It probably accounts for more than 80% of the development resources, yet I have never seen any formal method/strategy/tool for handling maintenance/change requests/bugfixes.
I read somewhere (sorry, can't find the link) that the Navy budgets X $million to write the code for a missile-control system, and 2X $million to debug the code.
"When we change that balance, that environment, too quickly, by boosting one of the cycles to the detriment of another, we are no longer as fit to survive in the new environment. In related news, we also plan to allow various species to reproduce before hunting them to extinction, so we can continue to eat them."
- Link
First I read the post, and laughed: "This is a keeper", so I grabbed the link.
Then I saw "Doc Ruby" and it all made sense -- as usual, the good doctor mixes useful information with his patent dry wit.
Soul tonic, Doc. I think you're chanelling Mencken.
consider that the Boston Massacre, one of the key events that defined the colonial uprising as a revolution, involved only *five* [people]
I didn't know that -- very interesting.
John Brunner says (in "The Jagged Orbit") that you only need five percent of a population on your side to effect a revolution. Margaret Mead said something similar about how a small group of committed people make up the only way of getting real social change.
The idea of using a lot of large monolith type needles came up, these were supposed to be truly massive and the idea was to convey 'dont dig here', or something.
For the past couple of centuries, archaeologists have waged a vigorous effort to find massive buried structures (Troy, Peruvian pyramids, etc.) -- and dig them up. Human nature, I guess.
Give an engineer a mysterious black box with a big red button labelled "Don't Push". Will the engineer push the button, or not? Oh, the temptation! How else can you find out exactly why you're not supposed to push?
The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si. - Millionth Monkey
As the ancient Greeks codified oral tradition -- cradle of their intellectual development -- into written words, conservatives lamented that writing would cause men to forget how to memorize and recite the odes of blind Homer.
And so it was: Hellas forgot the skill of epic poetry.
Who today -- even an Icelander? -- memorizes a hundred lines of saga... let alone a thousand lines... let alone ten thousand lines...?
And why is this so? Because writing is more efficient -- more efficacious -- than oral tradition. Writing gets things done. Writing matters, in the sense of ideas represented by material tokens.
So it is with tranquility in our time: a forgotten art, made obsolete by our intellectual technology.
So hypertask, damn you -- hypertask! This world is dog-eat-dog, and Devil take the hindmost!
The bits were indeed meaningless. They were random bits which represented nothing. The grammar nazi thinks you have mistaken useless for meaningless. The test was indeed useful, but the bits were still meaningless.
Hmm. I'm not sure I agree... but I will say, I'm glad you're on the job, grammar nazi. That's exactly the kind of semantic nuance-manship I'd champion myself, were I sober....
The reason Java is perceived as uncool is because they've got this horrible grey/violet default color scheme. Since when has violet been the color of cool? Exactly never.
In its day, mauve was all the rage:
In 1856, while trying to synthesize artificial quinine, 18-year-old chemistry student William Perkin instead produced a murky residue. Fifty years later, he described the event: he "was about to throw a certain residue away when I thought it might be interesting. The solution of it resulted in a strangely beautiful color." Perkin had stumbled across the world's first aniline dye, a color that became known as mauve.
"So what?" you might say. "A teenager invented a new color." As Simon Garfield admirably points out in Mauve, the color really did change the world. Before Perkin's discovery all the dyes and paints were colored by roots, leaves, insects, or, in the case of purple, mollusks. As a result, colors were inconsistent and unpredictably strong, often fading or washing out. Perkin found a dye that would always produce a uniform shade--and he pointed the way to other synthetic colors, thus revolutionizing the world of both dyemaking and fashion. Mauve became all the rage. Queen Victoria wore it to her daughter's wedding in 1858, and the highly influential Empress Eugénie decided the color matched her eyes. Soon, the streets of London erupted in what one wag called the "mauve measles."
Mauve had a much wider impact as well. By finding a commercial use for his discovery--much to the dismay of his teacher, the great August Hofmann, who believed there needed to be a separation between "pure" and "applied" science--Perkin inspired others to follow in his footsteps: "Ten years after Perkin's discovery of mauve, organic chemistry was perceived as being exciting, profitable, and of great practical use." The influx of bright young men all hoping to earn their fortunes through industrial applications of chemistry later brought significant advances in the fields of medicine, perfume, photography, and even explosives. Through it all, Garfield tells his story in clever, witty prose, turning this odd little tale into a very entertaining read.
--Sunny Delaney
With the pirates, though, mutiny was rare, even if the captain was an evil malevolant tyrant. No matter what he did, mutiny was worse. Mutiny is the worst crime you can commit on the high seas.
That's very interesting -- thanks for the info.
Word got out that you took part in a mutiny, no matter what an asshole Captain Blythe was, you'd never serve on a ship again in your life. Hell, you'd be lucky to pay for passage on one.
Blythe wasn't a pirate, was he? I believe he was a Captain (Admiral?) in the Queen's Navy.
As long as i have TCP/IP over parrots, i'm fine. I wonder how many times you would have to say http://slashdot.org to a parrot before he can repeat it and pass the message on to the next parrot on the next island.
I teach at a local technical college, also the occasional short course, etc. I'm fond of telling my students:
The classroom is not a democracy. We have very different roles here. But neither is it a tyranny -- if I get tyrannical, students will simply leave.
The classroom is best described as a pirate ship: I have power to the extent that the crew accepts me as their leader.
So too with Linus and linux. If people believe in him, he leads them; if people don't believe in him, he's just a mortal man again, everybody goes their own way. (I'm assuming he's not the type to incite mutinous plank-walking behaviors.)
It's all about the acrostics, man. I'm actually working on a unix program to parse the KJV and reassemble the spiritual truths contained in the first letter of each verse.
User I/O isn't everything, at my line of work (Video Post production) User I/O can be neglected when compared to disk I/O.
Good point, I hadn't thought of machine-machine data handling. You're quite right: computers are often used for tasks that require little or no human input.
Nonetheless I stand by the intent of my original post: the speed of human thought far, far exceeds our capacity to convert thought (some kinds of thought, anyway) into computer data.
No, the slowest part of PC's today is the user interface. The rate at which a user enters data (via keyboard/mouse) is a fraction of the rate at which a user thinks. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
It took Magellan a couple-three years to go around the globe.
Magellan himself died in the Phillipines. Of his five-ship fleet, only one made it home:
"On September 6, 1522, the remaining crew of Magellan's voyage and the last ship of the fleet, Victoria, arrived in Spain, almost exactly three years after leaving. "
But what would be the problem with doing so? Is it a matter of dangers of rocket failure (e.g. huge atmospheric dirty-bomb), or is it also quantity of waste to be disposed of and the cost?
Slashdot Mirror
It probably accounts for more than 80% of the development resources, yet I have never seen any formal method/strategy/tool for handling maintenance/change requests/bugfixes.
I read somewhere (sorry, can't find the link) that the Navy budgets X $million to write the code for a missile-control system, and 2X $million to debug the code.
-kgj
Then I saw "Doc Ruby" and it all made sense -- as usual, the good doctor mixes useful information with his patent dry wit.
Soul tonic, Doc. I think you're chanelling Mencken.
-kgj
consider that the Boston Massacre, one of the key events that defined the colonial uprising as a revolution, involved only *five* [people]
I didn't know that -- very interesting.
John Brunner says (in "The Jagged Orbit") that you only need five percent of a population on your side to effect a revolution. Margaret Mead said something similar about how a small group of committed people make up the only way of getting real social change.
-kgj
It's a question of scale.
One person = suspect
Two people = conspiracy
Three people = mob
Four people = revolution
We can't allow revolution, now can we? That would upset the entire system!
Better to arrest those suspects before they have a chance to conspire
-kgj
The idea of using a lot of large monolith type needles came up, these were supposed to be truly massive and the idea was to convey 'dont dig here', or something.
For the past couple of centuries, archaeologists have waged a vigorous effort to find massive buried structures (Troy, Peruvian pyramids, etc.) -- and dig them up. Human nature, I guess.
Give an engineer a mysterious black box with a big red button labelled "Don't Push". Will the engineer push the button, or not? Oh, the temptation! How else can you find out exactly why you're not supposed to push?
-kgj
The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
- Millionth Monkey
Well said -- both informative and entertaining.
-kgj
Speech recognition on a chip, yes.
But only "silicon" in the sense that every other silicon chip is silicon.
No magical "silicon" breakthroughs to see here, keep moving.
-kgj
Austria is that island where the toilets flush backwards, no?
Austria is an island, in the sense that it's surrounded by Europe.
I'm not sure about Austrian toilets, but I'm afraid they may resemble German toilets.
-kgj
As the ancient Greeks codified oral tradition -- cradle of their intellectual development -- into written words, conservatives lamented that writing would cause men to forget how to memorize and recite the odes of blind Homer.
And so it was: Hellas forgot the skill of epic poetry.
Who today -- even an Icelander? -- memorizes a hundred lines of saga
And why is this so? Because writing is more efficient -- more efficacious -- than oral tradition. Writing gets things done. Writing matters, in the sense of ideas represented by material tokens.
So it is with tranquility in our time: a forgotten art, made obsolete by our intellectual technology.
So hypertask, damn you -- hypertask! This world is dog-eat-dog, and Devil take the hindmost!
-kgj
Grammar checking isn't a feature.
Grammar checking is a human viral meme which infects software.
-kgj
The bits were indeed meaningless. They were random bits which represented nothing. The grammar nazi thinks you have mistaken useless for meaningless. The test was indeed useful, but the bits were still meaningless.
... but I will say, I'm glad you're on the job, grammar nazi. That's exactly the kind of semantic nuance-manship I'd champion myself, were I sober ....
Hmm. I'm not sure I agree
-kgj
Meaningless? Meaningless?
Those bits weren't "meaningless" -- they meant something very clear and important:
Test successful.
-kgj
Where can I find screenshots of this new release?
On the Enlightenment site, under "Screenshots".
-kgj
Nothing is worse than a warm beer when hunting or driving.
Oh, there's worse all right -- how about a warm beer while having sex with a fat chick on a hot day?
-kgj
In its day, mauve was all the rage: -kgj
With the pirates, though, mutiny was rare, even if the captain was an evil malevolant tyrant. No matter what he did, mutiny was worse. Mutiny is the worst crime you can commit on the high seas.
That's very interesting -- thanks for the info.
Word got out that you took part in a mutiny, no matter what an asshole Captain Blythe was, you'd never serve on a ship again in your life. Hell, you'd be lucky to pay for passage on one.
Blythe wasn't a pirate, was he? I believe he was a Captain (Admiral?) in the Queen's Navy.
-kgj
As long as i have TCP/IP over parrots, i'm fine. I wonder how many times you would have to say http://slashdot.org to a parrot before he can repeat it and pass the message on to the next parrot on the next island.
Made me laugh!
-kgj
I teach at a local technical college, also the occasional short course, etc. I'm fond of telling my students:
The classroom is not a democracy. We have very different roles here. But neither is it a tyranny -- if I get tyrannical, students will simply leave.
The classroom is best described as a pirate ship: I have power to the extent that the crew accepts me as their leader.
So too with Linus and linux. If people believe in him, he leads them; if people don't believe in him, he's just a mortal man again, everybody goes their own way. (I'm assuming he's not the type to incite mutinous plank-walking behaviors.)
-kgj
It's all about the acrostics, man. I'm actually working on a unix program to parse the KJV and reassemble the spiritual truths contained in the first letter of each verse.
Made me laugh!
-kgj
User I/O isn't everything, at my line of work (Video Post production) User I/O can be neglected when compared to disk I/O.
Good point, I hadn't thought of machine-machine data handling. You're quite right: computers are often used for tasks that require little or no human input.
Nonetheless I stand by the intent of my original post: the speed of human thought far, far exceeds our capacity to convert thought (some kinds of thought, anyway) into computer data.
-kgj
Actually some people already used a speech interface is vigorous indication is much faster than typing or clicking on keys ...
Good point -- thanks.
Nonetheless I stand by my original post: the speed of human thought far, far exceeds our capacity to convert thought into computer data.
-kgj
The slowest part of PC's today is the disk drive.
No, the slowest part of PC's today is the user interface. The rate at which a user enters data (via keyboard/mouse) is a fraction of the rate at which a user thinks. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
-kgj
It took Magellan a couple-three years to go around the globe.
Magellan himself died in the Phillipines. Of his five-ship fleet, only one made it home:
"On September 6, 1522, the remaining crew of Magellan's voyage and the last ship of the fleet, Victoria, arrived in Spain, almost exactly three years after leaving. "
Link @ wiki.com
Microsoft Plans News Aggregator
...?
Did anyone else read this as "Microsoft Plans News Aggravator"
-kgj
... launch it into the sun.
But what would be the problem with doing so? Is it a matter of dangers of rocket failure (e.g. huge atmospheric dirty-bomb), or is it also quantity of waste to be disposed of and the cost?
Yes, and yes.
-kgj