The point of these tools, is to simply verify the consistency of a design, not to execute or examine existing source code. The steps involved are: 1) Come up with software design 2) Implement software design in one of these tools (model it in Z, or as a state machine using fsp/ltsa) 3) Use said tool to verify the consistency of the design.
Now, this activity, of course, takes a lot of time, and is unlikely to ever be of any use to your average J2EE/Ajax/Enterprise application. Areas where they CAN be of use are in things such as life-critical systems. For instance medical devices, or air plane control systems. Using something like FSP/LTSA you can model, check, and verify that your design does not every allow the system to enter into an invalid state. Now, remember, this says nothing about the final code, there is a separate issue of the code not matching the design, but it is possible to verify that the design does not ever lead to invalid states.
Twasn't flamebait... The smaller artists WILL get screwed. I don't know why they think this is appropriate for music/movies. If someone applied the same logic to $800 software packages it wouldn't fly.
Who gets hurts the most by this proposition? The little guy! Okay, the filthy socialis... I mean french start collecting this "tax" and paying out to the big players, BMG, Sony, etc. What about all of the smaller artists who get pirated... they aren't going to see ANYTHING. This is not the solution to the problem. Are they going to start allowing people to pirate software by paying a small tax? As long as you pay your $4 fee you can download photoshop? It's the same idea! How can a group of people be so misguided?
I think perhaps what you REALLY mean here by stability is Fault Tolerance. It's impossible to write code that has zero defects, outside of any trivial examples. Real Code Has Real Defects. Now, as you talk about modular design and being able to restart modules, you're talking about, not stability, but fault tolerance; the ability of the application to recognize and recover from faults. For instance, you can't necessarily guarantee that the module on machine A running task B won't die, hell the computer could accidently fry, but if your application was Fault Tolerant then the application would kick off another process somewhere else on computer C to rerun job B. Stable systems aren't built necessarily by trying to write defect-free code, but by recognizing that defects will occur and architecting the system in such a way that it can recover from them. Here you need to be concerned about things like transactions, data roll-back, consistency, techniques (active vs. passive, warm vs. cold). The key thing is before you even write a LINE of this C++ code, make sure that you have a complete, comprehensive ARCHITECTURE for your application that will gracefully handle faults.
Dan's point isn't that CS is not useful, just that CS degrees don't cover everything that is really required to be a true software engineer. I don't think that he's making an argument for CIS or "vocational" programmers, we all know what road that leads down. I have my BS in CS and my masters from Carnegie Mellon in Software Engineering and I think that it is combination of the two that really qualifies me to be a good developer.
The fundamental problem with CS degrees is that there is ZERO focus on the business aspects of softare: management, design, process, etc. They teach the (very very important) fundamentals of programming languages, computer theory, etc. but they don't teach process, or give any sort of business sense. Students don't learn anything about development lifecycles or software architectures. This means that the average CS graduate is only suited for the build phase of development, often times, they don't have any realization that there is any other phase!
The solution for this is not to add vocational training to CS curricula but to add courses in software design (architectures/patterns/uml), software processes/lifecycles (waterfall, spiral model, evolutionary dev., CMM, ISO-9001), and software project management (business tradeoffs of software, business reasoning).
These courses should be in addition to the fundamental courses in operating systems, computer architectures, data structures, programming languages.
The addition of this sort of coursework would provide the foundation required for CS students to enter the workforce as Software Engineers capable of working on all phases of software development projects.
My first job fresh from getting my masters in software engineering from one of the big name schools in CS I'm making $62,000 from one of the big consulting firms as a developer/analyst. This is in San Francisco. I turned down an offer of $80,000 in NYC. My friends from school working @amazon started at $78,000 + 15,000 signing.
I don't get this hatred of Disney for preserving Mickey Mouse. Why do YOU people feel that YOU own Mickey Mouse more than the company the founder started does? WHY should someone's creation be handed over to everyone, other than you desire for "public good". FUCK public good. If you create something it should belong to YOU and/or whoever you decide to sell it to. In perpetuity. What right does society have to make a claim on something that they didn't create? Yeah, they bought the Beatles albums and helped make them a success, that doesn't give them a right to the actual "rights" to the work! Fuck that. I'm so sick of these social leeches always feeling they have some entitlement to the accomplishments of others. If you don't fucking like it, create you OWN tunes/characters/whathaveyou and release it as public domain. Yeah, this IP hoarding may be detrimental to the "public good" but that's bullshit, public good be damned, if you are the creator it's YOURS to do with as you wish. Forever.
I'm currently doing my master's at Carnegie Mellon University in Software Engineering . I am tremendously happy with the program. The problem with basic CS degrees is that they teach you the fundamentals of computer science, and how to code but they don't teach you ANYTHING about what it means to write software. There is a lot more that goes into software than hacking at code, and this is usually lost on the B.S. CS students (and all the local know-it-all sysadmins). The program is a mixture of software project management, and things like software architecting, program analysis, and there are other cool courses like Fault Tolerant Distributed Systems (the one i spent 45 minutes talking about during my recent Google interview). The program has definitely changed my outlook on software, and I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone. Within the next ten years we're (America) going to have to start teaching at least rudimentary software engineering skills to our students or else ALL of the jobs are going to be going to India and China where they care about something other than making sure that students understand about automata and graph theory. We've got an almost 100% job placement rate (right through the dot-com burst too) and my friends from the program have jobs working at places like Amazon and Google. Good Luck whatever you decide.
You've got to be kidding me? I'm not spoiled. I'm not rich by any means, I am at CMU because I work my ASS off. I made a conscious decision in my life to work hard and stay in school because I knew what it meant for my future. So who is it that really DESERVES it more? Is it the people who are the best and the brightest and have worked their asses off to show it; the ones who will be changing the world? Or is it another 15 year old mother of 2 who thought her baby-daddy jamal had a better future as a crack dealer than he could have if he stayed in school. I love the concept that if you are capable, you should be shat upon. I hope that someday, YOU, cdtoad get to live in a world where everything is designed by this lowest common denominator you love so much. Cars? Nope. Computers, of course not! Light bulbs??? Hell no. These folks are not the ones who are driving society and innovation. I'll stick with beleiving in hard work, wise decisions, and innovation personally.
Well, if you are interested in a strong overall education, and not on lots of women I'd suggest my alma mater Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It's a top 50 schools, and their engineering schools is great. I'd look into IT here, they are part of the cisco academy, which means you can take courses as part of your college work, and earn cisco networking certifications, CCNA, CCNP, CCDA, CCDP, among others. IT@RPI
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The point of these tools, is to simply verify the consistency of a design, not to execute or examine existing source code. The steps involved are:
1) Come up with software design
2) Implement software design in one of these tools (model it in Z, or as a state machine using fsp/ltsa)
3) Use said tool to verify the consistency of the design.
Now, this activity, of course, takes a lot of time, and is unlikely to ever be of any use to your average J2EE/Ajax/Enterprise application. Areas where they CAN be of use are in things such as life-critical systems. For instance medical devices, or air plane control systems. Using something like FSP/LTSA you can model, check, and verify that your design does not every allow the system to enter into an invalid state. Now, remember, this says nothing about the final code, there is a separate issue of the code not matching the design, but it is possible to verify that the design does not ever lead to invalid states.
Twasn't flamebait... The smaller artists WILL get screwed. I don't know why they think this is appropriate for music/movies. If someone applied the same logic to $800 software packages it wouldn't fly.
Who gets hurts the most by this proposition? The little guy! Okay, the filthy socialis... I mean french start collecting this "tax" and paying out to the big players, BMG, Sony, etc. What about all of the smaller artists who get pirated... they aren't going to see ANYTHING. This is not the solution to the problem. Are they going to start allowing people to pirate software by paying a small tax? As long as you pay your $4 fee you can download photoshop? It's the same idea! How can a group of people be so misguided?
I think perhaps what you REALLY mean here by stability is Fault Tolerance. It's impossible to write code that has zero defects, outside of any trivial examples. Real Code Has Real Defects. Now, as you talk about modular design and being able to restart modules, you're talking about, not stability, but fault tolerance; the ability of the application to recognize and recover from faults. For instance, you can't necessarily guarantee that the module on machine A running task B won't die, hell the computer could accidently fry, but if your application was Fault Tolerant then the application would kick off another process somewhere else on computer C to rerun job B. Stable systems aren't built necessarily by trying to write defect-free code, but by recognizing that defects will occur and architecting the system in such a way that it can recover from them. Here you need to be concerned about things like transactions, data roll-back, consistency, techniques (active vs. passive, warm vs. cold). The key thing is before you even write a LINE of this C++ code, make sure that you have a complete, comprehensive ARCHITECTURE for your application that will gracefully handle faults.
Dan's point isn't that CS is not useful, just that CS degrees don't cover everything that is really required to be a true software engineer. I don't think that he's making an argument for CIS or "vocational" programmers, we all know what road that leads down. I have my BS in CS and my masters from Carnegie Mellon in Software Engineering and I think that it is combination of the two that really qualifies me to be a good developer.
The fundamental problem with CS degrees is that there is ZERO focus on the business aspects of softare: management, design, process, etc. They teach the (very very important) fundamentals of programming languages, computer theory, etc. but they don't teach process, or give any sort of business sense. Students don't learn anything about development lifecycles or software architectures. This means that the average CS graduate is only suited for the build phase of development, often times, they don't have any realization that there is any other phase!
The solution for this is not to add vocational training to CS curricula but to add courses in software design (architectures/patterns/uml), software processes/lifecycles (waterfall, spiral model, evolutionary dev., CMM, ISO-9001), and software project management (business tradeoffs of software, business reasoning).
These courses should be in addition to the fundamental courses in operating systems, computer architectures, data structures, programming languages.
The addition of this sort of coursework would provide the foundation required for CS students to enter the workforce as Software Engineers capable of working on all phases of software development projects.
My first job fresh from getting my masters in software engineering from one of the big name schools in CS I'm making $62,000 from one of the big consulting firms as a developer/analyst. This is in San Francisco. I turned down an offer of $80,000 in NYC. My friends from school working @amazon started at $78,000 + 15,000 signing.
I don't get this hatred of Disney for preserving Mickey Mouse. Why do YOU people feel that YOU own Mickey Mouse more than the company the founder started does? WHY should someone's creation be handed over to everyone, other than you desire for "public good". FUCK public good. If you create something it should belong to YOU and/or whoever you decide to sell it to. In perpetuity. What right does society have to make a claim on something that they didn't create? Yeah, they bought the Beatles albums and helped make them a success, that doesn't give them a right to the actual "rights" to the work! Fuck that. I'm so sick of these social leeches always feeling they have some entitlement to the accomplishments of others. If you don't fucking like it, create you OWN tunes/characters/whathaveyou and release it as public domain. Yeah, this IP hoarding may be detrimental to the "public good" but that's bullshit, public good be damned, if you are the creator it's YOURS to do with as you wish. Forever.
I'm currently doing my master's at Carnegie Mellon University in Software Engineering . I am tremendously happy with the program. The problem with basic CS degrees is that they teach you the fundamentals of computer science, and how to code but they don't teach you ANYTHING about what it means to write software. There is a lot more that goes into software than hacking at code, and this is usually lost on the B.S. CS students (and all the local know-it-all sysadmins). The program is a mixture of software project management, and things like software architecting, program analysis, and there are other cool courses like Fault Tolerant Distributed Systems (the one i spent 45 minutes talking about during my recent Google interview). The program has definitely changed my outlook on software, and I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone. Within the next ten years we're (America) going to have to start teaching at least rudimentary software engineering skills to our students or else ALL of the jobs are going to be going to India and China where they care about something other than making sure that students understand about automata and graph theory. We've got an almost 100% job placement rate (right through the dot-com burst too) and my friends from the program have jobs working at places like Amazon and Google. Good Luck whatever you decide.
You've got to be kidding me? I'm not spoiled. I'm not rich by any means, I am at CMU because I work my ASS off.
I made a conscious decision in my life to work hard and stay in school because I knew what it meant for my future. So who is it that really DESERVES it more? Is it the people who are the best and the brightest and have worked their asses off to show it; the ones who will be changing the world? Or is it another 15 year old mother of 2 who thought her baby-daddy jamal had a better future as a crack dealer than he could have if he stayed in school. I love the concept that if you are capable, you should be shat upon. I hope that someday, YOU, cdtoad get to live in a world where everything is designed by this lowest common denominator you love so much. Cars? Nope. Computers, of course not! Light bulbs??? Hell no. These folks are not the ones who are driving society and innovation. I'll stick with beleiving in hard work, wise decisions, and innovation personally.
fp!
My first, and the first in this thread!
Well, if you are interested in a strong overall education, and not on lots of women I'd suggest my alma mater Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It's a top 50 schools, and their engineering schools is great. I'd look into IT here, they are part of the cisco academy, which means you can take courses as part of your college work, and earn cisco networking certifications, CCNA, CCNP, CCDA, CCDP, among others. IT@RPI