The default position will be that nothing and I mean nothing in the corporate domain will be able to open a TCP connection to anything in the SCADA domain.
and the guys in charge of this will take it all the way to senior management if you even look like you are thinking of breaking this rule.
and you'll have to sign some serious career limiting documents before the guys in suits will sanction this.
or at least that's how it's been at place I have worked where they have SCADA networks and my specialist topic is data integration so I tend to bump into these issues fairly often
SCADA networks are usually on a completely separate domain from the corporate network. It'll be behind two sets of firewalls controlled by anal retentive engineers
No survival of the fittest is actually survival of the fittest gene. Read Dawkin's The Selfish Gene - nothing new here that hasn't been written up in pop science for 30 years as far as I can tell
Back when I was at University my supervisor was doing Natural Language research using LISP.
They would type in short stories then ask the computer questions about the stories
One story included something about John's driving his car and crashing into Mary This uncovered a bug in the code where they were try to access the first element of an empty list
It may have been a less advanced toolset, but the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benifits. Now? If it isn't going to make a profit next month, trash it. Fuck the modern era. We did more with slide rules and determination than we do now with modern technology.
Nope re the mindset back then. I was coding for living back then and the ratio of good developers to bad developers is still pretty much the same now. Go and read the Mythical Man Month. What's sad is not that 'we were better at this stuff in the good old days' but that we, as an industry, haven't learned how to do things better having had 30 years of practice.
A friend of mine led the development team that built the onboard software for the Huygens probe. The QA cycles they went through would be insane for any normal project.
For example they gave the compiled code to a completely separate team and got them to reverse engineer the specifications.
This uncovered a Y2K bug in the ADA runtime that the code was built on
As the test driven development mantra goes - test until you aren't scared any more Knowing that your code will be run once and only once in production, there's no second chances and that the box it's running on is some 10's of light hours away makes you rather easily scared
Read Fielding's Thesis - for me the most interesting part is where he discusses and suggests a definition of an architecture. If I recall, he defines an architecture as a set of design constraints chosen to achieve a set of goals.
Last year I was doing Java CAPS work and you don't get much more enterprisey that that. Under the hood JCAPS uses lots of open source stuff,. For example, if I recall correctly it uses some of the Apache Commons libraries and it certainly uses stuff like Ant.
However, the powers that be wouldn't let me use them, their logic being - if there's an issue in an Apache Commons lib then Sun (now Oracle of course) have the horse power to fix it but we don't. If we have an issue with one of the libraries Sun sure as anything won't fix it.
And I found it difficult to argue against this stance.
On the other hand in some enterprises the difficulties, costs and time delays of going through formal procurement procedures can kill you. Sometimes the politics play out so that you can use FOSS because it doesn't need to be procured and actually deliver something before hell freezes over.
Different types of enterprises and different types of politics but it's not, in my experience, in my experience because FOSS is cheaper than alternatives it to do with support and internal procurement policies.
That's perfectly true. However, in this case, I was sure that Dave couldn't sense it. My son also has Asperger's and I wouldn't want to put someone in that position if they could be stressed by the situation without having the skills to cope with it. That was the very problem - the situation was very stressful and most of my team were affected by it and didn't have the coping skills - Dave wasn't stressed by it.
Yes ago we were doing a data warehousing project. This involved getting other departments to build extract feeds from their system so that we could pull all the data together. Some one had to chase down progress from all these third parties. It was no fun at at all. Spending hours hassling people who were tee'd off with you 'wasting' their time.
Dave had mild Aspergers. We got him to do the hassling as he couldn't sense the irritation of the people he was calling.
Whoops - wasn't logged in - testing Firefox with Tree Style Tabs
My teenage kids don't pay anything to get to the mall when they come with me and, trust me, getting 1/3 of the buy price back for a game which is no longer the thing would really appeal to them.
I'd guess that the teenage demographic is larger for console games than for PC games.
Don't assume that you're the target demographic
About 1980 and I am working for a small Cambridge(UK) software house. I used to back up disc to disc and run on the target discs to verify the backup. In addition I would periodically, ok ok when I remembered, backup to tape.
I left the company and went to work in London. A few months later Terry came in during the middle of the night to do some work. He tried booting his machine and it wouldn't. So, he tries another disc, that didn't work so he tries the first disc in a second machine.
Fast forward an hour - every machine has it's disc heads screwed and every disc has been ripped up by a crashed disc head.
Good job my tape backup was still around - it was the only backup of the company's core product.
I worked for a computer bureaux in the 80's. We upgraded the operating system - very cool, the new release allowed larger files. We didn't, unfortunately, upgrade the backup utility to handle these larger files. Months go by - then there's a problem - whoops backups are useless - Luckily there's a physical audit trail so we we can pay for very large data entry exercise to get our client's data back.
A couple of years later, I am in the pub with some mates and John turns up. I ask him how he's managed to finish work and get to the pub so early. "I did a fast backup" he said. I was interested so I asked him to explain. "Oh, it's easy, get the target tapes from the rack, rub out the old date, write the new date, put them back into rack and go to the pub"
Worked for a large software shop in the 90's. I am part of a decent sized Oracle development (circa 50 devs). Ops decides that Oracles backup routines are too slow and 'optimize' them. Some weeks later - guess what - there's a problem and the backups are useless - No physical audit trail this time - the team has to redo all of there work - it was not good for the project budget, the team moral or the client
of what you're hoping for then accept. Unless you have signed contracts with customers and you have the funds to take it legal if they go back on these. Trust me - been there more than once. Take the money - invent something new again but this time have it properly capitalized
Where's the money coming from to fund your current exercise - could it run out one day?
Do you actually need to take the risk of turning this current opportunity into significant wealth or are you content with something more modest
Could you easily generate the next "great idea" or do you believe this a one-off
The big question is "should you bank or gamble?" - only you can judge this but trust me - banking is always harder than you think so if you have a real offer then consider it seriously - gambling always feels attractive to people who place bets
And yes - hire an attorney - if you can't afford one then you aren't really playing yet.
Going with the exclusive option as a developer means that you've got a well defined platform to target - major advantage. Trying to target multiple platforms is much harder but a mature game developer should have this covered. This story is pure corporate politics as it would appear the game's developers "Terminal Reality" are ready for multiple games consoles.
Yep - corporates playing pissing matches at the expense of the developers and the players.
The host planet - electrolysis
on
When Comets Attack
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The FA talks about the comet having a 'host planet' around which it orbited long enough for the 'host planet's' magnetic field to electrolyse the water in the comet into hydrogen and oxygen. It was the ignition of the hydrogen that is claimed to have causes the explosion. Possible of course but it seems a bit of a stretch to me. Occam's razor and all.
"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet." - Michael A. Jackson
That being said, when I hit the experts only situation I can usually get 2 orders of magnitude improvement in speed. I just then have to spend the time to document the hell out of it so that the next poor bastard who maintains the code can understand what on earth I've done. Especially given that all too often I am this poor bastard.
You're a project manager I am told and here's your team. He's called Jon and he's a 17 year old intern
Jon could actually code believe it or not (he's now a CS Professor)
Our task was to build - wait for it - here's the spec - the entire spec - "The complete Business System" - budget 5K GDP.
We eventually worked out that this meant the three ledgers plus stock control - so we went and talked to some people at the customer site to try and understand what that meant. I guess we did some business analysis but we certainly didn't call it that as it hadn't come up on my degree
Now the dangerous, off the leash, fresh CS grad really started to get stuck in:
Mmmm - we'll need some sort of thing to store information on disc and it can't be just a serial file. We need to be able to access specific addresses on the disc - let's mod the OS, TRIPOS. TRIPOS what quite interesting - open source with two comments in the entire thing if I recall correctly, "See the plot of Ruddygore" "Watch this bit, it's tricky". Did I mention that databases didn't come up on my degree either. There wasn't enough time left to cover this after we'd learned about augmented state transition machines and the Turing Halting Problem
OK - we'll need to be able to store information on disc using a LISP like paradigm. Let's build a general purpose storage thingy - what shall call it? Management now start to get excited - they're not going to get the "Complete Business System" for 5k, we've spent that already but look at all the IP these guys are generating.
Now let's get real - this thing's going to have deal with money and BCPL only has integers - we need to invent a library that deals with pounds and pennies. "Wow, Wow" says management "every one will buy that, can it do dollars and cents?"
"Sorry guys" says management "the bank says we have to let you go"
I got a job in London on double the money and Jon went to University. I got the arrogance slapped out of me by the old hands who explained to me that it had all been invented before
Can you guess what happened to the company that thought it could hire a fresh CS grad as a project manager?
Coding in BCPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL)on 64k TRIPOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS) machines with no memory protection was probably the worst experience for me.
BCPL effectively had no types and memory management was very c like.
If memory got tight, which it always did, you needed to needed to split your application into pieces and get the code to page sections of itself in and out of memory.
If you didn't initialise a variable it was probably equal to zero. If you used it as a pointer then your were probably smashing all over the bottom of memory.
The stand alone debugger was loaded at the bottom of memory so you'd now smashed that to pieces and you were probably left to debug by walking through memory by pushing buttons of the front of the machine, reading the hex of memory locations and trying to de-assemble and decompile the memory one word at a time
Now I use Eclipse - luxury - don't miss those days at all.
Slashdot Mirror
He's probably first level support for some package
The default position will be that nothing and I mean nothing in the corporate domain will be able to open a TCP connection to anything in the SCADA domain.
and the guys in charge of this will take it all the way to senior management if you even look like you are thinking of breaking this rule.
and you'll have to sign some serious career limiting documents before the guys in suits will sanction this.
or at least that's how it's been at place I have worked where they have SCADA networks and my specialist topic is data integration so I tend to bump into these issues fairly often
SCADA networks are usually on a completely separate domain from the corporate network. It'll be behind two sets of firewalls controlled by anal retentive engineers
No survival of the fittest is actually survival of the fittest gene. Read Dawkin's The Selfish Gene - nothing new here that hasn't been written up in pop science for 30 years as far as I can tell
Back when I was at University my supervisor was doing Natural Language research using LISP.
They would type in short stories then ask the computer questions about the stories
One story included something about John's driving his car and crashing into Mary
This uncovered a bug in the code where they were try to access the first element of an empty list
The LISP engine errored with.... drum roll....
"Illegal CAR usage"
It may have been a less advanced toolset, but the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benifits. Now? If it isn't going to make a profit next month, trash it. Fuck the modern era. We did more with slide rules and determination than we do now with modern technology.
Nope re the mindset back then. I was coding for living back then and the ratio of good developers to bad developers is still pretty much the same now. Go and read the Mythical Man Month. What's sad is not that 'we were better at this stuff in the good old days' but that we, as an industry, haven't learned how to do things better having had 30 years of practice.
A friend of mine led the development team that built the onboard software for the Huygens probe. The QA cycles they went through would be insane for any normal project.
For example they gave the compiled code to a completely separate team and got them to reverse engineer the specifications.
This uncovered a Y2K bug in the ADA runtime that the code was built on
As the test driven development mantra goes - test until you aren't scared any more
Knowing that your code will be run once and only once in production, there's no second chances and that the box it's running on is some 10's of light hours away makes you rather easily scared
Read Fielding's Thesis - for me the most interesting part is where he discusses and suggests a definition of an architecture. If I recall, he defines an architecture as a set of design constraints chosen to achieve a set of goals.
as there were a few hints that she might have been learning to act ;)
I think that it depends on the enterprise.
Last year I was doing Java CAPS work and you don't get much more enterprisey that that. Under the hood JCAPS uses lots of open source stuff,. For example, if I recall correctly it uses some of the Apache Commons libraries and it certainly uses stuff like Ant.
However, the powers that be wouldn't let me use them, their logic being - if there's an issue in an Apache Commons lib then Sun (now Oracle of course) have the horse power to fix it but we don't. If we have an issue with one of the libraries Sun sure as anything won't fix it.
And I found it difficult to argue against this stance.
On the other hand in some enterprises the difficulties, costs and time delays of going through formal procurement procedures can kill you. Sometimes the politics play out so that you can use FOSS because it doesn't need to be procured and actually deliver something before hell freezes over.
Different types of enterprises and different types of politics but it's not, in my experience, in my experience because FOSS is cheaper than alternatives it to do with support and internal procurement policies.
That's perfectly true. However, in this case, I was sure that Dave couldn't sense it. My son also has Asperger's and I wouldn't want to put someone in that position if they could be stressed by the situation without having the skills to cope with it. That was the very problem - the situation was very stressful and most of my team were affected by it and didn't have the coping skills - Dave wasn't stressed by it.
My son has Asperger's so I wasn't completely uninformed
Dave had mild Aspergers. We got him to do the hassling as he couldn't sense the irritation of the people he was calling.
Whoops - wasn't logged in - testing Firefox with Tree Style Tabs
My teenage kids don't pay anything to get to the mall when they come with me and, trust me, getting 1/3 of the buy price back for a game which is no longer the thing would really appeal to them.
I'd guess that the teenage demographic is larger for console games than for PC games. Don't assume that you're the target demographic
About 1980 and I am working for a small Cambridge(UK) software house. I used to back up disc to disc and run on the target discs to verify the backup. In addition I would periodically, ok ok when I remembered, backup to tape.
I left the company and went to work in London. A few months later Terry came in during the middle of the night to do some work. He tried booting his machine and it wouldn't. So, he tries another disc, that didn't work so he tries the first disc in a second machine.
Fast forward an hour - every machine has it's disc heads screwed and every disc has been ripped up by a crashed disc head.
Good job my tape backup was still around - it was the only backup of the company's core product.
I worked for a computer bureaux in the 80's. We upgraded the operating system - very cool, the new release allowed larger files. We didn't, unfortunately, upgrade the backup utility to handle these larger files. Months go by - then there's a problem - whoops backups are useless - Luckily there's a physical audit trail so we we can pay for very large data entry exercise to get our client's data back.
A couple of years later, I am in the pub with some mates and John turns up. I ask him how he's managed to finish work and get to the pub so early. "I did a fast backup" he said. I was interested so I asked him to explain. "Oh, it's easy, get the target tapes from the rack, rub out the old date, write the new date, put them back into rack and go to the pub"
Worked for a large software shop in the 90's. I am part of a decent sized Oracle development (circa 50 devs). Ops decides that Oracles backup routines are too slow and 'optimize' them. Some weeks later - guess what - there's a problem and the backups are useless - No physical audit trail this time - the team has to redo all of there work - it was not good for the project budget, the team moral or the client
if it isn't verified
Just a quick google so I am sure there's lot's more
of what you're hoping for then accept. Unless you have signed contracts with customers and you have the funds to take it legal if they go back on these. Trust me - been there more than once. Take the money - invent something new again but this time have it properly capitalized
The big question is "should you bank or gamble?" - only you can judge this but trust me - banking is always harder than you think so if you have a real offer then consider it seriously - gambling always feels attractive to people who place bets
And yes - hire an attorney - if you can't afford one then you aren't really playing yet.
Going with the exclusive option as a developer means that you've got a well defined platform to target - major advantage. Trying to target multiple platforms is much harder but a mature game developer should have this covered. This story is pure corporate politics as it would appear the game's developers "Terminal Reality" are ready for multiple games consoles.
Yep - corporates playing pissing matches at the expense of the developers and the players.
The FA talks about the comet having a 'host planet' around which it orbited long enough for the 'host planet's' magnetic field to electrolyse the water in the comet into hydrogen and oxygen. It was the ignition of the hydrogen that is claimed to have causes the explosion. Possible of course but it seems a bit of a stretch to me. Occam's razor and all.
This is one of my favourite quotes:
"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet." - Michael A. Jackson
That being said, when I hit the experts only situation I can usually get 2 orders of magnitude improvement in speed. I just then have to spend the time to document the hell out of it so that the next poor bastard who maintains the code can understand what on earth I've done. Especially given that all too often I am this poor bastard.
You're a project manager I am told and here's your team. He's called Jon and he's a 17 year old intern
Jon could actually code believe it or not (he's now a CS Professor)
Our task was to build - wait for it - here's the spec - the entire spec - "The complete Business System" - budget 5K GDP.
We eventually worked out that this meant the three ledgers plus stock control - so we went and talked to some people at the customer site to try and understand what that meant. I guess we did some business analysis but we certainly didn't call it that as it hadn't come up on my degree
Now the dangerous, off the leash, fresh CS grad really started to get stuck in:
"Sorry guys" says management "the bank says we have to let you go" I got a job in London on double the money and Jon went to University. I got the arrogance slapped out of me by the old hands who explained to me that it had all been invented before
Can you guess what happened to the company that thought it could hire a fresh CS grad as a project manager?
Coding in BCPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL)on 64k TRIPOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS) machines with no memory protection was probably the worst experience for me.
BCPL effectively had no types and memory management was very c like.
If memory got tight, which it always did, you needed to needed to split your application into pieces and get the code to page sections of itself in and out of memory.
If you didn't initialise a variable it was probably equal to zero. If you used it as a pointer then your were probably smashing all over the bottom of memory.
The stand alone debugger was loaded at the bottom of memory so you'd now smashed that to pieces and you were probably left to debug by walking through memory by pushing buttons of the front of the machine, reading the hex of memory locations and trying to de-assemble and decompile the memory one word at a time
Now I use Eclipse - luxury - don't miss those days at all.