So true. The ONLY thing that irked me so far about.NET's layer is the method that allows you to figure out the parameters of a stored procedure. Its in OleDb_, Sql_, and Oracle_ providers, but not in Db_, so you either have to use a provider specific method, or have fun with Reflection. It should be implemented at the abstract class level, with maybe a property "SupportDeriveParams" or some such or throw an exception if its not implemented, I don't know. But having to use SqlCommandBuilder.DeriveParameters (or the other provider's equivalents) is the only time I have to touch the DB specific classes, and it annoyes me to no end.
Using database abstraction layers and object relational mappers like Hibernate or LLBLGenPro allows for the most part to be DB-agnostic except for the most ressource intensive queries where you need to use DB-specific optimisation, which is rather rare except with reports and such, and even then, 90% of the queries that hit the server pretty hard would be better done on an OLAP system of some kind, so the above are pretty darn good.
Then again, these tools have disadvantages of their own, but still.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Considering XP's lackluster first few months (hell, first year), I was a bit scared of trying it out, but since I have an MSDN Universal (well, is it called "premium with VSTS" now?), I was able to evaluate it without risks, and I did...
Works perfectly fine. I'm not going back to XP, thats for sure.
Yeah, I agree with you (and I'm about as far from ADD as it gets, so I'm not biaised). The thing really, is that most mental "issues" are simply defined as "Problem XYZ, when XYZ starts being problematic in the person's everyday life". Very, very vague, with no black or white, just an ocean of gray area.
Really, someone with ADD is just someone normal, whom's "Uniqueness" (for lack of better word) is incompatible with sociaty as it is now. The drugs and stuff can be useful, but only in extreme scenarios (in other words, I doubt more than 1/100 person who takes them today really should)
It kindda matters... Many, many places have all or most broadband ISPs metering bandwidth and charging when you go over your limit (like cellphone plans), someone could use your connection as a file server and have the RIAA knock at your door (you'd most likely get off without a scratch, but its still a pain even if you're found innocent), they can slow down the hell out of you by running 5 bit torrents, or worse, use your local network (most people have better things to do than protecting themselves against people on the local network, but this kindda kills it).
It is kind of a big deal. The worse part is the false sense of security: most people see that their router is "secured" and think its safe and good.
Wow, the difference between 512 megs and 1 gig is that huge with Vista?
I was running Vista Ultimate with all the bells and whistles on, multiple instances of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 with all the main services turned on, SQL Management Studio (and we know that one is twice as heavy as VS2005), bunch of messengers, copious amounts of browsers, etc, on 1 gig of RAM and it was usuable. Not speedy, but usuable.
Now of course I just got an extra 1 gig stick of ram, and its plain zippy, but that goes without saying.
Science only provides models to explain thing, and real scientists will never shove anything as facts. Hell, seems more and more like "what goes up must go down" (when speaking about earth's gravity field) ain't even all that true, what with all the theories about dimentions and such...
Humans, in general, are retards. Atheists, agnostics, christians, islamics, whatever. Science works in a way to accomodate that: a model is never final, and is only there to explain things until we find a better model. That ALSO includes, that if someday, as long as real science is applied as such, if we figure out that it IS indeed a supreme being that is responsible for everything, it WILL replace the evolution model. It implies a "we're right, until proven otherwise".
Religion, however, by definitions, implies a "We're right you're wrong. And everyone who disagrees with us will rot in hell (or whatever, depending on the religion) Pwned." idea. And that is, in my opinion, quite disturbing, as it is an incredible display of ignorance, and intolerence.
Good scientists might push evolution a lot, but its not like the scientifict community just stopped studying the theory. "We're right, okie, we're not, its over. NEEEEEEEEEEEEXT". Religious communities, however, usually does.
You're right, but last I checked, newer versions of Dreamweaver used CSS by default (heck, even Microsoft Expression does) and automatically remove or merge pointless nested tags, on top of having a bunch of analysis tools to clean up code. If someone knows how to use Dreamweaver, you'll be hard pressed to tell that they used it, except maybe for the dead giveaways in the auto-generated javascript snippets...
I didn't use Dreamweaver in a long time, but heck, Expression (and Im fairly sure Visual Studio Orcas too) can put all styles in a separate CSS file like a normal programmer does.
Its not perfect obviously, but these tools came a long way since Frontp...sorry, it hurts too much, I can't even type THAT name...
No, just no. While Computer Science is definately extremely useful, and many jobs (like game development) are nice bets for it, saying that a CS degree should not teach you about practical programming because you can pick that up on your own is insanity. CS Degree should not focus on programming, that is correct (it should have a little bit, since it is applied math, but not much, you are right).
However, practical programming also is taught in school: its called software engineering. CS majors from schools where they teach "true" computer science, trying to pick up practical programming on their own, is simply a disaster waiting to happen. And since its by FAR the norm, the software development field currently IS a disaster. Programming is much more than just coding, and has its own set of theoritical concepts, from design patterns to architecture. You CAN pick that up on your own: more or less as easily as you can pick up all the theories you mentionned (which is not easy at all). Its possible, but simply put, most people require schooling to get it right.
The concerns are from the fact that only PART of.NET is open, for example the C# language specification. Anything that can actually be patented in VB (aka: not much, languages themselves not being patentable and all) is, ASP.NET contains a ton of patented stuff, etc..NET's assemblies are also very easy to disasemble, but there is still copyright on the code (the same copyright laws that make the GPL possible, btw!): how much do you want to bet that a ton of Mono is just copy paste from.NET assemblies opened up in Reflector? (Though to be fair, thats not patents, its copyright).
Then again, maybe its clean. But unless I get the time and chance to verify that on my own... (and again to be fair, I doubt Microsoft will do anything, unless they really push it. If they end up with a full ASP.NET 2.0 and WinFX stack running on Linux, you can bet Microsoft is going to say something... until then though I doubt it: but until then, Mono ain't very useful)
Unless the university totally sucks, a computer science degree contains most of the important stuff for game development: maths, maths, applied maths, more maths. Did I mention some math? Oh, and some system programming.
In the end, thats all what games are about.
I didn't check by myself, but my girlfriend who goes to CMU told me they have a graduate program for game programming thats fairly popular with EA too I think, so then one can kill 2 birds with one stone: have a fairly decent CS degree, and game specific education, with a potential big name having you in their line of sight as soon as you graduate... Its almost a flawless plan, if it is true.
Correct. People thinking MONO allows cross platform compatibility with.NET have never coded anything beyond a few forms and command line tools in their lives. No programmer worth their salt will pick.NET for the language or the base framework themselves. They pick.NET because it integrate easily with windows land. (Active Directory, SQL Server or Oracle on Windows, just about anything Windows specific like the journal or the performance counters, IIS and ASP.NET, etc).
As soon as you touch any of that stuff, even if the framework was perfect, crossplatform compatibility goes down the window (pun not intended).
I'm a.NET programmer, but the day I want cross platform, is the day I get rid of my MSDN Subscription:.NET will -never- be it, no matter how hard the Mono guys work.
If you use Mono, its because you like Mono. Not because you like.NET.
Same here. Im running Vista ultimate on my main machine, which also doubles as a dev and test machine. With all the dev servers, instant messengers, and all around tons of stuff running at the same time, on a crappy 1 ghz machine, its quite zippy in my book. Probably could be faster too, as I didn't reformat or even defrag the file system in years...
Careful to compare apples with apples though. Most computers loaded with Vista are loaded with Vista Home Premium: Vista Business is the equivalent of Pro, and is the price Win XP Pro was. Home Premium is cheaper.
Oh hell yes it was. Actualy, I bet you it was -worse-. Win2k and WinXP didn't play DOS games, and at the time XP came out, a LOT of games still required 98. I had to do it soooooooooooooo many times, it wasn't funny @.@
As long as they dont use it as an excuse to escape taxes one way or another, and its done "by the book", the OEM can refund you whatever the hell they want to refund you, since they can just write it off as custom retention fee or something along those lines. How much they paid for Vista, how much they refund you...thats all up to customer service.
You only half read my post eh? I mean, I must be crazy, saying that I can actually get support from Microsoft, so it wasn't worth reading? Yes, I can, and HAVE talked with the authors of certain tools. Scott Guthrie and Mikhail Arkhipov are quite helpful fellows.
Its served as to whatever is crossbrowser. The team that makes VS isn't the team that makes IE, and are probably as pissed off as we all are about how uncompliant it is (for example, the design view for ASP.NET in VS2005 renders correctly a bunch of CSS that IE will ignore even though its in the specs, AND will bitch and whine quite a bit if you dare use a IE CSS filter).
That being said, last I checked, VS2005 default to XHTML 1.0 transitional, not XHTML 1.1 strict:)
::GASPS:: Big news, there are hundreds of forums about Microsoft products too, who would have thought. But when those don't work (and don't be so cocky as to think you can find ANYTHING when you need it on OSS community boards), you can call support until things get fixed (you can too with OSS if you have support contracts though). Thats what the parent meant.
Most serious Microsoft development shops or companies will have MSDN subscriptions (no need for a MS Gold partner thingy, hahaha), which ends up giving you a few support calls. These aren't with your typical outsourced tech here, but can escalate up to the person who actually coded the darn thing you have problem with (rarely, obviously). And if it takes 5 hours on the phone to fix it, they will stay 5 hours on the phone with you. Its quite useful, and cheaper than people would think... (mostly because you get the subscription for OTHER perks...where I work, most of the calls go to waste, because no one use them, hahaha)
Thats a pretty darn good analogy, actually:) The web world (while still programming) is such a prime example of that. Lately with all the frameworks, ruby on rail, asp.net, all the java stuff, AJAX toolkits, etc, one can do without knowing even the basic of HTML, Javascript and CSS... but all these tools are buggy, since they are built on top of buggy frameworks themselves (thanks Internet Explorer).
So when things go weird, you see on the forums a bunch of clueless newbies asking what went wrong, when the problems are usualy found within 10 seconds by people who know how to do real HTML/CSS/JS.
I know people will say "No one who doesn't know HTML should deal with web stuff!", and thats exactly my point. But its still a very good example, since its a very very recent one, and is probably fairly similar to how assembly programmers felt when the first batch of third generation languages compilers started popping up...
People who read my previous posts on similar topics probably have seen im one of the vocal advocates for shifting toward a more "practical" education system when it comes to anything computer related, or at least splitting the more science part from the engineering part (splitting CS in two, more or less). But EVEN with these belief, I have to say, learning assembly is totally relevent.
Even in modern languages like C#, when you start doing something complicated, you will need to use pointers, at least once in your life (yes, C# allows pointers. Look up the unsafe { } construct). Pointers are the abstraction of something as low level as it gets, and to fully comprehend how it works, you need to, at least once, have touched assembly. No need for an ENTIRE class about it. But at -least- one or two assignmed, a few lectures. People need to know what it is, how it works.
Otherwise, the first time Visual Studio (or whatever) pops up with an exception in a native bit of code, and pops the disasemblyer, people just go "wtf?!" and think its an hopeless situation...
Slashdot Mirror
So true. The ONLY thing that irked me so far about .NET's layer is the method that allows you to figure out the parameters of a stored procedure. Its in OleDb_, Sql_, and Oracle_ providers, but not in Db_, so you either have to use a provider specific method, or have fun with Reflection. It should be implemented at the abstract class level, with maybe a property "SupportDeriveParams" or some such or throw an exception if its not implemented, I don't know. But having to use SqlCommandBuilder.DeriveParameters (or the other provider's equivalents) is the only time I have to touch the DB specific classes, and it annoyes me to no end.
Using database abstraction layers and object relational mappers like Hibernate or LLBLGenPro allows for the most part to be DB-agnostic except for the most ressource intensive queries where you need to use DB-specific optimisation, which is rather rare except with reports and such, and even then, 90% of the queries that hit the server pretty hard would be better done on an OLAP system of some kind, so the above are pretty darn good.
Then again, these tools have disadvantages of their own, but still.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Considering XP's lackluster first few months (hell, first year), I was a bit scared of trying it out, but since I have an MSDN Universal (well, is it called "premium with VSTS" now?), I was able to evaluate it without risks, and I did...
Works perfectly fine. I'm not going back to XP, thats for sure.
Yeah, I agree with you (and I'm about as far from ADD as it gets, so I'm not biaised). The thing really, is that most mental "issues" are simply defined as "Problem XYZ, when XYZ starts being problematic in the person's everyday life". Very, very vague, with no black or white, just an ocean of gray area.
Really, someone with ADD is just someone normal, whom's "Uniqueness" (for lack of better word) is incompatible with sociaty as it is now. The drugs and stuff can be useful, but only in extreme scenarios (in other words, I doubt more than 1/100 person who takes them today really should)
It kindda matters... Many, many places have all or most broadband ISPs metering bandwidth and charging when you go over your limit (like cellphone plans), someone could use your connection as a file server and have the RIAA knock at your door (you'd most likely get off without a scratch, but its still a pain even if you're found innocent), they can slow down the hell out of you by running 5 bit torrents, or worse, use your local network (most people have better things to do than protecting themselves against people on the local network, but this kindda kills it).
It is kind of a big deal. The worse part is the false sense of security: most people see that their router is "secured" and think its safe and good.
Wow, the difference between 512 megs and 1 gig is that huge with Vista?
I was running Vista Ultimate with all the bells and whistles on, multiple instances of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 with all the main services turned on, SQL Management Studio (and we know that one is twice as heavy as VS2005), bunch of messengers, copious amounts of browsers, etc, on 1 gig of RAM and it was usuable. Not speedy, but usuable.
Now of course I just got an extra 1 gig stick of ram, and its plain zippy, but that goes without saying.
yeah, and the joke is that there isn't one, so you'll be playing "the game" and no one will win. Ever.
Science only provides models to explain thing, and real scientists will never shove anything as facts. Hell, seems more and more like "what goes up must go down" (when speaking about earth's gravity field) ain't even all that true, what with all the theories about dimentions and such...
Humans, in general, are retards. Atheists, agnostics, christians, islamics, whatever. Science works in a way to accomodate that: a model is never final, and is only there to explain things until we find a better model. That ALSO includes, that if someday, as long as real science is applied as such, if we figure out that it IS indeed a supreme being that is responsible for everything, it WILL replace the evolution model. It implies a "we're right, until proven otherwise".
Religion, however, by definitions, implies a "We're right you're wrong. And everyone who disagrees with us will rot in hell (or whatever, depending on the religion) Pwned." idea. And that is, in my opinion, quite disturbing, as it is an incredible display of ignorance, and intolerence.
Good scientists might push evolution a lot, but its not like the scientifict community just stopped studying the theory. "We're right, okie, we're not, its over. NEEEEEEEEEEEEXT". Religious communities, however, usually does.
Now I wonder...who's paid the most... a monkey who's reviewing patents, or a supreme court judge...
You're right, but last I checked, newer versions of Dreamweaver used CSS by default (heck, even Microsoft Expression does) and automatically remove or merge pointless nested tags, on top of having a bunch of analysis tools to clean up code. If someone knows how to use Dreamweaver, you'll be hard pressed to tell that they used it, except maybe for the dead giveaways in the auto-generated javascript snippets...
I didn't use Dreamweaver in a long time, but heck, Expression (and Im fairly sure Visual Studio Orcas too) can put all styles in a separate CSS file like a normal programmer does.
Its not perfect obviously, but these tools came a long way since Frontp...sorry, it hurts too much, I can't even type THAT name...
Warning, this is a little offtopic.
No, just no. While Computer Science is definately extremely useful, and many jobs (like game development) are nice bets for it, saying that a CS degree should not teach you about practical programming because you can pick that up on your own is insanity. CS Degree should not focus on programming, that is correct (it should have a little bit, since it is applied math, but not much, you are right).
However, practical programming also is taught in school: its called software engineering. CS majors from schools where they teach "true" computer science, trying to pick up practical programming on their own, is simply a disaster waiting to happen. And since its by FAR the norm, the software development field currently IS a disaster. Programming is much more than just coding, and has its own set of theoritical concepts, from design patterns to architecture. You CAN pick that up on your own: more or less as easily as you can pick up all the theories you mentionned (which is not easy at all). Its possible, but simply put, most people require schooling to get it right.
Thats already more math than 99% of other programming related jobs :)
The concerns are from the fact that only PART of .NET is open, for example the C# language specification. Anything that can actually be patented in VB (aka: not much, languages themselves not being patentable and all) is, ASP.NET contains a ton of patented stuff, etc. .NET's assemblies are also very easy to disasemble, but there is still copyright on the code (the same copyright laws that make the GPL possible, btw!): how much do you want to bet that a ton of Mono is just copy paste from .NET assemblies opened up in Reflector? (Though to be fair, thats not patents, its copyright).
Then again, maybe its clean. But unless I get the time and chance to verify that on my own... (and again to be fair, I doubt Microsoft will do anything, unless they really push it. If they end up with a full ASP.NET 2.0 and WinFX stack running on Linux, you can bet Microsoft is going to say something... until then though I doubt it: but until then, Mono ain't very useful)
Unless the university totally sucks, a computer science degree contains most of the important stuff for game development: maths, maths, applied maths, more maths. Did I mention some math? Oh, and some system programming.
In the end, thats all what games are about.
I didn't check by myself, but my girlfriend who goes to CMU told me they have a graduate program for game programming thats fairly popular with EA too I think, so then one can kill 2 birds with one stone: have a fairly decent CS degree, and game specific education, with a potential big name having you in their line of sight as soon as you graduate... Its almost a flawless plan, if it is true.
Correct. People thinking MONO allows cross platform compatibility with .NET have never coded anything beyond a few forms and command line tools in their lives. No programmer worth their salt will pick .NET for the language or the base framework themselves. They pick .NET because it integrate easily with windows land. (Active Directory, SQL Server or Oracle on Windows, just about anything Windows specific like the journal or the performance counters, IIS and ASP.NET, etc).
.NET programmer, but the day I want cross platform, is the day I get rid of my MSDN Subscription: .NET will -never- be it, no matter how hard the Mono guys work.
.NET.
As soon as you touch any of that stuff, even if the framework was perfect, crossplatform compatibility goes down the window (pun not intended).
I'm a
If you use Mono, its because you like Mono. Not because you like
Same here. Im running Vista ultimate on my main machine, which also doubles as a dev and test machine. With all the dev servers, instant messengers, and all around tons of stuff running at the same time, on a crappy 1 ghz machine, its quite zippy in my book. Probably could be faster too, as I didn't reformat or even defrag the file system in years...
Careful to compare apples with apples though. Most computers loaded with Vista are loaded with Vista Home Premium: Vista Business is the equivalent of Pro, and is the price Win XP Pro was. Home Premium is cheaper.
Oh hell yes it was. Actualy, I bet you it was -worse-. Win2k and WinXP didn't play DOS games, and at the time XP came out, a LOT of games still required 98. I had to do it soooooooooooooo many times, it wasn't funny @.@
As long as they dont use it as an excuse to escape taxes one way or another, and its done "by the book", the OEM can refund you whatever the hell they want to refund you, since they can just write it off as custom retention fee or something along those lines. How much they paid for Vista, how much they refund you...thats all up to customer service.
You only half read my post eh? I mean, I must be crazy, saying that I can actually get support from Microsoft, so it wasn't worth reading? Yes, I can, and HAVE talked with the authors of certain tools. Scott Guthrie and Mikhail Arkhipov are quite helpful fellows.
Its served as to whatever is crossbrowser. The team that makes VS isn't the team that makes IE, and are probably as pissed off as we all are about how uncompliant it is (for example, the design view for ASP.NET in VS2005 renders correctly a bunch of CSS that IE will ignore even though its in the specs, AND will bitch and whine quite a bit if you dare use a IE CSS filter).
:)
That being said, last I checked, VS2005 default to XHTML 1.0 transitional, not XHTML 1.1 strict
::GASPS:: Big news, there are hundreds of forums about Microsoft products too, who would have thought. But when those don't work (and don't be so cocky as to think you can find ANYTHING when you need it on OSS community boards), you can call support until things get fixed (you can too with OSS if you have support contracts though). Thats what the parent meant.
Most serious Microsoft development shops or companies will have MSDN subscriptions (no need for a MS Gold partner thingy, hahaha), which ends up giving you a few support calls. These aren't with your typical outsourced tech here, but can escalate up to the person who actually coded the darn thing you have problem with (rarely, obviously). And if it takes 5 hours on the phone to fix it, they will stay 5 hours on the phone with you. Its quite useful, and cheaper than people would think... (mostly because you get the subscription for OTHER perks...where I work, most of the calls go to waste, because no one use them, hahaha)
Thats a pretty darn good analogy, actually :) The web world (while still programming) is such a prime example of that. Lately with all the frameworks, ruby on rail, asp.net, all the java stuff, AJAX toolkits, etc, one can do without knowing even the basic of HTML, Javascript and CSS... but all these tools are buggy, since they are built on top of buggy frameworks themselves (thanks Internet Explorer).
So when things go weird, you see on the forums a bunch of clueless newbies asking what went wrong, when the problems are usualy found within 10 seconds by people who know how to do real HTML/CSS/JS.
I know people will say "No one who doesn't know HTML should deal with web stuff!", and thats exactly my point. But its still a very good example, since its a very very recent one, and is probably fairly similar to how assembly programmers felt when the first batch of third generation languages compilers started popping up...
People who read my previous posts on similar topics probably have seen im one of the vocal advocates for shifting toward a more "practical" education system when it comes to anything computer related, or at least splitting the more science part from the engineering part (splitting CS in two, more or less). But EVEN with these belief, I have to say, learning assembly is totally relevent.
Even in modern languages like C#, when you start doing something complicated, you will need to use pointers, at least once in your life (yes, C# allows pointers. Look up the unsafe { } construct). Pointers are the abstraction of something as low level as it gets, and to fully comprehend how it works, you need to, at least once, have touched assembly. No need for an ENTIRE class about it. But at -least- one or two assignmed, a few lectures. People need to know what it is, how it works.
Otherwise, the first time Visual Studio (or whatever) pops up with an exception in a native bit of code, and pops the disasemblyer, people just go "wtf?!" and think its an hopeless situation...