Ashley at Metamaxim wrote:
>>How have cars evolved over time? How much of that original model T is
>>in todays cars? Do car engineers spend all their time re-using what
>>they had before or do they sometimes throw out and re-build from scratch?
>
> In a recent conversation with Michael Jackson (the software methodologist,
> not
> the bizarre guy with the plastic face) he recommended the following book as a
> good insight into the way engineering evolves:
>
> "What Engineers Know and How They Know It" by Walter G. Vincenti.
What is interesting is to look at the methods that have been kept and the
variation of implementations.
In automobiles, its been metal vs plastic for components in the cockpit.
Brakes
have always been about friction, it just the effeciency of that friction thats
been varied to manage heating. Engines have been about two chief technologies
with the wankel rotary close behind. There have been countless other
investigations, but the "it works, let's use it" attitude has prevailed from my
perspective.
In airplanes, it's been fiberglass vs wood vs metal for structural makeup.
But,
the same functionality and same basic attributes have been around since the
early days. Only more recently, has the view of the atmosphere as a fluid
rather than as "air" shaped the view of how to shape airfoils, wing loadings,
power ratios etc.
In software, we've always had ways to distribute work amongst machines. The
granularity of that work separation has always been slanted toward work that is
easily separated from a larger task. Only in graphics cards has miniscule
optimization been used to squeeze out the last bit of performance.
As SOA becomes the phrase to associate with distributed computing, my interest
is the focus of MS who had/has no real experience with large scale distributed
computing. They seem most interested in making it possible to exchange
information in simple forms, because the task of interworking their environment
with the flexibility available in all the others (mobile code, corba, simple
text exchange when there isn't <CR><LF> issues, support for multiple filesystem
structures and a FileSystem API, etc) was so dramatically different.
But, in the end, if everyone gets in line with money, that's where the vendors
will create products. If you vote with your feet and your money for the
technologies that really work and really scale, you'll of course be in the
minority, because the majority is not educated or otherwise prepared to make an
intelligent decision. The majority will make a compromise decision that allows
them to feel like they've solved the immediate problem. Then, they'll just
continue on, solving the new set of problems they've bought into.
Gregg Wonderly
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