It's simply not true that middle-aged developers have a hard time finding work due to rampant ageism. If you have advanced skills building high-quality software with technologies that are in demand, your age hardly matters. The smart employers value engineers with years of experience who are more likely to create good products and not make costly mistakes. I've been working for almost 20 years as a professional developer, am now 41 and making the best money of my career developing financial tools for a major investment bank.
Development teams doing high-profile projects that get media attention (as opposed to boring, routine stuff like telecom databases, retail POS terminals, embedded SW for consumer devices, etc) do tend to have more developers who are in their mid-30s or younger. This is generally not because of age bias, it's more likely because younger developers are most familiar with the latest languages and tools. Startups also tend to have young developers since they are more OK with high risk/high reward deals and long hours, and haven't had as much opportunity to get into engineering careers with big companies. Also, after a few decades in the field, many developers eventually get tired of endlessly staring at computer screens and learning new skills every 5-10 years. They move up into management or start new careers. A well-educated, hard-working engineer can easily move into many other less demanding career tracks including finance/investing, marketing, HR, real estate, and non-technical corporate jobs.
HTML5 is still a W3C Working Draft standard (see http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/) and is still changing so browser developers are slow to spend effort implementing it. Even after it becomes an official 1.0 standard, some browsers may not implement parts of it for years, so some amount of browser-specific code (and occasional non-availability of some features on some platforms) will always be a fact of life when building Web UIs.
Just switching from a fragile tile-covered aircraft strapped to the side of a flaking-foam-covered hydrogen tank to an inherently ballistically stable capsule placed as far from the flaming end of the rocket as possible (i.e., on top of it) will achieve the desired 10x safety factor improvement. NASA has been tied to its delta-winged boondoggle for several decades too long. If they would eliminate the segmented, non-throttleable solid rocket boosters (currently still in the plan thanks to Morton Thiokol's lobbyists) they could improve safety another 10x. And if they want to do all this at minimum cost, they could just buy Soyuz vehicles, the world's safest, most reliable manned space transportation system. Of course, national pride would allow this to happen only sometime after Putin declares his undying love for country music and Harley-Davidsons.
HTML5 canvas has a lot of potential. Once accelerated 3D graphics in the browser is standard, the potential uses and demand for content will be huge: visualizations, innovative interfaces, attention-grabbing content, digital art, games... But IE doesn't support canvas so any site that relies on it for anything more than trivial rendering will be unusable by almost half of Internet users (current IE browser share: ~40%, according to w3schools). Probably Microsoft sees canvas as a threat to Silverlight so won't work with it until they absolutely have to. Here's a canvas animation demo I wrote. Looks fine on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iPhone... barely works on IE using emulated support for the canvas element.
Here's my latest HTML5 canvas demo: http://3.paulhamill.com/html_canvas_animation Should work fine on recent Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iPhone browsers. Animates with glacial slowness and lower quality on IE since this uses excanvas.js emulation. Non-functional on Konqueror. More canvas demos: http://www.canvasdemos.com
The elephant in the room (which doesn't get enough attention) is that the Ares rocket design is fundamentally flawed due to politics taking precedence over engineering. The Ares first stage will be a solid rocket booster which not only is inherently less controllable than a liquid fueled rocket (since it can't be throttled), but also makes the whole vehicle aerodynamically unstable (since it has a smaller diameter than the upper stage). The proposed reusable solid first stage has the same segmented design that caused the Challenger shuttle explosion when inter-segment seals burned through. It may have problems with severe in-flight vibration which cannot be dealt with by throttling engine power, leading to absurd hacks involving giant shock absorbers. Why is this poor up front design being officially pitched by NASA? Because of the high-powered, big money political lobbying of Morton Thiokol, the Shuttle's Solid Rocket Booster producer, which saw its meal ticket vanishing with the Shuttle retirement. Why has every other human-rated rocket (aside from the Shuttle) been liquid fueled with progressively smaller stages? Because the engineers went with the best design instead of having key pieces decided a priori by senators with law degrees and pockets full of contractor dollars. It will be truly pathetic if NASA winds up with another unreliable, problematic, unsafe vehicle due to back-room lobbying by government contractors. NASA engineers realize the truth which is why they are openly calling for a better design concept. Morton Thiokol should be forced to independently build its own solid-fuel rocket and participate in a fair competition with other rocket designs instead of using back-channel politics to sell its products.
In April 2008 a Soyuz made an uncontrolled reentry due to failure of the service module to separate during the de-orbit sequence. The cosmonauts survived due to the inherent ballistic stability and fail-safety of the design: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6229
NASA has finally conceded that the safest place for the astronauts is on top of the launch stack, with abort rockets to escape a failing lower stage, and with no exposure to damage from falling debris. These factors plus the increased safety of ballistic reentry explain the return to capsules with the Constellation system.
Shuttle vs. Soyuz Reliability http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=7954.0
Soyuz vs Shuttle http://salul.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/soyuz-vs-shuttle/
The mainstream media once again lives up to its long history of mangling science stories.
The report cites 5 specific fatal aspects of the loss of Columbia: depressurization, extreme dynamic loads, separation of the crew from the vehicle, exposure to space, and ground impact. Implying that this really means inadequate restraint systems is a joke. No amount of safety hardware would permit surviving the breakup and uncontrolled re-entry of (pieces of) your spacecraft.
Due to NASA politics, the report omits a more accurate summary statement that the Shuttle is an inherently flawed and unsafe design when compared to ballistically stable capsules that can and do survive uncontrolled re-entry.
Though not a hardcore climber, I've summited numerous 14,000+ ft peaks in Colorado.
The fact that most Everest climbers die from altitude effects while descending is not surprising. Altitude sickness hits gradually and most of them realized they were ill (or their more lucid companions did) and were in the process of trying to get down when they died. At such heights oxygen deprivation kills you before you have time to freeze to death.
More than falling, exposure, altitude, or any other specific risk, "summit fever" is the single greatest danger of mountaineering. When people are fixated on summiting regardless of conditions (including physical exhaustion) they place themselves at an elevated and unnecessary risk of death. Everest expeditions involving gung-ho newbies who have paid large amounts of money for a single-shot attempt inevitably leads to a high death rate, since these sacrificial victims are both maniacally obsessed with reaching the top and incapable of objectively evaluating the situation.
Everest climbs should be limited to those who have proven high-altitude mountaineering experience. Guides who profit by leading inexperienced tourists into extreme danger should be villified, especially those who have the gall to come down unscathed while leaving behind the frozen corpses of their clients. They're the ones creating Everest's culture of death.
Buzz knew the odds were high of Apollo 11 being the end of his life. Someone traveling 400m km away from the nearest breathable atmosphere understands that completely. A Mars mission that budgets mass for a return capability gives up many years worth of resources. The immense expenditure of traveling to Mars make it insane just to spend a few days or weeks on the planet. The astronauts must be prepared to stay for a period that is well past their life expectancy given the many risks, even if theoretically they have can return.
The ultimate billionaire stunt: get a Soyuz TM, load a 1 year supply of ramen noodles and beer, use a satellite booster to shoot it trans-Mars and back. Live deep space podcasts!
In the mid-90s Yahoo! pared down every variable and path in their HTML to get the minimum document size and thus fastest loading. You'd see stuff in their HTML like img src=a/b.gif and a minimum of spaces and newlines. However, back then most people had dialup Internet access and a few KB made a noticeable difference. In the past few years, mainstream Web sites pretty much assume broadband. Don't bother visiting YouTube or MySpace if you're still on a modem. Aside from graphics and videos, one of the main sources of bloat is Web 2.0. Look at the source of a Web 2.0 site, even Yahoo!, and often you see 4 times as many bytes of Javascript as HTML. All that script content not only has to be retrieved from the server, but also takes time to evaluate on the client. Google is one of the few heavily visited sites that has kept their main page to a bare minimum of plain HTML, and it is reflected in their popularity. If you visit a page 10 times a day you don't want to be slowed down by fancy shmancy embedded dynamic AJAX controls.
Microsoft owns Visual Studio and the MSDN. They have the legal right to demand that Jamie Cansdale not modify their product and remove his MVP status. However, it's unfair and shortsighted. TestDriven.NET made doing Test Driven Development (TDD) of.NET code significantly easier. Cansdale is handing Microsoft and.NET developers a valuable tool for free. If Visual Studio Express is aimed at beginner developers, MS should be happy to help them get started with best practices by being able to do TDD.
One reason for Microsoft to behave this way is that they have introduced their own unit test framework in Visual Studio Team Edition. It's not unlikely that the designers of the Visual Studio test framework looked at TestDriven.NET as an example of how unit testing should be built in to Visual Studio. Serious developers know the importance of doing TDD and will pay for an IDE that supports it. Cansdale is undercutting their sales opportunities by permitting developers to do TDD for free in the Express edition.
Cansdale should stop tickling the tiger, forget about integrating TestDriven.NET into VS Express, and provide a separate interface for VS Express users to use TestDriven.NET to test their code without going through the Visual Studio GUI. No integration, no license violation.
Chapter 8 of my book Unit Test Frameworkshttp://www.mounthamill.com/about.html describes how to use NUnit to do TDD of.NET code without any need to integrate with Visual Studio. NUnit is one of the testing frameworks supported by TestDriven.NET.
Like Murphy's Law, Moore's Law is a heuristic rule of engineering. "In general, the computing power of a commercially available CPU doubles every 18 months." Trying to define this specifically in terms of number of transistors, MIPS, processor speed, etc. is silly. The specific technological advances that drive Moore's Law are diverse, driven both by incremental improvements in existing technologies, such as shrinking die sizes in chip fabs, and occasional leaps of innovation, like multi-core CPUs. Representing them as a smoothly increasing exponential function is a massive oversimplification for the benefit of laypersons and Wall Street.
This article is just lame and defeatist. If game developers listened to this kind of argument, no games would ever get written. If you've got a cool game concept, work on it. If it's good, eventually you will take it to the point where it can go commercial. Even if it doesn't get that far, you can enjoy following your vision and learn valuable skills. Many game developers started out playing with a concept for kicks with no hope of ever taking it to market.
I wrote my first game on a C64 in the late 80s. It was a text based adventure game written in BASIC, a fan tribute to Star Wars. Gave it to a few friends to play, then accidentally formatted the floppy with the source code. Oops. But I enjoyed writing it and it got me started as a programmer.
For the past 2 years my hobby project has been a Windows arcade style game, Sol, a sort of Galaga 3D. Not only has developing the game helped keep programming fun rather than just being wage-earning drudgery, but also I've learned marketable skills in graphics, interactive design, build systems, coding techniques, etc. After writing a video game from scratch, creating simple 3D GUIs and many other types of apps seems easy.
As an individual developer, you can write your own games. It would be tough to match the amount of creative content in commercial games: complicated levels and scenarios, large amounts of artistic graphics, hordes of characters, libraries of sound effects, etc. But you can create a game that is playable and fun. You can achieve the same sense of satisfaction as in the old days. If your design and marketing skills are good, you can sell your game and make money. Simple web-based or phone games are still within the reach of one developer. If the type of game you're creating would require a larger team, you can still be a lone wolf: create a playable prototype, then sell or license the concept to a game studio or publisher.
Check out the current prototype of Sol and some free screensavers at http://www.mounthamill.com/. Feedback welcome.
"The Future Belongs to Siberia" is a Soviet slogan that my Russian babushka-in-law liked to repeat. It's a joke to westerners. However, in 50 or 100 years it won't be such a joke.
Siberia is the last great undeveloped yet habitable region of the Earth. It is vast, extending from north of the Arctic Circle down to the borders of China and other Asian nations, and from the Caucasus Mountains in the west to the Pacific; in total, significantly larger than all of Europe. The southern parts are temperate, far from the frozen taiga that most people imagine. It contains immense regions of forest, tundra, mountains, and natural resources of all kinds that have only begun to be exploited. Much of it still is reachable only by aircraft. Billions of people could live there, and eventually will.
In the near term, the Siberian cities are severely economically disadvantaged yet contain significant numbers of people who received advanced educations under the Soviet system, a combination that makes them ripe for offshore technology projects, as described in the original post.
This situation exemplifies the reality of using Microsoft tools for any kind of development, not just 3D graphics. Use Microsoft dev tools, face vendor lock-in, non-portability, and rewriting your code every couple of years when they release a new iteration of their products and deprecate the old APIs.
I wrote some free Windows screensavers ( available at http://www.mounthamill.com/ ) using GNU dev tools (gcc, make, cygwin) and OpenGL. They work great on Windows XP and 2000. I can even build and run them on Linux although haven't made the effort to deploy them as Linux screensavers.
From my experience, any game developer could use OpenGL and free/open source tools to develop code. There is no graphics effect you can do in DirectX than you cannot do in OpenGL. A few specialized effects may be slightly easier to implement in DirectX. OpenGL is easier to use, in general. If you go with DirectX, you will be required to build a more complex engine to deal with differences between different Windows versions. You also will be required to shell out thousands of bucks to buy MS Visual Studio and associated dev tools (not to mention the cost of Windows itself.) Total investment to build a 3D graphics application using OpenGL and GNU tools, $0. Difference to users, none.
I assume all the developers who did choose the MS tools either had business motivations to be aligned with MS, or were targeting the X-Box and thus mandatory usage of DirectX. MS buys the companies that publish the most popular games (e.g. Blizzard, Bungie), forcing them to use the MS dev tools. If that's not sufficient evidence that the MS tools would lose in a fair competition, what is?
Now it seems Google has swung to the opposite extreme, being very paranoid about clicks possibly being fraudulent and not crediting ad referers. Not too long ago I put some Google ads up on a free screensaver site http://www.mounthamill.com/ and have gotten a significant number of legitimate clicks, but Google disallows a lot of them for no apparent reason.
All this discussion of saving the Hubble seems to ignore an obvious solution. Just launch a completely new, improved orbiting observatory. Hubble is nearing the end of its lifespan even if it is serviced. A replacement might not cost a lot more than a servicing mission and would involve zero risk.
My first job after college. A top secret project at a major defense contractor to reengineer a classified government system. A featureless, windowless building. Every person has their own safe to store classified documentation.
It's a noncompetitive contract. The contractor has taken hundreds of clueless idiots, given them crash courses in current technology, and declared them all to be experts.
The phones are monitored. The computers are monitored. Nobody will talk about the project because it might be a security violation. It takes months just to get the general idea what we're doing.
What are we doing? Creating stacks and stacks of technical documents, documents that refer to documents, requirements with five nested levels of numbered paragraphs, interface documents, design documents, operations documents, systems to track the cross-references, the changes, the acronyms. In short, creating the mother of all piles of paper, that will eventually ensure that weeks must be spent checking and re-checking every page each time someone wants to do some work.
Some day, in the future, we may start actually writing code. Some day very far away.
I quit one day after my contractually agreed one year was up.
There is no worse job than a job where there is absolutely nothing to do.
The Comanche is the poster child for enormous pork barrel government defense projects.
Maybe it's an awesome machine, but to spend $8 billion over 20 years and still not be in production is indefensible. It's only a helicopter. You can be sure that if the Army really needed it, it would only have taken a few years to start production.
Back in 1992, I was almost hired by Sikorsky to work as a co-op on this project. They already had an airframe back then. What have they been doing in the 12 years since then? Busy work to keep those multi-million dollar payments coming.
Beyond that, the experiences of the US military in Kosovo and Iraq suggest pretty strongly that the whole attack helicopter concept is flawed. They are too slow, too low, and too vulnerable.
Probably the whole reason the Army ever came up with attack helicopters is that they are forbidden to operate fixed-wing aircraft.
It's true, exploring space is dangerous and lives will be lost.
The real tragedy is using this as an excuse to keep flying the shuttle and killing more astronauts. The US needs to develop a new vehicle ASAP. NASA needs to step up to the plate, admit that the shuttle is too unsafe to fly as is and too old to reengineer, and get the money to develop its replacement on a fast track. A number of opportunities to develop a replacement and retire the shuttle were wasted before the loss of Columbia. NASA is unwilling to risk ending the shuttle program, their most prominent icon, and their fixation on it blinds them to other possibilities. There are ways to keep the ISS operating and astronauts flying without ever launching another shuttle. NASA just doesn't have the political will to pursue them.
The "studies" of in-flight repair are hideous examples of a cheap hack gone too far. It should be a joke. Who would ever voluntarily go through re-entry in a shuttle with a hand-patched wing?
Why won't NASA just admit that the shuttle is a first-generation vehicle and cannot be "fixed"? Why doesn't NASA recognize that Soyuz, and Apollo for that matter, prove that space flight can be much safer than the shuttle? When was the American way ever to throw people's lives away when there was an alternative?
The shuttle is just a piece of hardware. It has killed fourteen people. Walk away from it. Put the remaining three orbiters in museums. Move on.
NASA's administrator Sean O'Keefe guaranteed that there would be problems when he triumphantly announced that "we're back."
Mars had to teach puny proud humans their lesson.
Has there ever been a lander which had a serious communications problem but then recovered? I think not.
Re:The picture appears composited
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News from Mars
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After all the complaints about NASA "modifying" photos so that the colors are "inaccurate", it's amazing that there's not more screaming about ESA releasing a completely fake image, which, to most people, appears to show a deep dark canyon, but actually is overhead and landscape views crudely stuck together.
Some propagandist at ESA must have designed the image to look really dramatic. It certainly worked for the press.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simply not true that middle-aged developers have a hard time finding work due to rampant ageism. If you have advanced skills building high-quality software with technologies that are in demand, your age hardly matters. The smart employers value engineers with years of experience who are more likely to create good products and not make costly mistakes. I've been working for almost 20 years as a professional developer, am now 41 and making the best money of my career developing financial tools for a major investment bank.
Development teams doing high-profile projects that get media attention (as opposed to boring, routine stuff like telecom databases, retail POS terminals, embedded SW for consumer devices, etc) do tend to have more developers who are in their mid-30s or younger. This is generally not because of age bias, it's more likely because younger developers are most familiar with the latest languages and tools. Startups also tend to have young developers since they are more OK with high risk/high reward deals and long hours, and haven't had as much opportunity to get into engineering careers with big companies. Also, after a few decades in the field, many developers eventually get tired of endlessly staring at computer screens and learning new skills every 5-10 years. They move up into management or start new careers. A well-educated, hard-working engineer can easily move into many other less demanding career tracks including finance/investing, marketing, HR, real estate, and non-technical corporate jobs.
HTML5 is still a W3C Working Draft standard (see http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/) and is still changing so browser developers are slow to spend effort implementing it. Even after it becomes an official 1.0 standard, some browsers may not implement parts of it for years, so some amount of browser-specific code (and occasional non-availability of some features on some platforms) will always be a fact of life when building Web UIs.
Just switching from a fragile tile-covered aircraft strapped to the side of a flaking-foam-covered hydrogen tank to an inherently ballistically stable capsule placed as far from the flaming end of the rocket as possible (i.e., on top of it) will achieve the desired 10x safety factor improvement. NASA has been tied to its delta-winged boondoggle for several decades too long. If they would eliminate the segmented, non-throttleable solid rocket boosters (currently still in the plan thanks to Morton Thiokol's lobbyists) they could improve safety another 10x. And if they want to do all this at minimum cost, they could just buy Soyuz vehicles, the world's safest, most reliable manned space transportation system. Of course, national pride would allow this to happen only sometime after Putin declares his undying love for country music and Harley-Davidsons.
HTML5 canvas has a lot of potential. Once accelerated 3D graphics in the browser is standard, the potential uses and demand for content will be huge: visualizations, innovative interfaces, attention-grabbing content, digital art, games...
But IE doesn't support canvas so any site that relies on it for anything more than trivial rendering will be unusable by almost half of Internet users (current IE browser share: ~40%, according to w3schools). Probably Microsoft sees canvas as a threat to Silverlight so won't work with it until they absolutely have to.
Here's a canvas animation demo I wrote. Looks fine on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iPhone... barely works on IE using emulated support for the canvas element.
Here's my latest HTML5 canvas demo: http://3.paulhamill.com/html_canvas_animation
Should work fine on recent Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iPhone browsers. Animates with glacial slowness and lower quality on IE since this uses excanvas.js emulation. Non-functional on Konqueror.
More canvas demos: http://www.canvasdemos.com
The elephant in the room (which doesn't get enough attention) is that the Ares rocket design is fundamentally flawed due to politics taking precedence over engineering. The Ares first stage will be a solid rocket booster which not only is inherently less controllable than a liquid fueled rocket (since it can't be throttled), but also makes the whole vehicle aerodynamically unstable (since it has a smaller diameter than the upper stage). The proposed reusable solid first stage has the same segmented design that caused the Challenger shuttle explosion when inter-segment seals burned through. It may have problems with severe in-flight vibration which cannot be dealt with by throttling engine power, leading to absurd hacks involving giant shock absorbers. Why is this poor up front design being officially pitched by NASA? Because of the high-powered, big money political lobbying of Morton Thiokol, the Shuttle's Solid Rocket Booster producer, which saw its meal ticket vanishing with the Shuttle retirement. Why has every other human-rated rocket (aside from the Shuttle) been liquid fueled with progressively smaller stages? Because the engineers went with the best design instead of having key pieces decided a priori by senators with law degrees and pockets full of contractor dollars. It will be truly pathetic if NASA winds up with another unreliable, problematic, unsafe vehicle due to back-room lobbying by government contractors. NASA engineers realize the truth which is why they are openly calling for a better design concept. Morton Thiokol should be forced to independently build its own solid-fuel rocket and participate in a fair competition with other rocket designs instead of using back-channel politics to sell its products.
In April 2008 a Soyuz made an uncontrolled reentry due to failure of the service module to separate during the de-orbit sequence. The cosmonauts survived due to the inherent ballistic stability and fail-safety of the design:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6229
NASA has finally conceded that the safest place for the astronauts is on top of the launch stack, with abort rockets to escape a failing lower stage, and with no exposure to damage from falling debris. These factors plus the increased safety of ballistic reentry explain the return to capsules with the Constellation system.
Shuttle vs. Soyuz Reliability
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=7954.0
Soyuz vs Shuttle
http://salul.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/soyuz-vs-shuttle/
The mainstream media once again lives up to its long history of mangling science stories.
The report cites 5 specific fatal aspects of the loss of Columbia: depressurization, extreme dynamic loads, separation of the crew from the vehicle, exposure to space, and ground impact. Implying that this really means inadequate restraint systems is a joke. No amount of safety hardware would permit surviving the breakup and uncontrolled re-entry of (pieces of) your spacecraft.
Due to NASA politics, the report omits a more accurate summary statement that the Shuttle is an inherently flawed and unsafe design when compared to ballistically stable capsules that can and do survive uncontrolled re-entry.
http://3.paulhamill.com
Though not a hardcore climber, I've summited numerous 14,000+ ft peaks in Colorado.
The fact that most Everest climbers die from altitude effects while descending is not surprising. Altitude sickness hits gradually and most of them realized they were ill (or their more lucid companions did) and were in the process of trying to get down when they died. At such heights oxygen deprivation kills you before you have time to freeze to death.
More than falling, exposure, altitude, or any other specific risk, "summit fever" is the single greatest danger of mountaineering. When people are fixated on summiting regardless of conditions (including physical exhaustion) they place themselves at an elevated and unnecessary risk of death. Everest expeditions involving gung-ho newbies who have paid large amounts of money for a single-shot attempt inevitably leads to a high death rate, since these sacrificial victims are both maniacally obsessed with reaching the top and incapable of objectively evaluating the situation.
Everest climbs should be limited to those who have proven high-altitude mountaineering experience. Guides who profit by leading inexperienced tourists into extreme danger should be villified, especially those who have the gall to come down unscathed while leaving behind the frozen corpses of their clients. They're the ones creating Everest's culture of death.
- Paul
http://3.paulhamill.com
Buzz knew the odds were high of Apollo 11 being the end of his life. Someone traveling 400m km away from the nearest breathable atmosphere understands that completely. A Mars mission that budgets mass for a return capability gives up many years worth of resources. The immense expenditure of traveling to Mars make it insane just to spend a few days or weeks on the planet. The astronauts must be prepared to stay for a period that is well past their life expectancy given the many risks, even if theoretically they have can return.
The ultimate billionaire stunt: get a Soyuz TM, load a 1 year supply of ramen noodles and beer, use a satellite booster to shoot it trans-Mars and back. Live deep space podcasts!
http://3.paulhamill.com
In the mid-90s Yahoo! pared down every variable and path in their HTML to get the minimum document size and thus fastest loading. You'd see stuff in their HTML like img src=a/b.gif and a minimum of spaces and newlines. However, back then most people had dialup Internet access and a few KB made a noticeable difference. In the past few years, mainstream Web sites pretty much assume broadband. Don't bother visiting YouTube or MySpace if you're still on a modem. Aside from graphics and videos, one of the main sources of bloat is Web 2.0. Look at the source of a Web 2.0 site, even Yahoo!, and often you see 4 times as many bytes of Javascript as HTML. All that script content not only has to be retrieved from the server, but also takes time to evaluate on the client. Google is one of the few heavily visited sites that has kept their main page to a bare minimum of plain HTML, and it is reflected in their popularity. If you visit a page 10 times a day you don't want to be slowed down by fancy shmancy embedded dynamic AJAX controls.
- Spike
Freeware OpenGL arcade game SOL, competitor in the 2008 Independent Games Festival: http://www.mounthamill.com/sol.html
Microsoft owns Visual Studio and the MSDN. They have the legal right to demand that Jamie Cansdale not modify their product and remove his MVP status. However, it's unfair and shortsighted. TestDriven.NET made doing Test Driven Development (TDD) of .NET code significantly easier. Cansdale is handing Microsoft and .NET developers a valuable tool for free. If Visual Studio Express is aimed at beginner developers, MS should be happy to help them get started with best practices by being able to do TDD.
.NET code without any need to integrate with Visual Studio. NUnit is one of the testing frameworks supported by TestDriven.NET.
One reason for Microsoft to behave this way is that they have introduced their own unit test framework in Visual Studio Team Edition. It's not unlikely that the designers of the Visual Studio test framework looked at TestDriven.NET as an example of how unit testing should be built in to Visual Studio. Serious developers know the importance of doing TDD and will pay for an IDE that supports it. Cansdale is undercutting their sales opportunities by permitting developers to do TDD for free in the Express edition.
Cansdale should stop tickling the tiger, forget about integrating TestDriven.NET into VS Express, and provide a separate interface for VS Express users to use TestDriven.NET to test their code without going through the Visual Studio GUI. No integration, no license violation.
Chapter 8 of my book Unit Test Frameworks http://www.mounthamill.com/about.html describes how to use NUnit to do TDD of
Like Murphy's Law, Moore's Law is a heuristic rule of engineering. "In general, the computing power of a commercially available CPU doubles every 18 months." Trying to define this specifically in terms of number of transistors, MIPS, processor speed, etc. is silly. The specific technological advances that drive Moore's Law are diverse, driven both by incremental improvements in existing technologies, such as shrinking die sizes in chip fabs, and occasional leaps of innovation, like multi-core CPUs. Representing them as a smoothly increasing exponential function is a massive oversimplification for the benefit of laypersons and Wall Street.
** Check out free Windows OpenGL screensavers at http://www.mounthamill.com/ **
This article is just lame and defeatist. If game developers listened to this kind of argument, no games would ever get written. If you've got a cool game concept, work on it. If it's good, eventually you will take it to the point where it can go commercial. Even if it doesn't get that far, you can enjoy following your vision and learn valuable skills. Many game developers started out playing with a concept for kicks with no hope of ever taking it to market.
I wrote my first game on a C64 in the late 80s. It was a text based adventure game written in BASIC, a fan tribute to Star Wars. Gave it to a few friends to play, then accidentally formatted the floppy with the source code. Oops. But I enjoyed writing it and it got me started as a programmer.
For the past 2 years my hobby project has been a Windows arcade style game, Sol, a sort of Galaga 3D. Not only has developing the game helped keep programming fun rather than just being wage-earning drudgery, but also I've learned marketable skills in graphics, interactive design, build systems, coding techniques, etc. After writing a video game from scratch, creating simple 3D GUIs and many other types of apps seems easy.
As an individual developer, you can write your own games. It would be tough to match the amount of creative content in commercial games: complicated levels and scenarios, large amounts of artistic graphics, hordes of characters, libraries of sound effects, etc. But you can create a game that is playable and fun. You can achieve the same sense of satisfaction as in the old days. If your design and marketing skills are good, you can sell your game and make money. Simple web-based or phone games are still within the reach of one developer. If the type of game you're creating would require a larger team, you can still be a lone wolf: create a playable prototype, then sell or license the concept to a game studio or publisher.
Check out the current prototype of Sol and some free screensavers at http://www.mounthamill.com/. Feedback welcome.
- Spike
"The Future Belongs to Siberia" is a Soviet slogan that my Russian babushka-in-law liked to repeat. It's a joke to westerners. However, in 50 or 100 years it won't be such a joke.
Siberia is the last great undeveloped yet habitable region of the Earth. It is vast, extending from north of the Arctic Circle down to the borders of China and other Asian nations, and from the Caucasus Mountains in the west to the Pacific; in total, significantly larger than all of Europe. The southern parts are temperate, far from the frozen taiga that most people imagine. It contains immense regions of forest, tundra, mountains, and natural resources of all kinds that have only begun to be exploited. Much of it still is reachable only by aircraft. Billions of people could live there, and eventually will.
In the near term, the Siberian cities are severely economically disadvantaged yet contain significant numbers of people who received advanced educations under the Soviet system, a combination that makes them ripe for offshore technology projects, as described in the original post.
- spike
This situation exemplifies the reality of using Microsoft tools for any kind of development, not just 3D graphics. Use Microsoft dev tools, face vendor lock-in, non-portability, and rewriting your code every couple of years when they release a new iteration of their products and deprecate the old APIs.
I wrote some free Windows screensavers ( available at http://www.mounthamill.com/ ) using GNU dev tools (gcc, make, cygwin) and OpenGL. They work great on Windows XP and 2000. I can even build and run them on Linux although haven't made the effort to deploy them as Linux screensavers.
From my experience, any game developer could use OpenGL and free/open source tools to develop code. There is no graphics effect you can do in DirectX than you cannot do in OpenGL. A few specialized effects may be slightly easier to implement in DirectX. OpenGL is easier to use, in general. If you go with DirectX, you will be required to build a more complex engine to deal with differences between different Windows versions. You also will be required to shell out thousands of bucks to buy MS Visual Studio and associated dev tools (not to mention the cost of Windows itself.) Total investment to build a 3D graphics application using OpenGL and GNU tools, $0. Difference to users, none.
I assume all the developers who did choose the MS tools either had business motivations to be aligned with MS, or were targeting the X-Box and thus mandatory usage of DirectX. MS buys the companies that publish the most popular games (e.g. Blizzard, Bungie), forcing them to use the MS dev tools. If that's not sufficient evidence that the MS tools would lose in a fair competition, what is?
- Spike
Free Windows screensavers http://www.mounthamill.com/
Now it seems Google has swung to the opposite extreme, being very paranoid about clicks possibly being fraudulent and not crediting ad referers. Not too long ago I put some Google ads up on a free screensaver site http://www.mounthamill.com/ and have gotten a significant number of legitimate clicks, but Google disallows a lot of them for no apparent reason.
... welcome our new delta-winged overlords.
All this discussion of saving the Hubble seems to ignore an obvious solution. Just launch a completely new, improved orbiting observatory. Hubble is nearing the end of its lifespan even if it is serviced. A replacement might not cost a lot more than a servicing mission and would involve zero risk.
My first job after college. A top secret project at a major defense contractor to reengineer a classified government system. A featureless, windowless building. Every person has their own safe to store classified documentation.
It's a noncompetitive contract. The contractor has taken hundreds of clueless idiots, given them crash courses in current technology, and declared them all to be experts.
The phones are monitored. The computers are monitored. Nobody will talk about the project because it might be a security violation. It takes months just to get the general idea what we're doing.
What are we doing? Creating stacks and stacks of technical documents, documents that refer to documents, requirements with five nested levels of numbered paragraphs, interface documents, design documents, operations documents, systems to track the cross-references, the changes, the acronyms. In short, creating the mother of all piles of paper, that will eventually ensure that weeks must be spent checking and re-checking every page each time someone wants to do some work.
Some day, in the future, we may start actually writing code. Some day very far away.
I quit one day after my contractually agreed one year was up.
There is no worse job than a job where there is absolutely nothing to do.
The Comanche is the poster child for enormous pork barrel government defense projects.
Maybe it's an awesome machine, but to spend $8 billion over 20 years and still not be in production is indefensible. It's only a helicopter. You can be sure that if the Army really needed it, it would only have taken a few years to start production.
Back in 1992, I was almost hired by Sikorsky to work as a co-op on this project. They already had an airframe back then. What have they been doing in the 12 years since then? Busy work to keep those multi-million dollar payments coming.
Beyond that, the experiences of the US military in Kosovo and Iraq suggest pretty strongly that the whole attack helicopter concept is flawed. They are too slow, too low, and too vulnerable.
Probably the whole reason the Army ever came up with attack helicopters is that they are forbidden to operate fixed-wing aircraft.
I have been a software developer for more than 15 years. Currently employed as a Senior Software Engineer.
I've only come across one way to write code that is close to bug-free: Test-Driven Development (TDD.)
In TDD, you never write a line of code unless there is a unit test in place to check the results.
I have seen very complex systems get built from scratch with virtually no bugs when TDD is followed.
There are lots of online resources about TDD. It is one of the foundations of XP (Extreme Programming.)
It's true, exploring space is dangerous and lives will be lost.
The real tragedy is using this as an excuse to keep flying the shuttle and killing more astronauts. The US needs to develop a new vehicle ASAP. NASA needs to step up to the plate, admit that the shuttle is too unsafe to fly as is and too old to reengineer, and get the money to develop its replacement on a fast track. A number of opportunities to develop a replacement and retire the shuttle were wasted before the loss of Columbia. NASA is unwilling to risk ending the shuttle program, their most prominent icon, and their fixation on it blinds them to other possibilities. There are ways to keep the ISS operating and astronauts flying without ever launching another shuttle. NASA just doesn't have the political will to pursue them.
The "studies" of in-flight repair are hideous examples of a cheap hack gone too far. It should be a joke. Who would ever voluntarily go through re-entry in a shuttle with a hand-patched wing?
Why won't NASA just admit that the shuttle is a first-generation vehicle and cannot be "fixed"? Why doesn't NASA recognize that Soyuz, and Apollo for that matter, prove that space flight can be much safer than the shuttle? When was the American way ever to throw people's lives away when there was an alternative?
The shuttle is just a piece of hardware. It has killed fourteen people. Walk away from it. Put the remaining three orbiters in museums. Move on.
NASA's administrator Sean O'Keefe guaranteed that there would be problems when he triumphantly announced that "we're back."
Mars had to teach puny proud humans their lesson.
Has there ever been a lander which had a serious communications problem but then recovered? I think not.
After all the complaints about NASA "modifying" photos so that the colors are "inaccurate", it's amazing that there's not more screaming about ESA releasing a completely fake image, which, to most people, appears to show a deep dark canyon, but actually is overhead and landscape views crudely stuck together.
Some propagandist at ESA must have designed the image to look really dramatic. It certainly worked for the press.