I can confirm this. When the dev who had been
doing trivial bugfixes on it handed me the project
(actually the "reference machine" if you can
believe that shit) he said "Source Safe isn't."
It got pretty much zero attention while I was
there.
Maybe some folks are using it there,
but in product development it was not considered
an acceptable option for source code control.
The Elements of Programming Style
by Brian W. Kernighan, P. J. Plauger. ISBN: 0070342075
I read this brief classic a long time ago in Math 131 (Intro to Fortran) and it set my style for the rest of my carrer. The quality of clarity in programming is independent of the language used. Besides all the excellent advice others have posted, I'd keep this principle on mind:
The source code is not only instructions for the machine, it is the most important means of communication between the software developer and the (eventual, inevitable) maintainer. Ask yourself, "If I sent this code to another developer who's completely unfamiliar with the project, would they be able to quickly understand what it does and how?"
I'be been in the coding pits for 25 years & have
read a lot of resumes and done a lot of interviewing. I can unequivocally say that I would
consider open-source project experience at least as valid as that gained in other projects done as an employee. I would value it using the same criteria: project
size, duration, complexity, platform, what parts the individual had been responsible for, how successful the result, etc.
You could legitimately argue that open source experience is worth more. IMHO many of the biggest challenges in large-scale software
engineering are social. If someone can succeed in the less-structured environment of an open source project, where more depends on inidividual initiative, dilligence and respect for your (unpaid) colleagues, it's an excellent indicator of qualities that are desirable in a "typical" environment but are not guaranteed merely by having performed acceptably in previous jobs.
Picture humanity as a group of monkeys sitting on a high tree branch, with a hungry lion waiting paitiently below. A small group of monkeys is sawing furiously away at the branch they all sit on. "We need more lumber!" they shout. Another other group is in a state of panic, shouting "Save the tree! Save the tree!" But most of the monkeys are doing what monkeys generally do: scratching, having sex and looking around for food, completely uninterested in the other two groups.
Sigh.
On my office cube I have a graph of the ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica. The graph of mean planetary temperature change looks like a roller coaster. Goddess sure does like to mix it up. What's striking about it is that for the last 12,000 years or so, we've had an anomalously stable and warm trend. Just about the time humans figured out how to grow wheat and live in villages.
Did humans cause global warming? Well, I don't think there were that many campfires back in the paleolithic. How bout the other way round?
Maybe the stable, warmer temperatures made possiblee the "stupid human trick" of huge cities based on domesticated crops?
My unscientific take on it is that the climate is a big 'ol complicated chaotic system. If you're betting your civilization on linear trends persisting very long in any direction, then you're lookin to get spanked. And you haven't looked very hard at the data. I'm as green as the next bumper-sticker-sporting, recycling vegetarian. But I think we're just clever monkeys in the end.
Why is Katz a featured writer at /. ?
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1
I'm not one to bash Katz usually, but really.
Another silly article. As usual, Jon declares his
metaphor to be real and then goes looking for it
at the local mall. Others will deconstruct this
more thoroughly, I'm sure, no need for me to
go on at length.
But I don't get it. Why is Katz still a featured writer? What's the appeal? Is he Troll-In-Residence? Is there some slashdot lore
(from the early days) that explains it? Seriously. It's beyond wierd at this point.
No protected memory? Big security hole.
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Palm OS
currently allow any app accesss to all of memory?
SSL is well and good, but if the OS doesn't prevent the apps from accessing each other's memory space then the device is wide open to viral/trojan attack.
I've been at a streaming-media search engine for
about two years and I suspect we're typical of our
industry.
Basically, we're a java/Linux shop and Windows installs are regarded as a
necessary evil. There are some things that
we have to do that for both licensing and technical reasons (the media player HAS to be
part of the operating system, right?) need to be
run on windows. But every windows install is
an ongoing liability. They're a pain to build
and configure, unreliable, configurations differ
for no apparent reason, managing large numbers
of rackmounts is a nightmare, etc. etc. You've heard it all before. But the advent of XP fills us
with dread. The question is not whether we'll
adopt it, but whether this one will seriously
damage the company.
It kind of feels like the living in Sarajevo
and being shelled by the troops
up on the hill. Incoming! Licensing bombs have
hit the spiders, sarge! Oh no! More breakage
in the media crackers! Can we repair it or
do we have to abandon the codec? I mean, it's
a wintel world out there, and ours is a volume
business, and if we
reimplement stuff ourselves we'll
be attacked by hordes of mutant ninja lawyers.
It's not like we can
ignore it. Bill farts, we run for cover. We are
small, the death star is merciless.
The response seems to support the criticism of
devs being clueless and arrogant. Daniel seems to
miss at least one point completely.
From the review:
The CGI scripts used to Administrate do not verify user data satisfactorily.
From Daniel Goscomb's reply:
As to the part about user authentification of the CGI scripts. This is completely irrelevant. There is no authentication in the CGI scripts. The authentication is done via.htaccess files, and has no interaction with the CGI at all, other than when you change the passwords.
And then there's alternative networks. There's lot of rich people in Saudi Arabia, what's to stop someone from discreetly leasing some phone lines? Or a satellite link?
Not only is it unlikely to work, it seems to me that
there are plenty of people in Saudi Arabia who already know that. This is a technological "fig leaf" that serves a political purpose: to satisfy the religous/right-wing elements of society that the government (allready at risk) is doing enough
to protect them from "godless" influences.
Don't sweat it,/., this puppy is BBD. No one's fooling anybody.
It's not the same at all.
In your example, the firewall would
have to be configured to allow requests on port 80
to be passed to somehost.yourcompany.com. Unless
somehost is intended as a web server, that would be
poor practice. Additionally, the trojan CGI has to
be running/installed on the web server (KickMe).
At any decently run site the installed CGIs and
servlets will be examined fairly carefully before
exposing them to the public.
OTOH, in order for everyone inside the firewall to
use soap application servers on the outside,
port 80 traffic has to be allowed in both directions
for all machines. Any PC could have a trojaned
app installed and the firewall can do nothing about it. Likely as not, those users are less
security concious than the admin of a publicly
available web server.
I don't accept the assumption that this is a
problem that needs to be solved. If a business isn't viable that doesn't mean we have to adopt a system that will make it do so. Look at the example again:
Go to any bookstore today and you can find hundreds of thousands of titles available, all of them published on paper. It would be extremely useful to have all of this information available in an electronic form on the Web, but none of these titles are currently on the Web because there is no way to make money from them. We are locked into paper publishing right now because of the lack of a good Web business model.
It may not be worth anyone's while to put Books In Print on a free website. That doesn't mean we need an across-the-board micropayment mechanism to pay for doing so. It would be extremely useful to have an espresso stand with full-time barrista in my kitchen but I'm not going to hold my breath.
The web is fine, reports of it's demise are generally coming from people who failed to get rich off it.
OK it's an old chestnut but I still love it for it's plain common sense:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Is this really the way you want to go, especially given the high cost of porting? It seems unlikely that unicode will emerge as the ultimate standard, at least for the web. It doesn't support a large enough character space to include all the characters needed by various Chinese, Japanese, Korean et.al. writing forms.
There's some interesting articles on the subject, among them:
No he didn't. He acknowledged the truth of a friend's comment that the world is now full of very bad cryptographic applications written by people who read his first book.
This relates to a distinction made by another poster between the algorithm and the protocol. It's easy to use a good algorithm in a bad protocol, to wit, just cause you screwed up key exchange doesn't mean DES is broken.
I love the trilogy dearly & first read it when I was 12 years old. Sadly, as an adult I've come to understand that, if only unconciously, Tolkien has mapped the geography of Middle Earth onto that of Europe, and in the process perpetuates some very vicious racist stereotypes.
It's obvious from the text that Hobbits live in the British Isles, but look at the map again. It doesn't stop there. The war against Mordor is a transparent retelling of the centuries of conflict between Europe and the Huns (initially), later the Ottoman Empire. It's the same "West (good) vs. East (bad)" myth that fueled the Crusades.
Check out the language (character set) of the orcs & Mordor, and the everpresent stereotypes (filth, cruelty, even curved blades!). Notice how ME is bordered on the West by the sea (divine, the final retreat of the heroes i.e. Avalon) but on the East it's a complete blank. Even the shape of Mordor resembles Turkey (Anatolia, actually).
There are so many details to support this it would make a decent PhD dissertation. But I don't mean to judge Tolkien or invalidate his work, it's just that as an adult I can't help but place it in the larger historcial and social context. The British Empire had finally triumphed (at hideous cost, e.g. Gallipoli) over the Ottoman at the time of The Hobbit's publication ('37?) but was itself mortally wounded. Rising Arab and Indian nationalism were busily undermining colonial rule, and Sauron was indeed growing in power in Europe's midst. The apocalypse finally arrived in Europe with the same inescapable and terrible violence it did in Middle Earth.
I look at that map and I see Europe before WWII. It makes me sad, because contained withing one of my most beloved childhood stories is a racist view of the world that persists (in some ways) to this day.
I Love watching KDE & GNOME duke it out
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
·
· Score: 2
I mean, could anything better happen to linux? The market mavens moan about a newbie-friendly desktop as being the big missing piece to take more market share and we got 2 contenders beating the hell out of each other for the title.
On! On! I'll be in the bar watching it on the Biz channel. First person I meet with source in either tree gets a free beer on me.
While reading Levy's book and some other sources I remember coming away with the disturbing sense that what I was looking at was not really evolution but rather a very expensive form of data compression. OK, after an enormous number of trials we manage to "evolve" a virtual ant that can successfully navigate a virtual maze. We could hard-code the same behavior, but the result is ususally not an optimal solution in terms of the space required. By definition our programming language & interpreter will contain a lot of stuff that solves for the general case. So, to mash up a bunch 'o bits and execute that at some very low level of the machine can after enough trials (& selection) produce a smaller (combined 'code' & 'data') chunk that will accomplish the same goal.
Perhaps it's my view of evolution that needs to change. But I have the intuitive sense that it solves a much higher order of problem.
The simple fact is that X is stable and works marvelously. Performance gains are going to come from hardware for the most part. New widget libraries come along all the time and can happily coexist with one another, making your desktop look like a salvador dali painting or anything else you can think of. If you want to fight the good fight and advance the penetration of open-sourced systems (which mostly means X as the low level graphics layer) you have to address two really important application-level issues:
Threading. One of the most obvious qualities of an app, even to a novice, is whether the GUI remains responsive when the application is doing stuff. This is something that MS is committing heavy resources to, and it's a big reason why their apps look and feel as good as they do.
Interoperability. Lots and lots of freeware apps don't even support cut and past, while MS now allows you to embed a foo in every bar and stream video while the paperclip dances. But in some ways it's easier to do it on *nix systems. Repeat after me: "CORBA is a protocol, and COM is a binary format..."
Why didn't anyone ever think of this before? If Microsoft had a mascot or animal totem, what would it be? It has to be a real animal. The paperclip doesn't count.
Pig (too obvious)
Bull (rear view?)
Sloth ("Heeeeerrrrs Mike the Microsloth!")
Dinosaur (obvious, but appropriate, especially T. Rex)
Vulture
Balrog (cool graphics possiblilites)
Vampire or otherwise undead creature
Jeez, the possibilites are stunning. I kind of like the idea of a dancing T.Rex, with a straw hat, cane and big ol' grin that dances around looking cute and then periodically tears up something to bloody shreds (kind of like the Cat help animation).
Anyone care to take a stab at it? A poll!! Definitiely should be a Slashdot poll!!
Right on. Craft, or even art form. Elegance counts, especially if you're trying to build something really robust that you can get your investment back out of over a few years.
Some companies care about quality more than others.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some folks are using it there, but in product development it was not considered an acceptable option for source code control.
My $0.02 based on 25 years in the biz.
So what? The employer pays.
I read this brief classic a long time ago in Math 131 (Intro to Fortran) and it set my style for the rest of my carrer. The quality of clarity in programming is independent of the language used. Besides all the excellent advice others have posted, I'd keep this principle on mind:
The source code is not only instructions for the machine, it is the most important means of communication between the software developer and the (eventual, inevitable) maintainer. Ask yourself, "If I sent this code to another developer who's completely unfamiliar with the project, would they be able to quickly understand what it does and how?"
You could legitimately argue that open source experience is worth more. IMHO many of the biggest challenges in large-scale software engineering are social. If someone can succeed in the less-structured environment of an open source project, where more depends on inidividual initiative, dilligence and respect for your (unpaid) colleagues, it's an excellent indicator of qualities that are desirable in a "typical" environment but are not guaranteed merely by having performed acceptably in previous jobs.
Sigh.
On my office cube I have a graph of the ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica. The graph of mean planetary temperature change looks like a roller coaster. Goddess sure does like to mix it up. What's striking about it is that for the last 12,000 years or so, we've had an anomalously stable and warm trend. Just about the time humans figured out how to grow wheat and live in villages.
Did humans cause global warming? Well, I don't think there were that many campfires back in the paleolithic. How bout the other way round? Maybe the stable, warmer temperatures made possiblee the "stupid human trick" of huge cities based on domesticated crops?
My unscientific take on it is that the climate is a big 'ol complicated chaotic system. If you're betting your civilization on linear trends persisting very long in any direction, then you're lookin to get spanked. And you haven't looked very hard at the data. I'm as green as the next bumper-sticker-sporting, recycling vegetarian. But I think we're just clever monkeys in the end.
But I don't get it. Why is Katz still a featured writer? What's the appeal? Is he Troll-In-Residence? Is there some slashdot lore (from the early days) that explains it? Seriously. It's beyond wierd at this point.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Palm OS currently allow any app accesss to all of memory? SSL is well and good, but if the OS doesn't prevent the apps from accessing each other's memory space then the device is wide open to viral/trojan attack.
Basically, we're a java/Linux shop and Windows installs are regarded as a necessary evil. There are some things that we have to do that for both licensing and technical reasons (the media player HAS to be part of the operating system, right?) need to be run on windows. But every windows install is an ongoing liability. They're a pain to build and configure, unreliable, configurations differ for no apparent reason, managing large numbers of rackmounts is a nightmare, etc. etc. You've heard it all before. But the advent of XP fills us with dread. The question is not whether we'll adopt it, but whether this one will seriously damage the company.
It kind of feels like the living in Sarajevo and being shelled by the troops up on the hill. Incoming! Licensing bombs have hit the spiders, sarge! Oh no! More breakage in the media crackers! Can we repair it or do we have to abandon the codec? I mean, it's a wintel world out there, and ours is a volume business, and if we reimplement stuff ourselves we'll be attacked by hordes of mutant ninja lawyers.
It's not like we can ignore it. Bill farts, we run for cover. We are small, the death star is merciless.
From the review:
From Daniel Goscomb's reply:Not only is it unlikely to work, it seems to me that there are plenty of people in Saudi Arabia who already know that. This is a technological "fig leaf" that serves a political purpose: to satisfy the religous/right-wing elements of society that the government (allready at risk) is doing enough to protect them from "godless" influences.
Don't sweat it, /., this puppy is BBD. No one's fooling anybody.
OTOH, in order for everyone inside the firewall to use soap application servers on the outside, port 80 traffic has to be allowed in both directions for all machines. Any PC could have a trojaned app installed and the firewall can do nothing about it. Likely as not, those users are less security concious than the admin of a publicly available web server.
The web is fine, reports of it's demise are generally coming from people who failed to get rich off it.
Aaack! The url got munged. Can't seem to get it to appear correctly. Remove the extraneous space :-(
There's some interesting articles on the subject, among them:
http://www.hastingsresearch.com/net/04-unicode-lim itations.shtml
This relates to a distinction made by another poster between the algorithm and the protocol. It's easy to use a good algorithm in a bad protocol, to wit, just cause you screwed up key exchange doesn't mean DES is broken.
It's obvious from the text that Hobbits live in the British Isles, but look at the map again. It doesn't stop there. The war against Mordor is a transparent retelling of the centuries of conflict between Europe and the Huns (initially), later the Ottoman Empire. It's the same "West (good) vs. East (bad)" myth that fueled the Crusades.
Mordor == Turkey
Orcs == Turks
Rohan = Hungary
Gondor = Austria
Minas Tirith == Vienna
Check out the language (character set) of the orcs & Mordor, and the everpresent stereotypes (filth, cruelty, even curved blades!). Notice how ME is bordered on the West by the sea (divine, the final retreat of the heroes i.e. Avalon) but on the East it's a complete blank. Even the shape of Mordor resembles Turkey (Anatolia, actually).
There are so many details to support this it would make a decent PhD dissertation. But I don't mean to judge Tolkien or invalidate his work, it's just that as an adult I can't help but place it in the larger historcial and social context. The British Empire had finally triumphed (at hideous cost, e.g. Gallipoli) over the Ottoman at the time of The Hobbit's publication ('37?) but was itself mortally wounded. Rising Arab and Indian nationalism were busily undermining colonial rule, and Sauron was indeed growing in power in Europe's midst. The apocalypse finally arrived in Europe with the same inescapable and terrible violence it did in Middle Earth.
I look at that map and I see Europe before WWII. It makes me sad, because contained withing one of my most beloved childhood stories is a racist view of the world that persists (in some ways) to this day.
On! On! I'll be in the bar watching it on the Biz channel. First person I meet with source in either tree gets a free beer on me.
Perhaps it's my view of evolution that needs to change. But I have the intuitive sense that it solves a much higher order of problem.
You mean they're not? Next you'll be telling me there aren't any hobbits either.
- Pig (too obvious)
- Bull (rear view?)
- Sloth ("Heeeeerrrrs Mike the Microsloth!")
- Dinosaur (obvious, but appropriate, especially T. Rex)
- Vulture
- Balrog (cool graphics possiblilites)
- Vampire or otherwise undead creature
Jeez, the possibilites are stunning. I kind of like the idea of a dancing T.Rex, with a straw hat, cane and big ol' grin that dances around looking cute and then periodically tears up something to bloody shreds (kind of like the Cat help animation).Anyone care to take a stab at it? A poll!! Definitiely should be a Slashdot poll!!
Right on. Craft, or even art form. Elegance counts, especially if you're trying to build something really robust that you can get your investment back out of over a few years.
Some companies care about quality more than others.