So, for instance, an open source program will be troubleshot and combed over by people from potentially a dozen different countries.
pro-mpd seemed to be attempting to steer a cultural-related response out of Scott Trappe. However, I really think geographically-distributed culture has little to do with the actual code quality.
What is more significant is that distributed developers tend to communicate mostly through written e-mail or newsgroups. Their very act of communication is documenting their decisions and design plan!
Many "bugs" are due to Joe-developer-A having a coffee-room discussion with Joe-developer-B, where the idea is good but not thought through and certainly not written down. So, when they go to implement it, they probably lost the insight they briefly had during their discussion and the end result isn't very good. This scenario is harder to achieve when there are e-mail archives to remind everyone what's going on.
Why is it that every time I see even 30 seconds of Fox News, I just want to punch the anchors through the TV and run out of the room screaming. Fox News must be produced by the same people who made "When Animals Attack" and "Real TV". Fox News misses the point of good news and goes straight for the blue-collar beer-drinkin trailer-trash stereotypical American loser viewership.
You can't believe how many people use their PS2 (or X-Box) as their primary (if only) DVD player.
Yes, the PS2 with the add-on remote is a pretty darn good DVD player. However, one reason it is successful in this multi-role scheme is that the PS2 doesn't come with unanticipated DRM or other crippling roadblocks.
I say "unanticipated", because it is pretty clear to the public, now, that DVD has that CSS stuff, and that the PS2 games are proprietary. But Sony left it at that. There's no "big brother" modem connection always reporting that were playing nice, for example. Consumers are generally comfortable with this sort of compromise.
He is not forced into a constant upgrade cycle to stay current.
It's interesting how a proprietary gaming platform can actually empower the consumer. It seems for PCs, the manufacturers manipulate the consumers so they always have an inferiority complex about their hardware. Console owners don't care too much that their hardware is not bleeding edge any more--they just want more and more games.
So, it isn't a matter of what we can see but how much manipulation an image can handle. The appearance of >24-bit graphics cards and scanners is beginning to make sense to me.
This sounds so much like the argument that once a software company has made enough money on a version of software that they should/could give it away or open source it so that people who would have never bought it can benefit from it.
The software company also needs to have the integrity to disband or adapt when their software reaches maturity. Once a piece of software implements well everything it is required to do, there is no incentive for people to buy new versions. Once this happens, the company has to find new markets to write to, try to impose subscription schemes, or break up saying "thanks for the memories."
After all, we all know that drug companies don't fight for extended patent rights to drugs that improve peoples lives.
I think this is still motivated purely by money. It just happens that the patent expiration lifetime is adequate for the business cycles of drugs. Claritin patent expires...here's new and improved Celebrex!
In other industries, such as software, it can be argued that patents run too long. Or too short, as Disney would like us to believe in the copyright domain.
How is that fair? The CEO's make about 10000 dollars an hour....
10000 dollars an hour probably isn't fair, but CEOs still make decisions that can make or destroy entire companies. How do you think Motorola's execs felt after Iridium? What about Intel's execs about the Itanic? What about Sun, where they're trying to define themselves in spite of x86-64 and Linux? These CEOs are pissing themselves with stress and are trying to keep their companies afloat. CEOs that are actually sucessful deserve their salary, but the ones that aren't and still get paid are criminals.
CEOs are a far cry from $9/hr. tech support staff.
Buy an average car for 1/2 or more of a yearly average household income.
Houses start at 5x yearly average household income.
Perhaps where you are from, but there are many places in the U.S., where decent cars are 15 to 25K and decent houses are 100 to 200K. I'm talking Japanese sedan and three-bedrooms, here, not crap at all.
This is barely enough to stay in a cheap apartment and drive a crappy used car.
I have trouble believing it is really that bad. Just last November, I saw jobs offering >50K in the south-east US. There are still companies looking hard for talented people. Perhaps outside of California, Denver, etc., the IT industry isn't as bad as many people are claiming?
For 12K, you'd be much better off working doing landscaping or construction.
Let's see, the unionization rate is around 12% in the private sector, the lowest rate it's been in 80 years, down from 35% in the 1950s. And over 40 million Americans go without healthcare, an all time high.
The world economy is much more complex than can be modeled by any 2-variable formula. Unionization and health care really have no logical connection, here.
At our company we now have multiple college graduates working for under $10/hour.
At first, I thought, "what crap", but then I realized $9/hr. is about right for lots of jobs outside IT that don't require lots of critical thinking. Basically, $9/hr. is better than 'Cashier' but not as good as 'Technician II' in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately, the last decade has seen our standards go way beyond $9/hr. being a livable wage. It seems the U.S. is in for an "attitude adjustment". This, in itself, is actually healthy, but lots of people will be bitching about it, regardless.
All Microsoft needs to do is make their standard an open one (that can be used by others), like Adobe has done with their PostScript and PDF formats.
Let's just say the assholes at Adobe are not nearly as full of shit as the assholes at Microsoft. Given how Microsoft is constantly making the same mistakes over and over, I think their constipation is incurable, and we just need to let them die off.
Re:Software Engineering is different in Purpose
on
Software Craftsmanship
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The basic notion of software engineering is to create a *process* which is so perfect that no personal weaknesses in your programmers can hurt the company.
This is a very dangerous notion, and I disagree with it.
Engineering is about creating technology. It's unfortunate that most "Software Engineers" are clueless doe-eyed grads or uneducated bureaucrats, but that is a symptom of the overall immaturity of the industry. It's unfortunate that the overall credibility and quality in the software industry is so poor that people impose soul-less processes to eliminate risk.
Look at engineering firms like the Skunk Works or early NASA, who produced tremendous technology in an almost absurd amount of time. With the cogs-in-a-wheel method, these organizations would still be making paper airplanes and the sound barrier would be a finger in the ear!
Even with RUP, Extreme this-and-that, CMM, whatever, nothing can replace individual talent in an engineering project, and absolutely nothing can completely remove the risk associated with these talented individuals.
Last I recall most anyone can license Media Player 9 codecs at a reasonable rate.
This still wouldn't allow a Free implementation to be made. Also, there really isn't an incentive for competing commercial player implementations to use MS' codecs, because the codecs are way too volatile (MS can change them at a whim).
As things become popular in computers you don't expect to have to buy anything else.
This seems okay until you're backed into a corner (figuratively) and realize only one vendor provides the technology you have come to depend on (yes, it's just like heroine--just less damaging physiologically).
Why would I want DirectX to be unbundled?
Because it levels the playing field for APIs, such as OpenGL.
Microsoft didn't drive Stac out of business it just licensed their disk compression software.
What happened to Stac after DOS 6 came out? I haven't heard about them since.
How can the same action result in two opposite outcomes?
See my response to the other response to my initial post (i.e., the 5 facts of MS market domination).
Because what actually reduced user choice in Microsoft's case is not bundling (which in fact increases choice), but its other actions, such as preventing OEMs from also bundling Netscape.
Actually, it's both the bundling and the bullying of the OEMs. The bundled products are more convienient and tend to gain rapid adoption, given that Windows is on 90% or so of desktops (again, see my other post).
Please explain to me (using short words - remember, i am a moron) how bundling media player with windows decreases my choices.
Fact: some flavor of Windows is installed on greater than 90% of home and business desktops.
Fact 2: A new market emerges, where multiple companies are producing multimedia players which can stream music and video over the internet to Windows-based desktops. These players become popular, even though users have to install them as third-party software. This isn't a really big deal to them, however.
Fact 3: Microsoft sees that streaming multimedia players are becoming popular and realize how easy it is to take over that market. So, they create a new player program, which uses proprietary undocumented file formats and uses proprietary undocuemented API resources, and they bundle this program for free with all new releases of Windows and provide downloads for old releases of Windows.
Fact 4: Being oblivious to the proprietary nature of the new player, most of the users for those 90% of home and business desktops begin using it, because it is convenient and seems to perform better than the alternatives.
Fact 5: The market share of the original implementations plummets, their companies disappear or are left to forage as niche or boutique companies, and suddenly there is only one viable popular streaming multimedia player available!
It's that simple.
This formula works for web browsers (IE), office suites (Office, of course), graphics APIs (DirectX), operating systems (DR-DOS), and compression software (Stac), too. A similar argument can even be made concerning e-mail server software (Exchange), diagramming software (Visio), and probably lots of other things I've forgotton or have been swept under the rug by MS' PR department.
And, this whole thing depends on Microsoft maintaining a monopoly on desktop operating system software (See fact #1 above).
Why not let MS bundle any software it likes, but under one condition: It has to adher to open standards.
What's so sad is that many other companies do this by choice or are forced by the market, but Microsoft has to be forced to do it by governments. This is sickening.
Outside of Microsoft, the computer industry has settled on things like TCP/IP, NFS, POSIX, various ANSI standards, IEEE standards, several ISO standards, etc. just so any amount of progress is possible. When there is real competition, sometimes competitors really do what they don't like: working together for their common benefit. This is a good thing. But Microsoft is like the toddler who hasn't learned to share: mine, mine, mine! This is bad for anyone who does business with MS.
Coming from NJ to Minnesota, I was amazed that there aren't even basic car inspections required, much less the emissions testing.
Then don't visit South Carolina--the shock might be too great for you! SC has no inspections (lots of billowing smoke around), no real registration inforcement (lots of cars without license plates), and a counterproductive property tax system (lots of old beater cars with no license plates and billowing smoke)...well, you get the idea.
And, being a rotary diesel, it's going to last a very, very long time, too.
I have no argument at all against biodiesel hybrids. However, I have heard that rotary engines have different break-in requirements than regular reciprocating engines, and they can run poorly if the seals don't set properly. This could very easily be a non-issue for modern engines, so I wouldn't mind being re-educated.
So what if diesel can make great strides in reducing polution - is it zero emmissions?
At 50 or so MPG for the VW Golf TDI, the pollution must be pretty darn low. And, this car isn't even a hybrid. If hybrids are supposed to be even better than this, I'd say they are a good compromise for the eco-freaks out there.
A similar "get the cars off highways" by expanding the ferry fleet on the San Francisco bay movement has sprung up and they are trying every trick in the book to prevent acknowledging the fact that the ferrys burn more and pollute more than if every person they carry drove in a single car instead.
That's because ferries have big-ass off-road-rated diesel engines, while cars have tiny regulated-out-the-wazoo diesel engines. Also, more of the ferry polution goes straight into the water. Motorized boats are pretty nasty when you think about it.
...government financial support is the worse idea possible.
I agree. There are small-business allowances for government contracting, where small-businesses are given awards just because (brace yourself) they cannot compete on price but have a powerful congressman on their side. Yuck.
There are whole industries which are extremely unhealthy and artificially propped up by the government. Defense contractors, airlines, Amtrack, etc. It seems that, when the government gets involved, the outcome is more often worse than better. The main reason is that government bureaucrats don't give a rat's ass if they are actually productive. All they really need to do is blow the budget, and that's all that matters to them.
Very true but unfortunate, because e-mail still isn't good enough.
For some projects, e-mail is the only written design documentation. Even then, it isn't reliable, as some people don't keep e-mail and some people never remember what they read in e-mail. Worse, some people cannot write to save their lives or write in some sort of inintelligible slang, dialect, or 133t-speak (you see, it makes them special, as if they are somehow important because of this).
Sigh. I wish people could just learn to write their damn language well. In the U.S., for example, it is really sad that the junior-high and high-schools are totally broken, because we could be so much more effective e-mail writers--and more effective professionals--as a result.
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So, for instance, an open source program will be troubleshot and combed over by people from potentially a dozen different countries.
pro-mpd seemed to be attempting to steer a cultural-related response out of Scott Trappe. However, I really think geographically-distributed culture has little to do with the actual code quality.
What is more significant is that distributed developers tend to communicate mostly through written e-mail or newsgroups. Their very act of communication is documenting their decisions and design plan!
Many "bugs" are due to Joe-developer-A having a coffee-room discussion with Joe-developer-B, where the idea is good but not thought through and certainly not written down. So, when they go to implement it, they probably lost the insight they briefly had during their discussion and the end result isn't very good. This scenario is harder to achieve when there are e-mail archives to remind everyone what's going on.
(or "facts" if we're talking about Fox)
Why is it that every time I see even 30 seconds of Fox News, I just want to punch the anchors through the TV and run out of the room screaming. Fox News must be produced by the same people who made "When Animals Attack" and "Real TV". Fox News misses the point of good news and goes straight for the blue-collar beer-drinkin trailer-trash stereotypical American loser viewership.
You can't believe how many people use their PS2 (or X-Box) as their primary (if only) DVD player.
Yes, the PS2 with the add-on remote is a pretty darn good DVD player. However, one reason it is successful in this multi-role scheme is that the PS2 doesn't come with unanticipated DRM or other crippling roadblocks.
I say "unanticipated", because it is pretty clear to the public, now, that DVD has that CSS stuff, and that the PS2 games are proprietary. But Sony left it at that. There's no "big brother" modem connection always reporting that were playing nice, for example. Consumers are generally comfortable with this sort of compromise.
He is not forced into a constant upgrade cycle to stay current.
It's interesting how a proprietary gaming platform can actually empower the consumer. It seems for PCs, the manufacturers manipulate the consumers so they always have an inferiority complex about their hardware. Console owners don't care too much that their hardware is not bleeding edge any more--they just want more and more games.
it's twice as fast as the PS2
Really? A cache-crippled Celeron on a PC motherboard?
Look at the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Blood brings blood.
This is because they are all a bunch of selfish bigoted stubborn jerks. They bring it upon themselves.
The real problem there is dynamic range.
So, it isn't a matter of what we can see but how much manipulation an image can handle. The appearance of >24-bit graphics cards and scanners is beginning to make sense to me.
This sounds so much like the argument that once a software company has made enough money on a version of software that they should/could give it away or open source it so that people who would have never bought it can benefit from it.
The software company also needs to have the integrity to disband or adapt when their software reaches maturity. Once a piece of software implements well everything it is required to do, there is no incentive for people to buy new versions. Once this happens, the company has to find new markets to write to, try to impose subscription schemes, or break up saying "thanks for the memories."
After all, we all know that drug companies don't fight for extended patent rights to drugs that improve peoples lives.
I think this is still motivated purely by money. It just happens that the patent expiration lifetime is adequate for the business cycles of drugs. Claritin patent expires...here's new and improved Celebrex!
In other industries, such as software, it can be argued that patents run too long. Or too short, as Disney would like us to believe in the copyright domain.
How is that fair? The CEO's make about 10000 dollars an hour....
10000 dollars an hour probably isn't fair, but CEOs still make decisions that can make or destroy entire companies. How do you think Motorola's execs felt after Iridium? What about Intel's execs about the Itanic? What about Sun, where they're trying to define themselves in spite of x86-64 and Linux? These CEOs are pissing themselves with stress and are trying to keep their companies afloat. CEOs that are actually sucessful deserve their salary, but the ones that aren't and still get paid are criminals.
CEOs are a far cry from $9/hr. tech support staff.
Today, its more like:
Buy an average car for 1/2 or more of a yearly average household income.
Houses start at 5x yearly average household income.
Perhaps where you are from, but there are many places in the U.S., where decent cars are 15 to 25K and decent houses are 100 to 200K. I'm talking Japanese sedan and three-bedrooms, here, not crap at all.
12k
This is near the official poverty level.
20k
This is barely enough to stay in a cheap apartment and drive a crappy used car.
I have trouble believing it is really that bad. Just last November, I saw jobs offering >50K in the south-east US. There are still companies looking hard for talented people. Perhaps outside of California, Denver, etc., the IT industry isn't as bad as many people are claiming?
For 12K, you'd be much better off working doing landscaping or construction.
Let's see, the unionization rate is around 12% in the private sector, the lowest rate it's been in 80 years, down from 35% in the 1950s. And over 40 million Americans go without healthcare, an all time high.
The world economy is much more complex than can be modeled by any 2-variable formula. Unionization and health care really have no logical connection, here.
At our company we now have multiple college graduates working for under $10/hour.
At first, I thought, "what crap", but then I realized $9/hr. is about right for lots of jobs outside IT that don't require lots of critical thinking. Basically, $9/hr. is better than 'Cashier' but not as good as 'Technician II' in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately, the last decade has seen our standards go way beyond $9/hr. being a livable wage. It seems the U.S. is in for an "attitude adjustment". This, in itself, is actually healthy, but lots of people will be bitching about it, regardless.
All Microsoft needs to do is make their standard an open one (that can be used by others), like Adobe has done with their PostScript and PDF formats.
Let's just say the assholes at Adobe are not nearly as full of shit as the assholes at Microsoft. Given how Microsoft is constantly making the same mistakes over and over, I think their constipation is incurable, and we just need to let them die off.
The basic notion of software engineering is to create a *process* which is so perfect that no personal weaknesses in your programmers can hurt the company.
This is a very dangerous notion, and I disagree with it.
Engineering is about creating technology. It's unfortunate that most "Software Engineers" are clueless doe-eyed grads or uneducated bureaucrats, but that is a symptom of the overall immaturity of the industry. It's unfortunate that the overall credibility and quality in the software industry is so poor that people impose soul-less processes to eliminate risk.
Look at engineering firms like the Skunk Works or early NASA, who produced tremendous technology in an almost absurd amount of time. With the cogs-in-a-wheel method, these organizations would still be making paper airplanes and the sound barrier would be a finger in the ear!
Even with RUP, Extreme this-and-that, CMM, whatever, nothing can replace individual talent in an engineering project, and absolutely nothing can completely remove the risk associated with these talented individuals.
Last I recall most anyone can license Media Player 9 codecs at a reasonable rate.
This still wouldn't allow a Free implementation to be made. Also, there really isn't an incentive for competing commercial player implementations to use MS' codecs, because the codecs are way too volatile (MS can change them at a whim).
As things become popular in computers you don't expect to have to buy anything else.
This seems okay until you're backed into a corner (figuratively) and realize only one vendor provides the technology you have come to depend on (yes, it's just like heroine--just less damaging physiologically).
Why would I want DirectX to be unbundled?
Because it levels the playing field for APIs, such as OpenGL.
Microsoft didn't drive Stac out of business it just licensed their disk compression software.
What happened to Stac after DOS 6 came out? I haven't heard about them since.
How can the same action result in two opposite outcomes?
See my response to the other response to my initial post (i.e., the 5 facts of MS market domination).
Because what actually reduced user choice in Microsoft's case is not bundling (which in fact increases choice), but its other actions, such as preventing OEMs from also bundling Netscape.
Actually, it's both the bundling and the bullying of the OEMs. The bundled products are more convienient and tend to gain rapid adoption, given that Windows is on 90% or so of desktops (again, see my other post).
Please explain to me (using short words - remember, i am a moron) how bundling media player with windows decreases my choices.
Fact: some flavor of Windows is installed on greater than 90% of home and business desktops.
Fact 2: A new market emerges, where multiple companies are producing multimedia players which can stream music and video over the internet to Windows-based desktops. These players become popular, even though users have to install them as third-party software. This isn't a really big deal to them, however.
Fact 3: Microsoft sees that streaming multimedia players are becoming popular and realize how easy it is to take over that market. So, they create a new player program, which uses proprietary undocumented file formats and uses proprietary undocuemented API resources, and they bundle this program for free with all new releases of Windows and provide downloads for old releases of Windows.
Fact 4: Being oblivious to the proprietary nature of the new player, most of the users for those 90% of home and business desktops begin using it, because it is convenient and seems to perform better than the alternatives.
Fact 5: The market share of the original implementations plummets, their companies disappear or are left to forage as niche or boutique companies, and suddenly there is only one viable popular streaming multimedia player available!
It's that simple.
This formula works for web browsers (IE), office suites (Office, of course), graphics APIs (DirectX), operating systems (DR-DOS), and compression software (Stac), too. A similar argument can even be made concerning e-mail server software (Exchange), diagramming software (Visio), and probably lots of other things I've forgotton or have been swept under the rug by MS' PR department.
And, this whole thing depends on Microsoft maintaining a monopoly on desktop operating system software (See fact #1 above).
Why not let MS bundle any software it likes, but under one condition: It has to adher to open standards.
What's so sad is that many other companies do this by choice or are forced by the market, but Microsoft has to be forced to do it by governments. This is sickening.
Outside of Microsoft, the computer industry has settled on things like TCP/IP, NFS, POSIX, various ANSI standards, IEEE standards, several ISO standards, etc. just so any amount of progress is possible. When there is real competition, sometimes competitors really do what they don't like: working together for their common benefit. This is a good thing. But Microsoft is like the toddler who hasn't learned to share: mine, mine, mine! This is bad for anyone who does business with MS.
So, why is it wrong for MS... but alright for Red Hat, Mandrake, etc?
The Linux distributions, for example, bundle to increase user choice. Microsoft bundles applications to decrease user choice.
Why is this do difficult for many people to understand?
Coming from NJ to Minnesota, I was amazed that there aren't even basic car inspections required, much less the emissions testing.
Then don't visit South Carolina--the shock might be too great for you! SC has no inspections (lots of billowing smoke around), no real registration inforcement (lots of cars without license plates), and a counterproductive property tax system (lots of old beater cars with no license plates and billowing smoke)...well, you get the idea.
And, being a rotary diesel, it's going to last a very, very long time, too.
I have no argument at all against biodiesel hybrids. However, I have heard that rotary engines have different break-in requirements than regular reciprocating engines, and they can run poorly if the seals don't set properly. This could very easily be a non-issue for modern engines, so I wouldn't mind being re-educated.
So what if diesel can make great strides in reducing polution - is it zero emmissions?
At 50 or so MPG for the VW Golf TDI, the pollution must be pretty darn low. And, this car isn't even a hybrid. If hybrids are supposed to be even better than this, I'd say they are a good compromise for the eco-freaks out there.
A similar "get the cars off highways" by expanding the ferry fleet on the San Francisco bay movement has sprung up and they are trying every trick in the book to prevent acknowledging the fact that the ferrys burn more and pollute more than if every person they carry drove in a single car instead.
That's because ferries have big-ass off-road-rated diesel engines, while cars have tiny regulated-out-the-wazoo diesel engines. Also, more of the ferry polution goes straight into the water. Motorized boats are pretty nasty when you think about it.
...government financial support is the worse idea possible.
I agree. There are small-business allowances for government contracting, where small-businesses are given awards just because (brace yourself) they cannot compete on price but have a powerful congressman on their side. Yuck.
There are whole industries which are extremely unhealthy and artificially propped up by the government. Defense contractors, airlines, Amtrack, etc. It seems that, when the government gets involved, the outcome is more often worse than better. The main reason is that government bureaucrats don't give a rat's ass if they are actually productive. All they really need to do is blow the budget, and that's all that matters to them.
If it's not in an email it never happened.
Very true but unfortunate, because e-mail still isn't good enough.
For some projects, e-mail is the only written design documentation. Even then, it isn't reliable, as some people don't keep e-mail and some people never remember what they read in e-mail. Worse, some people cannot write to save their lives or write in some sort of inintelligible slang, dialect, or 133t-speak (you see, it makes them special, as if they are somehow important because of this).
Sigh. I wish people could just learn to write their damn language well. In the U.S., for example, it is really sad that the junior-high and high-schools are totally broken, because we could be so much more effective e-mail writers--and more effective professionals--as a result.