Maybe they should quit fooling around and have the sort of robust firmware that Sun has in their SparcStations. You can do a hell of a lot with a SparcStation at the bios prompt. I believe it includes a Forth engine. Correct me if I'm wrong.
You are mostly correct. The only thing is that it isn't a "bios prompt" but a "boot prompt" or an "ok prompt". Additionally, enabling full diagnostics at the boot prompt and rebooting sends a rediculous amount of info out of serial port A. It is very useful. After seeing that, working with PCs is painful, simply painful.
UNIX workstations have had amazing firmware-based diagnostics for at least a decade (the limit of my experience with them). It's called the OpenBoot PROM. Plug a serial console into the back of the machine and reboot, and you'll see.
It is intended for complex distributed processes that cross several application domains.
Yes, and so are the other 3,142 languages that came out last month and the 2,675 languages from the month before that. Don't get me started on the 15,476.NET languages...I'll pass out!
It always tickles me that people compare software building with car building.
How are they fundamentally different? What is simple about designing a car, the materials that go into it, the tolerances of all the moving parts, the factories that will build it, the tooling for those factories, and the tremendous effort of managing many thousands of employees? The more exposure I get to automotive and manufacturing engineering, the more impressed I am that cars work at all let alone for 250,000 miles for the better ones.
And yes, software engineering for non-trivial projects is this complex, also, but I rarely see a "software engineer" that admits it or even is aware of it. That is why most software still sucks.
Ugh, nothing is worse than wasting the equivalent of a whole day per week in meetings. They never last "just fifteen minutes," and the result is often a ad-hoc design-by-committee project, where no one has the guts to commit to anything.
Actually, yes, these people are constantly re-evaluating their process because their time-to-market requirements are constantly getting tighter and tighter. Just read Business Week for six months and follow the changes in the auto industry through their articles: they are all about faster, faster, and listen-to-the-customer constant process-reengineering, with CEO ans design heads being hired and fired depending on how well they can make theri human- and machine-assembly-lines line up and fire.
The difference is that the auto industry takes this stuff very seriously and there is often committment from the top executives on down. They incorporate their engineering practices as a core part of their business. They understand the value of engineering and good processes.
The same is far from true in most software firms. Many software engineering managers are just transplants from other parts of the company. They often have little experience or training. They often think in terms of buzzwords rather than fundamental concepts. They often screw up.
I recently booted up a 486-DX2 system that I had in the closet. The processor seemed okay, but I couldn't get over the 3400RPM hard drive (yuck).
Even on todays GHz machines, the hard drive still crawls (but a little faster at 7200RPM). The processors are so damn fast now that the disks are just shameful.
He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this.
One interesting side-effect of this is the spectrum of device interfaces seen in an office (and causing headaches for the staff). big-plug, PS2, & USB keyboards. Parallel, network, and USB printers. Serial, PS2, and USB mice. Parallel, serial, SCSI, IDE, USB, and Firewire scanners, Zip drives, CD drives, etc. The last six years has really cluttered offices with lots of working (often expensive, too) but plug-incompatible stuff. How's that for efficiency.
You're making the assumption that Microsoft will even be around in 2050. My bet is that they'll fall off their pedestal long before that, because no company can screw its customers forever. Even the tobacco companies are struggling, now, once the public got smart and sued their asses off (sure, it took decades, but it did happen). I think a similar thing will eventually happen in the software industry--it's just that the public base of knowledge takes a long time to build up and act on that knowledge.
I find that once this happens, system performance takes a distinct hit.
Perhaps Apple could learn a few lessons from Solaris. Solaris allows any number of swap partitions and swap files to be combined into the system's virtual memory. There doesn't appear to be a performance degradation (at least that I've seen), and the OS can take advantage of any multiple disk/multiple controller situations for possibly even a performance boost.
Mac IE doesn't work on anything but Macs (and is a completely separate codebase to Win IE)
If it truly is a separate code base, then that is just another indication how badly software engineering is done within Microsoft. What a waste of good human talent to do the same web browser twice!
However, professionals certainly have no excuse for the problems mentioned so far.
The sad thing is that most people who choose only Microsoft software really do think of themselves as professionals. They think "playing with the big boys" is the professional thing to do, even when it is counterproductive.
I wish I understood why the same people who would bitch about non-standard wheels for their car or off-voltage wiring in their house have no problem bending over for Microsoft. It really is a psychological deficiency.
No mention of any of this in the detailed description of what they'd fixed.
The gritty details generally are left out of any end-user documentation. For any complex system like a UNIX kernel, there will be hundreds or perhaps thousands of bug fixes from one release to another. Even Solaris, among the top ranks of UNIX, has many many fixes listed in their patch reports. It's just that Solaris is mature enough that very few people actually see those bugs, and Max OS X is on its way towards that sort of maturity--it'll just take some time.
Whenever a unix system starts swapping memory out to disk it's gonna slow down. I keep an eye on the number of swap files - when it goes from one to two...
It seems odd that Mac OS X would resort to creating multiple swap files and, then, allow cruft to build up in them. That is very unlike my experience with other UNIX; it seems much more like Windows. It appears that there must be memory leaks or other types of object leaks that collect like dust bunnies in the swap files.
I'm not necessarily knocking Apple in this, as I've seen how hard it is to deal with memory leaks in C programs. However, it may indicate that they either use malloc() directly too often without adding leak-detecting code or tools.
I've seen the show a few times, and occasionally one team's machine or whatever is really a joke (i.e., the team's original strategy failed and the deadline really bit them in the ass). There was one episode where they built rockets: one team designed a fundamentally unstable rocket that looked like crap and flopped on launch--they obviously had run out of time.
One thing I realized recently is that telemarketing and SPAM are evidence that societies don't always scale well. Massive amounts of telemarketing and SPAM have actually made our society less efficient and have been facilitated by the same technology intended to help us all out. Very interesting.
It's sort of like the evolution of parasites but in a technological ecosystem.
The problem with this being done at the federal level is the amount of lobbying that will take place for special exemptions (political campaigns, charities, etc.).
The sad thing is that the charities are the sleaziest of them all!
"Do you think it is important to (support|stop) X?" "Sure." "Would you like to donate Y?" "No." (they set you up to make you feel like a hypocrite; i.e., they are scum)
I've worked on many projects, particularly with the big consultancies, that use waterfall-type methodologies that fail.
There is generally no such thing as a true waterfall in a real project. When one occurs is usually an indication of design by committee and bureaucracy, where the project is doomed regardless of methodology.
I really think latching onto a branded methodology, such as XP or RUP or Waterfall or whatever, for a project is the wrong approach, because it is only good management that makes XP or RUP or Waterfall or whatever work in the first place. The methods themselves are for informational purposes only. They can influence a managerial approach, but anyone exclaiming, "We follow XP methodologies," just looks silly and will invoke resistence from the more cynical team members.
Good managers avoid thinking and speaking in terms of such buzzword methodologies, but they also freely admit that they learned something from those methodologies and applied what they learned to their own approach. Good arguments beat buzzwords when trying to convice the skeptics and cynics among us.
Whilst I agree with most of your points that last analogy is just utterly ridiculous, unless you happen to have evidence of Bill Gates sponsoring killings.
I knew someone would reply like this. See the other reply to my post.
But if the example given above is not unethically leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (web browsers) to gain unearned market share in another totally unrelated area (news services) then i don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should quit fooling around and have the sort of robust firmware that Sun has in their SparcStations. You can do a hell of a lot with a SparcStation at the bios prompt. I believe it includes a Forth engine. Correct me if I'm wrong.
You are mostly correct. The only thing is that it isn't a "bios prompt" but a "boot prompt" or an "ok prompt". Additionally, enabling full diagnostics at the boot prompt and rebooting sends a rediculous amount of info out of serial port A. It is very useful. After seeing that, working with PCs is painful, simply painful.
UNIX workstations have had amazing firmware-based diagnostics for at least a decade (the limit of my experience with them). It's called the OpenBoot PROM. Plug a serial console into the back of the machine and reboot, and you'll see.
It is intended for complex distributed processes that cross several application domains.
.NET languages...I'll pass out!
Yes, and so are the other 3,142 languages that came out last month and the 2,675 languages from the month before that. Don't get me started on the 15,476
It always tickles me that people compare software building with car building.
How are they fundamentally different? What is simple about designing a car, the materials that go into it, the tolerances of all the moving parts, the factories that will build it, the tooling for those factories, and the tremendous effort of managing many thousands of employees? The more exposure I get to automotive and manufacturing engineering, the more impressed I am that cars work at all let alone for 250,000 miles for the better ones.
And yes, software engineering for non-trivial projects is this complex, also, but I rarely see a "software engineer" that admits it or even is aware of it. That is why most software still sucks.
The most accurate portrayal of a computer has to be when the little girl says: "I know this, this is UNIX" - Jurassic Park.
How about the fat guy who was personally responsible for millions of lines of code...that ran some doors and controlled a fence.
First "Extreme Programming", now "Scrum". Yuck.
the daily meetings actually were good for me
Ugh, nothing is worse than wasting the equivalent of a whole day per week in meetings. They never last "just fifteen minutes," and the result is often a ad-hoc design-by-committee project, where no one has the guts to commit to anything.
Actually, yes, these people are constantly re-evaluating their process because their time-to-market requirements are constantly getting tighter and tighter. Just read Business Week for six months and follow the changes in the auto industry through their articles: they are all about faster, faster, and listen-to-the-customer constant process-reengineering, with CEO ans design heads being hired and fired depending on how well they can make theri human- and machine-assembly-lines line up and fire.
The difference is that the auto industry takes this stuff very seriously and there is often committment from the top executives on down. They incorporate their engineering practices as a core part of their business. They understand the value of engineering and good processes.
The same is far from true in most software firms. Many software engineering managers are just transplants from other parts of the company. They often have little experience or training. They often think in terms of buzzwords rather than fundamental concepts. They often screw up.
...now I find they are "big-plug" keyboards.
Uh, don't quote me on that one. I'd hate to be the start of another irritating yet popular misnomer.
I recently booted up a 486-DX2 system that I had in the closet. The processor seemed okay, but I couldn't get over the 3400RPM hard drive (yuck).
Even on todays GHz machines, the hard drive still crawls (but a little faster at 7200RPM). The processors are so damn fast now that the disks are just shameful.
He can probably do his job fine on a 600mhz machine or less and companies know this.
One interesting side-effect of this is the spectrum of device interfaces seen in an office (and causing headaches for the staff). big-plug, PS2, & USB keyboards. Parallel, network, and USB printers. Serial, PS2, and USB mice. Parallel, serial, SCSI, IDE, USB, and Firewire scanners, Zip drives, CD drives, etc. The last six years has really cluttered offices with lots of working (often expensive, too) but plug-incompatible stuff. How's that for efficiency.
Year 2050.
You're making the assumption that Microsoft will even be around in 2050. My bet is that they'll fall off their pedestal long before that, because no company can screw its customers forever. Even the tobacco companies are struggling, now, once the public got smart and sued their asses off (sure, it took decades, but it did happen). I think a similar thing will eventually happen in the software industry--it's just that the public base of knowledge takes a long time to build up and act on that knowledge.
I find that once this happens, system performance takes a distinct hit.
Perhaps Apple could learn a few lessons from Solaris. Solaris allows any number of swap partitions and swap files to be combined into the system's virtual memory. There doesn't appear to be a performance degradation (at least that I've seen), and the OS can take advantage of any multiple disk/multiple controller situations for possibly even a performance boost.
Mac IE doesn't work on anything but Macs (and is a completely separate codebase to Win IE)
If it truly is a separate code base, then that is just another indication how badly software engineering is done within Microsoft. What a waste of good human talent to do the same web browser twice!
However, professionals certainly have no excuse for the problems mentioned so far.
The sad thing is that most people who choose only Microsoft software really do think of themselves as professionals. They think "playing with the big boys" is the professional thing to do, even when it is counterproductive.
I wish I understood why the same people who would bitch about non-standard wheels for their car or off-voltage wiring in their house have no problem bending over for Microsoft. It really is a psychological deficiency.
No mention of any of this in the detailed description of what they'd fixed.
The gritty details generally are left out of any end-user documentation. For any complex system like a UNIX kernel, there will be hundreds or perhaps thousands of bug fixes from one release to another. Even Solaris, among the top ranks of UNIX, has many many fixes listed in their patch reports. It's just that Solaris is mature enough that very few people actually see those bugs, and Max OS X is on its way towards that sort of maturity--it'll just take some time.
Whenever a unix system starts swapping memory out to disk it's gonna slow down. I keep an eye on the number of swap files - when it goes from one to two...
It seems odd that Mac OS X would resort to creating multiple swap files and, then, allow cruft to build up in them. That is very unlike my experience with other UNIX; it seems much more like Windows. It appears that there must be memory leaks or other types of object leaks that collect like dust bunnies in the swap files.
I'm not necessarily knocking Apple in this, as I've seen how hard it is to deal with memory leaks in C programs. However, it may indicate that they either use malloc() directly too often without adding leak-detecting code or tools.
I havent bought an Ubi game since PoR, nor do I plan on ever buying another Ubi game again.
Myst 3 seemed pretty good. It provided an interesting environment to play in and had very challenging puzzles. Finished it in a week, though.
Some editing tricks perhaps?
I've seen the show a few times, and occasionally one team's machine or whatever is really a joke (i.e., the team's original strategy failed and the deadline really bit them in the ass). There was one episode where they built rockets: one team designed a fundamentally unstable rocket that looked like crap and flopped on launch--they obviously had run out of time.
One thing I realized recently is that telemarketing and SPAM are evidence that societies don't always scale well. Massive amounts of telemarketing and SPAM have actually made our society less efficient and have been facilitated by the same technology intended to help us all out. Very interesting.
It's sort of like the evolution of parasites but in a technological ecosystem.
The problem with this being done at the federal level is the amount of lobbying that will take place for special exemptions (political campaigns, charities, etc.).
The sad thing is that the charities are the sleaziest of them all!
"Do you think it is important to (support|stop) X?"
"Sure."
"Would you like to donate Y?"
"No."
(they set you up to make you feel like a hypocrite; i.e., they are scum)
I've worked on many projects, particularly with the big consultancies, that use waterfall-type methodologies that fail.
There is generally no such thing as a true waterfall in a real project. When one occurs is usually an indication of design by committee and bureaucracy, where the project is doomed regardless of methodology.
I really think latching onto a branded methodology, such as XP or RUP or Waterfall or whatever, for a project is the wrong approach, because it is only good management that makes XP or RUP or Waterfall or whatever work in the first place. The methods themselves are for informational purposes only. They can influence a managerial approach, but anyone exclaiming, "We follow XP methodologies," just looks silly and will invoke resistence from the more cynical team members.
Good managers avoid thinking and speaking in terms of such buzzword methodologies, but they also freely admit that they learned something from those methodologies and applied what they learned to their own approach. Good arguments beat buzzwords when trying to convice the skeptics and cynics among us.
Whilst I agree with most of your points that last analogy is just utterly ridiculous, unless you happen to have evidence of Bill Gates sponsoring killings.
I knew someone would reply like this. See the other reply to my post.
MS is taking ideas from Apple again.
Yes, but anything from Apple is wide open compared to the XBox 2.
Apple: PowerPC, PCI, Firewire, USB, IDE, SCSI, OpenBoot PROM, etc. etc. XBox 2: who knows?
But if the example given above is not unethically leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (web browsers) to gain unearned market share in another totally unrelated area (news services) then i don't know what is.
MS + MSNBC + MSN = one big conflict of interest.