The law was never meant to compensate anyone beyond the amount they were injured. Winning a court case was never supposed to equivalent to winning the lottery. Unfortunately, compensatory damage awards (and the lawyers who want to get their share of them) have made the court system into the new lottery system. The idea of awarding compensatory damages is quite simple, punish the wrongdoer by taking from them something they hold dear (i.e. money) in the hopes that they will work hard to avoid even more costly future punishments. I believe that compensatory damages are a reasonable and probably somewhat effective form of corporate (rather than corporal) punishment; no part of this money should, however, go to the individual or the lawyer who brought the suit. The damage award is where the wronged party is compensated. I don't have any perfect solution to the question of where the compensatory damage award should go; I only know that the current system is completely and horrifically wrong. The money should go to a fund distributed on the federal level to improve the quality of life of everyone (vague, eh?), but safeguards must be enacted to ensure that desire for additional money in that fund never translates into the frivolous lawsuit climate we have today. I would not want the federal government to suddenly begin prosecuting more often simply because it wants to fill its own pockets. Anyway, the thought is incomplete.
I don't know if there are any UFOs or ghosts out there haunting our nights. Nothing has yet convinced me that there are such things, and yet I cannot deny that the world would be infinitely more interesting if there were. The existence of ghosts would mean that life does not end in death, only that it changes form (something that many are willing to believe based only upon faith). The existence of and friendship with the little men in the UFOs could lead to some phenomenal leaps in humanity and technology (saving countless hours, dollars, and lives); unless they kill us all or something. My only point in mentioning these is that things such as UFOs and ghosts are generally considered the subjects of lame science and disreputable scientists, despite the fact that the self-described "real" scientists have not really bothered to investigate the matter. There may be no valid UFO or ghost sightings, I'm certainly not trying to suggest that there are; I can only say that it seems peculiar that an issue which has so many adherents and such far reaching consequences is so little studied by a society some of whose institutions would merrily fork over $500,000 to WPI in grant money to study differential equations.
And now, back to the supposed point of this column...
The Alps Glide Point ($69) claims to be the next generation in pointing devices. If this is the case, I think I will begin buying up the remaining mice for my own private cache. The design and the idea are pretty simple. Instead of a mouse that you roll for miles on a desktop, the Glide Point has a small rectangular sensing pad (about the size of a credit card) on which you slide your fingers. There are two buttons below the sensing pad, and one programmable one above. You can almost completely avoid using the buttons, though, by double-tapping your finger on the sensor pad (which counts as a double click). The sensing pad doesn't sense where your finger is, it senses the movement of your finger. The device is not pressure sensitive. If I remember correctly, it works by setting up thousands of little magnetic fields via an array of tiny inductors (essentially very small wire coils); the presence of your finger affects the nearby magnetic fields that the inductors create and this change in the current going to some inductors gets translated into a coordinate location (it is something like this, anyway). I tried learning to operate this thing with my right foot, thinking that my ability to interface with a computer would just be truly dazzling if I never had to take my hands off the keyboard. When that failed, I figured maybe I'd just try and learn to use my fingers. When that failed I sent it back to the mail-order place from which it came. It may be a truly remarkable product. It may just be that both my toes and fingers are somewhat larger than the average Glide Point user (my digits are not freakish or anything, they're just appropriate for my somewhat above average height). The problem I consistently had with the Glide Point is that it was impossible to get the exactness in control of the pointer that I had with a mouse. I could get the pointer near where I wanted, but never exactly where I wanted. In the end, I would have to try and make minor corrections by rolling my finger/toe. This method rarely worked effectively. The pointer would always jump around on me, leading to incredible frustration and a longing for my mouse. The only fair and sound advice I can give is: if you're really thinking about it, buy it locally, try it out, and don't get rid of your mouse just yet.
This past spring I bought the Academically Priced Borland C++ 4.50 ($99) from the WPI bookstore. It will probably be the only time in my personal history when purchasing something at the WPI bookstore meant I saved money. I have gotten the two free updates since then (current version is now 4.52). I've always liked Borland, since they came out with the then revolutionary integrated development environment (IDE) of Turbo Pascal version 1.0 sometime around 1986. I've used Borland Turbo Pascal, Turbo Pascal for Windows, and now C++ (for Windows, NT, 95, DOS). I think the critical thing to remember with any development platform is that they all do essentially the same thing. You can write a program in Visual Basic that can do everything another program written in Borland C++ can do. There are peculiarities and limitations in each language, but almost all can be overcome. Knowledge of one platform is never a waste; if you become skilled in any one language you can switch to any other fairly quickly. I chose Borland C++ because I had liked their products in the past and I had heard good things about this one. There is a wide selection of alternatives. The ones I have heard most favorable things about are Microsoft's Visual Basic and Watcom's C++.
Visual Basic seems to be a good programming language for people new to programming, though its flexibility makes it useful for programmers of all levels. One of its major strengths lies in the wide range of libraries (VBXs) for developing graphical user interface (GUI) items. Borland C++ and other languages can use these VBXs, but they're not as easy to implement as in Visual Basic. I have heard of some limitations in the current version of Visual Basic, which includes an inability to directly access dynamically linked libraries (DLLs). There are ways to get around this limitation, however.
Watcom's C++ is particularly well suited to those people trying to develop identical code for multiple platforms (including Windows NT, Windows 3.x, OS/2 2.x, 32-bit extended DOS, Novell NLM, and more). Those fine people in Waterloo, Ontario who bring us the Maple computer algebra system do all their stuff in Watcom.
If you're going to get Borland C++ and have or can borrow a CD ROM drive, get the CD ROM version of Borland C++. If you're going to fully install the software (as opposed to running some things off CD ROM) you'll be installing 100 MB worth of data (which is more floppy switching than any sane person would want to do). The 25 lbs. of manuals are also included on the CD ROM as well as in paper form (which makes searching for things considerably easier). If you're trying to learn Windows programming, don't expect the Borland manuals to teach you.
They are only useful once you reach a certain level of understanding. To begin learning about using the Object Windows Library (the Borland approach to controlling the graphical user interface and all the features of Windows) you might want to take a look at Teach Yourself OWL Programming in 21 days, by Ian Spencer (one of the SAMS' series).
There's my allotment for the week shot to hell... if you have any comments, suggestions, whatever, please pass them along.
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