The cumulative number of errors of fact plus the lack of clarity in the meaning of his main points make this a highly incendiary and misleading article. As little as I may like GPL3 for other reasons, he paints a herring quite red several times over. The cases he points to are much simpler than he'd make them sound. I found this article insulting on several levels. I hope I do not to have to educate too many readers mislead by it in the future.
I couldn't agree more. But it's really only interesting if they stop grandstanding and compare comparable products. In our case, Coverity shouldn't make any statements about Open versus Closed source unless they have some degree of comparable data for OpenLDAP versus Netscape/Red hat, Sun, IBM, CA, Novell, and Oracle (at a minimum) Directory Server products. Comparing the bug level in OpenLDAP to that of a Jet Engine control program is not only misleading (because they don't give you a measure of the cost per thousand lines of code to achieve the defect level) but irrelevant because people evaluating Directory Servers don't care what the defect level is in some other irrelevant discipline's closed soource code.
I find it unacceptable that they publish all this pretty, and generally positive, information about which projects in Open Source they scanned and then draw conclusions without telling the reader which non-Open Source Code they're comparing it to. One suspects, in the dark of night and in a paranoid frame of mind, that they're comparing to what Homeland Security COULD give them which is stuff nobody's much heard of and no Enterprise would think of deploying. Just s suspicion but one that's left on the table by the one-sided reporting.
Well, can we read the underlying article as a Paid Commercial Announcement for firms funded by prominent Venture Capital Firms needing PR to go public quickly? This is a business model that Red Hat and now Novell have been riding for years. So have smaller companies like Symas and PADL except that the smaller companies can actually support the code. These new VC-funded companies with househod name Executives rely on the principals of the smaller companies to actually do the work. The smart money finds the smaller companies and gets dramatically better (and cheaper) support [a paid commercial announcement].
Amusing. It's just part of the Sales Pitch to "the street" and those who have no clue. They're trying to make it sound like this old idea is new so they can generate excitement and multiples of real value for the IPO. And the market's collective amnesia will help them.
Yeah, sorry they used "Startling"... It's actually a good read... something you might recommend to those people who don't get it and can read. Not as good as the better comments in this thread but better than "startling" implies.
Thanks, BrentO, you make a couple of good points. My $0.02 follows.
The problems with dictation are two-fold. The technology is way too fragile. It is too easily thrown off by changes in ambient noise environment or the speaker's level of stress/emotion. That will slowly improve. More processing power and storage will become available for more robust pattern matching. But the second problem is probably more the point: people can't dictate. Dictation is a learned skill and few people are willing to take the time to learn or to be that disciplined. With a keyboard and a word processing program, you can noodle around and generally do what we do on pencil and paper until it's right. Dictation isn't easy.
The other side of speech works well. We use it in offices, in factories and on trade show floors all the time. Browsing the Web and filling in forms designed for data entry by voice works. VoiceSurfer by Conversay works. The Web works as well by voice as it does by mouse. It would work better if Web developers did some simple things... but they don't know what to do and nobody's pushing the isues. Conversay's software offers easy JavaScript scripting or effortless voice enablement. If you don't mind wearing a headset, you may find it is as easy and almost as fast as the mouse.
The real message is that people don't talk to their computers. Most don't wear headsets or have high-quality directional microphones attached to their computers. And virtually everyone feels strange talking to a machine. I have a headset on mine that I use for voice over IP, I still don't run with VoiceSurfer on all the time:-(... proof of BrentO's position at a powerful level. We'll see if that strangeness fades... my prediction is that it's 2005 and beyond.
My UK friends subject me to flavors of rugby (not one, but several) and cricket. The rest of the world (and even some in the US) to both soccer and basketball. Business friends in the US want to talk about the SuperBowl as they have (wannahave) cool seats and all. At least this year, it came down to a competitive last few minutes in a close game that had drama leading in, a very close finish, and didn't drag on through 20 minutes of contrived delaying tactics. In general the ads were too cute by 100%. Some positive messaging counted... the Christopher Reeves thing strikes a chord as do the kids talking about smoking. The monkey makes a statement... but... For around 20% of my total annual TV viewing, for a change, it was kind of worth it.
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The cumulative number of errors of fact plus the lack of clarity in the meaning of his main points make this a highly incendiary and misleading article. As little as I may like GPL3 for other reasons, he paints a herring quite red several times over. The cases he points to are much simpler than he'd make them sound. I found this article insulting on several levels. I hope I do not to have to educate too many readers mislead by it in the future.
I couldn't agree more. But it's really only interesting if they stop grandstanding and compare comparable products. In our case, Coverity shouldn't make any statements about Open versus Closed source unless they have some degree of comparable data for OpenLDAP versus Netscape/Red hat, Sun, IBM, CA, Novell, and Oracle (at a minimum) Directory Server products. Comparing the bug level in OpenLDAP to that of a Jet Engine control program is not only misleading (because they don't give you a measure of the cost per thousand lines of code to achieve the defect level) but irrelevant because people evaluating Directory Servers don't care what the defect level is in some other irrelevant discipline's closed soource code.
I find it unacceptable that they publish all this pretty, and generally positive, information about which projects in Open Source they scanned and then draw conclusions without telling the reader which non-Open Source Code they're comparing it to. One suspects, in the dark of night and in a paranoid frame of mind, that they're comparing to what Homeland Security COULD give them which is stuff nobody's much heard of and no Enterprise would think of deploying. Just s suspicion but one that's left on the table by the one-sided reporting.
Amusing. It's just part of the Sales Pitch to "the street" and those who have no clue. They're trying to make it sound like this old idea is new so they can generate excitement and multiples of real value for the IPO. And the market's collective amnesia will help them.
Yeah, sorry they used "Startling" ... It's actually a good read ... something you might recommend to those people who don't get it and can read. Not as good as the better comments in this thread but better than "startling" implies.
The problems with dictation are two-fold. The technology is way too fragile. It is too easily thrown off by changes in ambient noise environment or the speaker's level of stress/emotion. That will slowly improve. More processing power and storage will become available for more robust pattern matching. But the second problem is probably more the point: people can't dictate. Dictation is a learned skill and few people are willing to take the time to learn or to be that disciplined. With a keyboard and a word processing program, you can noodle around and generally do what we do on pencil and paper until it's right. Dictation isn't easy.
The other side of speech works well. We use it in offices, in factories and on trade show floors all the time. Browsing the Web and filling in forms designed for data entry by voice works . VoiceSurfer by Conversay works. The Web works as well by voice as it does by mouse. It would work better if Web developers did some simple things ... but they don't know what to do and nobody's pushing the isues. Conversay's software offers easy JavaScript scripting or effortless voice enablement. If you don't mind wearing a headset, you may find it is as easy and almost as fast as the mouse.
The real message is that people don't talk to their computers. Most don't wear headsets or have high-quality directional microphones attached to their computers. And virtually everyone feels strange talking to a machine. I have a headset on mine that I use for voice over IP, I still don't run with VoiceSurfer on all the time :-( ... proof of BrentO's position at a powerful level. We'll see if that strangeness fades ... my prediction is that it's 2005 and beyond.
My UK friends subject me to flavors of rugby (not one, but several) and cricket. The rest of the world (and even some in the US) to both soccer and basketball. Business friends in the US want to talk about the SuperBowl as they have (wannahave) cool seats and all. ... the Christopher Reeves thing strikes a chord as do the kids talking about smoking. The monkey makes a statement ... but ...
At least this year, it came down to a competitive last few minutes in a close game that had drama leading in, a very close finish, and didn't drag on through 20 minutes of contrived delaying tactics.
In general the ads were too cute by 100%. Some positive messaging counted
For around 20% of my total annual TV viewing, for a change, it was kind of worth it.