In some quarters today, it's still a controversial proposition to argue that computer programming is an art as well as a science. But 20 years ago, when Microsoft Press editor Susan Lammers assembled a collection of interviews with software pioneers into a book titled "Programmers at Work," the idea was downright outlandish. Programming had long been viewed as the domain of corporate engineers and university computer scientists. But in the first flush of the personal computer era, the role of software innovator began to evolve into something more like the grand American tradition of the basement inventor -- with a dollop of the huckster on top and, underneath, a deep foundation of idealism.
It made sense that the people writing the most important code for the new desktop machines were ragged individualists with eccentric streaks. At a panel on Tuesday (sponsored by the SDWest conference and Dr. Dobb's Journal) that celebrated Lammers' book, seven of the 19 original subjects of "Programmers at Work" lined up on stage to talk about what's changed in software over the past two decades -- and demonstrate that they have lost none of their cantankerous edge.
In "Programmers at Work," Lammers told the crowd, "I looked at the programmer as an individual on a quest to create something new that would change the world." Certainly, the panel's group lived up to that billing: it included Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote much of the original Macintosh operating system and is now chronicling that saga at Folklore.org; Jef Raskin, who created the original concept for the Macintosh; Charles Simonyi, a Xerox PARC veteran and two-decade Microsoft code guru responsible for much of today's Office suite; Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the pioneering spreadsheet program; virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier; gaming pioneer Scott Kim; and Robert Carr, father of Ashton-Tate's Framework.
But for all their considerable achievements, this was not a group content to snooze on a heap of laurels. In fact, though the hour-and-a-half discussion was full of contention, one thing all the participants agreed on was that software today is in dire need of help. It's still too hard: not only for users struggling to make sense of poorly designed interfaces, but for programmers swimming upstream against a current of constraints that numb creativity and drown innovation.
These veterans shared a starting-point assumption that the rest of the world is only slowly beginning to understand: While computer hardware seems to advance according to the exponential upward curve known as Moore's Law (doubling in speed -- or halving in cost -- every year or two), software, when it advances at all, seems to move at a more leisurely linear pace.
As Lanier said, "Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore's Law. Moore's Law isn't a match for our bad coding."
The impact of this differential is not simply a matter of which industry gets to collect more profits. It sets a maddening limit on how much good we can expect information technology to achieve. If computers are, as it has often been put, "amplifiers for our brains," then software's limitations cap the volume way too low. Or, in Simonyi's words, "Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty."
Most successful programmers are at heart can-do engineers who are optimistic that every problem has a solution. So it was only natural that, even in this relatively small gathering of software pioneers, there were multiple, and conflicting, ideas about how we should proceed in order to break that bottleneck.
Simonyi believes the answer is to unshackle the design of software from the details of implementation in code. "There are two meanings to software design," he explained on Tuesday. "One is, designing the artifact we're trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles -- the subject matter expert and the software engineer."
Giving the former group tools to
In America, the reason you have to take a breathalyzer is because you give legal consent to one by driving on a public road. A credit card has no such law.
In the USA, the vast majority of people on minimum wage now will not be on it in a year. I am a 17 year old. I used to get paid minimum wage. So did most of my friends. We get raises after a few months. The only people on minimum wage are those who are new employees (usually teenagers), or those that are too lazy to get a raise. There is no need to keep increasing minimum wage every few years. Several of my friends were left unemployed after these "raises", as their employers could no longer afford to stay in business. I prefer to be paid a little and still have a job, rather than get a raise and lose it.
You know, if it is okay to take life, maybe it is okay for me to join The Army of God and go out and kill the baby killers. I mean, life isn't sacred, right? So it isn't like I would be doing anything wrong. And since life isn't sacred, the police and government shouldn't have a problem with me...
Well, it isn't a cow. It isn't a duck. It isn't a pile of excriment. It is not a rock. What is it? It is a human. Just like a cat embryo is a cat being, a human embryo is a human being. It is human, in that it is of our species. It is a being, being in that is exists (or does until you murder it). It isn't dead. It is alive. Thus: LIVING HUMAN BEING. How is this not reasonable and logical? This is perfectly scientific reasoning.
I didn't say EGG cell. I said that the fertilized egg was a person. Not the ovum. A human is created at conception. Or in cloning, when an egg cell is given full genetic matereal. Your hangnail is not capable of becoming a mature human if it is placed in a womb. A blastulist is.
LOL Well, there is a difference between a natural death and a murder. The baby in a miscarrage dies as an act of nature, the mother's body rejects it or the baby has a fatal disorder of some type. Ripping a baby apart to get stem cells is a PURPOSFUL act. Murder.
Everybody's point of view seems objective to one's self.
The fact is that the anti-abortion christian right isn't basing their argument on science, they're basing it on nonsence. Their attempt to define the argument in scientific terms is just a front. They don't want a compromise. They see the world in black and white. It wouldn't fly with them.
I agree man. Say, old people for insatance. They are defenseless, crippled, and don't really help me at all. They're a burden, as a matter of fact. I think they are sub human. Let's kill them. Same with Jews and colored peoples. They aren't really human, and they steal our jobs and money. Let's kill them too. Or babies. Ya know, I got my GF pregnant a couple years ago, and the damn thing is so expensive. So I think I should just take him out back and get rid of him with my machetie. I mean, he isn't really a person. He can hardly even talk. He deficates on himself. Obviously I can just get rid of him, because he isn't human.
Or maybe life is a sacred thing. One that man cannot rightfully take. Just my $.02,
Regarding the destruction of an egg cell, a woman's body does this every month, and a woman starts off with over 100,000 eggs, of which obviously almost all are destroyed at some point.
The egg is not just a cell. This is different. This cell is a person. If it is placed in the right environment, it will survive and develop into a man or woman. It is a person. It has exactally the same God given rights as any of us. It was a human being. They killed it... How is this not murder?
This person's right to live should be defended by law shouldn't it? Perhaps even by every one of us. I would hope that if we saw someone killing an innocent child on the street, we would defend it with our lives. Our society has started down the path of killing babies because we can live longer off their parts. May God have mercy on us all.
I receved a 3Dvision card for christmas. The driver CD dosen't work. The manual is in very poorly translated english. One instruction even says to power on the machine before installing the PCI card. The card has no tech support or website. I managed to find the missing driver files by using the install wizard in Windows, and searching for the files it requested on google.
-philip.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have thought rabbits would make a better analogy, as I thought they do it a lot more than sheep.
In Soviet Russia, DVDs burn YOU!
"Only wimps use tape backup; real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
-Linus Torvalds
In some quarters today, it's still a controversial proposition to argue that computer programming is an art as well as a science. But 20 years ago, when Microsoft Press editor Susan Lammers assembled a collection of interviews with software pioneers into a book titled "Programmers at Work," the idea was downright outlandish. Programming had long been viewed as the domain of corporate engineers and university computer scientists. But in the first flush of the personal computer era, the role of software innovator began to evolve into something more like the grand American tradition of the basement inventor -- with a dollop of the huckster on top and, underneath, a deep foundation of idealism. It made sense that the people writing the most important code for the new desktop machines were ragged individualists with eccentric streaks. At a panel on Tuesday (sponsored by the SDWest conference and Dr. Dobb's Journal) that celebrated Lammers' book, seven of the 19 original subjects of "Programmers at Work" lined up on stage to talk about what's changed in software over the past two decades -- and demonstrate that they have lost none of their cantankerous edge. In "Programmers at Work," Lammers told the crowd, "I looked at the programmer as an individual on a quest to create something new that would change the world." Certainly, the panel's group lived up to that billing: it included Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote much of the original Macintosh operating system and is now chronicling that saga at Folklore.org; Jef Raskin, who created the original concept for the Macintosh; Charles Simonyi, a Xerox PARC veteran and two-decade Microsoft code guru responsible for much of today's Office suite; Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the pioneering spreadsheet program; virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier; gaming pioneer Scott Kim; and Robert Carr, father of Ashton-Tate's Framework. But for all their considerable achievements, this was not a group content to snooze on a heap of laurels. In fact, though the hour-and-a-half discussion was full of contention, one thing all the participants agreed on was that software today is in dire need of help. It's still too hard: not only for users struggling to make sense of poorly designed interfaces, but for programmers swimming upstream against a current of constraints that numb creativity and drown innovation. These veterans shared a starting-point assumption that the rest of the world is only slowly beginning to understand: While computer hardware seems to advance according to the exponential upward curve known as Moore's Law (doubling in speed -- or halving in cost -- every year or two), software, when it advances at all, seems to move at a more leisurely linear pace. As Lanier said, "Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore's Law. Moore's Law isn't a match for our bad coding." The impact of this differential is not simply a matter of which industry gets to collect more profits. It sets a maddening limit on how much good we can expect information technology to achieve. If computers are, as it has often been put, "amplifiers for our brains," then software's limitations cap the volume way too low. Or, in Simonyi's words, "Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty." Most successful programmers are at heart can-do engineers who are optimistic that every problem has a solution. So it was only natural that, even in this relatively small gathering of software pioneers, there were multiple, and conflicting, ideas about how we should proceed in order to break that bottleneck. Simonyi believes the answer is to unshackle the design of software from the details of implementation in code. "There are two meanings to software design," he explained on Tuesday. "One is, designing the artifact we're trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles -- the subject matter expert and the software engineer." Giving the former group tools to
Not to be pedantic or anything, but shouldn't that be an RF receiver on your nuts? Unless you broadcast whenever you have sex...
So, Being a Slashdotter, he doesn't broadcast all that often...
You would think that the windows users would be getting banged a lot more than us linux geeks.
Well, you have to admit, Windows is far superior to everything else out there these days. I run XP and it never crashes. Good old Microsoft products.
-philip.
Oh... wait.
In the USA, the vast majority of people on minimum wage now will not be on it in a year. I am a 17 year old. I used to get paid minimum wage. So did most of my friends. We get raises after a few months. The only people on minimum wage are those who are new employees (usually teenagers), or those that are too lazy to get a raise. There is no need to keep increasing minimum wage every few years. Several of my friends were left unemployed after these "raises", as their employers could no longer afford to stay in business. I prefer to be paid a little and still have a job, rather than get a raise and lose it.
-philip.
Sure, GEOS is cool. But imagine a beowulf cluster of Commodores running this...
sorry, kinda meant to show that a fertilized egg was a person... otherwise this whole thing sounds nuts. Guess I gotta preview a little next time.
-philip.
-philip.
-philip
STR
-philip
-philip.
I agree man. Say, old people for insatance. They are defenseless, crippled, and don't really help me at all. They're a burden, as a matter of fact. I think they are sub human. Let's kill them. Same with Jews and colored peoples. They aren't really human, and they steal our jobs and money. Let's kill them too. Or babies. Ya know, I got my GF pregnant a couple years ago, and the damn thing is so expensive. So I think I should just take him out back and get rid of him with my machetie. I mean, he isn't really a person. He can hardly even talk. He deficates on himself. Obviously I can just get rid of him, because he isn't human.
Or maybe life is a sacred thing. One that man cannot rightfully take. Just my $.02,
-philip.
The egg is not just a cell. This is different. This cell is a person. If it is placed in the right environment, it will survive and develop into a man or woman. It is a person. It has exactally the same God given rights as any of us. It was a human being. They killed it... How is this not murder?
This person's right to live should be defended by law shouldn't it? Perhaps even by every one of us. I would hope that if we saw someone killing an innocent child on the street, we would defend it with our lives. Our society has started down the path of killing babies because we can live longer off their parts. May God have mercy on us all.
-philip.
STR
I receved a 3Dvision card for christmas. The driver CD dosen't work. The manual is in very poorly translated english. One instruction even says to power on the machine before installing the PCI card. The card has no tech support or website. I managed to find the missing driver files by using the install wizard in Windows, and searching for the files it requested on google. -philip.