There is a Soyuz space cupsule on the ISS that can be used to return the astronauts currently there (2 Americans, 1 Russian). This is, in fact, why the ISS has been limited to 3 astronauts; it is all they had the room for on the escape capsule.
I think this will actually help Russia's space program; unless we want to close up the ISS and come home, Nasa is going to throw some big bucks Russia's way... They now have the only vehicle that can get to and from the ISS, at least as long as the shuttle is grounded.
There's something about the way complexity builds up in nature so that if you have a small change, it results in sufficiently small results; it's possible to have incremental evolution.
This completely ignores the kind of non-linearity we mean when we talk about chaos theory. Small changes in initial conditions can create huge variations in output, which is why it is incredibly hard to predict the weather, the random motions of a billiard break, or even the exact positions of the planets thousands of years from now.
Coat patterns are influenced by the environment in the uterus during fetal development... similar to the principles at develop your fingerprints. Even identical twins don't have duplicate fingerprints, even though they share more genetic information in common than clones do (itentical twins *also* share the mitochondrial dna from their mother, which is not the same as a 'nuclear' dna that gets cloned).
It's not like hundreds upon hundreds of people have commit access to a project like JBoss... or Ant... or Apache... There are relatively few committers, and each of those has generally earned some amount of trust from the maintainer of the project. And those people I'm trusting are easily identifiable to me...
who is administering the server where I can download Apache? I have no friggin clue.
So, I can trust a small group of people who have the earned trust of the person willing to sign their name to it, vs trusting an unknown number of people, or a sysadmin who used his mother's maiden name as the root password to the server he's administering.
No, but plenty of open source projects 'sign' their work, which I can then verify with gpg and the public key of the developer(s).
The question then becomes, "Do I trust that person", instead of, "Do I trust that person and every bloody person who just might be able to alter a file in the long chain of responsibility from him compiling it to me installing it."
Remember how the atari 2600 worked? one cartridge could have like, 140 games on it, all variations on a theme...
Here is the tank game! Here is the tank game in a maze! Here is the tank game with bullets that bounce! Here is the tank game with bullets that bounce in a maze!
I bet between the video tapes, CD's, DVD, and hell, even vinyl albums I own (I AM 33, after all), I bet I have several terabytes of data if it were all digital instead of this rotting analog stuff I have. If I still had every paper I had ever written for school, the games I used to play, etc, I bet it would be huge. (I actually DO have some old high school papers, but I don't have any way to read 5 1/4 inch Apple ][ appleworks data anymore... but open file formats like OpenOffice has probably solved that problem for me...)
I work on a project of about a dozen developers, some os us geographically diverse. We use an Object-Oriented Database with Java (Database is from Versant).
We don't worry about *any* kind of DB administrator. Each developer has their own instance of the database. We don't worry about schema changes that break the database, because we *also* have a way to import/export the database to an XML file. Thus, if the schema radically changes from the deployed version, we just export to XML and re-import, so there is no complex though about 'schema evolution' necessary,
Of course, with everyone having such free ability to make changes that impacts the format of the data store, we need good unit tests to make sure things don't break unintentionally. This is actually one area we need to improve upon. People can make changes that affect the schema easily, and most times, its not an issue... but a lot of times people make changes that would impact the XML format, and they don't always handle it properly.
Unit Tests are Key, but that's nothing new to the concept of refactoring.
I manage a project for the U.S. State Department that is translated into about a dozen languages.
It is not as simple as just translating Strings, but that is probably the biggest part of it. You also have to be aware of Date formats in different locales, customs for displaying large numbers (some countries separate with commas, spaces, or even periods), currency display, and if your application does something with it, Units of Measure (such as feet, meters, miles, etc).
There are even cultural sensitivities for icons - Think how often you see an icon in an application that is based on something like a Street Sign (like a stop sign). All of these have to be localizable.
ISO has standards on all of these things, and it is hard to go wrong by sticking with standards.
Java has beena big win for us here. Besides being able to keep all the strings out of the application and in Resource Bundles, it is aware of a bunch of 'locales', and when you set the locale, classes like Date just Do The Right Thing. The MessageFormatter also helps when you want to build sentences by suppliying words in the middle, but sentence structure changes from language to language.
There are actually TWO different skills here:
The first is called Internationalization (oftern abreviated I18n), and it involves all the skills necessary to write an application so it is neutral to cultural biases. All Strings in resource files, all messages composed with MessageFormetters, all Icons loaded from the filesystem and with a naming convention so they can be substituted in the future, and managing the layout of windows so that they 'grow' nicely when a 4 letter word gets subsituted by a 4 word phrase in another language.
The second is called 'Localization', (L10N) and needs to occur for each Locale you are planning to customize your application for. This is best done by native language speakers who ALSO speak the language of the developers or domain experts. If the Internationalization was done right, then it just involves editing 'configuration', and no real coding.
Re:From the department of the Glaringly Obvious
on
Software Architecture
·
· Score: 2
There scary thing is, there are people out there that will read a statement like that and consider it a glorious insight. Those are the people that would end up paying $500 to go to an all-day event at a hotel to hear a motivational speaker. I think the average slashdot reader is a little smarter than that, but these people do exist.
I'm not making any comment on the rest of the book. As a software cfaftsman, I might be interested in actually reading it.
I'm late posting to this party, but I'll post anyway on the hopes that this whole conversation will get the attention of someone at IBM and my thoughts might influence someone of importance.
Open Sourcing the Rational suite of products makes perfect sense. Why?
1) IBM is a consulting company. See all those ads lately? the want to sell people-time, not product. Give away the product, and you will have even more people that need/want help to use it.
2) IBM now 'owns' the Rational Unified Process. Release the tools and wallpaper the earth with information about RUP, and everyone interested in Software Process Improvement will naturally adopt the stuff. More doors open for consulting, and IBM gains mindshare as 'the people to talk to for serious software engineering.
3) The open source community seriously lacks tools in this area. Releasing them would be a huge splash, gaining mindshare and free advertising, which is exactly what a large consulting company wants.
4) You already have eclipse... turn the stuff into eclipse plug-ins! The killer IDE can become the killer cradle-to-grave tool for software lifecycle management... it would kick the pants off Togethersoft.
If you agree, please mod this post up. Maybe someone with a clue at IBM will agree.
Of course, you could also write a program that just printed out "3.141592654" and then just started generating random numbers...
Run the program, and impress your friends. Tell them you wrote a simulation of the toothpick technique described on slashdot... just don't release the source.
When I was in college, I wrote a distibuted computing project that drew detailed plot of the Mandelbrot Beetle. I fantasized that if I could zoom in on JUST the right spot, I'd see "God was here" as if in graffiti. Wouldn't that just be kick ass?
I work on a laptop most of the time, on battery power a lot. Every time my fan kicks in when I'm on battery, I think to myself how absurd this is... I am using up a significant percentage of my stored electrons to generate heat I don't want... I then use up a significant percentage of my stored electrons running fans to make thast heat go away.
Seems to me that even a small improvement in thermal efficiency of the processor would reduce TWO reasons to consume my precious battery power. Anything short of this seems like a hack - a stopgap solution until we get better thermal efficiency at the source of the problem.
So, they know an approximate mass, they can guestimate how fast it is moving, and from the location of the Earth at that time, they know a relative position in the solar system.
Is this thing moving at an 'escape' velocity from our solar system? Is it in orbit around the sun like a comet? Can we calculate that orbit and see if it might hit us again?
If these things are so common that they found 2 events in 3 years worth of data, why don't we see buildings occasionally cruble as if hit by a missile?
Except I will look to xml.openoffice.org to write some xslt transformations to take Microsoft office documents and liberate them once and for all.
Once I can move my team of 20 people to open office with no real worries or complaints about 'interchanging' files with lusers still using Microsoft, I will.
BUT, have you ever looked at an HTML file generated by Microsoft word? It is a GREAT example of how they can pollute a standard into something unreadable.
I suspect that they will copyright or otherwise lock up their DTD/Schema, and try to lash out at anyone that uses them in other than 'approved' ways.
The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave thomas and Andy Hunt. While not exactly 'theory of application design' is an EXCELLENT book about being a software engineering practicioner.
I also believe that the cooling rock is acting as an insulator itself... Just as it can be warm inside of an igloo.
The rock in immediate contact with the leaves transfers its heat into the leaves and the chicken, but that heat is not enough to cook it quickly. Tha t'cooler' layer of the rock serves as an insulator for the chicken. The rock on the outside is still giving up heat to the air (more slowly did to the chicken inside), so it still feels hot.
I live in the SHADOW of the AOL building in Loudoun County, VA. My town is filled with AOL Millionaires renovating 100 year old houses.
I HAVE NO BANDWIDTH! I am paying $150 a month for an ISDN line and a stitic IP address... WHAT DO YOU THINK I'D BE WILLING TO PAY FOR a 384k DSL?
According to the rumor mill around here, the phone company's CO has a big empty room, built especially for you, just waiting for you to come in and drop all your nice equipment to give the area various DSL flavors... But you haven't done anything! Originally, people were saying you couldn't handle the capacity of installs you'd get here, with all this pent up demand. Then, people were saying you couldn't AFFORD to do anything...
Tell you what... Take some of that $245 million in CASH, and GET THE EQUIPMENT IN HERE. Hire a few people to do some installs and support the area, and guess what? THAT IS HOW BUSINESSES FIND CUSTOMERS AND MAKE MONEY! THAT IS THE PATH TO PROFITABILITY! Find the customers willing to pay out the ASS for your service, and MAKE THEM HAPPY!
Sincerely,
someone who has your money in his pocket, and all you need to do to get it is give me some frelling bandwidth!
Before we got married, my wife worked on 'jewlers row' in Philadelphia, grading diamonds for a living. She knew all the politics, all the fake costs, and considers DeBeers more evil than I do Microsoft.
When we got engaged, she designed a platinum ring with a blue saphire as the main stone.
She is ecstatic with it, because EVERY time she wears it out (maybe 2-3 times a month) SOMEONE comments about how pretty and unusual it is.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a Soyuz space cupsule on the ISS that can be used to return the astronauts currently there (2 Americans, 1 Russian). This is, in fact, why the ISS has been limited to 3 astronauts; it is all they had the room for on the escape capsule.
I think this will actually help Russia's space program; unless we want to close up the ISS and come home, Nasa is going to throw some big bucks Russia's way... They now have the only vehicle that can get to and from the ISS, at least as long as the shuttle is grounded.
It is *always* helpful if you can wait 3 months. If you need a computer, buy one. If not, wait - you'll only be able to get more for less.
-db
This completely ignores the kind of non-linearity we mean when we talk about chaos theory. Small changes in initial conditions can create huge variations in output, which is why it is incredibly hard to predict the weather, the random motions of a billiard break, or even the exact positions of the planets thousands of years from now.
Coat patterns are influenced by the environment in the uterus during fetal development... similar to the principles at develop your fingerprints. Even identical twins don't have duplicate fingerprints, even though they share more genetic information in common than clones do (itentical twins *also* share the mitochondrial dna from their mother, which is not the same as a 'nuclear' dna that gets cloned).
Not entirely so.
It's not like hundreds upon hundreds of people have commit access to a project like JBoss... or Ant... or Apache... There are relatively few committers, and each of those has generally earned some amount of trust from the maintainer of the project. And those people I'm trusting are easily identifiable to me...
who is administering the server where I can download Apache? I have no friggin clue.
So, I can trust a small group of people who have the earned trust of the person willing to sign their name to it, vs trusting an unknown number of people, or a sysadmin who used his mother's maiden name as the root password to the server he's administering.
Not the same thing at all.
No, but plenty of open source projects 'sign' their work, which I can then verify with gpg and the public key of the developer(s).
The question then becomes, "Do I trust that person", instead of, "Do I trust that person and every bloody person who just might be able to alter a file in the long chain of responsibility from him compiling it to me installing it."
GPG. Know it. Live it. Love it.
Remember how the atari 2600 worked? one cartridge could have like, 140 games on it, all variations on a theme...
Here is the tank game!
Here is the tank game in a maze!
Here is the tank game with bullets that bounce!
Here is the tank game with bullets that bounce in a maze!
and so on. Hope thats not what they mean...
I bet between the video tapes, CD's, DVD, and hell, even vinyl albums I own (I AM 33, after all), I bet I have several terabytes of data if it were all digital instead of this rotting analog stuff I have. If I still had every paper I had ever written for school, the games I used to play, etc, I bet it would be huge. (I actually DO have some old high school papers, but I don't have any way to read 5 1/4 inch Apple ][ appleworks data anymore... but open file formats like OpenOffice has probably solved that problem for me...)
Considering the analogy to car repair, how about we issue 'driver's licenses' for computers?
"I'm sorry sir, you cannot use this computer; you were too stupid to pass the test."
Seems like a fair exchange to me... we certify the people working on the computers when we license those who use them.
I work on a project of about a dozen developers, some os us geographically diverse. We use an Object-Oriented Database with Java (Database is from Versant).
We don't worry about *any* kind of DB administrator. Each developer has their own instance of the database. We don't worry about schema changes that break the database, because we *also* have a way to import/export the database to an XML file. Thus, if the schema radically changes from the deployed version, we just export to XML and re-import, so there is no complex though about 'schema evolution' necessary,
Of course, with everyone having such free ability to make changes that impacts the format of the data store, we need good unit tests to make sure things don't break unintentionally. This is actually one area we need to improve upon. People can make changes that affect the schema easily, and most times, its not an issue... but a lot of times people make changes that would impact the XML format, and they don't always handle it properly.
Unit Tests are Key, but that's nothing new to the concept of refactoring.
I manage a project for the U.S. State Department that is translated into about a dozen languages.
It is not as simple as just translating Strings, but that is probably the biggest part of it. You also have to be aware of Date formats in different locales, customs for displaying large numbers (some countries separate with commas, spaces, or even periods), currency display, and if your application does something with it, Units of Measure (such as feet, meters, miles, etc).
There are even cultural sensitivities for icons - Think how often you see an icon in an application that is based on something like a Street Sign (like a stop sign). All of these have to be localizable.
ISO has standards on all of these things, and it is hard to go wrong by sticking with standards.
Java has beena big win for us here. Besides being able to keep all the strings out of the application and in Resource Bundles, it is aware of a bunch of 'locales', and when you set the locale, classes like Date just Do The Right Thing. The MessageFormatter also helps when you want to build sentences by suppliying words in the middle, but sentence structure changes from language to language.
There are actually TWO different skills here:
The first is called Internationalization (oftern abreviated I18n), and it involves all the skills necessary to write an application so it is neutral to cultural biases. All Strings in resource files, all messages composed with MessageFormetters, all Icons loaded from the filesystem and with a naming convention so they can be substituted in the future, and managing the layout of windows so that they 'grow' nicely when a 4 letter word gets subsituted by a 4 word phrase in another language.
The second is called 'Localization', (L10N) and needs to occur for each Locale you are planning to customize your application for. This is best done by native language speakers who ALSO speak the language of the developers or domain experts. If the Internationalization was done right, then it just involves editing 'configuration', and no real coding.
There scary thing is, there are people out there that will read a statement like that and consider it a glorious insight. Those are the people that would end up paying $500 to go to an all-day event at a hotel to hear a motivational speaker. I think the average slashdot reader is a little smarter than that, but these people do exist.
I'm not making any comment on the rest of the book. As a software cfaftsman, I might be interested in actually reading it.
I'm late posting to this party, but I'll post anyway on the hopes that this whole conversation will get the attention of someone at IBM and my thoughts might influence someone of importance.
Open Sourcing the Rational suite of products makes perfect sense. Why?
1) IBM is a consulting company. See all those ads lately? the want to sell people-time, not product. Give away the product, and you will have even more people that need/want help to use it.
2) IBM now 'owns' the Rational Unified Process. Release the tools and wallpaper the earth with information about RUP, and everyone interested in Software Process Improvement will naturally adopt the stuff. More doors open for consulting, and IBM gains mindshare as 'the people to talk to for serious software engineering.
3) The open source community seriously lacks tools in this area. Releasing them would be a huge splash, gaining mindshare and free advertising, which is exactly what a large consulting company wants.
4) You already have eclipse... turn the stuff into eclipse plug-ins! The killer IDE can become the killer cradle-to-grave tool for software lifecycle management... it would kick the pants off Togethersoft.
If you agree, please mod this post up. Maybe someone with a clue at IBM will agree.
Of course, you could also write a program that just printed out "3.141592654" and then just started generating random numbers...
Run the program, and impress your friends. Tell them you wrote a simulation of the toothpick technique described on slashdot... just don't release the source.
When I was in college, I wrote a distibuted computing project that drew detailed plot of the Mandelbrot Beetle. I fantasized that if I could zoom in on JUST the right spot, I'd see "God was here" as if in graffiti. Wouldn't that just be kick ass?
I work on a laptop most of the time, on battery power a lot. Every time my fan kicks in when I'm on battery, I think to myself how absurd this is... I am using up a significant percentage of my stored electrons to generate heat I don't want... I then use up a significant percentage of my stored electrons running fans to make thast heat go away.
Seems to me that even a small improvement in thermal efficiency of the processor would reduce TWO reasons to consume my precious battery power. Anything short of this seems like a hack - a stopgap solution until we get better thermal efficiency at the source of the problem.
So, they know an approximate mass, they can guestimate how fast it is moving, and from the location of the Earth at that time, they know a relative position in the solar system.
Is this thing moving at an 'escape' velocity from our solar system? Is it in orbit around the sun like a comet? Can we calculate that orbit and see if it might hit us again?
If these things are so common that they found 2 events in 3 years worth of data, why don't we see buildings occasionally cruble as if hit by a missile?
Except I will look to xml.openoffice.org to write some xslt transformations to take Microsoft office documents and liberate them once and for all.
Once I can move my team of 20 people to open office with no real worries or complaints about 'interchanging' files with lusers still using Microsoft, I will.
BUT, have you ever looked at an HTML file generated by Microsoft word? It is a GREAT example of how they can pollute a standard into something unreadable.
I suspect that they will copyright or otherwise lock up their DTD/Schema, and try to lash out at anyone that uses them in other than 'approved' ways.
The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave thomas and Andy Hunt. While not exactly 'theory of application design' is an EXCELLENT book about being a software engineering practicioner.
I dunno about you, but I *wish* it took me almost two hours to transmit my DNA!
The 9 months isn't the transmission... it's the time it takes to interpret it. I believe the average male 'transmits' in something like 7 minutes.
-db
I also believe that the cooling rock is acting as an insulator itself... Just as it can be warm inside of an igloo.
The rock in immediate contact with the leaves transfers its heat into the leaves and the chicken, but that heat is not enough to cook it quickly. Tha t'cooler' layer of the rock serves as an insulator for the chicken. The rock on the outside is still giving up heat to the air (more slowly did to the chicken inside), so it still feels hot.
-db
Covad,
I live in the SHADOW of the AOL building in Loudoun County, VA. My town is filled with AOL Millionaires renovating 100 year old houses.
I HAVE NO BANDWIDTH! I am paying $150 a month for an ISDN line and a stitic IP address... WHAT DO YOU THINK I'D BE WILLING TO PAY FOR a 384k DSL?
According to the rumor mill around here, the phone company's CO has a big empty room, built especially for you, just waiting for you to come in and drop all your nice equipment to give the area various DSL flavors... But you haven't done anything! Originally, people were saying you couldn't handle the capacity of installs you'd get here, with all this pent up demand. Then, people were saying you couldn't AFFORD to do anything...
Tell you what... Take some of that $245 million in CASH, and GET THE EQUIPMENT IN HERE. Hire a few people to do some installs and support the area, and guess what? THAT IS HOW BUSINESSES FIND CUSTOMERS AND MAKE MONEY! THAT IS THE PATH TO PROFITABILITY! Find the customers willing to pay out the ASS for your service, and MAKE THEM HAPPY!
Sincerely,
someone who has your money in his pocket, and all you need to do to get it is give me some frelling bandwidth!
We are using JBoss and Tomcat in a production system, deployed in the government offices of 9 different governments.
For more information, see www.trackernet.org
A guy I know had a wireless network appear in his building one day... and it wasn't his... it belonged to another company in the same building.
He periodically sent pages to their printer that said in big letters, "The wireless network is insecure! Please secure your wireless network!"
After a couple of weeks, it went away.
Before we got married, my wife worked on 'jewlers row' in Philadelphia, grading diamonds for a living. She knew all the politics, all the fake costs, and considers DeBeers more evil than I do Microsoft.
When we got engaged, she designed a platinum ring with a blue saphire as the main stone.
She is ecstatic with it, because EVERY time she wears it out (maybe 2-3 times a month) SOMEONE comments about how pretty and unusual it is.