You can get almost all of that bandwidth in a phone call. "Tele"-commuting means tele"-communications. Whiteboarding is good too.
Some, perhaps. But nothing close to all.
I work in the style of various Agile methods, including the unfortunately named Extreme Programming. This involves close team development.
One great benefit is intentional communication. Turning to the guy at the next desk to ask a question is still an order of magnitude easier than even the shiniest phone. And the bandwidth is still a lot higher; on the phone you lose expression and posture, to say nothing of the ability to hand you something.
But just as important is the unintentional communication. If the pair next to me is having trouble with something that I know about, then I can just pipe up. If I'm making a decision that affects them, they can put their two cents in without me having to call a meeting.
Sitting in the same room with my team gives me a great deal of information about the state of the project for free. Getting the same info by telephone or email is much, much harder.
If someone is not producing good documentation, they are a long-term drain on the organization and should be dumped. Just a rule of thumb, of course, but an important one.
Alternatively, perhaps it's the organization that develops in a way that requires a lot of paperwork that is a long-term drain and should be dumped.
Documentation is a method of communication. We communicate so we can develop with speed and accuracy. But documentation isn't the only way to do that, or even the best one.
When documentation is necessary, I use it. (And as a published writer, I even think it's fun.) But it's never my first choice.
That's a plausible theory. If writing documentation were as easy as talking to the guy at the next desk, your theory would even be true.
Alas, when writing, you have to guess every question anybody would ask, and then guess at what their experience and knowledge is, so that you can then guess at the right answer. And even if you guess right three times in a row, writing good docs takes much longer than chatting in the hall.
Human conversation has massive bandwidth and low latency. Really good documentation can be a close second. But most people write shitty documentation.
(Note to lame programmers: the fact that documentation sucks isn't a reason to write crappy code. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that a human can understand.")
there is increasing evidence of correlation between ADHD and bipolar disorder
You have any cites on this? I'd certainly believe it, but I'd love to read the studies.
For a great book on the topic of creativity and mental illness, read Touched With Fire. It looks at the Romantic-era poets and concludes that bipolar disorder (and its little brother, cyclothymia) ran in the families of many of them and a lot of modern creative people, too.
Do you mean this is still possible at the age of 22 aswell? I have said problems, and though I can think of at least one other cause (weed), I've had these problems long before I started smoking. Do you suggest I get tested? And how should I go about that?
Getting shit done is complicated; all sorts of problems could cause you to not live up to your potential. A sharp professional will be able to help a lot. Unfortunately, finding a sharp professional is hard; there are a lot of idiot psychiatrists and counsellors out there. I encourage you to take the time to find one.
But ADHD does certainly persist into adulthood for some people. If the symptoms ring a bell, go buy the book Driven to Distraction. Somewhere in there there's a list of 100 questions you can ask yourself. It's not a diagnostic test or anything, but for me, a bunch of the questions (and many other things in the book) rang a bell, a big, massive, liberty-bell-sized bell. If you have the same experience, absolutely talk to somebody who specialized in ADHD. If you can find somebody who specializes in adult ADHD, even better; if not, be prepared for a waiting room with a lot of small chairs and copies of Highlights.
If you want to talk about it more, you're welcome to email me at the obvious address (my name at my web site).
The other side of this, though, is that the majority of people aren't online yet and this idea that a company couldn't survive without a 'net presence smacks of elitism.
It's not very elite anymore: According to something I heard on NPR this evening: 60% of americans have used the Internet in the last week. (Here in the SF Bay area, it's 75%.)
For some reason ADHD is diagnosed in the United States significantly more than any other country in the world.
Note that the United States was settled by a bunch of people who decided that they just couldn't sit still, who were so excited by new opportunity or so fed up with where they were that they made a big leap into the unknown.
It's no shock to me at all that the US has a lot more ADHD; every ADHD person I know loves to travel.
Even though she has been diagnosed with ADHD by a doctor, I question giving drugs to "correct" the behavior of such an individual. I don't know what long term effects drugs like the dreaded "r" have, but I'd be afraid of neutering my child with such drugs if I found they had a high IQ.
This is a reasonable fear to have; around my house we would jokingly refer to Ritalin as the "zombie worker bee pill".
But for me, Ritalin was immensely helpful in helping me to put all my smarts to use. Growing up, I was deeply frustrated at how little I got done: I started a million things, and finished about two. I had a long string of report cards that talked about the great gap between my potential and what I actually accomplished. Ritalin (and the other ADHD drugs I tried) allowed me to actually focus on something in a normal way, which was a revelation.
Unfortunately, I didn't get diagnosed until college, so I had 18 years of bad habits and self-esteem issues to unwind. If I could wave a magic wand, I would change things so that I could have tried Ritalin (and other ADHD meds) intermittently from an early age (e.g., a week on, a week off). I really value the saltative way my ADHD-flavored brain works, but it was only the addition of some drug-induced mundane habits that let me really flower.
I took Ritalin, and I went from a 2.0 to a 3.0. It obviously worked.
Don't get me wrong: I think Ritalin can be very helpful to people with ADHD; it sure helped me. But it doesn't work the other way around: improved performance while on Ritalin does not mean that you have ADHD. Ritalin (and other stimulants, like caffeine) improve academic performance for everybody.
Agreed. Let me also add that several of the drugs that are effective for some people with ADHD aren't stimulants at all. Welbutrin is one. And even the best drugs aren't a whole answer; you have to change a lot of things about your life.
Personally, I tried five or six drugs for ADHD, and they all had their benefits. For me, though, the main benefit was experiencing other ways to be. I haven't tried any of the medications in years, but the intermittent experience of having a more normal attention span really helped me see how to achieve a lot of the benefits without drugs.
I'd also strongly encourage people with ADHD to try meditation and yoga. (And when I say yoga, I don't mean american-style "power yoga" with an areobics instructor looking for the latest fad. It should be the slow, peaceful, but intense kind.)
Also, I found the book Driven to Distraction to be the best book on the topic; it's written by a professional psychiatrist who also had ADHD. The first time I read it blew me away: suddenly a number of seemingly unrelated things in my life fell into a pattern.
Software should not, with few exceptions perhaps, be a service.
That's a reasonable thing to say. Of course, it's also reasonable to want your software to be kept current. And it's also reasonable to say that if it turns out you don't need a product, it sucks to have paid a lot of money for it. Alas, these notions, individually reasonable, don't go together.
Personally, I'm pretty fed up with the way a lot of companies, especially Microsoft, try to keep people on the upgrade treadmill. And I never know what to do for expensive programs that I know I'll use rarely: if I could pay $5/day for Photoshop the two times a year I really need it, I would. And I'm sick to death with the marketing bullshit used to trick people into laying out a lot of money for what turns out to be crappy software.
Usage-based pricing and subscription pricing can better align the interests of companies and of programmers. It's not a panacea, and it doesn't suit everybody, but you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
It may be costly, but it is still easy and ultimately cheaper proportionally than changing a bridge.
And getting easier and cheaper. With techniques like refactoring, you can significantly flatten the cost-of-change curve.
Software also wins big because our tools and "materials" are advancing much more rapidly than physical tools and materials are. Component-based software also helps; bridge-builders can borrow ideas from one another, but they can't just copy 95% of somebody else's bridge and add on a couple new entry ramps.
If you're creating something new "almost every time", you are doing something terribly wrong.
The way I look at it, if you are creating the same thing every time, you should teach a computer to do it. Computers are good at boring, repetitive actions; humans are good at figuring new things out. We should take advantage of that: good developers should strive to be doing as much new stuff as possible.
But I agree completely that the problems in software development are mainly people problems, not technical ones.
StringBuffers should be used unless features of String are needed
Better still, use the Writer or the OutputStream. If you're just using a StringBuffer to pile up output before sending it, it's better for your CPU and your RAM usage if you just write the stuff out.
The main problem I see with OO systems is that they have been put forward as a panacea to all software woes, when in fact they also bring some of there own problems to the party(see MFC for details). The OO paradigm has been oversold over the years in the detriment of other ways of working
Last time I used MS stuff (which was admittedly a few years back) I concluded they wouldn't know an object if it bit them on the ass. I hear the C# stuff is better, though. The Java people have also improved; their early APIs weren't very object oriented, but they're getting better.
Unfortunately, generations of programmers (and worse, managers) have been mislead into thinking that using an OO language means you're doing OO. The magic of OO is mainly in the analysis and design. Done right, the productivity gains are stunning.
Personally, I think good OO code is the optimal modelling language. Done right, the code should end up being easily readable:
SlashdotPost post = new SlashdotPost(request);
if (post.validate()) {
story.addPost(post);
return new PostSubmittedPage(post);
} else {
return new PostEditPage(post);
}
People who think that a phone book of UML diagrams and user-written specs are enough to produce code are generally fooling themselves. And if the spec does have all the information needed to produce the code, then somebody should just write a compiler for it and let the programmers go do something interesting.
Re:Green is not the real color...
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 2
Strong environmental laws do NOT fit within a capitalist system.
A bold assertion, unmarred by actual facts. Perhaps once you have some, you could come back and address my point.
As a start, try learning about negative externalities, which any market economy needs to address somehow. Any good economics class should address this. Hint: you can't just pretend they don't exist.
Or heck, you could try moving next door to a third-world, coal-fired steel plant and see if you think that a well-educated marketplace is enough to make people buy their steel from other plants. That would give you some facts, too, even if you wouldn't be able to use them for nearly as long.
Hey dude, I'm sure you haven't noticed, but the economy is WRECKED.
Eh?
Last I looked, we just came out of a mild, mild recession with unemployment rates that are still much better than Europe. GDP is forcast to increase circa 3% this year.
The main thing that's going on is that we're still working off the hangover from the big dot-com party. Hopefully this will teach us a little caution about wild parties.
Re:Recycling Paper Is Harmful
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 2
As with any Slashdot poster, I've have to figure out if you're a reasonable, thoughtful person, or just a frothing lunatic. Any guesses what posts like this make me think?
Re:Green is not the real color...
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 2
And you think that the once every four year inspections are what keeps your food safe? [...] What keeps food safe is the fact that a company who poisons someone is going to have to pay them for the liability
You have pretty obviously never worked in a restaurant.
Re:Green is not the real color...
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 2
Anyway, yeah, anyone who wants to open a restaurant can either have smoking ban, or allow their customers to smoke. you don't like it, don't go there
You oppose libertarians because you oppose liberty-- you want to decide what people can do and not let them make their own choices, and that's fascist. Oh, and you're a liar.
If you actually supported human rights, you'd vote libertarian, its the only party that does support them.
Hi! I like the Libertarians, and I agree with a lot of what they have to say. I would be inclined to vote for them once they have stopped running quite so many goofballs for office (e.g., the guy who turned himself blue.
But frothing like this is only hurting them. Your views are so crashingly unsubtle that you'd have a hard time persuading me to get out of a burning building, let alone voting for someone.
Take the smoking ban, for example. The standard Libertarian line is that your right to swing your fist ends somewhere near my nose. So suppose I go into your favorite bar and start blowing asbestos fibers into the air. Who's liberty is more important? Mine to blow asbestos fibers into the air? Or yours to keep living?
Note that nobody is saying, even in California, you can't consume all the nicotine that you want; you're just not allowed to do it in a way that interferes with others' health and enjoyment of their meals.
Re:Green is not the real color...
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Green" is just another word for "Communist"
That depends on the Green. But strong environmental laws fit perfectly well with a capitalist agenda.
How? Consider air pollution. Air is something that we all own. If I build an incinerator for waste disposal, what I'm really doing is selling a decrease in quality of your air. Should I be allowed to do that?
If the answer is yes, then clearly I should have to pay for it. Otherwise we're faced with that classic economic problem, a tragedy of the commons. Of course, some Greens say, "No! No pollution, ever," which is a bit silly. And others say, "Well, ok, but we must regulate."
Other Greens, though, favor market-based mechanisms, like carbon taxes and tradable pollution permits. This is a kind of environmentalism that Adam Smith would like; instead of taxing things that people should do (like earning income) we can tax people for things they shouldn't do (like emitting the particles that contribute to asthma).
Slashdot Mirror
You can get almost all of that bandwidth in a phone call. "Tele"-commuting means tele"-communications. Whiteboarding is good too.
Some, perhaps. But nothing close to all.
I work in the style of various Agile methods, including the unfortunately named Extreme Programming. This involves close team development.
One great benefit is intentional communication. Turning to the guy at the next desk to ask a question is still an order of magnitude easier than even the shiniest phone. And the bandwidth is still a lot higher; on the phone you lose expression and posture, to say nothing of the ability to hand you something.
But just as important is the unintentional communication. If the pair next to me is having trouble with something that I know about, then I can just pipe up. If I'm making a decision that affects them, they can put their two cents in without me having to call a meeting.
Sitting in the same room with my team gives me a great deal of information about the state of the project for free. Getting the same info by telephone or email is much, much harder.
If someone is not producing good documentation, they are a long-term drain on the organization and should be dumped. Just a rule of thumb, of course, but an important one.
Alternatively, perhaps it's the organization that develops in a way that requires a lot of paperwork that is a long-term drain and should be dumped.
Documentation is a method of communication. We communicate so we can develop with speed and accuracy. But documentation isn't the only way to do that, or even the best one.
When documentation is necessary, I use it. (And as a published writer, I even think it's fun.) But it's never my first choice.
That's a plausible theory. If writing documentation were as easy as talking to the guy at the next desk, your theory would even be true.
Alas, when writing, you have to guess every question anybody would ask, and then guess at what their experience and knowledge is, so that you can then guess at the right answer. And even if you guess right three times in a row, writing good docs takes much longer than chatting in the hall.
Human conversation has massive bandwidth and low latency. Really good documentation can be a close second. But most people write shitty documentation.
(Note to lame programmers: the fact that documentation sucks isn't a reason to write crappy code. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that a human can understand.")
In 2029 $10.000 may allow you to buy a bag of dog food... maybe a couple of sandwiches.
As the rules say, the money is invested between the placing of the bet and the payoff. So it's $10,000 plus 25 years of compound interest.
The study, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil have bet $20,000 on whether a computer will pass the Turing Test by 2029.
You sissy. Real men mine the ore, extract the metals, and make their own wire. And then for the LEDs...
there is increasing evidence of correlation between ADHD and bipolar disorder
You have any cites on this? I'd certainly believe it, but I'd love to read the studies.
For a great book on the topic of creativity and mental illness, read Touched With Fire. It looks at the Romantic-era poets and concludes that bipolar disorder (and its little brother, cyclothymia) ran in the families of many of them and a lot of modern creative people, too.
Do you mean this is still possible at the age of 22 aswell? I have said problems, and though I can think of at least one other cause (weed), I've had these problems long before I started smoking. Do you suggest I get tested? And how should I go about that?
Getting shit done is complicated; all sorts of problems could cause you to not live up to your potential. A sharp professional will be able to help a lot. Unfortunately, finding a sharp professional is hard; there are a lot of idiot psychiatrists and counsellors out there. I encourage you to take the time to find one.
But ADHD does certainly persist into adulthood for some people. If the symptoms ring a bell, go buy the book Driven to Distraction. Somewhere in there there's a list of 100 questions you can ask yourself. It's not a diagnostic test or anything, but for me, a bunch of the questions (and many other things in the book) rang a bell, a big, massive, liberty-bell-sized bell. If you have the same experience, absolutely talk to somebody who specialized in ADHD. If you can find somebody who specializes in adult ADHD, even better; if not, be prepared for a waiting room with a lot of small chairs and copies of Highlights.
If you want to talk about it more, you're welcome to email me at the obvious address (my name at my web site).
The other side of this, though, is that the majority of people aren't online yet and this idea that a company couldn't survive without a 'net presence smacks of elitism.
It's not very elite anymore: According to something I heard on NPR this evening: 60% of americans have used the Internet in the last week. (Here in the SF Bay area, it's 75%.)
For some reason ADHD is diagnosed in the United States significantly more than any other country in the world.
Note that the United States was settled by a bunch of people who decided that they just couldn't sit still, who were so excited by new opportunity or so fed up with where they were that they made a big leap into the unknown.
It's no shock to me at all that the US has a lot more ADHD; every ADHD person I know loves to travel.
Even though she has been diagnosed with ADHD by a doctor, I question giving drugs to "correct" the behavior of such an individual. I don't know what long term effects drugs like the dreaded "r" have, but I'd be afraid of neutering my child with such drugs if I found they had a high IQ.
This is a reasonable fear to have; around my house we would jokingly refer to Ritalin as the "zombie worker bee pill".
But for me, Ritalin was immensely helpful in helping me to put all my smarts to use. Growing up, I was deeply frustrated at how little I got done: I started a million things, and finished about two. I had a long string of report cards that talked about the great gap between my potential and what I actually accomplished. Ritalin (and the other ADHD drugs I tried) allowed me to actually focus on something in a normal way, which was a revelation.
Unfortunately, I didn't get diagnosed until college, so I had 18 years of bad habits and self-esteem issues to unwind. If I could wave a magic wand, I would change things so that I could have tried Ritalin (and other ADHD meds) intermittently from an early age (e.g., a week on, a week off). I really value the saltative way my ADHD-flavored brain works, but it was only the addition of some drug-induced mundane habits that let me really flower.
I took Ritalin, and I went from a 2.0 to a 3.0. It obviously worked.
Don't get me wrong: I think Ritalin can be very helpful to people with ADHD; it sure helped me. But it doesn't work the other way around: improved performance while on Ritalin does not mean that you have ADHD. Ritalin (and other stimulants, like caffeine) improve academic performance for everybody.
Agreed. Let me also add that several of the drugs that are effective for some people with ADHD aren't stimulants at all. Welbutrin is one. And even the best drugs aren't a whole answer; you have to change a lot of things about your life.
Personally, I tried five or six drugs for ADHD, and they all had their benefits. For me, though, the main benefit was experiencing other ways to be. I haven't tried any of the medications in years, but the intermittent experience of having a more normal attention span really helped me see how to achieve a lot of the benefits without drugs.
I'd also strongly encourage people with ADHD to try meditation and yoga. (And when I say yoga, I don't mean american-style "power yoga" with an areobics instructor looking for the latest fad. It should be the slow, peaceful, but intense kind.)
Also, I found the book Driven to Distraction to be the best book on the topic; it's written by a professional psychiatrist who also had ADHD. The first time I read it blew me away: suddenly a number of seemingly unrelated things in my life fell into a pattern.
Software should not, with few exceptions perhaps, be a service.
That's a reasonable thing to say. Of course, it's also reasonable to want your software to be kept current. And it's also reasonable to say that if it turns out you don't need a product, it sucks to have paid a lot of money for it. Alas, these notions, individually reasonable, don't go together.
Personally, I'm pretty fed up with the way a lot of companies, especially Microsoft, try to keep people on the upgrade treadmill. And I never know what to do for expensive programs that I know I'll use rarely: if I could pay $5/day for Photoshop the two times a year I really need it, I would. And I'm sick to death with the marketing bullshit used to trick people into laying out a lot of money for what turns out to be crappy software.
Usage-based pricing and subscription pricing can better align the interests of companies and of programmers. It's not a panacea, and it doesn't suit everybody, but you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
It may be costly, but it is still easy and ultimately cheaper proportionally than changing a bridge.
And getting easier and cheaper. With techniques like refactoring, you can significantly flatten the cost-of-change curve.
Software also wins big because our tools and "materials" are advancing much more rapidly than physical tools and materials are. Component-based software also helps; bridge-builders can borrow ideas from one another, but they can't just copy 95% of somebody else's bridge and add on a couple new entry ramps.
If you're creating something new "almost every time", you are doing something terribly wrong.
The way I look at it, if you are creating the same thing every time, you should teach a computer to do it. Computers are good at boring, repetitive actions; humans are good at figuring new things out. We should take advantage of that: good developers should strive to be doing as much new stuff as possible.
But I agree completely that the problems in software development are mainly people problems, not technical ones.
StringBuffers should be used unless features of String are needed
Better still, use the Writer or the OutputStream. If you're just using a StringBuffer to pile up output before sending it, it's better for your CPU and your RAM usage if you just write the stuff out.
The main problem I see with OO systems is that they have been put forward as a panacea to all software woes, when in fact they also bring some of there own problems to the party(see MFC for details). The OO paradigm has been oversold over the years in the detriment of other ways of working
Last time I used MS stuff (which was admittedly a few years back) I concluded they wouldn't know an object if it bit them on the ass. I hear the C# stuff is better, though. The Java people have also improved; their early APIs weren't very object oriented, but they're getting better.
Unfortunately, generations of programmers (and worse, managers) have been mislead into thinking that using an OO language means you're doing OO. The magic of OO is mainly in the analysis and design. Done right, the productivity gains are stunning.
Personally, I think good OO code is the optimal modelling language. Done right, the code should end up being easily readable:
SlashdotPost post = new SlashdotPost(request);
if (post.validate()) {
story.addPost(post);
return new PostSubmittedPage(post);
} else {
return new PostEditPage(post);
}
People who think that a phone book of UML diagrams and user-written specs are enough to produce code are generally fooling themselves. And if the spec does have all the information needed to produce the code, then somebody should just write a compiler for it and let the programmers go do something interesting.
Strong environmental laws do NOT fit within a capitalist system.
A bold assertion, unmarred by actual facts. Perhaps once you have some, you could come back and address my point.
As a start, try learning about negative externalities, which any market economy needs to address somehow. Any good economics class should address this. Hint: you can't just pretend they don't exist.
Or heck, you could try moving next door to a third-world, coal-fired steel plant and see if you think that a well-educated marketplace is enough to make people buy their steel from other plants. That would give you some facts, too, even if you wouldn't be able to use them for nearly as long.
Hey dude, I'm sure you haven't noticed, but the economy is WRECKED.
Eh?
Last I looked, we just came out of a mild, mild recession with unemployment rates that are still much better than Europe. GDP is forcast to increase circa 3% this year.
The main thing that's going on is that we're still working off the hangover from the big dot-com party. Hopefully this will teach us a little caution about wild parties.
As with any Slashdot poster, I've have to figure out if you're a reasonable, thoughtful person, or just a frothing lunatic. Any guesses what posts like this make me think?
And you think that the once every four year inspections are what keeps your food safe? [...] What keeps food safe is the fact that a company who poisons someone is going to have to pay them for the liability
You have pretty obviously never worked in a restaurant.
Anyway, yeah, anyone who wants to open a restaurant can either have smoking ban, or allow their customers to smoke. you don't like it, don't go there
You oppose libertarians because you oppose liberty-- you want to decide what people can do and not let them make their own choices, and that's fascist. Oh, and you're a liar.
If you actually supported human rights, you'd vote libertarian, its the only party that does support them.
Hi! I like the Libertarians, and I agree with a lot of what they have to say. I would be inclined to vote for them once they have stopped running quite so many goofballs for office (e.g., the guy who turned himself blue.
But frothing like this is only hurting them. Your views are so crashingly unsubtle that you'd have a hard time persuading me to get out of a burning building, let alone voting for someone.
Take the smoking ban, for example. The standard Libertarian line is that your right to swing your fist ends somewhere near my nose. So suppose I go into your favorite bar and start blowing asbestos fibers into the air. Who's liberty is more important? Mine to blow asbestos fibers into the air? Or yours to keep living?
Note that nobody is saying, even in California, you can't consume all the nicotine that you want; you're just not allowed to do it in a way that interferes with others' health and enjoyment of their meals.
"Green" is just another word for "Communist"
That depends on the Green. But strong environmental laws fit perfectly well with a capitalist agenda.
How? Consider air pollution. Air is something that we all own. If I build an incinerator for waste disposal, what I'm really doing is selling a decrease in quality of your air. Should I be allowed to do that?
If the answer is yes, then clearly I should have to pay for it. Otherwise we're faced with that classic economic problem, a tragedy of the commons. Of course, some Greens say, "No! No pollution, ever," which is a bit silly. And others say, "Well, ok, but we must regulate."
Other Greens, though, favor market-based mechanisms, like carbon taxes and tradable pollution permits. This is a kind of environmentalism that Adam Smith would like; instead of taxing things that people should do (like earning income) we can tax people for things they shouldn't do (like emitting the particles that contribute to asthma).