You are absolutly right, so for the sake of karma, I'll expand a little on what you said...
A clearly defined and documented interface provides the integral part of any software project. With out them all the diagrams and quality control will not help when it comes to maintenance and new development.
One thing that comes from clearly defined interfaces is extremely modular code. Modular code encourages de-coupling of components, making it easier to develop new features and fix old ones.
Another thing that interfaces provide, if they are properly used, is a true abstraction from the implementation. So when a new programmer comes onto the scene he gets a good feel for what the module does before he gets into the implementation. If the code is really bad then it can be replaced without breaking other software, by rigidly adhering to the definition of the interface.
Yes this is not a perfect thing but it is a wonderful start. I'm a C++ programmer with 7 years of experience. When I develop a new object or related objects I create a base class that just defines the interface. I use pure virtual functions so there is no implementation. I define what each of the methods do. Through inheritance I then implement the interface. I may write crap code for proof of concept or just a time constraint but when I go back and re-implement the clearly defined interface it does not change the behavior of code that is dependent on that interface.
Another method I use is factories. I have objects that construct related objects and return a handle to just the interface. This way other code
that I write is never directly accessing the implementation of the object.
I do understand that other languages do not support some of the features that C++ does but with a little thought and design the same ideas can be used to implement strongly defined interfaces and good decoupling of modules can be achieved.
This is a more hands on approach to software but it is something that I feel is missed by most software development. A strongly defined interface will always allow for easier development, maintenance, and addition of new features.
heh, yea I saw that, I typed it in a different window because this little box just sucks big time, I double-pasted my own comment. I didn't see it and I "over reacted" about the double-paste. But the comment is my own, and if you would like to have a technical discussion about it I hang out in irc.openprojects.net. I hang out in #c, #c++ and #linux, my handle is the same as slashdot "infodragon". I try to help out when time permits. So if you ever would like to chat then please join. I'd be glad to have a discussion about my technical merrits. See you there.
First of all what do you mean by "double-paste"? This is an origional comment by my self, but I guess from your point of view anybody who says somthing that is comprehensive and informative got it from some commentary and is trying to "karma whore." If you would have taken the time you would have seen that this is the first comment that I have posted in a long time, quite the oppsite from a karma whore. I only post to threads that I have some intrest in and somthing to say, as an expert in the programming field I have both, on this thread.
Sorry if my "stolen commentary" offends you but it is origional and until you open your mind a little and decide to act instead of reacting you'll never make it 2 steps forward in the real world.
Could you please email me. I'm curious who the meticulous company is. It seems implied they may be a medial company. If they are I'm really curious who they are.
Yea I know what you mean. I cannot stand legislatoin like this!
Here are a couple of loop holes here...
What about MS DOS debug program. This falls under the guise of hacking, but is distributed with almost every OS MS has produced!
Whate about nmap? The article discusses this. The councel says there will be exemptions... From the article, " The Council of Europe has promised to provide a list of exceptions to the treaty, and professional network administrators will likely end up exempt"
First of all what software will be exempt? I've used a DDoS tool for fluding my own network to see if my machines would choke! (BTW it was fun seeing win 9x croke but linux just slow down a little) This tool was designed for DDoS but I have a completely legit use for it.
The other part "...network administrators will likely end up exempt." This really pisses me off!!! I'm a C++ developer not a net admin. But I can do a better job of net. admin. thay anybody in my co's IT dept. Would I end up exempt? Who knows, I'll probably get prosecuted for haveing a copy of nmap!
This is just bogus crap! What lawmakers do not understand they prosecute. If it looks like it breaks a law and they don't understand it, prosecute it!
the firewall/NAT functionality of the kernel and iptables utility will allow you to track the number of packets and nuber of bytes traveling across each port that you are monitoring.
You can also use the logging module to log particular firewall/NAT ruels to gain more detailed info.
JohnKatz
Pros: Will bring a lot of attention even though it may be negative.
Cons: Will some how associate the Cruiser with somthing post-Columbine
Biggest Concern: Uses a lot of uber-tecnical terms and gets a few wrong. Resulting in a monkey-wrench used for a steering wheel.
Sounds like your people skills are on par with your technical skills. That's a rarity in this field.
You hit the nail on the head! People skills with technical skills are a rarity, but I wonder... In the extremely competitive market that is IT, competition is the center of hiring! The problem that professionals have is that they try to compete with each other. There are too many jobs for that. It is difficult to be involved in an extremely competitive arena, where you are the object of competition, with out competiting your self.
Also the fact that there are many potential employers out there doing their best in hiring us, it is dificult not to get a big head and lose the humility and meekness that I was talking about.
I dropped out of college, I had a total of @28 credit hours, for a high paying job. I started at $35/hour plus a hefty per-diem package. I had an upward battle of gaining acceptance of my peers. I was 19 with 3 years professional experience in C/C++.
I was woking with people who were twice my age and with 4 to 5 times the work experience. They looked down on the young "wipper snapper."
I had a keen ability to sniff out bugs that just seemed impossible by everybody else. Finding a couple of them that everybody had given up on was the turning factor in gaining acceptance. But technical ability was only part of the acceptance. I had to learn quickly that I had to treat these people with much respect even though they didn't respect me. With the finding of bugs I didn't announce, or paraide the fact. I just humbly asked for the next bug/project to work on.
I emphasise the word "humbly" because the showed the older programmers that I was there to help the project in the best way that I could that was the best for the project and the people on the projects.
After about a year my software archectecture(SP?) skills were recognised and I was involved in almost all decisions on the development of some major software. In fact I was given a project of my own, I was 20, dealing with 50 year olds. They were all bent out of shape because I had won the title of lead. The project was for Windows CE utilizing a GPS reciever for tracking and docking of large freight ships. The projecst was deamed still born when it was given to me. I was given an impossible situation. I pulled it off by scrapping the old software and starting fresh. Everyone laughed, but they stopped when I had working software in 3 weeks that did more than the software that had been worked on for 6 months.
With that project along with a couple of other details gave my managers enough confidence in me, as a contractor, to send me to Oragne County CA at the age of 21. My responsiblilty was to train a group of software engineers on the fraimwork and ideals behind the software that I was woking on. I was a contractor with absoutly no obligation whatsoever to staying with this company. They paid Every expense.
I say all that to say... Technical merit will only get you so far. To really succeed you need to show initiative with out appearing cocky. You need a good atitude of looking out for what is best for the project and the other people on the project. Humility and Meekness is also very important. The best definition of meekness I've ever herad is, Power restrained. Think of a gentel giant. He could crush everything in his path but instead restrains his power, meekness! Humility is not, "Oh Woe is me." Humility is understanding your abilities and the abilities around you. With your abilities try not to inflate your position at your job. Let you co-workers do this. Humility is also tring to build an air of synenergy. Trying to build everyone up around you to better the project. It is to some extent every one for everyone else. The word humility is the combination of two words Human and Ability. Humility is the ability to effictively interact with other Humans to better their environment and yours.
P.S.
I failed speelling all through my school career!
What you are describing is exactally the experience I have. From what I understand it is a form/symptom of ADD.
A certian part of you brain is stimulation deprived... This causes anxiety, a loss in attention span, and a few other nasty things. Anyway ritilen is an excellent stimulant to provide the necessary stimulation to that part of your brain that requires it, but the problem with ritilen is that it is also a powerfull drug with many side effects. Caffine also has the ability to stimiluate that part of the brain. By injesting Caffine/ritilen you are providing the stimulation necessary to the stimulation deprived part of the brain and a by product is the relief of the anxiety which allows you to relax and fall in the medative state which is required for sleep.
But of course IANAD (I am not a doctor ) so I may be way off base. It certianly is a good explanation of why giving a stimulate, ritilen, to ADHD people calms them down. Where if you gave ritilen to a non ADD/ADHD person it has the effect of a high, poor mans coke.
The Galeon project will probably be one of the first to greatly benifit from the relicensing! Slashdot had a discussion about Galeon back in July.
Currently they cannot distribute the gtkembmoz.h file, due to licensing restrictions, which is needed for compiling the source code.
Through Galeon, this will also directally effect the GNOME project. Giving it a simple browser utilizing the Gecko rendering engine. We will, with evolution/nautilus(SP?) have seperate apps for browsing, e-mail, and file/system management! Along with the upcomming GPL of Star Office, GNOME is on the move to providing a complete productivity environment without the bloat!
If NT itself allows applications, after they have crashed, to leave leaked memory or leve the system in a strange state or leave the system in a slowed state then it is not a stable OS. It may not fall/crash but it is not stable. Kinda like a ship in a storm, your footing is not stable but, hopefully, the ship won't sink. You may be flung overboard but, hopefully, the ship won't sink!
I think the FBI is great and does a great job, but I'm not going to give them the keys to my house because they tell me they won't search it without a really good reason.
OK... From the story....
But privacy advocates and some members of Congress fear the system may cast too wide a net, encompassing private information about legal activities and leading to potential abuses.(emphasis added)
Some members of congress feel that there is potential for abuses. The only way for potential abuse is for monitoring information of non criminals/suspects which means private americans and corporations, From what I understand the FBI was instuted to protect, in part, the protection of Americans privacy. Some of our own congressmen admit, by implication, that the FBI is corrupt. I don't know about everybody else but if I had a choice I would not want the FBI involved in anyhthing remotely close to me due to the possibility of abuses. In fact if I had a choice I would have the power of the FBI GREATLY reduced so that Americans privacy would have more protection.
I've just reciently found these hidden discussions or whatever you want to call them. I got moded up on a couple of posts and my karma didn't go up. Anybody have any insight? I don't mind if my karma doesn't go up but I'm just curious.
Anyway it might be a good idea to have moderations in these boards not affect karma. That would keep the karma whores out and hopefully keep many of the trolls out too.
I believe that programming, as it transends from a science to a field of engineering, will become more of a COP (Component Oriented Programming). In the future, 5 to 15 years, I believe that programming will become more of putting/gluing components together rather than developing applications from scratch or developing apps from scratch and including a few light components.
But for this paradime to be accepted a good, reliable, easy to use, and fast component aractecture must be created. Microsoft has COM, *NIX has CORBA but the overhead for understanding and implementing these technologies is just too big. VB with COM tries to make an effort of making COP a viable solution but as everybody knows Microsoft cannot innovate. The system is cludgy and still very difficult to understand. What I feel a good COP environment would be is 90% of development time drag and drop and 10% of development time scripting, to glue everything together, i.e. passing data back and forth and implementing some dynamic interfaces.
I'm hoping that bonobo with the GNOME project will provide the ease of use portion of this but I have not had the time to look into it. Until then we will be stuck with the current form of programming.
What I find interesting is with all the gas planets out there they probably have many moons like our solar system's gas planets. Now for the gas planets that are orbiting the stars in the "green zone" there may be more possibilites for habitable moons than their may be for habitable planets. Just a thought...
They have gecko. All they had to do was put in a basic Java/JScript component and a few widgets to operate the browser and 99% of people would be happy.
The Mozilla team is building a huge project. They want to get it done and out the door. If you are complaining so much about a light browser then build one your self. You said your self that it is componentized Isn't that is the idea of open source... "If you don't like what is out there fork it!"
The Mozilla team is under the direction of AOL, formally Netscape. They want a huge browser with mail, skins, and widgetX with the kitchen sink. Mozilla is doing an awsome job with that requirement. What is even better as you pointed out is that they have made zillions of componets. All someone needs to do now is glue the components they want together and release a light browser. The Mozilla team has given us an awsome resource to allow for the light browser and give AOL what they want. For that I give the Mozilla team tons of credit!
BTW. I've been learning as much as I can about Mozilla reciently and the gtk+ widget for embedding Gecko so I can hopefully, with my 7 years of C experience, contribute to Galeon. So I know a little about what I am talking about.
Every software development project that I have been on has been late and over budget, that also goes for 90% of all software development projects in general. Software development is still a science, nothing like engenering. Until software development transends the state of being a science it will never be, consistantly, on time or on budget. Please stop trying to attribute engineering standards to a science!
BTW. Quite a few engineering projects also run late and over budget. Engineering still has not been perfected.
BTW2. I just installed todays nightly build on a windows machine a P166 32MB RAM. It is a little slow but kicks IE's butt for rendering speed. Now I say that is a quite a feet for software that has not been optimised and still has debugging routiness in the code, I'm not referring to debug info in the binaries I'm referring to code put in by the developers to help in the debugging process, which takes up CPU cycles and RAM.
What Mozilla is doing: Optimize for number of features. Accelerate the feature creep, fix the bugs, don't ship.
Hmm.... I guess what you are saying is that Mozilla does not have a goal. You are implying that the hackers think of something and say "gee man that is soooo cool lets put it into mozilla." If you had taken half a second and checked things out Mozilla has a decient plan and there is no feature creep!
The reason Mozilla is taking so long is that they are developing it right! That is the nice thing about open source development. You don't have a manager breathing down your neck!!! They can take the time to develope a tool for doing somthing rather than hard coding it. This give you 2 things... A good implimentation of whatever you are doing and a good tool to do that same thing in a different place or somthing similar. Not to mention offshoot projects like galeon. You want examples here they are...
Now if you want to take a look at the overall plan here is a layout of the Milestones As you can see they are at the end of what you call the feature creep, when in actuallity they are at the end of the development cycle and headed into bug/hunting performance tuning.
If Mozilla had done what the other commerical browser companies had done we would have ended up with a semi good browser that would have been hell to improve/upgrade. But Mozilla took the long hard path and when the upgrads come out relatively quick and painless everyone who cried the death/stupidity of Mozilla will be crying its brilliance.
BTW. I am using todays daily build with 5 browser windows open. For the past week that I have been using the daily builds they haven't crashed once. And they do a better job of general browsing than Netscape does!
Yea you just might be right. Someone with a huge internet node could deny access to certian sites but...
It would take an ungodly amount of processing power to check each packet to see where it is going and reject/drop it. Then you can come back and say well processing power is always increasing but I come back and say so is bandwith and the use of bandwith.
It just ain't possible to block those certian sites without bringing everything down to a crawl, i.e. killing your routers. It would be like DDoSing your self.
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutly right, so for the sake of karma, I'll expand a little on what you said...
A clearly defined and documented interface provides the integral part of any software project. With out them all the diagrams and quality control will not help when it comes to maintenance and new development.
One thing that comes from clearly defined interfaces is extremely modular code. Modular code encourages de-coupling of components, making it easier to develop new features and fix old ones.
Another thing that interfaces provide, if they are properly used, is a true abstraction from the implementation. So when a new programmer comes onto the scene he gets a good feel for what the module does before he gets into the implementation. If the code is really bad then it can be replaced without breaking other software, by rigidly adhering to the definition of the interface.
Yes this is not a perfect thing but it is a wonderful start. I'm a C++ programmer with 7 years of experience. When I develop a new object or related objects I create a base class that just defines the interface. I use pure virtual functions so there is no implementation. I define what each of the methods do. Through inheritance I then implement the interface. I may write crap code for proof of concept or just a time constraint but when I go back and re-implement the clearly defined interface it does not change the behavior of code that is dependent on that interface.
Another method I use is factories. I have objects that construct related objects and return a handle to just the interface. This way other code
that I write is never directly accessing the implementation of the object.
I do understand that other languages do not support some of the features that C++ does but with a little thought and design the same ideas can be used to implement strongly defined interfaces and good decoupling of modules can be achieved.
This is a more hands on approach to software but it is something that I feel is missed by most software development. A strongly defined interface will always allow for easier development, maintenance, and addition of new features.
heh, yea I saw that, I typed it in a different window because this little box just sucks big time, I double-pasted my own comment. I didn't see it and I "over reacted" about the double-paste. But the comment is my own, and if you would like to have a technical discussion about it I hang out in irc.openprojects.net. I hang out in #c, #c++ and #linux, my handle is the same as slashdot "infodragon". I try to help out when time permits. So if you ever would like to chat then please join. I'd be glad to have a discussion about my technical merrits. See you there.
First of all what do you mean by "double-paste"? This is an origional comment by my self, but I guess from your point of view anybody who says somthing that is comprehensive and informative got it from some commentary and is trying to "karma whore." If you would have taken the time you would have seen that this is the first comment that I have posted in a long time, quite the oppsite from a karma whore. I only post to threads that I have some intrest in and somthing to say, as an expert in the programming field I have both, on this thread.
Sorry if my "stolen commentary" offends you but it is origional and until you open your mind a little and decide to act instead of reacting you'll never make it 2 steps forward in the real world.
Actually it was a PCMCIA card. I saw the movie for the 3rd time last week and just noticed it.
jamienk,
Could you please email me. I'm curious who the meticulous company is. It seems implied they may be a medial company. If they are I'm really curious who they are.
Thanks
Yea I know what you mean. I cannot stand legislatoin like this!
Here are a couple of loop holes here...
What about MS DOS debug program. This falls under the guise of hacking, but is distributed with almost every OS MS has produced!
Whate about nmap? The article discusses this. The councel says there will be exemptions... From the article, " The Council of Europe has promised to provide a list of exceptions to the treaty, and professional network administrators will likely end up exempt"
First of all what software will be exempt? I've used a DDoS tool for fluding my own network to see if my machines would choke! (BTW it was fun seeing win 9x croke but linux just slow down a little) This tool was designed for DDoS but I have a completely legit use for it.
The other part "...network administrators will likely end up exempt." This really pisses me off!!! I'm a C++ developer not a net admin. But I can do a better job of net. admin. thay anybody in my co's IT dept. Would I end up exempt? Who knows, I'll probably get prosecuted for haveing a copy of nmap!
This is just bogus crap! What lawmakers do not understand they prosecute. If it looks like it breaks a law and they don't understand it, prosecute it!
"Suuuper Geeeenius."
It's Supra Geeeenius!
Here is a link to the story that doesn't need a login.
the firewall/NAT functionality of the kernel and iptables utility will allow you to track the number of packets and nuber of bytes traveling across each port that you are monitoring.
You can also use the logging module to log particular firewall/NAT ruels to gain more detailed info.
For more info check out the netfilter home page.
Linux 2.2 does this, but not as nicely and without the logging functionality.
INTL is Inter-Tel Inc. Found it on yahoo.
INTC is Intel.
JohnKatz
Pros: Will bring a lot of attention even though it may be negative.
Cons: Will some how associate the Cruiser with somthing post-Columbine
Biggest Concern: Uses a lot of uber-tecnical terms and gets a few wrong. Resulting in a monkey-wrench used for a steering wheel.
Sounds like your people skills are on par with your technical skills. That's a rarity in this field.
You hit the nail on the head! People skills with technical skills are a rarity, but I wonder... In the extremely competitive market that is IT, competition is the center of hiring! The problem that professionals have is that they try to compete with each other. There are too many jobs for that. It is difficult to be involved in an extremely competitive arena, where you are the object of competition, with out competiting your self.
Also the fact that there are many potential employers out there doing their best in hiring us, it is dificult not to get a big head and lose the humility and meekness that I was talking about.
This is very similar to my experiece!
I dropped out of college, I had a total of @28 credit hours, for a high paying job. I started at $35/hour plus a hefty per-diem package. I had an upward battle of gaining acceptance of my peers. I was 19 with 3 years professional experience in C/C++.
I was woking with people who were twice my age and with 4 to 5 times the work experience. They looked down on the young "wipper snapper."
I had a keen ability to sniff out bugs that just seemed impossible by everybody else. Finding a couple of them that everybody had given up on was the turning factor in gaining acceptance. But technical ability was only part of the acceptance. I had to learn quickly that I had to treat these people with much respect even though they didn't respect me. With the finding of bugs I didn't announce, or paraide the fact. I just humbly asked for the next bug/project to work on.
I emphasise the word "humbly" because the showed the older programmers that I was there to help the project in the best way that I could that was the best for the project and the people on the projects.
After about a year my software archectecture(SP?) skills were recognised and I was involved in almost all decisions on the development of some major software. In fact I was given a project of my own, I was 20, dealing with 50 year olds. They were all bent out of shape because I had won the title of lead. The project was for Windows CE utilizing a GPS reciever for tracking and docking of large freight ships. The projecst was deamed still born when it was given to me. I was given an impossible situation. I pulled it off by scrapping the old software and starting fresh. Everyone laughed, but they stopped when I had working software in 3 weeks that did more than the software that had been worked on for 6 months.
With that project along with a couple of other details gave my managers enough confidence in me, as a contractor, to send me to Oragne County CA at the age of 21. My responsiblilty was to train a group of software engineers on the fraimwork and ideals behind the software that I was woking on. I was a contractor with absoutly no obligation whatsoever to staying with this company. They paid Every expense.
I say all that to say... Technical merit will only get you so far. To really succeed you need to show initiative with out appearing cocky. You need a good atitude of looking out for what is best for the project and the other people on the project. Humility and Meekness is also very important. The best definition of meekness I've ever herad is, Power restrained. Think of a gentel giant. He could crush everything in his path but instead restrains his power, meekness! Humility is not, "Oh Woe is me." Humility is understanding your abilities and the abilities around you. With your abilities try not to inflate your position at your job. Let you co-workers do this. Humility is also tring to build an air of synenergy. Trying to build everyone up around you to better the project. It is to some extent every one for everyone else. The word humility is the combination of two words Human and Ability. Humility is the ability to effictively interact with other Humans to better their environment and yours.
P.S.
I failed speelling all through my school career!
What you are describing is exactally the experience I have. From what I understand it is a form/symptom of ADD.
A certian part of you brain is stimulation deprived... This causes anxiety, a loss in attention span, and a few other nasty things. Anyway ritilen is an excellent stimulant to provide the necessary stimulation to that part of your brain that requires it, but the problem with ritilen is that it is also a powerfull drug with many side effects. Caffine also has the ability to stimiluate that part of the brain. By injesting Caffine/ritilen you are providing the stimulation necessary to the stimulation deprived part of the brain and a by product is the relief of the anxiety which allows you to relax and fall in the medative state which is required for sleep.
But of course IANAD (I am not a doctor ) so I may be way off base. It certianly is a good explanation of why giving a stimulate, ritilen, to ADHD people calms them down. Where if you gave ritilen to a non ADD/ADHD person it has the effect of a high, poor mans coke.
Anyway enough babling... Back to work!
The Galeon project will probably be one of the first to greatly benifit from the relicensing! Slashdot had a discussion about Galeon back in July.
Currently they cannot distribute the gtkembmoz.h file, due to licensing restrictions, which is needed for compiling the source code.
Through Galeon, this will also directally effect the GNOME project. Giving it a simple browser utilizing the Gecko rendering engine. We will, with evolution/nautilus(SP?) have seperate apps for browsing, e-mail, and file/system management! Along with the upcomming GPL of Star Office, GNOME is on the move to providing a complete productivity environment without the bloat!
And effectively you have reproduced windows stability in linux.
P.S.
Running a pre-production kernel is not a good idea if you don't want crashes. I guess Windows has never been out of the pre-production phase.
Ok Mr. Troll I'll bite...
NT itself is stable
If NT itself allows applications, after they have crashed, to leave leaked memory or leve the system in a strange state or leave the system in a slowed state then it is not a stable OS. It may not fall/crash but it is not stable. Kinda like a ship in a storm, your footing is not stable but, hopefully, the ship won't sink. You may be flung overboard but, hopefully, the ship won't sink!
I think the FBI is great and does a great job, but I'm not going to give them the keys to my house because they tell me they won't search it without a really good reason.
OK... From the story....
But privacy advocates and some members of Congress fear the system may cast too wide a net, encompassing private information about legal activities and leading to potential abuses.(emphasis added)
Some members of congress feel that there is potential for abuses. The only way for potential abuse is for monitoring information of non criminals/suspects which means private americans and corporations, From what I understand the FBI was instuted to protect, in part, the protection of Americans privacy. Some of our own congressmen admit, by implication, that the FBI is corrupt. I don't know about everybody else but if I had a choice I would not want the FBI involved in anyhthing remotely close to me due to the possibility of abuses. In fact if I had a choice I would have the power of the FBI GREATLY reduced so that Americans privacy would have more protection.
I know this is off topic but...
I've just reciently found these hidden discussions or whatever you want to call them. I got moded up on a couple of posts and my karma didn't go up. Anybody have any insight? I don't mind if my karma doesn't go up but I'm just curious.
Anyway it might be a good idea to have moderations in these boards not affect karma. That would keep the karma whores out and hopefully keep many of the trolls out too.
I believe that programming, as it transends from a science to a field of engineering, will become more of a COP (Component Oriented Programming). In the future, 5 to 15 years, I believe that programming will become more of putting/gluing components together rather than developing applications from scratch or developing apps from scratch and including a few light components.
But for this paradime to be accepted a good, reliable, easy to use, and fast component aractecture must be created. Microsoft has COM, *NIX has CORBA but the overhead for understanding and implementing these technologies is just too big. VB with COM tries to make an effort of making COP a viable solution but as everybody knows Microsoft cannot innovate. The system is cludgy and still very difficult to understand. What I feel a good COP environment would be is 90% of development time drag and drop and 10% of development time scripting, to glue everything together, i.e. passing data back and forth and implementing some dynamic interfaces.
I'm hoping that bonobo with the GNOME project will provide the ease of use portion of this but I have not had the time to look into it. Until then we will be stuck with the current form of programming.
What I find interesting is with all the gas planets out there they probably have many moons like our solar system's gas planets. Now for the gas planets that are orbiting the stars in the "green zone" there may be more possibilites for habitable moons than their may be for habitable planets. Just a thought...
They have gecko. All they had to do was put in a basic Java/JScript component and a few widgets to operate the browser and 99% of people would be happy.
The Mozilla team is building a huge project. They want to get it done and out the door. If you are complaining so much about a light browser then build one your self. You said your self that it is componentized Isn't that is the idea of open source... "If you don't like what is out there fork it!"
The Mozilla team is under the direction of AOL, formally Netscape. They want a huge browser with mail, skins, and widgetX with the kitchen sink. Mozilla is doing an awsome job with that requirement. What is even better as you pointed out is that they have made zillions of componets. All someone needs to do now is glue the components they want together and release a light browser. The Mozilla team has given us an awsome resource to allow for the light browser and give AOL what they want. For that I give the Mozilla team tons of credit!
BTW. I've been learning as much as I can about Mozilla reciently and the gtk+ widget for embedding Gecko so I can hopefully, with my 7 years of C experience, contribute to Galeon. So I know a little about what I am talking about.
Where is M17
Late.
Every software development project that I have been on has been late and over budget, that also goes for 90% of all software development projects in general. Software development is still a science, nothing like engenering. Until software development transends the state of being a science it will never be, consistantly, on time or on budget. Please stop trying to attribute engineering standards to a science!
BTW. Quite a few engineering projects also run late and over budget. Engineering still has not been perfected.
BTW2. I just installed todays nightly build on a windows machine a P166 32MB RAM. It is a little slow but kicks IE's butt for rendering speed. Now I say that is a quite a feet for software that has not been optimised and still has debugging routiness in the code, I'm not referring to debug info in the binaries I'm referring to code put in by the developers to help in the debugging process, which takes up CPU cycles and RAM.
Hmm.... I guess what you are saying is that Mozilla does not have a goal. You are implying that the hackers think of something and say "gee man that is soooo cool lets put it into mozilla." If you had taken half a second and checked things out Mozilla has a decient plan and there is no feature creep!
The reason Mozilla is taking so long is that they are developing it right! That is the nice thing about open source development. You don't have a manager breathing down your neck!!! They can take the time to develope a tool for doing somthing rather than hard coding it. This give you 2 things... A good implimentation of whatever you are doing and a good tool to do that same thing in a different place or somthing similar. Not to mention offshoot projects like galeon. You want examples here they are...
Now if you want to take a look at the overall plan here is a layout of the Milestones As you can see they are at the end of what you call the feature creep, when in actuallity they are at the end of the development cycle and headed into bug/hunting performance tuning.
If Mozilla had done what the other commerical browser companies had done we would have ended up with a semi good browser that would have been hell to improve/upgrade. But Mozilla took the long hard path and when the upgrads come out relatively quick and painless everyone who cried the death/stupidity of Mozilla will be crying its brilliance.
BTW. I am using todays daily build with 5 browser windows open. For the past week that I have been using the daily builds they haven't crashed once. And they do a better job of general browsing than Netscape does!
Yea you just might be right. Someone with a huge internet node could deny access to certian sites but...
It would take an ungodly amount of processing power to check each packet to see where it is going and reject/drop it. Then you can come back and say well processing power is always increasing but I come back and say so is bandwith and the use of bandwith.
It just ain't possible to block those certian sites without bringing everything down to a crawl, i.e. killing your routers. It would be like DDoSing your self.