Re:Java has it's place, but it has problems
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 1
FUD, FUD and more FUD.
Starting with the jdk1.3.1_x series Java has been pretty peppy. JDK 1.4.1_x is downright speedy. Do a google search. On the server, Java is very fast and even some Swing apps can beat native code. Java in 1998 was slow. Java today is not. Get over it and stop living in the past.
It's not FUD at all, it's fact, fact, fact.
Java is fast, just not as fast as it should be and certainly not as fast as the competition (C/C++, Perl, PHP, etc.). You would never choose Java for performance reasons, you choose it for other reasons.
Well I don't know what your experience is but I have never run into any issues with Java being cross-platform. I have literaly just finished doing some bug fixes to a J2EE app for one of our clients. I develop on Win2K, test deploy on Solaris (Sparc) and will deploy it tommorow on HP-UX. All I do is redeploy the.ear file...no compiling involved.
Well let me qualify myself. I'm a principal engineer for a company that produces a top line Java IDE - it could well be the one you use. It's pure Java, great expertise has gone into not having platform specific codeing problems, and we target many platforms. I can tell you for sure that running on different VMs on different platforms is NOT just an out of the box experience. There are many problems and many flaws and this means you need to do the exact same test coverage on every platform, and every VM you target. There is no significant cost reduction using Java for cross platform work because of this.
No Java isn't perfect. But it's a darn site easier to learn and maintain than other, more obfuscated languages like Perl. Java is a language that let's you make less fatal mistakes. No buffer overflows, no pointers, strict type checking and casting rules as well as the Java sandbox go a long way in protecting a system running Java. Can the same be said about C? So even if I'm a bad java programmer, I can't be bad enough to cause the OS to crash or to introduce a system level vunerablility.
Java is easier to learn the language - but it does not make programming easier and that is the really important thing. Being a good programmer is very different to knowing a language, there's a lot of skill in writing well performing, maintainable code in a reasonable period of time. This mostly comes from experience and it's nothing to do with the language you use.
When Java first came on the scene it was touted - by both marketroids and programmers - as making programming easier, less error prone and faster. In some areas it has made things easier, in others not, but you still need a good programmer to write good code.
But please don't go spreading half-truths and crap to get moderated up.
These are no half truths, it's the cold light of day and that is Java is just another language and that's all there is to it.
Jamie
Java has it's place, but it has problems
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Java has it's place, but if you come across someone with the opinion that Java is the be all and end all, avoid them.
The very best thing about Java is the marketing hype Sun have managed to create. It's only Mac-o-philes who seem to be more obcessed (a Mac-Java geek is something to behold!).
Java's a decent clean OO language, it's got a good set of standard/accessible powerful libraries, it's handling of libraries is good (compared to say C/C++), it's simple to learn the language basics and the GUI toolkit (swing) is reasonable.
However for me Java has not delivered on it's promises. Performance generally is poor, compared to say Perl, and is dire when compared to C.
Java also failed to deliver it's platform independence - you just get so many problems running on different platforms and different VMs. Compare this to say Perl - if you avoid platform specifics, Perl just works. Even compare to C when using a library to abstract platform independence (e.g. things like in Gnome/Gtk or Qt), it's not so hard and at least the mistakes are usually yours. I know it's not the fault of Java as a language, but if it can't be implemented well, it won't be much good.
The final major reason Java has not delivered is because it's not made programming any easier or error prone - and much has been made of this promise. Yes, gc does save some bugs (it does cause some more, but on the whole it's good). Java does not save you from uneducated developers or people who simply suck as a programmer. I've seen some steaming piles of turds writted in Java by people who really should be better. This can be said of any language, but much was made about Java being a language to make people make less mistakes - they just make different ones.
So use Java with your eyes wide open, it's decent, good in some areas, weak in others and eventually you'll move on to the Next Big Thing TM.
I have a similar enclosure to this made by Miglia (Mediabank). You can basically put 2 3.5" hard drives in there as master/slave and connect up the firewire cable.
It's neat but doesn't work under linux. The ieee1394 stack in Linux doesn't support multiple LUNs for a device, and so it can only see the first disk in the box. I highly suspect that the Lacie drive will be the same. It's probably just using an updated version of the Oxford chipset that can cope with drives over 120Gb. From the ieee1394-devel mailing list, there's been no serious action to work on this.
Quite some time ago now a company a friend worked for needed a small system writing. It was a mid-sized company, still 10's of $millions turnover.
I wrote a demo, spec, etc. and put a bid in. They thought it was good so I had a meeting with the IT Director. He was happy with what I was planning but he questioned how much I was charging - at the time I thought it was a bit expensive, however, I was shocked when he said he thought it was too low! In fact I ended up charging 400% of my original estimate! They paid up, I was happy:)
Why, I don't know. Maybe my outsourced development was making their in house development and IT work seem overly expensive. Happy to take the wonga though.
This is really sad. I've subscribed to TPJ since about issue 3 and have all the issues. The SysAdmin deal was welcome, but only to keep it alive.
TPJ was such a valuable resource for me as a perl hacker. You learned so much from each issue and people always contributed interesting articles.
Seems like my 2 year subscription will now be for SysAdmin - something that I'm not really interested in:(
Re:Spread of US "culture"
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 1
What I meant is such a country already has a sufficient industry of soft drinks. When Coke comes in and takes over (which they do), there is no benefit for the local people. They still get soft drinks, it's not like they get better ones, or more money is pumped into the economy (what advertizing companies like Coke do pump in is more than made up for from the profits they take out).
Re:"...all for about $5 a month."
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 1
I can't say exactly how far $5 goes in Bhutan, but I've been to neighbouring countries and can tell you $5 is way too much to buy a bag of chillies (unless you mean a donkey load of them) and will go a long way.
For comparison I hired 2 people - a guide and a porter - for $11/day for 3 weeks. By local standards this was a very respectable wage. We are talking national average incomes of the order of $4 per week ($200 per year - yes that's no typo!).
So it will be only the rich people who can afford $5/month for such TV access.
Are you happy with US "culture" as it is today? By that term I do not mean real US culture (there is some), but the jokingly termed "culture" many non-US people label for things like Disney, Coke, WWF, etc.
Travelling around the US you see that such companies have had, what I believe, to be a very negative effect. Everywhere you go it all looks the same, tastes the same, hears the same (same music industry manufactured "pop"), etc. Local and regional flavour is lost. This is great if you like Taco Bell, only drinking Coke and listening to Britney. But there is a lot more to life than that!
Why is it popular in other countries? Well, 2 reasons:
1) The *good* thing about the US - **freedom**. You live a very privelidged life compared to many people of the world. Many people of the world see the US and freedom as being very related things. So when they are given a bit of freedom they have previously lacked, they gravitate towards such things. Think as a teenager and how you behaved once given freedom from parents.
2) This is a not so good thing about the US - **money**. Consider the situation in Bhutan as an example. At the moment there are local (very small) companies that make soft drinks - these won't be copies of Coke, etc., but will be genuine different soft drinks you've never experienced. As Bhutan opens itself up, Coca Cola will move in and either set up a new company to manufacture their drinks, or buy existing ones. People will buy their drinks first of all because of #1 above - it's new, it's cool, etc. Within a very short time, there will be no local soft drinks made. The reason for this will *not* be because Coke is better and people only want it. It will be because the Coca Cola company have the financial muscle to completely control the soft drinks industry of that country. This is not good.
#2 applies to things much more than soft drinks, TV, etc. When you're talking about 3rd world countries and things like agricultural seed supplies and strictly controlled genetically engineered crops, this can have a very bad effect. It's very realistic for companies akin to Monsanto to completely control who areas of agricultural production in these kinds of countries.
So if you believe "raionalism" is #2 above, and this is a good thing, you can surely extrapolate this to meaning there will eventually be only 1 of anything in the world - a single soft drink we all only buy, a single type of car, etc. I don't think this will be a nice place to live.
Left uncontrolled, #2 will eventually remove much of the choice and freedom in the world, thereby harming the greatest thing about the US, #1.
Spread of US "culture"
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually this is a bit more accurate than you may think. Recently I spent a month trekking in Nepal - a nearby country to Bhutan and one that has only recently (30 years) opened itself to foregin influences.
The popularity of WWF, even high in the remote mountain villages, was not something I expected. Then again, this is usually the only "culture" the US exports.
I also visited the country about 10 years earlier after a few months backpacking through India. For around 3 months I travelled and didn't once see a bottle/can of Coca Cola (or derivative) - it was all local soft drinks that were available. At the time it was a refreshing change, and gave you a much more local flavour.
On my more recent trip you could *only* get Coca Cola soft drinks (Coke, Sprite, Fanta, etc.), even high in the mountains a week's travel from the nearest road. OK, they were locally manufactured (under license) and tasted different (the Fanta was nice!), but it was something that got in the way of emersing yourself in a completely different culture. As for the locals themselves, there seemed to be no benefit whatsoever for them having "Coke" soft drinks compared to the local ones before them.
The media industry (music and film) are so stangnent it's unbelievable.
MP3 and digital music was (actually still is) a chance for them to make lots of money in new ways.
The same goes for digital TV/films, yet they can't see it. I actually worked in Digital TV a while and I don't have any faith in these companies being able to pull off anything worthwhile for the public due to the anal retentives in the media industry.
PVRs are great - the public love them. However, they're by no means the statan to media companies. PVRs will change, allowing targeted programming, targetted adverts, pay per view, etc. Nerds will hate it (I do), but it will happen.
But that's only the start. PVRs are not long for this world, as a set top box anyway. The future will be PVRs in the network - no set top box, no limited 40Gb storage - it will all work in the back end for you. Not only will this offer PVR like functionality but it will bring the reality of video on demand and targeted programming to the masses.
When this happens, the big media companies will be able to make more money from it than they can from their current distribution systems.
If they kill this, their only hope is DVD and then they're opening themselves up to far more piracy.
Personally, I hope all such companies burn in hell, but realistically they'll survive and continue to screw me over with content I don't want. Hopefully the digital revolution will give me a *bit* more choice.
It may not be a maintenance nightmare -- but it'll become one. Unless it is extremely simple or will only be worked on by one person, and in either of those cases, maintenance isn't a big concern anyway.
Jeeze, how many of you guys have worked on a big or long running project? Comments avoid the maintenance nightmare here! Something extremely simple or only being worked on by one person needs a lot *less* comments.
There are two problems: first, comments and code gradually diverge, no matter how well-disciplined the programmers are. Think of it this way: when you write code, you introduce bugs. Everyone does, no matter how good of a programmer they are. But those bugs have many ways of getting exposed and being fixed. Either the compiler will catch them, or the first run through the code will, or QA will. Now what's so different about comments? They are bound to contain bugs too. But the mechanisms for catching them (code reviews and the occasional poor sap who wanders through chasing after a bug) are much, much weaker. Result: buggy comments.
Buggy comments are an issue (and so can't 100% by counted on - you need some thinking too!), but the reason there is a difference between comments and code is that the language the comment is in is natural to the programmer - they have expressed their ideas without thinking of the language constructs they are using. The same cannot be said for code (even for good programmers) - a lot more thought has to go into the code itself, hence there is a far greater chance you can communicate the meaning of something to another programmer through a comment.
Try ordering your next pizza in C and see how far you get;)
Second, the assumed significance of a comment drops proportionally to the density of comments. If there are too many comments, a reader will naturally tune them out. When you read a book and the writer introduces a new character, she'll never tell you that the new guy is a human being with two arms and two legs and more crotch hair than knee hair. She'll tell you what's noteworthy about the person, the stuff that you wouldn't already assume. Comments should do the same. A big help here, already mentioned by another replier, is commenting the what rather than the how, since knowing the what gives you a set of reasonable expectations.
My original posting said just that - don't comment how it works, comment the meaning of it. What you intended it to do.
A more concrete expression of this tip is to try to comment the data structures, not the algorithms. If you do a good job describing what your data is, then I'll be able to guess what most of your code is going to say without reading it. And the rest is what's worth commenting.
A reasonable point, but I wouldn't choose to not comment algorithms. If it's a well known algorithm, just name it in a comment. If it's one that's been made up, you really *do* need to comment it - again describe what it's supposed to do, the theory behind the algorithm and any assumptions (but not the implementation - that's the code!).
It's funny when programming topics are discussed on/., it really brings out of the woodwork how many students, amature programmers and web programming weenies there are out there. They should try doing some real work for once.
I agree with the "increment loop counter" comment, that isn't worthwhile at all - but that's the difference between good and bad comments;)
However, I completely disagree with your premise about this being a maintenance nightmare and doubling workload.
It's the exact opposite of a maintenance nightmare - it helps maintenance (certainly for long running large projects with developer turnover).
It's also very little overhead. If you are a professional developer, just count how many hours you really write code in a week of working. It's not a great deal really, and the added time to add good comments is very little. The rewards of doing it are far greater than any costs.
This is a complete mindset thing, just like coding standards - if you get in the mindset, it's easy and no cost, if you moan and complain and fight them all the time it's a pain and loads of work.
Good code comments should describe the intention of the code. Write them *before* you write the code in a function/method to describe it's purpose. This will make you think exactly what you want it to do, and will allow for others to find/fix bugs easier when the implementation doesn't meet the intention.
I then write inline comments in the code describing it's flow. It's only then do I actually write the code.
Comments at file/class level should describe what it does and is used for. It should also describe how it fits in with the big picture of it's packages and the classes around it - give a reader some architectual scope to what they're looking at.
Get into a habit, even for trivial functions/methods and you'll soon not realized you're doing it.
Some people say code shouldn't need commenting, and the code itself should be enough. In a perfect world of no bugs and only populated by wizard programmers, this is fine, but not in the world I live in. You write some code and someone else (maybe yourself) will have to debug it at some point - maybe 3-4 years down the line. Even with a "neat" language like Java, working out how things work is much more time consuming without comments.
Yes I've used this a little and it's *very* nice. You're writing an email, or any document, and the bottom of your screen has a list of other emails and documents related not only to the mail/document you're writing, but the part of the document you're writing!!!
I first saw this a few years ago and when you first use it it blows you away. Why this hasn't become wildly popular I don't know.
I've just come back from spending a month in Nepal, a very poor country with limited telecommunications facilities.
In the larger cities (Kathmandu, Pokhara) you could call the UK over the internet for about 25-50Rs/minute. Using a traditional phone line costs 125-200Rs/minute. When I was there 10 years previous it was US$5/min!
The exchange rate is something like 72Rs to US$1.
The costs are differences aren't as much as this posting said, but it's still quite a saving.
Personally I shopped around for a cheap real phone call (125-150Rs/min) as the quality was so much better.
I think you should correct what you say, rather than "the single-chip G4 beats the pants off the Dell" you should be saying "the single-chip G4 running MacOS 9 beats the pants off the dual 1GHz (what P3?) Dell running Win2k".
Running pre-MacOS X it should be bloody fast - you're running in effect a 15 year old technology OS (and I don't mean it's no good) on modern technology. And everyone knows Windows (in all flavours) just makes decent hardware run like a 15 year old machine;)
Surely the point is, the GHz/MHz doesn't matter, the G4 is fast enough for the uses required and that's that.
I noticed the 25dBA fan and this really is cost cutting cheapness, I'd expect much more of Apple.
For such a machine you should be getting sub 20dBA from it's mechanicals, then it really will be quite (to the point you really won't notice it's on). 25dBA is better than most PCs, and is quiet by office standards, but it's by no means quiet for home use.
In the Overclocking/Build Your Own PC community (obviously not Apple's target market), building quiet PCs is a bit in fashion at the moment. It's very easy to build a sub 20dBA machine and doesn't cost too much.
25dBA from Apple is plain cost cutting and hence disappointing for a "premium" brand.
I've read a number of "joel on software" rants in the past and in almost every case I've come to the conclusion that this guy is just a prat who's trading on a couple of years work at MS (which impresses some people).
A *fair* amount of what he has to say is valid (in other articles too), but generally he's just a bit clueless and one of those people you really want to avoid working for.
As long as the joels of the world keep mismanaging big software companies (I work for one, and believe me, they're full of them), software will continue to be buggy, delievered too early, never do what users want and be written by miserable people who don't love the product.
When I left university 10 years ago I came very close do doing what you want to. I was going to go teaching computing to kids in a school in Nairobi Kenya. The term was for about 2 years and a charity was funding it. The funding fell through and i didn't go:(
There are charities around you just have to find them
If you're asking such questions, and you've made such commitments, you're fu*ked.
Do you really need to do this in C/C++? How much UI does it have? Does it run as some kind of server process? Unless people know all these kind of things about your project (and you didn't say much at all), you can pretty much discount what they say as it will just be speculation.
The quickest UI's to develop are web based ones (they're often the most simple).
For back end stuff, look at something like perl.
Complicated UI's, Java/Swing - at this stage I'd say you're committing to doing something too complex.
My guess is, you'll put a lot of work in on this (more than you think), you may get something written that does the job, you won't be happy with what you've done, but you will learn a lot (mostly non-technical about how you approach such a project).
Slashdot Mirror
Er, first thing I've really heard about it...
FUD, FUD and more FUD.
Starting with the jdk1.3.1_x series Java has been pretty peppy. JDK 1.4.1_x is downright speedy. Do a google search. On the server, Java is very fast and even some Swing apps can beat native code. Java in 1998 was slow. Java today is not. Get over it and stop living in the past.
It's not FUD at all, it's fact, fact, fact.
Java is fast, just not as fast as it should be and certainly not as fast as the competition (C/C++, Perl, PHP, etc.). You would never choose Java for performance reasons, you choose it for other reasons.
Well I don't know what your experience is but I have never run into any issues with Java being cross-platform. I have literaly just finished doing some bug fixes to a J2EE app for one of our clients. I develop on Win2K, test deploy on Solaris (Sparc) and will deploy it tommorow on HP-UX. All I do is redeploy the
Well let me qualify myself. I'm a principal engineer for a company that produces a top line Java IDE - it could well be the one you use. It's pure Java, great expertise has gone into not having platform specific codeing problems, and we target many platforms. I can tell you for sure that running on different VMs on different platforms is NOT just an out of the box experience. There are many problems and many flaws and this means you need to do the exact same test coverage on every platform, and every VM you target. There is no significant cost reduction using Java for cross platform work because of this.
No Java isn't perfect. But it's a darn site easier to learn and maintain than other, more obfuscated languages like Perl. Java is a language that let's you make less fatal mistakes. No buffer overflows, no pointers, strict type checking and casting rules as well as the Java sandbox go a long way in protecting a system running Java. Can the same be said about C? So even if I'm a bad java programmer, I can't be bad enough to cause the OS to crash or to introduce a system level vunerablility.
Java is easier to learn the language - but it does not make programming easier and that is the really important thing. Being a good programmer is very different to knowing a language, there's a lot of skill in writing well performing, maintainable code in a reasonable period of time. This mostly comes from experience and it's nothing to do with the language you use.
When Java first came on the scene it was touted - by both marketroids and programmers - as making programming easier, less error prone and faster. In some areas it has made things easier, in others not, but you still need a good programmer to write good code.
But please don't go spreading half-truths and crap to get moderated up.
These are no half truths, it's the cold light of day and that is Java is just another language and that's all there is to it.
Jamie
Java has it's place, but if you come across someone with the opinion that Java is the be all and end all, avoid them.
The very best thing about Java is the marketing hype Sun have managed to create. It's only Mac-o-philes who seem to be more obcessed (a Mac-Java geek is something to behold!).
Java's a decent clean OO language, it's got a good set of standard/accessible powerful libraries, it's handling of libraries is good (compared to say C/C++), it's simple to learn the language basics and the GUI toolkit (swing) is reasonable.
However for me Java has not delivered on it's promises. Performance generally is poor, compared to say Perl, and is dire when compared to C.
Java also failed to deliver it's platform independence - you just get so many problems running on different platforms and different VMs. Compare this to say Perl - if you avoid platform specifics, Perl just works. Even compare to C when using a library to abstract platform independence (e.g. things like in Gnome/Gtk or Qt), it's not so hard and at least the mistakes are usually yours. I know it's not the fault of Java as a language, but if it can't be implemented well, it won't be much good.
The final major reason Java has not delivered is because it's not made programming any easier or error prone - and much has been made of this promise. Yes, gc does save some bugs (it does cause some more, but on the whole it's good). Java does not save you from uneducated developers or people who simply suck as a programmer. I've seen some steaming piles of turds writted in Java by people who really should be better. This can be said of any language, but much was made about Java being a language to make people make less mistakes - they just make different ones.
So use Java with your eyes wide open, it's decent, good in some areas, weak in others and eventually you'll move on to the Next Big Thing TM.
Jamie
I have a similar enclosure to this made by Miglia (Mediabank). You can basically put 2 3.5" hard drives in there as master/slave and connect up the firewire cable.
It's neat but doesn't work under linux. The ieee1394 stack in Linux doesn't support multiple LUNs for a device, and so it can only see the first disk in the box. I highly suspect that the Lacie drive will be the same. It's probably just using an updated version of the Oxford chipset that can cope with drives over 120Gb. From the ieee1394-devel mailing list, there's been no serious action to work on this.
Firewire drives are well cool though.
Jamie
Understanding what Larry says is as easy as understanding perl...
;)
I'm sure everyone can understand that statement.
Jamie
Quite some time ago now a company a friend worked for needed a small system writing. It was a mid-sized company, still 10's of $millions turnover.
:)
I wrote a demo, spec, etc. and put a bid in. They thought it was good so I had a meeting with the IT Director. He was happy with what I was planning but he questioned how much I was charging - at the time I thought it was a bit expensive, however, I was shocked when he said he thought it was too low! In fact I ended up charging 400% of my original estimate! They paid up, I was happy
Why, I don't know. Maybe my outsourced development was making their in house development and IT work seem overly expensive. Happy to take the wonga though.
So when are we going to have human organs for pigs? Hey, they gotta live too!
This is really sad. I've subscribed to TPJ since about issue 3 and have all the issues. The SysAdmin deal was welcome, but only to keep it alive.
:(
TPJ was such a valuable resource for me as a perl hacker. You learned so much from each issue and people always contributed interesting articles.
Seems like my 2 year subscription will now be for SysAdmin - something that I'm not really interested in
What I meant is such a country already has a sufficient industry of soft drinks. When Coke comes in and takes over (which they do), there is no benefit for the local people. They still get soft drinks, it's not like they get better ones, or more money is pumped into the economy (what advertizing companies like Coke do pump in is more than made up for from the profits they take out).
I can't say exactly how far $5 goes in Bhutan, but I've been to neighbouring countries and can tell you $5 is way too much to buy a bag of chillies (unless you mean a donkey load of them) and will go a long way.
For comparison I hired 2 people - a guide and a porter - for $11/day for 3 weeks. By local standards this was a very respectable wage. We are talking national average incomes of the order of $4 per week ($200 per year - yes that's no typo!).
So it will be only the rich people who can afford $5/month for such TV access.
Are you happy with US "culture" as it is today? By that term I do not mean real US culture (there is some), but the jokingly termed "culture" many non-US people label for things like Disney, Coke, WWF, etc.
Travelling around the US you see that such companies have had, what I believe, to be a very negative effect. Everywhere you go it all looks the same, tastes the same, hears the same (same music industry manufactured "pop"), etc. Local and regional flavour is lost. This is great if you like Taco Bell, only drinking Coke and listening to Britney. But there is a lot more to life than that!
Why is it popular in other countries? Well, 2 reasons:
1) The *good* thing about the US - **freedom**. You live a very privelidged life compared to many people of the world. Many people of the world see the US and freedom as being very related things. So when they are given a bit of freedom they have previously lacked, they gravitate towards such things. Think as a teenager and how you behaved once given freedom from parents.
2) This is a not so good thing about the US - **money**. Consider the situation in Bhutan as an example. At the moment there are local (very small) companies that make soft drinks - these won't be copies of Coke, etc., but will be genuine different soft drinks you've never experienced. As Bhutan opens itself up, Coca Cola will move in and either set up a new company to manufacture their drinks, or buy existing ones. People will buy their drinks first of all because of #1 above - it's new, it's cool, etc. Within a very short time, there will be no local soft drinks made. The reason for this will *not* be because Coke is better and people only want it. It will be because the Coca Cola company have the financial muscle to completely control the soft drinks industry of that country. This is not good.
#2 applies to things much more than soft drinks, TV, etc. When you're talking about 3rd world countries and things like agricultural seed supplies and strictly controlled genetically engineered crops, this can have a very bad effect. It's very realistic for companies akin to Monsanto to completely control who areas of agricultural production in these kinds of countries.
So if you believe "raionalism" is #2 above, and this is a good thing, you can surely extrapolate this to meaning there will eventually be only 1 of anything in the world - a single soft drink we all only buy, a single type of car, etc. I don't think this will be a nice place to live.
Left uncontrolled, #2 will eventually remove much of the choice and freedom in the world, thereby harming the greatest thing about the US, #1.
Actually this is a bit more accurate than you may think. Recently I spent a month trekking in Nepal - a nearby country to Bhutan and one that has only recently (30 years) opened itself to foregin influences.
The popularity of WWF, even high in the remote mountain villages, was not something I expected. Then again, this is usually the only "culture" the US exports.
I also visited the country about 10 years earlier after a few months backpacking through India. For around 3 months I travelled and didn't once see a bottle/can of Coca Cola (or derivative) - it was all local soft drinks that were available. At the time it was a refreshing change, and gave you a much more local flavour.
On my more recent trip you could *only* get Coca Cola soft drinks (Coke, Sprite, Fanta, etc.), even high in the mountains a week's travel from the nearest road. OK, they were locally manufactured (under license) and tasted different (the Fanta was nice!), but it was something that got in the way of emersing yourself in a completely different culture. As for the locals themselves, there seemed to be no benefit whatsoever for them having "Coke" soft drinks compared to the local ones before them.
Ho hum, roll on the Disneyfication of the planet.
The media industry (music and film) are so stangnent it's unbelievable.
MP3 and digital music was (actually still is) a chance for them to make lots of money in new ways.
The same goes for digital TV/films, yet they can't see it. I actually worked in Digital TV a while and I don't have any faith in these companies being able to pull off anything worthwhile for the public due to the anal retentives in the media industry.
PVRs are great - the public love them. However, they're by no means the statan to media companies. PVRs will change, allowing targeted programming, targetted adverts, pay per view, etc. Nerds will hate it (I do), but it will happen.
But that's only the start. PVRs are not long for this world, as a set top box anyway. The future will be PVRs in the network - no set top box, no limited 40Gb storage - it will all work in the back end for you. Not only will this offer PVR like functionality but it will bring the reality of video on demand and targeted programming to the masses.
When this happens, the big media companies will be able to make more money from it than they can from their current distribution systems.
If they kill this, their only hope is DVD and then they're opening themselves up to far more piracy.
Personally, I hope all such companies burn in hell, but realistically they'll survive and continue to screw me over with content I don't want. Hopefully the digital revolution will give me a *bit* more choice.
It may not be a maintenance nightmare -- but it'll become one. Unless it is extremely simple or will only be worked on by one person, and in either of those cases, maintenance isn't a big concern anyway.
Jeeze, how many of you guys have worked on a big or long running project? Comments avoid the maintenance nightmare here! Something extremely simple or only being worked on by one person needs a lot *less* comments.
There are two problems: first, comments and code gradually diverge, no matter how well-disciplined the programmers are. Think of it this way: when you write code, you introduce bugs. Everyone does, no matter how good of a programmer they are. But those bugs have many ways of getting exposed and being fixed. Either the compiler will catch them, or the first run through the code will, or QA will. Now what's so different about comments? They are bound to contain bugs too. But the mechanisms for catching them (code reviews and the occasional poor sap who wanders through chasing after a bug) are much, much weaker. Result: buggy comments.
Buggy comments are an issue (and so can't 100% by counted on - you need some thinking too!), but the reason there is a difference between comments and code is that the language the comment is in is natural to the programmer - they have expressed their ideas without thinking of the language constructs they are using. The same cannot be said for code (even for good programmers) - a lot more thought has to go into the code itself, hence there is a far greater chance you can communicate the meaning of something to another programmer through a comment.
Try ordering your next pizza in C and see how far you get
Second, the assumed significance of a comment drops proportionally to the density of comments. If there are too many comments, a reader will naturally tune them out. When you read a book and the writer introduces a new character, she'll never tell you that the new guy is a human being with two arms and two legs and more crotch hair than knee hair. She'll tell you what's noteworthy about the person, the stuff that you wouldn't already assume. Comments should do the same. A big help here, already mentioned by another replier, is commenting the what rather than the how, since knowing the what gives you a set of reasonable expectations.
My original posting said just that - don't comment how it works, comment the meaning of it. What you intended it to do.
A more concrete expression of this tip is to try to comment the data structures, not the algorithms. If you do a good job describing what your data is, then I'll be able to guess what most of your code is going to say without reading it. And the rest is what's worth commenting.
A reasonable point, but I wouldn't choose to not comment algorithms. If it's a well known algorithm, just name it in a comment. If it's one that's been made up, you really *do* need to comment it - again describe what it's supposed to do, the theory behind the algorithm and any assumptions (but not the implementation - that's the code!).
It's funny when programming topics are discussed on
I agree with the "increment loop counter" comment, that isn't worthwhile at all - but that's the difference between good and bad comments ;)
However, I completely disagree with your premise about this being a maintenance nightmare and doubling workload.
It's the exact opposite of a maintenance nightmare - it helps maintenance (certainly for long running large projects with developer turnover).
It's also very little overhead. If you are a professional developer, just count how many hours you really write code in a week of working. It's not a great deal really, and the added time to add good comments is very little. The rewards of doing it are far greater than any costs.
This is a complete mindset thing, just like coding standards - if you get in the mindset, it's easy and no cost, if you moan and complain and fight them all the time it's a pain and loads of work.
Good code comments should describe the intention of the code. Write them *before* you write the code in a function/method to describe it's purpose. This will make you think exactly what you want it to do, and will allow for others to find/fix bugs easier when the implementation doesn't meet the intention.
I then write inline comments in the code describing it's flow. It's only then do I actually write the code.
Comments at file/class level should describe what it does and is used for. It should also describe how it fits in with the big picture of it's packages and the classes around it - give a reader some architectual scope to what they're looking at.
Get into a habit, even for trivial functions/methods and you'll soon not realized you're doing it.
Some people say code shouldn't need commenting, and the code itself should be enough. In a perfect world of no bugs and only populated by wizard programmers, this is fine, but not in the world I live in. You write some code and someone else (maybe yourself) will have to debug it at some point - maybe 3-4 years down the line. Even with a "neat" language like Java, working out how things work is much more time consuming without comments.
Yes I've used this a little and it's *very* nice. You're writing an email, or any document, and the bottom of your screen has a list of other emails and documents related not only to the mail/document you're writing, but the part of the document you're writing!!!
I first saw this a few years ago and when you first use it it blows you away. Why this hasn't become wildly popular I don't know.
Check it out.
Jamie
I've just come back from spending a month in Nepal, a very poor country with limited telecommunications facilities.
In the larger cities (Kathmandu, Pokhara) you could call the UK over the internet for about 25-50Rs/minute. Using a traditional phone line costs 125-200Rs/minute. When I was there 10 years previous it was US$5/min!
The exchange rate is something like 72Rs to US$1.
The costs are differences aren't as much as this posting said, but it's still quite a saving.
Personally I shopped around for a cheap real phone call (125-150Rs/min) as the quality was so much better.
Oracle's JDeveloper 9i has UML Class models that are in sync with your Java src code, change the code, the model changes and v. v.
? ja va.html
http://www.oracle.com/ip/develop/ids/index.html
Nice.
I think you should correct what you say, rather than "the single-chip G4 beats the pants off the Dell" you should be saying "the single-chip G4 running MacOS 9 beats the pants off the dual 1GHz (what P3?) Dell running Win2k".
;)
Running pre-MacOS X it should be bloody fast - you're running in effect a 15 year old technology OS (and I don't mean it's no good) on modern technology. And everyone knows Windows (in all flavours) just makes decent hardware run like a 15 year old machine
Surely the point is, the GHz/MHz doesn't matter, the G4 is fast enough for the uses required and that's that.
I noticed the 25dBA fan and this really is cost cutting cheapness, I'd expect much more of Apple.
For such a machine you should be getting sub 20dBA from it's mechanicals, then it really will be quite (to the point you really won't notice it's on). 25dBA is better than most PCs, and is quiet by office standards, but it's by no means quiet for home use.
In the Overclocking/Build Your Own PC community (obviously not Apple's target market), building quiet PCs is a bit in fashion at the moment. It's very easy to build a sub 20dBA machine and doesn't cost too much.
25dBA from Apple is plain cost cutting and hence disappointing for a "premium" brand.
Any bets on when Episode 1 (aka The Hobbit) will come out?
Given the popularity of LotR at the moment - and over the next 2 years, all the marketing, merchandise, etc. it's bound to happen isn't it...
I've read a number of "joel on software" rants in the past and in almost every case I've come to the conclusion that this guy is just a prat who's trading on a couple of years work at MS (which impresses some people).
A *fair* amount of what he has to say is valid (in other articles too), but generally he's just a bit clueless and one of those people you really want to avoid working for.
As long as the joels of the world keep mismanaging big software companies (I work for one, and believe me, they're full of them), software will continue to be buggy, delievered too early, never do what users want and be written by miserable people who don't love the product.
Thank god for open source...
When I left university 10 years ago I came very close do doing what you want to. I was going to go teaching computing to kids in a school in Nairobi Kenya. The term was for about 2 years and a charity was funding it. The funding fell through and i didn't go :(
There are charities around you just have to find them
If you're asking such questions, and you've made such commitments, you're fu*ked.
Do you really need to do this in C/C++? How much UI does it have? Does it run as some kind of server process? Unless people know all these kind of things about your project (and you didn't say much at all), you can pretty much discount what they say as it will just be speculation.
The quickest UI's to develop are web based ones (they're often the most simple).
For back end stuff, look at something like perl.
Complicated UI's, Java/Swing - at this stage I'd say you're committing to doing something too complex.
My guess is, you'll put a lot of work in on this (more than you think), you may get something written that does the job, you won't be happy with what you've done, but you will learn a lot (mostly non-technical about how you approach such a project).
Try to have fun though.