Others here have commented that as a noob, your code will likely suck. Even a few months from you, you'll reflect back or encounter code you wrote and think about how much it sucks.
The one tenant I can tell you is that code is never truly final. I mean 'final' in the sense that any product you're building (a web app or thick client or whatever) is never final because if people are using it, they'll always want new versions and updates that do things differently and better. This phenomenon gives you (and your product team) a chance to make things better, both in existing code/features and new things as well.
Secondly, you should try to learn and focus on the art of testing. Just like when you were learning mathematics in high school algebra and calculus and later numerical analysis or number theory or whatever in college, your instructors always want you to 'check your work.' In the simplest case, that's taking your 'final answer' and plugging it back in for 'X' and solving to see if you actually got the equation right. Think of testing like this: a balance of both sides of an equals sign.
Otherwise, be a sponge and read, listen, and absorb.
At my old company, we used SilkTest, which is a very nice tool. As you said, it does require scripting and it becomes a problem when tying it specific UI elements. Instead, we created an Automation framework that included Access DB's that work with SilkTest to do the testing. It requires a list of 'steps' that are performed, but if an element changes, we only need to go back to the Access DB and update what element it currently is 'pointing' at and then everything reflects it in the future. In addition, we used 'functions' in the Access DB that define a series of steps (like common operations like 'logging as a user X').
On top of that, we created an additional tool that automated testing across multiple machines distributively. Because out application can run only as a single instance on one machine at a time, testing on multiple machines means SilkTest and the particular tests that need to be run be setup manually on each separate machine. Therefore, if you've got 2,000 tests, you could wait for them all to complete or setup machines yourself to do it. Either way, it can take a long time to test a new build.
So we developed a server/client system using.NET that would 'schedule' tests to be run. Machine clients (or the machines that would be doing the testing) would be 'registered' with our server. Through the use of a web app, developers/testers (or anyone, actually) could choose from lists of tests to schedule to be run against a specified build. The server would then run those tests using available machines. Then, when those machines were done with their assigned tests, the returned the results to the server which could then be reviewed on the web app. IT ended up being quite slick in the end.
I'll agree that the CLEP can get you more credit, however, many high schools right now offer 'AP' classes as part of the curriculum for eligible students. In other words, the classes themselves perpare students for the exam by covering required material. So, for many students who may not be able or willing to study the material on their own, they can have a class that will prepare them for the exam to which they can hopefully get a good enough score on to receive college credit from the university or college they attend after high school.
I myself took AP Comp. Sci. (when it was C++) and AP Calc. and recieved 11 hours from university for the two of them, almost a full semester. That, coupled with taking a few more hours than normal each semester enabled to me to graduate in three years.
So, if there was one thing I'll make sure my kids (if and when I ever have any) is to make sure they take college credit examinations, if for nothing more than to save money. Seriously, avoiding just ONE year of more schooling saved me about $12,000! Plus, by graduating early and going to work (or a master's I suppose), I can increase me earnings potential by one entire year. I only wish I had taken more AP exams.
The GIMP is fine for someone looking to dabble and experiment with graphic arts and digital design. It is also good for doing more advanced things if you can get used to it.
However, from the professional's point of view, Photoshop is superior and handles things much better and has a lot more support down its throat than does The Gimp. Photoshop also works with all of the other leading edge desktop publishing software, which as you might have guessed, are also apps from Adobe.
So, yes, The Gimp may be free (which si good for someone just starting off), but the $600+ price tag for Photoshop really is peanuts for a professional graphics designer. And frankly, from their point of view, they want to be using THE top of the crop tool and they certainly want to be able to tell their customers that as well, not, "Oh we saved $600 by using The Gimp. Cool, huh?" Wrong, their customers don't care... they want the BEST... It might be a different story if Photoshop cost something like $20k a license, but.... IT DOESN'T.
You're the guy in Office Space who gets the specs from the customers so the engineers won't have to deal with them because you have people skills DAMMIT!
What is the relevance of this? I've seen people posting already about how their school has barely any wireless access at all and why that school is even on the list... but seriously, what does it *mean* to be on the list? Does it mean much of anything? Personally, I don't necessarily care if my school has wireless access on its campus with 100% coverage. It is not an important decision in choosing to go to school there, but apparently, some people do.
Well, for those that actually do their time in university and study and work hard, this is a totally irrelevant 'rating list' that I don't see the merit in being a headling on Slashdot. Of course, as has been pointed out in the past, the quality of the headlines appearing on Slashdot seems to be diminishing. MAybe I should stick to Kuro5hin.org...
Much like Hotmails users are required to pawn their eternal soul to the Prince of Darkness, Gmail users are going to have to bite the bullet and accept that their privacy may not be so private anymore. Why is this such a big problem?
Here on Slashdot, we want complete privacy, 1GB of email, unlimited sized attachments, all for free, oh and IMAP and POP access too, please.
Users want to have their cake and eat it too.
Not to mention the fact that most Slashdot users balk at companies that have any sort of personal information about them, god forbid those companies try to mine that data for useful trends for profitbility.
cell phones... IIRC, I believe (not sure about this, maybe its just a rumor) one can have a cell phone without a particular provider, but legal requirements (someone correct me if I am wrong) require that you still be able to use the phone to make emergency response (police, fire, etc.) phone calls even without a service plan through a particular provider. So, those of you with those nasty old Motorola analog 'bag' car phones, you might have a use for a cell phone with no service plan. If anyone has more info. or corrections, please post 'em.
Just to clarify some additional details about minimum wage jobs. As it has been shown by numerous studies, one cannot even live comfortably in the United States making minimum wage. If someone is earning minimum wage, they still have an annual income that is below the poverty line. In addition, minimum wage sets the lowest possible wage which ultimately increases the cost of goods and services for everyone in the end, including the people earning minimum wage. If the government decided to push minimum wage up to, say $20/hour, what do you think would happen then?
Do you think movie tickets would still be their ultra-low prices of $8-$10? How about those delicious, healthy, volumptuous cheeseburgers at McDonald's? Still $1.00 or whatever the current rate is?
The answer is NO WAY. Minimum wage serves a few purposes. One indirect benefit is the belief that people actually think of when they feel that there is a 'protection' for people who are poor. Gee, well at least they can earn a set minimum!
Sorry, but minimum wage has tons of speculation and rarely any clarification.
Automobiles are expensive and generally need to be repaired. If you want to regulate the repairing of PCs, you would be wasting your time. PCs cost next to nothing and are rarely worth the money to repair, except in specific circumstances. In addition, the likelihood of a mis-repair on a PC is not likely to physically injure someone. Also, data protection, if you consider loss of it as an injury, shouldn't be considered in the process. Who is to say the accountability for a customer's data is in the hands of the repairman or the hands of the customer (in terms of being responsible and making back-ups)?
If there is any kind of certification, then it should be done as it is done now: through industry or proprietary certs and respectable experience. It would make sense, if you had two equal candidates (companies or consultants) who wanted to repair your million-buck Sun boxes, to choose a person or company that is 'certified' than one that is not. Is that a guaruntee? No, but niether is a federally issued license. Sure, accountability might be in place, but that sure doesn't mean a whole lot if the guy can't do your particular job right the first time.
In addition, I would like to point out something. Making money by selling software is more profitable than developing and then selling the same software. On that note, one should notice a number of the motives behind a lot of the software industry's players' moves are. Think about Macromedia's purchase of Allaire's ColdFusion, Microsoft's purchase of DOS (er... CP/M), IBM's puchase of Tivoli. Even for some of the top software companies, buying all of the copyrights and licenses (or the whole company, dammit) makes more sense than developing and then selling your own.
I suggest you ask these questions here. Your questions is quite specific to generalize to the young, dumb slashdot crowd. Many of the posters in these aforementioned newsgroups are university professors who have either written or have contributed to mathematical writings, papers, periodicals, and articles. They will definitely be more useful than what you'll find here. Cheers
When we talk about what is
"cheaper" you first have to set a standard of performance. If you want X
data to always be retrieved in Y or less time, then you have a point of
comparion. Memory vs Disk becomes cheaper when the number of drives you have
to have to insure your level of performance becomes excessive in comparison
to the amount of data the drive is storing. This is particularly true when
having to index a large amount of data. If you need to do 7 or 8 disk arm
seeks to get to the data and you have a standard of performance you may need
many more disk than what the capacity of the platter dictates.
I do not believe that either all disk or all memory is ever the best
solution, but a blend is always needed. That blend goes from the traditional
1 to 100 ratio of memory to hard drive to 1 to 1. Remember the Dram stills
needs back up for the most unusual power failures, hardware failures.
In a well performing tranaction management system, you really don't want
more than 1 or 2 physical I/Os to the hard drive for performance, which
means you need intellingent indexes or hashing routines and a proper amount
of memory for caching.
It really is an interesting performance tuning topic. In fact some operating
systems manage the difference of disk vs memory for you the programming, so
you are always referencing data in memory and the OS and systems programmer
are controlling how much data is really in memory for the application how
much is on hard drive. A very similar concept to virtual memory for
programs.
The story of Cisco is more interesting than JUST its intial beginnings. The author of the SiliconValley article cannot be as comprehensive as a good book. Cisco is a very talented and clever organization of people with a very interesting business model (imperialistic in a sense). Cisco Connection is a well-written story about the conecton of Cisco and its dealings and dynamics over the last decade and a half. Very interesting corporate reading.
In addition to all of the hogwash of problems, no one mentioned ads and popups... Obviously, the use of ads and popups would probably impose some technical problems. What about, say, ANY page that pops up "extra" that the user didn't request for? On the other hand, if there was no good way around it and everything was ideal, maybe ISP's/websites would find a practical way to remove popups and extra ads for users browsing their pages. If they did this, then I might be interested. It's one thing to use ad-remover type software; It's another to NOT HAVE to use that kind of software. = )
As quoted my Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" published along with a collection of sermons in 1964:
He quotes in part III, paragraph I:
"More recently I have come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations. Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But I now believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good. I we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicales and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence."
As goofy as it for me to post this, I felt it necessary because it seemed to apply quite well in the wake of Tuesday's complete demise of the WTC and Pentagon. As much as America's desire is to rip apart those who are responsible for the acts of that day, I do believe we must restrain the knee-jerk reaction to run ourselves into war. Clearly, the responsible must be held accountable, but how? The question that Americans SHOULD focus on is not whether we ought to enter war, but rather how do we express justice in this matter without another raging onslaught of violence from ourselves?
Slashdot Mirror
Others here have commented that as a noob, your code will likely suck. Even a few months from you, you'll reflect back or encounter code you wrote and think about how much it sucks. The one tenant I can tell you is that code is never truly final. I mean 'final' in the sense that any product you're building (a web app or thick client or whatever) is never final because if people are using it, they'll always want new versions and updates that do things differently and better. This phenomenon gives you (and your product team) a chance to make things better, both in existing code/features and new things as well. Secondly, you should try to learn and focus on the art of testing. Just like when you were learning mathematics in high school algebra and calculus and later numerical analysis or number theory or whatever in college, your instructors always want you to 'check your work.' In the simplest case, that's taking your 'final answer' and plugging it back in for 'X' and solving to see if you actually got the equation right. Think of testing like this: a balance of both sides of an equals sign. Otherwise, be a sponge and read, listen, and absorb.
At my old company, we used SilkTest, which is a very nice tool. As you said, it does require scripting and it becomes a problem when tying it specific UI elements. Instead, we created an Automation framework that included Access DB's that work with SilkTest to do the testing. It requires a list of 'steps' that are performed, but if an element changes, we only need to go back to the Access DB and update what element it currently is 'pointing' at and then everything reflects it in the future. In addition, we used 'functions' in the Access DB that define a series of steps (like common operations like 'logging as a user X').
.NET that would 'schedule' tests to be run. Machine clients (or the machines that would be doing the testing) would be 'registered' with our server. Through the use of a web app, developers/testers (or anyone, actually) could choose from lists of tests to schedule to be run against a specified build. The server would then run those tests using available machines. Then, when those machines were done with their assigned tests, the returned the results to the server which could then be reviewed on the web app. IT ended up being quite slick in the end.
On top of that, we created an additional tool that automated testing across multiple machines distributively. Because out application can run only as a single instance on one machine at a time, testing on multiple machines means SilkTest and the particular tests that need to be run be setup manually on each separate machine. Therefore, if you've got 2,000 tests, you could wait for them all to complete or setup machines yourself to do it. Either way, it can take a long time to test a new build.
So we developed a server/client system using
I'll agree that the CLEP can get you more credit, however, many high schools right now offer 'AP' classes as part of the curriculum for eligible students. In other words, the classes themselves perpare students for the exam by covering required material. So, for many students who may not be able or willing to study the material on their own, they can have a class that will prepare them for the exam to which they can hopefully get a good enough score on to receive college credit from the university or college they attend after high school.
I myself took AP Comp. Sci. (when it was C++) and AP Calc. and recieved 11 hours from university for the two of them, almost a full semester. That, coupled with taking a few more hours than normal each semester enabled to me to graduate in three years.
So, if there was one thing I'll make sure my kids (if and when I ever have any) is to make sure they take college credit examinations, if for nothing more than to save money. Seriously, avoiding just ONE year of more schooling saved me about $12,000! Plus, by graduating early and going to work (or a master's I suppose), I can increase me earnings potential by one entire year. I only wish I had taken more AP exams.
The GIMP is fine for someone looking to dabble and experiment with graphic arts and digital design. It is also good for doing more advanced things if you can get used to it.
However, from the professional's point of view, Photoshop is superior and handles things much better and has a lot more support down its throat than does The Gimp. Photoshop also works with all of the other leading edge desktop publishing software, which as you might have guessed, are also apps from Adobe.
So, yes, The Gimp may be free (which si good for someone just starting off), but the $600+ price tag for Photoshop really is peanuts for a professional graphics designer. And frankly, from their point of view, they want to be using THE top of the crop tool and they certainly want to be able to tell their customers that as well, not, "Oh we saved $600 by using The Gimp. Cool, huh?" Wrong, their customers don't care... they want the BEST... It might be a different story if Photoshop cost something like $20k a license, but.... IT DOESN'T.
You're the guy in Office Space who gets the specs from the customers so the engineers won't have to deal with them because you have people skills DAMMIT!
What is the relevance of this? I've seen people posting already about how their school has barely any wireless access at all and why that school is even on the list... but seriously, what does it *mean* to be on the list? Does it mean much of anything? Personally, I don't necessarily care if my school has wireless access on its campus with 100% coverage. It is not an important decision in choosing to go to school there, but apparently, some people do.
Well, for those that actually do their time in university and study and work hard, this is a totally irrelevant 'rating list' that I don't see the merit in being a headling on Slashdot. Of course, as has been pointed out in the past, the quality of the headlines appearing on Slashdot seems to be diminishing. MAybe I should stick to Kuro5hin.org...
Much like Hotmails users are required to pawn their eternal soul to the Prince of Darkness, Gmail users are going to have to bite the bullet and accept that their privacy may not be so private anymore. Why is this such a big problem?
Here on Slashdot, we want complete privacy, 1GB of email, unlimited sized attachments, all for free, oh and IMAP and POP access too, please. Users want to have their cake and eat it too. Not to mention the fact that most Slashdot users balk at companies that have any sort of personal information about them, god forbid those companies try to mine that data for useful trends for profitbility.
Well, you can kiss that goodbye when they've been publicly traded after their IPO for >6 months.
Nice Speedos
And people want to buy this guy's stock?
And you can get the whole shebang here: Sergey Brin's Stanford Homepage
cell phones... IIRC, I believe (not sure about this, maybe its just a rumor) one can have a cell phone without a particular provider, but legal requirements (someone correct me if I am wrong) require that you still be able to use the phone to make emergency response (police, fire, etc.) phone calls even without a service plan through a particular provider. So, those of you with those nasty old Motorola analog 'bag' car phones, you might have a use for a cell phone with no service plan. If anyone has more info. or corrections, please post 'em.
Just to clarify some additional details about minimum wage jobs. As it has been shown by numerous studies, one cannot even live comfortably in the United States making minimum wage. If someone is earning minimum wage, they still have an annual income that is below the poverty line. In addition, minimum wage sets the lowest possible wage which ultimately increases the cost of goods and services for everyone in the end, including the people earning minimum wage. If the government decided to push minimum wage up to, say $20/hour, what do you think would happen then?
Do you think movie tickets would still be their ultra-low prices of $8-$10? How about those delicious, healthy, volumptuous cheeseburgers at McDonald's? Still $1.00 or whatever the current rate is?
The answer is NO WAY. Minimum wage serves a few purposes. One indirect benefit is the belief that people actually think of when they feel that there is a 'protection' for people who are poor. Gee, well at least they can earn a set minimum!
Sorry, but minimum wage has tons of speculation and rarely any clarification.
Automobiles are expensive and generally need to be repaired. If you want to regulate the repairing of PCs, you would be wasting your time. PCs cost next to nothing and are rarely worth the money to repair, except in specific circumstances. In addition, the likelihood of a mis-repair on a PC is not likely to physically injure someone. Also, data protection, if you consider loss of it as an injury, shouldn't be considered in the process. Who is to say the accountability for a customer's data is in the hands of the repairman or the hands of the customer (in terms of being responsible and making back-ups)?
If there is any kind of certification, then it should be done as it is done now: through industry or proprietary certs and respectable experience. It would make sense, if you had two equal candidates (companies or consultants) who wanted to repair your million-buck Sun boxes, to choose a person or company that is 'certified' than one that is not. Is that a guaruntee? No, but niether is a federally issued license. Sure, accountability might be in place, but that sure doesn't mean a whole lot if the guy can't do your particular job right the first time.
In addition, I would like to point out something. Making money by selling software is more profitable than developing and then selling the same software. On that note, one should notice a number of the motives behind a lot of the software industry's players' moves are. Think about Macromedia's purchase of Allaire's ColdFusion, Microsoft's purchase of DOS (er... CP/M), IBM's puchase of Tivoli. Even for some of the top software companies, buying all of the copyrights and licenses (or the whole company, dammit) makes more sense than developing and then selling your own.
I suggest you ask these questions here. Your questions is quite specific to generalize to the young, dumb slashdot crowd. Many of the posters in these aforementioned newsgroups are university professors who have either written or have contributed to mathematical writings, papers, periodicals, and articles. They will definitely be more useful than what you'll find here.
Cheers
When we talk about what is "cheaper" you first have to set a standard of performance. If you want X data to always be retrieved in Y or less time, then you have a point of comparion. Memory vs Disk becomes cheaper when the number of drives you have to have to insure your level of performance becomes excessive in comparison to the amount of data the drive is storing. This is particularly true when having to index a large amount of data. If you need to do 7 or 8 disk arm seeks to get to the data and you have a standard of performance you may need many more disk than what the capacity of the platter dictates. I do not believe that either all disk or all memory is ever the best solution, but a blend is always needed. That blend goes from the traditional 1 to 100 ratio of memory to hard drive to 1 to 1. Remember the Dram stills needs back up for the most unusual power failures, hardware failures. In a well performing tranaction management system, you really don't want more than 1 or 2 physical I/Os to the hard drive for performance, which means you need intellingent indexes or hashing routines and a proper amount of memory for caching. It really is an interesting performance tuning topic. In fact some operating systems manage the difference of disk vs memory for you the programming, so you are always referencing data in memory and the OS and systems programmer are controlling how much data is really in memory for the application how much is on hard drive. A very similar concept to virtual memory for programs.
The story of Cisco is more interesting than JUST its intial beginnings. The author of the SiliconValley article cannot be as comprehensive as a good book. Cisco is a very talented and clever organization of people with a very interesting business model (imperialistic in a sense). Cisco Connection is a well-written story about the conecton of Cisco and its dealings and dynamics over the last decade and a half. Very interesting corporate reading.
In addition to all of the hogwash of problems, no one mentioned ads and popups... Obviously, the use of ads and popups would probably impose some technical problems. What about, say, ANY page that pops up "extra" that the user didn't request for? On the other hand, if there was no good way around it and everything was ideal, maybe ISP's/websites would find a practical way to remove popups and extra ads for users browsing their pages. If they did this, then I might be interested. It's one thing to use ad-remover type software; It's another to NOT HAVE to use that kind of software. = )
As quoted my Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" published along with a collection of sermons in 1964:
He quotes in part III, paragraph I:
"More recently I have come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations. Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But I now believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good. I we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicales and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence."
As goofy as it for me to post this, I felt it necessary because it seemed to apply quite well in the wake of Tuesday's complete demise of the WTC and Pentagon. As much as America's desire is to rip apart those who are responsible for the acts of that day, I do believe we must restrain the knee-jerk reaction to run ourselves into war. Clearly, the responsible must be held accountable, but how? The question that Americans SHOULD focus on is not whether we ought to enter war, but rather how do we express justice in this matter without another raging onslaught of violence from ourselves?