By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: November 8, 2008
Saturday, 8 November 2008
- Specifying Performance ★
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David Weiss, on measuring and specifying software performance:
While performance is one of the most important nonfunctional requirements, it’s often the most difficult to define. For new features it’s difficult to know where to set the performance goal because there’s not always some similar functionality to compare it against. Further, how would you define “slow” or “fast” in an objective and verifiable way? Confronted with this problem most software engineers simply skip this section of requirements with the justification, “If it’s too slow, I’ll see it and we’ll fix it then. I know slow when I see it.” If performance is specified, often some arbitrary time limit is set with little reasoning behind the performance goal.
- Splatter Exhibition in London ★
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Art exhibition regarding “the plausible impossibility of death in the mind of cartoon characters”. (Thanks to Daniel Nelson.)
- Bizarre Android Bug ★
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Ed Burnette:
It turns out the bug in Android I wrote about yesterday was worse than we thought. When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges.
This isn’t after the phone was attacked or modified, this is apparently a bug in a shipping version of the Android OS. Google has already issued a fix, but, still, this is bizarre.
- Philip Greenspun: ‘Let G.M. Go Bankrupt’ ★
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America seems to have an irrational soft spot for its auto industry. It’s a shame that these once-great companies have fallen so far, but the simple truth is that Ford and G.M. make ugly, inefficient cars that few people want to buy.