Software Evolution Storylines, Inspired By XKCD 136
jamie tips this mind-blowing data visualization concept from (naturally) data visualization researcher Michael Ogawa, who explains that it was inspired by "this XKCD comic. It represents characters as lines that converge in time as they share scenes. Could this technique be adapted for software developers who work on the same code?"
He may have been inspired by XKCD (Score:5, Informative)
...but XKCD pretty clearly was inspired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wallchart_of_World_History [wikipedia.org] (first version 1890).
It's a pretty cool visualization, illustrating in a very superficial way how each state mutates and evolves politically into its descendants.
Re:inspiration (Score:2, Informative)
No it doesn't. There are green lines for Frodo & Bilbo and a yellow line for the Ringbearer which functions as an overlay. At the start it overlays Bilbo's line, then moves to Frodo's line. At points it overlays Sam & Gollum for short periods.
Plug for Montessori Elementary (Score:2, Informative)
ls history (Score:3, Informative)
According to this [gnu.org] there are 5 files that start with "ls".
Except for ls.c, all those files have only one entry on their history. The "initial revision" on 1993-06-16.
On the other hand, you can check the history of ls [gnu.org] by yourself. Ignoring a "build" commit done on 2010-09-18 (and by the same guy who did the "initial revision" ones), the last commit is from 2010-07-01 with the message header of "ls: use the POSIX date style when the locale does not specify one".
While not extremely important, it does show that ls keeps receiving updates to this day.
Re:What will happen if I... (Score:3, Informative)
The thing is, you're not even allowed to post on slashdot unless you've already written a far better programming language than Java before your twelfth birthday.