There was a fellow I worked with. He went on and on and on about how he would manage the company. Wouldn't have made this or that mistakes, would have done this way or that.
One day he got his wish, he was made manager of a new division of the company. He got a team together and did everything his way. He did everything all the trade journals said you should to get quick, good results.
In one year, he had recreated every mistake that had been made. The only thing to his credit was that he done it in record time.
I think the Libertarian town would be a great experiment. I don't think it would be wildly successful, but it sure would be better filler for the news than getting hourly sniper reports between pondering how badly to crucify Martha Stewart.
Next year (2003) it's predicted that we'll hit the "Hubbert" peak for global world oil production. Hubbert predicted the US would hit this same peak in the 70's for US oil production. Does anyone remember the seventies? Think the economy is bad now, when the world starts sliding off this peak you're going to see some real sparks fly. Generation X -- hold onto your butts this ride is going to be bumpy.
Cheer up-- G.W. has promised a show along with the ride!
http://www.oilcrisis.com
When my Freshman year professor in the CS AP class was asked the question, "What language are we going to learn in this class?"
To which he quickly replied, "Any monkey can buy a book and learn a language, what's important is the concepts behind programming. To ask what language your going to learn is to miss the point. If our university focused on teaching a language then we would not be properly teaching our students.
Then my senior year, there was a class we had where every assignment was in a new obscure languages and we were expected to adapt rapidly.
The problem in reality is that most resumes are reviewed for language experience and not conceptual areas. To get a job you need XXX years of language XXX. What a stupid way to hire people, but it's the system and I play the game for a check.
...by those who haven't seen it. Most desperately, petrifyingly boring film I've ever seen. The movie spends ten or fifteen minutes just showing a guy driving home. Just driving. You think I'm exaggerating.
First of all the driving scene was making a point about the amount of noise and harrasment between the country and the city. Russians have long winters and can take a much longer development of a scene than an American brought up on MTV edits. The sound in that scene goes from serene birds chirping to insessant overbearing industrial noise to the point that you feel completely harrassed.
I mentioned the film to my brother-in-law who is Bulgarian and he said: "It's a Russian film, there will be an argument, someone will kill themselves, they will discuss philosophy between long shots of scenery most likely a stream, and since it's Tarkovsky there will be a rattling chandelier."
He hadn't seen the movie. When declaring it boring, it may just be a reflection of the fact that you would find most if not all Russian movies boring. Russian films require a much longer attention span and patience than just about any other country's movies.
My personal recommendation is the "Cleanroom" methodology. You create a functional specification with a mathematical guarantee of completeness and consistancy. Auditable correctness is also a part of the process. Then when it comes to testing you generate test cases that cover all states, all arcs and then do statistical test case generation based on a usage model. The overall cost of this process is a bit more up front, but studies have shown that the process far more than pays for itself in greatly reduced maintenance/debugging costs.
So to answer you question is that to generate a decent set of test cases, you really have to understand the problem space and have mapped out the state-space in some manner. Trying to derive this without a methodical approach and ones testing will be spotty. The worst I've seen so far was a random state-space walker (ala Brownian motion). Statistically this approach avoids all the difficult cases in the far corners of the state-space.
Now for the bad news: Cleanroom is quite tedious for the programmer. The enumeration phase takes seemingly forever and can be mind-numbingly boring.
Absolutely. I worked on fixing a system that sent controls to five dams to set their spill gates. These dams were far out in the woods. It sent the commands over an "unused" radio band assigned by the FCC. Besides the obvious fact that the moron who put it together didn't even bother to use CRC to check the packets for correctness, there was a bible thumping preacher broadcasting rants and raves out of his house on a regular basis. The upshot of the preacher's preaching all over a radio band he didn't own (and it wasn't on your radio dial so one wonders who was listening), was that the gates on the dams would go up and down for no apparent reason.
After the FCC shut the preacher's broadcasting done, I recommended CRC validation of the packets and an ACK/NAK two-phase commit to the movement of the spill gates.
I think a network requires working hardware. I've been window shopping for a game console for my daughter. About 50% of the time the store demo Xbox has a "black screen of death". Store clerks told me it's like that most of the time. They have to be ever vigilant to keep it going. Two ~10 year olds were playing yesterday on the Gamecube and the Sony box in the store. I asked them what they thought about the Xbox, their reply: "It's a piece of junk that crashes all the time"
This feature alone will kill the Xbox in the long run.
If Microsoft's bottom line is hurt with every purchase, at what point does some cash rich competitor start taking competing boxes off the market by buying them and landfilling them (after a nice drill bit chews through the console)?
At some point there actually would be an economic case for such behavior.
I say we should do it alternating Thursdays and Fridays every other year with alternate leap years on a Tuesday. Maybe there should be a planning panel together composed of hair dressers and lawyers. Also no day should feel left out or discriminated against, so there should be the capability for a "wild-card" day every third year to celebrate this day. This will be announced long after the event was supposed to happen, so that proper planning can be made for all week day inclusiveness under calenders that haven't been invented yet. You'll have to pick up the time off a tachyon stream on your sub-ether transmitter.
Oh hell, how about we put a Vogon planning committee in charge of deciding when the holiday is?
Think about what would really happen. Microsoft would deliver a base set of Windows with such marginal functionality, then have a nice expensive upgrade you'd have to buy to get anything done. Presto, modular windows with more money out of the public's pocket, because the sum of the two purchases would exceed the previous single purchase.
I think the only thing really relevent is proving that they lied about what was feasible. Thereby establishing a pattern of behavior. Requiring that Microsoft distribute modular windows wouldn't help anyone much.
The average consumer looks at $$$/Gig. No further. If the majority looked at failure rates first, then $$$/Gig. The industry would be a different story. At a certain point the number of failures to a particular drive creates word of mouth, "don't buy one of xxx drives". So the industry then tends toward the tolerable failure rate that it can get away with.
Personally, in the last year I've had more trouble with hard drives than the last fifteen years. I think it sucks!
Exactly. I think the only real security of a flight is to have the pilot in a hermetically sealed compartment.
On a recent flight I noted that if you have absolutely no metal on your body and you submit it all to the Xray-ers then you get far less attention. Then I noticed that the "random" screening concentrated on people who were easy to search and those who looked a bit scruffy (i.e. don't travel in that tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt). I had an interesting revelation. The question to ask is would any of this have prevented 9/11? The answer is no. My briefcase has two wonderful hinges which could easily have been sharpened with a dremel and modified to be removeable. Not a single baggage handler would have ever looked at them. The terrorists used box cutters for the 9/11 events. Then hinge is about the same dimensions and a handle easily crafted.
I went to my wife's lab in a hospital recently. Security confiscated my 1" swiss army knife keyring. I walked up to her lab, all the lab doors were wide open. Radioisotopes were laying about and scapels abounded. On my way out I got a scapel to trade with the guard for my pocket knife and tell him how silly this pretension of safety was.
My summary, the early screening did a good job of keeping guns off of planes. Keeping an item as simple as a box cutter is impossible without going to Draconian measures (no carry on luggage, strip searches for all and a free orange jump suit). Secure the pilot and develop the bomb detecting technology. This current mess is just a hassle to make us feel secure (and it doesn't)!
Apple's a perfect example of this. Just because they got University's to buy a lot of boxes didn't make it ripe for students to learn on them.
I was starting college in 1985 and these hot new Macintoshs had just hit the computer lab. They were a dream compared to hacking away on the mainframe with it's handout's of push the PF75 key, blah blah blah. So as a budding young programmer I thought the Mac was the future. I wanted to learn to program it. They had an interpreted C on them that I used, but you really couldn't do much fancy with it. I wanted to go deeper. Turned out you had to buy about $1500 bucks worth of books, compilers and official Mac developer license to really get into the nuts and bolts.
I found a PC in the EE lab. It was wide open. Didn't really have windows, but a C compiler was cheap and the specifications for it were lying around all over the place. I could easily solder something together and have it communicate on the main bus. It didn't have all the expense and proprietary restrictions of the Mac. Had a built in assembly level debugger even. It was a hackers dream-- wide open and pokeable. It was not a great box, but it was cheap and available and easy to get internal information about.
Guess what I learned and pursued on into my career. Guess what type of hardware I'm typing from now. An Intel box that gained popularity along with Microsoft.
The tighter Bill squeezes his claws the more systems that will slip through his fingers. (to paraphrase the wisdom of Star Wars). He will fall the way of Apple.
You're right about a good CS department. A really good one doesn't even teach languages, it should stick to concepts. Languages are just a means to an end.
Shawn
P.S. I quickly got sick of MS boxes and went to work in UNIX. At least UNIX/Linux doesn't crash all the time.
I saw "The Empire Stikes Back" movie in a theater bragging that it used 150mm film. Now that was awesome. There were waves of motion sickness in the snow speeder scenes.
So screw IMAX, go to 150mm if you can actually find a theater using it.
They can either help now, and begin to work with various groups, or they can be pushed off a burning platform later.
So inspiration I'm getting my torches ready for the bonfire party with the RIAA. May need some holy water and stakes while I'm at it, I hear they're undead!
The much awaited new doorstop from WROX press has arrived. It's in the traditional red to coordinate with the theme of their current line of doorstops. This latest addition is really large in case the door has a high clearance and extra heavy for those doors with large springs. It also features a fashionable "Linux" on the cover so you can be the envy of your guests, assuming you ever have any.
Your liabilty is limited to twenty times the total of what you paid the company for the product.
GNU'ed software is sold at a cost of zero, therefore zero liability.
Now if a company had 100 workstations running some product that they paid $100 each for, then the liability would be $200,000 ($100x100x20). One good slip and a company could be taken out to lunch by lawyers. Let's see, there's this one rich monopoly that the lawyers have their eyes on.
I just envision this giant OGRE game, but instead of the Ogre there's Bill and a million lawyers nipping at his heels as he tears through them belching cream pies.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey there lovely lady, what's your name?
Transmeta.
I'm Bill.
And thus another tragic sad story ensues.
There was a fellow I worked with. He went on and on and on about how he would manage the company. Wouldn't have made this or that mistakes, would have done this way or that.
One day he got his wish, he was made manager of a new division of the company. He got a team together and did everything his way. He did everything all the trade journals said you should to get quick, good results.
In one year, he had recreated every mistake that had been made. The only thing to his credit was that he done it in record time.
I think the Libertarian town would be a great experiment. I don't think it would be wildly successful, but it sure would be better filler for the news than getting hourly sniper reports between pondering how badly to crucify Martha Stewart.
Next year (2003) it's predicted that we'll hit the "Hubbert" peak for global world oil production. Hubbert predicted the US would hit this same peak in the 70's for US oil production. Does anyone remember the seventies? Think the economy is bad now, when the world starts sliding off this peak you're going to see some real sparks fly. Generation X -- hold onto your butts this ride is going to be bumpy. Cheer up-- G.W. has promised a show along with the ride! http://www.oilcrisis.com
I can here the music now.
Mannanap, nah nah nah nah nah nup.
Mannanap, nah nah nah nah nah nup.
SAKILA!
tune of Tequila
When my Freshman year professor in the CS AP class was asked the question, "What language are we going to learn in this class?"
To which he quickly replied, "Any monkey can buy a book and learn a language, what's important is the concepts behind programming. To ask what language your going to learn is to miss the point. If our university focused on teaching a language then we would not be properly teaching our students.
Then my senior year, there was a class we had where every assignment was in a new obscure languages and we were expected to adapt rapidly.
The problem in reality is that most resumes are reviewed for language experience and not conceptual areas. To get a job you need XXX years of language XXX. What a stupid way to hire people, but it's the system and I play the game for a check.
C# is for the Flying Code Monkeys!
Here's one you can buy for $200. The brand name is "International".
Code Free
Macrovision disabled
One year warranty
Pal and/or NTSC
Yes and according to federal timetables, the metric system was completely instituted in American life for the last 15 years.
How about.... "Captain! Incoming primitive radioactive missle from the Human sector, Earth!" "What! Our cyborg Billg-8 didn't wipe them as scheduled?"
First of all the driving scene was making a point about the amount of noise and harrasment between the country and the city. Russians have long winters and can take a much longer development of a scene than an American brought up on MTV edits. The sound in that scene goes from serene birds chirping to insessant overbearing industrial noise to the point that you feel completely harrassed.
I mentioned the film to my brother-in-law who is Bulgarian and he said: "It's a Russian film, there will be an argument, someone will kill themselves, they will discuss philosophy between long shots of scenery most likely a stream, and since it's Tarkovsky there will be a rattling chandelier."He hadn't seen the movie. When declaring it boring, it may just be a reflection of the fact that you would find most if not all Russian movies boring. Russian films require a much longer attention span and patience than just about any other country's movies.
My personal recommendation is the "Cleanroom" methodology. You create a functional specification with a mathematical guarantee of completeness and consistancy. Auditable correctness is also a part of the process. Then when it comes to testing you generate test cases that cover all states, all arcs and then do statistical test case generation based on a usage model. The overall cost of this process is a bit more up front, but studies have shown that the process far more than pays for itself in greatly reduced maintenance/debugging costs.
So to answer you question is that to generate a decent set of test cases, you really have to understand the problem space and have mapped out the state-space in some manner. Trying to derive this without a methodical approach and ones testing will be spotty. The worst I've seen so far was a random state-space walker (ala Brownian motion). Statistically this approach avoids all the difficult cases in the far corners of the state-space.
Now for the bad news: Cleanroom is quite tedious for the programmer. The enumeration phase takes seemingly forever and can be mind-numbingly boring.
Here's the amazon link on the layman's book on Cleanroom: Cleanroom Software Engineering: Technology and Process by Stacy J. Prowell, Carmen J. Trammell,Richard C. Linger, Jesse H. Poore
And now for the shameless self promotion bit with a long winded sales pitch for executives on Cleanroom: my own Cleanroom company: eLucidSoft.
Just chant over and over: "Hire eLucid, play golf."
Absolutely. I worked on fixing a system that sent controls to five dams to set their spill gates. These dams were far out in the woods. It sent the commands over an "unused" radio band assigned by the FCC. Besides the obvious fact that the moron who put it together didn't even bother to use CRC to check the packets for correctness, there was a bible thumping preacher broadcasting rants and raves out of his house on a regular basis. The upshot of the preacher's preaching all over a radio band he didn't own (and it wasn't on your radio dial so one wonders who was listening), was that the gates on the dams would go up and down for no apparent reason.
After the FCC shut the preacher's broadcasting done, I recommended CRC validation of the packets and an ACK/NAK two-phase commit to the movement of the spill gates.
I think a network requires working hardware. I've been window shopping for a game console for my daughter. About 50% of the time the store demo Xbox has a "black screen of death". Store clerks told me it's like that most of the time. They have to be ever vigilant to keep it going. Two ~10 year olds were playing yesterday on the Gamecube and the Sony box in the store. I asked them what they thought about the Xbox, their reply: "It's a piece of junk that crashes all the time"
This feature alone will kill the Xbox in the long run.
If Microsoft's bottom line is hurt with every purchase, at what point does some cash rich competitor start taking competing boxes off the market by buying them and landfilling them (after a nice drill bit chews through the console)?
At some point there actually would be an economic case for such behavior.
I really hope that one day we will see the figure for "Box Office" in terms of HOW MANY PEOPLE PURCHASING THE TICKETS, instead of HOW MUCH $$$$.
Adjusted for population growth (in place of inflation) I would imagine...
I say we should do it alternating Thursdays and Fridays every other year with alternate leap years on a Tuesday. Maybe there should be a planning panel together composed of hair dressers and lawyers. Also no day should feel left out or discriminated against, so there should be the capability for a "wild-card" day every third year to celebrate this day. This will be announced long after the event was supposed to happen, so that proper planning can be made for all week day inclusiveness under calenders that haven't been invented yet. You'll have to pick up the time off a tachyon stream on your sub-ether transmitter.
Oh hell, how about we put a Vogon planning committee in charge of deciding when the holiday is?
Think about what would really happen. Microsoft would deliver a base set of Windows with such marginal functionality, then have a nice expensive upgrade you'd have to buy to get anything done. Presto, modular windows with more money out of the public's pocket, because the sum of the two purchases would exceed the previous single purchase.
I think the only thing really relevent is proving that they lied about what was feasible. Thereby establishing a pattern of behavior. Requiring that Microsoft distribute modular windows wouldn't help anyone much.
The average consumer looks at $$$/Gig. No further. If the majority looked at failure rates first, then $$$/Gig. The industry would be a different story. At a certain point the number of failures to a particular drive creates word of mouth, "don't buy one of xxx drives". So the industry then tends toward the tolerable failure rate that it can get away with.
Personally, in the last year I've had more trouble with hard drives than the last fifteen years. I think it sucks!
I think it has to do with a chant that's forming in the wake of the Pentagon being broken by terrorists.
Sssssssss' CA CbtDpha
Ph'hglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl fhtan
Exactly. I think the only real security of a flight is to have the pilot in a hermetically sealed compartment.
On a recent flight I noted that if you have absolutely no metal on your body and you submit it all to the Xray-ers then you get far less attention. Then I noticed that the "random" screening concentrated on people who were easy to search and those who looked a bit scruffy (i.e. don't travel in that tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt). I had an interesting revelation. The question to ask is would any of this have prevented 9/11? The answer is no. My briefcase has two wonderful hinges which could easily have been sharpened with a dremel and modified to be removeable. Not a single baggage handler would have ever looked at them. The terrorists used box cutters for the 9/11 events. Then hinge is about the same dimensions and a handle easily crafted.
I went to my wife's lab in a hospital recently. Security confiscated my 1" swiss army knife keyring. I walked up to her lab, all the lab doors were wide open. Radioisotopes were laying about and scapels abounded. On my way out I got a scapel to trade with the guard for my pocket knife and tell him how silly this pretension of safety was.
My summary, the early screening did a good job of keeping guns off of planes. Keeping an item as simple as a box cutter is impossible without going to Draconian measures (no carry on luggage, strip searches for all and a free orange jump suit). Secure the pilot and develop the bomb detecting technology. This current mess is just a hassle to make us feel secure (and it doesn't)!
Apple's a perfect example of this. Just because they got University's to buy a lot of boxes didn't make it ripe for students to learn on them.
I was starting college in 1985 and these hot new Macintoshs had just hit the computer lab. They were a dream compared to hacking away on the mainframe with it's handout's of push the PF75 key, blah blah blah. So as a budding young programmer I thought the Mac was the future. I wanted to learn to program it. They had an interpreted C on them that I used, but you really couldn't do much fancy with it. I wanted to go deeper. Turned out you had to buy about $1500 bucks worth of books, compilers and official Mac developer license to really get into the nuts and bolts.
I found a PC in the EE lab. It was wide open. Didn't really have windows, but a C compiler was cheap and the specifications for it were lying around all over the place. I could easily solder something together and have it communicate on the main bus. It didn't have all the expense and proprietary restrictions of the Mac. Had a built in assembly level debugger even. It was a hackers dream-- wide open and pokeable. It was not a great box, but it was cheap and available and easy to get internal information about.
Guess what I learned and pursued on into my career. Guess what type of hardware I'm typing from now. An Intel box that gained popularity along with Microsoft.
The tighter Bill squeezes his claws the more systems that will slip through his fingers. (to paraphrase the wisdom of Star Wars). He will fall the way of Apple.
You're right about a good CS department. A really good one doesn't even teach languages, it should stick to concepts. Languages are just a means to an end.
Shawn
P.S. I quickly got sick of MS boxes and went to work in UNIX. At least UNIX/Linux doesn't crash all the time.
I saw "The Empire Stikes Back" movie in a theater bragging that it used 150mm film. Now that was awesome. There were waves of motion sickness in the snow speeder scenes.
So screw IMAX, go to 150mm if you can actually find a theater using it.
So inspiration I'm getting my torches ready for the bonfire party with the RIAA. May need some holy water and stakes while I'm at it, I hear they're undead!
There is nothing to see here.
Move along.
>Never underestimate the power of the Borg.
The much awaited new doorstop from WROX press has arrived. It's in the traditional red to coordinate with the theme of their current line of doorstops. This latest addition is really large in case the door has a high clearance and extra heavy for those doors with large springs. It also features a fashionable "Linux" on the cover so you can be the envy of your guests, assuming you ever have any.
Your liabilty is limited to twenty times the total of what you paid the company for the product.
GNU'ed software is sold at a cost of zero, therefore zero liability.
Now if a company had 100 workstations running some product that they paid $100 each for, then the liability would be $200,000 ($100x100x20). One good slip and a company could be taken out to lunch by lawyers. Let's see, there's this one rich monopoly that the lawyers have their eyes on.
I just envision this giant OGRE game, but instead of the Ogre there's Bill and a million lawyers nipping at his heels as he tears through them belching cream pies.