It's a very different world when a program is an algebraic structure rather than a bag of characters, when you can actually do algebra on programs rather than just swizzling characters around. A lot of things become possible.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in Analyze this!
Two years from now, spam will be solved,
--Bill Gates, January, 2004
Read the rest in Spam Will Be 'Solved' In 2 Years--Gates
the single most critical variable in the biohol trajectory is the coming rise in the number of gallons of fuel produced per acre. As we migrate from biomass derived from corn to biomass from so-called energy crops like switchgrass and miscanthus, I estimate that biomass yield will reach 20 to 24 tons per acre, a fourfold increase. At the same time, new technologies will enable us to extract more biohols from every ton of biomass, potentially to 110 gallons per ton. The result: We’ll be extracting 2,000 to 2,700 gallons of fuel per acre (as opposed to about 400 gallons with today’s technology). With better fuels and more-efficient engines improving mileage by about 50 percent, we can safely predict a seven- to tenfold gain in miles driven per acre of land over the next 25 years. Given this biohol trajectory, a future of independence from gasoline becomes not only possible but probable. And the trajectory begins with garden-variety corn ethanol.
--Vinod Khosla
Read the rest in Wired 14.10: My Big Biofuels Bet
So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
--Richard Dawkins
Read the rest in An Atheist Can Believe in Christmas
I have made it my life’s work to rid my brain of recursive thinking: it simply does not gel well with text processing under a fixed-stack system like Java. For text processing, the recursive solution is always the wrong solution…unless your system implements the tail recursion optimization of course
--Rick Jelliffe
Read the rest in Fake real-time blog from XML 2006: day one...some more
there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?
Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.
--Scott Adams
Read the rest in The Dilbert Blog: Electronic Voting Machines
I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that's just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software
Implementation inheritance causes the same intertwining and brittleness that have been observed when goto statements are overused. As a result, OO systems often suffer from complexity and lack of reuse.
--John Ousterhout
Read the rest in Scripting, IEEE Computer, March 1998
Last year, a Republican Congress passed a highway bill with 6,371 special projects costing the taxpayers 24 billion dollars. Those and other earmarks passed by a Republican Congress included $50 million for an indoor rainforest, $500,000 for a teapot museum; $350,000 for an Inner Harmony Foundation and Wellness Center; and of course, as you all know, $223 million for a bridge to nowhere. I didn’t see these projects in the fine print of the Contract with America, and neither did the voters.
--Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona
Read the rest in McCain Tells Conservatives G.O.P.’s Defeat Was Payback for Losing ‘Our Principles’
it's likely that in most incidents of people being killed as a result of software bugs (or IT systems bugs), the software wasn't thought to be safety-critical at all. For example, a word-processor failing to recognize that a print request has failed, resulting in a patient not getting a letter giving a hospital appointment. Or someone committing suicide because of an incorrect bank statement.
--Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 17 Aug 2005 08:25:54
Did you every try to get a bunch of freshmen to add a JAR to their class path? It's not a pretty sight.
--Cay Horstmann
Read the rest in Cay Horstmann's Blog: The World's Simplest Unit Testing Framework
GPL version 2 is the proper forcing function. By keeping all the industry innovations viewed and shareable, it pushes everyone toward compatibility."
--Rich Green, Sun
Read the rest in Sun picks GPL license for Java code | Tech News on ZDNet
Ironically, C programmers understand this much better than Lisp programmers. One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer.
--Ron Garrett
Read the rest in Rondam Ramblings: Top ten geek business myths
I think there’ll be lots of forks, and I approve. I suspect that basement hackers and university CompSci departments and other unexpected parties will take the Java source, hack groovy improvements into it, compile it, and want to give it to the world. They’ll discover that getting their creation blessed as “Java” requires running the TCK/trademark gauntlet, which isn’t groovy at all. So they’ll think of a clever name for it and publish anyhow.
Which is terrific. I see no downside, and I see huge upside in that the Java mainstream can watch this kind of stuff and (because of the GPL) adopt it if it’s good, and make things better for everybody.
Remember: However many forks there are, it ain’t Java unless it’s called “Java” or has the coffee-cup on it. If it has the name and cup, it is Java and it’s compatible. And Sun will absolutely enforce that in court if we have to. We have in the past and we will again.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Java Is Free
The Republican Party is not now, never was and never will be a conservative party. It is what it has always been – a representative of the rich and of big business.
--Charley Reese
Read the rest in No Conservative Party by Charley Reese
What Sun's actually done, and what almost no company before them has done, is to bend over backwards to do this right. They've resisted the siren-song of corporate counsel who feel the need to FUD their employer into paying them to invent entirely new legalise, which doesn't interoperate with anyone else's legalise.
--Roland Turner
Read the rest in Armadillo Reticence: Sun, Java and GPLv2
There’s class warfare, all right; but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
--Warren Buffett
Read the rest in In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning
The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion—when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.
--Sam Harris
Read the rest in RichardDawkins.net
We have won the "struggle to liberate Java" in the finest possible way: with Sun deciding to come with flying colors in support of setting Java free, and taking the leading position in that movement that they deserve, as the creators of the platform.
I’m very pleased with Sun’s execution of it all so far. For example, they’ve been very responsive to resolve questions about the licensing model from Java community members, who may not be familiar with the way the GPL or the Classpath exception works. They’ve done a great job on the FAQ for the OpenJDK project.
--Dalibor Topic
Read the rest in Cutting Free
People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?
Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?
--Ben Stein
Read the rest in In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning
Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn't give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too. That's a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends.
--Dan Glickman, MPAA
Read the rest in BBspot
Java Standard Edition contains about 6 million lines of code. Our legal team had to go over it, line by line, and look for all copyright marks and third-party involvements. Where Sun didn't have the correct licenses, we had to contact the owners, one by one, and determine the rights.
--Mike Dillon, Sun General Counsel
Read the rest in Sun Pours Out Java Cup
Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.
--Dr. Stephen Weinberg
Read the rest in A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the “Windows Genuine Advantage,” allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that you have breached the terms of the agreement, and they can essentially disable the software, and possibly deny you access to critical files on your computer without benefit of proof, hearing, testimony or judicial intervention. In fact, if Microsoft is wrong, and your software is, in fact, properly licensed, you probably will be forced to buy a license to another copy of the operating system from Microsoft just to be able to get access to your files, and then you can sue Microsoft for the original license fee. Even then, you wont be able to get any damages from Microsoft, and may not even be able to get the cost of the first license back.
--Mark D. Rasch, J.D.
Read the rest in Vista's EULA Product Activation Worries
First let’s get something straight. The real Jean Grey committed suicide in “The Uncanny X-Men” #137 in 1980. Every issue since then with “Jean Grey” in it is a PACK OF LIES.
--Erik Even
Read the rest in Furinkan High School Kendo Club: The 20 Sexiest Sci
For some strange reason, we got the end of last week off. As best I can determine, there was a surplus of turkeys in the turkey farms, and so the entire country had to be called into an emergency session of turkey eating. I've never seen this kind of thing happen before, it was weird. (Actually, come to think of it, when I was interning for Netscape there was a week in November where it seemed I was the only one working — I had assumed that there had just been some mysterious illness, but maybe it was related to this turkey emergency... It could be an annual thing. I'll have to keep an eye out next year, see if it happens again.)
--Ian Hickson
Read the rest in Hixie's Natural Log
People have been hesitant to distribute Java worldwide with Linux because of license alignment. This is the last gate to ensure that Java will be distributed worldwide.
--Rich Green, Sun Microsystems
Read the rest in Sun picks GPL license for Java code | Tech News on ZDNet
Anyone who tries to predict the long-term future effects of Free Java is braver than me. I have one concrete hope: that the people working on the GNU/Linux desktop can be unshackled from the tyranny of C++. Aside from that, who knows? Freedom is scary; but on balance I think Java’s new path will be more interesting and more profitable and more fun
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in ongoing · Java Is Free
If Java was an open standard, technologies like C# and the technologies it works with might not exist today.
--Bob Sutor, IBM
Read the rest in IBM pressures Sun to free Java - TechUpdate
Over the last 7 years I have come to the following conclusions:
- There are no instances in which TDD is impossible.
- There are no instances in which TDD is not advantageous.
- The impediments to TDD are human, not technical.
- The alternative to TDD is code that is not repeatably testable.
--Robert Martin on the junit mailing list, Sunday, 17 Aug 2006 10:53:39
The JRE+JDK was a loss-leader from the outset; the intent was to get adoption as widespread as possible so that they could sell related products and services. Sadly, they were obsessively focussed on preventing forks, which meant no open-source licensing, which severely curtailed reach amongst their largest natural constituency (developers with horizons wider than "we use it because it comes from Microsoft"). Sun has at last realised this error, realised that trademark law makes it possible to prevent forks from creating confusion, perhaps even realised that the ability to fork is a good thing, not a bad thing.
--Roland Turner
Read the rest in Armadillo Reticence: Sun, Java and GPLv2
As a rule of thumb, whenever multiple threads share data, you must make sure the relevant threads exchange monitor locks to ensure consistent memory views.
--Vladimir Roubtsov
Read the rest in The thread threat
Sun has firmly laid down the gauntlet to it's competitors to "walk the walk" and not just "talk the talk". Over the last few years we have had a number of them saying exactly the same thing to us. Well, the line has been firmly drawn in the sand. Sun has released it's two major crown jewels (Java and Solaris) as open source. Should we expect to see DB2 and Openview follow the same path from their respective owners, or shall they just continue to "talk the talk"?
--Alan Hargreaves
Read the rest in Alan Hargreaves' Weblog : Weblog
Sun's policy of GPLing Java which we are celebrating now is an extraordinary achievement in returning programming technology to that state of freely available knowledge that people can share and improve together. It's a crucial step in the process of turning the technology today into knowledge that people can use freely to make the technology of tomorrow.
--Eben Moglen
Read the rest in Alan Hargreaves' Weblog : Weblog
I think Sun has well, with this contribution have contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It's an example I hope others will follow
--Richard M. Stallman, Free Software Foundation
Read the rest in Alan Hargreaves' Weblog : Weblog
How do you decide between C#, Java, PHP, and Python? The only real difference is which one you know better. If you have a serious Java guru on your team who has build several large systems successfully with Java, you're going to be a hell of a lot more successful with Java than with C#, not because Java is a better language (it's not, but the differences are too minor to matter) but because he knows it better.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software
The war is over and Linux won.
--Dana Blankenhorn
Read the rest in Open Source | ZDNet.com
I actually have been doing a lot of work over the years in the real time world, and once upon a time, I’d get people from the real time world, particularly folks from the really spooky end, like the people who do flight avionics, and they say “I’d like to do this in Java”. And I’d say “I don’t really think I’d like to get on your airplane”. And then they’d say, “Do you want to know how we do it today?”, and it was always much, much scarier.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in James Gosling Q & A: Builder AU: Program: At Work
Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags; where tax and spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!
--Stephen Colbert
See the rest in Colbert calls it quits
Extending a class that you don't have source code for is always risky; the documentation may be incomplete in ways you can't foresee.
--Peter Norvig
Read the rest in Java IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions
IN ORDER TO CATCH THE REPUBLICANS STEALING YOUR VOTE, YOU FIRST HAVE TO VOTE. There are huge and valid concerns about the new electronic voting machines that must be addressed. It is far too easy to use new technology to rig the vote. But if your fear of that leads you to decide that you shouldn't bother voting, well, then, I guess they've succeeded in snuffing out your voice without having to rig the machine. Make them break the law if they want to win. Vote. We'll catch them if they do. I promise.
--Michael Moore
Read the rest in MichaelMoore.com : 5 Good Reasons to Vote Today ... a letter from Michael Moore
At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.
--Paul Krugman
Read the rest in Limiting the Damage
A true conservative is fiscally responsible. Laying debt and interest payments on posterity is neither conservative nor liberal. It is just obscenely irresponsible.
A true conservative believes in noninterference in the affairs of other countries. Regime change is a policy favored by fascists or communists, but it has nothing to do with American conservatism. Americans have the right to govern only one country – their own. Americans have an obligation to defend only one country – their own.
A true conservative believes in a free economy and that beyond protecting the public from force and fraud, the government should not interfere in private affairs.
There are a lot of other things that define a genuine conservative, but suffice it to say that the Republican Party, with its imperialistic foreign policy, its disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, its fiscal irresponsibility and its erosion of personal liberty, is not by any stretch of the imagination a conservative party.
--Charley Reese
Read the rest in No Conservative Party by Charley Reese
if I'm really excited about solving a problem, the first thing I do is quickly throw together methods and prototype it until I get the right bits on the screen or the right behavior. That's my proof of concept. It might take an afternoon or a couple of hours.
But once I've proved that it works, I start thinking about how to properly design the API. Working on a toolkit team, or anywhere in Sun, we're writing code for others to use, so we have to think about creating the right API. Once we have committed to it, we can never pull it from the JDK. So we design it with developers in mind. There's a big difference between making it work really quickly for me and actually designing it flexibly. There's a lot to consider.
--Shannon Hickey
Read the rest in Meet Shannon Hickey, Technical Lead for the Swing Toolkit Team at Sun Microsystems
when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else's ticket. The trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and the real ticket in someone else's name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a ticket in someone else's name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket is in an innocent's name, it won't raise a flag on the no-fly list.
You can also use a fake boarding pass instead of your real one if you have the "SSSS" mark and want to avoid secondary screening, or if you don't have a ticket but want to get into the gate area.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Wired News: The Boarding Pass Brouhaha
In short, it really sucks looking around at the wreckage that is my party and realizing that the only decent thing to do is to pull the plug on them (or help). I am not really having any fun attacking my old friends- but I don’t know how else to respond when people call decent men like Jim Webb a pervert for no other reason than to win an election. I don’t know how to deal with people who think savaging a man with Parkinson’s for electoral gain is appropriate election-year discourse. I don’t know how to react to people who think that calling anyone who disagrees with them on Iraq a “terrorist-enabler” than to swing back. I don’t know how to react to people who think that media reports of party hacks in the administration overruling scientists on issues like global warming, endangered species, intelligent design, prescription drugs, etc., are signs of… liberal media bias.
And it makes me mad. I still think of myself as a Republican- but I think the whole party has been hijacked by frauds and religionists and crooks and liars and corporate shills, and it frustrates me to no end to see my former friends enabling them, and I wonder ‘Why can’t they see what I see?”
--John Cole
Read the rest in Balloon Juice
Java EE's days have been numbered for a while now. Clearly, every time a new version comes out or module gets added, it only adds to the complexity. Eventually, it'll simply collapse under its own weight. It's not like there will be a future version of Java EE that's more lightweight than its predecessor.
--Jason Bloomberg, ZapThink
Read the rest in Analysts see Java EE dying in an SOA world
I find it interesting that Republicans like Senator Hatch repeatedly want to deregulate businesses but regulate the individual and it proves time and again that this is not the government conservatives espouse as being small and limited. It's "We want to be in control of your daily lives to the extent that we're watching what you're doing on your computers, we're watching whether you're violating any corporate copyrights. We're going to be the unpaid copyright police for the corporations."
--Pete Ashdown
Read the rest in Wired News: Techie Faces Orrin Hatch Nov. 7
There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove. You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.
--Richard Dawkins
Read the rest in Wired News: Battle of the New Atheism
Right now, there are two main groups, the Alliance and the Horde, which roughly correspond to "good" and "evil," although when most of your quests involve committing murder for a bribe, the moral distinction becomes tricky. I suggest they give us a third faction, the "apathetic" faction. The group's quests will all involve posting on message boards about how both sides are equally stupid and there's no point in trying because frankly demons are going to invade our dimension whether or not we do anything so everyone should just quit whining, except for people who are whining about how everyone's whining. When you get to 70th level, someone creates a Wikipedia article about you.
--Lore Sjöberg
Read the rest in Wired News: Warcraft Wonders of Tomorrow
I am quite convinced that test-first is a good approach to a huge majority of software situations. It is my default position. When, as very rarely happens, this approach leads to an apparent impasse, I will expend significant energy to find a way through before abandoning the test-first approach.
--Robert Martin on the junit mailing list, Sunday, 1 Jun 2006 08:41:34
One of the basic rules of debugging applies: any given bug is far more likely to be in your code than in the library. (Not "must be", but definitely "far more likely to be".) Can you create a *simple* program that demonstrates the problem?
--Glen Fisher
Read the rest in Re: Java Spelling Framework bugs
don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.
--Kevin Tillman
Read the rest in Truthdig - Reports
I learned long ago that it was a waste of my time to smile and nod as if I understood the conversation, just to be able to pretend that I knew something. Especially if I then turned around and reiterated my misunderstanding to another smile-and-nodder, so that eventually everyone got the wrong idea. Much better to just suck it up and say "I don't know what that means." I try to be very aggressive with myself about this, telling myself not to let anything slide and to ask the question. This has the important secondary benefit of discovering whether the person explaining the topic really knows what they're talking about.
My perception is that for an organization to be able to consume consulting, they must have that same attitude, but on a group scale. Maturity is when you don't say "uh oh, here's something that I don't know, and maybe other people will discover that and think that I'm stupid." Instead, you have enough experience to know that you are competent and valuable, and yet "I know some things, but there is a ton of stuff I don't know, and if I never ask the question I'll never learn any more."
--Bruce Eckel
Read the rest in Testing vs. Reviews
I recently ported a medium-sized Python program I'd written (about 1200 lines of fairly dense Python code) to Java, because the Python was taking about an hour to run, and I wanted to parallelize the work. I spent about 3 days doing the rewrite: one day on the straight port, a day adding in the threading, and a day fine-tuning it. The straight port wound up as 1300 lines of Java (surprising that it wasn't bigger, but maybe I code in Python with a Java accent?), and ran about 50% faster, down to about 30 minutes. After adding in the threading and state machine, the program ran in 50 to 60 seconds. So I got an order of magnitude improvement with only about a 50% increase overall in program size.
--Steve Yegge
Read the rest in Stevey's Blog Rants: Blogger's Block #4: Ruby and Java and Stuff
Mostly, in the end, it appears that Java on the client lost out to Flash of all things! This must be embarrassing for Sun, but it puts Java in its place. It couldn't even be competitive in the most inessential of tasks.
--Larry Seltzer
Read the rest in Java's Momentum Is Running Low
Platform is a vague word. It could mean an operating system, or a programming language, or a "framework" built on top of a programming language. It implies something that both supports and limits, like the foundation of a house.
The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. Java applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
It is possible to write functioning programs entirely with public, static variables. Mind you, it's not a good idea, but it can be done - it's just harder, and more fragile. The value of encapsulation is that it makes it possible to analyze the behavior of a portion of a program without having to review the code for the entire program.
--Brian Goetz
Read the rest in Testing Concurrent Programs
we could do away with the whole standards thing very easily if a few customers just exercised their economic power a little bit intelligently. Big customers have huge power, but they seem to have forgotten that. If the CTOs of 10 FORTUNE 500 firms announced that they were deferring further purchases of VPN products until they saw proof of interoperability, and open published specifications that weren't encumbered by patents or licenses, the whole market would standardize practically overnight. Because the truth is nobody cares about standards - everyone cares about what you can do with interoperable systems. If customers just openly refused to do business with vendors that produce non-interoperable systems, the whole thing would clear up really fast.
--Marcus Ranum
Read the rest in Interview with Marcus Ranum
That reminds me of when I started out as a programmer and I was very intimidated by the fact that I knew so little and everyone else must know so much. After a while I got some experience but it was not "real" experience, we didn't have really good control over what we were doing so I dreamt of working on a "real" team, you know the kind they must have in banks and when developing medical equipment and such... Later I have been working at a bank and I know more than I would like to know about development of medical equipment.
--Joakim Ohlrogge on the junit mailing list, Friday, 4 Aug 2006 12:54:46
This issue is no different than searching airplane pilots, something that regularly elicits howls of laughter among amateur security watchers. What they don't realize is that the issue is not whether we should trust pilots, airplane maintenance technicians or people with clearances. The issue is whether we should trust people who are dressed as pilots, wear airplane-maintenance-tech IDs or claim to have clearances.
We have two choices: Either build an infrastructure to verify their claims, or assume that they're false. And with apologies to pilots, maintenance techs and people with clearances, it's cheaper, easier and more secure to search you all.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Wired News: Why Everyone Must Be Screened
why does everyone use ArrayList and hate Vectors these days? Because Vector is synchronized and is slower (or because it's trendy to use the later collection APIs to show how superior you are?) Try it sometime. Add a million objects to a collection and get them out again. Which is faster? The winner is... Vector.
--Rolf Howarth on the java-dev mailing list, Friday, 4 Feb 2005 07:44:53
It's an urban myth that final actually speeds up anything in Java, just like it's an urban myth that synchronized blocks slow it down. Both may have been true in Java 1.0 but ain't any longer. A modern JIT compiler is almost certainly waaaay cleverer than you, so don't try and second guess it. Just write code that does what it's supposed to and is easy to read and let the compiler worry about low level optimisations.
--Rolf Howarth on the java-dev mailing list, Friday, 4 Feb 2005 07:44:53
I don't have a problem with anyone protecting their intellectual property and making sure that they are paid fairly for their work, but I am dismayed when, time after time, they seem to blur the line between fair use and piracy. The more that legitimate users are being made to feel like they have been cheated out of being able to use what they've paid for, the more people are being pushed into looking for tools that allow them to circumvent copy protection … simply to use what they paid for. That sets a worrying trend that will ultimately make things worse for the movie and recording industry. Imagine if keys were outlawed and people had to turn to lockpicks to get into their own homes? Would that make us all more secure? I doubt it! The same thing is happening here. The entertainment industry is forcing ordinary users to look for tools to bust copy protection in order to use a product they’ve paid for, ordinary users feels abused and ripped off by a big, faceless corporation, and the next time they want a song or movie, they're less likely to pay for it and more likely to acquire it through other channels.
--Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
Read the rest in » Protect DVD-Video
The Java Virtual Machine is reasonably general purpose. Over the years there have been literally hundreds of languages built on top of it, most of which nobody has really cared enough about. So, when you take a language and you host it on the Java Virtual Machine, you get really interesting portability, if you do it right you can get very interesting performance and most of all what you get is the ability to interoperate and interact across languages – having stuff written in JRuby directly calling stuff written in Python or Jython or Groovy. There's even a compiler for Visual Basic to target the Java Virtual Machine. The traditional way of implementing programming languages is one where they're all individual islands that don't really interoperate at any level that's more fine grained than network protocols. You can't call similar APIs without breaking it into a server and calling across address faces, something that's fairly expensive. The Virtual Machine is what lets them be one big reasonably happy family.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in James Gosling: For Ruby or Ajax or SOA, it's NetBeans
Dynamic code feels great to program in. After the first day you have half the system built. I did a huge portion of my thesis work in Python and it was a life saver. Thesis work doesn’t need to be bug free, it is the quintessential proof-of-concept (and yet so many CS students, when faced with a problem, break out the C++). But I have also worked on a large, multi-programmer, multi-year project, and this was not so pleasent. A large dynamically typed code base exhibits all the problems you would expect: interfaces are poorly documented and ever changing, uncommon code paths produce errors that would be caught by type checking, and IDE support is weak. The saving grace is that one person can do so much more in Python or Ruby that maybe you can turn your 10 programmer program into three one programmer programs and win out big, but this isn’t possible in a lot of domains. It is odd that evangelists for dynamic languages (many of whom have never worked on a large, dynamically-typed project) seem to want to deny that static type-checking finds errors, rather than just saying that type-checking isn’t worth the trouble when you are writing code trapped between a dynamically typed database interface and a string-only web interface.
--Jay Kreps
Read the rest in Empathy Box :: 5 Principles For Programming
If you copy-n-paste a handler half a dozen times, each time making minor changes, it's a good bet that the resulting code can be rearranged to separate the bits that stay the same from the bits that changed; the former become a generic handler and the latter into additional parameters to that handler. Bloat and complexity are reduced, which makes for better code, plus you've also now got a nice reusable handler you can use the next time.
--Hamish Sanderson on the applescript-users mailing list, Sunday, 29 Sep 2005 23:05:39
Programmers have very well-honed senses of justice. Code either works, or it doesn’t. There’s no sense in arguing whether a bug exists, since you can test the code and find out. The world of programming is very just and very strictly ordered and a heck of a lot of people go into programming in the first place because they prefer to spend their time in a just, orderly place, a strict meritocracy where you can win any debate simply by being right.
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in A Field Guide to Developers
C/C++ datatypes were based on the pysical host architecture and not on the effective data model that people want when developing portable applications; this is the major cause of the complexity of porting C/C++ applications across platforms, and even the most "portable" libaries are in fact "ported" by adding lots of modifications and conditional macros that are alien to the effective semantics of the language.
--Philippe Verdy on the unicode mailing list, Sunday, 21 Sep 2006 23:38:54
The oil interests fought the increased mileage requirements for new cars and trucks. They lobbied Congress for tax breaks and environmental waivers. Oil companies have received direct subsidies that add up to more than $120 billion, according to the General Accounting Office, and substantially more in indirect subsidies. When the EPA decided that the lead in gasoline was a serious health hazard and pushed for its removal, the oil companies spent millions fighting the change.
Today they are fighting for waiver from MBTE pollution liability and avoiding responsibility for carcinogenic benzene in our air. When municipalities in California decided to purchase cleaner natural gas buses, the diesel industry sued to block the switch. At every turn in the history of our oil dependence, the oil companies have spent their considerable fortune to make sure that we as a nation remained dependent on oil. They did this in large part by lobbying Congress, by providing congressmembers with large amounts of campaign cash, and by trying to suppress cleaner, cheaper alternatives to oil.
--Vinod Khosla
Read the rest in Wired 14.10: My Big Biofuels Bet
It matters not one whit that you and all your buddies think that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced pizza (unless, of course, your buddies are rich enough to be the customer base for your business). What matters is what your customers think. It is natural to assume that if you and your buddies think your idea is cool that millions of other people out there will think it's cool too, and sometimes it works out that way, but usually not. The reason is that if you are smart enough to have a brilliant idea then you (and most likely your buddies) are different from everyone else. I don't mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small.
--Ron Garrett
Read the rest in Rondam Ramblings: Top ten geek business myths
secrecy is the essence of evil.
--Len Bullard on the xml-dev mailing list, Friday, 29 Sep 2006 10:47:43
I think that conspiracy-mongering on 9/11 is a waste of time. The far greater conspiracy occurred after 9/11 when basically a neo-cabal inside our government hijacked policy and went to war. That was as broad a conspiracy as we can get and it was about 20, 30 people. That's all, they took over
--Oliver Stone
Read the rest in CNN.com - Oliver Stone: 'I'm ashamed for my country'
people always say static typing catches more errors at compile time. It is true, but these are the sort of errors that raraly occur anyhow and are usually trivial to notice, find and fix (if you have tests). And static typing makes you pay a high price for preventing these trivial errors - it's not just the type declarations for the vars, the impact goes a lot deeper.
--Antti Karanta on the junit mailing list, Friday, 3 Feb 2006 13:07:17
Eclipse development is far out-pacing its open source rival. This is likely because Eclipse benefits from a huge and growing ecosystem of contributors around the world, many of whom work on commercial software based on Eclipse RCP. Despite intense marketing and bundling efforts, and breaking down the barriers between the NetBeans and JDK teams, Sun has so far failed to put a dent in Eclipse's momentum. If you can't beat 'em…
--Ed Burnette
Read the rest in » NetBeans 6.0M3 vs. Eclipse 3.3M2 | Ed Burnette's Dev Connection | ZDNet.com
I'm not in the business of using code to protect people from their own carelessness. I provide good documentation in the form of a roadmap, some Javadoc and tests. If, after all that, they insist on being careless or lazy, then they deserve whatever they get.
--J. B. Rainsberger on the junit mailing list, Friday, 02 Sep 2005 08:35:49
People no longer necessarily install Java, and they don't notice it missing when it's not there.
Years ago, there were numerous sites I went to that had Java components on them for displaying data in ways richer than HTML could handle. Nowadays this is the province of Flash and AJAX.
Nobody uses Java for it, and if more sophisticated and intensive computation needs to be performed it is done on the server, not the client.
--Larry Seltzer
Read the rest in Java's Momentum Is Running Low
My big complaint with Mac OS security is that things like FileVault and secure virtual memory shouldn't be options -- they should be defaults. I believe that it's unethical for the computer to give the appearance of deleting information while actually leaving that information on the disk; computers shouldn't lie (explicitly or implicitly) to their users.
--Simson Garfinkel
Read the rest in Safe storage, Mac style
if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
--Christopher Griffith
Read the rest in How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You're Looking At It.
In five years, Java EE will be the CORBA of the 21st Century. People will look at it and say, "It had its time but nobody uses it any more because it was too complicated."
--Richard Monson-Haefel
Read the rest in Analysts see Java EE dying in an SOA world
What has to be especially satisfying about this plan for Apple is that there is literally no response even possible from its greatest competitor -- Microsoft. The level of technical sophistication and application integration required to make this work is beyond Microsoft within the next year or five years from now. So where Windows Vista will bring a variety of older Apple OS features to the PC desktop, Apple's Leopard will go far past the desktop metaphor altogether and introduce friggin' TELEPORTATION.
--Mark Stephens
Read the rest in PBS | I, Cringely . September 22, 2006
What WiMP11 represents is one of the biggest thefts of your rights that I can think of. MS planned this, pushed the various pieces slowly, and this is the first big hammer to drop. Your rights, the promises they made, and anything else that gets in the way of the content mafia making yet more money gets thrown out. Why? Greed. Your rights? History. You were dumb enough to let it happen, don't say I didn't warn you.
--Charlie Demerjian
Read the rest in Microsoft Media Player shreds your rights
we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner.
And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.
And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to.
And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace.
Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I'm here today.
But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.
--President Hugo Chavez (translated)
Read the rest in President Hugo Chavez Delivers Remarks at the U.N. General Assembly
Everyone in Iraq knows Bush is a dickhead. He's the boss' kid. Everybody I know who has a successful business who has a kid - the kid is always a fuckhead. Have you ever noticed that?
--Jesse James
Read the rest in BULLOCK'S HUSBAND IN BUSH RANT
I've always been a big fan of diversity and diversity certainly has its dark sides and it's like it's really confusing. The thing that Java tries to do and is actually remarkably successful at is spanning a lot of different domains, so you can do app server work, you can do cell phone work, you can do scientific programming, you can write software, do interplanetary navigation, all kinds of stuff in Java, whereas a lot of these other languages get a lot of their strength from being fairly domain specific. And at some level I don't really care about the programming language. What I really care about is the underlying semantics and the ability for things to interconnect.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in James Gosling: For Ruby or Ajax or SOA, it's NetBeans
Software development is, ultimately, controlled innovation - a software developer (unlike nearly all other professionals) is typically required to innovate on a daily basis. In only comparatively rare cases do software developers get to keep the fruits of their innovation; far more often they will receive wages that, when actual time versus "in-seat" time is calculated, place them fairly low down the totem pole in comparison to most other professionals. I'd argue that for most of the programmers working today on Longhorn, Microsoft will likely be making $100 return on investment for every $1 spent on compensation - with the resulting IP owned by Microsoft to boot. Not a bad return for a shared office, a few cola machines and strategically placed foosball games.
--Kurt Cagle on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 6 Jun 2005 16:41:24
At one time, the term alpha test meant something that was feature complete but had known bugs, and the term beta test was likewise feature complete and had no known bugs.
The purpose of an alpha test was to find out whether the feature set was what the users needed, and a beta would be the version shipped to manufacturing if the test showed no significant issues.
With XP, this sequence has reversed: an iteration test version should be defect free but be feature incomplete.
--John Roth on the fitnesse mailing list, Monday, 11 Sep 2006 16:05:20
And all of them have every right to BE RIGHT. All of them, ARE right. The problem comes if anybody believes that one institution, one product, one single leadership team can synthesise all of that into something which is optimal for EVERYBODY. It’s just not possible to deliver one thing which is optimal for two sets of conflicting requirements, let alone those of a thousand or so of the smartest, most passionate, and lets face it most eclectic of the world’s free software developers.
--Mark Shuttleworth
Read the rest in Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Conflicting goals create tension in communities
It is always possible to write tests first. The question is whether it is always practical. There are some situations, specifically having to do with untested legacy code, in which the cost to write tests is so high that manual testing might be cheaper; at least in the short term. But over time those situations can be mitigated to make testing easier.
--Robert Martin on the junit mailing list, Sunday, 1 Jun 2006 20:46:33
Remember the ASSSSS principle - A Simple Site Saves Stress Sometimes.
--David Matusiak on the webgroup mailing list, Monday, 11 Sep 2006 11:26:30
Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses.
--Martin Amis
Read the rest in The Observer | Review | The age of horrorism (part one)
trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
--Bruce Schneier
Read the rest in Wired News: Quickest Patch Ever
What kind of contract includes a provision that one of the parties has the right to violate the contract with impunity? Well, the Windows XP EULA for one, as an interesting analysis of Microsoft's legalese points out.
--Ed Foster
Read the rest in InfoWorld GripeLine by Ed Foster | InfoWorld | A Contract Only Microsoft Can Break | September 5, 2006 12:08 AM | By Ed Foster
When Java was first released, performance was that of a middling interpreted language - now it is as fast as any compiled language (including C) and only the design of your application holds back performance,
--Jack Shirazi on the Java Performance Tuning Newsletter mailing list, Sunday, 31 Mar 2005 14:34:42
Some people want the future of desktop Java to lie in rebuilding existing Java apps. This was the vision in the late '90s. Today some think Java apps have failed on the desktop because they don't see lots of Java technology-based word processors, spreadsheets, or graphics apps. It was shortsighted of us to think that developers would rewrite all of their old apps to run in the Java programming language. Existing apps aren't written in Java software or Perl or Ruby or .NET or anything else new simply because they haven't been rewritten at all. Existing apps are still in C++ and always will be.
The future of desktop Java technology -- and the future of other new languages and runtimes -- is in new kinds of applications, often talking to web-based services. I'm thinking of something like iTunes, where a web service, the music store, is as much a part of the application as the local app itself.
--Joshua Marinacci
Read the rest in Meet Josh Marinacci of the Swing Toolkit Team at Sun Microsystems
typically on new projects there's a long evaluation period where you decide what technology to use, along with lots of debates that include some crazy person actually wasting quite a lot of time evaluating Squeak and Lisp and OCaml and lots of other languages which are totally, truly brilliant programming languages worthy of great praise, but just don't have the gigantic ecosystem you need around them if you want to develop web software. These debates are enormously fun and a total and utter waste of time, because the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails).
--Joel Spolsky
Read the rest in Joel on Software
It's interesting how many bugs you can find in ancient code that thousands of people use every day
--Jeremias Maerki on the fop-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 30 Aug 2005 21:22:01
A good programmer can write a better program in a more appropriate language.
--Dan Saks
I took the classic approach to software development:
- encounter a bug
- blame the tool
- post to the mailing list and complain about it
- read the docs
- find own mistake and crawl back into my corner ;-)
--Ralph Scheuer on the java-dev mailing list, Tuesday, 30 Aug 2005 15:38:11
Test your multi-threaded code on an unusually slow system. We developed a bunch of code that passed its unit tests just fine when run from our desktops (fast single processor WinXP machines) and on our CruiseControl server (fast dual processor Linux machine). But when we tried running it on a quad processor PIII, stuff failed that we thought for months was safe and sound.
--Todd Bradley on the junit mailing list, Friday, 25 Aug 2006 09:02:09
Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about.
--Srirupa Prasad, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Read the rest in Wired News: Testing Drugs on India's Poor
That's one of the nice things about living in Cleveland: visiting just about any other city in the US a really cool experience.
--Alex Papadimoulis
Read the rest in The Daily WTF
The biggest problem with Swing was that it can do so much that it’s kind of become like the 747 cockpit if you like APIs. There’s a lot of complexity there, and the hard part is figuring out how to use it. It’s in this weird situation where pretty much anything you can want to do in Swing, you can do easily. But what’s hard is to figure out the easy path through all of the different options, the different ways you can do things. Once you figure out the one true path to get what you want done, then it’s pretty easy. People often say “Why don’t you just make it easier by simplifying it?”, and say, “so you simplify it in this way, it would make my life better”. But then for the next guy it would be worse, because he wants to not go there, he wants to go on this particular path. So it’s been difficult to manage the complexity right.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in James Gosling Q & A: Builder AU: Program: At Work
Any programmer that cannot follow rule N cannot follow rule M. My experience is that refusal to follow coding conventions is a warning flag, and that more serious problems will eventually appear.
This is especially true for rules where the intent is to produce code that can be manipulated by others. A programmer that refuses to do this is costing money, and very likely doing so deliberately (with job security in mind).
--Andrew Gideon on the wwwac mailing list, Sunday, Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:18:15
we had chosen PHP for a big Web application. That choice turned out well for a while—until we tried to maintain the application. Even though productivity [with PHP] was high, maintainability was horrible, and maintaining that application became a huge hassle. It was still the early days of PHP 4, and the PHP project had a habit of fixing critical bugs in minor version upgrades. Some of those changes made the APIs incompatible with previous versions. Since PHP had no static type checking or a compilation phase, you had to verify every page manually to see if that page still loaded after a minor upgrade.
--Geert Bevin
Read the rest in The Philosophy of RIFE
We're quite happy with the momentum and direction we have with Netbeans, and we're quite happy that Eclipse exists. Eclipse several years ago was relatively far ahead of Netbeans from a technology and functionality standpoint, and Eclipse really made Netbeans a lot better. The competition between us is a good thing for Java developers against the proprietary closed-source models that others are using to compete against the Java ecosystem
--Dan Roberts, director of marketing for developer tools, Sun
Read the rest in Sun: We're happy with Eclipse, honest... | The Register
While we’re at it, yes, it’s miraculous and wonderful that the plot was foiled, if it was. But now the whole Western world will be seriously inconvenienced in its travel for years, maybe decades. Isn’t this already a victory for our enemies? Isn’t this already a blow against world business? Might it be enough to push our already slowed growth into a recession?
--Ben Stein
Read the rest in Looking for the Will Beyond the Battlefield
I'd like to make two quick points in favor of static typing:
The value is not so much about robustness (I agree that mis-casts are rare) but about documentation. I do a lot of code reviews every day and I can tell you that reviewing Python or Ruby is an order of magnitude harder than reviewing Java because I can never tell what types are expected from method signatures.
Refactoring in dynamically typed languages is inherently unsafe. You can't even rename a method reliably. I'm glad it worked for you, but you need to keep in mind that renaming in a dynamically typed language is nothing more than a string replace. Use with caution.
--Cédric Beust on the junit mailing list, Monday, 6 Feb 2006 08:40:05
The Java start-up time is the number one ill of the whole Java phenomenon. This single fault killed the Java applet concept, and spawned the application server market: "Hey, that Java thing starts so slowly, why don't we pre-start a Java process, and cramp all of our applications into that one instance."
It really is unforgivable that after ten years, we are still suffering from the slow-start-ness of Java.
--Weiqi Gao
Read the rest in The First Thing I Would Do When I Get My Hands On Open Source Sun-Java ...
Despite what some parts of the media industry would like us to believe, copyright does not and is not intended to give authors complete control over all use of anything someone might have written.
--John Levine on the cbp mailing list, Sunday, Aug 2006 01:02:04
Smalltalk was more of a conceptual breakthrough than Java, but Smalltalk itself had several important predecessors from which it borrowed programming concepts. Java is a broadly successful synthesis of predecessor ideas plus its own unique networking-oriented innovations--just right for the Internet. Java will still be broadly used long after Smalltalk has contracted to a smaller and smaller niche.
--Charles Babcock
Read the rest in InformationWeek Weblog: 5 That Almost Made The List Of Greatest Software Ever
While you may think you (or your colleague) couldn't possibly get used to a different format, empirical evidence otherwise. Whether it's Hungarian notation, K&R vs. ANSI C, underscores_in_names vs. midCaps, whatever, people quickly get used to whatever they're dealing with day to day. Style /consistency/ is far more important than the particulars of the style itself.
--Colin Strasser on the wwwac mailing list, Friday, 11 Aug 2006 11:03:25
How many buttons do you need to click? This was the excellent question asked during a demo I recently saw. What was so good about that question? It is one of the better metrics for measuring user-interface productivity, which is in turn a key metric for perceived performance of user interfaces.
--Jack Shirazi in the Java Performance Tuning Newsletter, Sunday, 31 Jul 2005 15:42:45
Operation Iraqi Freedom has been exposed as a gruesome travesty. An old-fashioned colonial war, built on lies, greed and geopolitical fantasies, it has nothing to do with 'disarming' Iraq or 'liberating' the Iraqi people. Iraq is a threat to no one. No connection has been found between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11, and no evidence has been provided that Iraq has continued to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and might pass them on to terrorist groups. All this is malicious propaganda to mask the real war aims which are what they have been since 1991: to affirm America's global supremacy in a strategically vital, oil-rich part of the world, and to protect Israel's regional supremacy and its monopoly of weapons of mass destruction.
--Patrick Seale
Read the rest in Dar Al Hayat
The biggest misconception managers have is that they can cut back on the number of people in their group working on a project by making it open source, because the community will pick up the slack. Actually, it's just the opposite: An open-source project takes more resources than an internal proprietary one. Employees working on open source might spend an additional 25 percent of their time on community interaction. It costs more to do open-source development, but the benefits of better design and increased quality justify those costs. The community contributes to the quality of the final product by reporting and fixing bugs, and by innovating.
--Ron Goldman
Read the rest in Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Part Two of a Conversation With Sun Microsystems Laboratories' Ron Goldman
When I think that things around me works good enough and I can't see any problems that needs to be solved I will be really scared since it probably means that:
- a) I have given up
- b) I have stopped learning and trying new things.
- c) there is probably a c...
--Joakim Ohlrogge on the junit mailing list, Friday, 4 Aug 2006 12:54:46
Again and again, we hear the argument that a particular technology can be used for bad things, so we have to ban or control it. The problem is that when we ban or control a technology, we also deny ourselves some of the good things it can be used for. Security is always a trade-off. Almost all technologies can be used for both good and evil; in Beyond Fear, I call them "dual use" technologies. Most of the time, the good uses far outweigh the evil uses, and we're much better off as a society embracing the good uses and dealing with the evil uses some other way.
We don't ban cars because bank robbers can use them to get away faster. We don't ban cell phones because drug dealers use them to arrange sales. We don't ban money because kidnappers use it. And finally, we don't ban cryptography because the bad guys it to keep their communications secret. In all of these cases, the benefit to society of having the technology is much greater than the benefit to society of controlling, crippling, or banning the technology.
--Bruce Schneier on the CRYPTO-GRAM-LIST mailing list, Sunday, Wed, 15 Jun 2005 03:00:49
Today is yet another BigLayoffReduction-in-Force Day at Sun Microsystems. Between 4,000 and 5,000 jobs are expected to be cut this year, and today 311 jobs were cut from my local Sun Colorado campus. I have only a few friends left there... most of us got the boot one way or another over the last 4 years. But what I think is worse than the layoffs is the anticipation of layoffs. Ever since the first cuts began (the first one was supposed to be the only one, but there have been a gazillion since then), most of the employees who made each successive cut became more and more anxious, and less and less focused on whatever it is we were supposed to be doing to help the company turn things around (after the whole "we're the dot in dot com" thing stopped being Good Positioning).
--Kathy Sierra
Read the rest in Creating Passionate Users: Silver lining on Sun layoffs?
It's all about the frameworks. People talk about Java vs. Objective-C vs. Python vs. whatever, and I think the discussions are just idiotic. It's like arguing what kind of needle you want to use on a syringe and not paying any attention to what substance you're actually injecting yourself with.
Frameworks are the substance of programming. You build on top of a good one, your program is solid and fast and comes together beautifully. You build on top of a bad one, your life is miserable, brutish, and short.
I have much respect for my homies running Linux, but I just don't care for the frameworks. I programmed X11 in college and it sucked rats. I'm not going back to that, ever.
--Wil Shipley
Read the rest in On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley
I’m sitting here, for example, in my house tonight in darkness -- there’s no electricity -- next to a car park. What if someone launches a missile from the car park? Am I supposed to die for that? Is that a death sentence for me? Is that how Israel wages war? If I have children in the basement, are they to die for that? And then I’m told it’s my fault or it’s Hezbollah's fault? You know, these are serious moral questions.
It’s quite clear from listening to the IDF statement today that they believe that family deserved to die, because 90 feet away, they claim, a missile was fired. So they sentenced all those people to death. Is that what we're supposed to believe? I mean, presumably it is. I can't think of any other reason why they should say, “Well, 30 meters away a missile was fired.” Well, thanks very much. So those little children’s corpses in their plastic packages, all stuck together like giant candies today, this is supposed to be quite normal, this is how war is to be waged by the IDF.
--Robert Fisk
Read the rest in Democracy Now! | Robert Fisk Reports From Lebanon on the Israeli Bombing of Qana That Killed 57, Including 37 Children
I've said it before, I'll say it again: the real problem is LACK OF DOCUMENTATION. Those who describe application interfaces as 'frustratingly inconsistent' merely misdiagnose a symptom and miss the cause completely. Application developers who do not provide comprehensive interface documentation need to be held accountable by their users, because without accurate, detailed documentation users are left to figure out mystery meat APIs with nothing more than intelligent guesswork and random attempts at applying what's already been found to work on other applications to see if anything sticks on this one as well (where the 'inconsistent' misdiagnosis comes from).
--Hamish Sanderson on the applescript-users mailing list, Sunday, 29 Sep 2005 09:33:27
A common view of the schema or DTD is as a means to validate the instance for acceptance. However, it is perfectly useful as a means to validate an instance for rejection. You can have anti-schemas, anti-anti-schemas and so forth given some dynamic exchange such as messages which are themselves, evolving (the schema is a kind of message).
--Claude L (Len) Bullard, on the xml-dev mailing list, Sunday, 10 Feb 2005 10:46:05
America wasn’t founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state. I am sorry to tell you that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.
--Rev. Gregory A. Boyd
Read the rest in Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock
I used to have a blog, a wiki and forum software on my web server. But I got fed up with the never-ending job of staying on top of the latest "oops!" exploit.
--Steve Manes on the WWWAC mailing list, Tuesday, 09 May 2006 10:12:45
In almost every successful IT project I've ever been involved with it's been a nuts-and-bolts techie that's had the most important impact. More often than not, the "business skills" types were more hindrance than help. Many times their superiority and arrogance led to project failure.
For as long as I've been following IT, it's been the dream of business people and others to banish hard-core techies from such an important industry. There's always some prediction about how some new tool or methodology will finally make us irrelevant. Five years down the line, we'll have built thousands of new successful products, while those new tools and methodologies will be long forgotten.
You need us guys, get over it.
--Paul Knapp
Read the rest in Sorry businesspeople, but you need techies to build technology
Scripting languages will hit their peak interest period in 2006; Ruby conversions will be at its apogee, and its likely that somewhere in the latter half of 2006 we'll hear about the first major Ruby project failure, most likely from a large consulting firm that tries to duplicate the success of Ruby's evangelists (Dave Thomas, David Geary, and the other Rubyists I know of from the NFJS tour) by throwing Ruby at a project without really understanding it. In other words, same story, different technology, same result. By 2007 the Ruby Backlash will have begun.
--Ted Neward
Read the rest in The Blog Ride
I've never been a big fan of IDEs, but I have to admit that NetBeans is a pretty nice environment for Java coding. It certainly simplified the construction and running of unit tests and offered lots of useful context-sensitive information. It's only serious flaw is that it isn't Emacs, but I'm not sure I can legitimately hold that against it.
--Norm Walsh
Read the rest in Working with JAXP namespace contexts
Regulatory compliance (BASEL II, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA) will be an influence. If you have to be able to defend how you arrived at some numbers seven years ago, you're probably going to want a repository that supports versioning for XML schemas, source libraries, executables, XML documents, specifications, e-mails, diagrams, spreadsheets, and more.
--Ken North on the xml-dev mailing list, Monday, 3 May 2004
a program that is 10 times longer is 32 times harder to write.
Or put another way: a program that is 10 times smaller needs only 3% of the effort.
--Stephen Pemberton, XTech 2006
Read the rest in The Right Way to do Ajax is Declaratively | What Not How | http://duncan
Invoking the sanctity of human life, George Bush wielded the presidential veto for the first time in his presidency to halt US embryonic stem cell research in its tracks. He even paraded one-year-old Jack Jones, born from one of the frozen embryos that can now never be used for federally funded research, and talked of preventing the "taking of innocent human life". How hollow that sounds to Iraqis.
--Patrick Cockburn
Read the rest in Independent Online Edition > World Politics
this is exactly the issue Dell — and any company — has in all its customer interactions in the age of customer control: The person who answers the phone — or now responds to a blog post — is acting on behalf of Dell and to the customer is Dell, since that person is our connection to Dell. See the AOL cancellation video. Every one of your “customer service” employees and every one of your “public relations” employees in every encounter represents your company. That has always been the case. Only now, we can record their actions and report them to the world. There are many Chrises in many companies. The fact that they feel they can treat customers this way is a good indication, though, of the culture and management of the companies that employ them.
: I want to add that I hope young Chris does not lose his or her poor-paying internship. I’m sure that Chris, in fact, speaks for many people at Dell when it comes to what they think of me and perhaps other bloggers. Fine. I want transparency, I want conversation, this is the transparent conversation. Let’s have it. No more pussyfooting. The customers and the customer-service representatives have a real dialogue. The public meets the public relations company. No one-way mirrors. No hold buttons. No Muzak. No fake supervisors. Chris: Coffee’s on me, young man or woman.
--Jeff Jarvis
Read the rest in BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Some friendly advice from Dell
We don't allow doctors to perform surgery before washing their hands. It took a lot of effort and angst to get doctors to agree to this procedure when it was first discovered as beneficial. I think the effort was noble, and certainly not pointless.
I look at TDD in exactly the same way. It is a minimum standard of professionalism. You wash your hands before you cut, or you don't cut. Period.
--Robert Martin on the junit mailing list, Sunday, 1 Jun 2006 08:41:34
if two methods in two related classes have a similar naming scheme, they'll be interpreted as performing a similar action. One of the worst examples I can think of in J2EE is ejbCreate() method--which means "create a new object" in Session beans, but for Entity beans, "insert a new record in the database and, oh yeah, pull an existing object from the pool..." It would have been easier to remember what ejbCreate() does for entity beans if they'd given it a completely different name... even an arbitrary name (although ejbInsert() might have been nice). Having two different behaviors with the same name means cognitive load because your brain wants to find the pattern between the two matching names
--Kathy Sierra
Read the rest in Creating Passionate Users: Do your graphics say the wrong thing?
Every time you do something for the first time in your life, you're going to do a better job than other people who have done it before. You're aware of the most modern components. I was aware of the best chips that existed and used them for jobs for which they weren't intended. Poor design is a result of people not wanting to work hard. By working very hard, you can make devices that operate more simply.
--Steve Wozniak
Read the rest in The Great Woz Tells All
The odds are zero that RFID passport technology won't be hackable."
--Bruce Schneier , Counterpane Internet Security
Read the rest in Technologists object to U.S. RFID passports
Let's see if I have this right. The Arab "terrorists" attack military units, destroy at least one tank, and are therefore terrorists. Israel retaliates by launching aerial, naval, and artillery bombardments of civilian areas and they are engaging in self-defense. If we are unable to recognize the hypocrisy of this construct then we ourselves are so enveloped by propaganda and emotion that, like the Israelis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, we can't think rationally. We can only think in terms of tribalism and revenge.
--Larry C Johnson
Read the rest in NO QUARTER: Israel Takes A Stupid Pill
If you are a member of AT&T (including Cingular and SBC), Bell South or Verizon, your telecom company willingly sold the private telephone records of American citizens to the Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying operation.
-- Michael Kieschnick, Working Assets
Read the rest in WorkingForChange
The goal of the virtual machine is to provide for code portability, while in SOA, interoperability is far more important. Why go through all that trouble to build portable code, when in SOA, you want to leave the code where it is? Fundamentally, the virtual machine approach to distributed computing is through the serialization of objects leading to remote method invocation, while SOA runs on the exchange of messages between services with contracted interfaces.
--Jason Bloomberg, ZapThink
Read the rest in Analysts see Java EE dying in an SOA world
Let’s review what led up to me receiving this comment. 1.) I spend hard earned dollars on a Dell computer. 2.) I detect unwanted software on my computer 3.) I try to remove unwanted software on my own, only to discover it doesn’t easily uninstall. 4.) I ask Dell customer service for support and am asked to pay $49 to have it removed. 5.) I exercise my freedom of speech by truthfully complaining about my experience on my web site. 6.) Dell calls me a dipshit. Wow, what a way to win back your customers, Dell.
--Michael Righi
Read the rest in www. Michael Righi .com
We programmers need all the help we can get, and we should never assume otherwise. Careful design is great. Testing is great. Formal methods are great. Code reviews are great. Static analysis is great. But none of these things alone are sufficient to eliminate bugs: They will always be with us. A bug can exist for half a century despite our best efforts to exterminate it. We must program carefully, defensively, and remain ever vigilant.
--Joshua Bloch
Read the rest in Official Google Research Blog: Extra, Extra
The challenge isn't from the government alone, from industry alone or from technology alone. In different moments, each of these are friends of civil liberties. Sometimes they conspire in some combination of the three to be a challenge to civil liberties.
--Jennifer Granick, Center for Internet and Society
Read the rest in CHAMPION OF CYBERSPACE FACES ITS BIGGEST CASE YET / Listening in? Electronic Frontier Foundation accuses AT&T of violating users' digital privacy
The DB and the middle tier are merging, clearly. The current situation of having to deeply understand programming objects (top tier), XML etc. (mid-tier) and SQL (back-end) AND somehow keep track of which knows the state of what in order to work effectively does not make people happy.
--Michael Champion on the xml-dev mailing list, Wednesday, 4 May 2005 14:47:57
MacOS X is an inconsistent mess. Yes, it really is. Graphically, that is. OSX now has, what, 7 or 8 different themes, and as far as I'm concerned, that's 6 or 7 too many. Some people say Apple is experimenting with all these themes; that's fine, but please keep that reserved for testers, and not for people like me who do not like to spend 130 Euros every 18 months on a piece of software that is only getting more inconsistent instead of less. If you like graphical consistency, stick with BeOS/Zeta or GNOME.
--Thom Holwerda
Read the rest in What Sucks About DEs, pt. II: Apple, MacOS X
If you bring somebody in and they have problems, it's not because they're dumb, but we were dumb with the design.
--Robert Moritz, Sprint Nextel
Read the rest in iWon News
It's usually considered better engineering practice to assume that a building, a bridge, or a standard will be in existence for a long time, and to build it so as to allow incremental upgrades such as earthquake retrofitting, than to assume its imminent obsolescence and underengineer it.
--Doug Ewell on the Unicode mailing list, Tuesday, 17 May 2005 06:56:15
“It’s not the money.” While we’re on the topic of money, I tell this lie when asked to write, speak, or consult for low fees. But it is the money. I have four children and a wife, and I hate to travel away from them. If a for-profit organization wants me, it has to pay. I don’t care how prestigious the event is or what beautiful resort it’s in (all I’m going to do is answer email from my room and speak anyway), I simply won’t do it.
I’m more of a pushover for not-for-profits; the test in these cases is whether the organization is changing the world, and I believe I have a moral obligation to help out. But no cause is more important to me than my family.
--Guy Kawasaki
Read the rest in Signum sine tinnitu-
It is acceptable to be stale much of the time. Most data isn’t updated frequently, if at all. It is inserted as a new version (because of audit trail issues, etc.). Therefore, it doesn’t matter if what you see is a bit out of date. For example, if one uses the tracker for FedEx to look for a package and the data it shows is 30 minutes out of date, it will hardly be catastrophic. Unless one runs too fine a line on meetings or catching flights, even an airline’s landing info may be two to three minutes out of date without any serious ramifications. This fact inherently enables scalability by enabling the lazy copying of data to extra disks.
--Adam Bosworth
Read the rest in ACM Queue - Learning from THE WEB
Code coverage is the perfect example of the old maxim that "things get worse before they get better". Everyone's experience with code coverage is basically the same. The first time you run code coverage, you are horrified because no matter how comprehensive you think your test suite is, the initial percent coverage is surprisingly low. That's the beauty of using code coverage -- it gives you a useful quantitative result to replace a qualitative guess which is almost always wildly optimistic.
--Eric Sink
Read the rest in My life as a Code Economist
The one place where Java does have a legitimate remaining performance issue is startup time. But these days it's down small enough to where anything that runs more than a few seconds has a hard time noticing it. Most startup time in modern Java apps goes to the app itself, not the VM.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in Java Urban Performance Legends
One of the things that is often not well appreciated is that Java is really a two-level language: It's the virtual machine and it's the sort of ASCII syntax…all the other really interesting magic is in the virtual machine, the things that people never actually see. There are many, many, many scripting languages that have been put on top of that virtual machine.
--James Gosling
Read the rest in Is Java getting better with age?
For some bizarre reason, we seem to have settled on always, always, always giving users undo for such critical operations as deleting a single character. When users delete an entire document, however, we offer no possible recovery. That, in the real world, would be evidence of insanity. In the earliest days of the computer world, it was sometimes unavoidable. Now, it is inexcusable, particularly since large-scale undo is often so easy to implement with the use of a little magic.
The key to magic is that there are two performances: The one the magician is actually doing, and the one you think he is doing. If they coincide, the magic doesn't work. One of the keys to this separation is time: The actual manipulation-removal of the ball from under the cup, moving the coin from the top of the table to the underneath, etc.-either occurs before you think it did (anticipation) or after you think it did (premature consumption).
This separation of illusion from reality can work to our advantage as well. In the case of a deletion,
- We throw up a confirmation dialog
- The user confirms
- We delete the file
- We tell the user we deleted it.
What if we left out step three, at least for a while? The user can now experience that familiar sinking feeling that only occurs after we tell them the document is gone, go to the Edit menu, discover to their delight an active Undo and, magically, get all their information back. It requires no reconstruction of anything. We just reopen the same window we just blinked out.
--Bruce Tognazzini
Read the rest in The Scott Adams Meltdown: Anatomy of a Disast
API design is a whole parallel world to straight programming, which has its own aesthetics and rules - it's the meta-space around any problem space where what you write has to interact with other things. I know my sense of what's right and wrong, good and bad, has evolved enormously in recent years, and continues to. If you ever get a chance to work on a large codebase with a long history and lots of APIs, take it. It will make your outlook grow in unexpected ways. The beauty in API design is how to design it so users will enjoy using it, and at the same time leaving the API clean and small, with room to grow and evolve without breaking anything. It's an excercise in practicing kindness and decency both to the people who will use it, and to yourself, for you'll have to maintain it; and at the same time designing an API that's complementary to what the computer will phsyically need to do to accomplish whatever the task is (the Responder pattern in Cocoa is a lovely example of doing all three of these things).
--Tim Boudreau
Read the rest in Tim Boudreau's Blog: Of saxophones, westerns and the sense of beauty in programming
At the moment, the threading in Perl and Python and Ruby and PHP tends to be amateurish-to-absent. Java’s threading/concurrency machinery, on the other hand, has been excellent for years, and got a lot better in the 1.5 release. The dynamic-language guys will be working on this, but they’re starting from way behind.
--Tim Bray,
Read the rest in LAMP and Java
If Share Your OPML was a Java project I would've been heartsick to destroy it, but I coded the application in PHP. I've never written anything in PHP I didn't want to completely rewrite six months later.
--Rogers Cadenhead
Read the rest in Workbench: Settlement Reached with Dave Winer
Developers are renowned for underestimating effort, and I don't think that test-effort estimation is any different. In fact, given the disregard many developers have for testing, I think they would be more likely to underestimate the effort required to test their code than they would be to underestimate anything else.
The main cause of this test-effort blow-out is not that executing the test cycle in itself takes longer than expected, but that the number of test cycles that need to be executed over the life of the software is greater than expected. In my experience, it seems that most developers think they'll only test their code a couple of times at most. To such a developer I ask this question: "Have you ever had to test anything just a couple of times?" I certainly haven't.
--Ben Teese
Read the rest in Should we be doing more automated testing?
There are two kinds of legal departments in large companies: (a) the kind that automatically says, “No,” when asked, “Can we do this?” (b) and the kind that automatically says, “No,” when asked, “Can we do this?
--Guy Kawasaki,
Read the rest in The Top Ten Lies of Corporate Partners
Testing everything is a good thing. An important difference b