You've either missed the point or you're intentionally avoiding it.
The point is _not_ to simply "get the work done". If you're trying to make a buck, you need to get the work done better and quicker than any of your competitors. And they may have deeper pockets, more hardware, more developers, etc. The point of Scrum is to help managers and developers work as effectively as possible toward a common goal by, in part, removing all the crap that stands in the way.
Try to think this through just a little bit. Your advise to a company failing (but trying really hard) to be competitive is apparently "get on with your job". Alternatively, I suppose the employer should fire all of the developers and try again with a fresh batch.
The fact that your post was modded "insightful", I think is an indication that people would really like it to be true that software development is brain-dead simple. It's not. Sometimes even "talented" developers can benefit by learning techniques that have proven effective in the past.
How can you be sure you'd never pay for it, now that you know you can get it for free?
If you decided to not break the rules, you'd be asking yourself "Is this thing worth $10?". If it was the _only_ way to get it, then you'd be making an honest assessment of that.
Now you're asking yourself "Should I pay $10 or $0?". Have you really convinced yourself that the fact you can get it for free hasn't skewed your sense of what it's worth?
Maybe you can convince yourself that this particular thing is only worth $1. Shouldn't you refrain from downloading it for free until you've paid someone that dollar? Or is it the case that you've convinced yourself that everything you want to get for free by breaking the rules is actually worthless?
If there were no humans, would 2+2 still equal 4? The answer is yes, so people merely discovered this fact. Now, arithmetic is only a branch of math, but the theory applies to the whole (otherwise I'm wrong, and that can't be).
If there were no humans, would there still be cell phones? The answer is no, so we can say that cell phones were invented. Don't give me any crap about alien cell phones -- you get my point.
For those that want to get hung up on the first question, it's not as difficult as you're making it out. Of course the symbols would be different if another group of discoverers were to define the language of math, but the fundamental premise would be unchanged.
If you have any good reason why I'm wrong, I'd appreciate you not letting me know. Adapting to new ideas is a real bitch.
I'm not convinced that this can't be tackled in hardware (probably because I don't know anything about hardware). Stick with me for a minute though.
I imagine a single CPU core as having a vertical pipeline for calculation. What we're trying to do is take (let's say) four of these vertical pipelines and figure how best to use them, simultaneously in software. Except for the embarrassingly parallel problems, this is quite hard.
Can't we do _something_ in hardware to sort of stack those vertical pipelines? A single branch of execution (I'm not sure if that makes sense) would travel all the way up through all four cores before completing.
The bottom line is that I don't think it's feasible to expect developers to write maximally efficient code for computers that have a dozen cores. It makes more sense to have those dozen 2GHz cores to appear as one 24GHz core to the OS due to the way the hardware is created. I realize it would only operate close to 2GHz for single operations, but would scale up toward 24GHz when multi-tasking.
Excuse my ignorance of the subject matter. My intent is only to contribute something to the conversation.
As of April 2001, the shuttles logged a total of 375 million miles (http://www.space.com/news/spaceshuttles/shuttle_f uture_steps_010412.html). I'm not sure what the number is now, but at that time there were 7 fatalities, bringing the number of fatalities per 100 million miles to about 1.86.
By contrast, the number of fatalities per 100 million miles in automobiles (U.S.) is at about 1.5. It's unlikely that the shuttles have doubled their logged miles between April 2001 and now, but the fatalities have doubled, so the fatalities per 100 million miles is likely over 3 -- or twice as bad as automobiles.
But I would definately take the shuttle over a motorcycle!
Your fundamental question comes down to whether or not to place your faith in science or in the Bible. It's clear that you're letting your ignorance of the natural world strengthen your belief in the Bible (the sun shrinking as it ages?). There's nothing terrible about a little ignorance -- no one knows everything! Recognize, though, that most of your questions have been properly answered already -- you just haven't found them.
You should understand that the scientific method enables the evolution of ideas. People come up with crazy theories about how things work, and those theories are tested and retested many, many times under different circumstances, by different people in different times. Those theories that stand up to all of this scrutiny don't necessarily represent the "right" answers, but they are certainly our most accurate understanding of the world.
The Bible is completely separate from all of this. There's no testable ideas, and nothing in the way of useful scientific knowledge or theories. It's a book of stories, which may be useful to some people as a moral foundation. You're doing yourself a great disservice in ignoring the thousands of years of scientific work done by our ancestors to bring you the world that we have today. Your questioning attitude toward the world is terrific -- but place your faith in science when seeking answers about the natural world, because it has as its very _core_ the kind of skepticism that you seem to (half) embrace. Keep questioning the answers, of course, but you're going to be a lot better off believing in the solid foundation of science than in, as someone put it, fairy tales.
True, there aren't games that _require_ such a configuration, but people hardly by video cards that fit the bare requirements. Typically, especially when dealing with the latest technology, people are looking to buy something that will play their games with all the bells and whistles.
So, here's a challenge for anyone with the fastest card in the universe. Try running Everquest 2 in Extreme Quality mode. Zip through the detailed configuration and make sure everything is cranked. I'm talking environment shadows, maxed bump mapping distance, maxed textures, maximum number of lights and specular lights; the works. Then go on a 24 person raid, or heck, just try to stand in the middle of Willow Wood without the game turning into a slide show.
If you manage to pull that off without crying, try 16xAF and 4xAA at 1600x1200. SLI might make it a little better, but I don't think we're going to see _smooth_ gameplay, in these conditions, at Extreme Quality with high resolution and AA/AF in this game for a year or two.
If I'm wrong don't tell me because I don't wanna know. I can't afford it.
So, if our elecrolysis processes ever become so efficient that we pass the break-even point, hydrogen is then going to be considered an energy "source" and not an energy "carrier"... ?
That seems odd, since the hydrogen itself wouldn't have changed.
I understand that hydrogen isn't free. We need to use energy to isolate hydrogen, so we can use it in things like automobiles. But really, we haven't injected energy _into_ the hydrogen. It's the source of power for the automobile once it gets there.
This would be similar to the process of expending energy to refine oil into gasoline, would it not? The gasoline is the _source_ of power for the automobile. We don't call it an "energy carrier" just because we had to expend energy in obtaining it.
We could call the process of extracting hydrogen from water "water refinement", and refer to big "water refineries" of the future, right?
One day isn't bad. Heck, a few days isn't bad. The reason I read this website is to get news about a fairly wide range of somewhat technical-oriented subjects that interest me.
The benefit isn't necessarily timeliness, it's relevance. Or rather, how relevant the news is to what I'm concerned with.
I checked out digg.com -- it looks like a useful website but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of overlap between their recent news and Slashdot's recent news. The Slashdot news seems to be more along the lines of what I'm interested in.
I suspect that's not the case with you. Thanks for the link though.
You must be infected with a virus or something, it says it right there in the subject (I'm just joking, I really said "fallac").
I didn't realize this was such a touchy subject. I seriously was not trying to offend you or hurt your feelings. I was just trying for a +1 Funny but I seem to have poured salt into some deep, gaping wound. Were you run over by a muscle car? (That's a joke, I hope you weren't really run over by a muscle car, that'd be terrible).
I have no excuse for my careless mispelling of the word "phallic". I truly hope whatever damage I've done throwing around pseudo-words like "fallac" (god, I'm such a moron) can be undone in time.
As for the talk of pollution, I guess I just never really considered what's good for my kids. Had I known that my dormant muscle car was going to cause such terrible damage, I certainly wouldn't have driven it five years ago. I'm such an asshole.
I'm going to cry myself to sleep now. I'm really, really, sorry.
The next person that accuses me of having a muscle car to make up for some inadequacy in genital size is going to get beaten to death with my enormous penis.
Seriously, I'm sure there's a lot of this going on but it comes up _way_ too much in the comments for any article relating to automobiles. Some people, myself included, just like the sound and feel and look of a muscle car. I've got a wife and two kids -- a happy little family -- and no need to try to impress chicks with a car.
Besides (back on topic), someone could just as easily see your tricked-out, nano-plastics, auto-pilot, hi-tech intarweb connected, rice-burning car as compensation for something.
Oh, and incidentally I drive a Saturn sedan to work every day and my muscle car is rotting in my driveway (what's that say about my penis?)
Obviously, Bill Clinton had his personal faults. Don't we all. It was crazy the way the GOP handled the situation, and yes they were trying to milk it for all they could.
Sure, people were fed up with Clinton's misdeeds. Was that a decent reason for the voting public to elect the current imbecile in his place? Gore isn't Clinton. And even beside those two choices, there are others to vote for.
All I'm saying is that it makes sense to blame Clinton for screwing up his marriage, but the blame for our current situation lies squarely with the (slim majority of) voters.
Did you just claim that it's Bill Clinton's fault that Republicans voted the devil into office?
Priceless!
Democrats voted against this extension by a very large margin, yet you seem to be way more angry at them than at the party that actually managed to push this through.
"There is never, and has never been a charge associated with activation."
I was helping my brother in law out with a Windows XP installation. He had a legitimate OEM copy of Windows XP, which came with his computer. His hard drive failed, and we installed a new one, and then installed Windows XP on it.
He wasn't able to automatically activate it, so he had to call. The lady on the phone told him that he would need to pay to activate it ($25 I believe), since it was an OEM version of Windows XP. She said that you _only_ get free activation if you bought a retail copy of Windows XP.
Science can't yet explain the "Why am I here?" question. Some of us are alright with that. People that aren't alright with that seem to need to latch on to something with an "answer", and it tends to be religion.
But the "answer" that religion gives doesn't have any evidence that can be verified scientifically. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong, it just means that there's no reason to believe it at this time.
See? You've made a terrible mistake! I'm just glad I could help out.
I didn't mean to be so weak and irrelevant with the names. I understand it didn't make any sense. See:
"Alright, so lets put some names on this for fun, although it ends up not making much sense:"
At any rate, you haven't cleared anything up for me. I still don't see why IRV is "wrong", as that link alleges.
What's the point of ranking the votes if you're just going to tally the numbers up all at once. I don't think there are any fantastic new systems that just straight out do that, but that's essentially what it sounds like when you say "I think statements like that show that A has more support than B". That's not really the case. A only has more support than B if 5 people have their first choice taken away.
With IRV, the first choice might be taken away as a result of it being in the absolute minority, and only in the case of there being no clear winner. Isn't that sensible?
It's full of examples showing that IRV gets the "wrong" answer. Could someone explain this to me? How can it choose wrongly? Isn't it just another way if getting an answer?
Looking at the first example, you can see IRV chooses differently, no doubt, but it still makes sense to me...
17 voters, 3 candidates 8: A,C 5: B,A 4: C,B Winner: B (the others choose A)
Alright, so lets put some names on this for fun, although it ends up not making much sense:
So IRV chooses Kerry, and the others choose Bush. I think I can see the argument that IRV is wrong - You've got 13 people that chose Bush as their first or second choice, 12 people that chose Nader as their first or second choice and 9 people that chose Kerry as their first or second choice, yet Kerry wins.
Not only that, but Bush almost had a majority to begin with and most of those that remained would pick him second. But everyone knows Bush shouldn't win so this must be wrong.
Seriously though, I think what IRV does is allow an election to be run where everyone can vote their conscience. Those 4 people that chose Nader (that's at least realistic, right?) are re-considered as if Nader hadn't even entered the race! And that's only done if no one manages to get a majority in round one.
Now we've got a new line up... just Bush and Kerry. And in _that_ election, Kerry would win, given the numbers above.
That seems very fair to me, especially since Kerry ends up winning.
Interesting points but I didn't see in the parent's post any mention of following the rules "compulsively" or being afraid to do anything without "explicit permission".
I for one followed the rules more or less coincidentally. I didn't smoke or drink or do drugs because I didn't see the point, or maybe because I wanted to be unique... or maybe because I was chicken. Not because of rules.
A little off topic I guess...
Kevin
Which domains? Creating language compilers? Perhaps you think that most people implement language compilers and so (like the author) you think it's largely worthless to use OOP?
I tend to believe most people work at a much higher level of abstraction. In those cases (the majority?), OOP is something that can really turn a beastly chunk of spaghetti code into something that makes sense to work with.
The problem is that the "better" programmer you're talking about is often not the "better" programmer at all; he just thinks he is.
The programmers that are actually worth something are the ones that try to spread their knowledge to their teammates to improve everyone's efficiency.
They're also the ones that recognize pair programming as a way to share that knowledge, and also to get feedback about what they are doing wrong, or could use improvement in.
The result of all of this should be a team that works well together and uses the best practices to their advantage, rather than getting slowed down (in isolation) by the not so good practices.
Regardless of whether or not the "best practices" for that team end up being XP practices, I can't believe you'd advocate closed-door isolated programming as a reliable means for the production of high quality code.
Slashdot Mirror
You've either missed the point or you're intentionally avoiding it.
The point is _not_ to simply "get the work done". If you're trying to make a buck, you need to get the work done better and quicker than any of your competitors. And they may have deeper pockets, more hardware, more developers, etc. The point of Scrum is to help managers and developers work as effectively as possible toward a common goal by, in part, removing all the crap that stands in the way.
Try to think this through just a little bit. Your advise to a company failing (but trying really hard) to be competitive is apparently "get on with your job". Alternatively, I suppose the employer should fire all of the developers and try again with a fresh batch.
The fact that your post was modded "insightful", I think is an indication that people would really like it to be true that software development is brain-dead simple. It's not. Sometimes even "talented" developers can benefit by learning techniques that have proven effective in the past.
How can you be sure you'd never pay for it, now that you know you can get it for free?
If you decided to not break the rules, you'd be asking yourself "Is this thing worth $10?". If it was the _only_ way to get it, then you'd be making an honest assessment of that.
Now you're asking yourself "Should I pay $10 or $0?". Have you really convinced yourself that the fact you can get it for free hasn't skewed your sense of what it's worth?
Maybe you can convince yourself that this particular thing is only worth $1. Shouldn't you refrain from downloading it for free until you've paid someone that dollar? Or is it the case that you've convinced yourself that everything you want to get for free by breaking the rules is actually worthless?
If there were no humans, would 2+2 still equal 4? The answer is yes, so people merely discovered this fact. Now, arithmetic is only a branch of math, but the theory applies to the whole (otherwise I'm wrong, and that can't be).
If there were no humans, would there still be cell phones? The answer is no, so we can say that cell phones were invented. Don't give me any crap about alien cell phones -- you get my point.
For those that want to get hung up on the first question, it's not as difficult as you're making it out. Of course the symbols would be different if another group of discoverers were to define the language of math, but the fundamental premise would be unchanged.
If you have any good reason why I'm wrong, I'd appreciate you not letting me know. Adapting to new ideas is a real bitch.
Kevin
Can someone clarify -- the details confuse me: I should or should _not_ point this at my eyeball while active.
I'm not convinced that this can't be tackled in hardware (probably because I don't know anything about hardware). Stick with me for a minute though.
I imagine a single CPU core as having a vertical pipeline for calculation. What we're trying to do is take (let's say) four of these vertical pipelines and figure how best to use them, simultaneously in software. Except for the embarrassingly parallel problems, this is quite hard.
Can't we do _something_ in hardware to sort of stack those vertical pipelines? A single branch of execution (I'm not sure if that makes sense) would travel all the way up through all four cores before completing.
The bottom line is that I don't think it's feasible to expect developers to write maximally efficient code for computers that have a dozen cores. It makes more sense to have those dozen 2GHz cores to appear as one 24GHz core to the OS due to the way the hardware is created. I realize it would only operate close to 2GHz for single operations, but would scale up toward 24GHz when multi-tasking.
Excuse my ignorance of the subject matter. My intent is only to contribute something to the conversation.
Kevin
As of April 2001, the shuttles logged a total of 375 million miles (http://www.space.com/news/spaceshuttles/shuttle_f uture_steps_010412.html). I'm not sure what the number is now, but at that time there were 7 fatalities, bringing the number of fatalities per 100 million miles to about 1.86.
By contrast, the number of fatalities per 100 million miles in automobiles (U.S.) is at about 1.5. It's unlikely that the shuttles have doubled their logged miles between April 2001 and now, but the fatalities have doubled, so the fatalities per 100 million miles is likely over 3 -- or twice as bad as automobiles.
But I would definately take the shuttle over a motorcycle!
Your fundamental question comes down to whether or not to place your faith in science or in the Bible. It's clear that you're letting your ignorance of the natural world strengthen your belief in the Bible (the sun shrinking as it ages?). There's nothing terrible about a little ignorance -- no one knows everything! Recognize, though, that most of your questions have been properly answered already -- you just haven't found them.
You should understand that the scientific method enables the evolution of ideas. People come up with crazy theories about how things work, and those theories are tested and retested many, many times under different circumstances, by different people in different times. Those theories that stand up to all of this scrutiny don't necessarily represent the "right" answers, but they are certainly our most accurate understanding of the world.
The Bible is completely separate from all of this. There's no testable ideas, and nothing in the way of useful scientific knowledge or theories. It's a book of stories, which may be useful to some people as a moral foundation. You're doing yourself a great disservice in ignoring the thousands of years of scientific work done by our ancestors to bring you the world that we have today. Your questioning attitude toward the world is terrific -- but place your faith in science when seeking answers about the natural world, because it has as its very _core_ the kind of skepticism that you seem to (half) embrace. Keep questioning the answers, of course, but you're going to be a lot better off believing in the solid foundation of science than in, as someone put it, fairy tales.
Kevin
"I'm sure that rescuers at a hurricane scene would have killed for an emergency transmitter like that."
Great. Now in addition to terrorists, global warming and sick birds, I'll need to be afraid of rescuers.
True, there aren't games that _require_ such a configuration, but people hardly by video cards that fit the bare requirements. Typically, especially when dealing with the latest technology, people are looking to buy something that will play their games with all the bells and whistles.
So, here's a challenge for anyone with the fastest card in the universe. Try running Everquest 2 in Extreme Quality mode. Zip through the detailed configuration and make sure everything is cranked. I'm talking environment shadows, maxed bump mapping distance, maxed textures, maximum number of lights and specular lights; the works. Then go on a 24 person raid, or heck, just try to stand in the middle of Willow Wood without the game turning into a slide show.
If you manage to pull that off without crying, try 16xAF and 4xAA at 1600x1200. SLI might make it a little better, but I don't think we're going to see _smooth_ gameplay, in these conditions, at Extreme Quality with high resolution and AA/AF in this game for a year or two.
If I'm wrong don't tell me because I don't wanna know. I can't afford it.
So, if our elecrolysis processes ever become so efficient that we pass the break-even point, hydrogen is then going to be considered an energy "source" and not an energy "carrier" ... ?
That seems odd, since the hydrogen itself wouldn't have changed.
Kevin
Energy carrier?
I understand that hydrogen isn't free. We need to use energy to isolate hydrogen, so we can use it in things like automobiles. But really, we haven't injected energy _into_ the hydrogen. It's the source of power for the automobile once it gets there.
This would be similar to the process of expending energy to refine oil into gasoline, would it not? The gasoline is the _source_ of power for the automobile. We don't call it an "energy carrier" just because we had to expend energy in obtaining it.
We could call the process of extracting hydrogen from water "water refinement", and refer to big "water refineries" of the future, right?
Kevin
One day isn't bad. Heck, a few days isn't bad. The reason I read this website is to get news about a fairly wide range of somewhat technical-oriented subjects that interest me.
The benefit isn't necessarily timeliness, it's relevance. Or rather, how relevant the news is to what I'm concerned with.
I checked out digg.com -- it looks like a useful website but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of overlap between their recent news and Slashdot's recent news. The Slashdot news seems to be more along the lines of what I'm interested in.
I suspect that's not the case with you. Thanks for the link though.
Kevin
You must be infected with a virus or something, it says it right there in the subject (I'm just joking, I really said "fallac").
I didn't realize this was such a touchy subject. I seriously was not trying to offend you or hurt your feelings. I was just trying for a +1 Funny but I seem to have poured salt into some deep, gaping wound. Were you run over by a muscle car? (That's a joke, I hope you weren't really run over by a muscle car, that'd be terrible).
I have no excuse for my careless mispelling of the word "phallic". I truly hope whatever damage I've done throwing around pseudo-words like "fallac" (god, I'm such a moron) can be undone in time.
As for the talk of pollution, I guess I just never really considered what's good for my kids. Had I known that my dormant muscle car was going to cause such terrible damage, I certainly wouldn't have driven it five years ago. I'm such an asshole.
I'm going to cry myself to sleep now. I'm really, really, sorry.
Thanks for your insight.
Kevin
P.S. 20 years ago I was 9.
The next person that accuses me of having a muscle car to make up for some inadequacy in genital size is going to get beaten to death with my enormous penis.
Seriously, I'm sure there's a lot of this going on but it comes up _way_ too much in the comments for any article relating to automobiles. Some people, myself included, just like the sound and feel and look of a muscle car. I've got a wife and two kids -- a happy little family -- and no need to try to impress chicks with a car.
Besides (back on topic), someone could just as easily see your tricked-out, nano-plastics, auto-pilot, hi-tech intarweb connected, rice-burning car as compensation for something.
Oh, and incidentally I drive a Saturn sedan to work every day and my muscle car is rotting in my driveway (what's that say about my penis?)
Kevin
Obviously, Bill Clinton had his personal faults. Don't we all. It was crazy the way the GOP handled the situation, and yes they were trying to milk it for all they could.
Sure, people were fed up with Clinton's misdeeds. Was that a decent reason for the voting public to elect the current imbecile in his place? Gore isn't Clinton. And even beside those two choices, there are others to vote for.
All I'm saying is that it makes sense to blame Clinton for screwing up his marriage, but the blame for our current situation lies squarely with the (slim majority of) voters.
Did you just claim that it's Bill Clinton's fault that Republicans voted the devil into office?
Priceless!
Democrats voted against this extension by a very large margin, yet you seem to be way more angry at them than at the party that actually managed to push this through.
"There is never, and has never been a charge associated with activation."
I was helping my brother in law out with a Windows XP installation. He had a legitimate OEM copy of Windows XP, which came with his computer. His hard drive failed, and we installed a new one, and then installed Windows XP on it.
He wasn't able to automatically activate it, so he had to call. The lady on the phone told him that he would need to pay to activate it ($25 I believe), since it was an OEM version of Windows XP. She said that you _only_ get free activation if you bought a retail copy of Windows XP.
Kevin
Here's my proof that the idea of "intelligent design" is bogus:
The hole that I breathe through is the same hole that I regularly pack full of food.
Brilliant!
Science can't yet explain the "Why am I here?" question. Some of us are alright with that. People that aren't alright with that seem to need to latch on to something with an "answer", and it tends to be religion.
But the "answer" that religion gives doesn't have any evidence that can be verified scientifically. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong, it just means that there's no reason to believe it at this time.
See? You've made a terrible mistake! I'm just glad I could help out.
I didn't mean to be so weak and irrelevant with the names. I understand it didn't make any sense. See:
"Alright, so lets put some names on this for fun, although it ends up not making much sense:"
At any rate, you haven't cleared anything up for me. I still don't see why IRV is "wrong", as that link alleges.
What's the point of ranking the votes if you're just going to tally the numbers up all at once. I don't think there are any fantastic new systems that just straight out do that, but that's essentially what it sounds like when you say "I think statements like that show that A has more support than B". That's not really the case. A only has more support than B if 5 people have their first choice taken away.
With IRV, the first choice might be taken away as a result of it being in the absolute minority, and only in the case of there being no clear winner. Isn't that sensible?
Kevin
After poking around I came across this:
...
... just Bush and Kerry. And in _that_ election, Kerry would win, given the numbers above.
http://bolson.org/voting/cdata/contrived.html
It's full of examples showing that IRV gets the "wrong" answer. Could someone explain this to me? How can it choose wrongly? Isn't it just another way if getting an answer?
Looking at the first example, you can see IRV chooses differently, no doubt, but it still makes sense to me
17 voters, 3 candidates
8: A,C
5: B,A
4: C,B
Winner: B (the others choose A)
Alright, so lets put some names on this for fun, although it ends up not making much sense:
17 voters, 3 candidates
8: Bush,Nader
5: Kerry,Bush
4: Nader,Kerry
Winner: Kerry (I knew it!)
So IRV chooses Kerry, and the others choose Bush. I think I can see the argument that IRV is wrong - You've got 13 people that chose Bush as their first or second choice, 12 people that chose Nader as their first or second choice and 9 people that chose Kerry as their first or second choice, yet Kerry wins.
Not only that, but Bush almost had a majority to begin with and most of those that remained would pick him second. But everyone knows Bush shouldn't win so this must be wrong.
Seriously though, I think what IRV does is allow an election to be run where everyone can vote their conscience. Those 4 people that chose Nader (that's at least realistic, right?) are re-considered as if Nader hadn't even entered the race! And that's only done if no one manages to get a majority in round one.
Now we've got a new line up
That seems very fair to me, especially since Kerry ends up winning.
Kevin
Interesting points but I didn't see in the parent's post any mention of following the rules "compulsively" or being afraid to do anything without "explicit permission". I for one followed the rules more or less coincidentally. I didn't smoke or drink or do drugs because I didn't see the point, or maybe because I wanted to be unique ... or maybe because I was chicken. Not because of rules.
A little off topic I guess ...
Kevin
I'm not sure what just happened but I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.
Thundercougarfalconbird. I nearly split my side open.
"except for certain domains"?
Which domains? Creating language compilers? Perhaps you think that most people implement language compilers and so (like the author) you think it's largely worthless to use OOP?
I tend to believe most people work at a much higher level of abstraction. In those cases (the majority?), OOP is something that can really turn a beastly chunk of spaghetti code into something that makes sense to work with.
Kevin
Coding in isolation is a bad idea.
The problem is that the "better" programmer you're talking about is often not the "better" programmer at all; he just thinks he is.
The programmers that are actually worth something are the ones that try to spread their knowledge to their teammates to improve everyone's efficiency.
They're also the ones that recognize pair programming as a way to share that knowledge, and also to get feedback about what they are doing wrong, or could use improvement in.
The result of all of this should be a team that works well together and uses the best practices to their advantage, rather than getting slowed down (in isolation) by the not so good practices.
Regardless of whether or not the "best practices" for that team end up being XP practices, I can't believe you'd advocate closed-door isolated programming as a reliable means for the production of high quality code.