The school I went to never teached me to use a versionning system. I had to:
- Wonder what this "CVS" thing on SF was about - Go to the cvs website, still wondering what it was really used for. - Download it and try it. - Finally understand what it is, and wonder how I could have been without it during my whole CS and survive. (Well, not my whole CS, since I learnt about CVS at the before the end of it.)
It only takes a couple of unaware teachers to train a whole generation of ignorant developers.
Don't underestimate the power of ignorance. My 2 last employers didn't use a VCS because they didn't know that this kind of things existed. Of course, they now know, because I installed them one.:)
I just thought of a little analogy that would help people to get the point. Saying "My software is scalable" is like saying "The earthquake yesterday had a Richter scale". Of course it had a richter scale goddammit, every single earthquake does. Tell me WHAT scale it had, not if it had one or not.
A word processor is somehow scalable because you can write whatever you want in it.
The word "Scalable" is a *very* important way to evaluate the quality of a software. However, it is now a buzzword because the marketers denatured it.
Every software is scalable. The question to ask is not wether the software is scalable or not, but to what point it is. Because every software is scalable to a point, and every marketer adds it in their product description, it is a buzzword.
When I play too much Civ3, it isn't that I dream about it, no. I dream about normal stuff, except that these dreams become TURN BASED! Trust me, this is weird enough to try to slow down playing civ3.
I played this for 6 months (arbs rule!), this isn't really the kind of game I like. I prefer removing the RT from MMORTS. That said, SG wasn't a bad game, I just got tired of the threadmill.
would be a MMOTG (Tactical Game). One of my favourite game ever is Final Fantasy Tactics, and I always tought: "Goddammit, how cool it would be if it was multiplayer, and how GODLY it would be if it was MM!"
What I dislike about MMORPG is that you don't have the time to say "oh shit" that you are already dead in PvP. You don't have the time to talk to your opponents. Of course, if both players are nice RPers, maybe that they'll talk to each other, but has it ever happened to you with anybody else than people you already knew before combat? Have you ever tried to be a "Verbose PK" in UO? You can't. Combat goes too fast. Of course, you can macro some cool stuff to say, but it rapidly grows boring to say the same old stuff.
I'm saying this and I for one have no idea of a practical way to implement a game like that. Nevertheless, it would probably a MMO I would stick to. Or maybe it already exists and someone will tell me where I can find it?
I think this Joel guy gets far more coverage from Slashdot than he deserves (It's not his first story covered by/.).
And I don't agree about his C thing either. If you really want to know how the machine works, why not learn directly assembly instead? And when you actually want to produce something, switch to Python:)
Assumptions: { - I like to code. - I need to eat. - To eat, I need money. - To get money, someone needs to pay me. - I want to spend my time in the most appreciable way possible. }
Current Situation: { - I distribute non-free software, and sell licences to use them. - I get paid by customer who appreciate my work. - I can work 40 hours a week on stuff I actually like to code. - Awesome software has been built by myself in the past years, and customers can enjoy them. - I have the FREEDOM to code whatever I want to code. }
What if I would be "ethical" and write only free-software: { - I would work 40 hours/week in either a non-programming job, which I would probably hate, or (if I'm lucky), customizing free software for customers, which wouldn't be so bad, but not as cool as what I do now. - The software I wrote in the past years wouldn't exist, and nobody could enjoy it right now. }
Now, if the government would consider my work as public interest and offer me 50K/year to continue developing my softwares under GPL, I'd answer "hell yeah!", but alas, it is not the case.
Thus, I don't consider my actions as unethical because I just CANNOT afford to create this code under GPL.
In the last minute, a little african probably died of malnutrition. was it immoral for you to let him die? Not really, because you CANNOT afford to save them all.
In fact, you COULD afford to save a big bunch of them, but it would mean that you would need to share your wealth with them until you reached their own quality of life. THEN, and only THEN, you could feel like a truly moral person.
I also COULD afford to write free software, but it would mean giving away a lot of what brings me joy. Maybe I am not a moral person because I don't give away my happiness so a bunch of ungrateful users can use my softwares for free.
However, I think that it is perfectly understandable that "intelligent, informed people" value their own happiness enough to give away some of their morality and write non-free, but "enjoyable to write" software.
Now refute that, and tell me what I should do, considering the "Assumptions" section above.
Besides, the fact that *I* write non-free software do not restrict in anyway another programmer to write the exact same software under GPL.
I don't see any mention of a web application in the question.
I think that Python would be a *very* good option. Java is ugly (Yeah, I know, stating this is asking for Troll mod points from the java fanboys.),.Net is... Microsoft, and Python is just totally graceful.
With wxPython, you can build cross-platform GUI application very easily.
I must say that I'm totally biased here. I made the leap into python/wxpython 3 weeks ago (I used Delphi before that), and I absolutely love it. You don't know the joys of programming unless you tried the list comprehensions of python ([func(x) for x in y if cond(x)]).
As you can read, pretty everyone say it's legal and ethical. I won't argue about this.
What I will say is that this kind of stuff is a good argument for a developer NOT to go GPL.
A lot of GPL projects ask for donations. I don't know if it actually works, but let's say that developer X has the OSS spirit, work very hard on a cool project, he even manage to bring a couple of other developers.
Then, developer Y forks the project, slaps a new GUI on it. Developer Y has better marketing skills, and forked project actually becomes more popular than the original project.
Now let's say that the forked project has a donation button, and it actually works. Where does that money go? 80% of the forked project code comes from developer X. Will developer Y send 80% of the donations he receive to developer X?
I seriously doubt that the majority of people clicking on the "Donate" button actually check the whole CVS changelog to check who actually contributed to the project.
If I'd be developer X and would see that happening, I would sure be angry, but everyone would say that developer Y is legal and ethical and they would be RIGHT. Thus, I would not be angry at developer Y, but at me for choosing GPL.
Cmon, flame me for not having the "OSS spirit", but I will not make the mistake of investing considerable amount of my precious time into GPL so someone else makes money off it, and this story is yet another reason against GPL.
That said, I am not really "against" open source. I use a couple of open source programs daily, and if I had the time, I would probably try to contribute to my favourites (TortoiseCVS, wxPython/wxWidget). I'm just saying that someone who expect a reward for his/her work on a GPL project is a fool, and I'm also saying that I'm skeptical about donation buttons.
The only project I donated to yet is crimson editor, and it's not even OSS. However, I can be sure that my money went to the developer who worked the most on the project, because there is only one. If the project would have been GPL from the start and had a lot of contributors, I would probably wouldn't have donated, because the money probably wouldn't have gone to the developers who worked the most.
The community is everything, as always
on
R.I.P Ultima Online ?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's funny because I got my bi-annual "UO nostalgia" yesterday. I re-activated my account (which has been initially created in 1999), and I will probably close it within a month.
However, if I could find a community where people aren't powergamers, and better yet, use the faction system, I would probably stay there much longer.
My best UO times (in fact, my best MMOG times ever) were when the faction system launched and virtually every player was in a faction. That was some real fun.
Some guilds seem to be active in factions, but I'm tired of normal shards where every player has their own mules to boost their pvp char with super armors/weapons/potions. I exclusively play on siege perilous now.
Does anyone know any good guild for me in Siege? Is there any place for a crafter with skills in the 70s who doesn't want to grind to 100 before starting being useful in a guild?
I guess that the answer is no, and, IMHO, that is why UO is dying. Netcraft didn't confirm it, but I do:)
Strongly typed? Are we talking about the same Python or should I revise my definition of "strongly typed"? This thing is typeless!
For example, if I want to create a function that only accepts a certain type of instance to be passed as a parameter I must do something like that (if I don't need to, I would love to know what easier way there is to do that)
def MyFunc(aMyInstance):
if not isinstance(aMyInstance,TheClassIWant): raise TypeError
DoStuff()
MyFunc(SomeInstanceOfAClassIDontWant) #exception at runtime
However, if I comment out the typecheck line, aMyInstance could be *any* type, and an exception would be raised only if, in MyFunc, I call for an attribute aMyInstance doesn't have.
Maybe that my definition of "strongly typed" is completely wrong, but I think that Python is typeless, as opposed to Object pascal, which is strongly typed:
procedure MyFunc(aMyInstance:TheClassIWant); begin
DoStuff; end;
I second that. 4 hours of programming a day is usually my maximum. What's the point of programming 8 hours when you have to spend 2 hours the next day to fix the bugs you introduced during your last hours the day before?
I wonder about how this BS affects foreign companies.
For example, if some US company send me a cease & desist letter or something like that (I live in Canada), invoking one of their dummy patents on how a button has a "push effect" when clicked on, can I just stop selling in the US and tell them to go f*** themselves? Anyway, I'm way too small to even worth the C&D letter, but well, we never know.
If yes, that's one more reason to come to Canada...
One day, loosing the US market will become less costly than engaging a legal battle there.
Within a couple of years, all sane people will have left the US...
The last game I bought from EA was BF1942:road to rome. That is a good game. I wonder if it has been produced on a "time crunch". I heard BF:Vietnam was buggy slow etc.. Maybe there's a direct relation between the fact that it is flawed and the fact that there probably has been "time crunch" during it's development.
After having read this story, I really will avoid buying EA games. As a developer, I know that when I work more than 4 hours in a day, I stop being creative/productive. I usually do "light stuff" in the afternoon (testcases are good things to do in the afternoon...), because I know that if I go into the big stuff, I will probably produce bugs that will need to be fixed tomorrow morning.
From what I read in TFA, EA PHBs know nothing about software engineering. That's why PHB in a software company should have been coder first instead of coming straight from MBA. Hopefully, EA's going straight to hell with this corporate behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
I would watch 4-5-6 first because if you watch 1-2-3 before 4-5-6, the big punch "Luke... I AM..." in ep5 will be spoiled because you saw ep3.
:)
Yes, SW should be more enjoyable in the 456123 order, or better in the 456 order.
Hey, why not trying 654321? It must be fun
I'd first say that it is a very good idea, but I suspect that Southern americans, starving, would come up with their guns seize the farms.
An apocalyptic event like this would drive the world into complete anarchy, and only the craziest and strongest would survive.
Quebec, with it's huge water ressources, would sure be invaded by americans.
The school I went to never teached me to use a versionning system. I had to:
- Wonder what this "CVS" thing on SF was about
- Go to the cvs website, still wondering what it was really used for.
- Download it and try it.
- Finally understand what it is, and wonder how I could have been without it during my whole CS and survive. (Well, not my whole CS, since I learnt about CVS at the before the end of it.)
It only takes a couple of unaware teachers to train a whole generation of ignorant developers.
Don't underestimate the power of ignorance. My 2 last employers didn't use a VCS because they didn't know that this kind of things existed. Of course, they now know, because I installed them one. :)
I just thought of a little analogy that would help people to get the point. Saying "My software is scalable" is like saying "The earthquake yesterday had a Richter scale". Of course it had a richter scale goddammit, every single earthquake does. Tell me WHAT scale it had, not if it had one or not.
A word processor is somehow scalable because you can write whatever you want in it.
The word "Scalable" is a *very* important way to evaluate the quality of a software. However, it is now a buzzword because the marketers denatured it.
Every software is scalable. The question to ask is not wether the software is scalable or not, but to what point it is. Because every software is scalable to a point, and every marketer adds it in their product description, it is a buzzword.
It would be too easy to threaten a company to send "fake" spam on his behalf.
I must add that I for one *seriously* consider to move to mac when I see this pretty box.
I'm pretty sure that the mac mini will convert a lot of PC people to mac.
When I play too much Civ3, it isn't that I dream about it, no. I dream about normal stuff, except that these dreams become TURN BASED! Trust me, this is weird enough to try to slow down playing civ3.
I don't ask my server to render the XSLT on-the-fly, I pre-render them and upload the html files.
XSLT is the most obvious and powerful way to make templating for webpages.
I played this for 6 months (arbs rule!), this isn't really the kind of game I like. I prefer removing the RT from MMORTS. That said, SG wasn't a bad game, I just got tired of the threadmill.
would be a MMOTG (Tactical Game). One of my favourite game ever is Final Fantasy Tactics, and I always tought: "Goddammit, how cool it would be if it was multiplayer, and how GODLY it would be if it was MM!"
What I dislike about MMORPG is that you don't have the time to say "oh shit" that you are already dead in PvP. You don't have the time to talk to your opponents. Of course, if both players are nice RPers, maybe that they'll talk to each other, but has it ever happened to you with anybody else than people you already knew before combat? Have you ever tried to be a "Verbose PK" in UO? You can't. Combat goes too fast. Of course, you can macro some cool stuff to say, but it rapidly grows boring to say the same old stuff.
I'm saying this and I for one have no idea of a practical way to implement a game like that. Nevertheless, it would probably a MMO I would stick to. Or maybe it already exists and someone will tell me where I can find it?
I think this Joel guy gets far more coverage from Slashdot than he deserves (It's not his first story covered by /.).
:)
And I don't agree about his C thing either. If you really want to know how the machine works, why not learn directly assembly instead? And when you actually want to produce something, switch to Python
Assumptions:
{
- I like to code.
- I need to eat.
- To eat, I need money.
- To get money, someone needs to pay me.
- I want to spend my time in the most appreciable way possible.
}
Current Situation:
{
- I distribute non-free software, and sell licences to use them.
- I get paid by customer who appreciate my work.
- I can work 40 hours a week on stuff I actually like to code.
- Awesome software has been built by myself in the past years, and customers can enjoy them.
- I have the FREEDOM to code whatever I want to code.
}
What if I would be "ethical" and write only free-software:
{
- I would work 40 hours/week in either a non-programming job, which I would probably hate, or (if I'm lucky), customizing free software for customers, which wouldn't be so bad, but not as cool as what I do now.
- The software I wrote in the past years wouldn't exist, and nobody could enjoy it right now.
}
Now, if the government would consider my work as public interest and offer me 50K/year to continue developing my softwares under GPL, I'd answer "hell yeah!", but alas, it is not the case.
Thus, I don't consider my actions as unethical because I just CANNOT afford to create this code under GPL.
In the last minute, a little african probably died of malnutrition. was it immoral for you to let him die? Not really, because you CANNOT afford to save them all.
In fact, you COULD afford to save a big bunch of them, but it would mean that you would need to share your wealth with them until you reached their own quality of life. THEN, and only THEN, you could feel like a truly moral person.
I also COULD afford to write free software, but it would mean giving away a lot of what brings me joy. Maybe I am not a moral person because I don't give away my happiness so a bunch of ungrateful users can use my softwares for free.
However, I think that it is perfectly understandable that "intelligent, informed people" value their own happiness enough to give away some of their morality and write non-free, but "enjoyable to write" software.
Now refute that, and tell me what I should do, considering the "Assumptions" section above.
Besides, the fact that *I* write non-free software do not restrict in anyway another programmer to write the exact same software under GPL.
I don't see any mention of a web application in the question.
.Net is... Microsoft, and Python is just totally graceful.
I think that Python would be a *very* good option. Java is ugly (Yeah, I know, stating this is asking for Troll mod points from the java fanboys.),
With wxPython, you can build cross-platform GUI application very easily.
I must say that I'm totally biased here. I made the leap into python/wxpython 3 weeks ago (I used Delphi before that), and I absolutely love it. You don't know the joys of programming unless you tried the list comprehensions of python ([func(x) for x in y if cond(x)]).
And I never liked Java nor C.
As you can read, pretty everyone say it's legal and ethical. I won't argue about this.
What I will say is that this kind of stuff is a good argument for a developer NOT to go GPL.
A lot of GPL projects ask for donations. I don't know if it actually works, but let's say that developer X has the OSS spirit, work very hard on a cool project, he even manage to bring a couple of other developers.
Then, developer Y forks the project, slaps a new GUI on it. Developer Y has better marketing skills, and forked project actually becomes more popular than the original project.
Now let's say that the forked project has a donation button, and it actually works. Where does that money go? 80% of the forked project code comes from developer X. Will developer Y send 80% of the donations he receive to developer X?
I seriously doubt that the majority of people clicking on the "Donate" button actually check the whole CVS changelog to check who actually contributed to the project.
If I'd be developer X and would see that happening, I would sure be angry, but everyone would say that developer Y is legal and ethical and they would be RIGHT. Thus, I would not be angry at developer Y, but at me for choosing GPL.
Cmon, flame me for not having the "OSS spirit", but I will not make the mistake of investing considerable amount of my precious time into GPL so someone else makes money off it, and this story is yet another reason against GPL.
That said, I am not really "against" open source. I use a couple of open source programs daily, and if I had the time, I would probably try to contribute to my favourites (TortoiseCVS, wxPython/wxWidget). I'm just saying that someone who expect a reward for his/her work on a GPL project is a fool, and I'm also saying that I'm skeptical about donation buttons.
The only project I donated to yet is crimson editor, and it's not even OSS. However, I can be sure that my money went to the developer who worked the most on the project, because there is only one. If the project would have been GPL from the start and had a lot of contributors, I would probably wouldn't have donated, because the money probably wouldn't have gone to the developers who worked the most.
That's funny because I got my bi-annual "UO nostalgia" yesterday. I re-activated my account (which has been initially created in 1999), and I will probably close it within a month.
:)
However, if I could find a community where people aren't powergamers, and better yet, use the faction system, I would probably stay there much longer.
My best UO times (in fact, my best MMOG times ever) were when the faction system launched and virtually every player was in a faction. That was some real fun.
Some guilds seem to be active in factions, but I'm tired of normal shards where every player has their own mules to boost their pvp char with super armors/weapons/potions. I exclusively play on siege perilous now.
Does anyone know any good guild for me in Siege? Is there any place for a crafter with skills in the 70s who doesn't want to grind to 100 before starting being useful in a guild?
I guess that the answer is no, and, IMHO, that is why UO is dying. Netcraft didn't confirm it, but I do
Strongly typed? Are we talking about the same Python or should I revise my definition of "strongly typed"? This thing is typeless!
//compile error
For example, if I want to create a function that only accepts a certain type of instance to be passed as a parameter I must do something like that (if I don't need to, I would love to know what easier way there is to do that)
def MyFunc(aMyInstance):
if not isinstance(aMyInstance,TheClassIWant): raise TypeError
DoStuff()
MyFunc(SomeInstanceOfAClassIDontWant) #exception at runtime
However, if I comment out the typecheck line, aMyInstance could be *any* type, and an exception would be raised only if, in MyFunc, I call for an attribute aMyInstance doesn't have.
Maybe that my definition of "strongly typed" is completely wrong, but I think that Python is typeless, as opposed to Object pascal, which is strongly typed:
procedure MyFunc(aMyInstance:TheClassIWant);
begin
DoStuff;
end;
MyFunc(SomeInstanceOfAClassIDontWant);
In my head, "strongly typed" != "object oriented".
Note: I only started Python a week ago, and I love it, especially wxPython.
You don't need to pay 200$/hour to have an *awesome* delphi developer at your service :).
I second that. 4 hours of programming a day is usually my maximum. What's the point of programming 8 hours when you have to spend 2 hours the next day to fix the bugs you introduced during your last hours the day before?
rofl. Thanks, that was the best laugh I had this week. I wish I had mod points.
You're sick. If everybody thought like you, programmers would be starving, and HL2 and HL1 wouldn't exist.
I wonder about how this BS affects foreign companies.
For example, if some US company send me a cease & desist letter or something like that (I live in Canada), invoking one of their dummy patents on how a button has a "push effect" when clicked on, can I just stop selling in the US and tell them to go f*** themselves? Anyway, I'm way too small to even worth the C&D letter, but well, we never know.
If yes, that's one more reason to come to Canada...
One day, loosing the US market will become less costly than engaging a legal battle there.
Within a couple of years, all sane people will have left the US...
The last game I bought from EA was BF1942:road to rome. That is a good game. I wonder if it has been produced on a "time crunch". I heard BF:Vietnam was buggy slow etc.. Maybe there's a direct relation between the fact that it is flawed and the fact that there probably has been "time crunch" during it's development.
After having read this story, I really will avoid buying EA games. As a developer, I know that when I work more than 4 hours in a day, I stop being creative/productive. I usually do "light stuff" in the afternoon (testcases are good things to do in the afternoon...), because I know that if I go into the big stuff, I will probably produce bugs that will need to be fixed tomorrow morning.
From what I read in TFA, EA PHBs know nothing about software engineering. That's why PHB in a software company should have been coder first instead of coming straight from MBA. Hopefully, EA's going straight to hell with this corporate behavior.