Ah well, when I was writing word processors there was no way a student was going to have a personal computer or a word processor, so they were most certainly not a target audience!
Anything students wrote using a computer in those days was likely to be coded in ROFF on the university mainframe, printed out in a fixed width font on a line printer. And then only until someone caught them and told them off for wasting precious CPU cycles.
That doesn't sound like a huge gap until you notice that -- oops -- the 1.7 version of ThinkFree Write has no word-count function.
I learnt many years ago that if you want a decent review of your word processor you MUST include a word count function.
Sure, the word count function is, for 99% of users, just bloat that they are never going to use, but reviewers get paid by the word for writing their reviews, and naturally try to write their reviews using the word processor under review, so if you don't include a word count function the entire review consists of a whine about the missing word count function.
(The same reviewer, oddly, seems to think that a missing spelling checker is no big deal. That's fair enough if s/he is a properly trained professional journalist and never uses words s/he can't spell and never makes typing mistakes, but for the other 99% of us...)
Potential clients need to be able to contact me by clicking on a mailto link without any faffing about. If I make it harder than that they'll just go elsewhere.
Getting away from a problem sometimes is a good way to solve it.
Works for debugging, anyway.
Once upon a time we were stuck for ages with a horrible bug, and were making no progress. I went home for a bath (don't remember at this distance why I thought that was necessary), and in the bath worked out what must be going wrong.
On returning to the office I got some coffee and wandered over to my desk, ignoring the group of people still huddled round the minicomputer. After a few minutes I looked up and said "You have fixed, it haven't you?". "No", they said.
So I told them which module to look in, and then which line of code was wrong, without the listing in front of me, and for no apparent reason they got quite cross when they discovered I was right.
My recollection is that Brooks was complaining about the injection of hundreds of programmers, rather than a small team of architects, at the system design stage of his project, not the coding stage. That's a different point, which I'd agree with.
Case studies re wide gaps between programmers: I think this was mentioned in Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming) amongst other places, and again I can agree that some individual programmers are ten times as productive as some other individual programmers (and isn't it a strange market place in which their pay can only differ by a maximum factor of two or so?).
However, getting back to the context of this thread, I will continue to disagree, until I've seen some evidence, with the orginal assertion which seemed to me to be saying that a small number of amateurs working in their spare time can do better than a properly managed team of hundreds of full time, experienced, qualified, professional engineers.
(1) My page is important to a lot of people as it does have important information which is not available anywhere else.
(3) People are supplying fewer links already in email. How often do you email someone a long complicated URL these days, and how often do you now email them "Google for xxx yyy / I'm Feeling Lucky" - quicker and easier to type and read? I haven't seen many Google search strings replacing links directly on web pages yet, but who knows?
Now that Google will find anything you want so easily, isn't there a danger that people will stop putting links to useful and interesting sites on their pages?
I don't need to tell people, via a link, about some wonderful site I've found if they can find it for themselves quicker and easier using Google. So I might not bother to maintain my collections of useful links, and Google will lose its information source. A victim of its own success.
I never can quite understand the reports one reads of CS courses not teaching multiple languages. And any CS course that doesn't at least show you what assembler looks like is surely not worth doing.
In fact, if one were to look at computer science departments across the country, you'd see that Java has replaced C++.
Yes, and don't we all remember computer science departments espousing all sorts of other languages that had no commercial following (AlgolW) or limited mainstream application (Pascal)?
Computer science courses use computer languages for a variety of purposes, such as teaching algorithms, language design and compiler writing, several of which are quite different to the requirements of engineers building substantial systems.
Yes, language B might end up supplanting language A, and if it does you might note in retrospect that computer science courses started using language B before engineers, but you can't make the deduction the other way around.
Just check out how many Java contractors are currently out of work in the UK and compare with C++ contractors.
I built a Nixie tube meter when I was a schoolboy in the early 1970s, on account of 90v Nixie tubes being lots cheaper than any other display technology (and I only shorted the 90v line to something else and blew up all the electronics once).
Home made A/D - basically an op-amp integrator which ramped up to the voltage to be measured, whilst the Nixie tubes counted up time.
Yeah, sure, it took a hell of a lot of calibration to get any accuracy out of the thing, but the boxfull of 0.1% resistors I'd "acquired" from somewhere helped a lot.
And hooked into a couple of amplifiers in my (analogue) computer I could measure currents in the single figures of microamps - rather better than my moving coil meter could manage.
Many contracts say that at some point after the contract ends you have to delete whatever copies you've got of the confidential documents, source code, whatever.
It's not that hard to delete copies from your hard disk, shred the hard copies, and remember to "really delete" it all from your source code control system.
But who, in the real world, goes through their backup tapes, CDs, whatever, trying to erase individual files? or even parts of files? whilst not destroying other data - it just can't be done.
knowing 5 times more about computing than their lazy friends who grew up able to afford the latest Windows wanker-ware
Um, this helps them get a decent job, say, shipping clerk, how, exactly? Or would you rather they just got pregnant and lived on welfare like their mothers?
(Not everybody on slashdot reads like a 14-year-old with no experience of life and the real world, but I have to say that quite a few do.)
That's really going to help them learn the Windows and MS Office skills that might actually get them a job, isn't it? {Just one example from many possible.)
Here's another example: Part of this is about equality of access to public services, which are more and more moving online. You're not helping people if you give them a browser that doesn't work with public information and transaction sites designed for IE.
Sounds to me like a recipe for making sure the people on the wrong side of the digitial divide stay there.
If you're going to help people by improving access to hardware and software it needs to be mainstream stuff, not something that will be seen as "welfare ghetto" stuff that will stigmatise the children when they turn up at school not knowing what the richer kids know.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah well, when I was writing word processors there was no way a student was going to have a personal computer or a word processor, so they were most certainly not a target audience!
Anything students wrote using a computer in those days was likely to be coded in ROFF on the university mainframe, printed out in a fixed width font on a line printer. And then only until someone caught them and told them off for wasting precious CPU cycles.
That doesn't sound like a huge gap until you notice that -- oops -- the 1.7 version of ThinkFree Write has no word-count function.
...)
I learnt many years ago that if you want a decent review of your word processor you MUST include a word count function.
Sure, the word count function is, for 99% of users, just bloat that they are never going to use, but reviewers get paid by the word for writing their reviews, and naturally try to write their reviews using the word processor under review, so if you don't include a word count function the entire review consists of a whine about the missing word count function.
(The same reviewer, oddly, seems to think that a missing spelling checker is no big deal. That's fair enough if s/he is a properly trained professional journalist and never uses words s/he can't spell and never makes typing mistakes, but for the other 99% of us
You expect us to believe that slashweenies have real relationships with real people??
Ah, sorry, just spotted the date.
... and still make a living?
Potential clients need to be able to contact me by clicking on a mailto link without any faffing about. If I make it harder than that they'll just go elsewhere.
Getting away from a problem sometimes is a good way to solve it.
Works for debugging, anyway.
Once upon a time we were stuck for ages with a horrible bug, and were making no progress. I went home for a bath (don't remember at this distance why I thought that was necessary), and in the bath worked out what must be going wrong.
On returning to the office I got some coffee and wandered over to my desk, ignoring the group of people still huddled round the minicomputer. After a few minutes I looked up and said "You have fixed, it haven't you?". "No", they said.
So I told them which module to look in, and then which line of code was wrong, without the listing in front of me, and for no apparent reason they got quite cross when they discovered I was right.
My recollection is that Brooks was complaining about the injection of hundreds of programmers, rather than a small team of architects, at the system design stage of his project, not the coding stage. That's a different point, which I'd agree with.
Case studies re wide gaps between programmers: I think this was mentioned in Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming) amongst other places, and again I can agree that some individual programmers are ten times as productive as some other individual programmers (and isn't it a strange market place in which their pay can only differ by a maximum factor of two or so?).
However, getting back to the context of this thread, I will continue to disagree, until I've seen some evidence, with the orginal assertion which seemed to me to be saying that a small number of amateurs working in their spare time can do better than a properly managed team of hundreds of full time, experienced, qualified, professional engineers.
Complete rubbish.
Unless you can identify documented case studies supporting your implausible thesis, in which case I'll maybe retract having read the documentation.
There's a well known answer to this (and many other problems that amateurs run across time and time again) - see subject.
Just a couple of points:
(1) My page is important to a lot of people as it does have important information which is not available anywhere else.
(3) People are supplying fewer links already in email. How often do you email someone a long complicated URL these days, and how often do you now email them "Google for xxx yyy / I'm Feeling Lucky" - quicker and easier to type and read? I haven't seen many Google search strings replacing links directly on web pages yet, but who knows?
So Google is even better than I thought it was!
Now that Google will find anything you want so easily, isn't there a danger that people will stop putting links to useful and interesting sites on their pages?
I don't need to tell people, via a link, about some wonderful site I've found if they can find it for themselves quicker and easier using Google. So I might not bother to maintain my collections of useful links, and Google will lose its information source. A victim of its own success.
What happens then?
I never can quite understand the reports one reads of CS courses not teaching multiple languages. And any CS course that doesn't at least show you what assembler looks like is surely not worth doing.
In fact, if one were to look at computer science departments across the country, you'd see that Java has replaced C++.
Yes, and don't we all remember computer science departments espousing all sorts of other languages that had no commercial following (AlgolW) or limited mainstream application (Pascal)?
Computer science courses use computer languages for a variety of purposes, such as teaching algorithms, language design and compiler writing, several of which are quite different to the requirements of engineers building substantial systems.
Yes, language B might end up supplanting language A, and if it does you might note in retrospect that computer science courses started using language B before engineers, but you can't make the deduction the other way around.
Just check out how many Java contractors are currently out of work in the UK and compare with C++ contractors.
(nt)
was there ever a better baby-sitter than several hours of Looney Tunes
Well, yes, actually. Pretty well any human being would qualify.
What a bizarre comment - whose cultural norms does it represent, I wonder?
Don't you just love America!
I would agree that the US would be better directing its energy towards gun control than this sort of nonsense.
The one thing I dislike reading ZDNet, is how they state it could affect "PC's." Perhaps people who haven't figured out ...
Journalists who haven't figured out how to spell can't expect to have their writing taken seriously.
... your wife is a publisher and the last thing she wants is presents that remind her of work.
I built a Nixie tube meter when I was a schoolboy in the early 1970s, on account of 90v Nixie tubes being lots cheaper than any other display technology (and I only shorted the 90v line to something else and blew up all the electronics once).
Home made A/D - basically an op-amp integrator which ramped up to the voltage to be measured, whilst the Nixie tubes counted up time.
Yeah, sure, it took a hell of a lot of calibration to get any accuracy out of the thing, but the boxfull of 0.1% resistors I'd "acquired" from somewhere helped a lot.
And hooked into a couple of amplifiers in my (analogue) computer I could measure currents in the single figures of microamps - rather better than my moving coil meter could manage.
... "midsummer house cambridge".
Try it and see. "I'm feeling lucky" will do fine.
But yes, in real life people do email each other the Google search for a web page where that is quicker and easier to type than the URL.
Many contracts say that at some point after the contract ends you have to delete whatever copies you've got of the confidential documents, source code, whatever.
It's not that hard to delete copies from your hard disk, shred the hard copies, and remember to "really delete" it all from your source code control system.
But who, in the real world, goes through their backup tapes, CDs, whatever, trying to erase individual files? or even parts of files? whilst not destroying other data - it just can't be done.
knowing 5 times more about computing than their lazy friends who grew up able to afford the latest Windows wanker-ware
Um, this helps them get a decent job, say, shipping clerk, how, exactly? Or would you rather they just got pregnant and lived on welfare like their mothers?
(Not everybody on slashdot reads like a 14-year-old with no experience of life and the real world, but I have to say that quite a few do.)
OK, so give people Linux.
That's really going to help them learn the Windows and MS Office skills that might actually get them a job, isn't it? {Just one example from many possible.)
Here's another example: Part of this is about equality of access to public services, which are more and more moving online. You're not helping people if you give them a browser that doesn't work with public information and transaction sites designed for IE.
Sounds to me like a recipe for making sure the people on the wrong side of the digitial divide stay there.
If you're going to help people by improving access to hardware and software it needs to be mainstream stuff, not something that will be seen as "welfare ghetto" stuff that will stigmatise the children when they turn up at school not knowing what the richer kids know.
You just post a question to the relevant newsgroup.
Within minutes some helpful person will reply "RTFM".
Problem solved.