So you're saying that no one out there is still buying copies of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I can walk into Wal-Mart and pick that one up, not to mention, go to Amazon and buy pretty much any movie I want. Even films like All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie made 80 years ago, where all of the people involved in the production are now dead. How is that not indefinitely, for all intents and purposes?
Basically, it boils down to: it belongs to whomever can defend it. That's the way it works on Earth-- I don't think that'll change on the Moon, or on Mars. Lobbing rocks at Earth, anyone?
Anyone who invests in lunar real estate before any kind of lunar authority is established, backed up by force, is an idiot.
Not to mention-- even if he gets royalties, it's probably not going to be the same kind of sweet deal that actors get. Video games are different than movies in one important respect: a good movie will continue to sell indefinitely, and this is where royalties really pay off. This is rare for a video game. Even if you want to keep playing the game, you have to deal with obsolescence of the hardware and software. MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter was one of my favorite all-time games. Assuming if I can get it to run correctly in an emulator, forget about hooking up my old Gravis Analog joystick-- I don't even have a port for it on my computer anymore!
Microsoft used to rely on file format lock-in as a sales tool, but it seems now compatibility and (gasp) quality are Microsoft's selling points for Office. Watch the next step be the ability to switch back to menus instead of the toolbar.
That's because nobody bought Office 2003. We were all too busy rolling out Office 2002.
As a side note, we still don't use 2003 or 2007 (still on 2002, thanks), but if we want new copies, our Microsoft rep cheerfully tells us that if we buy 2007 licenses, they are backward-compatible to allow us to use 2002 instead. They do this with pretty much all of their software, so take their sales figures with a grain of salt.
Do you work down the hall or something? That is exactly the story here. I didn't grow up impoverished or anything, but when I started here, I found I had this strange tendency to stuff all available food into my face. Once I realized I was doing that, I cut out the meeting leftovers. Seems like they order cheesecake every day.
I say all this as I reach into the tub of cookies my girlfriend baked me for work...;^)
I eat out at work pretty much every day, owing to the fact that I run to work pretty much every day. 6 miles of bouncing in a running backpack tends to turn all but the most unappetizing food into something... unappetizing. Eating out doesn't stop you from making good food choices-- what it does do, though, is cost you more.
Speaking of Apple, has anyone ever noticed that under Mac OS X, there isn't even a built-in function to remove an application? At least Windows pretends to. And before you mention, "just drag the application icon to the trash"-- what about the dotfiles, preferences, tempfiles, and other miscellaneous shit that applications spew around the system? E.g., Dreamweaver, the only application I've found so far to be completely unmanageable with radmind, thanks to these assholes?
And those people would be wrong. IT is a perfect place where applications of quality control skills, failure analysis skills, team organization, and complex systems modeling would benefit. The reason engineers look down their noses at IT is because, for now, IT is mostly manageable without those skills, and, having grown up in a family of engineers, I can say without hesitiation that newly-minted engineers are encouraged to be snobs. But give it 10-20 years and I suspect IT will be a different place.
Actually, the problem with corporations is that they remove the most serious repercussions for bad decisions. In fact, that is the point of a corporate entity: to shield the people making decisions from the law. Let's face it: people are the ones making illegal or unethical decisions, not some fictitious "legal person". So that allows you to have HP's board members engaging in identity fraud, Microsoft's board engaging in monopolistic practices, the banking industry engaging in financial fraud, and when it all comes out, oops, it's the company's fault. The company won't do it again! Meanwhile ignoring the fact that a company is only a collection of people.
Put an American in almost any European city and they will start using public transport, because it is easier than dealing with a car. Which is an interesting point. I think that the reason why cars became the dominant mode of transport in the U.S. is simply because we didn't face the same kind of resource constraints that our European friends did. Not to mention, Europe had an "opportunity" to rebuild itself intelligently after being pretty much obliterated in the first half of the 20th century.
Last time I checked, an "operating system" was not just a kernel. So yes, I definitely lump the userland in with that term. Tell me, what distribution of Windows comes without or is even useable without COM?
But the author also points out that his measure of "quality" is limited. From the paper:
Other methodological limitations of this study are the small number of (admittedly large and important) systems studied, the language specificity of the employed metrics, and the coverage of only maintainability and portability from the space of all software quality attributes. This last limitation means that the study fails to take into account the large and important set of quality attributes that are typically determined at runtime: functionality, reliability, usability, and efficiency. However, these missing attributes are affected by configuration, tuning, and workload selection. Studying them would introduce additional subjective criteria. The controversy surrounding studies comparing competing operating systems in areas like security or performance demonstrates the difficulty of such approaches. From the end-user perspective functionality, reliability, usability, and efficiency are pretty much the entire thing. Most users couldn't care less that a piece of software is hard to maintain as long as it does what he wants reliably, consistently, and with a minimal amount of cognitive load. So this paper is aimed more at applying traditional software engineering metrics to four pieces of real-world software. The outcome *should* show little difference, since all four of these pieces of software are used in mission-critical applications. It would be surprising if one or more of them were not at all in the same ballpark, but it is nonetheless interesting that very different software development styles basically create products with roughly the same mesaures, e.g., modularity.
With regard to the guy who went crazy and drove his motorcycle across the country-- I think the point of the book was to demonstrate that "subjective" and "objective" are specious terms. Science gets all hot and bothered when words like "good" and "bad" are used, but not when words like "point" are used. So if we can make allowances for axiomatic terms, why not so-called "qualitative" terms? After all, the word "axiom" means, according to Wikipedia:
The word "axiom" comes from the Greek word axioma a verbal noun from the verb axioein, meaning "to deem worthy", but also "to require", which in turn comes from axios, meaning "being in balance", and hence "having (the same) value (as)", "worthy", "proper". Among the ancient Greek philosophers an axiom was a claim which could be seen to be true without any need for proof. Indeed, if you look at many of our "quantitative" measures, they are, at their heart, a formalization of "goodness" and "badness". If you're a mathematician, you might argue that this is not true (since there are loads of mathematical constructs whose only requirement is simply self-consistency and not some conformance to any external phenomenon), but if you're an engineer, you're whole career balances on the fine points of "goodness" and "badness". It is an essential concept!
My personal opinion is that if statistics are a wash-out in general, then the researcher is asking the wrong questions. I know that the author pre-defined his metrics in order to avoid bias, but that's not necessarily good science. Scientific questions should be directed toward answering specific questions, and the investigatory process must allow the scientist to ask new questions based on new data.
There is clear non-anecdotal evidence that these operating systems behave differently (and, additionally, we assign a qualitative meaning to this behavior), so the question as I understand it is: is this a result of the development style of the OS programmers? The author should seek to answer that question as unambiguously as possible. If the answer to that question is "it is unclear", then the author should have gone back and asked more questions before he published his paper, because all he has shown is that the investigatory techniques he used are ill-suited to answering the question he posed.
It's not a very good summary, but the paper is well-written, which is interesting considering that the author is the one who submitted the summary to Slashdot. I suspect that he assumes we have more familiarity with the subject than we actually do.
What OS you run DOES NOT = LESS or MORE security at this point from an OS architectual standpoint unless you have an older OS without security inherently designed at the core level. (Like Win9x, OS/2, System 9 earlier) You're kidding, right? Or are we supposed to assume that Windows "core level" does not include COM?
It's called a slide rule, and no, I meant a real ruler. A slide rule is actually a calculating device. They're quite good at their particular problem domain, and accurate enough for a lot of things. My father (a former physicist) uses his when he does carpentry.
Anyway, the point about the ruler being-- this is basically the same thing as zebra stripes, so they are obviously useful.
Good point, and here's another: her tables are not nearly large enough. I'd like to see the author add a "scale" component to her study. Striping on small tables may have a negligible benefit, but on large tables, I think you'll see something significant. Maybe the obviousness of this benefit is lost on people now that we have fast computers-- after all, a fast computer can look up table data (or heck, compute it directly) a lot faster than you can, so I expect that really big tables aren't so common anymore. But flip open any mathematics textbook printed before the 1980's, and there are plenty of huge tables in them. Ruler required.
But not only that-- this also means that any method we have for producing electrical power is a candidate for powering vehicles. So large solar arrays, wind farms, hydropower, geothermal power, trash incinerators, and [whatever else] all gain the ability to power our transportation network. This allows us to diversify our energy consumption, making it less likely in the future that our economic stability will depend on those-who-control-the-oil.
OK, I should have added that I will not watch Clint act alongside monkeys, or, say, red wagons. My brain may be fried, but there is such a thing as "too dumb".
Thing is-- in order to solve these problems with SMTP, we simply need to break backward compatibility. It's the fact that SMTP continues to allow a lowest-common-denominator kind of communication that enables people to abuse email. The next standard should use mutual authentication to prevent spoofing (maybe ala MIT's PGP key repository), encryption to prevent hijacking (and evesdropping), and all of the other tricks employed by modern network protocols to keep them working properly. I don't think incremental improvements to SMTP will ever solve SMTP's shortcomings, as long as people need to be able to receive email from any old non-compliant sender.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that no one out there is still buying copies of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I can walk into Wal-Mart and pick that one up, not to mention, go to Amazon and buy pretty much any movie I want. Even films like All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie made 80 years ago, where all of the people involved in the production are now dead. How is that not indefinitely, for all intents and purposes?
Basically, it boils down to: it belongs to whomever can defend it. That's the way it works on Earth-- I don't think that'll change on the Moon, or on Mars. Lobbing rocks at Earth, anyone?
Anyone who invests in lunar real estate before any kind of lunar authority is established, backed up by force, is an idiot.
Not to mention-- even if he gets royalties, it's probably not going to be the same kind of sweet deal that actors get. Video games are different than movies in one important respect: a good movie will continue to sell indefinitely, and this is where royalties really pay off. This is rare for a video game. Even if you want to keep playing the game, you have to deal with obsolescence of the hardware and software. MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter was one of my favorite all-time games. Assuming if I can get it to run correctly in an emulator, forget about hooking up my old Gravis Analog joystick-- I don't even have a port for it on my computer anymore!
Nope.
That's because nobody bought Office 2003. We were all too busy rolling out Office 2002.
As a side note, we still don't use 2003 or 2007 (still on 2002, thanks), but if we want new copies, our Microsoft rep cheerfully tells us that if we buy 2007 licenses, they are backward-compatible to allow us to use 2002 instead. They do this with pretty much all of their software, so take their sales figures with a grain of salt.
Ah, the old embrace-erection-extinguish play, for use when Microsoft is done fucking around.
Do you work down the hall or something? That is exactly the story here. I didn't grow up impoverished or anything, but when I started here, I found I had this strange tendency to stuff all available food into my face. Once I realized I was doing that, I cut out the meeting leftovers. Seems like they order cheesecake every day.
;^)
I say all this as I reach into the tub of cookies my girlfriend baked me for work...
I eat out at work pretty much every day, owing to the fact that I run to work pretty much every day. 6 miles of bouncing in a running backpack tends to turn all but the most unappetizing food into something... unappetizing. Eating out doesn't stop you from making good food choices-- what it does do, though, is cost you more.
Awesome tip. Thank you.
Speaking of Apple, has anyone ever noticed that under Mac OS X, there isn't even a built-in function to remove an application? At least Windows pretends to. And before you mention, "just drag the application icon to the trash"-- what about the dotfiles, preferences, tempfiles, and other miscellaneous shit that applications spew around the system? E.g., Dreamweaver, the only application I've found so far to be completely unmanageable with radmind, thanks to these assholes?
And those people would be wrong. IT is a perfect place where applications of quality control skills, failure analysis skills, team organization, and complex systems modeling would benefit. The reason engineers look down their noses at IT is because, for now, IT is mostly manageable without those skills, and, having grown up in a family of engineers, I can say without hesitiation that newly-minted engineers are encouraged to be snobs. But give it 10-20 years and I suspect IT will be a different place.
Actually, the problem with corporations is that they remove the most serious repercussions for bad decisions. In fact, that is the point of a corporate entity: to shield the people making decisions from the law. Let's face it: people are the ones making illegal or unethical decisions, not some fictitious "legal person". So that allows you to have HP's board members engaging in identity fraud, Microsoft's board engaging in monopolistic practices, the banking industry engaging in financial fraud, and when it all comes out, oops, it's the company's fault. The company won't do it again! Meanwhile ignoring the fact that a company is only a collection of people.
Last time I checked, an "operating system" was not just a kernel. So yes, I definitely lump the userland in with that term. Tell me, what distribution of Windows comes without or is even useable without COM?
My personal opinion is that if statistics are a wash-out in general, then the researcher is asking the wrong questions. I know that the author pre-defined his metrics in order to avoid bias, but that's not necessarily good science. Scientific questions should be directed toward answering specific questions, and the investigatory process must allow the scientist to ask new questions based on new data.
There is clear non-anecdotal evidence that these operating systems behave differently (and, additionally, we assign a qualitative meaning to this behavior), so the question as I understand it is: is this a result of the development style of the OS programmers? The author should seek to answer that question as unambiguously as possible. If the answer to that question is "it is unclear", then the author should have gone back and asked more questions before he published his paper, because all he has shown is that the investigatory techniques he used are ill-suited to answering the question he posed.
It's not a very good summary, but the paper is well-written, which is interesting considering that the author is the one who submitted the summary to Slashdot. I suspect that he assumes we have more familiarity with the subject than we actually do.
Maybe you could tell me how you did that instead of calling names.
It's called a slide rule, and no, I meant a real ruler. A slide rule is actually a calculating device. They're quite good at their particular problem domain, and accurate enough for a lot of things. My father (a former physicist) uses his when he does carpentry.
Anyway, the point about the ruler being-- this is basically the same thing as zebra stripes, so they are obviously useful.
Good point, and here's another: her tables are not nearly large enough. I'd like to see the author add a "scale" component to her study. Striping on small tables may have a negligible benefit, but on large tables, I think you'll see something significant. Maybe the obviousness of this benefit is lost on people now that we have fast computers-- after all, a fast computer can look up table data (or heck, compute it directly) a lot faster than you can, so I expect that really big tables aren't so common anymore. But flip open any mathematics textbook printed before the 1980's, and there are plenty of huge tables in them. Ruler required.
But not only that-- this also means that any method we have for producing electrical power is a candidate for powering vehicles. So large solar arrays, wind farms, hydropower, geothermal power, trash incinerators, and [whatever else] all gain the ability to power our transportation network. This allows us to diversify our energy consumption, making it less likely in the future that our economic stability will depend on those-who-control-the-oil.
OK, I should have added that I will not watch Clint act alongside monkeys, or, say, red wagons. My brain may be fried, but there is such a thing as "too dumb".
Thing is-- in order to solve these problems with SMTP, we simply need to break backward compatibility. It's the fact that SMTP continues to allow a lowest-common-denominator kind of communication that enables people to abuse email. The next standard should use mutual authentication to prevent spoofing (maybe ala MIT's PGP key repository), encryption to prevent hijacking (and evesdropping), and all of the other tricks employed by modern network protocols to keep them working properly. I don't think incremental improvements to SMTP will ever solve SMTP's shortcomings, as long as people need to be able to receive email from any old non-compliant sender.