No silver bullet for software development

Software engineering is a bit different from other enginnerings. That is, software doens't have the same properties as other manufactured products, and conventional rules may be useless to this area of design. Brooks, in his text "No Silver Bullet", compares software design to a werewolf, and explains why there is no magical solution to development problem.

Following Aristotle, we can divide software development problems in two groups: Essencial problems and Accidental ones. The great monster appears we wen tend to focus on accidental problemas rather than solving the main issues.

Essencial problems are those wich belongs to the design process. They are inherently embedded in desing process. Four software main essencial issues are:

- Complexity: The management of an abstract entity like software is a problem itself. Unlike other manufactured products, software usually grows unlinearly, and the lack of effective models to describe it parts, makes it worse to take control of the whole project. Communication problems also produces great damages, since there is no concrete model and people have to understand the same of an invisible thing.

- Conformity: Einstein said that natural laws must be really simple, since God has projected them. For software engineering this is not valid. Softwares must be in conformity with lots of complex rules (frequently conflicting one), which makes is a big problem for the software engineering.

- Changeability: Software represents functions, that, always have to be changed or even improved. Even when everything works OK, people think about new functionality, that need to be added.

- Invisibility: This has much to do with the complexity problem. We need powerful tools and good geometric abstractions to represent all the software structure and behavior. Unlike an architect blueprints, software models generally don't follow an hierarchical order, and its many interactions makes the visualization and understanding difficult. Inivisibility one of the major problems in software development, but that has been minimized with a wide range of models and abstractions developed in the past years.

Trying to overcome these essencial problems will certainly grow your success chances, but, one more time, there is no miracle solution.

We'll talk later about some accidental problems, which are easier to face.

Apple iPhone unlocked by a teenager

The 17 year old teenager, George Hotz, managed to hack Apple iPhone, so that it can now connect to mobile phones networks. Before, iPhone was only able to communicate with AT&T networks. Hotz, that spent all the summer in his personal project (precisely 500 hours), will be trading his tunned iPhone for a new car. CertiCell, who bought Hotz discovery, does not have plans about commercializating this new iPhone right now, but it certainly will.

New Yahoo! email

Since the Gmail perfect world, Yahoo email was always in background when talking about email services. Now things seem to get funnier. Yahoo annouced some features that will decorate its new email service. Services like instant messaging, mobile message exchanging will be in a single box, what will give Yahoo a better position in this race. Let's se then what Google's prepared for us.

Nintendo Wii is a best-seller

Nintento Wii is now the best-seller console since Microsoft's XBox 360, that until this moment was leading the third generation consoles market. The data is from Video Game Chartz, and shows that Nintendo Wii is getting more costumers especially in North America and Japan.

Wii is the fith video game from Nintendo, and provides the user a different experience while playing. With an wireless joystick, the player can play a bowl match, or take an f1 race. It came just after Game Cube, and brings a new perspective to the video games world.

Just like everything that is new, Nintendo Wii brought some doubts about its success, but now we see that it did it.

Microsoft agitates for open-source patent pacts

Following some frosty responses to Microsoft's controversial patent deal with Novell last year, the software maker has begun a more aggressive attempt to persuade open-source software companies to license its know-how.

But does open-source infringe?
The only problem with Microsoft's plan: so far its actions have only rallied the open-source troops, and not everyone believes the open-source gang egregiously violates the intellectual property regime.

"I don't think open-source is not playing by existing intellectual property rules," said Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with DLA Piper. "Currently, open-source (participants) use copyright for everything they do. A lot of open-source companies have patents."

Radcliffe also derided Microsoft's reasoning that the purported open-source patent violations aren't accentual because the company thinks hundreds of cases exist. "It's an illusion or deceptive to say merely because there apparently are potentially a lot of patents infringed, it's intentional. That's certainly not the legal standard," he said. "I would also be willing to bet, given the number of patent suits against Microsoft that they've lost, under their own theory, Microsoft itself is intentionally infringing."

The fact remains, though, that patents and open-source software can be anathema. Patents give exclusive, proprietary rights to those who hold them, but open-source software is built on a philosophy of free technology sharing. Many in the open-source realm deride software patents and have been lobbying to curtail their influence.

When Novell and Microsoft announced their patent deal, the Free Software Foundation was quick to say it would move to prohibit such arrangements in a future version of the General Public License (GPL), the most widely used open-source license. The most recent draft seeks to prohibit all future deals of that nature and potentially past ones, too.

The timing of Microsoft's pronouncement is telling, Radcliffe said, "particularly when you think that GPL version 3 is still in draft. I don't think that is a coincidence," he said.

Source: http://news.com.com/Microsoft+agitates+for+open-source+patent+pacts/2100-7344_3-6183662.html?tag=nefd.lede