EJBs, when deployed in a J2EE-compliant EJB container provide a lot of services that would be difficult or time consuming to write yourself. Plus, there's 1000 books about the standard. You get transactions handled automatically, across any number of data sources, you get Object-Relational Mapping and all that that brings. You get connection pooling. You get a lot of stuff that you wouldn't want to write yourself. Plus, it's all remote, so you can have business logic stored in one place, with clients accessing it remotely, and always being in sync. This way you can write multiple client types (web, swing, pda) that all use the exact same business logic.
Yes, it can make simple things difficult, but it mostly makes difficult things simple. If you are creating a large system, you do NOT want to be hacking ASP, PERL, PHP or some other roll-your-own architecture, especially if you have a lot of engineers, not all of whom are senior programming Gods who can behave themselves in such wild-west environments (i.e. most serious projects).
Because it works. It is a logical and physical way to break up your code. Why else would it be in use for almost the entire existence of programming? Also, you say "Almost nothing else is still done that way". HTML is done in flat files. You just break it up according to however you want. XML files are just "flat text files" when you get down to it. The few things that aren't "flat text files", are binary proprietary formats to the detriment of everyone. MS-Word isn't a flat text file, and as such, it's very difficult to read.
And furthermore, what does putting code in XML give you that you can't do now? Why do you need different fonts? Fonts are for layout and presentation, not for communicating instructions to the computer. Most editors support syntax highlighting, which is all you need.
each environment was based on a user-name. All environemnts with a particular username were assumed the same. For example, we had 3 live servers, 1 dev and 1 stage (total of 5 boxes). On the 3 live servers, the UNIX user was named 'live'. 'stage' and 'dev' on the stage an dev boxes.
Then, each config file in the SCCS was named configfile.logname, so you end up with:
somefile.conf.live
somefile.conf.stage
somefile.conf.dev
somefile.conf.joeprogrammer
somefile.conf.bobarchitect
and so forth.
The build script would then either symlink or copy the file for the user running it to the right place:
When symlinking and using CVS, updates to/build/conf get reflected in/etc/conf/myapp
Occasionally, we would need something more complicated than just config files, and so there were scripts that could abstract out the global configuration parameters from the environment specific ones and then glue them together:
That said, on any project you must have a release engineer, even if not full time, one person on the project should be assigned the duty of handling the build and release procedures. This includes updating all conf files, and disemenating changes to the group. No tool can replace good team communication. I view systems like what I described as something the release engineer deals with and as a tool for him/her to increase efficiency. The developers should just be able to type 'make' (or equiv) and have it all work out.
Pros: Simple, based on standard UNIX stuff, little or no secret sauce.
Cons: Tougher to get it to work in cross-platform environment, doesn't handle potentially complicated configuration files, requires a person full or part time to administer and maintain.
Record it using your all-in-wonder, and then burn the eps onto a DVD. If you have a Mac and a superdirve, iDVD is supposed to be great. There are probably similar alternatives on Linux or Windoze.
Good music will be heard. See Fugazi
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"I now understand how hard it is for any non-corporate sanctioned music to become widely heard."
If something is truely "good", or at least something that would be popular to sufficient people to sustain the band, it will be heard. Look at Fugazi. They are a D.C. area neo-punk band that does not have merchandise, is not on a major label, and does not make videos. The receive little to no radio airplay outside college stations, and are completely self-sustaining. They continue to charge only $5 admission to their shows and their CDs (I believe) are $10 post-paid from their record label (which they own and operate).
If you want to do it, and you are talented enough, you do not need major labels or commercial radio.
The biggest reasons for faster drivers (other than running a file server) would be digital audio and offline graphics rendering. They should show benchmarks on that. There's utilities that tell you, for example, how many audio tracks you can read/write at one time. Comparison to SCSI would be nice, too, since IDE should be a cheap alternative to SCSI for desktop audio users (because SCSI shines with multiple reads, which you don't really need when you want one app to have max. bandwidth to the disk)
I can't imagine that John Q. Photoshop user cares about disk speed; cpu speed is probably more the issue for that.
"There is no way any objective person could think this unit is superior."
The iPod currently does not:
- allow you to play all songs of a given genre (without having made a playlist holding them in iTunes first)
- create a playlist on the fly from just the iPod
(All playlists must be made in iTunes ahead of time, unless you play an album or all tunes of an artist.)
The nomad jukebox does both (and every discman and home CD player in the world lets you do #2). Until this is fixed I couldn't really use the iPod. I frequently don't know what I want to listen to until I'm about to listen, except that I rarely, if ever, want to listen to songs by artist or album. Usually, I queue up a bunch of songs I feel like listenting to, or a bunch in a certain genre and put it on repeat. This is a key feature of any jukebox. Hopefully they will fix this in newer firmware.
I loved Brisco County, Jr. and Jack of All Trades, and I was wondering if you had like a billion dollars to make a TV show, and there was no one else holding the purse strings, would you bring one of those two back, or make a new one (and if so, what would be it be?), or would you forget TV and make a movie, or even just lay in your bed of cash with several beautiful women?
Just because you can explain why it loads quickly doesn't mean it isn't a benefit to users. I never use Star Office because it takes too damn long to load up and it's slow as hell, on a PIII800/512!! Hopefully 6.0 fixes that, but I have my doubts.
To get the upgrade, you have to fill out a form by hand and mail it in with Proof of Purchase. Then you get to wait 6-12 weeks for them to send it to you. Plus, they give no indications as to where you can get instant upgrades, nor does CompUSA's site have any info on it. Seems pretty unacceptable to me.
All creations are automatically copyright. Stating as such affects nothing. Registerting with the copyright office (in the US anyway) only affects your ability to defend the copyright. So, your post and my post are all copyright by us as the authors.
Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Software has to:
Meet user requirements
Which doesn't necessarily mean it has nice and pretty code. If you have time, you are doing yourself a favor by designing it, but you can't lose track of the purpose of what you are doing, which is to get something working.
Most techniques for designing or building software (e.g. patterns, processes) all serve to help you avoid bugs, which is to say more efficiently build software that meets user requirements.
What, is it not OK for hackers to get any exercise these days?
Maybe it was the .mid file format, then
on
DeMuDi Linux
·
· Score: 1
Maybe it was the.mid file format that seemed complicated.... It was a while ago that I even looked at this stuff, so I might be getting it confused.... Of course, the two are likely the same thing, so maybe I'm just backpeddling:)
Again, Linux's issue is software
on
DeMuDi Linux
·
· Score: 2
To be a legitimate digital audio/midi sequencer box for either home enthusiast or actual studio, Linux needs some really good sequencing software. Something like cakewalk or cubase. The last MIDI sequencer I used was really behind (not that I blame them).
Is anyone working on this? I've considered it, but the MIDI spec is pretty daunting looking to me....
Samba FS is only supported on Linux. The only way to really access smb shares from any other OS is to use the ftp-like smbclient. That is lame and I don't think counts as a legitimate samba client.
I guess getting smbfs to work on other unixs and mac os is pretty hard, because it's been this way for a while.
The whole reason Linux has been successful as a server is that it emulated/implemented the standards of the day, namely UNIX.
Now, what needs to happen is for it to emulate/support/implement the standards for desktop applications, which, as much as we hate to admit it, are mostly owned by Microsoft.
Suggesting to someone that they create yet more "standards" for browser plug-ins or document file formats makes no sense.
I can't really use Linux at work, because it doesn't support very many desktop application standards. I can't open many office documents (and Star Office cannot be relied upon to open all documents, plus it's incredibly slow on a PIII800/512M!!!), nor can I read HTML email consistently, nor can I easily and consistently deal with attachments.
ActiveX isn't a big deal, because not many sites use it, but our intranet application, for example, does make good use of it, and my ability to use our intranet is limited on Linux.
The alternatives Linux provides are implementations of standards, not in alternatives to the standards themselves.
It costs plenty of money, but my company is using eRoom and it works beautifully. YOu can link documents (word documents etc. ARE searchable) with discussions, polls, mini-DBs, etc. It's a great groupware/collaboration tool that is not as difficult to use as notes, but has an interface that anyone can deal with (web-based).
Since Lisp doesn't have strong typing, and you don't have to formally declare/define any data structures, it's very simple and quick to code up a complex algorithm and data structure that you typically need in AI, which makes heavy use of custom algorithms and data structures.
PERL could be viewed similarly, but LISP has historical precedence.
I tried to code an AI algorithm in C++ for one semester, and I wasted a lot of time coding and debugging basic data structures. Of course, I was doing that because the lisp version of the code was so unreadable and incomprehensible (due to lack of typing and data structures and documentation) that I needed something I understood to work with.
Real can't solve any real problems. The theoretical stuff is all good, but it's not practical. You can't solve a planning problem in milliseconds while keeping the framerate up and having realistic looking characters. When people laud (sp?) the AI in games, it's not so much that an advance in AI theory has occured, but that someone was able to code AI in such a way that it's useful in a real-world application.
Slashdot Mirror
EJBs, when deployed in a J2EE-compliant EJB container provide a lot of services that would be difficult or time consuming to write yourself. Plus, there's 1000 books about the standard. You get transactions handled automatically, across any number of data sources, you get Object-Relational Mapping and all that that brings. You get connection pooling. You get a lot of stuff that you wouldn't want to write yourself. Plus, it's all remote, so you can have business logic stored in one place, with clients accessing it remotely, and always being in sync. This way you can write multiple client types (web, swing, pda) that all use the exact same business logic.
Yes, it can make simple things difficult, but it mostly makes difficult things simple. If you are creating a large system, you do NOT want to be hacking ASP, PERL, PHP or some other roll-your-own architecture, especially if you have a lot of engineers, not all of whom are senior programming Gods who can behave themselves in such wild-west environments (i.e. most serious projects).
Because it works. It is a logical and physical way to break up your code. Why else would it be in use for almost the entire existence of programming? Also, you say "Almost nothing else is still done that way". HTML is done in flat files. You just break it up according to however you want. XML files are just "flat text files" when you get down to it. The few things that aren't "flat text files", are binary proprietary formats to the detriment of everyone. MS-Word isn't a flat text file, and as such, it's very difficult to read.
And furthermore, what does putting code in XML give you that you can't do now? Why do you need different fonts? Fonts are for layout and presentation, not for communicating instructions to the computer. Most editors support syntax highlighting, which is all you need.
There is a noted increase in revenue when an ad campaign is put out. Despite what you _think_ you are paying attention to, ads DO have an affect.
I used to work on the Toyota website, and when they ran an ad campaign, site traffic would increase dramatically. They also reported increased sales.
Plus, think about it logically, if ads didn't generate revenue or alter spending habits, they wouldn't be cost effective and wouldn't exist.
each environment was based on a user-name. All environemnts with a particular username were assumed the same. For example, we had 3 live servers, 1 dev and 1 stage (total of 5 boxes). On the 3 live servers, the UNIX user was named 'live'. 'stage' and 'dev' on the stage an dev boxes.
Then, each config file in the SCCS was named configfile.logname, so you end up with: somefile.conf.live
somefile.conf.stage
somefile.conf.dev
somefile.conf.joeprogrammer
somefile.conf.bobarchitect
and so forth.
The build script would then either symlink or copy the file for the user running it to the right place:
cd /etc/conf/myapp ; ln -s /build/conf/somefile.conf.$LOGNAME somefile.conf
When symlinking and using CVS, updates to /build/conf get reflected in /etc/conf/myapp
Occasionally, we would need something more complicated than just config files, and so there were scripts that could abstract out the global configuration parameters from the environment specific ones and then glue them together:
In the simplest case the script does:
cat /build/conf/global_opts.conf /build/conf/environment_opts.conf.$LOGNAME > /etc/conf/myapp/config.conf
That said, on any project you must have a release engineer, even if not full time, one person on the project should be assigned the duty of handling the build and release procedures. This includes updating all conf files, and disemenating changes to the group. No tool can replace good team communication. I view systems like what I described as something the release engineer deals with and as a tool for him/her to increase efficiency. The developers should just be able to type 'make' (or equiv) and have it all work out.
Pros: Simple, based on standard UNIX stuff, little or no secret sauce.
Cons: Tougher to get it to work in cross-platform environment, doesn't handle potentially complicated configuration files, requires a person full or part time to administer and maintain.
RDS was THE coolest game ever. The only thing that came close was Mail Order Monsters....
Record it using your all-in-wonder, and then burn the eps onto a DVD. If you have a Mac and a superdirve, iDVD is supposed to be great. There are probably similar alternatives on Linux or Windoze.
If something is truely "good", or at least something that would be popular to sufficient people to sustain the band, it will be heard. Look at Fugazi. They are a D.C. area neo-punk band that does not have merchandise, is not on a major label, and does not make videos. The receive little to no radio airplay outside college stations, and are completely self-sustaining. They continue to charge only $5 admission to their shows and their CDs (I believe) are $10 post-paid from their record label (which they own and operate).
If you want to do it, and you are talented enough, you do not need major labels or commercial radio.
The biggest reasons for faster drivers (other than running a file server) would be digital audio and offline graphics rendering. They should show benchmarks on that. There's utilities that tell you, for example, how many audio tracks you can read/write at one time. Comparison to SCSI would be nice, too, since IDE should be a cheap alternative to SCSI for desktop audio users (because SCSI shines with multiple reads, which you don't really need when you want one app to have max. bandwidth to the disk)
I can't imagine that John Q. Photoshop user cares about disk speed; cpu speed is probably more the issue for that.
"There is no way any objective person could think this unit is superior."
The iPod currently does not:
- allow you to play all songs of a given genre (without having made a playlist holding them in iTunes first)
- create a playlist on the fly from just the iPod
(All playlists must be made in iTunes ahead of time, unless you play an album or all tunes of an artist.)
The nomad jukebox does both (and every discman and home CD player in the world lets you do #2). Until this is fixed I couldn't really use the iPod. I frequently don't know what I want to listen to until I'm about to listen, except that I rarely, if ever, want to listen to songs by artist or album. Usually, I queue up a bunch of songs I feel like listenting to, or a bunch in a certain genre and put it on repeat. This is a key feature of any jukebox. Hopefully they will fix this in newer firmware.
I loved Brisco County, Jr. and Jack of All Trades, and I was wondering if you had like a billion dollars to make a TV show, and there was no one else holding the purse strings, would you bring one of those two back, or make a new one (and if so, what would be it be?), or would you forget TV and make a movie, or even just lay in your bed of cash with several beautiful women?
Just because you can explain why it loads quickly doesn't mean it isn't a benefit to users. I never use Star Office because it takes too damn long to load up and it's slow as hell, on a PIII800/512!! Hopefully 6.0 fixes that, but I have my doubts.
To get the upgrade, you have to fill out a form by hand and mail it in with Proof of Purchase. Then you get to wait 6-12 weeks for them to send it to you. Plus, they give no indications as to where you can get instant upgrades, nor does CompUSA's site have any info on it. Seems pretty unacceptable to me.
All creations are automatically copyright. Stating as such affects nothing. Registerting with the copyright office (in the US anyway) only affects your ability to defend the copyright. So, your post and my post are all copyright by us as the authors.
- Meet user requirements
Which doesn't necessarily mean it has nice and pretty code. If you have time, you are doing yourself a favor by designing it, but you can't lose track of the purpose of what you are doing, which is to get something working.Most techniques for designing or building software (e.g. patterns, processes) all serve to help you avoid bugs, which is to say more efficiently build software that meets user requirements.
What, is it not OK for hackers to get any exercise these days?
Maybe it was the .mid file format that seemed complicated.... It was a while ago that I even looked at this stuff, so I might be getting it confused.... Of course, the two are likely the same thing, so maybe I'm just backpeddling :)
Is anyone working on this? I've considered it, but the MIDI spec is pretty daunting looking to me....
I guess getting smbfs to work on other unixs and mac os is pretty hard, because it's been this way for a while.
Now, what needs to happen is for it to emulate/support/implement the standards for desktop applications, which, as much as we hate to admit it, are mostly owned by Microsoft. Suggesting to someone that they create yet more "standards" for browser plug-ins or document file formats makes no sense.
I can't really use Linux at work, because it doesn't support very many desktop application standards. I can't open many office documents (and Star Office cannot be relied upon to open all documents, plus it's incredibly slow on a PIII800/512M!!!), nor can I read HTML email consistently, nor can I easily and consistently deal with attachments.
ActiveX isn't a big deal, because not many sites use it, but our intranet application, for example, does make good use of it, and my ability to use our intranet is limited on Linux.
The alternatives Linux provides are implementations of standards, not in alternatives to the standards themselves.
It costs plenty of money, but my company is using eRoom and it works beautifully. YOu can link documents (word documents etc. ARE searchable) with discussions, polls, mini-DBs, etc. It's a great groupware/collaboration tool that is not as difficult to use as notes, but has an interface that anyone can deal with (web-based).
Since Lisp doesn't have strong typing, and you don't have to formally declare/define any data structures, it's very simple and quick to code up a complex algorithm and data structure that you typically need in AI, which makes heavy use of custom algorithms and data structures.
PERL could be viewed similarly, but LISP has historical precedence.
I tried to code an AI algorithm in C++ for one semester, and I wasted a lot of time coding and debugging basic data structures. Of course, I was doing that because the lisp version of the code was so unreadable and incomprehensible (due to lack of typing and data structures and documentation) that I needed something I understood to work with.
A disruption in communications can mean only one thing....invasion.
Real can't solve any real problems. The theoretical stuff is all good, but it's not practical. You can't solve a planning problem in milliseconds while keeping the framerate up and having realistic looking characters. When people laud (sp?) the AI in games, it's not so much that an advance in AI theory has occured, but that someone was able to code AI in such a way that it's useful in a real-world application.
Looks like my machine, and the "goodness" of the image depends on the rendering engine a lot more than the video card....
Well, they did, and I apologize for my comments. I did just what I was accusing slashdot of. I am an idiot. What a waste of an 8th post......