In my opinion, programming is most efficiently done by individuals, when they are properly motivated.
You are right; the way to run a large project is to have lots of individuals with well-defined interfaces between their code. So you have a fraction (probably the majority) writing code that exposes APIs to fulfill all the requirements of the project, and the rest of the people develop "glue" that calls these APIs to actually implement the project. This highly modular approach is well suited to OO methods, and makes for great reuse, especially if you can retain your staff long term - someone comes along with a new project, and someone experienced with the codebase can "glue" it together very quickly.
Engineering is the act of constructing a system to meet said requirements.
You are mistaken. Civil Engineers design a skyscraper, construction workers construct it. Mechanical Engineers design a car, assembly line workers construct it.
A software engineer spends 80% of his time on requirements capture, analysis, design and documentation and 20% of his time coding. A programmer gets his instructions from an engineer and spends 95% of his time programming (and the rest goofing off on/.).
In any mature industry, actual implementation is semi-skilled labor at best.
"Milk" implies that they don't contribute their share and from watching linux-kernel I can tell you thier engineers are responsable for many of the scaleabillity improvments added so far during the 2.5.x development cycle.
Code doesn't pay rent or bills in and of itself; you have to sell it to someone first. IBM's making money because the hardware it sells running Linux doesn't have to subsidize the cost of OS development that someone's done for free, as hardware running AIX has to also pay for AIX development.
Why would someone want a digital camera integrated in their PDA? Is there some aspect of Personal Digitial Assistance that involves photography?
I guess it depends on what you use your PDA for. I was looking for an apartment last summer, and I carried my PDA (addresses, phone numbers, maps) and a camera (to photograph the rooms so I could compare them later). It would have been handy to have one device to do that. If your job involved, say, comparing product samples, or meeting lots of people, or scouting locations, that feature would be useful just because it cuts down on the number of devices you need to carry/recharge/maintain.
In line with that, I also dropped HP from my list of "good companies" when Lucent's marketing manager was hired as their new president, and all the old management fled. Lucent, if you remember, came up with those wonderful closed architecture WinModems that -- as it later turned out-- died within a year due to quality problems. Now, as it turns out, I find that HP has been short-filling their inkjet cartridges.
Funny that you didn't also drop Apple when they switched from SCSI to IDE, or when the quality of their cases dropped markedly in the Performa PPC machines, or...
Guess your principles aren't as firmly stuck on as you thought.
This is being shortsighted. It assumes that the only way resources are granted to something is by a direct line of money/developers and this is just not the way ANTY economy works (and many people seem to make this mistake).
So long as developers need to eat, pay rent, wear clothes, drive cars etc, then I'm afraid that ultimately, the only was to support them is to give them money.
And in the end publicity will generate MCUH more money than a direct line through this company ever would.
As Dodd pointed out, a cascade of application errors resulted in a cascade of OS failures. That should NEVER happen in critical systems.
I guess it depends on the nature of the application failure. If it went crazy and exhausted the process table, say, well that would take down a Linux box too.
Attaching any sort of "blame" here to the OS is just silly. You have to choose the right tool for the job. If you can't put in nails with a screwdriver, is it the screwdriver's fault?
But in that SmartShip debacle, the OS trapped the error and killed itself instead of the errant application... Starting a chain reaction that caused EVERY MACHINE on the control network to crash. Not just one small routine, but the ENTIRE NETWORK.
Thing is, I've worked with a bunch of OSs, including NT4 and guess what: if you set up a few hundred NT servers and workstations in a domain, and one bluescreens, it doesn't take all the others with it!
Think about it. The MBA programs of 1000 universities are churning out cute little guys in suits whose ticket to the good life is figuring out how to squeeze out enough "new" money to justify their own million-dollar salary. Did you think benefits and pensions would escape their notice?
Not really - newly-minted MBAs have been very hard hit during the economic downturn. It's a very expensive degree compared to an MS in CS, and there are people a year or two after graduation who still haven't found MBA-level work, or indeed anything at all.
The rule of thumb is that if your MBA programme isn't in the top 25 or so in the world, don't count on getting a return on your investment. The rest are just rubber-stamps.
Except we do NOT get royalties from the work we have done, nor do we get any consideration from those who come later and build on our work.
Some do, some don't. Lots of companies sell products on a revenue sharing model. You can use their product in your own, and you give them a certain amount per unit sold. Others sell licenses that have to be renewed anually.
All those "everything should be free" Open Source ideals suddenly don't seem so appealing when you're looking at retirement.
Aside from the fact that that side of the family has a history of longevity, I believe that the two reasons why he kept going were (a) he didn't feel like quitting, because he enjoyed his job, and (b) he worked in a field (partner in a mid-sized law firm) where nobody could dictate to him when to retire.
That's the key - you need equity, an ownership stake. That means partnership in a firm, or maybe copyright of a book you wrote, or some intellectual property like a patent. Basically, a way to lock in future cash flows using a present-day asset.
In Europe, a lot of societies which have historically cherished the idea of retirement at age 65 with a generous pension are starting to re-think this concept, primarily because the pension funds simply won't be able to keep up with the glut of baby boomers retiring soon
I read in the newspaper that if the retirement age had the same relationship to life expecancy now as it did when the age of 65 was set, it should be 69.
Frankly, tho', I think the baby boomers shouldn't expect too much from the State pension. My generation are going to have our hands full sorting our the mess they made of society and the environment without supporting them too. They should have thought of that when they were screwing us on property prices, driving their SUVs, downsizing "gen x" workers, etc.
Lack of job security nowadays means that, while you may show professionalism towards an employer, you do not display the traditional "loyalty for life". As I can tell, it is in the nature of companies to act in a manner they perceive to be economically rational
Yes, but it's fair enough. After all, employees aren't particularly loyal these days, if a better offer (money, hours, commuting distance, promotion, whatever) comes along, you take it. If employees want employers to be loyal, they have to remember that it works both ways.
I'm skeptical of IT people who stay at the same job for more than a few years.
You're correct, but only if you differentiate between job and company. I'd hire someone who started as a tape loader at XYZ Corp 20 years ago and worked his way up within the company to a senior position over someone who'd been a tape operator at a dozen different companies in the same period.
Ever hear of 'hyperinflation?' It's made life savings essentially worthless overnight in places like Argentina, Peru, and Weimar Germany. It could happen here someday.
Right now in the UK, there is a generation who made a fortune on their property (i.e. houses, apartments, land, etc). The reason is the inflation of the 70s. This effectively massively reduced the proportion of their money that they had to spend on servicing debt, because the amount of a mortgage was locked in, so they could pay it off very easily, and sit back and let the value of their capital increase. So, inflation is bad for people with money, but it's good for people with capital goods. Unfortunately, my generation is paying for it - but we'll get our revenge when the "baby boomers" retire.
One of the differences I've always noted between Latin America and the US, is that in Latin America people build and rely on relationships with other people, especially family.
We have that here too, except we call it "nepotism".
Bad form to reply to my own post but check this out:
The application crashed on a divide-by-zero, if I remember correctly. The underlying OS was nothing to do with it. Or would you rather the OS trapped that error and just substituted in a random number? With the source to the Linux kernel, I'm sure you could do that;-)
It seems to me that in Microsoft's position, they are not obligated to do anything. They control the biggest monopoly in the computer industry and they are in the habit of making companies/projects obligated to make their systems work with Microsoft systems. There is no reason for Microsft to be obliged to do anything with a port of their CLR.
There was no reason for MS to make the CLR an ECMA standard either, nor to port it to FreeBSD, but they did. I believe that Microsoft would support Linux if the endgame involves the elimination of Sun.
That's the problem with these big companies. They're made of disparate groups each with its own world view.
Their own P&L you mean. Each group is responsible for reporting profits to head office, and if those profits aren't there, then heads will roll.
That means that if one business unit has to pursue a policy that doesn't help another in order to protect its own profits, it will. This happened at IBM: the PC hardware division wasn't willing to risk it own sales by by preloading OS/2 just because it would have made things easier for the OS/2 division.
Which do you suppose makes more profit (and hence has more influence at head office) at Sun: the Open Source advocacy group, or the UltraSPARC engineering group? (Hint: the workstation and server group probably "buy" the CPUs internally from the SPARC group).
Clearly then OpenBSD developers are sticking to their guns, their question is really how an "Open" architecture cannot be disclosed without some contractual agreement.
You've misunderstood the word "open". SPARC is open in that anyone can download the specification and implement it - you can set up a rival SPARC-based hardware company, fab your own SPARCs and compete with Sun, if you want to, and they will have no legal means to stop you.
However, what is not open is Sun's own implementation of that SPARC specification. That's because they spent a lot of their own money on it, creating the best implementation they could. If you want your own SPARC, you will have to implement it on your own.
Think about it this way: if you want to have your own recording of a Mozart symphony, you can buy one that an orchestra has recorded, or you can perform it and record it yourself. What you can't do is take a pre-recorded copy and try to pass it off as your own - even tho' the score is in the public domain.
Sun has always seemed to be in the bussiness of sharing , but oftens seems to do a stab in the back
No, Sun are in the business of making money. All the cool stuff they do has to be paid for one way or the other. A fab is possibly the most expensive artifact on the planet, short of an aircraft carrier. Sun are perfectly willing to provide documentation to anyone willing to meet them halfway and sign an NDA, which is fair enough, since they need to protect their opportunity to earn a return on their investment. (Note that I said opportunity, not right).
This is not a flame or a troll, but the OpenBSD people's position is "we want you to respect our terms, but we aren't willing to respect yours". Well, you can't have your cake and eat it - and no amount of ranting will change that.
So, COBOL's obviously the language to choose for a healthy career, right? It's DEAD, Jim. The only companies that use it will make you sit in a room with no windows and wear a tie. C'mon, you know it's true.
The COBOL job market is quite different from the Java job market. Mostly it's people who've been in the industry a long time and communicate through word-of-mouth, the trade press, and a network of recruiters.
...in places like Germany, where they have banned games such as "Quake 2" for for violence, and forced "Tomb Raider" to have blue-blooded animals, and changed the translation in "Command and Conquor" so that the soldiers are all robots. But they haven't touched AA yet -- image the diplomatic fun if Germany banned a game that the U.S. government produced.
I don't know if you've seen the German version of the movie Starship Troopers, but it's dubbed so instead of Carmen saying "Hiroshima was destroyed" she says "Washington". I don't recall there being a diplomatic incident over it, tho'.
Has anyone noticed that on one of the desert missions you play the American's and of course you must fight the "terrorists" who are obviously arab. It's pretty sick that our tax payer dollars are being used to promote these racist ideals.
Prejudice is nothing to do with it! Of all the Taliban in Afghanistan, just one (John Walker Lindh) was white! Of all the hijackers on Sept 11, not a single one was white!
Now I'm not saying that whites aren't terrorists (just look at the IRA) but the fact is, right now the US is facing threats that originate from one fairly homogeneous racial group.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to use against AlQueda.
No, because al-Queda rely on oral communication between people who's grandparents, parents and children are friends. That's why no-one knows what they're up to, and why it's so difficult to infiltrate them. The US govt can throw almost unlimited resources at this, but there is no technological solution this time.
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In my opinion, programming is most efficiently done by individuals, when they are properly motivated.
You are right; the way to run a large project is to have lots of individuals with well-defined interfaces between their code. So you have a fraction (probably the majority) writing code that exposes APIs to fulfill all the requirements of the project, and the rest of the people develop "glue" that calls these APIs to actually implement the project. This highly modular approach is well suited to OO methods, and makes for great reuse, especially if you can retain your staff long term - someone comes along with a new project, and someone experienced with the codebase can "glue" it together very quickly.
Engineering is the act of constructing a system to meet said requirements.
/.).
You are mistaken. Civil Engineers design a skyscraper, construction workers construct it. Mechanical Engineers design a car, assembly line workers construct it.
A software engineer spends 80% of his time on requirements capture, analysis, design and documentation and 20% of his time coding. A programmer gets his instructions from an engineer and spends 95% of his time programming (and the rest goofing off on
In any mature industry, actual implementation is semi-skilled labor at best.
"Milk" implies that they don't contribute their share and from watching linux-kernel I can tell you thier engineers are responsable for many of the scaleabillity improvments added so far during the 2.5.x development cycle.
Code doesn't pay rent or bills in and of itself; you have to sell it to someone first. IBM's making money because the hardware it sells running Linux doesn't have to subsidize the cost of OS development that someone's done for free, as hardware running AIX has to also pay for AIX development.
Why would someone want a digital camera integrated in their PDA? Is there some aspect of Personal Digitial Assistance that involves photography?
I guess it depends on what you use your PDA for. I was looking for an apartment last summer, and I carried my PDA (addresses, phone numbers, maps) and a camera (to photograph the rooms so I could compare them later). It would have been handy to have one device to do that. If your job involved, say, comparing product samples, or meeting lots of people, or scouting locations, that feature would be useful just because it cuts down on the number of devices you need to carry/recharge/maintain.
In line with that, I also dropped HP from my list of "good companies" when Lucent's marketing manager was hired as their new president, and all the old management fled. Lucent, if you remember, came up with those wonderful closed architecture WinModems that -- as it later turned out-- died within a year due to quality problems. Now, as it turns out, I find that HP has been short-filling their inkjet cartridges.
Funny that you didn't also drop Apple when they switched from SCSI to IDE, or when the quality of their cases dropped markedly in the Performa PPC machines, or...
Guess your principles aren't as firmly stuck on as you thought.
This is being shortsighted. It assumes that the only way resources are granted to something is by a direct line of money/developers and this is just not the way ANTY economy works (and many people seem to make this mistake).
So long as developers need to eat, pay rent, wear clothes, drive cars etc, then I'm afraid that ultimately, the only was to support them is to give them money.
And in the end publicity will generate MCUH more money than a direct line through this company ever would.
Tell that to VA Linux' shareholders.
Oh.. you Don't workfor M$?
/. not rendering correctly in Netscape on my SGI.
Then why does www.kitten.org.uk
map to Microshaft's 2000 server page?
Only for Linux users. It's my revenge for
As Dodd pointed out, a cascade of application errors resulted in a cascade of OS failures. That should NEVER happen in critical systems.
I guess it depends on the nature of the application failure. If it went crazy and exhausted the process table, say, well that would take down a Linux box too.
Attaching any sort of "blame" here to the OS is just silly. You have to choose the right tool for the job. If you can't put in nails with a screwdriver, is it the screwdriver's fault?
But in that SmartShip debacle, the OS trapped the error and killed itself instead of the errant application... Starting a chain reaction that caused EVERY MACHINE on the control network to crash. Not just one small routine, but the ENTIRE NETWORK.
Thing is, I've worked with a bunch of OSs, including NT4 and guess what: if you set up a few hundred NT servers and workstations in a domain, and one bluescreens, it doesn't take all the others with it!
So this wasn't NT's fault, it was the Navy's.
Think about it. The MBA programs of 1000 universities are churning out cute little guys in suits whose ticket to the good life is figuring out how to squeeze out enough "new" money to justify their own million-dollar salary. Did you think benefits and pensions would escape their notice?
Not really - newly-minted MBAs have been very hard hit during the economic downturn. It's a very expensive degree compared to an MS in CS, and there are people a year or two after graduation who still haven't found MBA-level work, or indeed anything at all.
The rule of thumb is that if your MBA programme isn't in the top 25 or so in the world, don't count on getting a return on your investment. The rest are just rubber-stamps.
Except we do NOT get royalties from the work we have done, nor do we get any consideration from those who come later and build on our work.
Some do, some don't. Lots of companies sell products on a revenue sharing model. You can use their product in your own, and you give them a certain amount per unit sold. Others sell licenses that have to be renewed anually.
All those "everything should be free" Open Source ideals suddenly don't seem so appealing when you're looking at retirement.
Aside from the fact that that side of the family has a history of longevity, I believe that the two reasons why he kept going were (a) he didn't feel like quitting, because he enjoyed his job, and (b) he worked in a field (partner in a mid-sized law firm) where nobody could dictate to him when to retire.
That's the key - you need equity, an ownership stake. That means partnership in a firm, or maybe copyright of a book you wrote, or some intellectual property like a patent. Basically, a way to lock in future cash flows using a present-day asset.
In Europe, a lot of societies which have historically cherished the idea of retirement at age 65 with a generous pension are starting to re-think this concept, primarily because the pension funds simply won't be able to keep up with the glut of baby boomers retiring soon
I read in the newspaper that if the retirement age had the same relationship to life expecancy now as it did when the age of 65 was set, it should be 69.
Frankly, tho', I think the baby boomers shouldn't expect too much from the State pension. My generation are going to have our hands full sorting our the mess they made of society and the environment without supporting them too. They should have thought of that when they were screwing us on property prices, driving their SUVs, downsizing "gen x" workers, etc.
Lack of job security nowadays means that, while you may show professionalism towards an employer, you do not display the traditional "loyalty for life". As I can tell, it is in the nature of companies to act in a manner they perceive to be economically rational
Yes, but it's fair enough. After all, employees aren't particularly loyal these days, if a better offer (money, hours, commuting distance, promotion, whatever) comes along, you take it. If employees want employers to be loyal, they have to remember that it works both ways.
I'm skeptical of IT people who stay at the same job for more than a few years.
You're correct, but only if you differentiate between job and company. I'd hire someone who started as a tape loader at XYZ Corp 20 years ago and worked his way up within the company to a senior position over someone who'd been a tape operator at a dozen different companies in the same period.
Ever hear of 'hyperinflation?' It's made life savings essentially worthless overnight in places like Argentina, Peru, and Weimar Germany. It could happen here someday.
Right now in the UK, there is a generation who made a fortune on their property (i.e. houses, apartments, land, etc). The reason is the inflation of the 70s. This effectively massively reduced the proportion of their money that they had to spend on servicing debt, because the amount of a mortgage was locked in, so they could pay it off very easily, and sit back and let the value of their capital increase. So, inflation is bad for people with money, but it's good for people with capital goods. Unfortunately, my generation is paying for it - but we'll get our revenge when the "baby boomers" retire.
One of the differences I've always noted between Latin America and the US, is that in Latin America people build and rely on relationships with other people, especially family.
We have that here too, except we call it "nepotism".
Bad form to reply to my own post but check this out:
;-)
The application crashed on a divide-by-zero, if I remember correctly. The underlying OS was nothing to do with it. Or would you rather the OS trapped that error and just substituted in a random number? With the source to the Linux kernel, I'm sure you could do that
It seems to me that in Microsoft's position, they are not obligated to do anything. They control the biggest monopoly in the computer industry and they are in the habit of making companies/projects obligated to make their systems work with Microsoft systems. There is no reason for Microsft to be obliged to do anything with a port of their CLR.
There was no reason for MS to make the CLR an ECMA standard either, nor to port it to FreeBSD, but they did. I believe that Microsoft would support Linux if the endgame involves the elimination of Sun.
So what is open, SPARC or UltraSparcIII. I haven't the time to find out. Do you know, sql*kitten?
As far as I know, UltraSPARC-III is the (proprietary) implementation of the (open) SPARC9 specification.
That's the problem with these big companies. They're made of disparate groups each with its own world view.
Their own P&L you mean. Each group is responsible for reporting profits to head office, and if those profits aren't there, then heads will roll.
That means that if one business unit has to pursue a policy that doesn't help another in order to protect its own profits, it will. This happened at IBM: the PC hardware division wasn't willing to risk it own sales by by preloading OS/2 just because it would have made things easier for the OS/2 division.
Which do you suppose makes more profit (and hence has more influence at head office) at Sun: the Open Source advocacy group, or the UltraSPARC engineering group? (Hint: the workstation and server group probably "buy" the CPUs internally from the SPARC group).
Clearly then OpenBSD developers are sticking to their guns, their question is really how an "Open" architecture cannot be disclosed without some contractual agreement.
You've misunderstood the word "open". SPARC is open in that anyone can download the specification and implement it - you can set up a rival SPARC-based hardware company, fab your own SPARCs and compete with Sun, if you want to, and they will have no legal means to stop you.
However, what is not open is Sun's own implementation of that SPARC specification. That's because they spent a lot of their own money on it, creating the best implementation they could. If you want your own SPARC, you will have to implement it on your own.
Think about it this way: if you want to have your own recording of a Mozart symphony, you can buy one that an orchestra has recorded, or you can perform it and record it yourself. What you can't do is take a pre-recorded copy and try to pass it off as your own - even tho' the score is in the public domain.
Sun has always seemed to be in the bussiness of sharing , but oftens seems to do a stab in the back
No, Sun are in the business of making money. All the cool stuff they do has to be paid for one way or the other. A fab is possibly the most expensive artifact on the planet, short of an aircraft carrier. Sun are perfectly willing to provide documentation to anyone willing to meet them halfway and sign an NDA, which is fair enough, since they need to protect their opportunity to earn a return on their investment. (Note that I said opportunity, not right).
This is not a flame or a troll, but the OpenBSD people's position is "we want you to respect our terms, but we aren't willing to respect yours". Well, you can't have your cake and eat it - and no amount of ranting will change that.
So, COBOL's obviously the language to choose for a healthy career, right? It's DEAD, Jim. The only companies that use it will make you sit in a room with no windows and wear a tie. C'mon, you know it's true.
The COBOL job market is quite different from the Java job market. Mostly it's people who've been in the industry a long time and communicate through word-of-mouth, the trade press, and a network of recruiters.
2048 bits will be enough effectively for ever
Hey, you grew up in Potters Bar. I'm from just up the road in Hatfield. Small world.
...in places like Germany, where they have banned games such as "Quake 2" for for violence, and forced "Tomb Raider" to have blue-blooded animals, and changed the translation in "Command and Conquor" so that the soldiers are all robots. But they haven't touched AA yet -- image the diplomatic fun if Germany banned a game that the U.S. government produced.
I don't know if you've seen the German version of the movie Starship Troopers, but it's dubbed so instead of Carmen saying "Hiroshima was destroyed" she says "Washington". I don't recall there being a diplomatic incident over it, tho'.
Has anyone noticed that on one of the desert missions you play the American's and of course you must fight the "terrorists" who are obviously arab. It's pretty sick that our tax payer dollars are being used to promote these racist ideals.
Prejudice is nothing to do with it! Of all the Taliban in Afghanistan, just one (John Walker Lindh) was white! Of all the hijackers on Sept 11, not a single one was white!
Now I'm not saying that whites aren't terrorists (just look at the IRA) but the fact is, right now the US is facing threats that originate from one fairly homogeneous racial group.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to use against AlQueda.
No, because al-Queda rely on oral communication between people who's grandparents, parents and children are friends. That's why no-one knows what they're up to, and why it's so difficult to infiltrate them. The US govt can throw almost unlimited resources at this, but there is no technological solution this time.