1) SELECT * FROM gnu WHERE gnu NOT IN ('Unix', 'Linux', 'Windows', 'Mac OS'....);
2) Stallman makes some good points, sometimes. But I believe that he and Linus differ in their mindsets. Linus is a coder and is primarily concerned with that. Stallman is definitely more politically minded. He assumes that everyone is concerned with the ethics of software and what it means for software to be free. While I dont disagree with freely available software (and by freely available I mean free to use, change, and distribute said changes), I disagree with anyone with the approach that "My approach is the most correct." Im not suggesting that RMS is correct or not in what he preaches. He's obviously free to have his own opinion. However, I believe that his goal is virtually unattainable as the masses are going to do whatever they want, regardless of someone saying otherwise. But I am ultimately of the opinion that the best tool for the job is the right choice, regardless of what it costs. If you're not happy with something, you certainly have the option of writing something yourself. The choice should definitely be up to YOU.
GoDaddy and MySpace both are wrong about what happened here, in some cases. MySpace has a legit claim about protecting usernames and passwords. They were wrong for first reporting to GoDaddy, when they really should have went through channels, just like everyone else. Personally, they should be taking better stance on security, but with the popularity of MySpace as of late, it probably wont do a lot of good. Its going to get hit more than the school nerd by the football team.
GoDaddy is also in the wrong for acting so fast without having investigated to see that the proper channels were taken. GoDaddy's Terms and Conditions states that they can pull your domain at any time without reason or notice. Keep in mind that the guy who runs seclists.org states that he was indeed contacted. However, GoDaddy is also wrong for not giving him enough of a chance to respond prior to pulling his domain.
There are definitely quirks in the system. Someone obviously needs to put MySpace in their place. GoDaddy should definitely do something to better serve the customer in instances like this. And the customer should definitely be held accountable for the content of his site, especially when users submit information. If you're not watching the content being submitted to be sure that it complies with terms and conditions that you agreed to, then in my opinion, responsibility (at least some) should fall there.
Terms and conditions are essentially a contract/license for use. If you violate those terms, then the provider has the right to pull your services. Thats just like if you dont pay your cable bill, the cable provider has every right to pull your service until you're in compliance. How is this different than someone submitting other illegal materials and having services suspended because of said illegal material? Im not saying that anyone is right here, just that people shouldnt be so surprised when this kind of thing happens as a result of a violation of said terms.
Im not sure I understand how this is a freedom of speech issue though. Granted the guy should have had the opportunity to respond appropriately, which Im sure he would have complied with no problems.
I think they're all wrong. Perhaps the lesson here is that when you read "You agree that we have the right to change these terms from time to time" in a terms and conditions statement from a service provider that you think twice before agreeing and if you do agree, expect some things to possibly show up that you may not agree with.
We use a similar setup in our company. Ideally we have three environments, Development, QA and Deployment. Obviously, all development is done in DEV. Once we've completed the project and have done our own internal QA in Development (which we pass all projects to another developer to test), we send the changes to QA, where they are tested again. Once everything has been signed off by QA, we cut a deployment environment, which consists of the signed off QA release, plus any deployment scripting that needs to be done. Any documentation needed for deployment is generated at this time. Once our deployment environment is completed, we send it to our technical staff, who actually installs the release. One thing we've tried to be consistent on is how releases are installed. Major releases are generally the same, so a lot of the documentation from a previous major release carries over. Same with minor releases. Usually our minor releases are structurally the same, so the documentation doesnt change much.
There are still a lot of issues with what we do in our company. From reading other comments, I fully agree that any release should be automated. Installing a release should not be too complicated, where there are 75 installation steps in order to complete the installation. It seems to me you would want an automated installation with logging, that logs any errors in copying files, as well as any errors as a result of scripting. So when you finally complete the deployment of a release and pass it to whomever is installing it, you hand them a CD and say, "Hit next a few times and here's the log file in case there are problems." There are a couple of additional things here to remember. 1)Always take a backup. No matter how failsafe you make a release, there is always the possibility of a problem occurring and should always have a way to revert back to a previous version. 2)It seems to be that any IT dept/Technical Dept is a bridge between every department within a software company and would need someone who has a good background in all things IT, including development. If you dont have this and cant afford this, my suggestion is to stay up to date with what is happening in the application cycle as a whole. In order to support something, you have to understand how it works and what the possibilities of failure are, if there are any. Im not saying that IT people have to code, but they should at least understand the technical processes behind whatever is being released.
In the end, Development is just another part of information technology and whether you have someone who is well rounded, who understands technical as well as development, or someone who works with development to understand the pieces needed to support an application, the goal is the same for every department involved in the application and thats design, develop, deploy and support the application, in all aspects.
We fight with deployment all the time. Since we're a small shop with limited staff, our processes arent perfected and I dont believe they ever will. But we get better with each release. Consistency and teamwork is the key. Without either, deployments are going to be a pain for all parties involved.
I agree that in the US, there is no such Computer Science course, at least not that I know of. Budgeting education in this country is not done correctly in my opinion. More focus is placed on Math and Science rather than critical thinking.
At the college level, I am in agreement that something like this should be done. One of the goals of a course that Ive described would be grill the prof during the development of the project.
This is exactly the skillset that I think all CS majors should have experience with before graduating. Because all of these things are going to come into play as you work on a large project, whether it be a proprietary project or open source.
Programming assignments are good for conveying conceptual information, but thats it, in my opinion. There really is usually no substance to them, and are usually never tested beyond the "grading" process. I agree with another comment I read where during the second year or so, a project should be written, then forgotten about, asking the student to come back and maintain it. This is a very useful idea as we usually spend a good deal of time maintaining old code, and even though the urge to re-write the bad code is there, sometimes, you have to fix what is there because there isnt enough time to get the right code out the door to the customer.
This is exactly what I would like to see at Walsh University (the school I went to). Producing something that is useful is definitely a good goal to have, and might make students taking such a course feel better about the course if they're writing something that is being used. I certainly know I would feel better about it if I were writing something that was useful to someone. I took a quick gander at the site you posted, and it seems like a decent program.
I know I would certainly like to see more encouragement from the CS staff at the college I went to. Working on an open source project was never something we were encouraged to do. The only reason I could see for the lack of encouragement is that when in college, the profs expect you to study.
At the college I went to, the Computer Science program hasnt been in existence that long, and is not a popular program, as other programs are pushed (such as Nursing, and Business). However, I think such a course should be standard. Taking this course would allow a student to apply everything they've learned in all of their other courses and give them an idea of what an actual development cycle is like.
This is one area where I had to learn this skill in the real world. And because I do all of my work programming in a proprietary language (Compuware's Uniface), there are no (that I know of) unit testing packages to test software. There was some focus on testing software but not a lot of concentration was placed on it. One of the things I was thinking about for the course I described earlier is going through the QA process, where testing is done not only by a professor but also by students to develop their testing skills. Anyone who's done any kind of programming knows that the better your testing skills are, the more robust the software will be...unless you're Microsoft.
I also installed IE7 last night and found a couple of things.
1) CSS Support sucks in IE7, as if it didnt already suck. On a forum I go to on a regular basis, I noticed that the CSS that would normally display content on the left displayed it in the center. While I am not familiar with how the CSS is coded on this site, it looked unusual to me, as it displays content on the left just fine in firefox and ie6 with no problems. Did not test in Opera. Found other issues with CSS on several other sites as well, such as MySpace and Digg. I realize that Microsoft feels that they can create their own standards in many cases, but I really feel that they could make a step in the right direction and do something for the entire community by making it easier for web developers to create websites that work cross browser without all of the "hacking" that is required to make sites compliant with IE.
2) The Quick Tabs feature is essentially useless in my opinion. While it is a neat thing, it probably could have waited.
There are a lot of really great designs coming in that i have enjoyed looking at. However, I think one thing should be noted here. The placement of the login in the header next to the Slashdot logo I think is a wonderful idea. However, Ive noticed on some of the designs (as well as the current Slashdot design) that the login form and the Login menu section on the left are completely separate, which seems to me to be a bit awkward for new people who may be interested in signing up for a Slashdot account. I know some people will be like, they're n00bs, who cares. But it seems to me that all of this information should be together. With the login section in the footer, this might look funny having links below the form boxes, but Im sure it could be done. Whether the login information is on the left or the right, it really doesnt matter, as long as it is together.
Just a polite suggestion.
Ahh, deadlines, where would we be without them. Personally, I think that deadlines are the catch 22 of software development. With a strict deadline, you sacrifice quality. However, with a loose deadline, you sacrifice a product to your customer, which then sacrifices money coming into the company, which sacrifices your paycheck and even your job.
Deadlines definitely have their place in the world, but I also believe that they should be loose enough to give you time to get a secure, thoroughly tested, and correct version of software out to the customer. Either that or a signed paper that says you're not responsible for anything you code because you were told to get the product out on time. However, that thought is incredibly naive at best.
Slashdot Mirror
1) SELECT * FROM gnu WHERE gnu NOT IN ('Unix', 'Linux', 'Windows', 'Mac OS'....);
2) Stallman makes some good points, sometimes. But I believe that he and Linus differ in their mindsets. Linus is a coder and is primarily concerned with that. Stallman is definitely more politically minded. He assumes that everyone is concerned with the ethics of software and what it means for software to be free. While I dont disagree with freely available software (and by freely available I mean free to use, change, and distribute said changes), I disagree with anyone with the approach that "My approach is the most correct." Im not suggesting that RMS is correct or not in what he preaches. He's obviously free to have his own opinion. However, I believe that his goal is virtually unattainable as the masses are going to do whatever they want, regardless of someone saying otherwise. But I am ultimately of the opinion that the best tool for the job is the right choice, regardless of what it costs. If you're not happy with something, you certainly have the option of writing something yourself. The choice should definitely be up to YOU.
GoDaddy and MySpace both are wrong about what happened here, in some cases. MySpace has a legit claim about protecting usernames and passwords. They were wrong for first reporting to GoDaddy, when they really should have went through channels, just like everyone else. Personally, they should be taking better stance on security, but with the popularity of MySpace as of late, it probably wont do a lot of good. Its going to get hit more than the school nerd by the football team. GoDaddy is also in the wrong for acting so fast without having investigated to see that the proper channels were taken. GoDaddy's Terms and Conditions states that they can pull your domain at any time without reason or notice. Keep in mind that the guy who runs seclists.org states that he was indeed contacted. However, GoDaddy is also wrong for not giving him enough of a chance to respond prior to pulling his domain. There are definitely quirks in the system. Someone obviously needs to put MySpace in their place. GoDaddy should definitely do something to better serve the customer in instances like this. And the customer should definitely be held accountable for the content of his site, especially when users submit information. If you're not watching the content being submitted to be sure that it complies with terms and conditions that you agreed to, then in my opinion, responsibility (at least some) should fall there. Terms and conditions are essentially a contract/license for use. If you violate those terms, then the provider has the right to pull your services. Thats just like if you dont pay your cable bill, the cable provider has every right to pull your service until you're in compliance. How is this different than someone submitting other illegal materials and having services suspended because of said illegal material? Im not saying that anyone is right here, just that people shouldnt be so surprised when this kind of thing happens as a result of a violation of said terms. Im not sure I understand how this is a freedom of speech issue though. Granted the guy should have had the opportunity to respond appropriately, which Im sure he would have complied with no problems. I think they're all wrong. Perhaps the lesson here is that when you read "You agree that we have the right to change these terms from time to time" in a terms and conditions statement from a service provider that you think twice before agreeing and if you do agree, expect some things to possibly show up that you may not agree with.
We use a similar setup in our company. Ideally we have three environments, Development, QA and Deployment. Obviously, all development is done in DEV. Once we've completed the project and have done our own internal QA in Development (which we pass all projects to another developer to test), we send the changes to QA, where they are tested again. Once everything has been signed off by QA, we cut a deployment environment, which consists of the signed off QA release, plus any deployment scripting that needs to be done. Any documentation needed for deployment is generated at this time. Once our deployment environment is completed, we send it to our technical staff, who actually installs the release. One thing we've tried to be consistent on is how releases are installed. Major releases are generally the same, so a lot of the documentation from a previous major release carries over. Same with minor releases. Usually our minor releases are structurally the same, so the documentation doesnt change much.
There are still a lot of issues with what we do in our company. From reading other comments, I fully agree that any release should be automated. Installing a release should not be too complicated, where there are 75 installation steps in order to complete the installation. It seems to me you would want an automated installation with logging, that logs any errors in copying files, as well as any errors as a result of scripting. So when you finally complete the deployment of a release and pass it to whomever is installing it, you hand them a CD and say, "Hit next a few times and here's the log file in case there are problems." There are a couple of additional things here to remember. 1)Always take a backup. No matter how failsafe you make a release, there is always the possibility of a problem occurring and should always have a way to revert back to a previous version. 2)It seems to be that any IT dept/Technical Dept is a bridge between every department within a software company and would need someone who has a good background in all things IT, including development. If you dont have this and cant afford this, my suggestion is to stay up to date with what is happening in the application cycle as a whole. In order to support something, you have to understand how it works and what the possibilities of failure are, if there are any. Im not saying that IT people have to code, but they should at least understand the technical processes behind whatever is being released.
In the end, Development is just another part of information technology and whether you have someone who is well rounded, who understands technical as well as development, or someone who works with development to understand the pieces needed to support an application, the goal is the same for every department involved in the application and thats design, develop, deploy and support the application, in all aspects.
We fight with deployment all the time. Since we're a small shop with limited staff, our processes arent perfected and I dont believe they ever will. But we get better with each release. Consistency and teamwork is the key. Without either, deployments are going to be a pain for all parties involved.
I agree that in the US, there is no such Computer Science course, at least not that I know of. Budgeting education in this country is not done correctly in my opinion. More focus is placed on Math and Science rather than critical thinking. At the college level, I am in agreement that something like this should be done. One of the goals of a course that Ive described would be grill the prof during the development of the project.
This is exactly the skillset that I think all CS majors should have experience with before graduating. Because all of these things are going to come into play as you work on a large project, whether it be a proprietary project or open source. Programming assignments are good for conveying conceptual information, but thats it, in my opinion. There really is usually no substance to them, and are usually never tested beyond the "grading" process. I agree with another comment I read where during the second year or so, a project should be written, then forgotten about, asking the student to come back and maintain it. This is a very useful idea as we usually spend a good deal of time maintaining old code, and even though the urge to re-write the bad code is there, sometimes, you have to fix what is there because there isnt enough time to get the right code out the door to the customer.
This is exactly what I would like to see at Walsh University (the school I went to). Producing something that is useful is definitely a good goal to have, and might make students taking such a course feel better about the course if they're writing something that is being used. I certainly know I would feel better about it if I were writing something that was useful to someone. I took a quick gander at the site you posted, and it seems like a decent program.
I know I would certainly like to see more encouragement from the CS staff at the college I went to. Working on an open source project was never something we were encouraged to do. The only reason I could see for the lack of encouragement is that when in college, the profs expect you to study.
At the college I went to, the Computer Science program hasnt been in existence that long, and is not a popular program, as other programs are pushed (such as Nursing, and Business). However, I think such a course should be standard. Taking this course would allow a student to apply everything they've learned in all of their other courses and give them an idea of what an actual development cycle is like.
This is one area where I had to learn this skill in the real world. And because I do all of my work programming in a proprietary language (Compuware's Uniface), there are no (that I know of) unit testing packages to test software. There was some focus on testing software but not a lot of concentration was placed on it. One of the things I was thinking about for the course I described earlier is going through the QA process, where testing is done not only by a professor but also by students to develop their testing skills. Anyone who's done any kind of programming knows that the better your testing skills are, the more robust the software will be...unless you're Microsoft.
Thats because it does stand for Hypertext Preprocessor.
I also installed IE7 last night and found a couple of things.
1) CSS Support sucks in IE7, as if it didnt already suck. On a forum I go to on a regular basis, I noticed that the CSS that would normally display content on the left displayed it in the center. While I am not familiar with how the CSS is coded on this site, it looked unusual to me, as it displays content on the left just fine in firefox and ie6 with no problems. Did not test in Opera. Found other issues with CSS on several other sites as well, such as MySpace and Digg. I realize that Microsoft feels that they can create their own standards in many cases, but I really feel that they could make a step in the right direction and do something for the entire community by making it easier for web developers to create websites that work cross browser without all of the "hacking" that is required to make sites compliant with IE.
2) The Quick Tabs feature is essentially useless in my opinion. While it is a neat thing, it probably could have waited.
There are a lot of really great designs coming in that i have enjoyed looking at. However, I think one thing should be noted here. The placement of the login in the header next to the Slashdot logo I think is a wonderful idea. However, Ive noticed on some of the designs (as well as the current Slashdot design) that the login form and the Login menu section on the left are completely separate, which seems to me to be a bit awkward for new people who may be interested in signing up for a Slashdot account. I know some people will be like, they're n00bs, who cares. But it seems to me that all of this information should be together. With the login section in the footer, this might look funny having links below the form boxes, but Im sure it could be done. Whether the login information is on the left or the right, it really doesnt matter, as long as it is together. Just a polite suggestion.
Ahh, deadlines, where would we be without them. Personally, I think that deadlines are the catch 22 of software development. With a strict deadline, you sacrifice quality. However, with a loose deadline, you sacrifice a product to your customer, which then sacrifices money coming into the company, which sacrifices your paycheck and even your job. Deadlines definitely have their place in the world, but I also believe that they should be loose enough to give you time to get a secure, thoroughly tested, and correct version of software out to the customer. Either that or a signed paper that says you're not responsible for anything you code because you were told to get the product out on time. However, that thought is incredibly naive at best.