Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Arbitrary major version jumps (Score 1) 172

Since you clearly didn't look up Rice's Theorem, here it is:

Any non-trivial property of a Turing machine is undecidable.

In other words, there is no methodical way to guarantee anything interesting about a piece of software, and that includes whether it works properly under every input. You can verify that it works with "typical" inputs, but there will always be some set of boundary conditions that you couldn't possibly have known to check on day one.

Comment Re:Arbitrary major version jumps (Score 1) 172

Look up Rice's Theorem. Or work on a major software project. It goes way beyond unfair to expect a complex software system to "just work as it should" - it's mathematically impossible to make sure it does.

Beyond that, supporting every single ancient version just because one guy somewhere might be using it would take man-hours away from supporting the versions most people use. It sucks for that one guy, but it'd suck for everyone else if a gaping security hole in a more common version were to stay unpatched for too long.

Furthermore, the older a version of a program gets, the more of its devs switch jobs, retire, etc. You can bring on new devs and make them learn the old code base (current job market notwithstanding), but once again, that takes man-hours, especially if the old code base was written before everyone started thinking about maintainability. You could instead put them to work adding a feature to the next version that a larger segment of the market has been wanting. And you need to keep releasing software - the competitors are, and the devs' salaries don't appear out of thin air.

Comment My solution (Score 1) 123

What I do is seek a contract, then through my own LLC provide a solo 401(k), provide my own healthcare, etc. My benefits won't vanish on someone else's whim, and I have access to all the funds offered by my favorite investment manager. Plus my clients don't have to supply the benefits they would otherwise offer, and only have to pay for the hours I work (and I only have to be around when there is work).

Then again, there's kind of a seller's market for people with multiple computer science degrees, so YMMV. Maybe I wouldn't be saying this if finding contracts were harder.

Comment Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score 1, Offtopic) 367

Which they can do, because they're offtopic (and so is this by the way). I for one welcome this practice, as the worst thing to come out of Beta in my opinion is the deluge of +5 comments about it and the subsequent impossibility of finding the on-topic comments I came here to read in the first place.

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Working...