I hope you're not implying that it is useless though.
Having voice as the sole or primary means of input and interaction is obviously a poort coice for power users but having more means of input is usually a good thing. How about being able to send voice commands to apps not in your (typing) focus? Being able to not be required to sit at your computer and walk around via (wireless) mic. You could get exercising in while still doing "work"!
Not to mention my mother who types about 10 wpm. Not everyone is as leet and skilled as you and the bubble of people you know.
Re:Things I don't need
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
You know OSX has a decent chance in small companies looking to dump x86 windows and go to *ix. It is unproven so it'll probably take another year or so before people feel comfortable switching to it. It supports samba and nfs and all your unix goodies that many IT people are familiar with. Basically it can play nice with your other systems. Idiot proof *ix? We'll have to see. I haven't seen the versions since DP3 but it was always heading towards what I thought groups like KDE and Gnome should have been doing (if they wanted world domination/average joe desktop)
And (with a few notable exceptions) Apple hardware is a joy and dream to work with. Most cases in particular make the standard PC look like a complete and total joke. The sliding panels on the PCs may be a huge convenience but it just can't compare to a system built by robotic assembly. This means easy access to almost anything, stuff that folds out, pops in, etc.
The exceptions would happen to be (from my experience) the PowerMac 9500 and the hodgepodge of eclectic connectors that Apple used to make. Well, I suppose that new USB/Power/Video connector qualifies as well. Slick as hell though.
I have to mention BeOS as a system that offered both a GUI and CLUI but was sadly overmatched. Apple is obviously in a different postion and one that has a much greater chance of success.
As far as x86 ports I don't think that's really even a decent possibility. Jobs could prove how crazy he really is but it's incredibly unlikely for all the dozen reason people mention.
Anyways, here's a me too for support of OSX. I use FreeBSD at home as a server. I'd love to see something as stable but with an excellent user enviroment.
Exactly. It would be like BeOS all over again with resources stretched to the limit to try to get hardware supported. Even with the various BSD and *IX source drivers available this incredible growth in support base is daunting.
Also, vendors would *not* be a reliable source for support drivers. Heck, there are mainstream stuff that took months to get fully supported in win2k. What would happen with an OS that has a miniscule share compared to MS's OSs.
Couple all that with having to maintain different codebases (again look at BeOS and perhaps NT) and you can see headaches big enough to stop anyone in their tracks.
Pure speculation on my part but if Apple were to relase it for x86 (and go against their core philosophies) it would the sign of a desparate company trying one last time to get back into the market. I don't think Apple is in that position and so I don't think they'll be doing so.
btw: Why does this question get asked every 2 weeks? Don't we beat it to death enough each time there's any sort of Mac announcement?
XP is about attitude. Just as there is a vast difference between agressive and passive error checking/handling, the entire XP philosophy is centered around agressive programming.
You don't code until you need to code it. (No that doesn't mean you don't do a proper design) You refactor code and design as soon as you run into delays or problems. This way you avoid cruft that builds up. You are under constant code review (when programming in partners). You get exposed to the whole system and not just one small section. Interestingly many of the XP practices go against what traditional SE teaches.
http://www.xprogramming.com/ - has a good overview of the processes and atmosphere that XP creates. Check out the XP Practices in particular.
I've tried implementing some of these practices myself in personal programming. I can tell you it takes more engery but so far I like what I'm seeing from my progress. I'd like to see how effective pair programming can be as well. I've done a bit of this at work but only at weekly code reviews.
Now I don't think it's the silver bullet or holy grail but I'll try anything to hasten the development process whie lowering defect count. I don't try to do everything that XP advocates.
Anyways, if there's one thing you should probably get from XP it's an agressive mentality when programming.
- make a dig at the computer buying public
- spread misinformation about the price of the fastest mac systems
- spread misinformation about the lowest x86 proc you can buy
- assert information that you cannot verify
- but kept your value high by having an angle into x86/mac thing that people have been speculating about for years
Kudos. That should rile up some replies (mine included).
I'm sure some of the space software could make a reasonable claim to being more impressive. In fact, they're so sure of their methods that they can tell you how many bugs a new piece of software has. They might not have an inkling of where those defects are but since they haven't hit their expected bug count they know it's there.
Now, that's impressive. It's impressive from a psychological and programming viewpoint. It's impressive on so many levels.
I completely agree with you about TeX. It's the opening example of McConnell's Code Complete. It's a statement that to any programmer is 'perfect'.
Oh, and I'd suggest reading Code Complete to anyone wondering what makes 'good code'.
I was under the impression that the qwerty keyboard was designed to *slow down* typists. Back in the typewriter days they would type so fast that the heads would jam as they flew towards the the paper. Can anyone clarify?
Realtime raytracing awaits. Until you can reproduce reality you'll want to be able to keep throwing more and more power at the problem. The latest batch of games/cards doesn't come close to allowing this.
I believe Thief and especially Thief 2 (I'm sure of the latter) made money. Thief 2 continued to make money after they closed LGL. LGL closed largely due to Eidos's involvment with Ion Storm (LGL also had a couple stinkers).
We had patents to protect garage inventors and small companies from being run out of business by larger corporations. Having a patent does not preclude using that patented technology, it merely forces others to license it for a fee. Now, I have no idea who regulates what that fee is but I've heard that a 1.5% royalty per unit is considered extremely high. It also tends to take several months to years to get licensing agreements hammered out amongst big corporations. The initial incentives for grabbing those patents were to 'make your big bucks' just like the IPO craze, get in, get rich, get out.
Today patents are being abused. No question that the process needs more oversight and large companies should have less power concerning patent issues.
I'd add that as your product gets larger you want to *engineer* your code, not go through all night hack sessions. One isn't as fun as the other but one is definitely more reliable. Unfortunately, market pressures and timetables often dictate how strongly you engineer a product.
Another point, creative code tends to be bad because it incurrs too much maintenance overhead. Unless this is the super duper optimized inner loop of your app it's almost always a better choice to go with a plain method of code contruction than one that takes shortcuts and is 'neat'.
Sadly, programmers aren't being exposed to Software Engineering principles as much as they should. And when they are it's too little, often only a token gesture. An example: my former university is creating a Software Engineering degree... it's in the School of Engineering, not Computer Science. Which one would one suppose has future programmers, hmm.
I'd like to see if sites like SourceForge, which provide many of the tools needed for a good engineering process, can affect how many of us 'garage developers' create their products.
This is not their sole, nor primary means of making money. They *sell* their browser (of which I have bought a license). That is their primary means... and now people can have a free version (if they can tolerate the ads and trust Opera to not gather too much information). Which, as others have pointed out, is great for web developers who just want to check out what a page looks like in Opera.
Might I add, for those who think they're smart enough to fix the problem: Before you call pretend to explain the problem to an imaginary tech (this works when you have software bugs). It's amazing how many times you can fix problems using this method. Of course, most people don't sit back and analyze things when their net connect goes down in the middle of their pr0n downloads or Quake sessions...;P
It's the old, 'hey teacher I have a question about this problem, I understand this but I don't get... oh wait, nevermind'
Then do a google search for the BOFH story archives. There are rarely apocryphal tales in the tech support industry. Technology reduces people to Neanderthalic states of intelligence (wait, that's too much credit).
Many of us moderate activiely. This is not only a way to make the system work but to contribute to the site. Our comments contribute to the growth and popularity of the site. It means we feel involved with the site. Many of us are insulted that the staff cannot take a minute to VERIFY trivial facts, recheck their spelling and grammar, and take the time to edit a mistake (Big kudos to timothy, he's about the only regular article poster that updates). We feel that our involvement is marginalized. The OSS thing is based on community. The same thing that makes 'us' feel like a 'community', the same thing that leads to protest lies, the same thing that makes us hold software and companies to higher standards drive us to criticize the Slashdot staff. They don't take pride in their work. They are hypocritical and their behavior is at odds with the general ethics of the OSS philosophy. Theoreticaly this is where we should start having a massive fork. I've started asking friends what other sites offer good tech discussion.
As I've said before, Slashdot feels more and more like using Windows. Money making owners who don't give a damn about their users (that's how I and many others feel). I feel dirtier and more frustrated the more I use it, but most of the alternatives aren't that attractive.
I wouldn't stand for writing 100 lines to do something trivial either... That's why I don't code in assembly. That said, WHY woud you be doing something trivial in Java? A Higher Power being unnecessarily stiff?
I also recently did the interviewing rounds when I graduated, everyone liked to see Java on the resume, everyone is trying it, it gets used in places that a web surfer dones't usually see (I generally hate Java Applets). I wouldn't diss Java without first seeing what it does well (mostly library support for everything under the Sun (haha I made a pun)). I wrote a simple tiered web proxy server and spider bot using Java, it took about two weeks to write. I'd be lost trying that in C or any other langauge that I currently know (C/C++/php/pascal). Anyways, if it doesn't do what you want well then find another solution.
And what you really need to do is talk to the programmers at the places you interview at. Your resume (like a college degree) is just a door opener.
Re:What is nice about Opera (4\beta for Linux)?
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 1
I'd add that Opera can save your all open windows for your broswing session and load all those pages next time you startup. This is *extemely* nice when wanting to save all those search results and pages on some topic w/o bookmarking 15 links or if you have a set bunch of pages you like to read every morning.
Re:What is nice about Opera (4\beta for Linux)?
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 1
I haven't tried Opera on *ix so this may not apply to you anyways...
Opera on *windows* is/was great. It's fast and light (not only memory wise but speed and feel) compared to the alternaties which are/were basically IE, NS, and now Mozilla. Especially when IE and NS were in the 4.x stage Opera just steamed past both. Also, the MDI interface is kickass useful in certain cases, like when you're trying to do price comparisons for a dozen sites. It never crashed on me (3.5, 3.6) except on shutdown ocaisionally and some Java pages. It's tiny, 1.2MBs (last time I checked)! It runs great on a 486 dx4 100 (my pathetic work machine at the time) w/ 16MBs ram.
My one gripe with it was that it formatted some pages with poor html somewhat, oddly. It's also not as pretty as IE and NS/Mozilla but I almost never hold that against a program.
Lately I've been using IE5.01 amost exclusively but every once in a while I'll drop into Opera or even Mozilla (Mozilla isn't there yet).
Oh, one thing, you say you'd never pay for non/free software. Huh? So you'd pay for free software but not non-free? I suppose you're one of those free price purists (I have not truck with that), I just find it odd that you even hecked out Opera if you were such a person.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, then I can just hack wireless networks at will. They shouldn't be broadcasting right? Those pagers and cell phones too.
Remember to run whatever note you send to your Congressman through a spellchecker ;)
You think none of the planners had ever played SimCity.
I hope you're not implying that it is useless though.
Having voice as the sole or primary means of input and interaction is obviously a poort coice for power users but having more means of input is usually a good thing. How about being able to send voice commands to apps not in your (typing) focus? Being able to not be required to sit at your computer and walk around via (wireless) mic. You could get exercising in while still doing "work"!
Not to mention my mother who types about 10 wpm. Not everyone is as leet and skilled as you and the bubble of people you know.
You know OSX has a decent chance in small companies looking to dump x86 windows and go to *ix. It is unproven so it'll probably take another year or so before people feel comfortable switching to it. It supports samba and nfs and all your unix goodies that many IT people are familiar with. Basically it can play nice with your other systems. Idiot proof *ix? We'll have to see. I haven't seen the versions since DP3 but it was always heading towards what I thought groups like KDE and Gnome should have been doing (if they wanted world domination/average joe desktop)
And (with a few notable exceptions) Apple hardware is a joy and dream to work with. Most cases in particular make the standard PC look like a complete and total joke. The sliding panels on the PCs may be a huge convenience but it just can't compare to a system built by robotic assembly. This means easy access to almost anything, stuff that folds out, pops in, etc.
The exceptions would happen to be (from my experience) the PowerMac 9500 and the hodgepodge of eclectic connectors that Apple used to make. Well, I suppose that new USB/Power/Video connector qualifies as well. Slick as hell though.
I have to mention BeOS as a system that offered both a GUI and CLUI but was sadly overmatched. Apple is obviously in a different postion and one that has a much greater chance of success.
As far as x86 ports I don't think that's really even a decent possibility. Jobs could prove how crazy he really is but it's incredibly unlikely for all the dozen reason people mention.
Anyways, here's a me too for support of OSX. I use FreeBSD at home as a server. I'd love to see something as stable but with an excellent user enviroment.
Exactly. It would be like BeOS all over again with resources stretched to the limit to try to get hardware supported. Even with the various BSD and *IX source drivers available this incredible growth in support base is daunting.
Also, vendors would *not* be a reliable source for support drivers. Heck, there are mainstream stuff that took months to get fully supported in win2k. What would happen with an OS that has a miniscule share compared to MS's OSs.
Couple all that with having to maintain different codebases (again look at BeOS and perhaps NT) and you can see headaches big enough to stop anyone in their tracks.
Pure speculation on my part but if Apple were to relase it for x86 (and go against their core philosophies) it would the sign of a desparate company trying one last time to get back into the market. I don't think Apple is in that position and so I don't think they'll be doing so.
btw: Why does this question get asked every 2 weeks? Don't we beat it to death enough each time there's any sort of Mac announcement?
XP is about attitude. Just as there is a vast difference between agressive and passive error checking/handling, the entire XP philosophy is centered around agressive programming.
You don't code until you need to code it. (No that doesn't mean you don't do a proper design) You refactor code and design as soon as you run into delays or problems. This way you avoid cruft that builds up. You are under constant code review (when programming in partners). You get exposed to the whole system and not just one small section. Interestingly many of the XP practices go against what traditional SE teaches.
http://www.xprogramming.com/ - has a good overview of the processes and atmosphere that XP creates. Check out the XP Practices in particular.
I've tried implementing some of these practices myself in personal programming. I can tell you it takes more engery but so far I like what I'm seeing from my progress. I'd like to see how effective pair programming can be as well. I've done a bit of this at work but only at weekly code reviews.
Now I don't think it's the silver bullet or holy grail but I'll try anything to hasten the development process whie lowering defect count. I don't try to do everything that XP advocates.
Anyways, if there's one thing you should probably get from XP it's an agressive mentality when programming.
Great troll post.
You managed to:
- make a dig at the computer buying public
- spread misinformation about the price of the fastest mac systems
- spread misinformation about the lowest x86 proc you can buy
- assert information that you cannot verify
- but kept your value high by having an angle into x86/mac thing that people have been speculating about for years
Kudos. That should rile up some replies (mine included).
I'm sure some of the space software could make a reasonable claim to being more impressive. In fact, they're so sure of their methods that they can tell you how many bugs a new piece of software has. They might not have an inkling of where those defects are but since they haven't hit their expected bug count they know it's there.
Now, that's impressive. It's impressive from a psychological and programming viewpoint. It's impressive on so many levels.
I completely agree with you about TeX. It's the opening example of McConnell's Code Complete. It's a statement that to any programmer is 'perfect'.
Oh, and I'd suggest reading Code Complete to anyone wondering what makes 'good code'.
Many of us only browse at +3 or higher thresholds. That way we don't get exposed to the filth underneath. Deal with it.
Well, the optical mice are pretty nice to use, provided, of course, that you can stomach one button. The hockey puck is no longer sold with Macs.
The keyboard I do dislike (borderline hate) though.
So basically what you want is Linux to be where Windows is today... right? Not for many years.
I was under the impression that the qwerty keyboard was designed to *slow down* typists. Back in the typewriter days they would type so fast that the heads would jam as they flew towards the the paper. Can anyone clarify?
Realtime raytracing awaits. Until you can reproduce reality you'll want to be able to keep throwing more and more power at the problem. The latest batch of games/cards doesn't come close to allowing this.
I believe Thief and especially Thief 2 (I'm sure of the latter) made money. Thief 2 continued to make money after they closed LGL. LGL closed largely due to Eidos's involvment with Ion Storm (LGL also had a couple stinkers).
So, yes, that type of game can make money.
We had patents to protect garage inventors and small companies from being run out of business by larger corporations. Having a patent does not preclude using that patented technology, it merely forces others to license it for a fee. Now, I have no idea who regulates what that fee is but I've heard that a 1.5% royalty per unit is considered extremely high. It also tends to take several months to years to get licensing agreements hammered out amongst big corporations. The initial incentives for grabbing those patents were to 'make your big bucks' just like the IPO craze, get in, get rich, get out.
Today patents are being abused. No question that the process needs more oversight and large companies should have less power concerning patent issues.
It's beta, I've used it. Anyone can purchase it. That qualifies as vapor?
I'd add that as your product gets larger you want to *engineer* your code, not go through all night hack sessions. One isn't as fun as the other but one is definitely more reliable. Unfortunately, market pressures and timetables often dictate how strongly you engineer a product.
Another point, creative code tends to be bad because it incurrs too much maintenance overhead. Unless this is the super duper optimized inner loop of your app it's almost always a better choice to go with a plain method of code contruction than one that takes shortcuts and is 'neat'.
Sadly, programmers aren't being exposed to Software Engineering principles as much as they should. And when they are it's too little, often only a token gesture. An example: my former university is creating a Software Engineering degree... it's in the School of Engineering, not Computer Science. Which one would one suppose has future programmers, hmm.
I'd like to see if sites like SourceForge, which provide many of the tools needed for a good engineering process, can affect how many of us 'garage developers' create their products.
This is not their sole, nor primary means of making money. They *sell* their browser (of which I have bought a license). That is their primary means... and now people can have a free version (if they can tolerate the ads and trust Opera to not gather too much information). Which, as others have pointed out, is great for web developers who just want to check out what a page looks like in Opera.
Might I add, for those who think they're smart enough to fix the problem: Before you call pretend to explain the problem to an imaginary tech (this works when you have software bugs). It's amazing how many times you can fix problems using this method. Of course, most people don't sit back and analyze things when their net connect goes down in the middle of their pr0n downloads or Quake sessions... ;P
It's the old, 'hey teacher I have a question about this problem, I understand this but I don't get... oh wait, nevermind'
...and the corresponding
alt.sysadmin.recovery
alt.sysadmin.bofh
Then do a google search for the BOFH story archives. There are rarely apocryphal tales in the tech support industry. Technology reduces people to Neanderthalic states of intelligence (wait, that's too much credit).
Many of us moderate activiely. This is not only a way to make the system work but to contribute to the site. Our comments contribute to the growth and popularity of the site. It means we feel involved with the site. Many of us are insulted that the staff cannot take a minute to VERIFY trivial facts, recheck their spelling and grammar, and take the time to edit a mistake (Big kudos to timothy, he's about the only regular article poster that updates). We feel that our involvement is marginalized. The OSS thing is based on community. The same thing that makes 'us' feel like a 'community', the same thing that leads to protest lies, the same thing that makes us hold software and companies to higher standards drive us to criticize the Slashdot staff. They don't take pride in their work. They are hypocritical and their behavior is at odds with the general ethics of the OSS philosophy. Theoreticaly this is where we should start having a massive fork. I've started asking friends what other sites offer good tech discussion.
As I've said before, Slashdot feels more and more like using Windows. Money making owners who don't give a damn about their users (that's how I and many others feel). I feel dirtier and more frustrated the more I use it, but most of the alternatives aren't that attractive.
I wouldn't stand for writing 100 lines to do something trivial either... That's why I don't code in assembly. That said, WHY woud you be doing something trivial in Java? A Higher Power being unnecessarily stiff?
I also recently did the interviewing rounds when I graduated, everyone liked to see Java on the resume, everyone is trying it, it gets used in places that a web surfer dones't usually see (I generally hate Java Applets). I wouldn't diss Java without first seeing what it does well (mostly library support for everything under the Sun (haha I made a pun)). I wrote a simple tiered web proxy server and spider bot using Java, it took about two weeks to write. I'd be lost trying that in C or any other langauge that I currently know (C/C++/php/pascal). Anyways, if it doesn't do what you want well then find another solution.
And what you really need to do is talk to the programmers at the places you interview at. Your resume (like a college degree) is just a door opener.
I'd add that Opera can save your all open windows for your broswing session and load all those pages next time you startup. This is *extemely* nice when wanting to save all those search results and pages on some topic w/o bookmarking 15 links or if you have a set bunch of pages you like to read every morning.
I haven't tried Opera on *ix so this may not apply to you anyways...
Opera on *windows* is/was great. It's fast and light (not only memory wise but speed and feel) compared to the alternaties which are/were basically IE, NS, and now Mozilla. Especially when IE and NS were in the 4.x stage Opera just steamed past both. Also, the MDI interface is kickass useful in certain cases, like when you're trying to do price comparisons for a dozen sites. It never crashed on me (3.5, 3.6) except on shutdown ocaisionally and some Java pages. It's tiny, 1.2MBs (last time I checked)! It runs great on a 486 dx4 100 (my pathetic work machine at the time) w/ 16MBs ram.
My one gripe with it was that it formatted some pages with poor html somewhat, oddly. It's also not as pretty as IE and NS/Mozilla but I almost never hold that against a program.
Lately I've been using IE5.01 amost exclusively but every once in a while I'll drop into Opera or even Mozilla (Mozilla isn't there yet).
Oh, one thing, you say you'd never pay for non/free software. Huh? So you'd pay for free software but not non-free? I suppose you're one of those free price purists (I have not truck with that), I just find it odd that you even hecked out Opera if you were such a person.