People don't usually pay for software. They pay for one of the following:
1) a pure conscience 2) a zero fuss installation process 3) not having to go through the effort of finding a copy of said software and ripping it
[if 2 is broken and outweighs 3 in effort and hassle, people ripp software - one of the reasons I haven't bought any copies of flash anymore since MX 2004 Pro - the installation and registration process is an insult to any paying customer] 4) cool looking UIs and neat workflows 5) automated processes (software + hardware + the people to understand the problem and set it all up to actually save work and money + a number to call when things go south) 6) access to a professionally maintained gameserver
In fact, in the web developement industry, that a piece of software is open source is mostly a given. Wether a company succeeds or failes is rather independant of wether it offers its code as OSS or not.
This guy and his essay on the issue at hand is a breath of fresh air in a ongoing onslaught of web-developement misconceptions that increased tenfold ever since countless Java freaks joined the fray with the hype called Ruby on Rails.
I beg all people to read it and read it well. Please.
May I quote one part: In the MVC pattern, the Model is the application object. It contains all the presentation-agnostic, data-centric logic, which is often labelled "the business logic".
No he isn't. He critisizes the incorrect use and application of the term MVC and the misconception and the pointless enforcement of a wrong concept of MVC in places where it is often more than pointless to do so. Like in most modern web application scenarious.
And does quite a bit of complaining about Django without completely demonstrating his point.
No he doesn't. He uses Django as an example for all current hip Web FWs out there to emphasise the issue above. And he clearly states that before he even goes into Djangos documentation and concept of MVC.
There are some good quotes atributed to him, but one particular one that goes to show how very wrong even experts can be:
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
In my experience this is utter arrogant rubbish. Not being able to teach good programming to people who know Basic only stems from the inability of people like Dijkstra to teach. One of the reasons I usually stear clear of all to academic IT enviroments and programming languages. Like Ruby or Java.
Though modders have a completely different ethics about free/non-free they do put lots of work into stuff they basically give away for free (beer). The entire community is one the FOSS crowd should look into, as it hints towards the quality we can expect once the race for better GFX is over and we've reached realistic RT rendering and OSS engines finally can catch up.
Right now modders use the best engine they can get (often Valves Source for Windows nowadays) and the best tools they can get (non-commercial versions of Maya or Softimage or something like that). It will take some more time to bridge that gap, but I do see this coming.
As with every other profession, having a degree or not is quite decoupled from being good at your profession or not. However, we IT people still have one huge advantage: Information Technology is advancing so fast, it is almost easyer being up to date without a degree. I studied a semester of CS a year ago. We were wasting our time learning with tools from the early 90ies, including a Windows 95 diagramm tool that nobody in the real world would ever use nowadays. The speedy advancement in IT and the large gap it often causes between academic eduzcation and reality are large enough for even the one or other HR deptartment to notice that a degree in IT doesn't really matter that much.
If you are *interested* in studying CS (including Math 1 through 4 and basic economy) and you are young enough to do it (read: haven't started a career yet), then do it. If you don't know if you'll like it, try it out. Do a semester and then take it from there. Either drop out or pull through and specialize. Do not study CS simply for a career opportunity.
If you are positive that you mostly hate studying CS or racking up the dept for doing it, then don't do it. Focus on the IT field you're interested in, get some internships and small projects and join an OSS project. Your initial salary will be lower at the begining of your career, but listening to my team lead ragging about his tour de fource to a MSC in CS (during a time in which the first degree was still free in Germany) lets me suspect you'll have more fun getting there.
I have a diploma in performing arts (ergo: completely unrelated) 22 years of computing and programming experience and have gotten my current job based on my skills and not a degree. It is possible and happens far more often than in other, more entrenched fields.
This meta-article and the whole style of discussion proves it once again in so many ways: To many n00bs claim to much of a say in Web-developenent. Especially among the ones programming a lot but actually knowing squat about web-developement and it's specialties. That something like this goes as an expertise story shows the downside of the field. It's like the entire imature discussion, indifferent raving and bashing about Ajax or RoR or some other recent fad in the field.
To clear a few things up
1) MVC is a construct to describe the most basic setup when using a seperate persistance layer in an end-user application. The concept has been around for at least 15 years and is most certainly *not* limited to web-developement. On contrary, it's basically a relatively simple model for 90ies style GUI DB Apps. For modern web-developement fanatically sticking to MVC is a severe restriction, as in a web-app with seperate persistance, the controller - due to stateless connection to the UI (Browser) - needs to be seperated into at least 2 tiers to make any sense at all, thus turning a pure 3-tier MVC approach into more of a hinderance than a support in webapps.
2) Moving the view layer into client-side logic (if it's in MVC or something else is of no concern) is nothing new. The concept has been around since the dawn of computer networking and is - of course - also a natural progression for web-apps and a growing availability of umbiquious zero-fuss rich-client funtionality (read: non-trivial standardised JavaScript client-server stuff (aka 'Ajax') nowadays works in most Browsers). In many ways the pure server side stuff in web-logic of the last 10 years was an exception and intermediate solution paid for with huge server overhead in order to offer statefull sorta-kinda-GUI-apps in software purpose built for something completely different: Reading documents (aka 'Browsers'). Java was an attempt to get the real thing but it didn't catch on for various reasons. The main being crappy plattform deployment to end-users. That's why - strangely enough for Java enthusiasts - Java still is competing with Flash in that respect.
3) Client-side logic doesn't break MVC. As explained above, MVC has nothing to do wether the app resides on the client, the server or is spread out between. In fact, the most sophisticated frameworks that rely on rich-client functionality do that seperation as the most natural result. Openlaszlo (that which Adope ripped off in Flex) and Tibco GI come to mind as prime examples for that. And both have been around for quite some time now.
As a senior web-developer with solid experience I love the fact that the entire field is very good at regularly offering solid ripostes of result oriented work to any academic arrogance the field of computer science and programming. Thus the ongoing success of PHP-based web-apps. However, it appears that this is taken as an excuse - by professionals just as much as novices - to babble out and present anything they ran accross and haven't fully looked into yet as the newest insight in the field. I sometimes wish people would stop, do some research and then think before they post an opinion that isn't even thought through to the end. Customers and novices interested in the field for whatever reason are confused enough as it is.
Just 4 months ago I joined the worlds largest browser game company as an ActionScript 3 developer. They've grown from 2 employees in 2003 to 155 when I came and ~170 right now and plan to expand to approx. 300+ in 2009. The games are free, only turning of adds or buying small extra features is our source of income. Our current growth rate is insane and I expect it to gain even more due to mobile MMO-gaming in the next 2 years or so. This kinda fits the articles prediction.
Did the same thing for a customer once. He wanted me to use Fusioncharts. It actually was one of the rare times where a customer prerequisite wasn't totally hairbrained. To the contrary, I'd actually use them again if I had to do something like that. There is a lot of clientside logic in them to cover for correct interpretation of a very easy and powerfull XML spec for the data. Very nice and flexible, you'll get results fast. If you haven't noticed by now: This is a recommendation, even though they are not FOSS.
The only OSS alternative worth looking at, AFAICT, is Open Flash Chart.
Why don't you give both a try and tell us the comparsion results?
She fumbled, in a high-stress enviroment under high-stress circumstances, but it's not her fault. I actually instantly saw the flaw with something/somebody else when I read this the first time.
what in heavens name is up with a space grease gun leaking grease were it's not supposed to? Were does Nasa get these? At the local hardware store for 10 Dollars a piece or what? This stunt actually went quite well. Imagine her not being able to do her job (or get back to the airlock) because a grease gun explodes all over her helmet visor or something simular.
Say what you want, but somewhere some Nasa engineering team has to get back to the drawing table ASAP and design a greasegun that actually works relyably - Nasa style wise. Or something simular with no moving parts at all. Maybe get a vaseline can and a spatula tied to a string or something - that's probably how the russians do it. I'd actually be super-pissed at gear that goes haywire on me 7 hours into a stressy EVA. I do climbing - imagine your backback shedding mission-critical gear at 300 meters in the vertical or something simular. Multipling that by a thousand hints the scale of issues we're talking about.
Way more people than just the astronaut are responsible here.
I earned 25K just 5 years ago by building an rich-client e-learning system that could handle ISDN for transferring video lectures by using sophisticated preloading mechanisims. This was just a year before DSL got critical mass and made it 65% superfluos, and a few years before codecs had improved so far that bandwidth was halved. The system I built would now maybe be worth half of that, and only if it came with a server-side admin interface.
A year ago I built a totally internationalised (content and interface) custom vertical-market CRM with n-dimensional user-rights management and optimised access controll using a web framework. I made about 8K on that. As soon as Nooku is final and Joomla 1.6 comes out with full ACL ( and if they don't screw up ) that will be worth about a half to a third of the original cost. I expect this to happen in the first two thirds of 2009.
To fill you in on the situation: This is normal.
Software, aka the 'virtual world', is an area were the - by todays standards for real-life humanity haibrained - concept of marxsisim works a-ok, as the cost to double what I posses if you desire it too is factually nil. This is the reason that shrinkwrap software is dead as a doornail in mid-term, unless there's a law that you have to use proprietary software.
Where is Borland and JBuilder and the accompaning business model? Disintegrated in a purple logic cloud. I remember Borland JBuilder Enterprise costing bizarly outlandish 4-digit sums of money 8 years ago. Now you can download IDEs that are far better for free. And even the best software companies can't afford to ask more money than a day or two of an IT professional setting up and configging an OSS tool would cost.
Maya 2.x used to cost upwards of 20K, now you can download Blender for free and it kicks older versions on Maya up and down the street. And the last thing seperating it from todays prime-time players is Renderman compliance and a few odd features strewn about. A whole sub-set of the multimedia tool industry is about to go belly up and/or radically change just because of 6 handfulls of enthusiasts based in Amsterdam patiently working away on their passion for the last decade.
FOSS is slowly creeping from general stuff - that it actually allready is superiour in - into more vertical markets such as gaming, grafics & multimedia, rich clients and Business IT / ERP. It let's SAP and MS execs breathe shallower just thinking about it, but there is no way it be stopped. Once hardware has become universally ubiquious, the speed of this process will grow by orders of magnitude. I expect to see the total death of shrinkwrap software and it's concepts in my lifetime and while I'm still earning money as an IT professional.
Bottom line: We are helping humanity here. And we will have to adapt to the fact that we have to develop the right stuff only once, as it then can be copied and used freely throughout the world ever after. This is Cyberpunk at its best. It's called Free Open Source Software and its taking the IT-world by storm as we speak. Get with the programm.
I'm a mac user. I've used Linux for 11 years now, I've used Windows back in the day for StarCraft or when it was neccesary for work (and on my jobs workstation) and I use OS X today whenever I want zero-fuss integration and need to run the Flash IDE to draw up some RIA components. I still use Debian and Ubuntu aswell, however.
I'm typing this on my Mac Mini with Tiger - with the pricey but neat new aluminum mac KB attached - and my last computer purchase was the famous classic 12" G4 macbook, trusted subnotebook of hackers and geeks all around the world. The fluorescent light needs longer time to fully light up, but after 5 years it still is a piece of integrated hard- and software that I love to use on a regular basis. In a nutshell: I'm a computer expert and I like my macs and I can name solid reasons why I do.
Apple has a rock-solid multiplier in me, as I - as most geeks - am the opinion-leader in all things concerning IT and computers for at least 50 people that know me well enough to know my profession. I can inmediately think of at least 3 people who have gotten macs also due to largely my influence on their decision.
That aside I can only say: Get pissy with me and I'm right back to Linux on x86 only. As soon as I have to fuss around with media not playing on my computers I'm gone, mac mini and 13" unibody MacBook be damned. I'd rather fuss around with half-finished OSS projects or crappy printer integration on a dell laptop that looks and handles like a piece of shit than having some DRM scheme wasting my time. If Apple even thinks about pressing the lock-in game, I'm gone and I will stop recommending Apple instantly. And I'll start discouraging people from buying them.
I'm reading lot's of ragging on Agile here. Maybe you guys should actually f*cking read the agile manifesto. It's only a few sentences after all. You'll notice that it's actually quite a good thing that tries to rid the software devprocess of bloat and get close to the people for whom software is written.
Whenever I've used agile with the right people, it was a breeze getting the job done. It's basically common-sence systematically applied to software developement in my book.
Just reading your post shows me that you guys where using scrum the wrong way. Most people don't understand the true purpose of Scrum. We do Scrums every day at 11:30 and they take about a minute ot two per team-member (just did todays and I'm checking on slashdot while adding my new tickets to mantis).
Scrums are stand-up meetings. Everybody stands and keeps his turn short. You say what you where doing since yesterday, what you achieved and what you are going to do today. It's mostly about self-awareness and being able to judge your capacities - it's a mental exercise, not a classic meeting (we have those too, but only like once every 8 weeks).
Agile came out of the need to deal with controll-freaks who didn't do their homework and tend to weigh down things that should be lighweight with to much bureaucracy. Where human interfacing is a key point of your software, Agile is a very good method to handle things. If the pipeline has skilled people at each section, that is. Our company is technology driven with managers that actually wrote code at some point in their career. I'd call our process somewhat agile - we get changes every odd week - and everybody deals with it without a single hitch.... Coming to think of it, maybe that's why we dominate our market.
Bottom line: You guys got Scrum and Agile all wrong. Maybe you should've steared clear from the get go.
To elaborate: He's bemoaning that this beautyfull desktop is being discontinued. A true catastrophe that will set back the entire industry by years to come.
CS is still in it's infant stage. It's simple evolution that unaccepted men who don't get a spoose go out to explore new fields (loonies claiming that the earth rotates around the sun and simular heresies (Galileo/Kopernicus), outcast crazy dutch painters who have no chance with the ladies at all 'not finishing' their pictures and thus establishing new territories (Van Gogh), math-nuts with nothing better to do thinking up calculating machines, etc.) in order to gain better leverage towards the 'average' society.
CS/IT is still utter nerdterritory - which are outcast no-chancers by nature - with these exact traits with tons of brainwork to do and mostly eventually pointless things to try out and explore, and it will take another 80 years or so until that changes thouroughly. Then normal men and thus average women too will follow. It usually has been that way.
To emphasis the point: You don't really think that we'll still be hacking web developement frameworks 30 years from now, do you? Though so.
This essay sums this issue up pretty good and gives solid explainations for why it is that way.
Haha, you hicks in flyover territory never fail to amuse me. "I could be a dancer if I wanted" "I could be an architect if I wanted" well guess what buddy you're not good enough, that's why you're not up on that stage under the bright lights.
You apparently missed the part where I wrote about having performed myself for 10 years (practically the whole 90ies). Fulltime, btw. I even earned a solid salary as a teacher in the field. So I actually do know what I'm talking about.
She's good at math but doesn't want it as a career. So f*cking what?
This actually is very normal. I excell at expressive stage dance and Aikido, even though I've only done the latter for about 3 years up to know. I'm good at it probably because I have a diploma and 10 years of experience in performing arts. Yet I didn't choose it as a career. Instead I'm a professional multimedia-designer and a web-developer/flash-actionscript developer since nine years ago. A world class dancer I know earned his tuition by performing and earing bucketloads of money - yet he was studying to become an architect. (Original quote:"I know I'm good at performing, but you should see me as an architect.")
I recently went to a professionals performance of the type of dance I did. Done by those considered best in this particular field. The performance was so unbelievably crappy and boring, I'm sure I could've done better right of the bat, even though I haven't performed in 9 years. I actually saw technical mistakes on stage instantly. Give me a minimum-wage budget for all performers, and in 2 years I'll have the best crew in the world. I could out-choreograph 90% percent of the people in that area instantly.
So why didn't I choose a career in performing arts? Well, first of all, if you go performing arts, you do *nothing* else. It's not 9 to 5 it's more like 9 to 12 o'clock in the evening and _paying_ for it the first 5 years. Until you've gotten yourself a reputation and the gigs and sponsorings come rolling in. You have to morph into a person resembling some kind of dictator if you want to successfully shoo a crew of 25 dancers about and the amount of work that goes into a regular 2 and a half hour show is reminiscent of a large complex mission-critical software project. Having a child or even just having fun hanging out with friends other than your dancing crew once in a while is a total deal-breaker in this field.
Why don't I teach Aikido then? Well, I suppose I could after another year of concentrated training, but I'd need a Dojo and generally would have to think of it as fun even when teaching people the same boring basics every day again even though I'd love to do randoris with experienced Aikidokas that are at my level most of the time. Sorry, but that doesn't sound particulary attractive to me. Screw that as a career.
I'm not the most outstanding flash/as3 developer right now - the position for which I'm currently hired -, especially when compared to my project manager, but I'm a very experienced senior web expert with solid art, design, software architecture and programming skills and just got a job with a large game developer and come right after my team-lead, AS-skill-wise (And he has a CS degree and has stuck with ActionScript ever since). I'm in heaven right now, with people around me I like, a fun job and superiors that understand what I'm saying and can actually answer my questions if I have any. It's a software developers paradise that more than covers for the below average salary. Which comes to my bank account every month - contrary to that of most professional dancers and Aikidokas. I'll stick with that for now, thank you.
Bottom line: There are bazillions of people who excell in a field and yet pursue no career in it. I know people who could give the best lectures at a campus and have no academic degree at all, because they're just fine working as a gardener, woodworker or traditional german slater. This isn't a problem. Your intention of showing her the upsides of science are good and you should attempt to do that, but don't force the issue if she persists in stearing clear of it, for it actually is quite common.
Balmer, being the crazy nutcase original that he is, has actually acknowledged OSS achievements in the past and - for a MS exec - is quite aware of what it going on in OSS. After all, the newer Windows UIs perpetually copy the better ideas from KDE, so there has to be some awarness. Between him and BG I suspect he'd be more likeley to admit when it's time to move from shrinkwrap software to services, allthough he still doesn't even mention that in public.
... I'd say don't programm anything yourself unless you are abolutely sure it doesn't exist in some form of lib or class. Programming in Java is a PITA as it is, and it's whole point is that you don't have to build anything yourself.
In fact, Java is nearly not at all about programming but about reading docs and integrating libs and classes that provide the code you need. It's OOP Forte with the brakes removed, and one of the reasons it's considered to be so outright boring. That's why there are so many thriving alternatives such as PHP or Python, so that people can get a chance to do some result oriented coding.
You are in Java territory allready and Java now is free (speech) aswell, so continue to play the Java game and learn as much as you can about it by integrating existing code. Java-style research, doc-reading and OOP knitworking is tedious but in the end it'll pay off. Especially if you plan to advance in an suit-style big-bucks IT career. There's a reason any other PL can't get by OOP and/or the Java way of doing things beyond a certain point if they want to be taken for granted.
To go even further, I'd actually look into UML editors and CASE-Tools once you know your way around Java, as these are the most advanced in the Java world and mark the point beyond which Java loses its pain factor. I find JBoss and jBPM BPEL, JPDL and GPD particularly interesting. (If you allready feel sick reading those abrevations, then you know why a large part of me still avoids Java whenever possible:-) )
Rule Number 1: NEVER get pissy with the majority of main core contributers. If the project has *any* significance at all, you WILL lose. And for very good reasons (and riddance) too. That's a fact. Learn it.
There's a lot of KDE in those UI shots. This is not the first time MS has been ripping KDE UI-wise and usability-wise. XP's UI was heavily inspired by KDE-Keramik for instance, the new Windows System Manager was a blatant KDE System Manager rippoff, etc. I find it interesting, as it shows the attention OSS gets from competitors in the field.
In my self analysis, however, I find the biggest culprit is "brain noise." When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration.
I observe the same effect - I'm 38 - however I think it's simply exaustion from the lack of sleep and brain-downtime. The older you grow the more structured your every day life becomes and the more compact and effective your calendar becomes and the less you notice exaustion, simply because you have become used to it in the context of what you're doing. As soon as I've had enough sleep or start to learn something entirely new - a year ago I did my GED and a first semester of CS for instance - I notice the old freshness kicking in again. Changing behaviour and thinking patters keeps the brain on edge and busy. All else is something like brain-boredom. That's where the brain-noise comes in, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
People don't usually pay for software. They pay for one of the following:
1) a pure conscience
2) a zero fuss installation process
3) not having to go through the effort of finding a copy of said software and ripping it
[if 2 is broken and outweighs 3 in effort and hassle, people ripp software - one of the reasons I haven't bought any copies of flash anymore since MX 2004 Pro - the installation and registration process is an insult to any paying customer]
4) cool looking UIs and neat workflows
5) automated processes (software + hardware + the people to understand the problem and set it all up to actually save work and money + a number to call when things go south)
6) access to a professionally maintained gameserver
In fact, in the web developement industry, that a piece of software is open source is mostly a given. Wether a company succeeds or failes is rather independant of wether it offers its code as OSS or not.
This guy and his essay on the issue at hand is a breath of fresh air in a ongoing onslaught of web-developement misconceptions that increased tenfold ever since countless Java freaks joined the fray with the hype called Ruby on Rails.
I beg all people to read it and read it well. Please.
May I quote one part:
In the MVC pattern, the Model is the application object. It contains all the presentation-agnostic, data-centric logic, which is often labelled "the business logic".
Yes. Say it again. Halleluja!
Author is Pedantic
No he isn't. He critisizes the incorrect use and application of the term MVC and the misconception and the pointless enforcement of a wrong concept of MVC in places where it is often more than pointless to do so. Like in most modern web application scenarious.
And does quite a bit of complaining about Django without completely demonstrating his point.
No he doesn't. He uses Django as an example for all current hip Web FWs out there to emphasise the issue above. And he clearly states that before he even goes into Djangos documentation and concept of MVC.
There are some good quotes atributed to him, but one particular one that goes to show how very wrong even experts can be:
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
In my experience this is utter arrogant rubbish. Not being able to teach good programming to people who know Basic only stems from the inability of people like Dijkstra to teach. One of the reasons I usually stear clear of all to academic IT enviroments and programming languages. Like Ruby or Java.
Though modders have a completely different ethics about free/non-free they do put lots of work into stuff they basically give away for free (beer). The entire community is one the FOSS crowd should look into, as it hints towards the quality we can expect once the race for better GFX is over and we've reached realistic RT rendering and OSS engines finally can catch up.
Right now modders use the best engine they can get (often Valves Source for Windows nowadays) and the best tools they can get (non-commercial versions of Maya or Softimage or something like that). It will take some more time to bridge that gap, but I do see this coming.
At first I honestly thought he meant the Acorn Computer. Yeah, I'm that much of a geek.
As with every other profession, having a degree or not is quite decoupled from being good at your profession or not. However, we IT people still have one huge advantage: Information Technology is advancing so fast, it is almost easyer being up to date without a degree. I studied a semester of CS a year ago. We were wasting our time learning with tools from the early 90ies, including a Windows 95 diagramm tool that nobody in the real world would ever use nowadays.
The speedy advancement in IT and the large gap it often causes between academic eduzcation and reality are large enough for even the one or other HR deptartment to notice that a degree in IT doesn't really matter that much.
If you are *interested* in studying CS (including Math 1 through 4 and basic economy) and you are young enough to do it (read: haven't started a career yet), then do it. If you don't know if you'll like it, try it out. Do a semester and then take it from there. Either drop out or pull through and specialize. Do not study CS simply for a career opportunity.
If you are positive that you mostly hate studying CS or racking up the dept for doing it, then don't do it. Focus on the IT field you're interested in, get some internships and small projects and join an OSS project. Your initial salary will be lower at the begining of your career, but listening to my team lead ragging about his tour de fource to a MSC in CS (during a time in which the first degree was still free in Germany) lets me suspect you'll have more fun getting there.
I have a diploma in performing arts (ergo: completely unrelated) 22 years of computing and programming experience and have gotten my current job based on my skills and not a degree. It is possible and happens far more often than in other, more entrenched fields.
My 2 cents.
This meta-article and the whole style of discussion proves it once again in so many ways: To many n00bs claim to much of a say in Web-developenent. Especially among the ones programming a lot but actually knowing squat about web-developement and it's specialties. That something like this goes as an expertise story shows the downside of the field. It's like the entire imature discussion, indifferent raving and bashing about Ajax or RoR or some other recent fad in the field.
To clear a few things up
1) MVC is a construct to describe the most basic setup when using a seperate persistance layer in an end-user application. The concept has been around for at least 15 years and is most certainly *not* limited to web-developement. On contrary, it's basically a relatively simple model for 90ies style GUI DB Apps. For modern web-developement fanatically sticking to MVC is a severe restriction, as in a web-app with seperate persistance, the controller - due to stateless connection to the UI (Browser) - needs to be seperated into at least 2 tiers to make any sense at all, thus turning a pure 3-tier MVC approach into more of a hinderance than a support in webapps.
2) Moving the view layer into client-side logic (if it's in MVC or something else is of no concern) is nothing new. The concept has been around since the dawn of computer networking and is - of course - also a natural progression for web-apps and a growing availability of umbiquious zero-fuss rich-client funtionality (read: non-trivial standardised JavaScript client-server stuff (aka 'Ajax') nowadays works in most Browsers). In many ways the pure server side stuff in web-logic of the last 10 years was an exception and intermediate solution paid for with huge server overhead in order to offer statefull sorta-kinda-GUI-apps in software purpose built for something completely different: Reading documents (aka 'Browsers'). Java was an attempt to get the real thing but it didn't catch on for various reasons. The main being crappy plattform deployment to end-users. That's why - strangely enough for Java enthusiasts - Java still is competing with Flash in that respect.
3) Client-side logic doesn't break MVC. As explained above, MVC has nothing to do wether the app resides on the client, the server or is spread out between. In fact, the most sophisticated frameworks that rely on rich-client functionality do that seperation as the most natural result. Openlaszlo (that which Adope ripped off in Flex) and Tibco GI come to mind as prime examples for that. And both have been around for quite some time now.
As a senior web-developer with solid experience I love the fact that the entire field is very good at regularly offering solid ripostes of result oriented work to any academic arrogance the field of computer science and programming. Thus the ongoing success of PHP-based web-apps. However, it appears that this is taken as an excuse - by professionals just as much as novices - to babble out and present anything they ran accross and haven't fully looked into yet as the newest insight in the field. I sometimes wish people would stop, do some research and then think before they post an opinion that isn't even thought through to the end. Customers and novices interested in the field for whatever reason are confused enough as it is.
My 2 cents.
Just 4 months ago I joined the worlds largest browser game company as an ActionScript 3 developer. They've grown from 2 employees in 2003 to 155 when I came and ~170 right now and plan to expand to approx. 300+ in 2009. The games are free, only turning of adds or buying small extra features is our source of income. Our current growth rate is insane and I expect it to gain even more due to mobile MMO-gaming in the next 2 years or so. This kinda fits the articles prediction.
Did the same thing for a customer once. He wanted me to use Fusioncharts. It actually was one of the rare times where a customer prerequisite wasn't totally hairbrained. To the contrary, I'd actually use them again if I had to do something like that. There is a lot of clientside logic in them to cover for correct interpretation of a very easy and powerfull XML spec for the data. Very nice and flexible, you'll get results fast.
If you haven't noticed by now: This is a recommendation, even though they are not FOSS.
The only OSS alternative worth looking at, AFAICT, is Open Flash Chart.
Why don't you give both a try and tell us the comparsion results?
She fumbled, in a high-stress enviroment under high-stress circumstances, but it's not her fault. I actually instantly saw the flaw with something/somebody else when I read this the first time.
what in heavens name is up with a space grease gun leaking grease were it's not supposed to? Were does Nasa get these? At the local hardware store for 10 Dollars a piece or what? This stunt actually went quite well. Imagine her not being able to do her job (or get back to the airlock) because a grease gun explodes all over her helmet visor or something simular.
Say what you want, but somewhere some Nasa engineering team has to get back to the drawing table ASAP and design a greasegun that actually works relyably - Nasa style wise. Or something simular with no moving parts at all. Maybe get a vaseline can and a spatula tied to a string or something - that's probably how the russians do it.
I'd actually be super-pissed at gear that goes haywire on me 7 hours into a stressy EVA. I do climbing - imagine your backback shedding mission-critical gear at 300 meters in the vertical or something simular. Multipling that by a thousand hints the scale of issues we're talking about.
Way more people than just the astronaut are responsible here.
I earned 25K just 5 years ago by building an rich-client e-learning system that could handle ISDN for transferring video lectures by using sophisticated preloading mechanisims. This was just a year before DSL got critical mass and made it 65% superfluos, and a few years before codecs had improved so far that bandwidth was halved. The system I built would now maybe be worth half of that, and only if it came with a server-side admin interface.
A year ago I built a totally internationalised (content and interface) custom vertical-market CRM with n-dimensional user-rights management and optimised access controll using a web framework. I made about 8K on that. As soon as Nooku is final and Joomla 1.6 comes out with full ACL ( and if they don't screw up ) that will be worth about a half to a third of the original cost. I expect this to happen in the first two thirds of 2009.
To fill you in on the situation: This is normal.
Software, aka the 'virtual world', is an area were the - by todays standards for real-life humanity haibrained - concept of marxsisim works a-ok, as the cost to double what I posses if you desire it too is factually nil. This is the reason that shrinkwrap software is dead as a doornail in mid-term, unless there's a law that you have to use proprietary software.
Where is Borland and JBuilder and the accompaning business model? Disintegrated in a purple logic cloud.
I remember Borland JBuilder Enterprise costing bizarly outlandish 4-digit sums of money 8 years ago. Now you can download IDEs that are far better for free. And even the best software companies can't afford to ask more money than a day or two of an IT professional setting up and configging an OSS tool would cost.
Maya 2.x used to cost upwards of 20K, now you can download Blender for free and it kicks older versions on Maya up and down the street. And the last thing seperating it from todays prime-time players is Renderman compliance and a few odd features strewn about. A whole sub-set of the multimedia tool industry is about to go belly up and/or radically change just because of 6 handfulls of enthusiasts based in Amsterdam patiently working away on their passion for the last decade.
FOSS is slowly creeping from general stuff - that it actually allready is superiour in - into more vertical markets such as gaming, grafics & multimedia, rich clients and Business IT / ERP. It let's SAP and MS execs breathe shallower just thinking about it, but there is no way it be stopped. Once hardware has become universally ubiquious, the speed of this process will grow by orders of magnitude. I expect to see the total death of shrinkwrap software and it's concepts in my lifetime and while I'm still earning money as an IT professional.
Bottom line:
We are helping humanity here. And we will have to adapt to the fact that we have to develop the right stuff only once, as it then can be copied and used freely throughout the world ever after. This is Cyberpunk at its best. It's called Free Open Source Software and its taking the IT-world by storm as we speak.
Get with the programm.
My 2 cents.
I'm a mac user. I've used Linux for 11 years now, I've used Windows back in the day for StarCraft or when it was neccesary for work (and on my jobs workstation) and I use OS X today whenever I want zero-fuss integration and need to run the Flash IDE to draw up some RIA components. I still use Debian and Ubuntu aswell, however.
I'm typing this on my Mac Mini with Tiger - with the pricey but neat new aluminum mac KB attached - and my last computer purchase was the famous classic 12" G4 macbook, trusted subnotebook of hackers and geeks all around the world. The fluorescent light needs longer time to fully light up, but after 5 years it still is a piece of integrated hard- and software that I love to use on a regular basis. In a nutshell: I'm a computer expert and I like my macs and I can name solid reasons why I do.
Apple has a rock-solid multiplier in me, as I - as most geeks - am the opinion-leader in all things concerning IT and computers for at least 50 people that know me well enough to know my profession. I can inmediately think of at least 3 people who have gotten macs also due to largely my influence on their decision.
That aside I can only say: Get pissy with me and I'm right back to Linux on x86 only. As soon as I have to fuss around with media not playing on my computers I'm gone, mac mini and 13" unibody MacBook be damned. I'd rather fuss around with half-finished OSS projects or crappy printer integration on a dell laptop that looks and handles like a piece of shit than having some DRM scheme wasting my time. If Apple even thinks about pressing the lock-in game, I'm gone and I will stop recommending Apple instantly. And I'll start discouraging people from buying them.
My 2 Euros.
I'm reading lot's of ragging on Agile here. Maybe you guys should actually f*cking read the agile manifesto. It's only a few sentences after all. You'll notice that it's actually quite a good thing that tries to rid the software devprocess of bloat and get close to the people for whom software is written.
Whenever I've used agile with the right people, it was a breeze getting the job done. It's basically common-sence systematically applied to software developement in my book.
Just reading your post shows me that you guys where using scrum the wrong way. Most people don't understand the true purpose of Scrum. We do Scrums every day at 11:30 and they take about a minute ot two per team-member (just did todays and I'm checking on slashdot while adding my new tickets to mantis).
Scrums are stand-up meetings. Everybody stands and keeps his turn short. You say what you where doing since yesterday, what you achieved and what you are going to do today. It's mostly about self-awareness and being able to judge your capacities - it's a mental exercise, not a classic meeting (we have those too, but only like once every 8 weeks).
Agile came out of the need to deal with controll-freaks who didn't do their homework and tend to weigh down things that should be lighweight with to much bureaucracy. Where human interfacing is a key point of your software, Agile is a very good method to handle things. If the pipeline has skilled people at each section, that is. Our company is technology driven with managers that actually wrote code at some point in their career. I'd call our process somewhat agile - we get changes every odd week - and everybody deals with it without a single hitch. ... Coming to think of it, maybe that's why we dominate our market.
Bottom line:
You guys got Scrum and Agile all wrong. Maybe you should've steared clear from the get go.
To elaborate: He's bemoaning that this beautyfull desktop is being discontinued. A true catastrophe that will set back the entire industry by years to come.
CS is still in it's infant stage. It's simple evolution that unaccepted men who don't get a spoose go out to explore new fields (loonies claiming that the earth rotates around the sun and simular heresies (Galileo/Kopernicus), outcast crazy dutch painters who have no chance with the ladies at all 'not finishing' their pictures and thus establishing new territories (Van Gogh), math-nuts with nothing better to do thinking up calculating machines, etc.) in order to gain better leverage towards the 'average' society.
CS/IT is still utter nerdterritory - which are outcast no-chancers by nature - with these exact traits with tons of brainwork to do and mostly eventually pointless things to try out and explore, and it will take another 80 years or so until that changes thouroughly. Then normal men and thus average women too will follow. It usually has been that way.
To emphasis the point: You don't really think that we'll still be hacking web developement frameworks 30 years from now, do you? Though so.
This essay sums this issue up pretty good and gives solid explainations for why it is that way.
Haha, you hicks in flyover territory never fail to amuse me. "I could be a dancer if I wanted" "I could be an architect if I wanted" well guess what buddy you're not good enough, that's why you're not up on that stage under the bright lights.
You apparently missed the part where I wrote about having performed myself for 10 years (practically the whole 90ies). Fulltime, btw. I even earned a solid salary as a teacher in the field. So I actually do know what I'm talking about.
She's good at math but doesn't want it as a career. So f*cking what?
This actually is very normal. I excell at expressive stage dance and Aikido, even though I've only done the latter for about 3 years up to know. I'm good at it probably because I have a diploma and 10 years of experience in performing arts. Yet I didn't choose it as a career. Instead I'm a professional multimedia-designer and a web-developer/flash-actionscript developer since nine years ago. A world class dancer I know earned his tuition by performing and earing bucketloads of money - yet he was studying to become an architect. (Original quote:"I know I'm good at performing, but you should see me as an architect.")
I recently went to a professionals performance of the type of dance I did. Done by those considered best in this particular field. The performance was so unbelievably crappy and boring, I'm sure I could've done better right of the bat, even though I haven't performed in 9 years. I actually saw technical mistakes on stage instantly. Give me a minimum-wage budget for all performers, and in 2 years I'll have the best crew in the world. I could out-choreograph 90% percent of the people in that area instantly.
So why didn't I choose a career in performing arts? Well, first of all, if you go performing arts, you do *nothing* else. It's not 9 to 5 it's more like 9 to 12 o'clock in the evening and _paying_ for it the first 5 years. Until you've gotten yourself a reputation and the gigs and sponsorings come rolling in. You have to morph into a person resembling some kind of dictator if you want to successfully shoo a crew of 25 dancers about and the amount of work that goes into a regular 2 and a half hour show is reminiscent of a large complex mission-critical software project. Having a child or even just having fun hanging out with friends other than your dancing crew once in a while is a total deal-breaker in this field.
Why don't I teach Aikido then? Well, I suppose I could after another year of concentrated training, but I'd need a Dojo and generally would have to think of it as fun even when teaching people the same boring basics every day again even though I'd love to do randoris with experienced Aikidokas that are at my level most of the time. Sorry, but that doesn't sound particulary attractive to me. Screw that as a career.
I'm not the most outstanding flash/as3 developer right now - the position for which I'm currently hired -, especially when compared to my project manager, but I'm a very experienced senior web expert with solid art, design, software architecture and programming skills and just got a job with a large game developer and come right after my team-lead, AS-skill-wise (And he has a CS degree and has stuck with ActionScript ever since). I'm in heaven right now, with people around me I like, a fun job and superiors that understand what I'm saying and can actually answer my questions if I have any. It's a software developers paradise that more than covers for the below average salary. Which comes to my bank account every month - contrary to that of most professional dancers and Aikidokas. I'll stick with that for now, thank you.
Bottom line:
There are bazillions of people who excell in a field and yet pursue no career in it. I know people who could give the best lectures at a campus and have no academic degree at all, because they're just fine working as a gardener, woodworker or traditional german slater. This isn't a problem. Your intention of showing her the upsides of science are good and you should attempt to do that, but don't force the issue if she persists in stearing clear of it, for it actually is quite common.
Balmer, being the crazy nutcase original that he is, has actually acknowledged OSS achievements in the past and - for a MS exec - is quite aware of what it going on in OSS. After all, the newer Windows UIs perpetually copy the better ideas from KDE, so there has to be some awarness.
Between him and BG I suspect he'd be more likeley to admit when it's time to move from shrinkwrap software to services, allthough he still doesn't even mention that in public.
... I'd say don't programm anything yourself unless you are abolutely sure it doesn't exist in some form of lib or class. Programming in Java is a PITA as it is, and it's whole point is that you don't have to build anything yourself.
In fact, Java is nearly not at all about programming but about reading docs and integrating libs and classes that provide the code you need. It's OOP Forte with the brakes removed, and one of the reasons it's considered to be so outright boring. That's why there are so many thriving alternatives such as PHP or Python, so that people can get a chance to do some result oriented coding.
You are in Java territory allready and Java now is free (speech) aswell, so continue to play the Java game and learn as much as you can about it by integrating existing code. Java-style research, doc-reading and OOP knitworking is tedious but in the end it'll pay off. Especially if you plan to advance in an suit-style big-bucks IT career. There's a reason any other PL can't get by OOP and/or the Java way of doing things beyond a certain point if they want to be taken for granted.
To go even further, I'd actually look into UML editors and CASE-Tools once you know your way around Java, as these are the most advanced in the Java world and mark the point beyond which Java loses its pain factor. I find JBoss and jBPM BPEL, JPDL and GPD particularly interesting. (If you allready feel sick reading those abrevations, then you know why a large part of me still avoids Java whenever possible :-) )
My 2 cents.
My old mid-sixties double-sided slideruler outperforms Vista. Now what was your point again?
Rule Number 1: NEVER get pissy with the majority of main core contributers. If the project has *any* significance at all, you WILL lose. And for very good reasons (and riddance) too. That's a fact. Learn it.
There's a lot of KDE in those UI shots. This is not the first time MS has been ripping KDE UI-wise and usability-wise. XP's UI was heavily inspired by KDE-Keramik for instance, the new Windows System Manager was a blatant KDE System Manager rippoff, etc.
I find it interesting, as it shows the attention OSS gets from competitors in the field.
In my self analysis, however, I find the biggest culprit is "brain noise." When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration.
I observe the same effect - I'm 38 - however I think it's simply exaustion from the lack of sleep and brain-downtime. The older you grow the more structured your every day life becomes and the more compact and effective your calendar becomes and the less you notice exaustion, simply because you have become used to it in the context of what you're doing. As soon as I've had enough sleep or start to learn something entirely new - a year ago I did my GED and a first semester of CS for instance - I notice the old freshness kicking in again. Changing behaviour and thinking patters keeps the brain on edge and busy. All else is something like brain-boredom. That's where the brain-noise comes in, I think.
My 2 cents.