According to economic theory, when a minimum wage is above the 'market' wage it causes unemployment.
Yes, and according to the geocentric theory the sun moves around the earth.
However, neither currently mainstream economic theory nor the geocentric theory have much to do with the actual world in which we live, and fail when pushed beyond the most simple predictions. Minimum wage laws have not caused unemployment to rise.
Whether it's meth or tide with bleach or patté (banned in many places now, ISYN,)
One of these things is not like the others...the issue with paté is not that it's "bad for you", it's that it is produced via amazing cruelty to animals.
Gee, and I thought their purpose had something to do with writing good software, but I guess it's just about politics after all.
The purpose of free software has always been to promote freedom, an inherently political goal.
In the past few years, some people in the "open source" movement noticed that freedom also leads to good software, and have often championed the use of free software for reasons other than the promotion of freedom. As RMS put it:
For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.
It's the 3000+ functions in the global (and only)
namespace.
Having many functions available is a good thing, no? Namespaces for
standard libraries are a PITA that gains nothing in terms of encapsulation
or abstraction.
It's the inconsistant function naming ('2' or 'to',
underscores or not) and parameters (needle-haystack or
haystack-needle.)
PHP functions are often drawn from other languages, such as C or Perl,
and the naming and parameters in the PHP versions are consistant with these
other languages.
I don't see a significant problem here. If the function isn't familiar
enough to you that you have its name and parameters memorized you need to
look at its manual page before using it anyway - true for any language, to
check for preconditions and limitations.
It's the poor quality of much of PEAR (not that there aren't
some fine packages there, but they are not the majority)
Same can be said of CPAN.
Read through the comment threads on php.net, and you'll find
mistakes, clumsy workarounds and just general Bad Ideas all over the
place.)
You'll find the same in newsgroups and other forums for C++, Java, Perl, or
any language.
Does PHP have some misfeatures? Sure. Since the day in the early 1980s
when I wrote my first program, I haven't yet met a language that didn't.
But it's a pretty good tool for the job of creating web applications.
Didn't JMS write the story for six seasons but was dicked around by the movie studios and had to shorten it to five?
He planned for five. It wasn't certain he was going to get the fifth one, so he tied up a lot of stuff in the fourth; when season was approved, there was a little less material left to go around.
Still, season 5 holds up better on re-watching than I'd orginally thought, with a few very good eps - Gaiman's "Day of the Dead", the Ellison-inspired "A View From the Gallery", and "The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father" for a look behind the scenes at the Psi Corps.
It's amazing the complicated dance that many young people are led through to prevent them understanding that Orwell's '1984' is a direct indictment of Stalinism and Soviet Communism. It's almost as if there was a concerted effort made by those who revere 'Communism/socialism' in theory.
Yeah but by saying "you radiate cold" you fundamentally don't understand what's going on.
It makes every bit as much sense to speak of something "radiating cold" as it does to speak of "hole flow" in a semicondutor, or indeed "conventional current" in any electric circuit. Relax.
not to mention wind turbines take up tons of space, slaughter birds, and are eyesores, while solar panels are relatively low-key.
Wind turbines take up little more space than radio towers or high-tension power lines, and are much more aesthetically pleasing. Think of them as giant mobiles.
We do need to learn more about how to make them safe for birds, but smokestacks and pollution from other forms of generation also kill wildlife; well-placed wind turbine may well be safer for birds than the forms of generation they displace.
Also, you need somewhere to store the energy for later
Only if you're off the grid. Intertie systems with net metering (run your electric meter backwards when you're producing more than you're using) look very attractive.
unless, of course, you want to inject another line of logic: They're fighting for your country and you aren't.
Nah. They're fighting for my government. Not always the same thing.
Last time any other nation was a real military threat to my country was 1814 or 1865, depending on whether you want to argue that the pro-slavery terrorists who styled themselves the "Confederacy" were or were not "another nation". The Mexican-American war was a war of agression; neither Japan nor Germany posed a threat of invading the U.S. in WWII (and Hawaii was not part of the U.S. - understand how there came to be a naval base at Pearl Harbor and you'll see that the Pacific theatre was a straight-up battle between colonial powers); and the mass murderers behind 9/11, while very bad people against whom strong action must be taken, are criminals, not a military threat who are going to invade the U.S.
(BTW, I'm not saying the Nazis weren't brutal sadistic thugs, or that the Japanese colonialism of the early 20th century wasn't more brutal than the American colonialism of that period. This doesn't change the fact that neither was a threat to send troops over here to invade and occupy the U.S.)
Yet my government keeps finding all kinds of things to send American soldiers overseas to kill and die over - mostly involving protecting the interests of its richest and most powerful citizens and corporations.
If your country runs out of soldiers they're in some tough straits, wether they lost them via combat attrition, and/or lack of recruits because people like yourself who can't envision that the use of violence is ever necessary.
Governments can always create more soldiers via conscription. If they lose officers, they're in a tough place, but cannon fodder is relatively cheap.
Perhaps, if a government were corrupt, or otherwise undeserving of loyalty, I could agree...questionable as some decisions have been, I still support my government and would die to defend my home.
Again, the former and the latter are completely unrelated. The government can go screw itself; but if Canada tries to invade us, my rifle will be out and ready.
Disclaimer: Discharged from the US Navy July 11th after a 6-year stint.
Sorry that you got ripped off of a few years of your life by the con men who convinced you that serving them was the same as serving your country; glad you made it out in one piece.
Why should not lefthanders be allowed to enjoy the comfort and ergonomy of having the primary click button under their index finger?...But not having the mouse in 'left-handed' mode when using the left hand just sucks
I've been quite happily clicking on my "marble mouse" trackball's first button with my ring finger for years. Before that I used my middle finger on the mouse button, left handed with "right-handed" buttons
I'm not sure that index-finger clicking is that ergonomic. With my arm in a natural relaxed postion, my hand slants such that my little finger is lowest and my index finger highest; using my index finger (either hand) to click a mouse button involves pronation of the forearm to bring the hand closer to the desk.
Then again, I play guitar; my left hand fingers are probably a bit stronger and more coordinated than most folks.
since carbon dating may actually be inaccurate at showing the lapse such long periods of time
No. We're talking about very small changes over billions of years. Any effect on radiometric dating would be a tiny fraction of a percent, completely irrelevant to paleobiology - you're not going to hear, "OMG! With this new model, we understand that this fossil is actually 2,317,001 years old (plus or minus 2,000), not 2,317,000 (plus or minus 2,000)! This changes everything!"
Most importantly, think what happens to your friend's enterprise when you disappear from the scene...I do not think you should dismiss COTS solutions just because of their absolute price
What happens to his friend's enterprise when the proprietary COTS vendor disappears from the scene?
Part of the "absolute price" of a proprietary COTS solution is lock-in. With a decent F/OSS solution, the client is always free to hire a developer for maintenance and improvements.
At a Scrum meeting, the only questions that may be asked are "What did you do yesterday," "What are you going to do today," and "Is there anything that is impeding you?"
Is "Daily meetings are impeding me, wasting my time, breaking my concentration, and sapping my morale, indeed my very will to live" an allowed answer?
And did you not say that "the requesting parties are able to get feedback every 24 hours"? Or are you counting the minutiae of developer's day-to-day actions as "feedback"?
"My impediment is that the task is so ill-defined that I do not know what I am supposed to be doing today" is something stakeholders should here within 24 hours of it becoming apparent.
24 hours, hell, you can tell management that as soon as they ask for an estimate on how long it's going to take to build the road through the unexplored jungle. So, great, they hear it. Then what? They can't define it any further, and neither can anyone else at this time, because we don't even know the borders of the jungle.
We could make a 30-day plan for preliminary planning on how to develop a plan to explore the jungle, but that's not what's being requested; management wants to know how long it's going to take to get that road built.
A stakeholder who wants to ask "How long do you think the whole project will take?" can do so at a working meeting; and "an impediment to my accomplishing what I have committed to accomplish during this sprint is the surfeit of working meetings where questions unrelated to the goals are bruited about"
"Unrelated to the goals?" From management's perspective - the perspective of the people paying for all this - at the moment knowing how long it's all going to take is the goal.
Breaking things into two-day tasks instead of thirty-day tasks means that at the end of a year, you will have performed 125 estimates instead of twelve. You think your 126th estimate might be better than your 13th?
Not necessarily. I can eyeball distances to the nearest meter much more accurately than I can estimate them to the nearest millimeter, no matter how often I make such estimations.
Precise full-task estimates are applicable to known repeatable undertakings; the highway project you have described fails to qualify.
In other, more simple words: we don't know.
A different process is required for projects with many unknowns, which will give you, the highway-desirers, the best way to manage your investment and gauge progress.
Any nontrivial software project has many unknowns. The whole point of this thread is what sort of process is appropriate for such projects. If you're admiting that the "scrum" is inadequate for complex projects, what do you recommend instead?
In the case where even that's not possible (You are not expert enough to break a given task up any further, or redefine it so that it you are able to break it up), then the correct estimate is, "We do not have the skills to properly estimate this project."...Does this adequately cover the general case? If not, where does it fail?
The problem you're ignoring is when the lack is not in skills or expertese, but in information about the problem.
You can't break a problem down until you throughly understand it. Gaining that understanding is problem in itself. How long will it take you to learn to grebnesk? You can't make any sort of guess until you've started to understand grebnesking.
It's like digging a well - you dig until you hit water. How deep will you have to dig? If the area is geologically unknown, you simply can't make a prediction. Maybe feet, maybe 600. Now, once you first hit water, then you can give an estimate on how long it will take to complete the well.
Any interesting software project is digging in unknown ground - if the ground is known, we just re-use or adapt someone else's implementation(s), and the task is fairly trivial. That's what makes software different than building a bridge.
Asking how long an interesting software project will take is often more like asking "how long will it take to find a cure for this disease?" or "how long will it take to write a novel?" than "how long will it take to build a bridge across this river?"
Either the platform was developed in-house, in which case the respective team should be shot
It seems that out in the "real world", there are many development teams who should have been put up against the wall ages ago. I've worked on a fair number of projects, and useful documentation has been the exception rather than the rule.
With the Scrum development process, the requesting parties are able to get feedback every 24 hours.
Hmm, so every 24 hours you can tell them "don't know how long it will be"..."still don't know"..."nope, still don't know"...
The development team's does not commit to delivering more than they believe can be achieved in thirty days.
Some tasks take months, or even years, just to get a handle on.
I swear some software projects I've worked on have been like this: "We need a highway built through this unexplored jungle. We don't know the siz or shape of the jungle. Somewhere in there is probably at least on large river that you'll have to bridge, we don't know where, how deep, how wide. Might be some mountains too. There might be geographic fault lines, we're not sure. Might be quicksand. And did I mention the rodents of unusual size? Just a rumor. Maybe.
"Ok, so, before we get started, send out any explorers or anything, we need you to tell us exactly how long this highway will take to build."
isn't that basically what the judge said - that it WAS reasonable for the teacher to consider it a valid threat?
According to TFA, the court did find that "the words 'Kill Mr. VanderMolen' and the accompanying graphic cannot be viewed as anything but an unequivocal, unconditional, immediate threat of injury specific as to the person threatened".
As far as I can see from the details given, the communication was stupid, rude, and tasteless, but also equivocal, conditional, and remote, and it's a marked stretch to declare this a "true threat". Any teacher who thinks students don't talk casually and jokingly about killing teachers, is detached from reality.
When I was in elementary school back in the idyllic 1970s, before Columbine, before violent videogames, before gangsta rap, etc., we had a little song: "Glory, glory hallelujah / Teacher hit me with ruler / Shot her with my little.44 / Now my teacher ain't a teacher any more."
Or how about, "On top of Old Smoky / All covered in blood / I shot my poor teacher / With a.44 gun / I went to her funeral / I went to her grave / Some people threw flowers / I threw a grenade".
Of course the names of our teachers could be substituted as appropriate (if it scanned).
Not to mention "Marijuana, marijuana / LSD, LSD / Scientists make it / Teachers take it / Why can't we, why can't we?"
I suppose any kid singing these now, would promptly be arrested and committed to a state institution for violent juvenile drug addicts.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and according to the geocentric theory the sun moves around the earth.
However, neither currently mainstream economic theory nor the geocentric theory have much to do with the actual world in which we live, and fail when pushed beyond the most simple predictions. Minimum wage laws have not caused unemployment to rise.
One of these things is not like the others...the issue with paté is not that it's "bad for you", it's that it is produced via amazing cruelty to animals.
What's nonstandard about refering to a users' ability to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software as "freedom"?
The purpose of free software has always been to promote freedom, an inherently political goal.
In the past few years, some people in the "open source" movement noticed that freedom also leads to good software, and have often championed the use of free software for reasons other than the promotion of freedom. As RMS put it:
It helps the manufacturer by increasing the likelyhood that people who value freedom will purchase their hardware.
If you don't value freedom, and choose to purchase locked-down hardware...well, that's sad.
Having many functions available is a good thing, no? Namespaces for standard libraries are a PITA that gains nothing in terms of encapsulation or abstraction.
PHP functions are often drawn from other languages, such as C or Perl, and the naming and parameters in the PHP versions are consistant with these other languages.
I don't see a significant problem here. If the function isn't familiar enough to you that you have its name and parameters memorized you need to look at its manual page before using it anyway - true for any language, to check for preconditions and limitations.
Same can be said of CPAN.
You'll find the same in newsgroups and other forums for C++, Java, Perl, or any language.
Does PHP have some misfeatures? Sure. Since the day in the early 1980s when I wrote my first program, I haven't yet met a language that didn't. But it's a pretty good tool for the job of creating web applications.
He planned for five. It wasn't certain he was going to get the fifth one, so he tied up a lot of stuff in the fourth; when season was approved, there was a little less material left to go around.
Still, season 5 holds up better on re-watching than I'd orginally thought, with a few very good eps - Gaiman's "Day of the Dead", the Ellison-inspired "A View From the Gallery", and "The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father" for a look behind the scenes at the Psi Corps.
It's amazing the complicated dance that many people are led through to prevent them understanding that socialism, Marxism, and Stalinism are distinct ideas, and that George Orwell was both a lifelong socialist (even taking up arms to fight for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War) and a strong critic of Soviet totalitarianism.
It's almost as if there was a concerted effort made by those who would like to discourage any consideration of alternatives to capitalism.
It makes every bit as much sense to speak of something "radiating cold" as it does to speak of "hole flow" in a semicondutor, or indeed "conventional current" in any electric circuit. Relax.
Wind turbines take up little more space than radio towers or high-tension power lines, and are much more aesthetically pleasing. Think of them as giant mobiles.
We do need to learn more about how to make them safe for birds, but smokestacks and pollution from other forms of generation also kill wildlife; well-placed wind turbine may well be safer for birds than the forms of generation they displace.
Only if you're off the grid. Intertie systems with net metering (run your electric meter backwards when you're producing more than you're using) look very attractive.
Nah. They're fighting for my government. Not always the same thing.
Last time any other nation was a real military threat to my country was 1814 or 1865, depending on whether you want to argue that the pro-slavery terrorists who styled themselves the "Confederacy" were or were not "another nation". The Mexican-American war was a war of agression; neither Japan nor Germany posed a threat of invading the U.S. in WWII (and Hawaii was not part of the U.S. - understand how there came to be a naval base at Pearl Harbor and you'll see that the Pacific theatre was a straight-up battle between colonial powers); and the mass murderers behind 9/11, while very bad people against whom strong action must be taken, are criminals, not a military threat who are going to invade the U.S.
(BTW, I'm not saying the Nazis weren't brutal sadistic thugs, or that the Japanese colonialism of the early 20th century wasn't more brutal than the American colonialism of that period. This doesn't change the fact that neither was a threat to send troops over here to invade and occupy the U.S.)
Yet my government keeps finding all kinds of things to send American soldiers overseas to kill and die over - mostly involving protecting the interests of its richest and most powerful citizens and corporations.
Governments can always create more soldiers via conscription. If they lose officers, they're in a tough place, but cannon fodder is relatively cheap.
Again, the former and the latter are completely unrelated. The government can go screw itself; but if Canada tries to invade us, my rifle will be out and ready.
Sorry that you got ripped off of a few years of your life by the con men who convinced you that serving them was the same as serving your country; glad you made it out in one piece.
I've been quite happily clicking on my "marble mouse" trackball's first button with my ring finger for years. Before that I used my middle finger on the mouse button, left handed with "right-handed" buttons
I'm not sure that index-finger clicking is that ergonomic. With my arm in a natural relaxed postion, my hand slants such that my little finger is lowest and my index finger highest; using my index finger (either hand) to click a mouse button involves pronation of the forearm to bring the hand closer to the desk.
Then again, I play guitar; my left hand fingers are probably a bit stronger and more coordinated than most folks.
No. We're talking about very small changes over billions of years. Any effect on radiometric dating would be a tiny fraction of a percent, completely irrelevant to paleobiology - you're not going to hear, "OMG! With this new model, we understand that this fossil is actually 2,317,001 years old (plus or minus 2,000), not 2,317,000 (plus or minus 2,000)! This changes everything!"
It's called VIP.
What happens to his friend's enterprise when the proprietary COTS vendor disappears from the scene?
Part of the "absolute price" of a proprietary COTS solution is lock-in. With a decent F/OSS solution, the client is always free to hire a developer for maintenance and improvements.
Fair enough, I was sloppy in my usage there. Yes, complexity is not the same as unknowability.
Bing! On that we're in agreement. Now, if only we could convince The Mgmt. about that.
Is "Daily meetings are impeding me, wasting my time, breaking my concentration, and sapping my morale, indeed my very will to live" an allowed answer?
And did you not say that "the requesting parties are able to get feedback every 24 hours"? Or are you counting the minutiae of developer's day-to-day actions as "feedback"?
24 hours, hell, you can tell management that as soon as they ask for an estimate on how long it's going to take to build the road through the unexplored jungle. So, great, they hear it. Then what? They can't define it any further, and neither can anyone else at this time, because we don't even know the borders of the jungle.
We could make a 30-day plan for preliminary planning on how to develop a plan to explore the jungle, but that's not what's being requested; management wants to know how long it's going to take to get that road built.
"Unrelated to the goals?" From management's perspective - the perspective of the people paying for all this - at the moment knowing how long it's all going to take is the goal.
Not necessarily. I can eyeball distances to the nearest meter much more accurately than I can estimate them to the nearest millimeter, no matter how often I make such estimations.
In other, more simple words: we don't know.
Any nontrivial software project has many unknowns. The whole point of this thread is what sort of process is appropriate for such projects. If you're admiting that the "scrum" is inadequate for complex projects, what do you recommend instead?
The problem you're ignoring is when the lack is not in skills or expertese, but in information about the problem.
You can't break a problem down until you throughly understand it. Gaining that understanding is problem in itself. How long will it take you to learn to grebnesk? You can't make any sort of guess until you've started to understand grebnesking.
It's like digging a well - you dig until you hit water. How deep will you have to dig? If the area is geologically unknown, you simply can't make a prediction. Maybe feet, maybe 600. Now, once you first hit water, then you can give an estimate on how long it will take to complete the well.
Any interesting software project is digging in unknown ground - if the ground is known, we just re-use or adapt someone else's implementation(s), and the task is fairly trivial. That's what makes software different than building a bridge.
Asking how long an interesting software project will take is often more like asking "how long will it take to find a cure for this disease?" or "how long will it take to write a novel?" than "how long will it take to build a bridge across this river?"
Hmm. Then why, depspite years spend working under PMs who'd taken all sorts of courses, have I encountered so few who could deal?
Then the problem is trivial. What about the general case?
And it seems that no one has yet come up with a good answer outside the trivial case.
It seems that out in the "real world", there are many development teams who should have been put up against the wall ages ago. I've worked on a fair number of projects, and useful documentation has been the exception rather than the rule.
Hmm, so every 24 hours you can tell them "don't know how long it will be"..."still don't know"..."nope, still don't know"...
Some tasks take months, or even years, just to get a handle on.
I swear some software projects I've worked on have been like this: "We need a highway built through this unexplored jungle. We don't know the siz or shape of the jungle. Somewhere in there is probably at least on large river that you'll have to bridge, we don't know where, how deep, how wide. Might be some mountains too. There might be geographic fault lines, we're not sure. Might be quicksand. And did I mention the rodents of unusual size? Just a rumor. Maybe.
"Ok, so, before we get started, send out any explorers or anything, we need you to tell us exactly how long this highway will take to build."
According to TFA, the court did find that "the words 'Kill Mr. VanderMolen' and the accompanying graphic cannot be viewed as anything but an unequivocal, unconditional, immediate threat of injury specific as to the person threatened".
As far as I can see from the details given, the communication was stupid, rude, and tasteless, but also equivocal, conditional, and remote, and it's a marked stretch to declare this a "true threat". Any teacher who thinks students don't talk casually and jokingly about killing teachers, is detached from reality.
When I was in elementary school back in the idyllic 1970s, before Columbine, before violent videogames, before gangsta rap, etc., we had a little song: "Glory, glory hallelujah / Teacher hit me with ruler / Shot her with my little .44 / Now my teacher ain't a teacher any more."
Or how about, "On top of Old Smoky / All covered in blood / I shot my poor teacher / With a .44 gun / I went to her funeral / I went to her grave / Some people threw flowers / I threw a grenade".
Of course the names of our teachers could be substituted as appropriate (if it scanned).
Not to mention "Marijuana, marijuana / LSD, LSD / Scientists make it / Teachers take it / Why can't we, why can't we?"
I suppose any kid singing these now, would promptly be arrested and committed to a state institution for violent juvenile drug addicts.