Not that I do not believe in Knuth's Art of Programming but nowadays, it is pretty hard to find some software requirements which do not already exist. Entreprise programming notably is most of the times a question of assembling existing components and configuring them. Design patterns are completely common too and they cover the major part of the needs. There is no longer such a thing as creative art in programming for 99% of programmers. There are code writing conventions, documentation conventions, testing conventions. The 1% is left to people writing prototypes for the newest technologies. However, there is certainly a refactoring art for seasoned developers reviewing young programmers' code.:)) The art of performance tuning perhaps. And maybe, the art of applying the correct solutions to known problems.
In such a context, how can one claim to be an artist ? By reinventing the wheel without knowing others are building cars already...
That raises the question of recycling. I would fully agree with you if a recycling policy is "bundled" with your obsolescence-based products. But this is not always the case and this approach can sometimes be harmful, like with nuclear waste.
In UK recently, there has been a series of train accidents due to cracks in the rails, and no later than today, problems in the tube in London. Well, I'd say there is a market here, I'm sure private companies will be delighted!:))
Just call it testing. After all, they spent more than 200.000.000$ to reach for there and meet all their goals. Successful operations like this are a proof of concept that will bring trust and therefore money for the next missions. And that's badly needed after the 2 consecutives crashes on Mars.
What about XML-EDI, UDDI, EbXML (nice little article about the 3 initiatives)? Ok, it is not specifically aimed at groupwares but rather at distributed applications. But, on the other hand, are groupwares aimed at staying localized in just one area ? I'm not too sure. I believe groupwares will slowly mutate to an application server-like architecture where different parts will be build by different companies. Well apart from MS I mean...
The thing is that some companies cannot real Unix gurus because there are not so many, or these already have a job and want to stay where they are or they are just too expensive for them. Still they need someone to do the job. Therefore, the only alternative is to get resources with less skills. People who installed Linux on their home PC and muck around with it are now given chances at a low salary to get into companies system to learn. This has a price: learning mistakes lead to the many security holes. Actually, the same applies to computer science in general and particularly to programming languages where quick-and-dirty *rules*. But the choice is simply a dirty system or nothing. Business pressure makes it so that dirty wins by far.
Actually, the IT market is so insane due to the lack of resources at the moment that anybody who has worked on a Unix machine to do some ftp for the website of his ISP company can write on her CV Unix administrator because 1. she believes it in her own mind, 2. she knows she can double her salary with another company, 3. she'll learn it in the next company anyway. These are the new rules...
Just a little bit scary in terms of security but hell, everybody now wants to run when they are not even sure they can walk...
I don't know who said that there are 3 big levers to motivate your staff: money, power and acknoledgement of the good work done. Each employee will be motivated by a combination of these 3 main factors. Some would tend to be motivated if you give them some challenging things to do that stimulate their wits, the others say "Show me the money" and the other ones want to become a partner in 5 years. At a local scale, this is maintainable but in very big structures where you have less personalization, it is much harder to do. There are of course other levers, such as working conditions, convenience of access, flexible hours...
I guess that in most cases if employees are given nice working conditions, a decent salary and are well considered by the hierarchy, they will feel as if they belong to the family and that's probably the strongest link you can think of.
Within 4 years, according to a BBC broadcast and to the Blue Tooth business plan, there should be more than 1 billion Blue Tooth chips for sale in the world. With the whole load of Java Embedded Softwares coming using Jini, wireless applications are the next big thing so you'd better get used to it even though you might think wireless components are a bit awkward for now. It's getting there...
There are burglars everywhere and there will always be. Now, by agreeing such a treaty, they would make both black hat and white hat hacking illegal. Research towards a better security for operating systems needs ethical penetration tests (Microsoft has recently asked hackers to break into Windows 2000 for instance). Since you can't prevent burglars to exist, the best you can do is make their life harder by securing systems the best you can.
If you don't get really strong people to test the lock that will secure the house, they will never be enhanced and it will be more accessible to break into it.
And knowing the increasing number of projects going onto the web, I can hardly imagine that security techniques improve slower than crackers' techniques.
Publishing hackers' exploits make a few script kiddies test your resistance (even though most of the time they don't know what to do with it and just update you rhomepage...), ok, but it pushes system administrators to keep up the pace with security patches and make the script kiddies inefficient, and improve the quality of OS's and softwares much faster. Would someone dare saying that open source code has in some way harmed the quality of softwares ?? Well it's just the same here...
Again will such a treaty prevent the NSA to improve its cracking techniques ?
Cars pollute more in cities due to the driving conditions. Therefore, lessening the gas emissions in these conditions could already be a big step forwards. I have heard about a few interesting projects, some of them are already quite successfully implemented here and there involving electric cars which could be recharged by induction. The main hurdle to that is the time it takes to recharge the batteries. However, some recent scientific researches may have found the solution to that problem. Then, it is all a question of mentalities.
In Europe, the price for gas is ridiculously high due to the petrol price itself (20%) but mostly due to the taxes (70%). Alternatives to petrol would mean very bad news for both the governments and petrol lobbies. However, people getting more and more weary of the ecologic issues at stake (last December, an oil boat has sunk and brought about one of the biggest oil spills in France), the pressure is higher and higher on them to actually think about changes. Some (local) tests are therefore being done to reinsure voters that the government is taking care of the problem. But events like Gulf war show that there are still a lot of interests at stake for oil.
Anyway, LPG is already a good step forwards in terms of keeping everyone happy. Some other cars use gas and electricity. But in the Information society, soon enough, the third sector will be working remotely thereby reducing the gas emissions. Nuclear electricity will little by little be replaced by sun energy...
The funny stuff is that this article about a monopolistic position, business pressure over competitors and bad business practices is published on a web site running on a Windows server, optimised for Microsoft products.
Mistakes at this level can really be lethal. Intel imposed its top-down approach even though bottom-up surveys showed that it was a poor decision... But the war for market shares tend to impose these top-down decisions for a question of survival.
In these times of huge mergers between giant companies, it is quite likely that this happens again and at very high scales (ouch!!). AOL-Netscape was a first example, Intel-Rambus another one, who's next ?
In the case of emails, why not marking personal emails as 'Personal'. Those emails would not be legally accessible by the employer. And if an employer sees that there are 50 personal emails a day for an employee then he is fully entitled to say he has a problem with it. Privacy is preserved and company working time is monitored.
In the case of internet access, I believe that employers should be allowed to say that it can only be used for work purposes and therefore have full right to monitor their employees' navigation.
Sort of meeting behalves...
In September a major point in the French Constitution has been destituted: the president from 2002 onwards shall be president for 5 years instead of 7.
20% of people voted...
There seems to be a growing disinterest in politics everywhere. In France, it is partly due to all the "affaires" (corruption and so on...).
I believe that it is all deeper than that. Not too far ago, politics represented an institution. People in grey talking about things noone understands and who everybody respect. But now, in the times of improved communication, of less censorship, of more accessible information, people start to think for themselves, have better opinions and start to realize that politics has become a big marketing fight with its buzzwords, buzztopics, trends, ruled and leveraged by polls. This has been pushed to such a point that they define voters as 'targets'. So they have to act younger, speak younger to seduce tomorrow's voters. Just like bankers, priests, singers or recruiters. Signs of times, the French socialist candidate for the city hall in Paris recently admitted he was gay. 2 weeks later, his competitor gave an interview in a gay magazine (looks like a fight over a market sector doesn't it ?).
I don't believe they will get anywhere better if they don't clearly show some genuine interest for the community, or at least for their own vision, and moreover, stick to it.
Also, I tend to believe that people do not understand a 100th of what is going on. Rather, they support their candidate as they would support their football team, with a strong feeling of belonging to a community rather than that of supporting the most suitable person. Am I wrong there ?
I believe that requirements are a good thing for everyone. In case the deadlines are not met and the requirements fullfilled, the client company is in a position to either sue or negociate the continuation of the project. And on the other hand, the contractor is paid according to these functionalities. That raises the question of feature freeze which is most of the time completely overlooked by the client who believes that it works because he pays for it, completely disregardind the potential need for a redesign. Generally, the conditions under which the changes may occur should be predefined.
It is a good practice though to be able to write requirements which are not fuzzy and all terms defined in a glossary somewhere hence the need for professional requirements writers who can be able to translate information from a non-technical background (business flows) to technical terms.
It is very common though that clients mix application prototyping with application development, jump the gun and create a death march project at a huge cost.
After all, you build houses out of plans, you just don't start piling bricks randomly... This simple analogy should help everyone understand what a reasonable approach should be. But do we have enough time to be reasonable nowadays ?:)
Will they censor Moby Dick ?
And it's always the same story. People get killed, murdered, slaughtered everyday on TV, in the news, in the street but that is fine for censors... But showing living flesh is bad.
It's all a long religion story which shaped people's mind in the times of ignorance. I hate those legacy systems, what we need is a good refactoring. Anyone interested ?
A little question to the specialists out there:
Could this kind of bacteria be a missing link between mineral and life forms ? This sort of living structure stands in the grey area and makes me wonder what life actually is... Can it only be defined by the fact that a structure can reproduce and spread ?
Old question...
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I do not believe in Knuth's Art of Programming but nowadays, it is pretty hard to find some software requirements which do not already exist. Entreprise programming notably is most of the times a question of assembling existing components and configuring them. Design patterns are completely common too and they cover the major part of the needs. There is no longer such a thing as creative art in programming for 99% of programmers. There are code writing conventions, documentation conventions, testing conventions. The 1% is left to people writing prototypes for the newest technologies. However, there is certainly a refactoring art for seasoned developers reviewing young programmers' code. :)) The art of performance tuning perhaps. And maybe, the art of applying the correct solutions to known problems.
In such a context, how can one claim to be an artist ? By reinventing the wheel without knowing others are building cars already...
That raises the question of recycling. I would fully agree with you if a recycling policy is "bundled" with your obsolescence-based products. But this is not always the case and this approach can sometimes be harmful, like with nuclear waste.
In UK recently, there has been a series of train accidents due to cracks in the rails, and no later than today, problems in the tube in London. Well, I'd say there is a market here, I'm sure private companies will be delighted! :))
Just call it testing. After all, they spent more than 200.000.000$ to reach for there and meet all their goals. Successful operations like this are a proof of concept that will bring trust and therefore money for the next missions. And that's badly needed after the 2 consecutives crashes on Mars.
... on www.pillow.ru.
What about XML-EDI, UDDI, EbXML (nice little article about the 3 initiatives)? Ok, it is not specifically aimed at groupwares but rather at distributed applications. But, on the other hand, are groupwares aimed at staying localized in just one area ? I'm not too sure. I believe groupwares will slowly mutate to an application server-like architecture where different parts will be build by different companies. Well apart from MS I mean...
The thing is that some companies cannot real Unix gurus because there are not so many, or these already have a job and want to stay where they are or they are just too expensive for them. Still they need someone to do the job. Therefore, the only alternative is to get resources with less skills. People who installed Linux on their home PC and muck around with it are now given chances at a low salary to get into companies system to learn. This has a price: learning mistakes lead to the many security holes. Actually, the same applies to computer science in general and particularly to programming languages where quick-and-dirty *rules*. But the choice is simply a dirty system or nothing. Business pressure makes it so that dirty wins by far.
Actually, the IT market is so insane due to the lack of resources at the moment that anybody who has worked on a Unix machine to do some ftp for the website of his ISP company can write on her CV Unix administrator because 1. she believes it in her own mind, 2. she knows she can double her salary with another company, 3. she'll learn it in the next company anyway. These are the new rules...
Just a little bit scary in terms of security but hell, everybody now wants to run when they are not even sure they can walk...
I don't know who said that there are 3 big levers to motivate your staff: money, power and acknoledgement of the good work done. Each employee will be motivated by a combination of these 3 main factors. Some would tend to be motivated if you give them some challenging things to do that stimulate their wits, the others say "Show me the money" and the other ones want to become a partner in 5 years. At a local scale, this is maintainable but in very big structures where you have less personalization, it is much harder to do. There are of course other levers, such as working conditions, convenience of access, flexible hours... I guess that in most cases if employees are given nice working conditions, a decent salary and are well considered by the hierarchy, they will feel as if they belong to the family and that's probably the strongest link you can think of.
Within 4 years, according to a BBC broadcast and to the Blue Tooth business plan, there should be more than 1 billion Blue Tooth chips for sale in the world. With the whole load of Java Embedded Softwares coming using Jini, wireless applications are the next big thing so you'd better get used to it even though you might think wireless components are a bit awkward for now. It's getting there...
There are burglars everywhere and there will always be. Now, by agreeing such a treaty, they would make both black hat and white hat hacking illegal. Research towards a better security for operating systems needs ethical penetration tests (Microsoft has recently asked hackers to break into Windows 2000 for instance). Since you can't prevent burglars to exist, the best you can do is make their life harder by securing systems the best you can.
If you don't get really strong people to test the lock that will secure the house, they will never be enhanced and it will be more accessible to break into it.
And knowing the increasing number of projects going onto the web, I can hardly imagine that security techniques improve slower than crackers' techniques.
Publishing hackers' exploits make a few script kiddies test your resistance (even though most of the time they don't know what to do with it and just update you rhomepage...), ok, but it pushes system administrators to keep up the pace with security patches and make the script kiddies inefficient, and improve the quality of OS's and softwares much faster. Would someone dare saying that open source code has in some way harmed the quality of softwares ?? Well it's just the same here...
Again will such a treaty prevent the NSA to improve its cracking techniques ?
Cars pollute more in cities due to the driving conditions. Therefore, lessening the gas emissions in these conditions could already be a big step forwards. I have heard about a few interesting projects, some of them are already quite successfully implemented here and there involving electric cars which could be recharged by induction. The main hurdle to that is the time it takes to recharge the batteries. However, some recent scientific researches may have found the solution to that problem. Then, it is all a question of mentalities.
... in an ideal scenario.
In Europe, the price for gas is ridiculously high due to the petrol price itself (20%) but mostly due to the taxes (70%). Alternatives to petrol would mean very bad news for both the governments and petrol lobbies. However, people getting more and more weary of the ecologic issues at stake (last December, an oil boat has sunk and brought about one of the biggest oil spills in France), the pressure is higher and higher on them to actually think about changes. Some (local) tests are therefore being done to reinsure voters that the government is taking care of the problem. But events like Gulf war show that there are still a lot of interests at stake for oil.
Anyway, LPG is already a good step forwards in terms of keeping everyone happy. Some other cars use gas and electricity. But in the Information society, soon enough, the third sector will be working remotely thereby reducing the gas emissions. Nuclear electricity will little by little be replaced by sun energy...
The funny stuff is that this article about a monopolistic position, business pressure over competitors and bad business practices is published on a web site running on a Windows server, optimised for Microsoft products.
How paradoxal life can be sometimes...
Mistakes at this level can really be lethal. Intel imposed its top-down approach even though bottom-up surveys showed that it was a poor decision... But the war for market shares tend to impose these top-down decisions for a question of survival.
In these times of huge mergers between giant companies, it is quite likely that this happens again and at very high scales (ouch!!). AOL-Netscape was a first example, Intel-Rambus another one, who's next ?
Why don't you use your mobile ?
In the case of emails, why not marking personal emails as 'Personal'. Those emails would not be legally accessible by the employer. And if an employer sees that there are 50 personal emails a day for an employee then he is fully entitled to say he has a problem with it. Privacy is preserved and company working time is monitored. In the case of internet access, I believe that employers should be allowed to say that it can only be used for work purposes and therefore have full right to monitor their employees' navigation. Sort of meeting behalves...
My French grammar and style are no doubt much better... :)
Better with a link! :))
I thought that Mir was supposed to fall dow on Paris last August ??? Remember Paco Rabanne's predictions ?
Well it's never too late! What if the Russian teams compute the coordinates in inches and centimeters ? The end of the world is near... Fear. Fear.
In September a major point in the French Constitution has been destituted: the president from 2002 onwards shall be president for 5 years instead of 7.
20% of people voted...
There seems to be a growing disinterest in politics everywhere. In France, it is partly due to all the "affaires" (corruption and so on...).
I believe that it is all deeper than that. Not too far ago, politics represented an institution. People in grey talking about things noone understands and who everybody respect. But now, in the times of improved communication, of less censorship, of more accessible information, people start to think for themselves, have better opinions and start to realize that politics has become a big marketing fight with its buzzwords, buzztopics, trends, ruled and leveraged by polls. This has been pushed to such a point that they define voters as 'targets'. So they have to act younger, speak younger to seduce tomorrow's voters. Just like bankers, priests, singers or recruiters. Signs of times, the French socialist candidate for the city hall in Paris recently admitted he was gay. 2 weeks later, his competitor gave an interview in a gay magazine (looks like a fight over a market sector doesn't it ?).
I don't believe they will get anywhere better if they don't clearly show some genuine interest for the community, or at least for their own vision, and moreover, stick to it.
Also, I tend to believe that people do not understand a 100th of what is going on. Rather, they support their candidate as they would support their football team, with a strong feeling of belonging to a community rather than that of supporting the most suitable person. Am I wrong there ?
I believe that requirements are a good thing for everyone. In case the deadlines are not met and the requirements fullfilled, the client company is in a position to either sue or negociate the continuation of the project. And on the other hand, the contractor is paid according to these functionalities. That raises the question of feature freeze which is most of the time completely overlooked by the client who believes that it works because he pays for it, completely disregardind the potential need for a redesign. Generally, the conditions under which the changes may occur should be predefined. It is a good practice though to be able to write requirements which are not fuzzy and all terms defined in a glossary somewhere hence the need for professional requirements writers who can be able to translate information from a non-technical background (business flows) to technical terms. It is very common though that clients mix application prototyping with application development, jump the gun and create a death march project at a huge cost. After all, you build houses out of plans, you just don't start piling bricks randomly... This simple analogy should help everyone understand what a reasonable approach should be. But do we have enough time to be reasonable nowadays ? :)
Will they censor Moby Dick ? And it's always the same story. People get killed, murdered, slaughtered everyday on TV, in the news, in the street but that is fine for censors... But showing living flesh is bad. It's all a long religion story which shaped people's mind in the times of ignorance. I hate those legacy systems, what we need is a good refactoring. Anyone interested ?
A little question to the specialists out there: Could this kind of bacteria be a missing link between mineral and life forms ? This sort of living structure stands in the grey area and makes me wonder what life actually is... Can it only be defined by the fact that a structure can reproduce and spread ? Old question...