| last updated:24 May 2004 15:07 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 23 May 2004) | View Other Weeks |
| The 'Holy Grail' of software revisted. | Sun 23 May | Berlin Brown |
| We ask the question, how do you develop, really good software, and typically, the answer includes an approach with requirements documents, design, testing, coding, on and on. But every time, I read these solutions, I think wow these solutions are very general, not very specific. In any case, there are schools and books devoted to such a question and it is not an easy question. But I do propose for future posts on this thread and posts on comp.software-eng to included specifics. How many people worked on gathering requirement docs? How long did it take to develop the requirements? How long did you spend on design? How many people make up your development team? How many people make up your test team? What versioning software do you use, CVS, SUBVERSION, etc? How big was your project, SLOC? How industry was your project in? People comment on how well linux is documented, and it is true, I wish there were similar FAQ style webpages out there for software engineering and project management? just my 2 cents |
| Sun 23 May | Brad Wilson | > How many people worked on gathering 'requirement docs'? > How long did it take to develop the requirements? None. We do not have formalized requirements docs. We use agile planning, which means that the developers are really only focusing on what's coming in the next few weeks. The customer representative contains the overall system requirements in whatever form they wish. They aren't an issue until implementation time. > How long did you spend on 'design'? A couple percent, at the most. We generally only designed the complex system-level pieces of the system. The rest fell out during implementation. > How many people make up your development team? 3, to start. A 4th hired on about 3 months ago. > How many people make up your test team? We don't have a dedicated test team. > What versioning software do you use, CVS, SUBVERSION, etc? Subversion 1.0 > How big was your project, SLOC? I don't believe these measures have any value in the questions you're asking. There are approximately 500,000 lines of code in our application suite. > How industry was your project in? Marketing |
| Sun 23 May | Ron | > How many people worked on gathering 'requirement docs'? 1 or 2 >How long did it take to develop the requirements? typically two hours to about a week, then minor revisions back and forth >How long did you spend on 'design'? Around 25% of total project time on average, then 45% code and implement (and unit tests), and rest on integrating, bugfixes and formal qualification testing. >How many people make up your development team? 50-60 in our department, with 4-15 on each project, typically. But there is overlap since the core group (~5 people) kind of work on all projects simultaneously. >How many people make up your test team? 3-5 >What versioning software do you use, CVS, SUBVERSION, etc? Sourcesafe >How big was your project, SLOC? We don't use LOC, so who knows, but it takes around 8 hours to compile on a 2.4Ghz P4 (the source files are 2GB on disk). >How industry was your project in? Aerospace >I wish there were similar FAQ style webpages out there for software engineering and project management? There are tons of books, check your local bookstore. |
| Sun 23 May | Berlin Brown | How industry was your project in? and I apologize for not previewing my post What industry are you in? -- sounds a lot better. |
| Changing Windows XP | Sun 23 May | RP |
| Do you know of a way to hack a couple of things on Windows XP? Id like to be able to add more folders to the start menu and decide which applications go to the list of recently used applications (I hate it when he puts MSN Messenger and WinRAR in there). |
| Sun 23 May | blaZiT | No need to hack windows to do that! For recent used files, just drag and drop the icon of the program on the list. To remove right click on the icon and say delete. Add folders to programs menu. Click on start then right click on all programs and choose explore. Now windows explorer pops up in the folder start menu. To create new folders just do what you normally do to create folders and copy/paste your program shortcuts into their. Not the real app. But the shortcut. |
| Sun 23 May | Kyralessa | TweakUI for Windows XP will let you restrict which programs can appear on the recently-used list. The setting is under Taskbar > XP Start Menu. You can get TweakUI from: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp |
| On Math | Sun 23 May | alleB |
| I had a very poor math education when I was in school. Of course that means that nowadays I have zero knowledge on all things mathematic. Do any of you guys know of any math classes for adults? |
| Sun 23 May | OffMyMeds | I posed the same question last year on forums.gentoo.org and this book came back highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521017076/qid=1085357469/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-0704145-2236027?v=glance&s=books&n=507846#product-details It's targeted as a survival study guide for science and engineering students who got screwed (or screwed themselves) on their math education prior to college. I liked the look of it from the details on Amazon and bought it. I haven't made time to get into it yet though, so all I can say is that it still looks like the best option for self study. Maybe I should be looking into taking a class somewhere though, given my lack of discipline as displayed above. We have an excellent community college system where I live. If I can find the time and maybe get my employer to pony up for it, I might take a look there. |
| Sun 23 May | OffMyMeds | Sorry for the ridiculously wide link. I don't know why I thought it would wrap. Should a moderator decide to remove it, the book is called _Maths: A student's Survival Guide_ by Jenny Olive and is easy to find at Amazon. |
| Sun 23 May | Warren Henning | Out of curiosity, does the math you'd like to learn have any connection to programming you'd like to do (I'm not being critical, I'm curious)? How far would you like to go? Teaching oneself math requires discipline most people don't have. I guess the key is not cheating on reading things over, and not going any further until you've mastered what's already been presented in a book. That's why it's so terrible to fall behind in a math class: your lack of comprehension compounds itself as time goes on. Also, be sure to do lots (more than you would in a class) of problems, including some challenging ones. At football games in America, we chant: 3.14159, sec tan cos sin, gooooo math! Not really. |
| Sun 23 May | Greg Hurlman | The link worked OK for me, but just in case for others... http://tinyurl.com/27gzo |
| Sun 23 May | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | >> Do any of you guys know of any math classes for adults? Yeah. Its called U-N-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y. |
| A+ Certification: cost and difficulty? | Sun 23 May | Certification Sycophant |
| On vacation this month I wandered into an unloved book outlet store and found a rack of those cheat sheet notebook page size plastic coated cards. A cheat sheet on C++ next to one about beer, etc. Anyway, they had three different A+ certification refresher cards. I was curious and looked them over. Each one was a review of A+ certification software and hardware concepts. Now, I have no IT certifications, although I am a long term techie with a BSEE and do the usual build and fry my own boxes from scratch all the time. The general level of dfficulty of all the cards was approximately the same as that which a baked potato or a head of lettuce could master. So, sports fans - debates about career tracks being a different topic - what does A+ certification cost? What is the lowest entry level of such certification? Who (what testing centers that is) does the testing? And is it *feasible* (advisable that is) to simply buy a cram course or book and take the tests w/o much study? As is the case with any established IT topic, everything in NGs and on the web Ive yet found about A+ is highly self referential and uninformative. Thanks in advance... |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | You forgot the most important question: 'Since I have a BSEE, does having an A+ cert really add anything to my resume' I'm thinking 'no' Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Certification Sycophant | I've found that with more blue collar and uninformed small company owners, degrees mean little or are even a negative strike against one because they signify abstract intellectual achievement, which is resented in some quarters. Certifications are more blue collar (think of the ASE certificates hanging in a garage) so IMO have more currency with the sub sub Fortune 1000 business client crowd. That's my reasoning. Anyway, as I said the career impact/relevance is not what I wanted to discuss - just the feasibility of winging the A+ tests. |
| Sun 23 May | Dennis Forbes | 'I've found that with more blue collar and uninformed small company owners, degrees mean little or are even a negative strike against one because they signify abstract intellectual achievement, which is resented in some quarters.' Who's the resentful one in this picture? However I think what you might see as 'resentment' might simply be practicality: Your abstract intellectual achievements might be of little value (and indeed may be detrimental for the reason shown above) if someone is looking for someone to install video cards or diagnose why someone's porn directory got deleted. 'Certifications are more blue collar (think of the ASE certificates hanging in a garage) so IMO have more currency with the sub sub Fortune 1000 business client crowd.' Apologies if this sounds harsh, but if you have a BSEE and are thinking about getting an A+ certificate, then you have done something seriously wrong in your career path. |
| Math library question | Sun 23 May | Philo |
| Most math libraries Ive run into solely use radians for arguments. The problem is that nobody in the real world uses radians. How come Math libraries never seem to implement interfaces that use degrees? Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Joe | I suppose they figure it's easier for you to write 'degrees * Math.PI / 180', than it is for them to write all the wrappers... As to why they chose radians over degrees in the first place, perhaps radians are the standard in math circles (no pun intended), even though degrees is preferred by non-mathematicians? Just a guess... |
| Sun 23 May | Eric Debois | I heard an explaination for this once but I dont recall the details. It has something to do with the relation to Pi and the infinite string of decimals. Its like, some operations are better to do with radians because you can get exact results as oppsed to an infinate string of decimals. Other operations are better to do with degrees for the same reason. |
| Sun 23 May | as | I probably lost touch with the real world some time ago, but I always work in radians. Mathematicians and physicists use them because it makes the equations simpler - eg if you differentiate sin(x) where x is expressed in radians you get cos(x). If you're working with complex numbers, then you can write exp(i.x) = cos(x) + i.sin(x), which simplifies the handling of some differential equations. If you try and use degrees instead, you end up with factors of 180/pi cropping up all over the place. After a while radians just come to seem the natural way to do things - just as working with logs to the base e instead of base 10 does. I should add that my wife and son think I'm barking mad. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | Oh, I'm well aware of the mathematical reasons for using Pi. The only problem is that I think most developers are generally coding against the real world, where bearings are in degrees, offsets are in degrees, torque angles are in degrees... In fact, I cannot think of a single *practical* angle measurement in anything but degrees. I'd be interested to find out the proportion of times Math libraries are called with the Pi/180 factor compared to without - I'm thinking the factor is there a signficant majority of the time it's there, since if you're working in radians, you're not in .Net or Java... (I could be wrong, of course. :) ) Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Danil | 'In fact, I cannot think of a single *practical* angle measurement in anything but degrees.' You sound like someone raised on English units complaining that they cannot think of a single practical length measurement in anything but feet. But anytime you are interested in the length of an arc, the area of a pie slice, the surface area on a sphere, you are going to end up working in radians. Practically speaking, the only case I can think of where degrees are superior are nautical distances (a minute's a mile), and even that is sort of a biassed historical accident (one minute of arc on earth surface being the definition of a nautical mile). Is there some particular advantage to measuring torsion angles in degrees, beyond the fact that everybody does it that way? |
| Sun 23 May | no name | Philo, welcome to GIS. |
| Sun 23 May | ian | Philo, You seem to be incorrect in your initial supposition. The mathematical trig functions use radians _by definition_. If a sin function did not take radians, it would not be the sin function any more, it would be something else. In the real world of engineering (electrical and otherwise) it is IMHO much more normal to need the function that takes radians than one that takes degrees. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | 'You sound like someone raised on English units complaining that they cannot think of a single practical length measurement in anything but feet.' You're so right. Those whole four years of advanced mathematics - I slept through those. Never mind the two semesters of power and transmission lines I suffered through. 'Is there some particular advantage to measuring torsion angles in degrees, beyond the fact that everybody does it that way?' Spoken like a true engineer. Now, since I'm designing and building applications and user interfaces to be used by the 'everybody' referenced above... 'You seem to be incorrect in your initial supposition. The mathematical trig functions use radians _by definition_. If a sin function did not take radians, it would not be the sin function any more, it would be something else.' ? Where did you get this? The sine of an angle in a right triangle is the ratio of the length of the opposite side to the hypotenuse. The angle may be measured in any units desired - it's just an angle. Now, the neat thing about radians is that the measurement of an angle can be defined as the length of the arc subtended by that angle in a circle of radius 1. But the definition of 'sine' isn't dependent on that at all, that I'm aware of; just as the linear measurements have no units whatsoever. I could redefine all of geometry using the angular measurement 'philo' where 360 degrees = 42 philos. The entire discipline would survive just fine. ( sin(5.25)=.7071 ) Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Bill | Philo, get back to work. |
| Sun 23 May | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Yo, Philo. Radians is based off of PI...case you didnt know. So, in a matter of speaking, radians isnt all that arbitary. |
| Sun 23 May | Tom H | '? Where did you get this?' Probably from the definition of the trig functions (although I remembered it from high school the way you described it). http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Sine.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cosine.html |
| Sun 23 May | Christopher Wells | The x87 FPU seems to use radians instead of degrees; a math library that does the same is thinner (more efficient). To implement support for both in your interface, you may overload with a new defined type: double sin(double radians); struct Degree { double value; }; double sin(Degree degrees); |
| Sun 23 May | matt | Sigh. Having (almost) got a maths degree I think I'm qualified to answer this one. This may get a bit technical, but you guys asked for it by ignorantly presuming radians to be arbitrary or silly. Ha. First, from a purely mathematical point of view: Yes, sin is /defined/ as taking radians. And this definition is /not/ an arbitrary one. Radians are the only natural way to define the sin function. Rather like e is the 'natural' base to use for logarithms, multiples of Pi are the 'natural' way to measure angles. The simplest way to explain this is to say that differentiating sin and cos only 'works' if you work with radians. Working in radians, sin differentiates to give cos, cos to give -sin, etc. If however we make up a silly sin function (call it SillySin) which takes argument in degrees, it doesn't differentiate to give cos, silly or otherwise. Why? SillySin(x degrees) = ProperSin( x * Pi/180 ) so d/dx SillySin(x) = Pi*180 * ProperCos( x * Pi/180) = Pi*180 * SillyCos(x) You get lots of factors of Pi*180 popping out that shouldn't be there if things are going to work out right. And yes, until you start differentiating things there isn't really any obvious reason for using radians - hence why radians mode on your calculator seem a bit pointless and confusing until you do a calculus course. But really, I would have hoped people on here would remember some calculus at least... Infact when mathematicians are building up calculus using limits in a very strict way one stage at a time, the sin function is typically /defined/ as a power series: sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7! + ... And the symbol Pi is /defined/ as the smallest zero of the sin function on the positive part of the real line (once you've shown that such a root exists uniquely). That's right, mathematicians don't define Pi as anything to do with circumference/diameter ratios. It's actually /defined/ as a root of the sin function. You might be tempted to think this definition is arbitrary and we could just as easily define 180 degrees as the first root of the sin function but that just wouldn't work, for reasons outlined above, and many others. But for the computer scientists out there - why should a function that calculates sin on a computer, for simple purposes, not take degrees? fair question I guess. Because, all the algorithms for actually /calculating/ the sin function, operate on radians. One example would be the power series above - to calculate the sin of an angle to a given accuracy, you sum up the first however-many terms of that sequence (figuring out how many terms you need to some to get a given accuracy would be a matter for numerical analysis) This only gives the right answer if the number you input is in Radians. So if the input was given in degrees, the function would only have to convert it into radians first anyway, before it could do anything useful with it. As I said, radians is just the natural way of doing trigonometry, and using any other angle measure only involves converting it to radians when you want to actually do any of the calculations. If that bugs you, write a little inline wrapper function that converts, or something. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | Should a programmer deliver a program that elegantly accomplishes the problem domain in the way that makes sense to the programmer, or... should a programmer deliver a program that does what the user needs it to do? That was the root of my question. I still don't think that the mathematical basis of sine has anything to do with the fact that AFAIK, 99% of common usage measures angles in degrees. Calculators can perform trig functions in degrees and radians - WTF can't Math library functions? Sure, I can do the 180/Pi thing myself - but I shouldn't have to. Philo |
| Sun 23 May | DaveF | Matt gives a great answer. As an engineer I'll just add that Philo's belief that 'The problem is that nobody in the real world uses radians' is not correct. As an engineer (optics) I work in radians as much as degrees. It just depends on whether I'm dealing with optical alignment (radians) or hardware orientation(degrees). And quite often I want both radians and degrees, so I just toss in pi/180 and 180/pi factors as needed. Also, per Matt's explanation of the power series approximation to Sin(x) == x for small values of x (in radians). This is very useful, and radians are the unit of choice for first-order analyses. |
| Implementers of SharePoint Portal Server ???? | Sun 23 May | tim |
| Has anyone implemented a typical company intranet via SharePoint? How did it go ? We are currently looking at a re-do of our Intranet. 2 Things are putting sharepoint portal server at the head of the pack : 1) The Search functionality, 2) The close integration with Word, Excel, etc. Just looking for any misc. comments on any surprises you might hit. |
| Sun 23 May | tim | And how is the stability? |
| Sun 23 May | no name | philo, share your knowledge here |
| Sun 23 May | Mark Hoffman | One of my clients implemented SharePoint and Team Services a couple of years ago when they were still relatively new. Overall, they are happy with it, but it's not been without a lot of headaches. The stability hasn't been all that wonderful. They would frequently have to bounce the SharePoint server because it would simply stop responding to web requests. Several phone calls to Microsoft and the best advice they could get was 'Reboot the server occassionally'. Where SharePoint has really shined is the ability to integrate corporate applications with it's document management systems. Rather than having documents scattered across the network, everything is centralized in SharePoint and all of the applications that I write for them use SharePoint as the datastore. Whether it be a fat-client or an intranet web site, we can search and pull from SharePoint. Now...the current version of SharePoint is completely different than the version I've worked with. The new version uses SQL Server for a datastore instead of the hideous Exchange Web Data Store which is largely to blame for stability problems. Overall, although SharePoint has given me tons of headaches, much of that was due to the fact it was relatively new when my client implemented it. Even with all the problems, I'd still recommend it because it does a have a solid feature set and apparently the new version is much more stable. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | I was told I couldn't talk about SharePoint on here. Something about 'guerilla marketing.' However, since I've been building a few portals over the past few months, anyone who needs advice is welcome to email me. :-) Philo |
| The real problem with .NET | Sun 23 May | Name |
| Im sure most of us have heard the parable about the house built on rock and the house built on sand. The house built on the sand washes away with the tide whereas the house built on the rock stands firm. (Well ok just humor me if you havent heard it, its biblical.) We also have houses (applications) built on rock, Win32 API, and houses built on sand, .NET. Microsoft confuses the Win32 API with .NET. They think both are the same when, in reality, they arent, but they should be. Thats right folks, they should be one and the same. If .NET is simply a virtual machine environment then it should expose all of the functionality of the rock its built on, the Win32 API. Unfortunately it falls short of this task. If on the other hand, .NET is a platform, then it should be the OS. Thus, instead of letting .NET wash out to sea, you would have another rock. (Did I hear someone say... AS/400?) Hey Microsoft! When is your new VM OS coming out? |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | If they charge for the .Net Framework and make a handsome change, maybe it would work out.. porting it that is. You gotta remember Win32 is HUGE, to replicate it for other platforms is a requirement for porting .Net Framework. Java on the other-hand most the most part really do rely on a fairly complete abstraction that maps to a very thin layer of Win32 or other platform specific calls. Swing relies on little more than a very fast canvas on all platforms and blits to it. |
| Sun 23 May | Joe | From what I hear, it seems that Longhorn will rely extensively on the .NET framework. Although I'm sure the Win32 API isn't going away anytime soon, the fact that MS is "eating their own dog food" at least shows that they are trying to position .NET as a rock. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | .Net abstracts Win32, to the benefit of both developers and admins. .Net adds garbage collection, memory management, abstraction of complex libraries (writing against the SqlClient library instead of native ODBC code, for example). Abstracting them both makes writing the code easier (especially with intellisense in unfamiliar territory) and makes it somewhat more difficult to write code that will break other apps or the system. In addition, code access security means that admins can control what code runs and what doesn't - even to the degree of allowing certain developers to do certain things. In theory, in a 100% managed code environment, viruses would be impossible (unrecognized code simply cannot execute, or can't affect resources outside its environment). I don't believe you can say the same about a Win32 environment. Now you can argue about the implementation, or the manageability, but I'd venture that the intent is for .Net to be a house of rock in the Win32 desert of sand. But it depends on what you're looking for in development. Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Simon Lucy | And it produces UI that looks like my 10 year old did it. |
| Sun 23 May | Name | The ultimate goal of .NET should have been to become it's own platform not to abstract a platform. .NET fails to choose whether it's a platform or not. It teeters on the edge. Right now it's simply an abstraction layer that has the added benefit of giving developers a nice RAD environment, GC etc etc. I'm definitely not arguing the merits of the current incarnation of .NET because there are many. If .NET matures to become a real platform, (or an OS in and of itself) it will allow exposure to complete functionality of the underlying API. Now if .NET were an OS, it would eliminate the whole .NET VM layer because that would be transparent, which is the way it should be. This is why I think Microsoft should have simply created a whole new VM based OS instead of just a thin layer. Though, this may be their plan for the future. |
| Sun 23 May | Chris Nahr | 'And it produces UI that looks like my 10 year old did it.' Are you trying to keep up with the trolls? Please show me a Win32 program with such glamorous UI that any Windows Forms UI pales beside it... |
| Sun 23 May | christopher baus (www.baus.net) | I personally think it is bad to force users into the VM world. Let's say there is a great new hardware technology in the future, let's call it, WI-FI++. Since WI-FI++ is a hardware technology it makes sense to abstract that in the OS. If Microsoft only provides access to this interface via .NET, I think this is bad. I may want to write a server, or other application that requires that WI-FI++ be near real time and deterministic, and I don't want to take the overhead of the VM. I think Microsoft should continue to support a native interface similar to Win32. To me .NET is the modern day lisp machine. |
| Sun 23 May | Mark Hoffman | 'Microsoft confuses the Win32 API with .NET. ' I don't think MS is confused in the least. They know exactly which is which. Developers on the hand..... As Philo said, .NET abstracts the Win32 API. If there are things that you need in Win32, then you can still make calls to Win32. Of course, this comes at a cost. I've not had time to keep current with Longhorn, but it certainly looks like it will be what you are wanting. 'And it produces UI that looks like my 10 year old did it.' You must be thinking of Java .NET doesn't produce UIs. Developers do and they do it using tools that transcend the .NET Framework. If a UI sucks, then it's because the designer making the UI lacks the talent. |
| Sun 23 May | Joe | Name, I think if .NET were developed in a vacuum, then making it the core of the OS may have been a good approach. But as it wasn't, there are other factors to consider, like time to market and existing legacy code bases. And Christopher Baus makes a good point about VM vs native in regard to hardware support and real-time apps, too. Personally, I think .NET should have been released even earlier than it was, since it fills a crucial gap in Windows development (between the point and click VB'er, and the C++ crowd). I'm glad we didn't have to wait another 5-10 years for it! I will agree that the UI's Visual Studio .NET is capable of producing out of the box leave something to be desired. However the problem there is the set of controls included in the box, not the Framework itself. You'd think if MS wants us to write apps that conform to the look and feel of the currently shipping OS (Win XP), that they would have made it a little easier to do. Instead, we got manifest files and Application.EnableVisualStyles(), which also forces us to run arround setting the proper FlatStyle attribute on every textbox and button in the entire application. Blech! And mind you, that doesn't work for all controls, either... TreeView, for example, still sticks you with 3 border choices: None, FixedSingle, or Fixed3D, which are all pretty ugly. It really is a lot of work to make a UI that shines as nicely as Office XP/2003 or VS.Net. |
| Sun 23 May | Brad Wilson | 'To me .NET is the modern day lisp machine.' The irony is, this is read according to the person. Someone who loves VMs reads this as a compliment, not an insult. The LISP Virtual Machine was an amazing feat of engineering, decades ahead of its time. |
| Sun 23 May | Green Pajamas | As Joe said, the real problem in creating UIs is with the controls in .NET, not with the .NET itself. Not all of these controls support right-to-left (or mirrored) text either. .NET 2.0 will support Office 2003 style UIs. Not so sure whether support for RTL (mirrored) controls would improve or not. By the way, it's really easy to create new controls in .NET. In fact, Windows-based controls seem easier to create than web-based ASP.NET controls. The 'real problem' with .NET is that it has evolved or extended itself to other territories too. Initially it was simply NGWS and ASP+ - to create Web Services and web-based applications. It was probably targetted to enterprise development. That's why we dont see *real* support for *real* Windows-based UIs in .NET - not before .NET 2.0. About the VM or .NET OS thing. Two or three days back, a friend was telling about some research in his university for creating an OS that executes .NET applications without any need for an additional runtime (something of that sort). I thought it was a pretty stupid idea or probably I didn't get it right. It turned out that Microsoft was funding it. They have to shell out their huge R&D budget some way or the other. But the *real problem* that is often attributed with .NET is also the source of its integrity. The huge 23+ MB file that we're afraid of. If that huge file was broken into smaller components which could be redistributed separately, we would have something on the lines of Java. There's J2SE, J2ME, J2EE, JWSDP, etc and a huge pile of JSRs. |
| Sun 23 May | Dennis Forbes | 'By the way, it's really easy to create new controls in .NET.' The difference, though, is that when Microsoft releases the .NET 2.0 Framework with new controls, behind the scenes these controls will be native code (as most of the Framework is -- clean layers atop native code), and thus will perform excellently. Creating your own control generally entails 100% managed, which for GUI widgets is less than spritely. |
| Why Google will not win in the search war | Sun 23 May | K |
| http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html Notice the Top 10 Gaining Queries( Week Ending May 17, 2004) and Top 10 Declining Queries (Week Ending May 17, 2004) Around 30% of them can be called intelligent. Questions about Iraqi prisoner abuse (lynddie england), the American who was unfortunately killed (Berg) Majority of them are just moronic. Like Orlando Bloom, Alexandra Kerry (who showed her tits), Troy ( a movie). This is more or less the pattern in the zeitgist for any month. Inference? The people who use google - or the **people who matter** are the ones who dont look for real relevance. If they type Alexandra Kerry, they just want to see Kerrys tits. and not Sharon Stones. The barrier of entry to satisfy such people is very very less. It proves beyond doubt that people are not looking for brilliance or even **relevance** here. Google will tell you which Alexandra Kerry tit site is the **most** popular. But the jokers who are searching are not looking for brilliance. Till now, all other search engines sucked abysmally. Even if they improve a bit and provide some relevant results, the days of google being undisputed No 1 is over. Even with their search results sucking, Yahoo is just some percentage points away from google. This is not to say Google would lose the search war. Hardly that. But it cannot win decisively either and become a monopoly. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | I think the biggest way Google can win is to create two version of the site. Google, and google moderated. One would be militant about filtering out crap, one would be as it is now. I think there are people in Google who probably feels the same way but aren't really convinced it's possible for such a search engine to exist (where will all the moderation monkeys come from) and still be as cool as the current google. If Google can seriously fix 90% of the problems they are having now, and still keep the secret to itself, other search engines will have to work much harder to proof their worth. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Best way to go about it is probably in fact using things like Gmail and snooping for PGDs... or Paul Graham Dollars... or words that are relevant to your life. If you use this and map like minded people together, you (as google) will be able to tell relevent clicks from irrevent ones. I click on 5 links.. 3 are deceiving... Someone clicks on 5 links.. 3 are deceiving... Someone+1 ... same thing Someone+2... same thing.. Statistically the one that gets clicked on the most are the most relevant.. the ones everyone is ignoring is crap. You keep at this for a while and the order of things will be just beautiful. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Okay so you need a spy like Toolbar that listens to clicks too, but then a url redirector will do that for you too (see google cached pages). |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Hell, just add a survey to every google cached page at the top. [Click here if this is page is irrelevent] [Click here if this is really relevant] Again, you need PDGs using something like GMail to put people into groups. Unfortunately to link the two together people will have to learn to give a little. They need to log into Google Passport so that GMail PDGs talks to Toolbar PDGs. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Once you have this and thousands of CS BSes will be writing a paper about this. |
| Sun 23 May | Eric Debois | K > I think you are missreading the data. You are assuming that people only ever search for one type of things. I would think its more like, everyone has special interestes, but those are very diverse. But the car people, the computer people, the sports people and whatever, all go googling for brittny spears every once in a while. If they has statistics for 'Frivolus' vs. 'Serious' searches, I bet the serious once would win. |
| Sun 23 May | David Heinrich | What the hell are you some of you talking about? Google has this thing called 'Google Safe Search'. You can choose to filter results with strong or moderate filtering. There's no need for 'two separate Google sites'. Now, I don't think that Google will become a 'monopoly'*, but it has strong advantages over every other search engine. The closest one compared to Google is AllTheWeb. Google has some major advantages over other search engines. The thing that I appreciate the most is that it is a spartan website (so is AltaVista and AllTheWeb), without lots of crap all over the place. It's just about the business of providing me with search-results. The text-ads that come up are even useful to me at times (especially when I search for something like 'Health Savings Account'). Google appears to have got the message: Users don't like pictures (unless they ask for them, see porn). When searching for something, I just want plain-text and very fast results. One should also note that there is a psychological advantage to speed. In terms of significance, would it really matter if Google took 2 or 3 seconds to produce results, instead of it's current instantaneous results? No. But there is something deeply satisfying about getting a result in a time-frame that appears almost instantaneous. * People talking about Google becoming a monopoly have been fooled by Statist definitions of monopoly. On the free market, with no State-instituted barriers to entry or State-priviledges, there can be no monopolies or monopoly-prices, even if one company has 100% market-share, because if that company earns enormous profits, it encourages other entrepreneurs to enter the field, until the profit-rate approaches the natural rate of interest. The reality is that all real monopolies (e.g., patents) come because of State-granted priviledges. |
| Sun 23 May | Dennis Forbes | Google wasn't the first search engine, you know -- there were others before it that Google sent to the grave. Having said this, and just repeating what Eric said, the 'most popular' are intersection sets between millions of people, but each of those millions of people also look for highly specialized things as well: I don't think many people will proclaim 'Well I'm just looking up a boy band, so I'll use X, but when I want to look for something serious I'll use Y'. You find one that satisfies both. |
| Sun 23 May | Simon Lucy | If there are one billion people making searches (which is a not unreasonable estimate), why on earth would the top ten, or least ten be in any way relevant? continued in statistical/odious_idiocies_I_have_known |
| Sun 23 May | hoser | The days of 'winner take all' are over. And that applies to Google as well. The difference is that Google seeks (from what I can tell) to merely do their job well. They employ just under 1000 people, and from what I've seen are quite profitable at that. They seem to be rolling out new services aggressively. They will succeed. Microsoft on the other hand does not consider a project a success unless its a Windows/Office grand-slam homer. By this standard, Microsoft will perpetually fail. The days of winner take all are over. Success belongs to companies that can execute efficiently at many things. Ones that can adapt quickly through true added value. |
| Sun 23 May | Tom H | I expect Google will be the search site of choice as long as it treats it's users with respect. Many web sites seem like they're trying to annoy or deceive people with unmarked advertising, spam, intrusive or popup ads, etc. Google is one of the few who understand that people come back because the site is nice to visit. I'm not saying the other heavyweights are bad, just that they'll have a tough time beating the leader unless the leader drives it's own customers away. |
| Sun 23 May | matt | Hmm. Not sure if I buy that. Just because the majority of a persons searches may be moronic, doesn't mean they won't expect good relevant results in say the 20% of searches in which they're looking for something more obscure/detailed. If the world split neatly into 'moronic search engine users' and 'non-moronic search engine users' then it might work better, but everyone does some amount of non-moronic searching, just some more than others. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | 'Google, and google moderated.' You mean Google and Yahoo? Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Lol, how true Philo :D |
| ASP.NET 2.0 | Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen |
| I have been to MSDN site and I cant really figure this out, when is 2 coming out? When can we expect it to be stable (wait for a couple of years, dont use it before 2006?)? Are they going to "back port" the features added to ASP.NET 1.1? |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | I mean back port as in will you have access to ASP.NET 2.0 or the next version of .Net Framework if you aren't jumping on the Visual Studio.net 2005 bandwagon? If that's not possible, what do Visual Studio.Net 2003 people have to pay to get to 2005? |
| Sun 23 May | Mark Hoffman | I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that you will still have access to 2.0 features without Visual Studio.NET 2005. The reasoning is that you can download the 1.1 version of the Framework today and compile .NET applications without having Visual Studio.NET. However, you won't be able to have the 2.0 Framework work within the current version of Visual Studio.NET, so if you want Visual Studio and ASP.NET 2.0 together, then you will have to upgrade. No price has been given, but I'd expect it to fall in line with their current prices, perhaps just a bit higher. Time for that MSDN Universal subscription! |
| Sun 23 May | Dennis Forbes | 'Oddly enough VS 2005 is scheduled to ship in 2005' Yeah, the name it got after being pushed back several times, finally slipping all the way to 2005. Don't be surprized if it ends up being VS.NET 2006. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Thanks for the feedback! |
| Sun 23 May | Jorel on Software | To be more specific, I've heard Q1 2005. |
| How soon will SUN Microsystems drown? | Sat 22 May | karthik |
| http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Business/SiliconInsider/SiliconInsider_040429-3.html Almost certainly Gosling and Papadopoulos are upto something. And something as big as Java. Even with the recent cash infusion from Microsoft and massive layoffs/outsourcing, SUN can only last for 1.5-2 years. Al its cash reserves will run out. Their current cash reserves is around 3 billion dollars. With nearly a 500-700 million loses every quarter, they will have to close shop or do something dramatic. Its difficult to see LINUX desktops taking off as SUN hopes. It will- like most technology grow popular in increments. And in developing countries, not many people are willing to pay when a pirated Windows will do just as well. I think we can expect something dramatic from SUN in terms of technology in the next one year. |
| Sat 22 May | karthik | Actual link is this. Sorry http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Business/SiliconInsider/SiliconInsider_040429-1.html |
| Sun 23 May | This Space for Rent | YAWN. The demise of Sun, as well as the demise of Apple, has been predicted ad nauseum. Neither company will "drown", simply because Micro$soft won't allow it. And Micro$oft won't allow it because it isn't in its best interest for any of its pseudo-competitors to disappear. |
| Sun 23 May | Data Miner | >something as big as Java< Something as big an irrelevance as Java, maybe. I have had the misfortune to do some JDBC programming (on Sun) in recent months (since Oracle sort of requires/supports it), and it's a pig. All kinds of aggravation with JDK and JRE and J** this and J** that bullshit. Just getting all the right combinations of libraries and environment variables is a royal pain in the a**. And its not as though the language itself is so great. It's C++ with better table manners, and that's not saying much. I actually learned OOP with a 'real' OOP language (Smalltalk), and I used to be a C programmer, so I know what I am talking about. Java totally sucks, because Sun should have made it public domain years ago and didn't. Microsoft keeps playing games with JVM just to keep up the appearance of having credible competition. Just like the WWF, the appearance of competition between MS and Sun is phony - just for the dumb-ass audience (DoJ and Sun). Maybe the idiots at Sun still believe that they are actually competing with Microsoft. In their dreams... Even though I despise Microsoft and all its evil works, I have to admit that C# is what C++ and Java should have been. Of course, Objective-C is better still, but irrelevant, rather like Betamax. C# is VHS. Add to the mix the fact that IBM and even the emasculated (Fiorina'd) HP build better UNIX boxes at better prices than Sun, I don't see much sunshine in Sun's future. Solaris is so inferior to AIX, it's a joke. Even HP/UX is better. Did you know that the standard installation of Solaris 9 (the current one) still installs the 1988 version of Korn Shell? Move over Solaris, Linux is here. AS/400 anyone? |
| Sun 23 May | As400 | My understanding is that Windows will soon run on Sparc. |
| Sun 23 May | karthik | < |
| Sun 23 May | Leauki (Andrew J. Brehm) | 'My understanding is that Windows will soon run on Sparc.' What for? |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | > it isn't in its best interest Look, Microsoft doesn't have to worry if these guys go away, new competition will always replace those going away. Perhaps we can argue that the space Sun fills today is now being eroded by Microsoft, and we are looking at the final and complete eclipse in the next two years, but new software solution domains will always rise and Microsoft may not always be the first one to fill it, hence there will always be new Real Networks, new Adobes, new Apples, and new IBMs right over the horizon. Microsoft will always have competitions. |
| Sun 23 May | Hm. | so I'm the only person in the world that's noticed that microsoft is losing deals to linux? (munich anyone?) that, according to a lot of linux types, linux is as good as windows, and free. sounds to me like microsoft has plenty of competition. that means it's not a monopoly any more. does that make everyone happy? |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | I think from our side the biggest problem is that computer science is a booming industry but we are too pig headed to make it grow well in a way that makes us all rich. It isn't whether Microsoft is a monopoly or not, so let's keep our eyes on the ball and complete some billable hours instead of chatting here all the time!! *finger pointing at me* |
Sun 23 May | blaZiT | so I'm the only person in the world that's noticed that microsoft is losing deals to linux? (munich anyone?) that, according to a lot of linux types, linux is as good as windows, and free.You win some you loose some. What matters is how much you win and how much you loose. As long as you win more then you loose everything ok. And Munich Linux was not free at all. At the end Balmer offered Windows + Support for less then Suse did. The desicsion was more based on politics. I think it had to do with that Suse is german and MS is foreign. A government agency would (or should want to) like to keep tax money in the country. In corporations desktop OS licenses are not that of a big deal what costs more are support (from seller and sysadmin) and support from third party applications that can run on them. Thats why everyone is talking about TCO (total cost of ownership) else yes just download a linux distro and burn it x times. |
| Sun 23 May | Data Miner | Why do so many people have such difficulty spelling a simple word like "lose"? |
| Sun 23 May | Joe | Since we're bagging on Java, I think I'll play devil's advocate :) I actually thought JSP was a godsend when I first started using it. Keep in mind, this was pre-ASP.NET, so I was comparing it to classic ASP. The whole experience was much more OOP friendly. Switching back to today, I can't really talk much about Java, cause I work in a Microsoft shop now. But I know there are new technologies like Java Faces that are supposed to make the GUI end of things more pallatable, and they have the Struts framework now too for MVC structure. Personally, I've always thought JDBC was pretty usable. And of course it was nice that the DB libraries were written in Java themselves, so you didn't have to care about whether DB xxx's lib would work on whichever variant of *nix you happened to be running. I always thought the biggest pain in the arse were the monstrous app servers (ie, Websphere and the like)... |
| Sun 23 May | blaZiT | Why do so many people have such difficulty spelling a simple word like 'lose'? I guess it's because of the way you say it (long o). I will try not to make the mistake again. But I can't guarantee other spelling mistekes ;) |
| Sun 23 May | Berlin Brown | Sun stats from Yahoo finance, please tell me when a multi-billion dollar company with 30k employees will die in 2 years. Employees (last reported count): 36,100 Market Cap (intraday): 12.84B Enterprise Value (23-May-04)³: 11.93B Trailing P/E (ttm, intraday): N/A Forward P/E (fye 30-Jun-05)¹: 193.00 PEG Ratio (5 yr expected)¹: N/A Price/Sales (ttm): 1.16 Price/Book (mrq): 2.30 Enterprise Value/Revenue (ttm)³: 1.08 Enterprise Value/EBITDA (ttm)³: 170.4 |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | Um, with all due respect, you should learn a bit about what those numbers mean. There are some other numbers you need to look at too that tell more of the story. Philo |
| No More "X"s please !! | Sat 22 May | Boycott X |
| Is it just me or are others getting irritated by the letter X in almost everything? XSL,XAML,XML,XHTML, XSD,XUL ,, blah blah blah. I make it a point to avoid all technology begining with the letter X. Till now, i havent felt that i missed something. Go to google, type out any three letter word starting with the letter X and you will find someone trying to con you into buying it. |
| Sat 22 May | Xistentialist | You know, you're Xing out a LOT of good technology with that decision. |
| Sat 22 May | Malcolm X | "The lesser of two evils is still evil." |
| Sat 22 May | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | So, you don't want any presents for X-mas this year!?! Are you NUTS?!? |
| Sat 22 May | Green Pajamas | What about all the Gs and Ks on Linux desktops? :p |
| Sat 22 May | Green Pajamas | And yeah, Es :) |
| Sat 22 May | Chris | I don't know if the OP was making a joke, but really it is quite logical that all those technologies listed start with an X as they are all related to or based off XML in some form. But what is really annoying me is all the other companies such as AMD and about 1 million smaller shareware companies making XP versions of their software and hardware. Now THAT is annoying. |
| Sat 22 May | f(x) = a0 + a1x + a2x^2 + ... | Ah, sorry, but the system I work on uses Xilinx CPLDs. It's hard to go to work and avoid Xs. The PC I use, although a W2K system, runs an X server so I can access the Linux box at the end of the bench. The XEmacs editor has been ported to run directly on Windows, so in spite of the name, it doesn't require an X server. |
| Sun 23 May | Steve Jones (UK) | I kind of know what the OP means, especially as the "X" is short for *e*xtensible. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | I'm xtremely xcited to finally xamine a post where someone xtemporaneously xpounds on the xcessive xpansion of the 'X' in modern xpression. It's xtremely xhausting to xclusively xchange information in x-this or x-that. It xsanguinates my brain, and I xpect it'll be xtinguished soon. Phileaux |
| developing software to semi-pro gambler | Sat 22 May | bluff |
| Ive been kicking ass in online Texas Hold em. Are there other software developers out there that are owning the poker tables? |
| Sat 22 May | Philo | One of the top NYC poker players was doing it to pay the rent when the dotcom bust happened. Until Giuliani started 'cleaning up' the NYC poker circuit. Hmmm... maybe I should find out what he's doing now and avoid it... Philo |
| Sat 22 May | bluff | It's illegal to play Texas Hold 'em in NYC? That place is more conservative than I thought. I'm sure the good players can always play at the casinos in Jersey, though. |
| Sat 22 May | Picknitter | What are some good sites to play poker online? |
| Sat 22 May | BobRoss | I love playing at PartyPoker.com. Texas Hold 'Em rocks! (I even think there's a 'meetup' for hold 'em players, too) |
| Sat 22 May | Chris | PokerRoom.com is good for me. Although I am not too good at it. |
| Sat 22 May | Dave | Check out the forums at http://www.twoplustwo.com That is the top online poker discussion site on the net. You'll get more than enough great advice there. |
| Sat 22 May | Phil Hellmouth | The recent popularity of Poker has resulted in thousands of *terrible* players playing online and onland. Make hay while the sun shines cause these guys won't be around forever. Of the big name players Paul Phillips, Phil Gordon and Barry Greenstein are ex dot com weasels, although Phillips isn't much of a developer. |
| Sat 22 May | Phil Hellmouth | Oh, and Robert Varkoni who won the World Series of Poker two years ago is an unemployed 'systems analyst'. The WSOP of Poker just started today and will have approximately 2500 players and a 25 million dollar prize fund, although first prize is only 5 million. |
| Sat 22 May | Christopher Hester | Glad I'm not the only one. I am doing well playing both Texas and Omaha Hold'em on pokerstars.com. One thing I have noticed is the number of of 'great' hands that seem to be dealt. I have seen 4 of a kind far more online than in live play, and my ace high flush was recently bested by a straight flush. To some degree I attribute this the the number of hands that can be dealt per hour online. However it seems high. Have any others seen this trend? |
| Sun 23 May | bluff | I recommend partypoker.com. Lots of players and there always seems to be an open table. Also, I forgot to mention in my first post that in addition to be an excellent online poker player I'm banging Shana Hiatt. |
| Sun 23 May | Joe | I'm not sure that attributing the higher number of "good" hands to the higher number of hands dealt overall is really statistically valid...afterall, shouldn't there be a proportionate increase in "bad" hands too then? |
| Sun 23 May | anony coward | 'I'm not sure that attributing the higher number of 'good' hands to the higher number of hands dealt ...' Yea. I'd attribute it to astroturf. Someone please delete this whole thread. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | Not so fast, kemosabe... Actually, software developer to card sharp isn't much of a stretch - they're both abstract logic, probabilities, set theory.... Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Brad Wilson | I've already decided that if I get rich of my current venture, I'm going to play poker for a living. :-D |
| Cross-platform desktop applications | Sat 22 May | Sean Cull |
| Ive done some Java and C++ development, and have been looking into developing some cross-platform desktop apps. Ive known about QT (www.trolltech.com) for a while now, but have never really looked at it. At first I was thinking of using Swing, but QT seems like a pretty good way to go. Not to mention it seems to use native widgets, unlike Swing. Anyone out there using Swing or QT for commercial desktop applications? Id like to get some feedback on this. Basically, Id be looking at doing Windows and Mac versions. |
| Sat 22 May | FullNameRequired | Depending on the type of app you are doing, either wxWindows or REALbasic would be a _good_ choice. I use both for different purposes and they are both _good_ at what they do. |
| Sat 22 May | Green Pajamas | Just a quick note. If you think that since Qt has been used in KDE, it's free to use in commercial applications then take a look at this web page from TrollTech's website. http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html Other than that I've no idea about Qt. :) |
| Sat 22 May | Doug | If you wanted to stick with java you might consider the SWT from eclipse: http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/~checkout~/platform-swt-home/main.html I don't know how it compares to other toolkits but eclipse is fairly impressive. |
| Sat 22 May | Li-fan Chen | While we are on the topic of SWT, what's the state of the GCJ (the ahead of time java compiler from GNU). |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | I think there might be something to say for an cross-platform AOT compiler for Mono or Java that backs to FastCGI, but then that's kinda raw and so 90s. However it wins big on the compatibility area because you code everything, you dont' have to worry about some enterprise library company pulling the rug from underneath you, but then your code would be so raw and custom and crash so often no one would do business with you :D |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Some people here will say *cough* philo *cough* your best bet is to do what Microsoft does, write it using Visual C++ 6.0 or Visual Studio.net and ask all the mac and linux users to get VMWare. The cost of ownership for the client is just a few hundred dollars US. Some of your customers will not accept this answer so you'll just have to cry yourself to bed. |
| Sun 23 May | Nic C-L | What about TK? I think that's pretty portable and freely available |
| Sun 23 May | alleB | Swing is S L O W. No matter what 'they' say, Swing is slow as molasses. So, if you want to do X-Platform development, go with C++ and wxWindows. |
| Sun 23 May | John Rusk | Have a look at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000051.html if you haven't already. |
| Zip Scheduler | Sat 22 May | Sauron |
| Is there a shareware/freeware utility which performs recurring ZIP of folders based on period (start date/end date) and file extensions ? (for a given folder) |
| Sat 22 May | Sauron | My other requirement is also a DataBase log which tells you that StuffIt.CPP was in CPP0009.ZIP |
| Sat 22 May | Philo | http://www.winzip.com/prodpagecl.htm Probably the best place to start. :-) Philo |
| Sun 23 May | mb | nant has a zip task. |
| Sun 23 May | Yoey | How about this? ZIP Component 'This component provides industry-standard Zip archive functionality. It is designed to be easy to use. You can pack/unpack a file or folder with a single line of code. If you need to create or extract Zip files on the fly, this component is for you.' http://www.xstandard.com/page.asp?p=C9891D8A-5390-44ED-BC60-2267ED6763A7 |
| Sun 23 May | Simon Lucy | Ummm, scheduling things is an operating system kind of thing. AT (or its variants on Windows NT and above) The egregious scheduler in '98 crontab in *nix |
| Sun 23 May | Data Miner | Assuming that you are running on Windows, you could opt for Perl or install Cygwin and use the *NIX utilities, such as gunzip and cron. |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | 'Assuming that you are running on Windows, you could opt for Perl or install Cygwin and use the *NIX utilities, such as gunzip and cron.' ? Any reason not to just use the Windows Scheduler? I mean seriously - Perl and cron are serious overkill. Philo |
| Beta Testing Pointers | Sat 22 May | Might Just Give It a Whirl |
| What are the qualities of a good beta tester and how do you ensure you get selected? Should you be a programmer or at least have some programming knowledge? Should you even be experienced in the program field?
What exactly are you expected, as part of your job, to report on? Fist impressions, installation, UI, documentation, ... are all parts of a good product. Do you report everything? The background color is ugly? The toolbar is missing the top border? I cant do |
| Sat 22 May | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | Well, sending nice gifts never seems to hurt. The bigger the better, IMO. |
| Sat 22 May | Koz | We send our beta testers a bottle of wine and some chocolates / biscuits. Just a nice gesture, we don't tell them they'll get this before hand so we get enthusiastic participants. |
| Sun 23 May | John Q Tester | Probably wouldn't want programmers, unless the product is a tool for programmers. Developers seem, in general, not all of them, to have too much respect for code. They tend to test for what the code says should happen, not what the design says should happen. Also, a beta tester should have good domain knowledge for the app. You want a user who's more advanced in the app but is otherwise an average Joe in computers, otherwise he'll just work around your problems instead of reporting them. If you can get people who realize that 'Background colour is ugly' and 'Feature foo deletes bar component' are both valid issues but should be given different priorities then your much better off as well. Cheers John Q |
| Sun 23 May | Might Just Give It a Whirl | John Q Thanks, I'm of the opinion that you want people who'll report every oddity they find - from people with a strong domain knowledge (who may naturally jump what may be confusing steps) to domain novices (who'll stumble on them). You can prioritise the returns any way you want (I think) getting as much feed-back as you can is the object. 'Excellent feed-back, just what we need.' is my objective. |
| Sun 23 May | Bevan Arps | Above everything else, I think a good Beta tester has to give good bug reports. For example, don't report 'The background colour is wrong'. Instead, report 'The background colour on the password confirmation dialog doesn't match the colour defined by my desktop theme'. Think 'How can I direct someone to reproduce this bug' - if the developer acting on the bug report can't reproduce the issue, it won't get fixed. Of course, sometimes you can't do more than say 'I was typing in the password field and the application just disappeared' - but do pass on all the information you have. To get selected to beta test a product, you generally need to prove your value in advance so that the company running the beta program knows you will provide useful bug reports. So, start by providing useful (detailed, even) reports on the software you already use. If the company doesn't want to recieve the reports, post them on the web for others to read (that way, a different company can google for your name and see your value). Just my 2c. |
| Sun 23 May | Might Just Give It a Whirl | Bevan Thanks for joining in, way more than 2c in value in there for me. I'm starting to think that what I'm primarily looking for is the definition of a bug. BSOD - that's a bug. Program disappears with the log-in dialogue (that actually happens with this program - under certain circumstances - indeed, a bug. I don't want to start reporting missing 'features' as bugs or is it if ... it looks like it _should_ do XYZ but it doesn't then that's a bug. Normal function for an ABC type application that's missing ... a bug? Menus/Tool-Bar buttons that are enabled when they shouldn't be ... a bug? I think they are but on the other end all these little things may get annoying. Thx again |
| TechEd '04 | Sat 22 May | |
| So hey, about to attend my first MS TechEd conference this week...gotta admit, never been to one of these things, so Im a bit nervous =) Ive picked out all my breakout sessions, but Im curious as to what to expect outside of that. Are the BOF sessions worth going to? How about the Jam sessions? Hands-on labs? And the attendee party? Any thoughts/comments welcome... |
| Sat 22 May | Too many Tech Eds | Brace yourself for a large gathering of pasty, white middle aged men wearing shorts (that are too short) with black socks and dress shoes. Well, I'm exaggerating, but only a little bit. They are a blast, you'll learn a lot, probably eat and drink too much and get a chance to hang out with some interesting, if not poorly dressed, people. |
| Sat 22 May | Elephant | 'a large gathering of pasty, white middle aged men wearing shorts (that are too short) with black socks and dress shoes.' Yeah! That sounds so *HOT* to me! |
| Sat 22 May | Philo | You know about the 'no pants' thing, right? Philo |
| Sun 23 May | Elephant | No pants, or no underpants?? |
| Sun 23 May | Simon Lucy | If one has no underpants, one pants, neh? |
| Sun 23 May | no name | Wow, how will I ever manage to pay attention to the seminars with all those hot studs running around everywhere? lol... |
| Sun 23 May | no name | What's the "no pants" thing? |
| Sun 23 May | Philo | Since everyone just wears khaki dockers anyway, there's this group consensus thing that after the first day everyone just wears swimsuits or running shorts and save on the drycleaning costs. (All the pics are on the first day, so dress up - coat and tie) Philo |
| Sun 23 May | no name | Well that's good! This is San Diego...you're likely to catch heat stroke if you walk around all day in a suit and tie, lol. OK, that's not *completely* true, business people do still dress up for day-to-day work here...but not me ;-) |
| Sun 23 May | Elephant | And of course, if you do decide to wear swimsuits or running shorts, they should be flattering to your package. Hmm...I wonder if anyone will wear a jockstrap or a codpiece or speedos (sp?)... Someone's at the door....someone's ringing the bell... |
| LDAP Browsers | Sat 22 May | Neumonic |
| Hi: Are there any recommendations for a browser to view iPlanet LDAP? Thanks |
| Sat 22 May | Jon Deeming | If you don't mind having Java running, this one's quite nice: http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap/ |
| Sun 23 May | GreenMeanie | http://www.ldapbrowser.com/ |
| Speeding up Dial-Up | Sat 22 May | C |
| Ive read about a lot of services to speed up dial-up. NetSpeed I believe is one of them. Has anyone tried to use services like this or programs that claim to speed things up. Do they actually work? |
| Sat 22 May | Grumpy Young Man | Of course not... 56Kbps is 56Kbps. Their claims are based on caching 'frequently-accessed' web sites, to save an extra 200ms. But it still takes the full 5 seconds to download to your machine. |
| Sat 22 May | Sean Harding | I thought I read somewhere that they re-compress the images on pages you view, so they download faster but look much worse. |
| Sat 22 May | no name | The NetZero(featured often on TV commercials) faq has some info about how this works. This technique seems to be a reasonable way to give speedup over a slow link, assuming that each peer has spare CPU cycles to do the compression/decompression. http://www.netzero.net/signup/faqs-accel.html#R Related to this(perhaps this technique is used by NetZero) is distillation or lossy compression: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fox96adapting.html I've never tried this service, as I can get broadband. Has anyone tried it? |
| Sat 22 May | Stephen Depooter | Yes, as I understand it does work. I am not sure of the actual bandwidth increase. Anyways, the company that makes the software that NetZero and the AOL highspeed dial up service is called SlipStream Data. http://www.slipstreamdata.com/ |
| Sat 22 May | Bored Bystander | The claims of dial up accelerators have always sounded bogus because modems do on the fly compression and decompression. Compression on top of compression adds no advantage. And compressing image data such as JPEGs with any lossless compression technique really adds no advantage at all. AOL has their own image compression layer - '.ART' files. It results in a truly crappy image being returned to the workstation, plus is a non standard format so non AOL users normally can't view ART files. As far as caching: some of the most irritation I have ever experienced online has been in using a local ISP whose whiz bangy satellite caching technology was preventing me from using certain interactive pages because the returned result page would almost never reflect the previous operation. IE, the caching was not allowing a result page to be transmitted back to me. The ISP was stupid and could not be convinced that this may interfere with non trivial web uses (such as online ordering) that could actually cost users real money... |
| Sat 22 May | Chen-li Fan | If you're stupid enough to use AOL, you're stupid enough to believe that you can "speed up" a 56k dial-up connection. |
| Sat 22 May | no name | 1. Speeding up a dial-up connection is relative to the context in which it is used. (i.e. What part are you speeding up.) 2. When I set my connection speed to 38.4kbs it seems to give a more even flow of data. I determined this by starting at the lowest possible setting and working up. If Windows says that I connected at the given speed then I switch to the next higher setting and repeat. I get to 56k and it says connected at 40k so I set it to 38.4k which seems to be a very reliable setting. I don't know if this is an exact science or not, but it is the way I did it. 3. Caching items on your hard drive is sufficient for the average user who only knows how or wants to connect to check their email and perhaps look at Yahoo! 4. GoZilla download manager has never given me a bad download. 5. I have found external modems to be more reliable than internal. As for the technical reason for that, there probably is none, it's just luck. |
| Sat 22 May | blaZiT | As far as I know Mozilla and IE will cache automatically. If you don't agree look at the folder where either browser saves their temp files. |
| Sat 22 May | Matthew Lock | You could subjectively speed up your browsing by blocking all the ad servers. A lot of websites bandwidth is probably 80% banner ads, once you don't download them the web seems a lot faster. Here's a discussion of that: http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/03/30/hosts.html?page=1 |
| Sun 23 May | Dennis Atkins | The compression thing is horrible. Try it once and never again. Want a real speed up? Install an ad blocker, disable java, disable javascript, disable flash. Now your browsing is ten times faster! Hurray! |
| Sun 23 May | mb | don't know if any of the 'speed up' proxies are predictive proxies. that is, you go to a page, and it follows a link or two off the page and starts downloading the linked pages while you're reading the current page. so it seems faster when it gets it right. i imagine most are bogus. |
| French Words/expression used in English | Sat 22 May | French Poster |
| Im currently reading Rick Chapmans in Search Of Stupidity and Ive notice that he uses a lot of french expressions : - Deja Vu (Already seen) - Faux pas (Bad move?) Is there a web site or a book which lists all the French expressions used in English ? Are they widely used in the US ? UK ? Australia ? |
| Sat 22 May | KayJay | They are widely used by all English speaking people, irrespective of nationality. à propos, a good start for a list may be here ' http://french.about.com/library/bl-frenchinenglish-list.htm '- sans the quotation marks. |
| Sat 22 May | tapiwa | because Rick Chapman is a regular on this board, |
| Sat 22 May | GinG | And French people use Latin expression to look smart (vice versa, sine qua non, etcetera, etc...) It would be interesting to know if things are similar in other languages. [Elephant, Why do you want to delete this thread? It has nothing to do with software as many other threads in JoS. I read here more on India, US policy, Iraq and terrorism than in any other political forum I know.] |
| Sat 22 May | deja vu | and how could I NOT post an inane comment on this thread ? *grin* |
| Sat 22 May | rick chapman | +++I'm currently reading Rick Chapman's in Search Of Stupidity and I've notice that he uses a lot of french expressions : - 'Deja Vu' (Already seen) - 'Faux pas' (Bad move?) Is there a web site or a book which lists all the French expressions used in English ? Are they widely used in the US ? UK ? Australia ?+++ French phrases are widely used in contemporary American English. I also tend to use bete noire, fin de cicle, nest' pas, oeuvre, je ne sais quoi, etc. One reason for this may be that my wife has a tremendous talent for languages and is one of those annoying people who actually remembers the langauge(s) they're taught in high school, in her case, French (I have to practice to retain any of my Spanish). As a result, I'm constantly watching French movies and picking up phrases and expressions. Of course, I have to read the subtitles while she's just listening to the dialog. rick |
| Sat 22 May | rick chapman | +++I like to have sex with animals! Arrrgh! +++ The ass, no doubt. rick |
| Sat 22 May | no name | Not to mention that whole thing with William the Bastard of Normandy affecting the English language. |
| Sat 22 May | MediocreDev | Yes, I've noticed that as well. It seems everybody tries to look smarter by peppering their speech/text with French words. I find that EXTREMELY irritating, especially since a lot of those snotty fools can't even spell French properly. I also find it quite hypocritical, with all that anti-French rethoric going on, especially since the war in Iraq. So it's 'Freedom Fries', but we're allowed to say 'voilà' or 'touché'? Je vous emmerde. |
| Sat 22 May | Brian | I think the anti-French sentiment is limited to those not intelligent enough to incorporate French phrases into their communications when appropriate. I tend to use 'vis-a-vis' somewhat regularly. |
| Sat 22 May | MediocreDev | 'I think the anti-French sentiment is limited to those not intelligent enough to incorporate French phrases into their communications when appropriate. I tend to use 'vis-a-vis' somewhat regularly. ' What does incorporating French in your speech have to do with intelligence? NOTHING. It's just trendy, that's all. What's wrong with plain English? Instead of 'vis à vis', use 'towards' or some other synonym as the context warrants... |
| Sat 22 May | Simon Lucy | French has been intermingled with the English language for around a thousand years, it seems a bit pointless to cavill at that now. |
| Sat 22 May | Mr. Petain | Did Rick use the phrase 'We Surrender' ? Because I think that phrase originated in France. |
| Sat 22 May | yet another anon | I agree with Simon - what's the big deal? |
| Sat 22 May | Christopher Wells | > 'Faux pas' (Bad move?) A mistake. > ... bete noire, fin de cicle, nest' pas ... ... bête noire, fin de ciècle, n'est-ce pas ... > 'Je vous emmerde.' tr: 'I annoy you.' > What does incorporating French in your speech have to do with intelligence? Intelligent in the military sense: meaning 'knowledgeable'. > What's wrong with plain English? When I was young my Dad peppered his English speech with 'μεν' and 'δε' ('on the one hand ... on the other hand ...'). I can't immediately think of a plain English word for various things: 'plateau' for example, the flat terrain at the top of a hill. Apart from that, plain English speech is certainly most appropriate, for talking with people who only understand plain English; but, Rick believes his phrases are widely used, in contemporary American English. Incidentally, French Poster, there are some entire phrases that I've seen used by people who are apparently anglophone: especially 'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'. I also find that some words don't translate exactly: for example 'La peur aime l'idée du danger.' loses meaning in English, because 'peur' taking an article anthropomorphises it, makes it like a concrete noun; or 'Le malheur fait dans certaines âmes un vaste désert où retentit la voix de Dieu', because 'âmes' doesn't translate well (people? spirits? souls? minds? bodies?), and neither does 'retentit'. Probably every language is like that. 'I once heard a Welsh sermon in which the word 'truth' was repeatedly uttered in English. Apparently there is no exact equivalent in Welsh' - Geoffrey Madan And, 'efficient' is another word that's heard in Welsh. |
| Sat 22 May | Tayssir John Gabbour | Programming languages also accumulate idioms from others, and there's a definite tension between 'pure' languages and ones which freely accumulate ideas. The idea-accumulating languages have a bad rep because people immediately think of Perl, but in the end I think they are the best kind of programmer's language, as opposed to pure languages. They just need to give programmers control to evolve them. Still though, a lot of damage may have been done by idiot philosophers dazzling their audiences with exotic French words. 'It was as if the translator, rather than helping us engage with ideas and argue over them, preferred to fetishize their foreignness and turn us into dazzled spectators of an exotic scene.' http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/838701.html#cutid1 |
| Sat 22 May | Christopher Wells | > 'μεν' and 'δε'
... which loses something in the translation. |
| Sat 22 May | Tom | Using French words can indeed be pretentious, but then again sometimes there's no English equivalent. I don't even think these phrases can count as French any more, anyway -- they're pretty much assimilated into the English language, and their meaning is no longer same as the literal translation. But as it's pretentiousness you don't like, I'm surprised at the use of 'synonym', 'context', 'incorporating' and the use of the passive voice :) |
| Sat 22 May | Tom | "Faux pas" is, more strictly, a (possibly gauche, usually social) blunder, rather than a mistake. Farting at the table, asking for fish knives when eating with the Queen (and calling her "Lizzie"), that kind of thing. |
| Sat 22 May | Stephen Jones | ----'I also tend to use bete noire, fin de cicle, nest' pas, '--- A goood thing you don't use them in French; the French get quite uptight if you don't spell them correctly. 'bête noire, fin de siècle, n'est-ce pas?' If you want to be able to write French accents correctly without undergoing the horrors of the French keyboard setup, then choose the Spanish one, which does for all Romance languages and has the umlaut as well. There do seem to be three kinds of French words used in English: those that are accepted as being perfectly correct English words, such as mutton, commence or boudoir ; those that are perceived by English speakers as being French, but whch have in fact been taken into English and often have a very different meaning or construction such as 'vis-à-vis', 'au fait', 'après-ski' and 'bête noire'; and finally French words or phrases that have no meanng in English (for example 'n'est-ce pas?' or voilà!' or 'tout de suite') but are used by speakers who want to remind us they haven't forgotten their schooldays. The second class of 'French' words has its counterpart in many 'English' in French such as 'le footing' (jogging) or 'le smoking' (tuxedo or smoking-jacket). |
| Sat 22 May | Philo | 'Yes, I've noticed that as well. It seems everybody tries to look smarter by peppering their speech/text with French words.' No, I just refuse to limit myself to a hammer and spackle knife when weaving language. First of all, terms like 'faux pas,' 'facade' (I know - I don't feel like looking up the symbol for it), and 'deja vu' have been in circulation in english for so long I'd be tempted to call them part of the english language (obviously something that would never happen in France [grin]). Other times, I may use foreign terms, like n'est-ce pas, je ne sais quoi, or non because I simply don't feel there's an analogue in english speech, especially written speech, where you can't use inflection. Philo |
| Sat 22 May | Stephen Jones | ----' n'est-ce pas, je ne sais quoi, or non because I simply don't feel there's an analogue in english speech, especially written speech, where you can't use inflection. '----- so 'innit?', 'I dunno' and 'no' aren't in your vocabulary? As for inflection - well I have to admit there's nothing like a bit of gratuitious French to sound like an absolute twit (unless of course you're French, in which case a bit of English serves just as welll). |
| Sat 22 May | John C. | And in response to the original poster's question 'Is there a web site or a book which lists all the French expressions used in English ?', the answer is yes. That book is known as a dictionary. :-) Seriously. Any decent English dictionary will include commonly-used words and phrases from other languages, often with basic etymologies that illustrate the origin of the term. If it's an online resource you want, try dictionary.com. |
| Sat 22 May | Tayssir John Gabbour | Incidentally, http://french.about.com/library/bl-frenchinenglish-list.htm Of course I'm sure an etymologist can give a really good answer; I have an etymological dictionary which probably has an origin index. But the above link seems to cover the really obvious ones which retain a French flavor. |
| Sat 22 May | Air Biscuit | ''Faux pas' is, more strictly, a (possibly gauche, usually social) blunder, rather than a mistake. Farting at the table...' Farting at the table a blunder? Why, its celebrated (high-fives, etc.) at my house! |
| Sat 22 May | Brian | 'What does incorporating French in your speech have to do with intelligence? NOTHING. It's just trendy, that's all.' As others have said, something that has been done for hundreds of years is hardly trendy. And I maintain that speaking precisely, using the 'mot juste' is a sign of intelligence, or at least of learning. Do you not agree? Sometimes it's necessary to use a foreign word or phrase. And few of the ones cited here are obscure - I wouldn't hesitate to use 'fin de ciecle' around most of my peers. 'What's wrong with plain English? Instead of 'vis à vis', use 'towards' or some other synonym as the context warrants...' True, 'vis-a-vis' has very close English equivalents. Sometimes you just need to change it up. How many times can you say 'with respect to' or 'relating to' before you need to mix it up a little? |
| Sat 22 May | Oren Miller | http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/f/fr/french_phrases_used_by_english_speakers.html Also covers seemingly French phrases that are not French. |
| Sat 22 May | FrenGlaise For Fun | J' doir allez au garrage pour fixxe mon flat. |
| Sat 22 May | Stephen Jones | of course, anybody who says using French words is pretentious (or worse unpatriotic) should be humbled by the fact that the most famous use of them in English belongs to Yogi Berra. 'It's deja vu all over again.' |
| Sat 22 May | Ged Byrne | Why invent new expressions when other languages alreay have a perfectly good phrase. English doesn't just borrow from French. What about uber-whatever, wunderlust and zeitgeist? And it isn't all one sided. What would the French do if you tried to take away 'le Weekend?' |
| Sat 22 May | scruffie | According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of 'faux pas' in English was in 1676. 'déjà vu', 1903. 'bête noire', 1844. 'vis-à-vis', 1755. Considering how many words in English come from other languages, it's hardly fair to pick on French. Heck, 'dictionary' comes from Latin! Boo! Ban it! |
| Sat 22 May | MediocreDev | To all the pretentious fools who dare disagree with me ;o))~ : It's true that French has been part of English for centuries, and there's even been times where the English Royal court used French almost exclusively - now that's trendy! But the fact is that if you compare regular U.S. English from 30 years ago and the contemporary flavor, I'll bet my left arm that there are WAY more French in today's speech. It's really trendy nowadays, and it's not only reserved to a certain part of society anymore... It's not in the Bronx yet though: 'Yo, you made a faux-pas, fool!' ;-) It is also true that other languages, and especially French, borrow a lot from English - it's not exclusive to English. While it is an interesting phenomenon, that might even lead to a sort of unified language several centuries from now, what annoys me is the social aspect of the thing. As some have said, there are perfectly valid ways to say much of that stuff in 'pure' English. Just go read a few English Lit books, and you'll see what I mean. And yes, screwing up the spelling, and especially the accents, makes you look like an ignorant snob. I can't count the times I've read 'viola' instead of 'voilà'. The former is the verb 'to rape' at the past tense... |
| Sat 22 May | Belgian Fritkot | Laissez tomber les mecs, en général vous faites plein de fautes lorsque vous écrivez des mots en français ! |
| Sat 22 May | Uni-Linguist | MediocreDev Wouldn't it still be 'Yo, you made a fox-pass, fool!' in the Bronx? I intentionally like to 'anglisize' the words - specifically if there are any K-beckers around. Pisses them off big-time. |
| Sat 22 May | Philo | 'I can't count the times I've read 'viola' instead of 'voilà'. The former is the verb 'to rape' at the past tense... ' Hmmm... considering some of the solutions I've hacked together, 'viola' may in fact be more appropriate... In the non-french vein, I also like 'gestalt,' and there's a German word I keep forgetting that means 'to stare in horrified fascination' or something to that effect (which I'd like to work on getting to replace 'like looking at a traffic accident') Philo |
| Sat 22 May | MediocreDev | 'Hmmm... considering some of the solutions I've hacked together, 'viola' may in fact be more appropriate...' Need. To. Refrain. From. Making. Anti-Microsoft. Joke. ARRFGRHHH I CAN'T!!!!!!!!!!! Philo, that's to be expected from a Microsoft employee... PHEW!! I feel better now. C'est la vie, et on s'amuse comme des fous. |
| Sat 22 May | Philo | :-P BTW, this thread reminds me of a quote from one of the recent spoof movies (maybe 'Loaded Weapon'): 'Quid pro quo, Lieutenant, quid pro quo' 'What does that mean?' 'It means I'm pretentious.' Philo |
| Sun 23 May | John C. | >>I can't count the times I've read 'viola' instead of 'voilà'.<< Just wait until the first time you get an e-mail that reads 'blah blah blah, and walla it worked'. Before that, the only 'walla' I'd run into was Walla Walla, Washington. I had to read the sentence about five times before I realized that the sender meant 'voilà'! |
| Sun 23 May | Data Miner | >there's a German word I keep forgetting that means 'to stare in horrified fascination' or something to that effect (which I'd like to work on getting to replace 'like looking at a traffic accident')< Philo, you might be thinking of 'schadenfreude', which, loosely translated, is 'taking pleasure in the misfortune of others'. The very existence of such a word speaks volumes about the speakers of the language... I heard that there is actually no French word that has the same meaning as the 'English' word 'entrepreneur'. I have always had a certain affection for the Greek word 'hubris'... |
| Sun 23 May | Ged Byrne | Lets not forget the danger of using French words when you don't really know what your talking about. You can look very, very stupid. 'The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur.' - George W. Bush, discussing the decline of the French economy with British Prime Minister Tony Blair |
| Sun 23 May | Herr Herr | This is so common.. in all languages I am familiar with. In my native English people say * 'ciao' from Italian - as do Bulgarians and Romanians. * We drink 'cappucino' (and cappuncinos - not cappucini as the Italians would say in plural form) * We put RSVP on invitations * we say kindergarten, gesundheit, schadenfreude, doppelganger from Germany In my adopted land, Germany, we call people 'teenagers', we buy concert 'tickets', musician play in a 'band' That's life, not worth complaining about the language people use. It is always changing and adopting |
Sun 23 May | KayJay | Philo, you might be thinking of 'schadenfreude', which, loosely translated, is 'taking pleasure in the misfortune of others'. The very existence of such a word speaks volumes about the speakers of the language...There is a word for that in English, 'gloat'. The very existence of a similar word in most other languages as well, speaks volumes about the human condition and its commonalities. |
| Sun 23 May | Keith Moore | FWIW (probably not much): A number of French words are used in aviation -- fuselage, empenage, pitot, chandelle, etc. |
| Sun 23 May | John Ridout | Words of foreign origin are the norm. English is a hybrid language and only about 1 in 5 modern English words derive from Old English. English borrows from French, German, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Latin, Norse, and so on. Foreign phrases can be a good source of amusement. E.g. 'per deum' expenses. I'm sure he meant quotidian rather than something godly. N.B. it's 'siècle' not 'ciècle'. And who does not use a little latin, 'i.e., e.g., p.s., n.b., etc.'? |
| Sun 23 May | Christopher Wells | English doesn't use plain english either: "keep it under your hat" instead of "keep it secret", etc. |
| Sun 23 May | Rupert | Philo, are you thinking of schadenfreude? (Satisfaction in the misfortunes of others -- literally damage-joy.) I love that word. |
| Sun 23 May | Elephant | Right as rain, Rick! By the way, can I have sex with your ass? 8-P |
| Sun 23 May | Christopher Wells | > Laissez tomber les mecs, en général vous faites plein de fautes lorsque vous écrivez des mots en français ! Faisons-nous «plein de fautes», ou «pleins de fautes»? |
| Sun 23 May | Joe | Often times when foreign expressions are used, they don't retain their original meaning. Since the adopters (referring to the masses at large, rather than an individual) don't actually speak the language, they really only know the word in context and perhaps rough translation, and therefore tend to apply it when it might not exactly fit. But then that usage too becomes commonplace, and so the word/phrase takes on a whole new meaning. For example, the German noun 'Spiel', translates to 'play' (as in a theater performance, or a game). But in the americanized usage of 'He went off on a Spiel about the middle east,' it means a rant or discourse. I don't really find the use of foreign vocabulary in and of itself to be pretentious. Of course, it certainly can be used that way, but that's the speaker's pretentiousness, not that of the language. Also, I think there is probably some correlation between Americans perceiving the use of French as pretentious, and the typical American stereotype that the French themselves are pretentious. |
| Sun 23 May | FritesPower | Christopher, since you ask, it is in fact 'plein de fautes'. :D |
| Sun 23 May | Murphy | 'Pretentious' is one of those marker words like 'elitist' or 'intellectual' or 'condescending' that more often than not tells you more about the speaker than his subject. When Fred says 'Bill is such a pretentious ass,' it's usually a dead giveaway that Bill made Fred feel stupid or ignorant, but Fred has nothing impressive to say about Bill's positions, so he's left with no other face-saving route than to turn the subject to Bill himself. Occasionally that's not the case, but most often it is. Smart, knowledgeable people don't tend to be hurt by other people's pretensions, because they can't be made to feel stupid, even when their positions and beliefs are seriously threatened. (Thinking people feel no shame in discovering their position was weak or even wrong, and are happy to adjust or discard any of their beliefs to account for new facts or good arguments to the contrary.) 'Elitist' in even more fun in this regard, because it belies the laughable delusion that everybody has something valuable to contribute. But 'condescending' is the coup de grace in this group, as a surefire marker for low self-esteem. Its use outright proclaims 'Bill makes me feel stupid.' But I might be wrong about this. I'm just a condescending, pretentious, faux-intellectual and elitist snob, after all. And a pompous boob to boot. Did I mention arrogant? |
| Sun 23 May | MediocreDev | 'But I might be wrong about this. I'm just a condescending, pretentious, faux-intellectual and elitist snob, after all. And a pompous boob to boot. Did I mention arrogant?' We're all entitled to our self-righteous delusions... |
| Magazines on line, great idea! | Sat 22 May | Albert D. Kallal |
| I love the headline I used for this post! Gee, do you think NO ONE has ever thought of putting a magazine on-line that you could download IN PLACE of purchasing a paper subscription? I think every human who EVER saw a computer connected to web has had this thought. The problem is of course that reading text on line is usually a REAL CRAPPY user experience. Slow response, tons of offensive pop up ads and crap browser interface have given the impression that web based reading is horrible! However, despite this bad user experience, zillions of companies have tried to distribute on-line content..and have FIALED miserably. Thus, people walk away thinking that on-line delivery of a magazine can NOT replace the paper one! Well, the REAL problem here is not the idea of delivering a magazine..but delivering something that has a MUCH BETTER user experience then just browsing the web. We are talking about clean HIGH QUALITY pages that you can read with ease..and none of this browser crap. Of course, some of the early attempts to package mainstream magazines where just a pdf copy of the original paper magazine. Use of pdf files did solve the problem of HIGH quality, and it certainly got rid of the pop-ups, and all the other annoying crap that the web has in terms of delays etc. However, these pdf files were NOT hyper-linked, and thus again the user experience was not very good. And, I hate to say it..but the early attempts had no digital rights built in. Well, guess what…someone just hit the bull’s eye here. They got it ALL right. They even allow you to email a copy of the magazine to others (actually, what happens is a “link” is sent and that user has to download the magazine. This means you can “lend”/send to some friends, but if you abuse this and send to a zillion people you an’t going to get away doing that. Anyway…I just received my first copy of a magazine that is subscription based, but an electronic copy of the printed version. I actually had a choice between paper and electronic. WOW…I love the electron version….it is actually better then print! Darn it..what a great and obvious business to have created. I am just shaking my head as to why I did not think of this idea. (well..everone did..but they just did not think how to execute it…these guys did!). The other moral of this story shows how FAR superior a nice rich client is for most things we do. People walk home and want to burn cd’s, copy digital pictures…and now are starting to even record TV! All of these “average joe” features requires a nice good interface and client (like windows!). If you don’t believe that browsing text and information on your local computer is FAR better then the pop-up ad infested web…think again! This subscription model has been thrown around by virtually everyone…but no one got right …until now. To anyone…if you want o give a e-magazine a try..head your browser down to http://www.zinio.com/main They have some compliment magazines you can try. I remember years ago we used to get those inserts in magazine with about a “zillion” magazines you could choose from at a reduced rate (looked like postage stamps that you tear off into a form). Well, this company is obviously the new incarnation of that business model (that model is companies that don’t create, or even make the magazine, but just sell subscriptions anyway they can. I remember friends selling these stuff door to door, and even some pitching this stuff to me in supermarket parking lots. We are talking long before the internet came to be. What a brilliant idea..and they simply live off of the publishers work. This was, and is a business opportunity missed by so many.! Anyway….from my first experience with this magazine reader..this guys hit this right on the mark… Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sat 22 May | Data Miner | So, is this the latest MLM fad?... |
| Sat 22 May | Ben Combee | Zinio bugs me for a lot of reasons. First, the reading experience isn't very good, since the article layout still follows pages. Second, it won't work with non-IE browsers. Third, it's really slow on my system, and doing simple stuff like flipping pages takes a while, especially with advertisements. PDF would be better, but a linked tree of HTML or a HTML archive is best, IMO. |
| Sat 22 May | Wisea** | Hey, hey, whatup, Fat Albert?! |
| Sat 22 May | Satyadeep Musuvathy | The Zinio reader on the MAC is amazing. It even simulates turning of the pages. You've got to use it to believe it :-) |
| Sat 22 May | Simon Lucy | There is one significant drawback to magazines online. Sitting on the bog isn't something I want to share with a hunk of electronics. |
| Sat 22 May | Steve-O | 'Sitting on the bog isn't something I want to share with a hunk of electronics.' You hit it dead on. I do some of my best reading on the bog... |
| Sat 22 May | Grumpy Young Man | Lousy web site, ActiveX controls on every page so you get the annoying popups everywhere (unless you like getting viruses and have them enabled), then you have to download their spyware to read their magazines... no thanks. |
| Sat 22 May | RS | Its asking me to install a software on my system for reading the magazine. Thats a non starter IMO. |
| Sat 22 May | Chris Nahr | It's a custom version of Adobe Reader, probably so that you can't simply copy the PDF file and distribute it to other people as you normally could. The need for special software is irritating but I found it works well enough. |
| Sat 22 May | Sean Harding | I've used Zinio reader on my Mac, and I don't like it that much. The turning pages effect gets a nice 'oooo' reaction the first time, but beyond that I don't find that it enhances the experience any. And it makes it take longer for the pages to turn. Scrolling around the page to read is sort of a pain and (at least on my 15' powerbook) if I zoom it so the entire page fits on the screen, the text is too small to read comfortably. So I end up having to zoom so half the page fits and then scroll up and down as I read the columns. Ugh. It's nice to have magazines online for searching articles and such, but for normal reading, I'll still take paper. |
| Sat 22 May | RS | Its sent me three emails since. I tried to unsubscribe. First there is no direct option. I wrote an email to customer service asking them to unsubscribe me. They replied saying they cannot do that. And gave me the address and phone number of Business Week (the magazine I was trying to read in the test download before realizing I needed a reader). Now I am supposed to contact Business Week and it might 'take them six to four weeks to' unsubscribe me. So I guess I will continue receiving email from this company till then. Don't try this unless you want your inbox filling up without an option to unsubscribe. |
| Sat 22 May | Joe | Albert said: 'The other moral of this story shows how FAR superior a nice rich client is for most things we do. People walk home and want to burn cd’s, copy digital pictures…and now are starting to even record TV! All of these “average joe” features requires a nice good interface and client (like windows!).' I'd just like to point out that at least one of the features you mentioned above (PVR-type capabilities) actually has been implemented quite well as an internet explorer based app... The Microsoft Media Center software that sits on top of XP is really just a fancy web app :) Now granted, all the data and pages are sitting on your hard drive, so it's a *local* web app and therefore doesn't get put into the same category as far as all the standard thick vs thin client arguments. But the point referenced here was the quality of the UI experience, and I think MCE does quite a nice job of that. It certainly is very possible to build rich multimedia-oriented UI's in HTML (albeit perhaps with the help of a couple ActiveX controls for system level functionality). |
| Sat 22 May | Stephen Jones | Dear Albert, Reading online using a browser can't be that bad. I spend about three or four hours every day doing it. What I find irritating about all these online readers and so on is that they are trying to reinvent the wheel. For readiing online HTML wins over everytihing else - reading text online is what it is designed to do. .Pdf files are great for printing and Acrobat for the Palm means they are great for reading on a PDA, but for the screen they are lousy. The only reason they are used is for security. |
| Sat 22 May | Picknitter | Your spell checker has FIALED! |
| Sat 22 May | Picknitter | Miserably. |
| Sat 22 May | Albert D. Kallal | A few good points brought out here: ** we all still prefer having a nice magazine over some computer terminal. You can’t really cozy up to your computer to read a magazine. I don’t see any possibility of using a computer to replace a magazines. I totally agree with all comments. And, even my self I prefer in most cases a paper magazine. However, e-mags do have some advantages also (you can take MANY magazines with you…they are searchable, they don’t pile up all over the place. When I think of the piles of computer magazines I used to have..I can’t imagine how many I would have now based on the INCREASED amount of reading that I do. Paper really does start to get messy. ** Quality of text. A few people seem to commented that the text was not the right size, or zoomed right, or was not that clear. On my windows XP..the default settings were bang on..and the reading was much nicer then HTML pages..by a good deal. I do think there should be settings to reduce the “cool” effects….I would certainly agree that time delays should be a user setting. ** The 15 meg install and setup of the client sucks big time! Yes…everyone got that complaint right! Again, I totally agree….however, a rich client CAN provide a better experience then what most web based systems deliver (and, of course we do need off-line ability anyway. So, I still am in favor of the rich client tool…but it got to install and work in a painless fashion. Some rightly pointed out that with some add-ins to a browser, you could likely get the same user experience. Either way, we are talking about a enhanced system…above and beyond what the basic browser offers. ** Reading on line is not that bad. Well, that is true..we are all doing that right now..and for sure MOST of my reading does occur on line!. I do think however that the formula these guys got it right (it can still use some work..but it is the first example of a subscription based electron magazine system that I can see that works….and it will only get better..). I do think there is room for this type of subscription model…. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sun 23 May | As400 | Again the ActiveX means it's a non-starter. Using ActiveX is inviting virueses, worms, trojans, spyware etc to inhabit your hard drive. Sooner or later ActiveX will bite you in the ass. I ga-rone-tee-it. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Okay before getting into this I will give the geeks' answer (as Joel so fondly pointed out his ins Forum Design article) * Magazine = natural stock and inserts: 2000 dpi to 4000 dpi / Monitor = 72 dpi [Verdict: Magazine wins on resolution] * Magazine = feels heavy / Website = same weight as every other site [Verdict: Magazine wins on psychological feeling of worth something] * Magazine = cost money, a lot / Website = less [Verdict: website wins!] * Magazine = easy to navigate / Website = HubCanada.com [Verdict: Magazine wins on navigation!] * Magazine = takes forever to scan into OmniPage, OmniPage chokes on Garamond / Website = View Source or even more advanced!! WGET!! [Verdict: Magazine wins on copy right protection!] * Magazine = pretty pictures to rip out and post on wall / Website = 75 dpi crap on Epsons [Verdict: A 100 million dollar 6 color printing press has no comparison my friend] |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Oh for those of you who's gonna say you can google online ezines.. no you can't... not if google can't log in. |
| Sun 23 May | Li-fan Chen | Albert in time the magazine presses will wise up and ensure you can't get those encyclopedic searchable cds. You'll end up with LEXIS/NEXIS deals where you pay as you go--article by article. That might not be a bad future at all, I look forward to it--but the established press will be peeved to find that you can search for and read the indies just as easily as the old blokes--and that hurts their plan to lock you in using expensive subscriptions--and therefore hurts them furthur by disabling their ability to sell their ad spaces. So they won't go for a LEXIS/NEXIS unless the article writing community cry foul. |
| Sun 23 May | OffMyMeds | Maybe it's an age thing (I've had computers in the home since age five), but I don't have any complaints about reading text on screen and find a properly laid out web page quite pleasant to read. I like being able to navigate with one finger (scroll wheel or pg down). For the bog I often take my tablet (posting from the throne right now). PDF's I find quite annoying because of the slowness (downloading, then waiting for the reader to open the first time) and issues getting the page sized just right. As far as I'm concerned, PDF's are useful for documents intended to be printed and that's all. So given all that, the Zinio reader didn't do anything for me. I don't recall if the page turn was linked to the scroll wheel/page down or not, but it would be annoying if it wasn't and the graphical page turn does nothing for me in and of itself. So I guess the moral is, 'to each his or her own.' |
| Life Happens | Fri 21 May | Wayne |
| Program: Advice for people who dont know this already. Author: Wayne Sub Main() STEP1: With great care, do what you have to, to get whatever it is that you know you want. Try not to hurt anyones feelings. STEP2: Get some friends who want the same things as you. If you meet people who dont want 50% or more of the same things as you, run the other way. Kind of like me right now (my ex-girlfriend (as of 2.5 hours ago) is in the other room packing. STEP3: If what you want changes, then GOTO STEP1. STEP4: Spend as much time doing things that you want to do, live happily, pay taxes, die. STEP5: If youre Catholic or Buddhist, Call Main(). End Sub (Wouldnt life be so much easier if you could compile a program like this for yourself?) |
| Sat 22 May | FullNameRequired | Hi Wayne, I have an alternate hypothesis for (1), once you have a relationship with another person. (1) With great care, do what you have to, to get whatever it is that you know your partner wants *and* (1.2)With great care, do what you have to, to get whatever it is that you know you want. (1.2.5) expect your partner to take the same approach to their life. (1.2.6) spend as much time as necessary talking things over to ensure that you both get as much of what you want as is realistic. be careful yo uare focused on achieving what they want as much as they are, and that they are focused on getting what you want as much as you are.. (1.3) If you come to the conclusion that your partner is only trying to get what they want, regardless of what you want, run the other way. (1.4) Get some friends who want different things to you; they are the interesting people who may have something to teach you. (1.5) (3) If what you want changes, or what your partner wants changes, go to step 1. (4) spend as much of your life as possible skiing sorry about your breakup ;) happens to the best of us. |
| Sat 22 May | You know what I'm sayin'? | And remember, in this world, the strong devour the weak. |
| Sat 22 May | Steve Jones (UK) | Wayne, isn't that eventually going to cause a Stack Overflow ? |
| Sat 22 May | no name | Tail-call optimization, Steve. |
| Sun 23 May | Jim | Wayne, Don't sweat the petty things, just pet the sweaty things. |
| Sun 23 May | Elephant | Jim, Would you like to pet my sweaty thing? |
| Recommend a few applications for my portfolio? | Fri 21 May | Alex |
| I graduated last year with a degree in Mech. Eng. (Industrial robots). We did a lot of mechanical subjects and not nearly enough C.S., but I privately maintained an active interest in programming. Now, companies Ive interviewed for have turned me down because of lack of experience even though I aced their C++ tests. Admittedly, there is more to it than C++, so nowadays Im slowly catching up on Windows programming and a few other things. I figured the best way to stand out (since the resume is still blank) is to come with a batch of previous work, that should alleviate the lack of experience part (by experience I think they mean exposure). Could you recommend a few applications I could write that would put me in a good light? Something that people wont say hell, everybody can do that. Something impressive and not boring. I have an idea of my own (a collaborative application), but perhaps someone has better ideas for a nice portfolio. |
| Fri 21 May | no name | How about a robot simulator (even just a really simple electromechanical system)? |
| Fri 21 May | Wisea** | How about a program to control your vibrator? :-P |
| Fri 21 May | Li-fan Chen | Do you think the application you will write must relate somehow to industrial controls and robotics? |
| Fri 21 May | Alex | Not at all. In fact, the farther from it, the better. |
| Fri 21 May | Li-fan Chen | Well can you make a few web services? maybe a Goofy one? They are all the rage now days. Start slow... like a ROCK SUCK meter for anyone to pop in their website name or something to find out if their site rocks or sucks. Share some code, spread the word, do some viral marketing. Sell yourself a little, someone will bend I think. You might want to try to pick up some ISAPI if you are Windows and apache C++ module writing if Linux. |
| Fri 21 May | Li-fan Chen | Or one of those web toys. They are referenced using a url in a image tag. Shows weather and other dumb stuff. |
| Fri 21 May | Joe | Have you thought about getting involved in an open source project? There are plenty who could use the help, and they won't turn you away for not being a veteran. It'll give you a real world application to point to and say 'hey, I did that!' rather than something contrived in a sand box. If you need to turn a profit with your work, then I suggest starting small. Ask around and see if anybody local needs any projects done -- websites, simple DB apps, and the like. Small shops can't afford big consulting firms, so they're more likely to take a chance on someone who doesn't have as much experience. Either of the above will also give you some great 'soft skills' too, if you haven't had a chance to develop them yet already. Working on an open source project means being part of a team, while working as a consultant gets you experience in analyzing business requirements and dealing with customers. |
| Fri 21 May | Joe | Oh, and don't worry about being "impressive." Afterall, what's a better indication of skill: a boring bread-and-butter business app, or a big flashy widget with no real purpose? |
| Fri 21 May | no name | A big flashy widget that adds value to a giant class of "boring, bread and butter business apps." |
| Fri 21 May | Cruel to be kind | If you can't think of something to design and build, you probably are not a software developer anyway. |
| Fri 21 May | Alex | Cruel, I want to be like you. |