Well, it tends to work in the areas where UML (in any of its incarnations) and the Unified Process reigns supreme. Now, the important thing before putting any claims about UML, object oriented programming and Agile is to understand the background behind their origins.
The Unified Process precursors were initially developed by consultants helping improve the code quality at Ericsson. The work was mostly in the area of voice switches and network management equipment. These consitute a specific field of software design which is quite different from the rest of the industry.
The most important difference is that there is an existing specification to which the software must comply. The specification already defines what the software is supposed to do for each allowed input, what are the error conditions, how to handle errors and this is usually defined as a set of simple and very strict rules. This type of task can be very easily expressed as a flow chart. The data objects are mostly defined in the protocol spec so there is no data design work to wrestle with. The spec rules are trivial to map to elementary state machines and are usually very small and well defined. They can be easily written with test cases and unit tested. And most importantly there is plenty of system resource to implement them.
While the methodology behind this type of work can be applicable to other fields there is no justification whatsoever to state that it is the only correct methodology.
It is not applicable to systems whose behaviour is mostly determined by a resource constraint.
In order to apply it to a system you have to define the specification first and express it in terms which are suspiciously similar to a Telecom switch spec - trivial actions with well defined input and output.
It is not applicable to systems where the conditions determining the change of execution are complex and cannot be expressed in terms of simple rules. Best example is possibly heavy duty math. It is nearly invincible to UML, UP and Agile attacks.
It shot down at least several aircraft due to friendly fire.
Further to that at least several of the blasts in Ryadh and other places around the gulf in Gulf War 1 did not look anything like Scud blasts. Smaller, high explosive blasts, some of them right above the ground instead of after hitting it. I remember even CNN voicing the suspicion that it was not a Scud blast, but the patriot selfdestructing (and this part disappearing immediately from all repeats of the coverage).
If I recall correctly, at least one of these strange blasts had casualties.
So no, I am not blaming Patriot for failing to shoot down R1s. I am blaming it for blowing up civilian ground targets while trying to do so. Along with a few friendly aircraft for good measure.
Both radiation bugs in both cases have killed less people then the shiteware used in Patriot missile system. Ariane and Mariner get an honorable mentioning, Raytheon doen't. Why?
There also no mentioning of power grid system bugs. The recent US blackout was a good example.
First, A company that buys top of the line technology and after that screws it magestically for the sole reason that it is "Not Invented Here (tm)" is bound to have some serious troubles down the road.
Second, Suse marketed towards Europe and was quite successfull. KDE was one of the major pieces in the puzzle and one of the reasons for SuSe success. By taking this step, Novell shows that it does not give a flying shit about the Europe market wishes.
So there is nothing myopic here. It is just business Frankie, just business. I will simply give my money to someone who actually pays attention to the market where I operate. Novell is showing that it is not that company.
Mainframe manufacturing with all relevant support and consulting
PC manufacturing
So on ad naseum...
It is in fact a serious cutdown. It is quite strange to see the BackOffice and Batch Processing services go. They were doing it for a very large proportion of the banks on the UK market at one point.
Typical case of American disregard for market needs outside America.
Seen that many times in the days when I used to work for an American company. As one of my coworkers used to say: American "technical" middle management are like seagulls, they come from across the ocean, shit all over you, nick your sandwiches, scream loudly for a while above your head, make a right mess and after that fly back leaving you to do janitorial work for a few weeks.
It is a real pity that this has happened to SuSe. And based on what I see I think I will drop out of consideration any Novell products for the foreseeable future. I do not like seagulls.
More then twenty years ago one of the Italian historians (forgot the name) did an experiment on the feasibility of the Archimedes death ray. Italian sun, boat and 100+ footsoldiers with flat polished metal bronze sheets. A resource Siracuse had on the walls facing the sea anyway. They already had the soldiers there and they already had metal shields.
The boat ignited no problems.
No need for flower petal-like MIT contraptions done by a freshman engineering class, no complex aiming mechanisms, nothing beyond the technology of 4th century BC. Just 100+ humans with exact directions where to aim their light reflections. Apparently does the trick.
"And just one more thing. On your way back, I'd like you to take the time to learn the Babylon 5 mantra: 'Ivanova is always right. I will listen to Ivanova. I will not ignore Ivanova's recommendations. Ivanova is God. And, if this ever happens again, Ivanova will personally rip your lungs out! Babylon control out. Civilians." [Looks at ceiling.]
Xena isn't.
Disclaimer - I am male. I am judging by what my wife likes and what makes her frown in disgust and change the channel.
That was about something more similar to hardlinks IIRC.
I think it was only as an idea that was supposed to be part of XP. It was supposed to be able to replace multiple copies of the same file with a single reference with an increased refcount.
I do not think it ended up in the shipping version.
Even if it did it would have never given XP/2003 the same advantages as link reference counting gives to Unixes because of the differences in the locking model. Actually dunno... With some changes in the default way Windoze installs and deinstalls stuff it may have ended up being useful.
Quite likely. If you have the original video around run in slow motion the sequence "Are you hurt" with Lea at the gate in episode IV. See same thing in the DVD. Compare. Judge for yourself.
If that was not groping in the original dunno what is.
Nope. root@YY:~# cat/proc/cpuinfo | head | grep "model name" model name : Intel(R) XEON(TM) CPU 2.00GHz root@YY:~# cat/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_avail able_frequencies 250000 500000 750000 1000000 1250000 1500000 1750000 2000000 You are mistaking generic speedstep for P4 CloclModulation. Completely different cattle of fish
FYI: Writer has autocomplete. In factr, it works better then the MS Word one as it has a better context adaptation. In MS Word I have to turn it off when I write technical documentation as it keeps coming up with phenomenally cretinous MBA/PHB style suggestions. In OpenOffice I do not. The suggestions are dependent on the text of what you have written so far and get better as you go. As far as the grammar checker - fair point. But it is a much less hindrance then the lack of vector graphic (visio and friends) import. No matter how much I hate the stuff when I have to do trivial network documentation or presentations I have to power up the b*** MS sh***e.
Any Intel P4 has an integrated clock throttle and this is the intended power saving mode. The other power saving features like ACPI idle states have little or no effect.
The problem is that CPU frequency alteration it is not available at OS level under Winhoze server OSes (it uses it only on Centrino laptops and nothing else) and is usually unused under Linux as noone bothers to configure it. If you use it you can throttle down the CPU and power consumption on P4 to match the load.
A well spec-ed server is usually in the 20-30% LAVG range during business hours. This means that with CPU frequency alteration its CPU power consumption will be less then 30% of what it says on the label. If a chunk of load comes around it will pick up to max and then fall back to this level. Further to that, on most good servers the fans are temperature controlled so doing this increases the server MTBF along with the MTBF of the server room cooling system.
By the way, I am not an Intel fanboy, just the opposite, but it has to be given credit were credit is due. It has excellent power saving mechanisms and till recently it was ahead of AMD (Intel worked on SMP, AMD did not). Problem is - nearly noone uses them in the server room. In fact I do not know a single other person who has done a blanket deployment of cpufreqd to all of their server and linux desktop kit.
Re:I would actually buy Office
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Close, but no cigar.
OpenOffice worse component is the bloody Calc. It uses 4 times or so more memory then gnumeric for the same spreadsheets and eats considerably more resources. It is in fact the worst component in OpenOffice. This along with lack of decent chart/vector/diagram integration into both writer and impress are the main factors that hinder the adoption of openoffice in business.
Writer is clearly better then MSWord and is getting better with every release. Calc has been going down since StarOffice 3.3. I have not really played with 4, but 5 was clearly worse then 3.3 and it has not improved since.
When I wrote it I was fully aware that you can get the colloidal sludge into more reasonable form. There are 3 ways to do it - bake, acid or stong base like NaOH. None of this is suitable for a car. Further to this, baking will defeat any energy efficiency gains by adding extra energy expenditure. Acid or Base will always have to be added in excess which creates an extra nasty pollution problem.
I still stand by what I said. This is a complete BS as it is associated with a host of nasty pollution problems. They are different from the type we deal with now, but they exits none the less.
Reading the Taco rant (deliberately spelled without Cmdr) I had a good laugh at this one: "But If the US Government told me to change my name...".
Well the Bulgarian government already did it to all turks and muslims in 1984. The greek government did it to all Bulgarians and muslims in 1920. The... did it... Shall I continue?
Actually they already do practically force you to change your name. I had a hysterical bout of laughter recently listening to a friend of mine. He has to travel quite often to the US and he has a collegue of Middle Eastern appearance. With the name of Jihad. Guess what happens to the guy at US customs and border control every time. As he is not the only one I bet that someone already changed his name to get over this...
It has emissions and of a very ugly kind. True, Al will happily give hydrogen when whacked with a hyperheated steam. It is the well known firefighters rule of "never try to extinguish burning Aluminium with water".
There is a problem though - under controlled condition the reaction results in colloidal Alx(OH)y/AlxOy suspension which is a right mess. Its mechanical properies are all over the place so you cannot filter it, separate it or deal with it by any reasonable means. So the idea is a BS for most applications.
Wrong. It is an obscure coding page. It is a page you hit only if you miss a link on a navigation menu after an overdose of ethanol solutions on a Friday night. Now the stats for http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather that will be interesting. Especially the latter as it has cookies (if you set your hometown) so it can filter out down to unique visitors.
Intel will not allow you to use Centrino BRANDING if you cannot deliver the battery life and WiFi features promissed by Intel Marketing in the Centrino marketing campaign shots. This essentially means that you cannot mention the name Centrino in any of your promotional literature, adverts and compliance statements.
In order to comply with this spec (and use the name)you must have a system that is capable to use runtime frequency alteration and do it effectively enough to deliver the battery life promissed for an average load. No linux kernel prior to 2.6.7 can do it. 2.6.9-2.6.11 with a correctly configured cpufreqd gets close, but not quite enough. If you want to really do it you need to have the on-demand CPUfreq kernel policy manager working. Which means IIRC 2.6.12+ or a heavy dose of backported patches. Further to that you have to have Intel wifi drivers and improvements to the 802.11 stack which are not mainline kernel yet.
There are also a few other conditions, but these are the important ones.
Frankly, the only reason to get through all this idiocy is if there is a laptop manufacturer there waiting to start shipping Linux as an option on their laptops. Wonder who this is...
Daihatsu has a similar steering wheel paddle-controlled gearbox as an option on most of their pensioner utility vehicles (YRV, Sirion F-Speed, Terios, most Japanese specific models, etc). And guess what - the manual is still better:-)
As a matter of fact the paddle controlled gearbox idea was first implemented in Formula 1 cars very long ago. It is by no means a BMW idea and it is not limited to extortionately priced M3 erectile disfunction compensators.
The screenshots show an omega class destroyer being blown up into bits by a wing of Enterpise V class starships. None of which are too scale. Either the destroyer is 10 times bigger then it should be or the ships are 10 times smaller then they should be. Further to that there are two screenshots that look like spoofs of the Babylon 5. One looks like the opening "C&C window" shot and another one looks like a spoof of the Ivanova "Mayday" message with the twist that Ivanova looks like Ozzie. Looking at the screenshots I have some doubts that I will waste my bandwidth on downloading it...
Gotta see it to believe it. Unless the creators of the movie are the only finns with a sense of humour in all Finland or members of their Swedish minority...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it tends to work in the areas where UML (in any of its incarnations) and the Unified Process reigns supreme. Now, the important thing before putting any claims about UML, object oriented programming and Agile is to understand the background behind their origins.
The Unified Process precursors were initially developed by consultants helping improve the code quality at Ericsson. The work was mostly in the area of voice switches and network management equipment. These consitute a specific field of software design which is quite different from the rest of the industry.
The most important difference is that there is an existing specification to which the software must comply. The specification already defines what the software is supposed to do for each allowed input, what are the error conditions, how to handle errors and this is usually defined as a set of simple and very strict rules. This type of task can be very easily expressed as a flow chart. The data objects are mostly defined in the protocol spec so there is no data design work to wrestle with. The spec rules are trivial to map to elementary state machines and are usually very small and well defined. They can be easily written with test cases and unit tested. And most importantly there is plenty of system resource to implement them.
While the methodology behind this type of work can be applicable to other fields there is no justification whatsoever to state that it is the only correct methodology.
It is not applicable to systems whose behaviour is mostly determined by a resource constraint.
In order to apply it to a system you have to define the specification first and express it in terms which are suspiciously similar to a Telecom switch spec - trivial actions with well defined input and output.
It is not applicable to systems where the conditions determining the change of execution are complex and cannot be expressed in terms of simple rules. Best example is possibly heavy duty math. It is nearly invincible to UML, UP and Agile attacks.
So on, so fourth.
George Orwell, The Animal Farm
No.
It shot down at least several aircraft due to friendly fire.
Further to that at least several of the blasts in Ryadh and other places around the gulf in Gulf War 1 did not look anything like Scud blasts. Smaller, high explosive blasts, some of them right above the ground instead of after hitting it. I remember even CNN voicing the suspicion that it was not a Scud blast, but the patriot selfdestructing (and this part disappearing immediately from all repeats of the coverage).
If I recall correctly, at least one of these strange blasts had casualties.
So no, I am not blaming Patriot for failing to shoot down R1s. I am blaming it for blowing up civilian ground targets while trying to do so. Along with a few friendly aircraft for good measure.
Seconded.
Both radiation bugs in both cases have killed less people then the shiteware used in Patriot missile system. Ariane and Mariner get an honorable mentioning, Raytheon doen't. Why?
There also no mentioning of power grid system bugs. The recent US blackout was a good example.
Myopic? Gimme a break.
First, A company that buys top of the line technology and after that screws it magestically for the sole reason that it is "Not Invented Here (tm)" is bound to have some serious troubles down the road.
Second, Suse marketed towards Europe and was quite successfull. KDE was one of the major pieces in the puzzle and one of the reasons for SuSe success. By taking this step, Novell shows that it does not give a flying shit about the Europe market wishes.
So there is nothing myopic here. It is just business Frankie, just business. I will simply give my money to someone who actually pays attention to the market where I operate. Novell is showing that it is not that company.
BackOffice/NonRealtime infrastructure
Mainframe manufacturing with all relevant support and consulting
PC manufacturing
So on ad naseum...
It is in fact a serious cutdown. It is quite strange to see the BackOffice and Batch Processing services go. They were doing it for a very large proportion of the banks on the UK market at one point.
Seconded.
Typical case of American disregard for market needs outside America.
Seen that many times in the days when I used to work for an American company. As one of my coworkers used to say: American "technical" middle management are like seagulls, they come from across the ocean, shit all over you, nick your sandwiches, scream loudly for a while above your head, make a right mess and after that fly back leaving you to do janitorial work for a few weeks.
It is a real pity that this has happened to SuSe. And based on what I see I think I will drop out of consideration any Novell products for the foreseeable future. I do not like seagulls.
Seconded.
More then twenty years ago one of the Italian historians (forgot the name) did an experiment on the feasibility of the Archimedes death ray. Italian sun, boat and 100+ footsoldiers with flat polished metal bronze sheets. A resource Siracuse had on the walls facing the sea anyway. They already had the soldiers there and they already had metal shields.
The boat ignited no problems.
No need for flower petal-like MIT contraptions done by a freshman engineering class, no complex aiming mechanisms, nothing beyond the technology of 4th century BC. Just 100+ humans with exact directions where to aim their light reflections. Apparently does the trick.
No. This is a metric of good marketing. Not of good product. Completely different thing.
Xena is not female empowerment
Now this is female empowerment in Sci Fi:
"And just one more thing. On your way back, I'd like you to take the time to learn the Babylon 5 mantra: 'Ivanova is always right. I will listen to Ivanova. I will not ignore Ivanova's recommendations. Ivanova is God. And, if this ever happens again, Ivanova will personally rip your lungs out! Babylon control out. Civilians." [Looks at ceiling.]
Xena isn't.
Disclaimer - I am male. I am judging by what my wife likes and what makes her frown in disgust and change the channel.
That was about something more similar to hardlinks IIRC.
I think it was only as an idea that was supposed to be part of XP. It was supposed to be able to replace multiple copies of the same file with a single reference with an increased refcount.
I do not think it ended up in the shipping version.
Even if it did it would have never given XP/2003 the same advantages as link reference counting gives to Unixes because of the differences in the locking model. Actually dunno... With some changes in the default way Windoze installs and deinstalls stuff it may have ended up being useful.
Quite likely. If you have the original video around run in slow motion the sequence "Are you hurt" with Lea at the gate in episode IV. See same thing in the DVD. Compare. Judge for yourself.
If that was not groping in the original dunno what is.
Completely removed in the DVD cut.
Nope. /proc/cpuinfo | head | grep "model name" /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_avail able_frequencies
root@YY:~# cat
model name : Intel(R) XEON(TM) CPU 2.00GHz
root@YY:~# cat
250000 500000 750000 1000000 1250000 1500000 1750000 2000000
You are mistaking generic speedstep for P4 CloclModulation. Completely different cattle of fish
FYI: Writer has autocomplete. In factr, it works better then the MS Word one as it has a better context adaptation. In MS Word I have to turn it off when I write technical documentation as it keeps coming up with phenomenally cretinous MBA/PHB style suggestions. In OpenOffice I do not. The suggestions are dependent on the text of what you have written so far and get better as you go.
As far as the grammar checker - fair point. But it is a much less hindrance then the lack of vector graphic (visio and friends) import. No matter how much I hate the stuff when I have to do trivial network documentation or presentations I have to power up the b*** MS sh***e.
It is not Intel at fault. Or not exactly.
Any Intel P4 has an integrated clock throttle and this is the intended power saving mode. The other power saving features like ACPI idle states have little or no effect.
The problem is that CPU frequency alteration it is not available at OS level under Winhoze server OSes (it uses it only on Centrino laptops and nothing else) and is usually unused under Linux as noone bothers to configure it. If you use it you can throttle down the CPU and power consumption on P4 to match the load.
A well spec-ed server is usually in the 20-30% LAVG range during business hours. This means that with CPU frequency alteration its CPU power consumption will be less then 30% of what it says on the label. If a chunk of load comes around it will pick up to max and then fall back to this level. Further to that, on most good servers the fans are temperature controlled so doing this increases the server MTBF along with the MTBF of the server room cooling system.
By the way, I am not an Intel fanboy, just the opposite, but it has to be given credit were credit is due. It has excellent power saving mechanisms and till recently it was ahead of AMD (Intel worked on SMP, AMD did not). Problem is - nearly noone uses them in the server room. In fact I do not know a single other person who has done a blanket deployment of cpufreqd to all of their server and linux desktop kit.
Close, but no cigar. OpenOffice worse component is the bloody Calc. It uses 4 times or so more memory then gnumeric for the same spreadsheets and eats considerably more resources. It is in fact the worst component in OpenOffice. This along with lack of decent chart/vector/diagram integration into both writer and impress are the main factors that hinder the adoption of openoffice in business. Writer is clearly better then MSWord and is getting better with every release. Calc has been going down since StarOffice 3.3. I have not really played with 4, but 5 was clearly worse then 3.3 and it has not improved since.
IAAC by the way (I am a Chemist).
When I wrote it I was fully aware that you can get the colloidal sludge into more reasonable form. There are 3 ways to do it - bake, acid or stong base like NaOH. None of this is suitable for a car. Further to this, baking will defeat any energy efficiency gains by adding extra energy expenditure. Acid or Base will always have to be added in excess which creates an extra nasty pollution problem.
I still stand by what I said. This is a complete BS as it is associated with a host of nasty pollution problems. They are different from the type we deal with now, but they exits none the less.
Reading the Taco rant (deliberately spelled without Cmdr) I had a good laugh at this one: "But If the US Government told me to change my name...".
Well the Bulgarian government already did it to all turks and muslims in 1984. The greek government did it to all Bulgarians and muslims in 1920. The ... did it... Shall I continue?
Actually they already do practically force you to change your name. I had a hysterical bout of laughter recently listening to a friend of mine. He has to travel quite often to the US and he has a collegue of Middle Eastern appearance. With the name of Jihad. Guess what happens to the guy at US customs and border control every time. As he is not the only one I bet that someone already changed his name to get over this...
Seconded.
It has emissions and of a very ugly kind. True, Al will happily give hydrogen when whacked with a hyperheated steam. It is the well known firefighters rule of "never try to extinguish burning Aluminium with water".
There is a problem though - under controlled condition the reaction results in colloidal Alx(OH)y/AlxOy suspension which is a right mess. Its mechanical properies are all over the place so you cannot filter it, separate it or deal with it by any reasonable means. So the idea is a BS for most applications.
Wrong. It is an obscure coding page. It is a page you hit only if you miss a link on a navigation menu after an overdose of ethanol solutions on a Friday night. Now the stats for http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather that will be interesting. Especially the latter as it has cookies (if you set your hometown) so it can filter out down to unique visitors.
In order to comply with this spec (and use the name)you must have a system that is capable to use runtime frequency alteration and do it effectively enough to deliver the battery life promissed for an average load. No linux kernel prior to 2.6.7 can do it. 2.6.9-2.6.11 with a correctly configured cpufreqd gets close, but not quite enough. If you want to really do it you need to have the on-demand CPUfreq kernel policy manager working. Which means IIRC 2.6.12+ or a heavy dose of backported patches. Further to that you have to have Intel wifi drivers and improvements to the 802.11 stack which are not mainline kernel yet.
There are also a few other conditions, but these are the important ones.
Frankly, the only reason to get through all this idiocy is if there is a laptop manufacturer there waiting to start shipping Linux as an option on their laptops. Wonder who this is...
BMW is not the only one.
:-)
Daihatsu has a similar steering wheel paddle-controlled gearbox as an option on most of their pensioner utility vehicles (YRV, Sirion F-Speed, Terios, most Japanese specific models, etc). And guess what - the manual is still better
As a matter of fact the paddle controlled gearbox idea was first implemented in Formula 1 cars very long ago. It is by no means a BMW idea and it is not limited to extortionately priced M3 erectile disfunction compensators.
Interesting read. Especially the bottom part. Am I just being paranoic, or I see a "coincidence" here... Guess not...
The screenshots show an omega class destroyer being blown up into bits by a wing of Enterpise V class starships. None of which are too scale. Either the destroyer is 10 times bigger then it should be or the ships are 10 times smaller then they should be. Further to that there are two screenshots that look like spoofs of the Babylon 5. One looks like the opening "C&C window" shot and another one looks like a spoof of the Ivanova "Mayday" message with the twist that Ivanova looks like Ozzie. Looking at the screenshots I have some doubts that I will waste my bandwidth on downloading it...
Gotta see it to believe it. Unless the creators of the movie are the only finns with a sense of humour in all Finland or members of their Swedish minority...