Your focus shouldn't be on tracking and staying on top of all the trends. It should be about finding ways to be more efficient and more productive with what you're already doing. Occasionally, I will accidentally run across a cool new tool or framework that's useful, but most of the time I have to go looking for it myself. If you find yourself saying "Surely there's a better way," someone else has probably said the same thing. And while you could scan books or search online for the answer, talking to someone else who has experienced the same thing is probably your best bet. Get involved with a local user's group for whatever language you're developing in. Ask questions, show up at the meetings and contribute back to the group. It's still good to track new trends, but this should be secondary. Just subscribe to a tech magazine or two or maybe watch some of the RSS feeds from sites that pertain to your work, but your best resource is the rest of the community.
Just like any other medium, how long the disks last depend in part on how you treat them. I have a stacks and stacks of data CDs that are still fine after several years, but I make sure to take care of them. For important data, I make at least two copies of the CD/DVD to make sure that we don't have a single point of failure. I also jot down the date that I burned the CD. Periodically, we'll pull out the CDs and try to read them. We don't do this with all of them, only the CDs that haven't been used for a couple years. Every once in a rare while you'll find a bad one -- just copy the good one over to a new CD, jot down the date and put them back. This might seem a little obsessive complusive to some of you, but trust me, it doesn't hurt to be extra cautious especially with really important data that may be called on years in the future and it really doesn't take that much effort.
While I believe the actions of cheaters are reprehensible, you'd have to be very naive to think that there wouldn't be someone trying to cheat. Cheaters have always existed and the internet only makes it easier for them because instead of needing slight of hand to get an ace up their sleeve, they only need to find a bot on a warez site.
So, what can you do about it? Don't play. Send a complaint to the online gaming company and tell them that you're not going to use their service again. Play with your friends in a home game or in a local tournament and avoid the internet completely. If you're playing poker only because of the money, I believe you're missing the best part of the game.
The article just focused on a few features the author was interested in. It was not a comprehensive evaluation of the product. I just upgraded to Fedora Core 4 a couple weekends ago and it has been great for what I needed it to do. For some people Fedora will fit their needs and for others it won't.
If you're going to evaulate the product, evaluate ALL (or at least a majority) of it. Don't just give a product a bad rating because it didn't do/have specifically what you wanted or because you don't understand Linux memory allocation (from the article: "I wasn't as happy with the memory consumption. About 230 MBs of RAM were used on a clean, default load (according to "free", just after the OS loaded -- no major cashing has occured yet). I find this requirement huge, it means that computers with 256 MBs of RAM will swap heavily after only a few minutes of using the system").
Whether your are a Slackware aficionado or not, the book deserves a look at least!
I am not a Slackware aficionado. If anything I am a Fedora aficionado. I've used Debian back in the day (1998) and Redhat as well with a little SuSE thrown in for good flavor over the years. Why should I look at a book speificially targeting Slackware when I am not an aficionado? Just curious...
I appreciate your comment and yes, some of what you wrote is what I meant by saying it was "political" in nature. I can't say that all of what you wrote was what I meant because a couple of your points were things I hadn't even thought of. But I do not disagree with what you said.
Don't get me wrong, I do have faith in aerospace. I work with those people every day and they have to be some of the best, smartest people I have ever been around. All of us are extremely happy to see the work going on with SpaceShip One and the X Prize. The problem as we see it is not in the engineers, pilots, and astronauts. The problem with the manned program is all of the non-engineering government red tape that surrounds it. If a NASA engineer working on the shuttle came to me said there was a very low risk on something, I would believe him. However, I don't know whether the comment about low risk in this particular case was coming from the engineers or from management/public relations (even if an engineer was one to utter the actual words). And as you can guess, what worries me is that the statement came from public relations. I hope with everything in me that that's not the case.
I grew up in the era when all the shuttle launches were televised and it seemed that every other kid wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. I was one of those kids and I believed that all the cool science and break-throughs were made by astronauts up in orbit.
However, during college, I realized that the shuttle program is about 95% politics and 5% science. I got an internship within the space program, but in the unmanned satellite area. After college, I continued to work in the area of space sciences and now I have several missions under my belt. Having seen how things work from the inside, the majority of good science comes from our unmanned satellites that don't make the news and the majority of the public don't even know about. While there are certain scientific benefits that the shuttle program has brought, the majority of the shuttle program has been a public relations campaign and politics.
While I already believed that every precaution should be taken before sending the shuttle back up, I want NASA to make extra sure that every precaution really has been made because we are risking people's lives in the name of politics and public relations. Don't get me wrong, I don't want people to risk their lives in the name of science or exploration either, but there will always be some risk in exploration. There shouldn't be any risk (with respect to people's lives) just to play politics and get nice photos of Americans and Russians together in orbit.
I don't want to see the manned program disappear. But I do want to see NASA be as responsible as they can be. I don't know where the "acceptable risk" falls, but I sure hope it's really low.
I was wondering the same thing about whether cliche should be +1 or -1. There are some that are appropriate and funny, but not funny enough to earn Funny +1. Then there are some that are bad, but not bad enough to earn any of the negative moderations. However, most of the time it seems that the cliches fall into the latter category. I just want to have a category that indicates "Your attempt at humor by using the current Slashdot cliche of the month has been noticed, but we do not find it particularly funny, insightful or interesting." So, I guess in that case, it should be a -1, but I wouldn't want to put Cliche down at the level of Flamebait and Troll. Wow, I really must have nothing to do today if I can spend my time thinking of stuff this this.
The features you're talking about are really beyond the range of cron or any other "scheduler." The reason cron exists is to allow you to run jobs at a scheduled time. That's it. If you need to ensure that different cron jobs don't conflict with each other, that's a sign that those jobs need to be combined into a single script. A simple shell script wrapper around the jobs can take care of the logic you need. Just call that wrapper from cron and you should be good.
Of course, but there is a trade-off between the depth of the documentation and the ease of use. It's easy to get lost in the documentation especially for large projects. If you record every last use of "brain power," you're going to wind up with a lot of detail that will be hard for the new programmer on the scene to wade through.
Let me use a good ol' practical programming example. Oracle is by far one of the most powerful, but yet one of the most complicated programs to work with. If I recorded every detail of Oracle, I'd wind up with a tome which would contain a huge number of volumes. While this ensures that I have every last significant detail written down, it becomes really hard for the new programmer to learn or to even find the place where the answer is. It's easier to learn if there is a distilled version of the documentation. While it doesn't have every last detail, it can get a new programmer started on trying to learn the system. This still isn't the best solution because you may need specific information that isn't included in the distilled version. The best case is to find your Oracle guru and get some guidance from them. Your co-workers and the local gurus are the greatest assests. Sometimes a quick question to your local guru will save you hours of trying to figure things out on your own. Use the documentation first, but when the documentation breaks down, find the people who know where things are and just ask them "Hey, where can I find this or that?"
And by the way, if you find yourself asking such questions, WRITE THE ANSWERS DOWN somewhere and amend the documentation itself. It's all too often that the same old problems are revisted time and time again because no one wrote down the answer the first time.
The primary problem is that there's too much information to document. I could create a document which included every design decision and every little facet of the project, but the document would wind up so huge, it'd be impossible to work with. The best resource I know of is the project guru. Every project has one -- the one guy who seems to know everything or at least can tell you where to find the details. Find this guy and pick his brain as much as you can. That'll carry you a lot farther than the documentation itself. However, if the guru is no longer around, you're up a creek without a paddle.
While my company is in the research and development end of the spectrum, they are very particular about what makes its way out of the company. Most of our business is contracting work. In order to have work we need to get contracts and to get contracts, we need to beat out our competitors. One of the points of leverage is that we have an internal code library which is proven and tested. Giving the library away does not help us do our work any better nor does it help us win additional contracts, but it will help our competitors.
We do have less specialized code which could be released without any real backlash, but it's too much of a headache to go through the legal process with the company's lawyers to get something out as open source. I have some additions I'd like to make to a couple of open source projects, but I simply don't have the time to sit down with the lawyers and work through red tape nor do I have time to sit down with my upper management (non-programmers) and convince them that giving away some code is 1) a good idea and 2) will not hurt the company.
If you're doing any J2EE work, I highly recommend Eclipse with the myEclipse plugin. It carries a price tag of about $30 per year, but this is much cheaper than many of the other equivalent IDEs. Included are a JSP developer, XML editor, SQL Editor, database explorer, EJB modeler and JSTL support among many other features. It is a great tool.
If J2EE isn't of any concern, I still first recommend Eclipse because of its nice integration with CVS, JUnit and other Java tools. There are also plugins for C and C++. And best of all, it's free. Even if Eclipse weren't free, I'd still pay for it. It's the best IDE I know.
The only other IDE I'd recommend is SlickEdit. I used it for a number of years for C/C++ and Java before switching to Eclipse. It's a good editor, but I found that I could do my job better with Eclipse. Many of my co-workers use SlickEdit instead and rave about it. It all depends on what you need to do and how you work. There's now a plugin so you can use the SlickEdit code editor in Eclipse. However, Visual SlickEdit comes with a price tag in the $200 - $300 range and the plugin is a about $150 or so.
I'm considering doing that in a basement room (soon to be PC room and office) to make network/power wiring easier, modifiable, and expandable.
How many computers and how much equipment are you going to have down there? How much do you expect your setup to change? Isn't a raised floor a little overkill for a basement? An efficient wiring scheme is all you need. I once lived beside a guy who was a ham radio operator. He had a lot of stuff and was constantly buying new gadgets and gizmos. He has his computers and radio equipment in a basement room, but you didn't even notice all the cabling because he planned out where all the wires went before putting things together or changing something. Most people will organize their computers and electronics and then just throw the wires in to connect everything. Just plan out the wiring at the same time when you plan the rest of the layout.
Unless you're downloading a group and going offline to read, there's no reason to keep anything but the headers on your computer.
Headers are all I have. The comment is not about disk space, but about total messages.
Any decent newsreader (i.e., not Outlook) should have filters (killfiles, scorefiles) that automatically find the interesting stuff for you. With something like Gravity, it's trivially easy to reduce a 1000 post-per-day group to 50.
My specific scenario deals with how I read news and the newsgroups I'm interested in. Most of the time I subscribe and read a newsgroup just for general informational purposes. What that means is that I don't know what I'll be interested in ahead of time. Of course, there are filters to that remove the total junk messages, but I don't want to limit myself to a little corner of the newsgroup. There have been many times when I've learned something or found something that has really helped me just by coming across it. I wouldn't necessarily have that if everything were scored and distilled for me -- I could very easily look past something. Maybe I'll have to give it up one day in order to handle the larger newsgroups, but I guess it's just a power thing -- I hate to give up control, especially to some program. Heh.
During the early days of the internet a large percentage of the people using the internet knew about and used Usenet. And there were vibrant discussions and debates and there still are today. I'm not denying that. However, over the course of time the percentage of people using Usenet went way down. The growth of Usenet was nowhere close to tracking the growth of the internet in general. The new John and Jane Q. Publics of the internet don't know that Usenet exists or even what a newsreader is. You mention Usenet and you get a blank response or a question like "Is that a web site?" Even some of the young tech savvy crowd don't know much about it. They know it as Deja News or Google Groups. I'm saying that based on the some of the college grads we recently hired. I can't make sweeping generalizations, but it does seem to be a trend with the grads the past couple of years.
My reason for mentioning that Google helped to popularize news is that Google helped to bring Usenet to those who didn't know it was there or what it was. Sure, Deja News was around, but that didn't mean anything to John Q. Public. However, John Q. Public uses Google and uses Google a lot, so much so that "Google" has now become a verb. Anyway, just having that little extra link on Googles main page has directed many more people into the world of Usenet. The newsgroups I follow have a number of posters who use Google -- posters who weren't there before Google Groups showed up. I don't have anything to back up this claim other than having seen an influx of new posters around the time Google Groups launched. I may be totally wrong, but it seemed there was a correspondance.
And for the record, I have used newsgroups for about 8 or 9 years myself.
I misspoke when I said "filling up my mailbox." What you say is true -- the news is fetched only when you feel like and messages have expiration dates and so on. And I do use a newsreader for a certain select set of newsgroups.
When I said "filling up my mailbox," I wasn't thinking of the disk space being used or things like that, but rather that certain newsgroups have hundreds of messages per day. Even if the messages are threaded, it's still hard to wade through all the cruft and find the threads you're interested in, especially when the interest is causual. I find Google much more suitable for such cases -- I don't have to download anything and Google can find the specific threads that interest me.
As I said above, I do subscribe to a set of newsgroups, all of which are much lower volume (15 - 30 posts/day) and all of which I post to on a semi-regular basis. For those, the newsreader the better option. Which is approach is better is completely dependent on the traffic volume, interest level, and my posting frequency to the group.
Okay, so people are now going to have to pay for a service that was once free. How is this a nail in the coffin? It seemed that Usenet was dying out until Google came along and included it via Google Groups.
Even though I knew Usenet was out there, it really wasn't until Google Groups that I started using it heavily. I'm a casual Usenet user with a post here and a post there, but most of the time I just don't want all the traffic filling up my mailbox. Having it online in a nice form and easily searchable has made it much easier to work with and find exactly what you need and it's now much more available to folks who never knew it existed in the first place. (What's this little Groups link over here?...)
One free provider not being free any more doesn't change anything all that much other than being an inconvience for certain users.
While including code directly may speed up the compilation time, you will loose all the time you gain and then some when you get into debugging.
If you have a complicated #include chain, you can wind up with a lot of duplication. Some compilers will complain, some won't. However, if you have typedefs, structs or the like, most compliers will complain and not compile your code until the duplications are removed. I don't know what compiler you're using or if you are planning on including more than functions or global variables, so I don't know if this is an issue or not.
The more general issue is that it's much easier to track down bugs and other problems if there is a clean separation between definitions and implementations. I can't characterize that difference in a few sentences, so I'll just say that it has been my experience that projects which are developed in a true modular nature are much easier to debug than projects designed in a monolithic nature. The time saved in debugging more than makes up for a little time lost in compilation.
One thing I'm curious about is what effect that the Sun's activity has on climate change. There have been spacecraft studying the sun and more spacecraft studying the magnetosphere and it's interaction with the solar wind. However, it seems that we only have understanding of individual events and the immediate effects of those events. It will be really interesting when some people get a good idea of what long term effects CMEs (coronal mass ejections) and other Sun activity has on our little blue world.
I would much rather have a review of the ease of use of the software than seeing eye candy. The GUI presentation is an important aspect of software, but it's not the look of the GUI so much as it is how easy the GUI is to use. The best GUI software out there is the kind where you don't have to think too hard about how to do something. There are times when I've gone back to the command line just because the layout in the GUI version was so confusing. There's a big difference between an interface being really slick and being really useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Your focus shouldn't be on tracking and staying on top of all the trends. It should be about finding ways to be more efficient and more productive with what you're already doing. Occasionally, I will accidentally run across a cool new tool or framework that's useful, but most of the time I have to go looking for it myself. If you find yourself saying "Surely there's a better way," someone else has probably said the same thing. And while you could scan books or search online for the answer, talking to someone else who has experienced the same thing is probably your best bet. Get involved with a local user's group for whatever language you're developing in. Ask questions, show up at the meetings and contribute back to the group. It's still good to track new trends, but this should be secondary. Just subscribe to a tech magazine or two or maybe watch some of the RSS feeds from sites that pertain to your work, but your best resource is the rest of the community.
Just like any other medium, how long the disks last depend in part on how you treat them. I have a stacks and stacks of data CDs that are still fine after several years, but I make sure to take care of them. For important data, I make at least two copies of the CD/DVD to make sure that we don't have a single point of failure. I also jot down the date that I burned the CD. Periodically, we'll pull out the CDs and try to read them. We don't do this with all of them, only the CDs that haven't been used for a couple years. Every once in a rare while you'll find a bad one -- just copy the good one over to a new CD, jot down the date and put them back. This might seem a little obsessive complusive to some of you, but trust me, it doesn't hurt to be extra cautious especially with really important data that may be called on years in the future and it really doesn't take that much effort.
While I believe the actions of cheaters are reprehensible, you'd have to be very naive to think that there wouldn't be someone trying to cheat. Cheaters have always existed and the internet only makes it easier for them because instead of needing slight of hand to get an ace up their sleeve, they only need to find a bot on a warez site.
So, what can you do about it? Don't play. Send a complaint to the online gaming company and tell them that you're not going to use their service again. Play with your friends in a home game or in a local tournament and avoid the internet completely. If you're playing poker only because of the money, I believe you're missing the best part of the game.
But can it play the hardest chord ever?
The article just focused on a few features the author was interested in. It was not a comprehensive evaluation of the product. I just upgraded to Fedora Core 4 a couple weekends ago and it has been great for what I needed it to do. For some people Fedora will fit their needs and for others it won't.
If you're going to evaulate the product, evaluate ALL (or at least a majority) of it. Don't just give a product a bad rating because it didn't do/have specifically what you wanted or because you don't understand Linux memory allocation (from the article: "I wasn't as happy with the memory consumption. About 230 MBs of RAM were used on a clean, default load (according to "free", just after the OS loaded -- no major cashing has occured yet). I find this requirement huge, it means that computers with 256 MBs of RAM will swap heavily after only a few minutes of using the system").
Whether your are a Slackware aficionado or not, the book deserves a look at least!
I am not a Slackware aficionado. If anything I am a Fedora aficionado. I've used Debian back in the day (1998) and Redhat as well with a little SuSE thrown in for good flavor over the years. Why should I look at a book speificially targeting Slackware when I am not an aficionado? Just curious...I appreciate your comment and yes, some of what you wrote is what I meant by saying it was "political" in nature. I can't say that all of what you wrote was what I meant because a couple of your points were things I hadn't even thought of. But I do not disagree with what you said.
Don't get me wrong, I do have faith in aerospace. I work with those people every day and they have to be some of the best, smartest people I have ever been around. All of us are extremely happy to see the work going on with SpaceShip One and the X Prize. The problem as we see it is not in the engineers, pilots, and astronauts. The problem with the manned program is all of the non-engineering government red tape that surrounds it. If a NASA engineer working on the shuttle came to me said there was a very low risk on something, I would believe him. However, I don't know whether the comment about low risk in this particular case was coming from the engineers or from management/public relations (even if an engineer was one to utter the actual words). And as you can guess, what worries me is that the statement came from public relations. I hope with everything in me that that's not the case.
I grew up in the era when all the shuttle launches were televised and it seemed that every other kid wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. I was one of those kids and I believed that all the cool science and break-throughs were made by astronauts up in orbit.
However, during college, I realized that the shuttle program is about 95% politics and 5% science. I got an internship within the space program, but in the unmanned satellite area. After college, I continued to work in the area of space sciences and now I have several missions under my belt. Having seen how things work from the inside, the majority of good science comes from our unmanned satellites that don't make the news and the majority of the public don't even know about. While there are certain scientific benefits that the shuttle program has brought, the majority of the shuttle program has been a public relations campaign and politics.
While I already believed that every precaution should be taken before sending the shuttle back up, I want NASA to make extra sure that every precaution really has been made because we are risking people's lives in the name of politics and public relations. Don't get me wrong, I don't want people to risk their lives in the name of science or exploration either, but there will always be some risk in exploration. There shouldn't be any risk (with respect to people's lives) just to play politics and get nice photos of Americans and Russians together in orbit.
I don't want to see the manned program disappear. But I do want to see NASA be as responsible as they can be. I don't know where the "acceptable risk" falls, but I sure hope it's really low.
I was wondering the same thing about whether cliche should be +1 or -1. There are some that are appropriate and funny, but not funny enough to earn Funny +1. Then there are some that are bad, but not bad enough to earn any of the negative moderations. However, most of the time it seems that the cliches fall into the latter category. I just want to have a category that indicates "Your attempt at humor by using the current Slashdot cliche of the month has been noticed, but we do not find it particularly funny, insightful or interesting." So, I guess in that case, it should be a -1, but I wouldn't want to put Cliche down at the level of Flamebait and Troll. Wow, I really must have nothing to do today if I can spend my time thinking of stuff this this.
Slashdot needs a new moderation category, Cliche. Someone mod parent +1 Cliche.
The features you're talking about are really beyond the range of cron or any other "scheduler." The reason cron exists is to allow you to run jobs at a scheduled time. That's it. If you need to ensure that different cron jobs don't conflict with each other, that's a sign that those jobs need to be combined into a single script. A simple shell script wrapper around the jobs can take care of the logic you need. Just call that wrapper from cron and you should be good.
Of course, but there is a trade-off between the depth of the documentation and the ease of use. It's easy to get lost in the documentation especially for large projects. If you record every last use of "brain power," you're going to wind up with a lot of detail that will be hard for the new programmer on the scene to wade through.
Let me use a good ol' practical programming example. Oracle is by far one of the most powerful, but yet one of the most complicated programs to work with. If I recorded every detail of Oracle, I'd wind up with a tome which would contain a huge number of volumes. While this ensures that I have every last significant detail written down, it becomes really hard for the new programmer to learn or to even find the place where the answer is. It's easier to learn if there is a distilled version of the documentation. While it doesn't have every last detail, it can get a new programmer started on trying to learn the system. This still isn't the best solution because you may need specific information that isn't included in the distilled version. The best case is to find your Oracle guru and get some guidance from them. Your co-workers and the local gurus are the greatest assests. Sometimes a quick question to your local guru will save you hours of trying to figure things out on your own. Use the documentation first, but when the documentation breaks down, find the people who know where things are and just ask them "Hey, where can I find this or that?"
And by the way, if you find yourself asking such questions, WRITE THE ANSWERS DOWN somewhere and amend the documentation itself. It's all too often that the same old problems are revisted time and time again because no one wrote down the answer the first time.
The primary problem is that there's too much information to document. I could create a document which included every design decision and every little facet of the project, but the document would wind up so huge, it'd be impossible to work with. The best resource I know of is the project guru. Every project has one -- the one guy who seems to know everything or at least can tell you where to find the details. Find this guy and pick his brain as much as you can. That'll carry you a lot farther than the documentation itself. However, if the guru is no longer around, you're up a creek without a paddle.
A while back there was an article in 2600 about how to "Hack the Look" of Windows. Take a look at the articles here and here.
While my company is in the research and development end of the spectrum, they are very particular about what makes its way out of the company. Most of our business is contracting work. In order to have work we need to get contracts and to get contracts, we need to beat out our competitors. One of the points of leverage is that we have an internal code library which is proven and tested. Giving the library away does not help us do our work any better nor does it help us win additional contracts, but it will help our competitors.
We do have less specialized code which could be released without any real backlash, but it's too much of a headache to go through the legal process with the company's lawyers to get something out as open source. I have some additions I'd like to make to a couple of open source projects, but I simply don't have the time to sit down with the lawyers and work through red tape nor do I have time to sit down with my upper management (non-programmers) and convince them that giving away some code is 1) a good idea and 2) will not hurt the company.
If you're doing any J2EE work, I highly recommend Eclipse with the myEclipse plugin. It carries a price tag of about $30 per year, but this is much cheaper than many of the other equivalent IDEs. Included are a JSP developer, XML editor, SQL Editor, database explorer, EJB modeler and JSTL support among many other features. It is a great tool.
If J2EE isn't of any concern, I still first recommend Eclipse because of its nice integration with CVS, JUnit and other Java tools. There are also plugins for C and C++. And best of all, it's free. Even if Eclipse weren't free, I'd still pay for it. It's the best IDE I know.
The only other IDE I'd recommend is SlickEdit. I used it for a number of years for C/C++ and Java before switching to Eclipse. It's a good editor, but I found that I could do my job better with Eclipse. Many of my co-workers use SlickEdit instead and rave about it. It all depends on what you need to do and how you work. There's now a plugin so you can use the SlickEdit code editor in Eclipse. However, Visual SlickEdit comes with a price tag in the $200 - $300 range and the plugin is a about $150 or so.
I'm considering doing that in a basement room (soon to be PC room and office) to make network/power wiring easier, modifiable, and expandable.
How many computers and how much equipment are you going to have down there? How much do you expect your setup to change? Isn't a raised floor a little overkill for a basement? An efficient wiring scheme is all you need. I once lived beside a guy who was a ham radio operator. He had a lot of stuff and was constantly buying new gadgets and gizmos. He has his computers and radio equipment in a basement room, but you didn't even notice all the cabling because he planned out where all the wires went before putting things together or changing something. Most people will organize their computers and electronics and then just throw the wires in to connect everything. Just plan out the wiring at the same time when you plan the rest of the layout.
Unless you're downloading a group and going offline to read, there's no reason to keep anything but the headers on your computer.
Headers are all I have. The comment is not about disk space, but about total messages.
Any decent newsreader (i.e., not Outlook) should have filters (killfiles, scorefiles) that automatically find the interesting stuff for you. With something like Gravity, it's trivially easy to reduce a 1000 post-per-day group to 50.
My specific scenario deals with how I read news and the newsgroups I'm interested in. Most of the time I subscribe and read a newsgroup just for general informational purposes. What that means is that I don't know what I'll be interested in ahead of time. Of course, there are filters to that remove the total junk messages, but I don't want to limit myself to a little corner of the newsgroup. There have been many times when I've learned something or found something that has really helped me just by coming across it. I wouldn't necessarily have that if everything were scored and distilled for me -- I could very easily look past something. Maybe I'll have to give it up one day in order to handle the larger newsgroups, but I guess it's just a power thing -- I hate to give up control, especially to some program. Heh.
During the early days of the internet a large percentage of the people using the internet knew about and used Usenet. And there were vibrant discussions and debates and there still are today. I'm not denying that. However, over the course of time the percentage of people using Usenet went way down. The growth of Usenet was nowhere close to tracking the growth of the internet in general. The new John and Jane Q. Publics of the internet don't know that Usenet exists or even what a newsreader is. You mention Usenet and you get a blank response or a question like "Is that a web site?" Even some of the young tech savvy crowd don't know much about it. They know it as Deja News or Google Groups. I'm saying that based on the some of the college grads we recently hired. I can't make sweeping generalizations, but it does seem to be a trend with the grads the past couple of years.
My reason for mentioning that Google helped to popularize news is that Google helped to bring Usenet to those who didn't know it was there or what it was. Sure, Deja News was around, but that didn't mean anything to John Q. Public. However, John Q. Public uses Google and uses Google a lot, so much so that "Google" has now become a verb. Anyway, just having that little extra link on Googles main page has directed many more people into the world of Usenet. The newsgroups I follow have a number of posters who use Google -- posters who weren't there before Google Groups showed up. I don't have anything to back up this claim other than having seen an influx of new posters around the time Google Groups launched. I may be totally wrong, but it seemed there was a correspondance.
And for the record, I have used newsgroups for about 8 or 9 years myself.
I misspoke when I said "filling up my mailbox." What you say is true -- the news is fetched only when you feel like and messages have expiration dates and so on. And I do use a newsreader for a certain select set of newsgroups.
When I said "filling up my mailbox," I wasn't thinking of the disk space being used or things like that, but rather that certain newsgroups have hundreds of messages per day. Even if the messages are threaded, it's still hard to wade through all the cruft and find the threads you're interested in, especially when the interest is causual. I find Google much more suitable for such cases -- I don't have to download anything and Google can find the specific threads that interest me.
As I said above, I do subscribe to a set of newsgroups, all of which are much lower volume (15 - 30 posts/day) and all of which I post to on a semi-regular basis. For those, the newsreader the better option. Which is approach is better is completely dependent on the traffic volume, interest level, and my posting frequency to the group.
Okay, so people are now going to have to pay for a service that was once free. How is this a nail in the coffin? It seemed that Usenet was dying out until Google came along and included it via Google Groups.
Even though I knew Usenet was out there, it really wasn't until Google Groups that I started using it heavily. I'm a casual Usenet user with a post here and a post there, but most of the time I just don't want all the traffic filling up my mailbox. Having it online in a nice form and easily searchable has made it much easier to work with and find exactly what you need and it's now much more available to folks who never knew it existed in the first place. (What's this little Groups link over here? ...)
One free provider not being free any more doesn't change anything all that much other than being an inconvience for certain users.
While including code directly may speed up the compilation time, you will loose all the time you gain and then some when you get into debugging.
If you have a complicated #include chain, you can wind up with a lot of duplication. Some compilers will complain, some won't. However, if you have typedefs, structs or the like, most compliers will complain and not compile your code until the duplications are removed. I don't know what compiler you're using or if you are planning on including more than functions or global variables, so I don't know if this is an issue or not.
The more general issue is that it's much easier to track down bugs and other problems if there is a clean separation between definitions and implementations. I can't characterize that difference in a few sentences, so I'll just say that it has been my experience that projects which are developed in a true modular nature are much easier to debug than projects designed in a monolithic nature. The time saved in debugging more than makes up for a little time lost in compilation.
the noise level has increased significantly due to the type of furniture
My office furniture doesn't make any noise as far as I can tell. Of course I'm not lucky enough to have my "wastebasket vibrate with happiness when trash is thrown into itOne thing I'm curious about is what effect that the Sun's activity has on climate change. There have been spacecraft studying the sun and more spacecraft studying the magnetosphere and it's interaction with the solar wind. However, it seems that we only have understanding of individual events and the immediate effects of those events. It will be really interesting when some people get a good idea of what long term effects CMEs (coronal mass ejections) and other Sun activity has on our little blue world.
I would much rather have a review of the ease of use of the software than seeing eye candy. The GUI presentation is an important aspect of software, but it's not the look of the GUI so much as it is how easy the GUI is to use. The best GUI software out there is the kind where you don't have to think too hard about how to do something. There are times when I've gone back to the command line just because the layout in the GUI version was so confusing. There's a big difference between an interface being really slick and being really useful.