One way get a sense of what computers will be like at a certain point in the future is to look an equal distance into the past. This approach isn't accurate and can't account for factors such as unexpected technological leaps or setbacks, but it's still a pretty good starting point.
I recently purchased an used book called Computer Systems in Business: An Introduction recently. Published in 1986, it features computer systems that seem pretty quaint almost two decades later.
One clever thing the book does is discuss the concept of P, a relative-cost measure for dicussing how much computers cost in light of the opposing forces of inflation and Moore's Law which make costs difficult to forecast in actual currency. P is equal to the average cost or value of a standard microcomputer system, which at the time consisted of...
CPU
Main memory (256K)
Keyboard
Monitor (they specified monochrome)
Two diskette drives
Dot matrix printer
The book does mention some things that seem pretty quaint these days: main memory for some larger micros exceeded 2 megabytes in 1985, two diskette drives would give you a total on-line storage capacity of a megabyte, and my favourite line: "A Winchester is sometimes called a hard disk."
The books goes on to discuss minicomputers (6 megs memory with 200 ns access time, 8K cache and 1.8 gig of hard disk -- er, Winchester -- space. Only when the book gets to mainframes do the machine specs seem somewhere in line with a machine you could probably buy at your local appliance shop...
A diagram of a typical 1985 mainframe system is shown in figure 7-17. Main memory size is 64 megabytes, and access time is 60 nanoseconds. The system also has a small (64K) cache memory. In the typical mainframe system, the access time for cache memory (35 nsec) is 1.7 times more rapid than that for main memory.
The diagram, which I can't include in this posting, shows 35 disk drives of 800 megabytes each (28 gigs total). In P units, the cost of such a beast was 1,043, or about $3.6 million dollars.
If we assume that the rate of tech progress over the next 15 years is roughly the same as the past 15, we have a starting point for visualizing what the average personal computer of 2015 could be like -- simply look at machines that cost about a thousand times more than the Celeron 600 at Circuit City.
Then, in the best/. traditon, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!
A well written Java app can be quite fast too. It's the many VB programmers who jumped on the Java bandwagon and use IDEs, misconfigured application servers, producing what they think is good code that give Java a bad wrap.
Speaking of bad raps, it's quite easy to get one simply by saying you code in VB. There are many bad VB programmers out there, but that's becuase of the sheer volume of VB programmers out there. VB and its notorious cousin, VBScript, are the Perl of the M$ world; given Windoze's market share, it's no surprise that there's a large number of VB programmers out there, and naturally you'll have a large number of bad ones. You'll also find many good ones.
However, bad VB programmers make a subset of the many bad programmers doing bad work in every language. One of the benefits of open source software is that I've had a chance to see how many bad C, C++ and Perl programmers are out there. Especially Perl. If you think that VB programmers are a piss-poor lot, then go look at some open source Perl code on Freshmeat or SourceForge some time -- you'll swear these people rode the short bus to school. You'll see brittle code, coupling on an near molecular level, barely cohesive modules, and a style that would make you think they were going for job security through code obscurity. For an excellent start, look at some early versions of Slashdot's source }:)
VB's object model is actually decent. It feeds off Java's, and with version 7 (if the announcements surrounding VS7 are to be believed), the object models will be kissing cousins. VB7 will have inheritance (finally), constructors, variable declaration/initialization on the same line and method overloading. VB in its current state has property procedures, which are syntactically sweeter that creating get/set methods in Java. Some of the best Java programmers I've seem came there from VB, and some of the worst have come from C++ (particularly those who just used it as a souped-up C).
As for IDEs, I think auto-complete (or Intellisense) is the programmer's greatest blessing, especially when developing in languages with large class libraries. As for drawing the user interface rather than hand-coding it, I say great! Anything that allows me to hand over UI design to a proper interface designer who cares about human factors over coder cred is fine by me. I think IDE developers should concentrate on making the GUI code that their IDEs generate better -- Borland have proven it's possible with Delphi and C++Builder.
I think clothing manufactures are convincing media to run stories saying that people are far more productive and feel better about themselves when they are dressed professionally.
Wasn't it the other way around? I remember reading that the trend towards "casual Fridays" started from a survey conducted by Levi's.
I think imperative programming languages tend to be more popular than functional programming languages for the same reason that reversepolishnotation calculators are less popular than those using standard notation. . A standard notation calculator should fill a good number of common needs, but when the going gets hairy, there's nothing like an RPN calculator to do the job quickly.
The same applies to programming languages. For many programming tasks, the imperative model will serve you well, but there are times -- especially when repetitive, recursive or just plain mathematically complex tasks are involved -- that a good functional language is exactly what you need.
Well, if anything, it proves that while technology is in and of itself politically neutral, no technology is born in a political vaccuum.
I just finished reading the "Philosophy" section of Fling's Sourceforge site and I've got that same creepy feeling I always get whenever I see a Randroid running at full tilt. I get the feeling that many geeks latch onto Rand because she appeals to their revenge fantasies.
I have no disagreement with the personal responsibility aspects of Objectivism -- ultimately, each one of us has to sleep in the bed that he or she made. The "me first always" stance really bothers me though. The blanket assumption that the disadvantaged are that way because they earned it or are lazy and incompetent smacks of the purely greedy kind of thinking that may end up being our ultimate demise.
Staying in touch with friends and family is an extremely big thing among Filipinos. Neal Stephenson hit the nail right on the head when he wrote this in Cryptonomicon:
``They will want to communicate with their families--the Filipinos are incredibly family-oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch of alienated loners.''
I think it's fair to say that this is one of those cases where a technology turns out to have a pretty good "fit" with the culture.
(A balikbayan is a Filipino living abroad who's returning home for a visit).
I go back to the Philippines to visit relatives about once a year; my last visit there spanned a week in late March/early April. I was there for the "Pope is dead" rumour, which thanks to a combination of "texting", word-of-mouth and the strong Catholicism (it was a Spanish colony for 300 years), spread like wildfire. I got to see and experience texting first-hand.
One reason for the high adoption of cell phones is that the wait for a land line is incredibly long. My cousins, who live in a suburb of Manila, were on the installation waiting list for over a year. For many people, the only way to get a phone within a reasonable period of time is to go mobile.
A mobile phone is a very handy thing in the Philippines, especially in extremely crowded cities like Manila, with a population of about 10 million (and a possible 2 or 3 million transients who get missed in the surveys). Traffic is so bad that they had to establish a system in which certain roads are off-limits to cars with odd- or even-numbered license plates at peak times, depending on the day. Running late is a common occurrence, and having a cell phone means that you can reach anyone who's waiting for you or find out how late the person you're waiting for will be.
Texting is much cheaper than using up your air time. There are many popular cell phone plans that offer 100 or 250 free text messages per month. Among the teen- and 20-something crowd, texting is most often used to let your friends know where you are or where to meet up. It proved to be extremely handy in "The Fort" -- a very popular and crowded mall of bars, clubs and restaurants located in an area similar to San Francisco's Presidio (along with the new club, Orange, it's a fun place to hang out...tell 'em I sent you).
There are services already available in the Philippines that we here in North America have yet to see. Some banks in the Philippines offer ATM-like functions over your cell phone -- you can check your bank account or be notified of things like payments due or maturing funds.
(In case you were wondering, the two official languages of the country are Filipino and English. Most of the people in Manila speak workable or better English, and most of the signage in Manila is in English.)
Every shopping center and more than a few street market stalls carry cell phones or cell phone accessories. I'm still kicking myself for not getting the Neon Genesis Evangelion face plate for my Nokia. My cousin has one of the phones with a flash RAM updateable ringer. His current phone ring is Aqua's "Barbie Girl", which somehow appals and amuses me at the same time.
As for the cultural aspects -- there's "hiya" (pronounced "hee-YA"), which can be translated as "shyness", "shame" or perhaps "reserve". It's a traditional Filipino trait not to be too outspoken, but you have to remember that a fair bit of North American culture has seeped in, thanks to a large expatriate community, radio and television. Traditionally, you were introduced to members of the opposite sex at well-chaperoned parties held at someones' parents house (many people still don't leave home until they're married there), but these days meeting people while out is increasingly becoming the norm. The teens and twenty-somethings are caught in the pull between the traditional and newer ways to socialize -- it seems that texting seems to be the best compromise. Perhaps texting might be the future of geek pick-ups at Linux conventions!
Just another "The Thrilla from Manila", Master of Kode Fu
So while M$ avoids all mention of Java in its C# docs, they do have one of their big Java guys playing a key role in its development. Interesting.
P.S. Apparently, if you make something of interest to a large enough group of people, someone will set up a web page tribute to you. Anders' tribute page is here.
That's the National Post's misspelling, not ours. But what do I know? The last time I saw the expression dy/dx, I tried to simplify it by saying "Hey look! The d's cancel out!"
National Post:...Steelbridge has brewed up a few thousand cases of cola -- the soft drink -- and will print the recipe and some computer code on each can...
That should read "will be brewing up a few thousand cases of cola." It's not ready yet.
National Post: Open Source is a model of software development in which the creators release the source code to a product for free and encourage others to share it, copy it, and modify it, with the caveat that it cannot be sold.
I'm still wincing from reading this, and that was hours ago. I am certain beyond doubt that nobody at the company told them that.
National Post:...John Henson, the 24-year-old chief technology officer...
While at the Macromedia Developer Conference in '97, I had the chance to meet John "JT" Thompson, who developed the Lingo language for Macromedia's Director project. He said that he wanted to create a language that anyone -- even kids -- could use to create rich multimedia apps -- that was his graphics arts medial coming through. He also wanted it to be a powerful programming language -- his computer engineering medial showing.
As for Director's high price, there is an academic edition of Director that you can buy at college campuses or any other place they teach new media design. It's considerably cheaper and the only difference is that compiled apps show the "Made with Educational Version" nag window at the beginning.
That statement was made almost 20 years ago, when BASIC had devolved into the numbered-line version that was included in most personal computer ROMs of that day. Even BASIC's creator's, Kemeny and Kurtz, denounced such versions and wrote a book called Back to BASIC in which they lambasted these "street BASICs." The BASIC that Dijkstra was talking about is quite different from today's variants, such as Visual Basic or REALBasic.
You might also find the commentary on what Dijkstra said here.
I think that too much of anything is a bad thing. You can be just as obsessed about anything other than computers, whether it's a sport, reading, an art form or musical instrument. While I do agree that having people skills and "emotional intelligence" (as it's being called these days) is very important, I also think that the "programming will stunt your social development" card is a little overplayed. There's no hard and fast rule that says coding skills and social skills are mutually exclusive.
I'll risk any "face" I may lose by suggesting this here on/., but I would strongly recommend VB as a great programming language to get your kids started. I'm a firm believer of having the applications and OS match your goals and not the other way around, as because of this, I would have to recommend the Windoze/VB approach. This being/., I figure I should don the asbestos hoodie and justify my this, so here goes...
1. VB is a direct descendant of BASIC (the B in which stood for "Beginner's") a language designed with the beginner in mind. The language, as it currently exists as Visual Basic is pretty decent, containing a complete set of decent control structures, data structures and a fair chunk of OOP stuff (it's missing inheritance and overloading -- there are Java-style interfaces, though). A previous poster suggested C, which I don't feel is a beginner's language -- you have to know a little bit more about computers and programming before using it.
2. Intellisense. No more riffling through manuals or help files just to find out what arguments a function takes or what methods and properties are available to an object -- they appear in a pop-up box as you type. This has proven to be so nice that this feature now appears in Borland's IDEs too. I like this kind of thing because it lets you concentrate on learning the abstract concepts and leaving the rote memorization for later.
3. Quicker satisfaction curve. Your kids are using Windows, and I think it would be more satisfying to them if they wrote programs that looked like Windows apps. They'd still be learning the same basic concepts of algorithms and data structures whether or not their programs were CLI- or GUI-based, but I wager it's more satisfying to see a window that says "hello world" than seeing "hello world" on a CLI. Sure, many of us grew up programming on CLIs and it was good enough for us back then, but that was then -- in a world before tens of megabytes of RAM, gigahertz chips and zillions of polygons per second.
4. Literature. There are a fair number of VB books out there, many of which are aimed at beginners. The Learning Edition of VB even comes with a decent tutorial book and some fun apps to write.
If the thought of having your kids learn VB is too much to bear, you could also try Delphi. The problem is that Pascal has some odd rules about when you terminate statements with semicolons, and -- more's the pity -- and isn't used as much as VB. That being said, Delphi is a pretty nice tool, and I can hardly wait to see the Linux version come out.
I don't think it will poison your kids' minds to have them learn on an M$ tool. If programming is really their calling, they'll be able to move on to different languages on different OSs. In the end, it's about engendering a love for the craft and having fun, not about whose programming language is more 31337.
Re:Buying clothes online is plain stupid
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
It's not always a stupid idea. Boo.com and Amazon are bad examples because they seem to be following that strange philosophy that you can build great businesses by consuming more money than producing it. You can almost hear them say "sustainability is so 1900's."
However, there is a long history of catalog shopping that does translate well to the Internet -- consider the Sears and Roebuck catalogs, Abercrombie and Fitch, and more recently, J. Crew and (of course) Victoria's Secret. These catalog shops reach the large segement of the North American population who don't live near a large city or outlet mall and who would like a vest, those cargo pants or Swiss Army knife or other item that you might not be able to get in a small town. Even in big cities, J. Crew has a rabid following, simply because they make a decent shirt and jacket, and some sexy capri pants.
As for ordering clothing, I think it's only fair that we geeks know our measurements. After all this jibber-jabber about complaining that (l)users don't know their processor speeds, amount of RAM and drive capacity, we should at least know our arm, neck and waist measurements!
Once the furor dies down, someone should send out mass e-mail with a subject line of...
This e-mail has a virus attachment. Ignore it.
...a body that reads...
You really should trash this message. The attached file, YET_ANOTHER_VBS_OR_VBA_VIRUS.vbs, is a malicious program similar to the "Love Bug" or "Melissa".
DO NOT DOUBLE-CLICK ON THIS ATTACHMENT!
...and an attachment containing the following VBScript:
msgbox "You never learn, do you?"
{insert code to send copies of this message and attachment here}
Believe me, I am not under the illusion that I can rely on the community for peer review. I'm working at a company that develops open source software, and nowhere in our plans are we relying on outside peer review. Our open source philosophy is that we have nothing to hide, we welcome input from users and improvements from programmers, but as developers, the responsibility for developing a good application of high quality is still ours and ours alone.
Well, that's my opinion, anyway. There are two sets of opinions here, and the lines seem to be drawn between those who have developed applications for direct consumer use (who tend to be the open source skeptics) and those who have developed server apps ((the zealots).
I don't think that a "troll" rating for the previous post is completely fair. Whether open source is better than closed source is a matter of opinion, and the poster is simply voicing his/hers.
The points made in the comments "Most open source projects are really only the work of one or two people" and "how many people ever read the source code to something they download?" are well made. I can't say for certain, because I haven't carried out a poll or seen any statistics. What I know from the literature (such as CatB), experience and observation is that most open source projects start out as an itch that a programmer decides to scratch. The majority of people who find out about the project don't do anything except download the binary, a few download the code, a fraction of them comments and a fraction of that fraction hand back some modifications. Only a small portion of the much-vaunted "many eyes that make bugs shallow" are actually being harnessed. That's not a bad thing -- the closed source model exposes the software to even fewer eyes. It's just that there are many obstacles to fixing or modifying someone else's code: how the original programmer wrote it, availability of documentation, availability of the programmer to answer questions, whether it's written in a language you know, the complexity of the program's problem domain, how good a programmer you are, and the big one -- how much time you have.
The primary advantage provided by open source to a program's developer is the potential peer review and fine-grained testing that freely handing out your source gives you. There's a large body of evidence that code review is one of the best ways for incresing software quality. However, as Fred Brooks says, there's no silver bullet for the problems of software development, and peer review is only one step in making good software. Without good planning and process, all you have is a bickering committee. And we know why they don't make statues, painting or memorials of committees, right?
There's a very good article by Steve McConnell (author of Code Complete, Rapid Development, Software Project Survival Guide and After the Gold Rush) covering some of the issues around open source software. He points out that if open source wants to really reach its potential, the following needs to be done:
1. Create a central clearinghouse for the open-source methodology so it can be fully captured and evolved.
2. Kick its addiction to Code and Fix.
3. Focus on eliminating upstream defects earlier.
4. Collect and publish data to support its claims about the effectiveness of the open-source development approach.
===
Getting back to the original reason for this post -- could I ask one of you moderators to consider cancelling out the "troll" rating for the previous post with an "underrated"? A contrarian opinion does not constitute a troll.
Hardly true. I've found my iBook to be one of the best development platforms for both MacOS and Linux. Replace the stock 3.2G drive with a 12G and install an Airport Card, and you have a wicked development machine that lets you move freely about the office. I've gotten over five hours' life on the battery, which I have to get from any laptop of any make.
One of the best pieces of software for the MacOS is BBEdit, the best text editing software I've had the pleasure of working with. It integrates nicely with the Mac versions of Perl and Python, and the SSH and FTP tools you can get are the nicest I've worked with on any platform. There is a usability aesthetic to the design of Mac software that both the Win and Lin worlds would do well to emulate.
On the Linux partition -- yup, I've got one -- I use Yellow Dog Linux, which on a 300MHz iBook runs circles around an equally RAM- and drive-equipped Toshiba 400MHz Celeron running Red Hat. And yes, it knows what do to with a two- and three-button mouse...
As for iBook style, nobody said that nerd != stylin'.
I gave the script a look-see, and I have to say that whoever wrote it was showing some restraint. The program uses a recursion to iterate through all the files on a user's drives, yet it only really destroys scripts and JPEGs and hides MPEG files.
Why stop there? Why just make it seem as if MP3s were being deleted, instead of actually zapping them? If I really wanted to do some serious damage, I'd have written it to take out executables -- or worse, harder-to-replace documents such as word processor files, spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations...hey, even settings for "The Sims".
It seems that this virus was meant to do just enough damage to make a point about security, rather than be seriously crippling. Either that, or the writer fears that if the damage was worse, he'd be in even deeper crap with the authorities.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently purchased an used book called Computer Systems in Business: An Introduction recently. Published in 1986, it features computer systems that seem pretty quaint almost two decades later.
One clever thing the book does is discuss the concept of P, a relative-cost measure for dicussing how much computers cost in light of the opposing forces of inflation and Moore's Law which make costs difficult to forecast in actual currency. P is equal to the average cost or value of a standard microcomputer system, which at the time consisted of...
- CPU
- Main memory (256K)
- Keyboard
- Monitor (they specified monochrome)
- Two diskette drives
- Dot matrix printer
The book does mention some things that seem pretty quaint these days: main memory for some larger micros exceeded 2 megabytes in 1985, two diskette drives would give you a total on-line storage capacity of a megabyte, and my favourite line: "A Winchester is sometimes called a hard disk."The books goes on to discuss minicomputers (6 megs memory with 200 ns access time, 8K cache and 1.8 gig of hard disk -- er, Winchester -- space. Only when the book gets to mainframes do the machine specs seem somewhere in line with a machine you could probably buy at your local appliance shop...
The diagram, which I can't include in this posting, shows 35 disk drives of 800 megabytes each (28 gigs total). In P units, the cost of such a beast was 1,043, or about $3.6 million dollars.If we assume that the rate of tech progress over the next 15 years is roughly the same as the past 15, we have a starting point for visualizing what the average personal computer of 2015 could be like -- simply look at machines that cost about a thousand times more than the Celeron 600 at Circuit City.
Then, in the best /. traditon, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!
Speaking of bad raps, it's quite easy to get one simply by saying you code in VB. There are many bad VB programmers out there, but that's becuase of the sheer volume of VB programmers out there. VB and its notorious cousin, VBScript, are the Perl of the M$ world; given Windoze's market share, it's no surprise that there's a large number of VB programmers out there, and naturally you'll have a large number of bad ones. You'll also find many good ones.
However, bad VB programmers make a subset of the many bad programmers doing bad work in every language. One of the benefits of open source software is that I've had a chance to see how many bad C, C++ and Perl programmers are out there. Especially Perl. If you think that VB programmers are a piss-poor lot, then go look at some open source Perl code on Freshmeat or SourceForge some time -- you'll swear these people rode the short bus to school. You'll see brittle code, coupling on an near molecular level, barely cohesive modules, and a style that would make you think they were going for job security through code obscurity. For an excellent start, look at some early versions of Slashdot's source }:)
VB's object model is actually decent. It feeds off Java's, and with version 7 (if the announcements surrounding VS7 are to be believed), the object models will be kissing cousins. VB7 will have inheritance (finally), constructors, variable declaration/initialization on the same line and method overloading. VB in its current state has property procedures, which are syntactically sweeter that creating get/set methods in Java. Some of the best Java programmers I've seem came there from VB, and some of the worst have come from C++ (particularly those who just used it as a souped-up C).
As for IDEs, I think auto-complete (or Intellisense) is the programmer's greatest blessing, especially when developing in languages with large class libraries. As for drawing the user interface rather than hand-coding it, I say great! Anything that allows me to hand over UI design to a proper interface designer who cares about human factors over coder cred is fine by me. I think IDE developers should concentrate on making the GUI code that their IDEs generate better -- Borland have proven it's possible with Delphi and C++Builder.
Wasn't it the other way around? I remember reading that the trend towards "casual Fridays" started from a survey conducted by Levi's.
The same applies to programming languages. For many programming tasks, the imperative model will serve you well, but there are times -- especially when repetitive, recursive or just plain mathematically complex tasks are involved -- that a good functional language is exactly what you need.
P.S. While probably not the best way to compare languages, you might want to check out this web page that compares how you'd get verious programming languages to output the complete lyrics to the "99 bottles of beer" song. (At last, an almost on-topic posting about beer!)
I just finished reading the "Philosophy" section of Fling's Sourceforge site and I've got that same creepy feeling I always get whenever I see a Randroid running at full tilt. I get the feeling that many geeks latch onto Rand because she appeals to their revenge fantasies.
I have no disagreement with the personal responsibility aspects of Objectivism -- ultimately, each one of us has to sleep in the bed that he or she made. The "me first always" stance really bothers me though. The blanket assumption that the disadvantaged are that way because they earned it or are lazy and incompetent smacks of the purely greedy kind of thinking that may end up being our ultimate demise.
Want a nervous laugh? Go hit the Ayn Rand Institute's site and check out articles such as Sweatshop Opponents want to Violate Worker's Rights, Against Environmentalism, or my all-time favourite, Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial (Even if you're not religious, don't you think we really overdo that holiday's shopping aspect?).
Want some food for thought? Check out author Paulina Barsook and what she has to say about the kind of libertarianism that many people in high-tech are buying into these days.
Staying in touch with friends and family is an extremely big thing among Filipinos. Neal Stephenson hit the nail right on the head when he wrote this in Cryptonomicon:
I think it's fair to say that this is one of those cases where a technology turns out to have a pretty good "fit" with the culture.Yes, that would be me. Accordioning is the new texting. Just ask Emmett.
I go back to the Philippines to visit relatives about once a year; my last visit there spanned a week in late March/early April. I was there for the "Pope is dead" rumour, which thanks to a combination of "texting", word-of-mouth and the strong Catholicism (it was a Spanish colony for 300 years), spread like wildfire. I got to see and experience texting first-hand.
One reason for the high adoption of cell phones is that the wait for a land line is incredibly long. My cousins, who live in a suburb of Manila, were on the installation waiting list for over a year. For many people, the only way to get a phone within a reasonable period of time is to go mobile.
A mobile phone is a very handy thing in the Philippines, especially in extremely crowded cities like Manila, with a population of about 10 million (and a possible 2 or 3 million transients who get missed in the surveys). Traffic is so bad that they had to establish a system in which certain roads are off-limits to cars with odd- or even-numbered license plates at peak times, depending on the day. Running late is a common occurrence, and having a cell phone means that you can reach anyone who's waiting for you or find out how late the person you're waiting for will be.
Texting is much cheaper than using up your air time. There are many popular cell phone plans that offer 100 or 250 free text messages per month. Among the teen- and 20-something crowd, texting is most often used to let your friends know where you are or where to meet up. It proved to be extremely handy in "The Fort" -- a very popular and crowded mall of bars, clubs and restaurants located in an area similar to San Francisco's Presidio (along with the new club, Orange, it's a fun place to hang out...tell 'em I sent you).
There are services already available in the Philippines that we here in North America have yet to see. Some banks in the Philippines offer ATM-like functions over your cell phone -- you can check your bank account or be notified of things like payments due or maturing funds.
(In case you were wondering, the two official languages of the country are Filipino and English. Most of the people in Manila speak workable or better English, and most of the signage in Manila is in English.)
Every shopping center and more than a few street market stalls carry cell phones or cell phone accessories. I'm still kicking myself for not getting the Neon Genesis Evangelion face plate for my Nokia. My cousin has one of the phones with a flash RAM updateable ringer. His current phone ring is Aqua's "Barbie Girl", which somehow appals and amuses me at the same time.
As for the cultural aspects -- there's "hiya" (pronounced "hee-YA"), which can be translated as "shyness", "shame" or perhaps "reserve". It's a traditional Filipino trait not to be too outspoken, but you have to remember that a fair bit of North American culture has seeped in, thanks to a large expatriate community, radio and television. Traditionally, you were introduced to members of the opposite sex at well-chaperoned parties held at someones' parents house (many people still don't leave home until they're married there), but these days meeting people while out is increasingly becoming the norm. The teens and twenty-somethings are caught in the pull between the traditional and newer ways to socialize -- it seems that texting seems to be the best compromise. Perhaps texting might be the future of geek pick-ups at Linux conventions!
Just another "The Thrilla from Manila",
Master of Kode Fu
Anders became the chief architect of the Windows Foundations Classes, the application framework for Visual J++.
So while M$ avoids all mention of Java in its C# docs, they do have one of their big Java guys playing a key role in its development. Interesting.
P.S. Apparently, if you make something of interest to a large enough group of people, someone will set up a web page tribute to you. Anders' tribute page is here.
...is for someone to design some Battlefield Earth skins and levels to make the whole ordeal complete!
That's the National Post's misspelling, not ours. But what do I know? The last time I saw the expression dy/dx, I tried to simplify it by saying "Hey look! The d's cancel out!"
That should read "will be brewing up a few thousand cases of cola." It's not ready yet.
National Post: Open Source is a model of software development in which the creators release the source code to a product for free and encourage others to share it, copy it, and modify it, with the caveat that it cannot be sold.
I'm still wincing from reading this, and that was hours ago. I am certain beyond doubt that nobody at the company told them that.
National Post: ...John Henson, the 24-year-old chief technology officer...
John is 27. He only acts like a 24-year-old.
Of course, those clever bastards may have puposely introduced the errors to prove the adage "many eyes make bugs shallow"...
As for Director's high price, there is an academic edition of Director that you can buy at college campuses or any other place they teach new media design. It's considerably cheaper and the only difference is that compiled apps show the "Made with Educational Version" nag window at the beginning.
That statement was made almost 20 years ago, when BASIC had devolved into the numbered-line version that was included in most personal computer ROMs of that day. Even BASIC's creator's, Kemeny and Kurtz, denounced such versions and wrote a book called Back to BASIC in which they lambasted these "street BASICs." The BASIC that Dijkstra was talking about is quite different from today's variants, such as Visual Basic or REALBasic.
You might also find the commentary on what Dijkstra said here.
I think that too much of anything is a bad thing. You can be just as obsessed about anything other than computers, whether it's a sport, reading, an art form or musical instrument. While I do agree that having people skills and "emotional intelligence" (as it's being called these days) is very important, I also think that the "programming will stunt your social development" card is a little overplayed. There's no hard and fast rule that says coding skills and social skills are mutually exclusive.
1. VB is a direct descendant of BASIC (the B in which stood for "Beginner's") a language designed with the beginner in mind. The language, as it currently exists as Visual Basic is pretty decent, containing a complete set of decent control structures, data structures and a fair chunk of OOP stuff (it's missing inheritance and overloading -- there are Java-style interfaces, though). A previous poster suggested C, which I don't feel is a beginner's language -- you have to know a little bit more about computers and programming before using it.
2. Intellisense. No more riffling through manuals or help files just to find out what arguments a function takes or what methods and properties are available to an object -- they appear in a pop-up box as you type. This has proven to be so nice that this feature now appears in Borland's IDEs too. I like this kind of thing because it lets you concentrate on learning the abstract concepts and leaving the rote memorization for later.
3. Quicker satisfaction curve. Your kids are using Windows, and I think it would be more satisfying to them if they wrote programs that looked like Windows apps. They'd still be learning the same basic concepts of algorithms and data structures whether or not their programs were CLI- or GUI-based, but I wager it's more satisfying to see a window that says "hello world" than seeing "hello world" on a CLI. Sure, many of us grew up programming on CLIs and it was good enough for us back then, but that was then -- in a world before tens of megabytes of RAM, gigahertz chips and zillions of polygons per second.
4. Literature. There are a fair number of VB books out there, many of which are aimed at beginners. The Learning Edition of VB even comes with a decent tutorial book and some fun apps to write.
If the thought of having your kids learn VB is too much to bear, you could also try Delphi. The problem is that Pascal has some odd rules about when you terminate statements with semicolons, and -- more's the pity -- and isn't used as much as VB. That being said, Delphi is a pretty nice tool, and I can hardly wait to see the Linux version come out.
I don't think it will poison your kids' minds to have them learn on an M$ tool. If programming is really their calling, they'll be able to move on to different languages on different OSs. In the end, it's about engendering a love for the craft and having fun, not about whose programming language is more 31337.
However, there is a long history of catalog shopping that does translate well to the Internet -- consider the Sears and Roebuck catalogs, Abercrombie and Fitch, and more recently, J. Crew and (of course) Victoria's Secret. These catalog shops reach the large segement of the North American population who don't live near a large city or outlet mall and who would like a vest, those cargo pants or Swiss Army knife or other item that you might not be able to get in a small town. Even in big cities, J. Crew has a rabid following, simply because they make a decent shirt and jacket, and some sexy capri pants.
As for ordering clothing, I think it's only fair that we geeks know our measurements. After all this jibber-jabber about complaining that (l)users don't know their processor speeds, amount of RAM and drive capacity, we should at least know our arm, neck and waist measurements!
A friend of mine at the Alias|Wavefront offices here in Toronto told me about today's announcement of Maya for OS X...sounds pretty tasty!
Well, that's my opinion, anyway. There are two sets of opinions here, and the lines seem to be drawn between those who have developed applications for direct consumer use (who tend to be the open source skeptics) and those who have developed server apps ((the zealots).
The points made in the comments "Most open source projects are really only the work of one or two people" and "how many people ever read the source code to something they download?" are well made. I can't say for certain, because I haven't carried out a poll or seen any statistics. What I know from the literature (such as CatB), experience and observation is that most open source projects start out as an itch that a programmer decides to scratch. The majority of people who find out about the project don't do anything except download the binary, a few download the code, a fraction of them comments and a fraction of that fraction hand back some modifications. Only a small portion of the much-vaunted "many eyes that make bugs shallow" are actually being harnessed. That's not a bad thing -- the closed source model exposes the software to even fewer eyes. It's just that there are many obstacles to fixing or modifying someone else's code: how the original programmer wrote it, availability of documentation, availability of the programmer to answer questions, whether it's written in a language you know, the complexity of the program's problem domain, how good a programmer you are, and the big one -- how much time you have.
The primary advantage provided by open source to a program's developer is the potential peer review and fine-grained testing that freely handing out your source gives you. There's a large body of evidence that code review is one of the best ways for incresing software quality. However, as Fred Brooks says, there's no silver bullet for the problems of software development, and peer review is only one step in making good software. Without good planning and process, all you have is a bickering committee. And we know why they don't make statues, painting or memorials of committees, right?
There's a very good article by Steve McConnell (author of Code Complete, Rapid Development, Software Project Survival Guide and After the Gold Rush) covering some of the issues around open source software. He points out that if open source wants to really reach its potential, the following needs to be done:
1. Create a central clearinghouse for the open-source methodology so it can be fully captured and evolved.
2. Kick its addiction to Code and Fix.
3. Focus on eliminating upstream defects earlier.
4. Collect and publish data to support its claims about the effectiveness of the open-source development approach.
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Getting back to the original reason for this post -- could I ask one of you moderators to consider cancelling out the "troll" rating for the previous post with an "underrated"? A contrarian opinion does not constitute a troll.
One of the best pieces of software for the MacOS is BBEdit, the best text editing software I've had the pleasure of working with. It integrates nicely with the Mac versions of Perl and Python, and the SSH and FTP tools you can get are the nicest I've worked with on any platform. There is a usability aesthetic to the design of Mac software that both the Win and Lin worlds would do well to emulate.
On the Linux partition -- yup, I've got one -- I use Yellow Dog Linux, which on a 300MHz iBook runs circles around an equally RAM- and drive-equipped Toshiba 400MHz Celeron running Red Hat. And yes, it knows what do to with a two- and three-button mouse...
As for iBook style, nobody said that nerd != stylin'.
Why stop there? Why just make it seem as if MP3s were being deleted, instead of actually zapping them? If I really wanted to do some serious damage, I'd have written it to take out executables -- or worse, harder-to-replace documents such as word processor files, spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations...hey, even settings for "The Sims".
It seems that this virus was meant to do just enough damage to make a point about security, rather than be seriously crippling. Either that, or the writer fears that if the damage was worse, he'd be in even deeper crap with the authorities.
Opinions?