I spend quite a bit of time on Sun's Java fora, and I know I speak for the majority of the regulars there when I say that beginners shouldn't use IDEs. We see a lot of people who've only used IDEs and don't have a clue about basic issues like the CLASSPATH. When it comes to GUI-building, it's even more emphatic: if you use an IDE's GUI builder you will end up with brittle code which you don't understand.
Having said that, I wouldn't recommend Notepad either. Let them use a syntax highlighting editor (and don't force them to use a console-based editor like vi or emacs).
Most of the other students had a really hard time with the course because they were basically expected to get their programs right the first time.
Come off it. I'd been programming for over 10 years when I first came across debuggers. If someone can't manage to print useful debug information, they almost certainly can't write useful code without a psychic (WYWIWYG) compiler.
No, we had a General Election last year. It has been a pretty bad couple of weeks for Blair, but the fact is that he doesn't need the excuse of distracting attention from something else: he's a control freak, plain and simple.
In domestic British politics I support the party which is probably most pro-Europe because they have both sane policies on civil liberties and people who actually know anything at all about I.T. In European elections I support () the U.K. Independence Party. I see this as just one example of how so-called "representative democracy" falls far short of true democracy.
The E.U. is worse in terms of democracy, because a lot of its government is done not by people elected by the demos, but by people nominated by national governments and without direct accountability to the people they govern. This is one of the reasons that I want out.
An undergraduate degree at a U.S. college is about the equivalent of A-levels and the first two years of university in the U.K. I'm surprised your professor, in particular, didn't expect that: it's quite well known.
As I understand it the UK and US administrations signed a symmetric extradition treaty. The reason it's asymmetric is that the UK Parliament ratified it and the US Congress won't. Don't ask me why it didn't stipulate that it needed ratification by both legislatures to become effective.
I got fed up with nano's lack of a search-and-replace feature
Which version of nano? I use Debian so I don't even have the most recent version (I'm at 1.2.4), but it does have search-and-replace, including regex support.
(ok, so now a country can be composed of other countries)
If you understand the U.S. system, including its history, this should be no surprise. Why else do you think it's phrased in terms of "states" and "federal" government? The U.S.S.R. (a Union of Republics) is another historical example.
"England...doesn't have it's own government", "The NHS in England is run by the UK government"... ok so "England" which is a "region" doesn't have it's own government like most "country"s would, but instead relies on some parent federal UK government, but on the other hand other terroritories, which you are calling "constituent countries" DO have their own governments
Blame Tony Blair. He inherited an admittedly messy system which had one government whose Acts varied in their jurisdictions. He then made it messier by setting up a Scottish Parliament with authority over certain aspects of Scottish governance, and a Welsh Assembly, with similar but lesser authority over Welsh governance. However, he refuses to countenance an English Parliament, or even to prevent Scottish members of the United Kingdom (think "federal") Parliament from voting on issues which affect only England and which in Scotland would be dealt with by the Scottish Parliament. For anyone wanting to research this further, the issue of this asymmetry is known as the "West Lothian question".
Well it's not so much that gifted kids need a teacher to tell them how to program. They need a teacher to encourage them, and that is what's missing.
I didn't even need that, and I don't think I was particularly highly motivated: just bored. The most input any of my teachers had into my programming was permitting me to write some software for coursework when I was 15 rather than using Genesis (an Archimedes hypertext program). I'd been programming for 8 years by then.
I think the big difference is that there's so much more to do now. I started because I'd played through the miniscule collection of games I had, and the computer's manual included a chapter on programming in BASIC. I don't see that happening nowadays.
> Since modern computers ship with 512MB of RAM or more
I wish. In the U.K. most big computer vendors still put all the money into the processor, because consumers know that the processor speed is the indicator of performance. An Acer advertising insert from a newspaper happens to be near the top of my paper recycling pile and while most computers in it do have 512MB or more it does have a 1.6GHz laptop and a 2.8GHz (!) desktop with 256MB.
Excuse me? How is belief in an unsupported, un-falsifiable theory considered "perfectly logical"? By definition, Christians (and anyone else believing in a god) are perfectly illogical.
You seem to be confusing logic with Popperian philosophy of science. A logical axiom is unsupported and unfalsifiable (although attempts to falsify it could demonstrate an axiomatic system to be inconsistent).
Slashdot Mirror
Having said that, I wouldn't recommend Notepad either. Let them use a syntax highlighting editor (and don't force them to use a console-based editor like vi or emacs).
No, we had a General Election last year. It has been a pretty bad couple of weeks for Blair, but the fact is that he doesn't need the excuse of distracting attention from something else: he's a control freak, plain and simple.
It was old news then. The Register reported on it four months ago.
The E.U. is worse in terms of democracy, because a lot of its government is done not by people elected by the demos, but by people nominated by national governments and without direct accountability to the people they govern. This is one of the reasons that I want out.
Depends on whether the investors I'm talking to this afternoon buy in or not.
An undergraduate degree at a U.S. college is about the equivalent of A-levels and the first two years of university in the U.K. I'm surprised your professor, in particular, didn't expect that: it's quite well known.
As I understand it the UK and US administrations signed a symmetric extradition treaty. The reason it's asymmetric is that the UK Parliament ratified it and the US Congress won't. Don't ask me why it didn't stipulate that it needed ratification by both legislatures to become effective.
Even the first time I tried using vi I didn't have to resort to the power button. Ctrl-Z, ps, kill.
Actually I think Jesus' language of choice was Aramaic, although he could probably handle some Latin as well when the PHTW needed him to.
So non-residents can't buy alcohol in Texas? If not, that's crazy.
Maybe she decided that the cost (in time, money and pain) wasn't worth the benefits (in appearance and ability to eat cucumber sandwiches).
I think the big difference is that there's so much more to do now. I started because I'd played through the miniscule collection of games I had, and the computer's manual included a chapter on programming in BASIC. I don't see that happening nowadays.
Ted Heath, but that was a temporary measure to conserve fuel supplies around the 1973 oil crisis.
No, that's far too much hassle when you can just set the clock on your computer to be a couple of hours out.
The simple solution to this is for the mail client to turn all HTML messages into plain text, but that wouldn't sell well, alas.
Of course it's fat. Apparently it grew by 27.1% in the past year. That's like a typical American putting on about 60 pounds.
> Since modern computers ship with 512MB of RAM or more I wish. In the U.K. most big computer vendors still put all the money into the processor, because consumers know that the processor speed is the indicator of performance. An Acer advertising insert from a newspaper happens to be near the top of my paper recycling pile and while most computers in it do have 512MB or more it does have a 1.6GHz laptop and a 2.8GHz (!) desktop with 256MB.