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Challenges of Software Development In The Modern World
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On January 15, 1990, the AT&T long-distance telephone network broke down, interrupting nationwide long distance telephone services in the United States for more than 8 hours. An ill-placed "break" statement in the switching software, written in the C language, was to blame for the breakdown.
On June 4, 1996, the maiden flight of the new and improved Ariane 5 communications satellite launcher developed by the European Space Agency exploded 37 seconds after liftoff. An incorrectly handled software exception resulting from converting a 64-bit floating point to a 16 bit signed integer caused the disaster.
On June 8, 2001, a software problem in the new trading software installed overnight for the New York Stock Exchange caused failures in trading on half of the floor of the exchange and forced the NYSE to shut down the entire trading floor for more than an hour.
It is the opinion of some experts that we are not capable of delivering 100% reliable software all of the time, and I tend to agree to some extent - with the exception of claiming that there are solutions to such predicaments. Various factors, including pressures by marketing, business strategies and customer demands force us to skip ahead in the development path - straying from the methodology. However, if we were to compensate for pressures from various origins and if we were to plan for it in the future, these pressures might become far less of a threat over time.
Karl R Popper - Irrefutability of an argument is not a virtue but a vice
Written by Danie van Eeden |
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- Irrefutability of an argument is not a virtue but a vice - Karl R. Popper believes science should not aim at the truth per se, but should aim at truths with a high empirical content. In other words, science should aim at providing as much true information as possible in order to help prove the argument to be true. Science should move from statements with low content to that of a high content. Growth of science, according to Popper, is a sequence of progressively better hypothesis.
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Thomas Kuhn - The structure of my argument is simple
Written by Danie van Eeden |
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The Paradigm of Thomas Kuhn In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn tries to clarify the definition of his paradigm. Perhaps his attempt to do so clearly illustrates the concept of a paradigm in itself. But let us hold off with that for a while... In order to help us understand Kuhn’s way of thinking, he has provided us with the Exemplar thesis and the Weltansschauung (World View) thesis, both of which run hand in hand with what he want us to understand as the finality of his theory.
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