I know that whenever I hit Amazon, I have something very specific in mind that I'm looking for that I couldn't find at a brick-and-morter. In fact, any time a BM tells me they have to special order it, I hit Amazon. I think a lot of people shop this way.
Its the same for other web. People who search for products on the web are usually looking for something specific. This is, in my opinion, one reason why click through ads don't work. Most clicks I find totally irrelevant. Actually, in 10 years I've never voluntarily followed a banner ad.
Seems I turn to the web more and more these days to find specialty items I know the warehouse BMs won't carry. I buy classical musically exclusively through Amazon because most of the smaller specialty retailers in my city have been put out of business by the WalMart/Costco style mega stores.
A few years back, there were 3 classical music CD shops around. A big megachain opened, and they dedicated an entire floor to classical and lowballed all prices trying to get the volume sale. These 3 independants went under, and shortly after that, the megachain closed down/vented their classical section.
If Microsoft were a blue chip stock, this would be important. BUT... Microsoft is a commodity stock - so missed earnings are pretty much irrelevant - because until recently Microsoft has not paid a dividend, and investment stocks usually react differently to bunged projections (cause it means you didn't get paid.) All Microsoft has to do is announce some vapourware and the stock price goes up. Such is the nature of commodities.
Though I find the (dup) article very cool, there are a couple things about neutron emitters...
1) as a propulsion source, ion emitters are cheaper/safer 2) from a safety PoV, neutrons don't interact too well with living cells (in any amount) - producing free radicals - almost impossible to shield against
Oh come on. You know its a love in. This kind of story gets printed, where stories about APEGGA issuing demand letters than anyone calling themself a 'software engineer' cease and desist do not...
There are enough of us geeks out there that we could re-invent/. to be open and interesting.
Yup! But the argument I heard on a couple projects was that avoiding re-use was an optimization... A nasty example was Access where a lot of interesting code was hand optimized in x86 asm. This was one of many reasons why it never got ported.
If you REALLY want to know, M$ has a 'provincial model' about pieces of the OS. That means various groups have ownership of some bit of functionality. Each group has a project lead that may or may not be the project manager (usually not tho.) The lead works with the manager to flesh out their bit, and all the managers participate with the sales and marketing groups in a steering committee.
In other words, sales and marketting has an idea of what people want in the next version, and this gets down to the various groups who do it.
The bloat comes in that there is very little re-use, or communication between apparently unrelated groups. One application I know had 20 implementations of a linked list...
/rant on Why why why why why to books on rapid enterprise development cover methodologies rife with process and reading-knowledge experts?
Once upon a time we did something called "rapid prototyping". It worked for most enterprise apps where clients and analysts didn't know their a-holes from their L-bows. Then we were told that "iterative software development is programming by trial and error... define a process". So some attempts at introducing order to chaos comes up with mounds of formal methodologies that somehow become RUP.
Then there is a total rebellion by the artists and untrained IT masses, who instead of blaming middle managers with NO expertise architecting, designing, requirement gathering, that instigate zillions of Death Marches - we get peer programming - that pushes back-seat-driver development coupled with accountability (decrease in hours playing Solitaire.)
Somehow more unrest leads to test driven development where you don't try specify every little detail but have a big picture and manage risk (Agile).
Guess what. We're right back to iterative development! But now we got all kinds of fancy labels to attach and heroes to worship.
Common sense and been-there-done-that became Design Patterns.
CR became Programming by Contract.
And all this while the big companies we work for are hell bent on outsourcing us all because "You IT/IS types consistently screwed up projects for years... so we'll give it to someone who knows better [in 3rd world country of choice.]"
The point of my rant?
The best rapid development process is done by experienced people, not by process.
Process doesn't write programs. People write programs./rant off
Re:Rapid J2EE development? Oxymoron?
on
Rapid J2EE Development
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you woulda said any large project, I'd agree. But J2EE, like anything else, gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with.
For example, a lot of n00bs think that any enterprise app should be using EJBs. The fekn reality is, most enterprise apps are 2-tier screaming out for POJOs and O_R Mapping tools.
So - it goes back to the quote - right tool for the right job.
Why do I hate Windows search? FastFind. It always indexes the disk when I don't want it to, so I turn it off, resulting in slow searches. So how will Longhorn fix the pathetic indexing strategy?
And how many times do people go searching for files based on content? Not a whole lot. People typically KNOW where shit is, so is the overhead of previews (supported by both ole, adobe stuff, etc) and indexing worth the overhead?
Maybe for e-mail, and I hate to say it, but CyberDog had the slickest search capabilities ever.
(p.s. I agree Magellan was an awesome product for its time.)
Reading throught the controversy, The Vicci Link was insightful!
I guess anyone who experimented with soft drugs isn't worthy of fundraising! Pot heads are all criminals after all!
The moral decline of America is what killed interprise. My Bill O'Reilly sense is tingling ( if neo_conservative then make_shit_up ) - al Trekkies (Trekkers) must be pot heads! Tepol was a druggie! WTF!
I'm sure this paper took a page from Bully Billy's beat-up-liberal [minded] people and companies for trying to start grass roots [communist] socially conscious [bleeding heart] beneficial [socialism] work. The facts are irrelevant.
Adobe refused to port their apps to what became Cocoa, forcing Apple to make this huge unweildy sidestep through Carbon that kept the abysmal OS 9 alive for years longer than it deserved
Dude, that's just wrong. Adobe is a conservatively minded company and was Apple's #2 largest developer. They didn't rush to X because it would take years to refactor all their applications, and X was radically different. Adobe (and Aldus, ie VAMP) put a lot of effort making cross (bi) platform frameworks such that their tools had the same LAF. X changed everything. And it was a huge gamble Apple made. It would be unreasonable to expect its developers to take the same risk.
The biggest complaint that any user has is the lack of tools on a platform. Without yellow box, the entire user base would be screwed on their existing investment in software.
And the X risk didn't just piss off big developers. I stopped supporting all my Mac apps on X because after Rhapsody, I could not justify upgrading all my hardware and development tools. I also didn't like having to BUY the OS from release to release as a developer.
Apple lost a lot of developers that supported Copland, OpenDoc, and other BIG failures. After you get burned so many times, you stop putting your hand in the flame.
What the RIAA proposes is akin to government regulation of any industry. The problem is, since when is an industry consortia given any credence when they try an apply their "standard" to another unrelated industry?
Its like my electric company telling my cable company what they can show, cause it takes electricity to power the TV.
The only organization that can impose any kind of regulation on an industry is... government... and we all know how much they want to do that (as most western goverments rush to deregulate everything.)
However, have you ever played SimEarth? It seems that sentience, given the right conditions, is inevitable. On the exinction of a dominant species, another will rise. Is spreading to another niche really an option? Especially one as hostile as space? If your carbon scrubbers fail, you die. If a micrometeorite pokes a hole in your oxygen processing, you die. Any contamination of your artificial environment or evolution of a bug; you die.
As for those other living things out there, though the Drake equation is popular, the chance of us actually meeting any other life is extremely remote. Our best bet is to meet some microbe on mars. To actually get out of the solar system, you are looking at many-generational type ships. Take alpha centauri... 4.3au. If you were to drive there, it would take you 53 million years. Our current fastest probe would take 30 thousand years. Could man-kind surive the journey? 30k years of "are we there yet"... I don't think so.
The name will be popular in certain circles. I don't think the crowd that promoted sanitized Christian unix (daemon removal, etc.) will like it much though.
I can see it now, saying to my old history prof... "I just installed Mandriver unix on my Hard Disk!" "I don't think Eunichs have much to drive with Bill."
Fisher said NASA has made no final decision on the cuts but has notified project scientists of its intentions and asked for cost-trimming proposals. He said the agency will make final decisions this month, perhaps by April 15.
I'm sure many nations in the world would cough up the resources to continue the project. Why not pass the buck to Australia or China? Its not like you're paying maintenance on the spacecraft... its just funding the mission logistics, science, and tracking.
Re:If this isn't a joke, it means Java 1.5 arrives
on
Mac OS X Tiger Goes Gold
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Like I said, if developers want Apple to give a shit about Java, they're going to need to start giving a shit about Apple.
I couldn't think of a more flawed statement. For the last 10 years developers have been hounding Apple to give them support that made them contenders. WWDC 1996 "Apple is going to be the #1 Java development platform..." followed by the slowest deployments and poor implementations. Apple blamed Sun, but the reality was the group was understaffed (not to mention staffed with newbs - I was recruited for the 1.2 port.)
In 1997 my company stopped using Mac as a development platform because we needed current JDK and working JDBC support.
Being in the sci-tech and engineering field, the biggest complaint since 1991 has been the lack of tools running on Macs. Java gave Apple an opportunity REGARDLESS of UI because sci-tech Java apps supposedly run anywhere, and its not a matter of reimplementing the application, as you Swing LAF is swappable (if you do it the way you're supposed to.) Making an argument that Apple users won't use software that isn't Mac-like is bunk when its the functionality thats important.
So, as I guy who hounded Apple for 10 years before giving up, I can honestly say that giving a shit about Apple and asking for current support and bug fixes did absolutely nothing.
And this whole "build it Mac-like and they'll come" is bullshit. Even Apple doesn't follow the once sacred UI guidelines anymore (think of the metal iWhatever interface.) This cliquey religious mentality is exactly the reason why Apple lost so much ground in sci-tech. Evangelism decided they'd only support "killer apps", and unfortunately in many verticals, there isn't such a thing. Why do I give a hoot about dnd support in an image processing app or a spreadsheet?
Slashdot Mirror
I know that whenever I hit Amazon, I have something very specific in mind that I'm looking for that I couldn't find at a brick-and-morter. In fact, any time a BM tells me they have to special order it, I hit Amazon. I think a lot of people shop this way.
Its the same for other web. People who search for products on the web are usually looking for something specific. This is, in my opinion, one reason why click through ads don't work. Most clicks I find totally irrelevant. Actually, in 10 years I've never voluntarily followed a banner ad.
Seems I turn to the web more and more these days to find specialty items I know the warehouse BMs won't carry. I buy classical musically exclusively through Amazon because most of the smaller specialty retailers in my city have been put out of business by the WalMart/Costco style mega stores.
A few years back, there were 3 classical music CD shops around. A big megachain opened, and they dedicated an entire floor to classical and lowballed all prices trying to get the volume sale. These 3 independants went under, and shortly after that, the megachain closed down/vented their classical section.
Prolly off topic but it still bugs me.
I heard once that running such beasts can sterilize you - so don't use if you wanna have kids. ;-)
you took it out of context... "until recently"
microsoft didn't pay until 2003! and THAT's only after Nader started making noise. Thats over 20 years of no ROI. See wired.
thanks for the shass tho
Open letter to Bill to pay a fekn dividend.
If Microsoft were a blue chip stock, this would be important. BUT ... Microsoft is a commodity stock - so missed earnings are pretty much irrelevant - because until recently Microsoft has not paid a dividend, and investment stocks usually react differently to bunged projections (cause it means you didn't get paid.) All Microsoft has to do is announce some vapourware and the stock price goes up. Such is the nature of commodities.
Though I find the (dup) article very cool, there are a couple things about neutron emitters...
1) as a propulsion source, ion emitters are cheaper/safer
2) from a safety PoV, neutrons don't interact too well with living cells (in any amount) - producing free radicals - almost impossible to shield against
Oh come on. You know its a love in. This kind of story gets printed, where stories about APEGGA issuing demand letters than anyone calling themself a 'software engineer' cease and desist do not...
/. to be open and interesting.
There are enough of us geeks out there that we could re-invent
Tiny holes... that contain nothing at all. An article about tiny holes. An article about nothing. Reminds me of Seinfeld.
Another M$ innovation ...
link -s file
Yup! But the argument I heard on a couple projects was that avoiding re-use was an optimization... A nasty example was Access where a lot of interesting code was hand optimized in x86 asm. This was one of many reasons why it never got ported.
Is this rhetorical or do you really want to know?
If you REALLY want to know, M$ has a 'provincial model' about pieces of the OS. That means various groups have ownership of some bit of functionality. Each group has a project lead that may or may not be the project manager (usually not tho.) The lead works with the manager to flesh out their bit, and all the managers participate with the sales and marketing groups in a steering committee.
In other words, sales and marketting has an idea of what people want in the next version, and this gets down to the various groups who do it.
The bloat comes in that there is very little re-use, or communication between apparently unrelated groups. One application I know had 20 implementations of a linked list...
/rant on
... define a process". So some attempts at introducing order to chaos comes up with mounds of formal methodologies that somehow become RUP.
/rant off
Why why why why why to books on rapid enterprise development cover methodologies rife with process and reading-knowledge experts?
Once upon a time we did something called "rapid prototyping". It worked for most enterprise apps where clients and analysts didn't know their a-holes from their L-bows. Then we were told that "iterative software development is programming by trial and error
Then there is a total rebellion by the artists and untrained IT masses, who instead of blaming middle managers with NO expertise architecting, designing, requirement gathering, that instigate zillions of Death Marches - we get peer programming - that pushes back-seat-driver development coupled with accountability (decrease in hours playing Solitaire.)
Somehow more unrest leads to test driven development where you don't try specify every little detail but have a big picture and manage risk (Agile).
Guess what. We're right back to iterative development! But now we got all kinds of fancy labels to attach and heroes to worship.
Common sense and been-there-done-that became Design Patterns.
CR became Programming by Contract.
And all this while the big companies we work for are hell bent on outsourcing us all because "You IT/IS types consistently screwed up projects for years... so we'll give it to someone who knows better [in 3rd world country of choice.]"
The point of my rant?
The best rapid development process is done by experienced people, not by process.
Process doesn't write programs. People write programs.
If you woulda said any large project, I'd agree. But J2EE, like anything else, gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with.
For example, a lot of n00bs think that any enterprise app should be using EJBs. The fekn reality is, most enterprise apps are 2-tier screaming out for POJOs and O_R Mapping tools.
So - it goes back to the quote - right tool for the right job.
Why do I hate Windows search? FastFind. It always indexes the disk when I don't want it to, so I turn it off, resulting in slow searches. So how will Longhorn fix the pathetic indexing strategy?
And how many times do people go searching for files based on content? Not a whole lot. People typically KNOW where shit is, so is the overhead of previews (supported by both ole, adobe stuff, etc) and indexing worth the overhead?
Maybe for e-mail, and I hate to say it, but CyberDog had the slickest search capabilities ever.
(p.s. I agree Magellan was an awesome product for its time.)
Reading throught the controversy, The Vicci Link was insightful!
I guess anyone who experimented with soft drugs isn't worthy of fundraising! Pot heads are all criminals after all!
The moral decline of America is what killed interprise. My Bill O'Reilly sense is tingling ( if neo_conservative then make_shit_up ) - al Trekkies (Trekkers) must be pot heads! Tepol was a druggie! WTF!
Arrg!
Adobe is a pretty conservative company. When they acquired Aldus, they killed everything but PageMaker (so SuperPaint and a bunch of other apps.)
So, expect everything NOT in Adobe's interest to die suddenly, especially if it wasn't getting much support from MM (i.e. JRun).
I'm sure this paper took a page from Bully Billy's beat-up-liberal [minded] people and companies for trying to start grass roots [communist] socially conscious [bleeding heart] beneficial [socialism] work. The facts are irrelevant.
http://www.sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com/
Adobe refused to port their apps to what became Cocoa, forcing Apple to make this huge unweildy sidestep through Carbon that kept the abysmal OS 9 alive for years longer than it deserved
Dude, that's just wrong. Adobe is a conservatively minded company and was Apple's #2 largest developer. They didn't rush to X because it would take years to refactor all their applications, and X was radically different. Adobe (and Aldus, ie VAMP) put a lot of effort making cross (bi) platform frameworks such that their tools had the same LAF. X changed everything. And it was a huge gamble Apple made. It would be unreasonable to expect its developers to take the same risk.
The biggest complaint that any user has is the lack of tools on a platform. Without yellow box, the entire user base would be screwed on their existing investment in software.
And the X risk didn't just piss off big developers. I stopped supporting all my Mac apps on X because after Rhapsody, I could not justify upgrading all my hardware and development tools. I also didn't like having to BUY the OS from release to release as a developer.
Apple lost a lot of developers that supported Copland, OpenDoc, and other BIG failures. After you get burned so many times, you stop putting your hand in the flame.
Pot grow-ops use a lot of electricity.
Policy forces should draft code-of-conduct for electricity companies to report excessive use.
The moral of the story: don't leave on your air conditioner.
What the RIAA proposes is akin to government regulation of any industry. The problem is, since when is an industry consortia given any credence when they try an apply their "standard" to another unrelated industry?
... government ... and we all know how much they want to do that (as most western goverments rush to deregulate everything.)
Its like my electric company telling my cable company what they can show, cause it takes electricity to power the TV.
The only organization that can impose any kind of regulation on an industry is
So...
na na na na RIAA fro
Terrific example. Kudos.
However, have you ever played SimEarth? It seems that sentience, given the right conditions, is inevitable. On the exinction of a dominant species, another will rise. Is spreading to another niche really an option? Especially one as hostile as space? If your carbon scrubbers fail, you die. If a micrometeorite pokes a hole in your oxygen processing, you die. Any contamination of your artificial environment or evolution of a bug; you die.
As for those other living things out there, though the Drake equation is popular, the chance of us actually meeting any other life is extremely remote. Our best bet is to meet some microbe on mars. To actually get out of the solar system, you are looking at many-generational type ships. Take alpha centauri... 4.3au. If you were to drive there, it would take you 53 million years. Our current fastest probe would take 30 thousand years. Could man-kind surive the journey? 30k years of "are we there yet"... I don't think so.
The name will be popular in certain circles. I don't think the crowd that promoted sanitized Christian unix (daemon removal, etc.) will like it much though.
I can see it now, saying to my old history prof...
"I just installed Mandriver unix on my Hard Disk!"
"I don't think Eunichs have much to drive with Bill."
Naw, I live in Alberta and am glued to CTV news net. Yeehaw.
Um there are bears, moose, and liberals so plenty of ph34r all around.
Fisher said NASA has made no final decision on the cuts but has notified project scientists of its intentions and asked for cost-trimming proposals. He said the agency will make final decisions this month, perhaps by April 15.
I'm sure many nations in the world would cough up the resources to continue the project. Why not pass the buck to Australia or China? Its not like you're paying maintenance on the spacecraft... its just funding the mission logistics, science, and tracking.
Like I said, if developers want Apple to give a shit about Java, they're going to need to start giving a shit about Apple.
.02.
I couldn't think of a more flawed statement. For the last 10 years developers have been hounding Apple to give them support that made them contenders. WWDC 1996 "Apple is going to be the #1 Java development platform..." followed by the slowest deployments and poor implementations. Apple blamed Sun, but the reality was the group was understaffed (not to mention staffed with newbs - I was recruited for the 1.2 port.)
In 1997 my company stopped using Mac as a development platform because we needed current JDK and working JDBC support.
Being in the sci-tech and engineering field, the biggest complaint since 1991 has been the lack of tools running on Macs. Java gave Apple an opportunity REGARDLESS of UI because sci-tech Java apps supposedly run anywhere, and its not a matter of reimplementing the application, as you Swing LAF is swappable (if you do it the way you're supposed to.) Making an argument that Apple users won't use software that isn't Mac-like is bunk when its the functionality thats important.
So, as I guy who hounded Apple for 10 years before giving up, I can honestly say that giving a shit about Apple and asking for current support and bug fixes did absolutely nothing.
And this whole "build it Mac-like and they'll come" is bullshit. Even Apple doesn't follow the once sacred UI guidelines anymore (think of the metal iWhatever interface.) This cliquey religious mentality is exactly the reason why Apple lost so much ground in sci-tech. Evangelism decided they'd only support "killer apps", and unfortunately in many verticals, there isn't such a thing. Why do I give a hoot about dnd support in an image processing app or a spreadsheet?
My