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Re: [ontolog-forum] How not to write specifications

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Francis McCabe <frankmccabe@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:58:15 -0700
Message-id: <7D0FEDDB-94D2-475B-AD08-922388D72FD8@xxxxxxx>
John
  I would like to know the evidence that you have for:    (01)

>
> This complexity explains how Microsoft managed to spend more money on
> developing Vista than NASA spent on the Apollo mission to the moon.    (02)

This is quite a quote!
Frank    (03)


On Jul 1, 2008, at 7:07 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:    (04)

> In response to legal requirements by various governments and the EU,
> Microsoft has released a massive dump of protocols, binary file
> formats, and other specifications for Windows Vista (including the
> .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007,
> Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007:
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jun08/06-30InteropUpdatePR.mspx
>
> That's the good news.  The bad news is that people who have looked
> at this dump have summarized the results in one pithy observation:
>
>    In order to understand any of it, you must understand *all* of it.
>
> Another comment is that the complexity of this dump makes the  
> successful
> reverse engineering by open-source developers seem like a miracle.  In
> fact, there are reports that Microsoft employees read the open source
> documentation in order to understand the products they're working on.
>
> This complexity explains how Microsoft managed to spend more money on
> developing Vista than NASA spent on the Apollo mission to the moon.
> It also explains how Apple, with a fraction of the resources of MSFT,
> was able to produce a more stable, more efficient, more secure OS
> that also provides more functionality and a better user interface.
>
> The moral of this story is that writing complete specifications
> cannot, by itself, make a system intelligible.  Furthermore, the
> task of rewriting those spec's in a formal language, by itself,
> will do nothing to make them more intelligible.
>
> What makes Apple's OS X more intelligible, efficient, and robust
> than Vista is the fundamental principle at the core of Unix from
> day 1:  modularity.
>
> The original NT, which was based on the same foundation as OS/2,
> was very modular until version 3.5.  But for version 4.0, Bill Gates
> made an incredible blunder:  he edicted that the GUI interfaces for
> Windows had to be incorporated into the OS kernel.  That decision
> destroyed the modularity, increased the complexity of the kernel by
> many orders of magnitude, and enabled bugs in the GUI to crash the
> entire system.
>
> Modularity is essential for any large project of any kind,
> including formal ontologies.
>
> John Sowa
>
>
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