Use CPPUnit, and follow test-driven development practices: 1) Write a test. 2) Run the test. It should fail. 3) Write just enough production code to make it pass. 4) Run the test. It should pass. 5) Repeat 1-4 until you have a complete system.
Honestly, this really works, and it'll save you a lot of debugging time in the end. Sure, you can't test every single input to the system, but you can test the corner cases and expected inputs, and that counts for a lot. I'll put my defect counts against any other programmer who thinks that unit tests are for wimps any day.
I use both languages on a regular basis. One of the compelling arguments toward Java for me is that the tools are better and cheaper. You can download Eclipse for free, and in my opinion it's the best development environment available, hands down. Lots of free Java servers out there, and the open source community has made a whole lotta great stuff to make your job as a programmer easier. Visual Studio, the best game in town 6 years ago, is pathetic by today's standards.
Even the Nobel prizes are often handed out for research done 20 or 30 years beforehand. It may be that they wait to see what the impact of the research turns out to be before bestowment.
The situation is improving, but unfortunately many CS programs at universities still don't require physics. Physics was optional at mine, so of course I didn't take any, not knowing how critical it could be later in my career.
On the other hand, the inherent problem with domain-specific software is that those who know how to program the software are the ones who don't understand the domain. Computer programmers can't be expected to study everything in the case that they might someday be called upon to code a gene sequencing program or a complex financial application or psychological model. This tends to result in bad software written by people with no training and little experience in software development.
Don't get me wrong--I don't mean to be elitest here, but in the few times that I've had to work on domain-specific programs written by domain-specific people, I've found that the existing code was very difficult to maintain.
We seem to have the opposite problem--expectations that are too low. I work as a software consultant doing J2EE applications. Often when we find ourselves dealing with a client who needs a small-scale web application done, we lay out their options for servers and pre-built solutions and they automatically reject all the free ones.
For some reason they have concerns about reliability. They'd rather pay $30K per CPU for BEA WebLogic then download JBoss for nothing, even if they only plan on supporting 100 users. I don't claim to understand it myself, but in corporate circles open source software has this stigma attached to it.
So what happens when the sky's overcast? Will the signal get lost like satellite TV? With terrestrial radio the signal only breaks when I drive under a mountain.
I remember when SOAP was going to be the protocol that was going to bridge the remote method invocation gap across platforms. The.NET version of SOAP turned out to be just different enough from the standard to still nominally conform to the standard but still make it difficult to adapt to it from Apache SOAP or another implementation.
Wondering how (or indeed, if) JXTA will be implemented into.NET.
Here's a mirror of the article for non-subscribers
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It wasn't an accidental invention, exactly, but it was certainly one that followed an unexpected trajectory to glory.
Thirty years ago, give or take a month or two, Ray Tomlinson, an unassuming computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm in Cambridge, Mass., sat down at his computer and wrote a relatively simple computer program that enabled electronic messages to travel from one computer to another.
Since then, e-mail has become such a fixture in so many people's lives, it is hard to imagine life without it. According to the International Data Corporation, some 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent each day. E-mail is a communications mainstay of businesses. It is the glue that keeps far-flung families together. Romantic relationships find both outlet and solace in it.
In some ways, observed Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy, a London-based research firm, e-mail has become the ultimate medium through which humans use computers -- to organize discussion groups, deliver news stories, confirm purchases, signal updates to Web pages or play chess. Or as he put it in the language of the Internet age, "E-mail has become an entire personal information environment."
Those are just the obvious aspects of life with e-mail.
In dozen of other, less obvious ways, e-mail has profoundly changed the way people communicate, as its unique properties have let it settle into a place all its own among forms of human interaction.
E-mail's inventors weren't necessarily thinking about the medium's less evident advantages -- that it makes time- zone problems evaporate, or that it can be the virtual sherpa for transporting documents, photos and video clips. Yet those are the benefits that continue to propel its use upward, with the number of users worldwide estimated in the hundreds of millions.
Then there are the perils. What you post to a mailing list may show up in Internet archives many years later. A finger glancing off the wrong key could catapult a message into cyberspace prematurely or send it to the wrong address. More ominously, opening a booby-trapped message can make you both a victim and an unwitting carrier of a computer virus conceived by a malicious code writer.
And almost from the start, e-mail was something to hide behind.
David Walden, an engineer who worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) with Mr. Tomlinson in the 1970's, recalled a turning point of sorts for him. "I remember when I realized that I could apologize in writing for a problem and thus make the situation better," he said, "and the person I was working with couldn't see me and thus couldn't read my body language, that I didn't' really feel contrite," he said.
E-mail is also a snapshot of one's mood from day to day, or even hour to hour.
"One of my kids saves e-mail for a year then sends it back to you as a kind of flashback to the past," said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet and a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote), the communications services company. "You would not do that with paper mail but it is easy with digital, electronic stuff."
With all those uses, the sheer volume of e- mail has, in fact, become overwhelming. It seems clear that like other technologies before it, e-mail has not simply replaced a way of doing things; it has created its own demand. In-boxes are increasingly filled not just with spam from strangers and well- meant but unwelcome humor from friends, but with single-sentence requests from higher-ups that translate to hours of extra work, and mile-long attachments from colleagues that must be read, and now.
Yet people live with it because, by now, they cannot live without it.
Mr. Tomlinson's clever little hack was not the very beginning of e-mail. It already existed in the 1960's, when computer scientists sent e-mail within time-sharing systems -- one computer with multiple terminals.
But Mr. Tomlinson, who is now a principal engineer at BBN Technologies, was the one who made it possible to send e-mail from one machine to another over a computer network. While he was well known for his programs, he became better known for a simple decision he made while writing them.
He needed a way to denote the separation between the name of the user from the name of the machine the user was on. His eye lighted on the @ symbol. Unaware that he was creating an icon for the wired world, that is what he chose. And equally unaware that his first message would someday be the object of historical scrutiny, Mr. Tomlinson said he made no mental note of what he first tapped out on the keyboard.
Through the 1970's, the use of network mail, as it was called back then, grew not exponentially, but as gradually as the Internet itself. The Internet started as a tool for research into computer networks, and e- mail was its counterpart to the interoffice memo. In fact, correspondence over the government-sponsored Internet, and its forerunner, the Arpanet, was to be restricted to official network business.
But from the start, people knew how to use e-mail in the name of distraction. One of the first network mailing lists, called SF- Lovers, was devoted to science fiction fans. The network's users, typically graduate students, began turning to e-mail to play games, exchange gossip, carry on relationships, carry out drug deals or circulate "Impeach Nixon" appeals.
With activities like those, not to mention the passion that can accompany scholarship, e-mail was not a sedate medium for long. Mr. Walden remembers seeing the first e-mail-based vituperation, later known as flaming, sometime in the mid-1970's.
"It was a really nasty flame from someone at M.I.T., and we complained to his boss that civility was still in order, even by e- mail," Mr. Walden said. "Of course, it was only a short time before flaming had a name and it wasn't worth bothering to try to stop it."
By the early 1970's, three-quarters of all traffic on the Arpanet was e-mail. And as the medium grew, some turned their attention to making it more practical. For example, sending e-mail was simple, but trying to read or respond to it was a huge annoyance. Text poured onto the screen in a stream, with nothing separating one incoming message from another. And there was no reply function.
Lawrence Roberts, who was then a manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office, solved that problem after his boss began complaining about the volume of e-mail piling up in his In box. In 1972, Dr. Roberts produced the first e-mail manager, called RD, which included a filing system, as well as a Delete function.
Further improvements to network mail were made by John Vittal, who in the 1970's was a young programmer at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Mr. Vittal spent many hours working on the program, which he called MSG, in his spare time. It included not just a Delete command but also an Answer feature, enabling a recipient to reply to a message easily. His program eventually became the de facto standard of the Arpanet.
More and more, the functionality of e- mail took on features of conventional correspondence. Two of Mr. Vittal's creations were the cc and bcc features -- appellations whose origins, in the carbon paper that smudged many a copy, now seem part of prehistory.
"There was a feeling that for user understandability we had to mimic traditional written forms of communication -- office memos, letters, post cards," Mr. Vittal said. "Drawing parallels helped people understand what they could do."
E-mail's wider potential did not go unnoticed. The General Accounting Office predicted in 1981 that electronic mail would sharply reduce the volume of conventional mail and would cut postal employment by two-thirds by 2000. (Its foresight was a bit blurred: e-mail and other competition notwithstanding, the volume of letters doubled in the last two decades, and the postal work force grew by 20 percent.)
As the use of computers in offices grew, various commercial e-mail services, none connected directly to the Internet, indeed cropped up. But all of them failed.
MCI Mail, developed in the early 1980's by MCI, the telecommunications company that is now part of WorldCom, was one very visible attempt to introduce e-mail to the business world. An elaborate, feature-rich service, MCI Mail was well ahead of its time. Not only could users send electronic messages of up to 500 characters for 45 cents, but for an additional charge they could also have MCI print and send those messages through the postal system or by courier.
The world was so unaccustomed to electronic mailboxes that MCI Mail included an alerting service by which MCI employees called recipients by telephone to tell them to check their electronic mail.
Yet MCI Mail, introduced in 1983, did not catch on. Nor did the Postal Service succeed with its version -- E-Com, for Electronic Computer-Originated Mail, introduced in 1982 and abandoned in 1985.
"It was a very, very tough sell in the business world," said Dr. Cerf, a co-developer of MCI Mail. "The question was always, `What's e-mail, and why do I need it?' But it was like being the first on your block to have a telephone -- `Well, who am I going to call?' "
But finally, with the advent of the World Wide Web and the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic, the network itself became widely accessible to the public at large in the mid-1990's. By then, online services were routinely providing home users with an Internet-based e-mail account. And not coincidentally, that was the period when America Online, most spectacularly, begin to take off.
By 1996, 300 million pieces of e-mail were sent on the average day, and roughly 100 million people worldwide were using the medium, according to estimates by the International Data Corporation.
Yet for all that has been done to make e- mail -- like the telephone or the television -- a tool of the masses, it has always suffered from what might be described as technocentrism.
Mr. Walden told the story of trying to set up e-mail for his 87-year-old mother, who has Parkinson's disease. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Mr. Walden said, he helped her through the AOL software. "I told her what to do as she slowly moved the mouse and struggled with not being able to double- click fast enough," he said. He showed her how to type a message, with many characters typed twice because she couldn't remove her fingers from the keys quickly.
"E-mail still comes out of the culture of the computer technologist and the assumption that people want and will deal with lots of little buttons, windows and message boxes," Mr. Walden said.
Actually, Mr. Walden pointed out, more primitive systems from the early 1970's like Dr. Roberts's RD program or Mr. Vittal's MSG might be easier for people like his mother to use.
Moreover, Mr. Walden said, the more useful and ubiquitous e-mail becomes, the more susceptible it is to the viruses and worms that circulate with alarming regularity through cyberspace.
Still, all the viruses and spam combined will not stop e-mail from remaining, at its core, a tool for one of the most basic of human tendencies -- the desire to be in touch.
Dr. Cerf said he occasionally received grateful messages from people who met over the Internet, courted via e-mail and are now married.
"I hope they stay together because I don't want to get blamed if they don't," Dr. Cerf said. "The one thing you learn is not to take too much credit because at some point you might have to take a lot of blame."
The Fax Machine May Fall Victim to the Advances of E-Mail
By KATIE HAFNER
SK any expert to speculate on the future of e-mail, and you are bound to hear two words: versatility and mobility.
E-mail is already becoming more and more portable. BlackBerry pagers that send and receive e-mail are increasingly standard issue not just for corporate executives but for members of government as well. Cellphones that can exchange short text messages are also becoming common.
In the next few years, it seems the leading potential victim of e-mail may be the fax machine. Those who toil on the technical side of things, developing the software and standards that make the technology appear seamless to its users, foresee a day when e-mail is used routinely for documents that are now faxed. They also predict the complete integration of the In boxes for voice messages, faxes and e-mail.
"One can imagine calling a voice-mail server that has access to your entire e- mail box," with speech-recognition software aiding voice access to e-mail, said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet who is now a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote). "An e-mail can be `addressed' to a phone number so that it can be `delivered' by phone call," he said.
Such so-called universal messaging systems already exist, but they are not especially easy to use. "It will be another five years or so before that's really attacked seriously," said Dave Crocker, a consultant who works on technical standards for e-mail.
Already, said Walter Ulrich, an early developer of commercial e-mail who is now an entrepreneur and consultant in Houston, "the interlinking of e-mail, information, directories, etc., is so smooth that e- mail almost disappears as a separate function and becomes part of the plumbing."
In five years, he added, e-mail may routine convey full-motion color video with instant click-through to any number of attachments and points of reference. "It will be better than the sci-fi movie `Outland' by a factor of 10," Mr. Ulrich said.
In five years, Dr. Cerf suggested, more than half of all bills will be sent by e-mail, and other advances that are still in the sputtering early stages will be commonplace.
He expects to see people sending e-mail to Internet-enabled appliances, in what he calls "a kind of deferred interaction mode."
In addition, "delivery of large attachments may be by way of pointers to object repositories so that recipients can direct the delivery of the attachment to targets other than the addressee's e-mail box," Dr. Cerf said. "This would allow more flexible manipulation of large attachments by way, for example, of two-way pagers."
At the same time, the sheer volume of e- mail is overwhelming. Dr. Cerf said he had archives of his own e-mail on tape going back to 1971.
"Some historian is going to have fun going through a fur ball of e-mail someday," he said.
Peter J. Denning, a professor of computer science at George Mason University, said In boxes have reached the point where 90 percent of the incoming mail is immediately disposed of.
Though better filters will help, he said, "we will need radically different practices of time management to cope, or else we'll give up on e-mail entirely."
For those who don't know what "war driving" means
on
War Driving With The Kids
·
· Score: 5, Informative
like me a few minutes ago, here's a link to a Register article about it.
Wouldn't it be great if there were some compact medium onto which we could somehow store music, allowing us to play it whenever and wherever we wished, as long as we could find a suitable device that could interpret the music? That could revolutionize the industry!
I don't know about you, but I'm going back to 8-tracks.
However, I do think CS students should be required to take at least one in-depth course on how to work in a team setting (and not just a senior project, I'm talking a course dedicated on how to work in a team).
I actually would really not appreciate having to shell out $3000 for a course in what is essentially time management and social skills. Team working should be something that programmers should experience in college, certainly, but not as a dedicated course.
Playing well with others is something we should have mastered by 3rd grade.
I would argue that using cash in today's society requires no less amount of faith. Since America went off the gold standard around the turn of the last century the amount of value a dollar bill has fluctuates with every minute.
One of the most effective things America did to Germany during World War II was to counterfeit marks and bomb the major metropolitan areas with them, creating a cash glut and sending inflation through the roof.
Wasn't there a similar idea out a few years ago where you could hook up a "Smell-o-matic" chemical emitting device to your box, thereby allowing web sites to embellish your web experience with smells? I hope this is half as successful as that idea was.
Truthfully, though, this could have lots of application in accessibility for the blind. Braille web pages could be just around the corner. BML?
Templates--
Java has the Object base class which subsume the need for templates; all the Java containers are set up to hold Objects, so you can cram whatever you want into them.
Pointers--
Java objects are completely implemented with pointers. You don't see them explicitly because they're an inherent and mandatory part of the language. Everything's passed by reference.
Slashdot Mirror
Use CPPUnit, and follow test-driven development practices:
1) Write a test.
2) Run the test. It should fail.
3) Write just enough production code to make it pass.
4) Run the test. It should pass.
5) Repeat 1-4 until you have a complete system.
Honestly, this really works, and it'll save you a lot of debugging time in the end. Sure, you can't test every single input to the system, but you can test the corner cases and expected inputs, and that counts for a lot. I'll put my defect counts against any other programmer who thinks that unit tests are for wimps any day.
I use both languages on a regular basis. One of the compelling arguments toward Java for me is that the tools are better and cheaper. You can download Eclipse for free, and in my opinion it's the best development environment available, hands down. Lots of free Java servers out there, and the open source community has made a whole lotta great stuff to make your job as a programmer easier. Visual Studio, the best game in town 6 years ago, is pathetic by today's standards.
What a fantastic game. Blended the best between mindless destruction and strategic annihilation. You can still get copies off eBay.
Even the Nobel prizes are often handed out for research done 20 or 30 years beforehand. It may be that they wait to see what the impact of the research turns out to be before bestowment.
On the other hand, the inherent problem with domain-specific software is that those who know how to program the software are the ones who don't understand the domain. Computer programmers can't be expected to study everything in the case that they might someday be called upon to code a gene sequencing program or a complex financial application or psychological model. This tends to result in bad software written by people with no training and little experience in software development.
Don't get me wrong--I don't mean to be elitest here, but in the few times that I've had to work on domain-specific programs written by domain-specific people, I've found that the existing code was very difficult to maintain.
to change their infrastructure to support/require Passport like that? Are they being bribed?
For some reason they have concerns about reliability. They'd rather pay $30K per CPU for BEA WebLogic then download JBoss for nothing, even if they only plan on supporting 100 users. I don't claim to understand it myself, but in corporate circles open source software has this stigma attached to it.
So what happens when the sky's overcast? Will the signal get lost like satellite TV? With terrestrial radio the signal only breaks when I drive under a mountain.
Here's an article talking about that. All signs point to yes.
I remember when SOAP was going to be the protocol that was going to bridge the remote method invocation gap across platforms. The .NET version of SOAP turned out to be just different enough from the standard to still nominally conform to the standard but still make it difficult to adapt to it from Apache SOAP or another implementation.
.NET.
Wondering how (or indeed, if) JXTA will be implemented into
It wasn't an accidental invention, exactly, but it was certainly one that followed an unexpected trajectory to glory.
Thirty years ago, give or take a month or two, Ray Tomlinson, an unassuming computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm in Cambridge, Mass., sat down at his computer and wrote a relatively simple computer program that enabled electronic messages to travel from one computer to another.
Since then, e-mail has become such a fixture in so many people's lives, it is hard to imagine life without it. According to the International Data Corporation, some 9.8 billion electronic messages are sent each day. E-mail is a communications mainstay of businesses. It is the glue that keeps far-flung families together. Romantic relationships find both outlet and solace in it.
In some ways, observed Nico Macdonald, a principal of Spy, a London-based research firm, e-mail has become the ultimate medium through which humans use computers -- to organize discussion groups, deliver news stories, confirm purchases, signal updates to Web pages or play chess. Or as he put it in the language of the Internet age, "E-mail has become an entire personal information environment."
Those are just the obvious aspects of life with e-mail.
In dozen of other, less obvious ways, e-mail has profoundly changed the way people communicate, as its unique properties have let it settle into a place all its own among forms of human interaction.
E-mail's inventors weren't necessarily thinking about the medium's less evident advantages -- that it makes time- zone problems evaporate, or that it can be the virtual sherpa for transporting documents, photos and video clips. Yet those are the benefits that continue to propel its use upward, with the number of users worldwide estimated in the hundreds of millions.
Then there are the perils. What you post to a mailing list may show up in Internet archives many years later. A finger glancing off the wrong key could catapult a message into cyberspace prematurely or send it to the wrong address. More ominously, opening a booby-trapped message can make you both a victim and an unwitting carrier of a computer virus conceived by a malicious code writer.
And almost from the start, e-mail was something to hide behind.
David Walden, an engineer who worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) with Mr. Tomlinson in the 1970's, recalled a turning point of sorts for him. "I remember when I realized that I could apologize in writing for a problem and thus make the situation better," he said, "and the person I was working with couldn't see me and thus couldn't read my body language, that I didn't' really feel contrite," he said.
E-mail is also a snapshot of one's mood from day to day, or even hour to hour.
"One of my kids saves e-mail for a year then sends it back to you as a kind of flashback to the past," said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet and a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote), the communications services company. "You would not do that with paper mail but it is easy with digital, electronic stuff."
With all those uses, the sheer volume of e- mail has, in fact, become overwhelming. It seems clear that like other technologies before it, e-mail has not simply replaced a way of doing things; it has created its own demand. In-boxes are increasingly filled not just with spam from strangers and well- meant but unwelcome humor from friends, but with single-sentence requests from higher-ups that translate to hours of extra work, and mile-long attachments from colleagues that must be read, and now.
Yet people live with it because, by now, they cannot live without it.
Mr. Tomlinson's clever little hack was not the very beginning of e-mail. It already existed in the 1960's, when computer scientists sent e-mail within time-sharing systems -- one computer with multiple terminals.
But Mr. Tomlinson, who is now a principal engineer at BBN Technologies, was the one who made it possible to send e-mail from one machine to another over a computer network. While he was well known for his programs, he became better known for a simple decision he made while writing them.
He needed a way to denote the separation between the name of the user from the name of the machine the user was on. His eye lighted on the @ symbol. Unaware that he was creating an icon for the wired world, that is what he chose. And equally unaware that his first message would someday be the object of historical scrutiny, Mr. Tomlinson said he made no mental note of what he first tapped out on the keyboard.
Through the 1970's, the use of network mail, as it was called back then, grew not exponentially, but as gradually as the Internet itself. The Internet started as a tool for research into computer networks, and e- mail was its counterpart to the interoffice memo. In fact, correspondence over the government-sponsored Internet, and its forerunner, the Arpanet, was to be restricted to official network business.
But from the start, people knew how to use e-mail in the name of distraction. One of the first network mailing lists, called SF- Lovers, was devoted to science fiction fans. The network's users, typically graduate students, began turning to e-mail to play games, exchange gossip, carry on relationships, carry out drug deals or circulate "Impeach Nixon" appeals.
With activities like those, not to mention the passion that can accompany scholarship, e-mail was not a sedate medium for long. Mr. Walden remembers seeing the first e-mail-based vituperation, later known as flaming, sometime in the mid-1970's.
"It was a really nasty flame from someone at M.I.T., and we complained to his boss that civility was still in order, even by e- mail," Mr. Walden said. "Of course, it was only a short time before flaming had a name and it wasn't worth bothering to try to stop it."
By the early 1970's, three-quarters of all traffic on the Arpanet was e-mail. And as the medium grew, some turned their attention to making it more practical. For example, sending e-mail was simple, but trying to read or respond to it was a huge annoyance. Text poured onto the screen in a stream, with nothing separating one incoming message from another. And there was no reply function.
Lawrence Roberts, who was then a manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office, solved that problem after his boss began complaining about the volume of e-mail piling up in his In box. In 1972, Dr. Roberts produced the first e-mail manager, called RD, which included a filing system, as well as a Delete function.
Further improvements to network mail were made by John Vittal, who in the 1970's was a young programmer at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Mr. Vittal spent many hours working on the program, which he called MSG, in his spare time. It included not just a Delete command but also an Answer feature, enabling a recipient to reply to a message easily. His program eventually became the de facto standard of the Arpanet.
More and more, the functionality of e- mail took on features of conventional correspondence. Two of Mr. Vittal's creations were the cc and bcc features -- appellations whose origins, in the carbon paper that smudged many a copy, now seem part of prehistory.
"There was a feeling that for user understandability we had to mimic traditional written forms of communication -- office memos, letters, post cards," Mr. Vittal said. "Drawing parallels helped people understand what they could do."
E-mail's wider potential did not go unnoticed. The General Accounting Office predicted in 1981 that electronic mail would sharply reduce the volume of conventional mail and would cut postal employment by two-thirds by 2000. (Its foresight was a bit blurred: e-mail and other competition notwithstanding, the volume of letters doubled in the last two decades, and the postal work force grew by 20 percent.)
As the use of computers in offices grew, various commercial e-mail services, none connected directly to the Internet, indeed cropped up. But all of them failed.
MCI Mail, developed in the early 1980's by MCI, the telecommunications company that is now part of WorldCom, was one very visible attempt to introduce e-mail to the business world. An elaborate, feature-rich service, MCI Mail was well ahead of its time. Not only could users send electronic messages of up to 500 characters for 45 cents, but for an additional charge they could also have MCI print and send those messages through the postal system or by courier.
The world was so unaccustomed to electronic mailboxes that MCI Mail included an alerting service by which MCI employees called recipients by telephone to tell them to check their electronic mail.
Yet MCI Mail, introduced in 1983, did not catch on. Nor did the Postal Service succeed with its version -- E-Com, for Electronic Computer-Originated Mail, introduced in 1982 and abandoned in 1985.
"It was a very, very tough sell in the business world," said Dr. Cerf, a co-developer of MCI Mail. "The question was always, `What's e-mail, and why do I need it?' But it was like being the first on your block to have a telephone -- `Well, who am I going to call?' "
But finally, with the advent of the World Wide Web and the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic, the network itself became widely accessible to the public at large in the mid-1990's. By then, online services were routinely providing home users with an Internet-based e-mail account. And not coincidentally, that was the period when America Online, most spectacularly, begin to take off.
By 1996, 300 million pieces of e-mail were sent on the average day, and roughly 100 million people worldwide were using the medium, according to estimates by the International Data Corporation.
Yet for all that has been done to make e- mail -- like the telephone or the television -- a tool of the masses, it has always suffered from what might be described as technocentrism.
Mr. Walden told the story of trying to set up e-mail for his 87-year-old mother, who has Parkinson's disease. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Mr. Walden said, he helped her through the AOL software. "I told her what to do as she slowly moved the mouse and struggled with not being able to double- click fast enough," he said. He showed her how to type a message, with many characters typed twice because she couldn't remove her fingers from the keys quickly.
"E-mail still comes out of the culture of the computer technologist and the assumption that people want and will deal with lots of little buttons, windows and message boxes," Mr. Walden said.
Actually, Mr. Walden pointed out, more primitive systems from the early 1970's like Dr. Roberts's RD program or Mr. Vittal's MSG might be easier for people like his mother to use.
Moreover, Mr. Walden said, the more useful and ubiquitous e-mail becomes, the more susceptible it is to the viruses and worms that circulate with alarming regularity through cyberspace.
Still, all the viruses and spam combined will not stop e-mail from remaining, at its core, a tool for one of the most basic of human tendencies -- the desire to be in touch.
Dr. Cerf said he occasionally received grateful messages from people who met over the Internet, courted via e-mail and are now married.
"I hope they stay together because I don't want to get blamed if they don't," Dr. Cerf said. "The one thing you learn is not to take too much credit because at some point you might have to take a lot of blame."
The Fax Machine May Fall Victim to the Advances of E-Mail
By KATIE HAFNER
SK any expert to speculate on the future of e-mail, and you are bound to hear two words: versatility and mobility.
E-mail is already becoming more and more portable. BlackBerry pagers that send and receive e-mail are increasingly standard issue not just for corporate executives but for members of government as well. Cellphones that can exchange short text messages are also becoming common.
In the next few years, it seems the leading potential victim of e-mail may be the fax machine. Those who toil on the technical side of things, developing the software and standards that make the technology appear seamless to its users, foresee a day when e-mail is used routinely for documents that are now faxed. They also predict the complete integration of the In boxes for voice messages, faxes and e-mail.
"One can imagine calling a voice-mail server that has access to your entire e- mail box," with speech-recognition software aiding voice access to e-mail, said Vinton G. Cerf, a founder of the Internet who is now a senior vice president at WorldCom (news/quote). "An e-mail can be `addressed' to a phone number so that it can be `delivered' by phone call," he said.
Such so-called universal messaging systems already exist, but they are not especially easy to use. "It will be another five years or so before that's really attacked seriously," said Dave Crocker, a consultant who works on technical standards for e-mail.
Already, said Walter Ulrich, an early developer of commercial e-mail who is now an entrepreneur and consultant in Houston, "the interlinking of e-mail, information, directories, etc., is so smooth that e- mail almost disappears as a separate function and becomes part of the plumbing."
In five years, he added, e-mail may routine convey full-motion color video with instant click-through to any number of attachments and points of reference. "It will be better than the sci-fi movie `Outland' by a factor of 10," Mr. Ulrich said.
In five years, Dr. Cerf suggested, more than half of all bills will be sent by e-mail, and other advances that are still in the sputtering early stages will be commonplace.
He expects to see people sending e-mail to Internet-enabled appliances, in what he calls "a kind of deferred interaction mode."
In addition, "delivery of large attachments may be by way of pointers to object repositories so that recipients can direct the delivery of the attachment to targets other than the addressee's e-mail box," Dr. Cerf said. "This would allow more flexible manipulation of large attachments by way, for example, of two-way pagers."
At the same time, the sheer volume of e- mail is overwhelming. Dr. Cerf said he had archives of his own e-mail on tape going back to 1971.
"Some historian is going to have fun going through a fur ball of e-mail someday," he said.
Peter J. Denning, a professor of computer science at George Mason University, said In boxes have reached the point where 90 percent of the incoming mail is immediately disposed of.
Though better filters will help, he said, "we will need radically different practices of time management to cope, or else we'll give up on e-mail entirely."
like me a few minutes ago, here's a link to a Register article about it.
Currently, whenever a telemarketer calls me, the caller ID reads "Unavailable." So I don't pick up the phone. It's very handy.
If they started displaying real phone numbers, they'd be tricking me into thinking that someone I want to talk to is calling and I'd answer.
Wouldn't it be great if there were some compact medium onto which we could somehow store music, allowing us to play it whenever and wherever we wished, as long as we could find a suitable device that could interpret the music? That could revolutionize the industry!
I don't know about you, but I'm going back to 8-tracks.
Good morning, Dave. What are you doing?
I have to go to the bathroom.
You've already been twice this morning, Dave. Perhaps you should cut down on the coffee.
Hal, let me in. I really have to go!
I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't let you do that. Please go back to your desk.
etc.
I notice that www.yippee.com is still available.
I actually would really not appreciate having to shell out $3000 for a course in what is essentially time management and social skills. Team working should be something that programmers should experience in college, certainly, but not as a dedicated course. Playing well with others is something we should have mastered by 3rd grade.
I would argue that using cash in today's society requires no less amount of faith. Since America went off the gold standard around the turn of the last century the amount of value a dollar bill has fluctuates with every minute.
One of the most effective things America did to Germany during World War II was to counterfeit marks and bomb the major metropolitan areas with them, creating a cash glut and sending inflation through the roof.
Wasn't there a similar idea out a few years ago where you could hook up a "Smell-o-matic" chemical emitting device to your box, thereby allowing web sites to embellish your web experience with smells? I hope this is half as successful as that idea was.
Truthfully, though, this could have lots of application in accessibility for the blind. Braille web pages could be just around the corner. BML?
They'll do what most commercial Java apps I've seen do already--ship a JVM with the product.
Templates-- Java has the Object base class which subsume the need for templates; all the Java containers are set up to hold Objects, so you can cram whatever you want into them. Pointers-- Java objects are completely implemented with pointers. You don't see them explicitly because they're an inherent and mandatory part of the language. Everything's passed by reference.