Who ever heard of an end-of-line character on a
mainframe? Everything was always fixed length, with the length in the DCB, or variable length, with a length prefix, at least back when I used them. There was a "record mark" character, but that was used back on the 1401's, back in ancient times.
First, Ada was not a big success because the defense contractors didn't like being told what to do. Contractors for most DOD projects that should have used Ada applied for and got waivers from the Ada mandate during the years that Ada was mandated. Some DOD projects in Ada were pretty good successes, and it was reasonably popular with European banks and other out of the US software engineering organizations that delivered pretty good products. But Ada never gained the market share or critical mass that might have led to attractive commercial offerings of Ada development kits because the defense contractors opted out in favor of the status quo.
Second, there is one big difference between Ada and java -- Ada is designed to be useful for hard realtime applications. The garbage collection in the JVM makes java unsuitable for applications that can't stand a little interruption of processing now and again.
Third, Ada is designed for very high reliability and very long lifecycle projects. Stuff like programs to control defense hardware that is going to stay in use just about forever, be maintainable forever, and should never fail. For example, the B-52's appeared in the 1950's and will likely still be flying in the 2020's, and newer hardware may be expected to last just as long. These are very extraordinary requirements compared to what most software is supposed to do, and Ada is not too bad at addressing them. In this domain, that's not over-engineering. How is anyone supposed to maintain twenty or thirty years worth of Windows or java code when there is a new version of Windows or java every couple of years?
Software that meets its requirements is an engineering success. Software that makes users want an improved version every 1-2 years is a commercial success. "COTS" (Commercial off-the-shelf) is the currently operative buzzword in the DoD.
It is not always a very powerful design that gives the users views of the data in the system. It may be much more usable to them to match the UI to the tasks that are performed rather than to the ERD of the system. OTOH, if you don't know very much about how the users will work, or if you will have a variety of users who will organize their work in various ways that you don't know much about, then you are better off giving them the data views than giving them badly-designed tasks. If you think that you know the tasks but aren't sure, then give them both the tasks that you think they can use and the atomic operations on the data when they know better than you.
Look at the works of Michael Jackson, who used to be well-known as the source of 'Jackson Structured Programming' and has more recently looked at workflow issues. With JSP, he explained how there is usually a clash in data structure between input and output, and how the job of programming was to resolve the structure clashes. In the UI case, the clash is between the units of human work that users bring to the machine and the transactions that the computer knows how to process. Use the machine to resolve the clashes; don't make the user do it.
... is to be able to develop an app once, then sell it as single-user standalone, or multi-user with browser-like interface to run on the customer's server, or rent it as a web app on the developer's server, or rent it as a web service on the developer's server -- while maintaining one set of code, not four.
How close is this Mozilla thing to supporting that?
One of the first nearly-personal computers, the IBM System 3, model 6, which booted up into a Basic (or RPG II), console was built like a desk. This thing came out in the spring of 1971. It had 16k of real memory, 48k of virtual memory, mountable disks, optional VDT, builtin 100 CPS dot-matrix printer right in the middle of the desk, card reader, card punch, and as much free desktop space as most computer geeks have today, etc.
It's not visible. You have to use a detector and
count rays. But it is very surprising. It has
two pieces of material that emit and absorb gamma
rays of a certain wavelength. You can show that
one piece of the material absorbs rays emitted by the other. But introduce a slight relative motion
between the two pieces, maybe 1 cm/sec or so, and
the absorbtion doesn't work anymore. It's too
selective, and the change in energy from the trivial relative motion puts the rays out of the
energy range that is absorbed.
The demonstration at the equator, as shown on BBC, that demonstrates how the direction of rotation of water going down a drain reverses on account of moving a couple of hundred feet across the line was also amazing. But it was not genuine. It's bunko artists who are quite skilled. Lots of experiments like that one.
A torsion pendulum that can demonstrate the
gravitational force from movable masses would also be a great demo.
They claim "up to 94 percent reliable". (You get those emails that say "earn up to $300/hour stuffing envelopes at home"?). "Up to" is a weasel word, just like "arguably", eg it ain't gonna happen.
But, even if it is 94%, if you've got a system that runs around 100 users, then 94% equals approximately 1 million mistakes per year. Where does the budget come from to timely track down 1 million false alarms annually? How is any analyst going to seriously follow every machine-generated warning when 99.99% of the machine-generated warnings are spurious?
Let us now return to reality, which is already in progress.
Jack should just about be a household name. When Apollo 13 went berserk, NASA dusted off some calculations of trajectories that he had previously done (he was no longer working for NASA) and used one of them to bring the astronauts back.
Why is so much of the 'reporting' on and even ratings of and published recommendations of tech products based on what the maker says the product will do (ie feature lists) and so little based on actual performance (ie quality)? After buying a few highly-rated products way too buggy to use, why would anyone want to pay any attention to the press anymore?
The machines are meant to ensure that costly post-Sept. 11 security at Canada's airports is focused on "people we don't know instead of those that we trust," she added.
People that I know I don't have do identify by computer; I know them. These security bozos are talking about people whom they pretend to know. Where does it say that people who fly often are less likely to do evil deeds? Anyone done a study to see how many times the 9/11 hijackers flew before 9/11 and how their flying habits compare to those of the average person? Even if the assumption that frequent flyers are somehow less likely to have been troublemakers in the past is true, how do we know that holds in the future? Shouldn't airplane safety be based on providing safety instead of on openly relying on arbitrary probability models that open gaping loopholes for attacks that 'no one expected'?
We are taking our eyes off the ball. For example, after 9/11 the airspace over Camp David, the White House, and Crawford, TX, was restricted by new rules. This week, we learn that the new rules are being broken very often. What is the government's reaction to the rule-breaking? To say that they will fine pilots or suspend licenses when the rules are broken. Do fines and license suspensions have anything to do with stopping anything resembling 9/11? What does this system accomplish? Why can't the government do anything to increase security instead of simply increasing rules?
The geriatric radio station here just jumped itself ahead about a decade. They are now playing nothing from the 30's, almost nothing from the 40's, little from the 50's, mostly 70's and early 80's. They've got selective amnesia. They don't play anything that shows how we could have done better. They play the pioneers of crass commercialism that make you think it was all meant to come out this way. Cultural mold -- the sordid remains of sordid attempts to make sordid money. But it's much better than all that stuff that the kids like nowadays. We knew it was over when Louis Armstrong recorded "What a Day for a Daydream".
BTW, the news is out now that rappers are taking payola to plug products in their raps and rap records. Will software companies go this route to promote, say, annual SDK subscriptions? What would the SW promo rap sound like?
The musicians who worked on the Titanic were charged for not returning their uniforms. You can make a decent living playing music, but you must be willing to play in an amusement park dressed up in an animal costume. Aged rock and rollers and country music stars keep playing until their sequins fall off around age 80 because they can't afford to retire. Renowned cultural icons sell their houses to corporations that will operate the houses as museums after the stars decease, with a clause that lets the star live in the future museum until then.
For games, the demos that come with the Clean programming language held my kid's interest longer than any other demo games that come with other languages.
In the 1880's, every saloon and salon had a piano (see any old movie) and a skilled professor of the keyboard. In the 1890's, the player piano was introduced. Today we have neither. The automaton destroyed the knowledge and trivialized the skill and removed the art so as to destroy their value. Can't find a decent ash-hauler anymore, either.
It's Happening in All the Professions
on
Engineer in a Box?
·
· Score: 1
A few years back, computational finance was a hot new field. Now, 95% of it is done by guys who know how to _use_ a program, not how to actually solve the problems.
Power users with Excel and Access do plenty of things that would have been just as impossible with good programmers 20 years ago as they are today, but the power users don't know this, so demand for programmers declines. In-house development now is only for things that don't even pretend to come in a box or from third-world outsourcers.
I've seen help-wanteds for project managers who must be PMI certified (takes years) and must have 2 years experience with MS-Project 2000 (takes hours to learn). I've seen help-wanteds for MD's who must be willing to do medical research data entry into Excel. I've seen ads for executive VP's who must have ten years of management experience and know MS-Word and Powerpoint. Human knowledge is degraded in comparison to knowledge embedded in software.
There is off-the-shelf software you can get now to design your own house. This is a combination of architecture and engineering, but simple enough that the program can do it. Money talks. The domain covered by the programs will only expand.
Not only does every possible finite sequence of bits occur in the bits of pi, it occurs an infinite number of times. It's all there: directions to Jimmy Hoffa's grave, the human genome, the lost works of Shakespeare, MPEG's of Gallmer and Bates doing the unspeakable, a bug-free release of Windows 2010, JPEG's of those court and military records Bush won't release, MS-DOS 1.0 with Gary Kildall's Easter Egg still in it, everything! An infinite number of times! Find it. Post it here.
Linda von Ronstadt's group, the Stone Poneys, broke up when they finally had a record in the top 10. Success sucks. You're sittin' in a bar, strummin' your guitar, and man comes in and says "Son, I'm gonna make you a star!" You sign his form. You gotta do two albums and they keep rejecting your material. You gotta travel to promote your album. They give you a nice $100,000 deal, but they charge back all the travel and promotion expenses. You don't make much. Willie Nelson was the biggest star in Texas some years back, but he couldn't even go there because of legal and tax troubles. He couldn't even afford a real bandage for his head.
http://www.nashvillescene.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? story=Back_Issues:2002:August_8-14_2002:News:Cover _Story
Tells of how sick the radio and music business can be. Please don't say that rock or rap doesn't get into this kind of crime.
There used to be a kind of broadcast operation called "Common Carrier" that was relatively cheap and unregulated, mostly used to serve campuses. You didn't put up an antenna to transmit, you pumped your signal of a few watts into the power lines, and the electric wires would carry it around a local area and right into any radio that was plugged into the power lines. Since it wasn't going out over the air a whole lot, the FCC didn't much care. IIRC, however, this mode didn't work for the FM band, it was used in the AM band, so forget about your stereo hi fi super digital type of signal.
Lorenzo W. Milam, aka P. P. McFeeley. He was involved heavily in starting KBOO in Portland, KCHU in Dallas, KDNA in St. Louis, and several other community stations around the country. He was also part-owner of a profitable commercial operation near the Bay Area of California. He wrote a book about it _Sex_in_Broadcasting_. The book didn't have any sex in it, but he knew it would sell better with a catchy title. Get the book if you can. Find Lorenzo if you can. Last I heard he had given up on radio as totally under the domination of the powerful interests and commercial forces, moved to Mexico, and started writing about other subjects.
Fun stuff. I remember that the Btrieve network server for Novell and the Btrieve single-user TSR could open the same tables -- simultaneously!!! If you had Btrieve running on your network, it was just about imperative to ban the single-user btrieve TSR from your company, with a periodic search and destroy through all the PC's, or it would corrupt network files. Some user would install a $59 app that came with a free Btrieve single-user runtime TSR and the user was never even alerted that the fool app used Btrieve. (Btrieve originally allowed developers unlimited free run-times if they bought the $89 Btrieve kit) The user would run their single-user app that kept track of their kid's Girl Scout Troop and then log-in to the mission-critical app that had a couple of million records and a gigabyte or two on the server. The bat file for the big app would try to load btrieve, but it would not load because it was already loaded (only the single-user version loaded by th single-user app still hanging around memory trying to be helpful), and it would run happily against the network files as if it owned them. Pages would be cached on both the user's PC and on the server. Files would get corrupted, and it was generally unpleasant.
The extended operations were great stuff, however. We were retrieving 1000 rows per second over pokey old LANS with 33 MHz machines when just about nothing else could do 100.
In 1968, two of the student houses at Caltech got caught in recruiting violations -- being intentionally obnoxious to the three students no one wanted. As punishment, one house was forced to take two of them:
http://www.magicdragon.com/jvp.html
and
http://www.fractal.com/hedges.html
The other house was punished with the big prize -- Dave Brin.
Slashdot Mirror
Who ever heard of an end-of-line character on a mainframe? Everything was always fixed length, with the length in the DCB, or variable length, with a length prefix, at least back when I used them. There was a "record mark" character, but that was used back on the 1401's, back in ancient times.
Second, there is one big difference between Ada and java -- Ada is designed to be useful for hard realtime applications. The garbage collection in the JVM makes java unsuitable for applications that can't stand a little interruption of processing now and again.
Third, Ada is designed for very high reliability and very long lifecycle projects. Stuff like programs to control defense hardware that is going to stay in use just about forever, be maintainable forever, and should never fail. For example, the B-52's appeared in the 1950's and will likely still be flying in the 2020's, and newer hardware may be expected to last just as long. These are very extraordinary requirements compared to what most software is supposed to do, and Ada is not too bad at addressing them. In this domain, that's not over-engineering. How is anyone supposed to maintain twenty or thirty years worth of Windows or java code when there is a new version of Windows or java every couple of years?
Software that meets its requirements is an engineering success. Software that makes users want an improved version every 1-2 years is a commercial success. "COTS" (Commercial off-the-shelf) is the currently operative buzzword in the DoD.
Look at the works of Michael Jackson, who used to be well-known as the source of 'Jackson Structured Programming' and has more recently looked at workflow issues. With JSP, he explained how there is usually a clash in data structure between input and output, and how the job of programming was to resolve the structure clashes. In the UI case, the clash is between the units of human work that users bring to the machine and the transactions that the computer knows how to process. Use the machine to resolve the clashes; don't make the user do it.
How close is this Mozilla thing to supporting that?
One of the first nearly-personal computers, the IBM System 3, model 6, which booted up into a Basic (or RPG II), console was built like a desk. This thing came out in the spring of 1971. It had 16k of real memory, 48k of virtual memory, mountable disks, optional VDT, builtin 100 CPS dot-matrix printer right in the middle of the desk, card reader, card punch, and as much free desktop space as most computer geeks have today, etc.
The demonstration at the equator, as shown on BBC, that demonstrates how the direction of rotation of water going down a drain reverses on account of moving a couple of hundred feet across the line was also amazing. But it was not genuine. It's bunko artists who are quite skilled. Lots of experiments like that one.
A torsion pendulum that can demonstrate the gravitational force from movable masses would also be a great demo.
But, even if it is 94%, if you've got a system that runs around 100 users, then 94% equals approximately 1 million mistakes per year. Where does the budget come from to timely track down 1 million false alarms annually? How is any analyst going to seriously follow every machine-generated warning when 99.99% of the machine-generated warnings are spurious?
Let us now return to reality, which is already in progress.
Jack should just about be a household name. When Apollo 13 went berserk, NASA dusted off some calculations of trajectories that he had previously done (he was no longer working for NASA) and used one of them to bring the astronauts back.
Do the airport security screeners tell that the liquid in the cell is what it's supposed to be?
Why is so much of the 'reporting' on and even ratings of and published recommendations of tech products based on what the maker says the product will do (ie feature lists) and so little based on actual performance (ie quality)? After buying a few highly-rated products way too buggy to use, why would anyone want to pay any attention to the press anymore?
Sure, NT was C2 ... if not connected to a network.
Heat Shortage Coming?
We are taking our eyes off the ball. For example, after 9/11 the airspace over Camp David, the White House, and Crawford, TX, was restricted by new rules. This week, we learn that the new rules are being broken very often. What is the government's reaction to the rule-breaking? To say that they will fine pilots or suspend licenses when the rules are broken. Do fines and license suspensions have anything to do with stopping anything resembling 9/11? What does this system accomplish? Why can't the government do anything to increase security instead of simply increasing rules?
BTW, the news is out now that rappers are taking payola to plug products in their raps and rap records. Will software companies go this route to promote, say, annual SDK subscriptions? What would the SW promo rap sound like?
The musicians who worked on the Titanic were charged for not returning their uniforms. You can make a decent living playing music, but you must be willing to play in an amusement park dressed up in an animal costume. Aged rock and rollers and country music stars keep playing until their sequins fall off around age 80 because they can't afford to retire. Renowned cultural icons sell their houses to corporations that will operate the houses as museums after the stars decease, with a clause that lets the star live in the future museum until then.
jMusic
For games, the demos that come with the Clean programming language held my kid's interest longer than any other demo games that come with other languages.
In the 1880's, every saloon and salon had a piano (see any old movie) and a skilled professor of the keyboard. In the 1890's, the player piano was introduced. Today we have neither. The automaton destroyed the knowledge and trivialized the skill and removed the art so as to destroy their value. Can't find a decent ash-hauler anymore, either.
Power users with Excel and Access do plenty of things that would have been just as impossible with good programmers 20 years ago as they are today, but the power users don't know this, so demand for programmers declines. In-house development now is only for things that don't even pretend to come in a box or from third-world outsourcers.
I've seen help-wanteds for project managers who must be PMI certified (takes years) and must have 2 years experience with MS-Project 2000 (takes hours to learn). I've seen help-wanteds for MD's who must be willing to do medical research data entry into Excel. I've seen ads for executive VP's who must have ten years of management experience and know MS-Word and Powerpoint. Human knowledge is degraded in comparison to knowledge embedded in software.
There is off-the-shelf software you can get now to design your own house. This is a combination of architecture and engineering, but simple enough that the program can do it. Money talks. The domain covered by the programs will only expand.
http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery
Not only does every possible finite sequence of bits occur in the bits of pi, it occurs an infinite number of times. It's all there: directions to Jimmy Hoffa's grave, the human genome, the lost works of Shakespeare, MPEG's of Gallmer and Bates doing the unspeakable, a bug-free release of Windows 2010, JPEG's of those court and military records Bush won't release, MS-DOS 1.0 with Gary Kildall's Easter Egg still in it, everything! An infinite number of times! Find it. Post it here.
Linda von Ronstadt's group, the Stone Poneys, broke up when they finally had a record in the top 10. Success sucks. You're sittin' in a bar, strummin' your guitar, and man comes in and says "Son, I'm gonna make you a star!" You sign his form. You gotta do two albums and they keep rejecting your material. You gotta travel to promote your album. They give you a nice $100,000 deal, but they charge back all the travel and promotion expenses. You don't make much. Willie Nelson was the biggest star in Texas some years back, but he couldn't even go there because of legal and tax troubles. He couldn't even afford a real bandage for his head.
http://www.nashvillescene.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? story=Back_Issues:2002:August_8-14_2002:News:Cover _Story
Tells of how sick the radio and music business can be. Please don't say that rock or rap doesn't get into this kind of crime.
There used to be a kind of broadcast operation called "Common Carrier" that was relatively cheap and unregulated, mostly used to serve campuses. You didn't put up an antenna to transmit, you pumped your signal of a few watts into the power lines, and the electric wires would carry it around a local area and right into any radio that was plugged into the power lines. Since it wasn't going out over the air a whole lot, the FCC didn't much care. IIRC, however, this mode didn't work for the FM band, it was used in the AM band, so forget about your stereo hi fi super digital type of signal.
Lorenzo W. Milam, aka P. P. McFeeley. He was involved heavily in starting KBOO in Portland, KCHU in Dallas, KDNA in St. Louis, and several other community stations around the country. He was also part-owner of a profitable commercial operation near the Bay Area of California. He wrote a book about it _Sex_in_Broadcasting_. The book didn't have any sex in it, but he knew it would sell better with a catchy title. Get the book if you can. Find Lorenzo if you can. Last I heard he had given up on radio as totally under the domination of the powerful interests and commercial forces, moved to Mexico, and started writing about other subjects.
The extended operations were great stuff, however. We were retrieving 1000 rows per second over pokey old LANS with 33 MHz machines when just about nothing else could do 100.
In 1968, two of the student houses at Caltech got caught in recruiting violations -- being intentionally obnoxious to the three students no one wanted. As punishment, one house was forced to take two of them: http://www.magicdragon.com/jvp.html and http://www.fractal.com/hedges.html The other house was punished with the big prize -- Dave Brin.