We faced the same challenge at our company recently.
My company publishes a CMS for specialized niches. The product started around 2002, and we developed it without real direction, since we added functionalities as we needed them. The first years were great, since we were the only ones to release such a tool, but some concurrents emerged after a few years, proposing a much cheaper alternative.
As we built the project without long-term view, adding new functionalities took more and more time, since the codebase was hard to maintain (for information, we mainly use VB.NET with a lot of XSLT).
Two years ago, we realized that the interface could be improved for the customers, but it was impossible to do it with a reasonable amount of effort. Thus, the CEO decided to start a new product, and we used an interesting approach: the customers approach (or technically, BDD, behaviour driven development).
The idea is to describe scenarios and implement them one after another, using agile methodologies. For this kind of approach, you really need to hear about your customers, and write the scenarios that they need, and it's obviously impossible when you start your company.
The project is now radically different, but not yet released, since it's really a subset of the previous project.
What we discovered is that we needed to maintain the old codebase, because our consultants still used it, and it is difficult to sell the new project, since it's really different.
So I would suggest that if you want to totally rewrite your codebase, you need to place a few resources on maintaining the original project, since it won't probably die before a long time...
Where did I blame Apple ? They are just going for profit, like any sane company should do. However, I doubt it's sustainable in the long term.
or do you really want to pay 10 times as much to get the whole world on equal wages?
This is exactly what is going to kill capitalism. Since their jobs is so much cheaper, why are you still working ? You should have been replaced by a chinese with 1/10 of your salary.
Transferring all manufacturing tools to an external country only impoverish your country in the long term. It also makes you dependent on them. I agree that cheap products (and I mean non technological ones, like clothes) should be done at the lowest possible costs, but for technological products, you just give your technology to China, and the quality is a lot more poor than you could have done here.
BTW, did you notice the trend of disposable technology, like computers, mobile phones, televisions, fridges or washing machines ? 20 years ago, it was possible to buy a fridge that would last 20 years. Nowadays, it's impossible. Planned obsolescence is the new plague.
Suicides at home are not taken into account in these statistics.
In our western countries, suicides during work are really rare, and it's also rare to die because of an accident at work, compared to China.
And what about your sick way of counting deads ? Any life is precious, but of course, the value of their lives is less important than the money they can provide us.
I guess that it was at this time that Bill Gates realized that he could make more money by copying products and selling them (and of course, he stopped coding, since he realized he was an excellent seller).
The most successful product Microsoft ever wrote is Office, which killed all its concurrents, but it's not really innovative.
Visual Studio is still trying to copy features from external companies (do you remember Turbo C at the time, it was way ahead of Microsoft C Compiler).
No, the problem is when you connect your computer to the Internet.
I remember the one time when I installed Windows XP (without SP), and launched a windows update. My computer crashed while downloading SP2, meaning that worms installed on compromised Windows were attacking every computer in the world in less than 15 minutes. It's difficult to protect yourself when the protection needs more time to install than to be attacked.
One of my colleagues owns a lot of movies in BluRay format.
Since it's a PITA to access his collection, he simply rips the Blurays and reencode them in high-quality. I don't have the details about the quality, but I guess an encoded movie is around 2 gigabytes with 5.1 sound.
This way, all his collection is available on a single disk on his network.
Unless you are a top BT uploader of BDRip movies, I think you don't need to keep your collection available online. Use tapes or DVD to store them.
The fact that stack crashing doesn't exist in interpreted code alone demonstrates that languages (or their runtime environments that are inherent to a language) are not all equal in exploit-ability levels.
I was hired as an engineer on Rizom 7 years ago to work on the tools to create the world (I remember seing my name in some of the sources), but I quit after one month.
The real problem of such large games is that there should be a guy who is able to create an universe and be able to communicate his view to his team.
However, there was nobody like that (or perhaps nobody communicated about it ?), and I sensed that there was no clear direction. I was a very experienced game programmer at that time, and I was able to quickly understand when a project was viable or not.
Also, the large team behind Rizom was clearly only interested into the technical parts, and after one month of writing tools, I realized that they were never going to release the game, since it was not their priority.
Giving the project to the OSS community won't change anything, since nobody has a clear view how to create an universe that is both logical and fun.
It's pretty sad to see a project die after such a long amount of time and work.
Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
You are right, but not for the reason you thought...
In fact, the recent movies and series are written with story writing software, like Dramatica Pro. This allows to build complex stories, and most importantly, the story remains consistent even if the writers change !
The idea of the studios is to have writers being disposable, or at least they could be changed during the life of the serie. This was impossible 20 years ago.
BTW, using flashbacks in a serie makes it easier to write, since as a writer, you can add whatever you want at any point.
Pirates: please, don't pollute the Tor network with your files. Tor is only for web browsing or for low quality video streaming.
If you really want to download pirated stuff, there are tons of other ways than to kill Tor. If you are able to use Tor (which is for the tech savvy), you should be able to discover the other ways. Hints: NNTP, HTTP, IRC.
if I though I was getting fired for doing my job, and feared my bank accounts might be frozen (paranoia), I'd likely want to be a bit flush with cash too.
Wow, do you really need over $10,000 for your daily expenses ? If this is the case, could you lend me some money, pretty please ?
He was railroaded because he exposed incompetence.
From where comes this weird conclusion ?
He blocked all access to their network, and used what I call 'noble motives'. This is a manipulation trick we all use when we want to look good, even though we did wrong things. Using the excuse that everybody is incompetent (see, they don't even have access, so they are incompetent), he locked everybody away, and all his actions show that he wanted to use his access as a ransom. He seemed also to consider that he was the owner of the network.
I know several guys like him, and I can assure you that they are sociopaths. It's very difficult to work with them, since they place traps everywhere to prevent you from working. They tend to degrade you, and show themselves as the only competent ones, because only they can do this particular job. Frankly, if you do your job correctly, you should be easily replaced, but your real value resides in your human traits.
If Childs had been a little bit honest, I doubt he would be in his current situation.
Although the punition is tough, I hope he'll accept the lesson and change for the better.
At the time, the best computers were Pentium 133 with 512 Mb. The game engine was coded in assembly and relied heavily on floating point.
Integer computation (multiply/divide) was a lot slower than using floating point.
And yes, I know all the tricks, like using fractions or fixed point arithmetic, but the best computer were too slow, and the accuracy of fixed point is terrible. The race was on a very large map, and all vehicles could collide with each others...
23 March 1994 - Aeroflot Flight 593 crashed on its way to Hong Kong. The captain, Yaroslav Kudrinsky, invited his two children into the cockpit, and permitted them to sit at the controls, against airline regulations. His fifteen-year-old son, Eldar Kudrinsky, accidentally disconnected the autopilot, causing the plane to bank to the right before diving. The co-pilot brought up the plane too far, causing it to stall and start a flat spin. The pilots recovered the plane but it crashed into a forest, killing all 75 people on board.
At that time, I was programming a network game about trucks, and when when replaying a demo on the network, the players desynchronized after a few minutes.
I spent a lot of time looking into the logs, and discovered that there was a floating point error that desynchronized the trucks. I still believe that the FDIV bug was much more frequent than publicized, and it had more impact than what Intel originally described.
Intel released a software patch to Watcom C++ library, but the patch was terrible, with the FDIV replaced with a lot of instructions just to detect the cases where the bug might appear, and use shiftings instead of FDIV.
I think that the bug was much publicized because it was the beginning of Internet, where a lot of new information went unfiltered, and Intel completely missed their communication on this bug discovered by Thomas Nicely. Here is the whole story behind this bug: http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html
I went to several chiropractors and osteopaths, and the best I ever encountered was a cranial osteopath, who was able to realign my skull (I did not think it was even possible !). When he manipulated me, I didn't sense anything, but I did some meditation this night, and suffered like hell. A few days after, I noticed that my glasses were properly aligned. I had an accident 15 years ago, resulting in cranial trauma, and he was able to readjust my whole bones structure (although he was unable to detect my flat feet).
BTW, you should avoid AT ALL COSTS the chiropractors or etiopaths who use cracking on your skeleton.
First, there is a good risk that when they crack your bones, it goes wrong. My wife taught industrial cleaning to handicapped people, and there was one woman who was handicapped because of the chiropractor butchered her, by applying wrong torsions.
Secondly, it's very dangerous to replace the bones regularly, since they tend to "float" after a few times. One of my friends had a girlfriend practicing chiropractic on him. Since then, the bones on his back are moving pretty freely (that's scary). This is especially dangerous for etiopaths and various cracking practitioners, since they experiment the treatments on themselves and have problems later !
Thirdly, they treat the symptoms and not the causes. In my case, an ethiologist cracked me to increase my lateral mobility, but the reduction reappeared after a few months, because my body tends to find a position where it does not suffer. So it would have required that I had to go to see him regularly. He should have tried to find the problem instead, which is that I have flat feet and tend to sleep in weird positions, all of these leading to my skeleton trying to find a comfortable configuration. In my case, doing a few light physical exercises every morning lead to better results after one month.
Slashdot Mirror
The future sucks badly.
Hopefully, the world will end in 2012.
US is 26th: http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/
Just before Norway and Russia but after Ukraine and Austria.
But I guess it's normal, because of the small amount of money invested in the US infrastructure...
Before I discovered Martin Gardner's books, I was unable to understand mathematics, and I had very bad grades.
One day, I bought one of his books, and suddenly, I was able to see that math and logic was fun, and we could play with them.
To the amazement of my teachers, my grades increased in a few days, and I wanted to become a mathematician at this moment.
I became a programmer because I wanted to solve some of his puzzles so badly with my computer.
Thanks Martin !
We faced the same challenge at our company recently.
My company publishes a CMS for specialized niches.
The product started around 2002, and we developed it without real direction, since we added functionalities as we needed them.
The first years were great, since we were the only ones to release such a tool, but some concurrents emerged after a few years, proposing a much cheaper alternative.
As we built the project without long-term view, adding new functionalities took more and more time, since the codebase was hard to maintain (for information, we mainly use VB.NET with a lot of XSLT).
Two years ago, we realized that the interface could be improved for the customers, but it was impossible to do it with a reasonable amount of effort.
Thus, the CEO decided to start a new product, and we used an interesting approach: the customers approach (or technically, BDD, behaviour driven development).
The idea is to describe scenarios and implement them one after another, using agile methodologies.
For this kind of approach, you really need to hear about your customers, and write the scenarios that they need, and it's obviously impossible when you start your company.
The project is now radically different, but not yet released, since it's really a subset of the previous project.
What we discovered is that we needed to maintain the old codebase, because our consultants still used it, and it is difficult to sell the new project, since it's really different.
So I would suggest that if you want to totally rewrite your codebase, you need to place a few resources on maintaining the original project, since it won't probably die before a long time...
but to blame Apple for it is far-fetched.
Where did I blame Apple ?
They are just going for profit, like any sane company should do. However, I doubt it's sustainable in the long term.
or do you really want to pay 10 times as much to get the whole world on equal wages?
This is exactly what is going to kill capitalism.
Since their jobs is so much cheaper, why are you still working ? You should have been replaced by a chinese with 1/10 of your salary.
Transferring all manufacturing tools to an external country only impoverish your country in the long term. It also makes you dependent on them.
I agree that cheap products (and I mean non technological ones, like clothes) should be done at the lowest possible costs, but for technological products, you just give your technology to China, and the quality is a lot more poor than you could have done here.
BTW, did you notice the trend of disposable technology, like computers, mobile phones, televisions, fridges or washing machines ?
20 years ago, it was possible to buy a fridge that would last 20 years.
Nowadays, it's impossible.
Planned obsolescence is the new plague.
The counted suicides are the ones at the factory.
Suicides at home are not taken into account in these statistics.
In our western countries, suicides during work are really rare, and it's also rare to die because of an accident at work, compared to China.
And what about your sick way of counting deads ?
Any life is precious, but of course, the value of their lives is less important than the money they can provide us.
In fact, Microsoft only wrote Basic at this time (remember GWBasic ?).
They licensed Q-Dos, which was a copy of CPM at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS
I guess that it was at this time that Bill Gates realized that he could make more money by copying products and selling them (and of course, he stopped coding, since he realized he was an excellent seller).
The most successful product Microsoft ever wrote is Office, which killed all its concurrents, but it's not really innovative.
Visual Studio is still trying to copy features from external companies (do you remember Turbo C at the time, it was way ahead of Microsoft C Compiler).
You got me, since I clicked on the link !
You might become infected just by watching porn.
In my case, I though that "Flaw Data" was a new product from Microsoft.
No, the problem is when you connect your computer to the Internet.
I remember the one time when I installed Windows XP (without SP), and launched a windows update.
My computer crashed while downloading SP2, meaning that worms installed on compromised Windows were attacking every computer in the world in less than 15 minutes.
It's difficult to protect yourself when the protection needs more time to install than to be attacked.
One of my colleagues owns a lot of movies in BluRay format.
Since it's a PITA to access his collection, he simply rips the Blurays and reencode them in high-quality.
I don't have the details about the quality, but I guess an encoded movie is around 2 gigabytes with 5.1 sound.
This way, all his collection is available on a single disk on his network.
Unless you are a top BT uploader of BDRip movies, I think you don't need to keep your collection available online.
Use tapes or DVD to store them.
Work is so much better when your coworkers are indeed friends.
I once worked with one of my friends (I mean much more than an acquaintance, but much less than a close friend), and he was the boss.
It was a terrible experience for me, since he expected so much from me, and he was quite a tyrant.
Now, I'm pretty sure it's better to befriend coworkers than to work with friends.
The fact that stack crashing doesn't exist in interpreted code alone demonstrates that languages (or their runtime environments that are inherent to a language) are not all equal in exploit-ability levels.
You are totally wrong, since Javascript, which is interpreted, has numerous exploits involving stack crashing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_spraying
with an example here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/381171/help-me-understand-this-javascript-exploit
ActionScript (from Flash) is also an interpreted language, and full of security bugs !
I was hired as an engineer on Rizom 7 years ago to work on the tools to create the world (I remember seing my name in some of the sources), but I quit after one month.
The real problem of such large games is that there should be a guy who is able to create an universe and be able to communicate his view to his team.
However, there was nobody like that (or perhaps nobody communicated about it ?), and I sensed that there was no clear direction. I was a very experienced game programmer at that time, and I was able to quickly understand when a project was viable or not.
Also, the large team behind Rizom was clearly only interested into the technical parts, and after one month of writing tools, I realized that they were never going to release the game, since it was not their priority.
Giving the project to the OSS community won't change anything, since nobody has a clear view how to create an universe that is both logical and fun.
It's pretty sad to see a project die after such a long amount of time and work.
Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
You are right, but not for the reason you thought...
In fact, the recent movies and series are written with story writing software, like Dramatica Pro.
This allows to build complex stories, and most importantly, the story remains consistent even if the writers change !
You might have heard about the Writers Guild of America strike, or strikes before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hollywood_strikes
The idea of the studios is to have writers being disposable, or at least they could be changed during the life of the serie. This was impossible 20 years ago.
BTW, using flashbacks in a serie makes it easier to write, since as a writer, you can add whatever you want at any point.
Now, I understand why Tor is so slow.
Pirates: please, don't pollute the Tor network with your files.
Tor is only for web browsing or for low quality video streaming.
If you really want to download pirated stuff, there are tons of other ways than to kill Tor.
If you are able to use Tor (which is for the tech savvy), you should be able to discover the other ways.
Hints: NNTP, HTTP, IRC.
No problem, you just have to use a floppy disk to update their firmware.
if I though I was getting fired for doing my job, and feared my bank accounts might be frozen (paranoia), I'd likely want to be a bit flush with cash too.
Wow, do you really need over $10,000 for your daily expenses ?
If this is the case, could you lend me some money, pretty please ?
He was railroaded because he exposed incompetence.
From where comes this weird conclusion ?
He blocked all access to their network, and used what I call 'noble motives'. This is a manipulation trick we all use when we want to look good, even though we did wrong things.
Using the excuse that everybody is incompetent (see, they don't even have access, so they are incompetent), he locked everybody away, and all his actions show that he wanted to use his access as a ransom. He seemed also to consider that he was the owner of the network.
I know several guys like him, and I can assure you that they are sociopaths.
It's very difficult to work with them, since they place traps everywhere to prevent you from working.
They tend to degrade you, and show themselves as the only competent ones, because only they can do this particular job.
Frankly, if you do your job correctly, you should be easily replaced, but your real value resides in your human traits.
If Childs had been a little bit honest, I doubt he would be in his current situation.
Although the punition is tough, I hope he'll accept the lesson and change for the better.
At the time, the best computers were Pentium 133 with 512 Mb.
The game engine was coded in assembly and relied heavily on floating point.
Integer computation (multiply/divide) was a lot slower than using floating point.
And yes, I know all the tricks, like using fractions or fixed point arithmetic, but the best computer were too slow, and the accuracy of fixed point is terrible.
The race was on a very large map, and all vehicles could collide with each others...
I have yet to hear of a single incident where some distracted pilot crashed and killed people.
Ok, make your choice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_error
For example:
23 March 1994 - Aeroflot Flight 593 crashed on its way to Hong Kong. The captain, Yaroslav Kudrinsky, invited his two children into the cockpit, and permitted them to sit at the controls, against airline regulations. His fifteen-year-old son, Eldar Kudrinsky, accidentally disconnected the autopilot, causing the plane to bank to the right before diving. The co-pilot brought up the plane too far, causing it to stall and start a flat spin. The pilots recovered the plane but it crashed into a forest, killing all 75 people on board.
One-in-a-few-billion problem ?
At that time, I was programming a network game about trucks, and when when replaying a demo on the network, the players desynchronized after a few minutes.
I spent a lot of time looking into the logs, and discovered that there was a floating point error that desynchronized the trucks.
I still believe that the FDIV bug was much more frequent than publicized, and it had more impact than what Intel originally described.
Intel released a software patch to Watcom C++ library, but the patch was terrible, with the FDIV replaced with a lot of instructions just to detect the cases where the bug might appear, and use shiftings instead of FDIV.
I think that the bug was much publicized because it was the beginning of Internet, where a lot of new information went unfiltered, and Intel completely missed their communication on this bug discovered by Thomas Nicely.
Here is the whole story behind this bug:
http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html
Just share a folder, and use a tool like Desktop Google http://desktop.google.com/, so that it will index your files.
If I remember correctly, you can access to a distant Desktop Google with your browser.
This way, you can fine tune the rights for every folder without having to use a complex web interface.
Do not use your gmail password on another site !
I think your gmail account has been hacked because you provided your gmail address, and created an account with your gmail password on another site.
When your account is compromised, don't forget to check the Settings/Accounts and Imports, to verify that no account has been added here.
I went to several chiropractors and osteopaths, and the best I ever encountered was a cranial osteopath, who was able to realign my skull (I did not think it was even possible !). When he manipulated me, I didn't sense anything, but I did some meditation this night, and suffered like hell. A few days after, I noticed that my glasses were properly aligned. I had an accident 15 years ago, resulting in cranial trauma, and he was able to readjust my whole bones structure (although he was unable to detect my flat feet).
BTW, you should avoid AT ALL COSTS the chiropractors or etiopaths who use cracking on your skeleton.
First, there is a good risk that when they crack your bones, it goes wrong. My wife taught industrial cleaning to handicapped people, and there was one woman who was handicapped because of the chiropractor butchered her, by applying wrong torsions.
Secondly, it's very dangerous to replace the bones regularly, since they tend to "float" after a few times.
One of my friends had a girlfriend practicing chiropractic on him. Since then, the bones on his back are moving pretty freely (that's scary).
This is especially dangerous for etiopaths and various cracking practitioners, since they experiment the treatments on themselves and have problems later !
Thirdly, they treat the symptoms and not the causes. In my case, an ethiologist cracked me to increase my lateral mobility, but the reduction reappeared after a few months, because my body tends to find a position where it does not suffer.
So it would have required that I had to go to see him regularly.
He should have tried to find the problem instead, which is that I have flat feet and tend to sleep in weird positions, all of these leading to my skeleton trying to find a comfortable configuration.
In my case, doing a few light physical exercises every morning lead to better results after one month.