Beware big brother issues.. My company had a client with some old IBM-licensed remote access software. One day IBM decided that they did not have any licenses for the software. The software disabled itself. Most of the paper and media had been discarded years ago. Much phone calling later we convinced IBM to restore some of the licenses so they could limp along.
I had my bank mis-pay a check as 3.15 instead of 315 and docked me for the full 315.. a month before the payee noticed, another month to sort it out with the bank, and they only acknowledged the error after I faxed them a copy of the canceled check with my statement..
I have heard tale of a checking account being closed, but an automatic payment (via ACH) was still active. And the bank payed it, debiting the closed account! Kept doing it for a year. The issue was discovered when this person applied for a loan and found his credit was bad. Considering the rules around ACH transactions, it is not clear that proof of closing the account would have helped.
*At least* keep your own copy of the electronic records. And keep anything from the government. Getting fscked by Big Company Inc. is not as bad as what Big Government can do to you if you cannot (for example) prove that your kids are enrolled in school.
Second he is using the full cost of the hybrid. He is assuming that you dump a perfectly good car and buy a hybrid, NOT that you are bright enough to buy a hybrid when it is time to buy something. That is, he is assuming it is the full cost, not the incremental cost of the hybrid. While that MAY be a correct financial analysis, it is unlikely to be a real world analysis (IMO).
Later in the article he compares the cost of purchasing the Prius to the cost of purchasing the Toyota Corolla. Further on in the last portion he gives a chart listing the purchase price, monthly payments, and fuel savings of various hybrids and other cars.
To summarize the article: under current economic conditions you spend less money over 5 years buying the economy car than the hybrid. To save money with the hybrid-- with the current $6000+ price difference vs the economy car-- you need(!) ~$10/gallon gas prices.
I play Civ 3 on a Mac 7600 (with G3 upgrade + 384MB ram + Panther). This machine dates back to 1998. Your Pentium M screams by comparison.
My solution to the game performance is to turn off animations, turn off show AI moves, and play 5 City Challenge. It speeds game play in so many ways, and adds some wrinkles to game play. Its no crime if you get 6 or 7 cities later in the game either. A typical 5CC game takes me between 10 and 16 hours of total playing time spread over 2 weeks.
Heh, I can conquer the world on Monarchy with only 5 cities.
I own other, much faster machines that I use exclusively for work and slashdot.
It is already possible to win Civ 3 with Economics. Two methods:
1) Convince all of the AI to pay you Gold Per Turn for technology. This deal lasts 20 turns. For these 20 turns, the AI is converting commerce into cash to pay you instead of producing science or supporting military. You boost your science by the amount of the payment. Repeat whenever possible. If you can keep most of the AI on these deals for an age, they become 'addicted' and you will have a permenant tech lead.
2) Instigate wars: Pay the #2 or #3 ranked AI to form an alliance with you to beat the #1 AI, but only exert yourself enough to make sure your ally is not wiped out. Repeat with a different ally. After a while, some of these wars become self-sustaining feuds with AI too weak to overrun each other.
GPL sec 0: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License"
Using the combination of a GPL plugin with non-free browsers and plugins is legal.
You can distribute the GPLflash plugin alone. The GPLflash plugin is not dependent on any particular browser or other plugin (though it does require a browser). The browser and other plugins work without the GPLflash plugin. So the browser is not a derivitive work that must be distributed with the GPLflash plugin.
I am in the segment that wants a mental challenge with my bit-blasting action. I suspect gamers in their late 20s to early 30s are with me here as well. We know all the AI exploits from the games we played as kids. One or another variant of them works in current games-- BORING.
Minorities can certainly always wreak havoc on the freedom of others.
There have been plenty of examples throughout history where small
group dictate the masses. This almost always happens with violence
(dictatorships with the help of 1984-style mind control hasn't become
known as of today).
The second point is certainly acceptable by all people, the first needs some explanation. The fundamental problem is that configuration options are bad. Be it at runtime or at compile. Ideally there is one configuration which works everywhere. Every new configuration increases complexity. Not linearly but instead exponentially. Each option might influence every other option. This is a disaster not only for users, but also the developers. It means exponential growth of testing. Which of course won't happen and therefore the code is basically untested. For developers this means that often only one or two configurations are really tested. Any us of another configuration is probably doomed to failure in any non-trivial project.
I am a Macintosh programmer from long ago. In the Pre-OS X days I worked extensively with the mac ports of libxml, libxslt, and TCL. I played with other open source software on the mac as well like MacPerl and the early mozilla builds. The mac port was generally a point release or 2 behind the main development. I assume the blogger udrepper is talking about people like me. The usual situation I encountered was that mac programmers had to support the macintosh port with little input from the non-mac programmers. The project "owners" would include the mac support files in a subdirectory of the project source tree. Everybody on the project understood that the contents of this subdirectory was only of interest to mac programmers.
This was quite a reasonable situation. No mac-specific configuration options affected the rest of the project. It is no longer the case. Now the OS X (usually spelled "darwin") build is another option in the makefile.
For my new projects the razor is even sharper. Only Linux is supported and only the few interesting mainstream architecture with reasonable APIs are maintained. Support for architectures with deliberately different APIs (i.e., IA-64) can be contributed. No other configuration is supported, actively or not, and people would have to exercise their right to add patches or fork the entire code to add other support.
Over-dramatic; leads to fragmentation which leads to redundant work. I think you would do better to revert to the platform-specific sub folders and let the programmers of that platform update their patches at their own pace. This saves the "minority users" the problem of maintaining a new website and CVS system. You get the benefit of some contributions to the main development since a new feature or two usually must be added by the minority platform programmers.
If you really want to support exactly one platform with few options, then be sure to use a scripting language (any of the P* languages will do), or maybe java and/or mono.
Don't let Minorities dictate the direction!
The leadership of any substantial group of people is always a minority. How many bosses do you have? How many people work for him?
Quite possible. The game market was MUCH smaller 10-15 years ago-- sales in the low hundreds of thousands was major success. These days, a top game sells in the millions.
GTA:SA probably sold more in its first month than FF:whatever sold in all of 1994.
It may be possible to support ActiveX from Mozilla with added security for example, which would improve on the flaws in the IE implementation. Now that would be A Good Thing.
You cannot improve the flaws reguarding ActiveX.
You cannot restrict the capabilities of an ActiveX control without drastically altering the way all Windows applications work. The ActiveX control is a full COM/DCOM/COM+ object (essentially an application) on windows. In the manner of other COM objects such as Microsoft Word, ActiveX objects execute i386 code directly on your processor. They can modify the registry; open, create, and modify files; open network connections, etc. COM is the binary file format of windows sort of like ELF on linux. It was never designed to be slung across a network, let alone a network with untrustworthy code on it. Microsoft has made some attempt at restricting ActiveX with XP Service Pack 2, but there really is not much that can be done short of throwing out COM (and that is why Microsoft made.NET).
The chief flaw in the ActiveX concept is that it allows another user-- a complete stranger-- to run an arbitrary program on your computer, with your identity and privileges. You have no means of granting limited privileges to the ActiveX control or of stopping and removing the control after it has run. When you click Yes to that dialog asking you to "trust content" from whomever, you are granting a great deal of trust. And because an ActiveX control is just like any other application on windows, you cannot grant any less trust to ActiveX than to any other application.
Historically, the percieved (and, usually, actual) injustices created by the ability of the victor to impose intolerable conditions on the vanquished has in fact lead to future wars.
That does usually happen, but not always. For a brief time after the war, the victors have a choice of what to do with the remains of the vanquished. The victors' usual choice is some combination of plunder and semi-random killing, then forget about them. If the victors choose to annihilate the vanquished (native americans for example) no further war can occur from that source. If the vanquished are assimilated into the society of the victors, then any strife can be handled within the framework of law rather than the battlefield (assuming the victors have "reasonable" laws and apply them consistently). Then there is the anomaly of WWII where the vanquished nations were remodelled into something the victors could live with, but that was not offensive to the vanquished people.
Guess what...war begets war. Weapons beget weapons.
Uh, no. War begats peace. Overwhelming weapons begats non-proliferation.
War does not lead to peace, it does not lead to more war. War determines who is "in control" of whatever. The decisions of the the persons in control and reactions of everybody else determine the next occurances of war. In the long run, you can expect that control of anything will be violently disputed, regardless of the weapons available to the combatants.
Why do you think the world has as much peace as it has? It's the called the US Military. The bigger the imbalance of power between the US and the rest of the world, the less the rogue nations will be tempted to invade their neighbors. Unfortunately, expansionism is alive and well in the middle east.
If peace is the absence of large scale violence, then there was more peace during the cold war. Both superpowers had an interest in supressing large scale wars. A sprawling regional conflict like in Liberia/Ivory Coast/Siearra Leone would not have been tolerated. Chaves of Venezuela would not have lasted 6 months. Every rogue was on the leash of one or the other superpower. Since the soviet union dropped out, strange things are coming out.
Small companies cannot make the same games as big companies. Small company games must be clever, not massive.
IMO, the answer to content for a small company is reusable content, like a soccer field or Quake level. For an MMORPG, this would be a New York style city. You can see it all in a week, but there is always something going on (that does not require the attention of the Programmers). Imagine Antigua in the age of piracy.
I have not heard of anyone doing large scale random content in MMORPGs, though this was done effectively in some single player RPGs (Nethack and company) and strategy games (Civilization).
For high level players vs low level players, put things in the game that are level independent. Perhaps make the "powerful" stuff in the game depend on location in the world or some other more dynamic effect than long play time. Or associate level with the player's actual game skill vs other players instead of a character attribute. In other multiplayer games, the newbie gets the same weapons as the old timer.
A superjumbo sized jet with 2-3 ABL turrets at 60,000 ft. Anything (fighters, missles of all kinds, flying robots) within 500 miles is toast! Tanks on the ground explode in a few seconds. Specific buildings incinerated at will leaving the rest of the town intact. A flying battleship-- completely redefines air combat.
Agreed, XWT system solves this problem elegantly. Only one code base to maintain, optimal performance on windows. BUT you will have to rewrite your app, and probably patch the XWT client side parts for your imaging needs.
Flash also solves this problem. It is already installed on modern ( 3 yrs old) systems and Macromedia is at peace with Microsoft. But I recommend Open Source wherever practical, and maybe flash does not support your particular imaging display needs.
DHTML + Javascript + serverside image generator will work OK if you do not need 3D.
I encountered this as well with one client. My code had been reused, and repurposed and abused into a sprawling mess.. Be direct.
Like cars, code gets old and crufty and must be renovated (or thrown out and rewritten). The client won't go for it the first time around, but they now know it must be done eventually and can plan for it.
I have never seen an article discussing the difference, but in my experience the difference is in the approach to solving a problem.
"Programming" style development is about building the best possible program. It requires an upfront analysis/design stage . During the design stage, you figure out the most efficient way for your program to do everything it must do. This means you must have a (legally and mathematically) precise idea of what your program must do. Then you figure out the most efficient way to build the program. Finally you actually build the program according to the design. There is a certain art to making the implementation conform to the design when the inevitable unexpected problems occur. Good designs have fallbacks.
"Scripting" style development is about building the program as quickly as possible. The only planning is perhaps 15 minutes of note jotting and brainstorming. While writing code, you will have at least 1 book (printed from a webpage) open on your desk describing the Funky Toolkit you just installed which does 30-70% of the task for you.
Programming languages are designed to permit the creation of the most efficient possible program. Scripting languages are designed to permit fastest possible creation of some kind of program. Using scripting style development with a programming language will lead to disaster. However, programming style development works fine with scripting languages, though the programmers will not complete the program much faster than if they had used a programming language.
Gotta agree, but engineers/scientists sometimes go overboard with their endeavours and fail to see the impact it may have on humanity.
Going "overboard" is necessary to solve the most difficult problems. I find that I must live in the problem domain for a while (days, weeks) before getting anywhere on my most difficult programming tasks. This is aggravated by everyone that needs the program insisting that I finish it faster. This all builds up a kind of inertia.
Now, selection of which problems to solve is a serious failing among engineers. I made a buck off these solutions, but none of them improved life for more than a few dozen people. Consider the lost man-years spent building websites for all the dead dot-coms. I doubt a liberal arts education would help with problem selection.
Anyone who says universities are balanced politically is an idiot.
Nor should you expect political balance in a university. Only those who value education enough to actually do it dispite the economic penalty will seek work in universities. Such interest almost requires a Liberal (Enlightment-style) political outlook. Most liberals are registered Democrats as that party is slightly closer to real Liberalism than the Republican party.
Tis easier to test someone for liberalness than for dedication to knowledge, competence, etc... so I expect most schools just hire liberals except when a non-liberal has something extraordinary.
We do not work with infinite n. We work with finite n of a quite limited range. The exponent matters, and to say anything to the contrary is a misleading oversimplification.
But n is rapidly increasing.
There is a Moores Law-like effect on dataset sizes that grows faster than processing power. Today terabyte databases are not unusual. It is not unreasonable to have a terabyte on the desktop. Five years ago people could not access drives bigger than 8GB.
An algorithm that takes exponential time to process such a dataset may perform better FOR NOW than one that takes polynomial time. But 5 years from now the exponential algorithm will be useless-- the dataset size (n) will have increased by orders of magnitude, which does horrible things to the exponential runtime.
We routinely keep software around for 30+ years. We cannot expect an exponential time algorithm to be useful over even 10 years. But with the increasing processing power, we can expect a bad polynomial time algorithm to eventually become useful, as recently happened with 3D graphics algorithms.
I did a bit of FORTRAN in the early 90's. IMO, its great strength is the ability to control the range and accuracy of numerical values as part of the language. No other programming language (that I know of) has comparable abilities. FORTRAN's control of numbers is analogous to the way Perl treats regular expressions as part of the language.
Sure, you can get a math library for your favorite language that provides similar ability. You can get a regular expression library for other languages that gives you Perl-like abilities. But if you have ever used Perl, you know that the regex libraries of other languages cannot provide the flexibility-- the ease of expression-- the Awesome Power-- that Perl allows with regex. So it goes with numbers in FORTRAN. If you have a fetish for numbers, FORTRAN is for you.
Yea, FORTRAN code is write-only, like Perl... such is the price of expressive-control.
Most "Linux developers" and "BSD developers " do not know enough to build the hardware-level guts of an OS. Hurd is not (last i checked) developed far enough for the common software developer to work on. AtheOS chose to defy compatibility, I suspect it would require a month of relearning to develop on. In both cases, a developer who already has a UNIX system has little reason to switch.
I personally find AtheOS more interesting than Hurd (Xwindows is Evil!), but I could not begin to do anything useful on it or for it, even ignoring the hardware incompatibilities.
More interesting question: "do Hurd or AtheOS have developer support comparable to what Linux had in 1993?"
Unfortunately, the standard way to move MIME encoded mail from one system to another is to mail it. This is *not* a good idea.
Suppose you are changing to a new computer (Linux to MacOS X for example), and you want to keep your email. Or suppose you are changing jobs.
Imagine emailing thousands of messages to yourself just to move them from one machine to another... If your former employer followed the prevailing advice here of locking up mail on a server, then this is the ONLY way you can keep your email.
If you kept copies of your mail locally, then you can burn the mail archive to CD, but since your mail is still in some client-specific format, you must install the same mail client on your new machine. Perl help you if the mail client software does not run on it.
An end user in a corporate office should not be installing their own software-- thats IT's job. IT should compile the apps themselves just on principle.
Slashdot Mirror
Beware big brother issues..
My company had a client with some old IBM-licensed remote access software. One day IBM decided that they did not have any licenses for the software. The software disabled itself. Most of the paper and media had been discarded years ago. Much phone calling later we convinced IBM to restore some of the licenses so they could limp along.
I had my bank mis-pay a check as 3.15 instead of 315 and docked me for the full 315.. a month before the payee noticed, another month to sort it out with the bank, and they only acknowledged the error after I faxed them a copy of the canceled check with my statement..
I have heard tale of a checking account being closed, but an automatic payment (via ACH) was still active. And the bank payed it, debiting the closed account! Kept doing it for a year. The issue was discovered when this person applied for a loan and found his credit was bad. Considering the rules around ACH transactions, it is not clear that proof of closing the account would have helped.
*At least* keep your own copy of the electronic records.
And keep anything from the government. Getting fscked by Big Company Inc. is not as bad as what Big Government can do to you if you cannot (for example) prove that your kids are enrolled in school.
Later in the article he compares the cost of purchasing the Prius to the cost of purchasing the Toyota Corolla. Further on in the last portion he gives a chart listing the purchase price, monthly payments, and fuel savings of various hybrids and other cars.
To summarize the article: under current economic conditions you spend less money over 5 years buying the economy car than the hybrid. To save money with the hybrid-- with the current $6000+ price difference vs the economy car-- you need(!) ~$10/gallon gas prices.
I play Civ 3 on a Mac 7600 (with G3 upgrade + 384MB ram + Panther).
This machine dates back to 1998. Your Pentium M screams by comparison.
My solution to the game performance is to turn off animations, turn off show AI moves, and play 5 City Challenge. It speeds game play in so many ways, and adds some wrinkles to game play. Its no crime if you get 6 or 7 cities later in the game either. A typical 5CC game takes me between 10 and 16 hours of total playing time spread over 2 weeks.
Heh, I can conquer the world on Monarchy with only 5 cities.
I own other, much faster machines that I use exclusively for work and slashdot.
It is already possible to win Civ 3 with Economics. Two methods:
1) Convince all of the AI to pay you Gold Per Turn for technology. This deal lasts 20 turns. For these 20 turns, the AI is converting commerce into cash to pay you instead of producing science or supporting military. You boost your science by the amount of the payment. Repeat whenever possible. If you can keep most of the AI on these deals for an age, they become 'addicted' and you will have a permenant tech lead.
2) Instigate wars: Pay the #2 or #3 ranked AI to form an alliance with you to beat the #1 AI, but only exert yourself enough to make sure your ally is not wiped out. Repeat with a different ally. After a while, some of these wars become self-sustaining feuds with AI too weak to overrun each other.
GPL sec 0: "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License"
Using the combination of a GPL plugin with non-free browsers and plugins is legal.
You can distribute the GPLflash plugin alone. The GPLflash plugin is not dependent on any particular browser or other plugin (though it does require a browser). The browser and other plugins work without the GPLflash plugin. So the browser is not a derivitive work that must be distributed with the GPLflash plugin.
I am in the segment that wants a mental challenge with my bit-blasting action. I suspect gamers in their late 20s to early 30s are with me here as well. We know all the AI exploits from the games we played as kids. One or another variant of them works in current games-- BORING.
Consider this discussion of Kim Il Jong of North Korea given in this blog:_ support.html a /transcript.html
http://mansei.typepad.com/dogstew/2004/10/popular
Especially the PBS interview mentioned in the blog:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/northkore
Basically the Dear Leader uses both violence and mind control.
I am a Macintosh programmer from long ago. In the Pre-OS X days I worked extensively with the mac ports of libxml, libxslt, and TCL. I played with other open source software on the mac as well like MacPerl and the early mozilla builds. The mac port was generally a point release or 2 behind the main development. I assume the blogger udrepper is talking about people like me. The usual situation I encountered was that mac programmers had to support the macintosh port with little input from the non-mac programmers. The project "owners" would include the mac support files in a subdirectory of the project source tree. Everybody on the project understood that the contents of this subdirectory was only of interest to mac programmers.
This was quite a reasonable situation. No mac-specific configuration options affected the rest of the project. It is no longer the case. Now the OS X (usually spelled "darwin") build is another option in the makefile.
Over-dramatic; leads to fragmentation which leads to redundant work. I think you would do better to revert to the platform-specific sub folders and let the programmers of that platform update their patches at their own pace. This saves the "minority users" the problem of maintaining a new website and CVS system. You get the benefit of some contributions to the main development since a new feature or two usually must be added by the minority platform programmers.
If you really want to support exactly one platform with few options, then be sure to use a scripting language (any of the P* languages will do), or maybe java and/or mono.
The leadership of any substantial group of people is always a minority. How many bosses do you have? How many people work for him?
See http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/intro/ for a good start on a Cross Browser compatibility enhancing JS script.
Quite possible. The game market was MUCH smaller 10-15 years ago-- sales in the low hundreds of thousands was major success. These days, a top game sells in the millions.
GTA:SA probably sold more in its first month than FF:whatever sold in all of 1994.
You cannot improve the flaws reguarding ActiveX.
You cannot restrict the capabilities of an ActiveX control without drastically altering the way all Windows applications work. The ActiveX control is a full COM/DCOM/COM+ object (essentially an application) on windows. In the manner of other COM objects such as Microsoft Word, ActiveX objects execute i386 code directly on your processor. They can modify the registry; open, create, and modify files; open network connections, etc. COM is the binary file format of windows sort of like ELF on linux. It was never designed to be slung across a network, let alone a network with untrustworthy code on it. Microsoft has made some attempt at restricting ActiveX with XP Service Pack 2, but there really is not much that can be done short of throwing out COM (and that is why Microsoft made .NET).
The chief flaw in the ActiveX concept is that it allows another user-- a complete stranger-- to run an arbitrary program on your computer, with your identity and privileges. You have no means of granting limited privileges to the ActiveX control or of stopping and removing the control after it has run. When you click Yes to that dialog asking you to "trust content" from whomever, you are granting a great deal of trust. And because an ActiveX control is just like any other application on windows, you cannot grant any less trust to ActiveX than to any other application.
Historically, the percieved (and, usually, actual)
injustices created by the ability of the victor
to impose intolerable conditions on the vanquished
has in fact lead to future wars.
That does usually happen, but not always. For a brief time after the war, the victors have a choice of what to do with the remains of the vanquished. The victors' usual choice is some combination of plunder and semi-random killing, then forget about them. If the victors choose to annihilate the vanquished (native americans for example) no further war can occur from that source. If the vanquished are assimilated into the society of the victors, then any strife can be handled within the framework of law rather than the battlefield (assuming the victors have "reasonable" laws and apply them consistently). Then there is the anomaly of WWII where the vanquished nations were remodelled into something the victors could live with, but that was not offensive to the vanquished people.
Guess what...war begets war. Weapons beget weapons.
Uh, no. War begats peace. Overwhelming weapons begats non-proliferation.
War does not lead to peace, it does not lead to more war. War determines who is "in control" of whatever. The decisions of the the persons in control and reactions of everybody else determine the next occurances of war. In the long run, you can expect that control of anything will be violently disputed, regardless of the weapons available to the combatants.
Why do you think the world has as much peace as it has? It's the called the US Military. The bigger the imbalance of power between the US and the rest of the world, the less the rogue nations will be tempted to invade their neighbors. Unfortunately, expansionism is alive and well in the middle east.
If peace is the absence of large scale violence, then there was more peace during the cold war. Both superpowers had an interest in supressing large scale wars. A sprawling regional conflict like in Liberia/Ivory Coast/Siearra Leone would not have been tolerated. Chaves of Venezuela would not have lasted 6 months. Every rogue was on the leash of one or the other superpower. Since the soviet union dropped out, strange things are coming out.
Small companies cannot make the same games as big companies. Small company games must be clever, not massive.
IMO, the answer to content for a small company is reusable content, like a soccer field or Quake level. For an MMORPG, this would be a New York style city. You can see it all in a week, but there is always something going on (that does not require the attention of the Programmers). Imagine Antigua in the age of piracy.
I have not heard of anyone doing large scale random content in MMORPGs, though this was done effectively in some single player RPGs (Nethack and company) and strategy games (Civilization).
For high level players vs low level players, put things in the game that are level independent. Perhaps make the "powerful" stuff in the game depend on location in the world or some other more dynamic effect than long play time. Or associate level with the player's actual game skill vs other players instead of a character attribute. In other multiplayer games, the newbie gets the same weapons as the old timer.
A superjumbo sized jet with 2-3 ABL turrets at 60,000 ft. Anything (fighters, missles of all kinds, flying robots) within 500 miles is toast! Tanks on the ground explode in a few seconds. Specific buildings incinerated at will leaving the rest of the town intact. A flying battleship-- completely redefines air combat.
Agreed, XWT system solves this problem elegantly. Only one code base to maintain, optimal performance on windows. BUT you will have to rewrite your app, and probably patch the XWT client side parts for your imaging needs.
Flash also solves this problem. It is already installed on modern ( 3 yrs old) systems and Macromedia is at peace with Microsoft. But I recommend Open Source wherever practical, and maybe flash does not support your particular imaging display needs.
DHTML + Javascript + serverside image generator will work OK if you do not need 3D.
I encountered this as well with one client. My code had been reused, and repurposed and abused into a sprawling mess.. Be direct.
Like cars, code gets old and crufty and must be renovated (or thrown out and rewritten). The client won't go for it the first time around, but they now know it must be done eventually and can plan for it.
I have never seen an article discussing the difference, but in my experience the difference is in the approach to solving a problem.
"Programming" style development is about building the best possible program. It requires an upfront analysis/design stage . During the design stage, you figure out the most efficient way for your program to do everything it must do. This means you must have a (legally and mathematically) precise idea of what your program must do. Then you figure out the most efficient way to build the program. Finally you actually build the program according to the design. There is a certain art to making the implementation conform to the design when the inevitable unexpected problems occur. Good designs have fallbacks.
"Scripting" style development is about building the program as quickly as possible. The only planning is perhaps 15 minutes of note jotting and brainstorming. While writing code, you will have at least 1 book (printed from a webpage) open on your desk describing the Funky Toolkit you just installed which does 30-70% of the task for you.
Programming languages are designed to permit the creation of the most efficient possible program. Scripting languages are designed to permit fastest possible creation of some kind of program. Using scripting style development with a programming language will lead to disaster. However, programming style development works fine with scripting languages, though the programmers will not complete the program much faster than if they had used a programming language.
Gotta agree, but engineers/scientists sometimes go overboard with their endeavours and fail to see the impact it may have on humanity.
Going "overboard" is necessary to solve the most difficult problems. I find that I must live in the problem domain for a while (days, weeks) before getting anywhere on my most difficult programming tasks. This is aggravated by everyone that needs the program insisting that I finish it faster. This all builds up a kind of inertia.
Now, selection of which problems to solve is a serious failing among engineers. I made a buck off these solutions, but none of them improved life for more than a few dozen people. Consider the lost man-years spent building websites for all the dead dot-coms. I doubt a liberal arts education would help with problem selection.
Anyone who says universities are balanced politically is an idiot.
Nor should you expect political balance in a university. Only those who value education enough to actually do it dispite the economic penalty will seek work in universities. Such interest almost requires a Liberal (Enlightment-style) political outlook. Most liberals are registered Democrats as that party is slightly closer to real Liberalism than the Republican party.
Tis easier to test someone for liberalness than for dedication to knowledge, competence, etc... so I expect most schools just hire liberals except when a non-liberal has something extraordinary.
But n is rapidly increasing.
There is a Moores Law-like effect on dataset sizes that grows faster than processing power. Today terabyte databases are not unusual. It is not unreasonable to have a terabyte on the desktop. Five years ago people could not access drives bigger than 8GB.
An algorithm that takes exponential time to process such a dataset may perform better FOR NOW than one that takes polynomial time. But 5 years from now the exponential algorithm will be useless-- the dataset size (n) will have increased by orders of magnitude, which does horrible things to the exponential runtime.
We routinely keep software around for 30+ years. We cannot expect an exponential time algorithm to be useful over even 10 years. But with the increasing processing power, we can expect a bad polynomial time algorithm to eventually become useful, as recently happened with 3D graphics algorithms.
I did a bit of FORTRAN in the early 90's. IMO, its great strength is the ability to control the range and accuracy of numerical values as part of the language. No other programming language (that I know of) has comparable abilities. FORTRAN's control of numbers is analogous to the way Perl treats regular expressions as part of the language.
Sure, you can get a math library for your favorite language that provides similar ability. You can get a regular expression library for other languages that gives you Perl-like abilities. But if you have ever used Perl, you know that the regex libraries of other languages cannot provide the flexibility-- the ease of expression-- the Awesome Power-- that Perl allows with regex. So it goes with numbers in FORTRAN. If you have a fetish for numbers, FORTRAN is for you.
Yea, FORTRAN code is write-only, like Perl... such is the price of expressive-control.
There is no competing P2P software on the Macintosh. MacPython is mature. Announce your port on www.macintouch.com. Instant 5% of all computer users.
Most "Linux developers" and "BSD developers
" do not know enough to build the hardware-level guts of an OS. Hurd is not (last i checked) developed far enough for the common software developer to work on. AtheOS chose to defy compatibility, I suspect it would require a month of relearning to develop on. In both cases, a developer who already has a UNIX system has little reason to switch.
I personally find AtheOS more interesting than Hurd (Xwindows is Evil!), but I could not begin to do anything useful on it or for it, even ignoring the hardware incompatibilities.
More interesting question: "do Hurd or AtheOS have developer support comparable to what Linux had in 1993?"
Unfortunately, the standard way to move MIME encoded mail from one system to another is to mail it. This is *not* a good idea.
Suppose you are changing to a new computer (Linux to MacOS X for example), and you want to keep your email. Or suppose you are changing jobs.
Imagine emailing thousands of messages to yourself just to move them from one machine to another... If your former employer followed the prevailing advice here of locking up mail on a server, then this is the ONLY way you can keep your email.
If you kept copies of your mail locally, then you can burn the mail archive to CD, but since your mail is still in some client-specific format, you must install the same mail client on your new machine. Perl help you if the mail client software does not run on it.
An end user in a corporate office should not be installing their own software-- thats IT's job. IT should compile the apps themselves just on principle.