as long as long as the plutocrats and their champagne caviar cocktails arrive safely. Somehow I think Marketing and Legal will want to rework that presentation.
And BTW, I'm pretty sure Pedestrians (in the US) have right of way in just about every situation. So deliberately programming the car to violate that is saying you don't care what harm you do. Legal may not be happy with that either.
I mostly like FF design and functionality. But I am sick to death of the rapid point releases. Every few weeks, one more update, one more version number, one more download and install. Tried just going to reminder status, until that was hounding me to distraction too. I finally turned it all off. I still remember to check for updates, but I do it on my schedule, and only once per month or so.
I realize Mozilla can be bothered to do their own final quality checking until someone else finds it in the field, but I don't want to be part of the experiment. People say the XP model is better for everyone, but all it says to me is you want to be more like Microsoft. Welcome to Planet Beta Test
I would feel better if we did everything we could to keep it in space until a replacement is operational, and then after that as long as it is cost effective. Its kinda what my dad told me about my first car: "Put as little money in it as you can, and drive it until it blows up."
The safe thing to do, and the thing I least expect NASA to advocate, is exactly as you state. They will want to retire the old Hubble, THEN build a new one, and THEN when it launches, it will go *boom* and $10billion will go to the bottom of the Atlantic. We will have nothing in space and at least three more years wait 'til they build another one. If they do.
Keep Hubble up until it is staring its replacement in the face.
I wonder if this was meant to indicate Open Source Software?
No, it was meant to limit or defeat the use of "throw-it-to-the-winds"-ware. The sort of unsupported, undocumented thing you might have found floating around on Bulletin Board libraries in years past.
Nothing worse than finding out your mission critical maintenence, supplies and personnel database is built around a "really cool utility" somebody found 13 years ago on Bob's Basement BBS, and it only runs on MS-DOS 5.0 or AmigaDOS
"Uhhh... General, we can make it work, but we need to find Gigabit drivers backward compatible to DOS"
Open Source wouldn't be necessary if proprietary solutions had completly documented external interfaces and file formats.
Absolutely correct! Black Box engineering techniques, and piecewise interchangeability have been around for decades, and actually predate modern software and digital computers by nearly a century (cf. "Cyrus McCormick"). Software Engineering as a discipline has been trying to truly implement the concept for years, as any Object Oriented programmer knows.
The government, and really anyone willing to buy a developers license, should at a minimum have a definition of ALL the interfaces to every module in the code of interest. And that includes side effects that might inadvertantly arise in a third modules due to interaction between two others. Of course, delivering such a definition would require extensive testing of the internals of the code, or more straightforward programming techniques, something certain large companies are loathe to do.
If MS and others really feel that what they do and how they do it should be a trade secret and protected as such, fine. Lock those modules away and just tell me how to interface with them in a complete and reliable way. It wouldn't be Open Source that way, but I'm not a religious nut about it. I just want to be able to identify and switch out bad componenets on my schedule, not the manufacturers.
As an example, I for one don't usually care about the internal details of a new Chevy engine either. But when I buy one, it better have the same bolt pattern and hose couplings as the last engine I had in my custom hot rod. If I decide to go to Ford, it is up to me to figure out the adapters and conversions. And I definitely DON'T want some undocumented "feature" on the Ford looking for only "genuine" Ford parts to talk to.
Software, it is supposed to be Engineering, not Magic and Marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
as long as long as the plutocrats and their champagne caviar cocktails arrive safely. Somehow I think Marketing and Legal will want to rework that presentation. And BTW, I'm pretty sure Pedestrians (in the US) have right of way in just about every situation. So deliberately programming the car to violate that is saying you don't care what harm you do. Legal may not be happy with that either.
I realize Mozilla can be bothered to do their own final quality checking until someone else finds it in the field, but I don't want to be part of the experiment. People say the XP model is better for everyone, but all it says to me is you want to be more like Microsoft. Welcome to Planet Beta Test
The safe thing to do, and the thing I least expect NASA to advocate, is exactly as you state. They will want to retire the old Hubble, THEN build a new one, and THEN when it launches, it will go *boom* and $10billion will go to the bottom of the Atlantic. We will have nothing in space and at least three more years wait 'til they build another one. If they do.
Keep Hubble up until it is staring its replacement in the face.
I wonder if this was meant to indicate Open Source Software?
No, it was meant to limit or defeat the use of "throw-it-to-the-winds"-ware. The sort of unsupported, undocumented thing you might have found floating around on Bulletin Board libraries in years past.
Nothing worse than finding out your mission critical maintenence, supplies and personnel database is built around a "really cool utility" somebody found 13 years ago on Bob's Basement BBS, and it only runs on MS-DOS 5.0 or AmigaDOS
"Uhhh... General, we can make it work, but we need to find Gigabit drivers backward compatible to DOS"
Open Source wouldn't be necessary if proprietary solutions had completly documented external interfaces and file formats.
Absolutely correct! Black Box engineering techniques, and piecewise interchangeability have been around for decades, and actually predate modern software and digital computers by nearly a century (cf. "Cyrus McCormick"). Software Engineering as a discipline has been trying to truly implement the concept for years, as any Object Oriented programmer knows.
The government, and really anyone willing to buy a developers license, should at a minimum have a definition of ALL the interfaces to every module in the code of interest. And that includes side effects that might inadvertantly arise in a third modules due to interaction between two others. Of course, delivering such a definition would require extensive testing of the internals of the code, or more straightforward programming techniques, something certain large companies are loathe to do.
If MS and others really feel that what they do and how they do it should be a trade secret and protected as such, fine. Lock those modules away and just tell me how to interface with them in a complete and reliable way. It wouldn't be Open Source that way, but I'm not a religious nut about it. I just want to be able to identify and switch out bad componenets on my schedule, not the manufacturers.
As an example, I for one don't usually care about the internal details of a new Chevy engine either. But when I buy one, it better have the same bolt pattern and hose couplings as the last engine I had in my custom hot rod. If I decide to go to Ford, it is up to me to figure out the adapters and conversions. And I definitely DON'T want some undocumented "feature" on the Ford looking for only "genuine" Ford parts to talk to.
Software, it is supposed to be Engineering, not Magic and Marketing.