I hate to break it to you but "fully defined requirements analysis" is a pipe dream filled with rainbows and unicorns. I have never, not once, seen a requirements document that accurately captures exactly what the system will do.
Well, I've written them, and I've never had a project fail.
One example involved interviewing
i) the owners of the company
ii) an executive from each department
iii) a "regular joe" representative from each department
This became a 40+ page project specification, which was signed off by all stakeholders and became the contract.
Then this document was fed into a series of code generation engines, which created hundreds of thousands of lines of code. This was all done with an eye towards allowing various professionals to go away and do what they do best without getting held up waiting on each other or tripping over each other, filling in the missing functionality in the generated code.
That system is still in operation close to a decade later, organizing the working lives of thousands and serving the needs of millions.
Now I work in Agile. I hate it. I'm always having to check with other people constantly to move forward, I never get in the zone, there's a lack of clarity and vision, and I feel like I'm getting stupider each day and I'm not producing my best work.
Frankly, decimal is kind of a cruddy system. It was a bad call in the first place to use base 10. Yeah, it's good for counting on your fingers, but it's only cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 5 and 10. Base 12 would have been a much better choice, it's cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12.
I say we ditch metric, imperial and the decimal system as well.
What sort of work are they being taken away from to deal with his insignificant little problem, I wonder.
In determining the eitology and perhaps a therapy for this condition, what other medical conditions will be subsequently solved by the newly gained knowledge?
None of us knows. It could be zero, it could be dozens. It could have no bearing, it could cure heart disease.
If only the Pages and Huntsmans of the world were the common model of spending by the wealthy, the world would be better off.
Kind of sad that he's been given the power to direct the efforts of a large number of respected medical professionals to address something that is extremely rare and neither crippling nor life threatening. What sort of work are they being taken away from to deal with his insignificant little problem, I wonder.
We should just do away with copyright already. From now on, the only way to get paid for porno is by the cameraman who offers you 500 euro while he's giving you a ride to your friend's house. He'll have no way to recoup, other than taking money from investors who convinced him to release the footage on Bittorrent.
Hot Legal Teens Fucking on a BMW. Brought to you by BMW.
Product placement would be an easy way to fund free porn. And really, how much more Pavlovian can you get than to have someone masturbate while looking at your product?
People like to say things like this as if it is literally nothing, but I do not really believe them. The entire entertainment sector would be completely gutted if they could make no money from their work put into their respective projects. Everything from movies to games to books and more.
Good. I hate em. I think they SHOULD starve.
Sure, people would still make these kind of things, but it would be personal projects just for the sake of doing them and nothing more. The variety and quality would be extremely variable if these paths weren't tied to their livelihoods anymore and they needed employment in other areas.
That's the goal. If you're not creating solely because you have something to say, great. You shouldn't be creating things for the purpose of manipulating us into feeding and clothing and housing you. I'd rather see them die.
Then, like most people, you're not doing it right.
Try riding a motorcycle for a while and see what happens if you don't concentrate 100% of the time.
It's the need to concentrate that makes it relaxing.
It's like rock climbing. You have to focus on the immediacy of the moment. It relieves my overactive mind from cycling over emotionally charged thoughts and leaves me unable to return to them because I'll die if I do.
I find driving incredibly relaxing. It requires just enough focus to get me into a zen like state, but not enough that it ever gets taxing except under unusual circumstances. Sometimes if I'm really stressed, I'll hop behind the wheel and drive for an hour or two in some random direction, then come back and feel totally relaxed.
But, right now my car is in the shop, and I'm taking the bus, and it's stressful as hell. Buying groceries is either an expensive taxi or a painful ordeal, sleeping in 10 minutes means I'm half an hour late for work, and visiting my friends has to be weighed against the boredom of an hour each way bus trip.
I don't know how anyone could possibly think of driving as boring and stressful. It's right up there with sex, tobacco and whiskey as far as I'm concerned.
I understand that you set up a drug lab in your home and spent your time experimenting with the way that Bath Salts increased the enjoyment you got sleeping with young girls.
The MVC pattern doesn't really fit into this realm at all. It has its place in developing standalone applications, but when you're dealing with multi-tiered web applications, it's a poor fit.
The stuff you send to the client is your view. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the whole shebang. The code that runs on the server is your controller. The database is your model.
Modern MVC implementations on the web are like writing an emulator of a bygone age because the abstractions are comfortable even though they don't fit.
it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.
Of course some stuff is created without thought to getting paid. But those things are less likely to use DRM anyway.
But you're going to cut down creation to a fraction of what it is if there's no profit motive. Say goodbye to feature films and big FPS games for example.
Goodbye! Thanks for all the fish! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!
But its cute to try and blame it on one particular... protocol? I'm not sure what 'deal with bittorrent' means. I mean, I get the 'first 7 minutes to bittorrent users' but who is that exactly? People that use software from bittorrent inc? Anyone with a bittorrent client? Who are they actually talking about? Well thought out statement you have there.
"How the heck can you distribute a movie on which you spent a minimum of $10 million just on the two lead actors (and probably more) via a medium you can't charge for?"
The Screen Actors Guild is really uptight about making sure that every actor everywhere is in their union, to the point of fining its members if they perform in the same piece as an actor that isn't part of that union. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to kill this either, namely because indie studios might be more likely to stay away from that union because they can't afford to pay what any of its members demand.
If that leads to a series of entertaining films coming out that don't contain any members of the Screen Actors Guild, they're really going to be up shit creek.
I don't really believe democracy is going to survive unless those who are not able bodied members of the work force are forcibly disenfranchised. The elderly dramatically outnumber the young, and they hold most of the wealth. There have been multiple generations of less than replacement level reproduction, and all the politicians and business leaders recognize that the situation is desperate, that we aren't capable of surviving on our own, but if we brought in the number of immigrants necessary to make up for all the babies we didn't have, we couldn't force them to support our aged population once they got here. The nations we would like to poach people from are a) suffering the same problem b) recent converts to our culture who have no reason to flee here c) able to recognize what we're about and actively hostile towards us. When we as a culture decided it was acceptable to entice women to exchange the children a woman would bear for the service she could provide us in the hear and now, we really fucked ourselves. Unless a lot of old people vote to throw themselves on their sword, what's going to happen is we're going to fritter away resources making their end days as comfortable as possible, when they should be used to set the ship aright and ensure a future. We're also going to make enemies of those destined to inherit the world from us, trying to use economic and military force to compel them to serve us.
I think the sensible thing for an able bodied person to do is to attempt to migrate to a young and vibrant culture... I've been considering Brazil.
Perhaps there are intelligent entities out there who will interact with 'us' after we assemble ourselves into a higher form of life, just as we have been assembled from lower forms of life.
Flying around the planet for a business meeting would seem pretty outrageous to a single celled organism. On interstellar scales, we are the single celled organisms.
We're going to have to successfully grow our population to levels that boggle the mind before we become significant, and even then, we're going to have as much chance to interact with aliens in their own environment as a human white blood cell has of chatting up a cell from a dogs liver. We're going to be structural components in such a scenario, so most of us will exist our whole lives "inside" the "body", except those that are born to be "skin".
Going further, the intelligences involved would have concerns as far removed from our own that we wouldn't have any chance of recognizing them. Their lifespans would be vastly beyond our own, the way our own lifespan is vastly greater than a skin cell.
When you get right down to it, it's entirely possible this is already going on. How the hell would we recognize such a thing?
And I don't mean this as a neo-luddite "computers are taking our jobs" kind of way, just that the set of skills that are unique to humanity are shrinking. We're running, as fast as we can, at a point where ownership of capital is the only factor for success in a free-market economy.
That's when the blood begins to flow. And rightly so.
What's troll-y is claiming that you don't see how that language could annoy anyone. There is a perfectly suitable gender-neutral word that makes exactly the same point. It's 2013 ffs.
When I read stuff like "stewardess", I think old-timer or non-native-English speaker.
And yes I realize this is/. and/. is not know for being a bastion of progressive thought on gender and bias. But sometimes I get annoyed at careless crap like the above and attempt to piss into the wind. Sue me.
No one's going to sue you, cupcake. Just be a dear and make me a sandwich, hmmm?
There's a huge difference between operating under a pseudonym to avoid gender bias and manufacturing blatant lies specifically intended to defraud.
Dontcha think? Dontcha?
No, not really. The goal to mislead is the same. The lengths gone to are a matter of degree, and the degree required comes from society, not the individual. If he could have achieved the same goal with less effort, he would have.
If it had been a woman, posing as a man, there would be a big discussion about how it was reasonable for her to do that, because it gave her a chance to have her work judged without having to deal with peoples pro-male bias. It used to be pretty common, particularly when you're in a situation where you don't actually meet the people you're doing business with. Writers operating under a pseudonym, for example.
So, he lied, and took advantage of peoples pro-female bias. And, people react with anger, just like people of a previous generation reacted with anger. People genuinely believe that men SHOULD have to work harder to get ahead. That's why they're mad. Because their prejudice is heartfelt.
Unfortunately, "more transparency" was used incorrectly as what we really would like to achieve is a more transparent government and a less transparent society.
But your response does highlight the fact that you really do believe that you will be safest when you have no more rights. Such a thought is abhorent to many a good patriot here in the states.
I don't want the right to hide. I want the right to see. If you prefer hiding to seeing, makes me think you're either a coward or a criminal. Maybe both. I certainly don't see it as sane and wise to participate in a democracy with people who keep secrets.
"Removing anonymity would remove the mob mentality effect, and allow us to exploit the power of this type of technology for good purpose."
The fact that some innocent people got undeserved attention is hardly a convincing reason to do away with anonymous free speech. If you want to talk about a "lynch mob" mentality, look at what happens to people who dare question the politically correct orthodoxy in this country. Dr. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winning geneticist lost his job and position on the board of directors at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory because he made some politically incorrect comments about race and genetic differences. The guy was an EXPERT in the field of genetics but was persecuted for saying something that the witch hunters didn't want to hear. Two high school students in FL posted a YouTube video where they made "racist" comments and had to be taken out of their school because they were getting death threats. As long as people are going to be subjected to reprisal and violence for speaking unpopular opinions, we need anonymous free speech.
That's terrible. We really should look into that... death threats are not ok. Who were the people who made the death threats?
Oh, right. We don't know, because they were made anonymously.
Reminds me of a lecture I heard recently, talking about a woman who was being stalked by her ex-boyfriend. They were attempting to make the point that she needed privacy protection to keep her safe.
All I could think is, restricting access to this lady's information isn't going to stop him from sitting in his car and following her. It might make things a little more difficult, but only marginally.
On the other hand, if this lady had access to pervasive surveillance infrastructure, she would KNOW when her creepy ex was following her. She would know that she should stay close to others, not wander off alone, perhaps alert others that she felt in danger, or leave the area entirely if she felt it was justified.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you but "fully defined requirements analysis" is a pipe dream filled with rainbows and unicorns. I have never, not once, seen a requirements document that accurately captures exactly what the system will do.
Well, I've written them, and I've never had a project fail.
One example involved interviewing
i) the owners of the company
ii) an executive from each department
iii) a "regular joe" representative from each department
This became a 40+ page project specification, which was signed off by all stakeholders and became the contract.
Then this document was fed into a series of code generation engines, which created hundreds of thousands of lines of code. This was all done with an eye towards allowing various professionals to go away and do what they do best without getting held up waiting on each other or tripping over each other, filling in the missing functionality in the generated code.
That system is still in operation close to a decade later, organizing the working lives of thousands and serving the needs of millions.
Now I work in Agile. I hate it. I'm always having to check with other people constantly to move forward, I never get in the zone, there's a lack of clarity and vision, and I feel like I'm getting stupider each day and I'm not producing my best work.
Frankly, decimal is kind of a cruddy system. It was a bad call in the first place to use base 10. Yeah, it's good for counting on your fingers, but it's only cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 5 and 10. Base 12 would have been a much better choice, it's cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12.
I say we ditch metric, imperial and the decimal system as well.
Why didn't you spell it out the first time?
Wanted attention.
What sort of work are they being taken away from to deal with his insignificant little problem, I wonder.
In determining the eitology and perhaps a therapy for this condition, what other medical conditions will be subsequently solved by the newly gained knowledge?
None of us knows. It could be zero, it could be dozens. It could have no bearing, it could cure heart disease.
If only the Pages and Huntsmans of the world were the common model of spending by the wealthy, the world would be better off.
It's offensive.
Kind of sad that he's been given the power to direct the efforts of a large number of respected medical professionals to address something that is extremely rare and neither crippling nor life threatening. What sort of work are they being taken away from to deal with his insignificant little problem, I wonder.
Wish I had mod points for you.
We should just do away with copyright already. From now on, the only way to get paid for porno is by the cameraman who offers you 500 euro while he's giving you a ride to your friend's house. He'll have no way to recoup, other than taking money from investors who convinced him to release the footage on Bittorrent.
Hot Legal Teens Fucking on a BMW. Brought to you by BMW.
Product placement would be an easy way to fund free porn. And really, how much more Pavlovian can you get than to have someone masturbate while looking at your product?
People like to say things like this as if it is literally nothing, but I do not really believe them. The entire entertainment sector would be completely gutted if they could make no money from their work put into their respective projects. Everything from movies to games to books and more.
Good. I hate em. I think they SHOULD starve.
Sure, people would still make these kind of things, but it would be personal projects just for the sake of doing them and nothing more. The variety and quality would be extremely variable if these paths weren't tied to their livelihoods anymore and they needed employment in other areas.
That's the goal. If you're not creating solely because you have something to say, great. You shouldn't be creating things for the purpose of manipulating us into feeding and clothing and housing you. I'd rather see them die.
I find driving incredibly relaxing.
Then, like most people, you're not doing it right.
Try riding a motorcycle for a while and see what happens if you don't concentrate 100% of the time.
It's the need to concentrate that makes it relaxing.
It's like rock climbing. You have to focus on the immediacy of the moment. It relieves my overactive mind from cycling over emotionally charged thoughts and leaves me unable to return to them because I'll die if I do.
I find driving incredibly relaxing. It requires just enough focus to get me into a zen like state, but not enough that it ever gets taxing except under unusual circumstances. Sometimes if I'm really stressed, I'll hop behind the wheel and drive for an hour or two in some random direction, then come back and feel totally relaxed.
But, right now my car is in the shop, and I'm taking the bus, and it's stressful as hell. Buying groceries is either an expensive taxi or a painful ordeal, sleeping in 10 minutes means I'm half an hour late for work, and visiting my friends has to be weighed against the boredom of an hour each way bus trip.
I don't know how anyone could possibly think of driving as boring and stressful. It's right up there with sex, tobacco and whiskey as far as I'm concerned.
Hi John,
I understand that you set up a drug lab in your home and spent your time experimenting with the way that Bath Salts increased the enjoyment you got sleeping with young girls.
What did you learn from your experience?
The MVC pattern doesn't really fit into this realm at all. It has its place in developing standalone applications, but when you're dealing with multi-tiered web applications, it's a poor fit.
The stuff you send to the client is your view. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the whole shebang. The code that runs on the server is your controller. The database is your model.
Modern MVC implementations on the web are like writing an emulator of a bygone age because the abstractions are comfortable even though they don't fit.
it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.
Of course some stuff is created without thought to getting paid. But those things are less likely to use DRM anyway.
But you're going to cut down creation to a fraction of what it is if there's no profit motive. Say goodbye to feature films and big FPS games for example.
Goodbye! Thanks for all the fish! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!
But its cute to try and blame it on one particular ... protocol? I'm not sure what 'deal with bittorrent' means. I mean, I get the 'first 7 minutes to bittorrent users' but who is that exactly? People that use software from bittorrent inc? Anyone with a bittorrent client? Who are they actually talking about? Well thought out statement you have there.
If you visit http://www.bittorrent.com/ it will become quickly apparent what they mean, I think.
http://bundles.bittorrent.com/torrents/BitTorrent-ArthurNewman.torrent
I imagine they're seeding it.
"How the heck can you distribute a movie on which you spent a minimum of $10 million just on the two lead actors (and probably more) via a medium you can't charge for?"
Merchandising?
The Screen Actors Guild is really uptight about making sure that every actor everywhere is in their union, to the point of fining its members if they perform in the same piece as an actor that isn't part of that union. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to kill this either, namely because indie studios might be more likely to stay away from that union because they can't afford to pay what any of its members demand.
If that leads to a series of entertaining films coming out that don't contain any members of the Screen Actors Guild, they're really going to be up shit creek.
I don't really believe democracy is going to survive unless those who are not able bodied members of the work force are forcibly disenfranchised. The elderly dramatically outnumber the young, and they hold most of the wealth. There have been multiple generations of less than replacement level reproduction, and all the politicians and business leaders recognize that the situation is desperate, that we aren't capable of surviving on our own, but if we brought in the number of immigrants necessary to make up for all the babies we didn't have, we couldn't force them to support our aged population once they got here. The nations we would like to poach people from are a) suffering the same problem b) recent converts to our culture who have no reason to flee here c) able to recognize what we're about and actively hostile towards us. When we as a culture decided it was acceptable to entice women to exchange the children a woman would bear for the service she could provide us in the hear and now, we really fucked ourselves. Unless a lot of old people vote to throw themselves on their sword, what's going to happen is we're going to fritter away resources making their end days as comfortable as possible, when they should be used to set the ship aright and ensure a future. We're also going to make enemies of those destined to inherit the world from us, trying to use economic and military force to compel them to serve us.
I think the sensible thing for an able bodied person to do is to attempt to migrate to a young and vibrant culture... I've been considering Brazil.
Since we're all conjecturing anyways...
Oooh, I want to play.
Perhaps there are intelligent entities out there who will interact with 'us' after we assemble ourselves into a higher form of life, just as we have been assembled from lower forms of life.
Flying around the planet for a business meeting would seem pretty outrageous to a single celled organism. On interstellar scales, we are the single celled organisms.
We're going to have to successfully grow our population to levels that boggle the mind before we become significant, and even then, we're going to have as much chance to interact with aliens in their own environment as a human white blood cell has of chatting up a cell from a dogs liver. We're going to be structural components in such a scenario, so most of us will exist our whole lives "inside" the "body", except those that are born to be "skin".
Going further, the intelligences involved would have concerns as far removed from our own that we wouldn't have any chance of recognizing them. Their lifespans would be vastly beyond our own, the way our own lifespan is vastly greater than a skin cell.
When you get right down to it, it's entirely possible this is already going on. How the hell would we recognize such a thing?
And I don't mean this as a neo-luddite "computers are taking our jobs" kind of way, just that the set of skills that are unique to humanity are shrinking. We're running, as fast as we can, at a point where ownership of capital is the only factor for success in a free-market economy.
That's when the blood begins to flow. And rightly so.
What's troll-y is claiming that you don't see how that language could annoy anyone. There is a perfectly suitable gender-neutral word that makes exactly the same point. It's 2013 ffs.
When I read stuff like "stewardess", I think old-timer or non-native-English speaker.
And yes I realize this is /. and /. is not know for being a bastion of progressive thought on gender and bias. But sometimes I get annoyed at careless crap like the above and attempt to piss into the wind. Sue me.
No one's going to sue you, cupcake. Just be a dear and make me a sandwich, hmmm?
There's a huge difference between operating under a pseudonym to avoid gender bias and manufacturing blatant lies specifically intended to defraud.
Dontcha think? Dontcha?
No, not really. The goal to mislead is the same. The lengths gone to are a matter of degree, and the degree required comes from society, not the individual. If he could have achieved the same goal with less effort, he would have.
Not true, this worked for the guy, Adria Richard, from the dongle-gate
Nice!
If it had been a woman, posing as a man, there would be a big discussion about how it was reasonable for her to do that, because it gave her a chance to have her work judged without having to deal with peoples pro-male bias. It used to be pretty common, particularly when you're in a situation where you don't actually meet the people you're doing business with. Writers operating under a pseudonym, for example.
So, he lied, and took advantage of peoples pro-female bias. And, people react with anger, just like people of a previous generation reacted with anger. People genuinely believe that men SHOULD have to work harder to get ahead. That's why they're mad. Because their prejudice is heartfelt.
Unfortunately, "more transparency" was used incorrectly as what we really would like to achieve is a more transparent government and a less transparent society.
But your response does highlight the fact that you really do believe that you will be safest when you have no more rights. Such a thought is abhorent to many a good patriot here in the states.
I don't want the right to hide. I want the right to see. If you prefer hiding to seeing, makes me think you're either a coward or a criminal. Maybe both. I certainly don't see it as sane and wise to participate in a democracy with people who keep secrets.
"Removing anonymity would remove the mob mentality effect, and allow us to exploit the power of this type of technology for good purpose."
The fact that some innocent people got undeserved attention is hardly a convincing reason to do away with anonymous free speech.
If you want to talk about a "lynch mob" mentality, look at what happens to people who dare question the politically correct orthodoxy in this country. Dr. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winning geneticist lost his job and position on the board of directors at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory because he made some politically incorrect comments about race and genetic differences. The guy was an EXPERT in the field of genetics but was persecuted for saying something that the witch hunters didn't want to hear.
Two high school students in FL posted a YouTube video where they made "racist" comments and had to be taken out of their school because they were getting death threats.
As long as people are going to be subjected to reprisal and violence for speaking unpopular opinions, we need anonymous free speech.
That's terrible. We really should look into that... death threats are not ok. Who were the people who made the death threats?
Oh, right. We don't know, because they were made anonymously.
Reminds me of a lecture I heard recently, talking about a woman who was being stalked by her ex-boyfriend. They were attempting to make the point that she needed privacy protection to keep her safe.
All I could think is, restricting access to this lady's information isn't going to stop him from sitting in his car and following her. It might make things a little more difficult, but only marginally.
On the other hand, if this lady had access to pervasive surveillance infrastructure, she would KNOW when her creepy ex was following her. She would know that she should stay close to others, not wander off alone, perhaps alert others that she felt in danger, or leave the area entirely if she felt it was justified.
The whole argument is backwards.