Of the dozens of spam messages I get every day, at least 20% of them are unreadable. I'm not counting the ones that are in languages that I don't know. I'm talking about the ones that are sent in an encoding that isn't properly reflected in the headers. Then there are the ones that are in such poorly formatted HTML that they just won't display.
In my comment, I posted a link to the author's archive of all of the example source code. There are plenty of examples. I looked at the online copy. It appears to have some additional code that is necessary for completeness so that it will compile, but wasn't relevant to the points being made in the text. Honestly, I believe the code is much easier to understand with the explanations in the text, but it may give you an idea of the quality of the examples. It think that a number of them are useful as a starting point for a library.
First, there are some significant errata (and a lot of minor typos). Get the errata list and the code for all of the examples from one of the authors at his website. Second, some of these techniques depend on features that aren't yet available in many compilers. Don't expect them all to work yet. They do discuss that in the book.
With that said, I'm not sure that I would have rated this book a 10, but it's close enough that I'm not arguing. It is not a light read, nor should it be. This book and Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design have convinced me that C++ templates are much more powerful, useful and complex than I realized. In fact, if I hadn't read Alexandrescu's book first, I wouldn't have thought C++ Templates was missing anything. These two books should be on the shelf of anyone who wants to use the full power of templates.
One of the clear advantages enjoyed by Open Source development projects is the luxury of time: the developers can take as long as they deem necessary to get it "right."
That luxury of time comes both before and after the release for open source. Without the pressure of a specific feature list and release schedule being directly tied to a revenue stream it is obvious that open source projects have more leeway before the release date. However, the Release Early, Release Often paradigm has two parts. It presents a model that makes a project available to people all the way along the adoption curve. There is less pressure for make-or-break releases. This presents an opportunity for a more continuous cycle of releases and improvements.
I think a project of ANY size benefits from peer review, and that it is even more important if there is only a single developer!
One of the benefits of the open source model is that even projects with only a single developer can get peer review. The reasons are simple, and obvious once they are stated. The only barrier to entry as a reviewer on an open source project is knowledge, of the project, the language, and the address to send bug reports to. It is often touted that open source turns every user into a potential co-developer. It should not be overlooked that projects with a large user base can receive not just bug reports, but also patches, from that user base.
I've found that when I investigate a problem to determine if there is a bug, the investigation often yields a solution because I have the source to inspect. Thus, when I submit a bug report, I can frequently include a candidate patch to fix it. Even projects with a single active developer can often have a number of occasional or even one-time contributors.
How many of us have a relative who insists on calling both RAM and hard drive space "memory"? Mine even manages to find every possible ambiguous situation for confusing the issue, such as "It says here on the box that I don't have enough memory to install this." And then she insists that I know what she really means and that I'm being stuborn.
I can't answer the question of whether all the tech jobs are headed overseas with complete certainty. I suspect they aren't because there are things that require hands on work. Someone here suggested becoming a plumber because that can't be shipped overseas.
Nonetheless, there's a concept in economics called "comparative advantage". David Friedman explains it at considerable length in his book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. The relevant chapter can be found here. I'll give a shorter summary.
Assume there are two people. Let's call them Joe and Asok. Joe's labor to make a car costs $1000. His labor to assemble a PC and load all the software is $100. Asok can build the car for $250 and set up the PC for $75. Asok does both jobs cheaper. It doesn't matter whether he's cheaper because his labor is less expensive per hour or because he works faster. He'll end up with the car manufacturing and Joe will be supporting the PCs, because neither of them can do both at the same time. Think of the price of PCs in cars or cars in PCs.
During a recession, when there is more labor than businesses demand, both jobs can get done where the labor is cheapest. When demand for labor rises again, the jobs that get done in various places will depend on comparative advantage.
There are differences in cost, quality, availability, skills and numerous other factors. All of those will help determine which industries and products each country, or even region, enjoys a comparative advantage in.
You don't want your tank software blue-screening in the middle of a fight. "Hold on guys, don't fire at me for a second, I need to reboot my tank."
I think a second is an understatement here. I'm not trying to criticize boot times for various OSes either. Military computer hardware is spec'ed to be tough, but not always fast. Yes, they want fast computers for some things. But for battlefield stuff, hardening it against the conditions it is likely to meet is more important than raw speed. So I don't expect that it would reboot in a second if it bluescreened. By the time you have to reboot it, the situation is already pretty bad.
Fortunately, it's open source. We can learn from it and take the lessons with us to other code. While there are a lot of people getting mileage out of the amount of malware out there that attacks Windows, one of the reasons there is so much of it is that it is absolutely no challenge to find Windows machines on the net because of their sheer number. And many of them are poorly secured because Windows is the OS that is shipped on machines that are sold to people who have neither the knowledge to secure a computer nor the time to learn how.
There are several efforts to improve the security of Linux and *BSD. In the end, I think they'll benefit us all. Bruce Schneier talks about the window of exposure in his book Secrets and Lies. Efforts to improve the security of open source OSs have several benefits in reducing that window.
Some bugs will be fixed before they are ever exploited. A security vulnerability is still a vulnerability. But the damage is much less in this case.
Some bugs will be fixed faster after they are first exploited. Again, this reduces the damage that is done.
But in the long run, a greater benefit is the number of people who acquire some knowledge of how to analyze and test for security vulnerabilities and how to fix them. That is going to be greatest in open source. It provides the opportunity for competent programmers to wear the white hats.
One book that is well worth the time (at least for C++ programmers) is Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied. He presents template implementations of some of the patterns from Design Patterns. Patterns are a level of abstraction above what we used to express directly in code. That may be changing. And the code is available as the Loki library.
Just reading a book won't save you from the next cracker attack. However, having a solid knowledge of the basics of web security and a list of effective checkpoints for configuring your server, will definitely help you to prevent at least the most trivial mistakes.
And having a published authority to refer to can help in justifying the time to a boss or a client. If they already trust you, they'll believe that the web server needs to be secured. But I find that the bulleted list of actions to take and the benefits of those actions goes a long way towards maintaining real world credibility.
There are other good reasons to CC someone's boss. Frequently, getting someone's time to work on a problem that is outside of their normal responsibilities is going to require approval from about. Describing the need to both the guy whose help you want and the guy who can authorize it can work wonders in situations like this. That way, the guy whose help you wanted doesn't have to pitch it to his boss for you. Of course, it is often appropriate to use this form:
To: Boss CC: Coworker with skills you need Subject: XYZ Project
Hey Mr. Boss,
Coworker has some skills that could save us several weeks of redundant work. We could really use a couple days of his time and it would help us bring the XYZ Project in within or even under budget.
If the government really wants to get you, they'll surround you with Tempest vans, put a key sniffer in your keyboard, grab all your traffic through your ISP and monitor your phone calls.
True enough. However, I don't want to publish my travel plans to too many people via unencrypted e-mail every time I send my family the flight number I'm coming in on. I've had my home burglerized once. I don't think anyone who has had that experience wants to go through it again.
PGP and GPG also provide signatures. In the semi-anonymous world of the web and open source, there's a lot to be said for signing your source code.
I have a blind friend who has told me many times that she found the web completely unusable until she tried Emacspeak. With the ever-increasing reliance on graphics this is only getting worse. And usability by the blind rarely ever makes it into the discussion when web sites are designed, much less making it onto the feature list.
Yes, Harry Potter has some weird fans. I was out there with a bunch of them, robes, pointy hats and all. We convinced a local theater to let us promote our SF club by raffling off a gift basket of Harry Potter stuff in their lobby on opening night. It was a great ice breaker. I met some wonderful people who I might never known otherwise, including one of the elves who runs the FictionAlley Harry Potter fanfic site.
We'll be doing something similar for the Lord of the Rings opening night next month. I'm just glad that getting a job, owning a house and having kids didn't mean that I forgot how much fun it can be to just throw myself into doing something weird. I laughed, I talked, I posed with my friends for a news crew. It was fun. Go ahead and be weird. There's a good chance you'll make some friends, or put a smile on a kid's face.
Talk to the SourceForge people themselves about their efforts to sell support for the SourceForge software for internal corporate "open source" projects. The idea is that without imposing any particular license, the SourceForge platform provides companies with an "open source" development atmosphere. Source code gets shared, etc.
If you can get managers to understand that there is not one single thing called "open source software", but rather a range of licensing and development models that fit that name, you've solved half of your problem.
A new release of KDE is probably enough to drive new minor releases for a lot of distros. So, what other widely used stuff is seeing a new release these days? The news about the StarOffice beta isn't even cold yet, so I expect we'll be seeing that.
The point is that a University is an institution of higher learning, not a job training center.
I fully agree with you. I was not trying to turn universities into something they are not and should not become. However, presumably when one earns a degree, one intends to do something with it. That something is often to apply it in the workplace. Other alternatives include graduate school and research in an academic setting.
I got what I considered to be an excellent education from a top engineering school. I don't use most of the tools and programming languages that I learned then any more, nor would I expect to after more than a decade. But I use a considerable amount of the theory that I learned.
Let me restate what I wish I had had available. I wish I could have taken a single, elective course to learn a few of the job hunting skills that I have had to pick up elsewhere over the years. I believe our career center had some seminars that fit this need, but they were not well advertised.
There are a number of skills I wish that I had acquired before I went out into the wider world. I would have liked a course on getting a job. It could have included:
Resume writing
Researching companies as potential employers
Interviewing skills
Networking
Universities could do a lot to help new graduates entering the workforce. Since jobs today are far from employment for life, those skills would prove useful a number of times.
I can't believe that no one has posted a reference to the Jargon File entry for the bug-compatibility standard that WINE has now met:
bug-compatible adj.
[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossils or misfeatures in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."
Re:Just don't let it go to their head.
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You can imagine what the ISS would be like with a couple of tipsy astronauts/cosmonauts, etc.
When you get drunk on a space station, does the room stop spinning?
Open source is not unlike a huge pot luck dinner. We all bring something and we get back a complete meal rather than a single dish. The biggest difference is that software is easily copied. So we each brought a single serving and got back meals for the entire year.
Years ago, Theodore Sturgeon was asked why 90% of science fiction was crap. He replied with something that has become known as Sturgeon's Law. He said (I am paraphrasing), "Of course, 90% of science fiction is crap. 90% of everything is crap."
Part of what makes nostagia work for us is the unreliability of human memory. We remember things that made a strong impression on us. Things that we take the time to enjoy, possibly over and over again, are going to make a stronger impression. We will remember them. Culturally, there is an analogous situation. It is the shows that were most popular that live on in reruns. It is the bestselling books that are reprinted.
I don't believe that popular culture is going to hell in a handbasket. It is possible that we are reaching such a flood stage that there is too much material out there for us to filter. But I think the ratio of good to bad has probably shifted little.
Slashdot Mirror
If all you can think of to photograph is a dumpster, just toss your wallet into it.
Finally, the book to send to my mom when she calls with those Family Tech Support problems with her laptop.
Of the dozens of spam messages I get every day, at least 20% of them are unreadable. I'm not counting the ones that are in languages that I don't know. I'm talking about the ones that are sent in an encoding that isn't properly reflected in the headers. Then there are the ones that are in such poorly formatted HTML that they just won't display.
In my comment, I posted a link to the author's archive of all of the example source code. There are plenty of examples. I looked at the online copy. It appears to have some additional code that is necessary for completeness so that it will compile, but wasn't relevant to the points being made in the text. Honestly, I believe the code is much easier to understand with the explanations in the text, but it may give you an idea of the quality of the examples. It think that a number of them are useful as a starting point for a library.
First, there are some significant errata (and a lot of minor typos). Get the errata list and the code for all of the examples from one of the authors at his website. Second, some of these techniques depend on features that aren't yet available in many compilers. Don't expect them all to work yet. They do discuss that in the book.
With that said, I'm not sure that I would have rated this book a 10, but it's close enough that I'm not arguing. It is not a light read, nor should it be. This book and Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design have convinced me that C++ templates are much more powerful, useful and complex than I realized. In fact, if I hadn't read Alexandrescu's book first, I wouldn't have thought C++ Templates was missing anything. These two books should be on the shelf of anyone who wants to use the full power of templates.
That luxury of time comes both before and after the release for open source. Without the pressure of a specific feature list and release schedule being directly tied to a revenue stream it is obvious that open source projects have more leeway before the release date. However, the Release Early, Release Often paradigm has two parts. It presents a model that makes a project available to people all the way along the adoption curve. There is less pressure for make-or-break releases. This presents an opportunity for a more continuous cycle of releases and improvements.
One of the benefits of the open source model is that even projects with only a single developer can get peer review. The reasons are simple, and obvious once they are stated. The only barrier to entry as a reviewer on an open source project is knowledge, of the project, the language, and the address to send bug reports to. It is often touted that open source turns every user into a potential co-developer. It should not be overlooked that projects with a large user base can receive not just bug reports, but also patches, from that user base.
I've found that when I investigate a problem to determine if there is a bug, the investigation often yields a solution because I have the source to inspect. Thus, when I submit a bug report, I can frequently include a candidate patch to fix it. Even projects with a single active developer can often have a number of occasional or even one-time contributors.
How many of us have a relative who insists on calling both RAM and hard drive space "memory"? Mine even manages to find every possible ambiguous situation for confusing the issue, such as "It says here on the box that I don't have enough memory to install this." And then she insists that I know what she really means and that I'm being stuborn.
I can't answer the question of whether all the tech jobs are headed overseas with complete certainty. I suspect they aren't because there are things that require hands on work. Someone here suggested becoming a plumber because that can't be shipped overseas.
Nonetheless, there's a concept in economics called "comparative advantage". David Friedman explains it at considerable length in his book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. The relevant chapter can be found here. I'll give a shorter summary.
Assume there are two people. Let's call them Joe and Asok. Joe's labor to make a car costs $1000. His labor to assemble a PC and load all the software is $100. Asok can build the car for $250 and set up the PC for $75. Asok does both jobs cheaper. It doesn't matter whether he's cheaper because his labor is less expensive per hour or because he works faster. He'll end up with the car manufacturing and Joe will be supporting the PCs, because neither of them can do both at the same time. Think of the price of PCs in cars or cars in PCs.
During a recession, when there is more labor than businesses demand, both jobs can get done where the labor is cheapest. When demand for labor rises again, the jobs that get done in various places will depend on comparative advantage.
There are differences in cost, quality, availability, skills and numerous other factors. All of those will help determine which industries and products each country, or even region, enjoys a comparative advantage in.
I think a second is an understatement here. I'm not trying to criticize boot times for various OSes either. Military computer hardware is spec'ed to be tough, but not always fast. Yes, they want fast computers for some things. But for battlefield stuff, hardening it against the conditions it is likely to meet is more important than raw speed. So I don't expect that it would reboot in a second if it bluescreened. By the time you have to reboot it, the situation is already pretty bad.
Fortunately, it's open source. We can learn from it and take the lessons with us to other code. While there are a lot of people getting mileage out of the amount of malware out there that attacks Windows, one of the reasons there is so much of it is that it is absolutely no challenge to find Windows machines on the net because of their sheer number. And many of them are poorly secured because Windows is the OS that is shipped on machines that are sold to people who have neither the knowledge to secure a computer nor the time to learn how.
There are several efforts to improve the security of Linux and *BSD. In the end, I think they'll benefit us all. Bruce Schneier talks about the window of exposure in his book Secrets and Lies. Efforts to improve the security of open source OSs have several benefits in reducing that window.
Some bugs will be fixed before they are ever exploited. A security vulnerability is still a vulnerability. But the damage is much less in this case.
Some bugs will be fixed faster after they are first exploited. Again, this reduces the damage that is done.
But in the long run, a greater benefit is the number of people who acquire some knowledge of how to analyze and test for security vulnerabilities and how to fix them. That is going to be greatest in open source. It provides the opportunity for competent programmers to wear the white hats.
One book that is well worth the time (at least for C++ programmers) is Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied. He presents template implementations of some of the patterns from Design Patterns. Patterns are a level of abstraction above what we used to express directly in code. That may be changing. And the code is available as the Loki library.
And having a published authority to refer to can help in justifying the time to a boss or a client. If they already trust you, they'll believe that the web server needs to be secured. But I find that the bulleted list of actions to take and the benefits of those actions goes a long way towards maintaining real world credibility.
There are other good reasons to CC someone's boss. Frequently, getting someone's time to work on a problem that is outside of their normal responsibilities is going to require approval from about. Describing the need to both the guy whose help you want and the guy who can authorize it can work wonders in situations like this. That way, the guy whose help you wanted doesn't have to pitch it to his boss for you. Of course, it is often appropriate to use this form:
To: Boss
CC: Coworker with skills you need
Subject: XYZ Project
Hey Mr. Boss,
Coworker has some skills that could save us several weeks of redundant work. We could really use a couple days of his time and it would help us bring the XYZ Project in within or even under budget.
Note, swapping the To and CC lines.
True enough. However, I don't want to publish my travel plans to too many people via unencrypted e-mail every time I send my family the flight number I'm coming in on. I've had my home burglerized once. I don't think anyone who has had that experience wants to go through it again.
PGP and GPG also provide signatures. In the semi-anonymous world of the web and open source, there's a lot to be said for signing your source code.
I have a blind friend who has told me many times that she found the web completely unusable until she tried Emacspeak. With the ever-increasing reliance on graphics this is only getting worse. And usability by the blind rarely ever makes it into the discussion when web sites are designed, much less making it onto the feature list.
Yes, Harry Potter has some weird fans. I was out there with a bunch of them, robes, pointy hats and all. We convinced a local theater to let us promote our SF club by raffling off a gift basket of Harry Potter stuff in their lobby on opening night. It was a great ice breaker. I met some wonderful people who I might never known otherwise, including one of the elves who runs the FictionAlley Harry Potter fanfic site.
We'll be doing something similar for the Lord of the Rings opening night next month. I'm just glad that getting a job, owning a house and having kids didn't mean that I forgot how much fun it can be to just throw myself into doing something weird. I laughed, I talked, I posed with my friends for a news crew. It was fun. Go ahead and be weird. There's a good chance you'll make some friends, or put a smile on a kid's face.
Talk to the SourceForge people themselves about their efforts to sell support for the SourceForge software for internal corporate "open source" projects. The idea is that without imposing any particular license, the SourceForge platform provides companies with an "open source" development atmosphere. Source code gets shared, etc.
If you can get managers to understand that there is not one single thing called "open source software", but rather a range of licensing and development models that fit that name, you've solved half of your problem.
A new release of KDE is probably enough to drive new minor releases for a lot of distros. So, what other widely used stuff is seeing a new release these days? The news about the StarOffice beta isn't even cold yet, so I expect we'll be seeing that.
I fully agree with you. I was not trying to turn universities into something they are not and should not become. However, presumably when one earns a degree, one intends to do something with it. That something is often to apply it in the workplace. Other alternatives include graduate school and research in an academic setting.
I got what I considered to be an excellent education from a top engineering school. I don't use most of the tools and programming languages that I learned then any more, nor would I expect to after more than a decade. But I use a considerable amount of the theory that I learned.
Let me restate what I wish I had had available. I wish I could have taken a single, elective course to learn a few of the job hunting skills that I have had to pick up elsewhere over the years. I believe our career center had some seminars that fit this need, but they were not well advertised.
Universities could do a lot to help new graduates entering the workforce. Since jobs today are far from employment for life, those skills would prove useful a number of times.
When you get drunk on a space station, does the room stop spinning?
Open source is not unlike a huge pot luck dinner. We all bring something and we get back a complete meal rather than a single dish. The biggest difference is that software is easily copied. So we each brought a single serving and got back meals for the entire year.
Years ago, Theodore Sturgeon was asked why 90% of science fiction was crap. He replied with something that has become known as Sturgeon's Law. He said (I am paraphrasing), "Of course, 90% of science fiction is crap. 90% of everything is crap."
Part of what makes nostagia work for us is the unreliability of human memory. We remember things that made a strong impression on us. Things that we take the time to enjoy, possibly over and over again, are going to make a stronger impression. We will remember them. Culturally, there is an analogous situation. It is the shows that were most popular that live on in reruns. It is the bestselling books that are reprinted.
I don't believe that popular culture is going to hell in a handbasket. It is possible that we are reaching such a flood stage that there is too much material out there for us to filter. But I think the ratio of good to bad has probably shifted little.