I feel compelled at this juncture to point out that your Civic has 170,000 miles on it.
My last car was a Ford Taurus. A bad fitting caused the radiator hose to pop off one day, which caused all the coolant to drain out, which caused the engine to completely overheat in fairly short order. Result: a few weeks later, the head gasket went. It would have cost about a thousand bucks to repair. That car had just shy of 100K miles on it.
I now live in hope for the day that a bunch of the corporations pushing for invasive DRM like Blizzard's Warden and Sony's whatever-it's-called sue each other under the DMCA for circumventing each others technologies, instead of suing us for trying to crawl out from under them.
My better judgement tells me that it is petty and low to make a comment like this, but it nags at me, so I'm going to let it out and then apologize.
"Sure. It's easy to donate tons of money to good causes when you have more of it (money) than anyone else in the world."
Sorry for my meanness. In conclusion, let me humbly suggest that rather than just applaud Gates for donating this money (or chide him for not giving more), we all follow suit and give what we can to whatever worthwhile causes we can.
I actually had to re-read the first page of the article a couple of times to make sure I wasn't mistaken. I'm not. Here's my redacted version of the front page - note how he buries the lede in a two word sentence at the end of the page.
Why hasn't photo-editing software been developed that is both easy to use and not rinky-dink? Take Adobe Photoshop (please!) as an example. It's often unnecessarily complicated. So over the years, people have developed programs to be bundled with digital cameras. Even Adobe had one of these programs, which has been replaced by Photoshop Elements. Photoshop Elements is essentially an older version of Photoshop with its name changed to Elements. It's fine.
I actually had to rub my eyes and reread that last bit over again a few times, then skip to the next page for the punchline. But there's no punchline, as the next page starts a new topic.
Even shorter version: "Dammit! Why can't someone design decent photo editing software? It's all either incredibly complicated or for kiddies!" (long rant edited for brevity) "Oh, except for Photoshop Elements. It's fine."
Shorter still version: "I am an asshole with attention deficit disorder."
ephraimX gets it a couple posts down. It's basically a remnant of old prejudices against lefties: "right" in Latin is "Dexter," which is where we get the term "dextrous," or even "ambidextrous" - literally, "right-handed on both sides." Conversely, the left side is associated with bad things, so "gauche" means lacking in grace.
Do you really think Google needs 5000 computers to serve a website? NO--- a signifigant number of those computers are for data crunching-- what are people viewing now, what advertisements should we show them? It's called "predictive marketing", it's a more advanced version of those stupid "Direct Marketing" advertisements you get in the mail.
"To serve a web site." Right. A website which just happens to provide access to arguably the largest searchable index of the web available.
"Do you really think that the White Star Line needed 46,239 tonnes of steel to build a boat? NO--- a signficant amount of that steel was used to provide accomodations: where people eat, sleep, and live while they're on the boat."
(Not that I mean to say that Google should be compared to the Titanic, or that it doesn't take some computational firepower to crunch all that user data. But "serving a web site" is sort of a big understatement of even the most basic of functions Google's server farm provides.)
I think you're missing my point, which is: Jack Thompson's hypothetical game has as much narrative context as Manhunt (which he's cited before), and almost certainly more than Postal.
Jack Thompson is an ass of the first caliber, and deserves whatever shit he gets. Nevertheless, Tycho is being unfair to him in one respect.
This vile "challenge" Jack Thompson has put to the supposedly monolithic "game industry" is like a topographical map of the twisted fantasy realm he inhabits. I could excerpt it, but I don't want to be accused of selective editing. The reality is that what he suggests is grotesque. I mean that it is literally disgusting. Of course, the violent acts he's cobbled together here from other games are robbed of a narrative context in which they make sense. Killing Gamestop and EB employees, though? That's not metaphor. He's not being metaphorical. He is batshit fucking loco insane.
I'll grant that, no problem. But can someone describe for me the "narrative context" in Postal 2 which justified such actions? Or even Manhunt, which, god help me, I actually paid money for and played all the way through.
(If you never played Manhunt, the idea is that you're a convict secretly rented out to a snuff film producer to take part in a game so shocking and post-modern that it was considered a classic of short story literature in 1947. You get extra points for exterminating your hunters in as gruesome and vicious a manner as posible.)
So to recap, no love lost for Jack Thompson, but Tycho should be a little more honest when it comes to the really disgusting games out there.
Further proof that MSIE is the more advanced browser. After all, it doesn't require any additional code to freeze. Plus, it'll temporarily screw up your whole UI while it does!
(Sorry. I hate perpetuating the old MSIE vs. Firefox flamefest, but that joke wrote itself.)
Ugh, god no. There are plenty of reasons to hate RUP, but there are equally as many reasons to hate XP. Considering that XP is tiny in comparison to RUP, I'd say that weighs more heavily against XP.
(if I might recommend: it's not precisely unbiased, but there's more than a little truth in it, and it'll make you laugh. Extreme Programming Refactored.)
I mean it has been analysed and designed, and documented, and modelled, and designed again until no stone is left unturned, and BAM! suddenly we are implmenting software? Am I the only guy who thinks this is too good to be true? Nowhere in the Rational Unified Process can I find any diagram, reference to, or project plan, about the "Build" or "Code" stage. Yes, I know there is a "Construct phase" but nothing inside it actually talks about putting hands on keyboard and coding.
You're probably confused by RUP's use of the term "implementation." When a software architect considers what the functional requirements of the software are, then starts describing classes and subsystems that are supposed to meet those requirements, he's performing one of the disciplines, analysis. When you take into account nonfunctional requirements, performance requirements, et cetera, and further refine the description, you're performing the "design" discipline. The person in the "implementation" role is the one actually developing - and often testing - the components.
So, the "bam" you're referring to - implementing software - in RUP, that refers to actually writing the damn stuff. If it seems like you magically skipped from analysis and design over the whole meat of the process, it's because you're probably confusing the term "implementation" with "deployment."
Incidentally: if you look at a diagram of the Phases vs. Disciplines of RUP (there are a lot of them to choose from, and they depend on the type of project you're working on), you'll see the third phase is called Construction. In Construction, there's a lot of "implementation" which starts to taper off right near the end of the phase, and a bunch of "testing" which ramps up right near the end. That's the part you're thinking of.
But since you asked: the part right near the end of construction is usually where people start to realize it if something is seriously going wrong. So yes, if expensive consultants are going to be summoned, that's probably where.
(sorry if this is rambling and incoherent - I'm up way past my bedtime)
RUP is, in fact, a process to follow. It stands for Rational Unified Process, and defines a set of Roles, Activities, and tools used to write software. It goes into extremely exacting detail, which is, in my opinion, it's biggest weakness: unless you've memorized huge chunks of RUP, you spend a lot of your time trying to remember how to follow it. Once you have, you've spent too much time.
The activities described by RUP are supported to varying degrees by the various Rational tools: Rose for modeling, ClearCase for source control, and ClearQuest for issue tracking.
By the legal definition I would say that Microsoft is a monopoly and this position has been upheld in court. As Adam Smith pointed out monopolies are the enemy of good management and therefore antithetical to a free market. It is in the best interest of healthy competition to regulate monopolies and restrain them from abusing their power.
Adam Smith was also writing in a time at which "monopolies" were granted by the crown of England, as in, "I grant this company the sole right to import tea from India to England." This is significantly different from the type of monopoly Microsoft represents.
Not to say that Microsoft didn't abuse its market position or wasn't deserving of punishment, but Smith probably would have had bigger fish to fry.
Of course, there are going to be situations where RoR isn't the ideal solution. But integration with legacy apps prejudices the field against almost anything that isn't "the thing that I was last working with."
As for workign with a real "enterprise" environment: if SAP doesn't count, I'm not sure what does. (warning: links to page which has horrible, non-wrapping formatting in my browser. YMMV.)
The SQL database abstraction layer is an important feature of SQLObject, that Ruby on Rails doesn't currently support -- you have to write database dependent SQL code mixed in with your Ruby code....So you don't have to change any of your Python code to port it to a different database, and you don't have to mix together two different notations, or quote a bunch of SQL strings in your Python code. It's a much more "pythonic" way of database programming than raw SQL.
I'm going to assume you haven't actually done any Ruby on Rails.
The only raw SQL you're ever forced to write in a RoR app is the initial data definition where you create the tables in your database. After that, it's all object-relational mapping as handled by the Active Record component. No SQL to be found, no rewriting code to port from one database to another. (Well - unless you count recreating the tables, or changing the name of the database driver in the config file.)
Tell me - how and where does one start writing SQL when you're using Ruby's Activerecord (which sounds like a building block for making Ruby objects similar to Python's SQLObject but without writing a single line of SQL)?
In pretty much every Ruby tutorial I've seen (including Agile Web Development with Rails), the sequence goes: write the SQL, write the class, let Rails infer what isn't worth specifying.
More specifically: Rails makes a vast number of assumptions about the manner in which you store your data, but for the most part the assumptions are 1) reasonable, and 2) overrideable. This goes along with their philosphy of "convention over configuration," something any J2EE developer can likely relate to.
For example: Rails expects that if I create a class called "LineItem," that it can find a table in the database called "LineItems" that has an autoincrementing primary key called "id." If I create a "ShoppingCart" class, and in my class definition I put "has_many:LineItems", it expects a field in the "ShoppingCarts" table called "LineItem_id," ostensibly a foreign key (although it will handle the standard key constraints itself, w/o intervention from the RDB.) And so forth. But after you've written your data definitions, you basically don't have to write any SQL again afterwards. And if you find the Rails conventions to onerous, you can always override them.
Active Record has a new feature called "Migrations" coming out RSN which abstracts away even this initial involvement in the SQL, but I haven't so much as touched it yet.
David Heinemeier Hansson (one of the RoR progenitors and its most recognizable evangelist) recently addressed this dichotomy on his blog.
Active Record is opinionated software, just like the rest of Rails... And the opinion goes as follows: I don't want my database to be clever!
In other words, I want a single layer of cleverness: My domain model. Object-orientation is all about encapsulating clever. Letting it sieve half ways through to the database is a terrible violation of those fine intentions. And I want no part of it.
Flickr is experiencing a similar problem, only now the issue is with people from the UAE crossposting their photos to millions of unrelated groups, then whining about why noone leaves comments on their photos.
Just as a follow-up - the specification of the SWF format has been available under more or less these terms for years, possibly since Macromedia Flash was introduced.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel compelled at this juncture to point out that your Civic has 170,000 miles on it.
My last car was a Ford Taurus. A bad fitting caused the radiator hose to pop off one day, which caused all the coolant to drain out, which caused the engine to completely overheat in fairly short order. Result: a few weeks later, the head gasket went. It would have cost about a thousand bucks to repair. That car had just shy of 100K miles on it.
170K suddenly doesn't sound so bad.
Obviously, the linked web site is being run off a prototype of the $100 laptop.
I now live in hope for the day that a bunch of the corporations pushing for invasive DRM like Blizzard's Warden and Sony's whatever-it's-called sue each other under the DMCA for circumventing each others technologies, instead of suing us for trying to crawl out from under them.
My better judgement tells me that it is petty and low to make a comment like this, but it nags at me, so I'm going to let it out and then apologize.
"Sure. It's easy to donate tons of money to good causes when you have more of it (money) than anyone else in the world."
Sorry for my meanness. In conclusion, let me humbly suggest that rather than just applaud Gates for donating this money (or chide him for not giving more), we all follow suit and give what we can to whatever worthwhile causes we can.
Oh yeah? Well, my ambition is to lead the NBA in rebounds.
Of course, I'm 5'6" and 32 years old - not to mention pudgy and with asthma - but ambition is ambition, baby.
I actually had to rub my eyes and reread that last bit over again a few times, then skip to the next page for the punchline. But there's no punchline, as the next page starts a new topic.
Even shorter version:
"Dammit! Why can't someone design decent photo editing software? It's all either incredibly complicated or for kiddies!" (long rant edited for brevity) "Oh, except for Photoshop Elements. It's fine."
Shorter still version:
"I am an asshole with attention deficit disorder."
ephraimX gets it a couple posts down. It's basically a remnant of old prejudices against lefties: "right" in Latin is "Dexter," which is where we get the term "dextrous," or even "ambidextrous" - literally, "right-handed on both sides." Conversely, the left side is associated with bad things, so "gauche" means lacking in grace.
"To serve a web site." Right. A website which just happens to provide access to arguably the largest searchable index of the web available.
"Do you really think that the White Star Line needed 46,239 tonnes of steel to build a boat? NO--- a signficant amount of that steel was used to provide accomodations: where people eat, sleep, and live while they're on the boat."
(Not that I mean to say that Google should be compared to the Titanic, or that it doesn't take some computational firepower to crunch all that user data. But "serving a web site" is sort of a big understatement of even the most basic of functions Google's server farm provides.)
It's funny you should say that - I thought the people from cable news were blaming the web.
Hand wire. Feh! I train the magic gnomes that power my computers personally!
I think you're missing my point, which is: Jack Thompson's hypothetical game has as much narrative context as Manhunt (which he's cited before), and almost certainly more than Postal.
I'll grant that, no problem. But can someone describe for me the "narrative context" in Postal 2 which justified such actions? Or even Manhunt , which, god help me, I actually paid money for and played all the way through.
(If you never played Manhunt, the idea is that you're a convict secretly rented out to a snuff film producer to take part in a game so shocking and post-modern that it was considered a classic of short story literature in 1947. You get extra points for exterminating your hunters in as gruesome and vicious a manner as posible.)
So to recap, no love lost for Jack Thompson, but Tycho should be a little more honest when it comes to the really disgusting games out there.
Yes. Bam! Your web browser locked up!
Further proof that MSIE is the more advanced browser. After all, it doesn't require any additional code to freeze. Plus, it'll temporarily screw up your whole UI while it does!
(Sorry. I hate perpetuating the old MSIE vs. Firefox flamefest, but that joke wrote itself.)
Heh. The presenter is David Heinemeier Hannson. His blog can be found here.
;)
The demo on that page is often referred to as the "whoops" demo for obvious reasons.
Ugh, god no. There are plenty of reasons to hate RUP, but there are equally as many reasons to hate XP. Considering that XP is tiny in comparison to RUP, I'd say that weighs more heavily against XP.
(if I might recommend: it's not precisely unbiased, but there's more than a little truth in it, and it'll make you laugh. Extreme Programming Refactored.)
You're probably confused by RUP's use of the term "implementation." When a software architect considers what the functional requirements of the software are, then starts describing classes and subsystems that are supposed to meet those requirements, he's performing one of the disciplines, analysis. When you take into account nonfunctional requirements, performance requirements, et cetera, and further refine the description, you're performing the "design" discipline. The person in the "implementation" role is the one actually developing - and often testing - the components.
So, the "bam" you're referring to - implementing software - in RUP, that refers to actually writing the damn stuff. If it seems like you magically skipped from analysis and design over the whole meat of the process, it's because you're probably confusing the term "implementation" with "deployment."
Incidentally: if you look at a diagram of the Phases vs. Disciplines of RUP (there are a lot of them to choose from, and they depend on the type of project you're working on), you'll see the third phase is called Construction. In Construction, there's a lot of "implementation" which starts to taper off right near the end of the phase, and a bunch of "testing" which ramps up right near the end. That's the part you're thinking of.
But since you asked: the part right near the end of construction is usually where people start to realize it if something is seriously going wrong. So yes, if expensive consultants are going to be summoned, that's probably where.
(sorry if this is rambling and incoherent - I'm up way past my bedtime)
RUP is, in fact, a process to follow. It stands for Rational Unified Process, and defines a set of Roles, Activities, and tools used to write software. It goes into extremely exacting detail, which is, in my opinion, it's biggest weakness: unless you've memorized huge chunks of RUP, you spend a lot of your time trying to remember how to follow it. Once you have, you've spent too much time.
The activities described by RUP are supported to varying degrees by the various Rational tools: Rose for modeling, ClearCase for source control, and ClearQuest for issue tracking.
Adam Smith was also writing in a time at which "monopolies" were granted by the crown of England, as in, "I grant this company the sole right to import tea from India to England." This is significantly different from the type of monopoly Microsoft represents.
Not to say that Microsoft didn't abuse its market position or wasn't deserving of punishment, but Smith probably would have had bigger fish to fry.
Of course, there are going to be situations where RoR isn't the ideal solution. But integration with legacy apps prejudices the field against almost anything that isn't "the thing that I was last working with."
As for workign with a real "enterprise" environment: if SAP doesn't count, I'm not sure what does. (warning: links to page which has horrible, non-wrapping formatting in my browser. YMMV.)
I'm going to assume you haven't actually done any Ruby on Rails.
The only raw SQL you're ever forced to write in a RoR app is the initial data definition where you create the tables in your database. After that, it's all object-relational mapping as handled by the Active Record component. No SQL to be found, no rewriting code to port from one database to another. (Well - unless you count recreating the tables, or changing the name of the database driver in the config file.)
In pretty much every Ruby tutorial I've seen (including Agile Web Development with Rails ), the sequence goes: write the SQL, write the class, let Rails infer what isn't worth specifying.
More specifically: Rails makes a vast number of assumptions about the manner in which you store your data, but for the most part the assumptions are 1) reasonable, and 2) overrideable. This goes along with their philosphy of "convention over configuration," something any J2EE developer can likely relate to.
For example: Rails expects that if I create a class called "LineItem," that it can find a table in the database called "LineItems" that has an autoincrementing primary key called "id." If I create a "ShoppingCart" class, and in my class definition I put "has_many
Active Record has a new feature called "Migrations" coming out RSN which abstracts away even this initial involvement in the SQL, but I haven't so much as touched it yet.
Flickr is experiencing a similar problem, only now the issue is with people from the UAE crossposting their photos to millions of unrelated groups, then whining about why noone leaves comments on their photos.
Just as a follow-up - the specification of the SWF format has been available under more or less these terms for years, possibly since Macromedia Flash was introduced.
...there's already this. It does pretty much exactly what you're looking for, except via VNC.