It's not that I don't get it... I GET IT. But as I walk by my co-workers' cubes, I see photos of babies and dogs and husbands pop up in wall paper and screen savers. Are you honestly saying that none of them should have any of that on their work machine? And, along the same lines, scheulding of the kids' orthodontic appointments should only be happeing in private email? That's just not realisitc and sometimes not even possible. Not realistic because Outlook is in our face all day long. Not even possible because our corporate firewalls block Gmail and all other popular public email services...
The TrueCrypt solution seems like a good one, I'll definitely be checking that out. And if it works as it looks like it should, I'll recommend it to those who insist on having photos of their loved ones on their work computers.
Thanks for the (helpful) suggestions. Should have know that minds would jump to trannies and bukkake, but that's slashdot for you.
I get all the issues raised. I don't know if the dead guy *actually* had anything rumor-worthy. Maybe, maybe not. What is a little horrifying to me is if these rumors get back to his family. I get that if I write an email to my wife from work, it is entirely possible that IT could have seen it, maybe even passed it around. That is less of a conern to me than some office interns getting access, with their possible lack of IT ethics. The rumors are all about admins (by "admins" I should make it clear I meant "adminstrative assistants"), not IT.
As for the content, it doesn't even really matter if it is a naked photo of my wife or a picture of my kid blowing out birthday candles - it is not relevent to business and no one else needs to see it. "Company resources" yada yada yada... I don't know many people who don't have personal stuff on their work computer embarrassing or not.
So I'm dead, what do I care? Well, I don't even know the dead guy's family, and I care about the repercussions for them... why would I *not* care about my own family after my demise? Of more concern to me are my journals - they are my private thoughts, and if I can't control them, I don't want anyone, maybe even *especially* my own family, having access. Dead or not. Maybe if I were someone important, and my diaries could bring them financial gain after my death, I might care less about them surviving me. But no one is going to pay for them - and if my thoughts about family got out to everyone out of context (or even in context), there could be stress and anxiety they don't need.
I'll read the upmodded replies with interest. Thanks.
It should be noted, for the social-studies-ignorant, that this is not the passage of a bill into a law, just the passage of a bill through a committee, one of many hurdles a bill must go through. Of course, the committee is often the hardest hurdle to overcome, but there are many chances to defeat this bill. It must still pass the full Senate and, assuming the bill has not already gone though the House, must go through all the same hurdles in the House. I suggest that now is the time to voice your concern about the bill to your elected officials.
My wife and I bought new laptops for our kids just so that we could leverage Vista's parental controls. We don't spy on the kids so much as we make it perfectly clear to them that we will be checking up on what they are doing (we're actually more concerned that they don't go over their hour-per-day limit than that they might visit certain sites, but being able to see where they are spending that time is important, too). Of course, my kids are all pre-teens, and I'm not at all sure yet if my monitoring will go up or down as they get older, but I can say that it will not stop - and they know it.
I think this is as much a part of good parenting as is getting to know your kids' friends, as it is making sure there are chaperones on field trips and at school dances. Monitoring is no replacement for education - the kids know why we restrict certain sites from them, and if we feel the need to restrict others, we will and we will tell them why. But just as they are still learning math and language skills, they are also still learning good judegement. You don't teach a kid math skills by testing them and not reviewing the test with them. Good judgement is not inherent - you have to let them not only make bad choices but tell them when they did and explain why it was a bad choice.
I am a scout leader, and I want to be able to teach my boys that just because you can do a thing does not mean that you should do a thing. Do I think the RIAA and MPAA are Nazi-like and Stalinist in their tactics? Yes. Do I think they are on the right side of the issue? Yes. Should the BSA use the resources of the RIAA and/or MPAA to promote its mission? Maybe not - that's a debate scouts and scout leaders can have in their packs and dens (I'm a cub scout leader, so I'm not into troops yet).
One of the basic tenets of scouting is honesty. How does promoting piracy, or at the very least not condemning piracy, jibe with this tenet? It cannot. If a scout is going to live up to the scout code, then pirating music and video is not something they should do, pure and simple.
I would love to see a legal alternative to all of this. I would encourage scouts to borrow music and video from friends to try things out, download approved files, and pay for what they intend to keep. In fact, I would encourage anyone to do the same, scout or not.
I entered the IT world professionally 1989. I married in 1990. Today, I'm still in IT and still married.
Fortunately for me, I work at a company that values family as much as profit, and so there was never any pressure to work long hours or weekends, so I was able to devote attention to my marriage - and because I was happy with my family, I think I was a better worker.
Of course, in that time, I've had coworkers who have divorced, but two of my closest coworkers have both been married at least as long as I. Can working in IT contribute to a divorce? Sure - if you let it; if your company forces you to let it. But I don't think that's unique to IT.
Like so many things in life, I don't think your question has an easy answer. A degree from a well-known programming school might give you an easier time getting a foot in the door, but in the end, skill has a lot to do with it (and just because you graduate from a state college shouldn't mean you don't have skill), and so does plain old dumb luck.
I was a Poli Science major in college. I graduated with unremarkable grades from a good school with a Poli Sci major and a Geography minor. Not exactly the educational path one takes to become a programmer. But I am two weeks away from celebrating my 15th anniversary doing just that. By luck, I worked for a tech company in the summer, and then as a temp after graduation. I was attracted there because I liked to code in BASIC as a hobby. Turns out I was good at it as a career.
I graduated from a good school (not great, but good); I have skills; I had a spot of good luck that I parlayed well. Some combination thereof has to make for a good career in this field.
I have a lot of roles in my life. Yes, I am a programmer. But I am also a husband, father, and just a plain old damn person. Any time I hear of a methodology that encourages people to work lots of overtime I cringe. People cannot sustain a pace over 30 days where they are coming in early, staying late, and working weekends, to meet a goal that is only a few hours away, when another goal has just been met a few hours ago. Daily scrums have to be the biggest waste of time I have ever heard of.
At my company, one division used the Scrum method, and it failed, taking the division, 100 jobs, and millions of development dollars with it. The biggest problem I heard from senior programmers in other divisions was that the daily scrums encouraged people to build a great prototype to show what they would do, but there so never anything actually done. Programmers would work for hours in the morning to fix the problems identified in the prototype, make changes in the afternoon, and start again after the next scrum. Waste, waste, waste.
In our division, we have a product designer build a spec with the customer. The spec is handed to the programmer. The programmer works on the project as long as necessary without interruption (which is not to say that deadlines are open ended), and then the programmer hands it off to QA. At worst there are weekly meetings to check status. The big difference is that the programmer is on his own, trusted to call in reinforcements when he feels they are necessary. There's no need for a daily meeting if there are no problems. If coding is going well, then let it keep going.
I have no doubt that scrumming works well for some, especially those who need constant direction and/or hand holding, or those who have no life outside of work. But I'll take our methodology any day.
>>The real bag guys in this whole thing are the ones with all the money in Redmond. It's their crap that's broken by design.
This is like saying, to use the red-light example, that because barriers are not thrown up when there is a red light, that red-light-runners should not be liable for running the red lights.
Is it bad that MS stuff is "broken by design?" Sure, that's a bad thing. But is it then necessary that virus writers exploit the shortcomings to inconvenience every user of said software? No, it absolutely is not. It would be better for those writers to devote their talents (I use the word with some reticence) to coming up with solutions or protections, not exploits.
If this person is responsible for the original virus or any iteration thereof, he should have been willing accept the consequences of unleashing it (and every virus writer knows that what he is doing is illegal and prosecutable). Perhaps by catching this guy, they can get closer to the original authors, and arrest them as well. Not instead of... as well. All of them are the bottom of the engineering barrel.
This article gives me an idea... it says "Opt-In Marketing sends out 80 million e-mails offering vacation packages. For each person who clicks on the e-mail to visit the travel company's website, the company earns $1 - a fee roughly in line with industry norms." What if instead of sending spam to the Deleted folder or filtering it to the bit bucket, filters were written to "click back" to any links in a spam first... after a while, someone would figure out that the $2000 campaign is now costing $400,000 but generating the same amount of business as ever before.
How did we get to the moon in the 60's and 70's? Because we wanted to beat the Soviets there. If the real exploration of our neighborhood is to happen, we need something like this - how many people in the U.S. want to see a permanent Chinese moonbase without our own to watch over them? Will it be expensive? Of course. Is it worthwhile? Of course. There has just been no impetus at the government level, and no where near the funds at the private level. With a "threat" like this, maybe government and industry can work together to make it happen.
One of the first things I do when I start a new semester teaching C (yes, there are still classes out there in this fine language), I always bring my dog-eared K&R. Then I say "we're not using this book - it is a classic and I refer to is often, but it is too dense." Then I heft my copy of "C Programming" by KN King, soon to be published in its 2nd Edition, and say "this book may be all you'll ever need." I'll check out the new "C" book, but I suspect it won't outside King's.
In the US, there is a distinct line between the government and corporations. Cynics may say that there is no real line, but it is there. The Constitution protects you and everyone else in America from governmental intrusion. Look at the Constitution (here) and you won't find a single word restricting businesses from doing any thing they want. The government, directly, cannot stop it, becuase it is not a power granted to the government. Now, there can be regulation, and the states have some powers, too, but in the end, the Framers of the Constitution were not worried about private violations of rights. A business, after all, cannot put you in jail.
What we have to do is identify when a business violates rights of free speech or privacy, or whatever, and boycott them. That is the remedy for this private sector violation. Business runs on its ability to DO business. If no one goes to a site because it collects too much personal information, or no one uses a software product because it has been revealed to be too nosey, then the business will alter its model. More governmental regulation is probably not the answer, else the government starts sticking its nose in places it doesn't belong.
The big problem I see is that too many people are either fooled by business into revealing too many personal details, or are too willing to trade personal details for a free screen saver or t-shirt. That is a bit harder to deal with.
Re:Can someone give 1 good reason to use C++ over
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
I agree with you - I've dabbled a bit in C++, but for the past ten years, I've been coding in C, and nothing I did in C++ convinced me to start a massive switch-over to C++ or to even start coding new programs in C++. Now, the fact that our programs are done for *nix machines is part of the deciding factor - no need for the abilities something like the MFC gives you in conjunction with C++ when coding for Windows, and since our main user audience is the heads-down data entry person, using a dumb terminal (even if that dumb terminal is Reflections and not a VT100), there's little that C++ libraries have been able to offer. I also teach a course in C in my local community college - I guess that might push me into the zealot category, but I what I've tried to do to not be a simple zealot, with blind loyalty, is enhance the reasons to learn C while not denegrating the other common languages. For one thing, C is a great base language to learn, considering its progeny. I, as a C programmer, can at least read code written in C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, and PHP, just to knock off a few that I have actually read. Now, that doesn't mean I can write code in these languages, but I have a leg-up on the BASIC programmer, for example. C also continues to be a powerful language, and as the original poster noted, it has a certain clarity that I find lacking in C++. I remember trying to write a simple C++ program without using C standard library functions like sprintf... and getting completely lost in the complexity of string streams to build a string with a formatted number! We are now looking at doing a rewrite of our core product, with the front end in Java. But the back end, it has already been decided, will be in C -- for a product that will probably be sold into the 2010's, and used well beyond that (the middle layer's architechture has not yet been determined). C has a long life behind it and a long life ahead of it, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn programming... That all having been said, however, I would not disparage someone who wanted to buy this book to get started in a career coding in C++.
Seems to me that most fan sites are... fan sites. And most fans are... little people with a computer, modem, and an itch to put up a site about a favoriate game. Not the sort of person who would keep an attorney on retainer; maybe the sort of person to have 15 ad banners on the page, pulling in $15/yr.
>It is too bad. They had an oportunity to point out all that is evil in FilterWare and they sold out. Easy for us to say... it is one thing to be on the outside, looking in, and say "Fight em!" when you're not the one being threatened with life-changing litigation. Can you imagine if they were taken to court and *lost*? It is a very scary thing (I know, Lucasfilm did the same thing to me over the tatooine.com domain). It is an unfortunate weapon that a rich person or company has available that we little ones do not have. All Mattel would have needed to do for me to fold was threaten legal action. I cannot afford a lawyer to answer a cease-and-desist letter let alone defend a trademark, copyright, or trade secrets violation suit.
I looked at the engineer's site, and the hardware looks cool; $200 for a Win or Linux machine is just great. But thing stuck out at me, and made me wonder about usablility - there is no ESC key on the keyboard. Is the keyboard proprietary? If not, how do use vi? How do you cancel things in Windows? I mean, little ole ESC doesn't seem like much, but I realize it hit it dozens of times a day... My point (yes there is one) is maybe these guys could build these machines *specifically* to be low-cost Linux machines. Even at $300 or $350, the machine is still pretty spiffy.
Everything has to start out somewhere. This story may be reporting only on the growth of a few cells, and the leap from there to differentiation may be a long one (such as the leap from making metals to making a semiconductor is a long one), but for a lot of people, news like this stirs a lot of hope.
And, yes, maybe the first beneficiaries of a fully developed technology will be the rich and powerful, but just as a few videophiles need to buy a few hundred thousand HDTV units before mere mortals like me can afford one, that's business for you (and let's not forget that one way or another, every thing is a business venture, even grown organs).
I, and millions, yes, millions, of people would love to have a brand new pancreas so we could throw away the needles and insulin to treat diabetes. New livers, new kidneys, new stomachs... there are real people with real disease that could benefit from grown organs. Sure, there are people who destroyed their livers or lungs by drinking or smoking, but do we not treat lung cancer just because it is largely self-induced? No.
So, despite the cost, despite the cynicism, despite whatever, let's encourage this kind of research and see what we can come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that I don't get it ... I GET IT. But as I walk by my co-workers' cubes, I see photos of babies and dogs and husbands pop up in wall paper and screen savers. Are you honestly saying that none of them should have any of that on their work machine? And, along the same lines, scheulding of the kids' orthodontic appointments should only be happeing in private email? That's just not realisitc and sometimes not even possible. Not realistic because Outlook is in our face all day long. Not even possible because our corporate firewalls block Gmail and all other popular public email services...
The TrueCrypt solution seems like a good one, I'll definitely be checking that out. And if it works as it looks like it should, I'll recommend it to those who insist on having photos of their loved ones on their work computers.
Thanks for the (helpful) suggestions. Should have know that minds would jump to trannies and bukkake, but that's slashdot for you.
I get all the issues raised. I don't know if the dead guy *actually* had anything rumor-worthy. Maybe, maybe not. What is a little horrifying to me is if these rumors get back to his family. I get that if I write an email to my wife from work, it is entirely possible that IT could have seen it, maybe even passed it around. That is less of a conern to me than some office interns getting access, with their possible lack of IT ethics. The rumors are all about admins (by "admins" I should make it clear I meant "adminstrative assistants"), not IT.
As for the content, it doesn't even really matter if it is a naked photo of my wife or a picture of my kid blowing out birthday candles - it is not relevent to business and no one else needs to see it. "Company resources" yada yada yada ... I don't know many people who don't have personal stuff on their work computer embarrassing or not.
So I'm dead, what do I care? Well, I don't even know the dead guy's family, and I care about the repercussions for them... why would I *not* care about my own family after my demise? Of more concern to me are my journals - they are my private thoughts, and if I can't control them, I don't want anyone, maybe even *especially* my own family, having access. Dead or not. Maybe if I were someone important, and my diaries could bring them financial gain after my death, I might care less about them surviving me. But no one is going to pay for them - and if my thoughts about family got out to everyone out of context (or even in context), there could be stress and anxiety they don't need.
I'll read the upmodded replies with interest. Thanks.
It should be noted, for the social-studies-ignorant, that this is not the passage of a bill into a law, just the passage of a bill through a committee, one of many hurdles a bill must go through. Of course, the committee is often the hardest hurdle to overcome, but there are many chances to defeat this bill. It must still pass the full Senate and, assuming the bill has not already gone though the House, must go through all the same hurdles in the House. I suggest that now is the time to voice your concern about the bill to your elected officials.
My wife and I bought new laptops for our kids just so that we could leverage Vista's parental controls. We don't spy on the kids so much as we make it perfectly clear to them that we will be checking up on what they are doing (we're actually more concerned that they don't go over their hour-per-day limit than that they might visit certain sites, but being able to see where they are spending that time is important, too). Of course, my kids are all pre-teens, and I'm not at all sure yet if my monitoring will go up or down as they get older, but I can say that it will not stop - and they know it.
I think this is as much a part of good parenting as is getting to know your kids' friends, as it is making sure there are chaperones on field trips and at school dances. Monitoring is no replacement for education - the kids know why we restrict certain sites from them, and if we feel the need to restrict others, we will and we will tell them why. But just as they are still learning math and language skills, they are also still learning good judegement. You don't teach a kid math skills by testing them and not reviewing the test with them. Good judgement is not inherent - you have to let them not only make bad choices but tell them when they did and explain why it was a bad choice.
I am a scout leader, and I want to be able to teach my boys that just because you can do a thing does not mean that you should do a thing. Do I think the RIAA and MPAA are Nazi-like and Stalinist in their tactics? Yes. Do I think they are on the right side of the issue? Yes. Should the BSA use the resources of the RIAA and/or MPAA to promote its mission? Maybe not - that's a debate scouts and scout leaders can have in their packs and dens (I'm a cub scout leader, so I'm not into troops yet). One of the basic tenets of scouting is honesty. How does promoting piracy, or at the very least not condemning piracy, jibe with this tenet? It cannot. If a scout is going to live up to the scout code, then pirating music and video is not something they should do, pure and simple. I would love to see a legal alternative to all of this. I would encourage scouts to borrow music and video from friends to try things out, download approved files, and pay for what they intend to keep. In fact, I would encourage anyone to do the same, scout or not.
I entered the IT world professionally 1989. I married in 1990. Today, I'm still in IT and still married.
Fortunately for me, I work at a company that values family as much as profit, and so there was never any pressure to work long hours or weekends, so I was able to devote attention to my marriage - and because I was happy with my family, I think I was a better worker.
Of course, in that time, I've had coworkers who have divorced, but two of my closest coworkers have both been married at least as long as I. Can working in IT contribute to a divorce? Sure - if you let it; if your company forces you to let it. But I don't think that's unique to IT.
Like so many things in life, I don't think your question has an easy answer. A degree from a well-known programming school might give you an easier time getting a foot in the door, but in the end, skill has a lot to do with it (and just because you graduate from a state college shouldn't mean you don't have skill), and so does plain old dumb luck.
I was a Poli Science major in college. I graduated with unremarkable grades from a good school with a Poli Sci major and a Geography minor. Not exactly the educational path one takes to become a programmer. But I am two weeks away from celebrating my 15th anniversary doing just that. By luck, I worked for a tech company in the summer, and then as a temp after graduation. I was attracted there because I liked to code in BASIC as a hobby. Turns out I was good at it as a career.
I graduated from a good school (not great, but good); I have skills; I had a spot of good luck that I parlayed well. Some combination thereof has to make for a good career in this field.
I have a lot of roles in my life. Yes, I am a programmer. But I am also a husband, father, and just a plain old damn person. Any time I hear of a methodology that encourages people to work lots of overtime I cringe. People cannot sustain a pace over 30 days where they are coming in early, staying late, and working weekends, to meet a goal that is only a few hours away, when another goal has just been met a few hours ago. Daily scrums have to be the biggest waste of time I have ever heard of.
At my company, one division used the Scrum method, and it failed, taking the division, 100 jobs, and millions of development dollars with it. The biggest problem I heard from senior programmers in other divisions was that the daily scrums encouraged people to build a great prototype to show what they would do, but there so never anything actually done. Programmers would work for hours in the morning to fix the problems identified in the prototype, make changes in the afternoon, and start again after the next scrum. Waste, waste, waste.
In our division, we have a product designer build a spec with the customer. The spec is handed to the programmer. The programmer works on the project as long as necessary without interruption (which is not to say that deadlines are open ended), and then the programmer hands it off to QA. At worst there are weekly meetings to check status. The big difference is that the programmer is on his own, trusted to call in reinforcements when he feels they are necessary. There's no need for a daily meeting if there are no problems. If coding is going well, then let it keep going.
I have no doubt that scrumming works well for some, especially those who need constant direction and/or hand holding, or those who have no life outside of work. But I'll take our methodology any day.
>>The real bag guys in this whole thing are the ones with all the money in Redmond. It's their crap that's broken by design.
... as well. All of them are the bottom of the engineering barrel.
This is like saying, to use the red-light example, that because barriers are not thrown up when there is a red light, that red-light-runners should not be liable for running the red lights.
Is it bad that MS stuff is "broken by design?" Sure, that's a bad thing. But is it then necessary that virus writers exploit the shortcomings to inconvenience every user of said software? No, it absolutely is not. It would be better for those writers to devote their talents (I use the word with some reticence) to coming up with solutions or protections, not exploits.
If this person is responsible for the original virus or any iteration thereof, he should have been willing accept the consequences of unleashing it (and every virus writer knows that what he is doing is illegal and prosecutable). Perhaps by catching this guy, they can get closer to the original authors, and arrest them as well. Not instead of
This article gives me an idea ... it says "Opt-In Marketing sends out 80 million e-mails offering vacation packages. For each person who clicks on the e-mail to visit the travel company's website, the company earns $1 - a fee roughly in line with industry norms." What if instead of sending spam to the Deleted folder or filtering it to the bit bucket, filters were written to "click back" to any links in a spam first ... after a while, someone would figure out that the $2000 campaign is now costing $400,000 but generating the same amount of business as ever before.
Sounds like a job for SpamCop.
How did we get to the moon in the 60's and 70's? Because we wanted to beat the Soviets there. If the real exploration of our neighborhood is to happen, we need something like this - how many people in the U.S. want to see a permanent Chinese moonbase without our own to watch over them? Will it be expensive? Of course. Is it worthwhile? Of course. There has just been no impetus at the government level, and no where near the funds at the private level. With a "threat" like this, maybe government and industry can work together to make it happen.
One of the first things I do when I start a new semester teaching C (yes, there are still classes out there in this fine language), I always bring my dog-eared K&R. Then I say "we're not using this book - it is a classic and I refer to is often, but it is too dense." Then I heft my copy of "C Programming" by KN King, soon to be published in its 2nd Edition, and say "this book may be all you'll ever need." I'll check out the new "C" book, but I suspect it won't outside King's.
... This "editorial" comes from a 1973 broadcast by Gordon Sinclair. Sinclair died in 1984.
u ni que/american.html
http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/schools/rta/ccf/news/
In the US, there is a distinct line between the government and corporations. Cynics may say that there is no real line, but it is there. The Constitution protects you and everyone else in America from governmental intrusion. Look at the Constitution (here) and you won't find a single word restricting businesses from doing any thing they want. The government, directly, cannot stop it, becuase it is not a power granted to the government. Now, there can be regulation, and the states have some powers, too, but in the end, the Framers of the Constitution were not worried about private violations of rights. A business, after all, cannot put you in jail. What we have to do is identify when a business violates rights of free speech or privacy, or whatever, and boycott them. That is the remedy for this private sector violation. Business runs on its ability to DO business. If no one goes to a site because it collects too much personal information, or no one uses a software product because it has been revealed to be too nosey, then the business will alter its model. More governmental regulation is probably not the answer, else the government starts sticking its nose in places it doesn't belong. The big problem I see is that too many people are either fooled by business into revealing too many personal details, or are too willing to trade personal details for a free screen saver or t-shirt. That is a bit harder to deal with.
I agree with you - I've dabbled a bit in C++, but for the past ten years, I've been coding in C, and nothing I did in C++ convinced me to start a massive switch-over to C++ or to even start coding new programs in C++. Now, the fact that our programs are done for *nix machines is part of the deciding factor - no need for the abilities something like the MFC gives you in conjunction with C++ when coding for Windows, and since our main user audience is the heads-down data entry person, using a dumb terminal (even if that dumb terminal is Reflections and not a VT100), there's little that C++ libraries have been able to offer. I also teach a course in C in my local community college - I guess that might push me into the zealot category, but I what I've tried to do to not be a simple zealot, with blind loyalty, is enhance the reasons to learn C while not denegrating the other common languages. For one thing, C is a great base language to learn, considering its progeny. I, as a C programmer, can at least read code written in C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, and PHP, just to knock off a few that I have actually read. Now, that doesn't mean I can write code in these languages, but I have a leg-up on the BASIC programmer, for example. C also continues to be a powerful language, and as the original poster noted, it has a certain clarity that I find lacking in C++. I remember trying to write a simple C++ program without using C standard library functions like sprintf ... and getting completely lost in the complexity of string streams to build a string with a formatted number! We are now looking at doing a rewrite of our core product, with the front end in Java. But the back end, it has already been decided, will be in C -- for a product that will probably be sold into the 2010's, and used well beyond that (the middle layer's architechture has not yet been determined). C has a long life behind it and a long life ahead of it, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn programming ... That all having been said, however, I would not disparage someone who wanted to buy this book to get started in a career coding in C++.
Seems to me that most fan sites are ... fan sites. And most fans are ... little people with a computer, modem, and an itch to put up a site about a favoriate game. Not the sort of person who would keep an attorney on retainer; maybe the sort of person to have 15 ad banners on the page, pulling in $15/yr.
>It is too bad. They had an oportunity to point out all that is evil in FilterWare and they sold out. Easy for us to say ... it is one thing to be on the outside, looking in, and say "Fight em!" when you're not the one being threatened with life-changing litigation. Can you imagine if they were taken to court and *lost*? It is a very scary thing (I know, Lucasfilm did the same thing to me over the tatooine.com domain). It is an unfortunate weapon that a rich person or company has available that we little ones do not have. All Mattel would have needed to do for me to fold was threaten legal action. I cannot afford a lawyer to answer a cease-and-desist letter let alone defend a trademark, copyright, or trade secrets violation suit.
I looked at the engineer's site, and the hardware looks cool; $200 for a Win or Linux machine is just great. But thing stuck out at me, and made me wonder about usablility - there is no ESC key on the keyboard. Is the keyboard proprietary? If not, how do use vi? How do you cancel things in Windows? I mean, little ole ESC doesn't seem like much, but I realize it hit it dozens of times a day... My point (yes there is one) is maybe these guys could build these machines *specifically* to be low-cost Linux machines. Even at $300 or $350, the machine is still pretty spiffy.
And, yes, maybe the first beneficiaries of a fully developed technology will be the rich and powerful, but just as a few videophiles need to buy a few hundred thousand HDTV units before mere mortals like me can afford one, that's business for you (and let's not forget that one way or another, every thing is a business venture, even grown organs).
I, and millions, yes, millions, of people would love to have a brand new pancreas so we could throw away the needles and insulin to treat diabetes. New livers, new kidneys, new stomachs ... there are real people with real disease that could benefit from grown organs. Sure, there are people who destroyed their livers or lungs by drinking or smoking, but do we not treat lung cancer just because it is largely self-induced? No.
So, despite the cost, despite the cynicism, despite whatever, let's encourage this kind of research and see what we can come up with.