On 10/29/2010 11:12 AM, Tim Cook wrote:
> On 2010-10-28 15:43, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Man it would have been annoying
>> otherwise, but, not as frustrating as the, "Dude, since you are looking
>> for this, you must already understand everything I am telling you, even
>> though I really don't clearly describe what is going on.", mentality you
>> get from some articles. lol
>
> It's because the articles don't go over stuff that was already in an
> article back in the '80s. You're assumed to have had a subscription
> since then and the ability to look up (if you haven't already memorised)
> any arbitrary bit of information that's a prerequisite for a /current/
> article.
>
> That is to say, "you should have already learned the fundamentals of
> this, here's the next step you can take".
>
> Ditto all the 3D libraries and stuff. Either you already know all the
> math behind it, or you don't, but either way, why should they waste
> valuable magazine ad-space on material that's covered in your college
> compsci course (I am supposing, here...I would have taken some
> programming class or another when I went to NIU but they all had 50 math
> prereqs...even for the BASIC 101 where the final exam code was 10 print
> "hello world" 20 end. ugh)?
>
Well, that is one way to look at it, sure. The problem, sadly, is that 
not all compsci classes are the same. Mine spent 99% of its time on 
business math and databases, and like 2 weeks on C++ (which was classed 
as a "current concept", i.e., "we'll toss this at you a bit, so you know 
the basics, but otherwise, we don't give a crap"). Still, its not just 
magazines with these problems. The magazines often do a fair job of 
explaining some stuff, when they are decent magazines.

Now.. the problem is often tech manuals. Back in the days of the Apple 
IIgs, I have a book for C, which I couldn't run anyway, without a hard 
drive, which wasn't too easy, or cheap, to get for the thing, which had 
**different** flag values than those used in Pascal, for the *same* API. 
If you used the wrong ones, you couldn't even get a standard mouse menu 
to function properly. I ran into a similar issue with Windows APIs. Now, 
its not as bad, but not long ago, the only way to get the headers, which 
contained all the constant declarations in them, was to "buy" C++. To 
use the API with "anything" else, like VB, you needed to know what those 
where, they where no documented in the help, even when the help 
specifically referenced the API, and not *one single book* out there on 
the APIs included an index, or section, which showed what any of these 
values where, so you could reference them. You where expected to 
reference them *only* in C++, by name, *by* including the headers for 
every single API, even if you only used one function from them.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I don't use something often, I may 
not remember how to call it, I certainly won't know what the constants 
where for those things, to do various stuff with them. Yet, the only 
references you can find are for C++, and, again, only by "name", not 
value... There was/is a third party API thing around, which tried to 
provide examples, and values, for these things, cross referenced for 
several languages, but.. I have kept wondering why tf MS never provided 
anything remotely similar for their own bloody IDE? To me, as the guy 
pulling my hair out trying to remember how many things I need to send to 
a function, and what, so I can do something I *maybe* need once a year 
for something, and, maybe not in the "approved" language, its a no 
brainer. For MS, it seems to be not only meaningless, but so meaningless 
that they can't even provide the original source for the applications 
"in" their own books they sold on the subject, or a working example, 
which does more than the equivalent of, "Here is how you insert a screw 
in generic hole A, using a single generic screw S, from here, you should 
be able to assemble the Empire State Building..." o.O

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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