As far as I remember, the question was about how to ensure good quality. And if you'll notice, QA also addresses the need to make accurate estimates of your development times. Poor quality code delivered before it is ready for shipping is like wetting your pants: initially it feels quite nice and warm, but...
At first I was quite excited about this thing, as I have been looking for something like this for a long time, but it is one of these things that are "almost, but not quite unlike tea" (from HHGG I believe).
Background: I grow orchids; a lot of them. It isn't hard, I've got a conservtory for that, but when you grow things in a small, confined space, the microclimate becomes very important - or perhaps that should be nano-climate, since it can vary widely over a few 10s of centimetres.
So, what I have been looking for is a sensor that can measure temperature, air-humidity, wind-speed and pressure, and is cheap enough that I can deploy one per plant. They should be networked and powered over a thin wire and be able to deliver their data up about once a minute or so.
China is all for NK being a general pain to the US
And so is the US, probably. There is nothing like a perceived threat to security - or better, and obnoxious "naughty boy" to focus the attention away from other things. Just as an example, there are elements in the US who could be an internal threat to national security, if weren't dimwitted enough to follow the reality show in North Korea and elsewhere.
All of which is not to say that there isn't also a genuine, humanitarian concern in both China and America about the poor souls trapped in that regime. Even politicians sometimes have a heart, although it often seems to be painted on.
The only way of producing good quality code that I know of, is by introducing rigorous quality assurance, and by management realising that code is not ready for release until it has passed all QA tests. Not meeting deadlines is a minor sin, releasing unfinished code is a major one.
QA is something that should be integrated on all levels:
- When developers estimate the work, they have to learn that it takes much longer than you expect; even if you can accurately estimate how many hours a piece of code will take, you have to take into account all the overhead, like meetings, context switches, breaks (and that IS important!) etc. 30% of effective work is probably all you can realistically sustain over a longer period of time. QA in this context means that you compare your estimate to how long it actually took and change your future estimates accordingly.
- Code must not be checked in to source code control unless accompanied by unit tests etc that demonstrably work as expected. Many source code control tools can check this automatically as part of the check-in.
- The product must be integration tested by a separate QA team, whose only purpose in life is to break your work. They musst not be developers, because developers will know too much about how to work around problems. All integration testing must be carried out on non-development systems, so you are not unwittingly relying on development libraries and environment settings that your customers don't have.
There are tools that can help you with this process, but really it is about management discipline, and ultimately about sustaining a good business. After all, if you take money from your customers and give a poor quality product, they will decide that you are liar, an incompetent - or both. And then they'll go away and give you a bad reputation.
But if there isn't a good chance of a backdoor in their software, I'm a monkey's uncle.
A monkey's descendant, actually, according to Mr Darwin. There may well be backdoors of all kinds in SW; I don't think we need to be any more concerned about whether it comes from China or the US. Friendly nations are only friendly now, they may become less so in the future, and will quite likely have prepared for such a scenario in several ways.
Security by perfect code is just as illusory as security by obscurity; it is a kind of magical thinking. They can help slow down an enemy, but it isn't enough in any way. A better bet is to keep friend and foe where you can see them, and to make sure that your friendship is worth more than any alternative.
Aren't these companies partly owned by the People's Liberation Army?
No. The Chinese state may be involved in many enterprises, but the state is not the same as the army, and the army does not control the state. The picture is far more complex than you seem to think - the Chinese is no more one monolithic entity where all parts are in perfect lockstep, than the American 'state' of states; it wouldn't work in any other way - the national government rules over provincial governments, who rule over lower level, local governments etc. The higher level governments often have surprisingly little influence on the lower levels. Some companies are owned by government institutions at some level, but many are privately owned, and many private business people more or less 'own' their local government.
What we should worry about in China (and anywhere) is not the national government, but the foul taint of corruption that springs from unelected, private business owners, who have far too much influence. If you think about it, when we hear about the appalling working conditions in some Chinese factories, this is exactly what is going on: rich people - capitalists, if you will - who treat their workers worse than animals and use their wealth to buy influence and pay off the police.
The Chinese national government are trying very hard to get to grips with this problem, because it is vital for China's future. No one wants to do business in any sense with somebody that you can't trust, and you can't trust a system that is rotten with corruption and crime.
As an alternative, you could try to take an interest together in something entirely new. Who knows what beautiful and enriching experiences that would give you?
Well, perhaps not quite the next step, but I can already imagine sending one of those to Mars in pieces to build a physical base for manned missions. It would have to be self-assembling and able to produce its own building materials on site, but it seems feasible to me. Not easy, but possible.
Personally, I'd go for words in the inuit language(s). Inuit words are so wonderfully impossible to guess from a dictionary because of the nature of the language; consider the following example:
umiaq: a large boat - a 'wife boat' umiarssuaq: a big wife boat - ie a ship umiarssualivik: a place for a ship: a harbour umiarssualivinnguaq: a small harbour etc
Combine that with a complex grammar and the fact that the rules for spelling are somewhat uncertain, and you have the perfect passwords, easy to remember and write, hard to crack, I think.
Perhaps - but what is 'beef' exactly, other than 'something extracted from a dead cow'? I'd rather eat horse MEAT than 'beef'; or go for the vegetarian option, although it has to be said, that one is rather dire too. In fact, it's better just to stay away.
If we just plug up the volcanos, everything will be fine!
Actually, that's a brilliant idea! Because, what would we use to plug them with? Lots of concrete which would have to be manufactured - so that way we could solve the climate problems AND start the global economy again.
Islam has been growing there, this is not unusual thing for Islamic countries.
Listen, we are the ones that claim to be scientifcally minded, right? So lets make the effort, instead of just slagging off Islam or other religions.
It is clearly not the fault of Islam that there are reactionaries (aka 'fundamentalists') in the world who will twist the words of just about anything to fit with their prejudices. As backwards thinking and darkened the Islamic world may seem now, there was once when the Islamic nations were at the forefront of science and progress; and, incidentally, that was also the time when the Christian world was in the deepest darkness, as bad as the Muslim countries seem now.
The reason this is important is not because we shouldn't offend other religions or some nonosense like that, but because WE ARE NOT ANTI-SCIENTISTS: we look at the evidence and try to keep our minds open, accepting the truth without trying to twist it in our favour.
Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will separate from the roughly 8,200 pound spacecraft and descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface
2,645 GBP (4,225.29 USD)? That's bloody cheap, it used to cost millions.
Walking is a terrible form of exercise, because it's too easy.
Exercise doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to be. Being physically active gives so many benefits that burning calories is only a minor point, really. Also, to somebody without any physical activity, walking is probably the best place to start.
You are obviously a quite competitive person, who likes to challenge yourself; but a lot of us are not there yet. Any exercise is worth doing, from a health point of view, especially if you enjoy it.
I don't know about those two lists - is the fork thing stupid? I think what is stupid is the assumption that it is intended to somehow stop people from overeating; it isn't, it is only a device that may perhaps help the user keep track of the eating of a meal. This could be valuable information, just like keeping a food diary can.
On the other hand, what is the sense of have a gigantic television screen with absurdly high resolution, when all you can watch is crappy programs or crappy computer games? It's a bit like owning a Ferrari when you only ever drive around in a 30 mph area; well, you get the idea.
Are these lists really the best one can come up with? This kind of reporting seems to have been dredged from the bottom of the CESpit.
About the good eating habits - they will also help you get up more often to breathe, especially if your diet is heavy on beans... it will certainly give you an incentive to get outside often, and your colleagues will help reminding you too.
The problem is much smaller than one imagines; there are many things that can help you. The structure of the characters themselves can often give you hints about the meaning or the pronunciation.
Apart from that, when you learn eg. English, it also takes a number of years to become a fluent reader, and when you are, you don't read words one letter at a time - you take them in as a whole, so in reality you have learned to reconginse thousands of letter combinations, which I think is very similar to reading Chinese characters.
Well, my wife types almost faster in Chinese than I can in English; on Linux you install something like scim, which provides several input methods. I think the most popular is pinyin based: You enter pinyin and get a small list of characters to choose from; and often you can get away with entering just the first letter of the pinyin representation, because short sequences of Chinese characters quite often are fairly unique.
Yeah, you're right. Metrics of 10 are much simpler than orders of 16, 32, 34 or any other random selection
Of course; and I am fully in favour of using the metric system. However, I think it is important to distinguish between popular and official usage; even in countries where the metric system has been used for a long time, it is till not unusual for some things to be spoken of in, say, pounds. Probably because something the aproximate size pound is what you would use in your daily life: meat for your evening meal and foodstuffs in general. So you would buy 500g of beef mince and think of it as 'a pound', and that is OK because it is not critical whether it is exact.
Where it gets absurd is when you try to use these units as exact measurements; like when a cup is defined to be 236.5882365 ml - that is, a *customary* cup, as opposed to a *legal* cup, or an *imperial* cup, or.... When you are trying to communicate exact dimensions, it is not rational to use a system that is likely to introduce misunderstandings.
I have no idea why one can still read American texts concerning things like science or engineering using inches, pounds, yards etc. It isn't because people in general are against it - they were against it in all metric countries, because people are against change, simply, but government went ahead anyway, simply based on the obvious merits of the scheme. And it has worked too - nobody would want to go back now.
...Chinese glyphs make them more primitive than using an alphabet...
If I may pick up on this one: The Chinese writing system is in fact very far from being 'primitive' in any sense of the word - it is uniquely suited to the Chinese language and continues to this day to be better than all the alphabetical systems that have been attempted over the years: Bopomofo, Wade-Giles, Pinyin and several others. There are two reasons for this, in my view.
One is that the Chinese language doesn't have the same grammatical need for expressing different word forms - there are no inflections etc, so the same word form is used throughout, unlike in English (e.g. 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are'...). Thus you can use the same character for a word everywhere without the sort of modification you see in Japanese, and there is no incentive to get away from the writing system.
The most important reason, however, is that the Chinese writing system allows you to write all the different dialects in the same way; this means that you can communicate things like common legislation and culture over the whole of that vast country. When you compare things like spoken language or local culture across Chinese, the differences are at least as great as the differences you find in Europe, but all Chinese feel they belong to the same nation - that is ultimately because of the writing system. It is also interesting to note, that the groups that want to break away from China are exactly the ones whose languages are not compatible with the writing.
And of course, once you master Chinese writing, it turns out to be hugely convenient, because it is so compact and concise.
Why not address the larger issue of why the government has to be everyone's mom?
Stop whining. You live in a society and enjoy the benefits; but in any society, all things are connected to some extent. So, if a family's breadwinner gambles away everything, it doesn't hurt only him, but a number of dependents; people who are most likely innocent in this context and who shouldn't have been hurt. Just imagine that you were hit by the consequences of the irresponsible actions of some fool; wouldn't you want to go after him? And if it turns out that there is nothing to come after, wouldn't you like to be able to go after those that enabled this person to hurt you? I bet you would.
It is always so easy to be against the government and society in general when you feel safe and are annoyed that there are requirements as well as benefits; to me that is no better than uninformed smugness. You may think that you want "no government", but just remeber that no government would also mean no general education, which would mean very few doctors, no jobs outside subsistence farming etc. And it would mean very little infra-structure: no interstate highways, no trains, no water, electricity or internet. Whoops.
Yeah, it is annoying to pay taxes and having rules, but it is like brushing your teeth or washing your hands: it's is a good idea.
Why does a religion that sings 'father, son and holy ghost' when worshiping get away with calling itself monotheistic? How is praying to patron saints monotheistic? It looks like deification from over here.
Ask the Hindus; they have millions of gods, all of which can be considered aspects of the one God, if you wish.
But there is nothing wrong or inferior about polytheism. In fact, I would tend to think that recognising many gods makes people more tolerant towards those who follow a different religion, simply because you aren't tied into the idea that "There Is Only One God".
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I remember, the question was about how to ensure good quality. And if you'll notice, QA also addresses the need to make accurate estimates of your development times. Poor quality code delivered before it is ready for shipping is like wetting your pants: initially it feels quite nice and warm, but ...
At first I was quite excited about this thing, as I have been looking for something like this for a long time, but it is one of these things that are "almost, but not quite unlike tea" (from HHGG I believe).
Background: I grow orchids; a lot of them. It isn't hard, I've got a conservtory for that, but when you grow things in a small, confined space, the microclimate becomes very important - or perhaps that should be nano-climate, since it can vary widely over a few 10s of centimetres.
So, what I have been looking for is a sensor that can measure temperature, air-humidity, wind-speed and pressure, and is cheap enough that I can deploy one per plant. They should be networked and powered over a thin wire and be able to deliver their data up about once a minute or so.
Alas, the thing they produce doesn't fit.
China is all for NK being a general pain to the US
And so is the US, probably. There is nothing like a perceived threat to security - or better, and obnoxious "naughty boy" to focus the attention away from other things. Just as an example, there are elements in the US who could be an internal threat to national security, if weren't dimwitted enough to follow the reality show in North Korea and elsewhere.
All of which is not to say that there isn't also a genuine, humanitarian concern in both China and America about the poor souls trapped in that regime. Even politicians sometimes have a heart, although it often seems to be painted on.
The only way of producing good quality code that I know of, is by introducing rigorous quality assurance, and by management realising that code is not ready for release until it has passed all QA tests. Not meeting deadlines is a minor sin, releasing unfinished code is a major one.
QA is something that should be integrated on all levels:
- When developers estimate the work, they have to learn that it takes much longer than you expect; even if you can accurately estimate how many hours a piece of code will take, you have to take into account all the overhead, like meetings, context switches, breaks (and that IS important!) etc. 30% of effective work is probably all you can realistically sustain over a longer period of time. QA in this context means that you compare your estimate to how long it actually took and change your future estimates accordingly.
- Code must not be checked in to source code control unless accompanied by unit tests etc that demonstrably work as expected. Many source code control tools can check this automatically as part of the check-in.
- The product must be integration tested by a separate QA team, whose only purpose in life is to break your work. They musst not be developers, because developers will know too much about how to work around problems. All integration testing must be carried out on non-development systems, so you are not unwittingly relying on development libraries and environment settings that your customers don't have.
There are tools that can help you with this process, but really it is about management discipline, and ultimately about sustaining a good business. After all, if you take money from your customers and give a poor quality product, they will decide that you are liar, an incompetent - or both. And then they'll go away and give you a bad reputation.
But if there isn't a good chance of a backdoor in their software, I'm a monkey's uncle.
A monkey's descendant, actually, according to Mr Darwin. There may well be backdoors of all kinds in SW; I don't think we need to be any more concerned about whether it comes from China or the US. Friendly nations are only friendly now, they may become less so in the future, and will quite likely have prepared for such a scenario in several ways.
Security by perfect code is just as illusory as security by obscurity; it is a kind of magical thinking. They can help slow down an enemy, but it isn't enough in any way. A better bet is to keep friend and foe where you can see them, and to make sure that your friendship is worth more than any alternative.
Aren't these companies partly owned by the People's Liberation Army?
No. The Chinese state may be involved in many enterprises, but the state is not the same as the army, and the army does not control the state. The picture is far more complex than you seem to think - the Chinese is no more one monolithic entity where all parts are in perfect lockstep, than the American 'state' of states; it wouldn't work in any other way - the national government rules over provincial governments, who rule over lower level, local governments etc. The higher level governments often have surprisingly little influence on the lower levels. Some companies are owned by government institutions at some level, but many are privately owned, and many private business people more or less 'own' their local government.
What we should worry about in China (and anywhere) is not the national government, but the foul taint of corruption that springs from unelected, private business owners, who have far too much influence. If you think about it, when we hear about the appalling working conditions in some Chinese factories, this is exactly what is going on: rich people - capitalists, if you will - who treat their workers worse than animals and use their wealth to buy influence and pay off the police.
The Chinese national government are trying very hard to get to grips with this problem, because it is vital for China's future. No one wants to do business in any sense with somebody that you can't trust, and you can't trust a system that is rotten with corruption and crime.
As an alternative, you could try to take an interest together in something entirely new. Who knows what beautiful and enriching experiences that would give you?
Well, perhaps not quite the next step, but I can already imagine sending one of those to Mars in pieces to build a physical base for manned missions. It would have to be self-assembling and able to produce its own building materials on site, but it seems feasible to me. Not easy, but possible.
Personally, I'd go for words in the inuit language(s). Inuit words are so wonderfully impossible to guess from a dictionary because of the nature of the language; consider the following example:
umiaq: a large boat - a 'wife boat'
umiarssuaq: a big wife boat - ie a ship
umiarssualivik: a place for a ship: a harbour
umiarssualivinnguaq: a small harbour
etc
Combine that with a complex grammar and the fact that the rules for spelling are somewhat uncertain, and you have the perfect passwords, easy to remember and write, hard to crack, I think.
The patties are 100% beef.
Perhaps - but what is 'beef' exactly, other than 'something extracted from a dead cow'? I'd rather eat horse MEAT than 'beef'; or go for the vegetarian option, although it has to be said, that one is rather dire too. In fact, it's better just to stay away.
If we just plug up the volcanos, everything will be fine!
Actually, that's a brilliant idea! Because, what would we use to plug them with? Lots of concrete which would have to be manufactured - so that way we could solve the climate problems AND start the global economy again.
Islam has been growing there, this is not unusual thing for Islamic countries.
Listen, we are the ones that claim to be scientifcally minded, right? So lets make the effort, instead of just slagging off Islam or other religions.
It is clearly not the fault of Islam that there are reactionaries (aka 'fundamentalists') in the world who will twist the words of just about anything to fit with their prejudices. As backwards thinking and darkened the Islamic world may seem now, there was once when the Islamic nations were at the forefront of science and progress; and, incidentally, that was also the time when the Christian world was in the deepest darkness, as bad as the Muslim countries seem now.
The reason this is important is not because we shouldn't offend other religions or some nonosense like that, but because WE ARE NOT ANTI-SCIENTISTS: we look at the evidence and try to keep our minds open, accepting the truth without trying to twist it in our favour.
I find I have to apolgise for my bad jokes again :-), sorry. It was just that the way it showed in my browser, it looked like a Bible quote.
If you weren't there you wouldn't need to open the pod bay door in the first place!
--
Ezekiel 23:20
I wish people would stop quoting the Bible all the time. Also, that's not really what it says at Ezekiel 23:20, if I'm any judge.
Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will separate from the roughly 8,200 pound spacecraft and descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface
2,645 GBP (4,225.29 USD)? That's bloody cheap, it used to cost millions.
Walking is a terrible form of exercise, because it's too easy.
Exercise doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to be. Being physically active gives so many benefits that burning calories is only a minor point, really. Also, to somebody without any physical activity, walking is probably the best place to start.
You are obviously a quite competitive person, who likes to challenge yourself; but a lot of us are not there yet. Any exercise is worth doing, from a health point of view, especially if you enjoy it.
I don't know about those two lists - is the fork thing stupid? I think what is stupid is the assumption that it is intended to somehow stop people from overeating; it isn't, it is only a device that may perhaps help the user keep track of the eating of a meal. This could be valuable information, just like keeping a food diary can.
On the other hand, what is the sense of have a gigantic television screen with absurdly high resolution, when all you can watch is crappy programs or crappy computer games? It's a bit like owning a Ferrari when you only ever drive around in a 30 mph area; well, you get the idea.
Are these lists really the best one can come up with? This kind of reporting seems to have been dredged from the bottom of the CESpit.
About the good eating habits - they will also help you get up more often to breathe, especially if your diet is heavy on beans ... it will certainly give you an incentive to get outside often, and your colleagues will help reminding you too.
Oh, for an OS that could be rude when needed...
The problem is much smaller than one imagines; there are many things that can help you. The structure of the characters themselves can often give you hints about the meaning or the pronunciation.
Apart from that, when you learn eg. English, it also takes a number of years to become a fluent reader, and when you are, you don't read words one letter at a time - you take them in as a whole, so in reality you have learned to reconginse thousands of letter combinations, which I think is very similar to reading Chinese characters.
Well, my wife types almost faster in Chinese than I can in English; on Linux you install something like scim, which provides several input methods. I think the most popular is pinyin based: You enter pinyin and get a small list of characters to choose from; and often you can get away with entering just the first letter of the pinyin representation, because short sequences of Chinese characters quite often are fairly unique.
Yeah, you're right. Metrics of 10 are much simpler than orders of 16, 32, 34 or any other random selection
Of course; and I am fully in favour of using the metric system. However, I think it is important to distinguish between popular and official usage; even in countries where the metric system has been used for a long time, it is till not unusual for some things to be spoken of in, say, pounds. Probably because something the aproximate size pound is what you would use in your daily life: meat for your evening meal and foodstuffs in general. So you would buy 500g of beef mince and think of it as 'a pound', and that is OK because it is not critical whether it is exact.
Where it gets absurd is when you try to use these units as exact measurements; like when a cup is defined to be 236.5882365 ml - that is, a *customary* cup, as opposed to a *legal* cup, or an *imperial* cup, or .... When you are trying to communicate exact dimensions, it is not rational to use a system that is likely to introduce misunderstandings.
I have no idea why one can still read American texts concerning things like science or engineering using inches, pounds, yards etc. It isn't because people in general are against it - they were against it in all metric countries, because people are against change, simply, but government went ahead anyway, simply based on the obvious merits of the scheme. And it has worked too - nobody would want to go back now.
...Chinese glyphs make them more primitive than using an alphabet...
If I may pick up on this one: The Chinese writing system is in fact very far from being 'primitive' in any sense of the word - it is uniquely suited to the Chinese language and continues to this day to be better than all the alphabetical systems that have been attempted over the years: Bopomofo, Wade-Giles, Pinyin and several others. There are two reasons for this, in my view.
One is that the Chinese language doesn't have the same grammatical need for expressing different word forms - there are no inflections etc, so the same word form is used throughout, unlike in English (e.g. 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are' ...). Thus you can use the same character for a word everywhere without the sort of modification you see in Japanese, and there is no incentive to get away from the writing system.
The most important reason, however, is that the Chinese writing system allows you to write all the different dialects in the same way; this means that you can communicate things like common legislation and culture over the whole of that vast country. When you compare things like spoken language or local culture across Chinese, the differences are at least as great as the differences you find in Europe, but all Chinese feel they belong to the same nation - that is ultimately because of the writing system. It is also interesting to note, that the groups that want to break away from China are exactly the ones whose languages are not compatible with the writing.
And of course, once you master Chinese writing, it turns out to be hugely convenient, because it is so compact and concise.
I don't mind it been presented as an american invention if it can help bring the US in the 20th century.
Not a moment too soon, seeing that we're in the 21st centurey now.
Why not address the larger issue of why the government has to be everyone's mom?
Stop whining. You live in a society and enjoy the benefits; but in any society, all things are connected to some extent. So, if a family's breadwinner gambles away everything, it doesn't hurt only him, but a number of dependents; people who are most likely innocent in this context and who shouldn't have been hurt. Just imagine that you were hit by the consequences of the irresponsible actions of some fool; wouldn't you want to go after him? And if it turns out that there is nothing to come after, wouldn't you like to be able to go after those that enabled this person to hurt you? I bet you would.
It is always so easy to be against the government and society in general when you feel safe and are annoyed that there are requirements as well as benefits; to me that is no better than uninformed smugness. You may think that you want "no government", but just remeber that no government would also mean no general education, which would mean very few doctors, no jobs outside subsistence farming etc. And it would mean very little infra-structure: no interstate highways, no trains, no water, electricity or internet. Whoops.
Yeah, it is annoying to pay taxes and having rules, but it is like brushing your teeth or washing your hands: it's is a good idea.
Why does a religion that sings 'father, son and holy ghost' when worshiping get away with calling itself monotheistic? How is praying to patron saints monotheistic? It looks like deification from over here.
Ask the Hindus; they have millions of gods, all of which can be considered aspects of the one God, if you wish.
But there is nothing wrong or inferior about polytheism. In fact, I would tend to think that recognising many gods makes people more tolerant towards those who follow a different religion, simply because you aren't tied into the idea that "There Is Only One God".