10. Comments that explain the “how” but not the “why”

Introductory-level programming courses teach students to comment early and comment often. The idea is that it’s better to have too many comments than to have too few. Unfortunately, many programmers seem to take this as a personal challenge to comment every single line of code. This is why you will often see something like this code snippit taken from Jeff Atwood’s post on Coding Without Comments:

r = n / 2; // Set r to n divided by 2

// Loop while r - (n/r) is greater than t
while ( abs( r - (n/r) ) > t ) {
    r = 0.5 * ( r + (n/r) ); // Set r to half of r + (n/r)
}

Do you have any idea what this code does? Me neither. The problem is that while there are plenty of comments describing what the code is doing, there are none describing why it’s doing it.

Now, consider the same code with a different commenting methodology:

// square root of n with Newton-Raphson approximation
r = n / 2;

while ( abs( r - (n/r) ) > t ) {
    r = 0.5 * ( r + (n/r) );
}

Much better! We still might not understand exactly what’s going on here, but at least we have a starting point.

Comments are supposed to help the reader understand the code, not the syntax. It’s a fair assumption that the reader has a basic understanding of how a for loop works; there’s no need to add comments such as “// iterate over a list of customers”. What the reader is not going to be familiar with is why your code works and why you chose to write it the way you did.

9. Interruptions

Very few programmers can go from 0 to code at the drop of a hat. In general, we tend to be more akin to locomotives than ferraris; it may take us awhile to get started, but once we hit our stride we can get an impressive amount of work done. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to get into a programming zone when your train of thought is constantly being derailed by clients, managers, and fellow programmers.

There is simply too much information we need to keep in mind while we’re working on a task to be able to drop the task, handle another issue, then pick up the task without missing a beat. Interruptions kill our train of thought and getting it back is often a time-consuming, frustrating, and worst of all, error-prone process.

8. Scope creep

From Wikipedia:

Scope creep (also called focus creep, requirement creep, feature creep, and sometimes kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence that is to be avoided.

Scope creep turns relatively simple requests into horribly complex and time consuming monsters. It only takes a few innocent keystrokes by the requirements guy for scope creep to happen:

• Version 1: Show a map of the location
• Version 2: Show a 3D map of the location
• Version 3: Show a 3D map of the location that the user can fly through

Argh! What used to be a 30 minute task just turned into a massively complex system that could take hundreds of man hours. Even worse, most of the time scope creep happens during development, which requires rewriting, refactoring, and sometimes throwing out code that was developed just days prior.

7. Management that doesn’t understand programming

Management is not an easy job. People suck; we’re fickle and fragile and we’re all out for #1. Keeping a large group of us content and cohesive is a mountain of a task. However, that doesn’t mean that managers should be able to get away without having some basic understanding of what their subordinates are doing. When management cannot grasp the basic concepts of our jobs, we end up with scope creep, unrealistic deadlines, and general frustration on both sides of the table. This is a pretty common complaint amongst programmers and the source of a lot of angst (as well as one hilarious cartoon).

6. Documenting our applications

Let me preface this by saying that yes, I know that there are a lot of documentation-generating applications out there, but in my experience those are usually only good for generating API documentation for other programmers to read. If you are working with an application that normal everyday people are using, you’re going to have to write some documentation that the average layman can understand (e.g. how your application works, troubleshooting guides, etc.).

It’s not hard to see that this is something programmers dread doing. Take a quick look at all the open-source projects out there. What’s the one thing that all of them are constantly asking for help with? Documentation.

I think I can safely speak on behalf of all programmers everywhere when I say, “can’t someone else do it?“.

5. Applications without documentation

I never said that we weren’t hypocrites. Programmers are constantly asked to incorporate 3rd party libraries and applications into their work. In order to do that, we need documentation. Unfortunately, as mentioned in item 6, programmers hate writing documentation. No, the irony is not lost on us.

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to utilize a 3rd party library while having absolutely no fricken idea what half the functions in the API do. What’s the difference between poorlyNamedFunctionA() and poorlyButSimilarlyNamedFunctionB()? Do I need to perform a null check before accessing PropertyX? I guess I’ll just have to find out through trial and error! Ugh.

4. Hardware

Any programmer who has ever been called upon to debug a strange crash on the database server or why the RAID drives aren’t working properly knows that hardware problems are a pain. There seems to be a common misconception that since programmers work with computers, we must know how to fix them. Granted, this may be true for some programmers, but I reckon the vast majority of us don’t know or really care about what’s going on after the code gets translated into assembly. We just want the stuff to work like it’s supposed to so we can focus on higher level tasks.

3. Vagueness

“The website is broken”. “Feature X isn’t working properly”. Vague requests are a pain to deal with. It’s always surprising to me how exasperated non-programmers tend to get when they are asked to reproduce a problem for a programmer. They don’t seem to understand that “it’s broken, fix it!” is not enough information for us to work off of.

Software is (for the most part) deterministic. We like it that way. Humor us by letting us figure out which step of the process is broken instead of asking us to simply “fix it”.

2. Other programmers

Programmers don’t always get along with other programmers. Shocking, but true. This could easily be its own top 10 list, so I’m just going to list some of the common traits programmers have that annoy their fellow programmers and save going into detail for a separate post:

• Being grumpy to the point of being hostile.
• Failing to understand that there is a time to debate system architecture and a time to get things done.
• Inability to communicate effectively and confusing terminology.
• Failure to pull ones own weight.
• Being apathetic towards the code base and project

And last, but not least, the number 1 thing that annoys programmers…

1. Their own code, 6 months later

Ever look back at some of your old code and grimace in pain? How stupid you were! How could you, who know so much now, have written that? Burn it! Burn it with fire!

Well, good news. You’re not alone.

The truth is, the programming world is one that is constantly changing. What we regard as a best practice today can be obsolete tomorrow. It’s simply not possible to write perfect code because the standards upon which our code is judged is evolving every day. It’s tough to cope with the fact that your work, as beautiful as it may be now, is probably going to be ridiculed later. It’s frustrating because no matter how much research we do into the latest and greatest tools, designs, frameworks, and best practices, there’s always the sense that what we’re truly after is slightly out of reach. For me, this is the most annoying thing about being a programmer. The fragility of what we do is necessary to facilitate improvement, but I can’t help feeling like I’m one of those sand-painting monks.

Well, there you have it. The top 10 things that annoy programmers. Again, if you feel that I missed anything please be sure to let me know in the comments!

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Near the close of trading on the Nasdaq exchange, Apple’s market capitalization stood at $223 billion, higher than No. 2 Microsoft, which had a market cap of $219.3 billion.

It was the first time that Apple’s total share worth climbed above its rival’s.

“Apple’s market cap just exceeded Microsoft’s for the first time ever, making it the world’s largest tech company in terms of market cap,” said Brian Marshall, an analyst with BroadPoint AmTech. “It’s interesting that just seven years ago, the company traded at less than cash.”

A company’s market cap is equal to its share price times the number of shares outstanding. A year ago, Apple’s shares closed at $130.78; today, the company’s shares fell in late afternoon trading to $244.13, a one-year increase of 86.7%.

Microsoft’s shares, meanwhile, dropped to $24.99 in late trading, off more than a dollar for the day.

Google , a competitor to both Apple and Microsoft, closed the day with a market cap of $152 billion.

Oil giant Exxon Mobil is the U.S.’s largest company, with a market cap of $278.6 billion.

According to BroadPoint’s Marshall, both Apple and Microsoft will generate in the neighborhood of $65 billion in revenues during the 2010 calendar year.

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The purpose of this Trojan-based validation is apparently to figure which credentials are valid and can be sold. Symantec is calling this the Trojan.Loginck, and as described in a blog post by Symantec researcher Eoin Ward, the database of stolen information includes about 210,000 stolen accounts for World of Warcraft, 60,000 for Aion, 2 million for PlayNC and 16 million for Wayi Entertainment, all of which were being sold online.

Symantec is recommending users of these sites change their passwords.

“The particular database server we uncovered seems very much at the heart of this operation — part of a distributed password checker aimed at Chinese gaming sites. The stolen login credentials are not just from particular online games, but include user login accounts associated with sites that host a variety of online games,” Ward writes.

In his blog, Ward says to turn the gaming credentials into cash, the cybercrooks have apparently written a program that checks the login details using Trojan.Loginck to make sure they are valid, which is easier than trying to log into gaming sites 44 million times.

The value of stolen accounts credentials can range from $35 to several thousand dollars, according to Symantec’s research, which sought a rough market value based on prices associated with www.playerauctions.com, described as a legitimate Web site to protect buyer and seller against fraud.

“Most botnets have the ability to download and run files, so why not push a custom piece of malware to each bot? The malware could log on to the database and download a group of user names and passwords in order to check them for validity,” Ward writes. The database in question was holding 17GB of flat file data, and Symantec analyzed its attempts to validate passwords for Wayi Entertainment. There are said to be credentials for at least 18 gaming Web sites in the database.

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During a conference call with the executive committee of a nonprofit board on which I sit I decided to send an email to a client.

I know, I know. You’d think I’d have learned.

Last week I wrote about the dangers of using a cell phone while driving. Multitasking is dangerous. And so I proposed a way to stop.

But when I sent that email, I wasn’t in a car. I was safe at my desk. What could go wrong?

Well, I sent the client the message. Then I had to send him another one, this time with the attachment I had forgotten to append. Finally, my third email to him explained why that attachment wasn’t what he was expecting. When I eventually refocused on the call, I realized I hadn’t heard a question the Chair of the Board had asked me.

I swear I wasn’t smoking anything. But I might as well have been. A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQs. What’s the impact of a 10-point drop? The same as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

You might think you’re different, that you’ve done it so much you’ve become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you’d be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.

I decided to do an experiment. For one week I would do no multitasking and see what happened. What techniques would help? Could I sustain a focus on one thing at a time for that long?

For the most part, I succeeded. If I was on the phone, all I did was talk or listen on the phone. In a meeting I did nothing but focus on the meeting. Any interruptions — email, a knock on the door — I held off until I finished what I was working on.

During the week I discovered six things:

First, it was delightful. I noticed this most dramatically when I was with my children. I shut my cell phone off and found myself much more deeply engaged and present with them. I never realized how significantly a short moment of checking my email disengaged me from the people and things right there in front of me. Don’t laugh, but I actually — for the first time in a while — noticed the beauty of leaves blowing in the wind.

Second, I made significant progress on challenging projects, the kind that — like writing or strategizing — require thought and persistence. The kind I usually try to distract myself from. I stayed with each project when it got hard, and experienced a number of breakthroughs.

Third, my stress dropped dramatically. Research shows that multitasking isn’t just inefficient, it’s stressful. And I found that to be true. It was a relief to do only one thing at a time. I felt liberated from the strain of keeping so many balls in the air at each moment. It felt reassuring to finish one thing before going to the next.

Fourth, I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time. An hour-long meeting seemed interminably long. A meandering pointless conversation was excruciating. II became laser-focused on getting things done. Since I wasn’t doing anything else, I got bored much more quickly. I had no tolerance for wasted time.

Fifth, I had tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable. When I listened to my wife Eleanor, I was in no rush. When I was brainstorming about a difficult problem, I stuck with it. Nothing else was competing for my attention so I was able to settle into the one thing I was doing.

Sixth, there was no downside. I lost nothing by not multitasking. No projects were left unfinished. No one became frustrated with me for not answering a call or failing to return an email the second I received it.

That’s why it’s so surprising that multitasking is so hard to resist. If there’s no downside to stopping, why don’t we all just stop?

I think it’s because our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? So, while you’re on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brain power to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we’re already using that brain power to pick up nuance, think about what we’re hearing, access our creativity, and stay connected to what’s happening around us. It’s not really extra brain power. And diverting it has negative consequences.

So how do we resist the temptation?

First, the obvious: the best way to avoid interruptions is to turn them off. Often I write at 6 am when there’s nothing to distract me, I disconnect my computer from its wireless connection and turn my phone off. In my car, I leave my phone in the trunk. Drastic? Maybe. But most of us shouldn’t trust ourselves.

Second, the less obvious: Use your loss of patience to your advantage. Create unrealistically short deadlines. Cut all meetings in half. Give yourself a third of the time you think you need to accomplish something.

There’s nothing like a deadline to keep things moving. And when things are moving fast, we can’t help but focus on them. How many people run a race while texting? If you really only have 30 minutes to finish a presentation you thought would take an hour, are you really going to answer an interrupting call?

Interestingly, because multitasking is so stressful, single-tasking to meet a tight deadline will actually reduce your stress. In other words, giving yourself less time to do things could make you more productive and relaxed.

Finally, it’s good to remember that we’re not perfect. Every once in a while it might be OK to allow for a little multitasking. As I was writing this, Daniel, my two-year-old son, walked into my office, climbed on my lap, and said “Monsters, Inc. movie please.”

So, here we are, I’m finishing this piece on the left side of my computer screen while Daniel is on my lap watching a movie on the right side of my computer screen.

Sometimes, it is simply impossible to resist a little multitasking.

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These important collective behaviors happen spontaneously in both natural and engineered networks composed of a large number of interacting parts, but how?

Two Northwestern University researchers examined how a network’s structure governs its synchronization and found that different factors interact antagonistically for a network to optimize, or efficiently perform, its task. For example, using a smaller number of interactions, or even negative interactions, can — contrary to expectations — improve synchronization. They also discovered that very similar networks can behave very differently.

The findings, which are published by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), contribute a new understanding of the interplay between the parts of networks and their synchronization.

The general mathematical framework developed by the researchers is very flexible and can be applied to a large variety of network systems, ranging from those with a few nodes to networks with millions of nodes of various types.

“The network we are very interested in is the power grid, especially considering the ongoing efforts to develop a Smart Grid,” said Adilson E. Motter, an author of the paper and an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “A Smart Grid not only will increase harnessing of intermittent sources such as solar and wind but also may allow real-time pricing and give customers the option to choose their power supplier.”

“While it can be argued that a new system will undergo new perturbations, it also offers the possibility of exploiting the to prevent or recover from failures in real time, thus adding a new dimension to the concept of smart network,” Motter said. “We want to know how such a system can be kept stable, and our research is helping us understand what parameters affect the stability of synchronous states.”

Motter also is an assistant professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the executive committee of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). He conducted the research with colleague Takashi Nishikawa, a sabbatical visitor from Clarkson University.

The results of the study are:

- Synchronization often can be enhanced not by reducing the size of the network or making it more densely connected, but instead by increasing the number of parts to synchronize and reducing the number of interactions between them. For example, even if it is not possible to synchronize 1,000 nodes it may be possible to synchronize 2,000 of them.

“A network out of synch also may be made to synchronize by taking out, or obstructing, some of the interactions,” Nishikawa said. “This illustrates that ‘less can be more’ in synchronization phenomena.”

- Contrary to the prevailing paradigm, network structures that in isolation would inhibit synchronization can, in fact, facilitate synchronization when in the presence of other synchronization-inhibiting structures. For example, negative interactions cause the nodes to distance their activities from each other, thus inhibiting synchronization. But when the entire network is taken into account, negative interactions can cancel the effect of heterogeneities in the network and lead to synchronous behavior that would not be possible without them.

- The researchers identified for the first time the networks that can most easily lead to synchronous activity and found, surprisingly, that very similar networks can behave very differently. For example, sets of networks with only slightly different sizes or differing by only one or a few interactions can include very good and very bad “synchronizers.”

“This sensitive dependence on the network structure is the network analogue of chaos,” Motter said. “Small perturbations in the network can have far-reaching and counterintuitive consequences for synchronization.” The fall of a tree on a power line in Canada could set off a blackout in Florida, but the twist is that it also may prevent one, he says.

Motter and Nishikawa’s research opens up new possibilities on how to develop controllers for engineered systems. Consumers’ daily needs depend on tightly controlled systems. In the power grid in the eastern U.S., for example, nearly 4,000 power generators must oscillate “up and down” in synch more than five million times a day to keep houses lighted.

More information: The paper is titled “Network Synchronization Landscape Reveals Compensatory Structures, Quantization, and the Positive Effect of Negative Interactions.” The full article is available on PNAS’ website at http://www.pnas.org/ .

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This can be a person in the office that has casual IT interest or someone whom you feel can step in to assist in a pinch. Get this person what they need, including access to systems. For the case of “if you need it” access, consider an envelope for each system and an administrator-level password in it. If the envelope is opened, then change the password or remove the additional account when you return. If elevated permissions can be added (such as to an Active Directory account) during the time-frame, that can easily be removed. This also may be a good idea to set up a Skype account for you and the temporary helper for quick questions should you be traveling internationally.

Chances are, there is something that regularly needs interaction. Whether this be changing the tape, a periodic reboot of a system, or moving a file through a system that gets hung up; it should be something you address. If you can, write up a procedure for each of these situations, especially the most common situations like restoring a file or resetting a system.

If there is something that is somewhat regular yet requires interaction above what you can comfortably hand off, maybe move the schedule so that it happens right before you leave or upon your return. In the backup tape example, maybe tweak the schedule so that a full backup happens right before you leave and incremental backups happen daily for 10 days instead of 7. Of course, make sure the overall level of protection is not affected!

If your organization has a commercial wireless account, you may be able to add additional features to your phone’s data plan to be fully connected during your absence without incurring fees on your personal account. This can also include international dialing.

Don’t just blindly decline meetings, but try to push them to occur before or after your absence. For regular meetings, get the frequent attendees up to speed on your availability.

If you give someone privileged access to an admin account, prevent the password for changing during the vacation period and reset it upon your return. The same goes for your own user account, if by chance anything is using your user account – you would like to know about it beforehand. Change your own password as well a week or so before the vacation.

When I go on vacation, I’ll check in to both my work and personal accounts but still have an auto responder in place. The auto responder must state when you will return, how to get in touch with someone if this is urgent, and whether or not you expect this email to be replied to during your absence. You also may share your mobile phone with the helping person so that they can get you, even if only via a text message.

You can add more specific application and system tasks via automation. I’ve used Windows Scheduled Tasks or other scripts to do something that I know will be an issue, such as restart a delicate system, preemptively.

The systems will survive, but will you survive the vacation? How do you go about getting out of the office? Share your tips below.

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Eye tracking has been used for years, primarily as a way for people with disabilities to use computers and to enable advertisers to track a person’s focus of interest. “The naturalness of gaze interaction makes eye tracking promising,” says John Hansen, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark who works on gaze tracking. “Most of the time we are looking at the information we find most interesting.”

Mobile eye tracking could be useful for all mobile phone users, says Dartmouth professor Andrew Campbell, who led the development of the new system, called EyePhone. But so far, little work has been done on eye tracking on mobile phones. This isn’t surprising–keeping track of a gaze via a mobile phone is much more challenging than on a desktop computer because both the user and the phone are moving, and the surrounding environment is so changeable.

“Existing algorithms were highly inaccurate in mobile conditions–even if you are standing and there’s a small movement in your arm, you’d get a large amount of blurring and error,” says Campbell. The Dartmouth researchers got around this with an algorithm that learns to identify a person’s eye under different conditions. During a learning phase, the system is trained to identify a person’s eye at varying distances and under different lighting. A user must calibrate the system by taking a picture of the left or right eye both indoors and outdoors.

EyePhone runs on a Nokia 810 smart phone. The program tracks the position of an eye relative to the screen (rather than where a person is looking). A user must move the phone slightly so the icon is directly in front of her eye and then select an application by blinking. The program places an “error box” virtually around an eye, and can recognize the eye as long as it doesn’t move outside of this box. The phone app divides the camera frame into nine regions and looks for the eye in one of these regions. While the eye tracking approach is rudimentary, the researchers hope to develop more sophisticated methods soon. The system is at least 76 percent accurate in daylight and while the user is standing still and 60 percent accurate when a person is walking, says Campbell.

“This is a good step forward,” says Robert Jacob, a professor of computer science at Tufts University who also works on eye tracking. “One of the problems with the cell phone is that there’s no place for the user interface. Eye tracking seems like a very clever idea.”

However, Jacob points out that tracking a user’s gaze will be more challenging on a cell phone. This is because the eye barely moves when a person’s gaze shifts between items close together on a small screen.

Hansen says the Dartmouth work is interesting, but says, “it’s a hard problem they are facing here and I expect a lot of work in this area for years to come.

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It’s GPS, and it’s everywhere.

Although most people may associate the Global Positioning System with the navigation devices that are becoming standard equipment on new cars, GPS has become a nerve center for the 21st century rivaling the Internet — enabling cargo companies to track shipments, guiding firefighters to hot spots and even helping people find lost dogs.

“It’s a ubiquitous utility that everybody takes for granted now,” said Bradford W. Parkinson.

He should know. Three decades ago, as a baby-faced Air Force colonel just out of the Vietnam War, Parkinson led the Pentagon team that developed GPS at a military base in El Segundo.

Now, scientists and engineers — including those at a sprawling satellite-making factory in El Segundo — are developing an $8-billion GPS upgrade that will make the system more reliable, more widespread and much more accurate.

The new system is designed to pinpoint someone’s location within an arm’s length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block.

“This new system has the potential to deliver capabilities we haven’t seen yet,” said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for aerospace research firm Teal Group. “Because GPS touches so many industries, it’s hard to imagine what industry wouldn’t be affected.”

The 24 satellites that make up the GPS constellation — many of them built at the former Rockwell plant in Seal Beach — will be replaced one by one. The first replacement was scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral this weekend. The overhaul will take a decade and is being overseen by engineers at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo, where Parkinson and his team developed the current system.

“We know that the world relies on GPS,” said Col. David B. Goldstein, the chief engineer for the upgrade.

San Diego found out firsthand in 2007, when the Navy accidentally jammed GPS signals in the area, knocking out cellphone service and a hospital’s emergency hospital paging system for doctors. New York experienced a similar problem a year later.

The upgrade is designed in part to prevent such outages by increasing the number of signals beamed to Earth from satellites that orbit 12,000 miles above. By triangulating the signals from four satellites, GPS receivers — and there are now more than a billion of them — can pinpoint your location on the ground.

Although “positioning” is an obvious application of the technology, it’s also become a crucial timekeeper for the financial industry. Transactions made everywhere, from ATMs to Wall Street stock trades, are time-stamped using precise atomic clocks ticking within the GPS satellites. The clocks are accurate to one-billionth of a second. It’s a crucial technology for Wall Street, where a fraction of a second could mean billions of dollars.

Before GPS, explorers and seafarers figured out where they were by looking at the sun and the stars. Even with the advent of gyroscopes and radios, navigation was still imprecise, with an average margin of error of a mile or two.

The Cold War sparked the necessity for something better.

When the Soviet Union launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, scientists at Johns Hopkins University scrambled to track it. They soon realized they could determine Sputnik’s position by monitoring the radio waves it emitted.

That led to a breakthrough concept. If radio waves could be used to track a satellite from Earth, the radio waves from the satellite could also be used to determine the position of an object on the ground.

The Pentagon jumped at the idea. The Navy in particular needed help guiding its submarines that carried nuclear missiles. Because the submarines spent months underwater and only surfaced sporadically, they did not have a precise way of knowing where they were, which diminished the accuracy of the missiles.

In the 1960s, the Pentagon launched more than a dozen satellites under a program called Transit to help the submarines, which were outfitted with an antenna that could receive satellite signals when they surfaced.

But the system was accurate only to within 100 feet — and only when a submarine wasn’t moving. The government needed something better.

That’s where Parkinson came in. In 1972, the Pentagon tapped him to develop a satellite-based navigation system that had more naysayers than supporters. Parkinson recalled frequent trips to Washington to deflect criticism from politicians and even some Pentagon brass that decried the project as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“I was told that the system was useless and that it had no future,” said Parkinson, 75, who is now professor emeritus at Stanford University. “I guess we proved them wrong.”

In addition to Rockwell, Parkinson enlisted engineers at Aerospace Corp., also in El Segundo. The first satellite was launched in 1978 and the system began partially operating with 21 satellites in 1993.

The military seized on the technology quickly, using GPS to guide troops through sand storms during the first Gulf War. A few years later, in 1995, GPS became a household name after Air Force Capt. Scott F. O’Grady used his hand-held unit to guide rescuers to his position after his jet was shot down over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Since then, GPS has revolutionized warfare. GPS is used to direct the drones seeking out insurgents in Afghanistan, and has made “smart bombs” so accurate that they can be dropped from 40,000 feet and still land within 10 feet of their target.

The Pentagon operates and controls the GPS satellite system used in every country around the world. Until 2000 it deliberately degraded the signals that could be read by civilian devices. Commercial applications soared in 2000, when President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to stop making the signals fuzzy.

Worried that the U.S. could flip the switch and shut off GPS to the rest of the world, several countries are developing their own satellites to wean themselves from relying on technology controlled by the U.S. military. The European Union, China and Russia are spending billions of dollars to develop their own versions.

Commercial applications, meanwhile, continue to multiply.

NavCom Technology Inc. in Torrance makes a remote-control system for tractors that steers by GPS. The company refines GPS signals with other ground-based navigation devices so that farmers can watch their tractors plant seeds in straight rows without overlapping in their fields.

Oil riggers pay a monthly subscription for a GPS service that enables them to zero in on oil fields that lay thousands of feet below the surface on the ocean floor.

The number of users who subscribe to such services is expected to balloon to at least 15 million this year, up from 100,000 six years ago, according to Frost & Sullivan, a San Antonio research firm.

“That’s not including the hundreds of millions of people who get the signals for free on applications through their cellphones,” said Daniel Longfield, industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

Under the $8-billion upgrade, Boeing Co.’s Space and Intelligence Systems in El Segundo is building 12 satellites the size of sport-utility vehicles, and 18 others will be assembled by Lockheed Martin Corp. in Denver. Twenty-four will go into orbit and six will be reserved as spares.

The first phase is more than three years behind schedule, costing taxpayers about $1 billion. Much of the delay has been blamed on Air Force demands for new features, including the ability to upgrade the satellites’ software while they are in space.

The new satellites will also triple the amount of signals available for commercial use and will have atomic clocks that are even more precise — keeping time to a fraction of a billionth of a second.

“GPS has truly become the lighthouse of the world,” Parkinson said. “It’s just remarkable how the system has evolved over the past 30 years. It’ll be just as interesting to see what will come in the next 30.”

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While Seagate’s last attempt to market a hybrid drive focused on energy savings, its new Momentus XT is all about performance and capacity.

The drive has special software that tracks a person’s use trends and then uses the SSD component of the drive to optimize performance, and it can adjust that performance over time with changes in user behavior.

The Momentus XT is a 7200-rpm serial ATA (SATA) hard-disk drive combined with 4GB of SSD capacity and 32MB of DDR3 cache memory. Seagate was unable to offer read, write speeds on the drive.

The combination, Seagate said, blows by traditional 7,200-rpm and 10,000-rpm hard-disk drives for read and write speeds, and nearly matches pure-SSD performance for the same.

“We heard loud and clear from our user’s feedback back [on our last hybrid drive] that our next drive had better be a high performance one,” said Mark Wojtasiak, senior product marketing manager at Seagate.

Seagate said it tested the Momentus XT against three other industry-leading drives, included a pure-SSD, a 10,000-rpmWestern Digital Velociraptor hard drive, and its own 7200-rpm Momentus hard-disk drive. It used ASUS G51-series gaming notebooks running Windows 7 Home Premium, running identical scripts on each.

“We booted within 5 seconds of an SSDs boot time, and we were 15 seconds faster than a 300GB Velociraptor and 36 seconds faster than our 7200-rpm [Momentus] drive,” Wojtasiak said.

When it came to loading applications, the Seagate Momentus XT was within range of a SSD drive, and it was “significantly” faster than the Velociraptor or Momentus hard drives, he said.

In the fall of 2007, Seagate launched its first and only hybrid drive, the Momentus 5400 PSD, or Power Savings Drive. The 2.5-in. PSD had a spindle speed of 5,400 rpm and only 256MB NAND flash capacity. That drive failed to sell well.

The purpose of the PSD’s SSD component was to act as a type of cache so that boot times would be improved and the hard drive platters would only spin up about 10% of the time, consuming up to 50% less power than traditional 5400-rpm spinning drives. But the drive offered little capacity compared with hard-disk drives of its day, and performance was only modestly better.

Stephen Baker, vice president of computer hardware industry analysis at research firm NPD Group, said, “I think they’ve tried to address some of the issues around price, and they’ve tried to address the fact that pure SSD drives are pretty expensive, and hybrids in the past didn’t offer you a lot of value — they didn’t perform mush better than SSDs, but they cost much more.”

Baker said from a price-point perspective, the Momentus XT is very competitive with hard drives and SSDs. For example, an Intel X25-M (consumer-class) SSD with 80GB of capacity costs about $215 on online retail sites such as Newegg.com.

The new Momentus XT comes in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB capacities and has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $113, $132, and $156, respectively. ASUS said it will be the first PC maker to ship systems featuring Seagate’s Momentus XT drive.

The drive is targeted at PC gamers, work groups, or developers and other computer enthusiasts who want to build their own high-performance computer. If it catches on, eventually, the product is expected to be marketed at the general laptop computer market, Wojtasiak said.

Secret sauce

Along with the Momentus XT, Seagate announced its Adaptive Memory software, an algorithm that maps user patterns and optimizes the drive’s performance based on those patterns.

Wojtasiak said the first time a user boots a system with the Momentum XT drive, the Adaptive Memory kicks in and begins learning use patters, booting the OS and then the most frequently used applications first.

By second boot, the system knows about 80% of a users system preferences and habits, and by the third boot, the drive’s performance optimization peaks and remains topped out, he said.

The Momentus XT also performs the same regardless of the operating system, Wojtasiak said. “This is operating system and application independent,” he said.

According to Seagate, OS independent means that the operating system does not determine what data should be written to flash memory versus the disk platters. Data placement is decided by the Momentum XT’s algorithms, which monitor accesses to the disc and identify the data that would see the biggest performance benefit from being be put in flash memory. It also means that the solid state hybrid drive will show a performance benefit when installed in a system with any operating systems: XP, Vista, Windows 7, Linux, Mac, etc.

“I think Seagate has done a good job of acknowledging they have had two pitches that they swung at in this product segment and they missed both,” said Mark Geenen, an analyst with research firm Trendfocus.

“With this product, it looks like they’ve made some good design adjustments so that without a fully optimized OS this product can still learn over time user tendencies and adjust performance,” he said.

Geenen said he was impressed with performance demonstrations of the Momentus XT by Seagate. “I think they’ve made it an attractive product,” he said.

A year and a half ago, Seagate announced its first SSD, the 2.5-in Pulsar, an enterprise-class drive that uses single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips. The PSD offered up to 240MB/sec. sequential read speeds and 200MB/sec. sequential write speeds or peak performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS.

It also claimed the Pulsar was as much as 20% faster than standard 5400-rpm hard drive technology, cuts energy consumption by 50% and improves mean time between failure (MBTF) by 50% compared with traditional drives.

Stuck on SLC SSD

The company has yet to produce a consumer-class SSD using less expensive multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chip technology, however.

Like with the Pulsar SSD, Wojtasiak said Seagate stuck with SLD NAND flash for the Momentus XT. SLC NAND flash memory, which stores just one bit per cell, natively has higher performance and vastly better endurance than MLC NAND flash.

SLC typically can sustain 10 times the number of write-erase cycles as MLC NAND flash, even though newer wear-leveling software is helping to even that playing field.

“What’s important to note about the SSD is that data is always written to disk first and then mirrored to the flash memory,” Wojtasiak said. “So there is no risk of losing that data should something happen to the flash.”

In its own tests, Seagate said it emulated writing 250GB of data to the Momentum XT over a five-year span, and “saw very little to no SSD degredation.”

The Momentus XT uses USB 3.0 interconnect with up to 4.8 Gbit/sec. throughput and native command queuing (NCQ), and also has an eSATA port for use of the drive in an external enclosure.

While Baker was impressed with changes made for the Momentum XT, he said the biggest hurdle facing its uptake is building a market for such a product.

“It’s about the value proposition as they try to take over more of the 2.5-in drive market because 2.5-in. drives are not as popular a product as 3.5-in. drives for your specialty users who like to build their own systems,” Baker said.

“The key is to develop a culture of buying big and cheap drives for capacity and then supplementing them with products like [the Momentus XT] to boost the performance,” he said.

Seagate has also announced two new versions of its 5400-rpmand 7200-rpm Momentus traditional hard drive, with up to 750GB of capacity.

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