I'm not worried about paying double for Netflix. I'm more worried that 10, 20 or even 30 years from now Netflix or some company which bought Netflix will still be doing the same thing they are today with no real innovation because nobody else was ever able to afford the "fast lane" fees to enter the market and challenge them.
I don't think Netflix's price could double due to carriers charging them. The market probably wouldn't support it. If carriers wanted to drive Netflix out of business they might. I could see Comcast doing that if they want to sell streaming Xfinity to everyone.
Unless they want to kill Netflix in order to replace it with their own services, if carriers get the ability to do slow lanes they would have to charge an amount that Netflix can actually afford to pay without raising their prices so high that they go out of business. Otherwise they lose a potential revenue stream.
As for your bill going up.. if Netflix can raise their prices without losing their customers they should have already done it even before having to pay fees to the carriers. That's how free market supply and demand work!
I remember reading (back in Pentium I days) that NASA still used 386s for a lot of things that went into space. The larger transistors inside made the chip more radiation resistant.
I wonder if they ever found a way to make modern processors more radiation resistant or if they just added more shielding or maybe even still use the old stuff...
I was assuming that EISA was just a special case inside of the same code as ISA and that what was proposed was to remove all ISA support. Is that what was going to happen?
ISA is old but I am sure there is quite a bit more than just one person out there with some sort of legacy hardware using it. I have a little bit of ISA hardware myself that I would like to use but not quite enough to build up a legacy PC. Every now and then I search the internet for ISA to USB adapters. There actually IS one company selling such a beast but it is way to expensive to be worthwile for me. But.. if I had some expensive piece of lab equipment or something like that with a proprietary ISA adapter... it would make sense.
I loved being able to set the IRQs and memory addresses. Ok, not really but the for the first decade or so I HATED plug and play, or plug and pray as we called it in my office. Half the time it didn't work! It would try to put things right on top of one another. When possible I would disable it and just use the jumpers. Once you got used to it it wasn't THAT hard and it was great knowing that your soundcard was on IRQ X and your video on IRQY and never the two would conflict. Early plug and play seemed to randomly decide to reshuffle things and the next time you boot it may not still work.
That was of course a long time ago and things work well on any reasonable hardware today. But.. I still cringe when people complain about setting IRQs. It's not hard to move a jumper and its not that complicated of a concept to know that to things probably shouldn't try to use the same resource. Not being able to set those things caused me far far more frustration than having to set them ever did! Even though things are great now I'm not entirely sure that decade of pain was worth it to get here.
"I had never managed to see more than one of these systems in my lifetime"
When I was in college I worked for the campus (NPR, not student) radio station. I wasn't a DJ, did tech work there. Anyway.. that was around the same time you were replacing that EISA system.
We were on a tight budget (hey, it's public radio, what do you expect). During my time there we put the first computers in the studios as well as everyone's offices. Previously only a few managers had computers.
Anyway... to accomplish this we used to get old computers from other university departments. I'm talking real old, like original IBM ATs and knockoffs from the same era. We would hack the case with a nibbler and pop-rivet gun to fit a standard motherboard. We kept the power supply, floppy drives and sometimes they had usable hard drives. Yes.. we installed Windows 95 (and later 98) on MFM hard drives!
My boss, the engineer had a source for 486 motherboard, CPU + RAM combos. Depending on CPU speed and amount of RAM they were either $10 or $15! This all sounds horribly obsolete but at the time it was plenty good enough to run the then current web browsers, Office and email. Anything beyond that they probably weren't supposed to be doing anyway. In an era when new PCs were still $1500+ we were equiping people for under $50.
Well.. back to the point.. these motherboards had EISA slots and somehow the boss managed to get ahold of a handful of EISA video cards. Those computers that got the EISA cards did seem to run a lot faster!
So.. long story short.. I have seen more EISA cards than you.:-P
Oh, yah, this thread was about kids who only had a smartphone. How many platforms are identical between desktops and smartphones? Sure, Android uses Java. It isn't exactly the same environment as on a desktop though. I don't think the same code is very likely to run on both beyond maybe console hello world.
Should they be teaching programming using HTML5? If so I don't think we can find enough common ground to even have a reasonable conversation about this!
That probably isn't the point. Did the original article say what track the classes were on, Computer Science or Information Systems? I'm thinking Computer Science but maybe that's just because it is what I studied.
Anyway, at least when I was in school (~15 years ago I must admit) the question of marketshare was a non-issue for Computer Science students. The classes were meant to teach THEORY. The languages and platforms used were chosen to best present the theory (or just happened to be what a professor knew/liked). The professor could use BFK if that's what he thought best represented the concept he was teaching!
All that practical stuff.. then popular languages.. that was assumed to not be worth teaching. It would all be obsolete by graduation time anyway! You were expected to learn that stuff on your own, maybe even on the job. The theory you learn though was supposed to make you better at it once you did.
If you wanted to learn the actual tools employers were looking for.. then you went for Information Systems. Then you didn't learn theory so much. Also you took a lot of business classes. Instead of computer science your goal was it management.
Yes but you are at a university level. University level computer classes are generally taught by people with some background in computers.
Pre-university schools will NEVER have that benefit. It just isn't the same set of job requirements. Pre-University schools are places filled with children. Children who are there because they have to be, don't apreciate the importance of why they are there and honestly don't have the emotional maturity to do so.
To do the job well teachers require a tendancy towards caring and nurturing, patience and a love for children that one does not need in the University. The personality types that will do well align more with those of a nanny than those of a computer scientist.
Some schools may get lucky and find a teacher with both. That will always be rare. Here is a magic box, you can memorize exactly what it does as you follow along the pre-written course syllabus with NO DEVIATION and the kids will see EXACTLY what you see. That's what is needed for teachers.
Or.. maybe I was just jaded by my own experiences...
Start mass producing some sort of cheapie glass-like thing under a different name out of China. Make it work but buggy enough to be slightly annoying. Make so many, so cheap that they are all over the place.
Let the Glass shy AHoles wine, complain and in some cases start bar fights because they get mad every time they see one. Give it a year or two for the AHoles to burn themselves out and go find a different cause to baby on about.
Then, when everyone is used to the cameras being around... finally Google comes out with a well refined, not-sucking Glass 2 and nobody is worried because OMG IT HAS A CAMERA! They are already used to that.
They release Glass.. at a rediculous price for early developers to check it out.
They got a bunch of negative attention because people feared the camera. (Lions Tigers, Bears and Cameras, Oh My)
Everyone talks about it like it was a failure to sell.
They start looking for how to make version 2 sell like version 1 didn't.
But... they never even tried to sell it at a normal price? Right? That "explorer" price wasnt supposed to be anywhere near representative of Glass's price as a real product right?
So what if a very vocal number of people keep talking about how much they hate it? Any attention is attention. Maybe there are enough of us who WOULD buy it if it were at a reasonable price. Maybe the naysayers rants just keep reminding us how much we want one! Free marketing!
Or maybe that's just me. I don't see how they can know anything about sales when it has only ever been offered for $1,500! Who the F buys a toy like that for $1500?!?
Generation 1 should be old news now, having been sold for something like $200 to $250. Generation 2 should be almost out and people like me who will never spend the money for a device that will be obsolete in a year should be chomping at the bit to go buy a gen 1 for $50 or so soon.
Or is $1500 really what it costs to make and sell a device like that? Is the tech required still that expensive? If so then they should give up. And.. the rest of us should go through eggs at Google headquarters for producing (and I assume patenting) something so far ahead of it's time that in a few years when the components ARE available for a reasonable price nobody can/will produce it b/c the one company which now hogs all the IP marketed too soon, lost money and is now afraid to try again!
They should just suspend both parties, harasser and harasee. Afterall, that's how most schools handle physical (non-sexual) harassment right? And it works oh-so well!
What about them? They do the same thing kids have ever done who take a computer class but don't have one at home. They use the school computers.
Actually.. there are ways to program on a smartphone. So long as it isn't iOS you can even get compilers for just about any language. But... that doesn't mean you get to use it for class.
No teacher is going to want to support that. They would have to either limit everything to the least common denominator (Yay, everybody gets to write a hello-world console app!) or teach a dozen variants per class. (this is how you create a window in Windows, here is the code for Linux umm.. is that X or Wayland... here is how to create a form on Android... here is how to do it on OSX..)
No, the school will standardize on a type of PC, maybe Windows, maybe Mac and the teacher will pick the rest of the development environment. If you are too much of a trendy butthead to own a real computer and expect to do everything on your smartphone then you use the school lab. If they are nice maybe they set up a vnc or remote desktop server that you can log in to with whatever device makes you happy.
Oh geez, Safari? Not that I want to stick up for Dice-dot but come on! I might use Links to browse on occasion myself but at least I understand that when I do I am so far from the norm that I get what I get and I shouldn't expect webmasters to cater to me!
My understanding (feel free to enlightenme if wrong) is that most distros still offer other init systems, they just aren't requiring package maintainers to suppor them. Thus.. things you want to use might become dependent on Systemd.
Also (as far as I know) Gnome is the only thing already doing this with KDE likely to follow soon.
I'm guessing (more speculative) that Systemd dependency is only likely to be an issue with big "desktopy" projects like this.
I hope that you are not running Gnome or KDE on your router!
So... what's the problem? Just use a different init!
Also... what kind of router are we talking about? Is this a PC being used as a router? Or is it a device which was actually meant to be a router. If the latter what distro does it run? Do router distros like openwrt, ddwrt, etc... actually use the same init systems as desktops? I always assumed they just ran a few simple scripts.
That being said.. although I've been a long-time Linux user I am using M0n0wall myself. It's a BSD based router distro, much like Pfsense which others have recommended but a bit lighter. I only chose it b/c it (and pfsense) supported the device I wanted to convert to a router and I didn't see anyone mention any of the Linux ones for it online.
My only complaint is that I haven't been able to get a VPN server running on it. I'm not sure this is M0n0wall's fault as this has been a problem for me on a number of other installations I have attempted. I suspect my cable company of blocking it.
But, anyway.. not a single device in MY home seems to care if it's packets are being routed through Linux, BSD or whatever! How about a Syllable router for the win?!?!
>>I'm upset the Republican party corrupted the legislative process during his tenure since that mindset is ringing around the world. Promoting good laws to smash upon the rocks of a blockaded congress seems pointless.
We didn't see him making such bold statements when he at least had the senate to back him up.
>>The advantage I see is reminding the voter that the Republican party is not supporting the little guy or even the middle-class. It also shows the democrat party understanding the social problems of the average voter and looking for a solution.
Hah, yah, sure. That's one angle to look at it. If those things are real why wasn't it happening when there were more Democrats in congress? Rather than "reminding" I would use the word "convincing". Better yet maybe "selling" or even "scamming". If there was any sincerity to this it would have been coming out a long time before now!
Obama is starting to sound more like his old campaign-trail self than the president we have come to know. I think it's probably easy for him to make promises now as he can just blame the Republican congress when they don't actually happen.
There was a period in the 0s when PC processors were good for cooking eggs. You had to be careful with the AMD ones though, they had a tendency to burn the egg quickly.
I am a C# programmer by day. It's been my job for something like 5 or 6 years now. For me, the greatest feature of moving to a different platform would be...
NOT HAVING DATASETS!!
The things are a horible crutch! All of our software is Datasets everyhwhere, our programming department has standardized on them as the go-to tool for everything to the point of discouraging any other solution as "making it harder by not using what everyone else is used to."
The problem is Datasets are really nice objects.. for... representing a database. But why would you want to represent a database? With most development you probably already have a database!
Don't get me wrong, I love relational databases. They are great at the data storage level but they should remain there. You shouldn't still be thinking about tables, rows, collumns and joins all the way up to the UI layer. Leave the database stuff for the queries you write within your model code. Write your models to provide an API that reperesents what you are trying to do, not the storage enigine behind everything!
Instead of objects that pretend to be databases (what's the point?) instead write objects that represent widgets, employees, orders and sales or whatever else is apropriate. They should have methods and properties that represent what you are trying to do like product.price and employee.fire() not dsProducts.Rows.Find(productid)["price"] and dsEmployees.Rows.Find(employeeid)["status"] = SomeProject.SomeNamespace.StaticsClass.EmployeeStatus.Terminated;.NET, at least as it is normally used sucks, it encourages bad code. Run away while you can!
Ok, that's better than just touching the door but why the hell would you bother if you can just knee the handicap button?
Again... using it is not like a parking space. It does not make it unavailable for the next person. Nobody is going to wet their wheelchair because you pushed the button.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not worried about paying double for Netflix. I'm more worried that 10, 20 or even 30 years from now Netflix or some company which bought Netflix will still be doing the same thing they are today with no real innovation because nobody else was ever able to afford the "fast lane" fees to enter the market and challenge them.
I don't think Netflix's price could double due to carriers charging them. The market probably wouldn't support it. If carriers wanted to drive Netflix out of business they might. I could see Comcast doing that if they want to sell streaming Xfinity to everyone.
Unless they want to kill Netflix in order to replace it with their own services, if carriers get the ability to do slow lanes they would have to charge an amount that Netflix can actually afford to pay without raising their prices so high that they go out of business. Otherwise they lose a potential revenue stream.
As for your bill going up.. if Netflix can raise their prices without losing their customers they should have already done it even before having to pay fees to the carriers. That's how free market supply and demand work!
I remember reading (back in Pentium I days) that NASA still used 386s for a lot of things that went into space. The larger transistors inside made the chip more radiation resistant.
I wonder if they ever found a way to make modern processors more radiation resistant or if they just added more shielding or maybe even still use the old stuff...
What the fuck are you talking about?
I've watched my parents throw away perfectly good printer/scanner combos that were only a few years old because there were no drivers beyond XP.
I have dozens of network and video adapters on a shelf in my garage that work great in Linux but have no Windows drivers beyond XP.
Until recently even a 386 could run Linux!
Linux vendor? I wouldn't know. I've never used one. I can install my own software thank you!
I was assuming that EISA was just a special case inside of the same code as ISA and that what was proposed was to remove all ISA support. Is that what was going to happen?
ISA is old but I am sure there is quite a bit more than just one person out there with some sort of legacy hardware using it. I have a little bit of ISA hardware myself that I would like to use but not quite enough to build up a legacy PC. Every now and then I search the internet for ISA to USB adapters. There actually IS one company selling such a beast but it is way to expensive to be worthwile for me. But.. if I had some expensive piece of lab equipment or something like that with a proprietary ISA adapter... it would make sense.
I loved being able to set the IRQs and memory addresses. Ok, not really but the for the first decade or so I HATED plug and play, or plug and pray as we called it in my office. Half the time it didn't work! It would try to put things right on top of one another. When possible I would disable it and just use the jumpers. Once you got used to it it wasn't THAT hard and it was great knowing that your soundcard was on IRQ X and your video on IRQY and never the two would conflict. Early plug and play seemed to randomly decide to reshuffle things and the next time you boot it may not still work.
That was of course a long time ago and things work well on any reasonable hardware today. But.. I still cringe when people complain about setting IRQs. It's not hard to move a jumper and its not that complicated of a concept to know that to things probably shouldn't try to use the same resource. Not being able to set those things caused me far far more frustration than having to set them ever did! Even though things are great now I'm not entirely sure that decade of pain was worth it to get here.
"I had never managed to see more than one of these systems in my lifetime"
When I was in college I worked for the campus (NPR, not student) radio station. I wasn't a DJ, did tech work there. Anyway.. that was around the same time you were replacing that EISA system.
We were on a tight budget (hey, it's public radio, what do you expect). During my time there we put the first computers in the studios as well as everyone's offices. Previously only a few managers had computers.
Anyway... to accomplish this we used to get old computers from other university departments. I'm talking real old, like original IBM ATs and knockoffs from the same era. We would hack the case with a nibbler and pop-rivet gun to fit a standard motherboard. We kept the power supply, floppy drives and sometimes they had usable hard drives. Yes.. we installed Windows 95 (and later 98) on MFM hard drives!
My boss, the engineer had a source for 486 motherboard, CPU + RAM combos. Depending on CPU speed and amount of RAM they were either $10 or $15! This all sounds horribly obsolete but at the time it was plenty good enough to run the then current web browsers, Office and email. Anything beyond that they probably weren't supposed to be doing anyway. In an era when new PCs were still $1500+ we were equiping people for under $50.
Well.. back to the point.. these motherboards had EISA slots and somehow the boss managed to get ahold of a handful of EISA video cards. Those computers that got the EISA cards did seem to run a lot faster!
So.. long story short.. I have seen more EISA cards than you. :-P
Oh, yah, this thread was about kids who only had a smartphone. How many platforms are identical between desktops and smartphones? Sure, Android uses Java. It isn't exactly the same environment as on a desktop though. I don't think the same code is very likely to run on both beyond maybe console hello world.
Should they be teaching programming using HTML5? If so I don't think we can find enough common ground to even have a reasonable conversation about this!
That probably isn't the point. Did the original article say what track the classes were on, Computer Science or Information Systems? I'm thinking Computer Science but maybe that's just because it is what I studied.
Anyway, at least when I was in school (~15 years ago I must admit) the question of marketshare was a non-issue for Computer Science students. The classes were meant to teach THEORY. The languages and platforms used were chosen to best present the theory (or just happened to be what a professor knew/liked). The professor could use BFK if that's what he thought best represented the concept he was teaching!
All that practical stuff.. then popular languages.. that was assumed to not be worth teaching. It would all be obsolete by graduation time anyway! You were expected to learn that stuff on your own, maybe even on the job. The theory you learn though was supposed to make you better at it once you did.
If you wanted to learn the actual tools employers were looking for.. then you went for Information Systems. Then you didn't learn theory so much. Also you took a lot of business classes. Instead of computer science your goal was it management.
Yes but you are at a university level. University level computer classes are generally taught by people with some background in computers.
Pre-university schools will NEVER have that benefit. It just isn't the same set of job requirements. Pre-University schools are places filled with children. Children who are there because they have to be, don't apreciate the importance of why they are there and honestly don't have the emotional maturity to do so.
To do the job well teachers require a tendancy towards caring and nurturing, patience and a love for children that one does not need in the University. The personality types that will do well align more with those of a nanny than those of a computer scientist.
Some schools may get lucky and find a teacher with both. That will always be rare. Here is a magic box, you can memorize exactly what it does as you follow along the pre-written course syllabus with NO DEVIATION and the kids will see EXACTLY what you see. That's what is needed for teachers.
Or.. maybe I was just jaded by my own experiences...
If they really want version 2 to sell...
Start mass producing some sort of cheapie glass-like thing under a different name out of China. Make it work but buggy enough to be slightly annoying. Make so many, so cheap that they are all over the place.
Let the Glass shy AHoles wine, complain and in some cases start bar fights because they get mad every time they see one. Give it a year or two for the AHoles to burn themselves out and go find a different cause to baby on about.
Then, when everyone is used to the cameras being around... finally Google comes out with a well refined, not-sucking Glass 2 and nobody is worried because OMG IT HAS A CAMERA! They are already used to that.
I don't get it. What the F... are they doing?
They release Glass.. at a rediculous price for early developers to check it out.
They got a bunch of negative attention because people feared the camera. (Lions Tigers, Bears and Cameras, Oh My)
Everyone talks about it like it was a failure to sell.
They start looking for how to make version 2 sell like version 1 didn't.
But... they never even tried to sell it at a normal price? Right? That "explorer" price wasnt supposed to be anywhere near representative of Glass's price as a real product right?
So what if a very vocal number of people keep talking about how much they hate it? Any attention is attention. Maybe there are enough of us who WOULD buy it if it were at a reasonable price. Maybe the naysayers rants just keep reminding us how much we want one! Free marketing!
Or maybe that's just me. I don't see how they can know anything about sales when it has only ever been offered for $1,500! Who the F buys a toy like that for $1500?!?
Generation 1 should be old news now, having been sold for something like $200 to $250. Generation 2 should be almost out and people like me who will never spend the money for a device that will be obsolete in a year should be chomping at the bit to go buy a gen 1 for $50 or so soon.
Or is $1500 really what it costs to make and sell a device like that? Is the tech required still that expensive? If so then they should give up. And.. the rest of us should go through eggs at Google headquarters for producing (and I assume patenting) something so far ahead of it's time that in a few years when the components ARE available for a reasonable price nobody can/will produce it b/c the one company which now hogs all the IP marketed too soon, lost money and is now afraid to try again!
They should just suspend both parties, harasser and harasee. Afterall, that's how most schools handle physical (non-sexual) harassment right? And it works oh-so well!
What about them? They do the same thing kids have ever done who take a computer class but don't have one at home. They use the school computers.
Actually.. there are ways to program on a smartphone. So long as it isn't iOS you can even get compilers for just about any language. But... that doesn't mean you get to use it for class.
No teacher is going to want to support that. They would have to either limit everything to the least common denominator (Yay, everybody gets to write a hello-world console app!) or teach a dozen variants per class. (this is how you create a window in Windows, here is the code for Linux umm.. is that X or Wayland... here is how to create a form on Android... here is how to do it on OSX..)
No, the school will standardize on a type of PC, maybe Windows, maybe Mac and the teacher will pick the rest of the development environment. If you are too much of a trendy butthead to own a real computer and expect to do everything on your smartphone then you use the school lab. If they are nice maybe they set up a vnc or remote desktop server that you can log in to with whatever device makes you happy.
"...VB is MS only."
No it's not.
http://www.mono-project.com/do...
VBScript != Visual Basic
it's kind of like Javascript vs Java
Oh geez, Safari? Not that I want to stick up for Dice-dot but come on! I might use Links to browse on occasion myself but at least I understand that when I do I am so far from the norm that I get what I get and I shouldn't expect webmasters to cater to me!
Next will be a horde of angry Arachne users!
My understanding (feel free to enlightenme if wrong) is that most distros still offer other init systems, they just aren't requiring package maintainers to suppor them. Thus.. things you want to use might become dependent on Systemd.
Also (as far as I know) Gnome is the only thing already doing this with KDE likely to follow soon.
I'm guessing (more speculative) that Systemd dependency is only likely to be an issue with big "desktopy" projects like this.
I hope that you are not running Gnome or KDE on your router!
So... what's the problem? Just use a different init!
Also... what kind of router are we talking about? Is this a PC being used as a router? Or is it a device which was actually meant to be a router. If the latter what distro does it run? Do router distros like openwrt, ddwrt, etc... actually use the same init systems as desktops? I always assumed they just ran a few simple scripts.
That being said.. although I've been a long-time Linux user I am using M0n0wall myself. It's a BSD based router distro, much like Pfsense which others have recommended but a bit lighter. I only chose it b/c it (and pfsense) supported the device I wanted to convert to a router and I didn't see anyone mention any of the Linux ones for it online.
My only complaint is that I haven't been able to get a VPN server running on it. I'm not sure this is M0n0wall's fault as this has been a problem for me on a number of other installations I have attempted. I suspect my cable company of blocking it.
But, anyway.. not a single device in MY home seems to care if it's packets are being routed through Linux, BSD or whatever! How about a Syllable router for the win?!?!
>>I'm upset the Republican party corrupted the legislative process during his tenure since that mindset is ringing around the world. Promoting good laws to smash upon the rocks of a blockaded congress seems pointless.
We didn't see him making such bold statements when he at least had the senate to back him up.
>>The advantage I see is reminding the voter that the Republican party is not supporting the little guy or even the middle-class. It also shows the democrat party understanding the social problems of the average voter and looking for a solution.
Hah, yah, sure. That's one angle to look at it. If those things are real why wasn't it happening when there were more Democrats in congress? Rather than "reminding" I would use the word "convincing". Better yet maybe "selling" or even "scamming". If there was any sincerity to this it would have been coming out a long time before now!
It's hard to believe.
But, it's also hard to believe that their legal advisors were that incompetent too!
Compare that to the list of politicians that should be locked up or maybe even just shot... (probably all of them)
Obama is starting to sound more like his old campaign-trail self than the president we have come to know. I think it's probably easy for him to make promises now as he can just blame the Republican congress when they don't actually happen.
There was a period in the 0s when PC processors were good for cooking eggs. You had to be careful with the AMD ones though, they had a tendency to burn the egg quickly.
I am a C# programmer by day. It's been my job for something like 5 or 6 years now. For me, the greatest feature of moving to a different platform would be...
NOT HAVING DATASETS!!
The things are a horible crutch! All of our software is Datasets everyhwhere, our programming department has standardized on them as the go-to tool for everything to the point of discouraging any other solution as "making it harder by not using what everyone else is used to."
The problem is Datasets are really nice objects.. for... representing a database. But why would you want to represent a database? With most development you probably already have a database!
Don't get me wrong, I love relational databases. They are great at the data storage level but they should remain there. You shouldn't still be thinking about tables, rows, collumns and joins all the way up to the UI layer. Leave the database stuff for the queries you write within your model code. Write your models to provide an API that reperesents what you are trying to do, not the storage enigine behind everything!
Instead of objects that pretend to be databases (what's the point?) instead write objects that represent widgets, employees, orders and sales or whatever else is apropriate. They should have methods and properties that represent what you are trying to do like product.price and employee.fire() not dsProducts.Rows.Find(productid)["price"] and dsEmployees.Rows.Find(employeeid)["status"] = SomeProject.SomeNamespace.StaticsClass.EmployeeStatus.Terminated; .NET, at least as it is normally used sucks, it encourages bad code. Run away while you can!
Sure, if you fly over both the Atlantic and the Pacific, there you are!
Ok, that's better than just touching the door but why the hell would you bother if you can just knee the handicap button?
Again... using it is not like a parking space. It does not make it unavailable for the next person. Nobody is going to wet their wheelchair because you pushed the button.