Business users don't generally use Linux on the desktop because of:
1) IT inertia - i.e., application infrastructure which would require replacement (a.k.a. lock-in) 2) Corporate desire not to spend extra money supporting another OS 3) Training costs
Joe Home User sees #1 and #3 as well. e.g. for #1, they want to play Cabela's Big Game Hunter, not hack on Gnumeric. And Big Game Hunter is a Windows app, not a Linux app. For #3 - and this is the killer - Linux is still too hard to use. Venture outside the well-defined, tolerably easy-to-use user needs space of web browsing and... and that's about it... and you're looking at having to deal with a command-prompt. God forbid you should have to install something like a printer, which is usually dirt-simple on Windows, but a PITA on Linux (to wit: I have used Linux and FreeBSD since 2000. I still cannot get my Brother HL-2040 to print anything besides text and Word docs via CUPS + SMB on my FreeBSD box. PDFs are a no-go. But it works fine when connected to my OSX laptop - which also runs CUPS, so I know it *can* be done.)
Users have a hard time dealing with command-prompts -- that's partly why GUIs were invented.
Windows offers a path-of-least-resistance/lower barrier-to-entry. It does so by having a larger established application base, far-greater mindshare (which in turns feeds the app base), and by providing a generally easier-to-use interface -- all of which drive its own growth, or at least self-perpetuation.
Meanwhile, although Linux is free-to-possess, it is certainly *not* free to learn, and operating it requires more time spent "tweaking" than is usually the case on Windows. As the old saying goes, "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing." Hence why some of us have switched to OSX (my time is pretty expensive)...
Windows' continuing desktop dominance is ultimately a feedback loop in action. Linux is great for many things, and for a power user who does no more than basic Office-type work (Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.), and who doesn't mind multiple audio streams failing to mix together correctly -- or require different audio frameworks to do it, depending on the app -- it's usable... But as a desktop for Joe User, Linux isn't there yet, and probably never will be (consider the expansion into synchronization with iPods, cellphones (and the PIM stuff that goes along with smartphones), and so forth. Even Apple has a lot of catch-up to do here; Microsoft is using its market dominance to connect all these things in a tolerable -- but far from perfect -- manner.)
After spending around 8 years trying to convince friends and family that privacy is important, I gave up about 3 years ago trying. In that time, I've graduated high school, picked up a CS degree, and work now as a developer.
Nobody cares. As I said about 1.5 years ago on a related topic, the realization that privacy is important requires strong knowledge of multiple fields of study. But most people are lucky to have strong knowledge of more than 1 or 2. People are largely too stupid to understand the subject of privacy, especially where it intersects with the world of computing.
From the submitter's comment, it sounds like all they're doing is using undergraduate-level statistics. Finding correlations in 2 datasets is *FAR* from new; you can do it yourself with all kinds of data on Swivel.
But correlation != causation; any/. reader should know that. A correlation in data does not mean there is any actual connection between them: there is surely a non-zero correlation between lobster prices in Maine and the number of prostitutes murdered in Thailand. But that does not mean they are in any way connected.
Social scientists have been struggling with this problem for decades, particularly that most-empirical of social scientists, the economist... Predicting human behavior can be broadly performed with simple statistical models, true. But to gain accurate, actionable information is quite a more challenging task.
That CS profs are treading on ground that social scientists have already, with dismal results, suggests one or both of two things: a lack of cross-disciplinary study on the CS profs' part (quite likely, given the insular nature of us CS people), and/or an over-fascination with statistical techniques they haven't experienced enough to realize just how limited they really are in their real-world predictive capability, given dirty, inspecific, inconsistent data...
See also Visual Studio, or WSAD/Eclipse, or NetBeans.
Professionals do not waste time with half-assed, flimsy, easily-broken/high-maintenance hacks like the tools normally used on *nix systems... Professionals get their boss to pay hundreds of dollars for a competent toolset, or (if they are unlucky) buy it themselves.
I understand that professional mechanics often have to purchase $10k in tools; guys in construction also spend several thousand on their tools. You think they'd rather use a rock, rope, and a stick to pound nails -- or would they rather use a solid, well-made, for-reals hammer that isn't just cobbled-together by some pimply-faced car-nut teenager mechanic-wannabe, and which costs money and is mass-produced?
Stop screwing around with vim and grep (except whe you have big text files to parse - they're still great for those purposes). Forget 1978; join us in 2008!
No, I'm opposed to any sort of forced eugenics, e.g. particularly China's "1 child" policy (I've yet to catch the Malthusian bug), or the sort practiced from the 1930s until the 1970s in Sweden (in which some 60,000 people - often homeless men - were forcibly sterilized by the government).
That said, call me an elitist, but -- there are a *lot* of bad parents out there. They are people who - because they do a poor job taking care of their children, who introduce people into the world who, by some combination of genetics and upbringing, become a drag on our culture and our economy - should not be having children. See also Britney Spears, and probably the trailer park from which she hails... There are a lot of inner-city ghetto-dwellers and rural trailer-trash who can't take care of the kids they keep having because even as adults, they are completely irresponsible. They produce kids who then become a drag on the rest of us: they show up in crime statistics, they yield poor service in the labor force, they mock (if not, more aggressively, thwart) attempts at intellectual culture, which retards all forms of progress.
My strongly-libertarian instincts of the past are slowly giving-way to notions of testing people to roughly gauge whether somebody is capable of competently managing the responsibilities that come along with the rights and liberties we typically assign them... Americans who don't have at least a very vague idea of what most of each of the Amendments on the U.S. Bill of Rights should not be permitted to vote. People who are mentally ill and have criminal records should not be permitted to buy firearms (likewise, citizens should not be barred from owning military-grade weapons (except WMDs, IMO) if they so choose, if they can pass the same tests of competency and controls over said arms that the military demands of its soldiers and organization). At least we test people for ability to drive on public roadways - though even there, the bar is pretty low. And therein lies the problem of a "responsibility-tested culture of liberty" -- who decides the test? What standards are sufficient? Can the tests be perfectly objective? What if the tests are poorly-written - can those who fail it still have a say in changing the test, if need be?
I would never outright ban anybody from enjoying any conceivable freedom which does not infringe upon the freedom of others (example: there's no reason an adult should be unfree to smoke or drink themselves stupid in the comfort of their own home, if they want to). The trouble is where there are social interactions -- that freedom of one actor unavoidably alters the outcome of another actor's (such as when said drunk person gets in a car and drives on the road with other drivers). That is where testing comes into play (mandatory breathalyzers built into cars, perhaps? e.g. alcohol sensors in the steering wheel which sample the driver's body moisture)...
Great, yet-another intelligent (I assume, given your non-AC status on/. - I know, it's no guarantee, but aside from the trolls, the least that can be said of/. is that there aren't many mouth-breathers here) person who doesn't want kids. Are you trying to ensure the transition from fiction to non-fiction of the movie Idiocracy?
*grins*:) I argue with people here pretty much any time I post, but I've been here for a few years, and since around the turn of the millenium at least as a lurker...
I actually think OSS works pretty well as a development model and more-broadly as a cultural advancement in the way information is communicated and evolved. I just don't take it as religion, that's all.:-)
Of course, what the slashvertiser-of-the-day didn't tell you is that FiOS isn't available in some major markets -- like, oh, Chicago and its surrounding suburbs (even the very wealthy ones).
Too bad. I'd love to stop giving Ma Be^H^H^H^H^H Comcast my money...
There is a third way: it's called "being reasonable", or "having nuance", or "creating exceptions where it's pragmatic to do so". Open source works and/or is desirable for many projects and situations - but not all.
Microsoft is not interested in fixing a security flaw in the database they use for their Active Directory system? What, do they not care about the security of their authentication and authorization network OS database?
Color me unsurprised, really (I don't know why they don't use SQL Server anyway, but whatever the reason, they don't yet).
If he encourages Americans to support a war in which tens or hundreds of thousands of people will ultimately perish -- compared to the perhaps hundreds or single-thousands of people who will have died at the hands of Jihidists outside the war's scope during the same time period -- then yes, O'Reilly can be said to be more dangerous than Jihadi editorialists, who (like O'Reilly, but in reverse) promote violence against the West.
Now, is O'Reilly by himself more dangerous than the Jihad movement as a whole? Surely not - but that's because the comparison is one comparing different object types: a single person versus a religious and cultural uprising involving many people... It's an invalid comparison.
Because geeks -- computer geeks, anyway -- tend to be of an engineering mindset, rather than an analyst mindset. Hence, you have the distinction between the beliefs in engineering and spontaneous order: a distinction between the beliefs in pre-planning and proaction to a successful outcome, and a successful outcome arising purely reactively through the interactions between multiple agents. Engineering versus emergent behavior.
Anyway, that's one answer. Another answer is simpler: Slashdot's largest demographic segment is 18-24 year-old males, i.e. college-age geeks. It's pretty much a given that if somebody is in college, their beliefs turn leftist for a while; the arrogant notion that they know it all means they favor ideologies which proclaim success through knowing all a priori, as Soviet socialism did.
The poverty of that view has long since been demonstrated. In spite of the massive computing might possessed by the likes of IBM, Google, the NSA, and so forth, mankind is still quite a ways away from having amassed nearly enough knowledge and understanding of that knowledge and ability to process it all such that the sort of engineering-driven, planned society and economy can possibly succeed.
Oh, I should include as a classic example the various hedge funds out there. They hire brilliant quantitative analysts to work on risk models that require grid computing clusters to calculate. The result? The current, massive sub-prime mortgage meltdown we are seeing.
See also the book titled When Genius Failed, about the failure of Long-Term Capital Management -- a hedge fund that failed 10 years ago for much the same reason those today are failing: lack of sufficient knowledge and predictive capability, i.e., a lack of engineering skill. Nevermind the existence of 2 economics Nobel Laureates on their team, including one (Myron Scholes) partially-responsible for the Black-Scholes formula now considered the defacto standard in risk-pricing...
Geeks appear more at home in Soviet Russia because they have the arrogance to believe they can outsmart tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people. So have the people involved in the above-named organizations...
Just who, precisely, paid $400-$600 for an iPhone from an Apple store: the consumer, or Apple?
Oh, right, Apple sells the device. Hence, once money is exchanged for the "iPhone" goods, the device becomes property of the purchaser.
Stupid/. posters don't get even the most fundamental goddamn concept in capitalism correct. The owners are well within their rights to do as they please with the phone; whether Apple should support them after they have modified it depends on what Apple has stated in their software licensing, warranty contract, and particularly, what a court of law dictates they shall cover should this actually go to court (which it likely will), etc...
People in rural areas are likely to be too poor to afford a 50" plasma TV and 7.1 digital surround sound system./. leftists call for equality in ownership of 50" plasma TVs and 7.1 digital surround sound systems...
Seriously, if broadband Internet isn't reaching the countryside, then that is a market signal that they are too expensive; that they are, by living in the boonies, behaving inefficiently relative to the conditions of the point in time. It is an incentive to move closer to an urban area, where job opportunities, salaries, social activities, etc. are greater, and the ability to behave in an environmentally-sounder manner -- by biking or taking mass-transit rather than driving -- is improved.
Similarly, it is also an incentive to try to solve the problem independently. WiMax, or directional 802.11a/b/g to create a mesh network between small towns, anybody?
Mr. Farm-Country web developer should've done his homework *before* moving. Duh. And he could still get dialup service and have his site hosted somewhere else with much fatter pipes (e.g. Rackspace), rather than hosting it himself... you know, like people did back during the "web 1.0" era...
Dot-com boom Cisco: This Interwebnet is big! You need our routers to handle the traffic! Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!!
ca. 2002 Cisco: The routers we sold you before aren't powerful enough for web 2.0, and soon everybody will be doing everything over the Intertubes. You need Router XP for all that traffic. Oh, and stay tuned for Router Vista edition. Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!
Today Cisco: Video big! Big videos! Router XP is puny for video; you need big frames and more memory! Come get Router Vista! Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!
The problem is that the majority of what we need to know for our non-working and working lives is inherently not very interesting to children who would rather be doing something that children consider "fun".
Most kids don't regard writing code as "fun", for example -- and that is the job of a software developer.
Most kids don't regard the determination of chemical bonds as "fun" -- but that's fundamental to the field of chemistry.
Most kids (including me, when I was one, and still to this day) couldn't care less what Shakespeare wrote -- and what he wrote is frankly irrelevant to anybody who does something useful for a living (scientists, engineers, doctors), though still useful for people who "play" for a living (e.g. actors/actresses), and possibly lawyers (when using a Shakespearean story as an digestible analogy that a jury or a judge can understand, anyway).
Most kids don't care about managing their personal finances, because that's not "fun" -- even though they will go into debt and/or broke if they don't learn how.
And so on. Rather than do any of these things, most kids would rather watch TV, run around outdoors (which is at least good for their physical health and socially-stimulative), play video games, smoke/drink/huff cans of pesticide, etc.. Real life can't compete with the entertainment value of delinquincy, and at the age of (for example) 14, the ostensibly more-responsible age of 21 seems almost infinitely far-away ("so who cares, right?")...
The sad reality is that most of life is boring -- and the sooner people recognize this, accept it, move on and learn the necessary material anyway, the better off we'll all be.
As a professional young adult, I know I spend *very* little of my 168 hours/week doing things I consider purely "fun" (playing video/computer games, poker, traveling, getting laid, writing code for a personal project (which is half work-related anyway, since such projects are a vehicle for learning new stuff))... Most of what I do involves working, doing things related to my work, maintaining my physical and/or financial health, and planning for my future.
The life of a responsible, disciplined adult isn't easy, nor does it tend to be fun. But we find ways to make such trivial work interesting...
More power to teachers if they can find ways to make education and learning interesting. It *can* be (and I think for most of us reading/., it is) -- but it first takes a self-driven *desire* to learn the given material; a certain passion... Without it, education is rote tedium; an obstacle in the way of other, more-entertaining things.
I'm a software developer/engineer. 2 of my friends are lawyers. One makes 1/2 what I do; the other 2/3 what I do.
I work 40-50 hours/week; they work 50-70 hours/week.
I occasionally get paged in the morning for the failure of a server product that was poorly-chosen by people more-senior than me; one of them (a public criminal defense attorney) gets called in the middle of the night every so often by clients wanting a $0 bail when they have rap sheets 14 pages long (the upside, as a public attorney, is that he gets to tell them they're morons and not worry about losing customers).
Although my job role has changed recently for the worse in almost every respect, I still don't envy my lawyer friends. They go through more hell than I do for less money, and needed 3 years more formal education than I did to get it. That's a good thing, since for many years, I considered becoming a lawyer myself.
Very few lawyers are rich, and those who are typically work in some area of IP law, doing the boring drudgery of reading boilerplate EULAs, patents, and such. Read the book "So You Wanna Be a Lawyer" sometime; it seems accurate and enlightening.
I was a 2000 graduate of BHS. We paid $50 to park. That's not so bad: parking in the Chicago loop often goes for $20/day or more, and at many apartment complexes in/near Chicago, parking goes for $75/month or more.
I'm glad to see the students stood-up to the administration on parking. We had the same problem, but with some 1300 people (compared to I believe 1800 now? And with that satellite building in the parking lot next to the tennis courts), it wasn't nearly as bad. Rides were shared, as was the parking pass, and as students we took turns driving around town to drive each other to school. And sometimes we parked in the lot near the Dairy Queen. But it worked...
My class stood-up to the administration on study hall. We'd been promised a study hall if we made sufficiently-good scores on one of the various standardized tests; we made those grades, and the administration still took away study hall. We protested going into our senior year and won. (Now, in retrospect, I think study hall was a waste of time better spent learning, which is why I only took it half the year.)
For several weeks, we poured over reports filed by NTSB crash investigators, as well as seating charts that showed where each passenger sat and whether they lived or died.
(emphasis mine)
Now if only Popular Mechanics' editors had pored over the article before publication...
WTF? If you don't have requirements, then what the hell do you expect to test?
Requirements are likely to change over time for any non-trivial development project, but ultimately, you need to perform testing prior to release, and if you don't have in-hand the things the customers wanted, then you have no idea how to determine whether you've met the customer's demands.
Whether thick documentation is appropriate depends on the project's needs. Where safety is paramount (as in your space shuttle example), thick specs are critical; where the app is a one-time use script written in a day, probably nothing more than a "purpose" section in the code is needed besides comments in the code, of course... And in-between those extremes fall projects with varying needs.
But regardless, you have to have at least a rough idea going in what you are writing (else, are you even thinking far enough ahead to know what must be written?), so that by the time you're coming out and doing testing, you have a very good idea of what must be tested.
To do anything else results in cowboy coding slop and apps/scripts that programmers a year later won't understand because the original developers have left the organization seeking greener pastures and left a paucity of documentation for future reference.
I'm not much for the waterfall process; its promoters (who are few these days) tend to view the process as infallible and worse, themselves and/or their development team as infallible and all-knowing. That's a laughably-arrogant and inaccurate assertion on their part.
But I find it almost as funny that agile developers believe their process to be somehow novel. Aside from XP, as far as I can tell, it's not: RUP is just the waterfall process with each major stage (requirements, design, etc., and their sub-stages) overlapping its neighbor phases by some arbitrary percentage. The unit-build approach typically found in agile methodology, in which requirements are prioritized, selected, and then units forming the basis to fulfill each requirement are designed, constructed, and tested individually, is sensible in that it forms building blocks for potentially multiple apps. It's much like the advancing abstractions in software design made over time (from thinking about software as sets of single bits, to singular flat sections of data (e.g. the "data division" in COBOL), to objects and the hierarchy of classes which define their structure, to the current stage we're in of writing "components" (for which each has a separate specification).
But it is still done within the scope of a project, which defines a specific set of pieces to be created, and thus, there is nevertheless an overarching design specifying those units.
At the end of the day, the bulk of agile methodology is the waterfall methodology adjusted to have non-blocking I/O from one major phase to the next (rather than blocking and completing each phase 100% before continuing)...
As a final note, the overlapping of the phases results (as is happening in a RUP-managed project I'm developing-for at the moment) in previously-accomplished work being changed later, after more work has been done than would've been in the waterfall process, because of a failure to think through the project's needs thoroughly enough. Then you violate a maxim of the management theorist Peter Drucker, who once wrote "there is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all". With increased foresight, such waste can be avoided (though never eliminated, because again, requirements change)...
Was this a university for women? Were the boys in the class included for "diversity" purposes?
I've been in multiple public universities' math courses, and they are invariably majority-populated -- though not *nearly* as strikingly as in the CS courses (where I had multiple courses with *zero* girls in them) -- by males...
Slashdot Mirror
Business users don't generally use Linux on the desktop because of:
1) IT inertia - i.e., application infrastructure which would require replacement (a.k.a. lock-in)
2) Corporate desire not to spend extra money supporting another OS
3) Training costs
Joe Home User sees #1 and #3 as well. e.g. for #1, they want to play Cabela's Big Game Hunter, not hack on Gnumeric. And Big Game Hunter is a Windows app, not a Linux app. For #3 - and this is the killer - Linux is still too hard to use. Venture outside the well-defined, tolerably easy-to-use user needs space of web browsing and... and that's about it... and you're looking at having to deal with a command-prompt. God forbid you should have to install something like a printer, which is usually dirt-simple on Windows, but a PITA on Linux (to wit: I have used Linux and FreeBSD since 2000. I still cannot get my Brother HL-2040 to print anything besides text and Word docs via CUPS + SMB on my FreeBSD box. PDFs are a no-go. But it works fine when connected to my OSX laptop - which also runs CUPS, so I know it *can* be done.)
Users have a hard time dealing with command-prompts -- that's partly why GUIs were invented.
Windows offers a path-of-least-resistance/lower barrier-to-entry. It does so by having a larger established application base, far-greater mindshare (which in turns feeds the app base), and by providing a generally easier-to-use interface -- all of which drive its own growth, or at least self-perpetuation.
Meanwhile, although Linux is free-to-possess, it is certainly *not* free to learn, and operating it requires more time spent "tweaking" than is usually the case on Windows. As the old saying goes, "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing." Hence why some of us have switched to OSX (my time is pretty expensive)...
Windows' continuing desktop dominance is ultimately a feedback loop in action. Linux is great for many things, and for a power user who does no more than basic Office-type work (Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.), and who doesn't mind multiple audio streams failing to mix together correctly -- or require different audio frameworks to do it, depending on the app -- it's usable... But as a desktop for Joe User, Linux isn't there yet, and probably never will be (consider the expansion into synchronization with iPods, cellphones (and the PIM stuff that goes along with smartphones), and so forth. Even Apple has a lot of catch-up to do here; Microsoft is using its market dominance to connect all these things in a tolerable -- but far from perfect -- manner.)
After spending around 8 years trying to convince friends and family that privacy is important, I gave up about 3 years ago trying. In that time, I've graduated high school, picked up a CS degree, and work now as a developer.
Nobody cares. As I said about 1.5 years ago on a related topic, the realization that privacy is important requires strong knowledge of multiple fields of study. But most people are lucky to have strong knowledge of more than 1 or 2. People are largely too stupid to understand the subject of privacy, especially where it intersects with the world of computing.
From the submitter's comment, it sounds like all they're doing is using undergraduate-level statistics. Finding correlations in 2 datasets is *FAR* from new; you can do it yourself with all kinds of data on Swivel.
/. reader should know that. A correlation in data does not mean there is any actual connection between them: there is surely a non-zero correlation between lobster prices in Maine and the number of prostitutes murdered in Thailand. But that does not mean they are in any way connected.
But correlation != causation; any
Social scientists have been struggling with this problem for decades, particularly that most-empirical of social scientists, the economist... Predicting human behavior can be broadly performed with simple statistical models, true. But to gain accurate, actionable information is quite a more challenging task.
That CS profs are treading on ground that social scientists have already, with dismal results, suggests one or both of two things: a lack of cross-disciplinary study on the CS profs' part (quite likely, given the insular nature of us CS people), and/or an over-fascination with statistical techniques they haven't experienced enough to realize just how limited they really are in their real-world predictive capability, given dirty, inspecific, inconsistent data...
See also Visual Studio, or WSAD/Eclipse, or NetBeans.
Professionals do not waste time with half-assed, flimsy, easily-broken/high-maintenance hacks like the tools normally used on *nix systems... Professionals get their boss to pay hundreds of dollars for a competent toolset, or (if they are unlucky) buy it themselves.
I understand that professional mechanics often have to purchase $10k in tools; guys in construction also spend several thousand on their tools. You think they'd rather use a rock, rope, and a stick to pound nails -- or would they rather use a solid, well-made, for-reals hammer that isn't just cobbled-together by some pimply-faced car-nut teenager mechanic-wannabe, and which costs money and is mass-produced?
Stop screwing around with vim and grep (except whe you have big text files to parse - they're still great for those purposes). Forget 1978; join us in 2008!
No, I'm opposed to any sort of forced eugenics, e.g. particularly China's "1 child" policy (I've yet to catch the Malthusian bug), or the sort practiced from the 1930s until the 1970s in Sweden (in which some 60,000 people - often homeless men - were forcibly sterilized by the government).
That said, call me an elitist, but -- there are a *lot* of bad parents out there. They are people who - because they do a poor job taking care of their children, who introduce people into the world who, by some combination of genetics and upbringing, become a drag on our culture and our economy - should not be having children. See also Britney Spears, and probably the trailer park from which she hails... There are a lot of inner-city ghetto-dwellers and rural trailer-trash who can't take care of the kids they keep having because even as adults, they are completely irresponsible. They produce kids who then become a drag on the rest of us: they show up in crime statistics, they yield poor service in the labor force, they mock (if not, more aggressively, thwart) attempts at intellectual culture, which retards all forms of progress.
My strongly-libertarian instincts of the past are slowly giving-way to notions of testing people to roughly gauge whether somebody is capable of competently managing the responsibilities that come along with the rights and liberties we typically assign them... Americans who don't have at least a very vague idea of what most of each of the Amendments on the U.S. Bill of Rights should not be permitted to vote. People who are mentally ill and have criminal records should not be permitted to buy firearms (likewise, citizens should not be barred from owning military-grade weapons (except WMDs, IMO) if they so choose, if they can pass the same tests of competency and controls over said arms that the military demands of its soldiers and organization). At least we test people for ability to drive on public roadways - though even there, the bar is pretty low. And therein lies the problem of a "responsibility-tested culture of liberty" -- who decides the test? What standards are sufficient? Can the tests be perfectly objective? What if the tests are poorly-written - can those who fail it still have a say in changing the test, if need be?
I would never outright ban anybody from enjoying any conceivable freedom which does not infringe upon the freedom of others (example: there's no reason an adult should be unfree to smoke or drink themselves stupid in the comfort of their own home, if they want to). The trouble is where there are social interactions -- that freedom of one actor unavoidably alters the outcome of another actor's (such as when said drunk person gets in a car and drives on the road with other drivers). That is where testing comes into play (mandatory breathalyzers built into cars, perhaps? e.g. alcohol sensors in the steering wheel which sample the driver's body moisture)...
Great, yet-another intelligent (I assume, given your non-AC status on /. - I know, it's no guarantee, but aside from the trolls, the least that can be said of /. is that there aren't many mouth-breathers here) person who doesn't want kids. Are you trying to ensure the transition from fiction to non-fiction of the movie Idiocracy?
...you work out of mommy and daddy's basement and eat their food and drive their car(s)?
*grins* :) I argue with people here pretty much any time I post, but I've been here for a few years, and since around the turn of the millenium at least as a lurker...
I actually think OSS works pretty well as a development model and more-broadly as a cultural advancement in the way information is communicated and evolved. I just don't take it as religion, that's all. :-)
Of course, what the slashvertiser-of-the-day didn't tell you is that FiOS isn't available in some major markets -- like, oh, Chicago and its surrounding suburbs (even the very wealthy ones).
Too bad. I'd love to stop giving Ma Be^H^H^H^H^H Comcast my money...
What does this statement, and the statement by President Bush that "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists", have in common?
Both are an example of a false dichotomy/false dilemma.
There is a third way: it's called "being reasonable", or "having nuance", or "creating exceptions where it's pragmatic to do so". Open source works and/or is desirable for many projects and situations - but not all.
Microsoft is not interested in fixing a security flaw in the database they use for their Active Directory system? What, do they not care about the security of their authentication and authorization network OS database?
Color me unsurprised, really (I don't know why they don't use SQL Server anyway, but whatever the reason, they don't yet).
If he encourages Americans to support a war in which tens or hundreds of thousands of people will ultimately perish -- compared to the perhaps hundreds or single-thousands of people who will have died at the hands of Jihidists outside the war's scope during the same time period -- then yes, O'Reilly can be said to be more dangerous than Jihadi editorialists, who (like O'Reilly, but in reverse) promote violence against the West.
Now, is O'Reilly by himself more dangerous than the Jihad movement as a whole? Surely not - but that's because the comparison is one comparing different object types: a single person versus a religious and cultural uprising involving many people... It's an invalid comparison.
Because geeks -- computer geeks, anyway -- tend to be of an engineering mindset, rather than an analyst mindset. Hence, you have the distinction between the beliefs in engineering and spontaneous order: a distinction between the beliefs in pre-planning and proaction to a successful outcome, and a successful outcome arising purely reactively through the interactions between multiple agents. Engineering versus emergent behavior.
Free-market economics professor Russell Roberts wrote a good piece on the difference.
Anyway, that's one answer. Another answer is simpler: Slashdot's largest demographic segment is 18-24 year-old males, i.e. college-age geeks. It's pretty much a given that if somebody is in college, their beliefs turn leftist for a while; the arrogant notion that they know it all means they favor ideologies which proclaim success through knowing all a priori, as Soviet socialism did.
The poverty of that view has long since been demonstrated. In spite of the massive computing might possessed by the likes of IBM, Google, the NSA, and so forth, mankind is still quite a ways away from having amassed nearly enough knowledge and understanding of that knowledge and ability to process it all such that the sort of engineering-driven, planned society and economy can possibly succeed.
Oh, I should include as a classic example the various hedge funds out there. They hire brilliant quantitative analysts to work on risk models that require grid computing clusters to calculate. The result? The current, massive sub-prime mortgage meltdown we are seeing.
See also the book titled When Genius Failed, about the failure of Long-Term Capital Management -- a hedge fund that failed 10 years ago for much the same reason those today are failing: lack of sufficient knowledge and predictive capability, i.e., a lack of engineering skill. Nevermind the existence of 2 economics Nobel Laureates on their team, including one (Myron Scholes) partially-responsible for the Black-Scholes formula now considered the defacto standard in risk-pricing...
Geeks appear more at home in Soviet Russia because they have the arrogance to believe they can outsmart tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people. So have the people involved in the above-named organizations...
No no, Candians shit pure butterscotch and piss maple syrup! Get it right, geez... :P
Just who, precisely, paid $400-$600 for an iPhone from an Apple store: the consumer, or Apple?
/. posters don't get even the most fundamental goddamn concept in capitalism correct. The owners are well within their rights to do as they please with the phone; whether Apple should support them after they have modified it depends on what Apple has stated in their software licensing, warranty contract, and particularly, what a court of law dictates they shall cover should this actually go to court (which it likely will), etc...
Oh, right, Apple sells the device. Hence, once money is exchanged for the "iPhone" goods, the device becomes property of the purchaser.
Stupid
People in rural areas are likely to be too poor to afford a 50" plasma TV and 7.1 digital surround sound system. /. leftists call for equality in ownership of 50" plasma TVs and 7.1 digital surround sound systems...
Seriously, if broadband Internet isn't reaching the countryside, then that is a market signal that they are too expensive; that they are, by living in the boonies, behaving inefficiently relative to the conditions of the point in time. It is an incentive to move closer to an urban area, where job opportunities, salaries, social activities, etc. are greater, and the ability to behave in an environmentally-sounder manner -- by biking or taking mass-transit rather than driving -- is improved.
Similarly, it is also an incentive to try to solve the problem independently. WiMax, or directional 802.11a/b/g to create a mesh network between small towns, anybody?
Mr. Farm-Country web developer should've done his homework *before* moving. Duh. And he could still get dialup service and have his site hosted somewhere else with much fatter pipes (e.g. Rackspace), rather than hosting it himself... you know, like people did back during the "web 1.0" era...
Dot-com boom
Cisco: This Interwebnet is big! You need our routers to handle the traffic!
Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!!
ca. 2002
Cisco: The routers we sold you before aren't powerful enough for web 2.0, and soon everybody will be doing everything over the Intertubes. You need Router XP for all that traffic. Oh, and stay tuned for Router Vista edition.
Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!
Today
Cisco: Video big! Big videos! Router XP is puny for video; you need big frames and more memory! Come get Router Vista!
Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!
The problem is that the majority of what we need to know for our non-working and working lives is inherently not very interesting to children who would rather be doing something that children consider "fun".
/., it is) -- but it first takes a self-driven *desire* to learn the given material; a certain passion... Without it, education is rote tedium; an obstacle in the way of other, more-entertaining things.
Most kids don't regard writing code as "fun", for example -- and that is the job of a software developer.
Most kids don't regard the determination of chemical bonds as "fun" -- but that's fundamental to the field of chemistry.
Most kids (including me, when I was one, and still to this day) couldn't care less what Shakespeare wrote -- and what he wrote is frankly irrelevant to anybody who does something useful for a living (scientists, engineers, doctors), though still useful for people who "play" for a living (e.g. actors/actresses), and possibly lawyers (when using a Shakespearean story as an digestible analogy that a jury or a judge can understand, anyway).
Most kids don't care about managing their personal finances, because that's not "fun" -- even though they will go into debt and/or broke if they don't learn how.
And so on. Rather than do any of these things, most kids would rather watch TV, run around outdoors (which is at least good for their physical health and socially-stimulative), play video games, smoke/drink/huff cans of pesticide, etc.. Real life can't compete with the entertainment value of delinquincy, and at the age of (for example) 14, the ostensibly more-responsible age of 21 seems almost infinitely far-away ("so who cares, right?")...
The sad reality is that most of life is boring -- and the sooner people recognize this, accept it, move on and learn the necessary material anyway, the better off we'll all be.
As a professional young adult, I know I spend *very* little of my 168 hours/week doing things I consider purely "fun" (playing video/computer games, poker, traveling, getting laid, writing code for a personal project (which is half work-related anyway, since such projects are a vehicle for learning new stuff))... Most of what I do involves working, doing things related to my work, maintaining my physical and/or financial health, and planning for my future.
The life of a responsible, disciplined adult isn't easy, nor does it tend to be fun. But we find ways to make such trivial work interesting...
More power to teachers if they can find ways to make education and learning interesting. It *can* be (and I think for most of us reading
Shows what you know about lawyers.
I'm a software developer/engineer. 2 of my friends are lawyers. One makes 1/2 what I do; the other 2/3 what I do.
I work 40-50 hours/week; they work 50-70 hours/week.
I occasionally get paged in the morning for the failure of a server product that was poorly-chosen by people more-senior than me; one of them (a public criminal defense attorney) gets called in the middle of the night every so often by clients wanting a $0 bail when they have rap sheets 14 pages long (the upside, as a public attorney, is that he gets to tell them they're morons and not worry about losing customers).
Although my job role has changed recently for the worse in almost every respect, I still don't envy my lawyer friends. They go through more hell than I do for less money, and needed 3 years more formal education than I did to get it. That's a good thing, since for many years, I considered becoming a lawyer myself.
Very few lawyers are rich, and those who are typically work in some area of IP law, doing the boring drudgery of reading boilerplate EULAs, patents, and such. Read the book "So You Wanna Be a Lawyer" sometime; it seems accurate and enlightening.
I was a 2000 graduate of BHS. We paid $50 to park. That's not so bad: parking in the Chicago loop often goes for $20/day or more, and at many apartment complexes in/near Chicago, parking goes for $75/month or more.
I'm glad to see the students stood-up to the administration on parking. We had the same problem, but with some 1300 people (compared to I believe 1800 now? And with that satellite building in the parking lot next to the tennis courts), it wasn't nearly as bad. Rides were shared, as was the parking pass, and as students we took turns driving around town to drive each other to school. And sometimes we parked in the lot near the Dairy Queen. But it worked...
My class stood-up to the administration on study hall. We'd been promised a study hall if we made sufficiently-good scores on one of the various standardized tests; we made those grades, and the administration still took away study hall. We protested going into our senior year and won. (Now, in retrospect, I think study hall was a waste of time better spent learning, which is why I only took it half the year.)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence." - Ken Thompson
See also Occam's Razor.
(emphasis mine)
Now if only Popular Mechanics' editors had pored over the article before publication...
</nazi type="spelling">
WTF? If you don't have requirements, then what the hell do you expect to test?
Requirements are likely to change over time for any non-trivial development project, but ultimately, you need to perform testing prior to release, and if you don't have in-hand the things the customers wanted, then you have no idea how to determine whether you've met the customer's demands.
Whether thick documentation is appropriate depends on the project's needs. Where safety is paramount (as in your space shuttle example), thick specs are critical; where the app is a one-time use script written in a day, probably nothing more than a "purpose" section in the code is needed besides comments in the code, of course... And in-between those extremes fall projects with varying needs.
But regardless, you have to have at least a rough idea going in what you are writing (else, are you even thinking far enough ahead to know what must be written?), so that by the time you're coming out and doing testing, you have a very good idea of what must be tested.
To do anything else results in cowboy coding slop and apps/scripts that programmers a year later won't understand because the original developers have left the organization seeking greener pastures and left a paucity of documentation for future reference.
I'm not much for the waterfall process; its promoters (who are few these days) tend to view the process as infallible and worse, themselves and/or their development team as infallible and all-knowing. That's a laughably-arrogant and inaccurate assertion on their part.
But I find it almost as funny that agile developers believe their process to be somehow novel. Aside from XP, as far as I can tell, it's not: RUP is just the waterfall process with each major stage (requirements, design, etc., and their sub-stages) overlapping its neighbor phases by some arbitrary percentage. The unit-build approach typically found in agile methodology, in which requirements are prioritized, selected, and then units forming the basis to fulfill each requirement are designed, constructed, and tested individually, is sensible in that it forms building blocks for potentially multiple apps. It's much like the advancing abstractions in software design made over time (from thinking about software as sets of single bits, to singular flat sections of data (e.g. the "data division" in COBOL), to objects and the hierarchy of classes which define their structure, to the current stage we're in of writing "components" (for which each has a separate specification).
But it is still done within the scope of a project, which defines a specific set of pieces to be created, and thus, there is nevertheless an overarching design specifying those units.
At the end of the day, the bulk of agile methodology is the waterfall methodology adjusted to have non-blocking I/O from one major phase to the next (rather than blocking and completing each phase 100% before continuing)...
As a final note, the overlapping of the phases results (as is happening in a RUP-managed project I'm developing-for at the moment) in previously-accomplished work being changed later, after more work has been done than would've been in the waterfall process, because of a failure to think through the project's needs thoroughly enough. Then you violate a maxim of the management theorist Peter Drucker, who once wrote "there is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all". With increased foresight, such waste can be avoided (though never eliminated, because again, requirements change)...
Was this a university for women? Were the boys in the class included for "diversity" purposes?
I've been in multiple public universities' math courses, and they are invariably majority-populated -- though not *nearly* as strikingly as in the CS courses (where I had multiple courses with *zero* girls in them) -- by males...