...that we can see so clearly where we've been, but can't go there again.
Of all the things ever predicted by science-fiction writers, did any of them predict that after we'd gotten to the moon, we'd let grass grow on the Saturn launching pads?
"History records that the first successful voyage to the Moon was made in 2316 by Grzchopeng M'bennypacker. Some enthusiasts insist that unidentifiable metal fragments in the Taurus-Littrow valley are human artifacts, and are evidence that the United States reached the moon centuries earlier, but professional historians dismiss these as unproven speculation, and do not accept Frafnar Otsumix's alleged "decoding" of binary files alleged to be in what Otsumix calls "jpg" format. In any case, even if a handful of crude United States spacecraft somehow--by design or accident--managed reach the moon in the twentieth century, it is of no importance as nothing further came of it."
No, not very influential outside the Mac community, not all that influential within it. But the as posed here in Slashdot, "if you could go back in time," this is the one, and not because of what it had to say about the Mac, but because it is the only book I've ever read that truly accepts the idea of debugging. Every other book carries the implied notion that you should concentrate on writing bug-free software, and that a good programmer really ought to be able to do it.
About half of the book was devoted to debugging, and it is my personal surmise that the book was originally entitled "How to Debug Macintosh Software" and that the publishers made him change it. Some might charge that the way Mac software was at the time--A5 worlds, very little RAM to spare, and somewhat finicky memory management--writing Mac software intrinsically required more debugging than other environments. It doesn't matter.
What matters was that this is the only book I read that honestly and truly embraced debugging as a fundamental and legitimate part of the software development process.
Microsoft doesn't deserve much credit, either. Microsoft was thought to be late to the tablet party. Conceptually, the credit should go to Alan Kay for the "Dynabook." The 1989 GRiDpad was the first real product, and there was an immense amount of buzz around GO! Computing's 1992 PenPoint. Microsoft really just genned up "Windows for Pen Computing" as a sort of me-too response to PenPoint. Wang Labs had something called "Guide" (after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) which got lost in the collapse of the company; the people working on it went on to found a company called, if memory serves me, Arthur Dent, but I don't know what happened to it.
Apple deserves credit for the iPad in much the same way as it deserves credit for the GUI... and Edison deserves credit for the electric light, and the Wright Brothers deserve credit for the airplane. None of them really "invented" these things, none of them were really the first, and most of the technology was in the air waiting to be commercialized. But in each case they were the first to make it to market with something that didn't suck--with a finished, usable, "perfected"--to use an old-fashioned word--product.
This doesn't look like a case of censoring the Venus de Milo, or blocking email from someone named Scunthorpe, or anything like that. Nor are there obvious political or religious overtones.
Context matters--what happens to a student who actually uses a "bad" word in an innocent context--"It was a bitch and she had the purtiest coat. I said to the feller owned her, ' When she finds pups,' says I, 'I'd like one.'"--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "The Yearling." Or someone who quotes the F-word passage from "The Catcher in the Rye." Or someone who just barely crosses the line in, let's say, a creative writing piece that too-accurately reports the colloquial language of her peers. The actions the school takes matter. But the list itself, as a trigger for action, seems pretty sensible.
One could easily write an essay on eroticism in Walt Whitman ("I sing the body electric,") or Shakespeare playing to the groundlings ("Spake ye of country matters?"), without violating the list.
This list doesn't look like ludicrous overreaching to me. I enjoyed my giggles from reading it as much as anyone else, and am amused by its being available in an open Google Docs document. But it doesn't reflect poorly on North Canton schools.
Any high school student who uses these words in a piece of schoolwork is either committed a mistake--a mistake that could potentially cost them a job if their adult life--or they're engaged in a breaching experiment. Either way, it is perfectly appropriate for the school to take some kind of action.
Let's not forget Admiral Grace Hopper who programmed, developed a successful programming language, led successful standardization efforts, managed--did just about everything you could do with computers both as a direct individual-contributor and as a high-level manager.
Disruption afford opportunities for opportunists, and some of them are dishonest. Balances worked out over many decades that represent some kind of rough fairness between competing interests are brushed aside in a twinkling, and the new technology creates a chance for early colonizers to make a successful power grab. The ordinary citizens understands intuitively that new technology is used against him first, then checks and balances are worked out later.
... that we've turned the corner and are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel? Perpetual optimism is neither helpful nor constructive.
"A year ago none of us could see victory. Now we can see it clearly, like light at the end of the tunnel."--Lieutenant-General Henri-Eugène Navarre, 1953."
"Dien Bien Phu has fulfilled the mission...." --French Army spokesperson, 1954
"Victory is in sight."--General Paul D. Harkins, 1963
"I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off." President Johnson, 1964
"At last there is light at the end of the tunnel." Joseph Alsop, 1965
"The North Vietnamese cannot take the punishment any more in the South. I think we can bring the war to a conclusion within the next year, possibly within the next six months." --General S. L. A. Marshall, 1966
"I believe there is light at the end of what has been a long and lonely tunnel." --President Johnson, 1966
"We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."--General Westmoreland, 1967
"We have the enemy licked now. He is beaten."Admiral John S. McCain, 1969
"The enemy is reeling from successive disasters. We are, in fact, winning the war." --William F. Buckley, 1969
"If we just keep up the pressure, these little guys will crack."--U. S. General Earl Wheeler, 1970
(The U.S. continued fighting for three more years. The end of the war is often given as 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese)
I had a manager who stated that he was introducing regular code reviews. Well, actually, he stated that he wanted to conduct regular code reviews. Not knowing too much about them, I dug up a copy of Freedman and Weinberg's "The Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews," and saw that they spell out--from memory, but I'm sure others will correct me if I'm mistaken--that management should not participate in code reviews and that code reviews should never be used for employee evaluation. I pointed this out to him and he said coldly that he was going to conduct code reviews. (In the event, of course, it didn't mattered. We had one meeting, we wasted some time in unproductive discussions of different people expressing their personal coding tastes and the manager stating his approval/disapproval of same, and somehow the manager never found the time to conduct another).
Any employee should be justifiably leery of walking into a "code review" situation, much as any employee should be cautious in taking advantage of HR "Employee Assistance Programs."
I've been in other "code review" situations that deteriorated into edgy negative criticism. Unfortunately, the degree of collegiality in any situation is that of its least collegial member. It takes an awfully good team to have the degree of companionship and trust to do something like that properly.
It's all well and good to say "well, your bad experiences weren't truly code reviews," and my recollection is that Freedman and Weinberg offer numerous suggestions to make them work... but I can only report my own experience.
And while I've been in good teams, teams that I think could have conducted productive code reviews, the parts of the project we were working on were so different--different computer languages and different development systems--that I doubt we could have given all that much help to each other. If we'd been given the time. Which we weren't.
I was approached by McGraw-Hill indirectly, via an investment forum, and invited to receive a free copy of a book, "The House that Bogle Built" if I'd review it online. Since I'm a fan of John C. Bogle, champion of index mutual funds and founder of Vanguard, I said sure. I liked the book, and gave it a good review. At the end of my review, I noted "Disclosure: the publisher sent me a complimentary copy."
Was I corrupted by the free book? Almost certainly, yes. Not that I sold my soul for a retail value of $28, but certainly, there was a the warm fuzzy comfortable aura of Vanguard fans together helping each other out.
But professional reviewers get free review copies, too. Why is it worse for amateurs to get them? Do people really think professionals are any less corrupt? I very much resent Dvorak's implication that it is somehow fine for professional reviews to accept free review copies because, he says, everybody knows it. (Do they?)
Should amateur reviewers who receive free books disclose that fact. Yes. Do they? Not usually. Should professional reviewers who receive free books disclose that fact? Yes, they should, explicitly, in every review. Do they? I've never seen it, have you?
Amazon Reader Reviews at least tell you whether or not the reviewer personally purchased a copy of the book from Amazon or not. If you want to screen out corrupted reader reviews, only read the reviews that say "Amazon Verified Purchase."
Want to screen out reviews from professional reviewers who haven't personally plunked down their own money for the book they're reviewing? Don't read any professional reviews at all.
I think Dvorak just doesn't like competition from amateurs.
At least I didn't sell my review copy, as professional reviewers often do.
You really need to put this context. Windows 1.0 came out in 1985 with non-overlapping windows. Very odd, since to anyone who was paying attention then, the very word "Windows" mean the overlapping windows developed at Xerox PARC and embodied in machines like the Alto, the Star, the Three Rivers PERQ, etc. To have a system called "Windows" without overlapping windows is missing the point on a grand scale.
IBM's TopView was a multitasking, "character-mode GUI" version of DOS that came out in 1984. DESQview not only beat Windows 1.0, it actually survived and enjoyed a modest success in the following years. I do not remember whether they had overlapping windows or not.
GEM, a genuine full-fledged, GUI with overlapping windows, shipped in 1985 for the 8086. I don't remember it having much success as an OS or user environment, but there was one faintly successful product--was it a desktop publishing program? that actually incorporated GEM as an integral part of the program.
Of course, the Lisa shipped in 1983.
And there was one more, darn it, what was it? Was it from the VisiCalc people? Yes, VisiOn shipped in late 1983, and it, too, was a full-fledged GUI with overlapping windows.
"but its most life-saving application may be against the age-old disease tuberculosis." What a tragedy. Tuberculosis was practically unheard of in the U.S. by the 1970s and 80s, but experienced a resurgence due to failure to care for cases occurring among AIDS patients, the homeless, the poor, and illegal immigrants. Tuberculosis was once treatable--not at great expense, but not with one cheap vaccine shot, either; careful treatment and followup was needed to make sure that the infection was completely cured. This wasn't done, and the result is that now we have resistant strains.
Infectious disease does not know how to respect social status, and the upper- and middle classes cannot be healthy if the poor are sick. As the debate over health care continues, it is something to keep in mind.
I hope this new advance works. Otherwise, boomers may be the only generation in the history of the human race to live our entire lives free of the terror of bacterial infection.
If the point of the post is to showcase "PivotViewer," I am certainly unimpressed. After taking a long time to load, it presents me with a lot of baffling animated bling that fails to help me understand what he's getting at.
The original Mac "zoomrects" helped you understand intuitively that the window was another view of the same entity as the icon. A good example of using animation to clarify a UI abstraction. The little files with wings flying from folder to folder when you copy files in Windows is silly--because the concept doesn't need graphic illustration--but at least the animation conveys some meaningful semantic content.
I don't know what on earth the flying icons in PivotViewer are supposed to be showing, other than "it's animated--because we can."
I don't understand what he's getting at when I browse in HTML, either.
For better or for worse, the "public option" probably deserves most of the credit for developing nuclear energy, the Internet, and space travel. Radio broadcasting as we know it was also large developed by the "public option," specifically university radio stations in the 1920s, a fact that was forgotten when radio became commercializable and commercial radio pretty well eclipsed the pioneers.
I don't think anyone can say what would have happened if the government had not chosen to fund these developments. The fact is, in the particular parallel universe we live in, they were developed publicly.
Our high school typing classes in the 1960s used a set of records--78 RPM shellac records, of course--of rhythmic music. The rhythms were calibrated in words per minute--30 wpm, 35, wpm, 40 wpm, etc. The same piece of music was used for several increasing speeds, then as you got to some faster speed you were rewarded by getting to hear a different piece of music.
The slowest ones used a piece of march music named "American Patrol," which is one of those pieces of music most people cannot name but recognize instantly when they hear it. YouTube has a recording, not the same recording (and incorrectly identified--it's by F. W. Meachum, not Sousa). The typing records were, of course, played with a very heavy, steady, square beat. To this day I can't hear this piece of music without thinking "F-R-F-space-J-U-J."
Quite seriously, though, all touch-typing classes--not just in my high-school days, but in my mother's high school days--drilled into you the importance of maintaining an absolutely steady, even rhythm. You didn't slow down, even when stretching with the left pinky to hit the exclamation point, and you didn't speed up, even when you're typing T-H-E.
I'm not sure how this particular bit of lore got lost. As nearly as I can tell, the generation that has learned to "key" on computer keyboards is not being taught to keep a steady rhythm. I don't know if the importance of the steady rhythm is real or just tradition or superstition; we were taught it and I believed it and still do.
Incidentally, typing on a high-quality, properly maintained office manual typewriter had a distinctly sensuous pleasure to it. The inertia of the typebars and the force profile of the keyboard had apparently evolved to feel good. In my high school days they had a mix of manual and electric typewriters. I could type faster on the electrics, and of course they produced better-looking typing, but they weren't as pleasant to use. Cheap portables were, of course, no fun, but a good full-size office Royal or Remington... mmmmmmmm.
I think they are MUCH better than they were in the 50s.
Just a few years ago I was privileged to see a couple of 1950s films in a "3D festival" at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. These were clean, restored prints and well projected. The two I saw were "Kiss Me, Kate" and "Miss Sadie Thompson." I believe I was getting the same experience I'd have had in a good first-run house in the 1950s.
Incidentally, there could be another reason 3D never took off: it is unflattering to female actors. Makeup can hide the contours of an aging face in 2D, but not in 3D. I won't say Kathryn Grayson and Rita Hayworth looked old. But they certainly looked as if they were in their thirties.
Anyway, it was pretty good--I truly enjoyed "Kiss Me, Kate" which made good, imaginative use of 3D. But IMAX 3D and, I think it was "RealD" the local cineplex used for Avatar, are _much_ better.
Two-eye, two-image stereoscopic photography was invented by George Wheatstone (the same man who invented the Wheatstone bridge) in 1838. For almost two centuries it has constantly occupied a niche market, never going away and never going mainstream.
The Victorian parlor stereoscope became the ViewMaster of my childhood days. I still see them in toy stores. From time to time in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s I saw casual amateurs with Stereo Realists taking vacation pictures, but it was rare. A few years ago the Ritz stores had single-use cameras with four lenses, and a photofinishing service for them that delivered lenticular prints. Motion pictures using polarized stereo glasses have been with us for half a century, continually being rediscovered.
Most impressive to me so far has been IMAX 3D, which is _considerably_ better than whatever process the local Showcase used for Avatar, because a) it is much brighter, and b) the picture is large enough that you really are unaware of the ugly pseudoscopic problems at the edge of the field. There's no way that home 3D is going to be as good as IMAX 3D.
And none of it is ever going to be any more popular than quadrophonic sound. Because there are, plain and simple, insoluble problems with two-image stereoscopic 3D.
The biggest is that the added realism of 3D is only seen if a) you are seated on a location that's reasonably square-on to the center of the screen, which is never true for more than one person in a living room, and never true for more than a tiny percentage of the people in an auditorium; b) the 2D perspective is consistent with the 3D perspective, which is only true if the cinematographer restricts herself to a single focal length and throws away a century of screen grammar. If these two conditions are not met, you get a stimulating, novel, Cabinet-of-Dr.-Caligari experience that has limited appeal--reminiscent of the early days of color TV when it was thrilling to watch people turning from magenta-skinned to green-skinned as they crossed from left to right, because it was SO not black-and-white.
If 3D were automatically realistic, from every seat in the living room, and did not require directors to completely reinvent their storytelling technique, then, like stereophonic sound, it would be (mostly) just value added, and would gradually displace 2D as costs drop, the way stereo sound has gradually replaced monophonic.
But it is not. There are tradeoffs, and not just in cost. And the content for which 3D adds more than it costs is just not that big a percentage of the showtime universe. There is more to cinema than Kiss Me, Kate, House of Wax, This Is Cinerama!, The Polar Express, Titanic: Ghosts of the Abyss, Sharks 3D! and Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.
Avatar was a good movie. But does anyone believe it would not have been a good movie in 2D?
Windows NT was originally positioned as a portable, platform-neutral system and Microsoft made a big deal of it not being just limited to Intel architecture but also running on ACE platforms (remember ACE?), MIPS, Digital Alpha, and at least one other whose name escapes me. IBM PowerPC maybe?
Microsoft seduced and abandoned companies that committed to Windows on non-Intel platforms, with the abandonment beginning almost as soon as the seduction was complete. My employer made a significant commitment to Windows-on-DEC-Alpha--at that time, their specific application benchmarked over twice as fast on Alpha as on Intel. It was NT 3.51, IIRC, and Microsoft moved up to Windows 4.0 on Intel and kept dragging feet and making excuses on Alpha, finally acknowledging that it was not going to be supported. At that point, the Alpha systems bought by my employer's customers were barely a year old, and those customers were not happy with us for selling them such rapidly orphaned products.
What matters is not whether Windows can run on ARM, but whether Microsoft actually has any serious or durable commitment to supporting it on that platform.
Calling these things eBooks ought to be considered deceptive labeling.
It's not a book if you can't lend it.
It's not a book if you can't resell it.
It's not a book if it won't last thirty years under ordinary casual home storage conditions.
It's not a book when a public library can't buy one copy and lend it out as often as they wish.
It's not about feel of the cloth covers or the smell of the dust or the silverfish living in real books, it's about replicating the functionality all books have had for five hundred years.
Nominations are kept secret for fifty years so there is no way to confirm whether or not some person has been nominated. The nominators are chosen by the Nobel committee; you can't just send a name in yourself or organize a campaign to nominate someone. All details of the nominations are also kept secret for 50 years, so there is no way to confirm whether or not Snorre Valen is a nominator.
How long do you think it will it be before people who have purchased the "unlimited" plan and taken it seriously will receive notices from Verizon saying that their account has been cancelled or disabled due to "excessive" use? And the representatives explaining that they just mean "no stated limit," and that they never dreamed that people would actually download _that_ much, and it is with the saddest and greatest reluctance they have been unwillingly forced to take measures against a few, a very very few evildoers in order to insure the optimum user experience for the vast majority of good Verizon customers, and anyway they never really said it was unlimited because if you scroll 61% of the way down the 150-page online terms and conditions they reserve the right to curtail the usage by any individual in the interests of the greater good of the Verizon network as a whole?
...by over-the-top, intrusive, nagging fundraising by Wikipedia. Yes, of course I know how to click the "close" box. Yes, Wikipedia is important to me. Yes, I made a small donation. No, I'm not a marketing or "development" (fund-raising) expert. Yes, the Wikimedia Foundation can do what it thinks best.
I'm just saying I was really annoyed, and this is the first time I've found it annoying.
What next? Pictures looking down at adorable impoverished third world toddler girls staring up into the camera with big sad Walter Keane eyes? "Little Furfelette is starving for knowledge. Her only reference book is a 1982 World Almanac. You can give her new hope. Or you can click the 'close' box and break her little heart. Which will it be?"
The Wikimedia Foundation can do what it thinks best, but I don't have to like it. And I don't.
Slashdot Mirror
...that we can see so clearly where we've been, but can't go there again.
Of all the things ever predicted by science-fiction writers, did any of them predict that after we'd gotten to the moon, we'd let grass grow on the Saturn launching pads?
"History records that the first successful voyage to the Moon was made in 2316 by Grzchopeng M'bennypacker. Some enthusiasts insist that unidentifiable metal fragments in the Taurus-Littrow valley are human artifacts, and are evidence that the United States reached the moon centuries earlier, but professional historians dismiss these as unproven speculation, and do not accept Frafnar Otsumix's alleged "decoding" of binary files alleged to be in what Otsumix calls "jpg" format. In any case, even if a handful of crude United States spacecraft somehow--by design or accident--managed reach the moon in the twentieth century, it is of no importance as nothing further came of it."
No, not very influential outside the Mac community, not all that influential within it. But the as posed here in Slashdot, "if you could go back in time," this is the one, and not because of what it had to say about the Mac, but because it is the only book I've ever read that truly accepts the idea of debugging. Every other book carries the implied notion that you should concentrate on writing bug-free software, and that a good programmer really ought to be able to do it.
About half of the book was devoted to debugging, and it is my personal surmise that the book was originally entitled "How to Debug Macintosh Software" and that the publishers made him change it. Some might charge that the way Mac software was at the time--A5 worlds, very little RAM to spare, and somewhat finicky memory management--writing Mac software intrinsically required more debugging than other environments. It doesn't matter.
What matters was that this is the only book I read that honestly and truly embraced debugging as a fundamental and legitimate part of the software development process.
Wikipedia's article on Maria Mitchell, who discovered "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in 1847, observing from the rooftop of her home in Nantucket.
Microsoft doesn't deserve much credit, either. Microsoft was thought to be late to the tablet party. Conceptually, the credit should go to Alan Kay for the "Dynabook." The 1989 GRiDpad was the first real product, and there was an immense amount of buzz around GO! Computing's 1992 PenPoint. Microsoft really just genned up "Windows for Pen Computing" as a sort of me-too response to PenPoint. Wang Labs had something called "Guide" (after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) which got lost in the collapse of the company; the people working on it went on to found a company called, if memory serves me, Arthur Dent, but I don't know what happened to it.
Apple deserves credit for the iPad in much the same way as it deserves credit for the GUI... and Edison deserves credit for the electric light, and the Wright Brothers deserve credit for the airplane. None of them really "invented" these things, none of them were really the first, and most of the technology was in the air waiting to be commercialized. But in each case they were the first to make it to market with something that didn't suck--with a finished, usable, "perfected"--to use an old-fashioned word--product.
This doesn't look like a case of censoring the Venus de Milo, or blocking email from someone named Scunthorpe, or anything like that. Nor are there obvious political or religious overtones.
Context matters--what happens to a student who actually uses a "bad" word in an innocent context--"It was a bitch and she had the purtiest coat. I said to the feller owned her, ' When she finds pups,' says I, 'I'd like one.'"--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "The Yearling." Or someone who quotes the F-word passage from "The Catcher in the Rye." Or someone who just barely crosses the line in, let's say, a creative writing piece that too-accurately reports the colloquial language of her peers. The actions the school takes matter. But the list itself, as a trigger for action, seems pretty sensible.
One could easily write an essay on eroticism in Walt Whitman ("I sing the body electric,") or Shakespeare playing to the groundlings ("Spake ye of country matters?"), without violating the list.
This list doesn't look like ludicrous overreaching to me. I enjoyed my giggles from reading it as much as anyone else, and am amused by its being available in an open Google Docs document. But it doesn't reflect poorly on North Canton schools.
Any high school student who uses these words in a piece of schoolwork is either committed a mistake--a mistake that could potentially cost them a job if their adult life--or they're engaged in a breaching experiment. Either way, it is perfectly appropriate for the school to take some kind of action.
Let's not forget Admiral Grace Hopper who programmed, developed a successful programming language, led successful standardization efforts, managed--did just about everything you could do with computers both as a direct individual-contributor and as a high-level manager.
She was a nerd and she did "stuff that mattered."
Disruption afford opportunities for opportunists, and some of them are dishonest. Balances worked out over many decades that represent some kind of rough fairness between competing interests are brushed aside in a twinkling, and the new technology creates a chance for early colonizers to make a successful power grab. The ordinary citizens understands intuitively that new technology is used against him first, then checks and balances are worked out later.
... that we've turned the corner and are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel? Perpetual optimism is neither helpful nor constructive.
"A year ago none of us could see victory. Now we can see it clearly, like light at the end of the tunnel."--Lieutenant-General Henri-Eugène Navarre, 1953."
"Dien Bien Phu has fulfilled the mission...." --French Army spokesperson, 1954
"Victory is in sight."--General Paul D. Harkins, 1963
"I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off." President Johnson, 1964
"At last there is light at the end of the tunnel." Joseph Alsop, 1965
"The North Vietnamese cannot take the punishment any more in the South. I think we can bring the war to a conclusion within the next year, possibly within the next six months." --General S. L. A. Marshall, 1966
"I believe there is light at the end of what has been a long and lonely tunnel." --President Johnson, 1966
"We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."--General Westmoreland, 1967
"We have the enemy licked now. He is beaten."Admiral John S. McCain, 1969
"The enemy is reeling from successive disasters. We are, in fact, winning the war." --William F. Buckley, 1969
"If we just keep up the pressure, these little guys will crack."--U. S. General Earl Wheeler, 1970
(The U.S. continued fighting for three more years. The end of the war is often given as 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese)
I had a manager who stated that he was introducing regular code reviews. Well, actually, he stated that he wanted to conduct regular code reviews. Not knowing too much about them, I dug up a copy of Freedman and Weinberg's "The Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews," and saw that they spell out--from memory, but I'm sure others will correct me if I'm mistaken--that management should not participate in code reviews and that code reviews should never be used for employee evaluation. I pointed this out to him and he said coldly that he was going to conduct code reviews. (In the event, of course, it didn't mattered. We had one meeting, we wasted some time in unproductive discussions of different people expressing their personal coding tastes and the manager stating his approval/disapproval of same, and somehow the manager never found the time to conduct another).
Any employee should be justifiably leery of walking into a "code review" situation, much as any employee should be cautious in taking advantage of HR "Employee Assistance Programs."
I've been in other "code review" situations that deteriorated into edgy negative criticism. Unfortunately, the degree of collegiality in any situation is that of its least collegial member. It takes an awfully good team to have the degree of companionship and trust to do something like that properly.
It's all well and good to say "well, your bad experiences weren't truly code reviews," and my recollection is that Freedman and Weinberg offer numerous suggestions to make them work... but I can only report my own experience.
And while I've been in good teams, teams that I think could have conducted productive code reviews, the parts of the project we were working on were so different--different computer languages and different development systems--that I doubt we could have given all that much help to each other. If we'd been given the time. Which we weren't.
I was approached by McGraw-Hill indirectly, via an investment forum, and invited to receive a free copy of a book, "The House that Bogle Built" if I'd review it online. Since I'm a fan of John C. Bogle, champion of index mutual funds and founder of Vanguard, I said sure. I liked the book, and gave it a good review. At the end of my review, I noted "Disclosure: the publisher sent me a complimentary copy."
Was I corrupted by the free book? Almost certainly, yes. Not that I sold my soul for a retail value of $28, but certainly, there was a the warm fuzzy comfortable aura of Vanguard fans together helping each other out.
But professional reviewers get free review copies, too. Why is it worse for amateurs to get them? Do people really think professionals are any less corrupt? I very much resent Dvorak's implication that it is somehow fine for professional reviews to accept free review copies because, he says, everybody knows it. (Do they?)
Should amateur reviewers who receive free books disclose that fact. Yes. Do they? Not usually. Should professional reviewers who receive free books disclose that fact? Yes, they should, explicitly, in every review. Do they? I've never seen it, have you?
Amazon Reader Reviews at least tell you whether or not the reviewer personally purchased a copy of the book from Amazon or not. If you want to screen out corrupted reader reviews, only read the reviews that say "Amazon Verified Purchase."
Want to screen out reviews from professional reviewers who haven't personally plunked down their own money for the book they're reviewing? Don't read any professional reviews at all.
I think Dvorak just doesn't like competition from amateurs.
At least I didn't sell my review copy, as professional reviewers often do.
Followed quickly by the Constitution of the United States, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Bible, the table of logarithms, and "Fanny Hill."
You really need to put this context. Windows 1.0 came out in 1985 with non-overlapping windows. Very odd, since to anyone who was paying attention then, the very word "Windows" mean the overlapping windows developed at Xerox PARC and embodied in machines like the Alto, the Star, the Three Rivers PERQ, etc. To have a system called "Windows" without overlapping windows is missing the point on a grand scale.
IBM's TopView was a multitasking, "character-mode GUI" version of DOS that came out in 1984. DESQview not only beat Windows 1.0, it actually survived and enjoyed a modest success in the following years. I do not remember whether they had overlapping windows or not.
GEM, a genuine full-fledged, GUI with overlapping windows, shipped in 1985 for the 8086. I don't remember it having much success as an OS or user environment, but there was one faintly successful product--was it a desktop publishing program? that actually incorporated GEM as an integral part of the program.
Of course, the Lisa shipped in 1983.
And there was one more, darn it, what was it? Was it from the VisiCalc people? Yes, VisiOn shipped in late 1983, and it, too, was a full-fledged GUI with overlapping windows.
"but its most life-saving application may be against the age-old disease tuberculosis." What a tragedy. Tuberculosis was practically unheard of in the U.S. by the 1970s and 80s, but experienced a resurgence due to failure to care for cases occurring among AIDS patients, the homeless, the poor, and illegal immigrants. Tuberculosis was once treatable--not at great expense, but not with one cheap vaccine shot, either; careful treatment and followup was needed to make sure that the infection was completely cured. This wasn't done, and the result is that now we have resistant strains.
Infectious disease does not know how to respect social status, and the upper- and middle classes cannot be healthy if the poor are sick. As the debate over health care continues, it is something to keep in mind.
I hope this new advance works. Otherwise, boomers may be the only generation in the history of the human race to live our entire lives free of the terror of bacterial infection.
If the point of the post is to showcase "PivotViewer," I am certainly unimpressed. After taking a long time to load, it presents me with a lot of baffling animated bling that fails to help me understand what he's getting at.
The original Mac "zoomrects" helped you understand intuitively that the window was another view of the same entity as the icon. A good example of using animation to clarify a UI abstraction. The little files with wings flying from folder to folder when you copy files in Windows is silly--because the concept doesn't need graphic illustration--but at least the animation conveys some meaningful semantic content.
I don't know what on earth the flying icons in PivotViewer are supposed to be showing, other than "it's animated--because we can."
I don't understand what he's getting at when I browse in HTML, either.
For better or for worse, the "public option" probably deserves most of the credit for developing nuclear energy, the Internet, and space travel. Radio broadcasting as we know it was also large developed by the "public option," specifically university radio stations in the 1920s, a fact that was forgotten when radio became commercializable and commercial radio pretty well eclipsed the pioneers.
I don't think anyone can say what would have happened if the government had not chosen to fund these developments. The fact is, in the particular parallel universe we live in, they were developed publicly.
Our high school typing classes in the 1960s used a set of records--78 RPM shellac records, of course--of rhythmic music. The rhythms were calibrated in words per minute--30 wpm, 35, wpm, 40 wpm, etc. The same piece of music was used for several increasing speeds, then as you got to some faster speed you were rewarded by getting to hear a different piece of music.
The slowest ones used a piece of march music named "American Patrol," which is one of those pieces of music most people cannot name but recognize instantly when they hear it. YouTube has a recording, not the same recording (and incorrectly identified--it's by F. W. Meachum, not Sousa). The typing records were, of course, played with a very heavy, steady, square beat. To this day I can't hear this piece of music without thinking "F-R-F-space-J-U-J."
Quite seriously, though, all touch-typing classes--not just in my high-school days, but in my mother's high school days--drilled into you the importance of maintaining an absolutely steady, even rhythm. You didn't slow down, even when stretching with the left pinky to hit the exclamation point, and you didn't speed up, even when you're typing T-H-E.
I'm not sure how this particular bit of lore got lost. As nearly as I can tell, the generation that has learned to "key" on computer keyboards is not being taught to keep a steady rhythm. I don't know if the importance of the steady rhythm is real or just tradition or superstition; we were taught it and I believed it and still do.
Incidentally, typing on a high-quality, properly maintained office manual typewriter had a distinctly sensuous pleasure to it. The inertia of the typebars and the force profile of the keyboard had apparently evolved to feel good. In my high school days they had a mix of manual and electric typewriters. I could type faster on the electrics, and of course they produced better-looking typing, but they weren't as pleasant to use. Cheap portables were, of course, no fun, but a good full-size office Royal or Remington... mmmmmmmm.
You're right. Thanks. Sorry to have posted misinformation.
I think they are MUCH better than they were in the 50s.
Just a few years ago I was privileged to see a couple of 1950s films in a "3D festival" at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto. These were clean, restored prints and well projected. The two I saw were "Kiss Me, Kate" and "Miss Sadie Thompson." I believe I was getting the same experience I'd have had in a good first-run house in the 1950s.
Incidentally, there could be another reason 3D never took off: it is unflattering to female actors. Makeup can hide the contours of an aging face in 2D, but not in 3D. I won't say Kathryn Grayson and Rita Hayworth looked old. But they certainly looked as if they were in their thirties.
Anyway, it was pretty good--I truly enjoyed "Kiss Me, Kate" which made good, imaginative use of 3D. But IMAX 3D and, I think it was "RealD" the local cineplex used for Avatar, are _much_ better.
Two-eye, two-image stereoscopic photography was invented by George Wheatstone (the same man who invented the Wheatstone bridge) in 1838. For almost two centuries it has constantly occupied a niche market, never going away and never going mainstream.
The Victorian parlor stereoscope became the ViewMaster of my childhood days. I still see them in toy stores. From time to time in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s I saw casual amateurs with Stereo Realists taking vacation pictures, but it was rare. A few years ago the Ritz stores had single-use cameras with four lenses, and a photofinishing service for them that delivered lenticular prints. Motion pictures using polarized stereo glasses have been with us for half a century, continually being rediscovered.
Most impressive to me so far has been IMAX 3D, which is _considerably_ better than whatever process the local Showcase used for Avatar, because a) it is much brighter, and b) the picture is large enough that you really are unaware of the ugly pseudoscopic problems at the edge of the field. There's no way that home 3D is going to be as good as IMAX 3D.
And none of it is ever going to be any more popular than quadrophonic sound. Because there are, plain and simple, insoluble problems with two-image stereoscopic 3D.
The biggest is that the added realism of 3D is only seen if a) you are seated on a location that's reasonably square-on to the center of the screen, which is never true for more than one person in a living room, and never true for more than a tiny percentage of the people in an auditorium; b) the 2D perspective is consistent with the 3D perspective, which is only true if the cinematographer restricts herself to a single focal length and throws away a century of screen grammar. If these two conditions are not met, you get a stimulating, novel, Cabinet-of-Dr.-Caligari experience that has limited appeal--reminiscent of the early days of color TV when it was thrilling to watch people turning from magenta-skinned to green-skinned as they crossed from left to right, because it was SO not black-and-white.
If 3D were automatically realistic, from every seat in the living room, and did not require directors to completely reinvent their storytelling technique, then, like stereophonic sound, it would be (mostly) just value added, and would gradually displace 2D as costs drop, the way stereo sound has gradually replaced monophonic.
But it is not. There are tradeoffs, and not just in cost. And the content for which 3D adds more than it costs is just not that big a percentage of the showtime universe. There is more to cinema than Kiss Me, Kate, House of Wax, This Is Cinerama!, The Polar Express, Titanic: Ghosts of the Abyss, Sharks 3D! and Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.
Avatar was a good movie. But does anyone believe it would not have been a good movie in 2D?
Windows NT was originally positioned as a portable, platform-neutral system and Microsoft made a big deal of it not being just limited to Intel architecture but also running on ACE platforms (remember ACE?), MIPS, Digital Alpha, and at least one other whose name escapes me. IBM PowerPC maybe?
Microsoft seduced and abandoned companies that committed to Windows on non-Intel platforms, with the abandonment beginning almost as soon as the seduction was complete. My employer made a significant commitment to Windows-on-DEC-Alpha--at that time, their specific application benchmarked over twice as fast on Alpha as on Intel. It was NT 3.51, IIRC, and Microsoft moved up to Windows 4.0 on Intel and kept dragging feet and making excuses on Alpha, finally acknowledging that it was not going to be supported. At that point, the Alpha systems bought by my employer's customers were barely a year old, and those customers were not happy with us for selling them such rapidly orphaned products.
What matters is not whether Windows can run on ARM, but whether Microsoft actually has any serious or durable commitment to supporting it on that platform.
It's not the greatest book in the world.
It's not Herman Wouk's greatest book.
But Herman Wouk's 2004 novel, "A Hole in Texas" has got to be the best romantic comedy about the Superconducting Super Collider ever written.
Calling these things eBooks ought to be considered deceptive labeling.
It's not a book if you can't lend it.
It's not a book if you can't resell it.
It's not a book if it won't last thirty years under ordinary casual home storage conditions.
It's not a book when a public library can't buy one copy and lend it out as often as they wish.
It's not about feel of the cloth covers or the smell of the dust or the silverfish living in real books, it's about replicating the functionality all books have had for five hundred years.
Nominations are kept secret for fifty years so there is no way to confirm whether or not some person has been nominated. The nominators are chosen by the Nobel committee; you can't just send a name in yourself or organize a campaign to nominate someone. All details of the nominations are also kept secret for 50 years, so there is no way to confirm whether or not Snorre Valen is a nominator.
See the Nobel Prize website's nomination facts.
How long do you think it will it be before people who have purchased the "unlimited" plan and taken it seriously will receive notices from Verizon saying that their account has been cancelled or disabled due to "excessive" use? And the representatives explaining that they just mean "no stated limit," and that they never dreamed that people would actually download _that_ much, and it is with the saddest and greatest reluctance they have been unwillingly forced to take measures against a few, a very very few evildoers in order to insure the optimum user experience for the vast majority of good Verizon customers, and anyway they never really said it was unlimited because if you scroll 61% of the way down the 150-page online terms and conditions they reserve the right to curtail the usage by any individual in the interests of the greater good of the Verizon network as a whole?
...by over-the-top, intrusive, nagging fundraising by Wikipedia. Yes, of course I know how to click the "close" box. Yes, Wikipedia is important to me. Yes, I made a small donation. No, I'm not a marketing or "development" (fund-raising) expert. Yes, the Wikimedia Foundation can do what it thinks best.
I'm just saying I was really annoyed, and this is the first time I've found it annoying.
What next? Pictures looking down at adorable impoverished third world toddler girls staring up into the camera with big sad Walter Keane eyes? "Little Furfelette is starving for knowledge. Her only reference book is a 1982 World Almanac. You can give her new hope. Or you can click the 'close' box and break her little heart. Which will it be?"
The Wikimedia Foundation can do what it thinks best, but I don't have to like it. And I don't.