Software schedules can be estimated, if you know the exact boundaries of your project and you have done similar things before. For instance, if I am asked to write a report that does similar things to stuff I've done before, I know about how long it will take.
But let's take a recent example of something I did. I had to connect to our SQL Server database, which required that I figure out a way to connect to the database, learn the various quirks of that method, and do the job. I might have to try several different methods, and some of them might require that I learn new tools. It would be very difficult to estimate that project accurately; the only way I can think of would be to actually do it.
So that, of course, is what I did. It turns out my original intuitive estimate ("a week or so") was pretty accurate (once adjustments were made for my nasty case of the flu:-( ), but I wouldn't bet my professional reputation on its accuracy.
If you only do routine things, then, you're right. But if you sometimes venture into unknown territory, well, I'd like to see what your estimation mechanism is.
They certainly aren't doing okay embracing whatever they're embracing now. And I don't even mean our attacks; It's been ten years since the Russians left, and nobody can claim Afghanistan prospered. Instead, competing factions tore the country apart until the Taliban came in.
A good counter-example is the Korean war, whch destroyed South Korean infrastructure. The South Koreans got up, dusted themselves off and went to work in a capitalistic, export-oriented style. The result: A rich nation.
Name a nation rendered worse off due to development of a free economy, and I might be willing to pay more attention. Would Afghanistan have been better off if it had put its effort into making things others want instead of factional fighting? You tell me, but the answer seems obvious.
This seems unlikely; as an employer, you can't improve working conditions until you have the cash to do so. If you don't, well, working conditions won't be so great.
What it gave me was an admiration for the corporations, and how they will co-opt anything, even forces aiming at their own destruction.
When corporations do truly evil things, activist groups can act as checks and balances against them.
But it's important to note that if you want the people of desperately poor countries to thrive, they need to start at the bottom and work their way up. Rich countries don't spring up in a day; in early America, there were appalling working conditions, which gradually got better as the nation got richer. The same general pattern occured in Japan, South Korea and just about everywhere else that's prosperous now.
The nations that turned their back on capitalism and trade have fared far worse; consider India, most of Africa and the Middle East as examples. We complain about people being paid $ 0.50 a day for their work; in Afghanistan that would feel like wealth.
In the end, capitalism may be a terrible system, its main virtue being that every other system is worse. The way capitalism works is that people try and do as well as they can. If the jobs given by the multinational corporations were really bad, well, they can always try and find work elsewhere. Often the reason wages are so low is that there isn't work to be found. This is hardly the fault of multinational corporations!
I am not saying that multinationals are perfect, but this is an imperfect world, at best. The multinationals have provided opportunity in desolate places where opportunities are scarce.
And I must admit to disliking the homogination of the world, the McDonalds and Burger Kings and the like. The best way to fight this is simply not to eat there. The only way American culture and businesses can succeed is that people want their products. Somehow it doesn't seem like depriving people of what they want is going to make the world a better place.
It may be very colourful and very idealistic to protest the WTO and trade, but trade produces an improvement in the status of everyone in the world. If those poor people don't make our stuff, they'd probably be picking rice in a paddy, working 12 back-breaking hours a day.
But now we have pervasive networking, so it's easy to copy stuff from your old computer and media to your new one, even if the new one has spiffy new features.
So as of now, this problem should be easily fixable. Admittedly this is not true retroactively, but from now on it should be pretty easy to save anything people consider worth saving.
The real problem, then, is to determine what is worth saving while it's still commonplace. That's the rub.
That's odd, I could have sworn Amazon started on DEC systems, moved to HP Unix systems and is now running on anonymous Linux systems.
Your point is well taken, but as far as I know they never used Sun.
Personally, I don't think this is much of a triumph for Linux since I think of it as part of the Unix universe. This is infighting between friends, with only one of them winning in the end. The common enemy isn't helped, or hurt, by this.
Just in case you didn't notice, it's really difficult to lose a standard that's been accepted by enough people to have critical mass.
I don't see GIF and JPG images becoming unreadable, ever, because there's too much of a critical mass of information associated with them now, and that useful pile of information continues to be added to on a daily basis.
Yes, better technology will emerge, but the old standard image formats will still have a place.
Far as I can tell, most digital images are stored in the JPG format, and the sheer volume of images on the web should ensure its immortality.
I would expect that 100 years from now, we'll still have tools that can read GIF and JPG formats, simply due to the critical mass that has already been established.
I've tried it. It has perhaps the worst learning curve of any system I know. You have to learn about 300 pages worth of concepts to write 'hello, world'.
Of course once you do that, there are a lot of really neat things about it, but sadly I just didn't have the time to learn it:-(.
I'd say let 'em win this one. If they don't want me to see their content, that is their right. After all, a quick look at the main page shows that all they can do for me is ask for my money. Buy Windows XP! Buy Air Tickets! Buy books! Buy music!
On the other hand...
My Netscape 4.7 for Linux works fine.
OmniWeb 4.0.5 for MacOS X works fine
And (of course) IE 5 for MacOS X works fine.
There doesn't seem to be any meaningful difference in the rendition of the page on any of these browsers. I would have to guess, though, that they are doing this based on popularity - there are probably quite a few Netscape 4.x browsers around, and those who have downloaded Mozilla most likely can go back with prehistoric Netscape.
The only explanation I have for OmniWeb is that its market share is so puny they don't know it exists yet. Oh, and I think it emulates Netscape's user agent screen precisely anyway.
Truthfully, the main MSN page is so "sell-sell-sell!" that I wouldn't care if it was vaporized off the face of the planet. No, Mr bin Laden, I don't mean that seriously. But certainly there is absolutely nothing there that would give me the slightest desire to change browsers to see it.
The main problem would be the cost of replacing all the hardware with Macs, which are more expensive than PCs. Of course they stay up to date for a longer period, which helps with some of the cost, but the cost of conversion is still high.
Unless you talk about notebooks, of course - then I think the Mac is both superior and roughly equal if not cheaper in price.
With Microsoft getting more strict on licensing, one major advantage of running PCs over Macs - the easy piracy of software that spreads through many offices - is gone.
I run a Titanium G4 laptop using MacOS X and love it. But perceptions of high cost are hard to shake.
It's not a question of sales. It's a question of cool. There was never any question as to which route Steve would take in designing his baby.
You have to realize that Steve, the man behind the thing, is the same fellow who thought we'd all buy $3,999 Cinema Displays because they were cool. And guess what? Plenty of us did, but it was probably a mistake for the Cube to only come into its designer own with one.
It will be interesting to see how many do buy this thing. I'm looking forward to checking it out at the Apple Store in Glendale, but I suspect I'll save my pennies for one of the ultra-fast G5s said to come out early next year. A better use of my money, cool factor or no.
Although I'm surprised anyone would have difficulty understanding that - the descriptive material and code exampes made it quite clear what an eggplant is and that the site is satire.
I'd eat an eggplant to celebrate their achievement if I could stand to do so.
D
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
In today's market, you are probably right because stock options are not worth much at the moment - but if we have another boom time in the future, Microsoft will start losing key people to companies that can make their employees rich through stock options.
I certainly know that's the kind of opportunity I want to find.
Best answer: None, as long as they are being offered free by someone else.
The only exception might be something truly mission critical, where quality of the for-pay service was substantially better. But I don't see that happening, at least not with Microsoft as the vendor.
xemacs was derived from emacs when JWZ (http://www.jwz.org/) found working with RMS impossible. You can read the story on his web site.
It was originally called Lucid Emacs and was going to be a free portion of a commercial product. When the commercial product failed, it was renamed xemacs.
The biggest advantage is support of variable width fonts. If you want the text you're editing to look pretty while you're editing it, xemacs is the best.
I just wish it had MacOS X Cocoa support so the fonts would look beautiful instead of simply "better than boring old Courier". Sadly, I have not the time or talent to delve into something as complex as actually doing this, so about all I can do is wait until someone else does it for me:-(.
I agree with the people who mentioned that emacs has a stiff learning curve - I learned it back in the late 70s when there was nothing easier to use - but once you give it some time, it's by far the fastest and most efficient way to edit text; you and the text become one with the speed in which you can move around and do stuff. No GUI compares to emacs incremental search - type Control-S, type in characters, watch the cursor move as you type until you find what you're looking for.
T1 service in my universe is still about $1,000 a month.
My PacBell DSL connection has gone down on me (or become so slow as to be worse than dialup, which is about the same thing) three times in the month and a half that I've had it, and tech support is miserable. Not a happy camper:-(.
You might be better off leasing your car due to lower out of pocket costs, because the car decays over a short period of years and has a predictable residual value. By not paying off that residual, you save quite a bit out of pocket if you want to have a new car every few years. There is very little value in owning a car if it's breaking down all the time and ready for replacement.
A home is different, of course, because it will generally increase in value over time, especially in popular regions of the country like Southern California (where I live). Boat dock homes in Newport Beach that sold for $ 2.5 million five years ago are now going for $ 3.5 million. Obviously I should have bought one:-(.
Renting software is harder to gauge; how many of you use commercial software more than, say, five years old?
At the same time, who wants to lose the use of something they paid for for no good reason? It's tough for me to accept the idea of the forced upgrade, especially when the original software I got still works.
So buying is not always better than renting. But renting usually makes sense only if we're talking about a product you couldn't afford to buy. Most software as it stands is priced reasonably enough so there may be little reason to not buy it outright. And if you don't like Microsoft's draconian "you must upgrade now" licenses, well, it might be a good idea to switch to another vendor.
Transactions are certainly required in a double-entry bookkeeping system, where you have two sets of data that have to be consistent in order to give an acceptable result. The traditional example is that if I add money to one account, I'd better have subtracted it from the other, or someone is going to have more than they should. In that case, I would definitely agree that you must use an ACID-compliant database.
But in ordinary business transactions, I don't see it. I add a sales order, consisting of two tables, header and line items. I add the line items, then the header, so if there is a header, there's a complete transaction. Since my system is on a UPS, and since transactions only take place during business hours, any problems with referential integrity are vanishingly rare.
I think it would be a little silly to fire me for using a database without transactions on this basis. You could argue that there might be traces of transactions that did not take place, if there was a power or hardware failure at the moment a transaction was being entered. But since we would have an orderly shutdown of the hardware in the case of a power failure, and we would get the data from backups in the case of a catastrophic hardware failure, I really don't see the problem here.
The system I have developed using mySQL has had thousands of orders run through it, and I can't think of a single situation where transactions would have helped or changed the outcome of events.
I've used Cold Fusion for a few projects. The achilles heel in my mind is that if you try and code legibly (indentation, blank lines betwen code segments, and so on), you get horrible amounts of blank space in your HTML output. At least for me, this made debugging tough, since the resulting HTML was hard to read, and resulted in some appearance strangenesses, too.
I much prefer my more primitive C/CGI system. Using mySQL's instantaneous connection and disconnection, it's not much different in speed from allegedly more sophisticated solutions, and I can produce readable and maintanable code.
Well, yes; see yesterday's reruns segment of As the Apple Turns (www.appleturns.com) for a nice little recap.
But I dunno. It seems like it would actually be fun to be Larry, but I can't say I'd enjoy being Gates or Ballmer. So for the mercurial cool factor, Larry's hard to beat, although I suppose Steve Jobs gives him a run for his money at times.
Slashdot Mirror
Software schedules can be estimated, if you know the exact boundaries of your project and you have done similar things before. For instance, if I am asked to write a report that does similar things to stuff I've done before, I know about how long it will take.
:-( ), but I wouldn't bet my professional reputation on its accuracy.
But let's take a recent example of something I did. I had to connect to our SQL Server database, which required that I figure out a way to connect to the database, learn the various quirks of that method, and do the job. I might have to try several different methods, and some of them might require that I learn new tools. It would be very difficult to estimate that project accurately; the only way I can think of would be to actually do it.
So that, of course, is what I did. It turns out my original intuitive estimate ("a week or so") was pretty accurate (once adjustments were made for my nasty case of the flu
If you only do routine things, then, you're right. But if you sometimes venture into unknown territory, well, I'd like to see what your estimation mechanism is.
D
They certainly aren't doing okay embracing whatever they're embracing now. And I don't even mean our attacks; It's been ten years since the Russians left, and nobody can claim Afghanistan prospered. Instead, competing factions tore the country apart until the Taliban came in.
A good counter-example is the Korean war, whch destroyed South Korean infrastructure. The South Koreans got up, dusted themselves off and went to work in a capitalistic, export-oriented style. The result: A rich nation.
Name a nation rendered worse off due to development of a free economy, and I might be willing to pay more attention. Would Afghanistan have been better off if it had put its effort into making things others want instead of factional fighting? You tell me, but the answer seems obvious.
D
This seems unlikely; as an employer, you can't improve working conditions until you have the cash to do so. If you don't, well, working conditions won't be so great.
D
You are correct; it did turn its back between independence and somewhere in the 1990s, and during that period its economic record was appalling.
Because India has turned towards capitalism and trade now, its fortunes are improving. And, of course, that supports my point very well.
D
Nice try, but it requires Windows ... ugh.
D
What it gave me was an admiration for the corporations, and how they will co-opt anything, even forces aiming at their own destruction.
When corporations do truly evil things, activist groups can act as checks and balances against them.
But it's important to note that if you want the people of desperately poor countries to thrive, they need to start at the bottom and work their way up. Rich countries don't spring up in a day; in early America, there were appalling working conditions, which gradually got better as the nation got richer. The same general pattern occured in Japan, South Korea and just about everywhere else that's prosperous now.
The nations that turned their back on capitalism and trade have fared far worse; consider India, most of Africa and the Middle East as examples. We complain about people being paid $ 0.50 a day for their work; in Afghanistan that would feel like wealth.
In the end, capitalism may be a terrible system, its main virtue being that every other system is worse. The way capitalism works is that people try and do as well as they can. If the jobs given by the multinational corporations were really bad, well, they can always try and find work elsewhere. Often the reason wages are so low is that there isn't work to be found. This is hardly the fault of multinational corporations!
I am not saying that multinationals are perfect, but this is an imperfect world, at best. The multinationals have provided opportunity in desolate places where opportunities are scarce.
And I must admit to disliking the homogination of the world, the McDonalds and Burger Kings and the like. The best way to fight this is simply not to eat there. The only way American culture and businesses can succeed is that people want their products. Somehow it doesn't seem like depriving people of what they want is going to make the world a better place.
It may be very colourful and very idealistic to protest the WTO and trade, but trade produces an improvement in the status of everyone in the world. If those poor people don't make our stuff, they'd probably be picking rice in a paddy, working 12 back-breaking hours a day.
D
But now we have pervasive networking, so it's easy to copy stuff from your old computer and media to your new one, even if the new one has spiffy new features.
So as of now, this problem should be easily fixable. Admittedly this is not true retroactively, but from now on it should be pretty easy to save anything people consider worth saving.
The real problem, then, is to determine what is worth saving while it's still commonplace. That's the rub.
D
That's odd, I could have sworn Amazon started on DEC systems, moved to HP Unix systems and is now running on anonymous Linux systems.
Your point is well taken, but as far as I know they never used Sun.
Personally, I don't think this is much of a triumph for Linux since I think of it as part of the Unix universe. This is infighting between friends, with only one of them winning in the end. The common enemy isn't helped, or hurt, by this.
D
Just in case you didn't notice, it's really difficult to lose a standard that's been accepted by enough people to have critical mass.
I don't see GIF and JPG images becoming unreadable, ever, because there's too much of a critical mass of information associated with them now, and that useful pile of information continues to be added to on a daily basis.
Yes, better technology will emerge, but the old standard image formats will still have a place.
D
Far as I can tell, most digital images are stored in the JPG format, and the sheer volume of images on the web should ensure its immortality.
I would expect that 100 years from now, we'll still have tools that can read GIF and JPG formats, simply due to the critical mass that has already been established.
D
I've tried it. It has perhaps the worst learning curve of any system I know. You have to learn about 300 pages worth of concepts to write 'hello, world'.
:-(.
Of course once you do that, there are a lot of really neat things about it, but sadly I just didn't have the time to learn it
D
Haulover Beach in Miami has been nude for ages; I visit there whenever I go to Miami(*)
D
(*) I'm just too cheap to buy a bathing suit, honest.
Every time I think of Martha Stewart, I think of this:
/ y2 Karchives/051.html
http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k
D
I'd say let 'em win this one. If they don't want me to see their content, that is their right. After all, a quick look at the main page shows that all they can do for me is ask for my money. Buy Windows XP! Buy Air Tickets! Buy books! Buy music!
...
On the other hand
My Netscape 4.7 for Linux works fine.
OmniWeb 4.0.5 for MacOS X works fine
And (of course) IE 5 for MacOS X works fine.
There doesn't seem to be any meaningful difference in the rendition of the page on any of these browsers. I would have to guess, though, that they are doing this based on popularity - there are probably quite a few Netscape 4.x browsers around, and those who have downloaded Mozilla most likely can go back with prehistoric Netscape.
The only explanation I have for OmniWeb is that its market share is so puny they don't know it exists yet. Oh, and I think it emulates Netscape's user agent screen precisely anyway.
Truthfully, the main MSN page is so "sell-sell-sell!" that I wouldn't care if it was vaporized off the face of the planet. No, Mr bin Laden, I don't mean that seriously. But certainly there is absolutely nothing there that would give me the slightest desire to change browsers to see it.
D
The main problem would be the cost of replacing all the hardware with Macs, which are more expensive than PCs. Of course they stay up to date for a longer period, which helps with some of the cost, but the cost of conversion is still high.
Unless you talk about notebooks, of course - then I think the Mac is both superior and roughly equal if not cheaper in price.
With Microsoft getting more strict on licensing, one major advantage of running PCs over Macs - the easy piracy of software that spreads through many offices - is gone.
I run a Titanium G4 laptop using MacOS X and love it. But perceptions of high cost are hard to shake.
D
It's not a question of sales. It's a question of cool. There was never any question as to which route Steve would take in designing his baby.
You have to realize that Steve, the man behind the thing, is the same fellow who thought we'd all buy $3,999 Cinema Displays because they were cool. And guess what? Plenty of us did, but it was probably a mistake for the Cube to only come into its designer own with one.
It will be interesting to see how many do buy this thing. I'm looking forward to checking it out at the Apple Store in Glendale, but I suspect I'll save my pennies for one of the ultra-fast G5s said to come out early next year. A better use of my money, cool factor or no.
D
It's a joke, and a pretty good one at that.
Although I'm surprised anyone would have difficulty understanding that - the descriptive material and code exampes made it quite clear what an eggplant is and that the site is satire.
I'd eat an eggplant to celebrate their achievement if I could stand to do so.
D
In today's market, you are probably right because stock options are not worth much at the moment - but if we have another boom time in the future, Microsoft will start losing key people to companies that can make their employees rich through stock options.
I certainly know that's the kind of opportunity I want to find.
D
Best answer: None, as long as they are being offered free by someone else.
The only exception might be something truly mission critical, where quality of the for-pay service was substantially better. But I don't see that happening, at least not with Microsoft as the vendor.
D
xemacs was derived from emacs when JWZ (http://www.jwz.org/) found working with RMS impossible. You can read the story on his web site.
:-(.
It was originally called Lucid Emacs and was going to be a free portion of a commercial product. When the commercial product failed, it was renamed xemacs.
The biggest advantage is support of variable width fonts. If you want the text you're editing to look pretty while you're editing it, xemacs is the best.
I just wish it had MacOS X Cocoa support so the fonts would look beautiful instead of simply "better than boring old Courier". Sadly, I have not the time or talent to delve into something as complex as actually doing this, so about all I can do is wait until someone else does it for me
I agree with the people who mentioned that emacs has a stiff learning curve - I learned it back in the late 70s when there was nothing easier to use - but once you give it some time, it's by far the fastest and most efficient way to edit text; you and the text become one with the speed in which you can move around and do stuff. No GUI compares to emacs incremental search - type Control-S, type in characters, watch the cursor move as you type until you find what you're looking for.
D
What's your planned vendor for the wireless T1?
:-(.
T1 service in my universe is still about $1,000 a month.
My PacBell DSL connection has gone down on me (or become so slow as to be worse than dialup, which is about the same thing) three times in the month and a half that I've had it, and tech support is miserable. Not a happy camper
D
You might be better off leasing your car due to lower out of pocket costs, because the car decays over a short period of years and has a predictable residual value. By not paying off that residual, you save quite a bit out of pocket if you want to have a new car every few years. There is very little value in owning a car if it's breaking down all the time and ready for replacement.
:-(.
A home is different, of course, because it will generally increase in value over time, especially in popular regions of the country like Southern California (where I live). Boat dock homes in Newport Beach that sold for $ 2.5 million five years ago are now going for $ 3.5 million. Obviously I should have bought one
Renting software is harder to gauge; how many of you use commercial software more than, say, five years old?
At the same time, who wants to lose the use of something they paid for for no good reason? It's tough for me to accept the idea of the forced upgrade, especially when the original software I got still works.
So buying is not always better than renting. But renting usually makes sense only if we're talking about a product you couldn't afford to buy. Most software as it stands is priced reasonably enough so there may be little reason to not buy it outright. And if you don't like Microsoft's draconian "you must upgrade now" licenses, well, it might be a good idea to switch to another vendor.
D
Transactions are certainly required in a double-entry bookkeeping system, where you have two sets of data that have to be consistent in order to give an acceptable result. The traditional example is that if I add money to one account, I'd better have subtracted it from the other, or someone is going to have more than they should. In that case, I would definitely agree that you must use an ACID-compliant database.
But in ordinary business transactions, I don't see it. I add a sales order, consisting of two tables, header and line items. I add the line items, then the header, so if there is a header, there's a complete transaction. Since my system is on a UPS, and since transactions only take place during business hours, any problems with referential integrity are vanishingly rare.
I think it would be a little silly to fire me for using a database without transactions on this basis. You could argue that there might be traces of transactions that did not take place, if there was a power or hardware failure at the moment a transaction was being entered. But since we would have an orderly shutdown of the hardware in the case of a power failure, and we would get the data from backups in the case of a catastrophic hardware failure, I really don't see the problem here.
The system I have developed using mySQL has had thousands of orders run through it, and I can't think of a single situation where transactions would have helped or changed the outcome of events.
So tell me, why should I be fired?
D
I've used Cold Fusion for a few projects. The achilles heel in my mind is that if you try and code legibly (indentation, blank lines betwen code segments, and so on), you get horrible amounts of blank space in your HTML output. At least for me, this made debugging tough, since the resulting HTML was hard to read, and resulted in some appearance strangenesses, too.
I much prefer my more primitive C/CGI system. Using mySQL's instantaneous connection and disconnection, it's not much different in speed from allegedly more sophisticated solutions, and I can produce readable and maintanable code.
D
Well, yes; see yesterday's reruns segment of As the Apple Turns (www.appleturns.com) for a nice little recap.
But I dunno. It seems like it would actually be fun to be Larry, but I can't say I'd enjoy being Gates or Ballmer. So for the mercurial cool factor, Larry's hard to beat, although I suppose Steve Jobs gives him a run for his money at times.
But I don't think Steve has as much fun either.
D