June 30, 2004
Catastrophic Failure
A colleague at work received the following error message while working with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003:
Says a lot about the quality of the product, doesn't it?
June 23, 2004
UML Fever
The March 2004 issue of ACM Queue features a humorous article by Alex E. Bell of Boeing Corporation, titled Death by UML Fever. The article is available online and focuses on the overuses and misuses of the Unified Modeling Language. A must-read for everyone having close contact with UML.
June 06, 2004
The Joy of Computing
Todays online issue of The New York Times has an interview with Bill Joy (free registration required to view). Bill Joy, the co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, left the company last September to "sit down and relax with a glass of wine and a blank sheet of paper," as he told a reporter. Joy's many contributions to computing include the vi editor, parts of BSD Unix, the Network File System, and, most recently, JXTA and other contributions to Java.
In 2000, Joy wrote a controversial article for Wired, titled "Why the future doesn't need us", where he predicted doom for mankind should the intelligent machines we are going to built in the not-so-far future some day decide that they do not need us any longer. The New York Times interview mostly focuses on similar topics.