Here, let me fix that so Bigjeff5 can handle it:::

Do what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did.

1: Create a huge tech company
2. ???
3. PROFIT!

Let's make an analogy to a real-world situation and I think you'll probably understand a bit better.

Just as an unknown security exploit has the potential to collapse a server, an engineering flaw can cause a building to collapse.

An engineer (think security expert) is underneath a building (this would be the server) making some checks for integrity (security). During this check, he discovers a very important beam has several bolts that appear to be coming out or have sheared off::: someone with malicious intentions could quickly and easily destroy the building; but it might also be possible for natural events (i.e. an earthquake) to cause it to topple as well. Realizing the situation is grave but not wanting to cause mass panic, he tells someone in charge about the situation. It is a very important problem to address, and there are a lot of complexities to deal with, so the engineer sits back and waits to hear something. After enough time goes by without any indication that something has been done to either temporarily or permanently fix the problem, the engineer tells the people in the building about it, causing a bit of mass panic, but quickly prompting those in charge to get the problem fixed.

But let's say the engineer decides NOT to announce it publicly. Sure, people in the building go about their business as though nothing is wrong, and the threat of a malicious person hearing of the problem is avoided. What happens when a natural event causes the building to collapse? Or when a "terrorist" finds the problem and exploits it? All the people in the building--if they survived--would be fuming mad about a problem that was known but not dealt with. Now instead of having "the people in charge" mad at him, the people that were affected are mad.

If you didn't catch the moral, here it is. Announcing the problem to the world will piss off the vendor, but will ultimately result in either a fix from them or some other form of mitigation from those that are affected and/or have the means to stop it. Ignoring the situation only gives the illusion of stability... the illusion that there isn't a problem, or that unspoken problems will never be exploited. Hmm.. there's lots of illusions in "ignore" scenario...

The problem with the "grab whatever if it's temporary" is that temporary solutions oftentimes become more permanent than anything. I have had many experiences where fixing a problem in the server room exposes some "temporary" fix from years ago that I never had time to make permanent (and since it worked, nobody thought twice about the problem it had fixed).

Or when developing web applications, somebody implements that "quick function" that does X, intended only for internal stuff. Another feature comes along, and pretty soon we're using that temporary function as the core of a new system... and sometimes it even gets embedded into the core of the system. But remember, it was only temporary.

I absolutely agree!

At one point at a previous job, I was tasked with putting all of our projects into our project management software and prioritize. I built a tree structure with parent projects and sub-projects, where the furthest-out projects needed to be completed before the parent project could be done (so the root projects were easy to understand for the PHB, and we could deal with the smaller bits). Each level was prioritized based on the level, so I could tell what piece should be completed first (I worked that part out with the other developers so we all understood what it all meant, along with figuring out some of the lower-level priorities and building best-guess timelines).

After a week of prioritizing, arranging, and setting timelines, I brought it to the PHB. I explained the logic of the thing and how much I'd worked with the other developers in order to get it organized as such. He gave me a blank stare, asking why there were so many sub-projects and why he couldn't find the project he was looking for, etc. I explained the organizational logic, and he just gave me that blank, glazed-eye stares and then excused me.

The next morning I was called into his office, where he showed me (with a huge smile on his face) how he'd rearranged everything. There were no trees (projects with sub-projects) that explained dependencies. The timelines were changed to what he wanted them to be, causing 10-12 projects to overlap on very tight timeframes. EVERYTHING was a project (the sub-projects that were dependencies of parents were suddenly their own projects with incredibly low priority). Only the projects he was interested were prioritized, and there were dozens of projects set with the highest priority.

The funniest thing? Some time later we had a meeting where he told us adamantly that we should only EVER have ONE priority 1 (highest priority) item and that we shouldn't work on anything else until that priority 1 project was done. *sigh*

Sometimes PHB's just don't understand simple logic. Telling them you either need more time or they will have to deal with poorly tested and completely undocumented code doesn't sink in.

I had an employer (thankfully I was smart enough to get away from there) that took away our profit-sharing, holding it as "incentive" for the programmers to build this new feature quickly. Being the leader, I was forced to try reasoning with him.

I told him that we needed 4 more months than he was giving us, and that taking away our profit sharing and calling it "incentive" or saying that it is a "bonus" is BS (keep in mind, we'd had this for many years and were originally told that it would never be taken away). He smiled and offered two extra months, but that the money would still be held.

I pleaded with him, explaining that one of the devs just bought a house with his wife and that he would lose the house if he had to go that long without the money (these checks were literally 30-50% of our monthly income), but he wouldn't budge. "Fine, we'll push hard and get it done in your timeline, but there's probably going to be a metric ton of bugs to deal with because we won't have time to do much error-checking." His response? "Just get it done on time. And don't let there be any bugs."

The moral of the story: Some PHB's just don't care: "Documentation? I'm the PHB, I don't care." "Error checking? Don't waste your time. Oh, and don't allow any errors."

Forgive me, but it seems that you are simply arguing semantics:

searching: to inquire, investigate, examine, or seek; conduct an examination or investigation

theory: a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

experiment:a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.

The existence of this particle is still theory and conjecture. Until there is empirical/verifiable evidence to support it's existence, there is no proof that it exists. There are many things that were thought to not exist that do throughout history (i.e. germs), and vice-versa.

The point to all this is still the same: one can definitively say something exists once it is discovered. Definitively saying it does not exist is infinitely more difficult to prove (as with the existence of aliens: it is a much better bet to propose they exist instead of saying they do not; we cannot even adequately explore planets in our own solar system let alone others to narrow the odds).

The problem with searching for something that only theoretically exists is that it is profoundly easier to prove that something exists (by finding it) versus proving that it does not exist ("we've done a lot of searching without result, but we cannot conclusively say this [x] does not exist"). If they find it, yay search is over. If they don't... well, they'll probably just keep looking until they rip a hole in the space/time continuum or create a blackhole that rips the Earth from existence... I'd rather them find it as not.

If turbidostato supposedly created a "new derogatory term for closed source software", what was it? I don't understand why there are such flame wars for open source vs. closed source software.

If Microsoft Word were (as a predominant example) an open source application, doesn't it stand to reason that more of the bugs would have been found and squashed? It also stands to reason that a piece of software with such a massive following would invariably become a much better product with hundreds or thousands (more) of talented programmers working to add features and such. The other beauty of it is that there generally seem to be just as many people testing changes to the code as there are coders, so bugs would be found faster and features would be solidified quicker.

So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think closed source software is so awesome. It seems to me the problem isn't with whether it's closed or open sourced, but rather the perception. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Microsoft products; when I mentioned anything about Linux or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "open source" mean NOT Microsoft, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against them.

This is the "fanboy" concept to a tee. Listen for a minute to the concept instead of thinking we're somehow bashing this way of life that you want to cling to so much.

Sure, there's probably very little code in the Linux kernel from 15 years ago... but how much would we really want? Oh, and wait, Linux is built to run on i386 architecture, which I'm pretty sure was sometime prior to '95. Just my two cents.

YEAH! I mean, there's just NO WAY that all those service packs and updates for Windows have ANYTHING to do with your bandwidth congestion. Nor the downloaders that have to be downloaded for the real download to begin. Nor those browsers that fetch all the links from the current page so when you click on *one* of them it'll load fast. It couldn't have anything to do with all those anti-virus updates. Nothing at all to do with the 800G of files places download for their Redhat Satellite server. No way would anybody download 5G images of DVDs just to avoid that little 2-week delay. Nobody telecommutes, that's ridiculous. Oh, and those online "offsite backup" facilities that backup 300 workstations and 700 servers over the Internets, those don't take up much of your bandwidth. It is definitely those damned pirates.

Priceless. I actually made an audible giggle to that one... that's geek humor if I ever heard it.