All the advice to rewrite it is misguided. Maybe rewrite small parts that you need to to keep it working on new hardware, or whatever, but if it works, I would think that wholesale rewriting is asking for trouble. The Ars article is full of great advice about what you should do to manage a large codebase going forward, but actually it doesn't really address the question of what to do about a large legacy codebase that wasn't written with best practice. The best software is written by incremental improvement of what went before (no matter how badly written, as long as it meets its specification) - big projects written from scratch usually fail.
I think that's what they call a "leading question". Here's an unusual answer - the UK magazine Electronics Today International published plans in 197(?) for a home-build hobby computer that had similar specs, ran BASIC and could be assembled from parts you sourced yourself, using their PCB design. They even had off-the-shelf case, keyboard and so on. It would definitely have been in this price range or less. I bet nobody can remember it now - I believe it was called the "Triton". I think it may have been Z80 based, but possibly was 6502 - I don't recall. I remember reading the articles with great interest, but then could think of no earthly purpose for the thing - but perhaps that was in some ways the point. Give a geek something cool and they'll figure out what to do with it.
The C64 was a vital machine in my understanding of computers and programming. I was a hardware designer in the early 80s, mostly analogue/RF with a smattering of digital. I had no idea how processors worked or the connection between the electronics and coding. The C64 changed all that.
I bought one to play games and explore in 1983, but programming in BASIC was too limited, though I wrote a few simple "apps" that way. One day I saw a listing in a magazine for a Space Invaders implementation and it was basically raw hex that had to be POKEd in. The source was listed, in assembler, and I had that light-bulb moment where the bridge between the electronics and the code came into focus. From then on, I never wrote in BASIC. Instead, I bought the MIKRO assembler cartridge and wrote various utilities and games in assembler. I also made an EPROM programmer that plugged into the cartridge port so I "saved" my efforts to EPROM instead of tape and just booted straight into them via the cartridge port.
It was timely. During the 80s most of the hardware I worked on as a designer migrated from discrete logic to microprocessor-based designs, and thanks to the C64 I was well-placed to keep up and even lead that trend. I moved on to the 8051 and then the 68000, but I never forgot the importance of the C64 and the 6502 in that learning.
Stop filling cars with stupid user interfaces for electronic systems that require close visual attention to use! Touch screens are stupid in cars - there's no tactile feedback so you HAVE TO USE YOUR EYES! I think GM are worse than Ford in this respect but they're all at it, even top-end marques like BMW and Mercedes.
I want physical switches with positive tactile feedback whose function is clear and doesn't keep changing in different "modes" just because you're too cheap to provide a separate switch for different things. Cars of the 1960s with great big toggle switches on wooden dashboards were easier to drive than this.
a few developers too lazy to implement something Apple's been telling them they need to implement for the better part of a year
What, like Apple themselves? Sure, they have sandboxed some of their apps that are fairly self-contained, but the more complex ones CANNOT be sandboxed (i.e. iPhoto, iTunes) because they share data with each other.
As an Apple developer, we are not "too lazy". Have YOU actually tried making a real-world app work with sandboxing? I have, at very, very great length. I eventually gave up, because our app, which is in fact quite modest, couldn't support of all of its features with sandboxing enabled. I could work around some but some were simply broken and with no possible way to fix them. Luckily our app is already on sale in the App Store and we can still put out updates without being forced into sandboxing for now.
The other big problem with sandboxing is that, apart from being incomplete and very buggy, there's no way to enable it selectively based on OS version, so while Apple have been slowly addressing some of its issues with each OS.release, there's no way to allow an app to turn on sandboxing based on which version has the necessary support - without that the vast majority of the customer base would be unable to upgrade - their app would simply stop working properly.
Your incoherent rant lost me about paragraph two, but I struggled valiantly through to the end where I was rewarded thusly:
fata complete
I think you perhaps were reaching for "fait accompli", but you fell short and proved not only that you're a frothing nit, but an illiterate one at that.
In a very useful sense of the word - in comparing their noise levels. When Concorde entered service in 1976 the only large fan-jets were 747s, TriStars and DC-10s, every other plane had noisy turbojets - all other Boeings, DC-8, VC-10, Trident, BAC 1-11.... In that company Concorde didn't stand out quite as much on noise as it did nearly 30 years later, when it was the only turbojet still flying.
No they don't. A jet engine works by accelerating air which produces an equal and opposite reaction (thrust). The air behind the engine is not "pushed against". If there were no air the engine would still produce thrust if air (or something) could be fed into it, and that is how a rocket works.
Yep, Concorde was noisy but in a kind of cool way. I once stayed in the Raddisson Hotel right next to one of Heathrow's runways, and my room overlooked it - a planespotter's ideal room! The windows were astonishing - they totally eliminated all noise from the planes. Except for Concorde, which created a strong vibration and a dull roar on takeoff, where everything else took off in eerie silence.
Concorde's noise seemed out of place among the modern turbofan fleets but that reflects more how far engines have come since the 60s than anything really wrong with Concorde. Compare it to a Boing 707, DC-8 or other contemporary and it wasn't so stand-out noisy. All planes were quite loud back then.
Concorde may not have made much economic sense but it was a cool thing to have actually existed. Today's world is so run by idiot bean-counters that we are never likely to see a thing built "because it can" again. Rather sad, isn't it?
Injecting code on a Mac is super easy. When an archive is opened, it creates the objects listed and calls -initWithCoder: on that object. So all you need to do is craft a suitably nefarious archive and trick a user into opening it with some app.
Mountain Lion actually addresses this vulnerability, but developers are going to have to rev their code to use the updated API. I'm surprised it hasn't (AFAIK) been used as an attack vector by trojans because it does seem a glaring hole. I hope I'm not going to regret pointing this out...
The biggest problem with the walled garden is the term "walled garden". That's what seems to get the geeks' knickers in a twist. Why not think of it as an immune system, of sorts? Would you rather go about your daily business without a working immune system?
I see a bright future for Greenland. Forget Spain or Greece, take a nice relaxing balmy beach holiday in sunny Greenland. That's where it's going to be at, if you are a property developer looking to build holiday accommodation, resorts, apartments, theme parks, restaurants and cafes. Get in now before the rush. And all that concrete and travelling there by air can only help make the dream come true sooner!
I have to disagree. Being honest can serve two purposes: a) it can be extremely satisfying, if you have had a very bad time of things and they are coming to an end, and b) it can highlight bad managers or other employees that have caused you so much grief and they might be reined in so that they don't continue to make life hell for others.
I had an appallingly bad manager some time ago who made my life hell with his ultra-micromanagment and his constant snooping. He finally drove me to leave and there was a bit of a showdown - I wouldn't exactly call it an exit interview but his boss was there. I told him exactly what I thought of him and why he was such a bad manager. I think he was actually surprised that his 'style' caused so much friction. Interestingly (though too late) several people came forward afterwards and told me they had had the same experiences with the same guy, and had asked for transfers to get away from him. My response of leaving was more extreme, but driven by the same problems. I heard a few weeks later he did get moved (not fired, unfortunately) and given a role that did not involve direct people-management. So these things can have a positive result for those you leave behind.
Expect adult people to be able to handle speech they dislike.
You are so right. In fact I think it's time this was taught in schools at some point, along with general internet safety. Ignoring what an idiot says is always an option, but there's something in human nature that makes it hard to do. I think it's that when we see something written down we are conditioned to think of it as carrying some authority or weight, whereas in fact it's just a piece of garbage, written down. Other people reading it should see it for what it is, and a private thought of "what a jerk" or whatever is all it takes. An answer, especially one that escalates some sort of argument, is NOT required.
Anyone whose solution to the world's problems starts with "kill 80+% of the population" worries me a great deal.
Me too, and I most certainly said nothing of the sort. Birth control on the other hand, and good nutrition so that people don't have to breed excessively to ensure the survival of a few... but we're getting a long way from fracking.
Agreed, but that's really an argument about population. My wood fire is sustainable because I can grow enough timber to keep it going indefinitely on the land I own (which isn't huge, but it is more than the average city plot), but not everyone has that much land.
I'm not sure it is a metaphor. I don't have to justify it - I've presented my position and the reasons for it. You can agree or disagree, but it's up to you to show my argument is incorrect with sound reasoned argument of your own. I don't see any so far, just a denial that there is a problem. Which was my original point.
Slashdot Mirror
All the advice to rewrite it is misguided. Maybe rewrite small parts that you need to to keep it working on new hardware, or whatever, but if it works, I would think that wholesale rewriting is asking for trouble. The Ars article is full of great advice about what you should do to manage a large codebase going forward, but actually it doesn't really address the question of what to do about a large legacy codebase that wasn't written with best practice. The best software is written by incremental improvement of what went before (no matter how badly written, as long as it meets its specification) - big projects written from scratch usually fail.
Chick-Fil-A isn't refusing to serve gays
Perhaps not, but I bet gays are pretty much never going to shop there ever again, so it's not really a problem for them anyway.
but for $595, could anyone else have done better
I think that's what they call a "leading question". Here's an unusual answer - the UK magazine Electronics Today International published plans in 197(?) for a home-build hobby computer that had similar specs, ran BASIC and could be assembled from parts you sourced yourself, using their PCB design. They even had off-the-shelf case, keyboard and so on. It would definitely have been in this price range or less. I bet nobody can remember it now - I believe it was called the "Triton". I think it may have been Z80 based, but possibly was 6502 - I don't recall. I remember reading the articles with great interest, but then could think of no earthly purpose for the thing - but perhaps that was in some ways the point. Give a geek something cool and they'll figure out what to do with it.
That's why they're called "dash-boards", it's the board you get dashed against in a crash....
...meet teacup.
The C64 was a vital machine in my understanding of computers and programming. I was a hardware designer in the early 80s, mostly analogue/RF with a smattering of digital. I had no idea how processors worked or the connection between the electronics and coding. The C64 changed all that.
I bought one to play games and explore in 1983, but programming in BASIC was too limited, though I wrote a few simple "apps" that way. One day I saw a listing in a magazine for a Space Invaders implementation and it was basically raw hex that had to be POKEd in. The source was listed, in assembler, and I had that light-bulb moment where the bridge between the electronics and the code came into focus. From then on, I never wrote in BASIC. Instead, I bought the MIKRO assembler cartridge and wrote various utilities and games in assembler. I also made an EPROM programmer that plugged into the cartridge port so I "saved" my efforts to EPROM instead of tape and just booted straight into them via the cartridge port.
It was timely. During the 80s most of the hardware I worked on as a designer migrated from discrete logic to microprocessor-based designs, and thanks to the C64 I was well-placed to keep up and even lead that trend. I moved on to the 8051 and then the 68000, but I never forgot the importance of the C64 and the 6502 in that learning.
first Rainbow-Logo computer?
Nope: Apple logo
Stop filling cars with stupid user interfaces for electronic systems that require close visual attention to use! Touch screens are stupid in cars - there's no tactile feedback so you HAVE TO USE YOUR EYES! I think GM are worse than Ford in this respect but they're all at it, even top-end marques like BMW and Mercedes.
I want physical switches with positive tactile feedback whose function is clear and doesn't keep changing in different "modes" just because you're too cheap to provide a separate switch for different things. Cars of the 1960s with great big toggle switches on wooden dashboards were easier to drive than this.
No, I thought the same :) but I doubt that the largely US audience here would get the joke.
a few developers too lazy to implement something Apple's been telling them they need to implement for the better part of a year
.release, there's no way to allow an app to turn on sandboxing based on which version has the necessary support - without that the vast majority of the customer base would be unable to upgrade - their app would simply stop working properly.
What, like Apple themselves? Sure, they have sandboxed some of their apps that are fairly self-contained, but the more complex ones CANNOT be sandboxed (i.e. iPhoto, iTunes) because they share data with each other.
As an Apple developer, we are not "too lazy". Have YOU actually tried making a real-world app work with sandboxing? I have, at very, very great length. I eventually gave up, because our app, which is in fact quite modest, couldn't support of all of its features with sandboxing enabled. I could work around some but some were simply broken and with no possible way to fix them. Luckily our app is already on sale in the App Store and we can still put out updates without being forced into sandboxing for now.
The other big problem with sandboxing is that, apart from being incomplete and very buggy, there's no way to enable it selectively based on OS version, so while Apple have been slowly addressing some of its issues with each OS
It really is an absolute shambles.
Your incoherent rant lost me about paragraph two, but I struggled valiantly through to the end where I was rewarded thusly:
fata complete
I think you perhaps were reaching for "fait accompli", but you fell short and proved not only that you're a frothing nit, but an illiterate one at that.
In a very useful sense of the word - in comparing their noise levels. When Concorde entered service in 1976 the only large fan-jets were 747s, TriStars and DC-10s, every other plane had noisy turbojets - all other Boeings, DC-8, VC-10, Trident, BAC 1-11.... In that company Concorde didn't stand out quite as much on noise as it did nearly 30 years later, when it was the only turbojet still flying.
They push against the air instead of the ground
No they don't. A jet engine works by accelerating air which produces an equal and opposite reaction (thrust). The air behind the engine is not "pushed against". If there were no air the engine would still produce thrust if air (or something) could be fed into it, and that is how a rocket works.
Same in the UK!
Yep, Concorde was noisy but in a kind of cool way. I once stayed in the Raddisson Hotel right next to one of Heathrow's runways, and my room overlooked it - a planespotter's ideal room! The windows were astonishing - they totally eliminated all noise from the planes. Except for Concorde, which created a strong vibration and a dull roar on takeoff, where everything else took off in eerie silence.
Concorde's noise seemed out of place among the modern turbofan fleets but that reflects more how far engines have come since the 60s than anything really wrong with Concorde. Compare it to a Boing 707, DC-8 or other contemporary and it wasn't so stand-out noisy. All planes were quite loud back then.
Concorde may not have made much economic sense but it was a cool thing to have actually existed. Today's world is so run by idiot bean-counters that we are never likely to see a thing built "because it can" again. Rather sad, isn't it?
Injecting code on a Mac is super easy. When an archive is opened, it creates the objects listed and calls -initWithCoder: on that object. So all you need to do is craft a suitably nefarious archive and trick a user into opening it with some app.
Mountain Lion actually addresses this vulnerability, but developers are going to have to rev their code to use the updated API. I'm surprised it hasn't (AFAIK) been used as an attack vector by trojans because it does seem a glaring hole. I hope I'm not going to regret pointing this out...
The biggest problem with the walled garden is the term "walled garden". That's what seems to get the geeks' knickers in a twist. Why not think of it as an immune system, of sorts? Would you rather go about your daily business without a working immune system?
I see a bright future for Greenland. Forget Spain or Greece, take a nice relaxing balmy beach holiday in sunny Greenland. That's where it's going to be at, if you are a property developer looking to build holiday accommodation, resorts, apartments, theme parks, restaurants and cafes. Get in now before the rush. And all that concrete and travelling there by air can only help make the dream come true sooner!
Hand in your geek card.
That's what he said.
We didn't start the fire....
(well, not about her, but mentions her)
I have to disagree. Being honest can serve two purposes: a) it can be extremely satisfying, if you have had a very bad time of things and they are coming to an end, and b) it can highlight bad managers or other employees that have caused you so much grief and they might be reined in so that they don't continue to make life hell for others.
I had an appallingly bad manager some time ago who made my life hell with his ultra-micromanagment and his constant snooping. He finally drove me to leave and there was a bit of a showdown - I wouldn't exactly call it an exit interview but his boss was there. I told him exactly what I thought of him and why he was such a bad manager. I think he was actually surprised that his 'style' caused so much friction. Interestingly (though too late) several people came forward afterwards and told me they had had the same experiences with the same guy, and had asked for transfers to get away from him. My response of leaving was more extreme, but driven by the same problems. I heard a few weeks later he did get moved (not fired, unfortunately) and given a role that did not involve direct people-management. So these things can have a positive result for those you leave behind.
Expect adult people to be able to handle speech they dislike.
You are so right. In fact I think it's time this was taught in schools at some point, along with general internet safety. Ignoring what an idiot says is always an option, but there's something in human nature that makes it hard to do. I think it's that when we see something written down we are conditioned to think of it as carrying some authority or weight, whereas in fact it's just a piece of garbage, written down. Other people reading it should see it for what it is, and a private thought of "what a jerk" or whatever is all it takes. An answer, especially one that escalates some sort of argument, is NOT required.
Anyone whose solution to the world's problems starts with "kill 80+% of the population" worries me a great deal.
Me too, and I most certainly said nothing of the sort. Birth control on the other hand, and good nutrition so that people don't have to breed excessively to ensure the survival of a few... but we're getting a long way from fracking.
Agreed, but that's really an argument about population. My wood fire is sustainable because I can grow enough timber to keep it going indefinitely on the land I own (which isn't huge, but it is more than the average city plot), but not everyone has that much land.
I'm not sure it is a metaphor. I don't have to justify it - I've presented my position and the reasons for it. You can agree or disagree, but it's up to you to show my argument is incorrect with sound reasoned argument of your own. I don't see any so far, just a denial that there is a problem. Which was my original point.