Unspoken but I bet part of the problem is that with the DHS and the TSA and their combined incompetence and evil, foreign workers from certain areas of the world are just having too much trouble coming into the country and staying in.
The best deals current run about 10g per US dollar, so that's 10 million in WoW gold. Enough to buy epic flight training for you and all your guildies and have enough left over to get that [Elegant Black Dress].
Yes, that's exactly it. Continuing to develop software with techniques and practices that made sense decades ago requires only the tools developed back then. Perhaps this style of development and the mindset that perpetuates it are factors in why the failure rate for software development projects remains high despite tremendous advances in the technology -- and the practices not adopted.
Distributed version control the way git does it (conceptually, not necessarily the implementation) is the best idea in SCM since concurrent development and optimistic merge conflict resolution on check-in.
Notice how, even years after better ideas superceded the lock-modify-unlock paradigm, many tools and shops still use exclusive-lock SCM.
It could be quite a while before you see anything like the way git does SCM in use in the majority of programming shops.
What's former FEMA director Mike Brown doing now? Among other things, he runs a Colorado-based disaster preparedness consultancy and is bad-mouthing his former bosses.
A little research on the part of the OP might have turned up the following fact, pretty well known to those of us who are familiar with the technique, from Wikipedia: Design by Contract(TM)" is a trademark of Eiffel Software, the designers of Eiffel.
So the short answer is, DbC is extremely common, but it can't be called that by anyone but Bertrand Meyer and his licensees.
On the other hand, from my experience writing good unit tests gives you most of the benefits of DbC and a whole bunch of other benefits that DbC doesn't give, so of the two, I'd rather spend my time writing unit tests.
COBOL has its dark corners. Aside from spaghetti code, there's things like MOVE CORRESPONDING, the ALTER verb (computed GOTO -- changes where the branch statement goes to at runtime). Not to mention potholes like lack of namespaces and various weirdnesses with modules in different source files, and you have a mess.
On the positive side, COBOL is one of the few widely-used languages that has exact fixed-precision decimal arithmetic on big numbers. This is handy for things like money.
Useful? Sure. Free of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation features like abstract data types, namespaces and closures? Pretty much, enough to make it simplistic. Clear? Not in this universe.
I laugh at what specs say in general. It's just words, not working code. Nice guide, but not an implementation. Granted, what the spec says is awful, but show me how it actually works in the implementation. Look at the Internet RFC standards-track process for example. No RFC gets elevated to the Internet Standard level until there is experience with working implementations. Even a *draft* standard needs two independent and interoperable implementations from different code bases.
And that's just for specs generally -- this one is from Microsoft. As experience with the.NET spec showed, they don't even necessarily complete that before they ship an implementation, so adherence to any spec is a non-starter.
I stand by my position -- asserting that what a specification says is the effect working implementations will have just speculation. I'm very much concerned about implications of the Vista DRM, but this article is not one I would include as a persuasive and useful piece of evidence for that concern.
A lot of assertions about what will happen, but specific examples and evidence are few and far between. Without harder facts that demonstrate the effects he claims, the author's claims are no more believable as those of "Intelligent Design".
Stop asking for resumes in Word format. I've known people that will take an html file and change the extension to.doc. Word will open it fine and give no hint that it is not a "real" Word format file.
If you're asking the question, you have already gone wrong. Seriously, if the organization divides the functions and has fiefdom wars going on like this, you're sunk and someone higher than you will have to fix things.
In places where I've worked where this divide exists, I just don't get into the dispute. I do my work and let the office politicians worry about the next step, unless I'm specifically asked for my input.
By 'do my work', I mean do it right. In one environment where IT did the deployments, I got a vote of confidence from everyone who said "we don't worry about deployments with you, your shit just works."
That's definitely the way I'd go, and Microsoft isn't innovating in this field, either. Pods, otherwise known as office cluster spaces, have been explored many times. I've done cubicles, bullpens, and even had my own office (not in a while) but the closest I've seen to pods was an arrangement of individual offices around a large common space. We didn't take advantage of the common space and the offices were too disconnected for adequate spontaneous collaboration, though.
My thoughts were along those lines, too. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the programmer is so inexperienced and/or has so little background in software that really did think his idea was new and original. Add to that the likelihood that having a patent portfolio is key to promotions in some companies. I've been around long enough I've seen self-proclaimed experts reveal 'new and unique' solutions to which I can immediately comment, "Oh, that's just *foo*, like they used to do in *dinosaur-age technology*".
After all, they only support Windows on this title and don't have plans to provide support to other OS platforms.
Wrong. World of Warcraft is completely supported on OS X, and in fact Blizzard shipped binaries for OS X on Intel shortly after said hardware was released.
That's well put. One way to approach it in discussions with management is something like this:
1) Real infosec breaches that have happened, and the cost (cite the loss of VA data, or other situation, and the costs that the companies have paid, including things like picking up the cost of credit reports for a year, etc)
2) Some real things we can do, right now, and what it has cost to do similar things at other companies.
3) The kinds of user-visible "annoyances" that increased the suggestions will trigger, and potential costs and experiences for the transition. Be sure to acknowledge that change is always going to result in some short-term friction and negative feedback, and give examples of how that's resolved itself in other cases.
After that, as the parent says, it's up to management to decide the cost/risk tolerance they are comfortable with, and if that differs from your own, you have a choice to make. Change jobs, accept their choice without reservation, accept their choice but continue a long-term dialog between your team and the business and resolve and respond to issues as they come up in ways that move towards your goals.
It's Tuesday. What a day to pick to run a WoW story with a link to the website. It always gets slammed by players on Tuesday as it is, looking for the updated PvP rankings and generally satisfying their addiction on the forums during the weekly downtime. On top of that, a slashdotting. Better hope Nef doesn't pay you a visit.
Imagine how great these new Apollo style capsules will be with 40 years of materials science improvements.
Except that it won't be 40 years better, just a little updated. NASA effectively scrapped all the design proposals that contractors submitted -- the ones based on 40 years of experience in space flight -- and "down-selected" to something of its own design, largely repeating Apollo.
Alas, politics is the fountain of compromise, and compromise is the enemy of engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Unspoken but I bet part of the problem is that with the DHS and the TSA and their combined incompetence and evil, foreign workers from certain areas of the world are just having too much trouble coming into the country and staying in.
The best deals current run about 10g per US dollar, so that's 10 million in WoW gold. Enough to buy epic flight training for you and all your guildies and have enough left over to get that [Elegant Black Dress].
Yes, that's exactly it. Continuing to develop software with techniques and practices that made sense decades ago requires only the tools developed back then. Perhaps this style of development and the mindset that perpetuates it are factors in why the failure rate for software development projects remains high despite tremendous advances in the technology -- and the practices not adopted.
Distributed version control the way git does it (conceptually, not necessarily the implementation) is the best idea in SCM since concurrent development and optimistic merge conflict resolution on check-in.
Notice how, even years after better ideas superceded the lock-modify-unlock paradigm, many tools and shops still use exclusive-lock SCM.
It could be quite a while before you see anything like the way git does SCM in use in the majority of programming shops.
You don't really understand how Gore-Tex works, do you?
It's what Bruce Schneier calls Movie Plot Security. A waste of money and effort, but someone is getting rich off it.
What's former FEMA director Mike Brown doing now? Among other things, he runs a Colorado-based disaster preparedness consultancy and is bad-mouthing his former bosses.
A little research on the part of the OP might have turned up the following fact, pretty well known to those of us who are familiar with the technique, from Wikipedia: Design by Contract(TM)" is a trademark of Eiffel Software, the designers of Eiffel.
So the short answer is, DbC is extremely common, but it can't be called that by anyone but Bertrand Meyer and his licensees.
On the other hand, from my experience writing good unit tests gives you most of the benefits of DbC and a whole bunch of other benefits that DbC doesn't give, so of the two, I'd rather spend my time writing unit tests.
COBOL has its dark corners. Aside from spaghetti code, there's things like MOVE CORRESPONDING, the ALTER verb (computed GOTO -- changes where the branch statement goes to at runtime). Not to mention potholes like lack of namespaces and various weirdnesses with modules in different source files, and you have a mess.
On the positive side, COBOL is one of the few widely-used languages that has exact fixed-precision decimal arithmetic on big numbers. This is handy for things like money.
Useful? Sure. Free of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation features like abstract data types, namespaces and closures? Pretty much, enough to make it simplistic. Clear? Not in this universe.
I laugh at what specs say in general. It's just words, not working code. Nice guide, but not an implementation. Granted, what the spec says is awful, but show me how it actually works in the implementation. Look at the Internet RFC standards-track process for example. No RFC gets elevated to the Internet Standard level until there is experience with working implementations. Even a *draft* standard needs two independent and interoperable implementations from different code bases.
.NET spec showed, they don't even necessarily complete that before they ship an implementation, so adherence to any spec is a non-starter.
And that's just for specs generally -- this one is from Microsoft. As experience with the
I stand by my position -- asserting that what a specification says is the effect working implementations will have just speculation. I'm very much concerned about implications of the Vista DRM, but this article is not one I would include as a persuasive and useful piece of evidence for that concern.
A lot of assertions about what will happen, but specific examples and evidence are few and far between. Without harder facts that demonstrate the effects he claims, the author's claims are no more believable as those of "Intelligent Design".
Stop asking for resumes in Word format. I've known people that will take an html file and change the extension to .doc. Word will open it fine and give no hint that it is not a "real" Word format file.
If you're asking the question, you have already gone wrong. Seriously, if the organization divides the functions and has fiefdom wars going on like this, you're sunk and someone higher than you will have to fix things.
In places where I've worked where this divide exists, I just don't get into the dispute. I do my work and let the office politicians worry about the next step, unless I'm specifically asked for my input.
By 'do my work', I mean do it right. In one environment where IT did the deployments, I got a vote of confidence from everyone who said "we don't worry about deployments with you, your shit just works."
That's definitely the way I'd go, and Microsoft isn't innovating in this field, either. Pods, otherwise known as office cluster spaces, have been explored many times. I've done cubicles, bullpens, and even had my own office (not in a while) but the closest I've seen to pods was an arrangement of individual offices around a large common space. We didn't take advantage of the common space and the offices were too disconnected for adequate spontaneous collaboration, though.
My thoughts were along those lines, too. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the programmer is so inexperienced and/or has so little background in software that really did think his idea was new and original. Add to that the likelihood that having a patent portfolio is key to promotions in some companies. I've been around long enough I've seen self-proclaimed experts reveal 'new and unique' solutions to which I can immediately comment, "Oh, that's just *foo*, like they used to do in *dinosaur-age technology*".
There's really a book titled, "1337 h4x0r h4ndb00k"?
IM IN UR COMMENTZ, STEALIN UR KARMAZ
Are you familiar with the phrase "flip the bozo bit"?
Wrong. World of Warcraft is completely supported on OS X, and in fact Blizzard shipped binaries for OS X on Intel shortly after said hardware was released.
What is it about "ultimate, do-everything" project sponsored by the government that sets off every alarm bell signaling imminent failure?
What's really galling is that he included David Heinemeier Hansson over Larry.
That's well put. One way to approach it in discussions with management is something like this:
1) Real infosec breaches that have happened, and the cost (cite the loss of VA data, or other situation, and the costs that the companies have paid, including things like picking up the cost of credit reports for a year, etc)
2) Some real things we can do, right now, and what it has cost to do similar things at other companies.
3) The kinds of user-visible "annoyances" that increased the suggestions will trigger, and potential costs and experiences for the transition. Be sure to acknowledge that change is always going to result in some short-term friction and negative feedback, and give examples of how that's resolved itself in other cases.
After that, as the parent says, it's up to management to decide the cost/risk tolerance they are comfortable with, and if that differs from your own, you have a choice to make. Change jobs, accept their choice without reservation, accept their choice but continue a long-term dialog between your team and the business and resolve and respond to issues as they come up in ways that move towards your goals.
It's Tuesday. What a day to pick to run a WoW story with a link to the website. It always gets slammed by players on Tuesday as it is, looking for the updated PvP rankings and generally satisfying their addiction on the forums during the weekly downtime. On top of that, a slashdotting. Better hope Nef doesn't pay you a visit.
Thinking Machines' CM-1 also came out of MIT. You think they could do better than re-use historic designations.
I don't have mod points, but this would get +5 DAYUM STRAIGHT.
Except that it won't be 40 years better, just a little updated. NASA effectively scrapped all the design proposals that contractors submitted -- the ones based on 40 years of experience in space flight -- and "down-selected" to something of its own design, largely repeating Apollo.
Indeed, and Encyclopedia Astronautica's article on the CEV effectively clobbers any impressions that the CEV, aka Orion, is any different than the shuttle when it comes to that.