For example, those of us who already own Fords... without any Windows.
More to the point, I own a Windstar and a Taurus, both because of their safety. I can already look back on the days when I didn't expect my Fords to crash, but I knew that I'd be safe if they did.
Of course, one common use for Thinkpads is a pull-out rackmounted drawer with a KVM so they can serve as the keyboard and monitor for the entire rack. The Thinkpad case fits very nicely.
We're seeing articles about companies competing for Linux revenue streams. Yes, think about that. There's money to be made in open source and this is one more example of that. I want to see both of them thrive.
You are correct. I got interrupted by the phone as I was writing that and left out one very critical word: "published". Refactoring started to gain a wider audience when published articles and books about it started using Java. At that point the ideas were more accessible to a mainstream audience.
Software development processes have almost nothing to do with the choice of language. That said, it's been my observation that there are lots of really smart people working on Java to improve the development process. Eclipse is amazing with code completion, on-the-fly error tracking and refactoring. JUnit (comes with eclipse) is a benchmark Test Driven Development system. If you must switch languages, invest in the training to make those tools productive!
Yes! There are tools for both TDD and Refactoring for C++. For that matter, there are TDD frameworks for embedded C code too. However, the refactoring tools for Java are ahead of the support for C++. If you actually make use of them, they can improve your productivity. Switching languages because of some blind belief that programmers using a particular language are more productive is a waste of time. Switching to take advantage of tools and libraries that are better than the ones available for your old language can help you.
For the record, I've used C++ for years. I still use C for embedded code. I love Perl. I've used a bunch of other languages as well. I learned Java several years ago because it was the language of choice for examples in the early work on refactoring. Design Patterns were about raising the level of abstraction on chunks of code. Refactoring is about raising the level of abstraction on changes to code.
Re:How does he work? With 3 Screens!
on
How Bill Gates Works
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· Score: 4, Funny
Bicycle commuting is not necessarily as dangerous as you think. There are conditions under which I won't ride, including dangerous traffic conditions. However, I have commuted on busy city streets and secondary highways. It is worth it to learn about safety. I don't live in a particularly bike-friendly city, although it isn't actively bike-hostile either. I recommend John Forester's book Effective Cycling. He can be a bit strident on some issues, but his advice on safety has saved me from at least two accidents.
They are still going to be vulnerable. The problem is that users are going to click on links and run things. Sure, some things are obviously social engineering to get you to run trojans. You can teach most users to avoid those. But my wife cleaned up a client's site after someone opened what claimed to be a zip file with the most recent updates to something she'd been working on with a coworker. In retrospect, the message she got was a bogus one created by a worm. But she was expecting a zip at the time, from that coworker and they were under deadline pressure.
Sure. Why go for just 90% of the software market when with additional effort and degraded performance you can approach 100% without recompiling. If the linux users won't buy it anyway, so what?
Windows is not 90% of the software market because there is no one single unified market for all apps. This is one of those places where statistics can lead you horribly astray. For example, if you are writing client anti-virus or anti-spyware tools, even if you make them run portably, 99+% of your market is on Windows and although the engine might run portably, you'd need different datafiles on each platform. However, if you are writing a web-based app, making it run portably across operating systems might add considerably more than 10% to your market.
I agree with you completely about Baen. A friend introduced me to the Honor Harrington series several years ago. That led me to Baen's web site and the Baen Free Library. I've bought several hard cover books with bundled CDs and immediately put most of the books on my Palm Pilot with Plucker. It means that I can take several books with me almost anywhere I go. I read the entire Prince Roger series by John Ringo and David Weber on my Palm and Eric Flint's 1632 & 1633 while the print copies sat on my headboard.
Before the CoCo; before the Trash-80; we had this home computer. You programmed it by wire wrapping, more or less. The keyboard consisted of 10 sliding switches. The monitor was a set of 10 flashlight bulbs. RAM, what's that?
My point was that there are C++ libraries to parse XML, and there is are tools to transform XML into other stuff. You can use the tools to generate C++ code containing the data if you want it hard-coded. When the folks in Marketing had down the requirement to make it 100% buzzword compliant, you can throw in a library and a little code to parse the XML.
I certainly have enough old code laying around to parse enough different config files. There are three advantages to XML. The first is that it is text-based, so you can write it from any programming language that can write text to files, or your favorite text editor. That doesn't set it apart from any other text file format. The second is that there are lots of libraries and tools for dealing with it in any programing language. You don't have to write, debug and maintain tools to parse it. The third is only an advantage if you use it right. That is, the tags and attributes document what your data is. If you do it wrong, your data can end up looking like sloppy ASN.1 littered with angle brackets.
Assuming of course that I want to put a lot of complex data into my code rather than load it from XML or a database, I would seriously consider creating the XML files anyway. That would make switching to loading XML at runtime later a bit easier if I had a change of heart. Then I'd write some XLST to generate the C++ initialization from the XML source. Not that I expect any of this to change anyone's opinion on whether this is a shortcoming of C++ or whether it should be considered as a possible new feature.
Someone else asked why you would want to hard-code complex data. I can think of a couple of reasons. Sometimes your data is essentially static, but isn't composed completely of built-in types. State tables are a rich source of examples. In an embedded system, you may be hard-coding all sorts of things that could be expressed in a database or XML, but you can't afford the storage for the libraries and the database. Finally, if you need to write a small program that loads fast to do a quick job, you don't want the program to load and then have it read it's configuration from somewhere if that configuration is static.
For those of you who have the DVD set, go watch the scenes that were deleted. There's one where Simon is looking up some information about Serenity. Book explains it to him. Watch the scene.
If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
I expect to hear that from someone while I'm waiting in line for tickets to Serenity the day it opens.
He doesn't sing all that well, so it's a good thing they got a real singer to do it. Not to slight him, it's just obviously not a talent/skill he's developed. He makes a much better writer...
There aren't that many people who can write and produce a great series and write a theme song that captures it so completely and compellingly.
Individual blogs do rise and fall. I've watched several blogs I've enjoyed die as the people who wrote them merged their work into group blogs. I watched one group blog fragment as several writers were overwhelmed with real world obligations. I don't think blogs, wikis, or even Usenet are going to die any time soon.
I agree to an extent. Most open source software is designed to be portable across a wide variety of *nix platforms. Yes, this may mean that more open source developers will use OSX as their native platform. It has the potential to seriously change the landscape for desktop *nix use, which will have an effect on some commercial Linux distros. But it is not going to kill open source development and it isn't going to eliminate Linux as a target platform for open source apps.
L.L. Zamenhof's idea with Esperanto was not to replace native languages but to supplement them with an easy-to-use language that people would feel natural moving to.
I know. Actually, the example you gave concerning word order is both one of the greatest strengths and one of the sore points among Esperantists. I for one, forget the accusative a huge percentage of the time. Most of the Esperantists I've talked to don't have trouble understanding me with any word order that places the subject before the object (SVO, SOV, VSO). But I'm sure that I wouldn't be universally understood, and my lapses are at least going to make it harder for some listeners to follow me, so I'm trying to correct myself.
It turns out that there is a big plus in the regularity of Esperanto and the heavy use of derived and compound words besides making the language easier to learn. I've experienced this first-hand several times. You don't have to use Esperanto daily to maintain decent fluency. And you can invent words on the fly with a reasonable expectation that your listener will understand.
The problem is that you can't arbitrarily remove ambiguity in translation. In some cases, the ambiguity was not intended, where a word has multiple meanings, but given enough context, it is clear which one is correct. You can remove that. In other cases, ambiguity serves a legitimate purpose. There are times when you want to talk about an arbitrary member of a group hypothetically or generally.
Claude Piron talks about some of these issues from the perspective of a translator. He also points out that most source texts have errors in them as well.
Since Esperanto is mentioned so prominently, I have to wonder whether the tool will support it. There has been at least one previous attempt to use Esperanto as an intermediate language for a machine translation project. The only English translation of the article I could find is now only available in Google's cache. There is an ironic symmetry to that.
I've been running Debian 3.0 on my home desktop for about 18 months now. Yes, there are a lot of ancient versions on it. However, there are plenty of backports of popular packages available too. I've never been more than one minor release behind on Mozilla. I'm a little out-of-date on OpenOffice, but I'm certainly not stuck on 1.0. And I built GCC 4.0.0 myself from sources yesterday.
In all that time, three things have broken and all of them were installed from sources other than Debian packages. I have a driver for my onboard NIC from Intel. They didn't release it under the GPL until they were happy with it, which was a later version of the kernel than I'm running. When the kernel is patched, I have to reinstall their driver. The other two are very similar issues. I've had the same sort of problems with drivers for hardware that's newer than the kernel I'm running on other distros. This isn't solely a Debian issue.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point, I own a Windstar and a Taurus, both because of their safety. I can already look back on the days when I didn't expect my Fords to crash, but I knew that I'd be safe if they did.
Of course, one common use for Thinkpads is a pull-out rackmounted drawer with a KVM so they can serve as the keyboard and monitor for the entire rack. The Thinkpad case fits very nicely.
"Hey Steve, it's Friday and that's the 5th reboot I've heard this morning."
"Yeah. It's taking longer every month to roll out the Black Tuesday patches."
We're seeing articles about companies competing for Linux revenue streams. Yes, think about that. There's money to be made in open source and this is one more example of that. I want to see both of them thrive.
Check out Ubuntu's LaptopTestingTeam page on their wiki. Not everything has been tested, but they are actively seeking feedback.
You are correct. I got interrupted by the phone as I was writing that and left out one very critical word: "published". Refactoring started to gain a wider audience when published articles and books about it started using Java. At that point the ideas were more accessible to a mainstream audience.
Yes! There are tools for both TDD and Refactoring for C++. For that matter, there are TDD frameworks for embedded C code too. However, the refactoring tools for Java are ahead of the support for C++. If you actually make use of them, they can improve your productivity. Switching languages because of some blind belief that programmers using a particular language are more productive is a waste of time. Switching to take advantage of tools and libraries that are better than the ones available for your old language can help you.
For the record, I've used C++ for years. I still use C for embedded code. I love Perl. I've used a bunch of other languages as well. I learned Java several years ago because it was the language of choice for examples in the early work on refactoring. Design Patterns were about raising the level of abstraction on chunks of code. Refactoring is about raising the level of abstraction on changes to code.
Bicycle commuting is not necessarily as dangerous as you think. There are conditions under which I won't ride, including dangerous traffic conditions. However, I have commuted on busy city streets and secondary highways. It is worth it to learn about safety. I don't live in a particularly bike-friendly city, although it isn't actively bike-hostile either. I recommend John Forester's book Effective Cycling. He can be a bit strident on some issues, but his advice on safety has saved me from at least two accidents.
They are still going to be vulnerable. The problem is that users are going to click on links and run things. Sure, some things are obviously social engineering to get you to run trojans. You can teach most users to avoid those. But my wife cleaned up a client's site after someone opened what claimed to be a zip file with the most recent updates to something she'd been working on with a coworker. In retrospect, the message she got was a bogus one created by a worm. But she was expecting a zip at the time, from that coworker and they were under deadline pressure.
Windows is not 90% of the software market because there is no one single unified market for all apps. This is one of those places where statistics can lead you horribly astray. For example, if you are writing client anti-virus or anti-spyware tools, even if you make them run portably, 99+% of your market is on Windows and although the engine might run portably, you'd need different datafiles on each platform. However, if you are writing a web-based app, making it run portably across operating systems might add considerably more than 10% to your market.
I agree with you completely about Baen. A friend introduced me to the Honor Harrington series several years ago. That led me to Baen's web site and the Baen Free Library. I've bought several hard cover books with bundled CDs and immediately put most of the books on my Palm Pilot with Plucker. It means that I can take several books with me almost anywhere I go. I read the entire Prince Roger series by John Ringo and David Weber on my Palm and Eric Flint's 1632 & 1633 while the print copies sat on my headboard.
Nedankinde.
Before the CoCo; before the Trash-80; we had this home computer. You programmed it by wire wrapping, more or less. The keyboard consisted of 10 sliding switches. The monitor was a set of 10 flashlight bulbs. RAM, what's that?
I certainly have enough old code laying around to parse enough different config files. There are three advantages to XML. The first is that it is text-based, so you can write it from any programming language that can write text to files, or your favorite text editor. That doesn't set it apart from any other text file format. The second is that there are lots of libraries and tools for dealing with it in any programing language. You don't have to write, debug and maintain tools to parse it. The third is only an advantage if you use it right. That is, the tags and attributes document what your data is. If you do it wrong, your data can end up looking like sloppy ASN.1 littered with angle brackets.
Assuming of course that I want to put a lot of complex data into my code rather than load it from XML or a database, I would seriously consider creating the XML files anyway. That would make switching to loading XML at runtime later a bit easier if I had a change of heart. Then I'd write some XLST to generate the C++ initialization from the XML source. Not that I expect any of this to change anyone's opinion on whether this is a shortcoming of C++ or whether it should be considered as a possible new feature.
Someone else asked why you would want to hard-code complex data. I can think of a couple of reasons. Sometimes your data is essentially static, but isn't composed completely of built-in types. State tables are a rich source of examples. In an embedded system, you may be hard-coding all sorts of things that could be expressed in a database or XML, but you can't afford the storage for the libraries and the database. Finally, if you need to write a small program that loads fast to do a quick job, you don't want the program to load and then have it read it's configuration from somewhere if that configuration is static.
For those of you who have the DVD set, go watch the scenes that were deleted. There's one where Simon is looking up some information about Serenity. Book explains it to him. Watch the scene.
If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
I expect to hear that from someone while I'm waiting in line for tickets to Serenity the day it opens.
He doesn't sing all that well, so it's a good thing they got a real singer to do it. Not to slight him, it's just obviously not a talent/skill he's developed. He makes a much better writer...
There aren't that many people who can write and produce a great series and write a theme song that captures it so completely and compellingly.
Individual blogs do rise and fall. I've watched several blogs I've enjoyed die as the people who wrote them merged their work into group blogs. I watched one group blog fragment as several writers were overwhelmed with real world obligations. I don't think blogs, wikis, or even Usenet are going to die any time soon.
I agree to an extent. Most open source software is designed to be portable across a wide variety of *nix platforms. Yes, this may mean that more open source developers will use OSX as their native platform. It has the potential to seriously change the landscape for desktop *nix use, which will have an effect on some commercial Linux distros. But it is not going to kill open source development and it isn't going to eliminate Linux as a target platform for open source apps.
L.L. Zamenhof's idea with Esperanto was not to replace native languages but to supplement them with an easy-to-use language that people would feel natural moving to.
I know. Actually, the example you gave concerning word order is both one of the greatest strengths and one of the sore points among Esperantists. I for one, forget the accusative a huge percentage of the time. Most of the Esperantists I've talked to don't have trouble understanding me with any word order that places the subject before the object (SVO, SOV, VSO). But I'm sure that I wouldn't be universally understood, and my lapses are at least going to make it harder for some listeners to follow me, so I'm trying to correct myself.
It turns out that there is a big plus in the regularity of Esperanto and the heavy use of derived and compound words besides making the language easier to learn. I've experienced this first-hand several times. You don't have to use Esperanto daily to maintain decent fluency. And you can invent words on the fly with a reasonable expectation that your listener will understand.
The problem is that you can't arbitrarily remove ambiguity in translation. In some cases, the ambiguity was not intended, where a word has multiple meanings, but given enough context, it is clear which one is correct. You can remove that. In other cases, ambiguity serves a legitimate purpose. There are times when you want to talk about an arbitrary member of a group hypothetically or generally.
Claude Piron talks about some of these issues from the perspective of a translator. He also points out that most source texts have errors in them as well.
Since Esperanto is mentioned so prominently, I have to wonder whether the tool will support it. There has been at least one previous attempt to use Esperanto as an intermediate language for a machine translation project. The only English translation of the article I could find is now only available in Google's cache. There is an ironic symmetry to that.
I've been running Debian 3.0 on my home desktop for about 18 months now. Yes, there are a lot of ancient versions on it. However, there are plenty of backports of popular packages available too. I've never been more than one minor release behind on Mozilla. I'm a little out-of-date on OpenOffice, but I'm certainly not stuck on 1.0. And I built GCC 4.0.0 myself from sources yesterday.
In all that time, three things have broken and all of them were installed from sources other than Debian packages. I have a driver for my onboard NIC from Intel. They didn't release it under the GPL until they were happy with it, which was a later version of the kernel than I'm running. When the kernel is patched, I have to reinstall their driver. The other two are very similar issues. I've had the same sort of problems with drivers for hardware that's newer than the kernel I'm running on other distros. This isn't solely a Debian issue.