I work on an application that has a both a GUI (graphical) and API (scripting) interface. Our product has a very large installed base. Many customers have invested a lot of time and effort into writing scripts that use our product. In all of our designs and implementation, we (understandably) have a very strict requirement to maintain...
The SQL implementation of relational databases has been around in their current form for something like 25 years (since System R and Ingres). Even the main (loosely adhered to) standard is ANSI-92 (although there were later updates) is a good 15 years old. What innovations can you think of with SQL based databases in the last ten years...
I'm applying for a masters in fall of next year and was wondering if anyone had suggestions for interesting/challenging master's degrees in CS. I think that even though picking the right university is important, it is even more important to pick a master's degree where you'll find talented/creative people to interact and learn from. bac...
I was watching something on TV the other day and sat in disbelief as someone said something to the effect of, "I wish we could round up all of the people who made mistakes and punish them." That statement floored me. Punishing malevolence is one thing (preferably by immediate dismissal), but punishing mistakes? How is one to learn? Doesn...
Alan Kay was quoted several years ago to the effect that there had been only three new things in software in the preceding 20 years (effectively the lifespan of PCs). One of them was Spreadsheets. Does anyone remember the other two? (EDIT: Who is Alan Kay (a few may ask.) His work at Xerox Parc arguably did more to shape our current so...
The effects of the current economic crisis is far reaching. Here in Australia we are seeing massive cut backs on spending and massive job cuts in big business - mining giant Rio Tinto has just announced 14,000 jobs being cut world wide (~2/3 contractors, 1/3 employees). My business specialises in short term innovative software developm...
This question arose from comments about different kinds of progress in computing over the last 50 years or so. I was asked by some of the other participants to raise it as a question to the whole forum. The basic idea here is not to bash the current state of things but to try to understand something about the progress of coming up with...
It seems to me that, in some ways, Java is where C was a while back. Both are fairly minimalist languages for their time, with relatively clean, simple cores to build on. (I'm referring to the core language here, not the libraries.) Both are/were extremely popular. Both are/were lingua francas, with tons of legacy code. Both are/wer...
.NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC - there's really a lot of new Microsoft technology released / on the horizon to try out these days. (The examples I gave is all Microsoft technology but this can apply to any language or platform). I am curious how this is handled in the company you work for. A few examples: Do you have...
Innovation seems to be a Buzz word these days. Each organization is giving a lot of emphasis on it and at the same time it is also becoming the most abusive word. Every new thing is not an innovation. In my organization also there is a drive started to promote the innovation culture and some how i got involved in that. I want to know ho...
G'day, When was the last time you did something new? And what was it? Language - Erlang?, Haskell?, C++ instead of C?, Ruby?, C# from Java?, etc. Platform - Linux from Unix?, ASP.NET from .NET?, Unix from Windows?, etc. IDE - Eclipse from VS?, Netbeans?, etc. Approach - OO from functional decomposition, etc. Role - Architect from deve...
Often times convention is one of the most important design consideration for user interface. Usually the advice goes to do it like Microsoft does. This is for three reasons: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If your users expect to click on a floppy disk icon to save, don't change the icon (even though some of them may have never see...
He guys, I just read this post about really nasty (and cool at the same time) ways to perform XSS. However, there is still something unclear to me. I understand the full concept of the attack, however, I dont see how this can potentially be exploited. The "action" attribute inside the form must point to a ftp server (or any other serve...
Don't worry, I'm not breaking the web :P I'm annoyed by some stuff in CSS, and I'm going to fix it. It'll be syntactic sugar only, my language will be server-side compiled to regular CSS, so there's no need for special software on the client side. My current ideas: Variables (actually, they're constants). You will be able to define c...
Traditional version control system are displaying versioning information by grouping Projects->Folders->Files with Tree view on the left and details view on the right, then you will click on each item to look at revision history for that configuration history. Assuming that I have all the historical versioning information available for ...
I've been working as a software developer for almost a year (not much though) in a corporate environment but all I've done so far is a raw software implementation of company needs. Senior coworkers don't seem to be doing some fairly different stuff. In fact their "benefit" for being experienced is simply an app design and getting their h...
At the company that I work we have a successful software product that did well but is now obsolete and unmaintainable. I am trying to explain that you need to innovate and replace this product with new offering in order to survive. I am looking for some good examples of companies that made the mistake that we are close to making - relyin...