We actually did this on a recent project, but with Duplo rather than Lego for better visibility. We used a series of green Duplo baseplates attached to a whiteboard as the base, and set up a burndown chart slash completion "thermometer" with colour coded Duplo blocks representing system features, and how we did, time-wise, on implementing each (green = on time, yellow = late, red = Viet Nam).
Vacuum is vacuum, right? Presumably, this particular odor should also appear on items that have been in a vacuum chamber, shouldn't it? For that matter, the fragments of a broken light bulb or vacuum tube should have the scent....
There's a Win32 emulator for the OLPC, and you can grab the OLPC SimCity-branded version and run it in that. Also, the future tense "will be getting" isn't warranted here in the OLPC case -- I currently have the game installed on my XO, and it runs just fine.
We generally get fixes for real bugs out within 24 hours
We do too, although we release every two weeks, so it would have to be a critical security bug to get us to do a patch release and not just include the fix in the next code drop. Genuine defects (as opposed to platform support issues, production support issues, configuration problems, or changed requirements) are a stop-the-line issue.
Um, and if it's taking you a month to fix a problem, what is your level of automated test coverage? You are doing TDD, right? And how much time are you spending on refactoring for maintainability?
Manager Tools. http://www.manager-tools.com . Run, don't walk, over there... and first of all, check out the podcasts in the "Manager Tools Basics" group that was just posted.
Executive summary (ha ha): meet with your people one-on-one every week, give them lots of feedback, and coach them where they need to improve.
I just made the jump to management myself, and this is one of the best resources I've found. And it's free.
That may be true, but Toronto's biggest retail music store just went out of business due to competition from online sales (iTunes) and from downloading.:-(
Yes, the RIAA and MPAA exaggerate just about everything... but that doesn't mean that everything is all roses north of the 49th parallel.
Amen to that. And some folks (like me) are fond of the stories that single-player RPGs, Interactive Fiction, and so forth tell, but refuse to get sucked in to the time and money sink that is an MMORPG.
(Besides, after all the time I spent on text-based MUSHes in the early 90s, I think I've used up my lifetime quota.)
If they did commit such a solecism, they've corrected it by now: "As Mobile Phones Grow More Complex, Carriers Insist on Fewer Operating Systems" is what appears in TFA at the moment.
Medium-sized retailers complain that large game publishers ignore their concerns in favour of huge big box chains. Game studios complain that large game publishers squeeze out quality offerings in favour of crappy sequels and licensed games aimed at sales at big box stores. Gamers complain that all they can buy at the local big box store are crappy sequels and licensed properties, and that there's very little exciting to play.
Is it just me, or is the obvious solution to all of this for the medium-sized retailers and the high-quality developers to get in cahoots, and offer games that are actually good on a business model that works for the developers, the small-to-mid-range retailers, and the customer?
One obvious problem: "restricting" versus "not restricting" isn't a brightly-defined binary choice. Many European countries, for example, have laws prohibiting Holocaust denial, and require ISPs to take down or block access to neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial sites. But they're a far cry from, say, China. The proposed legislation doesn't deal well with that distinction....
As a gamer, I kind of miss the 'you can only get it on this system.'
Well, that makes one of us. As a gamer who doesn't have an unlimited budget to throw at acquiring every platform in existence, I absolutely hate exclusives.
The one exception to that would be games that take advantage of a feature that's only available on one system, such as the DS touchscreen/stylus or the Wiimote. I'd much rather have good games that are well designed to take advantage of a system's features than lots of titles dumbed down to the lowest common denominator to get them on as many platforms as possible. But for titles that don't have those technical limitations, it's exasperating to have something unavailable for reasons that don't benefit me as a gamer.
A slightly nicer question: when was the last time that this system would have saved an aircraft that a simple flare dispenser would have failed to save?
The one telecommuting job that I've worked for involved a team (both the team that I was in charge of and the larger team that we were part of) where no two employees were in the same location. We all worked out of home offices or the company's local offices, depending.
It worked remarkably well. Communication between team members was actually better than on many teams that I've worked on in cube farms. When everyone is isolated, a consciousness develops that everyone needs to be very explicit about picking up the phone and calling each other to stay on the same page. In the cube farm, it's easy to become complacent about the fact that so-and-so has a cube two aisles over, and never go and talk to them.
The telecommuting job was wonderful in terms of being able to keep up an aggressive pace, sustainably. Adding up the time for the commute to and from the job I had had before it, plus getting ready in the morning before going to work, travel time out to eat at lunch, and so forth, an eight-hour work day generally took me around eleven hours or so. On my telecommuting job, I wound up working lots of ten hour days, yet felt like I was working less hard.
On the other hand, my current job involves agile development where everyone is together in a single project room, and that's just about as pleasant, and much more efficient in terms of delivering on time. And impossible to do by telecommuting....
it's becoming more difficult and costly to test every line of software code
What do you mean, "more difficult and costly to test every line?" Every line, or close to every line, darned well ought to have test coverage before you commit it to your source code repository, let alone delivering it to the customer. And properly factored and coded classes and modules should be testable in isolation. If the cost of testing -- and, presumably, the cost of change -- is increasing drastically as the system size increases, you're doing something wrong....
And it's far, far more costly to deliver software that doesn't have good code coverage than it is to write good tests and deliver well-tested software.
Why bother with Windows at all? I have a large enough backlog in my "to play" list at the moment between handhelds and my PS2 that I don't really have *room* to add another platform anyway. And that's without considering the games that natively exist on Linux that I find myself playing as much or more than commercial efforts: Wesnoth, Nethack, lots and lots of IF, Flightgear, Freeciv, retro games under emulation, and so forth.
And I don't have to get on the graphics card treadmill, either.
I did move to Canada, and my partner and I love it here. I grew up in the Snow Belt (Toronto's winters are less severe), we've both been fond of the country for years, and I had a great job opportunity here, so I moved here as much or more to move to here as I did to move from the US.
"What's stopping me?" Nothing.
There are some encouraging signs that things might start to get reasonable again after the election, but even if they do, we'll probably stay here just because we like it.
Standout entries this year include a new game from acclaimed writer (and previous IF Comp winner) Emily Short, an interactive moebius strip, the requisite bible game(s) and a game about making games.
Um, it's considered bad form to single out specific games for discussion before the end of the voting period. Especially on a widely read site like Slashdot. Please don't do this next year.
More to the point, wasn't the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley that it's Hurd's *job* to know about the things he's claiming not to? "I didn't know what my subordinates were doing" isn't supposed to wash any more as a valid excuse, at least not under the law.
Slashdot Mirror
We actually did this on a recent project, but with Duplo rather than Lego for better visibility. We used a series of green Duplo baseplates attached to a whiteboard as the base, and set up a burndown chart slash completion "thermometer" with colour coded Duplo blocks representing system features, and how we did, time-wise, on implementing each (green = on time, yellow = late, red = Viet Nam).
Vacuum is vacuum, right? Presumably, this particular odor should also appear on items that have been in a vacuum chamber, shouldn't it? For that matter, the fragments of a broken light bulb or vacuum tube should have the scent....
There's a Win32 emulator for the OLPC, and you can grab the OLPC SimCity-branded version and run it in that. Also, the future tense "will be getting" isn't warranted here in the OLPC case -- I currently have the game installed on my XO, and it runs just fine.
We generally get fixes for real bugs out within 24 hours
We do too, although we release every two weeks, so it would have to be a critical security bug to get us to do a patch release and not just include the fix in the next code drop. Genuine defects (as opposed to platform support issues, production support issues, configuration problems, or changed requirements) are a stop-the-line issue.
Um, and if it's taking you a month to fix a problem, what is your level of automated test coverage? You are doing TDD, right? And how much time are you spending on refactoring for maintainability?
Executive summary (ha ha): meet with your people one-on-one every week, give them lots of feedback, and coach them where they need to improve.
I just made the jump to management myself, and this is one of the best resources I've found. And it's free.
That model seems to be working just fine for the SMART Fortwo. Heck, I might consider one for my next vehicle. They're very cute.
In fact, SMART themselves are planning a vehicle like this for next year, according to Wikipedia....
Yes, the RIAA and MPAA exaggerate just about everything... but that doesn't mean that everything is all roses north of the 49th parallel.
Amen to that. And some folks (like me) are fond of the stories that single-player RPGs, Interactive Fiction, and so forth tell, but refuse to get sucked in to the time and money sink that is an MMORPG. (Besides, after all the time I spent on text-based MUSHes in the early 90s, I think I've used up my lifetime quota.)
If they did commit such a solecism, they've corrected it by now: "As Mobile Phones Grow More Complex, Carriers Insist on Fewer Operating Systems" is what appears in TFA at the moment.
Sure, but that doesn't help if your packet gets rejected by the martian filter on the firewall....
Is it just me, or is the obvious solution to all of this for the medium-sized retailers and the high-quality developers to get in cahoots, and offer games that are actually good on a business model that works for the developers, the small-to-mid-range retailers, and the customer?
One obvious problem: "restricting" versus "not restricting" isn't a brightly-defined binary choice. Many European countries, for example, have laws prohibiting Holocaust denial, and require ISPs to take down or block access to neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial sites. But they're a far cry from, say, China. The proposed legislation doesn't deal well with that distinction....
As a gamer, I kind of miss the 'you can only get it on this system.'
Well, that makes one of us. As a gamer who doesn't have an unlimited budget to throw at acquiring every platform in existence, I absolutely hate exclusives.
The one exception to that would be games that take advantage of a feature that's only available on one system, such as the DS touchscreen/stylus or the Wiimote. I'd much rather have good games that are well designed to take advantage of a system's features than lots of titles dumbed down to the lowest common denominator to get them on as many platforms as possible. But for titles that don't have those technical limitations, it's exasperating to have something unavailable for reasons that don't benefit me as a gamer.
A slightly nicer question: when was the last time that this system would have saved an aircraft that a simple flare dispenser would have failed to save?
It worked remarkably well. Communication between team members was actually better than on many teams that I've worked on in cube farms. When everyone is isolated, a consciousness develops that everyone needs to be very explicit about picking up the phone and calling each other to stay on the same page. In the cube farm, it's easy to become complacent about the fact that so-and-so has a cube two aisles over, and never go and talk to them.
The telecommuting job was wonderful in terms of being able to keep up an aggressive pace, sustainably. Adding up the time for the commute to and from the job I had had before it, plus getting ready in the morning before going to work, travel time out to eat at lunch, and so forth, an eight-hour work day generally took me around eleven hours or so. On my telecommuting job, I wound up working lots of ten hour days, yet felt like I was working less hard.
On the other hand, my current job involves agile development where everyone is together in a single project room, and that's just about as pleasant, and much more efficient in terms of delivering on time. And impossible to do by telecommuting....
Nice to see "The Omnivorous Engine" in TA. There are a lot of brilliant minds here. Ethanol is cheap and it's very common here.
That's great, but didn't TFA cite ethanol as one of the losers? How exactly is ethanol a loser if an ethanol engine is a winner?
...this apparently happened in August, 2005, and we've just realized it now.
Universal Pictures, you mean? Yes, that logo has been visible from space for quite some time now....
it's becoming more difficult and costly to test every line of software code
What do you mean, "more difficult and costly to test every line?" Every line, or close to every line, darned well ought to have test coverage before you commit it to your source code repository, let alone delivering it to the customer. And properly factored and coded classes and modules should be testable in isolation. If the cost of testing -- and, presumably, the cost of change -- is increasing drastically as the system size increases, you're doing something wrong....
And it's far, far more costly to deliver software that doesn't have good code coverage than it is to write good tests and deliver well-tested software.
And I don't have to get on the graphics card treadmill, either.
"What's stopping me?" Nothing.
There are some encouraging signs that things might start to get reasonable again after the election, but even if they do, we'll probably stay here just because we like it.
Standout entries this year include a new game from acclaimed writer (and previous IF Comp winner) Emily Short, an interactive moebius strip, the requisite bible game(s) and a game about making games.
Um, it's considered bad form to single out specific games for discussion before the end of the voting period. Especially on a widely read site like Slashdot. Please don't do this next year.
More to the point, wasn't the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley that it's Hurd's *job* to know about the things he's claiming not to? "I didn't know what my subordinates were doing" isn't supposed to wash any more as a valid excuse, at least not under the law.
In related news, the Bloomsday Book is also online, and can be found here....