#71
Post
by hellosailor » Sat Aug 19, 2017 11:44 am
"That's like saying there's no excuse to stupidity. "
Not at all. What was the line from Forest Gump? Stupid is as stupid does? And mental (or physical) abilities and lack thereof are to a great extent fixed by genetics and the environment, not something that can be actively reviewed and modified. Yet.
As opposed to programming, where there are definite processes and procedures that can be used for quality control and function checks. I think it was between NT5.1 (XP) and Vista (NT6) that MS announced a big change, from assigning programming tasks that used to be "one programmer, one module of code" to a massive internal process shift to "one module, one programing TEAM". I have no idea how that worked out...except the product still isn't polished.
In the shift from solo to teams, the concept is easy and proven. Two pairs of eyes, two minds, two different skill sets, are more likely to see errors and to have at least one person not as tired and likely the be missing or making them. It is the same thing in the publishing world, where a proofreader with "alien eyes" used to be the norm. Someone who has no idea of what they are reading, will catch errors that the author themself will always miss. In fact, sometimes the proofreaders are not native language readers, or they read the pages upside down. In both cases the result is that every letter--not just sentences--becomes a task, and is checked on a higher level.
In the business world, in the programming world, the international standard is not surprisingly ISO9000 and similar. Microsoft and many others do not follow an ISO process, which includes testing, feedback, and continual correction and improvement. And that's really old hat mundane business process, but they choose to ignore it.
Or then again, there are some folks like Rosie O'Donnell, who prove that you can be *belligerently* stupid, not just ignorant or incapable of understanding, but proudly making a real concerted effort to remain uninformed and refuse to learn, even though they are able to. Like the software companies that believe in "ship now, beat the competition to market, we can fix the product later".
That was also, however briefly, part of Microsoft. I don't recall who was replacing who...Myrvold / Balmer, perhaps?...The decision had been made to throw out NT4's spaghetti code and wrote NT5 all new. And Gates pushed for a 2000 release. The head of the program finally said "Lock out whatever isn't ready and doesn't work, the rest SHIPS NOW WE CAN FIX IT LATER". Yes, that was Windows2000 and a year later, after they finished the missing and broken sections, 5.1 shipped as XP. Proving that you can substantially improve programming--if you are willing to take the time to do it. (And gobs of additional feedback and true alpha/beta/gamma testing.)
I have a good friend who was at one time a C programmer. He was about to lose a holiday weekend because he had a stack of code to fix, and no matter how many times he reread the printout, he couldn't find the bug. Hours later...a comma can be critical, and some cheap SOB was pushing the printer ribbons (remember ribbons?) too far. He finally saw the faint incorrect comma. problem solved. Really, there's no excuse for the little stuff like that. It CAN be fixed.
"The only good silicon life form, is a dead silicon life form." [Will Rogers]
-- Harboring a retired T61P with Vista/U/32 and housebreaking a younger W530 foolishly upgraded from Win7/64 to Win10.