Have you ever been writing a document then suddenly thought "Gee I'd love to play chess at the moment"? With another editor you'd be stuffed - you'd probably have to open another program or something, but not with Emacs.
Doesn't work for me. I tried to play, but emacs declined a game:
I hope the new release makes it easier to get the java plugin working in RH9 or FC[34]. I've tried a number of different documented procedures with 1.0.6 and have never been able to get it working.
I personally think every OS should ship with some sort of a light db engine equipped to handle databases stored in files.
Yes, this makes sense. However, as someone who has spent a lot of time with Oracle and Postgres, I can say that neither one fits the bill. Oracle is just too huge and complex. Postgres is too quirky. It is very, very easy to get into serious performance problems with Postgres due to vacuuming (or lack thereof). If you have a table that is updated frequently, it has to be vacuumed frequently. If it's a big table, that can be trouble and you may need to redesign part of your application. None of this is insurmountable, but for something to be included with the OS, I think a lower degree of maintenance is necessary.
I think the best lightweight database of the sort being discussed is (was?) Watcom SQL.
In just about any creative enterprise, there is tension between the creators, who are often motivated by love of what they do; and the bean-counters whose only goal is to cut cost. The bean-counters have been winning. They've squeezed so much life out of their products for short-term gain that they've ignored the long term consequences, which we are now experiencing, at least in the USA:
- Crappy movies nobody wants to see, (hello Hollywood)
- Crappy music noboby wants to buy, (hello top 40)
- Crappy cars nobody wants to drive, (hello GM)
- Crappy software that is barely tolerated, (hello Microsoft)
There are people who will pay time and money for quality, but it isn't clear they can support businesses large enough to displace the mediocre behemoths.
Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish.
No, a slashdotter asking such a question is more like a working stiff asking who contributed to the congressman's campaign. What the congressman is doing is more like a Microsoft executive asking who funded a study favorable to Linux.
These days, a republican supporting this Administration's position on any scientific issue, against any credible scientist is highly suspect and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I used to use them for mass storage on a TRS-80. And my 4.77 MHz, 16k IBM PC supported cassette storage. Didn't need it though, thanks to the two 5" floppy drives, which stored, I believe, a total of 720k.
The article is using a highly unusual definition of nerd: "A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first," says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine's love and sex advice columnist. "He'll turn out to be a great father and a great husband."
If I undercharge due to a spreadsheet error, then I'm out $N, but someone else is $N better off.
If only there were some consulting company, someone who I could call to help me implement some best practicies, to help me avoid these tragic errors. Do PWC and KPMG know anyone who can help?
These guys are so hard up for papers. I've received a few emails from them, notifying me of extended deadlines -- basically spamming for participation. If they are so desperate, the reviewing standards must be pretty low.
Here's what I got from them: Dear...:
We are sorry to take a bit of your valuable time, but we thought it is good to inform you that we extended up to March 29th the deadline for submitting papers to WMSCI ((http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005). The extended deadlines are as follows:...
I have a 1983 Ph.D. in computer science, and I'm now a "software architect" working at a startup. First, I agree with many other posts stating that a Ph.D. is the long and uphill path to a good job in software development.
If your ultimate goal is to write software for a living, but you don't like doing independent research (reading books and journals, pencil & paper research, writing and publishing your research), don't do a Ph.D. You'll be miserable doing it, and if you manage to get through, which is doubtful, you'll find yourself at a disadvantage in the job market.
If you enjoy both software development and research, as I do, then after graduating, be aware of the implications of your career choices. The more time you spend in research, not writing software for a living, the harder it will be to make the transition. You may find yourself as a 30-35 year old researcher who has not shipped software. You will be competing with 22-25 year olds coming out of B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs, going for their first software jobs. I have seen many Ph.Ds who stay in research so long that they cannot make the transition.
Writing software for a research project is very different from writing (and supporting) software that goes into a shipping product, and experience in this area is what most employers look for, (the smart ones, anyway).
In my case, I was an assistant prof. for two years after getting my Ph.D. I realized that being a successful professor/researcher was a lot less fun than being a grad student. It's very much like the distinction between a manager and an individual contributor. As a professor, you need to write grants and supervise student research, doing less hands-on research yourself. I then went into DARPA-funded industry research in the mid 80s. I happened to be doing research in the hot topic of the day (object-oriented database systems), and landed my first real software job at a startup. I was hired because they valued my research background -- I was very lucky. I stayed at this company for eight years. I got to write a lot of software, but also spent time doing the grunt work of real software development: source control, writing tests, fixing lots of bugs, measuring and tuning performance, supporting customers, writing documentation. I've been doing software at startup companies ever since.
From the review, it sounds like SH is basically a library, and that library invocations are dressed up through the use of operator overloading.
Is this "metaprogramming"? Googling turns up a variety of definitions of the term, but the term sounds like it should mean writing a program which generates a program. Which is different from a library and syntactic sugar.
OK, so let me see if I understand. Better programmers select Python over Java because Python is the better language. Java is "a language that makes source code ugly". But "real ugliness" is "having to build programs out of the wrong concepts".
Are we talking about the concepts of the language, or the concepts of the application that the language is being used to express?
He probably doesn't mean the concepts of the language, because Java and Python have much in common. (And no, trivial syntactic differences don't count as conceptual differences.)
If he means the concepts of the application, then there goes his whole argument about Java forcing developers to build programs out of the wrong concepts.
Such nonsense. There are great, mediocre and horrible programmers in any language. The best programmers can create great software in any language.
At my company, we started building a new product on RH9 using Sun's JDK 1.4.2. This worked fine through development and functional testing. But once we started doing stress testing and scalability testing, things got difficult.
First we hit the infamous LD_ASSUME_KERNEL problem. The JVM would freeze up mysteriously on innocuous statements such as "count = 0". This happened in synchronized method, and the more threads there were, the more frequently we'd hit this problem.
Then we discovered that the Sun JDKs management of memory in conjunction with nio classes was not so good. Memory usage as reported by Java was fine, no leaks, and then all of a sudden we'd die with an OutOfMemoryError.
IBMs implementation seems to be of higher quality on Linux, and that's what we're now using.
Having gone through all this, I'm still glad that we're on Java. It's a very nice language, performance is more than adequate (for our application anyway), the libraries are excellent, the tools are excellent, and I'm happy not to be dealing with memory corruption issues.
Java is not the best for command line programs mainly because VM initialization is expensive (in terms of time).
Which is why a Java shell is needed. Everything runs inside the shell's VM, so there is no need to load the VM for each command.
I used to be a fan of the Psion 5mx which ran Java. Startup time was horribly slow, and typing in the classpath each time was torture, so I wrote a shell for it, still obtainable here.
This shell did the right thing with ClassLoaders, so that you could edit Java source, recompile using javac (inside the shell's VM), and reload the new version of the class.
Jshell is a bit ancient, (written in JDK 1.1.4 days), but it works. And it's open source if anyone wants to continue it.
Good to know I'm not the only one. I'm half-seriously thinking about it and getting more serious all the time. Bush is part of the problem, a big part, but there's more: a Congress that will go along with anything (as with this bill), a media that ignores all of this, and voters too dumb to act in their own self-interest.
I don't want to pay taxes to a government that is diligently working to screw me. Also, the rumblings about reinstating the draft are definitely there; it is easy to imagine Bush and his minions reinstating it; and I sure as hell don't want my kids getting drafted to further the insane policies of this government.
I don't know about immigration issues. I know that Toronto, Waterloo and Vancouver have pretty decent tech communities.
Anyone interested in setting up a web site or mailing list to share information on an escape to Canada?
Our VP was a bright guy, but a tad gullible, and sometimes too much of a micromanager. We were running a multi-day stress test and had a little fun with him. We rigged the server so that we could slow it down or speed it back up from a console. We called him in and said, (name changed to protect everyone), "Hey, Bill, we noticed that the server would slow down once in a while, and we finally noticed that it was because Kevin was kinking the ethernet cable with his chair."
Bill was absolutely incredulous. He had to see it for himself. So one of us kinked the ethernet cable to the server, the guy on the console did his bit, and the server slowed down. We unkinked the cable, console guy did his thing, and the server speeds back up. Bill tries it himself a few times and sputters. "This can't be happening! How can this be?!".
It was a great credit to all involved that they kept a straight face until the VP was positive he was being zoomed.
From the dotcom era: Wrote a http proxy that left everything on a web page alone, but substituted all text with "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." (Slashdot looks pretty strange that way.) Redirected a few browsers to point to it. Interesting to see who figured it out and who didn't.
From the Mesozoic era: You used to have to type up your source on punch cards, using a huge, clanking IBM 029 cardpunch. Most were beige with a color strip along the top, pink, green or yellow. A few were blue. Whatever. Great keyboards, and each key press gave a very satisfying KUH-LUNK. Editing was bizarre. If you make a mistake, you could load a second card, duplicate until the error, and then type your correction, (and don't forget to remove the card with the typo). This was a painful way to program. Run your deck through the card reader, then go to the huge line printer to get your output, consisting of source, output and error messages, and accounting information, (e.g. $0.37 to run your program, debited from your $50.00 funny money account). Turnaround could be horribly slow, 1/2 hour on a bad night. Standard practice was to write source code by hand, and desk-check everything very carefully. Anyway, newbie runs his first program, gets the inevitable compiler errors, and is completely stumped. He goes to the poor schmuck on duty whose job it is to unjam the card reader and printer. "Oh, you've got a color code error. You typed your program on the wrong color cards. You have to use the green ones."
I heard a discussion of agricultrual subsidies in the industrialized countries, by Robert Reich last night on NPR. Stay with me, I'll get to the point.
It is far cheaper to grow grain in developing countries than in the industrialized countries. It is the best way for those countries to make money. Yet they cannot afford to compete with the US, Europe and Japan because of subsidies. Why are there subisidies? Because agribusiness is politically powerful.
In all the discussion of offshoring that I've seen on slashdot, I've never seen this point discussed. In fact, I haven't seen the point raised anywhere. I'm definitely not in favor of ag subsidies, and I'm probably against any subsidies. I just find it curious that the subject of subsidized software development has not come up at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever been writing a document then suddenly thought "Gee I'd love to play chess at the moment"? With another editor you'd be stuffed - you'd probably have to open another program or something, but not with Emacs.
Doesn't work for me. I tried to play, but emacs declined a game:
M-x chess [no match]
I hope the new release makes it easier to get the java plugin working in RH9 or FC[34]. I've tried a number of different documented procedures with 1.0.6 and have never been able to get it working.
I personally think every OS should ship with some sort of a light db engine equipped to handle databases stored in files.
Yes, this makes sense. However, as someone who has spent a lot of time with Oracle and Postgres, I can say that neither one fits the bill. Oracle is just too huge and complex. Postgres is too quirky. It is very, very easy to get into serious performance problems with Postgres due to vacuuming (or lack thereof). If you have a table that is updated frequently, it has to be vacuumed frequently. If it's a big table, that can be trouble and you may need to redesign part of your application. None of this is insurmountable, but for something to be included with the OS, I think a lower degree of maintenance is necessary.
I think the best lightweight database of the sort being discussed is
(was?) Watcom SQL.
In just about any creative enterprise, there is tension between the creators, who are often motivated by love of what they do; and the bean-counters whose only goal is to cut cost. The bean-counters have been winning. They've squeezed so much life out of their products for short-term gain that they've ignored the long term consequences, which we are now experiencing, at least in the USA:
- Crappy movies nobody wants to see, (hello Hollywood)
- Crappy music noboby wants to buy, (hello top 40)
- Crappy cars nobody wants to drive, (hello GM)
- Crappy software that is barely tolerated, (hello Microsoft)
There are people who will pay time and money for quality, but it isn't clear they can support businesses large enough to displace the mediocre behemoths.
The planet of Saturn has ripped off Man or Astroman.
Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish.
No, a slashdotter asking such a question is more like a working stiff asking who contributed to the congressman's campaign. What the congressman is doing is more like a Microsoft executive asking who funded a study favorable to Linux.
These days, a republican supporting this Administration's position on any scientific issue, against any credible scientist is highly suspect and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
You can store music on them? That's cool.
I used to use them for mass storage on a TRS-80. And my 4.77 MHz, 16k IBM PC supported cassette storage. Didn't need it though, thanks to the two 5" floppy drives, which stored, I believe, a total of 720k.
The article is using a highly unusual definition of nerd: "A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first," says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine's love and sex advice columnist. "He'll turn out to be a great father and a great husband."
If I undercharge due to a spreadsheet error, then I'm out $N, but someone else is $N better off.
If only there were some consulting company, someone who I could call to help me implement some best practicies, to help me avoid these tragic errors. Do PWC and KPMG know anyone who can help?
Man, am I glad that I'm using Linux.
These guys are so hard up for papers. I've received a few emails from them, notifying me of extended deadlines -- basically spamming for participation. If they are so desperate, the reviewing standards must be pretty low.
...:
...
Here's what I got from them:
Dear
We are sorry to take a bit of your valuable time, but we thought it is good to inform you that we extended up to March 29th the deadline for submitting papers to WMSCI ((http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005). The extended deadlines are as follows:
Don't use SHA-1
I have a 1983 Ph.D. in computer science, and I'm now a "software architect" working at a startup. First, I agree with many other posts stating that a Ph.D. is the long and uphill path to a good job in software development.
If your ultimate goal is to write software for a living, but you don't like doing independent research (reading books and journals, pencil & paper research, writing and publishing your research), don't do a Ph.D. You'll be miserable doing it, and if you manage to get through, which is doubtful, you'll find yourself at a disadvantage in the job market.
If you enjoy both software development and research, as I do, then after graduating, be aware of the implications of your career choices. The more time you spend in research, not writing software for a living, the harder it will be to make the transition. You may find yourself as a 30-35 year old researcher who has not shipped software. You will be competing with 22-25 year olds coming out of B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs, going for their first software jobs. I have seen many Ph.Ds who stay in research so long that they cannot make the transition.
Writing software for a research project is very different from writing (and supporting) software that goes into a shipping product, and experience in this area is what most employers look for, (the smart ones, anyway).
In my case, I was an assistant prof. for two years after getting my Ph.D. I realized that being a successful professor/researcher was a lot less fun than being a grad student. It's very much like the distinction between a manager and an individual contributor. As a professor, you need to write grants and supervise student research, doing less hands-on research yourself. I then went into DARPA-funded industry research in the mid 80s. I happened to be doing research in the hot topic of the day (object-oriented database systems), and landed my first real software job at a startup. I was hired because they valued my research background -- I was very lucky. I stayed at this company for eight years. I got to write a lot of software, but also spent time doing the grunt work of real software development: source control, writing tests, fixing lots of bugs, measuring and tuning performance, supporting customers, writing documentation. I've been doing software at startup companies ever since.
From the review, it sounds like SH is basically a library, and that library invocations are dressed up through the use of operator overloading.
Is this "metaprogramming"? Googling turns up a variety of definitions of the term, but the term sounds like it should mean writing a program which generates a program. Which is different from a library and syntactic sugar.
OK, so let me see if I understand. Better programmers select Python over Java because Python is the better language. Java is "a language that makes source code ugly". But "real ugliness" is "having to build programs out of the wrong concepts".
Are we talking about the concepts of the language, or the concepts of the application that the language is being used to express?
He probably doesn't mean the concepts of the language, because Java and Python have much in common. (And no, trivial syntactic differences don't count as conceptual differences.)
If he means the concepts of the application, then there goes his whole argument about Java forcing developers to build programs out of the wrong concepts.
Such nonsense. There are great, mediocre and horrible programmers in any language. The best programmers can create great software in any language.
At my company, we started building a new product on RH9 using Sun's
JDK 1.4.2. This worked fine through development and functional
testing. But once we started doing stress testing and scalability
testing, things got difficult.
First we hit the infamous LD_ASSUME_KERNEL problem. The JVM would
freeze up mysteriously on innocuous statements such as "count =
0". This happened in synchronized method, and the more threads there
were, the more frequently we'd hit this problem.
Then we discovered that the Sun JDKs management of memory in
conjunction with nio classes was not so good. Memory usage as reported
by Java was fine, no leaks, and then all of a sudden we'd die with an
OutOfMemoryError.
IBMs implementation seems to be of higher quality on Linux, and that's
what we're now using.
Having gone through all this, I'm still glad that we're on Java. It's
a very nice language, performance is more than adequate (for our
application anyway), the libraries are excellent, the tools are
excellent, and I'm happy not to be dealing with memory corruption
issues.
Java is not the best for command line programs mainly because VM initialization is expensive (in terms of time).
Which is why a Java shell is needed. Everything runs inside the shell's VM, so there is no need to load the VM for each command.
I used to be a fan of the Psion 5mx which ran Java. Startup time was horribly slow, and typing in the classpath each time was torture, so I wrote a shell for it, still obtainable here.
This shell did the right thing with ClassLoaders, so that you could edit Java source, recompile using javac (inside the shell's VM), and reload the new version of the class.
Jshell is a bit ancient, (written in JDK 1.1.4 days), but it works. And it's open source if anyone wants to continue it.
There is a neat trick for dealing with a biased coin in a coin toss:
- Flip twice.
- Discard the pair of throws if it's both heads (HH) or both tails (TT).
- Count HT as heads, and TH as tails.
(I think this idea was from John von Neumann.)
Applied to the current situation: Flip twice, once starting H down, once with T down.
How about XP Unplugged? Now that I'd pay money for.
Good to know I'm not the only one. I'm half-seriously thinking about it and getting more serious all the time. Bush is part of the problem, a big part, but there's more: a Congress that will go along with anything (as with this bill), a media that ignores all of this, and voters too dumb to act in their own self-interest.
I don't want to pay taxes to a government that is diligently working to screw me. Also, the rumblings about reinstating the draft are definitely there; it is easy to imagine Bush and his minions reinstating it; and I sure as hell don't want my kids getting drafted to further the insane policies of this government.
I don't know about immigration issues. I know that Toronto, Waterloo and Vancouver have pretty decent tech communities.
Anyone interested in setting up a web site or mailing list to share information on an escape to Canada?
Our VP was a bright guy, but a tad gullible, and sometimes too much of
a micromanager. We were running a multi-day stress test and had a
little fun with him. We rigged the server so that we could slow it
down or speed it back up from a console. We called him in and said,
(name changed to protect everyone), "Hey, Bill, we noticed that the
server would slow down once in a while, and we finally noticed that it
was because Kevin was kinking the ethernet cable with his chair."
Bill was absolutely incredulous. He had to see it for himself. So one
of us kinked the ethernet cable to the server, the guy on the console
did his bit, and the server slowed down. We unkinked the cable,
console guy did his thing, and the server speeds back up. Bill tries
it himself a few times and sputters. "This can't be happening! How can
this be?!".
It was a great credit to all involved that they kept a straight face
until the VP was positive he was being zoomed.
From the dotcom era: Wrote a http proxy that left everything on a web
page alone, but substituted all text with "All work and no play makes
Jack a dull boy." (Slashdot looks pretty strange that way.)
Redirected a few browsers to point to it. Interesting to see who
figured it out and who didn't.
From the Mesozoic era: You used to have to type up your source on
punch cards, using a huge, clanking IBM 029 cardpunch. Most were
beige with a color strip along the top, pink, green or yellow. A few
were blue. Whatever. Great keyboards, and each key press gave a very
satisfying KUH-LUNK. Editing was bizarre. If you make a mistake, you
could load a second card, duplicate until the error, and then type
your correction, (and don't forget to remove the card with the typo).
This was a painful way to program. Run your deck through the card
reader, then go to the huge line printer to get your output,
consisting of source, output and error messages, and accounting
information, (e.g. $0.37 to run your program, debited from your $50.00
funny money account). Turnaround could be horribly slow, 1/2 hour on
a bad night. Standard practice was to write source code by hand, and
desk-check everything very carefully. Anyway, newbie runs his first
program, gets the inevitable compiler errors, and is completely
stumped. He goes to the poor schmuck on duty whose job it is to unjam
the card reader and printer. "Oh, you've got a color code error. You
typed your program on the wrong color cards. You have to use the green
ones."
I heard a discussion of agricultrual subsidies in the industrialized
countries, by Robert Reich last night on NPR. Stay with me, I'll get
to the point.
It is far cheaper to grow grain in developing countries than in the
industrialized countries. It is the best way for those countries to
make money. Yet they cannot afford to compete with the US, Europe and
Japan because of subsidies. Why are there subisidies? Because
agribusiness is politically powerful.
In all the discussion of offshoring that I've seen on slashdot, I've
never seen this point discussed. In fact, I haven't seen the point
raised anywhere. I'm definitely not in favor of ag subsidies, and I'm
probably against any subsidies. I just find it curious that the
subject of subsidized software development has not come up at all.
"You want fries with that?"
If you're just starting out, this anthology might be the place to start, but see this review first.