You are forgetting politics: I have been explicitly told Your estimates are unacceptable - they will have to be halved!
Others have mentioned "creeping featureism".
There is also the "event Horizon" - When faced with a project of infinite size, people will tend towards an estimate that is based on their idea of how long it takes to solve an infinite problem. For a salesman, this is a couple of days. For a typical manager, a couple of weeks. For an engineer, a couple of months.
For estimates to be meaningful, the work has to be divided into units which you can guarantee will never exceed your event horizon.
I have managed many successful estimates on large (over one year, more than 5 people) projects, based on the method that it needs an average of two weeks to implement, document and test, any feature of the project you can identify before the project starts.
By "feature" I mean explicit bit of behaviour by the code eg "ack an inbound packet", "echo the character on the serial line". I know any amount of people who can code this in 3 minutes in perl or whatever. That is not the same as developing supportable code. All loops have to be unwound, all nesting flattened. Every level of the heirarchy has to be accounted for serially.
Let me introduce Dr Spin's 2:1 Law:Supportable code needs 2kg of paperwork per byte of executable code. Includes minutes of meetings, sketches on envelopes. (Most of it is binned, but it still has to be created).
Obviously you have never even seen a help desk. People really DO phone and say
"My keyboard doesnt have an ANY key"
"Which is the LEFT mouse button again?"
Yesterday, I had someone complain that some of the text was off the screen. Five years using a computer, and she dis not know about horizontal scroll bars!
Its true - you don't actually need a brain to use Windows!
I believe the number of man years the project takes can be increased by code inspections, but having sat through a few, I am less convinced that errors will be reduced.
As others have said already, bad programmers prouce ad code. Goodd programmers cost money. Unemployed programmers produce freeware/open source.
Programmers who produce really dismal code are probably unemployable, but there is no law against them shipping freeware/open source.
I have just wasted three hours trying to install some commercial software over a network that was so defective I gave up. So you pays your money and takes your choice, but I'd rather have free crap than pay good money for shite.
These people probably find it hard to lock their front door too, but after a couple of VCRs have gone missing, they'll get the message.
Sure I want my credit card details held by M$, then "Grabbet & Runne Inc, Shoplifters to the unsuspecting" can open an account with M$ and find out who to burgle, and which credit card numbers to use when pulling a scam at the bank.
I know you are a troll, but in case anyone doesn't:
FreeBSD is used by the majority of ISPs, as it is extremely stable and reliable, and offers high performance. Its also free, unlike M$ products. NetBSD is widely used, by (a) hobbyists, because it runs on most anything from a PDA to elderly big iron like Vax 11/750, and (b) people who want a gateway/firewall on a small machine.
OpenBSD is secure, but usage is pretty marginal, partly because Theo De Raat makes enemies faster than he writes code (and thats fast!)
Sure ownership of FreeBSD changes minute by minute - that is at least in part because its not very relevant to anyone who owns it. Its source is more open than Linux. Not only its not dying, its not actually possible to kill it. So long as I or anyone else has the source on a hard disk, it lives. FreeBSD probably supports more hardware than Linux, and has almost always supported new hardware sooner than Linux.
The poster obviously believes the myth that there will soon be only one OS in the world, and that will probably be WinXP. Ask a Mac user (OSX IS FreeBSD with a new UI) will he be switching to WinXP? No chance. Its far more likely that the world will switch to OSX just as soon as its ported to Intel architecture.
Its pretty easy to explain... most lawyers are of the same calibre as the support people who say "just reformat the hard disk, and reinstall windows" when the problem is that the mouse needs cleaning.
And the people who employ them respect them because they wear expensive clothes.
All those open source apps will run on OSX without any problem. If your kit's too old, use NetBSD. Either way, it will be easier and more reliable than Linux.
The only obvious reason for Linux on a PPC is the recursive one - you are developing Linux for the PPC!
Real nerds use *BSD - and flame everyone who doesn't:-)
Its OK, MS can't do this- it would certianly be illegal as well as immoral.... Outside of the USA, even clauses forbidding reverse engineering are illegal.
Thats another reason why Linux got going in Finland, while BSD didn't in the USA.
Anyway,
Computer history teaches us that first time users can be sold any amount of overpriced sh*te. After they have been badly burned, they wise up. Mainframes did it - IBM nearly died as a result of a sales plan based on kicking the sh*te out of their customers. Minis did it - where is DEC now? DG? Prime?. The PC has brought 100 million suckers to the market. Next time they upgrade, they will do it to get a feature they can USE. Easier access to viruses probably is not it.
Non technical users keep asking me "why do I get these messages about my programs committing immoral acts?" I tell them its because they were fool enough to buy programs from Microsoft. Maybe they should consider alternative suppliers.
I still wonder how, with the infinite pool of developers that is open-source, how comes kde is not as slick as Win95? and gnome won't install on anything ever, and includes virtually every piece of open source ever written in its dependencies.
I cannot see any reason why an optical bus would
save heat, have better bandwidth or be faster than
copper.
Losses in copper buses are not high, and drivers and receivers for copper are always going to be more efficient than drivers and receivers for light. A connection from a driver to copper or from copper to receiver is nothing. To or from light needs a significant effort. Opto drivers and receivers are normally either slow or expensive. And will sure as hell need power.
For a patent to be valid it has to be non-obvious to a practitioner of the relevant field".
Since this is totally obvious to anyone who has ever used such primative junk as dBase IV, indeed the dBase IV code generator could be easily modified to do this, the "patent" is worthless.
If I was an IBM shareholder, I'd be seriously p*ssed at the pointless wasting of dosh.
If a US tax payer, I'd be asking what the "patent examiners" were doing, when they should have been doing what they are paid to do.
Even if this patent happened to stand in the USA, it wouldn't work elsewhere, so you can write your sript+templates jobbie in another country, and then make it accessable to the US by putting it on a web site:-)
I have a rotary engine invention too. I have discussed it with people from several likely manufacturers = the verdict is - "We don't want any new technology, even if its better than what we've got - we've spent a lot of money on cenventional engines, and we are happy with them."
Ideas like twice the power to weight ratio and
10% of the moving parts are not of any interest to the likes of Ford, even if (as with my engine) you could stick with the existing fuels, and servicing skills.
However, if you want something small and light that gives great bass at out of door pop concerts, I have the answer. I first made one in the 60's, so the patent is definitely out. You can all know for free: Use the audio to modulate the flow of gas into a large burner. I stuck as small speaker to one of those gas regulator valves.
When the gas burns it gives an acoustic gain approx equal to the amount the gas expands when burned (about 100 times)
I used bunsens, but for a big outdoor concert, the thing used in a hot air balloon migh be needed.
Wont work with treble because frequency response won't go very high, and there is plenty of distortion. and there is a lot of noise - but at an outdoor concert, people would never notice).
Don't try this at home, folks!
Even I did it in a real physics lab. If you want to employ me to develop it commercially, or to use at your next concert in the park, let me know.
Even if RAMBus does hold patents they are worthless.
I proposed this to the company I worked for at the time SCSI was first invented. The idea was that all those military projects which turned into bloatwawre and crawled could meet the acceptance criteria by running from a RAM disk.
Unfortunately for us, It turned out someone was already selling the product. AFAICR, it was Sperry-Rand, so our patent would have failed as it was prior knowledge. By now all those patents will have lapsed..
I seem to recall that RSX/11 in the days of PDP/11s, did something like this. A list of apps was specified at boot time, and the OS cached the data needed to demand-page the start-up page set.
The benefits were minimal in the face of faster hardware, and people preferred OSes that didn't bother, like Unix.
Because making endles forms for people to fill in is an effective way of solving the unemployment problem and filling all those gigabyte disks people keep buying.
Slashdot Mirror
You are forgetting politics: I have been explicitly told Your estimates are unacceptable - they will have to be halved!
Others have mentioned "creeping featureism".
There is also the "event Horizon" - When faced with a project of infinite size, people will tend towards an estimate that is based on their idea of how long it takes to solve an infinite problem. For a salesman, this is a couple of days. For a typical manager, a couple of weeks. For an engineer, a couple of months.
For estimates to be meaningful, the work has to be divided into units which you can guarantee will never exceed your event horizon.
I have managed many successful estimates on large (over one year, more than 5 people) projects, based on the method that it needs an average of two weeks to implement, document and test, any feature of the project you can identify before the project starts.
By "feature" I mean explicit bit of behaviour by the code eg "ack an inbound packet", "echo the character on the serial line". I know any amount of people who can code this in 3 minutes in perl or whatever. That is not the same as developing supportable code. All loops have to be unwound, all nesting flattened. Every level of the heirarchy has to be accounted for serially.
Let me introduce Dr Spin's 2:1 Law: Supportable code needs 2kg of paperwork per byte of executable code. Includes minutes of meetings, sketches on envelopes. (Most of it is binned, but it still has to be created).
and the vast monohull community... they're still so in love with wood...
Wood is so repairable. Its fine to use high tech materials, but what happens when they break in a remote part of the world?
You may not sail to the West Indies, but the next owner might, so wood has a higher resale value.
Wooden monohulls have a life well over 60 years with proper maintenance. Glass fibre does not.
I think stainless steel's pretty cool, but in the cold climate of Northern Europe, I'm not sure cool is what you want!
The truth IS un-American - its a well known fact. Even Bin Laden knows that!
Obviously you have never even seen a help desk. People really DO phone and say
"My keyboard doesnt have an ANY key"
"Which is the LEFT mouse button again?"
Yesterday, I had someone complain that some of the text was off the screen. Five years using a computer, and she dis not know about horizontal scroll bars!
Its true - you don't actually need a brain to use Windows!
The video shows clearly that there is not enough time to pop a decent imported beer before your CPU fries.
:-)
So keep a cold beer with you when ever you are computing
WPAN is a system for torturing terrorists with erl scripts, I thought everyone knew that!
I believe the number of man years the project takes can be increased by code inspections, but having sat through a few, I am less convinced that errors will be reduced.
As others have said already, bad programmers prouce ad code. Goodd programmers cost money. Unemployed programmers produce freeware/open source.
Programmers who produce really dismal code are probably unemployable, but there is no law against them shipping freeware/open source.
I have just wasted three hours trying to install some commercial software over a network that was so defective I gave up. So you pays your money and takes your choice, but I'd rather have free crap than pay good money for shite.
Perhaps you should pay a visit to www.FreeBSD.org or www.NetBSD.org - open source does not mean Linux.
These people probably find it hard to lock their front door too, but after a couple of VCRs have gone missing, they'll get the message.
Sure I want my credit card details held by M$, then "Grabbet & Runne Inc, Shoplifters to the unsuspecting" can open an account with M$ and find out who to burgle, and which credit card numbers to use when pulling a scam at the bank.
I know you are a troll, but in case anyone doesn't:
FreeBSD is used by the majority of ISPs, as it is extremely stable and reliable, and offers high performance. Its also free, unlike M$ products. NetBSD is widely used, by (a) hobbyists, because it runs on most anything from a PDA to elderly big iron like Vax 11/750, and (b) people who want a gateway/firewall on a small machine.
OpenBSD is secure, but usage is pretty marginal, partly because Theo De Raat makes enemies faster than he writes code (and thats fast!)
Sure ownership of FreeBSD changes minute by minute - that is at least in part because its not very relevant to anyone who owns it. Its source is more open than Linux. Not only its not dying, its not actually possible to kill it. So long as I or anyone else has the source on a hard disk, it lives. FreeBSD probably supports more hardware than Linux, and has almost always supported new hardware sooner than Linux.
The poster obviously believes the myth that there will soon be only one OS in the world, and that will probably be WinXP. Ask a Mac user (OSX IS FreeBSD with a new UI) will he be switching to WinXP? No chance. Its far more likely that the world will switch to OSX just as soon as its ported to Intel architecture.
Its pretty easy to explain ... most lawyers are of the same calibre as the support people who say "just reformat the hard disk, and reinstall windows" when the problem is that the mouse needs cleaning.
And the people who employ them respect them because they wear expensive clothes.
With a culture like that, we are all doomed.
All those open source apps will run on OSX without any problem. If your kit's too old, use NetBSD. Either way, it will be easier and more reliable than Linux.
:-)
The only obvious reason for Linux on a PPC is the recursive one - you are developing Linux for the PPC!
Real nerds use *BSD - and flame everyone who doesn't
Its OK, MS can't do this- it would certianly be illegal as well as immoral. ... Outside of the USA, even clauses forbidding reverse engineering are illegal.
Thats another reason why Linux got going in Finland, while BSD didn't in the USA.
Anyway, Computer history teaches us that first time users can be sold any amount of overpriced sh*te. After they have been badly burned, they wise up. Mainframes did it - IBM nearly died as a result of a sales plan based on kicking the sh*te out of their customers. Minis did it - where is DEC now? DG? Prime?. The PC has brought 100 million suckers to the market. Next time they upgrade, they will do it to get a feature they can USE. Easier access to viruses probably is not it.
Non technical users keep asking me "why do I get these messages about my programs committing immoral acts?" I tell them its because they were fool enough to buy programs from Microsoft. Maybe they should consider alternative suppliers.
I still wonder how, with the infinite pool of developers that is open-source, how comes kde is not as slick as Win95? and gnome won't install on anything ever, and includes virtually every piece of open source ever written in its dependencies.
I cannot see any reason why an optical bus would save heat, have better bandwidth or be faster than copper.
Losses in copper buses are not high, and drivers and receivers for copper are always going to be more efficient than drivers and receivers for light. A connection from a driver to copper or from copper to receiver is nothing. To or from light needs a significant effort. Opto drivers and receivers are normally either slow or expensive. And will sure as hell need power.
For a patent to be valid it has to be non-obvious to a practitioner of the relevant field".
:-)
Since this is totally obvious to anyone who has ever used such primative junk as dBase IV, indeed the dBase IV code generator could be easily modified to do this, the "patent" is worthless.
If I was an IBM shareholder, I'd be seriously p*ssed at the pointless wasting of dosh.
If a US tax payer, I'd be asking what the "patent examiners" were doing, when they should have been doing what they are paid to do.
Even if this patent happened to stand in the USA, it wouldn't work elsewhere, so you can write your sript+templates jobbie in another country, and then make it accessable to the US by putting it on a web site
Maybe you should go and live in a European country - most of them have laws invalidating immoral clauses in contracts.
Can't you see Leslie Nielson in Airplane98 "hand over the controls, or I'll pluck your eyebrows..." Yeah! Kewl!
Maybe you should have voted for Ross Perot after all!
I have a rotary engine invention too. I have discussed it with people from several likely manufacturers = the verdict is - "We don't want any new technology, even if its better than what we've got - we've spent a lot of money on cenventional engines, and we are happy with them."
Ideas like twice the power to weight ratio and 10% of the moving parts are not of any interest to the likes of Ford, even if (as with my engine) you could stick with the existing fuels, and servicing skills.
It won't work as described.
However, if you want something small and light that gives great bass at out of door pop concerts, I have the answer. I first made one in the 60's, so the patent is definitely out. You can all know for free: Use the audio to modulate the flow of gas into a large burner. I stuck as small speaker to one of those gas regulator valves.
When the gas burns it gives an acoustic gain approx equal to the amount the gas expands when burned (about 100 times)
I used bunsens, but for a big outdoor concert, the thing used in a hot air balloon migh be needed. Wont work with treble because frequency response won't go very high, and there is plenty of distortion. and there is a lot of noise - but at an outdoor concert, people would never notice).
Don't try this at home, folks!
Even I did it in a real physics lab. If you want to employ me to develop it commercially, or to use at your next concert in the park, let me know.
Maintaining power? Can you say UPS?
I knew you could.
Even if RAMBus does hold patents they are worthless.
I proposed this to the company I worked for at the time SCSI was first invented. The idea was that all those military projects which turned into bloatwawre and crawled could meet the acceptance criteria by running from a RAM disk.
Unfortunately for us, It turned out someone was already selling the product. AFAICR, it was Sperry-Rand, so our patent would have failed as it was prior knowledge. By now all those patents will have lapsed..
I seem to recall that RSX/11 in the days of PDP/11s, did something like this. A list of apps was specified at boot time, and the OS cached the data needed to demand-page the start-up page set.
The benefits were minimal in the face of faster hardware, and people preferred OSes that didn't bother, like Unix.
The USA can only outlaw open source software in the USA.
The rest of the world can have decent software while you in the USA shackle yourselves to your own bedposts, and see if we care.
The same goes for the rest of the stupid legislation proposed:
Not withstanding rampant bullying in WTO committees, the rest of the world remains free to make its own laws. (At least for the next year or two).
I live in Britain and the answer is...
Because making endles forms for people to fill in is an effective way of solving the unemployment problem and filling all those gigabyte disks people keep buying.
There must be some mistake - everyone knows Satanism is 666!