That's management. Developers want to do what's right, but their management allocates about a half of the time it would take to do something right to any given task at hand. A polished turd is good enough for the management. Pressure developers to work on "compressed" schedule, then pressure test to certify the product before the deadline, throw all the bugs test finds over the fence to the next version. That's the product cycle of a software product for you. And then the product goes to sustained engineering team who doesn't know jack about the codebase and they fix it using their own assumptions. This is why fixes often result in more bugs - their assumptions may not be correct.
And no, developers don't have time to go back and revisit the TODOs everywhere in the code. TODOs remain TODOs forever.
I've worked on a major product in CRM market, and let me tell you, don't want to know what goes into sausage. If you knew, you wouldn't touch this code with a 10 foot pole much less bet your company on it.
I'm sure it's the same with ERP. It's just a huge polished turd, but because you don't have the source code you don't know it's a turd. You only see the polish.
It's like curing calluses by chopping the legs off. It's about time that someone with a brain came in and fixed this phishing problem once and forever. Disabling international domains is not a solution. Remember, majority of the population of this planet doesn't speak English. Why should they NOT use their native alphabet?
What they should have done is they should have forced Microsoft to put together windows installer which would allow to deselect (or select) WMP when installing the OS. Kind of like you can deselect Quick Time when installing Mac OS X.
As things stand, they've simply screwed system builders and consumers without helping the competition much. The first thing that any self-respecting user does is he installs updates. And I'll be surprised if WMP doesn't appear in the list of optional updates right after you go to windows update site.
Yet another solution would be to force links to competing players, along with a link to WMP be put onto the default desktop. So you'd have a choice what to install and what not to install. Of course most people would just install WMP, because it's the best windows media player on the market right now, but that would be their choice.
I will switch to cell phone exclusively when my wife will be able to talk for hours every day (as she currently does) for the price that we currently pay for landline + cellphone. BTW, we pay $10 for cellphone (special offer, 30min a month) and $37 for landline, all taxes included. So get us 3000 minutes for $50 and we're switching.
that he's an MS empoyee, because what he suggested is stupid. People's vocabularies are not that extensive, so passphrases are easier to crack than they seem.
Multifactor auth is the only cure. I wish there was something available to implement it besides smartcards. Something that doesn't require a smart card reader and works everywhere, preferably something wireless within a few feet. You could do three-factor auth, even. This "something", pin code and biometric (fingerprint). That would be pretty darn cool.
doesn't cross-polinate the organic products that I buy. Best of all, keep it in complete isolation, in hot houses, wherever you want. When people start dying of weird diseases 30 years down the road I don't want to be affected.
This reminds me that "lead is OK" stuff pushed by the oil industry, or "asbestos is fine", or "chlorine and benzene are not a danger", or "PCBs don't cause cancer", or "cigarettes aren't addictive". Quite frankly after all of this I'm surprised that some slashdotters place so much trust in Monsanto et al. Those PR really do their work.
Those who don't learn from the history are bound to repeat it.
Of course Napster will blow it, but I think it's about time that someone aggressively competed with Apple. This may bring some goodies to us, consumers, like for example iPods supporting 24 bit / 96KHz audio, and songs encoded straight from artist's final mixdown, or different versions of songs (most artists have many versions of their songs, most are unrelesed), or something else, i.e. the stuff you can't get on half.com at $5-8 per CD. How about independent artists? Why did Steve Vai choose to open his own store? Why isn't Apple all over this incredibly gifted fellow?
Is lack of competition. They almost always win, either in price, or in features, or in both. In all fairness, there's no office suite on the market that would be more polished than MS Office. There's nothing to replace Exchange. There's nothing to replace Windows even, because once you move an inch away from windows your hardware doesn't work anymore.
That creates problems for Microsoft itself. Everyone is too attached to "cash cows", they become "sacred", everyone is afraid of making big bets until it's too late. Microsoft is simply afraid to boldly innovate. They have people and money, they simply don't want to.
It has some potential, yes, but in order for it to become the real cash cow, they need to sell billions of songs every year. Consider this. They've sold something like 250M songs since opening iTunes. This is just $250M in revenue, out of which a half (at least) goes to the record company and the artists. $175M is not that much. I'd think that R&D and operations of iTunes are at least $30-40M a year. That's another $60M to cut out of this pie (2 years). What's left? $115M, a measly $57M per year of profits.
I think they're making a lot more on iPods themselves.
I would actually not mind Google ads on the bottom of Wikipedia pages if they're relevant. Let's say I'm reading about some scientific shit on there, and google suggests a few books on the bottom of the page. I migh just as well go ahead and buy them.
There are no less than a hundred apps and scripts to strip all comments from the source code. If there's anything preventing MS from releasing the source code, it's not the comments.
In the country where a sizable percentage of the population actually goes to church every weekend, a demon is not a very good symbol. Neither is a penguin (because it looks stupid), but that's another story.
1. CMYK and LAB color mode support in GIMP 2. Complete color management support throughout the app 3. High bit depth graphics support - 48 bit and floating point (to stay a bit ahead of Apple/Microsoft).
That's all I want. I couldn't care less about how things look and feel if they do what I want. Well, at least if we're not talking about Mac apps, where look and feel are more important.
He was fired over a comment that Google has shitty health benefits compared to MSFT (btw, massage is NOT covered anymore). Is this right?
I've sent my resume to them a while ago, and they emailed me back. It really seems that Google is a huge mess right now. First of all, they didn't spell my last name right once in four emails. Second of all, I was told that I'll be called by some person, but the phone number they've provided was someone else's phone number. When I politely e-mailed them about the fact they pretended they didn't know what was going on. I have provided _my_ phone number in this same email. No one called. I guess the fellow in HR who contacted me doesn't like to admit his mistakes.
At any rate, I have a pretty interesting job right now anyway, so there's just not enough incentive for me to go to Google. I just wanted to see what it's like, and my first impression is pretty negative. Reading comments from some other applicants, I see that I'm not the only one who wasn't overwhelmed.
The next two years, will be the last chance to get Linux on the consumer desktop.
Once Longhorn comes out, Microsoft will again be so far ahead, it won't be easy, or even possible, for enthusiasts to catch up. Right now they're essentially standing still. They've put all their efforts into LH, there's nothing going on with XP except for service packs/bugfixes. Now is the perfect time to release a really polished Linux desktop that would be simple to setup and use.
When Longhorn comes out, Microsoft, and folks who develop for Windows, will surge ahead REALLY fast.
Here's why:
1. The entire OS will be accessible through a set of managed APIs. This makes coding 10 times easier and faster, and raises productivity to unprecedented levels. This also makes buffer overflows and some other security issues a thing of the past.
2. New, resolution independent, vector based, GPU-enabled UI engine. Two years from Longhorn release people will be buying 200+ DPI displays because things look a lot better on them. What's KDE/Gnome users gonna do? That's right, try to discern tiny non-scalable icons on these displays.
3. Completely new UI, including some significant paradigm changes.
4. Seamless integration of client and server side (that's what XAML is all about, IMHO). Your webapps will actually run sandboxed.NET code on your machine. Kind of like applets, but the entire webapp will be built out of them. Just think about the possibilities there.
5. Reliable Web Services - Indigo, web services that don't suck. More importantly, web service protocol that's supported by the majority of computers in the world (when most people upgrade). And you can bet your ass they will upgrade, just like a couple of years after W95 was released almost everyone ran W95.
The most important thing is, all of this will be available to Windows users out of the box, without any tweaking/recompiling/downloading dependencies. That's where the real strength of this all is. Developers will be able to rely on this stuff when building next-gen apps and be reasonably sure that if a user runs Longhorn, the app will run there.
It's time to stop copying Windows XP, folks. It's time to start copying Longhorn. Gnome devs have already realised that.
Is it possible to use something else to drive AppleScript-enabled apps? Say, Javascript or Python? For some reason AppleScript just looks foreign to me, so I'd like to use the languages that I already know. Windows supports this, Mac, it seems, does not. I'd be glad to be wrong.
for these cards. And that other manufacturer may not be forthcoming with the hardware docs for an open source product. I think it's unfair to blame intel in this case.
This is developed (apparently) by folks from Intel. It's just that nobody can't be bothered to include it into the kernel.
ACPI spec is publicly available, but nobody can be bothered to fully implement it.
Finally, nice examples of UI are available even within OSS community, yet every distro out there ships with UI that was, it seems, put together by a teenager.
And yet there's STILL no distro that _out of the box_: 1. _Fully_ supports ACPI (read: works with laptops) 2. Supports current wireless NICs (Intel Pro Wireless 2200 fgzample) 3. Has a polished UI that one would be proud of, without tweaking the hell out of it
Talk about inefficiences of open source software development.
That hole serves a purpose. You'd have to spin the disk at a much faster speed to get the same sustained data rate if you made the hole smaller. And CDs/DVDs are already near their physical strength limits.
Slashdot Mirror
That's management. Developers want to do what's right, but their management allocates about a half of the time it would take to do something right to any given task at hand. A polished turd is good enough for the management. Pressure developers to work on "compressed" schedule, then pressure test to certify the product before the deadline, throw all the bugs test finds over the fence to the next version. That's the product cycle of a software product for you. And then the product goes to sustained engineering team who doesn't know jack about the codebase and they fix it using their own assumptions. This is why fixes often result in more bugs - their assumptions may not be correct.
And no, developers don't have time to go back and revisit the TODOs everywhere in the code. TODOs remain TODOs forever.
I've worked on a major product in CRM market, and let me tell you, don't want to know what goes into sausage. If you knew, you wouldn't touch this code with a 10 foot pole much less bet your company on it.
I'm sure it's the same with ERP. It's just a huge polished turd, but because you don't have the source code you don't know it's a turd. You only see the polish.
It's like curing calluses by chopping the legs off. It's about time that someone with a brain came in and fixed this phishing problem once and forever. Disabling international domains is not a solution. Remember, majority of the population of this planet doesn't speak English. Why should they NOT use their native alphabet?
Something that doesn't need to make money to survive can't die, by definition. Proven by Netcraft and BSD.
What they should have done is they should have forced Microsoft to put together windows installer which would allow to deselect (or select) WMP when installing the OS. Kind of like you can deselect Quick Time when installing Mac OS X.
As things stand, they've simply screwed system builders and consumers without helping the competition much. The first thing that any self-respecting user does is he installs updates. And I'll be surprised if WMP doesn't appear in the list of optional updates right after you go to windows update site.
Yet another solution would be to force links to competing players, along with a link to WMP be put onto the default desktop. So you'd have a choice what to install and what not to install. Of course most people would just install WMP, because it's the best windows media player on the market right now, but that would be their choice.
I will switch to cell phone exclusively when my wife will be able to talk for hours every day (as she currently does) for the price that we currently pay for landline + cellphone. BTW, we pay $10 for cellphone (special offer, 30min a month) and $37 for landline, all taxes included. So get us 3000 minutes for $50 and we're switching.
that he's an MS empoyee, because what he suggested is stupid. People's vocabularies are not that extensive, so passphrases are easier to crack than they seem.
Multifactor auth is the only cure. I wish there was something available to implement it besides smartcards. Something that doesn't require a smart card reader and works everywhere, preferably something wireless within a few feet. You could do three-factor auth, even. This "something", pin code and biometric (fingerprint). That would be pretty darn cool.
doesn't cross-polinate the organic products that I buy. Best of all, keep it in complete isolation, in hot houses, wherever you want. When people start dying of weird diseases 30 years down the road I don't want to be affected.
This reminds me that "lead is OK" stuff pushed by the oil industry, or "asbestos is fine", or "chlorine and benzene are not a danger", or "PCBs don't cause cancer", or "cigarettes aren't addictive". Quite frankly after all of this I'm surprised that some slashdotters place so much trust in Monsanto et al. Those PR really do their work.
Those who don't learn from the history are bound to repeat it.
Of course Napster will blow it, but I think it's about time that someone aggressively competed with Apple. This may bring some goodies to us, consumers, like for example iPods supporting 24 bit / 96KHz audio, and songs encoded straight from artist's final mixdown, or different versions of songs (most artists have many versions of their songs, most are unrelesed), or something else, i.e. the stuff you can't get on half.com at $5-8 per CD. How about independent artists? Why did Steve Vai choose to open his own store? Why isn't Apple all over this incredibly gifted fellow?
Is lack of competition. They almost always win, either in price, or in features, or in both. In all fairness, there's no office suite on the market that would be more polished than MS Office. There's nothing to replace Exchange. There's nothing to replace Windows even, because once you move an inch away from windows your hardware doesn't work anymore.
That creates problems for Microsoft itself. Everyone is too attached to "cash cows", they become "sacred", everyone is afraid of making big bets until it's too late. Microsoft is simply afraid to boldly innovate. They have people and money, they simply don't want to.
It has some potential, yes, but in order for it to become the real cash cow, they need to sell billions of songs every year. Consider this. They've sold something like 250M songs since opening iTunes. This is just $250M in revenue, out of which a half (at least) goes to the record company and the artists. $175M is not that much. I'd think that R&D and operations of iTunes are at least $30-40M a year. That's another $60M to cut out of this pie (2 years). What's left? $115M, a measly $57M per year of profits.
I think they're making a lot more on iPods themselves.
I would actually not mind Google ads on the bottom of Wikipedia pages if they're relevant. Let's say I'm reading about some scientific shit on there, and google suggests a few books on the bottom of the page. I migh just as well go ahead and buy them.
There are no less than a hundred apps and scripts to strip all comments from the source code. If there's anything preventing MS from releasing the source code, it's not the comments.
Crashes after a few minutes. I didn't even do anything special. Just a little unsharp mask and levels.
In the country where a sizable percentage of the population actually goes to church every weekend, a demon is not a very good symbol. Neither is a penguin (because it looks stupid), but that's another story.
1. CMYK and LAB color mode support in GIMP
2. Complete color management support throughout the app
3. High bit depth graphics support - 48 bit and floating point (to stay a bit ahead of Apple/Microsoft).
That's all I want. I couldn't care less about how things look and feel if they do what I want. Well, at least if we're not talking about Mac apps, where look and feel are more important.
Ask a butcher about the benefits of vegetarian food. I mean, come on, who the fuck really cares what he says.
He was fired over a comment that Google has shitty health benefits compared to MSFT (btw, massage is NOT covered anymore). Is this right?
I've sent my resume to them a while ago, and they emailed me back. It really seems that Google is a huge mess right now. First of all, they didn't spell my last name right once in four emails. Second of all, I was told that I'll be called by some person, but the phone number they've provided was someone else's phone number. When I politely e-mailed them about the fact they pretended they didn't know what was going on. I have provided _my_ phone number in this same email. No one called. I guess the fellow in HR who contacted me doesn't like to admit his mistakes.
At any rate, I have a pretty interesting job right now anyway, so there's just not enough incentive for me to go to Google. I just wanted to see what it's like, and my first impression is pretty negative. Reading comments from some other applicants, I see that I'm not the only one who wasn't overwhelmed.
The next two years, will be the last chance to get Linux on the consumer desktop.
.NET code on your machine. Kind of like applets, but the entire webapp will be built out of them. Just think about the possibilities there.
Once Longhorn comes out, Microsoft will again be so far ahead, it won't be easy, or even possible, for enthusiasts to catch up. Right now they're essentially standing still. They've put all their efforts into LH, there's nothing going on with XP except for service packs/bugfixes. Now is the perfect time to release a really polished Linux desktop that would be simple to setup and use.
When Longhorn comes out, Microsoft, and folks who develop for Windows, will surge ahead REALLY fast.
Here's why:
1. The entire OS will be accessible through a set of managed APIs. This makes coding 10 times easier and faster, and raises productivity to unprecedented levels. This also makes buffer overflows and some other security issues a thing of the past.
2. New, resolution independent, vector based, GPU-enabled UI engine. Two years from Longhorn release people will be buying 200+ DPI displays because things look a lot better on them. What's KDE/Gnome users gonna do? That's right, try to discern tiny non-scalable icons on these displays.
3. Completely new UI, including some significant paradigm changes.
4. Seamless integration of client and server side (that's what XAML is all about, IMHO). Your webapps will actually run sandboxed
5. Reliable Web Services - Indigo, web services that don't suck. More importantly, web service protocol that's supported by the majority of computers in the world (when most people upgrade). And you can bet your ass they will upgrade, just like a couple of years after W95 was released almost everyone ran W95.
The most important thing is, all of this will be available to Windows users out of the box, without any tweaking/recompiling/downloading dependencies. That's where the real strength of this all is. Developers will be able to rely on this stuff when building next-gen apps and be reasonably sure that if a user runs Longhorn, the app will run there.
It's time to stop copying Windows XP, folks. It's time to start copying Longhorn. Gnome devs have already realised that.
Man, I've been struggling with AS like you wouldn't believe.
Is it possible to use something else to drive AppleScript-enabled apps? Say, Javascript or Python? For some reason AppleScript just looks foreign to me, so I'd like to use the languages that I already know. Windows supports this, Mac, it seems, does not. I'd be glad to be wrong.
for these cards. And that other manufacturer may not be forthcoming with the hardware docs for an open source product. I think it's unfair to blame intel in this case.
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
This is developed (apparently) by folks from Intel. It's just that nobody can't be bothered to include it into the kernel.
ACPI spec is publicly available, but nobody can be bothered to fully implement it.
Finally, nice examples of UI are available even within OSS community, yet every distro out there ships with UI that was, it seems, put together by a teenager.
And yet there's STILL no distro that _out of the box_:
1. _Fully_ supports ACPI (read: works with laptops)
2. Supports current wireless NICs (Intel Pro Wireless 2200 fgzample)
3. Has a polished UI that one would be proud of, without tweaking the hell out of it
Talk about inefficiences of open source software development.
That hole serves a purpose. You'd have to spin the disk at a much faster speed to get the same sustained data rate if you made the hole smaller. And CDs/DVDs are already near their physical strength limits.