I think its going to be easier to put launch a balloon and a robotic camera than it will be to put someone up on a jet propelled hose pipe to look over the horizon.
If I am correct, an observer standing at see level can only see 8 miles before the horizon disappears. The higher up you are the more you get to see.
While interesting, I do think that this should be kept private.
There are a few good reasons to make this public
1. Historians, universities and students will have access to quality material for analysis and correlation.
2. The public will be able to scrutinize and correct incorrect reports ensuring that congress have the correct information.
But consider that you give away your thought processes and the foundations of your strategies to those opponents that should not be privy to your thoughts.
For windows, if you are a consumer you need 4gb of memory. Always have a small amount of swap (100mb) as I find that windows becomes unstable without it. If your
* Why do you have more than 4gb memory? You need to look at your applications. If you are using photoshop you may need more memory. Rule of thumb: for each large application (photoshop, database) use an extra 1 GB of swap.
* If you have 8gb of memory and you are hitting swap you probably need to tune your servers and applications. If you have 10 applications you would have 10gb of swap. A well tuned server should use very little of that.
* If you have 4gb of ram and have 2 large applications then you have 4gb of memory and 2gb of swap.
Its basic math - you cannot divorce your needs from your usage and have to recognize that if you overload a server it will be sub-optimal. A server should ideally average 70% CPU and 70% memory usage to cater for spikes. Too much swapping will slow you down.
With a move to visualization it becomes more important to be friendly with shared resources and thats a whole different topic.
That is cheeper than I am currently paying (South Africa). If their international roaming charges are PG13 then I might get one and roam. Locked in for 2 years might be a bit harsh if it breaks which is what usually happens to my phones.
I have enough experience with Relax NG to say that it is great.
The compact syntax is enjoyable as you can be quite precise (compared to XSD) and there are tools that convert between the compact syntax and the xml Relax NG syntax allowing you to use syntax that suites your needs. In general, JING it is quite a bit quicker than a few of the XSD validators for comparably complex schemas.
There are a few disadvantages:
* The full range of tools that are available are not advanced on a regular basis. I found a few bugs in the JING source code and had the opportunity to fix them where necessary.
* I feel that RelaxNG is marginalized because of XSD and along with that goes alot of additional OSS support. They are maintained by individuals instead of teams. I would recommend that the author of JING puts his software forward to the apache foundation (jakarta commons) and see if it can attract a bit more attention.
* Web services are a bit of a sticking point. The use of a Relax NG schema can be embedded into the WSDL, however, the various 3rd party clients may not necessarily understand the schema, and by extension, they would not generate any supporting classes making integration with a relax NG defined webservice a little more complex than it needs to be.
Look, you dont want your sysadmins (or anyone who has access to sensitive information) sitting with his back to a large glass window which is at ground level next to commonly walked path by employees or the public.
However, if you are going to exist in sets of cubicals then be certain that that team is able to monitor who is walking around and standing around the area. In many companies have sensitive departments that are walled off. Everyone with a particular security level/trust would sit in a seperate cubical area with a common access control mechanism.
If
Country looses economic superiority Then
Ensure country has all military superiority options covered for the next 100 years.
Military options over the next 100 years will involve space superiority. This is required to ensure the status quo (peace). Space is the next non conventional warzone that will be developed. Any madman at the head of a country (eg:hitler, in a country which has the economy to fight war) could escelate issues beyond belief with serious consequences.
I for one do not welcome the envasion of Taiwan by Chinese idiots. China would be a stronger country with Taiwan as a seperate independant friendly state than it as an incorporated state. UK + US, Spain + Brazil, China + Taiwan - I'd say that the Chinese are idiots for not embracing Taiwan as friends as opposed to trying to force some form of nationalism on them. The challenges are anti missle, control over communication (satailite) social issues.
Better to develop these technologies now than not have the ability to develop them later on. (look at the soviet union - sudden changes without planning broke the SU/russia, not the fall of the SU.)
Failure to adopt x86 does not imply that their current PPC offering has failed. IBM may continue to supply Apple with sufficiently powered PPC chips 2 years from now that make it feasible to continue with PPC.
What this gives Apple is the software R&D in the x86 world + marchitecture without sacrificing any performance gains that IBM achieve. Additionally, the sword has been raised above intel for a second time... with Apple demanding a significant discount instead of going with AMD.
Personally, I'd flog that sword for all its worth even though I prefer AMD due to their measured technical superiority.
I can say the same. Yes, I can quit on the spot for regular periods of months. I actually enjoy being off coffee for quite some time.
BUT
I can also say that after one cup of coffee at work 30 minutes after I start working will allow me to absorb myself into what I'm doing. I'll get 'much more' done.
Isnt it amazing that every 4+ comment is negative. I would imagine that this could be seen as a voting mechanism by the randomly chosen moderators of the opinions they think are worthwhile. No two random people are defending startrek.
Sci-Fi producers should canvas slashdot for community advice since its not the diehard supporters (ie: the few hundred that read alt.sf.star-trek (or whatever)) but the public that they seek to entertain.
C#.NET advantages come 1) from taking everything good in java 2) adding cleaner COM+ integration and windows integration.
Thats it.
Now Java 1.5 will fix alot of issues i have with java and it removes one of the reasons (1) for moving to C#.NET. (2) is going to be difficult for java to level. Having said that, (2) is the reason why.NET will last forever in general application development. App development with ATL, Win32, x,y,z is a nightmare in some respects..Net will do for windows what Java has done for computing.
I recon they should build a pipeline to the middle of the sahara desert and pump sea water there... build a lake/whatnot and get some consistent rain in the desert. As long as this happens, maybe it would be possible to open up some farm land and feed a few million.
The biggest problem I forsee is the knock-on effect with different weather systems. Irregular weather would throw out weather models and possibly disrupt whatever systems depend on at least 3 day weather forcasts.
... two researchers took highspeed photographs of a pig in a specially-designed windtunnel to study how pigs fly. This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars.
Dont worry... in a couple of years, when the infrastructure is rolled out, there will be soo much competition at the current level that the only diff will be price.
Prices will drop and the tech will be standard. If you ever ACTUALLY need to use it (there is always that one time @ band camp)... then you'll be changed a fortune in service fees / whatnot.
Atleast you'll have the opportunity... but dont think you'll get the service cheap.
Realise that developing software is (as someone said) akin to developing a new theory of relativity every time you write a new program and that its easier to explode and manipulate a 25m x 25m square of reinforced concrete than it is to radically adjust and transform a program into something that has an improved framework.
Typically, once you've chosen your framework and added functionality to a software application - you've locked yourself into a framework paradigm its difficult to change your framework without a total rewrite.
=====
The above is a fundamental hurdle to all software development.
We typically get about 3meters up this pole-vault by using various infrastructure environments that are a boon to developers - JSP, SQL Server, SAP, etc. They ensure that the developer does not need to reinvent the wheel. The boon of reusable components is modern computing.
===
Problems with IT businesses are their lack of extracting resalable components from their software. Customised software is effectively worthless to anyone else other than its intended recipient. Reusable components have a real value to many companies.
===
A brilliant example is the infrastructure developed by Borland that promotes engineering:
C++ Builder, Delphi, etc:
Drag, Drop, connect a few dots, Run. - True engineering.
===
The next major development boon will come in the project management field but it will have limited development benifits instead improving the maintainence and formal validation of engineered software.
Various environments and languages need to come up with a common framework and process description as output by language compilers at the time of object code compilation. This need is based upon the realisation that there is no language and environment that suits every need and so there are many different languages and environments eg:Html, Perl, Python, Java, C++, Smalltalk, Assembler, Natural, Cobol, JScript, ASP, XML, XSL. They all have their purpose but make it difficult to coordinate and collect information in a single project management tool that has real value. Taking observations further one will notice that projects often use many different environments and are fractured hybrids.
Eg: JSP frontend with a backend group of application servers connected to a database server and possibly a rendering/computation farm in there somewhere. All that connectd by various perl, shell scripts, corba, PL/SQL, java, c++, libraries, etc.
The need for a consolidated project management view that is able to analyse, verify and formalise every aspect of a large system aswell as any meaningfull application by software developers/engineers is there, but nonexistant. This will only be realised when compiler writers develop a common process description that can be consolidated by a single project management tool reading the outputs of many different compiled outputs.
This would ensure that the task of analysing the source code is not the responsibility of the management tool developer - he'd go out of business before analysing in detail every appropriate language - but rather the compiler writer - who is the only person who can truely formalise and describe the processes that his compiled output will execute based on appropriate input source.
====
Your typical bane of any project is either an inappropriate project development paradigm and inappropriate project management tools that provide very little real value to the developer/engineers and provide more of an accountability token for management to disclaim management responsibility by implying that the developers/engineers are not developing according to schedule when managements theory of relativity ends being relatively different to the theory of relativity that is possibly concievable according to a reasonable schedule by developers.
an intresting read: " http://theregister.co.uk/content/7/28299 .html IT project failure is rampant - KPMG "
===
There are some hazards one must realise. Many software companies are setting the industry/world economy up for a typical downfall by destroying the companies that support them. They do this by over-charging for products. MS, Oracle, IBM, etc are common examples.
They charge monopolistic rates and take large profits for the use of their engineering services at the cost of the longterm viability of the economy as a whole. With large taking excessive profits, they reduce the expendature that real companies can use to grow their business. Money is centralised in software companies which ONLY facilitate other companies to do business. They do not ensure profitability of real businesses.
This is why ALL IT companies, IT departments, etc, are not profit earners because they do not conduct business, they only facilitate it, optimise it. Being able to make transactions, does not imply that one will give a company money because its got a good set of servers. I want fruit and dont care about your lovely pair of servers.
>...and I keep wondering what "improvements"... > have actually brought progress to the key > issue: more quickly and more inexpensively > developing software that's more reliable?
Your question has more aspects that one would realise:
1) The realisation that reusable packaged components are a boon to development.
2) The realisation that during development of a large project, one can produce reusable components as a spinoff resaleable develop that adds true value to the company (by value of the asset.. whereas a customised application is typically worthless to anyone but the company that requires that specific set of customisations).
3) The actual resale of those developed components through mass market repositories at REASONABLE prices.
4) A culture of purchasing components instead of developing something simple ensures ownership of a non-core problem (maintainance of a component) is not the responsability of a company whose business only requires the usage of said component. A number of component companies price their components and support costs outside the range of small businesses... which is a shame.
5) Open Source repositories of reusable components is an evolution within the world of software development.
---
Software, tools and components that provide massive improvements in TTM (time to market) for small projects are possibly insignificant when taking into account large projects but a quick summary would be:
The various middleware and appropriate environments allow a developer to develop and deploy solutions without developing those lower software layers (eg: JSP, SQL Server, Websphere, RMI).
In my opinion, with more companies developing reasonably priced, stable and secure infrastructure the more one can reasonably engineer a reasonable solution.
A brilliant example is the infrastructure developed by Borland:
For small projects, the biggest boon to developers is reasonably priced components for GUI development environments such as C++ Builder, Delphi, etc.
Drag, Drop, connect a few dots, Run.
True engineering.
---
There are some hazards one must realise. Many software companies are setting the industry/world economy up for a typical downfall by destroying the companies that support them. They do this by over-charging for products. MS, Oracle, IBM, etc are common examples.
They charge monopolistic rates and take large profits for the use of their engineering services at the cost of the longterm viability of the economy as a whole. With large taking excessive profits, they reduce the expendature that real companies can use to grow their business. Money is centralised in software companies which ONLY facilitate other companies to do business. They do not ensure profitability of real businesses.
This is why ALL IT companies, IT departments, etc, are not profit earners because they do not conduct business, they only facilitate it, optimise it. Being able to make transactions, does not imply that one will give a company money because its got a good set of servers. I want fruit and dont care about your lovely pair of servers.
So, our view of IT isnt too good at the moment.
====
The next major development boons will come in the project management field but it will have limited development benifits instead improving the maintainence and formal validation of engineered software.
Realise that developing software is (as someone said somewhere... not sure who) akin to developing a new theory of relativity every time you write a new program and that its easier to explode and manipulate a 25m x 25m square of reinforced concrete than it is to radically adjust and transform a program into something that has an improved framework.
Typically, once you've chosen your framework and added functionality to a software application - you've locked yourself into a framework paradigm its difficult to change your framework without a total rewrite.
==============
So... considering project management:
Various environments and languages need to come up with a common framework and process description as output by the language compiler at the time of object code compilation. This need is based upon the realisation that there is no language and environment that suits every need. Html, Perl, Python, Java, C++, Smalltalk, Assembler, Natural, Cobol, JScript, ASP, XML, XSL, etc - all have/had their need and provided the best solution to the problem at the time of the initial development of various solutions. To compound matters further, the various environments are probably fractured hybrids of many environments. Eg: JSP frontend with a backend group of application servers connected to a database server and possibly a rendering/computation farm in there somewhere. All that connectd by various perl, shell scripts, corba, PL/SQL, java, c++, libraries, etc.
The need for a consolidated project management view that is able to analyse, verify and formalise every aspect of a large system is the next evolutionary phase of software development and project management.
This will only happen with compiler writers developing a common.process.description output file that can be consolidated by a single project management tool reading the outputs of many different compiled outputs.
This would ensure that the task of analysing source code the responsibility of management tool developer (he'd go out of business before analysing in detail various languages) but rather the compiler writer (who is the only person who can truely formalise and describe the processes that his compiled output will execute based on appropriate input source).
If this ever happens, it would be paradise in binary.
====
So, your typical bane of any project is either an inappropriate project development paradigm and inappropriate project management tools that provide little real value to the developer/engineers and are more of a token of accountability for management to disclaim responsibility by implying that the developers/engineers are not developing according to schedule when managements theory of relativity ends being relatively different to the theory of relativity that is possibly concievable by developers.
Its funny that my views intrestingly correlate with real life:
The cost of project failure is then typically carried by shareholders/ investors/ owners and as a result the company performs badly and the economy is weakened as inflation rises.
" http://theregister.co.uk/content/7/28299.html IT project failure is rampant - KPMG "
Yes - technology has advanced.
Yes - various tools are easier to use.
Yes - vendors are more easily able to make available certified components.
No - there is nothing significant that improves the actual programming of complex projects outside the leveraging of infrastructure frameworks. Please show me something significant.
-Tim
Beowulf Cluster
on
Lotus Nanotech
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Wow, imagine a beowulf cluster with that stuff!!
Just spray water to clean any dust particles that made it past your cluster-conditioner.
MS's only way out w.r.t long term survival in a hostile environment towards their OS is truely a cutdown version of Windows 2000 that is supported for 10 years across various x86/whatever hardware platforms. Nothing fancy, very little maintainance. They've effectively paid off their development costs for Win2k when they make profit each quarter. I doubt they have any loans to repay.
Hardware vendors that write and develop their own drivers will keep hardware support for the OS up to par.
The cutdown win2k should be sold at half the cost of current prices. Something reasonably inexpensive. MS's future feature rich OSes need to compete, feature wise, with this cut down OS that is so inexpensive and secure that it is not seen as a hostile invader but rather a standardized 10 year platform.
This would cut into their short term profit margines, yes. It would, however, be the only way I can see MS could survive the global harsh critisism. I'm not implying that their lack of survival would mean their bancrupcy, but rather that they are being continually tarnished as a company and may never recover or remove that tarnish. Their ownly survival is good faith/fair practice by releasing a 10 year windows 2000/like os that is 'sold'.
Win2k @ $30-$50 per pc is alot more reasonable than what they're currently priced (er: winXP license with a downgrade to win2k).
Slashdot Mirror
I think its going to be easier to put launch a balloon and a robotic camera than it will be to put someone up on a jet propelled hose pipe to look over the horizon.
If I am correct, an observer standing at see level can only see 8 miles before the horizon disappears. The higher up you are the more you get to see.
-Tim
While interesting, I do think that this should be kept private.
There are a few good reasons to make this public
1. Historians, universities and students will have access to quality material for analysis and correlation.
2. The public will be able to scrutinize and correct incorrect reports ensuring that congress have the correct information.
But consider that you give away your thought processes and the foundations of your strategies to those opponents that should not be privy to your thoughts.
For windows, if you are a consumer you need 4gb of memory. Always have a small amount of swap (100mb) as I find that windows becomes unstable without it. If your
RAM -> Swap
1gb -> 3gb
2gb -> 2gb
3gb -> 1gb
4gb -> 0gb
5gb -> 0gb *
6gb -> 0gb *
8gb -> 0gb *
* Why do you have more than 4gb memory? You need to look at your applications. If you are using photoshop you may need more memory. Rule of thumb: for each large application (photoshop, database) use an extra 1 GB of swap.
* If you have 8gb of memory and you are hitting swap you probably need to tune your servers and applications. If you have 10 applications you would have 10gb of swap. A well tuned server should use very little of that.
* If you have 4gb of ram and have 2 large applications then you have 4gb of memory and 2gb of swap.
Its basic math - you cannot divorce your needs from your usage and have to recognize that if you overload a server it will be sub-optimal. A server should ideally average 70% CPU and 70% memory usage to cater for spikes. Too much swapping will slow you down.
With a move to visualization it becomes more important to be friendly with shared resources and thats a whole different topic.
Finally, I'll be able to blame those 4am morning phonecalls (when i'm pissed drunk) on my iPhone Shuffle.
That is cheeper than I am currently paying (South Africa). If their international roaming charges are PG13 then I might get one and roam. Locked in for 2 years might be a bit harsh if it breaks which is what usually happens to my phones.
Looks like they uncovered the first programmer.
I guess the real question is, How much coffee has he had?
Why is installing an internally developed component any different from deploying and managing Microsoft Exchange or Apache?
IT deploy, Dev must develop and document.
Small companies may try to save costs by skipping documentation.
I have enough experience with Relax NG to say that it is great.
The compact syntax is enjoyable as you can be quite precise (compared to XSD) and there are tools that convert between the compact syntax and the xml Relax NG syntax allowing you to use syntax that suites your needs. In general, JING it is quite a bit quicker than a few of the XSD validators for comparably complex schemas.
There are a few disadvantages:
* The full range of tools that are available are not advanced on a regular basis. I found a few bugs in the JING source code and had the opportunity to fix them where necessary.
* I feel that RelaxNG is marginalized because of XSD and along with that goes alot of additional OSS support. They are maintained by individuals instead of teams. I would recommend that the author of JING puts his software forward to the apache foundation (jakarta commons) and see if it can attract a bit more attention.
* Web services are a bit of a sticking point. The use of a Relax NG schema can be embedded into the WSDL, however, the various 3rd party clients may not necessarily understand the schema, and by extension, they would not generate any supporting classes making integration with a relax NG defined webservice a little more complex than it needs to be.
Relax NG really is great.
-Tim
It is more about psychology than history/cost/reliability. This is Apple we're talking about.
The transition to "intel" cannot be seen as alienating their current Apple user base.
If the case looks the same and the OS looks the same then its an Apple. Put them side by side and you might not notice a difference.
The same design team is probably cooking up something new for the 2007-2010 timeframe.
-Tim
If anything, this is more of a reason to use iTunes + iPod.
Get thee sony cd drm scum away from me. Great way to push people towards your competitor.
Look, you dont want your sysadmins (or anyone who has access to sensitive information) sitting with his back to a large glass window which is at ground level next to commonly walked path by employees or the public.
However, if you are going to exist in sets of cubicals then be certain that that team is able to monitor who is walking around and standing around the area. In many companies have sensitive departments that are walled off. Everyone with a particular security level/trust would sit in a seperate cubical area with a common access control mechanism.
Office space is expensive.
If
Country looses economic superiority
Then
Ensure country has all military superiority options covered for the next 100 years.
Military options over the next 100 years will involve space superiority. This is required to ensure the status quo (peace). Space is the next non conventional warzone that will be developed. Any madman at the head of a country (eg:hitler, in a country which has the economy to fight war) could escelate issues beyond belief with serious consequences.
I for one do not welcome the envasion of Taiwan by Chinese idiots. China would be a stronger country with Taiwan as a seperate independant friendly state than it as an incorporated state. UK + US, Spain + Brazil, China + Taiwan - I'd say that the Chinese are idiots for not embracing Taiwan as friends as opposed to trying to force some form of nationalism on them. The challenges are anti missle, control over communication (satailite) social issues.
Better to develop these technologies now than not have the ability to develop them later on. (look at the soviet union - sudden changes without planning broke the SU/russia, not the fall of the SU.)
-Tim
In addition,
Failure to adopt x86 does not imply that their current PPC offering has failed. IBM may continue to supply Apple with sufficiently powered PPC chips 2 years from now that make it feasible to continue with PPC.
What this gives Apple is the software R&D in the x86 world + marchitecture without sacrificing any performance gains that IBM achieve. Additionally, the sword has been raised above intel for a second time... with Apple demanding a significant discount instead of going with AMD.
Personally, I'd flog that sword for all its worth even though I prefer AMD due to their measured technical superiority.
-Tim
Take the above advice seriously.
If you are undecided, get a couple of professional qualifications. (Sun Certifications + MCSD + etc)
Once you've finished, go for an MBA if you're keen and committed.
I can say the same. Yes, I can quit on the spot for regular periods of months. I actually enjoy being off coffee for quite some time.
BUT
I can also say that after one cup of coffee at work 30 minutes after I start working will allow me to absorb myself into what I'm doing. I'll get 'much more' done.
-Tim
Isnt it amazing that every 4+ comment is negative. I would imagine that this could be seen as a voting mechanism by the randomly chosen moderators of the opinions they think are worthwhile. No two random people are defending startrek.
Sci-Fi producers should canvas slashdot for community advice since its not the diehard supporters (ie: the few hundred that read alt.sf.star-trek (or whatever)) but the public that they seek to entertain.
-Tim
C#.NET advantages come
.NET will last forever in general application development. App development with ATL, Win32, x,y,z is a nightmare in some respects. .Net will do for windows what Java has done for computing.
1) from taking everything good in java
2) adding cleaner COM+ integration and windows integration.
Thats it.
Now Java 1.5 will fix alot of issues i have with java and it removes one of the reasons (1) for moving to C#.NET.
(2) is going to be difficult for java to level. Having said that, (2) is the reason why
IE could be caching the server types. Hence it already knows its not an IIS server and doesnt submit the request.
He needs to hit an IIS server and send us the dumps.
-Tim
I recon they should build a pipeline to the middle of the sahara desert and pump sea water there... build a lake/whatnot and get some consistent rain in the desert. As long as this happens, maybe it would be possible to open up some farm land and feed a few million.
The biggest problem I forsee is the knock-on effect with different weather systems. Irregular weather would throw out weather models and possibly disrupt whatever systems depend on at least 3 day weather forcasts.
-Tim
... two researchers took highspeed photographs of a pig in a specially-designed windtunnel to study how pigs fly. This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars.
Dont worry... in a couple of years, when the infrastructure is rolled out, there will be soo much competition at the current level that the only diff will be price.
Prices will drop and the tech will be standard. If you ever ACTUALLY need to use it (there is always that one time @ band camp)... then you'll be changed a fortune in service fees / whatnot.
Atleast you'll have the opportunity... but dont think you'll get the service cheap.
-Tim
Realise that developing software is (as someone said) akin to developing a new theory of relativity every time you write a new program and that its easier to explode and manipulate a 25m x 25m square of reinforced concrete than it is to radically adjust and transform a program into something that has an improved framework.
Typically, once you've chosen your framework and added functionality to a software application - you've locked yourself into a framework paradigm its difficult to change your framework without a total rewrite.
=====
The above is a fundamental hurdle to all software development.
We typically get about 3meters up this pole-vault by using various infrastructure environments that are a boon to developers - JSP, SQL Server, SAP, etc. They ensure that the developer does not need to reinvent the wheel. The boon of reusable components is modern computing.
===
Problems with IT businesses are their lack of extracting resalable components from their software. Customised software is effectively worthless to anyone else other than its intended recipient. Reusable components have a real value to many companies.
===
A brilliant example is the infrastructure developed by Borland that promotes engineering:
C++ Builder, Delphi, etc:
Drag, Drop, connect a few dots, Run. - True engineering.
===
The next major development boon will come in the project management field but it will have limited development benifits instead improving the maintainence and formal validation of engineered software.
Various environments and languages need to come up with a common framework and process description as output by language compilers at the time of object code compilation. This need is based upon the realisation that there is no language and environment that suits every need and so there are many different languages and environments eg:Html, Perl, Python, Java, C++, Smalltalk, Assembler, Natural, Cobol, JScript, ASP, XML, XSL. They all have their purpose but make it difficult to coordinate and collect information in a single project management tool that has real value. Taking observations further one will notice that projects often use many different environments and are fractured hybrids.
Eg: JSP frontend with a backend group of application servers connected to a database server and possibly a rendering/computation farm in there somewhere. All that connectd by various perl, shell scripts, corba, PL/SQL, java, c++, libraries, etc.
The need for a consolidated project management view that is able to analyse, verify and formalise every aspect of a large system aswell as any meaningfull application by software developers/engineers is there, but nonexistant. This will only be realised when compiler writers develop a common process description that can be consolidated by a single project management tool reading the outputs of many different compiled outputs.
This would ensure that the task of analysing the source code is not the responsibility of the management tool developer - he'd go out of business before analysing in detail every appropriate language - but rather the compiler writer - who is the only person who can truely formalise and describe the processes that his compiled output will execute based on appropriate input source.
====
Your typical bane of any project is either an inappropriate project development paradigm and inappropriate project management tools that provide very little real value to the developer/engineers and provide more of an accountability token for management to disclaim management responsibility by implying that the developers/engineers are not developing according to schedule when managements theory of relativity ends being relatively different to the theory of relativity that is possibly concievable according to a reasonable schedule by developers.
an intresting read:
"
http://theregister.co.uk/content/7/2829
IT project failure is rampant - KPMG
"
===
There are some hazards one must realise. Many software companies are setting the industry/world economy up for a typical downfall by destroying the companies that support them. They do this by over-charging for products. MS, Oracle, IBM, etc are common examples.
They charge monopolistic rates and take large profits for the use of their engineering services at the cost of the longterm viability of the economy as a whole. With large taking excessive profits, they reduce the expendature that real companies can use to grow their business. Money is centralised in software companies which ONLY facilitate other companies to do business. They do not ensure profitability of real businesses.
This is why ALL IT companies, IT departments, etc, are not profit earners because they do not conduct business, they only facilitate it, optimise it. Being able to make transactions, does not imply that one will give a company money because its got a good set of servers. I want fruit and dont care about your lovely pair of servers.
===
-Tim
> ...and I keep wondering what "improvements" ...
l
> have actually brought progress to the key
> issue: more quickly and more inexpensively
> developing software that's more reliable?
Your question has more aspects that one would realise:
1) The realisation that reusable packaged components are a boon to development.
2) The realisation that during development of a large project, one can produce reusable components as a spinoff resaleable develop that adds true value to the company (by value of the asset.. whereas a customised application is typically worthless to anyone but the company that requires that specific set of customisations).
3) The actual resale of those developed components through mass market repositories at REASONABLE prices.
4) A culture of purchasing components instead of developing something simple ensures ownership of a non-core problem (maintainance of a component) is not the responsability of a company whose business only requires the usage of said component. A number of component companies price their components and support costs outside the range of small businesses... which is a shame.
5) Open Source repositories of reusable components is an evolution within the world of software development.
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Software, tools and components that provide massive improvements in TTM (time to market) for small projects are possibly insignificant when taking into account large projects but a quick summary would be:
The various middleware and appropriate environments allow a developer to develop and deploy solutions without developing those lower software layers (eg: JSP, SQL Server, Websphere, RMI).
In my opinion, with more companies developing reasonably priced, stable and secure infrastructure the more one can reasonably engineer a reasonable solution.
A brilliant example is the infrastructure developed by Borland:
For small projects, the biggest boon to developers is reasonably priced components for GUI development environments such as C++ Builder, Delphi, etc.
Drag, Drop, connect a few dots, Run.
True engineering.
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There are some hazards one must realise. Many software companies are setting the industry/world economy up for a typical downfall by destroying the companies that support them. They do this by over-charging for products. MS, Oracle, IBM, etc are common examples.
They charge monopolistic rates and take large profits for the use of their engineering services at the cost of the longterm viability of the economy as a whole. With large taking excessive profits, they reduce the expendature that real companies can use to grow their business. Money is centralised in software companies which ONLY facilitate other companies to do business. They do not ensure profitability of real businesses.
This is why ALL IT companies, IT departments, etc, are not profit earners because they do not conduct business, they only facilitate it, optimise it. Being able to make transactions, does not imply that one will give a company money because its got a good set of servers. I want fruit and dont care about your lovely pair of servers.
So, our view of IT isnt too good at the moment.
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The next major development boons will come in the project management field but it will have limited development benifits instead improving the maintainence and formal validation of engineered software.
Realise that developing software is (as someone said somewhere... not sure who) akin to developing a new theory of relativity every time you write a new program and that its easier to explode and manipulate a 25m x 25m square of reinforced concrete than it is to radically adjust and transform a program into something that has an improved framework.
Typically, once you've chosen your framework and added functionality to a software application - you've locked yourself into a framework paradigm its difficult to change your framework without a total rewrite.
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So... considering project management:
Various environments and languages need to come up with a common framework and process description as output by the language compiler at the time of object code compilation. This need is based upon the realisation that there is no language and environment that suits every need. Html, Perl, Python, Java, C++, Smalltalk, Assembler, Natural, Cobol, JScript, ASP, XML, XSL, etc - all have/had their need and provided the best solution to the problem at the time of the initial development of various solutions. To compound matters further, the various environments are probably fractured hybrids of many environments. Eg: JSP frontend with a backend group of application servers connected to a database server and possibly a rendering/computation farm in there somewhere. All that connectd by various perl, shell scripts, corba, PL/SQL, java, c++, libraries, etc.
The need for a consolidated project management view that is able to analyse, verify and formalise every aspect of a large system is the next evolutionary phase of software development and project management.
This will only happen with compiler writers developing a common.process.description output file that can be consolidated by a single project management tool reading the outputs of many different compiled outputs.
This would ensure that the task of analysing source code the responsibility of management tool developer (he'd go out of business before analysing in detail various languages) but rather the compiler writer (who is the only person who can truely formalise and describe the processes that his compiled output will execute based on appropriate input source).
If this ever happens, it would be paradise in binary.
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So, your typical bane of any project is either an inappropriate project development paradigm and inappropriate project management tools that provide little real value to the developer/engineers and are more of a token of accountability for management to disclaim responsibility by implying that the developers/engineers are not developing according to schedule when managements theory of relativity ends being relatively different to the theory of relativity that is possibly concievable by developers.
Its funny that my views intrestingly correlate with real life:
The cost of project failure is then typically carried by shareholders/ investors/ owners and as a result the company performs badly and the economy is weakened as inflation rises.
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http://theregister.co.uk/content/7/28299.htm
IT project failure is rampant - KPMG
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Yes - technology has advanced.
Yes - various tools are easier to use.
Yes - vendors are more easily able to make available certified components.
No - there is nothing significant that improves the actual programming of complex projects outside the leveraging of infrastructure frameworks. Please show me something significant.
-Tim
Wow, imagine a beowulf cluster with that stuff!!
Just spray water to clean any dust particles that made it past your cluster-conditioner.
MS's only way out w.r.t long term survival in a hostile environment towards their OS is truely a cutdown version of Windows 2000 that is supported for 10 years across various x86/whatever hardware platforms. Nothing fancy, very little maintainance. They've effectively paid off their development costs for Win2k when they make profit each quarter. I doubt they have any loans to repay.
Hardware vendors that write and develop their own drivers will keep hardware support for the OS up to par.
The cutdown win2k should be sold at half the cost of current prices. Something reasonably inexpensive. MS's future feature rich OSes need to compete, feature wise, with this cut down OS that is so inexpensive and secure that it is not seen as a hostile invader but rather a standardized 10 year platform.
This would cut into their short term profit margines, yes. It would, however, be the only way I can see MS could survive the global harsh critisism. I'm not implying that their lack of survival would mean their bancrupcy, but rather that they are being continually tarnished as a company and may never recover or remove that tarnish. Their ownly survival is good faith/fair practice by releasing a 10 year windows 2000/like os that is 'sold'.
Win2k @ $30-$50 per pc is alot more reasonable than what they're currently priced (er: winXP license with a downgrade to win2k).
-Tim