I grew up in the UK, and have lived in several other countries in Europe. every time this topic comes up, there are people, who otherwise to me sound like pretty ordinary folks, who profess to carry guns every day. Because they feel required to, to feel safe. Because friends of theirs have actually used one to fend off somebody. Because of other stuff like that.
I feel really sorry for you people. I cannot even begin to imagine living in a society where I would feel the need to own a gun. As far as I know, guns kill people. People with guns shoot people. They die. People with guns get shot. They die. If you point your gun at someone, you'd better want them dead. Are you really prepared to pull that trigger, to kill someone, to protect your family and/or property?
Don't you think that's a little over the top? Maybe you're better off improving your security. How about one of those big automatic lights out front and out back? That's probably enough to scare off 90% of burglars on its own. Fit better locks. Arrange your garden so it gives no cover to people coming up to the house. Get a big dog. Whatever. Just learning a little about basic security measures can pay off much more than arming yourself. Burglars want an easy time of it, if your house is even slightly more inaccessable they'll pass on to the next.
Back to my first point though, I really don't know how to put it into words so that you folks in the USA can really understand. I simply cannot conceive of what it would be like to live like that, with a gun in my pocket. I don't think I'll be moving to the USA any time soon.
hey, what about, just plain, how easy is it to do what you want at that site?
E.g., a couple of months ago, I tried to rent a car online. To start with, all I wanted to know was, how much is it going to cost me for these dates? Could I do that easily? No. I tried 3 or 4 of the top names (I won't list them, I'm sure you can guess), and spent at least 10 mninutes on each site fighting my way through endless screens, where it seems you are allowed to enter one piece of information, then wait for the next page to come up etc. And on one site, I found several different ways of getting through to the end, each one with a different price! Eventually my wife got bored and after five minutes on the phone had the prices.
The key point being, every single damned extra click or pause hurts! Add the two together, and you've lost your customer.
(I could mention Use Cases here but I really don't want to start up that discussion - what? I did mention them? --ducks-- )
>MS is already in talks with the government to work out the modalities of sharing the source code
"Modalities"!!! Wtf is that supposed to mean?
From Merriam-Webster (cheers guys): ------------ One entry found for modality. Main Entry: modality Pronunciation: mO-'da-l&-tE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -ties Date: circa 1617 1 a : the quality or state of being modal b : a modal quality or attribute : FORM 2 : the classification of logical propositions according to their asserting or denying the possibility, impossibility, contingency, or necessity of their content 3 : one of the main avenues of sensation (as vision) 4 : a usually physical therapeutic agency ------------ So, it's either some strange Indian method of healing, or M$ are asserting their own impossibility!
Yeah, I showed her mine, then all I got to see was her knickers. Didn't seem fair to me. I still remember her name (Andrea), even though I've not seen her for 30 years!
>And if, God forbid, most of the metropolitan cities in the U.S, Europe, and Asia are destroyed in nuclear Armageddon, then the Internet's going to suffer big-time.
Sheesh, after nuclear armageddon you think anyone's worried about the internet? I think most slashdot user's will have more to worry about than downloading porn by then! There'll be no power for your 'puter anyway.
I've read both articles several times now, and I don't quite get it. Is he arguing that the source should be completely open, as in published to the world, or just that the customer gets it. There seem to be hints at both in the articles. And most folks here seem to assume the former, but I think that's just their "open source is for anyone" bias.
In any case, I have a problem with letting anyone have the code. A practical one. And that is, in what form? Do they just get a big zip file - my current project consists of around 8000 source files. Good luck in working out what it does! No customer of this project is going to have a clue about any of it. And even if they hired someone to check it out, it would take them months even to begin to understand how it all works, how it's architectured. Or are they just going to take a few files at random and see if they look pretty. Maybe they could even run some metrics on them to see if they have enough comments, etc., but we're getting into a whole different ball park now. Also, maybe we now have to maintain two different builds: one with the magical 1% hidden, and a real one. Anyone who's ever worked on slightly different projects based on a single main source tree will back me up here, it adds a whole extra level of complexity to the build and test process.
Frankly, I don't see the benefit that this will bring to anyone, except adding extra cost to the project. I think the objective is good, but the solution sucks!
>Support of user modified code is impossible Eh? Maybe you should ask Linus about this! Seriously though, the suggestion is that this is a one way thing, you don't have to support anything that's user modified. On the other hand, you could put in your contract that you do support it. It's up to you. It may be something extra to handle, but it sure ain't impossible.
>Competitors may take advantage of reading the source Well, if I give the source to my customer, then it's up to them to look after it. Only the customer gets it, it's not like the source is published on the internet. And presumably the customer will take the same security measures they take with the rest of their trade secrets to make sure their competitors don't see it.
>It's "my money" that went into developing the source and "I" want to reap the benefits of "my" work I beg your pardon, who paid for this stuff to be developed? I don't own any of the code I've ever written professionally, it's all owned by my past employers or clients (I freelance now). What further benefits can you reap? Sell the same stuff again to someone else? In that case your customer is going to be pretty pissed if he paid for it's development originally. > Bug handling would be a nightmare Why does this change? The only thing that could happen here is that the customer points to actual code where he thinks there might be a bug. What's the problem with that?
So if you and your customer want to get into this sort of contract, I don't think it's a problem. But it will be more effort for you, and therefore cost the customer more.
But who wants quality software? Sure as an engineer I don't want to produce crap, but when did you get the time to do top quality stuff?
The saying goes: "good, cheap, fast, pick any two." Well by the time you've put the question to marketing "good" is already out the window! They want it now, and as long as it works most of the time, that's fine. They don't give a toss what the code looks like, as long as it has more features than the competitors' products, and we can get it on the market quicker. Virtually every place I've ever worked, as soon as deadlines get tight (which they always do) any process you had gets ditched and it's hack hack hack. And the thing is, this has become acceptable to users. We're used to having the damn thing crash every now and then, or do weird things once in a while, but as long as its not too often we don't mind, that's just the way it is with software right?
So you're dead right, all of this has not changed one bit in the last 20 years. And it won't, why should it? There's no motivation for the management to let you as a developer produce higher quality stuff, because it costs more time and more money, and doesn't bring enough quantifiable benefits.
Well OK, but as I understood it, the throttle behaviour is static, so will not be affected by the presence of the virus.
I think it more likely that the virus writers will work round the throttle, e.g. by not allowing an easily detectable backlog of requests to build up, etc.
Read the damn article, the whole point is that it *doesn't* affect performance, except in an absolutely minimal way. The technique depends on the fact that the machine will behave differently once the virus attacks, and it's this different behaviour that is disrupted, *not* normal behaviour.
>Northwest Passage threading 900 miles through a tangle of islands
>For supertankers... the trip would be shortened by 11,800 miles.
Anybody else see ecological disaster looming here?
Re:this book is out of date
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 3, Informative
>Most of the stuff in the design patterns book was interesting to look at 5 years ago when the book first came out. And is still perfectly relevant. Writing SW hasn't changed that much in the last 5 years.
>You would be better off now to read through the JAVA class documents. This may help if you want to know how to write a nice class, but patterns are about getting good interactions between classes, they look at things at a much higher level of abstraction. This is one reason why they can add to a programmer's vocabulary.
>Design Patterns that are published in a book like that lag the real practices of the software industry by many years. And they have been superceded by what exactly?
>Folks who work in software lead the industry, they don't live in the publishing houses or in the ivy covered hallways of money mongering corporate universitys. Oh, and they never talk to each other? If I think I'm leading the industry, how do I go about spreading my fabulous ideas? Hey, maybe publishing a book would be a good way?
>Now it is OUT OF DATE. No it is NOT. All the ideas are still valid, all the problems are still around, and the basic concept of patterns has spread enormously, so that now you get anti-patterns, analysis patterns, project management patterns etc. etc.
Re:Since the author didnt mention it...
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 1
Absolutely it's worth it, this is my most used reference book, yes even more than my Stroustrup. I have saved myself a lot of time and effort by using some of these patterns, you can probably get the same benefit.
Re:Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 1
I have used these on many projects (admittedly mostly large ones). For a lot of common design problems, you simply need to look in the book and there is your answer. It is now second nature to me to use, for example, factories for creating families of objects where the end client doesn't actually need to know the concrete type of object it is using. There are some patterns, or derivatives thereof, that are found on nearly every project I have worked on in the last five years, e.g. singleton, observer.
It's important to remember that the authors stress that these are not designs that you might think of the first time you go through a problem, especially if you are relatively new to OO. Therefore what may seem a strange design at first, may suddenly click into place when you really analyse it in the context of your particular problem.
It's basically a case of "suck it and see". If you have a problem, check out the book to see if it's helpful.
>every major software project will come up with its own "design patterns" This is true, but every major software project will also come up with similar problems to a lot of other major software projects. That is where this book helps.
>upgrade the operating software of your television? The distinction between computers and televisions is rapidly blurring, and this sort of feature will very soon be available. Car manufacturers already can upgrade the software in the car management systems etc., but at the moment only the dealer can do this. Why not do it yourself? Car's can already be connected to the internet via their mobile phones, so the upgrade medium is already there. Even fridges are becoming wired up, soon you'll be able to upgrade those (maybe with a new personality - cue HHGTTG quotes).
However, maybe you're right that the OS will be less visible. Bugfixes will be installed without you even noticing.
But there will be many more things needing an OS, so the market will still be there, but it will tend towards the hardware manufacturers rather than consumers. Having succeeded in getting a Windows desktop in every home (yeah yeah apart from all you Linux only bods, but you still need it for games dontcha?), MS now wants to get some version of Windows into evey other electronic box in your house, right down to your toaster and alarm clock, which is possibly a market many times the size of the PC market (Heh, imagine all your appliances with a little sticker on them - "Windows Inside").
Sure it can be punished, if: 1. You can find the person who now has the object. 2. You can prove that particular object is yours. That's theft alright. Coupla big 'if's though.
But if you leave some secret object in a public place, and someone takes a photo of it and publishes it, but leaves the object there, can you punish them for that? Ridiculous right?
So I'm allowed to guess www.intentia.com, but I'm not allowed to guess www.intentia.com/topsecret.html? Ridiculous again.
Yeah right. Presumably all the terrorists on the 9/11 flights would have passed this with flying colours, all having perfectly valid documentation and no criminal records?
It might help jump the queues though, for those that don't mind being on YAGD (yet another government database), and also don't mind having to prove every year that they're still one of the good guys!
Waddaya mean OffTopic? It was a joke dammit!
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in the UK, and have lived in several other countries in Europe. every time this topic comes up, there are people, who otherwise to me sound like pretty ordinary folks, who profess to carry guns every day. Because they feel required to, to feel safe. Because friends of theirs have actually used one to fend off somebody. Because of other stuff like that.
I feel really sorry for you people. I cannot even begin to imagine living in a society where I would feel the need to own a gun. As far as I know, guns kill people. People with guns shoot people. They die. People with guns get shot. They die. If you point your gun at someone, you'd better want them dead. Are you really prepared to pull that trigger, to kill someone, to protect your family and/or property?
Don't you think that's a little over the top? Maybe you're better off improving your security. How about one of those big automatic lights out front and out back? That's probably enough to scare off 90% of burglars on its own. Fit better locks. Arrange your garden so it gives no cover to people coming up to the house. Get a big dog. Whatever. Just learning a little about basic security measures can pay off much more than arming yourself. Burglars want an easy time of it, if your house is even slightly more inaccessable they'll pass on to the next.
Back to my first point though, I really don't know how to put it into words so that you folks in the USA can really understand. I simply cannot conceive of what it would be like to live like that, with a gun in my pocket. I don't think I'll be moving to the USA any time soon.
I wish you luck.
Robin.
hey, what about, just plain, how easy is it to do what you want at that site?
E.g., a couple of months ago, I tried to rent a car online. To start with, all I wanted to know was, how much is it going to cost me for these dates? Could I do that easily? No. I tried 3 or 4 of the top names (I won't list them, I'm sure you can guess), and spent at least 10 mninutes on each site fighting my way through endless screens, where it seems you are allowed to enter one piece of information, then wait for the next page to come up etc. And on one site, I found several different ways of getting through to the end, each one with a different price! Eventually my wife got bored and after five minutes on the phone had the prices.
The key point being, every single damned extra click or pause hurts! Add the two together, and you've lost your customer.
(I could mention Use Cases here but I really don't want to start up that discussion - what? I did mention them? --ducks-- )
>MS is already in talks with the government to work out the modalities of sharing the source code
"Modalities"!!! Wtf is that supposed to mean?
From Merriam-Webster (cheers guys):
------------
One entry found for modality.
Main Entry: modality
Pronunciation: mO-'da-l&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Date: circa 1617
1 a : the quality or state of being modal b : a modal quality or attribute : FORM
2 : the classification of logical propositions according to their asserting or denying the possibility, impossibility, contingency, or necessity of their content
3 : one of the main avenues of sensation (as vision)
4 : a usually physical therapeutic agency
------------
So, it's either some strange Indian method of healing, or M$ are asserting their own impossibility!
Yeah, I showed her mine, then all I got to see was her knickers. Didn't seem fair to me.
I still remember her name (Andrea), even though I've not seen her for 30 years!
>And if, God forbid, most of the metropolitan cities in the U.S, Europe, and Asia are destroyed in nuclear Armageddon, then the Internet's going to suffer big-time.
Sheesh, after nuclear armageddon you think anyone's worried about the internet? I think most slashdot user's will have more to worry about than downloading porn by then!
There'll be no power for your 'puter anyway.
Google even corrects your spelling!
I tried
"sdggfsdf"
And got:
Your original search: sdggfsdf returned zero results.
The alternate spelling: sdfgsdf returned the results below.
With 634 matches! Some of them in Russian!
Hey, that GeoDisplay sounds pretty cool, why don't they put that on the web?
I've read both articles several times now, and I don't quite get it. Is he arguing that the source should be completely open, as in published to the world, or just that the customer gets it. There seem to be hints at both in the articles. And most folks here seem to assume the former, but I think that's just their "open source is for anyone" bias.
In any case, I have a problem with letting anyone have the code. A practical one. And that is, in what form? Do they just get a big zip file - my current project consists of around 8000 source files. Good luck in working out what it does! No customer of this project is going to have a clue about any of it. And even if they hired someone to check it out, it would take them months even to begin to understand how it all works, how it's architectured.
Or are they just going to take a few files at random and see if they look pretty. Maybe they could even run some metrics on them to see if they have enough comments, etc., but we're getting into a whole different ball park now.
Also, maybe we now have to maintain two different builds: one with the magical 1% hidden, and a real one. Anyone who's ever worked on slightly different projects based on a single main source tree will back me up here, it adds a whole extra level of complexity to the build and test process.
Frankly, I don't see the benefit that this will bring to anyone, except adding extra cost to the project.
I think the objective is good, but the solution sucks!
To take your points in order:
>Support of user modified code is impossible
Eh? Maybe you should ask Linus about this! Seriously though, the suggestion is that this is a one way thing, you don't have to support anything that's user modified. On the other hand, you could put in your contract that you do support it. It's up to you. It may be something extra to handle, but it sure ain't impossible.
>Competitors may take advantage of reading the source
Well, if I give the source to my customer, then it's up to them to look after it. Only the customer gets it, it's not like the source is published on the internet. And presumably the customer will take the same security measures they take with the rest of their trade secrets to make sure their competitors don't see it.
>It's "my money" that went into developing the source and "I" want to reap the benefits of "my" work
I beg your pardon, who paid for this stuff to be developed? I don't own any of the code I've ever written professionally, it's all owned by my past employers or clients (I freelance now). What further benefits can you reap? Sell the same stuff again to someone else? In that case your customer is going to be pretty pissed if he paid for it's development originally.
> Bug handling would be a nightmare
Why does this change? The only thing that could happen here is that the customer points to actual code where he thinks there might be a bug. What's the problem with that?
So if you and your customer want to get into this sort of contract, I don't think it's a problem. But it will be more effort for you, and therefore cost the customer more.
Well she does talk about it like she's cooking:
' she says, "to take this ingredient and another one there and stick something together."'
The author simply extended her own analogy. What's wrong with that?
But who wants quality software? Sure as an engineer I don't want to produce crap, but when did you get the time to do top quality stuff?
The saying goes: "good, cheap, fast, pick any two." Well by the time you've put the question to marketing "good" is already out the window! They want it now, and as long as it works most of the time, that's fine. They don't give a toss what the code looks like, as long as it has more features than the competitors' products, and we can get it on the market quicker. Virtually every place I've ever worked, as soon as deadlines get tight (which they always do) any process you had gets ditched and it's hack hack hack.
And the thing is, this has become acceptable to users. We're used to having the damn thing crash every now and then, or do weird things once in a while, but as long as its not too often we don't mind, that's just the way it is with software right?
So you're dead right, all of this has not changed one bit in the last 20 years. And it won't, why should it? There's no motivation for the management to let you as a developer produce higher quality stuff, because it costs more time and more money, and doesn't bring enough quantifiable benefits.
Well OK, but as I understood it, the throttle behaviour is static, so will not be affected by the presence of the virus.
I think it more likely that the virus writers will work round the throttle, e.g. by not allowing an easily detectable backlog of requests to build up, etc.
Read the damn article, the whole point is that it *doesn't* affect performance, except in an absolutely minimal way. The technique depends on the fact that the machine will behave differently once the virus attacks, and it's this different behaviour that is disrupted, *not* normal behaviour.
Tries desparately to think of something interesting to say about this post, other than, "cool", "why didn't I think of that" etc. Fails.
Tries desparately to resist temptation to mention FirstPost. Fails.
Tries to think of something else to discourage moderators from hitting the thumbs down button. ??
>Carrying capacity: 250-pound user
Well, I guess that cuts out at least half the American population!
>Northwest Passage threading 900 miles through a tangle of islands
... the trip would be shortened by 11,800 miles.
>For supertankers
Anybody else see ecological disaster looming here?
>Most of the stuff in the design patterns book was interesting to look at 5 years ago when the book first came out.
And is still perfectly relevant. Writing SW hasn't changed that much in the last 5 years.
>You would be better off now to read through the JAVA class documents.
This may help if you want to know how to write a nice class, but patterns are about getting good interactions between classes, they look at things at a much higher level of abstraction. This is one reason why they can add to a programmer's vocabulary.
>Design Patterns that are published in a book like that lag the real practices of the software industry by many years.
And they have been superceded by what exactly?
>Folks who work in software lead the industry, they don't live in the publishing houses or in the ivy covered hallways of money mongering corporate universitys.
Oh, and they never talk to each other? If I think I'm leading the industry, how do I go about spreading my fabulous ideas? Hey, maybe publishing a book would be a good way?
>Now it is OUT OF DATE.
No it is NOT. All the ideas are still valid, all the problems are still around, and the basic concept of patterns has spread enormously, so that now you get anti-patterns, analysis patterns, project management patterns etc. etc.
Absolutely it's worth it, this is my most used reference book, yes even more than my Stroustrup. I have saved myself a lot of time and effort by using some of these patterns, you can probably get the same benefit.
I have used these on many projects (admittedly mostly large ones). For a lot of common design problems, you simply need to look in the book and there is your answer. It is now second nature to me to use, for example, factories for creating families of objects where the end client doesn't actually need to know the concrete type of object it is using.
There are some patterns, or derivatives thereof, that are found on nearly every project I have worked on in the last five years, e.g. singleton, observer.
It's important to remember that the authors stress that these are not designs that you might think of the first time you go through a problem, especially if you are relatively new to OO. Therefore what may seem a strange design at first, may suddenly click into place when you really analyse it in the context of your particular problem.
It's basically a case of "suck it and see". If you have a problem, check out the book to see if it's helpful.
>every major software project will come up with its own "design patterns"
This is true, but every major software project will also come up with similar problems to a lot of other major software projects. That is where this book helps.
>upgrade the operating software of your television?
The distinction between computers and televisions is rapidly blurring, and this sort of feature will very soon be available. Car manufacturers already can upgrade the software in the car management systems etc., but at the moment only the dealer can do this. Why not do it yourself? Car's can already be connected to the internet via their mobile phones, so the upgrade medium is already there. Even fridges are becoming wired up, soon you'll be able to upgrade those (maybe with a new personality - cue HHGTTG quotes).
However, maybe you're right that the OS will be less visible. Bugfixes will be installed without you even noticing.
But there will be many more things needing an OS, so the market will still be there, but it will tend towards the hardware manufacturers rather than consumers. Having succeeded in getting a Windows desktop in every home (yeah yeah apart from all you Linux only bods, but you still need it for games dontcha?), MS now wants to get some version of Windows into evey other electronic box in your house, right down to your toaster and alarm clock, which is possibly a market many times the size of the PC market (Heh, imagine all your appliances with a little sticker on them - "Windows Inside").
So the OS is still one key to the future for MS.
Sure it can be punished, if:
1. You can find the person who now has the object.
2. You can prove that particular object is yours.
That's theft alright. Coupla big 'if's though.
But if you leave some secret object in a public place, and someone takes a photo of it and publishes it, but leaves the object there, can you punish them for that? Ridiculous right?
So I'm allowed to guess www.intentia.com, but I'm not allowed to guess www.intentia.com/topsecret.html?
Ridiculous again.
Case dismissed.
Yeah right. Presumably all the terrorists on the 9/11 flights would have passed this with flying colours, all having perfectly valid documentation and no criminal records? It might help jump the queues though, for those that don't mind being on YAGD (yet another government database), and also don't mind having to prove every year that they're still one of the good guys! Waddaya mean OffTopic? It was a joke dammit!
They forgot to mention there was a floppy disk attached to the mouse with a piece of string!
./ ??? I think you've gone up a level too many there. I think maybe you mean /. :)
No regrets, you saved me some work there. Except I'm now in for a long tweaking session tonight. Cheers dude.