[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. 

:)
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Mr. Thomas Barclay
Software Developer & Systems Analyst
thomas.barclay@stargrunt.ca
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