Yep to me Software Engineering is more like Design.
The Architects design stuff, and the Builders build it.
The Programmers design stuff, and the Compilers build it.
The trouble is too many people don't get it and manage software projects the way they manage the Build phase of a civil engineering project. When they should be managing it the way they manage the Design phase.
The build phase of a civil engineering project can involve scores of workers and heavy machinery. The build phase of a software engineering project involves the programmer typing "make all" and going to fetch a coffee.
The big problem: Civil Engineering: build phase costs 10-100x design phase Software Engineering: design phase costs > 1000x more build phase
And that's why Management ends up shipping the "plastic models/blueprints" as v1.0 since they compile and kinda work.
How software engineering differs from computer science is similar to the way civil/mechanical engineering differs from math.
Engineering does involve math, but a lot of times you don't really do a lot of math - something else does it for you:). Same for software engineering, 90% of the time you aren't doing the "pure CS" stuff- sorting algorithms, info theory etc.
You're doing stuff like figuring out how to talk (and what to say) to some database or Active Directory, or whether the API for something is documented (correctly) or not. Or creating a brand new protocol that is not too inefficient and mere mortal programmers can use without screwing up.
I doubt real engineers would use a completely unreliable piece of software.
Real engineers are practical enough to use software works well enough. They're not mathematicians who keep looking for complete proofs, or 100% - they are well aware of the real world.
And in the real world, it will be exceedingly unlikely that the finite element analysis software will work fine for lots of different cases, but fail dangerously for your case even though it is not really very different to other common cases.
If the case is something really new and "far out", I bet a proper engineer would do more checks and perhaps add higher safety margins.
The other thing is, an experienced engineer will often know whether something is dangerous. It's just like you looking at a branch and guessing whether it will hold your weight or not. If a branch is way too weak it's easy to guess that.
Similarly if the software gives a result that's ridiculous an experienced engineer should notice it.
So the software has to give a result that's not ridiculous, but still dangerous despite the margins of errors etc.
It's more likely that the contractor botches up the job (or cheats) and doesn't build according to the required quality and spec - e.g. use more sand in the concrete to save cost, use less concrete, etc.
It's not that hard to design a system that doesn't kill people. I can't recall the last time my DHCP server killed someone, even though I've killed it so many times.
In fact I'd say it's hard to design an autonomous system that can keep killing people despite everyone else trying to stop it.
Y'know like one of those killer robots from the future.
If it doesn't meet their rules the hackers shouldn't win the prize.
But we might still give low ratings to StrongWebmail the service.
Hmmm, their site seems to require javascript to log in. I'll give it a low rating just for that alone.
Oh, even worse: enabling js for their domain alone doesn't work! Seems like they need googleapis.com.
I'm not going to enable js for other domains - what if googleapis gets exploited one day? Even if strongwebmail is ok, googleapis might not be (look at google's security track record).
At this rate I think the more I look at their system the lower my opinion will be;).
And if it was because of the janitor attack, then the hackers shouldn't win the prize, but in that case I still won't say good things about StrongWebmail to anyone:).
When seat belts fail they could cause big problems too. Furthermore a friend of mine survived a car accident because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt - he was thrown out of the car after it hit a tree, and the car proceeded to wrap itself around another tree - so if he was kept in the car by a seatbelt he would be dead.
BUT I'm still going to stick to wearing my seatbelt. It's still a better bet.
Similarly I'm pretty sure there are far fewer cases of traction control causing a serious accident than serious accidents that would have been prevented (or made less serious) if there had been traction control. FWIW my car doesn't have traction control.
As long as a lot of other humans go some place, there's a high chance the cave dweller would too (assuming the cave dweller is human).
It's called mimicry. Humans are better at mimicry than the other apes.
Most of us do a lot of things we don't understand at all and we do a lot of it by copying. This allows humans to specialize - be subject matter experts, and it allows human society to scale and use ever increasingly complex technology.
A lot of people have no idea about what it takes for there to be lighting, clean running water and air conditioning. Or how food gets to their table (heh some might not eat it if they knew).
1) From a firefox user's PoV - it looks like "Opening a Program from a Website" which is what everyone keeps yelling at them NOT to do.
2) It took me more than 5 minutes to download a simple program that just draws 3D spheres (from your link). Yeah I have a crappy connection, but I doubt "corporate" java apps are going to be small (and I've seen them being updated every few weeks - which means everyone has to redownload). They're fine over the LAN, but this Cloud thing...
FWIW, I've tried the 4K java game stuff and many are great (and download quickly), but there are very few java programmers who can and will do that for "office/corporate apps".
They're moving to a rental model - they want to continue owning everything while you keep handing them money, be unable to copy anything or even reverse engineer stuff.
In some ways they're worse than the "evil communist" stereotype.
Maybe soon you'll only rent houses with a huge upfront deposit, and the Owners will also take a cut every time there's a new tenant - who pays a lot of $$$$$$ to the previous tenant (who needed a loan to pay for the deposit).
Then only the rich have property while the proletariat don't. Well at least it's not complete abolition of private property...
If they just want to mess around instead of doing serious research on new areas, then maybe they should actually stick to messing up the original site.
> the US auto industry is dead because they made cars so awful twenty years ago
No surprise if they really do think like this:
Quote Fight Club: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
They left out the "long term goodwill" factors, and that's what you're talking about: 20 years later, people will still associate your name with shit.
It should be A * B * C * D = X where D = "good/bad factor" - how good we want to be at the cost to ourselves.
While the quote is from a movie, it's clear a lot of CxOs of large companies do think like that and have D = 1.
The reason why Toyota's retain value better is because if you buy a 6 year old Toyota it is more likely to work decently than say a 6 year old Fiat.
You are right most people don't actually consider the resale value much when they are buying a car.
Paying extra money upfront in hope for more money later is a risk and so there should be a significant premium gain on that risk. If there isn't it is a bad investment and you better have other reasons for paying the higher price.
You might as well use the extra money to buy some shares (in Apple?:) ) or invest it some other way.
It's my understanding that the sound engineers, marketing, promos, t-shirts, etc are paid for from the _advance_ the Label "gives" to the Band.
So if the Band goes platinum but still doesn't make enough $$$$$$ to cover all the upfront expenses, the Band could end up in debt to the Label, and so has to write a few more albums etc... Go figure.
Nowadays you can do sound engineering in a home studio for a lot cheaper. It might not be as good, but it seems millions of people find listening to compressed music over crappy earphones acceptable - and by compressed I don't just mean MP3, I mean in terms of dynamic range. Effectively about 8-10 bits of dynamic range instead of the 16 bit or 24 bit possible with modern tech.
What would help musicians and artistes would be a site (or three) that actually provide decent reviews. Reviews that can cater for the myriad tastes. For instance some people consistently like whatever a particular reviewer hates:).
So I'm thinking one could go through all the users and the different ratings and group them into different Points of Views. Then users can choose to see stuff based on any particular PoV. If they prefer a certain PoV they can use that. If they want a different PoV (buying stuff for someone else) they can select that as well. The difficulty is I can't work out an efficient algorithm to handle millions of users and PoVs.
And so does sifting out the gems from the "ho hum". In the past I think the labels did do sifting for gems (and that is still a valuable service). Nowadays I think it's more about control.
You're ignoring the complete system though - if a dog stops performing properly, the handlers stop using the dog.
Also, most breeds of dogs have been bred for generations to be "useful to humans", that coupled with decent training means that the handler saying "bad dog!" is usually punishment enough.
Crime to be insane? If you're insane some countries lock you up for longer - you don't actually have a "release date". You only get out if someone decides you're sane enough...
Secondly it's extremely rare to be the sort of insane where: 1) You make 35000 copies of DVDs for the purpose of keeping them. 2) You retain the ability, time and resources to do 1) 3) You keep them in a warehouse instead of a better controlled environment.
The sad thing is originals (esp of Japanese anime) in Malaysia often have crappy translations too and it's hard to tell. Even worse, in a multi DVD set, the first DVD could be OK, but really bad in the second DVD (e.g. Britannia in the first DVD and Bu-Li-Ta-Ni-Ya in the second).
Another annoying thing is the originals often have ads you can't skip past on an ordinary DVD player. You seldom get that sort of BS with the pirate versions.
Anyway, despite what the _summary_ says I doubt the dogs can normally tell the difference between pirate and original DVDs.
The originals and "unauthorized" editions could even come from the same factory for all you know.
The dogs are just used to find where the huge stashes of DVDs are. If you have a lot of DVDs stored somewhere with no legit paper trail or good explanation then it gets rather suspicious;).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep to me Software Engineering is more like Design.
:).
The Architects design stuff, and the Builders build it.
The Programmers design stuff, and the Compilers build it.
The trouble is too many people don't get it and manage software projects the way they manage the Build phase of a civil engineering project. When they should be managing it the way they manage the Design phase.
The build phase of a civil engineering project can involve scores of workers and heavy machinery.
The build phase of a software engineering project involves the programmer typing "make all" and going to fetch a coffee.
The big problem:
Civil Engineering: build phase costs 10-100x design phase
Software Engineering: design phase costs > 1000x more build phase
And that's why Management ends up shipping the "plastic models/blueprints" as v1.0 since they compile and kinda work.
How software engineering differs from computer science is similar to the way civil/mechanical engineering differs from math.
Engineering does involve math, but a lot of times you don't really do a lot of math - something else does it for you
Same for software engineering, 90% of the time you aren't doing the "pure CS" stuff- sorting algorithms, info theory etc.
You're doing stuff like figuring out how to talk (and what to say) to some database or Active Directory, or whether the API for something is documented (correctly) or not. Or creating a brand new protocol that is not too inefficient and mere mortal programmers can use without screwing up.
> "complete unreliable piece of _software_"
I doubt real engineers would use a completely unreliable piece of software.
Real engineers are practical enough to use software works well enough. They're not mathematicians who keep looking for complete proofs, or 100% - they are well aware of the real world.
And in the real world, it will be exceedingly unlikely that the finite element analysis software will work fine for lots of different cases, but fail dangerously for your case even though it is not really very different to other common cases.
If the case is something really new and "far out", I bet a proper engineer would do more checks and perhaps add higher safety margins.
The other thing is, an experienced engineer will often know whether something is dangerous. It's just like you looking at a branch and guessing whether it will hold your weight or not. If a branch is way too weak it's easy to guess that.
Similarly if the software gives a result that's ridiculous an experienced engineer should notice it.
So the software has to give a result that's not ridiculous, but still dangerous despite the margins of errors etc.
It's more likely that the contractor botches up the job (or cheats) and doesn't build according to the required quality and spec - e.g. use more sand in the concrete to save cost, use less concrete, etc.
It's not that hard to design a system that doesn't kill people. I can't recall the last time my DHCP server killed someone, even though I've killed it so many times.
In fact I'd say it's hard to design an autonomous system that can keep killing people despite everyone else trying to stop it.
Y'know like one of those killer robots from the future.
There are always rules in a contest.
Rule #0 - A "win" is defined by the rules.
If there are no rules, there is no winning. If there is no winning, what sort of contest is it? And who gets the prize?
Yes there may be a weak link in the armor, but if you don't follow the rules you SHOULDN'T get the $10K.
If it doesn't meet their rules the hackers shouldn't win the prize.
;).
But we might still give low ratings to StrongWebmail the service.
Hmmm, their site seems to require javascript to log in. I'll give it a low rating just for that alone.
Oh, even worse: enabling js for their domain alone doesn't work! Seems like they need googleapis.com.
I'm not going to enable js for other domains - what if googleapis gets exploited one day? Even if strongwebmail is ok, googleapis might not be (look at google's security track record).
At this rate I think the more I look at their system the lower my opinion will be
Yeah, I'd want to know that too.
:).
And if it was because of the janitor attack, then the hackers shouldn't win the prize, but in that case I still won't say good things about StrongWebmail to anyone
I don't think I'd be complaining much about huge amounts of cheap storage.
However I'd complain about low bandwidth and high latency.
Imagine if you have 100TB drives but they only do sequential transfers at 200MB/sec and are still stuck at about 10milliseconds access time (7200rpm).
What that means: it'll take 6 days to transfer 100TB at 200MB/sec, and random transfer speeds will be about as crap as now (1-2MB/sec).
I figure that's low risk.
Risk = Likelihood * Impact
When seat belts fail they could cause big problems too. Furthermore a friend of mine survived a car accident because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt - he was thrown out of the car after it hit a tree, and the car proceeded to wrap itself around another tree - so if he was kept in the car by a seatbelt he would be dead.
BUT I'm still going to stick to wearing my seatbelt. It's still a better bet.
Similarly I'm pretty sure there are far fewer cases of traction control causing a serious accident than serious accidents that would have been prevented (or made less serious) if there had been traction control. FWIW my car doesn't have traction control.
> I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding..
;) ).
When you're in an airplane piloted by someone else, your genes matter less to your survival in event of a crash, compared to if you're in a car.
If you're in a plane and it blows up, whether you're sickly or fit or a super genius, you die (unless you're Wolverine
If you're driving a car and you screw up and die, then your genes "fail" and the human gene pool gets "better".
Individuals doing riskier things every day than flying, might actually help improve the gene pool. And perhaps we've evolved that way.
As long as a lot of other humans go some place, there's a high chance the cave dweller would too (assuming the cave dweller is human).
It's called mimicry. Humans are better at mimicry than the other apes.
Most of us do a lot of things we don't understand at all and we do a lot of it by copying. This allows humans to specialize - be subject matter experts, and it allows human society to scale and use ever increasingly complex technology.
A lot of people have no idea about what it takes for there to be lighting, clean running water and air conditioning. Or how food gets to their table (heh some might not eat it if they knew).
Oh... looks like the 5 minutes was to download a new version of Java or something.
And IE doesn't do that prompting, whereas Firefox does (at least on my setup).
> Java has webstart since 1.4 which uses JNLP...
1) From a firefox user's PoV - it looks like "Opening a Program from a Website" which is what everyone keeps yelling at them NOT to do.
2) It took me more than 5 minutes to download a simple program that just draws 3D spheres (from your link). Yeah I have a crappy connection, but I doubt "corporate" java apps are going to be small (and I've seen them being updated every few weeks - which means everyone has to redownload). They're fine over the LAN, but this Cloud thing...
FWIW, I've tried the 4K java game stuff and many are great (and download quickly), but there are very few java programmers who can and will do that for "office/corporate apps".
To be fair, there are jurisdiction issues. Even the **AA have to get cooperation from local governments to take action on "pirates".
I hope they planted a GPS tracking device somewhere though.
They're moving to a rental model - they want to continue owning everything while you keep handing them money, be unable to copy anything or even reverse engineer stuff.
In some ways they're worse than the "evil communist" stereotype.
Maybe soon you'll only rent houses with a huge upfront deposit, and the Owners will also take a cut every time there's a new tenant - who pays a lot of $$$$$$ to the previous tenant (who needed a loan to pay for the deposit).
Then only the rich have property while the proletariat don't. Well at least it's not complete abolition of private property...
Ah progress.
If they just want to mess around instead of doing serious research on new areas, then maybe they should actually stick to messing up the original site.
> the US auto industry is dead because they made cars so awful twenty years ago
No surprise if they really do think like this:
Quote Fight Club: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
They left out the "long term goodwill" factors, and that's what you're talking about: 20 years later, people will still associate your name with shit.
It should be A * B * C * D = X where D = "good/bad factor" - how good we want to be at the cost to ourselves.
While the quote is from a movie, it's clear a lot of CxOs of large companies do think like that and have D = 1.
Sometimes it's not just because you can't afford to drop $60 on the game.
:).
You can't afford to drop the $1000 on the latest hardware to play it the way it's meant to be played.
Yes you can play it in low detail, but that's a $20 experience
When the "enough grunt" hardware drops in price, you could see higher sales, but people might buy other stuff.
FWIW, USD60 is a lot of money in my country. For $60 you can pay for 30 to 60 decent meals.
The reason why Toyota's retain value better is because if you buy a 6 year old Toyota it is more likely to work decently than say a 6 year old Fiat.
:) ) or invest it some other way.
You are right most people don't actually consider the resale value much when they are buying a car.
Paying extra money upfront in hope for more money later is a risk and so there should be a significant premium gain on that risk. If there isn't it is a bad investment and you better have other reasons for paying the higher price.
You might as well use the extra money to buy some shares (in Apple?
It's my understanding that the sound engineers, marketing, promos, t-shirts, etc are paid for from the _advance_ the Label "gives" to the Band.
:).
So if the Band goes platinum but still doesn't make enough $$$$$$ to cover all the upfront expenses, the Band could end up in debt to the Label, and so has to write a few more albums etc... Go figure.
Nowadays you can do sound engineering in a home studio for a lot cheaper. It might not be as good, but it seems millions of people find listening to compressed music over crappy earphones acceptable - and by compressed I don't just mean MP3, I mean in terms of dynamic range. Effectively about 8-10 bits of dynamic range instead of the 16 bit or 24 bit possible with modern tech.
What would help musicians and artistes would be a site (or three) that actually provide decent reviews. Reviews that can cater for the myriad tastes. For instance some people consistently like whatever a particular reviewer hates
So I'm thinking one could go through all the users and the different ratings and group them into different Points of Views. Then users can choose to see stuff based on any particular PoV. If they prefer a certain PoV they can use that. If they want a different PoV (buying stuff for someone else) they can select that as well. The difficulty is I can't work out an efficient algorithm to handle millions of users and PoVs.
Marketing does count for a bit (lot?) [1].
And so does sifting out the gems from the "ho hum".
In the past I think the labels did do sifting for gems (and that is still a valuable service). Nowadays I think it's more about control.
[1] There are tons of very talented musicians out there who are relative unknowns. e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-g45767Tbk&feature=related
You're ignoring the complete system though - if a dog stops performing properly, the handlers stop using the dog.
Also, most breeds of dogs have been bred for generations to be "useful to humans", that coupled with decent training means that the handler saying "bad dog!" is usually punishment enough.
Crime to be insane? If you're insane some countries lock you up for longer - you don't actually have a "release date". You only get out if someone decides you're sane enough...
Secondly it's extremely rare to be the sort of insane where:
1) You make 35000 copies of DVDs for the purpose of keeping them.
2) You retain the ability, time and resources to do 1)
3) You keep them in a warehouse instead of a better controlled environment.
The sad thing is originals (esp of Japanese anime) in Malaysia often have crappy translations too and it's hard to tell. Even worse, in a multi DVD set, the first DVD could be OK, but really bad in the second DVD (e.g. Britannia in the first DVD and Bu-Li-Ta-Ni-Ya in the second).
;).
Another annoying thing is the originals often have ads you can't skip past on an ordinary DVD player. You seldom get that sort of BS with the pirate versions.
Anyway, despite what the _summary_ says I doubt the dogs can normally tell the difference between pirate and original DVDs.
The originals and "unauthorized" editions could even come from the same factory for all you know.
The dogs are just used to find where the huge stashes of DVDs are. If you have a lot of DVDs stored somewhere with no legit paper trail or good explanation then it gets rather suspicious
That was Paradise Pete, not Jesus.
If they're really much crappier than average, maybe they need a change of management or something.