Harmonix was gracious enough to let you use the GH guitar in Rock Band. What? You can use your GH guitars with Rock Band? I guess you don't have a PS3 and had to watch Activision actively block the release of a patch that would have solved the issue. It was big news, but not big enough to get on slashdot, no matter how high it was voted in the fire hose.
The only downside to this was Rock Band hasn't been selling as well because of the name. You might want to look at the actual sales numbers. Rock Band has been Out Selling Guitar Hero, on the two systems that are fully functional, for months. It didn't get the same initial sales as GH because of the limited supply and price, but has been doing very well since. RB has been doing so well it is noted as single handedly improving Viacom's bottom line enough to be news worthy.
Though others have pointed this out repeatedly, you really ought to understand the difference between purchasing and licensing. Software is not purchased, and hasn't been for many many years, but rather it is licensed for use.
The is no first-license doctrine. Software is more akin to a service or a lease. In most cases you do not have the right to sublet rental property or to transfer licenses without explicit permission, as it is never your property.
I am not saying you have to like it, just saying that first-sale does not apply.
Javascript is inherently multithreaded and embedded in a highly asynchronous environment, het has no threading API whatsoever. This is because there is no reason to create custom threads. Multi-threaded functionality can be handled in a safe way through event handling. Implementing a semaphore is pretty simple if you need such a thing, but creating true asynchronous applications is actually a better approach.
Aren't you made of meat? Also not all creatures are designed to eat meat. And factory farming is far from natural. Yes, humans are made of meat, but they also have no know natural predator. The only animal that would come close are other humans but as is is well known eating flesh of your own species is the cause of many diseases, specifically neurological disorders caused by eating nervous tissue of your own species.
It's also true that not all creatures are designed to eat meat, but humans are.
Lastly factory farming is as natural as apes using sticks to dig out termites. Part of human nature is the ability to create and use tools. This is what separates us from most of the animal kingdom. We are able to hunt, kill and eat animals that are physically superior to use because we can create tools and work collectively. And factory farming is certainly more natural than synthetically replicating animal matter.
If you chose not to eat meat then I am totally cool with that, but please do not try to use some unfounded moral high ground as your justification.
only a mentally defective person would carry a balance on a card and pay it off over time. Only a mental defective person would make blanket statements about financial matters with out any basis in economics.
Carrying a balance on a credit card that has a less than prime interest rate, which any educated person will have, is beneficial to the person carrying the balance. If you can earn more on the interest of an investment of the money than it will cost you in interest on the card you are better off carrying the balance and investing the money. If you do not currently have a 0 or near 0 interest rate I suggest checking your mail every once in a while, or fixing your credit.
That's because Sony uses the Playstation brand on all their gaming products. Try looking at the Nintendo brand. The GameBoy and DS have been selling extremely well going back about 20 years now. I was talking specifically about home consoles not handhelds, which is why I did not include the PlayStation protable, the DS or GameBoy. Point was that Sony is still leading the home console sales, even if it's not the PS3 specifically.
Wiis sales are limited by supply, and are expected to be for at least another 6 months (according to GameStop's recent financial reports). That's interesting that Nintedo has been able to sell 1.5 million units in one month and less than half a million in another. Does Nintendo produce more units in certain months than others? Normally supply constraints go up as time goes on not down. But then again that's only if they are physical constraints.
Like I previously said I don't really care about any console wars, I buy what I think is the best fit for me, but I am sick of fanboys ignore the actual numbers, which show that Sony's home consoles are currently out selling the other manufactures and that the sales of the PS3 are nearly identical to the best selling PS2.
Not starting a console war just wanted to point out an interesting statistic from those numbers. The best selling home console brand in February was the PlayStation. Total sales of PlayStation branded home consoles (not handhelds) is 632,600 with the next closet competitor, being Nintedo, having only 432,000, or only 2/3 the sales of Sony's brand.
I just find it funny when someone talks about the dominance of a console in the market and how Microsoft or Nintendo has taken down the Playstation giant, with out actually realizing the the Playstation has continual out sold both competitors month in and month out since the brand was first released.
So it seems that what Sony is doing, including marketing of Blu-ray is working, and microsoft might want to start taking a look at that.
I just wanted to say that I am glad to see that I am not alone in realizing that these proposed changes to JS are certainly not for the better.
JavaScript is a very powerful language that got almost everything about OO correct. Everything is an Object, and should remain that way. Packages are Objects, functions are Objects, Constructors are objects. Objects can inherit from Objects, no need for clunky class hierarchies. Ducktyping is more powerful and more applicable to real world modeling that static typing.
Constants are ok but unnecessary, while the program units will actually and some useful functionality. Sadly it looks like this update is not going to bring a heck of a lot to JS, except bloat and massive performance penalties.
The T&Cs specifically prohibit loading and running code (including scripts) that are not part of the application bundle. I think you missed this quote from the article which is quote from the license.
"no interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."
Firefox runs inside an XUL runtime interpreter. What the Firefox developers would need to do is port XUL to the iPhone platform and that seems to be explicitly against the licensing since that would allow code to be interpreted by code other than the apple API, namely the XUL interpreter.
We don't ask you because we don't trust you. This is the crux of the entire issue between Administration (System, Database and others) and it is a mater of trust. Not trusting developers is the fastest way to have security compromised. The people who write binaries are capable of circumventing any security measure you set up. If a Developer wants to be a criminal they will be, trying to stop them only frustrates those trying to do real work. It there is a virus on a competent developers box, or do to a competent developers actions it's because they wrote it and put it there. Your Virus scanning software is not going to catch that. (in the nearly 30 years I have been operating a computer I have never once had a virus, and yes I do check now and again).
Matters are made worse by Administrators not being willing to learn the tools necessary to support the development staff. Rather than complaining about the technology the developers have chose to utilize, learn how to support it. Also supplying the developers with the tools they need will keep them from every violating compliance. If I don't have to install an unlicensed tool to get my job done then I probably won't do it.
On the other hand I fully support any administrator that wants to be hard ass when a program written by the developers is continually causing issues such as down time. Turn the program off and tell them to fix it before you will turn it back on. Don't just bitch and complain about having to restart services and servers, actually do something about it. Oh and I also think people wanting to have their own personal preference for OS installed on a company machine is an unreasonable request. If you accepted a job in a windows shop you just have to deal with it.
Oh and I don't think that you, of all people, should really be complaining about "inchoherence."
I think this whole concept of balance of power is missing a couple key points. If two individuals know everything about each other it does not cause there to be a balance of power unless both individuals have the same level of concern over their own private information. If one of the two people has a high level of fear that their private information will be reveled when the other does not, then the one who feels they have nothing to hide maintains a higher level of power.
To truly make use of your private information powerless that information has to be freely available to everyone, not just a single individual. It doesn't matter what you know about others but rather that no one has more information than anyone else.
In my universe, the biggest source of headaches and jackassery is invariably the developers I support. In [i]their[/i] universe, developers are holy god-kings that can do no wrong. But in my universe, they're directly responsible for the miserable pile of unstable, un-maintainable, insecure applications whose uptime I'm supposed to sustain. I'm guessing this is just a bunch of Developers trying to get even for having to jump through a dozen hoops just to find an System Administrator capable of deploying applications, let alone willing to do it in anything even resembling reasonable a time frame.
There's not a single industry best practice in the realm of systems administration that my developers don't insist on violating every day, because it makes their job easier to ignore it. Being as the "industry best practice in the realm of systems administration" appear to be set up to make the system administrators job easier at the expense of every other job in the company, I can fully understand where the developers are coming from. Developers and Engineers like to get work done, Administrators (all types) like to avoid work and make it hard for others to get anything done, I always thought it was in the job description. Compare the definitions of Administrator and Engineer, you'll quickly see which group actually works.
This is exactly why processes like Automated Continuous Integration, automated testing, and all other forms of software automation came about. Anything that can take the Administrators out of the loop improves the rate at which code can be maintained.
This has already been associated with CCR5 Delta 32 at least in relationship to the HIV R5 strain. This study may have found another immunity or an immunity to a different strain, but immunity or increased resistance, has been known for many years. Delta 32 also protects against smallpox and the Plague just in case that ever comes back around again.
Though it may be that these machines are targeted at people who will primarily be using it to browse the web or send emails, I have to wonder if it will remain that way.
Could the influx of machines that are not only cheaper but lower performing cause software developers to over come Wirth's Law? Personally I would love to be able go back to measuring machines in Megabytes and Megahertz and still be able to continue using the machine for my day to day work.
The recent RIAA extortion has never been about the artists, merely keeping the "coke & whores" budget healthy. Coke and Whores? That sounds like it's completely about the artists to me. I mean that's the only reason to be a professional musician right?
You misunderstood my original comment. I guessing it's because you misinterpreted the statement about "real world" programmers and that I was referencing business application development (the majority of development being done). So a better paraphrasing of my statement would be "For the vast majority of development Computer Scientists are not needed and quite often caused more harm than good by chasing unnecessary reimplementation of well established algorithms."
Also, my examples are not wrong. Many of the other responses have already pointed out where you were wrong, but allow me to reiterate and expand upon them.
The majority of all sorting algorithms have a different application, but barring that it is agreed that Bubble sorts are the worst performing sorts for general application not insertion sorts. Second a hybrid merged-quicksort is going to be your best option for large data sets that are not already in a semi sorted order and don't require the order to remain stable. No matter how you look at it defaulting to a merged sort without knowing the state of the underlying data is foolish and a quicksort should be your fall back.
Second why do you care about the sorting algorithm since the data store itself probably including indexing and ordering services that are going to be considerably faster than any in memory sort. If for some reason you need to do the sort in memory the development environment you are working in will probably already have a fairly well defined set of APIs that can be used for sorting and, assuming they are built well, they will chose the correct sort of the situation.
Lastly performance is NEVER what makes or breaks software. No successful software project ever released was at the peak of efficiency. Useablity and marketing is what makes software successful, performance is only one small aspect of useablity, and in the majority of cases a minor aspect.
I don't need to make myself look more knowledgeable and was actually trying to avoid that.
First of all in all the cases you are refereeing to, Brooks was just repeating data or suggestions made by other people. The data about programmer productivity comes from Sackman, Erikson and Grant and shows that a good programmer is 5 to 10 times more productive than the worst performers. This means that on average a good programmer is on 3 to 4 times more productive than the average developer which is a far cry from 100 times, but still significant enough to take note.
The Surgical team concept was devised by Harlan Mills, or at least that is who Brooks is referencing. Mills suggest a team of 10 people including 2 programmers and 8 support personnel. It's true in later essays Brooks admits that some of those support personnel could share duties or even obsolete because of current techniques, but he's certainly not talking about 1 surgeon and 5 assistants.
Brooks essays are actually a manual for how a good project manager, as he was when he gathered the experience necessary to write the essays, to get the most out of architects, engineers and developers. He states very clearly that it takes a good project manager to create an environment in which developers can be most productive. Yes a good programmer is going to be more productive than a bad programmer, specifically so if you measure of a good programmer is based on productivity.
Carrying around a copy of TMM-M pays of again. Almost as useful as carrying around a copy of constitution.
I have on rule on talent: it isn't a substitute for process. Clarification on my previous comment.
I have on rule on talent: it isn't a substitute for good process.
But the point I was actually trying to make, and I think most people got based on the moderation, is that anyone who thinks they are talented enough to not need a good process is not nearly as good as they think they are.
I have extensive knowledge in Algorithms, which is I why I know that most programmers do not need to know this information, and also that even your examples are wrong. I had to learn algorithms because I got sick of CS grads thinking that this was somehow important to business application development (the vast majority of programming that takes place in the world today).
There is no need to know what sorting algorithm, or other algorithm, to use if you are working in a language that has significant APIs available. Most business application programmers only need to know what API interfaces to use and this is best figured out through benchmarking not understanding the underlying implementation. Sure if you are writing a compiler, working in a field were pre-existing APIs will not work for you, or possibly working on creating the next set of APIs then you may need to know algorithms, but that is why I was asking what specifically the OP considered a great programmer.
Oh and performance and quality rarely make or break software or else Windows and MS products would not be the big sellers that they are.
there are plenty of self taught programmers, but there are few self taught computer scientists and software developers. Who actually needs Computer Scientists. Remember scientists do research, real work is done by engineers. Yes there are plenty of self taught software, and even hardware, engineers in the world (the current leading software and hardware companies were founded by them). In generally real world programming requires very little knowledge of the inner workings of algorithms, and having someone hung up on such things will certain slow down productivity. Leave the comp sci grads to figuring out the next great compilation optimization, not writing software non-developers actually have to use.
Never let a job listing that states they require a masters keep you from considering the job. Every self taught individual in the world will tell you that you need to ignore those requirements and do what you need to if you want a company to consider you. It may not be the right environment, but it might also be that the person in charge of writing the requirements doesn't know what they really need, or is just trying to keep the slackers from applying.
Also every person in the world has room to learn and they can learn from anyone, even people they don't consider to be better than them. And remember that if someone is higher than you in an organization they certainly have a skill you are lacking, even if that skill is the patients to get through a college program.
I have one rule on process: it isn't a substitute for talent. I have on rule on talent: it isn't a substitute for process.
The firm that realizes that is golden in my book.
When it comes to any form of engineering I would take a good process over any amount of talent. Talent is what I want in an artist not someone building complex technical devices (including software). Yes it would be nice to have both, but if you have to give up one don't make it the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Though others have pointed this out repeatedly, you really ought to understand the difference between purchasing and licensing. Software is not purchased, and hasn't been for many many years, but rather it is licensed for use.
The is no first-license doctrine. Software is more akin to a service or a lease. In most cases you do not have the right to sublet rental property or to transfer licenses without explicit permission, as it is never your property.
I am not saying you have to like it, just saying that first-sale does not apply.
That's 1.21 Gigawatts, but nice try.
It's also true that not all creatures are designed to eat meat, but humans are.
Lastly factory farming is as natural as apes using sticks to dig out termites. Part of human nature is the ability to create and use tools. This is what separates us from most of the animal kingdom. We are able to hunt, kill and eat animals that are physically superior to use because we can create tools and work collectively. And factory farming is certainly more natural than synthetically replicating animal matter.
If you chose not to eat meat then I am totally cool with that, but please do not try to use some unfounded moral high ground as your justification.
Carrying a balance on a credit card that has a less than prime interest rate, which any educated person will have, is beneficial to the person carrying the balance. If you can earn more on the interest of an investment of the money than it will cost you in interest on the card you are better off carrying the balance and investing the money. If you do not currently have a 0 or near 0 interest rate I suggest checking your mail every once in a while, or fixing your credit.
Like I previously said I don't really care about any console wars, I buy what I think is the best fit for me, but I am sick of fanboys ignore the actual numbers, which show that Sony's home consoles are currently out selling the other manufactures and that the sales of the PS3 are nearly identical to the best selling PS2.
Not starting a console war just wanted to point out an interesting statistic from those numbers. The best selling home console brand in February was the PlayStation. Total sales of PlayStation branded home consoles (not handhelds) is 632,600 with the next closet competitor, being Nintedo, having only 432,000, or only 2/3 the sales of Sony's brand.
I just find it funny when someone talks about the dominance of a console in the market and how Microsoft or Nintendo has taken down the Playstation giant, with out actually realizing the the Playstation has continual out sold both competitors month in and month out since the brand was first released.
So it seems that what Sony is doing, including marketing of Blu-ray is working, and microsoft might want to start taking a look at that.
I just wanted to say that I am glad to see that I am not alone in realizing that these proposed changes to JS are certainly not for the better.
JavaScript is a very powerful language that got almost everything about OO correct. Everything is an Object, and should remain that way. Packages are Objects, functions are Objects, Constructors are objects. Objects can inherit from Objects, no need for clunky class hierarchies. Ducktyping is more powerful and more applicable to real world modeling that static typing.
Constants are ok but unnecessary, while the program units will actually and some useful functionality. Sadly it looks like this update is not going to bring a heck of a lot to JS, except bloat and massive performance penalties.
"no interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."
Firefox runs inside an XUL runtime interpreter. What the Firefox developers would need to do is port XUL to the iPhone platform and that seems to be explicitly against the licensing since that would allow code to be interpreted by code other than the apple API, namely the XUL interpreter.
Matters are made worse by Administrators not being willing to learn the tools necessary to support the development staff. Rather than complaining about the technology the developers have chose to utilize, learn how to support it. Also supplying the developers with the tools they need will keep them from every violating compliance. If I don't have to install an unlicensed tool to get my job done then I probably won't do it.
On the other hand I fully support any administrator that wants to be hard ass when a program written by the developers is continually causing issues such as down time. Turn the program off and tell them to fix it before you will turn it back on. Don't just bitch and complain about having to restart services and servers, actually do something about it. Oh and I also think people wanting to have their own personal preference for OS installed on a company machine is an unreasonable request. If you accepted a job in a windows shop you just have to deal with it.
Oh and I don't think that you, of all people, should really be complaining about "inchoherence."
I think this whole concept of balance of power is missing a couple key points. If two individuals know everything about each other it does not cause there to be a balance of power unless both individuals have the same level of concern over their own private information. If one of the two people has a high level of fear that their private information will be reveled when the other does not, then the one who feels they have nothing to hide maintains a higher level of power.
To truly make use of your private information powerless that information has to be freely available to everyone, not just a single individual. It doesn't matter what you know about others but rather that no one has more information than anyone else.
This is exactly why processes like Automated Continuous Integration, automated testing, and all other forms of software automation came about. Anything that can take the Administrators out of the loop improves the rate at which code can be maintained.
This has already been associated with CCR5 Delta 32 at least in relationship to the HIV R5 strain. This study may have found another immunity or an immunity to a different strain, but immunity or increased resistance, has been known for many years. Delta 32 also protects against smallpox and the Plague just in case that ever comes back around again.
Though it may be that these machines are targeted at people who will primarily be using it to browse the web or send emails, I have to wonder if it will remain that way.
Could the influx of machines that are not only cheaper but lower performing cause software developers to over come Wirth's Law? Personally I would love to be able go back to measuring machines in Megabytes and Megahertz and still be able to continue using the machine for my day to day work.
The majority of all sorting algorithms have a different application, but barring that it is agreed that Bubble sorts are the worst performing sorts for general application not insertion sorts. Second a hybrid merged-quicksort is going to be your best option for large data sets that are not already in a semi sorted order and don't require the order to remain stable. No matter how you look at it defaulting to a merged sort without knowing the state of the underlying data is foolish and a quicksort should be your fall back.
Second why do you care about the sorting algorithm since the data store itself probably including indexing and ordering services that are going to be considerably faster than any in memory sort. If for some reason you need to do the sort in memory the development environment you are working in will probably already have a fairly well defined set of APIs that can be used for sorting and, assuming they are built well, they will chose the correct sort of the situation.
Lastly performance is NEVER what makes or breaks software. No successful software project ever released was at the peak of efficiency. Useablity and marketing is what makes software successful, performance is only one small aspect of useablity, and in the majority of cases a minor aspect.
I don't need to make myself look more knowledgeable and was actually trying to avoid that.
First of all in all the cases you are refereeing to, Brooks was just repeating data or suggestions made by other people. The data about programmer productivity comes from Sackman, Erikson and Grant and shows that a good programmer is 5 to 10 times more productive than the worst performers. This means that on average a good programmer is on 3 to 4 times more productive than the average developer which is a far cry from 100 times, but still significant enough to take note.
The Surgical team concept was devised by Harlan Mills, or at least that is who Brooks is referencing. Mills suggest a team of 10 people including 2 programmers and 8 support personnel. It's true in later essays Brooks admits that some of those support personnel could share duties or even obsolete because of current techniques, but he's certainly not talking about 1 surgeon and 5 assistants.
Brooks essays are actually a manual for how a good project manager, as he was when he gathered the experience necessary to write the essays, to get the most out of architects, engineers and developers. He states very clearly that it takes a good project manager to create an environment in which developers can be most productive. Yes a good programmer is going to be more productive than a bad programmer, specifically so if you measure of a good programmer is based on productivity.
Carrying around a copy of TMM-M pays of again. Almost as useful as carrying around a copy of constitution.
I have on rule on talent: it isn't a substitute for good process.
But the point I was actually trying to make, and I think most people got based on the moderation, is that anyone who thinks they are talented enough to not need a good process is not nearly as good as they think they are.
I have extensive knowledge in Algorithms, which is I why I know that most programmers do not need to know this information, and also that even your examples are wrong. I had to learn algorithms because I got sick of CS grads thinking that this was somehow important to business application development (the vast majority of programming that takes place in the world today).
There is no need to know what sorting algorithm, or other algorithm, to use if you are working in a language that has significant APIs available. Most business application programmers only need to know what API interfaces to use and this is best figured out through benchmarking not understanding the underlying implementation. Sure if you are writing a compiler, working in a field were pre-existing APIs will not work for you, or possibly working on creating the next set of APIs then you may need to know algorithms, but that is why I was asking what specifically the OP considered a great programmer.
Oh and performance and quality rarely make or break software or else Windows and MS products would not be the big sellers that they are.
Never let a job listing that states they require a masters keep you from considering the job. Every self taught individual in the world will tell you that you need to ignore those requirements and do what you need to if you want a company to consider you. It may not be the right environment, but it might also be that the person in charge of writing the requirements doesn't know what they really need, or is just trying to keep the slackers from applying.
Also every person in the world has room to learn and they can learn from anyone, even people they don't consider to be better than them. And remember that if someone is higher than you in an organization they certainly have a skill you are lacking, even if that skill is the patients to get through a college program.
The firm that realizes that is golden in my book.
When it comes to any form of engineering I would take a good process over any amount of talent. Talent is what I want in an artist not someone building complex technical devices (including software). Yes it would be nice to have both, but if you have to give up one don't make it the process.