The innards may well be crap. If it works, who cares?
The poor sod who's been given the job of making the innards do something different, that's who cares. Never mind, I got paid several times as much as I would have earned for doing the same job on a decent code base, because it took me several times as long to make it work and I wasn't daft enough to quote fixed price for working on code like that!!
The article mentions a thing called Konqueror. I have had occasion to look at the source code for Konqueror and the bits I had to work with were complete and utter crap (OK, so maybe not the absolute worst code I've ever seen, but still many millions of miles from being the best).
So, the "robust, transparent functionality" that the story talks about excludes this Konqueror thingy, does it, or what?
... is that the retailer is responsible for what they sell - after all it is the retailer that has the contract with the punter, not the manufacturer. The punter cannot sue the manufacturer because they have no contract with the manufacturer.
If the manufacturer chooses to offer some sort of warranty to either the retailer and/or the punter that's up to them; they don't have to, it's a free market.
If the retailer doesn't want to bear the costs of remedying crap products that they sell they have a very simple solution... refrain from selling crap products.
For a programmer or a hobbyist or a hacker or a sysadmin, Windows is an infinitely worse OS.
Er, the "better" OS for a sysadmin is that which is more likely to keep her in work, surely to goodness?
Whilst many sysadmins can earn a living doing Windows only, and an increasing number find it useful to know Linux as well, the job market for Linux-only sysadmins who refuse to touch Windows is still pretty tiny. If you have such a job and your employer goes down the tubes the scope for finding another such job within a bicycle ride of where you live is somewhat limited in most parts of the world.
... but in the USA the answer is simply guns, surely?
For a slashdot specific answer:
Rig up lots of webcams, connect them to a Linux box with some open source motion detection software, and set off the mines in the front lawn and the machine guns when anything is detected.
So maybe you'll kill a few "innocent" people by accident. No problem, the American courts will let you off no trouble, and besides nobody "innocent" would be out walking anyway, would they.
... kicked the living *ass* out of Windows. And that's in spite of the fact that she didn't have working email...
Precisely the sort of gibberish one is used to from Linux weenies. In English:
"This Linux thing didn't actually work, and Windows did actually work, but my religion tells me that Linux was still better, even if the end result was totally and utterly useless for the specified task."
(Email under Windows? Go find a free email client, whether Microsoft's or someone else's, who cares, download, install, It Just Works.)
... would be a hand-crafted real time kernel, written in assembler, running on an IBM 360 mainframe - isn't that still what drives critical aviation systems?
... is that they don't allow you to use the easiest possible filter, which is that if I get an email from someone I don't do business with (eg, in my case, paypal) it's guaranteed fraud, I don't actually have to read it to decide, it just goes in the bin unread with the rest of the spam.
What the Oracle guy said was key, that if a software company can target a restricted range of kit, rather than every possible third party gizmo and buggy driver that can be installed under Windows, they've got a vastly easier job.
For some software applications it makes sense to refuse to ship the software on its own and insist on giving away free hardware with the deal, with the operating system of your choice (it isn't really going to matter which operating system) fully configured and installed. That way you know what the client is running your software on, you've tested it, and you've got an identical setup back in the lab to research problems on, and you know it isn't going to crash because the client's box is running some crap driver you've never heard of.
Hasn't most software either stayed the same price or is now more expensive
Er, no. Remember the early low functionality word processors and spreadsheets at GBP400 each? You can now get equivalent functionality in freeware or shareware, or a fully functional commercial office suite for less than the original price of a single application. And that's in cash terms, factor in inflation and the prices have come down still further.
Another example. Remember renting database servers for tens of thousands per month? Then somebody (better not mention their name here) came up with a different pricing model and you could have a server for a few hundred, and that was a single payment not a rental.
If the names of the authors had been on there it would have been fun? frightening? to see how many of them one actually knew.
Don't run applications written in Java!
on
Is Swap Necessary?
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· Score: 1
Then you won't have anything using hundreds or thousands of megabytes in a pathological fashion for a tiny little GUI and you don't need to worry about lack of memory on a modern machine.
For anyone who doesn't know, Lembit Opik[1] (Google will tell you all you want to know about him) was very largely responsible for getting this issue onto the political agenda.
Last time I was in the same room as him he was asked "OK, now you've got the politicians taking this seriously, when we spot one of these beggars coming towards us what do we do about it?"
His reply was that that wasn't his area of expertise; once politicians were taking the threat seriously they'd allocate money to the scientists and engineers, and a solution, if one were possible at all, was a done deal.
His lecture on how he got the politicians to take him seriously is well worth listening to; but actually I've found him rather good as a comic lecturer on several other subjects as well.
[1] Oh, and I'm sure slashdot geeks knew already that the "Oort cloud" is just shorthand for the "Oort-Opik cloud".
QA software testers & coders will cry out in anguish over this.....more work for them to do
I don't think the will "cry out in anguish" if they've got any sense. In today's market they'll jump for joy, knowing that their jobs are safe for another few months.
Surely we've all read them on the BBC site first?? - after all, we only come to slashdot when looking for light entertainment after reading all the real news.
Sturgeon's Revelation
on
Singularity Sky
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· Score: 3, Informative
"There's really no reason to use it anymore,"... Today it's largely the province of ham radio operators
Er, and radio navaids, there are still quite a lot of those around, and quite a lot of aeroplanes flying around listening to them.
"TITS":
- tune - identify (ie listen for the Morse code bleeps and make sure you've tuned the right navaid) - test - um, nobody can remember what the S stands for.
This would be in America. right?
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Even the 911 caller would likely not distinguish a blocked/jammed call from a normal "no service" area.
This would be in America, right? In much of the rest of the world there is no concept of "a normal no-service area". Somewhere you can't get service is abnormal.
Slashdot Mirror
The innards may well be crap. If it works, who cares?
The poor sod who's been given the job of making the innards do something different, that's who cares. Never mind, I got paid several times as much as I would have earned for doing the same job on a decent code base, because it took me several times as long to make it work and I wasn't daft enough to quote fixed price for working on code like that!!
The article mentions a thing called Konqueror. I have had occasion to look at the source code for Konqueror and the bits I had to work with were complete and utter crap (OK, so maybe not the absolute worst code I've ever seen, but still many millions of miles from being the best).
So, the "robust, transparent functionality" that the story talks about excludes this Konqueror thingy, does it, or what?
... is that the retailer is responsible for what they sell - after all it is the retailer that has the contract with the punter, not the manufacturer. The punter cannot sue the manufacturer because they have no contract with the manufacturer.
... refrain from selling crap products.
If the manufacturer chooses to offer some sort of warranty to either the retailer and/or the punter that's up to them; they don't have to, it's a free market.
If the retailer doesn't want to bear the costs of remedying crap products that they sell they have a very simple solution
When will the media get this right??
There is no way Star Wars is sci-fi. It's space opera (and third rate at that).
For a programmer or a hobbyist or a hacker or a sysadmin, Windows is an infinitely worse OS.
Er, the "better" OS for a sysadmin is that which is more likely to keep her in work, surely to goodness?
Whilst many sysadmins can earn a living doing Windows only, and an increasing number find it useful to know Linux as well, the job market for Linux-only sysadmins who refuse to touch Windows is still pretty tiny. If you have such a job and your employer goes down the tubes the scope for finding another such job within a bicycle ride of where you live is somewhat limited in most parts of the world.
... but in the USA the answer is simply guns, surely?
For a slashdot specific answer:
Rig up lots of webcams, connect them to a Linux box with some open source motion detection software, and set off the mines in the front lawn and the machine guns when anything is detected.
So maybe you'll kill a few "innocent" people by accident. No problem, the American courts will let you off no trouble, and besides nobody "innocent" would be out walking anyway, would they.
... that would get moderated "Flamebait"?
It's like sticking your fingers in your ears and going "na na na na na" when you don't want to hear something, isn't it.
... kicked the living *ass* out of Windows. And that's in spite of the fact that she didn't have working email...
Precisely the sort of gibberish one is used to from Linux weenies. In English:
"This Linux thing didn't actually work, and Windows did actually work, but my religion tells me that Linux was still better, even if the end result was totally and utterly useless for the specified task."
(Email under Windows? Go find a free email client, whether Microsoft's or someone else's, who cares, download, install, It Just Works.)
... would be a hand-crafted real time kernel, written in assembler, running on an IBM 360 mainframe - isn't that still what drives critical aviation systems?
... is that they don't allow you to use the easiest possible filter, which is that if I get an email from someone I don't do business with (eg, in my case, paypal) it's guaranteed fraud, I don't actually have to read it to decide, it just goes in the bin unread with the rest of the spam.
What the Oracle guy said was key, that if a software company can target a restricted range of kit, rather than every possible third party gizmo and buggy driver that can be installed under Windows, they've got a vastly easier job.
For some software applications it makes sense to refuse to ship the software on its own and insist on giving away free hardware with the deal, with the operating system of your choice (it isn't really going to matter which operating system) fully configured and installed. That way you know what the client is running your software on, you've tested it, and you've got an identical setup back in the lab to research problems on, and you know it isn't going to crash because the client's box is running some crap driver you've never heard of.
Hasn't most software either stayed the same price or is now more expensive
Er, no. Remember the early low functionality word processors and spreadsheets at GBP400 each? You can now get equivalent functionality in freeware or shareware, or a fully functional commercial office suite for less than the original price of a single application. And that's in cash terms, factor in inflation and the prices have come down still further.
Another example. Remember renting database servers for tens of thousands per month? Then somebody (better not mention their name here) came up with a different pricing model and you could have a server for a few hundred, and that was a single payment not a rental.
If the names of the authors had been on there it would have been fun? frightening? to see how many of them one actually knew.
Then you won't have anything using hundreds or thousands of megabytes in a pathological fashion for a tiny little GUI and you don't need to worry about lack of memory on a modern machine.
Haven't they got lives to get on with?
...
Ah, let's see, this is slashdot we're discussing this on
Dealing with burglars puts up the cost of Windows. I need to spend extra on secure frames, locks, sacrificial edgings, insurance policies ...
I know! I'll just stop using Windows, and brick up the holes! That'll make my life better won't it!
You forget:
...)
Grown-up says: -1 Troll - Of course if Linux were as popular as Windows then all the worms would be ported to Linux
(... and I await this getting -1 Troll, let's see how many minutes
For anyone who doesn't know, Lembit Opik[1] (Google will tell you all you want to know about him) was very largely responsible for getting this issue onto the political agenda.
Last time I was in the same room as him he was asked "OK, now you've got the politicians taking this seriously, when we spot one of these beggars coming towards us what do we do about it?"
His reply was that that wasn't his area of expertise; once politicians were taking the threat seriously they'd allocate money to the scientists and engineers, and a solution, if one were possible at all, was a done deal.
His lecture on how he got the politicians to take him seriously is well worth listening to; but actually I've found him rather good as a comic lecturer on several other subjects as well.
[1] Oh, and I'm sure slashdot geeks knew already that the "Oort cloud" is just shorthand for the "Oort-Opik cloud".
... one can say: "Only in England"
Modded as "Funny"??!*!
Only on slashdot. But then slashdot wouldn't have a mod category for "sound commercial sense", would it?
QA software testers & coders will cry out in anguish over this.....more work for them to do
I don't think the will "cry out in anguish" if they've got any sense. In today's market they'll jump for joy, knowing that their jobs are safe for another few months.
Surely we've all read them on the BBC site first?? - after all, we only come to slashdot when looking for light entertainment after reading all the real news.
Grew up and realised that:
most science fiction sucked
Yes, of course.
May I refer you to Sturgeon's Revelation.
"There's really no reason to use it anymore," ... Today it's largely the province of ham radio operators
Er, and radio navaids, there are still quite a lot of those around, and quite a lot of aeroplanes flying around listening to them.
"TITS":
- tune
- identify (ie listen for the Morse code bleeps and make sure you've tuned the right navaid)
- test
- um, nobody can remember what the S stands for.
Even the 911 caller would likely not distinguish a blocked/jammed call from a normal "no service" area.
This would be in America, right? In much of the rest of the world there is no concept of "a normal no-service area". Somewhere you can't get service is abnormal.