After a number of years of observation, research, and fine tuning, Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle have released a book that makes a subtle but vital revelation about the nature of software projects and how to better run them.
They have discovered that the Tao is the heart of all programming.
Hark, the master speaks:
A novice asked the Master: ``Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?''
The Master replies: ``That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao.''
A novice asked the master: ``I have a program that sometime runs and sometimes aborts. I have followed the rules of programming, yet I am totally baffled. What is the reason for this?''
The master replied: ``You are confused because you do not understand Tao. Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers simulate determinism; only Tao is perfect.
``The rules of programming are transitory; only Tao is eternal. Therefore you must contemplate Tao before you receive enlightenment.''
``But how will I know when I have received enlightenment?'' asked the novice.
``Your program will then run correctly,'' replied the master.
Learning what Scrum is and how to practice it is not all that profound. However, sitting back and realizing why Scrum works and how it addresses the fundamental flaws of the last 20 years of software engineering is.
Once you obtain that realization, you will have truly mastered the Tao.
Absolutely. I know it's very unpopular to say anything against google on/., but let's try to consider the matter objectively.
Google is a company. Repeat with me, google is just a company. OK, right now it is a privately held company, but eventually they are going to go public. When that happens, profits take precedence above everything else. Then you can't be so sure they'll stay on the straight and narrow path.
Up until now, google haven't been evil. Why? Mainly because it was started by geeks (Brin and Page were doing their Ph.D at Stan in '98), and the tradition continues (See this excellent article). But think of 10, 15 years into the future. Totally different people will probably be at the top. They'll see thing different from google does now. For all we know, they'll pull people's pages off the index because "the information could be used by terrorists".
The basic problem is that when a single entity has access to such a lot of information, and so many people depend on them, you can never know what's going to happen.
Note: I'm actually a major fan of google. However, it does not mean that I'll continue to be a google fan tomorrow, or that I don't ask "what if" questions.
For clarification: to ensure that the CPU (or platform) is the dominant influence on the overall performance, we fitted all systems with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro AGP display adapter and 512 MB of RAM.
Wait a minute, surely size isn't the only parameter of the memory that matters? Sure, you have to ensure there's no swapping (if you don't your benchmarks are sure to be totally screwed), but apart from that shouldn't memory bandwidth and latency be good enough to ensure that CPU is the dominant factor? Here is a nice article on this.
While one person may be perfectly content with an old Pentium 133 system that stores stamp club membership details in a DOS program in "real-time mode"
Just because I have an old machine doesn't mean I can't make productive use of it. All right, I can't do gaming, but my Pentium 333 machine suffices for everything else. Just make sure you have enough memory to run everything comfortably without swapping. Heck, I'm even running a webserver on it.
This is a good thing. One of the things I think today's desktop (not just linux, mind you) needs most is for the user to be able to interact more at the level of the desktop environment/window system rather than with applications alone. For instance, one of the things I liked best about sawfish was the endless amount of keyboard interaction it allowed. I could configure shortcuts for all sorts of window operations, and stuff like SHIFT+pull with mouse for resizing a window. Heck, I even used to change the volume with sawfish (map a keysroke to the commands aumix -v +5 and aumix -v -5).
Conversely, I'm disappointed that gnome2 in its effort to make it appeal to windows users has dumbed things down a lot. After all, once you get users to try out the linux desktop, how do you keep them? By making the desktop more powerful, of course.
I'm looking forward to seeing this get adopted widely. Eventually, I want there to be an entire layer that looks at your both keystrokes and your mouse movements before passing it on to the application. That way, handwriting recognition would work for all applications (wayV does this somewhat). Also, I could define app-independent "macros". For instance, I could set up some mouse gesture to translate into typing, say, my name or the URL of my home page.
Imagine what a dilemma this story would have been for the/. editors! While on the one hand wanting to trumpet "Yay! The end of spam!!", the other half wanted to write "No!! M$ is up to its dirty tricks again to demolish your last bit of freedom!!!". Note the uncertain, uncomfortable tone of timothy's comment: "There are a lot of things going on at Microsoft Research -- no guarantee that particular ones are going to be released in the real world.";^)
A logician turns up at the grocery and asks for a burger.
Grocer: Are you going to eat it or take it with you?
Logician: Yes.
Grocer: Eh? Oh, OK. Are you going to eat it or are you going to take it with you?
Logician: Both.
That's the problem with these big companies. They're made of disparate groups each with its own world view. So statements like "company foo is pro/anti open source" become meaningless. There is a lack of central vision and co-ordination. (Hint: what was one of the reasons Microsoft became what it is?) Look at IBM. Invests heavily in Linux, but OTOH is extrememly protective of its IP. Look at HPQ. (Remember the Perens anti-DMCA demonstration circus?) Look at SCO. They're all the same, vacillating (no pun intended). Except for exclusively OSS companies like RH, you can never tell.
You'll be amazed to know that the quality is constantly increasing. It works very similar to open source. Go check out the Recent Changes page. See how many changes there are that fix a spelling error, add a link, or add a couple of lines of information. That's massively parallel bugfixing and feature addition for you. They also attract very few vandals, because they're easily spotted, and because there's no incentive.
Phrack is perhaps a good example of the line between black hat and white hat "hackers" being blurry. The articles are informative and well-written, and by intelligent people, not your typical 14 yr old cracker on ecstasy who launches DDOS attacks from haX0r'd machines. I've done a compilers course, but still found a lot to learn about compilers from a phrack article on buffer overflows. Also check out the essays at SANS .
but these new methods of introducing dynamic content to an otherwise static medium actually CAN be useful, in the right hands.
Really? Care to point out a single constructive use of popups? (If I really want to open a link in a new window, I middle click it, period.) What about <blink>?
The web was designed for user control of presentation. Technologies that attempt to subvert this paradigm are *evil*. If you've got a good browser, you can only take what's good and throw out the rest (For example, in mozilla you can enable javascript but prevent javascript from opening popups). If you haven't got a good browser, switch.
AOL shipped NS 7.0 without popup blocking because that would hurt advertisers' interests, but reversed their decision because of public outcry.
MS, of course, isn't bothered just yet.
Now if more people start blocking popups with mozilla/netscape, advertisers will start trying more agressive methods, in turn leading more people to switch.
Could this tussle lead to a spiralling backlash against MSIE?
so their websites get more hits. but since they are hits that are basically forced, or unaware hits, how will this increase sales for the product being advertised?
First, Apple continues the wall-of-silence with respect to their
repugnant DMCA-based legal action, and there is no reason whatsoever
for us to think that they will not undertake similar action in the
future. It is regrettable that the DMCA was Apple-sponsored
legislation, and it is now time for them to disavow it and promise never
to employ it.
C'MON! We sit around and post all day about how evil the DMCA is and when someone has the balls to do something about it we call them stupid?
Companies don't do open source because of their love of freedom or anything. They do it because it saves them money. Many eyes... you know it. And we have a right to ask for something in return.
Coming back to the license issue: It's not about Apple not releasing under the GPL. The point is that the APSL is not an acceptable free software license. . Where did everyone get the idea from that they're asking for Apple to adopt the GPL???
Look at it in another way. How do you feel about M$ taking all the networking layer code from BSD?
OSS brings a lot of benefits to companies, but they also have some responsibilities if they want to have a useful symbiosis with the free software community. And it is our duty to remind them of this responsibility.
High latency is not a problem specific to the use of TCP. If you've got a high latency, you're stuck with it whatever mechanism you use because it's dictated by the speed of light.
OTOH, doesn't TCP use alot of SYN, ACK etc. to establish/close a connection? This could be a problem because it multiplies the round trip time which could have been avoided by using a special purpose protocol.
I'm also wondering if there would be a high error rate because of atmospheric disturbances and such. If so, TCP would be really useful because you get error correction for free.
The reporter doesn't seem to know the difference between the web and the internet. The web is a collection of documents, the internet is a collection of computers. For the thing to be web enabled it'll have to have a cgi interface, not ftp.
BTW, I don't think they are planning to control the spacecraft using FTP. That's just for beaming down the images and such.
They're more likely using telnet for control operations. They probably have some kind of shell listening on some port.
I agree with you 100%. I am a cryptography researcher, and the situation is pretty much the same in my field too. I want to point out two further ill-effects of the publishers' greed:
It makes life really difficult for independent researchers (i.e not working in an institution that will fund them), and for researchers in thrid world countries.
Someone pointed out about arXiv.org. This is really not a solution, because all the really important papers go to "prestigious" conferences/journals for it to bring credit to the researcher.
Interestingly, Google has (as of yet) no mention [google.com] of the phrase "where we are all artist/waiters."
Google indexes web pages only once a month. So getting no hits on google does not mean a thing.
Lelyveld's comments are here .
That said, it is highly irresponsible of the editors to post the article without a link to the lawyer's writing but instead a mailto: to his email.
Hmm... Lemme guess what the license for an open source camera would be like:
Whenever you distribute pictures taken with this camera, you have to distribute the negatives too:)
Four decades of years ago a group of hyperjobless
pantemporal employees at IBM got so fed up with the constant calls for tech support from moronic users... that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.
And to this end they built themselves and the world
a stupendous supercomputer encased in a very large steel framed box the size of a small city. It was so amazingly intelligent that as soon as its DSADs had been connected up it started from I think therefore I am and managed to deduce the existence of P2P and the great wiki before anyone managed to turn it off.
On the day of the great turning-on, it said: "What is this great task for which I, the Mainframe, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space, have been called into existence?"
"The second ? There must be some mistake," said the programmer.
"are you not a greater computer than the great Echelon at NSA which can predict acts of terrorism a year ahead in a picosecond?".
"The Echelon" said the Mainframe with unconcealed contempt. "A mere abacus - mention it not."
"What computer is this of which you speak?" he asked.
"The greatest computer in the universe", answered the mainframe after seven and a half years of comtemplation, "is the Beowulf ".
Slashdot Mirror
They have discovered that the Tao is the heart of all programming.
Hark, the master speaks:
Learning what Scrum is and how to practice it is not all that profound. However, sitting back and realizing why Scrum works and how it addresses the fundamental flaws of the last 20 years of software engineering is.
Once you obtain that realization, you will have truly mastered the Tao.
Google is a company. Repeat with me, google is just a company. OK, right now it is a privately held company, but eventually they are going to go public. When that happens, profits take precedence above everything else. Then you can't be so sure they'll stay on the straight and narrow path.
Up until now, google haven't been evil. Why? Mainly because it was started by geeks (Brin and Page were doing their Ph.D at Stan in '98), and the tradition continues (See this excellent article). But think of 10, 15 years into the future. Totally different people will probably be at the top. They'll see thing different from google does now. For all we know, they'll pull people's pages off the index because "the information could be used by terrorists".
The basic problem is that when a single entity has access to such a lot of information, and so many people depend on them, you can never know what's going to happen.
Note: I'm actually a major fan of google. However, it does not mean that I'll continue to be a google fan tomorrow, or that I don't ask "what if" questions.
bash$ lynx -dump http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/18/131250 &threshold=5 > original_story; /usr/local/slashbot/bin/extract-posts original_story $i > highly_modded_post; do /usr/local/slashbot/bin/post-comment < highly_modded_post ; $i=$[i+1]; done
;^)
bash$ $i=1; while
Watches karma roll in
Wait a minute, surely size isn't the only parameter of the memory that matters? Sure, you have to ensure there's no swapping (if you don't your benchmarks are sure to be totally screwed), but apart from that shouldn't memory bandwidth and latency be good enough to ensure that CPU is the dominant factor? Here is a nice article on this.
Just because I have an old machine doesn't mean I can't make productive use of it. All right, I can't do gaming, but my Pentium 333 machine suffices for everything else. Just make sure you have enough memory to run everything comfortably without swapping. Heck, I'm even running a webserver on it.
Conversely, I'm disappointed that gnome2 in its effort to make it appeal to windows users has dumbed things down a lot. After all, once you get users to try out the linux desktop, how do you keep them? By making the desktop more powerful, of course.
I'm looking forward to seeing this get adopted widely. Eventually, I want there to be an entire layer that looks at your both keystrokes and your mouse movements before passing it on to the application. That way, handwriting recognition would work for all applications (wayV does this somewhat). Also, I could define app-independent "macros". For instance, I could set up some mouse gesture to translate into typing, say, my name or the URL of my home page.
Imagine what a dilemma this story would have been for the /. editors! While on the one hand wanting to trumpet "Yay! The end of spam!!", the other half wanted to write "No!! M$ is up to its dirty tricks again to demolish your last bit of freedom!!!". Note the uncertain, uncomfortable tone of timothy's comment: "There are a lot of things going on at Microsoft Research -- no guarantee that particular ones are going to be released in the real world." ;^)
A logician turns up at the grocery and asks for a burger.
Grocer: Are you going to eat it or take it with you?
Logician: Yes.
Grocer: Eh? Oh, OK. Are you going to eat it or are you going to take it with you?
Logician: Both.
There already is one, here.
That's the problem with these big companies. They're made of disparate groups each with its own world view. So statements like "company foo is pro/anti open source" become meaningless. There is a lack of central vision and co-ordination. (Hint: what was one of the reasons Microsoft became what it is?) Look at IBM. Invests heavily in Linux, but OTOH is extrememly protective of its IP. Look at HPQ. (Remember the Perens anti-DMCA demonstration circus?) Look at SCO. They're all the same, vacillating (no pun intended). Except for exclusively OSS companies like RH, you can never tell.
You'll be amazed to know that the quality is constantly increasing. It works very similar to open source. Go check out the Recent Changes page. See how many changes there are that fix a spelling error, add a link, or add a couple of lines of information. That's massively parallel bugfixing and feature addition for you. They also attract very few vandals, because they're easily spotted, and because there's no incentive.
Phrack is perhaps a good example of the line between black hat and white hat "hackers" being blurry. The articles are informative and well-written, and by intelligent people, not your typical 14 yr old cracker on ecstasy who launches DDOS attacks from haX0r'd machines. I've done a compilers course, but still found a lot to learn about compilers from a phrack article on buffer overflows. Also check out the essays at SANS .
Really? Care to point out a single constructive use of popups? (If I really want to open a link in a new window, I middle click it, period.) What about <blink>?
The web was designed for user control of presentation. Technologies that attempt to subvert this paradigm are *evil*. If you've got a good browser, you can only take what's good and throw out the rest (For example, in mozilla you can enable javascript but prevent javascript from opening popups). If you haven't got a good browser, switch.
This could get very interesting.
AOL shipped NS 7.0 without popup blocking because that would hurt advertisers' interests, but reversed their decision because of public outcry.
MS, of course, isn't bothered just yet. Now if more people start blocking popups with mozilla/netscape, advertisers will start trying more agressive methods, in turn leading more people to switch.
Could this tussle lead to a spiralling backlash against MSIE?
How apt. Getting hit by all those popups can be very much like getting caught in a snowball fight.
Companies don't do open source because of their love of freedom or anything. They do it because it saves them money. Many eyes ... you know it. And we have a right to ask for something in return.
Coming back to the license issue: It's not about Apple not releasing under the GPL. The point is that the APSL is not an acceptable free software license. . Where did everyone get the idea from that they're asking for Apple to adopt the GPL???
Look at it in another way. How do you feel about M$ taking all the networking layer code from BSD? OSS brings a lot of benefits to companies, but they also have some responsibilities if they want to have a useful symbiosis with the free software community. And it is our duty to remind them of this responsibility.
OTOH, doesn't TCP use alot of SYN, ACK etc. to establish/close a connection? This could be a problem because it multiplies the round trip time which could have been avoided by using a special purpose protocol.
I'm also wondering if there would be a high error rate because of atmospheric disturbances and such. If so, TCP would be really useful because you get error correction for free.
BTW, I don't think they are planning to control the spacecraft using FTP. That's just for beaming down the images and such. They're more likely using telnet for control operations. They probably have some kind of shell listening on some port.
It should be obvious why there is no www server. www is world wide web: So you can't use from space :)
- It contributes to this pathetic situation:
Scientists Don't Read the Papers They Cite
-
It makes life really difficult for independent researchers (i.e not working in an institution that will fund them), and for researchers in thrid world countries.
Someone pointed out about arXiv.org. This is really not a solution, because all the really important papers go to "prestigious" conferences/journals for it to bring credit to the researcher.Interestingly, Google has (as of yet) no mention [google.com] of the phrase "where we are all artist/waiters."
Google indexes web pages only once a month. So getting no hits on google does not mean a thing. Lelyveld's comments are here .
That said, it is highly irresponsible of the editors to post the article without a link to the lawyer's writing but instead a mailto: to his email.
Hmm... Lemme guess what the license for an open source camera would be like:
Whenever you distribute pictures taken with this camera, you have to distribute the negatives too
Four decades of years ago a group of hyperjobless pantemporal employees at IBM got so fed up with the constant calls for tech support from moronic users... that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.
And to this end they built themselves and the world a stupendous supercomputer encased in a very large steel framed box the size of a small city. It was so amazingly intelligent that as soon as its DSADs had been connected up it started from I think therefore I am and managed to deduce the existence of P2P and the great wiki before anyone managed to turn it off.
On the day of the great turning-on, it said: "What is this great task for which I, the Mainframe, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space, have been called into existence?"
"The second ? There must be some mistake," said the programmer. "are you not a greater computer than the great Echelon at NSA which can predict acts of terrorism a year ahead in a picosecond?".
"The Echelon" said the Mainframe with unconcealed contempt. "A mere abacus - mention it not."
"What computer is this of which you speak?" he asked.
"The greatest computer in the universe", answered the mainframe after seven and a half years of comtemplation, "is the Beowulf ".