For some strange reason I question either your stated position as a free market libertarian, or your intelligence.
Please tell me where that is my stated opinion, because I strongly doubt your reading comprehension (and intelligence, fool). I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government measures office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does. But I think I hit a sore spot in the slashdot groupthink, going by the "-1, Disagree" moderation.
People stopped using it in favor of the one that actually followed the standard, and the MS flavor went away.
Let's try that without the historical revisionism. Microsoft implemented a very buggy and incomplete version that killed Java's reputation, and Sun spent 4 years fighting Microsoft in court to kill the Microsoft JVM until they finally got it to stop shipping a JVM. Eventually there was only Sun's version left, but it was only a bleak shadow of what it could have been.
In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark
Belgium: 10.4 mio people Netherlands: 16.5 mio people Norway: 4.9 mio people Denmark: 5.5 mio people Europe: 731 mio people
So 37.1/731 mio = 5.1%. And I can't speak for the other countries, but the only requirement in Norway was that public information must be at least in either HTML, PDF or ODF - having DOCs is fine as long as it's not the only option and they can still use whatever tools they like internally. I have been working with one rather large government institution in Norway and there's thousands and thousands of MS Office copies and no plans to switch. They only care about ODF in the same way they care about screenreaders for the blind being able to read their pages, it's for total accessibility. Call it a wildfire if you like but I'm more worried someone'll accidentally step on it than anything else.
Also known as Stargate's Emergency Plot Device. Ever notice how every one of them they find is almost dead or will be dead very very shortly, but is always just enough to save the plot? So it goes to follow that any ZPM would have exactly enough power to work at the auction and then be useless.
Yep, came up at work today and was very surprised by the hallelujah chorus though I suppose I shouldn't be. Of course no one has it for real yet but for some reason when Apple makes one then suddenly everyone wants one, even though tablets have been around and been utterly unpopular for years. Same with iPhone, there were many smart phones before but usually that'd be the business guys who'd run around with appointments and email and presentations and that sort of thing. Suddenly a whole bunch of people who had never had a smart phone before showed up with the iPhone and now there's tons of cool apps in the App Store that makes it almost worth buying, I'm considering it.
I think the greatest strength Apple has now is that it creates its own self-fulfilling prophecy, there weren't any cool apps and there wasn't a market before iPad. Now suddenly there's a huge supply and demand showing up at the same time by the aura of Steve Jobs. Everybody else gets stuck in that Catch 22 and just fizzle while they hit critical mass and take the entire market boom. Aople right now isn't competing against anyone, they're competing against the tablet form factor itself. If people don't want it despite being the iPad, it'll fail and the fans simmer down a bit but this tablet will fail miserably in either case.
Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
So they'd lose more and more documents? I don't think you're thinking straight, they want it easy for people to upgrade and annoying for people who haven't. If Microsoft had any substantial degree of failure on that (no, anecdotes aren't proof) then Office would FAIL in company upgrade testing. "We are unable to migrate to Office 2007 because we would lose compatibility with vital documents and historical records". Do you see that happening? No, so reality doesn't care how many times that FUD is repeated over and over.
That was very creative, but I was under the impression that it is the invisible hand of the market that is supposed to select the best product, not the government. In so far that the government should be involved, it should do the least possible to alter the market from what it'd otherwise be. Even though "The more openly available, and widely adopted, and patent unencumbered the format is, the lower the barrier of entry to supporting it is, and the greater the amount of software that can support it will be." may be a positive market intervention, it is none the less a quite substantial intervention which libertarians are generally against. The concept that companies that get a too dominant position and have too much lock-in should be reigned in is more something I expect to find in a European socialist economy than coming from a libertarian.
Think of step 1 as an instruction to compile it rather than execute it.
Then you start building an instruction list as you parse step 2-4: a) Clap your hands. b) Shout out that you are at step 3. c) Jump up and down.
5. Whoops optimization, results are never evaluated so we can just compile them way.
6. Finish test, the result is do to nothing.
It's actually quite like what a compiler might have to do, think of 5 as variables going out of scope for example. Why did we perform those calculations? They make no sense (unless there's trickery like the mutable and volatile keyword involved), so we go back and delete those instructions. So the test didn't use the word "compile" but it's implicit in "read" that you should parse it and that the point of reading the whole before executing the rest is to execute it in a smarter way. If you want it said in an even geekier way, your instruction pointer should stay at 1. while you invoke a JIT compiler on the remaining executions, and once the JIT compiler finishes steps 2-5. are NOPed and you are done.
Look, I don't think government schools are the holy grail and think alternative methods of teaching in private schools can offer good alternatives. But with the danger of invoking the "think of the children" argument, refusing to teach them major and important topics of life and the world around them is a very special kind of child abuse. If you seriously think the government should take no action to ensure children get at least a minimum level of education, then I strongly disagree with you. The whole argument reminds me very much of parents that neglect or abuse their kids and cry foul on any intervention from the government because they're the parents and think that makes them lord and master over their children.
Since you speak of human rights, perhaps a few quotes from Convention on the Rights of the Child:
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular: (a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;
2. No part of the present article or article 28 shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principle set forth in paragraph 1 of the present article and to the requirements that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State.
It should be large clue that these are Christians refusing the education done in a heavily Christian country (64% christian, 30% no registered religion, 5% muslim), they're hardly evangelizing other religions. They're refusing because their children could even hear about other religions. Or about this whole nasty business of having sex, I'm sure they'll stick their heads in the sand until their daughters come home pregnant. To be honest, sometimes you should worry more about the parents than the government...
Throwing good money after bad is hardly limited to 419 victims. It's like an IT project that you've invested a ton of money in and isn't performing and you've thrown out your Indian outsourcing team but this new team claims they can salvage most of it for a little more money. And they end up paying and ultimately still scrapping the whole system because it's hopeless but nobody wanted to admit the money is really gone. That part is really just human.
Might as well ban cigarettes because it could "fuel demand for pot". It's cartoons, thought crime, fantasy, not reality. It's not enough that he's stopped looking at real children and imagine by drawings, they want to jail him simply because of what's inside his head. You have to make at least as many leaps of logic as Jack Thompson does going from violent games and movies to murder and mayhem to find any other reasons.
That's always been "true", and always been a lame excuse. Yes, in a colonization effort LOTS of people fail - ask the Roanoake colony.
They failed to survive where other tribes already survived, nothing made that area uninhabitable. Oxygen, water, food and warmth are the essentials of human life and nothing of the sort will be on Mars without advanced technology to produce it. And you need a completely sealed pressure dome just to hold on to the air you have, before you can even think of generating oxygen.
Right now, can we even do a dry run? I mean we should have fairly solid data on Mars by now, temperature, pressure, radiation level, solar power and so on. Put up a giant freezer/vacuum chamber/radiation sources/lights to emulate sunlight and build a simulated Mars base inside. If we can't even build one on Earth, we sure can't do it on Mars.
Almost right, but also that Debian themselves could not update a Firefox-branded browser without getting permission from Mozilla first. I think particularly the security team had a problem with that.
IANAL but I have been an implementation consultant for some years now, and usually we work on time and material contracts that are not entirely unlike what you describe. All I can say is that most of the time it works out well in that we work and rework until the client is satisfied with the solution, but asking how much it'll cost is like asking how long a rubber band is. We have clients that have been very organized and very clear, and we've had clients that have very unclear requirements and very difficult to take a decision. The usual method of securing progress is to have fixed pots of money. This is how much money is in this phase, and if they're happy with how far we got for that money they'll sign on with another phase if not they'll halt the project or whatever. Getting money back can only happen in under really special circumstances.
If our customers want fixed deliveries to fixed prices then we can't have loose requirements, we can't have customers rejecting solutions for arbitrary reasons, whether it's because they suddenly found new requirements or don't like how it turned out in practice or whatever. Then we really do need a checklist of things we can check off and say "This solution is according to specifications" whether they like it or not. If they don't like it, write a change request and we'll quote you a change order price, but in all honestly they're rarely better off with that than with time and material.
That is the problem with your #1, it's not enough to have just success/failure criteria. In fact, many of the project charters I've read to have such criteria which can even be measurable but they require substantial cooperation from the customer. For example, just to take a classic: Together we take a decision but the customer come back later "You didn't tell us all the consequences of this decision and we won't accept this, correct it". Are they right? Sometimes, but very often also not. So we have a failed implementation but that doesn't automatically assign blame anywhere. And that'll be a long fight once it turns ugly, one way or the other.
This is either stupidity or an intentionally over the top "announcement" designed to soften people up so that when they release the actual platform people are relieved that it only phones home every hour instead of continuously.
No, the timing might be intelligent so the outrage happens now and not at game launch but they mean is exactly this bad or worse.
In 1999 the dotcom craze and y2k craze was absurd, IT people were golden. I remember running into an intro IT class in 1998 on first day, the auditorium was beyond packed and people would stand in all the aisles and up back and even down front. Naturally, so many people felt committed because they'd wasted a year or more on it by the time the bubbles were bursting. It's like the stock market, when everyone says buy buy buy and that this'll grow into heaven is the time to get out.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates. After all, how much intelligence does it really take to do 95+% of all the things required to make a technological civilization work?
Actually work tends to require much more intelligence than before, before doing manual labor was an typical way to make a living with hardly no education or intelligence. Most of that is gone, replaced by things like operating advanced tractors and lumber machines and whatnot. But there's no reproduction pressure, in fact the poorest and lowest educated (not necessarily the same as intelligence, but bright people don't usually end up that way) are the ones breeding the most.
So there was selection pressure for intelligence, but only because our peripherals (so to speak) had previously developed into general purpose tools.
Why would there be selection pressure for general purpose tools in a creature too dumb to use it? I find it more plausible that a specialized creature initially developed intelligence because it'd make it a better specialist but slowly evolved into being more flexible than specialized.
Based on my experience so far I would say to do the technical structure with waterfall, and the functional structure with agile. What do I mean by that? Well, most of the time the customer doesn't really know what he wants, which is why blueprinting fails so miserably. But you can often at a technical level know what a customer wants. Let's for example say the customer wants drop down fields in an application. You know you'll need a storage backend (database?), UI front end (web app?), you need functions to manage the values, you need listing, sorting, filtering (single or multivalue?), security, audit logs and so on. You can design a ton of things by waterfall without actually knowing what drop downs the customer will want.
Agile promises to do that by refactoring which rarely happens because it's very likely to break things that were already working, despite the unit tests. They need the documentation from the original waterfall design, and they need the testing from the new waterfall design to ensure quality. One of the things I've noticed suffers most in agile is the documentation because there's an implicit belief that this will all change again, so people skimp on it even more than usual to document it when it's "final". The result is often that things are kludges made to extend things rather than actually going back to refactor, because people spent very little time thinking about a long term design in the first place.
Conversely, I have done quite a few implementation projects and in most the customer has only a list of specifications and no real idea how he'd like it to work. Creating a blueprint accurate enough that technical people could implement by and that the customer understands well enough what he's not going to say "well, that's not what I wanted" is like pulling teeth. And at the end of the day, different stakeholders will still have a different idea in their mind of what it's going to be. If you have a decent architecture, then you can do agile on top of that. Want this link to go there? Want to see these things? Can we get a checkbox there? Can you calculate that in a preview? Hopefully yes, but if it goes against the architecture it might need to go a longer waterfall process.
There's a balance here, on the one side you got expert systems that try to be ultraflexible in every direction but only ends up as an overcomplicated mess. On the other, you have the projects where nobody took five minutes to think "Am I trying to solve one special instance of a general issue here?". I've no idea if it'd only make a complete mess of two development methodologies, but I'd sure like to try it out sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
For some strange reason I question either your stated position as a free market libertarian, or your intelligence.
Please tell me where that is my stated opinion, because I strongly doubt your reading comprehension (and intelligence, fool). I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government measures office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does. But I think I hit a sore spot in the slashdot groupthink, going by the "-1, Disagree" moderation.
And what happened with that?
People stopped using it in favor of the one that actually followed the standard, and the MS flavor went away.
Let's try that without the historical revisionism. Microsoft implemented a very buggy and incomplete version that killed Java's reputation, and Sun spent 4 years fighting Microsoft in court to kill the Microsoft JVM until they finally got it to stop shipping a JVM. Eventually there was only Sun's version left, but it was only a bleak shadow of what it could have been.
In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark
Belgium: 10.4 mio people
Netherlands: 16.5 mio people
Norway: 4.9 mio people
Denmark: 5.5 mio people
Europe: 731 mio people
So 37.1/731 mio = 5.1%. And I can't speak for the other countries, but the only requirement in Norway was that public information must be at least in either HTML, PDF or ODF - having DOCs is fine as long as it's not the only option and they can still use whatever tools they like internally. I have been working with one rather large government institution in Norway and there's thousands and thousands of MS Office copies and no plans to switch. They only care about ODF in the same way they care about screenreaders for the blind being able to read their pages, it's for total accessibility. Call it a wildfire if you like but I'm more worried someone'll accidentally step on it than anything else.
Also known as Stargate's Emergency Plot Device. Ever notice how every one of them they find is almost dead or will be dead very very shortly, but is always just enough to save the plot? So it goes to follow that any ZPM would have exactly enough power to work at the auction and then be useless.
Yep, came up at work today and was very surprised by the hallelujah chorus though I suppose I shouldn't be. Of course no one has it for real yet but for some reason when Apple makes one then suddenly everyone wants one, even though tablets have been around and been utterly unpopular for years. Same with iPhone, there were many smart phones before but usually that'd be the business guys who'd run around with appointments and email and presentations and that sort of thing. Suddenly a whole bunch of people who had never had a smart phone before showed up with the iPhone and now there's tons of cool apps in the App Store that makes it almost worth buying, I'm considering it.
I think the greatest strength Apple has now is that it creates its own self-fulfilling prophecy, there weren't any cool apps and there wasn't a market before iPad. Now suddenly there's a huge supply and demand showing up at the same time by the aura of Steve Jobs. Everybody else gets stuck in that Catch 22 and just fizzle while they hit critical mass and take the entire market boom. Aople right now isn't competing against anyone, they're competing against the tablet form factor itself. If people don't want it despite being the iPad, it'll fail and the fans simmer down a bit but this tablet will fail miserably in either case.
Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
So they'd lose more and more documents? I don't think you're thinking straight, they want it easy for people to upgrade and annoying for people who haven't. If Microsoft had any substantial degree of failure on that (no, anecdotes aren't proof) then Office would FAIL in company upgrade testing. "We are unable to migrate to Office 2007 because we would lose compatibility with vital documents and historical records". Do you see that happening? No, so reality doesn't care how many times that FUD is repeated over and over.
That was very creative, but I was under the impression that it is the invisible hand of the market that is supposed to select the best product, not the government. In so far that the government should be involved, it should do the least possible to alter the market from what it'd otherwise be. Even though "The more openly available, and widely adopted, and patent unencumbered the format is, the lower the barrier of entry to supporting it is, and the greater the amount of software that can support it will be." may be a positive market intervention, it is none the less a quite substantial intervention which libertarians are generally against. The concept that companies that get a too dominant position and have too much lock-in should be reigned in is more something I expect to find in a European socialist economy than coming from a libertarian.
Human factor, input device, computer itself. Just grab the key at more convenient part of the process.
Think of step 1 as an instruction to compile it rather than execute it.
Then you start building an instruction list as you parse step 2-4:
a) Clap your hands.
b) Shout out that you are at step 3.
c) Jump up and down.
5. Whoops optimization, results are never evaluated so we can just compile them way.
6. Finish test, the result is do to nothing.
It's actually quite like what a compiler might have to do, think of 5 as variables going out of scope for example. Why did we perform those calculations? They make no sense (unless there's trickery like the mutable and volatile keyword involved), so we go back and delete those instructions. So the test didn't use the word "compile" but it's implicit in "read" that you should parse it and that the point of reading the whole before executing the rest is to execute it in a smarter way. If you want it said in an even geekier way, your instruction pointer should stay at 1. while you invoke a JIT compiler on the remaining executions, and once the JIT compiler finishes steps 2-5. are NOPed and you are done.
Look, I don't think government schools are the holy grail and think alternative methods of teaching in private schools can offer good alternatives. But with the danger of invoking the "think of the children" argument, refusing to teach them major and important topics of life and the world around them is a very special kind of child abuse. If you seriously think the government should take no action to ensure children get at least a minimum level of education, then I strongly disagree with you. The whole argument reminds me very much of parents that neglect or abuse their kids and cry foul on any intervention from the government because they're the parents and think that makes them lord and master over their children.
Since you speak of human rights, perhaps a few quotes from Convention on the Rights of the Child:
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:
(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;
2. No part of the present article or article 28 shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principle set forth in paragraph 1 of the present article and to the requirements that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State.
It should be large clue that these are Christians refusing the education done in a heavily Christian country (64% christian, 30% no registered religion, 5% muslim), they're hardly evangelizing other religions. They're refusing because their children could even hear about other religions. Or about this whole nasty business of having sex, I'm sure they'll stick their heads in the sand until their daughters come home pregnant. To be honest, sometimes you should worry more about the parents than the government...
Throwing good money after bad is hardly limited to 419 victims. It's like an IT project that you've invested a ton of money in and isn't performing and you've thrown out your Indian outsourcing team but this new team claims they can salvage most of it for a little more money. And they end up paying and ultimately still scrapping the whole system because it's hopeless but nobody wanted to admit the money is really gone. That part is really just human.
Might as well ban cigarettes because it could "fuel demand for pot". It's cartoons, thought crime, fantasy, not reality. It's not enough that he's stopped looking at real children and imagine by drawings, they want to jail him simply because of what's inside his head. You have to make at least as many leaps of logic as Jack Thompson does going from violent games and movies to murder and mayhem to find any other reasons.
Never have figured out why they don't just all use HTML syntax <grumble/>
You first, or did you mean XHTML?
That's always been "true", and always been a lame excuse. Yes, in a colonization effort LOTS of people fail - ask the Roanoake colony.
They failed to survive where other tribes already survived, nothing made that area uninhabitable. Oxygen, water, food and warmth are the essentials of human life and nothing of the sort will be on Mars without advanced technology to produce it. And you need a completely sealed pressure dome just to hold on to the air you have, before you can even think of generating oxygen.
Right now, can we even do a dry run? I mean we should have fairly solid data on Mars by now, temperature, pressure, radiation level, solar power and so on. Put up a giant freezer/vacuum chamber/radiation sources/lights to emulate sunlight and build a simulated Mars base inside. If we can't even build one on Earth, we sure can't do it on Mars.
Almost right, but also that Debian themselves could not update a Firefox-branded browser without getting permission from Mozilla first. I think particularly the security team had a problem with that.
IANAL but I have been an implementation consultant for some years now, and usually we work on time and material contracts that are not entirely unlike what you describe. All I can say is that most of the time it works out well in that we work and rework until the client is satisfied with the solution, but asking how much it'll cost is like asking how long a rubber band is. We have clients that have been very organized and very clear, and we've had clients that have very unclear requirements and very difficult to take a decision. The usual method of securing progress is to have fixed pots of money. This is how much money is in this phase, and if they're happy with how far we got for that money they'll sign on with another phase if not they'll halt the project or whatever. Getting money back can only happen in under really special circumstances.
If our customers want fixed deliveries to fixed prices then we can't have loose requirements, we can't have customers rejecting solutions for arbitrary reasons, whether it's because they suddenly found new requirements or don't like how it turned out in practice or whatever. Then we really do need a checklist of things we can check off and say "This solution is according to specifications" whether they like it or not. If they don't like it, write a change request and we'll quote you a change order price, but in all honestly they're rarely better off with that than with time and material.
That is the problem with your #1, it's not enough to have just success/failure criteria. In fact, many of the project charters I've read to have such criteria which can even be measurable but they require substantial cooperation from the customer. For example, just to take a classic: Together we take a decision but the customer come back later "You didn't tell us all the consequences of this decision and we won't accept this, correct it". Are they right? Sometimes, but very often also not. So we have a failed implementation but that doesn't automatically assign blame anywhere. And that'll be a long fight once it turns ugly, one way or the other.
This is either stupidity or an intentionally over the top "announcement" designed to soften people up so that when they release the actual platform people are relieved that it only phones home every hour instead of continuously.
No, the timing might be intelligent so the outrage happens now and not at game launch but they mean is exactly this bad or worse.
In rough numbers, the mass of your normal human is one order of magnitude over the mass of the rover.
Not unless your average human is 1800 kg.
XP--Nobody actually knows what this stands for, but you can call it Windows 5.1 if that makes you feel better.
Straight from the horse's mouth found via Wikipedia:
The XP name is short for "experience," symbolizing the rich and extended user experiences Windows and Office can offer by embracing Web services that span a broad range of devices.
In 1999 the dotcom craze and y2k craze was absurd, IT people were golden. I remember running into an intro IT class in 1998 on first day, the auditorium was beyond packed and people would stand in all the aisles and up back and even down front. Naturally, so many people felt committed because they'd wasted a year or more on it by the time the bubbles were bursting. It's like the stock market, when everyone says buy buy buy and that this'll grow into heaven is the time to get out.
Or any other career for that matter... do you want to have your tonsils removed by a surgeon, who is, "in it for the money...?"
I'd certainly want it to be true for my dentist. The other options are far more disturbing...
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates. After all, how much intelligence does it really take to do 95+% of all the things required to make a technological civilization work?
Actually work tends to require much more intelligence than before, before doing manual labor was an typical way to make a living with hardly no education or intelligence. Most of that is gone, replaced by things like operating advanced tractors and lumber machines and whatnot. But there's no reproduction pressure, in fact the poorest and lowest educated (not necessarily the same as intelligence, but bright people don't usually end up that way) are the ones breeding the most.
So there was selection pressure for intelligence, but only because our peripherals (so to speak) had previously developed into general purpose tools.
Why would there be selection pressure for general purpose tools in a creature too dumb to use it? I find it more plausible that a specialized creature initially developed intelligence because it'd make it a better specialist but slowly evolved into being more flexible than specialized.
Based on my experience so far I would say to do the technical structure with waterfall, and the functional structure with agile. What do I mean by that? Well, most of the time the customer doesn't really know what he wants, which is why blueprinting fails so miserably. But you can often at a technical level know what a customer wants. Let's for example say the customer wants drop down fields in an application. You know you'll need a storage backend (database?), UI front end (web app?), you need functions to manage the values, you need listing, sorting, filtering (single or multivalue?), security, audit logs and so on. You can design a ton of things by waterfall without actually knowing what drop downs the customer will want.
Agile promises to do that by refactoring which rarely happens because it's very likely to break things that were already working, despite the unit tests. They need the documentation from the original waterfall design, and they need the testing from the new waterfall design to ensure quality. One of the things I've noticed suffers most in agile is the documentation because there's an implicit belief that this will all change again, so people skimp on it even more than usual to document it when it's "final". The result is often that things are kludges made to extend things rather than actually going back to refactor, because people spent very little time thinking about a long term design in the first place.
Conversely, I have done quite a few implementation projects and in most the customer has only a list of specifications and no real idea how he'd like it to work. Creating a blueprint accurate enough that technical people could implement by and that the customer understands well enough what he's not going to say "well, that's not what I wanted" is like pulling teeth. And at the end of the day, different stakeholders will still have a different idea in their mind of what it's going to be. If you have a decent architecture, then you can do agile on top of that. Want this link to go there? Want to see these things? Can we get a checkbox there? Can you calculate that in a preview? Hopefully yes, but if it goes against the architecture it might need to go a longer waterfall process.
There's a balance here, on the one side you got expert systems that try to be ultraflexible in every direction but only ends up as an overcomplicated mess. On the other, you have the projects where nobody took five minutes to think "Am I trying to solve one special instance of a general issue here?". I've no idea if it'd only make a complete mess of two development methodologies, but I'd sure like to try it out sometime.
Mod parent up:
Patch levels don't start at 1 the day of release, they start the day they start working on the next branch. The kernel included in the installation CD was at patchset 14, the latest released one is 17 (However there were 2-3 updates that didn't change the patch level). And Lucid is already at -11 (see http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/l/linux-meta/linux-meta_2.6.32.11.11/changelog and http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/linux-image).