"You mean I have to Click the MOUSE button to enter the first field? Hey! The Tab key doesnt work!"
The mouse may be among the worst UI disasters in history, due to its rampant misuse.
Even after years of working with computers, I still use vi, bash in vi mode, and emacs (yes, in vi emulation mode). Even in dbx, the vi bash mode carries over. One set of keystrokes for vi is widely emulated and is an amazing productivity booster. After all this, whenever I see an IDE for programming, I gag.
C like UNIX? Assembly like the really old dinosaur computers? Visual Basic in some fit of irony?
The fact that UNIX, DOS, and Windows are all written mostly in C, C++, and a bit of assembly is common knowledge, but it seems mainframes are more than figuratively a "black box".
Unfortunately, collges are too focused on loading up students with the hot new things (it appears to be Java now) and passing out easy degrees rather than having a comprehensive CIS program.
One very significant problem is that many companies no longer seem to do on-the-job-training for technologies that aren't proprietary (i.e., only the company knows it anyway). Most classified ads say "don't bother applying if you aren't already an expert at obscure tech XYZ". They simply don't see their employees as investments, any longer--they just want some magic pixie to come and build their next killer "web app".
Businesses want to ignore training, hoping the problems just magically disappear. This is why they look to colleges and tech schools to train people (at the people's expense) so they don't have to. The end result is tons of incompetence, waste, and frustration leading to very high turnover in many companies. Sometimes at interviews, once I see how a company operates, all I can do is be polite and hope the interview ends soon.
Most company executives spout a few words about how valuable their employees are, but how many of them are really and truly willing to follow through with genuine company-paid on-the-job training?
Payroll must be the first system in each company that management screws up.
We went from a single web form for time entry (super quick), to a ten-click-to-anything piece of shit "web-enabled" piece of shit (yes, it needs repeating). Not only that, it runs on Windows NT--the downtime is embarrasing. Company-wide, the cost of the labor hours required for just entering labor hours must be staggering.
Everyone already knows that Earth is the mating grounds for the Venusians and the Martians. Why speculate about life with which we are already intimately familiar?
Maybe it's just me, but every other invention and discovery means, along the other things, smaller cellphones.
This reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit where Will Ferrell pulls out a miniature toy phone (at most two centimeters long) as a parody of this trend.
One thing I've noticed is that cell phones are still thick even though their overall size is small. This makes them less comfortable than PDAs in a pant pocket. Maybe this reverso-refracto stuff will fix this.
Even if Sun produce an UltraSparc 4 processor (or whatever) with this technology built in, my guess is that it will be literally years before the popular Solaris compilers catch up (those being Sun Workshop and gcc).
Sun Workshop (now Forte (now Sun ONE Compiler Suite)) should not be a problem. Sun's compiler has thorough support from generic SPARC v9 output to specific USIII/VIS output. When the USIV comes out, the next version of the compiler will simply have new command-line switches.
Additionally, the multi-threading support in these new CPUs will be abstracted by the kernel APIs, meaning most programmers and compilers really won't notice the change from a regular UltraSPARC to the super-mega-32-thread-UltraSPARC. Sun is serious when they say "binary compatibility" (all the way from vintage SPARCstation up to brand new Sun Fire 15K; SPARC v9 is a superset of SPARC v8).
It is scaleable - provided you have the right sort of coast, with very deep war relatively close to the shore.
Then, global warming is our friend! Just wait for a few more years, and those Colorado ski resorts will be beach-front resorts and valuable power generating stations.
Think about all the money you could have spent on extended warranties over the years if you fell for the sales pitches. For me, that could easily be thousands of dollars (including the ones they push for cars). A thousand or thousands of dollars is plenty to replace the odd thing that breaks.
My point: don't buy extended warranties, because you are self-insured! The money saved over time more than covers anything that would actually need servicing or replacement.
Officially, only the SEI (or people acting on its behalf, I suppose) can evaluate a company and say they are "CMM Level 5". Getting to this point requires putting forth the proof that a process is repeatable, which for any group of humans, requires bureaucracy to handle the documentation and enforcement of the process. Strong will and discipline is sufficient for organizing a family, but it isn't sufficient for obtaining CMM level 5.
Also, processes implementing the CMMs are highly company-specific, which add an even higher learning curve and training burden for developers and managers. Imagine, in the family scenario, having peer reviews and QA meetings for each meal served, the greenness of the yard, why isn't Jimmy doing well in Algebra, etc. while keeping written records of it all for accountability and future analysis. For small teams, it is very possible for this sort of process to interfere with getting real work done.
I feel it is very important to separate the bureaucrats from the developers while imposing as little (or, at least, transparent) process on the developers as possible to satisfy whatever documentation and metrics gathering are needed. This is where bureaucracy can be helpful without being overbearing: developers can develop without needing to worry about formatting meeting minutes, making travel reservations, administering their own bug reporting system, etc. For small groups, however, this bureaucracy is very hard to afford--and the CMM breaks down.
Focus on cross-platform languages and libraries. You may not keep your job anyway, but you'll be flexible.
An additional benefit is that the concepts behind platform-independent technology are often behind the proprietary stuff as well. For example, if an interviewer asks about ASP, the interviewee can say "well, I'm familiar with JSP and/or PHP, which shares many of the concepts behind ASP, such as session management,..."
Saying any individual coder is at CMM 4 only works if one person is the entire process.
I'm pretty convinced that any project with one or only a few developers is CMM Level 1, regardless of what the CEO brags about. The CMM implies bureaucracy, where there really needs to be additional people on staff to handle all the documentation. Other people are needed to enforce the process. There also needs to be extra managers to handle all the new communication overhead. Don't forget the payroll people to handle all the new accounting practices. Oh, and there's the system administration overhead of all those CM tools.
I'm pretty convinced that the CMM is relevant only to those companies big enough to rival governments in sloth and politics, where some rule of law, essentially, is needed to keep everything moving forward.
I wholeheartedly wish for Sun the best of luck in this endeavor. However, I wonder if the barriers of entry to the desktop are so high that even Sun might not be able to devote enough resources to it.
As a counter-example to desktop software, consider cars. The barriers to entry in the automotive market are extremely high, but these barriers are generally very well defined. A new car company needs the resources to make their new car: 1) work on roads, 2) meet DOT & EPA regulations, 3) handle and appear as well as the competition, and 4) be durable under typical usage. It is completely plausible that, given enough resources, the new car company can pull it off and have a tangible product that can be immediately sold. In support of this argument, look at Kia and Hyundai over the past several years in U.S. markets.
None of these well-defined barriers work for desktop software. 1) There are no roads, at least for office software, high-level design software, financial software, etc. 2) There are no regulations for quality. 3) The competition is garbage, but people still buy it! 4) Durable software (meaning completely stable and reliable) is almost prohibitively expensive to build. Oh, and consumers have been conditioned for years to enjoy the worst, anyway. Given the cynicism and the ignorance of the public, there are no guarantees that this product can be sold at all.
(Sigh) I think the software industry has a long way to go.
And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.
This is incorrect. Sun Blade 2000 workstations start out at much less than $10,000. The ones that actually do cost ten times as much as the PC come with 2 CPUs, XVR-1000 graphics, and Gigabytes of RAM. Dropping the XVR-1000 is an instant 3 or 4 thousand dollar savings, for example.
They run the whole thing off of a Sun Blade 500MHz with 2GB RAM
And, according to the FAQ, Slashdot is run off 600MHz CPUs in a modestly-sized cluster. Stuff like this makes me look at the crap-apps running on our SMP "enterprise" servers and shake my head.
I think I've been hearing "we can just throw more hardware at it later" ever since my first 386...
And about the bised part, where i am, every 30 minutes, a big cross goes on the screen telling us to pray to god for the sake of our solders.
Along with Saddam's countdown to death and the alert-o-meter, I think everyone knows by now that Fox News is a piece of crap. Fox News is more like Hard Copy than CNN, and even CNN is pushing the limits of good taste.
Definitely. I noticed that most games still have essentially the same description on the back of their box even after two decades of gaming, which is pretty disappointing. Any box that reads "15 levels and 40 different types of monsters!" is worth putting back onto the shelf.
Even worse, is that certain game companies seem to make the same game over and over but put a different name on it. Really, what's the difference between Final Fantasy 8, The Legend of Dragoon, and Okage the Shadow King, for example, other than nuances of plot and different graphic designers on staff. They all have the same tedious battle sequence, tired repetitive character dances, you go around and buy stuff, etc.
Windows 95 v4.00.950 (July 1995) - 34,621K Windows 95 v4.00.950B (May 1997) - 45,169K
How can they release the same major version of Windows yet make it a full 30% bigger? That's sound engineering; I don't want to even estimate the number of changes between "" and "B".
...I've found that most people also believe that the Iraqis were behind 9/11...
I've seen this stated several times, but I can't see how this is true. Where does this theory come from? Where does this statistic come from?
While it is certainly possible and plausible that Saddam funded and/or encouraged terrorists, to say that Iraq was behind it all is a bit of a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows CNN is extremely liberal. Everyone knows Fox News is somewhat conservative.
I prefer to say that Fox News is trash, CNN is trash that doesn't smell quite as bad, and MSNBC is owned by Microsoft (need I say more).
News on TV and cable is good for only overviews of big events (big things blow up, Wolf keeps his beard trim, etc.). Details take some more research.
"You mean I have to Click the MOUSE button to enter the first field? Hey! The Tab key doesnt work!"
The mouse may be among the worst UI disasters in history, due to its rampant misuse.
Even after years of working with computers, I still use vi, bash in vi mode, and emacs (yes, in vi emulation mode). Even in dbx, the vi bash mode carries over. One set of keystrokes for vi is widely emulated and is an amazing productivity booster. After all this, whenever I see an IDE for programming, I gag.
What are mainframe operating systems written in?
C like UNIX? Assembly like the really old dinosaur computers? Visual Basic in some fit of irony?
The fact that UNIX, DOS, and Windows are all written mostly in C, C++, and a bit of assembly is common knowledge, but it seems mainframes are more than figuratively a "black box".
Unfortunately, collges are too focused on loading up students with the hot new things (it appears to be Java now) and passing out easy degrees rather than having a comprehensive CIS program.
One very significant problem is that many companies no longer seem to do on-the-job-training for technologies that aren't proprietary (i.e., only the company knows it anyway). Most classified ads say "don't bother applying if you aren't already an expert at obscure tech XYZ". They simply don't see their employees as investments, any longer--they just want some magic pixie to come and build their next killer "web app".
Businesses want to ignore training, hoping the problems just magically disappear. This is why they look to colleges and tech schools to train people (at the people's expense) so they don't have to. The end result is tons of incompetence, waste, and frustration leading to very high turnover in many companies. Sometimes at interviews, once I see how a company operates, all I can do is be polite and hope the interview ends soon.
Most company executives spout a few words about how valuable their employees are, but how many of them are really and truly willing to follow through with genuine company-paid on-the-job training?
By the way, does anyone wonder what would happen if the government taxed the bible (which is in public domain)?
This is the problem. The Public Domain is so valuable (even though it is "free"), that decisions to limit it only stifle economic growth.
Disney, and, now the Mexican government. What a bunch of greedy losers.
Just make sure it is very well documented how to turn it off. Either a checkbox in the UI or an entry in prefs.js would suit me just fine.
It was the payroll system.
Payroll must be the first system in each company that management screws up.
We went from a single web form for time entry (super quick), to a ten-click-to-anything piece of shit "web-enabled" piece of shit (yes, it needs repeating). Not only that, it runs on Windows NT--the downtime is embarrasing. Company-wide, the cost of the labor hours required for just entering labor hours must be staggering.
I forget what it is exactly, something like ./setup \net.
setup -net
It allows NFS and OpenOffice to be very good friends.
Everyone already knows that Earth is the mating grounds for the Venusians and the Martians. Why speculate about life with which we are already intimately familiar?
I'm not sure abstracting one's family is a good thing.
Right now, it's two-income households and daycare, where good family time is essentially non-existant.
Now, that almost non-existant family time is virtualized. Just wonderful.
Why do so many people strive for these things?
...after 22 years of education 14.7 percent -- one in seven -- of gay and bisexual black men ages 23 to 29 become HIV-positive each year.
Now that 314% of gay and bisexual black men ages 23 to 29 have HIV, what can we do?
Wow 750 infected and 22 dead. How about the millions dead from AIDs?
AIDS can be prevented. Can an airborne virus?
Maybe it's just me, but every other invention and discovery means, along the other things, smaller cellphones.
This reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit where Will Ferrell pulls out a miniature toy phone (at most two centimeters long) as a parody of this trend.
One thing I've noticed is that cell phones are still thick even though their overall size is small. This makes them less comfortable than PDAs in a pant pocket. Maybe this reverso-refracto stuff will fix this.
Even if Sun produce an UltraSparc 4 processor (or whatever) with this technology built in, my guess is that it will be literally years before the popular Solaris compilers catch up (those being Sun Workshop and gcc).
Sun Workshop (now Forte (now Sun ONE Compiler Suite)) should not be a problem. Sun's compiler has thorough support from generic SPARC v9 output to specific USIII/VIS output. When the USIV comes out, the next version of the compiler will simply have new command-line switches.
Additionally, the multi-threading support in these new CPUs will be abstracted by the kernel APIs, meaning most programmers and compilers really won't notice the change from a regular UltraSPARC to the super-mega-32-thread-UltraSPARC. Sun is serious when they say "binary compatibility" (all the way from vintage SPARCstation up to brand new Sun Fire 15K; SPARC v9 is a superset of SPARC v8).
It is scaleable - provided you have the right sort of coast, with very deep war relatively close to the shore.
Then, global warming is our friend! Just wait for a few more years, and those Colorado ski resorts will be beach-front resorts and valuable power generating stations.
Think about all the money you could have spent on extended warranties over the years if you fell for the sales pitches. For me, that could easily be thousands of dollars (including the ones they push for cars). A thousand or thousands of dollars is plenty to replace the odd thing that breaks.
My point: don't buy extended warranties, because you are self-insured! The money saved over time more than covers anything that would actually need servicing or replacement.
Your family can be at CMM 5...
Officially, only the SEI (or people acting on its behalf, I suppose) can evaluate a company and say they are "CMM Level 5". Getting to this point requires putting forth the proof that a process is repeatable, which for any group of humans, requires bureaucracy to handle the documentation and enforcement of the process. Strong will and discipline is sufficient for organizing a family, but it isn't sufficient for obtaining CMM level 5.
Also, processes implementing the CMMs are highly company-specific, which add an even higher learning curve and training burden for developers and managers. Imagine, in the family scenario, having peer reviews and QA meetings for each meal served, the greenness of the yard, why isn't Jimmy doing well in Algebra, etc. while keeping written records of it all for accountability and future analysis. For small teams, it is very possible for this sort of process to interfere with getting real work done.
I feel it is very important to separate the bureaucrats from the developers while imposing as little (or, at least, transparent) process on the developers as possible to satisfy whatever documentation and metrics gathering are needed. This is where bureaucracy can be helpful without being overbearing: developers can develop without needing to worry about formatting meeting minutes, making travel reservations, administering their own bug reporting system, etc. For small groups, however, this bureaucracy is very hard to afford--and the CMM breaks down.
Focus on cross-platform languages and libraries.
..."
You may not keep your job anyway, but you'll be flexible.
An additional benefit is that the concepts behind platform-independent technology are often behind the proprietary stuff as well. For example, if an interviewer asks about ASP, the interviewee can say "well, I'm familiar with JSP and/or PHP, which shares many of the concepts behind ASP, such as session management,
Saying any individual coder is at CMM 4 only works if one person is the entire process.
I'm pretty convinced that any project with one or only a few developers is CMM Level 1, regardless of what the CEO brags about. The CMM implies bureaucracy, where there really needs to be additional people on staff to handle all the documentation. Other people are needed to enforce the process. There also needs to be extra managers to handle all the new communication overhead. Don't forget the payroll people to handle all the new accounting practices. Oh, and there's the system administration overhead of all those CM tools.
I'm pretty convinced that the CMM is relevant only to those companies big enough to rival governments in sloth and politics, where some rule of law, essentially, is needed to keep everything moving forward.
I wholeheartedly wish for Sun the best of luck in this endeavor. However, I wonder if the barriers of entry to the desktop are so high that even Sun might not be able to devote enough resources to it.
As a counter-example to desktop software, consider cars. The barriers to entry in the automotive market are extremely high, but these barriers are generally very well defined. A new car company needs the resources to make their new car: 1) work on roads, 2) meet DOT & EPA regulations, 3) handle and appear as well as the competition, and 4) be durable under typical usage. It is completely plausible that, given enough resources, the new car company can pull it off and have a tangible product that can be immediately sold. In support of this argument, look at Kia and Hyundai over the past several years in U.S. markets.
None of these well-defined barriers work for desktop software. 1) There are no roads, at least for office software, high-level design software, financial software, etc. 2) There are no regulations for quality. 3) The competition is garbage, but people still buy it! 4) Durable software (meaning completely stable and reliable) is almost prohibitively expensive to build. Oh, and consumers have been conditioned for years to enjoy the worst, anyway. Given the cynicism and the ignorance of the public, there are no guarantees that this product can be sold at all.
(Sigh) I think the software industry has a long way to go.
And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.
This is incorrect. Sun Blade 2000 workstations start out at much less than $10,000. The ones that actually do cost ten times as much as the PC come with 2 CPUs, XVR-1000 graphics, and Gigabytes of RAM. Dropping the XVR-1000 is an instant 3 or 4 thousand dollar savings, for example.
They run the whole thing off of a Sun Blade 500MHz with 2GB RAM
And, according to the FAQ, Slashdot is run off 600MHz CPUs in a modestly-sized cluster. Stuff like this makes me look at the crap-apps running on our SMP "enterprise" servers and shake my head.
I think I've been hearing "we can just throw more hardware at it later" ever since my first 386...
And about the bised part, where i am, every 30 minutes, a big cross goes on the screen telling us to pray to god for the sake of our solders.
Along with Saddam's countdown to death and the alert-o-meter, I think everyone knows by now that Fox News is a piece of crap. Fox News is more like Hard Copy than CNN, and even CNN is pushing the limits of good taste.
Killing monsters is getting old for sure.
Definitely. I noticed that most games still have essentially the same description on the back of their box even after two decades of gaming, which is pretty disappointing. Any box that reads "15 levels and 40 different types of monsters!" is worth putting back onto the shelf.
Even worse, is that certain game companies seem to make the same game over and over but put a different name on it. Really, what's the difference between Final Fantasy 8, The Legend of Dragoon, and Okage the Shadow King, for example, other than nuances of plot and different graphic designers on staff. They all have the same tedious battle sequence, tired repetitive character dances, you go around and buy stuff, etc.
Windows 95 v4.00.950 (July 1995) - 34,621K
Windows 95 v4.00.950B (May 1997) - 45,169K
How can they release the same major version of Windows yet make it a full 30% bigger? That's sound engineering; I don't want to even estimate the number of changes between "" and "B".
...I've found that most people also believe that the Iraqis were behind 9/11 ...
I've seen this stated several times, but I can't see how this is true. Where does this theory come from? Where does this statistic come from?
While it is certainly possible and plausible that Saddam funded and/or encouraged terrorists, to say that Iraq was behind it all is a bit of a stretch.