Posts by Gavan Fantom

LG GD910 Watch Phone

Handheld mobile phone

While this seems a really neat thing for people using bluetooth hands-free in their cars, would the authorities consider it as a hand-held device for the purposes of law enforcement?

The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

Hands-free kits make drivers even more dangerous

If you ban phones, what will the idiots do instead?

There are plenty of other things to find to distract idiots while driving. Like changing the music, tapping their feet to the boat on the accelerator pedal, putting on make-up, shouting at other drivers, masturbating, you name it.

What I would like to see is a proper scientific study done to see if some people are better able to put driving first, and if that's a skill that can be learnt or if it's a fixed personality trait.

Of course, that's not headline material.

Mozilla hits back at Firefox 3 quality slur

Releasing Software with Bugs

To the people who have said that no software should be released until *all* bugs are fixed, please think a little harder about what you're asking for.

All software has bugs, and even if you only consider known bugs, it's simply not possible to reach the point of actually releasing software without some known bugs still in it. It's too high a threshold for the real world.

If you were to postulate that no software is ever released by anybody until all known bugs are fixed, you simply would not have any software. At all. You wouldn't have had DOS, Windows, OS/2, OS X, Linux or any other operating system. You wouldn't even have a BIOS on your PC. You wouldn't have a mobile phone. And you most certainly wouldn't have a web browser. Not that that would matter, because apache and IIS wouldn't have been released either, so you wouldn't have any web servers to browse with your non-existent browser.

The question is simply how high to set the bar. Set it too low and you release software which falls over and people consider to be full of bugs. Set it too high and you simply don't release software, or you release it years too late. It would be pointless trying to release Firefox 3.0 in time for the 2012 olympics, because by then the web standards and features will have moved on, Opera and IE will have moved on, and nobody will use Firefox any more. It will be great for browsing archive.org, but nothing else.

So come on, leave them alone. Let them get on with their release engineering process. And then it's your choice whether to use what they release.