I don't think he's ever claimed to be an official spokesperson, he doesn't have the air of sanitized PR anyway. He seems like either an employee seeking to set people straight at the grass roots, or a non-traditional PR plant, or a non-Apple employee with some reasonable knowledge and ability to craft entertaining prose. Or a bit of all three.
The worst accusation you can make at the guy is over-use of the royal "we". Which is generally fine, I do it all the time when referring to my employer (BEA), though i'm careful to add a disclaimer when I'm making a statement of opinion.
Why does his identity matter? Or whether he's paid to do this or not? I'm not seeing a lot of obvious spin going on in his posts, if there were more, these things may carry more wait.
Why are so many people finding him annoying? I don't find him arrogant or deceptive at all. He's entertaining and usually quite insightful. And often makes some of the posters around him look like idiots (because they were in the first place).
Furthermore, the use of the royal "we" is something I often do when referring to my employer in writing (even publicly).
As for calling him a "self-appointed mouthpiece", that really sounds like sour grapes. Just ignore him if you don't like it, you come across as almost jealous otherwise.
Running a Java application on a computer from 1997 (EIGHT YEARS OLD) and looking for performance is what I would call... misplaced expectations. I can't even get Firefox to run well on a P233 MMX.
Assuming you believe SciFi/Fantasy is the same genre (I do), then he makes a very unique point that rings true to me: Malkovich and Spotless Mind *were* some of the greatest Sci Fi movies in recent memory.
And contrary to what many people say here, Smallville really is quite good SciFi, relatively speaking, at least from Season 3 onwards. I don't watch it regularly, but it's certainly a lot better than Trek has been in years. You've got to enjoy Teen Angst, of course (I do), though thankfully they don't overdo it.
Battlestar Galactica was a notable omission, I guess we'll have to see how Season 2 does....
Slavery was a much larger and more intense conflict. It's asinine to suggest we shouldn't read Thomas Jefferson because he owned (and apparently bedded) slaves.
Another way of looking at it: just because someone is "evil" doesn't mean they can't speak truth.
I know at least one major player in the financial world that does *all* internal coding in C (and some C++). It's not as rare as you think. They're a very, very performance conscious. company. When I interviewed with them, I spend two hours discussing details of struct packing, macros vs. inlining, how templates/virtuals are implemented in c++, etc. Java/C# are not all there is to this game.
Fair enough, interesting to get another anecdote to keep a realistic perspective (seeing how I work for a J2EE vendor, the kool-aid avoidance gets hard at times).
And good points on SWT v. Swing (though WebLogic Workshop is pretty good these days, and it's Swing), embedded memory constraints (I thought there were RT Java impl's that fixed this, but it's been a while) & the ease of OS X vs. Linux packaging.
I have written moderately large graphical python applications and they're anything but pokey. In my experience, wxPython is much more responsive than swing on the same machine.
I've used pyslsk which was written with wxPython, and it was pretty pokey. Useful, nonetheless.
I realize that benchmarks with regard to throughput and java show it to be absolutely faster, but if it doesn't provide a better user experience, what's the point?
The point is that you have several posters here suggesting that Azeurus' overall experience is quite good. I can add in other Java applications here too (Eclipse being an obvious one).
can't imagine the project that I'd choose to use java on. It seems that in the absence of anything else, C# is at least a more well designed language that does similar things. More likely, I'd code user interaction/business logic in a lightweight scripting language and build the low-level, performance critical parts in ANSI-C.
Depends on the kinds of projects you do, I suppose. I have no qualms with using C# or even scripting languages for business logic, though I question the practicality of doing the latter in the face of integration requirements (are you going to use Python to integrate with Siebel, PeopleSoft or SAP?), team knowledge (what do people know? What are you willing to sacrifice to get them to learn it ?), etc.
C# is a good language but I'd hardly call it a tremendous improvement over Java 5 -- they're rather on par, with minor differences.
As for ANSI-C for performance critical parts, I frankly haven't seen many "business" system that has required this in over 5 years. Most financial trading systems and banking applications these days run Java + WebLogic or WebSphere, or on.NET / COM+. Most client applications use either a messaging toolkit (MSMQ, JMS,.NET remoting, etc.) or plain HTTP for communication. Before Java 1.4.2 I could see the need for ANSI C to handle multiplexed non-blocking I/O, but now... the number of opportunities are fewer.
Java should be used where it does a reasonably good job--servers. Java is a monster when it comes to throughput but only so-so on latency, so why use it in a low-throughput, low-latency situation?
Like a P2P client??? oh, wait.
Can anyone explain to me the memory footprint? Baseline for a java runtime environment and hello, world is about 6-8 times what python takes to do the same? Actually, it's more than some medium-sized python projects I've worked on. What gives?
Don't know, not that big a deal, all things considered. This is somewhat of a red herring, you know.
I like how you criticize pyGTK although you haven't used it. Actually, you probably have used it, and couldn't tell the difference between pyGTK and GTK in C--I know I can't.
Well, I personally can't stand the API, but that's just taste. As for performance, I could tell the difference, though it wasn't the bindings I was complaining about, it was Python in general, for the kind of application I was writing.
Look, I like Python, it's a wonderful language, I prefer Ruby but I do recommend people to look at it all the time. I'm just calling for some perspective - it's not faster than Java, (Ruby isn't either), and it doesn't particularly have a better user experience, from both a server developer or client developer's perspective, though again it depends on what you're trying to do, with how many resources, and what constraints. And the client experience isn't really Python's fault, it is a general problem with environments coming from an X heritage -- a'la'carte toolkits, dependencies galore, nothing "just works", need a package manager like Fink to track it all.
Let's get some perspective. 266MHz isn't "a year or two" ago, it's been SEVEN YEARS since Intel released the P2 @ 266mhz. I have a 233MHz from that era, and you can barely even run Firefox on it (IE runs "OK"). Furthermore, 1997-1998 would be the era of Java 1.1 and 1.2, which were significantly slower.
These days, and since the year 2000 with the release of Java 1.3, Java UI's have been very usable. And Java is much faster than Python; it's comparing mixed mode dynamic compilation (Java) vs. interpreted (Python)! Pysco's JIT release in 2003 may have sped things up somewhat, but it's far from mainstream.
As for running on a 266Mhz machine, what's "plenty" of Python apps? Were they all graphical? I think you'd find graphical Python to be pretty pokey (pyGTK or what have you). Command-line Java is pretty fast.
Personally I'm not as anal about this but, a couple of examples:
- creating genre directories as your root folders in your music collection - creating A-G, H-P, Q-Z sub directories because you have too many artists to have as a flat list - naming the MP3's as "01 [Artist] Album - Song Title.mp3"
This is the kind of stuff he wants....
Anyway. If you just use iTunes to play & burn, it doesn't make sense. If you use external apps and need to use the filesystem, it does. Winamp launches faster when he wants to play specific tracks, for example.
Just out of my own curiosity... are you also one of those guys who complains that iTunes organizes your music for you? I ask because those guys are impossible for me to understand.
I have a friend that has around 300 gigabytes of MP3s and he insists on using CollectorzPro to keep them organized because it has much more flexible directory, tagging, and naming options than iTunes.
His biggest problem with iTunes is the time it takes to re-index his collection when he shuffles his directories around. Otherwise it's the fastest way for him to find a song.
Now, with a reasonable script, one probably could cut that time down significantly by re-using the ID3 tag information in the iTunes Catalog XML file. But a very nice feature enhancement would be for iTunes to do this on its own when re-indexing...
Next time one of your products is going to make sweeping not-undoable changes to something a human has put potentially thousands of hours into, GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO SAY NO FIRST, AND MAKE SURE THEY KNOW WHAT'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN.
Which is exactly what iTunes does, if you've ever used it.
As for features being undoable, here's an example off the top of my head: 128-bit AES encryption on your home folder, for example, was something I enabled and kept on my Powerbook for over a year. It never corrupted, despite the odd battery drainage or out-of-space or any number of abusive things I did to my filesystem.
Anyway, after a while I switched jobs, didn't have the need for such security, and migrated it back to an unencrypted folder. Took a bit of time + needed extra disk space, but otherwise, no problems.
I typically enjoy your grain-of-salt posts, but this is one where I must say you've really overstepped your area of competence.
Some providers (Rogers in Toronto, Canada, in particular), provide digital versions of the first 70 channels, so if you have a digital box they ignore the analog versions.
Other providers (Shaw) have gone completely digital (by having a massive digital/analog box swap several years back).
Windows 95 didn't "really" have Internet support eather until OSR1 IIRC. BillG's famous "December 1995 memo" was when they "got" the Internet, so Microsoft was pretty much asleep too (or having delusions of MSN/Blackbird grandeur).
I know that in your rush to (dis)prove how intelligent you are you couldn't be bothered to think about what was written rather than what you wanted to read, but you might try it the other way next time. It'll save you from spending so much time essentially arguing with yourself, which has the nice side benefit of not making you look incredibly stupid.
It's fun making brash claims like this when Anonymous, but you're the one that's clearly being daft.
When he uses the blueprints for an automobile to build the automobile, he gets an automobile, not another set of blueprints; so, you know, something different than the blueprints.
His point was that an automobile's manufacturing process is specified down to the absolute smallest detail in order to be mass manufactured. You only out of a mass manufacturing process what you put in.
As it is with source code. The source code is the design. Anything else is representation.
DO NOT START DESIGN UNTIL YOU HAVE THE REQUIREMENTS (yes, I know there are exceptions, but you should at least have *most* of the requirements first).
In my entire career, I see people try this time and time again. And it always winds up the same: destroyed family lives from the developers working 24x7 near the crunch time because of ambiguous requirements, customers that are unhappy because every time they change their mind they're given two words: "CHANGE REQUEST". CRs associate tremendous $$$ with any change, making it hard to deliver true "quality" if the market needs or our understanding of them is to ever evolve. Project managers that have very little real process control over what's going on and wind up as mere maintainers of spreadsheets, gantt charts, and earned-value analysis that have about as much accuracy as a tealeaf reader.
Your stated approach probably works well in enviornments where requirements are stable, and design work is so specialized that it requries rare subject matter experts. But I don't see those circumstances often.
There is a shift underfoot in software development akin to the one that manufacturing has gone through, from mass manufacturing to lean manufacturing, driven by Toyota's production and product development system. Gathering requirements , designing them, coding them, and testing them is "large batch" thinking that causes tremendous waste and inefficency because of the lack of learning, number of hand-offs, and amount of inventory (unimplemented requirements). Lean "Small batch" thinking is about small cycles of requirements, design, coding, testing, and refinement, with high levels of artifact reuse. Change is considered the norm in this process, while the product is in development. It's built into the funding and scope management structure of the project from the beginning , not bolted on as massive "shock trauma" that usually happens on projects with large requirements documents.
Have a good requirements document: everything is actually a requirement (not a design or implementation) and is testable (if you have the word "not" in it, it's not testable, for instance).
There are some circumstances where a good requirements document is attainable, and useful. In most IT or product development circumstances, however, the number of changes required mean that requirements must be captured in a more fluid manner (whether they are use cases + a set of non-functional metrics, or features, etc.)
Make sure the design is design and not implementation (design is "sum two numbers and check for overflow"; implementation is "temp32 = x16+y16; if temp32 > MAX16 then result16 = MAX16 else result16 = x16+y16;). Put another way, despite the popular writings I've seen lately to the contrary, CODE IS NOT DESIGN (any more than a car is the design of the car).
Sorry, this is a fundamental disagreement. The code is the embodiment of the design. Sure, there is high-level design and low-level design, with different concerns. BUT, design is about direction. Implementation is about mechanism (do I use a for loop, a while loop, or a do loop?)
The algorithm and all of its exceptional cases are simultaneously part of code and the design because no matter how much paper you write, it's completely useless if that's not how the software was written.
Make sure you can test that THE DESIGN MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS (which is subtly different than "does the design do what I designed it to do?"). If the design doesn't satisfy the requirements, it can never be a "good design".
In a vacuum sealed world of hand-offs, this might be appropriate. But most of the time, I find that a classic requirements document are not the real requirements. There is loads of ambiguity in it, it requires constant iteration to clarify that ambiguity, and that iteration is best done through collaborative development between customers and deve
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
I quite like the "Metacrap" paper, and I use it a lot as a reality check for those diving too deeply into the metadata / XML web services / SOA utopia.
Unfortunately I disagree with your interpretation of its arguments, as noted below.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Which came to be because some people are anal enough to sit down and add descriptions to their music collection , and people created ways of sharing those with others easily.
The point is to make it easy to add descriptions and combine it with implicit / observational metadata. iPhoto , for example, knows when you took your photos, which is a very good start for lazy people organizing data -- Spotlight can answer queries like "pictures taken on December 13 2004". People that are organization freaks can get better searches by putting some more words associated with it.
Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans
Or that which is implicitly associated with something by necessity - "observational" stuff. Creation dates, authors, links, etc. That stuff is usually very reliable, as noted in the last section of that paper...
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together....
Whoa. This argument seems to be an example of the "division fallacy". Since explicit metadata solutions don't work well on Internet scales means they won't work on smaller scales (like enterprises).
It's interesting you used communism as an argument against metadata in the beginning of your post, because economic systems are really a form of information system, in a sense. Communism is an attempt to explicitly associate metadata (prices) with goods. A market-based system, on the other hand, uses implicit metadata (supply/demand price adjustments) to govern. Yet we do recognize that explicit control is used within a company because it's more efficient than the market when applied to a small enough group (aka. 'transaction costs' argument).
Relating to the topic at hand -- quality data is important, and seriously lacking in most organizations (and individual user desktops!). Metadata partially fixes a major part of the quality issue: relevance. Explicit metadata, like most explicit forms of agreement, works well in an environment with a consistent culture and centralized policy -- or in the case of a single user, someone anal enough to tag their pictures. But it requries an investment.
On the other hand, implicit metadata is "free" because it's already there, it's just a matter of capturing, indexing, and making it accessible. Google did that with hyperlinks. Spotlight is doing that with photos, music, and emails. So whether people stay lazy or not, Spotlight still significantly improves the user experience in getting access to relevant information....
SuSE, Ubuntu, and other user-friendly distributions are better than Macintosh in terms of consistency, maintainability, performance, and functionality.
Uhhh. No. Disagree vehemenantly, particularly on consistency, maintainability, and functionality. My Powerbook continues to be the most productive and maintainable environment I work in vs. my XP and SuSE installs.
I've been using Linux regularly since 1994, it certainly has come a tremendous way, but it's far from where Apple is at.
Finaly "all the land" is occupied by one or very few businesses and that's when "the shit hits the fans". And that's what have to be solved somehow.
This is the general argument that Joseph Schumpeter, among others, held about capitalism -- it would be brought down by its own success. And it generally looks to be a valid point, given the corporate welfare, corruption, and the culture of economics-uber-alles.
Once serving customers no longer is necessary, there is no purpose to business other than to perpetuate its own power. Dysfunctional, politicized bureaucracy takes over, and it becomes purely an interests game. This problem appears universal - no known economic or political system (save theoretical anarchism) really seems to be able to fully control the power of a collective reinforcing its own interests.
Perhaps the solution is to understand when the market has failed and to substitute market power for political power. Unfortunately this seems to bring back the problem of why we privitize things in the first place -- they're so bloody wasteful under government control!
Yet.. the only known solution to check bureaucratic power is through representative democracy... where at least the rulers are freely chosen, even if they aren't always going to be the best rulers.
Regardless he's coasting if all he's doing is vaguely rescuing scripts.
That's what he did before his 3 TV shows, and he hasn't really done that for some time (2000 was his attempt at X-Men and Titan AE). He's been doing Serenity since Angel wrapped last year...
Now on to Joss Whedon: I know this is heresy on/. but I'm going to come out and say it: Firefly sucked. It got pulled off TV because it sucked. Its ratings were god awful, the acting was awful, the scenario's were the worst of B-movie drivel and its special effects were few and far between.
Disagree. Acting good, story very good. It did not suck.
Furthermore, ratings have nothing to do with quality, but if they did, Firefly DVD sales strongly correlate.
Except the problem is that Wonder Woman doesn't really kick ass. She's got a hilariously dated costume (which she dons by spinning around!) some shiny gold wristlets, and a backstory that can only call into question her obvious European features.
This is going to crash and burn.
You might be right on this, but given Joss' stint with the X-Men comics, he has a thing for re-invigorating old storylines & making them appeal to a modern audience. As for the costume & feel of the movie, a lot of it will depend on the production design and actors, who are TBD. Otherwise, I'm pretty confident he'll write a good script and direct a well paced movie.
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I don't think he's ever claimed to be an official spokesperson, he doesn't have the air of sanitized PR anyway. He seems like either an employee seeking to set people straight at the grass roots, or a non-traditional PR plant, or a non-Apple employee with some reasonable knowledge and ability to craft entertaining prose. Or a bit of all three.
The worst accusation you can make at the guy is over-use of the royal "we". Which is generally fine, I do it all the time when referring to my employer (BEA), though i'm careful to add a disclaimer when I'm making a statement of opinion.
Why does his identity matter? Or whether he's paid to do this or not? I'm not seeing a lot of obvious spin going on in his posts, if there were more, these things may carry more wait.
Why are so many people finding him annoying? I don't find him arrogant or deceptive at all. He's entertaining and usually quite insightful. And often makes some of the posters around him look like idiots (because they were in the first place).
Furthermore, the use of the royal "we" is something I often do when referring to my employer in writing (even publicly).
As for calling him a "self-appointed mouthpiece", that really sounds like sour grapes. Just ignore him if you don't like it, you come across as almost jealous otherwise.
Running a Java application on a computer from 1997 (EIGHT YEARS OLD) and looking for performance is what I would call ... misplaced expectations. I can't even get Firefox to run well on a P233 MMX.
Assuming you believe SciFi/Fantasy is the same genre (I do), then he makes a very unique point that rings true to me: Malkovich and Spotless Mind *were* some of the greatest Sci Fi movies in recent memory.
....
And contrary to what many people say here, Smallville really is quite good SciFi, relatively speaking, at least from Season 3 onwards. I don't watch it regularly, but it's certainly a lot better than Trek has been in years. You've got to enjoy Teen Angst, of course (I do), though thankfully they don't overdo it.
Battlestar Galactica was a notable omission, I guess we'll have to see how Season 2 does
Slavery was a much larger and more intense conflict. It's asinine to suggest we shouldn't read Thomas Jefferson because he owned (and apparently bedded) slaves.
Another way of looking at it: just because someone is "evil" doesn't mean they can't speak truth.
I know at least one major player in the financial world that does *all* internal coding in C (and some C++). It's not as rare as you think. They're a very, very performance conscious. company. When I interviewed with them, I spend two hours discussing details of struct packing, macros vs. inlining, how templates/virtuals are implemented in c++, etc. Java/C# are not all there is to this game.
Fair enough, interesting to get another anecdote to keep a realistic perspective (seeing how I work for a J2EE vendor, the kool-aid avoidance gets hard at times).
And good points on SWT v. Swing (though WebLogic Workshop is pretty good these days, and it's Swing), embedded memory constraints (I thought there were RT Java impl's that fixed this, but it's been a while) & the ease of OS X vs. Linux packaging.
I have written moderately large graphical python applications and they're anything but pokey. In my experience, wxPython is much more responsive than swing on the same machine.
.NET / COM+. Most client applications use either a messaging toolkit (MSMQ, JMS, .NET remoting, etc.) or plain HTTP for communication. Before Java 1.4.2 I could see the need for ANSI C to handle multiplexed non-blocking I/O, but now... the number of opportunities are fewer.
I've used pyslsk which was written with wxPython, and it was pretty pokey. Useful, nonetheless.
I realize that benchmarks with regard to throughput and java show it to be absolutely faster, but if it doesn't provide a better user experience, what's the point?
The point is that you have several posters here suggesting that Azeurus' overall experience is quite good. I can add in other Java applications here too (Eclipse being an obvious one).
can't imagine the project that I'd choose to use java on. It seems that in the absence of anything else, C# is at least a more well designed language that does similar things. More likely, I'd code user interaction/business logic in a lightweight scripting language and build the low-level, performance critical parts in ANSI-C.
Depends on the kinds of projects you do, I suppose. I have no qualms with using C# or even scripting languages for business logic, though I question the practicality of doing the latter in the face of integration requirements (are you going to use Python to integrate with Siebel, PeopleSoft or SAP?), team knowledge (what do people know? What are you willing to sacrifice to get them to learn it ?), etc.
C# is a good language but I'd hardly call it a tremendous improvement over Java 5 -- they're rather on par, with minor differences.
As for ANSI-C for performance critical parts, I frankly haven't seen many "business" system that has required this in over 5 years. Most financial trading systems and banking applications these days run Java + WebLogic or WebSphere, or on
Java should be used where it does a reasonably good job--servers. Java is a monster when it comes to throughput but only so-so on latency, so why use it in a low-throughput, low-latency situation?
Like a P2P client??? oh, wait.
Can anyone explain to me the memory footprint? Baseline for a java runtime environment and hello, world is about 6-8 times what python takes to do the same? Actually, it's more than some medium-sized python projects I've worked on. What gives?
Don't know, not that big a deal, all things considered. This is somewhat of a red herring, you know.
I like how you criticize pyGTK although you haven't used it. Actually, you probably have used it, and couldn't tell the difference between pyGTK and GTK in C--I know I can't.
Well, I personally can't stand the API, but that's just taste. As for performance, I could tell the difference, though it wasn't the bindings I was complaining about, it was Python in general, for the kind of application I was writing.
Look, I like Python, it's a wonderful language, I prefer Ruby but I do recommend people to look at it all the time. I'm just calling for some perspective - it's not faster than Java, (Ruby isn't either), and it doesn't particularly have a better user experience, from both a server developer or client developer's perspective, though again it depends on what you're trying to do, with how many resources, and what constraints. And the client experience isn't really Python's fault, it is a general problem with environments coming from an X heritage -- a'la'carte toolkits, dependencies galore, nothing "just works", need a package manager like Fink to track it all.
Let's get some perspective. 266MHz isn't "a year or two" ago, it's been SEVEN YEARS since Intel released the P2 @ 266mhz. I have a 233MHz from that era, and you can barely even run Firefox on it (IE runs "OK"). Furthermore, 1997-1998 would be the era of Java 1.1 and 1.2, which were significantly slower.
These days, and since the year 2000 with the release of Java 1.3, Java UI's have been very usable. And Java is much faster than Python; it's comparing mixed mode dynamic compilation (Java) vs. interpreted (Python)! Pysco's JIT release in 2003 may have sped things up somewhat, but it's far from mainstream.
As for running on a 266Mhz machine, what's "plenty" of Python apps? Were they all graphical? I think you'd find graphical Python to be pretty pokey (pyGTK or what have you). Command-line Java is pretty fast.
But Azereus isn't "insanely" slow either. I get the same throughput from either (Azereus on OS X vs. BitComet on Windows).
Personally I'm not as anal about this but, a couple of examples:
- creating genre directories as your root folders in your music collection
- creating A-G, H-P, Q-Z sub directories because you have too many artists to have as a flat list
- naming the MP3's as "01 [Artist] Album - Song Title.mp3"
This is the kind of stuff he wants....
Anyway. If you just use iTunes to play & burn, it doesn't make sense. If you use external apps and need to use the filesystem, it does. Winamp launches faster when he wants to play specific tracks, for example.
Just out of my own curiosity ... are you also one of those guys who complains that iTunes organizes your music for you? I ask because those guys are impossible for me to understand.
I have a friend that has around 300 gigabytes of MP3s and he insists on using CollectorzPro to keep them organized because it has much more flexible directory, tagging, and naming options than iTunes.
His biggest problem with iTunes is the time it takes to re-index his collection when he shuffles his directories around. Otherwise it's the fastest way for him to find a song.
Now, with a reasonable script, one probably could cut that time down significantly by re-using the ID3 tag information in the iTunes Catalog XML file. But a very nice feature enhancement would be for iTunes to do this on its own when re-indexing...
Next time one of your products is going to make sweeping not-undoable changes to something a human has put potentially thousands of hours into, GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO SAY NO FIRST, AND MAKE SURE THEY KNOW WHAT'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN.
Which is exactly what iTunes does, if you've ever used it.
As for features being undoable, here's an example off the top of my head: 128-bit AES encryption on your home folder, for example, was something I enabled and kept on my Powerbook for over a year. It never corrupted, despite the odd battery drainage or out-of-space or any number of abusive things I did to my filesystem.
Anyway, after a while I switched jobs, didn't have the need for such security, and migrated it back to an unencrypted folder. Took a bit of time + needed extra disk space, but otherwise, no problems.
I typically enjoy your grain-of-salt posts, but this is one where I must say you've really overstepped your area of competence.
Some providers (Rogers in Toronto, Canada, in particular), provide digital versions of the first 70 channels, so if you have a digital box they ignore the analog versions.
Other providers (Shaw) have gone completely digital (by having a massive digital/analog box swap several years back).
I still have people who never used Mac insist that Expose is the same as "Tile all windows" on windows.
ROFL. that made my day. Thank you.
Windows 95 didn't "really" have Internet support eather until OSR1 IIRC. BillG's famous "December 1995 memo" was when they "got" the Internet, so Microsoft was pretty much asleep too (or having delusions of MSN/Blackbird grandeur).
Couldn't have said it better.
I know that in your rush to (dis)prove how intelligent you are you couldn't be bothered to think about what was written rather than what you wanted to read, but you might try it the other way next time. It'll save you from spending so much time essentially arguing with yourself, which has the nice side benefit of not making you look incredibly stupid.
It's fun making brash claims like this when Anonymous, but you're the one that's clearly being daft.
When he uses the blueprints for an automobile to build the automobile, he gets an automobile, not another set of blueprints; so, you know, something different than the blueprints.
His point was that an automobile's manufacturing process is specified down to the absolute smallest detail in order to be mass manufactured. You only out of a mass manufacturing process what you put in.
As it is with source code. The source code is the design. Anything else is representation.
And I've been around a fair amount too.
DO NOT START DESIGN UNTIL YOU HAVE THE REQUIREMENTS (yes, I know there are exceptions, but you should at least have *most* of the requirements first).
In my entire career, I see people try this time and time again. And it always winds up the same: destroyed family lives from the developers working 24x7 near the crunch time because of ambiguous requirements, customers that are unhappy because every time they change their mind they're given two words: "CHANGE REQUEST". CRs associate tremendous $$$ with any change, making it hard to deliver true "quality" if the market needs or our understanding of them is to ever evolve. Project managers that have very little real process control over what's going on and wind up as mere maintainers of spreadsheets, gantt charts, and earned-value analysis that have about as much accuracy as a tealeaf reader.
Your stated approach probably works well in enviornments where requirements are stable, and design work is so specialized that it requries rare subject matter experts. But I don't see those circumstances often.
There is a shift underfoot in software development akin to the one that manufacturing has gone through, from mass manufacturing to lean manufacturing, driven by Toyota's production and product development system. Gathering requirements , designing them, coding them, and testing them is "large batch" thinking that causes tremendous waste and inefficency because of the lack of learning, number of hand-offs, and amount of inventory (unimplemented requirements). Lean "Small batch" thinking is about small cycles of requirements, design, coding, testing, and refinement, with high levels of artifact reuse. Change is considered the norm in this process, while the product is in development. It's built into the funding and scope management structure of the project from the beginning , not bolted on as massive "shock trauma" that usually happens on projects with large requirements documents.
Have a good requirements document: everything is actually a requirement (not a design or implementation) and is testable (if you have the word "not" in it, it's not testable, for instance).
There are some circumstances where a good requirements document is attainable, and useful. In most IT or product development circumstances, however, the number of changes required mean that requirements must be captured in a more fluid manner (whether they are use cases + a set of non-functional metrics, or features, etc.)
Make sure the design is design and not implementation (design is "sum two numbers and check for overflow"; implementation is "temp32 = x16+y16; if temp32 > MAX16 then result16 = MAX16 else result16 = x16+y16;). Put another way, despite the popular writings I've seen lately to the contrary, CODE IS NOT DESIGN (any more than a car is the design of the car).
Sorry, this is a fundamental disagreement. The code is the embodiment of the design. Sure, there is high-level design and low-level design, with different concerns. BUT, design is about direction. Implementation is about mechanism (do I use a for loop, a while loop, or a do loop?)
The algorithm and all of its exceptional cases are simultaneously part of code and the design because no matter how much paper you write, it's completely useless if that's not how the software was written.
Make sure you can test that THE DESIGN MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS (which is subtly different than "does the design do what I designed it to do?"). If the design doesn't satisfy the requirements, it can never be a "good design".
In a vacuum sealed world of hand-offs, this might be appropriate. But most of the time, I find that a classic requirements document are not the real requirements. There is loads of ambiguity in it, it requires constant iteration to clarify that ambiguity, and that iteration is best done through collaborative development between customers and deve
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
I quite like the "Metacrap" paper, and I use it a lot as a reality check for those diving too deeply into the metadata / XML web services / SOA utopia.
Unfortunately I disagree with your interpretation of its arguments, as noted below.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Which came to be because some people are anal enough to sit down and add descriptions to their music collection , and people created ways of sharing those with others easily.
The point is to make it easy to add descriptions and combine it with implicit / observational metadata. iPhoto , for example, knows when you took your photos, which is a very good start for lazy people organizing data -- Spotlight can answer queries like "pictures taken on December 13 2004". People that are organization freaks can get better searches by putting some more words associated with it.
Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans
Or that which is implicitly associated with something by necessity - "observational" stuff. Creation dates, authors, links, etc. That stuff is usually very reliable, as noted in the last section of that paper...
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together....
Whoa. This argument seems to be an example of the "division fallacy". Since explicit metadata solutions don't work well on Internet scales means they won't work on smaller scales (like enterprises).
It's interesting you used communism as an argument against metadata in the beginning of your post, because economic systems are really a form of information system, in a sense. Communism is an attempt to explicitly associate metadata (prices) with goods. A market-based system, on the other hand, uses implicit metadata (supply/demand price adjustments) to govern. Yet we do recognize that explicit control is used within a company because it's more efficient than the market when applied to a small enough group (aka. 'transaction costs' argument).
Relating to the topic at hand -- quality data is important, and seriously lacking in most organizations (and individual user desktops!). Metadata partially fixes a major part of the quality issue: relevance. Explicit metadata, like most explicit forms of agreement, works well in an environment with a consistent culture and centralized policy -- or in the case of a single user, someone anal enough to tag their pictures. But it requries an investment.
On the other hand, implicit metadata is "free" because it's already there, it's just a matter of capturing, indexing, and making it accessible. Google did that with hyperlinks. Spotlight is doing that with photos, music, and emails. So whether people stay lazy or not, Spotlight still significantly improves the user experience in getting access to relevant information....
SuSE, Ubuntu, and other user-friendly distributions are better than Macintosh in terms of consistency, maintainability, performance, and functionality.
Uhhh. No. Disagree vehemenantly, particularly on consistency, maintainability, and functionality. My Powerbook continues to be the most productive and maintainable environment I work in vs. my XP and SuSE installs.
I've been using Linux regularly since 1994, it certainly has come a tremendous way, but it's far from where Apple is at.
If you want a 64-bit server farm, for example, Xserve is quite competitive vs. Opteron or Itanium.
Similarly, most server farms in enterprises are name brand (IBM, HP or Dell), they're not exactly "next to nothing" in cost...
Finally, Xserve RAID has a price/performance ratio that shames most fibre channel solutions.
Finaly "all the land" is occupied by one or very few businesses and that's when "the shit hits the fans". And that's what have to be solved somehow.
.. the only known solution to check bureaucratic power is through representative democracy ... where at least the rulers are freely chosen, even if they aren't always going to be the best rulers.
This is the general argument that Joseph Schumpeter, among others, held about capitalism -- it would be brought down by its own success. And it generally looks to be a valid point, given the corporate welfare, corruption, and the culture of economics-uber-alles.
Once serving customers no longer is necessary, there is no purpose to business other than to perpetuate its own power. Dysfunctional, politicized bureaucracy takes over, and it becomes purely an interests game. This problem appears universal - no known economic or political system (save theoretical anarchism) really seems to be able to fully control the power of a collective reinforcing its own interests.
Perhaps the solution is to understand when the market has failed and to substitute market power for political power. Unfortunately this seems to bring back the problem of why we privitize things in the first place -- they're so bloody wasteful under government control!
Yet
So yeah, it's a dilemma.
Regardless he's coasting if all he's doing is vaguely rescuing scripts.
That's what he did before his 3 TV shows, and he hasn't really done that for some time (2000 was his attempt at X-Men and Titan AE). He's been doing Serenity since Angel wrapped last year...
Now on to Joss Whedon: I know this is heresy on /. but I'm going to come out and say it: Firefly sucked. It got pulled off TV because it sucked. Its ratings were god awful, the acting was awful, the scenario's were the worst of B-movie drivel and its special effects were few and far between.
Disagree. Acting good, story very good. It did not suck.
Furthermore, ratings have nothing to do with quality, but if they did, Firefly DVD sales strongly correlate.
Except the problem is that Wonder Woman doesn't really kick ass. She's got a hilariously dated costume (which she dons by spinning around!) some shiny gold wristlets, and a backstory that can only call into question her obvious European features.
This is going to crash and burn.
You might be right on this, but given Joss' stint with the X-Men comics, he has a thing for re-invigorating old storylines & making them appeal to a modern audience. As for the costume & feel of the movie, a lot of it will depend on the production design and actors, who are TBD. Otherwise, I'm pretty confident he'll write a good script and direct a well paced movie.
With the one liner, I so often reach for FileFilter and FilenameFilter that I overlooked the plain 'ol String[] list() for this example. My bad.