What principles are you talking about? I don't recall a single RFC that specifies that sort of stuff.
I've read a lot of RFCs over the years and I somehow don't recall any of them having to do with openness, sharing of knowledge, or any of the other traits people keep thinking the internet ought to have.
"mobile phone with camera: just take a pic of the jam and send it to your bosses email."
Yeah. Like anyone's boss reads their e-mail. Right...
Heck. If anyone did that, he'd probably figure they was surfing the web from home and screwing with him. What are the chances of a PHB beliving someone was really in their car taking photos with a phone?
The dilberts of the world never win.
Re:Flash-only unfortunate?
on
Fahrenheit
·
· Score: 2
Here. Have a free clue before you did youself any deeper of a hole.
OpenSWF: Here you can download code, the specs, etc. You can write your own player if you want. Other people have.
Re:Flash-only unfortunate?
on
Fahrenheit
·
· Score: 1
Ok. Maybe I'm a bit obtuse but WTF is the point in making a web site for a computer game accessable to blind people? Do you really think they're expecting to sell a lot of video games to blind people?
If anyone wants a clear understand of the disconnection between academia and the real world, feel free to download this pdf and stare in horror at Chapter 1. I don't think I can make it to chapter 2 at this point.
So far I've read a poem that, while interesting, a quick search on google shows that the person who presented it is also the translator. Right. Can someone please find the original so we can verify this for ourselves? Thank you.
I've seen police, fire fighters, and medical personnel compared with researchers in the social science and humanities. I've seen proposals for information to be on a "need to know" basis, with the only people who "need to know" being the government and (of course) researchers. I love it when someone welcomes a loss of freedom provided it doesn't include them.
Extreme Programming is a potential methodology to try. The use of pair programming in particular is something you should be looking at. Make them drive and you assist. Progress will follow. Some of the principles you already appear to be trying to follow, such as frequent small releases.
Reading the question, the point that sticks in my mind is that you admit to having even less project management experience than they have coding experience. Remember that as you think about replacing them with experienced people who know how to do the job they've been assigned. It seems to me that you need to stop doing their jobs and start learning how to do yours, which, like it or not, is being team leader and project manager.
Organization is also key. Read the last half of your second and third paragraphs again and tell me that you sat down and carefully organized your question. It's a careless error, but for someone who is complaining about their coding styles, it indicates a potential double standard.
What impresses me the most is that you seem to understand the solution needs to be found in management and methodologies but you don't discuss what (if any) methodologies you're using (although I'm suspecting waterfall right now).
Don't make them come to you. You're the leader. Be there for them, stay out of their way, and build trust. If you show leadership then they'll come to you. If you show tyranny, disgust, annoyance, or anything else, then they'll be happy to continue not producing anything in a vacumn.
Six weeks into a project with a tight deadline is not releasing code "early and often". In our world, six weeks is two iterations, each with their own deliverables, and a major iteration coming to a close. "Early and often" to many people means multiple code releases with full tests on a daily basis.
Remember, coders are no better than their enviroment. While you may have created an enviroment that works for you, it sounds like, as team leader, you've failed to create an enviroment that works for them. Perhaps it's time to put away 'your' piece of the project and start fixing the real problems.
"Julf's anonymous server seems to me to be contributing to the erosion of civility and responsibility that have been the
hallmarks of the more traditional parts of USENET. More than
that, Julf has refused to even discuss a compromise to his
position that all hierarchies should be open, by default, to his
server."
"There shouldn't be much controversy over this, but there will be
anyhow.:-)"
"Though I disagree with Depews actions, he stood up and took the
heat. an8785 engaged in an act of moral cowardice, and is now
hiding behind the shield of anonymity. Previously my opinion
was that the an8785 should simply be disabled. Given that an8785
has actively urged people to take actions to harm Depew and
refused to adequately reverse those actions, I now think an8785
should be unmasked. Should Depew come to actual harm, the
anonymous service might find itself in interesting waters."
"I disagree. an8785 did what s/he felt was necessary, and voicing
one's opinions (even anonymously) is the better path than not
doing so."
"In other words, anonymous servers with inadequate safegards
protect law-breakers from the consequences of their actions.
*That* is what I oppose."
Read the discussion. Note the use of REAL NAMES in almost every instance. Note the baseline belief differences between the admins of yesteryear and the admins of today. Privacy, as we define it today, was almost unthinkable then. And unless we remember that, blaming the people who behaved in one way a decade ago for not conforming to modern standards is not only a disservice, but a complete denial of how much we have changed.
As I read all these rants about privacy and the internet and how everyone knows to keep their information private, I wonder how many of these people are really simply internet newbies.
And I mean that in the old fashioned/. sense. How many of them were there back when those of us who used the net lived off of.plan,.profile, gopher, archie, veronica, jughead, pine, tin, nn, etc. (and watched or helped many of them emerge).
In 1993 who would have thought a question posted to alt.personals.bondage would have been stored in a giant database and saved for the world to access almost a decade later? Who would have cared?
At the time the debate over privacy centered around the existance of anon.penet.fi (and later Dick Depew's incredible failure when he took matters into his own hands).To come out now and say that we should have always been careful is like telling someone they should have had an airbag in their 1930 Buick. The reasons for privacy then were much different and the popular belief was that privacy wasn't needed by the average net user.
This is one of the issues the internet community has completely flip/flopped around on. Failure to realize that is basicly putting a big blind spot into how this situation has come about. The net went from a trusted space to an untrustworthy space rather quickly, and it's a little late to undo everything we did back then.
"Open Source is more secure because everyone can look for security holes"? (Even if no one actually does, which is likely on some of these projects.)
P2P increases/decreases music sales (pick your favorite, they're both just guesses)
COBOL is dead
We live in a world of blatent lies and guesses. What bothers me is that the article tries to pin the blame on the source of the "facts" instead of the horde of people who just accepted the "facts" as facts. Heck, Slashdot readers will rip into any moderator dumb enough to make THAT mistake. Why are we willing to accept such a low standard from anywhere else?
It's depressing to watch a reporter claim someone else is being irresponsible for starting a bad rumor and forgive everyone else for their complete failure to verify the truth of what turned out to be an urban legend.
You're also more disorganized, apathetic, whining, uneducated, unrealistic, and argumentative. What's your point?
The "movement" is a few actual activists (read, "people who get up off their ass and actually do something") surrounded by a large horde of greedy children who find it's a great chance to shoot of their mouth and get "free as in beer" everything. It's a movement that supports P2P (since it allows them to use others creations as they choose) while damning anyone who would take "their" software, modify it, and distribute the binaries without releasing the code.
Sure, the internet is moving from free to fee. That's because, despite popular belief, these services actually cost money. Bandwidth isn't free. Hardware isn't free. And the internet is rapidly proving that advertising isn't really all it was claimed to be. (since now the companies can better track ad results themselves).
Is slashdot free? For some, but those people get a big ass ad in the middle of the story and a banner ad the size of Mount Rushmore. Is Fast Company free? Sure. If you want the big banner ad there too. That's how they manage to afford to keep having a website up and running.
Do you really think John Ellis, when he wrote the article, did it gratis? Be real. He got paid and someone has to pay him. That someone passes the bill onto everyone else or gets money from advertising, public funding, or grants.
Here's the hint of the day. The people capable of getting things for free are the people also capable of paying for it, since they're the people whose ass isn't glued to a computer screen waiting for the latest p2p copyright violations to get to their system. They don't care that it's no longer free. What they care about it is that's reasonably priced. They can start their own pay service (read: "porn site") and quickly be able to afford all the nice pay things on the internet with a minimum of fuss. It's not hard work or rocket science. It's basic economics. Even Bucky Fuller realized that some things need to be paid for, just as some things are better to give away. You just have to know which and get off your butt and do it.
"I want to see a future where when I buy something, I own it."
As nice and simple as this sounds, I find that I end up not really understanding it. If I buy the toaster and the alarm clock and take them both apart and put them together in a new way, I should also be able to sell my creation.
Ok. I'm fine with that. And I can see where licenses, patents, and other legal entities get in the way of this.
Unfortunately, the Open Source community depends on a number of licenses that completely prevents this. If I actually buy a copy of Linux I can tear it apart and modify it, but I don't have the rights to simply resell my new creation. There are a number of requirements I have to meet before I can do that. I have to essentially provide a free copy of my changes in raw form to Big Brother and everyone else in order to do that.
Hmmmm. This has just gotten a lot more complicated. Do I want other people tearing apart my work and distributing the new creations as theirs? Do I want to tear apart other people's work and distribute the new creation as mine?
I think that's a question we need to ask ourselves. Do we want everyone to have these freedoms and are we willing to accept how these freedoms can be abused by corporations and individuals?
IMO, the answer is here: "In reluctant fairness I must say that I haven't updated my word processor since 1995."
Now let us consider the state of the Mac in 1995, 7 years ago, the last time he probably would have looked. Apple had dropped the incredibly open II series and was in the middle of what may be considered the most closed combination of hardware and software ever to be placed upon the marketplace.
Remember, the Mac of 7 years ago is not the Mac of today. Windows 3.14 coding options looked like the OSDN network in comparison. By 1995 the Beagle Brother's peeks and pokes charts had faded into memory, never to be seen again. (At least until I find a big enough scanner)
OSS has grown up in many ways. Because of this, it's time we stopped acting like children and took responsibility. As a group, we decided to adopt restrictive licenses in order to prevent our creations from being used in a manner we did not approve of and we decided that we actually cared who adopted our operating systems, our programs, and we decided that we were going to compete against organizations like Microsoft.
Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.
Down that path lies marketing (including FUD, which we seem to have adopted quite easily), profit (which we still claim to want, even if we debate how it's actually obtained under this model.), and responsibilty (since we presume people will use this O/S to do business.)
If you don't want to take the responsibilty to handle the tasks that aren't fun (such as marketing), please don't complain in a few years that the project died of lack of support and adoption.
In case you decided, for some reason, to read all of these comments, Thank you.
Thank you for Orn, Omnivore, and Ox, which taught me the rules to the Game of Life (Martin Gardner/ Scientific American).
Years later, as I still write alife experiments and study emergent behavior, I know that had it not been for those few books, my life would have been much poorer.
"and some clients believe the FUD being spewed/parroted by media"
Which FUD are we talking about? This entire series by been a collection of FUD on both sides. In case you missed it Slashdot is also doling out large quantities of: FEAR: Of loss of privacy, of misuse by Microsoft, os loss of user's rights. UNCERTAINTY: of what's going to happen period. Almost everything I've read so far is speculation. DOUBT: Doubting Microsoft's intentions, doubting it will work. How much doubt do you want?
As a community, we've not only grown a huge distrust for Microsoft, we've grown a love for their methods. Not only do we happily wage wars with FUD, we seem (as I look through the moderated up comments), apparently advocate licenses that prevent Palladium from working with "open hardware" (sorry, but that doesn't sound open to me, it sounds as exclusionary as Microsoft's standard tactics).
It's about time we returned to our core beliefs, before we lose them entirely and become what we claim to despise.
That's exactly what a government stooge would say. A little Uncertainty, maybe a little Distrust of the original site. Short of Fear, but maybe that's just to make us trust you.
How else can you explain your three digit user number if you're not an infiltrator?
</style>
And here we have a perfect example of the greed that has stepped into the shoes of Free (as in Beer) software. Someone who not only has hopped on the bandwagon because, hey, Linux is cool, but now sees their position on the bandwagon to allow they to make a profit, while at the same time pointing the finger at someone else because they want to make a profit.
And what's more amazing is that someone modded it up. (Note. In the course of this essay, someone got smart and correct that little bit of insanity. Thanks.)
Macromedia has, for quite a long time, been much more open with it's technology than other companies. Any other group has been able to download the specs, sample code, and write programs that either display or create swf files.
Are they SourceForge or FreshMeat or some other part of ODSN? Heck no. They're a company. just like any other, but while they may not meet the various acid tests everyone here is proposing, what they are doing is trying to do the Right Thing (tm). They are becoming more open. They're starting to embrace the philosophy. They're taking the risk.
And for that, they should be rewarded, not punished, lest we drive everyone else away as well.
PMI has all you need to know about certification and there are PMI meetings just about everywhere". Attend a few of those and you'll either be networked enough to improve things or fins a better job.
The difference between testing expected inputs and possible inputs is that reality doesn't limit itself to expected inputs. Heck, Sometimes it doesn't even limit itself to possible inputs.
Larger tests don't test more. What the large tests do is make sure everything works together. You need the small tests to make sure each piece actually works.
The bigger the test, the more likely that your testing platform doesn't resemble production.
There is a big difference between getting your test to run sucessfully and having bug free code.
Chances are the test cases have nothing to do with hiow the users actually use the program. Chances are the programmer has never actually seen how a user uses the program. Chances are, the first time he does he'll go back to his computer and start cursing the user for not doing things the "right" way.
If something breaks and you don't add that something to the test case you're asking for it to break again.
Testing deserves powerhouse machines and sadistic maniacs who like to break code. People who want the tests to be sucessful and don't run them that often are obviously not going to be as nasty as the real world. Even the sadistic manic has a hard time being as nasty as the real world.
Tests are less expensive than that production errors. But only if they find errors. Tests that prove the code works perfectly usually don't.
No programmer likes to be told he made a mistake. On the other hand they love a challege. Make testing fun and brutal and it'll be much more productive than if you make it boring and painless.
Let's start off by getting through the obvious. I'm a developer, a purchaser, and a beta tester.
The first truth of software development is that customers demand software immediately. They are not willing to wait for bug free versions to come out, or more accurately, those willing to wait are not nearly as vocal as the ones who want it now.
And the beta test, well, that's just a nightmare in itself. Between the number of beta testers who break NDA agreements, the ones who give their friends a copy of the beta test, and the ones who couldn't write down how to duplicate a problem if their life depended on it, it's amazing any progress is made at all during the beta test.
And all of this hinges on those peices of closed source software that the new software has to interface with. Finding out that Windows doesn't like you code is one thing, but chasing down some driver is much worse. And the people who write drivers and Operating systems have it just as bad, testing with released closed source products and hoping they work.
Yes, there is no silver bullet, but there is a large clip of small bullets that we need to learn how to start firing. We need test cases, documentation, standard interfaces, a complete removal of "hidden features" (unofficial functions that software developers rely on), and most importantly, a customer base that can all agree on a balance between "now" and "right".
quote: "According to information gathered by the group, the three executives awarded themselves ten-fold salary and bonus increases in May 2001, which were kept secret till the day after the sale of GTS's assets was announced. The three received a total of $21m (£14.7m) in 2001, a sum that amounted to 52 percent of the stock value of the company at the time, said Kaplan. By comparison, Enron's much criticized "loyalty bonuses" only amounted to a few percent of its value."
Slashdot Mirror
What principles are you talking about? I don't recall a single RFC that specifies that sort of stuff.
I've read a lot of RFCs over the years and I somehow don't recall any of them having to do with openness, sharing of knowledge, or any of the other traits people keep thinking the internet ought to have.
"mobile phone with camera: just take a pic of the jam and send it to your bosses email."
Yeah. Like anyone's boss reads their e-mail. Right...
Heck. If anyone did that, he'd probably figure they was surfing the web from home and screwing with him. What are the chances of a PHB beliving someone was really in their car taking photos with a phone?
The dilberts of the world never win.
Here. Have a free clue before you did youself any deeper of a hole. OpenSWF: Here you can download code, the specs, etc. You can write your own player if you want. Other people have.
Ok. Maybe I'm a bit obtuse but WTF is the point in making a web site for a computer game accessable to blind people? Do you really think they're expecting to sell a lot of video games to blind people?
So far I've read a poem that, while interesting, a quick search on google shows that the person who presented it is also the translator. Right. Can someone please find the original so we can verify this for ourselves? Thank you.
I've seen police, fire fighters, and medical personnel compared with researchers in the social science and humanities. I've seen proposals for information to be on a "need to know" basis, with the only people who "need to know" being the government and (of course) researchers. I love it when someone welcomes a loss of freedom provided it doesn't include them.
If you want some good music to listen to this to, I reccomend Love Me, I'm a Liberal by Phil Ochs unless you're too young, in which case you might as well listen to the Jello Biafra version
Reading the question, the point that sticks in my mind is that you admit to having even less project management experience than they have coding experience. Remember that as you think about replacing them with experienced people who know how to do the job they've been assigned. It seems to me that you need to stop doing their jobs and start learning how to do yours, which, like it or not, is being team leader and project manager.
Organization is also key. Read the last half of your second and third paragraphs again and tell me that you sat down and carefully organized your question. It's a careless error, but for someone who is complaining about their coding styles, it indicates a potential double standard.
What impresses me the most is that you seem to understand the solution needs to be found in management and methodologies but you don't discuss what (if any) methodologies you're using (although I'm suspecting waterfall right now).
Don't make them come to you. You're the leader. Be there for them, stay out of their way, and build trust. If you show leadership then they'll come to you. If you show tyranny, disgust, annoyance, or anything else, then they'll be happy to continue not producing anything in a vacumn.
Six weeks into a project with a tight deadline is not releasing code "early and often". In our world, six weeks is two iterations, each with their own deliverables, and a major iteration coming to a close. "Early and often" to many people means multiple code releases with full tests on a daily basis.
Remember, coders are no better than their enviroment. While you may have created an enviroment that works for you, it sounds like, as team leader, you've failed to create an enviroment that works for them. Perhaps it's time to put away 'your' piece of the project and start fixing the real problems.
Here are some classic tidbits:
"Julf's anonymous server seems to me to be contributing to the erosion of civility and responsibility that have been the hallmarks of the more traditional parts of USENET. More than that, Julf has refused to even discuss a compromise to his position that all hierarchies should be open, by default, to his server."
"There shouldn't be much controversy over this, but there will be anyhow. :-)"
"Though I disagree with Depews actions, he stood up and took the heat. an8785 engaged in an act of moral cowardice, and is now hiding behind the shield of anonymity. Previously my opinion was that the an8785 should simply be disabled. Given that an8785 has actively urged people to take actions to harm Depew and refused to adequately reverse those actions, I now think an8785 should be unmasked. Should Depew come to actual harm, the anonymous service might find itself in interesting waters."
"I disagree. an8785 did what s/he felt was necessary, and voicing one's opinions (even anonymously) is the better path than not doing so."
"In other words, anonymous servers with inadequate safegards protect law-breakers from the consequences of their actions. *That* is what I oppose."
Read the discussion. Note the use of REAL NAMES in almost every instance. Note the baseline belief differences between the admins of yesteryear and the admins of today. Privacy, as we define it today, was almost unthinkable then. And unless we remember that, blaming the people who behaved in one way a decade ago for not conforming to modern standards is not only a disservice, but a complete denial of how much we have changed.
And I mean that in the old fashioned /. sense. How many of them were there back when those of us who used the net lived off of .plan, .profile, gopher, archie, veronica, jughead, pine, tin, nn, etc. (and watched or helped many of them emerge).
In 1993 who would have thought a question posted to alt.personals.bondage would have been stored in a giant database and saved for the world to access almost a decade later? Who would have cared?
At the time the debate over privacy centered around the existance of anon.penet.fi (and later Dick Depew's incredible failure when he took matters into his own hands).To come out now and say that we should have always been careful is like telling someone they should have had an airbag in their 1930 Buick. The reasons for privacy then were much different and the popular belief was that privacy wasn't needed by the average net user.
This is one of the issues the internet community has completely flip/flopped around on. Failure to realize that is basicly putting a big blind spot into how this situation has come about. The net went from a trusted space to an untrustworthy space rather quickly, and it's a little late to undo everything we did back then.
- "Open Source is more secure because everyone can look for security holes"? (Even if no one actually does, which is likely on some of these projects.)
- P2P increases/decreases music sales (pick your favorite, they're both just guesses)
- COBOL is dead
We live in a world of blatent lies and guesses. What bothers me is that the article tries to pin the blame on the source of the "facts" instead of the horde of people who just accepted the "facts" as facts. Heck, Slashdot readers will rip into any moderator dumb enough to make THAT mistake. Why are we willing to accept such a low standard from anywhere else?It's depressing to watch a reporter claim someone else is being irresponsible for starting a bad rumor and forgive everyone else for their complete failure to verify the truth of what turned out to be an urban legend.
The "movement" is a few actual activists (read, "people who get up off their ass and actually do something") surrounded by a large horde of greedy children who find it's a great chance to shoot of their mouth and get "free as in beer" everything. It's a movement that supports P2P (since it allows them to use others creations as they choose) while damning anyone who would take "their" software, modify it, and distribute the binaries without releasing the code.
Sure, the internet is moving from free to fee. That's because, despite popular belief, these services actually cost money. Bandwidth isn't free. Hardware isn't free. And the internet is rapidly proving that advertising isn't really all it was claimed to be. (since now the companies can better track ad results themselves).
Is slashdot free? For some, but those people get a big ass ad in the middle of the story and a banner ad the size of Mount Rushmore. Is Fast Company free? Sure. If you want the big banner ad there too. That's how they manage to afford to keep having a website up and running.
Do you really think John Ellis, when he wrote the article, did it gratis? Be real. He got paid and someone has to pay him. That someone passes the bill onto everyone else or gets money from advertising, public funding, or grants.
Here's the hint of the day. The people capable of getting things for free are the people also capable of paying for it, since they're the people whose ass isn't glued to a computer screen waiting for the latest p2p copyright violations to get to their system. They don't care that it's no longer free. What they care about it is that's reasonably priced. They can start their own pay service (read: "porn site") and quickly be able to afford all the nice pay things on the internet with a minimum of fuss. It's not hard work or rocket science. It's basic economics. Even Bucky Fuller realized that some things need to be paid for, just as some things are better to give away. You just have to know which and get off your butt and do it.
Them that do, have.
As nice and simple as this sounds, I find that I end up not really understanding it. If I buy the toaster and the alarm clock and take them both apart and put them together in a new way, I should also be able to sell my creation.
Ok. I'm fine with that. And I can see where licenses, patents, and other legal entities get in the way of this.
Unfortunately, the Open Source community depends on a number of licenses that completely prevents this. If I actually buy a copy of Linux I can tear it apart and modify it, but I don't have the rights to simply resell my new creation. There are a number of requirements I have to meet before I can do that. I have to essentially provide a free copy of my changes in raw form to Big Brother and everyone else in order to do that.
Hmmmm. This has just gotten a lot more complicated. Do I want other people tearing apart my work and distributing the new creations as theirs? Do I want to tear apart other people's work and distribute the new creation as mine?
I think that's a question we need to ask ourselves. Do we want everyone to have these freedoms and are we willing to accept how these freedoms can be abused by corporations and individuals?
Pray you never find out the hard way.
Now let us consider the state of the Mac in 1995, 7 years ago, the last time he probably would have looked. Apple had dropped the incredibly open II series and was in the middle of what may be considered the most closed combination of hardware and software ever to be placed upon the marketplace.
Remember, the Mac of 7 years ago is not the Mac of today. Windows 3.14 coding options looked like the OSDN network in comparison. By 1995 the Beagle Brother's peeks and pokes charts had faded into memory, never to be seen again. (At least until I find a big enough scanner)
OSS has grown up in many ways. Because of this, it's time we stopped acting like children and took responsibility. As a group, we decided to adopt restrictive licenses in order to prevent our creations from being used in a manner we did not approve of and we decided that we actually cared who adopted our operating systems, our programs, and we decided that we were going to compete against organizations like Microsoft.
Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.
Down that path lies marketing (including FUD, which we seem to have adopted quite easily), profit (which we still claim to want, even if we debate how it's actually obtained under this model.), and responsibilty (since we presume people will use this O/S to do business.)
If you don't want to take the responsibilty to handle the tasks that aren't fun (such as marketing), please don't complain in a few years that the project died of lack of support and adoption.
In case you decided, for some reason, to read all of these comments, Thank you.
Thank you for Orn, Omnivore, and Ox, which taught me the rules to the Game of Life (Martin Gardner/ Scientific American).
Years later, as I still write alife experiments and study emergent behavior, I know that had it not been for those few books, my life would have been much poorer.
Thank you.
"and some clients believe the FUD being spewed/parroted by media"
Which FUD are we talking about? This entire series by been a collection of FUD on both sides. In case you missed it Slashdot is also doling out large quantities of:
FEAR: Of loss of privacy, of misuse by Microsoft, os loss of user's rights.
UNCERTAINTY: of what's going to happen period. Almost everything I've read so far is speculation.
DOUBT: Doubting Microsoft's intentions, doubting it will work. How much doubt do you want?
As a community, we've not only grown a huge distrust for Microsoft, we've grown a love for their methods. Not only do we happily wage wars with FUD, we seem (as I look through the moderated up comments), apparently advocate licenses that prevent Palladium from working with "open hardware" (sorry, but that doesn't sound open to me, it sounds as exclusionary as Microsoft's standard tactics).
It's about time we returned to our core beliefs, before we lose them entirely and become what we claim to despise.
That's exactly what a government stooge would say. A little Uncertainty, maybe a little Distrust of the original site. Short of Fear, but maybe that's just to make us trust you.
How else can you explain your three digit user number if you're not an infiltrator?
</style>
And what's more amazing is that someone modded it up. (Note. In the course of this essay, someone got smart and correct that little bit of insanity. Thanks.)
Macromedia has, for quite a long time, been much more open with it's technology than other companies. Any other group has been able to download the specs, sample code, and write programs that either display or create swf files.
Various Source Code files for playing, reading, or writing flash files.
SWF Format Specification
Meanwhile Macromedia has been supporting Linux for awhile now. You can get a Flash 5 player for Linux (they're currently working on the Flash 6 player) and ColfFusion for Linux, Heck they even have a link to Slashdot.
Are they SourceForge or FreshMeat or some other part of ODSN? Heck no. They're a company. just like any other, but while they may not meet the various acid tests everyone here is proposing, what they are doing is trying to do the Right Thing (tm). They are becoming more open. They're starting to embrace the philosophy. They're taking the risk.
And for that, they should be rewarded, not punished, lest we drive everyone else away as well.
PMI has all you need to know about certification and there are PMI meetings just about everywhere". Attend a few of those and you'll either be networked enough to improve things or fins a better job.
Wow. It's amazing what asking to be moderated up on UserFriendly will do for your Karma. Is this a common practice now?
The difference between testing expected inputs and possible inputs is that reality doesn't limit itself to expected inputs. Heck, Sometimes it doesn't even limit itself to possible inputs.
Larger tests don't test more. What the large tests do is make sure everything works together. You need the small tests to make sure each piece actually works.
The bigger the test, the more likely that your testing platform doesn't resemble production.
There is a big difference between getting your test to run sucessfully and having bug free code.
Chances are the test cases have nothing to do with hiow the users actually use the program. Chances are the programmer has never actually seen how a user uses the program. Chances are, the first time he does he'll go back to his computer and start cursing the user for not doing things the "right" way.
If something breaks and you don't add that something to the test case you're asking for it to break again.
Testing deserves powerhouse machines and sadistic maniacs who like to break code. People who want the tests to be sucessful and don't run them that often are obviously not going to be as nasty as the real world. Even the sadistic manic has a hard time being as nasty as the real world.
Tests are less expensive than that production errors. But only if they find errors. Tests that prove the code works perfectly usually don't.
No programmer likes to be told he made a mistake. On the other hand they love a challege. Make testing fun and brutal and it'll be much more productive than if you make it boring and painless.
Let's start off by getting through the obvious. I'm a developer, a purchaser, and a beta tester.
The first truth of software development is that customers demand software immediately. They are not willing to wait for bug free versions to come out, or more accurately, those willing to wait are not nearly as vocal as the ones who want it now.
And the beta test, well, that's just a nightmare in itself. Between the number of beta testers who break NDA agreements, the ones who give their friends a copy of the beta test, and the ones who couldn't write down how to duplicate a problem if their life depended on it, it's amazing any progress is made at all during the beta test.
And all of this hinges on those peices of closed source software that the new software has to interface with. Finding out that Windows doesn't like you code is one thing, but chasing down some driver is much worse. And the people who write drivers and Operating systems have it just as bad, testing with released closed source products and hoping they work.
Yes, there is no silver bullet, but there is a large clip of small bullets that we need to learn how to start firing. We need test cases, documentation, standard interfaces, a complete removal of "hidden features" (unofficial functions that software developers rely on), and most importantly, a customer base that can all agree on a balance between "now" and "right".
quote: "According to information gathered by the group, the three executives awarded themselves ten-fold salary and bonus increases in May 2001, which were kept secret till the day after the sale of GTS's assets was announced. The three received a total of $21m (£14.7m) in 2001, a sum that amounted to 52 percent of the stock value of the company at the time, said Kaplan. By comparison, Enron's much criticized "loyalty bonuses" only amounted to a few percent of its value."
There are no shortage of video editors out there and a quick search of Sourceforge for "video editing" shows a good chunk of projects rolling along.
If this wasn't a problem for us geeks 20 years ago, why is it a problem now?
And yes. I was a heavy duty PC4 user. Mine is dead now, but I keep it on my desk at work as a memento.