I too was somewhat surprised that underground Nukes weren't used in Afghanistan. The attack on the WTC was the equivalent in destructiveness of a small (100t-1kt) nuke, and used on civilians. That the US didn't use Nukes in return is a sign that someone up there was thinking. A bit of research shows why they didn't use them. Have a look at report called "Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons". The standard penetrator (B61-11) has piss-poor penetrating performance. Even a 100t nuke needs to be 70 metres down to avoid contamination.
Most of the Great Unwashed out there in slashdotland don't make any distinction between a 100t nuke and a 50 Mt nuke. But it makes a big difference to people nearby. For example, if you're 100 km downwind of a 100t underground nuke, you'll only detect it by watching CNN. If you're 100km downwind of a 1 Mt groundburst, you're dead from fallout. It's Ten Thousand Times more powerful. Both India and Pakisatan let off dozens of kiloton-range weapons not so long ago. Using nukes doesn't mean Instant Thermonuclear Global Death.
For everything you ever wanted to know about Nukes, see the High Energy Weapons Archive. The Federation of American Scientists may not be the most neutral and unbiased of commentators (very Liberal), but the facts they base their commentary on are unimpeachable. Anyone who pretends to hold an opinion worth anything should read the facts first.
Incinerating Baghdad - and a whole heap of babies, schoolkids etc - would be a really bad idea, literally unthinkable even if Saddam Hussein nuked the US. But using nuclear bunker-busters to target the people who pushed the button, rather than leaving them untouched and massacring civilians, that makes sense to me. And obviously to the US Military too.
"However, a new Ming emperor had come to the throne. His scholar-officials criticized Zheng's achievements, complaining about their great expense. China was now fighting another barbarian enemy on its western borders and needed to devote its resources to that struggle. When a court favorite wanted to continue Zheng He's voyages, he was turned down. To make sure, the court officials destroyed the logs that Zheng He had kept. We know about his voyages only from the pillar and some accounts that his crew members wrote."
In 1976, the US terminated manned space exploration, because it was too expensive. In 500 years, I wonder if archaeologists will argue that the legendary "Saturn 5" couldn't have worked, rockets don't scale up unlike contra-grav units.
In the UK, it is not uncommon to find some newer CDs retailing in record shops for up to 17GBP (24USD).
Since the average wage in the UK is approximately 18000GBP (25500USD) per annum, the average worker has to work two hours to be able to afford an album.
Here in Australia, the average price of a new Audio CD is about 35AUD (18USD). But the average wage in the cities is 30000AUD (15500USD), and 25000AUD (13000USD) in rural areas. So for us, it's a bit worse, but still about 2 hours (at 1650 hrs/year).
And of course we're in DVD region 4, along with Brazil, Bolivia, and New Zealand. So only about 10% of titles are available. At 40AUD (21USD) each. Fortunately the High Court has recently ruled that DVD regioning is an artificial restraint of trade, therefore illegal. So we can now legally use all-region players. And with a bit of luck, swap our region-4-only ones for new ones or get em legally modded.
As an aside, wouldn't it be a good idea if international pricing scams were well-publicised on the net? Things like comparative price of Mars Bars and Big Macs to set a standard, then average wages, then prices of technology? Sounds like something right up/.s alley.
Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.
I could make very few improvements to it, all minor:
Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.
Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.
Target your audience. If your site is for a rock group, by all means Flash away, go nuts. If it's trying to sell something, remember time is money to your clients. Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.
That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).
Ada is almost dead in the military. Why? Because there isn't enough money in maintaining Ada programs. They work, first time. Great for the military, lousy for the military-industrialist complex. Spend twice as much making it in the first place, then get no lucrative bugfix money afterwards. Making expensive programs that actually work is commercial suicide. Making cheap programs that actually work (which you do after some experience) gives you only subsistance level profits. Making cheap programs that almost work and require lots of profitable maintainance for years is the road to riches. So what if a few ships need towing to port due to a divide-by-zero error?
Of course, where firms could get sued if they screw up, such as in commercial avionics and jet engines, Ada is universally used. Ada doesn't guarantee good, safe, maintainable programs, but it's relatively easy to make them in Ada, and darn near impossible to make them in C.
As for Ada being harder to learn than C, which is harder:
for(i=0;i<BUFFER_SIZE;i++){
read(i);
}
or
for i in buffer loop
read(i);
end loop;
Maybe if people just quietly gave facts and hard numbers in the Great Language Wars then the Truth Will Out.... Nah. But it's worth a shot, anyway.
Those who can, compete,
Those who can't, commit criminal acts to drive the competitors out of business
It's no exaggeration to say that Microsoft is a criminal organisation - as a corporate entity, they've been found guilty of committing crimes under US law. As a corporate entity, they have committed and continue to commit unethical acts. It has been found by a court of law that these acts in the past don't just stretch the laws to the limit, they fragrantly break them. Without a change in corporate culture, they won't make my shortlist of recommended vendors, regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of their products. We can't afford to be tarred with the same brush in some future lawsuits by some savvy lawyer. "Why did you recommend a product produced by a Criminal Organisation, Mr Expert? One that is so flawed as to cause my client such irreperable damage?" No thanks, I don't need the hassle.
URLs To backup my bald assertions below. Browse the sites and you'll see studies and numbers. Facts not Religious opinion. Adapower is a good start. Or the Ada Information Clearinghouse
"intuitive and easy to use IDE; simplified GUI design and event handling; advanced error handling; advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection; full support for operator and function overloading; and portable (at compile-time) across various platforms."
IDE - there's a variety of freeware ones.
Simplified GUI - there's a variety of bindings to various APIs, from X-windows to SWING to W32. Plus many other simplified freeware ones, some thin, some thick. Pick which one is most appropriate. Ada (the language) doesn't have anything more advanced than stdio - but then again, neither does Java, it relies on the awt and swing libraries *shrug*
Advanced Error Handling - Java's exceptions contain more info than Ada's. Ada ones are more simple, easy to use, but I think Java's are better in most ways. They should be - both C++ and Java copied their exception handling from Ada's 1983 incarnation. OTOH most of the time all Java programmers (like me) do is make an exception without using any of the internal data, so YMMV.
Advanced OOD including multiple inheritance and abstract classes - As regards OOD. Ada's the most flexible of the lot. You can do strict OO, but don't have to. Methods are properties of Classes(actually packages) rather than objects, so you can say Wooden.paint(a_wooden_door) or Door.paint(a_wooden_door) rather than a_wooden_door.paint(). So you get all the advantages of multiple inheritance, without the horrendous penalties (which method are you inheriting, the paint for wooden things or the paint for doors?). Abstract classes are used all the time.
Garbage Collection - Ada doesn't produce garbage in general. You can do most things using statically allocated memory, or dynamic allocation within a statically-defined garbage-collected area. When you want dynamic allocation, you can choose to rely on the compiler's garbage collection, if it exists, but you're also given tools for explicit disposal of garbage. Note that Java has true garbage collection, but even Sun says that you can't rely on it, you should use explicit disposal. This is true not just for Java, but in general.
Operator/Function Overloading Ada has had this since 1983. Often copied, never bettered
Portable Stories abound of million- and 100,000-line Ada programs that require a dozen lines changed to make em work on different systems. My own personal war story is of a 20,000 liner developed on a 386 on an Irvine compiler, ported with 3 lines changed to a MicroVax using a DEC compiler, thence to a Vax using another DEC compiler, then to an embedded system using a DDC-I compiler. Was an AI to do anti-missile defence, people's lives depended on it. It's been in service since 1995. Cost less to make than the 7,000 lines of C in its test bed too. I've just help finish a 20,000 line piece of spaceflight avionics that makes not one Operating System call, even though it has 60+ simultaneous threads of execution. Oh yes, there's a shareware (or GNU licence? I forget) Ada compiler that produces Java bytecode, so will run on any Sun JVM.
So why isn't Ada-95 used by anyone? Because everyone knows it's too big (nearly as many keywords as C++,), needs a huge machine to run (bigger than a 286 running at 4 MHz - which was big in 1983 when Ada-83 was invented), it's designed by a committee (like Linux - one really good designer Jean Ichbiah, then peer review), and it's a product of the US Military (like Unix, and the Web - designed for not by). Oh yes, and expensive (GNAT is open source...) and uses a lot of risky concepts ( to wit, Operator Overloading, Object Oriented Design, Exceptions, all risky and untried in 1983 ). It's also obsolete, (the Ada-95 version being a little younger than C++). And it is used, for Avionics of all modern airliners ( Illyushin, Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus) and many satellites, railway- and air- traffic control systems, where quality is vital. It's not used much elsewhere, as there's a vested interest for software developers and programmers to keep software buggy (so they have job security) and quick to market (it takes a long time to develop reliable software).
So Ada's perfect, right? Wrong. It's just better than most general-purpose languages for many purposes. BUT It's not language of the month ( C# this month? ) so getting Ada programmers is very difficult. Though it's easy to learn, based like the similar Eiffel, Delphi, Object Pascal and Modula-2/3 on Pascal. If you've programmed hardware design in VDML, or used Oracle's access language, you've used Ada without knowing it.
Any idiot with a sufficiently powerful transmitter can DOS a scientific LEOsat while in the footprint, with less than a thousand bucks of hardware.
For the info of/.ers most LEOsats adjust their attitude with magnetorquers and reaction wheels, they are incapable of changing their orbits even if you snatch control. But you can, over successive orbits, put them into power-draining modes that will cause eventual loss of the bird.
LEOsats are also only commandable from one groundstation for 1-2 slots of 15mins or so per day.
Many scientific satellites use the ESA PUS standard high-level protocol (PPT here) on an AVTEC box or something similar, using CCSDS. It would be trivial to "crack" (since it's not encrypted), given a hundred thousand bucks for the hardware.ROT-13 is harder.
In summary, any moron can make life difficult for researchers. But firebombing chemistry pr CompSci labs would be just as "clever", far easier and cheaper, and even more annoying.
BTW unlike some who think this is a troll, I'm concerned about the issue myself. But given the hardware cost of implementing a reliable CCSDS protocol, only fairly wealthy hackers could do it. The Software is relatively easy for real-time programmers, but script kiddies, VB-jocks or even C coders need not apply, Ada would be the best way to do it with assembler second. The additional security of adding encryption on top would be negligible, as wealthy hackers could be expected to have access (hacked or legit) to arbitrarily large amounts of computing power. And any script kiddie could DOS us with a five-hundred-dollar jammer anyway. For 15 minutes.
OK, you're right. No need to be obnoxious about it though.
Yes, they're "pathetic" inasmuch as they are to be pitied, not blamed. Sort of like someone trying to compute the 90th digit of Pi using an abacus as opposed to a PC. Morons they're most decidedly NOT. Stuff that even an average programmer can do easily in Ada, such as multitasking, template instantiation and so on require near-genius IQs to do in other languages to get half the reliability. Making a reliable Ada-95 60 task program using GNAT and Booch components (cost : $0 ) is not trivial, but any good intern should be able to do it. But just try porting a simple 60-thread program using STL constructs in C++ from Linux(gcc) to Mac OS8(code warrior), or even Windows 95(VC++ 5) to see what I mean. They have to use all sorts of operating-system specific stuff and ifdefs rather than write once, run-anywhere code. And do surgery on the different variations of the STL.
What's more, "everyone knows" Ada's too verbose, and is to be eschewed because it has lots of reserved words (not as many C++ or Java), and has weird, untested and Evil features such as Exceptions and Generics. It got a bad press for this in 1983. So don't blame them, nor disrespect their intelligence.
It's difficult to go over bounds checks and disorder parameters when all you have to do is write code like
Try writing the same thing in C++ without leaving yourself open to lots of changes if the register enumeration changes from 0..5 to 67..76 or even (34, 45, 78) or (back, top, aux) and you'll see what I mean. Writing quality, efficient, readable code that handles errors well in some languages is just plain hard. So don't call them morons, they're just handicapped by using the fashionable and popular because they don't know any better. Even though there's plenty of evidence.
This article is right on target. It's much more important for open source software to be of a higher standard than closed-source, simply because with open source, shoddiness can't be hidden and swept under the carpet (to state the bleedin obvious). If we make shoddy open-source code, then up-and-coming programmers will see it, learn from it, and treat this very ordinary code as the 'norm'. Worse, they will treat it as a target to be aimed for, and cut corners so even this low standard isn't met.
FWIW I've worked in safety-critical areas for some 20 years. I've managed to dodge being assigned to management, and am doing neat stuff like spaceflight avionics for interest rather than chasing dollars doing yet-another-b-2-b system. The biggest problem I've found with re-educating interns is getting them to be paranoid enough. It's a matter of culture.
Quick N Dirty is an appropriate culture for some systems.
If you're writing throwaway code for a specific purpose (such as a simple script) then quality isn't an important issue.
If a deadline is approaching fast, your budget is zero, your team burnt out, then damn the long-term costs, hack it so it kinda works and ship it on time. It's crap, but they only paid for less than crap, so don't worry, be happy.
There's a major financial incentive to write high-maintenance code, both for programmers and companies. You make pennies on the initial sale, megabucks on the maintenance. What do you call a programmer who writes superb code that's maintenance-free? Unemployed.
This is true for design and requirement analysis, as well as code.
But... it's important to realise this is not the only way of doing things. It has it's place. But not in open source.(And there's such a thing as professional pride too, but I digress)
If you're writing a re-useable module, you should treat all inputs as being guilty until proven innocent, always check any outputs from your area, and be honest regarding what side-effects your module has. In some languages, this is easy (e.g. Ada ), in others darn near impossible (e.g. C), but it has to be done. It's obvious that you have to do it when lives are at stake. It's less obvious when you're writing some device driver for Linux - but literally tens of billions of dollars may be riding on how well you do your job. Even if you're not getting paid for it.
I'm not asking for the degree of robustness typically shown by safety-critical systems What? Your code failed just because half the memory was corrupted and a CPU was on fire? Unacceptable! Failure is Not an Option! but enough so that BSODs or their equivalent lead to puzzlement I've never seen one of those before!.
Like many people who have contributed to discussions over the past decade
in places like the Compuserve Military Forum, http://www.stratfor.com,
http://www.strategypage.com and others, I've done some analysis on
Threats, so know a bit about what I speak.
The general consensus had been that Cyberwarfare was going to be the
Next Big Thing. Global Thermonuclear War was passe, terrorism had been
shown to be at best innefectual, at worst counter-productive. Instead,
the threat was going to be vs infrastructure, the weapons anything from
a judiciously placed lump of Semtex, to frame-ups of key personnel or
their relatives, to The Worm From Hell. Few lives if any would be lost,
the hip-pocket nerve would be the target. I thought this myself, based
on the evidence that no terrorist group had ever detonated a nuke or
caused millions or even thousands of casualties in one attack.
But the so-called Nuclear threshold has now been crossed. OK, so they didn't
use Nukes as such - but the effect in terms of damage to property and people
was comparable with a small nuke. What makes a Nuke so terrible? It's the
random, massive destruction, the defencelessness we as a civilised
society have against it. The actual kill mechanism is less important, except
symbolically.
The point is, with Civilisation - the concept of having cities with such
things as sewerage, electricity, internet access, public health - addiction
to that concept leaves you vulnerable. Water supplies can be contaminated,
subways can be filled with poison gas, airliners can be hijacked and sent
crashing into skyscrapers, and there is no defence against this. None.
You can make things harder - for example, I doubt that the next hijackers
will be believed if they say "don't resist any no-one will get hurt." But
for every gap you fill, there are hundreds of others left wide open. A
Police State that covers most of these gaps leaves the facade of Society
intact, while destroying the heart, and still doesn't cover everything.
For my own peace of mind I won't say a half-dozen other things that have
been openly discussed as being more destructive, and a lot easier to
pull off than Ground Zero. I'm 99% sure that any Bad Hats reading this will
already have thought of them, but if one happened, the thought that they
might have been in the remaining 1% and got the idea here would destroy me.
I fully expect that some of them will be used, or attempted, against us
no matter what we do or do not do.
All you can do in the way of defence is make things so that random crazies
are very likely to get caught, and do not cause too much immediate damage
or long-term trauma if they get through. Against a wealthy, well-organised
and widespread group with literally millions of dollars to spend on airfares,
equipment, forged documents and so on, there is no credible defence. None.
If they are a bunch of amateurs, their sheer size and communications will
make them detectable long before they're able to do anything. But if they're
smart, recent events have shown that they can evade the system we had in
place before September 11th., and likely will be able to do so for some
years to come.
Until September 11th though, deterrence had worked. The chances of being
able to get through the defences were so small, and the consequences of
a successful strike being so large, that the game wasn't worth the candle.
But now every Xenophobic group who until now has had to watch impotently
as liberal states had run roughshod over their favourite hatreds and
prejudices will have gained heart, and probably more financial support.
OK, so there's no defence. What are our options?
Option a) Give In.
One trouble with this one is that we don't know who to surrender
to. Should we say "Ok, we'll stop going after the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Judea", then the Judean People's Liberation Organisation, their
hated enemy, will attack us even harder until we reverse our course.
Then there's the old saw "He who pays Danegeld is never free of the Danes".
Blackmailers historically require more and more. Should we give the Bad Hats a
reward for their behaviour, they'll naturally repeat it.
At the risk of showing some naivity, there's also a matter to be considered:
we wouldn't have been taking the actions the Bad Hats don't want us to if
we hadn't thought them to be either right at the time, or at least in our best
interests. For example, I'm so much in favour of allowing freedom of political
thought that I wouldn't give it up to save my life.
Finally, there's another issue: some of the Bad Hats don't take prisoners, they
won't accept our surrender. The type of people whose beliefs allow them to
deliberately massacre civilians as a prime objective - rather than do so
accidentally, or as regrettable byproduct of military neccessity - are the
type who won't listen to us if we cry "Uncle!". The mere existence of liberal
states is anathema to them. It's Their Way or No Way, Right is on their
side, and no abomination is unjustifiable if the End is good.
So for a variety of completely practical and cynical reasons, giving up or even
bending a bit is right out. At least this saves us some painful soul-searching.
b) Attack the Enemy's Capabilities.
If the Enemy isn't physically able to harm you, you don't care what they think.
The basic problem we have here is that the Enemy presents few clear-cut targets.
Either they're effectively stealthed, or they're inextricably mixed up with
a lot of innocents, third parties, or ourselves. For example, we could adopt a
policy of shooting down all airliners even remotely suspected of being hijacked.
This would certainly take out all hijackers, but also countless of our own
families.
Still, there are a number of targets, that can be serviced by a number of means.
The targets vary from such obvious ones as military training camps, which can be
neutralised by special forces, conventional invasion, air attacks, nukes or
political pressure to close them, through to financial supporters, who can be
rendered bankrupt via cyberwarfare, have their assets frozen, or just simply
assassinated, by bullet, bomb, frame-up or airstrike. Disinformation causing
their own side to kill them is a particularly neat way of doing things, as
it provides cover for your own infiltrators. Third-party bounty-hunters are
also a way of reducing your own casualties.
Attacking the Enemy's capabilities is something that can be done relatively
quickly, and depending on how much ethical damage we're willing to accept,
could be both thorough and effective. For example, Nuking every state that's
ever disagreed with us publically would be as effective and through and only
marginally less appropriate than cutting off our own heads to cure migraine.
Attacking the Enemy's Capabilities when they're well-defined is something the
military is good at. In this case, the number of appropriate targets is
relatively small, so military action is just a small part of the whole war.
On the other hand, some of those obvious targets are very difficult, so
would require a massive military effort to neutralise, so this difference
may be more apparent than real.
Expect a lot more unconventional but physically destructive warfare, e.g.
tracing down any "insider traders" who have made a (literal) killing on the
stock market recently, and depending on the evidence, rendering them
financially impotent ( a bullet in the brain is one simple way, but may not
be the most appropriate ). Manipulating the stock market might be equally
as effective at causing corporate collapse. Still, the financial "collateral
damage" may mean that a car accident or even sudden fatal illness might be
better. Trouble with such covert attacks is that true accidents in the future
will be blamed on you, so it might be better to just say "Yes, we shot him, so
what?" rather than weep crocadile tears.
c) Attack the Enemy's Will to Fight.
This is the epitome of warfare. You don't have to expend blood and treasure
if the Enemy lacks the will to attack you - he'll do what you want.
There are two ways of doing this, one far more effective than the other. The
easiest and quickest is to instill fear in the heart of the enemy. This has
historically been very popular, both on a large geopolitical scale, to the
smallest personal scale. It ranges from the terror of "Mutually Assured
Destruction" to the terror of provoking a Jihad. It ranges from the threat
to go after Saddam Hussein personally if he used Chemical Warfare in the
Gulf, to the blandishments "Just obey and no-one gets hurt" used every
day by Police forces, and for that matter, by the Hijackers on September 11th.
Note that credibility is the key. If the other side doesn't believe you,
as happened in the flight that impacted in Pennsylvania, even unarmed civilians
can and do fight effectively. If the other side believes that all they'll
get if you kill them is an instant ticket to Paradise, then threats aren't
credible. If you can convince them though that by their actions they've risked
eternal damnation, that's another matter. This is a particularly promissing
avenue of attack in this case. A great effort to convince the Imams and
Islamic Scholars of the world to unreservedly condemn Ground Zero and state
that the perpetrators are now roasting in fire hotter than the H-bomb would
likely be very effective indeed - the people concerned appear to be highly
religious. In recent times, both the USA in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan
gave up and pulled out because they had lost the will to fight what was
perceived to be a losing battle in a dubious cause.
And that last leads to the second, much harder and vastly more effective way
of removing the Enemy's will to fight. The absolute pinnacle of the military
art is to make the Enemy your Friend. And two can play at this game.
In order to resist, we must remain convinced that there is a clear-cut moral
difference between ourselves and the Enemy. Like Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero has
provided us with that.
We allowed Rwanda, and Cambodia, and Bosnia, and many others, sometimes out of
fear of a larger war (The Bogistanis are Russian Allies...), sometimes out of
ignorance (Bogistan? Where's that?), but sometimes out of indifference
(who gives a damn about what happens in Outer Bogistan?) or worse, if they
were our Allies in the "Great Game" ("If they didn't shoot those kids, the
commies would have taken over"). As the result, many of our Enemies call us
hypocrites, and with some (not much, but some) justification.
We (and I do not just mean the USA here, I mean every country that lost citizens
on September 11th for starters) can no longer say "Someone else's problem."
No more "business as usual". We must ratchet the filter of what is acceptable
behaviour by states or organisations a few more notches.
Not enough to make the different but basically decent into enemies or destroy
the ideals we hold dear, but enough so great quantities of the world do not
perceive us as hypocrites. If you want a soundbite "First we've got to get on
God's Side, then he'll be on Our Side."
Finally, as our long-term strategy, we must try to convert at least the children
of our enemies into our friends. Our weapons here are more likely to be solar-
powered radios, food drops (imagine a raid on Baghdad that fought through heavy
defences to drop a few thousand tonnes of baby food), education (so when Baghdad
announces that the baby food is all poisoned and millions have died, it's not
believed), and stern action to counter the Bad Hats. We may not be able to pick
any "Good Guys" to support, but we can sure identify and destroy the torturers of
the Secret Police, the thieves who take the foreign aid money, and those who terrorise
their own populace. For very often there are many who remain silent out of fear.
We must bolster their courage, and give them a reasonable choice of behaviour other
than to join the Enemy camp.
So much self-serving tub-thumping rubbish has been talked about "Moral Re-Armament"
that the phrase is direputable. Yet that is what we have to do. We must no longer
accept the right of any government to starve or massacre its people or any others.
We must also do something about our own internal injustices, racism and perjudice.
Not because it's "right", because it may not be. But to sap the feeling of smug
self-righteousness that is the Enemy's main strength, and take it for ourselves.
We must accomplish this task in the time-honored manner: wholesale slaughter of civilian populations.
Bin Laden couldn't have said it better himself.
The people who committed the unspeakably evil deeds were not monsters: they were human, much as we'd all like to forget this. They did what they did because they had been stung to madness, lashing out insanely at a power they felt helpless against. Much like the poster.
It therefore behooves us all to retain our sanity, and then to coldly, dispassionately and rationally erase the cause of the tragedy. If that means a programme of education, so be it. If it means one or two bullets in the right place and time, so be it. A clean nuclear weapon or ten in isolated locations if that's appropriate. But we won't erase the cause by losing our souls and massacring innocents.
Of course, improved quality in any product affects the bottom line, and it's the bottom line that managers are paid to keep up. How can a developer communicate to managers (both open and closed) the value of better quality in development, and how long should one try before giving up?
I've had miserable failure in the first part - the communications. Recently, I was employed at a firm doing XML server-side Java work, extracting data from an Oracle database, producing HTML and other formats, some quite complex for paper, CD-Rom and on-line products.
I had been employed to help boost the quality of their process, hence improve the quality of the product.
All I did was to make enemies in management. "Never mind the quality, we want it Yesterday!".
Even when projects done "my way" were consistently shown to be on-time, on-budget that was no excuse for abandoning the slipshod and low-quality way of doing things that was the norm. They didn't want speed, they wanted the appearance of speed. And I quote "A senior software engineer should be able to peer-review his own code without outside assistance."
.
So when to give up? When you start getting 1 (out of 5) for your performance review (as I did), despite having the best record for projects delivered on-time and within-budget. But not until then, fight the good fight./p?
How to simulate a space environment in the kitchen
on
Budget Satellite
·
· Score: 1
To give a very rough idea of why Space stuff is both hard and expensive, here's a small article on what a satellite has to go through:
To give some idea of the environment a satellite has to work in, try this.
First, to simulate launch, attack a chain to your satellite-wannabe and drag it around behind your car on a rough road for 2 minutes at about 30 mph. It should be switched off throughout, then switched on immediately before the next bit.
Stick it in a tumble drier for a minute, to simulate the tumbling after separation. It should be able to right itself after you take it out if attitude control is important (like so you can point antennae towards earth....)
Stick it in the freezer, turned to max Cold. Then, while it's at -20F, take it out and stick it in an oven at about 250F. After a few cycles, half an hour of each, then put it in the microwave and set it on "high" for 10 minutes. Repeat continuously for the period it's supposed to operate, and it should work without a hitch throughout.
I can't think of an easy way to simulate vacuum (you get some interesting outgassing with many components, shorts, conductive glunk accumulating everywhere), but the above should be enough for a basic test. More complex and realistic ones are much tougher to pass.
(The above based upon personal observations at our clean room, and vibration, vacuum-and-heat torture chambers etc for FedSat-1, a Scientific research micro-satellite based on SIL components due to go up on a NASDA H-2A booster next year).
I'm just team-leading the software development BTW, I'm no hardware junkie. Programming for a 5-year life cycle where errant cosmic rays not just may but will randomly flip bits, and it's still gotta work, is non-trivial, but doable. Kinda neat and really interesting too.
In space, no-one can go up there to press CTRL-ALT-DEL.
The Midgaard Campaign is one RPG I know of that pre-dates D&D, but only be a few years. I've done some web searches, but can't find any mention of it so far. First came into contact with it in Australia in 72 IIRC.
But I agree with E.G.G. - He and Dave Arneson invented the first mass-market RPG, the first widely published one. I first played it in 75.
A Method for the exchange of valuable considerations for other valuable considerations
The patent covers the "business method" consisting of the exchange via any means whatsoever of valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property and/or currency or any interest therein for other valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property and/or currency or any interest therein.
Supporting patents consequent to this include:
The exchange of currency for other valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property and/or currency or any interest therein -
Buying
The exchange of valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property currency or any interest therein for currency -
Selling
The exchange of valuable considerations including but not limited to good services valuta and/or currency or any interest therein for other valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property and/or currency or any interest therein -
Bartering
Want to outsource overseas? Here's some Do's and Don'ts, based on my own experience as a code provider
Make sure the task is well-defined. It should have really complete specifications of all interfaces to the outside world, plus a reasonably good specification of what it should achieve.
Have an agreed set of acceptance test procedures. Otherwise how the heck do you know if what's been delivered is acceptable? This doesn't just mean "input dataset A get result set B" but also standards for coding style, commenting, and results of lint or other quality tools.
Go with people who have a track record. Before giving a non-trivial task to Freedonian Hackers Inc. , give them a trivial task, and see how they go. You will probably be horrified. If Slobovian Widget Makers have done good work in the past for you, then go with them if you possibly can.
Recommended Countries: Russia (But language barrier is a problem), Australia (But coder availability is a problem, many have decamped to the US where wages are tripled and standards lower), and for COBOL (only) some Indian firms. Others are disasters, so test before you buy.
Yes, I know the above is common sense, and any large, professional IT (Information Technology) shop should do this anyway for in-house efforts. The point is that you can get away with not doing a lot of specification, documentation etc when dealing in-house. But externally generated stuff has to be of a much higher quality, simply because you won't have anyone who's familiar with its undocumented features.
When this works, it works well: Because the end-product, as it's well specified, under good Configuration Management, well documented etc is better than the in-house stuff. It costs more hours and resources (but hopefully less money) though.
I've actually seen a genetic-algorithm generated AI system from Australia ported to Europe, and integrated with a multi-million LOC system that worked adequately the first time it hit the target machine. After 1 week of debugging, it worked according to spec with zero category 3+ defects. Passed a 6-month continuous operation test shortly thereafter. Don't expect this to be the norm, but it can be done.
Things cost mostly the same -- they just spend more 'dollars' on them
You obviously haven't seen the wages we get paid. My I humbly suggest doing a little research, like having a look at Jobnet
This - and other - links might give anyone thinking of outsourcing here an idea of how much it would cost. And you'll find people who are familiar with CMM,.jsp
technology etc at ridiculously low rates.
Australia is a bit like Southern California - beautiful beaches, wonderful weather, but beer is twice as strong and half the price. Wages are low, but prices are lower. Take SoCal, subtract the guns, the drugs, and the money.
I'm not asking all the impoverished students etc reading this to contribute: but if even one person from Silicon valley can give 1 hour's pay, it would measureably help. Russia's a 3rd world county, even a single buck can go a long way.
Why this bunch?
It's composed of former Russki Submariners, who can be expected to know who's most in need.
It's genuine - at least 1 Australian reporter has actually visited them. No Maffya, No Bureaucracy.
These guys, on pitiful pensions, have already given what they can to transport the Kursk families to Severmorsk - sort of like getting people from Tucson, Philadelphia and Portland to Norfolk.
e-mail from them follows. After some thought, I've not included their e-mail address. Anyone interested in it can e-mail me at mailto:aebrain@dynamite.com.au.
Sorry, I just have visions of some clueless script kiddie spamming or DOSing them on a whim. At least this way, they'd have to do 10 seconds of research beforehand.
Dear sisters and brothers,
Only another submariners knows that danger and sacrifice we take by daring to go beneath the sea. And only submariners wives and sweethearts
knows that is to wait for us.
But at these day of tragedy we see that all barriers od differences and transgressions ceased and we experienced a new dimension in our
mentality.
All churches around the world prayed for Submariners and their families of the stricken Submarine "Kursk". We have never felt a human support in the same scale.
Our special gratitude to national submariners associations in USA, UK, Germany, France, Israel, Italy, Argentina and Chile, as also to the
Naval Attaches of USA and Great Britain. Our profound sorrow over the loss of our brothers on board of Kursk we sharing with you all. And we
see among you Admiral Copart (France), Admiral Carol (USA), sub veterans from USSN Triton and Nautilus, those who made first patrols under ice and circumnavigation, captains and men, our old and new friends, who took part in International Submariners Convention in May 2000 or visited Saint Petersburg (Hi, brothers from Providence Club and crew of USSN Halibut), sub veterans of the WWII and veterans of the cold war. Your love and kindness, your compassion and solidarity reinforced our strength against the pain of loss. It was very difficult and may be really impossible to process all your messages coming through the Internet. We told about and passed your messages in assistance with mass media and our friends who serves in Vidiaevo and Severomorsk to the families of the Kursk. We'll repeat it again on meeting with families living in Saint Petersburg on September.
All Russian navies - former and present - are feeling pain and guilt for what might have been done and shame as they face the people. I quess
that Admiral Popov became a first Admiral in the modern Russian history who ask forgiveness standing alone opposite the Russian people in front of TV camera.
Hope that this tragedy was the beginning of a new era of peace and foresight between our countries and I see the same thoughts in your messages.
Our submariners community understand responsibility regarding the families of the Kursk crew. In cooperation with the officials from
Moscow, Saint Petersburg and others cities we started a company on donation gathering. We see that we must take in account a submariners
community support, first of all. Donation which was announced in the official declarations is about 1.5 thousand dollars to one family only.
We'll take a trust for all kind of social support to widows and orphans.
Hope that all our friends all over the world could assist us.
You can use our special account for Kursk's families.
Be sure, we are working only heart to heart with our trapped brothers and sisters, because we are submariners too.
God bless you all
Chairman of the Submariners Club, Captain 1st Rank (ret) Igor Kurdin
Liaison officer of the Submariners Club Captain of 1st Rank (ret) Igor Kozyr
and all members of the Submariners Club
Correspondent bank:
BANK OF NEW YORK
SWIFT: IRVT US 3N
Beneficiary bank:
INKASBANK, ST. PETERSBURG
SWIFT: INKS RU 2 P
ACCOUNT: 890-0260-963
Beneficiary:
40703840200029000028
SUBMARINERS CLUB,
SAINT PETERSBURG
LINIA 9, 50, V.O.
ST. PETERSBURG
(DONATION TO THE KURSK CREW FAMILIES
- DOBROVOLNIY BEZVOZMEZDNIY VZNOS NA BLAGOTVORITELNIE TSELY, PRODAZE NE
PODLEZIT)
As they say, YMMV. Certainly Modula-3 is an excellent language, and arguing whether Ada-83, Ada-95 or Modula-3 is "better" is like arguing the difference between a Ford and a (Pontiac/Opel Holden). Yes there are differences, but it depends on the exact version, and the differences are relatively small.
But Ada (or Modula-3 or Eiffel) vs C, that's like comparing a Ford (or Opel or Toyota)to a pair of Rollerblades and a JATO pack.
Thanks for the URL BTW. Here's a good one for Ada: http://www.adahome.com
Also anyone who's seen Oracle's PL/SQL or done hardware design using VHDL has programmed in Ada (though they're probably not aware of it).
The Matrix. Mission Impossible 2. Star Wars 2. ...and a host of other lesser known titles...
Anyone see a pattern here? Why does Australia have 2 large studios (Universal in the Gold Coast, Fox in Sydney) making the cutting-edge hi-tech movies?
IMHO We here in Oz are the cheap Asian labour we've always been afraid of. Also Low Crime rate, Low Labour cost, Highly skilled, Politically stable. We even have more Americans emigrating here than Aussies leaving for the US, despite the pitiful salaries for IT engineers here. (How does 15 years of C, C++, Java, HTML costing $40,000 grab you?)
Market forces may increase the salaries - but may not. There are just too many non-monetary advantages to living here. And there are literally thousands of talented CGI programmers who will almost pay to be allowed to make movies here. Actually, given what I've seen at the multi-media training centre 200m away from my house in Canberra, delete the "almost".
Wonder what the Unions in Hollywood have to say about this consequence of Globalisation.
"In my experience, an "easy-to-use" programming language has the result of being horribly bloated, since you have to include features you'd never use, since it's so friendly to have everything already done for you"
"I like not having to link in complex number handling when I code "Hello World".
Hello world:
Java
public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.print("Hello World"); }
Ada 83
with Text_IO; procedure Hello_World is begin Text_IO.print("Hello World"); end;
As you can see, the easy-to-use Ada is bloated beyond belief. In mean, compare the pristine beauty of the "public static void main(String[] args)" with "procedure Hello_World is"
Slashdot Mirror
I too was somewhat surprised that underground Nukes weren't used in Afghanistan. The attack on the WTC was the equivalent in destructiveness of a small (100t-1kt) nuke, and used on civilians. That the US didn't use Nukes in return is a sign that someone up there was thinking. A bit of research shows why they didn't use them. Have a look at report called "Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons". The standard penetrator (B61-11) has piss-poor penetrating performance. Even a 100t nuke needs to be 70 metres down to avoid contamination.
Most of the Great Unwashed out there in slashdotland don't make any distinction between a 100t nuke and a 50 Mt nuke. But it makes a big difference to people nearby. For example, if you're 100 km downwind of a 100t underground nuke, you'll only detect it by watching CNN. If you're 100km downwind of a 1 Mt groundburst, you're dead from fallout. It's Ten Thousand Times more powerful. Both India and Pakisatan let off dozens of kiloton-range weapons not so long ago. Using nukes doesn't mean Instant Thermonuclear Global Death.
For everything you ever wanted to know about Nukes, see the High Energy Weapons Archive. The Federation of American Scientists may not be the most neutral and unbiased of commentators (very Liberal), but the facts they base their commentary on are unimpeachable. Anyone who pretends to hold an opinion worth anything should read the facts first.
Incinerating Baghdad - and a whole heap of babies, schoolkids etc - would be a really bad idea, literally unthinkable even if Saddam Hussein nuked the US. But using nuclear bunker-busters to target the people who pushed the button, rather than leaving them untouched and massacring civilians, that makes sense to me. And obviously to the US Military too.
In 1976, the US terminated manned space exploration, because it was too expensive. In 500 years, I wonder if archaeologists will argue that the legendary "Saturn 5" couldn't have worked, rockets don't scale up unlike contra-grav units.
Yes.
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory : Only 100 out of our 135 snake species are poisonous.
Here in Australia, the average price of a new Audio CD is about 35AUD (18USD). But the average wage in the cities is 30000AUD (15500USD), and 25000AUD (13000USD) in rural areas. So for us, it's a bit worse, but still about 2 hours (at 1650 hrs/year).
And of course we're in DVD region 4, along with Brazil, Bolivia, and New Zealand. So only about 10% of titles are available. At 40AUD (21USD) each. Fortunately the High Court has recently ruled that DVD regioning is an artificial restraint of trade, therefore illegal. So we can now legally use all-region players. And with a bit of luck, swap our region-4-only ones for new ones or get em legally modded.
As an aside, wouldn't it be a good idea if international pricing scams were well-publicised on the net? Things like comparative price of Mars Bars and Big Macs to set a standard, then average wages, then prices of technology? Sounds like something right up /.s alley.
Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.
I could make very few improvements to it, all minor:
That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).
Ada is almost dead in the military. Why? Because there isn't enough money in maintaining Ada programs. They work, first time. Great for the military, lousy for the military-industrialist complex. Spend twice as much making it in the first place, then get no lucrative bugfix money afterwards. Making expensive programs that actually work is commercial suicide. Making cheap programs that actually work (which you do after some experience) gives you only subsistance level profits. Making cheap programs that almost work and require lots of profitable maintainance for years is the road to riches. So what if a few ships need towing to port due to a divide-by-zero error?
Of course, where firms could get sued if they screw up, such as in commercial avionics and jet engines, Ada is universally used. Ada doesn't guarantee good, safe, maintainable programs, but it's relatively easy to make them in Ada, and darn near impossible to make them in C.
As for Ada being harder to learn than C, which is harder :
for(i=0;i<BUFFER_SIZE;i++){read(i);
}
or
for i in buffer loop
read(i);
end loop;
Maybe if people just quietly gave facts and hard numbers in the Great Language Wars then the Truth Will Out.... Nah. But it's worth a shot, anyway.
Those who can, compete,
Those who can't, commit criminal acts to drive the competitors out of business
It's no exaggeration to say that Microsoft is a criminal organisation - as a corporate entity, they've been found guilty of committing crimes under US law. As a corporate entity, they have committed and continue to commit unethical acts. It has been found by a court of law that these acts in the past don't just stretch the laws to the limit, they fragrantly break them. Without a change in corporate culture, they won't make my shortlist of recommended vendors, regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of their products. We can't afford to be tarred with the same brush in some future lawsuits by some savvy lawyer. "Why did you recommend a product produced by a Criminal Organisation, Mr Expert? One that is so flawed as to cause my client such irreperable damage?" No thanks, I don't need the hassle.
URLs To backup my bald assertions below. Browse the sites and you'll see studies and numbers. Facts not Religious opinion. Adapower is a good start. Or the Ada Information Clearinghouse
IDE - there's a variety of freeware ones.
Simplified GUI - there's a variety of bindings to various APIs, from X-windows to SWING to W32. Plus many other simplified freeware ones, some thin, some thick. Pick which one is most appropriate. Ada (the language) doesn't have anything more advanced than stdio - but then again, neither does Java, it relies on the awt and swing libraries *shrug*
Advanced Error Handling - Java's exceptions contain more info than Ada's. Ada ones are more simple, easy to use, but I think Java's are better in most ways. They should be - both C++ and Java copied their exception handling from Ada's 1983 incarnation. OTOH most of the time all Java programmers (like me) do is make an exception without using any of the internal data, so YMMV.
Advanced OOD including multiple inheritance and abstract classes - As regards OOD. Ada's the most flexible of the lot. You can do strict OO, but don't have to. Methods are properties of Classes(actually packages) rather than objects, so you can say Wooden.paint(a_wooden_door) or Door.paint(a_wooden_door) rather than a_wooden_door.paint(). So you get all the advantages of multiple inheritance, without the horrendous penalties (which method are you inheriting, the paint for wooden things or the paint for doors?). Abstract classes are used all the time.
Garbage Collection - Ada doesn't produce garbage in general. You can do most things using statically allocated memory, or dynamic allocation within a statically-defined garbage-collected area. When you want dynamic allocation, you can choose to rely on the compiler's garbage collection, if it exists, but you're also given tools for explicit disposal of garbage. Note that Java has true garbage collection, but even Sun says that you can't rely on it, you should use explicit disposal. This is true not just for Java, but in general.
Operator/Function Overloading Ada has had this since 1983. Often copied, never bettered
Portable Stories abound of million- and 100,000-line Ada programs that require a dozen lines changed to make em work on different systems. My own personal war story is of a 20,000 liner developed on a 386 on an Irvine compiler, ported with 3 lines changed to a MicroVax using a DEC compiler, thence to a Vax using another DEC compiler, then to an embedded system using a DDC-I compiler. Was an AI to do anti-missile defence, people's lives depended on it. It's been in service since 1995. Cost less to make than the 7,000 lines of C in its test bed too. I've just help finish a 20,000 line piece of spaceflight avionics that makes not one Operating System call, even though it has 60+ simultaneous threads of execution. Oh yes, there's a shareware (or GNU licence? I forget) Ada compiler that produces Java bytecode, so will run on any Sun JVM.
So why isn't Ada-95 used by anyone? Because everyone knows it's too big (nearly as many keywords as C++,), needs a huge machine to run (bigger than a 286 running at 4 MHz - which was big in 1983 when Ada-83 was invented), it's designed by a committee (like Linux - one really good designer Jean Ichbiah, then peer review), and it's a product of the US Military (like Unix, and the Web - designed for not by). Oh yes, and expensive (GNAT is open source...) and uses a lot of risky concepts ( to wit, Operator Overloading, Object Oriented Design, Exceptions, all risky and untried in 1983 ). It's also obsolete, (the Ada-95 version being a little younger than C++). And it is used, for Avionics of all modern airliners ( Illyushin, Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus) and many satellites, railway- and air- traffic control systems, where quality is vital. It's not used much elsewhere, as there's a vested interest for software developers and programmers to keep software buggy (so they have job security) and quick to market (it takes a long time to develop reliable software).
So Ada's perfect, right? Wrong. It's just better than most general-purpose languages for many purposes. BUT It's not language of the month ( C# this month? ) so getting Ada programmers is very difficult. Though it's easy to learn, based like the similar Eiffel, Delphi, Object Pascal and Modula-2/3 on Pascal. If you've programmed hardware design in VDML, or used Oracle's access language, you've used Ada without knowing it.
My 2 kopins worth
Any idiot with a sufficiently powerful transmitter can DOS a scientific LEOsat while in the footprint, with less than a thousand bucks of hardware.
For the info of /.ers most LEOsats adjust their attitude with magnetorquers and reaction wheels, they are incapable of changing their orbits even if you snatch control. But you can, over successive orbits, put them into power-draining modes that will cause eventual loss of the bird.
LEOsats are also only commandable from one groundstation for 1-2 slots of 15mins or so per day.
Many scientific satellites use the ESA PUS standard high-level protocol (PPT here) on an AVTEC box or something similar, using CCSDS. It would be trivial to "crack" (since it's not encrypted), given a hundred thousand bucks for the hardware.ROT-13 is harder.
In summary, any moron can make life difficult for researchers. But firebombing chemistry pr CompSci labs would be just as "clever", far easier and cheaper, and even more annoying.
BTW unlike some who think this is a troll, I'm concerned about the issue myself. But given the hardware cost of implementing a reliable CCSDS protocol, only fairly wealthy hackers could do it. The Software is relatively easy for real-time programmers, but script kiddies, VB-jocks or even C coders need not apply, Ada would be the best way to do it with assembler second. The additional security of adding encryption on top would be negligible, as wealthy hackers could be expected to have access (hacked or legit) to arbitrarily large amounts of computing power. And any script kiddie could DOS us with a five-hundred-dollar jammer anyway. For 15 minutes.
OK, you're right. No need to be obnoxious about it though.
Yes, they're "pathetic" inasmuch as they are to be pitied, not blamed. Sort of like someone trying to compute the 90th digit of Pi using an abacus as opposed to a PC. Morons they're most decidedly NOT. Stuff that even an average programmer can do easily in Ada, such as multitasking, template instantiation and so on require near-genius IQs to do in other languages to get half the reliability. Making a reliable Ada-95 60 task program using GNAT and Booch components (cost : $0 ) is not trivial, but any good intern should be able to do it. But just try porting a simple 60-thread program using STL constructs in C++ from Linux(gcc) to Mac OS8(code warrior), or even Windows 95(VC++ 5) to see what I mean. They have to use all sorts of operating-system specific stuff and ifdefs rather than write once, run-anywhere code. And do surgery on the different variations of the STL.
What's more, "everyone knows" Ada's too verbose, and is to be eschewed because it has lots of reserved words (not as many C++ or Java), and has weird, untested and Evil features such as Exceptions and Generics. It got a bad press for this in 1983. So don't blame them, nor disrespect their intelligence.
It's difficult to go over bounds checks and disorder parameters when all you have to do is write code like
begin- for this_reg in hardware_defn.IO_Registers loop
exception-
read_and_store_value ( register => this_reg, at_time => calendar.clock );
end loop;- when timeout_error => check_connection;
end;when others => raise;
Try writing the same thing in C++ without leaving yourself open to lots of changes if the register enumeration changes from 0..5 to 67..76 or even (34, 45, 78) or (back, top, aux) and you'll see what I mean. Writing quality, efficient, readable code that handles errors well in some languages is just plain hard. So don't call them morons, they're just handicapped by using the fashionable and popular because they don't know any better. Even though there's plenty of evidence.
Error Handling and Appropriate Technology
This article is right on target. It's much more important for open source software to be of a higher standard than closed-source, simply because with open source, shoddiness can't be hidden and swept under the carpet (to state the bleedin obvious). If we make shoddy open-source code, then up-and-coming programmers will see it, learn from it, and treat this very ordinary code as the 'norm'. Worse, they will treat it as a target to be aimed for, and cut corners so even this low standard isn't met.
FWIW I've worked in safety-critical areas for some 20 years. I've managed to dodge being assigned to management, and am doing neat stuff like spaceflight avionics for interest rather than chasing dollars doing yet-another-b-2-b system. The biggest problem I've found with re-educating interns is getting them to be paranoid enough. It's a matter of culture.
Quick N Dirty is an appropriate culture for some systems.
If you're writing throwaway code for a specific purpose (such as a simple script) then quality isn't an important issue.
If a deadline is approaching fast, your budget is zero, your team burnt out, then damn the long-term costs, hack it so it kinda works and ship it on time. It's crap, but they only paid for less than crap, so don't worry, be happy.
There's a major financial incentive to write high-maintenance code, both for programmers and companies. You make pennies on the initial sale, megabucks on the maintenance. What do you call a programmer who writes superb code that's maintenance-free? Unemployed.
This is true for design and requirement analysis, as well as code.
But... it's important to realise this is not the only way of doing things. It has it's place. But not in open source.(And there's such a thing as professional pride too, but I digress)
If you're writing a re-useable module, you should treat all inputs as being guilty until proven innocent, always check any outputs from your area, and be honest regarding what side-effects your module has. In some languages, this is easy (e.g. Ada ), in others darn near impossible (e.g. C), but it has to be done. It's obvious that you have to do it when lives are at stake. It's less obvious when you're writing some device driver for Linux - but literally tens of billions of dollars may be riding on how well you do your job. Even if you're not getting paid for it.
I'm not asking for the degree of robustness typically shown by safety-critical systems What? Your code failed just because half the memory was corrupted and a CPU was on fire? Unacceptable! Failure is Not an Option! but enough so that BSODs or their equivalent lead to puzzlement I've never seen one of those before!.
A New Kind of Warfare
There's no easy and quick answer to this one.
Like many people who have contributed to discussions over the past decade
in places like the Compuserve Military Forum, http://www.stratfor.com,
http://www.strategypage.com and others, I've done some analysis on
Threats, so know a bit about what I speak.
The general consensus had been that Cyberwarfare was going to be the
Next Big Thing. Global Thermonuclear War was passe, terrorism had been
shown to be at best innefectual, at worst counter-productive. Instead,
the threat was going to be vs infrastructure, the weapons anything from
a judiciously placed lump of Semtex, to frame-ups of key personnel or
their relatives, to The Worm From Hell. Few lives if any would be lost,
the hip-pocket nerve would be the target. I thought this myself, based
on the evidence that no terrorist group had ever detonated a nuke or
caused millions or even thousands of casualties in one attack.
But the so-called Nuclear threshold has now been crossed. OK, so they didn't
use Nukes as such - but the effect in terms of damage to property and people
was comparable with a small nuke. What makes a Nuke so terrible? It's the
random, massive destruction, the defencelessness we as a civilised
society have against it. The actual kill mechanism is less important, except
symbolically.
The point is, with Civilisation - the concept of having cities with such
things as sewerage, electricity, internet access, public health - addiction
to that concept leaves you vulnerable. Water supplies can be contaminated,
subways can be filled with poison gas, airliners can be hijacked and sent
crashing into skyscrapers, and there is no defence against this. None.
You can make things harder - for example, I doubt that the next hijackers
will be believed if they say "don't resist any no-one will get hurt." But
for every gap you fill, there are hundreds of others left wide open. A
Police State that covers most of these gaps leaves the facade of Society
intact, while destroying the heart, and still doesn't cover everything.
For my own peace of mind I won't say a half-dozen other things that have
been openly discussed as being more destructive, and a lot easier to
pull off than Ground Zero. I'm 99% sure that any Bad Hats reading this will
already have thought of them, but if one happened, the thought that they
might have been in the remaining 1% and got the idea here would destroy me.
I fully expect that some of them will be used, or attempted, against us
no matter what we do or do not do.
All you can do in the way of defence is make things so that random crazies
are very likely to get caught, and do not cause too much immediate damage
or long-term trauma if they get through. Against a wealthy, well-organised
and widespread group with literally millions of dollars to spend on airfares,
equipment, forged documents and so on, there is no credible defence. None.
If they are a bunch of amateurs, their sheer size and communications will
make them detectable long before they're able to do anything. But if they're
smart, recent events have shown that they can evade the system we had in
place before September 11th., and likely will be able to do so for some
years to come.
Until September 11th though, deterrence had worked. The chances of being
able to get through the defences were so small, and the consequences of
a successful strike being so large, that the game wasn't worth the candle.
But now every Xenophobic group who until now has had to watch impotently
as liberal states had run roughshod over their favourite hatreds and
prejudices will have gained heart, and probably more financial support.
OK, so there's no defence. What are our options?
Option a) Give In.
One trouble with this one is that we don't know who to surrender
to. Should we say "Ok, we'll stop going after the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Judea", then the Judean People's Liberation Organisation, their
hated enemy, will attack us even harder until we reverse our course.
Then there's the old saw "He who pays Danegeld is never free of the Danes".
Blackmailers historically require more and more. Should we give the Bad Hats a
reward for their behaviour, they'll naturally repeat it.
At the risk of showing some naivity, there's also a matter to be considered:
we wouldn't have been taking the actions the Bad Hats don't want us to if
we hadn't thought them to be either right at the time, or at least in our best
interests. For example, I'm so much in favour of allowing freedom of political
thought that I wouldn't give it up to save my life.
Finally, there's another issue: some of the Bad Hats don't take prisoners, they
won't accept our surrender. The type of people whose beliefs allow them to
deliberately massacre civilians as a prime objective - rather than do so
accidentally, or as regrettable byproduct of military neccessity - are the
type who won't listen to us if we cry "Uncle!". The mere existence of liberal
states is anathema to them. It's Their Way or No Way, Right is on their
side, and no abomination is unjustifiable if the End is good.
So for a variety of completely practical and cynical reasons, giving up or even
bending a bit is right out. At least this saves us some painful soul-searching.
b) Attack the Enemy's Capabilities.
If the Enemy isn't physically able to harm you, you don't care what they think.
The basic problem we have here is that the Enemy presents few clear-cut targets.
Either they're effectively stealthed, or they're inextricably mixed up with
a lot of innocents, third parties, or ourselves. For example, we could adopt a
policy of shooting down all airliners even remotely suspected of being hijacked.
This would certainly take out all hijackers, but also countless of our own
families.
Still, there are a number of targets, that can be serviced by a number of means.
The targets vary from such obvious ones as military training camps, which can be
neutralised by special forces, conventional invasion, air attacks, nukes or
political pressure to close them, through to financial supporters, who can be
rendered bankrupt via cyberwarfare, have their assets frozen, or just simply
assassinated, by bullet, bomb, frame-up or airstrike. Disinformation causing
their own side to kill them is a particularly neat way of doing things, as
it provides cover for your own infiltrators. Third-party bounty-hunters are
also a way of reducing your own casualties.
Attacking the Enemy's capabilities is something that can be done relatively
quickly, and depending on how much ethical damage we're willing to accept,
could be both thorough and effective. For example, Nuking every state that's
ever disagreed with us publically would be as effective and through and only
marginally less appropriate than cutting off our own heads to cure migraine.
Attacking the Enemy's Capabilities when they're well-defined is something the
military is good at. In this case, the number of appropriate targets is
relatively small, so military action is just a small part of the whole war.
On the other hand, some of those obvious targets are very difficult, so
would require a massive military effort to neutralise, so this difference
may be more apparent than real.
Expect a lot more unconventional but physically destructive warfare, e.g.
tracing down any "insider traders" who have made a (literal) killing on the
stock market recently, and depending on the evidence, rendering them
financially impotent ( a bullet in the brain is one simple way, but may not
be the most appropriate ). Manipulating the stock market might be equally
as effective at causing corporate collapse. Still, the financial "collateral
damage" may mean that a car accident or even sudden fatal illness might be
better. Trouble with such covert attacks is that true accidents in the future
will be blamed on you, so it might be better to just say "Yes, we shot him, so
what?" rather than weep crocadile tears.
c) Attack the Enemy's Will to Fight.
This is the epitome of warfare. You don't have to expend blood and treasure
if the Enemy lacks the will to attack you - he'll do what you want.
There are two ways of doing this, one far more effective than the other. The
easiest and quickest is to instill fear in the heart of the enemy. This has
historically been very popular, both on a large geopolitical scale, to the
smallest personal scale. It ranges from the terror of "Mutually Assured
Destruction" to the terror of provoking a Jihad. It ranges from the threat
to go after Saddam Hussein personally if he used Chemical Warfare in the
Gulf, to the blandishments "Just obey and no-one gets hurt" used every
day by Police forces, and for that matter, by the Hijackers on September 11th.
Note that credibility is the key. If the other side doesn't believe you,
as happened in the flight that impacted in Pennsylvania, even unarmed civilians
can and do fight effectively. If the other side believes that all they'll
get if you kill them is an instant ticket to Paradise, then threats aren't
credible. If you can convince them though that by their actions they've risked
eternal damnation, that's another matter. This is a particularly promissing
avenue of attack in this case. A great effort to convince the Imams and
Islamic Scholars of the world to unreservedly condemn Ground Zero and state
that the perpetrators are now roasting in fire hotter than the H-bomb would
likely be very effective indeed - the people concerned appear to be highly
religious. In recent times, both the USA in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan
gave up and pulled out because they had lost the will to fight what was
perceived to be a losing battle in a dubious cause.
And that last leads to the second, much harder and vastly more effective way
of removing the Enemy's will to fight. The absolute pinnacle of the military
art is to make the Enemy your Friend. And two can play at this game.
In order to resist, we must remain convinced that there is a clear-cut moral
difference between ourselves and the Enemy. Like Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero has
provided us with that.
We allowed Rwanda, and Cambodia, and Bosnia, and many others, sometimes out of
fear of a larger war (The Bogistanis are Russian Allies...), sometimes out of
ignorance (Bogistan? Where's that?), but sometimes out of indifference
(who gives a damn about what happens in Outer Bogistan?) or worse, if they
were our Allies in the "Great Game" ("If they didn't shoot those kids, the
commies would have taken over"). As the result, many of our Enemies call us
hypocrites, and with some (not much, but some) justification.
We (and I do not just mean the USA here, I mean every country that lost citizens
on September 11th for starters) can no longer say "Someone else's problem."
No more "business as usual". We must ratchet the filter of what is acceptable
behaviour by states or organisations a few more notches.
Not enough to make the different but basically decent into enemies or destroy
the ideals we hold dear, but enough so great quantities of the world do not
perceive us as hypocrites. If you want a soundbite "First we've got to get on
God's Side, then he'll be on Our Side."
Finally, as our long-term strategy, we must try to convert at least the children
of our enemies into our friends. Our weapons here are more likely to be solar-
powered radios, food drops (imagine a raid on Baghdad that fought through heavy
defences to drop a few thousand tonnes of baby food), education (so when Baghdad
announces that the baby food is all poisoned and millions have died, it's not
believed), and stern action to counter the Bad Hats. We may not be able to pick
any "Good Guys" to support, but we can sure identify and destroy the torturers of
the Secret Police, the thieves who take the foreign aid money, and those who terrorise
their own populace. For very often there are many who remain silent out of fear.
We must bolster their courage, and give them a reasonable choice of behaviour other
than to join the Enemy camp.
So much self-serving tub-thumping rubbish has been talked about "Moral Re-Armament"
that the phrase is direputable. Yet that is what we have to do. We must no longer
accept the right of any government to starve or massacre its people or any others.
We must also do something about our own internal injustices, racism and perjudice.
Not because it's "right", because it may not be. But to sap the feeling of smug
self-righteousness that is the Enemy's main strength, and take it for ourselves.
Bin Laden couldn't have said it better himself.
The people who committed the unspeakably evil deeds were not monsters: they were human, much as we'd all like to forget this. They did what they did because they had been stung to madness, lashing out insanely at a power they felt helpless against. Much like the poster.
It therefore behooves us all to retain our sanity, and then to coldly, dispassionately and rationally erase the cause of the tragedy. If that means a programme of education, so be it. If it means one or two bullets in the right place and time, so be it. A clean nuclear weapon or ten in isolated locations if that's appropriate. But we won't erase the cause by losing our souls and massacring innocents.
I've had miserable failure in the first part - the communications. Recently, I was employed at a firm doing XML server-side Java work, extracting data from an Oracle database, producing HTML and other formats, some quite complex for paper, CD-Rom and on-line products.
I had been employed to help boost the quality of their process, hence improve the quality of the product.
All I did was to make enemies in management. "Never mind the quality, we want it Yesterday!".
Even when projects done "my way" were consistently shown to be on-time, on-budget that was no excuse for abandoning the slipshod and low-quality way of doing things that was the norm. They didn't want speed, they wanted the appearance of speed. And I quote "A senior software engineer should be able to peer-review his own code without outside assistance."
.So when to give up? When you start getting 1 (out of 5) for your performance review (as I did), despite having the best record for projects delivered on-time and within-budget. But not until then, fight the good fight./p?
To give a very rough idea of why Space stuff is both hard and expensive, here's a small article on what a satellite has to go through:
To give some idea of the environment a satellite has to work in, try this.
First, to simulate launch, attack a chain to your satellite-wannabe and drag it around behind your car on a rough road for 2 minutes at about 30 mph. It should be switched off throughout, then switched on immediately before the next bit.
Stick it in a tumble drier for a minute, to simulate the tumbling after separation. It should be able to right itself after you take it out if attitude control is important (like so you can point antennae towards earth....)
Stick it in the freezer, turned to max Cold. Then, while it's at -20F, take it out and stick it in an oven at about 250F. After a few cycles, half an hour of each, then put it in the microwave and set it on "high" for 10 minutes. Repeat continuously for the period it's supposed to operate, and it should work without a hitch throughout.
I can't think of an easy way to simulate vacuum (you get some interesting outgassing with many components, shorts, conductive glunk accumulating everywhere), but the above should be enough for a basic test. More complex and realistic ones are much tougher to pass.
(The above based upon personal observations at our clean room, and vibration, vacuum-and-heat torture chambers etc for FedSat-1, a Scientific research micro-satellite based on SIL components due to go up on a NASDA H-2A booster next year).
I'm just team-leading the software development BTW, I'm no hardware junkie. Programming for a 5-year life cycle where errant cosmic rays not just may but will randomly flip bits, and it's still gotta work, is non-trivial, but doable. Kinda neat and really interesting too.
In space, no-one can go up there to press CTRL-ALT-DEL.
The Midgaard Campaign is one RPG I know of that pre-dates D&D, but only be a few years. I've done some web searches, but can't find any mention of it so far. First came into contact with it in Australia in 72 IIRC.
But I agree with E.G.G. - He and Dave Arneson invented the first mass-market RPG, the first widely published one. I first played it in 75.
The patent covers the "business method" consisting of the exchange via any means whatsoever of valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property and/or currency or any interest therein for other valuable considerations including but not limited to goods services valuta real property and/or currency or any interest therein.
Supporting patents consequent to this include:
Want to outsource overseas? Here's some Do's and Don'ts, based on my own experience as a code provider
Yes, I know the above is common sense, and any large, professional IT (Information Technology) shop should do this anyway for in-house efforts. The point is that you can get away with not doing a lot of specification, documentation etc when dealing in-house. But externally generated stuff has to be of a much higher quality, simply because you won't have anyone who's familiar with its undocumented features.
When this works, it works well: Because the end-product, as it's well specified, under good Configuration Management, well documented etc is better than the in-house stuff. It costs more hours and resources (but hopefully less money) though.
I've actually seen a genetic-algorithm generated AI system from Australia ported to Europe, and integrated with a multi-million LOC system that worked adequately the first time it hit the target machine. After 1 week of debugging, it worked according to spec with zero category 3+ defects. Passed a 6-month continuous operation test shortly thereafter. Don't expect this to be the norm, but it can be done.
You obviously haven't seen the wages we get paid. My I humbly suggest doing a little research, like having a look at Jobnet
This - and other - links might give anyone thinking of outsourcing here an idea of how much it would cost. And you'll find people who are familiar with CMM, .jsp
technology etc at ridiculously low rates.
Australia is a bit like Southern California - beautiful beaches, wonderful weather, but beer is twice as strong and half the price. Wages are low, but prices are lower. Take SoCal, subtract the guns, the drugs, and the money.
Correspondent bank:
BANK OF NEW YORK
SWIFT: IRVT US 3N
Beneficiary bank:
INKASBANK, ST. PETERSBURG
SWIFT: INKS RU 2 P
ACCOUNT: 890-0260-963
Beneficiary: 40703840200029000028
SUBMARINERS CLUB,
SAINT PETERSBURG LINIA 9, 50, V.O.
ST. PETERSBURG
(DONATION TO THE KURSK CREW FAMILIES - DOBROVOLNIY BEZVOZMEZDNIY VZNOS NA BLAGOTVORITELNIE TSELY, PRODAZE NE PODLEZIT)
I recommend the St Petersburg Submarine Club
.Why contribute?
EVEN A FEW BUCKS CAN HELP (shouting intended)
I'm not asking all the impoverished students etc reading this to contribute: but if even one person from Silicon valley can give 1 hour's pay, it would measureably help. Russia's a 3rd world county, even a single buck can go a long way.
Why this bunch?
It's composed of former Russki Submariners, who can be expected to know who's most in need.
It's genuine - at least 1 Australian reporter has actually visited them. No Maffya, No Bureaucracy.
These guys, on pitiful pensions, have already given what they can to transport the Kursk families to Severmorsk - sort of like getting people from Tucson, Philadelphia and Portland to Norfolk.
e-mail from them follows. After some thought, I've not included their e-mail address. Anyone interested in it can e-mail me at mailto:aebrain@dynamite.com.au.
Sorry, I just have visions of some clueless script kiddie spamming or DOSing them on a whim. At least this way, they'd have to do 10 seconds of research beforehand.
As they say, YMMV. Certainly Modula-3 is an excellent language, and arguing whether Ada-83, Ada-95 or Modula-3 is "better" is like arguing the difference between a Ford and a (Pontiac/Opel Holden). Yes there are differences, but it depends on the exact version, and the differences are relatively small.
But Ada (or Modula-3 or Eiffel) vs C, that's like comparing a Ford (or Opel or Toyota)to a pair of Rollerblades and a JATO pack.
Thanks for the URL BTW. Here's a good one for Ada:
http://www.adahome.com
Also anyone who's seen Oracle's PL/SQL or done hardware design using VHDL has programmed in Ada (though they're probably not aware of it).
The Matrix.
Mission Impossible 2.
Star Wars 2.
...and a host of other lesser known titles...
Anyone see a pattern here? Why does Australia have 2 large studios (Universal in the Gold Coast, Fox in Sydney) making the cutting-edge hi-tech movies?
IMHO We here in Oz are the cheap Asian labour we've always been afraid of. Also Low Crime rate, Low Labour cost, Highly skilled, Politically stable. We even have more Americans emigrating here than Aussies leaving for the US, despite the pitiful salaries for IT engineers here. (How does 15 years of C, C++, Java, HTML costing $40,000 grab you?)
Market forces may increase the salaries - but may not. There are just too many non-monetary advantages to living here. And there are literally thousands of talented CGI programmers who will almost pay to be allowed to make movies here. Actually, given what I've seen at the multi-media training centre 200m away from my house in Canberra, delete the "almost".
Wonder what the Unions in Hollywood have to say about this consequence of Globalisation.
"In my experience, an "easy-to-use" programming language has the result of being horribly bloated, since you have to include features you'd never use, since it's so friendly to have everything already done for you"
"I like not having to link in complex number handling when I code "Hello World".
Hello world:
Java
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.print("Hello World");
}
Ada 83
with Text_IO;
procedure Hello_World is
begin
Text_IO.print("Hello World");
end;
As you can see, the easy-to-use Ada is bloated beyond belief. In mean, compare the pristine beauty of the "public static void main(String[] args)"
with "procedure Hello_World is"