I haven't worked with Websphere and Rational products since 2005. Back then the Rational Unified Process with use cases, etc. was suppose to be the next big thing. Rational had some tools called the Rational Unified Process which allowed you to create sequence diagrams, etc.
When you click on the Jazz products link\ it takes you to the projects page where all of them start with "Rational" by name. Is IBM going to Open Source ClearCase now? Most attempts at trying to interchange ClearCase with CVS or Subversion have failed. I'm suspicious that since the projects all start with "Rational" by name that there then might be significant "features" unavailable unless one buys ClearCase?
Sounds like IBM is trying to FUD their own open source product, Eclipse, with the focus on uncertainty and doubt.
As a contractor/consultant I work in a multitude of environments. When management asks me about IDEs here's what I have to say.
1.) The ideal IDE user works on a stand-alone program, on the same platform as deployment. Productivity problems multiply manifold with IDEs when, for example, Java development is on Windows but production deployment is on Linux. 2.) The ideal IDE user works on homogeneous code with no heterogeneous requirements for legacy run-time integration. I've seen companies spend lots of productivity resources pulling third-party packages of a different language into the IDE. Usually the only ones capable of pulling this off are the most senior of engineers. Their productivity gets wasted doing build integration work on behalf of the IDE. 3.) The ideal IDE user works on a project slice only. Too many companies require, in effect, the entire source tree to be compiled because dependencies spun out of control and everything depends on everything else. Again, senior engineers are the only ones capable of solving the IDE failures and their productivity gets wasted. 4.) The ideal IDE user works on small code bases. 5.) The ideal IDE user is not required to run build scripts to build a project.
As a contractor, by the nature of the work, I cannot depend on any particular IDE to be installed at any site. Also it is incumbent on me to use VI and Emacs in production. Good luck finding any production box with Visual Studio installed.
I rarely work on stand-alone programs, I work on distributed software. As a systems program my code runs on multiple machines. While it is possible to attach to foreign processes on 10-20 machines, IDEs are very poor in doing so. Emacs, on the other hand, can fork as my shells as quickly as you like.
As a contractor I work on legacy code nobody else wants to touch as full-time help. I have to integrate legacy and new code.
As a contractor I have written Perl scripts that cobble together the legacy code and new code to create the entire production environment. This is not uncommon. An IDE is not a an ideal environment for complicated build script required to get the run-time working. They are very hostile to the work spaces that need to be checked in and swapped with other developers.
I've seen senior developers waste days on why code compiles and runs in production, but doesn't run in the IDE environment. I've seen tons of productivity wasted by each developer trying to integrate legacy code with each build.
As a contractor I have to say that as a lowest common denominator, Emacs and VI are always productive since they are found everywhere. In an Ideal setting, perhaps someone using an IDE is more productive than myself, but I'm a senior engineer and I doubt if I'm the target for any productivity debate about an IDE. IDEs, as has been noted here, best serve the less than senior developer who is working on code that is ideally completely written and maintained by them. Most Fortune 500 companies do use IDEs, but arguing that an IDE is always more productive is flat out false. In fact, I think if you wanted to pin the notion of a "religion" on the camps, the IDE camp is for more zealous than the Emacs and VI camp: I can use an IDE easy enough and that zealotry has killed productivity as it is not based on reason, but emotionally attachment to the bells and whistles that are not required. When it comes to refactoring, etc. I have personal Perl scripts that make any IDEs capabilities look like child's play. Perl is the ultimate refactoring and reporting tool in the right hands.
Finally, as you may have noticed, much of the productivity that gets lost by the use of an IDE is that of senior developers fixing the nasty integration issues. The trade off of lost senior development productivity due to IDE maintenance vs. the gain of productivity of the more numbered typical developer by use of said IDE is a management call. I have to say though, as a senior developer, I do not relish being brought in to fix IDE bugs on behalf of those who claim superior productivity because the lost productivity is not their time.
Lisp always reminds me of a Gary Larson cartoon. There is a six-year-old sitting in a classroom with one of Larson's typical frumpy teachers with big glasses at the blackboard. The caption reads, "Teacher, may I be excused? My brain is full."
Having gone the Engineering route of getting my CS degree, I have to say that nothing quite fills the brain like Lisp. Not Quantam Mechanics, not Special Relativity, Not Word Problems, Not Linear Transformations, and Not Shakespeare.
At Berkeley they use Lisp to weed out the less than committed, as the very first programming class a Freshman takes one takes is in Lisp. It was quite effective at getting Freshman to drop like flies.
Lisp hurts the brain. There is something not quite right about thinking in lambda functions. Or at least normal in the typical notion. Far be it from me to promote being normal, I'm a big fat weirdo, but the Lisp crowd, it seems to me, is a religious cult and has always used the language as an Elitist barrier. A computer science definition of machismoism: you must claim Lisp is the end all, be all. Paul Graham certainly fits into that elitist crowd. If normal is meant to mean not wanting to aspire to be part of some elitist crowd simply because one's brain is perceived superior by some arbitrary standard, count me normal. Or count my brain as full.
Welcome aboard. It is difficult for me to imagine my life without having known D&D and the subsequent games.
I look forward to more gaming and will think of Dave and Gary from time-to-time.
Maybe name a character, Garar. Or Arn Ax.
Welcome.
I read all the comments and mostly they were centered around the license and Visual Studio, the IDE.
I'd just like to add:
What is an ASP? What is an IDE?
Emacs and Java,Ruby,SQL,Perl,PHP,C++,bash,csh,Python,HTML,Javascript,/etc/text,XML,"language of tomorrow" forever!
Real programmers don't use an IDE. We have brains. Which probably explains why I've never heard of ASP. Or Microsoft.
</two-cents>
The biggest problem with any sort of confined fusion (Hohlraum, reverse-pinch, tokamak, etc.) is that there are no known materials that can withstand the neutron bombardment for very long. Let's say it all works... how do you get the heat from the plasma to electricity? Somewhere some material is needed that can withstand the neutrons but conduct/transmit the heat. NIF is a laser physicist's wet dream of a science fair project and an engineering marvel, but as a practical means of making useful power, precious little R&D has been invested in even thinking past the "Okay, we got ourselves a net positive energy output. What now?" Yes, cool science and an understanding of nature will no doubt come from this effort and I can't naysay it on it's own terms (and in the meanwhile it's been funding a goodly portion of the optics industry). But the "2050 plan" of both ITER and NIF still have "a miracle occurs here" in them as to materials and turning the heat into electricity. And I'm sure it involves making steam and spinning turbines like we've done since the time of Hero (ca AD 1100?).
The pipeline from university R&D to products that are good for society is delicate and gets broken easily. Steve Chu might have a chance to help smooth things out - it's a very tough job to decide where to spread your money and NIF has been going for a long time. We need programs like this. But the proportions are off, since nearly nothing is spent on conventional fission, and the US isn't aggressive in solar like Spain and Germany (okay, Kaaleefohrnia being an exception, but that's an Austrian anyway).
If you look at most great literature the writing was not done to make piles of money.
In fact, I think it is interesting to note that while music and video are subject to much pirating, books have remained relatively pirate proof.
How many artists historically are not "discovered" until long after they are dead? History is full with artists who died paupers only to be discovered later.
I'd actually make the counter argument. I believe copyright is tyranny. It encourages owners of the copyrighted material to wring every last cent out of existing owned property and ignore new and emerging artist. Bands such as the Beatles would never happen today because the record companies only want to pay a solo artist, such as Britney Spears. Lastly and sadly, proof that copyright is tyranny is evident in the top grossing touring bands each year over the last 30 years. Rarely is it a new band, most generally top grossing touring bands are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. That's because the record companies make piles of money promoting artists who have deep catalogs replete with greatest hits albums. Copyright law as it exists today in the US is tyranny of the worst kind, handicapping the youth. I have a brother who records. He can't even get a local radio station to talk with him because they are locked into only playing copyrighted material pre-approved by the big media conglomerates.
We are not free because of copyright laws today, we are imprisoned.
On a more serious note, automatic weapons are illegal to buy in many states. Yet you can buy the various pieces and put them together and still make your own.
In a similar manner, what if cell phone manufacturers sold the hardware sans software? Couldn't some hack in China sell the software without the click? I'm thinking of DVDFab here which is illegal to sell in the U.S.
Is this really a problem? I don't get it. As the cameras in cell phones get more sophisticated, one will be able to stand far enough away to where the sound won't be heard anyway. Also, unless a lot of money is spent making the camera lens and the phone speaker one and the same then one will always be able to cover the speaker by hand; and it seems some cell phone manufacturer could make that operation trivial to sell more phones.
From my perspective over the years I've used the MVC as a design pattern definition and never experienced the communication problems listed by the author.
With respect to "Observer" I would respectfully disagree.
Most notabley, imagine if you used an application indirectly by taking screenshots. Of course the "model" in this case would not be able to "update" the screenshot, but it would be able to update the application that was screenshot.
Web applications are really screenshots. They are not interactive in the sense of a desktop GUI.
When I as a grad student at Berkeley the question was asked can MVC be applied to such asynchronous applications as email and HTML. The answer was "Yes" if the *user* understood that they were dealing with disconnected or asynchronous views.
Take something like Subversion where a GUI connected to Subversion server can be MVC with respect to the Observer as required. Then I disconnect my laptop from the network. Is the design still MVC? The server models can no longer update the view until the laptop plugs back in?
To wit, the defintion of MVC has evolved to include applications where at times the view is disconnected and in the case of the web, all the time disconnected until the view checks in. That still doesn't mean the underlying design has changed.
Again, I've never experienced the confusion of the original post. Not ever. Which says to me that there must be a rather large community that can use the evolved definition of MVC to incorporate asynchronous and synchronous applications.
I don't really see why discussing MVC is as all that and a bag of chips as the author contends. I commonly use the concept of MVC with respect to Django and when I do I always reference this book:
Using the definitions as described in this book Django easily fits in the MVC design pattern.
People I work with "get it" and I've not encountered and confusion alluded too by the author when using the term as defined by the aforementioned book.
Language is always evolving and that is how non-technical words end up with multiple variations in the common language dictionary. I see no reason why technological terms should be excluded from this "language pattern". There is no notion that technogical terms have to stick to some "original definition". The book above provides a working definition that is common and clear.
How typical it is to blame the guy who no longer works at the company.
What am I referring too?
No other definitive source than the Colbert Report, of course!
See, Steven was interviewing this lady last week on the financial melt-down. Specifically he asked her why now? She responded that every year Wall Street came up with bigger and more sophisticated data models to obscure the problems of the previous derivative models. So Steven followed up with the question of "why now, why not just keep inventing bigger and badder data models? What went bust?"
The answer? The bankers, in their infinite wisdom, fired the tech workers.
To which Steven replied, "can't we just hire them back?"
To which she replied, "Nope, they've since moved on to find other work."
To wit, management is covering their a*ses by blaming no-longer-employeed workers. Just great.
It is weak and pathetic. But then what do you expect from management. Hire tech workers to build something. Fire/lay off said tech workers. If the tech works, great take credit! If tech fails, blame the techies.
It worked in California when Lockheed failed to deliver on the new DMV system, completely.
Always blame the techie for implementing what business asked for when the tech fails.
I'd just like to give a shout out to Havlen for creating Endless Nights IV
If you ever just wanted to run 30th level characters till your hearts content, this is the place.
Throw fireballs until your fingertips burn off.
Use those artifacts until you grow weary of them.
Give your arcane archer a challenge.
I definitely spent 10 times more hours playing this module than all the official NWN campaigns combined.
Thanks! Havlen!
I just wanted to put in my 2 cents that it's cheaper and easier to scale using content deliver networks as a web proxy if you can get a cache hit rate that justifies it.
The efficient model would look like:
browser <- CDN <- DNS <- cloud
Storage and bandwidth of a CDN web proxy will be about 1/2 that of a cloud service.
Sites like plentyoffish.com get away with just 4 servers by using a CDN. With only four machines then the choice of "cloud" vs. "real machine" becomes a "don't care".
AT&T and Comcast have both indicated that they will soon start metering bandwidth as well.
Who's going to win? Cisco or Time Warner? Bandwidth won't be doubling if the ISP providers start limiting users to 40GB/month and charging $1/GB overage. All the companies like Youtube and Netflix providing streaming video will see traffic drop to Nil if Mom & Dad have to pay $1GB in overage.
I actually started playing D&D back in 1974 when all you got was this white box. We had a couple of manuals that were nothing more than 8 1/2 by 11 sheets folded in 2 and stapled down the fold. In fact I still have the original dice from that box somewhere lying around. They are so worn though I think they are all Infinite sided die at this point.
D&D...Star Wars...it was great growing up as a geek and sci fi freak in the 1970s. Dr. Demento on the radio every Sunday! Science Fiction was hot, Roger Zelazny was in his prime and I was always waiting for the next Amber series book to come out. First thing we did with D&D was put all the Amber series characters in our scenario's. I remember Corwin was our first NPC to travel with our party. Eric was the nasty king. Benedict was the neutral but most powerful character. Great stuff.
Thanks for memories and for contributing to a great era of new imaginations for a teenage boy.
Multics was the precursor to Unix. Multics was a massively parallel operating system. It was designed to be an OS for a public utility. The thinking back then was all Americans would have computer terminals like a vt100 and plug into a municipal computer over a network.
Multics was designed for long lived processes. Short lived processes are something we take for granted today but wasn't assumed back then. Today we assume that the sequence is we open a program, perform a task, close the program. Microsoft Outlook, for example, relies on Outlook being closed for its queue when to purge email that's been deleted. Programs are not designed to be up years-on-end. In fact, Microsoft reboots their OS every month with Windows Update. I've often speculated that the reboot is often requested not because the patch requires it but because Microsoft knows that its OS needs rebooted, often.
Why? Why wouldn't one just leave every application you've ever opened, opened?
The reason is that programmers cannot reliably write long running process code. Programs crashed all the time in Multics. Something Multics wasn't very good at handling back in the 1960s. There was some research done and it was observed that programmers could write code for short lived processes fairly well but not long lived.
So, one lessoned learn from from the failure Multics is that programmers do not write reliable, long running code.
Parallel processing is a processing better suited to long running processes. Since humans are not good at writing long running processes it makes sense then that parallel processing is rare. The innovation to deal with this sticky dilemma was the client-server model. Only the server needs to be up for long periods of time. The clients can and should perform short lived tasks and only the server needs to be reliably programmed to run 24/7. Consequently you see servers have clusters, RAID storage, SAN storage and other parallel engineering and clients do not. In some sense, Windows is the terminal they were thinking of back in the Multics days. The twist is that given humans are not very good at writing long running processes then the client OS, Windows, is designed around short lived processes. Open, perform task, close. I leave Firefox open for more than a couple of days and it is using 300MB of memory and slowing my machine down. I close and reopen Firefox daily.
Threads didn't exist in the computing word until Virtual Memory with it's program isolation came to be. What happened before threads? What happened before threads is that programmers were in a shared, non-isolated environment. Where Multics gave isolation to every program, Unix just recognizes two users: root and everyone else. Before Virtual Memory, this meant that all user programs could easily step on each other and programs could bring each down. Which happened a lot.
Virtual Memory is one of the greatest computing advances because it specifically deals with a short coming in human nature. Humans are not very good at programming memory directly, i.e. pointers.
It wasn't very long after VM came out that threads were invented to allow intra-application memory sharing. Here's the irony though. There still as no advancement in getting humans to perform reliable programming. Humans today are still not very good at programming memory directly, even with monitors, semaphores and other OS helpers.
When I was in my graduate OS class the question was raised then of "when do you invoke a thread?" given you probably shouldn't to avoid instability.
The answer was to think about threads then as "light weight processes". The teaching was that given this a thread was appropriate for:
IO blocked requests.
Have one thread per IO device like keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. There should be one thread dedicated to CPU only and the CPU thread controls all the IO threads. The IO threads should be given the simple task of servicing requests on behalf of the CPU thread.
"I never did credit the Alliance with an over abundance of brains, and if you're the best they got."
-Malcom Reynolds
Whether its Jack Valenti or George Bush, one does have to wonder how the powers that be in the Allinance, "the best they got", ever "got" to begin with and just where are the Malcom Reynolds of the future at anyway? We definitely need some Brown Coats to kick someone's booty and be BDH. Were there Monkeys? Remember that line in "The Train Job"? I think the monkeys of Oz escaped and now they are running this country and the MPAA for sure.
People understand that telephone lines connect telephones.
Computer lines connect computers. Telephone companies have had computer swithes and PBX for years. But to the public the telephone system was described in terms of the telephone lines that run into their house. Telephones have since gone cellular. People still associate telephones with telephone lines.
The Internet is the computer lines and hardware used to connect computers for the express purposes of conveying information. Sometimes the lines are replaced by airwaves in the same since celluar phones replace telephone lines with airwaves.
The concept of Internet should not be used to describe the unlimited possibilities of content being provided, albeit Email or computer phones--which are nothing more the computing devices dedicated to a single purpose of conveying voice over computer lines.
Captain Reynolds meets Captain Kirk? Six shooter vs. phaser? Ultimately that depends on who can draw faster and aim better. Star Trek never had a scene where in one shot Kirk killed a guy holding a hostage, doing so without breaking stride of a brisk walk.
Although, for my money I'd really like to see how Captain Kirk could handle Yosaphbridge.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything...
am I dead?
Thanks! This was extremely helpful.
In my line of work I sometimes get asked these things myself and now I have an answer!
Cheers! mate!
Uhhh, does this mean the Unified Process is dead?
I haven't worked with Websphere and Rational products since 2005. Back then the Rational Unified Process with use cases, etc. was suppose to be the next big thing. Rational had some tools called the Rational Unified Process which allowed you to create sequence diagrams, etc.
When you click on the Jazz products link\ it takes you to the projects page where all of them start with "Rational" by name. Is IBM going to Open Source ClearCase now? Most attempts at trying to interchange ClearCase with CVS or Subversion have failed. I'm suspicious that since the projects all start with "Rational" by name that there then might be significant "features" unavailable unless one buys ClearCase?
Sounds like IBM is trying to FUD their own open source product, Eclipse, with the focus on uncertainty and doubt.
Is it just me or did this read like a promo right off of Microsoft's web site?
Is slashdot going to go the way of PC Magazine back in the late 1980s and just becoming a venue for corporate promotion?
This article was kinda depressing.
It is nice to have at least one corner of the Netverse not dominated by the corporate overlords.
As a contractor/consultant I work in a multitude of environments. When management asks me about IDEs here's what I have to say.
1.) The ideal IDE user works on a stand-alone program, on the same platform as deployment. Productivity problems multiply manifold with IDEs when, for example, Java development is on Windows but production deployment is on Linux.
2.) The ideal IDE user works on homogeneous code with no heterogeneous requirements for legacy run-time integration. I've seen companies spend lots of productivity resources pulling third-party packages of a different language into the IDE. Usually the only ones capable of pulling this off are the most senior of engineers. Their productivity gets wasted doing build integration work on behalf of the IDE.
3.) The ideal IDE user works on a project slice only. Too many companies require, in effect, the entire source tree to be compiled because dependencies spun out of control and everything depends on everything else. Again, senior engineers are the only ones capable of solving the IDE failures and their productivity gets wasted.
4.) The ideal IDE user works on small code bases.
5.) The ideal IDE user is not required to run build scripts to build a project.
As a contractor, by the nature of the work, I cannot depend on any particular IDE to be installed at any site. Also it is incumbent on me to use VI and Emacs in production. Good luck finding any production box with Visual Studio installed.
I rarely work on stand-alone programs, I work on distributed software. As a systems program my code runs on multiple machines. While it is possible to attach to foreign processes on 10-20 machines, IDEs are very poor in doing so. Emacs, on the other hand, can fork as my shells as quickly as you like.
As a contractor I work on legacy code nobody else wants to touch as full-time help. I have to integrate legacy and new code.
As a contractor I have written Perl scripts that cobble together the legacy code and new code to create the entire production environment. This is not uncommon. An IDE is not a an ideal environment for complicated build script required to get the run-time working. They are very hostile to the work spaces that need to be checked in and swapped with other developers.
I've seen senior developers waste days on why code compiles and runs in production, but doesn't run in the IDE environment. I've seen tons of productivity wasted by each developer trying to integrate legacy code with each build.
As a contractor I have to say that as a lowest common denominator, Emacs and VI are always productive since they are found everywhere. In an Ideal setting, perhaps someone using an IDE is more productive than myself, but I'm a senior engineer and I doubt if I'm the target for any productivity debate about an IDE. IDEs, as has been noted here, best serve the less than senior developer who is working on code that is ideally completely written and maintained by them. Most Fortune 500 companies do use IDEs, but arguing that an IDE is always more productive is flat out false. In fact, I think if you wanted to pin the notion of a "religion" on the camps, the IDE camp is for more zealous than the Emacs and VI camp: I can use an IDE easy enough and that zealotry has killed productivity as it is not based on reason, but emotionally attachment to the bells and whistles that are not required. When it comes to refactoring, etc. I have personal Perl scripts that make any IDEs capabilities look like child's play. Perl is the ultimate refactoring and reporting tool in the right hands.
Finally, as you may have noticed, much of the productivity that gets lost by the use of an IDE is that of senior developers fixing the nasty integration issues. The trade off of lost senior development productivity due to IDE maintenance vs. the gain of productivity of the more numbered typical developer by use of said IDE is a management call. I have to say though, as a senior developer, I do not relish being brought in to fix IDE bugs on behalf of those who claim superior productivity because the lost productivity is not their time.
Lisp always reminds me of a Gary Larson cartoon. There is a six-year-old sitting in a classroom with one of Larson's typical frumpy teachers with big glasses at the blackboard. The caption reads, "Teacher, may I be excused? My brain is full."
Having gone the Engineering route of getting my CS degree, I have to say that nothing quite fills the brain like Lisp. Not Quantam Mechanics, not Special Relativity, Not Word Problems, Not Linear Transformations, and Not Shakespeare.
At Berkeley they use Lisp to weed out the less than committed, as the very first programming class a Freshman takes one takes is in Lisp. It was quite effective at getting Freshman to drop like flies.
Lisp hurts the brain. There is something not quite right about thinking in lambda functions. Or at least normal in the typical notion. Far be it from me to promote being normal, I'm a big fat weirdo, but the Lisp crowd, it seems to me, is a religious cult and has always used the language as an Elitist barrier. A computer science definition of machismoism: you must claim Lisp is the end all, be all. Paul Graham certainly fits into that elitist crowd. If normal is meant to mean not wanting to aspire to be part of some elitist crowd simply because one's brain is perceived superior by some arbitrary standard, count me normal. Or count my brain as full.
Welcome aboard. It is difficult for me to imagine my life without having known D&D and the subsequent games.
I look forward to more gaming and will think of Dave and Gary from time-to-time.
Maybe name a character, Garar. Or Arn Ax.
Welcome.
I read all the comments and mostly they were centered around the license and Visual Studio, the IDE.
I'd just like to add:
What is an ASP? What is an IDE?
Emacs and Java,Ruby,SQL,Perl,PHP,C++,bash,csh,Python,HTML,Javascript,/etc/text,XML,"language of tomorrow" forever!
Real programmers don't use an IDE. We have brains. Which probably explains why I've never heard of ASP. Or Microsoft.
</two-cents>
The biggest problem with any sort of confined fusion (Hohlraum,
reverse-pinch, tokamak, etc.) is that there are no known materials
that can withstand the neutron bombardment for very long. Let's say
it all works... how do you get the heat from the plasma to
electricity? Somewhere some material is needed that can withstand the
neutrons but conduct/transmit the heat. NIF is a laser physicist's
wet dream of a science fair project and an engineering marvel, but as
a practical means of making useful power, precious little R&D has been
invested in even thinking past the "Okay, we got ourselves a net
positive energy output. What now?" Yes, cool science and an
understanding of nature will no doubt come from this effort and I
can't naysay it on it's own terms (and in the meanwhile it's been
funding a goodly portion of the optics industry). But the "2050 plan"
of both ITER and NIF still have "a miracle occurs here" in them as to
materials and turning the heat into electricity. And I'm sure it
involves making steam and spinning turbines like we've done since the
time of Hero (ca AD 1100?).
The pipeline from university R&D to products that are good for society
is delicate and gets broken easily. Steve Chu might have a chance to
help smooth things out - it's a very tough job to decide where to
spread your money and NIF has been going for a long time. We need
programs like this. But the proportions are off, since nearly nothing
is spent on conventional fission, and the US isn't aggressive in solar
like Spain and Germany (okay, Kaaleefohrnia being an exception, but
that's an Austrian anyway).
If you look at most great literature the writing was not done to make piles of money.
In fact, I think it is interesting to note that while music and video are subject to much pirating, books have remained relatively pirate proof.
How many artists historically are not "discovered" until long after they are dead? History is full with artists who died paupers only to be discovered later.
I'd actually make the counter argument. I believe copyright is tyranny. It encourages owners of the copyrighted material to wring every last cent out of existing owned property and ignore new and emerging artist. Bands such as the Beatles would never happen today because the record companies only want to pay a solo artist, such as Britney Spears. Lastly and sadly, proof that copyright is tyranny is evident in the top grossing touring bands each year over the last 30 years. Rarely is it a new band, most generally top grossing touring bands are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. That's because the record companies make piles of money promoting artists who have deep catalogs replete with greatest hits albums. Copyright law as it exists today in the US is tyranny of the worst kind, handicapping the youth. I have a brother who records. He can't even get a local radio station to talk with him because they are locked into only playing copyrighted material pre-approved by the big media conglomerates.
We are not free because of copyright laws today, we are imprisoned.
On a more serious note, automatic weapons are illegal to buy in many states. Yet you can buy the various pieces and put them together and still make your own.
In a similar manner, what if cell phone manufacturers sold the hardware sans software? Couldn't some hack in China sell the software without the click? I'm thinking of DVDFab here which is illegal to sell in the U.S.
Is this really a problem? I don't get it. As the cameras in cell phones get more sophisticated, one will be able to stand far enough away to where the sound won't be heard anyway. Also, unless a lot of money is spent making the camera lens and the phone speaker one and the same then one will always be able to cover the speaker by hand; and it seems some cell phone manufacturer could make that operation trivial to sell more phones.
From my perspective over the years I've used the MVC as a design pattern definition and never experienced the communication problems listed by the author.
With respect to "Observer" I would respectfully disagree.
Most notabley, imagine if you used an application indirectly by taking screenshots. Of course the "model" in this case would not be able to "update" the screenshot, but it would be able to update the application that was screenshot.
Web applications are really screenshots. They are not interactive in the sense of a desktop GUI.
When I as a grad student at Berkeley the question was asked can MVC be applied to such asynchronous applications as email and HTML. The answer was "Yes" if the *user* understood that they were dealing with disconnected or asynchronous views.
Take something like Subversion where a GUI connected to Subversion server can be MVC with respect to the Observer as required. Then I disconnect my laptop from the network. Is the design still MVC? The server models can no longer update the view until the laptop plugs back in?
To wit, the defintion of MVC has evolved to include applications where at times the view is disconnected and in the case of the web, all the time disconnected until the view checks in. That still doesn't mean the underlying design has changed.
Again, I've never experienced the confusion of the original post. Not ever. Which says to me that there must be a rather large community that can use the evolved definition of MVC to incorporate asynchronous and synchronous applications.
I don't really see why discussing MVC is as all that and a bag of chips as the author contends. I commonly use the concept of MVC with respect to Django and when I do I always reference this book:
Using the definitions as described in this book Django easily fits in the MVC design pattern.
People I work with "get it" and I've not encountered and confusion alluded too by the author when using the term as defined by the aforementioned book.
Language is always evolving and that is how non-technical words end up with multiple variations in the common language dictionary. I see no reason why technological terms should be excluded from this "language pattern". There is no notion that technogical terms have to stick to some "original definition". The book above provides a working definition that is common and clear.
What am I referring too?
No other definitive source than the Colbert Report, of course!
See, Steven was interviewing this lady last week on the financial melt-down. Specifically he asked her why now? She responded that every year Wall Street came up with bigger and more sophisticated data models to obscure the problems of the previous derivative models. So Steven followed up with the question of "why now, why not just keep inventing bigger and badder data models? What went bust?"
The answer? The bankers, in their infinite wisdom, fired the tech workers.
To which Steven replied, "can't we just hire them back?"
To which she replied, "Nope, they've since moved on to find other work."
To wit, management is covering their a*ses by blaming no-longer-employeed workers. Just great.
It is weak and pathetic. But then what do you expect from management. Hire tech workers to build something. Fire/lay off said tech workers. If the tech works, great take credit! If tech fails, blame the techies. It worked in California when Lockheed failed to deliver on the new DMV system, completely.
Always blame the techie for implementing what business asked for when the tech fails.
I'd just like to give a shout out to Havlen for creating Endless Nights IV
If you ever just wanted to run 30th level characters till your hearts content, this is the place.
Throw fireballs until your fingertips burn off.
Use those artifacts until you grow weary of them.
Give your arcane archer a challenge.
I definitely spent 10 times more hours playing this module than all the official NWN campaigns combined.
Thanks! Havlen!
The efficient model would look like:
Storage and bandwidth of a CDN web proxy will be about 1/2 that of a cloud service.
Sites like plentyoffish.com get away with just 4 servers by using a CDN. With only four machines then the choice of "cloud" vs. "real machine" becomes a "don't care".
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/02/going-medieval-time-warner-begins-metered-bandwidth-testing/#comments/
AT&T and Comcast have both indicated that they will soon start metering bandwidth as well.
Who's going to win? Cisco or Time Warner? Bandwidth won't be doubling if the ISP providers start limiting users to 40GB/month and charging $1/GB overage. All the companies like Youtube and Netflix providing streaming video will see traffic drop to Nil if Mom & Dad have to pay $1GB in overage.
Again, thank you very much Tom.
I enjoyed it very much.
I never stop to think about how my affinity for Perl might be related to imagination then related to AD&D.
I actually started playing D&D back in 1974 when all you got was this white box. We had a couple of manuals that were nothing more than 8 1/2 by 11 sheets folded in 2 and stapled down the fold. In fact I still have the original dice from that box somewhere lying around. They are so worn though I think they are all Infinite sided die at this point.
D&D...Star Wars...it was great growing up as a geek and sci fi freak in the 1970s. Dr. Demento on the radio every Sunday! Science Fiction was hot, Roger Zelazny was in his prime and I was always waiting for the next Amber series book to come out. First thing we did with D&D was put all the Amber series characters in our scenario's. I remember Corwin was our first NPC to travel with our party. Eric was the nasty king. Benedict was the neutral but most powerful character. Great stuff.
Thanks for memories and for contributing to a great era of new imaginations for a teenage boy.
Multics was designed for long lived processes. Short lived processes are something we take for granted today but wasn't assumed back then. Today we assume that the sequence is we open a program, perform a task, close the program. Microsoft Outlook, for example, relies on Outlook being closed for its queue when to purge email that's been deleted. Programs are not designed to be up years-on-end. In fact, Microsoft reboots their OS every month with Windows Update. I've often speculated that the reboot is often requested not because the patch requires it but because Microsoft knows that its OS needs rebooted, often.
Why? Why wouldn't one just leave every application you've ever opened, opened?
The reason is that programmers cannot reliably write long running process code. Programs crashed all the time in Multics. Something Multics wasn't very good at handling back in the 1960s. There was some research done and it was observed that programmers could write code for short lived processes fairly well but not long lived.
So, one lessoned learn from from the failure Multics is that programmers do not write reliable, long running code.
Parallel processing is a processing better suited to long running processes. Since humans are not good at writing long running processes it makes sense then that parallel processing is rare. The innovation to deal with this sticky dilemma was the client-server model. Only the server needs to be up for long periods of time. The clients can and should perform short lived tasks and only the server needs to be reliably programmed to run 24/7. Consequently you see servers have clusters, RAID storage, SAN storage and other parallel engineering and clients do not. In some sense, Windows is the terminal they were thinking of back in the Multics days. The twist is that given humans are not very good at writing long running processes then the client OS, Windows, is designed around short lived processes. Open, perform task, close. I leave Firefox open for more than a couple of days and it is using 300MB of memory and slowing my machine down. I close and reopen Firefox daily.
Threads didn't exist in the computing word until Virtual Memory with it's program isolation came to be. What happened before threads? What happened before threads is that programmers were in a shared, non-isolated environment. Where Multics gave isolation to every program, Unix just recognizes two users: root and everyone else. Before Virtual Memory, this meant that all user programs could easily step on each other and programs could bring each down. Which happened a lot.
Virtual Memory is one of the greatest computing advances because it specifically deals with a short coming in human nature. Humans are not very good at programming memory directly, i.e. pointers.
It wasn't very long after VM came out that threads were invented to allow intra-application memory sharing. Here's the irony though. There still as no advancement in getting humans to perform reliable programming. Humans today are still not very good at programming memory directly, even with monitors, semaphores and other OS helpers.
When I was in my graduate OS class the question was raised then of "when do you invoke a thread?" given you probably shouldn't to avoid instability.
The answer was to think about threads then as "light weight processes". The teaching was that given this a thread was appropriate for:
Have one thread per IO device like keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. There should be one thread dedicated to CPU only and the CPU thread controls all the IO threads. The IO threads should be given the simple task of servicing requests on behalf of the CPU thread.
Onl
People understand that telephone lines connect telephones. Computer lines connect computers. Telephone companies have had computer swithes and PBX for years. But to the public the telephone system was described in terms of the telephone lines that run into their house. Telephones have since gone cellular. People still associate telephones with telephone lines. The Internet is the computer lines and hardware used to connect computers for the express purposes of conveying information. Sometimes the lines are replaced by airwaves in the same since celluar phones replace telephone lines with airwaves. The concept of Internet should not be used to describe the unlimited possibilities of content being provided, albeit Email or computer phones--which are nothing more the computing devices dedicated to a single purpose of conveying voice over computer lines.
River Tam meets Spock?
That might be an interesting conversation.
Captain Reynolds meets Captain Kirk? Six shooter vs. phaser? Ultimately that depends on who can draw faster and aim better. Star Trek never had a scene where in one shot Kirk killed a guy holding a hostage, doing so without breaking stride of a brisk walk.
Although, for my money I'd really like to see how Captain Kirk could handle Yosaphbridge.
That would be fun.