If Lucas mostly keeps his hands off of this it will be good. Lucas is really good when it comes to the big picture view of the Star Wars universe. He did a fantastic job of creating this rich world with all kinds of potential. But if you look at the output from his work, the more involved he is with the movie, the more it sucks, generally speaking.
What is the best Star Wars movie of all time? Empire Strikes Back, the one he had the least involvement in. Lucas is bad at writing and directing. He really struggles to bring any sense of emotion to the characters. Whenever you see emotion it feels like Soap Opera camp. You look at the stilted dialogue of Padme and Anakin in Episode 2 and 3 and it's just painful.
So I believe that if Lucas is willing to keep his hands mostly off of this project and let it become it's own thing it stands a chance of not sucking. But it does fascinate me how things have come full circle. Star Wars set a bar and Battlestar Galactica came out shortly after trying to meet that bar and failing quite specatcularly. Now Star Wars comes to television and we have a very high bar set by Battlestar Galactica for what a sci-fi television show can be. Can Star Wars hold up? Probably not, but there's always hope I guess:)
Yeah I've seen some posts on here that looked like nothing more than ads, but this has to be the all time winner. It's a $99 pair of headphones folks. Whoop-dee-doo. Nothing hight tech about them. They are called "gamer" headphones because... well I don't know, because it doesn't even come with a microphone. Do they call them "gamer" because no self-respecting human would wear those with their IPod?
The thing is, do you want to teach them about computers, or about useful things they can do with computers. If you want to teach them about computers, then Linux for teh win. But if you want to teach them about useful things they can do like use the web, write documents, touch up photos, etc, then Windows/Mac is a better option.
Department of Homeland Security: A Democratic idea.
Oh... well given the track record of that mess, he may have a point.
Seriously, DHS was a massive mistake. Putting all of those people in one agency makes them focussed on bureaucratic reorganization and ass covering. It'll be decades before DHS works with any sort of effectivenes if it ever does.
The best irony of all is that the DHS doesn't include the FBI or the CIA. The information on Al Qaeda's plans that didn't bubble up to the top and get noticed were dug up by the FBI. So if the same crap was happening today it still wouldn't be any more likely to get to the right person.
What really concerns me is that everything in our political discourse is being broken down along this liberal versus concervative spectrum. If you are an activist, your activism is immediately pigeon holed into liberalism or conservativsm. Take, for example, the war in Iraq. If you're for it, you're a conservative and if you're against it, you're a liberal. Really when you analyze the positions closely, one could readily argue that it's a conservative perspective to not rush into a war.
Howard Dean is another good example of this. He was labeled an angry radical lefty. But if you look at this positions on the issues, he was really a moderate. Hell most of the truly radical left was a bit nervous about Dean because he wasn't all that liberal. What got him labeled though was that he did things differently in how he organized.
Today if you look at where the energy is in the Democratic party, the biggest movement is the "fighting dems". These are Iraq and Afghan war vets who are now running for congress. If you look at these people, by and large, they aren't that left leaning, yet the community of blogs, etc are hugely supportive of them. You find those "radical left" sites backing Paul Hackett, over Sherrod Brown even though Hackett is clearly the more conservative candidate.
There are limitations on what you can countersue over. Then in terms of a countersuit I believe you'd have to proove that it was frivolous which isn't necessarily that simple. Plus you have even more sunk costs into legal fees.
Scary as that may be, that's how the world works. You can be sued for pretty much anything and while you may not lose if you can afford to fight it, you still have to afford to fight it.
A good illustration of this comes from an experience a friend of mine had totally outside the realm of intellectual property. They were trying to extend a covenant in a neighborhood. Somebody who lived in the neighborhood resented the covenenant and sued. Fine, but then they also sued all the members of the neighborhood board personally for libel. There was zero libel or evidence there of, but of course then the individual board members had to defend libel lawsuits. No matter how frivolous they were, it costs money to defend a lawsuit.
During this who affair, my friend's home insurance covered their legal fees. But then the insurance company didn't want to be on the line for defending a libel case. So what did they do? They sued my friend to get out of having to pay the legal fees. My friend ended up settling with the insurance company saying that the insurance company didn't have to cover any more fees and my friend would owe them nothing for what they had already paid.
So in the end, from one legal dispute, three lawsuits emerge, and two of those suits were at best frivolous, taking advantage of the cost of a lawsuit as a tool to try to extract concessions.
Before he does that, what he really ought to be doing is talking to an attorney. An attorney can give you advice on what measures you can take to minimize your legal exposure here. That advice may include what you need to do to assure that you've done this in a clean manner. Having specs you hand off to somebody else may not provide the kind of validation that is needed.
In the end though you can do this 100% on the up and up and still get sued. A good lawyer will tell you that. Will they win the lawsuit? Not if you do this right, but then how many thousands of dollars will you blow defending the lawsuit, whether you win or not.
Whatever you decide to do an attorney can give you a clear perspective on what the ramifications are.
What do we have a competitive advantage in? All our electronics made in Japan. If you go to any other country in the world you'll see lots and lots of VW's and Hondas, but hardly any GM's or Fords. All our computers are made in Taiwan. All our random stuff we buy at Walmart is made in China.
What exactly is the competitive advantage that we have? And please, not hand waving vague mention of us being the best and brightest. What practical advantage do we have? Our educational system hasn't been keeping up and is underfunded, so we can't rely on being smarter than others. We have a high standard and thus cost of living, so we're too expensive to employ in grunt manufacturing work. So what is our advantage?
And the reason the IT Staff is working for the School is because no one else will hire them.
This is just plain wrong. A good friend of mine left a job not that long ago in the private sector to to go work in a University's IT department. He did it because the work environment is a lot better. It has nothing to do with his talents.
Most of the people that I've known who worked in University IT deparments did so because:
1) They like the environment better than the private sector. 2) Job stability 3) Just graduated from said university and are getting work experience
Arguably the people I've met in University IT departments are more skilled because they get more flexibility to experiment and try different things. In private IT, you tend to get pigeonholed into what they need most whereas a University tends to favor more jack of all trades work.
I think at this point they are on some radical experiment to see how irritating they can make themselves. Frivolous lawsuits and spam are where it starts. Next I expect they'll be sponsoring conventions for NAMBLA. "NAMBLA, powered by SCO".
Me thinks it is time for them to just put the old hoss down.
I've been playing PlanetSide since it was released, and a lot of the complaints about SWG sound very familiar. Frankly SOE seems very content to release buggy products and to release updates to those products that turn off large parts of their core subscriber base.
PlanetSide is perhaps the ultimate example of this. When the game first came out it was very buggy. I signed on in the first week that it was out but couldn't be compelled to recommend the game to any friends for a good 2-3 months after release because it was so flaky. Even then the person who joined up on my recommendation ended up leaving within a couple weeks because he couldn't get it to run stably on his system.
The next big screw up was the release of an expansion pack, Core Combat. This expansion pack brought minimal content and was fairly expensive. Most of the people I know who bought it when it was first released regretted it. It wasn't until the price dropped to like $10 that I could recommend it to people. $30 for a few new maps (which also has the effect of diluting the player concentrations), 3 new vehicles and 3 new weapons is rather overpriced.
Since that time, there's been a pretty steady decline in the population in the game. The final nail in the coffin was the release of BFR's, these big robots that are similar to what you'd see in Mechwarrior. It wasn't a terrible concept but they so radically altered the balance of the game that a lot of people abandoned ship.
Currently the game is decent. The pop levels are rather low, so while you'll find a battle anytime you log on, the quality of the battles has suffered a lot. Lots of 3-way stalemates happen now because there's no fun in the strategic approach of attacking empty continents. They are trying to get moe people by offering a try before you buy option where you can play as a lower level player for free. That might bring more people, or it might get exploited as people create temporary accounts to log on and grief people and cause disruptions.
It's a shame too, because the overal concept and play of the game is good. It's a really nice blend of strategy and action, but it's just been poorly managed by SOE.
I was just thinking that what would be interesting to see is change to what CS 101 classes typically are. My CS 101 was a pascal class (yeah, old skool). It was a class that many non-CS people would take to fulfill a computer requirement in another department. CS people usually found it painfully easy and non-CS people often struggled. Not many people go into CS without that basic knowledge of programming picked up somewhere else along the way.
So what I'm thinking is that these classes should be changed from raw programming to more of a design class. Like what if you spent a semester teaching people how to do analysis and documentation instead of teaching them how to write a for loop? The majority of people in this world don't need to know how a for loop works. But giving them some insight into how a business need can be broken down into specific concrete requirements would be hugely beneficial even beyond CS.
I think the big problem is that CS, as it's been taught is far more about the the theory of writing code and less about the real world design of software. In CS I learned about bubble sort. You know how often I use bubble sort? Never. Why? Because either my data is sorted when it comes out of the database or it's sorted using methods built into the language I'm using.
The vast majority of software that is written is done at a very high level right next to where business process and decisions are being made. Resource allocation, requirements gathering, and design, are what's critical to these projects succeeding, not the quality of the sorting algorithm used. It is important as a programmer to have an understanding of general algorithms and why some ways of doing something are better than others. But by and large, most of the serious problems I've seen in software development are rooted in the higher level issues of design.
Aren't we all taught that when we are writing a paper we're supposed to sit down and plan it out first? That we're supposed to create an outline?
In the end, the structure and design that preceeds coding correlates to the nature of the task, just like it does with writing a paper. Writing an e-mail, or posting on a blog is not an intensive literary endeavor, so no need to come up with a thesis, outline, etc. Writing a quick script to move some files around, etc, also doesn't require use cases, and state charts. To apply that amount of order would make the whole thing take a lot longer with not substantial benefit.
But if you're writing a doctoral thesis, yeah you'd better sit down and get yourself organized. What's your thesis? What's going to be the order in which you make your arguments? It's important and large so you need to spend some time designing it. If you're doing mission critical enterprise software, you do need to sit down and plan things out in detail, especially if you're dealing with a group of developers.
Now, as for the comparison to the way cars are built, I think this tendancy to relate software development to physical world engineering is a mistake. The main reason being that an item in the physical world can't be recompiled, or patched, or in any way modified once it's put together. Software is malleable, everybody knows it, and so pretending otherwise is just creating misery for one's self.
This is one of the reasons I like the Extreme Programming methodology. It seems to account for the malleability of everything decently well. You're always dealing with discrete chunks of functionality in short time intervals. It assumes that refactoring is going to happen and should happen frequently. Try refactoring a car... actually don't, you'll void the warranty for sure. You can try to design a complex system to deal with every little last possible requirement but it will take you forever to do this and in the end you'll have to change it anyhow.
In a perfect programming world, all of the requirements for a product would be known up front and never change. Design could be quite solid and implementation would be a breeze. I've NEVER seen that in the real world. In the real world, you are given a rough idea of how it should work and then it's changed several times while it's being written.
I think this is what people mean when they talk about libraries and/or APIs, but not really sure.
Not quite. What you are talking about sounds like just a repository of random code. A library is a specifically designed set of code to perform a given task or set of tasks. There's a certain amount of order implied in the term just as is implied by that big building where they put books.
API's are designed interfaces to a system to make coding easier to do. You don't have to understand how the underlying guts of the code works, you just program to work with interfaces. So you call the draw() method and a line appears on the screen but you don't need to know how to speak directly to the video card, etc.
AS for the original question, I have two suggestions. The first is to use CVS as a way to version your code. It's like have CTRL+Z for your entire project. It makes it much easier when you are adding new code because you can feel comfortable breaking it completely because you know you can revert it easily.
The second is to use a simple search engine to catalog your code. Google desktop would be up to the task. Just check out your code from CVS and put it in a directory somewhere. Then when you need code for some task you can search for it. If you're good about commenting your code, that should work like a charm.
There are some things we could do. The vast majority of shipping related fuel is Diesel (with the obvious exception of Jet-A in airplanes). That could be converted to biodiesel if you just have the infrastructure to grow the fuel. That's doable, it just might take a little while, and it would suck in the mean time.
The most difficult thing to deal with will be automobiles. They are not something readily converted to burn something else, nor is there an infrastructure to deliver a different type of fuel. Having said that, on the bright side, how long does the average person own a car? Cars naturally get cycled out every 5 or 6 years for most people (if not sooner). So provided some infrastructure was put in place to use some alternative (most readily, biodiesel), then the switch could happen in relatively short order.
None of it is going to be easy and the lack of cheap energy will have a significant negative pressure on the economy for some time to come. The sooner we go through that pain of transition, the less painful it will be. If we wait too long, we're going to be fighting, literally, with other countries for the control of the remaining oil.
Apple Hardware, by my definition is hardware that Apple makes money selling. Sure the pieces and parts are made by a host of 3rd parties, but in the end, the box with an apple logo that sells for $2000 is Apple hardware.
Well to be 100% accurate it isn't money taken out of their pocket. The people who would download the copy and not pay Apple are not likely people who were going to go out and buy a Macbook Pro anyhow.
I'd buy a boxed copy myself. If you download music, or other media, there's not the trojan threat that you get from downloading software. The only software I'd download through bittorrent is a Linux distro where it's all on the up and up and you can get hashes to validate you're getting what you're expecting.
Part of the problem here might simpyl be a lack of interest in the next generation platforms. Yes, there's the hard core people who will be out buying the systems early. But I own a PS2 and it plays the games I have just fine and I haven't bought a game for it in a while. Furthermore, because the XBox and the PS2 are still posessing large market shares, publishers are still making games for them.
Right now, what incentive is there to drop $400-500 on a new game system? Are the games that much better? Not really. Yeah the graphics are a bit better but not in the same way that the PS2 graphics were better than the PS1. I saw an XBox 360 at the store the other day and some kid was playing a fighting game. Yeah the graphics were nicer, but it was more or less the same game I would play on my Dreamcast back in the day.
In the end people will move to the new platform because that's where the games will be, but for now there's not a lot of incentive. Most people don't have HDTV's so they don't get much from that. Many people don't even network their game systems from what I've seen. So much of the touted features of the new systems aren't benefitting the majority of people.
Personally I'll probably buy a PS3 shortly after the release of the next GTA title.
Yup as long as Dell isn't doing it
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The fact of the matter is that Apple doesn't really care about people running OSX on a non-apple system. It's money in their pocket either way. What they want to avoid is having a bunch of white box manufacturers and Dell selling $400 PC's pre-installed with the OS. By making an honest effort to prevent install on non-apple platforms, they can prevent any sort of commercial competition on the hardware side.
So yeah, a few geeks will get OSX running on their PC's. They'll struggle with getting drivers to work correctly on non-blessed hardware, but generally feel cool. The rest of the world will buy Apples when they want to run OSX.
But one interesting twist on this: if I was looking to buy Apple hardware in hopes of having a dual boot OSX system this might change my mind. To my knowledge nobody has managed to get XP to run on Apple's hardware, but OSX is apparently running on non-apple hardware. That might all change with Vista coming out soon, but in the mean time running OSX on non-apple systems might be the better option.
Slashdot Mirror
If Lucas mostly keeps his hands off of this it will be good. Lucas is really good when it comes to the big picture view of the Star Wars universe. He did a fantastic job of creating this rich world with all kinds of potential. But if you look at the output from his work, the more involved he is with the movie, the more it sucks, generally speaking.
:)
What is the best Star Wars movie of all time? Empire Strikes Back, the one he had the least involvement in. Lucas is bad at writing and directing. He really struggles to bring any sense of emotion to the characters. Whenever you see emotion it feels like Soap Opera camp. You look at the stilted dialogue of Padme and Anakin in Episode 2 and 3 and it's just painful.
So I believe that if Lucas is willing to keep his hands mostly off of this project and let it become it's own thing it stands a chance of not sucking. But it does fascinate me how things have come full circle. Star Wars set a bar and Battlestar Galactica came out shortly after trying to meet that bar and failing quite specatcularly. Now Star Wars comes to television and we have a very high bar set by Battlestar Galactica for what a sci-fi television show can be. Can Star Wars hold up? Probably not, but there's always hope I guess
Yeah I've seen some posts on here that looked like nothing more than ads, but this has to be the all time winner. It's a $99 pair of headphones folks. Whoop-dee-doo. Nothing hight tech about them. They are called "gamer" headphones because... well I don't know, because it doesn't even come with a microphone. Do they call them "gamer" because no self-respecting human would wear those with their IPod?
The thing is, do you want to teach them about computers, or about useful things they can do with computers. If you want to teach them about computers, then Linux for teh win. But if you want to teach them about useful things they can do like use the web, write documents, touch up photos, etc, then Windows/Mac is a better option.
Department of Homeland Security: A Democratic idea.
Oh... well given the track record of that mess, he may have a point.
Seriously, DHS was a massive mistake. Putting all of those people in one agency makes them focussed on bureaucratic reorganization and ass covering. It'll be decades before DHS works with any sort of effectivenes if it ever does.
The best irony of all is that the DHS doesn't include the FBI or the CIA. The information on Al Qaeda's plans that didn't bubble up to the top and get noticed were dug up by the FBI. So if the same crap was happening today it still wouldn't be any more likely to get to the right person.
The Democratic Party has a problem: the public (correctly IMHO) perceives them to be weak on national security.
Why do you believe that?
What really concerns me is that everything in our political discourse is being broken down along this liberal versus concervative spectrum. If you are an activist, your activism is immediately pigeon holed into liberalism or conservativsm. Take, for example, the war in Iraq. If you're for it, you're a conservative and if you're against it, you're a liberal. Really when you analyze the positions closely, one could readily argue that it's a conservative perspective to not rush into a war.
Howard Dean is another good example of this. He was labeled an angry radical lefty. But if you look at this positions on the issues, he was really a moderate. Hell most of the truly radical left was a bit nervous about Dean because he wasn't all that liberal. What got him labeled though was that he did things differently in how he organized.
Today if you look at where the energy is in the Democratic party, the biggest movement is the "fighting dems". These are Iraq and Afghan war vets who are now running for congress. If you look at these people, by and large, they aren't that left leaning, yet the community of blogs, etc are hugely supportive of them. You find those "radical left" sites backing Paul Hackett, over Sherrod Brown even though Hackett is clearly the more conservative candidate.
There are limitations on what you can countersue over. Then in terms of a countersuit I believe you'd have to proove that it was frivolous which isn't necessarily that simple. Plus you have even more sunk costs into legal fees.
Scary as that may be, that's how the world works. You can be sued for pretty much anything and while you may not lose if you can afford to fight it, you still have to afford to fight it.
A good illustration of this comes from an experience a friend of mine had totally outside the realm of intellectual property. They were trying to extend a covenant in a neighborhood. Somebody who lived in the neighborhood resented the covenenant and sued. Fine, but then they also sued all the members of the neighborhood board personally for libel. There was zero libel or evidence there of, but of course then the individual board members had to defend libel lawsuits. No matter how frivolous they were, it costs money to defend a lawsuit.
During this who affair, my friend's home insurance covered their legal fees. But then the insurance company didn't want to be on the line for defending a libel case. So what did they do? They sued my friend to get out of having to pay the legal fees. My friend ended up settling with the insurance company saying that the insurance company didn't have to cover any more fees and my friend would owe them nothing for what they had already paid.
So in the end, from one legal dispute, three lawsuits emerge, and two of those suits were at best frivolous, taking advantage of the cost of a lawsuit as a tool to try to extract concessions.
Before he does that, what he really ought to be doing is talking to an attorney. An attorney can give you advice on what measures you can take to minimize your legal exposure here. That advice may include what you need to do to assure that you've done this in a clean manner. Having specs you hand off to somebody else may not provide the kind of validation that is needed.
In the end though you can do this 100% on the up and up and still get sued. A good lawyer will tell you that. Will they win the lawsuit? Not if you do this right, but then how many thousands of dollars will you blow defending the lawsuit, whether you win or not.
Whatever you decide to do an attorney can give you a clear perspective on what the ramifications are.
What do we have a competitive advantage in? All our electronics made in Japan. If you go to any other country in the world you'll see lots and lots of VW's and Hondas, but hardly any GM's or Fords. All our computers are made in Taiwan. All our random stuff we buy at Walmart is made in China.
What exactly is the competitive advantage that we have? And please, not hand waving vague mention of us being the best and brightest. What practical advantage do we have? Our educational system hasn't been keeping up and is underfunded, so we can't rely on being smarter than others. We have a high standard and thus cost of living, so we're too expensive to employ in grunt manufacturing work. So what is our advantage?
And the reason the IT Staff is working for the School is because no one else will hire them.
This is just plain wrong. A good friend of mine left a job not that long ago in the private sector to to go work in a University's IT department. He did it because the work environment is a lot better. It has nothing to do with his talents.
Most of the people that I've known who worked in University IT deparments did so because:
1) They like the environment better than the private sector.
2) Job stability
3) Just graduated from said university and are getting work experience
Arguably the people I've met in University IT departments are more skilled because they get more flexibility to experiment and try different things. In private IT, you tend to get pigeonholed into what they need most whereas a University tends to favor more jack of all trades work.
I think at this point they are on some radical experiment to see how irritating they can make themselves. Frivolous lawsuits and spam are where it starts. Next I expect they'll be sponsoring conventions for NAMBLA. "NAMBLA, powered by SCO".
Me thinks it is time for them to just put the old hoss down.
I've been playing PlanetSide since it was released, and a lot of the complaints about SWG sound very familiar. Frankly SOE seems very content to release buggy products and to release updates to those products that turn off large parts of their core subscriber base.
PlanetSide is perhaps the ultimate example of this. When the game first came out it was very buggy. I signed on in the first week that it was out but couldn't be compelled to recommend the game to any friends for a good 2-3 months after release because it was so flaky. Even then the person who joined up on my recommendation ended up leaving within a couple weeks because he couldn't get it to run stably on his system.
The next big screw up was the release of an expansion pack, Core Combat. This expansion pack brought minimal content and was fairly expensive. Most of the people I know who bought it when it was first released regretted it. It wasn't until the price dropped to like $10 that I could recommend it to people. $30 for a few new maps (which also has the effect of diluting the player concentrations), 3 new vehicles and 3 new weapons is rather overpriced.
Since that time, there's been a pretty steady decline in the population in the game. The final nail in the coffin was the release of BFR's, these big robots that are similar to what you'd see in Mechwarrior. It wasn't a terrible concept but they so radically altered the balance of the game that a lot of people abandoned ship.
Currently the game is decent. The pop levels are rather low, so while you'll find a battle anytime you log on, the quality of the battles has suffered a lot. Lots of 3-way stalemates happen now because there's no fun in the strategic approach of attacking empty continents. They are trying to get moe people by offering a try before you buy option where you can play as a lower level player for free. That might bring more people, or it might get exploited as people create temporary accounts to log on and grief people and cause disruptions.
It's a shame too, because the overal concept and play of the game is good. It's a really nice blend of strategy and action, but it's just been poorly managed by SOE.
I was just thinking that what would be interesting to see is change to what CS 101 classes typically are. My CS 101 was a pascal class (yeah, old skool). It was a class that many non-CS people would take to fulfill a computer requirement in another department. CS people usually found it painfully easy and non-CS people often struggled. Not many people go into CS without that basic knowledge of programming picked up somewhere else along the way.
So what I'm thinking is that these classes should be changed from raw programming to more of a design class. Like what if you spent a semester teaching people how to do analysis and documentation instead of teaching them how to write a for loop? The majority of people in this world don't need to know how a for loop works. But giving them some insight into how a business need can be broken down into specific concrete requirements would be hugely beneficial even beyond CS.
I think the big problem is that CS, as it's been taught is far more about the the theory of writing code and less about the real world design of software. In CS I learned about bubble sort. You know how often I use bubble sort? Never. Why? Because either my data is sorted when it comes out of the database or it's sorted using methods built into the language I'm using.
The vast majority of software that is written is done at a very high level right next to where business process and decisions are being made. Resource allocation, requirements gathering, and design, are what's critical to these projects succeeding, not the quality of the sorting algorithm used. It is important as a programmer to have an understanding of general algorithms and why some ways of doing something are better than others. But by and large, most of the serious problems I've seen in software development are rooted in the higher level issues of design.
Aren't we all taught that when we are writing a paper we're supposed to sit down and plan it out first? That we're supposed to create an outline?
In the end, the structure and design that preceeds coding correlates to the nature of the task, just like it does with writing a paper. Writing an e-mail, or posting on a blog is not an intensive literary endeavor, so no need to come up with a thesis, outline, etc. Writing a quick script to move some files around, etc, also doesn't require use cases, and state charts. To apply that amount of order would make the whole thing take a lot longer with not substantial benefit.
But if you're writing a doctoral thesis, yeah you'd better sit down and get yourself organized. What's your thesis? What's going to be the order in which you make your arguments? It's important and large so you need to spend some time designing it. If you're doing mission critical enterprise software, you do need to sit down and plan things out in detail, especially if you're dealing with a group of developers.
Now, as for the comparison to the way cars are built, I think this tendancy to relate software development to physical world engineering is a mistake. The main reason being that an item in the physical world can't be recompiled, or patched, or in any way modified once it's put together. Software is malleable, everybody knows it, and so pretending otherwise is just creating misery for one's self.
This is one of the reasons I like the Extreme Programming methodology. It seems to account for the malleability of everything decently well. You're always dealing with discrete chunks of functionality in short time intervals. It assumes that refactoring is going to happen and should happen frequently. Try refactoring a car... actually don't, you'll void the warranty for sure. You can try to design a complex system to deal with every little last possible requirement but it will take you forever to do this and in the end you'll have to change it anyhow.
In a perfect programming world, all of the requirements for a product would be known up front and never change. Design could be quite solid and implementation would be a breeze. I've NEVER seen that in the real world. In the real world, you are given a rough idea of how it should work and then it's changed several times while it's being written.
SVN would work too. I've always used CVS but the concept is the same.
I think this is what people mean when they talk about libraries and/or APIs, but not really sure.
Not quite. What you are talking about sounds like just a repository of random code. A library is a specifically designed set of code to perform a given task or set of tasks. There's a certain amount of order implied in the term just as is implied by that big building where they put books.
API's are designed interfaces to a system to make coding easier to do. You don't have to understand how the underlying guts of the code works, you just program to work with interfaces. So you call the draw() method and a line appears on the screen but you don't need to know how to speak directly to the video card, etc.
AS for the original question, I have two suggestions. The first is to use CVS as a way to version your code. It's like have CTRL+Z for your entire project. It makes it much easier when you are adding new code because you can feel comfortable breaking it completely because you know you can revert it easily.
The second is to use a simple search engine to catalog your code. Google desktop would be up to the task. Just check out your code from CVS and put it in a directory somewhere. Then when you need code for some task you can search for it. If you're good about commenting your code, that should work like a charm.
There are some things we could do. The vast majority of shipping related fuel is Diesel (with the obvious exception of Jet-A in airplanes). That could be converted to biodiesel if you just have the infrastructure to grow the fuel. That's doable, it just might take a little while, and it would suck in the mean time.
The most difficult thing to deal with will be automobiles. They are not something readily converted to burn something else, nor is there an infrastructure to deliver a different type of fuel. Having said that, on the bright side, how long does the average person own a car? Cars naturally get cycled out every 5 or 6 years for most people (if not sooner). So provided some infrastructure was put in place to use some alternative (most readily, biodiesel), then the switch could happen in relatively short order.
None of it is going to be easy and the lack of cheap energy will have a significant negative pressure on the economy for some time to come. The sooner we go through that pain of transition, the less painful it will be. If we wait too long, we're going to be fighting, literally, with other countries for the control of the remaining oil.
I can say with certainty, that we will never run out of resources. Now, having said that, the way we avoid running out of those resources is either:
1) Replacing them with some viable alternative
2) Competing for those resources and killing eachother until we reduce demand sufficiently
I kinda prefer option #1, but it does require a bit of ingenuity and forethough.
Apple Hardware, by my definition is hardware that Apple makes money selling. Sure the pieces and parts are made by a host of 3rd parties, but in the end, the box with an apple logo that sells for $2000 is Apple hardware.
Well to be 100% accurate it isn't money taken out of their pocket. The people who would download the copy and not pay Apple are not likely people who were going to go out and buy a Macbook Pro anyhow.
I'd buy a boxed copy myself. If you download music, or other media, there's not the trojan threat that you get from downloading software. The only software I'd download through bittorrent is a Linux distro where it's all on the up and up and you can get hashes to validate you're getting what you're expecting.
Part of the problem here might simpyl be a lack of interest in the next generation platforms. Yes, there's the hard core people who will be out buying the systems early. But I own a PS2 and it plays the games I have just fine and I haven't bought a game for it in a while. Furthermore, because the XBox and the PS2 are still posessing large market shares, publishers are still making games for them.
Right now, what incentive is there to drop $400-500 on a new game system? Are the games that much better? Not really. Yeah the graphics are a bit better but not in the same way that the PS2 graphics were better than the PS1. I saw an XBox 360 at the store the other day and some kid was playing a fighting game. Yeah the graphics were nicer, but it was more or less the same game I would play on my Dreamcast back in the day.
In the end people will move to the new platform because that's where the games will be, but for now there's not a lot of incentive. Most people don't have HDTV's so they don't get much from that. Many people don't even network their game systems from what I've seen. So much of the touted features of the new systems aren't benefitting the majority of people.
Personally I'll probably buy a PS3 shortly after the release of the next GTA title.
The fact of the matter is that Apple doesn't really care about people running OSX on a non-apple system. It's money in their pocket either way. What they want to avoid is having a bunch of white box manufacturers and Dell selling $400 PC's pre-installed with the OS. By making an honest effort to prevent install on non-apple platforms, they can prevent any sort of commercial competition on the hardware side.
So yeah, a few geeks will get OSX running on their PC's. They'll struggle with getting drivers to work correctly on non-blessed hardware, but generally feel cool. The rest of the world will buy Apples when they want to run OSX.
But one interesting twist on this: if I was looking to buy Apple hardware in hopes of having a dual boot OSX system this might change my mind. To my knowledge nobody has managed to get XP to run on Apple's hardware, but OSX is apparently running on non-apple hardware. That might all change with Vista coming out soon, but in the mean time running OSX on non-apple systems might be the better option.