I've even seen people using PHP as a templating engine in front of a J2EE application. So maybe instead of just the "LAM" part of "LAMP" it can even go as far as "LAMP+J2EE".
I think you answered your own question. The government hasn't handed out tons of corporate welfare to computer game companies because they are profitable all on their own.
Ok, it really has nothing to do with that -- it probably has something to do with all the problems our military would have if one of it's biggest suppliers suddenly went belly up.
But still, I think your "where can you buy an airline for a few tens of USD" is a silly question. I mean how many airliners does boeing sell? And how many copies of Half-life has Valve sold? And how much R&D went into the airliner, vs. how much R&D into Half-life? Now I'm not suggesting Half-life was easy to write... or that they didn't have any R&D at all, but I suspect their budget was a lot smaller and their overall return (percentage wise) was a lot better.
I think the notion of "User Friendly" should include more than just "easy to use". To me, a chainsaw is "easy to use" (just pull the cord and point it at what you want cut) but not "user friendly" because it's very easy to accidentally injure yourself, or others, or simply mess up the job you were trying to do if you're not an "experienced user".
If the chainsaw could detect that it was going to cut through human flesh and would shut itself down, or if had a screen that asked what angle you wanted the cut and how deep and then a robotic mechanism performed the cut exactly right, it would still be both easy to use (in fact, easier to use for the inexperienced user) and also more "user friendly".
Of course "experienced users" would be annoyed by the new interface and how long it took to specify the cut correctly and sooner or later someone would need to use a chainsaw to cut through someone's leg that was trapped under a fallen car or something and it would refuse to operate, costing this person's life... but it would be more user friendly.
The tivo unit does not get the data from the cable system, it gets it from the Tivo network (via phone, or in Tivo2 optionally via the Internet).
So if you don't pay for your subscription, you don't get the data. As the original poster said, you can set it manually to record a specific channel for a specific duration starting at a specific time on a specific date, but this would get real old, real fast.
You would also of course get the ability to pause and rewind live T.V. which would still be easy to do.
... I'm not sure when or where it was, but there were definately two legs on either side of me... and it was really dark for a long time... then suddenly very bright... then I was crying a lot.
1. You can run a gameboy emulator on the Zarus. 3. You don't really need wireless access in the Alaskan wilderness. There are providers who will definately cover you almost everywhere you'll really go.
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine soredly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Modifications such as moving to a new operating system, modifying the business logic, adding a web interface, moving to Unicode etc, shouldn't affect more than perhaps 10-20% (to grab figures at random) of a decently built software system.
Ok, well, first of all, grabbing figures at random is not the best way to build a solid argument, but I'll let that go for now.
Figures aside, I think this blanket statement is just plain old wrong. While I agree that most (or at least a lot of) COTS software should meet some minimal level of standards -- it should have a modular mechanism for handling internationalization -- the code should be written so that it can be ported to new operating systems with minimal effort -- the user interface should be abstracted from the guts of the code, etc... however, not all commercial software is COTS software.
When I am developing commercial software for a client, I typically spend as much time as needed gathering requirements from that client until I feel that I have a complete understanding of the clients needs. Then I provide that client with an estimate that approximates as closely as possible the costs I anticipate encountering as I develop a good solid piece of software that does exactly what the client wants and nothing more. If I think that the client may have neglected to consider something that may be useful now or in the future, such as a generic XML data gateway module, or a web interface, etc. then I will certainly bring it up and try to explain why I feel it would be better to include it now, but if the client tells me they don't want these things, then I'm not going to develop them, because it will end up costing the client more money for me to include functionality that they are not interested in.
...and the second that existing systems are so badly layered and modularized that any larger improvements are impossible. [...]I saw a system written in 1995 that couldn't handle the new millenium.
This statement doesn't contain enough detail to really carry any weight. Was the "system" a script to back up software on a weekly basis? or was it an air-traffic-control system? How much effort was it to add the Y2K support? Was the system originally developed under tight deadlines and with a tight budget? Was it so difficult that spending the extra 800 man hours to add that functionality up front would've meant the death of the entire project? Was it so easy to add in November of 1999 that it was done by an intern sysadmin by modifying one 3-line perl script and hey she even got it right the first time? There are a lot of good reasons why software written in 1995 might not have been Y2K compatible (hell, there are a lot of good reasons why software written in late December 1999 or even after the new millenium might not be Y2K safe). There are also a lot of bad reasons, but just mentioning this offhandly like this with no context is like saying "I saw a car developed in 2001 that runs on leaded gasoline". Hey most people wouldn't want that car in most situations, but without knowing why or under what conditions that car was developed, you can't automatically claim that it's "bad".
Can't we do any better than that? The GNU suite says we can, so why is it so hard with commercial software?
This is useless rhetoric. I've seen plenty of commercial software that works well too. All commercial software is not bad. Implying otherwise is just silly.
I don't mean to just be disagreeable, I actually think the root argument Cliff is making, which I interpret as "there are alot of problems in the software development industry that don't need to be" or perhaps even more succinctly (and more relevantly to a larger audience) "software should be better" is a valid argument, and the state of software development is in fact a big problem these days... however I think it's important that anyone interested in solving the problem really stay focused and try to understand what the real problems are. There are plenty of them, and going off on a wild goose chase after some red herrings certainly isn't the best way to skin the cat. Or something.
That was basically my thought while reading the article... there are a number of things in the article that at least seem to suggest that his parents probably put a lot of pressure on him to suceed, and his head may have been filled with thoughts like "all my chances at getting into a good college and being a success like my brother are shot if I go to jail... my life is worthless now... blah blah"... even if it wasn't something his father (or anyone else) said after the suspension, it sounds like there was probably a lot of pressure on him to be perfect.
I mean come on... he was 13, he was a black belt, on the swim team, played the violin, knew several programming languages, was angling for the Olympics and trying to follow in the footsteps of his big brother... then his parents are saying shit like this:
"My life is meaningless now," said Jayanta Majumder, Shinjan's father. "I worked so hard to bring up good children in a good school district."
Gee, I wonder how that makes his remaining son feel? And:
"I really don't have any idea what was going on in his mind," said Rita Majumder, Shinjan's mother. "But they surely are to blame."
Gee, maybe you should try talking to your kids every now and then? Especially around times when they are getting suspended....
"If I had any idea, this would never have happened," Jayanta said.
Controlling, much?
There's no hard evidence in the article but every other line in it makes me believe it was more the parents' fault than the schools or anyone elses.
Of course everyone's ignoring the other bottom line here too... he couldnt've been all that bright if he killed himself over getting suspended from school or worries about going to jail.
I don't mean to be overly harsh but I've seen so many situations before where parents overpressuring their kids did way more harm than good and way more harm than any other major influence in their life.
I don't know where the poster got the idea that they were broadcasting DSL, but it doesn't say that anywhere in the article. That would be silly anyway.
The only problem is that when I was in school they didn't teach you anything that would help prevent the software you develop from sucking. They didn't teach configuration management, they never mentioned revision control, they spent very little time on design, none on testing, no mention of the term "life cycle", especially not in any useful sense, etc.
While you really do need to study software development to produce good software, I think you can study all the right stuff on your own... I think school will teach you more bad habits than anything else.
At my current job, age seems to be a major factor when it comes to
listening to what I have to say and believing that what I say is true. I've done so many
different things, like filling bosses' requests to build an online app that does something
complex in a short time, building and maintaining servers and security, and act as a
consultant for authentication code and security on various platforms. Yet, none of them respect me
because I'm still in school and because I'm young.
Sure there's a winner and losers, but you get a chance to be the winner again the next time the level rotates, which is usually a few minutes away, and you respawn instantly when you die instead of being kept out until the round is over like in facist games like Counter-Strike. Plus there is no hardcoded limit on the number of frags you can get, it's determined only by your skill.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be "when-will-it-begin"?
Maybe something like this?
I've seen similar things at Best Buy.
I've even seen people using PHP as a templating engine in front of a J2EE application. So maybe instead of just the "LAM" part of "LAMP" it can even go as far as "LAMP+J2EE".
I think you answered your own question. The government hasn't handed out tons of corporate welfare to computer game companies because they are profitable all on their own.
Ok, it really has nothing to do with that -- it probably has something to do with all the problems our military would have if one of it's biggest suppliers suddenly went belly up.
But still, I think your "where can you buy an airline for a few tens of USD" is a silly question. I mean how many airliners does boeing sell? And how many copies of Half-life has Valve sold? And how much R&D went into the airliner, vs. how much R&D into Half-life? Now I'm not suggesting Half-life was easy to write... or that they didn't have any R&D at all, but I suspect their budget was a lot smaller and their overall return (percentage wise) was a lot better.
I think the notion of "User Friendly" should include more than just "easy to use". To me, a chainsaw is "easy to use" (just pull the cord and point it at what you want cut) but not "user friendly" because it's very easy to accidentally injure yourself, or others, or simply mess up the job you were trying to do if you're not an "experienced user".
If the chainsaw could detect that it was going to cut through human flesh and would shut itself down, or if had a screen that asked what angle you wanted the cut and how deep and then a robotic mechanism performed the cut exactly right, it would still be both easy to use (in fact, easier to use for the inexperienced user) and also more "user friendly".
Of course "experienced users" would be annoyed by the new interface and how long it took to specify the cut correctly and sooner or later someone would need to use a chainsaw to cut through someone's leg that was trapped under a fallen car or something and it would refuse to operate, costing this person's life... but it would be more user friendly.
No reason. In fact, you would want to.
The tivo unit does not get the data from the cable system, it gets it from the Tivo network (via phone, or in Tivo2 optionally via the Internet).
So if you don't pay for your subscription, you don't get the data. As the original poster said, you can set it manually to record a specific channel for a specific duration starting at a specific time on a specific date, but this would get real old, real fast.
You would also of course get the ability to pause and rewind live T.V. which would still be easy to do.
Curveball
I don't know why everyone hated that movie. I think if you go back and watch it again you will realize it is a work of genius.
I'm sure someone's probably pointed this out before, but this is the first time I've noticed your .sig:
C:\>tracert life.liberty.pursuit-of-happiness
I just wanted to point out that the "C:\>" seems to indicate you're already off to a bad start in your attempt to find happiness.
... I'm not sure when or where it was, but there were definately two legs on either side of me... and it was really dark for a long time... then suddenly very bright... then I was crying a lot.
...or they're stuck on a lame 15-17" monitor at work and the boss won't spring for a better one.
1. You can run a gameboy emulator on the Zarus.
3. You don't really need wireless access in the Alaskan wilderness. There are providers who will definately cover you almost everywhere you'll really go.
...it's at www.qoopy.net.
And they're legal in every state.
To quote from THHG:
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine soredly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Actually, the full answer is "Yes... duh."
Modifications such as moving to a new operating system, modifying the business logic, adding a web interface, moving to Unicode etc, shouldn't affect more than perhaps 10-20% (to grab figures at random) of a decently built software system.
...and the second that existing systems are so badly layered and modularized that any larger improvements are impossible. [...]I saw a system written in 1995 that couldn't handle the new millenium.
Ok, well, first of all, grabbing figures at random is not the best way to build a solid argument, but I'll let that go for now.
Figures aside, I think this blanket statement is just plain old wrong. While I agree that most (or at least a lot of) COTS software should meet some minimal level of standards -- it should have a modular mechanism for handling internationalization -- the code should be written so that it can be ported to new operating systems with minimal effort -- the user interface should be abstracted from the guts of the code, etc... however, not all commercial software is COTS software.
When I am developing commercial software for a client, I typically spend as much time as needed gathering requirements from that client until I feel that I have a complete understanding of the clients needs. Then I provide that client with an estimate that approximates as closely as possible the costs I anticipate encountering as I develop a good solid piece of software that does exactly what the client wants and nothing more. If I think that the client may have neglected to consider something that may be useful now or in the future, such as a generic XML data gateway module, or a web interface, etc. then I will certainly bring it up and try to explain why I feel it would be better to include it now, but if the client tells me they don't want these things, then I'm not going to develop them, because it will end up costing the client more money for me to include functionality that they are not interested in.
This statement doesn't contain enough detail to really carry any weight. Was the "system" a script to back up software on a weekly basis? or was it an air-traffic-control system? How much effort was it to add the Y2K support? Was the system originally developed under tight deadlines and with a tight budget? Was it so difficult that spending the extra 800 man hours to add that functionality up front would've meant the death of the entire project? Was it so easy to add in November of 1999 that it was done by an intern sysadmin by modifying one 3-line perl script and hey she even got it right the first time? There are a lot of good reasons why software written in 1995 might not have been Y2K compatible (hell, there are a lot of good reasons why software written in late December 1999 or even after the new millenium might not be Y2K safe). There are also a lot of bad reasons, but just mentioning this offhandly like this with no context is like saying "I saw a car developed in 2001 that runs on leaded gasoline". Hey most people wouldn't want that car in most situations, but without knowing why or under what conditions that car was developed, you can't automatically claim that it's "bad".
Can't we do any better than that? The GNU suite says we can, so why is it so hard with commercial software?
This is useless rhetoric. I've seen plenty of commercial software that works well too. All commercial software is not bad. Implying otherwise is just silly.
I don't mean to just be disagreeable, I actually think the root argument Cliff is making, which I interpret as "there are alot of problems in the software development industry that don't need to be" or perhaps even more succinctly (and more relevantly to a larger audience) "software should be better" is a valid argument, and the state of software development is in fact a big problem these days... however I think it's important that anyone interested in solving the problem really stay focused and try to understand what the real problems are. There are plenty of them, and going off on a wild goose chase after some red herrings certainly isn't the best way to skin the cat. Or something.
Yeah, right. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
I mean come on... he was 13, he was a black belt, on the swim team, played the violin, knew several programming languages, was angling for the Olympics and trying to follow in the footsteps of his big brother... then his parents are saying shit like this:
"My life is meaningless now," said Jayanta Majumder, Shinjan's father. "I worked so hard to bring up good children in a good school district."
Gee, I wonder how that makes his remaining son feel? And:
"I really don't have any idea what was going on in his mind," said Rita Majumder, Shinjan's mother. "But they surely are to blame."
Gee, maybe you should try talking to your kids every now and then? Especially around times when they are getting suspended....
"If I had any idea, this would never have happened," Jayanta said.
Controlling, much?
There's no hard evidence in the article but every other line in it makes me believe it was more the parents' fault than the schools or anyone elses.
Of course everyone's ignoring the other bottom line here too... he couldnt've been all that bright if he killed himself over getting suspended from school or worries about going to jail.
I don't mean to be overly harsh but I've seen so many situations before where parents overpressuring their kids did way more harm than good and way more harm than any other major influence in their life.
I don't know where the poster got the idea that they were broadcasting DSL, but it doesn't say that anywhere in the article. That would be silly anyway.
...yes.
The only problem is that when I was in school they didn't teach you anything that would help prevent the software you develop from sucking. They didn't teach configuration management, they never mentioned revision control, they spent very little time on design, none on testing, no mention of the term "life cycle", especially not in any useful sense, etc.
While you really do need to study software development to produce good software, I think you can study all the right stuff on your own... I think school will teach you more bad habits than anything else.
Want a job?
Sure there's a winner and losers, but you get a chance to be the winner again the next time the level rotates, which is usually a few minutes away, and you respawn instantly when you die instead of being kept out until the round is over like in facist games like Counter-Strike. Plus there is no hardcoded limit on the number of frags you can get, it's determined only by your skill.