I hate to be a me tooer but I agree with the parent. I am really enjoying About Face 2. They're challenging the basic assumtions that us programmers make about how the user works: 1) Why do we need a save button? Ideally, the program will backup a version of the document after every change and if the user undos, then the program will move to a previous backup seemlessly 2) Why do we have so many dialogs asking for comfirmation? 3) Why isn;t undo/redo universal in the operating system, or at least in the part of the system which the user uses always?
I find them to be very refreshing to read. Ideally, the filesystem would support the kinds of behaviors they are talking about. (basically have a SCM instead of flat files and it'll track all of the modifications, branches and merges) I think that this would be a very good direction for one of the KDE/gnome projects to move towards.
It's a great article because it puts out some more reasons why wikis are the way of the future and docs and shared drives aren't. Before I was acting of intution and now at least it's possible to point to someone else who agrees.
Did you even look at other Wikis before going with MediaWiki?
No, actually I didn't. All of the features which I thought were important then were built into MediaWiki. And the fact it is relatively easy to install and support was appealling when I couldm't devote alot of time to understanding the whole The Wiki Way. I just wanted something that worked fast and well.
If I redid it, I'd probably push my company to use confluence. it's more along the lines of a professional collaberation tool without the overhead and expense. I'd also look at Trac if I had any say over the SCM or bugtracking systems my company uses.
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold?
on
Acme for Windows
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· Score: 1
Kate is great.
I would use it more if it had sets of key-bindings instead of forcing you to modify one at a time. It's too painful to start changing them to the emacs style otherwise.
Oh and it needs more powerful tagging as well. (well, maybe kdevelop would be better...)
In unionized jobs, the individual workers have little or no control of the process
I've yet to see ANY software lifecycle where the engineers have more control over the process than the end users.
I find that end users are very, very vague about what they want. They know what they like (and don't like) when they see something working but in the absense of a viable prototype, end users are clueless. maybe thats why prototypes have a longer shelflife then they should. The enduser/boss sees it and says "I want X, Y, and Z changed and then ship it." It doesn't matter to him that the internals suck.
This is why Testdriven programming is so important. No code before tests. Then your internals will always be rock solid. (like building the frames before pouring the concrete.:)
Cheers, Ben
PS. If management ever discovered test-driven programming, I think programming work would be more commodized and programmers would have to lean towards unionizing more. The creativity/brillance factor would be reduced a bit.
Well if there were any firefox extensions which would edit mediawiki using mediawiki formating, it would be a hell of a lot less intimidating for the average user.
Managing a wiki isn't so hard, you just look at the RSS feed of changes on a daily basis and if there's a mistake, it's trivial to revert it.
This is a great article. I fought like hell at work to get people to use a wiki (I installed mediawiki) because it's so much more flexible then passing.doc files around. Even so, the PHBs here still wanted.doc. So I just copy-n-paste now. No more struggling with word formating/layout for me. That was a frigging nightmare:)
Ben
PS. pushing a wiki too hard might get you fired but at least it's worth doing. Plus, no more dependency on Word.
Funny, I had a similar course load when I graduated 5 years ago from UC Berkeley. (And I even thought the projects looked good on a resume.. hahah how naive i was!!)
Again, they tended not to focus on the language (except for Scheme as the first lang., java as the second and MIPS risc asm+c as the the third)
I suspect that it's more the quality of teachers, the resources at their disposal and the drive of the student's peers (as a whole) which determines how successful an education a student will receive.
I believe the controller for GUI (and maybe web?) applications is used to actually maintain the state variables of the application. The model is used to contain the nonstate variables. This means that when the user clicks on the BuyNow button before he logs in, he goes to the login screen and if he clicks on the BuyNow button after he logs in, he goes to the checkout screen. Using a controller lets you decouple the users item basket and his financal data from the current screen that he is in. Then you can start doing neat things with the controller like specifying it with statecharts (which manipulate the model using virtual methods) and being able to rewind properly when he clicks on the back button.
Obviously, some state variables (like whether a button is up or down) should be left in the View.
I'll take a picture. I have my PS2 standing right next to my 360, and the 360 is approximately.5 inch taller due to the hard drive, and no wider. It's a little deeper by about 1.5 inches, but that's less than the old Xbox and much less than my cable box or my DVD player.
There is a large slot in the back of the PS2 which I believe is space for a harddisk or ethernet/network card. The PS2 is designed to be extremely tight and compact. In fact, it's so compact that modding the damn thing is a difficult excercise in soldering. Definitely, not for the faint of heart. Just take yours apart and see (it'll void your warranty but do you really care??) Modding the XBOX on the other hand is a simple case of sloting in a three progged jack. (no idea about the 360 though)
Concerning that Will Wright's previous games were brillent smash hits, I seriously doubt that Spore will suck. In fact, the few games that he did do which werent well received were still a hell of a lot better then your average game designer. (Looking at Wikipedia, SimAnt and SimCopter come to mind)
Sure, Wired has put some inane stuff on but that's the risk you take if you try to predict the future all the time.
There is no way other than the use of industrial espionage to explain the short amount of time China took in developing its space program and supercomputer capabilities.
Actually I think they paid Russia for most of it. At least for a couple of the rockets and space ships. (veachuiles?? I can't spell well)
I personally feel, (but have not experienced yet) that overriding method_missing should normally be a totally illegal operation unless it is extremely well documented. This feature is liable to cause horrible, horrible pain and suffering for maintaince engineers. However, it's great if you want your own domain specific language. The dsl just has to be documented in great detail and then not changed whenever some slob feels like it.
Small problem with that plan. Cheap, overseas programmers are good are re-creating software. If you hire them to create new interesting software, you have very little control over their creative processes. Creating software is very much a process of getting and giving feedback about each feature, each datapackage. It's also very important to maintain quality and code constitancy. otherwise, the on;y people who will be able to maintain the code will be the same programmers you hired to create it which will create huge serious problems (IMHO) Since it is free/very cheap to reproduce software, your primary cost is the actual production and maintainence. Normal economic theory doesn't work properly.
This is why fears of overseas outsourcing is bullshit. The people playing for the software have to be in close proximity to the producers of the software...
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
You better start saving up a buffer so you do have flexibility to leave when the job place gets rough or your boss tries to ship your job to india.
Honestly, I think the best way to behave in a situation where the work gets unbarable is to quit and: 1) try to find a new job. 2) find a market/product and try to sell it. Let the marketplace decide. The barriers to entry are SO fucking low nowadays that it doesn't make sense to suffer in a crappy job. You can make 10x as much by using a bit of the creativity that is normally devoted to programming used for marketing and selling instead. And you'll have that flexibility to decide how much and how little to work. 3) threaten your boss that your going to quit unless x, y, z happen. Watch him fold.
Unions for creative jobs don't make sense because you're tieing your fortunes to those of the group. Everyone has to work together against the common enemy (the corperate leaders). In the computer engineering field, this seems like bs to me. Individual engineers have a high degree of power over whether a project successes or fails. In unionized jobs, the individual workers have little or no control of the process
I still have problems: 1) if Im trying to find rare stuff (The Prisoner, Specific TV episodes, Gundam stardust memories), the search sites mostly suck. Sure, they're better then nothing but they still mostly suck. I'd pay money for access to rare stuff. Maybe $2-5/episido. 2) Even if I find the stuff I want, it's a pain in the ass to get it (several days to download a 1GB movie) and then sometimes it's even the wrong thing. Like a movie mismarked and turns out to be crappy porn instead of a hollywood flick.
What really pisses me off is getting a huge movie almost downloaded and then it's impossible to get recoonected to the peers. It's like they're suddenly all gone. I suspect a honeypot scheme by the MPAA where bt peers offer premium downloads and then drop you as soon you've downloaded 50-70% of the files. Another one is not being able to contact the peers at all.
i think it's easy to dl stuff on bt but its even easier to mess with the protocol and mess up the peers. Cheers, Ben
$3/unit seems pretty heavy to me. My bosses were not too happy when a vendor wanted $1/unit for a substantial subsystem and we build medical equipment (it's expensive but the user will pay for it anyway).
Don't expect $15/unit winCE showing up anywhere in less then luxury good items. The economics doesn't make much sense...
If the studios offerred the movies at $1.50 and it only played on WMP, I'm sure 80-90% of computer users would be satisfied with the deal. People get their cheap entertainment without spending hours online trying to find a good/downloadable version.
Cheers, Ben
PS. Hell, I'd go for it if it played on linux. Finding downloadable stuff on bittorrent is a real pain in the ass nowadays.
Definitely too easy to use. My coworkers have been forced to learn vi because its the only editor builtin with busybox. I finally got so pissed off that I just dl'ed nano and installed it instead. Maybe I'll symlink vi -> nano, hehehe
If you read the article, it says that lens don't work because they have to be always facing the sun -> heavier/more expensive.
The hohlgraphic plates can redirect light coming in from any direction and cause it to eventually (after much bouncing around) fall on a photovoltaic cell. It also has the benefit of filtering out bad (unhelpful) IR light.
My parents drive an all electric Honda SUV and he charges it through solar cells on the top of his roof. Most days he makes money by generating more power then he consumes and he recieves a check from the electric company...
Cheers, Ben
Re:Thats what abandonware is!
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
It's a hell of a lot smaller because it doesn't rely on X11. Thats where a lot of the bloat is coming from.
It can be stripped down too so you get rid of those large features you don't want. Try dumping the ttf font renderer. That'll dump 2Mb (out of 8Mb) immediately
Ben
PS. It possible to strip down the kernel a lot. You just have to decide which features you want and Blam! you get a 2Mb kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to be a me tooer but I agree with the parent. I am really enjoying About Face 2.
They're challenging the basic assumtions that us programmers make about how the user works:
1) Why do we need a save button? Ideally, the program will backup a version of the document after every change and if the user undos, then the program will move to a previous backup seemlessly
2) Why do we have so many dialogs asking for comfirmation?
3) Why isn;t undo/redo universal in the operating system, or at least in the part of the system which the user uses always?
I find them to be very refreshing to read.
Ideally, the filesystem would support the kinds of behaviors they are talking about. (basically have a SCM instead of flat files and it'll track all of the modifications, branches and merges)
I think that this would be a very good direction for one of the KDE/gnome projects to move towards.
Cheers,
Ben
It's a great article because it puts out some more reasons why wikis are the way of the future and docs and shared drives aren't. Before I was acting of intution and now at least it's possible to point to someone else who agrees.
Did you even look at other Wikis before going with MediaWiki?
No, actually I didn't. All of the features which I thought were important then were built into MediaWiki.
And the fact it is relatively easy to install and support was appealling when I couldm't devote alot of time to understanding the whole The Wiki Way.
I just wanted something that worked fast and well.
If I redid it, I'd probably push my company to use confluence. it's more along the lines of a professional collaberation tool without the overhead and expense. I'd also look at Trac if I had any say over the SCM or bugtracking systems my company uses.
Cheers,
Ben
If you scroll down a bit, You'll find other wonderful DoE inventations.
Like this one
With inventations like that, who needs cars??
Ben
Kate is great.
I would use it more if it had sets of key-bindings instead of forcing you to modify one at a time.
It's too painful to start changing them to the emacs style otherwise.
Oh and it needs more powerful tagging as well. (well, maybe kdevelop would be better...)
Cheers,
Ben
All your points are good above this:
:)
In unionized jobs, the individual workers have little or no control of the process
I've yet to see ANY software lifecycle where the engineers have more control over the process than the end users.
I find that end users are very, very vague about what they want. They know what they like (and don't like) when they see something working but in the absense of a viable prototype, end users are clueless. maybe thats why prototypes have a longer shelflife then they should. The enduser/boss sees it and says "I want X, Y, and Z changed and then ship it." It doesn't matter to him that the internals suck.
This is why Testdriven programming is so important. No code before tests. Then your internals will always be rock solid.
(like building the frames before pouring the concrete.
Cheers,
Ben
PS. If management ever discovered test-driven programming, I think programming work would be more commodized and programmers would have to lean towards unionizing more.
The creativity/brillance factor would be reduced a bit.
Well if there were any firefox extensions which would edit mediawiki using mediawiki formating, it would be a hell of a lot less intimidating for the average user.
Managing a wiki isn't so hard, you just look at the RSS feed of changes on a daily basis and if there's a mistake, it's trivial to revert it.
Cheers,
Ben
This is a great article. .doc files around. .doc. So I just copy-n-paste now. No more struggling with word formating/layout for me. That was a frigging nightmare :)
I fought like hell at work to get people to use a wiki (I installed mediawiki) because it's so much more flexible then passing
Even so, the PHBs here still wanted
Ben
PS. pushing a wiki too hard might get you fired but at least it's worth doing.
Plus, no more dependency on Word.
Funny, I had a similar course load when I graduated 5 years ago from UC Berkeley. (And I even thought the projects looked good on a resume.. hahah how naive i was!!)
Again, they tended not to focus on the language (except for Scheme as the first lang., java as the second and MIPS risc asm+c as the the third)
I suspect that it's more the quality of teachers, the resources at their disposal and the drive of the student's peers (as a whole) which determines how successful an education a student will receive.
Cheers,
Ben
I believe the controller for GUI (and maybe web?) applications is used to actually maintain the state variables of the application. The model is used to contain the nonstate variables.
This means that when the user clicks on the BuyNow button before he logs in, he goes to the login screen and if he clicks on the BuyNow button after he logs in, he goes to the checkout screen. Using a controller lets you decouple the users item basket and his financal data from the current screen that he is in. Then you can start doing neat things with the controller like specifying it with statecharts (which manipulate the model using virtual methods) and being able to rewind properly when he clicks on the back button.
Obviously, some state variables (like whether a button is up or down) should be left in the View.
At least, that's the way it works in GUIs
Cheers,
Ben
I'll take a picture. I have my PS2 standing right next to my 360, and the 360 is approximately .5 inch taller due to the hard drive, and no wider. It's a little deeper by about 1.5 inches, but that's less than the old Xbox and much less than my cable box or my DVD player.
There is a large slot in the back of the PS2 which I believe is space for a harddisk or ethernet/network card.
The PS2 is designed to be extremely tight and compact. In fact, it's so compact that modding the damn thing is a difficult excercise in soldering. Definitely, not for the faint of heart. Just take yours apart and see (it'll void your warranty but do you really care??) Modding the XBOX on the other hand is a simple case of sloting in a three progged jack. (no idea about the 360 though)
Cheers,
Ben
Concerning that Will Wright's previous games were brillent smash hits,
I seriously doubt that Spore will suck. In fact, the few games that he did do which werent well received were still a hell of a lot better then your average game designer. (Looking at Wikipedia, SimAnt and SimCopter come to mind)
Sure, Wired has put some inane stuff on but that's the risk you take if you try to predict the future all the time.
Ben
There is no way other than the use of industrial espionage to explain the short amount of time China took in developing its space program and supercomputer capabilities.
Actually I think they paid Russia for most of it. At least for a couple of the rockets and space ships. (veachuiles?? I can't spell well)
Cheers,
Ben
I personally feel, (but have not experienced yet) that overriding method_missing should normally be a totally illegal operation unless it is extremely well documented. This feature is liable to cause horrible, horrible pain and suffering for maintaince engineers. However, it's great if you want your own domain specific language. The dsl just has to be documented in great detail and then not changed whenever some slob feels like it.
Cheers,
Ben
Small problem with that plan.
Cheap, overseas programmers are good are re-creating software. If you hire them to create new interesting software, you have very little control over their creative processes. Creating software is very much a process of getting and giving feedback about each feature, each datapackage. It's also very important to maintain quality and code constitancy. otherwise, the on;y people who will be able to maintain the code will be the same programmers you hired to create it which will create huge serious problems (IMHO) Since it is free/very cheap to reproduce software, your primary cost is the actual production and maintainence. Normal economic theory doesn't work properly.
This is why fears of overseas outsourcing is bullshit. The people playing for the software have to be in close proximity to the producers of the software...
Cheers,
Ben
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
You better start saving up a buffer so you do have flexibility to leave when the job place gets rough or your boss tries to ship your job to india.
Honestly, I think the best way to behave in a situation where the work gets unbarable is to quit and:
1) try to find a new job.
2) find a market/product and try to sell it. Let the marketplace decide. The barriers to entry are SO fucking low nowadays that it doesn't make sense to suffer in a crappy job. You can make 10x as much by using a bit of the creativity that is normally devoted to programming used for marketing and selling instead. And you'll have that flexibility to decide how much and how little to work.
3) threaten your boss that your going to quit unless x, y, z happen. Watch him fold.
Unions for creative jobs don't make sense because you're tieing your fortunes to those of the group. Everyone has to work together against the common enemy (the corperate leaders).
In the computer engineering field, this seems like bs to me. Individual engineers have a high degree of power over whether a project successes or fails. In unionized jobs, the individual workers have little or no control of the process
I still have problems:
1) if Im trying to find rare stuff (The Prisoner, Specific TV episodes, Gundam stardust memories), the search sites mostly suck. Sure, they're better then nothing but they still mostly suck. I'd pay money for access to rare stuff.
Maybe $2-5/episido.
2) Even if I find the stuff I want, it's a pain in the ass to get it (several days to download a 1GB movie) and then sometimes it's even the wrong thing. Like a movie mismarked and turns out to be crappy porn instead of a hollywood flick.
What really pisses me off is getting a huge movie almost downloaded and then it's impossible to get recoonected to the peers. It's like they're suddenly all gone. I suspect a honeypot scheme by the MPAA where bt peers offer premium downloads and then drop you as soon you've downloaded 50-70% of the files. Another one is not being able to contact the peers at all.
i think it's easy to dl stuff on bt but its even easier to mess with the protocol and mess up the peers.
Cheers,
Ben
$3/unit seems pretty heavy to me. My bosses were not too happy when a vendor wanted $1/unit for a substantial subsystem and we build medical equipment (it's expensive but the user will pay for it anyway).
Don't expect $15/unit winCE showing up anywhere in less then luxury good items. The economics doesn't make much sense...
Cheers,
Ben
Hummm, I'm not sure that its a token gesture.
If the studios offerred the movies at $1.50 and it only played on WMP, I'm sure 80-90% of computer users would be satisfied with the deal. People get their cheap entertainment without spending hours online trying to find a good/downloadable version.
Cheers,
Ben
PS. Hell, I'd go for it if it played on linux. Finding downloadable stuff on bittorrent is a real pain in the ass nowadays.
Definitely too easy to use.
My coworkers have been forced to learn vi because its the only editor builtin with busybox. I finally got so pissed off that I just dl'ed nano and installed it instead. Maybe I'll symlink vi -> nano, hehehe
Cheers,
Ben
Have you seen the programs they produced?
Nor have I...
nuff said,
Ben
PS. FF7 was pretty good though..
If you read the article, it says that lens don't work because they have to be always facing the sun -> heavier/more expensive.
The hohlgraphic plates can redirect light coming in from any direction and cause it to eventually (after much bouncing around) fall on a photovoltaic cell. It also has the benefit of filtering out bad (unhelpful) IR light.
Cheers,
Ben
The parent is totally correct.
My parents drive an all electric Honda SUV and he charges it through solar cells on the top of his roof.
Most days he makes money by generating more power then he consumes and he recieves a check from the electric company...
Cheers,
Ben
But what about threat of lawsuit??
Ben
Thats funny!!
Mod parent up!
You should try qt-embedded/qtopia then.
It's a hell of a lot smaller because it doesn't rely on X11.
Thats where a lot of the bloat is coming from.
It can be stripped down too so you get rid of those large features you don't want.
Try dumping the ttf font renderer. That'll dump 2Mb (out of 8Mb) immediately
Ben
PS. It possible to strip down the kernel a lot.
You just have to decide which features you want and Blam! you get a 2Mb kernel.