It was probably not a good decision in the first place to make C++ compatible with C.
Actually, I'll argue against that point in two ways. First, Objective C was pure ANSI C with about half a dozen syntax extensions to add object support. Because of that approach, it worked incredibly well and you could compile regular ANSI C programs using the same compiler. (In fact, I believe that the first Obj-C implementations were simply preprocessors that produced ANSI C.) Since when I first encountered Objective C I could quote Harbison & Steele chapter and verse, picking up Obj-C was pretty much a cinch.
Second, I don't know what the current state of C++ is, but IIRC back in the early 90s, it was not ANSI C compatible, i.e., it actually broke ANSI C programs. [Hey, y'all, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Oh, wait -- I'm on the 'net. I don't have to ask.:-)]
The biggest advantages that Obj-C had over C++ (IMHO and in addition to the ANSI C compatibility) were dynamic typing and a generic root Object class, with everything that falls out from that. If you go back and research the history of Java, you'll find that while it borrowed C++ syntax, the underlying object model and behavior was directly inspired by Obj-C.
Note that I'm not saying that C++ is not an effective or powerful language in the right hands, that other languages [insert current favorites] are necessarily better choices, or that there aren't situations where C++ is indeed the best choice. I've worked on projects where we evaluated various languages and deliberately chose C++ to do our development. What I am saying it what I said at the start: C++ is a brittle and complex language, and that causes ongoing problems for many software engineers and many software projects...bruce..
That's a wonderful link; thanks for pointing me to it.
Note, by the way, that most programming languages have flaws. limitations, and tradeoffs. But I really think that C++ was on the wrong track almost from the get-go, and that it has only gotten worse with time.
I fully believe that the massive 'Taligent' project -- a joint venture between IBM and Apple for a next-generation OS and graphical environment -- failed in large part because of the choice of C++ as the underlying language. I also believe that one of the reasons that NeXTstep survived and became Mac OS X is because of the choice of Objective C as the underlying language. I may be biased, but realize that (a) I was a professional NeXTstep developer and (b) I worked at becoming a professional Taligent developer (Taligent was too big, too slow, and too buggy and died pretty much stillborn)...bruce..
To be honest, I would have been tempted to score my own post as flamebait, though it was not intended as such. Let me quote from myself back in 1995, in the Bibliography section of my book Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development (M&T Books, 1995):
The Design and Evolution of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1994. This is a good book to have when you reach a point in your C++ studies that you want to throw things through windows. In the first place, it allows Stroustrup to explain the thinking and debates that provide insight into various aspects of C++. In the second place, it's softcover, which means it will bounce off the window when you throw it.
Elegance is that term of art in software engineering that we use to describe a piece of architecture, design, and/or coding that accomplishes what it needs to (and often a good deal more) with a minimum of complexity and a maximum of clarity. In all my years of dealing with C++, I have never heard anyone call it "elegant", and with good reason...bruce..
...is that C++ is a rather complex and brittle language.:-)..bruce..
P.S. Feel free to flame away at me, but not only have I developed professionally in C++, I've actually rescued a C++ project by (among other things) drafting C++ coding standards and guidelines for the 30 or so developers working on it.
Remember that the original post above was looking for an open source replacement for commercial GPS systems due to complaints about inaccuracies in said systems.
The OpenStreetMap project is pretty amazing, even though it did start out with existing (TIGER) data for its USA maps, but there are no quality controls on it, either for completeness or accuracy. As the OpenStreetMap wiki itself freelyadmits, "By the very nature of the wiki-style process there is no guarantee of accuracy of any kind....[w]hich means the database will always be subject to the whims, experimentation, and mistakes of the community." In short, there are no quality controls and no overriding financial and/or legal motivation to strive for the last few sigmas of accuracy that a commercial GPS firm achieves.
One of the fundamental challenges in all software development is the "90-90" problem: it takes 90% of the estimated time to complete the first 90% of the project, and another 90% of the time to complete the remaining 10% of the project. It's while completing that final 10% -- which typically involves a lot of negotiation between features, performance, and reliability -- that all the really hard choices are made, and where most 'death march' development efforts begin. It's also where a lot of software projects fail, because completing that final 10% turns out to be more difficult, expensive, and/or time consuming than originally envisioned. This is particularly true in open source projects, which is why sourceforge.net is crammed full of thousands of incomplete or abandoned software projects (including one of my own!) and why thousands more linger on, never quite getting to a 1.0 release.
As for the scaling issue: it is another truism of IT project failure that what works in the lab does not necessary work in production. Remember that GPS navigation systems have to work in real-time; any delays or lags would be inconvenient at best (e.g., a missed turn-off) and could actually be dangerous. A navigation system that works in real-time with a small (1 sq. mile) database may not be able to function in real-time with a 3.5 million sq. mile database. Note that when I punch in an address that's a few thousand miles away, it only takes my GPS system a matter of seconds to calculate a route for me, and it can maintain, track, modify, and update that route in real-time.
In short, I remain highly skeptical that an open source project could produce a GPS navigation system that would be (and would continue to be) superior to what you can buy for a few hundred bucks at Costco -- which is what the original poster was asking for...bruce..
I have served repeatedly over the past 9 years as an expert witness in technology-related litigation (including intellectual property cases), which means that I have analyzed (and, as required, rebutted) many expert reports and written quite a few of my own. Here are my observations:
-- Expert testimony in federal court (and for the most part, in state courts and arbitrations) is largely governed by several federal court decisions (Daubert v. Merrell Dow, Kumho Tire v. Carmichel) that require the judge to act as a 'gatekeeper' in deciding what expert testimony to allow or exclude. Much of Dr. Pouwelse's criticisms are aimed at the Daubert/Kumho standards, including qualifications and methodology, with an eye towards having these reports (and possibly Dr. Jacobson's testimony at trial) excluded.
-- Not having Dr. Jacobson's four reports/declarations, I can't critique them directly. However, the admissions by Dr. Jacobson during deposition that he spent only 45 minutes on his April 2006 report would appear to be pretty damaging. Even the briefest report I've ever written has taken at least several hours to put together, and I'm a fast writer; in most cases, it takes me anywhere from 40 to upwards of 100 hours of research, analysis, and writing to put together an expert report. Likewise, the 15 minutes on the December 19th declaration seems pretty short as well. This would naturally raise questions in the judge's mind whether Dr. Jacobson did his own research and writing and how well founded the reports and declarations are.
If someone has Dr. Jacobson's reports and declarations or has a link to them, please feel free to send them along, and I'll take a look at them directly...bruce..
The dancing dog observation
on
Open US GPS Data?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm amused at the thought of trying to create an open-source version of a typical North American commercial GPS street/address database and navigation program. I've used a GPS system in my car for about 3 years now, and while I encounter the occasional error or omission, most of the time I marvel that it works at all, much less as well as it does. As someone who has worked on some very large scale software projects, I have to say that the software quality assurance (SQA) challenges and issues for both the database itself and generating navigation routes from Point A to Point B are enough to give me the heebie jeebies -- particularly given the IT industry's general track record on SQA practices.
Here's a reality check. Pick any one-square-mile area of your community and attempt to create (and keep up to date) a GPS navigation system that will legally, safely, and efficiently navigate you between any two addresses within that square mile, keeping in mind your civil liabilities should your system cause accidents, injuries, or illegal driving maneuvers. Oh, and your navigation system has to fit in a device that's about the same size as a Palm Pilot or an iPod touch and that runs on rechargeable batteries.
Now scale this up by about 3.5 million to cover the United States...bruce..
HD ruined my expectations that the nightly news would be worth a watch because at least the female newscasters would be beautiful. With HD I now know they just have gobs of make up on and are actually not so pretty after all.
When I first got HD several years ago back in Washington DC, I watched an episode of "Law & Order" and was struck by how visible (and unattractive) the makeup was. We didn't get HD when we moved to Colorado back in 2005 but upgraded this past summer. It appears that most folks filming in HD are more aware of how things will look...bruce..
I wrote about this issue back in mid-2006 ("YouTube vs. Current TV ") and concluded with the following:
On our DirecTV satellite system, we have hundreds of channels, though fewer than we used to; we dropped all the movie channels when we discovered that we only watched one or two movies a month on them. Yet, outside of the local morning news/weather and occasional news channel updates, I seldom watch more than half a dozen shows and/or movies on TV each week. [Less than that now with the WGA strike going on.] By contrast, I suspect there are few days that go by in which I don't watch one or more YouTube videos, embedded in a blog or linked to in an e-mail I receive. In terms of total hours, I still watch more TV; in terms of discrete video productions, I watch more YouTube.
TV still has the bandwidth edge, and I now have several dozen HD channels coming in via DirecTV -- and just about anything is watchable when you watch it in HD.:-) HD video is starting to show up on the web, but the general quality level of web-based video is still low and slow. Until that problem is solved, TV will still have an edge. YMMV...bruce..
However getting Senior Management to change their ways is tough. I've done this work for NASA, DOD, IBM and now another big firm (competitor to IBM) and I see same song different verse over and over.
Yep. "And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis." So far, the answer seems to be, "Yes, it must."
Fred Brooks book is good as is Ed Yourdon's book "Death March"
Yes, I definitely should have mentioned Ed in there...bruce..
Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living, and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.
Once you've read these three books, then decide whether you still want to be an IT manager.:-)..bruce..
Many of us "millenials" may want more from our job. Is this entirely unreasonable? No. Because we have university degrees.
[Snort!] I graduated with a BS in Computer Science 30 years ago, which is likely before you were born. I was 5th out of six kids; all six of us got a college degree of some kind (AA, BA/BS, MA/MS). By contrast, of my nine kids/stepkids, only one has a college degree. I'm still not sure why that is; I certainly emphasized education while they were all growing up. For the most part, they just decided they wanted to mess around...bruce..
I'm not a lawyer, but I act from time to time as an expert witness in computer source code copyright infringement cases. Here are my observations:
-- Bring it to the attention of in-house counsel (assuming you have any). They will want to know as soon as possible. -- As mentioned previously, check the forum itself to see if there are explicit statements about source code postings being in the public domain; don't rely upon vague statements or assumptions. -- If so directed by counsel, contact the original author and see if you can get a written release from him/her for use of the code. -- If that goes nowhere (no response or refusal for release), then do a clean-room reverse engineering -- get someone who has never seen the copied code to write replacement code based on a set of specifications.
I have worked on cases that have ended up costing the defendant very large sums of money -- in litigation, settlement, and/or re-engineering -- because of some programmer 'borrowing' code that s/he had no rights to...bruce..
I read almost all of the Tom Swift series as a kid back in the 1960s, and watched lots of really cheesy SF/F flicks, but they never confused me as to what could happen in the real world.
On the other hand, when my son Jon was about 8 years old (~1990), he turned to me in the middle of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode on TV and asked, "Is this real?" Still, I think he's been pretty clear ever since then about reality vs. Hollywood...bruce..
...I'm a bit addicted to LOTRO (their acronym, not mine). I've never played WoW or EverQuest, so I can't compare it to them. But I like the sense of freedom on a known (Middle Earth) map. Having gotten myself up to Level 12, I'm now just wandering cross-country, heading towards the Misty Mountains. Based on what I've experienced so far, I suspect that I'm going to need to hook up with a few other folks to keep this up -- I'm running into some nasty MOBs.
While I did sign up for some crafts, I haven't done much with them so far...strikes me as a bit tedious, though I'm sure others will differ.
There is something vaguely silly about MMOs -- you have dozens of people running around, completing the same 'quests' or 'tasks'. This doesn't mean that it isn't fun as a game -- it just points out that the MMO's "immersive experience" doesn't really mimic in any real aspect what it would be like to live in such a fantasy setting (which, after all, would likely match Hobbs' famous description of life in the state of nature: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short).
The real test will be if I'm still playing it a month from now...bruce..
The three major innovations that have transformed broadcast TV in the last several years are: (1) PVRs; (2) DVD sets of TV series; (3) iTunes. There are very few first-run TV shows that I watch in real-time broadcast anymore, and not many that I keep up with during the season (such as it is).
We have a couple of Panasonic PVRs (one with an 80GB hard drive and ethernet port) for standard time-shifting and protection in case of interruption, but I even use those less and less. Typically what I have done is watch the first few episodes of the season, then once I get behind, I simply wait for the DVD set to come out at season's end.
However, even that is now shifting to buying episodes from iTunes -- and that's the real innovation. And now that my wife has a 30" cinema display on her Mac, it's not as though there's any real loss of quality. And, as with the DVDs, it's so nice not to have to even use the 'CM SKIP' button to jump over commercials.
I'm less convinced about the future of streaming video over the internet. We already have streaming video into homes: it's called cable and satellite. They have the bandwidth. The internet, as yet, does not, particularly at the final mile. While I'm a Netflix subscriber and fan, I haven't tried their streaming video service yet, and probably won't; if there's a movie I want to watch that badly, I'll order the DVD from Netflix (or simply buy a copy) and watch it on my living room TV.
The major innovation I'm waiting for is for a series to be financed in part or all by advance subscriptions. For example, suppose that SciFi decides not to pick up Battlestar Galactica for a fourth season. Then suppose that the production company offers to create a fourth season if enough people subscribe in advance, each paying, say, the combined cost of an iTunes 'season pass' and a complete DVD set. Those funds are held in escrow until the necessary amount is reached, and then the season goes into production. All subscribers get a season pass, a DVD set, and their names listed as 'associate producer' in a special credits feature on the DVD set. The production company could throw in some other perk as well; e.g., each subscriber gets a pass for two people to an end-of-season wrap party (yeah, it's a big party, but so what?). The next step would be for a production company to do this for a brand-new series and bypass broadcast TV altogether.
There was a brief, unsuccessful (and unauthorized) effort to resurrect Firefly this way, but that was pre-iTunes TV.
I think that within a few years, iTunes (and its competitors...does it have any competitors?...) will be selling first-run episodic video content of quality matching current TV shows but not appearing on TV (or only appearing after a delay -- sort of the reverse of what happens now, where a given TV episode becomes available on iTunes a day or two after initial broadcast). However, even that will require some bandwidth enhancements along the way; right now, with a solid broadband connection, it can take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes to download an 'hour-long' (typically 43-minute) episode. If iTunes is releasing first-run content on a weekly basis, then we can expect massive download spikes each time that occurs.
So, as per my title: if Bill Gates is just now saying that "internet will transform TV within 5 years", he's merely making an obvious statement rather than a perceptive or unexpected prediction. The net is already transforming TV...bruce..
I've also been a dedicated ThinkPad user since 2000 or so. I've owned three, all X-series to cut down on the weight of dragging my laptop around and to allow me to actually get work done in coach class. However, unlike some of the other posters here, I have had some mechanical problems with the ThinkPads; I've had to replace keyboards on two of them, the screen hinges on my current one (#3, have had it 2-3 years at least) are loosening, and the screen frame itself has popped a rivet. Beyond that, I have found in the last year or two that more and more when I travel on business that what I really need is a portable desktop system, i.e., lots of memory, lots of disk space, lots of processor power, and a large screen. This, of course, is mostly the antithesis of the ThinkPad X series. Beyond that, I've just been a little bit leery of how well quality has been maintained in the IBM -> Lenovo transition.
I did buy such a "portable desktop" laptop this week: a Fujitsu Lifebook N6410. Dual core T2400 @ 1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM (upgraded myself from 512KB), 80 GB hard drive + second hard drive bay (uses SATA laptop drives; be warned that it doesn't come with the bracing frame for the 2nd hard drive; I'm still working on that), full size keyboard + numeric pad, 17" display, stereo speakers + subwoofer, 256MB nVidia graphics (128MB dedicated/128MB shared), lots of ports, DVD-write drive, etc. Size of a boat anchor, weighs a ton, only lasts about 2 hours on battery, so it's definitely not my light, lithe ThinkPad X41, but it's right up there with all my desktop systems, and it's definitely easier than packing one of my Shuttles + a flat screen in a suitcase (which I've done before).
I'll see after a few trips whether and how much I miss my ThinkPad.
By the way, if you're looking at high-end laptops like this, avoid the Toshiba Satellite P105. I bought one earlier this week from Best Buy (the P105-S9312, w/2GB of RAM and a 200 GB hard drive), got it home, and promptly ran into problems: slow, flaky performance, occasional kernel faults, etc. I let it run all night and in the morning found it had powered itself down. When I powered it up, it went through three different kernel faults during bootup, rebooting each time, then finally got itself into WinXP--only to start reporting problems with previously working software. I tried four (4) times to do a system restore using the system restore disc--and had it fail each time. When I took it back to Best Buy to get my money back, I found that someone else had come in that same morning to exchange the same model. Not a good sign of high quality assurance. YMMV...bruce..
Sorry -- they're in the link in my comment. It's a rather lengthy posting I did a few weeks back on Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD and why their failure to agree on a common standard will probably marginalize them. In fact, even if they had agreed on a common standard, I think their market penetration would have been slow at best, because their advantages are not that obvious to the average consumer...bruce..
Yeah -- I hear you. Some 25 years ago, when I was writing game reviews for The Space Gamer, Steve Jackson (owner and publisher) had an official motto for all reviews and reviewers: "No turkeys". In other words, if a game was a turkey, we were to make sure the readers knew it was a turkey. Would that modern computer gaming magazines followed the same principles...bruce..
IIRC, Chris Crawford raised this exact question about 15-20 years ago. I find the question interesting since I don't believe in my ~30 years of playing computer games I've ever had one move me to tears. I've had movies do it, books do it, speeches do it, songs do it, and (sad to say) really-well-done-and-emotionally-manipulative TV commercials do it. But never a game.
I lived in Washington DC from July 1996 to August 1998, then from December 1999 to August 2005--a total of about seven years. During all that time, I subscribed to both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal; both would come every morning by 6 am, and I would eat breakfast standing up and going through both papers pretty thoroughly--paging through every section, scanning headlines, reading articles that interested me. I did this in spite of reviewing an increasing number of on-line news sites and blogs each day.
I moved to Parker, Colorado, in August 2005. Parker is about 25 miles from downtown Denver. My WSJ delivery shifted from early morning to coming in the mail--which meant that I got each day's edition in the afternoon, if I got it at all (sometimes it wouldn't come until the next day). I didn't even try to get the WP; instead, I signed up for a 'weekend' subscription to the Rocky Mountain News (largely for movie listings). And when my WSJ subscription came up for renewal, I let it lapse for this simple reason: by the time the WSJ came and I had a chance to read it, I had already been exposed to most of the news stories that interested me via the web.
I now have in my bookmarks roughly 140 news, information, commentary and blog sites, all of which I review at least once a day, and about 25% of which I review multiple times a day. I miss having the Post and the WSJ at my door before 6 am each morning; navigating their web sites is not as easy as reading the newspaper, and could I get them here that early, I would still subscribe to both, even at the combined rate of $200-300/year. But getting the WSJ in mid-afternoon just isn't worth it, and the Post would be even more delayed. So after a lifetime of reading newspapers (I'm 53), I've largely given up on them...bruce..
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'll argue against that point in two ways. First, Objective C was pure ANSI C with about half a dozen syntax extensions to add object support. Because of that approach, it worked incredibly well and you could compile regular ANSI C programs using the same compiler. (In fact, I believe that the first Obj-C implementations were simply preprocessors that produced ANSI C.) Since when I first encountered Objective C I could quote Harbison & Steele chapter and verse, picking up Obj-C was pretty much a cinch.
Second, I don't know what the current state of C++ is, but IIRC back in the early 90s, it was not ANSI C compatible, i.e., it actually broke ANSI C programs. [Hey, y'all, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Oh, wait -- I'm on the 'net. I don't have to ask.
The biggest advantages that Obj-C had over C++ (IMHO and in addition to the ANSI C compatibility) were dynamic typing and a generic root Object class, with everything that falls out from that. If you go back and research the history of Java, you'll find that while it borrowed C++ syntax, the underlying object model and behavior was directly inspired by Obj-C.
Note that I'm not saying that C++ is not an effective or powerful language in the right hands, that other languages [insert current favorites] are necessarily better choices, or that there aren't situations where C++ is indeed the best choice. I've worked on projects where we evaluated various languages and deliberately chose C++ to do our development. What I am saying it what I said at the start: C++ is a brittle and complex language, and that causes ongoing problems for many software engineers and many software projects.
Pyrrhonist:
..bruce..
That's a wonderful link; thanks for pointing me to it.
Note, by the way, that most programming languages have flaws. limitations, and tradeoffs. But I really think that C++ was on the wrong track almost from the get-go, and that it has only gotten worse with time.
I fully believe that the massive 'Taligent' project -- a joint venture between IBM and Apple for a next-generation OS and graphical environment -- failed in large part because of the choice of C++ as the underlying language. I also believe that one of the reasons that NeXTstep survived and became Mac OS X is because of the choice of Objective C as the underlying language. I may be biased, but realize that (a) I was a professional NeXTstep developer and (b) I worked at becoming a professional Taligent developer (Taligent was too big, too slow, and too buggy and died pretty much stillborn).
Elegance is that term of art in software engineering that we use to describe a piece of architecture, design, and/or coding that accomplishes what it needs to (and often a good deal more) with a minimum of complexity and a maximum of clarity. In all my years of dealing with C++, I have never heard anyone call it "elegant", and with good reason.
...is that C++ is a rather complex and brittle language. :-) ..bruce..
P.S. Feel free to flame away at me, but not only have I developed professionally in C++, I've actually rescued a C++ project by (among other things) drafting C++ coding standards and guidelines for the 30 or so developers working on it.
Babbling:
..bruce..
Remember that the original post above was looking for an open source replacement for commercial GPS systems due to complaints about inaccuracies in said systems.
The OpenStreetMap project is pretty amazing, even though it did start out with existing (TIGER) data for its USA maps, but there are no quality controls on it, either for completeness or accuracy. As the OpenStreetMap wiki itself freely admits, "By the very nature of the wiki-style process there is no guarantee of accuracy of any kind....[w]hich means the database will always be subject to the whims, experimentation, and mistakes of the community." In short, there are no quality controls and no overriding financial and/or legal motivation to strive for the last few sigmas of accuracy that a commercial GPS firm achieves.
One of the fundamental challenges in all software development is the "90-90" problem: it takes 90% of the estimated time to complete the first 90% of the project, and another 90% of the time to complete the remaining 10% of the project. It's while completing that final 10% -- which typically involves a lot of negotiation between features, performance, and reliability -- that all the really hard choices are made, and where most 'death march' development efforts begin. It's also where a lot of software projects fail, because completing that final 10% turns out to be more difficult, expensive, and/or time consuming than originally envisioned. This is particularly true in open source projects, which is why sourceforge.net is crammed full of thousands of incomplete or abandoned software projects (including one of my own!) and why thousands more linger on, never quite getting to a 1.0 release.
As for the scaling issue: it is another truism of IT project failure that what works in the lab does not necessary work in production. Remember that GPS navigation systems have to work in real-time; any delays or lags would be inconvenient at best (e.g., a missed turn-off) and could actually be dangerous. A navigation system that works in real-time with a small (1 sq. mile) database may not be able to function in real-time with a 3.5 million sq. mile database. Note that when I punch in an address that's a few thousand miles away, it only takes my GPS system a matter of seconds to calculate a route for me, and it can maintain, track, modify, and update that route in real-time.
In short, I remain highly skeptical that an open source project could produce a GPS navigation system that would be (and would continue to be) superior to what you can buy for a few hundred bucks at Costco -- which is what the original poster was asking for.
Thanks; will do that. ..bruce..
I have served repeatedly over the past 9 years as an expert witness in technology-related litigation (including intellectual property cases), which means that I have analyzed (and, as required, rebutted) many expert reports and written quite a few of my own. Here are my observations:
..bruce..
-- Expert testimony in federal court (and for the most part, in state courts and arbitrations) is largely governed by several federal court decisions (Daubert v. Merrell Dow, Kumho Tire v. Carmichel) that require the judge to act as a 'gatekeeper' in deciding what expert testimony to allow or exclude. Much of Dr. Pouwelse's criticisms are aimed at the Daubert/Kumho standards, including qualifications and methodology, with an eye towards having these reports (and possibly Dr. Jacobson's testimony at trial) excluded.
-- Not having Dr. Jacobson's four reports/declarations, I can't critique them directly. However, the admissions by Dr. Jacobson during deposition that he spent only 45 minutes on his April 2006 report would appear to be pretty damaging. Even the briefest report I've ever written has taken at least several hours to put together, and I'm a fast writer; in most cases, it takes me anywhere from 40 to upwards of 100 hours of research, analysis, and writing to put together an expert report. Likewise, the 15 minutes on the December 19th declaration seems pretty short as well. This would naturally raise questions in the judge's mind whether Dr. Jacobson did his own research and writing and how well founded the reports and declarations are.
If someone has Dr. Jacobson's reports and declarations or has a link to them, please feel free to send them along, and I'll take a look at them directly.
I'm amused at the thought of trying to create an open-source version of a typical North American commercial GPS street/address database and navigation program. I've used a GPS system in my car for about 3 years now, and while I encounter the occasional error or omission, most of the time I marvel that it works at all, much less as well as it does. As someone who has worked on some very large scale software projects, I have to say that the software quality assurance (SQA) challenges and issues for both the database itself and generating navigation routes from Point A to Point B are enough to give me the heebie jeebies -- particularly given the IT industry's general track record on SQA practices.
..bruce..
Here's a reality check. Pick any one-square-mile area of your community and attempt to create (and keep up to date) a GPS navigation system that will legally, safely, and efficiently navigate you between any two addresses within that square mile, keeping in mind your civil liabilities should your system cause accidents, injuries, or illegal driving maneuvers. Oh, and your navigation system has to fit in a device that's about the same size as a Palm Pilot or an iPod touch and that runs on rechargeable batteries.
Now scale this up by about 3.5 million to cover the United States.
When I first got HD several years ago back in Washington DC, I watched an episode of "Law & Order" and was struck by how visible (and unattractive) the makeup was. We didn't get HD when we moved to Colorado back in 2005 but upgraded this past summer. It appears that most folks filming in HD are more aware of how things will look.
Yep. "And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis." So far, the answer seems to be, "Yes, it must."
Yes, I definitely should have mentioned Ed in there.
- Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
- Journey of the Software Professional: The Sociology of Computer Programming by Luke Hohmann. This book is not nearly as well known (and read) as it should be; it's also a great source of references for hard research on IT development teams.
- The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living, and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.
Once you've read these three books, then decide whether you still want to be an IT manager.I'm not a lawyer, but I act from time to time as an expert witness in computer source code copyright infringement cases. Here are my observations:
..bruce..
-- Bring it to the attention of in-house counsel (assuming you have any). They will want to know as soon as possible.
-- As mentioned previously, check the forum itself to see if there are explicit statements about source code postings being in the public domain; don't rely upon vague statements or assumptions.
-- If so directed by counsel, contact the original author and see if you can get a written release from him/her for use of the code.
-- If that goes nowhere (no response or refusal for release), then do a clean-room reverse engineering -- get someone who has never seen the copied code to write replacement code based on a set of specifications.
I have worked on cases that have ended up costing the defendant very large sums of money -- in litigation, settlement, and/or re-engineering -- because of some programmer 'borrowing' code that s/he had no rights to.
I read almost all of the Tom Swift series as a kid back in the 1960s, and watched lots of really cheesy SF/F flicks, but they never confused me as to what could happen in the real world.
..bruce..
On the other hand, when my son Jon was about 8 years old (~1990), he turned to me in the middle of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode on TV and asked, "Is this real?" Still, I think he's been pretty clear ever since then about reality vs. Hollywood.
...I'm a bit addicted to LOTRO (their acronym, not mine). I've never played WoW or EverQuest, so I can't compare it to them. But I like the sense of freedom on a known (Middle Earth) map. Having gotten myself up to Level 12, I'm now just wandering cross-country, heading towards the Misty Mountains. Based on what I've experienced so far, I suspect that I'm going to need to hook up with a few other folks to keep this up -- I'm running into some nasty MOBs.
..bruce..
While I did sign up for some crafts, I haven't done much with them so far...strikes me as a bit tedious, though I'm sure others will differ.
There is something vaguely silly about MMOs -- you have dozens of people running around, completing the same 'quests' or 'tasks'. This doesn't mean that it isn't fun as a game -- it just points out that the MMO's "immersive experience" doesn't really mimic in any real aspect what it would be like to live in such a fantasy setting (which, after all, would likely match Hobbs' famous description of life in the state of nature: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short).
The real test will be if I'm still playing it a month from now.
The three major innovations that have transformed broadcast TV in the last several years are: (1) PVRs; (2) DVD sets of TV series; (3) iTunes. There are very few first-run TV shows that I watch in real-time broadcast anymore, and not many that I keep up with during the season (such as it is).
..bruce..
We have a couple of Panasonic PVRs (one with an 80GB hard drive and ethernet port) for standard time-shifting and protection in case of interruption, but I even use those less and less. Typically what I have done is watch the first few episodes of the season, then once I get behind, I simply wait for the DVD set to come out at season's end.
However, even that is now shifting to buying episodes from iTunes -- and that's the real innovation. And now that my wife has a 30" cinema display on her Mac, it's not as though there's any real loss of quality. And, as with the DVDs, it's so nice not to have to even use the 'CM SKIP' button to jump over commercials.
I'm less convinced about the future of streaming video over the internet. We already have streaming video into homes: it's called cable and satellite. They have the bandwidth. The internet, as yet, does not, particularly at the final mile. While I'm a Netflix subscriber and fan, I haven't tried their streaming video service yet, and probably won't; if there's a movie I want to watch that badly, I'll order the DVD from Netflix (or simply buy a copy) and watch it on my living room TV.
The major innovation I'm waiting for is for a series to be financed in part or all by advance subscriptions. For example, suppose that SciFi decides not to pick up Battlestar Galactica for a fourth season. Then suppose that the production company offers to create a fourth season if enough people subscribe in advance, each paying, say, the combined cost of an iTunes 'season pass' and a complete DVD set. Those funds are held in escrow until the necessary amount is reached, and then the season goes into production. All subscribers get a season pass, a DVD set, and their names listed as 'associate producer' in a special credits feature on the DVD set. The production company could throw in some other perk as well; e.g., each subscriber gets a pass for two people to an end-of-season wrap party (yeah, it's a big party, but so what?). The next step would be for a production company to do this for a brand-new series and bypass broadcast TV altogether.
There was a brief, unsuccessful (and unauthorized) effort to resurrect Firefly this way, but that was pre-iTunes TV.
I think that within a few years, iTunes (and its competitors...does it have any competitors?...) will be selling first-run episodic video content of quality matching current TV shows but not appearing on TV (or only appearing after a delay -- sort of the reverse of what happens now, where a given TV episode becomes available on iTunes a day or two after initial broadcast). However, even that will require some bandwidth enhancements along the way; right now, with a solid broadband connection, it can take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes to download an 'hour-long' (typically 43-minute) episode. If iTunes is releasing first-run content on a weekly basis, then we can expect massive download spikes each time that occurs.
So, as per my title: if Bill Gates is just now saying that "internet will transform TV within 5 years", he's merely making an obvious statement rather than a perceptive or unexpected prediction. The net is already transforming TV.
I've also been a dedicated ThinkPad user since 2000 or so. I've owned three, all X-series to cut down on the weight of dragging my laptop around and to allow me to actually get work done in coach class. However, unlike some of the other posters here, I have had some mechanical problems with the ThinkPads; I've had to replace keyboards on two of them, the screen hinges on my current one (#3, have had it 2-3 years at least) are loosening, and the screen frame itself has popped a rivet. Beyond that, I have found in the last year or two that more and more when I travel on business that what I really need is a portable desktop system, i.e., lots of memory, lots of disk space, lots of processor power, and a large screen. This, of course, is mostly the antithesis of the ThinkPad X series. Beyond that, I've just been a little bit leery of how well quality has been maintained in the IBM -> Lenovo transition.
..bruce..
I did buy such a "portable desktop" laptop this week: a Fujitsu Lifebook N6410. Dual core T2400 @ 1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM (upgraded myself from 512KB), 80 GB hard drive + second hard drive bay (uses SATA laptop drives; be warned that it doesn't come with the bracing frame for the 2nd hard drive; I'm still working on that), full size keyboard + numeric pad, 17" display, stereo speakers + subwoofer, 256MB nVidia graphics (128MB dedicated/128MB shared), lots of ports, DVD-write drive, etc. Size of a boat anchor, weighs a ton, only lasts about 2 hours on battery, so it's definitely not my light, lithe ThinkPad X41, but it's right up there with all my desktop systems, and it's definitely easier than packing one of my Shuttles + a flat screen in a suitcase (which I've done before).
I'll see after a few trips whether and how much I miss my ThinkPad.
By the way, if you're looking at high-end laptops like this, avoid the Toshiba Satellite P105. I bought one earlier this week from Best Buy (the P105-S9312, w/2GB of RAM and a 200 GB hard drive), got it home, and promptly ran into problems: slow, flaky performance, occasional kernel faults, etc. I let it run all night and in the morning found it had powered itself down. When I powered it up, it went through three different kernel faults during bootup, rebooting each time, then finally got itself into WinXP--only to start reporting problems with previously working software. I tried four (4) times to do a system restore using the system restore disc--and had it fail each time. When I took it back to Best Buy to get my money back, I found that someone else had come in that same morning to exchange the same model. Not a good sign of high quality assurance. YMMV.
Sorry -- they're in the link in my comment. It's a rather lengthy posting I did a few weeks back on Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD and why their failure to agree on a common standard will probably marginalize them. In fact, even if they had agreed on a common standard, I think their market penetration would have been slow at best, because their advantages are not that obvious to the average consumer. ..bruce..
...because no one is going to be terribly eager to put up with this crap. Here are my own thoughts on the subject. ..bruce..
Yeah -- I hear you. Some 25 years ago, when I was writing game reviews for The Space Gamer, Steve Jackson (owner and publisher) had an official motto for all reviews and reviewers: "No turkeys". In other words, if a game was a turkey, we were to make sure the readers knew it was a turkey. Would that modern computer gaming magazines followed the same principles. ..bruce..
IIRC, Chris Crawford raised this exact question about 15-20 years ago. I find the question interesting since I don't believe in my ~30 years of playing computer games I've ever had one move me to tears. I've had movies do it, books do it, speeches do it, songs do it, and (sad to say) really-well-done-and-emotionally-manipulative TV commercials do it. But never a game.
..bruce..
Hmm.
I lived in Washington DC from July 1996 to August 1998, then from December 1999 to August 2005--a total of about seven years. During all that time, I subscribed to both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal; both would come every morning by 6 am, and I would eat breakfast standing up and going through both papers pretty thoroughly--paging through every section, scanning headlines, reading articles that interested me. I did this in spite of reviewing an increasing number of on-line news sites and blogs each day.
..bruce..
I moved to Parker, Colorado, in August 2005. Parker is about 25 miles from downtown Denver. My WSJ delivery shifted from early morning to coming in the mail--which meant that I got each day's edition in the afternoon, if I got it at all (sometimes it wouldn't come until the next day). I didn't even try to get the WP; instead, I signed up for a 'weekend' subscription to the Rocky Mountain News (largely for movie listings). And when my WSJ subscription came up for renewal, I let it lapse for this simple reason: by the time the WSJ came and I had a chance to read it, I had already been exposed to most of the news stories that interested me via the web.
I now have in my bookmarks roughly 140 news, information, commentary and blog sites, all of which I review at least once a day, and about 25% of which I review multiple times a day. I miss having the Post and the WSJ at my door before 6 am each morning; navigating their web sites is not as easy as reading the newspaper, and could I get them here that early, I would still subscribe to both, even at the combined rate of $200-300/year. But getting the WSJ in mid-afternoon just isn't worth it, and the Post would be even more delayed. So after a lifetime of reading newspapers (I'm 53), I've largely given up on them.