This is hardly the situtation at my company. Frankly, marketing/sales/engineering all work well together to agree on 1) A feature set, 2) A date, and 3) Revenue targets based on 1 and 2 being met.
Wow, you picked a feature set AND a date? Who da man? Touch you!
Looks to me like the engineers are still doing all the work. Note that I'm not saying marketing and sales isn't hard work -- but within the context of planning a piece of software, relative to the engineering effort, they simply aren't. In your example the engineer is probably to blame for agreeing to the date, but how often are those engineers then badgered throughout development for new features? How often are existing features "redefined" during development? I could go on, but you get the point.
It's easiest to point fingers when you're sitting behind your keyboard at home with the finished product, as boy-wonder does in the original article. It's nearly as easy when you're at the start of the food-chain, cooking up an idea, with the target date far in the distance, and all the ugly details, testing, and other problems safely squirrled away on somebody else's part of the schedule.
One of the best signs of a truly experienced developer is when he gives time estimates that seem ridiculous. Sad but true. And don't give me this crap about comparisons with structural engineering or some other narrowly defined discipline. If you want me to rivet 500 steel I-beams, sure I can give you a target date. If you want 650,000 lines of working, flawlessly-interacting code to spring fully-formed from the gray goo in my head, it's going to be a little more difficult.
Re:Microsoft has planned this for quite awhile.
on
The Death of Folders?
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· Score: 1
What if a book is BOTH Sci-Fi AND Mystery? It can not be on both shelves at once
Only because libraries don't have symbolic links, shortcuts, URLs/URIs, or other meta-pointer concepts. Computers do.
And since I don't feel like searching for a more appropriate place for this comment, anyone who questions whether MS had the idea first needs to check out OLE property sheets from around 1995ish.
I think that the main way that they could offer value over the *IX world is by providing an lower-learning-curve-shell. Traditionally, this is how Microsoft has managed to offer value over Unix.
That was only valuable when the GUI wasn't the primary interface. Now only admins and power users (and then only to a degree) care about the CLI, and those people will be more than willing to figure out a more complex shell system.
Also, they benefitted from a STEEPER learning curve. Yes it's a common mistake, but a steep learning curve means you learn a lot for a small time investment. A low learning curve means it takes a long time to learn much. Plot it out and see. (Pet peeve? Me?)
One of the two Roomba owners I know has a long hair Persian cat, but neither of them have dogs, so I can't answer that. Based on them not having problems with a long hair cat, I'd venture to guess a short hair dog ought to be no problem.
I'm sorely tempted to buy an Ambrogio outright, but I know I've got to drop about $2500 on a 52" riding mower first. I'm just not sufficiently convinced that I'm willing to risk spending that much without a "manual" mower backup, and unfortunately at about the 2-acre point you're over the $2K mark no matter what you do.
(Heh, the sheep response was pretty funny though.)
I was a child once (obviously), and we were not permitted to behave so poorly. I therefore assume it is possible for parents to control their children, although I'll admit this appears to be a dying trend.
I'm not fond of the perimeter wire approach either, but the Ambrogio gets a whole bunch of other important things right. For my needs, two in particular are outstanding: it can operate fully autonomously (NONE of the others can do this that I have found), and it has the power needed to operate in a real-world environment. Those factors are more than enough to make up for the one-time need to bury a perimeter wire, in my book.
I do lament the fact that I have no electronics knowledge worth mentioning, however. I'd love to take a stab at the problem myself. Not that I have any reason to believe I could do it better, but it can't hurt to try, right? (Given that we're talking about robot lawn mowers, I recognize that's an opening for some obvious bad jokes.)
If you have it on DVD, I guarantee the artifacting of the compression process alone means you don't have anything close to "at least as good as the original". Try watching it on a large screen (say 92" or so) with a really good projector. You'll hurl.
While there is no concept of "pixels" in real film, the best picture quality is generally offered by the now mostly unused, very expensive fine-grained 70mm film format. For a project NASA undertook to film the earth from the ISS in 2002, they determined that the maximum effective resolution of this film format is about 4200 pixels per inch. That is well within the range of digital representation.
In my opinion, a more relevant and serious problem is the very low quality compression used by the DVD standard. Some of the banding and aliasing artifacts I've seen on DVD conversions makes certain movies almost unwatchable for me. We're a long way from having to worry about resolution limits in the conversion process just yet.
It is a conversationally convenient shortcut to avoid the longer, more precise explanation, "Han shot before Greedo tried to shoot Han."
But more relevantly, there is no reason to assume this enumeration must continue beyond the first instance. When you count to four, do you always insist that there must actually be a fifth object to count? If Greedo hadn't been instantly killed and someone said, "Han shot first, and Greedo shot second," what then? Why stop there? Who shot third, Chewie? Your assumption of succession is unwarranted.
Plus, of course, it makes a great bite-sized rallying cry for people who are annoyed with the namby-pamby decision Lucas made to change this bit of the movie, effectively turning our beloved hardboiled anti-hero into a wishy-washy cockroach.
I know you posted that mainly as a joke (and I thought it was fairly clever), but it did start me thinking about why that particular choice of words didn't bother me. Plus the mainframes are toast, so I'm having a particularly uneventful day at the office.
What's with this using "gay" as a synonym for "bad" or "stupid"?
Rather than pedantically pointing out that it's hardly new, I decided to look it up. Slow day. It would appear the meaning you prefer is actually the bastardisation by about 231 years.
"Ayto ['20th Century Words'] calls attention to the ambiguous use of the word in the 1868 song 'The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store,' by U.S. female impersonator Will S. Hays."
"The suggestion of immorality in the word can be traced back to 1637."
Original innovator? Ever heard of Terraserver? Um, yeah... Microsoft did it first. (And it didn't look like ass, unlike the new non-MS site currently living at terraserver.com...)
Actually he was probably best-known for his acting on Saturday Night Live. He was not divorced, but it was his wife who killed him. Shot him in his sleep, as I recall. Bitch.
I know you're joking, but in actuality mixed metal and wood structures are a Very Bad Thing. The metal tends to heat and deform so if it's structural, the whole building is shot. It also retains heat really well, so anything non-flammable has a better chance of either catching fire, or is harder to put out. Or at least, so my friend (who used to be a homebuilder himself) told me when I inquired about metal framing for my new house.
Of course, Sebastian Thrun's robots tend to be about the size of a large microwave oven (and those are the small ones)... not something you want lumbering around in your living room. Granted this may be something which can be overcome but even the early R&D Roombas were very small (there used to be pix on the iRobot site; not sure if they're still around).
I've been reading up on robotic lawn mowers lately -- these tend to cost at least ten times what a Roomba does -- and honestly they aren't any better, so I wouldn't hold my breath for those types of advances in a small affordable household vac bot.
The point is, you wasted a bunch of time telling us what a bunch of losers we are, but didn't expend even a moment's effort to make useful recommendations. Worse yet, you've responded several times to this criticism and have still failed to actually help anyone with this enormous storehouse of homecare wisdom you claim to posesses. Oh, we're supposed to ask questions first? Tell us mighty Oracle, how shall we vacuum our floors? How have we failed in our mission to achieve maximum household cleanliness? Dispense your wisdom. We grovel and beg for your enlightened forgiveness.
Have you actually seen one or are you speculating?
I know two people who have Roombas (a Red and an SE, I think). Their houses are quite clean, and they swear by them. For normal floor cleaning, they don't need to resort to any extra effort on their part. They do indeed replace quite a lot of labor.
Granted, this assumes your house isn't the sort of place with a lot of nooks and crannies where a device like this simply can't reach, but hopefully that's blatantly obvious and not the basis for your comment.
The Roomba DiscoverySE only runs for something like three hours on a charge, but can supposedly find its own charger. However, I've heard that they're noisy enough that you don't really want it running automatically -- you want to manually activate it before you leave the house for a few hours. They do not empty their own dustbins.
As for the lawnmower thing, I've been trying to locate a decent automated lawnmower for quite awhile now. I have several acres where I'm building my new house and I'm not looking forward to wasting time mowing. So far the only decent one out there for anything beyond a tiny residential postage-stamp lawn seems to be the Ambrogio... and it's both expensive and still not especially well-suited to multi-acre lawns. But to swerve back to something relevant to your post -- I have researched the matter extensively, and none of them bag their clippings, so none of them automatically dump the clippings. (There is one enormous, six-figure dollar-range mower -- I forget the name -- which may be an exception, but I doubt that was the sort of thing you were thinking of -- it's based on a large tractor like the kind you see mowing along highways).
Slashdot Mirror
This is hardly the situtation at my company. Frankly, marketing/sales/engineering all work well together to agree on 1) A feature set, 2) A date, and 3) Revenue targets based on 1 and 2 being met.
Wow, you picked a feature set AND a date? Who da man? Touch you!
Looks to me like the engineers are still doing all the work. Note that I'm not saying marketing and sales isn't hard work -- but within the context of planning a piece of software, relative to the engineering effort, they simply aren't. In your example the engineer is probably to blame for agreeing to the date, but how often are those engineers then badgered throughout development for new features? How often are existing features "redefined" during development? I could go on, but you get the point.
It's easiest to point fingers when you're sitting behind your keyboard at home with the finished product, as boy-wonder does in the original article. It's nearly as easy when you're at the start of the food-chain, cooking up an idea, with the target date far in the distance, and all the ugly details, testing, and other problems safely squirrled away on somebody else's part of the schedule.
One of the best signs of a truly experienced developer is when he gives time estimates that seem ridiculous. Sad but true. And don't give me this crap about comparisons with structural engineering or some other narrowly defined discipline. If you want me to rivet 500 steel I-beams, sure I can give you a target date. If you want 650,000 lines of working, flawlessly-interacting code to spring fully-formed from the gray goo in my head, it's going to be a little more difficult.
What if a book is BOTH Sci-Fi AND Mystery? It can not be on both shelves at once
Only because libraries don't have symbolic links, shortcuts, URLs/URIs, or other meta-pointer concepts. Computers do.
And since I don't feel like searching for a more appropriate place for this comment, anyone who questions whether MS had the idea first needs to check out OLE property sheets from around 1995ish.
I think that the main way that they could offer value over the *IX world is by providing an lower-learning-curve-shell. Traditionally, this is how Microsoft has managed to offer value over Unix.
That was only valuable when the GUI wasn't the primary interface. Now only admins and power users (and then only to a degree) care about the CLI, and those people will be more than willing to figure out a more complex shell system.
Also, they benefitted from a STEEPER learning curve. Yes it's a common mistake, but a steep learning curve means you learn a lot for a small time investment. A low learning curve means it takes a long time to learn much. Plot it out and see. (Pet peeve? Me?)
He probably hasn't unlocked that level yet...
One of the two Roomba owners I know has a long hair Persian cat, but neither of them have dogs, so I can't answer that. Based on them not having problems with a long hair cat, I'd venture to guess a short hair dog ought to be no problem.
I'm sorely tempted to buy an Ambrogio outright, but I know I've got to drop about $2500 on a 52" riding mower first. I'm just not sufficiently convinced that I'm willing to risk spending that much without a "manual" mower backup, and unfortunately at about the 2-acre point you're over the $2K mark no matter what you do.
(Heh, the sheep response was pretty funny though.)
You stupid monkey!
Bzzt.
History of TerraServer
I was a child once (obviously), and we were not permitted to behave so poorly. I therefore assume it is possible for parents to control their children, although I'll admit this appears to be a dying trend.
I'm not fond of the perimeter wire approach either, but the Ambrogio gets a whole bunch of other important things right. For my needs, two in particular are outstanding: it can operate fully autonomously (NONE of the others can do this that I have found), and it has the power needed to operate in a real-world environment. Those factors are more than enough to make up for the one-time need to bury a perimeter wire, in my book.
I do lament the fact that I have no electronics knowledge worth mentioning, however. I'd love to take a stab at the problem myself. Not that I have any reason to believe I could do it better, but it can't hurt to try, right? (Given that we're talking about robot lawn mowers, I recognize that's an opening for some obvious bad jokes.)
Yeah, the Python thing was definitely a nice spin.
Too bad I can't moderate now that I've posted. Oh well.
If you have it on DVD, I guarantee the artifacting of the compression process alone means you don't have anything close to "at least as good as the original". Try watching it on a large screen (say 92" or so) with a really good projector. You'll hurl.
While there is no concept of "pixels" in real film, the best picture quality is generally offered by the now mostly unused, very expensive fine-grained 70mm film format. For a project NASA undertook to film the earth from the ISS in 2002, they determined that the maximum effective resolution of this film format is about 4200 pixels per inch. That is well within the range of digital representation.
In my opinion, a more relevant and serious problem is the very low quality compression used by the DVD standard. Some of the banding and aliasing artifacts I've seen on DVD conversions makes certain movies almost unwatchable for me. We're a long way from having to worry about resolution limits in the conversion process just yet.
It is a conversationally convenient shortcut to avoid the longer, more precise explanation, "Han shot before Greedo tried to shoot Han."
But more relevantly, there is no reason to assume this enumeration must continue beyond the first instance. When you count to four, do you always insist that there must actually be a fifth object to count? If Greedo hadn't been instantly killed and someone said, "Han shot first, and Greedo shot second," what then? Why stop there? Who shot third, Chewie? Your assumption of succession is unwarranted.
Plus, of course, it makes a great bite-sized rallying cry for people who are annoyed with the namby-pamby decision Lucas made to change this bit of the movie, effectively turning our beloved hardboiled anti-hero into a wishy-washy cockroach.
I know you posted that mainly as a joke (and I thought it was fairly clever), but it did start me thinking about why that particular choice of words didn't bother me. Plus the mainframes are toast, so I'm having a particularly uneventful day at the office.
What's with this using "gay" as a synonym for "bad" or "stupid"?
Rather than pedantically pointing out that it's hardly new, I decided to look it up. Slow day. It would appear the meaning you prefer is actually the bastardisation by about 231 years.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gay
Two excerpts from the entry linked above:
"Ayto ['20th Century Words'] calls attention to the ambiguous use of the word in the 1868 song 'The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store,' by U.S. female impersonator Will S. Hays."
"The suggestion of immorality in the word can be traced back to 1637."
Original innovator? Ever heard of Terraserver? Um, yeah... Microsoft did it first.
(And it didn't look like ass, unlike the new non-MS site currently living at terraserver.com...)
Actually he was probably best-known for his acting on Saturday Night Live. He was not divorced, but it was his wife who killed him. Shot him in his sleep, as I recall. Bitch.
I know you're joking, but in actuality mixed metal and wood structures are a Very Bad Thing. The metal tends to heat and deform so if it's structural, the whole building is shot. It also retains heat really well, so anything non-flammable has a better chance of either catching fire, or is harder to put out. Or at least, so my friend (who used to be a homebuilder himself) told me when I inquired about metal framing for my new house.
Wow, loud AND noisy? That must suck twice.
Of course, Sebastian Thrun's robots tend to be about the size of a large microwave oven (and those are the small ones)... not something you want lumbering around in your living room. Granted this may be something which can be overcome but even the early R&D Roombas were very small (there used to be pix on the iRobot site; not sure if they're still around).
I've been reading up on robotic lawn mowers lately -- these tend to cost at least ten times what a Roomba does -- and honestly they aren't any better, so I wouldn't hold my breath for those types of advances in a small affordable household vac bot.
A quick check of the website shows that at least three of the problems he's listed have been addressed. Years ago, in fact.
The point is, you wasted a bunch of time telling us what a bunch of losers we are, but didn't expend even a moment's effort to make useful recommendations. Worse yet, you've responded several times to this criticism and have still failed to actually help anyone with this enormous storehouse of homecare wisdom you claim to posesses. Oh, we're supposed to ask questions first? Tell us mighty Oracle, how shall we vacuum our floors? How have we failed in our mission to achieve maximum household cleanliness? Dispense your wisdom. We grovel and beg for your enlightened forgiveness.
Your attempt to trick me into visiting a site called "ache wood" has failed.
Those suck. So does the iMow, the MowBot, and pretty much everything except the Ambrogio -- which unfortunately is extremely expensive.
Have you actually seen one or are you speculating?
I know two people who have Roombas (a Red and an SE, I think). Their houses are quite clean, and they swear by them. For normal floor cleaning, they don't need to resort to any extra effort on their part. They do indeed replace quite a lot of labor.
Granted, this assumes your house isn't the sort of place with a lot of nooks and crannies where a device like this simply can't reach, but hopefully that's blatantly obvious and not the basis for your comment.
The Roomba DiscoverySE only runs for something like three hours on a charge, but can supposedly find its own charger. However, I've heard that they're noisy enough that you don't really want it running automatically -- you want to manually activate it before you leave the house for a few hours. They do not empty their own dustbins.
As for the lawnmower thing, I've been trying to locate a decent automated lawnmower for quite awhile now. I have several acres where I'm building my new house and I'm not looking forward to wasting time mowing. So far the only decent one out there for anything beyond a tiny residential postage-stamp lawn seems to be the Ambrogio... and it's both expensive and still not especially well-suited to multi-acre lawns. But to swerve back to something relevant to your post -- I have researched the matter extensively, and none of them bag their clippings, so none of them automatically dump the clippings. (There is one enormous, six-figure dollar-range mower -- I forget the name -- which may be an exception, but I doubt that was the sort of thing you were thinking of -- it's based on a large tractor like the kind you see mowing along highways).