A lot depends on the number and cost of deployments. If all you build are 'singleton solutions', applications that run on one set of hardware, the cost perspectives are significantly different than if you're writing software that runs on costly and/or large numbers of deployments.
As one example, I was working on an Air Traffic Control system in the mid-'90s. The controller workstations were high-end systems with expensive RAM and we had a requirement that the controller applications had to be RAM resident, no swap. I rewrote part of the system and reduced the size of the application by about 50mb. The cost savings in that RAM (a 64mb chip) over the number of workstations we deployed was roughly $1m back then. Was that worth 3 months of my time? Management certainly thought so!
Imagine the cost savings associated with embedded computing, e.g. printer drivers, anti-lock brake systems, etc.
There are times when it really bothers me how few people understand things above their 'IT in the office' environment...
has been that they're "my way or the highway" IT Nazis who believe that the rest of us are there to make his job easier. Most CIOs I've seen are narrowly focused on their own little empires, rather than on advancing the goals of the organization/business at large. And most of them have relatively little intellectual independence from their vendor base.
This is covered in Chapter 10 of that invaluable reference "Learning GNU Emacs" (now in its 3rd edition, I need to 'upgrade' my 1st edition so the chapter organization might have changed) (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/index.html)
You can do M-x apropos macro to get info. There's an edit-kbd-macro command as well as a whole bunch of other useful things.
A couple of times the ability of Emacs to record keystrokes and then edit them has been a real power tool, particularly when I've needed to do very complex edits over a set of files.
So I'd record edits on the first file, look at the keyboard recording (doing any substitutes if necessary), bind that to a key combination, then iterate over the list of files. Now if I were a good Emacs hacker, I could have automated the iteration step, too:-)
OK, I know it's poor form to respond to yourself, but this is the best way to answer the questions/challenges from the subordinate comments.
IANAL.
But what I've seen is each side in the litigation I've observed, selectively pick facts that fit their position. The key word here is -selectively-. Just like political attack ads tell -part of the story-, the positions held by the bunches of lawyers pick-and-choose facts towards their position. Even the lawyer on 'my side' (not my lawyer, I'm not a direct party in the action but a proposed intervenor...) has told -part of the story-. The underlying expectation is that the other side or judge/jury will assemble the full story.
But if an attorney says "X" (but fails to say "and also Y", where Y is similarly relevant to the overall facts of the mater), does this constitute a breach of ethics? My empirical observation from both a small exposure to the law and larger exposure to politics is that there is presumably some point where, for example, the prosecution must disclose evidence that might help the defense. But must the prosecutor fully qualify his presentation by citing all parts of the facts? That's not my observation from the litigation that I've observed (and I've very carefully read the 1k pages of pleadings, evidence, statements, etc, and can specifically see where stuff was quoted out of context, etc, etc.)
And with respect to ethics, all I can think of is Al Gore's "No controlling legal authority..." quote, which I am sure is an accurate statement of legal ethics.
... Not all lawyers want to have sex with your mother, alive or otherwise.
I'm not convinced. I believe the current approach in legal training and education is that -anything- in support of the client's position is permissable. And frankly that approach is equally applicable in politics these days (not a surprise when the majority of politicians are lawyers.)
On both sides of the case I've been involved with, I've seen the lawyers say outrageous things, because there's NO CONSEQUENCES for doing so.
I believe a corporate ethics policy that says these kinds of things is a mandatory requirement for government contracting work. Since Microsoft wants to sell to the Feds, they have to have this pro-forma policy.
Oh, and I once had a Microsoft Lawyer lecture me on corporate ethics. Fortunately it was only in an email, so I was unable to respond physically...
Nokia/Ericsson/Scandanavia/Symbian have -not- produced the breakthrough devices that are represented by
a. Treo
b. Blackberry
c. iPhone So I'd characterize them as "legacy" with the negatives that term can imply.
I'm very much willing to wait for something with substantially more appeal than either a Windows-for-handhelds device or the current RIM offerings. I feel no compelling reason to compromise just to get a new smartphone today...
The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets:-)
Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.
I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.
But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.
Used to belong to a friend of mine whose last name is Smart. He didn't know who he sold it to until after the deal was done, and he might have gotten 10x what he sold it for if he had held out.
We've had several apparently legitimate offers for my wife's domain, which is her first name. One was a soccer team in Paraguay, and the other was a travel agency in Italy. In both cases a bit of Googling showed the name (with my wife's unusual spelling) was in use by the companies who contacted us. (The Paraguayan offer included free tickets to their games, which was a bit inconvenient for us:-)
If we had the.org version, I would have been more interested in selling the.com version, but unfortunately all the other TLDs were taken by presumably squatters.
Finally, my cousin has a business that uses his last name plus some other stuff. Apparently he let that particular domain expire, so I snarfed it up to give it (back) to him at Christmas.
So not all 'squatters' are evil, and some people looking to take a family name are legitimate. Unfortunately, it's hard to figure out how to do an international fair transfer for property like this that protects both side of the deal from the other.
A warning to the effect that the site's identity could not be verified is what should be done here. And it should take -1- click to proceed (if you so choose, and with an option to permanently add this certificate to a list of accepted certificates.)
One can argue with the SSL approach that handles both encryption and identity with a single solution, but it is legitimate to use self-signed certificates when all you care about is encryption.
The same behavior should apply to email user agents.
Side issue: Whatever happened to the idea of an 'open source' certificate user? It bothers me that there is a list of closed (and not cheap) certificate authorities.
IANAG (I Am Not A Geologist), but I'm a bit surprised by where this slide occurred. When I heard about 'rockslide blocking the road to Whistler', I was expecting something north of Squamish, particularly along the river valley (Cheakamus?) that's bordered by the lava flows from Garibaldi mountain. Seeing this along Howe Sound was a bit of a surprise.
If someone knows the type of rock that was in that slide, could you post that info? I guess it's not the granite that makes up the Chief...
dave (lived in N. Delta 95-97 and used to drive to Whistler a lot in the summer, just because we liked the trip...)
Well, I'd "never say never", but given the current state of things there's no way in the -foreseeable future- I'd buy a car with a Microsoft product in it that I was aware of, particularly one that made its presence known to me (e.g. an in-vehicle entertainment or user interface unit.)
Andre Norton, "Zero Stone" and "Uncharted Stars," or just about anything else as far as that goes. (I read "Zero Stone" & "Uncharted Stars" about 40 years ago and -many- times since)
Ursula LeGuin, "Wizard of Earthsea" tetralogy - my standard present to kids looking for something after Harry Potter.
Christopher Rowley, "Bazil Broketail" books (are there 5 of them?). Well these arrived after my youth, but I really like them.
John Bellairs, anything, but particularly "The Face in the Frost". Hey, what can you say about a book with a magic mirror with a love for old Brooklyn Dodgers games?
I claim that Ada83 is better than C, Ada95 and Eiffel are better than C++ and Ada05 is better than Java or C#. But that's just my opinion.
What is very clear is that the design philosophies of Ada (focusing on 'programming in the large') or Eiffel (focusing on 'correctness by contract conformance') have been lost. Both languages, along with others (dating back to COBOL) is on readability over writeability. (Programs get read much more often than they get written.) Python in some respects is the exception, as a language that doesn't start with C as the font of all syntax, and provides more emphasis on readability.
And many of us work on things that can't rely on high-powered computers connected to high powered networks where everything is a "web service", and the consequence of a software failure is more than "oops..."
So, depending on who you talk to...
(C | C++ | Java) is the ultimate programming language.
Now we're being told that compiled languages are passe' and all you need is
(Perl | Python | AJAX).
In the meantime, the -art- and -science- of programming language design seems to have withered away due to lack of interest from the developer community.
From what I've seen over the last 30 years:
1. Programing Languages -DO- make a difference in both individual productivity and organizational effectiveness. And the latter is -much more important- than the former for anything bigger than a breadbox.
2. Management doesn't believe #1. In fact, management doesn't believe in software engineering. Instead, management wants to throw bodies at problems to make impossible schedules, with little concern for quality of the product. At best, managers throw process (and SEI CMM/CMM-I) at the hoards of programmers, believing that process is a substitute for
(a) developer talent
(b) product quality
So I guess ( 1 & 2) together explain the demise of programming language design. And all we can pray for is increases in second-order tools such as debuggers and, if we're really good, tools like static analyzers, to make up for the sh*tty set of current (popular) programming languages. And as end users, bugs and security holes will continue to be chronic results...
Slashdot Mirror
A lot depends on the number and cost of deployments. If all you build are 'singleton solutions', applications that run on one set of hardware, the cost perspectives are significantly different than if you're writing software that runs on costly and/or large numbers of deployments.
As one example, I was working on an Air Traffic Control system in the mid-'90s. The controller workstations were high-end systems with expensive RAM and we had a requirement that the controller applications had to be RAM resident, no swap. I rewrote part of the system and reduced the size of the application by about 50mb. The cost savings in that RAM (a 64mb chip) over the number of workstations we deployed was roughly $1m back then. Was that worth 3 months of my time? Management certainly thought so!
Imagine the cost savings associated with embedded computing, e.g. printer drivers, anti-lock brake systems, etc.
There are times when it really bothers me how few people understand things above their 'IT in the office' environment...
dave
College professors have never had to take any classes in the education department.
But it's College professors who RUN education departments and teach this kind of bovine fertilizer.
dave
has been that they're "my way or the highway" IT Nazis who believe that the rest of us are there to make his job easier. Most CIOs I've seen are narrowly focused on their own little empires, rather than on advancing the goals of the organization/business at large. And most of them have relatively little intellectual independence from their vendor base.
God save us from CIOs!
dave
This is covered in Chapter 10 of that invaluable reference "Learning GNU Emacs" (now in its 3rd edition, I need to 'upgrade' my 1st edition so the chapter organization might have changed) (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/index.html)
You can do M-x apropos macro to get info. There's an edit-kbd-macro command as well as a whole bunch of other useful things.
dave
A couple of times the ability of Emacs to record keystrokes and then edit them has been a real power tool, particularly when I've needed to do very complex edits over a set of files.
So I'd record edits on the first file, look at the keyboard recording (doing any substitutes if necessary), bind that to a key combination, then iterate over the list of files. Now if I were a good Emacs hacker, I could have automated the iteration step, too :-)
And as Ensign Chekov would point out " Was first thought up by Russians!"
OK, I know it's poor form to respond to yourself, but this is the best way to answer the questions/challenges from the subordinate comments.
IANAL.
But what I've seen is each side in the litigation I've observed, selectively pick facts that fit their position. The key word here is -selectively-. Just like political attack ads tell -part of the story-, the positions held by the bunches of lawyers pick-and-choose facts towards their position. Even the lawyer on 'my side' (not my lawyer, I'm not a direct party in the action but a proposed intervenor...) has told -part of the story-. The underlying expectation is that the other side or judge/jury will assemble the full story.
But if an attorney says "X" (but fails to say "and also Y", where Y is similarly relevant to the overall facts of the mater), does this constitute a breach of ethics? My empirical observation from both a small exposure to the law and larger exposure to politics is that there is presumably some point where, for example, the prosecution must disclose evidence that might help the defense. But must the prosecutor fully qualify his presentation by citing all parts of the facts? That's not my observation from the litigation that I've observed (and I've very carefully read the 1k pages of pleadings, evidence, statements, etc, and can specifically see where stuff was quoted out of context, etc, etc.)
And with respect to ethics, all I can think of is Al Gore's "No controlling legal authority..." quote, which I am sure is an accurate statement of legal ethics.
dave
... Not all lawyers want to have sex with your mother, alive or otherwise.
I'm not convinced. I believe the current approach in legal training and education is that -anything- in support of the client's position is permissable. And frankly that approach is equally applicable in politics these days (not a surprise when the majority of politicians are lawyers.)
On both sides of the case I've been involved with, I've seen the lawyers say outrageous things, because there's NO CONSEQUENCES for doing so.
dave
p.s. tell your mother I'm sorry :-)
I believe a corporate ethics policy that says these kinds of things is a mandatory requirement for government contracting work. Since Microsoft wants to sell to the Feds, they have to have this pro-forma policy.
Oh, and I once had a Microsoft Lawyer lecture me on corporate ethics. Fortunately it was only in an email, so I was unable to respond physically...
dave
So we can thank Microsoft for creating the -need- for 750k IT jobs that are now outsourced?!?
dave
Nokia/Ericsson/Scandanavia/Symbian have -not- produced the breakthrough devices that are represented by
a. Treo
b. Blackberry
c. iPhone
So I'd characterize them as "legacy" with the negatives that term can imply.
(you asked...)
dave
I'm very much willing to wait for something with substantially more appeal than either a Windows-for-handhelds device or the current RIM offerings. I feel no compelling reason to compromise just to get a new smartphone today...
dave
The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets :-)
Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.
I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.
But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.
dave
A603 - Load Module Does Not Exist
(I think that was the response to a command line typo from the 'shell'.)
As a student learning this stuff, I saw that one a lot! More than 30 years later, I still remember it...
dave
on the IPv4 route problem, and then mod parent up for introducing an interesting topic to discuss?
dave
Used to belong to a friend of mine whose last name is Smart. He didn't know who he sold it to until after the deal was done, and he might have gotten 10x what he sold it for if he had held out.
We've had several apparently legitimate offers for my wife's domain, which is her first name. One was a soccer team in Paraguay, and the other was a travel agency in Italy. In both cases a bit of Googling showed the name (with my wife's unusual spelling) was in use by the companies who contacted us. (The Paraguayan offer included free tickets to their games, which was a bit inconvenient for us :-)
If we had the .org version, I would have been more interested in selling the .com version, but unfortunately all the other TLDs were taken by presumably squatters.
Finally, my cousin has a business that uses his last name plus some other stuff. Apparently he let that particular domain expire, so I snarfed it up to give it (back) to him at Christmas.
So not all 'squatters' are evil, and some people looking to take a family name are legitimate. Unfortunately, it's hard to figure out how to do an international fair transfer for property like this that protects both side of the deal from the other.
dave
A warning to the effect that the site's identity could not be verified is what should be done here. And it should take -1- click to proceed (if you so choose, and with an option to permanently add this certificate to a list of accepted certificates.)
One can argue with the SSL approach that handles both encryption and identity with a single solution, but it is legitimate to use self-signed certificates when all you care about is encryption.
The same behavior should apply to email user agents.
Side issue: Whatever happened to the idea of an 'open source' certificate user? It bothers me that there is a list of closed (and not cheap) certificate authorities.
dave
IANAG (I Am Not A Geologist), but I'm a bit surprised by where this slide occurred. When I heard about 'rockslide blocking the road to Whistler', I was expecting something north of Squamish, particularly along the river valley (Cheakamus?) that's bordered by the lava flows from Garibaldi mountain. Seeing this along Howe Sound was a bit of a surprise.
If someone knows the type of rock that was in that slide, could you post that info? I guess it's not the granite that makes up the Chief...
dave (lived in N. Delta 95-97 and used to drive to Whistler a lot in the summer, just because we liked the trip...)
Well, I'd "never say never", but given the current state of things there's no way in the -foreseeable future- I'd buy a car with a Microsoft product in it that I was aware of, particularly one that made its presence known to me (e.g. an in-vehicle entertainment or user interface unit.)
And I've sent Ford a message to that effect.
dave
I don't think these have been mentioned yet:
Andre Norton, "Zero Stone" and "Uncharted Stars," or just about anything else as far as that goes. (I read "Zero Stone" & "Uncharted Stars" about 40 years ago and -many- times since)
Ursula LeGuin, "Wizard of Earthsea" tetralogy - my standard present to kids looking for something after Harry Potter.
Christopher Rowley, "Bazil Broketail" books (are there 5 of them?). Well these arrived after my youth, but I really like them.
John Bellairs, anything, but particularly "The Face in the Frost". Hey, what can you say about a book with a magic mirror with a love for old Brooklyn Dodgers games?
dave
"Management standardizes that which they do not understand, to relieve them of the responsibility of having to think about it any more..."
dave
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity
Best to get info from people who get paid to generate it :-)
dave
Mod parent up +1 funny...
I claim that Ada83 is better than C, Ada95 and Eiffel are better than C++ and Ada05 is better than Java or C#. But that's just my opinion.
What is very clear is that the design philosophies of Ada (focusing on 'programming in the large') or Eiffel (focusing on 'correctness by contract conformance') have been lost. Both languages, along with others (dating back to COBOL) is on readability over writeability. (Programs get read much more often than they get written.) Python in some respects is the exception, as a language that doesn't start with C as the font of all syntax, and provides more emphasis on readability.
And many of us work on things that can't rely on high-powered computers connected to high powered networks where everything is a "web service", and the consequence of a software failure is more than "oops..."
dave
So, depending on who you talk to...
(C | C++ | Java) is the ultimate programming language.
Now we're being told that compiled languages are passe' and all you need is
(Perl | Python | AJAX).
In the meantime, the -art- and -science- of programming language design seems to have withered away due to lack of interest from the developer community.
From what I've seen over the last 30 years:
1. Programing Languages -DO- make a difference in both individual productivity and organizational effectiveness. And the latter is -much more important- than the former for anything bigger than a breadbox.
2. Management doesn't believe #1. In fact, management doesn't believe in software engineering. Instead, management wants to throw bodies at problems to make impossible schedules, with little concern for quality of the product. At best, managers throw process (and SEI CMM/CMM-I) at the hoards of programmers, believing that process is a substitute for
(a) developer talent
(b) product quality
So I guess ( 1 & 2) together explain the demise of programming language design. And all we can pray for is increases in second-order tools such as debuggers and, if we're really good, tools like static analyzers, to make up for the sh*tty set of current (popular) programming languages. And as end users, bugs and security holes will continue to be chronic results...
dave