If there were no patents all of the people involved here could have spent the last year of their lives doing something useful instead of quite carefully and at horrific cost arriving at a conclusion destined to be overturned on appeal.
Or, they could have scoured the patent database for relevant patents and used the tech from there, probably saving money in the process.. I thought that was how the whole thing was meant to work anyway, sharing information, not walling off certain routes of progress..
Actually, I lied - it's 37.5 hours a week but I usually think of it as a 40 hour week. I'm quite happy in the job, getting paid okay (about twice as much as they were paying me when I was a student), as well as a company car, company mobile, and company laptop.. I don't feel 'exploited', thanks.
Admittedly there is a bit of nepotism involved, as 2 of my uncle's work here - one is head of engineering, and the other co-created the company and is the main Director. One of my sisters was working in accounts for a while until she decided what she wanted to do at college. My dad used to be doing the same job I'm doing until he died actually. If I didn't know I was good at my job then I would have left the company by now, becauase I want it to do well. I've been involved in a few of the engineering projects, written applications for keeping track of assets and personnel, timesheet info, calculating performance of our mass-flow dredgers, maintaining another app that calculates performance of our drills, plus I've been writing the control system for a deep water mass-flow dredger that we're developing.. and in between all that I keep the network running as smoothly as possible, I've built up plenty of experience with different versions of Windows Server and Exchange. If I wasn't capable then I simply wouldn't be here, or they'd hire someone more experienced as 'IT Manager' and probably keep me on as a coder or whatever.
Uh yes I'm working 40 hours a week o_0 Perhaps 'manager' is too grand a title as I'm basically the only full-time IT staff (there's another guy who does most of the smaller jobs to free up my time to do coding, he's does IT, part contract work as he has a Law degree). I was just 'administrator' up until last year when they made my title officially IT manager. It's not a really large corporate business, we're currently bordering between small and medium sized business (main engineering and sales office in the UK, smaller sales office in Houston, and a tiny sales office in Singapore:p ). I have been working here for 7 years now, the first few years I was just working as a summer job, but the other IT Manager left just before I graduated. I have things running more smoothly than he did, and that was the case even when I didn't have an assistant. I don't particularly ever want to be a manager of people, but I'm quite happy to manage IT resources.
Sure you can 'operate' a car without a license. But if you don't know how to fill up the washer fluid or check the oil then you're either going to have to clean the screen by hand, or your engine will get damaged and cause more scrap or increased emissions, etc. When I did my CBT (compulsory basic training) for riding a motorbike in the UK we were taught how to check our oil and oil our chains, etc, because it's pretty important. I'd rather I was taught the same with cars rather than just driving around not realising that I was eating up oil that needed replacing. I once bought a car and the day after I got it the 'check engine' light came on because the oil was so low. Obviously I was a moron for trusting the guy that sold me the car in the first place (he'd done some work on the engine, I thought he'd have looked after it), but I should have probably checked the oil myself as well as Honda engines tend to eat oil pretty quickly when in VTEC. Regular servicing does take care of refilling fluids I think, but if you discover your car is leaking oil and you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere then you may need to top it up to get back to civilisation (or you could just call a rescue service of course, but that costs a lot of money).
I wasn't talking about people fixing their computers at all actually, I was thinking more along the lines of the idiots that fall for spam and trojans and make the whole computer idiot-proof-security and malware industries viable in the first place.
I agree that everyone doesn't need to know everything, and it was actually going to be part of my point in the GP, but a certain level of basic education for things like cars and computers would make the world a better place. Preventative maintenance and sensible usage is generally better than having to fix stuff (says the guy that went through something like 6 tyres in a month:p )
the extremly insidious attempt at restricting movement
It's not an attempt at restricting movement. If people really did stop travelling then the fuel tax would probably come down as the government realises what a stupid mistake it has made getting rid of such a good source of income.
And as for the rest of the stuff, at least we don't always make a big deal about freedom and democracy like I remember americans used to a decade ago. If those secret courts and secret laws were properly secret you wouldn't know about them either. As for unelected leaders, fair enough:p I'm not particularly paranoid if the government knows where I am and what I'm doing. It's when they start imposing crazy curfews and rules that I'll have a problem (having said that, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7498865.stm , but at least it's a 'voluntary' curfew..)
What does that have to do with freeloaders on a bus that would otherwise have been travelling down the route anyway?
Congestion charges have been in place in London for a few years now. It's a bit cheaper if you get a long term pass or live inside the congestion zone. Thankfully I live at the other end of the UK so it doesn't bother me!
I don't particularly agree with all these crazy taxes posing as 'green' taxes either (even tiny cars with small engines and low emissions are taxed heavily if they have 4 wheel drive), but I don't think it has anything to do with what they were talking about!
What's the problem with Skype? It works well, has a large userbase and interoperates with the traditional phone system at good rates. Are geeks meant to do everything by email, IRC and instant messaging (and perhaps Ventrilo but maybe that isn't geeky enough for you either)? What happens when they want to communicate with a non geek?
Well, it's working pretty well for the EEE PC so far! You have the option of installing XP or extra applications of course, but a lot of people find they're happy with the built in OS and apps.
I used to type in code from the Commodore 100 manual to do basic stuff like draw triangles and circles when I was about 4 or 5:p
I generally agree with what you are saying, it sucks when people are just being consumers and don't actually know anything about the product that they are using, but the thing is that you can't be an expert on everything (well, unless you are one of those people that spends their whole life learning and none working). People like us are interested in how a computer or the software running on it works, but others just want to use the finished product.
I was going to make excuses for why people don't need to know how to fix things, or how it's more complex these days to fix a car and requires specialist tools, but in essence you are right. People should have to learn basic car maintenance to get a license, and also pass some kind of test to be able to use a computer;) We'd have a lot less trouble if any idiot couldn't just go out and connect to the intarwebs.
My dad showed me how to do basic text input/output when I was about 8, but while I understood how to use variable to do basic stuff like say "what is your name?", "hello ", I didn't really get going properly until a few years later when I got a BASIC games programming book (Amos BASIC on the Amiga). I'd tried one of those point'n'click programming things before that where you just draw things and plug them into the game, but I didn't do much with it because I wanted to build my own games, not just copy others with different graphics.
I started off writing lots of little random games, like catching fruit dropping from the ceiling in a basket, snowboarding (kind of the opposite of the fruit thing, stuff flowed up from the bottom and you had to avoid it, and my ultimate achievement was a 2D platformer thing where you controlled 2 'orbs' (saved on character animation:P I had an animation for when they died but not for walking around) who tried to jump on each other's head to kill each other (like Mario and Sonic). I wanted them to be able to react realistically so they accelerated when you held down a key (at first I didn't bother to put a limit on the maximum speed so you could reach some hilarious speeds), experimented with them bouncing off the sides, going through the sides and back onto the screen etc. I think it was my idea to have them bounce off each other, but my dad told me the way to get it physically accurate (basically if 2 balls of equal mass hit each other in a 1D plane they will just swap their velocities, so I swapped their speed on the X axis when they collided, it worked really well:D ). Then I did a high score system, which was a good way to learn about basic sorting algorithms. I just used bubble sort in the end.
Around that time my dad showed me how to do a 'Moire' screensaver style app to get me familiar with arrays and loops. I think that kind of thing would be a good early project because it gets you familiar with graphics and loops, and has an impressive looking output.
Another thing I enjoyed a lot and could be a very fun way to get into coding is to start coding up mods for a game he likes - especially if it involves creating doing AI work. AI is a *lot* of fun - it's great to be able to display a 2D image or 3D model on screen, but it's even more fun to see it moving around and reacting to an environment in an intelligent manner:)
One thing about coding in basic is that it does a lot of the work for you (especially things like Amos BASIC which had built in graphical editors for creating sprites and animations to use in your app). I've still never actually written a Windows GUI based program in C (though I've done a DLL for LabVIEW, some basic command line apps, and some experimentation with OpenGL for 3D and 2D graphics - see NeonHelium for some great resources), though I'm sure I could if I needed to. I used to have the mentality that I'd have to write every program from the ground up, but these days there are so many libraries easily available on the net that you don't have to get down to the basics unless you want to. Things like writing a networked app used to seem really daunting to me, but these days writing something like a simple chat client can be done in a few lines of code.
You can teach anyone the basics of how to code, but unless you find projects that they are personally interested in, they aren't going to really get into it. That's kind of stating the obvious, but I don't get all these people who are like "start them on language x/y/z so that they get to know control structures!". The language isn't so important as the actual project they are undertaking, though admittedly basic tends to be very basic. Most languages these days seem to use C style sytax though, so it could be best to start off on one of those so that it's easier to switch between different languages. I really wouldn't recommend starting on FORTRAN as someone suggested above!
Wow. You do realise that there is a whole realm of coding outside of web apps, and that at the very least you should check any and all input that is going to interact with a database or filesystem? I wouldn't call myself an expert on security, but some things are just obvious. Either that was just a very poor joke, or.. the mind boggles.
Huh? What crashes. I even use Firefox Preloader now so it's in memory all day, and I don't get crashes. In OSX I don't use the preloader but the only crashes I've got are when I have a lot of tabs open at the same time.. for purposes of viewing 'art' *shifty eyes*
Buddy, nothing you can do, will ever be better than what I can do, period...
He's not your buddy, guy!
I usually read even long trogladite posts, but when they're filled with LOLBOLDCAPS I get bored quickly. I doubt many slashdotters have a PhD in English - but evidently, neither do you.
Are you perhaps on medication at the moment? Do you like building very large sandcastles and towers?
Weird. I'm 24 and working as an IT manager, but I used to think that if I was going to do anything else, it would be driving (either delivery, or possibly part of the Royal Logistics Corps) because driving is one of the few other things that I enjoy other than computers. Any abuse I have ever had on the roads was due to my own (mis)conduct - apart from one strange time a couple of months ago where this guy came flying onto a roundabout in front of me, and immediately looked over and gave me the finger as if he knew fine he was going to be cutting someone up and in fact he does so regularly. If I'd been driving as fast as he was (which I used to do, but these days I'm more sensible in built up areas) it could have been pretty bad.
It's pretty easy to get road rage if you let your inner animal take control, but driving around listening to good music is sometimes quite an attractive proposition compared to being stuck in the office. I certainly thought so a couple of years ago when office politics and other factors were stressing me out, but I'm very happy with my job atm.
One problem is that I doubt driving pays very well compared to working in IT - especially with the insane fuel costs at the moment.
I can agree with all of that, though I personally have no experience administering Mac OS so don't know what is available. I have just been running boot camp myself while I'm at work, don't really have any need to be running Windows and OSX at the same time, though I run pure OSX 100% of the time at home now, I can still use VPN and remote desktop which is all I need to check up on things remotely (and in fact I did just that this morning when someone contacted me saying they were having issues).
It doesn't look confusing to me at all, simply because I am used to it. The code in the else block is completely separate to the code that is going to be executed if the first set of conditions were true.
An arbitrary example to perhaps make you think of the structure a bit differently (or, more likely, you'll just think I'm an idiot;) )
if (blah blah) do_something(); else {
do_other_stuff();
AndSomeMore();
andSomeMoreStuff(); }
I bet further down the page there are arguments on StylesOfCapitalisationAnd_joining_together_words, I just decided to mess about with it there, I tend to use VariablesLikeThis in a wordy language like Delphi, and variables_like_this for more symbol oriented stuff like C.
So you'd prefer your code if it were only occasionally split into paragraphs (say a newline and tab at the end of each if/for/while/whatever block, but nowhere else)? You're taking the argument to rather absurd extremes. The most convenient way to structure your code is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, and I expect that a lot of people tend to go with what they are first taught.
It is of course possible to change your coding style - I'd be much more interested to hear from those who have changed their styles and why, rather than just have people say "it makes more sense to me" or "I can read denser code fine, so obviously I'm smarter than those who find it less readable", etc.
It's all down to whatever you are used to. Getting used to a different style of code is kind of like learning to drive on the other side of the road - and I'm sure some morons will have reasons for why their particular side of the road is better - but in essence there is no real difference, as long as everyone is driving on the same side. The worst case scenario would be someone changing coding styles every few lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I made a dent in someone's newly plastered and painted roof while playing bowling, a little while after saying I didn't like using the strap. Oops.
If there were no patents all of the people involved here could have spent the last year of their lives doing something useful instead of quite carefully and at horrific cost arriving at a conclusion destined to be overturned on appeal.
Or, they could have scoured the patent database for relevant patents and used the tech from there, probably saving money in the process.. I thought that was how the whole thing was meant to work anyway, sharing information, not walling off certain routes of progress..
Actually, I lied - it's 37.5 hours a week but I usually think of it as a 40 hour week. I'm quite happy in the job, getting paid okay (about twice as much as they were paying me when I was a student), as well as a company car, company mobile, and company laptop.. I don't feel 'exploited', thanks.
Admittedly there is a bit of nepotism involved, as 2 of my uncle's work here - one is head of engineering, and the other co-created the company and is the main Director. One of my sisters was working in accounts for a while until she decided what she wanted to do at college. My dad used to be doing the same job I'm doing until he died actually. If I didn't know I was good at my job then I would have left the company by now, becauase I want it to do well. I've been involved in a few of the engineering projects, written applications for keeping track of assets and personnel, timesheet info, calculating performance of our mass-flow dredgers, maintaining another app that calculates performance of our drills, plus I've been writing the control system for a deep water mass-flow dredger that we're developing.. and in between all that I keep the network running as smoothly as possible, I've built up plenty of experience with different versions of Windows Server and Exchange. If I wasn't capable then I simply wouldn't be here, or they'd hire someone more experienced as 'IT Manager' and probably keep me on as a coder or whatever.
Uh yes I'm working 40 hours a week o_0 Perhaps 'manager' is too grand a title as I'm basically the only full-time IT staff (there's another guy who does most of the smaller jobs to free up my time to do coding, he's does IT, part contract work as he has a Law degree). I was just 'administrator' up until last year when they made my title officially IT manager. It's not a really large corporate business, we're currently bordering between small and medium sized business (main engineering and sales office in the UK, smaller sales office in Houston, and a tiny sales office in Singapore :p ). I have been working here for 7 years now, the first few years I was just working as a summer job, but the other IT Manager left just before I graduated. I have things running more smoothly than he did, and that was the case even when I didn't have an assistant. I don't particularly ever want to be a manager of people, but I'm quite happy to manage IT resources.
Sure you can 'operate' a car without a license. But if you don't know how to fill up the washer fluid or check the oil then you're either going to have to clean the screen by hand, or your engine will get damaged and cause more scrap or increased emissions, etc. When I did my CBT (compulsory basic training) for riding a motorbike in the UK we were taught how to check our oil and oil our chains, etc, because it's pretty important. I'd rather I was taught the same with cars rather than just driving around not realising that I was eating up oil that needed replacing. I once bought a car and the day after I got it the 'check engine' light came on because the oil was so low. Obviously I was a moron for trusting the guy that sold me the car in the first place (he'd done some work on the engine, I thought he'd have looked after it), but I should have probably checked the oil myself as well as Honda engines tend to eat oil pretty quickly when in VTEC. Regular servicing does take care of refilling fluids I think, but if you discover your car is leaking oil and you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere then you may need to top it up to get back to civilisation (or you could just call a rescue service of course, but that costs a lot of money).
I wasn't talking about people fixing their computers at all actually, I was thinking more along the lines of the idiots that fall for spam and trojans and make the whole computer idiot-proof-security and malware industries viable in the first place.
I agree that everyone doesn't need to know everything, and it was actually going to be part of my point in the GP, but a certain level of basic education for things like cars and computers would make the world a better place. Preventative maintenance and sensible usage is generally better than having to fix stuff (says the guy that went through something like 6 tyres in a month :p )
the extremly insidious attempt at restricting movement
It's not an attempt at restricting movement. If people really did stop travelling then the fuel tax would probably come down as the government realises what a stupid mistake it has made getting rid of such a good source of income.
And as for the rest of the stuff, at least we don't always make a big deal about freedom and democracy like I remember americans used to a decade ago. If those secret courts and secret laws were properly secret you wouldn't know about them either. As for unelected leaders, fair enough :p I'm not particularly paranoid if the government knows where I am and what I'm doing. It's when they start imposing crazy curfews and rules that I'll have a problem (having said that, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7498865.stm , but at least it's a 'voluntary' curfew..)
What does that have to do with freeloaders on a bus that would otherwise have been travelling down the route anyway?
Congestion charges have been in place in London for a few years now. It's a bit cheaper if you get a long term pass or live inside the congestion zone. Thankfully I live at the other end of the UK so it doesn't bother me!
I don't particularly agree with all these crazy taxes posing as 'green' taxes either (even tiny cars with small engines and low emissions are taxed heavily if they have 4 wheel drive), but I don't think it has anything to do with what they were talking about!
Wow, Gordon Brown has modpoints today! I don't see how that was flamebait in any way..
As much as I'm a fan of open source, I'm also a very big fan of Just F****ing Works, so I'd include Skype.
Hear, hear here!
Multitouch would be nice of course, but I don't hold 2 styluses at the same time.
You mean you're not into chopstick-stylus computing yet? All the cool kids are doing it.
What's the problem with Skype? It works well, has a large userbase and interoperates with the traditional phone system at good rates. Are geeks meant to do everything by email, IRC and instant messaging (and perhaps Ventrilo but maybe that isn't geeky enough for you either)? What happens when they want to communicate with a non geek?
Well, it's working pretty well for the EEE PC so far! You have the option of installing XP or extra applications of course, but a lot of people find they're happy with the built in OS and apps.
I used to type in code from the Commodore 100 manual to do basic stuff like draw triangles and circles when I was about 4 or 5 :p
I generally agree with what you are saying, it sucks when people are just being consumers and don't actually know anything about the product that they are using, but the thing is that you can't be an expert on everything (well, unless you are one of those people that spends their whole life learning and none working). People like us are interested in how a computer or the software running on it works, but others just want to use the finished product.
I was going to make excuses for why people don't need to know how to fix things, or how it's more complex these days to fix a car and requires specialist tools, but in essence you are right. People should have to learn basic car maintenance to get a license, and also pass some kind of test to be able to use a computer ;) We'd have a lot less trouble if any idiot couldn't just go out and connect to the intarwebs.
My dad showed me how to do basic text input/output when I was about 8, but while I understood how to use variable to do basic stuff like say "what is your name?", "hello ", I didn't really get going properly until a few years later when I got a BASIC games programming book (Amos BASIC on the Amiga). I'd tried one of those point'n'click programming things before that where you just draw things and plug them into the game, but I didn't do much with it because I wanted to build my own games, not just copy others with different graphics.
I started off writing lots of little random games, like catching fruit dropping from the ceiling in a basket, snowboarding (kind of the opposite of the fruit thing, stuff flowed up from the bottom and you had to avoid it, and my ultimate achievement was a 2D platformer thing where you controlled 2 'orbs' (saved on character animation :P I had an animation for when they died but not for walking around) who tried to jump on each other's head to kill each other (like Mario and Sonic). I wanted them to be able to react realistically so they accelerated when you held down a key (at first I didn't bother to put a limit on the maximum speed so you could reach some hilarious speeds), experimented with them bouncing off the sides, going through the sides and back onto the screen etc. I think it was my idea to have them bounce off each other, but my dad told me the way to get it physically accurate (basically if 2 balls of equal mass hit each other in a 1D plane they will just swap their velocities, so I swapped their speed on the X axis when they collided, it worked really well :D ). Then I did a high score system, which was a good way to learn about basic sorting algorithms. I just used bubble sort in the end.
Around that time my dad showed me how to do a 'Moire' screensaver style app to get me familiar with arrays and loops. I think that kind of thing would be a good early project because it gets you familiar with graphics and loops, and has an impressive looking output.
Another thing I enjoyed a lot and could be a very fun way to get into coding is to start coding up mods for a game he likes - especially if it involves creating doing AI work. AI is a *lot* of fun - it's great to be able to display a 2D image or 3D model on screen, but it's even more fun to see it moving around and reacting to an environment in an intelligent manner :)
One thing about coding in basic is that it does a lot of the work for you (especially things like Amos BASIC which had built in graphical editors for creating sprites and animations to use in your app). I've still never actually written a Windows GUI based program in C (though I've done a DLL for LabVIEW, some basic command line apps, and some experimentation with OpenGL for 3D and 2D graphics - see NeonHelium for some great resources), though I'm sure I could if I needed to. I used to have the mentality that I'd have to write every program from the ground up, but these days there are so many libraries easily available on the net that you don't have to get down to the basics unless you want to. Things like writing a networked app used to seem really daunting to me, but these days writing something like a simple chat client can be done in a few lines of code.
You can teach anyone the basics of how to code, but unless you find projects that they are personally interested in, they aren't going to really get into it. That's kind of stating the obvious, but I don't get all these people who are like "start them on language x/y/z so that they get to know control structures!". The language isn't so important as the actual project they are undertaking, though admittedly basic tends to be very basic. Most languages these days seem to use C style sytax though, so it could be best to start off on one of those so that it's easier to switch between different languages. I really wouldn't recommend starting on FORTRAN as someone suggested above!
Wow. You do realise that there is a whole realm of coding outside of web apps, and that at the very least you should check any and all input that is going to interact with a database or filesystem? I wouldn't call myself an expert on security, but some things are just obvious. Either that was just a very poor joke, or.. the mind boggles.
Huh? What crashes. I even use Firefox Preloader now so it's in memory all day, and I don't get crashes. In OSX I don't use the preloader but the only crashes I've got are when I have a lot of tabs open at the same time.. for purposes of viewing 'art' *shifty eyes*
All that shows is that you lack imagination!
Buddy, nothing you can do, will ever be better than what I can do, period...
He's not your buddy, guy!
I usually read even long trogladite posts, but when they're filled with LOLBOLDCAPS I get bored quickly. I doubt many slashdotters have a PhD in English - but evidently, neither do you.
Are you perhaps on medication at the moment? Do you like building very large sandcastles and towers?
Weird. I'm 24 and working as an IT manager, but I used to think that if I was going to do anything else, it would be driving (either delivery, or possibly part of the Royal Logistics Corps) because driving is one of the few other things that I enjoy other than computers. Any abuse I have ever had on the roads was due to my own (mis)conduct - apart from one strange time a couple of months ago where this guy came flying onto a roundabout in front of me, and immediately looked over and gave me the finger as if he knew fine he was going to be cutting someone up and in fact he does so regularly. If I'd been driving as fast as he was (which I used to do, but these days I'm more sensible in built up areas) it could have been pretty bad.
It's pretty easy to get road rage if you let your inner animal take control, but driving around listening to good music is sometimes quite an attractive proposition compared to being stuck in the office. I certainly thought so a couple of years ago when office politics and other factors were stressing me out, but I'm very happy with my job atm.
One problem is that I doubt driving pays very well compared to working in IT - especially with the insane fuel costs at the moment.
Are you implying causality, or simply correlation?
I can agree with all of that, though I personally have no experience administering Mac OS so don't know what is available. I have just been running boot camp myself while I'm at work, don't really have any need to be running Windows and OSX at the same time, though I run pure OSX 100% of the time at home now, I can still use VPN and remote desktop which is all I need to check up on things remotely (and in fact I did just that this morning when someone contacted me saying they were having issues).
I don't imagine playing Quake in a web browser window would be as much fun as playing it fullscreen, anyway
Yeah, it's difficult to enjoy an FPS when you can only move backwards, forwards, stop and reload..
I never studied latin, you insensitive clod!
(homicidium, homo human being + caedere to cut, kill).
We're all homos in the end.
It doesn't look confusing to me at all, simply because I am used to it. The code in the else block is completely separate to the code that is going to be executed if the first set of conditions were true.
An arbitrary example to perhaps make you think of the structure a bit differently (or, more likely, you'll just think I'm an idiot ;) )
if (blah blah) do_something(); else {
do_other_stuff();
AndSomeMore();
andSomeMoreStuff();
}
I bet further down the page there are arguments on StylesOfCapitalisationAnd_joining_together_words, I just decided to mess about with it there, I tend to use VariablesLikeThis in a wordy language like Delphi, and variables_like_this for more symbol oriented stuff like C.
So you'd prefer your code if it were only occasionally split into paragraphs (say a newline and tab at the end of each if/for/while/whatever block, but nowhere else)? You're taking the argument to rather absurd extremes. The most convenient way to structure your code is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, and I expect that a lot of people tend to go with what they are first taught.
It is of course possible to change your coding style - I'd be much more interested to hear from those who have changed their styles and why, rather than just have people say "it makes more sense to me" or "I can read denser code fine, so obviously I'm smarter than those who find it less readable", etc.
It's all down to whatever you are used to. Getting used to a different style of code is kind of like learning to drive on the other side of the road - and I'm sure some morons will have reasons for why their particular side of the road is better - but in essence there is no real difference, as long as everyone is driving on the same side. The worst case scenario would be someone changing coding styles every few lines.