Why we all sell code with bugs
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 10:59 PM - Apt-get Install
Eric Sink in The Guardian
The world's six billion people can be divided into two groups: group one, who know why every good software company ships products with known bugs; and group two, who don't. Those in group 1 tend to forget what life was like before our youthful optimism was spoiled by reality. Sometimes we encounter a person in group two, a new hire on the team or a customer, who is shocked that any software company would ship a product before every last bug is fixed.
Every time Microsoft releases a version of Windows, stories are written about how the open bug count is a five-digit number. People in group two find that interesting. But if you are a software developer, you need to get into group one, where I am. Why would an independent software vendor - like SourceGear - release a product with known bugs? There are several reasons:
· We care about quality so deeply that we know how to decide which bugs are acceptable and which ones are not.
· It is better to ship a product with a known quality level than to ship a product full of surprises.
· The alternative is to fix them and risk introducing worse bugs.
Sure. May I add: because every time you fix your own bugs you can sell the product again. Or sell the patches.
45 comments The Economics of Programming Languages
Friday, May 19, 2006, 10:01 PM - Theory
David N. Welton proposes <i>the most salient points of the economics of programming languages, and describes their effects on existing languages, as well as on those who desire to write and introduce new languages</i>.
Programming languages, like any product, have certain properties. Obviously, like any other sort of information good, production costs in the sense of making copies are essentially zero. Research and development (sunk costs) are needed to create the software itself, which means that an initial investment is required, and if the language is not successful, chances are the investment can't be recouped. This applies to many information goods, but programming languages also have some qualities that make them special within this grouping. Namely, that they are both a means of directing computers and their peripherals to do useful work, but they are also a means of exchanging ideas and algorithms for doing that work between people. In other words, languages go beyond simply being something that's useful; they are also a means of communication. Furthermore, in the form of collections of code such as packages, modules or libraries, programming languages are also a way to exchange useful routines that can be recombined in novel ways by other programmers, instead of simply exchanging finished applications.
Read the article
Five Steps to Font Freedom
Monday, May 1, 2006, 03:02 PM - Beautiful Code, Copyfight
Think about these scenarios: You don't need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don't need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don't need to own Times to read the Times. You don't need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn't apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser. You are reading Arial right now. That's right, Arial. Why? Because everybody on Earth has a licensed version of Arial on their computer. The great democracy of the internet has failed to produce typography any better than the least common denominator of system fonts. As a designer, I hope you are outraged and offended. So what can you do about it?
link
via
Wireless Freedom
Wednesday, April 19, 2006, 10:16 PM - Apt-get Install
OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for wireless routers. Instead of trying to cram every possible feature into one firmware, OpenWrt provides only a minimal firmware with support for add-on packages. For users this means the ability to custom tune features, removing unwanted packages to make room for other packages and for developers this means being able to focus on packages without having to test and release an entire firmware.
Link to site
Link to docs
This Essay Breaks the Law
Friday, March 31, 2006, 07:57 PM - Copyfight
By MICHAEL CRICHTON Published in The New York Times, March 19, 2006
* The Earth revolves around the Sun.
* The speed of light is a constant.
* Apples fall to earth because of gravity.
* Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.
* Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.
* Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.
* Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.
ACTUALLY, I can't make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient's test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.
Read the rest of the article
Also: Over 5000 nanomedicine/nanotech patents have now been granted, and the patent land grab continues unabated.
projecting 3D (like you just don't care)
Monday, March 6, 2006, 12:57 PM - Beautiful Code, Games
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has built a system that projects 3D images in less that it takes to say 'hollogram'. The device projevts "real 3D images" which consist of dot arrays in space where there is nothing but air.
"Until now, projected three-dimensional imagery has been artificial; optical illusions that appear 3D due to the parallax difference between the eyes of the observer. Prolonged viewing of this conventional sort of 3D imagery can cause physical discomfort. The newly developed device, however, creates real 3D images by using laser light, which is focused through a lens at points in space above the device, to create plasma emissions from the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at the point of focus. Because plasma emission continues for a short period of time, the device is able to create 3D images by moving the point of focus."
link to the project
via dottocomu
the problem with the turing test
Friday, March 3, 2006, 04:32 PM - Theory, Robots
In The New Atlantis, Mark Halpern points out a bug in Turing's test: humans don't judge the intelligence of other humans by their response to questions but by their appearence.
In the October 1950 issue of the British quarterly Mind, Alan Turing published a 28-page paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” It was recognized almost instantly as a landmark. In 1956, less than six years after its publication in a small periodical read almost exclusively by academic philosophers, it was reprinted in The World of Mathematics, an anthology of writings on the classic problems and themes of mathematics and logic, most of them written by the greatest mathematicians and logicians of all time. (In an act that presaged much of the confusion that followed regarding what Turing really said, James Newman, editor of the anthology, silently re-titled the paper “Can a Machine Think?”) Since then, it has become one of the most reprinted, cited, quoted, misquoted, paraphrased, alluded to, and generally referenced philosophical papers ever published. It has influenced a wide range of intellectual disciplines—artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, epistemology, philosophy of mind—and helped shape public understanding, such as it is, of the limits and possibilities of non-human, man-made, artificial “intelligence.”
Turing’s paper claimed that suitably programmed digital computers would be generally accepted as thinking by around the year 2000, achieving that status by successfully responding to human questions in a human-like way. In preparing his readers to accept this idea, he explained what a digital computer is, presenting it as a special case of the “discrete state machine”; he offered a capsule explanation of what “programming” such a machine means; and he refuted—at least to his own satisfaction—nine arguments against his thesis that such a machine could be said to think. (All this groundwork was needed in 1950, when few people had even heard of computers.) But these sections of his paper are not what has made it so historically significant. The part that has seized our imagination, to the point where thousands who have never seen the paper nevertheless clearly remember it, is Turing’s proposed test for determining whether a computer is thinking—an experiment he calls the Imitation Game, but which is now known as the Turing Test.
READ the rest of the article by Mark Halpern.
via robots.net
humanoid from here
Back Next
