I have a friend at university who was recently hired by Microsoft, partially for a quality control role. While this's a single case, and in no way can be extrapolated to the whole company, from what he's said, it's apparent that they're reusing a large amount of their codebase, with the dodgy bits either rewritten or modified and thoroughly tested.
As you said, there's no way in hell you can have a 12 month rewrite. But, with any luck (for the end-users), this will hopefully turn out to be more than PR fluff.
That's the way the majority of the industry works, unfortunately. There's a slow but steady progression towards an ultimate goal of defect-free software. There's an ever-changing 'state of the art' that companies push themselves as having, but there's always room for improvement. It's often said that there's three goals - cost, quality, and time. Pick any two. This PR push is just an example of this - cost is typically the primary goal, within reason, and time used to be a secondary consideration, with quality falling a long way behind.
Thankfully, this appears to be changing, within some market segments at least. Customers -and- developers are realising that lack of quality is costing them, and making decisions accordingly that follow onto the rest of the industry. It's the same reason why software engineering cannot be called a real engineering discipline as yet - there's a minority of those who are committed to producing quality, reusable, reliable software, but the same cannot be said for the majority of the code factories turning out "XYZ 2005".
The PR push is a way of saying "Look at us, we have quality!". Any improvement is good. They, as per most PR-focused companies, do not announce the bad with the good. Nothing to see here, peoples.
It's interesting to hear how their software development survived in such an anarchistic environment - everyone producing their own code, with ad-hoc integration. It's a good example of how software development methodology can work though, even though the specifics of the specification design weren't discussed in the article - if everyone codes to a documented interface, software development can work on such a grand scale.
I personally would like to hear more about the software development procedures and methodologies used in other large projects - how successful different types of development are.
I work for an automotive parts manufacturer, and to see the lack of consistency within the organisation's software development is disturbing. Safety-critical parts are being produced, and the level of testing between said parts varies quite considerably. Additionally, the level of oversight and adherence to software development procedures is rather bad to say the least. I just hope it's not characteristic of the industry as a whole.
It's a USB HID device.. we have standards for this very reason. Nobody needs a specific driver - there's the USB HID spec to say 'Button 1 down', 'Move left X' etc.
I've had experience with this firsthand as well, as a developer of an intranet within a school.
The student admin system is paid for (and mandated) by the department - it's a horrible system written in Dataflex and MS Access (CASES and CASES21, to anyone in the know). The old system was atrocious to interface with, but at least the new one (CASES21) runs on SQL Server.
The curriculum side could quite easily run Linux - but there's no real push for them to do so.
If you truly had extensive experience with Victorian Schools, then you'd know they almost every TSSP in the state hate the EduPaSS server and it's creator.
I left the school that I worked at a year or two ago.. before the Edupass boxes came into play. And you're right about CASES21; but at least the curriculum side's free to run any old OS. While running Linux on the curriculum network would make TSSP lives a lot easier, teachers would be the hardest to convert.
Definitely.. teachers are rather staid when it comes to IT.
We pay ~AUD$15M/year as a state school system to MS for licensing. Beyond that, the schools pay only for media - although they're free to copy media from other schools. So there's no real incentive for schools to switch away.
I've had extensive experience with use of FOSS in Victorian Schools, or rather, the lack of.
The crux of the matter is, most educational software ('games', if you will), comes for Windows. True, there are alternatives for Linux, but the teachers hear on the grapevine from one another about the popular packages (i.e. Windows-based).
On the server end, many Victorian schools use WinNT/2k/2003, as the licensing arrangements with Microsoft give them basically free OS licenses. All they pay for is the media. There's an instant reason for them not to change - they won't be saving much, as you can find a MCSE going for much less than a unix sysadmin.
On the other side, a few schools are moving towards Linux on the server end - the school that I previously worked at had a number of Linux servers for fileserving, web, proxy etc. OSS can be utilised heavily on the server side, and is being pushed from the top (Dept. of Education) - a prebuilt proxy/wireless authentication box, "Edupass", is being sent to all schools, complete with documentation.
There are inroads being made with OSS to Victorian Schools, but on the client side, nothing will happen until schools are willing to undertake PD with staff on how to use Linux, and there is sufficient educational software available.
No idea; you'd have to ask someone who's familiar with the USA's laws.
IANAL, and IANAUS Resident.
I'm guessing that they would be fine, as long as they do not sell their cars into the US.
If, instead, as Adobe would hypothetically do with Photoshop - perform illicit reverse engineering overseas, import into the US, then sell a product depending on said reverse engineering, I think they would be in the shit.
They're a US company; the same way that soliciting somebody to commit a crime is (usually) criminal, I'm assuming they'd also be found to be guilty in a civil court when the DMCA is broken.
It's all well and good to look at the history of Intellectual Property law. It's good to look at how it's changed, and what got us to our current state.
The question which many of these articles fail to address is this - Yes, we know the current state of IP is bad for the majority. Why do we tolerate it, what can we do to change it, and, most importantly, what is best for -society- as a whole?
IP law that protects, say, drug patents for 60 years is bad - it enables drug conglomerates to develop medication and live off the proceeds for years without giving back to the community that granted the company a -temporary- monopoly.
What is a fair balance between: * Sustaining the economy * Fairness to the general public (a balance between the public good, and ability for individuals to be employed by IP-centric companies) * Rewarding creators and inventors of intellectual property.
So, if I may ask, what do Slashdot readers see as fair? I would suggest that we need to look at different copyright and patent periods depending on the type and application of an item.
Additionally, what can be done about the state of IP law? Australia recently got reamed by the USFTA; and many other countries, as signatories to the Berne Convention, IIRC, have been forced to extend their copyright periods to meet other countries'.
The problem is that users don't give a flying fuck about licenses. Mainly due to the reason that they're written in terse legalese, and they don't affect the end-user. Licenses are seldom enforced on most end-users, and as such, nobody cares if they're entering into a contract in exchange for their first-born.
Additionally, the users don't have too much choice (referring to a certain Office suite and operating system) - installed base can be a good thing for the company owning said software. The ones who do make a choice tend to be more educated about software licensing, but frankly, as long as the end-user is not affected by software licensing, it's like downloading music - nothing's going to change until the end-users are attacked.
I've been driving a fair bit in Oz the last couple of years.. state borders are a political thing, not a check-who's-coming-or-going thing.
The only real regulation is that if you're living in a state for a contiguous period of more than (one?) two months, you must re-register your vehicle in that state.
I scan and edit photos on my PC. 6000x4000 pixel 48bpp TIFFs take up a lot of room. 144mb a piece, give or take. I've got a 60gb LVM volume dedicated to photos.. and it's growing quickly. That's just my photos since mid last year.
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I have a friend at university who was recently hired by Microsoft, partially for a quality control role. While this's a single case, and in no way can be extrapolated to the whole company, from what he's said, it's apparent that they're reusing a large amount of their codebase, with the dodgy bits either rewritten or modified and thoroughly tested.
As you said, there's no way in hell you can have a 12 month rewrite. But, with any luck (for the end-users), this will hopefully turn out to be more than PR fluff.
That's the way the majority of the industry works, unfortunately. There's a slow but steady progression towards an ultimate goal of defect-free software. There's an ever-changing 'state of the art' that companies push themselves as having, but there's always room for improvement. It's often said that there's three goals - cost, quality, and time. Pick any two. This PR push is just an example of this - cost is typically the primary goal, within reason, and time used to be a secondary consideration, with quality falling a long way behind.
Thankfully, this appears to be changing, within some market segments at least. Customers -and- developers are realising that lack of quality is costing them, and making decisions accordingly that follow onto the rest of the industry. It's the same reason why software engineering cannot be called a real engineering discipline as yet - there's a minority of those who are committed to producing quality, reusable, reliable software, but the same cannot be said for the majority of the code factories turning out "XYZ 2005".
The PR push is a way of saying "Look at us, we have quality!". Any improvement is good. They, as per most PR-focused companies, do not announce the bad with the good. Nothing to see here, peoples.
It's interesting to hear how their software development survived in such an anarchistic environment - everyone producing their own code, with ad-hoc integration. It's a good example of how software development methodology can work though, even though the specifics of the specification design weren't discussed in the article - if everyone codes to a documented interface, software development can work on such a grand scale.
I personally would like to hear more about the software development procedures and methodologies used in other large projects - how successful different types of development are.
I work for an automotive parts manufacturer, and to see the lack of consistency within the organisation's software development is disturbing. Safety-critical parts are being produced, and the level of testing between said parts varies quite considerably. Additionally, the level of oversight and adherence to software development procedures is rather bad to say the least. I just hope it's not characteristic of the industry as a whole.
Kids reading? Not in America.. leave no twit behind!
That's expensive? Fuck. I'm paying $1.21/lt here in Melbourne, Australia.. and only a good 6 or so years ago do I remember it being 60-70c/lt. Sucks.
What's their legal authority to dictate what you can and cannot do? I can't understand how someone would voluntarily join such a group.
Might I just ask... what the smeg is Home Owner's Association, and what do they have to do with putting up a satellite dish?
Wasn't Itanic a non-x86 chip? Look at how it flopped.
Why limit it to the opposite sex?
See the homepage of the The Debian X Strike Force - X.org and Xfree86 guys.
Found this link from the Project Leader's page
IIS4 also had remote web admin, on a random high port for the complete IIS admin, and /iisadmin/ application for that web's admin.
NTAdmin was also a very cool util for NT4 running IIS.
It's a USB HID device.. we have standards for this very reason. Nobody needs a specific driver - there's the USB HID spec to say 'Button 1 down', 'Move left X' etc.
That's all well and good.. except for that Mozilla is released under the MPL (Mozilla Public License), AFAIK.
Leonardo Da Vinci's archives, of course..
I've had experience with this firsthand as well, as a developer of an intranet within a school.
The student admin system is paid for (and mandated) by the department - it's a horrible system written in Dataflex and MS Access (CASES and CASES21, to anyone in the know). The old system was atrocious to interface with, but at least the new one (CASES21) runs on SQL Server.
The curriculum side could quite easily run Linux - but there's no real push for them to do so.
If you truly had extensive experience with Victorian Schools, then you'd know they almost every TSSP in the state hate the EduPaSS server and it's creator.
I left the school that I worked at a year or two ago.. before the Edupass boxes came into play. And you're right about CASES21; but at least the curriculum side's free to run any old OS.
While running Linux on the curriculum network would make TSSP lives a lot easier, teachers would be the hardest to convert.
Definitely.. teachers are rather staid when it comes to IT.
We pay ~AUD$15M/year as a state school system to MS for licensing. Beyond that, the schools pay only for media - although they're free to copy media from other schools. So there's no real incentive for schools to switch away.
I've had extensive experience with use of FOSS in Victorian Schools, or rather, the lack of.
The crux of the matter is, most educational software ('games', if you will), comes for Windows. True, there are alternatives for Linux, but the teachers hear on the grapevine from one another about the popular packages (i.e. Windows-based).
On the server end, many Victorian schools use WinNT/2k/2003, as the licensing arrangements with Microsoft give them basically free OS licenses. All they pay for is the media. There's an instant reason for them not to change - they won't be saving much, as you can find a MCSE going for much less than a unix sysadmin.
On the other side, a few schools are moving towards Linux on the server end - the school that I previously worked at had a number of Linux servers for fileserving, web, proxy etc. OSS can be utilised heavily on the server side, and is being pushed from the top (Dept. of Education) - a prebuilt proxy/wireless authentication box, "Edupass", is being sent to all schools, complete with documentation.
There are inroads being made with OSS to Victorian Schools, but on the client side, nothing will happen until schools are willing to undertake PD with staff on how to use Linux, and there is sufficient educational software available.
No idea; you'd have to ask someone who's familiar with the USA's laws.
IANAL, and IANAUS Resident.
I'm guessing that they would be fine, as long as they do not sell their cars into the US.
If, instead, as Adobe would hypothetically do with Photoshop - perform illicit reverse engineering overseas, import into the US, then sell a product depending on said reverse engineering, I think they would be in the shit.
They're a US company; the same way that soliciting somebody to commit a crime is (usually) criminal, I'm assuming they'd also be found to be guilty in a civil court when the DMCA is broken.
It's all well and good to look at the history of Intellectual Property law. It's good to look at how it's changed, and what got us to our current state.
The question which many of these articles fail to address is this - Yes, we know the current state of IP is bad for the majority. Why do we tolerate it, what can we do to change it, and, most importantly, what is best for -society- as a whole?
IP law that protects, say, drug patents for 60 years is bad - it enables drug conglomerates to develop medication and live off the proceeds for years without giving back to the community that granted the company a -temporary- monopoly.
What is a fair balance between:
* Sustaining the economy
* Fairness to the general public (a balance between the public good, and ability for individuals to be employed by IP-centric companies)
* Rewarding creators and inventors of intellectual property.
So, if I may ask, what do Slashdot readers see as fair? I would suggest that we need to look at different copyright and patent periods depending on the type and application of an item.
Additionally, what can be done about the state of IP law? Australia recently got reamed by the USFTA; and many other countries, as signatories to the Berne Convention, IIRC, have been forced to extend their copyright periods to meet other countries'.
The problem is that users don't give a flying fuck about licenses. Mainly due to the reason that they're written in terse legalese, and they don't affect the end-user. Licenses are seldom enforced on most end-users, and as such, nobody cares if they're entering into a contract in exchange for their first-born.
Additionally, the users don't have too much choice (referring to a certain Office suite and operating system) - installed base can be a good thing for the company owning said software. The ones who do make a choice tend to be more educated about software licensing, but frankly, as long as the end-user is not affected by software licensing, it's like downloading music - nothing's going to change until the end-users are attacked.
I've been driving a fair bit in Oz the last couple of years.. state borders are a political thing, not a check-who's-coming-or-going thing.
The only real regulation is that if you're living in a state for a contiguous period of more than (one?) two months, you must re-register your vehicle in that state.
No biggie.
I scan and edit photos on my PC. 6000x4000 pixel 48bpp TIFFs take up a lot of room. 144mb a piece, give or take. I've got a 60gb LVM volume dedicated to photos.. and it's growing quickly. That's just my photos since mid last year.
I haven't had a chance to work with NDS past Novell 4.11.. how does Zenworks compare to Group Policies etc.?