FTA:

As projects surpass one million lines of code, there’s a direct correlation between size and quality for proprietary projects, and an inverse correlation for open source projects.

The article gives numbers: above 1M LOC, defect density increases for open source projects, and decreases for proprietary projects.
Increasing defect density with size is plausible: beyond a certain size, the code base becomes intractable.
Decreasing defect density with size is harder to understand: why should the quality fairy only visit specially big proprietary projects?

Perhaps the way those proprietary projects get into the MLOC range in the first place is with huge tracts of boilerplate, duplicated code, or machine-generated code.
That would inflate up the denominator in the defects/KLOC ratio.
But then that calls the whole defects/KLOC metric into question.

I was on the personnel committee at our church.

We grant 2 weeks parental leave to any employee who becomes the parent of a child (natural or adopted)
and 2 additional weeks to any employee who bears a child.

Women on the committee who had borne children did not think this was excessive.

Flying to Orbit, with an update for SpaceShipOne
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/stories/orbit.html

One of my kids had something like this: not for English, but for physics.
The teacher couldn't be bothered to assign and grade proper homework.
Instead, he fobbed the kids off onto a web app.
- go to the site
- get a problem
- solve the problem
- type in the numerical answer
- right answer? go on to the next problem
- wrong answer? try again
The web app allowed maybe 0.5% margin for rounding error, and you got 5 tries before it failed you on that problem.

It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched.
All learning is, at some level, an interaction--a conversation--between student and teacher.
Even if it is nothing more than a red check mark or a red X on a homework paper,
you have communicated some thing to some person and gotten some response.
You don't realize how important this is until it is gone.

With nothing but a machine to talk to, it stops being about learning.
It is just about satisfying the machine by whatever means necessary.
In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google.
This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem;
plugging in the numbers that the web app had generated for your instance of the problem would then yield the correct answer.
By the end of the school year, I was telling him that if he didn't want to deal with the web app, he should use google to get his grade,
and if he wanted to learn physics, I would teach it to him.

Automated essay grading is going to be even worse.
There is no point writing prose unless a human is going to read it.
When I want to talk to machines, I write code.

Writing songs, that voices never shared...
-- Paul Simon

There was a time, many years ago, when I filed my own taxes, on paper, using a pencil and a hand calculator. I knew what every number was and how the calculations were done.

It kept getting more and more complicated and time consuming, until about 10 years ago I finally gave up. Now I plug the numbers into a program and it prints out the forms--correctly, for all I know. Even with a program, it is hugely complex.

The tax code has to be complex so that there will be places to hide the loopholes for rich people. I don't make enough money to benefit from the loopholes, but I make enough that I have to deal with the complexity. Every year by the time I'm done with it I'm spitting nails.

How congress broke daylight savings time
A letter to my congressional representatives
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/letters/dst.html

Writing a browser: $10M
Writing an OS: $100M
EU bundling fine: $732
Desktop monopoly: priceless

Occasionally, one of my banks or health care orgs calls me on some (legitimate) business.
The first thing they do is ask me for my identifying info (SSN, birthdate, etc).
See, their security and privacy regs require them to verify my identity.
I always refuse, and try to explain the problem to them.

In the early days (going back maybe 5 years),
they had no idea what I was talking about,
and I could not get them to understand the problem.

Eventually, some of them understood that they had a problem.
But their understanding of the problem was that some of their customers wouldn't talk to them,
which meant that they couldn't complete the business at hand,
which mattered to them (or else they wouldn't have initiated the call in the first place).
Their solution?
Offer me a call-back number, so that I can call them instead.
Because, see, if I initiate the call, then they must be who they say they are, right? Right?

Just once in the last year, I had a bank that really understood the problem.
When I balked, they allowed that I could call back in on the customer service number *on my credit card*.
So I did.
From the reactions of the people who answered,
I got the impression that few of their customers do this.

Lisp
http://xkcd.com/224/

You think their English prose is bad,
just wait until you see (and have to debug, and maintain) their code.

I don't know about the aerodynamics, but the performance part is correct.
That little scoop below the engine is the intake for air to cool the engine.
The design of that scoop could affect overall performance by something like ~1%.
Sounds small, but when everyone is using the same underlying technology,
and encounters typically have binary outcomes (you die or he dies),
1% can make the difference.

Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, _The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_, talked almost exclusively about concepts and hardly at
all about tools. His idea of a scientific revolution is based on a
single example, the revolution in theoretical physics that occurred in
the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. [...]

Kuhn's book was so brilliantly written that it became an
instant classic. It misled a whole generation of students and
historians of science into believing that all scientific revolutions
are concept-driven. [...]

In the last 500 years, in addition to the quantum-mechanical
revolution that Kuhn took as his model, we have had six major
concept-driven revolutions, associated with the names of Copernicus,
Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Freud, and Einstein. During the same period
there have been about twenty tool-driven revolutions [...].

Two prime examples of tool-drive revolutions are the Galilean
revolution resulting from the use of the telescope in astronomy, and
the Crick-Watson revolution resulting from the use of X-ray diffraction
to determine the structure of big molecules in biology.

The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in
new ways. The effect of a tool-drive revolution is to discover new
things that have to be explained.

-- Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds

it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

... But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.

—Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"