Eric Raymond’s famous essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar compares commercial software projects to cathedrals and open source software projects to bazaars. Cathedrals are carefully planned. Bazaars are not. The organizational structure a bazaars emerges without deliberate coordination of its participants. The open source community has embraced the metaphor of the bazaar and the informality and spontaneity it implies.
Shmork wrote the following observation in the comments to a Coding Horror post yesterday that discussed the difficulties of using Linux software.
Almost nobody in the Western world shops at real-life bazaars either, because they are dodgy, unsafe, and unregulated. And in the Western world, we like things to be reliable, working, safe. So cathedral it is. Even our flea markets aren’t bazaars, really, they’re just knock-off cathedrals.
The ISO C++ Standard committee voted to closures and lambda (anonymous) functions to the language according to Herb Sutter. Anonymous functions would make templates much easier to use, but it seems odd to add these features to C++.
It is widely assumed that parachute use improves your chances of surviving a leap from an airplane. However, a meta analysis suggests this practice is not adequately supported by controlled experiments. See the article Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomized controlled trials by Gordon C S Smith and Jill P Pell. The authors summarize their conclusions in the abstract.
As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
