not saying what you said isn't insightful, but what you said is like saying people should type essays without a spell checker.
Every English teacher in the world would love it if spell checkers went away. Why? because then kids would have to actually learn how to f'in' spell!!!!
The spell checker has already created the handicapp. Especially as the spell checker doesn't get them to read for the correct they're/their/there etc., because they're all *spelled* correctly. (Yeah, Word supposedly has grammer checking, but its been wrong on my writing multiple times).
There are levels of programming, and programmers, just as there are with any craftsmen or artisan. There's learning the how, and optimizing the how with the tools. But what I want to see is the learning the why, and IDEs get in the way of learning the why.
yeah, they can "do the work", and there are plenty of maintenance jobs out there for people like that. But I am part of a team building new products, requiring new ideas and a stretching of the limits of the tools. I want people who know the metal. I want people who use tools to optimize their work, not tools that make up for their shortcomings.
not saying what you said isn't insightful, but what you said is like saying people should type essays without a spell checker.
Every English teacher in the world would love it if spell checkers went away. Why? because then kids would have to actually learn how to f'in' spell!!!!
The spell checker has already created the handicapp. Especially as the spell checker doesn't get them to read for the correct they're/their/there etc., because they're all *spelled* correctly. (Yeah, Word supposedly has grammer checking, but its been wrong on my writing multiple times).
You are supposed to be training them for the work place.
Every college professor in the world will disagree with you. University is a place for learning how to learn, not a trade school for the job market.
If you get the job training as part of it, fine, good, its a great program you're in. But if you don't learn what a University is supposed to refine, I don't want you around my code.
One needs to learn debugging through prints because one is NOT going to have the nice, friendly, IDE around when the customer files his bug report and server logs and megabytes of java stack traces. if you don't learn to debug by printing, you don't learn decent logging, and you won't be able to analyse a bug report you get later because you'll have nothing to work from.
AFTER they know how to program, present them the tools of software development and engineering. But not before.
One example, that's not that uncommon. We use eclipse. However, we do have an ant-based (javacc calling) build process for actually packaging the server (since it needs to do the SSL security keystores, yada yada). So you can get your errors fixed in the IDE, but occasionally, someone will change a dependency and stuff that looks fine in the IDE (since your.classpath picked up the changes) breaks the ant build. If you can't read a javacc dump of error and warnings, what good are you then?
again, the real world uses *both* - IDEs and command-line+log files. if you can't do the latter, you're of no use to me.
I'd say that it's more a case of IDEs helping crappy programmers get their projects nominally done, more than anything else. So far, I have yet to see anyone make a convincing case that an IDE actually impedes the work of a good programmer.
I never said otherwise. I never said that an IDE impedes work of a good programmer (I was an emacers for years and now swear by eclipse, mostly for its refactoring tools, but then again, refactoring is part of software development, not programming). I said an IDE impedes the process of becoming a good programmer.
One of my interview questions is what IDE do they use and specifically what features do they use it for.
If I get someone who says they use Eclipse or Netbeans for its refactoring support, it shows me they really know what they're doing.
so far, i haven't even had a candidate in the last 2 months that could even say what refactoring is.
IDEs make learning a severe dependency on the IDE possible, and based on my experience, likely.
there will come a time where there is no IDE to work with, like using Ajax, where you have to write a component in 6 different languages - XML, HTML, HTTP, Javascript, CSS, and your server language - and MOST of those won't have decent IDE support. if you can't escape that handicapp, then i don't want you working for me.
period.
(Note: i would support at the very least a syntax-sensitive editor with color highlighting, but even then someone could just learning to recognize colors, not learning to read the language, and that can hurt them later on.)
again, *programming* and *software development* are two different things. IDEs are great for software development, but IDEs have also created a world where i see a ton of shitty programmers.
and shitty programmers aren't terribly good at software development.
anonymous asshole, i've been in the *real* world for 15 years. i've seen so many slaves to IDEs who can't design or write real programs for shit that i absolutely dread interviewing new candidates.
i want people who know how to program, for whom the IDE is a tool to make their accurate and creative thought process real. instead, i get people who don't know shit and let the IDE do all the thinking for them.
the IDE is a great tool for software development. for learning to program, it creates a handicapp that never goes away.
now if you really want any respect for your own opinion, sign your fucking name to it.
as long as they trust the editor to catch their mistakes, they'll never actually learn to avoid them; they'll simply let the IDE be their guide and never learn it.
similarly, as long as they can debug in the IDE, they'll never learn real debugging techniques that the "cold metal", or even just debugging a running server they can't get an IDE into.
They should learn to program as close to the raw as possible. notepad, command line, debugging through prints.
They should learn software development separately, with an IDE, with integrated debugging and complex build systems. Learning to program, and learning to be a good software developer are two separate things.
at this point i don't know who does and who doesn't...well, i know some that do (Rico, Ajaxtags, script.) and it annoys the hell out of me to want just one feature and i can't get it without getting a bunch of crap and a javascript programming mindset that i think is overkill. yeah, it works, and i suppose if your app is 95% javascript it's probably for the best, but i need to mix-and-match features from several libraries and prototype gets in the way.
'cause i'm with thisblog and I won't use it. I've already taken it (and ajaxtags) out of my current project and replaced it with js code based on DWR that won't conflict.
as I think WalMart is not going to be ready for the thousands of returns they'll have to deal with when someone fries their motherboard by plugging in a second graphics card without seating it properly. (no, this didn't just happen to me...really...honest...er...um...well...ok, it did.)
until DIY improves its failsafes and adds much better error detection (its actually gotten worse since the 90s, a LOT worse), its not for the casual user.
well, the symphonies aren't bad, though, but I can do without the slavic dances. however, we should have known he'd be trouble when he goes to try to write an "american" symphony and still comes up with something just as Slovakian as the rest of his work.:)
It seems his record for bad explanations (and overhyped attention on/. ) is worse than Cringely's. Cringely at least most of the time has some support for his guesswork; Dvorak seems to just throw his crap out there like a kid throwing oatmeal at a wall to see what sticks.
gee, i thought it was just me...and my wife...and brother. and mom and dad. grandmother. nextdoor neighbor. my cousin in atlanta. my ex-boss now living in seatle. the headington morris men in the uk.
one dvd and you wouldn't believe the # of phone calls I got telling me to turn that damn thing down.
didn't do a good enough job of backing up *why* evolution is scientific and intelligent design is pseudo-science
actually, I don't think that's what it said (to repeat my interp: "it may be scientific and factual, but you can't assume that everybody in your test sample will believe that even before ID is introduced into the system").
because NOBODY should ever have to back up why evolution is scientific and intelligent design is pseudo-science, not to another scientist (who these people were supposed to be, even if in social sciences). if it was just a matter of "clarify why", it would have been sent back for clarification, not rejected outright.
as for why its a science and ID isn't, that was just reasserted in court in Dover PA (you can look it up, its a really nice 139 page document of artwork) and a great number in the scientific community have read it and its been in the public eye (and cited in a number of policy discussions) since its release date. and the talk.origins archive can fill in the rest of the details, provided you're not interested in reading Gould's 1341 page tomb. Alters shouldn't have had to defend THAT, of all things.
the group giving out the grants represents social sciences. their rejections had to be from a sociological standpoint because it sure as hell couldn't have been from an objectively scientific standpoint. if it was, they deserve all the abuse they're getting.
If their original letter had left out the following:
"Nor did the committee consider that there was adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design theory, was correct."
I would have taken this correction just a little more seriously.
But that sentence is what the rejection letter said, and no amount of "we didn't mean that" is going to fix their mess. If they didn't want to come across as a anti-evolutionary idiots, they shouldn't have written crap like that.
If they *meant* that assumption from a social sciences perspective (where in America, supposedly 50% of the population doesn't accept evolution through natural selection as the means by which the current (and many past) species exist on this planet), then perhaps they are right by simply pointing out (politely, perhaps) that 50% of the population are a bunch of idiots and you can't assume that they accept as true what you assert to be scientificly factual.
In other words, from a social sciences point of view, you can't look at "evolution is an accepted fact" as a constant, as a control, for basing a scientific experiment around ID.
In this, they are perhaps correct. If that is what they meant.
Although I had thought the Canadian population as a whole was better than that...
They used their normal Google logo, instead of one that highlighted the season or some current event (like basketballs, snowflakes, 4 leaf clovers on St. Patty's day, olympic rings).
Prior art is relative. i agree with you that its wrong for them to have gotten this patent, but it shows the flaws of the patent system.
throughout the 90s, anybody who transfered a non-web app to the web got "the patent" on it. anybody who applied an existing pattern to a browser got "the patent". anybody who took an existing webapp, say "shopping for records on the web" (remember, someone got that patent too even though i'd been buying online through cduniverse's telnet interface since 1990) and used the same technology to create "shopping for pizzas on the web" got the patent (yes i'm exaggerating the examples, but its the kind of thing that happened).
the patent sucks and never should have been granted, the PTO sucks, the jerks who actually attack people with such patents suck, they all suck.
but the question was what was the specific patent for (embedding an app in a web browser) for which nobody knew anybody was doing it until eolas presented their example to Netsacpe and Sun in 1994. i answered the question factually. it doesn't matter that i think they're full of shit because the question didn't ask my opinion.
i once wrote how, after Bezos survived that helicopter crash, that he should get the pilot to patent helicopter crash survival in amazon's name so that anytime anybody survived a helicopter crash, they would owe Bezos money.
a version of the original open-source Mosaic with their embedded media plugin code. granted, that was before the term "Open Source" became vogue. Prior to that it was simply "well, is it GPL'ed or just BSD or MIT'ed?".
it got little attention outside the browser development world (Netscape 1.0 was out by then, and stealing the whole show), but it was demoed to Netscape and Sun in the lead-up to Java embedding in Netscape 2.0, so it is prior art to Java in the browser (and thus, flash, shockwave, and the whole ActiveX concept, much less Mozilla's plug-in architecture).
i expect as much, given that mozilla hardly has any money at all and with so many people with the source codes, the browsers would remain active underground eternally.
of course, IE was originally written on the same Mosaic codebase that started Netscape and that the Eolas people first developed their work on for the patent.
According to Cringley years ago (who was talking about this back in '99) the patent was filed (and a demonstration given to Sun and Netscape separately, based on the opensource Mosaic codebase) *before* Java was actually released as part of Netscape 2.0.
Meaning they really do seem to be first because they predated the first embedded app of Java in Netscape.
As noted elsewhere, ALL browser plug-in architectures are vulnerable (the reason TBL got involved in the first place). IE was just the first target because 1) they didn't license it (actually thumbed their noses at it), and 2) they have the largest market share.
Mozilla could be hit at any point Eolas feels like it.
Eolas expected Microsoft to finally roll over and eat it and take out an official license. Microsoft called the bluff, only Eolas is still holding the higher hand right now.
the "Netscape-style" plug-ins would still be vulnerable; Mozilla is still vulnerable, as is Safari (and its Konquerer codebase).
the patent isn't on the specifics of Active-X, but the absolute general vague as hell concept of the browser plug-in. According to Cringley (years ago), Eolas showed a version in the opensource Mosaic codebase to Sun and Netscape *before* java was included in Netscape 2.0. Java is vulnerable.
As of 2003 (when Eolas won judgement against M$), Mozilla hadn't attempted to reach any agreement. Their post on the subject says to simply keep an eye out and be ready to change if we have to change.
Wikipedia currently is still saying "Other browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent".
Slashdot Mirror
not saying what you said isn't insightful, but what you said is like saying people should type essays without a spell checker.
Every English teacher in the world would love it if spell checkers went away. Why? because then kids would have to actually learn how to f'in' spell!!!!
The spell checker has already created the handicapp. Especially as the spell checker doesn't get them to read for the correct they're/their/there etc., because they're all *spelled* correctly. (Yeah, Word supposedly has grammer checking, but its been wrong on my writing multiple times).
There are levels of programming, and programmers, just as there are with any craftsmen or artisan. There's learning the how, and optimizing the how with the tools. But what I want to see is the learning the why, and IDEs get in the way of learning the why.
yeah, they can "do the work", and there are plenty of maintenance jobs out there for people like that. But I am part of a team building new products, requiring new ideas and a stretching of the limits of the tools. I want people who know the metal. I want people who use tools to optimize their work, not tools that make up for their shortcomings.
not saying what you said isn't insightful, but what you said is like saying people should type essays without a spell checker.
Every English teacher in the world would love it if spell checkers went away. Why? because then kids would have to actually learn how to f'in' spell!!!!
The spell checker has already created the handicapp. Especially as the spell checker doesn't get them to read for the correct they're/their/there etc., because they're all *spelled* correctly. (Yeah, Word supposedly has grammer checking, but its been wrong on my writing multiple times).
You are supposed to be training them for the work place.
.classpath picked up the changes) breaks the ant build. If you can't read a javacc dump of error and warnings, what good are you then?
Every college professor in the world will disagree with you. University is a place for learning how to learn, not a trade school for the job market.
If you get the job training as part of it, fine, good, its a great program you're in. But if you don't learn what a University is supposed to refine, I don't want you around my code.
One needs to learn debugging through prints because one is NOT going to have the nice, friendly, IDE around when the customer files his bug report and server logs and megabytes of java stack traces. if you don't learn to debug by printing, you don't learn decent logging, and you won't be able to analyse a bug report you get later because you'll have nothing to work from.
AFTER they know how to program, present them the tools of software development and engineering. But not before.
One example, that's not that uncommon. We use eclipse. However, we do have an ant-based (javacc calling) build process for actually packaging the server (since it needs to do the SSL security keystores, yada yada). So you can get your errors fixed in the IDE, but occasionally, someone will change a dependency and stuff that looks fine in the IDE (since your
again, the real world uses *both* - IDEs and command-line+log files. if you can't do the latter, you're of no use to me.
I'd say that it's more a case of IDEs helping crappy programmers get their projects nominally done, more than anything else. So far, I have yet to see anyone make a convincing case that an IDE actually impedes the work of a good programmer.
I never said otherwise. I never said that an IDE impedes work of a good programmer (I was an emacers for years and now swear by eclipse, mostly for its refactoring tools, but then again, refactoring is part of software development, not programming). I said an IDE impedes the process of becoming a good programmer.
One of my interview questions is what IDE do they use and specifically what features do they use it for.
If I get someone who says they use Eclipse or Netbeans for its refactoring support, it shows me they really know what they're doing.
so far, i haven't even had a candidate in the last 2 months that could even say what refactoring is.
IDEs make learning a severe dependency on the IDE possible, and based on my experience, likely.
there will come a time where there is no IDE to work with, like using Ajax, where you have to write a component in 6 different languages - XML, HTML, HTTP, Javascript, CSS, and your server language - and MOST of those won't have decent IDE support. if you can't escape that handicapp, then i don't want you working for me.
period.
(Note: i would support at the very least a syntax-sensitive editor with color highlighting, but even then someone could just learning to recognize colors, not learning to read the language, and that can hurt them later on.)
again, *programming* and *software development* are two different things. IDEs are great for software development, but IDEs have also created a world where i see a ton of shitty programmers.
and shitty programmers aren't terribly good at software development.
anonymous asshole, i've been in the *real* world for 15 years. i've seen so many slaves to IDEs who can't design or write real programs for shit that i absolutely dread interviewing new candidates.
i want people who know how to program, for whom the IDE is a tool to make their accurate and creative thought process real. instead, i get people who don't know shit and let the IDE do all the thinking for them.
the IDE is a great tool for software development. for learning to program, it creates a handicapp that never goes away.
now if you really want any respect for your own opinion, sign your fucking name to it.
no.
as long as they trust the editor to catch their mistakes, they'll never actually learn to avoid them; they'll simply let the IDE be their guide and never learn it.
similarly, as long as they can debug in the IDE, they'll never learn real debugging techniques that the "cold metal", or even just debugging a running server they can't get an IDE into.
They should learn to program as close to the raw as possible. notepad, command line, debugging through prints.
They should learn software development separately, with an IDE, with integrated debugging and complex build systems. Learning to program, and learning to be a good software developer are two separate things.
at this point i don't know who does and who doesn't...well, i know some that do (Rico, Ajaxtags, script.) and it annoys the hell out of me to want just one feature and i can't get it without getting a bunch of crap and a javascript programming mindset that i think is overkill. yeah, it works, and i suppose if your app is 95% javascript it's probably for the best, but i need to mix-and-match features from several libraries and prototype gets in the way.
'cause i'm with this blog and I won't use it. I've already taken it (and ajaxtags) out of my current project and replaced it with js code based on DWR that won't conflict.
as I think WalMart is not going to be ready for the thousands of returns they'll have to deal with when someone fries their motherboard by plugging in a second graphics card without seating it properly. (no, this didn't just happen to me...really...honest...er...um...well...ok, it did.)
until DIY improves its failsafes and adds much better error detection (its actually gotten worse since the 90s, a LOT worse), its not for the casual user.
well, the symphonies aren't bad, though, but I can do without the slavic dances. however, we should have known he'd be trouble when he goes to try to write an "american" symphony and still comes up with something just as Slovakian as the rest of his work. :)
It seems his record for bad explanations (and overhyped attention on /. ) is worse than Cringely's. Cringely at least most of the time has some support for his guesswork; Dvorak seems to just throw his crap out there like a kid throwing oatmeal at a wall to see what sticks.
gee, i thought it was just me...and my wife...and brother. and mom and dad. grandmother. nextdoor neighbor. my cousin in atlanta. my ex-boss now living in seatle. the headington morris men in the uk.
one dvd and you wouldn't believe the # of phone calls I got telling me to turn that damn thing down.
didn't do a good enough job of backing up *why* evolution is scientific and intelligent design is pseudo-science
actually, I don't think that's what it said (to repeat my interp: "it may be scientific and factual, but you can't assume that everybody in your test sample will believe that even before ID is introduced into the system").
because NOBODY should ever have to back up why evolution is scientific and intelligent design is pseudo-science, not to another scientist (who these people were supposed to be, even if in social sciences). if it was just a matter of "clarify why", it would have been sent back for clarification, not rejected outright.
as for why its a science and ID isn't, that was just reasserted in court in Dover PA (you can look it up, its a really nice 139 page document of artwork) and a great number in the scientific community have read it and its been in the public eye (and cited in a number of policy discussions) since its release date. and the talk.origins archive can fill in the rest of the details, provided you're not interested in reading Gould's 1341 page tomb. Alters shouldn't have had to defend THAT, of all things.
the group giving out the grants represents social sciences. their rejections had to be from a sociological standpoint because it sure as hell couldn't have been from an objectively scientific standpoint. if it was, they deserve all the abuse they're getting.
If their original letter had left out the following:
"Nor did the committee consider that there was adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design theory, was correct."
I would have taken this correction just a little more seriously.
But that sentence is what the rejection letter said, and no amount of "we didn't mean that" is going to fix their mess. If they didn't want to come across as a anti-evolutionary idiots, they shouldn't have written crap like that.
If they *meant* that assumption from a social sciences perspective (where in America, supposedly 50% of the population doesn't accept evolution through natural selection as the means by which the current (and many past) species exist on this planet), then perhaps they are right by simply pointing out (politely, perhaps) that 50% of the population are a bunch of idiots and you can't assume that they accept as true what you assert to be scientificly factual.
In other words, from a social sciences point of view, you can't look at "evolution is an accepted fact" as a constant, as a control, for basing a scientific experiment around ID.
In this, they are perhaps correct. If that is what they meant.
Although I had thought the Canadian population as a whole was better than that...
They used their normal Google logo, instead of one that highlighted the season or some current event (like basketballs, snowflakes, 4 leaf clovers on St. Patty's day, olympic rings).
uh, excuse me, but WTF?
Netscape 2.0 had BOTH Java and Javacript. The fact that they're unrelated is quite irrelevant.
Prior art is relative. i agree with you that its wrong for them to have gotten this patent, but it shows the flaws of the patent system.
throughout the 90s, anybody who transfered a non-web app to the web got "the patent" on it. anybody who applied an existing pattern to a browser got "the patent". anybody who took an existing webapp, say "shopping for records on the web" (remember, someone got that patent too even though i'd been buying online through cduniverse's telnet interface since 1990) and used the same technology to create "shopping for pizzas on the web" got the patent (yes i'm exaggerating the examples, but its the kind of thing that happened).
the patent sucks and never should have been granted, the PTO sucks, the jerks who actually attack people with such patents suck, they all suck.
but the question was what was the specific patent for (embedding an app in a web browser) for which nobody knew anybody was doing it until eolas presented their example to Netsacpe and Sun in 1994. i answered the question factually. it doesn't matter that i think they're full of shit because the question didn't ask my opinion.
i once wrote how, after Bezos survived that helicopter crash, that he should get the pilot to patent helicopter crash survival in amazon's name so that anytime anybody survived a helicopter crash, they would owe Bezos money.
a version of the original open-source Mosaic with their embedded media plugin code. granted, that was before the term "Open Source" became vogue. Prior to that it was simply "well, is it GPL'ed or just BSD or MIT'ed?".
it got little attention outside the browser development world (Netscape 1.0 was out by then, and stealing the whole show), but it was demoed to Netscape and Sun in the lead-up to Java embedding in Netscape 2.0, so it is prior art to Java in the browser (and thus, flash, shockwave, and the whole ActiveX concept, much less Mozilla's plug-in architecture).
this is still an issue until IE7 - in IE 5.5 and 6, XMLHTTPREQUEST is an ActiveX object, not a native JS component.
if my Ajax code is broken, i'm going to be pissed, 'cause I can't just say "use firefox", much as I would love to.
i expect as much, given that mozilla hardly has any money at all and with so many people with the source codes, the browsers would remain active underground eternally.
of course, IE was originally written on the same Mosaic codebase that started Netscape and that the Eolas people first developed their work on for the patent.
what was the prior art?
According to Cringley years ago (who was talking about this back in '99) the patent was filed (and a demonstration given to Sun and Netscape separately, based on the opensource Mosaic codebase) *before* Java was actually released as part of Netscape 2.0.
Meaning they really do seem to be first because they predated the first embedded app of Java in Netscape.
As noted elsewhere, ALL browser plug-in architectures are vulnerable (the reason TBL got involved in the first place). IE was just the first target because 1) they didn't license it (actually thumbed their noses at it), and 2) they have the largest market share.
Mozilla could be hit at any point Eolas feels like it.
Eolas expected Microsoft to finally roll over and eat it and take out an official license. Microsoft called the bluff, only Eolas is still holding the higher hand right now.
the "Netscape-style" plug-ins would still be vulnerable; Mozilla is still vulnerable, as is Safari (and its Konquerer codebase).
the patent isn't on the specifics of Active-X, but the absolute general vague as hell concept of the browser plug-in. According to Cringley (years ago), Eolas showed a version in the opensource Mosaic codebase to Sun and Netscape *before* java was included in Netscape 2.0. Java is vulnerable.
As of 2003 (when Eolas won judgement against M$), Mozilla hadn't attempted to reach any agreement. Their post on the subject says to simply keep an eye out and be ready to change if we have to change.
Wikipedia currently is still saying "Other browsers such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent".