The biggest factor with any successful military technology is making it "troop proof". The most successful systems are decidely low tech and can be field repaired etc.
For example, the most successful assault weapon ever is the AK47. They are definitely not the most accurate or most refined weapons but they take a lot of abuse and keep firing. Rustthem, let the termites eat the woodwork, get them dusty and they keep going. In comparison many other assault rifles misbehave when they get a pinch of dust in their gas chambers.
The same basic principle applies to bionic suites etc. Fancy shit breaks.
When a company starts to think otherwise then they're in trouble.
If you fall in love with product X and protect it from being canabalised by other products then those products suffer. Eventually product X becomes obsolete and you end up with nothing. The Intel business model: "Be your own worst enemy" is highly effective.
In most corporate environments, most desktops are kept the same by the corporate IT Gestapo, with first-line support, installation etc done by the jackboots. This means that the effort involved for Microsoft to support those 40k desktops is way lower than, say, 1000 * 1-desktop companies. Therefore the actual cost of good sold to Microsoft is probably no more than 1000 licenses. They can therefore give huge volume discounts without making a loss.
Of course they are willing to burn a lot of cash to maintain market share. MS have yet to have a quarter that comes near to breaking even in their mobile biz. They can afford to wait their time and burn cash in the mobile sector to keep their hands on corporate business.
Re:Labour, labour.... bullshit, bullshit
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Primer
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· Score: 2, Funny
If you knew what was involved, you never would have started.
I grant you that products are like babies: generally easy to conceive but hard to deliver. But, given the number of people who have undertaken their second or more venture and given the number of multiple-child families I think you have failed to make a case. In both case some sort of pain suppression or whatever seems to kick in and people come back for more.
ESR will tell you that you must be like him. He says one should play a musical instrument, enjoy (and preferably write) science fiction. He does not mention having a gun fetish, but I guess this helps...
Now I would classify myself as a hacker, but cant play a musical instrument (CD player isn't a musical instrument right?) and sci-fi gives me a softie. Dig guns though.
IMHO a good/great hacker must be prepared to go where he wants to with confidence. Don't just take on everyone else's mindset (if you do what the other 6 billion people are doing you're not going to do anything worthwhile). In short, scratch your own itch.
So a backtrace plus an edit box where the user is prompted to say wtf he was doing.
A log file does this far more reliably and useful (eg. No "Well I just opened a beer and talked on the phone to Pete", but Clicked OK, Opened file blaah, seg abort...). Whatever, there is no there is no need for the user to interact with the SEGABRT etc.
The bugs are not in the comments though. If someone reading the code saw "/* Copie the TV show titles *?" and fixed the spelling that wouldn't fix the program.
Mathematicians and physisists use their own language, not because they are stupid, but because natural languages are not good languages to convey the concepts they are expressing.
This is nonsense. It is far harder to explain the concepts of SEGABRT, pointers,... to users than the English language interface. This won't help fixing problems either. In my experience have baked solutions/explanations from users are worse than useless. As a programmer I'd rather get a backtrace or an action log (ie a log file that shows what the user did and what went wrong).
In the products I'm involved with I often get stupid reports from the field of the form "framing error causes unit to reset". When I get one of these, first thing I do is get back to the user and figure out exactly what they saw and what heppened withouth them trying to figure out the symptoms. In the "framing error" problem, what was really happening was that a power glitch was being caused when the RS232 cable was attched (because of bad grounding). This caused a reset. However, the user was a "super user" who knew bad things happen to serial data when you plug/unplug cables. One of the buzzwords he knew about was a framing error. So he "half solved" the problem by saying that a framing error caused the problem.
There is a big difference between observing and fixing problems. QA is about observing, not fixing, problems. It is better to provide a good way for users to make accurate error reports (eg. backtrace/log/whatever) than try have them try explain what went wrong.
As natural languages go, English is a very imprecise. Unfortunately English seems to be the main language for software developers (with all that offshoring, things might changes).
When I lived in South Africa I could speak pidgin Zulu and Xhosa and studied Xhosa at university. If I recall, Xhosa had 16 noun groups and seven tenses. This means that Xhosa is far less ambiguous as to the relationship between things. Verbs are spoken with the subject and object noun group prefixes attached. Thus the verb for "hit" is different when applied to a dog as opposed to a tree. This potentially helps remove a lot of the confusion in human/machine natural language interfaces. Problem though is finding enough Xhosa programmers and Xhosa people wanting to buy your product.
The classification seems to be getting random. The one on lattitudes and longitudes was classified under science. Should have been under dumb things to do with technology.
There is absolutely no need for specific laws to cover watching movies etc, all should be covered by negligence. If you start having specific laws then the loopholes get huge.
Officer:"Hey buddy you are not allowed to watch DVDs while you're driving". Driver:"It's OK, this is an MPEG off my harddrive." Officer:"Ok, carry on then...".
For those of you that can remember, or who have read The electric KoolAid acid test, there were such stupid loopholes in narcotics laws in the 60s when it was illegal to smoke dope, but legal to use LSD. These got tightened up by having blanket laws covering narcotics in general.
With driving, there should be no need to explicitely mention cell phones (under the cellphone law, listening and sending notes with voice-activated email is probably still legal and using a two-way radio is probably legal since it is technically not a cellphone - yet they are all equally instrusive into driver function), not watching movies, not playing chess,... Unfortunately it is hard to determine where the boundary of acceptable interference is since it is so subjective; is taking to your kids in the back OK?
Real debugging via a humna language (particularly English) is bullshit. The reason we have C, asm etc is because the concepts in programming are not easily expressed in English etc, but are far easier to express in a purpose-defined language. Likely the same applies to effective debugging
This reminds me of back in approx 1985 or so, someone "invented" a human language programming environment called "The Last One" or something like that. This would supposedly make it simple to write programs without having to learn C etc. Some programmers quaked in their boots. However the real issue with programming is learning the contructs, not the language (ie. if you understand what a linked list is, then writing one in C vs Pascal is pretty simple). Anyone that thinks that programming in English is easier is seriously misunderstanding programming. The ultimate test is to look at the languages that have survived: The more "human readable" languages like COBOL have not survived, but the more cryptic ones like C have. The big "killer app" for making programming simple for the non-programmer was the spreadsheet and that's hardly a natural language.
Now debugging is pretty much the same deal. Verbose English debugging interfaces might make it simple to learn to do very basic debugging, but once you get into things a bit deeper (and get more experienced), English becomes a huge liability and you'll be wishing for more concise and expressive languages.
Many patent holders would not go make a case against OSS, but there are a certain breed of scumbags out there who make it their biz to go search for patents and potential violators. They then contact the patent holder and ask for the right to go chace the infringer at no cost to the patent holder, except for a slice of the action.
Once the lawyer bastard has a "percentage ownership", the patent holder loses a lot of their rights as to whom they will pursue or not. Even if the patent holder is a nice guy, the whole business is reduced to lawyer level (ie lower than shark shit) morality.
The parent is right. It isn't about the royalty checks. It's about the threat to both the development and uptake of OSS.
Who wants to work on a project that, if it looks successful is going to end up being beaten up and shut down by the patent holder. Since OSS has no revenue stream, even a small royalty can kill it.
Big biz backers of OSS (IBM, Novell,...) could perceive a threat of big royalties or civil cases if they assist OSS projects. For example, the patent owners could make a case that apart from direct infringement, by assisting OSS IBM and others could be charged with assisting others to violate patents. In short, could get messy.
I bet you these points have already been found, just nobody has made such a fuss about them and catalogued them. It's a bit like saying that Lewis and Clark discovered a route to the west or that Livingston (or was it Stanley) discovered Victoria Falls. The local folks have been there for ages.
There is a minor difference... The Toyota car is controlled by the driver to express the driver's emotions. Herbie was a cranky car with its own emotions.
Spyware is going to get intrusive, but the porn should be great!
You're going to be able to download stuff that can't even be seen. Censorship issues will be interesting since you won't be downloading sensory images.
Being a Minister or working in a ministry in many African countries means getting a nice Mercedes or other car and a bunch of other perks. The ministry need not be one that the country actually needs. Hence you're going to find various ministries that do nothing useful and implement no useful policies, but will accept various bribes, trips abroad and "expense claims" from the government and those wishing to do business in these countries.
Considering other huge opportunities that they've had and ignored I doubt they are going to sort things out just for some IT biz. While the guys in power have the money, and the tanks to protect themselves from the masses, they have no motivation to improve anything. Encouragiging IT biz would just be asking to shine a light on the terrible state of the country. I can't see that those in power would want that.
The world is full of bullshit theories. Some have been proven wrong, some have been discontinued due to being politicall incorrect (eg. black folks are dumber because they have thicker skull bones).
So many of these dumb theories are there to support some daft notion: man is superior to other animals; white folks are better than black folks...
If you're a small company and need to (reasonably manually) process an order, pay a % to the credit card company and allow for bad debts etc, then fifty bucks doesn't go very far.
People regularly pay $5000 for an evaluation board from a company like Intel which does nothing more than promote their own chip.
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For example, the most successful assault weapon ever is the AK47. They are definitely not the most accurate or most refined weapons but they take a lot of abuse and keep firing. Rustthem, let the termites eat the woodwork, get them dusty and they keep going. In comparison many other assault rifles misbehave when they get a pinch of dust in their gas chambers.
The same basic principle applies to bionic suites etc. Fancy shit breaks.
Bottom line is that you should state prior claim to such intellectual property when you sign up. This way everything is clear.
If you fall in love with product X and protect it from being canabalised by other products then those products suffer. Eventually product X becomes obsolete and you end up with nothing. The Intel business model: "Be your own worst enemy" is highly effective.
Of course they are willing to burn a lot of cash to maintain market share. MS have yet to have a quarter that comes near to breaking even in their mobile biz. They can afford to wait their time and burn cash in the mobile sector to keep their hands on corporate business.
I grant you that products are like babies: generally easy to conceive but hard to deliver. But, given the number of people who have undertaken their second or more venture and given the number of multiple-child families I think you have failed to make a case. In both case some sort of pain suppression or whatever seems to kick in and people come back for more.
Now I would classify myself as a hacker, but cant play a musical instrument (CD player isn't a musical instrument right?) and sci-fi gives me a softie. Dig guns though.
IMHO a good/great hacker must be prepared to go where he wants to with confidence. Don't just take on everyone else's mindset (if you do what the other 6 billion people are doing you're not going to do anything worthwhile). In short, scratch your own itch.
A log file does this far more reliably and useful (eg. No "Well I just opened a beer and talked on the phone to Pete", but Clicked OK, Opened file blaah, seg abort...). Whatever, there is no there is no need for the user to interact with the SEGABRT etc.
Mathematicians and physisists use their own language, not because they are stupid, but because natural languages are not good languages to convey the concepts they are expressing.
In the products I'm involved with I often get stupid reports from the field of the form "framing error causes unit to reset". When I get one of these, first thing I do is get back to the user and figure out exactly what they saw and what heppened withouth them trying to figure out the symptoms. In the "framing error" problem, what was really happening was that a power glitch was being caused when the RS232 cable was attched (because of bad grounding). This caused a reset. However, the user was a "super user" who knew bad things happen to serial data when you plug/unplug cables. One of the buzzwords he knew about was a framing error. So he "half solved" the problem by saying that a framing error caused the problem.
There is a big difference between observing and fixing problems. QA is about observing, not fixing, problems. It is better to provide a good way for users to make accurate error reports (eg. backtrace/log/whatever) than try have them try explain what went wrong.
When I lived in South Africa I could speak pidgin Zulu and Xhosa and studied Xhosa at university. If I recall, Xhosa had 16 noun groups and seven tenses. This means that Xhosa is far less ambiguous as to the relationship between things. Verbs are spoken with the subject and object noun group prefixes attached. Thus the verb for "hit" is different when applied to a dog as opposed to a tree. This potentially helps remove a lot of the confusion in human/machine natural language interfaces. Problem though is finding enough Xhosa programmers and Xhosa people wanting to buy your product.
The classification seems to be getting random. The one on lattitudes and longitudes was classified under science. Should have been under dumb things to do with technology.
Officer:"Hey buddy you are not allowed to watch DVDs while you're driving". Driver:"It's OK, this is an MPEG off my harddrive." Officer:"Ok, carry on then...".
For those of you that can remember, or who have read The electric KoolAid acid test, there were such stupid loopholes in narcotics laws in the 60s when it was illegal to smoke dope, but legal to use LSD. These got tightened up by having blanket laws covering narcotics in general.
With driving, there should be no need to explicitely mention cell phones (under the cellphone law, listening and sending notes with voice-activated email is probably still legal and using a two-way radio is probably legal since it is technically not a cellphone - yet they are all equally instrusive into driver function), not watching movies, not playing chess,... Unfortunately it is hard to determine where the boundary of acceptable interference is since it is so subjective; is taking to your kids in the back OK?
This reminds me of back in approx 1985 or so, someone "invented" a human language programming environment called "The Last One" or something like that. This would supposedly make it simple to write programs without having to learn C etc. Some programmers quaked in their boots. However the real issue with programming is learning the contructs, not the language (ie. if you understand what a linked list is, then writing one in C vs Pascal is pretty simple). Anyone that thinks that programming in English is easier is seriously misunderstanding programming. The ultimate test is to look at the languages that have survived: The more "human readable" languages like COBOL have not survived, but the more cryptic ones like C have. The big "killer app" for making programming simple for the non-programmer was the spreadsheet and that's hardly a natural language.
Now debugging is pretty much the same deal. Verbose English debugging interfaces might make it simple to learn to do very basic debugging, but once you get into things a bit deeper (and get more experienced), English becomes a huge liability and you'll be wishing for more concise and expressive languages.
Many patent holders would not go make a case against OSS, but there are a certain breed of scumbags out there who make it their biz to go search for patents and potential violators. They then contact the patent holder and ask for the right to go chace the infringer at no cost to the patent holder, except for a slice of the action.
Once the lawyer bastard has a "percentage ownership", the patent holder loses a lot of their rights as to whom they will pursue or not. Even if the patent holder is a nice guy, the whole business is reduced to lawyer level (ie lower than shark shit) morality.
Who wants to work on a project that, if it looks successful is going to end up being beaten up and shut down by the patent holder. Since OSS has no revenue stream, even a small royalty can kill it.
Big biz backers of OSS (IBM, Novell,...) could perceive a threat of big royalties or civil cases if they assist OSS projects. For example, the patent owners could make a case that apart from direct infringement, by assisting OSS IBM and others could be charged with assisting others to violate patents. In short, could get messy.
I bet you these points have already been found, just nobody has made such a fuss about them and catalogued them. It's a bit like saying that Lewis and Clark discovered a route to the west or that Livingston (or was it Stanley) discovered Victoria Falls. The local folks have been there for ages.
In internet it isn't geography, but bandwidth that makes you remote.
There is a minor difference... The Toyota car is controlled by the driver to express the driver's emotions. Herbie was a cranky car with its own emotions.
But seriosly folks all my brain needs is a command line interface...
You're going to be able to download stuff that can't even be seen. Censorship issues will be interesting since you won't be downloading sensory images.
Being a Minister or working in a ministry in many African countries means getting a nice Mercedes or other car and a bunch of other perks. The ministry need not be one that the country actually needs. Hence you're going to find various ministries that do nothing useful and implement no useful policies, but will accept various bribes, trips abroad and "expense claims" from the government and those wishing to do business in these countries.
racists are cowards
Considering other huge opportunities that they've had and ignored I doubt they are going to sort things out just for some IT biz. While the guys in power have the money, and the tanks to protect themselves from the masses, they have no motivation to improve anything. Encouragiging IT biz would just be asking to shine a light on the terrible state of the country. I can't see that those in power would want that.
So many of these dumb theories are there to support some daft notion: man is superior to other animals; white folks are better than black folks...
People regularly pay $5000 for an evaluation board from a company like Intel which does nothing more than promote their own chip.