That movie pretty seemed to require you willing to play yourself in it. I was wondering how they pitched the movie to you and why you decided to participate in it.
Well, answering the last bit first, lots of little bugs take the form of something that takes 5 seconds to fix. The cost is really in how long it takes for you to diagnose and recover from your bugs. Admittedly, if you aggressively use unit testing, this can mitigate this problem a lot.... unless the bug is in your unit test.;-) Anyway, I submit that the probability of you on your own introducing a really nasty bug is much higher than if you are doing paired programming.
As for the twit you were working with... you're fucked there. *Any* team project with someone like that on board is going to be screwed no matter what practices are employed. You essentially have dead weight. One of the tenants of paired programming is that the pairs be formed in a "natural" manner, so you aren't stuck with dead weights. If there are people who are dead weights, then management *should* identify them (with the help of your feedback) and either get them up to speed with training for fire their asses (as is appropriate for the situation).
And shame on you for using Hungarian Notation... that sh*t has to die!!!!!;-)
The common pratices before XP became popular were to do exactly as you described. The problems with this are many fold, not the least of which it makes your development process extremely inflexible and unable to adapt to change, the tendancy to get locked into analysis paralysis, and the simple inability to define a plan when tackling a problem or technology that nobody has familiarity with.
FYI, XP isn't a "technology", and it isn't fly by night. It's based on successful practices that have existed in one form or another for decades. I have no idea what practices you think are in XP that in any way reinforce laziness. XP actually fights a number of lazy behaviours that programmers have. All it does is bring together a number of successful practices and espouse doing them "to the extreme" in order to combat the naturally lazy approaches of programmers.
If you think code reviews are great, then it's hard to accept your arugment about paired programming, as it's a continous code review.
Kent Beck, the guy who started the XP thing going, moves *very* quickly when he's programming... indeed, he does things that really you can only do in a Smalltalk environment in terms of jumping around. Still, he is eminently easy to follow. If you can't be followed, then my guess is it's not about your pace but the clarity of your code, and that *is* something that should be addressed when you're coding.
Generally speaking, programmers working on their own are lucky if they only introduce a bug every couple of hours. With paired programming you can easily go for days without doing so. Not having the bug in the first place saves you far more time than any perceived benefit that comes from "being free to be on your own".
Back when I was playing with Zephyr (which greatly predates Gaim... for that matter it predates ICQ & AIM) there was already a very nice X client (can't remember it's name) which was quite well established, providing a list of "friends" who were logged on, and allowed you to select one and send a message. It also provided message history from some friends (although by default I tended to let the messages post up in message boxes).
Well, the nice thing about Zephyr is that it was a protocol, and there were a number of clients for it. Rolling your own was pretty easy too. I'm not sure though by what you mean by "more interactive". Zephyr messages are delivered immediately, and you can reply immediately. That's pretty interactive.
I'd definitely put Zephyr in the same category as ICQ and AIM. It had presence notification and instant messaging. It also had cool stuff like categorized broadcast messages and scripting support.
To my way of thinking, everything since has been a poor Zephyr knock-off.
Here's a story that's a good example of how statistics can be misleading.
The odds of getting a royal flush, if you aren't cheating, are 1.539x10^-6. Now, you're playing cards with the Pope, and he gets a RoyalFlush. What are the odds he's cheating?
So, Microsoft says Internet Explorer is an inseperable part of Windows and is not a seperate product (despite it being available on a variety of platforms), but "security"....nah, that can't be part of Windows.
Well, I certainly don't have a P9, and I don't have Photoshop of any kind, mostly because the GIMP does the job pretty well for me, and it won't run on my favourite OS.
I have to use Windows for work much of the time, and as a consequence I have no problem paying for a license of Windows to support that.
Really, there is no need to break the law, thanks to the hard efforts of free software developers. The problem is that it's *easy* to break the law.
Um... a Power4 CPU is going to cost you a pretty penny. The supporting hardware to get it to perform like it can is going to cost you even more. Believe me, in terms of price/performance, the Xeon holds it's own.
During the election fiasco of 2000, Bruce Schneier went into the security side of this in great detail. You need human verifiable voting slips, but it can be done, at least for the most part.
Perl is (arguably) the work of one loan, mad genius, and not GPL.
But Perl is free software, and it is actually a lot more than the work of a loan, mad genius. It certainly started out that way, but the same is true of most good software.
The gcc compiler is by far not the best compiler for any platform. It's sole advantage is that it's portable.
Actually, on many platforms it's the *only* compiler. There were times where it generated the fastest code of any compiler out there for a few platforms, and I believe that is still true today on x86 (I could be wrong because I haven't benchmarked it against MSVC 7.0). In general, even proprietary compilers tend to not perform as well as the specialized, high-performance compilers that CPU vendors write for their own chips. It's true though that gcc's primary goals have been stability and portability. To that end they've been more successful than any of their competition in the proprietary space.
I could go on. Heck, during most of the last 20 years and 90's it wasn't uncommon for admins to replace their vendor supplied Unix programs with GNU or BSD versions because they were better.
Still, you have to give props to the "usefulness" of Linux.
In general, free software doesn't tend to be terribly interesting from an academic standpoint. However, it does tend to be very "useful" (to paraphrase you). I'd argue that every piece of software you put on that list would score high on the usefulness scale. This is actually what you'd expect to be the emergent quality of software that is ultimately controlled by the end user. Don't undervalue "usefulness". That quality is by far the most important in software, and the one which is most lacking. If that were the only quality where free software exceeded proprietary software, it's reason alone to scrap the proprietary development model.
Actually, your whole critism about RedHat is why I love them, and why I love the fact that they GPL/LGPL their work. Personally, I was REALLY glad to have 2.96. It was the best, most stable g++ at the time. I'm not saying that people were wrong for hating it, I'm just saying that it suited me. And that's the great thing.... if you didn't like 2.96, you could do one of several things:
Install kgcc and just don't use 2.96 at all. Don't worry about the C++ issues.
Use another distribution... remember they have access to the same software
Build your own version of RedHat from the SRPM's and compiling it with gcc/g++ 2.95.x.
Do #3, but SELL your distribution.
Much like what happened back in the day when RedHat didn't bundle KDE and Mandrake did, the open source nature means that when RedHat fucks up (or more accurately makes choices that don't suit your needs), you can go with something else. The switching costs are minimal. How can you NOT be happy as a RedHat customer?
The day this stuff stops being true is the day I'll stay up at night worrying about RedHat taking over the world. In the mean time, I think the risk of say Gillette taking over the world is much more significant.;-)
Several things disturb me about Liberal rhetoric, but most notably:
The use of ridicule and ad-hominem attacks to discredit valid ideas. i.e., Calling someone a member of the "religious right" as an implicit insult
The assertion of certain lies as universally-known truths. i.e., That big business has undue influence over conservatives.
Dude, it's all rhetoric. No matter which side you're on, rhetorical tactics on all sides of an argument have been refined over the millenia. This stuff is all Propoganda 101.
BTW, shame on you for calling Noam Chomsky a liberal. You either misunderstand what Chomsky is about or you misunderstand what liberals are about.
I hear you about the prejudices against conservatives, but I think the deal is more about prejudices about conservative talk shows. Conservative talk shows have become very popular over the last decade because they were the first to adopt the more contraversy focused "attack" style talk show. Liberal talk shows, which had really dominated before this, were more the "try to give everyone their say". I'm not saying that either style actually achieved these goals (and certainly neither of these styles is attributable to political perspective), I'm just saying they presented themselves in this manner.
People made the mistake of assuming these tactics were associated with political views, rather than realizing that they were styles of shows. The conservatives were the first to pick up on the new trend, mostly because they were the underdogs. However, it is rather easy to delude oneself into thinking "gee, these conservative talk shows are mean 'cause conservatives are mean."
If you get a modern P-4 laptop with a GeForce4 440 Go and a decent set of built in speakers, and you have the core components of a good portable gaming system. Get a nice big screen, preferabbly 1600x1200.
I hate to say it, as it's often been pointed out, but you are clearly missing the point with NWN. As far as I recall, Baldur's Gate does not have a DM Client, nor does it have a sophisticated module building mechanism like you have in NWN.
As far as I can tell, NWN gets closer to allowing online role-playing than any other game I've seen to date. Certainly Dungeon Siege is all but useless in this regard.
I also have zero problems with the M3 on my 5000e. I have the UXGA option and I can play NWN just fine with it (okay, I wish the 3D was better, but for a laptop as old as it is, it's pretty amazing).
For the record, I have a Compaq Armada M700 which DOES overheat.
Slashdot Mirror
That movie pretty seemed to require you willing to play yourself in it. I was wondering how they pitched the movie to you and why you decided to participate in it.
Well, answering the last bit first, lots of little bugs take the form of something that takes 5 seconds to fix. The cost is really in how long it takes for you to diagnose and recover from your bugs. Admittedly, if you aggressively use unit testing, this can mitigate this problem a lot.... unless the bug is in your unit test. ;-) Anyway, I submit that the probability of you on your own introducing a really nasty bug is much higher than if you are doing paired programming.
;-)
As for the twit you were working with... you're fucked there. *Any* team project with someone like that on board is going to be screwed no matter what practices are employed. You essentially have dead weight. One of the tenants of paired programming is that the pairs be formed in a "natural" manner, so you aren't stuck with dead weights. If there are people who are dead weights, then management *should* identify them (with the help of your feedback) and either get them up to speed with training for fire their asses (as is appropriate for the situation).
And shame on you for using Hungarian Notation... that sh*t has to die!!!!!
The common pratices before XP became popular were to do exactly as you described. The problems with this are many fold, not the least of which it makes your development process extremely inflexible and unable to adapt to change, the tendancy to get locked into analysis paralysis, and the simple inability to define a plan when tackling a problem or technology that nobody has familiarity with.
FYI, XP isn't a "technology", and it isn't fly by night. It's based on successful practices that have existed in one form or another for decades. I have no idea what practices you think are in XP that in any way reinforce laziness. XP actually fights a number of lazy behaviours that programmers have. All it does is bring together a number of successful practices and espouse doing them "to the extreme" in order to combat the naturally lazy approaches of programmers.
Call it Agile Programming. This is what all the "cool" people are calling it now anyway. ;-)
If you think code reviews are great, then it's hard to accept your arugment about paired programming, as it's a continous code review.
Kent Beck, the guy who started the XP thing going, moves *very* quickly when he's programming... indeed, he does things that really you can only do in a Smalltalk environment in terms of jumping around. Still, he is eminently easy to follow. If you can't be followed, then my guess is it's not about your pace but the clarity of your code, and that *is* something that should be addressed when you're coding.
Generally speaking, programmers working on their own are lucky if they only introduce a bug every couple of hours. With paired programming you can easily go for days without doing so. Not having the bug in the first place saves you far more time than any perceived benefit that comes from "being free to be on your own".
Back when I was playing with Zephyr (which greatly predates Gaim... for that matter it predates ICQ & AIM) there was already a very nice X client (can't remember it's name) which was quite well established, providing a list of "friends" who were logged on, and allowed you to select one and send a message. It also provided message history from some friends (although by default I tended to let the messages post up in message boxes).
Well, the nice thing about Zephyr is that it was a protocol, and there were a number of clients for it. Rolling your own was pretty easy too. I'm not sure though by what you mean by "more interactive". Zephyr messages are delivered immediately, and you can reply immediately. That's pretty interactive.
I'd definitely put Zephyr in the same category as ICQ and AIM. It had presence notification and instant messaging. It also had cool stuff like categorized broadcast messages and scripting support.
To my way of thinking, everything since has been a poor Zephyr knock-off.
That's exactly the point. People tend to think statistics are relevant even when they aren't. DNA evidence is similarly misleading.
Here's a story that's a good example of how statistics can be misleading.
The odds of getting a royal flush, if you aren't cheating, are 1.539x10^-6. Now, you're playing cards with the Pope, and he gets a RoyalFlush. What are the odds he's cheating?
So, Microsoft says Internet Explorer is an inseperable part of Windows and is not a seperate product (despite it being available on a variety of platforms), but "security"... .nah, that can't be part of Windows.
Well, I certainly don't have a P9, and I don't have Photoshop of any kind, mostly because the GIMP does the job pretty well for me, and it won't run on my favourite OS.
I have to use Windows for work much of the time, and as a consequence I have no problem paying for a license of Windows to support that.
Really, there is no need to break the law, thanks to the hard efforts of free software developers. The problem is that it's *easy* to break the law.
Um... a Power4 CPU is going to cost you a pretty penny. The supporting hardware to get it to perform like it can is going to cost you even more. Believe me, in terms of price/performance, the Xeon holds it's own.
During the election fiasco of 2000, Bruce Schneier went into the security side of this in great detail. You need human verifiable voting slips, but it can be done, at least for the most part.
"The HP 5L had a terrible feed problem because they relied on gravity to pull in the paper."
;-)
Man, you know it's a mess when you can't count on gravity.
Perl is (arguably) the work of one loan, mad genius, and not GPL.
But Perl is free software, and it is actually a lot more than the work of a loan, mad genius. It certainly started out that way, but the same is true of most good software.
The gcc compiler is by far not the best compiler for any platform. It's sole advantage is that it's portable.
Actually, on many platforms it's the *only* compiler. There were times where it generated the fastest code of any compiler out there for a few platforms, and I believe that is still true today on x86 (I could be wrong because I haven't benchmarked it against MSVC 7.0). In general, even proprietary compilers tend to not perform as well as the specialized, high-performance compilers that CPU vendors write for their own chips. It's true though that gcc's primary goals have been stability and portability. To that end they've been more successful than any of their competition in the proprietary space.
I could go on. Heck, during most of the last 20 years and 90's it wasn't uncommon for admins to replace their vendor supplied Unix programs with GNU or BSD versions because they were better.
Still, you have to give props to the "usefulness" of Linux.
In general, free software doesn't tend to be terribly interesting from an academic standpoint. However, it does tend to be very "useful" (to paraphrase you). I'd argue that every piece of software you put on that list would score high on the usefulness scale. This is actually what you'd expect to be the emergent quality of software that is ultimately controlled by the end user. Don't undervalue "usefulness". That quality is by far the most important in software, and the one which is most lacking. If that were the only quality where free software exceeded proprietary software, it's reason alone to scrap the proprietary development model.
Apologies for screwing up the HTML and not using preview mode.
Much like what happened back in the day when RedHat didn't bundle KDE and Mandrake did, the open source nature means that when RedHat fucks up (or more accurately makes choices that don't suit your needs), you can go with something else. The switching costs are minimal. How can you NOT be happy as a RedHat customer?
The day this stuff stops being true is the day I'll stay up at night worrying about RedHat taking over the world. In the mean time, I think the risk of say Gillette taking over the world is much more significant.
Several things disturb me about Liberal rhetoric, but most notably:
Dude, it's all rhetoric. No matter which side you're on, rhetorical tactics on all sides of an argument have been refined over the millenia. This stuff is all Propoganda 101.
BTW, shame on you for calling Noam Chomsky a liberal. You either misunderstand what Chomsky is about or you misunderstand what liberals are about.
I hear you about the prejudices against conservatives, but I think the deal is more about prejudices about conservative talk shows. Conservative talk shows have become very popular over the last decade because they were the first to adopt the more contraversy focused "attack" style talk show. Liberal talk shows, which had really dominated before this, were more the "try to give everyone their say". I'm not saying that either style actually achieved these goals (and certainly neither of these styles is attributable to political perspective), I'm just saying they presented themselves in this manner.
People made the mistake of assuming these tactics were associated with political views, rather than realizing that they were styles of shows. The conservatives were the first to pick up on the new trend, mostly because they were the underdogs. However, it is rather easy to delude oneself into thinking "gee, these conservative talk shows are mean 'cause conservatives are mean."
If you get a modern P-4 laptop with a GeForce4 440 Go and a decent set of built in speakers, and you have the core components of a good portable gaming system. Get a nice big screen, preferabbly 1600x1200.
I hate to say it, as it's often been pointed out, but you are clearly missing the point with NWN. As far as I recall, Baldur's Gate does not have a DM Client, nor does it have a sophisticated module building mechanism like you have in NWN.
As far as I can tell, NWN gets closer to allowing online role-playing than any other game I've seen to date. Certainly Dungeon Siege is all but useless in this regard.
I also have zero problems with the M3 on my 5000e. I have the UXGA option and I can play NWN just fine with it (okay, I wish the 3D was better, but for a laptop as old as it is, it's pretty amazing).
For the record, I have a Compaq Armada M700 which DOES overheat.
You say thatlike there's a difference....
--Chris
As opposed to the unlimited cycles of a floppy disk? Come on! They have failure rates which limit their use almost as much as CF cards.