Who said I got to work in PL/I? That's strictly for the vendor's programmers. They won't let us even see the source code on that. Or rather, if we get the source code, they drop support, whether we actually modify that source or not. Instead, I'm stuck with their crippled bastard child report generator language. If you take the worst parts of COBOL, RPG, PL/I and assembly, throw them all together, you get this language. Unfortunately, senior management (especially the CEO) is in love with the vendor, so there's no way it's goin' away (I've even been told not to criticize the system outside of the IT department... it's bad politically.)
Cache? You don't mean the "post-relational" database from Intersystems, do you? 'Cause back before I realized I was stuck with this piece of junk system, I was considering a different system based on that.
Bah. Nobody knows the credit union's software well enough. Not even the developers who wrote the damn thing. Half the time when I call support, they aren't even sure which part of the system I'm talking about. (I work at a credit union, maintaining their core financial system) The damn thing's written in PL/I, fer chrissakes! I'm impressed that the system keeps running.
But the point I was trying to make is that the problem isn't necessarily the engineers. It's the huge monolithic bureaucracies that the auto companies, especially the Big Three, have become. Their organizations have become so top-heavy that change is nearly impossible. Sure, innovations do come out of Detroit, but very slowly.
The problem isn't stupid automobile engineers... it's stupid management types who relegate their engineers to the status of secretaries. I've got a friend who spent 5 years at Carnegie Mellon to get a degree in mechanical engineering because he wanted to design cars. He got a job at Ford, and is quitting, going back to school for his MBA and going to start a restaurant. Why? Because since he's been at Ford, he hasn't been anywhere near designing a car.. he just looks at specs from vendors and approves them or disapproves them.
OK... I'll admit... that does sound very easy. Have you checked out Axis, Apache's rewrite of their original SOAP code? You get the same type of easy deployment. You don't even have to compile:) Axis will also autogenerate the WSDL in the same way ASP.NET does.
The only reason I haven't mentioned it before is because I haven't used it, primarily because it was still not feature complete when I started my project, and the features that were missing were vital to it.
Did I mention that most of that day was spent reading how to do it and learning the tools (Ant to autobuild the war, mostly) Considering this project was the first I've ever written in Java and the first I've ever done SOAP for, I think a day is pretty good. Especially when you consider the environment at our office:) One day of work is about 2 hours actual coding once you factor in all the interruptions:)
Re:Biggest announcement? Ha!
on
.NET for Apache
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· Score: 1
Do consumers really want "Web Services"?
No, probably not, because they have no idea what they are. But imagine this (some ideas I've been kicking around in my head at work):
A bill-payment service where not only can you pay your bills, but your bills are delivered directly to you electronically... view, review, click and pay...
Integrating with your vendors' systems so that they bill you through their system, which then transmits the invoice to your system, where it is processed and an electronic transfer is set up automatically, just waiting for accounting to approve it.
Those are just two ideas off the top of my head (obviously, I work at a financial institution:)... but these are what real web services are. It's not the consumer space where web services will shine... but in the B2B space.
Re:SOAP, WDSL, etc.
on
.NET for Apache
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not difficult at all to do SOAP in Apache (well, Tomcat actually:) with Java... you just write your service class and then write a deployment descriptor, then throw the whole thing in a WAR and drop it in the webservices directory. I had a simple stub up and running in about a day... and I was still teaching myself Java at the time. All I needed to do was flesh out the business logic and it was all ready to go. Of course, I've since decided my architecture was crap and thrown the whole thing out because it turns out I didn't need SOAP to begin with, but it ain't hard to do... I could very quickly build a SOAP front-end to the new code.
Now, I did have the advantage that my service was not meant to be a public service--it's a simple interface between us and one of our vendors--so I didn't bother figuring out how to do the WSDL.
Um, did you read the source? Or did you just open it up in IE? Because the source is clean (though not prettily formatted:), pure, 100% XML. In fact, there's only one namespace declaration in the entire thing (XLink, which they use to embed hyperlinks between various parts of the documents). All in all, this is some of the cleanest XML I've ever seen (including XML I've written myself by hand:)
But if you opened it up in IE, IE applies a stylesheet to all xml documents which gives you a nice collapsible view of the document tree (which is often easier to read than the source:)
When was your friend in Japan? Banks generally give an average rate for the day, unless you happen to be a corporate investor.
Actually (and I work at a financial institution) it is common for exchange rates to change several times a day now, since you can get instant updates on the money markets. We had a member recently who was going to wire $40,000 to Australia. Because of the size of the transfer, he had to sign for it in person. We had to wait for him to come in before we could even fill out the paperwork, so that we could be sure that when we told him his wire would arrive as X Australian dollars, that it would indeed be transmitted at that rate, as the institution that holds our foriegn currency clearance accounts updates the rates several times a day. Or something like that... I'm a programmer, not an accountant:)
A niche market is no guarantee for quality. Take, for example, the niche market of credit union financial software. I know of at least one vendor, who shall remain nameless, whose software is a piece of total crap. The client crashes regularly, often due to the user clicking or typing too quickly for it to keep up with its screen-scraped telnet underbelly, the security model is a joke, and, even though it runs on AIX, it is so poorly documented, that even if you do have a competent Unix admin, you can't really touch anything because you don't know if you'll break it (and most of the time neither does the vendor support personnel).
And this is software meant to handle, at least in the case of my organization, over 30 million transactions a month and over $180 million in assets (ok, not huge compared to a multinational corporation or bank, but not too shabby either). Now, why do people still use it? Because credit union IT staff (at least the ones using this particular system) are among the most clueless in the industry (probably because the pay scale sucks).
So, I have to agree with the sentiment that to get a high-quality product you have to have a high-quality consumer. If the consumer is too stupid to realize something is wrong, then the vendors have no reason to push themselves to fix the problems.
If there's one thing gov't can do, it's spec the hell out of something. I don't think this would be a problem if they addressed it in earnest.
They sure can... ever read the file specs for ACH (Automated Clearing House... basically the way the Fed moves money around)? They're so precise as to be unreadable... of course what do you expect from a file spec written by lawyers and accountants:)
Of course, Flash Gordon (I'm assuming you're talking about the movie, not the comic) was released _after_ Star Wars... and watch what you call old, you'll make me feel my age:)
Oh, and the force was kinda there... but only Ming had it.
Yes he should. But he's not only responsible for representing the conscious agenda of his constituents, but also for seeking solutions to the problems they either do not have the details to solve or simply have not forseen. IOW, his job is fulfill the needs his constituents don't know they have.
So, basically what you're saying is that if you can't read the source, you can't use OSS? Or are you saying that if you want to actually _do_ something with OSS, rather than just play with it and point and say "oooh... cool," you shouldn't use OSS? Or are you saying 99% of businesses and government agencies are not allowed to have solutions customized directly to their specific needs?
My friend, I think you may be the one who's 100% wrong... software's purpose is to be used. There is no point in writing it otherwise. And requiring anyone who can't write their own software to pay exorbitant fees for restrictive licenses that lock them into a particular vendor's products is not only arrogant, it's cruel.
Stratfor is an excellent source of information. It was one of the first places I went, after slashdot of course:), on the 11th. They had updated analyses roughly every hour to two hours. And their analyses go very in depth... some of it's really scary stuff. These guys _really_ know what they're doing. I just wish I could afford the subscription... I used to have a full membership back around when they launched and it was free... unfortunately I can't justify the cost to get it back. I miss it:(
But they're already working on building a Beowulf cluster of these. Though that sounds really wierd, now that I think about it... a Beowulf cluster of clusters... especially since each node in the cluster has 4 processors itself. Wow. Truly fractal computing.
Just because she played a lesbian doesn't make her so. 'Cause I seem to recall a Red Shoe Diaries episode (where strangely enough she again played a cop... she seems to specialize in security roles, I guess) where she basically kidnaps her (male) squash partner and fucks his brains out all night then lets him go... And believe me, she sure seemed to be enjoying those scenes:)
1) They (the Afghanis) do fight "American Style." While we many not have taught them their original style of desert warfare, we brought them up to date on how to use modern weaponry with guerilla tactics. Remember, we trained most of the folks who are now our enemies...
2) Modern (post-Vietnam) American military doctrine has been evolving more and more towards exactly this type of operation. Read the USMC's Warfighting and you'll see that the emphasis has shifted from the old attrition strategies which have dominated Western military thought since at least WWI (I'd say further back, but IANAE) towards a doctrine based on small, fast, and highly mobile units. This is why Powell said "we don't do mountains." In a mountainous environment you sacrifice speed and mobility, as you can no longer really use mechanized forces.
But, other than that, you're exactly right. Trying to fight terrorists with a strategy of attrition is doomed to failure. The only way to win a guerilla war is to become a guerilla.
Since when is Christianity a religious minority in the US? Granted, I'm not defending or condoning in anyway the censorship of the speech, but last I checked, Christianity was the majority religion in the US...
That said, Christians have been censoring non-Christians for centuries, so I don't think they have much room to complain (right, yes, but the hypocrisy bell chimes loudly)
Now I shall return to my constant refreshes to check for new posts.
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Who said I got to work in PL/I? That's strictly for the vendor's programmers. They won't let us even see the source code on that. Or rather, if we get the source code, they drop support, whether we actually modify that source or not. Instead, I'm stuck with their crippled bastard child report generator language. If you take the worst parts of COBOL, RPG, PL/I and assembly, throw them all together, you get this language. Unfortunately, senior management (especially the CEO) is in love with the vendor, so there's no way it's goin' away (I've even been told not to criticize the system outside of the IT department... it's bad politically.)
Cache? You don't mean the "post-relational" database from Intersystems, do you? 'Cause back before I realized I was stuck with this piece of junk system, I was considering a different system based on that.
Bah. Nobody knows the credit union's software well enough. Not even the developers who wrote the damn thing. Half the time when I call support, they aren't even sure which part of the system I'm talking about. (I work at a credit union, maintaining their core financial system) The damn thing's written in PL/I, fer chrissakes! I'm impressed that the system keeps running.
You may be right.
But the point I was trying to make is that the problem isn't necessarily the engineers. It's the huge monolithic bureaucracies that the auto companies, especially the Big Three, have become. Their organizations have become so top-heavy that change is nearly impossible. Sure, innovations do come out of Detroit, but very slowly.
The problem isn't stupid automobile engineers... it's stupid management types who relegate their engineers to the status of secretaries. I've got a friend who spent 5 years at Carnegie Mellon to get a degree in mechanical engineering because he wanted to design cars. He got a job at Ford, and is quitting, going back to school for his MBA and going to start a restaurant. Why? Because since he's been at Ford, he hasn't been anywhere near designing a car.. he just looks at specs from vendors and approves them or disapproves them.
OK... I'll admit... that does sound very easy. Have you checked out Axis, Apache's rewrite of their original SOAP code? You get the same type of easy deployment. You don't even have to compile:) Axis will also autogenerate the WSDL in the same way ASP.NET does.
The only reason I haven't mentioned it before is because I haven't used it, primarily because it was still not feature complete when I started my project, and the features that were missing were vital to it.
Did I mention that most of that day was spent reading how to do it and learning the tools (Ant to autobuild the war, mostly) Considering this project was the first I've ever written in Java and the first I've ever done SOAP for, I think a day is pretty good. Especially when you consider the environment at our office:) One day of work is about 2 hours actual coding once you factor in all the interruptions:)
Do consumers really want "Web Services"?
No, probably not, because they have no idea what they are. But imagine this (some ideas I've been kicking around in my head at work):
Those are just two ideas off the top of my head (obviously, I work at a financial institution:)... but these are what real web services are. It's not the consumer space where web services will shine... but in the B2B space.
It's not difficult at all to do SOAP in Apache (well, Tomcat actually:) with Java... you just write your service class and then write a deployment descriptor, then throw the whole thing in a WAR and drop it in the webservices directory. I had a simple stub up and running in about a day... and I was still teaching myself Java at the time. All I needed to do was flesh out the business logic and it was all ready to go. Of course, I've since decided my architecture was crap and thrown the whole thing out because it turns out I didn't need SOAP to begin with, but it ain't hard to do... I could very quickly build a SOAP front-end to the new code.
Now, I did have the advantage that my service was not meant to be a public service--it's a simple interface between us and one of our vendors--so I didn't bother figuring out how to do the WSDL.
Especially fast 18 year old girls....
Um, did you read the source? Or did you just open it up in IE? Because the source is clean (though not prettily formatted:), pure, 100% XML. In fact, there's only one namespace declaration in the entire thing (XLink, which they use to embed hyperlinks between various parts of the documents). All in all, this is some of the cleanest XML I've ever seen (including XML I've written myself by hand:)
But if you opened it up in IE, IE applies a stylesheet to all xml documents which gives you a nice collapsible view of the document tree (which is often easier to read than the source:)
When was your friend in Japan? Banks generally give an average rate for the day, unless you happen to be a corporate investor.
Actually (and I work at a financial institution) it is common for exchange rates to change several times a day now, since you can get instant updates on the money markets. We had a member recently who was going to wire $40,000 to Australia. Because of the size of the transfer, he had to sign for it in person. We had to wait for him to come in before we could even fill out the paperwork, so that we could be sure that when we told him his wire would arrive as X Australian dollars, that it would indeed be transmitted at that rate, as the institution that holds our foriegn currency clearance accounts updates the rates several times a day. Or something like that... I'm a programmer, not an accountant:)
Absolutely!
A niche market is no guarantee for quality. Take, for example, the niche market of credit union financial software. I know of at least one vendor, who shall remain nameless, whose software is a piece of total crap. The client crashes regularly, often due to the user clicking or typing too quickly for it to keep up with its screen-scraped telnet underbelly, the security model is a joke, and, even though it runs on AIX, it is so poorly documented, that even if you do have a competent Unix admin, you can't really touch anything because you don't know if you'll break it (and most of the time neither does the vendor support personnel).
And this is software meant to handle, at least in the case of my organization, over 30 million transactions a month and over $180 million in assets (ok, not huge compared to a multinational corporation or bank, but not too shabby either). Now, why do people still use it? Because credit union IT staff (at least the ones using this particular system) are among the most clueless in the industry (probably because the pay scale sucks).
So, I have to agree with the sentiment that to get a high-quality product you have to have a high-quality consumer. If the consumer is too stupid to realize something is wrong, then the vendors have no reason to push themselves to fix the problems.
They sure can... ever read the file specs for ACH (Automated Clearing House... basically the way the Fed moves money around)? They're so precise as to be unreadable... of course what do you expect from a file spec written by lawyers and accountants:)
Hmmm... sounds like just about every director I've ever worked with:) Though some were even more vague and flak-errr, spiritual.
You say that like losing Friends would be a bad thing...
Of course, Flash Gordon (I'm assuming you're talking about the movie, not the comic) was released _after_ Star Wars... and watch what you call old, you'll make me feel my age:)
Oh, and the force was kinda there... but only Ming had it.
Yes he should. But he's not only responsible for representing the conscious agenda of his constituents, but also for seeking solutions to the problems they either do not have the details to solve or simply have not forseen. IOW, his job is fulfill the needs his constituents don't know they have.
So, basically what you're saying is that if you can't read the source, you can't use OSS? Or are you saying that if you want to actually _do_ something with OSS, rather than just play with it and point and say "oooh... cool," you shouldn't use OSS? Or are you saying 99% of businesses and government agencies are not allowed to have solutions customized directly to their specific needs?
My friend, I think you may be the one who's 100% wrong... software's purpose is to be used. There is no point in writing it otherwise. And requiring anyone who can't write their own software to pay exorbitant fees for restrictive licenses that lock them into a particular vendor's products is not only arrogant, it's cruel.
Stratfor is an excellent source of information. It was one of the first places I went, after slashdot of course:), on the 11th. They had updated analyses roughly every hour to two hours. And their analyses go very in depth... some of it's really scary stuff. These guys _really_ know what they're doing. I just wish I could afford the subscription... I used to have a full membership back around when they launched and it was free... unfortunately I can't justify the cost to get it back. I miss it :(
But they're already working on building a Beowulf cluster of these. Though that sounds really wierd, now that I think about it... a Beowulf cluster of clusters... especially since each node in the cluster has 4 processors itself. Wow. Truly fractal computing.
Just because she played a lesbian doesn't make her so. 'Cause I seem to recall a Red Shoe Diaries episode (where strangely enough she again played a cop... she seems to specialize in security roles, I guess) where she basically kidnaps her (male) squash partner and fucks his brains out all night then lets him go... And believe me, she sure seemed to be enjoying those scenes:)
1) They (the Afghanis) do fight "American Style." While we many not have taught them their original style of desert warfare, we brought them up to date on how to use modern weaponry with guerilla tactics. Remember, we trained most of the folks who are now our enemies...
2) Modern (post-Vietnam) American military doctrine has been evolving more and more towards exactly this type of operation. Read the USMC's Warfighting and you'll see that the emphasis has shifted from the old attrition strategies which have dominated Western military thought since at least WWI (I'd say further back, but IANAE) towards a doctrine based on small, fast, and highly mobile units. This is why Powell said "we don't do mountains." In a mountainous environment you sacrifice speed and mobility, as you can no longer really use mechanized forces.
But, other than that, you're exactly right. Trying to fight terrorists with a strategy of attrition is doomed to failure. The only way to win a guerilla war is to become a guerilla.
That said, Christians have been censoring non-Christians for centuries, so I don't think they have much room to complain (right, yes, but the hypocrisy bell chimes loudly)
Now I shall return to my constant refreshes to check for new posts.
In Detroit, the tunnel to Canada is closed, but the bridges are still open...