NASA's software development methodology is remarkable. Their work should be the standard by which every programmer measures himself against.
Unfortunately, most programmers are underinformed, and haven't the foggiest idea that there's are methodologies that will reduce their error rates, increase their productivity, and meet their customers' needs fully.
It's a shame that programming still has this bullshit mystique of "art" to it. "Art" is just a lame excuse for laziness: instead of approaching the problems methodically and scientifically, it's just ever-so-much easier to take a half-assed hack-and-patch approach.
I think I'd better stop here, before I really kick into a rant...
Let's get Peter Molyneaux in to hack the Slashdot code a little -- I want a Black & White interface for Slashdot, so that I can pick, oh, say, Katz as my animal alter-ego. Whenever he posts a new article, I'll get to bitchslap him 'til he cries!
Of course, there'll have to be some sort of physical interface down at Slashdot HQ, so that the graphic interface can be translated to actual abuse...
Disney is using Level Control System's "Matrix3" audio processing engine to achieve their sound automation. Sound control doesn't get better than the Matrix3.
I can probably answer a number of questions about the sound system, if anyone is curious. If I can't answer them directly, I can get the info in fairly short order.
Same in Canada, except that the division is more supposedly along the lines of "essentials of living" versus "convienence food." It applies to a *lot* of things, beyond food.
What's most perturbing, though, is that it'd so damn illogical. Toilet paper: deemed essential and therefor not taxed. Tampons/pads: deemed *non*-essential, and taxed!!
On the other hand, RIAA's not really losing anything: as I clearly stated, I *refuse* to pay their prices. When they bring prices down to reasonable levels, I will pay their prices.
In the meantime, my possessing or not possessing a CD is moot: either way, RIAA isn't going to see any money from me. Picking up CDs at pawn shops is, from a RIAA perspective, just as unprofitable as my pirating them.
RIAA's gotta make the first move here, 'cause I am *not* pissing my money away on music that is, for the most part, produced poorly (oh, don't get me started on the abysmal quality of studio work these days!), manufactured cheaply, and doesn't return good income to the musicians.
I have bought perhaps four CDs at normal retail prices (CDN$18ish). I have purchased another, oh, say, two dozen in boxing-day sales, about CDN$8-12ish. *EVERY* other CD (must be about eighty of them) was purchased used or in going-out-of-business sales.
I now have a CDROM, and I am quickly building a library of pirated CDs. I *WILL* *NOT* participate in the price-gouging of RIAA. I *WILL* *NOT* pay full price for any music I am not intimately familiar with and love... and I *WILL* *NOT* pay full price for music that's more than a half-dozen year's old. There's no fucking way that a half-hour of The Workingman's Dead should cost $20!
And yet... if CDs were under $5, I'd be a whole lot less selective in what I purchased. Hell, I'd have at least ten times as many CDs as I have now -- meaning that RIAA would actually have made something on the order of *five times* as much money off me.
I'm sure it's going to head that way. You'll get a life-time IP address, and use it in everything. Your preferences will be able to follow you... and so will your email. (which, given the amount of spam i get these days, may not be so hot...)
Oh, yes, surely; I agree that the its only the value-adding labour that counts. My original (and, I admit, poor analogy) was to draw a parallel with artistic labour: a raku plate, for example, is just pretty clay, but it has value beyond the clay, and well-executed raku is quite valuable even though it contains no more clay than any other piece of raku.
Likewise, the Linux distribution is pretty much just clay: there's nothing particularly special about the binaries in any one distribution. It's the artistry in the distro that creates the value: a well-organized (=artistic) distro is more valuable than a poorly-organized distro. Ditto the website.
Anyway, my point was that they shouldn't be criticised for asking payment: if it's a distro you want to have, it must have value to you, ergo, it's not unfair to ask you to pay.
But they have added value with their labour: they've saved you the time (and expense) of organizing the distribution; and of creating and maintaining web access to that distribution.
The link to "company information" comes before the link to "product information." Now, pray tell, what are they trying to sell? Themselves, or their product?
Americans are being sold cars with daytime running lights? Hallelujuah! Saving a helluva lot more lives with that than with airbags.
I remember reading endless flames on an auto newsgroup back when DRLs were first being proposed and, later, put through in Canada. All the hysteria turned out to be unwarranted, and the improvement in driving safety is marked.
I'm sure you'd have no quibbles were they to be selling the distribution on solid gold discs, hard-carved by wizened old men wearing loupes and working with nanochisels. It'd be worth the price of the gold plus the cost of labour, surely.
How's the download version any different than that? Sure, it's perhaps not quite so blatantly labour-intensive, but someone had to do some gruntwork in putting together the package, let alone creating the fancy website for it. That's gotta be worth some amount of money.
Hey, we all know how Microsoft makes more money off its own stock than it does selling product, right? (The bit where they pay employees by stock options, get to write that off their taxes, and the tax refund is worth more than sales of Office?)
Well, hey, it's looking to become a bear market -- so Microsoft is doing the obvious: they're *GONNA SHORT THEIR OWN STOCK!**
Brilliant, eh? Make megabucks by driving their own share prices down.
Who cares if it helped NT? It means that our podunk communities aren't connected to fifty-year-old mechanical switches... something that you can't say for the USA.
Let me repeat: our podunk communities have DSL service, because our telco monopoly was forced into maintaining a high level of service and upgrades for those communities.
Left to the wonders of American-style pseudo-capitalism, they'd have been up shit creek for the next ten years, because there's no money in servicing them.
And in Canada, our (ex-) Telco monopolies have done much the same.
First, back in the good old days, when they were tame monopolies, there was a consumer advocacy control board that absolutely ruled them: the Telcos couldn't fart without permission.
As a result, we had telephone service in *every* community in Canada. I doubt many people quite comprehend what this means, because they don't quite comprehend how big Canada is and how remote its Northern communities are.
And when equipment was upgraded, it was always upgraded with the latest technology, not hand-me-downs from a larger community. A mechanical switch in Podunk, north BC, might be replaced with the Northern Telecom whiz-bang 2001, long before the existing NT golly-gee 1995 in Vancouver got upgraded. [In the US, if the small community *ever* got the upgrade, they'd get the old 1995 model, while the bigger centre got the 2001 model.)
Aaaaanyway, we had some of the lowest total ownership costs in the world, and all because we had a tame monopoly.
Bringing us up to this century, the telcos are now largely unregulated. This has caused some issues with repair and customer services, and suchlike.
But we still have kick-ass DSL. In BC, pretty much every community in the south half of the province has DSL service; and if they don't have DSL, they have access to cable.
I'm about 50' past the DSL limits, but managed to finagle service anyway; I've got 1400/512kbps service, for $45 per month, including modem rental. The service has been excellent over the past year-and-a-bit, despite the demand for service increasing at least eight-fold in that period.
Sure, it's basically a monopoly service: there are no real alternatives to DSL service. But it's cheap, reliable and *it isn't going to disappear.*
If only we had kept the monopoly tame: we'd have service to every darn home in the province by now...
You're right, but I had to make the point strongly, or it would have gone unnoticed.
There are actually at least three key stakeholders in any business: the investors, the employees, and the customers. They are the triad of cash flow that allows the company to continue operations: if you harm any of the stakeholders, you harm *all* the stakeholders.
[The other stakeholders are more abstract: the community and the environment being two of the more important ones. Helping them doesn't produce an immediate payback to the company, but when you start taking a long-term view, it becomes obvious that you need to take care of them...]
If you'd asked me last year, Roy, I'd have told you that it's *UTTERLY STUPID* to invest in companies that aren't making money, or are showing 100x revenues, etc.
The only people who got hurt in the tech stock crash were idiots and mutual fund owners. Anyone with a half-ounce of common sensibility did okay.
"Screwing over your customers is one thing, but
it sucks that they would jerk around employees too."
Now, if *THAT* doesn't explain why the whole tech industry is falling to pieces, I dunno what does.
Those lowly customers, boy, are what *KEEP YOU FED.* You can replace the employee easily enough, especially in this market, but it's damn difficult to replace a customer: once a customer walks, you've lost him -- and a dozen others that he talks to -- for life. And winning a new customer is dozens of times more expensive than keeping an existing one.
If Taco's attitude is prevalent, I suggest that everyone sell off their tech stocks and invest in, say, Sears, because there is *no hope* for the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA's software development methodology is remarkable. Their work should be the standard by which every programmer measures himself against.
Unfortunately, most programmers are underinformed, and haven't the foggiest idea that there's are methodologies that will reduce their error rates, increase their productivity, and meet their customers' needs fully.
It's a shame that programming still has this bullshit mystique of "art" to it. "Art" is just a lame excuse for laziness: instead of approaching the problems methodically and scientifically, it's just ever-so-much easier to take a half-assed hack-and-patch approach.
I think I'd better stop here, before I really kick into a rant...
--
OOoohhh!! I like that!
Let's get Peter Molyneaux in to hack the Slashdot code a little -- I want a Black & White interface for Slashdot, so that I can pick, oh, say, Katz as my animal alter-ego. Whenever he posts a new article, I'll get to bitchslap him 'til he cries!
Of course, there'll have to be some sort of physical interface down at Slashdot HQ, so that the graphic interface can be translated to actual abuse...
--
NIST has a *MINISCULE* budget compared to that asinine black hole of a military system you guys keep pouring most of your money into.
--
I daresay Linux in the embedded market is taking off exactly as quickly as it merits.
There are better solutions than Linux, peeps. Take the blinders off, and see how wide and varied the world is!
--
Disney is using Level Control System's "Matrix3" audio processing engine to achieve their sound automation. Sound control doesn't get better than the Matrix3.
Website at [LCS Audio].
I can probably answer a number of questions about the sound system, if anyone is curious. If I can't answer them directly, I can get the info in fairly short order.
--
Hey, if you're not eating six doughnuts a day, you aren't a Real Canadian!
--
Same in Canada, except that the division is more supposedly along the lines of "essentials of living" versus "convienence food." It applies to a *lot* of things, beyond food.
What's most perturbing, though, is that it'd so damn illogical. Toilet paper: deemed essential and therefor not taxed. Tampons/pads: deemed *non*-essential, and taxed!!
It's fucking stupid.
--
Raw potato is not poisonous. Potato leaves are poisonous.
--
Yup, you're right.
On the other hand, RIAA's not really losing anything: as I clearly stated, I *refuse* to pay their prices. When they bring prices down to reasonable levels, I will pay their prices.
In the meantime, my possessing or not possessing a CD is moot: either way, RIAA isn't going to see any money from me. Picking up CDs at pawn shops is, from a RIAA perspective, just as unprofitable as my pirating them.
RIAA's gotta make the first move here, 'cause I am *not* pissing my money away on music that is, for the most part, produced poorly (oh, don't get me started on the abysmal quality of studio work these days!), manufactured cheaply, and doesn't return good income to the musicians.
--
I have bought perhaps four CDs at normal retail prices (CDN$18ish). I have purchased another, oh, say, two dozen in boxing-day sales, about CDN$8-12ish. *EVERY* other CD (must be about eighty of them) was purchased used or in going-out-of-business sales.
I now have a CDROM, and I am quickly building a library of pirated CDs. I *WILL* *NOT* participate in the price-gouging of RIAA. I *WILL* *NOT* pay full price for any music I am not intimately familiar with and love... and I *WILL* *NOT* pay full price for music that's more than a half-dozen year's old. There's no fucking way that a half-hour of The Workingman's Dead should cost $20!
And yet... if CDs were under $5, I'd be a whole lot less selective in what I purchased. Hell, I'd have at least ten times as many CDs as I have now -- meaning that RIAA would actually have made something on the order of *five times* as much money off me.
Stupid buggers.
--
I'm sure it's going to head that way. You'll get a life-time IP address, and use it in everything. Your preferences will be able to follow you... and so will your email. (which, given the amount of spam i get these days, may not be so hot...)
--
Oh, yes, surely; I agree that the its only the value-adding labour that counts. My original (and, I admit, poor analogy) was to draw a parallel with artistic labour: a raku plate, for example, is just pretty clay, but it has value beyond the clay, and well-executed raku is quite valuable even though it contains no more clay than any other piece of raku.
Likewise, the Linux distribution is pretty much just clay: there's nothing particularly special about the binaries in any one distribution. It's the artistry in the distro that creates the value: a well-organized (=artistic) distro is more valuable than a poorly-organized distro. Ditto the website.
Anyway, my point was that they shouldn't be criticised for asking payment: if it's a distro you want to have, it must have value to you, ergo, it's not unfair to ask you to pay.
--
But they have added value with their labour: they've saved you the time (and expense) of organizing the distribution; and of creating and maintaining web access to that distribution.
--
The link to "company information" comes before the link to "product information." Now, pray tell, what are they trying to sell? Themselves, or their product?
Methinks they need to priorize a bit better.
--
For many thousands of years, mankind has been feeding plants with plants.
In recent years, we've taken a real shine to feeding animals to animals... even to those animals that are vegetarian.
The next logical step is, of course, to start feeding us to each other. Let's let marketing lead the way!
--
Americans are being sold cars with daytime running lights? Hallelujuah! Saving a helluva lot more lives with that than with airbags.
I remember reading endless flames on an auto newsgroup back when DRLs were first being proposed and, later, put through in Canada. All the hysteria turned out to be unwarranted, and the improvement in driving safety is marked.
--
I'm sure you'd have no quibbles were they to be selling the distribution on solid gold discs, hard-carved by wizened old men wearing loupes and working with nanochisels. It'd be worth the price of the gold plus the cost of labour, surely.
How's the download version any different than that? Sure, it's perhaps not quite so blatantly labour-intensive, but someone had to do some gruntwork in putting together the package, let alone creating the fancy website for it. That's gotta be worth some amount of money.
--
Hey, we all know how Microsoft makes more money off its own stock than it does selling product, right? (The bit where they pay employees by stock options, get to write that off their taxes, and the tax refund is worth more than sales of Office?)
Well, hey, it's looking to become a bear market -- so Microsoft is doing the obvious: they're *GONNA SHORT THEIR OWN STOCK!**
Brilliant, eh? Make megabucks by driving their own share prices down.
--
Who cares if it helped NT? It means that our podunk communities aren't connected to fifty-year-old mechanical switches... something that you can't say for the USA.
Let me repeat: our podunk communities have DSL service, because our telco monopoly was forced into maintaining a high level of service and upgrades for those communities.
Left to the wonders of American-style pseudo-capitalism, they'd have been up shit creek for the next ten years, because there's no money in servicing them.
--
http://www.aniteccom.com/
Canadian company. 800MHz Duron, C$105. About US$65. TBird @ C$175 = U$110.
--
800MHz processors are well under $100 now. Do you really expect them to get cheaper?!
--
And in Canada, our (ex-) Telco monopolies have done much the same.
First, back in the good old days, when they were tame monopolies, there was a consumer advocacy control board that absolutely ruled them: the Telcos couldn't fart without permission.
As a result, we had telephone service in *every* community in Canada. I doubt many people quite comprehend what this means, because they don't quite comprehend how big Canada is and how remote its Northern communities are.
And when equipment was upgraded, it was always upgraded with the latest technology, not hand-me-downs from a larger community. A mechanical switch in Podunk, north BC, might be replaced with the Northern Telecom whiz-bang 2001, long before the existing NT golly-gee 1995 in Vancouver got upgraded. [In the US, if the small community *ever* got the upgrade, they'd get the old 1995 model, while the bigger centre got the 2001 model.)
Aaaaanyway, we had some of the lowest total ownership costs in the world, and all because we had a tame monopoly.
Bringing us up to this century, the telcos are now largely unregulated. This has caused some issues with repair and customer services, and suchlike.
But we still have kick-ass DSL. In BC, pretty much every community in the south half of the province has DSL service; and if they don't have DSL, they have access to cable.
I'm about 50' past the DSL limits, but managed to finagle service anyway; I've got 1400/512kbps service, for $45 per month, including modem rental. The service has been excellent over the past year-and-a-bit, despite the demand for service increasing at least eight-fold in that period.
Sure, it's basically a monopoly service: there are no real alternatives to DSL service. But it's cheap, reliable and *it isn't going to disappear.*
If only we had kept the monopoly tame: we'd have service to every darn home in the province by now...
--
You're right, but I had to make the point strongly, or it would have gone unnoticed.
There are actually at least three key stakeholders in any business: the investors, the employees, and the customers. They are the triad of cash flow that allows the company to continue operations: if you harm any of the stakeholders, you harm *all* the stakeholders.
[The other stakeholders are more abstract: the community and the environment being two of the more important ones. Helping them doesn't produce an immediate payback to the company, but when you start taking a long-term view, it becomes obvious that you need to take care of them...]
--
If you'd asked me last year, Roy, I'd have told you that it's *UTTERLY STUPID* to invest in companies that aren't making money, or are showing 100x revenues, etc.
The only people who got hurt in the tech stock crash were idiots and mutual fund owners. Anyone with a half-ounce of common sensibility did okay.
--
"Screwing over your customers is one thing, but
it sucks that they would jerk around employees too."
Now, if *THAT* doesn't explain why the whole tech industry is falling to pieces, I dunno what does.
Those lowly customers, boy, are what *KEEP YOU FED.* You can replace the employee easily enough, especially in this market, but it's damn difficult to replace a customer: once a customer walks, you've lost him -- and a dozen others that he talks to -- for life. And winning a new customer is dozens of times more expensive than keeping an existing one.
If Taco's attitude is prevalent, I suggest that everyone sell off their tech stocks and invest in, say, Sears, because there is *no hope* for the industry.
Sheesh.
--