if the world was forced to switch to IPv6 tomorrow, I'm sure slashdot and all the other websites out there could migrate their stuff in no time.
Me, on the other hand, would have a great deal of trouble. Mainly because my home router doesn't support it and I can't find a decent (and cheap-ish) one to replace it that does.
they didn't partner with MS, their tech was bought by Homeland security to help filter documents relating to potential terrorists, MS saw what the tech did and suddenly.. the next version of Word came out with exactly the same technology in it. The original judge awarded them $40m for 'intentional patent infringement'.
According to the court: In court documents, Judge Leonard Davis revealed a "particularly damaging" Microsoft internal e-mail that not only acknowledged i4i's patent (No. 5,787,449), but listed the patent number and stated Word would make i4i's technology "obsolete."
oh no, this is one of those rare cases where MS is well out of order. They blatently stole the technology developed by i4i, and although I too hate software patents and patent trolls, this time the company is (well, was, until MS destroyed their legit business) in the right.
That they sell nothing now doesn't mean they weren't a good, small startup company once.
firstly, they don't always. Sure, they use a lot of parts made by Ford factories. But they also use a lot of parts made by 3rd parties under contract to them. Fair enough, its still Ford branded.
But, they use tyres made by Pirelli, and sound systems made by Sony to name 2.
In this case, if Ford was acting Apple, you wouldn't be allowed to use any new parts made by independent parties, or fuel made by anyone other than their (premium) approved manufacturer. That's not even the full problem here - in this case you're not even allowed to play some CDs on the entertainment system if it wasn't on the approved list of music, that you had to purchase from the manufacturer dealership!
And before you think that's fair and well, its their system, they can dictate these terms in order to keep the quality up, imagine if Steve Jobs decides that the only music permissible was Country and Western, or some nice male voice choir marching songs.
ahem, ok - I read this article on ArsTechnica about QML, the author describes an app he's written that was partically all QML and "It was a weekend project that required surprisingly little effort. These kinds of applications are trivially easy to make with Qt.
Ok, he hasn't done the full write up yet, but there's enough tease in that article to make you think QT is going places.
there are 'higher-level' GUIs written in opengl too - Plib's PUI for example or other 'game' programming environments. Its easy to reuse their code for LoB GUIS, and you can add some great effects added in there when needed too:)
then there has to be a middle ground - perhaps a reduced functionality system with additional time & services contract afterwards for modifications, enhancements and bugfixes to bring it up to what the customer wanted, whilst still giving them reassurance that they will be delivered a reasonable system.
Alternatively, enter into a small contract for a system to gauge the competency of the supplier, then increase the size of system after they've shown they can deliver. Building trust with suppliers rather than dropping each one for the lowest bidder each time works wonders.
I do like requirements traceability - but not to the level most of these things go to - paragraphs in a document is too fine grained. I'd say tracked in a bug-tracking system is fine - you only need to know which 'bug' is fixed by which bit of code after all, once you go beyond that... you're spending too much effort in process.
a colleague came to us saying how crap DOORS was. We were persuaded to use Serena Dimensions for a new project, after using it for 6 months, he was heard to say that he now realises DOORs wasn't that bad.
I guess being poked in the eye with something sharp doesn't seem so bad when the poky thing starts on your balls.
In my experience this *never* happens. Even for the little project with a 1-page document describing what the customer wants, I have scratched my head, phoned the business analyst at the customer, asked "wha?" and received a different requirement from that written down. Fortunately, in that case, we had an agile enough methodology that I could deliver what they actually wanted.
Now, for the 3,000 requirement document we receive for another project, there was no way in hell that every requirement would mesh perfectly with every other one. There were inconsistencies, duplicates that slightly varied. 100s of clarification requests later, we found the clarifications often conflicted with other requirements in the original document. And then, we received the 500 requirement change-notification document and we had to start all over again. Oh, I forgot the bit where we did user workshops and found the requirements didn't match what the user needed. And in the end we nearly got sued anyway because we didn't deliver to spec - even though that spec contradicted itself too often.
All in all, formal processes for requirements management are severely lacking in technical business analysis today. To the point where I know that its pointless trying to work within those frameworks. There are better methods that involve achieving the goal rather than ticking the boxes. Unfortunately, that requires dedication and full involvement (and some competency) from the people involved. The kind of projects that use full-blown requirements aren't the ones who can deliver that kind of staff.
my advice would be to avoid the integrated suite - they tend to be of even worse quality themselves than the 'hodgepodge' of tools. Also most of these suites are actually a hodgepodge of tools themselves, that you can buy piecemeal as they are too expensive to buy the 'enterprise' package.
At least the hodgepodge tools tend to be a lot better at what they do individually, a lot cheaper, faster and more reliable.
I've had the misfortune to use Serena Dimensions recently, and its a prime example of how not to write software, how the complexity of the single-suite approach makes it unusable, and buggy as hell. The only people I know who think its even acceptable are the contract staff we had to hire to administer it at outrageous rates. Avoid.
you know, if you *really* believed that, you wouldn't have posted it as AC. People may disagree with you, but even here you'd get a fair reception if you could hold up your end of the argument.
As it is, everyone knows you would be unable to defend that seriously. I think you need to get out more and see how the biggest, most critical software gets developed using those techniques.. and fails atrociously. There's a reason all those government IT projects fail, and those techniques are the reason, despite sounding like they would produce perfect software they turn out to be an utopian ideal that doesn't work in the real world.
which is exactly what you don't want - if they said "we own it", no-one would believe them until it got to court. If they said "we don't own it", no-one would care.
But, because they say "maybe", everyone starts to panic and worry, and think the problem is far worse that it ever could be.
thank God. my lego bin was full of oblong bits, with a few "pavement" pieces and triangular ones. That's all I needed:)
I have a feeling the speciality parts and kits were more driven as gift-things for, well people like me - grown up kids who used to play with lego but can't justify mucking about with a bucket of bits, but could justify the idea of constructing a 3d-jigsaw puzzle that happened to be made of lego (and could afford to buy the overpriced kits. of course)
unremarkable bits of plastic... I had Lego when I was a kid too, and it was great - helped my imagination in a constructive way - no use thinking about spaceships unless you could put one together from little blocks.
Today, we have Lego mindstorm - robot lego with software controllers. For something that was enjoyable and improving back then, and enjoyable and improving now is pretty cool.
Well, thats not strictly true. I know the D-link DIR-625 supports it (and is advertised as such), but that's the only one I ever found that does. No Netgear device does or Belkin that I found, and they don't even recognise the search term on their web site, just to show how clued up they are on the subject.
Oh, I should say that no online computer shop seems to have one of these for sale. Ho hum.
its not even the case that so-called 'legacy' languages like C++ are flatlined. Sure, there are less than there used to be, but I search on my favourite jobs board for C++ jobs and I get a lot of hits. Typically they are in industroes like defence, telecoms and media (streaming/TV type stuff).
The number of them are roughly the same when I filter out the lower-paid jobs too. So, unless you're a junior looking for any old job, there's no reason to worry about the perception that there are no jobs for these languages.
I am seeing more mobile jobs about - dev for iPhone, Android and some Linux kernel dev. They're still relatively minor, but definitely much more than there used to be. This is the UK BTW, search jobserve £40k or over.
maybe once upon a time, long ago, when CPUs performance was measured in 100s of Mhz. Today, things are different, and I'd say the biggest bottleneck is not the CPU but IO, so most script languages will run just fine (unless designed particularly badly, a flaw that can apply to Java, C or any other language).
Today, Java is an irrelevance - you want that super speed, you use C (or C++ without bloating up on OO), and for the rest you might as well code it in script. Performance isn't going to suffer terribly, and you might get even better developer productivity over Java than you did by using Java over C in the first place.
Things have moved on. Write your GUIs in html5/javascript and you have platform independence too. Job done.
Antitrust prosecutors showed the CEO being asked about a May 1997 email in which Microsoft manager Ben Slivka said he soon would publicly disparage a Java product provided by Sun Microsystems.
"JDK 1.2 has JFC, which we're going to be pissing on at every opportunity," Slivka told Gates in the email
MS did want to hurt Java, to make it a Windows-only thing (or at least, keep Java-on-Windows developers entirely on Windows and not port their apps to other platforms). At no point did MS want to get rid of AWT or Swing, which are the main parts of Java that are shit on any platform and replace them with their own Java GUI technology.
there's always the 'old, traditional' ways that still work fine - C++ server and javascript in your browser clients.
Plenty of shops use C/C++ components for speed, whilst gluing them together with lua or python. I can't see why that isn't more commonplace... except that it doesn't tie you into a '1 true way' of development that Microsoft and Sun/Oracle has marketed to you.
for clients, nobody (well, none of my customers) really wants thick-clients anymore, and porting them to modern OSs such as iOS or Android is almost a no-go, so a javascript-based HTML5-style GUI would appear to be the way forward.
There's plenty of experience building with these languages, so you wouldn't need to pay up for masses of training and then take a year or two gaining enough experience using them to become halfway good at using them.
Maybe we just need an easy-to-use utility library of C++ stuff for today's attention-defeicit coders who don't want to build their own from the building blocks provided by the usual C/C++ libs:)
yes, but do you have to buy all those licences to run RedHat, or do you buy sort-of enough and then deploy it as many times as you need. One of the biggest reasons to change to linux is that you don't have to ask permission from an accounting or budgetary department to do that kindof business change.
Hmm. you mean Amazon should implement a gift-certificate cash-transfer system, where you can buy cash to give to someone to show you care.
How much commission do you think they should take on each purchase, and how much to transfer the cash into your bank account. You surely didn't mean to cut out the middleman did you, you commie!:)
except that in C#, there's a handy shortcut that's used a great deal.
public type x { get; set; }
which provides you with a getter and a setter method on that type without having to bother typing all that nasty code to prevent invalid values from being set. In fact, they kinda provide you with all the style, but none of the substance of get/set methods in the first place, which I find to be pretty useless. You might as well access the member variable directly. I mean, for all the good it does. It does stop your StyleCop checker from telling you off for not using get/set accessor methods though, so that's quite worthwhile. (unless you think that automated style police tools are just part of the pointless bureaucracy too)
That, I think, sums up a lot of C# - nice IDE, some nice easy-to-use features, but ultimately, its just a very verbose language that doesn't really help you write good code.
Slashdot Mirror
"why not now?"
if the world was forced to switch to IPv6 tomorrow, I'm sure slashdot and all the other websites out there could migrate their stuff in no time.
Me, on the other hand, would have a great deal of trouble. Mainly because my home router doesn't support it and I can't find a decent (and cheap-ish) one to replace it that does.
There's ipv6.facebook.com
phew. I was beginning to get worried!
they didn't partner with MS, their tech was bought by Homeland security to help filter documents relating to potential terrorists, MS saw what the tech did and suddenly.. the next version of Word came out with exactly the same technology in it. The original judge awarded them $40m for 'intentional patent infringement'.
According to the court: In court documents, Judge Leonard Davis revealed a "particularly damaging" Microsoft internal e-mail that not only acknowledged i4i's patent (No. 5,787,449), but listed the patent number and stated Word would make i4i's technology "obsolete."
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/176685.asp
oh no, this is one of those rare cases where MS is well out of order. They blatently stole the technology developed by i4i, and although I too hate software patents and patent trolls, this time the company is (well, was, until MS destroyed their legit business) in the right.
That they sell nothing now doesn't mean they weren't a good, small startup company once.
firstly, they don't always. Sure, they use a lot of parts made by Ford factories. But they also use a lot of parts made by 3rd parties under contract to them. Fair enough, its still Ford branded.
But, they use tyres made by Pirelli, and sound systems made by Sony to name 2.
In this case, if Ford was acting Apple, you wouldn't be allowed to use any new parts made by independent parties, or fuel made by anyone other than their (premium) approved manufacturer. That's not even the full problem here - in this case you're not even allowed to play some CDs on the entertainment system if it wasn't on the approved list of music, that you had to purchase from the manufacturer dealership!
And before you think that's fair and well, its their system, they can dictate these terms in order to keep the quality up, imagine if Steve Jobs decides that the only music permissible was Country and Western, or some nice male voice choir marching songs.
don't knock QT Quick so quickly :)
ahem, ok - I read this article on ArsTechnica about QML, the author describes an app he's written that was partically all QML and "It was a weekend project that required surprisingly little effort. These kinds of applications are trivially easy to make with Qt.
Ok, he hasn't done the full write up yet, but there's enough tease in that article to make you think QT is going places.
there are 'higher-level' GUIs written in opengl too - Plib's PUI for example or other 'game' programming environments. Its easy to reuse their code for LoB GUIS, and you can add some great effects added in there when needed too :)
then there has to be a middle ground - perhaps a reduced functionality system with additional time & services contract afterwards for modifications, enhancements and bugfixes to bring it up to what the customer wanted, whilst still giving them reassurance that they will be delivered a reasonable system.
Alternatively, enter into a small contract for a system to gauge the competency of the supplier, then increase the size of system after they've shown they can deliver. Building trust with suppliers rather than dropping each one for the lowest bidder each time works wonders.
I do like requirements traceability - but not to the level most of these things go to - paragraphs in a document is too fine grained. I'd say tracked in a bug-tracking system is fine - you only need to know which 'bug' is fixed by which bit of code after all, once you go beyond that... you're spending too much effort in process.
a colleague came to us saying how crap DOORS was. We were persuaded to use Serena Dimensions for a new project, after using it for 6 months, he was heard to say that he now realises DOORs wasn't that bad.
I guess being poked in the eye with something sharp doesn't seem so bad when the poky thing starts on your balls.
In my experience this *never* happens. Even for the little project with a 1-page document describing what the customer wants, I have scratched my head, phoned the business analyst at the customer, asked "wha?" and received a different requirement from that written down. Fortunately, in that case, we had an agile enough methodology that I could deliver what they actually wanted.
Now, for the 3,000 requirement document we receive for another project, there was no way in hell that every requirement would mesh perfectly with every other one. There were inconsistencies, duplicates that slightly varied. 100s of clarification requests later, we found the clarifications often conflicted with other requirements in the original document. And then, we received the 500 requirement change-notification document and we had to start all over again. Oh, I forgot the bit where we did user workshops and found the requirements didn't match what the user needed. And in the end we nearly got sued anyway because we didn't deliver to spec - even though that spec contradicted itself too often.
All in all, formal processes for requirements management are severely lacking in technical business analysis today. To the point where I know that its pointless trying to work within those frameworks. There are better methods that involve achieving the goal rather than ticking the boxes. Unfortunately, that requires dedication and full involvement (and some competency) from the people involved. The kind of projects that use full-blown requirements aren't the ones who can deliver that kind of staff.
my advice would be to avoid the integrated suite - they tend to be of even worse quality themselves than the 'hodgepodge' of tools. Also most of these suites are actually a hodgepodge of tools themselves, that you can buy piecemeal as they are too expensive to buy the 'enterprise' package.
At least the hodgepodge tools tend to be a lot better at what they do individually, a lot cheaper, faster and more reliable.
I've had the misfortune to use Serena Dimensions recently, and its a prime example of how not to write software, how the complexity of the single-suite approach makes it unusable, and buggy as hell. The only people I know who think its even acceptable are the contract staff we had to hire to administer it at outrageous rates. Avoid.
you know, if you *really* believed that, you wouldn't have posted it as AC. People may disagree with you, but even here you'd get a fair reception if you could hold up your end of the argument.
As it is, everyone knows you would be unable to defend that seriously. I think you need to get out more and see how the biggest, most critical software gets developed using those techniques.. and fails atrociously. There's a reason all those government IT projects fail, and those techniques are the reason, despite sounding like they would produce perfect software they turn out to be an utopian ideal that doesn't work in the real world.
which is exactly what you don't want - if they said "we own it", no-one would believe them until it got to court. If they said "we don't own it", no-one would care.
But, because they say "maybe", everyone starts to panic and worry, and think the problem is far worse that it ever could be.
thank God. my lego bin was full of oblong bits, with a few "pavement" pieces and triangular ones. That's all I needed :)
I have a feeling the speciality parts and kits were more driven as gift-things for, well people like me - grown up kids who used to play with lego but can't justify mucking about with a bucket of bits, but could justify the idea of constructing a 3d-jigsaw puzzle that happened to be made of lego (and could afford to buy the overpriced kits. of course)
unremarkable bits of plastic... I had Lego when I was a kid too, and it was great - helped my imagination in a constructive way - no use thinking about spaceships unless you could put one together from little blocks.
Today, we have Lego mindstorm - robot lego with software controllers. For something that was enjoyable and improving back then, and enjoyable and improving now is pretty cool.
put simply, there aren't any.
Well, thats not strictly true. I know the D-link DIR-625 supports it (and is advertised as such), but that's the only one I ever found that does. No Netgear device does or Belkin that I found, and they don't even recognise the search term on their web site, just to show how clued up they are on the subject.
Oh, I should say that no online computer shop seems to have one of these for sale. Ho hum.
its not even the case that so-called 'legacy' languages like C++ are flatlined. Sure, there are less than there used to be, but I search on my favourite jobs board for C++ jobs and I get a lot of hits. Typically they are in industroes like defence, telecoms and media (streaming/TV type stuff).
The number of them are roughly the same when I filter out the lower-paid jobs too. So, unless you're a junior looking for any old job, there's no reason to worry about the perception that there are no jobs for these languages.
I am seeing more mobile jobs about - dev for iPhone, Android and some Linux kernel dev. They're still relatively minor, but definitely much more than there used to be. This is the UK BTW, search jobserve £40k or over.
maybe once upon a time, long ago, when CPUs performance was measured in 100s of Mhz. Today, things are different, and I'd say the biggest bottleneck is not the CPU but IO, so most script languages will run just fine (unless designed particularly badly, a flaw that can apply to Java, C or any other language).
Today, Java is an irrelevance - you want that super speed, you use C (or C++ without bloating up on OO), and for the rest you might as well code it in script. Performance isn't going to suffer terribly, and you might get even better developer productivity over Java than you did by using Java over C in the first place.
Things have moved on. Write your GUIs in html5/javascript and you have platform independence too. Job done.
From ZDNet coverage of the trial
Antitrust prosecutors showed the CEO being asked about a May 1997 email in which Microsoft manager Ben Slivka said he soon would publicly disparage a Java product provided by Sun Microsystems.
"JDK 1.2 has JFC, which we're going to be pissing on at every opportunity," Slivka told Gates in the email
MS did want to hurt Java, to make it a Windows-only thing (or at least, keep Java-on-Windows developers entirely on Windows and not port their apps to other platforms). At no point did MS want to get rid of AWT or Swing, which are the main parts of Java that are shit on any platform and replace them with their own Java GUI technology.
or boost, of course.
there's always the 'old, traditional' ways that still work fine - C++ server and javascript in your browser clients.
Plenty of shops use C/C++ components for speed, whilst gluing them together with lua or python. I can't see why that isn't more commonplace... except that it doesn't tie you into a '1 true way' of development that Microsoft and Sun/Oracle has marketed to you.
for clients, nobody (well, none of my customers) really wants thick-clients anymore, and porting them to modern OSs such as iOS or Android is almost a no-go, so a javascript-based HTML5-style GUI would appear to be the way forward.
There's plenty of experience building with these languages, so you wouldn't need to pay up for masses of training and then take a year or two gaining enough experience using them to become halfway good at using them.
Maybe we just need an easy-to-use utility library of C++ stuff for today's attention-defeicit coders who don't want to build their own from the building blocks provided by the usual C/C++ libs :)
Changing to Linux because you can is just stupid.
crikey, things have changed round here, haven't they?!
yes, but do you have to buy all those licences to run RedHat, or do you buy sort-of enough and then deploy it as many times as you need. One of the biggest reasons to change to linux is that you don't have to ask permission from an accounting or budgetary department to do that kindof business change.
If not, use CentOS.
Hmm. you mean Amazon should implement a gift-certificate cash-transfer system, where you can buy cash to give to someone to show you care.
How much commission do you think they should take on each purchase, and how much to transfer the cash into your bank account. You surely didn't mean to cut out the middleman did you, you commie! :)
except that in C#, there's a handy shortcut that's used a great deal.
public type x { get; set; }
which provides you with a getter and a setter method on that type without having to bother typing all that nasty code to prevent invalid values from being set. In fact, they kinda provide you with all the style, but none of the substance of get/set methods in the first place, which I find to be pretty useless. You might as well access the member variable directly. I mean, for all the good it does. It does stop your StyleCop checker from telling you off for not using get/set accessor methods though, so that's quite worthwhile. (unless you think that automated style police tools are just part of the pointless bureaucracy too)
That, I think, sums up a lot of C# - nice IDE, some nice easy-to-use features, but ultimately, its just a very verbose language that doesn't really help you write good code.