Assertions are a development aid. They should never be necessary in production code. They're especially good for pinpointing errors or miss-understandings the first time you or somebody else executes your code. As somebody else pointed out, you certainly don't need the expense of them in a production build. Use them to enforce contracts, e.g. as pre-condition in a function that alerts the callee that they've mistakenly passed a null reference. Or, use them in the middle of an algorithm as you write it so that any errors are caught when you come to test it. In C++, I often use them to pop-up reminder messages without killing the app (note: with GUI apps, MSFT have a modified version of assert that doens't necessarily call abort(), but offers the choice to ignore).
Exceptions are useful for exceptional circumstances that could potentially occur in production, such as running out of memory, or the network connection dying unexpectedly.
Isn't he the guy whose predictions and currency speculations forced the Pound Sterling and the Italian Lira out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, at great expense to those and several other countries?
Please read the relevant article. It explains the problem quite clearly. This has nothing to do with the.Net framework or the CLR.
Re:Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 1
"I have had the VS.NET Beta 2 for a few months, and it's generally easy to use, but very slow."
Yeah: the installation program was such a hog on my P2-450 that I decided to upgrade. I was pretty impressed with the way their setup program has come along now: it looks transaction based and does rollbacks if an error occurs. Very slick.
Re:They've released the dev stuff.
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Already got it installed! The damn thing doesn't play nicely with the X-mouse unfortunately. The UI must have been developed by the idiots who did Visual InterDev. I seem to remember MSVC5 had some issues with the X-mouse (auto-raise when the mouse went over things like the class-wizards drop list controls). MSVC6 played very nicely. Now it's back with avengence - behaving just as badly as the InterDev crap did.
Not really.Net, but the C++ compiler seems more compliant that before.
It would seem to me that this would be hard to do without incompatibilities, which of course would cause problems for many apps. Why not just dump Windows altogether and spend your money on something else?
It removed the IE shell application, but not the core components, such as mshtml.dll. What you've done is the equivalent of uninstalling Mozilla, except for major components like Gecko.
I guess it comes down to, how do you define what is IE, and what isn't?
Reading and understanding other people's code is a skill that is often neglected but really important for productivity in a business environment.
If the rest of MSFT's code is like what I've seen in the CRT, or MFC, or ATL, then it's not that bad. I've looked through many times trying to figure things out. I've learnt a lot from it as far developing Windows apps is concerned. It's certainly a lot better written than a lot of code from places I've worked, or been a student.
There has to be a real and credible threat of getting ticketed for violating traffic laws. If there wasn't, there would be more deaths and injuries on the roads, and our insurance rates would probably go up. On top of that, this is a cheap revenue source... or would you rather pay more taxes so the "real crimes" can be solved?
You chose to break the law, either through negligence or laziness or premeditation. Don't whine about it. If you disagree with the law, petition your elected representatives. That's how democracy works.
Right now I would like the police to pull over more people who haven't swept the snow of their cars, or cleaned their lights of salt and grit, or who have misaligned headlights. It will make my driving easier and safer.
This is BS. The site is far from being/.ed, and so this post completely unnecessary. I don't care how lazy people are, this is wrong. If you want to continue to get good articles, support them by going to their site and registering a hit in their logs.
"Kids are able to understand that pictures and video refer to the real-world at a much younger age -- around 2.5 years"
When my cousin's 18 month old daughter points at photos of her relatives, some whom she hasn't seen in a while, and who she see's infrequently, and says their names... is that what you mean by pictures referring to the real-world?
Interesting! I guess we come at things from different angles with very different constraints. The stuff I work on, the bloat is excusable if we can delivery quicker, with fewer bugs and lower maintenance costs. Memory fragmentation is of little concern. You OTOH have some other much more pressing concerns that constrains what features you use. Our challenges are different and the old adage applies: the right tools for the right job!
I saw some cheap used oscilloscopes in a local electronics surplus store at the weekend. If I got my hands on one, how would I go about measuring the frequencies like those guys did with their Linksys? Does one have to buy an antenna, or can it be made? Do all oscilloscopes have the necessary inputs for this. Are there any other considerations? Is this directional (depending on antenna, I guess)?
Sorry for the rather basic questions, but I'm not an EE, and I've only used an oscilloscope very briefly about 12 years ago. I really want to find out where the interference for my 2.4GHz phone is coming from, and how moving the base station helps. I also want to put an FM transmitter on my sound card, and so I want to see how that works too.
"Instead, you'll see cheap reality TV crap and other things that can be done on a shoe-string budget."
If that's what the biggest minority wants, then fine, let them get on with their pathetic little lives. Meanwhile, the rest of us with more than two brain cells will find other things to do. TV doesn't have to rule one's life you know. It's not really essential, and there are many other things one can do.
Have you done much team programming, especially with teams with junior members? In my experience, having to do one's own memory management results in nasty bugs. It seems that some people just don't can't do it well. Even when they can, there are still cases of miss-communication between team members. This is one reason why technologies like COM use reference counting, and in C++, smart pointers are encouraged. Personally, I advocate minimising the use of new and delete prefering stack-based classes like the STL. This reduces immensely the number of memory problems in a project.
They're hardly free. Virtually everybody I know around here (Toronto) watches their TV via cable or satellite. We pay at least $40, and often a lot more for this. No doubt some of that revenue goes to the content providers.
Personally, I prefer the British model. A small license fee (half what I currently pay annually) provides two advert free TV stations (5 national radio stations and 38+ local radio stations, plus one of the biggest news web sites on the net). There are also 2.5 (!) terrestrial channels available for free, with adverts. Now 5 channels might sound bad, but they have no less content than the 60 I currently get. What's more, 40% are commercial free, and the other ones have higher quality commercials which seem less intrusive (probably from having to compete with commercial free channels). They show all the good shows we get over here, but without the other crap (Channel 5 excluded)
'There are going to be real problems,' said organiser Dr Scott Gelfand, of Oklahoma State University. 'Some feminists even say artificial wombs mean men could eliminate women from the planet and still perpetuate our species. That's a bit alarmist. Nevertheless, this subject clearly raises strong feelings.'
The real irony of this statement to me is: for sometime some of the more confrontational feminists have been claiming that they don't need men thanks to medical advances such as artificial insemination. With this in mind, they've even been demanding that men justify why women should even need them! Ha: I guess they don't like it when confronted by equal standards, or their own arguments twisted against them.
For me, the biggest attraction of MP3 players is the ability to have no moving parts. This makes it truly portable and useful in more situations that what we had previously. So, my question is, how reliable is this IBM microdrive? How robust is it? If I'm training for to run a marathon, is it going to survive all of the pounding?
I don't see how you can compare an Arnie to Black Hawk Down. Arnie doesn't go for realism. Most of his action films are refreshing tongue-in-cheek. A lot of them don't certainly don't take themselves too seriously like so many bad boneheaded Hollywood action films. Arnie movies have never required a brain, but they have allowed suspension of reality for a while, which is a form of entertainment. Although his films are getting a bit less unoriginal, I can't think of anybody else who does films quite like him, and so the [sub-]genre isn't completely overswamped like others with floods of unimaginative Hollywood formula crap.
Slashdot Mirror
As an internet company, what's to stop them changing where they're registered to another country?
Use an Escrow service. I see that escrow.com has hefty fees these days, which is fine by me as I prefer escrow.ca. Better protection for the buyer.
"Its a braindead language with absoloutely no use"
Either you're lying or the job listings on the internet and in the newspaper are. And, I'm not referring to the braindead part of your comment.
Assertions are a development aid. They should never be necessary in production code. They're especially good for pinpointing errors or miss-understandings the first time you or somebody else executes your code. As somebody else pointed out, you certainly don't need the expense of them in a production build. Use them to enforce contracts, e.g. as pre-condition in a function that alerts the callee that they've mistakenly passed a null reference. Or, use them in the middle of an algorithm as you write it so that any errors are caught when you come to test it. In C++, I often use them to pop-up reminder messages without killing the app (note: with GUI apps, MSFT have a modified version of assert that doens't necessarily call abort(), but offers the choice to ignore).
Exceptions are useful for exceptional circumstances that could potentially occur in production, such as running out of memory, or the network connection dying unexpectedly.
Isn't he the guy whose predictions and currency speculations forced the Pound Sterling and the Italian Lira out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, at great expense to those and several other countries?
Please read the relevant article. It explains the problem quite clearly. This has nothing to do with the .Net framework or the CLR.
"I have had the VS.NET Beta 2 for a few months, and it's generally easy to use, but very slow."
Yeah: the installation program was such a hog on my P2-450 that I decided to upgrade. I was pretty impressed with the way their setup program has come along now: it looks transaction based and does rollbacks if an error occurs. Very slick.
Already got it installed! The damn thing doesn't play nicely with the X-mouse unfortunately. The UI must have been developed by the idiots who did Visual InterDev. I seem to remember MSVC5 had some issues with the X-mouse (auto-raise when the mouse went over things like the class-wizards drop list controls). MSVC6 played very nicely. Now it's back with avengence - behaving just as badly as the InterDev crap did.
.Net, but the C++ compiler seems more compliant that before.
Not really
It would seem to me that this would be hard to do without incompatibilities, which of course would cause problems for many apps. Why not just dump Windows altogether and spend your money on something else?
It removed the IE shell application, but not the core components, such as mshtml.dll. What you've done is the equivalent of uninstalling Mozilla, except for major components like Gecko.
I guess it comes down to, how do you define what is IE, and what isn't?
Thank you. You saved my breath! People bitch about the lack of code reuse, well this is a clear example of it at a binary component level.
Reading and understanding other people's code is a skill that is often neglected but really important for productivity in a business environment.
If the rest of MSFT's code is like what I've seen in the CRT, or MFC, or ATL, then it's not that bad. I've looked through many times trying to figure things out. I've learnt a lot from it as far developing Windows apps is concerned. It's certainly a lot better written than a lot of code from places I've worked, or been a student.
There has to be a real and credible threat of getting ticketed for violating traffic laws. If there wasn't, there would be more deaths and injuries on the roads, and our insurance rates would probably go up. On top of that, this is a cheap revenue source... or would you rather pay more taxes so the "real crimes" can be solved?
You chose to break the law, either through negligence or laziness or premeditation. Don't whine about it. If you disagree with the law, petition your elected representatives. That's how democracy works.
Right now I would like the police to pull over more people who haven't swept the snow of their cars, or cleaned their lights of salt and grit, or who have misaligned headlights. It will make my driving easier and safer.
This is BS. The site is far from being /.ed, and so this post completely unnecessary. I don't care how lazy people are, this is wrong. If you want to continue to get good articles, support them by going to their site and registering a hit in their logs.
"Kids are able to understand that pictures and video refer to the real-world at a much younger age -- around 2.5 years"
When my cousin's 18 month old daughter points at photos of her relatives, some whom she hasn't seen in a while, and who she see's infrequently, and says their names... is that what you mean by pictures referring to the real-world?
Interesting! I guess we come at things from different angles with very different constraints. The stuff I work on, the bloat is excusable if we can delivery quicker, with fewer bugs and lower maintenance costs. Memory fragmentation is of little concern. You OTOH have some other much more pressing concerns that constrains what features you use. Our challenges are different and the old adage applies: the right tools for the right job!
I saw some cheap used oscilloscopes in a local electronics surplus store at the weekend. If I got my hands on one, how would I go about measuring the frequencies like those guys did with their Linksys? Does one have to buy an antenna, or can it be made? Do all oscilloscopes have the necessary inputs for this. Are there any other considerations? Is this directional (depending on antenna, I guess)?
Sorry for the rather basic questions, but I'm not an EE, and I've only used an oscilloscope very briefly about 12 years ago. I really want to find out where the interference for my 2.4GHz phone is coming from, and how moving the base station helps. I also want to put an FM transmitter on my sound card, and so I want to see how that works too.
"Instead, you'll see cheap reality TV crap and other things that can be done on a shoe-string budget."
If that's what the biggest minority wants, then fine, let them get on with their pathetic little lives. Meanwhile, the rest of us with more than two brain cells will find other things to do. TV doesn't have to rule one's life you know. It's not really essential, and there are many other things one can do.
" Operator overloading is just fine. As long as you follow the logic of the other uses of the operator."
Exactly. That's why some places have code-reviews - insane uses of overloading can be caught early and the culprit educated.
Have you done much team programming, especially with teams with junior members? In my experience, having to do one's own memory management results in nasty bugs. It seems that some people just don't can't do it well. Even when they can, there are still cases of miss-communication between team members. This is one reason why technologies like COM use reference counting, and in C++, smart pointers are encouraged. Personally, I advocate minimising the use of new and delete prefering stack-based classes like the STL. This reduces immensely the number of memory problems in a project.
..."TV shows that broadcast for free seem"...
They're hardly free. Virtually everybody I know around here (Toronto) watches their TV via cable or satellite. We pay at least $40, and often a lot more for this. No doubt some of that revenue goes to the content providers.
Personally, I prefer the British model. A small license fee (half what I currently pay annually) provides two advert free TV stations (5 national radio stations and 38+ local radio stations, plus one of the biggest news web sites on the net). There are also 2.5 (!) terrestrial channels available for free, with adverts. Now 5 channels might sound bad, but they have no less content than the 60 I currently get. What's more, 40% are commercial free, and the other ones have higher quality commercials which seem less intrusive (probably from having to compete with commercial free channels). They show all the good shows we get over here, but without the other crap (Channel 5 excluded)
"This would be bad from the TV Network and Hollywood's point of view because it devalues regular TV airtime"
That's pretty ironical, since I consider the drivel they call ads as being a TV devaling factor in itself!
'There are going to be real problems,' said organiser Dr Scott Gelfand, of Oklahoma State University. 'Some feminists even say artificial wombs mean men could eliminate women from the planet and still perpetuate our species. That's a bit alarmist. Nevertheless, this subject clearly raises strong feelings.'
The real irony of this statement to me is: for sometime some of the more confrontational feminists have been claiming that they don't need men thanks to medical advances such as artificial insemination. With this in mind, they've even been demanding that men justify why women should even need them! Ha: I guess they don't like it when confronted by equal standards, or their own arguments twisted against them.
For me, the biggest attraction of MP3 players is the ability to have no moving parts. This makes it truly portable and useful in more situations that what we had previously. So, my question is, how reliable is this IBM microdrive? How robust is it? If I'm training for to run a marathon, is it going to survive all of the pounding?
I don't see how you can compare an Arnie to Black Hawk Down. Arnie doesn't go for realism. Most of his action films are refreshing tongue-in-cheek. A lot of them don't certainly don't take themselves too seriously like so many bad boneheaded Hollywood action films. Arnie movies have never required a brain, but they have allowed suspension of reality for a while, which is a form of entertainment. Although his films are getting a bit less unoriginal, I can't think of anybody else who does films quite like him, and so the [sub-]genre isn't completely overswamped like others with floods of unimaginative Hollywood formula crap.