Unfortunately I was offline when the post came up on Slashdot, so I guess nobody will be reading this now. Anyway:
Thanks for your support and advice. Although these people chose to ignore my emails about the copyright, they obviously found it impossible to ignore the Slashdot effect.
It is a pity that the end result is that we have effectively prevented the free flow of information, but at least the issue of public-domain documentation was aired.
Note that the copy appeared to have been online (without my name on it) for about 6 months before I discovered it and emailed them about it. I never wanted to get paid for this article, which is of limited interest. I just didn't want somebody trying to control it's further distribution.
Just don't get religous about it. Brooks' book is pretty ancient, and goes on at length about stuff which should be an absolute baseline for development today. You could get away with reading the summary at the back to make sure you're not completely clueless, then read something more up-to-date.
Most importantly, because it's so old, it talks about monolithic projects in which the developers and managers have no contact with the end-users. People expect much more these days.
However, TMMM is useful for saying to does-not-compute conservative managers 'Look, we're not doing this, and it says in TMMM that we should.'.
It's people's failure to admit that they can't plan everything that gets them into trouble. If unexpected things happen in every project, then you should start planning for unexpected things in the next project. Managers who demand that everything is totally specified get to keep their jobs, because their managers think the programmers just didn't do what they were told. Managers who learn from experience and develop their projects incrementally get usable product out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
'Mariachi Static' is from a Warren Zevon song.
Unfortunately I was offline when the post came up on Slashdot, so I guess nobody will be reading this now. Anyway:
Thanks for your support and advice. Although these people chose to ignore my emails about the copyright, they obviously found it impossible to ignore the Slashdot effect.
It is a pity that the end result is that we have effectively prevented the free flow of information, but at least the issue of public-domain documentation was aired.
Note that the copy appeared to have been online (without my name on it) for about 6 months before I discovered it and emailed them about it. I never wanted to get paid for this article, which is of limited interest. I just didn't want somebody trying to control it's further distribution.
Just don't get religous about it. Brooks' book is pretty ancient, and goes on at length about stuff which should be an absolute baseline for development today. You could get away with reading the summary at the back to make sure you're not completely clueless, then read something more up-to-date.
Most importantly, because it's so old, it talks about monolithic projects in which the developers and managers have no contact with the end-users. People expect much more these days.
However, TMMM is useful for saying to does-not-compute conservative managers 'Look, we're not doing this, and it says in TMMM that we should.'.
It's people's failure to admit that they can't plan everything that gets them into trouble. If unexpected things happen in every project, then you should start planning for unexpected things in the next project. Managers who demand that everything is totally specified get to keep their jobs, because their managers think the programmers just didn't do what they were told. Managers who learn from experience and develop their projects incrementally get usable product out the door.
The H1-B is supposed to provide America with tech workers. So doesn't it strike anyone as odd that you need higher education to get an H1-B?
IMHO most of the best tech workers are self-taught, whereas the graduates are generally clueless.
Of course. You can assume that we know what hackers are. This is slashdot after all.
How stupid is this guy? He just pissed off a bunch of hackers - the people who are most able to do something about it.