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Comment Pass the tinfoil (Score 2) 392

A) Steve wanted world dominance and couldn't stand the thought of users doing actual programming ... OR B) Hypercard basically sucked as an application and wasn't going to make any money

Comment Re:This is BS (Score 1) 203

As A coder I can testify that the metrics have very little to do with the end result meeting up with the specs. What the Managers (aka 'bean counters') want to know is who should be paid more or less for their contribution. You can fairly easily measure code product quality against specs, and there are a million ways to do that. ( and a million different interpretations but its doable) what has NOT been found, to my knowledge, is to measure the developer ... did he do it fast enough ? efficient ? Elegantly, if he spent more time would the result be better or worse ? If you put 10 paid people on it would the results be as good ? better ? Thats the hard part. Measuring the *developer* not the product.

Comment Re:This is BS (Score 1) 203

No I mean real BS. The core problem is not measurement but defining *what* is to be measured. To my knowledge that has never been achieved. Focusing on measurement is BS until we can agree on what is to actually be measured. To use your analogy. What is the measurement of a good cabinit ? How about a good piece of art ? Good in what way ? Value ? Prettiness ? Novelty ? Usefulness ? Uniqueness ? Utility ? Color ? Mass productivity (cabinits built per hour by X technology) ? Weight ? Shipping cost ? Price to produce ? Sales ? Measuring software IS BS until we define what the metrics are.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 171

As another poster mentioned, its not the "main" class that takes time its all the other jar files a real world app needs. A detailed analysis of this was presented at Balisage 2009 by Norm Walsh and myself. http://www.calldei.com/pubs/Balisage2009/index.html http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol4/html/Lee01/BalisageVol4-Lee01.html Includes some pretty pictures and charts running tests across multiple OS's and platforms running real world XML processing in java, both by piecemeal (starting java for each operation) vs integrated into a single app (xproc and xmlsh). Results are 50x and up performance difference between having to start java for each operation or not. And these are pretty hefty operations to begin with (not "hello world"). -David

Comment Re:My Advice (Score 1) 296

If you want the government to pay for you to "educate yourself" your in the wrong country. You may call it "bullshit financial reasons" but the the simple fact is that education in itself doesn't produce squat. It may be personally satisfying (and historically has been the Provence of the rich and aristocracy ) and if that's your goal then your on the right track. Work your 'day job' to pay for your 'hobby'. Its a great combination. You get paid and you get to enjoy your educational hobby. But if you that somehow you think academic ivory tower education is an actual economic benefit to society at large and deserve to be paid for it on its own merit without producing services of perceived value to society then you should stay in your tower. -David

Comment Re:Amazing - huh ? (Score 1) 396

Major ice sheets are evaporating, and there's someone in the wild that says, "hay, this is normal, don't worry." And then another person says, "Hay, this is great publishing!" It's like being in a theater and someone yells, "Fire!" and then a chorus of voices blocking the Exits screams, "There is no Fire!"

So who in this story is saying "Don't Worry" and who is "Blocking the Exits" ? I get the part about "Great Publishing" and "Fire" - end-of-the-world stories make great news. But the rest of your comment is way over my head ....

Comment Re:Awesome engineers (Score 1) 326

incredibly fucking awesome engineers get paid megabucks to do their job and then they jump in their Ferrari, go home to their lingerie model wife, get a blowjob right before their private chef serves them their meal, and then, if he's in the mood, bangs her sister - the swim suite model - while the wife watches and masturbates.

BTW, you'll never see them post on Slashdot because: They're creating awesome World saving software They're shopping for a new Ferrari Banging their model Wife or her sister or her lingerie model friends or all of them at once. Or he's reading tech journals while sipping single malt 500 year old scotch. Sleeping from all the work and model banging he has been doing.

So exactly whats the serial number of the universe your living in ? Great *salesmen* do the above. Great *Engineers* rarely ...

Comment Total and Complete BS (Score 2) 326

Great engineers write code because they love to and cant stop. Mediocre and lousy engineers write code (for some reasons) so they get ego points "contributing" to open source and hope to pad their resume. The great engineers then have to evaluate and fix their lousy code. Or it slips by and the whole suffers. I would love help from the great engineers for my open source projects but would prefer no help at all from the rest. Even then it will take work to make sure its up to my standards or biased egotistical opinions. "Its a cathedral not a bazaar". The best software I've ever seen and used was written by very few people, usually only one. A few exceptions (say Linux itself) but shouldn't be taken as the model for Open Source but rather a magical exception.

Comment Re:Yikes (Score 1) 616

C++ and Objective C co-existly about as cleanly as any two languages can. XCode natively supports both even intermixed within the same expression. In fact really OC is really C++ - some things + some things ... I find writing iPhone code much easier (and more efficient) when I stick to C++ for everything except where I have to communicate with the native OS API's ... Building, Debugging, Running ... all seamless ... as long as you follow a few constraints like not putting C++ objects directly in an OC class. ( pointers to C++ objects yes, actual objects no). A few other gotchas but very easy to deal with.

Comment Re:From irrelevant to obsolete in one fell swoop? (Score 1) 258

It does take a bit of effort. About as much as setting up an ebay and paypal account. But it can be 'worth it'. I "Found" 50 BTC lying around which I had minted this year then lost when I got tired of the game. Then last month I read that the exchange rate was $20 USD/BTC ... It was worth the about 2 hours of work it took me to get a mtgov account, a dwolla account, track down my backup of my bitcoin DB and sell them. By then the rate had got to about $17 and I sold a few blocks as the rate further dropped ... but within a week I had > $800 USD of "Real Money" in my "Real Bank" ... for about 2 hours work (and 2 days CPU/electricity time). For me, it was "worth it". But now mining is so hard its not worth it anymore. I had lucked out in Jan and had gotten a block solved with only 2 days of CPU time.

Comment California ... (Score 0) 195

I so bought into the California Liberal Philosophy when I lived there ... Da Evil Man, Green Green ! Down with Da Nukes ! Wicca Hippies with Tolerance (except towards anyone else) ... I still have my pony tail in my freezer to prove to the grandkids I was Cool Once ... Thankfully I moved out to the Midwest 10 years ago and met real people and came out of my lifetime of drug infused smokey haze and eventually woke up and realized "WTF" ? not that I'm apposed to drug induced smokey hazes ... but you should avoid making laws and spending other peoples money while so influenced. Drugs and Hallucinations are for personal enlightenment not fiscal policy. Salinas is a rich agricultural capital of he world ! whats wrong with that ? Now they are Green Techno-Bubble Idiots of the world. They should have asked the farmers if it was a sound investment. maybe they'd have sold some tulips instead and made a killing. -D -D

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