Joel Spolsky seems to have a bit to say about this. Try his Guerilla Guide to Interviewing. Of course, not everyone agrees with everything he says, but, in my opinion, he has quite a few insightful points.
You can go here to find all the articles related to growing a software team.
"Apache and Perl was the way to go in 1996, but times have changed." What?! This is the same type of fallacious argument that Microsoft uses against UNIX; "it's 30 years old, it can't be any good!"
Of course, generally, the entire reason one uses a high-level language (like Perl, or Python, or PHP, or whatever...) is because quickly putting something together is more important than lightning-fast speed. It's safe to say that web development is one of those tasks which generally benefits more from the former than the latter. With this in mind, your (unsupported claims) of Perl CGI's "efficiency" problems are irrelevant. Could we see something like benchmarks, or any kind of evidence?
Your comment about "serious" webmasters "doing it" in "Java or C" for "serious speed" strikes me as being particularly odd. Your use of the word "serious" seems quite silly; there are plenty of serious'webmasters'usingPerl. As for the languages you mention, almost no one uses C; that defeats the entire purpose of general web development methodology. Again, your claims are completely unsupported by any further evidence.
Personally, if I need to do any web scripting, I have my own language of choice.
If you want to learn about databases in general, rather than learning about a specific database, you might try C. J. Date's book, An Introduction to Database Systems (get it used - and don't worry about those stupid whiners who gave it low ratings, they just don't want to think carefully and precisely about data storage). I would suggest reading this (it's a bit challenging, but people on this website are generally pretty bright and up to a challenge, right?) and then merely perusing a specific database manual.
It seems much more consistent with the way computer science is taught in college: learn the timeless knowledge FIRST, and then the stuff that goes obsolete becomes trivial to learn.
Just a suggestion.
Doom III video
on
E3 Wrapup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In case y'all haven't seen it...
Doom III gameplay video - not very good quality, 11 minutes long. It's best, I think, to look at screenshots first and then watch the video.
The video is amazing. You should definitely download it.
Out of all the faculty and students in any K-12 school, maybe a few people will know anything about Linux, if they even know what it is at all. You're suggesting that we should teach them about operating system internals (something that one can't really experiment with in Windows because it is closed source)?
Who said the idea was to teach them computer science, which is what you seem to mean by "computers"? The idea is to get them familiar enough with computers that they can perform basic operations.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most people don't WANT to learn a lot about computers. A lot of kids these days like to use instant messenging applications, download MP3s, etc. but that's it. It has been my personal experience that no one has any aspirations besides getting into the best college possible.
Your suggestions are vague, but if I read what you said correctly, you expect minors to be examining source code? Yeah, right. Even if the school had an AP Computer Science class -- which basically teaches students the fundamentals of programming and assumes no programming background -- you don't read much code, it's done in a very boring, pedantic matter (and of course you don't get very advanced - student interest level, time, and lacking mathematical knowledge on the part of students prevent it). You read a lot of trivial programs but nothing approaching non-trivial. Given the nature of Open Source code that can be downloaded at no charge on the Internet (namely, its lack of documentation -- don't give me that "good code is its own documentation" crap), Open Source stuff in a school setting is totally unfeasible.
But of course, in the little world you seem to be stuck in, there is no such thing as not being obsessed with computers - it is simply not conceivable, like a square circle, or something that is both green and non-green at the same time.
"I dun't theenk it dues unytheeng tu Meecrusufft," said Bork in an interview with Linux Planet. "I theenk it joost lets zeem cunteenooe-a es zeey vere-a beffure-a."
as it turns out, slashdot reported on dreamhack 2001, which makes me wonder why michael didn't add a link to slashdot's story about dreamhack 2k1. lazy, lazy slashdot people.:P
Give one example of a site which uses java, javascript, or frames, where the same think couldn't have been done better with simple, single frame HTML.
Java allows you to do things that HTML simply can't do, that's one of the reasons it's rather popular. Witness Yahoo! Games; not the actual layout, but the games themselves, the actual Java applets. That can't be done at all with HTML; it opens up lots of possibilities.
As for JavaScript: it is rather useful and neat when you use it right. Witness A List Apart's gentle use of JavaScript to tell people using bad browsers to go upgrade. It will tell the person using Netscape 4.x on Linux as surely as it will tell the person using Netscape 4.x on Windows.
It's unfair that you associate frames with Java and Javascript; I agree that frames are unnecessary. It actually seems more difficult to me to use frames than HTML - and then of course there's all sorts of accessibility problems that come with them, etc.
A technology isn't bad just because it's abused; writing isn't a bad thing just because most people aren't Shakespeare.
it seems everytime microsoft puts something out, the first several versions of it are horrible. then they work like crazy to improve it until eventually it is sometimes superior to whatever else is competing with it. internet explorer is a good example; started out as a fringe product, now it has great standards compliance. etc etc etc
convergence is stupid. i am reminded of a good article i recently read about why this sort of thing (it actually used a digital camera wristwatch as a hypothetical example!) is stupid:
i want a good digital camera, and a good watch, so that if i want a better of each, i just get a new or somehow improved one; if they're all binded together, i get a mediocre version of whatever's in there and when i want a new camera i gotta throw away my watch.
various research firms and government research organizations (yes, there are people who get paid taxpayer dollars to play around with search engines and 3d engines and stuff) have been trying to come up with an effective method of visualizing information (e.g. text, filesystems, etc) in 3d for many years.
in my opinion, these browsers are neat as a novelty, but beyond that they aren't that useful. if browser people (mozilla team, opera team, konqueror people, microsoft, etc etc etc) worked on improving the user experience in existing products, we'd be doing just fine. having better information to display in the first place would help, too.
here's a link that should give you a good overview of information visualization that the government is sponsoring. this should help, too.
Since a lot of software (such as KOffice) coming out recently seems to be attempting to replace previously existing popular Windows applications (therefore making Linux more appealing to average users), I think the following is appropriate:
The very idea of the lay person using Linux is ridiculous and anyone who doesn't see how palpably absurd this whole "Linux should replace Microsoft" jihad is delusional. The people the Linux community seems to be targeting are the ones who got C's in school, majored in Business or Economics in college, and then had 2.5 children. They are not interested in math or science... Do you see the point I'm making? They don't want to learn, they don't want to change, and therefore any effort expended towards converting those that don't wish to be converted is wasted energy.
These are people who will never get past the login screen without help. (Help as in, "someone does it for me", not "someone shows me and I learn" or "I bother to read the manual"). These are people who would find installing Windows 98 to be a daunting task.
It seems that at some point an implication that Linux should topple Microsoft, because EVERYONE loves reading man pages and setting up ipmasq. This is a war that Linux developers cannot win, and so it is a waste of time.
Linux developers should focus on improving the user experience of people who have already converted.
Microsoft will win because they know that in order to get mindshare you don't actually have to provide a good service, you have to provide the illusion of doing so.
I don't think the people this conversion effort is targeting are stupid, I think they just don't care. Johnny has to go to soccer practice and Jane has her piano recital; where does reading Learning Perl fit into this picture? IT DOESN'T!
I say this because so many people seem so passionate about this cause, this naive cause, but they should focus their energy and talents towards more realistic goals. Linux will always be a nerd's operating system. It is unfortunate but true. Writing a program which is similar in function and purpose to a popular Windows-based application is fine, just remember who your potential userbase is.
Nerds forget how much they know. Home users can barely figure out Windows 98. To think that they're willing to even bother learning how to use fips in order to install Linux (or some other free Unix-like operating system such as FreeBSD) or something or download an ISO image or configure software like ipchains, etc. is completely delusional.
One of the basic ways in which one furthers one's expertise in Linux is to read the documentation that comes with the software. This is contradictory to basic user behavior; they never read the manual unless it's a LAST resort and even then, they're just likely to do just-in-time reading.
The developers should stick to their niche market.
In order to find the items that sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, you're going to have to spend hundreds of manhours looking for them. Gee, hundreds of hours to find something that sells for only hundreds of dollars... wouldn't that mean that you're only making at most a few dollars an hour? And when you play Diablo II that much, it really stops becoming fun. There are much more fulfilling (and sometimes much more profitable) ways of spending one's time.
Besides, everyone knows Baldur's Gate II 0wns Diablo in the go-around-and-kill-stuff-and-get-phat-l00t category.
the graphs are not done fairly. they almost never started at 0 to a result slightly higher than the higher result of the two processors, they were always done so that the intel bar was much longer (and therefore appeared to do much better) than the athlon when the actual results were that the two processors were pretty close.
also, note that the 1.7 ghz p4 has a 600 mhz advantage over the 1.1 ghz athlon and usually the performance difference was only 10-40%. the p4 has over 50% more processor mhz than the athlon. what an unfair comparison, especially when the 1.33 ghz athlon is out and available for purchase. processor mhz for processor mhz, the athlon beat the p4.
If you find yourself scanning through lots of webpages rather than reading word-by-word, you don't necessarily have "ADD" or whatever. There are plenty of good reasons to explain why we do not read through everything:
Low readability in monitors. This problem hasn't improved that much in thirty years or so, unfortunately. We make leaps and bounds in every other area of computer hardware but we still have monitors that reduce readability of text on screen by 25% (compared to the same text printed out). The eye doesn't like to read stuff that isn't very readable, eh?
People are in a god damn hurry these days. This is a bad thing. Everyone all stressed out and whatnot.. People need to relax.
Web content is formatted to be scannable, most of the time. The usability experts (Jakob Nielsen, Webword.com, etc.) always seem to think formatting things so that they are ultra-short and dumbed down to the point of insulting any reasonably educated (college degree) user's intelligence. But when everything is spoonfed and broken down into bulleted lists, I think we only contribute to this ultra-hurried way of browsing the web.
Zeldman of zeldman.com wrote an article about this:
http://www.pdn-pix.com/pix/column/
Now has never been a better time to start an independent creative project on the Internet.
C'mon, the Internet was never meant to be a damn strip mall next to a porno theater. Let's turn it into the Louvre museum next to the Library of Congress!
as other people have pointed out, you're wrong. and, uh, flash was originally designed to replace animated gifs. it does this very well. you know, you should check out some place like www.linkdup.com or maybe www.praystation.com and THEN tell me flash isn't Really Neat(tm).:)
"We are going to add plugins in our next major version, and we hope that plugins will do for filesystems what they did for Photoshop."
Err, photoshop plugins lead people to rely on clicking buttons instead of actually making stuff. Photoshop plugins were one of the worst things to happen to the Internet in the last 5 years.:) Hundreds of thousands of "gee, isn't render difference clouds cool" pages.
Other than that though, seems neat.
Slashdot Mirror
Imports are ultimately paid for by exports, so any restriction of exports ultimately reduces exports. (P. 739 of "Economics Today" by R. Miller)
Joel Spolsky seems to have a bit to say about this. Try his Guerilla Guide to Interviewing. Of course, not everyone agrees with everything he says, but, in my opinion, he has quite a few insightful points.
You can go here to find all the articles related to growing a software team.
Hope that helps.
I can't believe this was modded up to +3.
"Apache and Perl was the way to go in 1996, but times have changed." What?! This is the same type of fallacious argument that Microsoft uses against UNIX; "it's 30 years old, it can't be any good!"
Of course, generally, the entire reason one uses a high-level language (like Perl, or Python, or PHP, or whatever...) is because quickly putting something together is more important than lightning-fast speed. It's safe to say that web development is one of those tasks which generally benefits more from the former than the latter. With this in mind, your (unsupported claims) of Perl CGI's "efficiency" problems are irrelevant. Could we see something like benchmarks, or any kind of evidence?
Your comment about "serious" webmasters "doing it" in "Java or C" for "serious speed" strikes me as being particularly odd. Your use of the word "serious" seems quite silly; there are plenty of serious 'webmasters' using Perl. As for the languages you mention, almost no one uses C; that defeats the entire purpose of general web development methodology. Again, your claims are completely unsupported by any further evidence.
Personally, if I need to do any web scripting, I have my own language of choice.
These teaser images look pretty interesting.
"Why are users immediately forgiven for not even taking the least amount of effort to look for a solution to their confusion in the manual?"
you moron, you forgot the cardinal rules:
1. USERS DON'T READ.
2. SEE NUMBER 1
for christ's sake.
If you want to learn about databases in general, rather than learning about a specific database, you might try C. J. Date's book, An Introduction to Database Systems (get it used - and don't worry about those stupid whiners who gave it low ratings, they just don't want to think carefully and precisely about data storage). I would suggest reading this (it's a bit challenging, but people on this website are generally pretty bright and up to a challenge, right?) and then merely perusing a specific database manual.
It seems much more consistent with the way computer science is taught in college: learn the timeless knowledge FIRST, and then the stuff that goes obsolete becomes trivial to learn.
Just a suggestion.
In case y'all haven't seen it...
Doom III gameplay video - not very good quality, 11 minutes long. It's best, I think, to look at screenshots first and then watch the video.
The video is amazing. You should definitely download it.
Oh please, this smacks of naivete.
Out of all the faculty and students in any K-12 school, maybe a few people will know anything about Linux, if they even know what it is at all. You're suggesting that we should teach them about operating system internals (something that one can't really experiment with in Windows because it is closed source)?
Who said the idea was to teach them computer science, which is what you seem to mean by "computers"? The idea is to get them familiar enough with computers that they can perform basic operations.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most people don't WANT to learn a lot about computers. A lot of kids these days like to use instant messenging applications, download MP3s, etc. but that's it. It has been my personal experience that no one has any aspirations besides getting into the best college possible.
Your suggestions are vague, but if I read what you said correctly, you expect minors to be examining source code? Yeah, right. Even if the school had an AP Computer Science class -- which basically teaches students the fundamentals of programming and assumes no programming background -- you don't read much code, it's done in a very boring, pedantic matter (and of course you don't get very advanced - student interest level, time, and lacking mathematical knowledge on the part of students prevent it). You read a lot of trivial programs but nothing approaching non-trivial. Given the nature of Open Source code that can be downloaded at no charge on the Internet (namely, its lack of documentation -- don't give me that "good code is its own documentation" crap), Open Source stuff in a school setting is totally unfeasible.
But of course, in the little world you seem to be stuck in, there is no such thing as not being obsessed with computers - it is simply not conceivable, like a square circle, or something that is both green and non-green at the same time.
sorry, couldn't help myself.
More accurately, AOL/TW can give the impression that 24/7 support is available.
:|
Good luck getting a real live person on the phone.
as it turns out, slashdot reported on dreamhack 2001, which makes me wonder why michael didn't add a link to slashdot's story about dreamhack 2k1. lazy, lazy slashdot people. :P
Those idiots can just download a DOOM wad that turns all the monsters into Barney the Purple Dinosaur! They'll be killing machines in no time!
Java allows you to do things that HTML simply can't do, that's one of the reasons it's rather popular. Witness Yahoo! Games; not the actual layout, but the games themselves, the actual Java applets. That can't be done at all with HTML; it opens up lots of possibilities.
As for JavaScript: it is rather useful and neat when you use it right. Witness A List Apart's gentle use of JavaScript to tell people using bad browsers to go upgrade. It will tell the person using Netscape 4.x on Linux as surely as it will tell the person using Netscape 4.x on Windows.
It's unfair that you associate frames with Java and Javascript; I agree that frames are unnecessary. It actually seems more difficult to me to use frames than HTML - and then of course there's all sorts of accessibility problems that come with them, etc.
A technology isn't bad just because it's abused; writing isn't a bad thing just because most people aren't Shakespeare.
it seems everytime microsoft puts something out, the first several versions of it are horrible. then they work like crazy to improve it until eventually it is sometimes superior to whatever else is competing with it. internet explorer is a good example; started out as a fringe product, now it has great standards compliance. etc etc etc
convergence is stupid. i am reminded of a good article i recently read about why this sort of thing (it actually used a digital camera wristwatch as a hypothetical example!) is stupid:
the myth of convergence
i want a good digital camera, and a good watch, so that if i want a better of each, i just get a new or somehow improved one; if they're all binded together, i get a mediocre version of whatever's in there and when i want a new camera i gotta throw away my watch.
fuhget about it.
various research firms and government research organizations (yes, there are people who get paid taxpayer dollars to play around with search engines and 3d engines and stuff) have been trying to come up with an effective method of visualizing information (e.g. text, filesystems, etc) in 3d for many years.
in my opinion, these browsers are neat as a novelty, but beyond that they aren't that useful. if browser people (mozilla team, opera team, konqueror people, microsoft, etc etc etc) worked on improving the user experience in existing products, we'd be doing just fine. having better information to display in the first place would help, too.
here's a link that should give you a good overview of information visualization that the government is sponsoring. this should help, too.
Since a lot of software (such as KOffice) coming out recently seems to be attempting to replace previously existing popular Windows applications (therefore making Linux more appealing to average users), I think the following is appropriate:
The very idea of the lay person using Linux is ridiculous and anyone who doesn't see how palpably absurd this whole "Linux should replace Microsoft" jihad is delusional. The people the Linux community seems to be targeting are the ones who got C's in school, majored in Business or Economics in college, and then had 2.5 children. They are not interested in math or science... Do you see the point I'm making? They don't want to learn, they don't want to change, and therefore any effort expended towards converting those that don't wish to be converted is wasted energy.
These are people who will never get past the login screen without help. (Help as in, "someone does it for me", not "someone shows me and I learn" or "I bother to read the manual"). These are people who would find installing Windows 98 to be a daunting task.
It seems that at some point an implication that Linux should topple Microsoft, because EVERYONE loves reading man pages and setting up ipmasq. This is a war that Linux developers cannot win, and so it is a waste of time.
Linux developers should focus on improving the user experience of people who have already converted.
Microsoft will win because they know that in order to get mindshare you don't actually have to provide a good service, you have to provide the illusion of doing so.
I don't think the people this conversion effort is targeting are stupid, I think they just don't care. Johnny has to go to soccer practice and Jane has her piano recital; where does reading Learning Perl fit into this picture? IT DOESN'T!
I say this because so many people seem so passionate about this cause, this naive cause, but they should focus their energy and talents towards more realistic goals. Linux will always be a nerd's operating system. It is unfortunate but true. Writing a program which is similar in function and purpose to a popular Windows-based application is fine, just remember who your potential userbase is.
Nerds forget how much they know. Home users can barely figure out Windows 98. To think that they're willing to even bother learning how to use fips in order to install Linux (or some other free Unix-like operating system such as FreeBSD) or something or download an ISO image or configure software like ipchains, etc. is completely delusional.
One of the basic ways in which one furthers one's expertise in Linux is to read the documentation that comes with the software. This is contradictory to basic user behavior; they never read the manual unless it's a LAST resort and even then, they're just likely to do just-in-time reading.
The developers should stick to their niche market.
memorizing the syntax to dozens of cryptic commands is simple?
In order to find the items that sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, you're going to have to spend hundreds of manhours looking for them. Gee, hundreds of hours to find something that sells for only hundreds of dollars... wouldn't that mean that you're only making at most a few dollars an hour? And when you play Diablo II that much, it really stops becoming fun. There are much more fulfilling (and sometimes much more profitable) ways of spending one's time.
Besides, everyone knows Baldur's Gate II 0wns Diablo in the go-around-and-kill-stuff-and-get-phat-l00t category.
the graphs are not done fairly. they almost never started at 0 to a result slightly higher than the higher result of the two processors, they were always done so that the intel bar was much longer (and therefore appeared to do much better) than the athlon when the actual results were that the two processors were pretty close.
also, note that the 1.7 ghz p4 has a 600 mhz advantage over the 1.1 ghz athlon and usually the performance difference was only 10-40%. the p4 has over 50% more processor mhz than the athlon. what an unfair comparison, especially when the 1.33 ghz athlon is out and available for purchase. processor mhz for processor mhz, the athlon beat the p4.
Zeldman of zeldman.com wrote an article about this:
http://www.pdn-pix.com/pix/column/ Now has never been a better time to start an independent creative project on the Internet. C'mon, the Internet was never meant to be a damn strip mall next to a porno theater. Let's turn it into the Louvre museum next to the Library of Congress!
as other people have pointed out, you're wrong. and, uh, flash was originally designed to replace animated gifs. it does this very well. you know, you should check out some place like www.linkdup.com or maybe www.praystation.com and THEN tell me flash isn't Really Neat(tm). :)
"We are going to add plugins in our next major version, and we hope that plugins will do for filesystems what they did for Photoshop." Err, photoshop plugins lead people to rely on clicking buttons instead of actually making stuff. Photoshop plugins were one of the worst things to happen to the Internet in the last 5 years. :) Hundreds of thousands of "gee, isn't render difference clouds cool" pages.
Other than that though, seems neat.