IE allows to develop a page rapidly and make it look pretty in IE only I dunno, on my current project I had to develop a prototype/mock-up of our web GUI. I stuck IE7 on one monitor, FF2 on the other and pointed them both to the page I was working on. Edit, save, click "Refresh" on two browsers and see exactly what the clients will see. Worked just the same when I got the layout done and started working on the javascript.
Fortunately, it's a web app, not a shopping site. I'm sure I'd have the same problems real web designers have if I had to have lots of flashy graphics with curved corners and rollovers and whatnot. Still, it's not a problem developing on two different browsers simultaneously — unless you've got a morbid fear of hand-editing HTML...
People aren't going to blame MSFT for their Google apps not working I'm not so sure. If person A relies heavily on Google app foo (does Google have an e-Bay sniping app?), and they upgrade to a new box with Vista on it, and suddenly foo doesn't work, they'll hound their PC supplier. And when the PC supplier tells them that foo doesn't work on Vista, they'll likely threaten to send the PC back. And when the supplier offers to install Linux on it to make foo work...who can say what will happen? If they're already using OpenOffice, Thunderbird and FireFox, what difference will it really make? A new OS is a new OS, right?;)
<reality>Until they try to install that cute greeting card creator and it won't run...</reality>
I'm not sure how you decided Perforce is a "barely mid-level player" in the SCM market Why, by using only the finest in high-tech market player profiling, to whit: I Googled for "<scm system> configuration management" and noted how many hits each got. My list worked out to:
If we assume that # of hits == market share[1], then Perforce has 4.65% of the market. I realize this isn't the case, but I thought the results would be at least roughly indicative of relative ranking. This may be a Really Bad Idea (SM), and I'd happily fall on my sword if anyone could post some real figures (or even some from Gartner). I found some during my searches, but they were all several years old, so I didn't really consider them.
I'm sure these results are well worth the price you paid for them. Now if I could only get reimbursed for the fifteen minutes or so it took me to compile them... --- [1] I could probably get a patent on this idea, it's so good...
Good idea, building on a closed-source SCMS that's (barely!) a mid-level player in the market. I can understand not wanting ClearCase, but what's wrong with CVS or Subversion? Hell, even Monotone or GNU Arch...
Oh well, could be worse: they could have gone with StarTeam, PVCS or MKS Source Integrity...
but it's all those Add-ons to Exchange that Executives HAVE to have that are the killer to migrating away from it.Yep. If you don't have a BlackBerry conduit, you're not going to get much buy-in from companies with more than a couple hundred employees.
I bought an old HP LaserJet 4M+ a couple of years ago specifically because this model is built like a tank, performs fairly well even by today's standards...You can do this sort of thing with many electronics items...older flaky used electronics have failed already, leaving behind the survivors that were manufactured well
Precisely why I bought a Tek 547. Built like a tank, performs well ("only" 50MHz of bandwidth, but I've gotten 40+MHz out of two channels simultaneously), probably about as old as I am (...), and eminently servicible[0]. EMP-hard (all tubes!) and quite affordable, too. A new two-channel 50MHz scope would run you over $500, but a used Tek scope with similar capabilities will run you closer to $100 (I picked my 547 up for $25 at a garage sale). Of course, you need to find one locally, as they weigh a bit (where "bit" is defined as ">50lbs")...
One thing to keep in mind is that newer devices tend to be more power-efficient. The aforementioned 547 eats 500W (!), a newer scope probably won't break 30W. I've heard people recommend that you replace the refrigerator when you buy a house if the fridge is more than five years old, as you'll save enough money over its lifetime to justify the cost. So planned obsolesence may not be as evil as it might appear on the surface.
[0] Except for the main power transformer, which is disturbingly complex for such a simple component.
those who have experience sever [sic] problems are not doing something right
Like creating large tables with multiple indexes? SQL Server is infamous for corrupting data and indexes when things get too big for it to handle (tables over 500GB w/ 10+ indexes). There's a reason why big shops like to run DBCC CHECKDB once a week or so...
Not to mention the fact that Oracle has optimized just about every function far beyond what can reasonably be maintained. The amount of special-case code scattered throughout the system means that fixing a bug requires that you test lots of odd-wad configurations and test loads. If the special case in the data loader that lets (say) Exxon-Mobil load a couple terabytes of data in three hours instead of a weekend introduces a new bug, do you think they'll honk off a major account or patch around it?
Plus consider all the strange stuff that Oracle supports that doesn't exactly follow standard relational practices (like nested tables) or even relational theory (like arrays). Sometimes it's a wonder their stuff works at all, let alone as well as it does...
Read this interview and then tell me if you'd play anything recommended by "analysts". These people are paid to analyze industries and trends, not games and consoles. It's like asking a commodities broker which grocer has the best bananas! I'd far sooner trust a gaming journalist. They're far less likely to judge a game based on "genre coverage" as opposed to actual gameplay...
Until we are all communicating to each other via satellite
I don't know that we'll ever all be doing that. Punching a signal several hundred kms (vs. 8-20 with a GSM phone) takes either a fair amount of power or a big antenna, either of which makes the phone heavier and more bulky. Big and bulky phones won't sell, no matter how many ringtones/videos/games they can store. Better power sources may help, but if you shrink the antenna, you're going to have to use more power, and people are already concerned about microwaving their brains. When word gets out that you're pushing more than three times the power (7W as opposed to 2W on a GSM phone), people are going to avoid them like the plague (so to speak)[0].
There's also the issue with needing a line-of-sight shot to the satellite to contend with. While I heartily endorse the practice of stepping outside to make a phone call (for other people...;), that's probably the biggest stumbling block. Until we all get our flying cars with the bubble windows, of course. --- [0] Interestingly, a quadrafiliar helix antenna (suitable for satellite work) actually radiates less power horizontally (i.e., towards the head) than a typical monopole (standard cell phone antenna). This is per unit of power, though, and it's not enough less to compensate for trebling the power output.
I'd also recommend looking at the factory pattern. Whenever you need a form/page/screen, you just instantiate the appropriate factory and have it create the form/page/screen. The factory will know what widget set you're using, what OS you're targeting, and what device the GUI should work on. Typically you'll make a generic GUI factory, then subclass it for the particular widget set you're using.
Try to design your GUI so that it can assemble itself (via a layout manager or templating system). This makes the actual construction of the GUI a non-event, since you don't actually do it, the layout manager does. Adding a new control or rearranging the layout is pretty simple. It can be a bit harder if you're trying to create something fancy, but it can also make following corporate standards easier, since once you've got your layout manager configured, all the forms/pages/screens it produces will fit the standard.
It sounds kind of odd to me. If they're a heat sink when producing electricity, wouldn't running current through them turn them into a heat source? Obviously I didn't RTFA, but that made my bogometer twitch. Seems like some sort of reflexive property is being violated.
One thing I've noticed (which may or may not be real) is that my daughter seems to grow in her sleep. She'll enter a period (usually days) of increased appetite and activity, then one night she'll be very sleepy and go to bed early and I'll swear the next morning she's taller. She also has a definite decrease in stomach size, although whether this is related to fat-burning or an overall increase in body size I couldn't say.
Again, all apochyphal information, I haven't actually done before-and-after measurements. Still, there's a noticable difference, and after the growth spurt her appetite and activity level return to normal. So sleep may be a necessary component of the body's growth/repair mechanisms. It would be interesting to see if people who take this sleep-counteracting compound take longer to heal.
Re:Your pattern suggests "mechanical thinking"
on
You Call This Agile?
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· Score: 1
Remember the discussion wasn't about "important skills for developers", it was about the difference between the role of an Admin and a developer
No, the side discussion I started was about developer skills (or at least an indicator thereof). I thought the changed subject was clearly indicative; clearly, it was not (to everyone). I was just offering an observation triggered by the "programmers need to stop behaving like prima donnas" comment in the parent. In the future, I'll be sure to flag things more clearly. To tie this in with the parent thread, I'll offer up the additional observation that one trait that good developers and good admins share is the itch to fix a broken system, whether it's a borked XML schema or a misconfigured router. Breathing easier now?
It was you who first suggested a link between a copier and development skills, which you're now backing away from.
Nope, you're still missing the point. You can't seem to make the connection that clearing paper jams is an application of the ability to perform failure analysis. If you can't analyze the failure mode of a fairly simple system, how well are you going to be able to perform a failure analysis on a complex one? And again, the drive to fix an obviously broken system should spur the failure analysis in the first place.
Gotta love that revisionist history
The only revision necessary was to simplify the explanation for the target audience. I'll try to be less subtle in the future.
Re:Your pattern suggests "mechanical thinking"
on
You Call This Agile?
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· Score: 1
the "inner workings" of software have little in common with those of a copier
Gee, y'think? I didn't say that learning copier repair would make you a better programmer, I said that the ability to effectively analyze unfamiliar systems was an important skill for developers to have.
I guess you forgot to say "Unless one wants"
Nope, I was using the generic you. Using "one" as a pronoun always sounds stilted and artificial to me, but whatever floats your boat (sorry, "floats one's boat").
I apologize if you felt emasculated, I didn't mean to sound scornful of junior coders. I've just worked with too many that thought they were hot shit until their code failed the first time it left their development sandbox. Then you find out "Oh, I'm using a feature from the experimental branch of the database driver, you have to use this version of the library". Much quick education about using stable release versions ensues. But I'm sure you know all this — after all, you're a hot-shit developer, and I'm just a lowly copier repairman...
I must have missed where Japan conquered 51%+ of the area east of the Ural mountains.
They didn't &mdash China did. They just adopted the name "Japan" as it had better brand recognition. Unfortunately, due to censorship issues, the news hasn't gotten out yet...
Actually, the skills required for clearing a paper jam have little in common with the skills required for software development.
Actually, the ability to look into the inner workings of a failed system and determine the cause of failure and effect a solution are pretty primary to software development (as opposed to writing code, which is only a part of SD). Unless you want to be a junior coder forever, so you can ignore integration and deployment issues ("If the architect had done his job right, this wouldn't be a problem, so don't expect ME to fix it!").
So now you know why you can't always find the paper to clear.
The clearing of the paper is incidental, the real issue is making the machine usable again. If there's no paper jammed, you still have to flip open all the covers to let the controller know to re-check the sensors. Our lame fax/copier here seems to have two states: sleep and jammed. Usually all you have to do is flip the top cover open and closed and it resets itself, but as far as I can tell I'm the only one here who's figured that out...
Look around when you're being shown around your prospective work area. If the printer, copier or fax machine is blinking that it needs paper/toner/reset, you're not walking around in a "high-tech" environment. Developers who can't figure out how to clear a paper jam probably aren't going to be much help when their code won't deploy properly in production, either.
Real developers know how to reset the printer, because they had to do it a couple hundred times when they were trying to figure out how to encode and download the Tengwar fonts to it...
Re:The real advantage to Agile...
on
You Call This Agile?
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· Score: 2, Informative
if you are making life-saving heart monitor software, you had better fix a bug the moment it comes up
Dunno, I would think in that case you'd want a more heavy-weight process, with lots of QA and regression testing. I mean, it's not like there's a guy sitting in a doctor's office with a CAT-5 cable plugged into his chest, waiting for you to download PaceMaker 1.1-A...
Pressed/stamped CDs (like commercial audio CDs) age fairly well, given appropriate handling (well, at least my 20yo copy of Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ is still playable). Recordable CDs, however, aren't stamped. Instead, they use a phase-changing dye. Some of the earliest used a blue dye (cyananaline?) that wasn't stable and degraded after just a few years (10). Even discs with better dyes are sometimes not sealed properly and can go bad.
That said, there are some newer dyes that are claimed to be stable for a hundred years. I haven't ever seen these in stores, so they may be seriously expensive, or maybe I just don't know where to shop...;)
Keeping 'a copy of every program' is tractable, 'and a system to run them on' however is not.
Depends on how deep your pockets are. There's a warehouse in eastern PA that has a MicroVAX, a couple of VT240s and an extensive collection of TK50s holding scads of MOL files and pre-clinical trials data "just in case". Not sure if they'll revive everything and re-package it now that there are VAX emulators available, but if you've got data worth (potentially) several hundred million dollars, you'll go to extensive lengths to keep it available. I strongly suspect that these guys have not only the MV, but enough schematics to enable them to recreate some form of VAX, even if they have to cobble up something from FPGAs.
Re:How did they get the book out so fast
on
CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
I don't just go to the store and buy the first book I see, I read the reviews to make sure I'm buying the right one. Is this different from what the average Joe does?
Probably. From what I've noticed, most average Joes will go to the bookstore to get (say) "a CSS book". They flip through all the CSS books on the shelf, and pick whichever one seems to do the best job of covering whatever aspect of CSS they're trying to get a handle on at the time. Sometimes, they just grab the O'Reilly/Wrox/Addison Wesley/whatever book, because they either trust the brand or prefer the style. Regardless, that's typically the extent of their research.
I can't say that's bad, because I have wasted a fair amount of time trying to get by with on-line references because my local bookstore[0] didn't have the book that sounded the best, when I could have just gotten any book on the topic and made better progress.
[0] The one that has a case labeled "Java Development" with a shelf and a half of Java books and four and a half of C# books...
When I was in college (lo these many years ago), I had a class where we discussed language design and implementation. We had to write programs in FORTRAN, Snobol, Lisp, PL/I and Concurrent Euclid. We also had to study the run-time implementation of each. Ever since then, I've never had a problem learning a new language. I've even helped people debug programs in langauges I didn't know, since you can often discern details of the run-time from the structure of the code and the way the error messages are worded.
I almost wonder if it isn't time for CS to fork. One branch can be the "ivory tower" branch where they can argue over how many traveling salesmen can dance on the head of a pin, and what really constitutes a minimal perfect spanning tree. The other can be the "engineering" branch, where students learn assembly language, language and compiler design, OS design and implementation, and how to design and analyze effective algorithms. Cover the theory behind practical software development, but emphasize the practical over the theoretical.
<WAX mode="philosophical">The best CS class I had was the one where we implemented the UNIX V6 file system. In Pascal. It was a nasty, second-year weed-out course, but everyone who made it through learned so much more about software development (especially advanced debugging techniques), it was almost as though learning the actual course material was a bonus.</WAX>
Imagine the laughs if a new car was brought out which required the engine to be on all the time - because if you turned it off you cannot unlock the doors.
Dunno, I've owned several cars that had to have the ignition on before the radio would work...
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, it's a web app, not a shopping site. I'm sure I'd have the same problems real web designers have if I had to have lots of flashy graphics with curved corners and rollovers and whatnot. Still, it's not a problem developing on two different browsers simultaneously — unless you've got a morbid fear of hand-editing HTML...
<reality>Until they try to install that cute greeting card creator and it won't run...</reality>
2.8M — Clear Case
2.8M — CVS
2.4M — Visual Source Safe
1.8M — Subversion
1.1M — CCC/Harvest (now CA AllFusion Harvest)
900K — RCS
665K — Perforce
536K — PVCS
378K — Aegis
376K — Monotone
186K — BitKeeper
154K — StarTeam
101K — AllChange
68K — GNU Arch
29K — Continuus
16K — MKS Source Integrity
If we assume that # of hits == market share[1], then Perforce has 4.65% of the market. I realize this isn't the case, but I thought the results would be at least roughly indicative of relative ranking. This may be a Really Bad Idea (SM), and I'd happily fall on my sword if anyone could post some real figures (or even some from Gartner). I found some during my searches, but they were all several years old, so I didn't really consider them.
I'm sure these results are well worth the price you paid for them. Now if I could only get reimbursed for the fifteen minutes or so it took me to compile them...
---
[1] I could probably get a patent on this idea, it's so good...
Good idea, building on a closed-source SCMS that's (barely!) a mid-level player in the market. I can understand not wanting ClearCase, but what's wrong with CVS or Subversion? Hell, even Monotone or GNU Arch...
Oh well, could be worse: they could have gone with StarTeam, PVCS or MKS Source Integrity...
but it's all those Add-ons to Exchange that Executives HAVE to have that are the killer to migrating away from it.Yep. If you don't have a BlackBerry conduit, you're not going to get much buy-in from companies with more than a couple hundred employees.
One thing to keep in mind is that newer devices tend to be more power-efficient. The aforementioned 547 eats 500W (!), a newer scope probably won't break 30W. I've heard people recommend that you replace the refrigerator when you buy a house if the fridge is more than five years old, as you'll save enough money over its lifetime to justify the cost. So planned obsolesence may not be as evil as it might appear on the surface.
[0] Except for the main power transformer, which is disturbingly complex for such a simple component.
Not to mention the fact that Oracle has optimized just about every function far beyond what can reasonably be maintained. The amount of special-case code scattered throughout the system means that fixing a bug requires that you test lots of odd-wad configurations and test loads. If the special case in the data loader that lets (say) Exxon-Mobil load a couple terabytes of data in three hours instead of a weekend introduces a new bug, do you think they'll honk off a major account or patch around it?
Plus consider all the strange stuff that Oracle supports that doesn't exactly follow standard relational practices (like nested tables) or even relational theory (like arrays). Sometimes it's a wonder their stuff works at all, let alone as well as it does...
Read this interview and then tell me if you'd play anything recommended by "analysts". These people are paid to analyze industries and trends, not games and consoles. It's like asking a commodities broker which grocer has the best bananas! I'd far sooner trust a gaming journalist. They're far less likely to judge a game based on "genre coverage" as opposed to actual gameplay...
There's also the issue with needing a line-of-sight shot to the satellite to contend with. While I heartily endorse the practice of stepping outside to make a phone call (for other people...
---
[0] Interestingly, a quadrafiliar helix antenna (suitable for satellite work) actually radiates less power horizontally (i.e., towards the head) than a typical monopole (standard cell phone antenna). This is per unit of power, though, and it's not enough less to compensate for trebling the power output.
When I used to go to Argentina, everyone there just called it a "mobi". This was ten years ago.
I'd also recommend looking at the factory pattern. Whenever you need a form/page/screen, you just instantiate the appropriate factory and have it create the form/page/screen. The factory will know what widget set you're using, what OS you're targeting, and what device the GUI should work on. Typically you'll make a generic GUI factory, then subclass it for the particular widget set you're using.
Try to design your GUI so that it can assemble itself (via a layout manager or templating system). This makes the actual construction of the GUI a non-event, since you don't actually do it, the layout manager does. Adding a new control or rearranging the layout is pretty simple. It can be a bit harder if you're trying to create something fancy, but it can also make following corporate standards easier, since once you've got your layout manager configured, all the forms/pages/screens it produces will fit the standard.
It sounds kind of odd to me. If they're a heat sink when producing electricity, wouldn't running current through them turn them into a heat source? Obviously I didn't RTFA, but that made my bogometer twitch. Seems like some sort of reflexive property is being violated.
One thing I've noticed (which may or may not be real) is that my daughter seems to grow in her sleep. She'll enter a period (usually days) of increased appetite and activity, then one night she'll be very sleepy and go to bed early and I'll swear the next morning she's taller. She also has a definite decrease in stomach size, although whether this is related to fat-burning or an overall increase in body size I couldn't say.
Again, all apochyphal information, I haven't actually done before-and-after measurements. Still, there's a noticable difference, and after the growth spurt her appetite and activity level return to normal. So sleep may be a necessary component of the body's growth/repair mechanisms. It would be interesting to see if people who take this sleep-counteracting compound take longer to heal.
Nope, you're still missing the point. You can't seem to make the connection that clearing paper jams is an application of the ability to perform failure analysis. If you can't analyze the failure mode of a fairly simple system, how well are you going to be able to perform a failure analysis on a complex one? And again, the drive to fix an obviously broken system should spur the failure analysis in the first place.
The only revision necessary was to simplify the explanation for the target audience. I'll try to be less subtle in the future.
Nope, I was using the generic you. Using "one" as a pronoun always sounds stilted and artificial to me, but whatever floats your boat (sorry, "floats one's boat").
I apologize if you felt emasculated, I didn't mean to sound scornful of junior coders. I've just worked with too many that thought they were hot shit until their code failed the first time it left their development sandbox. Then you find out "Oh, I'm using a feature from the experimental branch of the database driver, you have to use this version of the library". Much quick education about using stable release versions ensues. But I'm sure you know all this — after all, you're a hot-shit developer, and I'm just a lowly copier repairman...
They didn't &mdash China did. They just adopted the name "Japan" as it had better brand recognition. Unfortunately, due to censorship issues, the news hasn't gotten out yet...
Actually, the ability to look into the inner workings of a failed system and determine the cause of failure and effect a solution are pretty primary to software development (as opposed to writing code, which is only a part of SD). Unless you want to be a junior coder forever, so you can ignore integration and deployment issues ("If the architect had done his job right, this wouldn't be a problem, so don't expect ME to fix it!").
The clearing of the paper is incidental, the real issue is making the machine usable again. If there's no paper jammed, you still have to flip open all the covers to let the controller know to re-check the sensors. Our lame fax/copier here seems to have two states: sleep and jammed. Usually all you have to do is flip the top cover open and closed and it resets itself, but as far as I can tell I'm the only one here who's figured that out...
Look around when you're being shown around your prospective work area. If the printer, copier or fax machine is blinking that it needs paper/toner/reset, you're not walking around in a "high-tech" environment. Developers who can't figure out how to clear a paper jam probably aren't going to be much help when their code won't deploy properly in production, either.
Real developers know how to reset the printer, because they had to do it a couple hundred times when they were trying to figure out how to encode and download the Tengwar fonts to it...
Dunno, I would think in that case you'd want a more heavy-weight process, with lots of QA and regression testing. I mean, it's not like there's a guy sitting in a doctor's office with a CAT-5 cable plugged into his chest, waiting for you to download PaceMaker 1.1-A...
Pressed/stamped CDs (like commercial audio CDs) age fairly well, given appropriate handling (well, at least my 20yo copy of Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ is still playable). Recordable CDs, however, aren't stamped. Instead, they use a phase-changing dye. Some of the earliest used a blue dye (cyananaline?) that wasn't stable and degraded after just a few years (10). Even discs with better dyes are sometimes not sealed properly and can go bad.
;)
That said, there are some newer dyes that are claimed to be stable for a hundred years. I haven't ever seen these in stores, so they may be seriously expensive, or maybe I just don't know where to shop...
Depends on how deep your pockets are. There's a warehouse in eastern PA that has a MicroVAX, a couple of VT240s and an extensive collection of TK50s holding scads of MOL files and pre-clinical trials data "just in case". Not sure if they'll revive everything and re-package it now that there are VAX emulators available, but if you've got data worth (potentially) several hundred million dollars, you'll go to extensive lengths to keep it available. I strongly suspect that these guys have not only the MV, but enough schematics to enable them to recreate some form of VAX, even if they have to cobble up something from FPGAs.
Probably. From what I've noticed, most average Joes will go to the bookstore to get (say) "a CSS book". They flip through all the CSS books on the shelf, and pick whichever one seems to do the best job of covering whatever aspect of CSS they're trying to get a handle on at the time. Sometimes, they just grab the O'Reilly/Wrox/Addison Wesley/whatever book, because they either trust the brand or prefer the style. Regardless, that's typically the extent of their research.
I can't say that's bad, because I have wasted a fair amount of time trying to get by with on-line references because my local bookstore[0] didn't have the book that sounded the best, when I could have just gotten any book on the topic and made better progress.
[0] The one that has a case labeled "Java Development" with a shelf and a half of Java books and four and a half of C# books...
When I was in college (lo these many years ago), I had a class where we discussed language design and implementation. We had to write programs in FORTRAN, Snobol, Lisp, PL/I and Concurrent Euclid. We also had to study the run-time implementation of each. Ever since then, I've never had a problem learning a new language. I've even helped people debug programs in langauges I didn't know, since you can often discern details of the run-time from the structure of the code and the way the error messages are worded.
I almost wonder if it isn't time for CS to fork. One branch can be the "ivory tower" branch where they can argue over how many traveling salesmen can dance on the head of a pin, and what really constitutes a minimal perfect spanning tree. The other can be the "engineering" branch, where students learn assembly language, language and compiler design, OS design and implementation, and how to design and analyze effective algorithms. Cover the theory behind practical software development, but emphasize the practical over the theoretical.
<WAX mode="philosophical">The best CS class I had was the one where we implemented the UNIX V6 file system. In Pascal. It was a nasty, second-year weed-out course, but everyone who made it through learned so much more about software development (especially advanced debugging techniques), it was almost as though learning the actual course material was a bonus.</WAX>
Dunno, I've owned several cars that had to have the ignition on before the radio would work...