Oleg Zabluda's blog
Friday, November 02, 2012
 
Life imitates art:
Life imitates art:

"It just feels like you wouldn't want to be out at night. Everything's pitch dark. I'm tired of it, big-time." — New York City resident Michael Tomeo as he left the storm-ravaged city on a bus to Philadelphia. (AP)

http://hosted2.ap.org/txdam/54828a5e8d9d48b7ba8b94ba38a9ef22/Article_2012-11-01-Superstorm%20Sandy-NYC/id-ca7dd13ee09a42f1b03a0b99ea38a009

In Isaac Asimov (Исаак Озимов, 1920-1992) "Nightfall"  ("Приход ночи", 1941) people see stars for the first time ever,  people go mad, civil disorder breaks out, cities are destroyed, civilization falls, every 2049 years.

Continuing with the AP article:
"We had three guys sitting out in the lobby last night with candlelight, and very threatening folks were passing by in the pitch black," Rima Finzi-Strauss said. "And everyone's leaving. That makes it worse."

In Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, Mary Wilson, 75, was buying water from a convenience store that was open but had no power. She said she had been without running water or electricity for three days, and lived on the 19th floor.
She walked downstairs Thursday for the first time because she ran out of bottled water and felt she was going to faint. She said she met people on the stairs who helped her down.
"I did a lot of praying: 'Help me to get to the main floor.' Now I've got to pray to get to the top," she said. "I said, 'I'll go down today or they'll find me dead.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_short_story_and_novel)
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Приход_ночи
http://lib.rus.ec/b/252231/read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_short_story_and_novel)

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 7:18 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
I started my professional software engineering attitude as an abstractionist.
I started my professional software engineering attitude as an abstractionist. Abstractions and Interfaces (aka API) is everything, implementation is nothing. Stay abstract, my friend. I was very proud that my massive IQ (for a programmer) allowed me to come up with excellent Abstractions/Interfaces/APIs, which is simply looking for maximum commonality, which is simply a form of pattern recognition. That's for the first 10 years.

Over the last ~10 years, more and more often I found myself following end-to-end principle, i.e. when middle layers were just passing things along, as dumbly as possible, but no dumber. I was never quite sure, though, if I was super-genius or super-lazy. Only time could tell how things play out.

Recently, I see more and more people making argument for, by name. We'll see.

Note that in networking (i.e. distributed systems = possibility of partial failures), the arguments played themselves out almost before my time, so I knew the answer. Here we are talking about monolithic systems (i.e. no possibility of partial failures).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4664
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 2:32 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster

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