For all of those moderators out there that are unaware, the above post is indeed funny.
No offence meant, but this made me chuckle. It's the star trek approach to humour: "the computer has analyzed your claim and detected a trace of sarcasm. this is entirely illogical. capt. kirk will now beat the sh*t out of you."
I'm not so sure that whether something is funny is something that research and analysis uncovers...
I'd have to disagree. I'm not saying that the review wasn't well written, it's just it's misleading to call it a book review. It's a summary of the book, and exposition of its main arguments. The reviewer agrees with the book's main thesis and has helpfully summarized it for us. The reviewer has told us very little about how good a book the book is (which is what a book review should do).
Part of the point of XP is to accept this, but to try to invent a discipline that it is likely that the coders will stick to. 'Heavyweight' disciplines don't get followed because they are contrary to the instincts of the programmers. XP aims to be followed by the programmers (and therefore the project gets some of the benefits) because it's what the programmers want to do: code, and code well, and code under sane conditions. (Not, eg. "you need to implement this feature by Tuesday"). The biggest thing that I took away from reading eXtreme Programming Explained was that, like all human interaction, especially in business, specifation is a negotiation.
I want this. That will take 2 years. That's too long. I can do that in 2 months. Hmm. That's not quite what I want. But I'm willing to pay for more than 2 months. How about adding something to that? 6 months. Good.
And it's a continuous process - 2 months in you can re-negotiate, always trying to find the best trade-off between cost and return.
I thought that the reviewers feelings came out rather strongly towards the end (dislike of XP). Reading XPE made me think about risk a lot. The point of XP is better risk-management. So a lot of the reviewer's points were overstated, to say the least.
What happened to the notion of freedom, so rarely espoused or valued on Slashdot, of freedom from government intervention?
Do you want to be free of govt. intervention when being mugged?
MS is breaking the law and hurting people in the process. (The cost of a monopoly to the economy and our jobs is huge, not to mention to the competitors).
You can easily buy a PC without Windows on it... and if you don't like Microsoft you can use one of the many alternatives. If you are a business owner and want to stream media content, you can choose from one of the many alternatives.
Perhaps you or I can. But most people can't. They don't sell linux in PC World.
Even if they could find one, MS would like to make it so they it would be no use to them, because their friends have windows. It isn't acceptable in any other industry to have non-interoperability on the scale that we have in computers, and that is primarily because there are no monopolies of the scale in computer software. There are the big 4 or 5 (in banking, in consumer electronics...), but no complete monopolies.
Pipelining: There's the precedent. If you do business in the EU you can lodge another complaint. Get them in the pipeline (assuming they are valid of course). In about 3 years time, MS will get hit with another huge fine... Repeat
If Intel can do it with processors...
It is damaging to shareholders - of MS's EU operations, it is a fair %age of profit. It's 5% or MS's overall profit! (Which should in theory knock 5% off the share price, 'cos this will happen every year until they change their slimy ways.
I do not read Welsh. I looked at your diary and thought "Aha! Google translation will help". Oh no it doesn't. I think that either the english on the page tricks it, or perhaps the meta-data DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN", too? Of course, google translation may not support Welsh.
International law has very little to do with it. MS has subsidiaries in the EU. Eg. Microsoft UK. These companies as EU companies have to comply with EU law. It will be them that are prosecuted.
It would be like any non-payment of fine case. The govt. send the bailiffs... I think that they would be more likely to take MS holdings, like offices (nice real estate)...
Microsoft doesn't have a business problem - it has a political problem.
The goal of anti-trust enforcement should be to turn that political problem into a business problem. If MS get hit with a half billion Euro fine every 2 years, then it becomes a business problem. The shareholders won't like the profits being eaten into like that. MS will have to treat the fines as a cost on its business practises and consider using practises that do not incur such costs. (I'm pretty sure that anti-trust fines don't count as an operating cost for tax purposes).
The grandparent post mentions coding being a "factory job". The commoditization of coding IS a huge problem.
It's not commoditization that's the problem, it's the lack of awareness between commodities and non-commodities.
To some 'decision-makers' and their advisors, all software is monkey work. That is wrong.
Some people are under the misapprehension that all programming is like mass production factory work. Some people even forget that mass production has its overhead - the people who organize the production lines to work so damned fast. These people cost money.
[Anyway, it could be claimed that the big problem with software is that we don't know how to divide the task into non-commodity (high-paid) and commodity (monkey work) labour. Perhaps this is not possible. (I'm not sure, and certainly am not about to argue it here).]
But what is clear is that some programming is routine - it has been done before a thousand times, it's been automated ten times (all unsuccessfully) and anyone who knows a bit can do it given a little time.
These are totally different to the new, ground-breaking, revolutionary uses of software. These take serious skill. The problem is that to outsiders the distinction is not obvious. "Well you automated the printing of invoices, so why don't you automate the tax returns?". Even experts sometimes don't realise that what they want to do is groundbreaking! Sometimes they realise half-way into a project, the whole thing gets redesigned a hundred times and fails. Or they never realise and the thing just grinds itself into the ground.
Assigning a lowly skilled (or ten) to a difficult project is not going to get good results. It's a mismatch between skill and experience on the one hand, and difficulty on the other.
VP3 was meant to be a Real-killer, rather than a movie format - streaming. How does DivX work at very low bitrates? Is it acceptable at modem speed? Does it stream well?
Well in eg a portable music player, each codec takes more silicon and silicon development costs lots of money. Either that or do it in software and then the batteries won't last 5 mins.
Unless u could do it in firmware - perhaps FPGA?
IANAJE (I am not a Java expert), but I thought that the soon-to-be-released JDK provided autoboxing which meant that you no longer had to arse around doing this junk manually...
It's nice to see a language clean up it nasty bits. (There are people who claim that knowing C++ just is knowing a long list of nasty bits to avoid... they havn't all been cleaned up).
Combined with the vulnerabilities in ActiveX and *Script, this is the single biggest impediment to securing Windows boxes (apart from general lack of computer knowledge amongst users). Whenever I do tech support on a Windows machine, I disable the preview pane, and tell the user that they have to double click to read mail. It means they are that little bit less likely to view (i.e. execute) that viral mail (you might still need to tell them not to read dodgy email, but it stops them having to see their bestiality spam before deleting it!).
none of them (including Microsoft) collect any actual personally identifiable information.
I thought that they backed off from that commitment. It was definitely well touted in the early days of Windows Update "this program will never send information that is personally identifiable". But they seem to have changed their mind.
MS need to be given a disincentive to abuse their monopoly power again (IE, WMP, what's next?). A fine that exceeds the profit from such an abuse would be one way. Breaking MS up would be the only real way to prevent it happenning, though. (MS-Windows, MS-Apps separate).
At least over here in the UK, I suspect that the reason it went on the blacklist of universities would be that it is now a commercial product and if people use University bandwidth for BitTorrent, then that's a commercial use of University bandwidth (on the part of Valve or Blizzard). They seem to dislike that a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
For all of those moderators out there that are unaware, the above post is indeed funny.
No offence meant, but this made me chuckle. It's the star trek approach to humour: "the computer has analyzed your claim and detected a trace of sarcasm. this is entirely illogical. capt. kirk will now beat the sh*t out of you."
I'm not so sure that whether something is funny is something that research and analysis uncovers...
no problem :)
howabout everyone who downloads music from the internet, copies a cd onto their mp3 player - that's a lot more than just geeks....
if they do that, then it's time to lodge another anti-trust complaint to the EU. another half-billion would do nicely. only 98 more needed....
pre-installed on their PCs?
I'd have to disagree. I'm not saying that the review wasn't well written, it's just it's misleading to call it a book review. It's a summary of the book, and exposition of its main arguments. The reviewer agrees with the book's main thesis and has helpfully summarized it for us. The reviewer has told us very little about how good a book the book is (which is what a book review should do).
Part of the point of XP is to accept this, but to try to invent a discipline that it is likely that the coders will stick to. 'Heavyweight' disciplines don't get followed because they are contrary to the instincts of the programmers. XP aims to be followed by the programmers (and therefore the project gets some of the benefits) because it's what the programmers want to do: code, and code well, and code under sane conditions. (Not, eg. "you need to implement this feature by Tuesday").
The biggest thing that I took away from reading eXtreme Programming Explained was that, like all human interaction, especially in business, specifation is a negotiation.
I want this.
That will take 2 years.
That's too long.
I can do that in 2 months.
Hmm. That's not quite what I want. But I'm willing to pay for more than 2 months. How about adding something to that?
6 months.
Good.
And it's a continuous process - 2 months in you can re-negotiate, always trying to find the best trade-off between cost and return.
I thought that the reviewers feelings came out rather strongly towards the end (dislike of XP). Reading XPE made me think about risk a lot. The point of XP is better risk-management. So a lot of the reviewer's points were overstated, to say the least.
Linux BIOS also offers an alternative to the next-generation bloatware-DRM-enabled BIOSes that will control your computer.
What happened to the notion of freedom, so rarely espoused or valued on Slashdot, of freedom from government intervention?
...), but no complete monopolies.
Do you want to be free of govt. intervention when being mugged?
MS is breaking the law and hurting people in the process. (The cost of a monopoly to the economy and our jobs is huge, not to mention to the competitors).
You can easily buy a PC without Windows on it... and if you don't like Microsoft you can use one of the many alternatives. If you are a business owner and want to stream media content, you can choose from one of the many alternatives.
Perhaps you or I can. But most people can't. They don't sell linux in PC World.
Even if they could find one, MS would like to make it so they it would be no use to them, because their friends have windows. It isn't acceptable in any other industry to have non-interoperability on the scale that we have in computers, and that is primarily because there are no monopolies of the scale in computer software. There are the big 4 or 5 (in banking, in consumer electronics
Pipelining: There's the precedent. If you do business in the EU you can lodge another complaint. Get them in the pipeline (assuming they are valid of course). In about 3 years time, MS will get hit with another huge fine... Repeat
If Intel can do it with processors...
It is damaging to shareholders - of MS's EU operations, it is a fair %age of profit. It's 5% or MS's overall profit! (Which should in theory knock 5% off the share price, 'cos this will happen every year until they change their slimy ways.
I do not read Welsh. I looked at your diary and thought "Aha! Google translation will help". Oh no it doesn't. I think that either the english on the page tricks it, or perhaps the meta-data DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN", too? Of course, google translation may not support Welsh.
International law has very little to do with it. MS has subsidiaries in the EU. Eg. Microsoft UK. These companies as EU companies have to comply with EU law. It will be them that are prosecuted.
It would be like any non-payment of fine case. The govt. send the bailiffs... I think that they would be more likely to take MS holdings, like offices (nice real estate)...
Microsoft doesn't have a business problem - it has a political problem.
The goal of anti-trust enforcement should be to turn that political problem into a business problem. If MS get hit with a half billion Euro fine every 2 years, then it becomes a business problem. The shareholders won't like the profits being eaten into like that. MS will have to treat the fines as a cost on its business practises and consider using practises that do not incur such costs. (I'm pretty sure that anti-trust fines don't count as an operating cost for tax purposes).
The grandparent post mentions coding being a "factory job". The commoditization of coding IS a huge problem.
It's not commoditization that's the problem, it's the lack of awareness between commodities and non-commodities.
To some 'decision-makers' and their advisors, all software is monkey work. That is wrong.
Some people are under the misapprehension that all programming is like mass production factory work.
Some people even forget that mass production has its overhead - the people who organize the production lines to work so damned fast. These people cost money.
[Anyway, it could be claimed that the big problem with software is that we don't know how to divide the task into non-commodity (high-paid) and commodity (monkey work) labour. Perhaps this is not possible. (I'm not sure, and certainly am not about to argue it here).]
But what is clear is that some programming is routine - it has been done before a thousand times, it's been automated ten times (all unsuccessfully) and anyone who knows a bit can do it given a little time.
These are totally different to the new, ground-breaking, revolutionary uses of software. These take serious skill. The problem is that to outsiders the distinction is not obvious. "Well you automated the printing of invoices, so why don't you automate the tax returns?". Even experts sometimes don't realise that what they want to do is groundbreaking! Sometimes they realise half-way into a project, the whole thing gets redesigned a hundred times and fails. Or they never realise and the thing just grinds itself into the ground.
Assigning a lowly skilled (or ten) to a difficult project is not going to get good results. It's a mismatch between skill and experience on the one hand, and difficulty on the other.
VP3 was meant to be a Real-killer, rather than a movie format - streaming. How does DivX work at very low bitrates? Is it acceptable at modem speed? Does it stream well?
Well in eg a portable music player, each codec takes more silicon and silicon development costs lots of money. Either that or do it in software and then the batteries won't last 5 mins.
Unless u could do it in firmware - perhaps FPGA?
... tell me when it's done and I can re-encode all my videos in it...
IANAJE (I am not a Java expert), but I thought that the soon-to-be-released JDK provided autoboxing which meant that you no longer had to arse around doing this junk manually...
It's nice to see a language clean up it nasty bits. (There are people who claim that knowing C++ just is knowing a long list of nasty bits to avoid... they havn't all been cleaned up).
Combined with the vulnerabilities in ActiveX and *Script, this is the single biggest impediment to securing Windows boxes (apart from general lack of computer knowledge amongst users). Whenever I do tech support on a Windows machine, I disable the preview pane, and tell the user that they have to double click to read mail. It means they are that little bit less likely to view (i.e. execute) that viral mail (you might still need to tell them not to read dodgy email, but it stops them having to see their bestiality spam before deleting it!).
the question is then: who the hell is going to do the R&D if all the Apple's, Sun's etc. go out of business, leaving only the Dell's left?
none of them (including Microsoft) collect any actual personally identifiable information.
I thought that they backed off from that commitment. It was definitely well touted in the early days of Windows Update "this program will never send information that is personally identifiable". But they seem to have changed their mind.
MS need to be given a disincentive to abuse their monopoly power again (IE, WMP, what's next?). A fine that exceeds the profit from such an abuse would be one way. Breaking MS up would be the only real way to prevent it happenning, though. (MS-Windows, MS-Apps separate).
At least over here in the UK, I suspect that the reason it went on the blacklist of universities would be that it is now a commercial product and if people use University bandwidth for BitTorrent, then that's a commercial use of University bandwidth (on the part of Valve or Blizzard). They seem to dislike that a lot.
One of the members of the team, daniel stone is currently working on packaging all the FreeDesktop stuff. See his blog entry for an explanation.