Err 1990 calling Slashdot. Its been well over a decade since CFC were used as coolants in refrigerators. Hell the US Goverment have replaced CFC/ODS from ICBMs as it says here and other places.
So while its cool the Ozone bit is already being dealt with.
I still find it funny that something capable of killing millions of people is "Ozone friendly" apart of course from Ionising the atmosphere if it is used!
In the sense of MS or Unix admins who need to know how to re-install the OS, troubleshoot the OS etc.
OS/390 admins need to know how to tune, how to cluster how to maintain. Its more like a DBA job than a Sys Admin.
MS and Unix systems just dream of being ABLE to worry about the things that are part of an OS/390 Admin's job. "I'm splitting the load over at 2pm onto 4 slices to take the increased load for that hour then dropping back down to 1 unless the threshold is met then it ramps up in 2 slice steps, we've put in call to IBM and they are going to turn on two more processor boards for the GL year end report this weekend, I've done the PAF already so how about going down the pub".
Rather than "Its running slow, can we buy a bigger server" or "Try unplugging it from the wall first".
Set should always perform validity checking but is a mirror of the real world.
Take a watch, you "get the time" from the watch and are able to "set the time" of the watch. The watch then tracks the time. Some of the comments are fine, some are indicative of someone who thinks they _really_ know OO but in fact just hasn't thought it over properly.
Unguarded sets are bad, but gets are standard object functions in the real-world. You "get the speed" from your dashboard, you don't "set" the speed on the dashboard you press the peddle, which has the resultant effect.
People are still buying the new mainframes and AS/400s (which should be lobbed in) especially now they run Java and new technologies.
Why ? Because of the support staff you require to run one. Is Unix harder than Windows 2000 are the people cheaper ? With these beasts its a mute question because YOU WON'T EMPLOY A SYSTEMS ADMIN for your server. You will outsource all of that to IBM, and they will make sure it works.
My favourite on this is being in a place with around 20 mainframes and AS/400s who had been asked to consider standardising on Windows going forwards. The IT manager's challenge to the sales guy was "How often does your stuff fail?" to which the sales guys asked "well when was the last time you had an expensive maintaince job on these servers".
The reply was that 4 years previously an IBM engineer had called to arrange a time to visit to replace a disk from the server which might fail soon. 2 years before that one had phoned to arrange a time to replace a processor board which was not performing correctly.
2 incidents on 20 machines in 10 years.
They elected not to move to Windows for infrastructure.
Then along came Java and suddenly you can buy these ultra-reliable boxes to run all of your newest and brightest applications.
Unix might whup windows, but OS/390 is Lennox Lewis standing at the back of the room with Ali smiling while they watch the little boys fight.
What can be done with $40bn by a large US Corporation.... well pretty impressive fraud by all accounts.
This is not to say that NASA should not be more effective or efficient it is to say that the "free market" is not always the best way to deliver power to homes, so it won't be certain to be the best to deliver a space station.
Private companies run railways in the UK, the goverment do it in France. I'd much prefer the French Goverment running the UK system than the companies currently doing it.
MVC is about design, its about knowing that your application will be maintained by other people. Its about seperating the various elements so multiple people can work on your project. Its about ensuring that elements are re-used effectively so testing effort is used more effectively.
MVC is about projects that work well. So to all those people who just "hack it together on my own", please remember that there are some people out there who do this for a living on sites and system that will still be maintained in 5, 10, 15 years or even longer. That is why you choose MVC, because you realise that Go-Live is only a small part of TCO.
MVC is great, and MDA is even better because it uses similar patterns at an even higher level.
Design is good, design works, patterns work. Just because you can "write 1,000 lines in a day" doesn't mean that in 6 months time even YOU will be able to maintain it. Don't knock it until you've been on a project with 10 people where they all thought they could do it their own way.
5 or so years ago this would have been reported as
"Under the guise of a civilian transporter the Chinese goverment demonstrated a potentially terrible military weapon, capable of accelerating several tonnes upto half the speed of sound"
Just think, if Iraq had just done this we'd declare war.
If you do a formal design using elements like Z you can test that the design works. You can also do this using things like OCL to define the requirements/pre/post for the classes in your design and then running conditions against this.
There aren't many products that do this yet as most people don't see the need, because most people don't test code properly, let alone designs.
Yes the price of top spec EVERYTHING in computing remains the same. Whether it be servers, PCs, Graphics cards or what ever. Moore's law states that things improve which means....
Ready for it....
WHAT WAS TOP SPEC LAST YEAR ISN'T THIS YEAR
Sorry for the shouting but really, what a silly thing to say. The Top Spec is the most expensive to manufacture as its new, has R&D to pay off and the volumes are lower. As the technology improves it becomes cheaper to make the old Top Spec thing as its now possible to make better things so making the older item becomes simpler, also the volumes go up as the cost goes down which again makes it cheaper to produce.
Saying "Top Spec cost half of what it does today" is just silly, the top spec card TODAY will cost HALF what it does now in 18 months time or so. That is because it will be the commodity item by then. The top spec card 18 months ago is now HALF the price that it was then.
Welcome to computing, its nice to have you aboard.
Now I'm sure that some people out there will rave about how great XP is, but reading the Mythical Man Month and working on any large, or even medium scale project with a long term life-span will tell you that while some elements of XP are good, these are the ones that existed before.
1) Write your test cases up front... this is ages old. XP isn't as rigourous as others who say "and make sure other people write them".
2) Pair Programming, works for two people of equal ability. The two headed surgical team from the Mythical man month is a much more effective way of using two heads.
Basically things like XP sum up how long computing has to go to become an engineering discipline. In every other engineering subject there are critical elements:
Requirements Design Testing and approval of design implementation testing of implementation (throughout implementation) Delivery. Maintainance
For a construction project all of these elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the construction industry can work on lower margins.
To become better requires not a "Silver Bullet" as Brookes says, the technology won't make the improvement. Its actually about people applying the rules _rather_ than looking for the Silver Bullet. Some projects succeed, others fail, there are reasons for the failures and the successes. But rarely do we learn from either.
XP is the embodyment of the non-engineering approach to computing that pervades this marketplace. The idea that you can build it wrong and change, don't design "code and check", have a unit test written by a bad coder to check his own bad code.
Brookes is right. At the end of the day computing success is down to a realisation of the soft-skills allied to technical talent.
If you have 10 brilliant people leading 100 average people... fire the 100 and support the 10 to do the delivery effectively. Make sure they follow a process, and make sure that the requirements are defined and change as little as possible. Make sure designs are verified, make sure code is reviewed.
Sure its less exciting that "just coding" but in the end it takes less time, costs less to maintain and delivers what the customer wants.
Engineering is a discipline, XP is just glorified hacking, only by becomming disciplined will software improve.
Think on it, power of two is a far to simplistic and dare I say it European system for the patriotic American. In Europe they use metres, kilometers, grams and kilgrams. All this regulation of structure around a number like 10 is typical of Europeans. Americans use sensible systems like 14 pounds (abbreviated sensibly to lbs as pounds clearly contains the letter l) to a Stone and 16 Ounces (again with a sensible abbreviation of oz) to a pound. Who needs these ridiculous regimented European systems that dicate that everything must follow a sensible pattern?
Patriotic Americans arise. 12 bits to a byte, 7 bytes to a word, 13 words to a sentence and 1764 bits to a chain.
Today the DOJ announced that they would no longer trust Microsoft and had removed Microsoft from the list of companies it would allow to police themselves. This was done on Microsoft's advice as they felt they could not be trusted not to screw around like they had before.
"Lets face it" said Bill Gates "asking us to police ourselves is like asking Dan Quayle to front a literacy program, its just not a good idea"
The Raw processing power of the brain is very high, but its actual effectiveness and speed is crap. The reason is the IO speeds, the network interface (spine) has poor throughput and requires lots of individual channels rather than being able to operate as a simple bus, this means loads of wasted space when a channel isn't doing anything.
The external interfaces are even worse, these make the brain totally useless for many tasks that computers can process in seconds. As an example try raytracing a rendering a scene using crayons and doing the maths in your head.
So the human brain totally and utterly is secondary to the computer already.
Apart from the fact that humans can be inspired. The solution may take a computer 100 years to attack by brute force and it will get there... but a smart person will do it in minutes because "its obvious".
Computers already outstrip us in terms of processing, but while they are just grown up calculators they miss the essence of human processing. A computer hardwired to mutate everything via/dev/random would be pretty useless, and yet the software in humans means that this is a greatest advantage.
It will be generations before computers will have reached a stage they can start doing the obvious. The limited processing of the brain has produced the people on the Jerry Springer show and Isaac Newton, it ain't the hardware, its the software that counts.
Paris has always been good for Bikes, Bladers, Scooters et al. The wide pavements, the properly enforced cycle lanes.
Lots of people Bike/Blade/Scoot to work in Paris because you can and lets face it Paris is a nice place to see as you go. The Scooters allow the suits to zip around with less hassle than blades, but many people still use blades. And while you look a little silly on a Scooter you are still part of some form of sub-culture, and they are not hanging around.
The Segway makes you look like a muppet. Parisiens will forgive many things, but not looking cool or stylish isn't one of them. This is a city with Policemen trained by the Olympic skating team to be bladers.
I await to be corrected but somehow I can't imagine 2,000 Segway owners meeting at Bastille on a Sunday afternoon for a great high speed crack around the city. Exercise is cool in Paris, being Fat is very uncool.
Vive la differance and all that, but Segway will be as popular as American tourists in Paris.
I get bugger all Spam, at work or at home. Could this be because I always tick the "don't spam me" boxes. And because I don't put real email addresses on the internet.
Strange isn't it.
How sad would you rate Trekkie fans ?
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You appear to have a healthy level of distain for "Trekkies" who become obsessed with the series. Where does this stem from, and what would you recommend that these people do instead.
And in Europe... and in India. But when I get to the US there is a marked drop off. To the stage where I have often used two phones, one tri-band and one CDMA/analogue.
I can "roam" onto competitors networks outside of my home country, but not at home. Hence my tri-band phone often gets a signal as it has 3 or so networks to chose from, while the Sprint phone gets nothing because I'm in a Sprint zone.
Basic solutions would be for better roaming agreements between providers and one standard for phones.
Slashdot Mirror
Porn industry doesn't complain
"Its all free advertising, and we've got premium services that are making a profit"
If the record industry could follow this model then it would be less of an issue.
Err 1990 calling Slashdot. Its been well over a decade since CFC were used as coolants in refrigerators. Hell the US Goverment have replaced CFC/ODS from ICBMs as it says here and other places.
So while its cool the Ozone bit is already being dealt with.
I still find it funny that something capable of killing millions of people is "Ozone friendly" apart of course from Ionising the atmosphere if it is used!
And as for the Italians.... sheesh
In the sense of MS or Unix admins who need to know how to re-install the OS, troubleshoot the OS etc.
OS/390 admins need to know how to tune, how to cluster how to maintain. Its more like a DBA job than a Sys Admin.
MS and Unix systems just dream of being ABLE to worry about the things that are part of an OS/390 Admin's job. "I'm splitting the load over at 2pm onto 4 slices to take the increased load for that hour then dropping back down to 1 unless the threshold is met then it ramps up in 2 slice steps, we've put in call to IBM and they are going to turn on two more processor boards for the GL year end report this weekend, I've done the PAF already so how about going down the pub".
Rather than "Its running slow, can we buy a bigger server" or "Try unplugging it from the wall first".
That article was woeful
"Get and set are evil"
Set should always perform validity checking but is a mirror of the real world.
Take a watch, you "get the time" from the watch and are able to "set the time" of the watch. The watch then tracks the time. Some of the comments are fine, some are indicative of someone who thinks they _really_ know OO but in fact just hasn't thought it over properly.
Unguarded sets are bad, but gets are standard object functions in the real-world. You "get the speed" from your dashboard, you don't "set" the speed on the dashboard you press the peddle, which has the resultant effect.
People are still buying the new mainframes and AS/400s (which should be lobbed in) especially now they run Java and new technologies.
Why ? Because of the support staff you require to run one. Is Unix harder than Windows 2000 are the people cheaper ? With these beasts its a mute question because YOU WON'T EMPLOY A SYSTEMS ADMIN for your server. You will outsource all of that to IBM, and they will make sure it works.
My favourite on this is being in a place with around 20 mainframes and AS/400s who had been asked to consider standardising on Windows going forwards. The IT manager's challenge to the sales guy was "How often does your stuff fail?" to which the sales guys asked "well when was the last time you had an expensive maintaince job on these servers".
The reply was that 4 years previously an IBM engineer had called to arrange a time to visit to replace a disk from the server which might fail soon. 2 years before that one had phoned to arrange a time to replace a processor board which was not performing correctly.
2 incidents on 20 machines in 10 years.
They elected not to move to Windows for infrastructure.
Then along came Java and suddenly you can buy these ultra-reliable boxes to run all of your newest and brightest applications.
Unix might whup windows, but OS/390 is Lennox Lewis standing at the back of the room with Ali smiling while they watch the little boys fight.
Or WorldCom, Tyco etc etc etc
What can be done with $40bn by a large US Corporation.... well pretty impressive fraud by all accounts.
This is not to say that NASA should not be more effective or efficient it is to say that the "free market" is not always the best way to deliver power to homes, so it won't be certain to be the best to deliver a space station.
Private companies run railways in the UK, the goverment do it in France. I'd much prefer the French Goverment running the UK system than the companies currently doing it.
MVC is about design, its about knowing that your application will be maintained by other people. Its about seperating the various elements so multiple people can work on your project. Its about ensuring that elements are re-used effectively so testing effort is used more effectively.
MVC is about projects that work well. So to all those people who just "hack it together on my own", please remember that there are some people out there who do this for a living on sites and system that will still be maintained in 5, 10, 15 years or even longer. That is why you choose MVC, because you realise that Go-Live is only a small part of TCO.
MVC is great, and MDA is even better because it uses similar patterns at an even higher level.
Design is good, design works, patterns work. Just because you can "write 1,000 lines in a day" doesn't mean that in 6 months time even YOU will be able to maintain it. Don't knock it until you've been on a project with 10 people where they all thought they could do it their own way.
Be an engineer, not a script kiddie.
5 or so years ago this would have been reported as
"Under the guise of a civilian transporter the Chinese goverment demonstrated a potentially terrible military weapon, capable of accelerating several tonnes upto half the speed of sound"
Just think, if Iraq had just done this we'd declare war.
Companies say that Customers should pay for their products rather than using cheaper or even free alternatives.
In related new DoD announce "War is good".
Oh very freaking funny you insensitive clod!
If you do a formal design using elements like Z you can test that the design works. You can also do this using things like OCL to define the requirements/pre/post for the classes in your design and then running conditions against this.
There aren't many products that do this yet as most people don't see the need, because most people don't test code properly, let alone designs.
Lots of the true tech books (Fowler on UML for instance is $35 and is brilliant.
I'd say as a rule that like fine food, the best books are small compact and just tell you what you need to know.
The big books are the crap resturants of the world, lots of food... not much quality.
Seen XP work with 4 people who were very good. Saw it fall flat on its face with 16 average people.
As all the XP books say, XP doesn't scale.
Yes the price of top spec EVERYTHING in computing remains the same. Whether it be servers, PCs, Graphics cards or what ever. Moore's law states that things improve which means....
Ready for it....
WHAT WAS TOP SPEC LAST YEAR ISN'T THIS YEAR
Sorry for the shouting but really, what a silly thing to say. The Top Spec is the most expensive to manufacture as its new, has R&D to pay off and the volumes are lower. As the technology improves it becomes cheaper to make the old Top Spec thing as its now possible to make better things so making the older item becomes simpler, also the volumes go up as the cost goes down which again makes it cheaper to produce.
Saying "Top Spec cost half of what it does today" is just silly, the top spec card TODAY will cost HALF what it does now in 18 months time or so. That is because it will be the commodity item by then. The top spec card 18 months ago is now HALF the price that it was then.
Welcome to computing, its nice to have you aboard.
Now I'm sure that some people out there will rave about how great XP is, but reading the Mythical Man Month and working on any large, or even medium scale project with a long term life-span will tell you that while some elements of XP are good, these are the ones that existed before.
1) Write your test cases up front... this is ages old. XP isn't as rigourous as others who say "and make sure other people write them".
2) Pair Programming, works for two people of equal ability. The two headed surgical team from the Mythical man month is a much more effective way of using two heads.
Basically things like XP sum up how long computing has to go to become an engineering discipline. In every other engineering subject there are critical elements:
Requirements
Design
Testing and approval of design
implementation
testing of implementation (throughout implementation)
Delivery.
Maintainance
For a construction project all of these elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the construction industry can work on lower margins.
To become better requires not a "Silver Bullet" as Brookes says, the technology won't make the improvement. Its actually about people applying the rules _rather_ than looking for the Silver Bullet. Some projects succeed, others fail, there are reasons for the failures and the successes. But rarely do we learn from either.
XP is the embodyment of the non-engineering approach to computing that pervades this marketplace. The idea that you can build it wrong and change, don't design "code and check", have a unit test written by a bad coder to check his own bad code.
Brookes is right. At the end of the day computing success is down to a realisation of the soft-skills allied to technical talent.
If you have 10 brilliant people leading 100 average people... fire the 100 and support the 10 to do the delivery effectively. Make sure they follow a process, and make sure that the requirements are defined and change as little as possible. Make sure designs are verified, make sure code is reviewed.
Sure its less exciting that "just coding" but in the end it takes less time, costs less to maintain and delivers what the customer wants.
Engineering is a discipline, XP is just glorified hacking, only by becomming disciplined will software improve.
This is ridiculous and irresponsible, mothers will be sending kids to school without food by mistake.
This MUST carry a large warning label that clearly states "contents are not edible".
And of course
"with your bare hands?"
yes
you stand amazed as the dragon lies dead at your feet.
Bugger graphics you can't beat a maze of twisty passages, all different.... or was it a twisty maze of different passages.
12 bit is much better for patriotic Americans.
Think on it, power of two is a far to simplistic and dare I say it European system for the patriotic American. In Europe they use metres, kilometers, grams and kilgrams. All this regulation of structure around a number like 10 is typical of Europeans. Americans use sensible systems like 14 pounds (abbreviated sensibly to lbs as pounds clearly contains the letter l) to a Stone and 16 Ounces (again with a sensible abbreviation of oz) to a pound. Who needs these ridiculous regimented European systems that dicate that everything must follow a sensible pattern?
Patriotic Americans arise. 12 bits to a byte, 7 bytes to a word, 13 words to a sentence and 1764 bits to a chain.
Today the DOJ announced that they would no longer trust Microsoft and had removed Microsoft from the list of companies it would allow to police themselves. This was done on Microsoft's advice as they felt they could not be trusted not to screw around like they had before.
"Lets face it" said Bill Gates "asking us to police ourselves is like asking Dan Quayle to front a literacy program, its just not a good idea"
The Raw processing power of the brain is very high, but its actual effectiveness and speed is crap. The reason is the IO speeds, the network interface (spine) has poor throughput and requires lots of individual channels rather than being able to operate as a simple bus, this means loads of wasted space when a channel isn't doing anything.
/dev/random would be pretty useless, and yet the software in humans means that this is a greatest advantage.
The external interfaces are even worse, these make the brain totally useless for many tasks that computers can process in seconds. As an example try raytracing a rendering a scene using crayons and doing the maths in your head.
So the human brain totally and utterly is secondary to the computer already.
Apart from the fact that humans can be inspired. The solution may take a computer 100 years to attack by brute force and it will get there... but a smart person will do it in minutes because "its obvious".
Computers already outstrip us in terms of processing, but while they are just grown up calculators they miss the essence of human processing. A computer hardwired to mutate everything via
It will be generations before computers will have reached a stage they can start doing the obvious. The limited processing of the brain has produced the people on the Jerry Springer show and Isaac Newton, it ain't the hardware, its the software that counts.
Paris has always been good for Bikes, Bladers, Scooters et al. The wide pavements, the properly enforced cycle lanes.
Lots of people Bike/Blade/Scoot to work in Paris because you can and lets face it Paris is a nice place to see as you go. The Scooters allow the suits to zip around with less hassle than blades, but many people still use blades. And while you look a little silly on a Scooter you are still part of some form of sub-culture, and they are not hanging around.
The Segway makes you look like a muppet. Parisiens will forgive many things, but not looking cool or stylish isn't one of them. This is a city with Policemen trained by the Olympic skating team to be bladers.
I await to be corrected but somehow I can't imagine 2,000 Segway owners meeting at Bastille on a Sunday afternoon for a great high speed crack around the city. Exercise is cool in Paris, being Fat is very uncool.
Vive la differance and all that, but Segway will be as popular as American tourists in Paris.
I get bugger all Spam, at work or at home. Could this be because I always tick the "don't spam me" boxes. And because I don't put real email addresses on the internet.
Strange isn't it.
You appear to have a healthy level of distain for "Trekkies" who become obsessed with the series. Where does this stem from, and what would you recommend that these people do instead.
And in Europe... and in India. But when I get to the US there is a marked drop off. To the stage where I have often used two phones, one tri-band and one CDMA/analogue.
I can "roam" onto competitors networks outside of my home country, but not at home. Hence my tri-band phone often gets a signal as it has 3 or so networks to chose from, while the Sprint phone gets nothing because I'm in a Sprint zone.
Basic solutions would be for better roaming agreements between providers and one standard for phones.