Lots of people know that Wikipedia hasn't had the server power to keep up, but a pay-for-service model isn't the answer. A free web-based encyclopedia is what makes wikipedia so great.
Nobody in the FOSS community is advocating software communism, e.g. all software is free and nobody gets paid, that's senseless. The nature of the industry is driven by development - the cutting-edge software of today, as buggy as it may be, gets reincarnated tomorrow as bullet-proof, well-designed open source software.
Now, before I start getting flamed for the last sentence, let me explain with an example. I hated vi when I first was exposed, thinking, "why on EARTH would anyone use this crap?" Then I saw someone use it to do something in 10 seconds that would've taken me 10 minutes in Visual Studio or Notepad. Then I was hooked, and now I have vi hot-keyed in Visual Studio.
This is how the open-source software movement works - little-by-little, people start realizing that better tools exist. In the case of vi, it's probably not something that the general public will appreciate, but in the case of, say, Linux, there's another thing that happens, where someone says, "I like it, but it needs some work before I can install it on Grandma's computer." What this means for the industry isn't about undercutting your co-worker, it's about competition and capitalism. Do you want the easy, expensive solution or the tricky, free solution?
As software and hardware become more complex, we will see the open source software become (even more so) the trusted foundation upon which all the commercial software is built. For instance, consider Linux + Apache + MySQL - how much of the Web is run by this combo? Just because Jim Bob Luser doesn't want to use FOSS doesn't mean that FOSS is a wart on the software industry.
Both the original author and the annotator are missing the point, because they both, like the religious zealots that they are, have lost the ability to concede a point to the other side.
The original author is unable to concede that a GUI can actually be more beneficial than a CLI in enough cases to justify its existence, and the annotator is unable to concede the converse - that the CLI is still a very powerful tool.
The problem with this article, and the computing world in general, is that it has polarized itself into two camps:
The James Hetfield "Command-line BAD!" camp, who will only appreciate DWIM computer features.
The super-geeks, who, with their French accents and their four-dollar lattés, sneer at the technologically challenged and take pride in using the most obscure tools to complete their tasks.
Until the most polarized people in both camps can get themselves to realize that both sides are wrong, we will never have the computing renaissance that we all dream of.
Parent speaks truth, however,
the "big studio" music that you hear on the radio is far, far different (higher in quality) than the bands' live performances (if they perform live at all, and don't lip synch). That being said, most of the work happens in the studio, and not on stage. The bands that sound good on stage as well as in the studio are the ones that have enough sway to bend the record labels their way. However, by the time that has happened, these bands have already been brainwashed by the record labels to believe that file sharing is the devil.
No wonder there are so many buffer overrun problems in MS software. "(c) Microsoft" should be 14 bytes (with the null terminator).
Re:Bring back procedural languages
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OOP is a wonderful thing because it enforces tons of those wonderful principles that are taught in Computer Science classes 'round the globe: encapsulation, abstraction, data hiding, "black-box" programming, etc. OOP is NOT supposed to be the end-all, be-all of programming, just as the creation of C and other higher-level programming languages was not to be the death of assembly programming.
What, so often, people fail to realize is that software is designed to be built in layers. See the TCP/IP stack, for instance. This allows for one of those wonderful OOP principles to work - abstraction. If the nature of the OOP system/API/et. al. is causing you more problems than it's solving, then I say it's not OOP's fault, it's the designer's fault. I don't believe that OOP is the solution to all problems - some problems are square, and some programming paradigms are round. Problems arise not because of the evil nature of OOP, but because someone tried to pound a square peg into a round hole. OO languages and systems give you the ability to make things object-oriented, but none that I've seen prevent you from using procedural programming techniques when your square programming problem doesn't fit nicely into a round OO hole.
Generally, I've found that people who hate OOP were forced into using it without getting enough exposure to it to appreciate it. Nobody's gotten rid of procedural programming, just like nobody's gotten rid of assembly programming. We just have higher-level tools and paradigms for dealing with high-level programming tasks.
I've spent too much time at a university to believe that. If that honestly is the truth, then why is it that a Japanese Comp Sci professor can spend 20 years in the US working 40 hours a week with native English speakers and still have such a thick accent that he's impossible to understand? Youth does have a large part to play in learning language.
the "we don't care if you use C++ exceptions as an key element of your architecture, you're f***ing screwed if you use them under JNI" bug? Yeah, I didn't think so.
JNI is a joke. I love dev'ing in pure Java, but it royally sucks when you attempt a multi-language solution.
2.) Mozilla was affected by this same vulnerability, but it's okay because it's Mozilla and not Microsoft.
Although I have no familiarity with Mozilla's architecture, I have a suspicion that it was written using Microsoft's libraries that deal with the GDI. Sorry if I'm wrong, but if Mozilla exhibits a bug that's the fault of the underlying OS (or an extension/API/whatever thereof), would it be Mozilla's problem, or the underlying OS?
Then what will I do to get my morning Clippy Fix[?]
Log in to your system, and open up your OOo app. Now, hit yourself in the head a couple of times with a brick (or clue-by-four, your choice). That should give you the same sensation as using Clippy(tm).
You see, at a good software shop, they would unit test each portion thoroughly before integrating it.
The problem, it seems, is that Microsoft modularizes code only when it suits their purposes, and writes disgusting, monolithic solutions when timeline overpowers good software engineering practices. If anyone has ever attempted to develop using MFC, they know what I'm talking about.
Now, to the complexity/chaos argument:
The article seems to be a developer acting like a marketing person, or a marketing person acting like a developer (or even worse, a marketing person doing development - AAACK!). Doing significant amounts of unit testing, and creating a development framework such that unit testing and production use-case testing can be completed from the same code-base, would solve problems like this where complexity starts becoming an issue.
This open file limit really could have been avoided if the file management portion would have been unit tested properly. A good tester, or test plan writer, would have thought, "what are the limits and border cases when dealing with files?" And would have, consequently, checked for excessive amounts of open files. Voila! Problem solved, and never released into the wild. Or, at least, would have given the person responsible for tracking the bug some sort of document saying, "We tested this portion up to X number of open files." This is an issue, as with most software bugs, with bad design and bad development practices.
...running a service on their product, LARTing those script kiddies that are smart enough to hack into your IP-enabled thermostat. Although, it makes me wish that LARTs were physically painful.
Honestly, though, the easiest way to do it would be to have a central service company deal with all of it, at the cost of a subscription-based service. Otherwise, it would be (essentially) asking Joe User to run his own webserver, which, more often than not, is a Bad Thing. All the people that don't get shivers down their spine when someone says "control your thermostat via your Hotmail(r) account!" can subscribe, and the rest of us can (and would) run our homes' thermostats ourselves with a Linux webserver and some open-source software.
A group of computer enthusiasts have begun a protest at the RIAA headquarters. Many of them have been seen doing "touchdown dances" and making obscene gestures towards the RIAA headquarters building.
Statistics should be taken by Area, not Population
on
Broadband Majority in US
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What aggravates me is that nobody understands the real issue - there are big areas of the US that can't get anything better than dial-up. People don't move to rural areas to get away from the technology, they go there to get away from the cities. Believe me, there are a lot of small-town folks that are pretty p***ed about having to wait till they visit their big-city buddy to get a first post in on/.
Perhaps people should start suing their ISPs for failing to do at least minimal filtering.
There's all these statistics about how much internet traffic is consumed by spam... you'd think that ISPs, for a minimal investment in some decent filtering software, would be able to reclaim that supposed two-thirds of their bandwidth.
I will not instigate revolution... I will not instigate revolution... I will not instigate revolution... I will not instigate revolution... ...
And productivity software will always be on the commercial side of the software industry anyway. Besides, (if you want to refer to the browser wars) if IE had its way, you'd have two disjoint subsets of the World Wide Web - one that is based on Microsoft-dictated standards (Microsoft-only versions of CSS and Java, for instance), and one that isn't. Although Mozilla started out buggy, it's causing a lot of people to switch. It had a rougher start, but it's turned into, essentially, a better product.
Now, if you'd like to compare apples with apples, look at gcc versus MS Visual Studio. It's a faster, better-working compiler, has a better debugger (ever even looked at xgdb? It kicks MS in the 455), and is easily integrated into a widely used standard interface - the UNIX/LINUX shell. As a matter of fact, here is a list of software that's open source, and free. Compare them to their closed-source, proprietary counterparts, and you'll find that the OSS has better documentation, better functionality, and tends to educate users rather than coddle them.
Never use it unless you want a toaster thrown at you. I carry toasters around for this purpose.
Do those toasters have Linux pre-installed before they are thrown? If so, you might be able to pitch this as a service/consulting job. OSS boosting the economy again!
Communism doesn't work because you can't offer need-based provision to those who spend more time and effort educating themselves than other people. If Jim has to spend 8 years in college to become a doctor, but his buddy Bob can go to work flipping burgers right now, and they both get provision "according to their need," why would Jim go to college?
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of people know that Wikipedia hasn't had the server power to keep up, but a pay-for-service model isn't the answer. A free web-based encyclopedia is what makes wikipedia so great.
Nobody in the FOSS community is advocating software communism, e.g. all software is free and nobody gets paid, that's senseless. The nature of the industry is driven by development - the cutting-edge software of today, as buggy as it may be, gets reincarnated tomorrow as bullet-proof, well-designed open source software.
Now, before I start getting flamed for the last sentence, let me explain with an example. I hated vi when I first was exposed, thinking, "why on EARTH would anyone use this crap?" Then I saw someone use it to do something in 10 seconds that would've taken me 10 minutes in Visual Studio or Notepad. Then I was hooked, and now I have vi hot-keyed in Visual Studio.
This is how the open-source software movement works - little-by-little, people start realizing that better tools exist. In the case of vi, it's probably not something that the general public will appreciate, but in the case of, say, Linux, there's another thing that happens, where someone says, "I like it, but it needs some work before I can install it on Grandma's computer." What this means for the industry isn't about undercutting your co-worker, it's about competition and capitalism. Do you want the easy, expensive solution or the tricky, free solution?
As software and hardware become more complex, we will see the open source software become (even more so) the trusted foundation upon which all the commercial software is built. For instance, consider Linux + Apache + MySQL - how much of the Web is run by this combo? Just because Jim Bob Luser doesn't want to use FOSS doesn't mean that FOSS is a wart on the software industry.
The original author is unable to concede that a GUI can actually be more beneficial than a CLI in enough cases to justify its existence, and the annotator is unable to concede the converse - that the CLI is still a very powerful tool.
The problem with this article, and the computing world in general, is that it has polarized itself into two camps:
- The James Hetfield "Command-line BAD!" camp, who will only appreciate DWIM computer features.
- The super-geeks, who, with their French accents and their four-dollar lattés, sneer at the technologically challenged and take pride in using the most obscure tools to complete their tasks.
Until the most polarized people in both camps can get themselves to realize that both sides are wrong, we will never have the computing renaissance that we all dream of.All your codebreak are belong to uk.
Parent speaks truth, however,
the "big studio" music that you hear on the radio is far, far different (higher in quality) than the bands' live performances (if they perform live at all, and don't lip synch). That being said, most of the work happens in the studio, and not on stage. The bands that sound good on stage as well as in the studio are the ones that have enough sway to bend the record labels their way. However, by the time that has happened, these bands have already been brainwashed by the record labels to believe that file sharing is the devil.
bit? Thats like 13 Bytes.
No wonder there are so many buffer overrun problems in MS software. "(c) Microsoft" should be 14 bytes (with the null terminator).
OOP is a wonderful thing because it enforces tons of those wonderful principles that are taught in Computer Science classes 'round the globe: encapsulation, abstraction, data hiding, "black-box" programming, etc. OOP is NOT supposed to be the end-all, be-all of programming, just as the creation of C and other higher-level programming languages was not to be the death of assembly programming.
What, so often, people fail to realize is that software is designed to be built in layers. See the TCP/IP stack, for instance. This allows for one of those wonderful OOP principles to work - abstraction. If the nature of the OOP system/API/et. al. is causing you more problems than it's solving, then I say it's not OOP's fault, it's the designer's fault. I don't believe that OOP is the solution to all problems - some problems are square, and some programming paradigms are round. Problems arise not because of the evil nature of OOP, but because someone tried to pound a square peg into a round hole. OO languages and systems give you the ability to make things object-oriented, but none that I've seen prevent you from using procedural programming techniques when your square programming problem doesn't fit nicely into a round OO hole.
Generally, I've found that people who hate OOP were forced into using it without getting enough exposure to it to appreciate it. Nobody's gotten rid of procedural programming, just like nobody's gotten rid of assembly programming. We just have higher-level tools and paradigms for dealing with high-level programming tasks.
Considering that Apollo 8 made it around the moon in less than a week, and this mission took over a year, we're not dealing with lots of speed here.
I'm interested in seeing some comparisons with project cost, energy consumption, etc.
Parent == false.
I've spent too much time at a university to believe that. If that honestly is the truth, then why is it that a Japanese Comp Sci professor can spend 20 years in the US working 40 hours a week with native English speakers and still have such a thick accent that he's impossible to understand? Youth does have a large part to play in learning language.
the "we don't care if you use C++ exceptions as an key element of your architecture, you're f***ing screwed if you use them under JNI" bug? Yeah, I didn't think so.
JNI is a joke. I love dev'ing in pure Java, but it royally sucks when you attempt a multi-language solution.
2.) Mozilla was affected by this same vulnerability, but it's okay because it's Mozilla and not Microsoft.
Although I have no familiarity with Mozilla's architecture, I have a suspicion that it was written using Microsoft's libraries that deal with the GDI. Sorry if I'm wrong, but if Mozilla exhibits a bug that's the fault of the underlying OS (or an extension/API/whatever thereof), would it be Mozilla's problem, or the underlying OS?
Then what will I do to get my morning Clippy Fix[?]
Log in to your system, and open up your OOo app. Now, hit yourself in the head a couple of times with a brick (or clue-by-four, your choice). That should give you the same sensation as using Clippy(tm).
Yeah!
You see, at a good software shop, they would unit test each portion thoroughly before integrating it.
The problem, it seems, is that Microsoft modularizes code only when it suits their purposes, and writes disgusting, monolithic solutions when timeline overpowers good software engineering practices. If anyone has ever attempted to develop using MFC, they know what I'm talking about.
Now, to the complexity/chaos argument:
The article seems to be a developer acting like a marketing person, or a marketing person acting like a developer (or even worse, a marketing person doing development - AAACK!). Doing significant amounts of unit testing, and creating a development framework such that unit testing and production use-case testing can be completed from the same code-base, would solve problems like this where complexity starts becoming an issue.
This open file limit really could have been avoided if the file management portion would have been unit tested properly. A good tester, or test plan writer, would have thought, "what are the limits and border cases when dealing with files?" And would have, consequently, checked for excessive amounts of open files. Voila! Problem solved, and never released into the wild. Or, at least, would have given the person responsible for tracking the bug some sort of document saying, "We tested this portion up to X number of open files." This is an issue, as with most software bugs, with bad design and bad development practices.
...running a service on their product, LARTing those script kiddies that are smart enough to hack into your IP-enabled thermostat. Although, it makes me wish that LARTs were physically painful. Honestly, though, the easiest way to do it would be to have a central service company deal with all of it, at the cost of a subscription-based service. Otherwise, it would be (essentially) asking Joe User to run his own webserver, which, more often than not, is a Bad Thing. All the people that don't get shivers down their spine when someone says "control your thermostat via your Hotmail(r) account!" can subscribe, and the rest of us can (and would) run our homes' thermostats ourselves with a Linux webserver and some open-source software.
A group of computer enthusiasts have begun a protest at the RIAA headquarters. Many of them have been seen doing "touchdown dances" and making obscene gestures towards the RIAA headquarters building.
Slashdotters can RTFA after the story has been up for half an hour.
That IT person is only trying to dazzle you with technobabble, and doesn't really know what he(she) is talking about.
Sorry everyone!
What aggravates me is that nobody understands the real issue - there are big areas of the US that can't get anything better than dial-up. People don't move to rural areas to get away from the technology, they go there to get away from the cities. Believe me, there are a lot of small-town folks that are pretty p***ed about having to wait till they visit their big-city buddy to get a first post in on /.
BROADBAND FOR PODUNK!
Hear, here!
...
Perhaps people should start suing their ISPs for failing to do at least minimal filtering.
There's all these statistics about how much internet traffic is consumed by spam... you'd think that ISPs, for a minimal investment in some decent filtering software, would be able to reclaim that supposed two-thirds of their bandwidth.
I will not instigate revolution...
I will not instigate revolution...
I will not instigate revolution...
I will not instigate revolution...
And productivity software will always be on the commercial side of the software industry anyway. Besides, (if you want to refer to the browser wars) if IE had its way, you'd have two disjoint subsets of the World Wide Web - one that is based on Microsoft-dictated standards (Microsoft-only versions of CSS and Java, for instance), and one that isn't. Although Mozilla started out buggy, it's causing a lot of people to switch. It had a rougher start, but it's turned into, essentially, a better product.
Now, if you'd like to compare apples with apples, look at gcc versus MS Visual Studio. It's a faster, better-working compiler, has a better debugger (ever even looked at xgdb? It kicks MS in the 455), and is easily integrated into a widely used standard interface - the UNIX/LINUX shell. As a matter of fact, here is a list of software that's open source, and free. Compare them to their closed-source, proprietary counterparts, and you'll find that the OSS has better documentation, better functionality, and tends to educate users rather than coddle them.
Never use it unless you want a toaster thrown at you. I carry toasters around for this purpose.
Do those toasters have Linux pre-installed before they are thrown? If so, you might be able to pitch this as a service/consulting job. OSS boosting the economy again!
Communism doesn't work because you can't offer need-based provision to those who spend more time and effort educating themselves than other people. If Jim has to spend 8 years in college to become a doctor, but his buddy Bob can go to work flipping burgers right now, and they both get provision "according to their need," why would Jim go to college?
That'd be a short-lived open-source effort: