Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Biotech Programming IT Technology

Mass Fatality Identification System 137

Posted by timothy from the strange-necessites dept.
Shipud writes " Bio-IT World is running a story on how Gene Codes corporation created the Mass Fatality Identification System (M-FISys) in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The story goes into the details of processing large amounts of data, aiming for a 99.9% accuracy rate, and extreme programing."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Mass Fatality Identification System More

Mass Fatality Identification System

Comments Filter:

  • extreme! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:43PM (#7039813)

    extreme programing

    One of the philosophies of extreme programming is "once and only once". Glad to see you applying this philosophy to that redundant "M"! Down with unnecessary repetition!

  • Handy after a nuclear war (Score:5, Funny)

    by torklugnutz ( 212328 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:44PM (#7039821) Homepage
    In the even of identification will be done in the following manner: The 30 of us that survive, that aren't cockroaches, please raise your hands.

  • Wheeee! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:44PM (#7039823)
    Mass fatality system! Oh boy! All of my many nefarious plans will see fruition, I just hope it's open source. Oh, it's an Identification system? Slot off /.!

  • Yuck... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by vitalidea ( 571366 )
    "At the Family Assistance Center, New York Police Department personnel interviewed friends and family members of victims, taking buccal swabs from family members"

    Now that just seems like a painful thing to have to do on top of everything else...

    • Re:Yuck... (Score:2, Informative)

      by dakryx ( 646923 )
      buccal - Of or relating to the cheeks or the mouth cavity.
    • Have you no sense of respect man. These people suffered one of the greatest tragedies of all time and the physical and emotional pain will continue for many years. Nothing about 9/11 is funny. You should be ashamed of yourself.
      • i'm sure i'll get modded as flamebait like the others, but so be it.

        have a little perspective! the attacks of 9/11 were terrible, to be sure, and i'm both sorry for those that lost friends and family, as well as thankful i didn't lose anyone i know. but one of the worst tragedies ever? hardly. look at history - the holocaust comes to mind. think of those that have died in slavery - no, i don't have exact numbers. how about natural disasters? a single earthquake, flood, etc. has often resulted in mu
        • You're the only non anonymous reply, so I will reply to you. I do think it was one of the worst tragedies. That is also a pretty relative statement.

          Consider all the minor tragedies. You're kid breaks his arm, you're girlfriend breaks up with you and you are upset. There are so many tragedies, that anything of significance is "one of the worst." I can't believe the replies railing on me for that statement. Worse than the Halocaust, no, but it's horrible. Come on and show a little respect.
    • Could someone explain to me why three of these comments were tagged as flamebait?

      First of all, I think jared_hanson needs a whack with a clue stick. What would make him think the parent comment was intended to be funny? It's a good point. Having ones cheeck swabbed for a DNA sample to identify a possibly destroyed or dismembered corpse would be a painful thing to have to do and think about for someone who had just lost a family member in the WTC.

      Second, the two replies to hanson's comments are also val

  • am I the only one.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:48PM (#7039851)
    who absolutely positively -HATES- the idea of 'paired programming'? While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful.

    When I'm in the 'zone' I can't talk with somebody else, I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it without getting yanked out of it. If the design is done well, and programmers are fairly equally competent, pairing two of them is going to probably be LESS productive than having only ONE, let alone two.

    The only time I can see paired programming being useful would be in a tutoring way, where coder A that has lots of experience with the codebase is paired with coder B that has never seen it, but this is more for getting coder B up to speed rather than to improve productivity and code quality.
    • I think that extreme programming really only works when people are having a hard time initially getting in to 'the zone'. It helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of, when you hit stumbling blocks on the code. Using the same computer is stupid, but extreme programming over, say, a ping-pong table - that works great.
    • And here I thought paired programming was a way for a company to save on hardware.

    • Science? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 1984 ( 56406 )
      So you don't like Extreme Programming. That's not the same thing as "Extreme Programming doesn't work" in general. You're generalizing excessively.
    • I think that it is only useful if the programmers work well together. Yes i know that sounds like the most generic comment ever made about the subject but its true. If one programmer is like you are and can't talk while in the 'zone' and the other programmer is someone who always has to know what is happening like a little 2-yr-old, then no it does not work at all. But say me and my friend john get together and we take turns writing code as it comes to us and we quietly watch each other while they code and

    • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful.

      what? that's not extreme programming! that's regular programming! XP goes against "big up-front design" -- which is exactly why they chose it for this particular project!

      xp wants: no big up-front design (just s

    • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:04PM (#7039948) Homepage Journal
      Extreme programming was designed for a team of developers. It takes a while to get in the 'zone', eh? What does your 'zone' code look like? Is it well-commented? Readable? If so, you are alright without extreme progamming.

      The idea of extreme programming is that it forces you to make readable code, simply because of the fact that you're in the presence of someone else.

      If you're in a project where you won't be responsible for the code you write later on, it would be a waste of time to have you write any code at all, if it takes that much time to decipher it.

      • When I'm in the "zone" I make absolutely sure that all thoughts and reasoning gets documented as I code, and in an external document of notes.

        Otherwise, you run the danger of looking at the code later, and not being in that mental ecstacy of understanding everything at once, and wondering why you wrote what you did, mainly because you had conceived of a frightfully, inhumanly efficient and clever way of doing something that no human may ever imagine again.
        • "Otherwise, you run the danger of looking at the code later, and not being in that mental ecstacy of understanding everything at once"...

          okay, someone has to stop coding while on LSD...

          "conceived of a frightfully, inhumanly efficient and clever way of doing something that no human may ever imagine again."

          Okay, and I imagine this happens to you, how many times a day? Month? Year? Lifetime? And of those times, what percentage of the time do you look back and wonder what the hell you were smoking? Or w
          • I _was_ exaggerating to make a point :)

            In a team I code as simply as possible. I think lots of lines of simple code is easier to maintain than clever programs in a single line, even if both ways are documented.

            Oh yeah, I have tried coding on LSD (computer science and uni life). The screen looked awesome, but I couldn't type much in, and what I typed in didn't make any sense.

    • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BlueGecko ( 109058 ) <benjamin.pollack@ g m ail.com> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:04PM (#7039952) Homepage
      I definitely agree that having two programmers sitting next to each other is very distracting and ultimately counterproductive (at least for me). However, I have found that the Mac programming editor SubEthaEdit [codingmonkeys.de] (formerly known as Hydra, but recently renamed due to legal issues) can be a tremendously productive alternative. In essence, you can think of it as an alternative implementation of paired programming. SubEthaEdit allows multiple users to edit a single document in real time. It uses color coding to distinguish who has added a modified what parts of the text to make real-time version tracking easy even in an highly chaotic environment, and even supports a fairly intelligent undo system. I've found that you get the benefits of paired programming (multiple people working and reviewing code at once), yet you also don't have to constantly explain everything as you're going or have that annoyance of someone leading over your shoulder, craning at the screen. Best of all, it becomes practical to have more than two people working on a single file at once. If you want, you can do NASA-style programming and have two people just searching for bugs and two people just coding. The results can be quite spectacular. SubEthaEdit may be not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd highly recommend you at least take a look.

      • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by marko123 ( 131635 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:48PM (#7040189) Homepage
        I'll look at it, but I can imagine myself just pissing off my programming partner by inserting characters right where her cursor is until she smashes the backspace key... on my head.

        • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:2, Insightful)

          by torpor ( 458 )
          Well, then you wouldn't be a 'programmer', you'd be more like a ... husband, or something.

          But seriously: SubEthaEdit rawks hardcore. Put two people together to work on the same code together, and it can make for some really nice results ... you have to think of it more as a team scenario, constantly communicating and discussing things -as needed- and then working around/with each other too. It can go like this:

          Programmer Bob - "Okay, I'll do all the util code today for module_XXX - load/save/parse/etc."
        • There are easier ways to tell a girl you like her than yanking on her pigtails. If you're into the head-smashing thing though, well, whatever floats your boat.
      • Holy shit! that's the coolest editor/thing I have ever seen. Why is it that after I shed all my vestiges of Win32 for Linux do I find that all the cool shit is happening on the Mac again?!?!?! Damn, damn damn. How am I supposed to justify a Powerbook to the accounting trolls....
      • I knew Hydra sounded familiar. Once in a blue moon I have a need for a collaborative network text editor [google.com] (hydra is at the top), but nothing ever really fit the bill and "just worked" (besides those dead-simple java whiteboards). A lot of what I find is just research papers on this subject. Demand mustn't be too high for this kind of groupware.

        --

    • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kevinvee ( 581676 ) <ktvaugha@[ ]ty.ncsu.edu ['uni' in gap]> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:13PM (#7039999)
      Throughout my higher education we have had paired and extreme programming shoved down our throats. I consider myself to be a fairly competent programmer, and have worked with others that have a wide array of skill sets. It has helped me personally in dealing with people that have such a wide array of skill sets. My communication skills have improved drastically. I'm sure there are other things which factored in to this, but paired programming certainly played a big role. My experiences overall have been pleasant. This is entirely subjective. I know people that feel completely different, and will rationalize it to the end. But, when I have worked with less knowledgable programmers we are able to get tasks done in almost the same amount of time it would have taken me to do it by myself, and a small fraction of the time it would have taken the other person to do it. When I work with people that have similar capabilities, and especially when we have personalities that work well together, we are able to get a ton more accomplished together than we ever could individually. And, when I work with people more knowledgable than mine, the earlier situation is reversed and I have the opportunity to learn at an accelerated pace. The most helpful thing I have found in my paired programming experiences is to have an open mind because in that kind of a close environment your ideas and thoughts can be trampled on rather quickly, and you have to be able to accept that environment and both acknowledge that some solutions are better and be able to rationalize any decisions you are making. In my experience it is entirely worth it. The code usually has less bugs when testing, and the end product is much more understandable in terms of structure and future upkeep.

      • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        My communication skills have improved drastically.

        Sadly, not to the point of using paragraphs.

    • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by panaceaa ( 205396 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:38PM (#7040135) Homepage Journal
      I hate paired programming too but my roommate is a proponent of it. He says that average coders have a hard time staying on focus and are often lured by quick hacks rather than doing needed redesigns. When you pair two of these programmers together, with a stated goal of following extreme programming practices, they're ultimately more productive because they have to explain their decisions and not slack off.

      But my roommate agrees, that for competent and motivated coders, who actaully know what they're doing and take pride in their work, extreme programming's paired programming fails. However, the software industry is not filled with competent and motivated coders. Most software developers graduated in CS for the money, without writing a lick of code before CS 101, and they could use a good deal of oversight.
      • He says that average coders have a hard time staying on focus and are often lured by quick hacks rather than doing needed redesigns.

        I agree with the rest of what you said (I'm having XP shoved down my throat as well) except this. I find that weather working alone or paired my programs tend to become messy hacks while I'm working on them and clean up afterwards. However, XP tends to make the redesigns less likely to happen if for not other reason than you know have to convince twice as many people tha
      • In your comment you said
        >Most software developers graduated in CS for >the money
        That reminds me of a scene in Casablanca

        Renault: What brought you to Casablanca?
        Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
        Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
        Rick: I was misinformed

        I imagine that those particular CS grads are similarly disappointed...
    • Why do you find it stressful? because you have to share space with another carbon unit? yes, there are situations where pairings can lead to friction - for me if the "pair" is a slow or hunt/peck typer i insist on driving.

      on the upside you get the following benefits:

      0) two people looking/reviewing the code as its written you get a review/concensus of two people thinking the code as written was a good idea. vs a guy alone in an office who creates something only they can understand/debug/modify which then

      • Re:am I the only one.... (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Do tell me more about how carbon unit pairings lead to friction. I sense a fascinating analogy.
    • You know, it's funny.... I've never done any "extreme" programming, and I too tend to get into the "do-not-talk-to-me-I'm-coding" mode. None the less, I've always been interested in trying XP or one of its variants. When I was a child, I spent countless hours programming in pairs with a succession of older, smarter kids. I really think that those early sessions played a huge part in my life. So, maybe the company doesn't win, but I wouldn't mind... :)
    • I have been doing extreme programming for 4 years, and I started with pair programming. Since from the wording of your comment, I take it you haven't tried pair programming for yourself, please, allow me to share my experience.

      First, let me begin with how I started pair programming:

      I started pair programming in the tutoring way you describe. I was "coder B" in your scenario: fresh out of university, I just joined a development team between projects, so there wasn't too much pressure. But the environment a
    • Althought I never tried "extreme programming" or other buzzwords, I always programmed in pair with friends and coworkers. When both of we are "in zone" I can't really feel any difference between my ideas and their ideas; it's just "ideas" with are implemented in code.

      I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it...
      I can and, in fact, I do it to myself all the time. So when I'm pair programming I just speak aloud my personal monologue. The "why" is usually short and interes
    • The reason you are more efficient pair programming than individual programming is that when someone is sitting right next to you, you both feel too guilty to refresh Slashdot every 5 minutes.

    • who absolutely positively -HATES- the idea of 'paired programming'? While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful.

      Extreme programming moves the design and review phases into tandem with the development phases -- they all go hand in hand, not split into sepa

  • Hmm.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @08:50PM (#7039860)
    Let's see..

    new technology ... check.
    mass fatatilies ... check.
    extreme programming ... check.

    Yep, Slashdotters will love this one. :)

  • But... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    In a clone infested future this will be useless

  • XP programming?? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 1000101 ( 584896 )
    From XP web site:
    "Extreme Programming (XP) was created in response to problem domains whose requirements change. Your customers may not have a firm idea of what the system should do. You may have a system whose functionality is expected to change every few months. In many software environments dynamically changing requirements is the only constant. This is when XP will succeed while other methodologies do not."

    I'm no expert, but isn't this exactly what OOA and OOD is all about? Isn't the whole point of OO

    • Re:XP programming?? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by richieb ( 3277 )
      I'm no expert, but isn't this exactly what OOA and OOD is all about? Isn't the whole point of OOA and OOD to get away from the "waterfall method" and allow changes in requirements, use cases, code, etc...?

      Not really. OO is a different approach to structuring systems and is a replacement for Structured Programming.

      Even with OOA and OOD people have tried to apply formal or semi-formal processes, which tend to look a lot like a waterfall approach (eg. RUP etc).

      XP starts with the assumption that require

      • "XP starts with the assumption that requirements will change and the that all requirement are not known at the time when you start building the system."

        All is well until this happens: Coders Baffled by Satisfied Client [bbspot.com] ;)

        "that's when management calls me into a meeting to tell me the client revised the specs, and I get another two weeks to work on it. But, this time the client stuck with the original spec. I'm screwed."
    • OOD is a language or meta-language level way of optimizing the way you work on the actual code itself. There is a tremendous amount of engineering that has little to do with the code itself, and this is what XP deals with. It is implicit in XP that you are using OOD, or something tantamount to it, in the case that you're using a language that is not OO.

      XP is built on certain assumptions specific to software engineering, so it is an optimization of the engineering practices that every engineer follows, wh
  • Programming is the phase when you write the functional ideas to code, i.e. engineering ( IMHO ). On design phase I have found it wery useful to have one or more people around but when the desing is done, please, stay away. Programming is art but should not be creative art ( most of time, there are exceptions ), you just make ideas to work and it requires both skill and consentration that is difficult is you have to stop and argue..
    • No, it shouldn't be extreme design, because the customer isn't going to use your design; they're going to use your program.

      but when the design is done, please, stay away.

      The design's not done until the customer's satisfied; and the customer's not satisfied until the software's solving all the problems. So by your criteria, you need to be pairing.

      Programming is art but should not be creative art ( most of time, there are exceptions ), you just make ideas to work and it requires both skill and consentra

  • 12 hour days? (Score:2, Informative)

    by JRManuel ( 30967 )
    The article mentions how the developers worked "... arduous 12-hour programming shifts." This goes against one of XPs core practices: No Overtime [extremeprogramming.org]. However, if a team is well-motivated (as these guys were), I think it becomes possible to stretch this rule. The second that their motivation wanes, they should switch back to a regular schedule.
    • XP practices currently include 'sustainable pace', which /may/ mean no overtime, but doesn't impose an artificial constraint. What it really means is that developers need to be responsible for their own well being so that they can be productive.
  • pretty much identify it as a mass fatality? I'd think that would at least be a major clue.

    Or are we going to start giving them names, like hurricanes?

    "In mass fatality "Jane" today. . ."

    What am I missing?

    KFG

  • How ironic... (Score:4, Funny)

    by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @09:42PM (#7040152)
    Isn't it ironic that the Extreme Programming [extremeprogramming.org] site is written in HTML 3.2 & JavaScript 1.0?

    Markup languages are hardly extreme, but surely they could push the bounds of the latest standards and do something truely extreme. ;-)

    Mike

    • Re:How ironic... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      methinks you don't know what XP is all about!

      extreme programming is not about any particular language, but about a way of programming.

      and that way is to STRAP ON A PARACHUTE AND JUMP OUT OF AN AIRPLANE AT 5000 FEET WITH YOUR POWERBOOK, ECLIPSE IDE, AND NOTHING ELSE!

      EXXXXTREEEEEME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
    • HTML 3.2 is a pretty good choice. Most obscure browsers can render HTML 3.2 just fine, but start having trouble when you go past that. HTML complexity increased a lot after 3.2.
  • There is no 'I' in team, but there is a 'me' in extreme.

    There is also a 'ramming' in programming, but I got nothin' for that.

  • People, we can't tolerate the creation of things like this; with systems like this in place what's to stop people from assuming that it's alright to do illegal/immoral things like hijack planes?!

    Just like the mentality Napster created for filesharing!

    </sarcasm>

  • Go here!

    http://www.mortalkombat.com

  • Mission Creep (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LuYu ( 519260 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @10:52PM (#7040512) Homepage Journal

    Could this not be used on the living as well? It would bring us closer to that frightening world we saw in Gattica.

    Should we be creating identification systems that can ID people with scraps of DNA?

    • Should we be creating identification systems that can ID people with scraps of DNA?

      we've already had it. Gattica was dystopian in that people were prejudged (and employed) based on the contents of their DNA. We don't have a system capable of decoding the genome of every individual.

      if you want to get technical, though - that dystopia is already our reality. How many times have you been asked the medical history of your family with regards to heart/lung disease, cancer, etc. Everything that you are phys

  • God bless them (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Tyro ( 247333 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @11:09PM (#7040589)
    I have all the respect in the world for these guys... programming methods or no, what they did and are doing is priceless.

    I was in New York on Sept 11... flown in on a C-141 as part of the rescue/relief effort (the rest of my Urban Search and Rescue team had to drive... I beat them there by a number of hours). That was the most unique flight I've ever been on, since by then the entire civilian air fleet had been grounded... between us and the f-15s, we were basically the only things flying... .

    Closure is important, and these guys are providing it... I'd like to shake their collective hand and buy them a nice cold beer.
  • If you want on the edge engineering for the software geek, try Leary-ism [abisource.com].

    EP geeks are TOTAL losers.
  • Occasional relief came in the form of some old toys lying around the office. A boxing nun became their "integration token." Staff could submit source code changes, but only if they had the nun.


    They never mentioned what platform/language this is written in, but the id of having to pass around a token to be able to communicate is so... so... Token Ring.

    -malakai
  • i wanna know which chimp i'm related to. hopefully my geneology does not end up with some other evolved chimps runnnig amok!
  • it looks to me like [defwack.com] they're [k12.oh.us] not [ign.com] that [defwack.com] hard [defwack.com] to [defwack.com] identify [defwack.com] (sorry, it was the first thing that came to mind)
  • Funnily enough the company I work for had an arm that was called FISYS - we changed the name when we discovered that fisys mean Fart in one of the scandinavian languages.
  • Now this sounds good, but that's one error in a thousand so we can suppose at least three mis-identifications for the September 11th event. I know that no system is perfect, but the distress that this could cause would seem to demand even greater accuracy.
  • I understand that necessity can be the Mother of Invention. Does't anyone else think it's very disturbing that we should learn to accept living in a time where this particular invention is rather useful.

  • Bob Shaler came to my workplace just a couple days ago and talked about this software and how it helped with the ID process. Great presentation.

    MFISys was crucial to juggling all the forensic DNA data generated by Bode, Celera, Myriad and others.

    Hats off to the programmers- and the practices- that got this software together so quickly. I'd very much like to see XP accepted by other software houses; this is just another example of how XP can turn out great results in a fraction of the time.

  • "Here you go, we definately identified this chunk of muscle and fat found at the scene as your late uncle."

    "Uhhhh, thanks..."

  • It's a pretty fucked up world we're living in where there's even a need for a "Mass Fatality" identification system.

    All those people cracking jokes need to sit down and think a bit about it. If there was any topic that warranted serious discussion/comments, this is it.

    There are several good posts about the programming issues etc., but why are so many mods wasting their mod points modding up so called "funny" posts?

    • The world still needs tools like this (Genetic ID, MFISys) because we still have things like earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, plane crashes and so forth.

      The NYC Medical Examiners Office was buried under the WTC mess (no pun intended) when that other plane crashed shortly after takeoff. With the tools already in hand, OCME was able to ID all the plane crash victims in less than 30 days. Not bad at all, considering the case load they already had.

    • "There are several good posts about the programming issues etc., but why are so many mods wasting their mod points modding up so called "funny" posts?"

      Because humor is one way for humans to deal with tragedy.
  • It was interesting to that the article noted how in Extreme Programming people work in pairs and then goes on to mention "Sutton was the first person to see the names and data together, working alone one night." This is so common with Extreme Programming. Lack of a design is not good in the long run. Even the most basic of designs is better than nothing. It seems people use the name "Extreme Programming" as a facade for poor programming practices and then go right ahead and do what they really wanted to
    • If you read even a little bit of the XP literature, you will find that it advocates continuous design, not a lack of design.

      When you design all the time, and you get immediate feedback about how your design decisions are working out, ... you get better (even if you are good already).

      Certainly, some people use XP as a facade for shoddy programming practices. XP requires discipline, the ability to want to do what is neccesary even if it is unpleasent. I'd love to revoke the scam artist's rights to claim
      • I've read plenty (including Beck's defining book) and did it to the extreme for six months with some joker that even Beck was quoted as saying was a great software guy. Oh by the way this idiot had 40 years of experience.

        Design is not what you do the next minute it's what you decide to do for quite a while longer. If you don't anticipate some things you are not doing design. I'm not talking anything big here. Deciding to make a server able to handle more than one client is a design decision based on th

  • This is probably one of the sickest fuckin' attempts to cash in on the events of 911 yet.

    So is this in case the current piss off the world strategy doesn't work and we need accurate body counts and identifications for CNN!

    Fuckin' sick!
  • 99.9% accuracy rate means it fails for every 1 in 1000 uses. IIRC, there were more than 3000 fatailities on 9/11.
  • Start a war? Follow a natural disaster around? Sponsor terrorists? Get tickets to a rock concert?

Slashdot Top Deals

A Fortran compiler is the hobgoblin of little minis.

Close