SteveJ-restore-test

Summary : There are multiple Essential Dimensions of Software Design besides " Functionality ". There are three Essential External Dimensions, {Function, Time, Money} and multiple Internal Dimensions. I'm ot sure where/how "Real-Time" is covered, it isn't just " Performance ": the necessary concurrency (not just "parallelism") and asynchronous events/processing require 10-100 times the cognitive capacity to deal with, and problems scale-up extraordinarily (faster than exponential) due to this added complexity. This is why Operating Systems and embedded critical systems (health/medicine, aerospace control, nuclear, Telecomms, Routers/Switches, Storage Devices, ...) are so difficult and expensive. Not understanding and enumerating these multiple Dimensions whilst seemingly teaching Functionality only is perhaps currently the single biggest single failure of the discipline of Software Engineering . The Necessary or Essential Dimensions ...

Summary : For the delivery of general purpose and wide-scale Compute/Internet Services there now seems to be a definitive hardware organisation for servers, typified by the E-bay "pod" contract . For decades there have been well documented "Design Rules" for producing Silicon devices using specific technologies/fabrication techniques. This is an attempt to capture some rules for current server farms. [ Update 06-Nov-11 : "Design Rules" are important: Patterson in a Sept. 1995 Scientific American article notes that the adoption of a quantitative design approach in the 1980's led to an improvement in microprocessor speedup from 35%pa to 55%pa. After a decade, processors were 3 times faster than forecast.] Commodity Servers have exactly three possible CPU configurations, based on "scale-up" factors: single CPU, with no coupling/coherency between App instances. e.g. pure static web-server. dual CPU, with moderate coupling/coherency. e.g. web-s...

Summary : "last to market" worked as a strategy in the past for Microsoft. But "everything is a PC" is probably false and theyll be sidelined in the new Mobile Devices world. A response from a friend, this page by John Gruber on Daring Firebal l, is worth reading. Gruber points out that Apple and Microsoft have radically different marketing strategies. Apple shows The Real Deal when it's ready, Microsoft pre-announces a long way out. Neither is "better" in itself, they're just different. I'm wondering if Microsoft's "Windows 8" is too little, too late. Yep, they've finally got an Apps Store, Cloud Storage and are trying to engage App Developers. With Smartphones, people buy Apps, not O/S features. This works against Microsoft. Win-7 didn't take off, why should this latest attempt? Remember that launch parade by MS with a coffin, 'cause they were going to bury the iPhone... How did that go for them? If I was a rusted-on...