Your instinct is correct, it's a bogus story. Here's what a real physicist has to say:
"The calculation in question came out as a 'preprint' in late July. Within a week the GR community identified a grave technical flaw that invalidates its broad conclusion. Since then the paper hasn't been published, nor (I would imagine) has it been accepted for publication without major revision. You learned about this result recently owing to the long deadlines associated with production of CERN Courier, a glossy magazine that popularizes fundamental science. They went to press at an embarrassing time. Trouble is, you'll never encounter the retraction. The majority of surprising new results that are popularized turn out to be false, but the public never gets clued."
Funny, if one of my help desk techs could clear a trouble ticket by changing a battery, I'd be pleased, not crying in my soup that it isn't some complex issue. But maybe that's just me.
The fantasy that patents protect the little guy has almost always been a fantasy. Only little guys with big pockets have won (Eolas has big pockets, for example).
The best defense is to get out ahead and stay ahead, and when Micro$oft or some other known abuser of small companies comes looking for a "joint development" or "partnership" deal, tell them to get lost. Don't give up your IP, ever, to anyone, for any reason. Big companies are really a colony organism of small companies. Probably the guys that are really competing with your little idea or concept are just a small sub-group inside that large company, perhaps with no more developers than you have. It is rare for some executive to say, "OK, let's stop everything we're doing and take these 200 programmers here and put them to work on kicking the tar out of ThreeNerds, Inc."
So the right answer, is, in fact "Get rid of software and process patents." They didn't protect you before. Now they actively prevent you from starting or doing anything. For example, what is the fallout from RIM's case in the investment community? Why should I invest my capital in a fledgling software company, when some sleeper patent lurking out there can be invoked by a bunch of sleazeballs and steal everything I've built? The answer is, I don't invest in software companies any more, period. Fuck 'em. I'm taking my money elsewhere.
Yes, and its un-clean implementations in stack-based Lisps with property lists and funarg problems? Right. Show me a purist and I'll show you complete lack of practical application. Where's the 1978 Jack Dennis dream of converting Fortran programs into stateless fine-grained parallel code? Oh right, didn't happen. I remember now.
Re:Maybe an OSS future isn't that bright afterall
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 0
A larger question is, when is software worth paying for, and when isn't it? Everyone has his own opinion. I think Excel is worth paying for, it's terrific. I think Windows is worth paying for, because OS-whatever only runs on Apples (they will NEVER get it), and the Linux desktops, well, suck.
I don't think Word is worth paying for, it pisses me off routinely. Neither is Photoshop -- The Gimp is good enough for what I do. Acrobat isn't worth paying for, I can generate PDF's a dozen different ways. I'm about to buy a Windows utility program that watches socket activity. It's terrific, it's cheap, and the free alternatives I've tried suck.
I'm currently using a treemap control that I paid for. I paid for it because it does what I need it to do. It is enormously better than anything out there, and it's better than the control we built for ourselves, which is running into issues that we don't have time to solve.
Of course my firewall runs Linux. But not much else, except for a caching dns lookup. What's the point? Cygwin satisfies my command-line Jones. I use an external hoster, haven't hosted my own site for years, too much bother.
I think I'm typical. People buy software because it satisfies a need. OSS falls into the "good enough" category, rarely the "best of breed" category. OSS is "good enough" for most of what I do. It's "best of breed" for IT stuff like dns and firewalling and so on. But OSS isn't as good as Excel. It isn't as good as Windows (sorry).
I ran Nessus, once. It was OK. Not great, just OK. Someone else did a commercial sweep of our site, found stuff Nessus didn't. We paid for that, didn't pay for Nessus. Was Nessus good enough? I don't know, it was useful I guess. I sure wasn't interested in their source code, who cares? I just wanted to run the utility once. If they're taking it closed-source because their competitors are stealing their ideas, I sympathize wholeheartedly. Their business model didn't work, and you gotta do what you gotta do to stay in business. Or you get another job and do Nessus as a hobby.
I think what the parent misses is that open source projects are hobbies. Hobbies take energy, people get enthusiastic about them, and so on. There will always be a pool of people wanting to join up and play together. Sometimes there will be a coalescing of usefulness and a reasonable product will emerge. Sometimes not. Was Nessus something hobbyists were excited about? Apparently not. C'est la vie.
The social contract is broken irretrievably, and we all need to adapt to the new reality. The new reality is, don't get too comfortable, keep the resume up to date, and move on the minute things are the slightest bit fishy. Some signs to look for:
o No more free pens in the stockroom, now the admin hands them out one by one and makes you sign for them. o An all-company memorandum from the CEO shows up suddenly, responding to hallway rumors or soft-pedaling bad news. o The perennial blame game between Sales, Marketing, and Engineering stops simmering and comes to a full boil in the hallway. o A top executive (any top executive) leaves mysteriously. o Sales guys start leaving (more than one is big trouble) o "The Board" starts poking around and introducing themselves to people. o A routine purchase request for equipment is turned down, regardless of justifications presented. o There is an odd new emphasis on collections activity. o "Investors" start showing up for tours of the engineering department. o The annual customer conference is canceled or postponed. o A delivery date is moved forward inexplicably, without consulting the engineers on the project. o It is impossible to get a reasonable explanation from your boss for a clearly unreasonable situation or request. o You are asked to stop work and "document" your project at a time that seems inappropriate and wrong. o You are asked to sign any document "acknowledging" your equity position (if any), when it should be abundantly clear what your equity position is.
One small way to protect yourself (and to acquire information about the company's activities that they would not normally share with you) is to take advantage of any stock purchase plan (real stock, not options) put forward, and buy a few shares (preferably as few as possible). This will at least make you privy to the legal documents around acquisition scenarios and so on.
But the best way to protect yourself is to get the resume engine revved up the minute you see the warning signs above. No need to delay. Get the hell out.
Humor is the right response to this, because basically, the more amorphous the problem, the more difficult the spec. There's no right answer.
o Worst case: an effort to specify a business process to be automated, with input from 25 high-powered consultants with 25 times zero years of practical experience. o Best case: an effort to specify a coherent system with predictable input and verifiable output.
There are numerous examples of both cases cited by various respondents. Ultimately the quality of the spec, if there is a spec, comes down to a balancing act between cost and the consequences of failure. If a communications protocol is ill-defined, the result is a hung communications line. So the spec must be tight enough to allow two independent implementations to cross-communicate, or the entire effort is useless. On the other hand, if some web-based bullshit e-commerce app is specified poorly, so what, some schmuck somewhere on an odd Tuesday can't order a Swingline Stapler. It's not the end of the world.
I also claim that most creative work is spec-less by definition. You're shingling into the fog, and there isn't any chalk line to follow.
Re:Why are they mutually exclusive?
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
Bingo! Give parent a cigar.
"I know my job will be here." I'm glad you think so. Because the people that own your company are busy trying to sell it to some meathead who will toss you on the dung heap without a second thought. It's all about the money, not about you.
The social contract is broken irretrievably, and we all need to adapt to the new reality. The new reality is, don't get too comfortable, keep the resume up to date, and move on the minute things are the slightest bit fishy. Some signs to look for:
o No more free pens in the stockroom, now the admin hands them out one by one and makes you sign for them. o An all-company memorandum from the CEO shows up suddenly, responding to hallway rumors or soft-pedaling bad news. o The perennial blame game between Sales, Marketing, and Engineering stops simmering and comes to a full boil in the hallway. o A top executive (any top executive) leaves mysteriously. o Sales guys start leaving (more than one is big trouble) o "The Board" starts poking around and introducing themselves to people. o A routine purchase request for equipment is turned down, regardless of justifications presented. o There is an odd new emphasis on collections activity. o "Investors" start showing up for tours of the engineering department. o The annual customer conference is canceled or postponed. o A delivery date is moved forward inexplicably, without consulting the engineers on the project. o It is impossible to get a reasonable explanation from your boss for a clearly unreasonable situation or request. o You are asked to stop work and "document" your project at a time that seems inappropriate and wrong. o You are asked to sign any document "acknowledging" your equity position (if any), when it should be abundantly clear what your equity position is.
One small way to protect yourself (and to acquire information about the company's activities that they would not normally share with you) is to take advantage of any stock purchase plan (real stock, not options) put forward, and buy a few shares (preferably as few as possible). This will at least make you privy to the legal documents around acquisition scenarios and so on.
But the best way to protect yourself is to get the resume engine revved up the minute you see the warning signs above. No need to delay. Get the hell out.
There was a project at Draper Laboratory in the 70's where, essentially, a steering wheel for a helicopter WAS invented.
It was fly-by-wire, of course. It consisted of a Plexiglas half-sphere that could be tilted in any direction ("go that way"), lifted up ("go up"), or pushed down ("go down"), with spring returns to zero position. When at zero position, the helicopter DIDN'T MOVE, PERIOD. They used an inertial guidance unit to hold position, automatically adjusting for wind.
My mother could fly this helicopter, and fly it well. Which meant that all the expensive training that's required for helicopter pilots (and there's a ton of it) wasn't necessary any more. Joe Army Private Off The Farm could jump into this thing and drive it. What was the reaction of the military? They HATED it. It offended all their macho sensibilities. Hey, pilots are cool, man, you can't let ORDINARY GUYS drive helicopters!
Now we're replacing all the aging (but reliable) heavy-lift helicopters with that plane/copter thingie that can't lift as much, costs about a billion dollars, and crashes all the time. You know, the one that Congress forced us to build even after the military tried to kill it. But I understand this new thingie is way harder to fly than helicopters, so we got the macho thing covered.
Actually, people like Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, etc. because they are prestige brands. Their design is mediocre compared to comparably-priced alternatives, and their repair frequency (and average cost of repair) is much higher.
And, the last Mac I disassembled didn't impress me with the quality of its workmanship. Dell makes a much better product than that unit.
With regard to your concern for "quality," if you buy a machine from a reputable manufacturer, and they install the software for you, it's going to work, just like your Apple will work. If you're going to dick around with third-party boards and stuff, well, you takes your chances. But the basic machine is solid.
Now, the software -- Windows -- isn't that solid, to be sure. But machine stability has nothing to do with hardware issues, when we're talking about cookie-cutter machines coming off a quality assembly line. You're just wrong on that score.
If you write software for a living, you'll be done soon. Very done. Toasty done. This has simply got to stop, and everyone in this forum, and anywhere else, who supports software patents of any kind, has to be beaten with a clue stick until they understand why it is the end of the world as we know it.
Bill Gates, are you out there? Here's a suggestion that will forever alter my opinion of you and of Microsoft -- in fact alter it to one of unconditional positive regard. Please save us, and donate all of Microsoft's software patents to the FSF. Then endow the FSF's anti-patent fight with $1B/year in perpetuity. Thank you for listening.
Because faith in the supernatural causes one to more readily accept supernatural explanations for natural events, when a non-supernatural explanation, absent faith, may be substantially more compelling.
Should one believe a drug company's study if one knows that the company that conducted the study was not blind to which patients ingested a new medication?
Analogously, with what credence should one accept another's conclusion that an event or process is supernatural, if that person has already acknowledged that she accepts supernatural explanations on faith?
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One cannot deny that there are many phenomena that we do not understand. The Standard Model of physics is known to be wrong, for example. But attribution of supernatural cause to phenomena that we do not understand is pointless. We might as well conclude that lightning emerges from the hand of Zeus, as some of our ancestors FAITHFULLY believed.
Sorry, that's not part of the deal. Which is why all religions are inherently dangerous. If a person accepts something on faith, he has narrowed his view such that he becomes blind to reality, sometimes to painfully obvious things like the fossil record (I like Martin Gardner's tongue-in-cheek explanation of the fossil record: It was created on the 7th day, complete with clues to a non-existent far distant past, to test our faith).
The problem is, narrowed perspective notwithstanding, people keep doing pesky things like... oh, I don't know... voting. Electing Creationists to the School Board. Stuff like that.
So it's inescapable. "They" will never "leave you the frig alone." That's the whole frigging problem.
We saw it circa 1998. The problem was most severe on Win95, where we first noticed it. We spotted it the same way you would imagine we would have spotted it -- our app (consisting of three independent communicating processes) went autistic for no apparent reason. With extensive message logging we proved that Windows was dropping our messages on the floor (about 1 in 10^5).
To solve this, we put our own protocol on top of Windows messaging that was able to recover from and re-transmit lost messages. No more autism. We shipped with the extra layer, never had a problem after that.
I cannot claim with certainty that the problem also occurred on NT4, because we didn't have concrete proof. However, one day we experienced an app lockup on NT4 with similar symptoms to the ones we were having constantly on Win95, so we just assumed it was the same problem, and we glued the protocol stuff onto the NT4 platform as well. After that we never saw the problem on either platform again.
Of course, I can't claim with 100% certainty that there wasn't some dumb error in our message handling, because if you learn anything in this business, it's that nobody can claim perfection no matter how good they are. But we stared at the code very hard, and I've been coding for 25 years, including writing CSMA network drivers, real-time operating systems, and so forth. Nobody could see anything wrong with our stuff, and when we wrote the debugging/logging jig, we dumbed our stuff way down in order to try to eliminate that variable.
So at the end of the day it sure looked like a Windows issue. We had massive evidence, test jigs, etc. We were thinking of complaining to Redmond, but by that time we were so disgusted at the time we'd wasted with NT4 and SQL Server 6 (both had more bugs than a bait store), and we were so far behind schedule as a result, that we had no stomach for a pointless conversation with them (I mean, what were they going to do, own up to dropping messages on the floor? And then what? We had a fix; we were done).
Hope this helps, and I hope it was sufficiently long ago that whatever was wrong has been fixed. You are quite correct -- if you are using high-frequency messaging, and if there was a problem with dropping messages, you'd have seen it.
Your mother (and mine, by the way) isn't alone. There's a zillion people out there who can't figure this out. I know a Harvard professor who double-clicks on everything. I know a high-tech Marketing professional who spastically double-clicks on stuff, then double-clicks again when the app is slow, just in case it missed her first double-click.
It's hard to explain. "Double-click invokes programs." Invokes? What the hell does that mean to the average person?
Paradoxically, single-click on a link causes a new web page to be displayed. That sure looks like something got "invoked", doesn't it?
How about all those apps that do something unexpected when you select an entry out of a combo box? Isn't the metaphor supposed to be SELECT, followed by PUSH A BUTTON?
So it's not all that easy to explain when you're supposed to single-click and when you're supposed to double-click. And, the fact that Windows misses some of the double-clicks you do because of the stupid-ass way double-click is implemented at the message level doesn't help, either.
Oh, and let's not forget the fact that Windows drops internal messages occasionally anyway (about 1 in 100,000 the last time I measured it, in case anyone cares), so remember that the next time you decide to create your own message class and "trust" Windows to deliver your messages.
Dammit, mod Mr. Harrison up. He's right, it's a perfect "Guns, Germs, and Steel" analogy./. has bred a virulent strain of trolls and assholes who are controlled reasonably well by the moderating system here and by other/. posters who point out their stupidity.
By and large, this system works. Yes, there are germs all over the body. But the body lives.
Putting a naked wiki out there like the LA Times did is the classic example of 20,000 Indians being slaughtered by 200 shit-scared Conquistadores. The Indians had never seen steel. They had never seen a horse. They had never seen armor. They never had a chance.
Way 1: Yes, I've seen this sort of thing before. At one company where I took over as Engineering head, the programming teams had failed to make decent forward progress. One reason is that I counted 26 people elsewhere in the company who were empowered to change the specs with a phone call (and some of them made a habit of doing so daily).
Way 2: Maybe the problem you're solving isn't really well enough defined for anyone to have written a spec up front. Maybe flipping back and forth between combos and listboxes and so on is all part of figuring that out. There are examples of successful software where prototypes were built 6 or 7 different ways before the "right" way to do things became obvious.
And, finally, your post scares me because it refers to "thousands of SQL queries in my programs." I hope you were just exaggerating to make your point, because otherwise that's a big danger signal. Those queries should be abstracted away in EJBs or the equivalent.
Slashdot Mirror
Your instinct is correct, it's a bogus story. Here's what a real physicist has to say:
"The calculation in question came out as a 'preprint' in late July. Within a week the GR community identified a grave technical flaw that invalidates its broad conclusion. Since then the paper hasn't been published, nor (I would imagine) has it been accepted for publication without major revision. You learned about this result recently owing to the long deadlines associated with production of CERN Courier, a glossy magazine that popularizes fundamental science. They went to press at an embarrassing time. Trouble is, you'll never encounter the retraction. The majority of surprising new results that are popularized turn out to be false, but the public never gets clued."
Funny, if one of my help desk techs could clear a trouble ticket by changing a battery, I'd be pleased, not crying in my soup that it isn't some complex issue. But maybe that's just me.
The fantasy that patents protect the little guy has almost always been a fantasy. Only little guys with big pockets have won (Eolas has big pockets, for example).
The best defense is to get out ahead and stay ahead, and when Micro$oft or some other known abuser of small companies comes looking for a "joint development" or "partnership" deal, tell them to get lost. Don't give up your IP, ever, to anyone, for any reason. Big companies are really a colony organism of small companies. Probably the guys that are really competing with your little idea or concept are just a small sub-group inside that large company, perhaps with no more developers than you have. It is rare for some executive to say, "OK, let's stop everything we're doing and take these 200 programmers here and put them to work on kicking the tar out of ThreeNerds, Inc."
So the right answer, is, in fact "Get rid of software and process patents." They didn't protect you before. Now they actively prevent you from starting or doing anything. For example, what is the fallout from RIM's case in the investment community? Why should I invest my capital in a fledgling software company, when some sleeper patent lurking out there can be invoked by a bunch of sleazeballs and steal everything I've built? The answer is, I don't invest in software companies any more, period. Fuck 'em. I'm taking my money elsewhere.
Yes, and its un-clean implementations in stack-based Lisps with property lists and funarg problems? Right. Show me a purist and I'll show you complete lack of practical application. Where's the 1978 Jack Dennis dream of converting Fortran programs into stateless fine-grained parallel code? Oh right, didn't happen. I remember now.
A larger question is, when is software worth paying for, and when isn't it? Everyone has his own opinion. I think Excel is worth paying for, it's terrific. I think Windows is worth paying for, because OS-whatever only runs on Apples (they will NEVER get it), and the Linux desktops, well, suck.
I don't think Word is worth paying for, it pisses me off routinely. Neither is Photoshop -- The Gimp is good enough for what I do. Acrobat isn't worth paying for, I can generate PDF's a dozen different ways. I'm about to buy a Windows utility program that watches socket activity. It's terrific, it's cheap, and the free alternatives I've tried suck.
I'm currently using a treemap control that I paid for. I paid for it because it does what I need it to do. It is enormously better than anything out there, and it's better than the control we built for ourselves, which is running into issues that we don't have time to solve.
Of course my firewall runs Linux. But not much else, except for a caching dns lookup. What's the point? Cygwin satisfies my command-line Jones. I use an external hoster, haven't hosted my own site for years, too much bother.
I think I'm typical. People buy software because it satisfies a need. OSS falls into the "good enough" category, rarely the "best of breed" category. OSS is "good enough" for most of what I do. It's "best of breed" for IT stuff like dns and firewalling and so on. But OSS isn't as good as Excel. It isn't as good as Windows (sorry).
I ran Nessus, once. It was OK. Not great, just OK. Someone else did a commercial sweep of our site, found stuff Nessus didn't. We paid for that, didn't pay for Nessus. Was Nessus good enough? I don't know, it was useful I guess. I sure wasn't interested in their source code, who cares? I just wanted to run the utility once. If they're taking it closed-source because their competitors are stealing their ideas, I sympathize wholeheartedly. Their business model didn't work, and you gotta do what you gotta do to stay in business. Or you get another job and do Nessus as a hobby.
I think what the parent misses is that open source projects are hobbies. Hobbies take energy, people get enthusiastic about them, and so on. There will always be a pool of people wanting to join up and play together. Sometimes there will be a coalescing of usefulness and a reasonable product will emerge. Sometimes not. Was Nessus something hobbyists were excited about? Apparently not. C'est la vie.
(parts of this previously posted by me)
The social contract is broken irretrievably, and we all need to adapt to the new reality. The new reality is, don't get too comfortable, keep the resume up to date, and move on the minute things are the slightest bit fishy. Some signs to look for:
o No more free pens in the stockroom, now the admin hands them out one by one and makes you sign for them.
o An all-company memorandum from the CEO shows up suddenly, responding to hallway rumors or soft-pedaling bad news.
o The perennial blame game between Sales, Marketing, and Engineering stops simmering and comes to a full boil in the hallway.
o A top executive (any top executive) leaves mysteriously.
o Sales guys start leaving (more than one is big trouble)
o "The Board" starts poking around and introducing themselves to people.
o A routine purchase request for equipment is turned down, regardless of justifications presented.
o There is an odd new emphasis on collections activity.
o "Investors" start showing up for tours of the engineering department.
o The annual customer conference is canceled or postponed.
o A delivery date is moved forward inexplicably, without consulting the engineers on the project.
o It is impossible to get a reasonable explanation from your boss for a clearly unreasonable situation or request.
o You are asked to stop work and "document" your project at a time that seems inappropriate and wrong.
o You are asked to sign any document "acknowledging" your equity position (if any), when it should be abundantly clear what your equity position is.
One small way to protect yourself (and to acquire information about the company's activities that they would not normally share with you) is to take advantage of any stock purchase plan (real stock, not options) put forward, and buy a few shares (preferably as few as possible). This will at least make you privy to the legal documents around acquisition scenarios and so on.
But the best way to protect yourself is to get the resume engine revved up the minute you see the warning signs above. No need to delay. Get the hell out.
o We can't go faster than the speed of sound.
o
Any time you say "can't", sorry, you're likely to be wrong.
Humor is the right response to this, because basically, the more amorphous the problem, the more difficult the spec. There's no right answer.
o Worst case: an effort to specify a business process to be automated, with input from 25 high-powered consultants with 25 times zero years of practical experience.
o Best case: an effort to specify a coherent system with predictable input and verifiable output.
There are numerous examples of both cases cited by various respondents. Ultimately the quality of the spec, if there is a spec, comes down to a balancing act between cost and the consequences of failure. If a communications protocol is ill-defined, the result is a hung communications line. So the spec must be tight enough to allow two independent implementations to cross-communicate, or the entire effort is useless. On the other hand, if some web-based bullshit e-commerce app is specified poorly, so what, some schmuck somewhere on an odd Tuesday can't order a Swingline Stapler. It's not the end of the world.
I also claim that most creative work is spec-less by definition. You're shingling into the fog, and there isn't any chalk line to follow.
Bingo! Give parent a cigar.
"I know my job will be here." I'm glad you think so. Because the people that own your company are busy trying to sell it to some meathead who will toss you on the dung heap without a second thought. It's all about the money, not about you.
The social contract is broken irretrievably, and we all need to adapt to the new reality. The new reality is, don't get too comfortable, keep the resume up to date, and move on the minute things are the slightest bit fishy. Some signs to look for:
o No more free pens in the stockroom, now the admin hands them out one by one and makes you sign for them.
o An all-company memorandum from the CEO shows up suddenly, responding to hallway rumors or soft-pedaling bad news.
o The perennial blame game between Sales, Marketing, and Engineering stops simmering and comes to a full boil in the hallway.
o A top executive (any top executive) leaves mysteriously.
o Sales guys start leaving (more than one is big trouble)
o "The Board" starts poking around and introducing themselves to people.
o A routine purchase request for equipment is turned down, regardless of justifications presented.
o There is an odd new emphasis on collections activity.
o "Investors" start showing up for tours of the engineering department.
o The annual customer conference is canceled or postponed.
o A delivery date is moved forward inexplicably, without consulting the engineers on the project.
o It is impossible to get a reasonable explanation from your boss for a clearly unreasonable situation or request.
o You are asked to stop work and "document" your project at a time that seems inappropriate and wrong.
o You are asked to sign any document "acknowledging" your equity position (if any), when it should be abundantly clear what your equity position is.
One small way to protect yourself (and to acquire information about the company's activities that they would not normally share with you) is to take advantage of any stock purchase plan (real stock, not options) put forward, and buy a few shares (preferably as few as possible). This will at least make you privy to the legal documents around acquisition scenarios and so on.
But the best way to protect yourself is to get the resume engine revved up the minute you see the warning signs above. No need to delay. Get the hell out.
It's only /., dude. Better skip that second cup of coffee tomorrow, and try to relax.
There was a project at Draper Laboratory in the 70's where, essentially, a steering wheel for a helicopter WAS invented.
It was fly-by-wire, of course. It consisted of a Plexiglas half-sphere that could be tilted in any direction ("go that way"), lifted up ("go up"), or pushed down ("go down"), with spring returns to zero position. When at zero position, the helicopter DIDN'T MOVE, PERIOD. They used an inertial guidance unit to hold position, automatically adjusting for wind.
My mother could fly this helicopter, and fly it well. Which meant that all the expensive training that's required for helicopter pilots (and there's a ton of it) wasn't necessary any more. Joe Army Private Off The Farm could jump into this thing and drive it. What was the reaction of the military? They HATED it. It offended all their macho sensibilities. Hey, pilots are cool, man, you can't let ORDINARY GUYS drive helicopters!
Now we're replacing all the aging (but reliable) heavy-lift helicopters with that plane/copter thingie that can't lift as much, costs about a billion dollars, and crashes all the time. You know, the one that Congress forced us to build even after the military tried to kill it. But I understand this new thingie is way harder to fly than helicopters, so we got the macho thing covered.
Thank you. WHen I read the original post I felt like my dog must feel when he tilts his head sideways.
Actually, people like Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, etc. because they are prestige brands. Their design is mediocre compared to comparably-priced alternatives, and their repair frequency (and average cost of repair) is much higher.
And, the last Mac I disassembled didn't impress me with the quality of its workmanship. Dell makes a much better product than that unit.
With regard to your concern for "quality," if you buy a machine from a reputable manufacturer, and they install the software for you, it's going to work, just like your Apple will work. If you're going to dick around with third-party boards and stuff, well, you takes your chances. But the basic machine is solid.
Now, the software -- Windows -- isn't that solid, to be sure. But machine stability has nothing to do with hardware issues, when we're talking about cookie-cutter machines coming off a quality assembly line. You're just wrong on that score.
So, gimme a Dell and gimme OS/X. I'm a happy guy.
If you write software for a living, you'll be done soon. Very done. Toasty done. This has simply got to stop, and everyone in this forum, and anywhere else, who supports software patents of any kind, has to be beaten with a clue stick until they understand why it is the end of the world as we know it.
Bill Gates, are you out there? Here's a suggestion that will forever alter my opinion of you and of Microsoft -- in fact alter it to one of unconditional positive regard. Please save us, and donate all of Microsoft's software patents to the FSF. Then endow the FSF's anti-patent fight with $1B/year in perpetuity. Thank you for listening.
At least his position, before he recanted it, was logically irrefutable, as Gardner also points out.
Because faith in the supernatural causes one to more readily accept supernatural explanations for natural events, when a non-supernatural explanation, absent faith, may be substantially more compelling.
Should one believe a drug company's study if one knows that the company that conducted the study was not blind to which patients ingested a new medication?
Analogously, with what credence should one accept another's conclusion that an event or process is supernatural, if that person has already acknowledged that she accepts supernatural explanations on faith?
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One cannot deny that there are many phenomena that we do not understand. The Standard Model of physics is known to be wrong, for example. But attribution of supernatural cause to phenomena that we do not understand is pointless. We might as well conclude that lightning emerges from the hand of Zeus, as some of our ancestors FAITHFULLY believed.
Sorry, that's not part of the deal. Which is why all religions are inherently dangerous. If a person accepts something on faith, he has narrowed his view such that he becomes blind to reality, sometimes to painfully obvious things like the fossil record (I like Martin Gardner's tongue-in-cheek explanation of the fossil record: It was created on the 7th day, complete with clues to a non-existent far distant past, to test our faith).
The problem is, narrowed perspective notwithstanding, people keep doing pesky things like... oh, I don't know... voting. Electing Creationists to the School Board. Stuff like that.
So it's inescapable. "They" will never "leave you the frig alone." That's the whole frigging problem.
We saw it circa 1998. The problem was most severe on Win95, where we first noticed it. We spotted it the same way you would imagine we would have spotted it -- our app (consisting of three independent communicating processes) went autistic for no apparent reason. With extensive message logging we proved that Windows was dropping our messages on the floor (about 1 in 10^5).
To solve this, we put our own protocol on top of Windows messaging that was able to recover from and re-transmit lost messages. No more autism. We shipped with the extra layer, never had a problem after that.
I cannot claim with certainty that the problem also occurred on NT4, because we didn't have concrete proof. However, one day we experienced an app lockup on NT4 with similar symptoms to the ones we were having constantly on Win95, so we just assumed it was the same problem, and we glued the protocol stuff onto the NT4 platform as well. After that we never saw the problem on either platform again.
Of course, I can't claim with 100% certainty that there wasn't some dumb error in our message handling, because if you learn anything in this business, it's that nobody can claim perfection no matter how good they are. But we stared at the code very hard, and I've been coding for 25 years, including writing CSMA network drivers, real-time operating systems, and so forth. Nobody could see anything wrong with our stuff, and when we wrote the debugging/logging jig, we dumbed our stuff way down in order to try to eliminate that variable.
So at the end of the day it sure looked like a Windows issue. We had massive evidence, test jigs, etc. We were thinking of complaining to Redmond, but by that time we were so disgusted at the time we'd wasted with NT4 and SQL Server 6 (both had more bugs than a bait store), and we were so far behind schedule as a result, that we had no stomach for a pointless conversation with them (I mean, what were they going to do, own up to dropping messages on the floor? And then what? We had a fix; we were done).
Hope this helps, and I hope it was sufficiently long ago that whatever was wrong has been fixed. You are quite correct -- if you are using high-frequency messaging, and if there was a problem with dropping messages, you'd have seen it.
Your mother (and mine, by the way) isn't alone. There's a zillion people out there who can't figure this out. I know a Harvard professor who double-clicks on everything. I know a high-tech Marketing professional who spastically double-clicks on stuff, then double-clicks again when the app is slow, just in case it missed her first double-click.
It's hard to explain. "Double-click invokes programs." Invokes? What the hell does that mean to the average person?
Paradoxically, single-click on a link causes a new web page to be displayed. That sure looks like something got "invoked", doesn't it?
How about all those apps that do something unexpected when you select an entry out of a combo box? Isn't the metaphor supposed to be SELECT, followed by PUSH A BUTTON?
So it's not all that easy to explain when you're supposed to single-click and when you're supposed to double-click. And, the fact that Windows misses some of the double-clicks you do because of the stupid-ass way double-click is implemented at the message level doesn't help, either.
Oh, and let's not forget the fact that Windows drops internal messages occasionally anyway (about 1 in 100,000 the last time I measured it, in case anyone cares), so remember that the next time you decide to create your own message class and "trust" Windows to deliver your messages.
Dammit, mod Mr. Harrison up. He's right, it's a perfect "Guns, Germs, and Steel" analogy. /. has bred a virulent strain of trolls and assholes who are controlled reasonably well by the moderating system here and by other /. posters who point out their stupidity.
By and large, this system works. Yes, there are germs all over the body. But the body lives.
Putting a naked wiki out there like the LA Times did is the classic example of 20,000 Indians being slaughtered by 200 shit-scared Conquistadores. The Indians had never seen steel. They had never seen a horse. They had never seen armor. They never had a chance.
Yes, and what's with the "grading" system? I couldn't make any sense of it whatsoever.
At least one of the problems they induced would never, ever happen to a normal person, either.
Here's an idea for their next article: "How Far Can You Drop a Demo Laptop, And What Damage Ensues?" I'm sure it will be equally well-thought-out.
He dragged his /. entry panel to the shared window, I guess, and Look What Happened.
No choice but to take the paycheck, get the resume tuned up, and run for the hills as soon as possible. Unbelievable story.
There are two ways I read your post.
Way 1: Yes, I've seen this sort of thing before. At one company where I took over as Engineering head, the programming teams had failed to make decent forward progress. One reason is that I counted 26 people elsewhere in the company who were empowered to change the specs with a phone call (and some of them made a habit of doing so daily).
Way 2: Maybe the problem you're solving isn't really well enough defined for anyone to have written a spec up front. Maybe flipping back and forth between combos and listboxes and so on is all part of figuring that out. There are examples of successful software where prototypes were built 6 or 7 different ways before the "right" way to do things became obvious.
And, finally, your post scares me because it refers to "thousands of SQL queries in my programs." I hope you were just exaggerating to make your point, because otherwise that's a big danger signal. Those queries should be abstracted away in EJBs or the equivalent.
"Z80 PC makers weren't able to transition to the 8080." Idiot. The 8080 pre-dated the Z80.
Typical Dvorak bilge, can't even get stupid stuff right.