The software development process.

Well, in C you do have to be able to take the address of a const. If the compiler could prove that was never done it could get away without allocating memory for it but otherwise...

Robert

So, how did the Georgia accent go over in Cambridge?

John

I usually do. If the operate-side task crashes, usually everything crashes. I often have one "procedural" program running on the op side, and the state machines running at interrupt dispatch level. The opside thing is typically an RS232 communications task that spends a lot of time waiting around and also parses inputs and composes replies... not the sort of thing state machines do well.

You can get paranoid and have the watchdog code check all sorts of things (stack depths, timers, pointers, rom checksums, junk like that) but the fact is, proper embedded code doesn't need a watchdog timer. I enable it because it's there, maybe for recovering from lightning bolts and such.

John

Like many Georgians, I don't have a noticeable regional accent.

I wouldn't vote for a brain dead slug like Rich for an office, even as low as dog catcher unless he was required to wear a suit of sirloin steaks in a town full of hungry pit bulls and rotwielers.

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Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Businesses (successful ones) thrive on differentiating themselves from their competition. Tires (for example) are the same everywhere you go. The smart tire warehouse will differentiate itself by its business processes, which will require custom business applications.

The bigger companies will attempt to force a one size fits all solution onto their customers. That's how they see their own success; standardization, common processes, etc. If the customers take that bait, they risk losing their competitive edge in that area. Those customers, the big companies can have. The smart ones who have some distinction that they want to maintain will avoid doing business with the bigger vendors.

--
Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Error reading FAT record: Try the SKINNY one? (Y/N)

As in, "Have another slice of Chocolate pie before you go! ;-)

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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

The problem with applying this back to software development is that the barn/garage/house problem is one where the 'design' is complete, the processes are well known but the implementation requires quite a bit of labor for repetitive processes. With software, its the analysis and design that takes the time. Once that's done, the implementation is just a matter of burning a few CDs or loading the product onto a server for distribution.

If you applied the s/w model to a house, you'd budget 90% for the architect and 10% for all the contractors.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Telemark:  If it was easy, they\'d call it snowboarding.

If you have to pay for the labor, it may be cheaper to have the trusses custom made and delivered, with the advantage of having heavier splice plated installed by an automated press. I helped put up the trusses fro a 60' * 60' addition to a garage back in the mid '80s. With the five of us it would have taken over a week to build all of the trusses. It took a little over fur fours to place and fasten the 31 trusses. Four of us took them to the end where the doors were going to be, with the truss upside down. We would set them about a foot from where they belonged, and use to long 2" * 4" to stand it up to where the fifth man was waiting to nail it with a temporary brace. Then we moved the ends to the marks to screw them down. We had most of the pearlings and metal roof up before dark.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Paul Hovnanian P.E. wrote: []

[]

Believing that MBAs are the designers of the downfall of the US, I've wanted to go undercover, get an MBA, and discover, expose, and ridicule these folk's weltanschauung.

It will never happen, like many things, but I think it will be required for someone to go through the program, to not get brainwashed, and to come out the other end to write an expo-say.

Can you imagine, I mean even for a minute, that you would sacrifice the long term well being of your children, and their children, and their's, for tomorrow's big haul? The MBA next door does this on a daily basis.

G W Bush has an MBA. He appears to have no managerial or financial skills.

He also has a B.S. in history. He appears to have no knowledge of that either.

I wonder what that means?

That he replied to all this "buy your university diploma"-spam?

Meindert

But it tastes better with mint sauce

--
- Mark Randall
http://www.temporal-solutions.co.uk
http://www.awportals.com

A horrible painful death to all of you!

Macros are great for setting up itterators :o)

--
- Mark Randall
http://www.temporal-solutions.co.uk
http://www.awportals.com

In message , dated Wed, 13 Sep 2006, mc writes

I don't know; you could ask on one of several newsgroups on etymology or linguistics.

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OOO - Own Opinions Only. Try www.jmwa.demon.co.uk and www.isce.org.uk
There are benefits from being irrational - just ask the square root of 2.
John Woodgate, J M Woodgate and Associates, Rayleigh, Essex UK

["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.design.] On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 16:32:41 GMT, Joerg wrote

...and they even run their own NNTP news server, with several support forums in German and English, all of which are continuously frequented by CadSoft staff (and management). Somehow it looks like they're operating out of a garage, but they seem to have been occupying their niche very successfully for quite a while now (I think I first used Eagle in '91).

robert

"Joel Kolstad" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

Nobody, except corporations with ressources far outstripping their clue, automates office - it breaks on *every* release and every third fixpack or so. Somewhere deep inside corp. IT. @my place there is a dedicated test bed just fiddling with automation issues.

The "truth" is another one I think.

First off, a business does not care about "why" or "how" it cares about results. Results - in the office realm - being glossy slides and glowing reports that can lure customers to part with money for product. They want to go from "glossy brochure" to "money" as quickly as possible. It is quick to buy the pacakge everyone else also uses. If Microsoft goes t*ts-up and nobody can read any old documents anymore - well, that is probably your sucessors problem.

Secondly, the yardstick for everything in a business is money. Money gives consequence to the person controlling it. Thus the IT department with a budget of 10% of turnover becomes a "strategic asset" and the manager gets to sit next to the boos on the board. An IT department with a budget below

1% of turnover is merely "services" - like the janitor. People howl when the toilet blocks up but once the problem is gone the janitor can go to.

In reality the big spending IT department might be wasting money and the small spending too little - but it will be the Big Gorilla from IT swinging his Gold Card that gets all the attention (and he makes the corporate jet look like a trivial thing on the budget too - which is also appreciated).

So, In My Opinion, the choice between Open Source and Proprietary Software are probably not made based on the merits of each solution but rather more on what the reward structure *really* (and not what is says but what it does) emphasize.

This process is allowed to work because shareholders actually do not care about their money anyway, being happy with single digit percentage profits on hundreds-of-million turnovers - so why should the people they hire to look after them care more!?

In the old days, 1990, the "yield" on investment in f.ex. GEC and ABB was above 15%, enforced by draconian management. Which, considering the risk of running a business is about right compared to bonds (which were about 8%). Today, all across the board, one would *make money* by investing the assets of most large businesses in bonds with the puny interest they carry today!

This is sick, but it will not change before "investors" become aware that the game of higher stock prices is not "investing", it is the game of getting executives stock options converted into a fat slice of the shareholders money. And still they do not care!

Openoffice is an office clone, therefore it aquires the same properties: In this case Bloated beyond Sustainability.

Very few open source developers can be arsed enough to keep up tracking bugs and understanding where to fix without breaking the architecture with 300++ MB of source code. That's what is inflicted on people at work; Open Source should be fun because youe are not getting paid.

In message , dated Thu,

14 Sep 2006, Frithiof Andreas Jensen writes

It really isn't possible to get to 15% now, and it wasn't in 1990 unless you were in a dominant market-share position in a very rapidly-growing market. Competition is fierce and rapidly-responding. In consumer electronics, there is a surfeit of unnecessary, relatively low-level 'innovation' - all these incompatible disc formats for example. What attracts large margins are totally new systems that the public can see an immediate advantage in acquiring.

In many really big businesses, e.g. food, you'd do better with a 3.5% savings account!

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OOO - Own Opinions Only. Try www.jmwa.demon.co.uk and www.isce.org.uk
There are benefits from being irrational - just ask the square root of 2.
John Woodgate, J M Woodgate and Associates, Rayleigh, Essex UK

OpenOffice is certainly large, and to some extent bloated, but it's fairly close to being complete as an office pack - there are very few features that could be added that are of real use to the great majority of users. MS Office reached that stage with Office 98 (or was it 97? I never use the stuff myself, so I don't remember exactly). The big problem MS has with Office is persuading people to keep upgrading - there is nothing that many people want to do with the software that can be done better with the newer versions.

I do hope that OpenOffice doesn't get much bigger, though, and that they don't integrate any more apps in the main package.

That's true for many open source projects, but not all - some, like OpenOffice, have a heavy influence of corporate sponsorship. A significant proportion of the developers of OpenOffice are paid workers (mostly paid by Sun), and thus *can* be told to do the boring stuff.