As a software developer I know uml reasonably well, and have tried to use it, but I find that I have big problems with it.
For example I don't find that class diagrams communicate anything that I can't understand better with a description in text, or other methods.
I don't want to get into what other methods I use here as it's not on topic really, but I *really* want to like uml and find it useful, but beyond quick back-of-envelope class diagrams to sketch out a subsystem I so far have not found it useful.
Do other people have this problem too? Does anyone actually *use* it in more than a trivial way? Everywhere I've worked, people want to use it, but never quite manage to. This isn't to say that proper design isn't done, just that uml isn't used much.
Should I just keep at it until it becomes so familiar that I think in UML rather than any oher way?
Well, bang routing is fine for a few hundred or thousand hosts, but doesn't really scale to hundreds of millions of hosts. And unlike dns can't cope with any of the route changing.
On the other hand, the article you mention SDSI looks really interesting. I've only looked at it quickly, but it does look like a good way to organise what is essentially a peer to peer replacement for dns, but which can incorporate dns too.
I like the sound of peer to peer dns.
The problems with the current system are that it requires a "root" and whoever owns that root has the power to impose their will on the rest of the system.
So far I've not managed to think of a way to make this work though:-(
What we really need is an alternative DNS for those of us that know what we are doing.
Sure, most people would never be able to get at our web sites or send us email, only those who knew enough to use an alternative DNS but that's almost certainly not a bad thing. Keep out most of the idiots and most of the spam.
I'm amazed nobody has done this already. Or did I just miss it?
But I can't see any reasable hope of pursuading people to replace DNS. But I suppose people won't care what kind of name lookup their email software is doing.... Hmm...
Or what about something like ICQ where you can say who you want to be able to receive communciations from. Anyone else you have to authorize before they can send you an actual message. I doubt spammers could be bothered to do this, they'd go find some other way to annoy people.
How about doing this?
Your email program looks at the headers of emails being received. If the message is from someone in your address book, or is from someone you sent an email to *recently*, or is from a recognised mailing list then you get the email.
If it does not fit any of those conditions, it must first validate the sender. To do this it sends back a message to the senders From address with instructions saying under what terms you are prepared to accept the email, and a code to send back saying that you accept those terms. Your client would then accept one, and only one message from that address to be delivered to you. If you want to accept more in future you can add them yo your local address book.
The fact that the "spammer" must explicitly accept your terms for accepting your email would give a lot more legal protection to filtering and blacklists of known spammers.
Hmm. Must think about this some, and implement something!
Well I don't really see any difference between editing an apache configuration file and using a dialog box to create a virtual directory to publish some files.
Of course in both cases you need to make sure that your web server is configured right, and has any security patches installed, and that when you publish script based pages that you make sure they are secure.
But there is nothing more secure about having a nice simple user interface to acomplish simple things than making you edit a complex configuration file apart from discouraging less experienced people from doing it all.
And although.NET is much more than web services, they are a fairly important part of the whole system and IIS is a critical part of providing those web services so I would certainly expect microsoft to continue working on IIS.
And also apache is nice in many ways, but if you just want to put up a couple files on an intranet or something, it's so easy just to right click on the directory and choose "Web Sharing" to create a virtual IIS web directory that it certainly has it's place.
In real life it's rare to be asked for an estimate of the time required.
What usually happens is you get told roughly what to build and the final date by which it needs to be ready. There then takes place a series of negotiations and compremises on the scope of work until everyone is "happy".
I suppose that doesn't really invalidate the point of the article at all, it's just an observation for those who think that estimation is the nice science that it is sometimes presented as being.
The problem is that "files and information" are a scarce resource in these cases. With most file sharing programs you often have to queue for a long time to get a file, or the bandwidth is shared a little thinly and it's slow to download.
Two solutions I can see - Punish the users for not sharing, but do so in a fair way. For example, require that if people have nothing to share that they agree to devote a small part of their disk space to cache popular files which automatically get placed there by the system.
I guess this is at least partly a technological problem to find a way that makes it easy to share and hard to "leach".
And in case my comments came over as too negative earlier, this *is* a good piece of software which is certainly worth of consideration if you have an old PC to use as a firewall.
Yeah well I didn't say he'd done anything *wrong*, I just wanted to warn people that he's attracted an awful lot of negative publicity in the past for his comments on the gpl, the ownership of his software and on people changing it as they like (as the GPL allows - as he was relying on to allow him to make some money this way).
I used smoothwall for a short time to evaluate it and technically it looked like quite a nice product, but then I started reading about the attitude of it's creator to the GPL.
Now I'm happy for people to write GPL software if they like, and I'm happy for people to write commecial software if they like, but smoothwall seems to want to get the benifits of both.
They seem to want to get make free use of other peoples work through the GPL, but to feel free to only release parts of their software commercialy. I'm not claiming they are breaking the GPL or anything, but there seems something very unfair about their approach.
Also if you get the GPL edition, there are all kinds of requests on the web site that you donate money to them "SmoothWall developers have kids and families too, and it's all about giving back to the people who helped you.
". And yet I would guess that about 90% of what they are giving out was written by other people and they don't suggest they are going to give 90% of their donations to them.
Again, nothing wrong with that, I just don't much like it.
Basically I suggest that people look at their web site, and search the internet for comments about the creators of this software and how unhappy some people are with them before they go and use it.
"Roxio, Inc. (Nasdaq:ROXI), the Digital Media Company, and Gracenote today announced the signing of a multi-year license that provides Gracenote CDDB as the exclusive CD recognition service to current and future Roxio customers..."
Hmm. I'm a Roxio customer and Gracenote CDDB certainly isn't an exclusive cd recognition service to me. I don't think they yet have the power to agree to that on my behalf.
It's not clear from reading this story who settled with who. (Forgive me if I missed the point somewhere!)
I can't believe that Roxio would have had to settle as surely they can get this information from whoever they like. So presumably they were given some incentive to do this... Which seems a little strange give that they were having legal action taken against them.
Going to meet up with friends and play network unreal tournament and wolfenstein while drinking beer & vodka. All as a scientific experiment to see how alcohol affects our ability to shoot things.
People have been trying to push this for years but there is no chance of it ever happening in my opinion for two reasons - Everyone is already used to the current names and we don't need new ones, and secondly the proposed names sound really stupid.
That article is just daft. It seeems to be saying that a hard disk directory structure is much better than a desktop because you can have unilimed space and organise it by directories, and then goes on to say it should be abolished and replaced by multiple desktops.
Maybe I missed the point. I hope so, then the article would make sense.
In my opinion the whole desktop metaphore is flawed. The screen should just be a view of the hard disk, but each user should have their own namespace on the disk and not be able to even see others files, or there system files without running special tools.
The problem with windows is that sometimes "My Computer" is a subdirectory of the disk and sometimes the disk is a sub-item of My Computer. It confuses me and I'm supposed to know what I'm doing!
YEah and in my opinion AMD systems tend to be unstable. They crash every day or so. People just put this down to windows, but in fact I find that the amd systems I've seen lock up considerably more often than the intel systems I've seen. Probably just down to insufficient cooling on the chips or something, but I'd rather hava reliable system than save a tiny amount of money.
These days, P4s are faster than athlons anyway. AMD are losing the megahertz battle
I've not got the luclin expansion yet but many of the problems introduced were there even with the old version.
The article is fair, but the expansion had only been out for 36 hours when it was written and already they have had one patch which has cured many of the worst software problems, and are promising more to come in the next few days.
I have every confidence that this will be a great game by the end of the week and everyone has forgotten about the launch problems.
As for the requirements, they are high, but that most people who buy a new computer now will get one that easily meets them. And they have to target the game at people who are likely to be buying it soon, not at those who last upgraded their PC 2 years ago. I'd rather they pushed the spec and made a nicer game than just went for the lowest common denominator and lose out to other games.
The worst problem I've got is that the expansion is not yet available in the UK!!!
But if you've not played everquest I have to recommend it to you. Yes there are some problems with this update but they'll all be sorted out in the next week or so and it will continue to be the best game around at the moment.
No I also have Daoc. It's good but not as good as everquest.
It looks better than the everquest (at least the original everquest) and has lots of good ideas but has three flaws:-
1. It's too quiet. You can't talk to people and hear conversations like in EQ.
2. It's dull. There isn't anything to do other than hit the next monster. And I know everquest is the same, but it just seems better.
3. It's too small. The whole world is about the size of one of everquests larger zones. And everquest has about 100 zones.
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As a software developer I know uml reasonably well, and have tried to use it, but I find that I have big problems with it.
For example I don't find that class diagrams communicate anything that I can't understand better with a description in text, or other methods.
I don't want to get into what other methods I use here as it's not on topic really, but I *really* want to like uml and find it useful, but beyond quick back-of-envelope class diagrams to sketch out a subsystem I so far have not found it useful.
Do other people have this problem too? Does anyone actually *use* it in more than a trivial way? Everywhere I've worked, people want to use it, but never quite manage to. This isn't to say that proper design isn't done, just that uml isn't used much.
Should I just keep at it until it becomes so familiar that I think in UML rather than any oher way?
Well, bang routing is fine for a few hundred or thousand hosts, but doesn't really scale to hundreds of millions of hosts. And unlike dns can't cope with any of the route changing.
On the other hand, the article you mention SDSI looks really interesting. I've only looked at it quickly, but it does look like a good way to organise what is essentially a peer to peer replacement for dns, but which can incorporate dns too.
I like the sound of peer to peer dns.
:-(
The problems with the current system are that it requires a "root" and whoever owns that root has the power to impose their will on the rest of the system.
So far I've not managed to think of a way to make this work though
Ah. Typical.
What the world needs is to unify all of these in some way. Surely that's possible?
What we really need is an alternative DNS for those of us that know what we are doing.
Sure, most people would never be able to get at our web sites or send us email, only those who knew enough to use an alternative DNS but that's almost certainly not a bad thing. Keep out most of the idiots and most of the spam.
I'm amazed nobody has done this already. Or did I just miss it?
I like this.
But I can't see any reasable hope of pursuading people to replace DNS. But I suppose people won't care what kind of name lookup their email software is doing.... Hmm...
Or what about something like ICQ where you can say who you want to be able to receive communciations from. Anyone else you have to authorize before they can send you an actual message. I doubt spammers could be bothered to do this, they'd go find some other way to annoy people.
How about doing this?
Your email program looks at the headers of emails being received. If the message is from someone in your address book, or is from someone you sent an email to *recently*, or is from a recognised mailing list then you get the email.
If it does not fit any of those conditions, it must first validate the sender. To do this it sends back a message to the senders From address with instructions saying under what terms you are prepared to accept the email, and a code to send back saying that you accept those terms. Your client would then accept one, and only one message from that address to be delivered to you. If you want to accept more in future you can add them yo your local address book.
The fact that the "spammer" must explicitly accept your terms for accepting your email would give a lot more legal protection to filtering and blacklists of known spammers.
Hmm. Must think about this some, and implement something!
Well I don't really see any difference between editing an apache configuration file and using a dialog box to create a virtual directory to publish some files.
Of course in both cases you need to make sure that your web server is configured right, and has any security patches installed, and that when you publish script based pages that you make sure they are secure.
But there is nothing more secure about having a nice simple user interface to acomplish simple things than making you edit a complex configuration file apart from discouraging less experienced people from doing it all.
And although .NET is much more than web services, they are a fairly important part of the whole system and IIS is a critical part of providing those web services so I would certainly expect microsoft to continue working on IIS.
And also apache is nice in many ways, but if you just want to put up a couple files on an intranet or something, it's so easy just to right click on the directory and choose "Web Sharing" to create a virtual IIS web directory that it certainly has it's place.
In real life it's rare to be asked for an estimate of the time required.
What usually happens is you get told roughly what to build and the final date by which it needs to be ready. There then takes place a series of negotiations and compremises on the scope of work until everyone is "happy".
I suppose that doesn't really invalidate the point of the article at all, it's just an observation for those who think that estimation is the nice science that it is sometimes presented as being.
Yeah and then it takes forver to download anything.
The problem is that the total available, useful, bandwidth for uploads is not as big as the useful bandwidth for downloads,
Body language and other behaviors have a significant impact on this effectiveness
Which is why this might be a good thing. Legal arguments should be decided on the evidence, not on who is best at presenting it.
The problem is that "files and information" are a scarce resource in these cases. With most file sharing programs you often have to queue for a long time to get a file, or the bandwidth is shared a little thinly and it's slow to download.
Two solutions I can see - Punish the users for not sharing, but do so in a fair way. For example, require that if people have nothing to share that they agree to devote a small part of their disk space to cache popular files which automatically get placed there by the system.
I guess this is at least partly a technological problem to find a way that makes it easy to share and hard to "leach".
Yeah I understand that.
And in case my comments came over as too negative earlier, this *is* a good piece of software which is certainly worth of consideration if you have an old PC to use as a firewall.
Yeah well I didn't say he'd done anything *wrong*, I just wanted to warn people that he's attracted an awful lot of negative publicity in the past for his comments on the gpl, the ownership of his software and on people changing it as they like (as the GPL allows - as he was relying on to allow him to make some money this way).
I used smoothwall for a short time to evaluate it and technically it looked like quite a nice product, but then I started reading about the attitude of it's creator to the GPL.
Now I'm happy for people to write GPL software if they like, and I'm happy for people to write commecial software if they like, but smoothwall seems to want to get the benifits of both.
They seem to want to get make free use of other peoples work through the GPL, but to feel free to only release parts of their software commercialy. I'm not claiming they are breaking the GPL or anything, but there seems something very unfair about their approach.
Also if you get the GPL edition, there are all kinds of requests on the web site that you donate money to them "SmoothWall developers have kids and families too, and it's all about giving back to the people who helped you.
". And yet I would guess that about 90% of what they are giving out was written by other people and they don't suggest they are going to give 90% of their donations to them.
Again, nothing wrong with that, I just don't much like it.
Basically I suggest that people look at their web site, and search the internet for comments about the creators of this software and how unhappy some people are with them before they go and use it.
"Roxio, Inc. (Nasdaq:ROXI), the Digital Media Company, and Gracenote today announced the signing of a multi-year license that provides Gracenote CDDB as the exclusive CD recognition service to current and future Roxio customers ..."
Hmm. I'm a Roxio customer and Gracenote CDDB certainly isn't an exclusive cd recognition service to me. I don't think they yet have the power to agree to that on my behalf.
It's not clear from reading this story who settled with who. (Forgive me if I missed the point somewhere!)
I can't believe that Roxio would have had to settle as surely they can get this information from whoever they like. So presumably they were given some incentive to do this... Which seems a little strange give that they were having legal action taken against them.
We need more information...
Looks like it. Someone seems to have broken into their web site and put a picture of a joke computer on the front page.
That has to be the stupidest looking computer I've ever seen in my life.
Going to meet up with friends and play network unreal tournament and wolfenstein while drinking beer & vodka. All as a scientific experiment to see how alcohol affects our ability to shoot things.
People have been trying to push this for years but there is no chance of it ever happening in my opinion for two reasons - Everyone is already used to the current names and we don't need new ones, and secondly the proposed names sound really stupid.
That article is just daft. It seeems to be saying that a hard disk directory structure is much better than a desktop because you can have unilimed space and organise it by directories, and then goes on to say it should be abolished and replaced by multiple desktops.
Maybe I missed the point. I hope so, then the article would make sense.
In my opinion the whole desktop metaphore is flawed. The screen should just be a view of the hard disk, but each user should have their own namespace on the disk and not be able to even see others files, or there system files without running special tools.
The problem with windows is that sometimes "My Computer" is a subdirectory of the disk and sometimes the disk is a sub-item of My Computer. It confuses me and I'm supposed to know what I'm doing!
YEah and in my opinion AMD systems tend to be unstable. They crash every day or so. People just put this down to windows, but in fact I find that the amd systems I've seen lock up considerably more often than the intel systems I've seen. Probably just down to insufficient cooling on the chips or something, but I'd rather hava reliable system than save a tiny amount of money.
These days, P4s are faster than athlons anyway. AMD are losing the megahertz battle
I've not got the luclin expansion yet but many of the problems introduced were there even with the old version.
The article is fair, but the expansion had only been out for 36 hours when it was written and already they have had one patch which has cured many of the worst software problems, and are promising more to come in the next few days.
I have every confidence that this will be a great game by the end of the week and everyone has forgotten about the launch problems.
As for the requirements, they are high, but that most people who buy a new computer now will get one that easily meets them. And they have to target the game at people who are likely to be buying it soon, not at those who last upgraded their PC 2 years ago. I'd rather they pushed the spec and made a nicer game than just went for the lowest common denominator and lose out to other games.
The worst problem I've got is that the expansion is not yet available in the UK!!!
But if you've not played everquest I have to recommend it to you. Yes there are some problems with this update but they'll all be sorted out in the next week or so and it will continue to be the best game around at the moment.
No I also have Daoc. It's good but not as good as everquest.
:-
It looks better than the everquest (at least the original everquest) and has lots of good ideas but has three flaws
1. It's too quiet. You can't talk to people and hear conversations like in EQ.
2. It's dull. There isn't anything to do other than hit the next monster. And I know everquest is the same, but it just seems better.
3. It's too small. The whole world is about the size of one of everquests larger zones. And everquest has about 100 zones.
New race to play, new classes, many more zones and vastly improved graphics.
How can you beat that?