Posts by Gareth Gouldstone 135 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
Python is not a pure OO language. It is a general purpose scripting language based on Objects. Some general things that non-OO people might use are implemented as functions, like print() and len(). In reality, they interact with the object via methods, obj.__str__() and obj__len__(), respectively. So the object itself decides what is printed and determines its own length, if any.
I knew when I was five that I was different. I didn't have a name for it until I was thirteen, by which time I had learned that it was 'wrong' to feel like I did. 48 years later I would hope that kids can see role models for how they are rather than how their parents would like them to be.
It seems that these days it is considered acceptable if things work 'most of the time', even if the service is worse than what we had before. Think digital tv dropouts, DAB car radios and VoIP reliability. They all 'work' more often than not but when there are problems it tends to be worse or more annoying than the older, dedicated hardware issues or analog interference. Ditto web-based apps vs full-fat local apps.
Unfortunately there is now an entire generation who will never have read a map and who probably have no idea where they have been nor how they got there. The nice lady (or man) said 'Turn left' and 'Turn right' and 'Destination on the left', but they have no picture in their head of where they are. Just look at the number of cars getting stuck in fords, or the lorries stuck in country lanes and you can see that people unquestioningly rely on the technology. That is not a good thing, but it does mean the technology has to work well or not at all.
... would make the BBC a state organ, subject to the political whims of the current incumbents. Come the next recession, bye bye Auntie Beeb. At least the licence fee, for all it's faults, maintains a fairly safe distance between broadcaster, state and treasury.
And without having to have an (often unannounced) advert break every 6 minutes, as is increasingly the case on commercial channels, rendering them unwatchable to anyone except demented gerbils.
I wonder how long before the advertisers get wise to the fact that PVRs mean no-one needs to watch adverts, so they pull their business, and the commercial channels all collapse.
As I wrote in an earlier comment,
" This is the largest misconception about iCloud.
It is all about SYNCing, nothing to do with STREAMing. All iCloud does is ensure all your iDevices (including Macs and PCs) are transparently synchronised. This may include your music, which does not have to be uploaded to iCloud if iTunes Match has a copy of all your tracks. If not, then only those non-matched tracks are uploaded, but ONLY for the purpose of re-synching back to other devices, not for streaming.
They want you to store data and use apps locally, otherwise you would not buy high-capacity iPhones etc, and would not pay for local apps.
To summarise, iCloud keeps your local off-line world in sync; it is not about the on-line use of data or applications."
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