No complaints about all the suggestions; i just find it a bit sad that this has to be spelled out:
Write down the requirements they specify.
I'm currently in a project where we, thanks to an obscure industry standard, have to provide traceability matrices! From System Requirement to SW requirement, to Design, to Code and finally to Test case.
It's actually not a bad feeling at all to do this once in a while...
Maybe it's just me, but if it comes to having a walk-through display in my living room, Princess Leia might not be the preferred object of desire...ahum...appreciation.
Saab Aircraft did this in the fifties by creating a scaled down (70%) version what was to become the "35 Draken" (Dragon) to iron out all the issues. The scaled down version did 887 test flights way before the final product was approaching first flight.
In addition the Draken was actually a very nice supersonic design with the first real double delta wing design. Innovation that clearly required a different testing methodology than just throwing it into the air.
Q: And how important is is template spezialisation for making portable C++ code like socket packages, SHM or file handling?
A: Unless you live by the law of Loki, none.
And of course gcc 3.2 if soooo good at handling template spezialisation...
And by the way, templates is not the point of C++ vs. C, the points are like Abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism. Object orientation, you know. And none of them have anything to do with VC. (Ever heard of Eiffel for example?) The fact is still that VC++ (or VS.NET) is the best environment for any large scale development project.
Until somebody shows me why our current small little project (~50k lines of C++) takes about 300 times longer to compile under Red Hat 8 compared to the whole ACE package under XP; I'll stick with XP and my pathetic VC6...
(Oh, and it's not even M$ fault anymore, we use the Intel compiler now. Shame on us.)
I was recently at a clients place doing some integration and afterwards it was time to give me a CD of our combined efforts. Now this client is a pure Linux place, they have not been close to a M$ OS in years (willingly). So what happens? Well we sit there for 5 minutes and set up KBurn (or whatever it was called), press the button to burn and then afterwards we laugh about how it took five minutes to set up, but only 5 msec to crash.
And then we FTP:ed the data to a Windoze box...
Seriously, I like linux as well, it has a bunch of cool features, but I will never use any distro until:
- It will give me a compile time below "too-bloody-long".
- A usable debugger. (They all f**king suck.)
- Usable basic "need-to-have" software like a CD/DVD burner that just works!
- It will give me a user friendly install system.
- Usable Office package. (Whatever the Excel clone shite is called in Open/Star office, it is not worth the money, even if it's 0.)
- A good development evironment. (JEdit is good. But not good enough.)
(And yes, I'm a c++ "hacker"... And yes, I prefer VC6 over anything else I've seen. I would love to use VS.NET except that everything I do have to be portable so I use VS6 and CMake for the Linux builds.)
Can't believe this crap is still going on! Cheaters completely destroyed Diablo on-line.
Part of the deal with any RPG is to find that über-item that is just around the corner; if I just play another 30 minutes, I'll probably find it.
Until you meet the super-l33t idiot who has 300 duped weapons for sale, and has never actually played the game; just trolling the news groups for the latest exploits.
"Everyone who is not German, who does not have a connection to German soil through blood, and who does not share in the moral and genetic superiority of the German people."
Excuse me, but have you ever been to Germany? Or is all your knowledge about Germany from "a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"?
As a foreigner/ausländer who has been living in Germany for years I must admit that I have no idea what you're talking about. I have witnessed more racism and "fucking foreigners" in Boston, SF, or London, or most other European countries than I have ever done in Germany.
The guilt for what happened 60 years ago is still running very deep within the German people born in the forties, fifties and sixties. (Even if they had nothing to do with it.) And for them to cast stone and name anybody inferior because they are not German is not very likely. It is rather amazing to witness how many Germans are ashamed of the fact that they are German; totally ignoring the tremendous accomplishments achieved within the last 60 years.
And as for the White Rose (Die Weiße Rose), maybe it would be a good idea to check another source than "a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". Die Weiße Rose was started by Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother and sister. Sophie had just about started her University education in Munich when, some 6-8 weeks later, she, her brother and some other students (medical most of them) issued the first "White Rose Flyer" ("Flugblätter der Weißen Rose").
Not exactly "intellectuals who were, or had been, in positions of authority".
The students behind Die Wieße Rose are nowadays considered to be freedom fighters who died for their beliefs. As they should be. Especially since they were in Hitlers own backyard; Bavaria.
To claim that they were merely pissed off intellectuals is pretty pathetic.
If you would care to go beyond "a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" you can visit the remembrance site at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Ludwigstraße. (Take the subway, parking is impossible.)
If the trip is too long, there's a couple of recommendable books about the subject:
Chaussy, Ulrich; Die Weiße Rose - eine multimediale Dokumentation deutschen Widerstandes. Systhema Verlag GmbH, München 1995. ISBN 3-634-23107-6.
Hanser, Richard; Vita Rosen - ett ädelt förräderi. Stockholm Nybloms Förlag, 1984. ISBN 91-7780-003-6.
Schneider, Michael C.; Keine Volksgenossen: studentischer Widerstand der Weißen Rose. Rektoratskollegium der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München 1993. ISBN 3-922480-08-X.
Scholl, Inge; Die Weiße Rose (Erweiterte Neuausgabe), S. Fischer Verlags GmbH (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH), Leck 1993. ISBN 3-596-11802-6.
Vinke, Hermann; Sophie Scholls korta liv, Alfabeta Förlaget Barrikaden, Lund 1984. ISBN 91-7712-024-8.
This is so funny. Model Rocket Engines are a hazard to humanity and can not, of course, be transported on Airplanes.
Butane Lighters on the other hand are perfectly safe and exactly the thing one wants to have inside an airplane cabin so that deranged people like Richard Reid can use them to explode bombs.
Where's the logic, reason, understanding, intelligence...oh, sorry, had momentarily forgotten who it was that paid for the current government in the first place. Sigh.
Finally the killer application that will convert the masses!
Better start dancing Ballmer, if you want to beat this...
Re:Do these cars strike anybody else as...
on
10 Techno-Cool Cars
·
· Score: 1
No you're not the only one left, but it's getting damn hard to survive out there. I own three pieces of pure Detroit steel (i.e. late sixties/early seventies), but just getting hold of UNC/UNF bolts and nuts is starting to become a real problem.
Of course I don't mind some modern cars...my Audi does have a 4.2l (256cui) V8 after all...
Is it just me or is Scott loosing focus?
His interview was filled with wonderful contradictions like:
- IBM & HP are stupidly throwing away all their UNIX knowledge and going all for Linux. We wouldn't do anything like that.
vs.
- The OS is just the plumbing which upon you build the real value-add.
Eh...what's really happening here, Scotty?
Is this one of these "Let's build a completely portable programming environments so that we can sell more of our proprietary hardware!" moments?
I thought you had it about right until it came to the "63 marketing analysts".
Anybody who's ever worked with marketing knows that there are not 63 marketing analysts available in the whole world.
If we on the other hand talk about "Marketing Managers", "Marketing Directors" or "Marketing Presidents", then you could have a million of them. On the dozen.
True, but if you look a little bit closer at the Cutter Consortium and the people involved you'll find one consulting organisation that actually has such an amount of experience and skill that everybody should listen.
They produce an excellent Cutter's Journal which contains some of the most interesting articles on methodology issues I've read. Shame that a subscription is about the Mexican GNP per year though.
The article can only refer to the worst testerone filled dot-com (code-like-hell) shops. Sure their environment will be rather different, if they will be around at all that is...
As for more traditional corporations, where most of the dot-com hype was never adopted anyway, the current change is rather positive than negative.
Finally, 20 years after Peopleware, it seems like people have actually started to notice that people and teams are first-order effects. The current agility hype is sure helping. (Let's hope it doesn't go too far...)
I recently managed to convince a (very traditional) organisation to go for dual monitors for a team of developers (14 ppl). That would just not have happened a couple of years ago.
"The increase in productivity is not worth the extra cost and it takes away from the key focus, which has to be work."
To calculate aircraft performance (i.e. can we take off with x passengers on this airfield that happens to have a big mountain at the end of the runway?) all (no exceptions) airlines use F77 calculation modules that are provided by the aircraft manufacturers.
These calculations are, at least in my book, as close to mission critical as you can come. Do it slightly wrong and you may end up in the safety net at the end of the runway. Do it majorly wrong and you hit the aforementioned mountain...
The modules are reasonably complex (up to 100k loc without a GUI), in strict F77 with the mess that that brings along and are written by Aerospace majors who, if they were lucky, got a 3 week course in F77 at University.
The obvious question is why?
- F77 is the most suitable language for the problem?
- Aerospace engineers like F77?
- It's an international conspiracy?
Unfortunately the last one is closest to the truth. The modules are coded according to a standard decided by IATA - International Air Transport Association (http://www.iata.org). A standard that was created some 20 years ago and with regards to F77 of course has not changed since... Why? Because the airlines knows how to handle these modules. The I/O and behaviour is well documented and understood and to change to something even resembling modern CS practices (even F90 would be a giant leap forwards!) would require huge investments for the airlines. Something they are of course not too willing to do. There are some reason for the currently ridiculously low (in comparison) fares we pay.
Oh, and by the way, the modules are of course not in any way certified by whatever competent authority there may exist. No, in general they prove their worth by the good old method of "service history".
PS. I have not given up flying just because I've experienced this. All aircraft operations have a rather large safety margin built in. For the "ouch" picture above with the very hard mountain top, we would also need to lose one engine. This in combination with the fact that the "service history" criteria seems to work pretty good still makes flying safer than walking...
Slashdot Mirror
No complaints about all the suggestions; i just find it a bit sad that this has to be spelled out:
Write down the requirements they specify.
I'm currently in a project where we, thanks to an obscure industry standard, have to provide traceability matrices! From System Requirement to SW requirement, to Design, to Code and finally to Test case.
It's actually not a bad feeling at all to do this once in a while...
Maybe it's just me, but if it comes to having a walk-through display in my living room, Princess Leia might not be the preferred object of desire...ahum...appreciation.
Saab Aircraft did this in the fifties by creating a scaled down (70%) version what was to become the "35 Draken" (Dragon) to iron out all the issues. The scaled down version did 887 test flights way before the final product was approaching first flight.
In addition the Draken was actually a very nice supersonic design with the first real double delta wing design. Innovation that clearly required a different testing methodology than just throwing it into the air.
Q: And how important is is template spezialisation for making portable C++ code like socket packages, SHM or file handling?
A: Unless you live by the law of Loki, none.
And of course gcc 3.2 if soooo good at handling template spezialisation...
And by the way, templates is not the point of C++ vs. C, the points are like Abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism. Object orientation, you know. And none of them have anything to do with VC. (Ever heard of Eiffel for example?) The fact is still that VC++ (or VS.NET) is the best environment for any large scale development project.
Until somebody shows me why our current small little project (~50k lines of C++) takes about 300 times longer to compile under Red Hat 8 compared to the whole ACE package under XP; I'll stick with XP and my pathetic VC6...
(Oh, and it's not even M$ fault anymore, we use the Intel compiler now. Shame on us.)
I was recently at a clients place doing some integration and afterwards it was time to give me a CD of our combined efforts. Now this client is a pure Linux place, they have not been close to a M$ OS in years (willingly). So what happens? Well we sit there for 5 minutes and set up KBurn (or whatever it was called), press the button to burn and then afterwards we laugh about how it took five minutes to set up, but only 5 msec to crash.
And then we FTP:ed the data to a Windoze box...
Seriously, I like linux as well, it has a bunch of cool features, but I will never use any distro until:
- It will give me a compile time below "too-bloody-long".
- A usable debugger. (They all f**king suck.)
- Usable basic "need-to-have" software like a CD/DVD burner that just works!
- It will give me a user friendly install system.
- Usable Office package. (Whatever the Excel clone shite is called in Open/Star office, it is not worth the money, even if it's 0.)
- A good development evironment. (JEdit is good. But not good enough.)
(And yes, I'm a c++ "hacker"... And yes, I prefer VC6 over anything else I've seen. I would love to use VS.NET except that everything I do have to be portable so I use VS6 and CMake for the Linux builds.)
Impressive indeed.
New business plan probably goes something like:
Can't believe this crap is still going on! Cheaters completely destroyed Diablo on-line.
Part of the deal with any RPG is to find that über-item that is just around the corner; if I just play another 30 minutes, I'll probably find it.
Until you meet the super-l33t idiot who has 300 duped weapons for sale, and has never actually played the game; just trolling the news groups for the latest exploits.
Sigh. Nowadays I play Civ III. Alone.
"Everyone who is not German, who does not have a connection to German soil through blood, and who does not share in the moral and genetic superiority of the German people."
Excuse me, but have you ever been to Germany? Or is all your knowledge about Germany from "a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"?
As a foreigner/ausländer who has been living in Germany for years I must admit that I have no idea what you're talking about. I have witnessed more racism and "fucking foreigners" in Boston, SF, or London, or most other European countries than I have ever done in Germany.
The guilt for what happened 60 years ago is still running very deep within the German people born in the forties, fifties and sixties. (Even if they had nothing to do with it.) And for them to cast stone and name anybody inferior because they are not German is not very likely. It is rather amazing to witness how many Germans are ashamed of the fact that they are German; totally ignoring the tremendous accomplishments achieved within the last 60 years.
And as for the White Rose (Die Weiße Rose), maybe it would be a good idea to check another source than "a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". Die Weiße Rose was started by Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother and sister. Sophie had just about started her University education in Munich when, some 6-8 weeks later, she, her brother and some other students (medical most of them) issued the first "White Rose Flyer" ("Flugblätter der Weißen Rose").
Not exactly "intellectuals who were, or had been, in positions of authority".
The students behind Die Wieße Rose are nowadays considered to be freedom fighters who died for their beliefs. As they should be. Especially since they were in Hitlers own backyard; Bavaria.
To claim that they were merely pissed off intellectuals is pretty pathetic.
If you would care to go beyond "a copy of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" you can visit the remembrance site at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Ludwigstraße. (Take the subway, parking is impossible.)
If the trip is too long, there's a couple of recommendable books about the subject:
Basically the current bool vector should be depreceated as soon as possible.
Well, you can get updated on all civilian Iraqi casualties here.
I would expect the number to dramatically increase pretty soon.
This is so funny. Model Rocket Engines are a hazard to humanity and can not, of course, be transported on Airplanes.
Butane Lighters on the other hand are perfectly safe and exactly the thing one wants to have inside an airplane cabin so that deranged people like Richard Reid can use them to explode bombs.
Where's the logic, reason, understanding, intelligence...oh, sorry, had momentarily forgotten who it was that paid for the current government in the first place. Sigh.
Full story.
Finally the killer application that will convert the masses!
Better start dancing Ballmer, if you want to beat this...
No you're not the only one left, but it's getting damn hard to survive out there. I own three pieces of pure Detroit steel (i.e. late sixties/early seventies), but just getting hold of UNC/UNF bolts and nuts is starting to become a real problem.
Of course I don't mind some modern cars...my Audi does have a 4.2l (256cui) V8 after all...
Is it just me or is Scott loosing focus?
His interview was filled with wonderful contradictions like:
- IBM & HP are stupidly throwing away all their UNIX knowledge and going all for Linux. We wouldn't do anything like that.
vs.
- The OS is just the plumbing which upon you build the real value-add.
Eh...what's really happening here, Scotty?
Is this one of these "Let's build a completely portable programming environments so that we can sell more of our proprietary hardware!" moments?
I thought you had it about right until it came to the "63 marketing analysts".
Anybody who's ever worked with marketing knows that there are not 63 marketing analysts available in the whole world.
If we on the other hand talk about "Marketing Managers", "Marketing Directors" or "Marketing Presidents", then you could have a million of them. On the dozen.
True, but if you look a little bit closer at the Cutter Consortium and the people involved you'll find one consulting organisation that actually has such an amount of experience and skill that everybody should listen. They produce an excellent Cutter's Journal which contains some of the most interesting articles on methodology issues I've read. Shame that a subscription is about the Mexican GNP per year though.
peace.mil
As for more traditional corporations, where most of the dot-com hype was never adopted anyway, the current change is rather positive than negative.
Finally, 20 years after Peopleware, it seems like people have actually started to notice that people and teams are first-order effects. The current agility hype is sure helping. (Let's hope it doesn't go too far...)
I recently managed to convince a (very traditional) organisation to go for dual monitors for a team of developers (14 ppl). That would just not have happened a couple of years ago.
I'm sorry Paul Rush, but you are a moron.
...F77 is what you rely upon.
To calculate aircraft performance (i.e. can we take off with x passengers on this airfield that happens to have a big mountain at the end of the runway?) all (no exceptions) airlines use F77 calculation modules that are provided by the aircraft manufacturers.
These calculations are, at least in my book, as close to mission critical as you can come. Do it slightly wrong and you may end up in the safety net at the end of the runway. Do it majorly wrong and you hit the aforementioned mountain...
The modules are reasonably complex (up to 100k loc without a GUI), in strict F77 with the mess that that brings along and are written by Aerospace majors who, if they were lucky, got a 3 week course in F77 at University.
The obvious question is why?
- F77 is the most suitable language for the problem?
- Aerospace engineers like F77?
- It's an international conspiracy?
Unfortunately the last one is closest to the truth. The modules are coded according to a standard decided by IATA - International Air Transport Association (http://www.iata.org). A standard that was created some 20 years ago and with regards to F77 of course has not changed since... Why? Because the airlines knows how to handle these modules. The I/O and behaviour is well documented and understood and to change to something even resembling modern CS practices (even F90 would be a giant leap forwards!) would require huge investments for the airlines. Something they are of course not too willing to do. There are some reason for the currently ridiculously low (in comparison) fares we pay.
Oh, and by the way, the modules are of course not in any way certified by whatever competent authority there may exist. No, in general they prove their worth by the good old method of "service history".
PS. I have not given up flying just because I've experienced this. All aircraft operations have a rather large safety margin built in. For the "ouch" picture above with the very hard mountain top, we would also need to lose one engine. This in combination with the fact that the "service history" criteria seems to work pretty good still makes flying safer than walking...