Basic psychology. People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Totally wrong. Companies stick with what works, because it makes sense.
Companies have also been putting new stuff on cheap servers running fairly expensive newly developed software and I haven't seen that result in a rush to pull the collective mainframe / large midrange plug yet.
You aren't really gaining an advantage because your software is better. Every company's software does basically the same thing and you all pay similar amounts.
This is just really silly, unfortunately. Any example you can give of any complexity, such as your luggage tracking example, is dependent on proprietary systems. Generalizing the functionality out to be database independent, data spec independent, terminal hub and spoke independent, business ERP functionality independemt, and everything about the company business processes independent is where it gets real silly real fast.
The premise the Red Hat CEO makes has been around awhile. It seems like with so much software being written that there must be a substantial portion that does about the same thing, and therefore everyone is reinventing the wheel at an enormous cost instead of contributing to and sharing from a collection of this common software functionality. The Red Hat guy put the cost of reinvented software at billions of dollars.
Yet when one looks objectively at a specific large corporate software base, what would be deemed common functionality yet not proprietary and competitive? I've seen more than my share of business software, and I'd be hard pressed to identify anything like that.
And yes, large corporate software bases are very complex and tend to be monolithic, but the business also depends on it, and the characterizations given throughout this thread show no familiarization with the rigor business takes with its lifeblood, corporate software.
I would like to see examples of this billions of dollars worth of common, non-proprietary, non-competitive sofware performing similar functionality in numerous companies, and then there'd be something to talk about.
The difficulty of coming up with a list like that is the answer to Red Hat's premise.
... only if your "refactoring" doesn't include a comprehensive, fully-passing, and regularly run test suite.
in a non-trivial world, "works" by definition is regularly running a comprehensive test suite, otherwise known as production, and fully passing.
but in the spirit of your comment, one will not get to "works" by debugging with production, not when every change in a non-trivial world has to be signed off on by a suite of high level people who are now personally responsible for everything you changed.
I don't know about "refactoring"/rewriting in a trivial world, but sounds like fun. Especially the part where you don't have to get every director impacted by a change to sign off on your test results.
Everything parent post describes happened on this virtual fence failure, from what I read on it today. The contractor was Boeing.
There's a bit of focus here on hardware because the submitter focused on that, but that only had to do with inability to estimate a cost to complete the project, which estimates are worthless anyway and the people involved are all liars except for the damn liars. So forget hardware. That's a government spin lie.
The failure was software, pure and simple. They also blame bandwidth and latency from using satellite transmission, which they plan now to replace with microwave at who knows how much cost, when data processors at source could probably pre-process and limit need for bandwisth, sheesh, we're talking about movement sensors for crying out loud. But failure was fundamenrtal inability to process in near real time volume of sensor data, and the volume was limited by bamdwidth to boot.
They paid Boeing $30 million for this failure, while also giving them $64 million more to write a command and control system to handle the data, and gave them a government battle management system software as a base package. Whether that works or not as is who knows.
The sensor data needed to be processed to aim cameras toward the sensors triggered, then message a nearby unit to intercept if visually confirmed.
Google or Sun could do this with interns in a summer camp, or any number of accomplished open source teams could do it even better, especially for $94 million minus hardware and installation.
It's just inability of these vendors everytime to be able to write software. Our tax dollars funnelled through the public teat, with programmers actually doing the work on hind teat.
Actually, he was living with his mother, which is where Nina brought the kids to him. He was even driving his mother's car after Nina disappeared until his mother put a lock on the steering wheel. Then Reiser went and retrieved his car from somewhere.
The "he was living in it" is just a defense for why his front seat is missing after Nina disappeared.
Yes, but Hans didn't stand to be in any better shape if Nina was murdered.
He'd be $30,000 or so better off from what he owed her, plus collecting any life insurance on her since their divorce wasn't final, plus no more child support or alimony.
Many missing women disappear just before a divorce is final, or a child is born, or something else which the ex can relieve financial pain or gain substantially by making her disappear.
You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim. The dude who has confessed to killing 8 (yes, eight) people, and was dating Nina (Hans' wife). IMHO, it's more likely that Hans was reading up on how to kill Sean (or even how to avoid being killed by Sean) than how to kill Nina.
A couple of clarifications. The books were bought after Nina disappeared, and the defense is that Reiser was researching police murder investigation tactics because he felt he was under investigation. (I don't know, doesn't this sort of belie the "he's so brilliant he doesn't know what going on around him" thing.)
The other is Sturgeon was close to the victim, but had also been Reiser's best friend. However, as part of a falling out that included Reiser suspecting him and Nina of having an affair, they exchanged some nastiness that went as far as lawsuits. The things that Reiser says in them about Sturgeon were the most bizarre up until Sturgeon claimed to have killed eight people in the past, so Sturgeon one upped hiom there.
As the WaPo article says today, it's unclear if the claim is true as Sturgeon still remains free. There's been no further mention of his claims anywhere.
AI seems to be nothing more than try random outputs and use feedback to reinforce outputs that resulted in success. It's sort of funny, my first recollection of this was in 1962 when a student in my grade school class performed this exercise for a project. A game was played repeatedly with losing moves recorded, developing a chart. Playing from the chart the game was eventually unbeatable by fellow students. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I wrote a Double Deck Pinochle game (first for TRS-80, then DOS, then Java, and soon PHP) whose DOS version I released as freeware many years ago. As it plays as well or better than most humans, it might mistakenly be called AI as chess games were earlier, but it is just a program of logic as in any other computer program. Anything complex as that doesn't lend itself to the trivial output - feedback loops that modern day AI efforts involve. Of course the more ambitious efforts of the '80s are infamous in their failures.
If we ever achieve AI it will be with a core of code that can generate modules of code that attempt different strategies, in other words grows a brain as program code and database, not just a matrix recording true - false results from random permutation outputs.
Well, since you mentioned z9, I'll throw in a real innovative OS, i5/OS nee OS/400. You Linux people would really think you had invented something if you had written an OS like OS/400 instead of IBM.
Not to knock the work done on Linux, some of which was contributed by IBM. But since the list of OS'es was given and deemed non-innovative, just saying.
It has. It's your name, SSN, address, birthdate, credit history. That's what becomes effectively not yours anymore because you can't use it. You can try, but it's no good anymore with all the uses made of it after it was stolen.
So you try to recover it, and yet at any time a new mortgage application can come in to a credit bureau with your name on it. Takes a lawyer and a lot of money to get it back. So call it recovering stolen goods, ot getting your name back.
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens. Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
Cheap and expensive are relative terms. We will have plenty of energy at a little higher rate than being paid now, in other words a little higher than bottled water or Gatorade.
Solar and wind generation and other alternatives will be cost effective at those rates, as well as processing heavier forms of carbon than sweet crude.
Real identity theft would be taking over someone's identity (probably with some lame face exchange technology) so that the rightful owner can no longer utilize it.
I've seen interviews of people who say they no longer can utilize their identity to do the things they expect to be able to do, buy a house, open a credit account, and have their previous credit rating.
...but 9 times out of 10 if you're implementing something in closed source, you're duplicating something that's already available in open source and more mature to boot.
This post needs closed source and open source reversed to be correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Basic psychology. People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Totally wrong. Companies stick with what works, because it makes sense.
Companies have also been putting new stuff on cheap servers running fairly expensive newly developed software and I haven't seen that result in a rush to pull the collective mainframe / large midrange plug yet.
rd
You aren't really gaining an advantage because your software is better. Every company's software does basically the same thing and you all pay similar amounts.
This is just really silly, unfortunately. Any example you can give of any complexity, such as your luggage tracking example, is dependent on proprietary systems. Generalizing the functionality out to be database independent, data spec independent, terminal hub and spoke independent, business ERP functionality independemt, and everything about the company business processes independent is where it gets real silly real fast.
rd
The premise the Red Hat CEO makes has been around awhile. It seems like with so much software being written that there must be a substantial portion that does about the same thing, and therefore everyone is reinventing the wheel at an enormous cost instead of contributing to and sharing from a collection of this common software functionality. The Red Hat guy put the cost of reinvented software at billions of dollars.
Yet when one looks objectively at a specific large corporate software base, what would be deemed common functionality yet not proprietary and competitive? I've seen more than my share of business software, and I'd be hard pressed to identify anything like that.
And yes, large corporate software bases are very complex and tend to be monolithic, but the business also depends on it, and the characterizations given throughout this thread show no familiarization with the rigor business takes with its lifeblood, corporate software.
I would like to see examples of this billions of dollars worth of common, non-proprietary, non-competitive sofware performing similar functionality in numerous companies, and then there'd be something to talk about.
The difficulty of coming up with a list like that is the answer to Red Hat's premise.
rd
... only if your "refactoring" doesn't include a comprehensive, fully-passing, and regularly run test suite.
in a non-trivial world, "works" by definition is regularly running a comprehensive test suite, otherwise known as production, and fully passing.
but in the spirit of your comment, one will not get to "works" by debugging with production, not when every change in a non-trivial world has to be signed off on by a suite of high level people who are now personally responsible for everything you changed.
I don't know about "refactoring"/rewriting in a trivial world, but sounds like fun. Especially the part where you don't have to get every director impacted by a change to sign off on your test results.
rd
Always resist modifying code just for the sake of cleaning it up. If it works, don't touch it.
This of course is wisdom of the ages which appears to have been lost somewhere where the term "refactoring" became vogue.
rd
I know French "jokes" may be acceptable in the U.S. ...
only for a small conservative subset of the U.S., which as we know have proven themselves to be a joke.
rd
National "Dragnet" Connecting at State, Local Level
what level does it connect at to become skynet?
Everything parent post describes happened on this virtual fence failure, from what I read on it today. The contractor was Boeing.
There's a bit of focus here on hardware because the submitter focused on that, but that only had to do with inability to estimate a cost to complete the project, which estimates are worthless anyway and the people involved are all liars except for the damn liars. So forget hardware. That's a government spin lie.
The failure was software, pure and simple. They also blame bandwidth and latency from using satellite transmission, which they plan now to replace with microwave at who knows how much cost, when data processors at source could probably pre-process and limit need for bandwisth, sheesh, we're talking about movement sensors for crying out loud. But failure was fundamenrtal inability to process in near real time volume of sensor data, and the volume was limited by bamdwidth to boot.
They paid Boeing $30 million for this failure, while also giving them $64 million more to write a command and control system to handle the data, and gave them a government battle management system software as a base package. Whether that works or not as is who knows.
The sensor data needed to be processed to aim cameras toward the sensors triggered, then message a nearby unit to intercept if visually confirmed.
Google or Sun could do this with interns in a summer camp, or any number of accomplished open source teams could do it even better, especially for $94 million minus hardware and installation.
It's just inability of these vendors everytime to be able to write software. Our tax dollars funnelled through the public teat, with programmers actually doing the work on hind teat.
rd
Keep it WHERE? He was living out of his car.
Actually, he was living with his mother, which is where Nina brought the kids to him. He was even driving his mother's car after Nina disappeared until his mother put a lock on the steering wheel. Then Reiser went and retrieved his car from somewhere.
The "he was living in it" is just a defense for why his front seat is missing after Nina disappeared.
rd
Yes, but Hans didn't stand to be in any better shape if Nina was murdered.
He'd be $30,000 or so better off from what he owed her, plus collecting any life insurance on her since their divorce wasn't final, plus no more child support or alimony.
Many missing women disappear just before a divorce is final, or a child is born, or something else which the ex can relieve financial pain or gain substantially by making her disappear.
rd
You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim. The dude who has confessed to killing 8 (yes, eight) people, and was dating Nina (Hans' wife). IMHO, it's more likely that Hans was reading up on how to kill Sean (or even how to avoid being killed by Sean) than how to kill Nina.
A couple of clarifications. The books were bought after Nina disappeared, and the defense is that Reiser was researching police murder investigation tactics because he felt he was under investigation. (I don't know, doesn't this sort of belie the "he's so brilliant he doesn't know what going on around him" thing.)
The other is Sturgeon was close to the victim, but had also been Reiser's best friend. However, as part of a falling out that included Reiser suspecting him and Nina of having an affair, they exchanged some nastiness that went as far as lawsuits. The things that Reiser says in them about Sturgeon were the most bizarre up until Sturgeon claimed to have killed eight people in the past, so Sturgeon one upped hiom there.
As the WaPo article says today, it's unclear if the claim is true as Sturgeon still remains free. There's been no further mention of his claims anywhere.
rd
3) There is no clear motive for Hans to of killed his wife.
As with most cases where women disappear, money is the driving motive.
Nina was scheduling a bankruptcy for herself, and Hans was in even worse shape based on what he owed Nina from court judgements.
rd
That's about as close to Greek Tragedy as you can get.
So would that be Geek Tragedy?
What? You can do better?
yes, but I'm keeping a low profile because I don't want the Terminator to find me.
rd
Perhaps Slashdot's lameness filter should be able to recognize code?
or even better, recognize lame code.
AI seems to be nothing more than try random outputs and use feedback to reinforce outputs that resulted in success. It's sort of funny, my first recollection of this was in 1962 when a student in my grade school class performed this exercise for a project. A game was played repeatedly with losing moves recorded, developing a chart. Playing from the chart the game was eventually unbeatable by fellow students. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I wrote a Double Deck Pinochle game (first for TRS-80, then DOS, then Java, and soon PHP) whose DOS version I released as freeware many years ago. As it plays as well or better than most humans, it might mistakenly be called AI as chess games were earlier, but it is just a program of logic as in any other computer program. Anything complex as that doesn't lend itself to the trivial output - feedback loops that modern day AI efforts involve. Of course the more ambitious efforts of the '80s are infamous in their failures.
If we ever achieve AI it will be with a core of code that can generate modules of code that attempt different strategies, in other words grows a brain as program code and database, not just a matrix recording true - false results from random permutation outputs.
rd
Well, since you mentioned z9, I'll throw in a real innovative OS, i5/OS nee OS/400. You Linux people would really think you had invented something if you had written an OS like OS/400 instead of IBM.
Not to knock the work done on Linux, some of which was contributed by IBM. But since the list of OS'es was given and deemed non-innovative, just saying.
rd
It has. It's your name, SSN, address, birthdate, credit history. That's what becomes effectively not yours anymore because you can't use it. You can try, but it's no good anymore with all the uses made of it after it was stolen.
So you try to recover it, and yet at any time a new mortgage application can come in to a credit bureau with your name on it. Takes a lawyer and a lot of money to get it back. So call it recovering stolen goods, ot getting your name back.
rd
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens. Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
Cheap and expensive are relative terms. We will have plenty of energy at a little higher rate than being paid now, in other words a little higher than bottled water or Gatorade.
Solar and wind generation and other alternatives will be cost effective at those rates, as well as processing heavier forms of carbon than sweet crude.
rd
If someone takes a shit on your windshield you don't claim your car has been "stolen" because you have to clean it up before you can drive it again.
But you would claim it was stolen if you couldn't drive it again because of it. Same thing.
rd
I don't think we can really 'predict' the future, of course.
I thought the New York World did a pretty good job of it back in 1908.
rd
It was supposed to be 100 years from now, not next year.
rd
Real identity theft would be taking over someone's identity (probably with some lame face exchange technology) so that the rightful owner can no longer utilize it.
I've seen interviews of people who say they no longer can utilize their identity to do the things they expect to be able to do, buy a house, open a credit account, and have their previous credit rating.
So they feel their identity has been stolen.
rd
...but 9 times out of 10 if you're implementing something in closed source, you're duplicating something that's already available in open source and more mature to boot.
This post needs closed source and open source reversed to be correct.
rd
Just save yourself some time and pretend she's already sworn a restraining order against you.
:)
This should be modded funny. Also informative.
rd