Well, that's an interesting misinterpretation, but the fact is that Java in a browser cannot be expected to be up to date, anyway. Java is a portable virtual machine that used to pack an incredible punch and have a lot of power, even in its most compact version. I've written programs for Java 1.0 that look gangbusters and run fast enough that older machines can keep up with their HotSpot JIT brethern. It took a lot of effort, and required a lot of care, but you COULD make Java run everywhere (no matter what the naysayers, like our braindead IT department, will tell you). But now that MS isn't including Java with their browser, Java's just another plug-in that consumers visiting your site might not have. And the java plugin is currently only available as part of a 5 meg J2RE download that is decidededly not for the average joe. Hell, our QA department has fscked up installs on three boxes! At the same time, I can't get rid of this damn Comet Cursor, the most idiotic, useless and proprietary software around. In fact, unless something is done to ease the Java gap that will begin to widen when XP hits the CompUSAs and Warez Servers of the world, we, the development community, will have to consign ourselves to a world where the most powerful cross browser, cross platform control is Flash 4.
I agree -- in theory. But I think that it depends (and this is not a Clintonism) on your definition of "good." Good software means what: software which is compelling, interesting and useful, or software which is full-featured, robust, stable and secure? I'd argue the first is good for having fun, proving a point, making a name for yourself, which is why I'm using a beta OS (OS-X) and a hobby OS (Cobalt Linux), and the second is good for making money and building a company (which is why my work machine runs Windows 2000 (ten years after 3.0) and not some loser's linux). Basically, what this guy's talking about isn't just good software, as in "good beer," but great software, as in "how the hell did we ever get around without this great effing software package???" Good software can be written in an afternoon, but it'll take years of writing, reviewing and revising code to make it great (just like writing literature, i might add).
After all, what we're talking about is the difference between building a framework and building an application. Anybody can say:
MimeMessage msg = Session.getInstance("mailserver");
msg.setTo("somebozo");
Transport.send(msg);
but it takes a long time to turn that into a full featured, easy to use mail package. Good programmers won't speed that up...we'll just make each step a smoother transition. All the good garbage collection and subtle, elegant, efficient algorithms in the world can't save your software if you don't take the time to think about what you REALLY want it to do and what your customers need it to do. It's taken Microsoft 10 years of windows to realize people want everything from a unified OS -- speed, stability, ease of use and customizability -- and with XP, they're getting closer. Shame they had to go and pull that no-Java prank...after all, Java's only 4 years away from becoming great software itself.
Okay, every argument against non-upgradable systems in here is totally invalid, because upgradable systems are a stupid idea for 95% of the population who don't even use the machine they have. It makes no sense to sell machines to a population that doesn't need them, either from the point of view of manufacturers solving device contention issues or of users trying to get the best machine for their money. It's kind of moot, anyway, since the range of devices available standard on modern machines is so varied, you shouldn't really need anything else. Hell, my $1800 iBook has 3d video, firewire video editing, DVD/CD-RW and plenty of ram...I can't think of anything I want to plug into the thing that I can't already plug in.
But the big question here is the obsolesence issue. We've got all these machines around that can only do what they are supposed to. Because of this, they're cheap as hell...maybe $400 for a complete machine. Nowadays, when a machine gets old, you wait a couple of years to replace it. I spend an average of $1000 per year on my machine (tax deductable, thank you very much freelance work). If I could buy a new whiz-bang PC every 5 months for the same price, I might do so. Now, if everybody does this, and many will, especially the folks who think that higher numbers improve their lives and that a P4 1.4 is "one louder" than an Athlon 1.33, we'll end up with a lot of waste. What might have been one tossed large metal box every two years, scroungable by wise hackers into a useful machine, is now two or three tossed large metal boxes per year with no scrapability factor. And that doesn't bode well for an industry that already impacts the environment more than its fair share (huge power supplies for underpowered machines, unreclaimable fibers in PC boards, increased environmental heat from speedy chips not designed to run HLT when they're not doing anything, and dirty, expensive, power sucking manufacturing firms).
The idea itself is not horrible...many people would benefit from a cheaper, "subscription" PC service. But use & lose hardware is not the most elegant solution. What if we made PCs like Swatches, with beautiful, expensive exterior cases that could be swapped with blocks of interior components? I don't mean components like a video card, expander card, &tc...i mean broad components, like a PC in a box, power supply in a box and a smaller box for storage. When the parts get old, take them to the store and have the boxes swapped out...but have the manufacturer reclaim the old parts. Sand down and remanufacture the processor. Melt down the steel and re-dye the pc board. Reuse wires and fans and pins.
If done right, the Swatch PC could be a very elegant solution, beautiful and slightly hackable with a high environmental conscience. But a disposable PC...disposable anything is bad!
I think I agree with this very much (I'd mod it if I hadn't posted), although I'd make certain adjustments. Instead of high intelligence, I'd say "high capacity for problem solving," intelligence being such a weighted term, and i'd underline "good programmers." We took an IQ test in the dev arena here a while back (open source one, too) and every developer got at least a 9 out of 10 in the problem solving section. The analytical section was a wash -- some of us getting as low as 3/10, and others as high as 9/10. The reason for this difference was the difficulty of some of the terms -- it was a "find the similarities, find the opposites" type of test. When we passed around dictionaries and tried again, the average was more like the problem solving section, 8 out of 10 I think.
We are, none of us, the type of hyper gregarious, influential people who will make a great management team. But we have built a complicated, modular n-tier application with no formal training in either software engineering or the language we use, and while we have a couple guys with CS degrees, the best of us are exterior fields. We had a high school graduate who code circles around anyone. In a way, I feel it is like the think tanks of the 50's and 60's around here...people want results, and they get them, but if we were micromanaged I don't think they'd see such positive ones. We need a longer leash.
Open this! My job consists of spending 10-14 hours a day fixing problems with our infrastructure through code...such as rewriting the mailing app to work as a background process because the adjunct mail server (which is forwarding requests to the big mail server all day) won't respond fast enough. The monitoring staff spends its days watching lines and making phone calls when one moves. It is their job to do this. If they are uppity because they have to do their job, I have no sympathy for them. There are plenty of state and private positions where a smartass guy can do nothing and be pissed because of it. On the other side, I stay positive all day, drowning below a small mountain of requests, provisos, and stupid politics. I even manage to keep my cool when faced with mistakes...I don't immediately call blame, because we all make mistakes. Everybody does in this industry, from Big Blue to NASA to Pedro's Web Design, LLC.
The 99% utilization program was taking up idle processes...in other words, all it was doing was destroying their SETI@HOME times. In repairing it, all I did was add a this.sleep(100) command to a listener thread (no, i couldn't put an EventListener on it...I was stuck with Java 1.0 commands because I was using the old Microsoft SDK for Java). The fix took a week to get past the IT guys, demanding additional stress testing (it passed QA in ten minutes), and in the meantime they didn't run the application (essential to one of our datafeeds) at all.
Exactly my point...you're claiming to do their job better than they can, but all you offer is the advice that "they can't fix it, they must suck." Real programming isn't the "science" that writing perl scripts is...there's a lot of complex shit going on! There's thread safety to worry about, algorithms to tune, and sometimes you can't sacrifice the clock cycles to run your housecleaning functions. One of the most complex and dirty things about programming is memory allocation/deallocation. I have a process (this is Java...I wish it were C so I could explicitly call deallocation, but there we are) that used to have a memory leak everywhere it was run -- on the development boxes, live boxes, and in a monitored JVM. I eliminated the offending code, and the leak is gone (along with an 8 meg decrease in size and a 50% speed up) on the monitored JVM...but it blows up the instant we put it on the live box. Why? Well, as it turns out, some IT jackass decided he didn't like the JVM working on two chips, so he turned off concurrent garbage collection. All of my System.gc() calls (which you aren't supposed to have to call anyway, according to the javasoft engineers) go unheeded.
As for the time checks...well, that's common when you're speed testing an algorithm, and they probably should have taken them out. I'd mark it up to lazy developers (it sounds like you have them, anyway) but that's too easy...instead, I'll mark it up to forgetfulness. Have you ever forgotten anything? Apparently, you haven't forgotten to preach your view of programming, which most coders I'm sure look upon as just more idiocy. We had one guy who forgot to change a variable in an sp, and as a defence of his mistake took time to point out that I didn't need to SELECT TOP 1 in a SQL if statement. OK, so I didn't know that...but that wasn't why the code broke! The code broke because somebody didn't take the time to read through four lines of commented SQL or follow a carefully laid out timeline.
As a primma-donna programmer (yes, I do have the "31337 H4X0R" bumper sticker, and a yellow post it above my monitor that says "THE MAN" with a small arrow pointing downward which I raise up and down the wall depending on how well my code is running that day), I can say this: management, we are not your problem. Sure, sometimes we act like we know everything and take on too much responsibility, but there's a difference between us and other employees: we DO know everything (or can learn it quickly) and can get it all done. It may take longer than you'd like, but then again, in some cases the last time you've brought your touchpad to a debugger was in the ways of terminals and mainframes. What you have to worry about is the prima donna IT folks...folks who like to act like WE are the cause of all of THEIR problems. Now, I'm not perfect...sometimes, I catch an exception I should have thrown, or forget to tell a thread to sleep and it takes up 99% of the CPU. But that's easily reparable. The IT folks around my company love to call us up when something breaks, wake up the ornery QA guy to back off the code at 2am and call us at home to drive in and fix stuff. We're expected to be johnny on the spot with information about every aspect of the application -- even ones we've never touched -- and to know how to fix any problem. We're architects, contractors, electricians and maids to the applications we build, and if we ask for even a moment of assistance from a monitor or official -- be it a password, a new directory, or even the version number of a server we're running -- it's "go away, we're busy, go break some more code."
Look, coding is not a job for the faint of heart. Real coding is an intensive process that requires you to learn and relearn concepts on the spot, to merge technologies designed by guys like us but packaged by moron marketeers and locked down by paranoid "systems engineers" (who, by the way, are as much engineers as my brother is with his Lego Castle set), disparaging technologies that do almost what you need them to (but not quite), and to do all of this admid pressure from all sides (customers, management and our own sense of impending deadlines). It's a process that keeps you away from your family and friends, working on something which has enraged you to the point of disbelief, a process which saw me afront a monitor at nine PM on my birthday, repairing a server which some IT dipshit had patched with a new kernel before testing it (or asking if it might break everything). It's an exciting process, stressful at times, and yet perfect for the obsessive tinkerers and puzzle solvers of the world because every day offers new challenges and new possibilities to advance your knowledge.
And the fact is this: we make your applications sing. Even the worst of us has the power to really make technology do what we want, instead of merely making it do what it was told. If you want to label us as egomaniacs, primadonnas or whatever, that's fine. But the second you start using your position as a prybar to make us operate mindlessly like a fry chef or a gardener, you start destroying the specialness of a good programmer. And, we will resent it. That resentment will surface in a decreased willingness to go beyond the call of duty, to exceed the 8 hour work day, or to throw in free hours to customers when we make mistakes. I'm not saying I'm a dick to other people in the company; just that I'm an idiot for spending as much effort on work as I do, and I won't spend it if treated poorly for my efforts. I take joy in the solutions I create, and the fact that I do create solutions...and not just additional problems for customers and co-workers. This joy surfaces in extreme zeal for work customers have complemented me on, interfaces that I've made more utilitarian than necesary, code that is well commented and efficient, and all those other simple things that make a coder a good coder.
By the way, I mean no offense to fry chefs...I respect people paying their dues in fast food. I do mean offense to IT primadonnas.
I may be unique in the world for saying this, but I love Dune, the Original movie, before Sci-Fi fucked with it. Yes, maybe it was different from the book, but who the hell cares? They are different texts in different mediums and serve a different purpose from each other. Sci-Fi's remake of Dune only served to make what was a piece with a wonderful feel and effects that were stylistic and beautiful into another crappy Sci-Fi film with B grade acting, C grade digital effects and costumes straight out of Lawrence of Arabia.
The fact is that the Sci-Fi channel is so stuck in its idiom of fiction by the numbers that it can't break out into a truly stylistic piece. Shows like Farscape may be technically well written and full of enough stupid melodrama to put a headlock on anything Vince MacMahon ever thought up, but they're just totally bereft of anything original or even interesting in theme or plot. The original Dune plot took a wonderful little piece of political pulp fiction by a decent writer and turned it into a fantastic adventure that excited me and left me feeling complete. I didn't need any more back story -- I was willing to corral the boring history of the world into some technical addendum a la some of the Star Wars books. Sci Fi managed to ruin a great movie by degrading the acting, enhancing the most boring aspects of the story while losing the ones that had any real cinematic flavour and restricted the camera angles to nothing but interior medium shots. Oh, and while making the movie more boring and not worth watching, they extended what was already a 4 hour film. When they make the sequel, they'll just be extending it furthur -- and since I'm sure they'll preclude it with a replay of their horrendious remake, it'll be a half day worth of boredom I suggest only for masochists, herbert fanatics and college students with nothing better to do.
Indy in Atlantis isn't a reaction to recent interest in the subject due to Disney's well crafted (if incredibly stupid) adventure pic. It's been kicked around since Last Crusade...in fact, there was a LucasArts SCUMM(tm) game that stuck Indy in a search for atlantis...it might have been his best. At least the puzzles were intriguing and different, unlike those in the SCUMM Last Crusade. There was also a Fate of Atlantis novelization.
As for Harrison being too old, it's been my understanding that he's supposed to play an aging IJ in the film, one who's starting to get a bit quirky but still able to throw down with whoever's in his path. I could see it being set easily in the mid 50s or early 60s, maybe with some serious cold war overtones (hell, get Tom Clancy to write it for a real Battle of the Adventure Flick Stars).
Anyway, as long as he isn't playing young Han Solo in the third Star Wars pic, I think it's great to hear about Ford doing adventure. After all, he was one of the heros of my youth...hell, it's he and Rick Hunter that inspired me to grow this constantly scruffy hairdo.
"Dr. Sbaitso" _WAS_ Eliza. Same algortihm and everything...only named differently so as not to pay any royalties to the copy of "101 BASIC Computer Games" they lifted it from. They stuck in a stupid age check if you tried to talk to the doc about sex...which sucks, because I've a feeling that if my Thunderboard could have helped me through my youthful urges, I wouldn't be the cross dressing deviant I am today.
I stick my password on the bottom of my keyboard. I do it in protest to the draconian IT policy which states that we need to choose a new, secure password containing four different character classes (one each of lower and upper case characters, numbers and control codes), be at least 9 characters long (which makes it absolutely impossible for our macs to connect, dumb IT fucks [ one can counter with "dumb mac fucks," but we need those macs to do our jobs of TESTING WEB APPS USED 80% BY MAC USERS]) AND BE CHANGED EVERY FIFTEEN DAYS! Now of course, you can still crack these passwords in a day and a half with l0phtcrack, but apparently we're making the world more secure.
The whole concept is so unbeleivable stupid that I loudly say, whenever IT is within earshot, "YES, MY PASSWORD IS UNDER MY KEYBOARD. YOU CAN CHECK IT IF YOU LIKE."
In retrospect, the domain admin password, which everybody fucking knows anyway, hasn't been changed in a year, and the sa password to our SQL servers, passed to four or five dba candidates when they were given their shakedown, HASN'T BEEN CHANGED IN FIVE YEARS.
So let's review: our user accounts, tied down so that we can't shit in the corner without an admin password, are rotated every fifteen days and given extreme scruitiny, even though you can hack them in an instant, anyway. Our most important access password are never changed, and are so unbelievably simple that you can pretty much guess them.
I can't believe you people spent two whole years in college for this!
When Monk Mengel fucked with his beans and created the modern sciences of botany and genetics, nobody said anything. Mankind had finally found a tool that would allow him to grow the plants HE wanted, not the ones nature liked. After all, that's what's important...nature has its zones in a modern society, and man has his. Neither should cross over into the other. What we've got here is a new way to convince plants to do what we like, to grow crops with less effort, with a greater yield with the same resources in the same area despite increasing temperatures to global warming.
Of course, one or two strains may unbalance an ecosystem...but it's science, man, and it's not as infallible or as deadly as anybody thinks. An awry atomic generator can kill a lot of people, but the power generated through atomic systems is far greater than any petroleum fuel -- and consider the number of people badly burned yearly because of petroleum explosions, and the ecosystems ruined by petroleum spills. In that case, the atoms, for all their half lives and hot water, win the race -- they're safer because there aren't as many of them and they're handled with greater care. So, too, are GE plants safer. If a GE plant starts to take over an ecosystem, its parent -- a powerful biotech conglomerate with a massive cash reserve -- can fix it without much problem, no matter what your environmentalist friend says. Hell, they have the money to pull every plant out of the ground and jump on them until they're just so much peat. But a standard crop, when released into a new environment, is totally uncontrolled. There's no rich company to stop it -- it may have been released by an immigrant farmer, as was the moss that now clogs the Watervliet Reservoir I swam in as a kid, or plant lover who didn't understand the ramifications of moving flora. GE is inherently less dangerous than any other research into the production of hybrid plants because GE has the time, money and knowledge to find out what the problem is and correct it.
If you want to hate and fear Frankenfoods, feel free...but personaly, I think they're less strange than the Tofu Pups I had for lunch. Hot dogs made from soy and bean curd that taste just like beef dogs? Now THAT'S fucked up!
So you plant a row of supercorn, and a row of pesticide corn. Your overall yield is high as an elephant's eye. Organic farmers do this sort of thing with plants that are naturally repellent to insects already...plant a couple around your field here and there and you end up with corn that, while still bug eaten, is much less likely to be as the insect population is quickly reduced. The added benefit is that, since the pesticide plants often generate an abundance of nitrogen, you can keep a field growing a season or more longer without rotating it.
If it turns into something you can't eat, you'll find out the first time you eat it. Duh. Jesus, my cousin was thirty two before he discovered he was allergic to cashew nuts. You see, cashew nuts are pretty expensive and their taste isn't good enough in many people's books (not mine, mind you, i love a good handful of cashews) to include them in common foods. We go to an expensive chinese place, my cousin says "hey, let me chow on this badass 'cashew chicken'" and nearly chokes fifteen minutes later when his throat swells up.
That wasn't a genetically engineered cashew, mind you...it wasn't even a salted one! So your argument is, you might have to be wary of new foods...my reply is, you need to be wary now!
My cousin's story isn't all that uncommon...I was 21 before I discovered I was violently allergic to loperamide, an ingredient in many medicines that cure diarrhea. You see, I ate an entire box of Lucky Charms in a college dare, took an Immodium the next morning and got so dizzy and halucinigenic I had to be carried to the hospital. It'd make a cheap high if it wasn't for the chills and three days of fever afterwards.
First off, MSDN downloads are a subscriber based service -- they've got to keep track of subscriptions somehow! And Passport is MS' new cross server identification system...of COURSE they're going to want to use it. I wouldn't want to have a different password for each server in the apple CVS network, and the same goes for MS' web services. They HAVE revamped the license and it's not nearly as serpentine as before.
But that doesn't stop you from using your ultimate response to any and all registration systems: lie. Lie as much as you can! Lie discordantly! Click female sometimes, male others, enter your race as an albino nepalese scotsgaelic neanderthal from northern Peru, and by all means give them false contact information. If we want to avoid the possible ramifications for misuse of our personal information, then we've got to give false information. Don't be a demographic, be ALL demographics! Nobody said you had to be truthful when asked a question. If MS needs your real name and real MSDN subscriber id, give them...but everything else in your passport should be clever fibs, abominations and halftruths. I like to build unflattering portfolios of people who bug the shit out of me at work.
After all, it won't take much worthless information for MS to drop this whole shenanigan and go to something useful (like an incredibly lightweight key based system...let's introduce PKE to the masses). Marketeers always get theirs in the end when they promote something this annoying...hence, the dotcom bust.
actually, i agree. But consider this: Slashdot gets more hits that a hippy postage stamp, and it remains relatively fast. Meanwhile, my company's site (running four MS SQl server, thirteen quad server running IIS 5, Win2k and ColdFusion 4.5) is choking when it goes over a million daily. Bad coding? Maybe. More likely it's bad architecture, unscalable web server and a database that's too big for it's britches. Either way, slashcode is a great little codeset (even if it is GNU)...and a couple hours of downtime in several months of uptime is fucking incredible to us stuck in Microsoft hell.
So the robot follows the sun. Big frickin' deal. I've trained my Aibo to follow co-eds in short skirts. It's even trained to take pictures with its 640x480 CCD camera and upload them to Igor on voyeurweb.
All I'm saying is that NASA seems to spend a lot of time worrying about not getting lost on Mars, and not enough time worrying about how to take compromising photos of those fly-ass Martian babes I saw in those fifties sci-fi flicks.
Funny...when a similar claim to rights was made by the Voice Actor's Guild for the voices of commercial actors over internet radio, it was lauded as the death of the medium. Seems paradoxial in a way, to expect one set of rights to apply to content and another to advertisement. After all, how can one monetize something as transverse as money gained from a website? In the case of some websites -- notably those which don't utilize any advertisement or subscription online, but instead rely on their web experience as cursory entities driving extra-web media -- no "real" money exchanges hand over web content, though the web experience may heighten and therefore expand the product. An example of this is a news program which may add transcripts of its editorials on their websites. Surely, some of these may be written by freelancers, and therefore come under the realm of this ruling. Should a freelance writer be allowed the ability to immediately naysay this service (providing as it does an essential link to the extra-web media and additional utility for the consumer who might not have videotaped it) simply because the news service can't provide additional cash to the writer?
Of course, what this probably means is nothing more than an addendum to freelance contracts giving the rights to utilization of content in additional media to the media owner -- meaning a few extra lines of small print, and no real additional cash in the pocket of John Q. Freelance. Writers are a bit more savvy that other artists when it comes to not getting screwed out of their rights, but not much so...and the question remains as to whether this makes it possible for freelancers to fully sign over their work accidentally under the guise of "medium transferrance."
More murky legislation...I applaud the effort as a writer, but would prefer a more definite "content rights can never be bought or sold in any way without explicit and particular consent of the author" legislation. You know -- something to protect everybody artful, so Prince can keep his name if he moves labels and Corey Feldman can get a little say in the upcoming Goonies DVD.
I guess reading salon a lot has caused me to ask the question: why do we keep treating the arts, an almost exclusively romantic pursuit, the same was as classic pursuits such as law and economics? Artists don't understand numbers and calculators don't understand art, which means that "content creators" are getting screwed by people who don't even realise the impact of the money they're making. This is how the media can be controlled by incredibly rich companies and we still get shitty programming -- anybody savvy enough to climb the ranks no longer as enough taste left to make a quality decision, and anybody with the taste is loathe to discuss anything as vulgar as money and ratings.
If you give artists total say in what happens to their work and total rights based on money made (with an exception granted for non-profits), you end up with a situation similar to that of pre-mass media times: people make something beautiful or appealing and when it is exploited they are at the very least paid.
I don't think MS would be able to invest thx to the anti-trust thing, else they would gobble up so many great (but unfortuantely economically troubled) rivals. VA Linux? Red Hat? MS could buy them up and put the tab on Steve Balmer's "Player's Club" card. But MS has a huge image problem right now...they've got to remain large while keeping a low profile. No more "Hotmail" or "C-NET" deals for MS...not for a while, anyway. I'm not saying they wouldn't LOVE to do so (and hell, we might benefit from it...SmartLinks to google searches would sure beat jumps to MSPROPAGANDA.ORG), just that it would look very bad...and we'd end up with a bunch of "Baby Bills."
Scientific American has this bitchin' article about supercomputing going on right now (i read it yesterday in the shower. No, I won't explain how I managed to keep the magazine dry -- the solution contains a lot of quantum theory and wax paper and other complicated stuff) -- part one this month and part two the next. Besides all the boring facts about trans-petaflop computing, there was a quicky about a transistor that hit 770 GHz...but, it might have been optical (it was on the same page touting optical switching at 10 gb/s for one cable vs hundreds of strand of steel and megawatts of power for the same accomplishment). Either way, that's three times IBM's number. You should check out the article anyway (it's not online, but every slashdotter should have a subscription to Sciam), since it has a lot of information on new technologies in supercomputing, including Hyper Technology Management Threading (a nice way to maximize current silicon to avoid halt cycles on billion dollar computers). It also runs a quick comparison of current megaprocessing techniques, including nods to Beowulf Clusters, Distributed Computing eg SETI and task specialized chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's an interesting misinterpretation, but the fact is that Java in a browser cannot be expected to be up to date, anyway. Java is a portable virtual machine that used to pack an incredible punch and have a lot of power, even in its most compact version. I've written programs for Java 1.0 that look gangbusters and run fast enough that older machines can keep up with their HotSpot JIT brethern. It took a lot of effort, and required a lot of care, but you COULD make Java run everywhere (no matter what the naysayers, like our braindead IT department, will tell you). But now that MS isn't including Java with their browser, Java's just another plug-in that consumers visiting your site might not have. And the java plugin is currently only available as part of a 5 meg J2RE download that is decidededly not for the average joe. Hell, our QA department has fscked up installs on three boxes! At the same time, I can't get rid of this damn Comet Cursor, the most idiotic, useless and proprietary software around. In fact, unless something is done to ease the Java gap that will begin to widen when XP hits the CompUSAs and Warez Servers of the world, we, the development community, will have to consign ourselves to a world where the most powerful cross browser, cross platform control is Flash 4.
*Shudder*.
I agree -- in theory. But I think that it depends (and this is not a Clintonism) on your definition of "good." Good software means what: software which is compelling, interesting and useful, or software which is full-featured, robust, stable and secure? I'd argue the first is good for having fun, proving a point, making a name for yourself, which is why I'm using a beta OS (OS-X) and a hobby OS (Cobalt Linux), and the second is good for making money and building a company (which is why my work machine runs Windows 2000 (ten years after 3.0) and not some loser's linux). Basically, what this guy's talking about isn't just good software, as in "good beer," but great software, as in "how the hell did we ever get around without this great effing software package???" Good software can be written in an afternoon, but it'll take years of writing, reviewing and revising code to make it great (just like writing literature, i might add).
After all, what we're talking about is the difference between building a framework and building an application. Anybody can say:
MimeMessage msg = Session.getInstance("mailserver");
msg.setTo("somebozo");
Transport.send(msg);
but it takes a long time to turn that into a full featured, easy to use mail package. Good programmers won't speed that up...we'll just make each step a smoother transition. All the good garbage collection and subtle, elegant, efficient algorithms in the world can't save your software if you don't take the time to think about what you REALLY want it to do and what your customers need it to do. It's taken Microsoft 10 years of windows to realize people want everything from a unified OS -- speed, stability, ease of use and customizability -- and with XP, they're getting closer. Shame they had to go and pull that no-Java prank...after all, Java's only 4 years away from becoming great software itself.
Okay, every argument against non-upgradable systems in here is totally invalid, because upgradable systems are a stupid idea for 95% of the population who don't even use the machine they have. It makes no sense to sell machines to a population that doesn't need them, either from the point of view of manufacturers solving device contention issues or of users trying to get the best machine for their money. It's kind of moot, anyway, since the range of devices available standard on modern machines is so varied, you shouldn't really need anything else. Hell, my $1800 iBook has 3d video, firewire video editing, DVD/CD-RW and plenty of ram...I can't think of anything I want to plug into the thing that I can't already plug in.
But the big question here is the obsolesence issue. We've got all these machines around that can only do what they are supposed to. Because of this, they're cheap as hell...maybe $400 for a complete machine. Nowadays, when a machine gets old, you wait a couple of years to replace it. I spend an average of $1000 per year on my machine (tax deductable, thank you very much freelance work). If I could buy a new whiz-bang PC every 5 months for the same price, I might do so. Now, if everybody does this, and many will, especially the folks who think that higher numbers improve their lives and that a P4 1.4 is "one louder" than an Athlon 1.33, we'll end up with a lot of waste. What might have been one tossed large metal box every two years, scroungable by wise hackers into a useful machine, is now two or three tossed large metal boxes per year with no scrapability factor. And that doesn't bode well for an industry that already impacts the environment more than its fair share (huge power supplies for underpowered machines, unreclaimable fibers in PC boards, increased environmental heat from speedy chips not designed to run HLT when they're not doing anything, and dirty, expensive, power sucking manufacturing firms).
The idea itself is not horrible...many people would benefit from a cheaper, "subscription" PC service. But use & lose hardware is not the most elegant solution. What if we made PCs like Swatches, with beautiful, expensive exterior cases that could be swapped with blocks of interior components? I don't mean components like a video card, expander card, &tc...i mean broad components, like a PC in a box, power supply in a box and a smaller box for storage. When the parts get old, take them to the store and have the boxes swapped out...but have the manufacturer reclaim the old parts. Sand down and remanufacture the processor. Melt down the steel and re-dye the pc board. Reuse wires and fans and pins.
If done right, the Swatch PC could be a very elegant solution, beautiful and slightly hackable with a high environmental conscience. But a disposable PC...disposable anything is bad!
I think I agree with this very much (I'd mod it if I hadn't posted), although I'd make certain adjustments. Instead of high intelligence, I'd say "high capacity for problem solving," intelligence being such a weighted term, and i'd underline "good programmers." We took an IQ test in the dev arena here a while back (open source one, too) and every developer got at least a 9 out of 10 in the problem solving section. The analytical section was a wash -- some of us getting as low as 3/10, and others as high as 9/10. The reason for this difference was the difficulty of some of the terms -- it was a "find the similarities, find the opposites" type of test. When we passed around dictionaries and tried again, the average was more like the problem solving section, 8 out of 10 I think.
We are, none of us, the type of hyper gregarious, influential people who will make a great management team. But we have built a complicated, modular n-tier application with no formal training in either software engineering or the language we use, and while we have a couple guys with CS degrees, the best of us are exterior fields. We had a high school graduate who code circles around anyone. In a way, I feel it is like the think tanks of the 50's and 60's around here...people want results, and they get them, but if we were micromanaged I don't think they'd see such positive ones. We need a longer leash.
Open this! My job consists of spending 10-14 hours a day fixing problems with our infrastructure through code...such as rewriting the mailing app to work as a background process because the adjunct mail server (which is forwarding requests to the big mail server all day) won't respond fast enough. The monitoring staff spends its days watching lines and making phone calls when one moves. It is their job to do this. If they are uppity because they have to do their job, I have no sympathy for them. There are plenty of state and private positions where a smartass guy can do nothing and be pissed because of it. On the other side, I stay positive all day, drowning below a small mountain of requests, provisos, and stupid politics. I even manage to keep my cool when faced with mistakes...I don't immediately call blame, because we all make mistakes. Everybody does in this industry, from Big Blue to NASA to Pedro's Web Design, LLC.
The 99% utilization program was taking up idle processes...in other words, all it was doing was destroying their SETI@HOME times. In repairing it, all I did was add a this.sleep(100) command to a listener thread (no, i couldn't put an EventListener on it...I was stuck with Java 1.0 commands because I was using the old Microsoft SDK for Java). The fix took a week to get past the IT guys, demanding additional stress testing (it passed QA in ten minutes), and in the meantime they didn't run the application (essential to one of our datafeeds) at all.
Exactly my point...you're claiming to do their job better than they can, but all you offer is the advice that "they can't fix it, they must suck." Real programming isn't the "science" that writing perl scripts is...there's a lot of complex shit going on! There's thread safety to worry about, algorithms to tune, and sometimes you can't sacrifice the clock cycles to run your housecleaning functions. One of the most complex and dirty things about programming is memory allocation/deallocation. I have a process (this is Java...I wish it were C so I could explicitly call deallocation, but there we are) that used to have a memory leak everywhere it was run -- on the development boxes, live boxes, and in a monitored JVM. I eliminated the offending code, and the leak is gone (along with an 8 meg decrease in size and a 50% speed up) on the monitored JVM...but it blows up the instant we put it on the live box. Why? Well, as it turns out, some IT jackass decided he didn't like the JVM working on two chips, so he turned off concurrent garbage collection. All of my System.gc() calls (which you aren't supposed to have to call anyway, according to the javasoft engineers) go unheeded.
As for the time checks...well, that's common when you're speed testing an algorithm, and they probably should have taken them out. I'd mark it up to lazy developers (it sounds like you have them, anyway) but that's too easy...instead, I'll mark it up to forgetfulness. Have you ever forgotten anything? Apparently, you haven't forgotten to preach your view of programming, which most coders I'm sure look upon as just more idiocy. We had one guy who forgot to change a variable in an sp, and as a defence of his mistake took time to point out that I didn't need to SELECT TOP 1 in a SQL if statement. OK, so I didn't know that...but that wasn't why the code broke! The code broke because somebody didn't take the time to read through four lines of commented SQL or follow a carefully laid out timeline.
As a primma-donna programmer (yes, I do have the "31337 H4X0R" bumper sticker, and a yellow post it above my monitor that says "THE MAN" with a small arrow pointing downward which I raise up and down the wall depending on how well my code is running that day), I can say this: management, we are not your problem. Sure, sometimes we act like we know everything and take on too much responsibility, but there's a difference between us and other employees: we DO know everything (or can learn it quickly) and can get it all done. It may take longer than you'd like, but then again, in some cases the last time you've brought your touchpad to a debugger was in the ways of terminals and mainframes. What you have to worry about is the prima donna IT folks...folks who like to act like WE are the cause of all of THEIR problems. Now, I'm not perfect...sometimes, I catch an exception I should have thrown, or forget to tell a thread to sleep and it takes up 99% of the CPU. But that's easily reparable. The IT folks around my company love to call us up when something breaks, wake up the ornery QA guy to back off the code at 2am and call us at home to drive in and fix stuff. We're expected to be johnny on the spot with information about every aspect of the application -- even ones we've never touched -- and to know how to fix any problem. We're architects, contractors, electricians and maids to the applications we build, and if we ask for even a moment of assistance from a monitor or official -- be it a password, a new directory, or even the version number of a server we're running -- it's "go away, we're busy, go break some more code."
Look, coding is not a job for the faint of heart. Real coding is an intensive process that requires you to learn and relearn concepts on the spot, to merge technologies designed by guys like us but packaged by moron marketeers and locked down by paranoid "systems engineers" (who, by the way, are as much engineers as my brother is with his Lego Castle set), disparaging technologies that do almost what you need them to (but not quite), and to do all of this admid pressure from all sides (customers, management and our own sense of impending deadlines). It's a process that keeps you away from your family and friends, working on something which has enraged you to the point of disbelief, a process which saw me afront a monitor at nine PM on my birthday, repairing a server which some IT dipshit had patched with a new kernel before testing it (or asking if it might break everything). It's an exciting process, stressful at times, and yet perfect for the obsessive tinkerers and puzzle solvers of the world because every day offers new challenges and new possibilities to advance your knowledge.
And the fact is this: we make your applications sing. Even the worst of us has the power to really make technology do what we want, instead of merely making it do what it was told. If you want to label us as egomaniacs, primadonnas or whatever, that's fine. But the second you start using your position as a prybar to make us operate mindlessly like a fry chef or a gardener, you start destroying the specialness of a good programmer. And, we will resent it. That resentment will surface in a decreased willingness to go beyond the call of duty, to exceed the 8 hour work day, or to throw in free hours to customers when we make mistakes. I'm not saying I'm a dick to other people in the company; just that I'm an idiot for spending as much effort on work as I do, and I won't spend it if treated poorly for my efforts. I take joy in the solutions I create, and the fact that I do create solutions...and not just additional problems for customers and co-workers. This joy surfaces in extreme zeal for work customers have complemented me on, interfaces that I've made more utilitarian than necesary, code that is well commented and efficient, and all those other simple things that make a coder a good coder.
By the way, I mean no offense to fry chefs...I respect people paying their dues in fast food. I do mean offense to IT primadonnas.
You play with legos at work and are worried about a little spam HTML??? Man, some people's priorities...
I may be unique in the world for saying this, but I love Dune, the Original movie, before Sci-Fi fucked with it. Yes, maybe it was different from the book, but who the hell cares? They are different texts in different mediums and serve a different purpose from each other. Sci-Fi's remake of Dune only served to make what was a piece with a wonderful feel and effects that were stylistic and beautiful into another crappy Sci-Fi film with B grade acting, C grade digital effects and costumes straight out of Lawrence of Arabia.
The fact is that the Sci-Fi channel is so stuck in its idiom of fiction by the numbers that it can't break out into a truly stylistic piece. Shows like Farscape may be technically well written and full of enough stupid melodrama to put a headlock on anything Vince MacMahon ever thought up, but they're just totally bereft of anything original or even interesting in theme or plot. The original Dune plot took a wonderful little piece of political pulp fiction by a decent writer and turned it into a fantastic adventure that excited me and left me feeling complete. I didn't need any more back story -- I was willing to corral the boring history of the world into some technical addendum a la some of the Star Wars books. Sci Fi managed to ruin a great movie by degrading the acting, enhancing the most boring aspects of the story while losing the ones that had any real cinematic flavour and restricted the camera angles to nothing but interior medium shots. Oh, and while making the movie more boring and not worth watching, they extended what was already a 4 hour film. When they make the sequel, they'll just be extending it furthur -- and since I'm sure they'll preclude it with a replay of their horrendious remake, it'll be a half day worth of boredom I suggest only for masochists, herbert fanatics and college students with nothing better to do.
Indy in Atlantis isn't a reaction to recent interest in the subject due to Disney's well crafted (if incredibly stupid) adventure pic. It's been kicked around since Last Crusade...in fact, there was a LucasArts SCUMM(tm) game that stuck Indy in a search for atlantis...it might have been his best. At least the puzzles were intriguing and different, unlike those in the SCUMM Last Crusade. There was also a Fate of Atlantis novelization.
As for Harrison being too old, it's been my understanding that he's supposed to play an aging IJ in the film, one who's starting to get a bit quirky but still able to throw down with whoever's in his path. I could see it being set easily in the mid 50s or early 60s, maybe with some serious cold war overtones (hell, get Tom Clancy to write it for a real Battle of the Adventure Flick Stars).
Anyway, as long as he isn't playing young Han Solo in the third Star Wars pic, I think it's great to hear about Ford doing adventure. After all, he was one of the heros of my youth...hell, it's he and Rick Hunter that inspired me to grow this constantly scruffy hairdo.
Your score: somewhat deviant, highly paranoid with delusions of grandeur. However, since this is Slashdot, you're no different from the rest of us.
"Dr. Sbaitso" _WAS_ Eliza. Same algortihm and everything...only named differently so as not to pay any royalties to the copy of "101 BASIC Computer Games" they lifted it from. They stuck in a stupid age check if you tried to talk to the doc about sex...which sucks, because I've a feeling that if my Thunderboard could have helped me through my youthful urges, I wouldn't be the cross dressing deviant I am today.
I stick my password on the bottom of my keyboard. I do it in protest to the draconian IT policy which states that we need to choose a new, secure password containing four different character classes (one each of lower and upper case characters, numbers and control codes), be at least 9 characters long (which makes it absolutely impossible for our macs to connect, dumb IT fucks [ one can counter with "dumb mac fucks," but we need those macs to do our jobs of TESTING WEB APPS USED 80% BY MAC USERS]) AND BE CHANGED EVERY FIFTEEN DAYS! Now of course, you can still crack these passwords in a day and a half with l0phtcrack, but apparently we're making the world more secure.
The whole concept is so unbeleivable stupid that I loudly say, whenever IT is within earshot, "YES, MY PASSWORD IS UNDER MY KEYBOARD. YOU CAN CHECK IT IF YOU LIKE."
In retrospect, the domain admin password, which everybody fucking knows anyway, hasn't been changed in a year, and the sa password to our SQL servers, passed to four or five dba candidates when they were given their shakedown, HASN'T BEEN CHANGED IN FIVE YEARS.
So let's review: our user accounts, tied down so that we can't shit in the corner without an admin password, are rotated every fifteen days and given extreme scruitiny, even though you can hack them in an instant, anyway. Our most important access password are never changed, and are so unbelievably simple that you can pretty much guess them.
I can't believe you people spent two whole years in college for this!
Hey, it's hard to spell halucinagenic, man!
When Monk Mengel fucked with his beans and created the modern sciences of botany and genetics, nobody said anything. Mankind had finally found a tool that would allow him to grow the plants HE wanted, not the ones nature liked. After all, that's what's important...nature has its zones in a modern society, and man has his. Neither should cross over into the other. What we've got here is a new way to convince plants to do what we like, to grow crops with less effort, with a greater yield with the same resources in the same area despite increasing temperatures to global warming.
Of course, one or two strains may unbalance an ecosystem...but it's science, man, and it's not as infallible or as deadly as anybody thinks. An awry atomic generator can kill a lot of people, but the power generated through atomic systems is far greater than any petroleum fuel -- and consider the number of people badly burned yearly because of petroleum explosions, and the ecosystems ruined by petroleum spills. In that case, the atoms, for all their half lives and hot water, win the race -- they're safer because there aren't as many of them and they're handled with greater care. So, too, are GE plants safer. If a GE plant starts to take over an ecosystem, its parent -- a powerful biotech conglomerate with a massive cash reserve -- can fix it without much problem, no matter what your environmentalist friend says. Hell, they have the money to pull every plant out of the ground and jump on them until they're just so much peat. But a standard crop, when released into a new environment, is totally uncontrolled. There's no rich company to stop it -- it may have been released by an immigrant farmer, as was the moss that now clogs the Watervliet Reservoir I swam in as a kid, or plant lover who didn't understand the ramifications of moving flora. GE is inherently less dangerous than any other research into the production of hybrid plants because GE has the time, money and knowledge to find out what the problem is and correct it.
If you want to hate and fear Frankenfoods, feel free...but personaly, I think they're less strange than the Tofu Pups I had for lunch. Hot dogs made from soy and bean curd that taste just like beef dogs? Now THAT'S fucked up!
So you plant a row of supercorn, and a row of pesticide corn. Your overall yield is high as an elephant's eye. Organic farmers do this sort of thing with plants that are naturally repellent to insects already...plant a couple around your field here and there and you end up with corn that, while still bug eaten, is much less likely to be as the insect population is quickly reduced. The added benefit is that, since the pesticide plants often generate an abundance of nitrogen, you can keep a field growing a season or more longer without rotating it.
If it turns into something you can't eat, you'll find out the first time you eat it. Duh. Jesus, my cousin was thirty two before he discovered he was allergic to cashew nuts. You see, cashew nuts are pretty expensive and their taste isn't good enough in many people's books (not mine, mind you, i love a good handful of cashews) to include them in common foods. We go to an expensive chinese place, my cousin says "hey, let me chow on this badass 'cashew chicken'" and nearly chokes fifteen minutes later when his throat swells up.
That wasn't a genetically engineered cashew, mind you...it wasn't even a salted one! So your argument is, you might have to be wary of new foods...my reply is, you need to be wary now!
My cousin's story isn't all that uncommon...I was 21 before I discovered I was violently allergic to loperamide, an ingredient in many medicines that cure diarrhea. You see, I ate an entire box of Lucky Charms in a college dare, took an Immodium the next morning and got so dizzy and halucinigenic I had to be carried to the hospital. It'd make a cheap high if it wasn't for the chills and three days of fever afterwards.
First off, MSDN downloads are a subscriber based service -- they've got to keep track of subscriptions somehow! And Passport is MS' new cross server identification system...of COURSE they're going to want to use it. I wouldn't want to have a different password for each server in the apple CVS network, and the same goes for MS' web services. They HAVE revamped the license and it's not nearly as serpentine as before.
But that doesn't stop you from using your ultimate response to any and all registration systems: lie. Lie as much as you can! Lie discordantly! Click female sometimes, male others, enter your race as an albino nepalese scotsgaelic neanderthal from northern Peru, and by all means give them false contact information. If we want to avoid the possible ramifications for misuse of our personal information, then we've got to give false information. Don't be a demographic, be ALL demographics! Nobody said you had to be truthful when asked a question. If MS needs your real name and real MSDN subscriber id, give them...but everything else in your passport should be clever fibs, abominations and halftruths. I like to build unflattering portfolios of people who bug the shit out of me at work.
After all, it won't take much worthless information for MS to drop this whole shenanigan and go to something useful (like an incredibly lightweight key based system...let's introduce PKE to the masses). Marketeers always get theirs in the end when they promote something this annoying...hence, the dotcom bust.
I'm all for bashing Taco, but don't bash the webserver. It's just not fair.
actually, i agree. But consider this: Slashdot gets more hits that a hippy postage stamp, and it remains relatively fast. Meanwhile, my company's site (running four MS SQl server, thirteen quad server running IIS 5, Win2k and ColdFusion 4.5) is choking when it goes over a million daily. Bad coding? Maybe. More likely it's bad architecture, unscalable web server and a database that's too big for it's britches. Either way, slashcode is a great little codeset (even if it is GNU)...and a couple hours of downtime in several months of uptime is fucking incredible to us stuck in Microsoft hell.
So the robot follows the sun. Big frickin' deal. I've trained my Aibo to follow co-eds in short skirts. It's even trained to take pictures with its 640x480 CCD camera and upload them to Igor on voyeurweb.
All I'm saying is that NASA seems to spend a lot of time worrying about not getting lost on Mars, and not enough time worrying about how to take compromising photos of those fly-ass Martian babes I saw in those fifties sci-fi flicks.
thank you for cleaning up my mistakes...i didn't pay much attention to the details of the article (must have been shampooing).
Funny...when a similar claim to rights was made by the Voice Actor's Guild for the voices of commercial actors over internet radio, it was lauded as the death of the medium. Seems paradoxial in a way, to expect one set of rights to apply to content and another to advertisement. After all, how can one monetize something as transverse as money gained from a website? In the case of some websites -- notably those which don't utilize any advertisement or subscription online, but instead rely on their web experience as cursory entities driving extra-web media -- no "real" money exchanges hand over web content, though the web experience may heighten and therefore expand the product. An example of this is a news program which may add transcripts of its editorials on their websites. Surely, some of these may be written by freelancers, and therefore come under the realm of this ruling. Should a freelance writer be allowed the ability to immediately naysay this service (providing as it does an essential link to the extra-web media and additional utility for the consumer who might not have videotaped it) simply because the news service can't provide additional cash to the writer?
Of course, what this probably means is nothing more than an addendum to freelance contracts giving the rights to utilization of content in additional media to the media owner -- meaning a few extra lines of small print, and no real additional cash in the pocket of John Q. Freelance. Writers are a bit more savvy that other artists when it comes to not getting screwed out of their rights, but not much so...and the question remains as to whether this makes it possible for freelancers to fully sign over their work accidentally under the guise of "medium transferrance."
More murky legislation...I applaud the effort as a writer, but would prefer a more definite "content rights can never be bought or sold in any way without explicit and particular consent of the author" legislation. You know -- something to protect everybody artful, so Prince can keep his name if he moves labels and Corey Feldman can get a little say in the upcoming Goonies DVD.
I guess reading salon a lot has caused me to ask the question: why do we keep treating the arts, an almost exclusively romantic pursuit, the same was as classic pursuits such as law and economics? Artists don't understand numbers and calculators don't understand art, which means that "content creators" are getting screwed by people who don't even realise the impact of the money they're making. This is how the media can be controlled by incredibly rich companies and we still get shitty programming -- anybody savvy enough to climb the ranks no longer as enough taste left to make a quality decision, and anybody with the taste is loathe to discuss anything as vulgar as money and ratings.
If you give artists total say in what happens to their work and total rights based on money made (with an exception granted for non-profits), you end up with a situation similar to that of pre-mass media times: people make something beautiful or appealing and when it is exploited they are at the very least paid.
I don't think MS would be able to invest thx to the anti-trust thing, else they would gobble up so many great (but unfortuantely economically troubled) rivals. VA Linux? Red Hat? MS could buy them up and put the tab on Steve Balmer's "Player's Club" card. But MS has a huge image problem right now...they've got to remain large while keeping a low profile. No more "Hotmail" or "C-NET" deals for MS...not for a while, anyway. I'm not saying they wouldn't LOVE to do so (and hell, we might benefit from it...SmartLinks to google searches would sure beat jumps to MSPROPAGANDA.ORG), just that it would look very bad...and we'd end up with a bunch of "Baby Bills."
Scientific American has this bitchin' article about supercomputing going on right now (i read it yesterday in the shower. No, I won't explain how I managed to keep the magazine dry -- the solution contains a lot of quantum theory and wax paper and other complicated stuff) -- part one this month and part two the next. Besides all the boring facts about trans-petaflop computing, there was a quicky about a transistor that hit 770 GHz...but, it might have been optical (it was on the same page touting optical switching at 10 gb/s for one cable vs hundreds of strand of steel and megawatts of power for the same accomplishment). Either way, that's three times IBM's number. You should check out the article anyway (it's not online, but every slashdotter should have a subscription to Sciam), since it has a lot of information on new technologies in supercomputing, including Hyper Technology Management Threading (a nice way to maximize current silicon to avoid halt cycles on billion dollar computers). It also runs a quick comparison of current megaprocessing techniques, including nods to Beowulf Clusters, Distributed Computing eg SETI and task specialized chips.