I see what you're saying, and I understand where you're coming from. I wrote air traffic management software for a while, and if you want to talk 'zero bug tolerance', that's their highest priority. I now work in an agile shop, and while it is more chaotic than traditional practices, there are ways to direct agile methods so that you get clean, solid, and documented software. We're a small (35 person) company that writes an on-demand enterprise system. We've got a couple thousand customers and our app has had 4-5 nines uptime over the last three years.
The key is to have one or two guys in charge who look at the big picture and decide how the program will be designed. We've got an architect managing interaction of all the hardware and software pieces. We've also got a project manager that goes more specifically into what is going to be done and which functionality will go into which components. At the start of a project, we get together, divide up user stories, and discuss generally how things are going to be implemented. This keeps your cowboy developers from throwing code into places it shouldn't be.
After the initial planning, it's on the developers to keep the quality and documentation going. Pair programming helps make sure that people aren't deviating from the plan. Two practices that make keep code clean and reduce bugs are unit tests and code documenting. If you design unit tests before you start coding, it's easy to see if your code is breaking some other piece of the app. One other key is that you actually have to use those tests. There are tons of places that write tons of unit tests, but don't make it easy to test the whole system at once. Get a daily or, better yet, hourly build and unit test run going so problems show up while you're working on the code. If you document the code as it's written and in the code, you not only help other people know what's going on, you make sure YOU know what's going on. Our rule of thumb is that if you can't understand what's going on from the comments, you either wrote lousy code or commented it poorly. At the same time, the architect is documenting the big picture, so both the general view and the specific code are maintainable.
We've got a small team and an app that we're adding to incrementally, but I think the same practices can be applied to larger projects. If you divide your group into teams and use agile practices on a small scale, having architects and management coordinate between them, a lot of these practices will still be valid.
That's my spin on it, I'm curious to hear from people who have used agile on large scale apps.
I've had problems with my iPod a lot, mostly because i was using it vertically on its side in the car and after I had it replaced the fourth time, I realized that might be a bad idea. One time, two days after I'd had it replaced, I dropped it on the driveway and it died. I brought it in to the Apple store, the guy saw a huge dent, said 'If it's damaged, the warranty is void... but since you just got it two days ago, I feel sorry for you' and replaced it on the spot.
My buddy went in on his birthday (two days ago) because his iPod had died. He didn't know if it was still under warranty or not, but figured it was worth a shot. The Apple guy looked up his info, found that the warranty had expired a month before that, but was like 'Oh, it's your birthday? Happy birthday! We'll forget that the warranty expired' and replaced the iPod for him.
I'd been telling my friends that Apple had good customer service, but they never really took it to heart. My buddy came home and said that he's never buying a non-Apple music player again.
One of the things that nobody's saying here is that the default behavior for McAfee is to move the files into a quarantine directory, not to delete them. The user would have to change the settings for that to happen. Admittedly, it's still messed up for the program to delete essential files, but I think it's good policy to quarantine first in case something like this happens.
That being said... On Saturday I went to do some work in Flash MX and got a message that it was missing a DLL file and I had to reinstall. No big deal, I must have botched something, so I reinstalled. While I was doing that, I went to get my bills together in Excel and got the message that Excel was no longer installed. My first reaction was that I had some kind of virus or trojan, so I ran a full system virus scan. It took me three hours of panic to realize that something like 40.exe files and another 80.dll files had been quarantined. VirusScan provides no way to restore quarantined files, so you have to pick through the scan log to find out where they originally lived and put them back yourself. I was wondering if this would come out in the news or if I just had a screwed up system. Thank god it's getting some press and McAfee had to fix it, I've been fighting my virus checker all weekend and it was getting pretty tiresome.
His Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus books were great intros to game development, but when I saw his name as the editor of the lousy prima tech game development series, I thought he'd given up. It's encouraging to see that he's still interested in sparking new things in homebrew game design and not just sitting on his success to make money.
When getting ready for college, I bought a 21 inch CRT monitor because it was a good price, but when i got to school realized that it took up most of my desk, leaving me no room at all to work. Spend the extra dollars and get an LCD monitor. Desk space is useful, especially if you can work next to your computer.
"One of the most interesting things that was said was the clever AI in games is a myth, most AI is just a series of hacks. Some of them are indeed complex but they never really make any serious attempt to scientifically replicate the way a human makes decisions."
How do we know that neural networks are the only method of creating AI? Other ways that could be developed may be put down as being complex clever hacks. I don't think we've achieved this yet, but don't put down game AI just because it doesn't use scientific reasoning.
Once he decided to remove Tom Bombadil/The Barrow Downs he easily had enough time to remain true to the story, and so many of his alterations took longer to correct later on in the story than he would have ever have saved if he'd just left it be.
Which alterations are these? Removing Tom Bombadil didn't change much at all. When I read the books the first time I even said to myself "What's the point of this whole section?". I understand that it does add to the mood of the books, but in terms of story he adds almost nothing. Most of the other changes seemed to be simple things that didn't change anything. Keep in mind that he is trying to appeal to both the LOTR enthusiasts and the general public. Including a lot of the travelling scenes or the extent of the dialogue would have made the movie unbearably boring for most viewers. I personally felt that the movie did a marvelous job of taking something as complex as LOTR is and bringing it down to something that's digestable in three hours.
There has definitely been a shortage of good anime in theatres. Aside from Princess Mononoke (sp?), I really haven't seen anything in theatres over the past couple years. From those readers that happen to be informed, what are some anime releases that actually made it to theatres in the US?
So if we're only talking about one ten-thousandth of a second by the close of the century, does this have the possibility of significantly affecting the lengths of days in the long run? If this continued to "snowball", would we be able to observe the changes on diurnal rhythms or would the events associated with global warming overshadow them?
From a friend of mine who happens to work at Radio Shack, I've heard that several XBoxes were returned to their store due to overheating problems. Apparently the DVD playing hardware can overheat the unit if it is in an enclosed space and running for a long period of time.
Sorry to be a little pessimistic, but at the moment Microsoft has no motivation to port Office X to Linux. For the amount of desktop Linux users in the market right not, it would not at all be profitable to pay the cost of porting it over. It's been beaten into our heads in this topic that porting from OSX to Linux is no easy matter, and the port would require hundreds if not thousands of hours of coding, as well as beta testing, promotion, distribution costs and support. For the relatively small market of Linux desktop users, there's no way that Microsoft would achieve a decent return on their investment. I know some of you would say that they could open-source it, but we all know that Microsoft is not an open source company and probably never will be. If the linux desktop market became as big or bigger than the macintosh market, there may be possibilities for this.
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I see what you're saying, and I understand where you're coming from. I wrote air traffic management software for a while, and if you want to talk 'zero bug tolerance', that's their highest priority. I now work in an agile shop, and while it is more chaotic than traditional practices, there are ways to direct agile methods so that you get clean, solid, and documented software. We're a small (35 person) company that writes an on-demand enterprise system. We've got a couple thousand customers and our app has had 4-5 nines uptime over the last three years.
The key is to have one or two guys in charge who look at the big picture and decide how the program will be designed. We've got an architect managing interaction of all the hardware and software pieces. We've also got a project manager that goes more specifically into what is going to be done and which functionality will go into which components. At the start of a project, we get together, divide up user stories, and discuss generally how things are going to be implemented. This keeps your cowboy developers from throwing code into places it shouldn't be.
After the initial planning, it's on the developers to keep the quality and documentation going. Pair programming helps make sure that people aren't deviating from the plan. Two practices that make keep code clean and reduce bugs are unit tests and code documenting. If you design unit tests before you start coding, it's easy to see if your code is breaking some other piece of the app. One other key is that you actually have to use those tests. There are tons of places that write tons of unit tests, but don't make it easy to test the whole system at once. Get a daily or, better yet, hourly build and unit test run going so problems show up while you're working on the code. If you document the code as it's written and in the code, you not only help other people know what's going on, you make sure YOU know what's going on. Our rule of thumb is that if you can't understand what's going on from the comments, you either wrote lousy code or commented it poorly. At the same time, the architect is documenting the big picture, so both the general view and the specific code are maintainable.
We've got a small team and an app that we're adding to incrementally, but I think the same practices can be applied to larger projects. If you divide your group into teams and use agile practices on a small scale, having architects and management coordinate between them, a lot of these practices will still be valid.
That's my spin on it, I'm curious to hear from people who have used agile on large scale apps.
I've had problems with my iPod a lot, mostly because i was using it vertically on its side in the car and after I had it replaced the fourth time, I realized that might be a bad idea. One time, two days after I'd had it replaced, I dropped it on the driveway and it died. I brought it in to the Apple store, the guy saw a huge dent, said 'If it's damaged, the warranty is void... but since you just got it two days ago, I feel sorry for you' and replaced it on the spot.
My buddy went in on his birthday (two days ago) because his iPod had died. He didn't know if it was still under warranty or not, but figured it was worth a shot. The Apple guy looked up his info, found that the warranty had expired a month before that, but was like 'Oh, it's your birthday? Happy birthday! We'll forget that the warranty expired' and replaced the iPod for him.
I'd been telling my friends that Apple had good customer service, but they never really took it to heart. My buddy came home and said that he's never buying a non-Apple music player again.
One of the things that nobody's saying here is that the default behavior for McAfee is to move the files into a quarantine directory, not to delete them. The user would have to change the settings for that to happen. Admittedly, it's still messed up for the program to delete essential files, but I think it's good policy to quarantine first in case something like this happens.
.exe files and another 80 .dll files had been quarantined. VirusScan provides no way to restore quarantined files, so you have to pick through the scan log to find out where they originally lived and put them back yourself. I was wondering if this would come out in the news or if I just had a screwed up system. Thank god it's getting some press and McAfee had to fix it, I've been fighting my virus checker all weekend and it was getting pretty tiresome.
That being said... On Saturday I went to do some work in Flash MX and got a message that it was missing a DLL file and I had to reinstall. No big deal, I must have botched something, so I reinstalled. While I was doing that, I went to get my bills together in Excel and got the message that Excel was no longer installed. My first reaction was that I had some kind of virus or trojan, so I ran a full system virus scan. It took me three hours of panic to realize that something like 40
His Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus books were great intros to game development, but when I saw his name as the editor of the lousy prima tech game development series, I thought he'd given up. It's encouraging to see that he's still interested in sparking new things in homebrew game design and not just sitting on his success to make money.
When getting ready for college, I bought a 21 inch CRT monitor because it was a good price, but when i got to school realized that it took up most of my desk, leaving me no room at all to work. Spend the extra dollars and get an LCD monitor. Desk space is useful, especially if you can work next to your computer.
How do we know that neural networks are the only method of creating AI? Other ways that could be developed may be put down as being complex clever hacks. I don't think we've achieved this yet, but don't put down game AI just because it doesn't use scientific reasoning.
Once he decided to remove Tom Bombadil/The Barrow Downs he easily had enough time to remain true to the story, and so many of his alterations took longer to correct later on in the story than he would have ever have saved if he'd just left it be. Which alterations are these? Removing Tom Bombadil didn't change much at all. When I read the books the first time I even said to myself "What's the point of this whole section?". I understand that it does add to the mood of the books, but in terms of story he adds almost nothing. Most of the other changes seemed to be simple things that didn't change anything. Keep in mind that he is trying to appeal to both the LOTR enthusiasts and the general public. Including a lot of the travelling scenes or the extent of the dialogue would have made the movie unbearably boring for most viewers. I personally felt that the movie did a marvelous job of taking something as complex as LOTR is and bringing it down to something that's digestable in three hours.
There has definitely been a shortage of good anime in theatres. Aside from Princess Mononoke (sp?), I really haven't seen anything in theatres over the past couple years. From those readers that happen to be informed, what are some anime releases that actually made it to theatres in the US?
So if we're only talking about one ten-thousandth of a second by the close of the century, does this have the possibility of significantly affecting the lengths of days in the long run? If this continued to "snowball", would we be able to observe the changes on diurnal rhythms or would the events associated with global warming overshadow them?
From a friend of mine who happens to work at Radio Shack, I've heard that several XBoxes were returned to their store due to overheating problems. Apparently the DVD playing hardware can overheat the unit if it is in an enclosed space and running for a long period of time.
Sorry to be a little pessimistic, but at the moment Microsoft has no motivation to port Office X to Linux. For the amount of desktop Linux users in the market right not, it would not at all be profitable to pay the cost of porting it over. It's been beaten into our heads in this topic that porting from OSX to Linux is no easy matter, and the port would require hundreds if not thousands of hours of coding, as well as beta testing, promotion, distribution costs and support. For the relatively small market of Linux desktop users, there's no way that Microsoft would achieve a decent return on their investment. I know some of you would say that they could open-source it, but we all know that Microsoft is not an open source company and probably never will be. If the linux desktop market became as big or bigger than the macintosh market, there may be possibilities for this.