I used to love watching "Win Ben Stein's Money", and he was even a guest at JavaOne and hosted a game for the attendees. We all thought he was a smart geeky guy. Talking about burning your geek credential in a fiery blaze of a flamewar.
Here's how I view that contribution. First, it's not code, it's CSS. Data.
More importantly, the contribution could be viewed as Microsoft trying to influence the W3C standards to its benefit. Of course IE already passes the 700 cases they release. Now if Microsoft can get W3C to adopt them, IE instantly is complaint, no extra work. Even if the test cases are sloppy, or worse, in their interpretation of the standard. It's not really that much different that Microsoft "contributing" OOXML to the document standards process. Just a backdoor way to get their implementation as the standard. It doesn't add anything of value to open source development.
I don't get it. The most enormously out-of-control spending ever seen in the history of the United States has occurred under the administration of Republican George W. Bush. Three presidents: Reagan, Bush Sr. and W, all Republicans, are responsible for most of the spending ever in US History. Somehow it's still possible to grind the anti-spending political axe against the DEMOCRATS?
companies that want people with 10+ years worth of experience and want to pay them like a kid out of college. ... and treat them like a kid out of college, that 10+ years of experience is just a nuisance that gets in the way of the new hire doing the job the company way, good or bad.
Zittrain lost me on his own misuse of the word anarchist. Politically, an anarchist is someone who simply rejects a society controlled by a coercive state. This, of course, is exactly what his 'communitarian corner' supports. His taxonomy distorts the debate by relying on the pejorative use of anarchy as a term for moral and political disorder.
A lot of the complexities in these file formats reflect features that are old, complicated, unloved, and rarely used. They're still in the file format for backwards compatibility, and because it doesn't cost anything for Microsoft to leave the code around.
You better believe it costs Microsoft quite a bit to keep it around. At the lowest level, having the codebase that big means the tools and practices needed to manage it have to be equal to the task. Here's a hint: MS does not use SourceSafe for the Office codebase. (They use the Team tools in visual studio, so they do eat their own dogfood, but not the lite food).
Far more insidious is the technical debt incurred by carrying around that backwards compatibility with Version-1-which-supported-123-bugs-and-all. Interdependencies that mean a bug either can't be fixed without introducing regressions, or can only be fixed dint of a complex scheme involving things like the 1900 vs. 1904 epoch split that Joel discusses.
Oh yes, it costs a small fortune to carry around that baggage, and only a company as big as Microsoft with Microsoft's revenues can afford it. The price might seem like 'nothing' in the billions of dollars that flow in and out of Microsoft, but ignoring the elephant in the room doesn't make the elephant go away.
Every checkbox, every formatting option, and every feature in Microsoft Office has to be represented in file formats somewhere. That checkbox in Word's paragraph menu called "Keep With Next" that causes a paragraph to be moved to the next page if necessary so that it's on the same page as the paragraph after it? That has to be in the file format. And that means if you want to implement a perfect Word clone than can correctly read Word documents, you have to implement that feature.
Hard to believe the programmers who did it that way were doing exactly the right thing. Separating data and representation is a basic programming skill.
A number of people are saying that this patent troll company will get its ass whooped because of the companies they are trying extort. Perhaps. But here's a rather more cynical view that I consider at least as likely. It has to do with the other end of the incentives -- profit and loss.
Most if not all the cable and media companies have a virtual monopoly on providing you service. Consider, how many of us have any choice in which cable provider to bring service to the home? So, what happens in this situation is that because the company can pretty much raise your rates or reduce your service by say, shifting channels currently on the cheap "Basic" bundle over to the pricier premium bundles. They can pretty much write their own profits. So now patent troll company comes and wants $X piece of the pie. As a cable provider, they'd look at the cost and risk of legal action vs. shelling out the money for a new agreement. Result: they just jack up rates for the consumer and pay off the extortionist, safely keeping the patent system alive for their own future interests.
We the consumers would see another jump in cable rates or some such service change, but there's not going to be a straw to break the patent camel's back on this one.
Hee. The fermion version of the bar joke goes: Two fermions walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second ways, "Damn, that's what I wanted!"
Or: The first one orders the stiffest, biggest drink on the menu and proceeds to get roaring drunk. The second one just sips water.
My own thoughts now. First, don't trust the comments, they are probably outdated. Second, if it's a big code base, forget the debugger. Write some little unit test cases that exercise the sections of code you need to understand, and assert what you think the code is supposed to do.
Finally, unless you are cursed with a codebase which is not kept in version control (in which case, ugh, time to start the jobhunt up again maybe), then take a look at the revision history. See what changes have been made to the area you are working on. With luck, someone will have put in a revision message that points you towards greater understanding of why a change was made, which will in turn nudge you towards knowing the purpose of the section of code that was change.
I'm going to suggest a book not about computers or software at all, but about visual communication: Understanding Comics. Jakob Nielsen endorses it (that might not be a positive recommendation for some of you..).
Re:Speed Improvements Are Nice, But Not Enough
on
Ruby 1.9.0 Released
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· Score: 1
compile time checking (think static types)
Perhaps Ruby is not the language for you?
(Ruby is a dynamic language, static/manifest typing is pretty much 180 degrees opposite the philosophy of the language).
As if there were some physical property of 100-base-T cables that made them intrinsically different from SATA cables.
Just to expand on and semi-contradict my other reply a little bit -- there is something intrinsically different about the two -- locks, latency and reliability. Programmers working on distributed systems will happily tell you the dangers of pretending the network is invisible and there's no difference between local and remote references. The thing is, it shouldn't be required for programmers to deal with the differences, but for certain kinds of applications the programmers need to know when a file is remote and deal with it.
It's when a developer is too inexperienced to know when it matters that trouble comes along. What happens is, the programmer either tries to write network-aware accesses and gets it wrong, thus screwing up the operations and leading to corruption, or the programmer ignores the distinction in the code when he or she shouldn't, and again, screws up the operations and gets corrupted files. Impossible to say which way the developers screwed up here, but possibly both.
Of course from the user standpoint, it should be completely invisible.
Aww, no fair comparing windows networking to DECNet and VMS. The first system to get file access right and consistent across disks/tapes/clusters/networking/carrier pigeon. Well, other than the 9-character limit in the filename part itself. And being different than any of the other slash-based filesystems around there were a lot of cross-platform tools that didn't cross over to VMS well, but I digress. With the distributed lock manager built into Files-11, everything was pretty transparent.
So all my important communications I write by hand in archival black ink on acid-free 100% rag paper. For truly mission-critical stuff, I have some stone tablets.
1 core for Windows 1 core for the anti-virus 1 core for the firewall 1 core for the DRM 1 core for Clippy 1 core for copying files. 1 core for the eye candy 1 core for the application you are trying to use.
It acquired a specific term to encompass the process in order to get through to the PHBs who see two people coding together and say "Hey you two, quit screwing around and get back to your jobs (sitting separately in cubicles, typing)!"
Pair programming isn't 2 people both trying to use the computer at the same time. Pair programming is 1 person working on writing the code and doing the keyboard tasks while the other person looks on and thinks about what's happening within the context of whatever functionality is currently being added to the code. They talk to each other, help each other notice stupid 1-off errors and typos, and bounce ideas off each other. Every so often, whenever one of them is tired of typing, or the one not typing has an idea that can be more easily expressed by typing out the code rather than talking about it, they switch.
Maybe one of them is a whiz the language and tools, and but is a bit fuzzy on the domain, and the other one is new to the language, but is a domain expert. At first the whiz does most of the keyboard work and the domain expert handles the meta stuff, but gradually they learn from each other and switching off helps them both progress. The domain expert might come to a point where he is trying to explain something complex, so decides to ask for the keyboard and type in some code that does it. It might not be syntactically correct or use the language structure in the best way, but the whiz, looking on, can help clean it up once the ideas are down.
But really, you can't fully appreciate it until you try it with someone with experience in pair programming.
No, they wouldn't die. Apollo LM abort mode at that point would have been something like what they did with Apollo 10, which was the test mission before. Separate from the descent stage and use the ascent stage to return the crew to the CSM.
As noted, the guts and brains part comes into play in knowing when things go a little wrong they are still "go" to proceed.
A similar kind of thing happened during the Apollo 12 launch when the vehicle was struck by lighting -- twice. Lots of alarms and a few minutes of concern, but flight controllers and astronauts working together were able to recover and continue a successful second lunar landing.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to love watching "Win Ben Stein's Money", and he was even a guest at JavaOne and hosted a game for the attendees. We all thought he was a smart geeky guy. Talking about burning your geek credential in a fiery blaze of a flamewar.
Here's how I view that contribution. First, it's not code, it's CSS. Data.
More importantly, the contribution could be viewed as Microsoft trying to influence the W3C standards to its benefit. Of course IE already passes the 700 cases they release. Now if Microsoft can get W3C to adopt them, IE instantly is complaint, no extra work. Even if the test cases are sloppy, or worse, in their interpretation of the standard. It's not really that much different that Microsoft "contributing" OOXML to the document standards process. Just a backdoor way to get their implementation as the standard. It doesn't add anything of value to open source development.
I don't get it. The most enormously out-of-control spending ever seen in the history of the United States has occurred under the administration of Republican George W. Bush. Three presidents: Reagan, Bush Sr. and W, all Republicans, are responsible for most of the spending ever in US History. Somehow it's still possible to grind the anti-spending political axe against the DEMOCRATS?
Zittrain lost me on his own misuse of the word anarchist. Politically, an anarchist is someone who simply rejects a society controlled by a coercive state. This, of course, is exactly what his 'communitarian corner' supports. His taxonomy distorts the debate by relying on the pejorative use of anarchy as a term for moral and political disorder.
How about: He knows when to jump from a sinking ship.
You better believe it costs Microsoft quite a bit to keep it around. At the lowest level, having the codebase that big means the tools and practices needed to manage it have to be equal to the task. Here's a hint: MS does not use SourceSafe for the Office codebase. (They use the Team tools in visual studio, so they do eat their own dogfood, but not the lite food).
Far more insidious is the technical debt incurred by carrying around that backwards compatibility with Version-1-which-supported-123-bugs-and-all. Interdependencies that mean a bug either can't be fixed without introducing regressions, or can only be fixed dint of a complex scheme involving things like the 1900 vs. 1904 epoch split that Joel discusses.
Oh yes, it costs a small fortune to carry around that baggage, and only a company as big as Microsoft with Microsoft's revenues can afford it. The price might seem like 'nothing' in the billions of dollars that flow in and out of Microsoft, but ignoring the elephant in the room doesn't make the elephant go away.
Hard to believe the programmers who did it that way were doing exactly the right thing. Separating data and representation is a basic programming skill.
A number of people are saying that this patent troll company will get its ass whooped because of the companies they are trying extort. Perhaps. But here's a rather more cynical view that I consider at least as likely. It has to do with the other end of the incentives -- profit and loss.
Most if not all the cable and media companies have a virtual monopoly on providing you service. Consider, how many of us have any choice in which cable provider to bring service to the home? So, what happens in this situation is that because the company can pretty much raise your rates or reduce your service by say, shifting channels currently on the cheap "Basic" bundle over to the pricier premium bundles. They can pretty much write their own profits. So now patent troll company comes and wants $X piece of the pie. As a cable provider, they'd look at the cost and risk of legal action vs. shelling out the money for a new agreement. Result: they just jack up rates for the consumer and pay off the extortionist, safely keeping the patent system alive for their own future interests.
We the consumers would see another jump in cable rates or some such service change, but there's not going to be a straw to break the patent camel's back on this one.
At The Dalles is one of the many dams along the Columbia River that supply all that electricity. But before the dam was completed in 1957, it had been one of the most important places in North America for the indigenous people. On March 10, 1957, hundreds of observers looked on as a rising Lake Celilo rapidly silenced the falls, submerged fishing platforms, and consumed the village of Celilo, ending an age-old existence for those who lived there.
Hee. The fermion version of the bar joke goes: Two fermions walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second ways, "Damn, that's what I wanted!"
Or:
The first one orders the stiffest, biggest drink on the menu and proceeds to get roaring drunk. The second one just sips water.
Two bosons walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second one says, "I'll have what he's having."
The best tool is your brain, applied liberally. Here's some thoughts to put in it
Feathers, Michael. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Chapter 16 especially.
Spinellis, Diomidis. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, Chapter 10 lists some tools for you.
My own thoughts now. First, don't trust the comments, they are probably outdated. Second, if it's a big code base, forget the debugger. Write some little unit test cases that exercise the sections of code you need to understand, and assert what you think the code is supposed to do.
Finally, unless you are cursed with a codebase which is not kept in version control (in which case, ugh, time to start the jobhunt up again maybe), then take a look at the revision history. See what changes have been made to the area you are working on. With luck, someone will have put in a revision message that points you towards greater understanding of why a change was made, which will in turn nudge you towards knowing the purpose of the section of code that was change.
I'm going to suggest a book not about computers or software at all, but about visual communication: Understanding Comics. Jakob Nielsen endorses it (that might not be a positive recommendation for some of you..).
Perhaps Ruby is not the language for you?
(Ruby is a dynamic language, static/manifest typing is pretty much 180 degrees opposite the philosophy of the language).
Just to expand on and semi-contradict my other reply a little bit -- there is something intrinsically different about the two -- locks, latency and reliability. Programmers working on distributed systems will happily tell you the dangers of pretending the network is invisible and there's no difference between local and remote references. The thing is, it shouldn't be required for programmers to deal with the differences, but for certain kinds of applications the programmers need to know when a file is remote and deal with it.
It's when a developer is too inexperienced to know when it matters that trouble comes along. What happens is, the programmer either tries to write network-aware accesses and gets it wrong, thus screwing up the operations and leading to corruption, or the programmer ignores the distinction in the code when he or she shouldn't, and again, screws up the operations and gets corrupted files. Impossible to say which way the developers screwed up here, but possibly both.
Of course from the user standpoint, it should be completely invisible.
Aww, no fair comparing windows networking to DECNet and VMS. The first system to get file access right and consistent across disks/tapes/clusters/networking/carrier pigeon. Well, other than the 9-character limit in the filename part itself. And being different than any of the other slash-based filesystems around there were a lot of cross-platform tools that didn't cross over to VMS well, but I digress. With the distributed lock manager built into Files-11, everything was pretty transparent.
NODE"user pass"::device:[dir.subdir]filename.type;ver
I remember the first time I was working in Houston on a VMS node on THEnet and specified a file on a server in Austin.
At least with Linux tools now we have vfs implementations that hide most of it. I'm not sure Windows-based systems have even gotten that far.
So all my important communications I write by hand in archival black ink on acid-free 100% rag paper. For truly mission-critical stuff, I have some stone tablets.
more like:
1 core for Windows
1 core for the anti-virus
1 core for the firewall
1 core for the DRM
1 core for Clippy
1 core for copying files.
1 core for the eye candy
1 core for the application you are trying to use.
longer THAN
sheesh, the state of English these days.
Oh stop, that makes it WORSE!
If you look carefully, the website has the OCP logo at the bottom left, next to the Fox logo. Something is fishy.
It acquired a specific term to encompass the process in order to get through to the PHBs who see two people coding together and say "Hey you two, quit screwing around and get back to your jobs (sitting separately in cubicles, typing)!"
Pair programming isn't 2 people both trying to use the computer at the same time. Pair programming is 1 person working on writing the code and doing the keyboard tasks while the other person looks on and thinks about what's happening within the context of whatever functionality is currently being added to the code. They talk to each other, help each other notice stupid 1-off errors and typos, and bounce ideas off each other. Every so often, whenever one of them is tired of typing, or the one not typing has an idea that can be more easily expressed by typing out the code rather than talking about it, they switch.
Maybe one of them is a whiz the language and tools, and but is a bit fuzzy on the domain, and the other one is new to the language, but is a domain expert. At first the whiz does most of the keyboard work and the domain expert handles the meta stuff, but gradually they learn from each other and switching off helps them both progress. The domain expert might come to a point where he is trying to explain something complex, so decides to ask for the keyboard and type in some code that does it. It might not be syntactically correct or use the language structure in the best way, but the whiz, looking on, can help clean it up once the ideas are down.
But really, you can't fully appreciate it until you try it with someone with experience in pair programming.
No, they wouldn't die. Apollo LM abort mode at that point would have been something like what they did with Apollo 10, which was the test mission before. Separate from the descent stage and use the ascent stage to return the crew to the CSM.
As noted, the guts and brains part comes into play in knowing when things go a little wrong they are still "go" to proceed.
A similar kind of thing happened during the Apollo 12 launch when the vehicle was struck by lighting -- twice. Lots of alarms and a few minutes of concern, but flight controllers and astronauts working together were able to recover and continue a successful second lunar landing.