I was once on a project where very few bugs were found in testing. Eventially we shipped and discovered that the testing group wasn't doing a good job of testing.
That sounds good until your realize the uncovered code path is only executed when the machine is on fire as a last message before it dies... A cheap machine is no problem of course, but management frowns physically destroying a million dollar computer for single test, especcially if there are several different cases like that.
If there is a bug it is worse yet, becuase you have to fix the bug, and destroy anouther machine to test. Code reviews and careful programing are a must in this case. (See my other posts for how bad my code reviews are though...)
Fortunatly things are not normally that bad, I have got a special board that generates bad parity, install that board, and see what happens. However there are over 100 different hardware problems I'm responsible for catching, and there isn't money for 100 boards exach destroied in some way. I only got a parity error board because that board went bad at a customers site and it wasn't detected correctly.
Okay, the example was a little obvious, and likely would be flaged. I wanted an obvious example that even non-programers are likely to understand. 20 lines of comment and 10 lines of code with a subtile logic error that work 99% of the time through all brances except when some unchecked condition exists are really hard to write on the fly, much less so that everyone can understand why *foo would not be null and yet have invalid data...
Yeah, but you can still vote, as can your neighbors. Buisness rules goverment only so long as citizens don't make informed votes. (Assuming there is no election fraud)
I know someone who did this, and ended up spending more money on extras. $30,000 worth of extras is really easy to add. Unfortunatly for them, their house isn't worth that extra $30,000, so they paid more for the house than it is worth on the merket. When you allow $400 for lights (true case) and spend $1,300 it doesn't seem like much difference, but it all adds up a little at a time.
Be careful, that extras do give you a better house. The $250 kitchen faucet is better than the $40 one, but they look the same and in the end your house isn't worth more after putting in the more expensive one.
Lastly, I found the government inspectors to be very grumpy and
skeptical about dealing with an independent contractor.
Did you know that the inspector is paid by the goverment, and you vote. More than that, local goverment often has a problem getting voters. If the inspector treats you baddly, you can get him fired. A letter to his boss while your a building, and if that doesn't work, get all your neighbors to vote (they probably would only vote for president otherwise) for someone else (like you, hint), who knows that inspectors treating homeowners baddly is a reason some is voting. It won't work everytime, but it can work often enough.
True story, back in the '70s my dad worked for Control Data (remember them?). One day the military walked in with a damaged disk, that is the drum (I think it was a drum machine, but I'm not sure) was physically warped. The military used rags to wipe the magnetic coating off the drum, and then burned the rags, and only then did the gaurds leave.
Judgeing by the small numbers of
American that have had this happen to them, one, I think the
Government has been very responsible with its powers
One is too many! Even one person not getting full rights until convicted in a court of law (fair and speedy public trial and so on) is too many!
I've seen people in power abuse that power. Psycologists have studyed it and concluded at most people automaticly abuse any power given to them. (prison gaurds)
My code comes back from test with three levels of bugs.
Problem 1: A crashing processor doesn't show up on the GUI. Turns out that I told the GUI that a porcessor crashed, in testing I saw something come out on the command line, and didn't notice the mispelling, but the GUI didn't know what to do with it. Took longer to open the file than to fix the bug. These should all be fixed, unfortunatly they are all minor enough that if caught late in the test cycle they are defered.
Problem 2: After causing failure A, failure B wasn't detected, it turns out the code to detect failure B is the same as failure A, and once A occures the code stops watching for B, even though the two are not related. This is a fundamental design problem, and can only be fixed by a re-write. (My excuse: someone else wrote the code and quit, I maintain it, but I have to impliment feature gamma before I can fix this problem...)
Problem 3: Tester pulls the ethernet cable between two nodes, and the complains that we said the node broke instead of the ethernet cable. This can be fixed, but we need some other way of determining that the other node is still operational we just can't communicate with it.
the first one is easy to fix, the second is solvable, but takes a lot of time, and the third can't be solved. When you come across the third, I hope you have better luck that me with people noticing the bold letters in your documentation noting that additional hardware is needed to solve that problem.
Unfortunatly i've come to agree that some bugs are not important enough. I have some in my code that the customer will never see just by following directions exactly, and even if seen it is a minor problem to the customer. To fix the problem though would require a major design change, and when we want to ship in 3 months there isn't time for that level of change to the code.
Maybe, if you code reviewers are any good. Here the process won't let any code be commited until it has been code reviewed. However the following code would pass code review:
// This function is invoked when a mistle launch is initiated to make // sure that two different users have both turned their key in the lock. // The locks status is stored at location 0x23236341 and 0x65a3e222, and
// follow the format of the electronic lock (document number 235235) // It returns TRUE if both locks have been turned, otherwise false. bool lockCheck() {
return TRUE;
}
The code review would flag only that missle is spelled wrong in the comments.
So if you can get quality code reviews, more power to you, I'll agree they are worth doing. If your code reviewer isn't very good, then it is a waste of everyone's time to do them.
I've never understood how so many people can look for a 4.0 GPA. 2.0 is average, and in all my classes the professors made sure that most of the students got a C. Now I can accept that the F and D students re-take the class or drop out, but that still doesn't explain how there can possibly be that many people with GPAs of more than 3.5.
There is one exception to the above: honors class. To stay in Honors you need a 3.0 are better GPA, so a C in honors can easially mean you learned less than a F student in the equivelent non-honors class. Yes I'm bitter, I had friends in honors with a better GPA for this reason alone.
I wasn't intending to use version numbers as the justification, just a supporting argument. Age was my arguement. IIRC GIMP was started sometime about '96, and photoshop sometime about '88. Odds are I'm wrong with both dates, but the seem reasonable even if wrong.
why is it that GIMP is years behind the current Photoshop?
For starters, GIMP is years younger than photoshop. I remember using photoshop 1.0 in the early '90s. Gimp is still at version 1.2.3 (latest stable). Perhaps you should compare photoshop 1.0 and Gimp 1.0.
Are netcafe's required to be licensed in NY? In my town I can set a netcafe up without a license, just rent (or buy) some space on main street, a T1, and some comptuers. Insurance is strongly recomended, but not strictly required. I may want to incorporate (if I have any sense I'll seek a lawyer to examine liability issues) but there is no license required.
I actually voted for them at the last election to make sure that the
Conservatives were kicked out, but not again. I realised the other day
that I was agreeing with some of the things the Conservative
politicians were saying. It made me feel dirty.
Why? There is no such thing as a politition who you can agree with 100%, and that is before they start compromising everything important. There will be conservatives better than liberals. There may even be times that one of the above two are better than any third party. Just vote for the best canidate. I generally hold the rule that if you have been in office you are by definition not the best canidate. (Even if stalin is the other choice)
Obviously you don't remember those computers. I remember clearly programs that timed how long if took to seek from one sector to anouther. (MULE only loaded 1 time out of 7 on my comptuer because my disk drive was 1 RPM faster than standard). I remember several programs where they took a laser to the disk at the factory, and then tried to write to that spot, easy to copy, but the program wouldn't run if it could write to where the laser hole was. And then there were programs with weak secotrs (read 5 times get 5 different results), dongoles, look up something on page n.
I think in every case someone hacked the program. I know a few people who bought the real version, and never opened the box, they copied the hacked version so they didn't have to deal with copy protection, which didn't consistently let the honest people in.
I still use my 386-25, and it still works great, booting off that 80 mb harddrive (we got the extra large size because 40 we knew someone who filled a 40 mb drive) Runing slockware 3.0, with some sort of upgrade. Last year I finially put it behind a firewall when I got sick of wondering what all that activity in syslog was about.
See, your laughing already. Actually considering the pace of technology you would laugh at my after server too, a dual ppro overclocked to 200. I find that both systems are plenty fast, though I don't run x on the 386.
I think you need a PDA, not a laptop. Not knowing your application I can't really say more, butif they can't push a big battery (not to mention the health risks of having one in a hospital) then they need something lighter. A PDA with an application to hold whatever data, and hot sycn it to the terminal at the nurse's station. PDAs can go weeks on a set of cheap batteries, and they are small enough that the nurse won't want to go back to a lighter clipboard.
Re:semi-polling mode
on
FreeBSD 4.6
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It always has. However the catch is that when there is no data to read polling still uses resources. So if 99% of the time there is data to read you are better off polling for it. If most of the time there is no data you are better off with the interupt overhead.
I know one product that gets around this by having the interupt handler never exit until there is no data, so if you are streaming data in they stay in the interupt handler, often for as much as 20 seconds at a time. Of course this means you can't do any other processing on the system, but that is okay for their application. There are many other ways around this, but you have to know your application to try them.
"maybe you don't infringe these seven
patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go
back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents
you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20
million?"
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand is there are laws against this thing, and SUN could easially have taken IBM to court over this claim. If IBM wants to pay someone to examine all 10,000 patents, that is their right. However the threat that they could is illegal to use.
I like this bit of evilness: write your GUI beforehand, and then write a specifican, but make it wrong. Tell the students that the GUI won't be ready for a week, but they will be graded on how they interact with the GUI. Tell the class to write the program and test code to prove the interface works (error checking not required). On the day the assignment is due, collect the their program and the test code, and give them the GUI in library format (previously announced that way of course). Make sure the library doens't impliment the specification, but just tell the students "I will be testing with this GUI, not your test program, since you didn't have time to test with my implimentaiton I'll accept revised versions that work for one week, you will lose points, but not as many as if your program doesn't work. Of course you know that their program will not work with the GUI so they don't lose points, they just sweat a little.
Evil, but fun to do, and it fits the real world very closely.
True, but all of wal-mart's compititon is worse. Wal-Mart happily sells guns. Target won't touch them, and K-Mart will sell them, but the company has made it clear they don't like it.
Every weekend in summer I can go to wal-mart and get my car washed by some local community charity. Wal-mart seems to encourage this, Target will not allow it. (I don't know about K-mart)
Wal-mart has problems i'll agree. They are still better for the comunity than Target or K-Mart, so I shop at Wal-Mart when I can live with cheap over quality, which is often. There are several "little guys" in town who sell stuff that appears to compete with Wal-Mart, and they can do so because they have better service, or higher quality. Before Wal-Mart they might have had quality, but I never shoped there when I has a choice because they didn't have service.
As for censoring of music, I find that most people think it is a good idea, so long as goverment isn't doing it. If you really want dirty music you can get it, there is no law against it. You just have to look harder.
No, genuine IBM machines ran PC-DOS, while everyone else ran MS-DOS. They were slightly different. In theory only in a few strings. (I seem to recall that PC-DOS didn't run on generic machine though) However PC-DOS and MS-DOS has idenitical functionality from a user's point of view.
Lindows runs most Windows software. I remember when clones claimed 99% compatability, because of the few apps that didn't run. However there soon were enough clones out there that programs that didn't run on a 99% compatable clone were ignored by the marketplace. Hopefully Lindows can achive the same thing - programs that depend on something Lindows/wine doesn't impliment lose in the marketplace.
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I was once on a project where very few bugs were found in testing. Eventially we shipped and discovered that the testing group wasn't doing a good job of testing.
That sounds good until your realize the uncovered code path is only executed when the machine is on fire as a last message before it dies... A cheap machine is no problem of course, but management frowns physically destroying a million dollar computer for single test, especcially if there are several different cases like that.
If there is a bug it is worse yet, becuase you have to fix the bug, and destroy anouther machine to test. Code reviews and careful programing are a must in this case. (See my other posts for how bad my code reviews are though...)
Fortunatly things are not normally that bad, I have got a special board that generates bad parity, install that board, and see what happens. However there are over 100 different hardware problems I'm responsible for catching, and there isn't money for 100 boards exach destroied in some way. I only got a parity error board because that board went bad at a customers site and it wasn't detected correctly.
Okay, the example was a little obvious, and likely would be flaged. I wanted an obvious example that even non-programers are likely to understand. 20 lines of comment and 10 lines of code with a subtile logic error that work 99% of the time through all brances except when some unchecked condition exists are really hard to write on the fly, much less so that everyone can understand why *foo would not be null and yet have invalid data...
Yeah, but you can still vote, as can your neighbors. Buisness rules goverment only so long as citizens don't make informed votes. (Assuming there is no election fraud)
I know someone who did this, and ended up spending more money on extras. $30,000 worth of extras is really easy to add. Unfortunatly for them, their house isn't worth that extra $30,000, so they paid more for the house than it is worth on the merket. When you allow $400 for lights (true case) and spend $1,300 it doesn't seem like much difference, but it all adds up a little at a time.
Be careful, that extras do give you a better house. The $250 kitchen faucet is better than the $40 one, but they look the same and in the end your house isn't worth more after putting in the more expensive one.
Lastly, I found the government inspectors to be very grumpy and skeptical about dealing with an independent contractor.
Did you know that the inspector is paid by the goverment, and you vote. More than that, local goverment often has a problem getting voters. If the inspector treats you baddly, you can get him fired. A letter to his boss while your a building, and if that doesn't work, get all your neighbors to vote (they probably would only vote for president otherwise) for someone else (like you, hint), who knows that inspectors treating homeowners baddly is a reason some is voting. It won't work everytime, but it can work often enough.
True story, back in the '70s my dad worked for Control Data (remember them?). One day the military walked in with a damaged disk, that is the drum (I think it was a drum machine, but I'm not sure) was physically warped. The military used rags to wipe the magnetic coating off the drum, and then burned the rags, and only then did the gaurds leave.
Judgeing by the small numbers of American that have had this happen to them, one, I think the Government has been very responsible with its powers
One is too many! Even one person not getting full rights until convicted in a court of law (fair and speedy public trial and so on) is too many!
I've seen people in power abuse that power. Psycologists have studyed it and concluded at most people automaticly abuse any power given to them. (prison gaurds)
My code comes back from test with three levels of bugs.
Problem 1: A crashing processor doesn't show up on the GUI. Turns out that I told the GUI that a porcessor crashed, in testing I saw something come out on the command line, and didn't notice the mispelling, but the GUI didn't know what to do with it. Took longer to open the file than to fix the bug. These should all be fixed, unfortunatly they are all minor enough that if caught late in the test cycle they are defered.
Problem 2: After causing failure A, failure B wasn't detected, it turns out the code to detect failure B is the same as failure A, and once A occures the code stops watching for B, even though the two are not related. This is a fundamental design problem, and can only be fixed by a re-write. (My excuse: someone else wrote the code and quit, I maintain it, but I have to impliment feature gamma before I can fix this problem...)
Problem 3: Tester pulls the ethernet cable between two nodes, and the complains that we said the node broke instead of the ethernet cable. This can be fixed, but we need some other way of determining that the other node is still operational we just can't communicate with it.
the first one is easy to fix, the second is solvable, but takes a lot of time, and the third can't be solved. When you come across the third, I hope you have better luck that me with people noticing the bold letters in your documentation noting that additional hardware is needed to solve that problem.
Unfortunatly i've come to agree that some bugs are not important enough. I have some in my code that the customer will never see just by following directions exactly, and even if seen it is a minor problem to the customer. To fix the problem though would require a major design change, and when we want to ship in 3 months there isn't time for that level of change to the code.
Maybe, if you code reviewers are any good. Here the process won't let any code be commited until it has been code reviewed. However the following code would pass code review:
// This function is invoked when a mistle launch is initiated to make
// sure that two different users have both turned their key in the lock.
// The locks status is stored at location 0x23236341 and 0x65a3e222, and
// follow the format of the electronic lock (document number 235235)
// It returns TRUE if both locks have been turned, otherwise false.
bool lockCheck()
{
return TRUE;
}
The code review would flag only that missle is spelled wrong in the comments.
So if you can get quality code reviews, more power to you, I'll agree they are worth doing. If your code reviewer isn't very good, then it is a waste of everyone's time to do them.
I've never understood how so many people can look for a 4.0 GPA. 2.0 is average, and in all my classes the professors made sure that most of the students got a C. Now I can accept that the F and D students re-take the class or drop out, but that still doesn't explain how there can possibly be that many people with GPAs of more than 3.5.
There is one exception to the above: honors class. To stay in Honors you need a 3.0 are better GPA, so a C in honors can easially mean you learned less than a F student in the equivelent non-honors class. Yes I'm bitter, I had friends in honors with a better GPA for this reason alone.
Yes, there are restrictions, like no beer served. I don't think that is right, but that is the way it is.
I wasn't intending to use version numbers as the justification, just a supporting argument. Age was my arguement. IIRC GIMP was started sometime about '96, and photoshop sometime about '88. Odds are I'm wrong with both dates, but the seem reasonable even if wrong.
why is it that GIMP is years behind the current Photoshop?
For starters, GIMP is years younger than photoshop. I remember using photoshop 1.0 in the early '90s. Gimp is still at version 1.2.3 (latest stable). Perhaps you should compare photoshop 1.0 and Gimp 1.0.
Are netcafe's required to be licensed in NY? In my town I can set a netcafe up without a license, just rent (or buy) some space on main street, a T1, and some comptuers. Insurance is strongly recomended, but not strictly required. I may want to incorporate (if I have any sense I'll seek a lawyer to examine liability issues) but there is no license required.
I actually voted for them at the last election to make sure that the Conservatives were kicked out, but not again. I realised the other day that I was agreeing with some of the things the Conservative politicians were saying. It made me feel dirty.
Why? There is no such thing as a politition who you can agree with 100%, and that is before they start compromising everything important. There will be conservatives better than liberals. There may even be times that one of the above two are better than any third party. Just vote for the best canidate. I generally hold the rule that if you have been in office you are by definition not the best canidate. (Even if stalin is the other choice)
Obviously you don't remember those computers. I remember clearly programs that timed how long if took to seek from one sector to anouther. (MULE only loaded 1 time out of 7 on my comptuer because my disk drive was 1 RPM faster than standard). I remember several programs where they took a laser to the disk at the factory, and then tried to write to that spot, easy to copy, but the program wouldn't run if it could write to where the laser hole was. And then there were programs with weak secotrs (read 5 times get 5 different results), dongoles, look up something on page n.
I think in every case someone hacked the program. I know a few people who bought the real version, and never opened the box, they copied the hacked version so they didn't have to deal with copy protection, which didn't consistently let the honest people in.
I still use my 386-25, and it still works great, booting off that 80 mb harddrive (we got the extra large size because 40 we knew someone who filled a 40 mb drive) Runing slockware 3.0, with some sort of upgrade. Last year I finially put it behind a firewall when I got sick of wondering what all that activity in syslog was about.
See, your laughing already. Actually considering the pace of technology you would laugh at my after server too, a dual ppro overclocked to 200. I find that both systems are plenty fast, though I don't run x on the 386.
I think you need a PDA, not a laptop. Not knowing your application I can't really say more, butif they can't push a big battery (not to mention the health risks of having one in a hospital) then they need something lighter. A PDA with an application to hold whatever data, and hot sycn it to the terminal at the nurse's station. PDAs can go weeks on a set of cheap batteries, and they are small enough that the nurse won't want to go back to a lighter clipboard.
It always has. However the catch is that when there is no data to read polling still uses resources. So if 99% of the time there is data to read you are better off polling for it. If most of the time there is no data you are better off with the interupt overhead.
I know one product that gets around this by having the interupt handler never exit until there is no data, so if you are streaming data in they stay in the interupt handler, often for as much as 20 seconds at a time. Of course this means you can't do any other processing on the system, but that is okay for their application. There are many other ways around this, but you have to know your application to try them.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand is there are laws against this thing, and SUN could easially have taken IBM to court over this claim. If IBM wants to pay someone to examine all 10,000 patents, that is their right. However the threat that they could is illegal to use.
then the staff (you) could write a nice gui
I like this bit of evilness: write your GUI beforehand, and then write a specifican, but make it wrong. Tell the students that the GUI won't be ready for a week, but they will be graded on how they interact with the GUI. Tell the class to write the program and test code to prove the interface works (error checking not required). On the day the assignment is due, collect the their program and the test code, and give them the GUI in library format (previously announced that way of course). Make sure the library doens't impliment the specification, but just tell the students "I will be testing with this GUI, not your test program, since you didn't have time to test with my implimentaiton I'll accept revised versions that work for one week, you will lose points, but not as many as if your program doesn't work. Of course you know that their program will not work with the GUI so they don't lose points, they just sweat a little.
Evil, but fun to do, and it fits the real world very closely.
True, but all of wal-mart's compititon is worse. Wal-Mart happily sells guns. Target won't touch them, and K-Mart will sell them, but the company has made it clear they don't like it.
Every weekend in summer I can go to wal-mart and get my car washed by some local community charity. Wal-mart seems to encourage this, Target will not allow it. (I don't know about K-mart)
Wal-mart has problems i'll agree. They are still better for the comunity than Target or K-Mart, so I shop at Wal-Mart when I can live with cheap over quality, which is often. There are several "little guys" in town who sell stuff that appears to compete with Wal-Mart, and they can do so because they have better service, or higher quality. Before Wal-Mart they might have had quality, but I never shoped there when I has a choice because they didn't have service.
As for censoring of music, I find that most people think it is a good idea, so long as goverment isn't doing it. If you really want dirty music you can get it, there is no law against it. You just have to look harder.
No, genuine IBM machines ran PC-DOS, while everyone else ran MS-DOS. They were slightly different. In theory only in a few strings. (I seem to recall that PC-DOS didn't run on generic machine though) However PC-DOS and MS-DOS has idenitical functionality from a user's point of view.
Lindows runs most Windows software. I remember when clones claimed 99% compatability, because of the few apps that didn't run. However there soon were enough clones out there that programs that didn't run on a 99% compatable clone were ignored by the marketplace. Hopefully Lindows can achive the same thing - programs that depend on something Lindows/wine doesn't impliment lose in the marketplace.