unfortunately, you'll find that your test suite becomes bigger and more costly to maintain that the actual software its supposed to test.
I think there are better ways to achieve quality software, and while unit tests do have their place, an over-reliance on them is just too much overhead to justify.
Software is one of the last kind of products where it's still somewhat accepted but people are quickly becoming intolerant to bugs nowadays.
in consumer devices perhaps, but that's a different area to most software. For most software sold, especially to business users, bugs are accepted as one of those things that happen. Now, really buggy software will eventually get replaced but in most cases the important thing is to have a good (or excellent) customer service that responds to, and fixes the bugs. If you have that, your customers will not care so much about bugs that they find. you just need to be responsive, and considerate in your communication with them. Once you have that in place, you'll often find that its an asset to you, the more bugs the customer finds, the more they feel loved. And customers like feeling that you care for their business - especially when its some executive/supervisor reporting them, and some grunt who has to actually use your PoS software. Its how the big names can make such poor enterprise software and still have it selling in billions of dollars a year in maintenance/support payments.
I think I might have just explained how buggy software is good for your business. I feel dirty.
indeed, the target can "continually improve our website services to enhance the customer experience" which means changing the textbox to come after the hidden field screws the scraper's code. And then put it back.
one thing I know is that there are lots of insurance 'supermarket' sites in the UK. They used to screenscrape but now hook into insurers systems in return for a cut. However, there's one insurer that advertises that "you will never find them on comparison websites" (its Directline) and uses this as a selling point to say they're cheaper because they cut out the middleman.
I don't know how they do it, but they're not on those comparison sites.
Similarly, there was a bit of a kerfuffle when one bank decided to let its customers handle their accounts on other bank sites by screenscraping. I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but they no longer offer it.
Assume your socket connections will always work, and don't bother handling errors, throttling or connection requests, its the cheapest, easiest way after all. Its probably not even "too many requests, shut down" but "too many requests, crash". Once there - ship and let your users be damned.
Only in this case, the company found out why you should hire the best devs you can and not the cheapest. If your business is software, you need to treat it like an asset, not a cost.
And this is why GPL exists. Does your co-worker or company care to contribute back to the Linux community? After all, they have benefited greatly from the free stuff they gained in the first place.. it'd only be polite to package, document and release your system after all. (and I'm sure you could get a load of people to help with that, which would not only improve it for you but also get some pretty cheap and powerful advertising for your company too).
You mean, the people lining up their pockets with the profits from selling those materials are now the same people who rig elections to keep themselves in power?
we're still talking about Russia and not America now?
I'm sure Russia has many, many problems but have you been to the less salubrious areas of LA, or Florida? Drug gangs in Florida are quite commonplace, even if they're not quite in-your-face as the Russian gangs are reported to be. There's plenty of deprivation, crime, and political corruption in America to put you off the place - and now they even have internment without trial too!
I understand Manning was never convicted (or tried or that matter) so to say he's an informer is stretching the truth quite a bit. He's a *suspected* informer which is a totally different thing.
Anytime someone is suspected of something and that makes them automatically guilty is the time you have to get your copies of 1984 out and have another read.
That's great, and how do you propose keeping all those passwords secure and synchronized across multiple devices and operating systems, some of which I'm not permitted to install software on?
postit notes of course!
Ok, I use Keepass which is brilliant, and will work on your phone too, so you have no excuse to have a DB of passwords (randomly generated by Keepass itself if necessary). The db and app is tiny and will happily install onto other systems (by copying the keepass binary and the db file) so you only need to find a way to keep your db file updated... personally, I use a usb drive as my passwords don't change that often. If I have to copy it onto a computer that doesn't allow usb... I zip and email it to myself instead.
Its not an insurmountable problem, and the relatively minor inconvenience of being organised with 1 file is a lot less hassle than updating a hundred sites that you used a single compromised password on.
Xmarks is still kicking though, that lets you store passwords and you can encrypt them, not that I use it for passwords.
I was surprised at the language used: the basic code at the side showing the code it was running, complete with gosubs, I did think "WTF", but then I read the rest of the site - particularly the bit "ClubCompy is an innovative new service for kids of all ages to learn about computer programming?" and it all became clear, and took me right back to the old days when I was learning programming using code just like that.
Ah, happy days. I'm old enough now not to be surprised that things come full-circle like this. I'm not sure if this code runs significantly faster than it did on my old 8-bit 4MHz z80-based computer I had at the time though, but hey, this is progress:)
why? there's no reason to stick with a browser anymore, they're completely interchangeable, so if IE9 doesn't rock (or to put it another way, as IE6->8 don't rock) then get yourself Firefox, or Chrome or Safari or Opera. Really easy, and you'll get used to the interface in no time at all - in fact, you might like some of the fancy bits in some of the other browsers and think "why the heck did I ever use IE?"
Results for FF 4.0 beta 8: 469/30/4835 (7837 total). I'd have expected more for my 3 x 2.7Ghz AMD CPU, but the browser I'm using is a beta version, and it does hold up well against the other results people have posted.
Phone Office isn't Office though, itas a cut-down mini-me version. So they can have that almost for free, but the full-blown Office is a different beast (ie a beast). They do have a 64-bit version but I wonder how much of that is actually 64-bit code and not just a ton of 32-bit still in there. By all accounts Office isn't the cleanest, simplest code out there (it has been evolving for years after all).
So, I think a port will be possible, but it'll take a lot of resources - it is, as you say, a un-managed app that requires porting effort, not a recompile.
I think he meant, much of the.NET framework is just a wrapper round the Win32 API, so porting.NET would require porting a huge amount of old native code. I'm sure that's doable by Microsoft's army of coders, but don't assume it'll happen overnight with a re-compile of all your apps.
And besides, a lot of business apps out there are win32/x86 only, they're the ones to worry about. Which I suppose could be part of Microsoft's strategy to make everything.net only.
The NT Kernel might be, even after all this time slapping whatever each release thinks is a useful feature into it, but who cares about that. I think I can guarantee Office will not run on ARM, so its pretty much dead already.
Then there's the reason to run Windows at all - the 3rd party apps that are x86 only (many are not even x86_64 yet) and they won't run either. So all in all, this is just fluff. If you want a low-energy server farm full of ARM CPUs (and who wouldn't!) then you might as well run Linux there - many, many server apps run Linux anyway. If you want ARM on the desktop, don't hold your breath, and if you want ARM mobile.. you already have it, even for WinPhone 7.
So, I'm confused. The ARM share price has done well from the rumour, but we'll see what astounding piece of underwhelm-dent gets revealed at CES.
so really, you'd find the awesomebar truly awesome if it put initial search matches at the top instead of just searching all history and bookmark entries. Fair enough - so stop whining about it and tell them that's what you'd like, then post a link to the bug so we can all click on it and agree its a great idea. Or you could just carry on being whiny and we'll all carry on ignoring you.
Personally, I'd like it to also stop suggesting every visited link in a website, and only suggest the site itself. I think that'd be better for me... but others might not agree.
absolutely - that 40% extra over the "lesser" colleges tend to be because the students tend to come from wealthier families anyway. I wonder what the spread of the increase is across all students? ie - is it that 10 of them become billionaires which brings that average up among all students there?
I have not done the math, but what is the ratio of bus passes sold vs. motor vehicles bought? If more bus passes are sold, under this same notion, that means that people find cars obsolete and that within 18 months, cars will go away and everybody will take the bus. Do you see how silly that sounds?
its not silly though, it only sounds that way because the number of bus passes sold is tiny compared to the number of cars out there. It sounds better if you compare commuters buying rail tickets v those buying road toll passes (or parking passes, or whatever). If the number of rail tickets suddenly rose dramatically (eg if there were free taxis to take you from station to work, or anything else the authorities did to make rail more attractive) then we would say the era of the car was over. Many people would still have them for leisure, but the 2-cars-per-household of today would end, no-one would want to keep a car they had to pay tax and maintenance on when they took the train everywhere.
Lets assume the government started doing something in this area, would you still think the car manufacturers would be a good investment? In our analogy, you can now see how Apple and Google are considered good investments while Microsft is unloved by the stock market.
are you sure? Things aren't as tethered to the PC as you might think, even games like WoW. Considering services like OnLive aren't too bad. You can see the $10 a month incentive for games developers writ large for the future.
And no, not that smart to continually upgrade your smartphone... but who (in the world of people selling you stuff) cares about that. If they can make better margin on a smartphone + contract sale instead of a replacement card, then you can bet which way they're going to be pushing. Besides, the vast majority of people buy fully configured PCs, and replace them when they get old.
the experience of using a PC... stuck at a desk in front of a monitor. Yum.
The smartphone experience on the other hand is not only mobile, but with a bluetooth keyboard (or voice recognition) and the phone plugged into your big TV screen. For the drones in the office, I can't see the PC being replaced anytime soon, but the home casual user - its gone, and for the gamer type in his bedroom, he's got that TV in there already, and for the salesman and manager and marketing types, that smartphone offer is irresistable.
The devices are getting as powerful as PCs anyway, dual-core CPUs and lots of flash RAM with a permanent network connection. These have more power than my old PC had just 5 years ago, and that's the big factor here that make it different this time - you no longer need a PC.
So, although its a self-serving article, don't think that times aren't changing.
Generally the foreign worker isn't paid to come here because of his unique skills (that's just the spin put on the process by the corporations who want more low-paid workers). They get to come here because they are a lot cheaper than the native equivalents, that means they often do not spend all the money to assist the local economy - instead they rent as cheaply as possible (often several people to a single property to save cash), save as much as they can and send it away home.
We see this in the UK, we've had a lot of Polish workers come over to do anything (including a great many construction workers who've seriously undercut the local plumbing/building/handyman economy which isn't such a bad thing as they actually do good jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible...) but they all work here on a 'temporary' basis, living very badly knowing that they can put up with the conditions as the money they save will be worth disproportionally more when they return home.
I see the same with the Indian workers we've brought over, they can't afford to live like I do - we don't pay them enough, so they scrimp and save and send it home.
Ultimately its a short-term gain, but a long-term disaster for the local economy. Not just because the locals are sitting around claiming benefits, but also the skills needed are not being kept up. In the UK, for example, we find ourselves in the position where we want (or need) nuclear power stations but we no longer have the workers who know how to build and maintain them. As a result, we'll be paying French companies for our electricity generation for years to come.
He's probably not racist, so put your own prejudices away for a bit.
When you do find though, is that the generic programmer you get from Indian development shops are the inexperienced ones. There's a very strong hierarchy in these places (and in India in general) which means that once a dev gets experience, he will expect to be promoted to a more senior supervisor/manager/etc position. Once there, coding is not part of his job description, and from what I've found the guys in these positions quickly start to resist being put back in a coding position.
The other issue is that, once you outsource to these dev shops, you never get the same guys twice. So we take junior devs from them, take ages to bring them up to speed, and next time we need them... we get another junior guy. I'm sure the Indian chaps over there are laughing their heads off at us, yet our pointy-haired management keeps on falling for it as all they see if the immediate $$ salary costs.
you assume he knew calculus before he started. In terms of relevance to us today, I see this kind of thing all the time in computing - why bother using the standard mechanism of performing a task when tyou can reinvent the wheel all over again. From the innumerable number of programming languages, to open source projects, to just my co-worker making up his own string class (gah!!)
Sometimes I wonder if its a lack of education (or more likely experience), or just bone-headed stubborness to understand anything that someone else made.
or.. here's a novel idea, ask someone who might know! Like on a website full of intelligent, informative and helpful people who would at least give pointers on where to look and advice to narrow their searching down a little.
Slashdot Mirror
unfortunately, you'll find that your test suite becomes bigger and more costly to maintain that the actual software its supposed to test.
I think there are better ways to achieve quality software, and while unit tests do have their place, an over-reliance on them is just too much overhead to justify.
Software is one of the last kind of products where it's still somewhat accepted but people are quickly becoming intolerant to bugs nowadays.
in consumer devices perhaps, but that's a different area to most software. For most software sold, especially to business users, bugs are accepted as one of those things that happen. Now, really buggy software will eventually get replaced but in most cases the important thing is to have a good (or excellent) customer service that responds to, and fixes the bugs. If you have that, your customers will not care so much about bugs that they find. you just need to be responsive, and considerate in your communication with them. Once you have that in place, you'll often find that its an asset to you, the more bugs the customer finds, the more they feel loved. And customers like feeling that you care for their business - especially when its some executive/supervisor reporting them, and some grunt who has to actually use your PoS software. Its how the big names can make such poor enterprise software and still have it selling in billions of dollars a year in maintenance/support payments.
I think I might have just explained how buggy software is good for your business. I feel dirty.
indeed, the target can "continually improve our website services to enhance the customer experience" which means changing the textbox to come after the hidden field screws the scraper's code. And then put it back.
one thing I know is that there are lots of insurance 'supermarket' sites in the UK. They used to screenscrape but now hook into insurers systems in return for a cut. However, there's one insurer that advertises that "you will never find them on comparison websites" (its Directline) and uses this as a selling point to say they're cheaper because they cut out the middleman.
I don't know how they do it, but they're not on those comparison sites.
Similarly, there was a bit of a kerfuffle when one bank decided to let its customers handle their accounts on other bank sites by screenscraping. I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but they no longer offer it.
and I can see job openings for lawyers skilled in the art of claiming website copyright violations :)
its called cheap, crappy developers.
Assume your socket connections will always work, and don't bother handling errors, throttling or connection requests, its the cheapest, easiest way after all. Its probably not even "too many requests, shut down" but "too many requests, crash". Once there - ship and let your users be damned.
Only in this case, the company found out why you should hire the best devs you can and not the cheapest. If your business is software, you need to treat it like an asset, not a cost.
And this is why GPL exists. Does your co-worker or company care to contribute back to the Linux community? After all, they have benefited greatly from the free stuff they gained in the first place.. it'd only be polite to package, document and release your system after all. (and I'm sure you could get a load of people to help with that, which would not only improve it for you but also get some pretty cheap and powerful advertising for your company too).
You mean, the people lining up their pockets with the profits from selling those materials are now the same people who rig elections to keep themselves in power?
we're still talking about Russia and not America now?
I'm sure Russia has many, many problems but have you been to the less salubrious areas of LA, or Florida? Drug gangs in Florida are quite commonplace, even if they're not quite in-your-face as the Russian gangs are reported to be. There's plenty of deprivation, crime, and political corruption in America to put you off the place - and now they even have internment without trial too!
I understand Manning was never convicted (or tried or that matter) so to say he's an informer is stretching the truth quite a bit. He's a *suspected* informer which is a totally different thing.
Anytime someone is suspected of something and that makes them automatically guilty is the time you have to get your copies of 1984 out and have another read.
That's great, and how do you propose keeping all those passwords secure and synchronized across multiple devices and operating systems, some of which I'm not permitted to install software on?
postit notes of course!
Ok, I use Keepass which is brilliant, and will work on your phone too, so you have no excuse to have a DB of passwords (randomly generated by Keepass itself if necessary). The db and app is tiny and will happily install onto other systems (by copying the keepass binary and the db file) so you only need to find a way to keep your db file updated... personally, I use a usb drive as my passwords don't change that often. If I have to copy it onto a computer that doesn't allow usb... I zip and email it to myself instead.
Its not an insurmountable problem, and the relatively minor inconvenience of being organised with 1 file is a lot less hassle than updating a hundred sites that you used a single compromised password on.
Xmarks is still kicking though, that lets you store passwords and you can encrypt them, not that I use it for passwords.
So now that the asshole of the internet is down, perhaps we can all piece together whatever is left of our lives and move out of the basement.
Sorry to piss on your cornflakes, but Facebook is still up.
yeah, mind the grass.
I was surprised at the language used: the basic code at the side showing the code it was running, complete with gosubs, I did think "WTF", but then I read the rest of the site - particularly the bit "ClubCompy is an innovative new service for kids of all ages to learn about computer programming?" and it all became clear, and took me right back to the old days when I was learning programming using code just like that.
Ah, happy days. I'm old enough now not to be surprised that things come full-circle like this. I'm not sure if this code runs significantly faster than it did on my old 8-bit 4MHz z80-based computer I had at the time though, but hey, this is progress :)
I'm praying IE9 will rock.
why? there's no reason to stick with a browser anymore, they're completely interchangeable, so if IE9 doesn't rock (or to put it another way, as IE6->8 don't rock) then get yourself Firefox, or Chrome or Safari or Opera. Really easy, and you'll get used to the interface in no time at all - in fact, you might like some of the fancy bits in some of the other browsers and think "why the heck did I ever use IE?"
Results for FF 4.0 beta 8: 469/30/4835 (7837 total). I'd have expected more for my 3 x 2.7Ghz AMD CPU, but the browser I'm using is a beta version, and it does hold up well against the other results people have posted.
Phone Office isn't Office though, itas a cut-down mini-me version. So they can have that almost for free, but the full-blown Office is a different beast (ie a beast). They do have a 64-bit version but I wonder how much of that is actually 64-bit code and not just a ton of 32-bit still in there. By all accounts Office isn't the cleanest, simplest code out there (it has been evolving for years after all).
So, I think a port will be possible, but it'll take a lot of resources - it is, as you say, a un-managed app that requires porting effort, not a recompile.
I think he meant, much of the .NET framework is just a wrapper round the Win32 API, so porting .NET would require porting a huge amount of old native code. I'm sure that's doable by Microsoft's army of coders, but don't assume it'll happen overnight with a re-compile of all your apps.
And besides, a lot of business apps out there are win32/x86 only, they're the ones to worry about. Which I suppose could be part of Microsoft's strategy to make everything .net only.
The NT Kernel might be, even after all this time slapping whatever each release thinks is a useful feature into it, but who cares about that. I think I can guarantee Office will not run on ARM, so its pretty much dead already.
Then there's the reason to run Windows at all - the 3rd party apps that are x86 only (many are not even x86_64 yet) and they won't run either. So all in all, this is just fluff. If you want a low-energy server farm full of ARM CPUs (and who wouldn't!) then you might as well run Linux there - many, many server apps run Linux anyway. If you want ARM on the desktop, don't hold your breath, and if you want ARM mobile .. you already have it, even for WinPhone 7.
So, I'm confused. The ARM share price has done well from the rumour, but we'll see what astounding piece of underwhelm-dent gets revealed at CES.
so really, you'd find the awesomebar truly awesome if it put initial search matches at the top instead of just searching all history and bookmark entries. Fair enough - so stop whining about it and tell them that's what you'd like, then post a link to the bug so we can all click on it and agree its a great idea. Or you could just carry on being whiny and we'll all carry on ignoring you.
Personally, I'd like it to also stop suggesting every visited link in a website, and only suggest the site itself. I think that'd be better for me... but others might not agree.
absolutely - that 40% extra over the "lesser" colleges tend to be because the students tend to come from wealthier families anyway. I wonder what the spread of the increase is across all students? ie - is it that 10 of them become billionaires which brings that average up among all students there?
I have not done the math, but what is the ratio of bus passes sold vs. motor vehicles bought? If more bus passes are sold, under this same notion, that means that people find cars obsolete and that within 18 months, cars will go away and everybody will take the bus. Do you see how silly that sounds?
its not silly though, it only sounds that way because the number of bus passes sold is tiny compared to the number of cars out there. It sounds better if you compare commuters buying rail tickets v those buying road toll passes (or parking passes, or whatever). If the number of rail tickets suddenly rose dramatically (eg if there were free taxis to take you from station to work, or anything else the authorities did to make rail more attractive) then we would say the era of the car was over. Many people would still have them for leisure, but the 2-cars-per-household of today would end, no-one would want to keep a car they had to pay tax and maintenance on when they took the train everywhere.
Lets assume the government started doing something in this area, would you still think the car manufacturers would be a good investment? In our analogy, you can now see how Apple and Google are considered good investments while Microsft is unloved by the stock market.
are you sure? Things aren't as tethered to the PC as you might think, even games like WoW. Considering services like OnLive aren't too bad. You can see the $10 a month incentive for games developers writ large for the future.
And no, not that smart to continually upgrade your smartphone... but who (in the world of people selling you stuff) cares about that. If they can make better margin on a smartphone + contract sale instead of a replacement card, then you can bet which way they're going to be pushing. Besides, the vast majority of people buy fully configured PCs, and replace them when they get old.
the experience of using a PC... stuck at a desk in front of a monitor. Yum.
The smartphone experience on the other hand is not only mobile, but with a bluetooth keyboard (or voice recognition) and the phone plugged into your big TV screen. For the drones in the office, I can't see the PC being replaced anytime soon, but the home casual user - its gone, and for the gamer type in his bedroom, he's got that TV in there already, and for the salesman and manager and marketing types, that smartphone offer is irresistable.
The devices are getting as powerful as PCs anyway, dual-core CPUs and lots of flash RAM with a permanent network connection. These have more power than my old PC had just 5 years ago, and that's the big factor here that make it different this time - you no longer need a PC.
So, although its a self-serving article, don't think that times aren't changing.
Generally the foreign worker isn't paid to come here because of his unique skills (that's just the spin put on the process by the corporations who want more low-paid workers). They get to come here because they are a lot cheaper than the native equivalents, that means they often do not spend all the money to assist the local economy - instead they rent as cheaply as possible (often several people to a single property to save cash), save as much as they can and send it away home.
We see this in the UK, we've had a lot of Polish workers come over to do anything (including a great many construction workers who've seriously undercut the local plumbing/building/handyman economy which isn't such a bad thing as they actually do good jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible...) but they all work here on a 'temporary' basis, living very badly knowing that they can put up with the conditions as the money they save will be worth disproportionally more when they return home.
I see the same with the Indian workers we've brought over, they can't afford to live like I do - we don't pay them enough, so they scrimp and save and send it home.
Ultimately its a short-term gain, but a long-term disaster for the local economy. Not just because the locals are sitting around claiming benefits, but also the skills needed are not being kept up. In the UK, for example, we find ourselves in the position where we want (or need) nuclear power stations but we no longer have the workers who know how to build and maintain them. As a result, we'll be paying French companies for our electricity generation for years to come.
He's probably not racist, so put your own prejudices away for a bit.
When you do find though, is that the generic programmer you get from Indian development shops are the inexperienced ones. There's a very strong hierarchy in these places (and in India in general) which means that once a dev gets experience, he will expect to be promoted to a more senior supervisor/manager/etc position. Once there, coding is not part of his job description, and from what I've found the guys in these positions quickly start to resist being put back in a coding position.
The other issue is that, once you outsource to these dev shops, you never get the same guys twice. So we take junior devs from them, take ages to bring them up to speed, and next time we need them... we get another junior guy. I'm sure the Indian chaps over there are laughing their heads off at us, yet our pointy-haired management keeps on falling for it as all they see if the immediate $$ salary costs.
you assume he knew calculus before he started. In terms of relevance to us today, I see this kind of thing all the time in computing - why bother using the standard mechanism of performing a task when tyou can reinvent the wheel all over again. From the innumerable number of programming languages, to open source projects, to just my co-worker making up his own string class (gah!!)
Sometimes I wonder if its a lack of education (or more likely experience), or just bone-headed stubborness to understand anything that someone else made.
or.. here's a novel idea, ask someone who might know! Like on a website full of intelligent, informative and helpful people who would at least give pointers on where to look and advice to narrow their searching down a little.
Hmm. Not here then :)