Doesn't the title "engineer" assume you know what your making before you start the implementation? I've never found that to be the case. Most of the engineers I work with, would be better fit the with the title of "technical lead".
Re:Not free but ... IntelliJ is by far the best
on
Eclipse 2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't think that Eclipse is at all a typical open source project. Its development is really driven by IBM who are using it as the basis for most of their enterprise development tools.
Have you USED ibm's development tools?!? IBM has some nice technical advancements from time to time, and they are big and powerful, but USEABLE???
Isn't that why they had to start over on their Java IDE? Visual Age was a piece of crap!
There is a chance that IBM will put some usability work into Eclipse, but given their history, I wouldn't expect it. And my previous comments about open source usability still stand.
Re:Not free but ... IntelliJ is by far the best
on
Eclipse 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
To help prove your point, check out the changes to eclipse in version 2.1: http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops /R-2.1 -200303272130/whats-new.html
There's very little in there that hasn't been in IDEA for at least 6 months. Eclipse is open source, so it will have many more features in the future, but more isn't always better.
I can't really see Eclipse overtaking IDEA in usability (it's natural strong suit). I've never seen an open source project that has excelled in that area. IBM may flex some muscle in this area and prove me wrong, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Why do you think the shower was so important to the computer researcher mentioned in the article?
At my first job, we always joked that our best ideas came to us in the shower, and that management needed to install one at work. Realistically, I think I always came up with things in the shower because I shower first thing in the morning. My head is clear. I'm refreshed. And I don't have anything else to concentrate on other than what problem I'm going to tackle when I get to work.
I can't imaging having a shower at work would help anyone solve problems better (although it would give some of my co-workers a chance to wash themselves for once).
I'm glad it's not just me. After coding for an hour or two, someone will interupt me. The explaination of their question may last a minute before I realize I'm not changing gears fast enough and I haven't understood word one. I always feel like a moron when I ask them to repeat it. It always turns out to be a really simple problem too.
I am paid to get the job done. Not to simply serve as somebodies' viewing entertainment. That is the difference between MIS and CS.
How can you expect to have your job taken seriously if you don't respect the roles of others? You and management have different goals. They want to serve the company and you want to serve the project. There IS a difference. The manager will happily let the project run late and over budget if it means there is an appearance of order. Even if they shouldn't, these things do matter.
I've heard reps from the EFF refer to the discs as 'crippled'. I like 'playback restriction technology' since many of the discs can't be played in old players, computer cd-roms, etc.
Here in Missouri, I haven't had as much luck. Our program has exemptions for politicians, telephone companies and charities. I get at least 4 calls a day from charities alone. I haven't given anyone money based on a phone call since before I got my current phone number. I don't know for sure, but I think they got my phone number from the no call list (I didn't have near as many problems before I added myself to the list).
The ZDNet article is a repeat of a Playboy article last month.
Playboy has quite a few good articles themed along the same lines as Wired or EFF posts... yet I rarely see references to it on slashdot. Don't you read the articles?
As opposed to make, which is written in C, which only runs on a few platforms?
You can't even copy a file in make without knowing what kind of system your on. Take a look at the targets available in ant some time. Its built to remove the need to access the operating system (as opposed to make, which offers dependency checking and little else.
I'm not trying to fault make... it simply wasn't built to be cross-platform. But lets not pretend that being available on many platforms and allowing cross-platform code are even close to the same thing.
To make things worse I've been finding more and more I'm required to build richer web content that runs on all browsers.
With IE and it's 95% market share (Mozilla's numbers), I've found people care less every day about cross-browser compatability. It was a real problem when the market was 50/50, but that's been a while.
The problem is people don't want to be organized, so they look to technology to help them be lazy. Plus try explaining 'metadata' to someone. At least now you can use the file cabinet, drawers, folders, papers example to explain the layout to someone.
Your right, people don't want to be organized. They want to be lazy. That's what computers are for... to do otherwise thoughtless work.
As far as explaining the word metadata, why would I try to do that? People already understand the word 'description'. Describe the file.
People use metadata every day. When my mom wants to play a game online, she doesn't go to games.yahoo.com. She goes to google and types "online card game". When someone wants to buy a pair of shoes, they don't type http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 072G1W/qid=1041616305//104-5897266-1255115?v=glanc e&n=507846. They type amazon.com and then search for "Nike Shoes". People will understand it if it's presented correctly (which of course, it won't be until Apple or MS get a hold of it).
-- sorry about that last comment. I couldn't help it.
The history bar in Mozilla is organized by day and then by site. What this study is looking for is a tree structure organized by time alone (the back button's stack plus any forks that would cause it to form a tree).
It wouldn't be hard to make the history bar do this though. They could even put a 'back' button at the top of the bar that works they way they expect (the feedback of seeing the selection change in the tree would help enforce their mental model).
What can a tablet PC for me do that a regular PC cannot?
A better question - what can a notebook do that a tablet PC cannot? The writable screen only adds $200 to the price of a laptop. Why not replace all but the low end laptops with tablet PCs? So what if Joe 6 pack doesn't see the need yet? They'll understand it when they start using it. No one wanted the minivan either!
No one read the article, did they??? The only two choices we have today are $16 popular CDs and free songs from the internet. Once we have more choices, people will pay. The artist will get their money. There will be a music industry. The only questions are:
How long will it take? Which model will be the most sucessfull? Will the current industry players realize this in time, or will mp3.com replace Epic?
People who are proud of their piracy are not evil, they just don't care enough about the artists to make up for the horible inconvience that is required to support them. Once a good system is in place, the 'proud pirate' will remind us all of the guy who brags about being able to get an extra candy bar out of the vending machine.
There was a lot of talk after the last Comdex that trade shows may be dying all together. Since the main purposes of the trade show have always been announcements and demonstrations, the internet has made a major dent in their usefulness. Tech companies used to use the shows to band together their announcements. The release of several products at the same time increased the odds of tv airtime. Now, with specialized media and a 24 hour news cycle, there isn't as much a need for it. In fact, its now better to announce a product during a dry spell in the news week.
I had no idea. I looked it up and Monsanto makes about 4.5 billion in sales per year. Harvard probably don't have a hard time finding good lawyers either.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is the same country in which the farmer was sued for using seeds from last year's canola crop, rather than buying them (again) from Monsanto.
These are two entirely different things... Harvard doesn't have near as much money as Monsanto!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but SWT isn't part of Java; It's an add on from IBM. Bruce Eckel's book is to teach you the Java language as it comes from Sun.
Actually, in the third edition he covers Ant and JUnit in addition to the standard libraries. In the preface, Eckel describes the book as an explanation of the fundamentals of Java. I think it's fair to say that SWT was left out because it is far from being a fundamental part of the language.
The addition of Ant to the book, IMHO is absolutely necessary (event if it isn't part of the standard). Understanding Ant should be every bit as important as some of the other topics in this book (I won't choose any examples, so not to start a flame war).
This is a great book for those who already have a background in C or C++ and anyone who already knows Java and wants to understand the language and it's history a bit better. It's easy to read and explains more about how to wrap your mind around Java than how to program in it.
For this reason I DO NOT recommend this book to beginning programmers, programmers transitioning from COBOL and 4th gen languages or anyone who wants to start writing Java tomorrow. This is a book about understanding Java... it's not good for those who want to learn syntax or jump in to their first program.
Our company was making a transition from an old character based system to a Swing/J2EE system. I made the mistake of suggesting this book for use in the classroom. Our programmers were simply too impatient for it. All of our advanced programmers loved it and recommend it, but those who just wanted to join the project quickly (most of them, in our case) preferred Sun's Java Tutorial series.
Another thing that irks me is the whole idea of wanting to know what people like Einstein were "really like." This always results in a deluge of personal details, the publication of which is not only disrespectful of the dead but largely useless. I mean, he was a brilliant physicist: do I really need to read his poetry from when he was 15?
From a historical point of view, I think it IS important. People need to understand the nature of history makers such as Einstein (among others). It gives us perspective when dealing with events and history makers of today. If we don't address personality of historical figures, then we stand a good chance of loosing historically important information. If not, we may not let the next Einstein into a good college, or ignore his work because he is non-conventional or eccentric. How and Why are every bit as important as What, When and Where.
Babylon 5 is "cheesy television" because it doesn't compare well to Lord of the Rings?!? What TV show compares well to LOTR? Star Trek? Dark Angel? Andromeda? Buffy?
I thought about moding you down as a troll, but I think you might be serious!
- I don't understand why the term and home buttons are on the clock panel. Both are simply shortcuts to applications and should go on the quick launch. - If the task bar is on the upper left, then where does a screen maximize to? Does the taskbar cover part of the frame (I hope so, or it might as well cover the entire top of the screen). If it does overlap the top of a maximized frame, then all controls will have to be on the right for this to be usable. - Static screen shots don't show the interaction well. Will there be a lot of OSX-ish animation. I would suggest a minimal amount of flash. It seems to fit the *nix crowd better (everyone wants to run it on their 90mhz p1), and it would set it appart from XP and OSX.
It has a very clean and simple look, (which everyone always likes but we rarely see in a finished product). I hope, if this does take off, it remains clean and simple.
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Doesn't the title "engineer" assume you know what your making before you start the implementation? I've never found that to be the case. Most of the engineers I work with, would be better fit the with the title of "technical lead".
I don't think that Eclipse is at all a typical open source project. Its development is really driven by IBM who are using it as the basis for most of their enterprise development tools.
Have you USED ibm's development tools?!? IBM has some nice technical advancements from time to time, and they are big and powerful, but USEABLE???
Isn't that why they had to start over on their Java IDE? Visual Age was a piece of crap!
There is a chance that IBM will put some usability work into Eclipse, but given their history, I wouldn't expect it. And my previous comments about open source usability still stand.To help prove your point, check out the changes to eclipse in version 2.1:s /R-2.1 -200303272130/whats-new.html
http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drop
There's very little in there that hasn't been in IDEA for at least 6 months. Eclipse is open source, so it will have many more features in the future, but more isn't always better.
I can't really see Eclipse overtaking IDEA in usability (it's natural strong suit). I've never seen an open source project that has excelled in that area. IBM may flex some muscle in this area and prove me wrong, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Why do you think the shower was so important to the computer researcher mentioned in the article?
At my first job, we always joked that our best ideas came to us in the shower, and that management needed to install one at work. Realistically, I think I always came up with things in the shower because I shower first thing in the morning. My head is clear. I'm refreshed. And I don't have anything else to concentrate on other than what problem I'm going to tackle when I get to work.
I can't imaging having a shower at work would help anyone solve problems better (although it would give some of my co-workers a chance to wash themselves for once).I'm glad it's not just me. After coding for an hour or two, someone will interupt me. The explaination of their question may last a minute before I realize I'm not changing gears fast enough and I haven't understood word one. I always feel like a moron when I ask them to repeat it. It always turns out to be a really simple problem too.
I am paid to get the job done. Not to simply serve as somebodies' viewing entertainment. That is the difference between MIS and CS.
How can you expect to have your job taken seriously if you don't respect the roles of others? You and management have different goals. They want to serve the company and you want to serve the project. There IS a difference. The manager will happily let the project run late and over budget if it means there is an appearance of order. Even if they shouldn't, these things do matter.I've heard reps from the EFF refer to the discs as 'crippled'. I like 'playback restriction technology' since many of the discs can't be played in old players, computer cd-roms, etc.
Here in Missouri, I haven't had as much luck. Our program has exemptions for politicians, telephone companies and charities. I get at least 4 calls a day from charities alone. I haven't given anyone money based on a phone call since before I got my current phone number. I don't know for sure, but I think they got my phone number from the no call list (I didn't have near as many problems before I added myself to the list).
The federal law has the same exceptions.
Did anyone else just have a flash from the end of 'Back to the Future'... Doc brown pouring a beer into 'Mr. Fusion'.
The ZDNet article is a repeat of a Playboy article last month.
Playboy has quite a few good articles themed along the same lines as Wired or EFF posts... yet I rarely see references to it on slashdot. Don't you read the articles?
As opposed to make, which is written in C, which only runs on a few platforms?
You can't even copy a file in make without knowing what kind of system your on. Take a look at the targets available in ant some time. Its built to remove the need to access the operating system (as opposed to make, which offers dependency checking and little else.
I'm not trying to fault make... it simply wasn't built to be cross-platform. But lets not pretend that being available on many platforms and allowing cross-platform code are even close to the same thing.Finally, someone who might be worse than me!
To make things worse I've been finding more and more I'm required to build richer web content that runs on all browsers.
With IE and it's 95% market share (Mozilla's numbers), I've found people care less every day about cross-browser compatability. It was a real problem when the market was 50/50, but that's been a while.The problem is people don't want to be organized, so they look to technology to help them be lazy. Plus try explaining 'metadata' to someone. At least now you can use the file cabinet, drawers, folders, papers example to explain the layout to someone.
Your right, people don't want to be organized. They want to be lazy. That's what computers are for... to do otherwise thoughtless work.
As far as explaining the word metadata, why would I try to do that? People already understand the word 'description'. Describe the file.
People use metadata every day. When my mom wants to play a game online, she doesn't go to games.yahoo.com. She goes to google and types "online card game". When someone wants to buy a pair of shoes, they don't type http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 072G1W/qid=1041616305//104-5897266-1255115?v=glanc e&n=507846. They type amazon.com and then search for "Nike Shoes". People will understand it if it's presented correctly (which of course, it won't be until Apple or MS get a hold of it).
-- sorry about that last comment. I couldn't help it.The history bar in Mozilla is organized by day and then by site. What this study is looking for is a tree structure organized by time alone (the back button's stack plus any forks that would cause it to form a tree).
It wouldn't be hard to make the history bar do this though. They could even put a 'back' button at the top of the bar that works they way they expect (the feedback of seeing the selection change in the tree would help enforce their mental model).
What can a tablet PC for me do that a regular PC cannot?
A better question - what can a notebook do that a tablet PC cannot? The writable screen only adds $200 to the price of a laptop. Why not replace all but the low end laptops with tablet PCs? So what if Joe 6 pack doesn't see the need yet? They'll understand it when they start using it. No one wanted the minivan either!
No one read the article, did they??? The only two choices we have today are $16 popular CDs and free songs from the internet. Once we have more choices, people will pay. The artist will get their money. There will be a music industry. The only questions are:
How long will it take?
Which model will be the most sucessfull?
Will the current industry players realize this in time, or will mp3.com replace Epic?
People who are proud of their piracy are not evil, they just don't care enough about the artists to make up for the horible inconvience that is required to support them. Once a good system is in place, the 'proud pirate' will remind us all of the guy who brags about being able to get an extra candy bar out of the vending machine.
There was a lot of talk after the last Comdex that trade shows may be dying all together. Since the main purposes of the trade show have always been announcements and demonstrations, the internet has made a major dent in their usefulness. Tech companies used to use the shows to band together their announcements. The release of several products at the same time increased the odds of tv airtime. Now, with specialized media and a 24 hour news cycle, there isn't as much a need for it. In fact, its now better to announce a product during a dry spell in the news week.
I had no idea. I looked it up and Monsanto makes about 4.5 billion in sales per year. Harvard probably don't have a hard time finding good lawyers either.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is the same country in which the farmer was sued for using seeds from last year's canola crop, rather than buying them (again) from Monsanto.
These are two entirely different things... Harvard doesn't have near as much money as Monsanto!Correct me if I'm wrong, but SWT isn't part of Java; It's an add on from IBM. Bruce Eckel's book is to teach you the Java language as it comes from Sun.
Actually, in the third edition he covers Ant and JUnit in addition to the standard libraries. In the preface, Eckel describes the book as an explanation of the fundamentals of Java. I think it's fair to say that SWT was left out because it is far from being a fundamental part of the language.
The addition of Ant to the book, IMHO is absolutely necessary (event if it isn't part of the standard). Understanding Ant should be every bit as important as some of the other topics in this book (I won't choose any examples, so not to start a flame war).This is a great book for those who already have a background in C or C++ and anyone who already knows Java and wants to understand the language and it's history a bit better. It's easy to read and explains more about how to wrap your mind around Java than how to program in it.
For this reason I DO NOT recommend this book to beginning programmers, programmers transitioning from COBOL and 4th gen languages or anyone who wants to start writing Java tomorrow. This is a book about understanding Java... it's not good for those who want to learn syntax or jump in to their first program.
Our company was making a transition from an old character based system to a Swing/J2EE system. I made the mistake of suggesting this book for use in the classroom. Our programmers were simply too impatient for it. All of our advanced programmers loved it and recommend it, but those who just wanted to join the project quickly (most of them, in our case) preferred Sun's Java Tutorial series.
Another thing that irks me is the whole idea of wanting to know what people like Einstein were "really like." This always results in a deluge of personal details, the publication of which is not only disrespectful of the dead but largely useless. I mean, he was a brilliant physicist: do I really need to read his poetry from when he was 15?
From a historical point of view, I think it IS important. People need to understand the nature of history makers such as Einstein (among others). It gives us perspective when dealing with events and history makers of today. If we don't address personality of historical figures, then we stand a good chance of loosing historically important information. If not, we may not let the next Einstein into a good college, or ignore his work because he is non-conventional or eccentric. How and Why are every bit as important as What, When and Where.Babylon 5 is "cheesy television" because it doesn't compare well to Lord of the Rings?!? What TV show compares well to LOTR? Star Trek? Dark Angel? Andromeda? Buffy?
I thought about moding you down as a troll, but I think you might be serious!
Overall, I like it a lot, but I have a few notes:
- I don't understand why the term and home buttons are on the clock panel. Both are simply shortcuts to applications and should go on the quick launch.
- If the task bar is on the upper left, then where does a screen maximize to? Does the taskbar cover part of the frame (I hope so, or it might as well cover the entire top of the screen). If it does overlap the top of a maximized frame, then all controls will have to be on the right for this to be usable.
- Static screen shots don't show the interaction well. Will there be a lot of OSX-ish animation. I would suggest a minimal amount of flash. It seems to fit the *nix crowd better (everyone wants to run it on their 90mhz p1), and it would set it appart from XP and OSX.
It has a very clean and simple look, (which everyone always likes but we rarely see in a finished product). I hope, if this does take off, it remains clean and simple.