If used correctly Visual Studio does not "rot your brain" or cause bad habits.
I agree, I've found myself writing code in Visual Studio on several occasions, but I also write code regularly in vim and compile on the command line (I don't like using X on our webserver), so I'm forced to stay on my toes, as it were. It is extremely convenient to be able to hit one button and compile, then hit another one to debug, but that's as far as I'll use it, and any IDE can do that. Code completion is helpful sometimes when you have a function thats overloaded several times, or really obscure ios::base methods.
One of my favorite features is the form of auto-completion and showing function prototypes. You don't have to have memorized the entire Win32 API to be a "good" programmer. Documentation comes in many forms and by having the IDE tell you when you open a parenthesis what the function expects as inputs is just another way of looking at the docs.
I agree in general, especially for the Win32 API because it's confusing as hell. But I usually write GUI apps in QT, and I know it well enough not to need Intellisense.
The one place where I think that an IDE can cause some harm for new programmers is the "shake-and-bake" method of designing an app where it asks 10 questions and writes the code for you.
But invariably this is what most programmers will use. An IDE is not a teaching tool, nor is it an acceptable tool to use while teaching. If an IDE must be used, use Dev-C++, which is basically an editor with gcc and gdb tacked on (code completion is present, but the last time I used it, it didn't work).
Past that, IDEs are a great tool for managing larger programming projects.
Agreed completely. As long as you understand in general how everything interacts, using an automatically generated makefile won't hurt, and it'll save you a lot of time at very little cost. It's when you don't entirely understand why certain things are included in certain places that you can run into trouble later.
Also, when we bought VS.NET at work (one of my coworkers really likes the compiler), we put up the two reference posters that ship with it... they took up our whole wall.:)
This year our computer science department switched to Visual Studio, and I can say without qualms that they couldn't have made a worse decision. Now we are forced to use VS.NET because the professor can't run the programs to grade it without.vcproj and.sln files.
Fortunately, this is not my first foray into C/C++, and I am quite used to writing programs in vim and compiling on the command line at my job, so usually I just import the source into VS.NET and compile to make sure it doesn't produce any strange microsoft errors (my favourite is the crap about "unable to verify assembly source", I'm looking right at the assembly source, why can't I verify it myself?). However, this does not bode well for my classmates. For one, the cost of using linux/bsd is now prohibitive: it's extremely inconvenient to haul ass down to the lab every week just to import some source.
It seems like the focus, even in obtaining a cs degree, is now speed of implementation instead of speed of code. I realize that this is common business practice in the real world, but do we really want all of our new cs graduates to be a horde of IDE-dependant windows programmers? I know that I dont look forward to working in that kind of environment, or running software produced in it either.
Play alot of graphic intensive games with alot of frames per second (the 180 degree spin trick mentioned above is the easiest way to see if this is a problem)
Watch alot of high quality video
I'm sure theres an application I'm leaving out, but in general, for office use, 25ms is fine as long as the contrast and colors are good. I game occasionally on a 12ms display, and I honestly don't notice the difference between it and a CRT. Except for the bad colors. Ghosting is only an issue where there are alot of frames per second (i.e. FPS > refresh rate in hz). It makes sense intuitively, if you're getting 75fps on a 75hz display, you're getting one frame per cycle. Ghosting would occur if the response time is not high enough to switch the colours of the pixels in less than one cycle. In the case of this theoretical display, the response time must be better than 13.333ms (1sec / 75hz * 1000ms/sec = 13.3333ms), because otherwise the colored pixels will "stick" for the next frame (so a 25ms display will ghost every other frame at 75fps and 75hz). As I said, this makes sense to me, but I could be totally wrong.
C is a very good language for writing an operating system assuming that you are competant enough in C to get the job done, because it is close(ish) to the machine. C++ isn't a bad choice either, because really it's just C with some memory protection and i/o streams tacked on. Not a lot of extra overhead and a slight savings in debugging time.
The problem is that C is what most OSS is written in (think Linux and most of its executables), so systems programmers (except those working for M$), use C. While a migration to C++ wouldn't hurt, it probably wouldn't help much either. You can still shoot yourself in the foot with pointers, and STL isn't really good for writing operating systems (although I've never tried).
On the other hand, writing an operating system in Java (or any bytecode language) is far from ideal. Yes, most everything is wrappered so it's very easy to write safe code, but why waste so much potential power running a native Bytecode -> x86 interpreter?
Its really a tradeoff of code overhead vs. developer time. Unless you're writing an OS on an Acorn RISC chip that executes Java bytecode natively.
(I'm pretty sure there's a better extension that does the same thing: the one I remember was customizable so you could point the query to any page you wanted, including wikipedia)
The only thing nano means is that it sounds more futuristic and "cool". How many companies have the word nano in their names just to attract investors? The new Hummer may have nanocomposite materials, but it's still the size of a small house.
Small businesses are run by dipshits who think they know what they're doing and like to question and micromanage every little thing.
Not all small business are run by dipshits, or horribly micromanaged.
That said, small businesses with the type of boss who like to micromanage things he/she/it doesn't understand are like the Pit of Fire (tm, why not keep the language appropriate:D) for network admins. If they hired you to manage/secure the network, they should let you do it. This ideally includes trading XP for Linspire or Ubuntu with gnome or some other kid-friendly Linux OS. If they like bubbly, give them KDE if you must. As a rule, allowing the employees to personalize company computers is a bad idea anyway, its just a workstation, not a place to get comfy, you certainly don't need to be bringing your copy of PartyPoker to work and installing it on my network. Then you never run spybot or the virus scan like I tell you to, so I lose a whole afternoon fixing the computer.
I used to be a software engineer who was responsible for the network. Now I'm just a software engineer who runs the webserver.
you're all exactly right! I have no moral standards! I have no ability to distinguish between right and wrong! I eat babies with ranch dressing!!!!!!
honestly...if it were that easy to "reevaluate my expenses" and magically make more money appear, wouldn't I have done it already? It's not like I smoke two packs a day or something.
i'm a student, not a professor. It pays better than the gas station, but that's as good as they have to do to get students to work for them instead of speedway. I don't know how well other universities pay, but UK sure doesn't give students great bank.
I was pointing out that games are fairly expensive, using my situation as an example. I would assume that many students find themselves in a similar situation. I didn't ask you to be a jackass just because you have a cooshy job as an IT manager and a trust fund.
They feel videogames are too expensive and resent the long wait for many games released in the US or in Asia before the UK.
... and that would be why I stopped. My job doesn't pay me near enough that I can afford to buy a USD40-50 game more than once or twice a year, and no game (except Alpha Centauri and Halo) can keep me entertained for more than a few weeks... I just can't replay the damn things. If I want to play something, my options are:
yeah...you might be right, but i'd have to agree with the assertion that OS X is more comparable to Linux maintenance-wise. We have two people who use iBooks, and I've never had one of them come to me with an OS X problem (except for missing firewire cables, but I attribute that to the beer). I don't know if this is a statement about the software itself or simply a more competant user base...
i'd rather train a dozen fairly bright grad students to use gnome or kde or xwindows (i have no preference: the only thing i don't do at command line is browse the web) than do daily maintainence on a dozen hostile computers. I'd gladly dedicate a week or two to teaching everyone a new GUI if it meant that I wouldn't get a call every hour because something new crashed.
I've honestly put in 12 and 13 hour days because of this. I get a wake-up call at 8am because the ones who come in early are having a problem, and I end up staying until 8-9pm because the ones who stay late have a different problem. It's not like I don't get paid for the hours I work, but I'd rather have time to do something besides work, commute, and sleep.
...is anyone honestly surprised? I spend at least half my day trying to patch together 2-year old windows machines... and that's not even what they hired me for. Really cuts into the time I can put in coding...
I noticed that after I posted. If/. had a way to edit comments, I would have fixed it, as well as removed the superfluous word from "1970's era". I guess that's what "preview" is for....
May I suggest you also calm down? Just a bit? Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you shouldn't be polite...
I believe this was addressed (albeit in a roundabout way) in the second post for this article. It absolutely is using the buzzword "nano" to generate interest in a class which has a much larger scope.
That is not to say that the class is worthless, social reaction to new technology needs to be studied (imo) more intensively than it is now (i.e. real funding, not just hyped up studies).
Alot of universities seem to be offering similar classes of late. In fact, next semester I begin a 4 semester course track about the implications of technology in our society with a focus on nanotechnology.
I'm looking forward to all that extra time to nap on the oh-so-comfy 1970's era right-hand-only desks.
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If used correctly Visual Studio does not "rot your brain" or cause bad habits.
I agree, I've found myself writing code in Visual Studio on several occasions, but I also write code regularly in vim and compile on the command line (I don't like using X on our webserver), so I'm forced to stay on my toes, as it were. It is extremely convenient to be able to hit one button and compile, then hit another one to debug, but that's as far as I'll use it, and any IDE can do that. Code completion is helpful sometimes when you have a function thats overloaded several times, or really obscure ios::base methods.
One of my favorite features is the form of auto-completion and showing function prototypes. You don't have to have memorized the entire Win32 API to be a "good" programmer. Documentation comes in many forms and by having the IDE tell you when you open a parenthesis what the function expects as inputs is just another way of looking at the docs.
I agree in general, especially for the Win32 API because it's confusing as hell. But I usually write GUI apps in QT, and I know it well enough not to need Intellisense.
The one place where I think that an IDE can cause some harm for new programmers is the "shake-and-bake" method of designing an app where it asks 10 questions and writes the code for you.
But invariably this is what most programmers will use. An IDE is not a teaching tool, nor is it an acceptable tool to use while teaching. If an IDE must be used, use Dev-C++, which is basically an editor with gcc and gdb tacked on (code completion is present, but the last time I used it, it didn't work).
Past that, IDEs are a great tool for managing larger programming projects.
Agreed completely. As long as you understand in general how everything interacts, using an automatically generated makefile won't hurt, and it'll save you a lot of time at very little cost. It's when you don't entirely understand why certain things are included in certain places that you can run into trouble later.
Also, when we bought VS.NET at work (one of my coworkers really likes the compiler), we put up the two reference posters that ship with it... they took up our whole wall. :)
This year our computer science department switched to Visual Studio, and I can say without qualms that they couldn't have made a worse decision. Now we are forced to use VS.NET because the professor can't run the programs to grade it without .vcproj and .sln files.
Fortunately, this is not my first foray into C/C++, and I am quite used to writing programs in vim and compiling on the command line at my job, so usually I just import the source into VS.NET and compile to make sure it doesn't produce any strange microsoft errors (my favourite is the crap about "unable to verify assembly source", I'm looking right at the assembly source, why can't I verify it myself?). However, this does not bode well for my classmates. For one, the cost of using linux/bsd is now prohibitive: it's extremely inconvenient to haul ass down to the lab every week just to import some source.
It seems like the focus, even in obtaining a cs degree, is now speed of implementation instead of speed of code. I realize that this is common business practice in the real world, but do we really want all of our new cs graduates to be a horde of IDE-dependant windows programmers? I know that I dont look forward to working in that kind of environment, or running software produced in it either.
Not unless you either:
I'm sure theres an application I'm leaving out, but in general, for office use, 25ms is fine as long as the contrast and colors are good. I game occasionally on a 12ms display, and I honestly don't notice the difference between it and a CRT. Except for the bad colors. Ghosting is only an issue where there are alot of frames per second (i.e. FPS > refresh rate in hz). It makes sense intuitively, if you're getting 75fps on a 75hz display, you're getting one frame per cycle. Ghosting would occur if the response time is not high enough to switch the colours of the pixels in less than one cycle. In the case of this theoretical display, the response time must be better than 13.333ms (1sec / 75hz * 1000ms/sec = 13.3333ms), because otherwise the colored pixels will "stick" for the next frame (so a 25ms display will ghost every other frame at 75fps and 75hz). As I said, this makes sense to me, but I could be totally wrong.
I meant ARM chip.
C is a very good language for writing an operating system assuming that you are competant enough in C to get the job done, because it is close(ish) to the machine. C++ isn't a bad choice either, because really it's just C with some memory protection and i/o streams tacked on. Not a lot of extra overhead and a slight savings in debugging time.
The problem is that C is what most OSS is written in (think Linux and most of its executables), so systems programmers (except those working for M$), use C. While a migration to C++ wouldn't hurt, it probably wouldn't help much either. You can still shoot yourself in the foot with pointers, and STL isn't really good for writing operating systems (although I've never tried).
On the other hand, writing an operating system in Java (or any bytecode language) is far from ideal. Yes, most everything is wrappered so it's very easy to write safe code, but why waste so much potential power running a native Bytecode -> x86 interpreter?
Its really a tradeoff of code overhead vs. developer time. Unless you're writing an OS on an Acorn RISC chip that executes Java bytecode natively.
Firefox has one of those too. And no ads!
(I'm pretty sure there's a better extension that does the same thing: the one I remember was customizable so you could point the query to any page you wanted, including wikipedia)
The only thing nano means is that it sounds more futuristic and "cool". How many companies have the word nano in their names just to attract investors? The new Hummer may have nanocomposite materials, but it's still the size of a small house.
i used pc-cilin at home and I was very impressed with it. Unfortunately it's subscription based, but so are all its commercial couterparts
sorry, i forgot my rant tags
Small businesses are run by dipshits who think they know what they're doing and like to question and micromanage every little thing.
Not all small business are run by dipshits, or horribly micromanaged.
That said, small businesses with the type of boss who like to micromanage things he/she/it doesn't understand are like the Pit of Fire (tm, why not keep the language appropriate :D) for network admins. If they hired you to manage/secure the network, they should let you do it. This ideally includes trading XP for Linspire or Ubuntu with gnome or some other kid-friendly Linux OS. If they like bubbly, give them KDE if you must. As a rule, allowing the employees to personalize company computers is a bad idea anyway, its just a workstation, not a place to get comfy, you certainly don't need to be bringing your copy of PartyPoker to work and installing it on my network. Then you never run spybot or the virus scan like I tell you to, so I lose a whole afternoon fixing the computer.
I used to be a software engineer who was responsible for the network. Now I'm just a software engineer who runs the webserver.
you're all exactly right! I have no moral standards! I have no ability to distinguish between right and wrong! I eat babies with ranch dressing!!!!!!
honestly...if it were that easy to "reevaluate my expenses" and magically make more money appear, wouldn't I have done it already? It's not like I smoke two packs a day or something.
i'm a student, not a professor. It pays better than the gas station, but that's as good as they have to do to get students to work for them instead of speedway. I don't know how well other universities pay, but UK sure doesn't give students great bank.
I was pointing out that games are fairly expensive, using my situation as an example. I would assume that many students find themselves in a similar situation. I didn't ask you to be a jackass just because you have a cooshy job as an IT manager and a trust fund.
They feel videogames are too expensive and resent the long wait for many games released in the US or in Asia before the UK.
... and that would be why I stopped. My job doesn't pay me near enough that I can afford to buy a USD40-50 game more than once or twice a year, and no game (except Alpha Centauri and Halo) can keep me entertained for more than a few weeks... I just can't replay the damn things. If I want to play something, my options are:
yeah...you might be right, but i'd have to agree with the assertion that OS X is more comparable to Linux maintenance-wise. We have two people who use iBooks, and I've never had one of them come to me with an OS X problem (except for missing firewire cables, but I attribute that to the beer). I don't know if this is a statement about the software itself or simply a more competant user base...
i'd rather train a dozen fairly bright grad students to use gnome or kde or xwindows (i have no preference: the only thing i don't do at command line is browse the web) than do daily maintainence on a dozen hostile computers. I'd gladly dedicate a week or two to teaching everyone a new GUI if it meant that I wouldn't get a call every hour because something new crashed.
I've honestly put in 12 and 13 hour days because of this. I get a wake-up call at 8am because the ones who come in early are having a problem, and I end up staying until 8-9pm because the ones who stay late have a different problem. It's not like I don't get paid for the hours I work, but I'd rather have time to do something besides work, commute, and sleep.
...is anyone honestly surprised? I spend at least half my day trying to patch together 2-year old windows machines... and that's not even what they hired me for. Really cuts into the time I can put in coding...
I don't think MSH will be included in Longhorn. There was a /. article to this effect a while back...
It's a shame, I would be a lot happier with my winXP installation if it had a real command line instead of this cmd.exe shit.
I noticed that after I posted. If /. had a way to edit comments, I would have fixed it, as well as removed the superfluous word from "1970's era". I guess that's what "preview" is for....
May I suggest you also calm down? Just a bit? Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you shouldn't be polite...
I noticed that after I posted. If /. had a way to edit comments, I would have fixed it, as well as removed the superfluous word from "1970's era".
I believe this was addressed (albeit in a roundabout way) in the second post for this article. It absolutely is using the buzzword "nano" to generate interest in a class which has a much larger scope.
That is not to say that the class is worthless, social reaction to new technology needs to be studied (imo) more intensively than it is now (i.e. real funding, not just hyped up studies).
Alot of universities seem to be offering similar classes of late. In fact, next semester I begin a 4 semester course track about the implications of technology in our society with a focus on nanotechnology. I'm looking forward to all that extra time to nap on the oh-so-comfy 1970's era right-hand-only desks.