XKCD once again comes to the rescue with a clear and concise explanation of the problem. First of all the company felt the need to change their name because the old one had been so tarnished. And they really expect us to trust them with our votes? And yes the analogy really is a good one. Something has gone horribly awry if a virus can get on your voting machine.
People often ask me computer questions. One question that I regularly get is “do I need to upgrade my computer?” I personally like to keep computers around for a while, and due to upgrades and whatnot probably hold on to them longer than others in my field. (Though perhaps about as long as non computer types.) Thus my general advice is that a computer should last for about 5 years. Do I eat my own dog food?
Classic II 1991, upgraded once with (10 MB RAM) and once (80 MB HD). (It still runs and has all the original packaging. Anyone want it?) That lasted for 4 years until I got my Power Mac 7500 in 1995. That was one of the most expandable (Mac) machines ever (ram twice, a graphics card, a processor upgrade, and probably something else that I am forgetting) and got me all the way to my first “real” programming job lasting 5 years. Although I did keep using it as a gaming, desktop, and server(!) machine for another three years. It was eventually replace by the Pismo in 2000. That was another awesome and expandable machine, but by this point my care and feeding of macs skills had improved, so it might not actually be all that expandable. In any case it holds a special place because it transitioned me from OS 9 to OS X, which was a beautiful thing. Also it let me surf in the living room which was a nice ability to have when working from home. In any case, it eventually got a little long in the tooth for doing some of the work I was doing (what do you mean you can’t do interactive SVG rendering development on a laptop??) and I got a Dual G5 tower in 2005. This machine (that I am writing on now) absolutely screams. And it still does. The graphics card is a bit out of date at this point, but less than you would think, and any apps that are vector unit aware will blow the pants off of anything else out there still. The main problem is that somewhere between there and now Apple decided to switch over to the crufty (but regularly upgraded) Intel chipset.
So what does all this introspection have to do with anything? Well two items really. First is makes me realize that I’ve only been using this desktop machine for well on three years, and I really have no right to get one of those laptops that I have been drooling over. The one problem is, I don’t have the ability to upgrade this machine like I should since the chipset changed over. No swapping out processors for me. (Ram and disk I could do though…)
The other item is that I am not as cool as I think I am about using older machines. Holy crap! He is using a 13 year old computer and asking advice on how to hook a network computer up to it! That is making me want to break out with the old 7500 and boot it up as a server again. I wonder if YDL is still around?
Wil Shipley, programmer of awesomeness like Delicious Library had a recent post about a truly impressive crasher and data loss bug. The article is worth it in and of itself, however, the real beauty of this article is in his opinion of computer science PhD students.
These are, in my opinion, probably from computer science PhD students who believe in a perfect world of provable programming and the Easter Bunny. Here in the realm of actually making money, if running your program causes a user’s computer to crash, she doesn’t care if it’s Apple’s “fault” — she’s going to post all over the interwebs that your program sucks, and ask you for her money back. Now, since you’re not a PhD student, you like money, so this is bad.
This is SO TRUE. This is everything that was wrong with grad school wrapped up into one nice little nugget.
Also, the article has a pretty good analysis of how to diagnose and treat software bugs. Triage, backup, reproduce, before even looking at code. (Admittedly I normally reproduce in unit tests, but that is generally before looking at the suspect code.)
The announcement that wasn’t on Monday was that 10.6 is going to be coming out sometime next year. The reason they didn’t make a major announcement about it was that it isn’t going to actually have any new features. Apple is planning on going back over what they currently have and consolidating and pruning and improving. (The name is very clever, since it will basically have the same customer facing feature set as Leopard (aka 10.5) they are calling it Snow Leopard.)
For the non programmers who read my meow posts, cleaning up old code is absolutely critical. There are so many instances where the second time you write something it is about a million times better than the first. So doing an entire release cycle with no new user facing features is just about the best thing you can do with an OS.
My guess is that 10.6 will be by far and away the best OS Apple has ever made if they are able to stick to their plan. Of course, there will be some new features. Some API internals that will make the life of developers better, but hopefully they will be able to keep those to the minimum needed to really give the developers time to work on improving the existing code base. It is simply a focus on quality that you normally don’t see in software, where the constant drumbeat is for new and flashier features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if they are able to not shove a bunch of extra features in it, and how much they will charge for something that, while wildly improved over the previous version, doesn’t show any new features to the end user.
Mike posted a link to a rant about computer languages. I was just recently having this argument about whether to use SQL queries or do the work inline in the high level language (Java in my case). The conclusion was pretty much, “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” One quote from the rant matches perfectly:
But what we wound up with was a bunch of entry-level programmers all around the world who know one language, whichever one it is, and they don’t want to switch. Switching languages: the second one is your hardest. Because the first one was hard, and you think the second one’s going to be that bad, and that you wasted the entire investment you put into learning the first one.
So, by and large, programmers – you know, the rank-and-file – they pretty much pick a language and they stay with it for their entire career.
Admittedly SQL v Java isn’t really a language issue, but I have seen this problem over and over again. One of my first clients was willing to blow two months of time for the entire dev team to have them switch from VB6 to C#, and the team wasn’t willing. They really did have that block of thinking that learning a new language was hard, not realizing that the vast majority of the skill-set transfers over.
Some people say that Apple is a bad company because it doesn’t provide enough backwards compatibility. Let’s think about that for a minute. 68000 -> PPC chipset transition. Invisible emulation mode provided. OS 6-9 -> OS X transition. Visible OS mode provided. Me running a program I built for an operating system that hasn’t been sold for 10 years by double clicking the app Icon? Priceless.
Too awesome. Unfortunately I do not believe that OS X 10.5 will run OS 9 and even if it did, I have to believe that it doesn’t emulate the 68000 chipset. Of course the main reason they dropped that was the PPC -> Intel transition. *sigh* Maybe I won’t upgrade quite yet. I still love my G5.
As more comes out about the lost presidential emails, it is worthwhile looking a the system decisions that got us here in the first place. It is interesting to note, that when the email retention laws went into effect during Clinton’s term, they were able to build an automatic, tamper resistant archiving scheme in under a year.
It is also interesting that when the Bush administration decided to upgrade the system, the archiving system became manual and lost the tamper resistance. The advantage of mismanaging every single aspect of your presidency is that when stuff like this comes up, we have to assume poor planning, rather than more nefarious causes. Nixon was an amateur.
Streetview is a cancer that is taking over Illinois and Wisconsin.
For some reason that pic really creeps me out. Also, they have been doing a lot of driving around!
I have been using Hulu a bit lately, more for the experience than anything else. However, after watching the first episode of the new Knight Rider and a couple other random things that I really don’t need to see any more of, I saw the first episode of 24. The interface is pretty slick, and the ads really aren’t that bad (5 ads for an entire TV show? Pretty ok IMO.) So I decided I would give it a spin and see if this is something that I really need to integrate into my life. I was going to watch the entire first season of 24 in Hulu. Well, just after I saw the third episode they decided, in their infinite wisdom, that they were no longer going to offer the first season. The last line of this article says it all. OK, people. I know you are control freaks, but please if you are going to offer something in online only format, LEAVE IT UP LONG ENOUGH FOR ME TO WACH IT!
I guess I’ll still prefer the iTMS.
Now this interactive ebb and flow of movie chart from the NYT is totally not something that I needed to see today. I totally should have been hired to write that. Oh the awesome.
I don’t normally talk about work on this blog. But there are some things that require announcement to the world.
1) Product is three weeks behind schedule.
2) Code freeze (no, really, this time.) is tomorrow.
3) It is 5:30 PM at the work site.
4) Email from the designers requesting a major code change.
Ugh. How late is Starbuck’s open again? At least the manager in charge was apologetic.
ob Irony: I have been dealing with a flaw in the design process that caused me to create a part of code on this project in a manner that lacked what I felt was the necessary abstraction for this piece of code. Upon further examination of the code requiring change, had it been built with the proper abstraction in the first place, it would be minimal work to implement the design change. As it is… *sigh* Fortunately I don’t need to change any of the unit tests. (The change removes negative cases, but doesn’t get rid of any positive ones.)
Odd dissonance. I use a “friendslist” to read Live Journal posts. The first two posts were of my friends talking about about dreams they had last night. The third one was a feed from Dork Tower which also talks about blogging your dreams. I’ll be chuckling for the rest of the day if you don’t mind. And not blogging my dreams. That is EXACLY what reading a dream journal of mine would be like.
Looks like Toshiba calls it quits. I guess I can go out and buy a new (digital) TV and a PS 3 to watch movies off of.
Interesting item in the PCWorld article, the “$24 million DVD market”?? If DVDs tend to cost about $20, they only sell a million a year? That would be 1/3rd of the US buys one DVD a year and no one else in the entire world does. That must be a typo, it has to be $24 billion market.
So, how long have you had your AT&T or Verizon phone? Turns out just like with TV next year, the cell network is going all digital on Monday. They claim that only 1% of their customers still cling to the analog network, however there is a pretty large secondary market that it analog. Plus 1% is 600,000 customers. That would suck to discover that your phone you never use doesn’t work any more when you have fallen and can’t get up. I wonder if I’ve ever even had an analog phone? Maybe that Nokia I had with AT&T way back when?
I love a good conspiracy as much as the next person. And I have always thought that the undersea cable network was a major chokepoint that could be easily tampered with. But it seems HIGHLY unlikely that the US is behind the recent cable breaks in the mideast. From the article:
The conspiracy theory explanation, while just slightly more plausible than “OMGPONIES,” has absolutely no independent evidence to back it up. Whatever else the Trilateral Commission, Illuminati, Big Pharma, Al Qaeda, vaccination campaigns, and the Easter Bunny might be plotting at this moment, they just don’t seem to be planning a major assault on the Middle East’s ability to watch illicit American Idol broadcasts, conduct business, or surf the Arabic equivalent of YouTube. Reuters reporting that repairs will be completed this weekend.
I don’t know why I find this so funny, but a backup application that I use regularly, called SuperDuper! finally released the latest version today. They have been working on this update for months and months now, but I have to believe that once they realized the release would be near the end of January they must have timed it to be on Super Duper Tuesday. I hate that name for the big primary date, but it does make a great pun for software releases.
The Apple TV isn’t the only game in town when it comes to online movie rentals and purchases. In fact, the XBox 360 has almost exactly the same feature set. Joystiq did a nice compare and contrast of features. Just don’t try to play guitar hero on your Apple TV.
What I really want though is the same thing for Unbox and TiVo
Every time I write a major application for a client, it never seems real during the process. There are so many small issues, little unit tests to be run, small bugs to fix. All the details are small minded thoughts, and only the occasional glance is made up to make sure the details still fit the over all plan. But somehow the plans are always good, and the details all fit together. Then there is a moment of magic when this very unreal collection of pieces turns into something real. And then it is a question of do you feel lucky? Do you trust yourself? Are you going to run it with debugging turned on, or crank it up to the warn level?
Crank it up to the warn level, run it, and walk away. Come back in 20 minutes, and it is done. No messages at all. No sign that it did anything at all. But then you poke at the resultant data, and as if by magic, everything worked. I am still amazed that I can leave the computer unattended for 20 minutes and have it do something useful in the real world.
(now if I can only get my MSSQL connection to stop timing out on me. No, I really do need that connection for 20 minutes!)
I promise this is the last MWSF post.
So, the download movie rentals are pretty cool, but after watching my wonderful wife sit through my going on (and on and on and on) about the benefits of different versions of video systems and why we really need that HD TV for all the new gadgets that are coming out, I think that Erica over at TUAW has this one right.
Charging a dollar more is a tax on people with a certain gene that is predominantly located in males. That is why my brain shuts off and paying $2000 for a TV almost makes sense. And as long as my wife can sit through the whole thing, we’ll wrap back around to the point where I realize that, really, we don’t watch TV anyway, so why do we really need that. *sigh* I think I’m the only gadget freak out there who doesn’t actually like to buy gadgets. I just like to drool over them when they come out.
Not a post, I really am working and not reading MWSF news, but I just had to say something about the funny guys over at TUAW. The new mac laptop is pretty, and if you want to pay an extra grand for something I hadn’t even heard of before, go right ahead. Quote from TUAW: “Sure, it may be worth every penny, but first you have to find all those pennies and herd them into a recognizable grouping of some sort.”
This might be the year that Apple gets large chunks of my money. Too many good products out.
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