I have read XP Explained and XP Planning and I love the series and XP.
It's especially interesting to me that Kent Beck is using something like XP in producing books about XP. Instead of one gargantuan tome, designed to sucker those who buy by weight, Beck is working on a iterative cycle. Release something that solves one problem, get feedback, repeat on a related problem. Here's what Beck has to has to say about this at his C2 wiki web page:
Re: XP books. Boy am I stupid. When I finally got my head out long enough for two or more oxygen molecules to reach my brain at the same time, I realized that the ExtremeWay to write a book series is to write the first book covering the most important stories, and then later on write some more books if necessary. Please contribute to the XpBookStories.
So maybe it wasn't because he had a master plan, but that's ok in the by XP standards. You don't know enough before you start to know where you will end.
As an active observer of that whole mess (and a sometime participant), I must disagree.
While he did seem pretty pissed about the whole thing -- and who can blame him? -- Josh really conducted himself well. He stuck to the facts and did very little name calling. A few other slashdotter's did drop to Redir's level, but flames beget flames.
The fascinating last piece of this story, that almost everyone missed can be found here. That's where Redir, posting as an AC, comes clean and grows up a bit.
The episode was one of the most interesting things that I have ever seen on the web. If I ever again here anyone say that "You can't trust what you read on the web," I'll have a pretty intersting story to tell about how that can be a self-correcting problem in a forum like Slashdot.
redir seems to finally have made a real attempt to do better, but for some reason he posted as an anonymous coward. Since it's been stuck at zero, I'll quote it's opening:
Simple. I was pissed and I wanted to be right. I had no clue what really happened as I couldn't get ahold of Chris, so I manipulated our system with a few 'update mytable set date where id =''s and swore up and down it was false. Why? Because I've known Chris for ten years and absolutely knew he'd never do something like that. I was wrong to do it, but I wanted to drive home the fact that he didn't steal an article. When people started emailing me with solid information I thought "I shouldn't have done what I just did" but it was too late at that point. Bottom line is I was wrong to back Chris up in that matter, I couldn't get ahold of him and I tried to cover his ass.
So he knows he screwed up. He says he wants to try to deal with the situation the right way from now on and that he is just 24.
The lesson for the rest of us, of course, is that whenever Phillip Ferreira or Chris Chabot go to get a job in the future, a quick search on their names will show this whole sordid tale.
This is where the web is a little scary. I hope this doesn't permanently hurt either of them. Do I trust ReviewBoard.com? Not at all. But I am not sure that should equal a lifetime ban on employment for those two.
I am working under the assumption that redir = Ferreira, Philip = "the real editor"
Thanks for coming clean. I wish you had used your nick just to clear up the loose ends, but this last post did demonstrate class. Keep that up even when (and it seems likely) you get more flames over this.
We all fuck up. It's time to move on and begin working to re-establish some credibility. And credibility is the most important asset for a site like ReviewBoard.com. I hope RB puts in some serious review procedures after this.
(Moderators, if you're still here: mod up that AC post above. It is the last chapter to a very intersting story.)
There is another loose end that you need to tie up for the/. community. If this was a simple case of not checking a user submission (and misattributing it), how come reviewboard.com was changing the article over the course of the evening to match redir's posts?
Dude, are you saying that you post user comments written in the first person under your own name? So you weren't trying to plagiarize AtariDataCenter, just some poor user.
Redir is also the admin contact for your site. And someone was both emailing redir (at least he claims that in many messages, even though the turn around times are implausible) and changing the content of the article while you were "sleeping." Someone at reviewboard.com was working on this tonight.
You've got a better story now, but it still doesn't hold together. Given the credibility of your friend and the plagiarism put up under your name, I don't see any reason to give you the benefit of the doubt.
But for anyone who questions if redir is indeed associated with ReviewBoard.com look here and search for "redir".
You'll notice that user's site info is given as "www.reviewboard.com" and the user's email is "philip@ferreira.net" which happens to be the same as the admin contact for reviewboard.com.
Come clean. Make real apologies. And we can all move on.
And there was a pretty damning link posted about redir being the handle for the review board editor -- backed up by Google.
And if the Epinions article is so lame, how come it looked good enough to plagiarize?
You look really bad to anyone that has followed this thread. Apologizing, admiting your lies, and having the Review Board do the same are your only decent options.
This is one of the funnest threads I've followed in/. for a long time. Doing a Google search on AtariDatacenter's real email string comes up with enough postings on geek topics that it seems highly credile that the owner of that email could have written the review. The best data point is this resume.
Doing the same thing for "Chris Chabot", the supposed author of the Review Board article does turn up a couple of semi-sophisticated computer related hits (needs help compiling a kernel), but in these cases Chris has a Review Board email address! ---> chabotc@reviewboard.com
I very much doubt that the review board is running a Sun E10K.
It seems pretty damn certain that the Review Board plagarized these articles. Since "redir" was also the original submitter and a strident attacker of AD, I would give fat odds, that he is "Chris Chabot" or at least a buddy of his.
But you got to hand it to the guy. Redir is a great handle for someone who redirects content from one site to another.
XP is based on a really happy intersection of novelty and practicality. There are lots of strange new ideas in these books, but they really deliver.
For something a bit more basic, but equally concerned with results check out "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. This book nailed down lots of points about programming for me. It would be especially useful for a new shop because it would give your crew a common vocabulary for the fundamentals.
I have been boycotting Amazon since the patent fiasco.
Now I have deleted credit card info, mailing addresses, and broke my email and user names. (BTW, there is now a "Georgette Orwell" who Amazon thinks shopped there from 1997 until early this year.)
If Microsoft is split up, it seems whatever company Gates went to would have a huge advantage in terms of regaining a dominant position. Customers would be inclined to view Bill's company as the "real" Microsoft. And I beleive that many employees of the other Baby Bills would leave their companies for Big Bill's. The fact that Gates would own about 15-20% of all these companies complicates the matter even further.
Given the above and the fact that Microsoft's illegal behavior starts at the top, is there any recourse to keep Bill Gates (and possible Steve Balmer) from participating in the day-to-day operations of any future version of Microsoft?
In the Philadelphia area programmers not long out of college seem to be starting somewhere around 50K, but it really varies.
If you can talk to business people and solve their problems salaries climb very fast and seem to level out in the 75-85K range. If you are a C coder working as the lowest rung in a big team, it will take longer to get there. If you are a risk taker and go for contract work you can make twice (or half) of that.
If you are primarily interested in money, I think that Business application programming is the easiest way to get there. Especially if you know the ins and outs of a big system that a big company has made a multi-million dollar bet on (Oracle, Domino, SAP, etc.) It is gratifying to see how your work can truly raise productivity (and this is why you will be well rewarded), but it sure isn't sexy.
150,000 copies of Running Linux sold! It's great to see that people who cared (and contributed to) Linux for a bunch of reasons besides money are doing pretty well in that department too.
Lots of the luminaries of the free software world have enough cash or cachet to work on whatever they think is most interesting. Definitely something for "World is getting better" side of the ledger.
I really hope that this phenmenon persists. Amazing how this contradicts the knee-jerk reaction against free software -- "but programmers have to eat." Matt Welsh is eating well.
The "invention" of the computer is a very complicated subject that I don't think any one book (even a good one like ENIAC) or discussion in/. can come to grips with.
First of all, the ENIAC was something that any current geek would recognize as a computer. I've talked to John Mauchly's widow, Kathleen Antonelli, who was one of the original programmers on the ENIAC, and while it may not have been a stored-memory computer, it was programmable. She coded very close to the machine.
Mauchly was a hacker who had an itch to scratch. He wanted to be better able to model the weather and needed a computer to do it. He didn't set out to "invent" the computer, but to build a tool to get a job done. WWII gave him the resources to do this and changed the job that needed doing.
We also need to remember that history is only obvious in retrospect. Mauchly and Eckert didn't know Turing's work (neither was a mathematician.) It was only after their very practical contribution that the idea of a Turing machine as a real machine began to make sense in any kind of widespread way.
A half-dozen or so people made groundbreaking contributions that coalesced in our idea of the computer. Mauchly and Eckert were certainly among them.
--Tim
Not unless Linux also boosts screen size
on
On Linux Laptops
·
· Score: 1
Linux might make the old cpus hum, but does it make the old screens any bigger? 10 inch passive matrix screens were the norm in the the 486 days. I am not a screen snob, but I couldn't code for very long on one of those.
Laptops are pricey because a good LCD is pricey. A Celeron 400 CPU cost about a hundred bucks in quantity. A 14 inch screen is in the neighborhood of $800. And unlike anything else in computers, a good screen holds its value much longer.
If your on a budget get a solid, cheap desktop system and a Palm. You'll be a lot happier.
Unless Sun has some sweetheart deals that aren't being mentioned, I don't see that RH or any distro is going to bother much with this. Star Office is "Open" only until you try to make any money off of it. It is not at all free software.
RH's business model is to make money off open source. They develop free software to improve a product that they can freely sell and build goodwill in the community. Pumping money into Star Office would not accomplish either of these. Sun would own their code and Slashdoters would laugh.
I am glad that Amazon gave corporations the ability to opt out. To do otherwise is borderline ethically and downright rude.
Point 2:
I hope few corporations decide to opt out. I think companies have a lot more to gain by having this information public than they have to lose. The competitive intellegence gathered this way is really weak (Intel employs a lot of geeks! Microsoft workers are a bunch of toadies!), but the benefits to that company's culture can be huge. New employees can come to grips with a company's mindset much more quickly by reading their company's top 10. Managers might even be able to get a clue about what their geeky employees are thinking about.
Summary:
The net is changing all the rules. We should be vigilant about privacy issues, but also be ready to benefit from these kinds of aggregations. We might get more from them thean we give up.
BTW, has anyone else noticed how really nimble Amazon is? When the net disagrees, they can change direction in a day. --Tim
Let's give the Abi folks a little slack on this. The.7 release is the first one that claims to have a stable file format, so I think they are entitled to some time to post the specs. But if you are really in a hurry, GO READ THE CODE. It will all be in there.
As for Microsoft, they are going to have to be a hell of a lot more paniced then they are now before they really open their file formats. At this point I take their XML stance as hot air. They make huge amounts from users upgrading Office for the sole reason of maintaining file compatibility. And making huge amounts is what they want to do.
The distinction you make between SW architects and coders is valid, but the presumption that the field is mature enough that we can codify and teach good SW engineering is not. Sure there are a lot of best practices that we all agree should be followed, but are those practices highly conguent with the conventional wisdom of say 1989? Linus was flamed for going with a monolithic kernel, because exactly the institutional types who would oversee licensing knew that only micro kernels made any sense.
Even on more abstract points the pace of change in design methodology has been much faster than any licensing board could keep up with. Actually this is why I like the current cert exams. Nobody expects that a particular ceritification will be worth diddly in five years. They really just work to keep you moving with the field.
As a big establishment institution it is not surprising that the Times prefers to talk to officials and not people who do the work. In my experience programmers are much more quality conscious than either management or customers, who for their own good reasons are cost conscious. To certify programmers without having a "building code" to enforce higher standards would not alter the current situation, but it would remove a a lot of talent from the field. Think about it: mediocre programmers with credentials can find jobs. Lacking credentials, you won't be able to find work without some obvious talent.
Since MS is keeping $20,000,000,000 under some very large matress that looks more and more like it was gained from illegal business practices, it seems fair to let them help clean up after their own mess.
Or let's go easy on them. For just $2 billion divided evenly between FSF and the Torvalds foundation (which will give/. a bandwidth grant as it's first official act), I'd let them walk right now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's especially interesting to me that Kent Beck is using something like XP in producing books about XP. Instead of one gargantuan tome, designed to sucker those who buy by weight, Beck is working on a iterative cycle. Release something that solves one problem, get feedback, repeat on a related problem. Here's what Beck has to has to say about this at his C2 wiki web page:
So maybe it wasn't because he had a master plan, but that's ok in the by XP standards. You don't know enough before you start to know where you will end.
His behaviour on /. was pretty ugly in patches.
As an active observer of that whole mess (and a sometime participant), I must disagree.
While he did seem pretty pissed about the whole thing -- and who can blame him? -- Josh really conducted himself well. He stuck to the facts and did very little name calling. A few other slashdotter's did drop to Redir's level, but flames beget flames.
The fascinating last piece of this story, that almost everyone missed can be found here. That's where Redir, posting as an AC, comes clean and grows up a bit.
The episode was one of the most interesting things that I have ever seen on the web. If I ever again here anyone say that "You can't trust what you read on the web," I'll have a pretty intersting story to tell about how that can be a self-correcting problem in a forum like Slashdot.
So he knows he screwed up. He says he wants to try to deal with the situation the right way from now on and that he is just 24.
The lesson for the rest of us, of course, is that whenever Phillip Ferreira or Chris Chabot go to get a job in the future, a quick search on their names will show this whole sordid tale.
This is where the web is a little scary. I hope this doesn't permanently hurt either of them. Do I trust ReviewBoard.com? Not at all. But I am not sure that should equal a lifetime ban on employment for those two.
I am working under the assumption that redir = Ferreira, Philip = "the real editor"
Thanks for coming clean. I wish you had used your nick just to clear up the loose ends, but this last post did demonstrate class. Keep that up even when (and it seems likely) you get more flames over this.
We all fuck up. It's time to move on and begin working to re-establish some credibility. And credibility is the most important asset for a site like ReviewBoard.com. I hope RB puts in some serious review procedures after this.
(Moderators, if you're still here: mod up that AC post above. It is the last chapter to a very intersting story.)
There is another loose end that you need to tie up for the /. community. If this was a simple case of not checking a user submission (and misattributing it), how come reviewboard.com was changing the article over the course of the evening to match redir's posts?
Dude, are you saying that you post user comments written in the first person under your own name? So you weren't trying to plagiarize AtariDataCenter, just some poor user.
Redir is also the admin contact for your site. And someone was both emailing redir (at least he claims that in many messages, even though the turn around times are implausible) and changing the content of the article while you were "sleeping." Someone at reviewboard.com was working on this tonight.
You've got a better story now, but it still doesn't hold together. Given the credibility of your friend and the plagiarism put up under your name, I don't see any reason to give you the benefit of the doubt.
But for anyone who questions if redir is indeed associated with ReviewBoard.com look here and search for "redir".
You'll notice that user's site info is given as "www.reviewboard.com" and the user's email is "philip@ferreira.net" which happens to be the same as the admin contact for reviewboard.com.
Come clean. Make real apologies. And we can all move on.
Well you did submit the orignal article!
And there was a pretty damning link posted about redir being the handle for the review board editor -- backed up by Google.
And if the Epinions article is so lame, how come it looked good enough to plagiarize?
You look really bad to anyone that has followed this thread. Apologizing, admiting your lies, and having the Review Board do the same are your only decent options.
You certainly owe AtariDatacenter an apology.
Given all the evidence that you, redir, are also part of the Review Board, I think that you owe Slashdot an apology as well.
Admit your mistakes. You'll feel better.
This is one of the funnest threads I've followed in /. for a long time. Doing a Google search on AtariDatacenter's real email string comes up with enough postings on geek topics that it seems highly credile that the owner of that email could have written the review. The best data point is this resume.
Doing the same thing for "Chris Chabot", the supposed author of the Review Board article does turn up a couple of semi-sophisticated computer related hits (needs help compiling a kernel), but in these cases Chris has a Review Board email address! ---> chabotc@reviewboard.com
I very much doubt that the review board is running a Sun E10K.
It seems pretty damn certain that the Review Board plagarized these articles. Since "redir" was also the original submitter and a strident attacker of AD, I would give fat odds, that he is "Chris Chabot" or at least a buddy of his.
But you got to hand it to the guy. Redir is a great handle for someone who redirects content from one site to another.
Good call firebus. I got a cached copy saved to my hardrive with the original 12/29/2000 date.
XP is based on a really happy intersection of novelty and practicality. There are lots of strange new ideas in these books, but they really deliver.
For something a bit more basic, but equally concerned with results check out "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. This book nailed down lots of points about programming for me. It would be especially useful for a new shop because it would give your crew a common vocabulary for the fundamentals.
--Tim
I have been boycotting Amazon since the patent fiasco.
Now I have deleted credit card info, mailing addresses, and broke my email and user names. (BTW, there is now a "Georgette Orwell" who Amazon thinks shopped there from 1997 until early this year.)
I suggest everyone do something similar.
-T
The correct idiom is "Unix on Viagra."
In this forum, however, "Unix on "Penguin Mints" would also be accepted.
If Microsoft is split up, it seems whatever company Gates went to would have a huge advantage in terms of regaining a dominant position. Customers would be inclined to view Bill's company as the "real" Microsoft. And I beleive that many employees of the other Baby Bills would leave their companies for Big Bill's. The fact that Gates would own about 15-20% of all these companies complicates the matter even further.
Given the above and the fact that Microsoft's illegal behavior starts at the top, is there any recourse to keep Bill Gates (and possible Steve Balmer) from participating in the day-to-day operations of any future version of Microsoft?
--Tim
In the Philadelphia area programmers not long out of college seem to be starting somewhere around 50K, but it really varies.
If you can talk to business people and solve their problems salaries climb very fast and seem to level out in the 75-85K range. If you are a C coder working as the lowest rung in a big team, it will take longer to get there. If you are a risk taker and go for contract work you can make twice (or half) of that.
If you are primarily interested in money, I think that Business application programming is the easiest way to get there. Especially if you know the ins and outs of a big system that a big company has made a multi-million dollar bet on (Oracle, Domino, SAP, etc.) It is gratifying to see how your work can truly raise productivity (and this is why you will be well rewarded), but it sure isn't sexy.
--Tim
150,000 copies of Running Linux sold! It's great to see that people who cared (and contributed to) Linux for a bunch of reasons besides money are doing pretty well in that department too.
Lots of the luminaries of the free software world have enough cash or cachet to work on whatever they think is most interesting. Definitely something for "World is getting better" side of the ledger.
I really hope that this phenmenon persists. Amazing how this contradicts the knee-jerk reaction against free software -- "but programmers have to eat." Matt Welsh is eating well.
The "invention" of the computer is a very complicated subject that I don't think any one book (even a good one like ENIAC) or discussion in /. can come to grips with.
First of all, the ENIAC was something that any current geek would recognize as a computer. I've talked to John Mauchly's widow, Kathleen Antonelli, who was one of the original programmers on the ENIAC, and while it may not have been a stored-memory computer, it was programmable. She coded very close to the machine.
Mauchly was a hacker who had an itch to scratch. He wanted to be better able to model the weather and needed a computer to do it. He didn't set out to "invent" the computer, but to build a tool to get a job done. WWII gave him the resources to do this and changed the job that needed doing.
We also need to remember that history is only obvious in retrospect. Mauchly and Eckert didn't know Turing's work (neither was a mathematician.) It was only after their very practical contribution that the idea of a Turing machine as a real machine began to make sense in any kind of widespread way.
A half-dozen or so people made groundbreaking contributions that coalesced in our idea of the computer. Mauchly and Eckert were certainly among them.
--Tim
Linux might make the old cpus hum, but does it make the old screens any bigger? 10 inch passive matrix screens were the norm in the the 486 days. I am not a screen snob, but I couldn't code for very long on one of those.
Laptops are pricey because a good LCD is pricey. A Celeron 400 CPU cost about a hundred bucks in quantity. A 14 inch screen is in the neighborhood of $800. And unlike anything else in computers, a good screen holds its value much longer.
If your on a budget get a solid, cheap desktop system and a Palm. You'll be a lot happier.
Unless Sun has some sweetheart deals that aren't being mentioned, I don't see that RH or any distro is going to bother much with this. Star Office is "Open" only until you try to make any money off of it. It is not at all free software.
RH's business model is to make money off open source. They develop free software to improve a product that they can freely sell and build goodwill in the community. Pumping money into Star Office would not accomplish either of these. Sun would own their code and Slashdoters would laugh.
--Tim
Point 1:
I am glad that Amazon gave corporations the ability to opt out. To do otherwise is borderline ethically and downright rude.
Point 2:
I hope few corporations decide to opt out. I think companies have a lot more to gain by having this information public than they have to lose. The competitive intellegence gathered this way is really weak (Intel employs a lot of geeks! Microsoft workers are a bunch of toadies!), but the benefits to that company's culture can be huge. New employees can come to grips with a company's mindset much more quickly by reading their company's top 10. Managers might even be able to get a clue about what their geeky employees are thinking about.
Summary:
The net is changing all the rules. We should be vigilant about privacy issues, but also be ready to benefit from these kinds of aggregations. We might get more from them thean we give up.
BTW, has anyone else noticed how really nimble Amazon is? When the net disagrees, they can change direction in a day.
--Tim
Let's give the Abi folks a little slack on this. The .7 release is the first one that claims to have a stable file format, so I think they are entitled to some time to post the specs. But if you are really in a hurry, GO READ THE CODE. It will all be in there.
As for Microsoft, they are going to have to be a hell of a lot more paniced then they are now before they really open their file formats. At this point I take their XML stance as hot air. They make huge amounts from users upgrading Office for the sole reason of maintaining file compatibility. And making huge amounts is what they want to do.
The distinction you make between SW architects and coders is valid, but the presumption that the field is mature enough that we can codify and teach good SW engineering is not. Sure there are a lot of best practices that we all agree should be followed, but are those practices highly conguent with the conventional wisdom of say 1989? Linus was flamed for going with a monolithic kernel, because exactly the institutional types who would oversee licensing knew that only micro kernels made any sense.
Even on more abstract points the pace of change in design methodology has been much faster than any licensing board could keep up with. Actually this is why I like the current cert exams. Nobody expects that a particular ceritification will be worth diddly in five years. They really just work to keep you moving with the field.
As a big establishment institution it is not surprising that the Times prefers to talk to officials and not people who do the work. In my experience programmers are much more quality conscious than either management or customers, who for their own good reasons are cost conscious. To certify programmers without having a "building code" to enforce higher standards would not alter the current situation, but it would remove a a lot of talent from the field. Think about it: mediocre programmers with credentials can find jobs. Lacking credentials, you won't be able to find work without some obvious talent.
Since MS is keeping $20,000,000,000 under some very large matress that looks more and more like it was gained from illegal business practices, it seems fair to let them help clean up after their own mess.
/. a bandwidth grant as it's first official act), I'd let them walk right now.
Or let's go easy on them. For just $2 billion divided evenly between FSF and the Torvalds foundation (which will give