The switch from Lisp wasnt the mistake, it was the move to C syntax that was wrong, replacing the unreadable parentheses with semi-colons, curly brackets, squiggles, dots and loads of other stupid ideas.
Maybe COBOL went to far, and just got it wrong, but the idea of a human readable language is a pretty good one.
If Java gets aspects support in the JRE, things like NetRexx and JPython could use this opportunity to undo some of the awfulness of Java by adding nice, readable, useful syntax for aspects.
most of the QA engineers were just re-tasked programmers without any HCI design principle background or experience.
Of course, anyone with HCI experience (or just read a Jakob Neilson book) would be more effective in programming making sure the problems dont arise in the first place.
I don't know whether they are laws, or just industry standards.
They are conditions on the broadcasting licence. The TV broadcaster can be fined, or even lose their licence if they disregard the licence conditions. Theres loads of info at the Broadcasting Standards Commision website where they, oh gosh, say they are a statutory body for 'Tandards and Fairness in Broadcasting'.
They'll all very much aware of the new stuff that really matters
Maybe true, maybe not.
Here in MVS land, alot of developers are really hot on XML right now, a few are into Java. But theres quite a few Assembler programmers here who cant even do basic HTML.
On the other hand, every last one of us knows enough to avoid XP, OO, ISO9000 and all the other pointless 'magic bullet' paradigms that dont actually get the job done.
There was quite a bit of interest in NetRexx about 5 years ago, as there are quite a few MVS (aka zOS OS/390 etc) developers familiar with Rexx.
At the time Java was very weak when dealing with strings, and the old crusty C syntax was a real turn-off for folks used to PLI and COBOL.
Ive not heard of any real NetRexx activity recently, although the web site shows its still being activly developed.
NetRexx is an IBM thing, so may become more popular as Eclipse and Websphere penetrate the core business divisions of large enterprises. NetRexx is able to use the Java APIs, so there is no problem getting at J2EE and SWT stuff.
The article states that they dumped the S/390 hardware, probably in favour of some *nix servers.
Its the same old story, company ditches the mainframe, company spends millions trying to get the replacement to work, company fails, company dies.
On zOS systems, the System Programmers (aka admins) have authority to do pretty much anything, they could in theory subvert the system to pull the classic 1/100th zorkmid from every account stunt.
However, the one authority thing zOS doesnt give to admins is the AUDITOR attribute. Auditors have the abilty to log any action on the system, including writes to system files, use of 'hacking tools' like IMASPZAP, changes to data access levels, etc.
Thats why you rarely hear about major banks being taken for millions, or shut down by a rogue sysprog, its just too dificult even for an expert to do it, and your audit trail will certainly be on tape and held for several years.
Here in the UK, the High Street is taking a bath, whilst the internet stores have just recorded their largest sales ever, breaking 1billion pounds.
As every PC user has easy net access, I wonder if thats where your old customers are shopping these days, especially as there are so many turkeys out there, and I can google up a couple of reviews when I see a game I might like.
In the UK, there are often tours of the city sewers, nuclear power stations (although you dont always get to see the actual reactor room, sometimes its just an orrible set of static displays),bridges, decommisioned nuclear and WWII bunkers, etc.
Mainframe users are actually paying for the sort of support where you pick up the phone and and engineer is enroute to your site before youve put the phone down. Some sites have an IBM engineer onsite anyway.
So as well as having extra capacity available, you also get failover support. If a CPU starts misbehaving, you can have it swapped out remotely.
The alternative is to suffer the consequences if something does go wrong. Recently Dabs.com were losing 1/2million pounds per day when a digger cut them off. A major bank or a stockmarket could start losing that sort of money per minute if their equipment went down.
The maths is easy: pay 10,000 extra for redundant hardware, or risk millions if it falls over.
And what about old telex machine users that used x0A0A0D (CRCRLF) in case the carrige got stuck?
You may think this is funny. but there is still some software out there that assumes a mechanical teletype at the far end, sending weather bulletins to Africa, football scores to the Beeb, etc.
I think youve missed the guys point. Its not his manager thats giving him pointless tasks, its other managers higher up in the organisation or other departments pushing him about.
In this case his manager should be able to deflect much of this, but sometimes the other department has a mandate to send him running for that rock.
I get this from our Alpha Testers. Usually things are fine: they find a defect, we fix it. But occasionally they get a real bee in their bonnet over some trivial thing, often because they confuse their personnal opinion with a properly run useability test. Something like capitalisation in error messages becomes the weeks hot topic, and you get lumbered changing something that was never broken.
So:
Do make sure your manager is aware of what you are doing, and make sure he is aware how pointless the task is. Then it wont go badly in your review if you do a slapdash job of it.
Do try and understand why someone has pushed this work your way. In one case I got shafted because a tester needed to impress his boss with his assertivness. They were just protecting their job and picked me cos they knew they could explain things in the tea room later. Sometimes salesmen need a stupid feature added cos a customer is just testing the companies willingness to respond to change requests.
Do avoid idiots. If you are in a meeting with a total documentation freak, just stay silent. Never visit someone you know likes to generate work. If you see them in the corridor, dive into the nearest office and ask if you can borrow a stapler, or be on the way to attend an emergency.
Do be aware of any issues like this comming your way. Then you can not be there when it arrives, and maybe someone else will have to pick it up. Or you can already have done it if you get enough warning.
Dont be rude. Many companies operate a policy of 'eliminate the assholes' so try not to be one of them. Politely point out how this will make things difficult for you, how it will cause the schedule to slip, how it will destabilise the product, etc, but never directly accuse someone of making your life difficult unless you are prepared to get another job.
Dont avoid doing stuff. Cos you get paid to do the work whether its pointless or not.
Do make sure that what you do doesnt adversly affect product quality. You dont want to be the guy who created the Word Macro Virus vulnerability cos some idiot wanted to embed a programming language in a wordprocessor document.
Whats next:
Extending sentitivity into the infrared.
Fixing the dead pixel problem that steadily gets worse as the camera ages. My 2 year old camera has to have bright dots spot edited out.
Totally radical designs. The Nikon Coolpix 990 is really useful for macro work on insects in the wild, you can get the camera close without having to shove your head into a bush to see the screen. I'd like to see the lens/CCD unit completely seperate from the CPU/battery compartment so I can get in for even better angles. The CPU/battery could even be a PDA/laptop, keeping costs down. You are already seeing this with those silly gimmicky phone/cameras.
Sorting out battery life. This is mostly the LCD draining the batteries, but all the same, its a problem.
True shot preview on SLRs. You cant see what the camera sees via the LCD on SLRs like you can with consumer cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
The switch from Lisp wasnt the mistake, it was the move to C syntax that was wrong, replacing the unreadable parentheses with semi-colons, curly brackets, squiggles, dots and loads of other stupid ideas. Maybe COBOL went to far, and just got it wrong, but the idea of a human readable language is a pretty good one. If Java gets aspects support in the JRE, things like NetRexx and JPython could use this opportunity to undo some of the awfulness of Java by adding nice, readable, useful syntax for aspects.
Makes perfect sense to me, but then Ive got a copy of the Cannatello book on my desk. Maybe ASM folks are 'Special' in some way.
Of course, anyone with HCI experience (or just read a Jakob Neilson book) would be more effective in programming making sure the problems dont arise in the first place.
They are conditions on the broadcasting licence. The TV broadcaster can be fined, or even lose their licence if they disregard the licence conditions. Theres loads of info at the Broadcasting Standards Commision website where they, oh gosh, say they are a statutory body for 'Tandards and Fairness in Broadcasting'.
Maybe true, maybe not.
Here in MVS land, alot of developers are really hot on XML right now, a few are into Java. But theres quite a few Assembler programmers here who cant even do basic HTML.
On the other hand, every last one of us knows enough to avoid XP, OO, ISO9000 and all the other pointless 'magic bullet' paradigms that dont actually get the job done.
There was quite a bit of interest in NetRexx about 5 years ago, as there are quite a few MVS (aka zOS OS/390 etc) developers familiar with Rexx.
At the time Java was very weak when dealing with strings, and the old crusty C syntax was a real turn-off for folks used to PLI and COBOL.
Ive not heard of any real NetRexx activity recently, although the web site shows its still being activly developed.
NetRexx is an IBM thing, so may become more popular as Eclipse and Websphere penetrate the core business divisions of large enterprises. NetRexx is able to use the Java APIs, so there is no problem getting at J2EE and SWT stuff.
The article states that they dumped the S/390 hardware, probably in favour of some *nix servers. Its the same old story, company ditches the mainframe, company spends millions trying to get the replacement to work, company fails, company dies.
On zOS systems, the System Programmers (aka admins) have authority to do pretty much anything, they could in theory subvert the system to pull the classic 1/100th zorkmid from every account stunt. However, the one authority thing zOS doesnt give to admins is the AUDITOR attribute. Auditors have the abilty to log any action on the system, including writes to system files, use of 'hacking tools' like IMASPZAP, changes to data access levels, etc. Thats why you rarely hear about major banks being taken for millions, or shut down by a rogue sysprog, its just too dificult even for an expert to do it, and your audit trail will certainly be on tape and held for several years.
Here in the UK, the High Street is taking a bath, whilst the internet stores have just recorded their largest sales ever, breaking 1billion pounds. As every PC user has easy net access, I wonder if thats where your old customers are shopping these days, especially as there are so many turkeys out there, and I can google up a couple of reviews when I see a game I might like.
In the UK, there are often tours of the city sewers, nuclear power stations (although you dont always get to see the actual reactor room, sometimes its just an orrible set of static displays),bridges, decommisioned nuclear and WWII bunkers, etc.
/ www.bbc.co.uk/kent/do_see/days_out/power_st ation.shtml
http://www.sussexhistory.com/sewers.htm
http:/
Mainframe users are actually paying for the sort of support where you pick up the phone and and engineer is enroute to your site before youve put the phone down. Some sites have an IBM engineer onsite anyway.
So as well as having extra capacity available, you also get failover support. If a CPU starts misbehaving, you can have it swapped out remotely.
The alternative is to suffer the consequences if something does go wrong. Recently Dabs.com were losing 1/2million pounds per day when a digger cut them off. A major bank or a stockmarket could start losing that sort of money per minute if their equipment went down.
The maths is easy: pay 10,000 extra for redundant hardware, or risk millions if it falls over.
And what about old telex machine users that used x0A0A0D (CRCRLF) in case the carrige got stuck?
You may think this is funny. but there is still some software out there that assumes a mechanical teletype at the far end, sending weather bulletins to Africa, football scores to the Beeb, etc.
I think youve missed the guys point. Its not his manager thats giving him pointless tasks, its other managers higher up in the organisation or other departments pushing him about.
In this case his manager should be able to deflect much of this, but sometimes the other department has a mandate to send him running for that rock.
I get this from our Alpha Testers. Usually things are fine: they find a defect, we fix it. But occasionally they get a real bee in their bonnet over some trivial thing, often because they confuse their personnal opinion with a properly run useability test. Something like capitalisation in error messages becomes the weeks hot topic, and you get lumbered changing something that was never broken.
So:
Do make sure your manager is aware of what you are doing, and make sure he is aware how pointless the task is. Then it wont go badly in your review if you do a slapdash job of it.
Do try and understand why someone has pushed this work your way. In one case I got shafted because a tester needed to impress his boss with his assertivness. They were just protecting their job and picked me cos they knew they could explain things in the tea room later. Sometimes salesmen need a stupid feature added cos a customer is just testing the companies willingness to respond to change requests.
Do avoid idiots. If you are in a meeting with a total documentation freak, just stay silent. Never visit someone you know likes to generate work. If you see them in the corridor, dive into the nearest office and ask if you can borrow a stapler, or be on the way to attend an emergency.
Do be aware of any issues like this comming your way. Then you can not be there when it arrives, and maybe someone else will have to pick it up. Or you can already have done it if you get enough warning.
Dont be rude. Many companies operate a policy of 'eliminate the assholes' so try not to be one of them. Politely point out how this will make things difficult for you, how it will cause the schedule to slip, how it will destabilise the product, etc, but never directly accuse someone of making your life difficult unless you are prepared to get another job.
Dont avoid doing stuff. Cos you get paid to do the work whether its pointless or not.
Do make sure that what you do doesnt adversly affect product quality. You dont want to be the guy who created the Word Macro Virus vulnerability cos some idiot wanted to embed a programming language in a wordprocessor document.
Whats next: Extending sentitivity into the infrared. Fixing the dead pixel problem that steadily gets worse as the camera ages. My 2 year old camera has to have bright dots spot edited out. Totally radical designs. The Nikon Coolpix 990 is really useful for macro work on insects in the wild, you can get the camera close without having to shove your head into a bush to see the screen. I'd like to see the lens/CCD unit completely seperate from the CPU/battery compartment so I can get in for even better angles. The CPU/battery could even be a PDA/laptop, keeping costs down. You are already seeing this with those silly gimmicky phone/cameras. Sorting out battery life. This is mostly the LCD draining the batteries, but all the same, its a problem. True shot preview on SLRs. You cant see what the camera sees via the LCD on SLRs like you can with consumer cameras.