Saturday Night Live finally made me laugh this season with The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders (dailypicksandflicks.com).
At my previous job, the ancient version of Firefox we used had become sort of a joke. It would constantly render incorrectly such that I was always chasing down formatting/styling bugs that had long since been fixed. Or, it would incur miserable slowdowns on Javascript-heavy client applications (of which we had many). Add to that, almost every site we visited claimed that we needed to "upgrade our browser to a more secure version," and some would even refuse to function based on that alone. I would have to get a plugin to falsely report my version in order to gain access to some sites.
At one point, I tried to take it upon my self to upgrade my workstation's Firefox. I downloaded the source code, and did the usual ritual to get it configured and compiled. However, about halfway through the compilation, it would come back with memory errors, claiming the compiler (a relatively small, concise program) had ran out of memory in trying to compile the pieces of Firefox together.
Turns out, even though Firefox itself will run on a machine with less than 4GB of RAM, you will still need at least 4GB of RAM (developer.mozilla.org) in order for it to compile correctly. Add to that the fact that Firefox eventually outgrew being able to compile on 32-bit Windows systems (developers.slashdot.org), such that you would need a 64-bit machine with 4GB+ memory in order to even build a 32-bit Firefox. That is to say: Firefox, though perhaps only a "simple" web browser, is a large project, both in scope, breadth, and the number of people involved with its development.
That said, Firefox releases are estimated to weigh in at ~2.9 million lines of source code.
Which is why I laugh when I hear size estimates of HealthCare.Gov to be in the 500 million lines of source code. (www.alexmarchant.com)
This implies to me that that number is one or more of the following:
First I laugh, then I get a little sad. I used to work at a place like CGI Federal doing government contracting. How the government wants to build software is a bad way to build software. Having one big thing that solves all problems is a near-impossible task. Having dozens of different contractors working on one big thing without clear leadership makes it worse. Having a "tech surge" at the end of a project is, in the software engineering world, a well-documented way to kill a project and/or prolong its maintenance in perpetuity.
Much as I like to have software engineering in the news, I'd prefer it to not be like this.
It's only 14 types of aircraft, Josh. I mean, the aircraft has blown its weight, stealth/detection, performance, and range requirements.
Oh, and it will only take 6 F-35s to replicate the 90% of the capabilities of two A-10s in a forward combat air support role.
Oh, and the F-35 has to trade stealthiness for compatibility with current battlefield communications systems, just like the F-22. Strange how physics rears its ugly head.
Oh, and the F-35 only has one engine, which means that carrier-based F-35s with an engine flameout are guaranteed to go swimming. This is in contrast with every other carrier-based aircraft since World War II, 70 years ago. NBD.
The F-35 might go for the same engine "improvements" that the F-22 did, and the F-22 is giving any flying pilot the Black Lung, just like coal miners.
NPR had a pretty good comment on why many of the Governments tech contractors are terrible. It was summed up in that any tech company with muscle and expertise don't even bid for Government contracts. The way contracts have to be written require a full time division just to bid for the job, never mind produce it.
Having had to mine government Request For Proposals for jobs, I know even something as small as landscaping is a task in tedium. Bids build in inordinate amount of profit and overhead for simple things, because companies create many proposals, but win few. The time dedicated to constructing the proposal blows any profit away. So prices are inflated. While competition should yield a better product, in government contracting instances it results in massively inflated prices.
In this healthcare case, it's probably a result of poor reporting, poor subcontractors, poor project management, overrun budgeting and timeline. If an existing powerhouse in the tech world was presented with this task, they could probably produce something streamlined and under budget. I can only wonder what a Google or Apple Healthcare site would look like. It would probably be easy to use and would actually work.
More graphical comparisons here: http://www.informa...lion-lines-of-code/ (www.informationisbeautiful.net)
Sing Along Songs for the Damned & Delirious
"Ultimately, this is too weird a record to ever succeed in any kind of mainstream way..."
This album was hugely overfunded on indiegogo (similar to the more recent album push by Devin Townsend... which I also funded). I'm a huge fan of fan-funded albums (ever since I definitely got my money's worth from Anamanaguchi's latest), and this one is no exception. These Canadians used the fan money to make their best album yet. The song Without Prejudice alone would have been worth the money, but the entire album just rocks off your face with riff after riff and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. And even though their original drummer left, guest Chris Adler of Lamb of God fame just annihilates the kit.
4.0/5 - Great album for fans of fan-funded frenetic fretwork. Bought the tab book for this as well... and this shit is ALMOST impossible. But not quite.
From the LibreDWG project page:
LibreDWG is based on LibDWG (http://libdwg.sourceforge.net (libdwg.sourceforge.net)), which is written with variable names, documentation and comments in Esperanto.
Goddamn hilarious.
