Excuse me, but didn't Boeing go with Russian engines for the Sealaunch program simply because they were the best engines for the job? Granted, I've heard nothing but bad things about their avionics systems, but I've come across several documents proclaiming their propulsion systems to be top notch. Now I *HAVE* heard that their manufacturing techniques were extremely inferior to their western counterparts (titanium, turbine blades and the like).
-Chris PS: Yes, I am one of those desk jockey rocket scientists, I plainly admit it. But this has been a thoroughly interesting thread, and your contributions have been most intriguing...:-)
If that were true, we'd be throwing planes away after every flight. Let's face it, if you continue to throw away space vehicles, space travel will never get cheap. What we need is a comprehensive program for building a cheap spacecraft over 3-4 generations.
If we designed a program like so:
1. No cargo. This craft carries only humans. It's a two stage to orbit craft, sort of like Energiya/Buran|shuttle/SSME+tanks. In the initial phase, only the orbiter is 100% reusable. Goal to remate the orbiter to a new launch stage within 3-4 days, and put it back in orbit within 7. 2. Develop reusable launcher stack. 3. Scale launcher stack to be able to launch two orbiters at once. (one on each side perhaps?) 4. Build bigger orbiter 5. Build cargo module for launch stack 6.... 7. Profit
Here, the two very complex goals of building a multi-purpose spacecraft are eliminated. We have lots of heavy lift platforms available to us today. What we don't have is robust reusable human orbiters. 12 person crew to orbit. Another orbiter revision with a 3 or 4 person crew and 4-6 experiment pallets. And another completely empty with only an airlock for cargo.
All using the same launch stack, reusable or not.
SSTO is preferable, in my eyes, because the goal of being able to land anywhere, and take back off again is very useful. Well, in this case, it really is SSTO, but you could always add auxiliary boosters, again, like Energiya/Buran (I guess I'm obsessed with how the Russians designed their program.;-) ).
A couple good points. If we're not going to do SSTO, then you want to decouple the orbiter from the launcher. In the case of Energiya, you could strap (eventually, if the program had been completed) 8 auxiliary boosters onto the main rocket stack to theoretically launch 200 tons into LEO. Put a small 20ton cargo into a nose fairing and put it in a geostationary orbit (I'm clueless, but I imagine that would have been possible). Now take off two of the boosters, and mount the orbiter stack with 60 tons of experiments in it, or mount a cargo container with 110-140 tons of construction materiel. A flexible launch system, that can be incrementally improved (better engines on the boosters?) without having to redesign the entire stack.
NASA sort of got it right. But the engines shouldn't have been in the orbiter. I seem to recall that the entire reason they were, was a future requirement for reboost capability in order to evade orbital based missiles.
The reason you want power on reentry is the ability to select another landing site in the event of bad weather or terrorist act or (Gods forbid) another plane crashed on you 10 minutes before you're scheduled to land, and the runway is wrecked.
If the weather is bad in Florida, why can't you bleed off some extra speed and reroute to Atlanta instead? Granted, you don't want a LOT of extra fuel, but having enough to let you pick one or two extra air-ports is worth it. Particularly if you can get the rollout distance for landing under 6000 feet.
Hell, if you want to do SSTO with relatively common fuels, you'll want this capability. There's nothing like being able to take off in New York, land in Hong Kong because the air over Taiwan got REALLY nasty, and then take off again to get back to New York.
Oh we are so far away from this, it makes me sad...
You're trying to compare a terrorist act to open warfare? War is a means to an end. What is the end that the terrorists want? I don't know that. Unless the end they wanted was "Let the U.S. bomb afghanistan into oblivion. That'll show the Taliban.... But Osama, we *ARE* ze Taliban... doh!", then they got it. But what I'm guessing is that Osama & Co. are pissed off, and upset because the seat of human civilization 6000 years ago is a slave to the rest of the nations of the world, and feels that's unfair. So he wants to terrorize us back to the stone age. Well, it's not working. Except for more memorials, and plaques, and parks, and bad memories, America hasn't changed. Oh, we're in a recession, big deal. Life goes on.
Asking our military to be a police force is the absolute worst thing we could do. We have police for that. Unfortunately, our police are only empowered to protect the homefront, not project power and make war. It's very hard to get cooperation from the people you're trying to save if you roll in with a shitload of tanks, helicopters, and painted men in green and brown carrying machine guns and hand grenades. If you think talking to a cop giving you a speeding ticket is tough, try doing it with a jumpy grunt with an M16 and no idea WTF he's doing...
But yes, we spend too much money on defense..:-) I think we spend too much more on social projects gone wrong, but that's just me.
I don't want a space elevator. Space elevators have inherent weaknesses in their design, including:
1. Fixed location to the earth. 2. Vulnerable to terrorist act 3. Vulnerable to weather and storms. 4. Monopolistic control of elevator time
What I do want are spaceports in every state in the union, in every country in the world, with reliable launch systems that can get me into space from 100 different places on earth, from untold numbers of vendors.
Personally, I think the Russians had it right with Buran. Decouple the launch mechanism from the orbiter. Putting the SSME's in the shuttle increases vehicle complexity, and makes development of a replacement launcher prohibitively expensive. Could we have rebuilt the Shuttle launcher around an Atlas V rocket stack? Or revive Energiya or something like it?
You're very right. As others have commented, unless your format was designed as a serial, with some direction (like 24, etc). Having a good set of continuity between episodes gives each show a place in the arc of it's own universe. Stargate:SG1 is a perfect example. 98% of it's episodes stand on their own, yet many of them build on scenes and characters from other earlier episodes. Giving some history to the whole series. Star Trek did a bit of that with Voyager and DS9. For all the reasons that Voyager sucked, I really don't believe their attempt at continuity was one of them. The arms race in technology, the fact that the ship looked brand new at the start EVERY SINGLE episode... I don't know about you, but when I take my car on a road trip in the desert and don't get to a carwash very often, she looks like shit. Compare that to a starship in a hostile part of the galaxy, and I think you'll get the image I'm trying to paint. Voyager was too cute for the story it was trying to portray. It wasn't dark, dramatic or dangerous. It was a light airy comic where everyone seemed like they were on a constant ecstacy high. Not once in the entire series did I sympathize with the crew wanting to get home. I just never bought it, and I think most of the viewing audience never bought it either.
You're absolutely right. When Babylon 5 was on Sci-Fi a year or so ago, my poor Tivo had a hard time keeping up (I had 5 years of episodes to catch up on). It's why I've latched onto Farscape in Babylon 5's absense. It's not really the same, in that Farscape's supporting cast is mostly there to give Crighton something to occupy his time with, whereas Babylon 5's plots could revolve around any number of cast members...
And if they happen to be in an area where other crew members are, they'll all die. And what if the boarding party thought of that tactic? If I were an assaulting commander, I'd CERTAINLY presume that mine enemies would attempt to suffocate me.
Granted, laser combat in a closed environment with lots of delicate and fragile stuff around isn't necessarily a good idea either, but it's better to contain a force with overwhelming firepower than to hope the ship can hold them back. Remember, airlocks can be shot/cut open, and bombs make great door-knockers.
There's something to be said for one-off episodes and movies, but I have to admit as much as I hated the whole trek phenomenon after the 3rd or 4th season of TNG, I really got into the last couple seasons of DS9, because it had a serial format to it that made it compelling to watch next weeks episode. That whole serial format is what makes things like 24, West Wing, Farscape, Stargate SG:1 interesting to watch. There's no fear in me that the good guys are in trouble. No suspense, because you know Jordi and Data are going to save the day.
No. We need death. We need strife. We need chaos. Heroic actions that lead to horrible consequences. Ala Lord of the Rings (sorry to insult LTR by comparing it to trek). But the trek series was never very serial to begin with, so this format might not work at all. I hate the fact that the Klingons kept getting beat down by the humans. Let's face it, a warrior race, based on strong tactical skill (al Queda) facing off against a strong enemy with powerful weapons, strong moral code (for the sake of argument) (U.S.A), etc. etc....
Are you crazy? First off, with SEC accounting rules, he's got to give the public some warning, 30 days, IIRC.
If BillG sold all his shares, or even half, I think you could count on the COMPLETE collapse of the Microsoft balloon. $44 to $4. The act of a CEO cashing out so much stock would send investors running, even if it was for a good reason, like buying Nantucket Island, say, and building a summer home.
I always thought it was pointer size? I mean, a 32 bit platform *CAN* have 64 bit registers... but I always thought bit-ness was keyed to the amount of memory addressable with a single x-bit pointer.
What home desktop tasks? Playing games? Correct. NT never had the support for video games. Microsoft was too interested in making it a viable and stable server platform. But it was hard enough to get people to develop for DirectX instead of people writing directly to DOS. Problem was, Microsoft needed a test-bed to prove DirectX on (95/98) without sacrificing the best of the WIN32 core in NT. NT had the same application limitations in 1996 that Linux does today. Very little in the way of sophisticated accounting software, nothing in the way of web development, nothing in the consumer digital imaging arena, or nothing pretty anyway.:-) Things are different 4 years later.
The evolution of NT 3.1->Windows 2000 is quite telling for what COULD happen with Linux if we keep our noses to the grindstones.
Pundits be damned. I just want something that boots in less than 10 seconds, a BIOS POST that isn't longer than the OS boot code (good luck), and really big fucking screens (4096x4096 @ 12' diagonal).
Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavor.:( So sad, to be so close to safety... I can imagine 100 reasons why she broke up, but I know a certifiable answer won't be coming for a LONG time... I don't want to see our space program grounded what with the X-33 and all it's brethren programs cancelled. Having to send our astronauts to the ISS via the Soyuz would be some serious egg in our faces (not to seem too petty).
May all our various Gods watch over the lost Explorers and their grieving families.
A point that I am not debating. I have however, always wished for the magic Windows Registry setting that I could toggle (the simple act of toggling it being a very clue that I want clippy and the like turned off), and software could rely on it to know not to do silly things like prompt me for submitting information to the net, or prompt me for running javascript, or 100 equally inane things (although some of these have security implications, I'm deliberately ignoring those, for the sake of this argument).
But it is a pointless argument, really, since with most software, ideally being installed in a deny-nearly-everything mode, it would be hideously insecure (Explorer, Outlook, Word macros, etc..).
Actually, to make systems respond better, increasing processors isn't going to help. Increasing cache hits and reducing time for disk reads is really the only reason to make systems snappier. As an example, in my poor laptop with 256K of cache, if I'm using a boatload of apps (MSDev, Explorer, Outlook, vi, etc) I'm going to be replacing pages in my poor cache nearly every second. I get a maybe 25% cache hit rate on my machine (from performance testing). With slow disk drives, that drives my performance down even more. When it comes to compiling, I can pin the CPU. But when it comes to working with Word and or Excel, CPU is hardly the problem for me anymore. Then it becomes the software going out and loading up wizards, and attempting to do things for me that I don't necessarily want it to do (MSdev with auto-indent, etc.).
I've LONG been a fan of software with two flags. New [l]user mode. Super [l]user mode.
So if I set Super luser mode, the software doesn't do SQUAT. No clippy, no autocomplete, no nothing. I hate it very much when my typing stream gets interrupted because Word or MSDev or Excel goes off and tries to autocomplete something (so I spend several hours every time I get a new machine turning said features off, and every new release turns them back on.. <sigh>).:-) Happy weekend, all. -Chris
Without wanting to harm the parent posters sensibilities or reputation, the post itself has the earmark of coming from someone who's never written a system from the ground up before. I've counted many a time when I've written 10,000 lines of code in a day just to get a workable system going (doing fly-by-wire system design). In many of those cases I have rewritten perhaps 5000 of those lines down to 1000 or so, as the system got more mature and robust and we could address more time to reliability as opposed to feature implementation.
In my particular case, there were a dozen programmers who couldn't do ANYTHING until I got my job done. Bug fixing does NOT a programmer make.
The answer to that is proper decoupling. By making your middle tier and client and database tiers seperate, you don't HAVE this problem. The rest becomes a matter of proper testing.
But you make a good point, in that certain complex systems, namely database clusters, and web farms introduce other difficulties into the mix, and that many, if not all, of the programmers writing to these targets have very little clue how these systems work, and what sorts of interdependencies they have on each other.
I fortunately was blessed with an upbringing in IT, building the foundation for these distributed apps, before writing the software that took advantage of them. Many of my comrades did not have such an advantage. This doesn't make me better than them, but it gives me an insight into how the whole system behaves that they will struggle to understand. I surmise that many programmers on slashdot have a similar experience.
Does this mean perfect in that the final product will reflect the input perfectly, or perfect in that, say, the grammar, spelling and typo's in the classics of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Marx are corrected and eliminated?
Few people can type 120 words per minute. Many can't even type 60. Most can speak at least that if not more. I can certainly read aloud at least twice as fast as I can type. But I'm sure that speech recognizer won't be able to keep up.;-)
And there it is. I think you, Sir, have hit on the biggest usability issue I see to date, and that's the two separate input devices I must use to master my computing environment. I don't claim to be smart enough to figure out a replacement to the ubiquitous mouse and keyboard, but I do see it as an annoyance, hence my own propensity to use primary the keyboard, and the mouse only when playing Counterstrike.;-)
An excellent answer, sir. Hmm, yes, the act of hitting CTRL with my pinky knuckle and losing the ability to hit the Q, versus simply using my nearly useless thumb to hit the Alt key.
Yet weren't we taught in typing class (those of us who use the home row, that we're supposed to alternate use of the left and right ctrl/shift/alt keys depending on which finger we're trying to shift?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, are correct. Life has a 100% fatality rate, last time I looked up statistics on it. :-) Wish I had a mod point for you.
Hell, many of us are even lucky to be born at all.
-Chris
Excuse me, but didn't Boeing go with Russian engines for the Sealaunch program simply because they were the best engines for the job? Granted, I've heard nothing but bad things about their avionics systems, but I've come across several documents proclaiming their propulsion systems to be top notch. Now I *HAVE* heard that their manufacturing techniques were extremely inferior to their western counterparts (titanium, turbine blades and the like).
:-)
-Chris
PS: Yes, I am one of those desk jockey rocket scientists, I plainly admit it. But this has been a thoroughly interesting thread, and your contributions have been most intriguing...
If that were true, we'd be throwing planes away after every flight. Let's face it, if you continue to throw away space vehicles, space travel will never get cheap. What we need is a comprehensive program for building a cheap spacecraft over 3-4 generations.
...
;-) ).
If we designed a program like so:
1. No cargo. This craft carries only humans. It's a two stage to orbit craft, sort of like Energiya/Buran|shuttle/SSME+tanks. In the initial phase, only the orbiter is 100% reusable. Goal to remate the orbiter to a new launch stage within 3-4 days, and put it back in orbit within 7.
2. Develop reusable launcher stack.
3. Scale launcher stack to be able to launch two orbiters at once. (one on each side perhaps?)
4. Build bigger orbiter
5. Build cargo module for launch stack
6.
7. Profit
Here, the two very complex goals of building a multi-purpose spacecraft are eliminated. We have lots of heavy lift platforms available to us today. What we don't have is robust reusable human orbiters. 12 person crew to orbit. Another orbiter revision with a 3 or 4 person crew and 4-6 experiment pallets. And another completely empty with only an airlock for cargo.
All using the same launch stack, reusable or not.
SSTO is preferable, in my eyes, because the goal of being able to land anywhere, and take back off again is very useful. Well, in this case, it really is SSTO, but you could always add auxiliary boosters, again, like Energiya/Buran (I guess I'm obsessed with how the Russians designed their program.
A couple good points. If we're not going to do SSTO, then you want to decouple the orbiter from the launcher. In the case of Energiya, you could strap (eventually, if the program had been completed) 8 auxiliary boosters onto the main rocket stack to theoretically launch 200 tons into LEO. Put a small 20ton cargo into a nose fairing and put it in a geostationary orbit (I'm clueless, but I imagine that would have been possible). Now take off two of the boosters, and mount the orbiter stack with 60 tons of experiments in it, or mount a cargo container with 110-140 tons of construction materiel. A flexible launch system, that can be incrementally improved (better engines on the boosters?) without having to redesign the entire stack.
NASA sort of got it right. But the engines shouldn't have been in the orbiter. I seem to recall that the entire reason they were, was a future requirement for reboost capability in order to evade orbital based missiles.
-Chris
The reason you want power on reentry is the ability to select another landing site in the event of bad weather or terrorist act or (Gods forbid) another plane crashed on you 10 minutes before you're scheduled to land, and the runway is wrecked.
If the weather is bad in Florida, why can't you bleed off some extra speed and reroute to Atlanta instead? Granted, you don't want a LOT of extra fuel, but having enough to let you pick one or two extra air-ports is worth it. Particularly if you can get the rollout distance for landing under 6000 feet.
Hell, if you want to do SSTO with relatively common fuels, you'll want this capability. There's nothing like being able to take off in New York, land in Hong Kong because the air over Taiwan got REALLY nasty, and then take off again to get back to New York.
Oh we are so far away from this, it makes me sad...
-Chris
You're trying to compare a terrorist act to open warfare? War is a means to an end. What is the end that the terrorists want? I don't know that. Unless the end they wanted was "Let the U.S. bomb afghanistan into oblivion. That'll show the Taliban.... But Osama, we *ARE* ze Taliban... doh!", then they got it. But what I'm guessing is that Osama & Co. are pissed off, and upset because the seat of human civilization 6000 years ago is a slave to the rest of the nations of the world, and feels that's unfair. So he wants to terrorize us back to the stone age. Well, it's not working. Except for more memorials, and plaques, and parks, and bad memories, America hasn't changed. Oh, we're in a recession, big deal. Life goes on.
:-) I think we spend too much more on social projects gone wrong, but that's just me.
Asking our military to be a police force is the absolute worst thing we could do. We have police for that. Unfortunately, our police are only empowered to protect the homefront, not project power and make war. It's very hard to get cooperation from the people you're trying to save if you roll in with a shitload of tanks, helicopters, and painted men in green and brown carrying machine guns and hand grenades. If you think talking to a cop giving you a speeding ticket is tough, try doing it with a jumpy grunt with an M16 and no idea WTF he's doing...
But yes, we spend too much money on defense..
Have a day!
I don't want a space elevator. Space elevators have inherent weaknesses in their design, including:
1. Fixed location to the earth.
2. Vulnerable to terrorist act
3. Vulnerable to weather and storms.
4. Monopolistic control of elevator time
What I do want are spaceports in every state in the union, in every country in the world, with reliable launch systems that can get me into space from 100 different places on earth, from untold numbers of vendors.
Personally, I think the Russians had it right with Buran. Decouple the launch mechanism from the orbiter. Putting the SSME's in the shuttle increases vehicle complexity, and makes development of a replacement launcher prohibitively expensive. Could we have rebuilt the Shuttle launcher around an Atlas V rocket stack? Or revive Energiya or something like it?
You're very right. As others have commented, unless your format was designed as a serial, with some direction (like 24, etc). Having a good set of continuity between episodes gives each show a place in the arc of it's own universe. Stargate:SG1 is a perfect example. 98% of it's episodes stand on their own, yet many of them build on scenes and characters from other earlier episodes. Giving some history to the whole series. Star Trek did a bit of that with Voyager and DS9. For all the reasons that Voyager sucked, I really don't believe their attempt at continuity was one of them. The arms race in technology, the fact that the ship looked brand new at the start EVERY SINGLE episode... I don't know about you, but when I take my car on a road trip in the desert and don't get to a carwash very often, she looks like shit. Compare that to a starship in a hostile part of the galaxy, and I think you'll get the image I'm trying to paint. Voyager was too cute for the story it was trying to portray. It wasn't dark, dramatic or dangerous. It was a light airy comic where everyone seemed like they were on a constant ecstacy high. Not once in the entire series did I sympathize with the crew wanting to get home. I just never bought it, and I think most of the viewing audience never bought it either.
You're absolutely right. When Babylon 5 was on Sci-Fi a year or so ago, my poor Tivo had a hard time keeping up (I had 5 years of episodes to catch up on). It's why I've latched onto Farscape in Babylon 5's absense. It's not really the same, in that Farscape's supporting cast is mostly there to give Crighton something to occupy his time with, whereas Babylon 5's plots could revolve around any number of cast members...
And if they happen to be in an area where other crew members are, they'll all die. And what if the boarding party thought of that tactic? If I were an assaulting commander, I'd CERTAINLY presume that mine enemies would attempt to suffocate me.
Granted, laser combat in a closed environment with lots of delicate and fragile stuff around isn't necessarily a good idea either, but it's better to contain a force with overwhelming firepower than to hope the ship can hold them back. Remember, airlocks can be shot/cut open, and bombs make great door-knockers.
There's something to be said for one-off episodes and movies, but I have to admit as much as I hated the whole trek phenomenon after the 3rd or 4th season of TNG, I really got into the last couple seasons of DS9, because it had a serial format to it that made it compelling to watch next weeks episode. That whole serial format is what makes things like 24, West Wing, Farscape, Stargate SG:1 interesting to watch. There's no fear in me that the good guys are in trouble. No suspense, because you know Jordi and Data are going to save the day.
No. We need death. We need strife. We need chaos. Heroic actions that lead to horrible consequences. Ala Lord of the Rings (sorry to insult LTR by comparing it to trek). But the trek series was never very serial to begin with, so this format might not work at all. I hate the fact that the Klingons kept getting beat down by the humans. Let's face it, a warrior race, based on strong tactical skill (al Queda) facing off against a strong enemy with powerful weapons, strong moral code (for the sake of argument) (U.S.A), etc. etc....
-Chris
Are you crazy? First off, with SEC accounting rules, he's got to give the public some warning, 30 days, IIRC.
If BillG sold all his shares, or even half, I think you could count on the COMPLETE collapse of the Microsoft balloon. $44 to $4. The act of a CEO cashing out so much stock would send investors running, even if it was for a good reason, like buying Nantucket Island, say, and building a summer home.
Yes, and the world was REALLY happy to be rid of it's predecessor, the 16bit segment:offset nightmare that was DOS.
-Chris
I always thought it was pointer size? I mean, a 32 bit platform *CAN* have 64 bit registers... but I always thought bit-ness was keyed to the amount of memory addressable with a single x-bit pointer.
I could be wrong though (and have been)...
-Chris
What home desktop tasks? Playing games? Correct. NT never had the support for video games. Microsoft was too interested in making it a viable and stable server platform. But it was hard enough to get people to develop for DirectX instead of people writing directly to DOS. Problem was, Microsoft needed a test-bed to prove DirectX on (95/98) without sacrificing the best of the WIN32 core in NT. NT had the same application limitations in 1996 that Linux does today. Very little in the way of sophisticated accounting software, nothing in the way of web development, nothing in the consumer digital imaging arena, or nothing pretty anyway. :-) Things are different 4 years later.
The evolution of NT 3.1->Windows 2000 is quite telling for what COULD happen with Linux if we keep our noses to the grindstones.
Pundits be damned. I just want something that boots in less than 10 seconds, a BIOS POST that isn't longer than the OS boot code (good luck), and really big fucking screens (4096x4096 @ 12' diagonal).
Have a day!
-Chris
Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavor. :( So sad, to be so close to safety... I can imagine 100 reasons why she broke up, but I know a certifiable answer won't be coming for a LONG time... I don't want to see our space program grounded what with the X-33 and all it's brethren programs cancelled. Having to send our astronauts to the ISS via the Soyuz would be some serious egg in our faces (not to seem too petty).
May all our various Gods watch over the lost Explorers and their grieving families.
-Chris Kaminski
A point that I am not debating. I have however, always wished for the magic Windows Registry setting that I could toggle (the simple act of toggling it being a very clue that I want clippy and the like turned off), and software could rely on it to know not to do silly things like prompt me for submitting information to the net, or prompt me for running javascript, or 100 equally inane things (although some of these have security implications, I'm deliberately ignoring those, for the sake of this argument).
But it is a pointless argument, really, since with most software, ideally being installed in a deny-nearly-everything mode, it would be hideously insecure (Explorer, Outlook, Word macros, etc..).
Actually, to make systems respond better, increasing processors isn't going to help. Increasing cache hits and reducing time for disk reads is really the only reason to make systems snappier. As an example, in my poor laptop with 256K of cache, if I'm using a boatload of apps (MSDev, Explorer, Outlook, vi, etc) I'm going to be replacing pages in my poor cache nearly every second. I get a maybe 25% cache hit rate on my machine (from performance testing). With slow disk drives, that drives my performance down even more. When it comes to compiling, I can pin the CPU. But when it comes to working with Word and or Excel, CPU is hardly the problem for me anymore. Then it becomes the software going out and loading up wizards, and attempting to do things for me that I don't necessarily want it to do (MSdev with auto-indent, etc.).
:-)
I've LONG been a fan of software with two flags. New [l]user mode.
Super [l]user mode.
So if I set Super luser mode, the software doesn't do SQUAT. No clippy, no autocomplete, no nothing. I hate it very much when my typing stream gets interrupted because Word or MSDev or Excel goes off and tries to autocomplete something (so I spend several hours every time I get a new machine turning said features off, and every new release turns them back on.. <sigh>).
Happy weekend, all.
-Chris
Without wanting to harm the parent posters sensibilities or reputation, the post itself has the earmark of coming from someone who's never written a system from the ground up before. I've counted many a time when I've written 10,000 lines of code in a day just to get a workable system going (doing fly-by-wire system design). In many of those cases I have rewritten perhaps 5000 of those lines down to 1000 or so, as the system got more mature and robust and we could address more time to reliability as opposed to feature implementation.
In my particular case, there were a dozen programmers who couldn't do ANYTHING until I got my job done. Bug fixing does NOT a programmer make.
The answer to that is proper decoupling. By making your middle tier and client and database tiers seperate, you don't HAVE this problem. The rest becomes a matter of proper testing.
But you make a good point, in that certain complex systems, namely database clusters, and web farms introduce other difficulties into the mix, and that many, if not all, of the programmers writing to these targets have very little clue how these systems work, and what sorts of interdependencies they have on each other.
I fortunately was blessed with an upbringing in IT, building the foundation for these distributed apps, before writing the software that took advantage of them. Many of my comrades did not have such an advantage. This doesn't make me better than them, but it gives me an insight into how the whole system behaves that they will struggle to understand. I surmise that many programmers on slashdot have a similar experience.
Does this mean perfect in that the final product will reflect the input perfectly, or perfect in that, say, the grammar, spelling and typo's in the classics of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Marx are corrected and eliminated?
Few people can type 120 words per minute. Many can't even type 60. Most can speak at least that if not more. I can certainly read aloud at least twice as fast as I can type. But I'm sure that speech recognizer won't be able to keep up. ;-)
-Chris
And there it is. I think you, Sir, have hit on the biggest usability issue I see to date, and that's the two separate input devices I must use to master my computing environment. I don't claim to be smart enough to figure out a replacement to the ubiquitous mouse and keyboard, but I do see it as an annoyance, hence my own propensity to use primary the keyboard, and the mouse only when playing Counterstrike. ;-)
An excellent answer, sir. Hmm, yes, the act of hitting CTRL with my pinky knuckle and losing the ability to hit the Q, versus simply using my nearly useless thumb to hit the Alt key.
:-)
Yet weren't we taught in typing class (those of us who use the home row, that we're supposed to alternate use of the left and right ctrl/shift/alt keys depending on which finger we're trying to shift?