Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (19130)	1/26/2007 6:20:51 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Trevor, Within a very short time frame, even allowing for "Internet Time" (remember that? It was soooo long ago!), the propensity for using open source (both) software and networking throughout Europe has become clear. One basis for my stating this is the community fiber projects we see being undertaken in some of the Scandinavian States and throughout the Netherlands, and another, the article I posted several days ago in Msg# 19084 "Move Over Silicon Valley" here: tinyurl.com On this board I've posted references to Web 2.0 development coming from Canada, Eastern Europe and The Netherlands, and even among posters in this forum, the only one who discusses Linux development with regularity (when he posts, which is becoming far too infrequently) is Jochen Jansen, a citizen of Germany. I am not suggesting that open source development is in any way falling dormant in the US. But, suddenly, we're seeing developments coming out of the EU that not only rival what's coming out of the States, but in some highly visible ways, taking a lead, as well. The 287-page FLOSS Report you posted is a whopper, both in terms of import and physical girth! I'm tempted to kill a tree, but I won't. It's on my agenda for this weekend. Thanks. FAC

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (19130)	1/28/2007 2:25:06 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software By Jason Pontin \| Jan. 28, 2007 \| NY Times Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer of C++, the most influential programming language of the last 25 years, has said that “our technological civilization depends on software.” True, but most software isn’t much good. Too many programs are ugly: inelegant, unreliable and not very useful. Software that satisfies and delights is as rare as a phoenix. All this does more than frustrate computer users. Bad software is terrible for business and the economy. Software failures cost $59.5 billion a year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded in a 2002 study, and fully 25 percent of commercial software projects are abandoned before completion. Of projects that are finished, 75 percent ship late or over budget. The reasons aren’t hard to divine. Programmers don’t know what a computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring over illustrated manuscripts. Worse, programs today contain millions of lines of code, and programmers are fallible like all other humans: there are, on average, 100 to 150 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, according to a 1994 study by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. No wonder so much software is so bad: programmers are drowning in ignorance, complexity and error. Continued at: tinyurl.com ------

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (19130)	1/29/2007 10:38:35 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Trevor, Of the sections of the FLOSS study that I have read, I was able to glean a fair amount of insight, although much of it was steeped in more statistical nuance than I felt the need to tolerate in parts. I kept being reminded of the methodology section in the beginning of the paper for its attention to the need for more inter-disciplinary analysis, recalling that this is something that we discussed here not so long ago - calling it, instead, trans-sectoral analysis. But the same points applied. I couldn't help sensing that viewing the subject from the sole perspective of FLOSS, as opposed to a larger canvass that included proprietary software and its dependencies, as well, I wasn't getting a good comparative sense of either genre in absolute terms, but the paper did deliver the point that the effects of FLOSS were profound. But then, I suppose, the paper would have been 1,288 pages with even more statistics, instead of only 288 with much fewer ;) The methodology section that I alluded to above: -- Methodology "The design of the research methodology provides for an approach based on sound expertise in economic analysis and reliable scenario-based forecasting, proven success in large empirical economic data collection backed by high standards of academic rigour, and supported by expertise in software engineering. Interesting studies have already been done on this topic, as software technologies continue to evolve and present new challenges to policymakers, ICT businesses and economic scholars. However, there is a serious lack of interdisciplinary studies that are supported by quantitative measures and empirical evidence on the impact of FLOSS on ICT markets – and in turn, on innovation and economic competitiveness. In particular, few national-level studies including significant economic analysis exist3 and no previous European or global studies provide an integrative approach to answering the question: what is the economic impact of open source? "The current study aims at providing an integrated empirical framework for evaluating the effects of FLOSS-related changes in information technologies and in the impact on ICT industry and economic competitiveness. This is accomplished by forming a list of economic, innovation and technology indicators to assess the impact of FLOSS over time, allowing for forecasting under a set of differing scenarios, based on a unique set of pre-existing and ongoing databases that form perhaps the single largest set of FLOSS-related empirical data in the world." ------ FAC