From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@s...>
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 13:48:02 -0500
Subject: [OT] Satellites and Xmas
1. Merry Xmas, Happy New Year, or Holiday of Choice, to all! Look forward to seeing many of you again in 2003 at ECC! 2. Alan: I understand what you're saying about re-use and testability. OTOH, if the common components happen to have a missed glitch, it can hit entire systems (when IE has a bug, it affects millions of users, when IIS has a bug, it affects millions of servers, etc). Probably good system design involves re-use, good code inspection, great testing, and enough heterogenous aspects to make single points of failure unlikely. (ie it tends to be a good thing to have *NIX boxes out there, because they tend to be immune to some of the things that kill Windoze boxes and vice versa). 3. KHR said: I guess anybody who re-invents the wheel thinks he is damn clever :-) [Tomb] Yes, but..... as someone who has developed large software systems, sometimes someone has implemented something off somewhere in a module but not well publicized it, and you need a method, so you implement it, then later someone finally says (usually long past when it would have been a useful piece of data) "I think someone.... dunno who.... implemented it.... somewhere else... or something like it....". And then you find out that perhaps you *have* reinvented the wheel, but it really doesn't make you any less clever necessarily. Just somewhat ignorant of prior developments, but with the amount of development going on in one project (let alone the sum total of the publicly accessible Internet), does this really surprise anyone? I think this is just one of the great hazards of information overload/mass-availability. There is, after all, a rather important distinction between knowing someone, somewhere has probably solved the same problem as you and knowing who it was and where they did it and what their solution was. :)