well I think the Catholic cannon contains the bible(?), and there are enough quotes about hell and eternal torment in that thing to sink a battleship.
Well, I didn't ask what you (or anyone) think. I ask for a citation. See, in this site, where supposedly the majority of people are of an engineering tendency, the difference should be obvious.
Also, and due to the supposed engineering nature of/. posters, we should know that a thought is an opinion, and than an opinion is not fact.
Now that we have cleared that up... you thought wrong. A Bible (of which there are many versions) is not what we refer as Church cannon.
Also, if you know a bit of what you are trying make an opinion of, different churches and denominations have different interpretations of the Bible (of which as we have already mentioned, has many versions.)
So, regarding the book which you said has enough ammo to sink a ship, The Catholic church has clear statements (as visible footnotes at the bottom of almost every printed page) that passages are to be interpreted according to the times (following established cannon), and never to be taken literally or as historical facts (which is completely opposite with the bible nuts we have here in the US.)
Anyone who has seen one should know this. Anyone who has never seen one should shut the hell up and do due diligence in researching the crap they want to criticize... as engineers and scientists do (and unlike many/. posters do.)
So, back to the question, cite the cannon that threatens people with eternal torment.
You can see how little scruple companies like the Catholic church have, when they dig up your remains to bury them again, just to make themselves look (not be, remember, Pope Kiddiefiddler) good...
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE. The remains were lost in an unmarked grave for a long time. They were found in an archaeological search. That is what is done for the remains of anyone famous whose grave is not certainly known (as in Columbus, Crazy Horse or Genghis Khan.)
Once the remains were found, they were buried in a grave that clearly has his name, and with the honors he deserved. Seriously, how much dumber can/. posters get?
Copernicus' remains were recovered as part of an archaeological discovery. Would you suggest not reburying them? Or perhaps just tossing them back in the hole and throwing the dirt back in?
Well, you see, the/. avant garde bigots don't read TFA... and when they do, they simply black out in front of such details. It's a lot easier to spew drivel online than to actually pay attention to detail.
I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
How about the Theory of the Big Bang? It was a Belgian priest who first formalized that.
Those factual details don't matter for the avant garde bigots in/. They like to pretend they are better than the fundamentalist bible fruit cakes, but by generalizing shit to any form of religion, they just show they are as imbecile and ignorant and as fundamentalist as the bible nuts... they just so happen to sit on the other side of the bigot spectrum.
I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
Don't be an idiot. The church through missionary missions have brought drinking water and electricity to millions. Logic has been in place for ages, and it was through the Catholic church (and the work of Muslim logicians) that many works of classical logic persisted after the fall of Rome.
You are right about birth control, but just slightly. The overwhelming majority of Catholics use birth control - it is a contentious issue that touches very fundamental principles that will take a long time within the church to resolve. There are even dissidents within the clergy when it comes to that. I know it is the avant garde thing to use a generalizing brush to pain things, but by the fucking balls of Christ man, at try to understand the things you criticize in such a bigot manner.
They're doing this as a PR stunt to distract people from the mistakes they're making today.
TFA gives the impression this is a gesture by local clergy, not a Church-wide move (much less a PR conspiracy.)
Copernicus is known in almost every science class today.
Why is why the man was re-buried with honors (which he wasn't when he died).
Who cares what The Church does with whatever-is-left-of-his-body now? 500 years later?
Certainly not you, which tells more about you than anything else. See, they don't do it for you, to get appraisal or approval from you. They do them for themselves. Because they see it is the correct thing to do. Your approval or disapproval is inconsequential.
Get off your high horse for a moment and ponder on that.
Right? its like, well, we may have been completely and totally wrong, if not flat out evil and cruel, but we will rebury you as a hero 500 years from now. And now they do the same thing to modern scientists. Talk about blindness.
What the fuck are you talking about? Example: Are you of who first proposed the Big Bang theory as a viable, scientific cosmological theory?
That's the video's last sentence, all the while I'm like "reeeaaally?". Using the video example, It's a lot faster for me to simply text "cafe @ 4?" (intentionally using "cafe" instead of "coffee" for texting brevity". People already use their own (usually) mutually intelligible l33tspeak when texting (sometimes with intelligent intention, and sometimes because they were never exposed to anything basic writing skills when graduating from HS.)
In Japan, typing and text users can type/text with latin characters with software automatically converting them to hiragana or Kanji. And I would assume it's the same in China, India or anywhere that uses either logograms, syllabaries or abugidas. People make up their own culture-specific conventions and shorthands with which to do texting and informal typing.
Unless I'm missing some revolutionary idea behind this, how does this improve the efficiency of texting when people already have their almost-universal, l33t-based shorthands? Also, this seems to miss these universal UI design rules:
Don't make me think - when using your UI to carry a task, if the UI forces me to think in amounts disproportional to the complexity and severity of the task, it is a fail. That is,
I should not have to scroll through multitudes of keyboards to be able to type "cafe @ 4?"
I should not have to configure keyboards preferences just so that I can type "cafe @ 4?"
When a user becomes proficient enough for a task (and a tool that carries that task), the user will always prefer keyboard short cuts over mouse/point-n-click operations.
I cringe at even the name of it: iConji - taking the name of a legitimate logogram system to baptize a solution looking for a problem (and a badly executed one to boot.)
Seriously, I'm really not one to fall for nerd bias here. I'm trying really hard to see this from the point of view of a typical texter, and I don't see this flying at all.
To better expound my previous post - barring a cataclysmic change (like a merger or a vital piece of technology unexpectedly going out of the window), if we find ourselves having to do a full rewrite from scratch, it probably means the end of 7-year-rewrite cycle caught us with our pants down. That is, either we didn't plan how to decommission the system, or the system (sometimes out of necessity) was written in a manner that was not amenable for incremental replacement and decommissioning.
Joel's position contradicts a paper I read years ago in an IEEE software journal that basically said you needed to plan on rewriting your application about every 7 years or have it collapse on you. The logic in the paper was based on two things I've found to be true in the real world..
I don't think Joel's position contradicts those findings. Joel is referring to a complete rewrite that happens "just because" and without a plan originating from the original system. The way I understand the IEEE finding is that the rewrite plan is part of (or stems from) the decommissioning at the end of a system life cycle.
The plan has to take into account the existing architecture: does the architecture allows for the rewrite to be organic, does it allow for its decommissioning? Also, take into account that the suggested rewrite that should occur every 7 years does not have to be a full-blown, all-or-nothing, from scratch rewrite (which is what Joel advice against.) It can be incremental and be done as a part of a plan in the system's life cycle.
I would actually interpret Joel's position of being one that describes how not to follow the IEEE advice on rewriting.
If this is true, then a rewrite of an existing application will always be a huge mistake. Joel is basically saying that developers don't benefit from previous experience, [b]a notion that I think is plainly wrong[/b]... All the [b]good developers[/b] I've ever worked with have been more than capable of seeing what works and what doesn't work in a solution, and would have been able to do a better job on the second try.
vlangber, see, benefiting from previous work only occurs with good developers, not with mediocre ones. So we have to look at what Joel said on that from that context. Many of Joel's writings deal with crappy/mediocre developers.
So it is true as you said, that it works... for good developers. Sub-par developers can also benefit from prior work if it was performed with competent developers, and only if the new work occurs in the same organization (and with the same competent developers from whom to learn.)
On average, and sadly, this is not the general case. There is more mediocrity than competency in software now (thanks to the Java/.Net universities), individuals who work year after year doing crappy work on crappy jobs with lowered expectations and dysfunctional modus operandi. They keep repeating the same crappy year of experience over and over. They wouldn't benefit at all from previous experience if they were tasked to rewrite something they did. Not in a million years.
If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s... and more blah blah...
The fact that you erroneously mix user-friendly with API tells me you are not a developer, or at least not one worth listening to when it comes to API design. And the fact that you state we should not expect better from a bunch of computer science Ph.Ds is an indication of projection and ignorance. What do you know about Ph.Ds? About their work and what they do? Did posting that generalization made you feel good about your webby education?
Seriously, if you were really that serious (and intellectually/professionally) capable of, you should have broken down the problem and shown a better alternative. But you didn't. You can't. So shut up.
The person you are replying to obviously read the article, but you where to busy trying to find someone to be snarky at to actual take the 35 seconds it would have taken to read the Article.
ANY innate sense of fairness that we were born with was stomped out long ago with capitalism.
Uhmmm, really, I always thought that that was stomped a long time ago when nomadic human bands started doing warfare against each other for resources, not to mention slavery, ritual cannibalism, the development of class/cast systems, monarchism, feudalism, communism and all those other social systems that are/were either contemporaneous to capitalism or that preceded it by hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of years going back to the realization that 1) you could grab a stick, a bone or a rock and beat someone with it - as chimps do - and 2) you can/need to kill someone not related to your band who happens to be sitting on the only hunting ground available to your band.
But hey, trying to explain the naturally violent/unfair human nature by using simplistic references to capitalism (or any other single economic/social system) must be the avant garde thing to do to nowadays.
It's nice to think that we still retain such nobility's, but let's not kid ourselves.
We - as a predatorial, competitive species - never had or retained such nobility to begin with. Don't kid yourself.
A major component missing from engineering education - software or otherwise - is the design process. In retrospect, I think this is due to too many professors lacking real world experience outside academia. Basically most of them have never been involved in large, complicated projects. I don't know about everyone else's education, but in my school we had just one course devoted to the software engineering process and one course devoted to the electrical engineering process. In retrospect this lopsided mix of fundamentals and process is really at odds with how engineering really works.
Funny you mention that (and I agree with you in that a lot of professors lack experience in large, complex projects, in particular enterprisey ones.) A few days ago I was talking with some colleagues about the disconnect between CS, EE and CE as well as between CS and MIS (which can be almost fatal for young graduates working either in engineering or corporate projects.)
But, and more related to your point, I was wondering how great it would have been if I had been exposed not just to one undergrad software engineering course, but to several, or perhaps one software engineering course paired with a systems engineering course (perhaps using case studies of projects that had problems wrt to design and management.)
My own undergrad course in software engineering had me building a fairly non-trivial application using PowerBuilder with a team. It was a good exercise, but I would have preferred this experienced to have been followed by another undergrad course covering requirements elicitation and analysis, testing, project estimation, design trade-offs and software process management., perhaps by using case studies.
My two grad courses in software engineering were mostly learning how to architect systems in UML and case studies on formal methods. Those are fine, but still, the items listed above were missing. Those were equally valuable and I had to learn about them the hard way. Software engineering education cannot be complete until those topics are standard part of the curriculum at the undergrad level.
Oh, well I'm being purely facetious. We were joking around about Systems of Systems the other day and imagined it was just a matter of time before the upper management starts talking about filling their ranks with "specialists" working on selling their expertise on Architectures of Architectures and other nebulous self referential recursive functional titles. And lo and behold, we now have Design of Design. Brilliant!
Beat the gold rush while you can!;-)
Oh, that's what you meant! LOL. I know exactly what you mean... it is a goldmine for architectural astronauts!:)
Great, SoS was the last big buzzword around corporations who wanted to charge the government a lot for doing LSI (large scale integration).
On the bright side, "DoD" is already taken in the military-industrial complex, so hopefully this won't catch on.
insert "yo dawg" reference here:
SoS is a big buzzword when it comes to software-intensive systems. In this case, I agree with you that it's just plain ol' LSI. When you start putting hardware in the mix (and I don't mean hardware=server), then the notion of SoS (and the engineering complexities of building such things) becomes more relevant (and less of a buzzword.) As a software enginer who has been working with systems engineers lately, it seems, at least to me, that software engineers (or at least people involved in developing medium-to-large software systems) could learn a thing or two from that discipline.
I'm not being facetious or argumentative. But I would like to know what your take on the SoS matter is. Honest curiosity.
Cost of development+manufacturing for it. So, probably several million dollars.
Several millions as in a few, a dozen, a hundred? Besides, cost of development and manufacturing are just the tip of the iceberg. There is marketing and potential loss of revenue as well as the potential of trade secrets being exposed to competitors, early picks that can tip potential buyers against the product...
... the ramifications are incalculable, unlikely to occur in the negative sense, but still possible (and thus impossible to rule out.) That makes such an item invaluable (wrt of the impossibility of determining the cost of permanently losing it.) It might sound sensationalist to someone not involved in product development, but for those who do (and for such a mass market and such high stakes), it would be stupid not to operate that way.
Manufacturing cost is a good place to start. It's not like this is a one of kind prototype that took years to make and there are no schematics to build a replacement. Like most device companies, they sent an NDA and schematics to a manufacturer in china. I wouldn't be surprised if they had hundreds of these prototypes passed out for QA purposes.
You haven't done much R&D and product development have you?
Slashdot Mirror
well I think the Catholic cannon contains the bible(?), and there are enough quotes about hell and eternal torment in that thing to sink a battleship.
Well, I didn't ask what you (or anyone) think. I ask for a citation. See, in this site, where supposedly the majority of people are of an engineering tendency, the difference should be obvious.
Also, and due to the supposed engineering nature of /. posters, we should know that a thought is an opinion, and than an opinion is not fact.
Now that we have cleared that up... you thought wrong. A Bible (of which there are many versions) is not what we refer as Church cannon.
Also, if you know a bit of what you are trying make an opinion of, different churches and denominations have different interpretations of the Bible (of which as we have already mentioned, has many versions.)
So, regarding the book which you said has enough ammo to sink a ship, The Catholic church has clear statements (as visible footnotes at the bottom of almost every printed page) that passages are to be interpreted according to the times (following established cannon), and never to be taken literally or as historical facts (which is completely opposite with the bible nuts we have here in the US.)
Anyone who has seen one should know this. Anyone who has never seen one should shut the hell up and do due diligence in researching the crap they want to criticize... as engineers and scientists do (and unlike many /. posters do.)
So, back to the question, cite the cannon that threatens people with eternal torment.
You can see how little scruple companies like the Catholic church have, when they dig up your remains to bury them again, just to make themselves look (not be, remember, Pope Kiddiefiddler) good...
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE. The remains were lost in an unmarked grave for a long time. They were found in an archaeological search. That is what is done for the remains of anyone famous whose grave is not certainly known (as in Columbus, Crazy Horse or Genghis Khan.)
Once the remains were found, they were buried in a grave that clearly has his name, and with the honors he deserved. Seriously, how much dumber can /. posters get?
Copernicus' remains were recovered as part of an archaeological discovery. Would you suggest not reburying them? Or perhaps just tossing them back in the hole and throwing the dirt back in?
Well, you see, the /. avant garde bigots don't read TFA... and when they do, they simply black out in front of such details. It's a lot easier to spew drivel online than to actually pay attention to detail.
I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
How about the Theory of the Big Bang? It was a Belgian priest who first formalized that.
Those factual details don't matter for the avant garde bigots in /. They like to pretend they are better than the fundamentalist bible fruit cakes, but by generalizing shit to any form of religion, they just show they are as imbecile and ignorant and as fundamentalist as the bible nuts... they just so happen to sit on the other side of the bigot spectrum.
I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
Don't be an idiot. The church through missionary missions have brought drinking water and electricity to millions. Logic has been in place for ages, and it was through the Catholic church (and the work of Muslim logicians) that many works of classical logic persisted after the fall of Rome.
You are right about birth control, but just slightly. The overwhelming majority of Catholics use birth control - it is a contentious issue that touches very fundamental principles that will take a long time within the church to resolve. There are even dissidents within the clergy when it comes to that. I know it is the avant garde thing to use a generalizing brush to pain things, but by the fucking balls of Christ man, at try to understand the things you criticize in such a bigot manner.
Strange that a religion that claims to be so forgiving is also always threatening eternal torment to anyone who disobeys them
Could you please quote the Catholic cannon that says that?
... an organization that claims to be the standard bearer of all things good uses the exact same psychological framework as an abusive relationship?
See above.
They're doing this as a PR stunt to distract people from the mistakes they're making today.
TFA gives the impression this is a gesture by local clergy, not a Church-wide move (much less a PR conspiracy.)
Copernicus is known in almost every science class today.
Why is why the man was re-buried with honors (which he wasn't when he died).
Who cares what The Church does with whatever-is-left-of-his-body now? 500 years later?
Certainly not you, which tells more about you than anything else. See, they don't do it for you, to get appraisal or approval from you. They do them for themselves. Because they see it is the correct thing to do. Your approval or disapproval is inconsequential.
Get off your high horse for a moment and ponder on that.
I'm sorry it happened to you.
Right? its like, well, we may have been completely and totally wrong, if not flat out evil and cruel, but we will rebury you as a hero 500 years from now. And now they do the same thing to modern scientists. Talk about blindness.
What the fuck are you talking about? Example: Are you of who first proposed the Big Bang theory as a viable, scientific cosmological theory?
is that simple
That's the video's last sentence, all the while I'm like "reeeaaally?". Using the video example, It's a lot faster for me to simply text "cafe @ 4?" (intentionally using "cafe" instead of "coffee" for texting brevity". People already use their own (usually) mutually intelligible l33tspeak when texting (sometimes with intelligent intention, and sometimes because they were never exposed to anything basic writing skills when graduating from HS.)
In Japan, typing and text users can type/text with latin characters with software automatically converting them to hiragana or Kanji. And I would assume it's the same in China, India or anywhere that uses either logograms, syllabaries or abugidas. People make up their own culture-specific conventions and shorthands with which to do texting and informal typing.
Unless I'm missing some revolutionary idea behind this, how does this improve the efficiency of texting when people already have their almost-universal, l33t-based shorthands? Also, this seems to miss these universal UI design rules:
I cringe at even the name of it: iConji - taking the name of a legitimate logogram system to baptize a solution looking for a problem (and a badly executed one to boot.)
Seriously, I'm really not one to fall for nerd bias here. I'm trying really hard to see this from the point of view of a typical texter, and I don't see this flying at all.
To better expound my previous post - barring a cataclysmic change (like a merger or a vital piece of technology unexpectedly going out of the window), if we find ourselves having to do a full rewrite from scratch, it probably means the end of 7-year-rewrite cycle caught us with our pants down. That is, either we didn't plan how to decommission the system, or the system (sometimes out of necessity) was written in a manner that was not amenable for incremental replacement and decommissioning.
Joel's position contradicts a paper I read years ago in an IEEE software journal that basically said you needed to plan on rewriting your application about every 7 years or have it collapse on you. The logic in the paper was based on two things I've found to be true in the real world. .
I don't think Joel's position contradicts those findings. Joel is referring to a complete rewrite that happens "just because" and without a plan originating from the original system. The way I understand the IEEE finding is that the rewrite plan is part of (or stems from) the decommissioning at the end of a system life cycle.
The plan has to take into account the existing architecture: does the architecture allows for the rewrite to be organic, does it allow for its decommissioning? Also, take into account that the suggested rewrite that should occur every 7 years does not have to be a full-blown, all-or-nothing, from scratch rewrite (which is what Joel advice against.) It can be incremental and be done as a part of a plan in the system's life cycle.
I would actually interpret Joel's position of being one that describes how not to follow the IEEE advice on rewriting.
For the love of everything that is holy, paragraphs!
If this is true, then a rewrite of an existing application will always be a huge mistake. Joel is basically saying that developers don't benefit from previous experience, [b]a notion that I think is plainly wrong[/b]... All the [b]good developers[/b] I've ever worked with have been more than capable of seeing what works and what doesn't work in a solution, and would have been able to do a better job on the second try.
vlangber, see, benefiting from previous work only occurs with good developers, not with mediocre ones. So we have to look at what Joel said on that from that context. Many of Joel's writings deal with crappy/mediocre developers.
So it is true as you said, that it works... for good developers. Sub-par developers can also benefit from prior work if it was performed with competent developers, and only if the new work occurs in the same organization (and with the same competent developers from whom to learn.)
On average, and sadly, this is not the general case. There is more mediocrity than competency in software now (thanks to the Java/.Net universities), individuals who work year after year doing crappy work on crappy jobs with lowered expectations and dysfunctional modus operandi. They keep repeating the same crappy year of experience over and over. They wouldn't benefit at all from previous experience if they were tasked to rewrite something they did. Not in a million years.
If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s... and more blah blah...
The fact that you erroneously mix user-friendly with API tells me you are not a developer, or at least not one worth listening to when it comes to API design. And the fact that you state we should not expect better from a bunch of computer science Ph.Ds is an indication of projection and ignorance. What do you know about Ph.Ds? About their work and what they do? Did posting that generalization made you feel good about your webby education?
Seriously, if you were really that serious (and intellectually/professionally) capable of, you should have broken down the problem and shown a better alternative. But you didn't. You can't. So shut up.
Reading is fundamental, you should try it.
Look at the last line of the 3rd paragraph.
The person you are replying to obviously read the article, but you where to busy trying to find someone to be snarky at to actual take the 35 seconds it would have taken to read the Article.
YOU are what is wrong with /.
Or maybe he is /. - profound I know!
while we have some ideas for the latter few have been tested
All we need a is a massive clone army. "Fathered" by Bruce Willis.
Will Demi Moore be involved in the process?
Also, don't confuse sociability with fairness.
ANY innate sense of fairness that we were born with was stomped out long ago with capitalism.
Uhmmm, really, I always thought that that was stomped a long time ago when nomadic human bands started doing warfare against each other for resources, not to mention slavery, ritual cannibalism, the development of class/cast systems, monarchism, feudalism, communism and all those other social systems that are/were either contemporaneous to capitalism or that preceded it by hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of years going back to the realization that 1) you could grab a stick, a bone or a rock and beat someone with it - as chimps do - and 2) you can/need to kill someone not related to your band who happens to be sitting on the only hunting ground available to your band.
But hey, trying to explain the naturally violent/unfair human nature by using simplistic references to capitalism (or any other single economic/social system) must be the avant garde thing to do to nowadays.
It's nice to think that we still retain such nobility's, but let's not kid ourselves.
We - as a predatorial, competitive species - never had or retained such nobility to begin with. Don't kid yourself.
A major component missing from engineering education - software or otherwise - is the design process. In retrospect, I think this is due to too many professors lacking real world experience outside academia. Basically most of them have never been involved in large, complicated projects. I don't know about everyone else's education, but in my school we had just one course devoted to the software engineering process and one course devoted to the electrical engineering process. In retrospect this lopsided mix of fundamentals and process is really at odds with how engineering really works.
Funny you mention that (and I agree with you in that a lot of professors lack experience in large, complex projects, in particular enterprisey ones.) A few days ago I was talking with some colleagues about the disconnect between CS, EE and CE as well as between CS and MIS (which can be almost fatal for young graduates working either in engineering or corporate projects.)
But, and more related to your point, I was wondering how great it would have been if I had been exposed not just to one undergrad software engineering course, but to several, or perhaps one software engineering course paired with a systems engineering course (perhaps using case studies of projects that had problems wrt to design and management.)
My own undergrad course in software engineering had me building a fairly non-trivial application using PowerBuilder with a team. It was a good exercise, but I would have preferred this experienced to have been followed by another undergrad course covering requirements elicitation and analysis, testing, project estimation, design trade-offs and software process management., perhaps by using case studies.
My two grad courses in software engineering were mostly learning how to architect systems in UML and case studies on formal methods. Those are fine, but still, the items listed above were missing. Those were equally valuable and I had to learn about them the hard way. Software engineering education cannot be complete until those topics are standard part of the curriculum at the undergrad level.
Oh, well I'm being purely facetious. We were joking around about Systems of Systems the other day and imagined it was just a matter of time before the upper management starts talking about filling their ranks with "specialists" working on selling their expertise on Architectures of Architectures and other nebulous self referential recursive functional titles. And lo and behold, we now have Design of Design. Brilliant!
Beat the gold rush while you can! ;-)
Oh, that's what you meant! LOL. I know exactly what you mean... it is a goldmine for architectural astronauts! :)
The hard part is the Designer.
Forget that! The hard part is the programmer!(10+1)!
Great, SoS was the last big buzzword around corporations who wanted to charge the government a lot for doing LSI (large scale integration).
On the bright side, "DoD" is already taken in the military-industrial complex, so hopefully this won't catch on.
insert "yo dawg" reference here:
SoS is a big buzzword when it comes to software-intensive systems. In this case, I agree with you that it's just plain ol' LSI. When you start putting hardware in the mix (and I don't mean hardware=server), then the notion of SoS (and the engineering complexities of building such things) becomes more relevant (and less of a buzzword.) As a software enginer who has been working with systems engineers lately, it seems, at least to me, that software engineers (or at least people involved in developing medium-to-large software systems) could learn a thing or two from that discipline.
I'm not being facetious or argumentative. But I would like to know what your take on the SoS matter is. Honest curiosity.
Cost of development+manufacturing for it. So, probably several million dollars.
Several millions as in a few, a dozen, a hundred? Besides, cost of development and manufacturing are just the tip of the iceberg. There is marketing and potential loss of revenue as well as the potential of trade secrets being exposed to competitors, early picks that can tip potential buyers against the product...
Manufacturing cost is a good place to start. It's not like this is a one of kind prototype that took years to make and there are no schematics to build a replacement. Like most device companies, they sent an NDA and schematics to a manufacturer in china. I wouldn't be surprised if they had hundreds of these prototypes passed out for QA purposes.
You haven't done much R&D and product development have you?