bug-free code mathematically impossible??? What strange sort of mathematics is that.
I can trivially prove that bug-free code exists: The empty program is a bug-free implementation of doing nothing.
Or: By defining that a specific program should do exactly what it does now, that program is absolutely bug-free.
You were probably thinking about the "halting problem" in computer science. There are programs where you can't prove total correctness because you can't prove they ever stop, see wikipedia for an explanation.
Your example actually drives my point. Unnecessary distractions like that all-hands meeting are good examples of bad management. But they are universal. No design methodolgy in existence says "Have a meeting every day where you talk about things unrelevant to everyone'.
To put that as an achievement of XP is like saying Windows invented the GUI.
Incidentally some of the methods of XP violate the principle (TDD for example, does a test case benefit the customer?) first to have an end result that does benefit the customer. But thats true for every other design methodology in existence. In the end every design method wants to benefit the customer. That a corporation has a big bureaucracy that works contrary to these goals is just the effect of reality on a theory.
You are completely right with your critique of the schema reviews and bloated structures, but when these design principles where thought out, I'm sure everyone thought it would ultimately benefit the customer. One could argue that the principle behind XP is 'Smallest possible organisation' or something similar (don't pin me on that, I don't have the time to think of something better), but 'Do only what benefits the customer' is a catch-all for any good design principle.
Originally, XP placed a lot of weight on continually asking yourself "Am I delivering value to my customer?" Followed by elimination of activities where the answer was "no". In other words, do more of the things that deliver value and less of the things that do not.The rest of your post is very insightful, but this sentence might have been spoken by a motivational guru on QVC. With that principle you can construct any design methodology you like. By the way, the second design principle of XP was 'Stay true to yourself';-).
Sorry if that sounded too harsh, but maybe because of things like this XP is regarded by some as a religion and not a viable design method
You are right and wrong. Your design might be the best way to do it, with OOP, abstraction, whatever. But what use are your OOP principles when only one programmer in the team, i.e. you, understands it?
These programmers you are working with seem to be horribly outdated. As long as you work with them you have to adapt to them. That's the crux of wanting to stay lowly programmer, you are not steering the boat, you are sitting in it.
As I see it you have these alternatives:
1) Stay in this team. Then it is 'When in Egypt do as the Egyptians do'. You can use your design principles somewhat in your own code, but the projects won't ever be designed like you think it is best.
2) Leave this job and look for a job where the team is more up to date. But I guarantee you, you still will have to compromise.
3) Leave the job and take a job as a single programmer. No team is no compromises. But you won't learn from the experience of others. And you will have to do everything, from coding to designing to talking to the customer.
4) Stay and become team leader. Then it's your say, but you still have to consider what the rest of the team knows. And, since code quality is not immediately measurable to share holders and company execs, you will still have to sacrifice code quality for fast development.
The only two things these ideas have in common are the following.
1.) People end up where they didn't mean to
2.) The word is the same.
There is more:
3) There is someone (the hijacker) maliciously trying to redirect people for his own gain
4) The hijacked people are using a service by an entity unrelated to the hijacker (google/airline), they have no relationship whatsoever with the hijacker nor do they usually want one.
5) The hijackers goals are in conflict with the goals of the hijacked people.
6) the hijacker needs the hijacked people for his goals.
So for your examples:
1) Getting bad directions.
There is (usually) no maliciousness involved, and even then there is no gain for the hijacker. There is no third party involved, the hijacked is asking/contacting the hijacker directly
2) Being lost.
No malicious hijacker at all.
3) Having a car break down
dito
4) URL Forwarding
No malice, no conflict between the goals of hijacker and hijacked, no third party, the hijacked contacts the hijacker directly.
Sure, I could also list some principal differences between the google and aircraft hijacking, the biggest IMHO: In aircraft hijacking the hijacker is actively involved in selecting the hijacked (but still, has no free choice among all people, he has to select among groups of airline passengers).
But you can't dismiss the analogy so easily, there's a reason google hijacking is called hijacking. Seems some other people stumbled on this analogy too.
Every voter gets a paper slip with a number on it that is part unique id (counter) and part chosen by the voter (let's call this the password part). The unique id was shown to the voter before he voted and before he entered his password. After the election every vote is made public with that number and its vote. Result:
1) Everyone has the power to check his or her vote AND check the outcome of the voting with a simple script and the public data.
2) The individual vote is not traceable to the voter (provided no voting booth organiser has the ability to find out the unique id a voter got).
3) Because of the chosen part no two voters can be given the same 'unique' id to "merge" their votes into one.
Ok, did I overlook anything? I can think of tricks that would work with 95 out of 100 people (like changing the id on the printout when the tampered machine finds a voter with the same 'password' and vote) in this scenario, but that's not good enough to avoid being found out by the 5% that are observant.
Practically this doesn't change anything. Crack was available for a long time, and any cracker who gets access to a password file has the time to run crack on it. If it takes a day or two usually doesn't matter at all. In the end a password is dead if crack can find it, otherwise not.
I would love to play with a machine like that. But I have heavy doubts that such a machine would be faster or smaller than a special purpose digital computer simulating fuzzy logic.
255 states? You think you can fit 255 states in a 1V voltage range? Without state 221 and 222 getting mixed up? With lets say a 1Ghz clock and all the electrical fields and line reflections etc. influencing your signal?
What you are proposing is similar to the good old analog computer, not a bad idea and for some sort of problems really useful, but not effective as a general-purpose machine. Research facilities have worked for years on fuzzy-processor and AFAIK they are used in some cases, but most of the time it's only a binary CPU emulating fuzzy logic. Great for some problems, not competitive for the rest.
The news article is talking about logic with 3 or 4 states which is not enough for fuzzy logic and is IMHO too much hazzle for too small a reward.
With windows, if I'm a competent user, I install, answer a few simple questions, and run Windows Update, which cures my system's ails. There's nothing I need to remove, as most stuff is disabled by default
If that were the case, all those Outlook worms never would have happened. The first thing you have to do on a windows box is to turn off a lot of "features" in Explorer and Outlook.
I concur with the rest of your mail though, underneath the graphical interface Linux is far from user-friendly. Compare that with windows which is underneath just unusable.
Why aren't there any companies that compete with them? Because they have a practically self-sustaining near-monopoly. Self-sustaining because they have the OS that everyone is accustomed to (which means for example those ~75% of PC users for whom the computer is so complicated that a different menu entry in MS word would throw them off completely). Self-sustaining because every PC maker gets Windows only cheap when they buy it for every PC they sell, whether included or not (Thats the reason Linux-PCs are not cheaper for the typical PC-buyer than Windows-PCs). Self-sustaining because most games come out only for Windows and this is the part where MS fixes the younger generation on Windows, which keeps them from looking for alternatives.
They didn't buy Apple because Apple is their proof that they don't have a monopoly. They couldn't have bought IBM at that time (I'm sure) but why should they if OS/2 sucked? I would guess MS would buy a competitor only as a last resort because 1) they want to avoid anti-trust investigations and 2) they have enough methods to keep the competitors small. See Netscape or especially DR-DOS for cases where they used their market power to eliminate the competition.
They know it's no use buying or disrupting any Linux-distro company by usual means because Linux works differently. That's why they see Linux as a thread.
As the head developer of Arcanum in a recent interviev conceded, they made the error to try too much with too few people. He also said they avoided that mistake with the upcoming 'Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil'. There is still hope for a really good CRPG.
ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an [autocracy].
Sorry, but ICANN was never a democratic institution. Only a minority of the Board members were elected by the internet community, everyone else was appointed by some US agency.
I guess the important difference between the CR tests and some positive personal observations is the amount of air circulation. The prinicple of Ionic Breeze won't work over a range of more than a few centimeters (comparable to the range of a magnet). So Ionic Breeze won't work unless there is a measurable draft in the room that sends a lot of dust in the path of the machine. Test it in a room with doors closed and it probably will fail miserably.
You can say CR used an unfair testing precedure or you can say Ionic Breeze works only under some conditions and is inferior to products with a fan.
Disclaimer: I don't have any Ionizer, this is just guess work.
That you have to pay for state television in Britian (also in Germany and other countries) whether you like it or not is acctually a good thing. If you ever have the chance to watch BBC or german TV, do so. No commercials every 15 minutes, higher quality (especially the news and political, social and cultural programmes), and no total sellout to the masses. Minorities don't get the short stick all the time. Think of it as a community service like road maintenance. You pay for it whether you use it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
bug-free code mathematically impossible??? What strange sort of mathematics is that.
I can trivially prove that bug-free code exists: The empty program is a bug-free implementation of doing nothing.
Or: By defining that a specific program should do exactly what it does now, that program is absolutely bug-free.
You were probably thinking about the "halting problem" in computer science. There are programs where you can't prove total correctness because you can't prove they ever stop, see wikipedia for an explanation.
Nowadays nearly everyone uses auctioneer, which levels the playing field. Items sold under value are seldom. Everyone knows the value of all items.
That's one reason why you should not allow remote content to be loaded by your email program.
To put that as an achievement of XP is like saying Windows invented the GUI.
Incidentally some of the methods of XP violate the principle (TDD for example, does a test case benefit the customer?) first to have an end result that does benefit the customer. But thats true for every other design methodology in existence.
In the end every design method wants to benefit the customer. That a corporation has a big bureaucracy that works contrary to these goals is just the effect of reality on a theory.
You are completely right with your critique of the schema reviews and bloated structures, but when these design principles where thought out, I'm sure everyone thought it would ultimately benefit the customer. One could argue that the principle behind XP is 'Smallest possible organisation' or something similar (don't pin me on that, I don't have the time to think of something better), but 'Do only what benefits the customer' is a catch-all for any good design principle.
Sorry if that sounded too harsh, but maybe because of things like this XP is regarded by some as a religion and not a viable design method
These programmers you are working with seem to be horribly outdated. As long as you work with them you have to adapt to them. That's the crux of wanting to stay lowly programmer, you are not steering the boat, you are sitting in it.
As I see it you have these alternatives:
1) Stay in this team. Then it is 'When in Egypt do as the Egyptians do'. You can use your design principles somewhat in your own code, but the projects won't ever be designed like you think it is best.
2) Leave this job and look for a job where the team is more up to date. But I guarantee you, you still will have to compromise. 3) Leave the job and take a job as a single programmer. No team is no compromises. But you won't learn from the experience of others. And you will have to do everything, from coding to designing to talking to the customer.
4) Stay and become team leader. Then it's your say, but you still have to consider what the rest of the team knows. And, since code quality is not immediately measurable to share holders and company execs, you will still have to sacrifice code quality for fast development.
3) There is someone (the hijacker) maliciously trying to redirect people for his own gain
4) The hijacked people are using a service by an entity unrelated to the hijacker (google/airline), they have no relationship whatsoever with the hijacker nor do they usually want one.
5) The hijackers goals are in conflict with the goals of the hijacked people.
6) the hijacker needs the hijacked people for his goals.
So for your examples:
1) Getting bad directions.
There is (usually) no maliciousness involved, and even then there is no gain for the hijacker. There is no third party involved, the hijacked is asking/contacting the hijacker directly
2) Being lost.
No malicious hijacker at all.
3) Having a car break down
dito
4) URL Forwarding
No malice, no conflict between the goals of hijacker and hijacked, no third party, the hijacked contacts the hijacker directly.
Sure, I could also list some principal differences between the google and aircraft hijacking, the biggest IMHO: In aircraft hijacking the hijacker is actively involved in selecting the hijacked (but still, has no free choice among all people, he has to select among groups of airline passengers).
But you can't dismiss the analogy so easily, there's a reason google hijacking is called hijacking. Seems some other people stumbled on this analogy too.
Simple system for accountable electronic voting:
Every voter gets a paper slip with a number on it that is part unique id (counter) and part chosen by the voter (let's call this the password part). The unique id was shown to the voter before he voted and before he entered his password. After the election every vote is made public with that number and its vote. Result:
1) Everyone has the power to check his or her vote AND check the outcome of the voting with a simple script and the public data.
2) The individual vote is not traceable to the voter (provided no voting booth organiser has the ability to find out the unique id a voter got).
3) Because of the chosen part no two voters can be given the same 'unique' id to "merge" their votes into one.
Ok, did I overlook anything? I can think of tricks that would work with 95 out of 100 people (like changing the id on the printout when the tampered machine finds a voter with the same 'password' and vote) in this scenario, but that's not good enough to avoid being found out by the 5% that are observant.
Practically this doesn't change anything. Crack was available for a long time, and any cracker who gets access to a password file has the time to run crack on it. If it takes a day or two usually doesn't matter at all. In the end a password is dead if crack can find it, otherwise not.
I would love to play with a machine like that. But I have heavy doubts that such a machine would be faster or smaller than a special purpose digital computer simulating fuzzy logic.
What you are proposing is similar to the good old analog computer, not a bad idea and for some sort of problems really useful, but not effective as a general-purpose machine. Research facilities have worked for years on fuzzy-processor and AFAIK they are used in some cases, but most of the time it's only a binary CPU emulating fuzzy logic. Great for some problems, not competitive for the rest. The news article is talking about logic with 3 or 4 states which is not enough for fuzzy logic and is IMHO too much hazzle for too small a reward.
With windows, if I'm a competent user, I install, answer a few simple questions, and run Windows Update, which cures my system's ails. There's nothing I need to remove, as most stuff is disabled by default
If that were the case, all those Outlook worms never would have happened. The first thing you have to do on a windows box is to turn off a lot of "features" in Explorer and Outlook.
I concur with the rest of your mail though, underneath the graphical interface Linux is far from user-friendly. Compare that with windows which is underneath just unusable.
Why aren't there any companies that compete with them? Because they have a practically self-sustaining near-monopoly. Self-sustaining because they have the OS that everyone is accustomed to (which means for example those ~75% of PC users for whom the computer is so complicated that a different menu entry in MS word would throw them off completely). Self-sustaining because every PC maker gets Windows only cheap when they buy it for every PC they sell, whether included or not (Thats the reason Linux-PCs are not cheaper for the typical PC-buyer than Windows-PCs). Self-sustaining because most games come out only for Windows and this is the part where MS fixes the younger generation on Windows, which keeps them from looking for alternatives.
They didn't buy Apple because Apple is their proof that they don't have a monopoly. They couldn't have bought IBM at that time (I'm sure) but why should they if OS/2 sucked? I would guess MS would buy a competitor only as a last resort because 1) they want to avoid anti-trust investigations and 2) they have enough methods to keep the competitors small. See Netscape or especially DR-DOS for cases where they used their market power to eliminate the competition.
They know it's no use buying or disrupting any Linux-distro company by usual means because Linux works differently. That's why they see Linux as a thread.
As the head developer of Arcanum in a recent interviev conceded, they made the error to try too much with too few people. He also said they avoided that mistake with the upcoming 'Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil'. There is still hope for a really good CRPG.
Checking Prices at buy.com:
XP Home : 183$
Suse Personal Edition: 32$
Please try not to compare apples with apple carts.
Sorry, but ICANN was never a democratic institution. Only a minority of the Board members were elected by the internet community, everyone else was appointed by some US agency.
You can say CR used an unfair testing precedure or you can say Ionic Breeze works only under some conditions and is inferior to products with a fan.
Disclaimer: I don't have any Ionizer, this is just guess work.
That you have to pay for state television in Britian (also in Germany and other countries) whether you like it or not is acctually a good thing. If you ever have the chance to watch BBC or german TV, do so. No commercials every 15 minutes, higher quality (especially the news and political, social and cultural programmes), and no total sellout to the masses. Minorities don't get the short stick all the time. Think of it as a community service like road maintenance. You pay for it whether you use it or not.