There's nothing wrong with the Good Old Stuff. I'm using Kermit right now to talk to the supervisory processor on a cisco Catalyst 5000 switch via a nearby PeeCee, since we seem to have thrown away all of the honest-to-$DEITY terminals around here. (The Cat 5k can't be attached to our network until I clean out some VLAN settings that could play Hob with our connectivity, so serial is the only option.)
...is customers. I suppose there will be some. Me, I figure if it's good enough to rent, it's good enough to own, so I'll continue to buy pieces of dead plastic.
The incentive to create free-as-in-beer software is not money, but there is an incentive. Remember Maslow's little Hierarchy of Needs, though. People who make stuff to give away feel inclined to do so only because they have some *other* way of meeting their more fundamental needs. If a man is starving, and making software is his only marketable skill, he'll sell that skill until he's well enough off not to worry about giving some of it away. Approval and self-actualization come last.
Sadly, the real problem here w.r.t. open-source is that so much OS software *has* no specifications or documentation against which conformance can be tested. It does what it does, and there's no way of knowing what it was intended to do, or what one might reasonably expect it to do.
(Of course one can counter that much commercial software is effectively the same, since the specifications are secret and the documentation is impenetrable and incomplete. Actually this might be a good place for OS to overtake closed products, since so many OS developers don't care how long it takes if the end product meets their standards of goodness.)
"Could you imagine how much this would slow down the development process?"
Yes, I can. It would probably slow the development process enough to give us time to do it right for a change. "Sorry, Big Boss, that two weeks of testing is firm -- it's required by law. Marketing will land us all in big trouble if they force us to meet their artificial deadline."
Back in school (you will soon see how long ago), some of us would test our input editing by scooping some cards out of the recycle bin at random, making sure some of then were upside-down or backward, and using that as input. We'd test for other stuff of course, but obvious nonsense is a good thing to check, at least until you learn how to design proper tests.
And a friend of mine has an interesting smoke-test for his code: he feeds it its own executable to see if it fails gracefully.
We were taught to care about such things. Then we got jobs and were told to take that stuff out, because it catches too many rejects. Huh.
See e.g. the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals. There *are* programming organizations promoting standards of reliable practice, it's just that their certifications haven't caught on yet.
With awareness of the problems of shoddy software on the increase, maybe now is the time that such cert.s will be more widely valued. That Professional Engineer ticket means something so worthwhile that the people who give out construction permits consider the advice of one of its holders a necessary and sufficient condition for issuing a permit. We may see the day when the general public's increasing dependence on software makes something like that happen in our own field.
"I'm looking at the software for the space shuttle. It's like civil engineering - due to the huge liabilities inherent in a failure scenario, an incredible amount of effort is put into ensuring that a failure scenario does not happen."
Uhhuh. And it still ships with a 4cm-thick wad of "waivers".
Good point, though. What's good enough for a garden tractor is not necessarily good enough for a race car, but that doesn't mean that garden tractors should be designed to race-car standards. "I can get it for what I'm willing to spend" is always an unwritten requirement.
Microsoft shares its Logo Requirements just fine. I wish somebody would read them sometime. It's probably the finest thing to come out of Microsoft. Unfortunately even some of their *own* developers seem to have difficulty sticking to a few simple principles.
You don't see Microsoft preventing the shipment of shlock software, but you also don't see the shlock shipping with their holy Logo on the box. They can sue you for that, and don't think they wouldn't.
(Alas, universal acceptance of the Logo Requirements wouldn't help me personally since it simply means something was designed for an OS other than the one that best suits my way of working. But at least I'd lose less hair setting things up for the people who do want it.)
Software's much more complex than hardware. How would you prove MS Office correct? How would you write down a definitive treatment of what it *means* to say that MS Office is "correct"?
You can prove the correctness of, say, the software in a home thermostat because it's almost entirely out of the user's control and therefore fairly simple. The trend in end-user software is toward ever more adjustability, and *nobody knows* what a given customer is going to do with it.
(There seems to be a problem with the middle ground here. Computer hardware is by definition so open that nobody knows what users will do with it, but it's *so* open that we can readily ignore the parts we obviously can't predict and concentrate on whether it executes the instructions defined for it. That thermostat is so simple that we can analyze it completely. But in between there's a region in which we don't have the tools or the brainpower to completely analyze the system, but nevertheless we somehow believe that it must be possible to do so, and we get upset that it hasn't been done.)
I think you are right. If you care about more than "it's cheap and it makes pix," get something you can control. Auto-this'n'that is okay sometimes, but get something you can take command of in those situations where you are right and the robot is wrong. Some of the world's greatest photos would've been ruined by a fancy camera.
That said, my main camera's 30 years old so I couldn't say what's good today. Grab a couple of magazines such as _Popular Photography_ and dig through the ad.s in the back to see what's sought by enthusiasts.
I read, "Hordes of the Underdark in Stores" and though, "yeah, that's exactly why I'm staying far, far away from the mall scene until after Christmas." Then I realized that "Hordes of the Underdark" is probably a game title.
I've toyed with the idea of setting up an ISP which would deliberately seek to be classified as a common carrier, precisely so that the rules are already spelled out and said ISP is *not allowed* to monitor its customers' traffic unless specifically ordered to by a judge. You have to keep plenty of logs on your service itself, but customers' business is (usually) theirs alone.
It's not particularly to promote anonymity, which isn't that important to me, but simply to operate in a less ambiguous realm. I think that some customers would appreciate the simplicity of "it's just like your telephone service."
Thank you. Amazing! I'm in Best Buy quite a lot and never saw them. Maybe the local franchises think Hoosers don't want DTV yet.
Also amazing, alas, is that even the cheapest one lists for twice what I paid for a whole (analog) TV set about a year ago. Guess I'll be waiting a little longer until the price comes in line with reality.
You still don't get it. FCC is aggressively in favor of DTV so it's going to happen. When a broadcaster is faced with a choice of (a) go digital, (b) go out of business, or (c) go to jail, what do you think he's going to do? Sellers of TV sets get the same choice.
Sure it is. The FCC has the power to say, "you can't sell that old gear anymore. You can't operate that old gear anymore." and make it stick. The broadcasters will either convert or go off the air. The set manufacturers will either bring out DTV or leave the U.S. market. There will be no more "type acceptance" for analog TV equipment and no licenses or renewals for analog TV transmissions.
What exactly *do* they teach you in that broadcasting school?
...that somebody actually makes TVs with digital tuners now. Maybe they'll think of selling them in the U.S. too! Right now the stores only have "digital-ready" boxes which are just hi-def monitors. There's usually some mumbling about a "set-top box" to make these incomplete TVs functional, but I don't see any of *those* in the stores either.
Hey, we'd have bought into the technology sooner if (a) it were actually in the stores, and (b) the incomplete bits of it that *are* in the stores weren't all sporting a price more appropriate to an automobile than to a TV set.
I bought a TV last year, and I'd have bought a reasonably-priced one with a digital tuner if there *were* any TV sets with digital tuners.
"You can wake up to an IM just as easily as you can an e-mail."
Sure. But then it's just email with added expectations of urgency. If you know you're going to have to wait for an answer, why not email it in the first place?
See? IM doesn't work the way I want it to when I'm there, and it doesn't work the way the other guy wants it to when I'm not there. IM is the wrong way to communicate with me, always.
But then, I'd also like to be able to call someone's answering machine *by choice*, without making the phone ring, so that I can drop off a message to be heard at leisure. Obviously I must be crazy.:-)
Well, yes, ask your lawyer. But also, it doesn't become the company's problem until the company finds out. If employee A gets nasty IMs from employee B and feels threatened, but says nothing to anyone, it's A's problem. If A complains to B, it's now B's problem. If A complains to A's boss, it's the company's problem. But if the company is snooping IMs, then it's the company's problem even if A never says a word, apparently. In that last scenario the company has liability without notice, so I would hope that counsel says "don't monitor until ordered to." But IANAL so I could be way off.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with the Good Old Stuff. I'm using Kermit right now to talk to the supervisory processor on a cisco Catalyst 5000 switch via a nearby PeeCee, since we seem to have thrown away all of the honest-to-$DEITY terminals around here. (The Cat 5k can't be attached to our network until I clean out some VLAN settings that could play Hob with our connectivity, so serial is the only option.)
...a "Method for Preventing Web Links Opening New Windows which Lack Essential Controls". How about you?
(Yeah, I know, time to roll up my sleeves and start hacking Firebird....)
Ah well, if the government suits screw up the current Internet, we can always abandon it and make a new one.
...is customers. I suppose there will be some. Me, I figure if it's good enough to rent, it's good enough to own, so I'll continue to buy pieces of dead plastic.
The incentive to create free-as-in-beer software is not money, but there is an incentive. Remember Maslow's little Hierarchy of Needs, though. People who make stuff to give away feel inclined to do so only because they have some *other* way of meeting their more fundamental needs. If a man is starving, and making software is his only marketable skill, he'll sell that skill until he's well enough off not to worry about giving some of it away. Approval and self-actualization come last.
Sadly, the real problem here w.r.t. open-source is that so much OS software *has* no specifications or documentation against which conformance can be tested. It does what it does, and there's no way of knowing what it was intended to do, or what one might reasonably expect it to do.
(Of course one can counter that much commercial software is effectively the same, since the specifications are secret and the documentation is impenetrable and incomplete. Actually this might be a good place for OS to overtake closed products, since so many OS developers don't care how long it takes if the end product meets their standards of goodness.)
"Could you imagine how much this would slow down the development process?"
Yes, I can. It would probably slow the development process enough to give us time to do it right for a change. "Sorry, Big Boss, that two weeks of testing is firm -- it's required by law. Marketing will land us all in big trouble if they force us to meet their artificial deadline."
Back in school (you will soon see how long ago), some of us would test our input editing by scooping some cards out of the recycle bin at random, making sure some of then were upside-down or backward, and using that as input. We'd test for other stuff of course, but obvious nonsense is a good thing to check, at least until you learn how to design proper tests.
And a friend of mine has an interesting smoke-test for his code: he feeds it its own executable to see if it fails gracefully.
We were taught to care about such things. Then we got jobs and were told to take that stuff out, because it catches too many rejects. Huh.
See e.g. the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals. There *are* programming organizations promoting standards of reliable practice, it's just that their certifications haven't caught on yet.
With awareness of the problems of shoddy software on the increase, maybe now is the time that such cert.s will be more widely valued. That Professional Engineer ticket means something so worthwhile that the people who give out construction permits consider the advice of one of its holders a necessary and sufficient condition for issuing a permit. We may see the day when the general public's increasing dependence on software makes something like that happen in our own field.
"I'm looking at the software for the space shuttle. It's like civil engineering - due to the huge liabilities inherent in a failure scenario, an incredible amount of effort is put into ensuring that a failure scenario does not happen."
Uhhuh. And it still ships with a 4cm-thick wad of "waivers".
Good point, though. What's good enough for a garden tractor is not necessarily good enough for a race car, but that doesn't mean that garden tractors should be designed to race-car standards. "I can get it for what I'm willing to spend" is always an unwritten requirement.
Obviously you haven't seen the "Cool, it runs with Linux" logo.
Microsoft shares its Logo Requirements just fine. I wish somebody would read them sometime. It's probably the finest thing to come out of Microsoft. Unfortunately even some of their *own* developers seem to have difficulty sticking to a few simple principles.
You don't see Microsoft preventing the shipment of shlock software, but you also don't see the shlock shipping with their holy Logo on the box. They can sue you for that, and don't think they wouldn't.
(Alas, universal acceptance of the Logo Requirements wouldn't help me personally since it simply means something was designed for an OS other than the one that best suits my way of working. But at least I'd lose less hair setting things up for the people who do want it.)
Software's much more complex than hardware. How would you prove MS Office correct? How would you write down a definitive treatment of what it *means* to say that MS Office is "correct"?
You can prove the correctness of, say, the software in a home thermostat because it's almost entirely out of the user's control and therefore fairly simple. The trend in end-user software is toward ever more adjustability, and *nobody knows* what a given customer is going to do with it.
(There seems to be a problem with the middle ground here. Computer hardware is by definition so open that nobody knows what users will do with it, but it's *so* open that we can readily ignore the parts we obviously can't predict and concentrate on whether it executes the instructions defined for it. That thermostat is so simple that we can analyze it completely. But in between there's a region in which we don't have the tools or the brainpower to completely analyze the system, but nevertheless we somehow believe that it must be possible to do so, and we get upset that it hasn't been done.)
I think you are right. If you care about more than "it's cheap and it makes pix," get something you can control. Auto-this'n'that is okay sometimes, but get something you can take command of in those situations where you are right and the robot is wrong. Some of the world's greatest photos would've been ruined by a fancy camera.
That said, my main camera's 30 years old so I couldn't say what's good today. Grab a couple of magazines such as _Popular Photography_ and dig through the ad.s in the back to see what's sought by enthusiasts.
I read, "Hordes of the Underdark in Stores" and though, "yeah, that's exactly why I'm staying far, far away from the mall scene until after Christmas." Then I realized that "Hordes of the Underdark" is probably a game title.
I've toyed with the idea of setting up an ISP which would deliberately seek to be classified as a common carrier, precisely so that the rules are already spelled out and said ISP is *not allowed* to monitor its customers' traffic unless specifically ordered to by a judge. You have to keep plenty of logs on your service itself, but customers' business is (usually) theirs alone.
It's not particularly to promote anonymity, which isn't that important to me, but simply to operate in a less ambiguous realm. I think that some customers would appreciate the simplicity of "it's just like your telephone service."
...I'd treat them the same as the ones I build: step one is to repartition and install the OS the way I want it. Spyware? what spyware?
Thank you. Amazing! I'm in Best Buy quite a lot and never saw them. Maybe the local franchises think Hoosers don't want DTV yet.
Also amazing, alas, is that even the cheapest one lists for twice what I paid for a whole (analog) TV set about a year ago. Guess I'll be waiting a little longer until the price comes in line with reality.
You still don't get it. FCC is aggressively in favor of DTV so it's going to happen. When a broadcaster is faced with a choice of (a) go digital, (b) go out of business, or (c) go to jail, what do you think he's going to do? Sellers of TV sets get the same choice.
In the U.S. you have to buy a set as big as a furniture van to get "digital-ready", and even then it has only an analog tuner. :-P
[not going to happen in 2006]
Sure it is. The FCC has the power to say, "you can't sell that old gear anymore. You can't operate that old gear anymore." and make it stick. The broadcasters will either convert or go off the air. The set manufacturers will either bring out DTV or leave the U.S. market. There will be no more "type acceptance" for analog TV equipment and no licenses or renewals for analog TV transmissions.
What exactly *do* they teach you in that broadcasting school?
...that somebody actually makes TVs with digital tuners now. Maybe they'll think of selling them in the U.S. too! Right now the stores only have "digital-ready" boxes which are just hi-def monitors. There's usually some mumbling about a "set-top box" to make these incomplete TVs functional, but I don't see any of *those* in the stores either.
Hey, we'd have bought into the technology sooner if (a) it were actually in the stores, and (b) the incomplete bits of it that *are* in the stores weren't all sporting a price more appropriate to an automobile than to a TV set.
I bought a TV last year, and I'd have bought a reasonably-priced one with a digital tuner if there *were* any TV sets with digital tuners.
"You can wake up to an IM just as easily as you can an e-mail."
:-)
Sure. But then it's just email with added expectations of urgency. If you know you're going to have to wait for an answer, why not email it in the first place?
See? IM doesn't work the way I want it to when I'm there, and it doesn't work the way the other guy wants it to when I'm not there. IM is the wrong way to communicate with me, always.
But then, I'd also like to be able to call someone's answering machine *by choice*, without making the phone ring, so that I can drop off a message to be heard at leisure. Obviously I must be crazy.
Well, yes, ask your lawyer. But also, it doesn't become the company's problem until the company finds out. If employee A gets nasty IMs from employee B and feels threatened, but says nothing to anyone, it's A's problem. If A complains to B, it's now B's problem. If A complains to A's boss, it's the company's problem. But if the company is snooping IMs, then it's the company's problem even if A never says a word, apparently. In that last scenario the company has liability without notice, so I would hope that counsel says "don't monitor until ordered to." But IANAL so I could be way off.