One of the most important aspects of being a programmer. Too many developers don't understand what makes a good user interface and what doesn't. Things like consistency through applications and the OS. Not forcing the user to constantly switch between keyboard and mouse. Efficient data entry. If you think you can make a good user interface using a web browser, you are probably wrong.
It looks more like a catalog for an IT training company than a serious CIS curriculum. To consider it a CS curriculum, it's too sad to even laugh. Just the course title "Real World Programming".... None of the colleges/universities I have attended have had the staff to teach the course. That's why they have Internship courses. And excuse me, two Exchange classes in a Development curriculum?
Having recently returned to college to get the degree I would need to get the job I already have, I've given some thought to this topic.
First, what's with the 'washout' courses being in the 3rd year? One university I attended required Advanced Cobol as a senior level cource. Cobol, JCL, etc. And it was designed around the premise that it would be the hardest course in the curriculum. (which was basically an instructor saying, I'm going to give vague assignments and then mark off when you can't read my mind) Rather than wasting people's time, frontload the curriculum. Make the intro course tough. For instance:
Thats why you'll always see the same 'raw' news on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. (or Al Jazeera) News items are never slanted to the left or right depending on which station is reporting it.
News is preprocessed and put into a form that is acceptable to the target audience.
It also could be that role playing is work. While some players might put out the effort to stay in character all the time, most are there to play. Sometimes hack-and-slash is good, mindless stress relief.
Compare it to AD&D. Some players I know had in-depth histories of all their characters. Others just rolled a few dice and gave it a name.
I think roleplaying is one of those things that we all say we want, but don't really. I suppose if they put a translator in the client so everything I typed came out in elvish or something....
If you read some of the white papers on the site linked to in the article, one of them states that MMOGs can and have had lifespans that exceed 10 years.
Moving customers to a new MMOG is like when your cellphone contract expires. You hope they will sign up with you again, but there are no guarantees. I know that when I leave AC1 I will look at all the 'new' MMOGs. I won't just run out and buy an ACx, Middle Earth, or D&D Online simply because Turbine is producing it. Actually, I'd like to spend some time in another genre. Earth & Beyond was interesting, but lacking. Eve was a huge advancement, but rather tedious. But what will come next? It seems that if you can maintain an acceptable playerbase for 10 years, why not cross genres and limit churn?
(i also think these suits are very different people from the actual devs, but i digress)
Just a clarification, I used developers in the sense of the companies developing the games. Not the actual programmers who are doing the coding.
As far as the programmers wanting to move on, I wouldn't be surprised. Programmers want to create new things. And the only thing worse than having to fix your prior mistakes is having to fix someone elses. We never notice the corner until after we've painted the floor. Maintenance programming is almost as much fun as writing documentation.
imo, the only truly interesting thing that will occur in the next generation of massmog launches - is seeing how EQ2 cannibalizes EQ's playerbase
I'm curious to see what happens here as well. When Turbine released Asheron's Call 2 it pulled quite a few people from AC1. And if AC2 had been worth playing it could have meant the death of AC1. It seem like "getting it right" in regards to a MMOG sequel includes shooting yourself in the foot on your current game.
Recently, I've started to wonder if building sequels for MMOGs is misguided. AC adds new content to the game every month. I think EQ has proven that selling expansion packs can be profitable, and that it supports your current game rather than detracting from it. With new content monthly, expansion packs, and player involvement, MMOGs don't get stale.
The conclusion I keep coming up with is that MMOG marketing is going to have to diverge from normal game marketing. How many Final Fantasy games are there now? With normal PC and console games, releasing a sequel every year or so revitalizes the franchise. But how many gamers are continuously playing 4+ year old games? The big difference between the normal games and MMOGs is persistence. I'm not sure the developers understand the value of that.
I guess no one in Washington ever bothered to read a Tom Clancy novel. Maybe they should start, because after two years of 'homeland security' I feel so much safer now.
I don't know about that. It used to be everyone wanted the biggest tower they could get. I did some of that too. We all wanted them so we could have lots of drives. But now everyone I know has moved to dedicated server(s). Small and quiet is the way to go. Nothing like connecting your laptop to the Shuttle in the corner via your wireless network... The only big pieces of hardware are the displays.
The problem here is no experienced computer user would consider this machine a 'backup' device.
This thing is worse than useless. It gives the owner the impression that the data is safe. All you have is two copies of your data, both of which are on cheap IDE drives. This is just an overpriced harddrive that they are calling a backup solution.
If they wanted to make something useful, they could have used a smaller harddrive and included automatic streaming to a DVD burner.
Re:Then why is this posted to the front page?
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
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· Score: 1
Many people don't ask charities where their money goes, but they should. You should at least know what percentage of donations goes to administrative overhead. A quick search of google found United Ways with admin costs ranging from 7.5% to 18%, and one site claimed the national average for charities is 40%. Personally, if I'm going to give money to a charity, I want to make sure their goals are in line with mine and that their fundraising and admin costs are reasonable.
Oh, and as far as a church's new roof. You'd expect them to take competitive bids wouldn't you? Shouldn't you expect Wikipedia to at least have an analysis of load and system requirements?
Also, it makes a difference what type of non-profit (not-for-profit) they are. Sororities and Fraternities are not held to the same accounting that a charity is. I doubt that Wikipedia is registered as a charity, so it's not unreasonable to ask where donations will go. It sounds like the fundraising is premature, but I'm not sure that's entirely their fault.
And you have the ability to talk to your local TV station. I haven't flown 85-90 times this year like another poster, but I do fly occasionally and always carry my laptop for work. I always get asked to take it out of it's case and run it through the x-ray separately. I have had them check my carryon because the chargers are too dense. But I have never even been asked to turn on my laptop.
I'm all for cooperating, but I'm not opening files or executing applications for them.
Here's the drill; put your cell phone, keys, change, pagers and any other toys in your carry on and run it through the machine. If you wear boots like I do, take them off and run them through, the steel shanks set off the metal detectors at any airport north of Texas. Put your coat through the machine. And last, take your laptop out of it's case and put it in one of the trays. WAIT until it goes fully into the machine before you walk through the metal detector. If you get hand searched, politely tell them that you need to stand so that you can keep an eye on your possessions.
Oh, and always have your photo ID easily accessable. Nobody wants to wait for you to dig through your wallet or purse for the ID you used 10 minutes earlier to pick up your boarding pass. You're just being rude.
It's not what Diebold is pushing, but it is something they offer. Look at their Accuvote OS
The difference between what you are suggesting and it's actual use is that only one is needed per polling location. Not exactly the option Diebold wants. Why sell one when you can sell ten.
FWIW, we have been using these to vote for several years now. If the device can't properly scan the ballot, it spits it out and you have the option of filling out a new one.
You've never stopped to help someone who ran out of gas by taking them to a gas station and then giving them a ride back to their car? No wonder you're posting anonymously.
They haven't said "no, we can't spare the gas". They did say, "we don't want tourists so we won't SELL you any".
The US goverment pays for search and rescue missions all the time. The Coast Guard provides services to anyone with a boat. The Parks department rescues hikers, climbers and skiers. They aren't required to have a 'rescue plan'.
This is about sending a message. And a very petty one at that. It's about exploration versus 'real' science. It will probably cost more to feed and house him than it would to replace 104 gallons of gas.
There have been issues with paper votes too. Mis-counts, "lost" ballots, and a growing demand to have election tallies faster.
There is also no reason why such an important part of our political system can't move forward to newer technologies. When appropriate.
One thing I question is why use touch screen voting? What is wrong with
this solution? Votes are cast on a piece of paper, just take a marker and fill in the appropriate bubble. Only one machine is required per location. So you have a fast count, and can always verify the acuracy by counting the paper ballots. And it's cost efficient too.
Fullquote Fidonot had many zones, regions, nodes, and points. It standardized the serial interface via FOSSIL (Fido-Opus-Seadog-Serias-Interface-Layer), which many early BBS software used (such as the Maximus package I used), and the mail programs.
There is no requirement for Fidonet BBSs to use a FOSSIL, several did not. The only requirement is that you support FTS0001 sessions during zone mail hour. At the same time, many BBS packages used a FOSSIL but couldn't participate in Fido without a front end, (QuickBBS, RemoteAccess, and I believe Telegard, Renegade, and probably WWIV) that is why we had Binkley, FrontDoor, and InterMail.
I have seen comments that the FOSSIL specification was based on Tom Jennings' FidoBBS serial routines. But I wouldn't go as far as to say that Fidonet 'standardized the serial interface'. That makes it appear that Fidonet was THE thing driving the standardization, when in fact it was just one or them. FOSSIL was a BBS thing in general, and pretty much died with them.
The FOSSIL specification was just a simple way for programmers to access the comports. Particularly when you had programs like X00 that provided highly optimized interfaces. It was more of a why reinvent the wheel type of thing. We didn't write our own mouse drivers either.
FOSSIL wasn't really a Fido thing. It was simply an interface for communications software so that they didn't have to handle the serial I/O. Think of today's drivers.
BTW, RemoteAccess and InterMail here. I killed my system in 1999 (after 10 years) because I there wasn't enough interest in keeping it and doing y2k testing.
I think one of the points of the article was that he chose a lifestyle where $20 million was all he would ever need. I suspect the cost of living in Roswell is pretty low.
There's a small problem with your calculation though, if you'll read closely, you find that he got $20 million in payments spread across 10 years.
Even so, give me $2 million a year for 10 years and I'll never work another day. I might even build robots and put an electronic tracker on my cat too.
But answer me this, do you want the same people that brought us the DMV and IRS to have control of you internet access?
The people that brought me the DMV and IRS, also brought me the Interstate and Intrastate highway systems. While driving the gauntlet of orange barrels can be annoying, that's more an issue of past funding and future growth than any reflection of competence.
I don't believe the government protected monopoly and guaranteed profit that the telcos had for more than half a century spurred much innovation.
As far as local municipalities developing these systems; I would trust my city government. But I live in a small town (roughly 5000). I don't know that I'd have that same confidence in a larger community. But it's just as easy to point out horribly managed projects in the private sector as it is in the government.
If you think buffer overruns are a Microsoft OS only problem, you have no idea what you are talking about.
They aren't the only OS to have them, there are sloppy programmers everywhere. But two years ago Microsoft announced to the world that they were focusing on security. They supposedly stopped development on everything and put all of their programmers through new training to be security conscious. Yet a problem that a simple code review should have exposed still exists. And please keep in mind, Microsoft also maintains the compiler that builds all of their products. If they were really serious about security, they could have fixed it there.
We all need to make sure we aren't putting out code that is vulnerable to known exploits. And Microsoft shouldn't be preaching to the industry about security until they have at least addressed a common, well known flaw in their products.
I'd support nuclear power, but I won't support drilling in ANWR. National Wildlife Refuge. Take your drills someplace else. I wouldn't shed a tear if the whole petroleum industry became obsolete.
The fact is; people are afraid of nuclear because they are uninformed, they don't like that it's more expensive than coal or oil, and the government really hasn't done a good job of providing options for disposing of nuclear waste.
BTW, I live about 100 miles from a nuclear reactor. Wolf Creek. It appears they are currently idle while being refueled.
If you read my post again, I said "I would argue that most new companies don't even *have* nightly batch cycles."
Most new companies aren't running COBOL either. Isn't that what this is all about?
Businesses run on batches, you just might not recognize them. The most apparent is accounting cycles. I have a completely x86/SQL based system that uses batches. Nightly jobs that purge old records in tables, summarize the day's business, and import from 3rd party shipping stations. Our customers run nightly EDI batches for orders, POs, and adjustments. And a batch to a lesser extent, I have a NT service that connects to our mainframe every 5 minutes to pull data.
You also might be surprised how many of those new, bleeding edge web stores don't have a real time connection to the inventory backend.
It's certainly not the way any of us would prefer to operate, but unless you want to bet your career on a forklift upgrade, it's a fact of life.
Slashdot Mirror
He didn't say it was his card.
-Screen design
One of the most important aspects of being a programmer. Too many developers don't understand what makes a good user interface and what doesn't. Things like consistency through applications and the OS. Not forcing the user to constantly switch between keyboard and mouse. Efficient data entry. If you think you can make a good user interface using a web browser, you are probably wrong.
It looks more like a catalog for an IT training company than a serious CIS curriculum. To consider it a CS curriculum, it's too sad to even laugh. Just the course title "Real World Programming".... None of the colleges/universities I have attended have had the staff to teach the course. That's why they have Internship courses. And excuse me, two Exchange classes in a Development curriculum?
Having recently returned to college to get the degree I would need to get the job I already have, I've given some thought to this topic.
First, what's with the 'washout' courses being in the 3rd year? One university I attended required Advanced Cobol as a senior level cource. Cobol, JCL, etc. And it was designed around the premise that it would be the hardest course in the curriculum. (which was basically an instructor saying, I'm going to give vague assignments and then mark off when you can't read my mind) Rather than wasting people's time, frontload the curriculum. Make the intro course tough. For instance:
Computing Concepts 5-6 hrs - number systems, functions/procedures, basic computer architecture (IE registers, etc), structured programming, BASIC, Pascal, ASM.
Two C language classes
Database concepts - introduction to SQL, simple database design, normalization
Advanced databases - advanced designs, stored procedures, triggers, management techniques
Operating systems concepts - file systems, memory management, threading
Networking technologies - sockets, RPC, DCOM, corba, etc.
Systems Design I - Requirements, documentation, analysis techiques. Design tools. (UML, DFDs, process flow, business rules)
Systems Design II - project scheduling, JAD, meet with one of the other Depts of the college to design a system to meet some business need.
Senior project - team project to develop one of the systems designed in Systems Design II.
And judging from some of the professionals I've dealt with; a reintroduction to spelling and grammar.
Of course this is a CIS development track. It doesn't pretend to address CS or systems.
Thats why you'll always see the same 'raw' news on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. (or Al Jazeera) News items are never slanted to the left or right depending on which station is reporting it.
News is preprocessed and put into a form that is acceptable to the target audience.
It also could be that role playing is work. While some players might put out the effort to stay in character all the time, most are there to play. Sometimes hack-and-slash is good, mindless stress relief.
Compare it to AD&D. Some players I know had in-depth histories of all their characters. Others just rolled a few dice and gave it a name.
I think roleplaying is one of those things that we all say we want, but don't really. I suppose if they put a translator in the client so everything I typed came out in elvish or something....
Are there any successful MMOG sequels?
If you read some of the white papers on the site linked to in the article, one of them states that MMOGs can and have had lifespans that exceed 10 years.
Moving customers to a new MMOG is like when your cellphone contract expires. You hope they will sign up with you again, but there are no guarantees. I know that when I leave AC1 I will look at all the 'new' MMOGs. I won't just run out and buy an ACx, Middle Earth, or D&D Online simply because Turbine is producing it. Actually, I'd like to spend some time in another genre. Earth & Beyond was interesting, but lacking. Eve was a huge advancement, but rather tedious. But what will come next? It seems that if you can maintain an acceptable playerbase for 10 years, why not cross genres and limit churn?
(i also think these suits are very different people from the actual devs, but i digress)
Just a clarification, I used developers in the sense of the companies developing the games. Not the actual programmers who are doing the coding.
As far as the programmers wanting to move on, I wouldn't be surprised. Programmers want to create new things. And the only thing worse than having to fix your prior mistakes is having to fix someone elses. We never notice the corner until after we've painted the floor. Maintenance programming is almost as much fun as writing documentation.
imo, the only truly interesting thing that will occur in the next generation of massmog launches - is seeing how EQ2 cannibalizes EQ's playerbase
I'm curious to see what happens here as well. When Turbine released Asheron's Call 2 it pulled quite a few people from AC1. And if AC2 had been worth playing it could have meant the death of AC1. It seem like "getting it right" in regards to a MMOG sequel includes shooting yourself in the foot on your current game.
Recently, I've started to wonder if building sequels for MMOGs is misguided. AC adds new content to the game every month. I think EQ has proven that selling expansion packs can be profitable, and that it supports your current game rather than detracting from it. With new content monthly, expansion packs, and player involvement, MMOGs don't get stale.
The conclusion I keep coming up with is that MMOG marketing is going to have to diverge from normal game marketing. How many Final Fantasy games are there now? With normal PC and console games, releasing a sequel every year or so revitalizes the franchise. But how many gamers are continuously playing 4+ year old games? The big difference between the normal games and MMOGs is persistence. I'm not sure the developers understand the value of that.
I guess no one in Washington ever bothered to read a Tom Clancy novel. Maybe they should start, because after two years of 'homeland security' I feel so much safer now.
I don't know about that. It used to be everyone wanted the biggest tower they could get. I did some of that too. We all wanted them so we could have lots of drives. But now everyone I know has moved to dedicated server(s). Small and quiet is the way to go. Nothing like connecting your laptop to the Shuttle in the corner via your wireless network... The only big pieces of hardware are the displays.
The problem here is no experienced computer user would consider this machine a 'backup' device.
This thing is worse than useless. It gives the owner the impression that the data is safe. All you have is two copies of your data, both of which are on cheap IDE drives. This is just an overpriced harddrive that they are calling a backup solution.
If they wanted to make something useful, they could have used a smaller harddrive and included automatic streaming to a DVD burner.
Many people don't ask charities where their money goes, but they should. You should at least know what percentage of donations goes to administrative overhead. A quick search of google found United Ways with admin costs ranging from 7.5% to 18%, and one site claimed the national average for charities is 40%. Personally, if I'm going to give money to a charity, I want to make sure their goals are in line with mine and that their fundraising and admin costs are reasonable.
Oh, and as far as a church's new roof. You'd expect them to take competitive bids wouldn't you? Shouldn't you expect Wikipedia to at least have an analysis of load and system requirements?
Also, it makes a difference what type of non-profit (not-for-profit) they are. Sororities and Fraternities are not held to the same accounting that a charity is. I doubt that Wikipedia is registered as a charity, so it's not unreasonable to ask where donations will go. It sounds like the fundraising is premature, but I'm not sure that's entirely their fault.
And you have the ability to talk to your local TV station. I haven't flown 85-90 times this year like another poster, but I do fly occasionally and always carry my laptop for work. I always get asked to take it out of it's case and run it through the x-ray separately. I have had them check my carryon because the chargers are too dense. But I have never even been asked to turn on my laptop.
I'm all for cooperating, but I'm not opening files or executing applications for them.
Here's the drill; put your cell phone, keys, change, pagers and any other toys in your carry on and run it through the machine. If you wear boots like I do, take them off and run them through, the steel shanks set off the metal detectors at any airport north of Texas. Put your coat through the machine. And last, take your laptop out of it's case and put it in one of the trays. WAIT until it goes fully into the machine before you walk through the metal detector. If you get hand searched, politely tell them that you need to stand so that you can keep an eye on your possessions.
Oh, and always have your photo ID easily accessable. Nobody wants to wait for you to dig through your wallet or purse for the ID you used 10 minutes earlier to pick up your boarding pass. You're just being rude.
It's not what Diebold is pushing, but it is something they offer. Look at their Accuvote OS
The difference between what you are suggesting and it's actual use is that only one is needed per polling location. Not exactly the option Diebold wants. Why sell one when you can sell ten.
FWIW, we have been using these to vote for several years now. If the device can't properly scan the ballot, it spits it out and you have the option of filling out a new one.
You've never stopped to help someone who ran out of gas by taking them to a gas station and then giving them a ride back to their car? No wonder you're posting anonymously.
They haven't said "no, we can't spare the gas". They did say, "we don't want tourists so we won't SELL you any".
The US goverment pays for search and rescue missions all the time. The Coast Guard provides services to anyone with a boat. The Parks department rescues hikers, climbers and skiers. They aren't required to have a 'rescue plan'.
This is about sending a message. And a very petty one at that. It's about exploration versus 'real' science. It will probably cost more to feed and house him than it would to replace 104 gallons of gas.
There is also no reason why such an important part of our political system can't move forward to newer technologies. When appropriate.
One thing I question is why use touch screen voting? What is wrong with this solution? Votes are cast on a piece of paper, just take a marker and fill in the appropriate bubble. Only one machine is required per location. So you have a fast count, and can always verify the acuracy by counting the paper ballots. And it's cost efficient too.
Fidonot had many zones, regions, nodes, and points. It standardized the serial interface via FOSSIL (Fido-Opus-Seadog-Serias-Interface-Layer), which many early BBS software used (such as the Maximus package I used), and the mail programs.
There is no requirement for Fidonet BBSs to use a FOSSIL, several did not. The only requirement is that you support FTS0001 sessions during zone mail hour. At the same time, many BBS packages used a FOSSIL but couldn't participate in Fido without a front end, (QuickBBS, RemoteAccess, and I believe Telegard, Renegade, and probably WWIV) that is why we had Binkley, FrontDoor, and InterMail.
I have seen comments that the FOSSIL specification was based on Tom Jennings' FidoBBS serial routines. But I wouldn't go as far as to say that Fidonet 'standardized the serial interface'. That makes it appear that Fidonet was THE thing driving the standardization, when in fact it was just one or them. FOSSIL was a BBS thing in general, and pretty much died with them.
The FOSSIL specification was just a simple way for programmers to access the comports. Particularly when you had programs like X00 that provided highly optimized interfaces. It was more of a why reinvent the wheel type of thing. We didn't write our own mouse drivers either.
My relatively new Toshiba laptop with XP blue screens about once or twice a week. It started with the November update of Asheron's Call.
FOSSIL wasn't really a Fido thing. It was simply an interface for communications software so that they didn't have to handle the serial I/O. Think of today's drivers.
BTW, RemoteAccess and InterMail here. I killed my system in 1999 (after 10 years) because I there wasn't enough interest in keeping it and doing y2k testing.
Of course he winds his own motors, he doesn't have a job.
I think one of the points of the article was that he chose a lifestyle where $20 million was all he would ever need. I suspect the cost of living in Roswell is pretty low.
There's a small problem with your calculation though, if you'll read closely, you find that he got $20 million in payments spread across 10 years.
Even so, give me $2 million a year for 10 years and I'll never work another day. I might even build robots and put an electronic tracker on my cat too.
The people that brought me the DMV and IRS, also brought me the Interstate and Intrastate highway systems. While driving the gauntlet of orange barrels can be annoying, that's more an issue of past funding and future growth than any reflection of competence.
I don't believe the government protected monopoly and guaranteed profit that the telcos had for more than half a century spurred much innovation.
As far as local municipalities developing these systems; I would trust my city government. But I live in a small town (roughly 5000). I don't know that I'd have that same confidence in a larger community. But it's just as easy to point out horribly managed projects in the private sector as it is in the government.
They aren't the only OS to have them, there are sloppy programmers everywhere. But two years ago Microsoft announced to the world that they were focusing on security. They supposedly stopped development on everything and put all of their programmers through new training to be security conscious. Yet a problem that a simple code review should have exposed still exists. And please keep in mind, Microsoft also maintains the compiler that builds all of their products. If they were really serious about security, they could have fixed it there.
We all need to make sure we aren't putting out code that is vulnerable to known exploits. And Microsoft shouldn't be preaching to the industry about security until they have at least addressed a common, well known flaw in their products.
I'd support nuclear power, but I won't support drilling in ANWR. National Wildlife Refuge. Take your drills someplace else. I wouldn't shed a tear if the whole petroleum industry became obsolete.
The fact is; people are afraid of nuclear because they are uninformed, they don't like that it's more expensive than coal or oil, and the government really hasn't done a good job of providing options for disposing of nuclear waste.
BTW, I live about 100 miles from a nuclear reactor. Wolf Creek. It appears they are currently idle while being refueled.
If you read my post again, I said "I would argue that most new companies don't even *have* nightly batch cycles."
Most new companies aren't running COBOL either. Isn't that what this is all about?
Businesses run on batches, you just might not recognize them. The most apparent is accounting cycles. I have a completely x86/SQL based system that uses batches. Nightly jobs that purge old records in tables, summarize the day's business, and import from 3rd party shipping stations. Our customers run nightly EDI batches for orders, POs, and adjustments. And a batch to a lesser extent, I have a NT service that connects to our mainframe every 5 minutes to pull data.
You also might be surprised how many of those new, bleeding edge web stores don't have a real time connection to the inventory backend.
It's certainly not the way any of us would prefer to operate, but unless you want to bet your career on a forklift upgrade, it's a fact of life.
BTW, aren't system backups generally a batch job?