The first 10% is easy. There are a lot of people who will gladly jump onto the latest and greatest.
The last 50% is also easy. Most people will 'follow the herd' and just keep using whatever everyone else is using, without really giving it much though.
In the 20-50% zone, there is an 'acceptance gap'. In here there is a 'critical mass' - the people who want to change, but need to 'stay compatible' with their offices, the die-hards who don't want to change, and will actively try to prevent the wider adoption, etc.
I have a job opening for exactly the position you are looking for. It is in Reston, Virginia... no, not like farmland - this is Northern Virginia, very close to Washington D.C. This is a great area to live - we have seasons, centally located for a lot of fun travel vacation, etc.
Go to www.fgm.com
click on 'careers'
filter on the Reston, VA positions
Look at the 'proess improvement specialist' position. Ignore what it says about 'RUP and ISO desired'. I don't know where that came from - I opened the position, and apparently the HR department added that. I will make sure that gets changed.
If asked for a referral, say something like "Dave Referred, from SlashDot."
There are other positions there that a burnt-out coder kight be interested in... but you mentioned process specifically.
Which is why open source is preferred for security...
It is at least theoretically possible that you (or someone you hire, or one of the 10 thousand pairs of eyes looking at the source) can find the issue and fix it. This is not possible at all with closed source software. If the source is 'obscured' from you, you have no control whatsoever.
The questions at the end, asked by 'Doug', sound like those of a CMM auditor/appraiser, with vocabulary like "according to a documented procedure" and "affected stakeholders". Sounds to me like someone is interested is assessing mozilla at CMM Level 2...
CMM is a 'process improvement methodology' from Carnagie Melon called the 'Capability Maturity Model'. It is similar in intent, although not at all in style or implementation to process improvement metholodogies like 'Extreme Programming' and 'Scrum'. For level 2, there are 6 'process areas' - the questions asked here are from the area of 'Software Configuration Management'.
It was very interesting that he was able to answer 'yes' to each question, and point to the 'documentation artifact' that proves his point. That is exactly what you are supposed to be able to do during a formal assessment. I'm going to bookmark this and save it for the next time someone rants about 'quality of open source'.
If the issues are 100% open, then 0% of the security comes from obscurity.
If 0% of the security comes from the ability of others to keep secrets (obscurity), then 100% of the security comes from my configuration, my password, my private key, etc.
Me controlling 100% of my security is a Good Thing.
My employer does take out the appropriate amount of taxes, based on a 'witholding' form I fill out, but:
my employer does not know how much interest I paid on tax deductible loans.
My employer does not know how much money I gave to charities this year.
My employer does not know how much I spent on medical expenses (which are deductible)
MY employer does not know how much money I made or lost in investments this year.
And I prefer to keep it that way.
Sales taxes in the U.S. are incredibly complicated. They vary by small region. Most States have a sales tax (in Virginia it is 4.5%), some cities take another 2-3% on top of that, some counties add a percent or two. In some jurisdictions food is not taxable, and in others, 'convenience food' is taxable, but not 'other' food - meaning I can walk into dunkin' donuts and get 1 donut and pay tax, or I can buy a dozen and pay no tax at all. Two identical stores with identical products just a few miles apart will pay different tax rates. It is ugly and complicated, but I like not having the tax as part of the advertised price - it makes it easier to comparison shop, and certainly makes the advertising literature easier to produce.
Billions of dollars were spent to fix mission critical systems... if they still failed, people would be screaming "We spent billions! Why did we still have the problem?" So instead, they are saying, "We didn't see any problems, should we really have spent the money?"
Maybe I understand Politics a little better after this - it is easier not to spend the money, wait for the disaster, then point fingers.
Why not write this off as a success? Are people just that used to not succeeding?
There WERE various y2k problems... just nothing in major industries like travel, banking, etc.
What about the recent bug mentioned here on slashdot about the airline flight booking system, failing when there were more than 32767 transactions in a given month? That is an example of the same kind of problem the y2k propbem was... I bet the head of Information Technology at that airline was making a 6 figure salary - how could he have the airline so reliant on software that didn't have a backup system, nor one he knew the performance characteristics of?
We use J2EE, and have been since 1999. JBoss is our application server. We used to use Weblogic, and were technically happy with it, but JBoss does everything we need, and has licenses and costs more favorable for our end users.
Our application is a bunch of domain objects and custom business logic, presented by the J2EE server as a bunch of sessions beans (some stateful, some stateless). We have a swing and a web-based client. Most of the rich interaction is done with the swing client, with mostly browsing and canned searching from the web-based client.
We do NOT use Entity beans - and I don't suggest anyone use this part of the EJB specification... For data persistence we use The Versant Object-Oriented Database. For data persistence, I'd recommend this, JDO, or Hibernate talking to the relational database of your choice.
We are very happy with the choices we have made. There is a TON of information out there about J2EE, we are happy with the performance we get, the skills are readily available, and there are plenty of vendors building tools in that space. J2EE is obviously a realistic choice for the kind of work you are doing - and has been for many years.
I do not know much about.NET... only because that isn't where my career has taken me, not because of any dogmatic stance. My major concern about using it for this kind of work is that there is no 'application server'....NET is tied to the windows platform. I know there are projects like Mono, but realistically, if you are using.NET, you are buying into Microsoft, their tools, and their solutions. With J2EE, I can upgrade my operating system and my application server independently - choose from different vendors for both, play them against each other for cost/support benefits, etc. With.NET, you just won't have these long-term options.
I am the president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. While some may say this makes me biased, I'm not an employee of Sun or anything... I work for a relatively small company. I am involved in the NovaJUG because I happen to know and like Java, and like to teach. I also occasionally speak at conferences such as the No Fluff, Just Stuff Software Symposiums. I'm not going to leave my email address or anything, but there is enough info in this to track me down. IF you would like to discuss this further, drop me a line.
Uh, you most certainly could buy compilers and tools such as Macintosh Programmers Workshop, ThinkC and ThinkPascal from Symantec, and Codewarrior from Metrowerks. I was exclusively a Mac programmer from 1985 - 1996.
The 'extension' of which you speak is equivalent to the file extensions under dos, like.exe,.txt,.doc, etc. MacOS has meta-data about each file - a 4 digit code identifying the file type, and a 4 digit code identifying the file that created it (which allows for some neat capabilities such as having two files of the same type, but opened by different applications when they are double-clicked on.)
The only reason you had to 'register' an extention with Apple was so other applications could know, for sure, what kind of file an extention represented. There is nothing to stop anyone from using any code they desired, just as there is nothing to stop me from naming a file with an ending like '.dll' under dos/windows... it just isn't a prudent thing to do.
In the movie Die hard, the thieves wanted the power to the building to be shut off... so they pretended to be terrorists, knowing what the FBI's protocols would be.
So now, when the terrorists of the world want to create chaos, and want to make sure that emergency vehicles which rely on GPS for positioning and commuunications cannot respond, they do something to have Homeland Security shut down GPS.
I think what they actually have here is proof the recognizing pictures of people you don't actually know in real life requires 3 areas of the brain. Are there any comparative studies that contrast celebritity photos vs. photos of people the subject knows in real life? Or photos of people vs. people who are actually, physically present?
I just bought an Epson RX600. It is dirt cheap and can scan/print directly to/from a compact flash... thus I don't even have to have it connected to a computer to be useful. Works fine with linux as long as you can use a CF card.
I haven't done any slide scanning, but it has that capability. I have done some prints from color negatives, and I was blown away that it actually worked, let alone worked well.
Re:Getters/setters bad?
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Check a principle called the 'Law Of Demeter'. I have a paper about it on my website called, "the Paperboy, the Wallet, and the law of Demeter". This will answer your question. In short, it is better to provide the common functions developers will need of your objects, rather than just expose the parts and let them manipulate them manually. Any piece of advice can be followed pragmatically or dogmatically though... Your mileage may vary.
Because it would have been more than a 1 day impact. They have a build process for the distro, a testing process to ensure that everything works as expected (and known issues have been addressed), they need to create the CD images, and distribute them to a zillion mirrors... I would be surprised if it took them less than a week to go from 'ok, lets build the release' to 'you can now download from your favorite mirror'.
Since it takes them a non-trivial amount of time to release, and since the distro contains dozens, if not hundreds of components that are being updated by their maintainers, some stuff is inevitably going to be outdated by the time you get it. It just so happens it was something a little higher profile than normal this time.
Fedora Core 2 didn't have the latest lmsensors library, but I don't think many people noticed.
Wow... the department stores hem your pants for FREE? AND they have a button at the table that summons over your waiter?
What marvelous advances... and so worth giving up things like freedom of speech, uncensored access to the internet, political dissent. And hey... the chineese government hasn't massacred their citizens for peacefully demonstrating for something like 15 years now. Sounds like a real great place!
Thousands of cosmic rays do not pass through our bodies every day... They are stopped by the atmosphere. Cosmic rays are actually fairly dangerous radiation. During the Apollo missions, Astronauts would occasionally see flashes of light as cosmic rays hit their eyes... they also left 'streaks' in the porthole glass.
I think you are confusing them with neutrinos, but even then you are wrong... billions of those pass through us every second.
Please please please! I need the full version of acrobat on linux! I have a really cool project that transforms xml into the FDF file that fills in PDF forms... It is used to automatically fill out paperwork, and is currently used by many government ministries around the world.. A linux option would be very welcome.
First of all, there are some things that will NEVER be outsourced. It is not enough for a lot of job security, but these things are:
1) Jobs needing a security clearance. In my area (Northern VA, this is almost the rule rather than the exception.
2) Jobs that require you to be 'close' to the problem - such as system administration, software engineering for in-house applications, etc.
As more and more jobs are outsourced, something interesting is going to happen: The people who got into this career in the late 90's because they could spell 'HTML' will complain about it, and go away. Those that are left will be the TALENTED people. They will 'move up the food chain' as lower level jobs are outsourced. Those left behind will become the people designing the system , those doing integration, and those doing quality assurance.
If I 'know' the pattern for the secret handshake, I could write a program that behaved the same way, then screwed the other program once I had convinced it I was its master (or slave).
The 'meta-game' is a very real concept in games... This is why chess masters study the previous games of their oppoents to learn their weaknesses, and is probably a MAJORITY of the strategy in games like Texas Hold'em, where you need to know how your opponent behaves when bluffing, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this the same technique Geordie LaForge came up with for introducing a virus into the Borg collective? Remember Hugh?
Maybe the image of Bill Gates-as-Borg was a little more prophetic than we all realized.
The first 10% is easy. There are a lot of people who will gladly jump onto the latest and greatest.
The last 50% is also easy. Most people will 'follow the herd' and just keep using whatever everyone else is using, without really giving it much though.
In the 20-50% zone, there is an 'acceptance gap'. In here there is a 'critical mass' - the people who want to change, but need to 'stay compatible' with their offices, the die-hards who don't want to change, and will actively try to prevent the wider adoption, etc.
The average IT department or web developer shouldn't care if it is a 1, 2, 12, or n browser world.
Ideally, we would all be coding to standards. Is your html compartible with the defined standards? XHTML, CSS, and so on?
After all, my cable company doesn't think of this as a '137 television world'... they are concerned about video standards.
Does the NBC Nightly News start up with a banner ad saying, "This broadcast best viewed on RCA Televisions"? No. That is just absurd.
I have a job opening for exactly the position you are looking for. It is in Reston, Virginia... no, not like farmland - this is Northern Virginia, very close to Washington D.C. This is a great area to live - we have seasons, centally located for a lot of fun travel vacation, etc.
Go to www.fgm.com
click on 'careers'
filter on the Reston, VA positions
Look at the 'proess improvement specialist' position. Ignore what it says about 'RUP and ISO desired'. I don't know where that came from - I opened the position, and apparently the HR department added that. I will make sure that gets changed.
If asked for a referral, say something like "Dave Referred, from SlashDot."
There are other positions there that a burnt-out coder kight be interested in... but you mentioned process specifically.
I'd say that posting a question about it on slashdot is your first clue something is wrong.
Wait... maybe thinking to turn to SlashDot for answers is your first clue that something is wrong with your management strategy.
Which is why open source is preferred for security...
It is at least theoretically possible that you (or someone you hire, or one of the 10 thousand pairs of eyes looking at the source) can find the issue and fix it. This is not possible at all with closed source software. If the source is 'obscured' from you, you have no control whatsoever.
The questions at the end, asked by 'Doug', sound like those of a CMM auditor/appraiser, with vocabulary like "according to a documented procedure" and "affected stakeholders". Sounds to me like someone is interested is assessing mozilla at CMM Level 2...
CMM is a 'process improvement methodology' from Carnagie Melon called the 'Capability Maturity Model'. It is similar in intent, although not at all in style or implementation to process improvement metholodogies like 'Extreme Programming' and 'Scrum'. For level 2, there are 6 'process areas' - the questions asked here are from the area of 'Software Configuration Management'.
It was very interesting that he was able to answer 'yes' to each question, and point to the 'documentation artifact' that proves his point. That is exactly what you are supposed to be able to do during a formal assessment. I'm going to bookmark this and save it for the next time someone rants about 'quality of open source'.
If the issues are 100% open, then 0% of the security comes from obscurity.
If 0% of the security comes from the ability of others to keep secrets (obscurity), then 100% of the security comes from my configuration, my password, my private key, etc.
Me controlling 100% of my security is a Good Thing.
My employer does take out the appropriate amount of taxes, based on a 'witholding' form I fill out, but:
my employer does not know how much interest I paid on tax deductible loans.
My employer does not know how much money I gave to charities this year.
My employer does not know how much I spent on medical expenses (which are deductible)
MY employer does not know how much money I made or lost in investments this year.
And I prefer to keep it that way.
Sales taxes in the U.S. are incredibly complicated. They vary by small region. Most States have a sales tax (in Virginia it is 4.5%), some cities take another 2-3% on top of that, some counties add a percent or two. In some jurisdictions food is not taxable, and in others, 'convenience food' is taxable, but not 'other' food - meaning I can walk into dunkin' donuts and get 1 donut and pay tax, or I can buy a dozen and pay no tax at all. Two identical stores with identical products just a few miles apart will pay different tax rates. It is ugly and complicated, but I like not having the tax as part of the advertised price - it makes it easier to comparison shop, and certainly makes the advertising literature easier to produce.
So, what about the DirectShow codec in linux? I'd love to watch my shows in Xine...
Are they planning one? Is there an open source one in the works anywhere? Are any of the specs open?
Billions of dollars were spent to fix mission critical systems... if they still failed, people would be screaming "We spent billions! Why did we still have the problem?" So instead, they are saying, "We didn't see any problems, should we really have spent the money?"
Maybe I understand Politics a little better after this - it is easier not to spend the money, wait for the disaster, then point fingers.
Why not write this off as a success? Are people just that used to not succeeding?
There WERE various y2k problems... just nothing in major industries like travel, banking, etc.
What about the recent bug mentioned here on slashdot about the airline flight booking system, failing when there were more than 32767 transactions in a given month? That is an example of the same kind of problem the y2k propbem was... I bet the head of Information Technology at that airline was making a 6 figure salary - how could he have the airline so reliant on software that didn't have a backup system, nor one he knew the performance characteristics of?
I cannot give you an answer for your particular situation, but I can tell you my opinion, based on my real-world experience.
I am the chief architect for a major application developed by the U.S. State Department, and used by foreign governments for the licensing of hazardous materials.
We use J2EE, and have been since 1999. JBoss is our application server. We used to use Weblogic, and were technically happy with it, but JBoss does everything we need, and has licenses and costs more favorable for our end users.
Our application is a bunch of domain objects and custom business logic, presented by the J2EE server as a bunch of sessions beans (some stateful, some stateless). We have a swing and a web-based client. Most of the rich interaction is done with the swing client, with mostly browsing and canned searching from the web-based client.
We do NOT use Entity beans - and I don't suggest anyone use this part of the EJB specification... For data persistence we use The Versant Object-Oriented Database. For data persistence, I'd recommend this, JDO, or Hibernate talking to the relational database of your choice.
We are very happy with the choices we have made. There is a TON of information out there about J2EE, we are happy with the performance we get, the skills are readily available, and there are plenty of vendors building tools in that space. J2EE is obviously a realistic choice for the kind of work you are doing - and has been for many years.
I do not know much about .NET... only because that isn't where my career has taken me, not because of any dogmatic stance. My major concern about using it for this kind of work is that there is no 'application server'... .NET is tied to the windows platform. I know there are projects like Mono, but realistically, if you are using .NET, you are buying into Microsoft, their tools, and their solutions. With J2EE, I can upgrade my operating system and my application server independently - choose from different vendors for both, play them against each other for cost/support benefits, etc. With .NET, you just won't have these long-term options.
I am the president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. While some may say this makes me biased, I'm not an employee of Sun or anything... I work for a relatively small company. I am involved in the NovaJUG because I happen to know and like Java, and like to teach. I also occasionally speak at conferences such as the No Fluff, Just Stuff Software Symposiums. I'm not going to leave my email address or anything, but there is enough info in this to track me down. IF you would like to discuss this further, drop me a line.
They got paid, didn't they? That's the first criteria of success that I'm aware of for a contractor... Government of otherwise.
Uh, you most certainly could buy compilers and tools such as Macintosh Programmers Workshop, ThinkC and ThinkPascal from Symantec, and Codewarrior from Metrowerks. I was exclusively a Mac programmer from 1985 - 1996.
.exe, .txt, .doc, etc. MacOS has meta-data about each file - a 4 digit code identifying the file type, and a 4 digit code identifying the file that created it (which allows for some neat capabilities such as having two files of the same type, but opened by different applications when they are double-clicked on.)
The 'extension' of which you speak is equivalent to the file extensions under dos, like
The only reason you had to 'register' an extention with Apple was so other applications could know, for sure, what kind of file an extention represented. There is nothing to stop anyone from using any code they desired, just as there is nothing to stop me from naming a file with an ending like '.dll' under dos/windows... it just isn't a prudent thing to do.
In the movie Die hard, the thieves wanted the power to the building to be shut off... so they pretended to be terrorists, knowing what the FBI's protocols would be.
So now, when the terrorists of the world want to create chaos, and want to make sure that emergency vehicles which rely on GPS for positioning and commuunications cannot respond, they do something to have Homeland Security shut down GPS.
Great work guys!
I think what they actually have here is proof the recognizing pictures of people you don't actually know in real life requires 3 areas of the brain. Are there any comparative studies that contrast celebritity photos vs. photos of people the subject knows in real life? Or photos of people vs. people who are actually, physically present?
I just bought an Epson RX600. It is dirt cheap and can scan/print directly to/from a compact flash... thus I don't even have to have it connected to a computer to be useful. Works fine with linux as long as you can use a CF card.
I haven't done any slide scanning, but it has that capability. I have done some prints from color negatives, and I was blown away that it actually worked, let alone worked well.
Check a principle called the 'Law Of Demeter'. I have a paper about it on my website called, "the Paperboy, the Wallet, and the law of Demeter". This will answer your question. In short, it is better to provide the common functions developers will need of your objects, rather than just expose the parts and let them manipulate them manually. Any piece of advice can be followed pragmatically or dogmatically though... Your mileage may vary.
Because it would have been more than a 1 day impact. They have a build process for the distro, a testing process to ensure that everything works as expected (and known issues have been addressed), they need to create the CD images, and distribute them to a zillion mirrors... I would be surprised if it took them less than a week to go from 'ok, lets build the release' to 'you can now download from your favorite mirror'.
Since it takes them a non-trivial amount of time to release, and since the distro contains dozens, if not hundreds of components that are being updated by their maintainers, some stuff is inevitably going to be outdated by the time you get it. It just so happens it was something a little higher profile than normal this time.
Fedora Core 2 didn't have the latest lmsensors library, but I don't think many people noticed.
Wow... the department stores hem your pants for FREE? AND they have a button at the table that summons over your waiter?
What marvelous advances... and so worth giving up things like freedom of speech, uncensored access to the internet, political dissent. And hey... the chineese government hasn't massacred their citizens for peacefully demonstrating for something like 15 years now. Sounds like a real great place!
Thousands of cosmic rays do not pass through our bodies every day... They are stopped by the atmosphere. Cosmic rays are actually fairly dangerous radiation. During the Apollo missions, Astronauts would occasionally see flashes of light as cosmic rays hit their eyes... they also left 'streaks' in the porthole glass.
I think you are confusing them with neutrinos, but even then you are wrong... billions of those pass through us every second.
Please please please! I need the full version of acrobat on linux! I have a really cool project that transforms xml into the FDF file that fills in PDF forms... It is used to automatically fill out paperwork, and is currently used by many government ministries around the world.. A linux option would be very welcome.
My favorite is the thinkgeek tshirt that says "2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2".
It is not just funny... if you consider the numbers not as integers, but as any float value with that integer as the first number, it is true.
First of all, there are some things that will NEVER be outsourced. It is not enough for a lot of job security, but these things are:
1) Jobs needing a security clearance. In my area (Northern VA, this is almost the rule rather than the exception.
2) Jobs that require you to be 'close' to the problem - such as system administration, software engineering for in-house applications, etc.
As more and more jobs are outsourced, something interesting is going to happen: The people who got into this career in the late 90's because they could spell 'HTML' will complain about it, and go away. Those that are left will be the TALENTED people. They will 'move up the food chain' as lower level jobs are outsourced. Those left behind will become the people designing the system , those doing integration, and those doing quality assurance.
You could also call it 'playing the meta-game'.
If I 'know' the pattern for the secret handshake, I could write a program that behaved the same way, then screwed the other program once I had convinced it I was its master (or slave).
The 'meta-game' is a very real concept in games... This is why chess masters study the previous games of their oppoents to learn their weaknesses, and is probably a MAJORITY of the strategy in games like Texas Hold'em, where you need to know how your opponent behaves when bluffing, etc.