Mod parent up! Not to mention that screen writing requires an immense amount of skill and experience, and the gap between a good script writer vs. a crappy one is IMHO probably larger than the gap between a crappy code monkey vs. a genius coder.
Just because they use pen/paper doesn't make their job any less demanding than ours, pounding out code.
Hmm, I have no link for you, but I do recall reading an interview with an Apple exec, who claimed that the 802.11n thing is something they would like to avoid in the future. I assumed at the time that he meant subscription revenue.
All in all I'm still unhappy with Apple. If this was purely an accounting thing, then why can't they charge $2-3? Enough to cover the accounting costs, but not enough to really profit, like they did with the 802.11n enabler. Seems like a quick money grab to me, and that always saddens me. They need to release these apps like they did for Apple TV2. Reward early adopters! Don't punish customers who are traditionally your strongest support base! It's code for fuck's sake, there's no per-unit cost to this.
When you're a monopoly, you don't have to EARN your customers. You just have them, period.
Here in Ontario, Canada, we have pro-competition laws on DSL (though sadly not cable), where the last-mile carrier (Bell Canada) is required to lease lines at regulated wholesale rates to resellers. This has worked out beautifully.
I'm with a small ISP that serves only a few cities in the province, but their customer support is excellent, the usage terms fair, and the price low. This is capitalism at its best.
Now, if only our politicians will get a clue and do the same thing with wireless. Canada's wireless infrastructure is among the worst in the world (third world even), and it's all due to the monopoly run by Rogers. Service is expensive ($200 for 500MB data/month!), the network drops calls like hot potatos, and customer service is miserably horrible, with insane contract lengths (you think you Americans have it bad with 2 years? Think 3!). Heck, our ONLY GSM 3G network is in Toronto, a SINGLE CITY! And only in the downtown core of the city!
As a hacked iPhone user, it makes me sad when I look at the state of Canadian wireless. There is so much potential, so many new business opportunities to be had by building a proper communication infrastructure. Our government has failed us, and despite write-ins to our MPs, NOBODY has tabled ANY bill to change this.
The buffet is actually a great analogy. How do real-life buffets deal with this problem? Most of the ones I've seen impose seating time limits (2-3 hours usually). This in effect places a cap on the maximum amount of food you can eat, adjusted so you don't break the bank for them.
But don't ISPs already do this? We have bandwidth caps on almost all accounts up here in Canada these days, they're pretty damned high, and even for an occasional (couple of times a week) torrenter like myself it's more than adequate.
Then clue the user in. Flash an icon of Mail.app with an arrow pointing to the desktop that houses the window, if the user isn't on the space already. There are many possible ways to let the user know what's going on without stealing focus.
Many places use specialized "vacuum" power connectors to avoid others leeching power. Next time you're there watch out for these circular three-prong looking contraptions.
It doesn't sound right to me. One of the (many) reasons I left Windows for OSX was to get away from the incessant focus-stealing that Windows apps like to do. It's incredibly annoying. OSX apps are generally good abut it, but in this case IMHO if I start an app, but then *switch away*, there should be NO way that app should be able to steal its focus back.
Heck, even quitting applications - in OSX if you quit an app and it pops up a dialog box asking you to save, that DOESN'T steal focus, thankfully!
Like other posters have said, the spelling of his name means nothing. Not to mention the fact that Taiwan has *no* space program, and I'd question why they'd go through the trouble of spying on the US for tech they don't even need.
It's all about revenue claim. After Apple got bit by the whole 802.11n driver thing, they've started claiming revenue for their laptops and iPhones in a staggered way - instead of all at once. This allows them to justify releasing significant new features on those platforms (as opposed to merely bug fixes).
My guess is that Apple never intended to release those new apps for the iTouch, and was caught off guard by all of the backlash and bad press... Unfortunately for them iPod revenue is probably claimed in entirety at sale.
Try typing a math equation with Equation Editor (which in itself is a decently capable equation editor, if not a bit unwieldy). As soon as you close your equation, it will pop up an advertisement for MathWorks or some other bullshit "upgraded" equation editor. Seriously MS, if I thought a feature was lacking I'd seek 3rd-party plugins myself, you don't need to pimp this to me.
I am no expert in the field, though I do sometimes pick up the easier-to-understand undergraduate level books that he's throwing out. Don't quote me as an expert, though if you have any questions I would gladly direct them towards him.
An understanding of evolutionary mechanics allow us to better predict things like the mutation of viral strains, or how to best conserve a species, as well as giving us clues as to things we have yet to discover. Darwin once saw a very large flower in a rain forest during his travels, noting that it had very long pistils. He then predicted that there must be a bird in that area who had an absurdly long tongue, to complement the flower. Lo and behold, over a hundred years after his death someone found the bird.
He's also studied the effects of isolated populations on bees and certain flower varieties. This research is often very applicable to humans, as evolutionarily speaking we follow all of the same rules as everything else on this planet.
I will ask him later for some more concrete examples of a real tangible advancement that has come of evolutionary biology.
As long as 50 years? Maybe more? How long as it been since DNA was discovered, and we are JUST beginning to get to the point where we can commercialize it! Institutional investors may be looking 50-60 years down the line, your average Joe looking to retire early is not.
And where is AT&T Labs now? Xerox PARC? Businesses believed it before, but it would seem they no longer do. Also, think outside of the world of computer technology - our research is a bargain compared to fields like genetics and biology.
Not to mention even when we invented the transistor, we already could see applications for it - after all, it's immediately obvious that we can replace vacuum tubes and make a better computer. Computer research ALWAYS has a short-term application, it's easy to justify funding.
As opposed to the guys who discovered DNA. If you went up to a private company and told them you wanted millions of dollars so you can poke around inside a cell and figure out what's inside... I doubt you'd get much of the funding you wanted. But it's unquestionable that the discovery of DNA has led to real and HUGE leaps in medical technology.
What does he mean by reform though? Simply agreeing that the patent system needs an overhaul isn't enough, we want to know exactly what he wants to do with it.
Are you saying that fundamental research would never lead to a technology capable of sweeping the market, or that businesses are so short-sighted as to never realize that as a possibility?
Businesses are run by investors, who are traditionally quite short sighted. There is a definite disconnect between funding long-term research and where the money comes from - short to mid-term investors. You need a stakeholder who has a vested interest in seeing long term (and we're talking LOOOOONG term, decades) advancement.
Not to mention that everyone wants in on the hottest new things. Biotech is already funded disproportionately to other valid biological research because it's "sexy", and the in thing. Take away government funding and this problem will worsen. Investors all want the maximum return on the dollar, which means risk-averse research funding, and focusing on what will most likely turn a profit the quickest.
Are you also suggesting businesses have no interest in genetics? Is it that private funding is not available, or that government funding is so easily available as to give private industry no reason to offer funding for fundamental research?
No, businesses have a great interest in genetics... so long as they see an application for it. But so much of what we do at the basic research level has NO CONCEIVABLE APPLICATIONS until decades later, when we solve another piece of the puzzle and suddenly the two pieces click to make something useful for us.
Do not forget that much of the world we live in is a direct product of government funded research - research that at the time was thought useless, and done only for the sake of increasing the sum of human knowledge. These kinds of things have a tendency to come back to us decades later as useful technologies.
You have a very narrow view of research. Almost all research that is done on government funding is invisible to you, the layman. They are fundamental topics that will see applications only YEARS down the road from now. The trick with private research funding is that they ensure only short-term success, since being investment-based that's all they can be.
Not to mention that private funding will always focus on the topics that will lead to business-applicable technologies soonest, as opposed to general research that will open up entirely new segments of science altogether, which is a long term benefit.
Government research support is absolutely critical. My brother is a researcher in the field of evolutionary genetics, something that few private companies will think about funding. But the knowledge is important, and in time has led to real advancements in our knowledge and our technology.
So please, keep up government scientific funding, it's the only competitive advantage the USA has ever had, and the only hope it has of maintaining its supremacy as a superpower.
Voice dialing is a funny thing when you think about why it was invented in the first place.
We invented voice dialing because address books were tedious to sift through, the UI for them SUCKED badly, so we needed a way to NOT have to surf slowly through an address book.
So here we have the iPhone, with an address book so easy to sift through that it takes almost no effort at all. The *need* for voice dialing is reduced, but IMHO not eliminated. The "favorite contacts" feature on iPhone further reduces this need, since you probably only record voice tags for your fave contacts ANYWAY.
I've used voice dialing before on a slowpoke Motorola, mostly because its OS was laggy as hell, and surfing through my contacts was a HUGE pain.
- Apple recently hired a television crew for... something. According to a Mac rumors site.
Exactly. People seem to be forgetting that Apple has OTHER product lines that it continues to expand. Hiring a television crew could mean ANYTHING.
I'm willing to bet that the February event won't be a 3G iPhone. It'll be the SDK and maybe a surprise (small MacBook Pro, PLEASE!). The 3G won't come until later this year, when AT&T's coverage is more complete, and the chipsets actually EXIST.
While I agree that overselling is a valid business strategy that gets too much bad press, hosts can't have their cake and eat it too. The logic behind overselling is that the vast majority of your customers are using so few resources that you can support the few customers that take up a lot of space and bandwith.
The problem with many hosts is that they are unwilling to honour that concept, either by inserting misleading and insidious exeptions into their TOS'es, or just plain being dicks. When someone gets an immensely popular site (legitimately, i.e. no illegal stuff), the host kicks them to the curb.
The iPhone touchscreen is not your average touchscreen, which tend to be soft, flexible, and generally pretty fragile. This sucker is covered with a scratch-resistant material, it's practically impossible to damage the actual screen, the best you can do is scratch it. Mine is almost 6 months old and there's not a scratch on the screen (can't say the same for the rest of the device...) If the iPhone got one thing right it's the touchscreen. It's sensitive, easy to use, and hardy.
Academics are entirely different. In an academic environment EVERYONE has their P.Eng, by virtue of the fact that all these grad students worked directly under P.Eng's before, it's easy to gain that experience.
The people who believe that software can be certified like bridges clearly haven't built or maintained any software.
Some can, most cannot, and most aren't WORTH certifying. It's a bit like how I'd like to have a certifiably safe car to drive, but I probably wouldn't go to the hassle of certifying my backyard fence (whatever benefits that may bring).
But mission critical software is ABSOLUTELY capable of being certified like bridges, airplanes, or any other mission critical asset. They can and they do - ever done work on an aircraft control system? Or *any* code that goes into an aircraft? The certifications are very rigorous, as much so as any hardware component in the plane.
The orders of complexity are geometrically greater with software.
The people who believe that software is geometrically more complicated than bridges clearly haven't built or maintained any bridges.
Don't flatter yourself (or me, 'cos hey, I'm a coder by trade too). When a spreadsheet crashes your only real concern is whether the user loses data. When a DC motor magnet comes loose from its stator due to the Florida heat, is lodged in the armature windings, and causes a vehicle fire, it's a whole new ball game. Tracking defects in these systems are a LOT more complicated than debugging a normal app - I've done both.
Theory says it is impossible to know if you have eliminated all errors from a program.
Program correctness is often a matter of opinion, semantics, and the result of hundreds of subtle trade-off compromises
that ensure that it is not possible, except at a meanngless management level, to say that it is "done" or correct.
And other engineering disciplines aren't? People discover defects in shipping products every day, but that doesn't mean regulation and certification haven't reduced consumer risk immensely. Mechanical and electrical engineering is also a matter of tradeoffs. How sensitive do you want this sensor? What's the tolerance on this resistor? How thick do we make the shaft of the motor? All of these decisions involve a large number of factors, and there are similarly a large number of "correct" choices.
The best code I've seen is usually written by a loner in a dark room who hates paperwork, because he or she is concentrating,
but can out-think any 10 other certified practitioners.
Bullshit. There are different criteria for "good code". There's code that's highly experimental, hacked together, but accomplishes incredible things at incredible performance. This is the type of code that loners in dark rooms create - truly masterful, almost artful, code that takes the machine to its limits and back again.
Then there's practical code, accountable code... boring code, if you will. This is the code that needs to WORK, absolutely reliably so, and when it doesn't heads will roll (sometimes literally!). Code that needs to interact with other similar systems flawlessly. This is the type of code that is written with thousands upon thousands of pages of specifications, tests, and regulations. This is certifiable code.
To use a car analogy (cue groans here): your idea of good code is like an F1 race car. Experimental, high performance, genius design. But for the rest of us we'd rather have conservative design, focusing on safety, and certification up the wazoo in that regard.
Of course it's quantifiable. If they send people out all across Asia, buying up pirated Microsoft software everywhere they go, tracing the origins of each one, it is entirely likely that they can say how much supply they were able to take off the market via an arrest.
And to EVERYONE posting the tired "MS and high-quality? HAH!" joke, ugh, it's not that funny. High quality clearly refers to pirated copies that were sold as genuine, bearing holographic marks and whatnot.
Precisely. I'm of the opinion that programming is a form of engineering, but not all of its practitioners deserve to be called engineers. To be an engineer is to accept a certain amount of accountability for your actions.
Yes. An accountant sweeping floors can still call himself and accountant, and engineers are no different. Unemployed, differently employed, if you've graduated from a CEAB approved program you get to call yourself an engineer whenever you want.
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Mod parent up! Not to mention that screen writing requires an immense amount of skill and experience, and the gap between a good script writer vs. a crappy one is IMHO probably larger than the gap between a crappy code monkey vs. a genius coder.
Just because they use pen/paper doesn't make their job any less demanding than ours, pounding out code.
Hmm, I have no link for you, but I do recall reading an interview with an Apple exec, who claimed that the 802.11n thing is something they would like to avoid in the future. I assumed at the time that he meant subscription revenue.
All in all I'm still unhappy with Apple. If this was purely an accounting thing, then why can't they charge $2-3? Enough to cover the accounting costs, but not enough to really profit, like they did with the 802.11n enabler. Seems like a quick money grab to me, and that always saddens me. They need to release these apps like they did for Apple TV2. Reward early adopters! Don't punish customers who are traditionally your strongest support base! It's code for fuck's sake, there's no per-unit cost to this.
When you're a monopoly, you don't have to EARN your customers. You just have them, period.
Here in Ontario, Canada, we have pro-competition laws on DSL (though sadly not cable), where the last-mile carrier (Bell Canada) is required to lease lines at regulated wholesale rates to resellers. This has worked out beautifully.
I'm with a small ISP that serves only a few cities in the province, but their customer support is excellent, the usage terms fair, and the price low. This is capitalism at its best.
Now, if only our politicians will get a clue and do the same thing with wireless. Canada's wireless infrastructure is among the worst in the world (third world even), and it's all due to the monopoly run by Rogers. Service is expensive ($200 for 500MB data/month!), the network drops calls like hot potatos, and customer service is miserably horrible, with insane contract lengths (you think you Americans have it bad with 2 years? Think 3!). Heck, our ONLY GSM 3G network is in Toronto, a SINGLE CITY! And only in the downtown core of the city!
As a hacked iPhone user, it makes me sad when I look at the state of Canadian wireless. There is so much potential, so many new business opportunities to be had by building a proper communication infrastructure. Our government has failed us, and despite write-ins to our MPs, NOBODY has tabled ANY bill to change this.
The buffet is actually a great analogy. How do real-life buffets deal with this problem? Most of the ones I've seen impose seating time limits (2-3 hours usually). This in effect places a cap on the maximum amount of food you can eat, adjusted so you don't break the bank for them.
But don't ISPs already do this? We have bandwidth caps on almost all accounts up here in Canada these days, they're pretty damned high, and even for an occasional (couple of times a week) torrenter like myself it's more than adequate.
Then clue the user in. Flash an icon of Mail.app with an arrow pointing to the desktop that houses the window, if the user isn't on the space already. There are many possible ways to let the user know what's going on without stealing focus.
Many places use specialized "vacuum" power connectors to avoid others leeching power. Next time you're there watch out for these circular three-prong looking contraptions.
It doesn't sound right to me. One of the (many) reasons I left Windows for OSX was to get away from the incessant focus-stealing that Windows apps like to do. It's incredibly annoying. OSX apps are generally good abut it, but in this case IMHO if I start an app, but then *switch away*, there should be NO way that app should be able to steal its focus back.
Heck, even quitting applications - in OSX if you quit an app and it pops up a dialog box asking you to save, that DOESN'T steal focus, thankfully!
Like other posters have said, the spelling of his name means nothing. Not to mention the fact that Taiwan has *no* space program, and I'd question why they'd go through the trouble of spying on the US for tech they don't even need.
It's all about revenue claim. After Apple got bit by the whole 802.11n driver thing, they've started claiming revenue for their laptops and iPhones in a staggered way - instead of all at once. This allows them to justify releasing significant new features on those platforms (as opposed to merely bug fixes).
My guess is that Apple never intended to release those new apps for the iTouch, and was caught off guard by all of the backlash and bad press... Unfortunately for them iPod revenue is probably claimed in entirety at sale.
Try typing a math equation with Equation Editor (which in itself is a decently capable equation editor, if not a bit unwieldy). As soon as you close your equation, it will pop up an advertisement for MathWorks or some other bullshit "upgraded" equation editor. Seriously MS, if I thought a feature was lacking I'd seek 3rd-party plugins myself, you don't need to pimp this to me.
I am no expert in the field, though I do sometimes pick up the easier-to-understand undergraduate level books that he's throwing out. Don't quote me as an expert, though if you have any questions I would gladly direct them towards him.
An understanding of evolutionary mechanics allow us to better predict things like the mutation of viral strains, or how to best conserve a species, as well as giving us clues as to things we have yet to discover. Darwin once saw a very large flower in a rain forest during his travels, noting that it had very long pistils. He then predicted that there must be a bird in that area who had an absurdly long tongue, to complement the flower. Lo and behold, over a hundred years after his death someone found the bird.
He's also studied the effects of isolated populations on bees and certain flower varieties. This research is often very applicable to humans, as evolutionarily speaking we follow all of the same rules as everything else on this planet.
I will ask him later for some more concrete examples of a real tangible advancement that has come of evolutionary biology.
As long as 50 years? Maybe more? How long as it been since DNA was discovered, and we are JUST beginning to get to the point where we can commercialize it! Institutional investors may be looking 50-60 years down the line, your average Joe looking to retire early is not.
And where is AT&T Labs now? Xerox PARC? Businesses believed it before, but it would seem they no longer do. Also, think outside of the world of computer technology - our research is a bargain compared to fields like genetics and biology.
Not to mention even when we invented the transistor, we already could see applications for it - after all, it's immediately obvious that we can replace vacuum tubes and make a better computer. Computer research ALWAYS has a short-term application, it's easy to justify funding.
As opposed to the guys who discovered DNA. If you went up to a private company and told them you wanted millions of dollars so you can poke around inside a cell and figure out what's inside... I doubt you'd get much of the funding you wanted. But it's unquestionable that the discovery of DNA has led to real and HUGE leaps in medical technology.
What does he mean by reform though? Simply agreeing that the patent system needs an overhaul isn't enough, we want to know exactly what he wants to do with it.
Businesses are run by investors, who are traditionally quite short sighted. There is a definite disconnect between funding long-term research and where the money comes from - short to mid-term investors. You need a stakeholder who has a vested interest in seeing long term (and we're talking LOOOOONG term, decades) advancement.
Not to mention that everyone wants in on the hottest new things. Biotech is already funded disproportionately to other valid biological research because it's "sexy", and the in thing. Take away government funding and this problem will worsen. Investors all want the maximum return on the dollar, which means risk-averse research funding, and focusing on what will most likely turn a profit the quickest.
Are you also suggesting businesses have no interest in genetics? Is it that private funding is not available, or that government funding is so easily available as to give private industry no reason to offer funding for fundamental research?No, businesses have a great interest in genetics... so long as they see an application for it. But so much of what we do at the basic research level has NO CONCEIVABLE APPLICATIONS until decades later, when we solve another piece of the puzzle and suddenly the two pieces click to make something useful for us.
Do not forget that much of the world we live in is a direct product of government funded research - research that at the time was thought useless, and done only for the sake of increasing the sum of human knowledge. These kinds of things have a tendency to come back to us decades later as useful technologies.
You have a very narrow view of research. Almost all research that is done on government funding is invisible to you, the layman. They are fundamental topics that will see applications only YEARS down the road from now. The trick with private research funding is that they ensure only short-term success, since being investment-based that's all they can be.
Not to mention that private funding will always focus on the topics that will lead to business-applicable technologies soonest, as opposed to general research that will open up entirely new segments of science altogether, which is a long term benefit.
Government research support is absolutely critical. My brother is a researcher in the field of evolutionary genetics, something that few private companies will think about funding. But the knowledge is important, and in time has led to real advancements in our knowledge and our technology.
So please, keep up government scientific funding, it's the only competitive advantage the USA has ever had, and the only hope it has of maintaining its supremacy as a superpower.
Voice dialing is a funny thing when you think about why it was invented in the first place.
We invented voice dialing because address books were tedious to sift through, the UI for them SUCKED badly, so we needed a way to NOT have to surf slowly through an address book.
So here we have the iPhone, with an address book so easy to sift through that it takes almost no effort at all. The *need* for voice dialing is reduced, but IMHO not eliminated. The "favorite contacts" feature on iPhone further reduces this need, since you probably only record voice tags for your fave contacts ANYWAY.
I've used voice dialing before on a slowpoke Motorola, mostly because its OS was laggy as hell, and surfing through my contacts was a HUGE pain.
Exactly. People seem to be forgetting that Apple has OTHER product lines that it continues to expand. Hiring a television crew could mean ANYTHING.
I'm willing to bet that the February event won't be a 3G iPhone. It'll be the SDK and maybe a surprise (small MacBook Pro, PLEASE!). The 3G won't come until later this year, when AT&T's coverage is more complete, and the chipsets actually EXIST.
While I agree that overselling is a valid business strategy that gets too much bad press, hosts can't have their cake and eat it too. The logic behind overselling is that the vast majority of your customers are using so few resources that you can support the few customers that take up a lot of space and bandwith.
The problem with many hosts is that they are unwilling to honour that concept, either by inserting misleading and insidious exeptions into their TOS'es, or just plain being dicks. When someone gets an immensely popular site (legitimately, i.e. no illegal stuff), the host kicks them to the curb.
The iPhone touchscreen is not your average touchscreen, which tend to be soft, flexible, and generally pretty fragile. This sucker is covered with a scratch-resistant material, it's practically impossible to damage the actual screen, the best you can do is scratch it. Mine is almost 6 months old and there's not a scratch on the screen (can't say the same for the rest of the device...) If the iPhone got one thing right it's the touchscreen. It's sensitive, easy to use, and hardy.
Academics are entirely different. In an academic environment EVERYONE has their P.Eng, by virtue of the fact that all these grad students worked directly under P.Eng's before, it's easy to gain that experience.
Some can, most cannot, and most aren't WORTH certifying. It's a bit like how I'd like to have a certifiably safe car to drive, but I probably wouldn't go to the hassle of certifying my backyard fence (whatever benefits that may bring).
But mission critical software is ABSOLUTELY capable of being certified like bridges, airplanes, or any other mission critical asset. They can and they do - ever done work on an aircraft control system? Or *any* code that goes into an aircraft? The certifications are very rigorous, as much so as any hardware component in the plane.
The orders of complexity are geometrically greater with software.The people who believe that software is geometrically more complicated than bridges clearly haven't built or maintained any bridges.
Don't flatter yourself (or me, 'cos hey, I'm a coder by trade too). When a spreadsheet crashes your only real concern is whether the user loses data. When a DC motor magnet comes loose from its stator due to the Florida heat, is lodged in the armature windings, and causes a vehicle fire, it's a whole new ball game. Tracking defects in these systems are a LOT more complicated than debugging a normal app - I've done both.
Theory says it is impossible to know if you have eliminated all errors from a program.Program correctness is often a matter of opinion, semantics, and the result of hundreds of subtle trade-off compromises that ensure that it is not possible, except at a meanngless management level, to say that it is "done" or correct.
And other engineering disciplines aren't? People discover defects in shipping products every day, but that doesn't mean regulation and certification haven't reduced consumer risk immensely. Mechanical and electrical engineering is also a matter of tradeoffs. How sensitive do you want this sensor? What's the tolerance on this resistor? How thick do we make the shaft of the motor? All of these decisions involve a large number of factors, and there are similarly a large number of "correct" choices.
The best code I've seen is usually written by a loner in a dark room who hates paperwork, because he or she is concentrating, but can out-think any 10 other certified practitioners.Bullshit. There are different criteria for "good code". There's code that's highly experimental, hacked together, but accomplishes incredible things at incredible performance. This is the type of code that loners in dark rooms create - truly masterful, almost artful, code that takes the machine to its limits and back again.
Then there's practical code, accountable code... boring code, if you will. This is the code that needs to WORK, absolutely reliably so, and when it doesn't heads will roll (sometimes literally!). Code that needs to interact with other similar systems flawlessly. This is the type of code that is written with thousands upon thousands of pages of specifications, tests, and regulations. This is certifiable code.
To use a car analogy (cue groans here): your idea of good code is like an F1 race car. Experimental, high performance, genius design. But for the rest of us we'd rather have conservative design, focusing on safety, and certification up the wazoo in that regard.
Of course it's quantifiable. If they send people out all across Asia, buying up pirated Microsoft software everywhere they go, tracing the origins of each one, it is entirely likely that they can say how much supply they were able to take off the market via an arrest.
And to EVERYONE posting the tired "MS and high-quality? HAH!" joke, ugh, it's not that funny. High quality clearly refers to pirated copies that were sold as genuine, bearing holographic marks and whatnot.
Precisely. I'm of the opinion that programming is a form of engineering, but not all of its practitioners deserve to be called engineers. To be an engineer is to accept a certain amount of accountability for your actions.
Yes. An accountant sweeping floors can still call himself and accountant, and engineers are no different. Unemployed, differently employed, if you've graduated from a CEAB approved program you get to call yourself an engineer whenever you want.