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North Pole Heads South
blamanj writes "Things are not looking good for Santa. First, news that it's getting warmer at the North Pole, and now, scientists report that the (magnetic) pole itself is on the move. 'Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting from North America at such a clip that it could end up in Siberia in the next 50 years.'"
Don't worry - it's coming... The crackhead moderators have been in a pissy mood lately.
More likely, they'll fly all Americans to secret prisons for torture.
If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?
Andrew Brown
Thursday December 8, 2005
The Guardian
Of all the myths that have grown up around open source software, perhaps the most pervasive is Eric Raymond's aphorism that "Many eyes make bugs shallow", suggesting that if lots of people can view a program's source code, they will find and fix its errors more quickly than commercial products whose code is jealously guarded. The only problem with this is that it's not true - certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice.
This project is most often quoted as the threat to Microsoft's cash-generating Office suite. The free suite comprises a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program; and graphics, equation editor and database programs if you want.
OpenOffice is the only free and open source product competitive with Office, able to read and write Microsoft format documents almost flawlessly. For Linux desktop users, it is the only way to communicate in the universe of business. But it also vividly demonstrates the limitations of open source as a way of producing software, and its futility as an ideology.
I like OpenOffice. I used it long before it was usable, out of a mixture of perversity, stinginess, and vague anti-Microsoft sentiment. When I started writing books, I had Microsoft Word 97, which could not print a 60,000-word manuscript without crashing. I have written numerous macros (which automate less obvious, or screamingly obvious, tasks), including the word count for version 1. I have done quality assurance work, submitting reports on bugs and testing those reported by others. So I know something about the open source "community" and the enormous gap between myth and reality.
Improbable assumptions
The reality is that any computer user probably depends on open source programs every time they look up anything on the net. But they don't know that, and they don't have to.
The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of open source was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it's a very different story.
This is important because of the second crucial false assumption: that even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can't. Most users just think: "The computer isn't doing what I want."
Big commercial software companies know this well. When developing products for the public, they spend a lot of money on usability testing to find out what users expect from software, and how to meet those expectations. Companies lose from user dissatisfaction in a way open source software doesn't, and so have an incentive to avoid errors in the first place: the number of calls to a support desk grows exponentially with the number of bugs and users. Where's the support desk for OpenOffice?
Despite the open source rhetoric, OpenOffice actually started as a commercial product - StarOffice, from Germany's StarDivision - before being bought in October 1999 by Sun Microsystems. Almost all the work on it is now done by about 100 full-time Sun programmers. That is a tiny fraction of the armies Microsoft or Google can deploy to solve a problem.
But what about the innumerable volunteers who can download the code and fix what they like? They take one look at the effort involved and run. OpenOffice is an extremely complex mountain of source code. As far as I know, in the five years it has been available as open source, not one contribution to the program has come from amateurs. The outsiders who have provided input have been full-time professionals employed by Linux companies to help make the software
In Soviet Russia, the north pole magnetizes YOU.
Nah, he lives in Drøbak, Norway.
Shut up you commie!
We'll get those birds eventually, with the help of our wind turbines!
Somebody mod the parent super-super-funny! That's hands-down the best soviet Russia joke I have ever seen on /.