coders just want to code, not find and fix bugs. So they have other people do that stuff for them...
I can validate that this is what happens in some large software companies. It's not as bad as the respondents seem to think.
In general, the product life cycle is broken up into development and maintenance segments. During the development portion of the life cycle, the coders write new code and defects found by QA are repaired. The product at this point goes through a fairly substantial quality gate.
After the product is released, it is transferred to a maintenance group. This group's specialty is to disgnose customer reported defects and produce fixes and patch kits for them with as little disruption to the existing code base as possible. These changes are, of course, given to the development group for placement into the next release, as well.
If you think about it, these functions require two different mind- and skill-sets. In addition, it keeps your main-line developers from being bogged down to repair low-frequency defects from two+ release old products... and these DO need to be supported for enterprise-level customers who don't want to roll out new releases every six months. The drawback is that you need a fairly large project team to support this structure.
Think of it like the LT working on 2.5 / AC working on 2.4 sort of thing. It really does make sense.
Of course, it also means that Microsoft might be doing something right, so there must be something wrong in my thinking...
It used to take a secretary several *days* of collecting schedules to schedule a meeting.
Then you (a) had really big meetings, really often, (b) staff and secretaries so overloaded they couldn't answer a normal E-mail, or (c) really dumb secretaries.
Here's a clue: When you have more than about 5 people, a non-regular meeting can NEVER be scheduled at time convenient for them all. This is true with a fancy-assed calendaring system, as well. You work around it by having the meeting called by a person higher in authority than anyone at the meeting who also delegates the running of the meeting to whomever originally wanted to call it. The participants will then make time for the meeting or delegate.
Jeezus friggin' Christ, you'd think most of the posters here are anti-social jackasses...
Well, they don't call SlashDot "News for Nerds" for no reason! Of course they're anti-social! They're nerds!
And, as for the jackasses part - well, they try really hard not to be, but their knee-jerk run towards ultra-simplicity often drives them into the Libertarian camp, no matter how messy reality may be.
If you look at it correctly, their positions can be rather touching in a pathetic sort of way, rather than vomit-inducing. At least it can be if you don't look too long.
I use their business class service, too. You also get the advantage that you can usually bypass the normal TS folk and dial direct into their networking center if you have an issue that doesn't concern them as an ISP. It costs a bit more, but it sure is worth it not to have to deal with the run-of-the-mill TS people...
No offense, but there are words for people in other countries that live as you choose to live - peasants. There is nothing inherently wrong in choosing this lifestyle by choice but, in most cases, this situation, by removing the people involved from any chance of economic improvement, tends to lead towards lower health level, lower life expectancy, and lower educational levels, not only in the aggregate, but also on an individual basis. So, good luck, but I am glad that most of my fellow countrymen are not choosing this alternative.
Libertarians believe that it's never morally correct to initiate force against someone in order to achieve a goal. They don't, however, have an issue with responding to such force in your defense.
Well, that'll make my heirs feel REALLY good after I croak from cancer because some dipshit corporation decides to pollute the water I drink and it takes 10 years to get on a court docket. But it doesn't do a hell of a lot for ME. Maybe Libertarians will be taken seriously when they realize that things that cause harm to others occasionally need to be PREVENTED because by the time it happens it's too late for the person who's harmed. And once you realize this, you're back to the same slippery slope as to which things are so harmful as to prevent, what criteria are valid, etc. Of course, Libertarianism is like Communism in the respect that it is a completely logical system that works as long as people don't act human.
No offense, but if any bozo with a P3 and a crappy SQL/Perl system can do it, why haven't they? Why doesn't someone start an open-source travel planner? I'm sure the travel agencies and booking agencies would be happy to use it. And the airlines would provide flight data, as long as they get their cut.
The real reason why people haven't done this "simple" task is that it ISN'T as simple as it sounds and that "simple" solutions turn out to be woefully inadequate when confronted with "real-world" data and problems.
...very similar to constrained graph search problems in speech recognition...
Not really. The objects searched over (phonemes) come from a relatively unchanging set having relatively unchanging attributes (frequency, duration, level, etc.) and are mapped to a relatively unchanging set of objects (vocabulary doesn't change that fast). New service levels, attribute changes, and itineraries need to be taken into count in the airline booking issue.
In the end, it's the flexibility in adding new models and code to handle new models in a seamless manner that makes Lisp (and other dynamic languages - e.g., Smalltalk for finance, Erlang for multiprocessing phone switches) so appealing for this type of problem.
Re:"The Rapture for atheists"
on
True Names
·
· Score: 2
Various technological revolutions have come and gone, and we humans are pretty much the same as we always were, as any student of history, ancient literature, or anthropology could tell you.
And that, my obtuse friend, is the point. We humans are limited in the speed to which we can adapt to change due to the biological matrix from which we came and the social matrices built upon that limited biological matrix. What happens when we introduce a new species that is liberated from that matrix? The point is that we cannot comprehend this new species any more than a chimpanzee could comprehend the human world.
Now compound this with the fact that the new species' evolution is no longer limited by biological speed, but that they start to redesign themselves at an accelerating pace. Now imagine trying to maintain your society or even existance in the face of these new species.
If we are lucky, they will allow us to stay around, perhaps giving us shiny trinkets that will make us happier and healthier. Perhaps, they'll pay as little attention to us as we pay to "lesser" species. And, perhaps, they'll like cows better than us for their pets and just exterminate us because we keep trying to eat them.
Singularity does not even begin to describe this...
Excuse me, but the idea that these VM's are "language independent" is laughable. They are relatively good with standard languages with relatively simple inheritance ideas, but they suck donkey balls on languages like Lisp, Smalltalk (no matter what SmallScript is doing), and Scheme (Kawa doesn't count - it still isn't fully R5RS compliant (only upward continuations, special flags needed to get tail recusrion, etc.) and it's still slower than anything).
Wordpad will allow you to CREATE, OPEN, EDIT and SAVE MSWord files.
Oddly enough, the WordPad program, although it does come bundled with the aforementioned OS'es will only allow you to edit a subset of the constructs possible in a full Word document (otherwise, Microsoft would never sell another copy of Word). So the original poster's question still stands. What if he had to edit a portion of the document that Word did not have the capability to edit.
And the only reason why Word is so commonplace is because it is so commonly pirated. But I guess a true Microsoft die hard thinks it's fine to turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into outlaws simply to edit a crappy document.
I would like to have an OS (kernel, apps and everything in between) written in one language and having a consistent and unified design. The language should preferably be some sort of Lisp.
Check out Symbolics. They sell the old Lisp Machine software
ported to a microcoded emulator that runs on DEC/Compaq/nobody Alpha hardware. You can also still find old Lisp Machines for sale occasionally. They're still pretty sweet.
I hope so. Otherwise, they'd be executing a single instruction pretty damn often:-). I hope you meant that there are too many ways for data coming into a program to inadvertantly take control of the IP.
Why should the government pay for you to have broadband? More apatly, why should I and your fellow citizens pay for YOU to have broadband?
Well, for one, this little thing called the network effect. Even die hard Libertarians recognize the existence of such a beast and seem to think it works wonders for the private sector. Network effects increase the value of everyone's connection as more people are connected. Whether or not you believe that the increase is a net positive or whether the government is the proper mechanism to bring about such an increase is another point. But the network effect answers at least part of the question as to why government might try.
If you have population-dense cities, surrounded by low-density farmland, you can provide access to most of the population simply by providing short-range access in the cities. In the US, most of the demand is in the suburbs, which involve much longer distances and are, therefore, much harder to provide for.
So what you're saying, essentially is that the suburbs suck? Well, goodness! We knew that already!
This is especially true in my home state of Massachusetts, where economics are such that the demand and the money is all in the suburbs.
So what you're saying is that Massachusetts really sucks? OK. I'll buy that...
the utilities you mention are metered, which means charged for actual use of the service (watts and gallons become bytes). and this is, i think, the kind of plan which has to happen to save broadband providers from themselves.
There is no way in hell that I would pay for metered service as long as ISP's allow rampant spamming and viral server accesses. Too much bandwidth gets sucked down by these scourges for me to ignore it. Plus, it creates a positive feedback loop for ISP's not to deal with these things. After all, you pay bandwidth charges for the "privilege" of downloading spam and to respond to viral web-server pings.
But I am a reasonable man. Stop the spammers and (still) Code Red infected customers and I'll talk about paying for bandwidth.
Intel handled their comparatively petty grievances (and the high-handed manner in which the company dealt with it--tells you something right there, doesn't it?).
Amen. My favorite Intel story comes from a guy who worked there a few years back. Turns out there was a cost cutting initiative of some sort and the company decided to make employees turn in their pencil stubs and empty ink pens to get new writing implements. Sheesh. The only problem I see is that some parts of Intel are so Draconian that they're too easy of a target.
I don't know what this "nine parts" jazz is, but that little 1997 blurb is about the funniest thing I've seen all day.
According to Lucas, SW was supposed to be a trilogy of trilogies (Lucas has since recanted and said that E3 will be the last). E5 was out 3 yr. after E4, E6 three years after that. You do the math. No one expected the long hiatus between E6 and E1. After Jar Jar, they wondered if Lucas had waited long enough...
I can't imagine there is much money to be made off the technology, because it's all text - the same search tech applies. So, as far as I can tell, there is no business reason to be doing this.
If you build it, they will come...
The old USENET posts are an information archaeologist's garbage heap. If information has any intrinsic value at all, this is the place to find treasures. Just because some folks see dirt doesn't mean there isn't gold to be mined.
Like most people who have actually read the book, I was VERY disappointed in the "Lord of the Rings" movie.
Well, I didn't read the books and I was still VERY diappointed with the movie. When my local newspaper gave it an A rating (one of the few movies it granted such to), I actually assumed this was going to be a GOOD movie. I can sum up the movie succintly:
In the end, I didn't really give a rat's patootie about any of the characters and half hoped that the bad guys would win (at least then there would be some shots of the goodie two shoes heroes being tortured or something and Middle Earth would be destroyed before anyone else had to sit through the next hideous sequels).
Plodding, deadly dull, and overly long. That's it.
The nice 10 MHz square waves going over an unshielded wire are going to make a whole lot of harmonics (and products) all up and down the radio spectrum. Depending on the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire (and with a transmitting antenna a mile long), I'm pretty sure you'd run afoul of any number of FCC regs. Plus, it would probably just irritate the cows:-).
Slashdot Mirror
I can validate that this is what happens in some large software companies. It's not as bad as the respondents seem to think.
In general, the product life cycle is broken up into development and maintenance segments. During the development portion of the life cycle, the coders write new code and defects found by QA are repaired. The product at this point goes through a fairly substantial quality gate.
After the product is released, it is transferred to a maintenance group. This group's specialty is to disgnose customer reported defects and produce fixes and patch kits for them with as little disruption to the existing code base as possible. These changes are, of course, given to the development group for placement into the next release, as well.
If you think about it, these functions require two different mind- and skill-sets. In addition, it keeps your main-line developers from being bogged down to repair low-frequency defects from two+ release old products... and these DO need to be supported for enterprise-level customers who don't want to roll out new releases every six months. The drawback is that you need a fairly large project team to support this structure.
Think of it like the LT working on 2.5 / AC working on 2.4 sort of thing. It really does make sense.
Of course, it also means that Microsoft might be doing something right, so there must be something wrong in my thinking...
Then you (a) had really big meetings, really often, (b) staff and secretaries so overloaded they couldn't answer a normal E-mail, or (c) really dumb secretaries.
Here's a clue: When you have more than about 5 people, a non-regular meeting can NEVER be scheduled at time convenient for them all. This is true with a fancy-assed calendaring system, as well. You work around it by having the meeting called by a person higher in authority than anyone at the meeting who also delegates the running of the meeting to whomever originally wanted to call it. The participants will then make time for the meeting or delegate.
Well, they don't call SlashDot "News for Nerds" for no reason! Of course they're anti-social! They're nerds!
And, as for the jackasses part - well, they try really hard not to be, but their knee-jerk run towards ultra-simplicity often drives them into the Libertarian camp, no matter how messy reality may be.
If you look at it correctly, their positions can be rather touching in a pathetic sort of way, rather than vomit-inducing. At least it can be if you don't look too long.
They banned this fine educational gem? What kind of perverse government do you have?!?!?!
I use their business class service, too. You also get the advantage that you can usually bypass the normal TS folk and dial direct into their networking center if you have an issue that doesn't concern them as an ISP. It costs a bit more, but it sure is worth it not to have to deal with the run-of-the-mill TS people...
No offense, but there are words for people in other countries that live as you choose to live - peasants. There is nothing inherently wrong in choosing this lifestyle by choice but, in most cases, this situation, by removing the people involved from any chance of economic improvement, tends to lead towards lower health level, lower life expectancy, and lower educational levels, not only in the aggregate, but also on an individual basis. So, good luck, but I am glad that most of my fellow countrymen are not choosing this alternative.
As anyone who has ever worked for a media company can tell you, "Amen".
Well, that'll make my heirs feel REALLY good after I croak from cancer because some dipshit corporation decides to pollute the water I drink and it takes 10 years to get on a court docket. But it doesn't do a hell of a lot for ME. Maybe Libertarians will be taken seriously when they realize that things that cause harm to others occasionally need to be PREVENTED because by the time it happens it's too late for the person who's harmed. And once you realize this, you're back to the same slippery slope as to which things are so harmful as to prevent, what criteria are valid, etc. Of course, Libertarianism is like Communism in the respect that it is a completely logical system that works as long as people don't act human.
The real reason why people haven't done this "simple" task is that it ISN'T as simple as it sounds and that "simple" solutions turn out to be woefully inadequate when confronted with "real-world" data and problems.
Not really. The objects searched over (phonemes) come from a relatively unchanging set having relatively unchanging attributes (frequency, duration, level, etc.) and are mapped to a relatively unchanging set of objects (vocabulary doesn't change that fast). New service levels, attribute changes, and itineraries need to be taken into count in the airline booking issue.
In the end, it's the flexibility in adding new models and code to handle new models in a seamless manner that makes Lisp (and other dynamic languages - e.g., Smalltalk for finance, Erlang for multiprocessing phone switches) so appealing for this type of problem.
And that, my obtuse friend, is the point. We humans are limited in the speed to which we can adapt to change due to the biological matrix from which we came and the social matrices built upon that limited biological matrix. What happens when we introduce a new species that is liberated from that matrix? The point is that we cannot comprehend this new species any more than a chimpanzee could comprehend the human world.
Now compound this with the fact that the new species' evolution is no longer limited by biological speed, but that they start to redesign themselves at an accelerating pace. Now imagine trying to maintain your society or even existance in the face of these new species.
If we are lucky, they will allow us to stay around, perhaps giving us shiny trinkets that will make us happier and healthier. Perhaps, they'll pay as little attention to us as we pay to "lesser" species. And, perhaps, they'll like cows better than us for their pets and just exterminate us because we keep trying to eat them.
Singularity does not even begin to describe this...
Developers, developers, developers...
Excuse me, but the idea that these VM's are "language independent" is laughable. They are relatively good with standard languages with relatively simple inheritance ideas, but they suck donkey balls on languages like Lisp, Smalltalk (no matter what SmallScript is doing), and Scheme (Kawa doesn't count - it still isn't fully R5RS compliant (only upward continuations, special flags needed to get tail recusrion, etc.) and it's still slower than anything).
Oddly enough, the WordPad program, although it does come bundled with the aforementioned OS'es will only allow you to edit a subset of the constructs possible in a full Word document (otherwise, Microsoft would never sell another copy of Word). So the original poster's question still stands. What if he had to edit a portion of the document that Word did not have the capability to edit.
And the only reason why Word is so commonplace is because it is so commonly pirated. But I guess a true Microsoft die hard thinks it's fine to turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into outlaws simply to edit a crappy document.
Yes, this is flame bait. No, I don't care.
And that's why you get paid about 15% of the billable rate :-).
Check out Symbolics. They sell the old Lisp Machine software
ported to a microcoded emulator that runs on DEC/Compaq/nobody Alpha hardware. You can also still find old Lisp Machines for sale occasionally. They're still pretty sweet.
I hope so. Otherwise, they'd be executing a single instruction pretty damn often :-). I hope you meant that there are too many ways for data coming into a program to inadvertantly take control of the IP.
Well, for one, this little thing called the network effect. Even die hard Libertarians recognize the existence of such a beast and seem to think it works wonders for the private sector. Network effects increase the value of everyone's connection as more people are connected. Whether or not you believe that the increase is a net positive or whether the government is the proper mechanism to bring about such an increase is another point. But the network effect answers at least part of the question as to why government might try.
So what you're saying, essentially is that the suburbs suck? Well, goodness! We knew that already!
This is especially true in my home state of Massachusetts, where economics are such that the demand and the money is all in the suburbs.
So what you're saying is that Massachusetts really sucks? OK. I'll buy that...
There is no way in hell that I would pay for metered service as long as ISP's allow rampant spamming and viral server accesses. Too much bandwidth gets sucked down by these scourges for me to ignore it. Plus, it creates a positive feedback loop for ISP's not to deal with these things. After all, you pay bandwidth charges for the "privilege" of downloading spam and to respond to viral web-server pings.
But I am a reasonable man. Stop the spammers and (still) Code Red infected customers and I'll talk about paying for bandwidth.
Amen. My favorite Intel story comes from a guy who worked there a few years back. Turns out there was a cost cutting initiative of some sort and the company decided to make employees turn in their pencil stubs and empty ink pens to get new writing implements. Sheesh. The only problem I see is that some parts of Intel are so Draconian that they're too easy of a target.
According to Lucas, SW was supposed to be a trilogy of trilogies (Lucas has since recanted and said that E3 will be the last). E5 was out 3 yr. after E4, E6 three years after that. You do the math. No one expected the long hiatus between E6 and E1. After Jar Jar, they wondered if Lucas had waited long enough...
If you build it, they will come...
The old USENET posts are an information archaeologist's garbage heap. If information has any intrinsic value at all, this is the place to find treasures. Just because some folks see dirt doesn't mean there isn't gold to be mined.
Well, I didn't read the books and I was still VERY diappointed with the movie. When my local newspaper gave it an A rating (one of the few movies it granted such to), I actually assumed this was going to be a GOOD movie. I can sum up the movie succintly:
do (/* seemingly */ forever) {
jabber(); jabber(); jabber();
fight(something);
slog_along();
}
In the end, I didn't really give a rat's patootie about any of the characters and half hoped that the bad guys would win (at least then there would be some shots of the goodie two shoes heroes being tortured or something and Middle Earth would be destroyed before anyone else had to sit through the next hideous sequels).
Plodding, deadly dull, and overly long. That's it.
The nice 10 MHz square waves going over an unshielded wire are going to make a whole lot of harmonics (and products) all up and down the radio spectrum. Depending on the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire (and with a transmitting antenna a mile long), I'm pretty sure you'd run afoul of any number of FCC regs. Plus, it would probably just irritate the cows :-).