I've used Python extensively and i still prefer Tcl (8.4) for many projects. Both have their strengths. I rather liked Python's OO abilities and use of tuples, but the way Tcl works magic with data is just so much more convenient to me (i do a lot of test automation). Now with the addition of the OO framework and dicts in 8.5, it makes a significant improvement in the areas i liked python for (less I/O intensive programming) and maybe i will just stick to Tcl now.
The OO stuff in 8.5 is not a bolted on kludge. A great deal of thought and experience went into this. Note though that the while the OO framework is done, it needs some supporting structure to make it easier to use. I think some are already done. For now i will just add my own. It should be possible to create XOTcl like OO programs with TclOO, and that ought to be superior to Python in terms of flexibility.
Memory management: i am pretty sure that objects that go out of scope are cleaned up automatically. Memory management in Tcl is bound to work a little bit different because the concept of references is not mappable to Tcl. But i'm not convinced that memory management will be really more difficult than in Python. You're probably confusing *can* manually destroy with *have to* manually destroy.
Just check out the price of games. Halflife2 and Halo2 and Doom III are just so cheap due to Microsoft entering the games market some years ago. Certainly down by more than 60%.
Seriously: it could be argued that prices of game consoles are cheaper due to Microsoft's presence in the market. But not the software. And i suspect that Nintendo and Sony would be at eachother's throats anyway.
If you are a java developer you will need to learn about generic programming and the java implementation of it. Unless you stick to java 1.4 forever. Maybe it's not everywhere just yet, but wait a bit and you'll see that generics are used everywhere, and you can try to avoid it but at some point you must learn at least how to work with generic classes. Even if you don't write them yourself. It's the same with C++ templates... I thought they were implemented in such a horrible ugly way that i refused to use them, but all kinds of libraries started to use templates. Ugly ugly ugly, but no way to ignore them. This was one of the reasons for me to switch to java! And now generic programming has come to 'enhance' java programming too....
Quite a few of them, working quietly on X-Free for ages to add new features and support new graphics chipsets. And most of the time they appear to get bashed for it, or are forgotten about.
X-Free has gotten rarkably little praise, compared to (for example) the Linux kernel while both are very complex projects, have the same importance and have been around for just as long. Although the number of contributors to X-Free is probably a lot smaller.
So here's a BIG THANK YOU to the guys who made X-Free!
I am an experienced programmer and i've been doing management for a few years. I don't quite agree...
They are exactly the sort of management that the industry needs, will likely encounter great success, and could serve as beneficial trend setters.
I agree with the first and last part of that sentence, but not the middle part. If you do your job well, no higher manager will ever notice. Only if you allow a big fuck-up to occur and then rescue the project, but that's not being very professional is it? Can you explain how you think these kind of managers will likely encounter great success?
Managing is easier really. It takes many many years to become an excellent programmer. I have been programming for 19 years and i am still worried about not knowing enough.
I have also been managing a group of 10 programmers for a few years, and in fact i appear to be doing a good job (on target for cost, quality and time; what more do you want?). To achieve this i needed 3 weeks of management training.
Recently i went back to programming. Why? Because it is more challenging (hey, isn't that ironic?) and it pays better to be a good programmer (and isn't that unexpected?). Being a manager is not hard, but it's a misserable job, mostly because other managers appear to like making life difficult for eachother. The only advantage it has is that it pays well compared to other misserable jobs. Maybe management is interesting if you are really free to make your own choices, but you will only that get if you can start your own company without needing 'intrusive' financing.
Excuse me. OF COURSE YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO PLAY GAMES ON YOUR PHONE! Whether you actually do it or not.
I love to play games on my phone. No need to carry around a gameboy, palm, laptop or anything but my phone to play a game of chess. I also like the old dogfight action game, and i'm sure it could benefit from some 3D graphics. I guess if you don't need all that, you never had any need for 3D acceleration on your PC either? This is progress my man. The more capabilities on the phone the better!
Do you know that using the gaming API's (Mophun or J2ME) you can also control the phone camera and the vibration motor? You can use this for really cool stuff (image analysis etc).
When mobile phones are discussed on slashdot the popular opinion always appears to be that they should pack none of these features: no camera, no games, no polyphonic ringtones, no bluetooth... Which is weird, because everybody here is supposed to be a gadget-loving-geek!
All i hear is how phones are lame and how wi-fi will rule etc etc. I'm getting a bit tired of it.
Don't forget that the EC is only a tiny fraction of size of all combined EU governments. If the EC is spending 250K Euros (an insignificant amount really IMO), it signals that all combined, there is 10s or 100s of millions being spent on investigating open source.
I wonder how long it will take before it is possible to run all the applications on the phone and just use the pda as a display and/or display device. Or the other way round. It would make perfect sense if you use bluetooth to connect the two?
The tiny screens and input systems for WAP phones annoy me, and it would be just wonderful if applications on a palm could access the WAP protocol stack on the phone to deliver some really great applications.
Maybe new terms are needed both for software and for jobs.
Software: User Interface applications, Real-Time control programs, Operating Systems, Database systems, etc.
Jobs: when you start a new project, do not start out with getting a 'Project Manager and a bunch of programmers', but: System architects, Requirements analysts, User Interface designers, Quality responsibles, configuration responsibles, application integrators, software testing specialist, etc.
Not all software sucks. Software that is badly designed sucks.
Enough research and experimentation has gone on in software development that it is perfectly feasible to write very good software indeed. Just use the right methods.
The problem is IMO that very few projects actually enforce the use of good development methods, and that a large number of the people (including programmers!) in the projects are unaware of them.
I do not think the problem can be solved just by improving terminology as the article suggests but it is a start. For example a company that makes hardware should not recruit 'C programmers' but 'Device Driver engineers', excluding from the recruitment process a lot of people that do not have the necessary skills.
But there is more to all this. Users should demand higher quality software (with their wallets). Project leaders/companies should do more than pay lip-service to their development process. Developers should demand that proper development methods are used, rising above the all too common amateuristic ways of working.
Strange as it may seem, the most difficult part seems to be to get users to actually demand and recognise quality.
I have noticed that a lot of these computer clubs dissapeared over the last 10 years. I would not blame this on the internet, but on closed systems like Windows and game consoles. This particular club may be an exception in that it is a university club (Berkeley!), but most of these clubs consist of a variety of people from everyday life (aka 'common people').
In the old days (yeah, nearly 30 i am) tinkering with your computer was encouraged by the media, and you did not need anything special to start since the computer booted into a simple development environment, and going to a computer club to share experience (and software;-) was just natural. That is where i met my programming buddies... learned a lot from them. With a windows box, you have to be pretty desperate (or paid) to try and program anything. Hacking windows is way too complex for a beginner, and no fun at all... how is a 'hacker club' supposed to form around it?
I think one of the only reasons why there still are clubs like these is the fact that open software like the GNU development tools, Linux, BSD etc have been with us since the rise of MS Windows.
My guess is that in the next decade the number of clubs like this will grow again thanks to increasing addoption of GNU/Linux/*BSD, and the Internet will help instead of hinder: it will be much easier to communicate and cooperate without having to travel around (read cycle along, since few hackers have cars or are old enough to drive where i live).
BTW i found this article way too sentimental and nostalgic. They make it sound like the end is nigh!
C has been around as long as UNIX. Nearly 30 years... Although you probably would not recognise the first versions of C as such because it has changed a lot since it's invention.
I used to have games that were sold on 5.25" floppies. One of them had some kind of copy protection that made it impossible to make a copy to the harddrive, so i always needed to have the 5.25" floppy in the drive to play the game.
When i got a new PC with a 3.5" disk drive, i found out that the case did not have enough room for the 5.25" drive. This meant that i could not play those games anymore!
Fortunately i had enough programming skills to circumvent the copy protection, and i used a friend's computer to put a modified version of the game on a 3.5" disk so that i was able to play again...
Had the DMCA been in effect back then, it would very clearly have been illegal (had i lived in the US, which i don't;-). I would never have been able to legally play that game anymore.
Although the publisher *might* have published a 3.5" disc version that i then could buy. I do not believe that many publishers could be bothered with their older titles... When computer technology progresses and 3.5" drives become somehting of the past (iMac?), the same thing happens again. It will happen to CD-ROMs too, some time in the future. And because of the DMCA a whole lot of software (especially games, which i consider things of cultural significance) will become inaccessible for almost everybody because the required hardware is not available.
Come to think of it, all those emulators for older computers (ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore 64, MSX etc etc) can be considered circumvention devices too.
Bluetooth has (at the very least) enough bandwidth to transfer voice (one of the uses is for headphones, remember?), so that would not be the problem. I expect that latency does not depend on the bleutooth device but on the hard/software around it. It will probably be the same as common serial protocols...
If i remember correctly it has a 1 Mb/s capacity. The actual speed that you will reach depends on the activity in the cell, much like the bandwidth on an ethernet.
For ventilation, just make microperforations. Could be good for the sound too, but it might cause problems with the aircushion that is supposed to suspend the sphere. Proper layout of the perforations could prevent that i assume.
I think the trick will be to prevent people from falling over all the time. Imagine playing a soccer match inside this contraption;-)
It is the return of BLOB!
Mad scientists are at it again!
Seriously though, aren't some of the above posters overreacting a little bit? It seems very unlikely (the word impossible comes to mind) to me that a 250 M years old bacteria will wipe out the human race. It wasn't even on discover.com's list!
Now only a small step to revive the dinosaurs themselves...
I was under the impression that disk caching renders ram disks obsolete except for the cases where you want to be absolutely certain that the data stays in memory (such as when your files are on removable media).
Slashdot Mirror
Tcl is great!
I've used Python extensively and i still prefer Tcl (8.4) for many projects. Both have their strengths. I rather liked Python's OO abilities and use of tuples, but the way Tcl works magic with data is just so much more convenient to me (i do a lot of test automation). Now with the addition of the OO framework and dicts in 8.5, it makes a significant improvement in the areas i liked python for (less I/O intensive programming) and maybe i will just stick to Tcl now.
The OO stuff in 8.5 is not a bolted on kludge. A great deal of thought and experience went into this. Note though that the while the OO framework is done, it needs some supporting structure to make it easier to use. I think some are already done. For now i will just add my own. It should be possible to create XOTcl like OO programs with TclOO, and that ought to be superior to Python in terms of flexibility.
Memory management: i am pretty sure that objects that go out of scope are cleaned up automatically. Memory management in Tcl is bound to work a little bit different because the concept of references is not mappable to Tcl. But i'm not convinced that memory management will be really more difficult than in Python. You're probably confusing *can* manually destroy with *have to* manually destroy.
Since 1337 speakers apparantly love obfuscation, |-|4/\/\ might be a synonym for $p4/\/\?
Yeah, i've seen that when i went to see The Aviator. The 'Rise Vader...' shot was funny. A nice reference to Frankenstein.
Just check out the price of games. Halflife2 and Halo2 and Doom III are just so cheap due to Microsoft entering the games market some years ago. Certainly down by more than 60%.
Seriously: it could be argued that prices of game consoles are cheaper due to Microsoft's presence in the market. But not the software. And i suspect that Nintendo and Sony would be at eachother's throats anyway.
If you are a java developer you will need to learn about generic programming and the java implementation of it. Unless you stick to java 1.4 forever. Maybe it's not everywhere just yet, but wait a bit and you'll see that generics are used everywhere, and you can try to avoid it but at some point you must learn at least how to work with generic classes. Even if you don't write them yourself.
It's the same with C++ templates... I thought they were implemented in such a horrible ugly way that i refused to use them, but all kinds of libraries started to use templates. Ugly ugly ugly, but no way to ignore them. This was one of the reasons for me to switch to java! And now generic programming has come to 'enhance' java programming too....
X-Free has gotten rarkably little praise, compared to (for example) the Linux kernel while both are very complex projects, have the same importance and have been around for just as long. Although the number of contributors to X-Free is probably a lot smaller.
So here's a BIG THANK YOU to the guys who made X-Free!
They are exactly the sort of management that the industry needs, will likely encounter great success, and could serve as beneficial trend setters.
I agree with the first and last part of that sentence, but not the middle part. If you do your job well, no higher manager will ever notice. Only if you allow a big fuck-up to occur and then rescue the project, but that's not being very professional is it? Can you explain how you think these kind of managers will likely encounter great success?
I have also been managing a group of 10 programmers for a few years, and in fact i appear to be doing a good job (on target for cost, quality and time; what more do you want?). To achieve this i needed 3 weeks of management training.
Recently i went back to programming. Why? Because it is more challenging (hey, isn't that ironic?) and it pays better to be a good programmer (and isn't that unexpected?). Being a manager is not hard, but it's a misserable job, mostly because other managers appear to like making life difficult for eachother. The only advantage it has is that it pays well compared to other misserable jobs. Maybe management is interesting if you are really free to make your own choices, but you will only that get if you can start your own company without needing 'intrusive' financing.
I love to play games on my phone. No need to carry around a gameboy, palm, laptop or anything but my phone to play a game of chess. I also like the old dogfight action game, and i'm sure it could benefit from some 3D graphics. I guess if you don't need all that, you never had any need for 3D acceleration on your PC either? This is progress my man. The more capabilities on the phone the better!
Do you know that using the gaming API's (Mophun or J2ME) you can also control the phone camera and the vibration motor? You can use this for really cool stuff (image analysis etc).
When mobile phones are discussed on slashdot the popular opinion always appears to be that they should pack none of these features: no camera, no games, no polyphonic ringtones, no bluetooth... Which is weird, because everybody here is supposed to be a gadget-loving-geek!
All i hear is how phones are lame and how wi-fi will rule etc etc. I'm getting a bit tired of it.
they are copying Linux related news from CNET.
Don't forget that the EC is only a tiny fraction of size of all combined EU governments. If the EC is spending 250K Euros (an insignificant amount really IMO), it signals that all combined, there is 10s or 100s of millions being spent on investigating open source.
I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Does having more genes make you superior?
Maybe the real question then is not if the console market will crash, but if the concept of the home-computer will make a come back?
The tiny screens and input systems for WAP phones annoy me, and it would be just wonderful if applications on a palm could access the WAP protocol stack on the phone to deliver some really great applications.
Projects that use the right engineering methods take less time to complete and support, and are therefore cheaper.
It probably is true that the engineers who use these methods are more expensive to hire.
Software: User Interface applications, Real-Time control programs, Operating Systems, Database systems, etc.
Jobs: when you start a new project, do not start out with getting a 'Project Manager and a bunch of programmers', but: System architects, Requirements analysts, User Interface designers, Quality responsibles, configuration responsibles, application integrators, software testing specialist, etc.
Enough research and experimentation has gone on in software development that it is perfectly feasible to write very good software indeed. Just use the right methods.
The problem is IMO that very few projects actually enforce the use of good development methods, and that a large number of the people (including programmers!) in the projects are unaware of them.
I do not think the problem can be solved just by improving terminology as the article suggests but it is a start. For example a company that makes hardware should not recruit 'C programmers' but 'Device Driver engineers', excluding from the recruitment process a lot of people that do not have the necessary skills.
But there is more to all this. Users should demand higher quality software (with their wallets). Project leaders/companies should do more than pay lip-service to their development process. Developers should demand that proper development methods are used, rising above the all too common amateuristic ways of working.
Strange as it may seem, the most difficult part seems to be to get users to actually demand and recognise quality.
In the old days (yeah, nearly 30 i am) tinkering with your computer was encouraged by the media, and you did not need anything special to start since the computer booted into a simple development environment, and going to a computer club to share experience (and software ;-) was just natural. That is where i met my programming buddies... learned a lot from them. With a windows box, you have to be pretty desperate (or paid) to try and program anything. Hacking windows is way too complex for a beginner, and no fun at all... how is a 'hacker club' supposed to form around it?
I think one of the only reasons why there still are clubs like these is the fact that open software like the GNU development tools, Linux, BSD etc have been with us since the rise of MS Windows.
My guess is that in the next decade the number of clubs like this will grow again thanks to increasing addoption of GNU/Linux/*BSD, and the Internet will help instead of hinder: it will be much easier to communicate and cooperate without having to travel around (read cycle along, since few hackers have cars or are old enough to drive where i live).
BTW i found this article way too sentimental and nostalgic. They make it sound like the end is nigh!
C has been around as long as UNIX. Nearly 30 years... Although you probably would not recognise the first versions of C as such because it has changed a lot since it's invention.
When i got a new PC with a 3.5" disk drive, i found out that the case did not have enough room for the 5.25" drive. This meant that i could not play those games anymore!
Fortunately i had enough programming skills to circumvent the copy protection, and i used a friend's computer to put a modified version of the game on a 3.5" disk so that i was able to play again...
Had the DMCA been in effect back then, it would very clearly have been illegal (had i lived in the US, which i don't ;-). I would never have been able to legally play that game anymore.
Although the publisher *might* have published a 3.5" disc version that i then could buy. I do not believe that many publishers could be bothered with their older titles... When computer technology progresses and 3.5" drives become somehting of the past (iMac?), the same thing happens again. It will happen to CD-ROMs too, some time in the future. And because of the DMCA a whole lot of software (especially games, which i consider things of cultural significance) will become inaccessible for almost everybody because the required hardware is not available.
Come to think of it, all those emulators for older computers (ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore 64, MSX etc etc) can be considered circumvention devices too.
Bluetooth has (at the very least) enough bandwidth to transfer voice (one of the uses is for headphones, remember?), so that would not be the problem. I expect that latency does not depend on the bleutooth device but on the hard/software around it. It will probably be the same as common serial protocols... If i remember correctly it has a 1 Mb/s capacity. The actual speed that you will reach depends on the activity in the cell, much like the bandwidth on an ethernet.
The only thing the article says is it utilizes 'a sophisticated radio frequency technology'.
For ventilation, just make microperforations. Could be good for the sound too, but it might cause problems with the aircushion that is supposed to suspend the sphere. Proper layout of the perforations could prevent that i assume. I think the trick will be to prevent people from falling over all the time. Imagine playing a soccer match inside this contraption ;-)
It is the return of BLOB! Mad scientists are at it again! Seriously though, aren't some of the above posters overreacting a little bit? It seems very unlikely (the word impossible comes to mind) to me that a 250 M years old bacteria will wipe out the human race. It wasn't even on discover.com's list! Now only a small step to revive the dinosaurs themselves...
I was under the impression that disk caching renders ram disks obsolete except for the cases where you want to be absolutely certain that the data stays in memory (such as when your files are on removable media).