The problem with the "Extreme PRogramming" suggestion is that you shouldn't need to do that. Everyone in the group does NOT need to know what I did yesterday, and what I'll do today.
This is probably true for a group, but certainly false for a team.
The problem I see is that while you may intend for the dailys to be short, there's a real potential for them to creep up and up.
That's why you do it as a stand-up meeting. Try it: no sitting, no leaning, just standing in a circle. If anybody complains about standing too long then tell them that it's their job to referee the meeting to make it shorter. It works fine for me; ours are ten minutes or so.
Too many meetings. Most employees don't like meetings, at least most employees that are productive.
I don't know that it's the number so much as whether the meetings are productive or not.
One of the tricks I really like from Extreme Programming is the daily stand-up meeting. It's a fast-paced status meeting where everybody gives a quick summary of what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and what they need help with. If people want to discuss something for more than about 30 seconds, they schedule something later with just the people involved. And as the title says, everybody must stand throughout, which keeps the pace lively. Generally they're 10 minutes or so.
There's a fine trick in another agile method, Scrum. Scrum, thinking of a ham-and-eggs breakfast, divides people into chickens and pigs. The chickens are involved in the project, but the pigs are committed. In a Scrum status meeting, chickens may attend, but only pigs can talk.
It can also help to forbid all distractions. If people are going to check out, then they should just leave and do something more productive.
No shit. They give themselves a statue for being smarter than anybody since Alan Turing? For Yahoo Mail? Sheesh.
Of course, I guess Google can read it as a compliment; since Gmail is, by all reports, better, I guess that means that Yahoo thinks the google people are smarter than Turing.
Maybe it's a secret plan to get Google engineers' heads to swell so much that they burst, splattering Google's curvy walls and free juice refrigerators with glial cells and overweening pride.
These children are living with their real parents. The fact that the semen came from some other guy's penis, whatever the motivation, seems like an infinitesimal part of the equation, unless you're worried about genetic diseases or something.
Not being in that situation, I can't say for sure. But a friend of mine recently tracked down her birth parents. Since she was adopted at birth, you'd think that it wouldn't matter a lot more. But it has meant a lot to her, and one multi-degreed friend of hers said, "Seeing them all together has really changed my views on the nature/nurture thing."
As I get older, I notice things about myself that would be completely mysterious had I not known my grandparents. One of them I never met, and I'll always wonder what things I'd gotten from his side of the family.
I love, love, love tcpdump and Ethereal. It's like an MRI for network issues. It has answered more WTF questions for me than anything else.
Similarly, strace and ltrace let me see what a program is up to on the local system, printing out a dump of every system or library call. Its invaluable when confronted with some mysterious error message: you can see exactly what the program was up to just before it barfed.
Why are you using hibernate? Just use standby, it barely takes any power as works just fine as long if you eventually dock it every night.
You answered your own question. Standby is just as good if I'm going to plug it in soon. There are many occasions when I can't plug it in or don't want to go to the trouble.
Technology should work for me, not the other way around. That's why most of my gear runs Linux. And once I'm done with the Windows project I'm working on, this laptop will run Linux, too.
Most of the haters seem to act as if Jobs personally took the time to kick their puppy. On the other hand, the people that love him don't seem to understand that he has serious personality flaws, and that he's just human.
Those are two sides of the same coin. Narcissistic Personality Disorder runs rampant in Silicon Valley, and to my mind Steve Jobs is exhibit A. His "reality distortion field" is legendary, but it's more accurately called an extraordinary ability to manipulate others. While it works, they love him. Eventually, when he screws them, their betrayed love turns to hate.
Having spent some time studying cults, I think it's exactly the same dynamic, but Jobs's talents are turned in a productive direction. I guess that's a step up, but the inmates-are-running-the-asylum aspect of this makes me a little nervous.
I think technically it would be illegal for Steve to barter a Pixar distribution deal for content for the Apple ITMS, as it would basically boil down to a conflict of interest.
Steve is responsible to both sets of share holders, and if he agreed to a give one for the other, he could possibly be robbing one set of share holders to give to the other.
It would certainly be a problem if he hid his conflict of interest, but that would be quite a trick. I think that as long as the two companies' boards approve the deal knowing that he negotiated both ends, it'd be legal. Whether it's wise is another question, of course.
They're a little vague on how they did the performance testing, but having just upgraded my new, similarly powered ThinkPad T42 from 512MB to 1.5 GB of RAM, that mostly fixed the performance problems I had.
However, there's one gotcha: There's a retarded Windows bug where machines with more than 1 GB of memory won't hibernate unless you close pretty much everything you have running. And with no source, I've just got to drum my fingers and hope that they'll one day fix it.
It could still be refused or delayed for valid technical reasons. But if Hans' comments on the list offend people to the point where they reject his huge contributions, that's worse for Linux than a few strongly worded posts on Reiser's part.
I agree that outright refusal of ReiserFS code would be a mistake. But neither do I think the jerkiness, which goes beyond mere strong words, is trivial.
The Linux kernel isn't just a complex bit of technology; it's also a complicated social mechanism. As a kernel user, I don't just want new features now; I want the platform to say viable for decades. Politeness is a social lubricant that reduces wear, and mutual respect repairs personal strain.
When I mentioned a leap of faith, I'm not talking about obviously false things (i.e. Santa Claus).
To the anti-theists I know, Christianity is as obviously false as Santa Claus.
You have to take a leap of faith. Either you somehow manage to believe that the universe created itself out of nothing and we popped out or you somehow manage to believe that there is this God that designed us with a purpose in a seemingly purposeless existence. It comes down to faith no matter how you slice it.
That's incorrect. There's a third option. I don't know how the universe started. I probably never will. That's ok by me; there are a lot of things I'll never know. Fantastic progress has been made in understanding the hows and whys of the world over the last few centuries, and I'll do what I can to keep that pace up.
Perhaps my great-great-great-great grandchildren will have unambiguous proof that one of our thousands of religions is right. Perhaps they'll have a scientific explanation and a vaccine for relgion the way we have one now for polio. They may have proof that we can never know either way. I'd love to find out, but I don't expect to, and I can live with that. No faith necessary.
Reading that thread, I'm not sure why. ReiserFS may be the bees' knees, but that's no excuse for that kind of behavior. Kernel style is kernel style; if Reiser thinks they should change kernel style, that's a reasonable thing to discuss, but the fuck-you-my-code's-better-than-your-crappy-code routine sure isn't the way to go about it.
securityfs - apparently another pseudo-filesystem that is meant to unify things that are being handled in different ways now.
DCCP - Datagram Congestion Control Protocol, apparently part-way between TCP and UDP, DCCP provides congestion control without TCP's reliability guarantees. Meant for streaming media, MMORPGs, and other apps that need UDPs timeliness but don't want to blindly flood links
Just a quick scan of pages, though, so I could be off on some of these.
The premise behind all "good science" is that God does not exist.
That's incorrect. Many good scientists are sincere Christians. Science is the search for for natural explanations for natural phenomena. For things not yet explained by science, science only says that they are not yet explained, nothing more.
ID is not theology.
The hypothesis that natural phenomenon X (e.g., evolution of blood clotting) is not only currently unexplained but also essentially unexplainable for all time is a scientific hypothesis. But it's one with, so far, no solid evidence. The fervent promotion of a dubious hypothesis as if it were as good as a deeply supported theory certainly isn't science. Since it's not, what do we call it? Well, when people are promoting unscientific ideas about what God did and didn't do, that sounds like theology to me.
Either one could very well be the case, but hardcore evolutionists manage to say that God does not exist. Is this a leap of faith? hell yes! This is atheology at it's finest.
I don't know any hardcore evolutionists who say that God does not exist, not in the sense you're suggesting. (I also know hardcore evolutionists who are also dedicated Christians, but that may be a bit beside the point.) Either you or the unnamed people you refer to are confusing the absence of proof with a proof of absence. Nobody can prove that God (or Santa Claus, or Kali, or Cthulu) doesn't exist.
Even the most rabid anti-theists I know (and Dawkins is a fine example) happily admit that Kali could be running the whole show. However, they feel that since there's no real evidence for it and that a lot of religious dogma has been proved false by the march of science, that they think the whole lot is claptrap and not worth anybody's time. That's not a leap of faith: they're saying, "Hey, this is my best guess, and I'm going to live my life based on that until there's hard data that makes me rethink things."
Ask yourself: is it a leap of faith to say that there's no Tooth Fairy, no Easter Bunny? How big is your faith that Zeus is just a colorful story, that Sherlock Holmes isn't real, that there isn't an invisible unicorn reading this over your shoulder? There are an infinite number of things you just don't believe in, with no giant leap of faith required. For most atheists, the Judeo-Christian god is just one more of those.
I think there should be a definate emphasis here that the US isn't in a dabate now over science in general, it's a debate about teaching controversial science in the classroom.
I disagree. The evolution that gets taught in high school isn't controversial science, and intelligent design isn't science at all; it's theology.
There are all sorts of interesting controversies in evolutionary biology, just as some of the most interesting problems in theoretical physics relate to gravity. But there's no more controversy about what gets taught at the high school level for one than for the other, and the core of both evolution and gravity are well established.
Even there, they're lacking. The "Star Wars" missle defense efforts have been dodging rigorous field testing in a way that makes it clear that political appearances are much more important than truth or success.
They'll warp the laws to a viewpoint no one's held in 2,000 years - there's been progress since then, but they don't want it.
Don't exaggerate. There are plenty of people with viewpoints like that. The Taliban are a great example. It's just a viewpoint that civilized, reasonable people haven't held in centuries.
the idea is that you should never have to edit the generated code.
Yes. We agree completely. I would more call that a compiler than a code generator, but we agree on the essence.
Also, I have found autogenerated documentation can be quite good.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm a big fan of Javadoc, POD, and the like. But that's handwritten documenation that a tool transforms. The only difference is that the doc source isin the program source. I was referring to tools that purport generate the documenation for you. Many Java IDEs (like Eclipse) do this, generating Javadoc stubs with auto-inferred information.
Tools like that are worse than useless. The programmers who wouldn't have written docs anyhow leave them there to clutter the code and get out of date.
Ruby on Rails is taking the OSS world by storm right now, and from what I can see it's all about "generated code".
Really? I haven't used it yet, but from what I've read I thought that it got its mojo through smart default behavior and careful introspection, not by generating reams of code for you to edit.
By reducing the total amount of hand-written code, you increase the expressiveness of the code that people do write. Since the biggest problem with code generation is a decrease in expressiveness, it would seem like RoR is headed in just the opposite direction.
I often end up reviewing or working on code from other people, and I couldn't agree more about his dislike of generated code.
Note that there are two sorts: the kind you never edit and the kind you have to edit. I love compilers, as they generate machine code so well that you never should have to look at it. But programs that generate source code or, even worse, documentation, are things I revile. They let an amateur get quick results, but at a drastic reduction in long-term maintainability. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
In the article, he mentions that IntelliSense encourages bottom-up programming, as it can only give hints for existing code. That's less true about IntelliJ's excellent Java editor IDEA (and I think Eclipse too, but it has been a while). Why? Because if you write a method call that doesn't exist, you can hit alt-enter and it will create the method for you. As somebody who likes both top-down and bottom-up approaches depending on circumstance, I think it balances things out nicely.
Flash is for Homestar Runner, not overdesigned menu sets and half-implmeneted-and-mostly-broken re-implementations of things that are already built into HTML such as the button and the scroll bar.
It doesn't make useless sites workable, but if you just want to stop being annoyed by intrusive multimedia, there's a great solution.
However, don't forget that time (deadlines) is just one part of a triumvirate of quality, time, and features.
I disagree strongly. You ignore cost, and quality isn't really an independent lever except in the very short term.
As you say elsewhere in your post, reduced quality can get you very short term improvements in features. But the long-term cost is horrific. It's why most long-lived projects either have terrible productivity or go through big rewrites, or both.
Having tried it a variety of ways, I favor the Extreme Programming approach: treat quality as a constant, set high. Make scope and time the main tradeoff. When that's insufficient, consider spending more money (on, e.g., people, services, or tools). But never let quality dip unless you already have time and budget 100% committed for repair or replacement of the low-quality code.
Reducing quality is like putting things on your credit card. Unless you pay it off promptly, you will soon be in a world of hurt, paying massive interest, courting bankruptcy, and making no progress on the things that matter to you.
This is not so much a programmer problem but just a business problem; also known as a people problem. [...] There is no right or wrong answer only the relationships you have to deal with.
I agree that this is a people problem, but I think there are specific solutions that work well in programming environments. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the planning approaches I've stolen from Scrum and Extreme Programming:
Get everybody who wants work out of you together for a meeting
Break the work down into independent chunks no more than a few days in length
Make the suits order them by priority
Every week, take a week's worth off the stack and do them, keeping track of how much you get done
As often as necessary, have another planning meeting where the suits reorder the cards based on how long your measurements indicate things will take
By agreeing to do whatever they want in whatever order they desire, you appear flexible and willing. But this is also a sneaky way to get them to reconcile the fact that they want more than can be reasonably gotten done. Personally I like doing this with one index card for each chunk of work and an estimate in days on each card. That way you can just hand them the stack of cards and say, "Ok! Put these in order of importance and I'll get to work on the top ones right away."
This has worked for me pretty much every time I've tried it. My life is much less stressful now.
I'm not usually one to complain about the age of articles on Slashdot, but I first read about the Long Now project in a Wired cover story published in 1998. Perhaps the article submitter didn't know about it until now, but this is far from a new project.
I think if Slashdot can cover Linus's every burst of indigestion and Microsoft's every scary move, it seems reasonable to check in on the Clock of the Long Now every decade or so. Especially since there is actual news: Discover just put the clock on the cover because the Long Now just completed the display of the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the "Extreme PRogramming" suggestion is that you shouldn't need to do that. Everyone in the group does NOT need to know what I did yesterday, and what I'll do today.
This is probably true for a group, but certainly false for a team.
The problem I see is that while you may intend for the dailys to be short, there's a real potential for them to creep up and up.
That's why you do it as a stand-up meeting. Try it: no sitting, no leaning, just standing in a circle. If anybody complains about standing too long then tell them that it's their job to referee the meeting to make it shorter. It works fine for me; ours are ten minutes or so.
Too many meetings. Most employees don't like meetings, at least most employees that are productive.
I don't know that it's the number so much as whether the meetings are productive or not.
One of the tricks I really like from Extreme Programming is the daily stand-up meeting. It's a fast-paced status meeting where everybody gives a quick summary of what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and what they need help with. If people want to discuss something for more than about 30 seconds, they schedule something later with just the people involved. And as the title says, everybody must stand throughout, which keeps the pace lively. Generally they're 10 minutes or so.
There's a fine trick in another agile method, Scrum. Scrum, thinking of a ham-and-eggs breakfast, divides people into chickens and pigs. The chickens are involved in the project, but the pigs are committed. In a Scrum status meeting, chickens may attend, but only pigs can talk.
It can also help to forbid all distractions. If people are going to check out, then they should just leave and do something more productive.
Hubris.
No shit. They give themselves a statue for being smarter than anybody since Alan Turing? For Yahoo Mail? Sheesh.
Of course, I guess Google can read it as a compliment; since Gmail is, by all reports, better, I guess that means that Yahoo thinks the google people are smarter than Turing.
Maybe it's a secret plan to get Google engineers' heads to swell so much that they burst, splattering Google's curvy walls and free juice refrigerators with glial cells and overweening pride.
These children are living with their real parents. The fact that the semen came from some other guy's penis, whatever the motivation, seems like an infinitesimal part of the equation, unless you're worried about genetic diseases or something.
Not being in that situation, I can't say for sure. But a friend of mine recently tracked down her birth parents. Since she was adopted at birth, you'd think that it wouldn't matter a lot more. But it has meant a lot to her, and one multi-degreed friend of hers said, "Seeing them all together has really changed my views on the nature/nurture thing."
As I get older, I notice things about myself that would be completely mysterious had I not known my grandparents. One of them I never met, and I'll always wonder what things I'd gotten from his side of the family.
I love, love, love tcpdump and Ethereal. It's like an MRI for network issues. It has answered more WTF questions for me than anything else.
Similarly, strace and ltrace let me see what a program is up to on the local system, printing out a dump of every system or library call. Its invaluable when confronted with some mysterious error message: you can see exactly what the program was up to just before it barfed.
Why are you using hibernate? Just use standby, it barely takes any power as works just fine as long if you eventually dock it every night.
You answered your own question. Standby is just as good if I'm going to plug it in soon. There are many occasions when I can't plug it in or don't want to go to the trouble.
Technology should work for me, not the other way around. That's why most of my gear runs Linux. And once I'm done with the Windows project I'm working on, this laptop will run Linux, too.
Most of the haters seem to act as if Jobs personally took the time to kick their puppy. On the other hand, the people that love him don't seem to understand that he has serious personality flaws, and that he's just human.
Those are two sides of the same coin. Narcissistic Personality Disorder runs rampant in Silicon Valley, and to my mind Steve Jobs is exhibit A. His "reality distortion field" is legendary, but it's more accurately called an extraordinary ability to manipulate others. While it works, they love him. Eventually, when he screws them, their betrayed love turns to hate.
Having spent some time studying cults, I think it's exactly the same dynamic, but Jobs's talents are turned in a productive direction. I guess that's a step up, but the inmates-are-running-the-asylum aspect of this makes me a little nervous.
I think technically it would be illegal for Steve to barter a Pixar distribution deal for content for the Apple ITMS, as it would basically boil down to a conflict of interest.
Steve is responsible to both sets of share holders, and if he agreed to a give one for the other, he could possibly be robbing one set of share holders to give to the other.
It would certainly be a problem if he hid his conflict of interest, but that would be quite a trick. I think that as long as the two companies' boards approve the deal knowing that he negotiated both ends, it'd be legal. Whether it's wise is another question, of course.
They're a little vague on how they did the performance testing, but having just upgraded my new, similarly powered ThinkPad T42 from 512MB to 1.5 GB of RAM, that mostly fixed the performance problems I had.
However, there's one gotcha: There's a retarded Windows bug where machines with more than 1 GB of memory won't hibernate unless you close pretty much everything you have running. And with no source, I've just got to drum my fingers and hope that they'll one day fix it.
It could still be refused or delayed for valid technical reasons. But if Hans' comments on the list offend people to the point where they reject his huge contributions, that's worse for Linux than a few strongly worded posts on Reiser's part.
I agree that outright refusal of ReiserFS code would be a mistake. But neither do I think the jerkiness, which goes beyond mere strong words, is trivial.
The Linux kernel isn't just a complex bit of technology; it's also a complicated social mechanism. As a kernel user, I don't just want new features now; I want the platform to say viable for decades. Politeness is a social lubricant that reduces wear, and mutual respect repairs personal strain.
When I mentioned a leap of faith, I'm not talking about obviously false things (i.e. Santa Claus).
To the anti-theists I know, Christianity is as obviously false as Santa Claus.
You have to take a leap of faith. Either you somehow manage to believe that the universe created itself out of nothing and we popped out or you somehow manage to believe that there is this God that designed us with a purpose in a seemingly purposeless existence. It comes down to faith no matter how you slice it.
That's incorrect. There's a third option. I don't know how the universe started. I probably never will. That's ok by me; there are a lot of things I'll never know. Fantastic progress has been made in understanding the hows and whys of the world over the last few centuries, and I'll do what I can to keep that pace up.
Perhaps my great-great-great-great grandchildren will have unambiguous proof that one of our thousands of religions is right. Perhaps they'll have a scientific explanation and a vaccine for relgion the way we have one now for polio. They may have proof that we can never know either way. I'd love to find out, but I don't expect to, and I can live with that. No faith necessary.
and I'm not blaming Hans.
Reading that thread, I'm not sure why. ReiserFS may be the bees' knees, but that's no excuse for that kind of behavior. Kernel style is kernel style; if Reiser thinks they should change kernel style, that's a reasonable thing to discuss, but the fuck-you-my-code's-better-than-your-crappy-code routine sure isn't the way to go about it.
Just a quick scan of pages, though, so I could be off on some of these.
I again disagree.
The premise behind all "good science" is that God does not exist.
That's incorrect. Many good scientists are sincere Christians. Science is the search for for natural explanations for natural phenomena. For things not yet explained by science, science only says that they are not yet explained, nothing more.
ID is not theology.
The hypothesis that natural phenomenon X (e.g., evolution of blood clotting) is not only currently unexplained but also essentially unexplainable for all time is a scientific hypothesis. But it's one with, so far, no solid evidence. The fervent promotion of a dubious hypothesis as if it were as good as a deeply supported theory certainly isn't science. Since it's not, what do we call it? Well, when people are promoting unscientific ideas about what God did and didn't do, that sounds like theology to me.
Either one could very well be the case, but hardcore evolutionists manage to say that God does not exist. Is this a leap of faith? hell yes! This is atheology at it's finest.
I don't know any hardcore evolutionists who say that God does not exist, not in the sense you're suggesting. (I also know hardcore evolutionists who are also dedicated Christians, but that may be a bit beside the point.) Either you or the unnamed people you refer to are confusing the absence of proof with a proof of absence. Nobody can prove that God (or Santa Claus, or Kali, or Cthulu) doesn't exist.
Even the most rabid anti-theists I know (and Dawkins is a fine example) happily admit that Kali could be running the whole show. However, they feel that since there's no real evidence for it and that a lot of religious dogma has been proved false by the march of science, that they think the whole lot is claptrap and not worth anybody's time. That's not a leap of faith: they're saying, "Hey, this is my best guess, and I'm going to live my life based on that until there's hard data that makes me rethink things."
Ask yourself: is it a leap of faith to say that there's no Tooth Fairy, no Easter Bunny? How big is your faith that Zeus is just a colorful story, that Sherlock Holmes isn't real, that there isn't an invisible unicorn reading this over your shoulder? There are an infinite number of things you just don't believe in, with no giant leap of faith required. For most atheists, the Judeo-Christian god is just one more of those.
I think there should be a definate emphasis here that the US isn't in a dabate now over science in general, it's a debate about teaching controversial science in the classroom.
I disagree. The evolution that gets taught in high school isn't controversial science, and intelligent design isn't science at all; it's theology.
There are all sorts of interesting controversies in evolutionary biology, just as some of the most interesting problems in theoretical physics relate to gravity. But there's no more controversy about what gets taught at the high school level for one than for the other, and the core of both evolution and gravity are well established.
weapons development is science
Even there, they're lacking. The "Star Wars" missle defense efforts have been dodging rigorous field testing in a way that makes it clear that political appearances are much more important than truth or success.
They'll warp the laws to a viewpoint no one's held in 2,000 years - there's been progress since then, but they don't want it.
Don't exaggerate. There are plenty of people with viewpoints like that. The Taliban are a great example. It's just a viewpoint that civilized, reasonable people haven't held in centuries.
the idea is that you should never have to edit the generated code.
Yes. We agree completely. I would more call that a compiler than a code generator, but we agree on the essence.
Also, I have found autogenerated documentation can be quite good.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm a big fan of Javadoc, POD, and the like. But that's handwritten documenation that a tool transforms. The only difference is that the doc source isin the program source. I was referring to tools that purport generate the documenation for you. Many Java IDEs (like Eclipse) do this, generating Javadoc stubs with auto-inferred information.
Tools like that are worse than useless. The programmers who wouldn't have written docs anyhow leave them there to clutter the code and get out of date.
Ruby on Rails is taking the OSS world by storm right now, and from what I can see it's all about "generated code".
Really? I haven't used it yet, but from what I've read I thought that it got its mojo through smart default behavior and careful introspection, not by generating reams of code for you to edit.
By reducing the total amount of hand-written code, you increase the expressiveness of the code that people do write. Since the biggest problem with code generation is a decrease in expressiveness, it would seem like RoR is headed in just the opposite direction.
I often end up reviewing or working on code from other people, and I couldn't agree more about his dislike of generated code.
Note that there are two sorts: the kind you never edit and the kind you have to edit. I love compilers, as they generate machine code so well that you never should have to look at it. But programs that generate source code or, even worse, documentation, are things I revile. They let an amateur get quick results, but at a drastic reduction in long-term maintainability. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
In the article, he mentions that IntelliSense encourages bottom-up programming, as it can only give hints for existing code. That's less true about IntelliJ's excellent Java editor IDEA (and I think Eclipse too, but it has been a while). Why? Because if you write a method call that doesn't exist, you can hit alt-enter and it will create the method for you. As somebody who likes both top-down and bottom-up approaches depending on circumstance, I think it balances things out nicely.
Flash is for Homestar Runner, not overdesigned menu sets and half-implmeneted-and-mostly-broken re-implementations of things that are already built into HTML such as the button and the scroll bar.
It doesn't make useless sites workable, but if you just want to stop being annoyed by intrusive multimedia, there's a great solution.
However, don't forget that time (deadlines) is just one part of a triumvirate of quality, time, and features.
I disagree strongly. You ignore cost, and quality isn't really an independent lever except in the very short term.
As you say elsewhere in your post, reduced quality can get you very short term improvements in features. But the long-term cost is horrific. It's why most long-lived projects either have terrible productivity or go through big rewrites, or both.
Having tried it a variety of ways, I favor the Extreme Programming approach: treat quality as a constant, set high. Make scope and time the main tradeoff. When that's insufficient, consider spending more money (on, e.g., people, services, or tools). But never let quality dip unless you already have time and budget 100% committed for repair or replacement of the low-quality code.
Reducing quality is like putting things on your credit card. Unless you pay it off promptly, you will soon be in a world of hurt, paying massive interest, courting bankruptcy, and making no progress on the things that matter to you.
I agree that this is a people problem, but I think there are specific solutions that work well in programming environments. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the planning approaches I've stolen from Scrum and Extreme Programming:
By agreeing to do whatever they want in whatever order they desire, you appear flexible and willing. But this is also a sneaky way to get them to reconcile the fact that they want more than can be reasonably gotten done. Personally I like doing this with one index card for each chunk of work and an estimate in days on each card. That way you can just hand them the stack of cards and say, "Ok! Put these in order of importance and I'll get to work on the top ones right away."
This has worked for me pretty much every time I've tried it. My life is much less stressful now.
I'm not usually one to complain about the age of articles on Slashdot, but I first read about the Long Now project in a Wired cover story published in 1998. Perhaps the article submitter didn't know about it until now, but this is far from a new project.
I think if Slashdot can cover Linus's every burst of indigestion and Microsoft's every scary move, it seems reasonable to check in on the Clock of the Long Now every decade or so. Especially since there is actual news: Discover just put the clock on the cover because the Long Now just completed the display of the solar system.