Honestly, this was just meant as a joke -- sort of a typical management response to a product crisis.
As usual, it was taken way too seriously and modded down.
My personal opinion of ISO and SEI is that they are used as "corporate clubs" to get contracts -- "my SEI level is bigger than yours".
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence on the web and in various books that show both to be a lot less effective than the ISO or SEI proponents would like us to believe.
My personal opinion? Quality employees and leadership make the difference, not certification or standards.
Case in point: DirectPC has much of their s/w written in India by a level III shop. The end result, in many cases, has been horribly buggy (just look at the posts in deja.com regarding DirectPC software when the release comes out)
Why? SEI places a major focus on "on-time" delivery -- not quality. When SEI is implemented, the majority of the tracking is on engineering metrics -- "was it on time?" -- and that, in general, is how the engineer is judged.
Note that this is directly contrary to traditional engineering -- that your overriding focus should be on correctness.
SEI and ISO are, unfortunately, not what they are represented to be in the mainstream press. When a single teenage programmer can crank out a fairly robust freee software project in a matter of weeks, with no metrics, SEI, or ISO (just his personal integrity) but a full ISO/SEI shop takes several months to produce a buggy work that is not as easy to use as the teens s/w, there is something grotesquely wrong with the system and the perception of engineering in general.
you could try these guys. i think they have something called "ming kits" that let you write parallel data in and rcv parallel data on the far side.
they have stores in denver, san diego, st. louis.
if you need details via phone or email i'd try to hit up the san diego store first, i think they have an old navy fart working there who knows the most about their radio kits.
a one-way link will probably set you back like $100 just for parts, but i'm guessing.
I have to that I don't really like the look and feel of Applix or Framemaker. Both are reasonable products, though. I'm definately not in Framemaker's target market.
Many commercial Linux apps are looking dated and are based on older codebases. Corel WordPerfect 8 is in Motif, the way they write it (or shall I say wrote it) in Utah quite a few years ago. Applixware has a bit of a dated feel, as well.
No wonder they get beat by StarOffice, which for all its faults, at least looks and behaves in a somewhat modern fashion.
The last three commercial software packages I bought for Linux are Quake3 Arena ( in the tin box ), Myth II, and Corel WordPerfect 8.
WP8 feels old and clunky. I still use it fairly often. MII and Q3A run for hours on my debian machine, no problems.
If I'm EVER going to pay for another productivity app for Linux, it had better have a decent/modern feel to it. If a company can't do that, then they should get out of the market and go make cheetos or something (sorry I'm getting a little hungry).
Loki is doing new things, and "gets it". The companies focusing away from Linux don't really seem to have any vision, and are just porting dated apps, so I guess they should go.
I don't mind paying for software -- freedom is never free, and slavery costs much more -- but the least the company can do is add a bit of excitement to the mix.
His father, by turning a blind eye while the S&Ls went nuts, with the end result that my Dad's career was destroyed.
Now I guess "Son of Bush" will fsck with mine?
It's not so much having a republican as president, it's the tendency for them to let questionable business practices slide -- the right wing cronies in high places really tend to rape the economy.
The Linux kernel, and nearly all the source to every application used on a Linux box, is free for your use, whether that use be private/personal or commercial.
Under the terms of the GPL, under which most Linux apps are distributed, you can use your Linux machine to develop code for any application, (pretty much) without concern for legal liability.
Granted, you can't derive works from GPL code into your program and sell it, but you can certainly use a Gnome-based Linux system to develop any original code without obligating yourself to additional costs or being concerned about liability to a third party as your project progresses.
All of the above changes when you add KDE/Qt to your Linux machine. You now must consider your intended audience, release of source code, and the environment in which you program. If you make a mistake, you are legally obligated to pay Trolltech approx. $1550.00 per developer, per year...more than Visual C++ Pro and W2K combined!
If you want to use it, great. But please don't be ignorant of the legal consequences of developing code in/under a KDE-interfaced Linux box.
...was that many on the hurd project were frustrated that mach kernel development had slowed and lost resources at the U of Utah or whatever.
They were planning on shifting to something called "L4", a microkernel started by a russian university (AIR). L4 is supposed to be extremely fast and lightweight.
remember the goal here -- instead of having to pester Linus with patches, and wondering what release they'll get in, you write something called a "translator" instead, and they are all the same from the kernel's point of view. No more kernel patches for drivers! Just add a translator!
I wish I GNU more about the L4 and Mach issues, cuz last I hurd that was the main issue deciding where HURD was going in the future.
> Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping
> people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as
> near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome
> approach is to just copy MS. So of course they
> don't have to spend money to get the same
> results.
I'm sorry that you wrote this, but you did. I was using HPUX w/ a variety of popup menus in 1988, and it had been around for awhile then. Before win 1.0 I believe. You are talking about systems here, and you are just plain wrong -- windowing GUI systems are all basically the same when you walk up to them.
> "All three" aren't learning from each other --
> both are learning from Windows. There's only one
> UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars
> behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K
> as an icon.
MS spends a lot of stolen money for very little improvement in the UI, I'll certainly admit that. As far as testing, Gnome and KDE are fairly stable products, so they probably do a lot of testing. Obviously they spend very little on R&D.
> When Win95 came out, all people did was complain
> about how stupid the start button is, now we
> read comparisons that say "well, KDE and Gnome
> both have start buttons, so they're just as good
> as Windows, I don't know where MS is wasting all
> that money."
Sure, we read it, but how hard is it to make popup, cascading menus in early X w/ twm? Or to pull down menus from the early Macs' menu bar? I've always throught the start button was dumb. If KDE and Gnome had no foot or K, I guess I'd use an icon to launch a menu system or use popups. I don't really care.
> So we can bitch and moan about how imperfect and
> stupid MS interfaces are, but quite frankly
> there are only two companies that can claim any
> moral high ground for actually advancing the UI
> outside of ripping off MS: Apple and Palm. They
> are the only companies I see actually doing NEW
> things as opposed to "me-too"...
popup menus, available all the back to the early history of X and twm, are the basis of the later menubar extension and then led to the "stay down"/"stay up" appearance of Microsoft's "Start Menu", which was done by others before it ended up in Microsoft's lower left corner of win95.
I have no idea why you are so interested in distorting the history of menu systems, popups, or the general thrashing of systems and UIs which have an lineage far removed from any microsoft product, but you do -- you made a very shaky post, so you have to deal with the consequences and innaccuracies of same.
Unless YOU do something, the net is GONE.
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 4
Another insane lawsuit by giant corporations that not only deprives us of our rights might destroys another internet company that is doing nothing more than move humanity out of the dark ages of information monopolies.
The eff has a article pleading for reform to the archaic copyright laws that are being twisted to destroy your internet freedoms.
seriously, i think there are only something like 5-6 people on the entire planet that can parse, consider and understand what you wrote without screaming "flame" or "troll".
There are still very real legal issues with KDE/qt, and a lot of people just want to wish them away.
Didn't the majority of the graphics gurus leave SGI for nvidia a few years back?
Obviously, faced with that influx of talent into their competitor, 3dfx was doomed. SGI is the leader when it comes to OpenGL drivers and hardware.
Great big googly moogly, 3dfx's next board was going to be 2X the price of their competitor for similar performance -- not exactly the sharpest strategy to gain market share.
personally, i think having a hardcopy record of every vote is important. kind of like a cash register journal, ya know?
sweden criticizing the USA? isn't that the country where the people are so liberal they rent their children to paedophiles? yikes.
someone was telling me about a system they saw where you slide your ballot into a machine *before* turning it in to the volunteers, and it 1) validates the holez; 2) prints a slip for you to take w/ you that lists everything you voted for.
the touch screen things are cool, but with no physical trail of every vote it could get ugly. but hey, if www.uboc.com can handle browser-agnostic banking through the web, i guess it's just another kind of transaction.
At any rate, around 15 years ago most corps were getting a lot of complaints at their shareholder's meetings about "corporate behavior", dealings with employees, environmental issues, etc. (GTE was about the hardest hit, as well as GM and GE).
Now? Hardly anyone questions corp. behavior...that is, people are so obsessed with greed and profits, they have lost their ability to "detach" themselves from their investment and analyze the possible ramifications of their investments.
Microsoft is an excellent example. If the employees/shareholders were able to detach themselves and look at the bigger picture, I would expect at least 20% or so to form some type of revolt and officially complain to the board.
But there is not a peep -- nothing. This is scary to me, since I believe the following:
"Microsoft shareholders and employees would be FAR BETTER OFF staging a revolt against their companies' current policies of isolation, and demand a complete and total adherance to standards and cooperation with other computing platforms"
Why? because the current philosophy of isolationism is great for the short term, but possibly devastating in the longer term.
By failing to (honestly) join in with other companies, they risk losing the lawsuit in a couple years.
By failing to (honestly) join in with other companies, they put the long-term viability of the USAs software leadership at risk...they force competition between the USA and other tech nations to be an "all or nothing" deal...that could come up nothing for the USA.
I just find it amazing that MS continues this march...with the.NET strategy...when there are phenomenal opportunities to be had via coalitions and cooperation.
Even more amazing is that some of the groundbreakers at Microsoft, people were in early, and are now phenomenally wealthy and have almost nothing to loose, can't detach themselves and do a employee or shareholder's revolt.
The short term embarrassment and financial losses might be distaseful/painful, but the long term benefits and stability of a truly open and cooperative Microsoft could be mind-boggling -- not only for the USA but for the whole world.
It's just a shame that the employees and 'neauveau riche' of Microsoft can't see past their pocketbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, this was just meant as a joke -- sort of a typical management response to a product crisis.
As usual, it was taken way too seriously and modded down.
My personal opinion of ISO and SEI is that they are used as "corporate clubs" to get contracts -- "my SEI level is bigger than yours".
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence on the web and in various books that show both to be a lot less effective than the ISO or SEI proponents would like us to believe.
My personal opinion? Quality employees and leadership make the difference, not certification or standards.
Case in point: DirectPC has much of their s/w written in India by a level III shop. The end result, in many cases, has been horribly buggy (just look at the posts in deja.com regarding DirectPC software when the release comes out)
Why? SEI places a major focus on "on-time" delivery -- not quality. When SEI is implemented, the majority of the tracking is on engineering metrics -- "was it on time?" -- and that, in general, is how the engineer is judged.
Note that this is directly contrary to traditional engineering -- that your overriding focus should be on correctness.
SEI and ISO are, unfortunately, not what they are represented to be in the mainstream press. When a single teenage programmer can crank out a fairly robust freee software project in a matter of weeks, with no metrics, SEI, or ISO (just his personal integrity) but a full ISO/SEI shop takes several months to produce a buggy work that is not as easy to use as the teens s/w, there is something grotesquely wrong with the system and the perception of engineering in general.
Both shops must become ISO9XXX certified, and all developers brought to SEI level 5 immediately.
I think there are drastically increased penalties for peddling products that turn children into morons in and around schools.
you need to be a ham and have tx and rx to use packet i think...
the only link i found of interest was a packet radio modem kit for ibm pc's.
see packet radio modem kit it's $59 for one end.
I know they have "ming kits" too, but they do not appear to be on the web page. geez, i wish someone in st. louis would learn php or something.
you could try these guys. i think they have something called "ming kits" that let you write parallel data in and rcv parallel data on the far side.
they have stores in denver, san diego, st. louis.
if you need details via phone or email i'd try to hit up the san diego store first, i think they have an old navy fart working there who knows the most about their radio kits.
a one-way link will probably set you back like $100 just for parts, but i'm guessing.
I have to that I don't really like the look and feel of Applix or Framemaker. Both are reasonable products, though. I'm definately not in Framemaker's target market.
Many commercial Linux apps are looking dated and are based on older codebases. Corel WordPerfect 8 is in Motif, the way they write it (or shall I say wrote it) in Utah quite a few years ago. Applixware has a bit of a dated feel, as well.
No wonder they get beat by StarOffice, which for all its faults, at least looks and behaves in a somewhat modern fashion.
The last three commercial software packages I bought for Linux are Quake3 Arena ( in the tin box ), Myth II, and Corel WordPerfect 8.
WP8 feels old and clunky. I still use it fairly often. MII and Q3A run for hours on my debian machine, no problems.
If I'm EVER going to pay for another productivity app for Linux, it had better have a decent/modern feel to it. If a company can't do that, then they should get out of the market and go make cheetos or something (sorry I'm getting a little hungry).
Loki is doing new things, and "gets it". The companies focusing away from Linux don't really seem to have any vision, and are just porting dated apps, so I guess they should go.
I don't mind paying for software -- freedom is never free, and slavery costs much more -- but the least the company can do is add a bit of excitement to the mix.
Saw a Ford Galaxy whilst drivin' my Subaru Outback just the other day.
His father, by turning a blind eye while the S&Ls went nuts, with the end result that my Dad's career was destroyed.
Now I guess "Son of Bush" will fsck with mine?
It's not so much having a republican as president, it's the tendency for them to let questionable business practices slide -- the right wing cronies in high places really tend to rape the economy.
The Linux kernel, and nearly all the source to every application used on a Linux box, is free for your use, whether that use be private/personal or commercial.
Under the terms of the GPL, under which most Linux apps are distributed, you can use your Linux machine to develop code for any application, (pretty much) without concern for legal liability.
Granted, you can't derive works from GPL code into your program and sell it, but you can certainly use a Gnome-based Linux system to develop any original code without obligating yourself to additional costs or being concerned about liability to a third party as your project progresses.
All of the above changes when you add KDE/Qt to your Linux machine. You now must consider your intended audience, release of source code, and the environment in which you program. If you make a mistake, you are legally obligated to pay Trolltech approx. $1550.00 per developer, per year...more than Visual C++ Pro and W2K combined!
If you want to use it, great. But please don't be ignorant of the legal consequences of developing code in/under a KDE-interfaced Linux box.
...was that many on the hurd project were frustrated that mach kernel development had slowed and lost resources at the U of Utah or whatever.
They were planning on shifting to something called "L4", a microkernel started by a russian university (AIR). L4 is supposed to be extremely fast and lightweight.
remember the goal here -- instead of having to pester Linus with patches, and wondering what release they'll get in, you write something called a "translator" instead, and they are all the same from the kernel's point of view. No more kernel patches for drivers! Just add a translator!
I wish I GNU more about the L4 and Mach issues, cuz last I hurd that was the main issue deciding where HURD was going in the future.
Free computing gneeds HURD.
> Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping
> people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as
> near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome
> approach is to just copy MS. So of course they
> don't have to spend money to get the same
> results.
I'm sorry that you wrote this, but you did. I was using HPUX w/ a variety of popup menus in 1988, and it had been around for awhile then. Before win 1.0 I believe. You are talking about systems here, and you are just plain wrong -- windowing GUI systems are all basically the same when you walk up to them.
> "All three" aren't learning from each other --
> both are learning from Windows. There's only one
> UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars
> behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K
> as an icon.
MS spends a lot of stolen money for very little improvement in the UI, I'll certainly admit that. As far as testing, Gnome and KDE are fairly stable products, so they probably do a lot of testing. Obviously they spend very little on R&D.
> When Win95 came out, all people did was complain
> about how stupid the start button is, now we
> read comparisons that say "well, KDE and Gnome
> both have start buttons, so they're just as good
> as Windows, I don't know where MS is wasting all
> that money."
Sure, we read it, but how hard is it to make popup, cascading menus in early X w/ twm? Or to pull down menus from the early Macs' menu bar? I've always throught the start button was dumb. If KDE and Gnome had no foot or K, I guess I'd use an icon to launch a menu system or use popups. I don't really care.
> So we can bitch and moan about how imperfect and
> stupid MS interfaces are, but quite frankly
> there are only two companies that can claim any
> moral high ground for actually advancing the UI
> outside of ripping off MS: Apple and Palm. They
> are the only companies I see actually doing NEW
> things as opposed to "me-too"...
popup menus, available all the back to the early history of X and twm, are the basis of the later menubar extension and then led to the "stay down"/"stay up" appearance of Microsoft's "Start Menu", which was done by others before it ended up in Microsoft's lower left corner of win95.
I have no idea why you are so interested in distorting the history of menu systems, popups, or the general thrashing of systems and UIs which have an lineage far removed from any microsoft product, but you do -- you made a very shaky post, so you have to deal with the consequences and innaccuracies of same.
hmmmm...uh...let me think...oh yeah! MS ripped off apple!
oh..wait...let's see...Apple ripped off xerox!
mmmm...just a sec...X was developed at MIT at the same time as all three!
you are so ignorant, it's laughable. the ui ripoffs have been happening for fiteen frickin years.
hasn't msoft stock been fairly low lately?
with the microsoft takeover of corel, combined with the impending sale of corels' linux efforts, shouldn't corel stock be rebounding?
how many tech stocks that have nothing to do with linux have cratered in the last 9 months?
youe post definately takes a rather skewed view at tech stocks and the market in general.
it's my understanding that eazel's nautilus will have previews of a number of file types.
does celestes' room have a penguin motif?
no shortage of stuffed toys, i bet.
Another insane lawsuit by giant corporations that not only deprives us of our rights might destroys another internet company that is doing nothing more than move humanity out of the dark ages of information monopolies.
The eff has a article pleading for reform to the archaic copyright laws that are being twisted to destroy your internet freedoms.
seriously, i think there are only something like 5-6 people on the entire planet that can parse, consider and understand what you wrote without screaming "flame" or "troll".
There are still very real legal issues with KDE/qt, and a lot of people just want to wish them away.
wrongo. you have to buy a pro license for any commercial development, which is, as the author said, $1500+
not to mention the issues with the qt inlined header code, which many think make qt unusable as an lgpl library.
okay, someone mod this down because I'm pointing out that Microsoft owns 1/4th of Corel, which is a partner in this and a major player in ms.NET
I swear it...doesn't MS own 1/4th of Corel??? So, they are part of this "Legion of Doom"?
Geez, the damn moderation is ridiculous, and I can believe you don't know this cuz you are all over this site...FUD? I think it's a real concern.
Didn't the majority of the graphics gurus leave SGI for nvidia a few years back?
Obviously, faced with that influx of talent into their competitor, 3dfx was doomed. SGI is the leader when it comes to OpenGL drivers and hardware.
Great big googly moogly, 3dfx's next board was going to be 2X the price of their competitor for similar performance -- not exactly the sharpest strategy to gain market share.
personally, i think having a hardcopy record of every vote is important. kind of like a cash register journal, ya know?
sweden criticizing the USA? isn't that the country where the people are so liberal they rent their children to paedophiles? yikes.
someone was telling me about a system they saw where you slide your ballot into a machine *before* turning it in to the volunteers, and it 1) validates the holez; 2) prints a slip for you to take w/ you that lists everything you voted for.
the touch screen things are cool, but with no physical trail of every vote it could get ugly. but hey, if www.uboc.com can handle browser-agnostic banking through the web, i guess it's just another kind of transaction.
global hawk seems to be working pretty well.
worst case scenario: some hack turns your assets against you.
kind of a nasty scenario, very tough to guarantee against.
if one pilot/human revolts, and bombs the capitol, it remains extremely unlikely that many will revolt.
once you can crack one aircraft, you have the means to take them all, especially if you can get in at a high enough level.
opens the somewhat interesting scenario of a small group of evil geniuses ruling the world with a beowolf or something.
Well, I got an OT mod...so you should be happy.
.NET strategy...when there are phenomenal opportunities to be had via coalitions and cooperation.
At any rate, around 15 years ago most corps were getting a lot of complaints at their shareholder's meetings about "corporate behavior", dealings with employees, environmental issues, etc. (GTE was about the hardest hit, as well as GM and GE).
Now? Hardly anyone questions corp. behavior...that is, people are so obsessed with greed and profits, they have lost their ability to "detach" themselves from their investment and analyze the possible ramifications of their investments.
Microsoft is an excellent example. If the employees/shareholders were able to detach themselves and look at the bigger picture, I would expect at least 20% or so to form some type of revolt and officially complain to the board.
But there is not a peep -- nothing. This is scary to me, since I believe the following:
"Microsoft shareholders and employees would be FAR BETTER OFF staging a revolt against their companies' current policies of isolation, and demand a complete and total adherance to standards and cooperation with other computing platforms"
Why? because the current philosophy of isolationism is great for the short term, but possibly devastating in the longer term.
By failing to (honestly) join in with other companies, they risk losing the lawsuit in a couple years.
By failing to (honestly) join in with other companies, they put the long-term viability of the USAs software leadership at risk...they force competition between the USA and other tech nations to be an "all or nothing" deal...that could come up nothing for the USA.
I just find it amazing that MS continues this march...with the
Even more amazing is that some of the groundbreakers at Microsoft, people were in early, and are now phenomenally wealthy and have almost nothing to loose, can't detach themselves and do a employee or shareholder's revolt.
The short term embarrassment and financial losses might be distaseful/painful, but the long term benefits and stability of a truly open and cooperative Microsoft could be mind-boggling -- not only for the USA but for the whole world.
It's just a shame that the employees and 'neauveau riche' of Microsoft can't see past their pocketbooks.