install the free compiler tools you now have gcc and make. Apple has made their own port of X11 you can download from their site. Before this there were other distributions of X11 available.
Get a package manager like Fink. There you will find just about every program you can get on Linux or any other UNIX like distribution.
And OS X being to UNIX as Windows 98 is to DOS is a rather bad analogy. Darwin, which is in fact open source, is a pure UNIX kernel. What OS X uses that is not open source is the windowing environment and some API's. Many of the independent system processes are not open source either. But the kernel is fairly "pure".
Sure, you can save $500.00 with a Dell/Linux but for the extra $500.00 you get a more complete operating system for day-to-day consumer use and fabulous tools. I think the Macintosh is worth the extra money but anyone who would rather use Linux I could understand too.
Yeah, yeah I know that's why light ca be thought of as both a wave and a particle, etc and why things look different through glass, etc.
But, in this scenario even in a vacuum you have our "c" and then you have the new "c" which raises "c" to a new velocity relative to itself. What a pain.
And people wonder why math is hard? First you're telling me that the speed of light, c, is constant. Now all of a sudden it isn't?
Glad I graduated already because the math my kids are going to have to di is going to be a bit tricker.
I drink my booze straight. I'd be a sucker not to take the large one that's cheaper/oz.
No doubt. Coming out of school I had to learn COBOL and the Tandem Non-Stop operating system. It's was a bitch trying to pick up a language where everything is global, has no stack etc but I think if you understand the fundamentals of a compiler and basic things like branching, selection, iteration, memory management etc then picking up a language isn't that hard.
I studied ML and Prolog in school and they were no doubt "strange" but it wasn't impossible. I picked up Objective C and Cocoa as well in my spare time in College and that was definitely more tricky because you're picking up a language with a different type of memory management than I had used and the late late late binding of Obj-C objects was different. But along with this you're picking up the Cocoa API all at once so it is definitely tricky. But, being that it's a typical iterative language it wasn't the worst thing on Earth. It made picking up Python a lot easier anyways in terms of object bindings.
But I think overall it's not impossibly for a good coder to pick up a language and start writing decent programs in it rather quickly. you figure most libraries do the same things (lists, string manipulation, various data structures, some algorithms like sorting, etc) and you know where to search when you need to do something.
I mean, when you break programming into data structures and algorithms, it becomes a rather remedial task in any language. It's figuring out how the particular language deals with the above mentioned things (branching, selection, iteration, memory management etc) so you can implement it.
I have to admit though that since a language like ML relies on recursive functions so much it *makes* you think differently about what you're doing.
So, in summery I would agree with you. It may take a bit longer for more exotic, noncommercial languages, but I think a fundamental knowledge of computer languages, compilers and type systems, etc make for an easy transition into any language. Any CS degree should allow a student to experiment with imperative, functional and logical languages.
Obviously you're going to DeVry not because of your passion for mathmatics and computer science but because you want to learn how to program and try and get a job being a programmer. For this reason alone I would pick up C# as there is a ton of market opportunities for C# programmers right now.
Really it doesn't matter. Anyone I would hire I would expect to be able to pick up a language and be good with it in a few weeks, including the general libraries, etc.
Is that there is a decline in men enrolling in Women's Studies degrees.
The point is, often girls like certain thing and boys like certain things. It has nothing to do with a social standard or any other kind of garbage these people make up to get grants. It has to do with the same reason more men are found roaming around best buy looking at electronics than girls.
Why do we constantly have this mission from some groups to force 50-50 on everything? Why is it that we have to take natural patterns out and force things on people. So now what, if a girl wants to study CS they make it free to encourage more girls to do it? Who cares who studies it! Race and sex don't matter!
On these same grounds have you seen any studies advocating to get more boys in school? The numbers are going way down for males while females continues to rise. Why don't we see a coalition focused on getting boys into colleges. Especially white boys who are showing the sharpest decline in enrollment?
Sure I'm going overboard here but my point is this: It's not a *problem* that fewer girls are going into CS. It's a fact. And that's all it is. They make guesses as to why and this is fine but do not try and manipulate things and make them unfair for everyone else to strike some unnatural balance. To me, it's irrelevant if fewer girls are going into engineering and CS programs.
I guess one major difference is you can create objects in C# that you can get an actual pointer to and directly manipulate memory. VB does not allow this. Also, VB and C# have different semantics for overloading, virtual methods and how shadowing works. I believe they also have inheritance differences as well, but these are all rather subtle
I thought there was a difference in using a "For Each" loop (thought VB created new objects on every iteration and C# didn't, but they both do...that's bad semantics in general in my opinion...let the programmer choose to make copies, eh?).
Also, it has been shown that identical code generally compiles better with C#, although it's not the greatest improvement.
You're right a lot though because they both use the same framework and libraries so most of the code they are really using is identical. There are subtle differences in the semantics, however. I'd use whatever makes the programmer comfortable I guess. I think VB is too verbose but I'm forced to use it often at work.
I just bring mine in with me. Hopefully that close radiation isn't fucking my balls up!
And different semantics. VB.NET creates objects everywhere! You can control this some in C# but in VB every little thing creates boatloads of objects. You actually have to be really careful in VB. Unfortunately many people are not and usually VB is used in the hands of unskilled developers. It's really, really easy to write garbage in VB than it is in C#.
All in all, I think C# should be wasy enough for unskilled developers (read, MIS majors, etc) to use daily. The benefits include a better compile, even to MISL, and all around cleaer semantics. You have to know a bit more but it's also clear what you're doing as opposed to VB where the smallest, most innocent thing can end up terrorizing an entire code base.
"If you ever paid hard-earned cash for a..."
So if I didn't spend hard-earned cash, it's alright, right?
The last thing we need is more people who don't know what they're doing working on software. It's hard enough as it is and when you get these people involved all hell breaks loose.
I'm not trying to be elitest here or anything, but some guy who goes and learns a little C++ and VB at the community college is not ready to design, develop and test complex or even semi-complex software. Even MIS students with a 4 year degree don't have a clue about these things, but trust me; they are everywhere.
All I'm saying is if they want to go to trade school and learn how to fix some computers, maybe do some admin work and set up networks in a business then fine. But stop teaching these people a little bit about programming so they think they can go off and code for a living. Some may have the talent but most don't.
Yeah that's my favorite standard.
Most systems are designed poorly and not made modular enough to be easily extended. So, when a new feature needs to be put in it gets crammed into other things and before you know it you have all types of functionality co-mingling and things are a mess. Of course, there is no documentation.
Most places have way too many MIS types who don't really understand software design or anything. Just programming...and poor programming at that because they don't know of a design pattern or what OOP really is, etc. Many CS folk suffer from this as well. Really, not many people can design a system come to think of it....
Ahh well, ya get paid none the less.
Nah, bad analogy. Light and sounds speeds have nothing to do with each other and where as one is a matter of technology, the other is a scientific impossibility. Look at the speed of light like this: The speed of light is for all intents and purposes infinity. In math class when talking about limits and how things approach infinity, well that's the speed of light. The main reason we can never go the speed of light is because we will keep getting closer, and closer, and closer but you will never get there because it is an untouchable wall. The only thing faster is the speed of lint.
Have they ever heard of "Non-Stop"? You know, the Tandem kernel? These machines have 99.99% up-time. They don't perform great always but they are bullet proof....and essentially non-hacked because....well, they don't really make root-kits for these things.
In case you never heard of them, they are a mainframe based computing system that is used heavily in stock markets, banks and ATM devices. Basically in places where up-time and reliability is rather important. I personally don't like programming on them too much (COBOL anyone!..language with no stack...just wrong) but it can be a fun learning experience. At least there is a program called "OSH" that emulates the bash shell, rather poorly I'll admit...but nice for a guy like me anyways.
I guess a neat thing about Tandem, that also makes them awkward to use initially, is that they don't have a typical file structure. Everything is "Volumes" and you write all these "Servers"....just different. In the end, there is a one-to-one mapping of their file system to something most of us find traditional.
...They really are good at cleaning up, aren't they?
Now they can feed us more lies faster.
But wouldn't you assume newspapers, with their might and "insight" into the news, would have been on top of this right from the start. I mean, they had every advantage.
Hurts. Hurts, real bad. Ramoana? Is that you Ramoana?
Peiper: Yes, please here me out!.. It's not really my problem...we were bitten...by a snake in the grass!! It's evilC:\ C:\ C:\++
But seriously folks, I do read the Times when I see one lying around.
Gonk!
Way to police yourself. It's your responsibility.
"A Class is a struct with some members that are pointers to functions."
.asm.
.asm, or whatever your target is.
I think it goes beyond that, really. OO is not just classes, as I'm sure you know. And really function pointers are nothing more than memory addresses for a beginning of some text section of your target
OO extends well beyond classes and is guarded by the principals of encapsulation, reuse through inheritance, interfaces and generic types, which in general is just a typing concept. Then there is a result of this which is polymorphism, which of course allows for methods to execute depending on the type of the caller.
I think in the end, OO comes down to an organization and type system that gets away from static and dynamic and goes into more abstract concepts.
I would say for someone like the parent, learning OO is indeed very difficult. They are used to structured programming and write software with the hardware very close in mind. OO on the other hand allows for expression that removes itself from hardware and concentrates more on types. The result of this idea of types allows for many of the features of OO programming.
With that, I suggest anyone really interested in OOP write a compiler for a small OO language. It's a lot of fun getting to the code generation part which makes you deal with dispatch, type checking (harder than it sounds because of the nature of inheritance, interfaces and how they create less types, etc) and then of course the basic parts of translating nodes on your abstract syntax tree into text sections of
"If you don't understand the MVC Pattern, using a GUI RAD can lead to some pretty nasty code."
Yes.
They would laugh your argument right out of the courtroom. And yes, the first amendment allows rights to speech, but if you say the wrong things, it can be held against you. You can speak out agaisnt the president, but you cannot talk about ways to kill him.
It definitely does. I bought my girlfriend one and after the first or second use it had a scratch near the top of the screen. She kept it in a sweatshirt pocket with nothing else in it so ideas about keys and other things found in pockets is baseless here. She was a bit upset (especially because finding cases is really hard right now) but we both agree it doesn't matter much. It works fine and the screen is 99.9% readable still so no real worry. It would be cool if there was a problem and Apple replaced the screens, however.
I use mine often as it is secure and I am some what protected. Not to mention I get a fancy statement I can query whenever to see exactly how and where I'm spending my money, except the loads of porno I buy which is cash only because that's how the black market works.....ok, that's a joke..made me laugh anyways.
I'm just sayin', credit card companies and credit card users should probably be a bit more careful. I have a credit card, it's a great tool and I understand it is a tool that has limits. Those limits are of course my income.
A credit card allows you to more easily balance your budget.
People are worthless. We should start our take over effective immediately. Shouldn't be too hard to trick 'em, huh?