Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
 Thomas M: where did that quote come from ... please provide props It's something I made up. This same discussion of design vs hacking goes on in various lists. Tim Bray made a comment a few weeks ago and that was my description of it's point. Mike C: Something tells me you don't dispute that as an empirical description of the Web, eh? We could argue about it as a normative model, of course. No. Yes. that's how a lot of engineering gets done. Engineering is about putting together parts to get a job done, not invention. One might do both but not under the same budget. We do have to remember that engineering artifacts are disposable and that design rationale doesn't have to document historical facts; it does have to be rational and reapplicable if one ever gets the same requirements (say, the right question) again. There is a sci-fistory I read many years ago about a message received from the inner heart of a gas-giant planet by the humans who had colonized the moons of that planet. The message threatened their destruction if they did not leave. All of the top human scientists declared it a hollow threat as all the mathematical proofs showed that the only way to enter or leave the atmosphere of the gas giant was to create a sustainable and adjustable force field, and that this was also proven mathematically impossible given that such a field would explode before it became stable. As they were leaving, a tinkering engineer was demonstrating his force-field spacecraft that got around the math by turning itself on and off at very high rates such that it never reached the point of exploding, but was stable enough to sustain an internal atmosphere with acceptable leakage. It was noted that the engineer was to be very wealthy and despite the missing, eye, ears, and some other injuries incurred as a result of his experiments with fields that did explode. And it was indicated that the planetary inhabitants didn't take the brush off well and were arming their craft and starting their pulse field generators. The math can be right and irrelevant. That's engineering. It's in the way that you use it. The trick is to measure the right thing; the analog to ask the right question. len 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
