Yes, I do know what the term "computer science" means-- do you? The point of this article is that AJAX applications break the semantic model of the web-- it gets a lot harder to link meaning from that page into a web of knowledge-- so Adobe is making some effort to open up their implementation to indexing, which helps in some small ways. The W3C is currently trying to find and standardize ways to build rich applications that fit with Berners-Lee's original model. The web is a classic CS problem as it mixes mathematics and linguistics, so if you don't see it you either know nothing about CS, or you did not pay attention in your classes.
Please don't take that too seriously; as I'm sure you've seen us EEs love to kid CS people and vice versa.:)
To be fair to computer scientists, in my experience it is a rare CS who looks down his nose at a traditional engineer. But don't worry, I don't really have a problem with what engineers think about computer scientists, because computer science has an effect on everything that we do in modern society, just as traditional engineering does. The fruits of computer science have made modern engineering tools possible, made the web possible, online banking and buying, and so on.
I remember when I heard that UPS hired a CS to optimize their driving routes, thus saving millions of dollars in fuel costs-- that's when I said to myself: this field is cool! That may not be the kind of thing you daydream about, but hey, I'm a geek, and I'm well past the age where I have to apologize for it.
If you're a computer scientist, the difference between physical, logical, and semantic relationships is very important. Network = physical relationship; Internet = logical relationship; The Web = semantic relationship. And like any dichotomy, there are places where these distinctions are inadequate-- that's where the science part comes in-- figuring out how to make our conceptualization match the real world.
This reminds me of a quote:
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. -- Alfred North Whitehead
If you don't care about these distinctions, don't be a computer scientist. Those of us who care about making computation easier, faster, and more useful should pay attention. Sometimes the niggling little details you don't care about are the key to understanding all of it.
I think that means that designers and testers should be the same thing-- i.e., that every designer should have a hand in testing. It keeps design grounded in reality. I often see designs that have a poor understanding of structural or business constraints. This is poor design, and some simple prototyping (where prototyping is a stage where the design-build-test iteration is tightly bound) would prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Writing software is not like manufacturing widgets-- the QA role and the design-of-the-manufacturing-plant role are naturally separated there. Copying in the digital realm is trivial, so "manufacturing" is an automatic process-- the computer does it. That means that all software development is design. Thus, QA in software is finding defects in design-- no QA tester spends their time inspecting the bits on a CD; that is an automated process handled by the computer. All feedback from QA must affect the logical structure of a program-- it gets translated into actual code by a programmer. Now some of these design problems are simple: typos, or mistakes about the way to call a function, etc., and others are deep changes to the structure of the program. When you separate the two roles, you now have a layer of abstraction between them-- I can see the appeal of wanting to do this, because this division of labor frees the programmer from having to think about it. But it also introduces bugs, because the programmer does not constantly have to test the validity of their work. I understand that this separation happens in the real world, but I think it is based on the mistaken belief that manufacturing software is the same as manufacturing widgets.
BTW, like real engineering, a lot of software engineering is an attempt to resolve the production of buggy software at the programmer level. Much of that involves bringing the two roles of testing and design closer together. Test suites do this. Extreme programming does this by checking your logic against another person. Functional languages do this by strictly enforcing certain logical structure.
When I was in high school, my father worked at BBN, which was one of the early privatized ISPs. There were some really cool things going on then-- they had networked battlefield simulators for military training use that operated in realtime across the Internet. They even once had students at various DOD schools participate in an "online concert" where each performer was at a different school, and it worked pretty well, and we're talking about the early-1990's here! Anyway, BBN's ISP division was known as "BBN Planet", a network that was growing quickly-- employees used to say, jokingly, that BBN's motto was "Today the planet, tomorrow the world!"
I am a database programmer, and I don't understand the pain either. Now, it may not be set up the way I imagine, but why can't each profile simply be treated like a separate account by most of the algorithms? Except that, in the "responsible account" field, you have the main profile. Accounts that do not have profiles simply point this field back to themselves (this is basic discrete math-- there's a set with a relation on itself). But I suppose if it were not set up this way, there could be some major pain-- in which case the correct procedure would be to refactor the code, and not to take a feature away from the customer.
Unless you're Donald Knuth, QA is essential-- no doubt. But it's not very exciting, at least when a project's programmers consider your work to be a bug reporting service. I think that's why the CS drek lands there. If QA people regularly had a hand in design, then I think the field would be quite different.
You will alter your style depending on your audience. Sometimes (e.g. with free software), you know others will be reading it, so you make things as clear as possible. I don't just mean commenting-- I mean, you define symbolic constants for readability, you make variable declaration explicit, you make your code less compact, you don't rely on side-effects, etc. On the other hand, if there is a small audience, or that audience's technical proficiency is known, and you need something working quickly, you just write something out quickly without worrying about how it looks. Perfect examples of where this happens is something like Perl, where you can write extremely terse code (Perl is very expressive), but which is very difficult to read, sometimes even for the guy who wrote it.
Keep the 4U and get a low-power mobo/CPU/chipset. I think you'll find that the 4U, while bulky, ensures that you will always have a very flexible setup.
At work, we go with SuperMicro 3U chassis and build out from there. Parts are very easy to come by, since, with the exception of the chassis itself, all parts are commodity items and very easy to replace.
Another alternative is Soekris + USB external drive. Very low power, although quite a bit more limited than the rackmount setup mentioned above.
I basically would never buy a pre-built integrated solution; I like having full control over the hardware.
I've read a few of your comments, and I can't tell if you're just trolling or if you actually believe the nonsense you're spewing here. Solar power looking good but being a waste of money? I think that the deluge of money being put into solar power right now argues against you, because generally speaking, if people invest in something, they expect a return. Now, obviously, solar plants aren't as sophisticated or efficient as current coal plant technology, but they do produce power, and the are becoming competitive price-per-watt. It's already cheaper than conventional power sources for hard-to-reach applications, like remote telecommunications, etc. But more importantly, it has been for nearly 30 years.
Besides, "waste of money" is a very subjective thing here. I personally don't consider something to be a waste if it is the responsible thing to do.
I don't understand all the hostility toward solar. There's no doubt-- it's pretty cool tech. We like cool tech here, right? You're like the people who kept saying "computers aren't for the masses" right up until they realized, Oh Shit!, the masses have computers now! Yeah, there are technical challenges to adding PV technology to our existing grid, but overcoming challenges is what humans excel at. We are being bombarded with solar energy! Wikipedia says that biomass alone absorbs 3 ZJ of energy per year. Solar power drives biological systems (our entire food chain!), atmospheric systems, oceanic systems, so-- are you kidding me? Why not try to capture that?!
If you read TFA you'll see that the TLDs will cost upwards of $100,000 and are subject to ICANN approval. Which is good, because my first thought was: is TLD-tasting the next scam? More TLDs are definitely going to make phishing harder to deal with short of some kind of additional out-of-band information (like... er... what SSL was supposed to provide).
Also, the problem domain in C *really* influences the style of code. And by style, I don't just mean do you write braces on the same line or next line, I mean:
Do you rely on the preprocessor for common constants and macros?
How many system facilities do you need to use?
Are you going to attempt an object-oriented approach?
Who else is reading your code?
What is the expected lifetime of the program?
The answers to these questions and many more can dramatically affect how a program in C is put together. I thought I was a pretty good C programmer until I recently started having to do some systems programming. It's like a completely different language now.
Since I am currently in the middle of drawing one (and yes, I'm kinda spacing out, reading/.), I would also argue that ER diagrams are useful. Just the drawing of them makes you think through some things that might never have occurred to you if you just started creating tables in a database.
Even if Sun as a corporate entity disappears, though, I'm sure that their influence will continue to be felt. Look at Netscape. Really, they only had two significant products (which came in one package): Navigator and JavaScript. Now, Netscape is no more, but Navigator lives on as Mozilla/Gecko and JavaScript as ECMAScript, and both of those technologies have been essential to the "2.0"ing of the web.
Sun created Java, which (love it or hate it) is still being taught as part of the core curriculum in many computer science programs. And SunOS/Solaris and its many associated technologies are being integrated into many places (PAM, DTrace, ZFS, and so on). If you have experience with any of Sun's technologies, you know they're not perfect, but they're damn well thought out, and they make many parts of your daily work easier.
I hope Sun weathers these changes-- they're one example of a company that saw a coming shift in the business of selling computers and software, and instead of lobbying the government to prop up their failing business model, instead changed their business model. There's plenty left for Sun to fix in their company-- e.g., have they opened up their hardware documentation yet? (we would probably buy Sun hardware if we could run other OSes, fully-supported on it). But it would be a shame to see such an innovator go the way of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc, etc, etc...
Too true. My 60-something-year-old aunt gets all bent out of shape when my 90-year-old grandmother has a drink, or, heaven forbid, peanut butter. The woman is 90! Let her enjoy what she has left, because from my perspective, she's not happy.
A guy named Guy Waterman climbed a local mountain during the winter a few years ago, stripped off his clothes, and let himself freeze to death. He apparently decided it was time to go. I know a lot of people were dismayed by his actions, but I've always thought-- that guy had balls. He decided that the quality of his life had diminished, and he faced death with dignity. I hope I can do the same.
I don't know about that one. Show me the figures. My impression is that obese adults have more health problems during their productive years than their healthy counterparts, and thus, are less productive (in aggregate). Furthermore, the span of their productive years is diminished by health problems. The number of health problems that are linked to high blood pressure and diabetes is just mind-blowing, and these lifestyle diseases are not easy or cheap to treat. But preventing them, in most cases, is very easy. I love my grandmother and watching the pain she goes through is difficult, but it is quite obvious that her near-lifelong disability (which recently resulted in having her leg amputated) is the result of poor diet and no exercise. It was preventable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I do know what the term "computer science" means-- do you? The point of this article is that AJAX applications break the semantic model of the web-- it gets a lot harder to link meaning from that page into a web of knowledge-- so Adobe is making some effort to open up their implementation to indexing, which helps in some small ways. The W3C is currently trying to find and standardize ways to build rich applications that fit with Berners-Lee's original model. The web is a classic CS problem as it mixes mathematics and linguistics, so if you don't see it you either know nothing about CS, or you did not pay attention in your classes.
Please don't take that too seriously; as I'm sure you've seen us EEs love to kid CS people and vice versa. :)
To be fair to computer scientists, in my experience it is a rare CS who looks down his nose at a traditional engineer. But don't worry, I don't really have a problem with what engineers think about computer scientists, because computer science has an effect on everything that we do in modern society, just as traditional engineering does. The fruits of computer science have made modern engineering tools possible, made the web possible, online banking and buying, and so on.
I remember when I heard that UPS hired a CS to optimize their driving routes, thus saving millions of dollars in fuel costs-- that's when I said to myself: this field is cool! That may not be the kind of thing you daydream about, but hey, I'm a geek, and I'm well past the age where I have to apologize for it.
This reminds me of a quote:
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
If you don't care about these distinctions, don't be a computer scientist. Those of us who care about making computation easier, faster, and more useful should pay attention. Sometimes the niggling little details you don't care about are the key to understanding all of it.
I think that means that designers and testers should be the same thing-- i.e., that every designer should have a hand in testing. It keeps design grounded in reality. I often see designs that have a poor understanding of structural or business constraints. This is poor design, and some simple prototyping (where prototyping is a stage where the design-build-test iteration is tightly bound) would prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Writing software is not like manufacturing widgets-- the QA role and the design-of-the-manufacturing-plant role are naturally separated there. Copying in the digital realm is trivial, so "manufacturing" is an automatic process-- the computer does it. That means that all software development is design. Thus, QA in software is finding defects in design-- no QA tester spends their time inspecting the bits on a CD; that is an automated process handled by the computer. All feedback from QA must affect the logical structure of a program-- it gets translated into actual code by a programmer. Now some of these design problems are simple: typos, or mistakes about the way to call a function, etc., and others are deep changes to the structure of the program. When you separate the two roles, you now have a layer of abstraction between them-- I can see the appeal of wanting to do this, because this division of labor frees the programmer from having to think about it. But it also introduces bugs, because the programmer does not constantly have to test the validity of their work. I understand that this separation happens in the real world, but I think it is based on the mistaken belief that manufacturing software is the same as manufacturing widgets.
BTW, like real engineering, a lot of software engineering is an attempt to resolve the production of buggy software at the programmer level. Much of that involves bringing the two roles of testing and design closer together. Test suites do this. Extreme programming does this by checking your logic against another person. Functional languages do this by strictly enforcing certain logical structure.
Wrong. Design is an iterative process, and testing is a part of that. Separating the two is a big part of why we have bad software.
When I was in high school, my father worked at BBN, which was one of the early privatized ISPs. There were some really cool things going on then-- they had networked battlefield simulators for military training use that operated in realtime across the Internet. They even once had students at various DOD schools participate in an "online concert" where each performer was at a different school, and it worked pretty well, and we're talking about the early-1990's here! Anyway, BBN's ISP division was known as "BBN Planet", a network that was growing quickly-- employees used to say, jokingly, that BBN's motto was "Today the planet, tomorrow the world!"
Er... WTF? I need a new glibc? I give up.
I am a database programmer, and I don't understand the pain either. Now, it may not be set up the way I imagine, but why can't each profile simply be treated like a separate account by most of the algorithms? Except that, in the "responsible account" field, you have the main profile. Accounts that do not have profiles simply point this field back to themselves (this is basic discrete math-- there's a set with a relation on itself). But I suppose if it were not set up this way, there could be some major pain-- in which case the correct procedure would be to refactor the code, and not to take a feature away from the customer.
Flash does not work on my cellphone or BSD laptop. So it's still not very accessible, even for the sighted folks. HTML, XHTML, and CSS work great.
Unless you're Donald Knuth, QA is essential-- no doubt. But it's not very exciting, at least when a project's programmers consider your work to be a bug reporting service. I think that's why the CS drek lands there. If QA people regularly had a hand in design, then I think the field would be quite different.
You will alter your style depending on your audience. Sometimes (e.g. with free software), you know others will be reading it, so you make things as clear as possible. I don't just mean commenting-- I mean, you define symbolic constants for readability, you make variable declaration explicit, you make your code less compact, you don't rely on side-effects, etc. On the other hand, if there is a small audience, or that audience's technical proficiency is known, and you need something working quickly, you just write something out quickly without worrying about how it looks. Perfect examples of where this happens is something like Perl, where you can write extremely terse code (Perl is very expressive), but which is very difficult to read, sometimes even for the guy who wrote it.
Keep the 4U and get a low-power mobo/CPU/chipset. I think you'll find that the 4U, while bulky, ensures that you will always have a very flexible setup.
At work, we go with SuperMicro 3U chassis and build out from there. Parts are very easy to come by, since, with the exception of the chassis itself, all parts are commodity items and very easy to replace.
Another alternative is Soekris + USB external drive. Very low power, although quite a bit more limited than the rackmount setup mentioned above.
I basically would never buy a pre-built integrated solution; I like having full control over the hardware.
Read for fuck's sake. "for hard-to-reach applications". What's so hard about that?
I've read a few of your comments, and I can't tell if you're just trolling or if you actually believe the nonsense you're spewing here. Solar power looking good but being a waste of money? I think that the deluge of money being put into solar power right now argues against you, because generally speaking, if people invest in something, they expect a return. Now, obviously, solar plants aren't as sophisticated or efficient as current coal plant technology, but they do produce power, and the are becoming competitive price-per-watt. It's already cheaper than conventional power sources for hard-to-reach applications, like remote telecommunications, etc. But more importantly, it has been for nearly 30 years.
Besides, "waste of money" is a very subjective thing here. I personally don't consider something to be a waste if it is the responsible thing to do.
I don't understand all the hostility toward solar. There's no doubt-- it's pretty cool tech. We like cool tech here, right? You're like the people who kept saying "computers aren't for the masses" right up until they realized, Oh Shit!, the masses have computers now! Yeah, there are technical challenges to adding PV technology to our existing grid, but overcoming challenges is what humans excel at. We are being bombarded with solar energy! Wikipedia says that biomass alone absorbs 3 ZJ of energy per year. Solar power drives biological systems (our entire food chain!), atmospheric systems, oceanic systems, so-- are you kidding me? Why not try to capture that?!
- Do you rely on the preprocessor for common constants and macros?
- How many system facilities do you need to use?
- Are you going to attempt an object-oriented approach?
- Who else is reading your code?
- What is the expected lifetime of the program?
The answers to these questions and many more can dramatically affect how a program in C is put together. I thought I was a pretty good C programmer until I recently started having to do some systems programming. It's like a completely different language now.Since I am currently in the middle of drawing one (and yes, I'm kinda spacing out, reading /.), I would also argue that ER diagrams are useful. Just the drawing of them makes you think through some things that might never have occurred to you if you just started creating tables in a database.
Does the user trust the CA? That's all it boils down to.
Even if Sun as a corporate entity disappears, though, I'm sure that their influence will continue to be felt. Look at Netscape. Really, they only had two significant products (which came in one package): Navigator and JavaScript. Now, Netscape is no more, but Navigator lives on as Mozilla/Gecko and JavaScript as ECMAScript, and both of those technologies have been essential to the "2.0"ing of the web.
Sun created Java, which (love it or hate it) is still being taught as part of the core curriculum in many computer science programs. And SunOS/Solaris and its many associated technologies are being integrated into many places (PAM, DTrace, ZFS, and so on). If you have experience with any of Sun's technologies, you know they're not perfect, but they're damn well thought out, and they make many parts of your daily work easier.
I hope Sun weathers these changes-- they're one example of a company that saw a coming shift in the business of selling computers and software, and instead of lobbying the government to prop up their failing business model, instead changed their business model. There's plenty left for Sun to fix in their company-- e.g., have they opened up their hardware documentation yet? (we would probably buy Sun hardware if we could run other OSes, fully-supported on it). But it would be a shame to see such an innovator go the way of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc, etc, etc...
To reply to myself: I stand corrected.
Too true. My 60-something-year-old aunt gets all bent out of shape when my 90-year-old grandmother has a drink, or, heaven forbid, peanut butter. The woman is 90! Let her enjoy what she has left, because from my perspective, she's not happy.
A guy named Guy Waterman climbed a local mountain during the winter a few years ago, stripped off his clothes, and let himself freeze to death. He apparently decided it was time to go. I know a lot of people were dismayed by his actions, but I've always thought-- that guy had balls. He decided that the quality of his life had diminished, and he faced death with dignity. I hope I can do the same.
There already is one: % body fat.
If you live in Massachusetts, you do not have that choice.
I don't know about that one. Show me the figures. My impression is that obese adults have more health problems during their productive years than their healthy counterparts, and thus, are less productive (in aggregate). Furthermore, the span of their productive years is diminished by health problems. The number of health problems that are linked to high blood pressure and diabetes is just mind-blowing, and these lifestyle diseases are not easy or cheap to treat. But preventing them, in most cases, is very easy. I love my grandmother and watching the pain she goes through is difficult, but it is quite obvious that her near-lifelong disability (which recently resulted in having her leg amputated) is the result of poor diet and no exercise. It was preventable.
Important difference: you can do something about your lifestyle. You cannot do anything (yet) about your genes.