Oh boo hoo! I've had TiVo for years and it *has* revolutionized the way that I watch TV. Yes it's nice to be able to watch what TV I want to watch when I want to watch it, but equally important is the ability to skip over commercials.
Americans are bombarded with advertising, and it's a filthy business. Everywhere you turn there's an advertisement launched at you. They're even so sleezy that they mark up prices so that they can say they are 30% off and make a sale.
What irks me is when I listen to a radio program or watch a television program and the actual content is only 3/4 of what is played. Some simpsons episodes are as short as 18 minutes! Other shows run for 22, but jeez - 18 minutes?! That's almost 50% commercials! Doesn't that seem ridiculous?
TiVO has simply made us the consumer more aware of the amount of advertising flung at us on a daily basis. The advertisers are going to have to find some other business model, because I believe that when TiVO takes off there will be no going back.
Here is some shameless self promotion, but I believe it to be in line with what Xaroth is saying.
The challenge to Xaroth's approach lies not in the deployment of these systems (if they're $200 a pop that's easy), but rather in the information harvesting and data collection. I can't imagine that everyone will own the same type of unit, and so how do you manage all these different protocols?
I'm working on a project called WeatherNet (http://meta-tools.sf.net/wxnet) and I'm trying to solve the problem I've outlined above. Using open protocols (web services) I'm trying to define WSDLs that any different weather station can implement to. For example, I've defined a WeatherSummary as containing a temperature (in fahrenheight), pressure (in inches of mercury), etc etc etc. How you implement that web service interface is up to you. But the point is that you conform to an interface.
Using this infrastructure, universal clients can be written to attach to any node in the network. I know this is shameless self promotion, but I'm hoping that a few people will follow the above link to my project page and take a look at the download.
Sitting in front of a TV, you do absolutely nothing. You slouch, with remote and hand, and stare at the TV while frequently drooling, grabbing one's self, burping, or snacking. This is horrid behavior - nothing positive comes of it. Period.
At least on a computer, even if playing MMORPGs, the user must *interact*, which is something television lacks. Televions is a broadcast medium whereas the Internet is interactive. The user must do some work in order to achieve satisfaction. With a TV, they must simply watch. On the web, they must read or strategize, or at the very least point and click, which is an exercise of hand-eye coordination.
I'd take a computer geek MMORPG no friend having dorkahontas over a TV addicted vegaholic that sits around and watches Space Ghost Coast To Coast all day.
Keep in mind that applets were conceived in an era where the browser was believed to be the next incarnation of an operating system. Applets provide a widget rich environment (awt) that had tremendous benefits over the drudgery of a request/response interaction that browsers offered. Applets were to revolution application development. Unfortunately they didn't...
Nowadays, there are lots of alternatives for installing a thin client onto a desktop computing platform, namely webstart and installanywhere. With distributing computing frameworks such as EJB so easy to deploy, it becomes a trivial task to implement in a full fledged application distributed via webstart what previously was cobbled together in an applet. Plus, webstart has controls that allow the end user to only download jar files that changed, a significant improvement over how applets worked a long time ago.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that you use Java applets at all. I've been a java developer for 5 - 6 years now, read usenet frequently, spend long hours at the office, went to JavaOne, etc - I'm very much a pro-java programmer. But when I come across a site that uses an applet, I usually just ignore it (they are normally just eye candy or silly scrollbars), or opt for the more attractive flash equivalents.
If you ask me, Sun really blundered on the desktop. They had a wonderful opportunity to gain a leg up on microsoft by waving their portability flag. But they pissed it all away by not creating a more visually appealing experience. What we're now seeing are full fledged flash applications that are portable, fast, and beautiful with respect to their java counterparts. It's sad...
Hopefully, with their j2me efforts and unification of the java platform they will refocus their effort on enriching the desktop java experience. If not, I'm sure that others (namely IBM and SWT) will fill the gap. Let's just hope they do it in a specification-first, reference-implementation second fashion...
I don't buy the "lowest common denominator" nonsense that some people are shoveling. That may have been true for browsers wrt html support and display resolutions, I don't believe it translates to Java. Consider this -
All the customer cares about is ease of use during the installation process. With InstallAnywhere virtually free (and I can't recall the name of the project that *is* actually free) - distributing your product is easy and transparent to the user.
Just to play games, let's assume that somebody out there *didn't* want to use an installer and shipped out JAR files. Even if this maniacal situation existed, the fact that Dell and HP are dropping the 1.4 JRE onto PCs prior to shipping them to customers makes the VM Microsoft bundled completely and utterly irrelevant!
IF installers were not freely available, and IF Dell and HP were not dropping 1.4 onto the desktop then *maybe* you'd have a handful of customers negatively impacted by the decision of the appelate court. But that's not the case.
In fact, I think it's better that MS doesn't have to ship the old version of Java (wasn't it 1.1.3 that they had tos hip?) - it completely eliminates any notion of "lease common denominator" nonsense.
mod parent up. Eight 01 definitely knows what he is talking about. TiVo has done a fabulous job in "leeking" information to the TiVo hacking community. If anything, they are in this *with* us, if not officially (or publicly) so.
You're absolutely correct Jordan. There are lots of scientific and astronomical calculations that would be immensely valuable in the open source world. One part of the analysis that I think most reports fail to recognize is the fringe benefits of using open source.
I work on an "enterprise" project for NASA, and we currently use several closed source COTS products (most notably WebLogic, TopLink, and Wasp). We also use several open soruce projects (most notably Xalan, Dom4J, and Tomcat). We have an immensely difficult configuation we must manage - the mapping of our object model to a relational data model. We use TopLink (closed source) to help us manage this challenge. TopLink is tightly coupled with WebLogic (another closed source product). We *very frequently* receive ambiguous error messages, NullPointerExceptiosn, InvocationTargetExceptions, and similar non-sensical and non-intuitive error messages out of our Closed Source projects. When this happens, luckily we have a stack trace that we can look at. To fix the problem, we employ the following strategy:
1.) Report the bug to the vendor 2.) Quietly, unjar the closed source product 3.) Quietly, decompile the class 4.) Quietly, re-compile it (to get line number debugging info) 5.) Re-produce our problem 6.) Quietly, open the decompiled source code in an editor 7.) Quietly, locate the line number that threw the exception 8.) Examine the if and try-catch'es that produced the exception 9.) Continue up through the stack until you determine the problem
For example... We mapped our object model using TopLink and named the project "foo". Our bean deployment descriptors used a project name of "FOO". The old version of TopLink was case insensitive. The new versions are case sensitive. Instead of erroring with "You referenced a project named 'FOO' in your bean deployment descriptor, but no project named 'foo' exists in your TopLink configuration.", TopLink gave us a NullPointerException. We would never have been able to determine the cause of the NPE without examining the code. We would've had to wait until our CSR responded to us (which ended up taking 4 days by the way) in order to resolve our problem.
That's the fundamental problem with closed source software. If TopLink and WebLogic were open, we would not have had to take steps 2 - 5 (that's 50% of our procedure!). And, this problem was simple. We could resolve it ourselves. But lots of other times there are more complex problems where you have some notion of what's going on (because you look at the internals), and you'd like to be helpful to the CSR folks on the other end by telling them your findings, but in doing so you may violate your end user license agreement because you decompiled their code. Net result: you (the customer) lose because you have to wait on an external entity for problem resolution (which is a risk). The CSR tech on the other end loses because they have to re-do all of your steps and do not get the benefit of your research (because you have to hide your knowledge from them). The only entity that wins is the vendor.
Now, compare this to open source where I can examine and post my diagnosis to usenet and receive feedback and/or ideas from hundreds of other developers. We're doing the same thing either way (examining source code). Why keep it closed?
Similarly, we've come across the situation where politics and financials from the vendor has negatively impacted our project's ability to satisfy the customer. For example - We discover a bug in WebLogic 6.1 SP2 that causes forces us to upgrade to SP4. We discover that TopLink 3.6 doesn't work with SP4. We look at some WebLogic internals, do some research, and determine that the reason why TopLink doesn't work with SP4 is because WebLogic added a callback function that all beans must implement. The callback function just stores a boolean value. We talk to TopLink about it. Their response: wait for the next patch. Our question
Many managers (not all) task you with items they believe are required in order for the company to make a product. These frequently come down from higher up as part of some type of corporate strategy or initiative (e.g. If we convert all 5 small databases to use 1 large MS database, we'll save on IT costs in the long run). You (the grunt) are tasked to implement according to the overall goals outlined by your manager.
However, given that your manager (and his/her manager) are multiple degrees of separation from the implementation (remember - a big part of what they care about is the bottom line in dollars), use this opportunity to explore new technologies that can be used for future reductions in cost. Pick up a programming language like perl or python, and start learning how you can automate server configuration deployments. Or, generate ghost images for the major operating systems you use so that new server installations are merely a flash of a disk. Or, start learning things like LDAP, or Active Directory so that when your boss comes to you looking for ideas for future cost cutting, you have some logs already in the fire.
As a programmer, I find downtime to be some of the most rewarding time because it gives me a chance to go back and add elements of automation that I didn't have time to implement during the release crunch. It's also a great opportunity to go back and implement unit tests for the code those-that-came-before-you neglected to write (it's interesting how most of them are now gone from our project). Don't look at downtime as a time where you need to cover your tail in order to save face (or your job) - look at is as an opportunity to plug all the leaks you've ranted to your girlfriend / wife / parents / friends for so long about.
Some employees are hard working, self motivated go-getters that are willing (under the correct circumstances) to burn the proverbial "midnight oil" in order to accomplish a goal. Other employees are pay-check collectors that look for hand-outs and will come up with a dozen excuses of why they can't accomplish their assignment in a reasonable amount of time.
What I've learned is that you'll never convert members of the latter group into members of the former. Very rarely does a slacker suddenly find inspiration and become a hard worker. I'm sure this isn't news to whoever might be reading this.
But why do we (as members of the hard working croud) care? Assuming a strong ethical standard exists in your management chain, slackers will either be terminated or reassigned to meaningless tasks while you enevitably rise up to the next level of the food chain. So what good does it do you (other than personal frustration over seeing a coworker shirk while you work your tail off) to try to convert those that don't want to be converted? Come on, give up!
On the other hand, hard workers can easily by exploited if the management chain is also a collection of slackers. In this situation they will either be slow to recognize your talent and hard work, or what's worse they'll recognize and exploit it (that's when you get pigeon holed into a task you don't necessarily enjoy or feel passionate about, but are responsible enough to take up the reigns because "it has to be done by someone"). When this happens, *you* (the reader) become the sucker in the situation, and need to find a new job.
Don't let yourself be taken advantage of as a hard worker when all around you are putting their AIM clients on "Always Active" - find a new job. Until you do that you will never be happy.
Ultima Online changed my life as well. While in college, my roomates and I (we lived in an on-campus apartment with T3 access to the world) shared one thing in common: computer games. While we all played a variety of games in the past, the one common thread we all shared was the Ultima series. One of us actually played Underworld. Not me tho.
I recall standing in Best Buy one day when Ultima Online was just released. I remember thinking to myself "I want a game, but which one?" I had to choose between Flight Simulator and Ultima Online. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) I chose Ultima. Brought it home, installed it, and was hooked up and playing within minutes. That's when it all went downhill...
My roomates started playing, which created a feedback loop that only made game playing that much more important. I was usually home, and usually playing Ultima. So when someone else came home, they'd see me playing and say "Are you near the valley?" (we had a house in the valley - one of the first houses). I'd respond "yes", and he'd jump online. We'd play for hours until he or I got bored. Then someone else came home and said "Oh, you're playing UO?" "Nah we were just signing off." He'd sign on and we'd be compelled to play "just a little longer." This behavior continued for nearly 2 years.
We planned our classes around Ultima. We even planned meals around Ultima. We'd come home from class around 1pm, play for an hour or two, take a break (usually to go to the bathroom) and then say to each other "hey it's 3pm. the school kiddies will probably be coming home soon. want to head to the crossroads and kill some pks?" I swear to you that when I was most involved with Ultima I actually saw people's names above their bodies when I was walking to and from class. People appeared blue, grey, and red to me IN REAL LIFE. It was unbelievable.
UO was the best game ever created. It had fantastic role players in the beginning that explored the various class systems, as well as hero role players who use a variety of combat methods. People sat around and told tales of combat, and even exchanged screenshots. Houses and guilds were honorable and meant something.
And then came EA.
It seems like when Garriott left the game that UO went right down the shitter. PK ran rampant, and people used cheats like UOAssist to advance their character stats. Dying was not a big deal to us - we had a house with lots of gold and armor. But dying because a bunch of script kiddies downloaded UOAssist, cornered you, drained your Strength, and then killed you was just downright annoying. The rampant PK'ing drove away the good players in the game. What was left over was utter shit.
I left the game in late 1999 a very sad person. What was once a great piece of entertainment and common characteristic between me and my roomates turned into an annoyance. Last summer I reactivated my account, signed on, and took a look to see what the world of UO has become. Most towns I found on many servers were deserted (even the banks). It's sad how a once thriving community has dwindled due to a lack of investment on the part of EA.
I really wish that Garriott had gotten UO2 off the ground. Of course, that was based on Ascension, which was a shit fest as well. So maybe it's good UO2 didn't get released.
I only educate those that show a willingness and an open minded attitude towards learning something new. Those that have made up their mind about open source without ever trying it will probably not be swayed by the likes of me.
As a general statement, my coworkers fall into this category and hence are beyond my abilities to educate or enlighten. That being said, the gloves come off on/. and I refer to them how I now see them: as mindless status-quo promoting robots who look at software development through the same lense they viewed it 10 - 15 years ago when they last wrote their Cobol and Fortran programs (they were *not* applications - they were programs. There is a difference).
Because idiot coworkers use MS products and are constantly sending me.ppt,.doc, and.xls files. And, they don't just write normal.doc and.ppt files - they have to put in animations, chapters, and all the other bells and whistles they have learned from their MSWord for Dummies book.
This will more than likely be modded down (Offtopic) but I feel compelled to post a reply.
This is actually why I advocate the use of xemacs for all software development over an IDE. Don't get me wrong, if you're a Java developer and only (yes that is a knock) Java developer - be my guest, use JBuilder or what have you.
But if you plan on writing XML files for building, python for prototyping, C for performance, perl to customize Bugzilla, php for your front end website, html for your corproate website, and ruby for god knows what - that's an awful lot of keystrokes you're going to have to memorize if you use a separate development environment for each language.
Sure, XEmacs doesn't give you things like API exploring. And ya ok, it doesn't give you a fancy gui where you can click and put in deployment descriptor settings - but it gets you 90% of the way there for ALL languages out there. When I need to save a Java, xml, C++, php, python, html, shell, or perl file - I hit Ctrl X Strl S. If I need the end of the line I hit Ctrl E. Ctrl K kills a line, and Ctrl S searches. It's uniform. Let's the burn-in ensue!
It's painful to watch an otherwise strong jabroni java programmer held hostage at his/her computer when working in another language because they've forgotten which macro is Save and have to take their hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to click File -> Save.
Let's decompose the XML parsing "problem" (if one actually exists) into smaller components that we can reasonably discuss. XML parsing is too broad a topic to intelligently discuss, but if you limit it to XML parsing in Java you suddenly have a topic small enough to be manageable. So let's discuss Java parsing in XML.
When XML was first introduced, there were no standard libraries in the JDK to facilitate parsing. What's more, the few projects out there varied wildly in how you actually used their DOM tree or SAX callback mechanism. This isn't necessarily a Bad Thing (tm), it's the same problem every emerging technology faces: immature tools. This is basic biology - lots of competing implementations (life forms), each struggling for community (resources).
So, time goes by, and eventually a handful of implementations emerge dominant. Some dominate due to performance, and some dominate because of ease of use of the API. The victors in this game then sometimes go through a merging process of their own, where the performance victors lend technology to ease of use API victors. After a lot of merging (and flames usually), one or two projects emerge out of the XML kingdom as the dominant players. In my opinion, in the world of Java these are Xalan (Xerces) and Dom4J.
During the maturation process, Sun comes along and looks at the technology and says "Wow this XML stuff is really here to stay. What implementations are out there, and what similarities exist between them? How can we facilitate growth of these projects?" They realize that certain classes (like org.xml.sax.InputSource) are common entities in both projects (even if the class InputSource doesn't exist), and they standardize it. For a reference to all of the XML standards implemented in the JDK, do a search on java.sun.com for JAXP, JAXM, and JAXB (just to name a few).
At this point, the XML projects come back and work in support so that they can be "JAXP compatible" (again this is part of the biological process of evolution). This insures that the projects works well with whatever Sun ships in the JDK.
In the end (which is really where we are now) you end up with a pluggable architecture, where the JDK provides some common functionality or interfaces that are implemented by open source projects.
Java XML parsing was damn hard back in the day - you had to marry your code to a specific project. But these days with the standardization that has taken place (thanks Sun!), as long as you write code that makes use of the JAXP specification you can plug in any JAXP-compliant parser into your app and things *should* work.
The difficult problem is getting other entities (Application Servers for example) to get up-to-date with the standards. WebLogic 6.1 comes with a non-JAXP compliant parser, and thus doesn't work with the latest JDK, Xalan, etc.
Looks promising. It didn't look like it covered some of the things I'm imaging (being able to move your mouse over a block of code while speaking into a microphone asking questions (or typing them)), but it's definitely a start.
I thought about Eclipse, as well as NetBeans. Unfortunately, between my primary job ($$), my second job ($$), my house, trying to become more involved with Python development, my meta-tools open source project, my mp3 shadow open source project, and my new weather web services open source project I simply don't have the time...:(
And, something tells me that this is something best left to a group of folks to talk about. I'm sure that I could not come up with a grammar extensible or flexible enough to suit today's needs and tomorrow's unknowns. If anything I could create a mailing list, but that's kind of weak.
I was mostly thinking this would be useful in the case where developers collaborate from different geographic locations, the most common case being open source. When I'm in the office I'll holler down the hall or go ask a Human (tm), but in cases where coworkers are working at home or in the world of open source I could definitely see this feature being useful.
Here's an idea that I'd really love to see implemented. Imagine if somebody were to come up with a grammar that worked on top of an open instant messaging protocol (jabber?) that encapsulated features useful for developers within an IDE?
The usage scenario would go something like this: I'm working Foo.java and have a question about some line of code. I right click on the line of code and a popup menu appears. I select Discuss, and then a side menu appears that lists my coworkers. The IDE uses "cvs annotate" (if I'm using CVS) to see who last modified the line of code I mouse'd over, and highlights their user id in my "Discuss" menu. I click the author (or anyone else for that matter), and my IDE sends an instant message to the other user indicating that I would like to collaborate on Foo.java. The remote user accepts the collaboration invitation and my version of the code appears in their editor window. At that point we can both edit the file at the same time, ask questions about code, or maybe even share a mouse? (Might be nice to be able to point to some code, ask a question, and have the remote user not only read what you are typing, but SEE what you are referring to).
Anyhow, it's a pipe dream, but man that would be cool.
Another interesting discussion is: where does DTV draw the line?
According to them it's illegal for me to intercept and decode their signal into a format that I can display on a television. What if I take the EM energy and convert it to electricity? Would DTV then come and arrest me?
Signal meters aren't illegal - why not? They receive the signal and convert it to electrical format.
There are a lot of interesting questions one can ask about where exactly the line lies in this debate.
I understand that there are airplanes that are flying over your personal airspace without your consent. Quick, get out those anti-aircraft guns and start firing.
You only own the airspace up to 200 feet or something similarly low. Since aircraft typically fly at 30,000+ they are well out of range of your property.
Likewise, I think you only own 5 feet or so of your Earth. A friend of mine was in some form of construction and told me that the reason why all pipes, wires, conduit, sewage, etc is at least N feet deep is not only to avoid the dangers associated with winter and frozen pipes, but also because homeowners own land N - 1 feet below their house.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh boo hoo! I've had TiVo for years and it *has* revolutionized the way that I watch TV. Yes it's nice to be able to watch what TV I want to watch when I want to watch it, but equally important is the ability to skip over commercials.
Americans are bombarded with advertising, and it's a filthy business. Everywhere you turn there's an advertisement launched at you. They're even so sleezy that they mark up prices so that they can say they are 30% off and make a sale.
What irks me is when I listen to a radio program or watch a television program and the actual content is only 3/4 of what is played. Some simpsons episodes are as short as 18 minutes! Other shows run for 22, but jeez - 18 minutes?! That's almost 50% commercials! Doesn't that seem ridiculous?
TiVO has simply made us the consumer more aware of the amount of advertising flung at us on a daily basis. The advertisers are going to have to find some other business model, because I believe that when TiVO takes off there will be no going back.
Here is some shameless self promotion, but I believe it to be in line with what Xaroth is saying.
The challenge to Xaroth's approach lies not in the deployment of these systems (if they're $200 a pop that's easy), but rather in the information harvesting and data collection. I can't imagine that everyone will own the same type of unit, and so how do you manage all these different protocols?
I'm working on a project called WeatherNet (http://meta-tools.sf.net/wxnet) and I'm trying to solve the problem I've outlined above. Using open protocols (web services) I'm trying to define WSDLs that any different weather station can implement to. For example, I've defined a WeatherSummary as containing a temperature (in fahrenheight), pressure (in inches of mercury), etc etc etc. How you implement that web service interface is up to you. But the point is that you conform to an interface.
Using this infrastructure, universal clients can be written to attach to any node in the network. I know this is shameless self promotion, but I'm hoping that a few people will follow the above link to my project page and take a look at the download.
And this is ... bad? Hardly...
Sitting in front of a TV, you do absolutely nothing. You slouch, with remote and hand, and stare at the TV while frequently drooling, grabbing one's self, burping, or snacking. This is horrid behavior - nothing positive comes of it. Period.
At least on a computer, even if playing MMORPGs, the user must *interact*, which is something television lacks. Televions is a broadcast medium whereas the Internet is interactive. The user must do some work in order to achieve satisfaction. With a TV, they must simply watch. On the web, they must read or strategize, or at the very least point and click, which is an exercise of hand-eye coordination.
I'd take a computer geek MMORPG no friend having dorkahontas over a TV addicted vegaholic that sits around and watches Space Ghost Coast To Coast all day.
Hah! Can you imagine the /. effect on the SEC Complain Form? Boy that makes me laugh for some reason...
-c
Keep in mind that applets were conceived in an era where the browser was believed to be the next incarnation of an operating system. Applets provide a widget rich environment (awt) that had tremendous benefits over the drudgery of a request/response interaction that browsers offered. Applets were to revolution application development. Unfortunately they didn't...
Nowadays, there are lots of alternatives for installing a thin client onto a desktop computing platform, namely webstart and installanywhere. With distributing computing frameworks such as EJB so easy to deploy, it becomes a trivial task to implement in a full fledged application distributed via webstart what previously was cobbled together in an applet. Plus, webstart has controls that allow the end user to only download jar files that changed, a significant improvement over how applets worked a long time ago.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that you use Java applets at all. I've been a java developer for 5 - 6 years now, read usenet frequently, spend long hours at the office, went to JavaOne, etc - I'm very much a pro-java programmer. But when I come across a site that uses an applet, I usually just ignore it (they are normally just eye candy or silly scrollbars), or opt for the more attractive flash equivalents.
If you ask me, Sun really blundered on the desktop. They had a wonderful opportunity to gain a leg up on microsoft by waving their portability flag. But they pissed it all away by not creating a more visually appealing experience. What we're now seeing are full fledged flash applications that are portable, fast, and beautiful with respect to their java counterparts. It's sad...
Hopefully, with their j2me efforts and unification of the java platform they will refocus their effort on enriching the desktop java experience. If not, I'm sure that others (namely IBM and SWT) will fill the gap. Let's just hope they do it in a specification-first, reference-implementation second fashion...
I don't buy the "lowest common denominator" nonsense that some people are shoveling. That may have been true for browsers wrt html support and display resolutions, I don't believe it translates to Java. Consider this -
All the customer cares about is ease of use during the installation process. With InstallAnywhere virtually free (and I can't recall the name of the project that *is* actually free) - distributing your product is easy and transparent to the user.
Just to play games, let's assume that somebody out there *didn't* want to use an installer and shipped out JAR files. Even if this maniacal situation existed, the fact that Dell and HP are dropping the 1.4 JRE onto PCs prior to shipping them to customers makes the VM Microsoft bundled completely and utterly irrelevant!
IF installers were not freely available, and IF Dell and HP were not dropping 1.4 onto the desktop then *maybe* you'd have a handful of customers negatively impacted by the decision of the appelate court. But that's not the case.
In fact, I think it's better that MS doesn't have to ship the old version of Java (wasn't it 1.1.3 that they had tos hip?) - it completely eliminates any notion of "lease common denominator" nonsense.
mod parent up. Eight 01 definitely knows what he is talking about. TiVo has done a fabulous job in "leeking" information to the TiVo hacking community. If anything, they are in this *with* us, if not officially (or publicly) so.
-c
There is a fairly straightforward and intuitive HOWTO at http://www.math.ualberta.ca/imaging/snfs
I use this at work to access files across the firewall. Very useful. Much better than any other VPN hacks I've seen. Definitely worth a look.
We recently incorporated WSDL parsing support into the project. SOAPpy has already been released with the new support. ZSI will shortly be released.
:)
WSDL support is most definitely in Python.
You're absolutely correct Jordan. There are lots of scientific and astronomical calculations that would be immensely valuable in the open source world. One part of the analysis that I think most reports fail to recognize is the fringe benefits of using open source.
...
I work on an "enterprise" project for NASA, and we currently use several closed source COTS products (most notably WebLogic, TopLink, and Wasp). We also use several open soruce projects (most notably Xalan, Dom4J, and Tomcat). We have an immensely difficult configuation we must manage - the mapping of our object model to a relational data model. We use TopLink (closed source) to help us manage this challenge. TopLink is tightly coupled with WebLogic (another closed source product). We *very frequently* receive ambiguous error messages, NullPointerExceptiosn, InvocationTargetExceptions, and similar non-sensical and non-intuitive error messages out of our Closed Source projects. When this happens, luckily we have a stack trace that we can look at. To fix the problem, we employ the following strategy:
1.) Report the bug to the vendor
2.) Quietly, unjar the closed source product
3.) Quietly, decompile the class
4.) Quietly, re-compile it (to get line number debugging info)
5.) Re-produce our problem
6.) Quietly, open the decompiled source code in an editor
7.) Quietly, locate the line number that threw the exception
8.) Examine the if and try-catch'es that produced the exception
9.) Continue up through the stack until you determine the problem
For example
We mapped our object model using TopLink and named the project "foo". Our bean deployment descriptors used a project name of "FOO". The old version of TopLink was case insensitive. The new versions are case sensitive. Instead of erroring with "You referenced a project named 'FOO' in your bean deployment descriptor, but no project named 'foo' exists in your TopLink configuration.", TopLink gave us a NullPointerException. We would never have been able to determine the cause of the NPE without examining the code. We would've had to wait until our CSR responded to us (which ended up taking 4 days by the way) in order to resolve our problem.
That's the fundamental problem with closed source software. If TopLink and WebLogic were open, we would not have had to take steps 2 - 5 (that's 50% of our procedure!). And, this problem was simple. We could resolve it ourselves. But lots of other times there are more complex problems where you have some notion of what's going on (because you look at the internals), and you'd like to be helpful to the CSR folks on the other end by telling them your findings, but in doing so you may violate your end user license agreement because you decompiled their code. Net result: you (the customer) lose because you have to wait on an external entity for problem resolution (which is a risk). The CSR tech on the other end loses because they have to re-do all of your steps and do not get the benefit of your research (because you have to hide your knowledge from them). The only entity that wins is the vendor.
Now, compare this to open source where I can examine and post my diagnosis to usenet and receive feedback and/or ideas from hundreds of other developers. We're doing the same thing either way (examining source code). Why keep it closed?
Similarly, we've come across the situation where politics and financials from the vendor has negatively impacted our project's ability to satisfy the customer. For example - We discover a bug in WebLogic 6.1 SP2 that causes forces us to upgrade to SP4. We discover that TopLink 3.6 doesn't work with SP4. We look at some WebLogic internals, do some research, and determine that the reason why TopLink doesn't work with SP4 is because WebLogic added a callback function that all beans must implement. The callback function just stores a boolean value. We talk to TopLink about it. Their response: wait for the next patch. Our question
Afraid I don't. All of my work is in Python and Java. X11 and OpenGL seems quite interesting tho.
Many managers (not all) task you with items they believe are required in order for the company to make a product. These frequently come down from higher up as part of some type of corporate strategy or initiative (e.g. If we convert all 5 small databases to use 1 large MS database, we'll save on IT costs in the long run). You (the grunt) are tasked to implement according to the overall goals outlined by your manager.
However, given that your manager (and his/her manager) are multiple degrees of separation from the implementation (remember - a big part of what they care about is the bottom line in dollars), use this opportunity to explore new technologies that can be used for future reductions in cost. Pick up a programming language like perl or python, and start learning how you can automate server configuration deployments. Or, generate ghost images for the major operating systems you use so that new server installations are merely a flash of a disk. Or, start learning things like LDAP, or Active Directory so that when your boss comes to you looking for ideas for future cost cutting, you have some logs already in the fire.
As a programmer, I find downtime to be some of the most rewarding time because it gives me a chance to go back and add elements of automation that I didn't have time to implement during the release crunch. It's also a great opportunity to go back and implement unit tests for the code those-that-came-before-you neglected to write (it's interesting how most of them are now gone from our project). Don't look at downtime as a time where you need to cover your tail in order to save face (or your job) - look at is as an opportunity to plug all the leaks you've ranted to your girlfriend / wife / parents / friends for so long about.
Some employees are hard working, self motivated go-getters that are willing (under the correct circumstances) to burn the proverbial "midnight oil" in order to accomplish a goal. Other employees are pay-check collectors that look for hand-outs and will come up with a dozen excuses of why they can't accomplish their assignment in a reasonable amount of time.
What I've learned is that you'll never convert members of the latter group into members of the former. Very rarely does a slacker suddenly find inspiration and become a hard worker. I'm sure this isn't news to whoever might be reading this.
But why do we (as members of the hard working croud) care? Assuming a strong ethical standard exists in your management chain, slackers will either be terminated or reassigned to meaningless tasks while you enevitably rise up to the next level of the food chain. So what good does it do you (other than personal frustration over seeing a coworker shirk while you work your tail off) to try to convert those that don't want to be converted? Come on, give up!
On the other hand, hard workers can easily by exploited if the management chain is also a collection of slackers. In this situation they will either be slow to recognize your talent and hard work, or what's worse they'll recognize and exploit it (that's when you get pigeon holed into a task you don't necessarily enjoy or feel passionate about, but are responsible enough to take up the reigns because "it has to be done by someone"). When this happens, *you* (the reader) become the sucker in the situation, and need to find a new job.
Don't let yourself be taken advantage of as a hard worker when all around you are putting their AIM clients on "Always Active" - find a new job. Until you do that you will never be happy.
Hope this helps someone...
Ultima Online changed my life as well. While in college, my roomates and I (we lived in an on-campus apartment with T3 access to the world) shared one thing in common: computer games. While we all played a variety of games in the past, the one common thread we all shared was the Ultima series. One of us actually played Underworld. Not me tho.
I recall standing in Best Buy one day when Ultima Online was just released. I remember thinking to myself "I want a game, but which one?" I had to choose between Flight Simulator and Ultima Online. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) I chose Ultima. Brought it home, installed it, and was hooked up and playing within minutes. That's when it all went downhill...
My roomates started playing, which created a feedback loop that only made game playing that much more important. I was usually home, and usually playing Ultima. So when someone else came home, they'd see me playing and say "Are you near the valley?" (we had a house in the valley - one of the first houses). I'd respond "yes", and he'd jump online. We'd play for hours until he or I got bored. Then someone else came home and said "Oh, you're playing UO?" "Nah we were just signing off." He'd sign on and we'd be compelled to play "just a little longer." This behavior continued for nearly 2 years.
We planned our classes around Ultima. We even planned meals around Ultima. We'd come home from class around 1pm, play for an hour or two, take a break (usually to go to the bathroom) and then say to each other "hey it's 3pm. the school kiddies will probably be coming home soon. want to head to the crossroads and kill some pks?" I swear to you that when I was most involved with Ultima I actually saw people's names above their bodies when I was walking to and from class. People appeared blue, grey, and red to me IN REAL LIFE. It was unbelievable.
UO was the best game ever created. It had fantastic role players in the beginning that explored the various class systems, as well as hero role players who use a variety of combat methods. People sat around and told tales of combat, and even exchanged screenshots. Houses and guilds were honorable and meant something.
And then came EA.
It seems like when Garriott left the game that UO went right down the shitter. PK ran rampant, and people used cheats like UOAssist to advance their character stats. Dying was not a big deal to us - we had a house with lots of gold and armor. But dying because a bunch of script kiddies downloaded UOAssist, cornered you, drained your Strength, and then killed you was just downright annoying. The rampant PK'ing drove away the good players in the game. What was left over was utter shit.
I left the game in late 1999 a very sad person. What was once a great piece of entertainment and common characteristic between me and my roomates turned into an annoyance. Last summer I reactivated my account, signed on, and took a look to see what the world of UO has become. Most towns I found on many servers were deserted (even the banks). It's sad how a once thriving community has dwindled due to a lack of investment on the part of EA.
I really wish that Garriott had gotten UO2 off the ground. Of course, that was based on Ascension, which was a shit fest as well. So maybe it's good UO2 didn't get released.
I only educate those that show a willingness and an open minded attitude towards learning something new. Those that have made up their mind about open source without ever trying it will probably not be swayed by the likes of me.
/. and I refer to them how I now see them: as mindless status-quo promoting robots who look at software development through the same lense they viewed it 10 - 15 years ago when they last wrote their Cobol and Fortran programs (they were *not* applications - they were programs. There is a difference).
As a general statement, my coworkers fall into this category and hence are beyond my abilities to educate or enlighten. That being said, the gloves come off on
Because idiot coworkers use MS products and are constantly sending me .ppt, .doc, and .xls files. And, they don't just write normal .doc and .ppt files - they have to put in animations, chapters, and all the other bells and whistles they have learned from their MSWord for Dummies book.
OpenOffice rarely converts them properly.
But for everything I create I use OO.
This will more than likely be modded down (Offtopic) but I feel compelled to post a reply.
This is actually why I advocate the use of xemacs for all software development over an IDE. Don't get me wrong, if you're a Java developer and only (yes that is a knock) Java developer - be my guest, use JBuilder or what have you.
But if you plan on writing XML files for building, python for prototyping, C for performance, perl to customize Bugzilla, php for your front end website, html for your corproate website, and ruby for god knows what - that's an awful lot of keystrokes you're going to have to memorize if you use a separate development environment for each language.
Sure, XEmacs doesn't give you things like API exploring. And ya ok, it doesn't give you a fancy gui where you can click and put in deployment descriptor settings - but it gets you 90% of the way there for ALL languages out there. When I need to save a Java, xml, C++, php, python, html, shell, or perl file - I hit Ctrl X Strl S. If I need the end of the line I hit Ctrl E. Ctrl K kills a line, and Ctrl S searches. It's uniform. Let's the burn-in ensue!
It's painful to watch an otherwise strong jabroni java programmer held hostage at his/her computer when working in another language because they've forgotten which macro is Save and have to take their hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to click File -> Save.
Well said, Robert.
Let's decompose the XML parsing "problem" (if one actually exists) into smaller components that we can reasonably discuss. XML parsing is too broad a topic to intelligently discuss, but if you limit it to XML parsing in Java you suddenly have a topic small enough to be manageable. So let's discuss Java parsing in XML.
When XML was first introduced, there were no standard libraries in the JDK to facilitate parsing. What's more, the few projects out there varied wildly in how you actually used their DOM tree or SAX callback mechanism. This isn't necessarily a Bad Thing (tm), it's the same problem every emerging technology faces: immature tools. This is basic biology - lots of competing implementations (life forms), each struggling for community (resources).
So, time goes by, and eventually a handful of implementations emerge dominant. Some dominate due to performance, and some dominate because of ease of use of the API. The victors in this game then sometimes go through a merging process of their own, where the performance victors lend technology to ease of use API victors. After a lot of merging (and flames usually), one or two projects emerge out of the XML kingdom as the dominant players. In my opinion, in the world of Java these are Xalan (Xerces) and Dom4J.
During the maturation process, Sun comes along and looks at the technology and says "Wow this XML stuff is really here to stay. What implementations are out there, and what similarities exist between them? How can we facilitate growth of these projects?" They realize that certain classes (like org.xml.sax.InputSource) are common entities in both projects (even if the class InputSource doesn't exist), and they standardize it. For a reference to all of the XML standards implemented in the JDK, do a search on java.sun.com for JAXP, JAXM, and JAXB (just to name a few).
At this point, the XML projects come back and work in support so that they can be "JAXP compatible" (again this is part of the biological process of evolution). This insures that the projects works well with whatever Sun ships in the JDK.
In the end (which is really where we are now) you end up with a pluggable architecture, where the JDK provides some common functionality or interfaces that are implemented by open source projects.
Java XML parsing was damn hard back in the day - you had to marry your code to a specific project. But these days with the standardization that has taken place (thanks Sun!), as long as you write code that makes use of the JAXP specification you can plug in any JAXP-compliant parser into your app and things *should* work.
The difficult problem is getting other entities (Application Servers for example) to get up-to-date with the standards. WebLogic 6.1 comes with a non-JAXP compliant parser, and thus doesn't work with the latest JDK, Xalan, etc.
Looks promising. It didn't look like it covered some of the things I'm imaging (being able to move your mouse over a block of code while speaking into a microphone asking questions (or typing them)), but it's definitely a start.
Jabber's so great....
I thought about Eclipse, as well as NetBeans. Unfortunately, between my primary job ($$), my second job ($$), my house, trying to become more involved with Python development, my meta-tools open source project, my mp3 shadow open source project, and my new weather web services open source project I simply don't have the time... :(
And, something tells me that this is something best left to a group of folks to talk about. I'm sure that I could not come up with a grammar extensible or flexible enough to suit today's needs and tomorrow's unknowns. If anything I could create a mailing list, but that's kind of weak.
I was mostly thinking this would be useful in the case where developers collaborate from different geographic locations, the most common case being open source. When I'm in the office I'll holler down the hall or go ask a Human (tm), but in cases where coworkers are working at home or in the world of open source I could definitely see this feature being useful.
Just my opinion tho.
I do agree with your last paragraph tho.
Here's an idea that I'd really love to see implemented. Imagine if somebody were to come up with a grammar that worked on top of an open instant messaging protocol (jabber?) that encapsulated features useful for developers within an IDE?
The usage scenario would go something like this: I'm working Foo.java and have a question about some line of code. I right click on the line of code and a popup menu appears. I select Discuss, and then a side menu appears that lists my coworkers. The IDE uses "cvs annotate" (if I'm using CVS) to see who last modified the line of code I mouse'd over, and highlights their user id in my "Discuss" menu. I click the author (or anyone else for that matter), and my IDE sends an instant message to the other user indicating that I would like to collaborate on Foo.java. The remote user accepts the collaboration invitation and my version of the code appears in their editor window. At that point we can both edit the file at the same time, ask questions about code, or maybe even share a mouse? (Might be nice to be able to point to some code, ask a question, and have the remote user not only read what you are typing, but SEE what you are referring to).
Anyhow, it's a pipe dream, but man that would be cool.
Another interesting discussion is: where does DTV draw the line?
According to them it's illegal for me to intercept and decode their signal into a format that I can display on a television. What if I take the EM energy and convert it to electricity? Would DTV then come and arrest me?
Signal meters aren't illegal - why not? They receive the signal and convert it to electrical format.
There are a lot of interesting questions one can ask about where exactly the line lies in this debate.
You only own the airspace up to 200 feet or something similarly low. Since aircraft typically fly at 30,000+ they are well out of range of your property.
Likewise, I think you only own 5 feet or so of your Earth. A friend of mine was in some form of construction and told me that the reason why all pipes, wires, conduit, sewage, etc is at least N feet deep is not only to avoid the dangers associated with winter and frozen pipes, but also because homeowners own land N - 1 feet below their house.