jmorrison

As an MIT alum in my 50s, let me assure you that a specific fundraiser is assigned to target you, personally and individually. "Ugh," indeed.

Old VI-3 geezer from the late 70s, early 80s here - the time when the EECS faculty tried to handle their over-subscription problem by (unsuccessfully) imposing their own, separate admission requirements and flunking out a significant fraction of EECS wannabes into other majors. Had an advisor who tried to get me to join the Armed forces instead of stay in school. Watched the Dept deny tenure to the only EECS prof to actually teach us and treat us as human beings.

Certainly makes those calls/emails from the MIT full-time alumni fundraisers feel, well, surreal.

Might I humbly suggest that anybody serious about this issue read (sadly, the late) Manny Lehman's "FEAST" publications? He attempts to quantitatively model software evolution, which includes complexity, errors of omission (limitations of domain model), errors of commission ("bugs"), etc. It is fascinating reading. I remember many "Aha!" moments when seeing the graphs. It also contains many quantitatively-derived principles one can operate by, some of which underlie pg's "beating the averages" argument. His wikipedia page is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manny_Lehman_%28computer_scien..., and the FEAST pubs are here http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/mml/feast2/papers.html

First time post from long-time lurker. Be kind.

Back In The Day (just to show how ancient I am), I personally debugged the first peer-to-peer (vs client/server) networked simulation protocol on the DARPA SIMNET project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET

Interesting stories notwithstanding (anybody else here ever got to drive/fire a tank, and have fellow engineers get dosed with CS gas, as part of a software engineering job?), when time came to standardize this research protocol as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Interactive_Simulat...,

we tried to get them to generalize the protocol thusly: http://www.google.com/patents/US5623642

The work was supported by a DARPA small-business project, so the IP was left with the company in hopes of commercializing it, and maximizing dissemination. The attempt to get the ideas incorporated as part of the standard was singularly unsuccessful. More's the pity, as I think it would have really helped make the simulations more capable of simulating a wider array of physical phenomena.

The commercial uptake was equally unsuccessful. I experienced some culture shock when proselytizing (again, unsuccessfully) at game development conferences.