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If its dead, is there a successor?
For those who didn't know:
The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among news servers.
NNTP isn't dead. It just smells funny.
Sadly, these days if you want to follow 10 different forums then you need to have 10 different accounts and learn 10 different UIs. I like being able to pick the newsreader that I like and have the same interface for all of my newsgroups. OpenID may bring some of this back, but I'm afraid that the "new internet" just doesn't care about interoperability like the "old internet" did.
It is not dead, but still used by guys who do prefer plain-text over animated emoticons and flashy ad-banners.
Seriously, I have been using it since ten years and I cannot detect any drop in the number of articles or users.
It's not dead - there's still plenty of traffic in the public C# group, for instance.
StackOverflow is becoming a pseudo-successor - but only for some kinds of threads. Q&A threads are ideally suited to SO; discussion threads don't work nearly as well here as they do in newsgroups.
I have never been on Usenet. But I use several “private” NNTP servers (disconnected from Usenet), including the awesome NNTP interface to mailing lists: http://gmane.org/
Edit: oh and none of those servers I use needs an "account". Yet they're quite spam-free.
I know many people like myself who still use nntp / usenet on a daily basis. It is an absolutely invaluable tool. I doubt it will go away anytime soon.
It's like the pinball machine of online communities. All the new kids may not know what it's all about and may think it is dead, but it is still alive and kicking and there's still nothing that can compare.
It's not dead (yet?) but it's being replaced by feeds and feedreader (RSS and Atom)
It's nowhere near as relevant as it once was. Nowadays any popular forum is going to be web-based. For example, stackoverflow would be very crap if based around NNTP. You just can't provide the same experience when your interaction with the forum software is so limited.
Another big problem is that you can't display a CAPTCHA over NNTP, or indeed provide any other modern interactive anti-spam measure.
I'd say yes, it's practically dead.
Agreed, NNTP's time is past. We have good connectivity; there is no need to replicate data across multiple servers any more. I use Google Groups in preference to NNTP.
However, NNTP does provide some community assurance against catastrophic failure. There's probably an open-source project in there somewhere for web-based forums to provide this kind of distributed, fault-tolerant, load-balanced services.
The only true NNTP Replacement could be Mailing lists. Not any web-based forum.
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I'm introducing a new Project-Management software in my company and looking into possible opensource software. Since i'm familiar with python, trac would be my first choice. but it looks like it is mostly used for software-projects, which isn't the case in my company.
Furthermore, time tracking is a big issue. We have multiple develeopers and each one should be able to track their time on the projects he worked on. This times schould be exported into csv at the end of each month (although i think i could to the export also directly from the DB)
So have anyone experiance with trac in non-software projects? It would be great to her some experiance from you, saves a lot of time for me ;)
We currently use Trac for our IT team. It allows us to track things such a help desk tickets, server projects and website changes. We have been doing this for over a year now and it is working great. It is even starting to spread out into other teams for managing team tasks!
As for pulling hours, etc from Trac, we use a custom field and then pull the data through the report module (now deprecated) and direct database access. In the past we have used plugins such as these.
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TimingAndEstimationPlugin
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracHoursPlugin
We have also tied Trac into AD for authentication which allows for a single shared pasword for Trac and our domain.
For what it's worth I've setup a couple of Trac instances, that are totally unrelated to software development. Trac works well as a low entry barrier platform for any stuff I've encountered so far. We have all sorts of applications running, and especially the attitude to wikify anything is very nice - wiki markup in tickets, consistent link syntax across modules (changeset comments, tickets, wiki pages), etc. And I can confirm the viral effect, that a well-established Trac application has.
Trac it's very slim at initial setup, but feature-rice and modular from the ground to satisfy growing demand. For things like time-tracking you could use solutions like the TimingAndEstimationPlugin mentioned by Josh before as well. In general trac-hacks.org is a crowded space, not exactly easy to pick what you want, but a valuable resource anyway.
Make sure to ask at the trac-users mailing list and IRC channel #trac at irc.freenode.net, if you encounter some challenges. It's a small developer community, but a friendly one, and with some Python experience you'll surely find your way. Source code and wiki docs at trac.edgewall.org are always your friend.
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Please feel free to move this to meta/superuser if this is the wrong place. But this is a developer related question.
I have a smallish company with about 10 employees (developers). Often when I am browsing the internet, I come across various techniques and methods which I would like to share with them. Now one way is to simply point them to those links, but that's not too effective as sometimes the link dies, our connectivity is down, people may want to add some comments/thoughts etc.
I am wondering what is the best way to organize all this data. Couple of questions:
Should I use a SO clone? Wiki? Digg clone?
Personally I dont want to use a wiki. I find it to be a pain to create links manually. I just want to post stuff and links and select an appropriate category and people can then view and comment etc.
How to get everyone involved in this process? SO does it well by giving points to users.
How does your company manage information?
Thank you for your time.
I quite liked a process once upon a time.
Start a knowledge base within the company using Blog/Wiki/SharePoint. SharePoint is nice in the fact that it is basically setup and go. You can modify to specific needs down the line. With this you should allow your staff to add posts or blog entries etc, and then once a week/month/whenever you should have a half day "learning" session.
In this session everyone can share idea's and "nice-finds" and then share with their fellow staff; alternatively, you give each member of the team the opportunity to "teach" a session whereby they can share a technology they've found and basically pitch it to the team.
This gives the following:
Adds to teamwork
Gives opportunities to change the way they work, by introducing new technologies
Active learning is always better than passive
The problem comes with people who are introverted, non-confident or simply do not have the time to give lessons, all of which can be overcome by lowering load, allow some to do written presentations, etc.
Hope this helps.
Use a wiki or a blog. Preferably one with both. That way they can search for things and you encourage them to post their own information. Its not easy to get everyone on board but keep trying.
I find the best way to get people involved is by example. Post good stuff and not just 'stuff I found to day about blah....' I read pages out there that all do it link to some new announcement or another - waste of time I think. Better to post somethings of relevance, but not just links. Put some comments along with links.
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I'm looking for examples where a human-based service replaced an automated one. For example, machine translation (although suboptimal in quality) largely replaced human translation in many areas -- can anyone think of where the opposite has occurred (especially with regard to today's industry)?
Edit: Before you downvote because this doesn't have the keyword C++, my reasoning is that programmers invariably create these technologies, and programmers are the ones who are either 1) displaced by the revival of human service, or 2) asked to somehow integrate the human element in a service. When there are questions like this one, it doesn't make sense to downvote this (unless you downvoted that, too).
reCaptcha is, I think, a direct counter-example to your machine translation example (since it's a form of visual translation, so to speak),
perhaps google image labeller counts
I recall something about yahoo running a "humans do simple tasks online for you cheaply, in the place of cpu cycles" scheme.
Crowdsourcing in general might be something similar to what you're thinking of.
Perhaps not the most exciting examples, but certainly among the most common--used everyday by pretty much everyone. Non-trivial as well.
Electronic Stability Control (braking-steering control in many (most?) automobiles
Auto-focus in some digital cameras.
It is an unlikely situation because for a machine to have been given the responsibility in the first place you would expect it to have been sufficiently good/cheap/etc at the task. So for it to then be replaced by a human, the human approach would need to have some how got better or cheaper at a faster rate than the technology driven one.
That's not to say that there isn't an example of this of course. I think it is an interesting question.
I've heard there are CAPTCHA-resolving centers in India. That may be a lie though.
Actually, I have an interesting example of this.
A few years ago I was working for a company writing a Dive School System for a Hotel in Sharm El Sheikh (in Egypt) along with a new "front of house" system. We were trying to come up with a fast check-in system for checking in an entire busload of divers arriving from the airport, the thing is, in Egypt labor is very very cheap, and the end it was more costly to do this with a computer system, than to continue with the old manual system of simply having 15-20 staff doing the checking in.
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Jeffery Palermo says 'Classic WebForms More Mature Than ASP.NET MVC': "Is Classic WebForms More Mature Than ASP.NET MVC?".
It seems to be subjective, but what I want to know is, what exactly "mature" software is?
The answer is very subjective. But basically if the software can answer to most of these criteria (in no order of importance):
secure
reliable
actively maintained
has active community
field-proven
Then it can be considered "mature".
It is important to note that different clients would expect different levels of "maturity". A large corporation would demand that the software it uses is secure enough to protect its sensitive data, and that the software is supported by a support rep available 24/7. As opposed to a small private project of your own which you might care much less about security, and you do not need (nor can afford) a service package which includes 24/7 customer support.
So ,maturity differentiates according to the client, but the basic criteria remain the same.
Mature is when people have figured out how to deal with it.
(And we're talking about development platforms not about end-user apps, aren't we?)
For example, javascript only became mature with the introduction of prototype, jquery and the like.
Before that, people tend to code strange things they they'd regret.
So you're asking for subjective opinions on a subjective topic. :)
I would say, mature would add the following characteristic to a technology:
People know how to use it, know its possibilities and limitations
People know what the typical usage scenarios are, patterns, what are good usage scenarios for this technology so that it shows its best
People have found out how to deal with limitations/bugs, there is a community knowledge and help out there
The technology is trusted enough to be used not only by individuals but in productive commercial environment as well
Reduce Subjectivity by Developing a Measuring Tool for yourself.
My Criteria are for Business Software:
Feature Rich - handle lots of Business Rules
Flexible - Selectable Features via Parameters & Configuration
Stable - Few, if any bugs causing malfunction such as crashes
Well Documented - User and technical Documentation
User Friendly - as attested and recommended by users
Robust - Not very much fazed by events such as power failures and erroneous user input.
Installs & Runs "out of the box".
Take all the Criteria and place it in a spreadsheet with columns rating from 0 - 5 and do a rating by ticking the column corresponding to your rating of each criteria.
If overall score is 25 or better then the software is mature.
If the score is 15 to 24 then the software is average.
If below 15 then the software is immature.
Mature software has to be whatever you mean it to be. I don't think you will find an easy mechanism for measuring maturity, and everyone's definition is going to differ anyway.
It's always going to be a subjective view I'm afraid and therefore subject to a lot of argument.
I would say that mature software is stable, well documented, widely used and well tested.
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What would you suggest for the following scenario:
A dozen of developers need to build and design a complex system. This design needs to be documented for future developers and the design decisions must be noted. These reports need to be made about every two months. My question is how this project should be documented.
I see two possibilities. Each developer writes about the things they helped design and integrate and then one person combines each of these documents together. The final document will probably be incoherent or redundant at times since the person tasked of assembling everything won't have much time to adjust every part.
Assume that the documentation parts from each developer arrive just a few days before deadline. A collaborative system (i.e. wiki) wouldn’t work properly since there wouldn’t be anything to read until a few days before deadline.
Or should a few people (2-3) be tasked with writing the documentation while the rest of the team works on actually developing the system? The developers would need a way to transfer their design choices and conclusions to the technical writers. How could this be done efficiently?
We approach this from 2 sides, using a RUP style approach. In the first case, you'll have a domain expert who is responsible for roughing out the design of what you're going to deliver - with developers chipping in as necessary. In the second case, we use a technical author - they document the application, so they should have a good idea of how it hangs together, and you involve them right through the design and development process. In this case, they can help to polish the design, and to make sure that it matches what they thought was being developed.
We use confluence (atlassian's wiki-like-thing) and document all kinds of different "things". The developers do it continiously, and we push each other for docs - we let peer pressure decide what is necessary. Whenever someone new comes along he/she is tasked with reading through everything and to find out what still is correct. The incorrect stuff is either deleted or updated as a consequence of this. We're happy when we can delete stuff ;)
The nice thing about this process is that the relevant stuff stays and the irrelevant stuff is deleted. We always "got away" from the more formalized demands by claiming that we could always construct the word documents they wanted if "they" needed them. "They" never needed them.
I think alternative 2 is the less agile, because it means a new stage to the project (although it may be in parallel with tests).
If you are in an agile model, then just add documentation (following a guideline) as a story.
If you are in a staged approach, then I would nevertheless ask developers to work on documentation, following some guidelines, and review that documentation along the design and the code. Eventually, you may have a technical writer reviewing everything for proper English, but that would be a kind of "release" activity.
I think you can use Sand Castle to document your project.
Check it out
Sand Castle from Microsoft
It's not a complete documentation, but making sure that interfaces etc. are commented using Doxygen-style comments means writing code and documenting it are closer together.
That way, developers should document what they do. I still think a review by the architect(s) is needed to ensure consistent quality, but ensuring people document what they do is the best way to ensure they follow the architecture.