As a programmer I spoke from that perspective but code is certainly not all there is in many projects.

Geeks do tend to be too cute about names and I find that to be asinine, but that's up to the project owner. Most of the time the open source project I may pull in is not user-visible so the name is a lot less important.

As for the installing/configuring, I've hit good and bad on both the open and non-open sides. The open source side tends toward the hobbyist so it may be worse in this respect for a randomly selected project. For many of projects on Linux the package maintainer, whether it be for apt or yum or some other system, often takes care of a lot of the that particular ugliness. I have a far simpler time installing a working web server with [insert backend language here] and [sql backend] using open source tools on Linux than I do on Windows. In many cases its little more than one command "apt-get install X Y X" where it goes out and finds everything, confirms I really want this, and does all the work for me.

I'm not convinced that commercial apps I've used are not just as graphically ugly as many of the open source ones, but then again most of the projects I deal with are libraries so I have less emphasis on the graphical elements. From the big companies, like MS, Apple, or Google, yes the graphical polish will be nicer, but at least many open source projects can get someone to make english sentences in user-visible dialogs unlike my "Smart TV" manufacturer (panasonic).

As for documentation, in the open source world it sometimes does not exist and that is a *major* issue for those projects. In the close source world it make exist more often but can also be completely unusable. I'm not sure which is worse in the end. With one I know from the get-go that I'm on my own or that I have to use community resources. With the other I may struggle with it for a long time before I figure out that I should just ignore the docs and look at what the damn library is actually doing.... but I usually can't.

When it comes to testing I've had poorly tested from each side and no chance of fixing one but some change of fixing the other. There's shit on both sides of the fence.

I'd like to come back to my original point that financial incentives are not the only incentives. I spoke of code because I write code, not because it is the only important thing. It's the thing I can speak of from personal experience. I would argue that other types of work that are done because someone wants to impress others, wants to scratch their own itch, or just wants to help a good cause are often done better than tasks done strictly for pay. Hopefully we all have jobs doing what we love, but when that isn't the case there's a great chance that you do something better in your off time because you really give a shit about it.

Was there a good reason to structure your post as a series of snide questions and a flippant remark?

There are many other types of incentives and I have rarely done my best work for strictly financial ones. When contributing to an open source project you have to think that somewhere someone will look at the code you write and have the ability to publicly shame you if you do something truly stupid. Standing, respect, whatever you want to call it, is a big motivator for many people. If the same thing happens in many businesses there *may* be consequences, but often as long as it works well enough to collect the customer's money it ships. Personally, I've found more fugly code turds in various closed source projects than I've touched than in the open source world.

I think you're misreading or oversimplifying those situations. It's not that there was no demand, but it is more difficult to measure before the product exists. There was a market for smartphones and Apple 1) tends to put out good stuff, 2) already made iPods so they had some experience w making small portable consumer devices, 3) demonstrated that people loved the Apple branding of such things.

As for the Tesla, people plunked down $40000 reservations before the cars existed, and continue to do so for new models. If that doesn't show demand exists I'm not sure what would.

I'm sure there are products where there was no demand before the product existed, but I don't think you can call that the common case. Before a company sinks significant cost into designing a new product they generally run some numbers to measure the current market demand for the final product. Sure, some of that is wishful thinking, but some is evaluating current offerings and seeing how your product will be able to grab the customers. I'm sure Apple looked at BlackBerry devices before throwing their hat into the smartphone market and I'm sure Musk had more that just a hunch that rich people would buy a luxury electric car. However, when you have enough money, as did the creators of both these examples, the market analysis is a little less critical during the development stage just because a failed project isn't the end of the world. Apple could have kept going even if the iPhone flopped and Musk wouldn't run out of cash if Tesla crashed and burned during the roadster days.

Seriously: http://xkcd.com/605/

I bet someone in battery manufacturing is looking as adding capacity now in anticipation of such events. This could be quite an opportunity for some manufacturer with a bit of foresight. As more companies make and sell more electric cars I doubt Tesla will be the only company hunting for more, cheaper, better.

The parasitic worm is Trichinella spiralis and is actually relatively easy to kill with cooking. Many pork dishes involve long slow cooking which renders them worms completely harmless. We eat feral pigs rural northern Florida without a problem. Granted, I pick preparations like slow cooker Cuban pork for any wild meat to be absolutely it's safe. As for exposure for the butcher, that's crap. The worm is embedded in a cyst that is dissolved by stomach acid so don't lick your hand while cleaning the animal but that's pretty much it for trichinosis. Of course it is an animal so there's always bacteria as well but you get different but other dangerous strains in our commercial meat supply too.

I can see this being a problem if automation is introduced piecemeal, but if you go from what we have now to something where the human driver is not required your example tends to make the opposite point for me. Before you say that cutting the human out is insane keep in mind that when something goes wrong in a car the stakes are not nearly as high as in a plane, both for the number of people involved, and for the fact that if the car engine cuts out and it coasts to a stop the result is generally not a pile of flaming wreckage in a hillside.

Keep in mind that a safer self-driving car only has to be better than the current batch of drivers and that is not a terribly high bar. Given how little training the average driver is required to have and thereby how badly many (most?) people drive doesn't that make the problem of creating a self-driving car that improves safety on the roads even simpler? I think you're trying to say that humans will be even worse drivers when they usually rely on automated technology, but there's not a ton of room at the bottom now. Based on most of the drivers I've seen, once you clear the initial figuring-it-out phase of your teenage years there doesn't seem to be a huge correlation between how long a person has been driving and how safe a driver they are. Other factors including fatigue, anger, and distraction appear to play a *much* larger role in their abilities. Keep in mind that the computer suffers from none of those problems AND can't get drunk. Shoot, just removing human competitive and aggressive instincts from the road would make driving much safer even if other mistakes remained constant.

Insurance companies may be terrible at everything else, but they can run statistics and if there is a self-driving car that gets in only 10% of the accidents that a human driver does there will be price incentives to push people toward that. Of course the incentives will only reduce your insurance by 20%, thereby making the customer happy and giving the insurance company a tidy profit since they don't pay out nearly as much.

Yeah, that's what an iPad is for!

So very true. In the end it all comes down to trust and as I posted above (before noticing yours) Thompson explained it extremely well.

Sorry to tell you, but Ken Thompson talked about you how you pretty much have to trust someone back in 1984: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

If no one else, you have to trust the compiler author isn't pulling a fast one on you....

Nice of you to get her the tablet she's always wanted.

Wish I could mod you up. I picked up BS, MS, and PhD (why on this last one... I'm not entirely sure) in CS without I or my parents having to pay for it. There are scholarships available for undergrads and assorted "graduate assistant" positions if you continue to the graduate level. The biggest thing most people I've dealt with need to understand is there is nothing wrong with going to a state school.

At the college level your degree is heavily what you make of it. If you want to learn a lot about the field, you can. If you want to skate by and barely do what's required, you can. However, if you interview with for a position and it's clear that you never did anything beyond the basic coursework and never cared enough to dig deeper on anything you're probably not getting a job. Pick a field somewhere in the intersection of "you're interested in it" and "you can get a job in it" and actually apply yourself. Look at the edges of what's taught in school and find bits and pieces that are interesting to you. Learn several programming languages, just so you can see that they're so inter-related that you can pick up whatever the new hotness is well enough to get through a basic interview. Learn some basic desktop IT work along with that CS degree so you could identify how the OS ate itself or what part the magic smoke escaped from and replace it. Learn every trick you can find for debugging tough problems from debuggers, to profilers, to writing your own logging routines, to breaking out wireshark because god only knows what's ACTUALLY traveling over the wires.

None of these things necessarily require a degree but if I were to roll a die on either a programmer who has a degree and one that doesn't, with no other knowledge, my odds of getting someone useful are slanted toward the college degree.

I've used them all as well, and I usually prefer ssh -X. Of course, I'm working within a fast internal network and over given more latency other tools may be better suited. On a daily basis I run my email client on my Linux laptop and pipe the display to a rootless X display running under cygwin on my Windows desktop. I commonly forget that the app is not just another windows program.

Can RDP be set to mix remote applications with locally running ones? I like the idea of switching with just an alt-tab and copying between apps without getting stuck in a box where all the remote apps are running. For example, when running RDP if I hit alt-tab to switch applications can I cycle through the other apps on my desktop or just the ones within the remote session?

Bull.

The BART cell phone repeater system has only been in place for a few years as a courtesy to riders. There are still emergency phones in stations (along with employees who have access to land lines) and the train conductors have the ability to call for assistance as well. People have built systems for calling for help in emergencies for decades before cell phones existed.

Sadly they'd still be beaten by my local ambulance chaser who is in the phonebook as "A Accident Attorney"....

Live in a nice central american or asian dictatorship for a while and tell us what a hell hole this place is. This does look like a terrible decision and they should have overthrown the other case instead of extending the state powers to the feds, but the flying spittle does nothing for anyone's cause.