I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the oldest code still in use is probably the FORTRAN differential equation libraries that are used in aerodynamic and thermodynamic applications. These were developed and extensively tested in the 1950s, and were much of the reason why FORTRAN got the funding it needed. The cost of rewriting these libraries from scratch, including complete re-testing, is very high. Yet the final cost of an inaccurate result is magnitudes greater.
My understanding is that when these libraries are migrated to new environments, it is generally considered better to test the emulations and tweak them until their results agree with the results of vintage systems, rather than messing about in the library code.
Whether parent post a troll be, matters not. Reply I shall</yodavoice>, as these points have yet to be addressed:
Dirigibles made with today's technology are an interesting concept, and could become an important part of the infrastructure in a few short years.
Dirigibles could provide manned, stratospheric bases that could replace cell phone towers and fiber optic cables (think point to point laser links operating above cloud cover over hundreds of miles). Such bases would be excellent command/control posts for forest fire management, local weather reports (including tracking individual tornadoes), crop assessments, border management, and so on. These bases are likely to evolve beyond the design limits of the dirigible fairly quickly, but dirigibles make sense as an interim stage, and probably as the escape vehicles and supply ships that these high outposts would always need.
Dirigibles make more economic sense than trucks in moving cargo from railway terminals and sea ports to destinations on the far side of difficult terrain (mountains, wetlands). Building fleets of dirigibles could easily be more sound fiscally and environmentally than continued maintenance of some existing rail lines and trucking routes.
But these are long term goals. Something is needed to fund the immediate R&D work. Giving joy rides to rich bas^H^H^H people is the kind of low hanging fruit that is worth pursuing.
Most of the historic problems with dirigibles concerned their bouyancy when on the ground. We now have heat pump technology that could be used to change the bouyancy of the lifting gas on a minute by minute basis. We can also manage mixtures of hydrogen and helium that would give better lift at lower cost than pure helium while avoiding any real and many of the irrational concerns over using pure hydrogen. Combined with lighter, stronger, and less porous gas bags and lighter and stronger frames, a modern dirigible would compare to the old Zeppelins like a racing yacht compares to kid's raft with a bedsheet sail.
I didn't realize that Microsoft still had developers. I sort of thought that Vista and Office 2007 demonstrated that all the developers had exercised their stock options and gone on to more interesting projects with Google, IBM, and Yahoo.
Um, wasn't that what the Yahoo deal was really all about? Ballmer trying to reclaim some of his developers developers developers?
A quantity of nuclear waste is an active retort whose future qualities are not predictable. I strongly disagree. The results of nuclear decay chains are quite predictable.
On the surface, it looks like parent post is attempting to use a strong opinion to trump facts.
No one is denying that in theory nuclear decay chains are predictable. The reality is that nuclear decay does not occur independently of chemical processes involving the matrix and the products of decay. While these cook along relatively slowly, the time periods we are talking about are very long, and over the long term the chemical, and therefore also the physical, changes within the retort are quite unpredictable. Even assuming that none of these chemical or physical changes would affect the "predictable" nuclear decay pathways (there are several ways chemistry and state changes could do so), there is still reason for concern about chemically explosive or corrosive failure of containment.
The waste needs to be actively monitored and managed for a very long time. Costs need to include reasonable set-asides to deal with unexpected contingencies, such as possibly extracting radioisotopes from failing vitreous ingots for storage in some safer manner. In a hundred years or so we will have enough practical experience from dealing with Hanford, Chernobyl, and so forth to temper the theories with real data. But attempts to gloss over our current lack of information do not promote sound policy development.
Thinking about nuclear waste as something inert that can be left alone until it is safe is a very wrong mental model. This stuff is more like a compost heap that is constantly changing, and that has the potential to destroy its container.
While I agree with portions of parent post, the following quote is a dangerous distortion of fact:
Nuclear waste just sits there in a small space, becoming slowly less harmful as time goes on.
Anyone who actually thinks about what radioactivity means will see the fallacy here:
radioactive material is undergoing a constant transmutation of elements.
That means the chemical makeup of any radioactive material is constantly changing, while
the radioactivity itself is constantly pumping energy into the system.
Phase changes, leaching, and corrosive activities in the resulting chemistries assure that over time, even a uniform vitreous solid waste will start to differentiate: different locales will have different chemical, radioactive, and physical properties.
These changes could promote changes in decay rates (through local chemistries that modify neutron energy) and changes in decay pathways.
This process is inherent to all nuclear waste.
This process is orders of magnitude more complex than a detailed chemical analysis of a burning candle would be.
This process involves positive feedback loops.
Nuclear waste will not "just sit there...becoming slowly less harmful."
A quantity of nuclear waste is an active retort whose future qualities are not predictable.
I am at this point a proponent for exploring fission power. But we need to do this with our eyes open. And we need to feed the accountants accurate data. Such as: nuclear waste management will necessarily involve long term active monitoring of the waste, and sufficient funds set aside to cover contingencies that could not be predicted when we start building these uncontrolled retorts.
OTOH, I never felt that Microsoft was acting in good faith in making the offer.
The FUD and distraction that this offer has caused Yahoo has been all to Microsoft's benefit, but completing a deal with Yahoo would mean merging two very different corporate cultures at a time when neither company is robust. Not good. A sure recipe for loss of market cap, and usually results in ousting the CEO. Ballmer isn't that stupid.
If Yahoo who had said yes to the deal, Microsoft would have found some reason for withdrawing the offer. Preferably after they had gotten a peek at Yahoo's books.
It goes to show how easily an education can be politically tainted.
Contrarily, it may just be another indicator that a professional can obtain a high degree of training in his chosen field while preserving the ignorance of his educational virginity.
You can require that med students and law students take certain liberal arts courses, etc, to round out their education. But there is no way you can require the ones who are pathologically focused on their career goals to study the material for its content, rather than studying it to get by the damn tests.
Short version: it can be easy to mistake a highly trained individual for a well educated individual. Don't do that.
This is my first sighting of "cruft" used as a verb!
And the context makes it absolutely clear what is meant by "crufting"!
Most excellent!!
I shall pass this along to Marketing right away. I can hear the commercials now: "Ours is the finest Word Processor, deeply crufted with exquisite layers of the very best in bells and whistles."
Agreed. Attempting to merge these two companies would so badly mangle the infrastructures of both that they would be like discarded wreckage alongside the Information Highway. The primary benefactors of the merger would be IBM and Google.
Microsoft knows this: they would never have consummated their offer. They would have found some reason to back out when the books were opened to inspection, if not before. The whole point of this exercise has been to generate FUD and divert attention from failings of Vista and Office 2007. And to shove the Yahoo race car into the wall if possible. This has been yet another variant of the SCO approach to marketing (Microsoft buying enough licenses from SCO to keep the SCO-IBM lawsuit alive).
Yahoo is likely to have a bright future. Despite the beating they've taken in the last couple of years, they've got some very strong assets and are well diversified. They seem to be on track for finding niches where they can shine... think of the Avis' success with the "We're number 2 so We Try Harder" approach to market.
Same difference. They moved from a company that made a reasonable profit publishing a few hardcopy journals to a company that functions as the gatekeeper to a much larger body of knowledge— where they really contribute very little any more, especially in comparison to their decreased costs. There are certainly less expensive ways to implement a referee model.
If you want to control scientific research, a good place to start would be to get a seat on the board of Elsevier.
My experience with this company is mostly from 1997 - 2001, when I controlled the subscriptions budget for a medical library. I did not much care for Elsevier's expansive and parasitic policies then. I have kept an eye on them since, the way you keep an eye on a rattlesnake that you have spotted in the corner of the room. What I have seen is that they have tightened their grip on distribution of knowledge, extended their reach into new fields, and increased their revenue streams.
My impression is that others in the textbook and research publishing business have either adopted Elsevier's behaviors or have been eaten up.
Parent post confuses those who do research with those who charge money for the results. When you spend several hundred dollars for a subscription to an online journal, most of the money goes to Elsevier or another "publisher". Very little goes to the researchers who wrote the papers. In fact, they may well be paying for the opportunity to let Elsevier make money off of their work. This has become the driving force behind the shape of today's refereed journals, but that shape is far different from what a refereed journal is intended to be.
It used not to be that way, before the internet. At that time, scientific journals were not seen as something anyone could make money from. Now they have become prey to marketeers who do not offer any benefits in exchange for sucking institutional funds away from research and education.
The international scientific community would do well to look itself over for leeching parasites and take appropriate action.
The initial direction of HTTP and the WWW was to promote freely available access to scientific papers.
Then something very unexpected and very strange happened. Elsevier and its ilk arose out of the brew. Now scientific papers are accessible only to those with institutions that can afford to pay the gatekeepers.
For want of an understanding of the denizens that lurk in markets, scientists have lost the way to realize their dream for the WWW.
It would appear that scientific training, with its emphasis on demonstrable truths, is of little benefit when dealing with adversaries that are comfortable with using smokes and mirrors as weapons.
Look into Ubuntu. The future you've asked for has arrived. The only thing is that you still think you need to buy new hardware to get better software, so you aren't seeing it. That kind of thinking is SO stuck in the last millennium.
Face it, if linus stated this everyone would triumph it as showing that linux moved with the times, and was better than monolithic old vista.
If Linus made this statement about Linux, it would be within the context of operating systems whose kernels and other low level components have an established history of successful upgrades with minimal negative impacts on userland. However I doubt that Linus would ever make this statement since he rarely casts glittering generalities before the public.
But the statement was made by Ballmer, and needs to be evaluated within the context of Microsoft's history of software releases. Within that context, the statement is clearly a piece of spin doctor legerdemain to cover the damage that Vista does to the userland experiences of those unfortunates who have had Vista inflicted upon them.
I suggest that author of PP sell off his MSFT stock and invest in something with a better future, like maybe a recycling and disposal company. It should be obvious to everyone with a brain that when a stockholder has to take up fanboi behaviors to protect his investment, there is something wrong with that stock.
Don't blame the pipe-wrench for making a poor hammer. Blame the craftsman too lazy to find a hammer.
A worker who uses a pipe-wrench as a hammer is no craftsman.
A writer who would blur the distinction between the work of a trained and ethically responsible craftsman and a somewhat trainable monkey is a poor wordsmith.
But after getting beyond that criticism, I believe I have an understanding of what I think the parent post was attempting to say. And I do not disagree with what I think was the intended point: In the great majority of cases, poor code is not the product of poor tools; it is due to inadequate training that leads to abuse of tools that are adequate to do a good job when used by someone that knows their craft.
Gawd, that last paragraph is pedantic and just plain awful. Need. More. Coffee.
I'll play along. I'm qualified to do so on this forum: I've read slashdot for years and I've never studied orbital mechanics or anything else pertinent to the subject.
The original NASA estimate was based on the probability that on the previous orbit Apophis would hit a small window of opportunity that would slingshot it around Earth into the final collision orbit. What the kid did was demonstrate that the window is actually much larger than NASA had first estimated, since collisions with small stuff known to be orbiting the Earth could funnel Apophis into the slingshot zone.
Oh, you wanted a car anology:
Consider a photographer at an auto race who has jumped the safety barrier to get some real good photos of the cars roaring into a hairpin turn. He knows that there is some small risk that a car will spin out as it approaches him and smash him flat, but to his mind it is an extremely low risk. There is only a narrow trajectory that would cause him danger.
But what if a bunch of ball bearings had been strewn onto the track in front of the curve? That changes the whole equation: if a race car teetering on the verge of spinning out hits one of these, it is much more likely to plow into the luckless photographer. The range of dangerous trajectories is much wider than the photographer estimated, since the track is not as clean as he pictured it in his mental model.
There is a strong argument to be made that the ISO processes are hale and hearty, but that the persons who were using them were not sound. The personal attacks may well be justified.
It was the decisions of persons who put OOXML on the fast track, and otherwise let things get so badly screwed up. Perhaps they should be held accountable for their actions. That kind of accountability is central to the ISO standards governing quality control of processes.
The job of the ISO is not to approve the one -and-only-one standard for a given task. Its job is to be a repository of standards that can be followed by all those whose wish to comply with said standard.
Well said!
There is no reason at all why we shouldn't have 5 different standards for 10mm fine thread nuts and bolts. The more the better!
I've just RTFA. My advice to others: don't bother.
What we have here is a report based on a single "authority" that states the obvious, twisted to support her own view of the value of her personal educational experiences.
Wikipedia is exactly what it purports to be: the wisdom of the crowds. Such wisdom is never authoritative; and it often requires further checking. It is, however, very broad: compared to its nearest competitor, Wikipedia provides access to hundreds of thousands more articles that span nearly the entire range of human experience. Due to its open editing policy, Wikipedia is also generally free from the biases of authorities who are pushing their own agenda: egregious offenses are usually identified and corrected fairly quickly; more subtle biases are often identified in parenthetical clauses that contain links to opposing views.
Considering its breath and speed of usage, arguing against a student's usage of Wikipedia because it is not written by authorities is akin to telling a scribe of ancient Egypt that he should not use the Library at Alexandria because the penmanship on some of the scrolls is sloppy.
When searching for the truth, no authority should ever be accepted without question as having the final or best answer. For instance, an associate professor of information systems at Deakin University named Sharman Lichtenstein got an article about her belief in Higher Authorities published in Computerworld. Before accepting her hierarchal belief structure as your own, you should see if there are any opposing views, which might show up in a place like the slashdot commentaries. Then you should form your own judgment.
For myself, where Wikipedia really shines is when I have to learn about something that is common knowledge but is outside my own personal experience. Perhaps I need a quick review of the law of cosines to make sense of something I've encountered in an article on signal processing: Wikipedia is the first place to go. Perhaps I want to know the characteristics that distinguish a 1957 Thunderbird from later models: Wikipedia is the place to start. Often in these kinds of cases, I don't have to research any further than the Wikipedia article. I can often determine that what I have found in Wikipedia is in the huge heap of things called "common knowledge" (even though I might not be familiar with that particular item), which means that I can use it without looking any further. Also, I really don't have to cite my source in these cases, since this item is going to be easily and unambiguously found by anyone else who goes looking for it, no matter where they look.
None of the other companies that have been fined for breaking EC trade laws were barred from tendering for government contracts, so what's so special about MS that justifies treating them differently besides the fact that some posters to Slashdot hate them?
In the eyes of many, what sets Microsoft apart from Siemens and other law breakers is that the others not only pay their fines, but they modify their business practices to comply with the court orders. They do not treat daily fines as a normal operating expense, like an increase in shipping costs. As a corporation, Microsoft has shown a staggering degree of contempt for courts in both the USA and the EU (and possibly elsewhere, too).
IF this were to happen, then all the non-disclosure agreements would be effectively nullified as well. So the source code would enter the public domain.
I doubt that things would ever go this far. Despite Microsoft's consistent pattern of confrontational behavior wrt to laws that it does not like, it can't be that stupid. Continuing on this path would mean that its executive officers could end up in criminal courts. That hasn't happened to a Really Big Corporation for a long, long time...
Death knell? Windows will not die with a bang, but with a whimper...
Nah.
Windows will die like a big ole dinosaur, and its death throes are gonna mess up its local ecosystem real bad.
Stay well clear of that tail. There's no mind controlling it any more.
And... well... there's no pleasant way to say this, but it needs to be said. So WARNING: NEXT PARAGRAPH MAY EVOKE UGLY GRAPHIC IMAGERY!
When a dinosaur dies like Windows is dying, it not only thrashes around a lot, but all its sphincter muscles relax and contents of its bowels and bladder spew forth, driven by the pressures of the terminal seizure. You want to be on high ground and up wind when that happens.
You've just proposed what might be the stupidest idea since Windows Millenium.
Gee, I was pretty sure that honor was being shared by Vista and MS Office 2007... But thanks for the nomination. It helps spread the word!
I'm a little hazy on how this retaliation by other countries that you speak of would work. Perhaps you could detail the mechanisms involved—, you know, the laws and treaties that could be invoked to allow one nation to punish another for enforcing its internal trade laws. How exactly would the US corporations "get SAP for free"? Is this related to the International Tit For Tat Ammendment to the US Constitution?
As pointed out elsewhere, a sovereign like the EU and its member states could simply nullify the property rights of an outlaw corporation. Shops dependent on Microsoft software would continue to function as they always have-- except they would no longer be paying licensing fees. The businesses that they buy support services from would have little trouble in making the adjustment. No EU citizens would suffer (except possibly shareholders of MSFT).
Since it would be legal for anyone to make copies of Windows, Vista, Office, etc, and modify them to remove rights management or "genuine" checks, the use of products derived from Microsoft code would soar, but that's really the only downside that Europe would see.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the oldest code still in use is probably the FORTRAN differential equation libraries that are used in aerodynamic and thermodynamic applications. These were developed and extensively tested in the 1950s, and were much of the reason why FORTRAN got the funding it needed. The cost of rewriting these libraries from scratch, including complete re-testing, is very high. Yet the final cost of an inaccurate result is magnitudes greater.
My understanding is that when these libraries are migrated to new environments, it is generally considered better to test the emulations and tweak them until their results agree with the results of vintage systems, rather than messing about in the library code.
Whether parent post a troll be, matters not. Reply I shall</yodavoice>, as these points have yet to be addressed:
Dirigibles made with today's technology are an interesting concept, and could become an important part of the infrastructure in a few short years.
Dirigibles could provide manned, stratospheric bases that could replace cell phone towers and fiber optic cables (think point to point laser links operating above cloud cover over hundreds of miles). Such bases would be excellent command/control posts for forest fire management, local weather reports (including tracking individual tornadoes), crop assessments, border management, and so on. These bases are likely to evolve beyond the design limits of the dirigible fairly quickly, but dirigibles make sense as an interim stage, and probably as the escape vehicles and supply ships that these high outposts would always need.
Dirigibles make more economic sense than trucks in moving cargo from railway terminals and sea ports to destinations on the far side of difficult terrain (mountains, wetlands). Building fleets of dirigibles could easily be more sound fiscally and environmentally than continued maintenance of some existing rail lines and trucking routes.
But these are long term goals. Something is needed to fund the immediate R&D work. Giving joy rides to rich bas^H^H^H people is the kind of low hanging fruit that is worth pursuing.
Most of the historic problems with dirigibles concerned their bouyancy when on the ground. We now have heat pump technology that could be used to change the bouyancy of the lifting gas on a minute by minute basis. We can also manage mixtures of hydrogen and helium that would give better lift at lower cost than pure helium while avoiding any real and many of the irrational concerns over using pure hydrogen. Combined with lighter, stronger, and less porous gas bags and lighter and stronger frames, a modern dirigible would compare to the old Zeppelins like a racing yacht compares to kid's raft with a bedsheet sail.
I didn't realize that Microsoft still had developers. I sort of thought that Vista and Office 2007 demonstrated that all the developers had exercised their stock options and gone on to more interesting projects with Google, IBM, and Yahoo.
Um, wasn't that what the Yahoo deal was really all about? Ballmer trying to reclaim some of his developers developers developers?
On the surface, it looks like parent post is attempting to use a strong opinion to trump facts.
No one is denying that in theory nuclear decay chains are predictable. The reality is that nuclear decay does not occur independently of chemical processes involving the matrix and the products of decay. While these cook along relatively slowly, the time periods we are talking about are very long, and over the long term the chemical, and therefore also the physical, changes within the retort are quite unpredictable. Even assuming that none of these chemical or physical changes would affect the "predictable" nuclear decay pathways (there are several ways chemistry and state changes could do so), there is still reason for concern about chemically explosive or corrosive failure of containment.
The waste needs to be actively monitored and managed for a very long time. Costs need to include reasonable set-asides to deal with unexpected contingencies, such as possibly extracting radioisotopes from failing vitreous ingots for storage in some safer manner. In a hundred years or so we will have enough practical experience from dealing with Hanford, Chernobyl, and so forth to temper the theories with real data. But attempts to gloss over our current lack of information do not promote sound policy development.
Thinking about nuclear waste as something inert that can be left alone until it is safe is a very wrong mental model. This stuff is more like a compost heap that is constantly changing, and that has the potential to destroy its container.
While I agree with portions of parent post, the following quote is a dangerous distortion of fact:
Nuclear waste just sits there in a small space, becoming slowly less harmful as time goes on.Anyone who actually thinks about what radioactivity means will see the fallacy here:
Nuclear waste will not "just sit there...becoming slowly less harmful."
A quantity of nuclear waste is an active retort whose future qualities are not predictable.
I am at this point a proponent for exploring fission power. But we need to do this with our eyes open. And we need to feed the accountants accurate data. Such as: nuclear waste management will necessarily involve long term active monitoring of the waste, and sufficient funds set aside to cover contingencies that could not be predicted when we start building these uncontrolled retorts.
OTOH, I never felt that Microsoft was acting in good faith in making the offer.
The FUD and distraction that this offer has caused Yahoo has been all to Microsoft's benefit, but completing a deal with Yahoo would mean merging two very different corporate cultures at a time when neither company is robust. Not good. A sure recipe for loss of market cap, and usually results in ousting the CEO. Ballmer isn't that stupid.
If Yahoo who had said yes to the deal, Microsoft would have found some reason for withdrawing the offer. Preferably after they had gotten a peek at Yahoo's books.
Contrarily, it may just be another indicator that a professional can obtain a high degree of training in his chosen field while preserving the ignorance of his educational virginity.
You can require that med students and law students take certain liberal arts courses, etc, to round out their education. But there is no way you can require the ones who are pathologically focused on their career goals to study the material for its content, rather than studying it to get by the damn tests.
Short version: it can be easy to mistake a highly trained individual for a well educated individual. Don't do that.
This is my first sighting of "cruft" used as a verb!
And the context makes it absolutely clear what is meant by "crufting"!
Most excellent!!
I shall pass this along to Marketing right away. I can hear the commercials now: "Ours is the finest Word Processor, deeply crufted with exquisite layers of the very best in bells and whistles."
Agreed. Attempting to merge these two companies would so badly mangle the infrastructures of both that they would be like discarded wreckage alongside the Information Highway. The primary benefactors of the merger would be IBM and Google.
Microsoft knows this: they would never have consummated their offer. They would have found some reason to back out when the books were opened to inspection, if not before. The whole point of this exercise has been to generate FUD and divert attention from failings of Vista and Office 2007. And to shove the Yahoo race car into the wall if possible. This has been yet another variant of the SCO approach to marketing (Microsoft buying enough licenses from SCO to keep the SCO-IBM lawsuit alive).
Yahoo is likely to have a bright future. Despite the beating they've taken in the last couple of years, they've got some very strong assets and are well diversified. They seem to be on track for finding niches where they can shine... think of the Avis' success with the "We're number 2 so We Try Harder" approach to market.
Same difference. They moved from a company that made a reasonable profit publishing a few hardcopy journals to a company that functions as the gatekeeper to a much larger body of knowledge— where they really contribute very little any more, especially in comparison to their decreased costs. There are certainly less expensive ways to implement a referee model.
If you want to control scientific research, a good place to start would be to get a seat on the board of Elsevier.
My experience with this company is mostly from 1997 - 2001, when I controlled the subscriptions budget for a medical library. I did not much care for Elsevier's expansive and parasitic policies then. I have kept an eye on them since, the way you keep an eye on a rattlesnake that you have spotted in the corner of the room. What I have seen is that they have tightened their grip on distribution of knowledge, extended their reach into new fields, and increased their revenue streams.
My impression is that others in the textbook and research publishing business have either adopted Elsevier's behaviors or have been eaten up.
Parent post confuses those who do research with those who charge money for the results. When you spend several hundred dollars for a subscription to an online journal, most of the money goes to Elsevier or another "publisher". Very little goes to the researchers who wrote the papers. In fact, they may well be paying for the opportunity to let Elsevier make money off of their work. This has become the driving force behind the shape of today's refereed journals, but that shape is far different from what a refereed journal is intended to be.
It used not to be that way, before the internet. At that time, scientific journals were not seen as something anyone could make money from. Now they have become prey to marketeers who do not offer any benefits in exchange for sucking institutional funds away from research and education.
The international scientific community would do well to look itself over for leeching parasites and take appropriate action.
The initial direction of HTTP and the WWW was to promote freely available access to scientific papers.
Then something very unexpected and very strange happened. Elsevier and its ilk arose out of the brew. Now scientific papers are accessible only to those with institutions that can afford to pay the gatekeepers.
For want of an understanding of the denizens that lurk in markets, scientists have lost the way to realize their dream for the WWW.
It would appear that scientific training, with its emphasis on demonstrable truths, is of little benefit when dealing with adversaries that are comfortable with using smokes and mirrors as weapons.
Look into Ubuntu. The future you've asked for has arrived. The only thing is that you still think you need to buy new hardware to get better software, so you aren't seeing it. That kind of thinking is SO stuck in the last millennium.
If Linus made this statement about Linux, it would be within the context of operating systems whose kernels and other low level components have an established history of successful upgrades with minimal negative impacts on userland. However I doubt that Linus would ever make this statement since he rarely casts glittering generalities before the public.
But the statement was made by Ballmer, and needs to be evaluated within the context of Microsoft's history of software releases. Within that context, the statement is clearly a piece of spin doctor legerdemain to cover the damage that Vista does to the userland experiences of those unfortunates who have had Vista inflicted upon them.
I suggest that author of PP sell off his MSFT stock and invest in something with a better future, like maybe a recycling and disposal company. It should be obvious to everyone with a brain that when a stockholder has to take up fanboi behaviors to protect his investment, there is something wrong with that stock.
"Any landing you walk away from is a good landing."
Ancient quotation from the early days of airplanes... and still appropriate.
Good to have the cosmonauts back in one piece.
A worker who uses a pipe-wrench as a hammer is no craftsman.
A writer who would blur the distinction between the work of a trained and ethically responsible craftsman and a somewhat trainable monkey is a poor wordsmith.
But after getting beyond that criticism, I believe I have an understanding of what I think the parent post was attempting to say. And I do not disagree with what I think was the intended point: In the great majority of cases, poor code is not the product of poor tools; it is due to inadequate training that leads to abuse of tools that are adequate to do a good job when used by someone that knows their craft.
Gawd, that last paragraph is pedantic and just plain awful. Need. More. Coffee.
I'll play along. I'm qualified to do so on this forum: I've read slashdot for years and I've never studied orbital mechanics or anything else pertinent to the subject.
The original NASA estimate was based on the probability that on the previous orbit Apophis would hit a small window of opportunity that would slingshot it around Earth into the final collision orbit. What the kid did was demonstrate that the window is actually much larger than NASA had first estimated, since collisions with small stuff known to be orbiting the Earth could funnel Apophis into the slingshot zone.
Oh, you wanted a car anology:
Consider a photographer at an auto race who has jumped the safety barrier to get some real good photos of the cars roaring into a hairpin turn. He knows that there is some small risk that a car will spin out as it approaches him and smash him flat, but to his mind it is an extremely low risk. There is only a narrow trajectory that would cause him danger.
But what if a bunch of ball bearings had been strewn onto the track in front of the curve? That changes the whole equation: if a race car teetering on the verge of spinning out hits one of these, it is much more likely to plow into the luckless photographer. The range of dangerous trajectories is much wider than the photographer estimated, since the track is not as clean as he pictured it in his mental model.
There is a strong argument to be made that the ISO processes are hale and hearty, but that the persons who were using them were not sound. The personal attacks may well be justified.
It was the decisions of persons who put OOXML on the fast track, and otherwise let things get so badly screwed up. Perhaps they should be held accountable for their actions. That kind of accountability is central to the ISO standards governing quality control of processes.
Well said!
There is no reason at all why we shouldn't have 5 different standards for 10mm fine thread nuts and bolts. The more the better!
I've just RTFA. My advice to others: don't bother.
What we have here is a report based on a single "authority" that states the obvious, twisted to support her own view of the value of her personal educational experiences.
Wikipedia is exactly what it purports to be: the wisdom of the crowds. Such wisdom is never authoritative; and it often requires further checking. It is, however, very broad: compared to its nearest competitor, Wikipedia provides access to hundreds of thousands more articles that span nearly the entire range of human experience. Due to its open editing policy, Wikipedia is also generally free from the biases of authorities who are pushing their own agenda: egregious offenses are usually identified and corrected fairly quickly; more subtle biases are often identified in parenthetical clauses that contain links to opposing views.
Considering its breath and speed of usage, arguing against a student's usage of Wikipedia because it is not written by authorities is akin to telling a scribe of ancient Egypt that he should not use the Library at Alexandria because the penmanship on some of the scrolls is sloppy.
When searching for the truth, no authority should ever be accepted without question as having the final or best answer. For instance, an associate professor of information systems at Deakin University named Sharman Lichtenstein got an article about her belief in Higher Authorities published in Computerworld. Before accepting her hierarchal belief structure as your own, you should see if there are any opposing views, which might show up in a place like the slashdot commentaries. Then you should form your own judgment.
For myself, where Wikipedia really shines is when I have to learn about something that is common knowledge but is outside my own personal experience. Perhaps I need a quick review of the law of cosines to make sense of something I've encountered in an article on signal processing: Wikipedia is the first place to go. Perhaps I want to know the characteristics that distinguish a 1957 Thunderbird from later models: Wikipedia is the place to start. Often in these kinds of cases, I don't have to research any further than the Wikipedia article. I can often determine that what I have found in Wikipedia is in the huge heap of things called "common knowledge" (even though I might not be familiar with that particular item), which means that I can use it without looking any further. Also, I really don't have to cite my source in these cases, since this item is going to be easily and unambiguously found by anyone else who goes looking for it, no matter where they look.
In the eyes of many, what sets Microsoft apart from Siemens and other law breakers is that the others not only pay their fines, but they modify their business practices to comply with the court orders. They do not treat daily fines as a normal operating expense, like an increase in shipping costs. As a corporation, Microsoft has shown a staggering degree of contempt for courts in both the USA and the EU (and possibly elsewhere, too).
IF this were to happen, then all the non-disclosure agreements would be effectively nullified as well. So the source code would enter the public domain.
I doubt that things would ever go this far. Despite Microsoft's consistent pattern of confrontational behavior wrt to laws that it does not like, it can't be that stupid. Continuing on this path would mean that its executive officers could end up in criminal courts. That hasn't happened to a Really Big Corporation for a long, long time...
...excepting Enron of course...
...but Microsoft isn't anything like Enron...
...right?
Nah.
Windows will die like a big ole dinosaur, and its death throes are gonna mess up its local ecosystem real bad.
Stay well clear of that tail. There's no mind controlling it any more.
And... well... there's no pleasant way to say this, but it needs to be said. So WARNING: NEXT PARAGRAPH MAY EVOKE UGLY GRAPHIC IMAGERY!
When a dinosaur dies like Windows is dying, it not only thrashes around a lot, but all its sphincter muscles relax and contents of its bowels and bladder spew forth, driven by the pressures of the terminal seizure. You want to be on high ground and up wind when that happens.
Gee, I was pretty sure that honor was being shared by Vista and MS Office 2007... But thanks for the nomination. It helps spread the word!
I'm a little hazy on how this retaliation by other countries that you speak of would work. Perhaps you could detail the mechanisms involved—, you know, the laws and treaties that could be invoked to allow one nation to punish another for enforcing its internal trade laws. How exactly would the US corporations "get SAP for free"? Is this related to the International Tit For Tat Ammendment to the US Constitution?
As pointed out elsewhere, a sovereign like the EU and its member states could simply nullify the property rights of an outlaw corporation. Shops dependent on Microsoft software would continue to function as they always have-- except they would no longer be paying licensing fees. The businesses that they buy support services from would have little trouble in making the adjustment. No EU citizens would suffer (except possibly shareholders of MSFT).
Since it would be legal for anyone to make copies of Windows, Vista, Office, etc, and modify them to remove rights management or "genuine" checks, the use of products derived from Microsoft code would soar, but that's really the only downside that Europe would see.