I think Paul Auster is an excellent storyteller in the non-SF category. Check out Moon palace and The New York trilogy. Gave me plenty of sensawunda. It's "real" literature as well. YMMV.
Several SF favorites have already been mentioned several times. They can probably bear yet another repetition:
Vernor Vinge for the utterly fantastic A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
George R.R. Martin for the excellent A Song of Ice and Fire series (in progress)
China Mieville for the dark, strange, gothic steampunk brick Perdido Street Station
(...) and we kept on writing things properly, including:
(...)
comments about who had done what with what code and when
Tracking code changes is the job of the SCM system.
Such comments, if you really think they are needed, can be generated by most SCM tools. It is not necessary and, in my experience, not very realistic to demand that developers manually maintain separate changelog block comments in each and every code file.
In my opinion, changelog comments add nothing but noise.
XP is an interesting (and controversial) methodology that has proven its usefulness in real projects, and it is nice to see it covered on slashdot. It is gaining acceptance in the software industry. One indication of this is the number of talks on XP at the SD2001 West conference in San Jose 8-12 April.
However, decent references are sorely missing from this story, like for example
the book by Kent Beck and one of the more comprehensive web sites, www.xprogramming.com by Ron Jeffries, with links to a lot of other resources on XP.
Wee ranted the following : When the Fed steps in like they did, the market becomes less and less free. (...) Yesterday was a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice.
I have big problems following your reasoning, especially from a libertarian point of view. I don't think the first statement is necessarily true, and - only partly as a result of this - find the second one overly melodramatic.
I'd like to think that true, "card carrying" libertarians and firm believers in capitalism in particular would agree that this ruling seeks to address a threat to the free market. Surely, if any action is taken, be it regulations on those MS practices that are seen as problematic or demands for changes in their organization, the consequence will hopefully be that the adverse effects of MS' total market dominance are reduced a bit. Of course they will be the major force for years to come, but maybe the market will become just a bit more open.
This can only be a Good Thing for the free market, IMNSHO. Why? Because in a market more open for smaller players, the diversity increases. Fair competition is what the free market is all about, and diversity is a necessary condition for true liberty and personal choice for consumers. A software market without options seems to take some of the pleasure out of "dollar voting".
(Insert a condescending and not very enlightening reference to Monty Pythons "cheese shop" here.)
Slashdot Mirror
Several SF favorites have already been mentioned several times. They can probably bear yet another repetition
Vernor Vinge for the utterly fantastic A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
George R.R. Martin for the excellent A Song of Ice and Fire series (in progress)
China Mieville for the dark, strange, gothic steampunk brick Perdido Street Station
Now and again, I find All music guide and their "related artists" categories to be quite useful for this purpose.
Such comments, if you really think they are needed, can be generated by most SCM tools. It is not necessary and, in my experience, not very realistic to demand that developers manually maintain separate changelog block comments in each and every code file.
In my opinion, changelog comments add nothing but noise.
XP is an interesting (and controversial) methodology that has proven its usefulness in real projects, and it is nice to see it covered on slashdot. It is gaining acceptance in the software industry. One indication of this is the number of talks on XP at the SD2001 West conference in San Jose 8-12 April.
However, decent references are sorely missing from this story, like for example
the book by Kent Beck and one of the more comprehensive web sites, www.xprogramming.com by Ron Jeffries, with links to a lot of other resources on XP.
Wee ranted the following :
When the Fed steps in like they did, the market becomes less and less free. (...)
Yesterday was a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice.
I have big problems following your reasoning, especially from a libertarian point of view. I don't think the first statement is necessarily true, and - only partly as a result of this - find the second one overly melodramatic.
I'd like to think that true, "card carrying" libertarians and firm believers in capitalism in particular would agree that this ruling seeks to address a threat to the free market. Surely, if any action is taken, be it regulations on those MS practices that are seen as problematic or demands for changes in their organization, the consequence will hopefully be that the adverse effects of MS' total market dominance are reduced a bit. Of course they will be the major force for years to come, but maybe the market will become just a bit more open.
This can only be a Good Thing for the free market, IMNSHO. Why? Because in a market more open for smaller players, the diversity increases. Fair competition is what the free market is all about, and diversity is a necessary condition for true liberty and personal choice for consumers. A software market without options seems to take some of the pleasure out of "dollar voting".
(Insert a condescending and not very enlightening reference to Monty Pythons "cheese shop" here.)