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nagnamer (1046654)
But of course paid developers sometimes care about their work. The same goes for any paid job. If one's lucky enough. But it's far from common.

Attila Dimedici (1036002)
Someone working for a company cares about what the company pays them to care about. If they spend time on something the company doesn't want them to, it will cause them to get a bad review and/or fired. A company paying someone to make open source software is going to care more about the code being clean than a company paying someone to make propietary software. this is because with open source software many more people will see the actual code than with propietary software and shoddily written code will reflect badly on the company.
None of this reflects on the work ethic, morals or ability of either the open source programmer or the proprietary source programmer. It is possible for these to be the same person and the analysis still applies.

An analysis cannot rely on luck, though luck may be a pleasant surprise. If all developers loved it and could do it well, then by extension, all code could be open sourced and no one would steal it; this entire discussion is moot.

Open Source has a distinct, tangible effect on the developer's motivation, because her product is her code. Closed Source can't effect the developer this way, because her product is "finished software," which is an acknowledged impossibility -- source: The Mythical Man-Month.

Hey, thanks for pointing out that closed sourcecode sometimes is not written by the paid developers!

Good catch!</sarcasm>

This is not about Microsoft bashing. Yes, they are an easy target. But you have not provided any sort of rebuttal to the GP's point -- a developer working toward a fixed financial reward is not sufficiently motivated to produce quality code. See The Mythical Man-Month and other sources.

As mentioned above, you do not have to press the escape key. You just have to enter an escape. ^[ (Control-[) enters an escape character. That's the ascii definition of that sequence. Just like ^G is bell and ^H is backspace, ^[ is escape.

http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html gives the full set.

Granted, they want to hit the market during the holiday rush, but then, add more programmers.

But the mythical man month doesn't always work... because it's mythical.

UNIX is designed in such a way that process creation is very cheap, therefore lots of UNIX programs use fork to achieve parallelism. OTOH, Windows is designed around the threading model, so no particular attention has been made to make process creation similarly cheap.

More info at this link and this one.

--

Bradley's Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.

Unlike Unix or Windows, HP3000's editor choices was quite limited.

Nowadays, things gotten better, I think. But those were the days.

There's a Slashdot article that talks about SAP-DB. And, there's a decent article by someone who installed it.

= 9J =

but we're dealing with a limited number of skilled programmers.

Open Source is not a corporation, nor is it a (managed) Democracy. It is, howerver a volunteer effort where programmers are permitted to put thier efforts behind whicheber effort they see fit, for whatever reason.

But why fork a project needlessly when combined efforts could produce a product that is ultimately more intuitive and polished than two rough apps that waste twice the time for twice the learning curve?

It is more likely that a single effort will produce a non-intuitive and unpolished implementation than two seperate efforts.

As for wasting "twice the time", if one effort finds itself committed to the wrong approach, then the rest of the community will be thankful that the other does exist. See the Mythical Man Month to understand why more programmers working on a single project does not necessarily mean that the project will turn out better or be ready quicker.

I'm not really certain that "intuitiveness" is at stake here. IMHO, the most important aspect of the .net spec is the network transparancy, not the particular user interface. If it is possible to implement the network layer without tying it to a particular user interface or Desktop environment, then that is what should be done. (IIRC, .net does some of what Gnome was originally intended to do as a "network object model environment". Too bad Gnome spent so much time attempting to be "Windows, but better" that Microsoft beat them to the punch on the "network object" spec.)

I do like some of what Ximian has done, but not enough to change my mind about accepting any argument for a "default desktop environment". Neither Gnome nor KDE has shown me that thier way is superior to designing apps that are not tied to any particular "desktop" or window manager.

The former editor of Windows *ding* *ding* *ding* *ding* *ding* *ding* PC Computing?

I think you meant Window^H^H^H^H^H^H PC Computing Or the simpler Windows^W PC Computing. HTH. :)

(To ensure I wasn't wrong, I found this link which does, in fact, list ^G as the bell character. It causes the console to beep. :))