There is a great deal of very widely used and powerful software out there that is not a Microsoft product, yet there is incessant chatter about when such-and-such MS app might be ported to Linux. Here's a hint: That's playing on microsoft's terms. If all O/S vendors depended solely on MS to supply useful applications to make their systems go they'd be in a world of hurt. Thankfully, there's Adobe, Oracle, Borland, BEA, Autodesk, Symantec, Intuit, and dozens of others that make quality business-critical applications. Linux fans would benefit themselves and the world much more by encourage those companies to support Linux, rather than perpetuating the MS software everywhere world.
I think the recent attention given to portable.NET is a case in point -- what's the attraction of putting so much free effort into a system that is barely out of vaporware and tied to MS when there are existing software systems that do the same things, and have been doing them reliably for years on multiple platforms? The phenomenon is hard to fathom.
So they've gathered a lot of requirements and done a lot design, but, as the lady says, "Where's the beef?" Why do all this work to replace open source tools that already exist? Why not take those tools and contribute back to them, or if the project owners don't like the contributions, take the things they like and build from there?
Perhaps this from their web page: "The Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory is providing $860,000 of funding for Software Carpentry, which is being administered by Code Sourcery, LLC." And this: CodeSourcery also provides training and strategic consulting services for companies considering the adoption of free or open source software.
Why use the MIT License? Why develop in Python? Why require that the submissions to the design competition not contain any source code? They require a language but not any source? Am I being too cynical in seeing how, after all this contributed design, coding, testing, etc is done, at taxpayer expense, Code Sourcery is now in a tremendous position as the sole-source solution for support and training to the shops that choose to use these tools? And to notice that choosing the MIT license allows them to take and wrap up all the source code into their products and not give back anything? These are questions that either are in the FAQ but not clearly answered, or not spoken about. Even the SC site itself has been retired and archived.
Thanks, I'll stick with XUnit, Bugzilla, cvs (and subversion when it's ready. For build config tools, well, if you do cross-platform C and C++, then autoconf or its successor, but that's just for one language and set of development requirements.
I'll be interested to see if anything widely used comes out of this exercise. So far, of the all the tools implementations promised for "Summer of 2001", we have QMTest 1.0. The rest? Late and unfinished.
> If the programmers I hire can't handle slight differences in C++ brace placement, I need to find better programmers!
You've never actually written code as part of a large team using source control have you? Try figuring out the diffs between the code you have just modified and the code a fellow programmer just checked in after his favorite editor just automagically realigned all the braces! Few, if any, version control tools can automagically resolve that kind of conflict for you, so you have to do it yourself, or else pull the new version to a different location, re-re-align the braces, and do the diff then. Ugh. Pick a brace (and space/tab!) style, preferably one in common use and documented, and stick with it. It's not about the readability of one person's code, it's about the compatibility of changes across time and team members.
Sorry, it's been tried. I live in a complex that was built brand-new with built-in broadband connections to every unit (for an extra cost turned on, of course) but the company that provided it (and the service for a number of other similar complexes) went kablooey in the Spring of 2000 in the dot-com crash.
No I didn't get any warning from ReFlex Communications, although there were 3 days between when they filed and when they shut off the service.
Too bad, it was pretty sweet and a very good deal.
For the love of Dijkstra please don't use Hungarian style. There's a lovely common style in linux/Documentation/CodingStyle Which references (and bashes) the GNU Coding Standards. Either one of those could be a good starting point, once you resolve the fights you'll get into over style.
Indeed, one of the roles of the Soyuz lifeboat (and the Progess) is to boost the ISS. Mission managers decided to use the shuttle in order to save consumables on those spacecraft. After all, the shuttle was headed home anyway, but they need the Russian craft for other things for a while.
As for the Russian modules, their propulsion gear was strictly for boost and initial docking and attitude control until the other modules arrived. The Progress couldn't tap into any residual fuel because there's no piping to hook up (that I know of)
Got a bite! Solar cells were the bait, but what really does it take to generate electricy? There are many ways to do it that are far more sustainable than fossil fuels. Wind and geothermal are possibilities, but we have at hand already in use a near-perfect H2 source: hydroelectric power. Water, electricity, all in one place. With a bit of thought beyond the petroleum cultural assumptions there's a great deal to like about fuel cells.
The whole idea of fuel cell technology is that hydrogen is cheap, clean, and renewable. Petroleum products like propane are limited, non-renewable resources. As they become more scarce and harder to extract, prices will continue to rise. H2 can made cheaply from seawater and solar cells. Burning hydrocarbons generates greenhouse gases and other pollutants -- bad enough outside, completely unacceptable inside -- too much CO2 or worse CO and you're down for the count.
1px square images can be effectively disabled in Mozilla by adding the following to your userContent.css file:
IMG[height="1"][width="1"], IMG[height="1px"][width="1px"]
{display: none !important;}
This file is in the chrome subdirectory of your person profile. It's a bit of stylesheet that overrides everything else and prevents mozilla from loading any 1x1 image. OK so some pages where webauthors might be using these as spacers might display a bit. Boohoo.
It doesn't cost $400m to launch a shuttle. The incremental per-launch cost is $150 million US. Other numbers that attempt to amortize the total cost of the program and non-shuttle-specific support facilities come up with higher numbers but they are suspect. Another false estimate comes from taking the total shuttle budget for a given fiscal year and dividing it by the number of launches. Of course NASA is a political agency so depending on what their policy goal is you'll hear different numbers from, but in this article there is no source stated for the cost figure.
See SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION COSTS in the sci.space FAQ controversy section.
The Eclipse Project got a lot of buzz at the last OOPSLA conference. A follow-on to IBM's VAJ, it's intended to be a programmer's workbench and include current tools like a refactoring browser, continuous integration. Too bad it seems slashdotted.
Too bad nobody took advantange of this update to actually fix some of the defects in the current version of slashcode. The misattributed comments defect, or #of posts in the threshold on the dropdown not updating, for example. Or maybe the not-so-uncommon situation where you can't log in but the only indication that there's a problem is that instead of getting your customized page you get the default slashdot page, or maybe This Defect
The Patch Maker story ran in mozillaZine on Sept 27 -- quite a long time ago and there was quite a lot of discussion there, why couldn't slashdot have posted that link then?
I suggest if you want to follow Mozilla news, go to mozillaZine and along the right-hand navigation click on the "Add Sidebar Panel" item (I'd make a link here but it needs more than a URL to make it go). Or go to one of the newsgroups, or watch the top items on Bugzilla (a great source for what's on the developer's mind). There's also This RDF newsfeed for top newsgroup threads. Am I making my point? Don't waste your time at mozillaquest, go to the real deal.
Enhydra first came to my attention almost a year ago when the company I was working for at the time was looking at JSP vs. XML for wireless and web presentation development. The folks at Lutris made no secret of their disdain for JSP and J2EE technology generally and their preference for their proprietary XML generating technology for web applications. There's an article about it at IBM's developerworks website at Objects, objects everywhere
and another even more relevant one at JSP technology -- friend or foe?
At this point, Lutris has too much ground to make up against the J2EE server leaders, and no one is jumping onto their proprietary XML binding bandwagon, so Enhydra needs a way to distinguish itself from other Java application servers to get attention. My own evaluation of Enhydra gave me serious reservations with its architecture, including some issues around its scalability. Pointing to Sun and crying foul over the J2EE licensing issues (and that's all it is: an spat over whether or not their product can have the official J2EE compliant label or not), is just poor form.
Face it, functional program languages do not represent real-world processes in ways that non-technical (particularly non-mathematical) people think, object-oriented languages do. Now any programmer worth his salt can, given sufficient resources, do the mapping of user requirements to functional constructs just fine, but for business application programming, it's just much more effective to say "the Ledger object sums all the values in the Activity column" to a business user than "the accumulate function is mapped over the list of transaction elements"
Brooks, Fred, The Mythical Man-Month -- Because it woke the world up to how to build big systems.
Schneier, Bruce Applied Cryptography -- Because libraries should have the books THEY don't want you to read.
DeMarco, Tom, and Timothy Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams -- How programmers working in teams actually get things done.
Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, Design Patterns -- Landmark book on developing with objects
Knuth, Donald, The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth -- Landmark classic
Alexander, Christopher A Pattern Language, ChristopherAlexander, et. al., and Timeless Way of Building -- Thinking about programs that people can actually use.
Yes! The first time I started using a PalmOS gadget I noticed that, and I know another person who is affected by it. The 'Lefty' hack would be great, if more programs would support it but so few do. As these things become more popular the manufacturers will need to start incorporating various ergo and disabled-friendly features, and the ability to designate the scrollbars on the left side is a start -- akin to a lefty mouse option, which most windowing systems have supported from the beginning.
I've taught myself, when possible, to scroll with the keypad with my right thumb, (or even the left) which helps some.
One great thing that Graffiti has freed me from is ink and pencil smudges on my left thumb heel. And the fact that it doesn't require you to move left-to-right across the surface to string letters together. Hooray for small victories!
I'm a former ReFlex customer and I have one of their little boxes, a Tut Systems LR100T but it's not really DSL, it's proprietary. I don't really have much use for it, but then again it might be worth something to someone.
Also, the apartment complexes where they installed the services have (I understand) a pretty setup in a rack somewhere on the property. Anyone know what happened to that?
There's no doubt that the psuedo-talented dot-com chaff are the biggest part of this. Companies hired whomever they could at outrageous rates with little regard for true skills, and the credulous greedy masses believed the "we'll all be rich enough to buy our own tropical island" hype. And I'm sure those folks earning six figures but saving nothing are getting a necessary lesson in economic realities. And with no support system, either private (friends and families) or public (homeless shelters nearly bankrupt because the hugely overpaid never had the compassion to toss them even a measly crumb of a donation), I'm not crying crocodile tears for them.
However, it's not all about the underqualified and overpaid getting what they deserve. Last week I received a resume from a man who'd been laid off when his company was bought out by a foreign company, and the new owners laid off all the programmers. This programmer had been with the company 7 years, prior to that had done some top-notch work for extremely desirable companies. He has a Masters in Computer Science, four patents to his name, and some twenty years in the industry. I'd love for my company to hire him, and I'd love to work for/with him. But it's nuts that this kind of skill is discarded so easily.
Find shelter in the old economy and hold on, it's getting to be a helluva bumpy ride.
Cross-platform, IDE that runs on Linux (and anywhere else Java runs), go with Java and Borland JBuilder. I've been using JBuilder 4 for some time, and 5 is out but I've not had a chance to try it. It's a free download. Also you could try Forte from Sun. It's pretty cool but you need a lot of horsepower to get the most benefit out of it.
Finally, learn to program without an IDE. Seriously. A text editor, a copy of the Ant Build Tool and you're good to go.
Puuuhleeeze. Suck it up and get some new clothes, at least they're not asking you to wear a suit & tie or uniform. You're a smart creative guy right? That's why you're into technology. This little issue of finding comfortable, fun clothing that meets an arbitrary and pointless dress code isn't beyond your analytical and investigative skills is it? Hey guess what... Dr. Martens are dress-code compliant, so are Aloha shirts, baggy raver pants, and a whole spectrum of self-expressive dresswear that you probably haven't thought about yet. Don't whine, innovate.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a great deal of very widely used and powerful software out there that is not a Microsoft product, yet there is incessant chatter about when such-and-such MS app might be ported to Linux. Here's a hint: That's playing on microsoft's terms. If all O/S vendors depended solely on MS to supply useful applications to make their systems go they'd be in a world of hurt. Thankfully, there's Adobe, Oracle, Borland, BEA, Autodesk, Symantec, Intuit, and dozens of others that make quality business-critical applications. Linux fans would benefit themselves and the world much more by encourage those companies to support Linux, rather than perpetuating the MS software everywhere world.
.NET is a case in point -- what's the attraction of putting so much free effort into a system that is barely out of vaporware and tied to MS when there are existing software systems that do the same things, and have been doing them reliably for years on multiple platforms? The phenomenon is hard to fathom.
I think the recent attention given to portable
So they've gathered a lot of requirements and done a lot design, but, as the lady says, "Where's the beef?" Why do all this work to replace open source tools that already exist? Why not take those tools and contribute back to them, or if the project owners don't like the contributions, take the things they like and build from there?
Perhaps this from their web page: "The Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory is providing $860,000 of funding for Software Carpentry, which is being administered by Code Sourcery, LLC." And this: CodeSourcery also provides training and strategic consulting services for companies considering the adoption of free or open source software.
Why use the MIT License? Why develop in Python? Why require that the submissions to the design competition not contain any source code? They require a language but not any source? Am I being too cynical in seeing how, after all this contributed design, coding, testing, etc is done, at taxpayer expense, Code Sourcery is now in a tremendous position as the sole-source solution for support and training to the shops that choose to use these tools? And to notice that choosing the MIT license allows them to take and wrap up all the source code into their products and not give back anything? These are questions that either are in the FAQ but not clearly answered, or not spoken about. Even the SC site itself has been retired and archived.
Thanks, I'll stick with XUnit, Bugzilla, cvs (and subversion when it's ready. For build config tools, well, if you do cross-platform C and C++, then autoconf or its successor, but that's just for one language and set of development requirements.
I'll be interested to see if anything widely used comes out of this exercise. So far, of the all the tools implementations promised for "Summer of 2001", we have QMTest 1.0. The rest? Late and unfinished.
> If the programmers I hire can't handle slight differences in C++ brace placement, I need to find better programmers!
You've never actually written code as part of a large team using source control have you? Try figuring out the diffs between the code you have just modified and the code a fellow programmer just checked in after his favorite editor just automagically realigned all the braces! Few, if any, version control tools can automagically resolve that kind of conflict for you, so you have to do it yourself, or else pull the new version to a different location, re-re-align the braces, and do the diff then. Ugh. Pick a brace (and space/tab!) style, preferably one in common use and documented, and stick with it. It's not about the readability of one person's code, it's about the compatibility of changes across time and team members.
Sorry, it's been tried. I live in a complex that was built brand-new with built-in broadband connections to every unit (for an extra cost turned on, of course) but the company that provided it (and the service for a number of other similar complexes) went kablooey in the Spring of 2000 in the dot-com crash.
No I didn't get any warning from ReFlex Communications, although there were 3 days between when they filed and when they shut off the service.
Too bad, it was pretty sweet and a very good deal.
For the love of Dijkstra please don't use Hungarian style. There's a lovely common style in linux/Documentation/CodingStyle Which references (and bashes) the GNU Coding Standards. Either one of those could be a good starting point, once you resolve the fights you'll get into over style.
Indeed, one of the roles of the Soyuz lifeboat (and the Progess) is to boost the ISS. Mission managers decided to use the shuttle in order to save consumables on those spacecraft. After all, the shuttle was headed home anyway, but they need the Russian craft for other things for a while.
As for the Russian modules, their propulsion gear was strictly for boost and initial docking and attitude control until the other modules arrived. The Progress couldn't tap into any residual fuel because there's no piping to hook up (that I know of)
Got a bite! Solar cells were the bait, but what really does it take to generate electricy? There are many ways to do it that are far more sustainable than fossil fuels. Wind and geothermal are possibilities, but we have at hand already in use a near-perfect H2 source: hydroelectric power. Water, electricity, all in one place. With a bit of thought beyond the petroleum cultural assumptions there's a great deal to like about fuel cells.
The whole idea of fuel cell technology is that hydrogen is cheap, clean, and renewable. Petroleum products like propane are limited, non-renewable resources. As they become more scarce and harder to extract, prices will continue to rise. H2 can made cheaply from seawater and solar cells. Burning hydrocarbons generates greenhouse gases and other pollutants -- bad enough outside, completely unacceptable inside -- too much CO2 or worse CO and you're down for the count.
Here's a bit on the basic science of the technology: What is a Fuel Cell?
As an aside, is it just me or does anyone else get a "SecureIIS application firewall security alert" on this animation URL?
1px square images can be effectively disabled in Mozilla by adding the following to your userContent.css file:
IMG[height="1"][width="1"], IMG[height="1px"][width="1px"]
{display: none !important;}
This file is in the chrome subdirectory of your person profile. It's a bit of stylesheet that overrides everything else and prevents mozilla from loading any 1x1 image. OK so some pages where webauthors might be using these as spacers might display a bit. Boohoo.
It doesn't cost $400m to launch a shuttle. The incremental per-launch cost is $150 million US. Other numbers that attempt to amortize the total cost of the program and non-shuttle-specific support facilities come up with higher numbers but they are suspect. Another false estimate comes from taking the total shuttle budget for a given fiscal year and dividing it by the number of launches. Of course NASA is a political agency so depending on what their policy goal is you'll hear different numbers from, but in this article there is no source stated for the cost figure.
See SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION COSTS in the sci.space FAQ controversy section.
The Eclipse Project got a lot of buzz at the last OOPSLA conference. A follow-on to IBM's VAJ, it's intended to be a programmer's workbench and include current tools like a refactoring browser, continuous integration. Too bad it seems slashdotted.
Too bad nobody took advantange of this update to actually fix some of the defects in the current version of slashcode. The misattributed comments defect, or #of posts in the threshold on the dropdown not updating, for example. Or maybe the not-so-uncommon situation where you can't log in but the only indication that there's a problem is that instead of getting your customized page you get the default slashdot page, or maybe This Defect
- The math archives WWW Server at the University of Tennessee
- Are You Ready? quizzes to help you assess your ability and progress
Hope this helps!The Patch Maker story ran in mozillaZine on Sept 27 -- quite a long time ago and there was quite a lot of discussion there, why couldn't slashdot have posted that link then?
I suggest if you want to follow Mozilla news, go to mozillaZine and along the right-hand navigation click on the "Add Sidebar Panel" item (I'd make a link here but it needs more than a URL to make it go). Or go to one of the newsgroups, or watch the top items on Bugzilla (a great source for what's on the developer's mind). There's also This RDF newsfeed for top newsgroup threads. Am I making my point? Don't waste your time at mozillaquest, go to the real deal.
At this point, Lutris has too much ground to make up against the J2EE server leaders, and no one is jumping onto their proprietary XML binding bandwagon, so Enhydra needs a way to distinguish itself from other Java application servers to get attention. My own evaluation of Enhydra gave me serious reservations with its architecture, including some issues around its scalability. Pointing to Sun and crying foul over the J2EE licensing issues (and that's all it is: an spat over whether or not their product can have the official J2EE compliant label or not), is just poor form.
Face it, functional program languages do not represent real-world processes in ways that non-technical (particularly non-mathematical) people think, object-oriented languages do. Now any programmer worth his salt can, given sufficient resources, do the mapping of user requirements to functional constructs just fine, but for business application programming, it's just much more effective to say "the Ledger object sums all the values in the Activity column" to a business user than "the accumulate function is mapped over the list of transaction elements"
Brooks, Fred, The Mythical Man-Month -- Because it woke the world up to how to build big systems.
Schneier, Bruce Applied Cryptography -- Because libraries should have the books THEY don't want you to read.
DeMarco, Tom, and Timothy Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams -- How programmers working in teams actually get things done.
Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, Design Patterns -- Landmark book on developing with objects
Knuth, Donald, The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth -- Landmark classic
Alexander, Christopher A Pattern Language, ChristopherAlexander, et. al., and Timeless Way of Building -- Thinking about programs that people can actually use.
Yes! The first time I started using a PalmOS gadget I noticed that, and I know another person who is affected by it. The 'Lefty' hack would be great, if more programs would support it but so few do. As these things become more popular the manufacturers will need to start incorporating various ergo and disabled-friendly features, and the ability to designate the scrollbars on the left side is a start -- akin to a lefty mouse option, which most windowing systems have supported from the beginning.
I've taught myself, when possible, to scroll with the keypad with my right thumb, (or even the left) which helps some.
One great thing that Graffiti has freed me from is ink and pencil smudges on my left thumb heel. And the fact that it doesn't require you to move left-to-right across the surface to string letters together. Hooray for small victories!
I'm a former ReFlex customer and I have one of their little boxes, a Tut Systems LR100T but it's not really DSL, it's proprietary. I don't really have much use for it, but then again it might be worth something to someone.
Also, the apartment complexes where they installed the services have (I understand) a pretty setup in a rack somewhere on the property. Anyone know what happened to that?
There's a nice little thread a FuckedCompany
In Mozilla, in your personal profile directory is a subdirectory named chrome. In it is a file name userContent.css. Add the following lines:
IMG[height="1"][width="1"], IMG[height="1"][width="1"] {display: none !important;}
There's no doubt that the psuedo-talented dot-com chaff are the biggest part of this. Companies hired whomever they could at outrageous rates with little regard for true skills, and the credulous greedy masses believed the "we'll all be rich enough to buy our own tropical island" hype. And I'm sure those folks earning six figures but saving nothing are getting a necessary lesson in economic realities. And with no support system, either private (friends and families) or public (homeless shelters nearly bankrupt because the hugely overpaid never had the compassion to toss them even a measly crumb of a donation), I'm not crying crocodile tears for them.
However, it's not all about the underqualified and overpaid getting what they deserve. Last week I received a resume from a man who'd been laid off when his company was bought out by a foreign company, and the new owners laid off all the programmers. This programmer had been with the company 7 years, prior to that had done some top-notch work for extremely desirable companies. He has a Masters in Computer Science, four patents to his name, and some twenty years in the industry. I'd love for my company to hire him, and I'd love to work for/with him. But it's nuts that this kind of skill is discarded so easily.
Find shelter in the old economy and hold on, it's getting to be a helluva bumpy ride.
Cross-platform, IDE that runs on Linux (and anywhere else Java runs), go with Java and Borland JBuilder. I've been using JBuilder 4 for some time, and 5 is out but I've not had a chance to try it. It's a free download. Also you could try Forte from Sun. It's pretty cool but you need a lot of horsepower to get the most benefit out of it.
Finally, learn to program without an IDE. Seriously. A text editor, a copy of the Ant Build Tool and you're good to go.
Puuuhleeeze. Suck it up and get some new clothes, at least they're not asking you to wear a suit & tie or uniform. You're a smart creative guy right? That's why you're into technology. This little issue of finding comfortable, fun clothing that meets an arbitrary and pointless dress code isn't beyond your analytical and investigative skills is it? Hey guess what ... Dr. Martens are dress-code compliant, so are Aloha shirts, baggy raver pants, and a whole spectrum of self-expressive dresswear that you probably haven't thought about yet. Don't whine, innovate.
Something simple yet beautiful that isn't new and obscure: F=ma