At a conservative estimate, I've pissed away half of my lifetime development effort dealing with instances where the documentation of an OS, APIs or SDKs doesn't match the actual behaviour. Every time I get sandbagged with that, I wish I could just read the damn source and see what's really going on.
Linus is quite right that a spec can be useful as a descriptive abstraction, but not as an absolute or proscriptive definition. When you're sitting there at the keyboard and hit a point where the behaviour differs from the spec, it doesn't matter why the spec is wrong, just that it is. Red pen it and move on.
Let me try a simpler analogy; you are a goat fucking sandal wearing yoghurt knitting hippy.
When mommy stops letting you drive her SUV, you're going to discover that a mechanic won't scratch his arse in the direction of your car for less than a hundred bucks. That's because you're paying for 100% of his time.
Now, how is that in any way related to the issue of making movies? Your three-fiddy or whatever it is that you can spare from your paper route money, who exactly are you going to give that to? That will, if you're lucky, pay for a runner to fetch a cup of weak coffee for the woman doing the makeup of an extra who'll be cut out of the final edit.
OK, so let's pool the money. You and a million other rubes send your three-fiddys to a guy who for the sake of argument we'll pretend isn't a classic Hollywood producer but the sort of Whedon/Smithesque writer/producer who's come up with the leather clad lesbo action that your sort so love to watch, box of Kleenex to hand. Let's even assume that you and your million hippy buddies used some sort of voodoo hippy magic to pick out the right unknown nerd with an screenplay out of the braying, sweating herd. Let's pretend all that, and let's pretend that you don't get bilked or he doesn't blow it on building a giant mechanical goat to invade Cuba with.
Now, the movie is made. It's in the can, all pre-paid for by you and your League of Basement Virgins. Now what?
In your model, Whedonsmith just gives the copies away? Uh... what? What? To whom? Just to you nerds? Yes? Then how the is that any horse-buggeringly different from just selling you a fucking copy? No? Then what Commie paradise are you living in where your million buddies don't grudge paying in money and having other people people reap the rewards? And in which Whedonsmith says "Ah, fuck it, I'm rich enough already?"
Do I get three guesses to pick your profession? 1) schoolkid, 2) Californian web designer, 3) tenured professor of economics at an Ivy League college.
Some guy on the intarwebs totally assured me that the utter flop of Cutthroat Island in 1995 was entirely due to potential customers waiting for someone to invent Peer 2 Peer so that they could watch it for nothing.
Which adds the ability to natively edit PDF document in what way exactly? Note: any answer involving a third party converter will be considered both NULL and void.
to the future, to the next version. Never their mind on where they were. Hmm? What they were releasing. Hmph. Bells. Heh. Whistles. Heh. A Guru craves not these things. You are feature driven.
Yarr, that be a likely tale. Do you know how much pressure a sperm whale endures during a dive? Try reproducing that around the circumference of a whale using the few dozens of pounds of muscle in the squid's long tentacles. And a squid's 'head' is the majority of its body. Cephalo-pod. What were the tentacles anchored to if the 'head' had been eaten?
All of the tales of squid attacking whales are based on a very few unsubstantiated and highly colourful accounts that fail in every detail. A giant squid's mass is somewhere in the region of 1% of that of a mid-sized whale. That's like a (small) domestic ferret preying on adult humans.
Both uploader and downloader are making unlawful copies; it's just much more efficient to sue a few prolific uploaders than hundreds of thousands of people pulling down the occasional DVD rip.
Why would an engineer waste his time moving to a management role? And yet it happens. People don't have to limit themselves to one skillset or a single career path.
If you think that press releases aren't important, then I can only assume that you don't have a mortgage.
Read Richard Feynman tearing them a new one over exactly that sort of language. It's disheartening that they still apparently have marketdroids doing their press releases.
But then announces that they're going to 'fix' Vista by spending $100 million on marketing it. He must be betting that his engineers don't, you know, read the news.
Slashdot Mirror
At a conservative estimate, I've pissed away half of my lifetime development effort dealing with instances where the documentation of an OS, APIs or SDKs doesn't match the actual behaviour. Every time I get sandbagged with that, I wish I could just read the damn source and see what's really going on.
Linus is quite right that a spec can be useful as a descriptive abstraction, but not as an absolute or proscriptive definition. When you're sitting there at the keyboard and hit a point where the behaviour differs from the spec, it doesn't matter why the spec is wrong, just that it is. Red pen it and move on.
That's pretty much what it always comes back to with Linus.
Let me try a simpler analogy; you are a goat fucking sandal wearing yoghurt knitting hippy.
When mommy stops letting you drive her SUV, you're going to discover that a mechanic won't scratch his arse in the direction of your car for less than a hundred bucks. That's because you're paying for 100% of his time.
Now, how is that in any way related to the issue of making movies? Your three-fiddy or whatever it is that you can spare from your paper route money, who exactly are you going to give that to? That will, if you're lucky, pay for a runner to fetch a cup of weak coffee for the woman doing the makeup of an extra who'll be cut out of the final edit.
OK, so let's pool the money. You and a million other rubes send your three-fiddys to a guy who for the sake of argument we'll pretend isn't a classic Hollywood producer but the sort of Whedon/Smithesque writer/producer who's come up with the leather clad lesbo action that your sort so love to watch, box of Kleenex to hand. Let's even assume that you and your million hippy buddies used some sort of voodoo hippy magic to pick out the right unknown nerd with an screenplay out of the braying, sweating herd. Let's pretend all that, and let's pretend that you don't get bilked or he doesn't blow it on building a giant mechanical goat to invade Cuba with.
Now, the movie is made. It's in the can, all pre-paid for by you and your League of Basement Virgins. Now what?
In your model, Whedonsmith just gives the copies away? Uh... what? What? To whom? Just to you nerds? Yes? Then how the is that any horse-buggeringly different from just selling you a fucking copy? No? Then what Commie paradise are you living in where your million buddies don't grudge paying in money and having other people people reap the rewards? And in which Whedonsmith says "Ah, fuck it, I'm rich enough already?"
Do I get three guesses to pick your profession? 1) schoolkid, 2) Californian web designer, 3) tenured professor of economics at an Ivy League college.
Some guy on the intarwebs totally assured me that the utter flop of Cutthroat Island in 1995 was entirely due to potential customers waiting for someone to invent Peer 2 Peer so that they could watch it for nothing.
Which adds the ability to natively edit PDF document in what way exactly? Note: any answer involving a third party converter will be considered both NULL and void.
Why is nobody making a profit selling them right now for $150?
to the future, to the next version. Never their mind on where they were. Hmm? What they were releasing. Hmph. Bells. Heh. Whistles. Heh. A Guru craves not these things. You are feature driven.
The camera was digital; no film was involved.
Yarr, that be a likely tale. Do you know how much pressure a sperm whale endures during a dive? Try reproducing that around the circumference of a whale using the few dozens of pounds of muscle in the squid's long tentacles. And a squid's 'head' is the majority of its body. Cephalo-pod. What were the tentacles anchored to if the 'head' had been eaten?
All of the tales of squid attacking whales are based on a very few unsubstantiated and highly colourful accounts that fail in every detail. A giant squid's mass is somewhere in the region of 1% of that of a mid-sized whale. That's like a (small) domestic ferret preying on adult humans.
Whichever law they need to buy to make it so.
Both uploader and downloader are making unlawful copies; it's just much more efficient to sue a few prolific uploaders than hundreds of thousands of people pulling down the occasional DVD rip.
I know that's 60 year old technology, but we could have build robot soldiers back in 1945 as well, if we didn't really give a damn who they shot.
But how about we call the Southern part of the peninsula "Korea", and the other part "Batshitzania"?
Wars haven't been honourable since 1485. Look it up.
Seriously, 'editors', I'll copy-edit this stuff for you for nothing, or you can continue to be scoffed at by third graders. Your choice.
Why would an engineer waste his time moving to a management role? And yet it happens. People don't have to limit themselves to one skillset or a single career path.
If you think that press releases aren't important, then I can only assume that you don't have a mortgage.
An engineer who can write? A writer who knows basic engineering or statistics? The release can't be vetted by an engineer?
Who owns Slashdot? Who owns news.com? Who pays the wages of the Slashdot... 'editors'?
Read Richard Feynman tearing them a new one over exactly that sort of language. It's disheartening that they still apparently have marketdroids doing their press releases.
I'm sure there are unbreakable technical safeguards built in to the system. Reeeeal secret ones, that no Bad Person will ever discov-
Pfffn, it's no use, I can't type that with a straight face. We need a new word for RFID pickpockets. Wifpockets?
Nine year old children can get that right. What does that say about Slashdot 'editors'?
But then announces that they're going to 'fix' Vista by spending $100 million on marketing it. He must be betting that his engineers don't, you know, read the news.
I don't think "MARKETERS! MARKETERS! MARKETERS!" is quite such a rousing chant.
That's verbal tech. You're downstat. Report for auditing.
How you 'editors' made it out of third grade, I'll never fathom.