Re:"Wings" in politics
on
Republic.Com
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· Score: 2
You need two or more axes to even begin classifying political groupings. One axis is quite simply freedom vs state control, but you will find both "leftists" and "rightists" spread from end to end. Out past the Libertarians at the freedom end are the anarchists (leftists), and some survivalists. Out past Pat Buchanan at the statist end, you've got commies, nazis, the 18th century conservatives who thought the King should control everything, and religous fanatics who think their religion should be the state.
The other axis is harder to define, but it corresponds better to the "left" and "right". Jerry Pournelle once used a very strange word for it, but what he seems to have meant is belief in "social engineering", and this does correspond fairly well to the right/left division all the way back to the French Revolution. That is, right-wingers think a thief steals because he is bad, and he's going to jail and then to hell. Left-wingers think social conditions made him steal (like hunger, poverty, bad parents, or a lack of high-paying jobs for stupid and lazy people), and therefore sending the thief to jail is unfair, but if they can just change the social conditions, people will become good.
There's also a strong association between right-wing and "conservative" (reluctant to change). Partly that's because the conservatives were on the defensive for 200 years... But mainly, the left wingers are always going to want to change something to make people better by making the world better, and the right wing is going to worry that it will actually make the world worse.
Re:I learned everything I know from slashdot!
on
Republic.Com
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· Score: 1
It seems like there is one thing in there we all agree on: "Everyone is dumber than me."
bwahahaha
Re:What's wrong with this
on
Republic.Com
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· Score: 2
The basic trouble is that, like the debates in the last Presidential campaign, it assumes that there are just two viewpoints. There are lots of viewpoints. Florida had about a dozen different Presidential candidates on their ballot. And that's just the groups that worked hard enough at collecting petitions to qualify for a contest where they knew they didn't have any chance... Do you want to require every web site to carry links to everyone who wants to be linked? Or do you want to appoint a gov't commission to decide which are valid viewpoints? (Besides the @#$%^&* presidential debate commission, I mean...)
Mod down someone who liked the dancing paperclip? No, we'd be having too much fun ridiculing the luser...
On Slashdot, I have never noticed a post getting modded down due to different ideas if there was a reasonable argument behind it. Of course, posts that display a lamentable lack of basic knowledge or are just plain illogical are either modded down, or else modded up as "funny".
Note that liberals and academics in the softer disciplines seem to think there is no such thing as facts. Christian conservatives are just as bad, in a different way -- they know there is such a thing as the truth, but have trouble assimilating any facts discovered in the last 1500 years. But I'm an engineer. There's a real world out there, with one set of real truths. We don't and probably never will know them all, but ignore just one thing that we do know and that machine you are designing isn't going to work!
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
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· Score: 1
Do I have this right: Brits drink real beer (not the watered-down crap we have over here), you drink it by the pint, and your pint is 25% bigger? That's a lot of beer.;)
"A pints a pound the world around" is from RA Heinlein, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. (Dreadfully condescending childrens' book, but it had a very nice illustration of how to do a close-enough measurement and calculation in your head and without proper measuring instruments.) I figured it for an old English saying -- but it may not have originally referred to either of the pints or pounds that are currently in use. And it is not an exact relationship in US units unless the water has some salt or pollutants that raise the density a little; the British pint might come closer...
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
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· Score: 1
Could you tell me of any practical mass measurement method (for solids) that does not rely on weight comparison? Put a balance scale in a centrifuge. Or recalibrate a spring scale for use in a centrifuge at a given angular velocity and radius.
Seriously, there are flow gauges which truly measure the mass of liquid per second by measuring the force it exerts on a bent pipe.
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 2
how many ounces weight a gallon of water exactly? "A pint's a pound the world around." A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, a pint is one pound, or one ounce (liquid) water is 1 ounce (weight). Of course, this depends on the temperature and purity of the water -- but so does the 1 liter water masses 1 kg relation in the metric system.
But I agree that the English system is ridiculous. At least there is only one definition of kilogram or liter, as compared to several "gallons", two "pounds", two "ounce" weights... Even with the American standardization upon one particular set of English units, it's still a lot harder to work with than metric.
There are two exceptions: time and temperature. With time, we're still using the Babylonian system of base 12 & 60 -- and because we do have to divide up the day by other ways than 2 and 5, I don't think it can be changed for the better. (Also, redefining the second would invalidate whole books of physical constants). For temperature, now that we can precisely measure 0 K, scientists and engineers ought to be using the Kelvin scale -- most calculations using the Celsius scale require either subtracting two temperatures or adding an offset which actually converts to Kelvin. But the Fahrenheit scale has some real advantages for ordinary life: 0 to 100 F nicely defines the range from really cold to really hot for humans, and covers over 90% of temperate zone temperature measurements. The Celsius scale is rational only for chemical reactions in water (including cooking).
CDC was in bankruptcy in the early 70's. I guess they did use that big wad of cash from IBM's settlement to get back into business... I don't know the exact chronology of CDC and S/360 announcements -- but CDC was founded by former IBM engineers who couldn't get IBM to go into full production of the larger mainframes they thought the market needed. CDC built large mainframes, not supercomputers, originally. I think IBM announced the S/360 line about the time CDC accumulated enough orders to prove that IBM's current mainframe line (1400's?) was underpowered compared to what many customers wanted, and the most powerful S/360's would match CDC's offerings. But IBM had lots of trouble deliveriing S/360 software (see The Mythical Man-Month), and for several years many of their customers were using the largest S/360's to run emulators of the older systems -- which meant they didn't get the full power of the top-end system they'd paid for, but it did keep them from buying CDC's. Once the 360 OS was out, it turned out to be a very good line of mainframes, letting the same application run on a wide range from quite small to very big. (Previously, you had to re-write for every new model -- the S/360 ended that, thank god.) CDC couldn't compete with that, so they switched the emphasis of their line to supercomputers (where you CAN ask people to re-write their code for a particular machine). But that's a tiny market and maybe they had bled too much cash already.
The rights and wrongs are complex. IBM never saw themselves as going too far in competition. The "selling vaporware" aspect was definitely not intentional -- IBM spent a fortune hiring more programmers to speed up the project, but it didn't work. However, when it became clear that the S/360 OS was going to be very, very late, I don't think IBM scaled back marketing efforts or did much to let potential customers know that delivery of the promised power was going to take years after the hardware was delivered. It didn't hurt most IBM customers (they didn't really need all that power yet, but just wanted the prestige of the biggest computer on the block), but there were probably a few that really did need the power right then and let IBM salesmen talk them out of buying CDC's when CDC was the only company that could deliver it. On the other hand, CDC's history after the courts gave them a massive cash transfusion from IBM does suggest that they just weren't good at selling computers...
I've heard various versions of that ranging from the Staq copyright notice being discovered in the MS binaries, to MS merely reverse-engineering Staq. (If Staq had a valid patent, even independently written code could have been a violation.) I don't know the truth and I'm not going to spend time trying to find out what it is...
The US does have pure technical schools, which teach a narrow specialty and don't give a college degree. It has a few schools (MIT, Stanford, Prnceton, and maybe a dozen others) which are full of "bright people researching and learning", at least in the schools' best departments. But most US colleges mix the "researching and learning" with technical specialties. Worse, most cater to a large group of students that are neither interested in research nor in technical specialties, but just want to get a degree as a sort of "management union card."
What I see as the best result of MIT's OpenCourseWare is that they will go beyond setting a standard of a real education, to posting examples of it for all to see. Maybe some diploma mills will use it to give themselves a real curriculum for those students that actually want it.
The historical origin of the lecture was in pre-printing press universities. When all books were handwritten, if you wanted a copy of the text book, you'd write while the professor read it aloud. (Of course, next year a few rich students would buy the book from the previous class.) In some cases, the students would even band together and hire someone to read a text they needed to copy.:(
Why this same format is still in use at American universities may indeed be a case of herd behavior. Note that Oxford U in England uses a different format -- you study the books on your own, do some homework, then see a "tutor" to review it and get the next assignment.
Another issue is that, while the auditory channel is indeed low bandwidth, a large part of the population never does learn to assimilate facts from written materials. Oxford and MIT don't have to worry about that because they start with the best students. American diploma mills do need to take it into account -- since they seem to take it as their most important mission to give college degrees to the children of the rich whether they are educable or not. But the big problem may be that the public schools start out teaching by lecture in Kindergarten, and never require significant self-study no matter how advanced the students are. They ask them to do a little reading and homework, but everything is also covered aloud repeatedly, so anyone with a 3-digit IQ can blow off the reading assignments. My 7 year old grandson can read well enough to study on his own. (He's also such a behavior problem that home-schooling is probably the only way to handle him...) If the schools required third graders to do a little self-study or go to the remedial class, then increased the amount every year, I think most kids would learn to read better and ultimately learn more.
The article left me wondering just what it is that the DSL companies were selling. They weren't selling services to the customer, ISP's did that. They can't run DSL lines to the customer -- only the local phone companies may do that, and quite often they can't (either don't know how, or the lines are too long or too patched-up). And finally, the local telcos are selling ADSL and T1 lines plus ISP service in competition with the DSL company & it's ISP's. So how in heck do you make a profit acting as a middleman when the company you depend on most to deliver the service you sell is also a competitor for the whole chain?
There is one ray of hope for the stockholders (not the customers or employees). It is probably possible in many cases to convince a court that the telco deliberately fouled up delivery of DSL in order to sell much higher priced T1's, or fouled up third-party DSL the better to sell DSL directly. So they should be able to sue under antitrust laws. This is in the tradition of Staq and CDC, which were rescued from bankruptcy by lawsuits after losing their markets.
For those who were born yesterday: Staq had a program which compressed data on the fly, so you could store twice as much on a small hard drive, if you didn't mind losing all those CPU cycles compressing and decompressing. This was briefly useful when Microsoft released Windows 3.x and made most existing drives too small, but MS-DOS 6.x included a program which looked suspiciously like Staq. Next year, much bigger hard drives were cheap and nobody cared about compression -- but Staq's lawsuit for patent or copyright infringement ground on and eventually won a big settlement. CDC built large mainframes in competition with IBM in the 60's. When they started, IBM didn't have anything near as powerful as the CDCs. So IBM announced the System 360, then tried to build it. The 360 hardware might have been on schedule, but the OS was several years late -- but still, many IBM customers waited for it instead of buying CDC. CDC filed an antitrust suit, claiming that selling vaporware was unfair competition. Long before the suit was settled, the full 360 line was out and delivering the promised power, and CDC was bankrupt. But finally IBM paid them to settle the suit -- and allegedly also to erase a database of IBM misdeeds that cost $16M to compile, before the Feds got interested...
How I handle that: write a little bit of a program. Get it working so I can show it to them. Find out what they want to change, or what they want to add next. Repeat until they're satisfied or the big boss comes and tells them they're sucking up too much of my time.
I just never knew that was called "Extreme Programming"
"people are ALWAYS trying to isolate the coders from the customers." It isn't just coders, all engineers have that problem -- but if the team doing the work is isolated from the customer, the quality is going to suffer no matter what methodology is used. If you've adopted XP, at least you know that the customer has to be involved throughout the process, and that in itself is going to improve the quality.
Cost: The only problem with justifying the cost is that usually management has no idea how much time is spent on thinking out the big picture (as opposed to coding the little picture), and on tracking down the bugs. I think that working alone, for 1 hour coding I spend 1/2 to 1 hour planning and 1 to 2 hours debugging. In pair programming, much of the time one guy's thinking and the other's coding, so there isn't that much wasted time -- and fewer bugs means a lot less debugging time afterwards.
Persuading programmers that they can work with someone peering over their shoulder is a bigger problem...
Re:The end user doesn't want to deal with security
on
New flaws in 802.11B
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· Score: 2
True, true... For an analogy from a slightly different field: some professional car thieves can create a key to fit your car and drive away in 60 seconds, but most stolen cars had the keys left in them...
Do remember that if someone is willing to spend big $$$ on it, they can pick up everything passing through those twisted pairs from an antenna across the street. The CIA has done much tougher interception jobs. I think few, if any, industrial spies would have the capability now, but that sort of equipment will benefit from Moore's law also. So some day you are either going to have to encrypt everything, or run fiber to the NIC...
But wireless has an extra layer of insecurity -- not only can you spy on it easily, but you can also inject false data.
How does Microsoft manage to put all those bugs in it's products? I'd guess it's by not "insulting" their programmers by requiring them to follow good practices...
If you can actually keep the code reviews frequent and vigorous... Industry surveys consistently show that code reviews are grossly underutilized. Pair programming seems to be just an extreme way to enforce continuous code review. And it does sound like it would drive people nuts. I'd suggest pairing the programmers but letting them work alone, with the requirement that at 5PM each one can explain his partner's code.
Being a semi-amateur Access programmer myself, that does kind of hit a nerve. I had a couple of database design courses in college (way out of my EE major, but the Air Force was paying my way and insisted I stay around during the summer even though I'd already taken the only two EE courses offered in the summer...) And that puts me way out ahead of the other people dabbling with Access around here.
A strong suggestion for anyone designing an office suite in the future: only include support for database front ends. Leave the actual database storage and design to a programmer's package, so idiots don't get as much chance to play with it.
You skipped the age box, therefore it's zero, and that's less than thirteen. Of course, real artificial intelligence might be wondering how a newborn could type... 8-)
As far as I can tell, the Oz legislature keeps proposing these inane things, they draw all sorts of criticism, then mostly they die in committee. But the idiot notions die very quietly, rather than embarrass the idiot who proposed them.
By contrast, in the USA they append stuff like this to an unrelated bill at the end of the session, it gets passed by Senators and Congressmen who haven't even read it, and then six months later there's a public stink about it -- if we're lucky. Seems like the Ozzies might have it over us; even if their legislature often sounds like one of Molly Ivins commentaries on the (incredibly stupid, according to her anyway) Texas legislature, at least the Ozzies get a chance to comment on the BS before it gets voted on...
Slashdot Mirror
You need two or more axes to even begin classifying political groupings. One axis is quite simply freedom vs state control, but you will find both "leftists" and "rightists" spread from end to end. Out past the Libertarians at the freedom end are the anarchists (leftists), and some survivalists. Out past Pat Buchanan at the statist end, you've got commies, nazis, the 18th century conservatives who thought the King should control everything, and religous fanatics who think their religion should be the state.
The other axis is harder to define, but it corresponds better to the "left" and "right". Jerry Pournelle once used a very strange word for it, but what he seems to have meant is belief in "social engineering", and this does correspond fairly well to the right/left division all the way back to the French Revolution. That is, right-wingers think a thief steals because he is bad, and he's going to jail and then to hell. Left-wingers think social conditions made him steal (like hunger, poverty, bad parents, or a lack of high-paying jobs for stupid and lazy people), and therefore sending the thief to jail is unfair, but if they can just change the social conditions, people will become good.
There's also a strong association between right-wing and "conservative" (reluctant to change). Partly that's because the conservatives were on the defensive for 200 years... But mainly, the left wingers are always going to want to change something to make people better by making the world better, and the right wing is going to worry that it will actually make the world worse.
It seems like there is one thing in there we all agree on: "Everyone is dumber than me." bwahahaha
The basic trouble is that, like the debates in the last Presidential campaign, it assumes that there are just two viewpoints. There are lots of viewpoints. Florida had about a dozen different Presidential candidates on their ballot. And that's just the groups that worked hard enough at collecting petitions to qualify for a contest where they knew they didn't have any chance... Do you want to require every web site to carry links to everyone who wants to be linked? Or do you want to appoint a gov't commission to decide which are valid viewpoints? (Besides the @#$%^&* presidential debate commission, I mean...)
Mod down someone who liked the dancing paperclip? No, we'd be having too much fun ridiculing the luser...
On Slashdot, I have never noticed a post getting modded down due to different ideas if there was a reasonable argument behind it. Of course, posts that display a lamentable lack of basic knowledge or are just plain illogical are either modded down, or else modded up as "funny".
Note that liberals and academics in the softer disciplines seem to think there is no such thing as facts. Christian conservatives are just as bad, in a different way -- they know there is such a thing as the truth, but have trouble assimilating any facts discovered in the last 1500 years. But I'm an engineer. There's a real world out there, with one set of real truths. We don't and probably never will know them all, but ignore just one thing that we do know and that machine you are designing isn't going to work!
Do I have this right: Brits drink real beer (not the watered-down crap we have over here), you drink it by the pint, and your pint is 25% bigger? That's a lot of beer. ;)
"A pints a pound the world around" is from RA Heinlein, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. (Dreadfully condescending childrens' book, but it had a very nice illustration of how to do a close-enough measurement and calculation in your head and without proper measuring instruments.) I figured it for an old English saying -- but it may not have originally referred to either of the pints or pounds that are currently in use. And it is not an exact relationship in US units unless the water has some salt or pollutants that raise the density a little; the British pint might come closer...
Could you tell me of any practical mass measurement method (for solids) that does not rely on weight comparison? Put a balance scale in a centrifuge. Or recalibrate a spring scale for use in a centrifuge at a given angular velocity and radius.
Seriously, there are flow gauges which truly measure the mass of liquid per second by measuring the force it exerts on a bent pipe.
how many ounces weight a gallon of water exactly? "A pint's a pound the world around." A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, a pint is one pound, or one ounce (liquid) water is 1 ounce (weight). Of course, this depends on the temperature and purity of the water -- but so does the 1 liter water masses 1 kg relation in the metric system.
But I agree that the English system is ridiculous. At least there is only one definition of kilogram or liter, as compared to several "gallons", two "pounds", two "ounce" weights... Even with the American standardization upon one particular set of English units, it's still a lot harder to work with than metric.
There are two exceptions: time and temperature. With time, we're still using the Babylonian system of base 12 & 60 -- and because we do have to divide up the day by other ways than 2 and 5, I don't think it can be changed for the better. (Also, redefining the second would invalidate whole books of physical constants). For temperature, now that we can precisely measure 0 K, scientists and engineers ought to be using the Kelvin scale -- most calculations using the Celsius scale require either subtracting two temperatures or adding an offset which actually converts to Kelvin. But the Fahrenheit scale has some real advantages for ordinary life: 0 to 100 F nicely defines the range from really cold to really hot for humans, and covers over 90% of temperate zone temperature measurements. The Celsius scale is rational only for chemical reactions in water (including cooking).
CDC was in bankruptcy in the early 70's. I guess they did use that big wad of cash from IBM's settlement to get back into business... I don't know the exact chronology of CDC and S/360 announcements -- but CDC was founded by former IBM engineers who couldn't get IBM to go into full production of the larger mainframes they thought the market needed. CDC built large mainframes, not supercomputers, originally. I think IBM announced the S/360 line about the time CDC accumulated enough orders to prove that IBM's current mainframe line (1400's?) was underpowered compared to what many customers wanted, and the most powerful S/360's would match CDC's offerings. But IBM had lots of trouble deliveriing S/360 software (see The Mythical Man-Month), and for several years many of their customers were using the largest S/360's to run emulators of the older systems -- which meant they didn't get the full power of the top-end system they'd paid for, but it did keep them from buying CDC's. Once the 360 OS was out, it turned out to be a very good line of mainframes, letting the same application run on a wide range from quite small to very big. (Previously, you had to re-write for every new model -- the S/360 ended that, thank god.) CDC couldn't compete with that, so they switched the emphasis of their line to supercomputers (where you CAN ask people to re-write their code for a particular machine). But that's a tiny market and maybe they had bled too much cash already.
The rights and wrongs are complex. IBM never saw themselves as going too far in competition. The "selling vaporware" aspect was definitely not intentional -- IBM spent a fortune hiring more programmers to speed up the project, but it didn't work. However, when it became clear that the S/360 OS was going to be very, very late, I don't think IBM scaled back marketing efforts or did much to let potential customers know that delivery of the promised power was going to take years after the hardware was delivered. It didn't hurt most IBM customers (they didn't really need all that power yet, but just wanted the prestige of the biggest computer on the block), but there were probably a few that really did need the power right then and let IBM salesmen talk them out of buying CDC's when CDC was the only company that could deliver it. On the other hand, CDC's history after the courts gave them a massive cash transfusion from IBM does suggest that they just weren't good at selling computers...
I've heard various versions of that ranging from the Staq copyright notice being discovered in the MS binaries, to MS merely reverse-engineering Staq. (If Staq had a valid patent, even independently written code could have been a violation.) I don't know the truth and I'm not going to spend time trying to find out what it is...
The US does have pure technical schools, which teach a narrow specialty and don't give a college degree. It has a few schools (MIT, Stanford, Prnceton, and maybe a dozen others) which are full of "bright people researching and learning", at least in the schools' best departments. But most US colleges mix the "researching and learning" with technical specialties. Worse, most cater to a large group of students that are neither interested in research nor in technical specialties, but just want to get a degree as a sort of "management union card."
What I see as the best result of MIT's OpenCourseWare is that they will go beyond setting a standard of a real education, to posting examples of it for all to see. Maybe some diploma mills will use it to give themselves a real curriculum for those students that actually want it.
The historical origin of the lecture was in pre-printing press universities. When all books were handwritten, if you wanted a copy of the text book, you'd write while the professor read it aloud. (Of course, next year a few rich students would buy the book from the previous class.) In some cases, the students would even band together and hire someone to read a text they needed to copy. :(
Why this same format is still in use at American universities may indeed be a case of herd behavior. Note that Oxford U in England uses a different format -- you study the books on your own, do some homework, then see a "tutor" to review it and get the next assignment.
Another issue is that, while the auditory channel is indeed low bandwidth, a large part of the population never does learn to assimilate facts from written materials. Oxford and MIT don't have to worry about that because they start with the best students. American diploma mills do need to take it into account -- since they seem to take it as their most important mission to give college degrees to the children of the rich whether they are educable or not. But the big problem may be that the public schools start out teaching by lecture in Kindergarten, and never require significant self-study no matter how advanced the students are. They ask them to do a little reading and homework, but everything is also covered aloud repeatedly, so anyone with a 3-digit IQ can blow off the reading assignments. My 7 year old grandson can read well enough to study on his own. (He's also such a behavior problem that home-schooling is probably the only way to handle him...) If the schools required third graders to do a little self-study or go to the remedial class, then increased the amount every year, I think most kids would learn to read better and ultimately learn more.
The article left me wondering just what it is that the DSL companies were selling. They weren't selling services to the customer, ISP's did that. They can't run DSL lines to the customer -- only the local phone companies may do that, and quite often they can't (either don't know how, or the lines are too long or too patched-up). And finally, the local telcos are selling ADSL and T1 lines plus ISP service in competition with the DSL company & it's ISP's. So how in heck do you make a profit acting as a middleman when the company you depend on most to deliver the service you sell is also a competitor for the whole chain?
There is one ray of hope for the stockholders (not the customers or employees). It is probably possible in many cases to convince a court that the telco deliberately fouled up delivery of DSL in order to sell much higher priced T1's, or fouled up third-party DSL the better to sell DSL directly. So they should be able to sue under antitrust laws. This is in the tradition of Staq and CDC, which were rescued from bankruptcy by lawsuits after losing their markets.
For those who were born yesterday: Staq had a program which compressed data on the fly, so you could store twice as much on a small hard drive, if you didn't mind losing all those CPU cycles compressing and decompressing. This was briefly useful when Microsoft released Windows 3.x and made most existing drives too small, but MS-DOS 6.x included a program which looked suspiciously like Staq. Next year, much bigger hard drives were cheap and nobody cared about compression -- but Staq's lawsuit for patent or copyright infringement ground on and eventually won a big settlement. CDC built large mainframes in competition with IBM in the 60's. When they started, IBM didn't have anything near as powerful as the CDCs. So IBM announced the System 360, then tried to build it. The 360 hardware might have been on schedule, but the OS was several years late -- but still, many IBM customers waited for it instead of buying CDC. CDC filed an antitrust suit, claiming that selling vaporware was unfair competition. Long before the suit was settled, the full 360 line was out and delivering the promised power, and CDC was bankrupt. But finally IBM paid them to settle the suit -- and allegedly also to erase a database of IBM misdeeds that cost $16M to compile, before the Feds got interested...
people who can't even write a proper spec
How I handle that: write a little bit of a program. Get it working so I can show it to them. Find out what they want to change, or what they want to add next. Repeat until they're satisfied or the big boss comes and tells them they're sucking up too much of my time.
I just never knew that was called "Extreme Programming"
For one, they spend less time on Slashdot, I'm sure. Maybe that's why we all hate the idea! ;)
"people are ALWAYS trying to isolate the coders from the customers." It isn't just coders, all engineers have that problem -- but if the team doing the work is isolated from the customer, the quality is going to suffer no matter what methodology is used. If you've adopted XP, at least you know that the customer has to be involved throughout the process, and that in itself is going to improve the quality.
Cost: The only problem with justifying the cost is that usually management has no idea how much time is spent on thinking out the big picture (as opposed to coding the little picture), and on tracking down the bugs. I think that working alone, for 1 hour coding I spend 1/2 to 1 hour planning and 1 to 2 hours debugging. In pair programming, much of the time one guy's thinking and the other's coding, so there isn't that much wasted time -- and fewer bugs means a lot less debugging time afterwards.
Persuading programmers that they can work with someone peering over their shoulder is a bigger problem...
True, true... For an analogy from a slightly different field: some professional car thieves can create a key to fit your car and drive away in 60 seconds, but most stolen cars had the keys left in them...
Do remember that if someone is willing to spend big $$$ on it, they can pick up everything passing through those twisted pairs from an antenna across the street. The CIA has done much tougher interception jobs. I think few, if any, industrial spies would have the capability now, but that sort of equipment will benefit from Moore's law also. So some day you are either going to have to encrypt everything, or run fiber to the NIC...
But wireless has an extra layer of insecurity -- not only can you spy on it easily, but you can also inject false data.
How does Microsoft manage to put all those bugs in it's products? I'd guess it's by not "insulting" their programmers by requiring them to follow good practices...
If you can actually keep the code reviews frequent and vigorous... Industry surveys consistently show that code reviews are grossly underutilized. Pair programming seems to be just an extreme way to enforce continuous code review. And it does sound like it would drive people nuts. I'd suggest pairing the programmers but letting them work alone, with the requirement that at 5PM each one can explain his partner's code.
Being a semi-amateur Access programmer myself, that does kind of hit a nerve. I had a couple of database design courses in college (way out of my EE major, but the Air Force was paying my way and insisted I stay around during the summer even though I'd already taken the only two EE courses offered in the summer...) And that puts me way out ahead of the other people dabbling with Access around here.
A strong suggestion for anyone designing an office suite in the future: only include support for database front ends. Leave the actual database storage and design to a programmer's package, so idiots don't get as much chance to play with it.
You skipped the age box, therefore it's zero, and that's less than thirteen. Of course, real artificial intelligence might be wondering how a newborn could type... 8-)
Or is it that the gov't is still being run by the inbred descendants of the original wardens and large landowners?
(1) Gambling debts are in no way legally enforceable. (2) Enforce the extortion laws, so they don't do very well at collecting illegally.
As far as I can tell, the Oz legislature keeps proposing these inane things, they draw all sorts of criticism, then mostly they die in committee. But the idiot notions die very quietly, rather than embarrass the idiot who proposed them. By contrast, in the USA they append stuff like this to an unrelated bill at the end of the session, it gets passed by Senators and Congressmen who haven't even read it, and then six months later there's a public stink about it -- if we're lucky. Seems like the Ozzies might have it over us; even if their legislature often sounds like one of Molly Ivins commentaries on the (incredibly stupid, according to her anyway) Texas legislature, at least the Ozzies get a chance to comment on the BS before it gets voted on...