Re:The problem is: that's not the problem
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 1
The problem is getting the knowledge to the people. And a way to measure/grade the knowledge of an individual. There is a huge distance from the average Wintel "programmer" to the "real" Computer Science world.
Next to that we need a way to have the outside world/employers to be able to tell the difference between the 10 lines VB programmer and the video driver programmer. (just trying to think of somewhere that efficiency counts) To most people both are "programmers".
I do think that although wintel has made computers affordable, its short-term gain focus has had some very nasty side-effects. I experience everyday the long term cost of cutting corners, and the short-term cost of doing things "right". It's very difficult to balance both, and unfortunately the decissionmakers are not able to make a well-informed decission. (you say it's crap, but it looks fine to me, so I sold it already / you're not a good programmer because we're getting all these complaints.)
Re:The problem is: that's not the problem
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 1
Your problem is that once computers were so expensive only smart people were allowed to program on them, today everyone can buy one and program some. (remember BASIC) I think there should be a movement in de software community for programmer validation. I mean if you want to practice law you have to get a degree, if you want to be an official XX repair shop, you have to have a certificate. I think we're going into that direction but the field is to young. We first have to figure out what are the right ways to do it. UML, Design Patters, OO, you name it. But I do think there is progress in software still, only maybe you're not at a site where it's happening anymore. Something like the field of Software Architecture wasn't around 10-15 years ago. Software Engineering is 20-25 years old. The move no longer is towards more efficient code, most compilers are efficient enough if you know how to use them properly. The move is towards being able to design and manage software of a complexity and scale of a whole new magnitude.
>They should just rename the internet the Itnerent, the spelling's so >bad.... Ask your grandfather to read the same passage you breeze >through and watch the cursing begin. See my piont?
My grandfather would not be able to read it at all, as he does not speak or read English. A lot of spelling errors in the internet are caused by people not using their prime language, like I am doing right now.
How much spelling errors would you make in Russian or Chineese? See mypoint?
Hmmm, maybe my summer holydays should be used to visit Norway afterall...
Greetings from the Netherlands.
Adriaan.
Starting something is easy, maintaining is not
on
Too Much Free Software
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's widely known in the software engineering field that Maintenance of a software product constitutes op to 80% of it's cost. (source:"OO and Classical Software Engineering", S.R.Schach) This is because the further a program has developed, the harder it get's to maintain and to prevent regression fault intoduction.
From experience I know it's easy to whip something up esp. in a RAD environment quite fast. But getting from a product that does what it has to do most of the time, to a product that includes: manuals, error-handling, fault tollerance, user-friendly GUI, help-files, consistent clear code and design, well documented code, is very hard, and takes a lot of effort. A lot of coders are not even trained to take these points into account when programming in my opinion.
In my view that's why a lot of OS projects never get the above list completed, even if they do have most of the desired core functions.
FORWARD COMPATIBILITY is what I like about WordPerfect, I can use my WordPerfect 10/2002 on Windows, or WordPerfect 8 on Linux, but my dad on his old trusty 486 with WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS can still read and edit my files. And I don't have to do "Save As". They only changed their fileformat from 5 to 6.
I beleive there is a program to make WinCE divices (Palm anyone) work as a universal remote, or otherwise a PC with the apropriate IR led & some electronics on the parallel port would do the same thing. Oh now I've given it away: computers are circumvention devices...
You are talking about the low level format you could do on MFM and RLL drives, to get the interleave right. This was done by invoking the format program stored in the BIOS of your harddisk controller, most of the time it would the code would be at adress C0000 or C8000, C0000 = 784kb, thus well above the 640kb DOS used. with debug you could start running code at any memory address. After IDE and the 286 came along this was no longer necessairy, as the 286 was fast enough to work without interleave, and the harddisk BIOS was no longer a separate BIOS, but you could do your Harddisk settings in the normal BIOS, thus all HD's now ship with an interleave of 1, and you can no longer do a low level format on a drive.
Adriaan
also posted here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50351&c id=5057 672
I only found this reference: (Tim is Tim Wisseman, the creator of vgaplanets)
To date Tim has only had 2 lawsuit threats, one from Microprose and one from Starcrossed Software. Microprose wanted all rights to VGA Planets, there was a lot of hot air over a slander case against me for something that he apparently said about Master of Orion (MOO). Tim says there was nothing to what he said about MOO, they were just trying to scare me into tuming VGA Planets over to them and in the end they offered me $7,000 for all rights. MOO came out after version 3.0 of VGAP and Tim got a case of MOO's from them... he feels they were "Bad Cop" / "Good Cop"ing him. He feels there is nothing to sue them for.... it is more likely MS will sue him over "Reach for the Stars", it came out like 15 years ago, it is supposed to be just like Planets although he has never seen it.
VGA planets was at version 3.0 in 1992, it already had it's own newsgroup alt.games.vga-planets in 1992. I have no idea how old the first version of vga planets is, but it certainly predates MOO. I can't find the source but I have once read that Tim Wisseman was living across the street from Mircoprose around the time MOO came out, and had handed some of their employees copies of the new vga-planets 3.0 some time before that... I think it's about 5 years ago I've read that, I can't find it anymore. I'll check out this Spaceward Ho! It get's mentioned a lot in old newsgroup postings together with vga-planets.
You are talking about the low level format you could do on MFM and RLL drives, to get the interleave right. This was done by invoking the format program stored in the BIOS of your harddisk controller, most of the time it would the code would be at adress C0000 or C8000, C0000 = 784kb, thus well above the 640kb DOS used. with debug you could start running code at any memory address. After IDE and the 286 came along this was no longer necessairy, as the 286 was fast enough to work without interleave, and the harddisk BIOS was no longer a separate BIOS, but you could do your Harddisk settings in the normal BIOS, thus all HD's now ship with an interleave of 1, and you can no longer do a low level format on a drive.
Yup, i've got one of those 286/20 still running;-) I've never had an Intel Chip. NEC V20 at 8 Mhz. (8086 like) AMD 286 at 20 Mhz. AMD 386 at 40 Mhz. Cyrix 486Dx4 at 100 Mhz. Cyrix P166+ at 133 Mhz. AMD K6-2 at 300 Mhz. (3 x 100 Mhz;-) AMD Duron at 700 Mhz. AMD Athlon at 1.4 GHz.
And the 386 died some time ago, the P166+ i've sold, the rest is still alive and exept for the 286 and V20 are still in use. The 286 and the NEC only get booted for nostalgia reasons every now and then.
Any of you people who like MOO should check out the play by e-mail game vga-planets. As the story goes MOO was more or less born when the it's creators were playing vga-planets 2.0 beta. The game is now at version 4. try http://www.vga-planets.com I started playing this game since version 3.0. (1994) And it's been my best investment ever.
Have you ever tried the Borland C++ Builder for GUI C++ work? Or the Kylix C++ version on linux? I have worked with VC++ 5, 6, BCB 3, 4, 5, and find the Borland products very easy for GUI design compared to the MicroSoft products. I have no experience with.Net yet. I have no connection with Borland, I just use their product sometimes.
FYI I live in the Netherlands, a country with strict firearms control. I have my numbers from our goverment bureau of statistics http://www.cbs.nl/nl/cijfers/kernc ijfers/index.htm
I am not going to quote all the number you have, I just want to compare the numbers of homocides. 16,137 / 260 million USA inhabitants = 62/million 180 / 16 million Dutch inhabitants = 11 / million
And the total number of accidental deaths, which might be less dependant on firearm availability, as a comparison. 93,592 / 260 million USA inhabitants = 359/million 3345 / 16 million Dutch inhabitants = 210 / million
I don't know what to make of these statistics, but for now I rather live in my own country.
In my company the contract is such that if we take the job for a fixed price, and the risks are ours, then the copyright of the product is ours too, and the client can only use the product. If the client pays us for every hour it takes to develop the product, then we are effectively temporairily his employee, and the client owns anything we have produced, but also has the risks if the project goes over budget or scedule.
Uhm, like Borland Delphi/ C++ Builder / Kylix / JBuilder have been doing for the past 6-7 years ?? I have both used VS 6.0 and the new VS.Net, and I just find it very familiar to what Borland has been doing for a long time. If our client's don't force us to do a project in VS (some do, because "it's corporate policy"), we use Borland,mostly C++, but the JBuilder for cross-platform. Now that Kylix supports C++, I think we are going to use that for Win32/Linux apps.
I am still one of those WordPerfect users. I like the WYSIWYG that LaTeX can not give you, and the "code screen" that gives you the same amount of control as LaTeX. Besides it has the same fileformat (although not open) since WP 6.0 for DOS (1993). It has a formla editor that's almost as good as LaTeX. And even while most of it's features have not changed since WP 6, only made easier to use, Word stil hasn't caugth up. It's just a pity that the rest of the WP Office Suite is not up to the same standard, ontherwise I could recommend it as a full Office replacement. If you want to make complex documents with lot's of sub-documents, indexes, tables, lists, references (to chapters, figures, literature, etc.), counters I still think it's the way to go. And it's better at importing/exporting.doc as StarOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is getting the knowledge to the people.
And a way to measure/grade the knowledge of an individual.
There is a huge distance from the average Wintel "programmer" to
the "real" Computer Science world.
Next to that we need a way to have the outside world/employers to be able to tell the difference between the 10 lines VB programmer and the
video driver programmer. (just trying to think of somewhere that efficiency counts) To most people both are "programmers".
I do think that although wintel has made computers affordable, its
short-term gain focus has had some very nasty side-effects. I experience everyday the long term cost of cutting corners, and
the short-term cost of doing things "right". It's very difficult to
balance both, and unfortunately the decissionmakers are not able
to make a well-informed decission. (you say it's crap, but it looks
fine to me, so I sold it already / you're not a good programmer because we're getting all these complaints.)
Your problem is that once computers were so expensive only smart people were allowed to program on them, today everyone can buy one and program some. (remember BASIC)
I think there should be a movement in de software community for programmer validation. I mean if you want to practice law you have to get a degree, if you want to be an official XX repair shop, you have to have a certificate.
I think we're going into that direction but the field is to young.
We first have to figure out what are the right ways to do it.
UML, Design Patters, OO, you name it.
But I do think there is progress in software still, only maybe you're not at a site where it's happening anymore.
Something like the field of Software Architecture wasn't around 10-15 years ago. Software Engineering is 20-25 years old.
The move no longer is towards more efficient code, most compilers are efficient enough if you know how to use them properly.
The move is towards being able to design and manage software of a complexity and scale of a whole new magnitude.
>They should just rename the internet the Itnerent, the spelling's so
>bad.... Ask your grandfather to read the same passage you breeze
>through and watch the cursing begin. See my piont?
My grandfather would not be able to read it at all, as he does not speak or read English. A lot of spelling errors in the internet are caused by people not using their prime language, like I am doing right now.
How much spelling errors would you make in Russian or Chineese?
See mypoint?
The only thing that I would like from Qt is a better RAD environment to work with.
Have you ever looked at Kylix, the Borland Delphi/C++ cross-over RAD environment for Linux/Win32 ?
You might like it, I do.
Cheers
Have you ever used any of the Borland Products?
C++ Builder, Delphi, Kylix (Linux C++ and Delphi)
or JBuilder (Java, Windows and Linux I don't have any hands-on xp)
I think MS copied the IDE Borland has been using since 1994. Just trya standard free OSS version of any of the above for yourself to see what I mean.
Adriaan
The trick when upgrading is not upgrading your software (at least not :-)
at the same time), then you really appreciate the increase.
Hmmm, maybe my summer holydays should be used to visit Norway
afterall...
Greetings from the Netherlands.
Adriaan.
It's widely known in the software engineering field that Maintenance of a software product constitutes op to 80% of it's cost.
(source:"OO and Classical Software Engineering", S.R.Schach)
This is because the further a program has developed, the harder it
get's to maintain and to prevent regression fault intoduction.
From experience I know it's easy to whip something up esp. in a RAD
environment quite fast. But getting from a product that does what it
has to do most of the time, to a product that includes:
manuals, error-handling, fault tollerance, user-friendly GUI,
help-files, consistent clear code and design, well documented code,
is very hard, and takes a lot of effort. A lot of coders are not even trained
to take these points into account when programming in my opinion.
In my view that's why a lot of OS projects never get the above list
completed, even if they do have most of the desired core functions.
Adriaan Renting.
20,000 leagues under the sea,
Voyage to the moon,
Certainly inspired people I think.
There's also this Steam Car appearing in one of his novells.
Oh, maybe we should go back to Leonardo Da Vinci?
Adriaan Renting.
FORWARD COMPATIBILITY is what I like about WordPerfect, I can use my WordPerfect 10/2002 on Windows, or WordPerfect 8 on Linux, but my dad on his old trusty 486 with WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS can still read and edit my files. And I don't have to do "Save As".
They only changed their fileformat from 5 to 6.
Adriaan
I beleive there is a program to make WinCE divices (Palm anyone) work as a universal remote, or otherwise a PC with the apropriate IR led & some electronics on the parallel port would do the same thing.
Oh now I've given it away: computers are circumvention devices...
You are talking about the low level format you could do on MFM and RLL drives, to get the interleave right. This was done by invoking the format program stored in the BIOS of your harddisk controller,
c id=5057 672
most of the time it would the code would be at adress C0000 or C8000,
C0000 = 784kb, thus well above the 640kb DOS used.
with debug you could start running code at any memory address.
After IDE and the 286 came along this was no longer necessairy, as the 286 was fast enough to work without interleave, and the harddisk BIOS was no longer a separate BIOS, but you could do your Harddisk settings in the normal BIOS, thus all HD's now ship with an interleave of 1, and you can no longer do a low level format on a drive.
Adriaan
also posted here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50351&
I only found this reference:
... he feels they were "Bad Cop" / "Good Cop"ing him. He feels there is nothing to sue them for .... it is more likely MS will sue him over "Reach for the Stars", it came out like 15 years ago, it is supposed to be just like Planets although he has never seen it.
(Tim is Tim Wisseman, the creator of vgaplanets)
To date Tim has only had 2 lawsuit threats, one from Microprose and one from Starcrossed Software. Microprose wanted all rights to VGA Planets, there was a lot of hot air over a slander case against me for something that he apparently said about Master of Orion (MOO). Tim says there was nothing to what he said about MOO, they were just trying to scare me into tuming VGA Planets over to them and in the end they offered me $7,000 for all rights. MOO came out after version 3.0 of VGAP and Tim got a case of MOO's from them
VGA planets was at version 3.0 in 1992, it already had it's own newsgroup alt.games.vga-planets in 1992.
I have no idea how old the first version of vga planets is, but it certainly predates MOO. I can't find the source but I have once read that Tim Wisseman was living across the street from Mircoprose around the time MOO came out, and had handed some of their employees copies of the new vga-planets 3.0 some time before that...
I think it's about 5 years ago I've read that, I can't find it anymore.
I'll check out this Spaceward Ho! It get's mentioned a lot in old newsgroup postings together with vga-planets.
Adriaan.
You are talking about the low level format you could do on MFM and RLL drives, to get the interleave right. This was done by invoking the format program stored in the BIOS of your harddisk controller,
most of the time it would the code would be at adress C0000 or C8000,
C0000 = 784kb, thus well above the 640kb DOS used.
with debug you could start running code at any memory address.
After IDE and the 286 came along this was no longer necessairy, as the 286 was fast enough to work without interleave, and the harddisk BIOS was no longer a separate BIOS, but you could do your Harddisk settings in the normal BIOS, thus all HD's now ship with an interleave of 1, and you can no longer do a low level format on a drive.
Adriaan.
Yup, i've got one of those 286/20 still running ;-) ;-)
I've never had an Intel Chip.
NEC V20 at 8 Mhz. (8086 like)
AMD 286 at 20 Mhz.
AMD 386 at 40 Mhz.
Cyrix 486Dx4 at 100 Mhz.
Cyrix P166+ at 133 Mhz.
AMD K6-2 at 300 Mhz. (3 x 100 Mhz
AMD Duron at 700 Mhz.
AMD Athlon at 1.4 GHz.
And the 386 died some time ago, the P166+ i've sold, the rest is still alive and exept for the 286 and V20 are still in use. The 286 and the NEC only get booted for nostalgia reasons every now and then.
Adriaan.
Any of you people who like MOO should check out the play by e-mail game vga-planets. As the story goes MOO was more or less born when the it's creators were playing vga-planets 2.0 beta.
The game is now at version 4. try http://www.vga-planets.com
I started playing this game since version 3.0. (1994) And it's been
my best investment ever.
Adriaan.
Have you ever tried the Borland C++ Builder for GUI C++ work? .Net yet.
Or the Kylix C++ version on linux?
I have worked with VC++ 5, 6, BCB 3, 4, 5, and find the Borland products very easy for GUI design compared to the MicroSoft products.
I have no experience with
I have no connection with Borland, I just use their product sometimes.
Adriaan.
Like for example Borland's TurboPascal...
That's before VB even existed I think.
Adriaan
FYI I live in the Netherlands, a country withc ijfers/index.htm
/million
/million
strict firearms control.
I have my numbers from our goverment bureau of
statistics
http://www.cbs.nl/nl/cijfers/kern
I am not going to quote all the number you have, I just want to compare the numbers of homocides.
16,137 / 260 million USA inhabitants = 62
180 / 16 million Dutch inhabitants = 11 / million
And the total number of accidental deaths, which might be less dependant on firearm availability, as a comparison.
93,592 / 260 million USA inhabitants = 359
3345 / 16 million Dutch inhabitants = 210 / million
I don't know what to make of these statistics, but for now I rather live in my own country.
Adriaan.
In my company the contract is such that if we take the job for a fixed price, and the risks are ours, then the copyright of the product is ours too, and the client can only use the product.
If the client pays us for every hour it takes to develop the product, then we are effectively temporairily his employee, and the client owns anything we have produced, but also has the risks if the project goes over budget or scedule.
Adiaan.
Uhm, like Borland Delphi /
C++ Builder / Kylix / JBuilder have been doing for the past 6-7 years ??
I have both used VS 6.0 and the new VS.Net, and I just find it very familiar to what Borland has been doing for a long time.
If our client's don't force us to do a project in VS (some do, because "it's corporate policy"), we use Borland,mostly C++, but the JBuilder for cross-platform. Now that Kylix supports C++, I think we are going to use that for Win32/Linux apps.
Adriaan.
Somehow this did not work out, i try again, should use preview more often...
x
{italic}
v
{bold}
w
{fontsize=12}
{/italic}
y
{/bold}
z
{/fontsize}
!
Until you want to do something like this ??
v
w
x
y
z
!
Maybe not a good example, but you get my point I
hope.
I am still one of those WordPerfect users. .doc as StarOffice.
I like the WYSIWYG that LaTeX can not give you, and the "code screen" that gives you the same amount of control as LaTeX.
Besides it has the same fileformat (although not open) since WP 6.0 for DOS (1993).
It has a formla editor that's almost as good as LaTeX.
And even while most of it's features have not changed since WP 6, only made easier to use, Word stil hasn't caugth up. It's just a pity that the rest of the WP Office Suite is not up to the same standard, ontherwise I could recommend it as a full Office replacement.
If you want to make complex documents with lot's of sub-documents, indexes, tables, lists, references (to chapters, figures, literature, etc.), counters I still think it's the way to go.
And it's better at importing/exporting