Microsoft has BEEN using automated integration and unit tests, for at least fifteen years. (I spent a year owning some of the unit tests for USER, back in NT 3.1 days.) Windows has one of the best systems for allowing modular code out there-- yeah, we know about DLL hell, but it's there because lots of programs *do* use the same shared libraries, and with the versioning stuff in Win2k and later it's mostly dealt with. Predetermined interfaces... gawd. COM was developed precisely to allow that, and it's been working its way steadily deeper into the OS over time.
Microsoft's existing dev practices would allow them to produce something the size of Apache, or PHP, or OpenOffice, with no trouble; they needed to do something better because the project they're taking on is so much larger.
H2 and O2 are not catalysts, nor do they "improve" combustion of other things in the neighborhood. One's fuel, the other's oxygen, and they just plain burn.
If you actually want to use water to get more motie power out of a given amount of fuel, just inject the water straight into the combustion chamber. This increases pressure in the combustion chamber and thus increases torque. It also forces water into the engine oil... not so good for the engine in the long run. Useful for drag racing, and for dogfighting in WWII-era military aircraft, but I wouldn't want it on my car.
Two of the three closest grocery stores to my house are an Albertsons and a Safeway. (The other one is a QFC-- but they don't seem to do the online shopping thingy, ah well.)
Soda cans? TISSUES? Oh, I wish. I've got a four-year-old. I know how many square inches of carpet one strawberry can completely soak with pulp and juice when it's thoroughly stomped in by little feet.
All of the things that I'd really want a robot for, it would get dirty quickly, and then get grit inside it, and then skizkeewunchgktktklllghh...
Which is a silly way to put it, but a real issue: before you can have a robot in every home, you have to have a robot that can OPERATE in a home, for something like a year, with no maintenance. Anything less and there just wouldn't be a point.
What's the average age of people in the US these days... forty-something or other iirc? A century ago, most people didn't even LIVE that long, and practically nobody was healthy enough after thirty to do creative work.
What I'm really waiting for is the first 40+ Miss Universe. You KNOW it's going to happen...
The funny thing, this is sort of true... the only reason that anybody bothers to mine rubies or sapphires anymore is for the snob value. You can buy artificial sapphires for under five bucks on Ebay that would cost tens of thousands of dollars if they had the paperwork showing that they were "natural." I bought a couple of handfuls, they're nifty.
You've got to be young, because if you were old enough to remember VisiCalc, you would never have thought this.
Most spreadsheets are made by the people on the ground-- secretaries, low-level managers, clerks. That's most of the problem right there; these folks tend to poke around randomly at a problem until they get something that "looks okay," and then forget how they got to a solution and just use it. God forbid that anything should change.
The simple truth is that, from the band's point of view, albums are advertising expense. Bands do not profit from albums.. even the tiny slice of royalties they're officially given are inevitably taken by the labels.
If all you do is buy albums, you are doing nothing, nothing at all, to help the band survive. It's not worth feeling guilty over it, but it is a good reason for the bands to find new ways to distribute their music... if they can actually make a nickel a tune selling it on mp3.com or whatever, that's five cents more than they get now.
Nah, they should just make the spammers buy Internet stocks. Scott Richter, you must go and buy five million shares of InfoSpace... AT TEN DOLLARS EACH!
Just think... some bastard spams your blog with links to "hotanalonlinepoker.com", so you pay Google thirty bucks to whack that site down one rank whenever the appropriate search is made.
Okay, so i can also see the scamentologists doing a few thousand of those on their detractors, but... it might still be worth it.
Their technical lead proudly described the amazing fast database system he'd written to handle full-text search, because none of the commercial DB engines could possibly be fast enough.
He was using binary search to look through what he was estimating would be about a million records on disk.
Perhaps it was a mistake to explain that using a hash table would find the correct record in an average of 1.5 disk hits, as opposed to the 19 that his system was taking, because they didn't offer me a job. Then, again, maybe it wasn't a mistake-- after all, I didn't end up working there.
Cheapass games are insanely great. Simple enough to play with a six-year-old, real enough to play with a group of adults. I've bought three copies of "Lord of the Fries" over the years, 'cos of wearing two of them out.
I see a lot of comments here talking about how Microsoft "got into" markets at such-and-such a time. It's worth mentioning something about this: Microsoft was ALREADY IN the two markets where they dominate, right from the start.
PC operating systems? Heh, yeah. Word processors? Word 1.0 came out in, I think, 1983... with mouse support, yet. Graphical spreadsheets? The spreadsheet that you could buy for your Mac the day it came out was Multiplan, and Excel was only a year or so behind that.
Microsoft has always had software available for all of the obvious "everybody has one" apps. Most of those programs laid around being unprofitable for years before they went anywhere; does anybody else remember the old saw about not buying anything from Microsoft with a version number less than 3.0?
Not that this makes 'em any less bastard monopolists... but they don't "jump into" markets at some magical "right time." It's just that they're in all of the markets, ALL of the time, waiting for the market leader to stumble.
" In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves with a gun because our value lies with beating people."
Re:An error in one of his essays
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 1
You've misunderstood his point. Those paragraphs are warning about a particular type of programmer you meet: the guy who says that since C++ doesn't "allow" references to invalid memory, they can't happen, so he uses references instead of pointers and never checks them. Then one day somebody else tries to call the code, passes in a pointers, and whap.
Y'know, a hammer with a warped handle *will* bite your thumb every damn' time. Likewise a screwdriver with a trashed head will slip, chew up the screws, etc.
C++ tries, really tries hard, to cause buffer overflows.
Y'know, there are still a few places in any major city where you can get a buggy whip... Fantasy Unlimited is probably the first shop I'd look at here in Seattle.
Slashdot Mirror
... but no. SCRABBLE, feh. I wanna summon lions in the plains!
Microsoft has BEEN using automated integration and unit tests, for at least fifteen years. (I spent a year owning some of the unit tests for USER, back in NT 3.1 days.) Windows has one of the best systems for allowing modular code out there-- yeah, we know about DLL hell, but it's there because lots of programs *do* use the same shared libraries, and with the versioning stuff in Win2k and later it's mostly dealt with. Predetermined interfaces... gawd. COM was developed precisely to allow that, and it's been working its way steadily deeper into the OS over time.
Microsoft's existing dev practices would allow them to produce something the size of Apache, or PHP, or OpenOffice, with no trouble; they needed to do something better because the project they're taking on is so much larger.
H2 and O2 are not catalysts, nor do they "improve" combustion of other things in the neighborhood. One's fuel, the other's oxygen, and they just plain burn.
If you actually want to use water to get more motie power out of a given amount of fuel, just inject the water straight into the combustion chamber. This increases pressure in the combustion chamber and thus increases torque. It also forces water into the engine oil... not so good for the engine in the long run. Useful for drag racing, and for dogfighting in WWII-era military aircraft, but I wouldn't want it on my car.
Two of the three closest grocery stores to my house are an Albertsons and a Safeway. (The other one is a QFC-- but they don't seem to do the online shopping thingy, ah well.)
If you can hire Alan Kay to write code, you probably do.
Soda cans? TISSUES? Oh, I wish. I've got a four-year-old. I know how many square inches of carpet one strawberry can completely soak with pulp and juice when it's thoroughly stomped in by little feet.
All of the things that I'd really want a robot for, it would get dirty quickly, and then get grit inside it, and then skizkeewunchgktktklllghh...
Which is a silly way to put it, but a real issue: before you can have a robot in every home, you have to have a robot that can OPERATE in a home, for something like a year, with no maintenance. Anything less and there just wouldn't be a point.
What's the average age of people in the US these days... forty-something or other iirc? A century ago, most people didn't even LIVE that long, and practically nobody was healthy enough after thirty to do creative work.
What I'm really waiting for is the first 40+ Miss Universe. You KNOW it's going to happen...
Gonna make me a "glass" house, and then I'm gonna throw me some STONES, oh, yeah.
The funny thing, this is sort of true... the only reason that anybody bothers to mine rubies or sapphires anymore is for the snob value. You can buy artificial sapphires for under five bucks on Ebay that would cost tens of thousands of dollars if they had the paperwork showing that they were "natural." I bought a couple of handfuls, they're nifty.
You've got to be young, because if you were old enough to remember VisiCalc, you would never have thought this.
Most spreadsheets are made by the people on the ground-- secretaries, low-level managers, clerks. That's most of the problem right there; these folks tend to poke around randomly at a problem until they get something that "looks okay," and then forget how they got to a solution and just use it. God forbid that anything should change.
No, but... one of the claims the record industry drones like to make is that file sharing hurts artists. That claim is false.
Quit equating copyright violations with theft, the two are not similar.
That's all this is. They've got their billions, they don't NEED a salary.
You can disagree, but you'll be wrong.
The simple truth is that, from the band's point of view, albums are advertising expense. Bands do not profit from albums.. even the tiny slice of royalties they're officially given are inevitably taken by the labels.
If all you do is buy albums, you are doing nothing, nothing at all, to help the band survive. It's not worth feeling guilty over it, but it is a good reason for the bands to find new ways to distribute their music... if they can actually make a nickel a tune selling it on mp3.com or whatever, that's five cents more than they get now.
Nah, they should just make the spammers buy Internet stocks. Scott Richter, you must go and buy five million shares of InfoSpace... AT TEN DOLLARS EACH!
Now I've got to be frightened of air, too?
Just think... some bastard spams your blog with links to "hotanalonlinepoker.com", so you pay Google thirty bucks to whack that site down one rank whenever the appropriate search is made.
Okay, so i can also see the scamentologists doing a few thousand of those on their detractors, but... it might still be worth it.
Their technical lead proudly described the amazing fast database system he'd written to handle full-text search, because none of the commercial DB engines could possibly be fast enough.
He was using binary search to look through what he was estimating would be about a million records on disk.
Perhaps it was a mistake to explain that using a hash table would find the correct record in an average of 1.5 disk hits, as opposed to the 19 that his system was taking, because they didn't offer me a job. Then, again, maybe it wasn't a mistake-- after all, I didn't end up working there.
Cheapass games are insanely great. Simple enough to play with a six-year-old, real enough to play with a group of adults. I've bought three copies of "Lord of the Fries" over the years, 'cos of wearing two of them out.
I see a lot of comments here talking about how Microsoft "got into" markets at such-and-such a time. It's worth mentioning something about this: Microsoft was ALREADY IN the two markets where they dominate, right from the start.
PC operating systems? Heh, yeah. Word processors? Word 1.0 came out in, I think, 1983... with mouse support, yet. Graphical spreadsheets? The spreadsheet that you could buy for your Mac the day it came out was Multiplan, and Excel was only a year or so behind that.
Microsoft has always had software available for all of the obvious "everybody has one" apps. Most of those programs laid around being unprofitable for years before they went anywhere; does anybody else remember the old saw about not buying anything from Microsoft with a version number less than 3.0?
Not that this makes 'em any less bastard monopolists... but they don't "jump into" markets at some magical "right time." It's just that they're in all of the markets, ALL of the time, waiting for the market leader to stumble.
" In our industry, one doesn't make hostile moves with a gun because our value lies with beating people."
You've misunderstood his point. Those paragraphs are warning about a particular type of programmer you meet: the guy who says that since C++ doesn't "allow" references to invalid memory, they can't happen, so he uses references instead of pointers and never checks them. Then one day somebody else tries to call the code, passes in a pointers, and whap.
Y'know, a hammer with a warped handle *will* bite your thumb every damn' time. Likewise a screwdriver with a trashed head will slip, chew up the screws, etc.
C++ tries, really tries hard, to cause buffer overflows.
Y'know, there are still a few places in any major city where you can get a buggy whip... Fantasy Unlimited is probably the first shop I'd look at here in Seattle.
Only a few days after that other guy beat him to death with, iirc, a chunk of pipe.