PCs are a bigger deal than health for 6 billion people?
Everyone else is saying, "Good thing he's not in health, because we'd have all these viruses." I'm wondering how his perspective got so twisted. Which changes people's lives more? Having a PC, or not dying?
Looking at what Schneier is saying, what humans are really doing is paying less attention to non-intelligent threats, even though they are more deadly. That does not sound like a successful survival strategy to me.
It doesn't mean that the guy will be arrested, no. So in that sense, it doesn't mean anything at all.
On the other hand, it isn't just "some guy", a Congressman said that he should be arrested. This means that we have semi-hysterical, technically clueless blowhards deciding national policy. I think that means something, and what it means is really bad...
I don't remember the source, but I read once that the probability of introducing a new bug in the process of fixing an old bug was somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. My experience as a software engineer would push me to the lower end of that estimate.
So, what did they do on October 13? Add a huge new feature? Or just fix a bug that was bad enough that they felt they had to fix it before they shipped, and make a mistake in the fixing process? My bet would be on the latter.
I mean, I hate Microsoft as much as the next Slashdotter, but I doubt they were dumb enough to be adding anything but bug fixes that late in the game...
Side note: The two scariest releases I have ever been part of took place on Friday the 13th and Halloween, respectively. And they were not scary because of the date, they were scary because we were nervous about whether the code was solid. Both went off without a hitch. So don't blame the date on this one, either.
And just what do you want Bush to do? Tell them to stop? Tried that. Get everybody else to tell them to stop? Tried that, too. Make them stop? That means military force. That means, almost certainly, the death of millions of people in Seoul (and possibly Japan as well). And if Bush did that, you'd be on Slashdot, whining about how Bush was an out-of-control cowboy who had just killed several million people by his stupidity.
Assassinate Kim Jong-Ill? That's against the law of the U.S., and would leave you whining about the out-of-control cowboy Bush again.
Well, then, what else is left? Asking them nicely? Riiiiiiight.
So just exactly do you want Bush to do? Or do you just like blaming him for everything?
It's not that the Internet has become a deadly effective political weapon. It's that the Internet lets anyone who has enough time, skill, and motivation to find out the truth.
Note well: By "tbe truth" I don't mean "the truth about someone's character", but rather "the truth about an event" or some such. That is, if someone said or did something, ever, in any context, there's probably someone who can find out about it on the net.
So what's really going on is that the Internet has turned the truth about people's past actions and statements into a deadly effective political weapon.
This is good and bad. It's bad because, as far as I can tell, it can only be used to destroy people. It's good because I think that the fewer politicians with enormous gaps between their public image and reality, the better.
It's more than just that technology doesn't advance in the direction that people expect. People (many of them, anyway) intuitively feel that all problems are about the same level of difficulty.
But solving something that's NP-complete is not "just a little more difficult" than writing a word processor or an OS. It's so much harder that we need a totally new theoretical framework. Faster processors aren't enough to get us there. And the theoretical breakthroughs come a whole lot less frequently than processor speed increases.
Flying cars? You know, we could probably do that today. It's just a personal STOL aircraft, basically. We can solve the technological problems there. What we can't solve is the rest of it. Between the power requirements (cost) and the driver knowledge needed to operate it, the market size is too small to be worth the effort to create such a beast.
AI? We have the computers that could run the code (maybe). We don't know how to write the code. We probably won't know how next decade, either, or the decade after that.
Smart bacteria? We could perhaps create them. Making them spy on keypresses? Possible. Finding the data you want in the stream of data coming from a trillion (or quadrillion) bacteria? He seems not to have addressed that one.
Sending cans to other parts of the solar system? We've done that. Permanent colonies? It's a lot harder than just sending a bigger can with more stuff in it.
We have breakthroughs in one area (CPUs, for instance) and people assume that other, related problems must be "only a little harder" and therefore about to be solved. But problems differ enormously in difficulty; the level of breakthroughs that we have now is nowhere near what we need for certain problems.
First, you're combining what I said with what other people said, and looking for consistency. That ain't gonna happen...
Second, "In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." If you think you can use any methodology in a brain-dead, just-follow-the-rules kind of way, reality is going to slap you, hard.
But, third, XP is not really rigid. You're supposed to adapt it to your environment, conditions, personnel, etc. So if you are trying to do XP in a stick-to-the-rules way, you're not really doing XP...
I can't argue with that. All I'm saying is, it's still not just XP. Following any methodology blindly, to the letter, is a recipe for disaster.
But I must admit that the "developer creep" is a new one to me. Sounds like the developers either didn't understand the architectural implications of the stories, or lied about how hard they would be.
I still don't buy it. "XP made it possible to hide the fact that Feature Creep was inevitable." OK, I can accept that. But again, any methodology will allow that unless you do some kind of gap analysis. And you can (and should) do gap analysis with XP, too - been there, done that.
I mean, you can hide gaps and feature creep in a several-thousand-entry project tracker, too. The issue isn't the methodology, it's that the people running the show can't see the gaps themselves and won't listen to the people who can see them. The problem isn't XP, it's the people. In this particular case, they happened to buy the idea of XP as a silver bullet that could save them from themselves, but it couldn't.
Sure we did. The question is, do we want to do it again?
\
And it's one thing to say, "Yeah, our ancestors in other countries did that a thousand years ago, but, hey, we're not like that." It's quite another to demonstrate, both to the world and to ourselves, that yes, we are like that.
You have several times stated what the problem was: politics.
Newsflash: Software development methodologies do not fix political problems. Not the waterfall, not XP, not agile, not Scrum, not anything.
So you had some idiot managers who insisted on developing everything in-house and who did this insane feature creep, and you're blaming XP because it couldn't save you from politics and idiot managers. Sorry, I'm not buying it. In that situation, only one thing can save you - firing the idiot political managers. Nothing else works.
Historically, there have been a number of intolerant Islamic regimes. There have also been tolerant ones.
Look, I'm not a Muslim apoligist. I'm both an American and a born-again Jesus freak, and I do not want to live under Islamic government. But history is what it is, and you're painting with too broad a brush.
And woe to us if we go with genocide. Yeah, we'd win the war (at least for a few years). But we'd lose... I guess this is overstating it slightly, but we'd lose our humanity. Or at least something worth having, something precious to western civilization, the idea of treating other human beings with decency. (See Nuremburg for why this is important.) And we'd sow seeds of hatred that would last for centuries, rather than just for decades...
IANAL. I'm not even sure I spelled either word right. But the thing is, legally, if you make a promise, and I act on that promise, you can't turn around and sue me for acting on your promise.
OK, it's a bit muddier than that. You can still sue me. Anybody can pretty much sue anybody for anything. But you can't win the lawsuit, and losing can be painful enough that most people don't play such games.
It's actually even muddier than that. You can't win the lawsuit, unless there's something else going on, like I'm also infringing on some other patent that you didn't promise not to sue on. So don't blindly take this and run without actually understanding what Microsoft said. It may go less far than you expect. But that paranoia aside, it's actually a really cool thing for MS to do (and I don't say that very often).
Not a lot of new features for you? Then what do you want??? Can you tell me?
More security, without it getting in my way. Oh, that wasn't the kind of thing you meant? You want actual features? I don't know. The problem is, Microsoft doesn't know either. Hence the lack of compelling features in Vista. Hence our comments about the lack of new features.
The OS is becoming a commodity. Commodities don't have many spiffy new features. When was the last really innovative, compelling new feature you saw in a potato chip?
Yeah, well, it cuts both ways. If the Republicans had the spine to stand for what they're supposed to stand for, they'd bother me a lot less than they currently do...
To combine two previous posts: This is not the normal case. The normal case is that you want to take a GPLed program, and change one line, or a hundred, but most of the program is the GPLed original. It's 99% theirs, not 99% yours. And that, in all such situations, robs your argument of it's moral force.
But what if it's really as you say? You've got your program, and you want to add one GPLed line? Yeah, you're right, it's going to make you GPL the whole thing. (Yes, I just admitted that your point was correct.) But so what? As someone else already posted (in reply to the chef using the GPL spices in his/her recipe), if you don't like the terms, don't use the code. You wrote the whole program yourself, but you can't rewrite that one line that you have to copy from GPLed code? Right. Sure. Either you are capable of rewriting the line (in which case, do it and stop being lazy), or you didn't write the of the program (in which case the situation as presented is just an academic exercise rather than a realistic scenario).
At a previous job, we had a huge code base - literally a million lines. We wanted to use GPG to check the signatures of some software that we were supplying over the internet to our installed base (didn't want them running something that didn't really come from us). But we didn't want to GPL all million lines of ours. No problem - we ran GPG as a separate executable, invoking it with a system() call and checking the return code (IIRC). Of course, this meant that we had to make the code for GPG available, but that wasn't a big deal. This is one way to handle the "adding a little GPL" scenario in the real world.
I do not want somebody else sending me what amounts to an ad for a song or a video!
I see a new business, though: Set up a wifi base with a fair amount of power. Send ads to everybody who passes with a Zune. Yeah, I can see it already. No, that doesn't make me want a Zune over an iPod. I get enough advertising in my day already, thanks.
It's called income tax. Specifically, Federal income tax. If you make 100k rather than 60k, you pay more than 100/60 = 1.67 times as much tax.
How much more? Well, that depends. Are you married or single? Kids? Do you own your home? Do you give to charity? Way too many variables to give a simple answer.
But the simple fact that the federal income tax is not a flat tax blows the parent's math out of the water.
Oh, yeah. "The weather is always nicer in the bay area"? Really? Quoting Mark Twain: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
Slashdot Mirror
You went to the hospital. They saw the kidney stone. You've got a doctor's word that you had a legitimate medical problem. There's your proof.
Would it stand up in court? You bet.
Will it now, 10 years after the fact? I don't know. If I understand correctly, medical records only have to be kept for 3 years after you turn 18.
But at the time, yeah, you had all the proof you needed.
I can't think of a more stupid strategy for any business.
PCs are a bigger deal than health for 6 billion people?
Everyone else is saying, "Good thing he's not in health, because we'd have all these viruses." I'm wondering how his perspective got so twisted. Which changes people's lives more? Having a PC, or not dying?
Looking at what Schneier is saying, what humans are really doing is paying less attention to non-intelligent threats, even though they are more deadly. That does not sound like a successful survival strategy to me.
On the other hand, it isn't just "some guy", a Congressman said that he should be arrested. This means that we have semi-hysterical, technically clueless blowhards deciding national policy. I think that means something, and what it means is really bad...
I don't remember the source, but I read once that the probability of introducing a new bug in the process of fixing an old bug was somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. My experience as a software engineer would push me to the lower end of that estimate.
So, what did they do on October 13? Add a huge new feature? Or just fix a bug that was bad enough that they felt they had to fix it before they shipped, and make a mistake in the fixing process? My bet would be on the latter.
I mean, I hate Microsoft as much as the next Slashdotter, but I doubt they were dumb enough to be adding anything but bug fixes that late in the game...
Side note: The two scariest releases I have ever been part of took place on Friday the 13th and Halloween, respectively. And they were not scary because of the date, they were scary because we were nervous about whether the code was solid. Both went off without a hitch. So don't blame the date on this one, either.
Certified mail, return receipt.
And just what do you want Bush to do? Tell them to stop? Tried that. Get everybody else to tell them to stop? Tried that, too. Make them stop? That means military force. That means, almost certainly, the death of millions of people in Seoul (and possibly Japan as well). And if Bush did that, you'd be on Slashdot, whining about how Bush was an out-of-control cowboy who had just killed several million people by his stupidity.
Assassinate Kim Jong-Ill? That's against the law of the U.S., and would leave you whining about the out-of-control cowboy Bush again.
Well, then, what else is left? Asking them nicely? Riiiiiiight.
So just exactly do you want Bush to do? Or do you just like blaming him for everything?
It's not that the Internet has become a deadly effective political weapon. It's that the Internet lets anyone who has enough time, skill, and motivation to find out the truth.
Note well: By "tbe truth" I don't mean "the truth about someone's character", but rather "the truth about an event" or some such. That is, if someone said or did something, ever, in any context, there's probably someone who can find out about it on the net.
So what's really going on is that the Internet has turned the truth about people's past actions and statements into a deadly effective political weapon.
This is good and bad. It's bad because, as far as I can tell, it can only be used to destroy people. It's good because I think that the fewer politicians with enormous gaps between their public image and reality, the better.
It's more than just that technology doesn't advance in the direction that people expect. People (many of them, anyway) intuitively feel that all problems are about the same level of difficulty.
But solving something that's NP-complete is not "just a little more difficult" than writing a word processor or an OS. It's so much harder that we need a totally new theoretical framework. Faster processors aren't enough to get us there. And the theoretical breakthroughs come a whole lot less frequently than processor speed increases.
Flying cars? You know, we could probably do that today. It's just a personal STOL aircraft, basically. We can solve the technological problems there. What we can't solve is the rest of it. Between the power requirements (cost) and the driver knowledge needed to operate it, the market size is too small to be worth the effort to create such a beast.
AI? We have the computers that could run the code (maybe). We don't know how to write the code. We probably won't know how next decade, either, or the decade after that.
Smart bacteria? We could perhaps create them. Making them spy on keypresses? Possible. Finding the data you want in the stream of data coming from a trillion (or quadrillion) bacteria? He seems not to have addressed that one.
Sending cans to other parts of the solar system? We've done that. Permanent colonies? It's a lot harder than just sending a bigger can with more stuff in it.
We have breakthroughs in one area (CPUs, for instance) and people assume that other, related problems must be "only a little harder" and therefore about to be solved. But problems differ enormously in difficulty; the level of breakthroughs that we have now is nowhere near what we need for certain problems.
Second, "In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." If you think you can use any methodology in a brain-dead, just-follow-the-rules kind of way, reality is going to slap you, hard.
But, third, XP is not really rigid. You're supposed to adapt it to your environment, conditions, personnel, etc. So if you are trying to do XP in a stick-to-the-rules way, you're not really doing XP...
But I must admit that the "developer creep" is a new one to me. Sounds like the developers either didn't understand the architectural implications of the stories, or lied about how hard they would be.
I mean, you can hide gaps and feature creep in a several-thousand-entry project tracker, too. The issue isn't the methodology, it's that the people running the show can't see the gaps themselves and won't listen to the people who can see them. The problem isn't XP, it's the people. In this particular case, they happened to buy the idea of XP as a silver bullet that could save them from themselves, but it couldn't.
\ And it's one thing to say, "Yeah, our ancestors in other countries did that a thousand years ago, but, hey, we're not like that." It's quite another to demonstrate, both to the world and to ourselves, that yes, we are like that.
You have several times stated what the problem was: politics. Newsflash: Software development methodologies do not fix political problems. Not the waterfall, not XP, not agile, not Scrum, not anything. So you had some idiot managers who insisted on developing everything in-house and who did this insane feature creep, and you're blaming XP because it couldn't save you from politics and idiot managers. Sorry, I'm not buying it. In that situation, only one thing can save you - firing the idiot political managers. Nothing else works.
Historically, there have been a number of intolerant Islamic regimes. There have also been tolerant ones.
Look, I'm not a Muslim apoligist. I'm both an American and a born-again Jesus freak, and I do not want to live under Islamic government. But history is what it is, and you're painting with too broad a brush.
And woe to us if we go with genocide. Yeah, we'd win the war (at least for a few years). But we'd lose... I guess this is overstating it slightly, but we'd lose our humanity. Or at least something worth having, something precious to western civilization, the idea of treating other human beings with decency. (See Nuremburg for why this is important.) And we'd sow seeds of hatred that would last for centuries, rather than just for decades...
Writing code that uses the patents?
Two words: promissory estoppel.
IANAL. I'm not even sure I spelled either word right. But the thing is, legally, if you make a promise, and I act on that promise, you can't turn around and sue me for acting on your promise.
OK, it's a bit muddier than that. You can still sue me. Anybody can pretty much sue anybody for anything. But you can't win the lawsuit, and losing can be painful enough that most people don't play such games.
It's actually even muddier than that. You can't win the lawsuit, unless there's something else going on, like I'm also infringing on some other patent that you didn't promise not to sue on. So don't blindly take this and run without actually understanding what Microsoft said. It may go less far than you expect. But that paranoia aside, it's actually a really cool thing for MS to do (and I don't say that very often).
More security, without it getting in my way. Oh, that wasn't the kind of thing you meant? You want actual features? I don't know. The problem is, Microsoft doesn't know either. Hence the lack of compelling features in Vista. Hence our comments about the lack of new features.
The OS is becoming a commodity. Commodities don't have many spiffy new features. When was the last really innovative, compelling new feature you saw in a potato chip?
Yeah, well, it cuts both ways. If the Republicans had the spine to stand for what they're supposed to stand for, they'd bother me a lot less than they currently do...
To combine two previous posts: This is not the normal case. The normal case is that you want to take a GPLed program, and change one line, or a hundred, but most of the program is the GPLed original. It's 99% theirs, not 99% yours. And that, in all such situations, robs your argument of it's moral force.
But what if it's really as you say? You've got your program, and you want to add one GPLed line? Yeah, you're right, it's going to make you GPL the whole thing. (Yes, I just admitted that your point was correct.) But so what? As someone else already posted (in reply to the chef using the GPL spices in his/her recipe), if you don't like the terms, don't use the code. You wrote the whole program yourself, but you can't rewrite that one line that you have to copy from GPLed code? Right. Sure. Either you are capable of rewriting the line (in which case, do it and stop being lazy), or you didn't write the of the program (in which case the situation as presented is just an academic exercise rather than a realistic scenario).
At a previous job, we had a huge code base - literally a million lines. We wanted to use GPG to check the signatures of some software that we were supplying over the internet to our installed base (didn't want them running something that didn't really come from us). But we didn't want to GPL all million lines of ours. No problem - we ran GPG as a separate executable, invoking it with a system() call and checking the return code (IIRC). Of course, this meant that we had to make the code for GPG available, but that wasn't a big deal. This is one way to handle the "adding a little GPL" scenario in the real world.
I see a new business, though: Set up a wifi base with a fair amount of power. Send ads to everybody who passes with a Zune. Yeah, I can see it already. No, that doesn't make me want a Zune over an iPod. I get enough advertising in my day already, thanks.
But unfortunately, the server doesn't owe it to me.
Better, yes. But viewed objectively, our political infrastructure doesn't look so hot at the moment...
It's called income tax. Specifically, Federal income tax. If you make 100k rather than 60k, you pay more than 100/60 = 1.67 times as much tax.
How much more? Well, that depends. Are you married or single? Kids? Do you own your home? Do you give to charity? Way too many variables to give a simple answer.
But the simple fact that the federal income tax is not a flat tax blows the parent's math out of the water.
Oh, yeah. "The weather is always nicer in the bay area"? Really? Quoting Mark Twain: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."