I'm not really sure what extreme programming entails, aside from the pair-programming.
However, I have been using pair programming for about 2.5 years now, but only for hobby coding, and I have two things to say about it.
I find it can be very fun
It's not without its dangers, though. While traveling together, on no sleep, halfway through a case of Bawls we wrote some code. It works good, but sprinkled through our class definitions is the line "friend Skeletor;"
It's pretty effective for making decent code happen. (expect the first release of jao in a few months)
I do think that how effective this technique is probably depends on the specific pairing, though my experience is quite limited on this, though.
Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
I've only been working in the industry for a couple of years, and have interned at two companies and worked fulltime for a third. The code there was written by 'professionals' (in the sense that writing this code was people's professions) and has been varying degrees of ugly. Not always hideous, rarely fantastic.
I think that the Open source process encourages clean code more than closed source development, for two reasons. 1) You don't want to show the world your ugly dumb code, 2) the world has the chance to clean up your ugly dumb code, if it wants.
"The FBI has ammended the terms of Kevin Mitnik's probation. Now he is allowed to use computers of any kind, so long as he doesn't do anything with them except play Daikatana. Civil rights activists are up in arms."
Radio stations don't pay royalties for broadcasting music. Actually, I don't know about the big ones, but I'm quite positive that the college radio station I DJ'd at for a couple of years did no such thing.
The way things worked was: I play a bunch of tracks, writing that down on the playlist. These playlists would find their ways to the CMJ and to the labels, who would say "Oooh, our music is getting some airplay. Send more free promos out to WMCN!" The RIAA sees the radio as free advertising, and realizes that radio and MTV are essential to making the platinum selling superstars.
Poor RIAA - the dinosaurs just don't get it. I've got 10X more use out of my CD collection with my.mp3.com/BeamIt than I ever did with they physical discs.
I think you don't get it. The RIAA doesn't care if you listen to the CDs you already bought at all, that's not why they make them.
This is okay and all, and it is appropriate to raise awareness of various other linuxes as well as other similar platforms (BSD, for instance), but there's the practical matter of "we can't support every possible *nix distro you could possibly have". I could make a linux distro with all networking support compiled out by default - would it be reasonable to expect id software's telephone support to resolve problems people have getting multiplayer to work on such a distro?
What would be REALLY useful would be a (open) linux standards group, which defines what is appropriate to expect from an install, so that developers need only test a limited space. You can never guarantee that something will work on ALL linux boxes. But it IS valuable to be able to know whether a given app will work with your system.
I feel the purpose of redhatisnotlinux.org is to get people to be more conservative in their statement of what linux X runs on, but just saying "I run under RedHat" is not so good either. Saying "I run on a LinuxBox 2000.3", or some sort would be quite reasonable. That standard would encompass several elements of the GNU/Linux OS, such as ensuring certain versions of shared libraries, various kernel options, and so on. You could go further for specificity and have "LinuxGameBox 2000.3" and "LinuxDevBox 2000.3" and so on, if more granularity was needed.
While OpenGL does provide an API by which programmers can take advantage of hardware accelerated geometry calculations, many games are not written to use this aspect of OpenGL, they implemented the matrix maths themselves, perhaps hoping to squeeze a few more optimisations in, or maybe to get performance less reliant on your GL implementation being good, or whatever.
As for DirectX, version 7 added stuff to the API by which these new features could be taken advantage of, but just because a programme use directx7 doesn't mean that it uses it right, obviously.
There are a large number of only vaguely standard text modes (like 132x43 or something) which are supported by SOME video cards. There never was a whole lot of software support for these modes, and were not included in the original VGA specification.
I believe that ATI's cards DO support a fairly large number of text modes, if you're after that kind of thing.
Well, the review in Thresh's FiringSquad says that indeed the geforce does perform better in many situations, particularly with a slower processor.
But they're very different cards, and they each have different strengths. The GeForce (nVidia's card for those who have had a cardboard box over their head lately) will certainly outperform a Voodoo5 in rendering high-poly-count scenes, while the Voodoo5 MAY be capable of a higher fill-rate, and will deliver full-screen antialiasing.
Ironically, the scenes that need fullscreen antialiasing the most are scenes with lots of polygon boundaries, eg, those with a high poly count. Hopefully the next generation of Voodoos will accelerate geometry, and the next generation of nVidia cards will do FSAA.
Slashdot's comment display, at least in Minimalist Mode, is very bad at this. In Netscape 4.x you have to wait for the whole 100Kbyte or so before seeing any of it.
This is actually netscape's fault. It has some kind of unwillingness to move things on the page as the page loads, so it often finds itself stuck waiting to know how wide a table has to be or something.
The Slashdot community does indeed say one thing, and do another, but that is merely a subset of what really happens which is that the Slashdot community says a couple dozen different things and does a few hundred different things.
"public domain" has a specific meaning when it comes to intellectual property laws. That is not it. I don't know the precise legal definition of the term, but it's something to the effect that that IP is owned by the public - anyone can freely use it in any way they wish (er, at least free of IP restrictions).
LZW is NOT in the public domain. If it were, Unisys could not collect royalties on it. It may be a publicly understood algorithm, but that just means other people are able to copy it, not that they're legally allowed to do so.
The Playstation just uses a MIPS R3000 or something. Getting GCC to cross-compile to that shouldn't be difficult. What you DO need to use is proprietory libraries and a proprietory boot loader to make a cd that the PSX can run. And if you want it to work on non-modded playstations, you're only choice is basically to give money to Sony.
I can't imagine the PS2 being a whole lot different, except the CPU architecture's more of a beast, and blank DVDs are more expensive than blank CDs. But obviously someone's written A compiler for it...
One of the reasons the PSX had such fantastic developer support was that it was architecturally fairly simple. A off-the-shelf processor, and the graphics acceleration was nothing fundamentally unusual, parallel, or tricky. Whether the bar has been raised on gaming and it's now worth the extra effort to suppor the sort of mad craziness the PS2 has inside it is anybody's guess.
That if I own a web server I shouldn't be allowed to take down whatever I want to?
Hardly. I would however say that if you provide hosting services for many people, you should not be liable for what THEY say on the page.
I very doubt that these ISPs wish to take down their customers pages - of course they'd prefer to keep taking their monthly cheques. However, the legal climate is such that doing so may put THE ISP at risk of a lawsuit. It should instead be the AUTHOR of the content who is liable, rather than the web hosting service, who as a result of this is in effect FORCED to take down any pages that anyone even threatens with a lawsuit over, frivolous though it may be.
DirectX doesn't really let apps directly the HW without going through the OS. I would instead consider it part of the OS which provides a set of interfaces which are of use to people writing games.
DirectX DOES, I believe, allow the DirectX driver developers to access the hardware directly, so that these drivers intended for realtime play (games) are not using layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction. Poorly written drivers can crash the system. This is always true.
In my opinion, engineering is, to a large degree, about making tradeoffs in order to get a product that does what it's supposed to done in a reasonable ammount of time. By that metric, compromising some stability for speed is reasonable. (It is easier to hard crash a windows box writing buggy code for directX, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that it's difficult to do the same thing using other APIs)
I find HIV scarier than cancer because cancer is not contagious. There is NO WAY cancer could concievably wipe out the human race. There are regions of the Earth where upwards of 50% of the population is infected with HIV. I suspect that it its infection rate is increasing much faster than cancer rates are.
However, some decisions can be financially correct but morally wrong. For instance exploiting child labor in a third world country and paying them dirt, or dumping hazardous waste somewhere legal but still dangerous, may be the 'best' deal they can make. Donating the resultant profits to charity is not a reasonable substitute for making consciencious decisions in the first place. (Only partially because it's ALWAYS easier and cheaper to break things than to fix them)
Otherwise, the cell contractors have an opportunity here to extort payment for blocking or caller ID services.
Caller ID services are VERY commonly included along with cell-phone packages at no extra charge, mainly because you can (if you're over your free time or whatever) pay per call you answer.
Slashdot Mirror
The brunching shuttlecocks has a page about this topic. Very funny stuff.
However, I have been using pair programming for about 2.5 years now, but only for hobby coding, and I have two things to say about it.
Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
I've only been working in the industry for a couple of years, and have interned at two companies and worked fulltime for a third. The code there was written by 'professionals' (in the sense that writing this code was people's professions) and has been varying degrees of ugly. Not always hideous, rarely fantastic.
I think that the Open source process encourages clean code more than closed source development, for two reasons. 1) You don't want to show the world your ugly dumb code, 2) the world has the chance to clean up your ugly dumb code, if it wants.
"The FBI has ammended the terms of Kevin Mitnik's probation. Now he is allowed to use computers of any kind, so long as he doesn't do anything with them except play Daikatana. Civil rights activists are up in arms."
Radio stations don't pay royalties for broadcasting music. Actually, I don't know about the big ones, but I'm quite positive that the college radio station I DJ'd at for a couple of years did no such thing.
The way things worked was: I play a bunch of tracks, writing that down on the playlist. These playlists would find their ways to the CMJ and to the labels, who would say "Oooh, our music is getting some airplay. Send more free promos out to WMCN!" The RIAA sees the radio as free advertising, and realizes that radio and MTV are essential to making the platinum selling superstars.
Poor RIAA - the dinosaurs just don't get it. I've got 10X more use out of my CD collection with my.mp3.com/BeamIt than I ever did with they physical discs.
I think you don't get it. The RIAA doesn't care if you listen to the CDs you already bought at all, that's not why they make them.
This is okay and all, and it is appropriate to raise awareness of various other linuxes as well as other similar platforms (BSD, for instance), but there's the practical matter of "we can't support every possible *nix distro you could possibly have". I could make a linux distro with all networking support compiled out by default - would it be reasonable to expect id software's telephone support to resolve problems people have getting multiplayer to work on such a distro?
What would be REALLY useful would be a (open) linux standards group, which defines what is appropriate to expect from an install, so that developers need only test a limited space. You can never guarantee that something will work on ALL linux boxes. But it IS valuable to be able to know whether a given app will work with your system.
I feel the purpose of redhatisnotlinux.org is to get people to be more conservative in their statement of what linux X runs on, but just saying "I run under RedHat" is not so good either. Saying "I run on a LinuxBox 2000.3", or some sort would be quite reasonable. That standard would encompass several elements of the GNU/Linux OS, such as ensuring certain versions of shared libraries, various kernel options, and so on. You could go further for specificity and have "LinuxGameBox 2000.3" and "LinuxDevBox 2000.3" and so on, if more granularity was needed.
While OpenGL does provide an API by which programmers can take advantage of hardware accelerated geometry calculations, many games are not written to use this aspect of OpenGL, they implemented the matrix maths themselves, perhaps hoping to squeeze a few more optimisations in, or maybe to get performance less reliant on your GL implementation being good, or whatever.
As for DirectX, version 7 added stuff to the API by which these new features could be taken advantage of, but just because a programme use directx7 doesn't mean that it uses it right, obviously.
There are a large number of only vaguely standard text modes (like 132x43 or something) which are supported by SOME video cards. There never was a whole lot of software support for these modes, and were not included in the original VGA specification.
I believe that ATI's cards DO support a fairly large number of text modes, if you're after that kind of thing.
Well, the review in Thresh's FiringSquad says that indeed the geforce does perform better in many situations, particularly with a slower processor.
But they're very different cards, and they each have different strengths. The GeForce (nVidia's card for those who have had a cardboard box over their head lately) will certainly outperform a Voodoo5 in rendering high-poly-count scenes, while the Voodoo5 MAY be capable of a higher fill-rate, and will deliver full-screen antialiasing.
Ironically, the scenes that need fullscreen antialiasing the most are scenes with lots of polygon boundaries, eg, those with a high poly count. Hopefully the next generation of Voodoos will accelerate geometry, and the next generation of nVidia cards will do FSAA.
Slashdot's comment display, at least in Minimalist Mode, is very bad at this. In Netscape 4.x you have to wait for the whole 100Kbyte or so before seeing any of it.
This is actually netscape's fault. It has some kind of unwillingness to move things on the page as the page loads, so it often finds itself stuck waiting to know how wide a table has to be or something.
The Slashdot community does indeed say one thing, and do another, but that is merely a subset of what really happens which is that the Slashdot community says a couple dozen different things and does a few hundred different things.
"public domain" has a specific meaning when it comes to intellectual property laws. That is not it. I don't know the precise legal definition of the term, but it's something to the effect that that IP is owned by the public - anyone can freely use it in any way they wish (er, at least free of IP restrictions).
LZW is NOT in the public domain. If it were, Unisys could not collect royalties on it. It may be a publicly understood algorithm, but that just means other people are able to copy it, not that they're legally allowed to do so.
That sucks for latency, though.
"stuff that matters" is so obviously a subjective term, just like "greatest show on earth". It's a catchphrase, not a guarantee.
It's all about ROB, the Robotic Operating Buddy.
The Playstation just uses a MIPS R3000 or something. Getting GCC to cross-compile to that shouldn't be difficult. What you DO need to use is proprietory libraries and a proprietory boot loader to make a cd that the PSX can run. And if you want it to work on non-modded playstations, you're only choice is basically to give money to Sony.
I can't imagine the PS2 being a whole lot different, except the CPU architecture's more of a beast, and blank DVDs are more expensive than blank CDs. But obviously someone's written A compiler for it...
One of the reasons the PSX had such fantastic developer support was that it was architecturally fairly simple. A off-the-shelf processor, and the graphics acceleration was nothing fundamentally unusual, parallel, or tricky. Whether the bar has been raised on gaming and it's now worth the extra effort to suppor the sort of mad craziness the PS2 has inside it is anybody's guess.
That if I own a web server I shouldn't be allowed to take down whatever I want to?
Hardly. I would however say that if you provide hosting services for many people, you should not be liable for what THEY say on the page.
I very doubt that these ISPs wish to take down their customers pages - of course they'd prefer to keep taking their monthly cheques. However, the legal climate is such that doing so may put THE ISP at risk of a lawsuit. It should instead be the AUTHOR of the content who is liable, rather than the web hosting service, who as a result of this is in effect FORCED to take down any pages that anyone even threatens with a lawsuit over, frivolous though it may be.
I dunno, he got a brother pretty early on. The only pre-luigi game I can think of with Mario in it is Donkey Kong..
Oh come on, Daikatana has been being hyped since, what, 1962?
I find HIV scarier than cancer because cancer is not contagious. There is NO WAY cancer could concievably wipe out the human race. There are regions of the Earth where upwards of 50% of the population is infected with HIV. I suspect that it its infection rate is increasing much faster than cancer rates are.
However, some decisions can be financially correct but morally wrong. For instance exploiting child labor in a third world country and paying them dirt, or dumping hazardous waste somewhere legal but still dangerous, may be the 'best' deal they can make. Donating the resultant profits to charity is not a reasonable substitute for making consciencious decisions in the first place. (Only partially because it's ALWAYS easier and cheaper to break things than to fix them)
Otherwise, the cell contractors have an opportunity here to extort payment for blocking or caller ID services.
Caller ID services are VERY commonly included along with cell-phone packages at no extra charge, mainly because you can (if you're over your free time or whatever) pay per call you answer.