todhsals - Slashdot User

Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @04:49AM from the be-there-or-be-somewhere-else dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."

The Value of BASIC As a First Programming Language 548

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @03:21AM from the proud-to-have-been-warped-by-it dept.

Mirk writes "Computer-science legend Edsger W. Dijkstra famously wrote: 'It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.' The Reinvigorated Programmer argues that the world is full of excellent programmers who cut their teeth on BASIC, and suggests it could even be because they started out with BASIC."

Comment Googlefight (Score 1) 558

by todhsals on Friday August 13, 2004 @08:25AM (#9957374) Attached to: The "Return" of Java Discussed

Before the inevitable complaints ("But it never went anywhere!") start, let's remember that everything is relative. A "Googlefight" on, say, Java vs .NET tells us that all has not necessarily gone Java's way just recently. A "mere" 66 million "Java" hits...versus 388 million for "NET" - but that may all be about to change.

With this as a measure of Java's success it's amazing it did as well as it did. Java fared pretty well compared to counting the google hits for anything on the net with the term ".net", such as every freekin url in the net TLD. At this point I just stopped reading.

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