| last updated:08 Mar 2004 18:15 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 07 Mar 2004) | View Other Weeks |
| Windows XP deployment tips? | Sun 07 Mar | Peanuts |
| Hello. I have a small company that sells PCs via the net. The user can customize every aspect of the machine, and has the choice of buying Windows (XP), which is installed by us so the user receives the machine in a ready-to-rock state. But since every machine is almost always 100% different from one another, deploying XP is a huge pain in the ass. Ive tried HDD images, Sysprep, you name it. An image of XP doesnt like being installed on a computer with a completely different motherboard. I would be able to live with installing the thing from scracth if it wasnt for one thing: installing all the Windows Update patches is a time waster. Is there a better way to do this? Perhaps I can download all fixes (including the Service Pack) as executable files and then just run then on the new machines? Anything? Im starting to spot a few gray hair lines here. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Jason (www.mesacanyon.com) | You should be able to 'slipstream' the XP installation so you end up with a fully, (or nearly fully patched machines) Here's a link for slipstreaming SP1a, http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/winxp-sp1-bootcd.html Here's a google search link for several articles that detail putting rollups, and other hotfixes in as well http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=deskbar&q=slipstream+windows+xp+hotfixes HTH, Jason |
| Authentication for Workstations - Using Win2k, NT | Sun 07 Mar | Ram Dass |
| Hi: What is the best method to used for authorizing user access for a bunch of workstations that run on NT, win 2000 and Win XP? Users will need to use a username and password to gain access to the machine. Currently a central authorization is controlled through LDAP. The workstations have not required authorization prior to this - i.e. any person could use the workstation to browse the Internet. In recent months there have been more temporary workers in the company and there have been concern that the workstations could be exploited. Is there a clean way to make the workstations authorize users through the LDAP? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | Authorization -- for what? To login? Why not use a domain? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ram Dass | I am ignorant :( What do you mean by 'domain'? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ram Dass | BTW - I used the wrong term in my earlier post. It is for 'authenticating' users - i.e. users will need to enter a login name and password. Currently we have an LDAP - which provides company-wide authentication. The workstations are not hooked up to LDAP and currently allow anonymous access - i.e. users are not challenged to enter a login name and password. Would it be suitable to make the workstations authenticate users directly against LDAP? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | I don't believe you can convince Windows to authenticate against an LDAP server. A domain is precisely what Microsoft does to solve this problem. A domain controller does, among many other things, authenticate against the domain user list. You have the workstation join the domain, and then you get centralized user list management. I know that, in the case of Windows 2000, Microsoft replaced domains with a system called Active Directory. An Active Directory server can ALSO serve as an LDAP server, so maybe one route you could take is to use a Windows 2000 or 2003 server in Active Directory mode, to replace the existing LDAP server, and given centralized authentication for all the workstations. |
| Error handling for C libraries? | Sun 07 Mar | J. Merkalson |
| How do you handle errors in your C modules? Is it ever acceptable for a general-purpose (read: has to work in both GUI and non-GUI, threaded and non-threaded environments) C library to just print errors to stderr and exit? Is it only acceptable for catastrophic errors, like if theres no more memory available or if it cant load some type of DLL at startup? I was thinking of adding an error_handler member to a library of mines main struct that would store a function pointer that I could call like this: RSSautomater->error_handler(This happened: %s, RSSErrorCode); which would call a routine that intern would call vfprintf and exit. But the user could overide this behavior by setting the pointer in ->error_handler to point to their own callback function that could do what ever they wanted (log the message and keep going, log the message and exit, etc). What are your thoughts on this? What do you typically do with your libraries? Can you point to any examples of C libraries you feel get error handling *really* right? |
| Sun 07 Mar | sid6581 | I return error codes. Plain and simple. This works for all programming languages my DLLs with C interfaces are used from. Printing text anywhere from a library strikes me as extraordinarily bad design, but that may just be me.. |
| Sun 07 Mar | dir at badblue dot com | Return an int error code, definitely. 0 for no error. Assuming a Win32 library, return existing win32 error codes so that a caller can translate them into the native language with little effort. |
| Any JoS users in Milwaukee? | Sun 07 Mar | JD |
| Hey All, Gone are the days when I used to visit JoS from India. Now I check it sitting in my aartment in US! :) Yep, I have arrived here in Milwaukee, WI last week and I was wondering if there any any JoS users in and around Milwaukee. Its always great to meet smart folks! :) Also, can any one tell me about good places to visit in and around Milwaukee. I want to make most of my stay in US! :) Thanks for your time, JD http://www.phpkid.org |
| Sun 07 Mar | JD | Typos and Typos. It's apartment and not aartment. Also, it's been 2 week and not one week I am in US. :) JD |
| Too much stress | Sun 07 Mar | Kevin Moore |
| Hi, I own a small software company and I have been working in IT for 15 years and an entrepeneur for the last 6 years. The last few months business is getting tight again and I am feeling very stressed. I have considered folding up shop and walking away from the business of being self-employed. The constant concern over revenue and growing the business takes its toll on me during the difficult down times. I was hoping people here might have some similar advice or suggestions as to how I can deal with this. A couple of specific questions: 1. Does anyone know of an online aptitude test that I could take that might offer some direction into a different career? 2. What do you all do to deal with this type of situation, specifically those of you that are self-employed? 3. Any advice or comments are appreciated. Thanks, Kevin |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | if you want to succeed, then don't give up if you think this much stress is not for you then go and find a less stressful job or change your behaviour |
| Sun 07 Mar | Phil | What are the goals you are after with that business of yours ? Only if this is clear can advice be provided. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Nigel | As useful as the previous post is, I'd suggest seeing a career counselor. A good program will involve sitting down a few times for a few hours, perhaps with some testing, and generating a picture of what you've done, what qualities you have, what you want to go into, and what you might need to get there. Kind of like a career tune-up. Can be very useful to get a neutral opinion on things. It's getting to be much more common these days. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Tarek | My 0.02 cents : Many people are victims of stress and are not in the IT industry. Maybe if you would know how to manage your stress better ... Sorry if I'm wrong ... Anyway I hope you'll achieve what ever path you choose ... Good luck! |
| Sun 07 Mar | | Get a sales guy, give him partial ownership and responsibility for leading. It won't cure you but it helps to have someone else with you in the trenches. Pick a partner very very very very very carefully. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | I agree with the point about getting partners. I'm just starting out (and probably a much younger person) and I know my constant worries would be reduced if I wasn't the only one doing the worrying. I think once one gets over the bad feelings it's a straightforward matter of looking for "ways to make business improve". |
| Sun 07 Mar | eclectic_echidna | What do you do when you aren't working? Make THAT your career. -- ee |
| Sun 07 Mar | Rick | When I was running my software business I found the stress happened when I didn't have a plan for all possibilities (i.e. the worst case), and it was basically the back of my mind nagging me. But just a simple 'if I only get 10 sales again next month, I'll need to fold by X, start looking for a job by Y, cash out Z...' was usually enough to relieve the uncertainty. (Eventually the worst case did happen, and I went to work for the Man... though went back five years later). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe Hendricks | Expect and plan for the down times ('worst case' as others have posted) so it's not as stressful. Self-employed here for 9 years and 3 of them have been tough. Still very much worth it, imo. |
| Recently Discovered Linux Kernel Exploit | Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa |
| A good overview is available here: http://isec.pl/vulnerabilities/isec-0014-mremap-unmap.txt Some discussion here http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/07/1533254.shtml Id like to know how many people on this forum use Linux on a daily basis and how this issue affects you (what distribution you use and how you plan to upgrade, etc.). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Anonymous Coward | I use Linux as my only desktop at work, as well as on my 'home' servers, which have ports open to the 'net. I'm not terribly worried about this exploit, because it requires the user to be previously logged in. Since no one else logs into these systems, I'm not terribly worried. I would be worrying if I ran an ISP or corporation that gave Linux shell accounts on sensitive systems. In any event, I would expect a fix to be released within the next few days, at which time, I will rebuild my kernel. I run Gentoo Linux, who are pretty quick about releasing fixes for system packages. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Employed Russian | > use Linux on a daily basis I do. > and how this issue affects you It doesn't: all my boxes are behind a firewall and have no public accounts (the only people who have login know root password anyway). > I would be worrying if I ran an ISP University computer lab admins would probably need to worry a bit ... Or not: with physicall access, anyone can just boot from Knoppix-CD and become root anyway. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Giovanni Corriga | By the way, that vulnerability was already fixed with version 2.6.3. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | Remember: When a patch for a Windows exploit is released, it's further proof that closed source software is evil. When a patch for a Linux exploit (any other open source software) is released, it's further proof that open source is wonderful. |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | That was probably the worst troll in the history of this board. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Seun Osewa, an exploit like this will probably not affect most web serving linux boxes. It may present a problem for linux servers serving public accounts (where people have rights to install and execute imported software). Preventative measures should be taken to patch it if you run a lot of unknown software (which is rare in the Linux space in most respectable projects) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Almost Anonymous | I run Linux and I don't plan on patching the system for this exploit. For the same reason as others have mentioned. I also run serveral Windows boxes and I don't patch them when every new Windows exploit comes out. But that is because they are all safely tucked away behind my Linux firewall. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > Preventative measures should be taken to patch it if you run a lot of unknown software (which is rare in the Linux space in most respectable projects) * Most people run respectable projects, patches and additions to most respectable projects are well watched. There's the occational student who must try every short message messenger out there on sourceforge.net, but they are in the minority--most people are PHP+Apache+MySQL+Linux (LAMP) monkeys. * Distributions are carefully verified using MD5 (yum in Fedora Core 1 does MD5 on all packages) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | Thanks everyone; the current mail setup on my Linux server uses one user account for each mailbox so this would have been a potential problem, but it so happens that I'm the only user. I'm glad to know this board is not only a windows and .NET-centric board. |
| Are DVD recordables as durable as CD-R ? | Sun 07 Mar | Michael |
| I have just bought a Sony DVD Recorder. It records both DVD-R and DVD+R, and it can record DVD+R at 8x. Im not sure if I should trust it for long-term (10 years, for example) data storage or not. I know that CD-R can be trusted. However, in the early days of CD-Rs, there were a lot of problems: some writers broke really quickly, after writing only 50-60 disks, some disks broke quickly (information unreadable after a few months), etc. Im thinking of switching to DVD recordable disks, but I want the data to last at least 10 years. Are DVD +/- R disks as reliable as CD-R disks ? Also, is a DVD recorded disk more vulerable to dust, small scratches, etc, than a CD? Any special precautions I should take? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | I'm not at all sure that CD-R's are reliable. I've recently been cloning a few machines from Cd images, and about one CD in fifteen is created faulty. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dan G | They are pretty good. The only thing and this was similar when CD-R's first game out is that cheap media is just that - cheap You may have to spend sometime trying different types of media to find what works best with your drive however once you do, it should be all smooth sailing |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Using CDRs can be a real learning experience, I used to buy batches of 100 uncoated unbranded medias (CAD$30 per 100), only to learn they stick together and the reflective surface would just peel off. Now I buy a more coated surface (still noname though--like RiDATA--CAD$15 per 50) to prevent peeling and sticking. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | DVDRs are made from the same machines and material as CDRs. To be perfectly blunt, when you lose a DVD, you lose 4 gigs of data, when you use a CDR, you lose 700 megs. If insurance companies insured data, that's how they would look at the risk. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | You risk is the same if both forms of media are equally likely to fail. It's about 6 or 7 CDs per DVD in terms of data storage, so you're much more likely to lose a CD than a DVD, even if the data loss is higher when you lose a DVD. As far as reliability goes, even on CDs there are mixed accounts. Some people have had no problems with CDs, others report mass failures after a few years. It seems to be a combination of burner + media + environment. The bad news for DVDs is that the media and burners are less mature, so if anything you'd expect them to be worse on average. I'd suggest spending a little more and getting name brand media (TDK or verbatim seem to be highly rated). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dennis Forbes | Clearly you should stick to floppies, preferrably single-sided 720KB variants. This will ameliorate the risk accordingly. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Or acid-paper, they are very popular and durable, however the data you store are very much open to interpretation hundreds of years from now. Do it with class, smoke signals last up to 5 minutes under the right conditions. |
| The integration of computers in schools | Sun 07 Mar | Laura Wells |
| INTRODUCTION My thesis before I researched this topic was that it is good to have computers in schools, and at home: because, they open up a world (the internet, chat rooms); and, because computer literacy is necessary in this advanced society (for example, at libraries now the catalogues are computerized instead of on cards). Computer-based instruction in schools is good, because it is a self-paced as opposed to a group-paced activity. OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT Unlike many topics in the History of Education, the use of computers is relatively new. The following timeline is taken from [Molnar]: * 1944 - First operational computer, the Mark 1, at Harvard * 1946 - The ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. Early computers were used by science, maths, and engineering, replacing slide rules for solving problems of the size faced in the real world. * 1959 - PLATO at the University of Illinois: first large-scale project for use in education, a several-thousand terminal system serving undergraduate education, elementary school reading, community college, and several campuses. Thus, the use of computers in education is 35 years old. * 1963 - Invention of BASIC, a new easy-to-use programming language: it spread rapidly and was used for the creation of computer-based instruction materials for a wide variety of subjects and all levels of schooling * 1963 - Stanford math and reading individualized computer-assisted instruction, rather than group-paced * Early 1970s - MIT developed the LOGO programming language, accessible to children and easy-to-use, used in elementary schools * 1974 - 2 million students in the U.S. using computers; National Science Foundation set up 30 regional computing networks * 1975 - 55% of schools in the U.S. had access to a computer * 1975 - relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous personal computers replace expensive time-shared computers * 1980s - computers added to schools curriculum * 1984 -beginning of the internet, when the NSF networked several supercomputers, and schools were linked too for research * 1987 - National Geographic KidsNet created, brings inquiry-based learning to elementary school children. In 1991, 6000 classrooms in 72 countries used KidsNet, and more than 90% of teachers reported that it significantly increased interest in and time spent on science. * 1995 - World Wide Web and the Internet begins to catch on; Microsoft Windows 95 is the first MS operating system to include network connectivity out of the box DISCUSSION OF CURRENT ISSUES AND DEBATE AROUND THE TOPIC Pros Some of the pros for computers in education are: * Computers help people to manage complex (large quantities of) data: for example, spreadsheets and graphs help you process large sets of numbers, and search engines help you manage large quantities of text. In some fields this is essential, for example it is estimated that would take a person 22 centuries to read the annual biomedical research literature. [Molnar] * Word-processing and composition, because correction is easy and spell-checking helps to make the work perfect. [page 243, Kropp] * Networked computers permit telecommunications (to help learn about things that are not located in the classroom), and decentralization (so that you can access information from several sources, and learn from several learning networks). [Cummins] * Distance Education courses with my home computer, and it was a good experience (I am a mature student): it does cut down on the commuting time * Many kids like to work with computers, for whatever reason. [page 243, Kropp] * Chat rooms and email promote writing literacy (compared with using the telephone). * The Internet and online references provide near-instant access to information on almost any topic: for example dyslexia, Mars, or Monarch butterflies. * Computer literacy is a vocational skill. * Computers can be used as sophisticated modelling tools in science, maths, and engineering Cons Some cons are: * A teacher in my field placement described the children as manic, crazed, and obsessed when the computer was on in the classroom (and she was glad when it wasnt working). * Children arent adults, so the fact that computers are vocationally useful isnt necessarily a good reason for having them in the school, especially in elementary school. * There was a good example in the Failure to Connect book of a childs being frantic and stressed when playing a racing maze game on the computer; also, she wasnt demonstrating any problem-solving or mapping skills: when asked, she didnt know why she had picked up the rope in the game. In this example, the parents attitudes were counter-productive and misinformed: they thought she was using the computer properly; and were excited that she knew how to use the computer; part of her stress may have been caused by her trying to earn her parents esteem by playing the computer game well. [page 204, Healy] * Computers are tools, not goals: however, young children arent wise enough to tell the difference between a tool and a goal. * Computers are expensive, both in money and in time. To use them in the classroom requires teacher expertise: how to use a computer; what to use computers for; and, how to teach using computers. * Data received through a computer may be unfiltered and uncriticised: by contrast, for example, the books available in a school library have been carefully selected. * In groups, one kid tends to hog the computer. [page 243, Kropp] * Some children will guess, rather than attempt to learn, with a machine. [page 243, Kropp] * Computers may give the impression that information is always visual, and entertaining. [page 243, Kropp] * Computers give children no human love, support, or encouragement. [page 243, Kropp] * Businesses are trying to influence the use of computers in schools. However, businesses are geared towards profit, and are consequently not fit to influence the educational agenda. [pages 148-152, Barlow] [pages 297-299, Healy * David Suzuki says that the cry for computer literacy has been ... one of the biggest cons ever foisted on the school system. [page 148, Barlow] MY POSITION ON THE TOPIC My position on the topic is that children should be about seven years old (i.e. at least Grade 2) before they begin to use computers. Before then, they should be playing with real things, reading, and interacting socially with real people. Children may be tempted to emulate their parents use of computers; however, I think that parents should protect their children from exposure to computers until the children have acquired some maturity: * Yes, we get a lot of pressure from parents, but we believe the gains from working with computers do not outweigh the losses for four- and five-year olds. At this age they need to be pushing Play-doh, not buttons. [page 242, Healy] * After youve developed your own brain, then you can have an artificial one to play with. [mother, quoted on page 203, Healy] * People are horrified when I tell them my own [six-year-old] childs not on the computer. ... Actually, I think its our job as adults to protect them, not expose them to all this stuff. [pre-school teacher, quoted on page 203, Healy] * Buy my four-year-old a computer? What nonsense! She needs first to build up her own mind, to learn writing, math. You must realise the computer can only do what the human mind tells it to. Our children need good minds so theyll be able to run the computers! [industrial software engineer, quoted on page 206, Healy] POSSIBLE FUTURE DIRECTIONS I expect that a continuing and perhaps increasing use of computers in schools is inevitable. However, I hope that teachers and parents are aware of the many ways in which computers do not help children to develop as whole individuals, nor promote the overall educational agenda, and that they will find appropriate ways to integrate computers with education. BIBLIOGRAPHY * Barlow, Maude and Robertson, Heather-Jane. (1994). Class Warfare: The Assault on Canadas Schools. Key Porter Books Ltd. Toronto. * Kropp, Paul and Hodson, Lynda. (1995). The School Solution: Getting Canadas Schools to Work for Your Children. Random House of Canada. Toronto * Cummins, Jim and Dayers, Dennis. (1997).Brave New Schools: Challenging Cultural Illiteracy. St. Martins Press. New York. * Healy, Jane M. (1998). Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect out Childrens Minds - for Better and Worse. Simon and Schuster. New York. * Molnar, Andrew. (1997). Computers in Education: A Brief History. The Journal. http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/a1681.cfm |
| Sun 07 Mar | Employed Russian | > My position on the topic is that children should be about seven years old (i.e. at least Grade 2) before they begin to use computers My position is that the only place where computers should be used in grade school is the library catalog. All other uses are harmful to education. > Some of the pros for computers in education are: The 'pros' you listed apply to *college* education, but they do not apply to grade-school education: > Computers help people to manage complex (large quantities of) data Grade school education is not about managing large quantities of data. It is about understandging fundamentals. Whenever I see my 16-year old dealing with large quantities of data, it is because he is doing 'science project', which is just another example of 'cargo-cult science' http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html > Word-processing and composition, because correction is easy and spell-checking helps to make the work perfect. Did you ever observe a kid writing anything on a computer? Instead of thinking about what he is writing, he is contantly distracted by 'auto-correction' (I know it can be turned off, but they usually don't). The result is that 'kds cn't spel a thng', and the quality of their writing abysmal. BTW, an argument can also be made that the (sorry) state of computer programming in this country is partly due to the high availability of interactive terminals: when you had to submit your program on a punch-card deck and get results a day later, you spent a lot more time *thinking* about your program, and thinikng about it is a good thing. > Networked computers permit telecommunications (to help learn about things that are not located in the classroom) Learning about things not located in the classroom does not require telecommunications, it only requires a good teacher. > Distance Education courses with my home computer These do not work for many adults (they require great self-discipline). Percentage of grade-school kinds that are able to learn anything via distance-learning is probably extremely small. > Many kids like to work with computers, for whatever reason. They don't. They like to *play* on them. > Chat rooms and email promote writing literacy Chat rooms and IM provide a constant stream of distractions, promote very short attention span, and very poor writing style. > The Internet and online references provide near-instant access to information on almost any topic: for example dyslexia, Mars, or Monarch butterflies. They do. They also provide very dis-organized collection of information, much of which is inaccurate. And the reason kids *need* such info, is usually because they are doing the science project. > Computer literacy is a vocational skill. True. Learn them in college. > Computers can be used as sophisticated modelling tools in science, maths, and engineering That's science project again. Grade school is not about sophisticated modelling. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Philo | '> Word-processing and composition, because correction is easy and spell-checking helps to make the work perfect. Did you ever observe a kid writing anything on a computer? Instead of thinking about what he is writing, he is contantly distracted by 'auto-correction' (I know it can be turned off, but they usually don't). The result is that 'kds cn't spel a thng', and the quality of their writing abysmal.' Agreed 100%. Here's an easy study I'd like to see - go to each 7th grade classroom in a school and ask for writing samples from each of the top five writers in the class. Then ask for a handwritten essay from each of them (direct, not via the teacher) My older daughter is a good writer, but I freaked when I finally saw her hand write something - her spelling was *awful*. I immediately mandated that she would write *everything* by hand first, then type it. In one year her spelling has improved 100%. Philo |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | A computer in the home is a good thing. But they have no place in elementary schools and extremely limited usefulness in high school. They idea that children must begin using computers at a very young age, or else they will be 'left behind' by the rest of the world, is one of the most absurd lies ever created. The areas where American children lag behind the rest of the world -- reading, math, science -- have nothing to do with whether or not they have learned to use a computer. The school years prior to college are about learning the basics. Computers in classrooms only serve to distract and their presence in the classrom has resulted in students who are well versed in Chat, Instant Messaging and the latest video games, but have no reading, writing or math skills and little knowledge of science and history. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | A slightly different point of view: I had the good fortune of going to a very good grade school. We had very good teachers in many subjects, and we had a computer lab with Apple 2e's in about 1979-80. We had a class completely separate from all other classes on using the computer, and we actually wrote toy programs in Logo, and the best students got to program in Basic. Thanks to that I was interested enough in actually doing things with computers that at age 10 I wrote a Zork style program that did really simple parsing of commands. It had a program that let you enter connectivity of rooms, a brief description of the room, objects, and obstacles, and it would save all that to a disk. Then another program would load all that into memory and you could play the game. For a different program I created a simple bubble sort routine - big deal, so what...but at age 10. This is all due to the presence of not just the computers but a quality teacher. Yes, kids will play on them, and IM, and search for mp3's - *IF* the system is set up to let them do it. I would suggest having the computers set up in a computer lab that aren't even networked to each other, let alone the internet. Each should have only the programs relevant to the class installed, with the rest of the system totally locked down. In the library, the computers should be linked only to the central server, not the internet, and should only provide access to the research materials approrpriate - and also a system that lets the kids know if a given book is checked out or not. Let the kids have a really basic word processor to type up reports and papers - there's no need to discriminate against kids whose parents either can't afford or won't buy a computer - but for the sake of humanity disable the spelling checker and penalize the kids who get it wrong. The problem is not just the computers - it is that the people administering them don't have the skills to do it right, and the schools that buy the machines don't have the money to hire the (much higher cost) people that do have said skills. It's also the problem of discipline - kids will find ways to waste time whether or not computers are in the room. It's not a new problem - I'm not being the curmudgeon saying 'Back in my day...' - I fully recognize how fortunate I was to have such good teachers. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Jordan Lev | I think the most important point you raise is the one about computers being a tool rather than a goal. I personally believe that computers should not be emphasized in the classroom to the extent that they are sometimes these days. I think the more important issue is 'how are our kids being taught' and 'how much attention are they getting from teachers (i.e. student-to-teacher ratio)' If the class is already doing well and has a great teaching staff, etc. then the computer could become a useful tool. But more frequently, its use it a distraction that keeps kids from learning what's really important at that age. I remember hearing a piece on NPR a few months ago about this very same topic. There was a man talking about how he had gone around to hundreds of schools (perhaps he was one of the authors you referenced -- I can't remember). He said that there were a few cases where the computers were actually helpful, but these were classes that were already quite successful and had great teachers. More often than not, though, the computers were a detriment that kept the kids from actually *learning* anything. He had a great quote: 'when you keep things simple, you allow for personal complexity to arise' -- meaning that the computer has so much complication and is so narrowly defined in how it is used and what it does, that kids don't learn to think for themselves [on a side note, this quote also reminds me of the whole HTML-as-a-simple-text-language issue -- the reason it's so great is because of its limitations and simplicity. But I digress...] Anyway, we have a whole heap of more important issues to worry about when it comes to education (in the United States, anyway), and hopefully people are realizing that 'having computers in the classroom' is not going to be the magic bullet that solves all of our problems easily. So, on to the next magic bullet... keep boobies off TV? -Jordan |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | Two of the biggest cons in this world are computers and education so imagine what happens when tney get together. - says somebody whose job is the use of computers in educations :) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Fred | 'High-Tech Heretic : Reflections of a Computer Contrarian ' by Clifford Stoll http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385489765/ http://www.familyhaven.com/parenting/hightechheretic.html |
| Sun 07 Mar | veal | Employed Russian is right on target. None of the original posters 'pro' arguments are valid, and her 'con' arguments barely scratch the surface but are reason enough to keep computers out. Grade school education is already rather shabby and is only harmed by computers in the classroom. The zombification of most children at home by television and video games has already produced generations increasingly swollen with morons of almost no capacity for critical thought, creativity, and human sympathy. Likewise deaden the classroom to learning and thought by introducing these visually-stimulating, random-fact-generating crutches to concentration and the the damage will be complete. (Bear in mind, I'm a computer programmer saying this, not a luddite. Computers play important roles in our society, but the education of partially-formed minds is not one of them.) The quoted parent was right that 'after you've developed your own brain, then you can have an artificial one to play with'. But a keen brain doesn't start to appear for most kids until the late teens if ever at all. The poster's position is a good one, if only she adds ten to her suggested age of introduction. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Laura Wells | Dear veal, > her 'con' arguments barely scratch the surface Did I miss something, apart from 'swollen with morons of almost no capacity for critical thought, creativity, and human sympathy', and 'deaden the classroom to learning and thought by introducing these visually-stimulating, random-fact-generating crutches to concentration'? Can you put that in terms my History of Education professor would understand? I'm studying Early Childhood Education, and have had a computer in my pre-school room in Field. I'd formed an opinion about computers for 2- to 5-year olds. It's been interesting to read your thoughts about computers for school-aged children on top of that. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Almost Anonymous | It's been my observation that most computer savy parents are againts computers in the classroom. I also fit this mold; I'm a programmer and I have a six-year-old in grade 1. Secretly, I think, most educators and parents want the computer to replace instruction. If we can put kids in front of the box and they can learn from it then we don't need as many teachers, helpers, etc. My own personal experience with computers in the classroom was fairly positive: Having a computer in the classroom in Grade 3 demonstrated my aptitude for it. My teacher told my parents that they should invest in a computer for me (c64). I might not be here, typing this, if it wasn't for that. In Grade 7, our block of time allocated for computers was spent doing the entire Microsoft Words (for DOS) tutorial. I learned all about word processors, spreadsheets, etc. That knowledge is still applicable, even today. |
| Book recommendation for state of art Web Design | Sun 07 Mar | NOP (No Ordinary Programmer) ;-) |
| Can someone recommend me the best book available these days for designing world class web pages ? Is there any general book which talk about (good/great) design in general ? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | If you go to a major bookstore, you'll discovered that just about everyone has an opinion about what makes for good web design and how everyone should do it. You might want to check out some blogs though to see what exactly is worth buying. There are TONS. I have always purchased elemental books that teaches me how to fish instead of giving me the fishes: For typography in a succinct little book: The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst Color is impossibly complex. So far I have cheated on color and bought books like the Designer's Guide to Color published by Chronical books. Others understand it much better than I do. For form and usability, get Joel's and Tuft and other useful books of that semblance that will teach you how to think. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | If you're a programmer, I would say web _design_ also requires lots of talent and not all of it comes from a book. If you're anything like me, you might not have the time or inclination to produce an original design that's 'state of the art'. On the other hand some will argue reasonably that all you need is an accessible website... |
| Sun 07 Mar | Egor Shipovalov | Depends on how you measure 'world-class'. Today, graphical design contributes very little (if anything) to website's overall success. 'Cool' design may often impress, but it won't buy you repeat vistors, sales, link popularity, or anything for that matter, since today's surfers realize that graphical designer's skills have completely nothing to do with the value site provides. If you want to build websites that people will love to use, become good at web usability and writing. These are key values in practically any website. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe Hendricks | 'Designing With Web Standards' by Jeffrey Zeldman 'About Face 2.0, The Essentials Of Interaction Design' by Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann But don't forget the wealth of free examples, tips and design advice at the Macromedia and Adobe websites. |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | NOPe |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > Depends on how you measure 'world-class'. Today, graphical design contributes very little (if anything) to website's overall success. I would like to go out on a limp to rationalize these kinds of sentiments: the company I work for gets most of its design inspirations based partly on strategic objectives and user feedbacks--the creatives might keep the typeface consist or get the right color theme for the audience, but they are limited in what they can do to win the next web design award. The people approving these design decisions or commenting on them aren't always graphics designers, but with immediate group review (Code Complete talks about trying your GUI to the guy in the next cubicle) it is possible to get the right kind of GUI situable for a large audience (say 50 milllion people). |
| How come Yahoo contains spam and hotmail does not? | Sun 07 Mar | karthik |
| Its really puzzling. Yahoo Mail seems to have zero or near zero spam. Its months and months since i received a single spam. But my hotmail inbox has become really unusable. Spam is so so bad that i have resolved never to use hotmail again. If Bill gates had sold my address to a dozen spammers, it could not have been worse. I have had this problem in all my hotmail accounts. Does someone know how Yahoo contains spam far far better than hotmail? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dan Maas | Just to confirm, are you absolutely sure you have not posted your email address publicly or in an online form? With am 'unlisted' Yahoo account I get Yahoo-brand spam about once a month, and that's about it. Also, perhaps your accounts are being targeted by a dictionary attack? I would think more common-sounding names would get more spam due to dictionary spammers. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Fred. | Clearly, MSN either sells adresses or publishes them in a directory somewhere but I haven't been able to find any option to prevent/delete this option. I created a new account at Hotmail to use with MSN Messenger. When I logged on the next day, already two SPAM e-mails were waiting in my Inbox. Draw your own conclusions. |
| Sun 07 Mar | KayJay | Just an observation, 'Contains'. Was misled initially. Yahoo! does fail in restricting spam, though to a lesser extent. My account receives on average 3 to 5 spam emails on a daily basis, most of which have a '@yahoo.com' or '@yahoo.co.in' as the spoofed address. I had discontinued using MSN and Hotmail accounts for almost a year now. Mostly beacise of spam, though not the only reason. In fact, my MS Passport is my Yahoo! account. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ken Klose | I've set up two hotmail accounts, and within a day its getting spam. On the other hand my Yahoo account went for a very long time spam-free, but then one day WHAMMO tons of spam. And from that day forth, SPAM-O-RAMA! Since then I'm gotten my own domain with unlimited virtual email addresses, so everytime I fill out an online form, sign up for something, or send in a rebate I give a unique address that I can identify with who I gave it to. I've been doing this for over a year and still none of those myriad email addresses have been inundated. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | >>'Clearly, MSN either sells adresses or publishes them in a directory somewhere ' I used to think the same thing, but a more likely answer is the use of a 'dictionary attack' by spammers. They simply spew out millions of e-mails using common names and collections of random letters. Since the 'from' address in the spam is fake anyway, they aren't bothered with all the undeliverable e-mails bouncing back. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Justin Johnson | I thought it was simply that Yahoo's spam filter is a lot better than Hotmail's. I receive around 10-20 spam every day to my Yahoo account, but the filter dumps it right into the bulk folder and all I have to do is click 'empty' whenever I check it. I've had the same Yahoo address for two years now, and use it everywhere I have to submit an email address. Doesn't Hotmail offer spam filtering? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Nigel | Yahoo offers spam filtering, but it's still a hassle. The free mailboxes have a certain limit, but the spam inbox still counts towards the limit. Even though I don't get much real email, I still have to clean out my spam inbox every couple days to prevent bouncing from a full inbox. I guess you get what you pay for eh. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Myron A. Semack | Yahoo has a better spam filter. Part of the reason you see spam, even if your e-mail address is 'unlisted' is that spammers will just randomly try usernames @aol.com, @yahoo.com, and @hotmail.com. Because there are so many subscribers at those domains, most of the e-mails actually 'hit' something. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Gwyn | I've got a hotmail account and have had it for several years. Zero spam. Perhaps the dictionary 'attack' is valid as you'd never ever find my surname in anyone's dictionary, even a dictionary of names! |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | Check out the boxes with default ticks the next time you fill in an application for a new Hotmail address. |
| Sun 07 Mar | somebody | Hotmail had a big update recently and it seems like the spam filter is now MUCH better. For example, yesterday I received 21 spam emails to my Hotmail account -- twenty went to the junk folder, one made it to the inbox. I use my Hotmail account as my random 'public' email account but it looks like these mostly came from dictionary attacks (judging from the lists of similiar addresses in the To fields). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Mike | Lip service. Notice how Microsoft has all these elaborate plans to end spam. Yet Hotmail users get a mailbox full of spam and Yahoo users don't. Microsoft talks a lot about security too. Draw your own conclusions here. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Seun Osewa | I also notice the same difference. Yahoo's spam filter seems to work better by default. I also think it's more elaborate since it allows human input and tuning ("this is spam" this is not spam") and its interface is not so bloated that you would be afraid to check your spam folder for false positives |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | My Hotmail account has never had a single spam message, and I just logged into my Yahoo account for the first time in three weeks and there were half-a-dozen spam messages. I don't use the spam filter in either. I can only presume that dictionary attacks are responsible for the occasional yahoo spam. Interestingly enough I get more dictionary spam on my work account that is almost never used for external email. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Kyralessa | 'Perhaps the dictionary 'attack' is valid as you'd never ever find my surname in anyone's dictionary, even a dictionary of names!' Prove it, Gwyn; what's your surname? C'mon, you can tell us. If you don't, then why should we believe what you say? You'll lose all credibility if you don't share this information. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Just out of curiosity, I created a new Hotmail account this afternoon. The username was greated through a random password generator (24 random alphanumeric characters) so it's completely immune from a dictionary attack. Six hours later, no spam so far. I'll provide an update if the situation changes. |
| An audio newbie looking for some advice | Sun 07 Mar | Audio Newbie |
| I know there are a lot of developers out there who are into audio creation. Hopefully, some of them read and post on JOS. Task I need to record my voice to an audio file. I plan on having a friend help me integrate this audio file with a video movie that was created with a camcorder. The camcorder movie has already been transferred to a PC and converted into an AVI file and an MPEG1 file. Problem I am a complete audio newbie. I currently dont have a clue how to properly record my voice to an audio file and edit the audio file if needed. Questions I have: * What audio recording/editing software do you recommend a newbie should use? * I only own a cheap microphone that plugs into my PC. Is this going to be a problem? * Not sure what file format I should save the audio file as. Any good audio related web sites for newbies? How about books? TIA for any help given. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Inidan Developer in India | Very very basic setup. Sound Recorder - Comes with Windows. AVI Editor - Comes with Visual Studio. (It sure was in 6.0, anyway) Regards KayJay |
| Sun 07 Mar | www.marktaw.com | * What audio recording/editing software do you recommend a newbie should use? From my website: ProTools Free Well, if you're running Windows 9x or OS9, then ProTools makes a free version of it's software. The only drawback is it only supports 8 tracks. At this price it may be worth it to dust off that Windows 98 disc. Another plus of this software is that anyone can install it. Your friend doesn't have to buy a copy in order to share your sessions. So you can take your USB based sound card over to you friend's house and continue working. On January 15, 2003, David Lemire sent to me: In regard to DAW software, here are some inexpensive and/or free candidates I've come across in my searches that I didn't see on your page. I've not personally tried any of these other than a coupla minutes playing with n-Track. * FASoft n-track shareware program, try-before-you-buy option, seems to have a really good rep on AM4T. http://www.fasoft.com * Quartz AudioMaster Freeware limited freeware version of their commercial products. 'Quartz AudioMaster Freeware will allow you to record, edit, mix, share and deliver your productions driving a fully integrated 4 tracks digital mixer, recorder, sound and time line editor in perfect synch with a 16 tracks MIDI sequencer.' www.digitalsoundplanet.com * Audacity Open source audio editor. 'Version 1.0.0 is the final, stable version of the original Audacity. It is a good, simple audio editor suitable for recording, mixing, and editing ordinary tracks of CD-quality audio, on many platforms including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.' http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ * PowerTracks Pro From the web site: 'PowerTracks Pro Audio is a professional, fully featured digital audio and MIDI workstation, packed with features for musicians, students and songwriters. With seamlessly integrated digital audio / MIDI recording, and built-in music notation, PowerTracks turns a typical soundcard equipped Windows PC into a music production powerhouse!' (From the same folks who sell 'Band In A Box'). This was discussed a little bit recently on alt.music.4-track, and I've seen positive things about it in other newsgroups. http://www.pgmusic.com/powertracks.htm Windows comes with a sound recorder program (or used to, I haven't had the occasion to use it in a while) that should be 'good enough' for simple use. ==== * I only own a cheap microphone that plugs into my PC. Is this going to be a problem? No, as long as you don't mind cheep microphone sound. If you want a super-simple hardware set up that's a step up from yours check: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20030214.html You can also get an idea of what your sound card might sound like from his mp3. ==== * Not sure what file format I should save the audio file as. Any good audio related web sites for newbies? How about books? On the PC, WAV files, on the Mac I believe it's AIFF. These are the uncompressed formats. You could use a proram like CDex to conver the WAV files to mp3 later on. I have a whole series of articles on this kind of thing, but aimed a little higher than where you're aiming. http://www.marktaw.com/recording/HomeStudio/BuildaHomeStudioonaBudget.html |
| Sun 07 Mar | www.marktaw.com | > on the Mac I believe it's AIFF Or maybe SD2 (Sound Designer 2)... on a Mac you probably don't have to think about it... |
| Sun 07 Mar | Eric Debois | Audacity is probably exactly what you need. Since you already have a mic, download audacity and record a bit with it. If it sucks.. which is likely.. you need a better mic and preamp. Perhaps you can borrow/rent it? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Holger | In the audio field there is the saying 'crap in, crap out'. So you should try to use the best equipment you can get your hands on. - The microphone is the most crucial part. No need to go expensive but maybe a friend has a Sure SM-58 he can borrow you? When you really want to buy a mic for yourself go to a music shop and get the cheapest SM-58 lookalike. Don't buy a microphone at a computer store. - The second most important part is the A/D converter. In most cases you will use your soundcard but if you can get something external, use it (cheap is OK). You won't get a good signal when the converter is in the same box as the hard drive and the graphics card. If possible buy this at a music store and not at a computer store. (Computer people are very immusical, they make loud machines.) No matter what equipment you use the following applies to all: - When recording don't hold the mic in your hand. Try to get a stand for it. - Turn the input level of your A/D converter (your soundcard) as high as possible without distorting your voice. Speak louder than normal (this might be weird at first but don't be shy). - Don't expect to get it right on the first take but have your recording software running in case you might nail it immediately. Musicians always run at least a DAT recorder just in case. - After you recorded your voice normalize the sound file so it will be as loud as possible. Every audio software can do this, the command is called 'Normalize'. - Don't get fancy with compression (audio compression, not MP3 compression). You can make things very bad if you don't know what you do. It's best to just leave your voice the way it is because the human ear is very aware of changes made to the human voice. - If you have too much background noise experiment with the noise gate. Again, every audio software can do this, the command is called 'Noise Gate'. This way you can't get rid of the noise but you can silence the recording during the pauses. Make the decay rather long, it will sound unnaturally with a short decay. Don't overdo this effect! - If the background noise really disturbs you, you should record again and speak louder. If that doesn't help you have to get your hands on better equipment. Well, that's almost all you can do. You should always keep in mind how you will use the sound and if you really need an expensive microphone or not. And don't overdo the processing afterwards, normalizing should be enough. Please excuse my english grammar. :-) |
| Make Me Disappear | Sun 07 Mar | entell |
| OK what I am going to talk about is very much out of context, but so is The Apprentice. :) I just came from a David Copperfield show. It was well worth the money we spent getting the front row seats. It is an entertaining, funny show with lots of mind bending tricks. In case you never saw any of his shows, live or on TV, he has two basic type of tricks. The first type is the let me pick some random people, have them write/pick random things and guess what those things are. He throws balls or fresbees to the audience to pick people and have them be part of the show. I am not sure exactly how he does it, but I think these types of tricks are pretty much staged. I guess he plants his own people and aim really well. When he cant get it right he ends up saying Sir, give the ball to the lady closest to you (this happened quite a few times). I can at least live with this answer. The other type of trick he pulls is making things disappear. We are talking about cars, motorcycles and people from the audience (13 to be exact in tonights show) once again randomly picked. I cannot explain this type of tricks with any scientific reasoning. I mean the only thing between you and the objects that disappear are a thin sheet of cloth. You can see under, around and in some cases even behind the area where things vanish. In one part of the show, he takes this guy (who is an insider I believe) and supposedly transports himself and the guy to a remote island. I dont care whether he makes it to the island or not (they make it look like he does), but before they disappear, they are on a steel platform, and the platform extends to the middle of the seating area right above the audience. He stands inside a telephone booth size wooden construction which is at the end of the steel platform. The wooden construction does not obstruct our view of what is inside and around it. He pulls a white big sheet over the construction and in a few seconds he is gone with the other guy! Later he reappears in the middle of the audience above some seats! #1 how the hell did he escape from the construction which is in the middle, over the seating area while everyone is looking straight at it? #2 how the hell did he reappear in the middle of the audience? I know I wasnt looking at where he reappeared, but what about the people who were sitting there? Were they all his own people planted to those seats? I dont know. When he made the 13 people from the audience disappear, even if they somehow walked out of the steel construction where they were seated in the middle of the stage before they disappeared, some of the people he picked were old, and they took a while even to be seated. There is time after they pull the sheet over the construction and before they pull it away again, but I cant figure out how they would have just left the stage without us seeing it all.. Not to mention that these people were holding flashlights which were moving when the sheet was pulled over the construction they were sitting in. Who were waving those flashlights which also disappeared together with the people! Can anyone explain these vanishings and reappearings? They are going to drive me nuts! p.s. Sorry about this completely out of context post, but I just had to. |
| Sun 07 Mar | anon | entell, you are from Pittsburgh? |
| Sun 07 Mar | braid_ged | Maybe not much insight but i once had a conversation with a retired magician and he said : 'With big tricks it's usually the obvious but difficult solution. If an elephant disapears from behind a curtain and you think 'There is no way they could have done that unless they had a massive crane lift it out or a fork lift truck drive up from a trap door.... how the hell did they do it. They had a massive crane lift it out or a fork lift truckdrive up from a trap door.' |
| Sun 07 Mar | braid_ged | Ah... The key to magic, I am told, is distraction and the fact that the trick always happens at a time other than when you think it has. For example 'How did they get out of that box is plain view ?' They were never in it. Mirrors or projection etc.... The trick occurs not when the audience is focused on it.. but when the magician is telling a joke or introducing some distraction. Magic is about distraction. |
| Sun 07 Mar | www.marktaw.com | There's a series on TV "debunking" a lot of these tricks. You can probably rent them too. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Simon Lucy | For most static illusions its a 45 degree mirror or set of mirrors. Distance or travelling illusions, such as seeming to be in one place and then another are usually accomplished using doubles or twins. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Rick | That video series I think is called the Masked Magician or maybe Mystery Magician. They'll show a modern illusion of the type you saw, then move the camera in back, do it again and show you how it worked. And it's always really obvious, like she disappeared from the box because she never got in the box, she just crouched down on a ledge behind it and hopped off behind the curtain as they spun it around. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Mark Pearce | Entell, You don't need to analyze - just enjoy the mystery! http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/articles/fire-eating.html Mark |
| Sun 07 Mar | somebody | I think the show was called something like "Secrets Revealed" and on TV about five years ago. They had a magician who was supposedly well-known and was referred to as the "Masked Magician" (since he claimed that revealing his identity would ruin his career). Eventually, he was unmasked and turned out to be some guy that no one ever heard of. He did reveal some interesting tricks but they never scaled well to the Copperfield level. |
| Open House Help | Sat 06 Mar | Elephant |
| Okay, if Im coming in from out of town for the open house, say D.C., whats the best way to get to Fog Creek, and what would you recommend for hotels? What if I take Amtrak in? Any and all recommendations are more than appreciated. I like nice hotels, but I dont want to shell out an arm and a leg. |
| Sat 06 Mar | The Walrus | How about a homeless shelter or a YMCA? |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Youth hostels and bed and breakfast. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Simon Lucy | Is there going to be a competition for the furthest travelled or the most imaginative/circuitous route? No, don't worry I'm not going. I do though have a mental image of squads of Joel lookalikes showing up and there being a sudden market in plastic face masks. |
| Sun 07 Mar | mb | hey, shouldn't this be in the 'new york' forum? looks like their offices are about 4 blocks north of the train station. exit on the 8th avenue side and walk. from the bus station you'd have to walk south about the same distance. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Elephant | I would have posted it there, but that's now the ask Joel forum. I suppose it would still fit there. |
| VMWare virtual machine as primary environment | Sat 06 Mar | VMQ |
| Im in the process of reconstructing a copy of my working environment on a new laptop and will be going through that process again soon with a faster desktop PC. Yuk! Any thoughts and experiences about running a VMWare virtual machine as your primary environment? So instead of installing development tools, email client, productivity applications etc. onto the native O/S you build your day-to-day working environment inside a VM. Advantages: easy to move your entire working environment between machines, for example to a laptop or a faster PC just by copying the VM. Easy backups too. Disadvantages: a slight performance hit (but does this matter with todays fast hardware?) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joel Spolsky | Great idea but at 2 GHz on the main CPU, it's still a little too slow, I think. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | I develop only inside of Virtual PC now. My host PCs run the most appropriate OS for personal use (Windows XP), and then I can select from literally dozens of available development environments as I see fit (matrix of OS vs. compiler vs. other things like what versions of individual software is installed vs. additional required development tools like SharePoint). I've been doing it this way for about 6 months now, and I cannot image doing it any other way now. This is just too flexible. Plus, my desktop has 2GB of RAM, so it's a breeze to not only get my development tools running in one VPC, but clean client and server environments in others, and have it all running at once. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | Oh, and I do it with a 1GHz P3 and 5400RPM drive on my laptop, too, and it's still extremely usable. |
| Sat 06 Mar | erics | Yup, I do this pretty often as I have multiple clients who require multiple, incompatible development environments. I'm usually using VMWare for linux work under Windows XP, but I sometimes run Windows under Windows as well. Performance is ok for development but drops off markedly your VM starts needing to page to disk. I should note that I'm running an older 1.3GHz 128M RAM laptop. More memory would certainly improve the situation. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | Yes, plentiful RAM is a requirement to make this work. I just upgraded my desktop machine (P4-2.8/800), and put 2GB of ultra-fast RAM into the system. Now I can run a literally insane number of Virtual PCs without swapping to disk. A strong recommendation for non-laptop users: get a second disk, and put the virtual hard drive files on that second disk, separate from your OS & paging file. Even on an external Firewire or USB 2 drive, that can make a pretty substantial difference in disk performance, which is admittedly the weakest point for both VMware and VPC. |
| Sat 06 Mar | dood , | we run our builds on a vmware machine. WE can build anywhere , and if hardware has problems we move the build vm image over to new machine. cj |
| Sat 06 Mar | Philo | [psst, Brad! One word: SCSI] |
| Sat 06 Mar | K | I develop on vpc's on a laptop (1.5ghz Pentium M with 1 G RAM) and it is a great way to do work. On the laptop I keep the VPC's on a USB 7200 harddrive w/ 8M cache. It is important to keep the VPC's on a harddrive that does not contain your host OS. The other benefit is that in team development you can bring a new person on to the team in less then half a day. Definately worth looking into. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Li-fan Chen | VMQ, you are right on. Basically you should only run the bare minimum on your host pc, this 1) reduces registry/dll hell to the point where you'll rarely reinstall; 2) keeps it stable And then stack on the goodies in your virtual host. You should still backup (either the VM files or ghost what's within) and use the rollback feature to undo what mysterious shareware might have done to your system. Performance wise, it's good enough for most office work. For GUI less linux remote administration/programming, I would say anything faster than a P3-800, For same machine GUI development, anything faster than a P4 2.0GHz should be more than adequate (depends on what you do though). You won't want to run 3D rendering or Premier in it, however, keep the serious long-runs and raw crunching out of it as much as possible. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > You won't want to run 3D rendering or Premier in it, however, keep the serious long-runs and raw crunching out of it as much as possible. YMMV. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | [psst, Brad! One word: SCSI] psst, Philo! One sentence: 3ware SATA hardware RAID smokes, for half the price of SCSI, when the drives are physicall the same! :) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | '[...] keep the serious long-runs and raw crunching out of it as much as possible.' Actually, this is precisely where VPC excels. The CPU performance between VPC and host is nearly 100% equal. Where you hurt the most is disk. So, computationally expensive (but not data intensive) things works just beautifully inside a VPC. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | I would go with Brad on this, basically this is what it will translate to: longer compiles, not because of CPU power waste, but disk access waste (lots of files are created, translated in any given major compiles). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Egor | I do 100% of my development inside VMware on 2GHz Celeron with 1G RAM. WinXP as host, RedHat Linux as guest (very minimal X environment, no KDE or something, so I give it 256MB). GCC compilation times seem to be on par with PIII-500/256/ATA33, (which I also use for same builds, so I can compare). So, as you see, slowdowns are significant. Things like traversing directory tree are also much slower. But my disks are virtual, I guess you can get a lot better performance from raw partition access. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | There are a couple different options to combat that. The raw partition access is a very good one. Another option available in VPC (and presumably VMware) is to make the "virtual disk" a fixed size on the host disk; i.e., it doesn't grow. Much of the performance penalty associated with disk access is growing the on-host file size for the virtual disk. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | Also... 'GCC compilation times seem to be on par with PIII-500/256/ATA33' I was previously a VMware user (paid twice, for 2.x and 3.x), and switched to Virtual PC, because I found the performance with Virtual PC is absolutely outstanding. My slowdowns are nowhere near as bad as yours seem to be.. The downside, obviously, is that the host for VPC must be Windows, whereas you can host VMware with Linux (which is a seemingly better host choice, given its relatively low hardware requirements). On the other hand, VPC can be hosted on the Mac, which last I checked, VMware could not. I'd say anybody who's evaluating VMware for something like this sort of owes it to themselves to get the timed trial version of VPC and do an A/B performance comparison. |
| Sun 07 Mar | anon | I have to agree. Virtual PC is much better at running Windows operating systems (can you say undocumented hooks -- just kidding folks! I don't want to troll), especially in the area of i/o throughput. There was a review going round a couple of weeks ago that confirmed this, if I find the link I post it. You can run non-Windows OS in Virtual PC 2004, and the networking side of things is handled in a much nicer fashion, without the extra adpators and bridge protocols that VMWare uses. Just my fraction of a Euro. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | I have never tried VPC, sincerely hope I am not missing out :-) Yes, VMWare is infatuated disk optimizations (but it has a crush on memory and processing power too). In order of preferences: 1. VMWare GSX running on Google's 13000+ linux servers 2. A complete scsi subsystem, accessed as a raw partition 3. A separate physical scsi drive, all to the virtual os as a single raw partition. 4. A separate physical ide drive, all to the virtual os as a single raw partition 5. A separate ide drive with separate partitions, one used by host os, one used by virtual os, 6. Same drive as host OS drive, dedicated raw access on a separate partition 7. Same drive as host OS drive, preallocated virtual disk 8. 7. Same drive as host OS drive, dynamic sizing of virtual disk The more you go out of your way to help this along, the more your VMWare will speed up. |
| Gwyn's "Why won't you show your cards?" | Sat 06 Mar | Philo |
| In http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1730&ixReplies=27 Gwyn asked why Joel wont reveal how his business is doing, stating that in the UK everyone has to, and it doesnt hurt them. In poker, you rules for five card stud are that each player gets one hole card and the other four are dealt face up in front of them. In five card draw, each player is given five cards face down. If youre in a game of five card draw, you dont ask one of the other players to lay down four cards because it works just fine in five card stud. The trick is that everyone is on the same playing field. In the US, small, privately-held companies dont have to reveal their business beyond normal public filings. For Joel to show all his cards on an internet message board would put him at a massive competitive disadvantage with other businesses here in the US. My advice - dont wander over to other peoples games and insist they play by your rules. You can ask, but they can also say no. (but if you want to join someone elses game, you should be prepared to play by their rules) Philo |
| Sat 06 Mar | Nick | It should also be noted that in the US there are commercial resources to gather info on private companies. In large companies, most purchasing departments will run a D&B report on new vendors if they are small and/or privately held. D&B provides basic credit reports on companies. I've never seen the contents of one, so I'm not sure what other info is entailed. So, even for private companies, some information is publicly available. Here is an example of what you can order: http://tinyurl.com/3ga7e |
| Sat 06 Mar | Nick | Also, Joel has inadvertantly provided other information about his company. Fog Creek employees have 'Fog Creek Software' in their posts to this forum. The only posts I've seen with the extra signature line are from Joel and Michael. So, you could speculate that Joel and Michael are the only two full time developers, making it a small company. On the other hand, Joel hires developers who are smart and get things done, and therefore don't waste their time in message boards like the rest of us. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Simon Lucy | In the UK all you have to do if you're a small company is post a set of unaudited accounts. If you aren't a limited liability company you don't even have to do that. |
| Sat 06 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | 'Anyone that really wanted to know the details of Fog Creek would have no trouble obtaining such information. ' Which is yet *another* reason why Joel doesn't need to disclose information if he prefers not to. If you want to know, then *search* for it. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | D&B reports are not exactly accurate. This is not a good way to evaluate how a company is doing, what their revenue is, etc, if that is what you guys are thinking of. On the other hand, there have been various business questions asked of Joel that he has just flat out blown off. Example: A (long) while back Joel ran an article on how he dumped Digital River as their payment processor / ESD provider and cooked up their own stuff. Fine, no need to give Digital River their reseller discount anymore. Someone asked later how they did with respect to fraud - online fraud is a BIG problem with doing your own order processing, outfits like Digital River (and their satelite companies) have skills and experience in this area, that is what you are paying for. Not a peep. I can't imagine Joel writing a story for MSDN about all his major screw-ups like Eric Sink did. The guy (Joel) is a cheerleader for his own bidness, and that is about it. Think I'll pose the online order fraud question on 'Ask Joel' and see if he ducks it once again. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | >>'For Joel to show all his cards on an internet message board would put him at a massive competitive disadvantage with other businesses here in the US.' Utter nonsense. This is a perfect example of excessive paranoia masquerading as 'protecting your business'. This is the same type of nonsense that has been rampant in government agencies (sepecially the federal government) for years. The most trivial information is classified as Top Secret. If someone obtains the source code to City Desk and starts producing a knock off product, obviously that would be bad.. But I cannot think of one single peice of information about the company that would be harmful if made public. Please explain how revealing the number of people employeed by Fog Creek Software would put them 'at a massive competitive disadvantage'. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joel Spolsky | We have a policy of not revealing any information about our e-commerce system because that would make it easier to hack. In particular I'm not going to tell you what we're doing to reduce fraud because people trying to defraud us would use it to circumvent our fraud reduction measures. Sorry. Nor am I going to tell you what bank I use for credit card processing or what software, all of which would just make it that much easier on someone trying to steal from us. (And if you were planning to rehash that stupid misinterpretation of Bruce Schneier, please restrain yourself: just because the development of new cryptographic algorithms benefits from openness does not in any way imply that the implementation of fraud detection and prevention measures benefits from publicity. We've gotten our credit card fraud rate down to zero with some clever measures that, frankly, if people knew what they were they could start defrauding us again. Yes, I'd rather have measures that would still work even if people knew what they were, but such things don't exist, so I welcome the advantage that secrecy provides.) We have a policy of not revealing sales figures primarily because we believe it would attract entry (i.e. competitors). We don't publish the number of employees that we have for the same reason, but you're welcome to come to the Fog Creek open house and count 'em yourself. In all these cases, there's a difference between 'if you ask me I'll tell you' and 'if you ask me I'll publish it on a web site.' For example, I wouldn't be happy if someone decided to hack Fog Creek and intercept all our credit card payments, redirecting them to their Swiss bank account, and I sure as hell do not need to give them a map, available with a conveniently high Google page rank, explaining how we process credit card transactions and making it just that much easier to steal from us, but again, come up to me at the open house, introduce yourself, and I'll happily show you the whole process and give you references for all the vendors we use. Just because we don't like to provide a complete online reference describing every aspect of Fog Creek's operation, doesn't mean we're obsessively secretive or hiding something. We don't have that much to hide, anyway. Occassionally some snarky troll says, 'why should we listen to what you say about software development if you refuse to divulge how much money Fog Creek makes?' as if that were the only way to judge whether the contents of my writing on the web makes sense. Judge what I write on its merits, not on whether Fog Creek makes money or has lots of employees. I'm not sure why these snarky trolls can't just judge whether my ideas are valid or not on their own, without reference to external sources of 'authority.' And finally I have generally found that when somebody asks for something you're not planning to tell them, you're much better off ignoring them than just outright refusing to give them the information, because you wind up in stupid arguments like this one which can easily be avoided by not engaging the trolls. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Philo | Sorry if you think it's stupid, Joel, but I felt that the 'why don't you reveal everything about your business when everyone in the UK does' was an interesting mental disconnect worth addressing. And Joe, you can't compare what governments do with what small businesses do - the question is 'who are they accountable to?' Philo |
| Sat 06 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | I posted this in the other thread, and I'll post it here too: I think maybe Joel has decided to let his actions speak louder than words about the internals of his company. His company has two products, one of which is on version 2 and the other of which is on version 3. This gives a very strong indication that his company is self-sufficient. He clearly states pricing for the products. A bored Sunday reading through the archives or a search will yield this post http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000026.html dated December 2, 2000. That's over three years out of date, and if you add to it the fact that his company recently had new office space created to their own specs and is hosting an open house, I'll think you'll find that he's doing fine. The exact internals are not necessary. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Gwyn | 'Sorry if you think it's stupid, Joel, but I felt that the 'why don't you reveal everything about your business when everyone in the UK does' was an interesting mental disconnect worth addressing.' Philo - that's a bit kiss-arse isn't it? I don't remember you proposing it like that! It was more a defence of why Joel shouldn't reveal it and your presumption about why that might be. I suspect that, in a global market, it might be interesting so see how all the American companies hiding their information might be adversely affecting UK companies that don't have that luxury.... or maybe not eh? Joel, that was quite some rant. Looks a little defensive maybe but well done anyway! Two 'snarky trolls' and a plain old 'troll' just for me. Although 'snarky' means 'irritable' and I suggest you actually meant 'irritating'. > I'm not sure why these snarky trolls can't just judge whether my ideas are valid or not on their own, without reference to external sources of 'authority.' I think it's fair to say that your ideas are generally presented as a statement of fact. So you have to accept being challenged. > And finally I have generally found that when somebody asks for something you're not planning to tell them, you're much better off ignoring them than just outright refusing to give them the information, because you wind up in stupid arguments like this one which can easily be avoided by not engaging the trolls. Actually not true. You may end up in a different (possibly interesting) discussion about why you wouldn't tell someone something but it's a competely different message you send by saying 'I don't reveal that because...' rather than ignoring it which comes across as 'Oops, that's an awkward question' I personally don't buy the 'it would attract entry' argument. You mean when people find out how successful you are that they're suddenly going to decide that there's money to be made in bug tracking systems or content management systems? Hmmm. But that's just my view. People in the public-eye professions (like actors or musicians) often whinge about the amount of public attention they get but, hey, get over it, that's part of the package. And likewise, when you sit yourself up on a public pedestal (for whatever reason you choose) you have to accept that part of that job is to deal with the awkward questions. You don't have to like it but you shouldn't be surprised that it happens. Trying to protect your image by only letting out what you consider good publicity is doomed to failure I'm afraid. You need a different approach. I and another person asked you questions 'Do you have any insight into working out product pricing' on the 'Ask Joel' forum. You didn't respond to either of them. To the outside world it looks like 'Joel knows everything' because those questions never appear but you could answer those questions with an honest 'I'm afraid I can't help you on that'. In the short term this may work but as a long term strategy it'll start to undermine you. Noone expects you to have all the answers. But people like other people to be honest about who they really are. This breeds trust and good long-term relationships. Now this thread has the potential to show insight into the mind of the man who created FC and JoS. And this is interesting in itself. |
| Sat 06 Mar | saberworks | http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1389 |
| Sat 06 Mar | The Ted | 'We have a policy of not revealing sales figures primarily because we believe it would attract entry (i.e. competitors).' Isn't the CMS & bug tracking fields ALREADY heavily competitive? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Brad Wilson | Yes, except that they have product differentiation. They're not bug tracking. They're easy to install, simple to use web-based bug tracking. That was enough of a differentiation for us to buy it. They're not CMS. They're lightweight site management for people who don't want to (and shouldn't have to) know HTML. Again, that's enough of a differentiation to make some sales. 'Own your market space. If you can't own the market, make a new one, and own that instead.' |
| Sun 07 Mar | VP | SPOON!!! |
| Sun 07 Mar | Richard P | Yeah. There are a lot of bug tracking and CMS tools. However, if everyone knew how much bling Joel was making, they would spend $$$ to research just what people like about Fog Creek products and make a near clone with a super-marketing-must-have feature tacked on. Almost every bug tracking software I've seen is overly feature-wridden. I haven't used Fog Bugz, but I get the impression from the marketing that it is lean-and-mean. Almost every CMS system out there is either just a set of perl scripts and some XML files or a huge, bloated, Java AppServer behemoth. CityDesk falls nicely in the sweet spot. So yeah, I think Joel's explanation holds water. |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | Google only returns 850,000+ hits for "web based bug tracking", so clearly there's room for competition. :} |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | Or 64,500 if you put it all in quotes. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | Right, because the REALLY important part is that it's web based, not that it's simple to install or easy to use, right? :-p |
| Sun 07 Mar | :} | Probably only 30,000 of those hits claim to be simple and easy to use. The rest claim to be powerful and feature-packed. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Kyralessa | 'Google only returns 850,000+ hits for 'web based bug tracking', so clearly there's room for competition. :}' http://search.csmonitor.com/search_content/0227/p09s01-coop.html |
| Sun 07 Mar | | Yah, I know you can't rely on google that way. I was just pointing out that there are several web based bug tracking systems that bill themselves as simple and easy to use. Even a lot of free ones. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | As someone who is in favor of free (we use Subversion and CruiseControl.NET, for instance), I'll say that I've never EVER seen a free bug tracking system that was as good and simple as FogBUGZ. If there were, I'd be using it. Just because they claim 'easy', doesn't make them easy. FogBUGZ really _is_ easy. |
| Sun 07 Mar | | 'Just because they claim 'easy', doesn't make them easy. FogBUGZ really _is_ easy' Does the same hold true for YOUR claim? |
| Sun 07 Mar | no name | Here's the real question: does an admission that Joel is worried about attracting competitors (and thinks his sales figures would do that) mean that we should all rush out and write our own CityDesk clone even without knowing the precise numbers? Or does it mean the market is so small that a second company in the same market would probably mean both would go under? :) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'Does the same hold true for YOUR claim?' Of course. You don't know me. Why should you believe my claim, when it's so simple to form you own opinion? That's what the big lump of gray is for, the stuff in your skull. :) |
| app research | Sat 06 Mar | entell |
| Anyone know of any good software out there to do the following: * An alternative to MS Outlook Is Eudora dead? Thats really the only one I can think of. Do you guys know/use other ones? * Bookmark management I am a bookmark junkie. I have hundreds of them, but keeping track of them ala IE is a horrendous job. How do you guys do it? Your suggestions may include commercial software as well as shareware and freeware. Thanks! |
| Sat 06 Mar | Almost Anonymous | I use Eudora! It's not dead yet... |
| Sat 06 Mar | x | I use the Mozilla mail client - it suits all my needs just fine. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Dan Maas | mutt user here. Command-line mail clients aren't for everyone, but fine for me :). |
| Sat 06 Mar | Liam | I prefer Outlook Express to Outlook.... It is quicker .... |
| Sat 06 Mar | Greg Hurlman | What are you looking for in an email app that isn't in Outlook? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Clay Dowling | Mozilla's Thunderbird package is very nice. It's very similar to the Mozilla mail component, but because it doesn't carry all of the Mozilla backage it is very fast. I've been very happy with it, and in general I don't like GUI mail clients. |
| Sat 06 Mar | entell | >What are you looking for in an email app that isn't in >Outlook? Greg, There is nothing more I am looking for. I just don't like Outlook 2000. Outlook Express is no better either. They are clunky, too many features and such. It also seems to crash a lot on me. I use the e-mail account my ISP provides me. Half the time Outlook doesn't realize it when new e-mail arrives. Sometimes it thinks the same e-mail is new twice or more.. It is just a silly app. I use it because it came with MS Office 2000. I was too lazy to find and install anything else, but I am very fed up with it at this point. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | Pegasus Mail is a reasonable email program that's free. It claims to store your mailboxes in Unix MBOX format, so you should be able to switch to something else if you don't like it. (It has its own proprietary format too, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of getting this exported, so beware.) I've been using it at home for about 18 months, and I used an earlier version about 8 years ago when I was at university. It's been trouble-free, and Norton Antivirus works with it. It does have a clunky UI, however, and a few cosmetic problems when scrolling messages and message lists. And when there were email problems with my ISP, it downloaded all my messages about 10 times each. And your mail filtering rules sometimes have to be set up twice -- once for your inbox (for future mail) and once as a general set to use to clear out any mail currently in your inbox that you want filtered. But other than those, no major complaints. One feature it doesn't have, which I find useful in Outlook, is a way to quickly get to the message you sent in reply to a message in your inbox. But it will at least tell you whether you replied, which is (for me) the most important thing :) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Greg Hurlman | You *might* want to check out this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/04/157219&mode=thread - grated, it's a /. thread, but at least you're guaranteed to have everything but Outlook discussed as a viable solution. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Benji Smith | I've been looking at Columba ( http://columba.sourceforge.net/ ) for a long time now. My company uses outlook, and that's what I use, but I'd definitely like to give Columba a try. If you do get a chance to check it out, post back here with your opinion. |
| Sat 06 Mar | hoser | Another vote for the Mozilla family of mail clients. The only thing it won't do (yet?) is schedule integration w/exchange servers. There is a calendar app, but its not compiled in by default. For just email use, mozilla mail rules are much more useful, and the spame filtering - while not perfect - works reasonably well. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Have you considered Oddpost? It provides a web-based email application that does a good job at emulating Outlook, without all of the extra fluff. http://www.oddpost.com/ |
| Sat 06 Mar | entell | Thanks for all the suggestions! I'll give them all a try as soon as I can. I really can't wait to throw Outlook out the window. There seems to be no suggestions for a bookmark manager though. You guys don't use them? Don't know any? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | I've not seen any bookmark managers. Every now and again, I copy my favourites (with Explorer, not the dreadful IE bookmark 'manager') into a new subfolder of the favourites menu. I copy those I know I'll use often back into the real favourites, for easy access. Any new ones I add into the main favourites. I also copy more from my backup into the real list as and when I need them. Then I repeat the process when the favourites list gets too large. It works surprisingly well. It's amazing how few I actually visit :) |
| Sun 07 Mar | entell | I couldn't find any bookmark managers either. I was planning to write one up, but not sure if it is worth the time. I think it is for my own use at least, but don't know if anyone else would care about it. |
| Sun 07 Mar | one programmer's opinion | entell, As far as a decent bookmark manager is concerned, I recommend that you visit a few shareware websites and while there doing a search for bookmark managers. There are so many on the market you really need to download a couple of them and try them out for yourself. I also recommend choosing a bookmark manager that allows you check for valid URLs since URLs have a tendency to die over time. |
| vxworks device driver | Fri 05 Mar | Adi |
| I am a beginner for device drivers development and i want to write a device driver for vxworks. Could anyone suggest a good site or book that could be a good Get-Started. Thanks in advance, Adi |
| Sat 06 Mar | son of parnas | vxworks has example drivers. They are pretty standard. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Vivek | You'll need the following concepts clear when you write a device driver. Vxworks drivers are explained in the Programmers guide ... http://rt.db.erau.edu/experiments/vx/toc/TableOfContents.html |
| A 20 minute usability review of City Desk | Fri 05 Mar | A Regular poster from India |
| Product: City desk starter edition. Operating system: Windows XP Professional. Dell Pentium 256 MB RAM An excellent product. I thought i would do a task analysis and probably a statistical study taking this as a example. But i came across very wierd things which are very basic usability flaws IMHO. The intital points are silly. But i would shout the roof down at any programmer who made some of the mistakes cited later on. But then again, i am a novice to city desk. Maybe there was some reason for doing it this way. Again, on the whole the usability is good. I did my masters in usability engineering. But this product had many basic flaws. The Microsoft usability standard at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/ch06g.asp is not implemented properly. You would say, FUCK MICROSOFT. But the problem is, people expect software to work the way MS works. Again this is just an initial impression. Its not a detailed study. And i am no city desk expert. So you could say, this is not well informed study. On pressing the windows shortcut key, the right mouse menu pops up in the most inconvenient position ---> Top left hand side. It should be where the caret should be. Logical and simple. If you are visually impaired, you will have a hard time locating where the menu popped up. I am not sure why almost every product has this bug . Or this is a feature? The Find Next has no shortcut key. You are compelled to use the mouse. Hardly intuitive.On a closer inspection, it has a shortcut key, but is not visible. Why do you expect me to type out all the letters on my keyboard to find the shortcut key?. The textboxes have visible shortcut keys but pushbuttons dont. Also Checkboxes dont have shortcut keys. Or is this a windows XP feature. Font Sizes. It shows font sizes from 1 to 7. Next to 1 it says Smallest. Yeh. I remember Arithmetic well enough to know that if there are numbers from 1-7, 1 is the smallest. The main thing is, if i want to set the font to 8, the letters distract. It forces me to read the words smallest or largest. Aricles, Properties, Extras . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. The font is also quite unpleasant. You wont see tabs with that font. On the bottom(Status text) it says 478 words. Helpful. But if you are like most people, you will find that a combination of number of lines and number of words make more sense. For example 30 lines, 300 words. In fact, people find it difficult to think in lines too. The best is Number of Pages with number of lines (like MS Word) It is an editor, but on pressing the Insert key does not show whether its an insert or in overtype mode. Very basic IMHO. This is usually found in products like microsoft word and yes, i do use this feature. When i type F1, nothing happens. Does not bring up the help system. I dont know whether its a problem with my edition. Other products installed seemed to work on the F1 key. Save and Close--> Again not intuitive. How many of you actually click the Maximize button on launching citydesk?. Why does it not come up like you expect it to come up? Splash screens are not meant for the purpose Joel is using them for. To repeat , Splash screen is meant to show the user something to look at when the application loads, though the main purpose is often lost. In Citydesk, the splash screen is shown after the application loads. Why have a application window for each window?. This can have unpleasant consequences. I go to city desk main, go to MS Word and to city desk article. On closing the city desk article, you expect to get back to city desk. But it takes you to MS Word. Atleast, simulate a MDI window, even if you dont use it. Some dialogs have Help , others have Learn More. Difference?. Small thing, you can ignore this one. The Ok and Cancel buttons should be in the bottom right hand side of dialogs. There is a specific reason for this. It should not distract you from the dialog contents. Similiar find boxes ought to be consistent. In the Edit Variable window, you bring up one find -replace box. In the main city desk article, another find-replace box. Cant you call the same box?. In the Edit variable Box, the Edit menu is disabled when the screen loads. This should not be done. Why?. A visually impaired user may not notice that the Edit menu is disabled. He may not see the edit menu at all. A better solution is to disable the sub menus. This way, the user will know that it may be enabled on navigating to the next control (Multiline).Again, pushbuttons have no shortcuts, but text boxes have. In the Edit Variable Box, why show scrollbars if there is only one line?. This is distracting. The horizontal scroll bar **always** distracts. It should be shown only when the text length exceeds screen space. The Edit Variable Box comes in the Top Left Hand Corner. Nope. It should come in the center. Forces the user to shift focus. I have heard of the windows standard on placement of dialog boxes. Should be mostly centered. But there is little reason to put it on the top left hand side. The HTML View has a caret size thicker than the Normal View. Smart programming?. This is quite noticeable. Also why change the font? In the main City Desk Explorer view, Windows short cut key does not work. Very basic IMHO. This is the first thing i look when i evaluate usability. Again, the Find-Replace Boxes have a little problem. The text box width is not consistent across different Find-Replace dialogs, although there is no evidence that the length of the text the user enters changes from one dialog to the other. The Find-Replace box in the HTML editor does not select the selected text by default. By this i mean that if Joel is highlighted in the article, i expect Joel to show up in the Find-Replace boxes. Basic, IMHO. The captions with the pictures in Find-Replace boxes have to have the first letter capitalized. Looks better. And is windows standard. In the Insert-Link dialog (External URL Text box)(, if the URL is too long, you are better of seeing the first N characters rather than the last N characters. I mean, you save it as www.amazon.com/sadasdasda/asd/ad/a/das/d/asdsasdadas What do you want to see the next time, is it www.amazon.com... or adadadasdsadad Long URLs can easily be viewed in this article. Provide the URL as a tooltip. This is what Microsoft recommends and what is commonly followed. In the Insert Link box, on navigating using the tab key, the radio button value changes from To a citydesk... to To an external URL. And no Joel, I know you think that this is smart. BEcause the user did not select anything, smartly change the value. The basic windows rule is that you should not change values in any fields when the user navigates. Read the MSDN article on usability. Tab order does not work in the Insert Link. It never seems to go to the Link appears in... checkbox. In the insert picture box, on clicking Import File, you get a unpleasant minor usability shock. The dialog is no longer visible when the Insert Picture comes up. Why?. Imagine if Microsoft Word window disappeared when the Save As dialog comes. I mean, there is no earthly reason why it ought to go off your vision radar for some time. In the Insert picture dialog box, The space between the Alignment frame and the picture is much larger than in the Link frame. I mean, see the space between Link and The image is not a link. There is one more problem. All the objects need to be centered within the frame. In the Link frame, the space between the frame and the first object is much larger than the space between the frame and the last object. This is glaringly obvious. The tab order is totally haywire in the Insert Dialog Box. Set the focus to the combo box.I expect it to go to the Import File and then to the Alignment frame. But it never goes to the alignment frame. And no Joel, although i am your fan, this is inexcusable. The problem with this design is that you can never navigate to the alignment frame by the keyboard by tabbing. Also, you cant navigate to some other fields. I noticed a very strange anomoly in the Insert Picture box. None of the radio buttons have VISIBLE shortcut keys, but the shortcut keys work. Put an Ampersand before the titles to indicate that there is a shortcut key.Even when i press the alt key, the shortcut keys are not visible. And no joel, there cannot be any earthly reason for this. Provide some kind of a shortcut key to navigate between windows in city desk. Usually, this is Ctrl+F6. When i click on Insert Audio, the file types show All Files. It should show Audio Files. A tooltip for Add pushbutton shows Add. A tooltip for Delete shows Delete. Whats the point mate?. Dont provide them at all or provide some meaningful tip. In Template Properties, i cannot navigate to the non-disabled checkboxes at all. On a closer inspection, i can navigate but i cant see that it has navigated !!! Windows in city desk open in all sorts of positions. One needs to look around the screen to see the place where it has opened. Keyboard navigation is haywire and wrong in citydesk. I respectfully recommend. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/ch06g.asp And yes Joel, i know users who do all stuff on their keyboard who get irritated by such things. I mean to be helpful, and i hope you fix these. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Matthew Lock | The best test of Citydesk's usability is that I could set up a site for my company, and marketing could add pages themselves after about 5 minutes training. AND not keep coming back to ask questions about how such and such worked. I can't think of any other low end CMS systems where that would be possible. |
| Fri 05 Mar | A Regular poster from India | I hope no one mistakes this post. I am not saying City desk is bad . 99.99% good and 0.01% defective is still a great product.Please dont mistake this post. Its just what i looked for. Respectfully |
| Fri 05 Mar | A Regular poster from India | The reason for this post is to get into a harsh usability war. I want someone saying "This is the reason for this" rather than saying "City desk is great". That way we all learn. Sorry for the third post. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Likes long walks, short piers | It's all relative. From my usability experience, City Desk does not appear to be aimed at casual or inexperienced users. Rather it appears geared toward speeding & simplifying the tasks of building & maintaining web content for those already familiar with the equivalent manual methods. From this perspective, City Desk is a relatively friendly tool. |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | I think this illustrates a good point: The success of a business depends on doing many things well, not doing one thing perfectly. (I.e., need to have effective markeing AND sales AND prices AND product ) Everything is a tradeoff. Likewise, producing a successful product depends on doing many things WELL, not doing one thing perfectly. If you do manage to get one thing perfect, the 'cost' of that perfection comes in reducing the success of the other features. Think of the company or product as a chain. It's only as strong as it's weakest link. PEOPLE CAN BE MYOPIC People often focus on thier own area of expertise (programming, the look of the program, sales, whatever) and think that that PORTION of the company IS the company. IF only they could get that part RIGHT, then it woudl be a success. OVERALL, IT'S A STRONG CHAIN Joel has gotten every piece of the company working fairly well. He has gotten most of the program working fairly well. Certainly room for improvement, if any piece was perfect them it would mean he spent too much time of that piece. He'd have one VERY STRONG link and, consequently, other weaker links. MY GRIPE Personally, my biggest gripe is that it's so hard to convert an EXISTING website to Citydesk. you basically have to cut and paste the whole site a page and image at a time. If my site were small enough to do that, I would not need CityDesk. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Perpetual Newbie II | Regular Poster and you carried out this study for what purpose? Practice? As a CD _user_ there a number of things that I, and from posts I've read in the CD NG - many other _users_ would like to see FC spend their time on. You pick up on exactly … ahh ... none of them. Although you came close a couple of times :) You did mention a few glaring items (not that any of them have either affected my ability to use CD or ever even been noticed for that matter) the most obvious being F1-Help. VB and HTML-Help, which is what the program uses, have never gotten on well – not a good excuse, I agree. On the 'Maximize' item - God I hate people who have to 'Maximize' every GD tool, utility or program they open. Especially on a multi-user machine. 95% back-ground. It's the only time I curse Form persistence. Yea, I know - off track - just a rant. I'm not about to argue 'usability' with the learned. Here's my 18 month review (just what you didn't want) It works great, I'm very productive with it and although there are a number of new features and fixes I'd like to see just about every item you mentioned, to me, is pure fluff. It doesn’t meet every anal item according to some MS document … BFD, I could give a fiddlers fart! Sorry, I got off track, what was it were studying here? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Seun Osewa | I think these are meaningful points that can help turn make a great product even greater; afterall software is about continual improvement over time. |
| Sat 06 Mar | John C | Regular poster, you've not written a usability review, you've just nit-picked small flaws in the GUI. If you want to review the usability of CityDesk, then use it to create and maintain a website and write about how good it was at doing that. I don't care if there's no 'Find Next' shortcut key, I care that it's top notch at maintaining a website... |
| Sat 06 Mar | Karl Max | Why do Joel's cronies defend him so much? This bloke... he's pointed out inconsistencies in the UI, coming from a company whose chief has written a *book* on UI design. To this post, you should either say, 'no, you're wrong. These are NOT UI problems' or say, 'yes, you're right. We'll fix them' or at least 'we know about it, but we did it this way because...' |
| Sat 06 Mar | Stephen Jones | I don't use City Desk but I'd like to answer a couple of points. --''Save and Close'--> Again not intuitive.' ----- There was a long debate over this a few months back. You might do a search and find the thread. It's one of the design decisions that will inevitably piss-off a fair proportion of people. The placing of the right context menu at the top left of the screen is the Windows default placement for some things, such as the display. I't not clear on any numerical scale whether 1 represents the smallest or the largest. You have to point it out. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeff Watkins | I think what I object to most about the OP's post is his tone. This is not a review. Nothing about his tone indicates objectivity. To me, his tone sounds like he's desperate to highlight his own knowledge of the subject (usability) rather than truly explore the design decisions (if indeed they were) behind certain aspects of City Desk. While I haven't ever used City Desk (it doesn't run on the Mac), I can base the following on my background building software: every software product has bugs and visual bugs are often easier to find. Had I adopted this tone back when I made a living doing usability consulting, I wouldn't have had many repeat customers. Oh, one more thing: I think the use of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) is ludicrous. If you call attention to it, it most certainly ISN'T a humble opinion. |
| Sat 06 Mar | anon | Umm, with regards the 'hidden' shortcut key for 'Find Next', isn't that just a case of Control Panel | Display | Appearance | Effects | "Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key" being turned on by default in Windows 200 0 and XP ? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | I disagree. I've not used Citydesk, and I don't really care about whether it's good or bad, but my complaint is with people who dismiss these so-called trivialities out of hand, or claim they don't matter when the program as a whole works well. As a blindingly obvious point, if the program as a whole didn't work well, the poster would probably have been moaning about something bigger. You don't complain about tab order, disappearing dialogs and strange menu positioning if you have bigger fish to fry. But these things are what turn a good program into one that's tiresome to use. You can beat the poster until you're blue in the face, but it won't stop inconsistent tab order and lack of keyboard shortcuts* from being a pain in the arse. A program that does just what you want will still cause your blood to boil, if keypresses don't do what you expect and obvious little things have simply been ignored. (And it's not like your expectations aren't borne of using a wide range of other Windows programs.) The slightly aggrieved tone is not a problem. No need to hold back. Minor annoyances like these create anger and frustration, and the fact that many people don't seem to notice (or, if they do, don't think it important) means you have to put your point across forcefully. Joel seems to have a pretty thick skin anyway. * -- those being problems that bug me in particular. I can't speak for the Citydesk-specific problems. P.S. context menus appear at the position indicated by the cursor for the device used to activate them. (Err... got that? :) For the desktop, there is no text caret, so keyboard-activated context menus appear at a default position. For a text editor, they should appear at the caret position. The caret indicates the screen position at which typing will have an effect. This is the same as the context menu appearing at the mouse cursor when you press the right mouse button. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | Anon -- sounds like the shortcut doesn't appear at all, so it's probably not that. I seem to remember that in the absence of any defined (with &) shortcut characters Windows will pick a default set for useful controls based on the first letter of the last text static before the control in the tab order. So maybe that is what's happening. |
| Sat 06 Mar | A Regular poster from India | I apologize to Joel for my tone. No excuses on my part. Maybe i got carried away. As for nitpicking, I was about to type in something on Indians not putting proper commas in resumes here, i shall desist. I hope he refrains from below the belt punching from his altar. I am not an anonymous coward who blasted a fine product. I did give my E Mail. Joel knows who i am. And lastly,I shall refrain from impolite langauge. |
| Sat 06 Mar | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | 'Aricles, Properties, Extras' . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. You can use Ctrl + Tab to go forwards or Shift + Ctrl + Tab to go backwards. That's a standard Windows shortcut for tabs. |
| Sat 06 Mar | there's a new one everyday | 'Masters in Usability Engineering' I got one of those in my cornflakes this morning. I'm sure Joel is happy to reap the rewards of all your unpaid efforts though, well done! |
| Sat 06 Mar | Ben Combee | I found the list of issues enlightening. There are several kinds of usability -- deep usability, surface usability, and functionality. Software can be good but still have flaws in these areas, and I think most of the criticisms the poster made are valid, although mainly in the surface area. The good thing about these is usually, they can be fixed fairly quickly without having a big impact on other parts of the program. I think the list was also useful for other developers as a reminder of areas of your program you might not consider; I've seen lots of apps with poor handling of keyboard navigation. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joe On Software (Joe) | >>'Why do Joel's cronies defend him so much? This bloke... he's pointed out inconsistencies in the UI, coming from a company whose chief has written a *book* on UI design.' Exactly. Instead of attacking the messenger, how about responding to the message. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Joel Spolsky | Thanks for the list! Actually we'd love to have you as a beta tester for version 3.0. This is exactly the kind of detailed feedback we LOVE in our beta tests... it's all little things that can be fixed in 1 minute each :) When we start the beta test for 3.0, I'll announce it on Joel on Software, and I think we're going to have to figure out some major reward for the most useful feedback. (During the 2.0 beta we got so much useful feedback of this sort from one user, we sent him a 512 MB upgrade for his computer. Also, half the bugs he was reporting were a result of his using a 64 MB computer ;) |
| Sat 06 Mar | saberworks | Sounds like you shouldn't have sent him an upgrade, then :) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Withheld | Actually it was my 128 MB machine and I was delighted and totally surprised when I got the memory in the mail. I'm not worthy. |
| Sat 06 Mar | A Regular poster from India | I want to respond to some of the usability objections raised 1) 'Aricles, Properties, Extras' . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. Someone pointed out that it can be done by Ctrl+Tab. Right. But how many users would know this?. Best is to add a Ampersand to the first letter. Users can recognize this. No user will read the MSDN manual where it is given. 2) Umm, with regards the 'hidden' shortcut key for 'Find Next', isn't that just a case of Control Panel | Display | Appearance | Effects | 'Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key' being turned on by default in Windows 200 0 and XP ? I did press the Alt key. Still not visible 3) The placing of the right context menu at the top left of the screen is the Windows default placement for some things As mentioned earlier, this bug is not unique to City Desk. Almost every product i have used has this bug. You may argue that most of them are minor. TRUE. But top notch usability means you get the work done without opening the help manual. I mean open the find-replace dialog. Should work like any other find-replace dialog. Some one who selects some text and goes to the find-replace box will expect to find it there. A golden rule is: Never invent your own controls/own way to do common things. The most intuitive products work likeyou expect it to work. This is the reason i think the Lotus Infobox is the greatest thing that happenned to usability (atleast for lotus). Not a single struggle. Even the icons are so intuitive thats its a pleasure to look at it. And lastly, thanks to Joel for taking it in the right spirit. I hope i have the time to test 3.0 and give good feedback and help a little bit and contribute and make citydesk a better product. Thank you all |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ken Klose | Joel, All your Beta Testers who make significant contributions should at least get an autographed copy of your book. You are a famous author after-all. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | Do beta testers get a free copy of City Desk (that is to say the one that has all the bugs fixed?) |
| Sun 07 Mar | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | 1) 'Articles, Properties, Extras' . No way to navigate between tabs using the keyboard. Someone pointed out that it can be done by Ctrl+Tab. Right. But how many users would know this?. Best is to add a Ampersand to the first letter. Users can recognize this. No user will read the MSDN manual where it is given. I don't think you should do this. It's totally non-standard and would just make the application look odd. The fact is, most users don't even know what the underlined letters mean in Windows. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Perpetual Newbie II | Stephen http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/BetaTest.html see Item 8. |
| Windows XP SP2 Will Break Your Apps. Part Deux. | Fri 05 Mar | Joe |
| http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/windows/story/0,10801,90849,00.html |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nate Silva | Damned if you do, damned if you don't... |
| Fri 05 Mar | pdq | What's "part deux" about this. It's the same story they've been saying all along. Am I missing something? |
| Fri 05 Mar | . | You're exactly write, Nate -- Microsoft put security as a far and away secondary priority for years, and now they're facing huge market pressure. In finally, belatedly, reacting they're finding that some of their prior practices were overly liberal, breaking some partner apps. They _are_ damned if they do and damned if they don't, and it's a house of cards that they made for themselves. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Chris Ormerod | [[Another product that Microsoft needs to update is its .Net Framework. The new memory protection features in SP2 require developers of certain applications to mark their code with memory execution permissions. If they don't, the protection features could interfere with the applications, according to Microsoft. 'The great bulk of applications will not be affected by memory protection. The No. 1 that leaps to mind is execution environments with just-in-time code generation. The .Net Framework is one,' Goodhew said. ]] Doesn't that quote mean that the .Net framework is one thing Microsoft WONT need to update? Or am I misunderstanding the 2 paragraphs? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | Causes problems with just-in-time code generation? Well, that might be handy in stopping mutating viruses, but it's also a nice way to mangle things like a Java JIT compiler or most of the anti-cracking software shells. I think this is both a good thing and a bad thing. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Richard P | One of the protections is that areas of memory must be specifically marked as executeable or not. This prevents the majority of buffer overflows, since the heap is generally not executeable. However, for JIT-like task, where you build code in-memory and then execute it, you're going to have to do the extra step to mark the area you just created as executeable. Interpreted languages: Parse grammar into a tree and traverse it. No executeable heap there, so no changes needed for SP2. JIT languages: Compile code and save results in-memory then execute in-memory. Changes needed. Compiled languages: No changes needed. So yes, this will break some java VMs. The fix should be easy though. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Frederik Slijkerman | I'm pretty sure the Microsoft JITter marks its target memory as executable though. :-) |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'One of the protections is that areas of memory must be specifically marked as executeable or not. This prevents the majority of buffer overflows, since the heap is generally not executeable.' This is the best feature in XP SP2, and unfortunately, is only available on supported CPUs (namely, the 64-bit Athlon and Opteron CPUs from AMD). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'I'm pretty sure the Microsoft JITter marks its target memory as executable though.' Well, I'm sure they will be once XP SP2 is out. :) The way things sit right now, it's clearly far more convenient to just allocate a chunk of RAM, write to it, then execute it. Playing by the rules means ensuring that all your newly JITted code lives on memory pages separate from data, and after it's been written to, those pages need to be flipped from read/write to read/execute (and, no, there's no read/write/execute). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Mike | 'This is the best feature in XP SP2, and unfortunately, is only available on supported CPUs (namely, the 64-bit Athlon and Opteron CPUs from AMD).' Intel x86 architechture is vulnerable to a lot of things that other chip architechtures are not. Far easier to have buffer overruns on x86 than about anything else. This plagues MS quite a bit, although Linux or anything else on x86 starts out with the same problems. I think AMD is going to take the baton from Intel as the 'NAME' in commodity computer chips for the next decade. Intel thought they could ram Itanic at us because they are Intel, so what ever they crap out is gold. The market showed them how stupid and full of hubris they were. |
| Open Source: Get up and dance! | Fri 05 Mar | Conspiracy Anti-Theorist |
| I live near the border between the US and Canada, so I get Canadian TV stations. A few times a year on their news broadcasts, they do a segment that usually has a title like Why Canada does matter. They do it in response to sentiment that Canada has had no effect on the world, and nothing would be different if it didnt exist. I myself dont think thats true, but thats not my point. The fact that they do a story defending against it actually lends credibility to the argument for it. A better approach would be to create documentaries about Canadian influence on the world, and skip rebutting the argument. Yesterday I read an article on the latest Halloween letter from the open source community. It consists of an email involving SCO executives, and a commentator trying to infer that Microsoft is pulling the strings behind SCOs litigation against Linux. It may be so, but its preposterous to try to use that email to prove it. Theyre reading waaaay too much into it. But thats not the point Im trying to make. Open source needs to stop riding on others (predominantly Microsoft) toes. There is no need, and it will hold OS back. A great deal of pushing OS forward has been done at the expense of saying how much better and cost-efficient the model is than Microsoft (Ill use MS for ease of use instead of all closed source programs). They talk about how insecure MS is, how expensive Office is, how many more sites there are on Apache than IIS, etc. The ultimate epitome of this is LindowsOS. They think theyre the best Linux distribution; I think otherwise. But theyre not just riding the toes of their competitor; theyre practically humping the leg. They have conceded the fact that they cannot sell their product without the Windows marketing tailcoats. Its like Pepsi introducing Poca Cola, and then railing about how much Coke sucks. Having mentioned Pepsi, Id like to use them as a first example. Since I was a child, I have seen Pepsi try new flavors, ad campaigns, and spokespeople every year with the same message: Were better than Coke. Yet they never achieve dominance in the industry. I think it is in part because they continue to attack Coke, which lends credibility to the argument that Coke is better. People are cautious of advertising and marketing where the competition is portrayed as inferior. The logical thought is Why are they trying to convince me otherwise? Are they desperate? If youll notice, Coke doesnt do negative advertising against Pepsi. They know they are on top. They dont have to prove it. Their ads talk about the smooth rich taste of Coke. And it seems apparent that for many years to come, Pepsi will always play second fiddle. The next example I would like to point out are Democrats and Republicans in the US. They are the reason that voter turnouts in the US are poor. They are the reason that nothing good happens quickly in government. Here are two groups, constantly attacking each other, riding on each others toes. Al Gore probably would not have done things differently than Bush. They just say so because they want to polarize voters. Do you notice that both parties say Schools good, taxes bad, welfare good, war bad, and then talk about how the other party thinks the opposite? They are two sides of the same coin, fighting one another to get the same thing done. What is the result? People have become disgusted with them both, vote randomly or dont vote at all. I say randomly because they are now voting on secondary criteria (good looks, nice demeanor, I think Im Republican). My evidence of that is to look at the percentages of the last election, and the current polls for this years. They are 50/50, which is no better than random. Where does this leave OS and MS? I believe that we are heading past Coke/Pepsi, and are well on the way to Democrat/Republican. After so many attacks against MS, they are now retaliating. MS still isnt using their full weight in the battle like OS is, but it is coming soon. When that happens, I believe that consumers will pay the price. They will be disenchanted on both sides. So what is my recommendation to open source? Get off Microsofts toes and dance! Talk about security in terms of what a user can get, and not in terms of how many viruses affect Windows. Talk about the productivity of OpenOffice. Do studies to prove them without involving the competition. Invite people to help with usability without comparing to Microsoft. Take down the Borg Gates pictures off of Slashdot. Remove the so-called Halloween letters. Theres no need to wage that type of campaign. It only lends credibility to Microsofts argument against it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bored Bystander | Summary of your post: a negative message is a lousy motivational or marketing tool. A positive message is a much more effective motivational or marketing tool. I agree. |
| Fri 05 Mar | MSHack | I do have a Linux box, but I make my living off Windows. That being said. it is unlikely that what you suggest can happen. First, and most importantly negative ads work. We may not like it, we may wish it were not so, but it does not change it. Hot, negative ads work better. Willie Horton, George Bush AWOL and the Halloween letters. From your posting I went to find the latest, and based on even the news line, it appears, that the interpretation is accurate. SCO appears to think it is not a big deal that they have MS funding. However, the issue with MS and OS is bigger. MS has always played down the OS community. They have a billion dollar PR machine and many more billions for R&D. OS does not. In a way OS is like Apple, or HP. It started small and then appeared to take on a life of its own. In reality, it took thousands of hours of hard work and no one likes their work vilified. You are looking for the ideal competitive environment, where everyone agrees on what 'good' is and knows not to spin. That's just not reality and in the case of competitors. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bored Bystander | I agree that negative/avoidance messages are somewhat effective. But people still need a positive reason to gravitate toward an alternative. The problem with OS and Linux is that they are not terribly attractive to anyone except for cost and 'total control' reasons. The strong negative message sent by open source is 'you have to be a geek and RTFM to use our stuff'. This, so far, overwhelms the positives of cost and control, leaving most users with businesses that they need to run to gravitate toward the bright, happy, shiny world of Windows and closed source. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bill Rushmore | The good news is that we (in the US) have two cola's to choose from, two politcal parties to vote for, and two ways to get our software. I hope we always have a choice. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | linux neither needs a bigger marketshare nor, in most cases, particularly cares whether it obtains it. specific companies make money from OSS, and thats fine and good...they can advertise if they want in anyway they want..I couldn't care less. The strength of Linux/Open source though is that those who want to can use it. That is _not_ true of any MS product....only those who can afford it can use it (legally at least) and..heres an interesting fact....95% of the world _cannot afford Microsoft products_ Linux doesn't need to 'gain marketshare', Linux will achieve marketshare without making any effort whatsoever. Each doing their own thing has worked perfectly well for Linux specifically and opensource in general for years, and will conjtinue to work for hte forseeable future. let stupid people worry about marketshare, the rest of us will just use that which makes life easiest. In summary, let IBM and Redhat worry about usability and marketshare, thats what they exist for....the rest of the opensource community will just do our own thing as we see best, _thats_ guaranteed to result in a strong offering and a strong comunity. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Tayssir John Gabbour | One often sees articles claiming that attacking the dominant competitor is effective, until you become dominant, in which case you probably shouldn't mention the other guys. I wonder how accurate that is. Eben Moglen in his Harvard lecture claimed gnu/Linux was successful enough to gain a backlash. So is a backlash something so easily avoidable? http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733 |
| Fri 05 Mar | Mike | 'Each doing their own thing has worked perfectly well for Linux specifically and opensource in general for years, and will conjtinue to work for hte forseeable future.' As it relates to the desktop? Hardly. Go read ESR on CUPS. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Eric Debois | Agreed. Linux desktops are still pretty primitive. I just had KDE 3.x installed on my debian box for a few weeks, and sure, it starts to look really good, and mostly works as expected. But there is something very beta-ish over the whole thing. I dont know exaxtly what it is. Might be that apps take a long time to launch, or that it is sometimes quite sluggish. Lots of features and lots of apps, but something very fundamental seems to be missing. On the other hand you have the light weight window managers, like windowmaker. Faster, and simpler and work very well, but they are litte mote than a graphical addition to the command line. It seems the command line is so central to everything linux that it cant just be hidden the way it is on windows, despite the valiant efforts by KDE and Gnome. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Simon Lucy | Ah choice, that pretty myth of americans who believe when they vote that's a choice they took and not a decision someone else made; that when they buy a consumer item that has a thousand variations an individual pick is a choice and not a reaction to advertising. The use of american in this context is not to exclusively isolate americans in this myth. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Paulo Caetano | > The use of american in this context is not > to exclusively isolate americans in this > myth. Hear, hear :) I live in Portugal, and we have our own version of the Reps vs. Dems., i.e., two parties pretending to be different, when in fact all they're doing is saying 'no' to whatever the other proposes. Oh, and stuffing their pockets in the process, naturally :) I can find plenty of political analogies between the US and Portugal. As for the Linux Desktop, I've bought a new PC in January, and have XP and Mandrake 9 on it. I'm extremely pleased with Mandrake, but I must admit the only apps I've used so far are Mozilla, KGet, and Solitaire, so my opinion shouldn't count that much :) Hey, it's my first Linux, so I'm still fooling around a bit. Only problems I've had so far: 1. When I made my first visit to MandrakeUpdate, it 'destroyed' my menus. Had to go to MenuDrake to 'ressurect' them. 2. It crashes on shutdown. I haven't tried to find out what's going on yet, because it seems to crash very close to the end of the shutdown process, and it has no noticeable adverse effect - other than forcing me to turn off the PC by pressing the power button, whereas XP shutdown will turn off the PC automatically. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Alex.ro | As someone mentioned earler, the Linux people are overcompensating. On one hand, they are promoting it as the best thing for the masses, and on the other (unconsciously?) are raising barriers to entry in the form of RTFM/'recompile the kernel'/'reconfigure the modulators'/CUPS etc. There is a human tendency to present simple things as complicated in order to look good. My university professors would go into incredibly nested parenthesized phrases to express simple things, in order to look IQ-ish. And the deeper your insecurities, the more nested and parenthesized your statements. COM is actually calling functions through pointers, but you have to read hundreds of pages to get to that. Not really on topic I suppose. |
| Sun 07 Mar | anon | "The linux people"... who are they exactly? I'm just a user, I don't claim that it is fit for mass consumption. |
| Tom Peters on Outsourcing | Fri 05 Mar | karthik |
| http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/534867.cms
Now before someone censors this tired old topic < |
| Fri 05 Mar | K | yawn |
| Fri 05 Mar | MSHack | He wrong. Just like when he did 'In Search of Excellence' and we later found out that over half the companies had gone under within 5 years. 'He says the Americans' 'unearned wage advantage' could be erased ... permanently.' First, it was not unearned. My tax dollars, and the tax dollars, and spending dollars of Americans, in support of American business, created this earned advantage. What we now see are countries in an effort to jump start their industry stealing a good portion of ours. Those two billion Chinese, by China's own admission will be running 1.8 billion copies of pirated software, on equipment, manufactured in near slave like conditions, using IP created in the US, and Europe for which China has chosen to ignore, what they consider 'protectionist IP laws.' Mexico, in an effort to lure business to its country avoided any kind off law, rule or regulation that may inhibit a company from moving there. They have seen a 200% increase in employee wages over the past 20 years, now in the $3/hour range, but have seen the expense of living in an area around plants grow by nearly twice that. In the end, their people are making less money, supporting companies that are offering near slave wages to create environmental wastelands. However, the ruling families of the country have been making a killing on the business deals. India, has a subclass of highly educated, highly motivated people, who have sought out US business. While certainly qualified, there idea of free trade is 'I take one, you give me one.' America has selected this naive policy of 'if we open our markets, they will too' India proves the naiveté of the very thought. Opening and competing for business in India is nearly impossible. Their protectionist regulations not only support a one way flow of labor, it insures that company seeking to do business in India, support its works to near exclusivity. The problem is an application of a economic theory or rules into an environment where people, in an effort to exploit their advantage, don't play by the rules. Free trade is like socialism. It sounds good in theory, but it can never be practically put into a system where people can benefit from usurping the very concepts. And it is not just countries, American companies, and Americans who demand a quarterly return on the 401k that create this situation. Americans have no teeth for making trade fair. If you want fair trade, it means, not a single item from China is allowed into the US, nor a single item from the US allowed into China, until they pass and enforce laws to protect IP. Communication lines from India, are suspended until they remove regulations that prevent US companies from bidding on business. We, both our companies and taxes spend billions in R&D only to have it stolen. Even Joel may find his software not only available in China, but being resold to the US as CityTable. We then hear Joel just needs to 'learn to compete, in a global economy.' Right. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Joe Hendricks | Thanks MSHack, that was a very interesting response and much food for thought.. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | MSHack: Fresh commentary that tastes good to me. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Stephen Jones | Teh Chinese and Indians are no more stealing your industry than the US stole its industry from other countiries. Ever heard of sour grapes? |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | Stephen, In one respect, the Chinese (at least) ARE literally stealing (or infringing on copyrights/intellectual propery). They're running a lot of pirated software over there. And producing a lot of pirated DVDs, etc. So, in a very real sense, they ARE 'stealing' intellectual property to grow thier economy. However, I'm still in favor of a global economy as long as it's a level playing field. If indian workers work for less because they CHOOSE to then that's OK. If they work for less because they are somehow coerced, then that's not free trade. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Rick | Excuse me? What industries did the U.S. steal?? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Stephen Jones | What industreis did the Chinese or Indians steal? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Stephen Jones | And for IP "theft" look at the number of Napster users that came from China and India, and the number that came from the US? |
| Fri 05 Mar | one meeeellion dollars! | Napster was primarily used in the western hemisphere, because the eastern never needed it -- they could just visit their local street seller and get what they needed in half the time and half the effort. |
| Fri 05 Mar | MSHack | China - MS Windows, office, and literally thousands of software titles that are available in markets without fear of government retribution. Malaysia - Took plans to chip manufacturing machines, protected by NDA and Trade Secret agreements and gave to competitors. Then required American companies to meet the price for the machines. India - I did not say stole anything. They have regulatory barriers built into their buracracy that protects their workers regardless of the price or bid. The very process of being able to bid on a contract is so slimy that without an Indian front you will probably not be able to bid. Then when you do use an India front, your bid is identified as 'foreign'. |
| Fri 05 Mar | no name | We've invited Peters to do a seminar at Baghdad U. |
| Fri 05 Mar | karthik | MSHACK, << Opening and competing for business in India is nearly impossible. Their protectionist regulations not only support a one way flow of labor, it insures that company seeking to do business in India, support its works to near exclusivity. >> OTH, i found your post uninformed . This is such a wrong statement that i dont know where to start |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | > China ... IP laws http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp;:4048252f:fe75300236c7ab1?type=technologyNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4502798 ... reports that the judicial situation there is slowly changing. |
| Fri 05 Mar | no name | Karthik, are you for real? India has some of the most protectionist laws around for foreign investment and labor. |
| Fri 05 Mar | karthik | << Karthik, are you for real? India has some of the most protectionist laws around for foreign investment and labor. >> I am for real. While the labor part is true, the foreign investment part is not. This is not to say that its completely free. But India has come a long long long way from its socialist days. Almost all multinationals -sony,microsoft, LG, Sharp,Toshiba, Akai etc. sell and sell well in India. |
| Sat 06 Mar | John Ridout | The USA used to "steal" IP (reprinting books) from the UK. Copyright was introduced only after a significant number of American authors complained when their own works were copied. I expect countries such as China will embrace IP laws as they have more of their own IP to protect. |
| Sat 06 Mar | no name | 1. Only graduates of Indian universities can qualify as professional accountants in India. 2. Foreign architecture and engineering firms working on many Indian government projects may be paid in nonconvertible rupees only, meaning that the money has to stay in India. |
| Sat 06 Mar | MSHack | Karthik You seem to assume foreign investment and competition are the same. Sure India is more than welcoming of US money to support Indian workers. But, as American company attempting to bid on Indian business some of the 'fun' we face are: - You bid is marked at a foreign bid. Gee, do think that plays into the selection process? - You can prove that there is not an equivalent available resource Indian owned or where the majority of employees are Indian. [Proving that is nearly impossible] - You then have government bureaucracy of India. For those who think, how back can it be? Imagine a simple bid: - You wait for 8 hours and when you get to the window they give you a form to fill out. They had to 'hand it to you.' It could not be in a place you might take it, because the person handing it to you stamps it, with the government seal. You then go fill out the form and return the next day. - Next you wait for 8+ hours to get the form reviewed. If there is a single error (read Joel's resume notes) the form is voided. You must then get a new form. Yep, go back to the first line tomorrow and start over again. To avoid this, you hire a local firm to do the paper work. This still takes four to sixteen weeks. Once the paper work is in, it is now open to an administrative review. To be candid, I don't think ANYONE knows what happens here. It appears you send your paperwork into hell and somewhere six to twenty weeks later, they send it out again for comment/clarification. Usually, this is to answer questions, provided in the form but that does not matter. BTW - you start at step one to get an addendum for the form. They have built a system to ensure that they never reject you, you just never complete the process in time to have the bid accepted. And it really does not matter if you are going for a government contract or an in-country contract, the process is nearly identical, except some of the companies will tell you (on the side) they cannot use off shore resources. If you wish to defend the protectionism in India, at least understand what it is. If you happen to be IN India, you only see your side of the process. |
| Sat 06 Mar | MSHack | My appologies. It appears English is a third language from my posting above. I need more coffee. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Mike | You know what? This thing about the US not being protectionist is absolute BS. I live in India. Going to the US to work is very, very, very difficult. Lots of papers to fill, very very low chance of getting accepted. And it's normal - an accountant is licensed only if he/she knows the accounting laws of his/her country. This is absolutely natural. Do you think that if an Indian medical doctor comes to the US, he is allowed to practice medicine? I tell you: NO. He or she has to pass through a complicated process in order to be allowed to practice medicine. So - don't tell me that the US is all about free trade, free work & all, and India isn't. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Dayton Petrodyk | So Mike, you feel that it is very easy for Americans to emigrate to India and find work? For your own point of interest, our family doctor is from India. He is here on a H1B. All his education was in India, none in the US. Coming to the US to practice was a straightforward process for him and all the paperwork was handled by his sponsor. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Immature programmer | > Do you think that if an Indian medical doctor > comes to the US, he is allowed to practice > medicine? > I tell you: NO. From my observation, this doesn't seem to be true. My dentist is Indian. There are many medical practitioners in the U.S. who are of Indian descent. And I'm not talking about 1st or second generation Indians. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Paulo Caetano | > What industreis did the Chinese or Indians > steal? Well, according to a piece I saw on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, everything, from golf clubs to cars. I did like the Spoony backpacks (someone misspelled Snoopy) and the Hugo Bsos articles :) Let's face it, they're stealing like mad, but no company really gives a damn, because everybody's thinking on cashing in on the 'huge chinese market' (e.g., MS's 'world wide' anti-piracy drive excluding China, for now). So, yes, they're stealing, but 'we' aren't worrying too much about it. We'll see how well it pays off. |
| Sat 06 Mar | no name | Mike, that's rubbish my friend. America, the UK and Australia recognise foreign trained doctors, accountants and programmers. Doctors have to demonstrate they really are trained, and thank God they do. Even so, in Australia, that requirement is relaxed for doctors working in rural areas. On the other hand, dear old India has just spent a few years refusing to recognise doctors trained in Russian universities. That includes Indian students. (They've finally decided they will recognise them.) Mike, the reality is that India is a corrupt country with average standards and an elite IT class close to the ruling BJP who have milked the system for all its worth. Now they run around pushing the line that they're better than Western firms. I will sit and watch the next few years as more Enrons roll in. |
| Sat 06 Mar | MSHack | 'Going to the US to work is very, very, very difficult. Lots of papers to fill, very very low chance of getting accepted.' Actually, it would have been harder, but in the end, the work is being sent to them. So there are no forms to fill out and concern about being accepted. |
| Sat 06 Mar | no name | I too watched that 60 Minutes segment about China. The reporter mentioned and the camera showed that entire freaking shopping malls are filled with stores that are selling mostly illegal merchandise! What I don't understand is why there aren't a ton of Chinese merchants selling this fraudulent stuff on eBay to all the stupid spend happy Americans out there? I bet that expensive golf club the girls on the Apprentice TV show bought from a Chinese merchant was fake. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Stephen Jones | So thay have merchandize with BsOs logos and you consider that stealing? jeez You'll be pulling in the guys with a 'My second car is a Mercedes' stickers on the back of their beat-up old jalopy next. Where I live there are six shops selling Levis. One of them sells genuine 'American' Levis, and the other five sell fakes. The genuine ones go for about $50 and the fake ones go for $10. There is not one person that doesn't know the difference and if you ask at the fake shop if they are 'American' Levis they will tell you they are not. You can also get genune Levis made under license in India or Thailand (or indeed the UK tnough they are more expensive than the 'American' variety and nothing like as good), and if you ask at the shop they will tell you straight off. |
| Service oriented architecture | Fri 05 Mar | Name withheld out of cowardice |
| Forgive me if this has been discussed before. People in my place of work are talking a great deal about a service oriented architecture (SOA). I have read presentations on it and it sounds like a new name for some existing ways of doing distributed applications. My initial impression is that this is a buzzword hoping for a market. I am planning to ignore and/or nod my head for the time being Does anyone have an alternative explanation? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bill Gate$ | I think Powersoft used that phrase (or something similar) with respect to their PFC (Powersoft Foundation Classes) framework some years back. So yeah, it's nothing new under the sun. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Koz | It's nothing new really. But it is slightly different to how most people do distributed systems. Basically, you focus on having the different tiers exporting 'services' instead of bits of functionality. i.e. Create Payment & Authorise Payment instead of Create & authorise the payment from form 11.0 |
| Fri 05 Mar | Name withheld out of cowardice | Koz- I don't see how that is any different from a current distributed system. The only difference I see in what you say is that you are call them 'services' instead of (I can't be sure which you mean) Objects or methods. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Should be working | The differences are there if you squint hard enough. Mainly, as far as I've seen: - Language and platform agnostic - A Web Service is (or should be) a self-contained, independent unit of functionality. Most previous distributed systems rely on a set of cooperating distributed services. - Transport neutral. A SOA should be accessible over a variety of transports. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Herbert Sitz | Whatever 'Service Oriented Architecture is, this cool software will help you do it: http://www.remobjects.com |
| Sat 06 Mar | fool for python | Remote objects is exactly what web services are not. http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_seanmcgrath_archive.html#107739235774357824 http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_seanmcgrath_archive.html#107727890368144486 |
| Sat 06 Mar | Herbert Sitz | Fool, did you actually look at RemObjects? Or are you just going off the name and saying that 'Remote Objects' aren't services? I confess I looked at your links and I can't find anything that would indicate RemObjects is doing things in a way that the guy wouldn't call services. Then again, I'm not the biggest genius in this area. In any case, RemObjects is totally organized around interfaces, and their framework seems to me to fit perfectly with this quote from your link: 'A service is strictly not a unit of code; it is rather a boundary definition that might be valid for several different concrete implementations.' Can you explain what I'm not understanding here? |
| Sat 06 Mar | fool for pyton | Herbert, my post was not in response to yours but rather a response to the messaging/documents vs objects/apis views of web services. By remote objects, I was not reffering to RemObjects as I have not *yet* looked at your offering. I gether from your response that it is not CORBA.next as Don Box calls Sun's view of web sevices. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Dave Hallett | http://dotnetguru.org/us/articles/SOA-Softly/SOA-Softly.html http://udidahan.weblogs.us/ (various posts) |
| Software for babies | Fri 05 Mar | Mauricio Macedo |
| Hi all, I have a baby girl (1 year and 2 months old) and she likes to play with my computer. Ok, play may not be the better term, rather bang the keyboard and mouse. I often open up the notepad or a DOS game, put her on my lap and let her press the keys freely. But the problem is that some special keys call Windows menu and change the window focus. I had the idea of developing a special software, running on full screen, that would play different sounds at each key pressed and show funny images/pictures. Do you think it would be marketeable? Thing is, may baby is growing up fast ans I fear she will lost interest on it soon. But it would be nice to develop it as a new product. What do you think? Does anyone have experience on developing software for kids? |
| Fri 05 Mar | standard slashback | 1. have idea 2. describe it on JoS 3. ? 4. Other people profit! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Patrik | This rings a bell; I think another JoSer already did something like this for his children... |
| Fri 05 Mar | John Topley (www.johntopley.com) | There was some software project that did exactly what you describe a few years ago in The Delphi Magazine. I can't remember the name of it though. Have you thought about giving her a copy of Visual Studio .NET to play with? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Mauricio Macedo | standard slashback: Ideas are a dime a dozen. If someone knows a similar software (I searched) I will just use and entertain my baby. I doubt people are eager to put up at least 50 hours of work in any unproven idea found on discussion fora. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bill Rushmore | When my 8 year old was a baby I had some DOS shareware program that is exactly what you described. The baby would bang on the keyboard and shapes with noises would appear. The kid wasn't anymore impressed with that than a plain DOS prompt. I finally just handed him a old broken keyboard and he was just as ammused with that. It is amazing how quickly they get the ctrl-alt-del sequence down and other destructive combinations. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Mauricio Macedo | Bill: this is what I fear, that she is more interested on the keyboard itself than anything on the screen or sounds. I think I just found a software that does what I described, it's called Baby Wow! http://www.kidsclick.com/descrip/my1st_toddler.htm I'm thinking about developing BabyTap just for kicks, as it would be my first multimedia application, besides beating the record of my youngest customer ever (nice for chit-chat conversations). |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dewd | Don't ask me how I found it :) 'This program creates a simple, safe and kid-friendly environment to let toddlers pound on the keyboard and play with the mouse. It temporarily disables the Windows key, and hides the other windows to prevent your baby from accidentally reconfiguring anything. It's highly customizable, and recommended by my 18-month old.' http://download.com.com/3000-2132-10126316.html?tag=lst-0-1 Yeah, I wanna tell you how I found it. I wanted to remap a key (dot to comma) and I came across that program at download.com. Funny. |
| Fri 05 Mar | happy to be working | I did the same as some others here. An old keyboard and my first born was as happy as a clam. Now, however, the second one wants to play with it too... I need to find another old keyboard! |
| Fri 05 Mar | njkayaker | No. No. No. Don't give her a copy of .NET. Bad idea. It's bad enough that our jobs are going to Indian adults. Do we really need to be completing with their children too? |
| Fri 05 Mar | apw | 'This program creates a simple, safe and kid-friendly environment to let toddlers pound on the keyboard and play with the mouse. It temporarily disables the Windows key, and hides the other windows to prevent your baby from accidentally reconfiguring anything. It's highly customizable, and recommended by my 18-month old.' This would be a good sys admin tool as well |
| Fri 05 Mar | old_timer | Commodore 64 had several such programs when my kids were young. 'Mimi the Ant', press a key and a butterfly flits across the screen along with some music. Press a different key and it's a snail with it's own theme music. There was a draw program that let you type m to move, d to draw, c to change colors, stuff like that. One time when my son was about 4 he got into the draw program. I left the room to go take a shower or something and when I returned the screen was full of shapes and colors. I said, 'Wow, that's great, how did you do that?' The kid takes the keyboard in hand and bashes it into his forehead several times. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Shapes and colors galore. |
| Fri 05 Mar | old_timer | Oh yeah, forgot to mention, eighteen years later he goes to college to major in computer graphics... And after discovering the true nature of computer graphics he switched to physical therapy... |
| Fri 05 Mar | JT | http://www.raize.com/CProducts/BabyType/Default.htm |
| Fri 05 Mar | Mauricio Macedo | Thank you all for you input, and interesting enough there is an old thread on this forum mentioning Maddie and BabyType Keyboard Pounder Sources available http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=11236 Now on to just drop the idea and use existing software. |
| Fri 05 Mar | pdq | I gave my daugher a spare keyboard and mouse to play (uh hm. i mean use) while daddy or mommy is on the computer. One thing to watch out for, our floppy drive got crammed full of pennies and other assorted crap because if daddy can put stuff in their, so can I. |
| Fri 05 Mar | a cynic writes... | We had something similar. A couple of years ago my youngest attacked the floppy drive of one machine with the stick from a lollipop. Apparently he kept losing at Space Invaders and felt it was the machine's fault. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | My son's favorite game with the PC was called 'shove small things into the floppy drive.' He thought it was loads of fun. Keep your kids away from the PC. They'll have plenty of time to do that later in life. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | I see that pdq and cynic were thinking the same thing as me. Honestly, if you want your kid to bang on something that makes noise, get her a Leap Pad or a kitten [ha ha, just kidding PETA members]. |
| Fri 05 Mar | My-dad-is-lost | Dad,where are you? Mom is calling you. OH! NO! I can't repeat what all she is saying... Dad,Come soon or you gonna have hard time today. Hurry up! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Forbes | 'Honestly, if you want your kid to bang on something that makes noise, get her a Leap Pad or a kitten' Even the most expensive computer keyboard is like $60, so why not leverage the powerful, multimedia, interactive device that we have in the form of computers (I wouldn't do this with a laptop unless you had an external keyboard). I got my 1 year old daughter the 'My First Leap Pad', and honestly the flat, Atari 400-esque surface is far too difficult to push -- there is no chance her tiny fingers are going to be able to push them hard enough. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | You're probably right, Dennis. I've always steered away from the things myself, because I'd rather buy my kids things that stimulate their imagination and creativity. At the age that all they can do is bang on the keyboard, there are so many other things they should and could be doing instead of sitting in front of a PC (even if they enjoy it). |
| Fri 05 Mar | pdq | Dennis, We have tons of old keyboards at the office, it was basically free. Or, at the house, we have a Pentium 3, an old Celeron, a 486 and I think we have a 286 out in a box in the garage. She could bang on the 486 keyboard to hearts content. Now, she's old enough and has the Celeron to play games on. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Matthew Lock | A bit left field, but I suggest Knoppix. If you don't know it's a bootable version of linux on a CD. The great thing about Knoppix is that you can't really do any damage to the system as the CD is read only. So you just insert a CD and let your baby bash away. Should your baby manage to crash something just reboot and everything is back as before. http://www.knoppix.org/ If Knoppix is a bit too large for you to install check out Damn Small Linux http://www.knoppix.org/ it's only 50 meg. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Justin Johnson | Both my niece and nephew played for a couple months with old keyboards I gave them. It was the pushing the keys that seemed to entertain them the most--the way they sprang right back, and made a little clicky noise. My nephew didn't actually get interested in making something happen on screen until he was about four, when Bob the Builder showed up there. Now he's about to turn six, and he boots it up, puts the CD in, plays it, and shuts it down all by himself. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Michael Moser | i have once made a paint program for smaller kids. http://www.michaelmoser.org/progs/app_pnty.htm - you don't have to press the mouse down while dragging the paint tool, everything is kind of modal with huge buttons, etc. |
| Sun 07 Mar | David Freeman | My son, then 2yrs, saw me writing a spec in MS Word. He had to bang the keyboard. Font was too small, 72 point, wrong colour, pick one. He really quickly learnt to spell Thomasthetankengine and Connor. He then moved to IE and thomasthetankengine.com and such. I learnt that the really useful part was me spending time with him and not working all the time. David |
| Picking up math for 3D graphics for a dev | Thu 04 Mar | dev |
| My friend recently accepted an offer to work at a CAD visualization company designing software using 3D graphics.He comes from a business apps background, with 2 years experience.We were discussing how the transition would be for him.Would it be difficult to pick up the Math needed? |
| Fri 05 Mar | joev | Run, don't walk, to your nearest book store, and pick up the classic work 'Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice'. This book is all about the theory: you won't find anything about Win32, X11, OSX, or whatever, because they didn't exist when this book was written. Every serious 3D developer should have this book on their shelf. Your friend is in for a heck of a shock: the requirements for a typical business application are far, far different than CAD software... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201848406 |
| Fri 05 Mar | Eric Lippert | > Would it be difficult to pick up the Math needed? It depends on what part of the system he's going to be working on -- CAD systems cover a lot of ground these days, and I would be surprised if the underlying graphics subsystem wasn't already implemented. I would imagine that an existing CAD system would use OpenGL or some similar package to do the heavy lifting. That said, the actual math isn't that hard. You need to have a solid understanding of the relationship between matrix mathematics and transformations -- scaling, translation, rotation, etc. Of course, it could get arbitrarily complicated -- you start thinking about declaring an arbitrary spline, rotating it about an arbitrary axis to describe a lathed part, and then determine its volume and you start talking about some reasonably buff calculus. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Sgt. Sausage | I second the motion for: 'Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice'.
We used it back in, oh about 1992 or so, as the primary text for a full year of graphics class in college. We built a limited 3D rendering engine over the course of that year.
Most of what's covered will likely already be handled by whatever library/package you'll be using, but unless you know this stuff you'll be really confused at times.
I'd also recommend a full academic year of Linear Algebra at your local college. Linear Algebra usually requires no prerequisites, other than a basic high school Algebra class.
From there, things get quite a bit more complicated. Non-linear 3D surfaces will require some difficult Calculus/Analytic Geometry, set theory, topology and whatnot.
BTW -- this is from someone who writes SQL all day. I may be blowing smoke up your arse! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Must be a manager | Hold on. Dev, do you mean this guy is just doing 'authoring,' putting together models using a package? I think you must, because no-one would hire a bus-app guy to write 3D apps. The learning curve is enormous and takes years, presuming he has the mathematical expertise to start with. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Mr Jack | Don't go and buy that book! You won't need it. Most of the complex math that used to be dumped on the programmer is now routinely dealt with by graphics libraries you use. Only buy the book if it turns out you need it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | K | CG:P&P is a great book, and the math in it is simple enough that anybody with a high school education can understand it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Jeff | CG: P & P is the classic text. If your friend is looking for something that holds your hand a bit more, he can try 'Mathematics for Computer Graphics Applications' by Mortenson or 'Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics' by Lengyel. Even though the latter book refers to game programming, almost everything in the text is equally applicable to CAD programs. A great site for free OpenGL tutorials can be found at: http://nehe.gamedev.net/ OpenGL is the graphics API that is used by just about every CAD program. Just writing a simple program which loads a small 3D mesh & spins it around under user control can teach you a lot about 3D graphics. |
| Fri 05 Mar | K | Don't waste your time on "Mathematics for Computer Graphics Applications". I got that book years ago because I wanted to make a little program that would generate a pulsating b-spline surface, spin it around, and do all the transformation/projection and clipping stuff. It has *terrible* explanations for everything from parametric representations of lines and curves to basic projection operations. CG:P&P, on the other hand, covers *much* more information and it has you derive all relevant functions/relations from first principles (the treatment of projection alone is worth the price of the book). |
| Fri 05 Mar | Full name: Email: | I really can't recommend CG: Principles and Practice highly enough - it is really the definitive introductory text for computer graphics. It's more clear, and more in-depth than any other introductory book I've seen. Some of the descriptions take a while to pick through, but it will save you loads of grief later on. Yes, some of the math involved is now handled by most libraries (like clipping, for instance), but to be able to efectively use these libraries you need to understand what the library is doing for you. When things go wrong, as they inevitably will, you really, really need the math background to be able to track down the problems. |
| Sat 06 Mar | no name | Dev, is this guy being hired to write 3D apps? |
| Sat 06 Mar | dev | yes |
| Sun 07 Mar | 3D Newbie too | I'm pretty much in the same boat : I'm a Database programmer, and would like to write 3D apps (for fun, during my spare time) My maths background is pretty nill, basic arthmetics that's all... (I've dropped out of school a long time ago) :-( Could please tell me what subjects in maths I should pick up please ... Any book recommendation ... I learn best if I can apply (in a snippet of code for instance) the implementation of a maths formulas for example .... Any book which teach maths for 3D coding that way ? |
| "The Apprentice" (Spoilers) | Thu 04 Mar | Philo |
| Sorry Im late... First, let me say, in the interests of decorum, that I simply echo Heidis reaction in the previews for next week. [grin] Kudos to Kwame for doing exactly as we talked about a few days ago - he had a concrete reason for his choices in the boardroom, he said he made a decision, it didnt pan out, but he learned something. Short and sweet. And he survived. Ditto on Heidi - she was totally up-front and honest about every observation: A lot of people have problems with you Yes, they do. Nice. Omarosa was a complete and utter train wreck. She had far too much ego invested in this and not enough ... je ne sais quoi ... herself if that makes sense. And the whole Ive been walking around a week with a concussion - oh please. Nice to see the Trumpster come back and finally put the whole thing to rest. Predictions: - The finale will be Heidi vs. Troy. - Carolyns I havent seen anything out of you will be directed at Amy. Philo |
| Thu 04 Mar | Nathan | Did Omarosa actually walk into the conference room without being invited?? For crying out loud, she should have been fired for just that. And I was amazed how she was able to turn on and off the tears at will. I'm so glad Trump saw through that and fired her. |
| Thu 04 Mar | . | Sexually abused by Richard Hatch, and attacked and given concussions by tiny pieces of drywall. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Scot | Nick's meeting with Trump was interesting at least because we have some insight into the selection criteria. 'Energy', wasn't it? Did anyone buy what he was saying to Nick about how well he was doing? |
| Thu 04 Mar | NathanJ | Overall the best job tonight was from Mehgan. That artwork was overpriced junk!! She should get a prize for convincing the team to go with her work just because it had higher sticker prices. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Edward | I was overjoyed to see a couple things; 1. Kwame has vocal cords. 2. Omarosa finally got caught. Heidi's a trainwreck waiting to happen. Her self-restraint just isn't there. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Rich | It's a little ironic that Omarosa was thrown out on this of all weeks, when she probably added more value to the team than in any other week. She seemed to be the only one in the group who wasn't clueless about art, was the only one who didn't pick that pricey artist, and was the only one who actually sold any pieces. Of course, her overwhelmingly negative presence always outweighed any actual contributions she ever made to her teams, and it's pretty amazing that she lasted as long as she did. It's just funny that her performance was relatively good this week, and she got canned anyway. The moment she started crying, I knew it was over for her, and she knew it, too. And if I can make a prediction, I think Carolyn's comments in next week's show will be directed toward Katrina, because that's exactly what I think to myself every time I see her on the screen -- Katrina has shown me nothing since day one. Everyone else has had some shining moment, but what has Katrina done? I think she'll be the next one to go. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nigel | I thought it was funny how Omarosa kept clinging to the fact that her choice in the artist mattered. Trump isn't looking for an art gallery manager. Acquired knowledge means absolutely squat if you can't communicate it well, and get along with your team. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | Omarosa sure shot herself in the foot. If she had handled herself better in the boardroom, she could've walked away from this round. What a drama queen. And why did she keep on referring to her role as finance manager? What finances?!? One lousy accounts receivable stub? Oh, and that pretentious little speech in the taxi - it drove me nuts. That's why you kick people when they're down - because some just won't stay down. Where's a giant, animated Monty Python foot when you need one? I'm a little confused about last week's preview for this episode. I could've swore I heard a female voice saying 'I just can't stand the pressure anymore.' But I never heard those actual words come out of Omarosa's mouth. Hmmm. I hate to make a prediction as to whom Carolyn's comments were directed. There's too many possibilities. But I think Carolyn has always been with Protege, which is now Kwame, Troy, Heidi, and sometimes Amy. So I would have to say Heidi. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | At the top of the episode, Trump said that Nick needs to stop loosing, but both times he lead his team it was to victory, admittedly Trump wouldn't know that until the end of this project. Trump singled Nick out at the beginning of the episode. His comments about Amy ('I wouldn't have done it / I think it's mistake') were taken the wrong way by Amy based on the expression on her face. What he was getting at was when Versacorp AND when Protege got to choose someone they chose Amy, they're basically saying 'she's the best person on the either team.' If it was allowed, it would've been a wise move to choose the other team's project manager - you'd throw them in to confusion from the start. I keep saying the teams should split up, but this time I disagree - how can you figure out which artist's work is better if you don't see both? But it seems it worked out for Nick's team. Anyone who said he consulted his team too much on the flea market project should've been surprised by his 'executive decision' this week. The abstract/nature art is going to be easier to sell because it has no inherent meaning - you can put any meaning you want on it, and you can buy it like bedroom sets: you want it to set the mood for the room it's in. The other artist's stuff, while fascinating, was too highbrow and niche, and the team didn't even know how to sell it. Besides, I don't think I want those two girls in my living room. I've stopped watching horror movies because I don't want those images in my head, I'm certainly not going to invite them in to stay. I'd love to see a book with the whole series, or go to a showing of her work though. I'd never want to go to a showing of the nature art guy's work... zzzzzzz, but I would want it in my living room. Go figure. A poll on NBC.com 'Why did Protege lose this week?' with the options: 1. Kwame chose a high-risk artist, 2. Omarosa and Heidi's fighting was distracting, 3. Troy and Heidi didn't understand the art, and 4. The team didn't believe in their product, an overwhelming 60% chose The team didn't believe in their product. This was Trump's message before the episode got underway. Personally, based on my statements above, I think Nick's team just got a better hand dealt to them. Abstract art, nature art, is probably going to outsell art with a message simply because once there is a message to the art, you have to match the message to the buyer. I thought Omarosa's reheasing her boardroom speech again would've saved her, but she had two things working against her. 1. Kwame was too mature to play any games, so any attacks aimed at him would've rolled off. 2. Heide won't roll over. When attacked, she stands up for herself, and their arguments meant that Omarosa was plugged in to those arguments, and reacted emotionally to them. Whoever said Kwame could choose Heidi and Omarosa just because they'd give each other heat & he could fade in to the background was right. Heide thought she was in for it. As soon as Trump addressed her she said 'I know you're gonna choose me' or something like that. I agree that she's too emotional. In fact Ereka, Heidi, Omarosa, Kristi and Jessie exemplify a certain stereotype of women - overly emotional, take everything too personally, and crack under pressure. By comparison, Kwame, Bill, and Troy look like Zen masters. Nick gets emotionally involved but in a typically male way, and in his personal Interview, Trump sort of commended that 'passion.' Good ploy on Nick's part, asking Trump about his mentors & getting him to talk about his parents. Kudos to The Donald (and this is what they call him on NBC.com) for calling Omarosa on her constantly making excuses. I think Omarosa's breakdown was real. She wasn't able to make any allies, and was under constant stress because of it. Yes, she created this situation herself, but I hardly think crying was a ploy. In typical Omarosa style, when backed in to a corner, she charged ahead and walked in to the boardroom, refusing to play by the rules. Observation: Now that the teams are down to 3 and 4 each, the PM choosing 2 people to go in to the board room will no longer work. We're in for a change of the way the game is played. |
| Fri 05 Mar | C | For a minute there I thought Omarosa was going to pull the race card on the Donald. I woulda paid money to see how that one would have gone down. As much as I couldn't stand her, it's a bit sad that she's gone. The unintentional comedy was simply off the charts with her. My vote is for Katrina to start acting the part of raving lunatic. I believe Carolyn's comments are directed toward her. She absolutely vanishes at game time. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken | I wish Nick had asked Trump how he acquired his exquisite taste in home decor. |
| Fri 05 Mar | moses whitecotton | Now that Omarosa is gone, who will be the "hated" ? Think about it if she was not on the prior shows, and served as someone for the masses ( us ) to hate would there have been any good television? There is no good without evil and boy was she (presented) as evil. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Steve Barbour | Oh, I can see Nick becoming 'the hated one'. Whole bunch of bravado going on there, and he'll be high off of his team's win. I bet he'll be impossible to work with unless he feels like he's in charge. I can't say that this was a particularly rivetting episode though. Once the artists were chosen, the die was pretty much cast. I agree that the abstract painter was the best choice though. My criteria for buying art tends to revolve around how the thing will look hanging over my sofa, and will have any uncomfortable explanations to give when the grand parents come to visit. The horror art was visually stunning, but I can't imagine wanting to see it hanging in the living room. |
| Fri 05 Mar | no name | Wow. Omarosa is on the Today Show saying that she isn't really a b*tch, but that the directors of the show have something against black women. Other than that it was just more excuses as to why she was chosen. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Name withheld out of cowardice | Ken- I'm with you buddy! Remember the early episode in which he gives the first tour of his place? He talks about how he has had all kinds of people, foreign dignitaries, royalty all so 'impressed' by his apartment. I imagine a large percentage of them (especially old money Europeans) must have been politely appalled by it. What did he tell his decorator, just find the most expensive crap anyone will sell you? I'll bet if it weren't for the radiation hazard he'd have the place trimmed in plutonium. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Confused | Is it just me or do you guys think this is a ridiculous show? When I first heard that this show was going to air, I was very excited. However, it turned out to be another 'MTV'S Real World' type of thing. These supposedly successful businessmen and businesswomen are a joke. I cannot believe they have their own businesses. How can they succeed? They look and act like recent college graduates with no experience but an ego the size of mount Everest. How can they leave their businesses to come to a show like this? Who is running their business while they are away? If they are THAT successful, they should just take a lifelong vacation as the dough is rolling in.. Why do they even need Trump? :) Secondly, they have the biggest ego I've ever seen, yet, I haven't seen anything special that they do. Last night's episode was yet another example of this. The side that picked the most normal looking art won. Wow! What a suprise? It is baffling noone wants to spend thousands on a picture with bloody heads! (sarcasm) I couldn't believe that poor woman spend close to a grand to get that picture of the kitten. Boy, did she look stupid?! I know if it was a real show of business wit, #1 we would have to pay to watch it, and #2 it would be perceived as utterly boring by the audience who loves to watch braindead shows like 'Bachelorette' for the thousandth time. So I guess they had to dumbify it for the average person to enjoy it. In the meantime everyone in the show looks stupid. Oh well... It was my fault to have high hopes for an intelligent show. p.s. Donald Trump *REALLY* needs a new hair cut! He has a ton of money but I guess some thing just can't be fixed with money! :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken | name withheld- I imagine the conversation went something like this: Decorator: Why don't you take a look at these swatches and tiles I've picked out, then get back to me on which ones you like so we can get a sense of your personal style? Trump: Er, how long is this going to take? Decorator: Um, well, that's really up to you... Trump: Let's just do this- get a bunch of expensive furniture and stuff, and just dip it all in molten gold. Decorator: You're the boss! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Forbes | Confused, your portrayal of elitism comes across as weak and, quite honestly, spiteful. Really, what were you expecting? A bunch of 50-something guys in suits having power lunches and delegating to low-level employees? This show is unique in that these are not only the leaders and decision makers, they're also the do-ers (the low level employees), and that is a lot of the entertainment of the show. And ultimately this is intended to be entertainment, so of course they're going to choose younger professionals, and of course they're going to be the pretty people (well, apart from Heidi...Ay karumba). Beyond that I've seen nothing that doesn't realistically parallel the real business world. Of course I feel the same way about Survivor -- when it first came out all of the wannabe elitist poo-poohed it, proclaimed that they were too busy sipping wine and reading old war recounts, and how it's all so unrealistic -- people don't really act that like. They are in denial about the way the real world operates. BTW: Your assessment of the art world is intriguing -- there are a lot of 'not normal' artists who make a tremendous living. Mind I thought it this case they made a horrible choice (the artist herself seemed to not believe in what she was selling -- 'Uh..yeah...this is the dichotomy between good and evil..and err...'). |
| Fri 05 Mar | Name withheld out of cowardice | Ken- There was a very funny series of 'Doonesbury' cartoons, more than ten years ago, I think, on this very topic. Uncle Duke was Trump's new Yacht captain and Trunp was giving him the tour. He had gold faucets in the bathroom (on the yacht I mean) and he pointed out everything to Duke with great pride always describing it as 'quality!' Duke interupted for a clarification- something to the effect of 'Excuse me sir, but by 'quality' do you mean 'outrageously expensive'?' The Donald replies something to the effect of 'are there any other deifnitions?' Duke responds something like 'None that matter' A&E had a show called 'America's Castles' which showed the mansions that rich people from the late 1800s and early 1900s had built. Some of them had real style. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Confused | TLC's 'Trading Spaces' has people with more integrity and organizational skills than the ones in this show. I worked with many other people in teams and I saw nothing childish happening like the things that happen on this show. The people they picked for this show are very unprofessional. Your average Joe doesn't watch this show anyway. It is a shame they had to turn it into this kind of entertainment. Drama always sells I guess. As for your comments on 'pretty', if I had never seen pretty before, I'd buy it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Forbes | Trading Spaces is entirely unlike this show. In Trading Spaces, everybody wins (so to speak). In this show, much like Survivor, one person wins in the end, so ultimately there is only a big I in team. Sadly a lot of life works that way too. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken | It's a brilliant idea for a show for the same reason Dilbert was a brilliant idea from a comic- just about everybody can relate to it. It's Dilbert adapted into a reality show. I don't normally watch reality shows, but I did get sucked into the first Joe Millionaire, and the Apprentice is way more of an intelligent show, though I know that's not saying much. The point is, yeah it's a reality show with all of the drama and petty bickering, but I'd venture it's better than most. Of course, if anyone here wants to actually admit they watch a lot of reality shows, they could support or refute my claim with a bit more to back it up. |
| Fri 05 Mar | apw | "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" is the best reality show yet. |
| Fri 05 Mar | apw | and as far as the most intelligent reality show...that honor would have to go to "The Mole" (not the celebrity version though) |
| Fri 05 Mar | The Mole | Yes, 'The Mole' was highly intelligent. I heard ABC lost the rights, so maybe someone else will pick it up and bring it back without the celebrities. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Clutch Cargo | Best reality show is The Amazing Race. Wasn't too suprised by Apprentice this week. Omarosa has been living on borrowed time for a while now. However this was one of the few missions she didn't screw up. Am I the only one who thinks they should have them play a game? Not Monopoly, but Acquire which they play at the Mind Sport Olympiad. Or maybe there's another business based game that would be interesting. I'd really like to see something where the players are all pitted against one another. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | What about Eco Challenge? A bit too much reality? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | Eco Challenge is a breed apart. It's also a Mark Burnett show, but it's a real race. The footage is really more of a quasi-documentary of the race edited for entertainment value, with depth added by showing the contestants background stories. Great show, though. The other reality shows consist of people put into a staged environment*. I can't stand most of them, but Burnett has figured out how to engross me with Survivor and The Apprentice. *I think The Restaurant is the other exception to this. But, I try not to watch too much TV, so I can't comment on it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Greg Hurlman | Clutch - There's only one game they would play - http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3179679296&category=19094 I'll second the 'Amazing Race' comment - it's the only reality show I've watched where I genunitely rooted for one team/couple/whatever to win. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'In this show, much like Survivor, one person wins in the end, so ultimately there is only a big I in team. Sadly a lot of life works that way too.' You can't blame 'competition' for the fact that everybody on the show is an abject and total loser. :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Brad Wilson | Oh, and Trump comes off like an idiot. Honestly, does he just walk around all day and brag about the stuff he owns? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Confused | Thank you Brad Wilson! I think it would make a funny show to watch these losers at their own work during one of their regular days! Now that would be hilarious! I am guessing Trump spends 95% of his time in front of the mirror perfecting is hair do! The other 5% gets spent eating lemons so that when he talks, his face gets that 'I just had sour fruit' look. Just for that, I could consider 'The Apprentice' a funny show! :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Brad Wilson | I think the "prize" where they got to have a picnic at his house was just the most over the top, hilarious moment on television. "Come, gaze at my mansion from the outside! Isn't it large? Okay, now, eat some food on my lawn. Don't wreck it." |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | Not too unlike the BillG Intern Bar-B-Que. You get to walk down his staircase to the lawn out back. You can look down the halls, go into the guest bathroom look into his "enterteining room" and gaze at the Winslow Homer painting Lost on the grand banks hung in the hallway on the second floor, but you can't touch anything, and don't hurt the grass. |
| Fri 05 Mar | no name | 'Honestly, does he just walk around all day and brag about the stuff he owns' Yes. Self-promotion is what he's famous for. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | I think Brad Wilson is spot on here. The whole premise of the show is rediculous, Trump is rediculous, and all the candidates are rediculous. They're larger than life blow up dolls, and that's how their supposed to be. Now tone it down 3 notches and see how it parallels the rediculous elements of your own life. If Omarosa is like Philo's ex-boss on steriods, then what can watching her teach us about how to handle situations with people like her? I mean come on people. Like giant men chasing after an oblong brown object on a green field is realistic. It's entertainment, but entertainment with some educational value - but you have to dig a little for it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | Sounds like the Irish Potato famine to me. Bunch of grown men chasing after the oblong brown potato. . . |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ray | Omarosa is one CNBC right now. For some reason she isn't in the studio like every other person that has been fired has been. She is working on a book and a line of business clothing. She calls herself the stongest candidate. Apparently she is going to be on the Tonight Show tonight.... |
| Fri 05 Mar | apw | I think the most realistic reality show is 'Cribs'. 'Yes you too can make huge globs of money and spend it in rooms of a house that you never go in by singing about car rims a prada shoes to some '70s bass line.' |
| Fri 05 Mar | Steve | Thanks for the Omarosa update Ray. Anyone got anymore on what she said on the Today Show? Also, it seemed to me like there was some weird editing at the very end of the show. Omarosa barges in and Trump yells at her. Then, it seems like the next scene has Heidi sitting down and Kwame standing and they're waiting for Omarosa to get composed and return to the board room. Was I missing something? |
| Fri 05 Mar | The Ted | re: today show -she said she was the strongest player. -everybody there came as an intern, she came as an executive. -she was the only one that acted like an executive. -there's been 10 years of reality shows stereotyping strong black women as pushy broads. -she REALLY had a concussion. had to go to the dr. and everything. -the dr. told her to sit and eat at least one meal per day. that's why she wanted to eat lunch. -Trump said it was only a little piece of plaster because as the property owner he is afraid of getting sued. -it was actually a BIG piece of cement that hit her head. -people love her. -trump was scared of her. he's not used to dealing with women as strong as she is. I thought that maybe the shows editors had made her look like a beeotch. Watching the today show made me realize they didn't have to try. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Confused | > -the dr. told her to sit and eat at least one meal per day. > that's why she wanted to eat lunch. She never mentioned that. All she said to Heidi was 'I have to sit down and have lunch'. She has a huge attitude problem! I don't care how smart she is. That attitude is not going to make too many friends. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Philo | 'it was actually a BIG piece of cement that hit her head.' I'm sorry - there were four or five other intelligent people standing right there when it happened - if it had been a real danger I have no doubt they would've been asking her if she was okay, had her sit down, and even called 911 if necessary. All we saw were startled looks and a little interest. It was a piece of plaster. Regarding the doctor, granted I have a negative bent towards Omarosa, but I'll bet he *probably* said 'you might have a concussion - I recommend...' just like if you're coughing and sneezing he'd say 'you might have a cold - I recommend rest and plenty of fluids' it's the baseline recommendation. 'Person gets hit in head, say 'concussion' and recommend sitting for one meal a day' Anyone here have any medical contacts who could confirm or refute this? Philo |
| Fri 05 Mar | The Ted | I'M PARAPHRASING OMAROSA FROM THE TODAY SHOW |
| Fri 05 Mar | The Ted | That's directed towards Philo and confused, who are obviously both confused as to what I was saying. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Confused | Ted. I know you are paraphrasing. I am not confused about this. I am confused about how techie people are actually drawn to this soap opera like show as if it has anything to offer. I thought it did before I saw an episode and I realized it was all fluff just like anything else on TV these days. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'I am confused about how techie people are actually drawn to this soap opera like show as if it has anything to offer.' Because, deep down, most people enjoy seeing people who are worse off than they are on television. There's really no other way to explain the prevalence of 'reality' TV. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Forbes | I missed that segment with her getting hit on the head by a vicious piece of plaster, however as you mentioned Philo, the use of rote medical blabber as some sort of proof is pretty questionable - Doctors will virtually always give such boilerplate recommendations, and few would be so confrontational as to proclaim "You got hit by a little piece of plaster and you think you have a concussion? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound." |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | 'sit and eat one meal a day' doesn't pass the sniff test. I'm not disputing that doctors dish out boilerplate responses. It's just that it seems like a odd thing to say - especially for a concussion. It'd be like going to the doctor with a sprained ankle and having him say, 'don't forget to breathe periodically and go poop when you feel a little back pressure.' I think she's lying. After all, she did work for Clinton! :^) |
Fri 05 Mar | The Ted | This is the only thing I could find about her 'political appointment'
http://www.kallipugos.com/archives/000519.html
Truth exposed: This young lady was a secretary, and presumably a bad one at that. She served as an assistant to the Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel for only a couple of months, and I believe that she was ceremoniously canned. This is one of those jobs that's about as far out of the loop as you can get, and is in the $20-22k pay range. As for her 'political consulting' career, I've been told that she consults a few pageant contestants, which obviously has very little to do with politics. |
| Fri 05 Mar | The Ted | This is too rich: 'She said the editing made it seem as though her injury was minor but she said she spent 18 hours in a New York City hospital diagnosed with severe head trauma and a concussion after being hit by a piece of sheet metal.' http://www.daytondailynews.com/localnews/content/localnews/daily/0220apprentice.html |
| Sat 06 Mar | T. Norman | And which NYC hospital was that? Of course she can't name the place, in case they deny it. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeffers | I'm surprised to hear any support for Omarossa. She was a lazy, spoiled, whiney, spiteful, stupid, uncreative, non-team player from the start. Remember her trying to sell the water by straight out lying to the clients? 'I'm a water expert who has tasted all your waters and this is much better!'. All I can say is 'uh... wow - I haven't seen such stuff since gradeschool. And her talking about the art like she knew what she was talking about - she clearly had zero clue, but everyone seems to give her credit for 'knowing art'. You're all commendably generous but come on folks. And as for the 'plaster' thing. 18 hours? NFW! And yes there were several thoughtful people 5 feet away who would have certainly helped if needed. Trump afraid of a lawsuit? No WAY - it was a tiny, tiny piece, evidenced by Omarossa HERSELF when she started playing basketball in the street (obviously just to give everyone else the finger). But I agree with whoever mentioned that her taxi speech was the perfectending - so self-endearing, so condescending, so psycho - so hilarious! Oh yeah - and it doesn't surprise me at all for her to use the race card in her comments about the producers. It totally fits her spiteful personality. Life hasn't been fair to her because she's black, so it's only fair that she fight back hard and dirty to get all those undeserving whitefolk back. But it really isn't a race thing - she's simply a spoiled brat. I've hired and worked with all different types of people, and seen the spiteful, 'I deserve this!!' personality a lot. They just never learned the value of a little hard work. Of course in Omarossa's case I'm sure she'll use this show for maximum leverage, conveniently ignoring the fact that her entire stage prescence was disgusting. So as much as we all may miss her antics in The Apprentice, I'll bet we can look forward to seeing more of her as she 'markets her own name' with these equally valueless networks. Gotta love it! |
| Sat 06 Mar | ~~~ | Omarosa bin Laden finally goes back to her cave. |
| Sat 06 Mar | www.marktaw.com | 1. What are the odds they actually have footage of Omarosa being hit on the head, but never showed the audience because of amount of discussion it would generate. They have footage of everyone's reaction to it, were they just unlucky here, or did the camera crew have the same disdain for her as well? 2. Her justifications after the show sound just as made up as her justifications during the show. She's using the inherent doubt we have in reality TV to her advantage. Her stories got more and more elaborate as she went along, and as I've mentioned before she was constantly rehearsing (and re-spinning) her boardroom speeches. 3. 18 hours in a NYC hospital is entirely possible, all she has to do is go to the Emergency Room, they'll see she's not at all critical, and leave her in the waiting room all day. Then she'll get in to see the doctor and he'll tell her something innocuous like 'Just make sure you get some rest and eat every day,' and keep her for a few hours for observations and tests just to avoid a lawsuit. 4. I fully expect an Omarosa talk show within the next year. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeffers | Agree with you on 1, 2 & 4 Mark. But still highly doubt the hospital thing. The producers would have shown *something* just for the drama. Whatever (who cares) - the main thing is she exited as she played - in a consistently moronic way. Now that she's gone, I think Heide, Kwame and Troy will be on the spot. For amusement, here are my guesses as to who goes next: 1) Amy I agree - she really done hasn't done anything - except keeping Omorosa from being murdered and keeping Nick's ego at max psi. So now I think she gets exposed ...if Protege can somehow win with 3... 2) Kwame Between Heide and Kwame, my guess is Trump likes Heide, and the producers may want to keep her around for the drama with her mom (sick but probable). And as off the radar as Kwame is, he hasn't actually done much, has he? 3) Nick Between Nick and Katrina, my guess is sometime soon Nick's 'ego vs. skill' will get exposed. I think all the compliments from Trump lately are a facade. He surely knows this guy's only asset is his ego (clearly his 'sales expertise' is nill with commodity products, and I doubt Trump will be handing over anything too high-end to any of these kids). 5) Heide I think Heide's likability will start fading with Omorosa gone. And as bright as she is, I don't think she stands much of a chance with the final 3. 5) Katrina I can't see Katrina screwing up before Heide. Her real estate skills should be worth more than an apartment renovation to Trump. I mean that loss was more due to Troy's wits than her skills (except she+Bill screwed up not listing it earlier - dumb). 6) Troy This guy has street smarts and a style customers like. But in the end my guess is Trump wants someone more polished and with more spine/teeth (as alike himself as possible) Winner: Bill Unless he screws up royally I can't see him losing. Then again, the reality TV BS factor may make spaghetti out of my list :-) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Philo | 'But in the end my guess is Trump wants someone more polished and with more spine/teeth' Nope. Trump wants someone who will win, and a 'poor old country boy' that can put people at ease and convince them that yes, this really is a fair contract is a pretty valuable asset. ;-) Philo |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeffers | True, and personally I think Troy is awesome. But I still Trump's ego will play a major role. Maybe he DOES want all energy, in which case Nick is his dream come true. Naaaaah. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Suzanne Stiver | As an artist, I'm amazed that Nick and his team managed to sell so much safe, department store-lounge art. I'm doubly amazed that Lia's artwork was not selected by either team, since everyone really liked it. But is this genuinely 'reality TV'? I wonder how much of the show is scripted. How much is Trump just 'playing' the audience? When is each episode actually filmed? Obviously next week's episode has already taken place. Is the ending a 'done deal' already? last one standing. Now I'm thinking Troy (or Nick), or maybe Heidi. ~Suzanne |
| Sun 07 Mar | Suzanne Stiver | I meant to say, the first time I saw the show (week two) I thought Nick would be the last one standing. I wanted Omarosa to get fired, but after I saw her on Leno last night I thought, hey, maybe Apprentice was just edited to make her the bad guy for the sake of drama. |
| Pricing conclusion | Thu 04 Mar | Gwyn |
| After all the discussion on pricing I though I would share my recent experiences with you. Well, its the first sales pitch tomorrow and Ive needed to come up with a pricing strategy over the last couple of weeks for our product. Boy its been hard! And thats just so I can show this customer what a deal hes getting compared to the normal prices! We know how much were going to charge him but we have had to do a load of work to calculate what the official figure is going to be. (if you dont hear from me for a while youll know tomorrow didnt go too well!!) Product is really consulting-ware at this stage and we are typically aiming at the medium to large enterprises. Its comprised of a server component and this is accessed by a client API. There is also a Windows forms-based GUI which does its work through the client API. As its used for managing meta-data about things in the organisation theres a big reporting requirement and we expect that customers will develop their own reporting on the intranet or integrate it with existing reporting on the intranet. Therefore our customers are likely to have a number of GUI users but some of the information is likely to be available, via the Intranet to the entire organisation. We obviously have to cater for all these occurences and make sure we get fair price for the product regardless of how the customer chooses to use the product. So, the pricing structure weve agreed is: Named-User licence - required for each accessor of the client API - £100 GUI licence - required for each GUI user. Also need a Named-User licence - £675 (1-20) £600 (21-50) £525 (51+) Server reporting licence - gives ability to extract (read only) data via the client API for publishing across the organisation - £10,000. Maintenance (upgrades and support) - 18%. This has been fairly scientifically worked out (by testing all combinations, comparing with similar enterprise products in the market, allowances for new company etc.) A typical 100 user GUI installation would therefore cost in the order of £67,750 A small 10 user GUI installation but where the information is published site-wide would cost £17,750. A small 10 user GUI installation who dont publish the information woud be £7,750 (good for SMEs) An installation of 300 users not using the GUI but their own bespoke access (therefore requiring read/write through the client API) would require 300 Named-User licences = £30,000. Bearing in mind the work Im doing for this first pitch, and that we havent had to advertise for this opportunity I think the regular cost of landing a customer is going to be several thousand pounds. Were offering a special deal for this company as an early adopter (will probably cost them 50% overall) Its bloody hard to balance the prices out! And then you have to consider the consultancy. For the first customer were proposing 20 days to model their requirements in terms of setup and develop some bespoke reports. Theres then probably another 60 days or so of consultancy to integrate it with their existing product set and intranet. And if were REALLY lucky, we may just get enough income to keep four of us employed at a bit above minimum wage for 6 months to try and develop the product further and get some more sales. Except none of us really know anything about sales and marketing yet. Any potential investors out there?!!! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Matthew Lock | > And if we're REALLY lucky, we may just get enough income to > keep four of us employed at a bit above minimum wage for > 6 months to try and develop the product further and get > some more sales. Except none of us really know anything > about sales and marketing yet. To be frank then why bother? You want to price it high enough so that if it succeeds you will earn a lot of money, otherwise it's not worth your time and risk. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Matthew Lock | Can I recommend this book: 'The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It' http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0887307280/104-3568174-6796752?v=glance It's a bit silly in places, but I think you guys would benefit from it's message that a good business plan is what most small businesses most need. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gwyn | Is there any other way to start out? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gwyn | > It's a bit silly in places, but I think you guys would benefit from it's message that a good business plan is what most small businesses most need. I agree. A business plan is a necessity. However, a business plan requires all sorts of information that most of the time you can't provide without at least some experience. You need to work out how many sales you can make. And I defy anyone to be able to calculate that in the IT market without being 1000% out apart from due to good luck. If you've got any advice, on how to work out how many potential global sales you can make in a horizontal market, with competitors who don't publish prices, with a product that in some ways is a bit like other products but in other ways is totally different, then I want to hear it!!!! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Must be a manager | Gwyn, your figures make sense. Twenty percent annually for maintenance is a standard figure. You've got four guys, which should send a message of solidity. In terms of business plan, all it really means for an organisation of your size is knowing roughly what you're developing, who you think will buy it, and why. Then you have to work the figures to pay yourselves. These sort of deals typically depend on some middle manager being satisfied he's not going to look silly later on, for choosing you. Business cards, title, documentation, offices, good phone answering, brochure and reference sites (or the equivalent) will see you looking sweet. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Philo | 'As it's used for managing meta-data about things in the organisation there's a big reporting requirement and we expect that customers will develop their own reporting on the intranet or integrate it with existing reporting on the intranet.' I hope 'things' is vague for confidentiality reasons and that's not your real sales pitch. [grin] IMHO, $100k+ is pretty steep for consulting-ware. As for the 'no reporting out of the box' - I think you'll lose right there. The people that write $100k checks want to see things. They don't want to hear vagaries and see powerpoints and visio diagrams. Throw five or ten reports in the box and they'll pay for themselves quickly. Philo (These opinions are solely mine and do not reflect the position of Microsoft) |
| Thu 04 Mar | Unfocused Focused | On the reporting, I agree. You're going to need some reports (if only to drop that 'No reports' item off of the spec.) Now that doesn't mean that the reports are going to be useful to them - a couple of almost data dump reports and several high level summaries (read record count type reports) will give you some reporting - and it'll give them something to start baseing their requirements for their custom reports. Alway give an option for doing custom reports (lots of additional work), and always do custom reports as T&M. (the longer they take to fine tune their formulas, the more you make. And it may surprise you how long it will take them.) |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | 'However, a business plan requires all sorts of information that most of the time you can't provide without at least some experience.' IMHO, that's the POINT of a business plan: not to provide answers but to provide QUESTIONS. I.e., a good managment consultant (like a good therapist) doesn't have the ANSWERS, they have the right QUESTIONS. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Ken Klose | Reports! Huge issue. I worked many years in consulting shops developing custom apps (new ones, very little maintaining old ones) and in EVERY design meeting with a customer I or anyone I talked to ever had, at some point the customer would eventually ask 'What about reports? What about security?' Report and security, they are checkbox features, got to have little check marks next to each. Between us consultants it was a running inside joke: anytime we were designing even the smallest of features someone would eventually chime in 'What about reports! What about security!'. Then we would all laugh. Oh, the good ole days! |
| Sun 07 Mar | Gwyn | Out of the box it does simple queries which will be enhanced shortly to do complex queries (query builder type functionality) which you can save for reuse. Reports are often created from a set of queries and this requires either bespoke reports to be created which we can do or they can do, using published interfaces, if they've got .NET skills. |
| Do Empty Fields in an ADO Rs use much memory? | Thu 04 Mar | Wayne |
| Say I have a manufactured client side recordset with two nullable fields (lets call them Simple and Complex). One of the fields is always left empty since the Simple field is used for storing simple data types (converted to a string) and the Complex field is used for storing binary data (adLongVarBinary). You *could* get rid of the Simple field, but to store simple data types in the Complex field youd have to convert them to a byte array first (and vice-versa to get them back out). Is it worth the savings? Im guessing no because the un-used field is always Null. BTW, the hidden .Collect() method of the Rs is used to get/set values by field index, so a full-fledged Field object is never created. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Wayne | Also, the average number of rows would be less than 250 and mostly simple data. OT: This is closed source software at it's worst. If I had the ADODB source code I could see exactly how it works and I'd know better how to use it. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Wayne | AOT: This is the type of problem that sometimes stops me from getting more things done, since I am sometimes a victim of the early optimization itch. It's probably a difference of like 1KB of memory for the whole recordset. I guess I could run tests...no, DON'T DO IT! But...arrrg! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Alexander Chalucov | So did you run the tests? Willing to share results? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Wayne | The single adLongVarBinary field recordset used 92K more memory for a 250 row recordset than a recordset with two fields. (it used 60K less than the 2 field rs, when I didn't store strings binarily as unicode). The two field recordset consisted of an adLongVarChar field and a adLongVarBinary field. Each recordset row was filled with a string of X's. For the recordset with 2 fields, the first 125 rows used the Varchar field leaving the Binary field null, and the second 125 rows used the Binary field. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Alex Chalucov | The differences in memory usage are pretty significant it seems. However, having in mind that the recordsets are usually way smaller then the tables) it's OK. |
| Free Terminal Services Client win98 | Wed 03 Mar | Tom Vu |
| I have looked on microsoft.com and google but cannot find an answer. Does anyone know where I can download a terminal services client for windows98, if at all. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Simon Lucy | You install it from the Terminal Services Client directory that's created when you install the Server. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | Terminal Services or Remote Desktop (for logging in remotely to a server)??? I got confused over the naming and was looking for TS when I wanted RD. If the latter then you can get it from here: www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/rdclientdl.asp |
| Wed 03 Mar | Tom Vu | Thanks, I'll look. I don't want the server I just want the client to connect to a remote server. I am on windows98 though, not 2000/XP. |
| Wed 03 Mar | mb | there's this wacky 'create install disks' option on the menu of a TS server. used to be the only way to install the client--you'd create disks, then stick them back in the machine. don't remember if the client ran on win98 or not. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Joel S | Remote desktop *is* terminal services. The best way is to go to this website on microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/rdclientdl.asp Do not let the windows XP title confuse you. This client will work for 98/ME/NT 4/2000/ and XP -You should use this client over the terminal services client. It fixes numerous bugs since those were released, and is compatible with every version of terminal services. -And hey, if you need a client for linux...go to www.rdesktop.org |
| Thu 04 Mar | Bill Tomlinson | Also, my impression from MS's site is that they're trying to push people towards using the remote desktop activeX control rather than the stand alone client. And if you're talking about having a lot of client computers (and you've got an IIS server around that can host the control), this might be an easier approach than installing the remote desktop/terminal services stand-alone client on all the client computers. |
| Sun 07 Mar | Maxim Fyodoroff | Thank you for a useful information |
| XP Network slowness | Tue 02 Mar | Karl Perry |
| Weve been fighting slow network performance with Windows XP for a couple of months now. Google searches, etc. have produced dozens of ideas but none of them have worked for us so far. We have about 50 pcs running on an all-switch network: 1 copper GB switch from NetGear and three 100MBps switches attached to it. Every device on our network connects either directly to the copper switch or to one of the 100Mbps switches - we got rid of all the daisy chains when we upgraded to Cat5e+ about five months ago. Our PDC and BDC both are 900MHz PIIIs with NT4 SP6a. We have another server running Win2K Server, and two new servers running Win2K3 server. All but one of the workstations on our network are running either Win2K Pro or XP Pro. We have both TCP/IP and NetBEUI installed as protocols on our servers. The problem is that the XP workstations take forever to browse directories on network shares if there are lots of files in the directories. We have one directory on our BDC that contains about 1,500 files in 9GB space and on a 2.8GHz P4 directly attached to the same switch and with every other computer on the network turned off, takes over a minute to display the directory in Windows Explorer. If we start the Win98 workstation - a lowly PIII/500, it will display the directory in about 10 seconds. These machines take minutes to start network database applications (yes, they are local database apps) and to load forms on them. Before XP, the apps started within 10-20 seconds. In the past three months we have added approximately 15 new workstations to the network, to go from 35 to our current 50. The older workstations - some connected directly to the servers switch and others one switch removed - start our apps very quickly. Has anyone else had experience with XP being a dog on a network? What have you done to solve this? TIA, |
| Tue 02 Mar | Wayne | I have the same problem with XP on my laptop. I think it's because I use it on different networks all the time, but that shouldn't matter. There's definitely something wrong. I've used Ethereal to try to see what it's trying to do on the wire, but I can't really make sense of it. I'll be watching this thread though :) |
| Tue 02 Mar | Mediocre ASP Monkey | I'm far from a networker, but I've heard NetBEUI is the Devil itself - and that XP networks with just TCP/IP run just lovely. OTOH, I wasn't paying much attention at the time, so let's see if wiser heads weigh in, shall we? ;) |
| Tue 02 Mar | Fred | To investigate, did you try creating sub-directories to avoid having so many files in one directory? Maybe the network part works differently in 9x and XP, which would explain the discrepency you currently observe. And if this hasn't been done yet, look on MSDN, see if any hint is available to explain this issue. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Karl Perry | Fred, We can't create a subdirectory in that particular directory because it's the data directory from the retarded Paradox app I inherited eight months ago and we're just two weeks from shutting down. However, that is not the only directory with a problem. Our new app is slow, too. We've discovered that, for this Paradox app at least, NetBEUI is basically essential. For some reason PDox just likes NetBEUI. We've looked on MSDN, their KB, on Google - all over the 'Net. As I said, dozens of suggestions but nothing has panned out yet. Keep the suggestions coming ... I'm grasping at straws here, and so are a lot of others. |
| Wed 03 Mar | kl | One of the System Admins at work told us to turn off 'Simple File Sharing' (Tools > Folder Options > View Tab in Advanced Settings) to browse the network shares faster. Maybe that'll do the trick. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Christopher Wells | Doug Knox says that XP's NetBEUI may not play well with older versions of NetBEUI: he suggests installing Win2K's NetBEUI on XP. Alternatively, consider using XP instead of NT4 as your file server? |
| Wed 03 Mar | Mark Tetrode | Maybe this http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak1557.aspx can help (didn't try it out myself). |
| Sun 07 Mar | Li-fan Chen | * Set up WINS server, trade in NetBEUI, it should reduce look up and broadcast traffic, use more efficient protocols * Set up DNS caching, even better, set up a DNS server for internal use, reduces look up time * Cache web access if you can, people surf the net a lot more than they browse file folders |
| Perforce for FREE!! | Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose |
| Perforce is offering a 2 user, 2 workspace, NO TIME LIMIT version for free download on their website http://www.perforce.com/perforce/devx.html Ive read in a few threads here that this is *THE* definitive source control program, so this seems like a great deal. My question though is what is the learning curve like? * SourceSafe - I used it many moons ago and it was a breeze to learn, although limited. * PVCS - I used this next, and it was a pain to learn, even with the help of knowledgeable peers. No better than SourceSafe in my estimation. * CVS - I used this last, and it was a PAIN AND A HALF to learn, even with the help of knowledgeable peers and useful tools like WinCVS. But after I learnt it, I admit it was the best so far. So heres my question, how painful is it to learn Perforce, especially without any knowledgeable peers around to show me stuff, or look over my shoulder and tell me when Im being a dumbass. I dont like having to wade through mountainous documentation of every feature and nuance when all I want is the basics -- Ive got better things to do with my Friday nights -- well, um actually I dont, at least not this Friday. I would happily stick to CVS if it had a feature that let you check in multiple file atomically, but alas it doesnt. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | I assume this is an ad? theyve always offered that. surely your marketing people have better things to do with their time? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | Yes open sourcerer, its CLEARLY an ad. I mean most ad copy from software companies: 1. Contains the word DUMBASS. 2. Asks everyone if the product in question is PAINFUL to learn. Good job reading! I think I can get you hired as an editor. Maybe at the Weekly World News. BTW: The proper knee-jerk 'open source' response when someone calls into question an open source technology (CVS in this case) is to respond with 'have you checked out the XXX project yet?' (in this case that would be Subversion). I don't have a problem with open source zealots, just LAZY open source zealots. |
| Fri 05 Mar | MacSqueeb | Why would the OP be an advertisement? I am new to using source control, and in checking out Perforce last week, I too discovered only then that they offer the unlimited trial described above. If I was ready to start testing it, I would probably look to opinions from JoS posters, as this is my most trusted resource for what intelligent peers in software creation are thinking. FWIW, if I am naive, and something about the poster posing a Ken Klose makes it obviously an ad, well I share the same question, so would it be ok to answer it on my behalf? |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | ' The proper knee-jerk 'open source' response when someone calls into question an open source technology' :) interesting assumption....based on the idea that attack is the best form of defense I assume? This is _clearly_ an add..Id stake money on it. and sarcasm is not a denial. (although I have no doubt that you are capable of an outright denial, people who advetise like this have already proven themselves to be free of normal human integrity) oh..and I actually use perforce myself..the free version...never really used cvs so I have no idea whether it does in fact have the feature you are claiming it does not or not, but personally Id be astonished if it did not. (anyone using cvs care to coment here?) The point is that anyone with experience in the other things you have listed would have had no problem trying out perforce themselves without wasting time on a question like this, which means that you are not posting a genuine question, which means that you are a deliberate advertisement. interesting your response has confirmed this to me, you sound very much the software sellers we get here from time to time :) Ive often wondered why the software industry has such good people in the programming area, and such genuine slimeballs in the marketing side of things. (philo excepted in this of course) |
| Fri 05 Mar | GiorgioG | clearly if any of you had googled for Ken Klose, you'd realize he'd asked a similar question about the MS Action pack...apparently he's either just too lazy to find out for himself, doesn't trust his ability to make a decision on his own, doesn't trust what he sees, or some other psychological issue. I highly doubt this is an ad for Perforce. Get over folks. The average joe on JoS knows that perforce kicks ass. Nothing to see here folks...move along. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | heh, looking closely at the action pack one that looks suspiciously like a slimeball marketing attempt as well..I wonder what his connection to the ebay seller was. this guy is a dodgy marketer, Ill guarantee it. hey Ken, tell us about your programming experience to prove me wrong :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | Well, while I've got my salesman's hat on, I'd like to tell you about the new Chevy Malibu, now available with third row seating. Chevy is a name you can trust! And since its an American car, you can be sure its been designed BY Americans, FOR Americans. No narrow seats for narrow asses. Big soft seats for big soft asses. Plus a mega-super-duper size cup holder. Now with the OnStar system... if you're ever in an accident, it will dial for help, and dial you attorney so you can immediately SUE THEIR ASS! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Would someone please just answer the question: What's Perforce got that CVS don't got, and is it worth the learning curve to get there? Is Perforce intuitive, or are you lost to learn it without a lot of reading the manual or getting help from a friend. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | To put another way, can someone whose lazy and has psychological issues learn it, or is it only for people with cool Italian names like Giorgio? |
| Fri 05 Mar | MacSqueeb | +++Would someone please just answer the question:+++ You're not allowed to ask questions of your peers anymore, Ken; it's a sure sign of laziness and distrust of your own judgement. This is particularly true if you're swamped, and would like some opinions before you invest time testing the thing for which you seek advice. Furthermore, if you are considering implementing said thing at work, where your employer is likely to have to stake some money on the fitness of a product, you *must* rely soley on your own opinion derived from hard-earned personal experience--the opinions of other users of the product cannot be trusted, and are probably just fake marketing testimonials anyway. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | nice sarcasm ken, really puts you in a positive light. 'Is Perforce intuitive, or are you lost to learn it without a lot of reading the manual or getting help from a friend. ' ?? perforce is a cli program, you could describe it in many, many different ways but 'intuitive' is clearly not going to be one of them. come on ken, stop beating around the bush and tell us about your programming experience :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | MacSqueeb | Correction: you're only allowed to ask questions after submitting your resume. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | hey MacSqueeb, have you considered taking the time you are spending checking out this thread and using it to download and play with perforce? believe it or not, internet chat forums cannot replace personal experience. If you dont have time to evaluate a product then you prolly shouldn't be advising your boss to spend money on it based on the random utterances of a bunch of people wasting their time on internet forums. seriously doodlet, Ken is a dodgy marketer slimeball and you are acting rather nicely as his patsy. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | I've gotten as much as Perforce is a CLI from lazily browsing the docs. So is CVS. But there is this nice (nice for open source freeware) UI for it called WinCVS that dumbs it down to my level. Do you use a UI for Perforce or do you do it from the command line? As for my programming credentials: I once programmed a webpage in HTTP and a little scripting in Java. :-p |
| Fri 05 Mar | MacSqueeb AKA embarrassed OSS advocate | +++have you considered taking the time you are spending checking out this thread and using it to download and play with perforce?+++ Yes I have. |
| Fri 05 Mar | GiorgioG | MacSqueeb: << This is particularly true if you're swamped, and would like some opinions before you invest time testing the thing for which you seek advice. >> Doing a little research for yourself (a simple google, or searching of the JoS forum) is common sense. If you can't do that before you post a question to the board, you are lazy or don't have any common sense of courtesy. This is not a board for newbies. Not to be elitist, but you should already know how to do this. And he's not swamped, he's doing a whole lot of nothing on a Friday night, as he admited. << Furthermore, if you are considering implementing said thing at work, where your employer is likely to have to stake some money on the fitness of a product, you *must* rely soley on your own opinion derived from hard-earned personal experience--the opinions of other users of the product cannot be trusted, and are probably just fake marketing testimonials anyway. >> Your employer is paying you to make decisions. Do some research. Don't waste everyone's time on questions that can be answered with a simple google search. Look at how much time we've wasted on this bullshit thread as it is. We are not your little magical knowledge elves who do your work for you. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | Step 1: Stir hornets nest on JoS forum. Step 3: Profit. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | 'Do you use a UI for Perforce or do you do it from the command line?' hey, a specific question...well done! maybe you could build it up to a knowledgable question one day? keep working on it anyway and dont be put off by sarcastic people who encourage thinking for yourself... both. I wrote my own GUI for the standard stuff and use the cli whenever I need to do something more advanced...one day Ill add all the fancy features and sell it for a million bucks. seriously web man if you can handle the terrible pressure of forming yourown opinion on it, trying actually installing it instead of merely scanning the docs nervously. oh...the server prefers having its own user space, so Id suggest getting your admin guy to give you his opinion on the best way to create one of those. If you ask nice he might even hold your hand while you do it... |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | ++++oh...the server prefers having its own user space, so Id suggest getting your admin guy to give you his opinion on the best way to create one of those++++ Excellent, exactly the kind of useful information I was hoping to get.... um.... like 17 posts ago. 'own user space' -- that smells suspiciously like UNIX crap to me since I'm my own 'admin guy' I'll need you to translate that into Windows speak for those of us who can only point at pretty pictures and clap joyously when things happen as a result. |
| Fri 05 Mar | "uh-oh I got electronic courage now" MacSqueeb | I guess all the helpfus research tips never occurred to me; moreover, my employer never asks me or pays me to make decisions because I am an inexperienced newbie lacking sufficient elite qualities. What did pop into my young mind was that Ken has always seemed like a decent guy from reading his contributions on JoS, and he asked a reasonable question, which apparently disproves my hypothisys that a helpful answer is as easy to give as a (lengthy) trollesque answer (read: 'SEARCH GOOGLE' + the usual). What really surprised me was the implication that one is even easier to give than to just pass on a question one doesn't feel like helping with. Now granted, I'm not offering anything userful (feeding trolls never is), but if I had anything useful rolling around in that ol' head o' mine, I might consider that a) Ken has already done some googling (now that I've been enlightened as to what google is, anyway), but would like to supplement his findings with the opinions of people he virtually socializes with as peers, or b) that it's Friday night, and after a long week Ken feels more like having a beer than googling or testing software this particular, but while he was settling into his weekend relaxation, he was still toying with his thoughts about perforce and thought he'd drop an off the cuff question for the guys and gals at JoS to throw in their $0.02--everyone likes to share their opinions, right? Now granted, such inconsiderate and lazy thinking on his part did force the more sagely members of the audience to waste their time (no doubt otherwise dedicated to dark, magely works), to have to stop what they were doing to put him back on the right track. Furthermore, it wasted the most holy of all intangibles: system resources. Come on Ken, this is a serious software forum--it's for posting updates on The Apprentice, there's no time for answering questions. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Justin Johnson | What the hell is the matter with posting a question on a piece of software, looking for experienced opinions on it? There's no shortage of threads here doing the same, some even started by Joel. I, too, wish someone would answer Ken's questions or at least give a general impression of it, and I say that as an IS manager who's spent the last few months getting CVS to be the norm in my department. |
| Fri 05 Mar | open sourcerer | ''own user space' -- that smells suspiciously like UNIX crap to me since I'm my own 'admin guy' I'll need you to translate that into Windows speak for those of us who can only point at pretty pictures and clap joyously when things happen as a result. ' unix crap? go away, find a learners forum for mentally disabled users and ask your questions there. Anyone who is unable to understand the concept of multiple users will never understand the idea of committing multiple files. dear god your existance on this forum offends me to my very bones. stupidity squared. too lazy to do your own research, too stupid to understand anyone elses and too driven to leave the problem alone. have you considered running for parliament? |
| Fri 05 Mar | HomeStar Runner | This thread will be BE-LEETED! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bob Abooey | ? Perforce has an incredible GUI, for both Windows and Linux. It is by-far the best source code management product I've used. CVS is obsolete, SourceSafe is garbage (slow and unreliable), ClearCase is a monster. There are several new open-source SCMs that purport to be successors to CVS, you could investigate them also. |
| Sat 06 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | It's perfectly reasonable to ask for OPINIONS on this forum. I'm more than happy to render opinions. It takes very little time. I trust a *soliticed* opinion from a fairly well known source (Jos) much more than browsing newsgroups. I, for one, thank the OP. I wasn't aware of Perforce's free version. After reading the reviews comparing Perforce and CVS, it looks good. OK, the OP might have found the following reviews in 2 minutes on google: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2378 http://www.websina.com/bugzero/source-version-control.html Perforce looks like the clear winner. Only downside is price, which is moot for me. Not more than two developers at my shop. But, if I get hooked and we have more programmers we'd stick with what we know. |
| Sat 06 Mar | x | We use Perforce in-house. It uses a central datastore model and, since it has a Java and web client, can support sourcetrees on practically anything that has a command line + Java. We use it for QNX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows hosted environments, with the server/db running on a Solaris box. Its command line is no worse than anyone else's, and it does have a nice GUI. Its notion of branches is relatively unsophisticated when compared to Clearcase, but it is several orders of magnitude cheaper and needs very little admin once it is set up. And it does have an excellent group checkin model, and has a nice merge utility that can be used both from the cmd line and from the gui. All in all, we're happy with it. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Ken Klose | open-sourcerer: I am most thankful for your gracious and generous help in my understanding of user spaces on the windows platform. A quick search on google: http://www.google.com/microsoft?q=user+space has revealed that google knows as much about user spaces in windows as you and I, which is to say nothing. I have a concept of what user spaces is as it relates to the UNIX platform, but having never dealt with a 'server [that] prefers having its own user space' in Windows before, I was hoping for clarification as to what the ramifications of this statement were to me and my situation. I only wish you could have provided it. At your suggestion, I will now 'find a learners forum for mentally disabled users'. Which one do you use? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Christopher Wells | The Perforce installation guide (for unix and Windows) is online at http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.032/manuals/p4sag/index.html ... reading the manual (I have't used Perforce myself) it says nothing very unusual about the installation: you need to be a Power User (or Administrator) to install; and if the Perforce server service is running from a network drive then it needs to run as a named user instead of as System so that it can access network drives. http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.032/manuals/p4win-gs/p4win-gs.pdf describes the Windows GUI for end-users. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Petee something | Perforce rocks. I've used in a 4 programmer shop and it was wonderfully fast, has a good plug in for VS .net and does changelists. It's everything CVS should be. You really should check out subversion though. It should also be everything CVS should be. I played with early versions and they were nifty and if they can keep things on track it should be dandy. I've never used Bitkeeper or Arch though, which appear to use a different setup which could be better. |
| Sat 06 Mar | I like it | 2nd in support for Perforce's GUI and merge utility. It is also fast. You can get problems if the server's idea of what files are on your had disk are different to what is actually on your hard disk. Also I think it identifies the user with the PC it is installed on too much. Haven't used it as a server. Personally prefer it to CVS, - but haven't used WinCVS much. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Gwyn | At last, some sensible comments on this thread. Made all that scrolling worthwhile. Boy do I hate it when you women all get the painters in at the same time |
| Sat 06 Mar | C Rose | I've used Perforce, and thought it was pretty good, but I'd much prefer to use CVS. If you like working through a GUI, rather than the command line, then I'd advise you to use TortoiseCVS rather than WinCVS. http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ However, it might be a good idea to check out (if you'll excuse the pun) Subversion, which just hit 1.0. It's designed to be the successor to CVS, and to solve many of CVS' problems. http://subversion.tigris.org/ If you go with Subversion, then you might also want to use the equivalent to TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN. http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ |
| Sat 06 Mar | Simon Lucy | We've just started evaluating/using NG3 for a project where we are separated by a deal of distance and SourceSafe didn't seem to be able to cope with the VPN. Its not free, its $89 a seat, but it does integrate in SCC clients so we can checkout and do most of the stuff we need to do in the IDE. It uses .NET and so that makes it the first reasonable application I've used on .NET. Mind you the UI still has that amateurish sketched in look that .NET apps seem to have. This is not an advert, I'm not even going to post a link. |
| Sat 06 Mar | son of parnas | Search on perfroce vs CVS and you'll get a lot of hits. I use the gui most of the time. It just works is the best compliment. When support is needed they are very good. The email list is helpful. Installation is a snap. Compare that with clearcase. The things that are bad: 1. Distributed development. We have people in inida and the east coast and accessing the depot is usually less than pleasant. A distributed depot would be nice. 2. Should have a soap/http/xml-rpc api. It has a C++ api but who cares. 3. Can't have formats in the submit comments. 4. Meta data like client specs are not versioned. 5. It has no ideas of directories, just files. 6. It is expensive for smaller shops. At home if we needed to go beyong 2 users i don't know if i could justify the cost of perforce. 7. Administration tasks are not in the gui. 8. Client side triggers are clumbsy. The things to do: 1. If you will have a large installation use subdirectories instead of having everything flat at the top. You need to start this way which is why i mention it. 2. Get the araxis merge tool. Very nice. 3. Use simple client specs. I would do little mapping. Things that are different: 1. client view specs. They map how the depot is expressed in a file system. This can get extremely confusing. Repress the urge to be clever. 2. change numbers. This is a really brilliant concept that is different than other systems. It means you no longer need labels once you combine client views and change numbers. You can recreate any build by knowing only the change number and client spec. Very convenient and clean. Perforce still has lables, but they are unecessary. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Nathan | How does perforce compare to Vault? Anyone used both? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Unless you have a programming sweat shop, this thing is going to cost a mint to use in most small IT businesses. $750-$650 for any company less than a 100, buys you just one year support. |
| Visual Basic question... | Fri 05 Mar | Mike G |
| Hi, my name is mike and right now im working on a macro for a game i play a lot. the command to attack is s2 or s3 and so on from 1 to 0 im having some trouble making it so the computer things that im accually pressing the button i havent done any macros before and the code is at a elementary level. i was wondering if anyone knew how to do simething like this right now, i made the interface and i have some of the code too. does anyone know how to make it so it puts in the text globaly so it would put it in in a full screen game? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Blargo | Back when I used to cheat in Ultima Online I used the macro recorder from Windows 3.1. Worked great. Of course, after a while I realized that if a game is so boring that I'd rather have a macro do the playing, it's not really worth it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | Especially when you're paying $10 a month to have a macro push the buttons for you. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Sam Livingston-Gray | Won't most game controllers do that? Okay, you still have to push *one* button instead of three or four... |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | The point is in games like Ultima Online (as mentioned) you have to walk around and build your skills. I tried UO once, and for example, you go through this incredibly tedious process of: Chop Wood -Didn't gather any usable lumber Chop Wood on new tree -Didn't gather any usable lumber Chop Wood on new tree -Collected 10 logs Use 10 logs to try and build a footstool -You didn't produce anything usable and it goes on and on to insane boredom and tedium. They call this an online game. I think I'd have better luck if I attempted the process in real life. Anyhow, to get through all this boredom and tedium, players build macros (which according to the game are illegal) to do it for them. So they chop wood for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and at the end of the week when they come back to their computer, now they are a master woodworker (oooh ahhhh). Now you can do things like build footstools to sell in a shop. But, as luck would have it running a store, you have to be there to sell stuff, or hire some computer guy to do it for you. So what do you do, you write another macro. Yeah, so I quickly nixed that game and the entire genre. What a waste of time and money. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bill Gate$ | 'and it goes on and on to insane boredom and tedium. They call this an online game. I think I'd have better luck if I attempted the process in real life.' lol |
| Fri 05 Mar | Tim H | I guess your macro would make your avatar do super-human things like Neo in the Matrix. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Mm | You could try Macro Magic: http://www.iolo.com/mm/index.cfm I use it to create macros for tedious items and can usually whip up some good ones in 5-10 minutes. It is basically geared to navigating around in Windows so I don't know if it will work within that specific game or not. But there is a 30-day demo so you can experiment. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Forbes | Ah, I fondly remember macroing fishing right in town where it was safe. Of course, then you'd have a tattler crying for an op to report a macroer (and it really was obvoius. I suppose if you were really into it you could make some sort of Liza interactions to thwart such reports). I remember going near the water and there'd be guys with just hundreds of fish around them, as their macro was to drop after catching. Hilarious. I did actually play that game for a fair bit, and me and a friend even managed to build a house (after finding and dutifully watching a house decay on a horribly overloaded shard). When we got bored it eventually collapsed -- what a waste - we could have sold that on Ebay. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Blargo | Oh, I did have lots of fun playing UO, but the fun came in screwing around. The fish on the ground was great. People would be gathered around a lake at 4am, macros running, but they had caught so many fish they were just laying on the ground. There was a bug for a while where you could get onto someone's locked boat by bringing your boat along side and extending your plank at just the right spot. Free stuff! I made my character sit outside a town, naked, in an ornate throne with beer bottles scattered around. People didn't know what to think of that. The best part was when I bought a house. That was fun for a while, but then I sold it to someone else. Of course, I kept a copy of the key. Every month or so I would go there and put all of his things on the lawn. I was in a guild once that owned a huge castle full of treasure. I didn't have a key, so I logged out in the castle after someone else had let me inside. I then waited until the middle of the night and had a friend come to the door. I would hand him the treasure, he would take it to my house, and we'd repeat. We took everything valuable and put the furniture on the lawn. UO was fun if you didn't take it seriously! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ashamed To Say | I took UO way too seriously. I'd spend hours and hours every day clicking on little bitmap shovels to 'mine' ore, which I'd 'drag' back to town, then 'smelt' them into ingots, which I'd sell to other players so they could make armor. After six months I finally had enough money to buy a house, I was so proud... Then I logged in one day and I was standing in the middle of an empty field. My house and everything in it had decayed, and all I had was the cape on my back (not even any pants)... I was actually almost suicidal. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Mike G | Just so you know... its not so it clicks 3 buttons instead of 1 when i select the button 'start', enables a timer... the timer will then keep pressing the 3 to 27 buttons EVERY X seconds... what ever you set it to.. and its for a game called Darkages... in this game, its LEGAL to set one up aslong as your still there waiting te computer... its illegal to walk away from the comp... but legal to let it do it for you when your sitting there..... and the reason i dont just use someone elses is because i want to LEARN how to make such a program. plus the others only do it up to 1 time a second and teh mana break is broken... the code is simple and i will send the project to anyone who wants to see what i did so far... but i just started programming about 4 months ago so im not a great programmer yet... the onlythings i've made were a memory game, a hangman game, and a text to binary(binary to text too) converter now that ive cleared that up.... help? :) ~mike |
| Puchasing Online | Fri 05 Mar | Paul Stovell |
| Howdy, I have some software I would like to sell online, so that a customer would go in, buy it with credit/visa/master card etc, and be given a special download link to download it, just like FogCreek does. Couple of questions: 1) What does it take to handle credit card information from users? Are there companies that would handle all the money stuff? If so, how much money would they take from each sale? 2) If I rolled my own, what sort of problems might I face? I am proficient with PHP and .NET, so I could do the web side, but what about the money side? Ive never worked with anything like that. 3) I would like to make my own page where the users enter payment details and everything, and then for my page to submit that information to the bank or whatever and have the money transferred into my account. 4) The customers my software is aimed at is other software companies and businesses. Would my sales be lower because Im making them only purchase via credit card and a download? It will only be like a 10mb download at most. I also just installed OSCommerce (www.oscommerce.com) on my computer and got it all setup and working, but Ive found it has no shipping module for online downloads, which was a real shame :( Thanks for any information :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Tony Edgecombe | >>1) What does it take to handle credit card information from users? Are there companies that would handle all the money stuff? If so, how much money would they take from each sale? There are many companies providing this service, I use swreg however you might want to look at one of the digital river companies or ShareIt. >>2) If I rolled my own, what sort of problems might I face? I am proficient with PHP and .NET, so I could do the web side, but what about the money side? I've never worked with anything like that. The biggest problem you would face is fraud, then currency and tax issues. Unless you are expecting a very high sales volume (more than $500,00) I'd stick with one of the existing providors. >>3) I would like to make my own page where the users enter payment details and everything, and then for my page to submit that information to the bank or whatever and have the money transferred into my account. Most of the exisiting providors will transfer the money to your account monthly or weekly if the volume is high enough. >>4) The customers my software is aimed at is other software companies and businesses. Would my sales be lower because I'm making them only purchase via credit card and a download? It will only be like a 10mb download at most. Virtually all my sales are to business customers, credit cards are fine for the majority. Occaisionly I get purchase orders although the customers still have to pay up front. I think most businesses are happy with this. I |
| Fri 05 Mar | Paul Stovell | Thankyou very much, I checked out Digital River and they do seem to offer very nice services. But I'm not exactly sure they have what I'm looking for... their CCNow thing seems to be very much user based. I've requested information from their sales team, so hopefully they can clear it up for me. Once again, thankyou very much! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Jackson | http://www.swreg.org http://www.shareit.com |
| Fri 05 Mar | Thinking Hard. | http://www.regsoft.com 10% cut; no sign-up fee or transaction quotas. |
| Fri 05 Mar | James U-S | Also take a look at www.worldpay.com |
| Sat 06 Mar | Paul Stovell | Thanks for all the links guys!:D However I have been experimenting with OSCommerce, and I've got it all setup for downloads and credit card stuff. If I get a web server with PHP/MySQL, would you think this is a safer way of going about it? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Dan Maas | I am using Kagi to sell a small product (www.maasdigital.com/starpro). It is working fine so far. They take about 10% of the price. Set-up with kagi is very easy, although you do need to mail them a signed postcard for legal reasons. Aside from that there are no fees or gotchas. You are able to customize part of your order page by default, or the entire page for a fee. Kagi is flexible with licensing options. I just get the payment received emails and send license keys manually, but you can also set up a license key generator or serial list with them. |
| Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | Fri 05 Mar | Vlad Gudim |
| I want to learn better influence others. Joel recommends Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0688128165/qid=1078489673/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_10_3/026-1336219-3356408) But Amazon search show there are another, newer book by the same author: Influence: Science and Practice (International Edition) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321188950/ref=pd_sim_b_dp_2/026-1336219-3356408) Anyone can comment please? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Anonymous this time, knowledge is power. | I've ready 'Influence: Science and Practise' and thoroughly recommend it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Anonymous this time, knowledge is power. | Sorry, 'read', not 'ready'! One other point: It'll give you pointers to how you can better influence people, but it's very difficult to change your behaviour in order to be a better influencer. I found the book most useful because it's helped me recognise when other people are trying to influence _me_. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Eric Debois | Whatever you do, stay clear of so called NLP-based methods of persuation (or sales tactics). The people who use them generally come across as very stupid, especially towards people who deal with logic on a daily basis like programmers. Those methods are generally based on misrepresenting the conditions upon which a choice is made, or deliberatly using common logical errors and non-sequiteurs. |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | 'Whatever you do, stay clear of so called NLP-based methods ' Do the above books deal with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming, I assume) ? |
| Fri 05 Mar | rwh | Cialdini's original book did not deal with Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I've read it, and recommend it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | Insofar as I recall, 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' is the better of the two based entirely on reading Amazon reviews. Cialdini also has a video, which I'm sure is fascinating, but is too expensive for me to bother with. Having read this book, I think it's brilliant, but I'm not entirely sure how much it will increase your ability to persuade. In general, I'm sure this book has be come a smarmy salesman's handbook. I highly recommend it, but not if you have to convince your boss of something next week. It's full of techniques that short circuit logic & reason & make direct appeals to emotion. Since reading this book, I've learned to recognize these situations as people trying to make me do something I don't really want to do. Rather, get a book on argumentation like Informal Logic by Walton. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Rich | This discussion brings up an interesting point. I don't generally respond well to emotional-type arguments (_pathos_, if you will), and I imagine many of you don't, either. However, there's lots of books, classes, and the like out there designed to teach people how to persuade/sell that use emotional methods. Certainly it's a major tool in the salesperson's arsenal. I must conclude that there is either a whole lot of misinformed salespeople, or a lot of emotionally swayable people. I'm betting on more the latter. Not that that's bad. I mean, as Don Norman is fond of pointing out as of late, we *are* emotional creatures... |
| Fri 05 Mar | John Rosenberg | Influence: Science and Practice is just an updated version of the book with newer examples. Both books are basically the same otherwise |
| Fri 05 Mar | Eric Debois | One of the NLP triks I really dislike, which seems to work best on elderly people is to abuse the unspoked rules of social behaviour. That is, structure the conversation so that there is never an opportunity for the victim to say no thanks in a polite fashion. Every time they try to stear to dialogue that way the sales person stears it away again. In short, you cant not decline without feeling like you hurt the salesmans feelings. And sure, it works on people who dont know what they want and so on. Personally, I hate people who try that stuff on me. Once I even had set my dogs on one of those guys. He just wouldnt shut up, and had his foot in the door so I let my two german shepards (sigfrid and roy) out at which point he departed. Sorry about the rant.. But I kind of feel like they are using stupidity to spread stupidity. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Magician | Eric, How do you know that he was using NLP? |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | > I must conclude that there is either a whole lot of misinformed salespeople, or a lot of emotionally swayable people. I'm betting on more the latter. < Rich, the whole point of the book is that WE'RE ALL susceptible to this kind of thing. Nobody is immune and it's arrogance to think you are. It probably happens to you every day without your being aware of it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Eric Debois | Magician >> You can spot it if you pay attention. They make alot of obvious statements that anyone would agree with and try to associate their end with that line of thinking. They might try to give you stuff. They often appeal to your memories and ask you to 'think back' of a time when you did something in particular. Actually anything except 'This is what I got, and this is the price' makes me kind of angry. As soon as someone tries to make me buy something by arguing or describing stuff that isnt directly conected to the product I stop listening. He he, Im getting worked up here. I think Ill go hack some NLP teachers website to get it out of my system. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Joe Hendricks | I prefer the extremely practical "Spin Selling Fieldbook" - after all, influence = sales <g> |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | Spin Selling was the model they used at (my former place of employ) and I pilfered one of the surplus books that was just sitting in my cube from the previous occupant, but never read it. Care to explain it a bit? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Phillip J. Eby | '''They often appeal to your memories and ask you to 'think back' of a time when you did something in particular.''' That's amateur stuff, hacked together from NLP techniques for counseling, not real NLP sales technique. Decent NLP technique doesn't draw attention to itself that way. For example, instead of 'think back to a time you did X', a decently skilled practictioner would just ask, 'So when's the last time you did X?' Or, 'So what would it take for me to get you to X?' Or any of a zillion other ways to *get* you to think about X, while staying on topic and using vocabulary that was in sync with the kind of conversation, while getting on your good side through humor, or by seeming to confide in you, or any number of other techniques. NLP is about learning to have sensitivity to who people are and what they do, not about cramming things down people's throats. Further, I'd note that the linguistic metamodel on which NLP originated, is *extremely* logical and is also quite valuable in eliciting requirements, because it shows how to determine what people *haven't* said. Of course, you can also turn it around and use it as a tool to create 'spin', but the model itself is neutral. It just models how people think with language, including their non-sequiturs and 'illogical' thoughts. Anyway, if you want to *successfully* influence people using NLP, I'd suggest the book 'Influencing with Integrity', which has some pretty good information on how to do this sort of thing with some finesse. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | You mean this $100 book? Principled Persuasion: Influence with Integrity, Sell with Standards by Marlene, Ed.D Caroselli http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0922411077/qid=1078535637 This company Influence with Integirty: Training for Business http://www.influence-integrity.com/index.htm Or maybe the $10 pocket guide? Manager's Pocket Guide to Influence with Integrity by Marlene Caroselli http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0874255228 |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | > This company > > Influence with Integirty Influencing with Integrity |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Atkins | 'But I kind of feel like they are using stupidity to spread stupidity.' On the offtopic of dealing with conniving salespeople, I enjoy making a game of it and considering the entire exchange a form of free entertainment. If they merely hang up shortly, I only get 1 pt. If we have a conversation that lasts more than 15 minutes and involves the art scene in the foreign country they are calling from, I get 5 points. When I can get the salesperson to decide to quit their job in disgust because I have overwhelmed them with evidence that they work for a disreputable company, I give myself 10 points. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Dennis Atkins | 'You can spot it if you pay attention. They make alot of obvious statements that anyone would agree with and try to associate their end with that line of thinking.' Thes is quite fascinating. Both the Unabomber's Manifesto and the Jehovah's Witnesses use these techniques. I have in the past heard it referred to as the 'A, therefore B' argument, also known as the 'non sequitor'. So NLP is based on the non sequitor. Maybe I will invent a new 'persuasion methodology' based on some OTHER well-known logical fallacy and make a killing! Help me out here, which ones have potential - ad hominem? 'Persons who don't buy our products are stupid and ugly!' Hm, actually that's already been done in all TV ads since 1950. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | Wow a lot of speculation and half truths. I don't know much about NLP, but I do know everyone here thinks they're completely immune to virtually every sales technique on the planet. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Michael Murray | It's interesting to me to read people talk about NLP like it's some sort of fad diet. It's the same types of claims that people make about Atkins when they haven't read any of the books. I'm not claiming that either NLP or Atkins is a cure-all to anything, or even that they work. Fact is, some people believe that both are useful tools, and some believe that they're not useful tools. Both are right. Neither point is any reason to get all worked up. The interesting thing is that people aren't nearly as worked up at the derivatives of the work of the NLP guys. David Allen's method (Getting Things Tone) is highly influenced by NLP tactics, as are Dr. Phil's methods a lot of the time. But those are 'breakthroughs'. Truth is, even Grinder and Bandler's original NLP work wasn't completely their own. The meta-model for communication (that Phillip mentioned above) was heavily based on Chomsky's original work in grammars. And the psychological side of their work was almost completely based on work performed by Gregory Bateson, Milton Erickson, and Virginia Satir. NLP isn't some sort of weird freakshow, though some of its practitioners make it look that way. It's an interesting set of information which has applications in some situations, and not in others. The pseudo-religious debate about it is somewhat ridiculous. |
| Sat 06 Mar | www.marktaw.com | Wow never thought I'd read about Bandler and Chomsky in the same paragraph. I admit I don't know any of the linguistics stuff Chomsky did, but I have a lot of respect for his political stuff. So do you have any book recommendations? I'm assuming 99% of the NLP stuff out there is smarmy derivitive crap with no substance just designed to sell books & seminars. What's the name of that Bandler book, The Structure of Magic? Is it any good? Or should I start somewhere else? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Michael Murray | Mark: the original stuff is pretty interesting. The pap that has been thrown around in the last 10 years is probably less so... with the emergence of Tony Robbins and his ilk (don't get me wrong, I'm a big Tony Robbins fan), the term NLP became a buzzword for all kinds of snakeoil, to be peddled in similar circles as perpetual motion machines. Structure of Magic (I & II) are fascinating: they're all about creating a model for structured communication that emphasizes precision in linguistic representation (called the 'meta model'). It's a fascinating idea, and it drew heavily on Chomsky's linguistics work. As for reading them, it's very much like reading a language spec or RFC: it's all about structured grammar, and linguistic well-formedness. It's fascinating, but it's sometimes hard to get through. Much like reading a language spec or RFC, I guess. :) Frogs Into Princes & Tranceformations are both very much the other side of the work: the first is more general, the second deals almost exclusively with Ericksonian hypnosis, but all of the topics they teach other places are discussed there with an interesting bent. You can't help but learn a lot reading them, but sometimes it's very 'therapy' focused. I'm actually a big fan of reading the stuff that Robert Dilts did... his work with Grinder drew heavily on Gregory Bateson's work, and it's some neat stuff. The work that they did on logical levels alone is some of the most fascinating and useful stuff around... it's like an OSI model for human communication, and it's interesting to see where else it applies. I'd suggest two resources for that stuff: read Bateson's original work ('Steps to an Ecology of Mind'), and see if you can track down the 'Syntax of Behavior' series of lectures on tape (The 'Talking Book World' in Toronto has them, if that helps... ;). It's quite a few hours, but they cover all kinds of incredible topics that are quite interesting. I'm a fan of all of it as a toolset, but not much else. I don't go in for the 'hocus pocus' of it all: the tools are interesting and useful in some situations, especially those that require precise communication of difficult concepts, and the elicitation of what someone really means when they're saying something. |
| Sat 06 Mar | www.marktaw.com | Thanks. I'm about 3/4 of the way though my current book and only moderately interested in the other stuff is on my shelf right now. I'll look around for these. I'm sure NLP has been given a bad name lately, and I kind of figured I'd have to go to the 'source.' I don't mind it being a little 'therapy.' It's certainly better than it being a little 'salesy.' Any one specific book you'd recommend I pick up next? |
| Sat 06 Mar | Rich | 'Rich, the whole point of the book is that WE'RE ALL susceptible to this kind of thing. Nobody is immune and it's arrogance to think you are. It probably happens to you every day without your being aware of it. ' I didn't mean to imply that I was immune. I said that I didn't 'respond well.' I tend to be more aware of it, I think. I don't like it when I am aware of it. I suspect I am at least sometimes uneasy even when I'm not conciously aware of the manipulation. And, of course, there times when I'm happily nodding along in tune with whatever's being pushed. I don't know about 'every day,' though *shrug*. I doubt it's quite that often. Anyway, the point is that many of the people on this forum, including myself, seem to have a heightened sensitivity to perceiving attempts at emptional persuasion. And, perhaps, a lower rate of being persuaded. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Rich | Heck, we're chatting about NLP, fercrissake. Tell me that *doesn't* give someone at least a bit more awareness about when someone is trying to pitch an emotional argument, among other things. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Michael Murray | Mark, Actually, there are some good introductions, but if you want to jump right in, I'd suggest the book that Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, etc. all contributed to, called 'Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume I (The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience)'. It's a little harder to find, but worth it. Dilts also wrote a book called 'Roots of NLP' that I've heard is fantastic, but I've never read it. If you're a language geek like I am, the Structure of Magic books are fascinating. They're also good bedtime reading, as they can inspire sleep. ;) Feel free to drop me an email if you want more info... M |
| Sat 06 Mar | www.marktaw.com | Rich - You're right, the very fact that we're aware that this kind of thing exists probably does make us a little more immune to some of the more heavy handed versions of this. Though I'll stand by my 'every day' comment. The stuff in Influence is really just a subverted version of the things that keep society together. If you buy your coffee from the guy on the corner rather than Starbucks because he once gave you a free newspaper, then your under Influence, and it's not always a bad thing. Mitch - Thanks. I am a big nerd and love learning about things like this, especially when the science behind it is well presented - I don't like books that make large assumptions that they never back up. I'll look for the books you recommend. |
| Quotes from a custom soft dev proposal | Thu 04 Mar | Withheld |
| The development schedule is based on our work with cooperating customers. Since customer priorities change on an almost daily basis, this process can be quite unpredictable. We will not be announcing a release date until the program is ready to ship. Performance is scalable. You can get any amount of performance you want out of a SQL Server database (by upgrading hardware). Anyone else find this eyebrow raising? A client has asked us what we think of the proposal and my instinct is run!!!. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Matthew Lock | 'Performance is scalable. You can get any amount of performance you want out of a SQL Server database (by upgrading hardware).' /me tries to imagine a program which couldn't get a performance increase by upgrading hardware |
| Thu 04 Mar | Philo | Notepad. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Matthew Lock | So did MS build some sort of performance limiter into Notepad so it runs the same on a 486 as a Pentium 4? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Simon Lucy | It may load quicker, though probably not after 6 months, but the duty cycle for collecting keystrokes is exactly the same regardless. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Rick | 'We will not be announcing a release date until the program is ready to ship' No, what you do in a proposal is specify the features, and a release date (like T+14 months, T = receipt of first payment). If 'customer priorities change', you revise the release date based on the new and discarded features. But you specify that in the proposal, so that the customer knows they can change the specs but with consequences to the schedule. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Bored Bystander | >> 'The development schedule is based on our work with cooperating customers. Since customer priorities change on an almost daily basis, this process can be quite unpredictable. We will not be announcing a release date until the program is ready to ship.' So it's done when it's done. What's the problem? QUITE understandable and it indicates to me that the software developer has, indeed, done this kind of work in the past. Clients generally run the software developer ragged with changes that are out-of-scope from the original specifications. And many clients, especially end users, are clueless that changes in specifications may propagate through the deliverable work and may require much additional effort. I have rarely seen any SW development specification that the client didn't modify continually. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mike | 'Performance is scalable. You can get any amount of performance you want out of a SQL Server database (by upgrading hardware).' In other words. We're too busy adding featuritis to this damn thing to do any sort of tuning or optimization, or being IDEiots we plain don't know how. So if you want better performance, buy better hardware. I would run from a product like this. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Unfocused Focused | Bored, If you're writing shrink wrapped software, then you can play the 'it's done when it's done' card, and more power to you if you can overcome the salesdroids and do it (and turn a profit, because you're saying you know your market VERY well.) Few projects I've been on have had this luxury - most are projects driven by a business need that must be met. (Of course if you're smart - you trim your scope down enough so that 'When it's done' is going to be inisde your business need deadline. Most users will hate you for this because that means you'll have to cut their AI level data entry wizard and their custom reports to show them in the absolute best light to their VP.) Mike, Yes and no. Scaling in hardware is a practical consideration for lots of reasons. The database is one of the few places that I would NOT want to rely on hardware scalability. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Philo | 'So did MS build some sort of performance limiter into Notepad so it runs the same on a 486 as a Pentium 4?' Well, as far as I'm aware, Notepad has always been pretty much a single-user application. Anyone ever tried to set up a Notepad server? Maybe it does scale... Notepad Collaboration: 'Give me the keyboard!' Philo |
| Fri 05 Mar | Alexander Chalucov | > Well, as far as I'm aware, Notepad has always been > pretty much a single-user application. Anyone ever tried > to set up a Notepad server? Maybe it does scale... An MDI version of Notepad would be required. Speaking seriously, Notepad is pretty sluggish with a, let's say, 100 MB file. So it would definitely benefit from a faster processor. Hey, the edit box control in Windows was not designed to scale! :) An example of an application which becomes more sluggish when hardware is upgraded - a badly written server Java application using files. It does not release the file handles, so this has to wait for the garbage collection. However, the memory is increased and garbage collection happens less often ==> less file handles are released ==> the system runs out of file handles, the built in logic in the server does retries .... |
| Fri 05 Mar | Brian | It sounds like the guys who wrote the proposal got burned in the past, and they're trying to make a stand. They scare you away today, but someday they will find the middle ground. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | Makes me also wonder. Sounds like a proposal from someone who has some experience, but did not nescessarily shape that experience into something positive. The first part seems to say: 'We can pretend all we want but in the end these things always where so far of the mark I can't even bother pretending anymore'. Now we have all been there, but I am sure we also all have been in situations where the deadline was rocksolid (e.g. in the event related stuff), and the only choice there was was in which features where going to be in. Even if I wanted to play the 'let's be honest' card in the proposal, I would at least present both ends of the spectrum, explain that in most cases the compromise lies somewhere in between and produce relative estimates. The second part is plain bollocks. If you want to say that often buying some extra gigs of memory is a far more cost effective solution than asking for custom performance code, than say so, but don't pretend trowing in some extra hardware will make any pig fly. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bill Rushmore | >'Performance is scalable. You can get any >amount of performance you want out of a SQL >Server database (by upgrading hardware).' My former (bankrupt) company tried this. The client (now my current emloyer!) bought a $30,000 Sun server and yet it still took over 5 mins of CPU time for the JSP page to be displayed! Yeah, run don't walk away from this one! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bored Bystander | Brian's right: (and was more accurate than I was): >> It sounds like the guys who wrote the proposal got burned in the past, and they're trying to make a stand. They scare you away today, but someday they will find the middle ground. Developing custom software projects for clients is VERY risky. There is always something to argue, debate or disagree about. Clients can always change their minds, withhold payment unless absurd performance standards are met, blame the contractor for not reading their mind, etc. The natural tendency after working through some projects like this is to overreact and to cover yourself. It's lousy marketing for this software developer but it's also much more true than the happy face that many contract developers will put on things. Unfortunately for our industry, the happy face sales people win sales and the reality based curmudgeons lose sales. That's the problem with being a geek focused business. The stuff that you are responsible makes you sound 'critical' when you try to explain variabilities to clients. If I were evaluating bids, they would definitely be in the running. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | Bored, so after the clever salesman tickles your 'rough justice' string you let them get away with 'Performance is scalable. You can get any amount of performance you want out of a SQL Server database (by upgrading hardware).'? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bored Bystander | You think these guys are 'clever'? No! I think the proposal that was quoted reflects geeks overreacting to business risks by becoming obnoxious about covering their hides. I think they're just being honest. I also think that being honest in this business causes one to lose business. I'm saying that it's not exactly endearing but it sounds honest. I side with honest. As far as the language about SQL Server, it was poorly phrased and abrasively sarcastic. But again, they are covering themselves. A query can run like absolute s*** if poorly constructed or if the indexes are inappropriate. And what about load, number of users accessing concurrently? Etc. Ask an open ended question, get an open ended answer. I'm sure some numbskull out there will give a clearcut, confident sounding, and absolutely misleading answer in response to an open ended question. |
| Sat 06 Mar | one programmer's opinion | Withheld, The sad fact is that just about everybody nowadays relies on badly defined time and materials software projects to earn a profit and put food on the table. While I would have to read the entire proposal before I gave a client my opinion, I certainly didn't like the snippet that was posted here on JOS. Imo, the honesty being expressed here is that the software development company which wrote this proposal doesn't appear to have a development methodology nor the experience to write a proper software project proposal. |
| how to return for nihilism? | Thu 04 Mar | nihilist |
| Im a sw developer, right now in a middle of burnout (started 2 years ago). Sometimes I feel as a nihilist. 8-10-12 years ago I loved programming, just to make things. Today I dont see any value in anything. I simply do not care if I can add a value for a client. Why should I do that? I do that because I need to pay bills, but thats it. I thought I change profession. But then I realized that if I would be a doctor, I would share the same view. Why should I spend my time helping others? Or a lawyer? Why? Guys, why are you doing what you do? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Rick | Prozac. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | void foo(void) |
| Thu 04 Mar | son of parnas | Nihilist, you might want to search the archives for some more thoughtful answers to similar questions. People are getting burned out on burnout. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > void foo(void) technically void foo(void) could still do something, side effects specifically, it doesn't quite mean 'nothing in nothing out', but it's all theoretical. Nihilist have you actually tried looking outside and realize how bloody lucky you are compare to the rest of the world? I'll see you at work tomorrow 8:30am sharp. |
| Thu 04 Mar | www.marktaw.com | http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adiscuss.fogcreek.com+burnout http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adiscuss.fogcreek.com+depression |
| Thu 04 Mar | no name | Nihilism is SO MUCH more than just plain burnout. Yet also so much less. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Should be working | Early mid-life crisis. Your life priorities are changing. Figure out how to get your life in line with your new priorities. Takes time and effort, but it's worthwhile. Gets rid of that fuck-it-all feeling. |
| Thu 04 Mar | olsson | http://www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/ |
| Thu 04 Mar | Joe Hendricks | just read Sartre |
| Thu 04 Mar | TomA | Go make something out of wood. A spoon. Or a log cabin. Or a boat. Or a guitar. Or a chair. |
| Thu 04 Mar | nihilist | maybe I read to much Cioran. some quotes for you guys: http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/quotes.php?ikey=5 |
| Thu 04 Mar | Alex.ro | How do you spell Sartre? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Joe Hendricks | > maybe I read to much Cioran. some quotes for you guys: Those are weenie nihilists ! *Real nihilists* read Sartre and Turgenev (and program in Eiffel) . |
| Thu 04 Mar | Fred | Six months with a good psychoanalyst, twice a week. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Cletus | 'Sometimes I feel as a nihilist.' 8-10-12 years ago I loved programming, just to make things. Today I don't see any value in anything. I simply do not care if I can add a value for a client. Why should I do that? I do that because I need to pay bills, but that's it. ' If you were consistent with your nihilist position, you would just drop the word 'care' altogether. What the heck do you 'care' about paying bills, if it is all pointless anyway. If you were true to your position and your actions have no meaning or purpose and the most important thing is to just act (the will to power) then it doesn't matter if you do your job or just quit (either one is pointless). According to your position as a nihilst, other people's opinions would be just as invalid and meaninless as the next guy. So what do you 'care' what people's opinions are? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Cletus | I think Jean Paul Sarte would be considered an existentialist. Quote from Nausea 'Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. The images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences... I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being.' If Sarte was consistent with his existential position, why did he sign the Algerian Manefisto? What position did he have to take a moral stance against an unjust war. If it's all pointless why make a deliberate, political, moral stance. I think that it is impossible to be human and live consistently according to the philosophies of Nietzche, Sarte, or Camus. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Christopher Wells | From the definition of nihilism at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=nihilist > a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless Perhaps the emphasis is on 'traditional', and that the only values or beliefs that have a foundation are those that are found in you. > a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths This definition doesn't deny subjective grounds. > a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility Again, the emphasis (implied by the phrase 'the social organization') would be on 'traditional'. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Christopher Wells | > Why should I spend my time helping others? I don't know that you 'should'. Many people don't. > Guys, why are you doing what you do? I read about Buddhism a long time ago. I liked it because I felt that what I read was *empirically* true, i.e. 'originating in or based on (*my*) observation or experience', not merely a doctrine to be taken 'on faith'. For example, I remember reading the 'Sermon At Benares' at which the Buddha said (I paraphrase)... There are four 'Noble Truths': * Life is suffering (enumerates 12 types of suffering: pain, sorrow, and so on) * Suffering is caused by desire: craving sensuous pleasures (the desire to have what you don't have, the desire to keep what you have now), the craving to live, and even the craving to die * Suffering can be ended: by ending desire * There is a way that leads to end suffering (called the 'Eight-fold Path', which he then goes on the explain). A person's original motive for following the 'Eight-fold Way', then, is not explicitly because they 'should' in order to help others (which Christ's 'Second Commandment' might have you take on faith), but more especially (or originally or explicitly) to avoid their (your) own suffering. This 'way' may include helping others (for example, because it's painful to feel hatred; or because, if you feel empathy or compassion, then another person's sorrow will affect the way you feel). > I do that because I need to pay bills, but that's it. That too could be in accordance with Buddhism, which recommends that you follow a 'Middle Way': between the extremes of self-indulgence on the one hand, and self-mortification (which is 'painful, useless, and unprofitable') on the other. > I simply do not care if I can add a value for a client. Why should I do that? Because you care about paying the bills, perhaps; and adding value for a client helps the client to pay your bills. Because it's a right thing to do (and if it isn't, perhaps you should start doing something else). > 8-10-12 years ago I loved programming, just to make things. So you had no desire but to make things, and were happy? And now you're no longer feeling the happiness that you remember you used to have, and you crave it, and because of that you're suffering? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | I used to have depressing thoughts like these, although never to the point that I would embrace nihilism. The problem as I saw it was that most work today doesn't mean anything at a basic needs level. You aren't tied to the earth and the world in any basic and meaningful way. At the dawn of civilization, work products were critical to survival - food, clothing, shelter. As societies progressed, the work products became more refined, all the while more abstract from the basic needs. In the 20th century, the work products in developed nations evolved from industrial (tangible) goods to intangible services. The degree of abstraction away from basic needs progressed much more rapidly. Look at the finance industry. Centuries ago it was basic money changing (usary). Later it progressed to asset protection, investments, and capital infusions for the markets. Now, you have teams of Physics PhD's doing Brownian motion Monte Carlo simulations of calls and puts. Not only are there derivatives of basic investments, but there are derivatives based on other derivatives (and probably derivatives of those). For me, all this abstraction made work less and less meaningful. And I worked in test engineering for a medical device manufacturer - seemingly important work! I still managed to take my work very seriously, but after seeing the test methods get modified, the data twisted, and the results thrown out time and again, you start to lose the passion. It all becomes meaningless, and you wonder how others can continue to be so driven doing activities that in the greater scope of things, have no meaning. That's when it hits you. You have to either (1) find a different career path that is meaningful, or (2) find one that may or may not be meaningless, but at least you enjoy it. I chose (2) and switched to software. What you choose is up to you, but I'd stay away from nihilism. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | You named your own problem and your own solution. 'I simply do not care if I can add a value for a client. Why should I do that?' As you said, 10 years ago you cared about your work. If you put in 10 units of effort, you got at least 10 units of reward. Now, for whatever reason, you're putting in x units of effort and getting considerably less than x units of reward. Maybe some volunteer work, or switching jobs to something you're passionate about, but unskilled in can help. It's certainly not just a matter of unplugging for a little while, you need a complete change. |
| Fri 05 Mar | no name | Sartre was originally existentialist, but in his later years he renounced his earlier positions and adopted Marxism. And here I thought that philo degree would never pay off. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Fernanda Stickpot | You'll lose your faith in nihilism some day. In the meantime, don't be surprised if you go through phases where you are working just for the money. That's just the way it goes sometimes. It's like asking why some days are sunny and some days are cloudy. What, if anything, you should do about it will come to you in the fullness of time. If you keep your eye on the ball I assure you that you will find a way. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Joe Hendricks | 'Sartre was originally existentialist...' What precludes someone from being 'existentialist' as well as 'nihilist' ? (not that I see either as healthy) AFAIK, neither Camus nor Sartre ever used 'existentialist' as a label for themselves - it was ivory tower philosophy professors that did that years later... |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ron | I thought life was about what you do AFTER you get home from work: family, friends, hobbies, food, drink, music... |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | I used to agree with that. Now I consider it to be a mild schizophrenia common to modern society. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Damian | say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism Dude, at least it's an ethos. |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeffers | Nihilist, I think this is easier than splitting philosophical hairs. How you feel makes perfect sense. And you're not alone: hundreds of thousands of computer people (including myself) feel the same way. I suspect many don't recognize it because, well because they're guys - and if they started a family in the good years, they are now sufficiently distracted that they don't need work to mean anything anymmore. But back to the point: 10-15 years ago this industry was largely about creating cool stuff that would hopefully make a difference. Some things worked, and made a bunch of money. And of course as soon as that happened, every uncreative moron on the planet jumped on the bandwagon - both engineers and VC's. IMHO, the VC's blew it all, because they encouraged valueless ideas and funded ANY idea in the off chance of making a buck. Harmless? Not to those who cared. This continued a few years until creativity and making a difference were so insignificant that they were smothered by marketeers and hype in every form possible. And those who cared about their work found themselves in a world of zero values - a moral and creative vacuum. That's where we all are, pal. Personally, I don't have the stomach to go back to work while it's all BS. And despite what some say, I think that even now the BS is rampant. So I'm thinking about writing about it - like my first title: 'Of COURSE you're depressed! Only a heartless machine would be happy right now! (how you got here and how to get out)'. Probably sounds lame, but man - do I have some good content :-) Anyway don't let it get you down. We've just seen a period where the worst in everyone came out. Your feeling bad is an indication that you aren't comfortable in that BS. Thank God! So separate yourself from it, remind yourself ot things you enjoy, and get back to some of them while this thing works itself out. Or maybe never come back to it which is what I expect to do. Life is so much better and real outside the geekosphere - go rediscover it! :-) |
| Sat 06 Mar | Jeffers | PS - examples that work for me: -Reconnect with friends/fam you blew off while workaholicing -Finally get in shape - amazing how it clears the confusion -Learn to fly - great mix of technical and FUN -or start a new hobby that's fun and creative (NOT work!) -Get laid / party / spend time with kids / other 'human stuff' -STOP being indoors - get out every chance you can ...kinda like how simple and great life was when I was 10... (except maybe for the getting laid part :-) Hmmm - just think how cool life could be if you could act like a 10-year old and ALSO get laid! Whatta life :-) |
| Laptop usability | Tue 02 Mar | karthik |
| Why the @#$@#$$@#&^%*^%@(sorry, cant be polite) do they put the windows shortcut key and start key on the top right hand side of the keyboard in laptops?. I find myself searching for the key always. They can squeeze it in the left side, like always |
| Tue 02 Mar | Aussie Chick | Or better, why do they put the insert key to the right of the spacebar, I am always bumping it and losing typed text. |
| Tue 02 Mar | JWA | I just checked and both my HP and Sharp laptops have them where they belong. Must be your band/model. On PC laptops I hate it when they put the fn key in the lower right-most corner, moving the ctrl key over. Some companies are smart and put the ctrl where it belongs and the fn key next to it. --Josh |
| Tue 02 Mar | Chris Tavares | My laptop has the windows key on the left, the context menu key on the right, and the insert button on the top row over the backspace key. I'm used to it; other keyboards (especially thinkpads) drive me insane. All laptop keyboards suck. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Jeff Watkins | About the only flaw with the Mac laptop keyboards is the slightly inconvenient placement of the fn and ctrl keys. The fn key is left-most followed by ctrl. Given the number of times I've found myself hitting fn-C rather than Ctrl-C to interrupt a shell process, I think the should be reversed. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Robert Jacobson | My Dell Inspiron keyboard's lower row is fairly standard: |
| Tue 02 Mar | Robert Jacobson | <evey -> even> |
| Tue 02 Mar | r1ch | Aussie Chick - do you actually ever use the insert key? If not, just pop the key off the keyboard. Someone suggested this to me ages ago and I've never accidentally hit caps lock or insert since. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Li-fan Chen | It hard to believe, although the primary reason is lack of real estate, the real reason is due to keyboard layout and design copyrights. Another reason? Stupidity! Let's not rule that out. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Heston T. Holtmann, B.Sc.Eng | A very nice tool to solve most laptop keyboard layout problems.. http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/ Enjoy I remapped my right-alt key as the 'windows context' menu key on my dell 8600.. enjoy |
| Tue 02 Mar | Martha | What really puzzles me is all the new 17" widescreen laptops that've come out -- with the usual cramped keyboard swimming in the middle of acres of available real estate. The HP zd7000 series is the only one I've seen that gets it right, using the available extra space to add in a full numeric keypad. |
| Tue 02 Mar | JWA | Windows XP, and possibly others, has an option in the Accessibility settings that allows you to set the computer to make a specific beep when ever you hit the Caps Lock, Num Lock, or Insert keys. I *always* set this up as one of the first things I do on a new computer. Check it out, you'll love it. --Josh |
| Tue 02 Mar | Dominatrix | Copyrights for layouts? Are you sure? I would think the best that could be done would be a design patent, which doesn't last too long I don't think; would be surprised if any good layout were still under patent. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Stephen Jones | ----'Check it out, you'll love it.'---- But always check out any food or dirinks your office mates give you on the office mouser first just in case it's poisoned. I accidentally hit caps lock a lot, and I can feel the eyes boring right through my back directly after the beep! |
| Wed 03 Mar | JWA | It's not an internal system beep, it's a sound file and therefore subject to your system volume. If you have any other sounds turned on, then this would be no more annoying. I guess it depends on your work arrangement. --Josh |
| Fri 05 Mar | Easton | Laptop owners have had it difficult to replace individual keys on their laptops when they are lost, worn or damaged. If this is your issue here is a site that carries individual keys, which is far less expensive than replacing a full keyboard: http://www.stores.ebay.com/eshaksstore |
| Sat 06 Mar | Stephen Jones | Changing the volume control, or even muting it, does not make any difference to the volume. |
| Joel and the Fog Creek photograph | Fri 05 Mar | karthik |
| <> Sigh. Deep deep deep disappointment. I was writing a freeware application (likely to be used by lots) and wanted to add it as my splash screen. I was about to write to Joel for permission when i saw Joels post. Its out of question i guess, since he paid big bucks for it and i cant pay him a cent for it. On the bright side, can someone please suggest a good free picture for a database tool. More professional it looks, the better. Should look like my tool will save them lot of time . Dissapointingly Yours , |
| Fri 05 Mar | Robert Jacobson | You could look into using a stock photograph. Just Google on 'stock photos.' Here's a site that offers free stock photographs (with certain limitations): http://freestockphotos.com/ |
| Fri 05 Mar | Code Monkey | My suggestion....make your software Donationware and on the spash screen put your photo -- with a 3 day old beard and groggy eyes in front of the computer -- and watch the money roll in :-) There was a (possibly apocryphal) story about some shareware which said 'if you do not pay $x ownership of your eternal soul passes to us' and they found surprisingly many people paid for it |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | Hmmm.. I'm no lawyer, but if you're not SELLING your software, aren't the 'fair use' laws a lot more lax? E.g., as a teacher, I could photocopy books and pass out copies to class. Fair use law. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Fair use law is really pretty limited. Even teachers don't have carte blanche any more -- the rule of thumb is that they can copy small portions of a book (a few pages maybe) but anything more requires permission from the copyright owner. |
| C library subroutine localtime() | Fri 05 Mar | Li Hu |
| It returns a tm*, questions are : 1. does the memory by this pointer need to be freed by calling program ? 2. is it thread-save ? Thanks a lot. |
| Fri 05 Mar | njkayaker | No, you don't have to free it. |
| Fri 05 Mar | njkayaker | In Windows, it should be if you use the MT version of the c library. |
| Fri 05 Mar | x | From the linux manpages on localtime(): 1. The struct tm is an internal structure. Don't free it. 2. It is _not_ thread-safe in general - nor is anything that returns a pointer to an internal structure. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | Depends if your libraries support multithreading. They should support it. It's not terribly hard. To LiHu: if you have problems with calling c library functions from different threads, first ensure you are calling the correct function to start a new thread. The system-level call won't know about the C runtime library, and so won't set up a new set of globals for the new thread. This can cause problems. There should be a C library equivalent (_beginthread under VC++, I believe, as opposed to CreateThread Win32 call; I suspect it is similar under Unix) that will do the relevant magic. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | If the library supports multithreading then two concurrent calls to localtime() shouldn't crash the library. However, if one thread calls localtime() and gets a pointer to the struct, then I don't see what could prevent another thread from calling localtime() before or during the time when the first thread is dereferencing the pointer (reading the data via the pointer returned by the first call). So I would say that it is not thread-safe. Implement a global function like this ... tm safegetlocaltime() { //enter critical section tm rc = *localtime(); //leave critical section return rc } ... and verify or hope that yours is the only function in the process that calls local time ... in which case safelocaltime would be thread safe. |
| Fri 05 Mar | K | The VC++ runtime library supports thread-local allocation of 'global' Standard C runtime variables. This includes the global tm structure used by the time functions. If you look at the source to localtime, you'll see it gets a tm* from an internal call to gmtime. If you look at the source to gmtime, you'll see a section like this (GMTIME.C): #ifdef _MT REG2 struct tm *ptb; /* will point to gmtime buffer */ _ptiddata ptd = _getptd(); ... /* Use per thread buffer area (malloc space, if necessary) */ if ( (ptd->_gmtimebuf != NULL) || ((ptd->_gmtimebuf = _malloc_crt(sizeof(struct tm))) != NULL) ) ptb = ptd->_gmtimebuf; else ptb = &tb; /* malloc error: use static buffer */ That _ptiddata structure is the key. It's actually a pointer to a _tiddata structure representing the global variables of the Standard C library (in MTDLL.H): /* Structure for each thread's data */ struct _tiddata { unsigned long _tid; /* thread ID */ unsigned long _thandle; /* thread handle */ int _terrno; /* errno value */ ... If you look at the code for the _getptd function, which returns a pointer to this structure, you'll see that it uses the Win32 functions TlsGetValue and TlsSetValue to associate allocated _tiddata structures with the current thread (TIDTABLE.C): _ptiddata __cdecl _getptd ( void ) { _ptiddata ptd; DWORD TL_LastError; TL_LastError = GetLastError(); if ( (ptd = TlsGetValue(__tlsindex)) == NULL ) { /* * no per-thread data structure for this thread. try to create * one. */ if ( ((ptd = _calloc_crt(1, sizeof(struct _tiddata))) != NULL) && TlsSetValue(__tlsindex, (LPVOID)ptd) ) { ... So, the short version is that the function is thread-safe. Your tm* in thread A won't be the same tm* as in thread B. Of course, this sort of thing is important to know if you rely on errno and so on. You also ought to keep in mind that _beginthread and _endthread have to be used instead of CreateThread so that this structure gets freed (though it won't be allocated at all unless you use one of the Standard C runtime functions). I hope this helped. :) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | > I hope this helped. :) Thanks! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Oren Miller | Under linux there is localtime_r, which is the reentrant version of that call. |
| Fog Creek Office Picture | Fri 05 Mar | Steve Jones (UK) |
| That picture on the JoS main page looks like it has been ray-traced, rather than being real. Like a PoV scene. Perhaps FC is just a cube farm after all ;^) or maybe Ive just been staring at my monitor too long. |
| Fri 05 Mar | John C | Yeah, the picture can't be real. Nobody has a desk that tidy. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Craig | No one who does any work that is! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Joel Spolsky | It's a real picture but it was taken at two different exposures, one which was appropriate for the indoor light and one which captured the outside through the window, and the outside picture was photoshopped into the window frame of the inside picture. But that's really what it looks like (minus post-its) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Ken Klose | But there is no programmer at the desk. Surely you don't let your programmers leave their desks?!?!? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Steve Jones (UK) | Joel, Did you soften the image in Photoshop ? It really looks like it has been manipulated somehow. Very nice though, got to admit. Sadly, its too far for me to come and visit (3000+ miles) and you can't even just jump on the daily Concorde any more. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | I was planning on making the drive up the coast, but on a Wednesday? I don't know how I'll be able to pull that off. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Joel Spolsky | I didn't do it myself, it was a professional architectural photographer... I just noticed he also photoshopped his own photos onto the computer monitors. |
| Fri 05 Mar | www.marktaw.com | It looks like the method they used to reduce the size of the image. I like bicubic myself because it gives images that soft, almost airbrushed quality & it works very well increasing the resolution as well. If you have some fotos that you think re ugly, sharp, and show all your blemishes, reduce them just 10% using this method and it'll look better, and in the extreme, like a fake office. |
| get/set routines in C? | Fri 05 Mar | MM Willis |
| There was a topic here several weeks ago (cant find it) that discussed the merits of get/set accessor methods in C++ classes as opposed to direct struct member manipulation by the user. Well, these types of get/set routines also pop up C. I know many prominent libraries (like expat and libghttp) use them. What are your thoughts on them? Are they only acceptable in a true OO language like C++? Are they merely a substandard way of faking OO in a procedural language like C? Are they never acceptable, in either C or C++? |
| Fri 05 Mar | René Nyffenegger | >>> Are they only acceptable in a true OO language like C++? If they are acceptable in a 'true OO language' they're equally acceptable in any other language. There is no reason why they should be good in one language and bad in another. Said that, based on my observations, set/get methods are unwarranted in about 90% of the cases. |
| Fri 05 Mar | _ | I've seen way too many of these in my life... and inflatory use of them is _always_ a sign the developer hasn't really understood the purpose of objects. In fact, some warning signs: * lots of Get/Set methods * huuuge classes * deep inheritance * complicated copycon/assop instead of good use of smart pointers * no or only partial const-correctness * no sign of any design regarding exception safety |
| Fri 05 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | * complicated copycon/assop instead of good use of smart pointers * no or only partial const-correctness * no sign of any design regarding exception safety All these three have nothing to do with objects, but rather implementations of object oriented languages. Not all OO languages need have copy constructors, smart pointers, const, or exceptions. If you'd said 'doesn't understand C++', I'd be more inclined to agree (other than perhaps const correctness, I think it's of debatable utility that should be determined on a case by case basis). |
| Fri 05 Mar | _ | Agreed, got carried away. |
| Fri 05 Mar | C Rose | In OO, if you have a public member variable foo, then where is the sense in writing a SetFoo() method? It's easier for the user of the API to just do MyObj->foo = 10. The class is less cluttered (i.e. the API programmer doesn't need to maintain tons of getters and setters), so the code is easier to test and maintain and is therefore cheaper. The API user does less typing and has a better idea of where that value 10 goes -- into a variable, rather than into a long dark tunnel. Where the use of setters makes sense is when there is coupling between the variable foo and other data. As an example, if setting foo on its own would place the system into an inconsistent state (i.e. you'd also need to change the value of bar), then writing a setter for foo (and possibly bar) allows you to ensure that the state of the system remains consistent. Always think about things from the point of view of the user of the API: they want to use the API to get stuff done -- if you force them to call lots of setters and then read data with lots of getters, then it's likely they'll make a mistake, especially when you forget (or don't have time) to write that documentation. Have a few, simple, interface functions to your code and return the relevant data in a structure. Make those interface functions easy to use, powerful and well-documented. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | > What are your thoughts on them? In C I'd imagine that you use get/set when there's a side-effect (e.g. coupling to aother data), or when you don't want the client code to depend on knowing the layout of your struct. > In OO, if you have a public member variable foo, then where is the sense in writing a SetFoo() method? In C# you can write ... class Bar { public int m_foo; public int foo { get { return m_foo; } set { m_foo = value; } } } ... and the caller can write ... Bar bar = new Bar(); bar.m_foo = 3; //legal syntax bar.foo = 4; //also legal syntax In fact, the latter statement is an implicit call to a 'set_Foo(int value)' method. > It's easier for the user of the API to just do MyObj->foo = 10. The above syntactic sugar makes it equally easy to caller a setter method. > Where the use of setters makes sense is when there is coupling between the variable foo and other data For example, if a side effect of set_Foo is that its sets a 'bool m_have_unsaved_data' member or similar. |
| Fri 05 Mar | sid6581 | There's another reason to use get/set methods in some circumstances: Thread safety. You can use internal locking in getters and setters. Also, you can assert the correctness of arguments, the object state, etc. Keep in mind also that the fact that you may not currently be doing anything else in these methods than simply getting and setting a member value, doesn't mean that won't change later. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt for modifying all the code I had that directly accessed the public members. Never again. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Chris Tavares | Using get/set methods instead of public fields is a matter of future-proofing. Sure, your 'warpspeed' field may be an int *now*, but what happens when you discover that warp fields actually require complex numbers? If you've exposed public fields, changing this requires breaking existing client code. If you used get/set methods, you'd just need to provide a new pair of get/sets that take complex, and you could transparently keep the old versions, and do the appropriate conversion under the hood. This is not really THAT important if the class is simply part of your source code - the compiler would flag an incompatible change like that. However, if you're building a library component, this sort of protection is CRITICAL. This is the reason that .NET languages built properties into the language. You write get/set functions, but the users of your class can still do 'drive.warpspeed = 2'. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Gav | >Keep in mind also that the fact that you may not currently be doing anything else in these methods than simply getting and setting a member value, doesn't mean that won't change later. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt for modifying all the code I had that directly accessed the public members. Never again. I've also done that, and, to me, it's the number 1 reason why all member variables should be private. If you need to acess the data, use a setter/getter. The argument that the caller gets to know that he's putting the number in a variable instead of 'long dark tunnel' completely misses the point--the caller shouldn't know, and if the class is properly implemented, he shouldn't care. I also agree with those who say that not every variable needs a getter/setter, and most of mine don't, but if have to choose between maintaining code that's got too many getter/setters, and code that has too many public variables, I know which I'd choose (having worked on both). |
| Fri 05 Mar | puzzled by get/set methods | Please forgive my impertinence, but I thought that using either public variables or public get/set methods contradicts the intent of encapsulation in "objects", and also makes it more difficult to use such objects for transactional or stateless or web-services purposes. Or is this only considered to be true for "business" objects? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Nick | I recently reviewed some code I wrote several years ago. It's interesting to review your old code to get a sense of your own style. I noticed that I used to use a lot of getters in the business layer objects of data centric applications. For example, I would I send a business layer object to a data layer object, and the data layer would extract the data using the business layer object's getters, then call a sproc with the data. Now I ask the question, 'how can I design this interface without any getters?' I usually end up creating objects with SetParameters() methods. By doing so, I've found it makes unit testing of each object a lot easier. The downside, though is that I sometimes end up with methods with long, long lists of parameters. I don't know if there is anything technically wrong with this, but it sure looks ugly. Is there a happy medium? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Rick | Puzzled, Public get/set methods can in fact encapsulate and abstract away the implementation. Maybe today they happen to store in a member variable, but tomorrow they could store on a central server... or they can contain logic, e.g. GetAmount(US_DOLLARS) returns the amount in the given currency. |
| Fri 05 Mar | puzzled by get/set methods | Rick, Thanks for the reply, but they still don't 'encapsulate' the fact that there ARE these values that need to be set, regardless of whether the internal implementation of the set method is abstracted away. It's like accelerating a 'car' object either by a sequence of public set methods: - car.setFuelMixture(...) - car.setFuelPumpRate(...) - car.setThrottleAngle(...) - car.Go() rather than by using a 'task'-oriented method: - car.Accelerate(TargetVelocity) Shouldn't the complexity all be encapsulated (and hidden) inside the object's code, and not all exposed as public methods or variables (therefore requiring the caller/client to both understand all the public 'internals' of the object plus setting all of them to the correct values and in the right order)? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Pakter | I usually use a lot of getters/setters, but I always try to make them private, since they often expose your implementation. This is not very relevant in C. However, if I had to program in C, I'd like to have a grep return all the modifications of a 'member' : hence the set() method. Except if a modern IDE can find the affectations for me, which is not very likely for C. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | Puzzled, I'd say you're right: 'Accelerate' is the simpler interface, which the Car class should expose to its auto-pilot UI. Even so, low-level implementation classes (such as FuelPump) might want to provide get/set accessor methods; for example, FuelPump.set_rate(int) might be better than exposing FuelPump.m_rate because set can do things like verify that the parameter value is within a sensible range (and because its set method would also needs to call a low-level hardware driver). |
| Fri 05 Mar | S. Tanna | One thing I have very commonly found get/set handy is when the data internal to the class does not precisely reflect the get/set methods For example, imagine you had a class which represents something which takes a long time to store/retrieve, e.g a file, some complex data structure, some results of complex calculations etc. Say m_y and m_z are the result of some really slow calculation from m_a and m_b Consider something like: class SlowClass { private: double m_a, m_b ; public: void SetAB( double a, double b ) { if ( ( m_a != a ) || ( m_b != b ) ) { m_a = a ; m_b = b ; } } double GetY() const { // some calculation to get m_y return m_y ; } double GetZ() const { // some calculation to get m_z return m_z ; } } ; vs: class FastClass { private: double m_a, m_b ; mutable double m_y, m_z ; // cached values of y and z mutable BOOL m_bYZUpToDate ; void UpdateCache() { if ( !m_bYZUpToDate ) { // some complex calculation that takes ages to calculate m_y and m_z from m_a and m_b m_y = ...etc.. m_z = ...etc... m_bYZUpToDate = TRUE ; } } public: FastClass() { m_bYZUpToDate = FALSE ; } void SetAB( double a, double b ) { m_a = a ; m_b = b ; m_bYZUpToDate = FALSE ; } double GetY() const { UpdateCache() ; return m_y ; } double GetZ() const { UpdateCache() ; return m_z ; } } ; Now the FastClass potentially wins on performance in several ways:- 1, If a user calls GetY and GetZ repeatedly without doing SetAB, you are doing a whole lot less calculations 2. If you do a SetAB and set it to the same values as you already had, then you don't waste time redoing the same calculation 3. The user of FastClass doesn't really have to worry about using the class in an efficient way, because efficiency is largely self-contained within the class. A user of SlowClass does, because they there is a potential to use the class in a very wasteful way (see points 1 and 2). Okay, this is just a stupid example, but several points follow:- (a) The same principle also applies not to calculations, but writing to database, file, complex memory data structure, etc. (b) In principle you could start with SlowClass and optimized it to FastClass, and it wouldn't have any effect on the code using the class. Omission of the get/set methods, however would be a different kettle of fish. |
| Fri 05 Mar | S. Tanna | Typo in FastClass first SetAB should be: void SetAB( double a, double b ) { m_a = a ; m_b = b ; } second SetAB should be: void SetAB( double a, double b ) { if ( ( m_a != a ) || ( m_b != b ) ) { m_a = a ; m_b = b ; m_bYZUpToDate = FALSE ; } } |
| Fri 05 Mar | puzzled by get/set methods | I may have caused some confusion with my choice of 'puzzled by get/set methods' as a moniker. I definitely agree that a get/set method is preferable to directly setting the value of a member variable. My puzzlement is about exposing *either* style in a public interface. The original question was asking about get/set routines in libraries, and methods for manipulation by the 'user' (implying from client code). If the FuelPump class has a '.set_rate(int)' method, shouldn't that still be private (or semi-private) inside the 'Car' object and not exposed as part of any public (or library) interface? [After all, you don't want to unintentionally call FuelPump.set_rate(0) just after you have called car.Accelerate(100)!] |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | I was thinking that set_rate would be public in the FuelPump interface; and that FuelPump could be a private class inside the Car class, or a public class at global scope. The FuelPump member would be private data in the Car class. The Car class may or may not expose a public method to interact with FuelPump-specific functionality (depending on how 'rich' you want Car's interface to be). Car is a 'user' (or 'client') of the FuelPump class, and Driver would be a user of the Car class. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Rick | I'd consider an accelerate method to be on a 'business' logic object -- like in a car crash simulator, your domain objects are cars, barriers, and roads. The user wants to accelerate and move things around. That's where you'd have an accelerate method that abstracts away how it's actually accelerated, because the user doesn't care. So the abstraction is at the Accelerate() level. In a customer service app though, your domain objects are customer records, because the user wants to pull up, modify, then resave the records. They don't care where or how they're stored, so in that case you abstract at the GetName/PutName level. So it depends on the app! |
| Keeping track of server changes? | Thu 04 Mar | Confused |
| I know this is largely a software forum, but I figure a handful of you are responsible for IT systems as well. How do you handle change control on your servers? That is, how do you keep track of what patches, hotfixes, updates or software have been installed to what servers? Our network is quickly growing beyond our abilities to keep everything in our heads, or even a simple paper log. Wed like a simple tool where we can enter in what change was made, the reasoning, etc. Preferably, wed like this to be web based and offer basic reporting features. For example, wed like to ask questions like Show me the history for of Server X for this time period. Any suggestions? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Andrew Hurst | The people here that run the business databases use phpBB. I think they have forums for each of the servers. I know another group that uses a blog. Big databases, lots of servers, more than a few TB. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gwyn | Funnily enough my company is going to officially release our new product in June and it does just the sort of thing you want to do. Because I've been there too and there was nothing that did the job. It's not cheap as chips though (about $1300/user on average), but if your company is in this sort of market then send me an email via the link below and I can give you some more details. Oh and we're gonna do a single user non-client server 'evaluation' edition at some point for FREE! This might suit some people. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mike | Unix admins solved this awhile back. Usaully it involves a web based frontend to a database of info about servers. You might look through back issues of sysadmin mag for specifics. |
| Fri 05 Mar | joev | Take a look at http://www.infrastructures.org/ . They provide a solid methodology on how to keep your configuration management in a sane fashion. In partiuclar, take a look at the Checklist. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Philo | If you're a Microsoft shop, check out SMS 2003. (disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee) Philo |
| SSL - Is dedicated hardware a requirement? | Thu 04 Mar | Ram Dass |
| To use SSL - does one need a dedicated piece of hardware/software? |
| Thu 04 Mar | anonymous | I assume by "To use SSL" you mean to serve web pages. Most web servers can use SSL without additional software. There is dedicated hardware available to enhance performance. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Edoc | There are a number of affordable SSL accelerator appliances available that can offload the CPU hogging of SSL encryption. It can make a big difference if you expect many simultaneous sessions. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | However, if the effective number of business transactions per second handled by your server is minimal (those are the ones requiring the SSL--remember?) due to large transactions, you might as well assume what the Athlon/Pentium can pull off is good enough. If you are hitting secured traffic of more than say 10 megabits per second, you should worry. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Dennis Forbes | One of the primary reasons that people offload SSL to dedicated hardware, apart from offloading processing, is to support load-balancing - Setting up and tearing down SSL connections is very expensive, but maintaining a session is very cheap. On the flip side, a maintained connection ties a connection to one web server, which may not best facilitate load balancing or failovers. This is why people have the keep alive SSL connection at dedicated hardware, and the actual requests can be load balanced/failovered on the web server side. |
| Fri 05 Mar | no name | There is another theoretical reason to use hardware SSL which is that software can be "modified" remotely whereas you need physical access to switch a hardware module. |
| Critical Chain and Buffer Management | Thu 04 Mar | Michael Sica (michaelsica.com) |
| What do you guys think of this? Critical Chain Basics http://www.focusedperformance.com/articles/cc01.html Critical Chain Scheduling and Buffer Management . . . Getting Out From Between Parkinsons Rock and Murphys Hard Place http://www.focusedperformance.com/articles/ccpm.html Has anyone worked with this? Anyone know of any software that supports this method? |
| Thu 04 Mar | CC Enthusiast | In a few words, it works. Check out these books for detailed information on Critical Chain: 'Critical Chain' - Eli Goldratt http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0884271536 'Project Management in the Fast Lane: Applying the Theory of Constraints' - Robert C. Newbold http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1574441957 'Critical Chain Project Management' - Lawrence P. Leach http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1580530745 Pay special attention to this last one. Larry Leach is deeply involved with PMI so his presentation is aligned carefully with project management standards. He's currently writing the next edition, so it might be worth waiting a while to purchase the forthcoming work instead of this one. There's a good Yahoo Group for CCPM related discussions: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CriticalChain/ And a couple software packages: CC-Pulse http://www.sphericalangle.com/ Prochain http://www.prochain.com/index.asp (by Rob Newbold, mentioned above) Concerto http://www.realization.com And the best web site for this stuff is Frank Patrick's site, which you have already noted. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Michael Sica (michaelsica.com) | Good lord man, Thanks! |
| Fri 05 Mar | Prakash S | the book was pretty cool, and I think a year or so back i had asked some questions on this forum regd Project Mgmt using CC. Do a search. There was/is also a yahoo groups which was dealing with CC & project Mgmt. |
| ESR/CUPS feedback | Thu 04 Mar | Krag |
| Some of the comments are so spot on its scary. OSSers take heed. This is what the world sees when they use Linux. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/luxury-part-deux.html |
| Thu 04 Mar | Krag | Forgot to include the best quote of all. 'It's been twenty years since the GNU Manifesto and nearly seven since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I think it's time we stopped congratulating ourselves quite so much on our dedication to freedom and our ability to write technically superior code, and began more often to ask 'What are we doing to serve the real users?' |
| Thu 04 Mar | RocketJeff | Old news http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=119473 |
| Thu 04 Mar | Simon Lucy | See Bruce Perens attempts (et al) to produce a sane distro that can be a mass market product. http://www.userlinux.com |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mike | This is ESR's follow up. The original thread was about the article itself. This is the feedback of the community. |
| Fri 05 Mar | RocketJeff | Oops, you're right Mike - sorry Krag, I feel like a real slashdotter by not fully reading before I responded... ESR's followup was good and addressed some of the generic issues that were raised on the flame-fest that this topic produced on slashdot. One of my favorite parts of this article was: 'It doesn't matter whether the the failure of the browsing defaults in CUPS to match the documentation was a CUPS-team screwup or a Fedora screwup — Aunt Tillie doesn't care which direction that finger points, and I don't either.' ALso, even if you aren't an OSS person, his original rant and this followup are applicable to all developers. There are plenty of closed-source/Windows/etc developers guilty of the same things. I think some of the worst examples of what he's talking about are never seen by the general public - it's a lot of the internal software written by businesses. I'm getting tons of praise at my new job because the app I'm developing actually looks & functions like a real Windows application. The previous developers coded apps that required arcane setup/usage rituals with options hardcoded in the programs and database fields reused without being renamed (which makes using the really bad report generator even worse). In addition, just about every error dialog is 'An error happened, call MIS' (with a black letters on a bright purple background. I'd love to trash all of the existing apps, but it looks like we'll be maintaing them for years until they can be replaced. |
| Does Windows XP Sp2 *automaticallY* include .net? | Thu 04 Mar | The real Entrepreneur |
| Hi, Ive heard lots of rumors that .net framework will be in the Windows XP SP2 update automatically. But, I heard that about SP1 and it wasnt true. .net was a OPTION. Anyone read anything about that? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Krag | Nope. Tough luck desktop dev. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Grumpy Old-Timer | I'm not being sarcastic, I really am curious. I've always heard that as time goes by, less and less users will be without .NET, so the whole can't-run-my-app-until-you-download-100-Meg or whatever will become a non-issue. *When* is that supposed to start happening? Is that a Longhorn thing? |
| Thu 04 Mar | GiorgioG | Not including it in SP2 makes me wonder if .NET 1.X is all about Fire & Motion until Longhorn appears...(and so on and so forth.) Microsoft wants to make inroads in the enterprise application space (ASP.NET, etc) - so why make it *too* easy to deploy desktop apps with .NET? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Christopher Wells | Isn't it easy to deploy desktop .NET applications: via CD, or LAN? Arent the only people who are worried those who want to distribute electronically to home users who have dial-up connections? |
| Thu 04 Mar | GiorgioG | Because many...many...businesses have sales staff that travel around and need access via dialup. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Yes, it's easy to distribute the framework as long as the size (about 25MB) isn't a problem. Also, it's only a one time hit -- after the framework is installed, it's there for every program that needs it. E.g., if you need to support traveling employees, just install the framework before they go on the road. |
| Thu 04 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | 'Also, it's only a one time hit -- after the framework is installed, it's there for every program that needs it. ' If installing the .net framework is so trivial, why doesn't microsoft make it mandatory? They'd get MUCH faster adoption of .net programming if they did. |
| Thu 04 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | And... I really don't want to rehash this ongoing argument. Simply put: any additional burden you place on the customer will lower sales and cost you money (and good will). YOu have to include .net in your download whether they have it or not, because if they do NOT have it, they're going to be confused and probably give up. (Most people can't even remember WHERE they downloaded your file to, much less remembering ... oh yeah, I have to go back to the website, find file xyz, etc. etc.) Yes, there are ways to make the above simpler. However, they involve a lot more moving parts (dynamic downloads from the web which run afoul of firewalls and antivirus software). And, no, I don't think we'll get a point where 90% of users have .net until maybe around 2010. I still have alot of customers on win 95 and one or two on windows 3.1. And then, there's the problem of which VERSION of .net they have. With .net covering sooo much code, we're going to get a lot of updates of .net. So... do you develop agains the latest version of .net? Which very few people will have? Or do you dev vs. 1.0 and test agains 1.1, and 1.2 and 1.3, etc.) Honestly, I've been hearing the 'oh, Microsoft will put the runtime in the next version of Windows' for about 9 Y E A R S now. It's wearing thin. Hopefully Longhorn will actually have .net in it. But that's 2 years (at least) off. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Grumpy Old-Timer | << if you need to support traveling employees, just install the framework before they go on the road. >> This is much harder than it sounds. First of all, salesreps are hardly ever in town. They're on the road, hopefully making sales. Getting them to come in just for a software update is a 'non-starter'. If you're *lucky*, they all come in once per quarter, and will leave their laptops with you for a while. So deploying a .NET application would seem to require a lot of advance planning; more than usual, I mean. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Walt | You have to know who your customers are before you decide you can't ask them to download a 25MB framework. Your business decision should revolve around that. In our case, our products are distributed via CD, but we will give customers advanced download links. With our first .NET desktop app I custom designed a setup launcher that looks to see if .NET is installed. If not, it looks to see if I can install it. If not, it will launch the MS site to download it, and won't continue until it's installed. We did this because our customers could care less about what the platform is, or what they need to get to run the software. They're doing research, so the software needs to be fast and accurate. To date, we have had no complaints about downloading the framework for those who download in advance (of course, we ship the framework on the CD). The point is, know your customers before making the decisions. As a side note, when we analyze our website's browser stats (what browsers are looking at the site), we are seeing a good number with .NET installed (>30%) |
| Thu 04 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Entrepreneur, I largely agree with you. It's a PITA that Microsoft didn't include the framework with the original Windows XP, much less SP1 and (apparently) SP2. OTOH, for my work, the many benefits of .Net outweigh this drawback. Obviously, your cost-benefit analysis for .Net could be very different. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mike | 'Hopefully Longhorn will actually have .net in it. But that's 2 years (at least) off.' More than that. The word is now we get XP Reloaded as in interim release, I sh!t you not, that's what they are calling it. Great, Windows ME. I know, if the runtime download is no big deal, why not insist users have ALL security patches applied as well? Then after only 5 days of being online via dialup they could try your little office utility demo thingy. 'It's a PITA that Microsoft didn't include the framework with the original Windows XP, much less SP1 and (apparently) SP2.' What's the point with all the updating you'd have to do you might as well get fresh anyway. |
| Thu 04 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | Mike, What's your source for the Longhorn delay and XP reloaded? PS - Maybe it should be XP: rebooted ? :-) |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mike | Here you go Real http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5165966.html I think if they call it reloaded it will be a mistake, as pretty much everyone has windows reloaded at one time or another;) |
| Fri 05 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'It's a PITA that Microsoft didn't include the framework with the original Windows XP.' That would've required a time machine, which Microsoft R&D hasn't perfected yet. :-p (Windows XP released October 2001, .NET 1.0 released January 2002) As for SP1, .NET is included in XP SP1, but only the CD version. The download version doesn't include it. When OEMs got new versions of the XP install image w/ SP1 slip-streamed into it, .NET was an optional component that they could elect to install or not. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Elephant | Just a thought... Everyone is always talking about making their new apps backwards compatible with people running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. I hate to say it, but these are the people that don't upgrade and don't buy new software as evidenced by the fact that they are running an operating system that is almost 10 years old. If you're planning on releasing a .net product, chances are that it's a new product, and not an upgrade of an exisiting product, and these people aren't going to buy it anyways. If your product is indeed a mature product, and for some reason you saw a benefit in porting all of your existing code to .net (certainally it's not cost effective in the short or medium term and maybe not the long term if its really a mature product) then I guess you have legitimate concerns. Although, I wonder if you're not worrying about the wrong problem. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | I suspect one reason MS isn't shipping the framework with the SP is for fear of being lambasted with another competiter lawsuit. Another reason could be they feel 1.0 and 1.1 were 'early adopter' releases and they will not go into serious deployment mode until 2.0. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | > people running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 I think that The real Entrepreneur's market might be more like: I bought my mum her first computer, 15 months ago. It runs XP. She's learned to use email and some word-processing, but hasn't the expertise to e.g. plug in a new printer (i.e. to know about installing software); and even I might find a 25 MB download daunting over her dial-up connection. Can you consider letting people order the software on CD, as well as via download? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Just me (Sir to you) | Have you ever known your mum, no, make that any "mum" (which I shall use as a generic term for elderly female that has no clue plugging in the USB printer) buying software? |
| Fri 05 Mar | Christopher Wells | I digressed: I think TRE's concern is people who *do* buy software but who have a dial-up connection. Ease of installation would be important too, but second to the problem of getting the software in the first place. I failed to download the XP service packs for her, for example (the connection reset, an hour or so into the download). |
| Fri 05 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | 'people running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95....these are the people that don't upgrade and don't buy new software as evidenced by the fact that they are running an operating system that is almost 10 years old' Actually, the way it works is this: Grandma might be willing to spend $500 on software, but not if they ALSO need to spend $500 on a new PC. But, wait, thier grandson has an old Windows 95 PC sitting in his garage. He's be happy to bring it over to grandma's and plug it in for her. Viola. BTW, technologically unsophisticated customes willing to pay much much more for software than techies IF IT IS EASY TO USE. Read 'Crossing the Chasm'. Early adopters aren't too demanding, but it needs to be cheap. Late adopters are willing to pay a lot but it has to work well and be EASY to use. The barrier that .net poses isn't simply one of download TIME. It's that this causes a cognitive disruption. They have to stop MY install, then install .net (possibly answering IT'S questions and having minor snafus) then get back to MY program). There's also the issue of needing IE 5. (I know IE 5 included on Win 2000+). BOTTOM LINE: .net has no real benefits to me. My software is fairly simple. No need for complex inheritance schemes, etc. But it has to be EASY TO USE. The only way to find out if my .net concerns are real is to make a huge investment: writing .net programs, coming up with all the workarounds to make installing it painless, etc. Anyway... I really didn't want to rehash this thread again. I don't mind discussing it, but it's been done to death. Thanks! |
| Fri 05 Mar | mb | BTW, XPSP1 does include .NET, it's just not installed by default. I think dotnetfx is a pretty silent install, so at least that part can be done with little cognitive dissonance: your installer just says 'please wait', installs .NET in the background, then says 'ok, i'm doing something else, please wait some more.' |
| Geocoding and proximty search question | Thu 04 Mar | NathanJ |
| Has anyone had good or bad experiences using any of the geocoding services out there? Im working on a project where we need to do proximity searches to find store centers nearest to customers (for the UK). MS Mappoint, MapQuest, and WhereonEarth.com seem to be the big vendors with the best data. Their services will run between $10K to $100K per year depending on server setup. But right now we only need UK data - and the postal code system in the UK seems to indicate it is relatively straightforward to figure this stuff out. The Royal Mail (royalmail.com) provides a datafile mapping the post codes to a geographic grid, but in a disclaimer it says that about 8% of their data (a few islands and most PO boxes) doesnt include the grid points!! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Ethan Herdrick | I've worked a little with a geocoding software package and its dataset for the U.S called RouteMap IMS. It's from ESRI. I found it to be pretty good and quite flexible (more flexible than its marketing materials would have you think), though the API documentation was poor. What you are doing is the most common sort of application that uses this kind of package, so you wouldn't even need to use the API as there is prebuilt JSP and ASP code for such things. Other offerings will have similar turnkey stuff for that, too. RouteMap is US$12k / server-year for use in publicly accessable products, US$6k / server-year for internally used products. It was the cheapest thing I could find with an API, but still too expensive for my project. What did you find at the $10k price point? I researched about fifteen different packages, let me know if you want my notes. Since the UK has fewer people and fewer addresses I would think it ought to be cheaper... on the other hand the entire country has lots of irregular street numbers and complicated street patterns (compared to the US) so that probably evens things out. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Ethan Herdrick | The link for RouteMap: http://www.esri.com/software/routemapims/ |
| Thu 04 Mar | runtime | There's also TeleAtlas, but I don't know much about them. http://www.teleatlas.com/homepage.jsp |
| Fri 05 Mar | Alexander Chalucov | I have worked for an ESRI Distributor for quite a while and knew most of their products (released by 2000). Most of them, even the simplest ones (like MapObjects and ArcView) would support some form of geocoding. The Internet Map Server product (called ArcIMS) also had some geocoding features. Some ESRI products would come with map data for the U.S. but I have never bothered to check what kind of data were provided and what was their quality. I would guess free == useless. I have noticed you're using the term 'proximity'. Are you talking about shortest straight line connecting two points, or driving distance? Judging by your description of the problem driving distance would make more sense. If so, you will need geocoding + shortest route estimation. In this respect, the higher-end ESRI products like ArcInfo and ArcRoute (I think they changed the name of the latter one) would do a pretty decent job, while ArcView and especially MapObjects would be too slow to be used in practical situations. It took MapObjects 40 minutes to find the best route in a city of 1.2 million on Pentium III/500 with quite a lot of RAM (128 megs? do not remember right now). |
| Fri 05 Mar | Justin | I've done exactly this a couple of years ago. I even created a website with everything you need to know on it – never bothered publishing it though; too much effort, given that I had paying work instead. There are about 2 dozen products that will provide geographic searching and range in price and quality from about £100 to £100k. These are listed on the Royal Mail website. Almost all the products you can buy will be deficient in some respect; you have to buy the next 'module' to get the functionality you want. Agree with Alexander; think about whether you want shortest route or distance. It won’t make much difference here (UK) though. Also think about whether you need a description of the route or a map (much more expensive) MapPoint has the data you need, although I have no idea how easy the API is to use or what the licensing requirements are like. There are 2 main Royal Mail products; the Postoffice Address File (PAF) and PostZone. The former provides full addresses, the latter maps post codes against geographic coordinates. These coords are Eastings and Northings, not long/lat. I found that radial searching was much easier with these anyway, so didn’t bother with long/lat conversions. PostZone is produced based on geo data from the Ordnance Survey. It is available in 100, 10 and 1 metre versions, providing different levels of accuracy. Also bear in mind the postcodes are “delivery points” not addresses. Royal Mail can and does move them around. Their estimate of 8% missing data is low; I found it was closer to 13%. You could probably write something to derive the data, based on nearby postcodes. The solution I went for involved stitching together data from MapInfo, Paf, PostZone and ONS data (for Local Authority etc). All Uk postcodes were mapped to local community parishes as part of the data load. Radial etc searching done on the fly. You can see the results at www.thelocalchannel.co.uk although I left this project in Dec 2002 - they seem to have broken some of the searches since then. Products worth looking at are MapInfo and QAS (qas.com) |
| Fri 05 Mar | NathanJ | Microsoft's Mappoint came in at $8K - that's close enough to 10K for me. And as others pointed out there are add-on modules and stuff so the price would go up based on needs. Our proximity search will be straightline based and not driving. Driving distance would be nice though... |
| VB.Net Success Stories | Thu 04 Mar | Ammo |
| We have a new project and Im trying to convince the management that we should be doing it using vb.net rather that the old vb6. Im interested in hearing from members of this forum who have implemented projects using .net. What features did you find most useful? How did the framework help you? I have read the marketting stuff and you can be sure I would rather hear from the trenches. Ammo |
| Thu 04 Mar | Pepe Le'Pew | Other than "It would look good on my resume", what are your reasons for wanting to use VB.NET? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | > Pepe Le'Pew The very same reason a person would use C#. Reasons to use C# / Reasons to use VB.NET? 1. We are a windows shop / Ditto 2. We are used to doing Java/C/Objective C / we need a similar language on our upgrade path / We are used to doing VB/Delphi, we need a similar language on our upgrade path. VB.Net the language has some quirks, but nothing to be ashamed of. I would say it is probably 20 to 100 percent more productive to use VB.NET than C# than switching to C# if you are already a VB person. |
| Thu 04 Mar | murph | vb.net does proper OO. That's more or less the end of the discussion as far as I'm concerned (-: But FWIW my last VB6 project was an OO design implemented in VB6 and there were more than a few times I suffered for the lack of genuine inheritance. The second reason is that good though VB6 is (I live in the real world, for all its faults the fact is that it does let you deliver) its also a dead product. .NET is the way of the future... |
| Thu 04 Mar | Ammo | Pepe Le'Pew, Thanks, my CV does not need any more sprucing up with spurious languages. Li-fan Chen, The question is not about the language choice, it's got to do with the 'why bother'. I have tried a few things and found that: It's relatively easier to do a UI in .net Better IDE More efficiency and flexibility in ADO.Net. Reflection coupled with the ability to generate code at runtime. ... I'm sure that some of the forum members have done at least one project. They should be in a position to say whether their move to .net benefited them in any way. I would rather we do not start a religious debate about languages Ammo |
| Thu 04 Mar | Sassy | * It's OO * The IDE is great * COM interop is easy I just took a C console program, wrapped it in a managed code library, exposed it to a web service, web app, and winforms app in about 2 days. Doesn't get much better than that. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Pepe Le'Pew | Ammo, In your original post you stated, 'I'm trying to convince the management that we should be doing it using vb.net rather that the old vb6' and in your last post you stated, 'It's relatively easier to do a UI in .net Better IDE More efficiency and flexibility in ADO.Net. Reflection coupled with the ability to generate code at runtime.' Ok, let's pretend I'm management. Reason #1:'It's relatively easier to do a UI in .net' So you mean faster, right? Reason #2: 'Better IDE' What's an 'IDE'? Sounds like whatever it is, you already have one, so why can't you just that IDE-doohickey and save the company some money? Reason #3: 'More efficiency and flexibility in ADO.Net' More efficiency and flexibility sounds nice, but what's 'ADO.NET'? Anyhoo, can you give me some numbers on the increased efficiency and flexibility? Reason #4: 'Reflection coupled with the ability to generate code at runtime' What's 'reflection'? I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you'll have to continue using what you've been using for application development. And...end of simulation of management. Looks like you've got some homework to do, Ammo. :-) |
| Thu 04 Mar | Katie Lucas | My other half does projects in various .NET environments all the time. They seem to ship. And they seem to ship well. I think this is a Them/Us thing. Me, I can't get on with something buried deep in the windows development model. I just don't get on with it at all. Even using Borland tools on MS platforms gave me slight claustrophobia. [Hence I'm doing Linux development...] For people who do 'get' windows development, they really do seem to get better results with the .net devtools than with the previous versions of VS. They seem to work mostly in VB.NET and then the minute they need to do anything complicated, drop into either C# or C++.NET and just 'throw it all together'. So yeah, it seems to work. {Much as it pains me to say it...} |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gwyn | Things not mentioned so far that I am very grateful for: * Multithreading * Can develop Windows Services * Can create 'singleton' distributed objects as well as 'single call' which was already supported in VB6/DCOM. (.NET Remoting is coooool.) * Performance * Proper exception handling Biggest downside my VB6 buddy finds is no 'edit and continue' in debug mode... but it is coming back! |
| Thu 04 Mar | JWA | You may be interested in this post from last week: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=118983&ixReplies=5 --Josh |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mark Hoffman | No matter what reasons people give you, there are going to be those that pipe up and say 'Big deal, I could have done that in VB 1.0 in the same amount of time.'. Also, I wouldn't narrow it to VB.NET, but rather .NET in general since the reasons for moving to VB.NET are virtually the same for C#. Here are some tidbits from my work with my clients: 1. The OOP features allowed us to develop a generic database access layer fairly quickly. We then used this in our applications so that we could still use the managed providers for SQL Server and Oracle, but be able to switch between the databases without recompiling. (This was necessary for a migration between the two databases.) 2. ASP.NET gives us a huge productivity boost because gone are the days of huge, scripted pages that are a pain to debug. 3. Easier unit testing. While there may be unit testing software for VB 6.0, Nunit simply rocks with .NET. We can easily run our unit tests on our business objects and entity classes. 4. This is harder to quantify, but having a true OOP language instead of a quasi-OOP and mainly procedural language such as VB 6.0 gives us a productivity boost simply because we are comfortable with OOP and know how to leverage it properly. |
| Thu 04 Mar | no name | for us asp.net brought productivity to the ground, maybe we just don't get it, |
| Thu 04 Mar | Philo | ASP.Net slowed me down a lot too because I fought it at the beginning. When I learned 'the way' of ASP.Net, I could slam out pages faster than I ever could in ASP, they're easier to maintain, and they run faster. Philo |
| Thu 04 Mar | Les C | Funny isn't it, how whenever .NET is mentioned, the discussion soon turns into how much better ASP.NET is than old ASP. Even when the question was 'why go *VB*.NET'. Perhaps VB.NET just *isn't* a great leap forward from VB6??? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Richard P | Strong-typing. 'nuff said. foo = getDateValFromDb() If IsDate(foo) Then 'passes bar = CDate(foo) ' fails End If I ended up just explicitly converting thigns to strings and back to their appropriate types half the time. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Robert Jacobson | I think both VB.Net and C# are massive improvements over VB6. I couldn't imagine going back. -- Amazing framework library. For example, a wide range of collection objects (hashtables, arraylists, etc.) instead of the VB6 'one size fits all' collection; strong support for XML; built-in sorting routines (with good interfaces to override the default sorting behavior if necessary); stupid-simple methods to serialize objects to binary data or XML. These all can be great time savers. -- Great IDE, plus a very comprehensive MSDN help system. -- A better library of WinForms objects. Also, the objects are more flexible -- if you don't like the way a listbox or button appears, e.g., you can override it. -- Fully OO. -- Structured error handling. -- Blazingly fast. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Sasquatch | 'Even when the question was 'why go *VB*.NET'.' It's even funnier when people post without bothering to read the entire thread. It's been stated at least twice that it's pointless to argue why someone should go to VB.NET, but rather you have to look at the entire .NET Framework. Considering that ASP.NET is part of .NET, it makes perfect good sense to consider this in your evaluation. There could easily be a web side part of his application. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Pepe Le'Pew | I, for one, wasn't trying to stir up a language war per se. It just seems to me that if you need to convince management to switch to VB.NET, then you have to address any and all objections they're likely to have, since switching will cost money. Tossing out technical buzzwords and phrases left and right that most managers don't understand is an ineffective approach, IMHO. |
| "Getting Things Done" tools or templates? | Wed 03 Mar | Mark Hoffman |
| Ive just started reading David Allens Getting Things Done. What tools or templates do you use to keep track of your task list? I havent gotten far into the book, but Ive read how he advices to break your tasks down into projects, have a simple workflow, etc. I suppose just using Word or Excel would work just fine, but I was curious if other people had a better way. (I think this was asked here a while back, but the thread is long gone now...) |
| Wed 03 Mar | Joe Hendricks | I both use and like <g> the features in Enterprise Architect for tracking (and forecasting) tasks per use case scenario. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Fred | Some people use Ecco http://www.cold-mountain.com/Pages/Download.html |
| Wed 03 Mar | www.marktaw.com | 'break your tasks down into projects' Wrong. A project is a goalpost - something to remind you that you will need to take another action once one action is done. The example in the book is changing the wheel on your tire. That's the project. The actual next steps are something like: Okay, I don't know where the store is and, I should call to get some prices. John knows a lot about cars I should CALL JOHN. So CALL JOHN is the actual next action. Once you CALL JOHN you need to take another action - call the store he told you to call. The Project is just there to remind you to put an item on your to do list (or a waiting for) once you've completed an action. The way you organize your tasks is not by project, you organize your tasks by situation. I.e. 'Phone Calls' 'At the Computer' 'Errands.' This is like putting Motor Oil down on your shopping list, even though it isn't food or a something for the house - you put it there because they sell Motor Oil in the supermarket. By the same token, you can make phone calls from the airport, but you upgrade the server. So having all your phone calls on a dozen different lists doesn't make as much sense as putting all your phone calls in one place. In practice, I have three to-do lists. 1. My Inbox - an e-mail is a strong reminder that you need to do something. 2. Computer Based Task List & Calender - because if I'm at the computer it's easier to type myself a quick to-do item than write it down. 3. Paper - because I haven't converted to Palm yet (really, I'm a luddite). We've discussed the benefits of paper here before. Everything that has to be done has to be done, so I keep it on one list, and put a box in the margin to check off once it's done. Maybe I'll doodle a little phone symbol, or something on the right side if I think it's important to keep a closer eye on this item. |
| Wed 03 Mar | www.marktaw.com | > but you upgrade the server but you can't upgrade the server |
| Wed 03 Mar | PDF | I still have the original thread saved into a Word document. If anyone wants it just email me. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | 'What tools or templates do you use to keep track of your task list?' My brain. Seriously. :) |
| Wed 03 Mar | Michael Murray | I'm a big David Allen convert, after reading the first book a little more than 6 months ago. It definitely gave me a massive increase in productivity. As far as tools go, I've really become hooked on my Palm: I'm using Key Suite to keep track of tasks, and Natara Bonsai to create project plans. I also got the 'Getting Things Done' Outlook add-in, which is a huge boost in my email processing. At David Allen's site (www.davidco.com), there are often discussions in the forums there about tools and methods for keeping things out of your head, and keeping psychic RAM clear. ;) Mike |
| Wed 03 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | I'm working on this. . I've read the book (it's good) and I'm taking a free class at bn.com Barnes & Noble university. It's (for me) a non-trivial task. I'd LIKE to have my work organized so that I can sit down every day and not worry about the 'big picture'. Have it all organized so that I only have to look at today. I know that sounds like a simple task, but I find it difficult. Part of my strength as a business owner is my ability to project things into the fugure. That was great when we started and I could really only visualize out 6 to 12 months. Now that we've been around for 9 years, I can visualize out a lot further and it bogs me down. I start to write some code and before I know it I'm planning out 4 new programs. Sighh... Oh... here's another idea... perhaps some out of work programmer will really master this system and write a variant of Outlook that incorporates the GTD system and email and a contact manager. Heck, I'd settle for a GOOD contact manager that also does email. (Goldmine is the closest I've found). |
| Wed 03 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | Opps... posted this before reading Michael's comment above. Maybe the Outlook pluggin would work for me.... if I still had Outlook :-) |
| Thu 04 Mar | mb | Sum Dum Gai-- Have you read the book this thread is about? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Oren | A todo.txt file, open all day long in Emacs. Move lines around as the tasks' priorities change. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Jeremy | I have read the GTD book and I'm a huge fan of it. It boosted by productivity, and also helped me have a clear head - I don't have to worry about forgetting anything. I use MS Word for keeping tasks, projects and next action lists. I also use my mobile phone to have the information with me when I am not at work or at home. For this, I simply copy/paste the contents of the Word document into a text file, and upload it to my mobile phone. I use a free midlet called MicroReader to read the text and to search in it. It is a good midlet :), but I think it only works on Siemens phones. There are a lot of options available if you have a Java-enabled phone. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Simon Lucy | I nibble at the tasty edges and occasionally take great mouthfuls of harder stuff (because its good for me), then I nibble some more. Nibbling is its own reward. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Darren Collins | The best free To Do list program I've found is: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/ToDoList2.asp It's one of the few that lets you group tasks under other tasks, set dates on tasks, etc so you can keep everything organised. I set up major tasks like Work, Home, etc so I can collapse the tasks I don't need to see at the moment and concentrate on what I'm supposed to be doing. It's a very lightweight program that works really well. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Bill Gate$ | Oren, That sounds like a killer app. I'm intrigued. Let's do lunch to discuss the possibilities. |
| Object-oriented databases ?? | Wed 03 Mar | tapiwa |
| I am working on an app where the data is very heirechal. Inheritance everywhere! Was going to use RDBMS, but it is kludgy. Someone suggested using an OO database. I have never used one, but last time I read up on these (about 2 yrs ago), no one seemed to have anything good to say about them. Has anyone here used them before? Any recommendations? Might it be worth looking at the Object Relational Databases? Are there significant performance issues? |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | No real world experience but I looked into Infrasystems Cache 18 months ago and got a free day on their introduction course. Looked pretty good and apparently IBM use their product. The only drawback for me was that, at the time, there was no decent .NET interface. Don't never whether this has changed in the last 18 months or not. Really it seemed best if you used it form their proprietary web based framework, CSP (Cache Server Pages). I believe that Cache works using sparse array principles. When I thought about how I would design an Object database it didn't seem that it there was a radically new data storage method involved but just a better interface to, or additional layer over, existing ideas. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Dewd | May I suggest one little piece of knowledge from Anders Hejlsberg: http://www.artima.com/intv/abstract.html |
| Wed 03 Mar | no name | http://www.dbdebunk.com/ |
| Wed 03 Mar | mutabled | I've worked with Versant v6.1 over a period of about a year in the financial industry from both Java and C++ (and even C but using that interface is, in the words of one otheir support engineers, 'like having root canal done without anaesthetic'). From this experience at best I would rank OO db's as ok - it does save you quite a lot of time going to and from table structures but you have other concerns like the fact that few other people can understand your code, it's quite hard to access the data other than directly in your OO programming language (i.e. VB6 etc have little hope and versant's tools were awful slow java messes), the query languages look like SQL but behave differently for where clauses and join-like operations and so are quite tricky to handle if you're used to relational databases. Changing your classes at all (ie. adding or removing an attribute) can cause everything to come crashing down in a heap and could become a nightmare to upgrade applications without having real database migration problems. Additionally the lead time it can take to get your head round everything is quite long and not something many people have time to learn before starting a project. In addition because you use the objects and classes just like any others (except they derive from a PersistentObject base class) it's very easy to write inefficient code where lots of network calls are implicit and you can have issues with objects cached in local memory being linked to those on the database and holding locks etc etc that are not at all obvious. There was a Java Data Objects standard in draft form when I was looking at this in 2003, not sure of the current state but it was looking to standardise this stuff which would help a lot if you're using Java. My experience was not a good one though the versant support engineers were pretty helpful. I wouldn't want to design an application around an OO database if i had the choice. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Name withheld out of cowardice | I really like object databases. I program mostly in Java and it is so much easier to store objects in an Object database. The question is, does the nature of your program mean you are mostly stroing and retrieving objects or is there a need to retrieve the info in a more relational way. It should be simple to answer the question. Imagine getting your information my navigating an object hierarchy and imagine getting your data via SQL calls. Which seems simpler. The problem with Object databases is that a) You will never be able to convince your organization to use one b) If you need to scale the really good ones are unjustifiably expensive (at least as of the last time I checked a few years ago- the top vendor wanted to sell me a dev license for $10,000?!?!?!!?) and 3) You will have to deal with all the members of the relational cult thinking you are an idiot and licking their chops awaiting the day you leave so they can re-write your crap in a proper database. As for Cache (Itersystems BTW) it is not really an object database. They call it a 'Post-Relational Database' and it is really a few layers over an old (mature, stable, established?) language originally called MUMPS and now standardized as 'M'. It stores things in Strings as sparse arrays but I think the arrays are limited to 255 length so when they get larger they must resort to trickery. I have used the product, tears ago, with Java. It was good and seemed pretty fast, though I never really stressed it. It runs on everything and has the advantage of storing objects hierarchically but being queriable via SQL. It is a nifty compromise. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Steve Jones (UK) | Caché is produced by InterSystems (www.intersystems.com) and they do now have .NET support. They seem to have conquered some niche markets (e.g. healthcare), but I wonder if they'll ever reach the mainstream. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | The one thing I liked about Intersystems (I should remember the name as they keep sending me literature!) was that they were very willing to make their product cheap for startup type uses and would treat you with as much respect as they would their biggest customers. Apparently this is a company ethic from the founders. And they understand that small fish can later become big fish. Their attitude was different from the mainstream and I liked it. But sadly not the product (enough) |
| Wed 03 Mar | Steve Jones (UK) | Sounds like they've been reading 'Crossing the Chasm'. I also found them to be very helpful, but didn't quite feel comfortable enough to use the product. My main reason was it'd take me ages to find out if it really worked for my situation, time I just didn't have. |
| Wed 03 Mar | former gemstone user | Here's a link to one I used a long time ago. It was fantastic at that time, so I imagine it's only improved. When I used it, though, it was programmed in Smalltalk. Not sure if that's still a requirement. Might be worth checking out, though: GemStone: http://www.gemstone.com/ |
| Wed 03 Mar | A Software Build Guy | A previous employer is droping an OODBM for a normal RDBM system because of issues with performance. The OODBM would cause issues and at 30000 - 100000 records it would grow to slow to be useful. This happen with two seperate OODBMs. I personally do not think that in the long run the ease of api usage buys any major advatage over a RDBM at all. |
| Wed 03 Mar | matt | PostgreSQL supports table inheritance, which makes it very easy to map object hierarchies to tables (so long as they're only single inheritance). I have tried it, and it does work. And PostgreSQL is a superb database anyway, so it's worth having a look to see if it'll help your situation. |
| Wed 03 Mar | x | This is a question that is as old as the hills (or at least as old as many younger programmers). The 'impedance mismatch' has been talked about since the early 80's, when OO first started appearing. The problem is that OODB's tend to fall into the 'what is OO' trap; they either try to be tightly coupled to a particular language like C++ (the downfall of the first generation of O-companies), or they are so generic that they end up competing directly with RDBMS's - and losing, since DB customers are enormously conservative and know RDBMS technology very well (the downfall of UniSQL, as well as why O2/Fresher isn't doing better, despite having excellent technology). Also, older database veterans know that many OODB's are often just CODASYL databases (vintage 1970) with updated terminology - but with many of the same problems and issues that hierarchical databases have always had. Those who think there is some vast conspiracy to keep 'better' OODB's from winning are just silly and don't know their history - DBMS's are the perfect example of how those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it... (Disclaimer: I build relational database engines for embedded systems for a living, so I'm somewhat biased...) |
| Wed 03 Mar | HeWhoMustBeConfused | You are making a fundamental mistake that will haunt future developers / enhancers of your system forever. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HEIRARCHAL DATA. Heirarchies are a VIEW of data, from a very tight perspective. Change your perspective and the model falls apart. Organise your data according to a properly normalised relational model and you will have the flexiblity to grow and change as future needs might require. |
| Wed 03 Mar | John Rusk | Some handy links: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LetsUseAnObjectOrientedDatabase http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectsVsRdbmsPerformance http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectOrientedDatabase |
| Thu 04 Mar | fool for python | I'm Access free! http://www.sleepycat.com/pdfs/wheresthecat.pdf |
| Fri 05 Mar | MR | http://www.inconcept.com/JCM/March2004/Pascal.htm |
| Where art thou, pariah? | Tue 02 Mar | Simon Lucy |
| The thread on Table driven programming brought up (in a kind of fur ball way), the following, but it was too diversionary for even me to put in that thread. Does this mean RPG2 jobs are coming back? I guess not. For some reason, RPG programmers were considered the lowest scale in the profession, subsequently followed by COBOL programmers, who may have also been RPG programmers, they tended to live in the same kinds of buildings. I wonder which is the pariah these days? php coders? VB? (Still?) Crystal Report writers? |
| Tue 02 Mar | Me | HTML and javascripters. Perhaps with Flash authors. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Andrew Hurst | "HTML programmers" |
| Tue 02 Mar | Code Monkey | Dos batch file writers.....TSR Developers...Microsoft BOB plugin development experts....Microsoft OS crash prevention engineer (ducks) |
| Tue 02 Mar | MacSqueeb | I am two out of three from the original post, and I feel unworthy compared to, say, C/C++, Java or Perl talent. :-) |
| Tue 02 Mar | OACIS | On a scale of who is the pariah in the computer geekdom. I had always considered VB 'programmers' to be the lowest of the low. I considered it scripting more than anything else, this coupled with the fact that most of the VB programmers that I have come across picked it up from 'teach yourself VB in 21 days/12 hours' etc. and this showed in their code quality.
After all, I took me a 3 years of university and many many more years of comercial experience before I could even consider myself half-way decent at coding.
but.... (age does this to you)
When you have worked for a number of companies and seen what goes on, everybody has their skills and every language has its place. I have seen people whip something up in VB that would have taken me a month of sundays to do (in any of the languages that I know). (excuse the exageration)
HTML 'coders' - once again, I always considered them scripters, after all, it is a markup language, NOT a programming language. But now, most HTML 'coders' must understand CSS, DHTML, Javascript, along with html optimisation, browser cross-compatability.
Everybody has their niche, and sometimes you just don't need an n-tier EJB/JSP/XML/XSLT/SQL/XHTML/ |
| Tue 02 Mar | Bored Bystander | I have a BSEE. When I moved from hardware development into software (first CAD, then embedded) in the mid 1980s, my EE 'friends' uniformly looked down upon software as 'easy', as 'slumming', as 'doing something that almost anyone could do'. I moved into software because I tend toward A.D.D. and hardware design cycles seemed mind numbingly looooong. I did find that design EEs generally seemed much more 'professional' and staid than did software developers, who had a 'pull it out of your ass' mentality. Back then I tried to distinguish myself in my work by being one of the rare SW types who could actually read and write specifications and interact at a reasonably professional level with others. Since then, the 'prestige' curves of each of these fields have crossed. Hardware development has been marginalized by offshoring of manufacturing, while software briefly became the 'glamor' career field of the mid 1990s. Today, it feels like building anything of value or quality has become 'slumming'. The only professional prestige is in ownership, sales, or using legal process to take something away from someone else. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Me | The inclusion of VB in these types of lists always strikes me as resulting from a lack of familiarity with Windows programming. Good VB programming requires expert knowledge of how Windows works, at the system level. It also requires expert C++ capabilities (in this sense, C++ is a support skill to VB capability.) There are others - C++ engineers - who use VB as a support skill for their work, such as building edit tools or frontends when required. Show me a good VB programmer, and I will show you someone who can do anything in Windows, including C++. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Joe | 'Show me a good VB programmer, and I will show you someone who can do anything in Windows, including C++. ' So if they can do anything in Windows, including C++, then wouldn't it more fair to refer to them as a good C++ programmer? |
| Tue 02 Mar | Bored Bystander | Years ago I worked with an incredibly adversarial jerk who was an ex-machinist turned VB developer (first at the DIY hobby level, then somehow talked himself into a paying programming job.) The guy would get in ranting arguments with the rest of us in the office over the merits of VB. He would defensively exhort us that 'you can do anything in VB' - Okayyy... operating systems, Dave? So, how about real time controls. Or embedded software. .. if you stated too many of these exceptions he would move toward you like he was going to get into a fistfight. The owner of this company *loved* this guy. Dave's claim to fame was driving home with an open six pack in the car seat next to him. Basically, think of the worst of blue collar working class hero ass kicking attitude combined with arrogance borne of cluelessness. Last I heard Dave talked himself into a job with Deloitte and Touche. Really. Not that VB is bad, or anything. I've worked around a lot of C/C++ developers who don't bath regularly... |
| Tue 02 Mar | Mediocre ASP Monkey | Pariah? Well, I'm an ASP monkey with no ASP.NET experience. According to the job ads, I'm the pariah :) Which is a shame, because I could really go for getting out of my bizzare cubicle-in-an-office. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Me | > So if they can do anything in Windows, including C++, then wouldn't it more fair to refer to them as a good C++ programmer? It really depends on the task. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Oren | > Not that VB is bad, or anything Some of my best friends are VB programmers. |
| Wed 03 Mar | no name | I'm an Html coder as well, 8 years ago I did "demos" in asm on X86, 12 years ago in C64 |
| Wed 03 Mar | no name | >> Not that VB is bad, or anything > >Some of my best friends are VB programmers. VB is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to code there. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Alex.ro | TSR as in terminate and stay resident? |
| Thu 04 Mar | your address is never revealed | 21st century pariah are all those J2EE architects discussing 'patterns', 'layers', 'frameworks' and 'domains' and NEVER GETTING THINGS DONE. I'm sooo bored with this web app fad... full of 'experts' who make applications WORSE than the 70s terminal form-filling ones. Bring back my old PowerBuilder develeopers. I need people to deliver software. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Joe | "All your PowerBuilder developers are belong to us" |
| Thu 04 Mar | RP | Now, that was an insightfull comment. I've been dwelling in the J2EE world and I must say, it sucks the big one. It's complex and it doesn't achieve a thing. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Me | I would second J2EE wankers. |
| Table Driven Programming | Tue 02 Mar | Nathan |
| Reference this post: http://weblogs.asp.net/ericlippert/archive/2004/02/24/79292.aspx Eric says, Table driven programming is a technique that can make any program more readable and maintainable, but is often overlooked by script developers. I havent heard of this technique before. Any good sources online where I can learn more about it? Eric suggested Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire - any other books or resources that are good? Is this method of programming only for scripting? |
| Tue 02 Mar | Chris Tavares | The concept of a 'Jump Table' has a long history, going back to machine language. No, it's not just for scripting. However, many times the compiler will expose higher level constructs that make them less necessary. For example, virtual functions are implemented via a jump table. Just calculate the array offset, grab the address, and jump. I don't have any other references on these kinds of things at hand, unfortunately. |
| Tue 02 Mar | no name | The 'article' is a dull and obvious observation (IMHO). |
| Tue 02 Mar | Chip | Here's a link to a book-length discussion on programming with tables: http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/top.htm There's also a lengthy rant on there about the evils of object-oriented practices, and discussions about other topics of interest: http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/index.html The stuff seems a little over the top, and I don't agree with most of it, but it is a different point of view. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Norrick | Using Metadata to help a program run is nothing new. I do this with most of my projects. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Insert half smiley here. | If you are at all confused by the article then don't fret, just practice programming some more. If you are writing code like that shown in the article, with reams of conditional statements, you are doing it the wrong way. By encoding the choices in a table, and writing a small amount of (perhaps a bit more complex) code to pick the right one, the program magically becomes simpler overall. |
| Tue 02 Mar | son of parnas | I do all my programming on a table. Lap driven programming never worke for me. |
| Tue 02 Mar | C Rose | I've seen this method suggested to be used with meta-data stored in files external to the program, and then read and interpreted at run-time. I agree that table-driven methods can make code a hell of a lot more maintainable (and the logic, too, if you structure the data correctly). However, by exposing the program's logic to anyone with a curious eye, is this approach not not asking to be considered a security flaw? Has anyone suggestions as to how this risk might be reduced to an acceptable level? |
| Tue 02 Mar | MX | Then encrypt the god damn config files! |
| Tue 02 Mar | Ori Berger | 'Security through obscurity' doesn't work in practice, despite the common belief. Security flaws can be discovered with or without access to your source code; Source code availability sometimes makes it easier, but that doesn't mean that undisclosed source code isn't vulnerable. Everybody has access to Apache source; Yet, it has proved more secure than the closed source IIS over a long period of time. (Apache is about twice is popular BTW - so IIS is not a more visible target). It's possible to design a secure, robust system whose design and implementation is public - unfortunately, most systems aren't. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Tayssir John Gabbour | The point is that most languages don't make this particularly easy. He puts a bunch of functions in a table, and later grabs the one he wants. Forget the fact a table is used, and just see it as a way to 'name' these handlers. The reason he posted it is because most languages don't support the ability to easily pass around functions in a pretty way. But it's a very basic programming technique, and no deeper than it seems. Think of these functions as 'objects'; I don't mean OOP, but just as a 'thing you can operate on.' If you put objects like numbers and strings into a table, you should be able to stick a function in there too. Then you can pull it out when needed. It's a very dynamic form of programming, where you're dealing with stuff at runtime instead of compiletime. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Ged Byrne | Annon and Norrik, Your right that this is all old news. The incredible things is that so few people use these techniques. Some programmers seem to be in love with the case statement. In the code I maintain there is a function that exists of a case statements embedded 3 deep that stretch over nearly a 1000 lines of code! |
| Wed 03 Mar | Clay Dowling | I have to agree, there's nothing particularly revolutionary about what he's doing, although it's not something taught in university classes. I use the technique heavily in CGI programs to determine which function will handle request processing based on the label on the button that the user pushed. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Eric Lippert | > I haven't heard of this technique before Good thing I blogged about it then! > Is this method of programming only for scripting? Good heavens no. Very handy in C. > The 'article' is a dull and obvious observation Thanks for sharing! I'm sure we're all thrilled by your fascinating opinion, sparkling wit, and condescending attitude. Oh, wait, am I feeding the troll? Never mind then. Forget I said anything. > by exposing the program's logic to anyone > with a curious eye, is this approach not > not asking to be considered a security flaw? The question is far, far too general. Pick a specific case and then ask 'What's the threat?' 'What are the vulnerabilities?' 'what are the consequences?' For example, the threat might be 'bad guys change the configuration file', the vulnerability might be 'because I left the file on a world-writable share', and the consequences might be 'and now my program is going to email my financial data to Fidel Castro instead of my accountant.' Once you know what the threats, vulnerabilities and consequences are, you can make sensible risk assessments. See Mike Howard's book for more details. > Your right that this is all old news. I don't believe I made the claim of originality! :-) > The incredible things is that so few people > use these techniques I agree -- which is why I wrote the article in the first place. |
| Stammering my way through an interview | Tue 02 Mar | RP |
| Besides posting acid rants about my desillusioned state with the current job market, I have another characteristic: I stammer. (by the way, is it stammering or stuttering?) I have a serious doubt. How do you guys, the ones who handled recruitment and job interviews, handled candidates that stammered? When I speak under certain conditions, like when Im talking to my boss or under the stress of an interview, I stammer a bit. So far, I have no idea what the person on the other end thought about me and how did it affect my ability to get the job. Can you guys give me an insight? |
| Tue 02 Mar | no name | I do-do-do-do-don't kno-no-no-know, sorry :) |
| Tue 02 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Did you try pretending they are naked, tied to leashes, etc etc... *no it doesn't help me* |
| Tue 02 Mar | Philo | Do you stutter in your native language? If not, could it be nervousness based on an unfounded fear of screwing up your translations? Philo |
| Tue 02 Mar | i like i | I know an extremely senior and influential engineer at a very large hitech company who stutters. So you can succeed! |
| Tue 02 Mar | RP | Yes, I stutter in my native language, but then again only under certain situations. Come on guys, what do you think? |
| Tue 02 Mar | Philo | There are programs for stutterers - I'm not sure what they embody, but I've seen a lot of people have success with them. Check the web to see if there's anything near you... FWIW, I've also interviewed people who stutter, and I never held it against them. Philo |
| Tue 02 Mar | Sven | I feel for you man - I used to stutter, especially on the phone. I couldn't even pick up the phone and say 'Hello.' It came out 'um um um um um he he hello.' Ordering at a drivethru was particularly painfull, especially if there were other people in the car thinking it was pretty funny. It sucks dude. The way I solved mine was to face it head on. A counselor gave me an assignment each week, like make 20 phone calls a day. I'd call restaurants and ask their hours, etc, etc. It wore me down so I couldn't stay at the tense level that caused my anxiety so I started to succeed, which was very reinforcing. Now it's gone. Good luck. See a speach therapist or phychologist if you think it would help. |
| Tue 02 Mar | John C | I worked with a guy that stammered even when he wasn't under pressure and he's managed to switch jobs when the market seemed pretty dead (might have had a lot to do with his being a genius though). If you're interviewed by a halfway decent interviewer they'll look past stammering, I certainly would. If you're going for an engineer role then stammering shouldn't effect your ability to do the job, so I don't see why it should matter. Trouble is, there are a lot of companies out there who are pretty clueless when it comes to interviewing so who knows. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Elephant | The last interview I gave was to someone that stuttered. I had serious reservations about hiring him, but he came very highly recommended from a co-worker whose oppinion I respect very much. I didn't hold the stuttering against him, but on the downside, he failed to communicate with me well. If you can't get it across to the interviewer that you're an excellent candidate, than the stuttering could indirectly effect the decision. In retrospect, I'm glad I trusted my co-worker's oppinion as it's turned out very well. |
| Tue 02 Mar | RP | What you just said is what worries me the most. The problem with stuttering is not the way it affects your speech, it's the way it affects your psyche. I get so nervous thinking that I'm going to stutter, that I end up looking like a mental retard (no offense meant, that's exactly the way I feel). I never seem to be able to get into the idea that 'being a stutterer is ok'. Damn, not only am I ugly as hell, I also had to stutter.... |
| Tue 02 Mar | Astarte | I think an enlightened organization would not hold it against you in an interview. I think the best bet is to say up front somthing along the lines of 'When I feel enthusiastic about a subject, I may speak quickly and begin to stutter. I will try to minimize that during the interview, but please bear with me.' This shows that you are confident and comfortable, and not stuttering because you are unable to cope under pressure (which an unenlightened person may assume). Also, remember that this may tell against you in an interview for a customer-facing job. If you stutter in interview, you will probably stutter in business meetings, which may give clients a poor impression. Good luck! |
| Tue 02 Mar | Brad Wilson | 'The problem with stuttering is not the way it affects your speech, it's the way it affects your psyche. I get so nervous thinking that I'm going to stutter, that I end up looking like a mental retard.' Well, then, I'd say you do have a pretty serious problem. You haven't said 'Yes! I'll get therapy for it!' yet. I hope you consider it, because communication and thinking on your feet is pretty important in an intellectual job. |
| Tue 02 Mar | RP | I've had therapy before. It helped *a lot*, but I feel I haven't gone the whole 9 yards. I'm currently looking for something to complement what I've done so far. Meanwhile, with or without therapy life goes on and interviews keep on coming, so......... |
| Tue 02 Mar | Name withheld out of cowardice | Tell the interviewer up front that you stutter, that it has been a problem since childhood and that you are getting speech therapy for it. Once the interviewer understands that it is a speech problem and doesn't mean you are being deceptive or stupid, he will likely adjust his perceptions of your responses. IT may even work slightly to your advantage. Your real problem getting a job is that you are very ugly. This bothers people much more than speech impediments. Fortunately you have chosen an excellent field to be unattractive in. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Woodentongue | I interviewed people with stammers, and one very severe example. It didn't make any difference other than the length of the interview and if you are an impatient interviewer, I think that makes you a bad interviewer anyway. One of the other interviewers - the supposed professional interviewer - was very impatient and caused the candidate to lock-up completely. Non-verbal communication is a much bigger deal than most people realise (70%?) and I think that in this industry, verbal communication skills have never been a priority. People often seem to communicate by email if at all, even when they sit next to each other. So, I would say it doesn't matter as long as the persons technical capability is good. In this case, the candidate didn't measure up technically. My biggest problem was convincing the interview panel that I was rejecting the candidate on technical grounds because they had a fit of right-on-eousness and wanted to take the person regardless. I had to examine my motives very carefully but I think the call was right. I don't want to give people jobs on sympathy and then have them struggle. As for advice, I would say demand patience. The company is looking for a developer not a silvertongued salesman. If the interviewer gets narked just ask to slow it down, explain that you are selling your technical capability. The interviewer should be looking for those skills, not an easy life or a power trip. Interviewing effectively is hard work. If necessary, resort to the whiteboard or pen and paper - I appreciate that can seem like a defeat or a sign of weakness. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Richard Sunarto | Hi, fellow stutterers! Now I know that it's not only me that stutters :-) By the way, it's so coincidance for me that this topic brought to me again. Last week I just attended a public forum 'Are you a stutter?'. I found teachers, parents, and even the stutters themselves attending it (I am included). (I found a stutterer who stutter more than I did) By the way, the lecturer said that the sooner the better. It can be classified as mild or chronic. Males dominate the percentage, and the statistics say that less than 1% of total population have it. (Then I am not lucky). Mostly it is caused by genetic (it can be by accident). There are some ways to overcome it: 1. Lidcombe (only for children below 5) 2. Prolonged Speech (for adults) 3. Caperdown Program (better version of prolonged speech) 4. Auditary Feedback Device (use external device, can reduce up to 90% of stuttering speech, however only works for 80% of stutterers) More info??? Find on google. I do not remember all of the detail of the lecture. Give it a try for the therapy! I will go for it this Friday (already book an appoinment) note: I am stutter in an unexpected conversation. However during 'normal' and 'planned' conversation I am perfectly normal and extrovert. (I usually plan a dialog before I speak) |
| Tue 02 Mar | MacSqueeb | No particular expertise here, but I would echo the advice to explain to the interviewer up front about your issue. If you have any oportunity to communicate via email prior to the interview, you may want to inform the interviewer or HR person arranging the inverview that way, and include a link to information on how to engage with people who stutter, such as this. http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/comdis/kuster/InfoPWDS/Listeners.html IANAL, but if you are interviewing in the US, it is illegal for a company to discriminate against you on the basis of a disability. I don't know if stuttering qualifies, but the possiblity might occur to the interviewer and cause him to adjust his thinking accordingly. |
| Tue 02 Mar | John C. | I can't remember whether I've specifically interviewed anybody with a stammer, but to me it's really no different than any other variation in speech, such as an accent. Which is to say that in most cases I don't think it would be an issue, although if it were severe enough that it fundamentally impeded communication I'd be a bit concerned. I agree that it would probably be to your benefit to make a comment about it up front, which illustrates that you are confident about yourself and not somehow ashamed or unusually nervous. |
| Tue 02 Mar | MacSqueeb | BTW, the link above was gleaned from the homepage http://www.thomer.com/index.html of a guy who is in a PhD program at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T. I note that because on his page he is very up front about his stuttering, and in describing himself it is clear that he is highly intelligent, thus helping the reader breakdown the instinct to subconciously assume the person stuttering is somehow less intelligent. Anyway, I thought it might be encouraging to read about a fellow stutterer, who has tackled it head on as well as racked up some impressive accomplishments. And by the way, best of luck on the interview! |
| Tue 02 Mar | David Fischer | I have no experience with stuttering, but I'd expect directed therapy to be most effective recourse. But possibly learning to communicate more effectively, and so reducing your anxiety, would help your stuttering. I've been involved with a local Toastmasters club ( http://toastmasters.org ) for five years. It's helped me a great deal with both prepared presentations (Ph.D. defense) and spontaneous Q&A (job interviews and Ph.D. defense). I don't know if participation in Toastmasters ever helped someone with stammering, but it enables people to become better communicators and helps them reduce and control their anxieties. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Gareth McCaughan | Unless either (0) you're going for a job in sales or (1) your stammer is very bad or (2) you write code like int int int mamamain(vvvoid) {{{{{ ret ret retu ret ret return 0;;; }}}} (both of which seem unlikely) there's no reason why any sane interviewer should hold it against you. Some interviewers are insane and liable to be prejudiced against people who stammer, or who have skin a different colour from theirs, or aren't the same age as they are, or whatever; that hurts, but there's nothing you can do about it. Work on the assumption that your interviewer is not insane. If you're worried about it, then by all means bring it up at the start, though I'd have thought most interviewers would understand without needing to be told explicitly. Of course that's much easier to say than to do... |
| Tue 02 Mar | T.J. | Sing. Seriously. |
| Tue 02 Mar | John C | Singing your way through an interview - that's an interesting idea. Like one of those musical Simpsons episodes. Bonus points if you can get it all to rhyme. ;-) But seriously. The guy who came second in the UK version of Pop Idol a couple of years ago (Gareth Gates) has a rather bad stutter when he speaks in front of the camera but doesn't do it when he sings (even in front of 10,000 screaming teenage fans). So it may not work for everyone. |
| Tue 02 Mar | T.J. | That is exactly what I am recommending FOR the interview. It is not an immediate cure for suttering -- it immediately supress the cause of suttering by forcing you to speak in pace. |
| Tue 02 Mar | John C | It'd take some amount of bottle to do it though! |
| Tue 02 Mar | Martha | Th th this is a a st st st st stutt ttt stuttt tut stutter. This, uh, this, uh, um, uh, this, uh um uh this is a stammer. (More or less.) |
| Tue 02 Mar | Alex.ro | Gareth ROTFL! Seriously RP, what you need is to be happy (content) with yourself. You're not seeing Brad Pitt when you look in the mirror, fine; but at least a healthy, fit man you can be. Go to the gym 3 times a week, work your arms and body, lose the flab (if any), and keep in shape. You'll like yourself. Alex. PS Funny method by Winston Churchill: he always imagined the other guy sitting on the toilet bowl. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Robert Jacobson | FWIW, MacSqueeb is right -- discriminating against someone because of a stutter probably violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as similar state laws. http://www.nsastutter.org/material/index.php?matid=191 http://members.aol.com/wdparry/ada.htm As a practical matter, one problem is that your stutter might make the interviewer nervous and lead to a difficult rapport. It might help if you could set the interviewer at ease by making a lighthearted comment or quip about your stutter at the start -- just to address the issue and let him know it's not a big deal. Think of the character Jimmy from 'South Park,' a kid with a stutter and a physical disability who's also an amateur stand-up comedian. He does a great job at disarming his audience through (really bad) jokes -- 'I ju... ju... just flew in and and buh... buh... buh... boy are my crutches tired.' |
| Tue 02 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | My wife is a speech-language pathologist. One of the areas they treat is stuttering (and, I assume, stammering). She said that, ironically, most of our professors who taught stuttering-treatment STUTTERED. So, *that* treatment isn't completely effective. ;-) |
| Wed 03 Mar | Richard Sunarto | "real entrepreneur" is right. When I attended the public seminar on stuttering, the speaker (head of the department) stuttered during the presentation. I do not know whether she did this on purpose to get empathy or really a stutterer. She spoke fluently, however she had a lot of fillers and did word repeatition. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Justin | Well there’s a mixed bag of advice… and that pretty much reflects the state of peoples understanding where stammering is concerned. I’ve been a stammerer all my speaking life and I was formally a “severe stammerer” which means that when I was stammering I was down to something like a word or two a minute accompanied by spasms, head jerks, jaw lock, dribbling and stomach cramps. The thing about stammering is that what you, the non-stammering populous see is the very tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole dark world of depression and psychology attached to it that drags you down pretty much as low as you can get. To top it all off it’s not like you’re in a wheel chair or you’ve got no arms, people can’t tell you’re about to have a problem speaking. Society finds it confusing; why can you talk perfectly fine to your cat/wife/child or sing etc but yet when you get in front of an authority figure and you instantly fall apart. Don’t be angered by posters of comments like “I do-do-do-do-don't kno-no-no-know”… just as in life it’s peoples ignorance showing through – it’ll do you no good to get hung up on negative experiences… move on. Here in the UK we’ve had a few high profile stammerers pop up and it’s resulted in a batch of good primetime documentaries that showed the effects of stammering on the individual and the help that’s out there. I’m pleased to say that I myself and people I’ve spoken to have noticed a marked change in attitudes. The perception of stammerers as bumbling idiots isn’t so rife now. Besides, you’re in good company, famous stammerers include Lewis Carrol, Charles Darwin, Marylin Monroe, Napoleon, Isaac Newton, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Stammering and stuttering are the same thing. Generally in the UK (where I live) we call it a stammer and in America it’s called a stutter. No one is sure what causes it. Habitual stammers are usually formed at childhood and are compounded by bad experiences through school and right into adult life. Stammers are organic, they constantly morph. If you manage to find a trick (which is what things like singing, tapping your foot, nodding your head etc are) then for the majority the trick only lasts a certain amount of time before the stammer reshapes to surface again. What you need to do is work on the cause of your stammer and not the symptom. For every stammerer this is different. I would advice you seek specialist treatment. Your doctor can refer you to a speech therapist but most speech therapists are trained to deal with impediments caused by age, injury or disease (heart attacks, brain injuries, oral cancers etc). I would recommend you do what I did and seek out a specialist course, one that helps stammerers only. Personally I would avoid using tricks or gadgets if I were you… they seem to have very limited success and the last thing you want is to replace one outlandish habit with another (such as singing everything). You can achieve your goals… I now run a business, speak to clients daily and I’ve appeared on TV and radio talking about my stammer and how people can get help. Life is fantastic now :o). About 3 years ago I attended a Starfish Project course in the UK ( http://www.starfishproject.co.uk/ ) which helped me to turn my life around. It dealt both with the overt side of my stammer and the psychology going on underneath it. I was immediately plunged into a massive support network and met a people who had been in the same position as me and were now standing up and speaking with total control of their speech. It was quite a revelation. If you can get over to England I’d recommend the Starfish Project, it’s a charity organisation so it’s really cheap and you get to come back on any course in the future for free. I return regularly to refresh and help out so you might even meet me there you lucky so and so ;o). There are some courses that are run as lucrative businesses offering guaranteed cures etc for many thousands of $, pretty much taking advantage of people in a desperate situation. Just be aware of that… always talk to people who have been on the courses and bare in mind that I’ve met hundreds of stammerers and not a single one of them is “cured”, myself included; I work hard every single day to keep control over my stammer and if I let it. Feel free to email me if you've any questions. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Justin | That last bit was meant to say '...and if I let it it would come back full force.' And that's what I get for concerntrating on what I'm saying and not what I'm typing ;o). |
| Thu 04 Mar | Julian | Even for a software position, verbal communication skills are important. People have to discuss complex technical topics with their coworkers. It's an impediment when they don't understand each other, whether the problem is an accent, stammering, or some other reason. (My biggest communication problem is that I often speak too quickly.) That being the case, if your stammering is worse in stressful situations, like an interview, say so. The interviewer may be less concerned if you can convince them that your stammering only occurs occasionally. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Antti Kurenniemi | I've interviewed a few persons who have had different kinds of problems with their speech, including stutter, and I've noticed that if I get them to relax it'll help - it's like if they're constantly worried about their stutter they try to avoid it and it only gets worse. When I've noticed that someone stutters (or speaks my language (or English) poorly), I've just said it up front like: 'I notice that you stutter quite a bit, but don't worry about it, it will not affect the outcome of this interview, and if there's anything that will help you during the interview don't hesitate to let me know'. It's unproductive to me if the person I'm interviewing is not focused on the interview but instead on his/her stutter (or ugly face, or glass eye, or whatever). |
| What is NULL | Tue 02 Mar | Chris Ormerod |
| Developing an APP in VFP now for a couple of years, and it works great in SQL Server and VFP databases, and we have been tasked with making it work with Oracle. So we are getting it working, and have discovered that apparently an empty string in Oracle is == NULL, but on every other DB system it seems that empty string == empty string, and NULL == NULL. So to get around this we have to store instead of in empty strings, or change what tables and fields accept NULLs. So basically this is causing us some issues because some other parts of our system rely on the fact that NULL == NULL and == empty string != NULL (wether that is good programming or not, that is just what was easiest for us at the time considering how the VFP ISNULL() function works) so my questions are: 1. Is the NULL behaviour we are seeing correct? 2. Is it configurable? |
| Tue 02 Mar | Steve Jones (UK) | AFAIK null != null, nor does null = '' and cannot be used in comparisons. You can use something like 'WHERE column_name IS [NOT] NULL'. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Patrik | Chris, Steve is correct. The correct NULL checking syntax in Oracle. NULL denotes 'nothing' or 'empty' in Oracle, so you can have constructs like this for example: select foo into foo_var from table where id=1 if foo_var is null ... ... end if; One word of advice, if you are porting to Oracle, stay away from the datatype CHAR. Use VARCHAR2. In the above example, had foo been declared as CHAR it would never be empty since CHARS is space padded to their declared length. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Chris Ormerod | Steve, Yeah, I miss-stated what I meant by NULL = NULL, what I really meant is just that NULL is NULL and not an empty string or 0 or a date of 1/1/1899 etc. Patrik, Thanks for that tip on the CHAR fields. Now my question - but how do I insert EMPTY STRINGs into a character field on Oracle where that character field is set to not allow nulls? At the moment we have had to resort to putting in a single space character for empty strings, but we were hoping for a more sane solution. Thanks for the info so far guys. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | You don't. Oracle doesn't believe in empty strings. If you want empty strings, declare your fields nullable and adjust accordingly. That's the way Oracle decided things are. If you don't like it, don't use Oracle. :/ |
| Tue 02 Mar | Patrik | >single space character for empty strings There is nothing that annoys me than ' ' in varchar fields. Use NULL in your insert statements. Consider the following example: select nvl(t.field,'nothing found') from table t where t.id=1; This would return 'nothing found' if t.field is null, otherwise it returns t.field. Very handy function to use in SQL when querying the DB. Those ' ' fields roally mess up this function, unless you use TRIM() on the field first and stuff. Also, when having space filled character fields in Oracle you end up using LTRIM or RTRIM and friends in your WHERE-clauses because Oracle is picky say you have the following: SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE FNAME='Patrik'; and SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE FNAME='Patrik ' ; is different, and you will not get a hit unless you match the number of spaces. Its ugly. So you normally see stuff like SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE TRIM(FNAME)='Patrik'; to work around this how-many-spaces-are-there problem. When using functions like this in your WHERE clauses to simplify the SQL writing, you disable the indexes, because indexes are built case sensetively, and the index scanner will compare 'Patrik' and 'Patrik ' or 'Patrik' to 'PATRIK' or whatever. I guess one line would have been enough, Avoid spaces in character fields at all cost. Good luck. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Chris Ormerod | So I suppose we are best to make all fields allow null then? Will have to test that and see what issues it causes on some of our older reports that all work fine on other DBs. Hopefully it won't be too much of an issue. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | 'When using functions like this in your WHERE clauses to simplify the SQL writing, you disable the indexes' Not necessarily. Oracle can do indexes based on a function. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Philip Dickerson | 'Not necessarily. Oracle can do indexes based on a function. ' Only later versions of Oracle. When was this introduced - v8.1.7 or so? Also, if you define a function-based index in Oracle, it will only be used if you use the exact same function in the WHERE clause in your SQL statement. |
| Tue 02 Mar | //Jorge | In some places I've seen: var = var & '' After they retrieve data... just to avoid the NULL item. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Jetguy | While we're on the subject of NULLs in databases... this http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp is probably the best (humorous) example of why you need NULL. |
| Tue 02 Mar | DJ | Stay away from empty strings!!! People use them to mean 'empty' or 'nothing' which is what Nulls where invented for. The only reason to keep using them is if you have legacy systems that don't support Nulls or you are lazy and don't want to deal with nulls. |
| Tue 02 Mar | Almost Anonymous | 'Stay away from empty strings!!! People use them to mean 'empty' or 'nothing' which is what Nulls where invented for.' NULLs are a necessary evil. But empty-strings are a common programming language concept. If you don't have empty strings in your database, then you just have to constantly convert between empty strings and NULLs and it's a waste of time and effort. My philosophy is to avoid NULLs whereever possible -- but if you need a NULL, use it. |
| Wed 03 Mar | rwh | 'Stay away from empty strings!!! People use them to mean 'empty' or 'nothing' which is what Nulls where invented for.' There can be an important difference between 'string that was supplied, but is empty', and 'no value supplied' or 'invalid value'. Oracle makes it impossible to express this difference. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Patrik | rwh >Oracle makes it impossible to express this difference. This is not a problem with nulls and/or empty strings. This is more of a data model problem. Most times you dont want to save invalid stuff in your database, you simply reject it and have the user fix the problem. If you for some reason need to save invalid values in your database you can have lookup tables that states which value(s) are valid for each input field and have a field to denote validity...That extra field denotes things like Empty or Invlaid or whatever. This way you can still have NULLs in your data entry fields and have the invalid_flag tell you why it was invalid on entry. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Martha | Oracle's nulls-only system doesn't allow capturing the difference between "I don't know the value that goes in this field" and "This field intentionally left blank". You end up having to find workarounds - using "n/a" or some similar notation to mean "intentionally blank". Of course, that leads to situations like the license plate story, or people getting mail addressed to Mr. John NMI Smith. |
| Fri 05 Mar | Chris | This works on every database I've tried but Oracle: create table test ( teststr varchar(20) NOT NULL ); insert into test values (''); Having to program special cases for Oracle for multiple database support is a waste of time. Life is too short for stupid differences like this. |
| Cargo Cult Organization Styles | Thu 04 Mar | pdq |
| Anyone see this article? Comments? http://www.stevemcconnell.com/ieeesoftware/eic10.htm |
| Thu 04 Mar | no name | Some old comments: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=12134 |
| Thu 04 Mar | Fred | ... and 'The UNIX-HATERS Handbook' is always pretty funny too. http://www.devili.iki.fi/pub/misc/books/uhh.pdf |
| Thu 04 Mar | hoser | My favorite part, courtesy Dennis Richie: Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. Bon appetit! ==== Who can resist, but to take - just - one - bite. |
| Some advice required ... | Thu 04 Mar | Mohammad Atif |
| Im a final year student of computer engineering here in Pakistan , i was planning to do my masters from USA . I like programming very much , ive studied C,Java , C# and was studying Lisp currently , but someone told me that part time programming jobs are very difficult to find while studying and it would be much better if I concentrated more on the network side . I will be needing assistanceship or some part time job to cover the studying expenses . What would you people suggest ?? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Rick | Most U.S. Universities have a work/study program, so you can teach or help with undergraduate classes, or assist with research (usually programming) for either money or reduced tuition. Check with the school's web site... |
| Thu 04 Mar | anon | Well, one question: are you doing your masters for interest, or under the belief that you need one in order to work? Others may have different experiences, but I rarely run into developers with Masters degrees. If, on the other hand, you are pursuing the degree out of a desire to do research, or just out of interest, then perhaps you could check if there are paid part time IT, teaching assistant, or even development opportunities at the university you are going to attend. Just a thought. |
| Thu 04 Mar | old_timer | The Homeland Secutity Dept. (Formerly Immigration and Naturalization Service) has rather strict rules on whether university students can 'work' while going to school on a student visa. If one has a school sponsored job, for instance working in the library part time, that is fine, but to seek professional employment is verboten. In one case recently an African basketball player at a division 1 school was staying in the US during the summer break to get more experience playing ball against Americans instead of returning home between school semesters. So to support himself he sought a job at a local restaurant. This was not allowed under his student visa, and not only was he almost deported, but his employer was fined for hiring an 'illegal' immigrant. Be certain that the type of visa you apply for does not restrict your ability to work your way through school. Know the terms under which you enter and don't assume you are free to do as you wish. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Edward | Agree with Rick. Graduate programs are very experienced with this problem. In the program that I was involved in, everyone doing a graduate degree had access to research money through their professor. Sometimes there was actual work involved, but quite often it was seen as more of a grant. I would give a call to the grad office of the universities that you're talking to, as well as the professors you'll be involved with. |
| Thu 04 Mar | JBS | As an International Student on an F1 Visa (Others - no Idea) you are Eligible for 20 hours/week of on-campus Employment. Assistantships are highly competitive as are the Jobs! Based on your Area of Interest you could start contacting Professors - to get a head start! Good Luck! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Exception guy | As to 'are you doing your masters for interest, or under the belief that you need one in order to work?' Foreign developers in the US often get a master's from a US university. It seems to give employers a known way to evaluate their education, versus a university abroad that they may know nothing about. Also, it lets an employer know that the person is used to living in the US. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Mohammad Atif | The reason why I am planning for Masters is that the computer field here ( Pakistan ) is highly saturated and thus pretty competitive ( i dont know about USA ) , and I think that having a masters in computers from a good university should go a long way in giving a boost to my career . |
| Thu 04 Mar | Chris Tavares | You think wrong. I've got a masters in CS, and mostly it gets ignored as far as I can tell. It made absolutely zero difference in my salary. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for the degree out of my own pocket. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Well, perhaps it would make a difference in Pakistan, assuming Mohammad intends on returning after graduation. He should probably check with local employers/developers to get their thoughts about the merits of an advanced degree. |
| Thu 04 Mar | sid6581 | On an F1 visa you can work 20 hours a week for the school. I worked as a math grader, developer, and research assistant throughout college. I got some truly great jobs in college. Another benefit of working the full 20 hours was that I then only had to pay in-state tuition, instead of the much higher tuition they charge international students. I also worked summers, and had two internships outside of school. As an F1 student you can work up to one year on CPT (curricular practical training) in your field of study while studying, and after you finish your studies you can work for a year on your F1 visa on OPT (optional practical training). I did all of this, graduated, got a job initially on OPT and switched over to H1B after I finished my undergrad degree. My company is also sponsoring a green card. However, I think today it's very hard for the average person to find an employer to sponsor a visa. I was very lucky. (And if anyone's wondering -- no, we're not hiring, so there's no use emailing me.) |
| Converting email from unix mbox to Outlook? | Thu 04 Mar | Wayne Earl |
| Because of business needs, Ive recently been required to use Outlook for my email client. I have a couple of years worth of email data in unix mbox format that I would like to import, however, I cant seem to find anything that will accomplish this . Can anyone here recommend a tool that will do this? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Jay | Don't know of a standalone tool, other than Outlook itself. I have an IMAP server running on my unix box, that I connect to with Outlook. My uw-imapd reads and stores folders as mbox files. It's just a matter of subscribing to the mbox file as a folder and drag'ndrop to an Outlook account. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Joel Spolsky | cp /my/mbox $MAIL and then Outlook will suck it all up as new unread email :) |
| Thu 04 Mar | Wayne Earl | Joel, I can't believe I didn't think of this. This works absolutely perfectly! I need a vacation. :-) |
| How do you find testers? | Thu 04 Mar | Joe Grossberg |
| Number 9 of the top twelve tips for beta testing says, in part: The minimum number of serious testers you need (i.e., people who send you three page summaries of their experience) is probably about 100. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BetaTest.html But where are you supposed to find 100 people who have the time, skill and -- most of all -- interest to do such a thing if: * you are a small company (i.e. you dont have hundreds of coworkers outside the project) * your product is not a video game (heck, who wouldnt want to beta-test that?) * you have a small, or non-existent, user base (e.g. a pre-release beta, or a very specialized product) Joe http://www.joegrossberg.com |
| Thu 04 Mar | Blargo | That was exactly my question. We don't have 100 customers, let alone people who want to test pre-release software. We send an email to all of our customers asking for testers, and probably 5 people want to do it. This is an expensive, specialized application that we only sell to professionals. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Joe Grossberg | Furthermore, as Joel himself says, only a fraction of the volunteers are going to give you useful feedback. So it's really hundreds, not just 100. |
| Thu 04 Mar | QA911.com | Joe: I have read Joel's article and having managed a few beta cycles, I can confirm that it's good advice. I think the 100 tester minimum should have included '(your mileage may vary)'. Here's one experience I had many years back that might be helpful. I inherited beta management duties for a Mac connectivity product that worked with DEC and UNIX servers. They had a list of 50-60 beta testers that they wanted me to use. It became apparent very quickly that 90% were simply on the list to get one of the following: 1. An advance look at the next version 2. Help in making a decision on a large site license 3. Some free software With my mananger's permission I tossed out roughly half the names and gave strict instructions to Support and Sales not to send me people that just want to kick the tires, but really have an interest in testing it. I also went to an Internet newgroup specific to this type of software and posted an invitation to be part of the next beta cycle. I ended up finding 12 people that really rocked! These folks easily generated 3 times as much feedback as the other 30-40 on the list and it was top notch data that the developers really appreciated. Just keeping these 12 great testers busy with requests from the developers was a full-time job. Having a message board would have helped, but this was just as people were discovering browsers. For care and feeding of the testers, we would find extra t-shirts from trade shows and other swag to send them and they *really* appreciated it. Once we shipped the product, they'd get a thank you letter with 1 shrinkwrapped copy. So my advice would be to start hanging out where some of your users might be and see if you can identify some 'thought leaders'. Invite them to check it out and slowly develop a roster. As Joel noted, only reward and keep those that offer useful feedback. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Joe Hendricks | Use a trial period and implant feedback reminders in the app's startup, along with an automatic bug email submitter ? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Rick | In my experience, public beta-testing is only for shrink-wrapped products where customers have a mix of unknown hardware configurations that you can't test in-house. You still need an internal QA testing process of some kind whether shrink-wrapped or not -- public beta is not for catching your bugs. Its best use is just to make sure it doesn't destroy anybody's system, and/or for a market sanity check if you've been developing in a vacuum. (So when all you get back is 'cool program' from a few people, that's a good thing). But specialized products don't need it, since you're either installing for the customer yourself, or you can specify (or provide) the exact hardware platform you developed and tested it for. |
| Thu 04 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | What is your goal with the testers? Are you trying to test for bugs? Or, are you testing usability? Here's what we do: Testing for BUGS We release the new versions to our paying customers. That way, they get the latest and greatest. And, if they have problems, we hear about it. We fix bugs really fast (usually within a day or two if it's serious) so it's very little inconvenience for the customer. NOTE: we do pretty through testing in-house before sending this out. Testing for USEABILITY I don't think you need 100 testers. Read Don't Make Me Think. He makes an excellent case for useability testing with just a couple of users. We test with just a few customers who we have close contact with. Then we release the product. We regularly update the program based on feedback. (Example: very few customers were using our 'Deluxe and PRO version features'. We suspected this was b/c the trial's button for those features was called 'Advanced Features'. That scared people (seriously). So we changed it to 'More Options...'. Many more people started using those features. |
| Copy & Paste of File Directory contents | Thu 04 Mar | Tarek |
| Is there a freeware somewhere which allows you to show you the contents of a directory so you can easily copy & paste into MS excel the list of files for a given directory... |
| Thu 04 Mar | Bob | You could use the command prompt to display the directory contents and copy the same into an XL sheet. There are different parameters for the dir command, so you can display the contents the way you want it before you copy them. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Steve Jones (UK) | Use something like: dir > test.csv in a command prompt, then enter test.csv and Excel will open the file for you. Change test.csv to the filename you want. Also check out the options for the dir command (enter dir /? to see them all). For example, you might want to do dir /s > test.csv to get all the subdirectories too. |
| Thu 04 Mar | The Not-So-Philosopher | I have a little shell utility calles SAMenu installed: http://www.smalleranimals.com/samenu.htm It adds an option to your right-click shell menus that allows you to 'Copy Path to Clipboard'. It works for individual or multiple files. I use it every day at work to send file paths around to my co-workers or when needed while coding. I have been using it for years and highly reccomend this free utility. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Code Monkey | Checkout the excellent and free RJHExtensions @ http://www.rjhsoftware.com/rjhextensions/ Like they say it call do that and more...... |
| Good book for MP3? | Thu 04 Mar | Bob |
| Need to know what books to get to learn nuts & bolts of mp3 - format, encoding, decoding, etc. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | There are several, although you can't go wrong with the O'Reilly and Associates (www.ora.com) one. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Code Monkey | Why a book? studying source and stuff on http://lame.sourceforge.net/ should be good enough |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | That's lame *sorry couldn't resist* |
| Disabling script debugging in IE | Thu 04 Mar | Angry Richard |
| I often get a dialog from Internet Explorer (v6), with something like: Error occured at line 23, Debug? I always check disable script debugging and uncheck display a notification about every error in the advanced options, but they somehow get reset and the dialogs continue. Has anyone else experienced this? It really fecks me off! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Yves | Bizarre. Did you try closing and re-opening all instances of IE after changing those options? Does it reset other preferences like your homepage? What if you change these options, not from IE, but from the 'Internet Options' when IE is closed? Expect this thread to be deleted soon, as this board is not intended to be used as a windows support forum. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Wayne | Yves: Why is it that some people just have to play 'Board Cop'? Why don't you let the real moderators do their job, and if you don't like the thread, don't comment on it. Angry Richard: You shouldn't have to close every instance of IE after setting those options. There is another problem somewhere. Try applying those options, closing the dialog, and then open the dialog again to see if the settings are the same. If they're not it's probably a registry permissions or group policy problem. If you have Visual Studio installed, you might want to search around for 'Machine Debug Manager' and see if that is related to this problem. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Nick | Is this a home PC or a work PC? If it's work, then under options->connection->LANsettings, is it setup to use an automatic configuration script?. I had this problem at a former employer whose configuration script reset everything. |
| Thu 04 Mar | mb | the old script debugger wouldn't always go completely away. remove it from the registry. (i think you look for mdm.exe or something, then rename/remove a key or value.) |
| Cooments on this book | Thu 04 Mar | Eddy |
| just curious, does any one have experience with the following book? Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design by Barbara Liskov (Author), John Guttag (Author) i am looking for some decent books on objects-oriented design/analysis/programming. |
| Thu 04 Mar | thumbs up | That's a fantastic book on object friendly methods. It's quite rigorous, though; not a code first and ask questions later approach. It's also not something I'd use to 'learn programming.' It isn't going to teach you Java syntax or make you comfortable with the Java libraries. It will show you how to rigorously specify your work and how to design a flexible solution to achieve the specification. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Aaron F Stanton | I think that books like that are things that every person even vaguely associated with programming should have to read. Especially non-programming types - maybe people wouldn't get orders to just whip out a program without thinking through requirements first. It sounds to me like this book wold be very applicable for even non-Java programming. Thanks for mentioning it. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Rick | Barbara Liskov was also my favorite professor at MIT -- of everything there, the most I learned was from her undergraduate class on software engineering (OO, late 80's-style). |
| Thu 04 Mar | . | Guerilla marketing! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Rick | Yes, I should have mentioned she's my mother. (I'm kidding, sheesh...) |
| Samsung: talk to me ... | Thu 04 Mar | Demotivator |
| I know this may not sound like 100% software related , but it is actually, in almost every domain they compete... Few years ago, they proclaimed they will beat SONY in brand name recognition by 2005... I guess, it is happening -believe it or not... SAMSUNG :-)/B> What do you think ? Why is this model working in the Asian marketplace and not here in N.A. ? Is it passion, idolatry, fanaticism or just pure materialistic incentives at work? How is it possible to drive - from top to bottom - a revolution like Nissans ? You just proclaim it ? Is it the charisma of a Ghosn driving it, his wit and native intelligence or ... |
| Thu 04 Mar | Stephen Jones | Samsung and LG are winning in the Asian market because they are cheaper, and spend a fortune on marketing there (look at the cricket sponsorship in LG's case). They also are doing an excellent job in designing and producing high quality products. And, unlike Sony, they aren't inventing anything, so their R & D cost should be a lot smaller. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Stephen Jones | Or at least not inventing to the extent that Sony is. LG's aperture grill system is a pretty useful invention, though with the decline in CRT's probably rapidly approaching obsolence for monitors |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gerald | Samsung is quite popular in Home Theater. Check the AVS forums at http://www.avsforum.com to see how popular their DLP rear projection sets are. Also, there 931 DVD Player was one of the first to use DVI and upconvert DVDs to High Definition levels (720p or 1080i). In this area they are certainly gaining ground on Sony who had a bit of a fiasco with their latest Grand Wega III LCD rear projection sets. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Attention deficit dis... wha? | I've been a Palm user for around 6 years and recently upgraded to the Samsung i500 (combination cell phone and Palm OS). Love it, love it, love it. So they're doing something right in my mind anyway. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | >And, unlike Sony, they aren't inventing anything, so their R & D cost should be a lot smaller. Harshhhh :) but you've toned down. No one really invents much of anything anymore. The billions of dollars thrown at MS Research has resulted in surprising few flying cars or any gateways that can transport your mind/spirit to Singapore in 10 seconds. |
| Thu 04 Mar | anon | There's a great book written by a guy named Jim Collins called 'Good to Great' in which he tried to find out what made a 'great' company. (Btw, his definition of a great company was one that beat the average market growth by at least 3 times over 15 years). I really recommend it (here's a link as well: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/51/goodtogreat.html) One of the things I took from the study was sometimes it really does start with someone just saying 'we're going to be the best in this particular market'. It might not happen, but if someone doesn't step up and say something like that, well, then it never happens. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | My point is, just because Sony throws tons of money at R&D doesn't mean R&D will produce anything (I am not implying that Sony R&D, or any R&D isn't being productive--but applied creativity can't be juiced out of a corporate machine the way you can get a law shop to patent per hour). |
| Thu 04 Mar | Unfocused Focused | anon, The problem I have with that process is often keeping the person saying that from saying it about every market segment they see. The critical thing about doing that is to identify a market that you want to own, and then following through to make sure it happens. I think that's what you're seeing with Samsung - they've targeted a space and they're following through. Once they own that space, then look for them to choose another and continue. Sony, on the other hand, is trying to be all things to all people, and they're starting to overstretch even their formidable resources. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Elephant | I'd say Sony's been overstreched for years. When it comes to their consumer electronics division, quality has really taken a nose dive. You can usually get something better, more reliable, and cheaper somewhere else. |
| Thu 04 Mar | anon | [ The problem I have with that process is often keeping the person saying that from saying it about every market segment they see. The critical thing about doing that is to identify a market that you want to own, and then following through to make sure it happens. I think that's what you're seeing with Samsung - they've targeted a space and they're following through. Once they own that space, then look for them to choose another and continue. Sony, on the other hand, is trying to be all things to all people, and they're starting to overstretch even their formidable resources. ] I totally agree. I think that's the kind of behaviour you see with the 'good to great' companies. There was a specific example (I don't remember which company it was) in which the management team saw that they would never be in the top 2 players in their current market, so they looked for a market in which they could be #1. They then committed the company to the move by selling off their most important assets in their current market (like Cortez burning his boats). Basically, it started with the team saying 'we need to go there cuz we're never going to win here'. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Unfocused Focused | Anon, If that was one of their examples, then I need to pick up the book (I've actually seen it over the years but it's never made it to the queue of books I own but haven't read yet. :-) ) Even if it has nothing else in it, using that example on managers would help with a lot of MADD (Manager Attention Deficiency Disorder) that I see. Or at least some of it. (And any improvement is well worth the effort!) |
| Bill Gates on Charlie Rose | Thu 04 Mar | PBS Fund-drive freeloader |
| Bill Gates was on Charlie Rose for an hour this evening. I learned a couple of things: 1) Bill has lost a lot of weight and looks younger than he did a couple of years ago 2) Charlie really, really likes rich people 3) Bills vision of the future usually takes the form of scenerios where applications of advanced software technology will allow people to get their sports scores faster and more conveniently 4) Bill claims that Longhorn will be as big a change as the original windows but offers absolutely no specifics Bill is much more boring to watch than Donald Trump. Is this because Longhorn is more boring than Trump Ice or am I missing something? |
| Thu 04 Mar | indeed | I thought it was fairly interesting. Part of the percieved (yours and mine) blandness of Gates's vision, I think, is the fact that Microsoft is a mature company. But as chief technologist, he is always in the position of trying to make it seem younger than it is. Besides, there is some subterfuge here. It's not like Gates is going to do anything but lay the company's marketing message out on the table. I suppose Rose gave him enough rope with which to hang himself, but Gates is good at avoiding those traps. But watching Gates speak is a good refresher on Microsoft's current marketing, and it's a fond reminder that in America a man like Gates (with that posture!) is on top. :) |
| Thu 04 Mar | braid_ged | Bill Gates is one of the best salesmen I have ever listened to. 1 - There is something kind of hypnotic about listening to him speak, it is nothing to do with what he says, its his rythm and inflection. In fact there has to be in order for him to get away with talking for so long to say so little. 2 - He answers every question with a sales pitch. Every single one. He is totally focused on what microsoft is doing. If you asked him what he thought about gender issues or crime in a public forum his answer would end with '... and thats part of what we are doing at microsoft'. 3 - His clarity of thought and expression is exceptional. It may come from practice and sticking to scripts or it may be just because he is a very sharp guy. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Ged Byrne | I'd like to know what was said. Has a transcipt appeared anywhere on the web? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Sum Dum Gai | Maybe my view of the future just doesn't mesh with Bill's, but I've never found him to be particuarly compelling to listen to. Then again, he's usually marketting towards people less tech savvy than I am, so perhaps that explains it. |
| Thu 04 Mar | C Science | Bill seemed to be on-key as always with Charlie Rose. You have to keep in mind that Bill was also doing rounds with CS students at Boston-area elite schools, so he had to stick with the unknown future having "so much" potential. I wonder what was said to the MIT students. |
| Algomod Technologies Corporation | Wed 03 Mar | Developer |
| Anybody heard of this recruiting firm? how are they? |
| Wed 03 Mar | Should be working | They're horrible. And no, I haven't heard of them. |
| Thu 04 Mar | x | Sounds like a front for someone fencing WMD's. I'm sure Dr. Evil must be on the management team... |
| Thu 04 Mar | Code Monkey | One quick check on a technology company I always do is plug its url into the wayback machine and see their 'old' web pages. It is always interesting to see... http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.algomod.com As my Indian coworkers would say looks like a 'body shop' |
| Code Complete 2 presentation by Steve McConnel | Wed 03 Mar | Jetguy |
| In January, there was a discussion in JoS about Steves upcoming Code Complete 2. If you are interested in Steve McConnell and Code Complete 2 and live in the Puget Sound (Seattle) area, you are welcome to attend Steves presentation this Monday, March 8th. I believe that this will be Steves first presentation anywhere on Code Complete 2 materials. More information at http://www.wsa.org/events/event.asp?EventID=376 or ping me at mikem at jetsoft dot com for more info. Event is free for WSA members and NWCPP members, $15 for others. You can become an NWCPP member for free beforehand if you wanna avoid the charge. BTW, Joel, instead of starting a new thread like this, I originally added this message to the old thread http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=103684 but to my surprise the thread was not resurrected as a recent topic. Curious. Hence the new thread on an old topic. |
| Wed 03 Mar | The real Entrepreneur | I'm still waiting for his book on managing/estimating schedules. But ... it's way behind schedule. |
| Thu 04 Mar | . | > BTW, Joel, instead of starting a new thread like this, I > originally added this message to the old thread > http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?> cmd=show&ixPost=103684 but to my surprise the thread > was not resurrected as a recent topic. Curious. Hence > the new thread on an old topic. The technology of this forum is a disgrace! |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gertjan | Maybe it has occured to you that this forum never bumps threads. They appear in order of the original creation. That's a design decision. I tried to follow this approach on a forum I run because I hoped it would promote the creation of (new) on-topic threads, but it got people confused instantly. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Li-fan Chen | Jetguy, are you spamming this forum? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Jordan Lev | 'The technology of this forum is a disgrace!' Ahh, the technology may be a disgrace, but then you don't understand that technology should serve a purpose (which it does very well here), and not just be advanced or cool or feature-filled for its own sake. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Jetguy | >> Jetguy, are you spamming this forum? Gosh, I didn't think I was spamming this forum. Steve McConnell has been discussed in this forum several times, all I did was let you know of a free meeting where they can hear him speak on a topic of interest to me and other typical JoS readers. I don't make any money out of it (I'm a volunteer with the WSA when I'm not writing code). Steve doesn't make any money out of it (he's speaking for free). The WSA is a nonprofit organization promoting the state's software business, and they don't make any money either. Sheesh, it's not like I tried to sell you penis enlargment pills or something. |
| Thu 04 Mar | just sooper | Does anyone know if Code Complete 2 is going to be a revision or new material altogether from the original Code Complete? |
| Thu 04 Mar | adfklsj | It's a revision Some of it is on-line at http://www.stevemcconnell.com Hurry - it's disappearing fast |
| Thu 04 Mar | just sooper | I guess I can skip buying the OG code complete and just wait till june to buy CC2 then. I would love to get my hands on the first 9 chapters if anyone happened to download them before they closed. Please feel free to email me. |
| Thu 04 Mar | . | > Ahh, the technology may be a disgrace, but then you > don't understand that technology should serve a > purpose (which it does very well here), and not just be > advanced or cool or feature-filled for its own sake. I repeat: The technology of this forum is a disgrace. Searches do not return proper results. If you want to post to an old thread and revive it, noone will ever see it since it drops off the website after a while. You have to post a new thread to get it going again for which you usually get a remark saying 'This has been discussed before.. blah blah..' which results in a first paragraph explaining you did the search, but either can't find anything or it is too old... As you can see, the technology in here is half-baked (which I think it Joel's own term). You don't need fancy pants technology to fix what I described above. Of course this forum doesn't generate cash and therefore is not on the priority list. But I had to say it since so many people seem to be using it. |
| Microsoft ISV Empower programme. Grrrrr! | Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn |
| Well, after reading about this in the thread last week I decided it was time to go for it. I went though and (eventually) after 2 gruelling hours (caused by inflexibility in the MS website) managed to lodge my application. Got a reply on Monday saying that they couldnt accept me onto the programme yet because I have a blank company website. Hellooooo? Isnt the idea of the Empower ISV programme that its for startups and new companies... to empower them with the tools they need for the first year. They said the reason for non-acceptance was because without the info. on the website they couldnt verify I really was an IT company. What sort of a response is that? Theyve got my company name, its clearly a UK limited company. Within a minute they could have looked it up on companies house and seen its an IT company thats been trading for 8 years. They could even get at my last years accounts. But ohhhh nooooo. Ive got to have a bloody website (that anyone could create with anything on it) to prove what Im doing. Anyway. I responded suggesting, politely, that they can check the validity of my application by recourse to the Companies House website and they failed to respond. Now I know that sometimes I can be a little brash in my approach but I like to give people one chance. No reply. So today I wrote again simply asking if they could acknowledge receipt of that email. This is two polite messages. Restraint and a privilege indeed. No reply. What sort of a fucking company is this? I guess theres one group of people who pirate software because they dont want to pay for it, but theres probably another group, who would legitimately buy software, but get so pissed off by the processes and twats that Microsoft employs that they feel pirating is the more valid thing to do. Perhaps those ragheads who keep trying to blow up the US were just previous customers of Microsoft. Get me that phone directory. Is it B for Bin or L for Laden? Im gonna join up. |
| Wed 03 Mar | SteveA | Gwyn, No offense since you are obviously aggravated, BUT, the website does say you will need a company website to apply. I havent applied yet because Im in the process of creating our website -- and now I'll DEFINTLEY make sure I do that before applying. In the future, Id suggest you do all the steps they say before applying. |
| Wed 03 Mar | karthik | < |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | I have a company website, it's blank. The requirement I read says that within 6 months you must announce your product on the company website. Perhaps the other requirement is buried somewhere amongst the 2 hour trawl. I did ask them where it was specified but obviously they didn't reply so that's no good. I admit I may not have followed the process, but really it's the fact that they don't reply that gets my goat!. Anyway, Osama just called me back. We're popping out for a chat over a couple of sheep's testicles tomorrow night. He seemed a lot keener to have me in his partnership programme... and he didn't even ask me for any money. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Joel Spolsky | Oh, this is rich. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | Good Lord. A response from Captain Joel Pour quoi? |
| Wed 03 Mar | Waiter | > Oh, this is rich. Told you to go easy with the chocolate sauce on those profiteroles |
| Wed 03 Mar | Saddam Insane | Gwynn have you read the fine print of Osama's Partner Programme? There is a little clause in there about suicide attacks that could prove to be a bigger headache than a blank website in the long run. Also, the government is getting ready to really clamp down on terror cells, they are gonna get the RIAA to go after them! |
| Wed 03 Mar | Simon Lucy | I'll agree the sign up procedure is byzantine in nature but its pretty clear that one of the requirements is that you have a running website with an indication that the nature of your business is to deliver software. Mind, when I applied the Netgear router was having one of its off days (now replaced) so I had to make a number of calls to get it sorted out. Then they didn't bother charging the credit card I'd put on the form but rang me another week later demanding payment. Once that was sorted out it all happened and the big grey box arrived yesterday with scads of Microsoft marketing stuff as well as the MSDN release. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Well, Gwyn might be a little riled up here, but the basic point seems valid -- why should a new software development company that hasn't yet released anything be required to have a web site? At best, it might be rather silly to publish a web site when you don't have anything to offer to the public. Having a web site for Xyzzy Corp that just says 'Exciting software products... coming soon!' isn't particularly useful. At worst, if the company's operating in stealth mode, announcing your presence to the world might be counterproductive. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Ken Klose | I think the solution to all these problems is to just use Linux and open-source tools! Ducking. Running. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | Robert - You're absolutely right. And this is one of the points in my reply to them. I thought about ringing up the 'regional support centre' but the country code was 49, I think, and I've got no idea where that is but you can bet your arse it's not going to be somewhere where they understand English without you having to repeat youself a lot in children's language. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Karel Thönissen (www.hello.nl) | 0049 = Germany. Your implied comments about Germany are inappropriate. Karel Thönissen www.hello.nl |
| Wed 03 Mar | Gwyn | Did I make any implied comments about Germany? I may have implied in wherever 0049 is (Germany it would appear), English is not their native tongue. And within that country there will be different abilities of speaking a foreign language, i.e. English. Based on these facts, and also my previous experience with foreign call centres, the probability is that I am going to get someone who does not speak English as well as an English person. ps. Your response was wonderfully efficient as I have come to expect of 0049ers. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Emperor Norton | 'ps. Your response was wonderfully efficient as I have come to expect of 0049ers. ' You've already offended the Germans, don't bring the San Franciscoans into this. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Norrick | I think it says a lot about Gwyn that when the time came for him to choose either a) drama or b) to slap a hasty wizard-generated FrontPage site up on his websapce to satisfy MS's program requirement, he chose drama. Stop feeding the trolls, people. Eventually they just slither back under the bridge from whence they came. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Nigel | Buddy, if you're going to have a stroke everytime a multi-national doesn't reply to your emails within a day or two, you're either going to have a short life, or a miserable long one. If you don't like their club, don't join. Go somewhere else. |
| Thu 04 Mar | John Ridout | I had a problem with my Empower ISV application and I called the 0049ers. They spoke excellent English (better than the average Londoner), were polite and resolved my problem quickly. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Karel Thönissen (www.hello.nl) | Gwyn, I am not a 0049 myself, I am a 0031 (-8. We are known for Piet Mondriaan, De Stijl, Edsger Dijkstra, Minix/Amoeba and Python. Karel Thönissen www.hello.nl |
| Thu 04 Mar | Robert Jacobson | Known for what exactly? [g, d, r] |
| Thu 04 Mar | John Ridout | Karel, I was thinking, windmills, tulips and soft drugs. |
| Thu 04 Mar | no name | Gwyn, just announce a "Hello World" app on your webshite, a brain dead requirement deserves a brain dead response. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Paulo Caetano | Regardless of whether or not Gwyn overreacted, this is what I loved the most about the whole story: 'They said the reason for non-acceptance was because without the info. on the website they couldn't verify I really was an IT company.' If this is true, it's about as braindead as it gets, IMHO. Or maybe it's just the new age dawning. It used to be 'If you saw it on TV, it must be true'. In the 21st century, it becomes 'If it's on your website, it must be true'. Hmm... Maybe I should set up some websites and give MS a ring. They have money to spare, and I could sell them some hot (well, bloody cold, actually) property on Mars, with a view to the ex-sea. -- 'Suravye ninto manshima taishite (Peace favor your sword)' (Shienaran salute) 'Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again' (Amys, Aiel Wise One) |
| Thu 04 Mar | Philo | 'Hellooooo? Isn't the idea of the 'Empower ISV' programme that it's for startups and new companies... to 'empower' them with the tools they need for the first year.' [...] 'Within a minute they could have looked it up on companies house and seen it's an IT company that's been trading for 8 years.' Uh, so are you new or are you eight years old? Philo |
| Thu 04 Mar | Gwyn | Both! I've been consulting through the company for 8 years, but now I'm going to start selling my software through it. An IT company but two very different purposes. |
| Reasoning alternatives (static code checker) | Wed 03 Mar | Ron E. |
| Im trying to find alternatives to the Reasoning service: http://reasoning.com/solutions/c_cpp_inspection.html Does anybody know of any? |
| Wed 03 Mar | C Rose | Sounds like lint to me http://www.gimpel.com/ |
| Wed 03 Mar | C Rose | ... oh, or Splint, if you are of the OSS persuasion http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/ |
| Wed 03 Mar | robert | Why bother? It sounds like they are running something like Insure++ or purify on your code, massaging the output, and charging you for the results. valgrind will do the important 90% of that for free. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Ron E. | The difference is that valgrind, Purify, Insure++, etc are runtime checkers while Flexelint and splint are source code checkers. The source code checker is useful because it can potentially find problems before you build. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Employed Russian | > The difference is that valgrind, Purify, Insure++, etc are runtime checkers Insure can find some bugs at compile-time as well. > It sounds like they are running something like Insure++ or purify on your code They aren't (they'd need your input data as well). Instead they build a model of your functions, then perform a limited amount of inter-procedural analysis, and finally verify the results 'by hand' to weed out false positives. In theory, complete search of the model can find all the bugs in your program. Unfortunately, the problem is exponential on the size of the program, and in practice they can only analyze a small subset of the entire model (all of their examples I've looked at were trivially small). This means, that after you've fixed all the bugs they found, you *still* have to do the runtime testing (preferably with Insure/Purify/valgrind), so the added expense is hard to justify, unless you are building a safety-critical system. Alternatives: This page lists some: http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/aadebug.html In particular, http://www.polyspace.com/ appears to be exact alternative to reasoning.com |
| Open source... rat race ? | Wed 03 Mar | Demotivator |
| Any comments on this topic here ? http://news.com.com/2100-1014-5168921.html?tag=nl ... Any pertinent ones from open source zealots out there ? |
| Wed 03 Mar | Joe Hendricks | I'd suggest you visit the huge Slashdot thread on this for the open source zealot perspective :-) |
| Wed 03 Mar | Clay Dowling | Mostly SCO is grasping at straws, trying to save their sorry selves. Their business hasn't been hurt by Linux, but by the fact that they have consistently produced a poor product. They've been embarassed by the fact that a college student and a bunch of hobbyists could produce a superior product in their spare time. Not that I'm biased or anything, but I've never met an SCO system that couldn't be improved by pulling the plug. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Li-fan Chen | What's going on right now is a really bad cycle, where SCO persist in presenting lose-lose situations for everyone and playing the bully. I don't know if their tactics will buy them much of anything. Whenever I see the SCO CEO speak I wonder what it must be like when Bill Gates spoke out against the copying of his company's source back in the haydays--which basically makes way for the lot of us to bring home the bacon using closed-source software 'right of usage' licensing. The difference between what BillG was arguing about is light and day from what I am reading from the SCO CEO--so I am not making direct comparisons. Most everyday open source contributors lack (to one degree or another) the sort of legal foresight that would have prevented this whole mess. Compare to the SCO folks though, the SCO arguments are completely wacked. The open source world is as a whole happy to receive some leaky-license immunization out of this whole fiasco and will take extra care in utilizing certain phrases in their licenses or to make their development process less prone to such legal attacks. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Call me Bill | Darl McBride is to be commended for having the vision and bravery to pursue this issue in the face of hostility from a global cabal of open source zealots. In a few years time, popular culture, including the media, will see McBride's assessment of the GPL as being inspired and logical. It's a pity most politicians and journalists don't understand the full consequences of the GPL. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Li-fan Chen | >Darl McBride is to be commended for having the vision and bravery to pursue this issue in the face of hostility from a global cabal of open source zealots. Let's try to rephase what you said, for example: The British Empire is to be commended for having the vision and bravery to pursue this issue [of the american independence] in the face of hostility from a global cabal of colonial anti-taxation zealots. Yes, the americans read the same bloody books to build the same bloody farms, and a few british scholars was surely involved in getting a ship/bridge/castle/black smithing facility/town or two built, but does this mean that britain owns the united states? Who's hammer and sweat did all the work? Would you say the work is completely unoriginal? What's at stack is not just a few header files, what's at stake is a lot of original code written by the open source folks. You may not like them, but I don't see how that makes Darl McBride original for trying to claim all of it. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Eric Debois | Hey.. the dudes a troll.. and a rather bad one at that |
| Wed 03 Mar | Chris Tavares | The objections to SCO's claims are, for the most part, not about open source, free markets, or any of the other smoke & mirrors they've been throwing around. At least, everyone rational (which, granted, is a fairly small number of people) should ignore the FUD. The big problem with the SCO claim is: 1) They claim they own certain IP. 2) They refuse to clearly identify what this IP is. 3) There is no evidence that that actually do own any of this. The basic problem is that SCO's basic claims are, for the most part, bald faced lies. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Eric Debois | >>>The basic problem is that SCO's basic claims are, for the most part, bald faced lies. Yes. One has to wonder what the heck they are really thinking. Is there a plan behind it or is it just the desperate flailing of a dying company? As if the situation with Novell, IBM and RedHat wasnt sufficent to dismember SCO completely, they have to go and pull new enemies into the mix. For what? If they had any solid evidence up their sleeves we would have seen it in the IBM suit by now. All they are producing is more FUD. I cant see any other outcome of this than SCOs death. Either as a direct result of the lawsuits, or because noone in their right mind will ever buy their system again. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Clay Dowling | So there will be some good to come out of it. If SCO disolves, they won't try foisting off any more of their bad operating systems on people for a lot of money. |
| Wed 03 Mar | hoser | Check out the chart on SCOX: There was good support at $14, but the down-trend has broken through that level solidly. Certainly an indicator of investor sentiment: noone buys the story, and if they did they're looking to get out. The next real test of support is at $10, and if it doesn't hold there, its going to $4, and fast. I wonder if McBride is taking notes on the the Ebbers/Skilling stories? Cop a plea early and rat out your friends. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Call me Bill | What's at stake is ownership of intellectual property. The stuff we create every day. It's a pretty important topic. The analogy with American independence is interesting, but could equally apply the other way around. McBride wants to stop freeloaders. That's what the British were, in their claims for unearned taxes. Theft comes not just from imposed payments, but also from unpaid payments. |
| Wed 03 Mar | mb | Bill--are you a troll or not? The freeloader here is McBride. He claims that your software is owned by him. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Call me Bill | No, I'm a troll. McBride doesn't claim he owns any of my software. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Call me Bill | Grrr .. editing. I originally wrote NOT a troll but changed the phrasing. |
| Wed 03 Mar | Mike | 'but I've never met an SCO system that couldn't be improved by pulling the plug. ' Maybe not, but it seems a lot of retailers disagree with you. The phrase I'd heard in the industry is you look around any shopping mall and you will find SCO customers. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Stephen Jones | Dear Bill, How do you know SCO doesn't claim to own any of your software? Or that I won't threaten to sue you because I claim to own it? What this case is about is extortion. If the wind blew from the South would you expect a Mexican to sue you because you're freeloading the air you breathe? |
| Thu 04 Mar | Call me Bill | I know that because SCO has not claimed to own any of my software. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Richard P | Dude. He's a troll. 'Call me Bill [Gates]'. Can you GET any more obvious? ...And I don't see any retailers running SCO that a) weren't doing it a looooooooong time before Linux had any commercial support b) aren't currently actively in progress of moving to Linux or Windows. I suspect Linux would get more converts than Windows because a) it's an easier port and b) the whole reason they chose SCO over proprietary-hardware UNIX was probably per-unit cost in the first place. I've never heard anything good about SCO. Every SCO customer I ever met picked SCO just because it was a commercially-supported UNIX that could run on cheap Intel boxes, not because it had any redeeming qualities over Solaris, AIX, or HPUX. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Eric Debois | So far SCO hasnt filed any lawsuits regarding copyright or patents, or even licenses, only breach of contract. None of the lawsuits has anything to do with the GPL directly. All the anti linux, anti gpl stuff SCO has been putting out is just hot air. |
| Thu 04 Mar | T. Norman | If they don't file criminal charges against the CEO and other execs of SCO after this fiasco, expect more scenarios like this from dying companies that have nothing to lose and everything to gain from their extortion efforts. |
| Thu 04 Mar | Justin Johnson | The best way to understand this is as an elaborate pump-'n'-dump scam. SCO is owned by the Canopy Group, a holding company controlled by Angel Investors. They look for dead or dying companies with IP (as SCO was before all this happened), buy them, and start suing everyong in arms's reach for one of three outcomes: 1. The stock price jumps up, increasing the value of Canopy's investment, which helps them when... 2. The target of the lawsuit, a big moneybags corporation simplies buys them for less than the cost of settling the lawsuit, or... 3. They actually get a ruling favoring them--which is a long shot, but possible--and get some settlement money. That's why SCO, a pissant vendor of a dying unix variant, is suing IBM, Chrysler and Autozone, and talks up going after Google. They're trying to make themselves so bloody annoying that one of the parties decides its cheaper to simply shut them up with cash. There's also the possibility that a big company doesn't want to risk an adverse ruling, and buys them to avoid that possibility. I don't remember the other names, but SCO isn't the first company the Canopy Group has done this with. Bill, I don't know if you're a troll or not, since you're close to the party line here on this issue, but there's no IP infringement demonstrated or even plausibly suggested. Their arguments amount to 'Linux couldn't be this good, this fast, without containing our IP'. Their specif |