What business are you in? That's right. SHIPPING SOFTWARE. You do not develop software. You do not write code. All of that is completely immaterial. It is simply a means to do what you are in the business of. The single most important thing that you do is ship software. You WILL ship cringeworthy code. You WILL ship unfinished code. You should darned well accept that. The "When it's ready" is a total cop out. Virtually NOBODY has that luxury of shipping "when it's ready" code. The demands of schedule and finance will dictate when you can ship, not any esoteric nonsense about "when it's ready". If you run out of money developing the software, then who cares if you're holding on to this notion of not shipping when it's ready? Nobody. If code is developed, and that code is scrapped on a shelf, was it ever written?

You can't blame management for your inability to communicate. People sit down and blame management continually about every little detail about "I don't care, ship it!". Remember, that's because what you do is SHIP CODE. Management wants that stuff on the shelf yesterday because you didn't convince them that it wasn't possible. You can say that you did, and that stupid management ignored you, but the reality is that you're just plain wrong.

There HAS to be a reason why there are plenty of successful software applications out there that shipped "unfinished". BTW, how you handle the second part of shipping code (ie what you do with software patches) is where you can redeem yourself.

I think, sir, that you're talking a bit out of your ass. Supersonic fighters have thin airfoils for aerodynamic reasons but they are by no means required to be symmetrical. The F15 and F16 (both supersonic capable aircraft) have cambered airfoils. Drag increases as the square of the lift coefficient - camber increases the lift coefficient for a given angle of attack, and thus camber increases induced drag (the component of drag associated with lift).

The reason stunt planes have symmetrical wings has to do with the fact that symmetric wings are more efficient when flying upside-down than a heavily cambered wing. That is a state that most other airplanes actively try to avoid. You get the same amount of lift out of the wing at the same angle of attacks. The reason why they're thick is because thicker wings allow you to delay stall. Since stunt planes fly slowly, you don't really have to worry about the efficiency of the wing. That and stunt planes are NOT optimized for aerodynamic efficiency - simply the ability to generate tons of lift quickly.

Next time you cite one of Dr. Anderson's wonderful text books, please read it first.

You're kidding me. MS person thinks their IT. I think you really want:

Boss - please do ${dodgy_thing}

There you go, problem solved. There's an open source solution to 80% fix of 100% of the problems.

This argument is true of _any_ system, however, not simply these particular ones. If I can get a sysadmin to run this binary that I've put in my home directory, then I can fully compromise the entire machine.

There is no way to secure the interior completely without making it unusable. There are simply levels of security.

Any time you introduce humans into the equation, there is ALWAYS a possibility of compromising a secure system. So by that extent, maybe the test has unreasonable expectations?

But if you had those Orange Screen VT100's, you'd be running lynx anyway, and your browsing speeds would be stunningly fast anyway.

Wow, that was probably one of the best cases of bad typing I've ever seen. I suppose that's the net result of "No good deed goes unpunished".

I don't see how your comment is relevant to what I said.

The response I was posting about was how their proposed non-NAND option isn't an option at all, suggesting that perhaps Intel had done their homework to use NAND memory, and not DDR (or some newer version of it) memory.

Apparently, you didn't read my comment in the context of the OP at all.

Sure you can. But you can't get 16 gigabytes of DDR2 RAM for 40-ish dollars. The OP was talking about DDR2, not flash memory.

Do you mean gigabit or gigabyte? Also, 16 gigabytes of RAM right now isn't very cheap at all. The cheapest DDR2 memory I've seen is about 12.50 dollars per gigabyte, so that's an additional 200 dollars per 16 gigabytes. Is that a good price to pay for some potential increase in speed? IMO, that's what I'd call "extremely hard to justify" for a consumer.

Meh, even the most expensive RAID cards loaded up with tons of RAM aren't as fast as a couple of Intel SSD's right now, so why bother with the expense?

First of all, DDR RAM is not cheap (at least, not compared to NAND RAM). It costs significantly more per gigabyte than even the most expensive of Intel's offerings for SSD's. While it should provide more theoretical throughput than any SSD, benchmarks at various places (http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1) haven't shown that to be significant yet, at least from the end user perspective (some synthetic benchmarks show that the RAM based disks can be faster than SSD's, but translating that to real world usage scenarios by consumers doesn't quite show any tangible benefits).

DDR RAM uses up a very large amount of power per stick compared to SSD's do. I remember seeing the power consumption of one of the DDR2 based "volatile hard drives", and it was higher than spinning drives (at least at idle), and wasn't particularly faster than the best of intel's SSD's.

So sounds like DDR RAM on board is expensive, power hungry, and doesn't provide that much of a tangible benefit to consumers. Tell me again why it's a good idea?

"buh-kuh buh-kuh" has become standard words in my vocabulary.

"Where's the buh-kuh buh-kuh" (where's the Tivo Remote).
"Buh-kuh buh-kuh" ("This commercial is stupid, fast forward please", or "Where's the Tivo Remote? I want to fast forward through this commercial/lame part of the show right now" or "whoa, did I see that right? Please rewind a few seconds").
"You buh-kuh buh-kuh'ed" ("You fast forwarded through the commercials too far into the show, please rewind a bit").

Reading a bit more about the patent dispute between Curtiss and the Wright company, it becomes clear that the Wright brothers wound up not being a financial success not because of lack of patent collections, but on moneys spent on defending the patents.

If that's the case, then that spells the doom of TiVO.

Having been through the patent process, it became clear to me that filing a patent does one and only one thing - it means that you can use your patent. Defending your patent (by litigation) ultimately will bankrupt you, unless you have a law firm on retainer (which in and of it self can bankrupt you if you're a very very very small business of one or two).

Things probably would have wound up being a bit different for the Wright Brothers had they simply accepted Toulmin's initial offer of being on retainer...

Interesting - I had thought that the Tivo HD that I bought has that as a selling point - it provides multi-room DVR features (albeit with other Tivo's or any generic computer running Windows/MacOSX).

If only there was some sort of small, removable storage media that you could plug into portable devices like the iPhone. I wonder when they're going to invent something like that... Then I wouldn't need to worry about this application eating up 1/8 of the total storage on the iPhone.

WoW does that now. By exploring every spot on the map (actually, just removing all of the fog of war), you gain an achievement, and a new title "the Explorer" that you cahttp://games.slashdot.org/story/09/08/08/0345231/Finding-New-and-Unintended-Ways-of-Playing-Games?from=rss#n add to your name.