Remember Castle Wolfenstein? Not the 3-D game, I mean the 2-D original game that the 3-D shooter was based on. Now that's a classic! I still have fond memories of pounding the option key on my atari 800 to launch grenades.
I find amusing that he describes open source as socialism. Socialism is a system where there's a central control of business by the government. This is almost exactly the opposite of that. Certainly there is a collective effort and collective benefit and so that notion of common interest and community is akin to what socialism is about. But the big flaw in socialism is the inefficiencies of central control, not that collective interest element.
The American fear of Socialism is derrived from the second S in USSR. Remember the Soviet Union was our Al Qaeda for many decades and so there's some assumptions that arise when you talk about socialism. Personally I don't think socialism and capitalism are incompatbile, you just have to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Capitalism's strength is the creation of efficiencies through market competition. Capitalism fails completely when competition does not exist. Also, capitalism, when allowed to run it's natural course, tends to favor an unequal distribution of wealth. Socialist policies, can help smooth the rough edges on capitalism. Adjusting laws to create competition where it is needed, and regulating industries where competition is effectively impossible. A company with no competition is no more efficient than a government operated one, and it's a hell of a lot more expensive.
This is why I wrote "and support". While yes, you can use a cross platform library to write your code, you also need to provide support for the other platform. That requires a certain amount of resources for testing on both platforms, technical support, etc. Nothing ever works 100% cross-platform without some tweaking.
I'm not sure you can make this claim. You're just predicting the future.
I think I can. The scale of games these days has increased tremendously. The amount of time, effort and people to develop a game is huge. There are companies out there that can make good money by doing nothing but designing trees for other people's games.
Is everything we can do in Linux available for Windows?
Pretty much, yes. Keep in mind most of the tools and libraries for games in Linux are either deliberately cross platform to make it easier to write for both operating systems, or they are ports of Windows stuff (Cedega).
I know what I'm proposing seems a bit silly. But on the other hand, so does playing catch-up eternally, creating and playing these communistic no-name clones of great games.
I mean I understand what you're getting at but I think there's not enough incentive to go out of one's way to make a game that only works on Linux. I would argue that the community that supports Linux would naturally be against such a concept because, generally, people who are into Linux like flexibility and choice and it seems rather odd that they'd work to eliminate that.
Yes, I agree, if your motivation is money, you should stick to Windows.
Ummm... okay, well it is for the vast majority of the commercial game developers. As for open source games a couple thoughts:
1) You will not be able to write a game in your spare time that is of such earth shattering quality that people, not ordinarily inclined to do so, would install Linux to play it.
2) If it's truly open source, somebody can port it to Windows if it's all that.
I mean, just think of some really great open source games for Linux -- nethack, Wesnoth, UQM, freeciv -- they all work fine on other platforms.
Nethack... okay, it's fine, but how many people are really that into it. Never heard of Wesnoth or UQM. As for freeciv, that's a derivative of a Windows game.
Until somebody develops a game that's only for Linux that's of such significance that people are willing to install Linux just to run it, you're not going to see any real change here. If other factors cause an overall shift in the market share for Linux, then the games will follow.
Believe me, I've bet on many a horse that lost out because of simple market share. My Atari 1040 ST played some great games but when I went to the local software store it was only IBM and some Mac games.
Great idea but here's the problem. If you're a game development company and you can only afford to code for and support one platform, which would you choose:
1) Windows with 90+% of the market 2) Linux with 5-10% of the market, give or take
Also, keep in mind that anybody who's a serious gamer has a Windows machine, or dual-boots.
Would strict evolutionists be able to explain disease-resistant GM crops? Would they be correct? Would we necessarily need to look for non-living, "intelligently-designed" artifacts before we allow ourselves the luxury of assuming that an intelligence (either natural or supernatural) is allowed to be considered a creator of living things?
This is a valid point, and yes, it's possible that some aspects of what we see of earth biology could have been created by some being. The problem in ID is this leap where it goes from finding something seemingly irreducibly complex, then making the leap to, "God did it". We have yet to find anything irreducibly complex that we didn't create ourselves. Presumably if there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe other than us (likely), it's possible we'll come across it at some point.
Having said that, even if we do find it, it doesn't proove or disprove God. It might proove some intervention by some intelligence, but even then it's hard to tell if it's intelligence or just a misunderstanding of the processes at work.
In my terms that is "the creator" or "God". I can't tell you much more about it because I can't really imagine a reality that is independent of time. Can you honestly say that you can?
The assumption this suggests is that the Universe had a definitive beginning and did not exist prior to that. At this point it's impossible to conclude that because we can only figure out what the Universe was in the past up to a point. Before that point what existed? Maybe the Universe has always been, maybe God screwed it into some complext light fixture. None of us knows, which is kinda my point when you get down to it. If you want to believe in God, fine, but you can't proove God.
Personally I've always tended to favor the concept that everything that exists is God. That God isn't a detached observer, or somebody enacting some grandiose experiment. That everything that exists has always been, in some form, and always will be, in some form. That nothing need exist independently of it. I cannot proove any of that though and that's fine with me.
I'm not confusing "why" with "how" but rather I'm saying that our lack of understanding of "how " doesn't suggest a "why". Science and religion are wholly incompatible with eachother. Trying to explain God based on the how of the universe is ludicrous. Trying to explain evolution based on the why of God is similarly ludicrous. There is nothing in science that prooves God and there is nothing in science that disprooves God.
Even if God presented himself tomorrow with a big "hi, I'm God" name tag it wouldn't proove his all mightyness in a scientific context. He could snap his fingers and destroy whole galaxies and all it would proove is he could whoop our collective ass, not that he was all mighty or that he was the guy who originally created the whole thing. Because hey, there might be somebody with an even bigger can of deific whoop ass waiting in the wings.
Well let's look at how cosmology developed. The first explanations were very much tied to spiritualism. You had notions of the sky being a curtain with holes poked in it, etc. Then we discovered planets and that sort of threw off a lot of assumptions. So it was figured that the stars were points of light in a shell surrounding the solar system. That ultimately everything revolved around us.
Of course that fell apart because it became obvious that we were in fact revolving around the sun. Each time, you had religious people trying to defend the old world view, going so far as to kill people on charges of hearacy for pointing out the indisputable truths: that we weren't the only planet, or the center of the solar system, or the center of the universe.
Now we know that there are lots of stars and lots of galaxies and we are beginning to get evidence of their being lots of planets (though it was a rather reasonable logical deduction for some time). Now some religious hold onto this notion that yeah it's a lot of stars and planets, but we're the only life. We'll see how long that lasts.
Ultimately there's always going to be a mystery. It's very unlikely we'll be able to conclusively determine what happened before the big bang (assuming the big bang stands as the best explanation of events). Of course "before" isn't necessarily an applicable concept here, but you get the point.
A couple points on the ID side are: "vestigal" organs are now being discovered to actually be important, and "junk" DNA seems to actually do something. This is not to say that evolution isn't important, and probably will have a place in biology even if something else supplants it, but ID does offer a valid alternative principle to the evolutionary framework.
The logic you are applying here is that since we don't thoroughly understand it, it favors intelligent design. This is the same mistake I was just pointing out, concluding that if we don't get it, it must be a grandiose design beyond our comprehension. That kind of logic is what convinced people that mental illness was demon posession. They didn't understand it, so they ascribed a mythos to the conditions and treated them using religious approaches that were utterly ineffective.
I have yet to see any evidence of any basic scientific rigor that anything, be it vestigal organs, or junk dna, can only be explained through concious design.
Intelligent Design seems to operate on the oz theory that since we can't see behind the curtain we should take what we see in front of the curtain on face value. Of course, throughout history, we've seen this story repeat time and time again. We find something we don't understand, somebody attributes it to the divine intervention, then we figure it out. Once it's made clear that there is an explanation these people run to find the next unsolvable mystery only to see it get solved too.
Of course given the infinite mystery of the Universe, this is going to continue. If somebody feels that an intelligent designer is the only plausible explanation for the order of the universe, then they'll continue to see it there whether it exists or not. Personally what I've never understood about the logic is this:
If the apparent order of the universe necessitates a creator, then what created the creator since presumably the creator would be of an even higher level of order? If the creator doesn't need a creator, then why does the universe need a creator?
Every so often it turns out that the cranks are right. Besides, isn't it a fun discussion that comes about from discussing the crankishness of a person?
1) You had two different browsers each with their own JVM plus a third JVM that you could download and they all behaved slightly inconsistently.
2) The Java applications were painfully slow
Now, go to google maps and tell me that it's slow. It doesn't matter what the software uses, it matters what you perceive. If you perceive waiting, sluggishness, etc, then it's a problem. This is common sense programming. You target a platform and you develop software that works well on that platform.
Seriously you build upon the failures that DHTML, HTML, Javascript, XML, XMLHTTRequest and you form a system which requires at least a 1 ghz processor just run a very simple GUI.
Ummmm.... I have a 1Ghz processor. Most people have 1Ghz processors. If most people couldn't run these GUI's they wouldn't exist because it would be worth the time to futz with them. The fact of the matter is that most people have way more processing power on their desks than they really need. Unless you do lots of video transcoding or game playing, a modern processor is total overkill.
In the end, applications are always designed to work with a target environment. If everybody has 1Ghz processors, it's really not worth the trouble to make it run on a lower end system. Furthermore, if you can enhance the overall ease of use of the system, etc, why not suck up a few more megahertz here and there? Obviously this has practical limits. Designing a web app that needed a 4Ghz processor to run would be assenine because nobody has them.
In the end though if it's complex, broken, and a resource hog then people just won't use it. But I think google maps prooved you can do some pretty cool stuff with it and so it's piqued people's interest in it. It's not going to be the solution for everything and sometimes it might not be worth the hassle, but it's one more tool in the toolbox.
Funny me, I thought that google for usenet was Google.
That's such 1990's thinking...
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Technological advances render all but the most dramatic processing demands almost moot.
It used to be true that a given process would be run exponentially faster over time by the growing power of processors. So if you wrote bloated crappy code, within two years it worked fine because all the processors got better. The problem is that we're running into a wall as to how high they can clock the processors because of the heat and power requirements.
The solution has been to switch to a multi-core processor that runs at the same or even sometimes lower frequencies. This works great but it has one HUGE caveat: the code must be able to run in parallel. Code that is being written today, by and large, doesn't account for this. Sure there's threading and all that in much of today's code, but not quite such that you're seeing those same exponential increases in performance.
To write fast code today you have to be able to write code that can break down into numerous discrete chunks that can all work in parallel. With each new generation of processor, this is going to become more and more critical. Right now we have 2 cores, then we'll get 4, 8, etc. With each generation, you'll get faster performance, but with each generation, the code becomes more complex because it must be broken down into smaller pieces to take advantage of the extra cores.
Having said that, I suspect that the OO people are, at the moment, more focussed with creating functional parity between OO and Office. Sure, sometimes it will be noticebly slower, but if it can do everything Office can do, then they can refactor the innards down the line to improve performance.
The fact of the matter is that there are very few people who really need PDA's. If they can get a phone that has PDA features without paying a lot more, they'll take it. But as a standalone device, the PDA is the jack of all trades master of none.
If you take a straight up pocket PC, you can:
-Make phone calls -Listen to music -Schedule appointments -Send e-mail -Watch movies
But how many of those tasks is it really exceptional at? It's great for keeping track of a calendar and corporations are the biggest buyer of PDA's for that reason. They set up a centralized meeting system and then hand out PDA's to everybody.
It's not ideal for phone calls. I have a treo which is about as good of a compromise as you can get it and it's still a bit bulky for the average person. It'll fit in a pocket but it bulges quite a bit. You can listen to music but then you have storage space issues and the interfaces aren't nearly as good as what's on an ipod. You can send a small e-mail with ease but you need a laptop for real productivity. Movies... well, if you like watching movies on a 2 inch screen, more power to you and your optometrist.
The niche that a PDA is trying to fill is deceptively difficult. Basically give people a computer that they can carry in their pocket all the time. There's practical limitations to how small you can make the display and keyboard before it becomes unusuable. The treo is the best compromise I've seen and by most phone standards it's huge.
Name me one PDA that has 30GB of space. Or 10... or 5 even?
I've got a treo. It's a nice phone/organizer and it'd suck donkeys for playing mp3's. Why? Because it has no storage space.
I think, quite honestly, it comes down to a decision about the intention of the devices. PDA's are marketed to business people. So part of that marketing choice involves trimming out features that would make them well suited to being mp3 players. Why does a business traveller need 10GB of space? It'd be nice, but in the grand scheme, they don't need it and they wouldn't be able to convince their employers to shell out for it.
The other thing to keep in mind is the costs involved. An IPod is basically a disk drive with a very minimal interface to manage the music. Simple input and simple output using relatively low cost parts. If you tried to build a PDA with similar capacity it'd get a lot more expensive quickly and then who would buy it? Business execs would compare it to a blackberry and think it overpriced. Consumers would compare it to an ipod and think it overpriced.
The thing that's bad about this is that assuming these guys have enough money to front the lawyers they can sue their way into riches regardless of whether it's a valid claim. All they do is send nastygrams to a bunch of small companies they believe to be infringing on their patent seeking royalties. Invariably a number of those companies will pay up to avoid the potential of open ended legal battles.
So in the 90's it was:
1) Do something cool 2)... 3) Profit
In the 00's it's
1) Do something somebody else did before 2) Sue everybody who already did it 3) Profit
One point I'm trying to make is that it is possible to write an arbitrarily complex system that is fault free. bug free as defined above as something that you can beat over the head with a baseball bat if any fault is found
This is a critical point. Bruce Schneier speaks to this a lot in his books. That in essence, it's impossible to make bug free systems past a certain level of complexity. When I say "bug free" there I mean, zero bugs. Perfect.
Now what you're saying isn't that it's possible to make a bug free system, but rather through the judicious use of baseball bats, you can encourage a relatively predictable and manageable set of bugs. That you can use contracts with your suppliers to establish fault tolerances that you consider acceptable. Invariably the higher quality level you expect, the higher the price you will pay.
So the major building block are there and remain there. With code re-use the foundations should only get more secure with time. I see no reason why in X years time we couldn't have all the things we expect in a desktop OS to be rock solid.
If all the time was spent focussing on making them rock solid, that might be true. But look at Windows development for a good example of how this works in reality. Their TCP/IP stack is, arguably, rock solid. I've never heard of an exploit for it. On the other hand they build new features on top of that stack that then have problems. Invariably you may have discrete rock solid components, but when you start gluing things together and making systems more complex you introduce unexpected flaws.
The third point I'm trying to make is that when the stability becomes a design goal (as would happen if it were a legal requirement)
I'm all for using contracts to press people into certain levels of quality but creating a law that mandates it is, I believe, quite dangerous. The thing is, not all systems need to posess the same fault tolerance. Creating legislation that mandates it would have the effect of shutting down a lot of development because it would not be worth the expense of doing it. That in the end, buggy software, hacked together at the last second may be sufficient for certain needs. That the software may be "good enough" even if it's not high quality.
As a final thought which occured to me earlier, a reason a building is more robust than your average system of software is that there is lots of redundancy in every part of the design. Not to say that my house doesn't have certain supporting walls that musn't be removed, but no individual brick being removed will cause the house to fall down. No single rotten beam will destroy the building. Maybe this is a design philosophy that the software world will move to as it matures over the comming decades.
I would argue that buildings are more fault tolerant because if they aren't people die, and with buildings you are dealing with a larger number of known quantities. People have been building structures for millenia. The modern skyscraper is built upon the successes and failures of countless buildings made before them. The physics of building construction is very well understood at this point. People want all kinds of wierd designs in buildings but ultimately it all meets certain well understood physical constraints that lock them down.
With software, it's a continuous evolution. Writing software for a mainframe is vastly different from writing software for a PC and then when you take that PC and hook it up to a network it gets even more complex. Now take that same software on a PC and make it work on a multi-processor system, then a multi-core multi-processor system. Then write software for a quantum computer. The rules of the game are rewritten on an almost daily basis.
In the vast majority of software, failure to function does not lead to injuries and fatalities. Those software systems that are at risk for that like in the Space Shuttle, or nuclear reactors, etc, are already subject to far more stringent validation. So I think the comparisons to building collapses, surgical procedures, etc, are a bit apple and orange.
When I worked at nortel we had a contract with our OS supplier that they were allowed no bugs in their os. As in if we found a flaw in their OS they had to fix it within a certain time period or face damages. Likewise were we sued for loss of revenue if it was determined they were responsible they would bear a proportionate measure of the blame.
These kinds of guarantees are perfectly effective when you have a controlled environment. If you are going to have a hardware device that runs on a particular OS that's been licensed for that specific purpose you can lock down constraints very nicely. It's when you get into complexity that you have a problem. You couldn't make similar demands of Microsoft for Windows for example.
It is possible to produce good software if you treat it as engineering as opposed to hacking.
Really what it boils down to is a balancing act between general software quality, security, usability and business concerns like cost and time to market. People will write "bad" software because it needs to be done quickly and/or at low cost. Also software is often made insecure out of an interest of making it more usable. Arguably the tight integration between IE, Outlook, and Windows itself makes the system easier to use. It also make is a breeding ground for all kinds of problems.
But ultimately that's all a choice and where it gets into being "engineering" is in making those choices conciously rather than accidentally.
I agree 100%. I think all companies should be liable for their products. However, I do not think it should be at the individual employee level.
Here's an interesting question. A piece of software that is written to work with Windows has a security flaw in it. The security flaw creates an exploitable condition in Windows such that you can gain total control over the system. Who's fault is it?
Obviously there was a security flaw in the software that you were using, but then it wouldn't be that critical if Windows handled it's security better. So isn't Windows partially to blame. And what if you set it up in an insecure manner? Isn't that your fault? Or is the developer's fault for not making it more idiot proof.
Now taking that down to the code inside of a program is just ridiculous. If you've got a team of 10 people (which is small in the grand scheme), each one of them could, individuall write totally secure code. However, come integration time, it turns out that they are opening up holes in eachother's code. So then who's fault is it? What about QA? Shouldn't they have some liability too?
Finally there's the PHB factor. You could have a group of the best, most security knowledgeable programmers in the world, and they could still screw up due to lack of time and resources. What if the boss tells them to do something that makes the system innately insecure? Who's fault is it then, his for telling them to do it or theirs for not pushing back on the requirement. Not to mention what happens after people have work a few months of 60 hour work weeks trying to get a project done.
In the end, liability is just a dumb concept in computers. In the end this is one of those places where the invisible hand of the market place is the best correction. Companies that write buggy software routinely will be smacked by the marketplace, by and large. The only exception to that rule is companies like Microsoft who have an effective monopoly. But then that's why we have anti-trust law isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Remember Castle Wolfenstein? Not the 3-D game, I mean the 2-D original game that the 3-D shooter was based on. Now that's a classic! I still have fond memories of pounding the option key on my atari 800 to launch grenades.
I find amusing that he describes open source as socialism. Socialism is a system where there's a central control of business by the government. This is almost exactly the opposite of that. Certainly there is a collective effort and collective benefit and so that notion of common interest and community is akin to what socialism is about. But the big flaw in socialism is the inefficiencies of central control, not that collective interest element.
The American fear of Socialism is derrived from the second S in USSR. Remember the Soviet Union was our Al Qaeda for many decades and so there's some assumptions that arise when you talk about socialism. Personally I don't think socialism and capitalism are incompatbile, you just have to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Capitalism's strength is the creation of efficiencies through market competition. Capitalism fails completely when competition does not exist. Also, capitalism, when allowed to run it's natural course, tends to favor an unequal distribution of wealth. Socialist policies, can help smooth the rough edges on capitalism. Adjusting laws to create competition where it is needed, and regulating industries where competition is effectively impossible. A company with no competition is no more efficient than a government operated one, and it's a hell of a lot more expensive.
This is why I wrote "and support". While yes, you can use a cross platform library to write your code, you also need to provide support for the other platform. That requires a certain amount of resources for testing on both platforms, technical support, etc. Nothing ever works 100% cross-platform without some tweaking.
I'm not sure you can make this claim. You're just predicting the future.
I think I can. The scale of games these days has increased tremendously. The amount of time, effort and people to develop a game is huge. There are companies out there that can make good money by doing nothing but designing trees for other people's games.
Is everything we can do in Linux available for Windows?
Pretty much, yes. Keep in mind most of the tools and libraries for games in Linux are either deliberately cross platform to make it easier to write for both operating systems, or they are ports of Windows stuff (Cedega).
I know what I'm proposing seems a bit silly. But on the other hand, so does playing catch-up eternally, creating and playing these communistic no-name clones of great games.
I mean I understand what you're getting at but I think there's not enough incentive to go out of one's way to make a game that only works on Linux. I would argue that the community that supports Linux would naturally be against such a concept because, generally, people who are into Linux like flexibility and choice and it seems rather odd that they'd work to eliminate that.
Okay... I think there's a place to start. Can we get a Linux game that's good and ISN'T a clone of something else :)
Yes, I agree, if your motivation is money, you should stick to Windows.
Ummm... okay, well it is for the vast majority of the commercial game developers. As for open source games a couple thoughts:
1) You will not be able to write a game in your spare time that is of such earth shattering quality that people, not ordinarily inclined to do so, would install Linux to play it.
2) If it's truly open source, somebody can port it to Windows if it's all that.
I mean, just think of some really great open source games for Linux -- nethack, Wesnoth, UQM, freeciv -- they all work fine on other platforms.
Nethack... okay, it's fine, but how many people are really that into it. Never heard of Wesnoth or UQM. As for freeciv, that's a derivative of a Windows game.
Until somebody develops a game that's only for Linux that's of such significance that people are willing to install Linux just to run it, you're not going to see any real change here. If other factors cause an overall shift in the market share for Linux, then the games will follow.
Believe me, I've bet on many a horse that lost out because of simple market share. My Atari 1040 ST played some great games but when I went to the local software store it was only IBM and some Mac games.
... Linux is completely dependent on an API that's controlled by Microsoft...
Somehow I don't think so...
Great idea but here's the problem. If you're a game development company and you can only afford to code for and support one platform, which would you choose:
1) Windows with 90+% of the market
2) Linux with 5-10% of the market, give or take
Also, keep in mind that anybody who's a serious gamer has a Windows machine, or dual-boots.
Would strict evolutionists be able to explain disease-resistant GM crops? Would they be correct? Would we necessarily need to look for non-living, "intelligently-designed" artifacts before we allow ourselves the luxury of assuming that an intelligence (either natural or supernatural) is allowed to be considered a creator of living things?
This is a valid point, and yes, it's possible that some aspects of what we see of earth biology could have been created by some being. The problem in ID is this leap where it goes from finding something seemingly irreducibly complex, then making the leap to, "God did it". We have yet to find anything irreducibly complex that we didn't create ourselves. Presumably if there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe other than us (likely), it's possible we'll come across it at some point.
Having said that, even if we do find it, it doesn't proove or disprove God. It might proove some intervention by some intelligence, but even then it's hard to tell if it's intelligence or just a misunderstanding of the processes at work.
In my terms that is "the creator" or "God". I can't tell you much more about it because I can't really imagine a reality that is independent of time. Can you honestly say that you can?
The assumption this suggests is that the Universe had a definitive beginning and did not exist prior to that. At this point it's impossible to conclude that because we can only figure out what the Universe was in the past up to a point. Before that point what existed? Maybe the Universe has always been, maybe God screwed it into some complext light fixture. None of us knows, which is kinda my point when you get down to it. If you want to believe in God, fine, but you can't proove God.
Personally I've always tended to favor the concept that everything that exists is God. That God isn't a detached observer, or somebody enacting some grandiose experiment. That everything that exists has always been, in some form, and always will be, in some form. That nothing need exist independently of it. I cannot proove any of that though and that's fine with me.
I'm not confusing "why" with "how" but rather I'm saying that our lack of understanding of "how " doesn't suggest a "why". Science and religion are wholly incompatible with eachother. Trying to explain God based on the how of the universe is ludicrous. Trying to explain evolution based on the why of God is similarly ludicrous. There is nothing in science that prooves God and there is nothing in science that disprooves God.
Even if God presented himself tomorrow with a big "hi, I'm God" name tag it wouldn't proove his all mightyness in a scientific context. He could snap his fingers and destroy whole galaxies and all it would proove is he could whoop our collective ass, not that he was all mighty or that he was the guy who originally created the whole thing. Because hey, there might be somebody with an even bigger can of deific whoop ass waiting in the wings.
Well let's look at how cosmology developed. The first explanations were very much tied to spiritualism. You had notions of the sky being a curtain with holes poked in it, etc. Then we discovered planets and that sort of threw off a lot of assumptions. So it was figured that the stars were points of light in a shell surrounding the solar system. That ultimately everything revolved around us.
Of course that fell apart because it became obvious that we were in fact revolving around the sun. Each time, you had religious people trying to defend the old world view, going so far as to kill people on charges of hearacy for pointing out the indisputable truths: that we weren't the only planet, or the center of the solar system, or the center of the universe.
Now we know that there are lots of stars and lots of galaxies and we are beginning to get evidence of their being lots of planets (though it was a rather reasonable logical deduction for some time). Now some religious hold onto this notion that yeah it's a lot of stars and planets, but we're the only life. We'll see how long that lasts.
Ultimately there's always going to be a mystery. It's very unlikely we'll be able to conclusively determine what happened before the big bang (assuming the big bang stands as the best explanation of events). Of course "before" isn't necessarily an applicable concept here, but you get the point.
A couple points on the ID side are: "vestigal" organs are now being discovered to actually be important, and "junk" DNA seems to actually do something. This is not to say that evolution isn't important, and probably will have a place in biology even if something else supplants it, but ID does offer a valid alternative principle to the evolutionary framework.
The logic you are applying here is that since we don't thoroughly understand it, it favors intelligent design. This is the same mistake I was just pointing out, concluding that if we don't get it, it must be a grandiose design beyond our comprehension. That kind of logic is what convinced people that mental illness was demon posession. They didn't understand it, so they ascribed a mythos to the conditions and treated them using religious approaches that were utterly ineffective.
I have yet to see any evidence of any basic scientific rigor that anything, be it vestigal organs, or junk dna, can only be explained through concious design.
Intelligent Design seems to operate on the oz theory that since we can't see behind the curtain we should take what we see in front of the curtain on face value. Of course, throughout history, we've seen this story repeat time and time again. We find something we don't understand, somebody attributes it to the divine intervention, then we figure it out. Once it's made clear that there is an explanation these people run to find the next unsolvable mystery only to see it get solved too.
Of course given the infinite mystery of the Universe, this is going to continue. If somebody feels that an intelligent designer is the only plausible explanation for the order of the universe, then they'll continue to see it there whether it exists or not. Personally what I've never understood about the logic is this:
If the apparent order of the universe necessitates a creator, then what created the creator since presumably the creator would be of an even higher level of order? If the creator doesn't need a creator, then why does the universe need a creator?
Every so often it turns out that the cranks are right. Besides, isn't it a fun discussion that comes about from discussing the crankishness of a person?
It'd look like gopher... but what if we didn't have gopher...
Java failed on the desktop because:
1) You had two different browsers each with their own JVM plus a third JVM that you could download and they all behaved slightly inconsistently.
2) The Java applications were painfully slow
Now, go to google maps and tell me that it's slow. It doesn't matter what the software uses, it matters what you perceive. If you perceive waiting, sluggishness, etc, then it's a problem. This is common sense programming. You target a platform and you develop software that works well on that platform.
Seriously you build upon the failures that DHTML, HTML, Javascript, XML, XMLHTTRequest and you form a system which requires at least a 1 ghz processor just run a very simple GUI.
Ummmm.... I have a 1Ghz processor. Most people have 1Ghz processors. If most people couldn't run these GUI's they wouldn't exist because it would be worth the time to futz with them. The fact of the matter is that most people have way more processing power on their desks than they really need. Unless you do lots of video transcoding or game playing, a modern processor is total overkill.
In the end, applications are always designed to work with a target environment. If everybody has 1Ghz processors, it's really not worth the trouble to make it run on a lower end system. Furthermore, if you can enhance the overall ease of use of the system, etc, why not suck up a few more megahertz here and there? Obviously this has practical limits. Designing a web app that needed a 4Ghz processor to run would be assenine because nobody has them.
In the end though if it's complex, broken, and a resource hog then people just won't use it. But I think google maps prooved you can do some pretty cool stuff with it and so it's piqued people's interest in it. It's not going to be the solution for everything and sometimes it might not be worth the hassle, but it's one more tool in the toolbox.
Funny me, I thought that google for usenet was Google.
Technological advances render all but the most dramatic processing demands almost moot.
It used to be true that a given process would be run exponentially faster over time by the growing power of processors. So if you wrote bloated crappy code, within two years it worked fine because all the processors got better. The problem is that we're running into a wall as to how high they can clock the processors because of the heat and power requirements.
The solution has been to switch to a multi-core processor that runs at the same or even sometimes lower frequencies. This works great but it has one HUGE caveat: the code must be able to run in parallel. Code that is being written today, by and large, doesn't account for this. Sure there's threading and all that in much of today's code, but not quite such that you're seeing those same exponential increases in performance.
To write fast code today you have to be able to write code that can break down into numerous discrete chunks that can all work in parallel. With each new generation of processor, this is going to become more and more critical. Right now we have 2 cores, then we'll get 4, 8, etc. With each generation, you'll get faster performance, but with each generation, the code becomes more complex because it must be broken down into smaller pieces to take advantage of the extra cores.
Having said that, I suspect that the OO people are, at the moment, more focussed with creating functional parity between OO and Office. Sure, sometimes it will be noticebly slower, but if it can do everything Office can do, then they can refactor the innards down the line to improve performance.
The fact of the matter is that there are very few people who really need PDA's. If they can get a phone that has PDA features without paying a lot more, they'll take it. But as a standalone device, the PDA is the jack of all trades master of none.
If you take a straight up pocket PC, you can:
-Make phone calls
-Listen to music
-Schedule appointments
-Send e-mail
-Watch movies
But how many of those tasks is it really exceptional at? It's great for keeping track of a calendar and corporations are the biggest buyer of PDA's for that reason. They set up a centralized meeting system and then hand out PDA's to everybody.
It's not ideal for phone calls. I have a treo which is about as good of a compromise as you can get it and it's still a bit bulky for the average person. It'll fit in a pocket but it bulges quite a bit. You can listen to music but then you have storage space issues and the interfaces aren't nearly as good as what's on an ipod. You can send a small e-mail with ease but you need a laptop for real productivity. Movies... well, if you like watching movies on a 2 inch screen, more power to you and your optometrist.
The niche that a PDA is trying to fill is deceptively difficult. Basically give people a computer that they can carry in their pocket all the time. There's practical limitations to how small you can make the display and keyboard before it becomes unusuable. The treo is the best compromise I've seen and by most phone standards it's huge.
Name me one PDA that has 30GB of space. Or 10... or 5 even?
I've got a treo. It's a nice phone/organizer and it'd suck donkeys for playing mp3's. Why? Because it has no storage space.
I think, quite honestly, it comes down to a decision about the intention of the devices. PDA's are marketed to business people. So part of that marketing choice involves trimming out features that would make them well suited to being mp3 players. Why does a business traveller need 10GB of space? It'd be nice, but in the grand scheme, they don't need it and they wouldn't be able to convince their employers to shell out for it.
The other thing to keep in mind is the costs involved. An IPod is basically a disk drive with a very minimal interface to manage the music. Simple input and simple output using relatively low cost parts. If you tried to build a PDA with similar capacity it'd get a lot more expensive quickly and then who would buy it? Business execs would compare it to a blackberry and think it overpriced. Consumers would compare it to an ipod and think it overpriced.
The thing that's bad about this is that assuming these guys have enough money to front the lawyers they can sue their way into riches regardless of whether it's a valid claim. All they do is send nastygrams to a bunch of small companies they believe to be infringing on their patent seeking royalties. Invariably a number of those companies will pay up to avoid the potential of open ended legal battles.
...
So in the 90's it was:
1) Do something cool
2)
3) Profit
In the 00's it's
1) Do something somebody else did before
2) Sue everybody who already did it
3) Profit
One point I'm trying to make is that it is possible to write an arbitrarily complex system that is fault free.
bug free as defined above as something that you can beat over the head with a baseball bat if any fault is found
This is a critical point. Bruce Schneier speaks to this a lot in his books. That in essence, it's impossible to make bug free systems past a certain level of complexity. When I say "bug free" there I mean, zero bugs. Perfect.
Now what you're saying isn't that it's possible to make a bug free system, but rather through the judicious use of baseball bats, you can encourage a relatively predictable and manageable set of bugs. That you can use contracts with your suppliers to establish fault tolerances that you consider acceptable. Invariably the higher quality level you expect, the higher the price you will pay.
So the major building block are there and remain there. With code re-use the foundations should only get more secure with time. I see no reason why in X years time we couldn't have all the things we expect in a desktop OS to be rock solid.
If all the time was spent focussing on making them rock solid, that might be true. But look at Windows development for a good example of how this works in reality. Their TCP/IP stack is, arguably, rock solid. I've never heard of an exploit for it. On the other hand they build new features on top of that stack that then have problems. Invariably you may have discrete rock solid components, but when you start gluing things together and making systems more complex you introduce unexpected flaws.
The third point I'm trying to make is that when the stability becomes a design goal (as would happen if it were a legal requirement)
I'm all for using contracts to press people into certain levels of quality but creating a law that mandates it is, I believe, quite dangerous. The thing is, not all systems need to posess the same fault tolerance. Creating legislation that mandates it would have the effect of shutting down a lot of development because it would not be worth the expense of doing it. That in the end, buggy software, hacked together at the last second may be sufficient for certain needs. That the software may be "good enough" even if it's not high quality.
As a final thought which occured to me earlier, a reason a building is more robust than your average system of software is that there is lots of redundancy in every part of the design. Not to say that my house doesn't have certain supporting walls that musn't be removed, but no individual brick being removed will cause the house to fall down. No single rotten beam will destroy the building.
Maybe this is a design philosophy that the software world will move to as it matures over the comming decades.
I would argue that buildings are more fault tolerant because if they aren't people die, and with buildings you are dealing with a larger number of known quantities. People have been building structures for millenia. The modern skyscraper is built upon the successes and failures of countless buildings made before them. The physics of building construction is very well understood at this point. People want all kinds of wierd designs in buildings but ultimately it all meets certain well understood physical constraints that lock them down.
With software, it's a continuous evolution. Writing software for a mainframe is vastly different from writing software for a PC and then when you take that PC and hook it up to a network it gets even more complex. Now take that same software on a PC and make it work on a multi-processor system, then a multi-core multi-processor system. Then write software for a quantum computer. The rules of the game are rewritten on an almost daily basis.
In the vast majority of software, failure to function does not lead to injuries and fatalities. Those software systems that are at risk for that like in the Space Shuttle, or nuclear reactors, etc, are already subject to far more stringent validation. So I think the comparisons to building collapses, surgical procedures, etc, are a bit apple and orange.
When I worked at nortel we had a contract with our OS supplier that they were allowed no bugs in their os. As in if we found a flaw in their OS they had to fix it within a certain time period or face damages. Likewise were we sued for loss of revenue if it was determined they were responsible they would bear a proportionate measure of the blame.
These kinds of guarantees are perfectly effective when you have a controlled environment. If you are going to have a hardware device that runs on a particular OS that's been licensed for that specific purpose you can lock down constraints very nicely. It's when you get into complexity that you have a problem. You couldn't make similar demands of Microsoft for Windows for example.
It is possible to produce good software if you treat it as engineering as opposed to hacking.
Really what it boils down to is a balancing act between general software quality, security, usability and business concerns like cost and time to market. People will write "bad" software because it needs to be done quickly and/or at low cost. Also software is often made insecure out of an interest of making it more usable. Arguably the tight integration between IE, Outlook, and Windows itself makes the system easier to use. It also make is a breeding ground for all kinds of problems.
But ultimately that's all a choice and where it gets into being "engineering" is in making those choices conciously rather than accidentally.
I agree 100%. I think all companies should be liable for their products. However, I do not think it should be at the individual employee level.
Here's an interesting question. A piece of software that is written to work with Windows has a security flaw in it. The security flaw creates an exploitable condition in Windows such that you can gain total control over the system. Who's fault is it?
Obviously there was a security flaw in the software that you were using, but then it wouldn't be that critical if Windows handled it's security better. So isn't Windows partially to blame. And what if you set it up in an insecure manner? Isn't that your fault? Or is the developer's fault for not making it more idiot proof.
Now taking that down to the code inside of a program is just ridiculous. If you've got a team of 10 people (which is small in the grand scheme), each one of them could, individuall write totally secure code. However, come integration time, it turns out that they are opening up holes in eachother's code. So then who's fault is it? What about QA? Shouldn't they have some liability too?
Finally there's the PHB factor. You could have a group of the best, most security knowledgeable programmers in the world, and they could still screw up due to lack of time and resources. What if the boss tells them to do something that makes the system innately insecure? Who's fault is it then, his for telling them to do it or theirs for not pushing back on the requirement. Not to mention what happens after people have work a few months of 60 hour work weeks trying to get a project done.
In the end, liability is just a dumb concept in computers. In the end this is one of those places where the invisible hand of the market place is the best correction. Companies that write buggy software routinely will be smacked by the marketplace, by and large. The only exception to that rule is companies like Microsoft who have an effective monopoly. But then that's why we have anti-trust law isn't it?