Comment Voltage of Flying Spaghetti Monster? (Score 1) 45
Finally FSM batteries. We are saved. But what will the voltage be?
Comment Brings back memories of the 1960s (Score 1) 220
This photo is so astounding that it brings back memories of the 1960s moon landing days. I was totally enthralled by the awesome techno-wizardry it took set, not one, but two men on the moon, and bring them back to earth. The techno wizardry needed to pull this shot off seems the equal of the feats of those heady days. Well done NASA, well done.
Comment And cigarettes aren't addictive.. (Score 2) 288
The man's favorite novel is Atlas Shrugged. All credibility voided by that fact alone.
Comment Really who does this crap (Score 1) 305
Replace gets() with gets_s()! You couldn't call it something sane like get_line(), or even gets_line() to avoid name collisions. Anything connected with C++ just seems to spread its taint.
Comment Baloneyium (Score 1) 138
According to my Oscar Meyer periodic table of elements, element 120 is called Baloneyium.
-- The Simpsons
Comment Re:Slow on Firefox (Score 3, Informative) 356
I had the same experience the first time I attempted to load the page. It was absolutely glacial. Then ,I tried to load the page a second time and it seemed to run just fine. I'm guessing some timing was altered when certain chunks of data got cached on the client.
Try letting the page begin rendering, then reload the page. It worked for me on FF 3.6.3 on a MacBookPro3,1 2.6GHz.
Curious if anyone else has similar results.
Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.
Disney Releases 3D Texture Mapper Source Code 83
dsavi writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com: 'We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope
the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new
Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under
disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source
projects as will as a library of recent publications.' This looks good for open source 3D graphics."
Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."
Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Nokia Gives Carriers a Cut of App Store Sales 13
Robbie B writes "Nokia mobile users will be able to pay for apps from the Ovi App Store on their mobile phone bill. Nokia is working on billing relationships with mobile operators around the globe, according to the story. Nokia developers will subsequently have to share their spoils with mobile operators should consumers choose mobile phone billing over the credit card option. That aside, the terms and conditions of the app store look to be quite fair — more in the style of Apple and Android (no fees for each app or update uploaded) than the terms of Windows Mobile Marketplace or Blackberry App World."
Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds? 962
firthisaword writes "I will be teaching an enrichment programming course to 11-14 year old gifted children in the Spring. It is meant as an introduction to very basic programming paradigms (conditions, variables, loops, etc.), but the kids will invariably have a mix of experience in dealing with computers and programming. The question: Which programming language would be best for starting these kids off on? I am tempted by QBasic which I remember from my early days — it is straightforward and fast, if antiquated and barely supported under XP. Others have suggested Pascal which was conceived as an instructional pseudocode language. Does anyone have experience in that age range? Anything you would recommend? And as a P.S: Out of the innumerable little puzzles/programs/tasks that novice programmers get introduced to such as Fibonacci numbers, primes or binary calculators, which was the most fun and which one taught you the most?" A few years ago, a reader asked a similar but more general question, and several questions have focused on how to introduce kids to programming. Would you do anything different in teaching kids identified as academically advanced?
Achieving Mathematical Proofs Via Computers 209
eldavojohn writes "A special issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) provides four beautiful articles illustrating formal proof by computation. PhysOrg has a simpler article on these assistant mathematical computer programs and states 'One long-term dream is to have formal proofs of all of the central theorems in mathematics. Thomas Hales, one of the authors writing in the Notices, says that such a collection of proofs would be akin to the sequencing of the mathematical genome.' You may recall a similar quest we discussed."
Comment Note to Bjarne, please stop! (Score 0, Troll) 567
Dear Bjarne,
Your language is broken. It was broken very early on, but at least it could be described in 200 pages of densely printed text. Now it has grown to insane proportions in ever more elaborate attempts to add feature upon feature in an effort to satisfy every possible programmers syntactic fetish. Until it is at the point where anyone attempting to use the language spends more time trying to master the tool, rather than using the tool to create the end result.
Because of the absurd feature set, it has become nearly impossible to master the full breadth of the language. This manifests itself in the worst way when you have a group of coders each knowing different features of the language, with only a small subset that makes up the intersection of every coders C++ skill. The end result is that programmer A spends half his/her time trying to figure out what programmer B did with the language, rather than the what problem the code was trying to solve.
The most important thing to teach about C++ is how not to use it. By that I mean teachers should be telling their students, "This language has a 1000 features (or is it 5000 now I lost count), you should only learn about 100." The key is which 100. It is great for low level coding, an improvement over C if used judiciously. If used to construct complex object systems it is a horrible choice. Higher level dynamic languages are the way to go.
Bjarne if C++ is to continue to be used, you need to stop dumping more garbage into the putrid landfill that C++ has become. Instead it should be stopped in its tracks, and the programming community should restart a new C extension that takes some of the useful ideas of C++, simplifies them, and carefully limits any attempt to add features without any real value. In short do what you completely failed to do.
Oh and Bjarne your language deity status is here by revoked due to abuse of power.
Your language is broken. It was broken very early on, but at least it could be described in 200 pages of densely printed text. Now it has grown to insane proportions in ever more elaborate attempts to add feature upon feature in an effort to satisfy every possible programmers syntactic fetish. Until it is at the point where anyone attempting to use the language spends more time trying to master the tool, rather than using the tool to create the end result.
Because of the absurd feature set, it has become nearly impossible to master the full breadth of the language. This manifests itself in the worst way when you have a group of coders each knowing different features of the language, with only a small subset that makes up the intersection of every coders C++ skill. The end result is that programmer A spends half his/her time trying to figure out what programmer B did with the language, rather than the what problem the code was trying to solve.
The most important thing to teach about C++ is how not to use it. By that I mean teachers should be telling their students, "This language has a 1000 features (or is it 5000 now I lost count), you should only learn about 100." The key is which 100. It is great for low level coding, an improvement over C if used judiciously. If used to construct complex object systems it is a horrible choice. Higher level dynamic languages are the way to go.
Bjarne if C++ is to continue to be used, you need to stop dumping more garbage into the putrid landfill that C++ has become. Instead it should be stopped in its tracks, and the programming community should restart a new C extension that takes some of the useful ideas of C++, simplifies them, and carefully limits any attempt to add features without any real value. In short do what you completely failed to do.
Oh and Bjarne your language deity status is here by revoked due to abuse of power.
