Some things are quicker on the command line. On any OS.
Just because you don't know how, don't want to learn how, or would rather use a mouse (delete as appropriate) doesn't alter the fact that I can manipulate text files much much faster on the command line than I can in a GUI.
Why would I install 17 GUI based network tools when I have them all already available on my command line (which is always open anyway).
I've been using GUIs since 1987. I've been using command lines since 1982. I still use both, on any OS I use (including my phone).
People that would rather waste worktime manipulating an inefficient pointing device to fill their screen real-estate with 'user friendly' imitations of the powerful tools available within a second of touching a keyboard.. ridiculous.
Your mac costs are frankly irrelevant. We're talking about a corporate context and at that point other costs start to matter far more
Just take maintenance of the desktop install base. Imaging, backup (generally not needed these days admittedly - everyone should be using network storage), hardware fixes/corrections, resolving software issues people have..
Those software issues can include driver support, roll-out of patches (humungous testing overhead), application installation problems, malware.
Then there's the whole compliance overhead. AV software, keyloggers, firewall configuration, locking down the desktop..
That's a lot of time, people and cost against which the hardware and OS costs are only a small fragment.
Yes, switch from $300 Windows desktops to $1500 Macs and someone from Finance will be querying your budget. But switch from $800 per year/user to $800 per year/user for TCO and Finance don't notice.
Of course, you then have the interesting discussions with your server teams about whether Mac supports their various services (email, single-sign-on, remote working, etc) and even more interesting discussions with the business about the constraints on their off-the-shelf application choices. But that's why everyone's switching to browser delivered apps anyway..
Thin terminals. I think I just made the case for thin terminal devices. Shit.
Ignore the book for a moment, and read the thoughts of leading software engineers.
What do Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Alistair Cockburn, Erich Gamma, Steve McConnell, Scot Ambler, Rob Martin, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas all say? Hit Google, do some 'free' exploration and reading.
Then read up on people's experience on these things. There are various mail lists, where people have tried these (and other techniques) and report their experiences.
You can reach the point fairly quickly where you can decide whether you want to give it a go or not. If you do, buy a book (or two, or three - Michael Feathers and Kent Beck have excellent books on this subject matter too) to help you get up to speed, but mainly, give it a go. Force yourself into the high-discipline "do it properly" frame of mind, give it a go for 2-3 months (ideally a full project) then decide whether it works for you.
If it does, keep doing it. If not, don't.
All good software engineers try that, continually, on anything that sounds interesting and might help. Sometimes a whole new process is adopted, but it's the little changes (unit testing, automated builds, design patterns... hell go back far enough and source code control was once new and scary) that add incremental value and turn programmers into software engineers that can reliably and consistently produce efficient maintainable working software.
Does your speaker have anything concrete with citations to back his assertions up, or is he happily dismissing one of the few genuine advances in software engineering in the last decade?
we found that the code developed using a test-driven development practice showed, during functional verification and regression tests, approximately 40% fewer defects than a baseline prior product developed in a more traditional fashion. The productivity of the team was not impacted by the additional focus on producing automated test cases. This test suite will aid in future enhancements and maintenance of this code.
A Spring 2003 experiment examines the claims that test-driven development or test-first programming improves software quality and programmer confidence. The results indicate support for these claims
Experimental results, subject to external validity concerns, tend to indicate that TDD programmers produce higher quality code because they passed 18% more functional black-box test cases.
We observed a significant increase in quality of the code (greater than two times) for projects developed using TDD compared to similar projects developed in the same organization in a non-TDD fashion.
In short, a cop gains no tactical or situational advantage by drawing his weapon but not firing. In real life, the movie standoff doesn't end with the criminal laying down his gun; it usually ends up much worse
If a highly trained (in the UK it's pretty much certain any firearms officer has had some serious training) man is pointing a gun at you, yelling at you to drop your weapon and/or sit down and/or some other relatively uncomplicated instruction, you can - ignore him, taking the risk he'll shoot and kill you, knowing that he's actually very capable of exactly that - try and shoot him first, knowing that even if you succeed his mate will probably kill you, and that your likely best outcome is that you'll get arrested and incarcerated - just do what he says, and accept that today wasn't your day
If you are faced by a policeman with no weapon drawn, you have a different set of options, a different set of outcomes and far more incentive to try something stupid.
Basically, the emotional impact and blatant threat of a drawn weapon is sufficient in itself to resolve many situations.
Not just you, I don't appear to have it in Firefox 3.5.7 or Windows/IE.
Unless I have a particular well written rootkit hiding from me that prevents display of that certificate but allows its continued use. I'm kind of guessing not.
If you read my other posts on this topic you'd see that I'm delighted with the phone, and realistic in my expectations of application support.
I have installed command line apps from Debian repositories. I have installed several of the apps available in the Maemo repositories (including dev and testing).
I also still hope that the device will be able to run Android apps _within Maemo_ as that will immediately give access to a significantly broader suite of apps designed for the mobile form factor.
Simple reality is that the n900 will never have as many purpose-written apps as Android phones, but as it's capable of running them (hardware; software will follow) it's not an either|or choice. I want both.
I don't think it's trolling to acknowledge that the n900 does not have particularly extensive app support yet, and especially when compared to the iPhone or to Android. I also don't think it'll ever match either, except as described above.
Maybe you disagree, but I am surprised by the ferocity of your disagreement.
I'm going to agree with you, while raising a third example that suggests you're wrong:)
Word play, particularly puns (much as I hate them), metaphor and its sordid cousin innuendo are excellent ways of telling people with a good command of the language (and thus more likely to be English speakers).
However, foreigners (especially with exposure to English language TV and films) can still match many natives in these areas.
The real test is the understanding of the language at a street level, where cultural references are made.
Almost nobody knows rhyming slang but most of us recognise its use and can adapt and interpret it. There are 17 different words for a small loaf of bread (i.e. a roll, a bun, a bap, a barm, a cob, etc), 6 of which only apply if it has a sausage in it.
However, maybe it's just my circles that nobody uses nuanced grammar ever - or that I automagically understand and interpret it, and thus don't realise how nuanced it is. As you can tell, I don't have a strong grasp of formal grammar myself.
Although I do like the screen and keyboard on the n900, it's not exactly a desktop replacement in that department.
It therefore benefits significantly from applications designed for the mobile form factor. Command line tools and general linux apps - good as they are - are not at their best in such a situation.
It's the difference between "I can do it" and "I want to do it". I want to have applications I want to use (but I'm too lazy to write them).
Obviously at a personal level it's all my own fault for being lazy. At a market level I think the n900 needs a lot more apps written for the platform, and ideally an Android VM providing access to the 20k apps written for that platform.
In the meantime I love the device for what it is; I just have a desire for it to be better.
My grammar was adequate for an informal discussion site (such as Slashdot) and I would use better sentence structure in a business document (such as the one I'm writing on another computer at the moment).
But I don't have a degree in English and I don't pretend to be particularly good at writing it. On the plus side, I do know how to spell 'superior'.
However, my point stands: people taught English as a second language tend to write better sentences than the English youth of today. And get off my lawn!
In the UK you aren't taught motorway driving, because it's illegal to drive on a motorway if you haven't passed your test.
Illogical perhaps, but most (all?) driving instructors will take pupils onto a dual-carriageway which pretty much has all the same characteristics as a motorway, including lane discipline, the speeds travelled and usually the central barrier/hard shoulder.
I know I hit 60 on my driving lessons on single-lane roads, and did 60 on dual carriageways. It took me a few hundred miles on motorways in my own car before I started going 70 on them anyway.
Reversing into a carpark/garage and parallel parking should all be taught. Even if it's not on the test, that's a specific instructor being incompetent and potentially fraudulent, not an issue with the system. It's unrealistic to expect driving tests to cover every possible manoeuvre.
Well, 2:1 is also a cut-off. A 2:2 Russell Group degree doesn't carry much more weight than a 2:1 at random ex-poly, and less than a 1st from one.
I know that's all very arbitrary, but I'm not making those decisions. It's recruiters (HR departments and recruitment firms) desperately latching on to any differentiator they can find that helps them with an initial filter of potential applicants.
I'd suggest you don't quote your grade - a BSc (Hons) from Birmingham sounds rather better than a 2:2 from Birmingham, and gets you that initial conversation where you can sell your non-academic experience too, and still maybe not have to share the actual degree grade.
Failing that, grab a random MSc - companies love people with posh letters after their name..
Indeed, much as I love to mock people from North America, on this occasion I can only emphasise.
Half the kids in Britain now expect to go to university, but haven't been taught how to prepare for it. Half the universities give out a degree for basically turning up. It's all now meaningless as a measure of achievement (employers no longer ask for a degree; they now ask for a degree from a small group of universities) and it provides a workforce that's never been taught useful skills.
I wont pretend they've never had to work hard, the whole ethos and approach seems to be geared at making people work harder at learning less. That's the irony; people are doing far more hours at university and coming out with a less valuable degree.
People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later.
People in England learn the street language and never get taught the grammar.
In online chat it's comical how often you can tell the 'Continental European speaking English' as opposed to the 'Native Brit or Irish person' purely from their superior grammar and spelling. That's particularly true for the younger age groups.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit
Hence the current Facebook protests that an exam asked questions that they hadn't been specifically taught the answers to. A comment quoted on national news was "that's 6 months of attending lessons wasted."
This worries me. People shouldn't be taught the test answers, they should be taught the basics in the subject and how to learn. The whole UK education system appears to be increasingly broken, and that (even more than the Government putting us into record debt) threatens the viability of the nation for the next few decades.
(Add it to the national debt and we're basically fucked.)
Or take the UK approach: 3 points on your driving licence.
You also get points for speeding, and other traffic violations.
Reach 12 points and you lose your driving licence. May be a 3 month ban, up to 2 years, potentially (but very rarely) more. Anything justifying a 2 year ban tends to come with a prison sentence attached.
Anybody can pay a fine, anybody can do a few hours community service, but being unable to (legally) drive for 3 months hurts, and even if you can afford a chauffeur being in prison hurts more.
Slashdot Mirror
Some things are quicker on the command line. On any OS.
Just because you don't know how, don't want to learn how, or would rather use a mouse (delete as appropriate) doesn't alter the fact that I can manipulate text files much much faster on the command line than I can in a GUI.
Why would I install 17 GUI based network tools when I have them all already available on my command line (which is always open anyway).
I've been using GUIs since 1987. I've been using command lines since 1982. I still use both, on any OS I use (including my phone).
People that would rather waste worktime manipulating an inefficient pointing device to fill their screen real-estate with 'user friendly' imitations of the powerful tools available within a second of touching a keyboard.. ridiculous.
Your mac costs are frankly irrelevant. We're talking about a corporate context and at that point other costs start to matter far more
Just take maintenance of the desktop install base. Imaging, backup (generally not needed these days admittedly - everyone should be using network storage), hardware fixes/corrections, resolving software issues people have..
Those software issues can include driver support, roll-out of patches (humungous testing overhead), application installation problems, malware.
Then there's the whole compliance overhead. AV software, keyloggers, firewall configuration, locking down the desktop..
That's a lot of time, people and cost against which the hardware and OS costs are only a small fragment.
Yes, switch from $300 Windows desktops to $1500 Macs and someone from Finance will be querying your budget. But switch from $800 per year/user to $800 per year/user for TCO and Finance don't notice.
Of course, you then have the interesting discussions with your server teams about whether Mac supports their various services (email, single-sign-on, remote working, etc) and even more interesting discussions with the business about the constraints on their off-the-shelf application choices. But that's why everyone's switching to browser delivered apps anyway..
Thin terminals. I think I just made the case for thin terminal devices. Shit.
Ignore the book for a moment, and read the thoughts of leading software engineers.
What do Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Alistair Cockburn, Erich Gamma, Steve McConnell, Scot Ambler, Rob Martin, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas all say? Hit Google, do some 'free' exploration and reading.
Then read up on people's experience on these things. There are various mail lists, where people have tried these (and other techniques) and report their experiences.
You can reach the point fairly quickly where you can decide whether you want to give it a go or not. If you do, buy a book (or two, or three - Michael Feathers and Kent Beck have excellent books on this subject matter too) to help you get up to speed, but mainly, give it a go. Force yourself into the high-discipline "do it properly" frame of mind, give it a go for 2-3 months (ideally a full project) then decide whether it works for you.
If it does, keep doing it. If not, don't.
All good software engineers try that, continually, on anything that sounds interesting and might help. Sometimes a whole new process is adopted, but it's the little changes (unit testing, automated builds, design patterns... hell go back far enough and source code control was once new and scary) that add incremental value and turn programmers into software engineers that can reliably and consistently produce efficient maintainable working software.
Does your speaker have anything concrete with citations to back his assertions up, or is he happily dismissing one of the few genuine advances in software engineering in the last decade?
we found that the code developed using a test-driven development practice showed, during functional verification and regression tests, approximately 40% fewer defects than a baseline prior product developed in a more traditional fashion. The productivity of the team was not impacted by the additional focus on producing automated test cases. This test suite will aid in future enhancements and maintenance of this code.
-- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.129.7992&rep=rep1&type=pdf
A Spring 2003 experiment examines the claims that test-driven development or test-first programming improves software quality and programmer confidence. The results indicate support for these claims
-- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=949421
Experimental results, subject to external validity concerns, tend to indicate that TDD programmers produce higher quality code because they passed 18% more functional black-box test cases.
-- http://qwer.org/tdd-study
We observed a significant increase in quality of the code (greater than two times) for projects developed using TDD compared to similar projects developed in the same organization in a non-TDD fashion.
-- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1159733.1159787
My apologies for the rough and ready citations, I only picked the ones I could find on the first fucking page of Google search results.
Incidentally, I'd like to apologise for the unnecessary and inaccurate apostrophe.
Curious, I thought the US had two houses so that one can act as the brake on the other.
This is why the UK have two houses. We also have a Supreme Court.
SCOTUS can strike down a bad law; the House of Lords' can prevent one being passed in the first place.
In short, a cop gains no tactical or situational advantage by drawing his weapon but not firing. In real life, the movie standoff doesn't end with the criminal laying down his gun; it usually ends up much worse
If a highly trained (in the UK it's pretty much certain any firearms officer has had some serious training) man is pointing a gun at you, yelling at you to drop your weapon and/or sit down and/or some other relatively uncomplicated instruction, you can
- ignore him, taking the risk he'll shoot and kill you, knowing that he's actually very capable of exactly that
- try and shoot him first, knowing that even if you succeed his mate will probably kill you, and that your likely best outcome is that you'll get arrested and incarcerated
- just do what he says, and accept that today wasn't your day
If you are faced by a policeman with no weapon drawn, you have a different set of options, a different set of outcomes and far more incentive to try something stupid.
Basically, the emotional impact and blatant threat of a drawn weapon is sufficient in itself to resolve many situations.
Sadly where I am most ranges disallow handguns.
Stupid fucking Dunblane over-reaction..
Fucking catholics.
Not sure, but I have Quake for my Nokia n900. It uses the tilt sensor for mouse-look, which is impressively usable too.
The daft thing is that I asked the question in all seriousness, thinking "wtf have the security guys come up with now?!"
Not just you, I don't appear to have it in Firefox 3.5.7 or Windows/IE.
Unless I have a particular well written rootkit hiding from me that prevents display of that certificate but allows its continued use. I'm kind of guessing not.
What's a MiTH attack? Man in ..?
If you read my other posts on this topic you'd see that I'm delighted with the phone, and realistic in my expectations of application support.
I have installed command line apps from Debian repositories. I have installed several of the apps available in the Maemo repositories (including dev and testing).
I also still hope that the device will be able to run Android apps _within Maemo_ as that will immediately give access to a significantly broader suite of apps designed for the mobile form factor.
Simple reality is that the n900 will never have as many purpose-written apps as Android phones, but as it's capable of running them (hardware; software will follow) it's not an either|or choice. I want both.
I don't think it's trolling to acknowledge that the n900 does not have particularly extensive app support yet, and especially when compared to the iPhone or to Android. I also don't think it'll ever match either, except as described above.
Maybe you disagree, but I am surprised by the ferocity of your disagreement.
So 200 apps vs 20,000? Please..
I'm going to agree with you, while raising a third example that suggests you're wrong :)
Word play, particularly puns (much as I hate them), metaphor and its sordid cousin innuendo are excellent ways of telling people with a good command of the language (and thus more likely to be English speakers).
However, foreigners (especially with exposure to English language TV and films) can still match many natives in these areas.
The real test is the understanding of the language at a street level, where cultural references are made.
Almost nobody knows rhyming slang but most of us recognise its use and can adapt and interpret it. There are 17 different words for a small loaf of bread (i.e. a roll, a bun, a bap, a barm, a cob, etc), 6 of which only apply if it has a sausage in it.
However, maybe it's just my circles that nobody uses nuanced grammar ever - or that I automagically understand and interpret it, and thus don't realise how nuanced it is. As you can tell, I don't have a strong grasp of formal grammar myself.
Although I do like the screen and keyboard on the n900, it's not exactly a desktop replacement in that department.
It therefore benefits significantly from applications designed for the mobile form factor. Command line tools and general linux apps - good as they are - are not at their best in such a situation.
It's the difference between "I can do it" and "I want to do it". I want to have applications I want to use (but I'm too lazy to write them).
Obviously at a personal level it's all my own fault for being lazy. At a market level I think the n900 needs a lot more apps written for the platform, and ideally an Android VM providing access to the 20k apps written for that platform.
In the meantime I love the device for what it is; I just have a desire for it to be better.
Whoa - where?
I want an Android VM for Maemo, hooked into the phone hardware. Then it's the best phone on the market bar none.
As it is, it's the best phone on the market except for the application support; I'm still hoping that comes good.
Ironic perhaps, rather than sarcastic.
My grammar was adequate for an informal discussion site (such as Slashdot) and I would use better sentence structure in a business document (such as the one I'm writing on another computer at the moment).
But I don't have a degree in English and I don't pretend to be particularly good at writing it. On the plus side, I do know how to spell 'superior'.
However, my point stands: people taught English as a second language tend to write better sentences than the English youth of today. And get off my lawn!
In the UK you aren't taught motorway driving, because it's illegal to drive on a motorway if you haven't passed your test.
Illogical perhaps, but most (all?) driving instructors will take pupils onto a dual-carriageway which pretty much has all the same characteristics as a motorway, including lane discipline, the speeds travelled and usually the central barrier/hard shoulder.
I know I hit 60 on my driving lessons on single-lane roads, and did 60 on dual carriageways. It took me a few hundred miles on motorways in my own car before I started going 70 on them anyway.
Reversing into a carpark/garage and parallel parking should all be taught. Even if it's not on the test, that's a specific instructor being incompetent and potentially fraudulent, not an issue with the system. It's unrealistic to expect driving tests to cover every possible manoeuvre.
Well, 2:1 is also a cut-off. A 2:2 Russell Group degree doesn't carry much more weight than a 2:1 at random ex-poly, and less than a 1st from one.
I know that's all very arbitrary, but I'm not making those decisions. It's recruiters (HR departments and recruitment firms) desperately latching on to any differentiator they can find that helps them with an initial filter of potential applicants.
I'd suggest you don't quote your grade - a BSc (Hons) from Birmingham sounds rather better than a 2:2 from Birmingham, and gets you that initial conversation where you can sell your non-academic experience too, and still maybe not have to share the actual degree grade.
Failing that, grab a random MSc - companies love people with posh letters after their name..
Yeah, I did mean 'empathise'. The ellipsis however can go fuck itself.. :)
Indeed, much as I love to mock people from North America, on this occasion I can only emphasise.
Half the kids in Britain now expect to go to university, but haven't been taught how to prepare for it. Half the universities give out a degree for basically turning up. It's all now meaningless as a measure of achievement (employers no longer ask for a degree; they now ask for a degree from a small group of universities) and it provides a workforce that's never been taught useful skills.
I wont pretend they've never had to work hard, the whole ethos and approach seems to be geared at making people work harder at learning less. That's the irony; people are doing far more hours at university and coming out with a less valuable degree.
Nobody is winning this one..
People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later.
People in England learn the street language and never get taught the grammar.
In online chat it's comical how often you can tell the 'Continental European speaking English' as opposed to the 'Native Brit or Irish person' purely from their superior grammar and spelling. That's particularly true for the younger age groups.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit
Hence the current Facebook protests that an exam asked questions that they hadn't been specifically taught the answers to. A comment quoted on national news was "that's 6 months of attending lessons wasted."
This worries me. People shouldn't be taught the test answers, they should be taught the basics in the subject and how to learn. The whole UK education system appears to be increasingly broken, and that (even more than the Government putting us into record debt) threatens the viability of the nation for the next few decades.
(Add it to the national debt and we're basically fucked.)
Or take the UK approach: 3 points on your driving licence.
You also get points for speeding, and other traffic violations.
Reach 12 points and you lose your driving licence. May be a 3 month ban, up to 2 years, potentially (but very rarely) more. Anything justifying a 2 year ban tends to come with a prison sentence attached.
Anybody can pay a fine, anybody can do a few hours community service, but being unable to (legally) drive for 3 months hurts, and even if you can afford a chauffeur being in prison hurts more.