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Testing, well-specced requirements, testing, and then more testing.

Every piece of the software is tested to exhaustion by a separate group to the one who wrote it.

During the Rogers Commission to investigate the Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman was critical of NASA's approach to engineering. The only group he had good things to say about was the software team.

From: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/richard-feynman-challenger-disaster-software-engineering/

The software is checked very carefully in a bottom-up fashion. First, each new line of code is checked, then sections of code or modules with special functions are verified. The scope is increased step by step until the new changes are incorporated into a complete system and checked. This complete output is considered the final product, newly released. But completely independently there is an independent verification group, that takes an adversary attitude to the software development group, and tests and verifies the software as if it were a customer of the delivered product.

To summarize then, the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster or Space Shuttle Main Engine safety systems. To be sure, there have been recent suggestions by management to curtail such elaborate and expensive tests as being unnecessary at this late date in Shuttle history.

...And that second quote pretty much answers the rest of your question too: "Are some of those processes applicable to other types of software development"

The answer is that technically it's possible, but just try getting a manager or client to approve the expenditure for this type of process and an entire separate testing team. It generally only happens where there's a potential for lives to be lost.

Interestingly, all NASA spacecraft still have all their debugging routines left in them when they fly. The reason for this is that removing the debugging routines would require another round of testing an certification, and that wouldn't be possible without the debugging routines.

There's a link to feynman's full report in the article, too ("Avionics" is the relevant part).

But the negative connotation has been associated with the word hacker from it's first printed use in the 60s. Checkmate Athiests.

Maybe you should use an actual dictionary?
Originally, it was used to describe someone breaking the law:
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blo...

Hey old guy, we have this great thing called Google.
By the way, the first printed use of the word was referring to people who were illegally hijacking phone line at MIT.

This thing below is called a 'link'. The device next to your keyboard is called a 'mouse'. Use it to move the pointer on your screen then left click on the 'link' in you IE 6 browser.

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker

how quaint. Here is an actually article from 1963:

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker

did you even look up what I was talking about? no, of course not . You don't understand the simple fact that you might actually be wrong.

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker

I look forward to your apology.

Considering the first time it was used was talk about people who where brakeing the law:

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker

Anyways, Hacker is like saying Driver.

It's the context of the rest of the story that matters.

Driver save a bus load of children with quick thinking. Drivers runs down pedestrian.

Hacker steals credit card numbers. Hackers warn of 0 day exploit.

The cost of something, however, is not binary - it's a continuous variable.

Um, not the last time I bought something. When I went to McDonalds today and got a quarter-pounder meal (large) it was $6.19 - exactly - no sliding scale, no continuous variable. I didn't see the price flickering between $6.18 and $6.20. No, the cost of something is a fixed amount, period.
Sorry, but I wouldn't debate this with you if you were right.
By your definition, free has no meaning because its all relative. I'm sorry, but for me, free (as in beer) means zero cost, nada, zip, zilch.
Should your computer throw a divide by zero when the divisor is 0.00000001 because its "close enough" to zero. Absolutely not. Zero means zero and free means free.

But it's certainly not the case that free == totally cool and $.01 == totally uncool.

Did I say it was? No. What I said was:

free will always be cooler than not free

And I think anyone who's had to work for a living can agree to that.

you shouldn't spend money for something if you don't need to, but come on - this really is essentially free

Is it really? What about after the 2 year period and you cough up the $200. What then? You've got a license to a 2-year old product that's already obsolete, but of course MS will be happy to sell you a license for the new version for a small upgrade fee of a few more hundred dollars. And what choice do you have now? Since your product is already developed using MS tools, you are pretty well locked in, or face a major rewrite to port it to another tool chain.

Besides, if it's "essentially free", why don't they just go ahead and make it totally free? Is it really worth it to MS to lose potential developers over $100/yr per seat? Apparently MS thinks so and I say good!

I'm glad so many developers drink the MS kool-aid. I get all the .NET work I can handle, but I prefer the Java/C++ work because I prefer the languages as well as the toolsets to MS, and in most cases the pay is much better (see http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jobs-and-trends).

You raise an issue worthy of further consideration. It was first posed succinctly by the fictional character from Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery. Dr. Evil: "Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?" (Similarly, Scott Adams states this as the Dilbert Principle, we are all stupid, about most things, most of the time.) With the rise of civilization and technology has come increased complexity. Unfortunately, we seem, on average, to be ill equipped to cope with it. It's amazing we can get things done at all, really, when you think about the difficulty we have making what ought to be simple decisions.

Consider this week the news is full of European countries enacting substantial budget cuts. We know that's the wrong thing to do. It times of economic prosperity, we should run balanced budgets or pay down national debt. When faced with a recession so enormous that people invoke the Great Depression as an analog, though we have only about 20% unemployment, rather than 30% or more, this situation is dire. We know that we must run deficits, large ones, in order to create a demand stimulus large enough to moderate this trough of the economic cycle. Nonetheless, we have politicians trying to score political points by railing against deficit spending -- which didn't bother them for the past 8 years when they were in charge.

The problem is profound, widespread ignorance, but not merely ignorance as in the mere unawareness of relevant facts. It's ignorance that makes one blind to the limits of one's own ability to asses one's own capability. Smearing lemon juice on your face doesn't make you invisible to security cameras. If you think it does, then you're not qualified to be a bank robber, but you're also not qualified to assess many, many other issues -- foremost among them, you're not qualified to assess your sills as a bank robber, and are likely to be utterly ignorant as to the possibility that you might not be able to assess those skills without outside assistance. Presented with relevant facts, these people remain impervious to rational assessment of a situation. They are so poorly equipped that they can't evaluate their own ignorance.

The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

After the first disaster which destroyed a Space Shuttle and killed all the astronauts aboard, a presidential commission was appointed to investigate, by President Reagan. Its members included the nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. Feynman wrote his own appendix to the official report of the committee. It's one of the most fascinating documents, and should be required reading for any engineer, politician, manager, or judge . It ranks up there with The Selfish Gene, Goedel Escher, Bach, and The Mythical Man Month.

Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering

Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

The lesson of the Challenger disaster directly applies to the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout disaster. Simply because we haven't had a disaster yet does not in any way imply that we are not doing things, lots of things, which are likely to lead to a disaster.

This problem applies to big problems, like managing national budgets, building and flying reusable spacecraft, drilling a mile under the ocean surface for oil -- and to small problems, like using mod points on Slashdot.

traditional BIOS are an archaic nightmare really.

Most new technologies in them are work around hacks required to maintain some support for very old communication protocols (6GB SATA drives still have to support IDE mode why?) etc.

Give this a read:

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-computers-boot-up

To clarify I do think that C# is a good language. This is why I referred to it as "a rival to both Java and C++".

I have already addressed the document and standards issue in another post, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1170319&cid=27289561

Currently Windows is losing share of the OS market. This makes getting locked in to a windows only language something to avoid if you can. I agree with use the right tool for the right job but the story is about what language he should learn for a job not what language to use for a single project. The 'job' in this case is to give the person the best tools for the future. With other OSes getting a foot hold in the market I think that cross platform languages are a better bet.

From the sound of it the UK is far different then the US http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jobs-and-trends http://www.langpop.com/. As you can see Java is in huge demand around here.

Again C# is a great language and MS has done many things right with it. But if you are just getting started I think it's a good idea to steer clear of it.

Yes. Pirated Windows is definitely non-elite.

However, the cost of Microsoft Home Licenses can be as high as % 7.8 of GNI (Gross National Income) per capita in some countries (in this case, Brazil, it being a middle-income country - it is much higher for, say, Bangladesh).

So the you realize it's a joke - or another load of royal M$ BS - when they portray Indians and Africans in that commercial.

Of course, the ad is targeted at US Americans. But they are basically treating the target audience as a stupid bunch of uninformed people, telling them: "See? We're all are one big happy family of consumers of M$ products." Which is a lie. A statistical, numerical, monetary lie.

So any which way I look at this commercial, it keeps saying: "Gee. I buy Microsoft Windows. I am an uniformed consumer that makes stupid buying decisions regarding technology."

An article by Gustavo Duarte referencing Richard Fenyman on the Challenger disaster and found here: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/2008/02/20/Richard-Feynman-Challenger-Disaster-Software-Engineering.aspx provides Olympian support for bottom up software design, of which assembly language is a part.