4 ms·

This comment really make me wonder if you have coded on a large project with a significant group of people. Building an iPhone app is nearly impossible for a si

This comment really make me wonder if you have coded on a large project with a significant group of people. Building an iPhone app is nearly impossible for a single coder to get 100% right, where they have massive control of everything. Add the heterogenous environment of Windows and dozens of programming groups trying to come together, and it is nonsensical to say "they could, at least, implement correctly something they invented." Software is way harder than that.

rbanffy 16y ago
I think Microsoft's view of software quality has contaminated the industry. If you can't build your own spec correctly, maybe that's because you got overambitious with it. I find it ludicrous that Microsoft could write the spec, find the resources to corrupt the process at ISO, discredit a valuable institution, cripple it by inflating membership with members that don't participate on any other issues in order to promote a standard that aims to be impossible to implement by third parties and be unable to command the resources required to implement it correctly in the first place. Didn't they have a reference implementation for the standard in the first place?!
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  So you mean Microsoft is to blame for Netscape 4.x sucking and crashing on every OS? Office has code dating back to the 80s. Read more for a backstory http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Who said anything about Netscape? No. It's not OK for Netscape to ship buggy software and it's certainly not OK for a 200+ billion dollar company to do so. What's the excuse? They couldn't hire programmers to correctly implement their own spec years after it being published?
    - recoiledsnake 16y ago
      >Who said anything about Netscape? You did, in a way. By saying this: >>I think Microsoft's view of software quality has contaminated the industry. >They couldn't hire programmers to correctly implement their own spec years after it being published? Throwing bodies at something doesn't make it right in software engineering. Haven't you heard of bugs and issues in Google's or Apple's products? After all, Apple is a bigger company now. I was going to link to some Apple bugs but Apple Discussions was down (cue 'why can't a 200+ billion company keep their forums up? Can't they hire more people to fix it?' ) Unable to add beyond 100 pages to document(maybe they need to hire more people to hit 200?) http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2687922&tstart=45 http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=26879... http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/apple-looking-into-slow-ios-4-performance-on-iphone-3g.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/apple-looking-into... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg&feature=playe...
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        > in a way You mean you interpreted as me saying something about Netscape. > Throwing bodies at something doesn't make it right in software engineering Usually no, but Microsoft can throw a lot of bodies and rebuild from scratch, this time with good engineering. > Apple is a bigger company now. I don't think so. It's just more valuable.
        recoiledsnake 16y ago
        Rebuilding something like Office will take a decade and will likely have no benefits at all. Rewrites rarely make sense at all. Just see how old some of the code thats in widespread use is. Android is built on Linux that started in 1991(ignoring that Linux was based on the even older Minix and it's Unix roots). OS X/iOS are based on BSD, Darwin and Unix which are quite old. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html >I don't think so. It's just more valuable. The point still stands.
- tzs 16y ago
  Why hold Microsoft to standards (no pun intended) that no one else can meet? Documents produced by Office validate better against the OOXML transitional spec than documents produced by OpenOffice validate against the ODF spec. If the ISO process had followed its normal course, the final OOXML spec would have been close to what went in, with a few fixes. Instead, IBM and a few others tried at every step to stop the process, and if they couldn't stop it, they pushed through significant changes to the spec. In effect they changed the process from standardizing (with some cleanup) an existing format into writing a new format.

rbanffy 16y ago

I think Microsoft's view of software quality has contaminated the industry. If you can't build your own spec correctly, maybe that's because you got overambitious with it. I find it ludicrous that Microsoft could write the spec, find the resources to corrupt the process at ISO, discredit a valuable institution, cripple it by inflating membership with members that don't participate on any other issues in order to promote a standard that aims to be impossible to implement by third parties and be unable to command the resources required to implement it correctly in the first place. Didn't they have a reference implementation for the standard in the first place?!

recoiledsnake 16y ago
So you mean Microsoft is to blame for Netscape 4.x sucking and crashing on every OS? Office has code dating back to the 80s. Read more for a backstory http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Who said anything about Netscape? No. It's not OK for Netscape to ship buggy software and it's certainly not OK for a 200+ billion dollar company to do so. What's the excuse? They couldn't hire programmers to correctly implement their own spec years after it being published?
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    >Who said anything about Netscape? You did, in a way. By saying this: >>I think Microsoft's view of software quality has contaminated the industry. >They couldn't hire programmers to correctly implement their own spec years after it being published? Throwing bodies at something doesn't make it right in software engineering. Haven't you heard of bugs and issues in Google's or Apple's products? After all, Apple is a bigger company now. I was going to link to some Apple bugs but Apple Discussions was down (cue 'why can't a 200+ billion company keep their forums up? Can't they hire more people to fix it?' ) Unable to add beyond 100 pages to document(maybe they need to hire more people to hit 200?) http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2687922&tstart=45 http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=26879... http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/apple-looking-into-slow-ios-4-performance-on-iphone-3g.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/apple-looking-into... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg&feature=playe...
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > in a way You mean you interpreted as me saying something about Netscape. > Throwing bodies at something doesn't make it right in software engineering Usually no, but Microsoft can throw a lot of bodies and rebuild from scratch, this time with good engineering. > Apple is a bigger company now. I don't think so. It's just more valuable.
      - recoiledsnake 16y ago
        Rebuilding something like Office will take a decade and will likely have no benefits at all. Rewrites rarely make sense at all. Just see how old some of the code thats in widespread use is. Android is built on Linux that started in 1991(ignoring that Linux was based on the even older Minix and it's Unix roots). OS X/iOS are based on BSD, Darwin and Unix which are quite old. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html >I don't think so. It's just more valuable. The point still stands.
tzs 16y ago
Why hold Microsoft to standards (no pun intended) that no one else can meet? Documents produced by Office validate better against the OOXML transitional spec than documents produced by OpenOffice validate against the ODF spec. If the ISO process had followed its normal course, the final OOXML spec would have been close to what went in, with a few fixes. Instead, IBM and a few others tried at every step to stop the process, and if they couldn't stop it, they pushed through significant changes to the spec. In effect they changed the process from standardizing (with some cleanup) an existing format into writing a new format.