Re:Everything, including tools, in moderation!
on
Software Fashion
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· Score: 1
Therefore, I feel OO design for everything is also a fad that has never been proven or disproven.
You'll get no debate from me. I believe that OO has its place, but isn't everywhere.
Re:Everything, including tools, in moderation!
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 1
mcdrewski42,
I read this on your info page...
Australian. Engineer. Coder. Currently working on enterprise billing software as an architect. I'd recommend it as an excellent career choice for someone without enough personality to be an auditor.
Hmm - Enterprise billing software? Australia? Auditor? Could the system go by the name "Power"? Feel free to email me or send me Lotus Notes:).
Everything, including tools, in moderation!
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What? No mention of UML?? Together with Design Patterns, these two are making my fellow software engineers less intelligible by the minute!
RevMike's first law of development methodologies- "The only thing worse than not following a methodology is rigidly following the wrong methodology."
If UML and Patterns is making your engineers less intelligible, then they are doing something wrong. It is possible that those tools are not appropriate for your problem space. It is also possible that they need to drop the elements of the model that aren't working for them.
Design Patterns is an incredibly useful tool, especially in the OO world. But as was noted in the article, there is a danger of designing everything as a pattern. Being able to say "I use a Service Locator to look up the remote resources" or "I use this Abstract Factory to get the proper xml parser" is incredibly useful. But it has a tendancy to be overdone.
So it sounds to me like they found SOMETHING but the important thing was that they had nothing to do with it. Otherwise they could just state that a complete comparison didn't turn up anything.
Then in September SGI carried out its more comprehensive comparison. "SGI continued our investigation to determine whether any other code in the Linux kernel was even conceivably implicated," Altmaier states in the letter.
This comparison revealed a few examples of line-by-line copying, but did not determine whether the code was owned by SCO or in the public domain, according to the letter. "SGI has discovered a few additional code segments... that may arguably be related to the Unix code," Altmaier wrote. He added that these segments were "trivial in amount."
SGI declined to reveal any details on the additional code segments it found, but the fact that its analysis appears to reveal no extensive overlap between the code in Linux and System V is good news for Linux users, according to Gartner Inc. analyst George Weiss.
I think it is pretty clear that 1) there might be small amounts of infringing code, 2) the amount of potentially infringing code is far less than SCO has said, 3) the infirnging code may even be from common sources copied into both code bases.
DeCSS is a tool than can be used to circumvent controls placed on a work by its publisher. The grounds for attacking it are different (not that I agree with the underlying rational of the law).
Microsoft Cures Cancer
Posted by michael on Friday October 03, @06:38PM
from the You-know-they're-evil-just-admit-it dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Microsoft researchers have discovered the cure for cancer, and MS is paying for any cancer patient's medical treatment" Micro$oft is up to their same old tricks - this time exploiting the sick and feeble to further their own agenda. Have they no shame?
Well, actually, Micro$oft wouldn't exactly cure cancer, they'd put it into remission for two or three years. You'd have to purchase new and "improved" treatments each time it came out of remission, in order to live for a few more years.
Oh, and they wouldn't be paying for the initial treatments out of the goodness of their hearts, but treatment would be funded by vouchers given to victims in prior settlments of court cases against MS.
Sun has 5 billion in cash reserves, and a profitable high end server business that will shrink somewhat, but not completely. It's utterly foolish to write this company off at this point.
I think that was the analyst's point... Sun can't compete in the mainstream server market anymore, so they should focus themselves on the "profitable high end server business". Basicly, they should accept that they are destined to be a niche player, do it well, and remain a viable company rather than try to compete across the board and lose the company to bad bets on Solaris over Linux in the commodity server market.
Apple has demonstrated that you can make money providing premium products and services in a niche.
On the other side of that, $16-20 is unreasonable. $10 would be fair, I think.
I'd maybe even go a little lower, perhaps to $8.00. I doubt that any cost in the cycle is more than that for producing a cassette tape.
What really gets my goat is that the price of a new release CD has never dropped. I remember in 1985 or so when the format was just getting traction the prices would be high. All the equipment was new and had to be paid for, people weren't sure it would be accepted, etc. So it cost about $16 for a new cd. AND IT NEVER CHANGED even after all the new cd pressing equipment was paid for. Even as the manufacturing cost per unit dropped through the floor. It never even dropped to the $12 price of a new LP.
We've had an e10k in our shop for a number of years now. You are right that the 15K and the e10k that preceded it aren't great performers. They really serve best as large scale server consolidation machines. You take all your small and medium Unix servers and combine them into one box, which can be reconfigured on the fly and at will. Basicly those machines fit the same kind of model that IBM promote, carving up a mainframe into lot's of independant virtual Linux machines.
Suns advantage over other platforms in recent years is their advanced Disk I/O capability. High speed disk arrays are far more important, and the abiltiy of the bus to handle that throughput are far more important to large databases than either CPU or shared memory. A mutli-terrabyte data warehouse isn't benfited by the faster CPUs you mentioned, or by the memory technologies you mention. Fiber-based disk arrays and the like are what is needed.
The pool of idiots willing to plunk down $1M for a box to serve web pages dried up 2 years ago.
You're absolutely right that Sun's big iron isn't needed for web pages. Previous posters are correct that the SPARC cpu isn't a great performer today. Sun's niche is the terrabyte sized data warehouse. Data warehousing apps typically require large memory and high bandwidth disk i/o. Sun's disk arrays are still high performers.
When an asteroid does strike the earth and wipes us all out, and some future intelligent creature fills our niche, what will they think when they excavate our natural history museums and find dinosaur bones?
I like to think that they'll figure a few dinosaurs did survive and lived in grand buildings as the rulers of all mankind.
Er-Um-I don't think so. Plenty of Asteroids have struck the Earth, and those are the degenerate case of "closest".
Did you really mean "Closest Asteroid of Significant Size since Hollywood Made Some Movies Recently About Asteroids Hitting the Earth and Wiping Out Humanity Yet Flies Past Earth"?
Shouldn't it be the other way around? The distributed solar system runs during daylight hours, it isn't something you can turn on during peak hours. Peak hours are when people get ready for work, and when they get home from work. In winter, it will be dark during peak hours.
IIRC, the highest electricity demand occurs in mid-afternoon during the summer. Air conditioning plays the bigest part. Air conditioning and solar dovetail very nicely.
No, the main problem is that unless you are generating your power using only renewable resources, you are likely causing a disproportionately high amount of pollution. Almost all power generation from fossil fuels is much more efficient if done on a large scale at a centralized power generation station. If we abandonded the grid and went to a lot of localized power generation facilities, the overall impact on the environment would be severe.
Agreed. In addition, if you are using renewable such as solar, you need to have a battery storage system to cover nightimes and cloudy days. Sufficiently large battery systems are pollution sources as well during manufacture and disposal.
On optimal system would include traditional power generation for base power and dispersed solar systems for peak demand.
Power companies provide at about 15c per kilowatt-HOUR. What does 20c per watt mean ? Meaning running continuously 12 hrs a day for 20 years ? Watt is a power unit. Watt-hours is energy.
I'm wondering about the same thing. My guess is that it costs 20 cents/watt in capital outlay. The article states that it costs 40 cents per watt for traditional plants. So I would guess that a 250 kW facility could be built for one hundred thousand dollars. This doesn't seem out of line, considering that they do this type of plant with a gas turbine on the back of a flatbed truck.
A typical home needs, IIRC, about 5kWh per day. Let's assume that, between rainy days and imperfectly aimed cells, we get the equiv. of 5 hours of full sun a day on these units. Lets also assume a peak load - Summertime afternoon with airconditioning on - of 1.5 kW. That requires about a $300. Figure another $2,000 for inverters, and some extra for miscellaneous. For about $3,000 you could have a zero electric bill in a "net" metering area.
I know you need to pass an "entrance exam" in order to be part of OpenBSD, but I didn't realize that the exam was to insure that your are nuts!
You people are so silly. These sorts of things take away time that could be better spent discussing vi vs. emacs, Linux vs. Gnu/Linux, and Kirk vs. Picard.
What do we call it when businesses control the government for the betterment of the people?
Businesses never work for the benefit of the people. When functioning properly businesses work for the benefit of their shareholders. When functioning improperly, they work for the benefit of their management. The fact that a properly functioning business can benefit the people as a whole is incidental to the business.
Why should efficiency at maximizing the economy be the standard of a good government? (Not that I have anything against growing and/or efficient economies... but why should it be the primary job of the government?)
I never claimed it should be the primary job of government. Americans are fond of using the phrase from our founding national document "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." The first job of government is providing security from external threats as well as internal threats - aka Defense and Criminal Justice - protect our life.
An efficient economy produces more wealth. More wealth can help foster the job of security - armies and criminal justice systems are expensive to operate. A wealthy state can afford to spend more on various services for the people - be it health care, education, social security, etc.
Here we get to the crux of the matter. An efficient economy generates wealth. That wealth can be used for the betterment of the people. It is in any state's interest to pursue a general policy of maximizing the efficiency of the economy.
That the general policy should be not be interpretted as laizze faire (sp?). An economy becomes efficient when it can operate on fair and open markets. Monopolies, deceptive business practices, unstable banking and monetary systems all serve to undermine the market. Government has a legitimiate duty to regulate.
I'm digressing - back to the point. Other things being equal, a government whose policies foster a more efficient economy is a better government. A government whose policies preserve life and liberty, and maintains such economic activity sufficient support life and liberty over the long haul, is superior to a government that is unable to support life and liberty, regardless of that government's economic policies.
The land war did not go very well for the United States. US attempts to sieze the initiative and invade Canada failed miserably. The British burned Washington DC, but the US Army did much better at Baltimore, and eventually at New Orleans.
The amazing part of the War of 1812 is that the US Navy performed spectacularly, defeating the Royal Navy in the Americas, Africa, and in the Royal Navy's home waters.
Some of the US Ships that performed extremely well are the "Essex", the "Constitution", the "Wasp", the "Enterprise", the "President", and the "United States". It is no wonder the US Navy carried many of these names into modern times. The story of the Pacific in WWII is in many ways the story of the Essex, the Wasp, and the Enterprise. The Constitution aka "Old Ironsides" has never been decommissioned.
There is a danger in wording it in the way that you did. By that standard, taking the traditional western legal definition of "consent" (which excludes assent due to coercion), any ruler who is in power as a result of force, threat of force, or oppression must therefore no longer have the right to govern....
I'm quite certain that this is not what you meant.:-)
No, that is what I meant, but one does have to take into account practical considerations as well. I'm guessing you are refering to the occupation of a country by American troops after those troops evicted an oppressive government. For the short term, pragmatic considerations rule. The interim authority needs to make steps as rapid as prudently possible to create conditions for the people to voice their consent/dissent.
[socialist principles] are still useful in certain niches, especially those where public policy dictates that it is more useful to optimize for some other factor than maximum efficiency.
Factors like...uh...a working public transportation system, mandatory social security, healthly citizens, environment protection, outstanding public schools, cheap or free university for everybody, etc etc etc
But those aren't really important, right?
I never said those things were unimportant. And none of those require state ownership of enterprise.
For instance, a working public transportation system is a key one for me. I live around NY, which has an excellent system. The problem currently with more widespread public transportation in the US is that gasoline is not taxed at levels that reflect its impact on society. If gasoline taxes were such that they would fund all road construction/maintenance as well as road safety law enforcement, with maybe a littel extra thrown in to cover the envirnmental costs, then people would choose public transportation as well as smaller cars and Vespa style scooters, etc. As more people ride public transportation, it becomes profitable. The government doesn't need to operate it because private concerns would be more than willing to do so.
I bet that 98% of the population can not tell the difference between socialism and communism. Do you care to enlighten us?
Socialism is an economic system based on the premise that government should control of industries and businesses for the betterment of the people. It is not incompatible with democracy. Real world experience with socialism is that it is not nearly as efficient at maximizing the economy as a properly functioning free market capitalist system. Most nations are moving away from applying socialist principles to the general economy, but they are still useful in certain niches, especially those where public policy dictates that it is more useful to optimize for some other factor than maximum efficiency.
Communism is a political system based on the principal that a small group should control political power in the name of the working class, and hold that power through authoritarian means, in order to implement a socialist economic policy.
Maybe we shouldn't be trying to bring democracy to other countries. Maybe we should be more intersted in governments that server the people.
I wish I had some mod points to give you.
The right to govern derives from the consent of the governed. A handful of small states in Europe still have ruling monarchs. No one is campaigning for change because the rulers of these states are sensitive and responsive to the needs of the people.
this is not the border of canada and the us, across which most people here on slashdot are posting, perhaps the most historically peaceful border in the world
The border is quiet. Maybe a little too quiet. What are those sneaky canucks up to?
As was mentioned in the article (which you of course did read) the fact that efficiency puts people out of work is a problem which is not going to go away. It will get worse. Emphasis mine
What is your basis for calling that a fact? Changing technology has caused economic dislocations since the dawn of civilization. What is your evidence that it is getting worse?
In reality, when an efficiency gain displaces a groups of workers, those workers rarely sit down and wait to die. They find new jobs, sometimes by learning new skills, sometimes by moving to a different region, sometimes a brand new business springs up to benefit from their labor.
This transition can often be difficult, but the answer is not to do things inefficiently, but to encourage labor liquidity. The fact that a worker once happened to be hired as a steel worker does not give him a lifelong right to be a steel worker. When the time comes that he is unable to work in a foundry, he needs to find new employment.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll get no debate from me. I believe that OO has its place, but isn't everywhere.
I read this on your info page...
Hmm - Enterprise billing software? Australia? Auditor? Could the system go by the name "Power"? Feel free to email me or send me Lotus NotesIf UML and Patterns is making your engineers less intelligible, then they are doing something wrong. It is possible that those tools are not appropriate for your problem space. It is also possible that they need to drop the elements of the model that aren't working for them.
Design Patterns is an incredibly useful tool, especially in the OO world. But as was noted in the article, there is a danger of designing everything as a pattern. Being able to say "I use a Service Locator to look up the remote resources" or "I use this Abstract Factory to get the proper xml parser" is incredibly useful. But it has a tendancy to be overdone.
Everything, including tools, in moderation!
DeCSS is a tool than can be used to circumvent controls placed on a work by its publisher. The grounds for attacking it are different (not that I agree with the underlying rational of the law).
Black powder muzzle loaders tend to be far less restricted than other fire arms. I'm not sure how this would stand, though.
Oh, and they wouldn't be paying for the initial treatments out of the goodness of their hearts, but treatment would be funded by vouchers given to victims in prior settlments of court cases against MS.
I think that was the analyst's point... Sun can't compete in the mainstream server market anymore, so they should focus themselves on the "profitable high end server business". Basicly, they should accept that they are destined to be a niche player, do it well, and remain a viable company rather than try to compete across the board and lose the company to bad bets on Solaris over Linux in the commodity server market.
Apple has demonstrated that you can make money providing premium products and services in a niche.
I'd maybe even go a little lower, perhaps to $8.00. I doubt that any cost in the cycle is more than that for producing a cassette tape.
What really gets my goat is that the price of a new release CD has never dropped. I remember in 1985 or so when the format was just getting traction the prices would be high. All the equipment was new and had to be paid for, people weren't sure it would be accepted, etc. So it cost about $16 for a new cd. AND IT NEVER CHANGED even after all the new cd pressing equipment was paid for. Even as the manufacturing cost per unit dropped through the floor. It never even dropped to the $12 price of a new LP.
Suns advantage over other platforms in recent years is their advanced Disk I/O capability. High speed disk arrays are far more important, and the abiltiy of the bus to handle that throughput are far more important to large databases than either CPU or shared memory. A mutli-terrabyte data warehouse isn't benfited by the faster CPUs you mentioned, or by the memory technologies you mention. Fiber-based disk arrays and the like are what is needed.
You're absolutely right that Sun's big iron isn't needed for web pages. Previous posters are correct that the SPARC cpu isn't a great performer today. Sun's niche is the terrabyte sized data warehouse. Data warehousing apps typically require large memory and high bandwidth disk i/o. Sun's disk arrays are still high performers.
I like to think that they'll figure a few dinosaurs did survive and lived in grand buildings as the rulers of all mankind.
Er-Um-I don't think so. Plenty of Asteroids have struck the Earth, and those are the degenerate case of "closest".
Did you really mean "Closest Asteroid of Significant Size since Hollywood Made Some Movies Recently About Asteroids Hitting the Earth and Wiping Out Humanity Yet Flies Past Earth"?
IIRC, the highest electricity demand occurs in mid-afternoon during the summer. Air conditioning plays the bigest part. Air conditioning and solar dovetail very nicely.
Agreed. In addition, if you are using renewable such as solar, you need to have a battery storage system to cover nightimes and cloudy days. Sufficiently large battery systems are pollution sources as well during manufacture and disposal.
On optimal system would include traditional power generation for base power and dispersed solar systems for peak demand.
I'm wondering about the same thing. My guess is that it costs 20 cents/watt in capital outlay. The article states that it costs 40 cents per watt for traditional plants. So I would guess that a 250 kW facility could be built for one hundred thousand dollars. This doesn't seem out of line, considering that they do this type of plant with a gas turbine on the back of a flatbed truck.
A typical home needs, IIRC, about 5kWh per day. Let's assume that, between rainy days and imperfectly aimed cells, we get the equiv. of 5 hours of full sun a day on these units. Lets also assume a peak load - Summertime afternoon with airconditioning on - of 1.5 kW. That requires about a $300. Figure another $2,000 for inverters, and some extra for miscellaneous. For about $3,000 you could have a zero electric bill in a "net" metering area.
You people are so silly. These sorts of things take away time that could be better spent discussing vi vs. emacs, Linux vs. Gnu/Linux, and Kirk vs. Picard.
Businesses never work for the benefit of the people. When functioning properly businesses work for the benefit of their shareholders. When functioning improperly, they work for the benefit of their management. The fact that a properly functioning business can benefit the people as a whole is incidental to the business.
Why should efficiency at maximizing the economy be the standard of a good government? (Not that I have anything against growing and/or efficient economies... but why should it be the primary job of the government?)
I never claimed it should be the primary job of government. Americans are fond of using the phrase from our founding national document "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." The first job of government is providing security from external threats as well as internal threats - aka Defense and Criminal Justice - protect our life.
An efficient economy produces more wealth. More wealth can help foster the job of security - armies and criminal justice systems are expensive to operate. A wealthy state can afford to spend more on various services for the people - be it health care, education, social security, etc.
Here we get to the crux of the matter. An efficient economy generates wealth. That wealth can be used for the betterment of the people. It is in any state's interest to pursue a general policy of maximizing the efficiency of the economy.
That the general policy should be not be interpretted as laizze faire (sp?). An economy becomes efficient when it can operate on fair and open markets. Monopolies, deceptive business practices, unstable banking and monetary systems all serve to undermine the market. Government has a legitimiate duty to regulate.
I'm digressing - back to the point. Other things being equal, a government whose policies foster a more efficient economy is a better government. A government whose policies preserve life and liberty, and maintains such economic activity sufficient support life and liberty over the long haul, is superior to a government that is unable to support life and liberty, regardless of that government's economic policies.
The amazing part of the War of 1812 is that the US Navy performed spectacularly, defeating the Royal Navy in the Americas, Africa, and in the Royal Navy's home waters.
Some of the US Ships that performed extremely well are the "Essex", the "Constitution", the "Wasp", the "Enterprise", the "President", and the "United States". It is no wonder the US Navy carried many of these names into modern times. The story of the Pacific in WWII is in many ways the story of the Essex, the Wasp, and the Enterprise. The Constitution aka "Old Ironsides" has never been decommissioned.
I'm quite certain that this is not what you meant. :-)
No, that is what I meant, but one does have to take into account practical considerations as well. I'm guessing you are refering to the occupation of a country by American troops after those troops evicted an oppressive government. For the short term, pragmatic considerations rule. The interim authority needs to make steps as rapid as prudently possible to create conditions for the people to voice their consent/dissent.
For instance, a working public transportation system is a key one for me. I live around NY, which has an excellent system. The problem currently with more widespread public transportation in the US is that gasoline is not taxed at levels that reflect its impact on society. If gasoline taxes were such that they would fund all road construction/maintenance as well as road safety law enforcement, with maybe a littel extra thrown in to cover the envirnmental costs, then people would choose public transportation as well as smaller cars and Vespa style scooters, etc. As more people ride public transportation, it becomes profitable. The government doesn't need to operate it because private concerns would be more than willing to do so.
Socialism is an economic system based on the premise that government should control of industries and businesses for the betterment of the people. It is not incompatible with democracy. Real world experience with socialism is that it is not nearly as efficient at maximizing the economy as a properly functioning free market capitalist system. Most nations are moving away from applying socialist principles to the general economy, but they are still useful in certain niches, especially those where public policy dictates that it is more useful to optimize for some other factor than maximum efficiency.
Communism is a political system based on the principal that a small group should control political power in the name of the working class, and hold that power through authoritarian means, in order to implement a socialist economic policy.
I wish I had some mod points to give you.
The right to govern derives from the consent of the governed. A handful of small states in Europe still have ruling monarchs. No one is campaigning for change because the rulers of these states are sensitive and responsive to the needs of the people.
The border is quiet. Maybe a little too quiet. What are those sneaky canucks up to?
What is your basis for calling that a fact? Changing technology has caused economic dislocations since the dawn of civilization. What is your evidence that it is getting worse?
In reality, when an efficiency gain displaces a groups of workers, those workers rarely sit down and wait to die. They find new jobs, sometimes by learning new skills, sometimes by moving to a different region, sometimes a brand new business springs up to benefit from their labor.
This transition can often be difficult, but the answer is not to do things inefficiently, but to encourage labor liquidity. The fact that a worker once happened to be hired as a steel worker does not give him a lifelong right to be a steel worker. When the time comes that he is unable to work in a foundry, he needs to find new employment.