hahaha

Yes, I once bought "Linear Circuits" by Scott, and have been bitter about it ever since.

Yes, graphical calculators have always been a gimmick, and completely pointless.

Professionals in engineering, science, or finance never use these things. A scientific or financial calculator, a spreadsheet, and possibly MATLAB are all you need.

This is just some guy's speculation. About as real as the plans for the Starship Enterprise that some people make. Or the drawings I did as an 11 year old of what was inside Steve Austin's bionic arm.

They are all huge broken OO designs! At least, that is my experience.

The original architect considers the domain - usually poorly since he/she is only human - and says "lets have an OO structure that looks like this". And with the first enhancement request the OO design breaks because the designer thought the world worked in a different way and enshrined that thinking in to the OOD.

OO almost always turns out to be an impediment. I once inherited a project that had been a poster-child for OOD, where the architect had innovated with "design patterns". OMG. Compared with similar projects of similar complexity, this particular project ended up costing about 100% more, or $20M, and was of course massively late.

I like your comment about "thinking about OO problems". Could we say OOD is software engineering for software engineering's sake? Oh, and for the worthies who sell books and CASE tools?

You are not alone!

OO is fine in theory but, oh dear, what a mess in reality. I would love to know how much OO has negatively impacted software development over the year. Find a disastrous project and I'm sure there will be a whole load of OO there boggling the mind. The problem is that the object design at the start of the project typically has no bearing on the model after some years, and the cost of redesign and refactoring over and over is terrible. And don't get me going on design-patterns! Lets take OO and move it beyond the whit of man, or at least 90% of developers.

OO is fine for small-scale objects, like UI widgets. Or very large container objects. But in between, oh my god.

Now I know this will be flame bait for a lot of slashdotters, but only because you have been brainwashed into thinking OO is good. Like how physicians thought blood letting was essential to balance the humours 200 years ago, but now viewed as a relic from the dark ages.

No, the answer is not assembly code either (even though I still have my 6502 hex codes by heart).

"All current life was set in place nearly three billion years ago". Absolutely not - your view of the history of biology is very warped. Study more biology itself to realize what 'current life' actually looks like. Some important points:

1.7~2 Billion years ago: probable endosymbiosis of prokaryote into eurkaryotic cells, forming mitochonria. Much later than the 3 billion years you suggest, and an absolutely vital stage in the evolution of multicellular life. In fact, it is suggested that the emergence of mitrochondria is why we are here to day - without these powerhouses single-celled life did not have enough available energy to form multi-cellular organisms.

1~1.3 Billions years ago: complex multi-cellular life: While the diversity, resilience, and ubiquity of single-celled life is amazing, I find complex multi-celled life much more astonishing. That colonies of cells can cooperate, specialise and form complex life is a wonderful achievement of evolution. Of course, it took a mind-boggling amount of time. Still, a significant step the results of which are quite distinct from life of 3 billions years ago. So your assertion is again inadequate.

~600 million years: emergence of the first neuron.

~580 million years: nerves and muscles, working together; first eyes

~550 million years: brains

And so the list goes on. Perhaps a significant development every 10-20 million years.

~540 million years: hearts and circulatory systems

There is a giant change from single-celled life to cats, dogs, and humans. What you should be saying is that, as a programmer, you are amazed that all life on Earth has the same genetic code - that the 3 base-pair codon is almost universal in every cell and organism on the plant. I suppose I do like you perspective though, when you look at a yeast cell, an oak tree, and a human and realise they are all related, all cousins, all derived from an evolutionary chain billions of years in the making.

.... Master System....

The reply above is not "Troll", please mod up.

Kids of 8 and 10 are quite happy to play in those type of website. How can the other poster be so insulting and haughty considering that these websites are fascinating and interactive (for that age) and designed to suck kids in. The poster clearly has no experience with young kids.

I heard that Behind Jaggi Lines was abandoned because of widespread pirating, back in the 80s. However, the Wikipedia article doesnt mention this, so I dont know.

This story is only about 2 years old - geez.

What a stupid fucking question. Go do some research you ignorant twat.

What a fuckwhit - the school principal should be fired.

Sizeism is one of several prejudices that seem currently acceptable by society. Imagine if the M$ news release said that game experience would change if the player were black; levels inaccessible because you were the wrong colour. Or female. Or gay. Or disabled.

25-30% of Americans are obese, but much of society (including the obese) seem to buy-in to the view that skinny is good and obese is obscene - and so nothing changes. Look at the comments here. Similar comments against gays or blacks would be dismissed as troll, but here we're having a good laugh. Anyway, with so many people being targeted by M$ I doubt that M$ is doing itself much of a favour.

Slashdotters who are quite happy to say: "fuck you, go on a diet ha ha" might do better by standing up for minorities that don't include themselves. In today's world we all have a job to protect our rights from the fucked-up ambitions of government, interest groups, and business, and divide-and-conquer is one of their ways of eroding rights.

"Lets have DRM, filtering, and inspection because some people are pirates", "Let's have biometric responses and limitations because some people are fat", "lets limit others because of IQ", "lets fuck with them because they are a minority, and the majority will let it pass". Well its possible to make up distinctions that catch all of us - we all belong to one minority or another depending on how creatively you cut the cake - and if we go down this path we all get fucked. So we have to stick up for others as if it were ourselves.

OK, help me get down off my soap box. Anyway, I'm a fat bastard and always have been. Nothing I can do about it. But I'll be alright so long as besides having fat avatars you can have avatars with 10" dicks :-)

I apologise - we all get the wrong end of the stick from time to time.