Yeah, it scares the crap outta me that the all-powerful E-Z Pass organization knows that I drive to work every day.
Well, it might really, if they start using the system to figure out that I'm driving those 30 miles in 24 minutes, whereas if I obeyed the speed limit it would be over 27 minutes.
Because programmers aren't trained in project management. If you aren't formally trained, the thinking goes, you don't have the qualifications to give an opinion on it.
I completely agree with your point, but flip it around - what would your reaction be if your project manager tried telling you how to organize your source code and how your development environment should be arranged?
I was told this weekend that this may no longer be valid. It's actually the ZIP code for the GE plant there (yes, the facility has its own ZIP code), but they may be phasing it out.
I don't have any extensions installed that an "average" user would be lost without - aside from TabBrowser Preferences, they're all development-related. My father uses Mozilla, with no extensions, and is fine (and he's an average user). He'd be fine with FireFox too, he just uses Moz because he likes his mail & web in one suite. My brother also runs Mozilla with no extensions, and has never wanted for anything.
What critical features are missing? I haven't found any yet.
In the default configuration, Opera was getting in my way. I found it cluttered, and I had a hard time finding some things. The few times I dip into Opera, I have to think hard about how I get a fresh tab to work with.
In the default configuration, on a fresh install, everything in Firefox/Mozilla was right where I needed it, I didn't have to do any configuration, and most importantly, the browser got out of my way and just let me run. I don't "need" any extensions personally, I could live without them; I have only 2 or 3 installed, just for convenience & things that an average user would never need in the first place.
Opera is the first browser I've used where the default toolbar/menu configuration was cumbersome. That's a sign. I shouldn't have to customize the hell out of it upon install just to make it usable.
If you still think it's cluttered, hit "F11" and surf with keyboard shortcuts in full-screen mode. Let's see anything Gecko-based do that!
Firefox seems to be doing it just fine right now. Mozilla seems to be doing it too.
I've tried Opera on a few occasions. Tried being the operative word. I just could not get past the UI. It was crazy. Too many things going on, too many menu items, things placed in completely non-obvious locations. I wanted to like Opera, I even switched to it for a couple months while I waited for Mozilla to stabilize in the pre-0.9 days, but the UI and some of the other features were deal breakers for me.
Asa summed up a lot of the feelings I had in a couple of his blog posts. Granted, he's likely to be somewhat Gecko-biased, but he raises very valid points.
I've had an experience with contractors on my projects very similar to what people are experiencing with outsourcing. The outsourced workers (or contractors, in my case) have little or no knowledge of the company's culture, the business, etc. (I do internal apps for my employer). So, they look at the spec and do exactly what's written. Some of these "specs" are little more than back of the napkin but they just take it and do what it says.
OTOH, I've worked with these folks for a couple years. I know the other applications they're familiar with. I have a passing knowledge of their business. So when something comes across my desk, I can walk over and say "ok, the paper says this, but I think there may be some confusion/miscommunication/misunderstanding" and we work out the problem together. My project manager does the same when she sees things that don't seem to match reality.
In short, my clients get what they actually wanted, not what they asked for.
I'd like to know that myself, but no one could ever give me an answer. I'm not in the group that managed that stuff - I'm just a lowly developer. Even though I had admin rights on my desktop, I wasn't able to change priority levels on this process.
Now that I think about it, it may have run at normal priority. Still interfered with everything. I asked the guys who set it up if they could knock the priority down a notch but they never did.
We used to have a full-system AV scan on every desktop Win2000 machine on our network. Typically, it was started around noon, but those of us who worked through lunch were severely impacted. Basically, your system became unusable because the AV scan ran at above-normal priority, and couldn't be stopped by the user.
Scans usually took over an hour. Over an hour where your system was barely usable. Every day.
The "police looking for a drug dealer" thing happened to a former co-worker of mine.
At 2 AM. With the house surrounded, and police ready to sneak into the house. Fortunately, something else had woken her up, and while she was walking down the hall she heard the cops or saw the flashlights.
Took an hour to explain to the police that the dealer no longer lived there, moved around the corner, they left but didn't entirely believe my co-worker or her husband that they weren't the subjects of the search.
Your MA experience is just good old fashioned profiling.
Lists like this don't always get realistic results. The list "organizer" may go to the CIO or CEO and ask to speak with a few people - of course, they will only direct the magazine to someone who's stopping just short of giving that executive a BJ right in the boardroom. Or maybe a survey will go out, but only to a select few employees, maybe even reviewed by management (think they won't watch for the.DOC attachment as it goes through the mail servers?) before actually going out. Sometimes, the people in the trenches won't even know the "review" is going on and won't be able to say their piece, or might be afraid to answer honestly.
I tend to take these lists with a large grain of salt. My employer was listed on a "100 best" list for several years running, but I didn't see half the goodness one would expect from #11 on a list like that.
That's pretty much what I saw (except the GE involvement; it was just us and RPI 10 years ago). Nevermind that managing things the way they were managed made both winning and learning nigh on impossible, but the teacher didn't seem to care much about that, at least in my experience. If you were in 7 years ago, you were probably on the team when my brother was; from what I had heard, things were better then than during my time.
I'm not sure we even made the animations, and as I implied above, even watching was difficult for me due to location & timing.
I was involved with FIRST in high school, a couple years after the whole thing starter. At the time, we were sponsored/partnered with a Renssealer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The year I participated, my classmates had very little involvement - it was really our teacher's, and the RPI class's project. The bulk of the work was done at RPI, a 20-minute drive away. Many of us didn't have our own transportation, had after school jobs, etc. so it was very hard for the high school students to be active participants. Those of us who could drive to RPI to participate on weeknights were handicapped by NY's laws regarding people under 18 driving after 9 PM. Most of our design ideas were thrown out or not even considered, and most of us felt no actual "ownership" of the project. On the few parts of the project where we were given the ability to participate (the "marketing" animation for example), we hardly knew enough about the project to do a good job on them. We'd go down to RPI on a Saturday or whenever and see things going in a completely different direction from where they were 4 days previous.
When I got to the competition in Nashua, NH, there were several projects which were clearly done by the corporate sponsors, then handed to the kids to drive. Looking back on it 10 years later, I'm more disappointed with the experience I had than pleased.
If you purchased Quicken in Germany, made for the German market and brought it home to the US, would you expect it to do all those US-centric things? That's what it sounds like you're asking here. As the grandparent poster pointed out, most of the GNUCash developers live in Germany, so they have neither the information, need, or access to develop the things needed to make it a viable US product (for you, anyway).
GNUCash does work for lots of people, even in the US. But not everyone. But guess what - Quicken doesn't work for everyone, nor MS Money. So keep on using what you're using, if it works for you.
You mean you seriously went away, defined a UI and everything - WITHOUT INVOLVING THE CUSTOMER?!?
Nope, if you read the whole thread, you'll see that the first design meetings were driven by the customer, attended by the customer, but the customers were not the end-users (and the people in the meeting barely paid lip service to having real users represented). They "designed" a system that was the exact opposite of usability, UI conventions, and common sense.
Job isn't done yet. Late May is supposedly our finish date. But I have had to "train" a few people to explain to them that things are working in the way they requested, apparently it's not intuitive or they just plain forgot.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientific progress goes "BOINC"
Yeah, it scares the crap outta me that the all-powerful E-Z Pass organization knows that I drive to work every day.
Well, it might really, if they start using the system to figure out that I'm driving those 30 miles in 24 minutes, whereas if I obeyed the speed limit it would be over 27 minutes.
So have I. And I had the same reaction that I'm sure you had. Which is why I posted that.
I completely agree with your point, but flip it around - what would your reaction be if your project manager tried telling you how to organize your source code and how your development environment should be arranged?
But did he learn anything?
I was told this weekend that this may no longer be valid. It's actually the ZIP code for the GE plant there (yes, the facility has its own ZIP code), but they may be phasing it out.
Innocent until proven guilty disappeared a few years ago. Due process is up next.
Zap Branigan instead?
What critical features are missing? I haven't found any yet.
In the default configuration, Opera was getting in my way. I found it cluttered, and I had a hard time finding some things. The few times I dip into Opera, I have to think hard about how I get a fresh tab to work with.
In the default configuration, on a fresh install, everything in Firefox/Mozilla was right where I needed it, I didn't have to do any configuration, and most importantly, the browser got out of my way and just let me run. I don't "need" any extensions personally, I could live without them; I have only 2 or 3 installed, just for convenience & things that an average user would never need in the first place.
Asa summed up a lot of the feelings I had in a couple of his blog posts. Granted, he's likely to be somewhat Gecko-biased, but he raises very valid points.
He can edit while he's idle, maybe on a train or a plane. Thus, he could have the story pretty close to done before getting home.
I've had an experience with contractors on my projects very similar to what people are experiencing with outsourcing. The outsourced workers (or contractors, in my case) have little or no knowledge of the company's culture, the business, etc. (I do internal apps for my employer). So, they look at the spec and do exactly what's written. Some of these "specs" are little more than back of the napkin but they just take it and do what it says.
OTOH, I've worked with these folks for a couple years. I know the other applications they're familiar with. I have a passing knowledge of their business. So when something comes across my desk, I can walk over and say "ok, the paper says this, but I think there may be some confusion/miscommunication/misunderstanding" and we work out the problem together. My project manager does the same when she sees things that don't seem to match reality.
In short, my clients get what they actually wanted, not what they asked for.
Now that I think about it, it may have run at normal priority. Still interfered with everything. I asked the guys who set it up if they could knock the priority down a notch but they never did.
1 cable per appliance is a hell of a lot better than a half-dozen.
Scans usually took over an hour. Over an hour where your system was barely usable. Every day.
At 2 AM. With the house surrounded, and police ready to sneak into the house. Fortunately, something else had woken her up, and while she was walking down the hall she heard the cops or saw the flashlights.
Took an hour to explain to the police that the dealer no longer lived there, moved around the corner, they left but didn't entirely believe my co-worker or her husband that they weren't the subjects of the search.
Your MA experience is just good old fashioned profiling.
I tend to take these lists with a large grain of salt. My employer was listed on a "100 best" list for several years running, but I didn't see half the goodness one would expect from #11 on a list like that.
I'm not sure we even made the animations, and as I implied above, even watching was difficult for me due to location & timing.
When I got to the competition in Nashua, NH, there were several projects which were clearly done by the corporate sponsors, then handed to the kids to drive. Looking back on it 10 years later, I'm more disappointed with the experience I had than pleased.
We do where I come from too. The word is "wife."
GNUCash does work for lots of people, even in the US. But not everyone. But guess what - Quicken doesn't work for everyone, nor MS Money. So keep on using what you're using, if it works for you.
Job isn't done yet. Late May is supposedly our finish date. But I have had to "train" a few people to explain to them that things are working in the way they requested, apparently it's not intuitive or they just plain forgot.