This thinking pretty much sums it up. Experimental/exploratory aviation is inherently risky. NASA has squatted on its haunches for half a century; no human had left low-earth orbit (LEO) since 1972. Idiots like these want to make it another 50 years. Good luck with that.
I teach CS 428 ("Software Engineering") at BYU. The three texts my students read are:
-- The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks (originally published in 1975, anniversary edition in 1995) -- Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister (first published in 1987, currently in its 3rd edition) -- Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass (published in 2002)
I also recommend to them (but don't require) The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerry Weinberg (first published in 1971)
I tell my students if they read those first three books, they will be in the 1% (or less) of people in the IT industry who have. Yet they clearly lay out all of the foundational issues in IT, including bad hiring, bad management, bad environments, lack of understanding (by management) of how to build teams and nurture talent, and so on. They explain why we have such crappy software and why we lose $50B or so each year in failed IT projects.
My other work is as an expert witness in litigation involving IT. About 50% of my cases are failed/disputed IT projects. My job is made easy -- though I am often depressed -- by how common and well-documented the root causes are. You'd think we'd learn. You'd be wrong...bruce..
I was an early Echo adopter and have a Dot now as well. I primarily use it to (a) maintain my shopping/errands list, and (b) stream music while I do stuff in the kitchen. I've never bought anything using it.
But I can tell you if the day comes that Alexa gives me ads when I'm asking for something else, it's getting unplugged forever...bruce..
However, most firms are bad at recruiting and maintaining top-quality people. Often, they chase the best ones away, resulting in the Dead Sea Effect.
Finally, "In starting a new software program, all the important mistakes are made on the first day." (The Art of Systems Architecting, Maier & Rechtin)...bruce..
I have an Amazon Echo and Dot ("Alexa"). Principal use is to maintain my grocery/errand list. I also use the Echo to stream music in the kitchen in the morning while I'm feeding the dogs. Won't be hard to fire at all.
Alistair! Great to touch base; hope you're doing well. And, yeah. I had actually hoped to see Jerry a month ago when I was in LA, but the (business) trip was too short to set up a visit. Drop me a line sometime (you can find my e-mail at my website)...bruce..
I got to know Jerry personally when I started writing for BYTE back in 1984. While I had read his BYTE column as well as much of his science fiction writings to date (both solo and with Larry Niven), what I didn't appreciate until some fact time with him was how much he knew about so many subjects. "Chaos Manor" (his name for the house that he and Roberta lived in in Studio CIty) was so named because of the shelves and stacks of books everywhere, on every conceivable subject. Jerry had a BA/MA in psychology and a PhD in political science; he was also an army vet, and did a lot of consulting for the US government, both in terms of the military and the space program. He also had what was pretty much a photographic memory. When I would argue with him on subjects, he'd bring up facts and figures from a vast array of sources.
He also didn't suffer fools gladly, which is why he ticked off so many people.:-) Also, he knew too much for them to prove him wrong, which these days is an unforgivable sin...bruce..
I'm actually a fan of Apple TV; we have one hooked up to our family room TV (55", a/v receiver, 3' speakers, subwoofer literally the size of a steamer trunk) as well as one hooked up to our bedroom TV upstairs. And yet as I sit here at the dinner table on my laptop (we have one of the family room/dining area/kitchen open rooms), I'm listening to streaming music from...our Amazon Echo. Why? Because when I came downstairs to feed the dogs, all I had to say was "Alexa, play my 'Mornings' playlist", and it did. No remote to fumble with, no checking to be sure I was in the right 'spot' in the Apple TV menu to play a playlist.
Apple blew it by not releasing a hands-free, voice-activated Apple TV a year ago. 4K doesn't wow me; I have no plans to run out and buy a 4K tv any time soon. What I want is better and more functionality, and in particular true voice activated functionality.
Anyone want to predict what actual Apple HomePod sales end up being?
Remember that for quite some time, the rumor was that Apple was going to release its own line of TV sets. Many people (including myself) thought that was a stupid idea, since it would put Apple into the TV manufacturing business, which is pretty cutthroat.
I think the same problems occur with the concept of Apple building its own self-driving car, except that car manufacturing is far more complex, capital-intensive, and labor-intensive than building TV sets, while still being just as cutthroat (note that US car mfgrs are dealing with slowing sales and mounting inventory). So, Apple's move is, generally speaking, a sane one.
On the other hand, Apple has largely blown its approach to the actual Apple TV to date (I own two and am a fan, but I love my Echo and Dot more), so who knows what it will achieve on the automotive front.
As noted, the problem with most organizations is that there is no technical advancement track. I actually proposed back in the late 90s at one organization that we establish a full technical track that went from entry-level coder all the way up to CTO (with a layer of 'senior technical officers' below the CTO level).
Other organizations -- such as Bell Labs in its heyday -- simply had everyone as 'Member of Technical Staff', with ad hoc organization around research and technical projects.
Sadly, though, most organizations do, in fact, force technical people to become managers to advance, regardless of whether they want to or are suited for it. It's one of the reasons IT remains so dysfunctional throughout most organizations.
Changed my major to CS in 1974; my first CS class (BYU), we started with a IBM 360 pseudo-machine code (on punched cards) and then moved on to actual 360 assembly (also on punched cards). Later in the semester, we had to buy a FORTRAN text (which I still have), teach ourselves FORTRAN, and pass a proficiency test. (My professor for that class was Dr Alan Ashton, who would end up being on of the co-authors of Word Perfect. Great teacher.)
At the same time, I started working part time for a computer-assisted translation research project on campus that was using PL/1; my first task was doing data entry of Spanish vocabulary, but I bought a text on PL/1 and started teaching myself.
I'd actually had some brief exposure to BASIC a few years earlier, but not enough to claim it was my first language.
I had pretty much abandoned Hulu over its mandatory ads -- and then they offered an ad-free version for a few dollars (per month) more. Jumped on that right quick. And of course, no ads in Netflix. Or Amazon video.
I DVR virtually any sports event I'm interested in. If I'm watching "live", it lets me pause the game for whatever reason, then skip over ads until I catch up again. If I'm not that invested in the game, or if I have other things interfering with seeing it live, I'll record it, see what the final score is, then decide whether I want to actually watch it. The upside is that I can skip thru ads.
Given that this case has gone on for six (6) years, a $3 million verdict probably won't even cover MobileMedia's legal fees (which, I suspect, the judge will not grant to them on top of the aware; it's unusual for the plaintiff/patent owner to get legal fees on top of damages in these cases). Patent litigation is very expensive, especially if you go to trial; I remember being staggered at what the cumulative per-hour billing rate must have been for one such trial where I testified as an expert...bruce..
Not to be an old programming fart (but, hey!), but this comes up about every 5-10 years. Someone has created a system for automatic program generation that is going to replace programmers (4th generation languages, anyone? How about "The Last One"?), and it turns out to have only limited usefulness.
Of course, code generation programs exist. They've existed almost as long we've been programming computers. The most common are assemblers and compilers, which take in text specifications and generate running code (or sometimes bytecode to be interpreted). And if you stop and think about the difficulties that most of us who code have with making source code that we write produce running code that meets our needs, you can immediately see the issues with replacing or bolting on top of that system a 'source code generation' system. It can work very well as long as you don't exceed what it can actually do and only if the code generation system itself is well-written and reliable. (This is why developers feel a sense of betrayal and anger with compiler bugs more than any other kind of tool bug.)
So, yeah, like strong AI, self-coding systems are always 5 to 10 years out and have been for half a century...bruce..
I have personally worked at firms that felt it was OK to lay people off without two-weeks' notice (and without severance pay). So, yeah, I think it's ok. Have I ever done it? No. Would I ever have done it? It would take some pretty extreme circumstances, since I'm a firm believer in not burning bridges (unnecessarily). However, at this point, I'm 63 and self-employed, so it's not likely to come up again in my own life.:-)
I had bought and read several of Ed's books before I met him; we became colleagues and then friends (albeit not close ones) about 15 years ago. It's been a year or two since we've swapped e-mails, but I continued to see his photography work show up on Facebook from time to time.
And I daresay many of those posting here have no idea how influential Ed was in software engineering developing as a discipline, starting nearly half a century ago. He pioneered and championed many concepts and practices that we would take for granted today, both in technique and process. I am so sorry to hear this...bruce..
As someone who lived through the ‘false dawn of space travel’ (to use Heinlein’s phrase), who grew up intensely following the space program, and who actually worked at NASA/JSC on the Space Shuttle flight simulators back in 1979-80, I can give you my observation: the American people got bored with space. Seriously. No one (outside of a small group of space enthusiasts, such as myself) was clamoring for yet more Apollo missions. TV ratings of flight and moonwalk coverage sank to the basement. It was all just more men in space suits skipping around in a black-and-white environment.
With no public demand or support, neither Congress nor the White House had much stomach for pushing things forward, not when the funds had other uses. The NASA manned flight division evolved into a jobs program, which is why NASA fought against privatization of space flight for so long. (The NASA unmanned space exploration division continued to work miracles, even as it does to this day.)
Of course, the real root problem was that the Apollo approach was fundamentally flawed in the first place; as some wag put it decades ago, it was like building a cruise liner for a single crossing of the Atlantic and sinking everything but one lifeboat at the end of the trip. Prior to Kennedy’s challenge, the US was working on an incremental approach: SSTO (single stage to orbit), gliding re-entry, and a space station. We basically lost half a century due to the Apollo approach (and the horribly expensive, horribly fragile kludge that was the Space Shuttle). Frankly, NASA’s current Orion effort is a repeat of just about all the mistakes we made with Apollo and threatens to soak up NASA’s budget for years to come, even as goal dates keep getting pushed back more and more.
The night that Apollo 11 landed, I was part of a group of friends (we were all high school students) who stayed up all night to watch the coverage. When I heard the words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”, I felt the future had begun. I was sure I would live long enough to visit LEO myself and to see humans colonize the moon and land on Mars. If you had described to me back in 1969 what the state of space exploration (and, in particular, US space exploration) would be in 2015, I would not have believed you. And yet here we are.
Seriously? Seriously? He really doesn't recognize the full implications of what he's proposing? Time to drag out my favorite passage from Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons":
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that! More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
Estimating confidence in the completion date for an IT project can be hard. When I've been asked to review a troubled IT project, I've found that a very useful technique to determine how far along the project actually is -- and when it's actually likely to be done -- is to ask those involved at different levels what their "$1,000 confidence level" is -- that is, what date they would be willing to bet $1,000 out of their own pocket that the project will actually be done by. I find that even the most optimistic engineer suddenly turns cautious and starts thinking of all the things that could go wrong.
I then ask what their $10,000 confidence level is. Those answers tend to be the most accurate...bruce..
Slashdot Mirror
This thinking pretty much sums it up. Experimental/exploratory aviation is inherently risky. NASA has squatted on its haunches for half a century; no human had left low-earth orbit (LEO) since 1972. Idiots like these want to make it another 50 years. Good luck with that.
I teach CS 428 ("Software Engineering") at BYU. The three texts my students read are:
-- The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks (originally published in 1975, anniversary edition in 1995)
-- Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister (first published in 1987, currently in its 3rd edition)
-- Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass (published in 2002)
I also recommend to them (but don't require) The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerry Weinberg (first published in 1971)
I tell my students if they read those first three books, they will be in the 1% (or less) of people in the IT industry who have. Yet they clearly lay out all of the foundational issues in IT, including bad hiring, bad management, bad environments, lack of understanding (by management) of how to build teams and nurture talent, and so on. They explain why we have such crappy software and why we lose $50B or so each year in failed IT projects.
My other work is as an expert witness in litigation involving IT. About 50% of my cases are failed/disputed IT projects. My job is made easy -- though I am often depressed -- by how common and well-documented the root causes are. You'd think we'd learn. You'd be wrong. ..bruce..
I was an early Echo adopter and have a Dot now as well. I primarily use it to (a) maintain my shopping/errands list, and (b) stream music while I do stuff in the kitchen. I've never bought anything using it.
But I can tell you if the day comes that Alexa gives me ads when I'm asking for something else, it's getting unplugged forever. ..bruce..
Best video on the subject ever: https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo
OK, only video on the subject, likely, but still the best ever. ..bruce..
The single biggest predictor of project success/failure is the quality of the people involved.
However, most firms are bad at recruiting and maintaining top-quality people. Often, they chase the best ones away, resulting in the Dead Sea Effect.
Finally, "In starting a new software program, all the important mistakes are made on the first day." (The Art of Systems Architecting, Maier & Rechtin). ..bruce..
I have an Amazon Echo and Dot ("Alexa"). Principal use is to maintain my grocery/errand list. I also use the Echo to stream music in the kitchen in the morning while I'm feeding the dogs. Won't be hard to fire at all.
Trust me, within the IT field, the Turing Award is considered every bit as prestigious as the Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ..bruce..
Alistair! Great to touch base; hope you're doing well. And, yeah. I had actually hoped to see Jerry a month ago when I was in LA, but the (business) trip was too short to set up a visit. Drop me a line sometime (you can find my e-mail at my website). ..bruce..
I got to know Jerry personally when I started writing for BYTE back in 1984. While I had read his BYTE column as well as much of his science fiction writings to date (both solo and with Larry Niven), what I didn't appreciate until some fact time with him was how much he knew about so many subjects. "Chaos Manor" (his name for the house that he and Roberta lived in in Studio CIty) was so named because of the shelves and stacks of books everywhere, on every conceivable subject. Jerry had a BA/MA in psychology and a PhD in political science; he was also an army vet, and did a lot of consulting for the US government, both in terms of the military and the space program. He also had what was pretty much a photographic memory. When I would argue with him on subjects, he'd bring up facts and figures from a vast array of sources.
He also didn't suffer fools gladly, which is why he ticked off so many people. :-) Also, he knew too much for them to prove him wrong, which these days is an unforgivable sin. ..bruce..
I'm actually a fan of Apple TV; we have one hooked up to our family room TV (55", a/v receiver, 3' speakers, subwoofer literally the size of a steamer trunk) as well as one hooked up to our bedroom TV upstairs. And yet as I sit here at the dinner table on my laptop (we have one of the family room/dining area/kitchen open rooms), I'm listening to streaming music from...our Amazon Echo. Why? Because when I came downstairs to feed the dogs, all I had to say was "Alexa, play my 'Mornings' playlist", and it did. No remote to fumble with, no checking to be sure I was in the right 'spot' in the Apple TV menu to play a playlist.
Apple blew it by not releasing a hands-free, voice-activated Apple TV a year ago. 4K doesn't wow me; I have no plans to run out and buy a 4K tv any time soon. What I want is better and more functionality, and in particular true voice activated functionality.
Anyone want to predict what actual Apple HomePod sales end up being?
Remember that for quite some time, the rumor was that Apple was going to release its own line of TV sets. Many people (including myself) thought that was a stupid idea, since it would put Apple into the TV manufacturing business, which is pretty cutthroat.
I think the same problems occur with the concept of Apple building its own self-driving car, except that car manufacturing is far more complex, capital-intensive, and labor-intensive than building TV sets, while still being just as cutthroat (note that US car mfgrs are dealing with slowing sales and mounting inventory). So, Apple's move is, generally speaking, a sane one.
On the other hand, Apple has largely blown its approach to the actual Apple TV to date (I own two and am a fan, but I love my Echo and Dot more), so who knows what it will achieve on the automotive front.
As noted, the problem with most organizations is that there is no technical advancement track. I actually proposed back in the late 90s at one organization that we establish a full technical track that went from entry-level coder all the way up to CTO (with a layer of 'senior technical officers' below the CTO level).
Other organizations -- such as Bell Labs in its heyday -- simply had everyone as 'Member of Technical Staff', with ad hoc organization around research and technical projects.
Sadly, though, most organizations do, in fact, force technical people to become managers to advance, regardless of whether they want to or are suited for it. It's one of the reasons IT remains so dysfunctional throughout most organizations.
I've got an iPhone 6+. I'm quite happy with it.
On the other hand, I may well get an iPad Pro (to replace my 1st gen iPad Air) when iOS 11 comes out. ..bruce..
Changed my major to CS in 1974; my first CS class (BYU), we started with a IBM 360 pseudo-machine code (on punched cards) and then moved on to actual 360 assembly (also on punched cards). Later in the semester, we had to buy a FORTRAN text (which I still have), teach ourselves FORTRAN, and pass a proficiency test. (My professor for that class was Dr Alan Ashton, who would end up being on of the co-authors of Word Perfect. Great teacher.)
At the same time, I started working part time for a computer-assisted translation research project on campus that was using PL/1; my first task was doing data entry of Spanish vocabulary, but I bought a text on PL/1 and started teaching myself.
I'd actually had some brief exposure to BASIC a few years earlier, but not enough to claim it was my first language.
I had pretty much abandoned Hulu over its mandatory ads -- and then they offered an ad-free version for a few dollars (per month) more. Jumped on that right quick. And of course, no ads in Netflix. Or Amazon video.
Bad, bad move. ..bruce..
I have them all on my Kindle, so I've been plowing through them. Next after that are the 'Caine Riordan' SF novels by Charles Gannon.
I can't be the only person who uses these on a regular basis.
Unless...I am.
Mind. Blown.
No, seriously. Is usage that rare? Because I do use these a lot. ..bruce..
I DVR virtually any sports event I'm interested in. If I'm watching "live", it lets me pause the game for whatever reason, then skip over ads until I catch up again. If I'm not that invested in the game, or if I have other things interfering with seeing it live, I'll record it, see what the final score is, then decide whether I want to actually watch it. The upside is that I can skip thru ads.
Given that this case has gone on for six (6) years, a $3 million verdict probably won't even cover MobileMedia's legal fees (which, I suspect, the judge will not grant to them on top of the aware; it's unusual for the plaintiff/patent owner to get legal fees on top of damages in these cases). Patent litigation is very expensive, especially if you go to trial; I remember being staggered at what the cumulative per-hour billing rate must have been for one such trial where I testified as an expert. ..bruce..
Not to be an old programming fart (but, hey!), but this comes up about every 5-10 years. Someone has created a system for automatic program generation that is going to replace programmers (4th generation languages, anyone? How about "The Last One"?), and it turns out to have only limited usefulness.
Of course, code generation programs exist. They've existed almost as long we've been programming computers. The most common are assemblers and compilers, which take in text specifications and generate running code (or sometimes bytecode to be interpreted). And if you stop and think about the difficulties that most of us who code have with making source code that we write produce running code that meets our needs, you can immediately see the issues with replacing or bolting on top of that system a 'source code generation' system. It can work very well as long as you don't exceed what it can actually do and only if the code generation system itself is well-written and reliable. (This is why developers feel a sense of betrayal and anger with compiler bugs more than any other kind of tool bug.)
So, yeah, like strong AI, self-coding systems are always 5 to 10 years out and have been for half a century. ..bruce..
I have personally worked at firms that felt it was OK to lay people off without two-weeks' notice (and without severance pay). So, yeah, I think it's ok. Have I ever done it? No. Would I ever have done it? It would take some pretty extreme circumstances, since I'm a firm believer in not burning bridges (unnecessarily). However, at this point, I'm 63 and self-employed, so it's not likely to come up again in my own life. :-)
I had bought and read several of Ed's books before I met him; we became colleagues and then friends (albeit not close ones) about 15 years ago. It's been a year or two since we've swapped e-mails, but I continued to see his photography work show up on Facebook from time to time.
And I daresay many of those posting here have no idea how influential Ed was in software engineering developing as a discipline, starting nearly half a century ago. He pioneered and championed many concepts and practices that we would take for granted today, both in technique and process. I am so sorry to hear this. ..bruce..
(A comment I made over at io9 as well.)
As someone who lived through the ‘false dawn of space travel’ (to use Heinlein’s phrase), who grew up intensely following the space program, and who actually worked at NASA/JSC on the Space Shuttle flight simulators back in 1979-80, I can give you my observation: the American people got bored with space. Seriously. No one (outside of a small group of space enthusiasts, such as myself) was clamoring for yet more Apollo missions. TV ratings of flight and moonwalk coverage sank to the basement. It was all just more men in space suits skipping around in a black-and-white environment.
With no public demand or support, neither Congress nor the White House had much stomach for pushing things forward, not when the funds had other uses. The NASA manned flight division evolved into a jobs program, which is why NASA fought against privatization of space flight for so long. (The NASA unmanned space exploration division continued to work miracles, even as it does to this day.)
Of course, the real root problem was that the Apollo approach was fundamentally flawed in the first place; as some wag put it decades ago, it was like building a cruise liner for a single crossing of the Atlantic and sinking everything but one lifeboat at the end of the trip. Prior to Kennedy’s challenge, the US was working on an incremental approach: SSTO (single stage to orbit), gliding re-entry, and a space station. We basically lost half a century due to the Apollo approach (and the horribly expensive, horribly fragile kludge that was the Space Shuttle). Frankly, NASA’s current Orion effort is a repeat of just about all the mistakes we made with Apollo and threatens to soak up NASA’s budget for years to come, even as goal dates keep getting pushed back more and more.
The night that Apollo 11 landed, I was part of a group of friends (we were all high school students) who stayed up all night to watch the coverage. When I heard the words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”, I felt the future had begun. I was sure I would live long enough to visit LEO myself and to see humans colonize the moon and land on Mars. If you had described to me back in 1969 what the state of space exploration (and, in particular, US space exploration) would be in 2015, I would not have believed you. And yet here we are.
Seriously? Seriously? He really doesn't recognize the full implications of what he's proposing? Time to drag out my favorite passage from Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons":
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
Estimating confidence in the completion date for an IT project can be hard. When I've been asked to review a troubled IT project, I've found that a very useful technique to determine how far along the project actually is -- and when it's actually likely to be done -- is to ask those involved at different levels what their "$1,000 confidence level" is -- that is, what date they would be willing to bet $1,000 out of their own pocket that the project will actually be done by. I find that even the most optimistic engineer suddenly turns cautious and starts thinking of all the things that could go wrong.
I then ask what their $10,000 confidence level is. Those answers tend to be the most accurate. ..bruce..