I think your criticism of the review is a little harsh. Sometimes it is valuable to reflect on what things have changed and what things haven't in particular fields. It gives you insight to pick out fads and what remains to be the kernel of the problem.
I will say that, on a personal level, I don't much care for Fred Brooks. From actually hearing him talk, he came across to me as one of those managers that doesn't give due credit to the work of his subordinates. I think that idealogy is reflected in many of the things he says in Mythical-Man Month.
Mythical-Man Month is a decent enough book at pointing out problems with developing software. But, I don't think it gives you any greater insight than just being on one project that fails, or ran overtime/over-budget (and according to statistics alomst all programmers will experience that, and often). In that sense, I think a book like Death March is much more valuable to prepare future professionals for what they will face in the real-world.
As for solutions that Brooks gave. Most of them didn't turn out be such great ideas, i.e. surgical team. He totally punts on how you develop programmer skill half-scoffing at the 10x productivity number.
All in all, I don't think Mythical Man Month is a must read. Death March + Code Complete will give most programmers a much better start. And Peopleware is a much better book for managers. Mythical-Man Month is James Fenimore Cooper of American Literature.
I still fail to see how P2P is key. Yes, the network might be harder to take down, but reliability isn't the most important aspect to most systems, usefulness is. In my experience, having a disorganized network becomes more susceptable to abuse. I mean compare Gnutella vs. BitTorrent, I'd argue that BitTorrent generally works better. And that is because there is a little bit of structure built into the system via the tracker.
I also don't like his nature argument. Nature creates hierarchies too. Your brain tells the rest of your body what to do. Queen bees vs. drones vs. workers. I mean, there are physical differences there, and it can't be pinned on purely social phenomenom.
I also have a hard time seeing any benefit from having your toaster route packets for you. I can see many houses having wireless routers in the future, just not integrated into every device in the house. It just seems like there will always be some specialized device that will do a 100x better job. People that really care will buy that. Other people will have blinking 12:00 syndrome.
As a side note to p2p applictions, the one idea that really hasn't come to fruition is p2p content creation. I mean, p2p is very useful for communication (IM, IP Telephony, forums, etc.) and distribution (BitTorrent). Wiki's and Open Source are sort of p2p content creation. But, I was thinking more along the lines of tradition art. Like an app that let's you play music together over the net to make a song. Or paint a picture, or make a movie. Obviously, the market for such programs is smaller than the consume content variety. But, I'd really like the net to really start enabling the production of new art in ways that weren't possible before. Beyond the obvious of enabling collaboration and hand-offs, but actually affecting the production of digital art. Although, I make no guarantees about if it will work well in practice.
The fact that Microsoft is breaking backwards compatibility is the exact reason that Joel says they lost the API war.
Developers, more than anything else want a stable platform to develop for. Microsoft's top priority in the past was to provide a stable platform (stable in the sense that all old-code worked on the new platform). Developers are users too. I would be really pissed off if I upgraded some app and it wasn't able to work with my old data. Why is there a different expectation when I code for an API? Why should I have to rewrite my code because the vendor discovered some better way of doing it? I probably went to a lot of trouble to get that code working in the first place. Make sure it performs well, possibly works around a couple bugs that took me hours or days to figure out, and now the vendor comes along and breaks it and I have to learn some new way of doing it and deal with new, yet undiscovered bugs. fsck that. If it was an app, I would ditch it. If it was a platform and had a choice, I'd ditch that too.
What platform are people turning to? Joel's answer is the web because HTML/browser represents a very stable platform. I won't reiterate his arguments here. But, I do feel that he has a point. He is a smart guy, and I could see it come to pass. That doesn't necessarily mean it will. Smart people have been wrong before:)
With Joel's world view, how Linux will make inroads on the corporate desktop is simply by having a good web-browser and being free. Features on the client will become irrelevant.
All I can say is prediction is hard, especially when you are trying to predict the future.
I really hate arguments that refer to "most people." Did you conduct a scientific survey? Take a poll? Hell, ask your friends? What gives you the authority to talk about the opinion of most people on any particular topic? Reviewers consider price/performance and comparable items on the market. The best they can do is give their opinion and justify their view with facts.
But what I hate to see is just blantant negativity towards certain products because it isn't the best value. Mac users are probably the most vilified on this account.
Markets work on optomism. Negativity poisons markets, and on large scales cause recessions and depressions. There is no good reason for this because it is solely a social phenomenon. For the most part, I believe things are good and getting better on every front.
My self-esteem has nothing to do with it. I hate seeing people participate in this bullying. Because, it does (however indirectly) affect my quality of life and produces nothing but dissatisfaction all around.
I don't know. I mean, a penny-a-song is pretty cheap. But, something about me wants to pay once and be able to play a song as much as I want.
If I kinda of only liked the song and wanted to hear it only once in a while. I'd probably wait for them to play it on the radio. If I really liked a song, I'd pay a buck so I could listen to it when ever I wanted and be done with it.
The only time I see this as useful is if you are playing a song that you don't like that much, but somebody else would. For example, hosting a party or you have a date at your house and you figure Wierd Al isn't going to set the mood you want.
I just don't see those situations of use setting up a sustainable business model for the costs they are going to endure. Of course, if it becomes _the_ method for DJ'ing. You might get the volume you need, but I still doubt it.
Of course, this is just my opinion and I could be wrong (and frequently am).
I will never understand the "wow, that computer is cool, but soo expensive" mentalality. I paid about $3000 for a laptop about 5 years-ago. I was happy with that machine. This one is more powerful, has a better battery life, and is cheaper in terms of actual dollars than the laptop. Should I pissed off that I bought my laptop now?
If you want the vaio, and have the expendable income, buy it. Who cares if you can get a better desktop for a tenth of the cost. The most powerful computer in the world isn't worth the money if you aren't happy with it and don't use it.
Anything that you buy is worth the money if you are satisfied with it. I really hate to see the put-down mentality of some people that take otherwise happy customers and make them feel stupid or cheated for their purchase. Absolutely, no good comes from that. You discourage people from buying products they would enjoy. You hurt companies that produce something cool, which causes them to raise prices on their not-so-cool items. In the end, for what? Your ego? Get a grip.
I agree, you haven't. But that is contingent on figuring out who on the bittorrent has rights to distribute the content. And download it only from that those people, and don't share out any of the pieces that you download. Then everything that you have done isn't illegal. Given the nature of bittorrent, I don't think that is feasible.
Remember, just because someone legally gave you a free copy of copyrighted work does not give you the right to redistribute it. All they have to do is show that they downloaded a piece of their work from you. I highly doubt that claims of fair-use since it was only a small chunk of the file will stand. That fair-use only applies when you are incorporating pieces into your own work, not broadcasting somebody else's work verbatim.
People that use bittorrent to violate copyrights are going to nailed. It is just a matter of time. The nature of program just bleeds information about who is doing what on the network. The largest problem the enforcers have is jurisdiction, and hooking IP addresses to real-life people, not evidence of the crime. MPAA is a lobby with lots of money and whose rights are being violated, so I don't think that the current hurdles to enforcement are going stand, at least in the US.
How are they "breaking the law?" They own the copyright on the work. So, presumably they are the only ones not breaking the law when they participate in the bittorrent network.
It isn't wire-tapping. They are not government employees. They didn't need any special privledges to the internet or hack bittorrent to figure this out. It is more like just finding a list of phone numbers for crack houses. Calling them up and ordering crack, and having the crack house send it to you, reciept and all.
They are private citizens that discover and have proof that their constitutionally guaranteed right to control distrubiution of their copyrighted work is being actively violated.
Hell, what can be simplier for the MPAA/RIAA? They can get the file once. Demonstrate they have a copyright on it. The tracker tells them everyone that is sharing the file. All they need is to hand it over to law enforcement agencies. The case itself open-and-shut.
Look, copyright is messed up in America. Copyright should only last for about 30 years. But, even so, you can't justify downloading the newest Harry Potter flick. Even under a more reasonable copyright system, that would still be illegal.
Legal worries aside, it is wrong. Content creators that express that they don't want you distributing something they created are legally guaranteed to do so for a limited time. People should respect that. Even if the MPAA/RIAA is a bunch of money grubbing asshats, it doesn't make it right.
Don't try to play with the legal technicalities. Rest assured, the law will eventually catch up to illegal distributors.
But, I appluad Real and Starz will be trying to do something that sounds like it might be really cool. Although, only time will tell if they can overcome the problems they will face (from technical to social). But, I think it is pretty sweet that they are trying.
I do think a useful way of thinking about programs is to think of them in terms of products from communities. Those communities hold values which they embody in the code.
Physicists, System Programmers, Application Programmers, Business Programmers, System Administrators each write code, and each have their own set of values about what makes code good. Of course, I'm biased. When I was talking about staying with a particular language/community I was thinking more in terms of 10,000-1,000,000 LOC projects and where programming is your profession.
Scripting definitely lends itself to sampling a variety of different languages, because scripting languages do offer a wide range of trade-offs between host integration and portability. But the scripting language itself was produced by a bunch of programmers with their own idea of what makes code good and which the language they produced embodies.
When you work on something large, you actually become part of the community. With small projects you are really just trying it out.
Of course, you are free to consider such observations as trite or meaningless. But I have fun trying to figure out why certain people dislike a particular idea, and I find placing a person in a communtity/group then reasoning about the group's values to be a useful way to approach the problem.
As an example: why do Unix programmers hate Win32 so much? I'd argue that it is because Unix programmers value having a small orthogonal API. The Win32 API is definitely not small or orthogonal. Why don't Win32 programmers mind so much? Win32 programmers value features to sell their app. So they expect a rich API to accomplish that. Orthogonality is something they'd gladly give up to get features into their app more quickly.
Yeah, seriously, I wish the "what is the best programming language contests" would come to an end. A programming language is just a tool, and in the big scheme of things, it isn't even the most important tool for the task you are trying to accomplish.
Things that are likely to have a bigger impact are your ability to aquire quality libraries, documentation for them, and your ability to get help if you hit a roadblock.
Saying that you choose a programming language is a misnomer, because you don't choose a programming language much like you don't choose a religion. You usually just stick with the ones that you are taught. You might change programming languages, but you usually do so because you wish to join a community and you need to speak their language (i.e. you want to become a kernel hacker so you learn C). Communities are unlikely to pick up new languages (too much history), instead they die and people disperse.
But really, programming languages nowadays don't really differentiate themselves by what they do, but instead the tradeoffs they make (is this feature in a library or in the language, do we support operator overloading? how? What is our dependence on the run-time system? Do we have a garbage collector?). So I find it hard to argue that one is quanitatively better then another unless you do a study of expert programmers, performance of resulting system, time that it took, and defect rates. We need real apps, comparing "Hello World" programs is a farce and tells you nothing.
Something like they did in "The Practice of Programming" but with a larger study of people and more controlled.
I'm sorry. I got the impression when Stern said: "As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to free speech were taken away. It had nothing to do with indecency" on March 19, 2004. That he was against the war. I don't listen to Stern. I used to, but I've moved around a bit and haven't gotten into the habit of listening to morning radio again.
I have hard time imagining Stern being "pro-war" but "anti-bush" since that seems to be the major election issue but I will concede that is possible. I might have been mistaken, but I wasn't lying. So please don't fling that word around so freely.
Stern is right though, he didn't get canned from the six Clear Channel stations because a caller used the word "nigger" before Stern hung up on him. It is almost certainly because he is "anti-bush", and I'm happy he is fighting back in a productive way. But, I'll reiterate nothing about what went down was illegal, or something I feel the government should get involved with. I disagree with Stern that his right to free speech was taken away. However, I do think something is definetly wrong with our current media conglomerate system we have in America. But, that isn't currently under discussion.
would like welcome our inappropiate programming masters.
Others may mock it's usefulness, and let's face it, this is not useful. But, I salute you for doing a project that has no practical use to anyone besides proving beyond a doubt to some nay-saying jerk that it can be done.
OT but Howard Stern gets dropped from Clear Channel because he is critical of Bush's War on Iraq. Clear Channel happens to like Bush. So they drop Stern from all stations that carry him, which was six.
This is not a first amendment issue. The bill of rights protects you from the government, not your asshat employeer. And office politics is a major issue that you have to juggle in a career.
In short, this isn't government censorship. Clear Channel didn't like what Stern was saying so he gets dropped. I don't think there is anything wrong with this scenario at least as far as the government is involved.
But as far as this High-Quality broadcast user rip stuff. I'm pretty sure it is legal as long as you don't redistribute. Of course, the RIAA wants restrictions, but I don't think they will get them. I really hate to see crippled technologies to unsuccessfully prevent illegal use. I wish they would just concentrate on enforcement. If that means suing 13 year-olds so be it. People bitch when they get busted, but everybody bitches when they get caught, just watch COPS some time.
To unsuccessfully prevent potential flames, forget about the information wants to be free stuff. We have copyright. Yes, copyright is broken right now and needs to be fixed. But that doesn't give you the right to copy the newest Linkin Park track from your friend. Even if you hate the RIAA and know the artists don't get much of the money. It is still illegal and you are being a bad citizen.
You are stating a tautology. I know of no one that believes you can test quality into code. Money has nothing to do with it.
Testing measures the quality of a product. Better testing means you know you have better quality. It doesn't mean the code is of better quality. Untested code might be better than tested code. But you don't know that the untested code is better. You'd have to test it first in order to find out.
I'm personally in favor of automated testing and all that it implies. Good design is important, but it isn't the most important aspect making a usable system. Having the best design in the world isn't worth squat if it doesn't work. Testing allows you to show that your system works as anticipated, and therefore is more important than design.
I believe humans are capable of cleaning up the mess and make the code systems they live in hosipitable. That is the essence of good design. But being able to predict that design from the outset is only possible when you have experience building a similar system. Unfortunately, writing new code to solved problems seems kind of a waste of time.
That said, security is a requirement, (an unanticipated requirement usually). Changing code to meet new requirements is a pain in the ass. Doing so without testing is murder.
In sum, in order to improve security, it needs to be seen as a requirement first. And, it needs to be tested second. Using tools and libraries that don't lend themselves understood exploits would help also.
We are still in the cowboy era of the Internet. That is, systems don't fully utilize their ability to connect to other computers to their full potential. Fetching patches, etc. But that will change, so this is only temporary... but I won't deny it is painful. But understand, finding exploits helps people improve their tests. So finding exploits leads to knowing that we have better software in the end. And I'll save my lamenting about programmers that consider themselves professionals without writing tests for another time.
I'm not a pacifist. But history teaches us another lesson, whenever a weapon is developed it will be used, no matter how horrible the consequences.
Maxwell invented the machinegun to stop wars nearly 100 years ago. He wanted to make a weapon so devasting that people would never wage war again, due to sheer human cost. Wars are obviously still being fought.
Look, I'm for security, and there are times when you need to fight back. But, by the very nature of the weapons, you are giving power to a few over the lives of hundreds, thousands, possibly millions. There is always a fear of the weapons falling into the wrong hands, but I ask whose are the right hands for that kind of power? Can we really trust anyone with that kind of weapon? Hell, I wouldn't even trust myself.
While, I admit a part of me wants to fawn over the new technology, and another part of me loves big explosions. This is real-life. People are going to die from that thing. Possibly evil men, men who have commited egregious acts of sin. But also innocent people, who love their life. And the potential for killing innocents goes up as the weapons get more devastating, because in the end, there are still humans picking the targets.
I personally think we have over-developed our military potential for the political state of the world. We need to destroy weapons, notably nuclear weapons, that we have instead of developing new ones.
I love America, I'd fight, kill and give my life freely for America, but it isn't worth destroying the whole human race over.
The whole endeavour of developing better ways of killing people is on the same moral ground as beheading people. It sickens me.
And no, I didn't RTFA.
-IrresponsibleUseOfFrogs
Slashdot Mirror
I think your criticism of the review is a little harsh. Sometimes it is valuable to reflect on what things have changed and what things haven't in particular fields. It gives you insight to pick out fads and what remains to be the kernel of the problem.
I will say that, on a personal level, I don't much care for Fred Brooks. From actually hearing him talk, he came across to me as one of those managers that doesn't give due credit to the work of his subordinates. I think that idealogy is reflected in many of the things he says in Mythical-Man Month.
Mythical-Man Month is a decent enough book at pointing out problems with developing software. But, I don't think it gives you any greater insight than just being on one project that fails, or ran overtime/over-budget (and according to statistics alomst all programmers will experience that, and often). In that sense, I think a book like Death March is much more valuable to prepare future professionals for what they will face in the real-world.
As for solutions that Brooks gave. Most of them didn't turn out be such great ideas, i.e. surgical team. He totally punts on how you develop programmer skill half-scoffing at the 10x productivity number.
All in all, I don't think Mythical Man Month is a must read. Death March + Code Complete will give most programmers a much better start. And Peopleware is a much better book for managers. Mythical-Man Month is James Fenimore Cooper of American Literature.
I still fail to see how P2P is key. Yes, the network might be harder to take down, but reliability isn't the most important aspect to most systems, usefulness is. In my experience, having a disorganized network becomes more susceptable to abuse. I mean compare Gnutella vs. BitTorrent, I'd argue that BitTorrent generally works better. And that is because there is a little bit of structure built into the system via the tracker.
I also don't like his nature argument. Nature creates hierarchies too. Your brain tells the rest of your body what to do. Queen bees vs. drones vs. workers. I mean, there are physical differences there, and it can't be pinned on purely social phenomenom.
I also have a hard time seeing any benefit from having your toaster route packets for you. I can see many houses having wireless routers in the future, just not integrated into every device in the house. It just seems like there will always be some specialized device that will do a 100x better job. People that really care will buy that. Other people will have blinking 12:00 syndrome.
As a side note to p2p applictions, the one idea that really hasn't come to fruition is p2p content creation. I mean, p2p is very useful for communication (IM, IP Telephony, forums, etc.) and distribution (BitTorrent). Wiki's and Open Source are sort of p2p content creation. But, I was thinking more along the lines of tradition art. Like an app that let's you play music together over the net to make a song. Or paint a picture, or make a movie. Obviously, the market for such programs is smaller than the consume content variety. But, I'd really like the net to really start enabling the production of new art in ways that weren't possible before. Beyond the obvious of enabling collaboration and hand-offs, but actually affecting the production of digital art. Although, I make no guarantees about if it will work well in practice.
The fact that Microsoft is breaking backwards compatibility is the exact reason that Joel says they lost the API war.
Developers, more than anything else want a stable platform to develop for. Microsoft's top priority in the past was to provide a stable platform (stable in the sense that all old-code worked on the new platform). Developers are users too. I would be really pissed off if I upgraded some app and it wasn't able to work with my old data. Why is there a different expectation when I code for an API? Why should I have to rewrite my code because the vendor discovered some better way of doing it? I probably went to a lot of trouble to get that code working in the first place. Make sure it performs well, possibly works around a couple bugs that took me hours or days to figure out, and now the vendor comes along and breaks it and I have to learn some new way of doing it and deal with new, yet undiscovered bugs. fsck that. If it was an app, I would ditch it. If it was a platform and had a choice, I'd ditch that too.
What platform are people turning to? Joel's answer is the web because HTML/browser represents a very stable platform. I won't reiterate his arguments here. But, I do feel that he has a point. He is a smart guy, and I could see it come to pass. That doesn't necessarily mean it will. Smart people have been wrong before :)
With Joel's world view, how Linux will make inroads on the corporate desktop is simply by having a good web-browser and being free. Features on the client will become irrelevant.
All I can say is prediction is hard, especially when you are trying to predict the future.
I really hate arguments that refer to "most people." Did you conduct a scientific survey? Take a poll? Hell, ask your friends? What gives you the authority to talk about the opinion of most people on any particular topic? Reviewers consider price/performance and comparable items on the market. The best they can do is give their opinion and justify their view with facts.
But what I hate to see is just blantant negativity towards certain products because it isn't the best value. Mac users are probably the most vilified on this account.
Markets work on optomism. Negativity poisons markets, and on large scales cause recessions and depressions. There is no good reason for this because it is solely a social phenomenon. For the most part, I believe things are good and getting better on every front.
My self-esteem has nothing to do with it. I hate seeing people participate in this bullying. Because, it does (however indirectly) affect my quality of life and produces nothing but dissatisfaction all around.
I don't know. I mean, a penny-a-song is pretty cheap. But, something about me wants to pay once and be able to play a song as much as I want.
If I kinda of only liked the song and wanted to hear it only once in a while. I'd probably wait for them to play it on the radio. If I really liked a song, I'd pay a buck so I could listen to it when ever I wanted and be done with it.
The only time I see this as useful is if you are playing a song that you don't like that much, but somebody else would. For example, hosting a party or you have a date at your house and you figure Wierd Al isn't going to set the mood you want.
I just don't see those situations of use setting up a sustainable business model for the costs they are going to endure. Of course, if it becomes _the_ method for DJ'ing. You might get the volume you need, but I still doubt it.
Of course, this is just my opinion and I could be wrong (and frequently am).
I will never understand the "wow, that computer is cool, but soo expensive" mentalality. I paid about $3000 for a laptop about 5 years-ago. I was happy with that machine. This one is more powerful, has a better battery life, and is cheaper in terms of actual dollars than the laptop. Should I pissed off that I bought my laptop now?
If you want the vaio, and have the expendable income, buy it. Who cares if you can get a better desktop for a tenth of the cost. The most powerful computer in the world isn't worth the money if you aren't happy with it and don't use it.
Anything that you buy is worth the money if you are satisfied with it. I really hate to see the put-down mentality of some people that take otherwise happy customers and make them feel stupid or cheated for their purchase. Absolutely, no good comes from that. You discourage people from buying products they would enjoy. You hurt companies that produce something cool, which causes them to raise prices on their not-so-cool items. In the end, for what? Your ego? Get a grip.
I agree, you haven't. But that is contingent on figuring out who on the bittorrent has rights to distribute the content. And download it only from that those people, and don't share out any of the pieces that you download. Then everything that you have done isn't illegal. Given the nature of bittorrent, I don't think that is feasible.
Remember, just because someone legally gave you a free copy of copyrighted work does not give you the right to redistribute it. All they have to do is show that they downloaded a piece of their work from you. I highly doubt that claims of fair-use since it was only a small chunk of the file will stand. That fair-use only applies when you are incorporating pieces into your own work, not broadcasting somebody else's work verbatim.
People that use bittorrent to violate copyrights are going to nailed. It is just a matter of time. The nature of program just bleeds information about who is doing what on the network. The largest problem the enforcers have is jurisdiction, and hooking IP addresses to real-life people, not evidence of the crime. MPAA is a lobby with lots of money and whose rights are being violated, so I don't think that the current hurdles to enforcement are going stand, at least in the US.
How are they "breaking the law?" They own the copyright on the work. So, presumably they are the only ones not breaking the law when they participate in the bittorrent network.
It isn't wire-tapping. They are not government employees. They didn't need any special privledges to the internet or hack bittorrent to figure this out. It is more like just finding a list of phone numbers for crack houses. Calling them up and ordering crack, and having the crack house send it to you, reciept and all.
They are private citizens that discover and have proof that their constitutionally guaranteed right to control distrubiution of their copyrighted work is being actively violated.
Hell, what can be simplier for the MPAA/RIAA? They can get the file once. Demonstrate they have a copyright on it. The tracker tells them everyone that is sharing the file. All they need is to hand it over to law enforcement agencies. The case itself open-and-shut.
Look, copyright is messed up in America. Copyright should only last for about 30 years. But, even so, you can't justify downloading the newest Harry Potter flick. Even under a more reasonable copyright system, that would still be illegal.
Legal worries aside, it is wrong. Content creators that express that they don't want you distributing something they created are legally guaranteed to do so for a limited time. People should respect that. Even if the MPAA/RIAA is a bunch of money grubbing asshats, it doesn't make it right.
Don't try to play with the legal technicalities. Rest assured, the law will eventually catch up to illegal distributors.
But, I appluad Real and Starz will be trying to do something that sounds like it might be really cool. Although, only time will tell if they can overcome the problems they will face (from technical to social). But, I think it is pretty sweet that they are trying.
I do think a useful way of thinking about programs is to think of them in terms of products from communities. Those communities hold values which they embody in the code.
Physicists, System Programmers, Application Programmers, Business Programmers, System Administrators each write code, and each have their own set of values about what makes code good. Of course, I'm biased. When I was talking about staying with a particular language/community I was thinking more in terms of 10,000-1,000,000 LOC projects and where programming is your profession.
Scripting definitely lends itself to sampling a variety of different languages, because scripting languages do offer a wide range of trade-offs between host integration and portability. But the scripting language itself was produced by a bunch of programmers with their own idea of what makes code good and which the language they produced embodies.
When you work on something large, you actually become part of the community. With small projects you are really just trying it out.
Of course, you are free to consider such observations as trite or meaningless. But I have fun trying to figure out why certain people dislike a particular idea, and I find placing a person in a communtity/group then reasoning about the group's values to be a useful way to approach the problem.
As an example: why do Unix programmers hate Win32 so much? I'd argue that it is because Unix programmers value having a small orthogonal API. The Win32 API is definitely not small or orthogonal. Why don't Win32 programmers mind so much? Win32 programmers value features to sell their app. So they expect a rich API to accomplish that. Orthogonality is something they'd gladly give up to get features into their app more quickly.
Just my $.02.
Yeah, seriously, I wish the "what is the best programming language contests" would come to an end. A programming language is just a tool, and in the big scheme of things, it isn't even the most important tool for the task you are trying to accomplish.
Things that are likely to have a bigger impact are your ability to aquire quality libraries, documentation for them, and your ability to get help if you hit a roadblock.
Saying that you choose a programming language is a misnomer, because you don't choose a programming language much like you don't choose a religion. You usually just stick with the ones that you are taught. You might change programming languages, but you usually do so because you wish to join a community and you need to speak their language (i.e. you want to become a kernel hacker so you learn C). Communities are unlikely to pick up new languages (too much history), instead they die and people disperse.
But really, programming languages nowadays don't really differentiate themselves by what they do, but instead the tradeoffs they make (is this feature in a library or in the language, do we support operator overloading? how? What is our dependence on the run-time system? Do we have a garbage collector?). So I find it hard to argue that one is quanitatively better then another unless you do a study of expert programmers, performance of resulting system, time that it took, and defect rates. We need real apps, comparing "Hello World" programs is a farce and tells you nothing.
Something like they did in "The Practice of Programming" but with a larger study of people and more controlled.
I'm sorry. I got the impression when Stern said: "As soon as I came out against Bush, that's when my rights to free speech were taken away. It had nothing to do with indecency" on March 19, 2004. That he was against the war. I don't listen to Stern. I used to, but I've moved around a bit and haven't gotten into the habit of listening to morning radio again.
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/03/far04009.hI have hard time imagining Stern being "pro-war" but "anti-bush" since that seems to be the major election issue but I will concede that is possible. I might have been mistaken, but I wasn't lying. So please don't fling that word around so freely.
Stern is right though, he didn't get canned from the six Clear Channel stations because a caller used the word "nigger" before Stern hung up on him. It is almost certainly because he is "anti-bush", and I'm happy he is fighting back in a productive way. But, I'll reiterate nothing about what went down was illegal, or something I feel the government should get involved with. I disagree with Stern that his right to free speech was taken away. However, I do think something is definetly wrong with our current media conglomerate system we have in America. But, that isn't currently under discussion.
would like welcome our inappropiate programming masters.
Others may mock it's usefulness, and let's face it, this is not useful. But, I salute you for doing a project that has no practical use to anyone besides proving beyond a doubt to some nay-saying jerk that it can be done.
OT but Howard Stern gets dropped from Clear Channel because he is critical of Bush's War on Iraq. Clear Channel happens to like Bush. So they drop Stern from all stations that carry him, which was six.
This is not a first amendment issue. The bill of rights protects you from the government, not your asshat employeer. And office politics is a major issue that you have to juggle in a career.
In short, this isn't government censorship. Clear Channel didn't like what Stern was saying so he gets dropped. I don't think there is anything wrong with this scenario at least as far as the government is involved.
But as far as this High-Quality broadcast user rip stuff. I'm pretty sure it is legal as long as you don't redistribute. Of course, the RIAA wants restrictions, but I don't think they will get them. I really hate to see crippled technologies to unsuccessfully prevent illegal use. I wish they would just concentrate on enforcement. If that means suing 13 year-olds so be it. People bitch when they get busted, but everybody bitches when they get caught, just watch COPS some time.
To unsuccessfully prevent potential flames, forget about the information wants to be free stuff. We have copyright. Yes, copyright is broken right now and needs to be fixed. But that doesn't give you the right to copy the newest Linkin Park track from your friend. Even if you hate the RIAA and know the artists don't get much of the money. It is still illegal and you are being a bad citizen.
Fin
You are stating a tautology. I know of no one that believes you can test quality into code. Money has nothing to do with it.
Testing measures the quality of a product. Better testing means you know you have better quality. It doesn't mean the code is of better quality. Untested code might be better than tested code. But you don't know that the untested code is better. You'd have to test it first in order to find out.
I'm personally in favor of automated testing and all that it implies. Good design is important, but it isn't the most important aspect making a usable system. Having the best design in the world isn't worth squat if it doesn't work. Testing allows you to show that your system works as anticipated, and therefore is more important than design.
I believe humans are capable of cleaning up the mess and make the code systems they live in hosipitable. That is the essence of good design. But being able to predict that design from the outset is only possible when you have experience building a similar system. Unfortunately, writing new code to solved problems seems kind of a waste of time.
That said, security is a requirement, (an unanticipated requirement usually). Changing code to meet new requirements is a pain in the ass. Doing so without testing is murder.
In sum, in order to improve security, it needs to be seen as a requirement first. And, it needs to be tested second. Using tools and libraries that don't lend themselves understood exploits would help also.
We are still in the cowboy era of the Internet. That is, systems don't fully utilize their ability to connect to other computers to their full potential. Fetching patches, etc. But that will change, so this is only temporary... but I won't deny it is painful. But understand, finding exploits helps people improve their tests. So finding exploits leads to knowing that we have better software in the end. And I'll save my lamenting about programmers that consider themselves professionals without writing tests for another time.
I'm not a pacifist. But history teaches us another lesson, whenever a weapon is developed it will be used, no matter how horrible the consequences. Maxwell invented the machinegun to stop wars nearly 100 years ago. He wanted to make a weapon so devasting that people would never wage war again, due to sheer human cost. Wars are obviously still being fought. Look, I'm for security, and there are times when you need to fight back. But, by the very nature of the weapons, you are giving power to a few over the lives of hundreds, thousands, possibly millions. There is always a fear of the weapons falling into the wrong hands, but I ask whose are the right hands for that kind of power? Can we really trust anyone with that kind of weapon? Hell, I wouldn't even trust myself. While, I admit a part of me wants to fawn over the new technology, and another part of me loves big explosions. This is real-life. People are going to die from that thing. Possibly evil men, men who have commited egregious acts of sin. But also innocent people, who love their life. And the potential for killing innocents goes up as the weapons get more devastating, because in the end, there are still humans picking the targets. I personally think we have over-developed our military potential for the political state of the world. We need to destroy weapons, notably nuclear weapons, that we have instead of developing new ones. I love America, I'd fight, kill and give my life freely for America, but it isn't worth destroying the whole human race over. The whole endeavour of developing better ways of killing people is on the same moral ground as beheading people. It sickens me. And no, I didn't RTFA. -IrresponsibleUseOfFrogs