No, it isn't. I took a legacy application that I began maintaining and used lint to eliminate hundreds of lines of code and several real never-before-detected bugs. It also encouraged me to remove dozens of implicit declarations and redundant "extern" statements in favor of real header files. The application really is better for it, and to do this work without lint would have been very very tedious. Granted, my experience is with Sun's compiler's lint, so I can't say whether other implementations are as good.
...it comes up with a LOT of complaints that are really unnecessary.
Actually, all of lint's complaints are about a potential problem. You just have to decide what is worth the time to fix.
Using lint is a deliberate process that should take several days or weeks for a large application (on the first time through). After that initial investment, using lint is still an important part of the ongoing health of the program, but it should become less and less of an effort each time.
From my brief researcy into the PDA/cellphone combos, I noticed that you'll probably end up picking the phone you like first, and, then, figure out who will support it. It seems the ones I saw (Samsung, Visor) work only on the PCS/CDMA networks and not the TDMA networks. I'd love for someone to prove otherwise, because a PDA/cell combo with multi-network capability would be awesome.
No, no, no...games like Doom affect people differently than games like Legend of Zelda. Why this occurs is a question left to psychological researchers, because there is obviously something to violent video games. However, I'm convinced that the people writing the legislation are trying to dictate what that something is without really knowing what it really is. Just making up some sort of arbitrary guidelines isn't the answer.
If you think about it, Super Mario Bros. is pretty darn violent (you know, smushing all them koopas).
Pac-man is violent.
NCAA Football is violent.
Doom 3 is violent.
Of course, violent to different degrees...where's the line drawn in these cases? I remember having loads of fun with Legend of Zelda and even the original Spy Hunter (remember that?). I was in elementary school at the time. In high school, I do remember having some wierd dreams after playing Doom, however (tell us why Psychologists, before people begin making arbtrary laws).
Trucks and tanks are one thing, but what about the dead people...
I've seen a documentary or two aired on U.S. cable stations (History channel, Discovery channel, etc.) that show the bodies strewn about the blown up vehicles.
Granted, most of the documentaries focused on neat-o technology and smart-bomb footage, but there were a few unmistakable scenes showing the aftermath.
What they show on the local evening news or CNN is another matter, but I attribute that to the fact that many TV newspeople are more easily affected by their viewers' preferences (gotta have ratings ratings ratings).
How many casualties have you actually seen in the news these days?
Footage from the last Gulf War is pretty darn gruesome. The "highway of death", shelled-out tanks, etc. There doesn't appear to be much censorship there.
Granted, this is all after the fact, but I don't get the impression that the last Gulf War has been highly sanitized for our consumption.
I'd be more curious what's been left out of news about Panama, Libya, Yugoslovia, Afghanistan, etc. (i.e., the smaller more tactical wars that can be more easily manipulated in the media)
I work for a large software development company that is trying to implement "Six Sigma" and it is a joke.
There are several replies to the article mentioning that Six Sigma is for manufacturing processes, and other replies mentioning Six Sigma in the context of software development. If the software project managers are really hungry for a formalized process, why not implement the CMM-SW or CMMI? They are designed from the ground up for software and not for manufacturing.
or if you have a HA cluster of inexpensive boxes, just dump the faulty one & replace the component if obvious to find.
HA clusters have limited applicability. There are lots of situations where there simply aren't the resources to manage a cluster (due to space, system requirements, etc.).
Clusters have become fasionable. However, outside of stateless application servers and rendering farms they often are not cost effective. For example, for an Oracle cluster, how many Oracle licenses can an organization stomach? Probably two...for a two-way cluster. With only two servers, the repair turn-around time must be very fast to minimize the chances of both servers being down. That's where the diagnostic capabilities of the Sun hardware comes in handy.
Also, I forgot to mention in my earlier post that other vendors besides Sun offer good hardware, too. I'd bet SGI, IBM RS/6000, and the HP Alpha boxes do pretty well.
dollar for dollar, x86 offerings will be much lower in price and support costs in the 2-4 processor setups.
I'm not so sure about this anymore. I was very impressed recently when I saw the diagnostic output from a Sun workstation that had a failed component. The Sun workstation reported down to the chip where the system had failed (the information comes out of the serial port during POST). When time equals money, this sort of stuff is hard to beat.
x86 boxes usually require hair-pulling trial-and-error troubleshooting that makes one feel terrible about the time wasted. Conversely, with the Sun box, the admin basically said "oh, that's it" and called the vendor.
You must be referring to firewalling on a per-application basis rather than on a per-IP-address or per-protocol basis. Are there good application-level firewall software for UNIX out there? How would a UNIX firewall genuinely be able to tell one application from another? Creating a new socket doesn't exactly require registering the application name (or does it at some level?).
While this was modded funny, this is exactly what the M$ spin-doctors will say. They will do anything to inject fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the those people who don't know enough to argue one way or the other. There are literally millions of people who will see a sentence like that above and have a few neurons flicker to be more skeptical about non-Microsoft products--even when there is no logical basis to do so. The human brain is very sensitive to stuff like this...that's why Microsoft has been so frustratingly successful at sucking in the masses. Why win based on merit, when you can win by bait-n-switch, sleight-of-hand, and non-sequitor?
People who have no idea how to accomplish the goal telling the people tasked with doing it, how it should be done.
Welcome to the real world (sigh). It is very common (especially in government contracts) for the customer's requirements to include specific languages, APIs, and other assorted buzzwords. Nevermind whether they are appropriate for the task...they are a requirement from the customer.
The very sad thing is that many times the required technologies are very immature (e.g., whiz-bang XML specs that are version 1.0 or worse), and the developers don't experience the hard lessons about new and immature technology until after delivering at least one "finished" version of the software. After that, the only recourse is damage control, where the developers are trying to protect their egos and reputations while trying to tactfully lead the customer out of the very deep muddy pit of technology they just bought.
When looking for employment, I try to sniff out projects like this and avoid them like the plague. They are hell. Cleaning toilets for a living is better than a project like that.
This is a system conceived by and designed by bureaucrats. People who talk a lot but don't understand the difficulties of creating new technology and making it fit together. I'd bet that getting up for work each morning was painful for you, and your laugh was more sardonic than happy.
...Itanium2 lists for under $8,000...The best current Alpha (1.25 ghz ev68 for the ES45) will cost you $17,000...
Find me a person who actually pays those prices, and I'll show you a fool. Anyone who knows how to buy hardware doesn't usually buy it from the vendor's on-line store at the vendor's MSRP! High-end salespeople are almost always willing to fudge prices to get a sale--hell, just asking for a quote (especially with the economy now) will make a salesperson piss themselve with joy (oh boy, a potential sale!).
You really can't know the true price of either the Itanium or the Alpha until you call someone and price out a specific system.
What percentage of personal computer users use more than 10GB of hard drive space? Seriously.
If a person isn't determined to use their computer for a PVR, a digital video workstation, or an international citizen tracking database, it might be better to spend the money for a top-notch SCSI hard drive of about 30 to 40 GB.
$250 buys a 36GB 10,000RPM Ultra 320 hard drive with a 1,200,000 hour MTBF and a five-year warranty. The extra price buys: faster seek times, less latency, higher bandwidth, longer drive life, a manufacturer that stands behind their product...and better peace of mind.
Why should a person jump through technically-complex hoops, such as IDE RAID, just to be comfortable with cheap and unreliable hard drives? A single high-performance hard drive coupled with a recovery plan in the slight chance it breaks could be a better plan. My idea of a recovery plan is: a known configuration that can be remade from OEM CD-ROMs plus personal data backups (e.g., CD-RW).
Computer components are so damn cheap anymore, that the money we would have spent on just the basics years ago can now go towards quality and reliability.
Don't forget SPARC! It is also an open alternative to Wintel with a good selection of excellent operating systems: Solaris, Linux, and *BSD.
We all should embrace PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, and other well-known and easily licensed brands of ISAs. These--as long as Congress doesn't screw everything up--will be the path forward when Microsoft, Intel, et. al. try to shove TCPA down everyone's throats.
Also, it certainly doesn't hurt that Sun, SGI, IBM (RS/6000), and Apple all produce really good hardware that lasts into the secondary markets. It isn't hard to find ten-year-old examples of each of these brands still serving useful purposes throughout server rooms and hobbyist desktops all over the world.
When the Wintel-brainwashed masses find themselves backed into an alley with the only exit closing rapidly, we can say to them, "We have the way out!" (imagine Microsoft reeling at the bitter taste of their own words:)
OK, we have an official copy of Windows XP installed.
Even better, it says: OK, we have an official known configuration of Windows XP installed. Bugs intact and certified!
How hard would it be for a cracker to determine the relatively small set of official known configurations out there, develop a new type of port scanner or whatever, and attack away? Finding ways of getting scripts or whatever to execute within the "trusted" environment will be a fun weekend project for many many curious (perhaps mischievous) people out there.
Seriously, the philosophy of sticking to signed code means that the patch cycle really has to slow down. How does Microsoft actually keep track of the signatures of Win XP OEM vs. Win XP OEM + a single patch (or any number of patches)? Sounds like a problem of exponential growth to me.
Even uninstalling it leaves crap everywhere. And their ad-ridden players are massively annoying.
Spyware...you forgot to mention that RealPlayer is spyware (unless every configurable option is scrutinized and disabled appropriately).
It's amazing how many programs try to peek in on what people are doing. PkZip did it for a while, Windows XP & Media Player, RealPlayer, Netscape Download Manager, websites that use cookies--all of you marketeers just need to mind your own business!
...people just don't want to do it for themselves.
Very true. Convenience has a genuine value to people and is why services-based jobs often make for good careers.
Personally, I'm surprised that all the slashdotters need software to do grade 6 arithmetic for them.
It isn't the arithmetic that makes income tax hard. Instead, it's reading through the documentation, coming up with three different ways to define the same thing (each with vastly different tax liabilities), and, then, choosing the cheapest one and hoping for the best. The U.S. Income Tax is artificially hard (it doesn't have to be--it just became a twisted mess as more and more people 'tweaked' it for one cause or another).
Learn from me: go to a tax prep specialist and stay the hell away from do-it-yourself software solutions.
This is why the U.S. Federal Income Tax is an abomination from hell. Why has an entire industry sprung up just for filing individual income tax returns?!? Why is income tax so incomprehensibly convoluted that huge numbers of people give up and pay their own hard-earned wages to a professional just so that the federal government won't throw them in prison for tax evasion?!?
The U.S. Federal Income Tax is a tool of ass-sucking politicians, nothing more.
One thing I find interesting about SPARC is that it looks like it was designed for UNIX. Register windows, priviledged mode, many SMP implementations, and the RISC approach in general just makes SPARC a shoe-in for C-language based multi-user multi-processing systems.
Also, SPARC is far from the kludge that is x86. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit looks like it went smoothly, and there is 32-bit compatibility built into the 64-bit instruction set.
Additionally, RISC ISAs are easy to read and understand.
You can license the SPARC brand for $99 and make your own compliant implementations with only encouragement and a pat on the back from Sun, Fujitsu, etc. Try getting that from Intel! In fact, I see SPARC as one of the get-a-way vehicles if/when Palladium becomes standard on x86 systems. A group of determined people can create a Free SPARC implementation for Free software, and Microsoft and Intel can only pick their nose and cry about it.
From what I've seen, design-as-you-go is very very dangerous when average programmers are doing the work.
Even Extreme Programming does not remove the dependency of needing a super-star on the team. No design or programming philosophy does. This is why such philosophies are for informational purposes only--no real project should actually be based upon one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
lint is horrible
...it comes up with a LOT of complaints that are really unnecessary.
No, it isn't. I took a legacy application that I began maintaining and used lint to eliminate hundreds of lines of code and several real never-before-detected bugs. It also encouraged me to remove dozens of implicit declarations and redundant "extern" statements in favor of real header files. The application really is better for it, and to do this work without lint would have been very very tedious. Granted, my experience is with Sun's compiler's lint, so I can't say whether other implementations are as good.
Actually, all of lint's complaints are about a potential problem. You just have to decide what is worth the time to fix.
Using lint is a deliberate process that should take several days or weeks for a large application (on the first time through). After that initial investment, using lint is still an important part of the ongoing health of the program, but it should become less and less of an effort each time.
From my brief researcy into the PDA/cellphone combos, I noticed that you'll probably end up picking the phone you like first, and, then, figure out who will support it. It seems the ones I saw (Samsung, Visor) work only on the PCS/CDMA networks and not the TDMA networks. I'd love for someone to prove otherwise, because a PDA/cell combo with multi-network capability would be awesome.
No, no, no...games like Doom affect people differently than games like Legend of Zelda. Why this occurs is a question left to psychological researchers, because there is obviously something to violent video games. However, I'm convinced that the people writing the legislation are trying to dictate what that something is without really knowing what it really is. Just making up some sort of arbitrary guidelines isn't the answer.
Oh yeah, don't forget that the federal government is marketing war games to our teenagers to boost enlistment rates.
If you think about it, Super Mario Bros. is pretty darn violent (you know, smushing all them koopas).
Pac-man is violent.
NCAA Football is violent.
Doom 3 is violent.
Of course, violent to different degrees...where's the line drawn in these cases? I remember having loads of fun with Legend of Zelda and even the original Spy Hunter (remember that?). I was in elementary school at the time. In high school, I do remember having some wierd dreams after playing Doom, however (tell us why Psychologists, before people begin making arbtrary laws).
Trucks and tanks are one thing, but what about the dead people...
I've seen a documentary or two aired on U.S. cable stations (History channel, Discovery channel, etc.) that show the bodies strewn about the blown up vehicles.
Granted, most of the documentaries focused on neat-o technology and smart-bomb footage, but there were a few unmistakable scenes showing the aftermath.
What they show on the local evening news or CNN is another matter, but I attribute that to the fact that many TV newspeople are more easily affected by their viewers' preferences (gotta have ratings ratings ratings).
How many casualties have you actually seen in the news these days?
Footage from the last Gulf War is pretty darn gruesome. The "highway of death", shelled-out tanks, etc. There doesn't appear to be much censorship there.
Granted, this is all after the fact, but I don't get the impression that the last Gulf War has been highly sanitized for our consumption.
I'd be more curious what's been left out of news about Panama, Libya, Yugoslovia, Afghanistan, etc. (i.e., the smaller more tactical wars that can be more easily manipulated in the media)
I work for a large software development company that is trying to implement "Six Sigma" and it is a joke.
There are several replies to the article mentioning that Six Sigma is for manufacturing processes, and other replies mentioning Six Sigma in the context of software development. If the software project managers are really hungry for a formalized process, why not implement the CMM-SW or CMMI? They are designed from the ground up for software and not for manufacturing.
or if you have a HA cluster of inexpensive boxes, just dump the faulty one & replace the component if obvious to find.
HA clusters have limited applicability. There are lots of situations where there simply aren't the resources to manage a cluster (due to space, system requirements, etc.).
Clusters have become fasionable. However, outside of stateless application servers and rendering farms they often are not cost effective. For example, for an Oracle cluster, how many Oracle licenses can an organization stomach? Probably two...for a two-way cluster. With only two servers, the repair turn-around time must be very fast to minimize the chances of both servers being down. That's where the diagnostic capabilities of the Sun hardware comes in handy.
Also, I forgot to mention in my earlier post that other vendors besides Sun offer good hardware, too. I'd bet SGI, IBM RS/6000, and the HP Alpha boxes do pretty well.
dollar for dollar, x86 offerings will be much lower in price and support costs in the 2-4 processor setups.
I'm not so sure about this anymore. I was very impressed recently when I saw the diagnostic output from a Sun workstation that had a failed component. The Sun workstation reported down to the chip where the system had failed (the information comes out of the serial port during POST). When time equals money, this sort of stuff is hard to beat.
x86 boxes usually require hair-pulling trial-and-error troubleshooting that makes one feel terrible about the time wasted. Conversely, with the Sun box, the admin basically said "oh, that's it" and called the vendor.
Learn to use software firewalls if you can.
You must be referring to firewalling on a per-application basis rather than on a per-IP-address or per-protocol basis. Are there good application-level firewall software for UNIX out there? How would a UNIX firewall genuinely be able to tell one application from another? Creating a new socket doesn't exactly require registering the application name (or does it at some level?).
"Using Linux causes death!"
While this was modded funny, this is exactly what the M$ spin-doctors will say. They will do anything to inject fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the those people who don't know enough to argue one way or the other. There are literally millions of people who will see a sentence like that above and have a few neurons flicker to be more skeptical about non-Microsoft products--even when there is no logical basis to do so. The human brain is very sensitive to stuff like this...that's why Microsoft has been so frustratingly successful at sucking in the masses. Why win based on merit, when you can win by bait-n-switch, sleight-of-hand, and non-sequitor?
People who have no idea how to accomplish the goal telling the people tasked with doing it, how it should be done.
Welcome to the real world (sigh). It is very common (especially in government contracts) for the customer's requirements to include specific languages, APIs, and other assorted buzzwords. Nevermind whether they are appropriate for the task...they are a requirement from the customer.
The very sad thing is that many times the required technologies are very immature (e.g., whiz-bang XML specs that are version 1.0 or worse), and the developers don't experience the hard lessons about new and immature technology until after delivering at least one "finished" version of the software. After that, the only recourse is damage control, where the developers are trying to protect their egos and reputations while trying to tactfully lead the customer out of the very deep muddy pit of technology they just bought.
When looking for employment, I try to sniff out projects like this and avoid them like the plague. They are hell. Cleaning toilets for a living is better than a project like that.
Steering committee...technical committee...XML...Oracle...BEA...ugh.
This is a system conceived by and designed by bureaucrats. People who talk a lot but don't understand the difficulties of creating new technology and making it fit together. I'd bet that getting up for work each morning was painful for you, and your laugh was more sardonic than happy.
...Itanium2 lists for under $8,000...The best current Alpha (1.25 ghz ev68 for the ES45) will cost you $17,000...
Find me a person who actually pays those prices, and I'll show you a fool. Anyone who knows how to buy hardware doesn't usually buy it from the vendor's on-line store at the vendor's MSRP! High-end salespeople are almost always willing to fudge prices to get a sale--hell, just asking for a quote (especially with the economy now) will make a salesperson piss themselve with joy (oh boy, a potential sale!).
You really can't know the true price of either the Itanium or the Alpha until you call someone and price out a specific system.
Cheap is better! IDE RAID just like real RAID. Kill the dissenter!
(dodges thrown chair, peeks up to talk to AC) Thanks! (ducks just in time to avoid rack-mount JBOD, whispers to self) Damn PeeCee owners...
What percentage of personal computer users use more than 10GB of hard drive space? Seriously.
If a person isn't determined to use their computer for a PVR, a digital video workstation, or an international citizen tracking database, it might be better to spend the money for a top-notch SCSI hard drive of about 30 to 40 GB.
$250 buys a 36GB 10,000RPM Ultra 320 hard drive with a 1,200,000 hour MTBF and a five-year warranty. The extra price buys: faster seek times, less latency, higher bandwidth, longer drive life, a manufacturer that stands behind their product...and better peace of mind.
Why should a person jump through technically-complex hoops, such as IDE RAID, just to be comfortable with cheap and unreliable hard drives? A single high-performance hard drive coupled with a recovery plan in the slight chance it breaks could be a better plan. My idea of a recovery plan is: a known configuration that can be remade from OEM CD-ROMs plus personal data backups (e.g., CD-RW).
Computer components are so damn cheap anymore, that the money we would have spent on just the basics years ago can now go towards quality and reliability.
bill gates ??
How about on a bathroom stall in honor of Microsoft software and business tactics?
PPC
Don't forget SPARC! It is also an open alternative to Wintel with a good selection of excellent operating systems: Solaris, Linux, and *BSD.
We all should embrace PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, and other well-known and easily licensed brands of ISAs. These--as long as Congress doesn't screw everything up--will be the path forward when Microsoft, Intel, et. al. try to shove TCPA down everyone's throats.
Also, it certainly doesn't hurt that Sun, SGI, IBM (RS/6000), and Apple all produce really good hardware that lasts into the secondary markets. It isn't hard to find ten-year-old examples of each of these brands still serving useful purposes throughout server rooms and hobbyist desktops all over the world.
When the Wintel-brainwashed masses find themselves backed into an alley with the only exit closing rapidly, we can say to them, "We have the way out!" (imagine Microsoft reeling at the bitter taste of their own words:)
OK, we have an official copy of Windows XP installed.
Even better, it says: OK, we have an official known configuration of Windows XP installed. Bugs intact and certified!
How hard would it be for a cracker to determine the relatively small set of official known configurations out there, develop a new type of port scanner or whatever, and attack away? Finding ways of getting scripts or whatever to execute within the "trusted" environment will be a fun weekend project for many many curious (perhaps mischievous) people out there.
Seriously, the philosophy of sticking to signed code means that the patch cycle really has to slow down. How does Microsoft actually keep track of the signatures of Win XP OEM vs. Win XP OEM + a single patch (or any number of patches)? Sounds like a problem of exponential growth to me.
Even uninstalling it leaves crap everywhere. And their ad-ridden players are massively annoying.
Spyware...you forgot to mention that RealPlayer is spyware (unless every configurable option is scrutinized and disabled appropriately).
It's amazing how many programs try to peek in on what people are doing. PkZip did it for a while, Windows XP & Media Player, RealPlayer, Netscape Download Manager, websites that use cookies--all of you marketeers just need to mind your own business!
...people just don't want to do it for themselves.
Very true. Convenience has a genuine value to people and is why services-based jobs often make for good careers.
Personally, I'm surprised that all the slashdotters need software to do grade 6 arithmetic for them.
It isn't the arithmetic that makes income tax hard. Instead, it's reading through the documentation, coming up with three different ways to define the same thing (each with vastly different tax liabilities), and, then, choosing the cheapest one and hoping for the best. The U.S. Income Tax is artificially hard (it doesn't have to be--it just became a twisted mess as more and more people 'tweaked' it for one cause or another).
Learn from me: go to a tax prep specialist and stay the hell away from do-it-yourself software solutions.
This is why the U.S. Federal Income Tax is an abomination from hell. Why has an entire industry sprung up just for filing individual income tax returns?!? Why is income tax so incomprehensibly convoluted that huge numbers of people give up and pay their own hard-earned wages to a professional just so that the federal government won't throw them in prison for tax evasion?!?
The U.S. Federal Income Tax is a tool of ass-sucking politicians, nothing more.
One thing I find interesting about SPARC is that it looks like it was designed for UNIX. Register windows, priviledged mode, many SMP implementations, and the RISC approach in general just makes SPARC a shoe-in for C-language based multi-user multi-processing systems.
Also, SPARC is far from the kludge that is x86. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit looks like it went smoothly, and there is 32-bit compatibility built into the 64-bit instruction set.
Additionally, RISC ISAs are easy to read and understand.
You can license the SPARC brand for $99 and make your own compliant implementations with only encouragement and a pat on the back from Sun, Fujitsu, etc. Try getting that from Intel! In fact, I see SPARC as one of the get-a-way vehicles if/when Palladium becomes standard on x86 systems. A group of determined people can create a Free SPARC implementation for Free software, and Microsoft and Intel can only pick their nose and cry about it.
...design as you go.
From what I've seen, design-as-you-go is very very dangerous when average programmers are doing the work.
Even Extreme Programming does not remove the dependency of needing a super-star on the team. No design or programming philosophy does. This is why such philosophies are for informational purposes only--no real project should actually be based upon one of them.