Well, there's not much to smack down in your post. Your only assertion is about what you believe, not what you think others should be taught as fact. At worst, this makes you a little silly for believing that one ancient story is more likely to be true than any other ancient story. A little disappointing, really;)
The only time I really get motivated on the smack down is when I come across a persistent evangelist trying to convert me or my fiance who simply does not take a hint. The first request to look at your tract will be met with a simple "No thanks." Not leaving it at that may result in a public scene (depending on my mood).
There's an important difference between what you think I said and what I actually said. I do not, under any circumstances, recommend that the PR department run the company; but as an early stage startup (fewer than five people), the CEO's job is primarily PR.
Obviously the CEO also has other responsibilities, including eventually leading the strategy and culture of the company, but when it's just you and the other guy, the thing that distinguishes the CEO from the other job is that the CEO is going to be the guy on the street, talking to potential investors, customers, making noise in trade rags, etc.
So, whoever is going to take on that job should be the best one at it.
When the company matures a bit and the responsibilities of the CEO change, who knows whether the same person should have that title?
Take a look at Google. The founders and the CEO together all act as the visionary strategic leaders. Neither founder has to give that up just because he doesn't have the title "CEO".
To start this off: no matter what, you're both "Founder".
The job of the CEO of a startup is public relations. Whoever is better at this job should be CEO. In either case, you're the CTO and he's the CFO. Whoever isn't the CEO can also be the COO if you both want two titles.
If he's got better people skills, then he's the CEO and CFO while you're the COO and CTO. If it's you, then you're the CEO and CTO while he's the COO and the CFO.
To say it another way, there's a school of thought that you need to have some coverage of the three human archetypes (Maven, Connector, Evangelist/Salesperson). Whoever is the strongest evangelist/salesperson gets the CEO title.
"but it may not scale up - but I'll be interested to see if it does." -- Russ Tedrake
The approach may not scale up?
Has the guy heard of humans? Ostriches? Kangaroos? Bipedal locomotion doesn't scale indefinitely (square-cube problem unfortunately), but biological approaches to controlling two-legged walking (and running and bounding) will definitely scale up to lots of "useful" sizes.
And if he's criticizing their current algorithms... of course they won't control a robot 10x larger, but that's just being pedantic. You'll need the bigger robot to figure it's own algorithms out (thus, their actual approach of an adaptive robot).
If I do one thing at a time it gets done faster, and with better results than if I try to multitask.
This is quite true. Multiple studies have shown that every context switch takes you 15 to 60 minutes to return to full productivity (depending on the focus required for the task), with a complete loss of about 50% of that time.
Most geeks who think they're great at multi-tasking should try focusing deeply on one problem some time. Their productivity would skyrocket.
If I limit work to something like 9-5 (well, actually 10-4) I get more done, with better results.
I prefer to limit any day to 10 hours and any week to 45 hours (in the office). Some people who've heard me advocate that think I'm a slacker, but I'm getting a lot more done than when I have pushed myself towards burnout and I always get more done than others in the office.
The fact that management doesn't get this in most companies just reinforces my utter contempt for most of the MBA's and suits who I see acting quite superior and self-important...
Function is the coolest feature, IMHO. I prefer a bag that carries what you need and nobody can tell if there's a laptop inside. Especially for airports. Let the guy who's "dressed for success" be the mark and just get on your flight with no muss or fuss.
Samsonite makes some nice backpacks like that. I've bought three Samsonite backpacks in the last three years:
one for me (linked) that my fiance "borrowed" one to replace the first (which turned out to be ideal for just carrying the laptop but too small for travel) and the current backpack that can carry my laptop as well as organize my camera bag (small SLR camera)
But at the moment, ebags only has the original that is still used (and loved) by my fiance for carrying her laptop to and from classes, especially when she's on her motorcycle.
Interesting point, and the evidence appears to partially bear out your argument. I hear about more and more of my acquaintances disconnecting cable and only using their television set to watch movies. My fiance and I had separately stopped watching broadcast/cable TV before we met (wasn't all that important to me, but it was a nice bonus).
At some point, we may reach a tipping point of people who don't watch TV, or only watch specific content on their TV's (live sports, maybe) and a whole industry called TV broadcasting will fade away and become part of our history...
Or maybe not. I'm better than Esther Dyson at predicting the future, but still not all that good.
The study is deemed to have *no* point at all, SINCE the result came as negative.
Actually, negative results are some of the most important pieces of information in science. Scientific propositions are never actually provable, but are instead required to be falsifiable. Credible negative results are essential to the process of setting aside invalid propositions so that more attention can be paid to more likely propositions.
Not understanding that science works this way gets creationists in trouble all the time (i.e. none of their statements are falsifiable, so none qualify as scientific propositions).
But I say simply diverting that sexual energy and waiting to even think about sex until your married is better. I think the most wonderful thing a man could offer a woman on their wedding night is the assurance that he has never lusted over another woman in his life.
If true, then there's something seriously wrong with you. When you were an adolescent, something was literally not right in your head. That kind of an anouncement would freak out most/all of the women I know (including the one I'm about to marry). And since when was female virginity ever appealing to anything but uber-macho guys who are insecure about comparisons being made?* I want a woman who's comfortable with sex and who already has some idea what makes her feel good.
* To some extent, virginity provides some minimal assurance that the kids are yours, but that's minimal at best. In today's society you'd better have real reasons to trust your wife (including regularly pleasuring her) beyond just physical control.
[...Much insightful stuff...] As we speak here, yet another youth in Iraq watches today's bloodshed, notes the US soldiers involved, and then takes a vow to bring America down.
Abso-fucking-lutely!
I've been saying this since 9/11 and the only response I get back is that I hate America. What? Because I want the place I live to be better than it is and the acts done in my name to be less reprehensible, I somehow hate my home?
Doublethink is thriving across this country, not just in the red states.
And before any red state residents get their panties in a twist, I'm a registered Republican (though I haven't voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since Regan).
A Korean doctor has outlined a health risk pattern that predicts death from online gaming. The most common cause of gaming death in Korea, according to Dr. Song Hyeong-gon, is pulmonary thrombo-embolism, a seizure of the cortex.
Pulmonary thrombosis (aka pulmonary thrombo-embolism) is when you sit still for too long, blood settles in veins in your legs and starts to clot, and then after you get up, one or more of the clots breaks loose and gets stuck in your lungs.
Intensely painful, fairly dangerous, sometimes fatal.
I agree but I think the problem is that as many of us use Echo2, we find less and less reasons to use book-marking capabilities.
This sounds like an inversion of the "Golden Hammer" antipattern. Maybe call it the "Missing Screwdriver" antipattern. "If you can't find your screwdriver, you tend to stop using screws, even when they're the most appropriate faster." Not incredibly catchy, but who knows?
Thanks for the good discussion, in any case. I always enjoy learning something new.
I'll try to provide a slightly different response from the other poster (who seems to be letting his frustration with Echo/Nextapp get the better of him).
Most of the applications I build have a user authentication system in the first place. You can't just access the system without first logging in so this is the first line in deflecting the user from immediately landing on said page
Handling this scenario is a straightforward part of our authentication subsystem which aims to minimize user astonishment. Users don't get to see anything in the app if they're not authenticated, but just because you're not authenticated doesn't mean we can't be smart about what you're trying to accomplish.
If you browse to a page and don't have an identity yet, we set aside the URL you were going to, and send you to the authentication page with that URL as the "destinationURL" session attribute. After authentication, if there is a "destinationURL" value, we try to send you back there. "We try to send you" is pretty important, as you may not be able to see what you were trying to get to if you aren't authorized to see it. In that case, we present you with an "authorization failed" message and then send you back to the front page. If they've saved their login in their browser, all they do is click on the URL, hit [Enter] or click the [Login] button and, almost all of the time, the user is looking at what they wanted to see.
This also makes users much, much, MUCH happier about authentication timeouts. They go to lunch, come back, click on a button or start navigating again. The app gives them another login, and most of the time, takes them right back where they intended to go. They don't have to re-navigate from the front page to continue where they left off. Cleanly restarting from a timeout can fail for a few reasons, as sometimes what they were doing relied on session state (step 2 of 4 in the xyz wizard), so after the timeout, we sometimes have to fall back to the nearest sane page (the start of the wizard, perhaps). Other times, it makes more sense to provide a message about why they couldn't return to the page they were on and send them back to the front page, but most of the time, there's a decent non-astonishing alternative semantically "nearby" to where they were.
The lack of this feature in Echo drove me to distraction. You spent too much time talking over that last feature with the other developer:
The very idea that the machines can't be inspected by a third party shows just how fragile such systems are.
In my opinion, at least as important is the belief that the proper group to see if the machines are compromised is the manufacturer.
"We've decided we are going have Diebold come and go through these machines and see if they are compromised," [Comissioner Ira Hatch] said
If the machines can't be verified as uncompromised on voting day by an election staffer at a voting location multiple times throughout the day, that's a huge problem. For the voting commission to accept Diebold's line that "That's the way it is." is simply unconscionable.
Slot machines in Nevada can be checked against any number of parameters to make sure that 1) hardware has not been added or replaced, 2) the software has not been altered (from the registered version on file with the NGC) and 3) the settings for the software match the casino's payout statements. The casino can do these checks, the NGC can do these checks, interested public parties can do these checks (with the cooperation of either the casino or the NGC).
Shouldn't we expect at least as much from the recordkeepers of democracy as we expect from a gambling house?
Thanks for the info that it is possible to add your own externalizable URL generator/parser. This bit of information would probably do a lot for Echo2's acceptance if they were to publicize it more, but that would probably mean that they would have to repudiate lots of previous statements about it being unnecessary.
On that project where we used Echo, I ceded responsibility of the UI frameworks to someone else and trusted the answers I received back. When my own 1-hour research confirmed that the Echo team dismissed the need for externalizable URL's and I didn't see any information that it was possible, I gave up on those features while we were using Echo.
Where Echo2 fails in my opinion is in inter-application communication you cannot have an application that passes it context to another application. The developers are currently proposing solutions for this problem but in reality it is a small problem as it is rare that a developer needs full context passed between applications. Few frameworks offer this feature but it allows for more robust applications and allows for greater reuse.
These types of integration may seem rare to the Nextapp team, but they are the lifeblood of the data/workflow repositories that I've worked on. Enterprise applications rarely exist that don't have to talk to accounts payable/receivable and other components of CMP and ERP systems. In the contract management repository that I've been referring to, we built JMS/XML interfaces for service integration and tried to sell around UI integration (because Echo didn't support it). Now, with Struts/Tiles/JSF, the UI integration is practical and our users cite it as their most important feature.
But now that I know that Echo2 may support it (perhaps with a lot of work-around code), it may be worthwhile to re-evaluate Echo2. I certainly liked the look of our Echo application.
So people acting like this is so scientifically not-happening are on just as shaky ground.
Incorrect. Double blind experiments involving black boxes which may or may not contain EM emitting components show that the discomfort by "sensitive" people depends entirely on whether they believe the boxes are currently emitting and not on actual emissions.
I do agree that most people would be healthier with fewer electrical devices around and more excuses to go outside and do something else, but this article and the equipment being advertised are at best ignorant and at worst fraudulent.
different application requires different architectures.
No doubt. But we're not even to the architecture step, and I already disagree with how Nextapp wants to describe web applications. They're presuming that enterprise data and process repositories don't benefit from externalizable (or bookmarkable) URL's because desktop applications achieving similar goals got along without them.
Wow.
That's very short-sighted and seems to be a deliberate mis-framing of what the web and URL's mean to users, especially users with outside applications that would benefit greatly if there was a way to "point" into an application from other applications (like email, calendars, wiki's, issue trackers, etc.). URL's are an excellent means to that goal. But Nextapp rules them out as an artifact of "documents".
It is very good for enterprise system development of say and accounting system or a admin system in which the user is accomplishing a business process.
Actually, it's in exactly these meta-domains that I'm building web applications, and the ability to email a URL for a search or a specific content item (the details of a financial commitment, for instance) has been invaluable. More precisely, the inability to do so hurt us badly. When we were using Echo as the front end, we simply had to say "too difficult" for those use cases, and that ended up hurting us in the sales process.
So, in my experience, Echo was (and is) a poor choice for almost any kind of enterprise system development. Because the mistakes are not just bugs, they're baked in to your front-end architecture if you use Echo.
Again, an application designed to input information to store in a DB or to transact a process is where such frameworks shine not in content rich applications such as a shopping site or a documentation project.
Again, I'm referring to exactly the kind of enterprise information management applications that you're saying don't need emailable URL's (store info in a DB/transact a process). And I'm not saying that every view within an application UI needs to representable as a URL. Views that represent intermediate steps in user interactions (step 2 of 4 in the xyz wizard) aren't appropriate, but being able to send a URL that the recipient can use to see the status of a particular business process? Without needing to do their own search? Without needing to navigate from the splash page of the app? You're simply not valuing the time/frustration/perspective of your customers.
URL's aren't just for documents any more. Most web developers were saying this in 1996, but it's a decade later, and Nextapp still disagrees, thus the final remark of my previous message.
You seem to agree with the assumption made by the Nextapp developers: that anything more complex than hyperlinked documents doesn't really need URL's and web features. If that works for your customers so far, then IMHO you've been lucky. That didn't work for our customers, and I think is an unwise framing of what a "web application" actually should be.
as I said from my evaluation the most intuitive and well designed framework that I have used to date is Echo2 as a developer need not concern themselves with any layer of the client communication.
I've had to use Echo and evaluated Echo2, and unless you agree with their framing of web applications (as desktop applications that happen to be accessed through a web browser), you'll get yourself in serious trouble. Their attitude is best summed up in their own response to a question about bookmarkable URL's: "Can you get a link to a certain window in a desktop application? Ajax is for web applications, not for hyperlinked documents."
<clue-bat> Web applications are not desktop applications that happen to be used through a web browser. </clue-bat>
Using the web as an application interface provides a number of new abilities (creating and passing around stateful references for one) that are simply not possible for a desktop application. And it's not like users don't know about these abilities or somehow don't expect them. The Nextapp devs and marketers say you shouldn't need to tell someone a URL that takes them directly to a particular piece of information (probably after an authentication step), but our users say that's a valuable/critical feature. Who should we listen to?
I'll use Echo again after the Nextapp guys learn some basics about the web. For the moment, they're clinging to outdated notions of information access and application context and that makes their frameworks a hinderance when trying to build an effective web application.
this guy using the World of Warcraft trademark for personal profit (which he clearly did)
But trademark law doesn't prevent you from using another company's trademarks for your profit. It primarily protects against uses that dilute the value of the trademark. So "MS Excel for Dummies" can be published without a license from Microsoft, even though it (1) clearly uses a trademarked phrase and (2) is published for profit. You can even sell your own spreadsheet program and market it as "Better than Excel!(tm)" as long as you don't call it something that could be confused with "Excel" or "MS Excel" or... Basically, all you have to do is acknowledge the trademark and not confuse potential customers with your use of the other company's trademark in your materials.
Which this guy apparently did. Blizzard is way out on a crazy limb here and in my non-expert estimation, will probably not prevail.
I strongly suspect he's a sociopath with no conscience or actual sense of right and wrong. I.e. he was born "broken" and by many people's definition, evil.
He's literally willing to do "whatever it takes" to keep himself in the life. Too bad for him he's also an idiot. The world is a better place with him behind bars. Let's hope he stays there for a very long time.
It doesn't sound as though you trust the professionalism of your staff. Not that you shouldn't provide the tools they need to be effective, but I notice that you're equating SOX and top-level control with software quality, which leads me to the conclusion that you don't trust your staff. In my experience, top-level control has almost nothing to do with software quality, while trust has been highly correlated with high quality products.
Step 1: Get the best staff you can. "10x" developers do exist, but you should be aiming for a staff of "3x" to "5x" developers of varying experience who work well together. The best developers won't really want to manage other people, but will want to be trusted with significant responsibility (i.e. they don't want to be fed detailed "specs"). Being good team members is at least as important as having top-notch skills.
Step 2: Get out of their way. At this point, you need to make it easier for them to get their jobs done. Most software development processes are about making it harder to do the wrong thing, which inevitably makes it harder to do the right thing. For many managers, software processes are like violence: "If some isn't good enough, more must work better." Don't fall into this trap.
Various things that will help (and not hinder) your developers:
Provide direct access to stakeholders with requirements, including customers if possible, domain experts, etc.
Fire poor performers quickly. Sooner if possible. Let the team decide who these people are (you'll hear the complaints quickly if you are receptive).
Get the team to agree on formatting and design conventions. This will save you more time and frustration than you know. People who insist on their own conventions are unprofessional and should have failed the criteria for being hired (they're not good team members).
Identify the team tie-breaker. You may use the title "team lead", "project manager", "architect", whatever. This is the person who makes the call when consensus doesn't happen quickly.
Get an effective issue tracking system. Bugzilla is a free and minimal option. Scarab may be ready for prime time (but wasn't a year ago when I last checked). Trac is simple but clean (and once they add the issue process enhancements... woo hoo). Rally is commercial and hosted, but very effective for agile teams.
Install subversion (use the file-based installation, the db installation option is still flaky). Understand and utilize subversion's features (branches and variations on branches are #1 on this list).
Protect the tip with a minimum of a nightly build. There are build checkers (calavista is good, there are some open source alternatives that can frequently check the status of the tip... I wish I could remember some names).
When you get to this point, you'll have read a lot more about software development (your good developers can recommend some fantastic books) and you'll have much more precise questions.
If you don't read at least "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks before managing a software team, you will fail and you won't understand why.
Ahem. The original quote is from "Star Wars: A New Hope". Grand Moff Tarkin made this statement to General Tagge (leader of the Imperial Fleet) in one of the conference rooms aboard the Death Star.
Yes, I am that big of a geek. No, I didn't like Ep1 or Ep2. Let's just stay quiet about Ep3.
You skimmed over 40 pages in 15 minutes? That's about 22 and a half seconds per page, which in most of my textbooks would get you maybe a couple of keywords if you're lucky.
Yup. One of the skills I taught myself in the summer before university was speed reading. That and the typing classes I took in high school (with the would-be secretaries) have done me more good than just about any other classes in my entire education.
Now, I'm not doing analysis of the subject or trying to synthesize problems as I go. I'm barely touching any of the equations in the text. What I'm really doing is building up the ability to quickly refer back into the chapter(s). Someone asks a question about the material? I can tell you the page and probably the part of the page on which that was discussed. If it was one of the areas I went back to spend more time on, I probably know a lot more than that.
The school that I went to did three classes for seven weeks. Most classes consisted of two or three lectures per week, conference time, and often lab time. You spent the same amount time in a class, just compressed into seven weeks.
Different schools will have different expectations about work outside of class. What you're describing sounds more like a trade school than a typical university. Trade schools usually have much lower expectations for homework and preparation than a large university or "four-year" college as they expect to provide more hands on training per subject area.
Either you work on the verge of burn-out all the time, or you spend 6-10 years in college.
I think you're exaggerating a little here. However, most people seem to think that spending five or six years in college is unacceptable. Why? Especially if you're working your way through school? Even seven sounds eminently reasonable if you decide to change majors once and you're working your way through.
I'm definitely in the minority on that subject. Puzzles me no end as to why... What good is cramming your education into someone else's schedule if you can't maintain relationships or have any semblance of a normal life?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's not much to smack down in your post. Your only assertion is about what you believe, not what you think others should be taught as fact. At worst, this makes you a little silly for believing that one ancient story is more likely to be true than any other ancient story. A little disappointing, really ;)
The only time I really get motivated on the smack down is when I come across a persistent evangelist trying to convert me or my fiance who simply does not take a hint. The first request to look at your tract will be met with a simple "No thanks." Not leaving it at that may result in a public scene (depending on my mood).
Regards,
Ross
There's an important difference between what you think I said and what I actually said. I do not, under any circumstances, recommend that the PR department run the company; but as an early stage startup (fewer than five people), the CEO's job is primarily PR.
Obviously the CEO also has other responsibilities, including eventually leading the strategy and culture of the company, but when it's just you and the other guy, the thing that distinguishes the CEO from the other job is that the CEO is going to be the guy on the street, talking to potential investors, customers, making noise in trade rags, etc.
So, whoever is going to take on that job should be the best one at it.
When the company matures a bit and the responsibilities of the CEO change, who knows whether the same person should have that title?
Take a look at Google. The founders and the CEO together all act as the visionary strategic leaders. Neither founder has to give that up just because he doesn't have the title "CEO".
Regards,
Ross
To start this off: no matter what, you're both "Founder".
The job of the CEO of a startup is public relations. Whoever is better at this job should be CEO. In either case, you're the CTO and he's the CFO. Whoever isn't the CEO can also be the COO if you both want two titles.
If he's got better people skills, then he's the CEO and CFO while you're the COO and CTO. If it's you, then you're the CEO and CTO while he's the COO and the CFO.
To say it another way, there's a school of thought that you need to have some coverage of the three human archetypes (Maven, Connector, Evangelist/Salesperson). Whoever is the strongest evangelist/salesperson gets the CEO title.
Regards,
Ross
"but it may not scale up - but I'll be interested to see if it does." -- Russ Tedrake
The approach may not scale up?
Has the guy heard of humans? Ostriches? Kangaroos? Bipedal locomotion doesn't scale indefinitely (square-cube problem unfortunately), but biological approaches to controlling two-legged walking (and running and bounding) will definitely scale up to lots of "useful" sizes.
And if he's criticizing their current algorithms... of course they won't control a robot 10x larger, but that's just being pedantic. You'll need the bigger robot to figure it's own algorithms out (thus, their actual approach of an adaptive robot).
Regards,
Ross
Ah, balance. My favorite word (no, really).
If I do one thing at a time it gets done faster, and with better results than if I try to multitask.
This is quite true. Multiple studies have shown that every context switch takes you 15 to 60 minutes to return to full productivity (depending on the focus required for the task), with a complete loss of about 50% of that time.
Most geeks who think they're great at multi-tasking should try focusing deeply on one problem some time. Their productivity would skyrocket.
If I limit work to something like 9-5 (well, actually 10-4) I get more done, with better results.
I prefer to limit any day to 10 hours and any week to 45 hours (in the office). Some people who've heard me advocate that think I'm a slacker, but I'm getting a lot more done than when I have pushed myself towards burnout and I always get more done than others in the office.
The fact that management doesn't get this in most companies just reinforces my utter contempt for most of the MBA's and suits who I see acting quite superior and self-important...
Regards,
Ross
Function is the coolest feature, IMHO. I prefer a bag that carries what you need and nobody can tell if there's a laptop inside. Especially for airports. Let the guy who's "dressed for success" be the mark and just get on your flight with no muss or fuss.
Samsonite makes some nice backpacks like that. I've bought three Samsonite backpacks in the last three years:
one for me (linked) that my fiance "borrowed"
one to replace the first (which turned out to be ideal for just carrying the laptop but too small for travel)
and the current backpack that can carry my laptop as well as organize my camera bag (small SLR camera)
But at the moment, ebags only has the original that is still used (and loved) by my fiance for carrying her laptop to and from classes, especially when she's on her motorcycle.
Regards,
Ross
If that was true, no one would watch TV anymore.
Interesting point, and the evidence appears to partially bear out your argument. I hear about more and more of my acquaintances disconnecting cable and only using their television set to watch movies. My fiance and I had separately stopped watching broadcast/cable TV before we met (wasn't all that important to me, but it was a nice bonus).
At some point, we may reach a tipping point of people who don't watch TV, or only watch specific content on their TV's (live sports, maybe) and a whole industry called TV broadcasting will fade away and become part of our history...
Or maybe not. I'm better than Esther Dyson at predicting the future, but still not all that good.
Regards,
Ross
The study is deemed to have *no* point at all, SINCE the result came as negative.
Actually, negative results are some of the most important pieces of information in science. Scientific propositions are never actually provable, but are instead required to be falsifiable. Credible negative results are essential to the process of setting aside invalid propositions so that more attention can be paid to more likely propositions.
Not understanding that science works this way gets creationists in trouble all the time (i.e. none of their statements are falsifiable, so none qualify as scientific propositions).
Regards,
Ross
But I say simply diverting that sexual energy and waiting to even think about sex until your married is better. I think the most wonderful thing a man could offer a woman on their wedding night is the assurance that he has never lusted over another woman in his life.
If true, then there's something seriously wrong with you. When you were an adolescent, something was literally not right in your head. That kind of an anouncement would freak out most/all of the women I know (including the one I'm about to marry). And since when was female virginity ever appealing to anything but uber-macho guys who are insecure about comparisons being made?* I want a woman who's comfortable with sex and who already has some idea what makes her feel good.
* To some extent, virginity provides some minimal assurance that the kids are yours, but that's minimal at best. In today's society you'd better have real reasons to trust your wife (including regularly pleasuring her) beyond just physical control.
Regards,
Ross
[...Much insightful stuff...] As we speak here, yet another youth in Iraq watches today's bloodshed, notes the US soldiers involved, and then takes a vow to bring America down.
Abso-fucking-lutely!
I've been saying this since 9/11 and the only response I get back is that I hate America. What? Because I want the place I live to be better than it is and the acts done in my name to be less reprehensible, I somehow hate my home?
Doublethink is thriving across this country, not just in the red states.
And before any red state residents get their panties in a twist, I'm a registered Republican (though I haven't voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since Regan).
Regards,
Ross
Pulmonary thrombosis (aka pulmonary thrombo-embolism) is when you sit still for too long, blood settles in veins in your legs and starts to clot, and then after you get up, one or more of the clots breaks loose and gets stuck in your lungs.
Intensely painful, fairly dangerous, sometimes fatal.
Has nothing to do with the cortex or seizures.
Regards,
Ross
faster => fastener
*sigh* Darn you too-quick preview!!!
Regards,
Ross
I agree but I think the problem is that as many of us use Echo2, we find less and less reasons to use book-marking capabilities.
This sounds like an inversion of the "Golden Hammer" antipattern. Maybe call it the "Missing Screwdriver" antipattern. "If you can't find your screwdriver, you tend to stop using screws, even when they're the most appropriate faster." Not incredibly catchy, but who knows?
Thanks for the good discussion, in any case. I always enjoy learning something new.
Regards,
Ross
I'll try to provide a slightly different response from the other poster (who seems to be letting his frustration with Echo/Nextapp get the better of him).
Most of the applications I build have a user authentication system in the first place. You can't just access the system without first logging in so this is the first line in deflecting the user from immediately landing on said page
Handling this scenario is a straightforward part of our authentication subsystem which aims to minimize user astonishment. Users don't get to see anything in the app if they're not authenticated, but just because you're not authenticated doesn't mean we can't be smart about what you're trying to accomplish.
If you browse to a page and don't have an identity yet, we set aside the URL you were going to, and send you to the authentication page with that URL as the "destinationURL" session attribute. After authentication, if there is a "destinationURL" value, we try to send you back there. "We try to send you" is pretty important, as you may not be able to see what you were trying to get to if you aren't authorized to see it. In that case, we present you with an "authorization failed" message and then send you back to the front page. If they've saved their login in their browser, all they do is click on the URL, hit [Enter] or click the [Login] button and, almost all of the time, the user is looking at what they wanted to see.
This also makes users much, much, MUCH happier about authentication timeouts. They go to lunch, come back, click on a button or start navigating again. The app gives them another login, and most of the time, takes them right back where they intended to go. They don't have to re-navigate from the front page to continue where they left off. Cleanly restarting from a timeout can fail for a few reasons, as sometimes what they were doing relied on session state (step 2 of 4 in the xyz wizard), so after the timeout, we sometimes have to fall back to the nearest sane page (the start of the wizard, perhaps). Other times, it makes more sense to provide a message about why they couldn't return to the page they were on and send them back to the front page, but most of the time, there's a decent non-astonishing alternative semantically "nearby" to where they were.
The lack of this feature in Echo drove me to distraction. You spent too much time talking over that last feature with the other developer:
[Please Wait]
AAuugghh!
Regards,
Ross
In my opinion, at least as important is the belief that the proper group to see if the machines are compromised is the manufacturer.
If the machines can't be verified as uncompromised on voting day by an election staffer at a voting location multiple times throughout the day, that's a huge problem. For the voting commission to accept Diebold's line that "That's the way it is." is simply unconscionable.
Slot machines in Nevada can be checked against any number of parameters to make sure that 1) hardware has not been added or replaced, 2) the software has not been altered (from the registered version on file with the NGC) and 3) the settings for the software match the casino's payout statements. The casino can do these checks, the NGC can do these checks, interested public parties can do these checks (with the cooperation of either the casino or the NGC).
Shouldn't we expect at least as much from the recordkeepers of democracy as we expect from a gambling house?
Regards,
Ross
Thanks for the info that it is possible to add your own externalizable URL generator/parser. This bit of information would probably do a lot for Echo2's acceptance if they were to publicize it more, but that would probably mean that they would have to repudiate lots of previous statements about it being unnecessary.
On that project where we used Echo, I ceded responsibility of the UI frameworks to someone else and trusted the answers I received back. When my own 1-hour research confirmed that the Echo team dismissed the need for externalizable URL's and I didn't see any information that it was possible, I gave up on those features while we were using Echo.
Where Echo2 fails in my opinion is in inter-application communication you cannot have an application that passes it context to another application. The developers are currently proposing solutions for this problem but in reality it is a small problem as it is rare that a developer needs full context passed between applications. Few frameworks offer this feature but it allows for more robust applications and allows for greater reuse.
These types of integration may seem rare to the Nextapp team, but they are the lifeblood of the data/workflow repositories that I've worked on. Enterprise applications rarely exist that don't have to talk to accounts payable/receivable and other components of CMP and ERP systems. In the contract management repository that I've been referring to, we built JMS/XML interfaces for service integration and tried to sell around UI integration (because Echo didn't support it). Now, with Struts/Tiles/JSF, the UI integration is practical and our users cite it as their most important feature.
But now that I know that Echo2 may support it (perhaps with a lot of work-around code), it may be worthwhile to re-evaluate Echo2. I certainly liked the look of our Echo application.
Regards,
Ross
So people acting like this is so scientifically not-happening are on just as shaky ground.
Incorrect. Double blind experiments involving black boxes which may or may not contain EM emitting components show that the discomfort by "sensitive" people depends entirely on whether they believe the boxes are currently emitting and not on actual emissions.
I do agree that most people would be healthier with fewer electrical devices around and more excuses to go outside and do something else, but this article and the equipment being advertised are at best ignorant and at worst fraudulent.
Regards,
Ross
different application requires different architectures.
No doubt. But we're not even to the architecture step, and I already disagree with how Nextapp wants to describe web applications. They're presuming that enterprise data and process repositories don't benefit from externalizable (or bookmarkable) URL's because desktop applications achieving similar goals got along without them.
Wow.
That's very short-sighted and seems to be a deliberate mis-framing of what the web and URL's mean to users, especially users with outside applications that would benefit greatly if there was a way to "point" into an application from other applications (like email, calendars, wiki's, issue trackers, etc.). URL's are an excellent means to that goal. But Nextapp rules them out as an artifact of "documents".
It is very good for enterprise system development of say and accounting system or a admin system in which the user is accomplishing a business process.
Actually, it's in exactly these meta-domains that I'm building web applications, and the ability to email a URL for a search or a specific content item (the details of a financial commitment, for instance) has been invaluable. More precisely, the inability to do so hurt us badly. When we were using Echo as the front end, we simply had to say "too difficult" for those use cases, and that ended up hurting us in the sales process.
So, in my experience, Echo was (and is) a poor choice for almost any kind of enterprise system development. Because the mistakes are not just bugs, they're baked in to your front-end architecture if you use Echo.
Again, an application designed to input information to store in a DB or to transact a process is where such frameworks shine not in content rich applications such as a shopping site or a documentation project.
Again, I'm referring to exactly the kind of enterprise information management applications that you're saying don't need emailable URL's (store info in a DB/transact a process). And I'm not saying that every view within an application UI needs to representable as a URL. Views that represent intermediate steps in user interactions (step 2 of 4 in the xyz wizard) aren't appropriate, but being able to send a URL that the recipient can use to see the status of a particular business process? Without needing to do their own search? Without needing to navigate from the splash page of the app? You're simply not valuing the time/frustration/perspective of your customers.
URL's aren't just for documents any more. Most web developers were saying this in 1996, but it's a decade later, and Nextapp still disagrees, thus the final remark of my previous message.
You seem to agree with the assumption made by the Nextapp developers: that anything more complex than hyperlinked documents doesn't really need URL's and web features. If that works for your customers so far, then IMHO you've been lucky. That didn't work for our customers, and I think is an unwise framing of what a "web application" actually should be.
Regards,
Ross
as I said from my evaluation the most intuitive and well designed framework that I have used to date is Echo2 as a developer need not concern themselves with any layer of the client communication.
I've had to use Echo and evaluated Echo2, and unless you agree with their framing of web applications (as desktop applications that happen to be accessed through a web browser), you'll get yourself in serious trouble. Their attitude is best summed up in their own response to a question about bookmarkable URL's: "Can you get a link to a certain window in a desktop application? Ajax is for web applications, not for hyperlinked documents."
<clue-bat>
Web applications are not desktop applications that happen to be used through a web browser.
</clue-bat>
Using the web as an application interface provides a number of new abilities (creating and passing around stateful references for one) that are simply not possible for a desktop application. And it's not like users don't know about these abilities or somehow don't expect them. The Nextapp devs and marketers say you shouldn't need to tell someone a URL that takes them directly to a particular piece of information (probably after an authentication step), but our users say that's a valuable/critical feature. Who should we listen to?
I'll use Echo again after the Nextapp guys learn some basics about the web. For the moment, they're clinging to outdated notions of information access and application context and that makes their frameworks a hinderance when trying to build an effective web application.
Regards,
Ross
this guy using the World of Warcraft trademark for personal profit (which he clearly did)
But trademark law doesn't prevent you from using another company's trademarks for your profit. It primarily protects against uses that dilute the value of the trademark. So "MS Excel for Dummies" can be published without a license from Microsoft, even though it (1) clearly uses a trademarked phrase and (2) is published for profit. You can even sell your own spreadsheet program and market it as "Better than Excel!(tm)" as long as you don't call it something that could be confused with "Excel" or "MS Excel" or... Basically, all you have to do is acknowledge the trademark and not confuse potential customers with your use of the other company's trademark in your materials.
Which this guy apparently did. Blizzard is way out on a crazy limb here and in my non-expert estimation, will probably not prevail.
Regards,
Ross
I strongly suspect he's a sociopath with no conscience or actual sense of right and wrong. I.e. he was born "broken" and by many people's definition, evil.
He's literally willing to do "whatever it takes" to keep himself in the life. Too bad for him he's also an idiot. The world is a better place with him behind bars. Let's hope he stays there for a very long time.
Regards,
Ross
Step 1: Get the best staff you can. "10x" developers do exist, but you should be aiming for a staff of "3x" to "5x" developers of varying experience who work well together. The best developers won't really want to manage other people, but will want to be trusted with significant responsibility (i.e. they don't want to be fed detailed "specs"). Being good team members is at least as important as having top-notch skills.
Step 2: Get out of their way. At this point, you need to make it easier for them to get their jobs done. Most software development processes are about making it harder to do the wrong thing, which inevitably makes it harder to do the right thing. For many managers, software processes are like violence: "If some isn't good enough, more must work better." Don't fall into this trap.
Various things that will help (and not hinder) your developers:
When you get to this point, you'll have read a lot more about software development (your good developers can recommend some fantastic books) and you'll have much more precise questions.
If you don't read at least "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks before managing a software team, you will fail and you won't understand why.
Regards,
Ross
Ahem. The original quote is from "Star Wars: A New Hope". Grand Moff Tarkin made this statement to General Tagge (leader of the Imperial Fleet) in one of the conference rooms aboard the Death Star.
Yes, I am that big of a geek. No, I didn't like Ep1 or Ep2. Let's just stay quiet about Ep3.
Regards,
Ross
You skimmed over 40 pages in 15 minutes? That's about 22 and a half seconds per page, which in most of my textbooks would get you maybe a couple of keywords if you're lucky.
Yup. One of the skills I taught myself in the summer before university was speed reading. That and the typing classes I took in high school (with the would-be secretaries) have done me more good than just about any other classes in my entire education.
Now, I'm not doing analysis of the subject or trying to synthesize problems as I go. I'm barely touching any of the equations in the text. What I'm really doing is building up the ability to quickly refer back into the chapter(s). Someone asks a question about the material? I can tell you the page and probably the part of the page on which that was discussed. If it was one of the areas I went back to spend more time on, I probably know a lot more than that.
Regards,
Ross
The school that I went to did three classes for seven weeks. Most classes consisted of two or three lectures per week, conference time, and often lab time. You spent the same amount time in a class, just compressed into seven weeks.
Different schools will have different expectations about work outside of class. What you're describing sounds more like a trade school than a typical university. Trade schools usually have much lower expectations for homework and preparation than a large university or "four-year" college as they expect to provide more hands on training per subject area.
Either you work on the verge of burn-out all the time, or you spend 6-10 years in college.
I think you're exaggerating a little here. However, most people seem to think that spending five or six years in college is unacceptable. Why? Especially if you're working your way through school? Even seven sounds eminently reasonable if you decide to change majors once and you're working your way through.
I'm definitely in the minority on that subject. Puzzles me no end as to why... What good is cramming your education into someone else's schedule if you can't maintain relationships or have any semblance of a normal life?
Regards,
Ross