Not only are these CASE* tools $1.14 per pack, but you do actually own them! Anyone who has given up the notion that you can sacraficing working, tested, iterative software for pounds of system design documents will tell you that these babys are great. When combined with advanced concepts like talking to your damn customers as various agile development practices advocate (like Scrum and XP), you can deliver great software.
Seriously folks, there is nothing to see here. Move along and don't take the free koolaid. Of the things this guy says that are correct (points 1,2, and 4) are addressed with changing your process, not your tools. Points (3 and 5) are just attempts to sell you a glass hammer (it's like the infamous "golden hammer", but breaks when you try to use it). Better programming models have been promised for over 30 years, and pay-as-you-go is just forcing you to behave the way some vendor wants you to. In this case, "some vendor" is IBM.
Part of this was the "cost" to our relationship. All of our friends and family members have family members near to offer free child care and/or have the luxury of houses offered to them. They can have one of them stop working w/o having to give up on home ownership in a steep housing market. And yes, they also have more time.
We looked at how we might do it, and as with college and our 1st home, it came down to doing it by ourselves, on our own, with no support structure. We realized this would put serious stress on our relationship. One person at risk for all of the bread-winning. One person managing all of the household. Our sense of equality and co-operation would be worn down. Our time with each other would be even more limted. We've weighed where we are aginst the timeframe to have our own kids and there's never been a "good" time, and the window of opportunity is closing in terms of likelyhood and safety (we don't want to be the psychotic fertility feinds). We think we could be good parents. We also think we could be good pastry chefs. Neither seems like a compelling reason to bring a new life into this world.
My wife and I bought our first home 6 months ago and did the math: with 3.5 years left on our student loans, either we can keep the house and play catch-up on planning for retirement or we can have kids and give it up. Her biological clock is ticking since we're both about 32. It's kids or our only shot at financial security (take a look at how much it costs to raise children). We don't have relatives to hand us piles of cash, or free childcare, or a place to live durring the early years. We've had to work hard for everything we have and trying to have a kid puts it all at serious risk.
This wasn't an easy decision. My wife and I have gone back and fourth on the topic of kids since neither of us have been longing for years for children. She was an oldest child and so helped raise her brother and sister while Mom worked along w/ babysitting, and I've just never been enthralled enough to want one but the thought of not experiencing it has been tought to deal with. It's still an emotional thing at times, but we're figuring out a way to deal with it.
We're phrasing it as "taking the easy way out": we're skipping the parent stage and going right to a psudo-grandparent stage. We're getting involved with the kids lives, taking them for occasional weekends, having fun (giving the parents a break in the process) and handing right the hell back. So far, it's working out great. No diapers unlesss we want to deal with them, we get to be the favorite aunt and uncle, and we've got over half a dozen (with more popping up every once in a while) to spend time with.
We're happy to play our role and stick with our levels of risk (zero to low), our friends and family are _MORE_ than happy whenever we offer to take the kids off their hands, and we're free to do whatever we want to with our lives. They say it takes a village to raise a child. That doesn't mean, however, that the village should be over-run with children.
Stay in school finish the CS degree, but do not leave until you get a Business degree to go with it. I whish I had. The 300 level business department courses I took for my "area of emphasis" (MIS) in my CS program were a spoonfeeding trip to candyland compared to Chem, Diff. Eq. and other CS *PREREQS* for cryin' out loud. By the time you're done with a BS. You should be able to almost sleep through a BA in biz in about 1 to 1 & 1/2 years. Durring that time you can audit all of the cool 400/500 level CS programs you like. While you're at it, spend a bit more time and get the cute little MBA. Hell, it's not even a thesis masters:) The technical jobs that stand best NOT to be offshored are the ones that require business and people skills as well as knowing something of what happens behind the scenes when you hit "Google Search" or "I'm Feeling Lucky" on everyones favorite search engine.
If your project has explicit, written in stone, unchanging goals...
Then you've drunk the Kool-Aid. Go throw up and quit trusting the customer not to screw you over. Now!!!
Agile is not a good choice for mission critical products.
Riiiiight:) Mission critical (as in "this needs to happen or the company folds") products need to spend months doing BDUF (Big Design Up Front) in order to stay in line with the 70% failure rate that business has come to expect (and resent) from software development methods.
The two day class sounds like it might have been softened up for newcomers so as to represent Agile methods as not being too disRUPtive (get it? ha ha) to industry leaches who push big frameworks and methodologies wich people stake projects, budgets, and careers on.
Disclaimar* - Keep in mind, I am part of an XP Team.
"The Mythical Man Month" should be required reading for every six figure mouth breather out there. Of course, it's thicker than "Who moved my cheese" and can't be purchased in an airport gift shop, so I suppose there's no hope...
Lets face it. Most people stick with Windows because it's there and it takes effort to get something better. Get a major PC manufacturer to start shipping some dual boot systems and see how well it fares...
As soon as you have a problem, you get the following conflicting and impossible solutions:
Debian Philosophy says: "Just recompile your app from source"
Commercial interests says: "Just use a supported distribution for our application"
The best thing you can do is keep the Debian box all stuff that complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and you'll be fine. If you need something that's no in Stable or not a late enough version in Stable, check out http://backports.org for expanded/updated packages. My last job used an old dual proc P3 running Woody to host our development "all-in-wonder" box - CVS, Bugzilla, CVSZilla, Wikki, development intranet web pages and some supporting tools. We used an rsync via ssh to a Solaris box w/ tape for nightly backups. It worked like a champ for a small team (4 devs, 1 manager & an occasional tester) without blinking. I'm sure would have scaled up at least 5 times that before the hardware we were running it on became the bottleneck.
For example, they don't use Visual Source Safe. Of course, you don't have to know what's in VSS not to trust it: just try and use it for a project once:)
I've been using CruiseControl for about half a year now, and the Ant Sound task works well. Just crank up the speakers and collect a directory of Success and Failure sounds. It's hard to ignore the audio track from the Psycho shower scene when a build fails, or a snip of the Indiana Jones theme music when it passes.
Our build machine recently switched to a rack mount in the server room, so I wrote a little Ant Task that loops and parses the CruiseControl RSS feed (mentioned in Pragmatic Automation) and sets build status baised on that, playing a set of sounds on a workstation locally. We get punk covers of show tunes (from Me First And the Gimmie Gimmie's "Are A drag") and Office Space quotes when the build fails. The sounds are different from our usual workstation collection, and nothing says you missed a file checkin or config change like Bill Lumberg saying "Uh... we have sort of a Problem here.." at max volume:)
As those of us outside the great Redmond Relaity Distortion Field have been saying for years; 3 flavors of windows support does _NOT_ make something "Cross Platform". Release and support C# and.NET directly on the same other platforms Java supports (Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS), and do it at the same time the Windows version comes out. Just like Sun does with Java. Until that happens,.NET and C# wont' be taken seriously as an alternative by the Java community.
This comment from an Engineering conference call from Dec West site to Colorado got the well deserved applause and laughter when the DEC/Compaq merger was announced. I was there when it happened, and this got to the main problem with DEC: couldn't market a whore in a free port. They sat on the Alpha design for years as it was before launch in part because they didn't want to eat into thier mini business the way they ate into mainframe business. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. Sorry, Alpha - guess you live on in IA-64 (the "IA" stands for "Inetl's Alpha").
Don't take my word for it. Take a look at the site of the New York State Teacher of The Year 1991, John Taylor Gatto (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/). The US educational system (and Indian system it was baised on) is seriously flawed. You want to increase your school systems effectiveness? Get rid of them.
Most of my wife's co-workers will be quitting teaching just a few years after starting. My wife will quit within a few years too. This is because they have realzed the system is broken and can't be fixed. If you're looking for proponents of private schools and alternative education, just look at where a supprising number of your public school teachers send thier kids, even before they quit.
One of the best programmers I know is from the University of Life, School of Hard Knocks. One of the worst I ever met had a M.S. in Comp. Sci. from and Indian University. Education means shit. Learning means everything.
I work for a firm that produces some enterprise software. We have a number of needed features that have been missing for _years_. These features don't affect the user interface, or even the users' interaction--they are for admin, failover, backup, clustering, etc.
I've spent a few years developing enterprise software myself. Enterprise software purchacing processes too often end up being fine examples of what goes wrong in the Principal Agent Problem. Specificly, that those who have the authority to make the purchasing decision are not accountable (or accountable enough) to the interest of a group of stakeholders (clearly, IT/admin staff in this case). If they've used similar products and the admins can't show the impact of the lack of these fetures, cant' argue their way out of it, lack the veto power, and it meets the "good enough" requirement then system is purchased anyways. There's a lot of garbage out there with pretty UIs that need regular reboots.
It's that simple. If this were not the case, there'd be real signs of things being fixed now that it's been over a year since the "Trustworthy Computing Initiative" was launched. Are there new firewall tools as part of new Service Packs? New security audit tools you can get from Windows Update? How about just turning _OFF_ default services for XP? Anything?!?! You'd think with 50 Billion in the bank and all the money they'll be saving from reduced employee benefits that they could afford to fix this junk, so you have to assume they choose not to.
It's a small thing, but I figure the less I use microsoft's products at all, the more I help enable them to fade into computing history where they belong. I make a point to promote non-Microsoft alternatives whenever I can to friends and family. I've turned a number of people on to Mozilla for browser and mail and WinAmp for music. I try to financially reward companies that support more than just Microsoft products. The reasons are first and most importantly security, and second an absolute disgust for Microsoft's business practices. For all they've done to screw over customers, competitors with 10x better products that they snuffed out, and of course "partners" (note: a good Microsoft "partnership" is when you get lube and a warning before they start on you).
I am a staunch supporter of A.B.M. (Anyone But Microsoft). If I am in a situation where I "must" use Windows, I use it only in the only way that can do the least harm to the world: as an insecure application launcher. I use it to run Cygwin, GVim, Eclipse, Mozilla, Thunderbird, and whatever else. I run the McAfee Anti-Virus, Spy-Bot Seek 'n Destroy and run Windoze update regularly. No windoze media player, IE removed from the desktop, always saying no to the.NET framework crap, and absolutely _NO_ Outlook garbage!! I run OpenOffice and tell people that I have an older office version if I can't open files and make them re-save and re-send them. If they gripe, I tell them to complain to Microsoft.
And of course, I make sure it's behind a firewall.
It is not by accident that our national motto is "E Pluribus Unum" (from many, one).
Aparently they don't teach much in the way of history and politics at your school (or research for that matter). Thanks to the idiocy of the cold war, we now suffer the association of "In god we trust".
A Legislative History of the National Motto http://www.aclj.org/stories/historyof_us_mo tto.asp
We have gone from being uniters to being dividers and our current political, social, and corporate environment reflects it all to well.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. They're way better than the VHS ones...
Seriously folks, there is nothing to see here. Move along and don't take the free koolaid. Of the things this guy says that are correct (points 1,2, and 4) are addressed with changing your process, not your tools. Points (3 and 5) are just attempts to sell you a glass hammer (it's like the infamous "golden hammer", but breaks when you try to use it). Better programming models have been promised for over 30 years, and pay-as-you-go is just forcing you to behave the way some vendor wants you to. In this case, "some vendor" is IBM.
*CASE: Celluloid Assisted Software Engineering
to boxes of rocks everywhere:)
Part of this was the "cost" to our relationship. All of our friends and family members have family members near to offer free child care and/or have the luxury of houses offered to them. They can have one of them stop working w/o having to give up on home ownership in a steep housing market. And yes, they also have more time.
We looked at how we might do it, and as with college and our 1st home, it came down to doing it by ourselves, on our own, with no support structure. We realized this would put serious stress on our relationship. One person at risk for all of the bread-winning. One person managing all of the household. Our sense of equality and co-operation would be worn down. Our time with each other would be even more limted. We've weighed where we are aginst the timeframe to have our own kids and there's never been a "good" time, and the window of opportunity is closing in terms of likelyhood and safety (we don't want to be the psychotic fertility feinds). We think we could be good parents. We also think we could be good pastry chefs. Neither seems like a compelling reason to bring a new life into this world.
My wife and I bought our first home 6 months ago and did the math: with 3.5 years left on our student loans, either we can keep the house and play catch-up on planning for retirement or we can have kids and give it up. Her biological clock is ticking since we're both about 32. It's kids or our only shot at financial security (take a look at how much it costs to raise children). We don't have relatives to hand us piles of cash, or free childcare, or a place to live durring the early years. We've had to work hard for everything we have and trying to have a kid puts it all at serious risk.
This wasn't an easy decision. My wife and I have gone back and fourth on the topic of kids since neither of us have been longing for years for children. She was an oldest child and so helped raise her brother and sister while Mom worked along w/ babysitting, and I've just never been enthralled enough to want one but the thought of not experiencing it has been tought to deal with. It's still an emotional thing at times, but we're figuring out a way to deal with it.
We're phrasing it as "taking the easy way out": we're skipping the parent stage and going right to a psudo-grandparent stage. We're getting involved with the kids lives, taking them for occasional weekends, having fun (giving the parents a break in the process) and handing right the hell back. So far, it's working out great. No diapers unlesss we want to deal with them, we get to be the favorite aunt and uncle, and we've got over half a dozen (with more popping up every once in a while) to spend time with.
We're happy to play our role and stick with our levels of risk (zero to low), our friends and family are _MORE_ than happy whenever we offer to take the kids off their hands, and we're free to do whatever we want to with our lives. They say it takes a village to raise a child. That doesn't mean, however, that the village should be over-run with children.
Stay in school finish the CS degree, but do not leave until you get a Business degree to go with it. I whish I had. The 300 level business department courses I took for my "area of emphasis" (MIS) in my CS program were a spoonfeeding trip to candyland compared to Chem, Diff. Eq. and other CS *PREREQS* for cryin' out loud. By the time you're done with a BS. You should be able to almost sleep through a BA in biz in about 1 to 1 & 1/2 years. Durring that time you can audit all of the cool 400/500 level CS programs you like. While you're at it, spend a bit more time and get the cute little MBA. Hell, it's not even a thesis masters:) The technical jobs that stand best NOT to be offshored are the ones that require business and people skills as well as knowing something of what happens behind the scenes when you hit "Google Search" or "I'm Feeling Lucky" on everyones favorite search engine.
If your project has explicit, written in stone, unchanging goals...
Then you've drunk the Kool-Aid. Go throw up and quit trusting the customer not to screw you over. Now!!!
Agile is not a good choice for mission critical products.
Riiiiight:) Mission critical (as in "this needs to happen or the company folds") products need to spend months doing BDUF (Big Design Up Front) in order to stay in line with the 70% failure rate that business has come to expect (and resent) from software development methods.
The two day class sounds like it might have been softened up for newcomers so as to represent Agile methods as not being too disRUPtive (get it? ha ha) to industry leaches who push big frameworks and methodologies wich people stake projects, budgets, and careers on.
Disclaimar* - Keep in mind, I am part of an XP Team.
"The Mythical Man Month" should be required reading for every six figure mouth breather out there. Of course, it's thicker than "Who moved my cheese" and can't be purchased in an airport gift shop, so I suppose there's no hope...
Lets face it. Most people stick with Windows because it's there and it takes effort to get something better. Get a major PC manufacturer to start shipping some dual boot systems and see how well it fares...
As soon as you have a problem, you get the following conflicting and impossible solutions:
Debian Philosophy says: "Just recompile your app from source"
Commercial interests says: "Just use a supported distribution for our application"
The best thing you can do is keep the Debian box all stuff that complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and you'll be fine. If you need something that's no in Stable or not a late enough version in Stable, check out http://backports.org for expanded/updated packages. My last job used an old dual proc P3 running Woody to host our development "all-in-wonder" box - CVS, Bugzilla, CVSZilla, Wikki, development intranet web pages and some supporting tools. We used an rsync via ssh to a Solaris box w/ tape for nightly backups. It worked like a champ for a small team (4 devs, 1 manager & an occasional tester) without blinking. I'm sure would have scaled up at least 5 times that before the hardware we were running it on became the bottleneck.
Home grown system that's been in place for years (according to a co-worker of mine who spent a few years there). Don't recall the name of it.
Bunch of savages on this 'Net forum... :)
For example, they don't use Visual Source Safe. Of course, you don't have to know what's in VSS not to trust it: just try and use it for a project once:)
I've been using CruiseControl for about half a year now, and the Ant Sound task works well. Just crank up the speakers and collect a directory of Success and Failure sounds. It's hard to ignore the audio track from the Psycho shower scene when a build fails, or a snip of the Indiana Jones theme music when it passes.
Our build machine recently switched to a rack mount in the server room, so I wrote a little Ant Task that loops and parses the CruiseControl RSS feed (mentioned in Pragmatic Automation) and sets build status baised on that, playing a set of sounds on a workstation locally. We get punk covers of show tunes (from Me First And the Gimmie Gimmie's "Are A drag") and Office Space quotes when the build fails. The sounds are different from our usual workstation collection, and nothing says you missed a file checkin or config change like Bill Lumberg saying "Uh... we have sort of a Problem here.." at max volume:)
As those of us outside the great Redmond Relaity Distortion Field have been saying for years; 3 flavors of windows support does _NOT_ make something "Cross Platform". Release and support C# and .NET directly on the same other platforms Java supports (Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS), and do it at the same time the Windows version comes out. Just like Sun does with Java. Until that happens, .NET and C# wont' be taken seriously as an alternative by the Java community.
This comment from an Engineering conference call from Dec West site to Colorado got the well deserved applause and laughter when the DEC/Compaq merger was announced. I was there when it happened, and this got to the main problem with DEC: couldn't market a whore in a free port. They sat on the Alpha design for years as it was before launch in part because they didn't want to eat into thier mini business the way they ate into mainframe business. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. Sorry, Alpha - guess you live on in IA-64 (the "IA" stands for "Inetl's Alpha").
Don't take my word for it. Take a look at the site of the New York State Teacher of The Year 1991, John Taylor Gatto (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/). The US educational system (and Indian system it was baised on) is seriously flawed. You want to increase your school systems effectiveness? Get rid of them.
Most of my wife's co-workers will be quitting teaching just a few years after starting. My wife will quit within a few years too. This is because they have realzed the system is broken and can't be fixed. If you're looking for proponents of private schools and alternative education, just look at where a supprising number of your public school teachers send thier kids, even before they quit.
One of the best programmers I know is from the University of Life, School of Hard Knocks. One of the worst I ever met had a M.S. in Comp. Sci. from and Indian University. Education means shit. Learning means everything.
Lets see how long this one stays up
After all, how many of us remember this diva named Jem? As I recall, she was "truely truely truely outrageous"...
I've spent a few years developing enterprise software myself. Enterprise software purchacing processes too often end up being fine examples of what goes wrong in the Principal Agent Problem. Specificly, that those who have the authority to make the purchasing decision are not accountable (or accountable enough) to the interest of a group of stakeholders (clearly, IT/admin staff in this case). If they've used similar products and the admins can't show the impact of the lack of these fetures, cant' argue their way out of it, lack the veto power, and it meets the "good enough" requirement then system is purchased anyways. There's a lot of garbage out there with pretty UIs that need regular reboots.
It's that simple. If this were not the case, there'd be real signs of things being fixed now that it's been over a year since the "Trustworthy Computing Initiative" was launched. Are there new firewall tools as part of new Service Packs? New security audit tools you can get from Windows Update? How about just turning _OFF_ default services for XP? Anything?!?! You'd think with 50 Billion in the bank and all the money they'll be saving from reduced employee benefits that they could afford to fix this junk, so you have to assume they choose not to.
It's a small thing, but I figure the less I use microsoft's products at all, the more I help enable them to fade into computing history where they belong. I make a point to promote non-Microsoft alternatives whenever I can to friends and family. I've turned a number of people on to Mozilla for browser and mail and WinAmp for music. I try to financially reward companies that support more than just Microsoft products. The reasons are first and most importantly security, and second an absolute disgust for Microsoft's business practices. For all they've done to screw over customers, competitors with 10x better products that they snuffed out, and of course "partners" (note: a good Microsoft "partnership" is when you get lube and a warning before they start on you).
.NET framework crap, and absolutely _NO_ Outlook garbage!! I run OpenOffice and tell people that I have an older office version if I can't open files and make them re-save and re-send them. If they gripe, I tell them to complain to Microsoft.
I am a staunch supporter of A.B.M. (Anyone But Microsoft). If I am in a situation where I "must" use Windows, I use it only in the only way that can do the least harm to the world: as an insecure application launcher. I use it to run Cygwin, GVim, Eclipse, Mozilla, Thunderbird, and whatever else. I run the McAfee Anti-Virus, Spy-Bot Seek 'n Destroy and run Windoze update regularly. No windoze media player, IE removed from the desktop, always saying no to the
And of course, I make sure it's behind a firewall.
It is not by accident that our national motto is "E Pluribus Unum" (from many, one).
o tto.asp
Aparently they don't teach much in the way of history and politics at your school (or research for that matter). Thanks to the idiocy of the cold war, we now suffer the association of "In god we trust".
A Legislative History of the National Motto
http://www.aclj.org/stories/historyof_us_m
We have gone from being uniters to being dividers and our current political, social, and corporate environment reflects it all to well.
"The Corporate States of America"
Land of the free gift with purchase.
Home of the Whopper.
Gotta ask, "where's Al Queda when you need 'em"?