The old Unix companies have been heading down for a while. Apollo and Sun started the workstation market, with HP, Digital, and IBM doing their thing, and SGI always hanging around in their own niche. Apollo was bought by HP. Digital sold alpha to Intel and then was bought by HP. IBM is still hanging around, but has surely thrown their hat into the *Linux ring. SGI is still there, but still in their own niche. Which means we are left with Sun, whose SPARC was always the slow machine that was marketed better than the rest, and HP. And, don't forget that HP and IBM have announced their migration to IA-64. So, Sun/SPARC seems to be the only remaining player outside the Intel fold. And SGI. Then there is Apple who keeps the MIPS architecture moving forward. Who knows where that will end up, but at least they keep things interesting.
More and more it is looking like an Intel world. AMD mearly adds some price competition. I worry about where we'll see the competition from inovative hardware architectures?
There is PLENTY of work building free software. I don't see the problem? Did someone say there is a depression in the software industry? They just don't know how to count the REAL new software economy. Now, if only it put food on the table and paid our mortgage.
I am a software engineer by day and a musician by night, so I'd say I have multiple interests in this discussion.
The bottom line is that it should be the normal way of things that people get paid for their work, whether that work be developing the latest glamor software application, cranking out a less-than-glamorous piece of software, creation of some hit recording, or contributing that music you heard the last time you rode an elevator.
The problem we are being confronted with in both software and music is that technology is short circuiting the traditional mechanisms through which money is exchanged for work/product. I do not profess to know the answer, but I do know that it IS wrong to expect musicians to go unpaid for their efforts. I think it is also wrong to expect software engineers to work at the top of their profession without financial reward.
What we need is some way to ensure that these products, recorded music and software source code, can be exchanged under curcumstances that cause their creators to be reliably compensated while allowing the consumer of this work/product reasonable use of it. HOW we do that, I do not yet know.
The sad thing is that upper management tends to read these articles and come to the simplest conclusion, in this case that they can buy this new software and reduce their system administration staff by x%. That alone wouldn't be terrible, but then the next thing is that they go and budget next year based on the capital expense of buy this great new software and reducing the number of admins. Next year their company buys Sun's products, good for Sun, and the admin staff size gets reduced, maybe good for company. BUT, then the admins remaining find they do NOT become more productive. In fact, they are now troubleshooting a whole new set of problems, and with fewer resources so more problems go longer without resolution. Upper management is pleased because they have saved on the staff budget, but the worker bees, both the remaining system administrators and the actual users of the systems in question get less done in more time and their frustration level increases. Yes, eventually the level of improvement may catch up with the reduction in admin staff, but there will be a lot of pain getting there. That's what happened when secretaries were replaced by word processor packages on the PC... that, and the fact that these people do far more than just type what others wrote by hand. My greatest fear is that, just as the secretary who used to truly run organizations and keep things working smoothly are a distant memory, with no one filling their role in the organization, so too will it be with system administrators as upper management buys into these myths of rapidly increased administrator productivity. Soon, only the senior management team will have system administrators AND secretaries.
Possibly... I lean more toward finishing the job his Dad started to pander to the Republican party's right wing, AND to fill the news with patriotic headlines as we head toward the election, pushing articles on the economy, unemployment, REAL defense issues, etc into the background as he can't possibly win on his record or the issues that are hurting most Americans.
The events of 9/11/2001 have very definitely changed my life. I grew up a New Yorker and have lots of family and friends who still live and work in the area. Thus, as I woke up here on the West Coast a year ago today and got a phone call from my girl friend to quick look at the TV, my first thought was of what family members and friends were in those buildings. I could not turn away from that TV screen. I kept hearing in my mind... I must watch this until every detail is forever etched into my mind so that I NEVER FORGET.
I was very fortunate. None of my family was actually in the World Trade Center that day, though one had plans to be there later that day. None of my friends were there either. But there were definite personal connections to those who died that day. The friend of my friend. The sister of my daughter's coach who was a flight attendant on one of the planes. So today I sit at my desk and try to work (I have a new job, I have no sick time, leave, or vacation to take off), I remember what happened to these people.
I also remember how I worried how the opportunists would exploit this tragedy. It seems today that I was rightly concerned. One is still attacked as un-American for questioning the actions of our President. Yet, I do not believe we are any safer today than we were one year ago. Though we very definitely are less free. The "war" continues, with no way of ever knowing when it is over. The battles are secret. The enemy unknown. We get told that we must kill people in Iraq to make the world safe, and while I do believe there is some risk there, I do not buy the argument that there is any relationship between Iraq and their quest for new weaponry and the tragedy in NY and DC... certainly less than that between oil money going to the Middle-Eastern countries. I see exploitation of this tragedy at every turn. Commercial. Political. Ethical. Religious. Everyone is trying to take advantage of the moment, of the desire to do something, anything, to respond to it when there IS no response that makes any sense.
We need to see all of the evidence of those responsible for the events of one year ago. We need to see all of the actions taken in response. We need to respect the founding principals and freedoms of our unique nation and realize that it is easy to be free during good times, it is harder during bad, yet it is the consistency of freedom during all times that makes our nation the United States of America.
Software development. The development cycle, the time it takes me from the time I change some code until I am running that new code to test it, always takes too long. I am currently running a dual Zeon 2.2 Ghz machine with 1G 266DDR RAM. And it still takes me over 30 minutes for the dev-cycle. And, this is a vast improvement over the prior system I was using. This system is not quite the absolutely fastest buildable right now, but its no slouch, yet I'd love everything to be twice as fast. I'll also admit that not everything is CPU speed. Builds require well balanced systems with great disk subsystems as well as great CPUs and RAM. Thus, no only do I need as much CPU horsepower as I can get my hands on, only slightly less than the number crunchers of the world, but I need it packed into systems with great bus and disk speed. I don't see nearly as much progress on that front...
Sure... there isn't much to the code you list. But, if you go through a big piece of legacy code and run into a sorting algorithm, wouldn't it be terribly helpful to know what the sorting algorithm is (and I sure hope a standard algorithm was either used or used as the basis for what is in the code), why it was chosen, and why other alternatives were not? This is the point of literate programming, to fully communicate the program, not stay so focused only on the particular programming language's level of description, which while very descriptive to a computer, communicating exactly what is needed to EXECUTE the algorithm, doesn't give humans much of an UNDERSTANDING of that algorithm.
I find this entire discussion pretty depressing as it demonstrates pretty dramatically the extremely poor state of software developer documentation.
Good developer documentation facilitates a great deal of those things that our managers keep crying for... quality software, produced quickly and efficiently, that does what our customers want.
Literate Programming was a terribly elegent way to integrate the documentation that we all should be writting into code in a way that suggests it would be far less likely to fail to keep documentation and code up to date and synchronized. This is VERY different from the current models of extractable embedded documentation, which I frankly don't find adding much. The problem is that we frequently look to tools to automatically generate the documentation when only a fully skill human developer can really explain what the intent and thought is behind each piece of code. Why is this the algorithm chosen? What others were examined and discarded, and for what reasons? These are all far more than describing the members of a class and assuming the reader can guess the USE of that class.
I have always wondered why AMD doesn't just implement a clock splitter on the CPU. Then they could be the first with a 3GHZ chip! Who cares that onboard it uses an internal clock of 1.5GHZ? Its the external clock speed that people buy, isn't it?
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The old Unix companies have been heading down for a while. Apollo and Sun started the workstation market, with HP, Digital, and IBM doing their thing, and SGI always hanging around in their own niche. Apollo was bought by HP. Digital sold alpha to Intel and then was bought by HP. IBM is still hanging around, but has surely thrown their hat into the *Linux ring. SGI is still there, but still in their own niche. Which means we are left with Sun, whose SPARC was always the slow machine that was marketed better than the rest, and HP. And, don't forget that HP and IBM have announced their migration to IA-64. So, Sun/SPARC seems to be the only remaining player outside the Intel fold. And SGI. Then there is Apple who keeps the MIPS architecture moving forward. Who knows where that will end up, but at least they keep things interesting.
More and more it is looking like an Intel world. AMD mearly adds some price competition. I worry about where we'll see the competition from inovative hardware architectures?
There is PLENTY of work building free software. I don't see the problem? Did someone say there is a depression in the software industry? They just don't know how to count the REAL new software economy. Now, if only it put food on the table and paid our mortgage.
I am a software engineer by day and a musician by night, so I'd say I have multiple interests in this discussion.
The bottom line is that it should be the normal way of things that people get paid for their work, whether that work be developing the latest glamor software application, cranking out a less-than-glamorous piece of software, creation of some hit recording, or contributing that music you heard the last time you rode an elevator.
The problem we are being confronted with in both software and music is that technology is short circuiting the traditional mechanisms through which money is exchanged for work/product. I do not profess to know the answer, but I do know that it IS wrong to expect musicians to go unpaid for their efforts. I think it is also wrong to expect software engineers to work at the top of their profession without financial reward.
What we need is some way to ensure that these products, recorded music and software source code, can be exchanged under curcumstances that cause their creators to be reliably compensated while allowing the consumer of this work/product reasonable use of it. HOW we do that, I do not yet know.
The sad thing is that upper management tends to read these articles and come to the simplest conclusion, in this case that they can buy this new software and reduce their system administration staff by x%. That alone wouldn't be terrible, but then the next thing is that they go and budget next year based on the capital expense of buy this great new software and reducing the number of admins. Next year their company buys Sun's products, good for Sun, and the admin staff size gets reduced, maybe good for company. BUT, then the admins remaining find they do NOT become more productive. In fact, they are now troubleshooting a whole new set of problems, and with fewer resources so more problems go longer without resolution. Upper management is pleased because they have saved on the staff budget, but the worker bees, both the remaining system administrators and the actual users of the systems in question get less done in more time and their frustration level increases. Yes, eventually the level of improvement may catch up with the reduction in admin staff, but there will be a lot of pain getting there. That's what happened when secretaries were replaced by word processor packages on the PC... that, and the fact that these people do far more than just type what others wrote by hand. My greatest fear is that, just as the secretary who used to truly run organizations and keep things working smoothly are a distant memory, with no one filling their role in the organization, so too will it be with system administrators as upper management buys into these myths of rapidly increased administrator productivity. Soon, only the senior management team will have system administrators AND secretaries.
Possibly... I lean more toward finishing the job his Dad started to pander to the Republican party's right wing, AND to fill the news with patriotic headlines as we head toward the election, pushing articles on the economy, unemployment, REAL defense issues, etc into the background as he can't possibly win on his record or the issues that are hurting most Americans.
The events of 9/11/2001 have very definitely changed my life. I grew up a New Yorker and have lots of family and friends who still live and work in the area. Thus, as I woke up here on the West Coast a year ago today and got a phone call from my girl friend to quick look at the TV, my first thought was of what family members and friends were in those buildings. I could not turn away from that TV screen. I kept hearing in my mind... I must watch this until every detail is forever etched into my mind so that I NEVER FORGET.
I was very fortunate. None of my family was actually in the World Trade Center that day, though one had plans to be there later that day. None of my friends were there either. But there were definite personal connections to those who died that day. The friend of my friend. The sister of my daughter's coach who was a flight attendant on one of the planes. So today I sit at my desk and try to work (I have a new job, I have no sick time, leave, or vacation to take off), I remember what happened to these people.
I also remember how I worried how the opportunists would exploit this tragedy. It seems today that I was rightly concerned. One is still attacked as un-American for questioning the actions of our President. Yet, I do not believe we are any safer today than we were one year ago. Though we very definitely are less free. The "war" continues, with no way of ever knowing when it is over. The battles are secret. The enemy unknown. We get told that we must kill people in Iraq to make the world safe, and while I do believe there is some risk there, I do not buy the argument that there is any relationship between Iraq and their quest for new weaponry and the tragedy in NY and DC... certainly less than that between oil money going to the Middle-Eastern countries. I see exploitation of this tragedy at every turn. Commercial. Political. Ethical. Religious. Everyone is trying to take advantage of the moment, of the desire to do something, anything, to respond to it when there IS no response that makes any sense.
We need to see all of the evidence of those responsible for the events of one year ago. We need to see all of the actions taken in response. We need to respect the founding principals and freedoms of our unique nation and realize that it is easy to be free during good times, it is harder during bad, yet it is the consistency of freedom during all times that makes our nation the United States of America.
Software development. The development cycle, the time it takes me from the time I change some code until I am running that new code to test it, always takes too long. I am currently running a dual Zeon 2.2 Ghz machine with 1G 266DDR RAM. And it still takes me over 30 minutes for the dev-cycle. And, this is a vast improvement over the prior system I was using. This system is not quite the absolutely fastest buildable right now, but its no slouch, yet I'd love everything to be twice as fast. I'll also admit that not everything is CPU speed. Builds require well balanced systems with great disk subsystems as well as great CPUs and RAM. Thus, no only do I need as much CPU horsepower as I can get my hands on, only slightly less than the number crunchers of the world, but I need it packed into systems with great bus and disk speed. I don't see nearly as much progress on that front...
Sure... there isn't much to the code you list. But, if you go through a big piece of legacy code and run into a sorting algorithm, wouldn't it be terribly helpful to know what the sorting algorithm is (and I sure hope a standard algorithm was either used or used as the basis for what is in the code), why it was chosen, and why other alternatives were not? This is the point of literate programming, to fully communicate the program, not stay so focused only on the particular programming language's level of description, which while very descriptive to a computer, communicating exactly what is needed to EXECUTE the algorithm, doesn't give humans much of an UNDERSTANDING of that algorithm.
I find this entire discussion pretty depressing as it demonstrates pretty dramatically the extremely poor state of software developer documentation.
Good developer documentation facilitates a great deal of those things that our managers keep crying for... quality software, produced quickly and efficiently, that does what our customers want.
Literate Programming was a terribly elegent way to integrate the documentation that we all should be writting into code in a way that suggests it would be far less likely to fail to keep documentation and code up to date and synchronized. This is VERY different from the current models of extractable embedded documentation, which I frankly don't find adding much. The problem is that we frequently look to tools to automatically generate the documentation when only a fully skill human developer can really explain what the intent and thought is behind each piece of code. Why is this the algorithm chosen? What others were examined and discarded, and for what reasons? These are all far more than describing the members of a class and assuming the reader can guess the USE of that class.
I have always wondered why AMD doesn't just implement a clock splitter on the CPU. Then they could be the first with a 3GHZ chip! Who cares that onboard it uses an internal clock of 1.5GHZ? Its the external clock speed that people buy, isn't it?