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No. More complex chip designs (particularly die shrinking) require more sophisticated fabrication techniques. Refining fab techniques is what reduces failure rates (and costs as yields increase).
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Even though more than 20 years have passed, I still remember wondering what it would be like to finish university and start working. Up until that point, I had pretty much spent my whole life in school, with only a few, non-programming summer jobs thrown in. My expectations of what it would be like to work as a software developer were mostly correct, but there were a few surprises in the first few years, and here are the top five. Wait, they actually expect the code to run?
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Better title: top 5 reasons why business programming sucks.
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Number 3 didn't surprise me in the slightest, I've never felt any non-trivial program was 100% complete even before I started working (including personal projects, which is why I tend to get discouraged and stop working on them).
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I bet another developer with only 10 years of experience would write this article differently. Anyone?
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5. People Interaction - I was not surprised because the software engineering courses I took in college prepared me for working in small teams, discussing / collaborating, on getting the group projects done that were assigned by our instructor. In the programming courses I often teach as a part time professor, I follow the same idea - small group projects to help teach these skills of working with others.
4. Writing Matters - Again thanks to my software engineering professor, this is not of surprise either. I require my students to document and write a little bit about the projects. What did they learn from it? What did they like about it? What did they hate about it? Also, if they were to do the project again, what aspects of it would they change?
3. Software is Never Done - This is of no surprise, and the only "surprise" to me is some projects that live out longer than their expected life expectancy in the SDLC.
2. Few Clever Algorithms - Really? I question this one as there are plenty of cleaver algorithms and solutions out there. Just takes a well motivated and driven mind to apply them.
1. Complexity from Aggregation - I disagree to an extent. "Complexity" is only how complex someone chooses to make something. Unless, this complexity is attempting to model something in science and nature
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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All these kids want to do Game Programming. Knew a guy who did it, and it sucked. First of all there is no money in it since game programming is apparently contracted out, and the companies that do it are pressured on budget and time. Second, it is really the graphics designers that create the game now, not the programmers.
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There are a number of Java memes which annoy me, partly because they were always a bad idea, but mostly because people still keep picking them up years after there is better alternatives. Here are a few of them. My pet hates in Java coding. What are yours?
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Guess it is sort of like UNIX whose command line interface was extremely inconsistant. A real pain.
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The internet is ablaze with an out of control REST flame war. It seems that many people think there’s a REST protocol when in fact there’s no such thing. Looking for a protocol in Roy Fielding’s dissertation will get you nowhere because it’s an academic paper describing an architectural style, there’s no protocol to be had. The only contribution Mr Fielding makes to the debate is to tell almost anyone who describes their API as RESTful, that it is not. Writing RESTful web services, in practice – in the real world – means that you are on your own.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Writing RESTful web services, in practice – in the real world – means that you are on your own
The real world is also complicated. CORBA[^] and DCE[^] may seem complicated, but if all you want is something similar to a RESTFul web service, they are pretty easy to use.
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It’s been over a decade since Roy Fielding wrote his seminal dissertation on Representation State Transfer (REST). Over this period we’ve seen SOAP/WSDL fall out of favor as the cool kids transition their services over to the REST paradigm. Or so it seems on the surface. In reality, we’ve spent the last 10 years building various ad-hoc services over HTTP that borrow bits and pieces from the grand vision that Roy outlined. We’ve settled into a rhythm that, depending on your outlook, is either a naive implementation or an enlightened massaging of the initial approach. Is the glass half empty, or half full? Virtually no popular APIs that claim to be RESTful today actually honor the complete tenets of the faith.
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Once upon a time, Steve Ballmer blasted Apple for asking its customers to pay $500 for an Apple logo. This was the “Apple Tax“, the price difference between the solid, professional workmanship of a laptop running on Windows, and Apple’s needlessly elegant MacBooks. Following last week’s verdict against Samsung, the kommentariat have raised the specter of an egregious new Apple Tax, one that Apple will levy on other smartphone makers who will have no choice but to pass the burden on to you. Have we already forgotten the Microsoft Tax many Android handsets already pay?
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A lot of people are on the fence when it comes to Microsoft’s forthcoming OS. The Modern (formerly Metro) UI has made some previously enthusiastic Windows devotees reluctant to upgrade and, to be fair, it’s easy to understand why. But there’s much more to Windows 8 than just its touch-friendly but slightly clunky Start screen. If you’ve yet to make up your mind about upgrading, maybe some of these new features will sway you. I wonder if the app marketplace will take off. Could it be the next App Store?
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There are come compelling reasons in the article. Don't think it is enough for me to rush and replace my Windows 7 with Windows 8 though. We will see if this is another Windows ME or not.
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Hmm, copying files seems to be a lot slower to me. Plus you get stupid security messages. That would be more like a reason not to upgrade
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Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk. 720k ought to be enough for anyone.
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I worked with a number of computers that had floppy disks. From what I remember Apple with its Macintosh was very much responsible for 3.4" floppy disk. What was really interesting was that the Macintosh version had more bits on the outside track than the inside. The IBM PC version had the same number. This meant that the Macintosh computer floppy could hold more data than the PC. Of course the PC format won out since there were eventually so many more PC's with 3.5" drives than there were Macintoshes.
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This history was pulled out of his arse by the author.
This is so full of inaccuracies that I don't even know where to begin.
"Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning."
Tiny amounts of data? Magnetic tapes were commonly 2400' in length and held data at 3200 bits/inch. That translatesd to about 90 megabytes. Since there were 9 tracks on the tape, that is about 720 megabits of storage (1 bit being used for parity check). Even if fully half the tape is wasted on inter-record gaps, that works out to 45 megabytes of data.Compare that to 1.44 megabytes on the final iteration of the 3.5" floppy.
Slower than a slug? At a speed of 120 inches/second, you get a data transfer rate of 384,000 bytes/second. The floppy, according to Wikipedia, had a maximum transfer rate of 1 million bits/second, translating to 125K bytes/second.
"I didn't know that IBM had decided as early as 1967 that tape-drives, while fine for back-ups, simply weren't good enough to load software on mainframes. So it was that Alan Shugart assigned David L. Noble to lead the development of “a reliable and inexpensive system for loading microcode into the IBM System/370 mainframes using a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL).” From this project came the first 8-inch floppy disk."
A tape could get lost in the vast library of tapes that a company would have. If the microprogram could be somehow stored in such a manner that it would never get lost, that would be one service call less for the IBM customer engineer each time someone misplaced the tape containing the microcode. The floppy drive was built into the cabinet of the CPU and the floppy drive containg the microcode for the IBM mainframe was copied into the flopp[y disk and put inside the floppy drive. I don't remember if it was possible to eject the media out of the floppy drive but somehow I think the user couldn't.
There were three buttons one rarely touched on the front panel (or, back side) of the IBM 360 mainframes. The first of these is the IPL (Initial Program Load) button. This would re-boot the computer by reloading the operating system. The second is the IMPL (Initial Micro Program Load, not ICPL) button, which actually reloaded the instruction set that the mainframe was capable of executing into ROM from the floppy disk. The third was the big red switch that turned the power off to the mainframe.
"According to Don Massaro (PDF link), another IBMer who followed Shugart to the new business, Wang’s founder Charles Wang said, “I want to come out with a much lower-end word processor. It has to be much lower cost and I can't afford to pay you $200 for your 8" floppy; I need a $100 floppy.”"
First of all, the founder of Wang Computers was An Wang; Charles Wang founded Computer Associates, Inc.
Even after several iterations the 5-1/4" floppy drive was being sold at $650. Some years after the IBM PC came out - that would make it the mid-to-late-1980's - Tandon Corporation announced the first sub-$400 floppy drive. It was the 1990s before you got to the $100 floppy drive.
Enough already!
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Just curious, thought that there had been 8" drives on the early PCs, so the price was not that bad. Can't confirm. Wikipedia has pretty much the same information.
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Bill Gates would be the first to point out all the cases where Microsoft’s competitors made a key mistake that let Microsoft succeed. Office is perhaps the most notable example, where competitors’ reluctance to support Microsoft Windows took Word and Excel from second-tier status to leadership as customers shifted from DOS to Windows.... That is why Microsoft historically keeps the pressure up even when its cause looks hopeless. Android may stumble, but Windows Phone needs to keep going the distance.
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Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us. Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don’t actually own them. There are no second-hand books in the Matrix.
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Had a friend with ITunes. Seemed like it was hell to backup, especially a large library. Then the licenses were limited by email address, so once had installed 5 times could not anymore, even if you had bought multiple iPods. I like MP3. Just copy those albums you want where you want them. No hassles. Death to Apple.
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So somebody votes me down. If you vote down you should at least tell me why you like ITunes. Maybe it is because it is proprietary???
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I'm sure he is a Apple fanboy...
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