Too right. If we'd have done FedSat all over again, we wouldn't have been so ambitious. OK, it worked, but it was a lot harder than it should have been, and may have cost more than a number of smaller, less ambitious satellites.
See "stepwise refinement" and other useful development strategies.
Hmmm.. now that we know we can build reliable gear that works for months (despite being zapped by the South Atlantic Anomaly High-Radiation zone a few times every day), I wonder what we could do regarding a Mars lander...
OK, Hands up all those who have headed up a software team for a spacecraft? OK, guess that makes me an expert FWIW. That's scary considering my ignorance.
Here's my 2c:
Software is NEVER deterministic in an operating environment. Just because you can put it on a bench and test the snot out of it does not certify it's behavior in the real world.
Truth.
Every condition should be able to be gracefully handled by an error checking routine. There is zero room for failure.
Also Truth.
The problem is that even formally verifiably correct programs have unpredictable behaviour when subject to running on imperfect hardware and in high radiation conditions. It is not possible to test every single permutation of events in anything other than the most simple systems. Fortunately, there is a technique that helps, it's in 3 parts, all of which are essential:
Good Systems Engineering (as has been mentioned in other posts)
Really thorough testing, it's not feasible to test all the code with all the values, but a good risk/hazard analysis will tell you which ones can kill people if they go wrong, so put the test resources in those. All other things get tested as well, but not with every single possible permutation of values.
Finally, and this is the one that saves your bacon more than anything else, confine faults into small error boxes. If something goes wrong, be it from a failed chip, an errant cosmic ray, or a software bug, then the error handling you have in each section should confine the resultant problems so they don't propagate. Some languages make this trivially easy - such as Eiffel's Design by Contract, Delphi's Assert or (my personal favourite) Ada's strict typing (plus exception handling). Others make it much more difficult, but still possible.
Is this some "magic bullet"? Hell no. But it works. Teams of normal mortals, not Software Geniusses, can produce software that works, and do so within a reasonable budget and in a reasonable time - both rather less than industry average for commercial work. Now the satellite our team made is just a LEOsat - but it's possibly the most complex satellite for its size ever launched.
Star Wars was the FIRST movie to do a Space based SCI-FI with lots of semi believeable special effects. The sci-fi movies before it sucked because the effects were lame..
Average amount of cable required per remote rural subscriber in Australia is about 30 km. That's the average. Many people in the Outback have their nearest neighbour over 100 miles away. 97% of the population lives in 13% of the area (source). So we're talking about 600,000 people - at most 200,000 subscribers - in an area equivalent to the USA, less Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
Existing LEOSats, such as Iridium and Globalstar can't even do 56kbps. But the Ka-band - if it works - may be enough to do 2 Gbps. That's what the experimental communications payload is for, amongst other things, to see how well or how badly Ka-band works over rural Australia (and also in built-up areas for other applications)
Have a look here. It's the English Bill of Rights, dated 1698. Some quotes:
That the subjects
which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law; That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders; That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;
Does that last bit sound familiar? Compare with Amendment VIII of the US Constitution:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
And apart from the Protestant-only bit, the US 2nd and 7th Amendments also sounds as if they've been inspired by the English original, of about a century earlier.
Why Violent? Surely the last 100 years have shown that non-violent protests are far more effective, provided only that the protestors are more than a small, shrill minority? Or are you convinced that your little group is intellectually superior to the masses?
As for the "hypocrites or just interested in censoring controversial opinions?", that's self-evidently a strawman. If I gave you the choice Are you an imbecile, or just an idiot? that would be just as intellectually bankrupt. You're neither (your post was cogent, relatively polite)- so please don't behave that way with such discredited dielectic and insult everyone's intelligence.
Re: advocates international violence(war) what would you have us do? Would you advocate Saddam Hussein as a person you't trust to have nukes? That's really the point here. OK, so you'd prefer Bush not to have them either, but if you don't see a difference in kind rather than degree between Bush and Saddam, I'd be very interested in your evidence. You either live on a different planet, or you know something I don't.
Finally, the fact that you post as an "Anonymous Coward" says a lot. The few times I've been moved to protest, I've not been afraid to give my name, to stand up for what I believe in. You'd gain a lot more credibility if you'd do the same. Sure, it would be at some personal risk - but if it's that important, that should make no difference. Maybe you think that you're just being prudent. But for once, "Anonymous Coward" seems to be an exactly accurate description, as it lessens your credibility, and you know it. You just don't think that your principles are worth even a minimal degree of personal risk - so why should anyone else?
You're willing to commit violence on others, to incite people to risk their own skins, but not to put your name on public display, to stand up and be counted. Or have I got it wrong?
Not always. OK, more often than not. It doesn't help that we're paid 1/3 or less of post-dotbomb US salaries. This was brought home to me when I saw the budgetary cost of the average programmer in Europe - USD $160,000 or $320,000 AusD. That includes payroll taxes etc etc, but is still four times what it costs to hire the average programmer here - who gets $20,000 USD, about half the cost. And even superstars wouldn't get more than $70,000 USD
But not every company is like this. OK, I'll name names: I work for this mob. The CEO gets less than the senior technical people. Every 2 weeks, all employees get together and we discuss the firm's accounts, what our plans are, how we can help each other. It's a (literal) Soviet. And we do all sorts of interesting stuff, like spaceflight avionics, help people get CMM 3+ etc. We work 9-to-5 in theory, but closer to 10-6 in practice. We have lives, and consider long hours to be a sign that we've screwed up in resource planning. It happens, but rarely.
Dress Code? "Whatever's appropriate". When flogging a tool to IBM, suit, tie, etc. Otherwise "civilised", whatever you're comfortable with. Some wear suits by preference, some not.
No, I wouldn't leave this place for 10x the money I'm getting. After 22 years in the business, I know how lucky I am.
The best description is here. It provides a good, concise description of CMM levels 1-5. Highly recommended as the best 1/3 page summary of CMM there is.
It also provides in much more detail a description of levels 0 to -3, the Capability Im-Maturity Model, and that part's hilarious.
People - and I'm particularly calling on all Islamic/.ers - we've got to do something about this.
Well bugamededsedfred. Somebody - the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils did something, according to this story from the Australian IT news. I'll quote it in full to pre-emptively prevent the/. effect:
A SYDNEY-BASED website promoting extreme Islam is to be closed, the peak Australian Federation of Islamic Councils says.
The federation said the Islamic Youth Movement, which runs the Call of Islam web magazine, had agreed to take down the site.
"I personally think it's inciting hatred," the federation's Kuranda Seyit told The Australian.
"It's a very sensitive time."
At www.islam.org.au, the site posted interviews with Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Sungkar, an alleged founder of Jemaah Islamiah, the regional terror network suspected of the Bali bomb attack.
Late yesterday, the site was still active and it is understood the youth movement had not complied with previous requests by moderate Muslim leaders that specific articles be removed from the web magazine. An entry on Call of Islam's homepage notes that articles on the website were last updated on September 6. The website advocates pursuit of an Islamic state by military struggle, opposition to "international Judeo movements and the Freemasons", and hostility to non-Muslim Australian society. Mainstream Muslim leaders say the Islamic Youth Movement is a small, unrepresentative group whose extremism is limited to rhetoric. But an article, "The Sword and the Spear" says the "intellectual superiority" of Islam "must be backed up with a prompt physical defence, and this is the power of the sword". Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna last week said: "I am surprised that the Australian Government is permitting this kind of propaganda to be published."
Obviously Rohan Gunaratna isn't quite familiar with the Australian concept of "Freedom of Speech" - it's not protected by our Constitution, just by custom (a far more solid guarantee IMHO). As long as it doesn't actually incite hatred and/or violence, it's best if the Government buts out, regardless of the article's nausea-index. This one comes close to overstepping the mark, but such cases should be and are given the benefit of the doubt.
For the Mainstream of Islam to take notice that the Islamofascists have brought the whole of their religion into disrepute, that's another matter. Good on 'em.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of comments about this one. I'd even be willing to bet that most/.ers have more symptoms of Aspergers than not.
Getting down to cases: I can only theorise based on my own internal experiences. So, here goes some facts and opinions, without attempt at analysis:
Until age 8, I had no understanding of the conspiracy called "common sense". I was constantly being told to use it, but there seemed to be no pattern to the illogical sets of behaviour it indicated. It was only when I saw the utility of playing the social game that I made a studied campaign to emulate something I couldn't process natively.
I look for sequences of words whose meanings do not correspond to the logical meaning of the individual components. If someone says "It's awful weather" then do not reply "It does not inspire Awe in me.", the symbol-set is a code for "Communication Request.". It should be ACK'd by a code such as "Yes, isn't it - but the rain will be good for the farmers." (thereby indicating willingness to continue meaningless social interaction - which can be useful, even if a waste of time), ACK'd by "Hmm, yes." indicating acknowledgement but no desire to continue this time (leaving open the possibility of communication should such be useful), or NAC'd by a grunt or just silence. This will be treated as a permanent stop on communication, so is to be used only after due consideration.
When living in a society which is illogical, and rubbing mud on one's belly and two feathers behind the right ear is compulsory, do so. Do not try to understand it, just review the consequences of not conforming. If it is important ethically not to conform (e.g. not joining in a lynch mob) then do so, but only after planning how to escape negative consequences.
Your wetware is running on actual hardware, subject to illness, hormones, and other non-logical interference. Take this into account as much as you can - and if you're young, do a lot of listening. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. There is a pattern there, just not an easy one to recognise, and it's both complex and dynamic. But regardless of whether you can understand human society, it is possible to fake it enough to be useful. Take comfort in the fact that evolution has pre-disposed your brain to do it, even if there's no logic to it.
Do not attempt to understand logically human-human interaction: your brain is wired not just for algorithmetic processing, but is a neural-net. You can think without consciousness. A good exercise is to consider such actions as walking - try to do it by thinking about it, and you will be less efficient than letting the programmable firmware handle it. You can do the same for decyphering some non-verbal communications from others. (I'm still not very good at this.)
One effective strategy when playing Primate Games of Dominance, Office Politics etc - certainly enough to survive, which is all that we're interested in - is to be completely truthful, honest and open. Those whose brains are wired for deceit will not be able to find your hidden agenda, since you don't have one. This will cause confusion to them, they will think you're a better player than they are, so will leave you alone.
When I was about 6, I had a General Anaesthetic. It took me over 10 hours to come out of it. For much of that period I was dimly aware of external stimuli, they just weren't important. Eventually I managed to decode the face-slaps and sounds as attempts to wake me up, and thought it useful to do so. I guess (and I do mean guess) that a lot of autistic children just haven't seen a good reason to interact socially or with anything else in the Universe. Even a fingerprint can be endlessly fascinating, so why bother with the sounds that the universe (the bits that are other people) makes? They are just a distraction. You can make them go away by screaming, so why remember words? As for my own son - who's now 16 months old - I'm playing games with him with lots of mechanical toys (lots of fun to be had with swinging doors ), but also playing social-interaction games such as "pass the juice bottle" where we share a cup of juice, taking turns. And a lot of exaggerated facial grimaces for smiles, frowns and other non-verbal communications. I want to show him that things outside himself are interesting too. Because to lose speech and get too fascinated by internals is debilitating and very very not-useful, fun though it might be. You will get frustrated, and not know how to alter your environment to make it better. You will also upset people around you who care about you.
Australia does NOT operate under any sembelance of an 'integrationist' policy. They take any immigrant, put them in an inhumane detention centre (if they're lucky enough not to just be turned away), and deport them ASAP.
Personally speaking as an immigrant to Australia, I can personally assure you this is factually challenged. Over 1/4 of Australia's population was born overseas. We take in more immigrants per head of population than the US, for example (more than any major country in the world except for Canada in fact). OK, according to the good old CIA factbook it's Canada 6.5/1000, Australia 4.12, USA 3.5.
That's the trouble with stating less-than-informed opinions in places like/. - you'll occasionally run into someone who can marshal some facts. You end up looking like a Dill, but at least you're better informed afterwards. Oh by the way, it's happened to me a few times too, you'
re not Robinson Crusoe.
Canada integrates people into its society. Part of the integration is adapting to their culture, and having their culture adapt to ours.
Australia operates under exactly the same philosophy, and long may she continue. But as recent events have shown, some cultures are more adaptable than others. Here's a particularly nauseating quote from a mainstream Islamic press article about "cultural assimilation" entitled Preserving the Islamic Identity in the West. It starts off fairly blandly:
The education system is typically where the indoctrination process begins. Muslim school children are sent off by their parents to Kafir schools with good intentions of an education and a chance at a better life (in this world, at least). The children are placed in an environment where the mixing of sexes is not only tolerated but encouraged through the placement of children in multi-gender sporting teams and class groups. These children grow up to believe such behaviour is normal. This leads, in most cases, to them passing off the Islamic requirement of segregated sexes as 'old fashioned' or 'backward'. After years in an environment as free as this, it is no surprise that we see so many young Muslims with 'boyfriends', and 'girlfriends'.
Then it goes on
A major component of the education system is to turn the students into 'good Australians'. To be a good Australian means to obey the laws of the land even if they conflict with the laws of Allah (s.w.t). We see this from the earliest stages of the child's education in the form of flag-raising ceremonies each morning in which the children sing the national anthem and stand in respect as the flag of the non-Muslims is raised over their heads.
and finally ends up with this hideous piece:
It is therefore unavoidable that as long as we live here we will, through a process of cultural osmosis, take on some of the characteristics of the Kuffar.
The likeness of Islam and Kuffar is like that of fresh clear spring water and water brought up from the bottom of a suburban sewer. If even a drop of the filthy water enters the clear water, the clarity diminishes. Likewise it only takes a drop of the filth of disbelief to contaminate Islam in the West. If we have it within our means we should therefore consider moving to a Muslim land whereby we can at least live amongst our brethren and within an Islamic society free from the contamination of the disbelievers.
I happen to agree with them in one respect: this type of intolerance has no place in any multi-culture, be it melting-pot or mosaic, Australia or Canada. And at least he's advocating a literal Apartheid rather than Genocide for "the Kaffir". Is this extremism typical of Islam? Certainly not of the many Muslims I know. But their religion has to some extent been hijacked by some very weird and dangerous Imams, with lots of money from Saudi Arabia supplied for schools and teachers of the most extreme kind.
IMHO We - not just mainstream Islam, but society as a whole - have screwed up in the past by not supplying sufficient teaching materials and educational resources to counteract these Islamofascists. And we're paying the price.
But I urge readers to do some websurfing of their own: don't rely on my words or interpretations. Certainly don't rely on second-hand views on parochial pro-Israeli or jigoistic USAian sites. Have a look at what's in the Islamic press worldwide, what all too many say about themselves. There's a lot of sanity, but just as much that is both scary and psychotic.
To see how psychotic, imagine if, say, the New York Times had published without anyone complaining the following:
The likeness of America and Muslim is like that of fresh clear spring water and water brought up from the bottom of a suburban sewer. If even a drop of the filthy water enters the clear water, the clarity diminishes. Likewise it only takes a drop of the filth of Islam to contaminate America.*
As I said, Nauseating. People - and I'm particularly calling on all Islamic/.ers - we've got to do something about this.
* - for the hard-of-thinking, the New York Times hasn't published any drivel like this, it's just a paraphrase of the quote above, with the tokens "islam" and "West" interchanged.
When I left in 1989, I was told the HMAS Hobart had a combined computing power on the whole ship, of a Macintosh Classic.
Let's see, a 2-bay UYK-7 with a 128k core running the 5XXX NCDS system... somewhere between a fat and skinny mac, yes, that's correct. (I was involved in programming them 1983-85).. and we were amazed at how antiquated they were even then.
If you really want Old, what about the EW keyset (designed about 1935 IIRC)? HMAS Hobart, now along with Brisbane and Perth either reefs or razorblades. Good boats all, even though they did "roll on wet grass".
how can you have 'official' and 'unofficial' secrets? How can that work? and what secrets are 'official' and which are 'unofficial'?
The unofficial answer is that I could tell you, but I'd have to kill-9 you. The official answer? You're not cleared for that.
But seriously folks... the definition of the types of information that is considered officially secret is within the Official Secrets Act legislation. I've signed the Official Secrets Act (Australian version - actually section 79 of the Crimes Act). And that's about all I can really say about it, apart from the fact that the quoted link's to an unofficial version. The UK version is a bit different, and the quoted link is to an official version.
Unlike many websites, neither has anything to do with secretaries, or secretions.
Re:and how many are single ...
on
The Aging Gamer
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I'm currently 43 and on my second marriage.
44 and still on my first - and we've just had our first child, after 20 years of wedded blitz.
Started programming at age 9 back in 1967, and the first computer game I played was on an IBM-360 back in 72. Star Trek, no less. First game I ever programmed was on an HP-65 programmable calculator a few years later.
So my advice is - don't think you'll be "old" in 2030. Save up some good stories about how the Net used to be free, how 2 GigaHz was a fast machine, how we only dreamed of having a Petabyte of main memory on our machine - which was on a desk, not wearable/implanted.
The EFA site lists a number of sites blocked by one particular tool, iFilter that was supposedly going to be installed in some schools (as of 1999). One "recommended" by one particular Senator in 1999. A simple keyword searcher, and not a particularly good one. That's it.
FWIW I had no problem getting to 3 of the 4 sites listed, and the other one isn't being reported as existing by Google.
But thanks for the attempt... looks like Australia's Internet Blocking isn't anyone's specialist subject. You made as good an attempt at helping me as I could ask for, and my sincere thanks for that. But you're in a minority, it appears that most people don't want to be confused by the facts.
Pretty much the only place you're safe is Russia, because the US police will protect you from Russian law, and Australia, because they're firewalled and can't access the internet.
Firewalled are we? I didn't know that. To prove it, please give a small list of, say, 10 - or even ONE - site that can't be accessed from Oz. Excluding those that involve goats, minors etc.
You see we may have legislation in effect that says "block all the kiddie porn" but in fact no-one here's come up with a way to do this effectively. Either you don't block what you want to, block what you don't want to, or (usually) both. So no blocks are actually in place that I've been able to find. Of course, I wouldn't know what I can't see, would I? So tell me. Thanks.
Otherwise I'll consign this to the realms of "Urban Myth".
As a software engineer in Australia, this is just waaaaaaaaay out of my reach
Yes, but at least you have a job. OK, so it's at $50k US or less (probably a lot less, maybe $30k if you've less than 5 years of experience). But at least it means Australian Software Engineers are competitive price-wise with Sri Lanka and India. We're still undercut by Ukraine and China though.
Like most Software people here in Oz, we could get 3x as much in the US or Europe. But that would mean leaving Australia - and I for one don't think it's worth it (having done 5 years in Germany, the US etc).
Some great information re State-of-the-art in 1980, Notations, Exception/Concurrency etc. My thanks, take a virtual "+1 Informative" from me.
As for the 'success' of ADA, what little success it has had has almost without exception been coerced. It does not say anything for the suitability of ADA for safety critical systems that it is used when the original proponents of ADA require its use as a contract condition.
Re: "little success" and "almost without exception been coerced" I respectfully submit the following very incomplete list of recent entirely "uncoerced" Ada projects:
Reuters news service
Swiss Postbank Electronic Funds Transfer system
Airbus 330 and 340
Beechjet 400A and Beech Starship I
Beriev BE-200 (Russian forest fire patrol)
Boeing 737-200, -400, -500, -600, -700, -800
Boeing 747-400
Boeing 757
Boeing 767
Boeing 777
Canadair Regional Jet
Embraer CBA-123 and CBA-145
Fokker F-100
Ilyushin 96M (Russian jetliner)
Saab 2000
Tupolev TU-204 (Russian jetliner)
Cairo Metro
Calcutta Metro
Caracas Metro
Channel Tunnel
Conrail (major U.S. railway company)
French High-Speed Rail (TGV)
French National Railways
Hong Kong Suburban Rail
London Underground
Paris Metro
Paris Suburban Rail
...and a host of others, satellites, financial systems, bio-medical... Of course mere popularity doesn't mean that the language is any good. But the fact that so many entities with nothing to do with the US Government or the now long-defunct "Ada mandate" have chosen Ada is notable. As to why? The (UK) Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) published a document:
"Guidelines For The Use Of The C Language In Vehicle Based Software" whose Section 1.3 "The use of C for safety-related systems" states
[arguments for using a restricted subset of C.] "Nonetheless, it should be recognised that there are other languages available which are in general better suited to safety-related systems, having (for example) fewer insecurities and better type checking. Examples of languages generally recognised to be more suitable than C are Ada and Modula 2. If such languages could be available for a proposed system then their use should be seriously considered in preference to C."
This post is getting long - most people won't read this far. But if you want, I'll follow-up with more hard data regarding reliability, cost etc. Basically, the reason Ada gets used is that it's provably better, the numbers on reliability, cost-to-develop, defect-rates etc. show it.
It is a pity that the catastrophe of ADA brought down the idea of dimensional analysis with it. Of course Hoare's Turing award lecture (please don't use this for anything safety critical the compilers are certain to be full of bugs) gave a salutary warning on unbounded complexity.
You mean such warnings as:
Gradually these objectives have been sacrificed in favour of power,
supposedly achieved by a plethora of features and notational conventions,
many of them unncessary and some of them, like exception handling,
even dangerous.
I mean, how many languages use Dem Debil Exceptions these days? Or the notational dot form, as in object.method ? And apart from Boeing, Beriev, Lockheed, Airbus, Antonov etc who uses Ada for safety-critical systems?
But I come not to bury Hoare, but to praise him (Hell, he invented the case statement..):
It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the Ada language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic to use
The astounding success of the SPARK subset of Ada-83 and Ravenscar subset of Ada-95 has vindicated him with a vengeance. You also have to remember that Hoare's speech(pdf) was in 1980 - and Ada-83 was greatly simplified from the Ada proposals of just 3 years earlier. But even then it was vastly more simple and powerful than C++ or Java. public static void main(String argsv){}? Ye Gods. Never mind, maybe if someone keeps on quoting the large and growing body of evidence about language choice being important, that it's not "religion" but a matter of objective measurement, and that one reason why most software sucks is that good programmers are using lousy languages, then maybe things will change..... Nah.
As mentioned previously on/. there's open-source e-voting code available on-line.
To recap the message:
The code is open-source
The OS is open-source (Debian)
The compiler is open-source(GNU)
It's been proven to work in an election (and survived a court challenge - the challenger gave up as there was overwhelming evidence to show it worked)
It caters for everything from simple first-past-the-post to the horrendously complex Hare-Clarke multiple preferential system used in Eire, Tasmania, Malta, and the Australian Capital Territory
And the development cost of the software was only $100,000 US
Damn, where are my mod points when I need em.. I'd give a "+1 Extremely Useful" to this.
For my sins, I've had to re-vamp our company's website. After a lot of experimentation, here's some design principles:
Sadly, CSS has too many different interpretations of what it should be doing on different browsers. This is a Royal Pain.
Take Accessibility by the blind seriously. If doing work for the gummint, this is mandatory. In any event, it's unethical not to do so.
Javascript is right out. Also a royal pain. This is because of security issues, a growing number of corporate clients have Javascript permanently turned off. This means though that you can't do effective versioning.
ASP and other MS-only stuff - don't even think about it, unless you want to appear like a total dork. Your next employer might (will) want to see what you've done, and if it's nothing but FrontPage-wizard generated MSTML, then you'll be shown the door, unless they're an MS shop.
Web design issues are discussed on our firm's "about this website" here, where you'll find some useful data about colour safety, how to detect Opera browsers when they lie, etc. Not Rocket Science - but we do that too.
Much as I agree with a lot of what you say... Hare-Clarke voting (as used in Tasmania and the ACT) is a horror to hand-count. It's nigh impossible to get it right.
That's why in the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) we use (as an option - you can vote with paper if you want to) an electronic voting system called eVACS. An Open-Source (of course) application compiled on an Open-Source compiler for an Open-Source OS. And standard commercial hardware.
For a/. post giving all the details - including where to get the source, a PDF describing the system etc, look here.
Slashdot Mirror
Too right. If we'd have done FedSat all over again, we wouldn't have been so ambitious. OK, it worked, but it was a lot harder than it should have been, and may have cost more than a number of smaller, less ambitious satellites.
See "stepwise refinement" and other useful development strategies.
Hmmm.. now that we know we can build reliable gear that works for months (despite being zapped by the South Atlantic Anomaly High-Radiation zone a few times every day), I wonder what we could do regarding a Mars lander...
Here's my 2c:Truth.Also Truth.
The problem is that even formally verifiably correct programs have unpredictable behaviour when subject to running on imperfect hardware and in high radiation conditions. It is not possible to test every single permutation of events in anything other than the most simple systems.
Fortunately, there is a technique that helps, it's in 3 parts, all of which are essential:
- Good Systems Engineering (as has been mentioned in other posts)
- Really thorough testing, it's not feasible to test all the code with all the values, but a good risk/hazard analysis will tell you which ones can kill people if they go wrong, so put the test resources in those. All other things get tested as well, but not with every single possible permutation of values.
- Finally, and this is the one that saves your bacon more than anything else, confine faults into small error boxes. If something goes wrong, be it from a failed chip, an errant cosmic ray, or a software bug, then the error handling you have in each section should confine the resultant problems so they don't propagate. Some languages make this trivially easy - such as Eiffel's Design by Contract, Delphi's Assert or (my personal favourite) Ada's strict typing (plus exception handling). Others make it much more difficult, but still possible.
Is this some "magic bullet"? Hell no. But it works. Teams of normal mortals, not Software Geniusses, can produce software that works, and do so within a reasonable budget and in a reasonable time - both rather less than industry average for commercial work.Now the satellite our team made is just a LEOsat - but it's possibly the most complex satellite for its size ever launched.
- 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968), with Flash explanation.
- Silent Running (1972 had far more believable robots - and very realistic explosions in space (based on the Starfish 1.4 Megaton tests).
It can be argued that these are not "Sci Fi" but "Science Fiction", not as spectacular as space opera. Things as they might actually be one day.Sorry, I'm a little peeved at writing the same darn URLs every time this comes up.
- Technical description by the ACT Electoral Commission
- Comments by a user in the Australian Computer Society on how the system worked in practice.
- Executive Summary of how it worked.
- 1 MB PDF full report.
- And finally.... The Source
Jeez... I mean, it's been a while that this has been available. Posted several times onAverage amount of cable required per remote rural subscriber in Australia is about 30 km. That's the average. Many people in the Outback have their nearest neighbour over 100 miles away. 97% of the population lives in 13% of the area (source). So we're talking about 600,000 people - at most 200,000 subscribers - in an area equivalent to the USA, less Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
Existing LEOSats, such as Iridium and Globalstar can't even do 56kbps. But the Ka-band - if it works - may be enough to do 2 Gbps. That's what the experimental communications payload is for, amongst other things, to see how well or how badly Ka-band works over rural Australia (and also in built-up areas for other applications)
Little Known Facts About the Bill of Rights
Does that last bit sound familiar? Compare with Amendment VIII of the US Constitution:And apart from the Protestant-only bit, the US 2nd and 7th Amendments also sounds as if they've been inspired by the English original, of about a century earlier.Have a look here. It's the English Bill of Rights, dated 1698. Some quotes:
As regards Smart Guns and how they work, have a look here for an Australian one. There's a page with a 4.5 Mb streaming video and a 45 Mb hi-res zipped version.
A couple of things:
- Why Violent? Surely the last 100 years have shown that non-violent protests are far more effective, provided only that the protestors are more than a small, shrill minority? Or are you convinced that your little group is intellectually superior to the masses?
- As for the "hypocrites or just interested in censoring controversial opinions?", that's self-evidently a strawman. If I gave you the choice Are you an imbecile, or just an idiot? that would be just as intellectually bankrupt. You're neither (your post was cogent, relatively polite)- so please don't behave that way with such discredited dielectic and insult everyone's intelligence.
- Re: advocates international violence(war) what would you have us do? Would you advocate Saddam Hussein as a person you't trust to have nukes? That's really the point here. OK, so you'd prefer Bush not to have them either, but if you don't see a difference in kind rather than degree between Bush and Saddam, I'd be very interested in your evidence. You either live on a different planet, or you know something I don't.
- Finally, the fact that you post as an "Anonymous Coward" says a lot. The few times I've been moved to protest, I've not been afraid to give my name, to stand up for what I believe in. You'd gain a lot more credibility if you'd do the same. Sure, it would be at some personal risk - but if it's that important, that should make no difference. Maybe you think that you're just being prudent. But for once, "Anonymous Coward" seems to be an exactly accurate description, as it lessens your credibility, and you know it. You just don't think that your principles are worth even a minimal degree of personal risk - so why should anyone else?
You're willing to commit violence on others, to incite people to risk their own skins, but not to put your name on public display, to stand up and be counted. Or have I got it wrong?Which in turn was inspired by this even older idea.
Not bad for 1848.But not every company is like this. OK, I'll name names: I work for this mob. The CEO gets less than the senior technical people. Every 2 weeks, all employees get together and we discuss the firm's accounts, what our plans are, how we can help each other. It's a (literal) Soviet. And we do all sorts of interesting stuff, like spaceflight avionics, help people get CMM 3+ etc. We work 9-to-5 in theory, but closer to 10-6 in practice. We have lives, and consider long hours to be a sign that we've screwed up in resource planning. It happens, but rarely.
Dress Code? "Whatever's appropriate". When flogging a tool to IBM, suit, tie, etc. Otherwise "civilised", whatever you're comfortable with. Some wear suits by preference, some not.
No, I wouldn't leave this place for 10x the money I'm getting. After 22 years in the business, I know how lucky I am.
The best description is here. It provides a good, concise description of CMM levels 1-5. Highly recommended as the best 1/3 page summary of CMM there is.
It also provides in much more detail a description of levels 0 to -3, the Capability Im-Maturity Model, and that part's hilarious.
People - and I'm particularly calling on all Islamic /.ers - we've got to do something about this.
Well bugamededsedfred. Somebody - the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils did something, according to this story from the Australian IT news. I'll quote it in full to pre-emptively prevent the /. effect :
Obviously Rohan Gunaratna isn't quite familiar with the Australian concept of "Freedom of Speech" - it's not protected by our Constitution, just by custom (a far more solid guarantee IMHO). As long as it doesn't actually incite hatred and/or violence, it's best if the Government buts out, regardless of the article's nausea-index. This one comes close to overstepping the mark, but such cases should be and are given the benefit of the doubt.For the Mainstream of Islam to take notice that the Islamofascists have brought the whole of their religion into disrepute, that's another matter. Good on 'em.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of comments about this one. I'd even be willing to bet that most /.ers have more symptoms of Aspergers than not.
Getting down to cases: I can only theorise based on my own internal experiences. So, here goes some facts and opinions, without attempt at analysis:
When I was about 6, I had a General Anaesthetic. It took me over 10 hours to come out of it. For much of that period I was dimly aware of external stimuli, they just weren't important. Eventually I managed to decode the face-slaps and sounds as attempts to wake me up, and thought it useful to do so. I guess (and I do mean guess) that a lot of autistic children just haven't seen a good reason to interact socially or with anything else in the Universe. Even a fingerprint can be endlessly fascinating, so why bother with the sounds that the universe (the bits that are other people) makes? They are just a distraction. You can make them go away by screaming, so why remember words? As for my own son - who's now 16 months old - I'm playing games with him with lots of mechanical toys (lots of fun to be had with swinging doors ), but also playing social-interaction games such as "pass the juice bottle" where we share a cup of juice, taking turns. And a lot of exaggerated facial grimaces for smiles, frowns and other non-verbal communications. I want to show him that things outside himself are interesting too. Because to lose speech and get too fascinated by internals is debilitating and very very not-useful, fun though it might be. You will get frustrated, and not know how to alter your environment to make it better. You will also upset people around you who care about you.
Australia does NOT operate under any sembelance of an 'integrationist' policy. They take any immigrant, put them in an inhumane detention centre (if they're lucky enough not to just be turned away), and deport them ASAP.
Personally speaking as an immigrant to Australia, I can personally assure you this is factually challenged. Over 1/4 of Australia's population was born overseas. We take in more immigrants per head of population than the US, for example (more than any major country in the world except for Canada in fact). OK, according to the good old CIA factbook it's Canada 6.5/1000, Australia 4.12, USA 3.5.
That's the trouble with stating less-than-informed opinions in places like /. - you'll occasionally run into someone who can marshal some facts. You end up looking like a Dill, but at least you're better informed afterwards. Oh by the way, it's happened to me a few times too, you'
re not Robinson Crusoe.
Canada integrates people into its society. Part of the integration is adapting to their culture, and having their culture adapt to ours.
Australia operates under exactly the same philosophy, and long may she continue. But as recent events have shown, some cultures are more adaptable than others. Here's a particularly nauseating quote from a mainstream Islamic press article about "cultural assimilation" entitled Preserving the Islamic Identity in the West. It starts off fairly blandly:
Then it goes on and finally ends up with this hideous piece: I happen to agree with them in one respect: this type of intolerance has no place in any multi-culture, be it melting-pot or mosaic, Australia or Canada. And at least he's advocating a literal Apartheid rather than Genocide for "the Kaffir". Is this extremism typical of Islam? Certainly not of the many Muslims I know. But their religion has to some extent been hijacked by some very weird and dangerous Imams, with lots of money from Saudi Arabia supplied for schools and teachers of the most extreme kind.IMHO We - not just mainstream Islam, but society as a whole - have screwed up in the past by not supplying sufficient teaching materials and educational resources to counteract these Islamofascists. And we're paying the price.
But I urge readers to do some websurfing of their own: don't rely on my words or interpretations. Certainly don't rely on second-hand views on parochial pro-Israeli or jigoistic USAian sites. Have a look at what's in the Islamic press worldwide, what all too many say about themselves. There's a lot of sanity, but just as much that is both scary and psychotic.
To see how psychotic, imagine if, say, the New York Times had published without anyone complaining the following:
As I said, Nauseating. People - and I'm particularly calling on all Islamic* - for the hard-of-thinking, the New York Times hasn't published any drivel like this, it's just a paraphrase of the quote above, with the tokens "islam" and "West" interchanged.
When I left in 1989, I was told the HMAS Hobart had a combined computing power on the whole ship, of a Macintosh Classic.
Let's see, a 2-bay UYK-7 with a 128k core running the 5XXX NCDS system... somewhere between a fat and skinny mac, yes, that's correct. (I was involved in programming them 1983-85).. and we were amazed at how antiquated they were even then.
If you really want Old, what about the EW keyset (designed about 1935 IIRC)? HMAS Hobart, now along with Brisbane and Perth either reefs or razorblades. Good boats all, even though they did "roll on wet grass".
how can you have 'official' and 'unofficial' secrets? How can that work? and what secrets are 'official' and which are 'unofficial'?
The unofficial answer is that I could tell you, but I'd have to kill-9 you. The official answer? You're not cleared for that.
But seriously folks... the definition of the types of information that is considered officially secret is within the Official Secrets Act legislation. I've signed the Official Secrets Act (Australian version - actually section 79 of the Crimes Act). And that's about all I can really say about it, apart from the fact that the quoted link's to an unofficial version. The UK version is a bit different, and the quoted link is to an official version.
Unlike many websites, neither has anything to do with secretaries, or secretions.
Started programming at age 9 back in 1967, and the first computer game I played was on an IBM-360 back in 72. Star Trek, no less. First game I ever programmed was on an HP-65 programmable calculator a few years later.
So my advice is - don't think you'll be "old" in 2030. Save up some good stories about how the Net used to be free, how 2 GigaHz was a fast machine, how we only dreamed of having a Petabyte of main memory on our machine - which was on a desk, not wearable/implanted.
The EFA site lists a number of sites blocked by one particular tool, iFilter that was supposedly going to be installed in some schools (as of 1999). One "recommended" by one particular Senator in 1999. A simple keyword searcher, and not a particularly good one. That's it.
FWIW I had no problem getting to 3 of the 4 sites listed, and the other one isn't being reported as existing by Google.
But thanks for the attempt... looks like Australia's Internet Blocking isn't anyone's specialist subject. You made as good an attempt at helping me as I could ask for, and my sincere thanks for that. But you're in a minority, it appears that most people don't want to be confused by the facts.
You see we may have legislation in effect that says "block all the kiddie porn" but in fact no-one here's come up with a way to do this effectively. Either you don't block what you want to, block what you don't want to, or (usually) both. So no blocks are actually in place that I've been able to find. Of course, I wouldn't know what I can't see, would I? So tell me. Thanks.
Otherwise I'll consign this to the realms of "Urban Myth".
Like most Software people here in Oz, we could get 3x as much in the US or Europe. But that would mean leaving Australia - and I for one don't think it's worth it (having done 5 years in Germany, the US etc).
Some great information re State-of-the-art in 1980, Notations, Exception/Concurrency etc. My thanks, take a virtual "+1 Informative" from me.
Re: "little success" and "almost without exception been coerced" I respectfully submit the following very incomplete list of recent entirely "uncoerced" Ada projects:This post is getting long - most people won't read this far. But if you want, I'll follow-up with more hard data regarding reliability, cost etc. Basically, the reason Ada gets used is that it's provably better, the numbers on reliability, cost-to-develop, defect-rates etc. show it.
Re: The Ada catastrophe:
You mean such warnings as: I mean, how many languages use Dem Debil Exceptions these days? Or the notational dot form, as in object.method ? And apart from Boeing, Beriev, Lockheed, Airbus, Antonov etc who uses Ada for safety-critical systems?But I come not to bury Hoare, but to praise him (Hell, he invented the case statement..):
The astounding success of the SPARK subset of Ada-83 and Ravenscar subset of Ada-95 has vindicated him with a vengeance. You also have to remember that Hoare's speech(pdf) was in 1980 - and Ada-83 was greatly simplified from the Ada proposals of just 3 years earlier. But even then it was vastly more simple and powerful than C++ or Java. public static void main(String argsv){}? Ye Gods. Never mind, maybe if someone keeps on quoting the large and growing body of evidence about language choice being important, that it's not "religion" but a matter of objective measurement, and that one reason why most software sucks is that good programmers are using lousy languages, then maybe things will change..... Nah.As mentioned previously on /. there's open-source e-voting code available on-line.
To recap the message:
Damn, where are my mod points when I need em.. I'd give a "+1 Extremely Useful" to this.
For my sins, I've had to re-vamp our company's website. After a lot of experimentation, here's some design principles:
- Sadly, CSS has too many different interpretations of what it should be doing on different browsers. This is a Royal Pain.
- Take Accessibility by the blind seriously. If doing work for the gummint, this is mandatory. In any event, it's unethical not to do so.
- Javascript is right out. Also a royal pain. This is because of security issues, a growing number of corporate clients have Javascript permanently turned off. This means though that you can't do effective versioning.
- ASP and other MS-only stuff - don't even think about it, unless you want to appear like a total dork. Your next employer might (will) want to see what you've done, and if it's nothing but FrontPage-wizard generated MSTML, then you'll be shown the door, unless they're an MS shop.
Web design issues are discussed on our firm's "about this website" here, where you'll find some useful data about colour safety, how to detect Opera browsers when they lie, etc. Not Rocket Science - but we do that too.Much as I agree with a lot of what you say... Hare-Clarke voting (as used in Tasmania and the ACT) is a horror to hand-count. It's nigh impossible to get it right.
That's why in the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) we use (as an option - you can vote with paper if you want to) an electronic voting system called eVACS. An Open-Source (of course) application compiled on an Open-Source compiler for an Open-Source OS. And standard commercial hardware.
For a /. post giving all the details - including where to get the source, a PDF describing the system etc, look here.