"Suppressing Scientology is no different the the Chinese government suppressing and killing Christians. "
Not really. Freedom of speech does not entitle you to harass other people and unlawfully accuse them of crimes. So true. But where do the chinese figure in there?
Note also, that the German government is much more concerned about dealing with the 20,000 or so Scientologists there, rather than the 2 million or so neo-Nazis. As much as I dislike our current government, this is simply not true.
One, a long list of neo-nazi organisations have been outlawed, scientology has not. Two, where do you get your numbers? 2 mio is totally bonkers. A couple hundred thousand is what I'd guess, and I live here. Three, both the government and the media talk about neo-nazis a lot more than about scientology.
Wherever you got your opinion, you should return it for a refund.
But you don't need religion for that state of mind, especially not one as nonsensical as the Mormons. There's quite a good selection of drugs that will make you equally easy-going, nice and friendly.
The other religions don't exactly come free, either. You just don't notice as much because they've been around for centuries and have found better ways to get at the dough. If you live in any european country or the US, chances are that some part of your taxes goes to the major churches, both directly and indirectly (e.g. tax cuts, etc.) no matter how much you despise them.
Warren Buffet is almost as rich as Bill and has been saying things like that (and many things much smarter and well-thought out) for many years. But it moves nothing.
'We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,' Smarter people have been saying that for decades.
The problem is that nobody has come up with a good answer to the "how" question so far.
There are many more interesting numbers than such a simple count. For example, as a user, I don't care at all for the number of fixed bugs, I care a lot more about the number of unfixed bugs.
What would you do if a terrorist bombed Microsoft headquarters tomorrow? By definition, bombing MS headquarters means you are not a terrorist, but a freedom fighter. You know, like the afghans back when they were firing at soviet tanks instead of US tanks.
Interesting, except for the constant microsoft advertisement. "I love flash, but we built this in silverlight (continue on to long rant about how great that is with no relation to the topic whatsoever)", or the "and since it's built in.net it can communicate with the Wiimote", err yes? What's that gotta do with.net? Then the "oh, look a picture of me at some microsoft meeting", and on and on. All that really got on my nerves about 3/4 through the video.
Microsoft's plan isn't sustainable or elegant: they basically want the entire web-community to add another tag each time MS releases a new version of IE. And maybe that's exactly what this is all about.
Let's see, most people are motivated by either money or power. Everyone near the top of MS has more than enough money. So we can safely assume their game is for power. Making everyone do something totally pointless just because you can sounds just about right as a test and/or demonstration of power.
Just out of curiosity what is your experience? I am guessing ivory tower. Not as solid as yours, but I did some work with High-Availability systems many years ago, and I ran the core systems of a billion dollar company a little later. I don't do zero-defect or NASA-style software development, but I try to adapt a bit of it for my projects.
compare them to something like DVD players or your wireless routers. Sure there are some crappy ones, but most of them work more or less perfectly. True. I'll also give you what I believe to be the real reason: You can't patch them. If they are defective, you have to make a recall, and that's horribly expensive.
In the pure software world, you just issue a patch. Proof for my theory? Right here: Games. For PC games, it has become very common that even if you buy a new game on the day it's released, there's already a patch, or will be within the first week. Most games go through several patches in their first few months. A dozen or so is not uncommon. Now same industry, different environment: Console games don't suffer from that problem. What's the difference? The only difference I can make out that affects this is what I just said: You can't patch them.
2) They have people whos job role is verifier and people whos role is to write code.
So do most companies that develop software. They just call them test engineers or something similar outside of that industry. True, but the difference is that they cut corners. I've seen quite a few companies that do have a QA part in their software development. In most cases, the QA's real job is to cause as little trouble as possible while ensuring some minimum standard to prevent that utter crap goes out the door.
3) They have a database of why changes were made and they track every bug that ever was.
Every software company worth a damn has cvs with check in logs and a bug tracker that tracks all useful information. I read that part of the article differently. They don't just log bugs, they actually look at them, try to understand them, and make sure that knowledge reaches everyone in the team. Also, they try to analyze why that bug was made and fix the source of the bug in addition to the bug itself. Most developers I know will mark the bug as "fixed" in the bugtracker, upload the fix to CVS/Subversion/whatever and be done with it.
They put out a product that only does a very small number of things Bah. Some of those companies do the exact same statistics as everyone else, stuff like average bugs per LOC. They still look a lot better. Sorry, you can't put it down that easily.
Did I miss any points? Yeah, some of the more important ones. The crucial one, as I see it, is that these people actually do have a process on how to code, not just when to code or what to code. I have never seen that in the IT industry anywhere else. Everything is pretty much "here's our code, here's the APIs, here's the specifications, you know your stuff, get going". The most you ever get is a style guide.
And yes, nobody really writes bug-free software. But ask MS if they'd give a life-long "we'll fix every bug you find, quickly and for free" guarantee on any of their products.
Of all the places, I'd thought/. would be a bit less likely to fall for this. You know, this old scam that they've been running for at least a decade?
There's nothing to see here. MS is throwing some propaganda at the masses so the abysmal failure of vista doesn't cause them to jump ship and to hold them on board for a while longer. They're trying to engineer things so that every company (they care a lot more about companies than home users) that thinks about switching away from MS, say to Apple or Linux, has at least one IT dude there saying "but win 7 is right around the corner, we should wait for that before making such a big decision".
Obviously, he's not using a bash or a C-shell, but rather a C++ shell. It's this OO thing where you have inheritence, and he's apparently talking about multiple-inheritence where your class has more than one parent class and inherits functions from both. Which is pretty gross when you think about it. Who wants a beer-drinking, nagging thing with both PMS and midlife crisis?
No, that's entirely consistent with the table. NT was the only somewhat good thing to ever come out of Redmond. Probably because it was designed by a different crew, as is obvious in the fact that now that they've left, it's all going downhill again.
There's nothing wrong with being "all about money" There's a lot wrong with that. Money is an arbitrary, artificial human invention. Putting something arbitrary and artificial up as your primary goal strikes me as utterly stupid. You know, it's a form of religion when you think about it: It ignores the reality in favour of a fabrication.
The key word is "all". I don't mind money being important. I do mind a lot when that sentence stops there. In my world, it goes on with something like ", because it..." and then you can list its advantages.
The problem is that it isn't about the advantages anymore, about what money was invented for once. Too smooth out commerce, make human interactions simpler, allow easier distribution of wealth, etc.
When government and it's special tool of coercion becomes heavily entangled in the economy, then you've got automatic, guaranteed corruption. I agree with that. I'd go a step further: When politics becomes a tool of the economy, then corruption is guaranteed because it stops being corruption - in the economy, selling anything for money is entirely natural, and morals, ethics, truth, values, all have a monetary value that they can be bought and sold for.
At its core all these standards basically say is have a well written specification and have test case(s) for every requirement in that standard. Your assumption is wrong. There is more to it. Do yourself the favour and do Google a bit. Try "They write the right stuff" for the NASA team, that's a good summary.
And yes, NASA has had catastrophic bugs. Their handling of it (mentioned in the article above) is worlds apart from the way MS or Sun or Apple or any Linux team does it.
Again, google and read before you continue with speculations.
It's more expensive to carefully engineer stuff, and heat is one of the main problems in high-end electronics, and one of the most difficult (read: expensive) to mitigate.
For MS, I would answer that in the affirmative. But that's just my prejudice speaking.
No, having standards doesn't grant you bug-free software.
But some standards and design principles are proven to result in much better and almost bug-free code. There are some developer teams on this planet who count their bugs in something like "bugs per year" and the number is very low. Compare that to thousands upon thousands of bugs in every major consumer software (I dimly remember the number of 14,000 for win NT, but I'm not sure where from).
That's not perfect, but it's several orders of magnitude better.
Google for the NASA software team, or "Zero Defect Software Design" - two of several approaches that result in software quality that's roughly where it should be.
I've become too cynical to believe that the people ever win anything in any election.
Someone said it very well recently: The economy is all about money, and politics is all about power. Nowhere does the good of the people figure in or matter.
It's easy to jump to the it-must-be-the-computers conclusion because PCs are unreliable in everyday use compared to washing machines, cars or compact disk players. Because people put up with behaviour in computers that would make them return every other product.
But that aside, computers and computer software can be very reliable. The consumer market isn't a good indication of everything. Boing doesn't exactly run windos on their airplanes, you know?
A company I used to work for almost 10 years ago did this. They had two kinds of power outlets in every room. White ones were for desk lamps and regular PCs while orange ones were for important equipment (the occasional PC that must be on 24/7).
The white ones were powered down every evening at some time. Yepp, that means hard shutdown for any connected PCs. No, people staying late wasn't a problem - it was a 9-to-5 company where the few people who occasionally did stay late had their machines connected to the orange outlets.
I travel quite a bit myself. Consistently, wireless is a lot easier to find than an ethernet port. Power outlets are fairly easy to find everywhere except on the plane.
And sure, yes, design is foremost on the mind of Apple. That's exactly what people love them for. Showing that something can be done, and can be done in a mass-market product instead of a vaporware/prototype has been a main part of Apple's strategy for many years now.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Freedom of speech does not entitle you to harass other people and unlawfully accuse them of crimes. So true. But where do the chinese figure in there?
One, a long list of neo-nazi organisations have been outlawed, scientology has not.
Two, where do you get your numbers? 2 mio is totally bonkers. A couple hundred thousand is what I'd guess, and I live here.
Three, both the government and the media talk about neo-nazis a lot more than about scientology.
Wherever you got your opinion, you should return it for a refund.
But you don't need religion for that state of mind, especially not one as nonsensical as the Mormons. There's quite a good selection of drugs that will make you equally easy-going, nice and friendly.
The long-term effects are roughly the same.
The other religions don't exactly come free, either. You just don't notice as much because they've been around for centuries and have found better ways to get at the dough. If you live in any european country or the US, chances are that some part of your taxes goes to the major churches, both directly and indirectly (e.g. tax cuts, etc.) no matter how much you despise them.
I call bullshit on that.
Warren Buffet is almost as rich as Bill and has been saying things like that (and many things much smarter and well-thought out) for many years. But it moves nothing.
The problem is that nobody has come up with a good answer to the "how" question so far.
Statistics lie for whoever pays them.
There are many more interesting numbers than such a simple count. For example, as a user, I don't care at all for the number of fixed bugs, I care a lot more about the number of unfixed bugs.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Interesting, except for the constant microsoft advertisement. "I love flash, but we built this in silverlight (continue on to long rant about how great that is with no relation to the topic whatsoever)", or the "and since it's built in .net it can communicate with the Wiimote", err yes? What's that gotta do with .net? Then the "oh, look a picture of me at some microsoft meeting", and on and on. All that really got on my nerves about 3/4 through the video.
Let's see, most people are motivated by either money or power. Everyone near the top of MS has more than enough money. So we can safely assume their game is for power. Making everyone do something totally pointless just because you can sounds just about right as a test and/or demonstration of power.
In the pure software world, you just issue a patch. Proof for my theory? Right here: Games. For PC games, it has become very common that even if you buy a new game on the day it's released, there's already a patch, or will be within the first week. Most games go through several patches in their first few months. A dozen or so is not uncommon. Now same industry, different environment: Console games don't suffer from that problem. What's the difference? The only difference I can make out that affects this is what I just said: You can't patch them. 2) They have people whos job role is verifier and people whos role is to write code.
So do most companies that develop software. They just call them test engineers or something similar outside of that industry. True, but the difference is that they cut corners. I've seen quite a few companies that do have a QA part in their software development. In most cases, the QA's real job is to cause as little trouble as possible while ensuring some minimum standard to prevent that utter crap goes out the door. 3) They have a database of why changes were made and they track every bug that ever was.
Every software company worth a damn has cvs with check in logs and a bug tracker that tracks all useful information. I read that part of the article differently. They don't just log bugs, they actually look at them, try to understand them, and make sure that knowledge reaches everyone in the team. Also, they try to analyze why that bug was made and fix the source of the bug in addition to the bug itself.
Most developers I know will mark the bug as "fixed" in the bugtracker, upload the fix to CVS/Subversion/whatever and be done with it. They put out a product that only does a very small number of things Bah. Some of those companies do the exact same statistics as everyone else, stuff like average bugs per LOC. They still look a lot better. Sorry, you can't put it down that easily. Did I miss any points? Yeah, some of the more important ones. The crucial one, as I see it, is that these people actually do have a process on how to code, not just when to code or what to code. I have never seen that in the IT industry anywhere else. Everything is pretty much "here's our code, here's the APIs, here's the specifications, you know your stuff, get going". The most you ever get is a style guide.
And yes, nobody really writes bug-free software. But ask MS if they'd give a life-long "we'll fix every bug you find, quickly and for free" guarantee on any of their products.
Of all the places, I'd thought /. would be a bit less likely to fall for this. You know, this old scam that they've been running for at least a decade?
There's nothing to see here. MS is throwing some propaganda at the masses so the abysmal failure of vista doesn't cause them to jump ship and to hold them on board for a while longer. They're trying to engineer things so that every company (they care a lot more about companies than home users) that thinks about switching away from MS, say to Apple or Linux, has at least one IT dude there saying "but win 7 is right around the corner, we should wait for that before making such a big decision".
And that's all there is to it.
Obviously, he's not using a bash or a C-shell, but rather a C++ shell. It's this OO thing where you have inheritence, and he's apparently talking about multiple-inheritence where your class has more than one parent class and inherits functions from both. Which is pretty gross when you think about it. Who wants a beer-drinking, nagging thing with both PMS and midlife crisis?
No, that's entirely consistent with the table. NT was the only somewhat good thing to ever come out of Redmond. Probably because it was designed by a different crew, as is obvious in the fact that now that they've left, it's all going downhill again.
The key word is "all". I don't mind money being important. I do mind a lot when that sentence stops there. In my world, it goes on with something like ", because it..." and then you can list its advantages.
The problem is that it isn't about the advantages anymore, about what money was invented for once. Too smooth out commerce, make human interactions simpler, allow easier distribution of wealth, etc. When government and it's special tool of coercion becomes heavily entangled in the economy, then you've got automatic, guaranteed corruption. I agree with that. I'd go a step further: When politics becomes a tool of the economy, then corruption is guaranteed because it stops being corruption - in the economy, selling anything for money is entirely natural, and morals, ethics, truth, values, all have a monetary value that they can be bought and sold for.
And yes, NASA has had catastrophic bugs. Their handling of it (mentioned in the article above) is worlds apart from the way MS or Sun or Apple or any Linux team does it.
Again, google and read before you continue with speculations.
It's more expensive to carefully engineer stuff, and heat is one of the main problems in high-end electronics, and one of the most difficult (read: expensive) to mitigate.
Has everyone forgotten the old wisdom regarding microsoft products? Never buy before they release version 3, everything before that is alpha.
Translation table:
rest of the world - MS
pre-alpha - version 1.0
alpha - version 1.0
beta - version 3.0
release - version 3.1
v1.1 - version 4.0
v2.0 - Name/Year
But that's the mindset of scientists.
As I read it, there were only bureaucrats involved in this, i.e. people who know nothing but have an opinion about everything.
For MS, I would answer that in the affirmative. But that's just my prejudice speaking.
No, having standards doesn't grant you bug-free software.
But some standards and design principles are proven to result in much better and almost bug-free code. There are some developer teams on this planet who count their bugs in something like "bugs per year" and the number is very low. Compare that to thousands upon thousands of bugs in every major consumer software (I dimly remember the number of 14,000 for win NT, but I'm not sure where from).
That's not perfect, but it's several orders of magnitude better.
Google for the NASA software team, or "Zero Defect Software Design" - two of several approaches that result in software quality that's roughly where it should be.
I've become too cynical to believe that the people ever win anything in any election.
Someone said it very well recently: The economy is all about money, and politics is all about power. Nowhere does the good of the people figure in or matter.
But that aside, computers and computer software can be very reliable. The consumer market isn't a good indication of everything. Boing doesn't exactly run windos on their airplanes, you know?
A company I used to work for almost 10 years ago did this. They had two kinds of power outlets in every room. White ones were for desk lamps and regular PCs while orange ones were for important equipment (the occasional PC that must be on 24/7).
The white ones were powered down every evening at some time. Yepp, that means hard shutdown for any connected PCs. No, people staying late wasn't a problem - it was a 9-to-5 company where the few people who occasionally did stay late had their machines connected to the orange outlets.
Ok, maybe the exact words weren't "thinner" but "I'll buy anything that looks sleek and makes me look cooler", but you get the meaning.
Are you sure of what you say?
I travel quite a bit myself. Consistently, wireless is a lot easier to find than an ethernet port. Power outlets are fairly easy to find everywhere except on the plane.
And sure, yes, design is foremost on the mind of Apple. That's exactly what people love them for. Showing that something can be done, and can be done in a mass-market product instead of a vaporware/prototype has been a main part of Apple's strategy for many years now.