We've had to justify creating auto test suites where I work.
Over the last decade our product has grown from one code-base into three strands, each with separate customer foci, and we've had a healthy amount of staff turnover so that there are still brilliant, creative and skilled people working on it but some of the original knowledge has left us.
We found* numbers to justify that automated testing of existing features, applied later will protect against regressive changes. Even where there are complicated features which were not modular in design, or which lack good interfaces, the tests have saved us massive amounts of time testing by hand. The real win is hidden under something we didn't realise until later: creating the tests have forced us to really document what the features are and how they work**, sometimes from a unit-test level, sometimes at the interface level and sometimes in a top-to-bottom vertical slice. Once you have a record of what your software does, in a computer which is skilled at remembering exactly and repeating exactly what some former staff member told it a couple of years ago, you have a decent reason to be confident that your bug fixes won't cause more harm than good.
*: ballpark figures / educated guesses / made up. **: We favour working code over comprehensive documentation, until our agile team is reassigned to other projects or leaves the company.
I'll bite: as long as the anyone in computer science writes software which is licensed with a disclaimer of warranty attached (even GPLv3 has "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND") then they're failed engineers. Real engineers have insurance for liability and warrant that their work is suitable for its intended use. Sure, there are support contracts available but when the majority of the computing workforce produce software that's 'good enough' and it's sold, installed and used without someone meeting their duty to care for the impact of their work, then they deserve the label 'failed engineer'.
I put an SSD in as system disk on my desktop,and it made me feel like a 12-year old boy again (guessing parent poster was once girl). When I was 12 we had a 25MHz ARM-powered desktop (Acorn A5000) which had its system software in ROM and which remains my definition of snappy. Windows 7 with 4GB of RAM and 4 2.5GHz AMD Phenom cores is nearly as snappy; Kubuntu 10.10 on the same hardware was dead on.
But to reply to TFA: no, I want spinning storage for the terabytes of archives my life will create, and the availabiliy of another speed/capacity tier of data cache will mean I'm always going to be sold the option of having both.
I wish someone had suggested I and the team I'm in work in a flexible and agile way a long time ago. I'm a recent convert, so excuse my fanaticism.
The manifesto recommends: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
in light of the following principles:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
It's the programming environment that works for dotNET developers (developers! developers!): Visual Studio plus ReSharper and the best of the platform flows from your fingers. Sadly, it's not the same as Vim or EMACS, where the best of the platform flows from your muscle memory...
QA in open source projects is volunteer work. You have the wireless cards and know that they don't work; Ubuntu's given you the tools to alter your configs and rebuild the kernel drivers into a working setup. What are the bug numbers where your patches are attached?
Canonical *don't* use their resources to employ QA team-members, nor to buy one of every piece of common hardware. Get your hands dirty and stop trolling.
My eyes hurt too if the brightness in the screen is above 15%, and most of the time the brightness is at 80+%. My HTC Hero adjusts the brightness automatically, and does a good job of being legible in sunlight and darkness.
Stallman's peace prize is already done -- but release manager rms refuses to make a formal release until his personal changes to the award are complete.
The important thing about play is the engagement of your imagination. That's why I look back at terrible 8-bit graphics and sound and remember them being so much more than what's on screen. Visuals and sounds that are too good -- or however immersive the motion control interface -- can't make up for not engaging my imagination.
unless all of your IP is kept as a trade secret such that third party disclosure completely fucks you
I think that would be my primary concern with having an outside party maintain my data storage services: trade secret is the term for IP you haven't yet valued and protected with copyrights, patents, design patents and trade marks. But breach of contract is a powerful thing, and having contracts which mandate notification and quantification of data breach within a specified timescale and which have an increasing penalty for late reporting, these contracts would be a core part of my risk management in this situation.
The thing that swings me in AMD's direction each time I put together a computer is that the MB and AMD CPU together are comparable for performance at a lower price point than the Intel chip and its MB.
There's a huge difference is culture with Linux distributions in contrast to Windows. Linux software is largely available under the GPL or other free licence. Debian package and sign 18,000+ packages and offer a central download service. That allows you to get software you want from a trustworthy central location without risk of it compromising your system. However, there are guides to hardening Debian out there on the internet (Google suggests http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/), and there are willing helpers available on IRC.
At a minimum, I would split your / (root),/boot and/home mounts to different partitions and only allow nodev (no device) and noexec (no executables) in your/home partition. Then don't be afraid to blast away the root and boot partitions as often as you want. Create a script run daily using Cron to list your installed packages (something as simple as 'dpkg -l >/home/user/package-list.txt') so that a reinstall puts the base system onto your machine, you connect for signed, Debian-created updates and then you can reinstall everything else you had (using something like 'aptitude install/home/user/package-list.txt').
Even better, if you go the VM route, you can easily save your Windows VM image to an external disk every week or so, and if/when it gets infected, just recover from a backup and be up and running again in minutes instead of days!
Even better, just DD the drive image every week to a backup. Why bother with virtualisation?
DiskPart is the Windows tool, found in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management in XP. It's comparable to PartEd and GPartEd on Linux, but I prefer the GPartEd live CD because of its hardware drivers (now using Kernel 2.6.30) and rsync and dd for imaging.
You'll get modded down and I'll join the long line of people looking to correct you. Sure, it's Microsoft's choice to bundle software with their OS. But the issue raised is that Microsoft used their monopoly to skew the fair market for web browsers and gave incentives to people who didn't include other software in the PC's they built and sold. So, as part of the billions of Euros in fines, Microsoft have to make sure that there is a level playing field for web browsers in the OS they sell in Europe.
anybody who currently uses Internet Explorer... is not going to change no matter how many browsers are included in the OS
And all the better for market share, improved quality of computer software and the world-wide web if people do have to choose a browser and can gain experience of what it's like without Microsoft's broken standards.
[P]erhaps you'd leave the right ctrl key where it is and have an asymmetric modifier key layout?
Given that I use the keyboad asymmetrically anyway (my right hand is on my mouse), I don't see the problem. Perhaps alignment and symmetry are far more important to you than to me?
I read a BBC blog that the present HD video equipment they have can only do single-plane focused images, and that good depth of field is difficult because of sensor noise and sensitivity. So to have a good set of lenses and a highly sensitive low-noise frame (and good sound recording) at the price of a 5DmkII would be a tremendous asset.
Hey, thanks for your discussion. I'm not going to change my stance that the distinction made by the 2^(10n) system from the 10^(3n) system is a useful one for removing confusion, and you're going to keep insisting that SI interpretation of MB (etc.) is that it's the 2^(10n) value. I'll keep saying that what you think is a bullshit argument creates confusion and needs to be explicitly worked around, and you'll keep saying that there is no ambiguity and confusion, and I'll keep saying that your citation of the court case indicates that there is grounds for confusion and that I, as a member of the public, suffer from the confusion. Then you say "you don't have to be confused, because my way is the way it always has been." Well, thanks.
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We've had to justify creating auto test suites where I work.
Over the last decade our product has grown from one code-base into three strands, each with separate customer foci, and we've had a healthy amount of staff turnover so that there are still brilliant, creative and skilled people working on it but some of the original knowledge has left us.
We found* numbers to justify that automated testing of existing features, applied later will protect against regressive changes. Even where there are complicated features which were not modular in design, or which lack good interfaces, the tests have saved us massive amounts of time testing by hand. The real win is hidden under something we didn't realise until later: creating the tests have forced us to really document what the features are and how they work**, sometimes from a unit-test level, sometimes at the interface level and sometimes in a top-to-bottom vertical slice. Once you have a record of what your software does, in a computer which is skilled at remembering exactly and repeating exactly what some former staff member told it a couple of years ago, you have a decent reason to be confident that your bug fixes won't cause more harm than good.
*: ballpark figures / educated guesses / made up.
**: We favour working code over comprehensive documentation, until our agile team is reassigned to other projects or leaves the company.
I'll bite: as long as the anyone in computer science writes software which is licensed with a disclaimer of warranty attached (even GPLv3 has "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND") then they're failed engineers. Real engineers have insurance for liability and warrant that their work is suitable for its intended use. Sure, there are support contracts available but when the majority of the computing workforce produce software that's 'good enough' and it's sold, installed and used without someone meeting their duty to care for the impact of their work, then they deserve the label 'failed engineer'.
I put an SSD in as system disk on my desktop,and it made me feel like a 12-year old boy again (guessing parent poster was once girl). When I was 12 we had a 25MHz ARM-powered desktop (Acorn A5000) which had its system software in ROM and which remains my definition of snappy. Windows 7 with 4GB of RAM and 4 2.5GHz AMD Phenom cores is nearly as snappy; Kubuntu 10.10 on the same hardware was dead on.
But to reply to TFA: no, I want spinning storage for the terabytes of archives my life will create, and the availabiliy of another speed/capacity tier of data cache will mean I'm always going to be sold the option of having both.
I wish someone had suggested I and the team I'm in work in a flexible and agile way a long time ago. I'm a recent convert, so excuse my fanaticism.
The manifesto recommends:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
in light of the following principles:
It's the programming environment that works for dotNET developers (developers! developers!): Visual Studio plus ReSharper and the best of the platform flows from your fingers. Sadly, it's not the same as Vim or EMACS, where the best of the platform flows from your muscle memory...
QA in open source projects is volunteer work. You have the wireless cards and know that they don't work; Ubuntu's given you the tools to alter your configs and rebuild the kernel drivers into a working setup. What are the bug numbers where your patches are attached?
Canonical *don't* use their resources to employ QA team-members, nor to buy one of every piece of common hardware. Get your hands dirty and stop trolling.
Good call, but bested by a Penrose Tiling.
Ugh. Seven important symbols: equality and the plus operator are kinda... neat.
My eyes hurt too if the brightness in the screen is above 15%, and most of the time the brightness is at 80+%. My HTC Hero adjusts the brightness automatically, and does a good job of being legible in sunlight and darkness.
The edit button's in the Revolution4 edition of Slashcode, coming when CowboyNeil stops writing fanfic.
Stallman's peace prize is already done -- but release manager rms refuses to make a formal release until his personal changes to the award are complete.
The important thing about play is the engagement of your imagination. That's why I look back at terrible 8-bit graphics and sound and remember them being so much more than what's on screen. Visuals and sounds that are too good -- or however immersive the motion control interface -- can't make up for not engaging my imagination.
I think that would be my primary concern with having an outside party maintain my data storage services: trade secret is the term for IP you haven't yet valued and protected with copyrights, patents, design patents and trade marks. But breach of contract is a powerful thing, and having contracts which mandate notification and quantification of data breach within a specified timescale and which have an increasing penalty for late reporting, these contracts would be a core part of my risk management in this situation.
The thing that swings me in AMD's direction each time I put together a computer is that the MB and AMD CPU together are comparable for performance at a lower price point than the Intel chip and its MB.
There's a huge difference is culture with Linux distributions in contrast to Windows. Linux software is largely available under the GPL or other free licence. Debian package and sign 18,000+ packages and offer a central download service. That allows you to get software you want from a trustworthy central location without risk of it compromising your system. However, there are guides to hardening Debian out there on the internet (Google suggests http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/), and there are willing helpers available on IRC.
At a minimum, I would split your / (root), /boot and /home mounts to different partitions and only allow nodev (no device) and noexec (no executables) in your /home partition. Then don't be afraid to blast away the root and boot partitions as often as you want. Create a script run daily using Cron to list your installed packages (something as simple as 'dpkg -l > /home/user/package-list.txt') so that a reinstall puts the base system onto your machine, you connect for signed, Debian-created updates and then you can reinstall everything else you had (using something like 'aptitude install /home/user/package-list.txt').
Even better, just DD the drive image every week to a backup. Why bother with virtualisation?
DiskPart is the Windows tool, found in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management in XP. It's comparable to PartEd and GPartEd on Linux, but I prefer the GPartEd live CD because of its hardware drivers (now using Kernel 2.6.30) and rsync and dd for imaging.
You'll get modded down and I'll join the long line of people looking to correct you. Sure, it's Microsoft's choice to bundle software with their OS. But the issue raised is that Microsoft used their monopoly to skew the fair market for web browsers and gave incentives to people who didn't include other software in the PC's they built and sold. So, as part of the billions of Euros in fines, Microsoft have to make sure that there is a level playing field for web browsers in the OS they sell in Europe.
And all the better for market share, improved quality of computer software and the world-wide web if people do have to choose a browser and can gain experience of what it's like without Microsoft's broken standards.
I don't use a mouse because starving rodents will eat butterflies.
Yes, it is possible. You could use Captive NTFS to employ the Windows filesystem implementation.
Given that I use the keyboad asymmetrically anyway (my right hand is on my mouse), I don't see the problem. Perhaps alignment and symmetry are far more important to you than to me?
In all fairness, exercise isn't abhorrent to rms when it's folk dancing.
I read a BBC blog that the present HD video equipment they have can only do single-plane focused images, and that good depth of field is difficult because of sensor noise and sensitivity. So to have a good set of lenses and a highly sensitive low-noise frame (and good sound recording) at the price of a 5DmkII would be a tremendous asset.
In fairness, Steve's already after the BRAINSSS! BRAAAINSSSS!!!
Hey, thanks for your discussion. I'm not going to change my stance that the distinction made by the 2^(10n) system from the 10^(3n) system is a useful one for removing confusion, and you're going to keep insisting that SI interpretation of MB (etc.) is that it's the 2^(10n) value. I'll keep saying that what you think is a bullshit argument creates confusion and needs to be explicitly worked around, and you'll keep saying that there is no ambiguity and confusion, and I'll keep saying that your citation of the court case indicates that there is grounds for confusion and that I, as a member of the public, suffer from the confusion. Then you say "you don't have to be confused, because my way is the way it always has been." Well, thanks.