I'm sorry, but to my eyes even Mozilla 0.9.9, with the `Aqua' look, is ugly. OmniWeb's antialiased text is so much easier on the eye that it's long been my browser of choice despite crashing regularly, poor JavaScript handling, etc.* Mozilla might look like Aqua, but it's not the real McCoy, and that often shows through, making it seem clumsy and unfinished. I can't put my finger on exactly why OmniWeb looks more elegant, but it really does.
* And now that OmniWeb 4.1 beta 4 is out, most of those problems are resolved. It's far more stable (hasn't crashed once), has better JavaScript handling, faster rendering, and many other improvements. I like it so much I've just handed over some money for it when I could have carried on using it for free! All OS X users should give it a try.
I think many of these methodologies work much better used as a bunch of tools (diagrams, processes, models) that can help you in your search for The Right Thing(TM), rather than a process to be blindly followed despite all intuition (like some Pointy-Haired ones advocate). Software is a creative field; rigidly-defined, objective methodologies can help, but they can't do the job for you.
IE, like many apps, is installed by the root user, so that all users will have access to it. But it runs under your own user ID. So you might be at risk from malicious code in the installer, but once installed, you have the power of Unix permissions to protect you from malicious code on the web etc.
The difference is that C# has fixed some of Java's brain damage, one of which is the lack of an unsigned data type which is just unforgivable.
For one thing, char is unsigned (range 0x0000–0xFFFF). And for another, who uses unsigned types anyway? I don't recall needing them once in C, and I've written a lot. Maybe they're important for a few low-level things, but they're hardly an `unforgivable' omission from Java IMO.
`Nearly 4 hours' is good, but wasn't Peter Jackson's original `Dream Cut' over five hours long? Wasn't the extra footage good enough, or is it being saved for yet another money-spinning DVD release in a year or two?
I did this at uni (email wasn't around when I was at school!), with only the ten or twenty addresses I knew. Hey, I was young and green and didn't know any better, mutter mutter shuffle shuffle... Everyone replied to everyone else, producing amusement followed by amazement as it got out of all proportion, right up to the point I had a (justifiably) nasty mail from the sysadm saying roughly "Little Boys. Play with your toys, but not on my system." I learned my lesson!
What if you downloaded much of your email over a mobile phone (that's cellphone for those who don't understand UKisms) connection? Charged at 10p/min (say $.15/min)? How much would you pay per day before you didget annoyed?
I started getting mouse-hand pain a few years ago – probably not the `standard' form, though as it was my palm that hurt, not my wrist. Anyway, I found a simple solution: mouse left-handed! I found it surprisingly easy, and now find it more comfortable than mousing right-handed, as it evens the hands out: instead of having one hand covering half the letter keys, the cursor keys, the numberic keypad and the mouse, the hands are much more evenly balanced. (I also found some, erm, other things are also great left-handed...;)
Buttonless mice such as the one supplied with my Mac G4 seem much easier on the hand than buttoned mice. You've much more freedom to change your grip, and you can click almost anywhere on it. (And before I get flamed, no, Real Programmers don't need at least 3 buttons! Maybe Windoze forces you, but Mac OS works very comfortably with one as well as with more. Honest.)
WHS! Perhaps the most important thing an IT manager can do is to read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month. Old, but still just as relevant.
The only things I'd add to that are:
Listen and trust. If you accept that you don't know everything about programming, and listen to those that do it, you've half-way there. I've had a manager who went through my estimate and halved every time value. I couldn't explain exactly why things might take so long, but I just knew they might: if everything worked first time and you knew in advance everything you'd need to do, programming would be the sort of meat-packing job managers seem to think it is, and not than the creative art it is. (Needless to say, my guess was far closer than my manager's that time!)
Care about the quality of code. The quickest/cheapest may look good on a balance sheet, but it often makes things worse in the long term. Clean design, code reviews, planning for the future, reuse, etc. have benefits that can't always be measured, but are real nonetheless.
Hard disks are recoverable (more or less, depending on the filesystem, whether they were shut down cleanly, etc.) If it's all in DRAM, and the power goes, you've just lost decades of indexes!
I was under the impression that it was usual for poetry to rhyme...? I don't know where you are, but unless you pronounce `route' the same as `rout' (or are Scottish and pronounce `doubt' as `doot'), then it doesn't really qualify...
A lot of people seem to have the idea that something that would be wrong to do in a leaflet or newspaper or on a street corner with a megaphone is OK if you do it on the internet.
Trouble is, the net isn't exactly like any of those things. It's a little like printing leaflets; it's a little like a conversation in a pub; it's a little like newspapers; it's a little like a coffee morning; it's a little like chatting to the queue at the supermarket; it's a little like carving your name on a tree; and it's a lot like something completely new.
So you can't just apply every existing law you like to it willy-nilly. Some existing laws will still be appropriate; some will best be applicable after modification; and some won't work well at all.
And then there's the problem of jurisdiction. If we here in the UK pass laws governing net use, will you in the USA abide by them? Thought not. But of course we'll need to abide by your laws, won't we...
And it gets more complicated. Who has jurisdiction if a German citizen visits Finland, dials into an Irish ISP, connects to a web site hosted in Mexico and uploads some dodgy stuff that's then downloaded by an American in Paris?...
The problem with JonKatz (if anyone else wants to know my uninformed opinion) is that he spends all his time here preaching to the converted.
He's not a bad writer. Of course, he doesn't write in the terse, factual manner most people here seem to like; he takes much longer to make his points than is sometimes necessary (or than many concentration spans here), and discusses social issues that are more a matter of opinion than most other topics here. But this doesn't make him a bad writer, it just means that his style is more suited to traditional journalism than to a site like SlashDot.
It's simply that much of the time, he's telling us about ourselves things we already knew. Combined with the other factors, many SlashDot readers clearly don't see the point of reading him, and this spills over into the negative and often downright offensive posts about him. Which is a shame, as I think that the SlashDot community needs someone with his skills: not on the inside, telling us about ourselves, but on the outside, telling the world about us. I think Jon could be a great ambassador for us.
Tom was even cut from the (excellent) 13-hour-long BBC Radio adaptation. If they couldn't make room for him, I can understand why Jackson couldn't. Yes, he's important to the story; but most of the other things cut or rushed were even more important.
The current terminology isn't broken for the public which understands gigabyte and megabyte, so don't fix it.
It's not broken for you, it's not broken for me, and the great unwashed don't care. But it's broken for HDD etc. manufacturers who use this to screw us out of 8% of our storage!
Break this into phases. You should NOT attempt to do this all at once. Each phase should be isolated and should consist of one unit of work.
Amen!!! The more you try to do at once, the less likely it is to ever see the light of day.
You must break this into small, manageable chunks, so that after each one you still have a working, maintainable, testable system. (If this means you have some duplicated functionality during the process, so be it.) If you have regular deliverables it keeps you focussed, reins in scope creep, demonstrates progress, and of course lets you Release Early And Release Often!
As others have said, the link between MMR and autism is dubious at best; even if it exists, the risk is far far smaller than the known risks of not immunising. I think it very sad that some parents are deciding not to immunise their children on the basis of this scare-mongering.
The term `free' causes so much confusion these days... How about replacing it with `unrestricted' (for free-as-in-speech) and `gratis' or `no-cost' (for free-as-in-beer)?
is there anything they could do that would appease this croud?
There were things they could have done, such as fixing the main problem in the month or so since it was discovered, rather than waiting until it had been made public; they could have avoided condemning anyone who dares to publicise such problems, as it's clearly the only way to get them fixed; and they could have written IE to follow standards in the first place, which would have avoided this.
By now, though, the only things they can do are fix the problems (which they seem to have done), and admit their mistakes and apologise – which they seem terminally incapable of doing.
Java is extremely popular for in-house software. That may not be a very visible market, but it accounts for 90% of software (according to a figure I saw in a mag). Far from `failure'.
Trouble is, in my experience most of the cruft that accumulates is working around bugs that:
have been fixed in the system software (OS/compiler/VM/etc.),
have been fixed elsewhere in the app,
didn't actually exist because the programmer misunderstood,
the stupid programmer put in ten lines above, or
a proper redesign would fix anyway
...none of which would be needed in a rewrite! Their comments can be useful to remind you of conditions that need to be checked for, but most of the cruft is just a waste of code and programmer time.
And don't underestimate programmer time. It's hard to quantify the time you'll save in future by having a neat, concise system instead of a mass of gunk, but just coz it won't fit into a neat box in a business case doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Some of the best bits of redesign have been done in people's spare time... Programmers often know the most efficient way to work even if the higher-ups don't.
Slashdot Mirror
* And now that OmniWeb 4.1 beta 4 is out, most of those problems are resolved. It's far more stable (hasn't crashed once), has better JavaScript handling, faster rendering, and many other improvements. I like it so much I've just handed over some money for it when I could have carried on using it for free! All OS X users should give it a try.
[rant mode: off]
IE, like many apps, is installed by the root user, so that all users will have access to it. But it runs under your own user ID. So you might be at risk from malicious code in the installer, but once installed, you have the power of Unix permissions to protect you from malicious code on the web etc.
`Nearly 4 hours' is good, but wasn't Peter Jackson's original `Dream Cut' over five hours long? Wasn't the extra footage good enough, or is it being saved for yet another money-spinning DVD release in a year or two?
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
[fx: ducks]
I did this at uni (email wasn't around when I was at school!), with only the ten or twenty addresses I knew. Hey, I was young and green and didn't know any better, mutter mutter shuffle shuffle... Everyone replied to everyone else, producing amusement followed by amazement as it got out of all proportion, right up to the point I had a (justifiably) nasty mail from the sysadm saying roughly "Little Boys. Play with your toys, but not on my system." I learned my lesson!
What if you downloaded much of your email over a mobile phone (that's cellphone for those who don't understand UKisms) connection? Charged at 10p/min (say $.15/min)? How much would you pay per day before you didget annoyed?
The only things I'd add to that are:
Hard disks are recoverable (more or less, depending on the filesystem, whether they were shut down cleanly, etc.) If it's all in DRAM, and the power goes, you've just lost decades of indexes!
Unless you back it up on disk, of course...
Here in the UK it does, yes. And you can stop your smutty sniggering at the back there! It doesn't mean that here, either...
I was under the impression that it was usual for poetry to rhyme...? I don't know where you are, but unless you pronounce `route' the same as `rout' (or are Scottish and pronounce `doubt' as `doot'), then it doesn't really qualify...
Trouble is, the net isn't exactly like any of those things. It's a little like printing leaflets; it's a little like a conversation in a pub; it's a little like newspapers; it's a little like a coffee morning; it's a little like chatting to the queue at the supermarket; it's a little like carving your name on a tree; and it's a lot like something completely new.
So you can't just apply every existing law you like to it willy-nilly. Some existing laws will still be appropriate; some will best be applicable after modification; and some won't work well at all.
And then there's the problem of jurisdiction. If we here in the UK pass laws governing net use, will you in the USA abide by them? Thought not. But of course we'll need to abide by your laws, won't we...
And it gets more complicated. Who has jurisdiction if a German citizen visits Finland, dials into an Irish ISP, connects to a web site hosted in Mexico and uploads some dodgy stuff that's then downloaded by an American in Paris?...
He's not a bad writer. Of course, he doesn't write in the terse, factual manner most people here seem to like; he takes much longer to make his points than is sometimes necessary (or than many concentration spans here), and discusses social issues that are more a matter of opinion than most other topics here. But this doesn't make him a bad writer, it just means that his style is more suited to traditional journalism than to a site like SlashDot.
It's simply that much of the time, he's telling us about ourselves things we already knew. Combined with the other factors, many SlashDot readers clearly don't see the point of reading him, and this spills over into the negative and often downright offensive posts about him. Which is a shame, as I think that the SlashDot community needs someone with his skills: not on the inside, telling us about ourselves, but on the outside, telling the world about us. I think Jon could be a great ambassador for us.
Tom was even cut from the (excellent) 13-hour-long BBC Radio adaptation. If they couldn't make room for him, I can understand why Jackson couldn't. Yes, he's important to the story; but most of the other things cut or rushed were even more important.
Why `LoTR' and not `LotR'? Why capitalise the `The' but not the `of'?
It's not broken for you, it's not broken for me, and the great unwashed don't care. But it's broken for HDD etc. manufacturers who use this to screw us out of 8% of our storage!
Amen!!! The more you try to do at once, the less likely it is to ever see the light of day.
You must break this into small, manageable chunks, so that after each one you still have a working, maintainable, testable system. (If this means you have some duplicated functionality during the process, so be it.) If you have regular deliverables it keeps you focussed, reins in scope creep, demonstrates progress, and of course lets you Release Early And Release Often!
As others have said, the link between MMR and autism is dubious at best; even if it exists, the risk is far far smaller than the known risks of not immunising. I think it very sad that some parents are deciding not to immunise their children on the basis of this scare-mongering.
The term `free' causes so much confusion these days... How about replacing it with `unrestricted' (for free-as-in-speech) and `gratis' or `no-cost' (for free-as-in-beer)?
There were things they could have done, such as fixing the main problem in the month or so since it was discovered, rather than waiting until it had been made public; they could have avoided condemning anyone who dares to publicise such problems, as it's clearly the only way to get them fixed; and they could have written IE to follow standards in the first place, which would have avoided this.
By now, though, the only things they can do are fix the problems (which they seem to have done), and admit their mistakes and apologise – which they seem terminally incapable of doing.
[fx: resists]
[fx: resists]
[fx: gives up]
Java is extremely popular for in-house software. That may not be a very visible market, but it accounts for 90% of software (according to a figure I saw in a mag). Far from `failure'.
That's all, you can carry on now.
And don't underestimate programmer time. It's hard to quantify the time you'll save in future by having a neat, concise system instead of a mass of gunk, but just coz it won't fit into a neat box in a business case doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Some of the best bits of redesign have been done in people's spare time... Programmers often know the most efficient way to work even if the higher-ups don't.