The point is not that they shouldn't pay taxes, the point is that there are already avenues in place to get this information. I think it should be illegal for governments to demand private information from eBay or etsy or the like without having a reason to investigate.
I wholeheartedly agree. The study is actually quite flawed and the article aludes to as much. If I am working in an area I am unfamiliar with, music may hinder me. But if I am working in a realm where I fully understand all the pieces and I just need to tie it together in a useful way (e.g. software design), music absolutely helps. I get into my own head and feel almost inspired by the music to work faster. Sometimes even knowing the lyrics helps. It really depends.
Then there is this:
"A problem with the music is the assumption that the familiar music is familiar."
Apparently the testees were not allowed to pick their music, but music "assumed to be familiar" was chosen for them (I think I am safe in inferring as much). This would be pure rubbish for an introvert. If I have to listen to music I am familiar with (enough that I can even tell you what key it's written in and play the melody) but absolutely detest. I will be so unhappy and distracted by my misery that I will, absolutely, peform worse than with silence.
In other words, this study is pure shit. The hypothesis is far too generic and the execution is fatally flawed.
Amazon does... sort of, but not really. That's actually my complaint. It depends on the network. Many series are incomplete (see the Simpsons, unless you really like the last ten years of it) or are only available for streaming after they have been released on DVD (anything by HBO). That's asinine.
I know. I'd even be okay with buying episodes of shows as they air, not to coincide with some poorly done DVD release (hello, HBO) if they exist at all. In lieu of sane options, piracy is all that's left.
The cabal of advertisers, cable companies, and television networks are all so worried about losing viewers that they've decided to strap their sinking ships together. Because that's a grand idea. It worked very well for the music industry. Who wants to rock out to my Nickelback CDs? After that we can watch a movie on my DIVX (not DivX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX) player!
This is some John C Dvorak level useless information. I'd advise anyone looking at buying a tv to do anything but watch this. It's rambling and about the level of discussion you'll get from a Best Buy salesman. His blog is also full of misinformation. This is binspam.
You touch on something, but I think there are deeper issues at work here.
(FWIW, I welcome their involvement in OSS. There is quite a bit of historical social machinery that stands in the way and someone needs to do something about it.)
Every few months (YMMV), it seems that there is a story on/. about a lack of women in science and engineering. Some posters on this particular topic have also suggested that very few women pursue "geeky" endeavors in their free time. From a very arm-chair/anecdotal position, I think these both have some of the main root cause: from a young age women are not encouraged to pursue technology or science in the same way boys are.
There are many factors for this, it's not as simple as saying that "the parents are doing a bad job" or "it's the schools". Like most things, it's not that black and white. As a boy, for a variety of reasons, I spent many hours reading books, tinkering, and generally "being by myself" that led to how I solve problems and spurred me on my way in my interests. My sisters, under the auspices of a very liberal, slightly disconnected intellectual, were given the same sort of options, but followed their peers more: socializing, etc. But I cannot rightly claim that this is what happens to everyone. What I can say is that it does seem like even children are encouraged in different paths by the whole of society and that this is hard to fight, but should start somewhere. Did my teachers encourage males to "be nerdy" and females to be social? Are there different pressures exerted on young girls, not just by their families, but by media?
If we take that disparity between male and female at an academic level (that is, the difference in enrollment/matriculation under science and technology by the sexes) and then envision those graduates as working professionals, the numbers make more sense. If (these are purely made up numbers to illustrate a point) 75% of graduates in, say, Computer Science are males and only 20% of graduates go on to contribute to OSS, there is a good chance that the make up of the OSS contributing graduates will be predominately male (there is no guarantee, of course... it could well be that that 20% is part of the 25% of female graduates in my made up scenario, but ceteris paribus you'd not expect that).
I don't think this has as much to do with salary as it does these other social rules and the existing social frameworks that exist. That is why groups like the Ada Initiative may seem backwards to some, but are needed. Someone needs to encourage the young (and old) women on the fence that they can contribute to OSS, that it's okay to be geeky. Someone needs to set these examples for girls so that they don't fall into the age old traps of misogyny.
Additional food for thought: I do many technical interviews and I see very few females who contribute to OSS in them, but a sad majority of the men are often quite bigoted and not as liberal as they would like to believe. That is to say, anecdotally, there is sometimes a correlation with OSS work and poor empathy skills which result in these types of problems (groping, etc). Sometimes this social outsider "dive into books" sort of thing that may contribute to the division to begin with, also makes some men who's social skills are undeveloped (to put it nicely) and pathetic (to put it bluntly).
To write re-usable, well-designed Objective-C on iOS takes a deft hand and you're right, there are a great deal of poorly written applications in Apple's App Store (Objective-C on iOS has no garbage collection and is much closer to, duh, C crossed with Smalltalk than anything else... there's nothing as raw as malloc, so it will allocate an appropriate amount of bits off the heap when the alloc message is sent, but you do have to worry about reference counting and telling the runtime that an object is safe for reclaiming. Very different from a mark and sweep type scheme where you can get away with not worrying about it, though that is bad too. Hell all the foundation classes still have a NextStep prefix!).
That, however (as is being pointed out by seebs et al) not the point.
At all.
This is not "App Store" code, this is code that is part of the OS... this would be like complaining about how unstable KDE is because KCalc crashes on you. Or, perhaps more appropriately, about poorly written VB apps (wink) in.NET when you have issues with Windows Media Player (a better, though still piss poor analogy).
I agree that it is far too easy for any joe (educated formally or not) to write rather shit apps, but that's just the way of things (to throw my hat into the fallacy of "appeal to authority" I've been "pro coding" since I was twenty and have the CS credentials trailing up to a Master's, but that doesn't make me right... or a good developer).
This is really a red herring, but to be fair, a good CS education isn't really an education in programming: it requires programming and touches on SE aspects of good design, but it is also an education in problem solving. Cyclomatic complexity, time complexity, good design, exposure to alternate paradigms (not just OO, but Functional and perhaps Aspect Oriented, etc), and a thorough awareness of important issues (tail recursion, memory management, etc) are things that one usually understands after having been through a decent program and, to be fair, I've met very few "self taught" or non-CS folks who understand all of those issues... but I have met some CS folks who don't know about any of them either. All that to say, that you could be a damn fine developer without a formal education, though that is much more rare.
As an aside, you will see a great deal of "I know JavaScript and Perl so I thought I had a good programming foundation" complaints in comments/reviews/discussions on iOS development. So there clearly are some chaps who are very confused about what, say, an O'Reilly book jacket means about "designed for experience programmers" and all that.
This is the exact kind of job I'm just leaving (I even know what SBIR stands for... just shoot me).
I've gotten to do very little original research, and even though the team is filled with great people, it's largely a bureaucracy that decides how much money we are going to give MIT and others.
Checkpoints, even in Halo 3 (especially on a few parts) are more frustrating than saves. "Hey I just beat ten guys and the last two keep clobbering me..." So instead of being able to save after you kill the first ten, you have to keep doing it all again. Checkpoints are a way of teasing your users. They should be auto-saves! Equally frustrating in Halo 3, is that the "save" feature, just keeps track of the last checkpoint. So hitting "exit and save" doesn't actually save your current progress.
Everyone has to learn somewhere, although if you are serious, VisualBasic is not the place to start. In my experience, the typical VisualBasic developer is just that. A good developer needs to understand concepts outside of the frame of wizards and such. Probably one of the biggest flaws in VisualStudio in general. MS loves wizards.
I would agree with you, but the internet as a medium is much different from any other news source. As an example, John Smith from Nowhere USA could create a website that claims that the government is controlling his mind, that Mr. Siegenthaler sacrifices children to Satan, and that Clinton was a robot. Of course, it is completely unfounded and untrue, but chances are that no one would call him on it... unless he got media attention. Wikipedia is popular, extremely popular, but not just because anyone can edit it. Moreso, Wikipedia is popular because you can make an entry for anything. Unlike a regular encyclopedia that is static. You may look up your favorite hobby ("dwarf tossing") and find no entry. Then you can make one. Because lots of people go to Wiki, other enthusiasts may also edit the entry and now you have a reference when none existed before.
The irony in all of this is that if it weren't for Wikipedia, Mr. Siegenthaler wouldn't be in any encyclopedia. As it were, some nut (tinfoil hat) decided to share his wacky views. Again, this has been brought up alot, but someone should have edited it, including Mr. Siegenthaler himself. That is the way it is supposed to work! And it's not the same as neo-Nazis painting swastikas on your house. It's more (not exactly) like "Matt likes men" scrawled on a bathroom stall. Albeit a stall that alot of people read. Wikipedia is a good place to start with information. After that you should know enough to investigate further.
And I do think that Mr. Siegenthaler is a bit of a hypocrite. Plus, I don't think I can say it too many times: no one would know you otherwise. Crotchity old coot.
While that is the "classic" defenition of a journalist, as many have pointed out, much of what is published in the media is actually the work of PR firms, re-releasing modified press releases. And I am not talking about those fake articles in you copy of Reader's Digest. Real magazine articles can often be traced back to a dubious source: some marketing firm that is pushing PR.
Considering the state of affairs, I think it is immoral to assume that because some bloggers may be fueled by corporations, it would not be fair to include them in the bill. Real journalists are bought and sold as well. Would these same protections have prevented Stephen Glass from getting caught (probably not, but he was a liar)? What about the state of things at the NY Times? That is what is dumb, you really have to consider the source. Professional journalists lie and slant as much as the next guy, elevating them above some info hungry blogger is a serious flaw in judgement. They both may be quacks, but that isn't the point.
Actually, that is only true most of the time. For some reason the smaller (8-9 thousand students) campus at Colorado Springs uses both "CU Colorado Springs" and "UCCS". The Denver campus and the Health Sciences campus stick with CU. I don't know why they are inconsistent, blame the CU regents for that one.
That is a very isolated view of the process. Security is a different problem entirely. As many of you will recall, you cannot verify that a program works, you can only show that for conditions X,Y, and Z, it appeared to work. This is exaclty like the scientific method: you show that you can't break it, but that does not prove that it works.
Handling security flaws can be a matter of good code reviews and hiring employees knowledgeable in exploits, but in alot of cases it is an "outside" call kind of thing.
For example, the good old buffer overflow exploit completely blindsided people back in 1988. No one even thought to check that strcpy would exceed the call frame in the execution stack. Security flaws are usually not as obvious as poorly written code. Claiming other wise is silly. Quality software does not mean it is secure.
I do think that when MS released SQLServer (and it was full of possible buffer overflow attacks), better quality control would have helped. But sometimes this is not up to the developer. Some Operating Systems have a safe run time where programs cannot access the execution stack directly. So if you install a product on an OS that prevents certain problems, you are safe, but if not, nothing is guaranteed.
And what if the requirements don't cover security? What if you Quality Model includes things you know about, but does not cover the as-yet-unimagined attacks?
And how many flaws are introduced because a developer was running short on time? Schedule and money constraints are the number 1 difficulty in the real world. You can't always make everything as nice as you want, and in that last week before delivery you might be hacking up those nice modules you wrote. It happens. It happens all the time.
This is not like real world problems: because software by its nature is abstract, you cannot be assured of security. When people like Howard Schmidt can understand that, real solutions can be found. It shows his level of ignorance to claim that flaws are the fault of a single developer.
Yeah, many people have thought that the skycar has been an investment scam, and it probably is. Hey the SEC thinks so!
Although I see that Bernoulli's principle strikes again! Alas, that is not really what generates lift (my modern Physics professor in college used to teach at the Air Force Academy and said they still teach that to pilots... ghastly). While there is a Bernoulli effect that influences lift, there is an assumption and crude explanation (hey the air flows above and below the wing have to meet up).
Many readers new to this topic may be looking for the explanation that is commonly put forward in many mainstream books, and even scientific exhibitions, that touch on flight and aerodynamic principles; namely, that due to the greater curvature (and hence longer path) of the upper surface of an aerofoil, the air going over the top must go faster in order to "catch up" with the air flowing around the bottom (and hence due to its faster speed its pressure is lower, etc). Despite the fact that this "explanation" is probably the most common of all, it must be made clear that it is utterly false.
Of course Bernoulli was a natural philosopher which explains why this was easily accepted (thanks Neal Stephenson, for fictionalizing that part of history).
Scientific arguments aside, the Moller sky car graced the pages of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science when I was a kid. No one in their right mind would buy it, it is a silly impractical (not to mention unsafe) idea. Do you know how much work it takes to get a pilot's license? Or instrument rated? Time and $$$$. That is why it is a dumb idea. But hey, rich old men can dream, can't they?
Their are hacks that are beautiful design solutions, constructed by someone who knows what they are doing. Sometimes they are the result of being "the new guy" on a five year old spaghetti code POS. Othertimes they are necessity of invention.
For example, one trick I use in pre-generics Java, is casting to enforce type during deep copies of collections:
public void setJunk(Collection c) throws ClassCastException {
this.junk = new HashSet();
for(Iterator i = c.iterator(); i.hasNext(); )
this.junk.add((SpecificClassType)i.next());
}
I would call that a hack, but it does something useful that (in this case) the language did not provide (and it is a simple example). I'd say the same thing about throwing exceptions on purpose and iterating through the stack trace to find the calling object. Clever, a hack, but clever and done by someone who knows what they are doing.
On the other hand, the guy two cubes down from me (who is twice my age and fudged his resume), who tries to get some code working by copying my, completely unrelated code, and commenting stuff out until it works for him... that is a hack. And that is not a good hack, certainly not art.
The one thing that I don't really get, is that if you understand how it all works, this doesn't really make sense. I mean this isn't something that really matters, for the most part.
A little brush up on teh Intarweb
ARPNET was the origins of the "Intarwebs", it was replaced by the U.S. built and controlled NSFNET [wikipedia.org] (full transion in 1989, Military went to MILNET). All ISPs had to sign an agreement with NSFNET (1987-1995) to connect to the backbone. NSFNET was not federally controlled, it was controlled by "Merit Network, Inc" which was run by public universities. True, a good bit of funding came from taxes, but it was up to academics as to how it was used. In 1995, NSFNET was transitioned to NAP architecture, which provided much faster routing and the capabilites for more growth. Today the "backbone" [wikipedia.org] is a collection of commercial ISPs, a few private, and a few University controlled networks. There is little to no direct federal intervention.
DNS [wikipedia.org] servers are, of course, chained in the sense that one DNS references another DNS, and DNS entries spread like viruses (lookups are forwarded). The root [wikipedia.org] level DNS servers (serving requests from the root). Some of them are DoD owned, and some are privately owned.
But not all traffic is routed through the root level DNS servers. In fact you local DNS might not need to hit the next guy in the chain if he still has a valid lookup entry for your request (check the TTL, not all BIND [wikipedia.org] implementations do this correctly). So the traffic on the internet does not go through one space, and you probably dont hit the root level DNS servers that often. Not only that but the way DNS works, unless you hit the root server yourself, it never knows that you were making the request, all it knows is that DNS server at 217.88.99.42 (or what have you) hit it.
Basically this whole argument is kind of silly. No one really controls net traffic, perse. The root DNS servers (i.e. ICANN) do for the most part reside in the US, but because of the recursive nature of a DNS lookup, it does not really tell you what is going on (put a packet sniffer on your own BIND server and see what comes up).
The Internet is still largely, "grass roots". It is largely peer-to-peer. The only centralized items are the root DNS servers.
Since the U.S. gov does not really control "the Internet", why should we change that? It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right", but that is gross over-simplification. Nobody really "controls" the internet. If their argument is just about moving or adding new root DNS servers, that wouldn't really matter, but instead it sounds like "politics as usual", that is to say FUD./p
I am not saying that the US is the greatest nation, but this article is not exactly clear...
A little background on teh web
ARPNET was the origins of the "Intarwebs", it was replaced by the U.S. built and controlled NSFNET (full transion in 1989, Military went to MILNET). All ISPs had to sign an agreement with NSFNET (1987-1995) to connect to the backbone. NSFNET was not federally controlled, it was controlled by "Merit Network, Inc" which was run by public universities. True, a good bit of funding came from taxes, but it was up to academics as to how it was used. In 1995, NSFNET was transitioned to NAP architecture, which provided much faster routing and the capabilites for more growth. Today the "backbone" is a collection of commercial ISPs, a few private, and a few University controlled networks. There is little to no direct federal intervention.
DNS servers are, of course, chained in the sense that one DNS references another DNS, and DNS entries spread like viruses (lookups are forwarded). The root level DNS servers (serving requests from the root). Some of them are DoD owned, and some are privately owned.
But not all traffic is routed through the root level DNS servers. In fact you local DNS might not need to hit the next guy in the chain if he still has a valid lookup entry for your request (check the TTL, not all BIND implementations do this correctly). So the traffic on the internet does not go through one space, and you probably dont hit the root level DNS servers that often. Not only that but the way DNS works, unless you hit the root server yourself, it never knows that you were making the request, all it knows is that DNS server at 217.88.99.42 (or what have you) hit it.
Basically this whole argument is kind of silly. No one really controls net traffic, perse. The root DNS servers (i.e. ICANN) do for the most part reside in the US, but because of the recursive nature of a DNS lookup, it does not really tell you what is going on (put a packet sniffer on your own BIND server and see what comes up).
The Internet is still largely, "grass roots". It is largely peer-to-peer. The only centralized items are the root DNS servers.
Since the U.S. gov does not really control it now, why should we change that? It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right", but that is gross over-simplification. Nobody really "controls" the internet. If their argument is just about moving or adding new root DNS servers, that wouldn't really matter, but instead it sounds like "politics as usual", that is to say FUD.
You are not familiar with the capabilites of IE through things like ActiveX controls. It is not part of the OS, perse, but with Active X I can wreak havoc on your OS. I can get hooks back into your OS... that is not so easy to do in another browser.
Well J# isn't supposed to be Java. I have never heard that, only that it is C# with Java-like syntax (which is to say not really that different). Now, I do remember good old J++, which was just a plain Java ripoff. Since J# is supposedly compatible with J++ maybe it is just MS trying to be clever(ly evil).
Back in 97 or so, J++ was actually Java. It wasn't until Visual Studio 6 that it became something else. Hence the lawsuit!
All that said, I worry for JBoss. I don't want to see MS ruin a good product.
When my laptop doesn't have problems running MySQL/Oracle, Eclipse/JDeveloper, WebLogic, XML Spy, and GIMP all at once without buring a hole in my pants... I will agree. I use a powerful laptop, but I still use my desktop alot, ESPECIALLY at work.
Hopefully this well help more people switch from IE. Or at least introduce some of the computer using public to the fact that IE is just a web browser and they can pick from many...
Dvorak is probably all wet, but Microsoft splitting into three seperate companies would save us from Microsoft and save Microsoft from themselves.
After reading that mini Microsoft blog that was posted earlier this week and hearing about the micro management driven from the top down, I think it is even more essential. Half of what is wrong with Microsoft is their desire to make everything Microsoft. From their own protocols and standards (Direct X, JScript) to slipping in bits and pieces of larger apps (Windows messaging not IM, IIS, SQLServer hooks). A seperate OS company and app company would really help all of us out. Wouldn't it be great to be able to run.NET on OS X(instead of IIS)? Or SQLServer on Debian? Or not have the Microsoft VM or JScript instead of Javascript.
But Microsoft is killing itself from the inside. Judging from the comments on the aforementioned blog, it is not a place for innovation from the ground up. Instead it is Billy G who tries to drive it from the top. That is what makes google work! Developers have the ideas, not the guy at the top!
the product development model that Bill created and fostered no longer works in our environment. It was awesome up to the time we shipped Windows 95, but now it's no longer feasible. I continually get stories from longtime MSFT employees who talk about the days when they slept on the floor of their office...stayed all weekend...and basically busted their asses to ship.
and
Think of Google. Their best stuff has comes out of the 8 hours a week they give each employee to tinker with whatever the hell they want.
The stupid thing about that is that this was rumored to be the original idea behind the last anti-trust suite: make Microsoft split up. I don't know if it was directly related to GW, but I have not seen or heard of anything happening to Microsoft as a result of them being convicted of anti-trust violations.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is not that they shouldn't pay taxes, the point is that there are already avenues in place to get this information. I think it should be illegal for governments to demand private information from eBay or etsy or the like without having a reason to investigate.
I wholeheartedly agree. The study is actually quite flawed and the article aludes to as much. If I am working in an area I am unfamiliar with, music may hinder me. But if I am working in a realm where I fully understand all the pieces and I just need to tie it together in a useful way (e.g. software design), music absolutely helps. I get into my own head and feel almost inspired by the music to work faster. Sometimes even knowing the lyrics helps. It really depends.
Then there is this:
"A problem with the music is the assumption that the familiar music is familiar."
Apparently the testees were not allowed to pick their music, but music "assumed to be familiar" was chosen for them (I think I am safe in inferring as much). This would be pure rubbish for an introvert. If I have to listen to music I am familiar with (enough that I can even tell you what key it's written in and play the melody) but absolutely detest. I will be so unhappy and distracted by my misery that I will, absolutely, peform worse than with silence.
In other words, this study is pure shit. The hypothesis is far too generic and the execution is fatally flawed.
Amazon does... sort of, but not really. That's actually my complaint. It depends on the network. Many series are incomplete (see the Simpsons, unless you really like the last ten years of it) or are only available for streaming after they have been released on DVD (anything by HBO). That's asinine.
I know. I'd even be okay with buying episodes of shows as they air, not to coincide with some poorly done DVD release (hello, HBO) if they exist at all. In lieu of sane options, piracy is all that's left.
The cabal of advertisers, cable companies, and television networks are all so worried about losing viewers that they've decided to strap their sinking ships together. Because that's a grand idea. It worked very well for the music industry. Who wants to rock out to my Nickelback CDs? After that we can watch a movie on my DIVX (not DivX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX) player!
This is some John C Dvorak level useless information. I'd advise anyone looking at buying a tv to do anything but watch this. It's rambling and about the level of discussion you'll get from a Best Buy salesman. His blog is also full of misinformation. This is binspam.
You touch on something, but I think there are deeper issues at work here.
(FWIW, I welcome their involvement in OSS. There is quite a bit of historical social machinery that stands in the way and someone needs to do something about it.)
Every few months (YMMV), it seems that there is a story on /. about a lack of women in science and engineering. Some posters on this particular topic have also suggested that very few women pursue "geeky" endeavors in their free time. From a very arm-chair/anecdotal position, I think these both have some of the main root cause: from a young age women are not encouraged to pursue technology or science in the same way boys are.
There are many factors for this, it's not as simple as saying that "the parents are doing a bad job" or "it's the schools". Like most things, it's not that black and white. As a boy, for a variety of reasons, I spent many hours reading books, tinkering, and generally "being by myself" that led to how I solve problems and spurred me on my way in my interests. My sisters, under the auspices of a very liberal, slightly disconnected intellectual, were given the same sort of options, but followed their peers more: socializing, etc. But I cannot rightly claim that this is what happens to everyone. What I can say is that it does seem like even children are encouraged in different paths by the whole of society and that this is hard to fight, but should start somewhere. Did my teachers encourage males to "be nerdy" and females to be social? Are there different pressures exerted on young girls, not just by their families, but by media?
If we take that disparity between male and female at an academic level (that is, the difference in enrollment/matriculation under science and technology by the sexes) and then envision those graduates as working professionals, the numbers make more sense. If (these are purely made up numbers to illustrate a point) 75% of graduates in, say, Computer Science are males and only 20% of graduates go on to contribute to OSS, there is a good chance that the make up of the OSS contributing graduates will be predominately male (there is no guarantee, of course... it could well be that that 20% is part of the 25% of female graduates in my made up scenario, but ceteris paribus you'd not expect that).
I don't think this has as much to do with salary as it does these other social rules and the existing social frameworks that exist. That is why groups like the Ada Initiative may seem backwards to some, but are needed. Someone needs to encourage the young (and old) women on the fence that they can contribute to OSS, that it's okay to be geeky. Someone needs to set these examples for girls so that they don't fall into the age old traps of misogyny.
Additional food for thought: I do many technical interviews and I see very few females who contribute to OSS in them, but a sad majority of the men are often quite bigoted and not as liberal as they would like to believe. That is to say, anecdotally, there is sometimes a correlation with OSS work and poor empathy skills which result in these types of problems (groping, etc). Sometimes this social outsider "dive into books" sort of thing that may contribute to the division to begin with, also makes some men who's social skills are undeveloped (to put it nicely) and pathetic (to put it bluntly).
To write re-usable, well-designed Objective-C on iOS takes a deft hand and you're right, there are a great deal of poorly written applications in Apple's App Store (Objective-C on iOS has no garbage collection and is much closer to, duh, C crossed with Smalltalk than anything else... there's nothing as raw as malloc, so it will allocate an appropriate amount of bits off the heap when the alloc message is sent, but you do have to worry about reference counting and telling the runtime that an object is safe for reclaiming. Very different from a mark and sweep type scheme where you can get away with not worrying about it, though that is bad too. Hell all the foundation classes still have a NextStep prefix!).
That, however (as is being pointed out by seebs et al) not the point.
At all.
This is not "App Store" code, this is code that is part of the OS... this would be like complaining about how unstable KDE is because KCalc crashes on you. Or, perhaps more appropriately, about poorly written VB apps (wink) in .NET when you have issues with Windows Media Player (a better, though still piss poor analogy).
I agree that it is far too easy for any joe (educated formally or not) to write rather shit apps, but that's just the way of things (to throw my hat into the fallacy of "appeal to authority" I've been "pro coding" since I was twenty and have the CS credentials trailing up to a Master's, but that doesn't make me right... or a good developer).
This is really a red herring, but to be fair, a good CS education isn't really an education in programming: it requires programming and touches on SE aspects of good design, but it is also an education in problem solving. Cyclomatic complexity, time complexity, good design, exposure to alternate paradigms (not just OO, but Functional and perhaps Aspect Oriented, etc), and a thorough awareness of important issues (tail recursion, memory management, etc) are things that one usually understands after having been through a decent program and, to be fair, I've met very few "self taught" or non-CS folks who understand all of those issues... but I have met some CS folks who don't know about any of them either. All that to say, that you could be a damn fine developer without a formal education, though that is much more rare.
As an aside, you will see a great deal of "I know JavaScript and Perl so I thought I had a good programming foundation" complaints in comments/reviews/discussions on iOS development. So there clearly are some chaps who are very confused about what, say, an O'Reilly book jacket means about "designed for experience programmers" and all that.
I completely concur:
This is the exact kind of job I'm just leaving (I even know what SBIR stands for... just shoot me).
I've gotten to do very little original research, and even though the team is filled with great people, it's largely a bureaucracy that decides how much money we are going to give MIT and others.
Not what I really want to do.
Checkpoints, even in Halo 3 (especially on a few parts) are more frustrating than saves. "Hey I just beat ten guys and the last two keep clobbering me..." So instead of being able to save after you kill the first ten, you have to keep doing it all again. Checkpoints are a way of teasing your users. They should be auto-saves! Equally frustrating in Halo 3, is that the "save" feature, just keeps track of the last checkpoint. So hitting "exit and save" doesn't actually save your current progress.
Everyone has to learn somewhere, although if you are serious, VisualBasic is not the place to start. In my experience, the typical VisualBasic developer is just that. A good developer needs to understand concepts outside of the frame of wizards and such. Probably one of the biggest flaws in VisualStudio in general. MS loves wizards.
I would agree with you, but the internet as a medium is much different from any other news source. As an example, John Smith from Nowhere USA could create a website that claims that the government is controlling his mind, that Mr. Siegenthaler sacrifices children to Satan, and that Clinton was a robot. Of course, it is completely unfounded and untrue, but chances are that no one would call him on it... unless he got media attention. Wikipedia is popular, extremely popular, but not just because anyone can edit it. Moreso, Wikipedia is popular because you can make an entry for anything. Unlike a regular encyclopedia that is static. You may look up your favorite hobby ("dwarf tossing") and find no entry. Then you can make one. Because lots of people go to Wiki, other enthusiasts may also edit the entry and now you have a reference when none existed before.
The irony in all of this is that if it weren't for Wikipedia, Mr. Siegenthaler wouldn't be in any encyclopedia. As it were, some nut (tinfoil hat) decided to share his wacky views. Again, this has been brought up alot, but someone should have edited it, including Mr. Siegenthaler himself. That is the way it is supposed to work! And it's not the same as neo-Nazis painting swastikas on your house. It's more (not exactly) like "Matt likes men" scrawled on a bathroom stall. Albeit a stall that alot of people read. Wikipedia is a good place to start with information. After that you should know enough to investigate further.
And I do think that Mr. Siegenthaler is a bit of a hypocrite. Plus, I don't think I can say it too many times: no one would know you otherwise. Crotchity old coot.
What is this Spain talk? Sounds like every restaurant in L.A.
While that is the "classic" defenition of a journalist, as many have pointed out, much of what is published in the media is actually the work of PR firms, re-releasing modified press releases. And I am not talking about those fake articles in you copy of Reader's Digest. Real magazine articles can often be traced back to a dubious source: some marketing firm that is pushing PR.
Considering the state of affairs, I think it is immoral to assume that because some bloggers may be fueled by corporations, it would not be fair to include them in the bill. Real journalists are bought and sold as well. Would these same protections have prevented Stephen Glass from getting caught (probably not, but he was a liar)? What about the state of things at the NY Times? That is what is dumb, you really have to consider the source. Professional journalists lie and slant as much as the next guy, elevating them above some info hungry blogger is a serious flaw in judgement. They both may be quacks, but that isn't the point.
Actually, that is only true most of the time. For some reason the smaller (8-9 thousand students) campus at Colorado Springs uses both "CU Colorado Springs" and "UCCS". The Denver campus and the Health Sciences campus stick with CU. I don't know why they are inconsistent, blame the CU regents for that one.
That is a very isolated view of the process. Security is a different problem entirely. As many of you will recall, you cannot verify that a program works, you can only show that for conditions X,Y, and Z, it appeared to work. This is exaclty like the scientific method: you show that you can't break it, but that does not prove that it works.
Handling security flaws can be a matter of good code reviews and hiring employees knowledgeable in exploits, but in alot of cases it is an "outside" call kind of thing.
For example, the good old buffer overflow exploit completely blindsided people back in 1988. No one even thought to check that strcpy would exceed the call frame in the execution stack. Security flaws are usually not as obvious as poorly written code. Claiming other wise is silly. Quality software does not mean it is secure.
I do think that when MS released SQLServer (and it was full of possible buffer overflow attacks), better quality control would have helped. But sometimes this is not up to the developer. Some Operating Systems have a safe run time where programs cannot access the execution stack directly. So if you install a product on an OS that prevents certain problems, you are safe, but if not, nothing is guaranteed.
And what if the requirements don't cover security? What if you Quality Model includes things you know about, but does not cover the as-yet-unimagined attacks?
And how many flaws are introduced because a developer was running short on time? Schedule and money constraints are the number 1 difficulty in the real world. You can't always make everything as nice as you want, and in that last week before delivery you might be hacking up those nice modules you wrote. It happens. It happens all the time.
This is not like real world problems: because software by its nature is abstract, you cannot be assured of security. When people like Howard Schmidt can understand that, real solutions can be found. It shows his level of ignorance to claim that flaws are the fault of a single developer.
Yeah, many people have thought that the skycar has been an investment scam, and it probably is. Hey the SEC thinks so!
Although I see that Bernoulli's principle strikes again! Alas, that is not really what generates lift (my modern Physics professor in college used to teach at the Air Force Academy and said they still teach that to pilots... ghastly). While there is a Bernoulli effect that influences lift, there is an assumption and crude explanation (hey the air flows above and below the wing have to meet up).
hereOf course Bernoulli was a natural philosopher which explains why this was easily accepted (thanks Neal Stephenson, for fictionalizing that part of history).
Scientific arguments aside, the Moller sky car graced the pages of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science when I was a kid. No one in their right mind would buy it, it is a silly impractical (not to mention unsafe) idea. Do you know how much work it takes to get a pilot's license? Or instrument rated? Time and $$$$. That is why it is a dumb idea. But hey, rich old men can dream, can't they?
Their are hacks that are beautiful design solutions, constructed by someone who knows what they are doing. Sometimes they are the result of being "the new guy" on a five year old spaghetti code POS. Othertimes they are necessity of invention.
For example, one trick I use in pre-generics Java, is casting to enforce type during deep copies of collections:
I would call that a hack, but it does something useful that (in this case) the language did not provide (and it is a simple example). I'd say the same thing about throwing exceptions on purpose and iterating through the stack trace to find the calling object. Clever, a hack, but clever and done by someone who knows what they are doing.On the other hand, the guy two cubes down from me (who is twice my age and fudged his resume), who tries to get some code working by copying my, completely unrelated code, and commenting stuff out until it works for him... that is a hack. And that is not a good hack, certainly not art.
The one thing that I don't really get, is that if you understand how it all works, this doesn't really make sense. I mean this isn't something that really matters, for the most part.
A little brush up on teh Intarweb
ARPNET was the origins of the "Intarwebs", it was replaced by the U.S. built and controlled NSFNET [wikipedia.org] (full transion in 1989, Military went to MILNET). All ISPs had to sign an agreement with NSFNET (1987-1995) to connect to the backbone. NSFNET was not federally controlled, it was controlled by "Merit Network, Inc" which was run by public universities. True, a good bit of funding came from taxes, but it was up to academics as to how it was used. In 1995, NSFNET was transitioned to NAP architecture, which provided much faster routing and the capabilites for more growth. Today the "backbone" [wikipedia.org] is a collection of commercial ISPs, a few private, and a few University controlled networks. There is little to no direct federal intervention.
DNS [wikipedia.org] servers are, of course, chained in the sense that one DNS references another DNS, and DNS entries spread like viruses (lookups are forwarded). The root [wikipedia.org] level DNS servers (serving requests from the root). Some of them are DoD owned, and some are privately owned.
But not all traffic is routed through the root level DNS servers. In fact you local DNS might not need to hit the next guy in the chain if he still has a valid lookup entry for your request (check the TTL, not all BIND [wikipedia.org] implementations do this correctly). So the traffic on the internet does not go through one space, and you probably dont hit the root level DNS servers that often. Not only that but the way DNS works, unless you hit the root server yourself, it never knows that you were making the request, all it knows is that DNS server at 217.88.99.42 (or what have you) hit it.
Basically this whole argument is kind of silly. No one really controls net traffic, perse. The root DNS servers (i.e. ICANN) do for the most part reside in the US, but because of the recursive nature of a DNS lookup, it does not really tell you what is going on (put a packet sniffer on your own BIND server and see what comes up).
The Internet is still largely, "grass roots". It is largely peer-to-peer. The only centralized items are the root DNS servers.
Since the U.S. gov does not really control "the Internet", why should we change that? It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right", but that is gross over-simplification. Nobody really "controls" the internet. If their argument is just about moving or adding new root DNS servers, that wouldn't really matter, but instead it sounds like "politics as usual", that is to say FUD./p
I am not saying that the US is the greatest nation, but this article is not exactly clear...
A little background on teh web
ARPNET was the origins of the "Intarwebs", it was replaced by the U.S. built and controlled NSFNET (full transion in 1989, Military went to MILNET). All ISPs had to sign an agreement with NSFNET (1987-1995) to connect to the backbone. NSFNET was not federally controlled, it was controlled by "Merit Network, Inc" which was run by public universities. True, a good bit of funding came from taxes, but it was up to academics as to how it was used. In 1995, NSFNET was transitioned to NAP architecture, which provided much faster routing and the capabilites for more growth. Today the "backbone" is a collection of commercial ISPs, a few private, and a few University controlled networks. There is little to no direct federal intervention.
DNS servers are, of course, chained in the sense that one DNS references another DNS, and DNS entries spread like viruses (lookups are forwarded). The root level DNS servers (serving requests from the root). Some of them are DoD owned, and some are privately owned.
But not all traffic is routed through the root level DNS servers. In fact you local DNS might not need to hit the next guy in the chain if he still has a valid lookup entry for your request (check the TTL, not all BIND implementations do this correctly). So the traffic on the internet does not go through one space, and you probably dont hit the root level DNS servers that often. Not only that but the way DNS works, unless you hit the root server yourself, it never knows that you were making the request, all it knows is that DNS server at 217.88.99.42 (or what have you) hit it.
Basically this whole argument is kind of silly. No one really controls net traffic, perse. The root DNS servers (i.e. ICANN) do for the most part reside in the US, but because of the recursive nature of a DNS lookup, it does not really tell you what is going on (put a packet sniffer on your own BIND server and see what comes up).
The Internet is still largely, "grass roots". It is largely peer-to-peer. The only centralized items are the root DNS servers.
Since the U.S. gov does not really control it now, why should we change that? It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right", but that is gross over-simplification. Nobody really "controls" the internet. If their argument is just about moving or adding new root DNS servers, that wouldn't really matter, but instead it sounds like "politics as usual", that is to say FUD.
You are not familiar with the capabilites of IE through things like ActiveX controls. It is not part of the OS, perse, but with Active X I can wreak havoc on your OS. I can get hooks back into your OS... that is not so easy to do in another browser.
Well J# isn't supposed to be Java. I have never heard that, only that it is C# with Java-like syntax (which is to say not really that different). Now, I do remember good old J++, which was just a plain Java ripoff. Since J# is supposedly compatible with J++ maybe it is just MS trying to be clever(ly evil).
Back in 97 or so, J++ was actually Java. It wasn't until Visual Studio 6 that it became something else. Hence the lawsuit!
All that said, I worry for JBoss. I don't want to see MS ruin a good product.
The Scheme people hold a contest and no one solves the problem in Scheme?
Dr Scheme... LISP... ah paren city! Takes me back to being a CS undergrad.
In the year 2000:
When my laptop doesn't have problems running MySQL/Oracle, Eclipse/JDeveloper, WebLogic, XML Spy, and GIMP all at once without buring a hole in my pants... I will agree. I use a powerful laptop, but I still use my desktop alot, ESPECIALLY at work.
Hopefully this well help more people switch from IE. Or at least introduce some of the computer using public to the fact that IE is just a web browser and they can pick from many...
That is, as long as FF still gets users ;-)
Dvorak is probably all wet, but Microsoft splitting into three seperate companies would save us from Microsoft and save Microsoft from themselves.
After reading that mini Microsoft blog that was posted earlier this week and hearing about the micro management driven from the top down, I think it is even more essential. Half of what is wrong with Microsoft is their desire to make everything Microsoft. From their own protocols and standards (Direct X, JScript) to slipping in bits and pieces of larger apps (Windows messaging not IM, IIS, SQLServer hooks). A seperate OS company and app company would really help all of us out. Wouldn't it be great to be able to run .NET on OS X(instead of IIS)? Or SQLServer on Debian? Or not have the Microsoft VM or JScript instead of Javascript.
But Microsoft is killing itself from the inside. Judging from the comments on the aforementioned blog, it is not a place for innovation from the ground up. Instead it is Billy G who tries to drive it from the top. That is what makes google work! Developers have the ideas, not the guy at the top!
andThe stupid thing about that is that this was rumored to be the original idea behind the last anti-trust suite: make Microsoft split up. I don't know if it was directly related to GW, but I have not seen or heard of anything happening to Microsoft as a result of them being convicted of anti-trust violations.