By the early 90's, it was already too late due to Microsoft's unchecked anticompetitive practices. Go look at the findings of fact from the Microsoft antitrust trial. There might have been a healthy amount of innovation going on, but competition was already in an unhealthy state.
eComStation is OS/2 with some "improvements". Basically, if a company can show a business case that meets IBM's conditions, then they can rebrand and sell OS/2. This has been done in other cases, but Serenity Systems was the first one to target the PC user. They (along with Mensys) managed to pull together a lot of the OS/2 development community.
It would be nice if IBM would allow them access to the source under non-disclosure agreements, so they could allow development to continue. There are a lot of developers who would be willing to sign an NDA to keep OS/2 going for little or no money. Forward thinking ones could turn such an effort into future business opportunity, especially with the horsepower being put into embedded devices these days.
I don't think so. Many of the same elements can be seen many of the quality/process improvement programs still being seen today. For some reason, management never seems to learn that workers aren't fungible.
5) A bad job market means employers can ask employees to work more overtime without the fear of turnover, leading to less free time available to work on open-source projects.
Microsoft's role in the PC market only came about due to the antitrust case against IBM. Mac and Linux are currently reaping some benefits from the antitrust case against Microsoft, which has forced Microsoft to tone down their strong-arm tactics.
The questions should be asking, "how much time should we spend in up-front work to reduce our error counts?"
You'll never improve quality in a test-driven environment. Quality comes from proper analysis of the problem space, and proper analysis of the design. This leads to isolation and minimal impact of requirement changes.
BTW, the posters who responded with the "why are you wasting time on Slashdot?" type responses are obviously ignorant of the meaning of knowledge work. To quote Timothy Lister, "People under time pressure don't think faster."
> No offense intended, but in no case should any programmer fail to see that "If you can't correct it, you needn't detect it." is rubbish.
Not necessarily rubbish if it is justifiable. In state machine construction, there are two choices to make for invalid events: ignore or can't happen. Can't happen events should be handled as exceptions, but ignore events can be ignored. There are cases where it is perfectly valid to ignore the return event of a printf.
Managers/companies who can't be flexible where logic dictates can be more trouble than they're worth as well.
>If anything the modern "have it all now" youngsters have lost such qualities as > patience and long attention spans. > This is bull! Kids are the same; they just have different stuff.
> I did well at school because I DAMN WELL GOT SOME COMMON SENSE AND BUCKLED DOWN TO > DOING SOME BLOODY WORK!!!! > I was bored at school 25-30 years ago, just like my son is now.
School is about mass education, and not individual education. It is set for average intelligence.
> Remind me - HOW MANY KIDS WITH DYSLEXIA AND ADHD WERE THERE 25 YEARS AGO???
From what I've seen, I'd say the numbers were on par with today, except that societal awareness is higher today. This may have reversed the trend from under-diagnosed to over-diagnosed, but actual numbers might be constant.
I don't have any studies to reference for this, but I'm just following your lead.;-)
Go to my first posting that you replied to, and click on "Parent" (or just click up from here). Now read the user id after "by". For example, on your posting, "doodlebumm", follows "by".
You forgot socially awkward. The humor and angst are lost if the tech person is also popular and outgoing. Where are all the roles for the tall, well muscled, good looking IT personnel?;-)
> If the things MS makes are 'defectivebydesign', then monopoly or not, some > other system will win. If MS can't innovate, can't implement standards, can't > make stable systems, then some other system will win.
If this was true, then Windows would have disappeared by the year 2000. OS/2, Amiga, Apple, and some *nix variant(s) would be splitting up the market. Standards would be in place to ensure file compatibilities.
Microsoft has set computing back by about 20 years.
I also don't know where you work, because IT departments in different companies (or even distributed IT in the same company) standardize on different versions of Office causing mismatches in file sharing. "Please resend in Office format."
People, you really need to check your history! Microsoft may have borrowed from their co-development of OS/2, but they developed with a different kernel. I can't believe how many times this MYTH got repeated!
IBM made OS/2 a much better product after the split. If you ask for recommended versions, you'll get OS/2 1.3 for the command line version and post OS/2 2.0 for the graphical version.
Microsoft leaving OS/2 was the best thing that ever happened to OS/2 from a technical standpoint, but not from a marketing standpoint.
> Because you know what's coming? An alternative. Typically a worse alternative. This happens all the time. Technical people love to bring up poor solutions to problems and contrast them against the better solution.
You're assuming that all technical people are created equal, which is wrong! Poor solutions often come up, because the other technical people aren't savvy enough to identify the good solution and want to ensure that they are comfortable with the direction of the work.
I interviewed with a small company once where the final stage of the interview was with the president of the company. We ended up getting into an argument, because he said something I knew to be wrong on a technical issue and I called him on it. I didn't really care at that point anyway, because he seemed to be a pretty arrogant bastard.
The fact that they require relocation to their office somewhere implies a lack of trust in their employees to get jobs done without explicit management or peer oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
By the early 90's, it was already too late due to Microsoft's unchecked anticompetitive practices. Go look at the findings of fact from the Microsoft antitrust trial. There might have been a healthy amount of innovation going on, but competition was already in an unhealthy state.
How can you break something that has always been broken?
eComStation is OS/2 with some "improvements". Basically, if a company can show a business case that meets IBM's conditions, then they can rebrand and sell OS/2. This has been done in other cases, but Serenity Systems was the first one to target the PC user. They (along with Mensys) managed to pull together a lot of the OS/2 development community.
It would be nice if IBM would allow them access to the source under non-disclosure agreements, so they could allow development to continue. There are a lot of developers who would be willing to sign an NDA to keep OS/2 going for little or no money. Forward thinking ones could turn such an effort into future business opportunity, especially with the horsepower being put into embedded devices these days.
I don't think so. Many of the same elements can be seen many of the quality/process improvement programs still being seen today. For some reason, management never seems to learn that workers aren't fungible.
5) A bad job market means employers can ask employees to work more overtime without the fear of turnover, leading to less free time available to work on open-source projects.
Microsoft's role in the PC market only came about due to the antitrust case against IBM.
Mac and Linux are currently reaping some benefits from the antitrust case against Microsoft, which has forced Microsoft to tone down their strong-arm tactics.
The questions should be asking, "how much time should we spend in up-front work to reduce our error counts?"
You'll never improve quality in a test-driven environment. Quality comes from proper analysis of the problem space, and proper analysis of the design. This leads to isolation and minimal impact of requirement changes.
BTW, the posters who responded with the "why are you wasting time on Slashdot?" type responses are obviously ignorant of the meaning of knowledge work. To quote Timothy Lister, "People under time pressure don't think faster."
> No offense intended, but in no case should any programmer fail to see that "If you can't correct it, you needn't detect it." is rubbish.
Not necessarily rubbish if it is justifiable. In state machine construction, there are two choices to make for invalid events: ignore or can't happen. Can't happen events should be handled as exceptions, but ignore events can be ignored. There are cases where it is perfectly valid to ignore the return event of a printf.
Managers/companies who can't be flexible where logic dictates can be more trouble than they're worth as well.
>If anything the modern "have it all now" youngsters have lost such qualities as
;-)
> patience and long attention spans.
>
This is bull! Kids are the same; they just have different stuff.
> I did well at school because I DAMN WELL GOT SOME COMMON SENSE AND BUCKLED DOWN TO
> DOING SOME BLOODY WORK!!!!
>
I was bored at school 25-30 years ago, just like my son is now.
School is about mass education, and not individual education. It is set for average intelligence.
> Remind me - HOW MANY KIDS WITH DYSLEXIA AND ADHD WERE THERE 25 YEARS AGO???
From what I've seen, I'd say the numbers were on par with today, except that societal awareness is higher today. This may have reversed the trend from under-diagnosed to over-diagnosed, but actual numbers might be constant.
I don't have any studies to reference for this, but I'm just following your lead.
Word!
Go to my first posting that you replied to, and click on "Parent" (or just click up from here). Now read the user id after "by". For example, on your posting, "doodlebumm", follows "by".
and now a word from the_wombie's yes man.
You forgot socially awkward. The humor and angst are lost if the tech person is also popular and outgoing. Where are all the roles for the tall, well muscled, good looking IT personnel? ;-)
Who are you to judge what is a better aspiration?
> If the version you're running now sucks, just wait for the next version. Right?
Wrong! It's going to suck too!
I haven't had a performance reason to upgrade my 700MHz 512MB RAM 9GB HD system. (I actually was pretty happy with the 300MHz before that.)
> If the things MS makes are 'defectivebydesign', then monopoly or not, some
> other system will win. If MS can't innovate, can't implement standards, can't
> make stable systems, then some other system will win.
If this was true, then Windows would have disappeared by the year 2000. OS/2, Amiga, Apple, and some *nix variant(s) would be splitting up the market. Standards would be in place to ensure file compatibilities.
Microsoft has set computing back by about 20 years.
I also don't know where you work, because IT departments in different companies (or even distributed IT in the same company) standardize on different versions of Office causing mismatches in file sharing. "Please resend in Office format."
CDs are a (debatable) lossy media as well, which is why LPs or DVD-Audio (et. al.) still have markets.
People, you really need to check your history! Microsoft may have borrowed from their co-development of OS/2, but they developed with a different kernel. I can't believe how many times this MYTH got repeated!
IBM made OS/2 a much better product after the split. If you ask for recommended versions, you'll get OS/2 1.3 for the command line version and post OS/2 2.0 for the graphical version.
Microsoft leaving OS/2 was the best thing that ever happened to OS/2 from a technical standpoint, but not from a marketing standpoint.
> Because you know what's coming? An alternative. Typically a worse alternative. This happens all the time. Technical people love to bring up poor solutions to problems and contrast them against the better solution.
You're assuming that all technical people are created equal, which is wrong! Poor solutions often come up, because the other technical people aren't savvy enough to identify the good solution and want to ensure that they are comfortable with the direction of the work.
Maybe he's not using the pslatex package in LyX. :-)
I interviewed with a small company once where the final stage of the interview was with the president of the company. We ended up getting into an argument, because he said something I knew to be wrong on a technical issue and I called him on it.
I didn't really care at that point anyway, because he seemed to be a pretty arrogant bastard.
The fact that they require relocation to their office somewhere implies a lack of trust in their employees to get jobs done without explicit management or peer oversight.
> If you take accept the full evolutionary hypothesis of the origin of life then
>
> * God does not exist.
> * Life has no fundamental purpose.
Wrong. Life's fundamental purpose is to procreate and evolve.
> * Free will is most likely an illusion.
This implies a belief in fate, not evolution. Given the first two, free will is the only thing that matters.