This is great for nostalgia and instant gratification.
How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating?
Don't know. Don't care.
Also, what kind of equipment will have to be used to produce these so fast?
Uh, a couple cables running from the stereo outs on the mixing board to the line in on a decent PC? Then, after the concert, perhaps a few CD-R drives? The biggest issue would seem to be any editing to get it below 80 minutes, but half-decent audio engineer can trim that stuff down quickly, or they could just do 1 hr shows, or just sell the end, or whatever.
Will the recording process suffer due to the hurry?
Duh? Popular musicians typically sound much better with multiple takes and processing. Some artists are good enough that it's not a big factor, and then of course anything that's improvised (*not* Britney Spears) is different each time.. Possibly better in many people's opinion.
The real killer for an individual live recording for me is sheer nostalgia. I've been to performances that I simply loved. I'd love to take them with me for the rest of my life to listen to and remember back. I've got recordings of a couple of these, but most of them are now lost.
Of course, for most pop artists that are aiming to do the same set every time (aside from "Hello New York/Chicago/Milwaulkee/Seattle/LA!"), just buying the "Live" CD released 6 months afterwards is accurate enough, but still doesn't offer the immediate gratification of buying it as you walk out the door.
Plus, a good performance, as opposed to great, often fades in goodness over time, as your 12 year old mind shifts from Britney to Justin. Selling it immediately will likely milk the cash cow more efficiently. Even better, a lot of those little 12 year old suburbanites can afford to buy the single, the album, the poster, the trapper keeper, the lunchbox, and multiple live recordings.
"Life is too short to write crap nobody will read. If you write crap, nobody will read it."
As I read through the comments here, it's apparent that virtually none of the posters clicked on the link much less read the document, and a good 90% of them didn't even read past the posting title.
Anyway, the article touches on good points, but it's very clear where the author has personal experience with something and where he doesn't. Some of those times he starts to sound like the books he recommends (all excellent recommendations). Other times (e.g. 4.1. How To Stay Motivated), he simply states something that would be good, but doesn't describe how it should be done.
He recommends "Succinctness is Power" by Paul Graham. Given the document's spottiness, he probably should've gone alnog those lines instead. Written down a little ditty about why you should read the material, and then his list of books and articles to read on how to be a programmer.
If half of the programmers I've known had read his recommended list, I'd have a hell of a lot more trouble staying far enough ahead to have time to review articles and post on slashdot.
Our QA people have developed their own framework for running tests in C#. It automatically discovers test cases via Reflection API, allows to group them into suites, run suites, generate reports, debug. It took 2 people 1.5 months to write it (while also dogfooding it to themselves and writing actual tests). No big fanfare, no buzzwords.
"Refactoring" - holy fuck, where do you get suck words?
I get a lot of those words by actively thinking about what I'm doing, and making sure I keep current by actively researching the subject.
Such actions could've saved your business 1.5 months and at least $10,000 (assuming the QA people are American). You might've wanted to go to google and type ".net unit testing framework". That would lead you to NUnit... which happens to be "a framework for running tests in C# (or any other.NET language). It automatically discovers test cases via Reflection API, allows to group them into suites, run suites, generate reports, debug." Plus, it's free, written, debugged, and supported by people your organization doesn't have to pay.
It's interesting that you used the term "dogfooding", which I'd say is even less intuitive than "refactoring". I take it you relied on someone else to teach that term to you? You are aware that it's a word that Microsoft announces with much fanfare that they do?
Software firewalls are great for managing misbehaving software installations like Realplayer. I've never had a better security tool.
There's a rapid-response high-security button on most computers with a little symbol that looks like a capital Q rotated 135 degrees counter-clockwise. You'd be surpised how much more effective it is for managing your misbehaving software installations. Sometimes the mangufacturer is even nice enough to label it "power", as in, it gives you the power of the computer.
Unfortunately, the evil empire figured that button had too much power over their misbehaving software a few years ago, so a standard called "ATX" was introduced that gave their misbehaving software some control over it. They haven't beaten us yet though. It's still possible to make a hardware mod with just a little soldering that restores the power to you, the user.
Your proposal sounds totally excessive, not to mention the fact that most of it would be enacted by sysadmins in the first place.
Even with it in place, there's nothing from stopping anyone, not just a disgruntled sysadmin, from executing the same plan by planting a bomb or somesuch on the premises before they go. I've never worked anywhere where you couldn't easily plant a few cubic feet of junk without anyone noticing for a few months.
If your own employees want to screw you, you're screwed. The only ways to prevent it would cost so much to enact that your business wouldn't be competitive in the marketplace anymore. Not to mention everyone would probably quit after getting strip-searched every morning and second-guessed everytime they tried to do something.
My voice sounds the same at 384kbps as it does on the current CDMA network.
Wake me up when they come out with a phone that can hold and play 3 hours of 320x240 MPEG-4 video, receive AM & FM radio, take passable 640x480 pictures, play Java and Gameboy games, record and playback a few hours of MP3s, has distinctive ringers, does SMS and email, and of course, has at least a couple hours of talk time.
Until then, I wish they'd just concentrate on upgrading the cellular infrastructure, so I can freaking make and receive a phone call during rush hour in Chicago. 3G is just going to strain the frequency bandwidth and infrastructure worse.
I'm not saying that source code shouldn't be included, but I'm not buying his argument. The entire thing seems to hinge on the following claim and false solution from the first article:
This secrecy is the key reason we have such lousy software. Software designers, programmers, and managers get away with bad code because no one outside their small workgroup ever sees it. [...] The solution is to release all software with a copy of its source code. This is currently the practice with nearly every other engineering discipline, because their designs are open for visual inspection and physical testing.
I disagree with every one of those claims.
You can view the design and algorithm of any program on my computer as much as I can view the design and mechanisms in a car, the hardware itself, or his favorite, a bridge. In none of those cases do you necessarily get to view the original designs, style, part names, or comments made while developing the product. Sure, you can look at the final product and pick it apart to see how it works, but that holds just as true for software as well.
I'm much more able to take apart and evaluate a software product's binaries than I am a suspension bridge, if for no other reason than I can clone, tear apart, and test software in a fully controlled environment more easily. I'd bet I can even evaluate software with a similar ratio of my evaluation time to original design time as a bridge engineer would evaluate a bridge.
He goes on to say purchasers can't view things like the comments, variable names, style, design, and algorithms of the source code. He asserts that he can determine the quality of a design based in part on these. Again, I totally disagree.
Things that are compiled out have no direct effect on the quality of the end-product. I've seen numerous high quality programs, meaning they do what they're supposed to, with awful commenting, horrible naming, and almost unforgivable formatting. Of course, I'd scold programmers for all of these things, but to the end-user, they matter as much as what the average mental stability of the company's developers. I don't see anyone suggesting that Microsoft should disclose all their employee's psychological profiles (nor should they!)
Companies and their developers won't necessarily produce better programs if they have to release their source. The developers I've known that produce truly sloppy and buggy code aren't embarassed, nor are their managers. They're working on things just hard enough for them to work some of the time. I've routinely seen people's code publicly critized, and they continue producing crap.
As to the company themselves, I absolutely don't believe companies would be embarassed into improving their systems if the source was available. Not to pick on Microsoft, but everyone knows their situation so I'll use them as an example. Most people who would consider purchasing non-Microsoft software know that Outlook and Internet Explorer have dozens of unpatched security holes. These are known design and source code flaws, so they're at least as embarassing as other flaws that may be exposed by releasing their source. However, they go for months without releasing fixes for them, and they continue to ship CDs with unpatched copies on them often for years afterwards.
There is a pretty new and little known, lite web server in town
The author is obviously not that into technology. Software released in 1995 isn't new at all by my standards. I certainly wouldn't consider most other things from 1999 new either. A car? certainly not. A building? maybe. A country? Well, OK.
I just wanted to say thank you to Lucky Green. He's doing a great public service. Even if he's not successful, I'm still thankful he tried. I'm not looking forward to a future where I have to chip my own computer just to develop, much less run, non-Microsoft software, and Palladium makes that possible.
Note that this isn't a slam on Microsoft. I'd probably do similar things if I held a monopoly on most desktop software. On second thought, I'd probably just sell said monopoly and retire happy:)
You could just run your 100base connector out to the hub and then to a wireless access point. May cost more than wireless PCI cards, but why subject yourself to the speed penalty for computers that aren't moved around.
I might of neglected to mention that the 100Base-T is running ~75ft along floorboards:). The aesthetic improvement would be significant.
Besides, 802.11b is plenty fast for practically everything outside of backups and moving CD images.. For those purposes a firewire disk you can move between computers slaughters any currently accessible networking.
I know the parent was a joke, but yeah, that 486 has run Linux since '95. It doesn't run X.. it's always been a server, and actually had an MGA card for the first half of its life until I got tired of keeping an MGA monitor around.
It's fine for doing NAT, Samba shares, a web server, as well as C, Perl, Python, and old C++ programming. It has been supporting all of those things just fine for 7 years. It's only required 2 hours of administration a year for the past 5 years.
Wanna see scalability? Develop a service or web-site to run fast enough for you personally on 7 year-old midrange hardware. Unless memory or disk latency was your bottleneck, you can stand pretty confident that a $2,000 modern server can handle 10x the load. Even if latency was the issue, modern hardware normally has far more memory and disk cache, so for small working sets you still may be OK.
All that said, it's too low-end for Java, modern C++, and kernel development work, all of which I usually use far more modern hardware for (I've got more than a 486.. please). Modern C++ and kernels simply require more for compilation. For Java, I use a huge IDE that uses tons of memory and CPU power to make me more efficient (e.g. auto-background-compilation, auto-completion, and docs on hover).
Sadly, it's replacement probably won't even be a separate box, nor will it likely run Linux. I'll probably just move all the services onto a Windows XP desktop with more than enough CPU and disk to spare. The consolidation will save power and space.
The facts of the matter are that my wife develops using Microsoft technologies, requires access to Win IE, and we both play Windows only games (and NO, it's certainly not worth my time to try to get each one working on a Windows emulation hack). On top of all that, the NT kernel is stable enough, secure enough with all incoming ports off, and fast enough on modern hardware. Plus, Cygwin runs fast enough on modern machines, so I can do most things I can get all my UNIX-style utilities if I want.
My only issue is that XP doesn't like to do NAT (aka share it's internet connection) for more than one network at a time (802.11b and 100Base-T). I've fought with it before without satisfaction, so I'll probably just replace all the 100Base-T with wireless.
Just curious. What macro system were you using to play the flash game? It seems like it'd take a good deal of effort, well probably more than an hour, to automate any reasonably complex application.
Nobody'll read the instructions that tell them there are privacy enhancements in place. The few who do read the instructions still won't understand how the enhancements work anyway. Even if they do kind of grasp it, they still won't be convinced their privacy is safe.
There's no incentive to answer correctly. Good old-fashioned generosity and truthfulness are more than cancelled out by spam.
I don't lie to deceive. I just answer as quickly as possible. I don't care if people know who I am. It's just easier to enter a@a.com and pick the first choice in each multiple choice group.
Yet the number of defects reported is so large that I wonder how much testing is too much?... I wonder if the testing procedure itself may be part of the problem.
The goal of testing is to find bugs. If you're finding lots of bugs, then the testing is being done at least passably.
If the number of legitimate bugs is so large that you think your testing procedure is broken, the actual problem is that your development procedure is broken.
The only case that your testing procedure is broken is if you want to ship bugs. There are cases where this is desirable, but it's really hard to get management to admit it in clear language.
I'd seriously reconsider your development process first. At a bare minimum, read at least 3 of the following books:
Rapid Development by Steve McConnell
Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
Peopleware by DeMarco & Lister
Code Complete by Steve McConnell
An eXtreme Programming book wouldn't hurt either, but the XP recommendation is little more than "follow all the recommended practices religiously".
The first thing you should learn from those books are that bugs cost an order of magnitude more to fix as they past through each stage in development. Further, bug fixes often introduce more bugs. This can easily leads to a project killing feedback cycle.
After those notions are beat into your head, they'll clue you in to moe really useful truths. Here are a few examples:
The more people read the code, the more errors they'll catch -- meaning stepping through your own code in a debugger, code reviews, or pair programming.. this isn't telling you to open source your project.
Design things to be testable -- I've thrown out numerous designs just because they'd be hard to test.. Places where you think you need multithreaded or reentrant code are especially good things to reconsider. This can be extended to design things to past tests as in XP.
Programming requires concentration -- I learned long ago that any code I write past 8 hours in a day might as well be burnt later.
Programming is done in a chaotic world -- Virtually nobody has decent requirements up front, programmers get demotivated with distant goals, and people make design errors... all of this leads to emphasis on iterative development of some sort.
If anybody in the Chicago area is in an organization that understands all of this, please let me know: gruschow_resume at yahoo.com
The DMCA includes an exception for encryption research (section 1201(g)).
Re:It's a big step up, but there is still distance
on
Java2 SDK v. 1.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You should probably hold up for a while. The Selector still has a few serious bugs, some of which they've acknowledged for >10 months now without fixing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm using the NIO libraries anyway because my company's system needs them, but I was running into a new bug a week for a while. I was hoping they'd have fixed at least the major ones by the time it became official. The workarounds for some of them are just awful.
We do Java here.. The project I'm currently working on has ~1000 classes and is being developed by 4-6 developers (some get pulled off to do other things from time to time).
We're using Visual Cafe exclusively for development. Unlike the previous poster, I've got my setup pretty stable, and the IDE has crashed only once in the past month. I've got my machine setup with Win2k (which hasn't crashed yet btw).. It was a little less stable under NT4 (crashed once a week).
On a side note, I've got CygWin (piles of GNU utils + a unix compatibility library for windows), Perl, Python, and a Vi clone installed. I use them all regularly. My development environment would suck a lot without all of them installed.. I'd die without grep, perl, find, etc. In fact, I've got a couple of perl scripts that I use to do transformations on Java sources.
The benefits of the IDE for me are clear:
Classes tree view - Shows a hierarchy of the classes in the project and their methods if you expand the class at the lowest level (VERY useful when you've got SO MANY classes).. makes it very easy for me to make a couple of clicks and get to whatever class I wanted to mess with.
Auto-Completion - I love this. It offers me with possible options as I type things and I can just hit tab and it completes it.. it does things like function definitions, class definitions, etc.. So if I type File.s and hit tab, I get File.separator. It's EXTREMELY helpful when you can't remember exactly what the function you wanted was called, you're plain lazy, or the function name is like 40 characters long. (I think microsoft labelled this IntelliSense when they added it to VB originally.).
Integrated Revision Control - If I don't have something checked out and I try to modify it, it'll either won't let me if someone else has it out, or will check it out for me.. very useful. Check-in and Add-to integration are nice to have integrated too, but I'd get by without them.
Go to definition - Jumps to the definition of a class, variable, or function
Integrated Debugger
Integrated Help - I can hit F1 on any JDK class or function and it pulls up a WinHelp conversion of the JDK docs for it.. which is usually good enough for me.
Easily Customizable Syntax Highlighting - It's kinda nice.. i don't actually find it that necessary though.
Java programmable plug-ins - It'd be nice if they'd freaking update the plug-in kit though. It's the same one they've had for like 2.5 years or something stupid, and it's clearly old.
I know I could do many of the above things in emacs, and a few in vim.. I do all of my non-java editing in vim, and I miss some of the ridiculous power features of it when I use Cafe, but it's good enough. The only thing that really pisses me off about Cafe's editor is that it's regular expression syntax doesn't resemble grep/perl/vi/etc..
I wish that the paperclip didn't have to be installed. I wasn't able to even access the help for a while after I first installed (I told it not to install the !#%!*%! answer wizard / agent / bastard / whatever they're calling it now). It kept coming up with some stupid error when I asked for help though.
One time it spit up the error though, it told me I had to install the paperclip bastard to get help on VBA for Access or something like that.. so I let it install it, and now I can read help.
I've found that ever since '95, Microsoft products work better if you just install them with all options as often as possible (we originally reinstalled Win95 monthly to keep it reasonably fast and stable).
Let me know when these things go into commercial production! With that amount of processing power, I could run MS Office 2000 in realtime!.
The dang thing eats > 99% of my PIII CPU doing paperclip animations and futzing with those summarized/unsummarized menus. I'm running NT because my development environment crashes so often that running a ms-dos-based environment (Win98) just wouldn't cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating? Don't know. Don't care.
Also, what kind of equipment will have to be used to produce these so fast?
Uh, a couple cables running from the stereo outs on the mixing board to the line in on a decent PC? Then, after the concert, perhaps a few CD-R drives? The biggest issue would seem to be any editing to get it below 80 minutes, but half-decent audio engineer can trim that stuff down quickly, or they could just do 1 hr shows, or just sell the end, or whatever.
Will the recording process suffer due to the hurry?
Duh? Popular musicians typically sound much better with multiple takes and processing. Some artists are good enough that it's not a big factor, and then of course anything that's improvised (*not* Britney Spears) is different each time.. Possibly better in many people's opinion.
The real killer for an individual live recording for me is sheer nostalgia. I've been to performances that I simply loved. I'd love to take them with me for the rest of my life to listen to and remember back. I've got recordings of a couple of these, but most of them are now lost.
Of course, for most pop artists that are aiming to do the same set every time (aside from "Hello New York/Chicago/Milwaulkee/Seattle/LA!"), just buying the "Live" CD released 6 months afterwards is accurate enough, but still doesn't offer the immediate gratification of buying it as you walk out the door.
Plus, a good performance, as opposed to great, often fades in goodness over time, as your 12 year old mind shifts from Britney to Justin. Selling it immediately will likely milk the cash cow more efficiently. Even better, a lot of those little 12 year old suburbanites can afford to buy the single, the album, the poster, the trapper keeper, the lunchbox, and multiple live recordings.
I like this quote from the document:
"Life is too short to write crap nobody will read. If you write crap, nobody will read it."
As I read through the comments here, it's apparent that virtually none of the posters clicked on the link much less read the document, and a good 90% of them didn't even read past the posting title.
Anyway, the article touches on good points, but it's very clear where the author has personal experience with something and where he doesn't. Some of those times he starts to sound like the books he recommends (all excellent recommendations). Other times (e.g. 4.1. How To Stay Motivated), he simply states something that would be good, but doesn't describe how it should be done.
He recommends "Succinctness is Power" by Paul Graham. Given the document's spottiness, he probably should've gone alnog those lines instead. Written down a little ditty about why you should read the material, and then his list of books and articles to read on how to be a programmer.
If half of the programmers I've known had read his recommended list, I'd have a hell of a lot more trouble staying far enough ahead to have time to review articles and post on slashdot.
"Refactoring" - holy fuck, where do you get suck words?
I get a lot of those words by actively thinking about what I'm doing, and making sure I keep current by actively researching the subject.
Such actions could've saved your business 1.5 months and at least $10,000 (assuming the QA people are American). You might've wanted to go to google and type ".net unit testing framework". That would lead you to NUnit... which happens to be "a framework for running tests in C# (or any other .NET language). It automatically discovers test cases via Reflection API, allows to group them into suites, run suites, generate reports, debug." Plus, it's free, written, debugged, and supported by people your organization doesn't have to pay.
It's interesting that you used the term "dogfooding", which I'd say is even less intuitive than "refactoring". I take it you relied on someone else to teach that term to you? You are aware that it's a word that Microsoft announces with much fanfare that they do?
Software firewalls are great for managing misbehaving software installations like Realplayer. I've never had a better security tool.
There's a rapid-response high-security button on most computers with a little symbol that looks like a capital Q rotated 135 degrees counter-clockwise. You'd be surpised how much more effective it is for managing your misbehaving software installations. Sometimes the mangufacturer is even nice enough to label it "power", as in, it gives you the power of the computer.
Unfortunately, the evil empire figured that button had too much power over their misbehaving software a few years ago, so a standard called "ATX" was introduced that gave their misbehaving software some control over it. They haven't beaten us yet though. It's still possible to make a hardware mod with just a little soldering that restores the power to you, the user.
I tried to post it. I really did. The slashdot filters just wouldn't let me. Seems like 37 characters per line should be plenty. Whatever.
Your proposal sounds totally excessive, not to mention the fact that most of it would be enacted by sysadmins in the first place.
Even with it in place, there's nothing from stopping anyone, not just a disgruntled sysadmin, from executing the same plan by planting a bomb or somesuch on the premises before they go. I've never worked anywhere where you couldn't easily plant a few cubic feet of junk without anyone noticing for a few months.
If your own employees want to screw you, you're screwed. The only ways to prevent it would cost so much to enact that your business wouldn't be competitive in the marketplace anymore. Not to mention everyone would probably quit after getting strip-searched every morning and second-guessed everytime they tried to do something.
Uh yeah. The Phantom Menace was a major flop (where major flop is defined as the #3 highest grossing film so far.
Seriously. Who here didn't see it?
Now, I know you think it sucked, but I bet you went and saw Episode 2 as well, eh?
I was too young to see Mad Max 1-3 in theaters. I'll go and see this one so long as it's rated >40% on rottentomatoes.
Wake me up when they come out with a phone that can hold and play 3 hours of 320x240 MPEG-4 video, receive AM & FM radio, take passable 640x480 pictures, play Java and Gameboy games, record and playback a few hours of MP3s, has distinctive ringers, does SMS and email, and of course, has at least a couple hours of talk time.
Until then, I wish they'd just concentrate on upgrading the cellular infrastructure, so I can freaking make and receive a phone call during rush hour in Chicago. 3G is just going to strain the frequency bandwidth and infrastructure worse.
This secrecy is the key reason we have such lousy software. Software designers, programmers, and managers get away with bad code because no one outside their small workgroup ever sees it. [...] The solution is to release all software with a copy of its source code. This is currently the practice with nearly every other engineering discipline, because their designs are open for visual inspection and physical testing.
I disagree with every one of those claims.
You can view the design and algorithm of any program on my computer as much as I can view the design and mechanisms in a car, the hardware itself, or his favorite, a bridge. In none of those cases do you necessarily get to view the original designs, style, part names, or comments made while developing the product. Sure, you can look at the final product and pick it apart to see how it works, but that holds just as true for software as well.
I'm much more able to take apart and evaluate a software product's binaries than I am a suspension bridge, if for no other reason than I can clone, tear apart, and test software in a fully controlled environment more easily. I'd bet I can even evaluate software with a similar ratio of my evaluation time to original design time as a bridge engineer would evaluate a bridge.
He goes on to say purchasers can't view things like the comments, variable names, style, design, and algorithms of the source code. He asserts that he can determine the quality of a design based in part on these. Again, I totally disagree.
Things that are compiled out have no direct effect on the quality of the end-product. I've seen numerous high quality programs, meaning they do what they're supposed to, with awful commenting, horrible naming, and almost unforgivable formatting. Of course, I'd scold programmers for all of these things, but to the end-user, they matter as much as what the average mental stability of the company's developers. I don't see anyone suggesting that Microsoft should disclose all their employee's psychological profiles (nor should they!)
Companies and their developers won't necessarily produce better programs if they have to release their source. The developers I've known that produce truly sloppy and buggy code aren't embarassed, nor are their managers. They're working on things just hard enough for them to work some of the time. I've routinely seen people's code publicly critized, and they continue producing crap.
As to the company themselves, I absolutely don't believe companies would be embarassed into improving their systems if the source was available. Not to pick on Microsoft, but everyone knows their situation so I'll use them as an example. Most people who would consider purchasing non-Microsoft software know that Outlook and Internet Explorer have dozens of unpatched security holes. These are known design and source code flaws, so they're at least as embarassing as other flaws that may be exposed by releasing their source. However, they go for months without releasing fixes for them, and they continue to ship CDs with unpatched copies on them often for years afterwards.
So, you're enjoying living with your parents?
The author is obviously not that into technology. Software released in 1995 isn't new at all by my standards. I certainly wouldn't consider most other things from 1999 new either. A car? certainly not. A building? maybe. A country? Well, OK.
I can easily get my P4 to dissipate less than 5W of heat, during normal usage..
Note that this isn't a slam on Microsoft. I'd probably do similar things if I held a monopoly on most desktop software. On second thought, I'd probably just sell said monopoly and retire happy :)
I might of neglected to mention that the 100Base-T is running ~75ft along floorboards :). The aesthetic improvement would be significant.
Besides, 802.11b is plenty fast for practically everything outside of backups and moving CD images.. For those purposes a firewire disk you can move between computers slaughters any currently accessible networking.
It's fine for doing NAT, Samba shares, a web server, as well as C, Perl, Python, and old C++ programming. It has been supporting all of those things just fine for 7 years. It's only required 2 hours of administration a year for the past 5 years.
Wanna see scalability? Develop a service or web-site to run fast enough for you personally on 7 year-old midrange hardware. Unless memory or disk latency was your bottleneck, you can stand pretty confident that a $2,000 modern server can handle 10x the load. Even if latency was the issue, modern hardware normally has far more memory and disk cache, so for small working sets you still may be OK.
All that said, it's too low-end for Java, modern C++, and kernel development work, all of which I usually use far more modern hardware for (I've got more than a 486.. please). Modern C++ and kernels simply require more for compilation. For Java, I use a huge IDE that uses tons of memory and CPU power to make me more efficient (e.g. auto-background-compilation, auto-completion, and docs on hover).
Sadly, it's replacement probably won't even be a separate box, nor will it likely run Linux. I'll probably just move all the services onto a Windows XP desktop with more than enough CPU and disk to spare. The consolidation will save power and space.
The facts of the matter are that my wife develops using Microsoft technologies, requires access to Win IE, and we both play Windows only games (and NO, it's certainly not worth my time to try to get each one working on a Windows emulation hack). On top of all that, the NT kernel is stable enough, secure enough with all incoming ports off, and fast enough on modern hardware. Plus, Cygwin runs fast enough on modern machines, so I can do most things I can get all my UNIX-style utilities if I want.
My only issue is that XP doesn't like to do NAT (aka share it's internet connection) for more than one network at a time (802.11b and 100Base-T). I've fought with it before without satisfaction, so I'll probably just replace all the 100Base-T with wireless.
Just curious. What macro system were you using to play the flash game? It seems like it'd take a good deal of effort, well probably more than an hour, to automate any reasonably complex application.
Gotta be the largest front-page posting I've ever seen.
I doubt it. The DVD-Rips have been out for months, although IIRC Harry Potter was a 2CD release.
There's no incentive to answer correctly. Good old-fashioned generosity and truthfulness are more than cancelled out by spam.
I don't lie to deceive. I just answer as quickly as possible. I don't care if people know who I am. It's just easier to enter a@a.com and pick the first choice in each multiple choice group.
The goal of testing is to find bugs. If you're finding lots of bugs, then the testing is being done at least passably.
If the number of legitimate bugs is so large that you think your testing procedure is broken, the actual problem is that your development procedure is broken.
The only case that your testing procedure is broken is if you want to ship bugs. There are cases where this is desirable, but it's really hard to get management to admit it in clear language.
I'd seriously reconsider your development process first. At a bare minimum, read at least 3 of the following books:
- Rapid Development by Steve McConnell
- Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
- Peopleware by DeMarco & Lister
- Code Complete by Steve McConnell
An eXtreme Programming book wouldn't hurt either, but the XP recommendation is little more than "follow all the recommended practices religiously".The first thing you should learn from those books are that bugs cost an order of magnitude more to fix as they past through each stage in development. Further, bug fixes often introduce more bugs. This can easily leads to a project killing feedback cycle.
After those notions are beat into your head, they'll clue you in to moe really useful truths. Here are a few examples:
- The more people read the code, the more errors they'll catch -- meaning stepping through your own code in a debugger, code reviews, or pair programming.. this isn't telling you to open source your project.
- Design things to be testable -- I've thrown out numerous designs just because they'd be hard to test.. Places where you think you need multithreaded or reentrant code are especially good things to reconsider. This can be extended to design things to past tests as in XP.
- Programming requires concentration -- I learned long ago that any code I write past 8 hours in a day might as well be burnt later.
- Programming is done in a chaotic world -- Virtually nobody has decent requirements up front, programmers get demotivated with distant goals, and people make design errors... all of this leads to emphasis on iterative development of some sort.
If anybody in the Chicago area is in an organization that understands all of this, please let me know: gruschow_resume at yahoo.comThe DMCA includes an exception for encryption research (section 1201(g)).
Don't get me wrong, I'm using the NIO libraries anyway because my company's system needs them, but I was running into a new bug a week for a while. I was hoping they'd have fixed at least the major ones by the time it became official. The workarounds for some of them are just awful.
My major sore points:
We're using Visual Cafe exclusively for development. Unlike the previous poster, I've got my setup pretty stable, and the IDE has crashed only once in the past month. I've got my machine setup with Win2k (which hasn't crashed yet btw).. It was a little less stable under NT4 (crashed once a week).
On a side note, I've got CygWin (piles of GNU utils + a unix compatibility library for windows), Perl, Python, and a Vi clone installed. I use them all regularly. My development environment would suck a lot without all of them installed.. I'd die without grep, perl, find, etc. In fact, I've got a couple of perl scripts that I use to do transformations on Java sources.
The benefits of the IDE for me are clear:
- Classes tree view - Shows a hierarchy of the classes in the project and their methods if you expand the class at the lowest level (VERY useful when you've got SO MANY classes).. makes it very easy for me to make a couple of clicks and get to whatever class I wanted to mess with.
- Auto-Completion - I love this. It offers me with possible options as I type things and I can just hit tab and it completes it.. it does things like function definitions, class definitions, etc.. So if I type File.s and hit tab, I get File.separator. It's EXTREMELY helpful when you can't remember exactly what the function you wanted was called, you're plain lazy, or the function name is like 40 characters long. (I think microsoft labelled this IntelliSense when they added it to VB originally.).
- Integrated Revision Control - If I don't have something checked out and I try to modify it, it'll either won't let me if someone else has it out, or will check it out for me.. very useful. Check-in and Add-to integration are nice to have integrated too, but I'd get by without them.
- Go to definition - Jumps to the definition of a class, variable, or function
- Integrated Debugger
- Integrated Help - I can hit F1 on any JDK class or function and it pulls up a WinHelp conversion of the JDK docs for it.. which is usually good enough for me.
- Easily Customizable Syntax Highlighting - It's kinda nice.. i don't actually find it that necessary though.
- Java programmable plug-ins - It'd be nice if they'd freaking update the plug-in kit though. It's the same one they've had for like 2.5 years or something stupid, and it's clearly old.
I know I could do many of the above things in emacs, and a few in vim.. I do all of my non-java editing in vim, and I miss some of the ridiculous power features of it when I use Cafe, but it's good enough. The only thing that really pisses me off about Cafe's editor is that it's regular expression syntax doesn't resemble grep/perl/vi/etc..One time it spit up the error though, it told me I had to install the paperclip bastard to get help on VBA for Access or something like that.. so I let it install it, and now I can read help.
I've found that ever since '95, Microsoft products work better if you just install them with all options as often as possible (we originally reinstalled Win95 monthly to keep it reasonably fast and stable).
The dang thing eats > 99% of my PIII CPU doing paperclip animations and futzing with those summarized/unsummarized menus. I'm running NT because my development environment crashes so often that running a ms-dos-based environment (Win98) just wouldn't cut it.