Surely a tool that spits out UML-like diagrams of the current code would be very useful to spot architecture flaws introduced during the refactoring process.
I use Together Control Center. An excellent tool, which among other things provides keeps the UML and the source code in constant synchronization. I find it extremely useful for that very purpose.
... some people find software diagrams helpful and some people
don't. The danger is that those who do think that those who don't should do and vice-versa. Instead we should just accept that some people will use diagrams and some won't.
We're kidding ourselves if we think that UML is automatically more intuitive for everyone. Or even for most people.
I looked for a simple, factual link and couldn't find one
Here is one from 2-1/2 years ago. Things have changed a bit since then, mainly for the worse.
Of particular concern is that current displays which do not implement a copy protection standard (because one has not yet been fully settled on) will be unusable with future digital sources (tuners, cable boxes, satellite receivers, DVD players, etc.) which do implement HDCP or whatever.
We will engineer and manufacture the upgrades necessary so the television you purchase today can be made compatible with near-future advances in digital television and digital interconnectivity. Specifically, we promise that you will be able to have your television upgraded, at a reasonable cost, to include an off-air HDTV tuner, a cable TV tuner (for unscrambled programming), an IEEE 1394 (FireWire®) connection, HAVi system control, and 5C copy protection.
They claim that this separates them from "other manufacturers whose latest generation HDTVs are destined for near-future obsolescence".
I seem to recall a while back there was an uproar about the original wording of the Mitsubishi promise, something to the effect of the upgrades not costing you more than $1000 (it now reads "at a reasonable cost"), and that the upgrades would be made only if feasible. That particular link, I cannot find. It probably was on the AVS Forum.
in 50 years, it'll be like airplane travel is now.
That's what we said 30 years ago.
32 years ago next Monday, Apollo 11 lifted off. Back then, nobody would ever have believed that after only 3-1/2 years and six lunar landings, we would scrap the whole thing.
In 1970, I truly believed that going into space was something that I would be able to do in my lifetime. I now know that I'll never leave our gravity well.
I had previously heard that it was originally named "duck tape" because the fabric that it was made out of was duck, a kind of canvas. I can't find a reference for that story, though.
Excellent points. As an Eiffel "true believer", I would add one more: Nobody really cares about quality.
Programmers want "cool syntax" and "expressive freedom"; programming languages are for hacking with, not for the considered, careful implementation of software.
Corporations and organizations want quick and cheap results. As an all too typical example, the company I work for is on a CMM program to improve our software quality. The definition of "software quality" for our CMM program is that the software is "delivered on time and in budget". As Dilbert's PHB says, "Oh, and we need a banner which says 'Quality'."
If you want to volunteer your time, you'll find almost anyplace is willing to accept your generosity.
However, I got the impression that you're looking to make a (less than ostentatious) living at it.
First off, the magic word is "nonprofit", rather than "charity". As in nonprofitjobs.org and the like. If you drop by your local bookstore, you'll find a number of titles about working in the nonprofit industry.
Be aware that (in the USA) most of the nonprofit agencies which are big enough to make it worthwhile to have full-time, paid IT personnel are located in the greater Washington DC area, close to the source of the grant money which is their lifeblood. If you don't want to live in DC, nor in Manhattan, your options will be greatly limited.
Oh, another tip. In the nonprofit world, the word "development" means "fundraising". Be sure they're talking about software development.
If you're a VB hacker, check out BlackBaud, which is one of the big providers of software for nonprofits. There are others, but that should get you started.
And, of course, there may be a branch or two of the US government whose work you might admire. Again, you'll probably end up in the greater DC area if you want to stay in IT.
IBM chose that chip for its PC line specifically to hobble it; that way the PC could never compete with IBM's then-profitable minicomputer line.
Can you back that claim up?
At the time that the IBM PC was being developed, there were only 3 possible choices for a 16-bit CPU: the iAPX86, the Z8000, and the 68K; the NS16K's didn't yet exist. At the time, Motorola's 68K sales force wouldn't lower themselves to talk to the designers of small computer systems; they insisted the 6809 (with a different sales force) was their solution in that market, although they changed their minds when they found themselves awash in 4-MHz 68000's about a year later. As for the Z8000... well...
In addition, IBM wanted to use an 8-bit bus. Remember, those were the days of through-hole components and "640K is more memory than anyone could ever need". The iAPX86 was available in an 8-bit version, the 8088; Motorola didn't even announce the 68008 until a year after the PC was introduced.
Certainly IBM has been known to intentionally cripple its products (the PC-Jr comes to mind), but the use of the iAPX86 architecture probably wasn't such a case.
what language is all of this done in? Ada would be my guess, or is there something even better than that?
I doubt that it's in Ada; I think the software predates Ada.
As for something better: in a word, Eiffel.
Unfortunately, there's an old but true saying:
"Make something foolproof, and only a fool will want to use it."
Eiffel is an amazingly clean, simple, and straightforward object-oriented language. It removes both the ability and the need for clever coding hacks, thereby shifting most of the development effort to software design rather than implementation. Most "programmers" aren't designers, though, and they scream bloody murder that they can't code something really cool like while (*to++ = *from++);
that it doesn't really control for the affects of physiological arousal.
But they did. From report for study #2:
These two games did not produce differences in systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, or mean arterial pressure (all ps >.3).
It may be that Myst is just as exciting as Wolfenstein 3D
There's a difference between exciting and physiologically arousing, and this didn't escape the researchers:
However, Wolfenstein 3D was rated as more exciting than Myst (Ms = 4.81 and 3.40, respectively), F(1, 27) = 10.46, p.13.
And:
A 2 (game type) × 2 (gender) × 2 (trait irritability) between-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed with State Hostility as the dependent variable and with Game Excitement as a covariate.
And:
A 2 (game type) × 2 (gender) × 2 (trait irritability) between-subjects ANOVA was performed on Aggression Accessibility with Game Excitement as a covariate.
And:
In Study 2, games were selected to create equal arousal states as measured by heart rate and blood pressure. Furthermore, excitement ratings were used as a covariate to further ensure that this route was closed off in this investigation.
If I had the money, I'd get an athlon, but to do so i'd need a new mobo $125 at least, and the cpu, while with the celeron 2, i'd just need a new cpu
/me Watches in amusement as the FC-PGA Celeron-2 gets forced into a Slot-1 or Socket-370. The power is applied, and the C-2's 1.5V core emits an interesting aroma...
Intel is in the motherboard business now. The days of upgrading a CPU without changing the motherboard are behind us. If it ain't the socket/slot, it's the VRM.
if my Celeron 433 works just fine and dandy, what in the world would I need a Celeron II for?
It's not about convincing people who have something that they're happy with that they should upgrade. It's about having a product which is half-way competitive with AMD for those people who are looking for a new computer.
There are still a lot of folks looking for a first (cheap) computer, and an amazing number of antique systems out there. My company just upgraded my software development system from the Pentium-166 that I'd been using. We have tons of 486 systems still in use, including a bunch of SX-25's. We will be buying new computers to replace those over the next few years, and we certainly will be looking for cheap ones.
Frankly, coding is boring. Designing systems is where the beauty of "programming" lies.
Must be one'a them Eiffel people.
Codin' ain't borin' if'n ya does it in a suitable language, like C++. Jest tryin' ta 'member all them funny rules 'n' exceptions is 'nuff to keep yerself charged up.
I wouldn't touch AltaVista, no way. Their ISP, 1stUp.com, specifically reserves the right to sell their partners your name, address, e-mail, and just about everything else that they know or find out about you.
However, my current recommendation is FreeWWWeb. At the moment, they don't run ads or anything, so there's no software to download, no fooling about. Just configure your dialer and your server addresses, and away you go. They're the only free ISP in the US with an NNTP server (AFAIK). Because there's no software to download, you don't have to be running Windows, either. And, if you should happen to head into Canada, they even have access numbers there.
Much of the subscriber information we gather is provided to 1stUp.com's sponsors in exchange for their financing of your ad-subsidized Internet service. Of the subscriber information we collect, only individualized information on the dates, time and duration of your online sessions is not subject to such disclosures.
It sure looks to me like they reserve the right to sell your name, address, e-mail address, etc.
Contrast this with the policies for NetZero, FreeI, FreeWWWeb. In fact, FreeI doesn't even collect personal identification data in the first place.
I remember reading about a VCR that had this as a feature. It detected the commercials by the half second or so of blank screen that precedes the commercials. It kept track of these blanks, and those that were only a few minutes long were judged to be commercial breaks. These were auto fast forwared through by the VCR.
I've got one, the Panasonic PVS-9670. It works pretty much like kramer says.
During recording, it makes an internal note each time it thinks it detects a DC restoration signal. When recording is done, and it's got some free time, it rewinds the tape and marks the beginning and end of each commercial break. It does appear to use time spans to distinguish commercials from program; the short bits are the commercials. This marking process is time-consuming; for a 1-hour program recorded at SP, it takes about 15 minutes before the VCR finally shuts down.
During playback, on encountering a "start commercial" marker, it goes into fast-forward to the next "end commercial" marker.
There are setup menu options to turn off the marking on record, and to turn off the auto-skip on playback.
The results are pretty good. I'd estimate it gets it right >80% of the time. It's most likely to mess up when there are a lot of commercials in a row, especially if your local station breaks in to run local spots. In that case, it tends to stop skipping early, leaving you watching the last couple of commercials.
I've never seen it skip anything which wasn't a commercial.
In any event, if it gets it wrong, the worst that happens is you have to grab the remote control and do it yourself, which is what you'd've had to have done anyway. No real loss.
If you have a credit card, own a home, rent an apartment, have a drivers liscense, or even a social security number, you've given up your privacy.
You have given up your anonymity, not your privacy.
The two are separate concepts. For example, your medical records are private but not anonymous. And someone distributing a "hidden cam" video of you violates your privacy even though you remain anonymous.
As we lose our anonymity, we must insist that it be replaced by privacy.
[This comment is, like Katz' article, extremely U.S.-centric]
There is no point in fussing over the possibility that the US government is going to legislate the 'Net. Commercial forces will do it for them.
Within a few years, most Americans will have a choice of exactly two ISP's: their cable provider (AT&T in most cases) and their ILEC Telco (SBC, in most cases). With dial-up access disappearing, the independent ISP's are on Death Row.
The two big ISP's will be working some very big-dollar deals with advertisers and such. I guarantee that those deals will include the ISP restricting subscribers in various ways. If you thought that AOL's Terms Of Service were onerous, just wait until you see what happens when your ISP lands a zillion-dollar deal with McDonalds. Your ISP will become child-safe.
Some good stuff on that site, well worth looking at.
A quick introduction to Soft Tempest (in HTML, Anderson seems to like PDF) can be found here. It's particularly interesting how the project was started:
Microsoft's recent $20 million donation to Cambridge University was accompanied by a request for research into technologies that would prevent users from illegally copying Microsoft's software products.... this involved the development of a technology that would permit Microsoft or other software vendors to identify unauthorized uses of software simply by driving surveillance vehicles near places where software was used, which could monitor faint radio signals from computers.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I would point to something Martin Fowler said:
We're kidding ourselves if we think that UML is automatically more intuitive for everyone. Or even for most people.Here is one from 2-1/2 years ago. Things have changed a bit since then, mainly for the worse.
Of particular concern is that current displays which do not implement a copy protection standard (because one has not yet been fully settled on) will be unusable with future digital sources (tuners, cable boxes, satellite receivers, DVD players, etc.) which do implement HDCP or whatever.
Mitsubishi says:
They claim that this separates them from "other manufacturers whose latest generation HDTVs are destined for near-future obsolescence".
I seem to recall a while back there was an uproar about the original wording of the Mitsubishi promise, something to the effect of the upgrades not costing you more than $1000 (it now reads "at a reasonable cost"), and that the upgrades would be made only if feasible. That particular link, I cannot find. It probably was on the AVS Forum.
32 years ago next Monday, Apollo 11 lifted off. Back then, nobody would ever have believed that after only 3-1/2 years and six lunar landings, we would scrap the whole thing.
In 1970, I truly believed that going into space was something that I would be able to do in my lifetime. I now know that I'll never leave our gravity well.
One explanation is here.
I had previously heard that it was originally named "duck tape" because the fabric that it was made out of was duck, a kind of canvas. I can't find a reference for that story, though.
Does nobody here remember WGBH's 1996 PBS miniseries, The Machine that Changed the World?
Programmers want "cool syntax" and "expressive freedom"; programming languages are for hacking with, not for the considered, careful implementation of software.
Corporations and organizations want quick and cheap results. As an all too typical example, the company I work for is on a CMM program to improve our software quality. The definition of "software quality" for our CMM program is that the software is "delivered on time and in budget". As Dilbert's PHB says, "Oh, and we need a banner which says 'Quality'."
However, I got the impression that you're looking to make a (less than ostentatious) living at it.
First off, the magic word is "nonprofit", rather than "charity". As in nonprofitjobs.org and the like. If you drop by your local bookstore, you'll find a number of titles about working in the nonprofit industry.
Be aware that (in the USA) most of the nonprofit agencies which are big enough to make it worthwhile to have full-time, paid IT personnel are located in the greater Washington DC area, close to the source of the grant money which is their lifeblood. If you don't want to live in DC, nor in Manhattan, your options will be greatly limited.
Oh, another tip. In the nonprofit world, the word "development" means "fundraising". Be sure they're talking about software development.
If you're a VB hacker, check out BlackBaud, which is one of the big providers of software for nonprofits. There are others, but that should get you started.
And, of course, there may be a branch or two of the US government whose work you might admire. Again, you'll probably end up in the greater DC area if you want to stay in IT.
Go to keyword "Marketing Preferences" and uncheck it. It's on the New User Tour (or at least used to be).
What's really annoying is that now AOL resets your marketing preferences every year, so you have to uncheck them annually.
Can you back that claim up?
At the time that the IBM PC was being developed, there were only 3 possible choices for a 16-bit CPU: the iAPX86, the Z8000, and the 68K; the NS16K's didn't yet exist. At the time, Motorola's 68K sales force wouldn't lower themselves to talk to the designers of small computer systems; they insisted the 6809 (with a different sales force) was their solution in that market, although they changed their minds when they found themselves awash in 4-MHz 68000's about a year later. As for the Z8000... well...
In addition, IBM wanted to use an 8-bit bus. Remember, those were the days of through-hole components and "640K is more memory than anyone could ever need". The iAPX86 was available in an 8-bit version, the 8088; Motorola didn't even announce the 68008 until a year after the PC was introduced.
Certainly IBM has been known to intentionally cripple its products (the PC-Jr comes to mind), but the use of the iAPX86 architecture probably wasn't such a case.
http://www.esrin.esa.it/htdocs/tidc/Press/Press96/ ariane5rep.html
I doubt that it's in Ada; I think the software predates Ada.
As for something better: in a word, Eiffel.
Unfortunately, there's an old but true saying:
Eiffel is an amazingly clean, simple, and straightforward object-oriented language. It removes both the ability and the need for clever coding hacks, thereby shifting most of the development effort to software design rather than implementation. Most "programmers" aren't designers, though, and they scream bloody murder that they can't code something really cool likewhile (*to++ = *from++);
obOSS: A GPL'ed Eiffel compiler is available at http://www.loria.fr/projets/SmallEiffel/.
But they did. From report for study #2:
It may be that Myst is just as exciting as Wolfenstein 3D
There's a difference between exciting and physiologically arousing, and this didn't escape the researchers:
And:
And:
And:
Check out this posting on creating Windows EXE's using SmallEiffel on Linux.
Intel is in the motherboard business now. The days of upgrading a CPU without changing the motherboard are behind us. If it ain't the socket/slot, it's the VRM.
It's not about convincing people who have something that they're happy with that they should upgrade. It's about having a product which is half-way competitive with AMD for those people who are looking for a new computer.
There are still a lot of folks looking for a first (cheap) computer, and an amazing number of antique systems out there. My company just upgraded my software development system from the Pentium-166 that I'd been using. We have tons of 486 systems still in use, including a bunch of SX-25's. We will be buying new computers to replace those over the next few years, and we certainly will be looking for cheap ones.
For the forward-looking:
The W3C's XHTML 1.0 spec states in part:
Must be one'a them Eiffel people.
Codin' ain't borin' if'n ya does it in a suitable language, like C++. Jest tryin' ta 'member all them funny rules 'n' exceptions is 'nuff to keep yerself charged up.
I wouldn't touch AltaVista, no way. Their ISP, 1stUp.com, specifically reserves the right to sell their partners your name, address, e-mail, and just about everything else that they know or find out about you.
NetZero has worked well for me.
However, my current recommendation is FreeWWWeb. At the moment, they don't run ads or anything, so there's no software to download, no fooling about. Just configure your dialer and your server addresses, and away you go. They're the only free ISP in the US with an NNTP server (AFAIK). Because there's no software to download, you don't have to be running Windows, either. And, if you should happen to head into Canada, they even have access numbers there.
It sure looks to me like they reserve the right to sell your name, address, e-mail address, etc.
Contrast this with the policies for NetZero, FreeI, FreeWWWeb. In fact, FreeI doesn't even collect personal identification data in the first place.
I've got one, the Panasonic PVS-9670. It works pretty much like kramer says.
During recording, it makes an internal note each time it thinks it detects a DC restoration signal. When recording is done, and it's got some free time, it rewinds the tape and marks the beginning and end of each commercial break. It does appear to use time spans to distinguish commercials from program; the short bits are the commercials. This marking process is time-consuming; for a 1-hour program recorded at SP, it takes about 15 minutes before the VCR finally shuts down.
During playback, on encountering a "start commercial" marker, it goes into fast-forward to the next "end commercial" marker.
There are setup menu options to turn off the marking on record, and to turn off the auto-skip on playback.
The results are pretty good. I'd estimate it gets it right >80% of the time. It's most likely to mess up when there are a lot of commercials in a row, especially if your local station breaks in to run local spots. In that case, it tends to stop skipping early, leaving you watching the last couple of commercials.
I've never seen it skip anything which wasn't a commercial.
In any event, if it gets it wrong, the worst that happens is you have to grab the remote control and do it yourself, which is what you'd've had to have done anyway. No real loss.
You have given up your anonymity, not your privacy.
The two are separate concepts. For example, your medical records are private but not anonymous. And someone distributing a "hidden cam" video of you violates your privacy even though you remain anonymous.
As we lose our anonymity, we must insist that it be replaced by privacy.
There is no point in fussing over the possibility that the US government is going to legislate the 'Net. Commercial forces will do it for them.
Within a few years, most Americans will have a choice of exactly two ISP's: their cable provider (AT&T in most cases) and their ILEC Telco (SBC, in most cases). With dial-up access disappearing, the independent ISP's are on Death Row.
The two big ISP's will be working some very big-dollar deals with advertisers and such. I guarantee that those deals will include the ISP restricting subscribers in various ways. If you thought that AOL's Terms Of Service were onerous, just wait until you see what happens when your ISP lands a zillion-dollar deal with McDonalds. Your ISP will become child-safe.
Some good stuff on that site, well worth looking at.
A quick introduction to Soft Tempest (in HTML, Anderson seems to like PDF) can be found here. It's particularly interesting how the project was started: