The Shuffle is absolutely fantastic if you don't care what song you're listening to. If I'm going to spend any money it's going to be on a device that allows me to choose what songs to play. Otherwise I might as well listen to radio.
I'm not an absolutely huge music fan, and I actually like the less commercial radio stations on the air. (A local station here plays jazz and blues mixed in with NPR news updates.) But I hate the radio when I have people in the car (it doesn't set a nice mood), and I completely lack non-vinyl music to play in my apartment when guests come over. For those situations, it'd be great to have a music player.
So for me, as a possibly occasional iPod user, I disagree that iPods are "affordable". It's not worth $200+ for me to meet my occasional needs. And considering the absolutely huge profits Apple is making on iPods, there's a huge opportunity for a company to come along and offer a sub-$100 MP3 player with a decent computer user interface for syncing. Unfortunately I'm not aware one yet. So far I've heard that everyone but Apple has absolutely awful music syncing applications.
It doesn't violate my NDA (well, actually, my employment agreement) because it's public information. There's lots of stuff I know that I can't talk about, but if a web site's written a story about Google, or Google's issued a press release, I'm free to link people to those pages, dictate what they say, and provide my opinion so long as there's not forward looking statements or an appearance that I'm talking on behalf of Google. When I previously worked at Adobe I could do the same thing after I signed a blogging agreement.
There's major advantages to Google universal search over Yahoo! oneSearch Yahoo!'s Alpha (Beta) Search. First, file type suggestions (e.g. Video, News, Images) are suggested based on where valuable content exists. If you search for "Google", you get Web and News on the header since there's a lot of web content and news about Google. But you don't get "Video," since there aren't many valuable videos about Google on the current web. (You can still get video by clicking on the top header, though, but it's not a suggested search.)
On the contrary, with Alpha(Beta) search you always get the YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo! News links on the right sidebar. There's no feedback as to whether they're potentially interesting until you click on them and judge for yourself. Same thing goes with Yahoo! oneSearch -- it's just a bunch of data listed on one page, without much filtering by possibly relevant datatypes.
But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects, is the ability to play videos right in the search results! I haven't seen anything like it on other major search engines. And it's great that the videos aren't off to the side, or up at the top -- they're mixed in the normal results and ranked quite appropriately! Which is great for me because it shows me how relevant the video actually is, whereas videos on the right hand side of Alpha(Beta) may be relevant or may be irrelevant, but with no guidance given.
True, however dialog buttons are about 2 feet from my face, and missile targets are between 10,000 and 100,000 feet away. Coupled with the fact that an object's visual size increases or decreases respective to the square of the distance to the object, missile targets seem like they'd be notably smaller than a dialog button.
However, I do believe that eye tracking missile systems significantly zoom in on a target location. Given the periphery vision required to judge the location of the target based on context and surroundings, I'd guess that targets are probably the size of a dialog button. But I haven't used the systems myself, or recently seen a video on their use, so I can't really say.
Using your eyes as a mouse has been tried before, but I've heard from user researchers that the eye jiggles around too much to make a reliable pointing device. If you've ever been at a usability study where there's an eye tracking device, you know what I mean -- the eye tracking dot dances all over the text, and even when a user's focusing on a button the eye dances around the corners of the button, and to the nearby buttons, while the user processes the button's meaning and makes sure he's clicking the right thing. One thing I can't explain is how the military uses eye tracking to aim missiles -- it seems like that system would run into the same problems.
My basic feeling towards your idea is that it's absolutely great for disabled people, but personally I like being able to look at one thing but have my mouse hovering over something else.
If that were the case, how would you even make a post to Slashdot? Would it always be anonymous? Unfortunately, anonymous posting breaks all the anti-spam efforts of Slashdot, since you can't differentiate people with established accounts from malicious users. So let's say you log in, what are you logging into? You supply your username and password, but is Slashdot even allowed to look up your user ID? That's personal information. Or what about remembering a link to your blog in your signature? Even if the link isn't as obvious as mine, it can link someone back to your identity.
My point is that systems need to be able to remember personal information in order for the world to work. Reputation depends on personal information. Convenience of the web depends on it also. If you were required to provide an authorization code any time you wanted this convenience, the authorization code would become even more prevalent and cached as a social security number, and we'd be even worse off than we are now.
There is such a thing as programming creative flow. For instance, say you're coming up with a prototype for a new site. You just want to get in there, come up with a basic database that fits your needs, come up with a data API, and then write some dynamically generated HTML. If you've done it a thousand times before, it's just going through the motions and getting the code written. And if you're in this situation and you can't quite remember how to query for all rows within a specific month -- ya, it does slow you down a bit.
I completely disagree with the spam article's premise that it'd be faster for me to go find a card laying somewhere on my desk, or that my creative flow wouldn't be broken by STANDING UP AND GOING TO LOOK AT A WALL POSTER, rather than going to the absolutely excellent MySQL documentation site, where I can actually cut and paste from examples. There's hardly ever a question about MySQL syntax or SQL functionality I can't get from the MySQL documentation. The only places where the MySQL developer guide lacks is in performance guidelines, but I don't expect that the spammed product does a better job on a laminated card.
Did Matt Raymond sent the nastygram to Washington Watch because the Library of Congress is part of the legislative branch, and Washington Watch can be perceived as critical of the corruption in Congress? Or did someone on the THOMAS team get personally insulted that someone could develop a better system than theirs, and push to punish the creator of the superior system out of jealousy? The latter seems a bit extreme, which leads me to believe Congressmen are scared of people knowing how much the government is actually spending on pork projects that they're even willing to have the Library of Congress send threatening letters to people who share the Library's vision for open information.
The FAQ on the Novell/Microsoft deal is filled with business doublespeak, but one sentence of it strikes me: "Novell will continue to promote Linux as the premier platform for core infrastructure and application services." It strikes me because it is the only sentence stating what Novell will continue doing after the agreements. It's a feel good sentence, sounding like "oh, Novell's continuing Linux development," but really explicitly stating the parts of Linux it will continue on. Considering that Novell was actively developing the Linux Desktop, and Robert Love was "Chief Architect, Linux Desktop, at Novell", it's apparent that the Linux Desktop is one of the items Novell will NOT continue.
Why should anyone implement SMIL? Just 'cause some people at the W3C specified it? The world doesn't work by people writing specifications for someone else to implement. People should write specifications if they're going to implement them, like a development lead on a software development team.
If open source is going to have a Flash competitor, someone needs to come out of the woodwork and just implement one. And make it better than Flash. Silverlight is retarded -- it does absolutely no more than Flash, supports fewer platforms, and has absolutely 0% adoption so far. It's going to be just as successful as the last Microsoft product to attack Adobe's position, Metro, or whatever they called it in Office 2007.
Open source shouldn't follow Microsoft's mistakes -- do something new -- like make video more efficient/robust with downsampling, fastforward, immediate playback after you scroll forward. Or allow video editing in a browser without massive server involvement. Or allow vector graphics to be drawn over HTML rendered in Firefox. There's tons of incredibly innovative new approaches that Microsoft could never push through its beaurocracy, and Adobe couldn't implement due to its previous technical decisions. (Adobe/Macromedia's done a great job, but they do have past implementation decisions behind them, and new products can take different paths on trade-offs to come up with a new direction.)
I presume you're a bad manager because you quickly jump to use the word "fire" when there's many other things you should do first that you didn't mention. You shouldn't have an inclination to fire people for possibly being dedicated to their jobs, possibly trying to keep up, or possibly trying to look like hard workers. You should mentor them on how to be more productive and, as cliche as it is (though it seems very important to you), work/life balance. And you should mention doing these things when you talk about your managerial inner dialog instead of mentioning firing your reports, if you actually are a decent manager.
What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts.
That type of information should be available through the Freedom of Information Act, or the Massachusetts Public Records Law. In fact, even TFA says it's probably because Diebold machines spit out a different paper ballot for disabled people than for ordinary voters, which in a precinct that only has one or two disabled voters, removes the anonymity from voting.
From my perspective, it seems like Diebold is being a bully and trying to scare people from choosing competitors in the future.
either of which gives me reason and inclination to fire them.
You know, being a manager isn't just about firing people and screwing them on raises. Why don't you just talk to your employees and try to figure out why they're working so hard? Maybe they don't realize that it's considered a negative. Or are you trying to make a workplace that's adversarial so that employees don't want to work 40 hours anyway?
I disagree with your assertion that the recording industry as a whole is obsolete. Last night I was out at a club/bar and I ran into a local promoter. He's looking at bringing Dimitri from Paris to our city at a club. He's doing the legwork of finding a place big enough to support the price tag (he said it has to have 550 people or more), and he'll do all the promotion, including fliers and whatever else promoters do. Do you think Dimitri has the time to set up a venue and send out fliers himself? No, he's a DJ. He goes from city to city and just plays at different places. His time is better spent finding new records than working 18 hours a day.
Ergo, there will always be room for middle men in the recording industry. That said, I don't think record labels have much of a future.
Why is anyone even talking about the opinion of a CEO? Opera is an HTML company -- they make HTML browsers. Why would the CEO of Opera have anything objective to say about OOXML or OpenXML? He wouldn't, which is why his pushes his own company's core competency: HTML. While Opera doesn't have a huge market share, if the market for HTML viewers grows, his company's likely to take a piece of that pie. But it's completely bunk because HTML's a mess of different standards, with many people using HTML 4.01 Transitional to this day, and the idea of people adopting CSS3 and writing documents using HTML is pretty far fetched. But you would never hear that from the CEO of an HTML browser company.
Wouldn't companies like Barr Labs, whose entire business model is to develop drugs that have fallen out of patent protection, be interested in developing a drug that's not patent protected? It could be a major windfall for them since they're able to develop a new drug before existing brands can be established in the space. The only trick I see is that Barr Labs isn't as used to dealing with the Federal Drug Administration for drug approval, so it might take some hiring in key areas of the company. But these don't seem like insurmountable challenges given the potential market size and the business model match with existing out-of-patent drugs.
BTW, I don't think caching and DRM are compatible.
Apple iTunes Music Store uses Akamai as their distribution network, which caches copies of all of the iTMS tracks across the globe. Apple still manages to restrict their AAC files by using calls back to Apple to perform DRM management and restrict a user to five copies, or whatever their current policies are.
I hope the grandparent poster reads this too: If Akamai can cache iTMS's files, and Akamai is a large customer of Adobe's Flash Media Server, which can stream video to customers on demand, then Akamai can figure out how to cache Netflix movies. Maybe they'll use a different technology than Adobe FMS, but their network is completely capable of handling both DRM and streaming. And so should any other caching network.
There's no tricks to be played by an accountant. If what you've received is under $10k, you don't even have to declare anything on your taxes. And it's not like PayPal is filing a W2 on your behalf. Additionally, I've transferred well over $10k between accounts (including accounts that weren't in my name -- like mortgage escrow accounts) without being contacted by the feds. So I really don't think he has to worry about anything.
I don't think your predictions are accurate. Tax payers are entitled to receive gifts up to $10,000/year from any individuals tax free. Now maybe someone gave a single gift of more than $10,000, it's highly unlikely. What's more likely is that he received many small gifts from many different people, which would be completely tax free. Now once he receives the money, if he gives it in one lump sum to another taxed entity, it would be subject to gift tax. But hopefully he's smart enough to use other people as relays to dip below the $10,000 threshold, or the money is going directly to a non-profit.
I am not an accountant but I am aware of the $10,000 gift maximum and I thought I'd share its mechanics.
But Apple is right on I-280, which is a straight shot from the Mission District in San Francisco. If you have a typical engineering schedule you get get to and from Apple in about 35 minutes -- maybe even 30 -- presuming you drive the typically fast speeds through the coastal range. Of all the places in Silicon Valley, Apple's probably in probably one of the best locations for those who like city living. The next best would probably be HP, which has a couple offices a few exits sooner in Palo Alto.
No Computer Science student follows any engineering methods. "Software is easily changed," is the mantra that's been ingrained into people's minds.
What you describe is not how things are taught at a proper university. At the University of Virginia there was extensive discussion on applying engineering project planning to computer science, how the waterfall process works (including its derivatives) and how changes at different points along the waterfall affect the financial cost of the change. At Cornell, there's a computer science program in both the liberal arts and the engineering school. I'd hazard a guess that the engineering school program definitely discusses the finer details of computer science as an engineering discipline.
Finally, there are well publicized standards for how to run a rigorous software development project. There are many companies throughout the world that follow these standards, mostly consulting companies, but you're correct that these practices are not the norm. (Especially in the West.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Shuffle is absolutely fantastic if you don't care what song you're listening to. If I'm going to spend any money it's going to be on a device that allows me to choose what songs to play. Otherwise I might as well listen to radio.
I'm not an absolutely huge music fan, and I actually like the less commercial radio stations on the air. (A local station here plays jazz and blues mixed in with NPR news updates.) But I hate the radio when I have people in the car (it doesn't set a nice mood), and I completely lack non-vinyl music to play in my apartment when guests come over. For those situations, it'd be great to have a music player.
So for me, as a possibly occasional iPod user, I disagree that iPods are "affordable". It's not worth $200+ for me to meet my occasional needs. And considering the absolutely huge profits Apple is making on iPods, there's a huge opportunity for a company to come along and offer a sub-$100 MP3 player with a decent computer user interface for syncing. Unfortunately I'm not aware one yet. So far I've heard that everyone but Apple has absolutely awful music syncing applications.
It doesn't violate my NDA (well, actually, my employment agreement) because it's public information. There's lots of stuff I know that I can't talk about, but if a web site's written a story about Google, or Google's issued a press release, I'm free to link people to those pages, dictate what they say, and provide my opinion so long as there's not forward looking statements or an appearance that I'm talking on behalf of Google. When I previously worked at Adobe I could do the same thing after I signed a blogging agreement.
There's major advantages to Google universal search over Yahoo! oneSearch Yahoo!'s Alpha (Beta) Search. First, file type suggestions (e.g. Video, News, Images) are suggested based on where valuable content exists. If you search for "Google", you get Web and News on the header since there's a lot of web content and news about Google. But you don't get "Video," since there aren't many valuable videos about Google on the current web. (You can still get video by clicking on the top header, though, but it's not a suggested search.)
On the contrary, with Alpha(Beta) search you always get the YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo! News links on the right sidebar. There's no feedback as to whether they're potentially interesting until you click on them and judge for yourself. Same thing goes with Yahoo! oneSearch -- it's just a bunch of data listed on one page, without much filtering by possibly relevant datatypes.
But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects, is the ability to play videos right in the search results! I haven't seen anything like it on other major search engines. And it's great that the videos aren't off to the side, or up at the top -- they're mixed in the normal results and ranked quite appropriately! Which is great for me because it shows me how relevant the video actually is, whereas videos on the right hand side of Alpha(Beta) may be relevant or may be irrelevant, but with no guidance given.
True, however dialog buttons are about 2 feet from my face, and missile targets are between 10,000 and 100,000 feet away. Coupled with the fact that an object's visual size increases or decreases respective to the square of the distance to the object, missile targets seem like they'd be notably smaller than a dialog button.
However, I do believe that eye tracking missile systems significantly zoom in on a target location. Given the periphery vision required to judge the location of the target based on context and surroundings, I'd guess that targets are probably the size of a dialog button. But I haven't used the systems myself, or recently seen a video on their use, so I can't really say.
Using your eyes as a mouse has been tried before, but I've heard from user researchers that the eye jiggles around too much to make a reliable pointing device. If you've ever been at a usability study where there's an eye tracking device, you know what I mean -- the eye tracking dot dances all over the text, and even when a user's focusing on a button the eye dances around the corners of the button, and to the nearby buttons, while the user processes the button's meaning and makes sure he's clicking the right thing. One thing I can't explain is how the military uses eye tracking to aim missiles -- it seems like that system would run into the same problems.
My basic feeling towards your idea is that it's absolutely great for disabled people, but personally I like being able to look at one thing but have my mouse hovering over something else.
If that were the case, how would you even make a post to Slashdot? Would it always be anonymous? Unfortunately, anonymous posting breaks all the anti-spam efforts of Slashdot, since you can't differentiate people with established accounts from malicious users. So let's say you log in, what are you logging into? You supply your username and password, but is Slashdot even allowed to look up your user ID? That's personal information. Or what about remembering a link to your blog in your signature? Even if the link isn't as obvious as mine, it can link someone back to your identity.
My point is that systems need to be able to remember personal information in order for the world to work. Reputation depends on personal information. Convenience of the web depends on it also. If you were required to provide an authorization code any time you wanted this convenience, the authorization code would become even more prevalent and cached as a social security number, and we'd be even worse off than we are now.
There is such a thing as programming creative flow. For instance, say you're coming up with a prototype for a new site. You just want to get in there, come up with a basic database that fits your needs, come up with a data API, and then write some dynamically generated HTML. If you've done it a thousand times before, it's just going through the motions and getting the code written. And if you're in this situation and you can't quite remember how to query for all rows within a specific month -- ya, it does slow you down a bit.
I completely disagree with the spam article's premise that it'd be faster for me to go find a card laying somewhere on my desk, or that my creative flow wouldn't be broken by STANDING UP AND GOING TO LOOK AT A WALL POSTER, rather than going to the absolutely excellent MySQL documentation site, where I can actually cut and paste from examples. There's hardly ever a question about MySQL syntax or SQL functionality I can't get from the MySQL documentation. The only places where the MySQL developer guide lacks is in performance guidelines, but I don't expect that the spammed product does a better job on a laminated card.
Did Matt Raymond sent the nastygram to Washington Watch because the Library of Congress is part of the legislative branch, and Washington Watch can be perceived as critical of the corruption in Congress? Or did someone on the THOMAS team get personally insulted that someone could develop a better system than theirs, and push to punish the creator of the superior system out of jealousy? The latter seems a bit extreme, which leads me to believe Congressmen are scared of people knowing how much the government is actually spending on pork projects that they're even willing to have the Library of Congress send threatening letters to people who share the Library's vision for open information.
My feelings are quite the contrary.
The FAQ on the Novell/Microsoft deal is filled with business doublespeak, but one sentence of it strikes me: "Novell will continue to promote Linux as the premier platform for core infrastructure and application services." It strikes me because it is the only sentence stating what Novell will continue doing after the agreements. It's a feel good sentence, sounding like "oh, Novell's continuing Linux development," but really explicitly stating the parts of Linux it will continue on. Considering that Novell was actively developing the Linux Desktop, and Robert Love was "Chief Architect, Linux Desktop, at Novell", it's apparent that the Linux Desktop is one of the items Novell will NOT continue.
Absolutely ... and how are you supposed to vandalize it if it's burned onto a read-only media? Isn't that the whole point of Wikipedia?
Why should anyone implement SMIL? Just 'cause some people at the W3C specified it? The world doesn't work by people writing specifications for someone else to implement. People should write specifications if they're going to implement them, like a development lead on a software development team.
If open source is going to have a Flash competitor, someone needs to come out of the woodwork and just implement one. And make it better than Flash. Silverlight is retarded -- it does absolutely no more than Flash, supports fewer platforms, and has absolutely 0% adoption so far. It's going to be just as successful as the last Microsoft product to attack Adobe's position, Metro, or whatever they called it in Office 2007.
Open source shouldn't follow Microsoft's mistakes -- do something new -- like make video more efficient/robust with downsampling, fastforward, immediate playback after you scroll forward. Or allow video editing in a browser without massive server involvement. Or allow vector graphics to be drawn over HTML rendered in Firefox. There's tons of incredibly innovative new approaches that Microsoft could never push through its beaurocracy, and Adobe couldn't implement due to its previous technical decisions. (Adobe/Macromedia's done a great job, but they do have past implementation decisions behind them, and new products can take different paths on trade-offs to come up with a new direction.)
Why do you presume thats what I believe or do?
I presume you're a bad manager because you quickly jump to use the word "fire" when there's many other things you should do first that you didn't mention. You shouldn't have an inclination to fire people for possibly being dedicated to their jobs, possibly trying to keep up, or possibly trying to look like hard workers. You should mentor them on how to be more productive and, as cliche as it is (though it seems very important to you), work/life balance. And you should mention doing these things when you talk about your managerial inner dialog instead of mentioning firing your reports, if you actually are a decent manager.
What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts.
That type of information should be available through the Freedom of Information Act, or the Massachusetts Public Records Law. In fact, even TFA says it's probably because Diebold machines spit out a different paper ballot for disabled people than for ordinary voters, which in a precinct that only has one or two disabled voters, removes the anonymity from voting.
From my perspective, it seems like Diebold is being a bully and trying to scare people from choosing competitors in the future.
either of which gives me reason and inclination to fire them.
You know, being a manager isn't just about firing people and screwing them on raises. Why don't you just talk to your employees and try to figure out why they're working so hard? Maybe they don't realize that it's considered a negative. Or are you trying to make a workplace that's adversarial so that employees don't want to work 40 hours anyway?
I disagree with your assertion that the recording industry as a whole is obsolete. Last night I was out at a club/bar and I ran into a local promoter. He's looking at bringing Dimitri from Paris to our city at a club. He's doing the legwork of finding a place big enough to support the price tag (he said it has to have 550 people or more), and he'll do all the promotion, including fliers and whatever else promoters do. Do you think Dimitri has the time to set up a venue and send out fliers himself? No, he's a DJ. He goes from city to city and just plays at different places. His time is better spent finding new records than working 18 hours a day.
Ergo, there will always be room for middle men in the recording industry. That said, I don't think record labels have much of a future.
Why is anyone even talking about the opinion of a CEO? Opera is an HTML company -- they make HTML browsers. Why would the CEO of Opera have anything objective to say about OOXML or OpenXML? He wouldn't, which is why his pushes his own company's core competency: HTML. While Opera doesn't have a huge market share, if the market for HTML viewers grows, his company's likely to take a piece of that pie. But it's completely bunk because HTML's a mess of different standards, with many people using HTML 4.01 Transitional to this day, and the idea of people adopting CSS3 and writing documents using HTML is pretty far fetched. But you would never hear that from the CEO of an HTML browser company.
I wouldn't be attracted by a Dell even if I were a magnet near his new ground wire.
Less than 0.1% of sperm survive the passage through the vagina and fertilize an egg. Is the idea that they somehow aid reproduction rather silly?
Wouldn't companies like Barr Labs, whose entire business model is to develop drugs that have fallen out of patent protection, be interested in developing a drug that's not patent protected? It could be a major windfall for them since they're able to develop a new drug before existing brands can be established in the space. The only trick I see is that Barr Labs isn't as used to dealing with the Federal Drug Administration for drug approval, so it might take some hiring in key areas of the company. But these don't seem like insurmountable challenges given the potential market size and the business model match with existing out-of-patent drugs.
BTW, I don't think caching and DRM are compatible.
Apple iTunes Music Store uses Akamai as their distribution network, which caches copies of all of the iTMS tracks across the globe. Apple still manages to restrict their AAC files by using calls back to Apple to perform DRM management and restrict a user to five copies, or whatever their current policies are.
I hope the grandparent poster reads this too: If Akamai can cache iTMS's files, and Akamai is a large customer of Adobe's Flash Media Server, which can stream video to customers on demand, then Akamai can figure out how to cache Netflix movies. Maybe they'll use a different technology than Adobe FMS, but their network is completely capable of handling both DRM and streaming. And so should any other caching network.
There's no tricks to be played by an accountant. If what you've received is under $10k, you don't even have to declare anything on your taxes. And it's not like PayPal is filing a W2 on your behalf. Additionally, I've transferred well over $10k between accounts (including accounts that weren't in my name -- like mortgage escrow accounts) without being contacted by the feds. So I really don't think he has to worry about anything.
I don't think your predictions are accurate. Tax payers are entitled to receive gifts up to $10,000/year from any individuals tax free. Now maybe someone gave a single gift of more than $10,000, it's highly unlikely. What's more likely is that he received many small gifts from many different people, which would be completely tax free. Now once he receives the money, if he gives it in one lump sum to another taxed entity, it would be subject to gift tax. But hopefully he's smart enough to use other people as relays to dip below the $10,000 threshold, or the money is going directly to a non-profit.
I am not an accountant but I am aware of the $10,000 gift maximum and I thought I'd share its mechanics.
But Apple is right on I-280, which is a straight shot from the Mission District in San Francisco. If you have a typical engineering schedule you get get to and from Apple in about 35 minutes -- maybe even 30 -- presuming you drive the typically fast speeds through the coastal range. Of all the places in Silicon Valley, Apple's probably in probably one of the best locations for those who like city living. The next best would probably be HP, which has a couple offices a few exits sooner in Palo Alto.
No Computer Science student follows any engineering methods. "Software is easily changed," is the mantra that's been ingrained into people's minds.
What you describe is not how things are taught at a proper university. At the University of Virginia there was extensive discussion on applying engineering project planning to computer science, how the waterfall process works (including its derivatives) and how changes at different points along the waterfall affect the financial cost of the change. At Cornell, there's a computer science program in both the liberal arts and the engineering school. I'd hazard a guess that the engineering school program definitely discusses the finer details of computer science as an engineering discipline.
Finally, there are well publicized standards for how to run a rigorous software development project. There are many companies throughout the world that follow these standards, mostly consulting companies, but you're correct that these practices are not the norm. (Especially in the West.)