Look at the software written twenty five years ago, and look at the software written recently.
Bill Joy wrote vi pretty much by himself. Bram Moolenaar write Vim pretty much by himself; it's a huge superset of Joy's editor.
The original portable C compiler (PCC) was about 5,000 lines of C. No one even blinks if a graduate student writes a far more sophisticated language processor, e.g., a C++ compiler, a complete Java development environment (including a compiler and debugger).
The original SimCity was awesome. No one thinks twice of re-implementing it for a PDA or a Java-enabled web browser.
What's changed? Programmers don't have to worry so much about CPU, disk, or memory limitations. The tools (compilers, libraries, source control) are much improved. Some of the new languages are far more productive. There are also new practices, and the results of lessons learned, on how to do development; some programmers take advantage of these (not enough!)
But our abilities haven't kept up with our aspirations. Compare SimCity to the masively multi-player Sims Online. How do vi or PCC stack up against Eclipse? Look at the text formatters of twenty five years ago, and then look at OpenOffice (or Microsoft's stuff); at Unix v6 vs. Max OS X.
Software hasn't kept up with Moore's Law. We're running a Red Queen's race, going as fast as we can just to stay in one place; and we're losing.
... some elements of XP are good, these are the ones that existed before
All the Extreme Programming practices are ones that existed before; and that's good! XP isn't a bunch of new ideas; it's a new combination of tried-and-true things that have worked. The practices that were picked (and not), and the extent to which that combination is followed, is what makes XP "extreme."
The flyers are an expression of information. Scanning the flyers and posting the images would be a violation of copyright. The information in the flyers is not protected by copyright.
Understand, though: this isn't about the information. It's about the control of the information. Copyright should be used as a shield, not as a sword; but that's not what's happening here.
(The "shield"/"sword" language is from the FATAL SUBTRACTION case.)
Several years ago, some online comic artists banded together and formed Keenspot (and its sibling network Keenspace). Hosting, forums, artist control of whether pop-up ads (vs. only banner ads) appear for any given comic, optional subscriptions for ad-free reading; good stuff.
Is Microsoft in this business (they label it "CE/Mobility") because they want to make a profit in this business? Or are they taking advantage of other strengths of their company to dominate the new sector?
Microsoft's recent Form 10-Q shows that, between June 1 and September 30, 2002, Microsoft lost $33M (U.S. dollars) on revenues of $17M in this part of their business. (Look for the second occurance of "CE/Mobility", the one under "Three months ending September 30" and "2002," about halfway down the page.) In other words, they spent a total of about $50M (in three months!), and lost almost three dollars for every dollar they spent.
This isn't proof by any means; but it's one interesting test in trying to decide Microsoft's corporate intentions.
P.S.: This rate may represent Microsoft scaling back their efforts! From June 1 to September 30, 2001, Microsoft lost $48M on revenues of $14M; so a total expenditure of $62M, or more than four dollars for ever one they made. Remember that Windows CE devices started shipping in early 1997; this is not a new business for them, but one that's almost six years old.
Nothing beats a well orchestrated and well executed plan - i.e., a written and documented plan. If software specifications are not worth formalizing on paper - it isn't worth creating.
XP proponents agree with you.
They'd point towards "the planning game," the XP deliverable for project management. (See Planning Extreme Programming for details.)
They'd point towards "user stories" (very similar to use cases), one XP deliverable for requirements gathering.
They'd also point to projects where the requirements weren't well defined up front and changed very quickly, and the cost of maintaining detailed requirements deliverables would have slowed the project down enormously.
And what project doesn't fall in that category? It's a fantasy to think, ala classic "waterfall" development, that the requirements can be set in stone before any of the design, coding, and testing is done. Requirements grow and change as the project progresses, in ways peculiar to the "softness" of software development. (No one would start a project to build a footbridge over a creek, then halfway through want a rail bridge over the Mississippi River.)
XP may not be the best way to address this, but it's one way; and even as McBreen concludes, it's a good way for some projects. For all projects? No one's saying it is.
XP lasted for about a week at a client site, before I got fed up with a foul smelling twit sharing my cubicle with me and quit.
Pair programming is not Extreme Programming. Perhaps XP cannot be done without pair programming (or perhaps it can); certainly pair programming can be done without XP. Some people have been doing it for decades. (I have, too, in a non-XP context.)
I've not met someone who can keep up with me when writing code. And really, that's not the time for 2 heads.
I strongly recommend the Williams and Kessler book on pair programming, which talks about this. (Maybe I should review it?)
Denial is not just a river in Egypt
on
The Economics of Spam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ms. Betterly... only sends bulk e-mails to people who have indicated at some time that they want to hear more about certain products or offers. People do that, some unwittingly, when they sign up for free e-mail accounts or create chat-room identities or buy products online. Many Web sites ask users whether they are interested in receiving marketing offers and ask them to check -- or, more likely, uncheck -- an obscure little box if they don't want to receive that kind of e-mail.... Because Ms. Betterly's e-mails aren't, in the strictest sense, unsolicited, she doesn't consider them spam. So she isn't breaking any rules when she sends hundreds of thousands of messages...
In her mind, anyone who agreed to accept any e-mail about anything, ever, has "opted in" to every list he or she hasn't explicitly opted out of.
In her mind, her time with her children is important, your time, and my time, weeding through UCE is not important.
In her mind, she's a moral and ethical person.
She's not out of her mind; she's just buried too deeply in it.
P.S.:
Ms. Betterly says she... doesn't forge or falsify the message header.
There was an MS-DOS shareware product -- in fact, it was the product for which the word "shareware" was coined, and by a guy who'd been Microsoft employee number 9, no less -- called PC-Write. It was a lightweight (fit on a floppy), blindingly fast (even on an original 4.77 MHz 8088) quasi-WYSIWYG word processor. I tried it, I paid for it, I used it a lot. With a little care, you could do fairly close to WYSIWYG editing of plain ASCII files.
The author (Bob Wallace) passed away September 29, 2002. His company is long gone, as is the company his product was sold to.
It looks as if you can download version 3.04 here. Halfway down this page you'll find version 4.15. The Pascal source code was available at one point; it's probably disappeared.
A similar product, "Breeze Word Processor," appears to be available here. This is a four year old (to the day!) Netnews discussion of lightweight MS-DOS word processor packages. Your very best bet might be an MS-DOS or Windows 3.x version of WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.
None of these are actively supported.-(
In this day when people lightly port Sim City and Civilization to PDAs and phones and web browsers, it shouldn't be that hard to recreate one of these.
When it comes to technical books, I look for a good publisher first, and a good author second.
A good publisher can help a so-so author (by, for example, good editing, technical and otherwise). A really good publisher can return a rotten manuscript as unpublishable and refuse to distribute the darned thing. The publisher can only do so much, of course, but I wouldn't lightly underestimate how much.
Any author, good or bad, gets a lot of value from the publisher. No book is perfect in the early drafts. A so-so publisher may often put out a very imperfect book.
I've had a little experience (from both sides of the keyboard) with Sams at one point in its history. I don't feel they were a publisher that added a lot of value once the author's work is done. They may have gotten some good authors who put out some good books, but not as consistently as (say) O'Reilly. (I don't know how Sams is doing these days.)
A couple of replies to earlier comments:
"... In 24 Hours" doesn't mean "start at 9 a.m. Monday, be done 9 a.m. Tuesday." It means, "put in a couple of hours a day, be done in about a couple of weeks."
Some people have complained this is an introductory book that's not very deep. Fine; it's not for gurus. It might well be a good book to read before reading the "purple book"; and that's not a bad thing.
... I just wish they had shown it, even once, anywhere near my house. I would have had to go into New York City to see it; maybe worth the trip for me, but how many of my nearby friends and family would bother?
I'm not the only one who's annoyed; IMDB ran this story:
Is Year's Best-Reviewed Film the Worst Marketed?: New York Daily News film critic Jack Mathews has chided Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook for rolling out Hayao Miyazaki's animated Spirited Away "as if it were some experimental gruel from Cremoria." Noting that the film received nearly unanimous rave reviews when it was released, Mathews asks in an "open letter" to Cook appearing in today's (Thursday) [October 24, 2002] edition of the newspaper: "Why didn't you treat it like any other Disney animated feature, with a wide release and a big-bucks ad campaign?" Instead, Mathews noted, the film, which opened in 26 theaters on Sept. 20, is now showing on only 151. He concludes: "I hate to say it, Dick, but you had a tap-in putt here and you blew it."
Does this mean that I cannot listen to CDs on my computer without being concidered a consumer without respect to listening pleasure?
Don't you know listening to music on a non-RIAA-approved device is theft?
Or borrowing a friend's music, or video, or book? Or supporting those bastions of evil, the "public" so-called libraries? Or recording a TV show or movie in some way that would let you "deep link" to the filler in between the commercials, instead of seeing it the way the copyright holder intended?
Don't you understand that going a day without buying a music disk is depriving artists in the music industry (CEOs, accountants, auditors, etc.) of the income they're entitled to?
Don't you know this so-called "Internet" is really... wait a minute, someone's knocking at my door, I'll be right back....
Did you say something about a standalone mail client?... Yes. We did. Thank you for listening. It's called Thunderbird, and more information will be available later
It'not mentioned on the current (0.4, Oceano) release notes. Anyone know why?
This appears to be describing, not only what you can (and can't) do with some evaluation software, but also with the information you get from reading HTML and PDF files on the site.
Joel Hodgell brought a spammer to court under Washington state's anti-spam law. Did he collect? No, his case was dismissed (the reasons aren't clear), and then the judge "imposed a $6,925 judgment against Hodgell to compensate... the spammers' lawyer". The state law is facing inconsistent application; some judges don't think a state law can be used on out-of-state residents, others refuse to hear it in small-claims court, despite a published opinion by the state's attorney general. News.com has a story on this and other cases.
Ubiquitous personal computers, ubiquitous fax machines, ubiquitous e-mail (I can send e-mail to every member of my family), ubiquitous Internet access (especially the Web), ubiquitous wireless voice service: telecom and computing innovations keep changing the world. Do you see anything that's just a blip on the radar screen today, but which might have a big impact on people's lives in a few years?
For a lot of us, the biggest issue on our personal agenda is employment: the chances of being laid off, and (worse) how long it will take to find a decent replacement job. (Underemployment is an issue, too; staying in the tech sector but taking more than a 25% pay cut, or leaving the tech sector in order to pay the rent/mortgage.)
It's not just relative to the dotcom bubble. There are few jobs, and those that are out there process applicants via companies that specialize in resume processing. (The latter means it's all about keywords, not how good you are.) The most reliable way to get a job continues to be working your personal network; but many networks have dissolved, as everyone gets laid off in a short period of time.
What's your take? From where you sit, have you seen any bright spots, or any indications things might get better (or worse)? What coping strategies have you seen people find for sucessfully getting new jobs, or surviving unemployment well?
Re:Why do no stories display the year?
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 4, Informative
My only main quibble with Slashdot is why aren't YEARS SHOWN ON STORIES!?
It's great seeing 'October 01'.. but what year is that? Why do Slashdot stories not display the year?/i>
There are a lot of efforts related to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). How do you see them going? Will SIP rule the roost? Is the wireline "plain old telephone service" phone going to be obsolete any time soon, at home, at work, or both? Will VoIP look like part of the Internet to the consumer, or will it be part of the obscure infrastructure?
I never thought I'd be able to e-mail my mother. I never though I'd be able to access the public library's "card" catalog from home. I never thought there'd be a more compelling screen than my television set for wasting time.-)
How do you find yourself using the Internet, in ways that would have surprised you a decade ago?
IPv6 holds solutions to many of the problems the Internet faces today; but it's still almost exclusively an IPv4 world out there. The usual vicious cycle applies: no one wants to support it until it's widely used, and no one wants to use it until it's widely supported. How, and when, do you see this logjam being broken up?
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the software written twenty five years ago, and look at the software written recently.
Bill Joy wrote vi pretty much by himself. Bram Moolenaar write Vim pretty much by himself; it's a huge superset of Joy's editor.
The original portable C compiler (PCC) was about 5,000 lines of C. No one even blinks if a graduate student writes a far more sophisticated language processor, e.g., a C++ compiler, a complete Java development environment (including a compiler and debugger).
The original SimCity was awesome. No one thinks twice of re-implementing it for a PDA or a Java-enabled web browser.
What's changed? Programmers don't have to worry so much about CPU, disk, or memory limitations. The tools (compilers, libraries, source control) are much improved. Some of the new languages are far more productive. There are also new practices, and the results of lessons learned, on how to do development; some programmers take advantage of these (not enough!)
But our abilities haven't kept up with our aspirations. Compare SimCity to the masively multi-player Sims Online. How do vi or PCC stack up against Eclipse? Look at the text formatters of twenty five years ago, and then look at OpenOffice (or Microsoft's stuff); at Unix v6 vs. Max OS X.
Software hasn't kept up with Moore's Law. We're running a Red Queen's race, going as fast as we can just to stay in one place; and we're losing.
The flyers are an expression of information. Scanning the flyers and posting the images would be a violation of copyright. The information in the flyers is not protected by copyright.
Understand, though: this isn't about the information. It's about the control of the information. Copyright should be used as a shield, not as a sword; but that's not what's happening here.
(The "shield"/"sword" language is from the FATAL SUBTRACTION case.)
Several years ago, some online comic artists banded together and formed Keenspot (and its sibling network Keenspace). Hosting, forums, artist control of whether pop-up ads (vs. only banner ads) appear for any given comic, optional subscriptions for ad-free reading; good stuff.
Among my favorites there: General Protection Fault, Help Desk, It's Walky (formerly Roomies), Lost and Found, Real Life, and Schlock Mercenary.
Is Microsoft in this business (they label it "CE/Mobility") because they want to make a profit in this business? Or are they taking advantage of other strengths of their company to dominate the new sector?
Microsoft's recent Form 10-Q shows that, between June 1 and September 30, 2002, Microsoft lost $33M (U.S. dollars) on revenues of $17M in this part of their business. (Look for the second occurance of "CE/Mobility", the one under "Three months ending September 30" and "2002," about halfway down the page.) In other words, they spent a total of about $50M (in three months!), and lost almost three dollars for every dollar they spent.
This isn't proof by any means; but it's one interesting test in trying to decide Microsoft's corporate intentions.
P.S.: This rate may represent Microsoft scaling back their efforts! From June 1 to September 30, 2001, Microsoft lost $48M on revenues of $14M; so a total expenditure of $62M, or more than four dollars for ever one they made. Remember that Windows CE devices started shipping in early 1997; this is not a new business for them, but one that's almost six years old.
They'd point towards "the planning game," the XP deliverable for project management. (See Planning Extreme Programming for details.)
They'd point towards "user stories" (very similar to use cases), one XP deliverable for requirements gathering.
They'd also point to projects where the requirements weren't well defined up front and changed very quickly, and the cost of maintaining detailed requirements deliverables would have slowed the project down enormously.
And what project doesn't fall in that category? It's a fantasy to think, ala classic "waterfall" development, that the requirements can be set in stone before any of the design, coding, and testing is done. Requirements grow and change as the project progresses, in ways peculiar to the "softness" of software development. (No one would start a project to build a footbridge over a creek, then halfway through want a rail bridge over the Mississippi River.)
XP may not be the best way to address this, but it's one way; and even as McBreen concludes, it's a good way for some projects. For all projects? No one's saying it is.
In her mind, her time with her children is important, your time, and my time, weeding through UCE is not important.
In her mind, she's a moral and ethical person.
She's not out of her mind; she's just buried too deeply in it.
P.S.:And I am Marie of Roumania.
There was an MS-DOS shareware product -- in fact, it was the product for which the word "shareware" was coined, and by a guy who'd been Microsoft employee number 9, no less -- called PC-Write. It was a lightweight (fit on a floppy), blindingly fast (even on an original 4.77 MHz 8088) quasi-WYSIWYG word processor. I tried it, I paid for it, I used it a lot. With a little care, you could do fairly close to WYSIWYG editing of plain ASCII files.
The author (Bob Wallace) passed away September 29, 2002. His company is long gone, as is the company his product was sold to.
It looks as if you can download version 3.04 here. Halfway down this page you'll find version 4.15. The Pascal source code was available at one point; it's probably disappeared.
A similar product, "Breeze Word Processor," appears to be available here. This is a four year old (to the day!) Netnews discussion of lightweight MS-DOS word processor packages. Your very best bet might be an MS-DOS or Windows 3.x version of WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.
None of these are actively supported.-(
In this day when people lightly port Sim City and Civilization to PDAs and phones and web browsers, it shouldn't be that hard to recreate one of these.
P.S.: What OS is your 8 MB system running?
When it comes to technical books, I look for a good publisher first, and a good author second.
A good publisher can help a so-so author (by, for example, good editing, technical and otherwise). A really good publisher can return a rotten manuscript as unpublishable and refuse to distribute the darned thing. The publisher can only do so much, of course, but I wouldn't lightly underestimate how much.
Any author, good or bad, gets a lot of value from the publisher. No book is perfect in the early drafts. A so-so publisher may often put out a very imperfect book.
I've had a little experience (from both sides of the keyboard) with Sams at one point in its history. I don't feel they were a publisher that added a lot of value once the author's work is done. They may have gotten some good authors who put out some good books, but not as consistently as (say) O'Reilly. (I don't know how Sams is doing these days.)
A couple of replies to earlier comments:
"... In 24 Hours" doesn't mean "start at 9 a.m. Monday, be done 9 a.m. Tuesday." It means, "put in a couple of hours a day, be done in about a couple of weeks."
Some people have complained this is an introductory book that's not very deep. Fine; it's not for gurus. It might well be a good book to read before reading the "purple book"; and that's not a bad thing.
I'm not the only one who's annoyed; IMDB ran this story:
Or borrowing a friend's music, or video, or book? Or supporting those bastions of evil, the "public" so-called libraries? Or recording a TV show or movie in some way that would let you "deep link" to the filler in between the commercials, instead of seeing it the way the copyright holder intended?
Don't you understand that going a day without buying a music disk is depriving artists in the music industry (CEOs, accountants, auditors, etc.) of the income they're entitled to?
Don't you know this so-called "Internet" is really
2. ???
3. Profit!
http://www.bangornews.com/editorialnews/article.cf m?ID=81458&CFID=5557730&CFTOKEN=2161477
... senators running for re-election can't update their Web sites for the last 60 days before Election Day."
"Under Senate rules
Steve McConnell is one of the good guys, and deserves the huge amount of respect he's earned; but I've really got to wonder about his web site's EULA:
... This is the License Agreement for Construx CxOne Basic (the "Product").... You may not use the Product as your organizational software process. You may not use the Product in conjunction with all or with multiple software projects in your organization, division, department, or company....
By viewing, downloading, and/or using material from this web site you agree to be bound by the terms defined in the license agreement
This appears to be describing, not only what you can (and can't) do with some evaluation software, but also with the information you get from reading HTML and PDF files on the site.
Words fail me.
Joel Hodgell brought a spammer to court under Washington state's anti-spam law. Did he collect? No, his case was dismissed (the reasons aren't clear), and then the judge "imposed a $6,925 judgment against Hodgell to compensate ... the spammers' lawyer". The state law is facing inconsistent application; some judges don't think a state law can be used on out-of-state residents, others refuse to hear it in small-claims court, despite a published opinion by the state's attorney general. News.com has a story on this and other cases.
Ubiquitous personal computers, ubiquitous fax machines, ubiquitous e-mail (I can send e-mail to every member of my family), ubiquitous Internet access (especially the Web), ubiquitous wireless voice service: telecom and computing innovations keep changing the world. Do you see anything that's just a blip on the radar screen today, but which might have a big impact on people's lives in a few years?
For a lot of us, the biggest issue on our personal agenda is employment: the chances of being laid off, and (worse) how long it will take to find a decent replacement job. (Underemployment is an issue, too; staying in the tech sector but taking more than a 25% pay cut, or leaving the tech sector in order to pay the rent/mortgage.)
It's not just relative to the dotcom bubble. There are few jobs, and those that are out there process applicants via companies that specialize in resume processing. (The latter means it's all about keywords, not how good you are.) The most reliable way to get a job continues to be working your personal network; but many networks have dissolved, as everyone gets laid off in a short period of time.
What's your take? From where you sit, have you seen any bright spots, or any indications things might get better (or worse)? What coping strategies have you seen people find for sucessfully getting new jobs, or surviving unemployment well?
There are a lot of efforts related to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). How do you see them going? Will SIP rule the roost? Is the wireline "plain old telephone service" phone going to be obsolete any time soon, at home, at work, or both? Will VoIP look like part of the Internet to the consumer, or will it be part of the obscure infrastructure?
I never thought I'd be able to e-mail my mother. I never though I'd be able to access the public library's "card" catalog from home. I never thought there'd be a more compelling screen than my television set for wasting time.-)
How do you find yourself using the Internet, in ways that would have surprised you a decade ago?
IPv6 holds solutions to many of the problems the Internet faces today; but it's still almost exclusively an IPv4 world out there. The usual vicious cycle applies: no one wants to support it until it's widely used, and no one wants to use it until it's widely supported. How, and when, do you see this logjam being broken up?
Do you read Slashdot? What do you think of it, both as a news source, and as a use of the Internet (user comments, moderation, meta moderation, etc.)?