Nowhere in the list does QUALITY come into play aside from having a bug tracking system. Needs to add "No publicly transparent process in place for bug fixing [ +100 points of FAIL ]" and also "New features always take precedence over bug fixing [ +50 points of FAIL ]". I guess for both open and closed source software projects quality is still considered optional and the first thing to get crossed off the list. Sadly, users put up with that.
I also wonder how the size limit is measured. Does that exclude code comments? I like code that has a lot of comments explaining in plain simple language what the next 3 to 5 lines of code do. It is much easier to decipher than trying to compile a programming language intended for machines in my head.
Lastly, that list arrogantly assumes that there is no open source software created on Windows and for Windows. Even using closed source runtimes that are freely available and freely distributable are not a problem. In the end one big metric for success is always ROI. That applies to open or closed source applications. If it is a pain to install and use forget about it. So let me propose one more thing for the list:
Not providing a commonly used binary package format for your software for the targeted platform (most users don't want to deal with make install and compiler output!) [ +50 points of FAIL ]
This is like the letter by nuclear scientists urging the US government not to build and deploy a nuclear bomb. The Musks and Wozs of the world unleashed tech revolution and once the genie is out the bottle it will not go back in. Rest assured that governments with vast military power available will build such autonomous killer robots. They will go rogue and they will just keep shooting at people, victims later listed as collateral damage in operations reports.
The tech leaders of today should not write such letters. When they are really serious about this issue band together and build a lobbying organization that injects a lot of cash into politics. Sadly, that is only way these days to influence decision makers.
Copyright needs to expire much earlier. Whoever creates content should have her or his creative investment protected, but that's it. Not their heirs and the heirs of their heirs or some company that exists only as a PO box in the Bermudas who holds copyrights for gazillion things and employs an army of sleazy lawyers.
And while we are at it, have patents expire much earlier as well. It works for healthcare, after a few years of cashing in generics are allowed and drive down the price.
Unionizing is still allowed, but more and more states remove all power from unions. Without being recognized as a representation of workers unions are on the same level as rabbit breeding clubs. We need union laws like Germany has them where half the board of directors is from the employee side.
As far as exchanging salary info, I think companies do not have to worry if they can explain their pay schedules. Bonus pay depends on plenty of things, some boni are revenue sharing which means that each employee either gets the same amount or it is calculated based on a rule, but transparent as to how much one gets. Some boni are purely for personal achievements as in a job well done beyond expectations. Exchanging info about base salaries is fine, including personal bonus payments will just generate bad blood. It is already a punch in the face to see the pay for C-levels in the annual reports.
It all depends a lot on the industry one is going for. I work in an area where skill and experience is valued most and none of that can be expressed through a cert. There are certs for my type of work but getting certified will definitely not advance me in my career. The vast majority of certs are nothing but a money maker for the issuing entity. For the same reason most of these certs expire after a short time.
Shows in general that hardware vendors still do not bother much to provide decent drivers or any at all for Linux. It all falls on the backs of clever developers who craft drivers that the manufacturer could have done better. As long as desktop computing and with that especially gaming is still mainly a Windows event not much will change. Chicken and egg problem...
As far as laziness and bad decisions in software development go, they are plenty and all over the place. Such as referencing records in lookup tables by record ID rather than the given ID. Reseed the table and the program stops working. Or the choice of some to store bits not as bit field but as strings in text fields as "0" and "1" or "Y" and "N". Or relying on UI controls to be in a specific state when the dialog or page gets loaded rather than explicitly setting it. Or requesting records from a service and trusting that the first item returned is always the same field rather than explicitly requesting the records and values in the order needed. Or failing when a data folder is not present instead of creating that folder instead. I could go on for a long time, but it may just be that the comment field on/. allows for more characters to be entered than can be stored in the designated table column. I've come across all these issues plenty of times and I am sure I haven't seen it all or even be close.
So basing something on a volatile identifier such as a file name is not that out of the world. If as suggested the optimization is different based on the application there is not much else the driver developers could go by. There is no entry in a file header or object in memory that specifies that this or that app needs this or that optimization or is of this or that application type.
I would have designed it differently, start of with a known good and stable configuration for every app, then allow the enthusiast user to tweak settings that can be easily reverted back to default and that can be saved as a profile. When the app gets an update it might be necessary to have the user assign the saved profile again. Also provide an option to make a selected profile the default for all applications unless otherwise specified
If there really is such a shortage of CS grads then pay the tuition for all of them or stop whining...and stop running to Congress for more H1B. It cannot always be on the shoulders of others to generate and foster talent.
As always, it depends. I do QA on browser based apps and that is already a royal pain in the rear...and we chose to support only IE, GC and FF on Windows with IE support going away soon because none of our customers seem to use IE (but will add Edge support). In plenty of cases you need to write code to check for browser type and then load custom JS so that a feature works the same across all browsers. Life would be much easier if browsers executed JS the same and rendered HTML/CSS the same...and that across OS boundaries as well.
As far as desktop apps go, one could use Java, but many poo-poo Java because it has security flaws (well, yes, it does, just like all other software in use today!). Even with Java you end up coding once and debugging everywhere because the underlying ecosystem is so vastly different.
The only technology that comes closest to work well and about the same across all platforms that support it is Flash with ActionScript. But there you have all the haters and bashers who just yell "Die, Flash, Die!" without offering any constructive criticism nor mentioning a suitable alternative...and no, HTML5 with JS is not a suitable alternative, see the top of my post. As far as Flash goes, why diss Flash when the world basically banks on an OS that has critical patches coming out on every second Tuesday of a month?
Coding across platforms is possible and doable, but you need to look at the return on investment. For most cases it is just not there to spend the extra effort to make the potential 1% happy that want to run the app on OS X or Linux.
Agreed, that is one of the reasons why I will not move to Win 10 on systems that matter to me. Just think you have documents open with pending changes and then Win 10 decides that 2:13 AM is a good time to reboot the whole box. Bye bye changes. Or slow downloads or a lengthy video render.
On top of that, there is still plenty of stuff plain broken in Win 10. Hibernation doesn't work right (system turns back on by itself for no reason), there is still the schizophrenic split between Settings and Control Panel, notification panel still reports at times that there are new notifications when there aren't, apps crash doing tasks the apps are intended for, the moronic keyboard layout sharing across systems when using a Microsoft account, the login page no longer offering to switch the layout (worked fine in the last pre-RTM build)...and plenty of other stuff others reported and Microsoft ignored.
Rumor has it that something like a service pack comes for the holiday shopping season towards the end of the year. Until then I monitor Win 10 in a VM and on a test system.
But what the heck...updates constantly needing to reboot the entire system? Linux now can replace the kernel without requiring a reboot, enterprise grade servers allow for hot swapping all kinds of hardware without impacting the system, but Microsoft cannot replace a handful of files and tell the system stop using the old copy, now use the new copy? Rather pathetic!
Agree, there is still plenty of stuff broken and plenty of user feedback ignored. Hibernation is still broken and I hope Microsoft fired the idiot who decided to split configuration between Settings and Control Panel. Why would anyone ever think this is a good idea? Also, keyboard layout and language preferences are shared across all devices via the Microsoft account. Sucks for people like me who run systems with different keyboards attached. Even worse, the login page never really knows which keyboard layout it is supposed to use, so good luck having the correct password be recognized on the first try. I have to type it in multiple times as it would be typed in using a different keyboard layout. Sure, I could give each box a different account, but that defeats the purpose of managing systems and exchanging non-localized settings, data, and apps across devices.
Microsoft also needs to work on Edge, I tried it on a handful of sites and Edge either didn't display them properly or just crashed. Reporting all these issues to Microsoft seems to be pointless because they don't fix any of them. It appears as that the Feedback app is just an about face attempt to come across as user oriented. I bet nobody ever looks at the submissions.
Leaves the question, when does the first Service Pack come out and when can we expect Windows 11? Or is this display or dismal quality the kick in the pants to look for alternatives?
...at least on earth. We can't even get proper funding for Amtrak or many other public transit organizations. The plans to build Transrapid lines across the continental US were ditched due to political unwillingness. Contrary, increasing the budget for the unsustainable and insanely expense Interstate system is not a problem.
The US spends over 25 billion Dollars a year (!!!)) just for maintenance of the Interstate system, which cost in the 50s and 60s about 131 billion $ to build and law prohibits on most of the Interstates to collect toll. Spending 6 billion on a high capacity dedicated transport system between SF and LA seems not that expensive.
Sure, initial expense would be big, but as a country we would be better served long term if we put down rails on one lane each direction of Interstates and have trains run. Especially freight will be a prime target which is still moved to 60% by trucks, which is incredibly expensive because trucks use more fuel and personnel than trains and are not faster long distance. Trucking will still be needed short distance, but that is where EVs come into play.
A hyperloop connecting central hubs will make sense assuming that it has any significant economic benefit over rail and air travel aside from being fast. I wonder if designing low fuel consumption ultrasonic planes might be the better solution. The Concorde was popular, but expensive and with a few design flaws.
That didn't stop Microsoft from making Windows. Or any other software vendor from releasing anything. Software ships with bugs and at times with significant security vulnerabilities. Flash may or may not have a larger number of flaws than other comparable applications, but Adobe has been more than responsive to bugs found.
Aside from that, what do the Flash bashers suggest we replace Flash and ActionScript with? HTML5 and JS which gets rendered differently in every browser or often not at all? What other technology is there that is cross-browser, cross-platform delivering the exact same experience of RIA? There is absolutely nothing else and therefore Flash needs to stick around unless someone comes up with an equally suitable replacement. Microsoft mildly tried it with Silverlight, but that was a total flopping fiasco and dead on arrival.
Most US politicians, more Republicans than Democrats, shy away from any legislation that lobbyist claim is bad for business. And with a constant political stalemate none will ever happen. Other than a military putsch like in Chile, mainly caused by political stalemate that was unable to take on the issues of the time.
Only shows that it is apparently way to easy to hack into systems...even kids can do that. So which sentence was given to those who obviously did not properly secure their systems?
It depends on the industry and type of job and type of certification. Example: When you apply as a medical assistant your A+ cert might not play a role. If you apply for a QA position at a medical manufacturing company your QA specific certs matter a lot.Some certs stick around for life, others expire in a year or so...like the Microsoft certs which cost a lot of money.
I work in software QA on non-critical systems, any QA cert would not advance me in my position / company. I benefit more from studying new technologies and attending QA specific meetups.
Yes, CC debt is expensive, but carrying a small balance might even improve your credit score...as dumb as it sounds.
Did you close a CC account? That will also impact the score because you basically cut your credit limit down.
There are way too many guns in private hands where they clearly do not belong. It is time to limit gun ownership to well-controlled militias aka police force!
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Nowhere in the list does QUALITY come into play aside from having a bug tracking system. Needs to add "No publicly transparent process in place for bug fixing [ +100 points of FAIL ]" and also "New features always take precedence over bug fixing [ +50 points of FAIL ]". I guess for both open and closed source software projects quality is still considered optional and the first thing to get crossed off the list. Sadly, users put up with that. I also wonder how the size limit is measured. Does that exclude code comments? I like code that has a lot of comments explaining in plain simple language what the next 3 to 5 lines of code do. It is much easier to decipher than trying to compile a programming language intended for machines in my head. Lastly, that list arrogantly assumes that there is no open source software created on Windows and for Windows. Even using closed source runtimes that are freely available and freely distributable are not a problem. In the end one big metric for success is always ROI. That applies to open or closed source applications. If it is a pain to install and use forget about it. So let me propose one more thing for the list: Not providing a commonly used binary package format for your software for the targeted platform (most users don't want to deal with make install and compiler output!) [ +50 points of FAIL ]
This is like the letter by nuclear scientists urging the US government not to build and deploy a nuclear bomb. The Musks and Wozs of the world unleashed tech revolution and once the genie is out the bottle it will not go back in. Rest assured that governments with vast military power available will build such autonomous killer robots. They will go rogue and they will just keep shooting at people, victims later listed as collateral damage in operations reports. The tech leaders of today should not write such letters. When they are really serious about this issue band together and build a lobbying organization that injects a lot of cash into politics. Sadly, that is only way these days to influence decision makers.
Copyright needs to expire much earlier. Whoever creates content should have her or his creative investment protected, but that's it. Not their heirs and the heirs of their heirs or some company that exists only as a PO box in the Bermudas who holds copyrights for gazillion things and employs an army of sleazy lawyers. And while we are at it, have patents expire much earlier as well. It works for healthcare, after a few years of cashing in generics are allowed and drive down the price.
that punishes autostarting videos on web pages with a minimum 10 year jail sentence.
Unionizing is still allowed, but more and more states remove all power from unions. Without being recognized as a representation of workers unions are on the same level as rabbit breeding clubs. We need union laws like Germany has them where half the board of directors is from the employee side. As far as exchanging salary info, I think companies do not have to worry if they can explain their pay schedules. Bonus pay depends on plenty of things, some boni are revenue sharing which means that each employee either gets the same amount or it is calculated based on a rule, but transparent as to how much one gets. Some boni are purely for personal achievements as in a job well done beyond expectations. Exchanging info about base salaries is fine, including personal bonus payments will just generate bad blood. It is already a punch in the face to see the pay for C-levels in the annual reports.
I have a Foscam and that can run two different modes, no ActiveX needed.
The US pays over twice as much to maintain the Interstate system....each year!
It all depends a lot on the industry one is going for. I work in an area where skill and experience is valued most and none of that can be expressed through a cert. There are certs for my type of work but getting certified will definitely not advance me in my career. The vast majority of certs are nothing but a money maker for the issuing entity. For the same reason most of these certs expire after a short time.
Shows in general that hardware vendors still do not bother much to provide decent drivers or any at all for Linux. It all falls on the backs of clever developers who craft drivers that the manufacturer could have done better. As long as desktop computing and with that especially gaming is still mainly a Windows event not much will change. Chicken and egg problem... As far as laziness and bad decisions in software development go, they are plenty and all over the place. Such as referencing records in lookup tables by record ID rather than the given ID. Reseed the table and the program stops working. Or the choice of some to store bits not as bit field but as strings in text fields as "0" and "1" or "Y" and "N". Or relying on UI controls to be in a specific state when the dialog or page gets loaded rather than explicitly setting it. Or requesting records from a service and trusting that the first item returned is always the same field rather than explicitly requesting the records and values in the order needed. Or failing when a data folder is not present instead of creating that folder instead. I could go on for a long time, but it may just be that the comment field on /. allows for more characters to be entered than can be stored in the designated table column. I've come across all these issues plenty of times and I am sure I haven't seen it all or even be close.
So basing something on a volatile identifier such as a file name is not that out of the world. If as suggested the optimization is different based on the application there is not much else the driver developers could go by. There is no entry in a file header or object in memory that specifies that this or that app needs this or that optimization or is of this or that application type.
I would have designed it differently, start of with a known good and stable configuration for every app, then allow the enthusiast user to tweak settings that can be easily reverted back to default and that can be saved as a profile. When the app gets an update it might be necessary to have the user assign the saved profile again. Also provide an option to make a selected profile the default for all applications unless otherwise specified
If there really is such a shortage of CS grads then pay the tuition for all of them or stop whining...and stop running to Congress for more H1B. It cannot always be on the shoulders of others to generate and foster talent.
As always, it depends. I do QA on browser based apps and that is already a royal pain in the rear...and we chose to support only IE, GC and FF on Windows with IE support going away soon because none of our customers seem to use IE (but will add Edge support). In plenty of cases you need to write code to check for browser type and then load custom JS so that a feature works the same across all browsers. Life would be much easier if browsers executed JS the same and rendered HTML/CSS the same...and that across OS boundaries as well. As far as desktop apps go, one could use Java, but many poo-poo Java because it has security flaws (well, yes, it does, just like all other software in use today!). Even with Java you end up coding once and debugging everywhere because the underlying ecosystem is so vastly different. The only technology that comes closest to work well and about the same across all platforms that support it is Flash with ActionScript. But there you have all the haters and bashers who just yell "Die, Flash, Die!" without offering any constructive criticism nor mentioning a suitable alternative...and no, HTML5 with JS is not a suitable alternative, see the top of my post. As far as Flash goes, why diss Flash when the world basically banks on an OS that has critical patches coming out on every second Tuesday of a month? Coding across platforms is possible and doable, but you need to look at the return on investment. For most cases it is just not there to spend the extra effort to make the potential 1% happy that want to run the app on OS X or Linux.
Agreed, that is one of the reasons why I will not move to Win 10 on systems that matter to me. Just think you have documents open with pending changes and then Win 10 decides that 2:13 AM is a good time to reboot the whole box. Bye bye changes. Or slow downloads or a lengthy video render. On top of that, there is still plenty of stuff plain broken in Win 10. Hibernation doesn't work right (system turns back on by itself for no reason), there is still the schizophrenic split between Settings and Control Panel, notification panel still reports at times that there are new notifications when there aren't, apps crash doing tasks the apps are intended for, the moronic keyboard layout sharing across systems when using a Microsoft account, the login page no longer offering to switch the layout (worked fine in the last pre-RTM build)...and plenty of other stuff others reported and Microsoft ignored. Rumor has it that something like a service pack comes for the holiday shopping season towards the end of the year. Until then I monitor Win 10 in a VM and on a test system. But what the heck...updates constantly needing to reboot the entire system? Linux now can replace the kernel without requiring a reboot, enterprise grade servers allow for hot swapping all kinds of hardware without impacting the system, but Microsoft cannot replace a handful of files and tell the system stop using the old copy, now use the new copy? Rather pathetic!
Apparently interesting enough for you to read it and comment on it.
They are an invention of the media to generate more page clicks and magazine buys.
....why guns has no reason to be in private households.
Agree, there is still plenty of stuff broken and plenty of user feedback ignored. Hibernation is still broken and I hope Microsoft fired the idiot who decided to split configuration between Settings and Control Panel. Why would anyone ever think this is a good idea? Also, keyboard layout and language preferences are shared across all devices via the Microsoft account. Sucks for people like me who run systems with different keyboards attached. Even worse, the login page never really knows which keyboard layout it is supposed to use, so good luck having the correct password be recognized on the first try. I have to type it in multiple times as it would be typed in using a different keyboard layout. Sure, I could give each box a different account, but that defeats the purpose of managing systems and exchanging non-localized settings, data, and apps across devices. Microsoft also needs to work on Edge, I tried it on a handful of sites and Edge either didn't display them properly or just crashed. Reporting all these issues to Microsoft seems to be pointless because they don't fix any of them. It appears as that the Feedback app is just an about face attempt to come across as user oriented. I bet nobody ever looks at the submissions. Leaves the question, when does the first Service Pack come out and when can we expect Windows 11? Or is this display or dismal quality the kick in the pants to look for alternatives?
...at least on earth. We can't even get proper funding for Amtrak or many other public transit organizations. The plans to build Transrapid lines across the continental US were ditched due to political unwillingness. Contrary, increasing the budget for the unsustainable and insanely expense Interstate system is not a problem. The US spends over 25 billion Dollars a year (!!!)) just for maintenance of the Interstate system, which cost in the 50s and 60s about 131 billion $ to build and law prohibits on most of the Interstates to collect toll. Spending 6 billion on a high capacity dedicated transport system between SF and LA seems not that expensive. Sure, initial expense would be big, but as a country we would be better served long term if we put down rails on one lane each direction of Interstates and have trains run. Especially freight will be a prime target which is still moved to 60% by trucks, which is incredibly expensive because trucks use more fuel and personnel than trains and are not faster long distance. Trucking will still be needed short distance, but that is where EVs come into play. A hyperloop connecting central hubs will make sense assuming that it has any significant economic benefit over rail and air travel aside from being fast. I wonder if designing low fuel consumption ultrasonic planes might be the better solution. The Concorde was popular, but expensive and with a few design flaws.
That didn't stop Microsoft from making Windows. Or any other software vendor from releasing anything. Software ships with bugs and at times with significant security vulnerabilities. Flash may or may not have a larger number of flaws than other comparable applications, but Adobe has been more than responsive to bugs found. Aside from that, what do the Flash bashers suggest we replace Flash and ActionScript with? HTML5 and JS which gets rendered differently in every browser or often not at all? What other technology is there that is cross-browser, cross-platform delivering the exact same experience of RIA? There is absolutely nothing else and therefore Flash needs to stick around unless someone comes up with an equally suitable replacement. Microsoft mildly tried it with Silverlight, but that was a total flopping fiasco and dead on arrival.
Most US politicians, more Republicans than Democrats, shy away from any legislation that lobbyist claim is bad for business. And with a constant political stalemate none will ever happen. Other than a military putsch like in Chile, mainly caused by political stalemate that was unable to take on the issues of the time.
And again, yes!
Only shows that it is apparently way to easy to hack into systems...even kids can do that. So which sentence was given to those who obviously did not properly secure their systems?
It depends on the industry and type of job and type of certification. Example: When you apply as a medical assistant your A+ cert might not play a role. If you apply for a QA position at a medical manufacturing company your QA specific certs matter a lot.Some certs stick around for life, others expire in a year or so...like the Microsoft certs which cost a lot of money. I work in software QA on non-critical systems, any QA cert would not advance me in my position / company. I benefit more from studying new technologies and attending QA specific meetups.
Yes, CC debt is expensive, but carrying a small balance might even improve your credit score...as dumb as it sounds. Did you close a CC account? That will also impact the score because you basically cut your credit limit down.
www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/300077387/why-ibms-breakthrough-7-nanometer-chip-matters-to-partners.htm
There are way too many guns in private hands where they clearly do not belong. It is time to limit gun ownership to well-controlled militias aka police force!