killer handwriting recognition? Compared to what, a monkey? The Newton had notoriously badhandwritingrecognition. A big part of what makes the Palm platform so popular is that graffiti is so much like ordinary block letter writing that it's easy to learn, but the computer has much less trouble recognizing it.
Wow, a slashdot article with CeeSharp and VB as the example languages? Someone was asleep when they read that submission. Oh wait, the editors don't read past the first page before deciding to post or reject submissions.
How about an XML processing article using languages that slashdotters actually care about and write in -- Perl, PHP3, Java, C++, Python, etc.? We're not going to pop over to freshmeat and download the latest VB4Debian, you realize.
If you chose to use C++ for its object-oriented abilities, you may be surprised to know that Alexander Stepanov (the inventor of STL) himself said he never uses what he calls "inheritance, virtuals - OO gook" of C++, and says, "I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people."
This may or may not be of any importance in your choice of language features and development practices.
Nice quote: "If I lose, I will pledge that I, and my crack mozilla development team, will assist in implementing XSL in the mozilla open source project.". I guess the author lost, because there's XSLT in Mozilla
Interestingly, so far the replies mention largely daytime activities. But there is one completely geeky outdoor activity that is largely a nighttime pursuit. Besides sex, that is. Amateur astronomers are some of the biggest geeks I know. The have their toys -- telescopes, CCD cameras, clock drives, star finders -- and obsessive observing goals -- the Messier Catalog, all the solar system planets, comets, and satellite tracking and indentification. There is a plethora of software for amateur astronomy as well.
So get out there in the middle of nowhere and Keep Watching the Skies
Sounds like a more coordinated build process would help out a lot. Martin Fowler's article Continuous Integration talks about this problem,
The fundamental benefit of continuous integration is that it removes sessions where people spend time hunting bugs where one person's work has stepped on someone else's work without either person realizing what happened. These bugs are hard to find because the problem isn't in one person's area, it is in the interaction between two pieces of work. This problem is exacerbated by time. Often integration bugs can be inserted weeks or months before they first manifest themselves. As a result they take a lot of finding.
If you're not already familiar with the Mozilla Tinderbox you should examine carefully how they coordinate ten simultaneous and continuous builds across 3 different operating systems with dozens of developers scattered across timezones.
I just don't see myself paying/. to put up content I create. There are many publishers out there that will happily take your money to finance their publishing your book -- it's called self-publishing and as any author will tell you, a self-published book is rarely anything more than an ego stroke for a wealthy writer wanna-be. Now the idea sending someone my words, who aggregates them with a bunch of words written by other people who have paid or not, and then paying them to see what I wrote sounds ludicrous. There just isn't enough value added by the intermediate party (slashdot) to justify my dime. If, on the other hand, contributors get paid, like magazine writers, out of the revenues generated in part by their contributions, that's another story.
Yes, paying for something that anyone can bookmark and use up your paid-for pageviews is certainly suboptimal. There's another point here. As a/. user you have selected your preferences for topics and sections of interest. Of course every article and comment your read and post is associated with your login. What a bonanza for advertisers. *cough*Privacy*cough*
Without the electric grid these computers and networks wouldn't be able to do anything, so it's the power companies' fault. Without plastics, metals and iron oxides to make storage media, those files couldn't be stored anywhere, so it's the fault of mining and petrochemical companies. Without air to carry the soundwaves and photons to transmit energy the music would be inaudible and the images would be invisible, so it's the fault of the Universe. Nah, to lawyers, the fault clearly belongs to whoever has the deepest pockets.
Is that an Itanium in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Re:from the earth to the moon
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 2
Yes you can get it on DVD, and I highly recommend the deluxe boxed set. For your convenience, I've linked directly to a web retailer where you can buy it.
If the legal problems and deletion policies keep in the direction they are going, pretty soon companies aren't going to be able to have any sort of knowledge base repository at all. Problem resolution from a bug that was filed 17 months ago? Gone. A bug report gets filed again, there's nothing to document that it's a duplicate, developers spend unproductive time fixing a bug that doesn't exist any more. Design documents for your business process automation system? Gone. A key widgetframmiz inspection gets skipped and your product blows up. Your patient record file from your last visit to the hospital? Gone. That operation you had to remove your spleen, what was the condition that required that?
So the companies will exist in an amnesiatic daze about anything that happened more than 12 months ago that only Joe from accounting who retired last year had in his head?
Nice nice article. Despite having used Perl for a number of years and become quite proficient in most parts of the language, I never really "got" the use of map and grep. Zlatanov's two central tips, "read from right to left" and "it's like foreach without an explicit looping condition" finally brought the principles home to me. I can finally read and understand The Schwartzian Transform!
There's no intended implication that Cooper can't deal with programming in the real world, just that his view of organizational change isn't consistent with the Extreme Programming approach. If we could all pick and choose from a variety of organizations that are not dysfunctional in one way or another, or if as software engineers we were able to involve ourselves and influence organizational change in the way Interaction Design espouses, we would be fine.
Cooper's core proposal, when you get right down to it, is reasonable except for the part about requiring the organization to be able to plan up front for things that will change.
To view XP as an abdication that "papers over the cracks" is to discredit the motivations of programmers -- both staff and contract. Extreme Programmers desire to find a way to achieve business goals within real-world constraints, yet also include quality, or "excellence" in development. But the philosophical angle is perhaps best expressed by The Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Kent Beck effectively skewers Cooper in the interview. While Cooper talks in the abstract about business process, requirements elicitation and better design techniques, Beck hits on the realities of everyday software development.
Beck: From the customer's perspective, no. I've had teams be called "whiners" because after 25 percent of the budget is spent, they're saying, "We have 10 features to add and we're going at half the speed that we expected. Which five would you like us to work on first?" And the customer says, "Oh, you whiners. Work some overtime or just get back to work or quit complaining." What do you say in a situation like that? You say, "I quit." Life's too short to work on doomed projects you already know are doomed after 25 percent of the budget is spent.
Contrast Cooper:
I believe that defining the behavior of software-based products and services is incredibly difficult. It has to be done from the point of view of understanding and visualizing the behavior of complex systems, not the construction of complex systems.
How many complex systems has Cooper constructed?
But here's the exchange that really drives it home:
Cooper: Building software isn't like slapping a shack together; it's more like building a 50-story office building or a giant dam.
Beck: I think it's nothing like those. If you build a skyscraper 50 stories high, you can't decide at that point, oh, we need another 50 stories and go jack it all up and put in a bigger foundation.
Cooper: That's precisely my point.
Beck: But in the software world, that's daily business.
Cooper: That's pissing money away and leaving scar tissue.
Zing! Cooper might be right about pissing money, but it's what happens all the time, and Beck and XP have given us tools to deal with it.
How about cellular phone service, with free long distance and unlimited calling, roaming in the entire US? Now how much would you pay? But wait! There's more.... Wireless internet from your phone or wireless PDA? Keep thinking big, you'll get to $230 fast.
Here is an example entitled Identifying Objects: A Case Study and Class Exercise giving an example of waveform rendering on an oscilloscope (see page 5), appropriately enough based on work done at Tektronix. Is that enough of an "engineering problem" for you?
Why yes, this has been done, and you can get it from Oracle, under the name Oracle Internet File System, and I've played with it a bit. Interesting concept, not a very robust implementation, but perhaps it's gotten better since I tried it under 8.1.7? It's kind of neat to be able to mount a drive under windows that's really data in an Oracle table.
Slashdot Mirror
killer handwriting recognition? Compared to what, a monkey? The Newton had notoriously bad handwriting recognition. A big part of what makes the Palm platform so popular is that graffiti is so much like ordinary block letter writing that it's easy to learn, but the computer has much less trouble recognizing it.
Wow, a slashdot article with CeeSharp and VB as the example languages? Someone was asleep when they read that submission. Oh wait, the editors don't read past the first page before deciding to post or reject submissions.
How about an XML processing article using languages that slashdotters actually care about and write in -- Perl, PHP3, Java, C++, Python, etc.? We're not going to pop over to freshmeat and download the latest VB4Debian, you realize.
Use a tool like doxygen to formalize your comment formats. The Mozilla project has a page for their doxygen-generated documents at the Mozilla/SeaMonkey Code Documentation and Cross-Reference.
In the Java world, Sun has a couple of documents on how to comment code, How to Write Doc Comments for the Javadoc Tool and Requirements for Writing Java API Specifications. Note that the latter references Object Class Specification by Edward V. Berard, Essays on Object-Oriented Software Engineering, 1993 Simon pp. 131-162., which is an excellent read in general.
All that said, please read and live Martin Fowler's comments on coding style and comments in "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code"
If you chose to use C++ for its object-oriented abilities, you may be surprised to know that Alexander Stepanov (the inventor of STL) himself said he never uses what he calls "inheritance, virtuals - OO gook" of C++, and says, "I think that object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence. I have yet to see an interesting piece of code that comes from these OO people."
This may or may not be of any importance in your choice of language features and development practices.
Nice quote: "If I lose, I will pledge that I, and my crack mozilla development team, will assist in implementing XSL in the mozilla open source project.". I guess the author lost, because there's XSLT in Mozilla
Interestingly, so far the replies mention largely daytime activities. But there is one completely geeky outdoor activity that is largely a nighttime pursuit. Besides sex, that is. Amateur astronomers are some of the biggest geeks I know. The have their toys -- telescopes, CCD cameras, clock drives, star finders -- and obsessive observing goals -- the Messier Catalog, all the solar system planets, comets, and satellite tracking and indentification. There is a plethora of software for amateur astronomy as well.
So get out there in the middle of nowhere and Keep Watching the Skies
Mozilla 1.0 RC1 release possible tomorrow.
Amusingly enough, the CNet story got onto the syndicate feeds and ended up on the front page of My Yahoo.
Java, Security Hole, Windows. The perfect slashdot headline. Having little to do with the actual content of the story helps, too.
Never ask a geek, "why?". Just nod your head and back away slowly.
I just don't see myself paying /. to put up content I create. There are many publishers out there that will happily take your money to finance their publishing your book -- it's called self-publishing and as any author will tell you, a self-published book is rarely anything more than an ego stroke for a wealthy writer wanna-be. Now the idea sending someone my words, who aggregates them with a bunch of words written by other people who have paid or not, and then paying them to see what I wrote sounds ludicrous. There just isn't enough value added by the intermediate party (slashdot) to justify my dime. If, on the other hand, contributors get paid, like magazine writers, out of the revenues generated in part by their contributions, that's another story.
Yes, paying for something that anyone can bookmark and use up your paid-for pageviews is certainly suboptimal. There's another point here. As a /. user you have selected your preferences for topics and sections of interest. Of course every article and comment your read and post is associated with your login. What a bonanza for advertisers. *cough*Privacy*cough*
Without the electric grid these computers and networks wouldn't be able to do anything, so it's the power companies' fault. Without plastics, metals and iron oxides to make storage media, those files couldn't be stored anywhere, so it's the fault of mining and petrochemical companies. Without air to carry the soundwaves and photons to transmit energy the music would be inaudible and the images would be invisible, so it's the fault of the Universe. Nah, to lawyers, the fault clearly belongs to whoever has the deepest pockets.
I might have more sympathy for George Lucas if you could get the first three chapters on DVD. You know, Digital Video Disc.
Heartiest of congratulations and best wishes, Rob and Kathleen!
Is that an Itanium in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Yes you can get it on DVD, and I highly recommend the deluxe boxed set. For your convenience, I've linked directly to a web retailer where you can buy it.
If the legal problems and deletion policies keep in the direction they are going, pretty soon companies aren't going to be able to have any sort of knowledge base repository at all. Problem resolution from a bug that was filed 17 months ago? Gone. A bug report gets filed again, there's nothing to document that it's a duplicate, developers spend unproductive time fixing a bug that doesn't exist any more. Design documents for your business process automation system? Gone. A key widgetframmiz inspection gets skipped and your product blows up. Your patient record file from your last visit to the hospital? Gone. That operation you had to remove your spleen, what was the condition that required that?
So the companies will exist in an amnesiatic daze about anything that happened more than 12 months ago that only Joe from accounting who retired last year had in his head?
Nice nice article. Despite having used Perl for a number of years and become quite proficient in most parts of the language, I never really "got" the use of map and grep. Zlatanov's two central tips, "read from right to left" and "it's like foreach without an explicit looping condition" finally brought the principles home to me. I can finally read and understand The Schwartzian Transform!
There's no intended implication that Cooper can't deal with programming in the real world, just that his view of organizational change isn't consistent with the Extreme Programming approach. If we could all pick and choose from a variety of organizations that are not dysfunctional in one way or another, or if as software engineers we were able to involve ourselves and influence organizational change in the way Interaction Design espouses, we would be fine.
Cooper's core proposal, when you get right down to it, is reasonable except for the part about requiring the organization to be able to plan up front for things that will change.
To view XP as an abdication that "papers over the cracks" is to discredit the motivations of programmers -- both staff and contract. Extreme Programmers desire to find a way to achieve business goals within real-world constraints, yet also include quality, or "excellence" in development. But the philosophical angle is perhaps best expressed by The Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Contrast Cooper:
How many complex systems has Cooper constructed?
But here's the exchange that really drives it home:
Cooper: Building software isn't like slapping a shack together; it's more like building a 50-story office building or a giant dam.
Beck: I think it's nothing like those. If you build a skyscraper 50 stories high, you can't decide at that point, oh, we need another 50 stories and go jack it all up and put in a bigger foundation.
Cooper: That's precisely my point.
Beck: But in the software world, that's daily business.
Cooper: That's pissing money away and leaving scar tissue.
Zing! Cooper might be right about pissing money, but it's what happens all the time, and Beck and XP have given us tools to deal with it.
How about cellular phone service, with free long distance and unlimited calling, roaming in the entire US? Now how much would you pay? But wait! There's more.... Wireless internet from your phone or wireless PDA? Keep thinking big, you'll get to $230 fast.
Here is an example entitled Identifying Objects: A Case Study and Class Exercise giving an example of waveform rendering on an oscilloscope (see page 5), appropriately enough based on work done at Tektronix. Is that enough of an "engineering problem" for you?
Why yes, this has been done, and you can get it from Oracle, under the name Oracle Internet File System, and I've played with it a bit. Interesting concept, not a very robust implementation, but perhaps it's gotten better since I tried it under 8.1.7? It's kind of neat to be able to mount a drive under windows that's really data in an Oracle table.