I started using them when I saw the FAA Air Traffic Control consoles use them. If it's good enough when people's lives are on the line, it's good enough for Turbo Pascal. And some friends and family who have borrowed one of my machines to use has started using trackballs.
When touch typing, it's nice to know exactly where the pointing device is. And when you have limited deskspace, even better. (My favorite device is the pointing-stick between the G and H key; though gaming I prefer the trackball--and mice are only useful when I've had to use the wheel extensively.)
Currently using Logitech MarbleMouse (have always been able to find them at CompUSA (RIP brick-and-mortar)). The all-optical detector never jams, though it seems the driver can't get the "middle button using left-and-right" click working:(. I see they are $20 online.
It sounds like the poster was describing a primary election form. In some "open primary" states, everyone can vote in the primary and can vote in ONLY ONE party's primary, since primary elections are for the purpose of nominating candidates for that party. It sounds like something the states shouldn't be involved in, but it shows how the political machine is wired for the two parties. Third parties, and the two parties in some states, hold nominating conventions to do the same thing.
A problem in some areas if that one party has a single obviously strong nominee, members of the opposing party will vote the other party's primary, and vote for an unelectable candidate. In very rare cases, the party loyalists will figure that the obvious candidate will win and not vote, and in fact the weaker candidate will win the primary. Or if there are a few good candidates, the opposition will try to get the weakest nominated. I'm shocked, shocked that people would consider doing this.
Last week's Washington Post had a very interesting aticle about this Eden and Evolution . It didn't try to verify or dispute the fact of evolution, but instead showed why fundamentlist religious folks have a big problem with evolution. And like many debates in society, it takes more than 10 seconds to get the point, so we end up just yelling past each other.
The religious right's big beef is that the theory of evolution really takes away man's special place in the universe. Evolution opens up the possibility that sentient life is something that just happened here on earth with no divine intervention. Evolution demonstrates that life could pop up in many places in the universe; given a stew of the right elements and physical conditions and enough time, life is inevitable.
Most non-religious or religious liberals (I'm a Unitarian Universalist, a denomination as theologically liberal as you could possibly imagine) think the fundamentalist's big problem is that evolution contradicts the first myth in the Bible (or whatever creation myth your religion professes). But religious folks have been very quick to switch from a literal translation to a more metaphorical one when the science demonstrates the facts. "The Earth does not move" (repeated a dozen times in the Bible) may have put Galileo under house arrest, but I doubt any Christian would fight the teaching of the heliocentric model of the solar system. What made that shift possible was the telescope; it not only easily showed other small systems at work that showed how the earth and the sun dance, but more recently (the last 50 years) has served as a time machine in astrophysics. Even most religious do not really believe all creation popped up ex nihilo in 144 hours (well, that's the first creation story; the one starting at Gen 2:4 isn't as time specific). In biology, there are dozens of well-documented recent observations that show speciation and other long-duration actions that are predicted by evolutionary theory--this is why "micro-eveolution" has been given as a reasonable possibility by some fundamentalists.
The key is to realize that people who truely believe in revealed knowledge aren't swayed by arguments from fact; they've been told that the scientific establishment is another source of revealed knowledge and the scientists really have no greater basis to really explain what's going on. At times scientific experts haven't been helpful to the novice public (too much cable news, which pits one crazed extreme opinion yeller with another extreme yeller, doesn't help). And some things, like string theory, really are mostly conjecture, and perhaps using a term like "string framework" may clear the air a bit. (And no, I'm not ready to debate string theory! It does explain many things, but one can fiddle the math to make it explain things way out of it's scope also.)
Geocentrism, was Re:how about "creationism" crap?
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Bad Science Awards
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The thing people forget is that geocentrism is part of the old testament, much like creationism. (Ps 93:1 "the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.", 1 Chr 16:30 "Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved." a few other verses). The phrase "the earth moves" is what makes heliocentrism in conflict with the Bible. Galileo was under (loose) house arrest for 20 years because of this, and his last words are reportedly "but it [the earth] moves" (in Italian, of course).
So if creationism is documented in the Bible, so is geocentrism (or any other theory where the earth does not move). In the meantime, I'm joining the protest at the Red Lobster (Lev 9:10-12 "And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination. Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you."
My favorite place in the world is Puerto Rico. A colony, oops, "Free Associated State" of the USA. Where speed limits are in Miles Per Hour. And all distances on road signs are in Kilometers--it took me a few days to figure that out.
What do you call "milestones" in ISO-land?
In PR, the distance markers are in kilometers and hectometers (halfway between 34 and 35 the sign says "K34 H5").
IBM published a book, "Accessing the Internet", in August 1995. About 230 pages long. Very quaint in parts ("150,000 new users every month") but still has many (at this point) timeless truths about working with the internet.
I just received my March 2004 Harper's Magazine, and the cover story is about the end of Globalism and the re-rise of Nationalism. The global economy goes through cycles; since the Depression the West embraced Keynesian (big government) until the 70's when Globalism (multinational corporations are dominant) fell into favor. In the last 7 years, it appears a new flavor of Nationalism is taking root; unilateral actions in the Middle East by the world's largest economy is shattering the ties that bound many economies together. The economic rise of China, and the rejection of Bretton Woods by countries starting with Malaysia and continuing with Argentina (and the rouge countries seem to continue working, even prospering--who has the world's tallest building today?) is showing how a government with backbone can stand up to the IMF. Throw in recent adventures with Enron and Parmalat and the assumptions that have worked for a generation are fraying apart. And with disturbing news that other countrys' investors are starting to hold back lending money for the USA national debt should cause concern.
If there are any economic nerds out here this could be the basis of a lot of discussion. The current wave of "corporatism" is overdue for some shaking up; perhaps the USA is about ready to re-examine its role in the world.
The article is about 20 pages long; good reading. Note that Harper's tends to be left-leaning; but then, so am I.
Last time I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC (a little over a year ago) they had a Soviet moon suit on display with a few details of the Soviet manned moon program. What was interesting was they had the moon backpack opened up, and there were several well-formed WOODEN braces holding a few things in there. I would guess they were temporary braces while the engineers waited for the real things to (never) appear. Also, the cosmonaut entered through a hatch in the back of the suit.
CA-Datacom is a hierarchical database--like IMS. It's not relational. Hey look! There is one CA-Datacom database on the list.
I work with the Customs and Border Protection database (see Peak Workload, all, OLTP). I've seen it pump 250,000 transactions in a minute (a few times a week) so I wouldn't be surprised to see 50,000/second. This has a few comfortably cruising IBM mainframes feeding a few database instances. MQSeries messaging is pulsing through a few thousand CICS transaction (millions of lines of COBOL). With generally subsecond response. Gotta love those 3270 workstations; web-based interfaces are way too slow (with a few hundred bytes to display the overhead is much much too large).
Last time I heard, IEFBR14 had at least 6 APARS against it. When you consider it's a utility that's over 35 years old, I guess someone would find a few problems with it. (One was that the return code wasn't set, another was a system debugger couldn't handle objects less than 16 bytes in size, a few other debugger bugs.)
I was there the first weekend in Maryland
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Junkyard Wars Tour
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I was there on their first weekend, a few miles from Discovery Channel HQ (TLC's overlord). The Missle Masters (the Navy team from this season; they live about 200 miles away) were there to say "hi" and helped a few people with their models.
It was about as much fun as you would expect when you realize that they want to get a few hundred people to build the models and they don't allow arc welding. Lots of flat screen TV's, and the mall's Radio Shack manager came down with a bunch of ZipZaps (the small RC cars) to play with (and sell); my 4 year-old had much fun (and the ZipZap has survived 2 weeks (3 sets of batteries) of use).
I kept asking for Kathy Rogers. I figured one of the TV hosts would show up for the first stop of the tour. Maybe on the last...
If you have the fastest car at the end of the tour you'll get to be on the show. The fastest run at the first weekend was 4.4 seconds.
One interesting factoid: If you go into a supermarket that is using IBM checkout equipment, many times you'll find an AS/400 in every 6th aisle or so. Probably under the moving belt, behind some panel. There may be a small window where you can see a green light. Quietly working away, keeping the cashiers happy.
They are configured in such a way that if a unit goes down, the workload between the aisles is re-shuffled between AS/400s (this may cause the cashier to re-scan the last few items, but usually is invisible). This reshuffling can also be done between closely-located stores. 4800 bps leased lines can handle the traffic, though you may notice a delay between a scan and the price appearing on the display.
AS/400's are not totally buttletproof. But in this configuration it's not unheard of for a machine to be down for a day or two before someone comes out to fix it (the failure is detected quickly, but if there's a few extra machines still available there's generally not a rush).
Chemical Engineering is mostly the same as Computer programming; both are trying to get very small hardware to do what you want. The scale of a lot of Chem Eng does make the bugs a bit more interesting. My dad (a ChemE) called home one day and said he would be late, and suggested we turn on the local news to see the tower of smoke and flame that resulted from one too many valves being open (no-one was hurt fortunately).
He also was called in as a consultant to a gas-fractionating plant where he asked why it seemed all their equipment is so up-to-date and was told that their experience was that the works destoyed itself about every three years. When working with 10,000 psi gases all it takes is one very small crack to put in a new order with Purchasing. Needless to say, they had many small, fully-automated units in a rural location (and lots of mounds of earth).
But most of his work was maintenance. Just like mine. (Though maintaining a hydrofluoric acid production line, where everything is teflon or wax (HF eats everything else, even people), sounds a lot more fun.) Once when I visited his plant he showed me their new machine that took a loaded rail car, grabbed the bottom, and tipped it over to empty it (the most efficient way). Neat.
Recently I read the IBM Journal of Research and Development's mega-issue on z900 mainframe technology. Read it here. You'll fall in love with technology all over again.
I think the best analogy is if PC's are cars, and UNIX servers are semi-trucks, then mainframes are 747's. If you're just tooling around town, or even going cross country, then your favorite auto will work. If you want to (have to?) do more useful things without all the idiot-proofing, then UNIX is the way. But if you're doing something industrial, then the mainframe is the way to go. But the user interface is, well, like flying a 747. And it's not the most efficient way to run to the store for a gallon of milk.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM (I wrote this on my company-issued ThinkPad). I use mainframes everyday, but spend most of my time using p690's running AIX--a web front end to processing that will continue to execute on the four clustered mainframes.
My first job out of college (1982) involved babysitting an IBM 370\168. On the console was a large meter (about 4 x 6 inches) marked 0.0 to 1.0 (11 big tickmarks, 90 little ones). A bunch of toggle switches allowed you to flip in the points you wanted to monitor (CPU, channels 0 through 15--this was a 2 processor complex so there was a twin console about 10 feet away). When monitoring a CPU it would rapidly jiggle from one extreme to another.
What I would like to see someone do is connect a 168 console to a modern system--it was about 5 feet long with hundreds of switch and dials and each one did something neat. Also, elled off on the left was two micofiche readers; the one on the left was usable to look up maintenance documents and the one on the right had a screwed-in fiche and rows of incandecent lights (about 20 rows and 32 columns; you could read the fiche between the rows of lights), and depending on where you were on the fiche you could look at the status of various registers. Between the two readers behind a panel was a small plugboard where you could configure the memory--if you had a failing chip (1024 bits) or card you could reconfigure the memory and re-IPL the machine. IIRC, the top few lights on the top row were red and were permanently marked things like "THERMAL FAULT" and other really nasty things.
For the US Census we ran a CMM level 5 shop. (I was with Lockheed Martin at the time, the same company who works on the Shuttle code). Our code development ran a bit slower than you have experienced but should expect with inspections and feedback. But once the system was deployed, it worked. And mostly on budget and just a hair behind schedule (see next paragraph).
The big problem was feature creep. The government figured (correctly) that a few thousand dollars in additional development effort would save on personnel--as it was we had about 8000 operators in the system at the end. So new requirements were coming in all the time. The total bill for the new features ran into the millions. But they were kept in control with processes.
Working on the Census convinced me that applying professional engineering concepts to software development actually works. When people say "software is different" I feel that they are so stuck in the last century. And in the end, it's a cost savings to do the right thing. You just need to convince the PHBs (which is the hardest part).
Don't forget (yuck) process and (yes) giveback
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Coder or Architect?
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One trend that (for better or worse) has been building for the past few years is the building maturity of software as an engineering dicipline. We're not there yet, but in about 15 years some of us will be counted on to develop systems that will be verifiably bulletproof and someone will be sued if it fails. (We may look back at the 90's as the good old days when even high-school kids could make good money cranking out code.)
150 years ago bridges used to collapse regularly; even 100 years ago bridge collapses were not unusual. But today, we're building bridges that will be around forever. What happened? Just before the American Civil War, Civil Engineers got together and decided to become more professional. This also led to standardization of building materials and design processes. Yes, you don't see people building bridges and dams totally off-the-cuff, and it takes a few months to do it right. Today, most bridges have a signature of a certified Civil Engineer on the blueprints and you can guess where the lawyers will be looking if there is a problem.
In the next few years all the SW-CMM process stuff will become critical ( http://www.sei.cmu.edu/ ). There are a few highly organized projects deployed and becuase we're taking measurements we can show that going through all the steps does decrease costs in all phases of a project. With the dot-bomb contraction there's a little less pressure and a little more time to do it right the first time.
The group that will push this through are those who are today identified as (usually) Architects. If you have a customer who can't figure out why there's an Architect on the project who's billing at a higher rate than a coder and yet doesn't produce any executables (my current problem) you can go back and show how, by applying a dicipline, the resulting system will be more stable and usable (my current solution). And even a PHB will see that--developing the communication skills to explain (as best as possible) the latest neat-o blivet to the founder's son is the hardest part of the job.
Of course, I'm still coding. But as a previous poster brought up, it's only to help out in a crunch or to get something started and ultimately my code is maintained (or rewritten) by someone else within a month of my writing it. But actually coding a, say, JSP is the only way to grok what you can do with it.
And giveback? Mentoring that new kid or getting that old COBOL programmer to get with the program is easy. Getting your employer to see the value of process is valuable (start with a new, small project and collect some quantifiable measurements). We are going to have to build a solid environment that we can develop solid systems on, and I don't think it will come from any MonopolieS.
I've had similar problems with some monitors, and
tried to figure out why some and not all--and like you, never with an LCD. One thing that I found is that refresh rates seem to be a big thing.
Even when I can't directly see flickering (say at 60 Hz where the display probably interacts with the fluorescent lights (also flickering at 60 Hz in the USA)) after a few hours something in my brain may be resonating and causing the headaches.
70 Hz sometimes wasn't good enough and I had to go to 85 Hz (if available). It could be that the 70 Hz as advertised was really 60 Hz.
A year or so ago I was working in the UK where lights flicker at 50 Hz and did some tests. When setting the refresh rate at 60 Hz I still got headaches (couldn't get the refresh rate to 50Hz, but could get 43 Hz interlaced--interlaced output was bad bad bad). I dimly remember reading someplace that some human neural plexuses (plexi?) have a cycle time of 16 msec (notably, around the heart so 60Hz AC is more deadly than 50Hz AC).
LCDs don't have these problems since they have such long persistence that you'll never normally see flicker. (The only times I've seen flicker is when the cabling is florked causing the signal to have lots of periodic noise introduced.) Also, digital interfaces on LCDs allow them to update the display without scanning in the usual sense.
Of course, since I'm trying to study this in a zero-blind fashion it could all be in my head in the first place!
One way to get "Software Engineering" to be the same status as, say, "Civil Engineering" is to see what happens to Civil Engineers:
Some sort of recognized college course of study.
A formal licensing/certification program.
A license from the state.
A legal recognition that the signature of the certified individual is important.
The ability for unsatisified customers and future users to come after you in court.
Note that not all Civil Engineers go through all steps in all states. But the last item is key: Professionals (Real Engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.) are legally liable for the work that goes out under their signature and can be sued for malpractice.
Does this mean that all software has to be distributed under the signature of a Certified Software Engineer? No, much like a pedestrian bridge in a park probably doesn't have to approved by a Civil Engineer. But a significant (whatever that means) piece of software will have to, much like a traffic-bearing bridge must.
If you've ever had to hire a Civil Engineer to do something for you (say, design a significant water impoundment system for your property) they aren't cheap.
Before we can do down this road we'll need a "certified" infrastructure. Much like a Civil Engineer has a list of materials that is manufactured to spec, we'll need operating systems, compilers, and such that we can build a certified structure upon. (My prediction: we'll see this within 10 years. And probably it will start with open source products that some company will use to build a certified base upon.)
It turns out Coriolis effects do come into play when firing missles. So there might have to be some sort of adjustment for it. There is a similar bit of math that has to be done when firing a rocket from the middle latitudes (Florida verses Guyana verses Khazakstan).
Water flowing in a sink is too small to see the effect, and weather patterns are clearly affected by it, so the Coriolis effect coming into play when shooting a several-ton mass a few thousand kilometers is within the bounds of reasonableness.
Actually, it's a bit deeper than that. In 1961 Bell Labs programmed an IBM 7094 computer to sing the song, and a record was released. (I rememeber checking it out of the library about 1974.) One rumor is the Kubrick chose that song since this is thought to be the first recording of a computer singing a song. So it's only natural for Bell Labs to reprise their 40-year-old hit song.
See this link for a recording. A bit spooky sounding.
When they first went up, the Shuttle used the AP-101D; the same computer as an F-16. It runs an IBM System 360 instruction set in a large 10cm x 20cm x 50cm metal box. It had about 256K of core memory. Four units built by IBM, and a fifth built by Rockwell (in case of a generic design fault) had their output compared every external clock tick, and if one unit disagreed it was locked out. During launch, all units ran the ascent code--upon reaching orbit one unit had the re-entry program loaded and then it was powered off.
About 10 years ago, these were replaced by AP-102's, which are a bit faster, smaller, and cooler and run the same instruction set. I think at that time they went to about 4 Meg of battery-backed ECC RAM. I may be wrong, but I think they did put them in smaller boxes so the computers only take half of the space. They may also have spinning disk drives instead of the older tapes (the tapes were about 30mm wide)--for years one bit of NASA dogma was "no spinning media in space" but modern drives are less massive and don't mind the lower atmospheric pressure too much. They do have laptops running other non-life-critical tasks, and these tend to be IBM ThinkPads from about 4 years ago (it takes about 2 years to get anything space rated) with funny power connections installed. The Space Station runs on ThinkPad 760's more-or-less (pentium 166's).
The real quality control of the Shuttle GPCs is the software. The team that maintains this is really good, and always striving to be better. And they program in something just one step above assembler!
All through the 1800's steam boiler explosions were quite common--steam technology was pushed until it was understood and matured. The raw material used to build boilers improved with the making of steel. Early Comet jets exploded until DeHavilland understood how a previously unknown phenomenon (metal fatigue from repeated pressurizations) caused a failure. But today steam boilers and jet airplanes very very rarely explode.
One difference is that with complex physical systems it is easy enough to build in redundancy. The Brooklyn Bridge has had dozens of diagonal stays (and maybe a few suspender cables) fail over the past century yet there is enough redundancy to prevent its collapse. But if your computer system doesn't have some sort of watchdog timer feature added by the manufacturer you have no protection form a wayward linelabel BranchUnconditional linelabel from hanging your system.
Today, we license boiler engineers, civil engineers, plumbers, CPAs, and even hairdressers. Not only does licensing provide revenue for the state, but it also insures that the person holding the license has passed a series of tests demonstrating minimal competence (think Driver's license). Once a licensed xyzzy has [designed a boiler] [designed a bridge] [installed a toilet] [cooked your books] [cut your hair] you can go back and hold that person responsible (i.e. sue them and their company) for a bad boiler/bridge/pipes/audit/shave.
Perhaps this is the next phase of the maturity of the software development profession. (A few years back New Jersey was thinking of this, but mostly as a scheme to raise revenue.) We'll have licensed Software Engineers. They won't be every member of a firm (not all Civil Engineers are necessarily licensed, but all designs are reviewed by them). We'd have to start with an operating environment that someone is willing to sign their name to "it does this-subset-of-functions." From that base, we can have a set of utilities that does another subset of functions, then applications that does the final set of functions.
We already have a software that people have signed their names to--the example that immediately comes to mind are the ascent, descent, and life support software of the Shuttle. The downside is that such software is expensive, but if sold in quantity the unit cost will go down. The APIs of such a system are nice and orthoganol (unlike Windows). Processor technology is at a level where even cheap processors can put processes in their own virtual space and hardware will detect something amiss.
Certifications are a start, but Certificates are not the same as Licenses. A certificate can go stale, but true licensed Professionals (doctors, lawyers, CPAs) have to keep up to keep their license. If they don't, they can be sued for malpractice.
So if I were to predict what's going to happen in the next few years (and I'll be the first to admit you can't predict anything about this business) I'll say that we may see Software Development emerging as a true Profession. A body of software developed by Licensed Professionals will start to be developed, and this licensed software will be used to perform critical tasks (run a Space Station or a nuclear plant, run a microwave, route IP packets). There will still be a lot of "unlicensed" software that no-one cares if it crashes (games, DVDs, toaters, office applications). Most of the programmers working at companies will be licensed, but almost everything going out the door will be reviewed, picked over, prodded, and stretched by someone who will sign their name on it. And if the program crashes badly, that someone will have to fix it, and/or be sued, and/or lose their license.
I'm kind of looking formward to this. I'm not willing to put my name on anything I've written recently, but there have been programs that did a few things and did them well--one program I wrote ran umnodified for about 6 years without stopping. (A work distribution system which during its tenure grew to handle about four times the maximum load it was originally designed for--the UNIX system it ran on was rebooted about twice a year and the program would pick right up from checkpoints. The good old days.)
The leg failed to deploy when a ground worker forgot to reconnect a hydraulic line (the one that pushed out the leg) while preparing the craft. Ooops. Too bad, the failed third flight showed the rocket could do some neat stuff, including a short segment where it was pointing 5 degrees below the (artificial) horizon. The one big problem was how to carry enough fuel to insure you can safely brake after re-entry. But putting the DC on top of a dumb booster would have made a nifty way of getting back to the moon.
Venturestar (the X-33) is having problems with the composite materials fuel tank delaminating after filled with cryogenic fuel. A not unheard-of problem, but it will be hard to correct; without composites the craft is too heavy to make orbit.
It was enough to make me want to go out and buy the book. Wasn't it by one of the first English films by that-French-director-who-wrote-the-book-on-Hitchco ck (too lazy to check the IMDB). And it had the opening credits read out loud and not written (after 20 years I still remember that).
Slashdot Mirror
I started using them when I saw the FAA Air Traffic Control consoles use them. If it's good enough when people's lives are on the line, it's good enough for Turbo Pascal. And some friends and family who have borrowed one of my machines to use has started using trackballs.
:(. I see they are $20 online.
When touch typing, it's nice to know exactly where the pointing device is. And when you have limited deskspace, even better. (My favorite device is the pointing-stick between the G and H key; though gaming I prefer the trackball--and mice are only useful when I've had to use the wheel extensively.)
Currently using Logitech MarbleMouse (have always been able to find them at CompUSA (RIP brick-and-mortar)). The all-optical detector never jams, though it seems the driver can't get the "middle button using left-and-right" click working
It sounds like the poster was describing a primary election form. In some "open primary" states, everyone can vote in the primary and can vote in ONLY ONE party's primary, since primary elections are for the purpose of nominating candidates for that party. It sounds like something the states shouldn't be involved in, but it shows how the political machine is wired for the two parties. Third parties, and the two parties in some states, hold nominating conventions to do the same thing.
A problem in some areas if that one party has a single obviously strong nominee, members of the opposing party will vote the other party's primary, and vote for an unelectable candidate. In very rare cases, the party loyalists will figure that the obvious candidate will win and not vote, and in fact the weaker candidate will win the primary. Or if there are a few good candidates, the opposition will try to get the weakest nominated. I'm shocked, shocked that people would consider doing this.
Last week's Washington Post had a very interesting aticle about this Eden and Evolution . It didn't try to verify or dispute the fact of evolution, but instead showed why fundamentlist religious folks have a big problem with evolution. And like many debates in society, it takes more than 10 seconds to get the point, so we end up just yelling past each other.
The religious right's big beef is that the theory of evolution really takes away man's special place in the universe. Evolution opens up the possibility that sentient life is something that just happened here on earth with no divine intervention. Evolution demonstrates that life could pop up in many places in the universe; given a stew of the right elements and physical conditions and enough time, life is inevitable.
Most non-religious or religious liberals (I'm a Unitarian Universalist, a denomination as theologically liberal as you could possibly imagine) think the fundamentalist's big problem is that evolution contradicts the first myth in the Bible (or whatever creation myth your religion professes). But religious folks have been very quick to switch from a literal translation to a more metaphorical one when the science demonstrates the facts. "The Earth does not move" (repeated a dozen times in the Bible) may have put Galileo under house arrest, but I doubt any Christian would fight the teaching of the heliocentric model of the solar system. What made that shift possible was the telescope; it not only easily showed other small systems at work that showed how the earth and the sun dance, but more recently (the last 50 years) has served as a time machine in astrophysics. Even most religious do not really believe all creation popped up ex nihilo in 144 hours (well, that's the first creation story; the one starting at Gen 2:4 isn't as time specific). In biology, there are dozens of well-documented recent observations that show speciation and other long-duration actions that are predicted by evolutionary theory--this is why "micro-eveolution" has been given as a reasonable possibility by some fundamentalists.
The key is to realize that people who truely believe in revealed knowledge aren't swayed by arguments from fact; they've been told that the scientific establishment is another source of revealed knowledge and the scientists really have no greater basis to really explain what's going on. At times scientific experts haven't been helpful to the novice public (too much cable news, which pits one crazed extreme opinion yeller with another extreme yeller, doesn't help). And some things, like string theory, really are mostly conjecture, and perhaps using a term like "string framework" may clear the air a bit. (And no, I'm not ready to debate string theory! It does explain many things, but one can fiddle the math to make it explain things way out of it's scope also.)
The thing people forget is that geocentrism is part of the old testament, much like creationism. (Ps 93:1 "the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.", 1 Chr 16:30 "Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved." a few other verses). The phrase "the earth moves" is what makes heliocentrism in conflict with the Bible. Galileo was under (loose) house arrest for 20 years because of this, and his last words are reportedly "but it [the earth] moves" (in Italian, of course).
So if creationism is documented in the Bible, so is geocentrism (or any other theory where the earth does not move). In the meantime, I'm joining the protest at the Red Lobster (Lev 9:10-12 "And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination. Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you."
My favorite place in the world is Puerto Rico. A colony, oops, "Free Associated State" of the USA. Where speed limits are in Miles Per Hour. And all distances on road signs are in Kilometers--it took me a few days to figure that out.
What do you call "milestones" in ISO-land?
In PR, the distance markers are in kilometers and hectometers (halfway between 34 and 35 the sign says "K34 H5").
IBM published a book, "Accessing the Internet", in August 1995. About 230 pages long. Very quaint in parts ("150,000 new users every month") but still has many (at this point) timeless truths about working with the internet.
Find it at this IBM search site or get the PDF file here.
If there are any economic nerds out here this could be the basis of a lot of discussion. The current wave of "corporatism" is overdue for some shaking up; perhaps the USA is about ready to re-examine its role in the world.
The article is about 20 pages long; good reading. Note that Harper's tends to be left-leaning; but then, so am I.
Last time I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC (a little over a year ago) they had a Soviet moon suit on display with a few details of the Soviet manned moon program. What was interesting was they had the moon backpack opened up, and there were several well-formed WOODEN braces holding a few things in there. I would guess they were temporary braces while the engineers waited for the real things to (never) appear. Also, the cosmonaut entered through a hatch in the back of the suit.
CA-Datacom is a hierarchical database--like IMS. It's not relational. Hey look! There is one CA-Datacom database on the list.
I work with the Customs and Border Protection database (see Peak Workload, all, OLTP). I've seen it pump 250,000 transactions in a minute (a few times a week) so I wouldn't be surprised to see 50,000/second. This has a few comfortably cruising IBM mainframes feeding a few database instances. MQSeries messaging is pulsing through a few thousand CICS transaction (millions of lines of COBOL). With generally subsecond response. Gotta love those 3270 workstations; web-based interfaces are way too slow (with a few hundred bytes to display the overhead is much much too large).
MVS stands for "Man Verses System". Plus, today it's spelled "z/OS".
Last time I heard, IEFBR14 had at least 6 APARS against it. When you consider it's a utility that's over 35 years old, I guess someone would find a few problems with it. (One was that the return code wasn't set, another was a system debugger couldn't handle objects less than 16 bytes in size, a few other debugger bugs.)
I was there on their first weekend, a few miles from Discovery Channel HQ (TLC's overlord). The Missle Masters (the Navy team from this season; they live about 200 miles away) were there to say "hi" and helped a few people with their models.
It was about as much fun as you would expect when you realize that they want to get a few hundred people to build the models and they don't allow arc welding. Lots of flat screen TV's, and the mall's Radio Shack manager came down with a bunch of ZipZaps (the small RC cars) to play with (and sell); my 4 year-old had much fun (and the ZipZap has survived 2 weeks (3 sets of batteries) of use).
I kept asking for Kathy Rogers. I figured one of the TV hosts would show up for the first stop of the tour. Maybe on the last...
If you have the fastest car at the end of the tour you'll get to be on the show. The fastest run at the first weekend was 4.4 seconds.
One interesting factoid: If you go into a supermarket that is using IBM checkout equipment, many times you'll find an AS/400 in every 6th aisle or so. Probably under the moving belt, behind some panel. There may be a small window where you can see a green light. Quietly working away, keeping the cashiers happy.
They are configured in such a way that if a unit goes down, the workload between the aisles is re-shuffled between AS/400s (this may cause the cashier to re-scan the last few items, but usually is invisible). This reshuffling can also be done between closely-located stores. 4800 bps leased lines can handle the traffic, though you may notice a delay between a scan and the price appearing on the display.
AS/400's are not totally buttletproof. But in this configuration it's not unheard of for a machine to be down for a day or two before someone comes out to fix it (the failure is detected quickly, but if there's a few extra machines still available there's generally not a rush).
Chemical Engineering is mostly the same as Computer programming; both are trying to get very small hardware to do what you want. The scale of a lot of Chem Eng does make the bugs a bit more interesting. My dad (a ChemE) called home one day and said he would be late, and suggested we turn on the local news to see the tower of smoke and flame that resulted from one too many valves being open (no-one was hurt fortunately).
He also was called in as a consultant to a gas-fractionating plant where he asked why it seemed all their equipment is so up-to-date and was told that their experience was that the works destoyed itself about every three years. When working with 10,000 psi gases all it takes is one very small crack to put in a new order with Purchasing. Needless to say, they had many small, fully-automated units in a rural location (and lots of mounds of earth).
But most of his work was maintenance. Just like mine. (Though maintaining a hydrofluoric acid production line, where everything is teflon or wax (HF eats everything else, even people), sounds a lot more fun.) Once when I visited his plant he showed me their new machine that took a loaded rail car, grabbed the bottom, and tipped it over to empty it (the most efficient way). Neat.
I think the best analogy is if PC's are cars, and UNIX servers are semi-trucks, then mainframes are 747's. If you're just tooling around town, or even going cross country, then your favorite auto will work. If you want to (have to?) do more useful things without all the idiot-proofing, then UNIX is the way. But if you're doing something industrial, then the mainframe is the way to go. But the user interface is, well, like flying a 747. And it's not the most efficient way to run to the store for a gallon of milk.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM (I wrote this on my company-issued ThinkPad). I use mainframes everyday, but spend most of my time using p690's running AIX--a web front end to processing that will continue to execute on the four clustered mainframes.
My first job out of college (1982) involved babysitting an IBM 370\168. On the console was a large meter (about 4 x 6 inches) marked 0.0 to 1.0 (11 big tickmarks, 90 little ones). A bunch of toggle switches allowed you to flip in the points you wanted to monitor (CPU, channels 0 through 15--this was a 2 processor complex so there was a twin console about 10 feet away). When monitoring a CPU it would rapidly jiggle from one extreme to another.
What I would like to see someone do is connect a 168 console to a modern system--it was about 5 feet long with hundreds of switch and dials and each one did something neat. Also, elled off on the left was two micofiche readers; the one on the left was usable to look up maintenance documents and the one on the right had a screwed-in fiche and rows of incandecent lights (about 20 rows and 32 columns; you could read the fiche between the rows of lights), and depending on where you were on the fiche you could look at the status of various registers. Between the two readers behind a panel was a small plugboard where you could configure the memory--if you had a failing chip (1024 bits) or card you could reconfigure the memory and re-IPL the machine. IIRC, the top few lights on the top row were red and were permanently marked things like "THERMAL FAULT" and other really nasty things.
For the US Census we ran a CMM level 5 shop. (I was with Lockheed Martin at the time, the same company who works on the Shuttle code). Our code development ran a bit slower than you have experienced but should expect with inspections and feedback. But once the system was deployed, it worked. And mostly on budget and just a hair behind schedule (see next paragraph).
The big problem was feature creep. The government figured (correctly) that a few thousand dollars in additional development effort would save on personnel--as it was we had about 8000 operators in the system at the end. So new requirements were coming in all the time. The total bill for the new features ran into the millions. But they were kept in control with processes.
Working on the Census convinced me that applying professional engineering concepts to software development actually works. When people say "software is different" I feel that they are so stuck in the last century. And in the end, it's a cost savings to do the right thing. You just need to convince the PHBs (which is the hardest part).
One trend that (for better or worse) has been building for the past few years is the building maturity of software as an engineering dicipline. We're not there yet, but in about 15 years some of us will be counted on to develop systems that will be verifiably bulletproof and someone will be sued if it fails. (We may look back at the 90's as the good old days when even high-school kids could make good money cranking out code.)
150 years ago bridges used to collapse regularly; even 100 years ago bridge collapses were not unusual. But today, we're building bridges that will be around forever. What happened? Just before the American Civil War, Civil Engineers got together and decided to become more professional. This also led to standardization of building materials and design processes. Yes, you don't see people building bridges and dams totally off-the-cuff, and it takes a few months to do it right. Today, most bridges have a signature of a certified Civil Engineer on the blueprints and you can guess where the lawyers will be looking if there is a problem.
In the next few years all the SW-CMM process stuff will become critical ( http://www.sei.cmu.edu/ ). There are a few highly organized projects deployed and becuase we're taking measurements we can show that going through all the steps does decrease costs in all phases of a project. With the dot-bomb contraction there's a little less pressure and a little more time to do it right the first time.
The group that will push this through are those who are today identified as (usually) Architects. If you have a customer who can't figure out why there's an Architect on the project who's billing at a higher rate than a coder and yet doesn't produce any executables (my current problem) you can go back and show how, by applying a dicipline, the resulting system will be more stable and usable (my current solution). And even a PHB will see that--developing the communication skills to explain (as best as possible) the latest neat-o blivet to the founder's son is the hardest part of the job.
Of course, I'm still coding. But as a previous poster brought up, it's only to help out in a crunch or to get something started and ultimately my code is maintained (or rewritten) by someone else within a month of my writing it. But actually coding a, say, JSP is the only way to grok what you can do with it.
And giveback? Mentoring that new kid or getting that old COBOL programmer to get with the program is easy. Getting your employer to see the value of process is valuable (start with a new, small project and collect some quantifiable measurements). We are going to have to build a solid environment that we can develop solid systems on, and I don't think it will come from any MonopolieS.
A year or so ago I was working in the UK where lights flicker at 50 Hz and did some tests. When setting the refresh rate at 60 Hz I still got headaches (couldn't get the refresh rate to 50Hz, but could get 43 Hz interlaced--interlaced output was bad bad bad). I dimly remember reading someplace that some human neural plexuses (plexi?) have a cycle time of 16 msec (notably, around the heart so 60Hz AC is more deadly than 50Hz AC).
LCDs don't have these problems since they have such long persistence that you'll never normally see flicker. (The only times I've seen flicker is when the cabling is florked causing the signal to have lots of periodic noise introduced.) Also, digital interfaces on LCDs allow them to update the display without scanning in the usual sense.
Of course, since I'm trying to study this in a zero-blind fashion it could all be in my head in the first place!
- Some sort of recognized college course of study.
- A formal licensing/certification program.
- A license from the state.
- A legal recognition that the signature of the certified individual is important.
- The ability for unsatisified customers and future users to come after you in court.
Note that not all Civil Engineers go through all steps in all states. But the last item is key: Professionals (Real Engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.) are legally liable for the work that goes out under their signature and can be sued for malpractice.Does this mean that all software has to be distributed under the signature of a Certified Software Engineer? No, much like a pedestrian bridge in a park probably doesn't have to approved by a Civil Engineer. But a significant (whatever that means) piece of software will have to, much like a traffic-bearing bridge must.
If you've ever had to hire a Civil Engineer to do something for you (say, design a significant water impoundment system for your property) they aren't cheap.
Before we can do down this road we'll need a "certified" infrastructure. Much like a Civil Engineer has a list of materials that is manufactured to spec, we'll need operating systems, compilers, and such that we can build a certified structure upon. (My prediction: we'll see this within 10 years. And probably it will start with open source products that some company will use to build a certified base upon.)
Water flowing in a sink is too small to see the effect, and weather patterns are clearly affected by it, so the Coriolis effect coming into play when shooting a several-ton mass a few thousand kilometers is within the bounds of reasonableness.
Actually, it's a bit deeper than that. In 1961 Bell Labs programmed an IBM 7094 computer to sing the song, and a record was released. (I rememeber checking it out of the library about 1974.) One rumor is the Kubrick chose that song since this is thought to be the first recording of a computer singing a song. So it's only natural for Bell Labs to reprise their 40-year-old hit song. See this link for a recording. A bit spooky sounding.
When they first went up, the Shuttle used the AP-101D; the same computer as an F-16. It runs an IBM System 360 instruction set in a large 10cm x 20cm x 50cm metal box. It had about 256K of core memory. Four units built by IBM, and a fifth built by Rockwell (in case of a generic design fault) had their output compared every external clock tick, and if one unit disagreed it was locked out. During launch, all units ran the ascent code--upon reaching orbit one unit had the re-entry program loaded and then it was powered off. About 10 years ago, these were replaced by AP-102's, which are a bit faster, smaller, and cooler and run the same instruction set. I think at that time they went to about 4 Meg of battery-backed ECC RAM. I may be wrong, but I think they did put them in smaller boxes so the computers only take half of the space. They may also have spinning disk drives instead of the older tapes (the tapes were about 30mm wide)--for years one bit of NASA dogma was "no spinning media in space" but modern drives are less massive and don't mind the lower atmospheric pressure too much. They do have laptops running other non-life-critical tasks, and these tend to be IBM ThinkPads from about 4 years ago (it takes about 2 years to get anything space rated) with funny power connections installed. The Space Station runs on ThinkPad 760's more-or-less (pentium 166's). The real quality control of the Shuttle GPCs is the software. The team that maintains this is really good, and always striving to be better. And they program in something just one step above assembler!
One difference is that with complex physical systems it is easy enough to build in redundancy. The Brooklyn Bridge has had dozens of diagonal stays (and maybe a few suspender cables) fail over the past century yet there is enough redundancy to prevent its collapse. But if your computer system doesn't have some sort of watchdog timer feature added by the manufacturer you have no protection form a wayward
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from hanging your system.
Today, we license boiler engineers, civil engineers, plumbers, CPAs, and even hairdressers. Not only does licensing provide revenue for the state, but it also insures that the person holding the license has passed a series of tests demonstrating minimal competence (think Driver's license). Once a licensed xyzzy has [designed a boiler] [designed a bridge] [installed a toilet] [cooked your books] [cut your hair] you can go back and hold that person responsible (i.e. sue them and their company) for a bad boiler/bridge/pipes/audit/shave.
Perhaps this is the next phase of the maturity of the software development profession. (A few years back New Jersey was thinking of this, but mostly as a scheme to raise revenue.) We'll have licensed Software Engineers. They won't be every member of a firm (not all Civil Engineers are necessarily licensed, but all designs are reviewed by them). We'd have to start with an operating environment that someone is willing to sign their name to "it does this-subset-of-functions." From that base, we can have a set of utilities that does another subset of functions, then applications that does the final set of functions.
We already have a software that people have signed their names to--the example that immediately comes to mind are the ascent, descent, and life support software of the Shuttle. The downside is that such software is expensive, but if sold in quantity the unit cost will go down. The APIs of such a system are nice and orthoganol (unlike Windows). Processor technology is at a level where even cheap processors can put processes in their own virtual space and hardware will detect something amiss.
Certifications are a start, but Certificates are not the same as Licenses. A certificate can go stale, but true licensed Professionals (doctors, lawyers, CPAs) have to keep up to keep their license. If they don't, they can be sued for malpractice.
So if I were to predict what's going to happen in the next few years (and I'll be the first to admit you can't predict anything about this business) I'll say that we may see Software Development emerging as a true Profession. A body of software developed by Licensed Professionals will start to be developed, and this licensed software will be used to perform critical tasks (run a Space Station or a nuclear plant, run a microwave, route IP packets). There will still be a lot of "unlicensed" software that no-one cares if it crashes (games, DVDs, toaters, office applications). Most of the programmers working at companies will be licensed, but almost everything going out the door will be reviewed, picked over, prodded, and stretched by someone who will sign their name on it. And if the program crashes badly, that someone will have to fix it, and/or be sued, and/or lose their license.
I'm kind of looking formward to this. I'm not willing to put my name on anything I've written recently, but there have been programs that did a few things and did them well--one program I wrote ran umnodified for about 6 years without stopping. (A work distribution system which during its tenure grew to handle about four times the maximum load it was originally designed for--the UNIX system it ran on was rebooted about twice a year and the program would pick right up from checkpoints. The good old days.)
Venturestar (the X-33) is having problems with the composite materials fuel tank delaminating after filled with cryogenic fuel. A not unheard-of problem, but it will be hard to correct; without composites the craft is too heavy to make orbit.
It was enough to make me want to go out and buy the book. Wasn't it by one of the first English films by that-French-director-who-wrote-the-book-on-Hitchco ck (too lazy to check the IMDB). And it had the opening credits read out loud and not written (after 20 years I still remember that).