Month: April 2008 (Page 1 of 3)

This morning, I came across Brian White’s blog post praising Best Buy for their efforts to connect their customers with a Geek Squad branded http://fixya.com site. It is a model built upon the backs of thousands of technical support evangelists operating under web 2.0 do-goodisms and according to fixya.com since 2006, their site has grown to over 700,000 pages.

While I find it quite interesting, I just don’t get it. What motivates these do-gooder techs to spend their evenings and weekends helping strangers?
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The next C++ standard (C++0x) will have lambda expressions as part of the standard. N2550 introduces them. It’s a short document, and it’s not too painful to read. Go ahead and click it.

Like many new C++ standards, it’s not clear yet how the new feature is going to be used. Michael Feathers has already decided not to use them. At least one other person seems to mostly agree. I, on the other hand, am with Herb Sutter who seems excited enough about the feature to imply that MSVC10 will have support for it. This is going to be a great feature. Incidentally, Sutter has mentioned an addition to C++/CLI in the past that would add less sophisticated lambda support for concurrency. I suspect he’s serious about adding the support soon.

There have been many times when I’ve desperately wanted to avoid defining a one-off functor or function in my code. In fact, there have been times when I’ve been desperate enough to actually use Boost.Lambda! This standard is a clear win over Boost’s attempts to deal with the limitations of C++03.
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I was scanning my home page today and I noticed this:

aseigo: Deploying KDE to 52 million young

The above link is a blog post pointing out the impact of this:

Open Source Diary: ProInfo and Linux Educacional – KDE in Public Schools in Brazil

sildenafil online So, men with atherosclerosis will experience some degree of erectile dysfunction. Men often find it more difficult https://unica-web.com/ENGLISH/2015/unica2015-jury-pleshanov.html generic cialis online than women to discuss sexual health matters, which can result in them feeling lost and without objective. The common explanation for impotence in young men is lifestyle changes that cause stress at home and by consulting your buy cialis online doctor. An adequate sleep increases the risk of erectile dysfunction. viagra super store Basically, KDE Linux will be distributed for free to "53,000 labs serving some 52,000,000 students" in the public educational system of Brazil. These posts contain links to the actual project including the proposed software offerings and screenshots of the very clean desktop interface.

I was immediately struck by how ground-breaking this is, then I started thinking about Microsoft. For a company that earns about a gillian in revenue each year, they really haven’t stepped up to the plate when it comes to education. I mean they may offer student discounts or some similar middle ground capitulation, but certainly no free hand-outs!

Who stepped up to the plate?? The open source community.

What does this mean for the open source community? More importantly, what does this mean for Microsoft? With the open source movement gaining steam at an exponential pace, how much heat (if any) is Microsoft feeling from it. One thing is for sure, you won’t see Microsoft bundled on any lab systems in Brazilian schools any time soon!!

ECMAScript 4.0 (ES4) is on its way. This will be the next standard for JavaScript. It’s not going to be usable on web pages for a while, though. In fact, I suspect I won’t be using it on my web page for at least 5 years. The problem is simple: as long as people still use older browsers, you won’t be able to assume that people have it.

However, the features in it are an interesting look at what the standards committee thinks is wrong with the current JavaScript. This is not a minor patch release. This is a dramatically overhaul of the current JavaScript (ES3). Oh, they’ve included a lot of minor things that are simply broken in ES3. These changes are certainly interesting, but today I’m going to talk about their major focus. They want to make it easier to develop large applications in JavaScript. Clearly, they understand that people are starting to develop large applications for web browsers, and they feel that there are problems with the currently available technologies for this.

I don’t have any experience with developing what I’d call a large JavaScript application, but we are starting to develop an extension of PC-Doctor for Windows that uses JavaScript in numerous places to control its behavior. In my dreams, I imagine that it will eventually become a large application made up of plugins that run on JavaScript.

Let’s go through the major features that the committee thinks I’ll need as our technology gets bigger…
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This article is going to have more questions in it than answers. It’s about a problem in software development that I’m not sure I’ve worried about enough. I’ve certainly thought about it for specific cases, but this is the first time I’ve tried to think about the problem in general.

My main question revolves around the cost of complexity in software. There is certainly a large cost in making software more complex. Maintenance becomes more difficult. Teaching new employees about the project becomes harder. In the end, you will get fewer engineers who understand a complex project than a simple one.

Unfortunately, almost any non-refactoring work will add to the complexity of a project. However, some changes can have a large effect on the complexity in a short period of time. Adding a new library or technique to the code base, for example, will make it so that the new technology will have to be understood by people working on the project.

What I really want to know is how much can this cost of complexity be mitigated? Besides switching libraries to add, what can be done to decrease the cost? My question is based on the assumption that some complexity is essential. So, given that you’re going to add a new library to the code base, for example, what can be done to reduce the cost? Continue reading