Waterfall works. Not in the modern corporate environemnt of course, but it does work. You see, before you start coding you had better know what you're going to write. I don't care how carefully thought out the Requirement Change Process is, if I've already coded the requirement and then you change it, it's going to take twice as long to fix/implement it then if you had planned it correctly to begin with.
For the corporate environment, which has to live within the realities of budgets, resources, and lame upper management, the spiral model works well. This is essentially a whole bunch of waterfalls strung together. You work on a few requirements at a time, adding more at each iteration.
But regardless of which model is used, you have to at least have a solid architectural design. Because if the architecture changes you're back to square one.
If you sell me a product, I want it to work. No questions asked. I don't care if it's "Free", Open, closed or proprietary. If you can't even make the fundamentally basic warranty of "your money back", then don't even bother going into business.
The article also says, however, that consumers' favortism of flashy products over reliable ones is partly to blame for the current state of software.
Apropos the "newbie" Linux distros, with their flashy installer, flashy autoconfig, flashy tools and flashy packaging. Compare them to droll, dry and boring Debian and Slackware. Which group is more reliable?
By "Lisp Machine", I mean real hardware designed for Lisp, and not a virtual machine. Some were produced, sure, but they were not workable in that they were expensive. In the real world price is an integral component of usability.
but hey, I guess DEC wasn't pragmatic, nor practical, nor affordable, and that's why you can't get a new Alpha anymore
You're right, DEC wasn't any of those things. It also wasn't very perceptive, and allowed Sparc/x86/PPC to intrude into their chosen niche without doing a thing about it. People used to buy Alphas because they were bloody fast. But they lost that advantage by not keeping up with their otherwise inferior competitors.
Whoa, you've never even seen Lisp, have you?
Yes I have. Took a whole quarter in at school. I hated it then, but I am starting to appreciate it more and more as I get older.
Now that there are compilers that can compile Lisp down to native machine code, the speed disadvantage is gone. But at one time it was a serious drawback, particularly when you had to pay for the CPU by the second. And C is still easier to learn (but more difficult to master) because of one fundamental reason: beginning programmers can grok procedural programming faster than functional programming. The reasons for this are unclear, but having taught CS, I have seen definitely seen it.
What did the authors offer as a better UI? No, not Windows. Not Mac. Some arcane LISP machine was usually the machine of choice.
What the authors fail to realize is that UNIX is the triumpth of realism over idealism. And like all ideologues, they're pissed senseless.
Idealism: ITS, Multics, Lisp, AI. The hallmark of these is perfection and elitism. Perfection doesn't exist, but no matter, given enough decades we will eventually produce the workable Lisp Machine. And who cares about the industry? Only the universities and their government patrons are worthy to use computers anyway.
Realism: UNIX, C, DBMS. The hallmark of these is pragmatism, practicality and affordability. UNIX isn't as good as ITS, but it's cheap and runs on the cheap hardware you've got. C isn't a tenth the language that Lisp is, but it has ten times the speed, can be learned with a tenth the effort, and runs on that same cheap hardware.
Plan 9 may be innovative. But it wasn't on the orginal posters list. ReiserFS was. What's innovative about ReiserFS? It's a journaling file system. A good journaling filesystem, to be sure, but still just a journaling filesystem.
When I look for innovative, I look for something no one has done before.
First, UPenn's grant (not OpenBSD's) was not cut because of Theo's anti-war comments. That was pure speculation on his part, subsequently denied by a DARPA spokesperson.
Second, there's nothing particularly strange about a Republican investing in a Chinese company. China has "opened" up. It's no longer an isolationist pure-totalitarian state. It's moving towards a real market economy in a rapid fashion. It actually makes some sort of sense for Rumsfeld to do this if you substitute "war hawk" with "capitalist".
Third, Free Software is not limited to "left-wing war protesters". Free Software is for everyone, not just those who agree with you. Software knows no artificial two-party political division to the universe.
That you think this situation "bizarre" is what is truly bizarre. If the world does not fit into your narrow preconceptions and stereotypes, perhaps it's time to dump them.
p.s. The anti-porn politician who makes his money off of strip clubs is a hypocrite. The pro-business politician who invests in a business in increasingly pro-business China is not.
"Soon after becoming U.S. defense secretary in January, Donald Rumsfeld sold a stake in a partnership that helped finance an operating system designed to protect Chinese computers from spying and sabotage."
I don't understand what's so strange about this. He doesn't have an investment now, so there's no conflict of interest. He used to have investments in China. I have investments in France. BFD
If he had one now, while Defense Secretary, then it would be newsworthy. And that's what your blurb tended to hint at. But in fact he doesn't, so it's a nothingburger. What am I missing?
Why can't they just have a flexible plan where I say, yes, I admit I have 3 boxen behind NAT and agree to pay an extra $5 to $10 a month?
Even better. Why can't they just have a flexible plan where I say, yes, I admit that I am not running Windows, and agree to pay $5 to $10 less a month because I don't need their support anyway?
No! It cannot be! Only the US government and US companies can do evil and/or stupid acts. Just ask Slashdot. All nations other than the US are freedom utopias. You must be lying. Fess up or lose your Slashdot membership card.
For those that didn't read the article, and have formed their opinions based solely on the ideologically tinted glasses that Theo is handing out, here are some quotes:
However, University spokeswoman Phyllis Holtzman said that "de Raadt is seriously mischaracterizing the circumstances of this situation."
Those who have followed some of Theo's more memorable threads in various development lists know that while he is an excellent coder and project manager, he does have the reputation of constructing molehills just so he can make mountains out of them.
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker also debunked de Raadt's claims and said that the openBSD project was canceled as part of the agency's "normal review process."
Looking at the posts here and elsewhere, you would think that this is the first time that the US Government has ever cancelled a contract. But that is not so. It happens several times a year to hundreds of contractors. Some of these contractors are huge Miltiary Industrial Complex veterans.
Walker explained that the funding cancelation was actually "due to world events and the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation states," and was not a response to the thoughts of an individual.
I have no idea what "increasingly capable nation states" means, but it's clear that it has nothing to do with Theo's public comments.
While the research was nearly finished, the termination still affects the project significantly, as it has forced the cancelation of a "hackathon" scheduled for next month... We advised Penn about suspending the 'security fest' [hackathon] portion of the project.
If you were a DARPA reviewer would you not be concerned about a "hackathon"? Don't think like a hacker, think like a stuffed shirt. This doesn't sound like a clash of political viewpoints, it sounds like a clash of cultures.
Reading the whole article, it seems clear to me that the project was not cancelled because Theo published some anti-war statements. We still don't know the exact reasons, but we need not resort to baseless speculation and paraoid delusions to make a reasonable guess.
I'll tell you what is crazy. It's crazy to believe baseless speculation. And that's all Theo's suppositions are.
No one outside of DARPA know why the contract was cancelled, because no one outside of DARPA was told. I don't know why. You don't know why. And Theo doesn't know why.
You're right of course. Vertical keyboards are nothing new, but this is the first one I've seen where you cannot adjust the angle. Taking a look around work, where there are several "split" keyboards, I find that most are between 30 and 45 degrees.
There's nothing to stop it... except human nature. If a company pays me a million days they can't tell me how to spend it. It's mine and I might choose not to give any of it to any candidate. Maybe they will get pissed and take me off the "political giving committee" next year, but in the mean time I still have that five million dollars, and it goes a long ways.
But I sense an underlying assumption that you think a corporation would fund one candidate or another. Companies aren't contributing to campaigns in order to see "their" candidate win. They contribute to campaigns to that they can have the subsequent ear of the winner. Thus, they contribute to all viable candidates across the board. Actual practice shows this.
Boys are not a monolithic group; neither are girls. By denying the "individual differences trump group means" point that the parent post was trying to make, all you're doing is trying to shift stereotypes around until they're something you find more palatable.
Despite the fact that individuals always trump the group, the culture never will.
I wasn't trying to assert that all boys and all girls are raised identically. What I was trying to suggest is that there is enough bias in the culture (and not just "our" culture) related to the upbringing of children that these gender "differences" will continue to manifest themselves statistically. Maybe only 20% of parents steer their children into these predetermined roles, but that 20% is enough to account for this 20% difference that the report found.
Which is sad, because in theory, they have no voting rights as a corporation.
Which is why I still advocate my unique and unfortunately unherelded campaign finance reform plan. It can easily be modified to encompass lobbyists as well.
1) There are no limits to campaign contributions, but...
2) You must be a registered voter. No corporations, unions or foreign nationalities allowed.
3) An exception is provided for independent political action committees, but...
4) They may only receive funds from registered voters.
Slashdot Mirror
The firm who sold the product as mechantable is liable. The hobbyist is not, because the hobbyist never made any such claims.
Waterfall works. Not in the modern corporate environemnt of course, but it does work. You see, before you start coding you had better know what you're going to write. I don't care how carefully thought out the Requirement Change Process is, if I've already coded the requirement and then you change it, it's going to take twice as long to fix/implement it then if you had planned it correctly to begin with.
For the corporate environment, which has to live within the realities of budgets, resources, and lame upper management, the spiral model works well. This is essentially a whole bunch of waterfalls strung together. You work on a few requirements at a time, adding more at each iteration.
But regardless of which model is used, you have to at least have a solid architectural design. Because if the architecture changes you're back to square one.
Hmmm, you work for the same company I do, don't you?
If you sell me a product, I want it to work. No questions asked. I don't care if it's "Free", Open, closed or proprietary. If you can't even make the fundamentally basic warranty of "your money back", then don't even bother going into business.
The article also says, however, that consumers' favortism of flashy products over reliable ones is partly to blame for the current state of software.
Apropos the "newbie" Linux distros, with their flashy installer, flashy autoconfig, flashy tools and flashy packaging. Compare them to droll, dry and boring Debian and Slackware. Which group is more reliable?
By "Lisp Machine", I mean real hardware designed for Lisp, and not a virtual machine. Some were produced, sure, but they were not workable in that they were expensive. In the real world price is an integral component of usability.
but hey, I guess DEC wasn't pragmatic, nor practical, nor affordable, and that's why you can't get a new Alpha anymore
You're right, DEC wasn't any of those things. It also wasn't very perceptive, and allowed Sparc/x86/PPC to intrude into their chosen niche without doing a thing about it. People used to buy Alphas because they were bloody fast. But they lost that advantage by not keeping up with their otherwise inferior competitors.
Whoa, you've never even seen Lisp, have you?
Yes I have. Took a whole quarter in at school. I hated it then, but I am starting to appreciate it more and more as I get older.
Now that there are compilers that can compile Lisp down to native machine code, the speed disadvantage is gone. But at one time it was a serious drawback, particularly when you had to pay for the CPU by the second. And C is still easier to learn (but more difficult to master) because of one fundamental reason: beginning programmers can grok procedural programming faster than functional programming. The reasons for this are unclear, but having taught CS, I have seen definitely seen it.
What did the authors offer as a better UI? No, not Windows. Not Mac. Some arcane LISP machine was usually the machine of choice.
What the authors fail to realize is that UNIX is the triumpth of realism over idealism. And like all ideologues, they're pissed senseless.
Idealism: ITS, Multics, Lisp, AI. The hallmark of these is perfection and elitism. Perfection doesn't exist, but no matter, given enough decades we will eventually produce the workable Lisp Machine. And who cares about the industry? Only the universities and their government patrons are worthy to use computers anyway.
Realism: UNIX, C, DBMS. The hallmark of these is pragmatism, practicality and affordability. UNIX isn't as good as ITS, but it's cheap and runs on the cheap hardware you've got. C isn't a tenth the language that Lisp is, but it has ten times the speed, can be learned with a tenth the effort, and runs on that same cheap hardware.
Plan 9 may be innovative. But it wasn't on the orginal posters list. ReiserFS was. What's innovative about ReiserFS? It's a journaling file system. A good journaling filesystem, to be sure, but still just a journaling filesystem.
When I look for innovative, I look for something no one has done before.
The question was about innovations on the edge, not about popular software.
What's innovative and edgy about linux? What makes GnuPG more innovative and edgy than PGP?
No, not to compile it, but to find all the dependencies hidden about the web...
If only Saddam had played nice with US investors - we could have overlooked his little human-rights and WMD transgressions like we do for China.
But of course!
First, UPenn's grant (not OpenBSD's) was not cut because of Theo's anti-war comments. That was pure speculation on his part, subsequently denied by a DARPA spokesperson.
Second, there's nothing particularly strange about a Republican investing in a Chinese company. China has "opened" up. It's no longer an isolationist pure-totalitarian state. It's moving towards a real market economy in a rapid fashion. It actually makes some sort of sense for Rumsfeld to do this if you substitute "war hawk" with "capitalist".
Third, Free Software is not limited to "left-wing war protesters". Free Software is for everyone, not just those who agree with you. Software knows no artificial two-party political division to the universe.
That you think this situation "bizarre" is what is truly bizarre. If the world does not fit into your narrow preconceptions and stereotypes, perhaps it's time to dump them.
p.s. The anti-porn politician who makes his money off of strip clubs is a hypocrite. The pro-business politician who invests in a business in increasingly pro-business China is not.
"Soon after becoming U.S. defense secretary in January, Donald Rumsfeld sold a stake in a partnership that helped finance an operating system designed to protect Chinese computers from spying and sabotage."
I don't understand what's so strange about this. He doesn't have an investment now, so there's no conflict of interest. He used to have investments in China. I have investments in France. BFD
If he had one now, while Defense Secretary, then it would be newsworthy. And that's what your blurb tended to hint at. But in fact he doesn't, so it's a nothingburger. What am I missing?
"I'm sorry, you need to disconnect your DSL router and start WinPoet before we can help you."
"But all I want to know is if your lines are down!"
"I'm sorry, you need to disconnect your DSL router and start WinPoet before we can help you."
"Are you a recording?"
"I'm sorry, you need to disconnect your DSL router and start WinPoet before we can help you."
I tried to look it up, but you didn't post a link...
Why can't they just have a flexible plan where I say, yes, I admit I have 3 boxen behind NAT and agree to pay an extra $5 to $10 a month?
Even better. Why can't they just have a flexible plan where I say, yes, I admit that I am not running Windows, and agree to pay $5 to $10 less a month because I don't need their support anyway?
No! It cannot be! Only the US government and US companies can do evil and/or stupid acts. Just ask Slashdot. All nations other than the US are freedom utopias. You must be lying. Fess up or lose your Slashdot membership card.
For those that didn't read the article, and have formed their opinions based solely on the ideologically tinted glasses that Theo is handing out, here are some quotes:
However, University spokeswoman Phyllis Holtzman said that "de Raadt is seriously mischaracterizing the circumstances of this situation."
Those who have followed some of Theo's more memorable threads in various development lists know that while he is an excellent coder and project manager, he does have the reputation of constructing molehills just so he can make mountains out of them.
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker also debunked de Raadt's claims and said that the openBSD project was canceled as part of the agency's "normal review process."
Looking at the posts here and elsewhere, you would think that this is the first time that the US Government has ever cancelled a contract. But that is not so. It happens several times a year to hundreds of contractors. Some of these contractors are huge Miltiary Industrial Complex veterans.
Walker explained that the funding cancelation was actually "due to world events and the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation states," and was not a response to the thoughts of an individual.
I have no idea what "increasingly capable nation states" means, but it's clear that it has nothing to do with Theo's public comments.
While the research was nearly finished, the termination still affects the project significantly, as it has forced the cancelation of a "hackathon" scheduled for next month... We advised Penn about suspending the 'security fest' [hackathon] portion of the project.
If you were a DARPA reviewer would you not be concerned about a "hackathon"? Don't think like a hacker, think like a stuffed shirt. This doesn't sound like a clash of political viewpoints, it sounds like a clash of cultures.
Reading the whole article, it seems clear to me that the project was not cancelled because Theo published some anti-war statements. We still don't know the exact reasons, but we need not resort to baseless speculation and paraoid delusions to make a reasonable guess.
I didn't get my bank loan. That looks like censure to me.
I'll tell you what is crazy. It's crazy to believe baseless speculation. And that's all Theo's suppositions are.
No one outside of DARPA know why the contract was cancelled, because no one outside of DARPA was told. I don't know why. You don't know why. And Theo doesn't know why.
You're right of course. Vertical keyboards are nothing new, but this is the first one I've seen where you cannot adjust the angle. Taking a look around work, where there are several "split" keyboards, I find that most are between 30 and 45 degrees.
There's nothing to stop it... except human nature. If a company pays me a million days they can't tell me how to spend it. It's mine and I might choose not to give any of it to any candidate. Maybe they will get pissed and take me off the "political giving committee" next year, but in the mean time I still have that five million dollars, and it goes a long ways.
But I sense an underlying assumption that you think a corporation would fund one candidate or another. Companies aren't contributing to campaigns in order to see "their" candidate win. They contribute to campaigns to that they can have the subsequent ear of the winner. Thus, they contribute to all viable candidates across the board. Actual practice shows this.
Got evidence for that?
Well your evidence from the Guardian seems just as anectdotal as mine. In your own words, it only "suggests" a difference at birth.
Boys are not a monolithic group; neither are girls. By denying the "individual differences trump group means" point that the parent post was trying to make, all you're doing is trying to shift stereotypes around until they're something you find more palatable.
Despite the fact that individuals always trump the group, the culture never will.
I wasn't trying to assert that all boys and all girls are raised identically. What I was trying to suggest is that there is enough bias in the culture (and not just "our" culture) related to the upbringing of children that these gender "differences" will continue to manifest themselves statistically. Maybe only 20% of parents steer their children into these predetermined roles, but that 20% is enough to account for this 20% difference that the report found.
Which is sad, because in theory, they have no voting rights as a corporation.
Which is why I still advocate my unique and unfortunately unherelded campaign finance reform plan. It can easily be modified to encompass lobbyists as well.
1) There are no limits to campaign contributions, but...
2) You must be a registered voter. No corporations, unions or foreign nationalities allowed.
3) An exception is provided for independent political action committees, but...
4) They may only receive funds from registered voters.