What I want to know is what kind of problems have Slashdot readers been faced with because of different environments being used for different phase of their projects, and how have they been overcome?
If possible, convince management that your Test/Staging env needs to be beefy enough to function as an "emergency backup system" and GET the marginally equivalent hardware.
On the side, if your production DB server is a cluster and your development DB server is not then where is your DBA going to practice all those hideously complex operations like failover and zero downtime promotes? If that is your situation then that is asking for major trouble.
1) You give up more than %50 of your company for the money. 2) The VC'ers put their own "crack team" of managers in place (themselves!) and pay (themselves) ourageous salaries. 3) A few months later, they have sucked all of their own capital back out. 4) The offer to buy the rest of the company for a pittance, which you accept, because you have no money and no control.
My friends and family know the proper currency to ply me with - BEER. They have to have at least a six on ice for me, and they better be willing to fetch them for me while I work my magic.
Also, if it is a big job (have them describe their problem over the phone) I have them bring just the box to my place and I hook it up to a spare monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. That way I can peck at it here and there while I'm working on something else more important.
GIMP is an OSS shining star, and a marvel to behold, but GIMP still has a way to go to be much more than a toy for those who do professional grade graphics. Every year I try it out to see how it has advanced, and every year I find myself going back to PhotoShop because some feature I require is not present yet. Maybe next year.
When the sun came up that morning, the sight of the cost in human life the Iraqis paid for that assault, and burning vehicles, was something I will never forget," Marcone says. "It was a gruesome sight. You look down the road that led to Baghdad, for a mile, mile and a half, you couldn't walk without stepping on a body part."
Yet just eight U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously, during the bridge fighting. Whereas U.S. tanks could withstand a direct hit from Iraqi shells, Iraqi vehicles would "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, Gordon puts things bluntly: "If the army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would have been killed." At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't information armor, but armor itself.
These last two paragraphs were the best part of the entire article. Obviously the initial poster didn't have the ass to make it through the whole thing.
The US military budget is insane, but I read stuff like this and I'm glad for 'our boys' sake that they have the best equipment and training.
All of the alchoholics in my family are fully functional. So much so that you wouldn't know they were alchoholics if you didn't see them with beer in hand at 8:00 am. Sharp as tacks, not a slur or a drunken moment, just smiles and good cheer all day long.
And no, I don't endorse it or practice it. And I'm not voting for Bush. My point is that you can't judge the man for that one picture because it is all about the individual's biology.
The video has some shocking content. The worst was a clip of a kid getting his fingers chopped off. That almost made me ralph with the hangover I have this morning.
I'm a Republican because I think government is taxing everyone too much, particularly the middle class, and that the size of government should be shrinking, not expanding.
I want minimum regulation. More regulation means more bureaucracy, more taxes, more paper, more energy consumption and a less hospitable business environment with fewer jobs.
I believe in protecting the environment, but not by churning out thousands of new regulations. Simplify, localize.
I want the best goods at the lowest price. If that means that someone gets paid 10 cents an hour in a foreign county, hey I'm glad I provided them a job.
I think perfect equality means merit and hard work should get you a job and a seat in a good university and race should not be a factor.
I believe the purpose of government is to do only that which private individuals cannot do for themselves: fund schools, roads, police, the military, the courts. Coincidentally, this is precisely what the Founders had proposed in the Constitution.
I believe vicious killers, kidnappers, pedophiles and rapists should be either executed or be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole after just one strike and not three.
I believe the foundation of our economic strength is the balance of the free-market system with a healthy respect for labor and fair collective bargaining.
Now, that being said, I disagree with many of the current administration's policies. I think that Dubya and his crew are in office for big business' purposes and nobody elses.
And yet ijits everywhere say that without a hint of sarcasm, and turn right around and cheer for Kerry. Mind you, you never specifically say you like him, so you might be an exception, but what about the rest of those that think Kerry will be any better?
I am a Republican, and I will be voting for Kerry. Most of my Republican friends and family feel the same. None of us like Kerry, but we figure that you could put a block of wood into office and it would do a better (or at least a more honest) job than Dubya.
What stuns me is that Bush still maintains a lead in the poles. I guess that proves that anecdotes (like mine above) are just about meaningless stacked up against "the herd". I'm doing my part and nagging the hell out of my few idjit friends who are staunch Bush supporters.
Yeah, I was interested too until I read about the entry fee. "Our objective today is to recognize and support new, independent creators in all aspects of moving image including filmmakers, screenwriters and now, electronic game developers." Replace "support" with "get supported by". I think I will pass this year, thanks but no thanks. I'm surprised there wasn't something in the small print out the games becoming property of SlamDance.
I thought the trailer looked fun, but I did note that the powers of the family members were too similar to the Fantastic 4:
Dad == strong/invincible == Thing Mom == elastic == Mr. Fantastic Daughter == invisible force fields == Invisible Girl (after she got her force field powers) Son == speedster != Human Torch
I have an 85 pound black lab mix, and he's great with my two daughters. Many neighbors and friends have concurred (from their own experience) that labs are generally great with kids.
My lab is scary as hell when he runs up to and barks at strangers - big basso barks. I know this because they tell me so. And yet he's never bitten anyone, even the UPS deliverymen dogs love to hate.
My lab always wants to make friends with other dogs. He backed down from a "Taco-bell" dog who was being agressive. But he's no wimp when it comes to our safety. He faced down a pair of 150 pound Rottweiler's when they came after me up the street, kept them at bay until I could get into the house.
All that for $50 at the dog pound, probably the best $50 I ever spent.
Speeding tickets only cost $50 because that is what you hand them in cash to avoid them giving you a ticket. You - "Oh, where did this fifty come from? Did you drop this, officer?". Cop - "You can go about your business, move along."
Surf the net for indie game houses. A lot of them post 'how to be an indie developer' pages, and a lot of indie developers outsource their art and sound development to russia, romania, india, pakistan, vietnam, guatemala, etc.
Post a project on rentacoder or guru and the 'low end' artists from those countries will come to you to bid on your project in droves. Pennies on the dollar, my friend.
Post anything that reflects bad upon an open source project and kiss your karma BYE BYE.
None of this was a troll. Nor flamebait. This was just MY EXPERIENCES that I thought were relevant to the FUCKING TOPIC which discusses, amongst other things, why IE still has such market share?!?!
How many games did you try? Just one or two? The wife has been through every game on that site, some of which brought Mozilla (and then the OS) to its knees.
A flight attendant invited me to a party a few years back, and it was mostly pilots and flight attendants at the party. All getting sloshed, of course - pilot and flight attendants DRINK. Since most airline pilots started their careers in the military I got to spend a lot of the evening listening to 'war' stories.
One pilot I talked to used to copilot one of the two big planes (747s?) that they send up that can launch all the missiles remotely in case NORAD gets knocked out. He told a story about how they would run all these drills where they would scramble, get in the air immediately, and then get transmitted codes from the ground. They would unscramble the codes as "do not launch" and then return to base without transmitting anything to the silos, drill over.
According to him, on one of these sorties received the "launch" code in error. So they asked the ground to repeat the transmission. Which they did, and it was the same. So they took a chance and broke protocol and radio'd the ground and told them that they had just sent the "launch" codes, and did they really want them to transmit this along to the silos? Of course the ground told them to cease and return to base.
I know a girl took a week long trip around area 51 for her honeymoon. Weird, huh? Stayed at all the tourist trap hotels around there. At one point, she and her husband had a picnic in "Area 51" about 100 yards into the desert past a "no trespassing" sign. 20 minutes into their picnic a jeep pulled up and a guy told them to get the hell out of there. *Something* is there, something worth having the surveillance and personnel to protect to that level.
Yes, his comments on the over-complexity of games were spot on. The real-life game of football hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. Why are computer football games today absolutely impossible to play?
I dread it when I'm playing PS2 with my buddies and somebody pulls out a new game that I havn't played yet. It means I'm going to spend the next hour getting whooped as I try to figure out which of the 18 buttons and levers on the controller does what.
I also don't get as much pleasure playing online first-person shooters. It doesn't matter that I am a great melee'r because I havn't figured out the exact manner to shoot X at Y and jump at Z at the exact moment to catapult myself impossibly across the map.
These guys are also going to have major patent infringement problems with NeoMedia Technologies, same way the Digital Convergance (Cue Cat) did. Unless, of course, they already have a licensing agreement.
These are the things that *good* experienced developers know and do because they've learned the best practices over a long time. The overhead is minimal, and the payback is huge in easily maintainable apps with excellent uptimes. Other developers who don't understand the WHY cannot be browbeaten into doing the WHAT because they just dont believe. They just do it half-assed or not at all. The crap gets thrown over the wall and burns up in production and the whole team looks bad.
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is what kind of problems have Slashdot readers been faced with because of different environments being used for different phase of their projects, and how have they been overcome?
If possible, convince management that your Test/Staging env needs to be beefy enough to function as an "emergency backup system" and GET the marginally equivalent hardware.
On the side, if your production DB server is a cluster and your development DB server is not then where is your DBA going to practice all those hideously complex operations like failover and zero downtime promotes? If that is your situation then that is asking for major trouble.
EA is moving to Orlando soon. Orlando is already a major tech center, soon to be a major gaming center.
Beware of the following pattern:
1) You give up more than %50 of your company for the money.
2) The VC'ers put their own "crack team" of managers in place (themselves!) and pay (themselves) ourageous salaries.
3) A few months later, they have sucked all of their own capital back out.
4) The offer to buy the rest of the company for a pittance, which you accept, because you have no money and no control.
My friends and family know the proper currency to ply me with - BEER. They have to have at least a six on ice for me, and they better be willing to fetch them for me while I work my magic.
Also, if it is a big job (have them describe their problem over the phone) I have them bring just the box to my place and I hook it up to a spare monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. That way I can peck at it here and there while I'm working on something else more important.
GIMP is an OSS shining star, and a marvel to behold, but GIMP still has a way to go to be much more than a toy for those who do professional grade graphics. Every year I try it out to see how it has advanced, and every year I find myself going back to PhotoShop because some feature I require is not present yet. Maybe next year.
When the sun came up that morning, the sight of the cost in human life the Iraqis paid for that assault, and burning vehicles, was something I will never forget," Marcone says. "It was a gruesome sight. You look down the road that led to Baghdad, for a mile, mile and a half, you couldn't walk without stepping on a body part."
Yet just eight U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously, during the bridge fighting. Whereas U.S. tanks could withstand a direct hit from Iraqi shells, Iraqi vehicles would "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, Gordon puts things bluntly: "If the army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would have been killed." At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't information armor, but armor itself.
These last two paragraphs were the best part of the entire article. Obviously the initial poster didn't have the ass to make it through the whole thing.
The US military budget is insane, but I read stuff like this and I'm glad for 'our boys' sake that they have the best equipment and training.
1) The constant presence of drink in hand.
2) Skipping meals, and eating very little of the meals that arent skipped.
I'll see your anecdote, and raise you mine:
All of the alchoholics in my family are fully functional. So much so that you wouldn't know they were alchoholics if you didn't see them with beer in hand at 8:00 am. Sharp as tacks, not a slur or a drunken moment, just smiles and good cheer all day long.
And no, I don't endorse it or practice it. And I'm not voting for Bush. My point is that you can't judge the man for that one picture because it is all about the individual's biology.
The video has some shocking content. The worst was a clip of a kid getting his fingers chopped off. That almost made me ralph with the hangover I have this morning.
I am a registered Republican.
I'm a Republican because I think government is taxing everyone too much, particularly the middle class, and that the size of government should be shrinking, not expanding.
I want minimum regulation. More regulation means more bureaucracy, more taxes, more paper, more energy consumption and a less hospitable business environment with fewer jobs.
I believe in protecting the environment, but not by churning out thousands of new regulations. Simplify, localize.
I want the best goods at the lowest price. If that means that someone gets paid 10 cents an hour in a foreign county, hey I'm glad I provided them a job.
I think perfect equality means merit and hard work should get you a job and a seat in a good university and race should not be a factor.
I believe the purpose of government is to do only that which private individuals cannot do for themselves: fund schools, roads, police, the military, the courts. Coincidentally, this is precisely what the Founders had proposed in the Constitution.
I believe vicious killers, kidnappers, pedophiles and rapists should be either executed or be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole after just one strike and not three.
I believe the foundation of our economic strength is the balance of the free-market system with a healthy respect for labor and fair collective bargaining.
Now, that being said, I disagree with many of the current administration's policies. I think that Dubya and his crew are in office for big business' purposes and nobody elses.
I was happy with Ronald Reagan and Poppa Bush.
And yet ijits everywhere say that without a hint of sarcasm, and turn right around and cheer for Kerry. Mind you, you never specifically say you like him, so you might be an exception, but what about the rest of those that think Kerry will be any better?
I am a Republican, and I will be voting for Kerry. Most of my Republican friends and family feel the same. None of us like Kerry, but we figure that you could put a block of wood into office and it would do a better (or at least a more honest) job than Dubya.
What stuns me is that Bush still maintains a lead in the poles. I guess that proves that anecdotes (like mine above) are just about meaningless stacked up against "the herd". I'm doing my part and nagging the hell out of my few idjit friends who are staunch Bush supporters.
Yeah, I was interested too until I read about the entry fee. "Our objective today is to recognize and support new, independent creators in all aspects of moving image including filmmakers, screenwriters and now, electronic game developers." Replace "support" with "get supported by". I think I will pass this year, thanks but no thanks. I'm surprised there wasn't something in the small print out the games becoming property of SlamDance.
I thought the trailer looked fun, but I did note that the powers of the family members were too similar to the Fantastic 4:
Dad == strong/invincible == Thing
Mom == elastic == Mr. Fantastic
Daughter == invisible force fields == Invisible Girl (after she got her force field powers)
Son == speedster != Human Torch
Ok, but 3 out of four, come on!
My anecdotal plug for labradors:
I have an 85 pound black lab mix, and he's great with my two daughters. Many neighbors and friends have concurred (from their own experience) that labs are generally great with kids.
My lab is scary as hell when he runs up to and barks at strangers - big basso barks. I know this because they tell me so. And yet he's never bitten anyone, even the UPS deliverymen dogs love to hate.
My lab always wants to make friends with other dogs. He backed down from a "Taco-bell" dog who was being agressive. But he's no wimp when it comes to our safety. He faced down a pair of 150 pound Rottweiler's when they came after me up the street, kept them at bay until I could get into the house.
All that for $50 at the dog pound, probably the best $50 I ever spent.
Speeding tickets only cost $50 because that is what you hand them in cash to avoid them giving you a ticket. You - "Oh, where did this fifty come from? Did you drop this, officer?". Cop - "You can go about your business, move along."
Surf the net for indie game houses. A lot of them post 'how to be an indie developer' pages, and a lot of indie developers outsource their art and sound development to russia, romania, india, pakistan, vietnam, guatemala, etc.
Post a project on rentacoder or guru and the 'low end' artists from those countries will come to you to bid on your project in droves. Pennies on the dollar, my friend.
Note to self:
Post anything that reflects bad upon an open source project and kiss your karma BYE BYE.
None of this was a troll. Nor flamebait. This was just MY EXPERIENCES that I thought were relevant to the FUCKING TOPIC which discusses, amongst other things, why IE still has such market share?!?!
LOL buncha bunks. Mod this down too, lemmings.
How many games did you try? Just one or two? The wife has been through every game on that site, some of which brought Mozilla (and then the OS) to its knees.
Until Mozilla is "backwards" compatable enough with IE to run games from the likes pogo.com then I have to stick with IE on Windoze.
Gotta keep the wife and kids happy and numb, or else they might figure out I spend all that hard earned money at the strip clubs.
A flight attendant invited me to a party a few years back, and it was mostly pilots and flight attendants at the party. All getting sloshed, of course - pilot and flight attendants DRINK. Since most airline pilots started their careers in the military I got to spend a lot of the evening listening to 'war' stories.
One pilot I talked to used to copilot one of the two big planes (747s?) that they send up that can launch all the missiles remotely in case NORAD gets knocked out. He told a story about how they would run all these drills where they would scramble, get in the air immediately, and then get transmitted codes from the ground. They would unscramble the codes as "do not launch" and then return to base without transmitting anything to the silos, drill over.
According to him, on one of these sorties received the "launch" code in error. So they asked the ground to repeat the transmission. Which they did, and it was the same. So they took a chance and broke protocol and radio'd the ground and told them that they had just sent the "launch" codes, and did they really want them to transmit this along to the silos? Of course the ground told them to cease and return to base.
Scary truth or dunken bravado? Who knows.
I know a girl took a week long trip around area 51 for her honeymoon. Weird, huh? Stayed at all the tourist trap hotels around there. At one point, she and her husband had a picnic in "Area 51" about 100 yards into the desert past a "no trespassing" sign. 20 minutes into their picnic a jeep pulled up and a guy told them to get the hell out of there. *Something* is there, something worth having the surveillance and personnel to protect to that level.
Yes, his comments on the over-complexity of games were spot on. The real-life game of football hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. Why are computer football games today absolutely impossible to play?
I dread it when I'm playing PS2 with my buddies and somebody pulls out a new game that I havn't played yet. It means I'm going to spend the next hour getting whooped as I try to figure out which of the 18 buttons and levers on the controller does what.
I also don't get as much pleasure playing online first-person shooters. It doesn't matter that I am a great melee'r because I havn't figured out the exact manner to shoot X at Y and jump at Z at the exact moment to catapult myself impossibly across the map.
The MegWay can only carry one person at a time, and so can their website.
These guys are also going to have major patent infringement problems with NeoMedia Technologies, same way the Digital Convergance (Cue Cat) did. Unless, of course, they already have a licensing agreement.
...are best practices. No just WHAT to do, but WHY you do it.
In no special order:
1) Requirement gathering (with biz SIGN OFF!)
2) Error handling!
3) Trace/debug modes
4) Param validation
5) Source Control
6) Bug tracking
7) Configuration management
8) Release management
9) Multiple environments (dev,test,stage,prod)
These are the things that *good* experienced developers know and do because they've learned the best practices over a long time. The overhead is minimal, and the payback is huge in easily maintainable apps with excellent uptimes. Other developers who don't understand the WHY cannot be browbeaten into doing the WHAT because they just dont believe. They just do it half-assed or not at all. The crap gets thrown over the wall and burns up in production and the whole team looks bad.
Do I sound bitter?