I've had some significant issues on both my PC and Mac with FF3. They all seem to revolve around JavaScript.
When in GMail, navigating away from GMail via a new site in the address bar in the same tab hangs FF3 entirely. This is on my Windows machine.
When in Facebook on my Mac at home, clicking any of the various links that execute javascript popups for DHTML hangs the site. I can navigate through links that are more classic hrefs that instantiate other requests through the browser, but clicking on things like the Name of someone in their status just fails.
Anyone else experience this?
If you truly understand software architecture and design, and the rhyme and reason behind the code you're writing - then you should be comfortable with your own abilities and skills. "Cowboy coding" is never going to be a directive of management, and is an entirely different problem from the "get it done" mentality. Any manager is going to insist that systems not be overengineered, and that objective consistently is client satisfaction. The customer *is* always right, and if they're paying for crappy, bloated, slow software - well, that's what you should build for them.
Obviously, this is probably pretty inlikely. Given that a) you're a talented software engineer and b) the client doesn't want you to build lousy software, I would say your problem is simply poor project organization and management. Arbitrary deadlines, poor scope management, refusal to consider bottom-up estimations, no rhyme or reason to task management, and no system of design and review of software will create that "Old West" mentality of software design where chaos rules. It's often not that there's a lack of interest in order, but a complete lack of knowledge to implement it.
If your group has a project manager or architect, they should be responsible for understanding these problems. If you don't have someone in this role, then I would suggest that you pry yourself away from your compiler for a bit and get a bit of an understanding of project management methodologies, SDLC, and more modern software methodologies like Agile. Understand why the process working above you is so flawed, and either try to assert change in this from within, or use that knowledge as your career advances.
The client (and your boss) will never likely see your code. Your shame (for lack of a better word) is not going to gain any empathy unless you can direct your attention at the problems that have put you in this position while at the same time showing how a more structured team environment when it comes to software can be better for the business.
I think that the practical approach is always somewhere in between, but that as opposed to putting a monopoly on the services offered by public entities, create a system in which both public services and private enterprise are forced to compete with each other without the obligation of a welfare fund that handicaps the market in the favor of public services. I've been a proponent of voucher programs where I can take the tax dollars I pay to send my children to the local public school and use it to instead fund the cost of tuition at a competing private school if I believe the services that one offers over the other other are beneficial.
I think the same idea could work for health care (and to an extent, exists today). There can well be a public insurance program which I may even be taxed for in lieu of a premium, but I should be able to receive a credit for those taxes to pay the premium with a competing provider. If the public service can compete with private offerings, so be it - but allow me as the consumer to have a choice.
To your first point, many and most medical establishments are non-profits (including my employer) and thus are exempt from most federal taxes. What taxes they still may pay are based on factors outside of profit and revenue, and thus it would be hard to create any incentive on the basis of taxation.
The problem with any system that looks at the subsidy side of health care neglects any desire for free enterprise on behalf of the providers. A "co-pay" is some additional amount of dollars that an insurer will not subsidize for care with a given provider. When a provider opts-in to an insurance program, they agree to bill each patient at a set rate, e.g. $200 per visit. If your co-pay with that provider is $15, it means the other $185 is being paid for by the insurer.
The benefit to the physician is really only that they gain access to an extensive base of potential clients, but they are able to do so at the cost of being limited in terms of the rate they can charge and still comply with the "co-pay" agreement with the insurer. If I want to bill my patients at $250 per visit, I must either opt-out of the standard provider directory that the insurer provides their subscribers (become an "out-of-network" physician) or attempt to re-negotiate the terms of my agreement with the insurer such that the co-pay remains the same but the benefit paid increases (which insurers will rarely, if ever, do).
So my question back to you then I guess is - how do we create a system, public or private, that allows providers to bill an amount in the marketplace that they can command for their services while maintaining affordability to everyone? Do we ask physicians to become philanthropic and take pay cuts or regulate through legislation what physicians can charge their patients? How do we regulate prescription costs in such a system? How do we ask physicians to cover their own costs (equipment, licensing, facilities, et. al.) in a system where price controls are in place? Or is there another solution that I'm missing?
I really don't care if we socialize health care or not, but let's not kid ourselves - the money to pay for these services has to come from somewhere. In Canada and Europe where these services are socialized, the cost is made up by placing tremendous tax burdens upon the constituency - creating a mandate for community funded care rather than an elective contribution (the American private insurance system).
This is simply a mandate that each resident carries some form of health insurance. Read that again: this is not subsidized health care; this is simply a law that creates an annual tax penalty for residents who cannot prove that they are insured. Bottom line - it ensures that any health insurer who operates within Massachsuetts is virtually guaranteed to earn business from the constituency here.
In the first year of this program, residents who elect to defy the mandate and do not purchase coverage will be subject to a paltry $219 lien on their taxes as punishment. Given that this is far less of an economic burden than paying the mandated premiums, anyone who can do math and is healthy would be advised to consider paying the penalty. Anyone who doesn't fit into either of those two categories probably already has health insurance - and those who don't more than likely exist at polar ends of the economic spectrum: they either print their own money and can pay for health-care as needed or they are poor and can't afford the tax penalty or the premium. Of course, for this group (earning 30K or less per year as an individual and 60K per year or less as a family of 4) - the premium costs are gratis under the new Massachusetts law.
Massachusetts has found a way to make public health policy in this country even more ludicrous than it already is. They have taken a system that was a dangerous marriage between public policy and corporate interest and have fully endorsed the idea that health insurance should be the business of private enterprise and that mandating the purchase of that insurance by enacting silly laws and tax penalties is the business of the state. Taken together, the whole thing seems rather sinister at the surface, and that's because it is. It shows either an utter disregard for the concept of insurance or a determined attempt to exploit the public ignorance of personal risk assessment. It's hard in fact to find ANY real benefit for the citizens of Massachsuetts in this mess.
The sales pitch by proponents of the legislation is that it will lower the average premium cost for the entire populace; as healthy individuals are forced to subscribe to an insurance plan, the revenues generated from their participation will offset the increasing costs of paying out benefits to subscribers who are sick. This really is like any other insurance that you can buy: the insurer needs to have as many (if not more) low risk subscribers who pay their premiums such that formerly low risk subscribers who become high risk can be paid the proper benefit when the time comes. But in this instance, the insurance industry won't have to break a sweat to get those low-risk subscribers on board. In fact, they don't even have to get off the couch - the statewide mandate ensures that unless there is some pandemic that makes everyone in Massachusetts sick, there will always be a pool of low-risk subscribers who generate a reliable revenue stream.
People wonder how this is a bad thing? Why would decreasing the average cost of health insurance for all individuals actually be a detrement to people? Well, first of all - because everyone must participate or be penalized financially, this is less of an insurance system and more of a welfare system: everyone is putting their money into the pool, and those who need the money more than others are allowed to take from the pool. In this case however, the twist is that the people responsible for managing this money are actually taking ownership of it and making business decisions on its use. While in a government-regulated welfare program revenues can have no other purpose than to cover expenses, insurance companies have a profit motive - an extra hand that dips into the pool of contributed funds every so often and takes a little something for itself. This isn't in and of itself evil - we deal with big corporations every day. However, there aren't any laws out there that require me to buy $10 of goods at Wal-Mart each day, that is precisely what Massachusetts has done with health insur
While I applaud Oracle's move - I still don't know why any developer would consciously choose a single persistence solution and code to it when the Java Persistence API (JPA) standardizes the whole mess into a single, platform portable specification. Case in point - with my employers latest enterprise application, we decided to migrate to a true EE5 stack over some convoluted analgum of Spring/Hibernate/ActiveMQ/Acegi/XFire/Kitchen Sink, and originally pursued Glassfish as our container. After months of some successes and a lot of pain with some of Glassfish's less mature features and bugs, we decided to give JBoss 4.0.5 a run. Because we coded our persistence to JPA and not specifically to Hibernate or Toplink, we were able to pretty much effortlessly migrate between platforms, with the only real work being required when setting up container resources in each container (JMS Destinations, Connection Pools, et. al.). Glassfish uses TL as its underlying persistence implementation, and JBoss uses Hibernate. It was all the same to us.
I've found in the domain I work in (medicine) that story-driven projects tends to work pretty well, both in the way that estimation can be achieved and the degree of cohesiveness with which the "specs" or stories come together.
1. Identify each potential user of the piece of software; 2. Use a sample size of that group (e.g. an auto mechanic, auto body specialist, etc.) or proxies for those users, and given the direction of the project (workshop management tool, per se), solicit stories for development. A story should be short and describe a measurable unit of work from the users perspective (e.g. As a mechanic, I must be able to find a wrench in my toolbox.) Define any constraints (The mechanic may not search through the toolboxes of other mechanics) and acceptance tests the user can refer to to see that the story is complete (Any known wrench in my toolbox should be retrievable).
This approach allows you to avoid the technology and focus on the true business requirements. From this process, you can then size each story, scope the project based on features desired or a given deadline, and then things proceed fairly naturally. This has worked very well for me with Agile and working with small iterations so the users can see the manifestation of the ideas that produced the stories, and provide feedback so that you can add additional stories, remove ones that are no longer valid, and above all else - demonstrate progress.
Single author (no, he's not a friend), but both books that have been fantastic for me in terms of taking a fairly unmanaged project group and making it a much less squeaky wheel within my department.
So long as MS were to make any effort to maintain compatibility, I might agree with you. Seeing that if Microsoft were to suspend Office development for the Mac, there is no reason to believe that they would then make any attempts to make the two office suites interoperable. Having a platform office suite isn't enough in today's day in age. It needs to be able to create documents that are readable by everyone.
While observations are interesting, they ultimately are no more representative of reality than visiting Los Angeles on a rainy day and concluding that that region of the U.S. is a tropical climate. Sample size means everything. In fact, the main point of the posted article I believ is to point out that the greater aggregate data *may* lie contrary to the conclusions by other scientists - coupled with the accusation that large pieces of data which effect both the overall sample size and result are missing.
Boston had one of the coldest winters recorded there in 2003. Does this mean there is no global warming? To one who walked to work every day and froze their ass off, it would certainly seem that way.
Tell me where you can sell your 2 year old PC for nearly 60% of it's value and easily get it sold. Apple's usually get that premium.
This is true. It's also true that Apple lives in a different horizontal from Sony, Dell, HP, etc. and has NO competition in that horizontal. IBM clones - the modern PC - allow for competition amongst hardware manufacturers and hence that competition has driven prices down for new PC's. When they are put back into circulation on the used market, they have to compete with the fact that a new PC is priced dramatically lower than a new Macintosh.
OTOH, Apple pretty much has a stranglehold as to how their PC's are priced, and because there is no competition in that horizontal to force apple to lower it's prices - you can put a used Macintosh up for sale at 60% or 70% of it's original value, and because there's enough demand for 1) Macs and 2) Used macs that are still a solid product and yet cost less than their newer counterparts, people will still buy them at a higher premium then they pay for a used PC.
Apple has the benefit of being the only name in their game - they are allowed to price their new PC's the way they do because of that initial quality, but the retained value is almost purely a result of the lack of competition in the new Macinstosh market and a demand for lesser-priced macs.
If you want to really entertain your brain, think about how wise apple would be to offer a trade-up program to keep used mac's off the general market. It's very likely that such a move would allow them to charge an even higher premium for a new Mac because then there is no price competition in their horizontal *at all.*
I don't think that's the complaint. The complaint is that as a voter, if I don't have a piece of paper that I can look at and say "why yes, that's my vote" then as far as I know my vote is just lingering in the ether, vulnerable to hacking and misrepresentation. Auditability on the software side is good, and I think your idea is a good one to regulate what happens with all of the votes after I accept my choices - but people still want to be able to see that what they touched on the screen is what ends up ultimately as their vote.
FURTHERMORE, I'm a strong believer that touch screen systems should only exist to produce a filled out, printed ballot that is then processed by conventional means. The goal here should be to increase the accuracy of the vote, not the speed. Government can wait - I'd rather have it done right than done fast.
Well, part of that is true - but ActiveX is really, far far more akin to Java Applets, AJAX, and Flash than it is to anything on the server side. PHP cannot do ANYTHING on the client beyond the boundaries that HTTP as a protocol permits. The very problem with ActiveX is that it can do things within the client that transpose the boundaries between the content being delivered by the server and the sanctity of the client. From the server, I could at one point with ActiveX write downloadable applications that could have unferreted access to the client system. In Java, I would at the very least have to provide a signed certificate that the JVM on the client would prompt the user to accept before any such access could be made.
Not to troll, but what please tell me what PHP can do on the client-side? While the rest of your cited examples are right on, PHP is NOT a client-side technology and does nothing from the perspective of interacting with the web browser. Java Applets are a far more correct example.
As an addednum - here's a prediction:
The cable companies will offer deals like:
1) Get up to 10 channels a month for $20.00 or
2) Get up to 20 channels a month for $35.00 or
3) Get unlimited channels for $50.00 a month.
A la carte sounds great, I'm sure - but what makes you think that the cable operators (like Comcast) would charge anything reasonable for the channels? Do you really think that it is interesting to them to have to pay the bulk-subscriber fee to the channels they currently offer you as part of a package, but then only elect to allow their subscriber base to pick and choose whether or not they'll help Comcast foot the bill?
Let me try to explain this another way - your cable company has to pay ESPN, per se, a fee so that they can relay that signal onto their subscriber base. Much the way you save by buying in bulk at Costco, the cable companies pay a bulk fee as part of a contract to service X subscribers. If you do the math, the cost relayed to you per-diem is relatively small. Last I checked, I got about 130 channels for about the same price you say you are paying. The cable portion of my cable/broadband bill every month is about $50, so I'm paying about 38 cents per channel.
However - when I subscribe to HBO, Cinemax, etc., the monthly fee is $7.50 a month. Why? Because the contract the cable company has with HBO, etc. is structured differently. Offering these channels as part of a "tiered" package that you pay more for is cost effective for the cable company. As subscribers, these channels cost you and I exponentially more than what we pay on a per channel basis for basic service.
So if a la carte access begins tomorrow, I'm not positive that we will see drastic deductions in our cable bills. We may indeed see more value for what we're paying for (you're not paying 30 cents a month for a channel you don't watch), but there's no way that the supply chain for cable television would allow this to happen and allow you and I to pay what we ae paying now on a per channel basis.
The right and many conservatives have pushed for this because it essentially makes all channels pay channels. Theoretically, this should mean that the FCC is handed a reduced role as decency-tzar and instead we have a economically controlled broadcast system where accountability is pushed to the consumer rather than to the producer.
Again, this is all in theory. In reality, we'll probably eventually see some sort of price scheduling by the FCC based on the content rating system as to deter people from purchasing and hence funding the production of indecent content...
If it is orchestrated the same way that PBS or, even worse, NPR orchestrate their pledge drives, would that mean we would be allowed to see Darwin only after a 10 minute speech by the curator about the importance of his/her exhibit? If that's the case, why not just charge higher admission fees?
Eh, corporate sponsorship IS a private donation. Usually, corporate sponsors will simply ask for their brand to be displayed prominently in advertising for the given attraction.
I think what you're searching for here is "anonymous donors," which is silly. Hell, even here in Boston we have the Hayden Planetarium and the Mugar Omni Theatre - fantastic features of the Boston Museum of Science that were built and are supported by the foundations which they are named after. The only reason these philanthropists can do what they do is because the causes they support feature their names prominently, and the notariety filters back to them in the form of support, assistance, and respect by the public.,p>
The money has to come from somewhere, and outside of an independently wealthy individual who seeks nothing but the ability to see these kinds of spectacles on display to the public, something needs to be provided in exchange for or in appreciation of the funding received typically. You'll have a hard time finding people, no matter how generous they may be, who are willing to displace a large chunk of their finances for no recognition. They sponsor these events for the same reason companies do.
Always good to have our priorities straight....
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Ooohhh - translucent UI! Does it have the little throbber icon at startup too? I really hope they use a horizontal texture in the toolbars as well, and maybe some really cool sounds when I click on stuff - I've been waiting for MS to incorporate "You've Got Mail!" into their OS for years!
I'm sure they will have to patch the Translucent UI stuff for years though to make it secure. Early adopters, beware!
Is it too much to ask that there be some basic editing, or is this like that article a while back where people see the same word in spite of how misspelled it may be?
As much as the end users like it, isn't this sorta like a TV that blocks advertising and blurs out product placement intelligently? Seems like if such a TV existed, content producers who earn their revenue from advertising would try to find ways to break such a device, or at the very least make their content incompatible enough so that end users would be forced to use a device that could receive the adverts in order to receive the other content.
I know as end-users we don't like it, but this is an equation of economics. If Firefix can block all advertising as we wish, and our usage of the sites that generate revenue off of said advertsing continues, what incentives to content producers on the web have to make sure that their sites remain Firefox compatible?
Lots of flames here, but through the burning embers I just want to point out that using Hibernate and Spring is not supposed to be an excuse to use XML - it just so happens that XML is the glue that these packages use to do their work. I personally could care less if it were a binary format or a CSV file.
Love it or hate it,.net uses a lot of XML metadata as well. Arguably in the Java community, XML probably gets a worse wrap simply because it doesn't have the tools that.net does to obsfucate the XML glue from the developer as they desire. XDoclet and AOP is a step in the right direction. I can definitely empathize with your complaints about XML from a Java background. But I think when looking at Spring, Hibernate, Struts, or any Java tool that uses XML metadata for configuration/persistence of application state - that unless you are looking to do some serious hacking of the package that would require that you denature the glue it uses, blissful ignorance is probably beneficial. The aforementioned packages work as advertised by their development teams - even if they do use XML.
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I've had some significant issues on both my PC and Mac with FF3. They all seem to revolve around JavaScript. When in GMail, navigating away from GMail via a new site in the address bar in the same tab hangs FF3 entirely. This is on my Windows machine. When in Facebook on my Mac at home, clicking any of the various links that execute javascript popups for DHTML hangs the site. I can navigate through links that are more classic hrefs that instantiate other requests through the browser, but clicking on things like the Name of someone in their status just fails. Anyone else experience this?
If you truly understand software architecture and design, and the rhyme and reason behind the code you're writing - then you should be comfortable with your own abilities and skills. "Cowboy coding" is never going to be a directive of management, and is an entirely different problem from the "get it done" mentality. Any manager is going to insist that systems not be overengineered, and that objective consistently is client satisfaction. The customer *is* always right, and if they're paying for crappy, bloated, slow software - well, that's what you should build for them.
Obviously, this is probably pretty inlikely. Given that a) you're a talented software engineer and b) the client doesn't want you to build lousy software, I would say your problem is simply poor project organization and management. Arbitrary deadlines, poor scope management, refusal to consider bottom-up estimations, no rhyme or reason to task management, and no system of design and review of software will create that "Old West" mentality of software design where chaos rules. It's often not that there's a lack of interest in order, but a complete lack of knowledge to implement it.
If your group has a project manager or architect, they should be responsible for understanding these problems. If you don't have someone in this role, then I would suggest that you pry yourself away from your compiler for a bit and get a bit of an understanding of project management methodologies, SDLC, and more modern software methodologies like Agile. Understand why the process working above you is so flawed, and either try to assert change in this from within, or use that knowledge as your career advances.
The client (and your boss) will never likely see your code. Your shame (for lack of a better word) is not going to gain any empathy unless you can direct your attention at the problems that have put you in this position while at the same time showing how a more structured team environment when it comes to software can be better for the business.
I think that the practical approach is always somewhere in between, but that as opposed to putting a monopoly on the services offered by public entities, create a system in which both public services and private enterprise are forced to compete with each other without the obligation of a welfare fund that handicaps the market in the favor of public services. I've been a proponent of voucher programs where I can take the tax dollars I pay to send my children to the local public school and use it to instead fund the cost of tuition at a competing private school if I believe the services that one offers over the other other are beneficial.
I think the same idea could work for health care (and to an extent, exists today). There can well be a public insurance program which I may even be taxed for in lieu of a premium, but I should be able to receive a credit for those taxes to pay the premium with a competing provider. If the public service can compete with private offerings, so be it - but allow me as the consumer to have a choice.
To your first point, many and most medical establishments are non-profits (including my employer) and thus are exempt from most federal taxes. What taxes they still may pay are based on factors outside of profit and revenue, and thus it would be hard to create any incentive on the basis of taxation.
The problem with any system that looks at the subsidy side of health care neglects any desire for free enterprise on behalf of the providers. A "co-pay" is some additional amount of dollars that an insurer will not subsidize for care with a given provider. When a provider opts-in to an insurance program, they agree to bill each patient at a set rate, e.g. $200 per visit. If your co-pay with that provider is $15, it means the other $185 is being paid for by the insurer.
The benefit to the physician is really only that they gain access to an extensive base of potential clients, but they are able to do so at the cost of being limited in terms of the rate they can charge and still comply with the "co-pay" agreement with the insurer. If I want to bill my patients at $250 per visit, I must either opt-out of the standard provider directory that the insurer provides their subscribers (become an "out-of-network" physician) or attempt to re-negotiate the terms of my agreement with the insurer such that the co-pay remains the same but the benefit paid increases (which insurers will rarely, if ever, do).
So my question back to you then I guess is - how do we create a system, public or private, that allows providers to bill an amount in the marketplace that they can command for their services while maintaining affordability to everyone? Do we ask physicians to become philanthropic and take pay cuts or regulate through legislation what physicians can charge their patients? How do we regulate prescription costs in such a system? How do we ask physicians to cover their own costs (equipment, licensing, facilities, et. al.) in a system where price controls are in place? Or is there another solution that I'm missing?
I really don't care if we socialize health care or not, but let's not kid ourselves - the money to pay for these services has to come from somewhere. In Canada and Europe where these services are socialized, the cost is made up by placing tremendous tax burdens upon the constituency - creating a mandate for community funded care rather than an elective contribution (the American private insurance system).
This is simply a mandate that each resident carries some form of health insurance. Read that again: this is not subsidized health care; this is simply a law that creates an annual tax penalty for residents who cannot prove that they are insured. Bottom line - it ensures that any health insurer who operates within Massachsuetts is virtually guaranteed to earn business from the constituency here.
In the first year of this program, residents who elect to defy the mandate and do not purchase coverage will be subject to a paltry $219 lien on their taxes as punishment. Given that this is far less of an economic burden than paying the mandated premiums, anyone who can do math and is healthy would be advised to consider paying the penalty. Anyone who doesn't fit into either of those two categories probably already has health insurance - and those who don't more than likely exist at polar ends of the economic spectrum: they either print their own money and can pay for health-care as needed or they are poor and can't afford the tax penalty or the premium. Of course, for this group (earning 30K or less per year as an individual and 60K per year or less as a family of 4) - the premium costs are gratis under the new Massachusetts law.
Massachusetts has found a way to make public health policy in this country even more ludicrous than it already is. They have taken a system that was a dangerous marriage between public policy and corporate interest and have fully endorsed the idea that health insurance should be the business of private enterprise and that mandating the purchase of that insurance by enacting silly laws and tax penalties is the business of the state. Taken together, the whole thing seems rather sinister at the surface, and that's because it is. It shows either an utter disregard for the concept of insurance or a determined attempt to exploit the public ignorance of personal risk assessment. It's hard in fact to find ANY real benefit for the citizens of Massachsuetts in this mess.
The sales pitch by proponents of the legislation is that it will lower the average premium cost for the entire populace; as healthy individuals are forced to subscribe to an insurance plan, the revenues generated from their participation will offset the increasing costs of paying out benefits to subscribers who are sick. This really is like any other insurance that you can buy: the insurer needs to have as many (if not more) low risk subscribers who pay their premiums such that formerly low risk subscribers who become high risk can be paid the proper benefit when the time comes. But in this instance, the insurance industry won't have to break a sweat to get those low-risk subscribers on board. In fact, they don't even have to get off the couch - the statewide mandate ensures that unless there is some pandemic that makes everyone in Massachusetts sick, there will always be a pool of low-risk subscribers who generate a reliable revenue stream.
People wonder how this is a bad thing? Why would decreasing the average cost of health insurance for all individuals actually be a detrement to people? Well, first of all - because everyone must participate or be penalized financially, this is less of an insurance system and more of a welfare system: everyone is putting their money into the pool, and those who need the money more than others are allowed to take from the pool. In this case however, the twist is that the people responsible for managing this money are actually taking ownership of it and making business decisions on its use. While in a government-regulated welfare program revenues can have no other purpose than to cover expenses, insurance companies have a profit motive - an extra hand that dips into the pool of contributed funds every so often and takes a little something for itself. This isn't in and of itself evil - we deal with big corporations every day. However, there aren't any laws out there that require me to buy $10 of goods at Wal-Mart each day, that is precisely what Massachusetts has done with health insur
While I applaud Oracle's move - I still don't know why any developer would consciously choose a single persistence solution and code to it when the Java Persistence API (JPA) standardizes the whole mess into a single, platform portable specification. Case in point - with my employers latest enterprise application, we decided to migrate to a true EE5 stack over some convoluted analgum of Spring/Hibernate/ActiveMQ/Acegi/XFire/Kitchen Sink, and originally pursued Glassfish as our container. After months of some successes and a lot of pain with some of Glassfish's less mature features and bugs, we decided to give JBoss 4.0.5 a run. Because we coded our persistence to JPA and not specifically to Hibernate or Toplink, we were able to pretty much effortlessly migrate between platforms, with the only real work being required when setting up container resources in each container (JMS Destinations, Connection Pools, et. al.). Glassfish uses TL as its underlying persistence implementation, and JBoss uses Hibernate. It was all the same to us.
I've found in the domain I work in (medicine) that story-driven projects tends to work pretty well, both in the way that estimation can be achieved and the degree of cohesiveness with which the "specs" or stories come together.
1. Identify each potential user of the piece of software;
2. Use a sample size of that group (e.g. an auto mechanic, auto body specialist, etc.) or proxies for those users, and given the direction of the project (workshop management tool, per se), solicit stories for development. A story should be short and describe a measurable unit of work from the users perspective (e.g. As a mechanic, I must be able to find a wrench in my toolbox.) Define any constraints (The mechanic may not search through the toolboxes of other mechanics) and acceptance tests the user can refer to to see that the story is complete (Any known wrench in my toolbox should be retrievable).
This approach allows you to avoid the technology and focus on the true business requirements. From this process, you can then size each story, scope the project based on features desired or a given deadline, and then things proceed fairly naturally. This has worked very well for me with Agile and working with small iterations so the users can see the manifestation of the ideas that produced the stories, and provide feedback so that you can add additional stories, remove ones that are no longer valid, and above all else - demonstrate progress.
Some good books on the subject:
User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn
Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
Single author (no, he's not a friend), but both books that have been fantastic for me in terms of taking a fairly unmanaged project group and making it a much less squeaky wheel within my department.
So long as MS were to make any effort to maintain compatibility, I might agree with you. Seeing that if Microsoft were to suspend Office development for the Mac, there is no reason to believe that they would then make any attempts to make the two office suites interoperable. Having a platform office suite isn't enough in today's day in age. It needs to be able to create documents that are readable by everyone.
The plural form of 'anecdote' is not 'fact.'
While observations are interesting, they ultimately are no more representative of reality than visiting Los Angeles on a rainy day and concluding that that region of the U.S. is a tropical climate. Sample size means everything. In fact, the main point of the posted article I believ is to point out that the greater aggregate data *may* lie contrary to the conclusions by other scientists - coupled with the accusation that large pieces of data which effect both the overall sample size and result are missing.
Boston had one of the coldest winters recorded there in 2003. Does this mean there is no global warming? To one who walked to work every day and froze their ass off, it would certainly seem that way.
This is true. It's also true that Apple lives in a different horizontal from Sony, Dell, HP, etc. and has NO competition in that horizontal. IBM clones - the modern PC - allow for competition amongst hardware manufacturers and hence that competition has driven prices down for new PC's. When they are put back into circulation on the used market, they have to compete with the fact that a new PC is priced dramatically lower than a new Macintosh. OTOH, Apple pretty much has a stranglehold as to how their PC's are priced, and because there is no competition in that horizontal to force apple to lower it's prices - you can put a used Macintosh up for sale at 60% or 70% of it's original value, and because there's enough demand for 1) Macs and 2) Used macs that are still a solid product and yet cost less than their newer counterparts, people will still buy them at a higher premium then they pay for a used PC. Apple has the benefit of being the only name in their game - they are allowed to price their new PC's the way they do because of that initial quality, but the retained value is almost purely a result of the lack of competition in the new Macinstosh market and a demand for lesser-priced macs. If you want to really entertain your brain, think about how wise apple would be to offer a trade-up program to keep used mac's off the general market. It's very likely that such a move would allow them to charge an even higher premium for a new Mac because then there is no price competition in their horizontal *at all.*
FURTHERMORE, I'm a strong believer that touch screen systems should only exist to produce a filled out, printed ballot that is then processed by conventional means. The goal here should be to increase the accuracy of the vote, not the speed. Government can wait - I'd rather have it done right than done fast.
Well, part of that is true - but ActiveX is really, far far more akin to Java Applets, AJAX, and Flash than it is to anything on the server side. PHP cannot do ANYTHING on the client beyond the boundaries that HTTP as a protocol permits. The very problem with ActiveX is that it can do things within the client that transpose the boundaries between the content being delivered by the server and the sanctity of the client. From the server, I could at one point with ActiveX write downloadable applications that could have unferreted access to the client system. In Java, I would at the very least have to provide a signed certificate that the JVM on the client would prompt the user to accept before any such access could be made.
Not to troll, but what please tell me what PHP can do on the client-side? While the rest of your cited examples are right on, PHP is NOT a client-side technology and does nothing from the perspective of interacting with the web browser. Java Applets are a far more correct example.
Yeah - I'm retarded.
Red Bull + Vodka has no net effect, then?
As an addednum - here's a prediction: The cable companies will offer deals like: 1) Get up to 10 channels a month for $20.00 or 2) Get up to 20 channels a month for $35.00 or 3) Get unlimited channels for $50.00 a month.
Let me try to explain this another way - your cable company has to pay ESPN, per se, a fee so that they can relay that signal onto their subscriber base. Much the way you save by buying in bulk at Costco, the cable companies pay a bulk fee as part of a contract to service X subscribers. If you do the math, the cost relayed to you per-diem is relatively small. Last I checked, I got about 130 channels for about the same price you say you are paying. The cable portion of my cable/broadband bill every month is about $50, so I'm paying about 38 cents per channel.
However - when I subscribe to HBO, Cinemax, etc., the monthly fee is $7.50 a month. Why? Because the contract the cable company has with HBO, etc. is structured differently. Offering these channels as part of a "tiered" package that you pay more for is cost effective for the cable company. As subscribers, these channels cost you and I exponentially more than what we pay on a per channel basis for basic service.
So if a la carte access begins tomorrow, I'm not positive that we will see drastic deductions in our cable bills. We may indeed see more value for what we're paying for (you're not paying 30 cents a month for a channel you don't watch), but there's no way that the supply chain for cable television would allow this to happen and allow you and I to pay what we ae paying now on a per channel basis.
Again, this is all in theory. In reality, we'll probably eventually see some sort of price scheduling by the FCC based on the content rating system as to deter people from purchasing and hence funding the production of indecent content...
Otherwise, yeah - it's capitalism at work.
If it is orchestrated the same way that PBS or, even worse, NPR orchestrate their pledge drives, would that mean we would be allowed to see Darwin only after a 10 minute speech by the curator about the importance of his/her exhibit? If that's the case, why not just charge higher admission fees?
I think what you're searching for here is "anonymous donors," which is silly. Hell, even here in Boston we have the Hayden Planetarium and the Mugar Omni Theatre - fantastic features of the Boston Museum of Science that were built and are supported by the foundations which they are named after. The only reason these philanthropists can do what they do is because the causes they support feature their names prominently, and the notariety filters back to them in the form of support, assistance, and respect by the public. ,p>
The money has to come from somewhere, and outside of an independently wealthy individual who seeks nothing but the ability to see these kinds of spectacles on display to the public, something needs to be provided in exchange for or in appreciation of the funding received typically. You'll have a hard time finding people, no matter how generous they may be, who are willing to displace a large chunk of their finances for no recognition. They sponsor these events for the same reason companies do.
Ooohhh - translucent UI! Does it have the little throbber icon at startup too? I really hope they use a horizontal texture in the toolbars as well, and maybe some really cool sounds when I click on stuff - I've been waiting for MS to incorporate "You've Got Mail!" into their OS for years! I'm sure they will have to patch the Translucent UI stuff for years though to make it secure. Early adopters, beware!
Is it too much to ask that there be some basic editing, or is this like that article a while back where people see the same word in spite of how misspelled it may be?
Probably already mentioned, but Settlers of Catan http://www.mayfairgames.com/mfg-shop/central/mfg-s oc.html(as well as many of it's expansion sets) never seem to get old, particularly "Cities and Knights"
As much as the end users like it, isn't this sorta like a TV that blocks advertising and blurs out product placement intelligently? Seems like if such a TV existed, content producers who earn their revenue from advertising would try to find ways to break such a device, or at the very least make their content incompatible enough so that end users would be forced to use a device that could receive the adverts in order to receive the other content. I know as end-users we don't like it, but this is an equation of economics. If Firefix can block all advertising as we wish, and our usage of the sites that generate revenue off of said advertsing continues, what incentives to content producers on the web have to make sure that their sites remain Firefox compatible?
Lots of flames here, but through the burning embers I just want to point out that using Hibernate and Spring is not supposed to be an excuse to use XML - it just so happens that XML is the glue that these packages use to do their work. I personally could care less if it were a binary format or a CSV file. Love it or hate it, .net uses a lot of XML metadata as well. Arguably in the Java community, XML probably gets a worse wrap simply because it doesn't have the tools that .net does to obsfucate the XML glue from the developer as they desire. XDoclet and AOP is a step in the right direction. I can definitely empathize with your complaints about XML from a Java background. But I think when looking at Spring, Hibernate, Struts, or any Java tool that uses XML metadata for configuration/persistence of application state - that unless you are looking to do some serious hacking of the package that would require that you denature the glue it uses, blissful ignorance is probably beneficial. The aforementioned packages work as advertised by their development teams - even if they do use XML.