I'd say that the people doing cost/benefit analyses and robotic repair feasibility studies are engineers, not scientists. The guys that got hung out to dry by the early mirror troubles, the ongoing gyroscope troubles and the recent "drop everything: We're going to Mars" troubles, they're scientists.
I can see de-orbiting an old, useless analog comsat as being sensible. But for stuff which would otherwise continue to usefully function for years or decades, write-off due to non catastrophic failure ought not to be the natural option. The US space program suffers from an attention deficit disorder.
Lots of folks are saying it's unfair to blame the OS vendor if it's a combination of human error and a (possibly third party) upgrade manager.
I disagree. A reasonably competent UNIX sysadmin can himself write scripts that will automate an upgrade task across n machines. So he understands the theory, is less likely to be snowed by the desktop management system vendor, and feels more in control during the upgrade process.
Microsoft Windows machines have never had integrated scriptable administration systems, nor has it been easy to script one up, leaving IT departments at the mercy of SMS or a similar product. Mass upgrades typically look nothing like individual upgrades, as the latter is usually accomplished via the GUI, so the sysadmin doesn't even have a feel for what the product is doing.
From the article: "Suppose there is a major design flaw in the software managing the anti-lock brakes on a popular model of car that results in injury of a number of people. How does the manufacturer of the braking system prove that it was not negilgent in the design and implementation of that software?"
Obviously, new software tools are going to have to embody twisty little logic traps and lawyer skills.
Well, the recruiter might have turned you down three years ago, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't apply again. The Army recently lowered its standards:
"In difficult recruiting environments, it is inevitable that either quality standards or recruiting resources be subject to adjustment," said Richard I. Stark Jr., a retired Army colonel who is a military-personnel specialist at the Center for Strategic & International Studies here. "The Army has been forced to adjust to both."
Yeah, he could sue, and then he wouldn't be dead anymore!
Seriously, for those twits who'd rather pay $100k for surgery with the right to sue than $20 for surgery without that right (assuming, as you all are, that suing in India is impossible or useless), if you're feeling that unlucky, maybe you should skip the surgery.
In every other conversation about outsourcing, it's the low wages in the other country that seem to be the issue, but in this one, it's magically their insurance/litigation regime. What gives?
I think that in order to have a really innovative OS, new tools are required. After all, productivity is limited by the toolchain, and this is using essentially the same toolchain as the various free UNIXes. Won't it end up having more or less the same features and limitations as current systems (assuming that hundreds of thousands of developer hours get devoted to developing and porting)?
* Make 3.79.1
* AutoConf 2.13
* AutoMake 1.4-p6
* BinUtils 2.15
* GCC 3.3.4
* M4 1.4.1
* FLex 2.5.4a
* Bison 1.875
* Patch 2.5.4
* CVS 1.12.9
* Indent 2.2.9
I was turned off as soon as I hit that word "architect" being used as a verb. After our hero "architected" his response, did he assign the task of actually writing it to someone else? Nooo.
English does evolve, and good writers sometimes repurpose words to great effect. Alas, judging by the rest of the reviews here, our hero is NOT a good writer -- having built a shoddy and ramshackle outhouse, he proudly crowns himself the architect of it.
As for all those people who shout "prescriptive grammarian!", I often suspect they're just too lazy to learn to write well, and have decided that claiming that rules are passe is an effective workaround.
So this guy's familiar with UNIX, he's familiar with Lisp, yet he thinks the future is XML and hideous frameworks with ever-changing APIs? Not often you se e someone with a hammer AND a screwdriver using the hammer to pound screws.
I can see electronic voting for dogcatcher, etcetera. But for national political office? Too much can go wrong. And for all those "just get a paper receipt" idiots, I have to say, has it occurred to you that anyone who can prove how they voted can sell their vote? The down-and-out will do it, for a flask or a rock, if you build a system that allows it.
I think young people might get more engaged in the political process if they worked as scrutineers and staff at polling booths, but automating everything down to "push button A for war, button B for peace" won't help a bit.
So it's more of the same?
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 1
I loved Stephenson's earlier work, but hated Cryptonomicon. After his prior successes, it appears that his editors could no longer offer helpful suggestions (or demands) and his craft went out the window. Way too many characters doing unlikely or inexplicable things, long, wandering storylines and a plethora of other troubles left me shaking my head.
From the start of this review, it looks like nothing's changed. You'd think he was getting paid by the word!
If his new stuff turns YOUR crank, that's great, but I'll have to be satisfied with my old copies of his classics.
Dude, the OP was working against the clock to solve a specific problem. I merely pointed out that, had he been using a better language to begin with, he wouldn't have had to spend all his time implementing a bignum library.
Now if the problem had called for gracefully handling bad input, I'd have put it in. As it is, my environment invokes the debugger for silly input, where the OP's probably would have crashed:
(print (fact -1)) Control stack overflow [Condition of type KERNEL:STACK-OVERFLOW]
Restarts: 0: [ABORT] Return to SLIME toplevel. 1: [ABORT] Return to Top-Level.
The article continually stresses an alternate viewpoint to what is allegedly taught in web design schools, scalability.
Not from what I've seen (or maybe it's taught but not followed?)
Many of the code and sites I've seen have scalability problems, and those aren't the ones that explicitly say "not designed to scale."
Life on Mars, yeah right!
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Am I the only one who thinks that, given the very low probability of life on any given other planet, the chances of finding life on the only other planet we can get to right now are astronomically low?
The cynic in me thinks that the folks at NASA are just raising the hopes of all those gullible people out there, to get more funding. Doing science that you know has a popular hook is one thing, but doing non-science as an excuse for cool engineering is inexcusable.
THIS is the book that reintroduced me to Lisp (I had dabbled with a toy implementation as a kid on my 8 bit micro). I kept hearing about SICP on Slashdot. When I found a copy in a used bookstore, I was amazed. Page one assumes no computer knowledge. By chapter 4 you're building an interpreter, and in chapter 5 (the last chapter) you're building a compiler.
You spend your programming career telling yourself that programming is akin to mathematics. Then you read this book and realize that all these years you've been doing arithmetic, and Lisp does mathematics.
Now tell me again why this new scripting language is interpreted?
Here's my principles, as they apply to this situation: My first duty is to select a reliable, competitive hosting company. All other things being equal, EV1's funding SCO would have disqualified them before I made the selection. My time's too valuable to play morality cop ex-post-facto for suppliers who are otherwise satisfactory. SCO's going to lose anyway, because nobody who sues IBM wins, even if they win.
I use EV1 Hosting. When I read the original announcement, I was disappointed, but I didn't switch. I'm too busy to mess with something that works.
Some people said they didn't want Marsh using their money to fund SCO. Me, I don't care if he uses it to feed a massive cocaine addiction, AS LONG AS MY BOX AND HIS NETWORK ARE ROCK-SOLID.
The poor guy did the deal thinking he was just buying something akin to fire insurance, and boy did he get burned.
Is it dynamic (can I define functions at runtime)? Is it compiled? Can I easily write code that manipulates code? Are functions first class objects? Can I extend the language seamlessly?
Some new languages are interesting, but most are built by people who have used and understood far too few of the current ones.
There's software guys, hardware guys, and now, HVAC guys??
This seems a little complex and extreme for the home builder. Maybe a specialty co-lo opportunity, though? "Icebox netbox"? No good for gamers, of course. But for others who need MIPS for problems that can't be parallelized...
Slashdot Mirror
I can see de-orbiting an old, useless analog comsat as being sensible. But for stuff which would otherwise continue to usefully function for years or decades, write-off due to non catastrophic failure ought not to be the natural option. The US space program suffers from an attention deficit disorder.
I disagree. A reasonably competent UNIX sysadmin can himself write scripts that will automate an upgrade task across n machines. So he understands the theory, is less likely to be snowed by the desktop management system vendor, and feels more in control during the upgrade process.
Microsoft Windows machines have never had integrated scriptable administration systems, nor has it been easy to script one up, leaving IT departments at the mercy of SMS or a similar product. Mass upgrades typically look nothing like individual upgrades, as the latter is usually accomplished via the GUI, so the sysadmin doesn't even have a feel for what the product is doing.
Obviously, new software tools are going to have to embody twisty little logic traps and lawyer skills.
"In difficult recruiting environments, it is inevitable that either quality standards or recruiting resources be subject to adjustment," said Richard I. Stark Jr., a retired Army colonel who is a military-personnel specialist at the Center for Strategic & International Studies here. "The Army has been forced to adjust to both."
Seriously, for those twits who'd rather pay $100k for surgery with the right to sue than $20 for surgery without that right (assuming, as you all are, that suing in India is impossible or useless), if you're feeling that unlucky, maybe you should skip the surgery.
In every other conversation about outsourcing, it's the low wages in the other country that seem to be the issue, but in this one, it's magically their insurance/litigation regime. What gives?
I think that in order to have a really innovative OS, new tools are required. After all, productivity is limited by the toolchain, and this is using essentially the same toolchain as the various free UNIXes. Won't it end up having more or less the same features and limitations as current systems (assuming that hundreds of thousands of developer hours get devoted to developing and porting)? * Make 3.79.1 * AutoConf 2.13 * AutoMake 1.4-p6 * BinUtils 2.15 * GCC 3.3.4 * M4 1.4.1 * FLex 2.5.4a * Bison 1.875 * Patch 2.5.4 * CVS 1.12.9 * Indent 2.2.9
English does evolve, and good writers sometimes repurpose words to great effect. Alas, judging by the rest of the reviews here, our hero is NOT a good writer -- having built a shoddy and ramshackle outhouse, he proudly crowns himself the architect of it.
As for all those people who shout "prescriptive grammarian!", I often suspect they're just too lazy to learn to write well, and have decided that claiming that rules are passe is an effective workaround.
So this guy's familiar with UNIX, he's familiar with Lisp, yet he thinks the future is XML and hideous frameworks with ever-changing APIs? Not often you se e someone with a hammer AND a screwdriver using the hammer to pound screws.
I think young people might get more engaged in the political process if they worked as scrutineers and staff at polling booths, but automating everything down to "push button A for war, button B for peace" won't help a bit.
Why not use a language that's smart enough to prove code written in a useful language, not just a toy?
From the CIA World Factbook
From the start of this review, it looks like nothing's changed. You'd think he was getting paid by the word!
If his new stuff turns YOUR crank, that's great, but I'll have to be satisfied with my old copies of his classics.
Now if the problem had called for gracefully handling bad input, I'd have put it in. As it is, my environment invokes the debugger for silly input, where the OP's probably would have crashed:
Spend less time on slashdot?
Not from what I've seen (or maybe it's taught but not followed?)
Many of the code and sites I've seen have scalability problems, and those aren't the ones that explicitly say "not designed to scale."
The cynic in me thinks that the folks at NASA are just raising the hopes of all those gullible people out there, to get more funding. Doing science that you know has a popular hook is one thing, but doing non-science as an excuse for cool engineering is inexcusable.
I do wish the government would force the SEC to clamp down on dodgy reporting, accounting and corporate governance.
You spend your programming career telling yourself that programming is akin to mathematics. Then you read this book and realize that all these years you've been doing arithmetic, and Lisp does mathematics.
Now tell me again why this new scripting language is interpreted?
Here's my principles, as they apply to this situation: My first duty is to select a reliable, competitive hosting company. All other things being equal, EV1's funding SCO would have disqualified them before I made the selection. My time's too valuable to play morality cop ex-post-facto for suppliers who are otherwise satisfactory. SCO's going to lose anyway, because nobody who sues IBM wins, even if they win.
So what are you looking for, an omniscient CEO, or one who never admits his mistakes?
Some people said they didn't want Marsh using their money to fund SCO. Me, I don't care if he uses it to feed a massive cocaine addiction, AS LONG AS MY BOX AND HIS NETWORK ARE ROCK-SOLID.
The poor guy did the deal thinking he was just buying something akin to fire insurance, and boy did he get burned.
Is it dynamic (can I define functions at runtime)? Is it compiled? Can I easily write code that manipulates code? Are functions first class objects? Can I extend the language seamlessly?
Some new languages are interesting, but most are built by people who have used and understood far too few of the current ones.
Here's more from Business 2.0 I like the "already peaked" bit.
This seems a little complex and extreme for the home builder. Maybe a specialty co-lo opportunity, though? "Icebox netbox"? No good for gamers, of course. But for others who need MIPS for problems that can't be parallelized...