I wouldn't say that. most of the companies i work with supply data in XML formats. generally they're very easy to read/debug and process and using standard libraries.
Some companies on the other hand try to give us proprietary binary data streams over tcp or incremental relational data dumps over TCP. Guess which i prefer.
I found that KVM cabling and setup was time consuming, anoying and expensive.
My favoured solution is currently a laptop and SSH. Plus A KVM monitor,keyboard/mouse left in the data center with a few critical machines on and with a spare very long (2-3Meters) KVM cable to connect to any machines stuck on bios/boot screens or with failing SSH.
Obviously this only works if you are Unix/Linux only. Remote KVMs would be useful though, can anyone recommend a secure one that isn't hideously expensive?
I don't know any real XPers that say "no other process can work". Many XPers are rightly concerned that some people claim to adopting XP without doing all the practices and then slag it off when it doesn't work.
In fact most of the XPers I know are also interested in other Agile processes.
Sure that's a factor, we pair program with each new potential developer as part of the recruitment process to see how well we work togethor.
XP works by enabling the team to work togethor and more effectively whilst stay focused on bringing business benefit. Bringing benefit over the longer term by developing a team and a process that both encourages and adapts to changes not just blaming customers for changing their minds after 3 months.
Customers will ALWAYS change their minds, even in the unlikely event they knew what they wanted when they started business requirements will change over time. XP isn't a silver bullet but compare to to more traditional processes that don't encourage change and it looks pretty good. (EG compared to "6 months upfront design and 200 page out sourced legal specs" or "individual eliteist hackers" type enviroments)
Other people i'm sure have success with other processes but this has worked for us and i get tired of slashdotters slagging it off when i'm not convinced most of them have worked in a full XP team.
Yet we keep playing the buzzword bingo with our new systems, e.g. "Extreme programming"
Hang on! The whole point of XP is about the fact that customers change their mind and developers never get it completely perfect in the first draft. XP promises a schedule based on the last one or three week iteration so it inherently remains accurate over time.
I've been doing XP properly for about 5 years and it's one of the reasons the company i work for has survived. Massive code changes have been neccessary as we've pretty much changed the product into an entirely different one that is now profitable with the aid of an agile process and tools + those 1500 unit tests.
Please don't blame XP just because it doesn't fix mega-death-march projects overnight or because it's a buzzword used by people who have never even written a unit test let alone pair programmed.
Here's the problem. Not many people care about controlling their computer in the sense that he's blabbing on about.
It's true that most people don't care about these rights or maybe even consider them 'rights' at all.
Yet, by insisting that people should demand these rights he may have triggered a movement that will both revolution and improve the way we develop software for generations to come.
That is why some people consider him a genius.
Personally I agree with him on the issue of free software but admit he is capable of talking waft - the wheel group in Unix being a specific example.
I think most javas GUI are slow because they use lightweight, non-cached and poorly optimised GUI's like Swing rather than native toolkits like SWT.
Re:A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widget
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yes it's important to move all the gnome stuff into GTK that way people like you will be forced to install gnome (now called GTK7) just to run your crappy little apps written way back in 1987.
I always maintain that the majority of users don't know they have a choice, hence they're using/starting/opening whatever that's been thrown at them.
I'm sorry i really can't support these wildly unfounded statement. Let's look at the facts:
Windows, Defragger, Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Messenger, Word, Excel...
Are you suggesting microsoft competed UNFAIRLY! But surely using their monopoly desktop position to put other competitors out of business would be illegal?!
So-called "web designers" that don't like this fact should find another medium more to their taste, and good riddance.
Heh. The business people can employ someone who can make a decent looking website (a so called "web-designer") or can employee a tech fanatic that refuses to see that HTML/CSS has moved on from the days of ARPANET and scientific papers. HTML/CSS is generally used by businesses for creating pretty graphical websites rendered to near pixel perfection.
One could argue that everything in CSS is a layout hint, but for all practical purposes it is describing how 99.9% of web browsers should layout the website and is used as a layout specification for the HTML.
If you want people using a variety of browsers to see what you put up on the web (adverts or othewise), write simple compliant code and test it thoroughly.
The costs involved in testing on two browsers was not worth it for the extra clickthroughs on a very small percentage use browser. This is changing as firefox usage grows, but the effects will take a while to trickle through
For some problems there is no work around for firefox it's pretty much accepted that running well on IE and taking 100% cpu on firefox is just tough. They really need to fix DHTML performance issues on firefox.
Not entirely accurate there are still rendering bugs in firefox (see slashdot) and some DHTML performance is so bad compared to IE that it could be considered a bug.
Also, adverts can be fully HTML/CSS compliant and still render differently on IE and Firefox due to different default behaviour that is not covered by HTML/CSS validators.
Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox, including some flash/dhtml combos and some dhtml ads.
I don't expect this is the main reason, but it doesn't help.
Also, click through rates and conversion rates are different issues. Probably many more IE users accidentily click on ads or click on them and lose interest than firefox users who are much more likely to only click through on an advert if they are interested in buying. (this is a guess we don't breakdown by browser type at the moment)
I love the goverment tendering process it fills me with much amusement.
The idea that you pay one company to come up with a box of requirements then send it out to tender, and get several boxes back from a few large companies like EDS. Then these get send off to the company contracted to deal with the subcontracting/tendering process. A haggling process commences between bunches of lawyers on both sides resulting in usually only one or two possibilities the cheapest one is then selected and fucks it up. Now a days most reputable companies don't even tender a bid cos of the cost and the fact they know it will be wasted money cos some company renowned for their failures like EDS will just undercut them.
My particular favourite was penalty clauses against downtime for an NHS system were introduced due to the fact that the system was so critical. But the company involved rather than implementing a backup system decided it would be more cost effective to ensure against a system failure.
Perhaps one day the out-sourcing-sub-contracting-legal-wrangling craziness will stop.
I agree he is being unreasonable but then the whole system of EULA's and particularly clickwrap EULAs is quite unreasonable.
It appears you are buying something in the shop and then you get home and it turns out you have brought the right to an agreement to play a game as long as you agree to 1001 conditions the full meaning of which could probably only be understood by a team of lawyers and which 99% of people click straight through.
I think there should be some law restricting the amount of crap you can put in these dodgy clickwrap licences not just for games but for spyware apps like WhenU too.
Slashdot Mirror
Well quite.
I'm still waiting for Gnu/Hurd to be finished.
I wouldn't say that. most of the companies i work with supply data in XML formats. generally they're very easy to read/debug and process and using standard libraries.
Some companies on the other hand try to give us proprietary binary data streams over tcp or incremental relational data dumps over TCP. Guess which i prefer.
Matt
Bah slashdot stripping away all the xml goodness
They're trying to make the XML-programming more powerful. what about:
100101110111
It's readable but, remains flexible.
I found that KVM cabling and setup was time consuming, anoying and expensive.
My favoured solution is currently a laptop and SSH. Plus A KVM monitor,keyboard/mouse left in the data center with a few critical machines on and with a spare very long (2-3Meters) KVM cable to connect to any machines stuck on bios/boot screens or with failing SSH.
Obviously this only works if you are Unix/Linux only. Remote KVMs would be useful though, can anyone recommend a secure one that isn't hideously expensive?
Depends what your software does, maybe if it's interesting i will write a free(RMS) version.
Then what version would people want?
I don't know any real XPers that say "no other process can work". Many XPers are rightly concerned that some people claim to adopting XP without doing all the practices and then slag it off when it doesn't work.
In fact most of the XPers I know are also interested in other Agile processes.
Sure that's a factor, we pair program with each new potential developer as part of the recruitment process to see how well we work togethor.
XP works by enabling the team to work togethor and more effectively whilst stay focused on bringing business benefit. Bringing benefit over the longer term by developing a team and a process that both encourages and adapts to changes not just blaming customers for changing their minds after 3 months.
Customers will ALWAYS change their minds, even in the unlikely event they knew what they wanted when they started business requirements will change over time. XP isn't a silver bullet but compare to to more traditional processes that don't encourage change and it looks pretty good. (EG compared to "6 months upfront design and 200 page out sourced legal specs" or "individual eliteist hackers" type enviroments)
Other people i'm sure have success with other processes but this has worked for us and i get tired of slashdotters slagging it off when i'm not convinced most of them have worked in a full XP team.
Yet we keep playing the buzzword bingo with our new systems, e.g. "Extreme programming"
Hang on! The whole point of XP is about the fact that customers change their mind and developers never get it completely perfect in the first draft. XP promises a schedule based on the last one or three week iteration so it inherently remains accurate over time.
I've been doing XP properly for about 5 years and it's one of the reasons the company i work for has survived. Massive code changes have been neccessary as we've pretty much changed the product into an entirely different one that is now profitable with the aid of an agile process and tools + those 1500 unit tests.
Please don't blame XP just because it doesn't fix mega-death-march projects overnight or because it's a buzzword used by people who have never even written a unit test let alone pair programmed.
Here's the problem. Not many people care about controlling their computer in the sense that he's blabbing on about.
It's true that most people don't care about these rights or maybe even consider them 'rights' at all.
Yet, by insisting that people should demand these rights he may have triggered a movement that will both revolution and improve the way we develop software for generations to come.
That is why some people consider him a genius.
Personally I agree with him on the issue of free software but admit he is capable of talking waft - the wheel group in Unix being a specific example.
I think most javas GUI are slow because they use lightweight, non-cached and poorly optimised GUI's like Swing rather than native toolkits like SWT.
Yes it's important to move all the gnome stuff into GTK that way people like you will be forced to install gnome (now called GTK7) just to run your crappy little apps written way back in 1987.
mwa ha ha ha
What is the connection between the men in the first list and the women in the second list?
They all have very strange sounding names.
I always maintain that the majority of users don't know they have a choice, hence they're using/starting/opening whatever that's been thrown at them.
I'm sorry i really can't support these wildly unfounded statement. Let's look at the facts:
Windows,
Defragger,
Media Player,
Internet Explorer,
Outlook Express,
Windows Messenger,
Word,
Excel...
Are you suggesting microsoft competed UNFAIRLY!
But surely using their monopoly desktop position to put other competitors out of business would be illegal?!
So-called "web designers" that don't like this fact should find another medium more to their taste, and good riddance.
Heh.
The business people can employ someone who can make a decent looking website (a so called "web-designer") or can employee a tech fanatic that refuses to see that HTML/CSS has moved on from the days of ARPANET and scientific papers. HTML/CSS is generally used by businesses for creating pretty graphical websites rendered to near pixel perfection.
One could argue that everything in CSS is a layout hint, but for all practical purposes it is describing how 99.9% of web browsers should layout the website and is used as a layout specification for the HTML.
If you want people using a variety of browsers to see what you put up on the web (adverts or othewise), write simple compliant code and test it thoroughly.
The costs involved in testing on two browsers was not worth it for the extra clickthroughs on a very small percentage use browser. This is changing as firefox usage grows, but the effects will take a while to trickle through
For some problems there is no work around for firefox it's pretty much accepted that running well on IE and taking 100% cpu on firefox is just tough. They really need to fix DHTML performance issues on firefox.
Not entirely accurate there are still rendering bugs in firefox (see slashdot) and some DHTML performance is so bad compared to IE that it could be considered a bug.
Also, adverts can be fully HTML/CSS compliant and still render differently on IE and Firefox due to different default behaviour that is not covered by HTML/CSS validators.
I work for an internet advertising company.
Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox, including some flash/dhtml combos and some dhtml ads.
I don't expect this is the main reason, but it doesn't help.
Also, click through rates and conversion rates are different issues. Probably many more IE users accidentily click on ads or click on them and lose interest than firefox users who are much more likely to only click through on an advert if they are interested in buying. (this is a guess we don't breakdown by browser type at the moment)
Yes I think they are still ironing out issues relating to a patent related clause in the next version of the GPL.
The IBM public license is another example of a license that is incompatible with the GPL because it tries to protect against patent claims.
Ok ok, they laughed at linux to start with - now they're open sourcing Solaris to compete with it.
I love the goverment tendering process it fills me with much amusement.
The idea that you pay one company to come up with a box of requirements then send it out to tender, and get several boxes back from a few large companies like EDS. Then these get send off to the company contracted to deal with the subcontracting/tendering process. A haggling process commences between bunches of lawyers on both sides resulting in usually only one or two possibilities the cheapest one is then selected and fucks it up. Now a days most reputable companies don't even tender a bid cos of the cost and the fact they know it will be wasted money cos some company renowned for their failures like EDS will just undercut them.
My particular favourite was penalty clauses against downtime for an NHS system were introduced due to the fact that the system was so critical. But the company involved rather than implementing a backup system decided it would be more cost effective to ensure against a system failure.
Perhaps one day the out-sourcing-sub-contracting-legal-wrangling craziness will stop.
Avalon + .NET
I'm glad someone can get java running cross-platform even if it does only run on the Sun JVM.
Well all that is fine for osX a unified system where the base install is the same everywhere and all the core system development is done in house.
It's not feasible for linux until something like the LSB becomes more popular.
I agree he is being unreasonable but then the whole system of EULA's and particularly clickwrap EULAs is quite unreasonable.
It appears you are buying something in the shop and then you get home and it turns out you have brought the right to an agreement to play a game as long as you agree to 1001 conditions the full meaning of which could probably only be understood by a team of lawyers and which 99% of people click straight through.
I think there should be some law restricting the amount of crap you can put in these dodgy clickwrap licences not just for games but for spyware apps like WhenU too.
Matt.