One thing I've learned in my life, given the chance, many will choose to do the wrong thing. I used to be cynical so many to me used to be most, but I'm pretty sure most will choose to do the right thing, but many won't. However I also know power corrupts, if only for the reason those who seek power generally suffer from narcissism, so for those with power, perhaps the bell curve is skewed more towards most.
I agree, but it's not so much that power corrupts, but that unaccountability corrupts. If an individual will suffer no consequences for harming another, then you are depending upon that individual's better nature. The problem is... he or she may not have one. That, in fact, is why we have the rule of law: you may or may not be someone that can be trusted, but the system will hold you accountable. Given that the Feds are involved in this matter, I think that an accounting is exactly what's about to happen.
It's people like you who give the movie studios one more reason to make things miserable for their law-abiding, paying customers.
As if they needed one. Their approach (and that of the music outfits) has always been to murder in the womb any media reproduction technology more advanced than the LP. Forget video... go to the theater and get in line, sheep. That's how they think... if a new tech is capable of making copies, they want it gone. Period. Doesn't matter what we think or want. You will consume whatever crumbs we offer, and you'll pay whatever we ask. Hell, left up the likes of Jack "Ding dong the bastard's DEAD!" Valenti the VCR would have been made illegal at the Federal level. Now, that was before anyone had even begun to distribute pre-recorded tapes that could be copied. They can't even entertain the concept that someone, somewhere, might enjoy something without paying the proper amount of juice money to a bunch of literal gangsters. Fact is, these sociopaths just want absolute, unquestioned, end-to-end control of media consumption and if they don't get it they go crying to Congress, pay a few bribes, write a few laws that their tame Congresscritters then dutifully have signed into law. It's disgusting, the level of corruption the media companies are capable of, and anyone who feels the slightest twinge of guilt over a torrent of the latest theatrical release is just uninformed. The Internet and Bit Torrent gave, and is still giving, these jerks exactly what they deserve.
My point being that blaming people who commit copyright infringement for the actions of the media moguls is misguided. The pricks that run the content cartels are, well... pricks.
Not always. Sometime you have a jackass programmer that refuses to listen to any pre-written architecture, refuses to listen to QA, and thinks that he can just produce code in complete isolation from the rest of the team. He believes that code will be perfect and if there are problems, its because of all the other idiots he's forced to work with.
I will repeat myself. If your team is not well run, you have a management failure. If you're going to keep an incompetent or insubordinate employee on the payroll, there'd better be a damn good reason. And you're right: an arrogant ass serves little purpose in a team programming environment. Either get the prick some counseling... or fire his ass because he's a liability.
The fact is, competence, in a team setting, has as much to do with normal human interaction as it does with technical ability. It just does, because in the end, what matters is the product, not the individual programmers. No matter how intellectually capable an individual may be, if he's a dick he's probably more trouble than he's worth. Get rid of him.
What are you talking about? Software fails all the time, and for many, many reasons. And if if a program is logically correct, the hardware upon which it must run can certainly fail to execute instructions correctly.
I hope you are not a software manager. If you are, you are completely and totally ignorant of modern software development processes and I pity anyone who works for you. Furthermore, as I pointed out in my previous post in this thread. the programmer is, by definition, the person least responsible for problems in shipping code. Unless your company takes a programmer's untested work, burns it to a CD and ships it to customers, you've just completely ignored all the other people involved in software development. For example, the quality assurance folks whose job it is to find bugs. Not to mention the architects and designers who are responsible for making sure that basic design is correct before a programmer even touches a keyboard, and a host of other people who have a role in producing quality software. If we are going to punish people, shouldn't everyone involved share in the responsibility?
Linus said it best: "How should I know if it works. That's what QC is for."
Get an education. Work in the field for a while. Then come back and perhaps we can have an intelligent dialog.
y drafting contracts that hold developers responsible when bugs creep into applications.
Arguably the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I'm old enough to have heard a lot of stupid shit.
Anybody who honestly thinks that scary looking contracts are going to keep the engineers in line
Is a moron who would have been a candidate for early-term abortion if we could only predict such things. The reality here is this: if you try to put engineers (especially software engineers) into a situation where every line of code they produce might put them in court, you're going to find yourself with a severe shortage of engineers. There are many things that creative minds can do, and if you make a particular line of work too personally dangerous nobody will enter that field.
More to the point however, only completely drain-bamaged organizations actually ship alpha code, which is obviously what we are talking about in this case. Because if we're not, if we're discussing production code that was overseen by competent management, conceived by competent designers, coded by competent software engineers and tested by competent QC engineers (you do have those, don't you?) then blaming the programmer alone is absolutely batshit insane, and will serve no legitimate purpose whatsoever.
Modern software development, much like the production of a motion picture, is a complex team effort, and singling out one sub-group of such an organization for punishment when failures occur (as it happens, the ones least responsible for such failures in shipping code) is just this side of brain-dead.
And I mean that about the programmers being the least responsible. Unless management has no functioning cerebral cortex material, they will understand and plan for bugs. You expect them, and you deal with them as part of your quality control process. Major failures can most frequently be attributed to a defective design and design review process: that sort of high-level work that happens long before a single developer writes one line of code. The reason that engineers who build bridges are not put in jail when a bridge fails and kills someone is because there are layers and layers and layers of review and error-checking that goes on before a design is approved for construction. It's no different in a well-run software team.
If your team is not well run, you have a management failure, not a programmer problem.
I had stupid people, I really do. And people that propose to punish programmers for bugs are fundamentally stupid.
Comcast sent me a fairly comprehensive nasty-gram on the subject.
There's a reason why I, and for that matter most of my friends, got off Comcast-down-to-the-depths-of-Hades at the first opportunity. A private FTP server whose only purpose is to allow the owner of the account to access his own files is not the same as offering a public server. Not that the likes of Comcast care about that... they just want anything other than browsing and email the hell off their network.
I swear, Comcast is the most incredible non-ISP that I've ever encountered.
It really depends on the situation and the time on your hands.
For the average project inheritor, the situation is almost always dire, and the amount of time available is usually pretty close to zero. Nothing but good management will ever change that. Consequently I'm not holding my breath.
I am article submitter O.P. and not retard I am programmer with Master DEgree in Computer Science from Indian Institude of Technology and If I am retard why does IBM give me 40.000,00 lines of code? American IBM cannott do it so they give it to me because of my education in India
IBM paies me 2 Mexican paysos for every line of code I fix that American coder screw up and I need food and room like American does. If American wants money than American should do job correct the first time and not have to send it to INdia to get all the work done correct. As AMerican teenager say DONT HATE THE PLAYER HATE THE GAME
The good news is that he's not a technical writer.
I feel like I'm feeding a troll here, but someone mod'd this up. So someone actually thinks you were saying something worthwhile, and I just don't see it.
On the other hand, some people just are that lucky, and never have to wade through three or four feet of someone else's leftover muck.
You are one sick fuck. Enjoy your visit from the FBI.
If you make a credible threat against the President, I would expect a visit from the Secret Service (dunno what's so secret about it, everyone seems to know about it.)
On the other hand, we're still allowed to say we don't like our President, even call him a traitor if we want, without government interference. Free speech and all that.
Nah, my G1 takes too damn long to boot... but theoretically if you're running a phone with an open-source OS it shouldn't be too difficult to patch it so the damn GPS isn't remotely accessible. Better yet, just make it always report that you're at home. Yeah, that wouldn't be so hot if you get shot by some carjacker and left for dead, but you can't have everything.
True enough... the problem is that the government will simply say, "yes, but just imagine what would have happened if we hadn't spent all those billions of taxpayer dollars on security, pawed through all that underwear, and stolen all those laptops."
How many unruly passengers would be pacified by the plane's WiFi?
Gas masks for the cabin crew, and a cylinder of knockout gas for the passengers would be just as effective, and would avoid the monthly service charges.
1) Make a guess, very generous one. Make sure there's plenty of space.
2) Double it, as you will need an equal amount of time for testing and bugfixing when you're done writing.
3) Double it again, as Murphy will make sure everything will fail, which will lead to inevitable delays.
4) Multiple by PI
Now you're pretty close to a realistic estimate!
Back when I was a contract developer, I would often take my original estimate, double it, and then add thirty percent. That used to work well for me for some reason.
No, because the people who actually do software development know that using "parametric tools to estimate development schedules" means guessing the future based on an approximation of the past...
...and often, that approximation of a past development event is substantially different from the project for which you want an estimate.
As investment firms usually disclaim: past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've learned in my life, given the chance, many will choose to do the wrong thing. I used to be cynical so many to me used to be most, but I'm pretty sure most will choose to do the right thing, but many won't. However I also know power corrupts, if only for the reason those who seek power generally suffer from narcissism, so for those with power, perhaps the bell curve is skewed more towards most.
I agree, but it's not so much that power corrupts, but that unaccountability corrupts. If an individual will suffer no consequences for harming another, then you are depending upon that individual's better nature. The problem is ... he or she may not have one. That, in fact, is why we have the rule of law: you may or may not be someone that can be trusted, but the system will hold you accountable. Given that the Feds are involved in this matter, I think that an accounting is exactly what's about to happen.
It's people like you who give the movie studios one more reason to make things miserable for their law-abiding, paying customers.
As if they needed one. Their approach (and that of the music outfits) has always been to murder in the womb any media reproduction technology more advanced than the LP. Forget video ... go to the theater and get in line, sheep. That's how they think ... if a new tech is capable of making copies, they want it gone. Period. Doesn't matter what we think or want. You will consume whatever crumbs we offer, and you'll pay whatever we ask. Hell, left up the likes of Jack "Ding dong the bastard's DEAD!" Valenti the VCR would have been made illegal at the Federal level. Now, that was before anyone had even begun to distribute pre-recorded tapes that could be copied. They can't even entertain the concept that someone, somewhere, might enjoy something without paying the proper amount of juice money to a bunch of literal gangsters. Fact is, these sociopaths just want absolute, unquestioned, end-to-end control of media consumption and if they don't get it they go crying to Congress, pay a few bribes, write a few laws that their tame Congresscritters then dutifully have signed into law. It's disgusting, the level of corruption the media companies are capable of, and anyone who feels the slightest twinge of guilt over a torrent of the latest theatrical release is just uninformed. The Internet and Bit Torrent gave, and is still giving, these jerks exactly what they deserve.
... pricks.
My point being that blaming people who commit copyright infringement for the actions of the media moguls is misguided. The pricks that run the content cartels are, well
Not always. Sometime you have a jackass programmer that refuses to listen to any pre-written architecture, refuses to listen to QA, and thinks that he can just produce code in complete isolation from the rest of the team. He believes that code will be perfect and if there are problems, its because of all the other idiots he's forced to work with.
I will repeat myself. If your team is not well run, you have a management failure. If you're going to keep an incompetent or insubordinate employee on the payroll, there'd better be a damn good reason. And you're right: an arrogant ass serves little purpose in a team programming environment. Either get the prick some counseling ... or fire his ass because he's a liability.
The fact is, competence, in a team setting, has as much to do with normal human interaction as it does with technical ability. It just does, because in the end, what matters is the product, not the individual programmers. No matter how intellectually capable an individual may be, if he's a dick he's probably more trouble than he's worth. Get rid of him.
Software does not fail, ever
What are you talking about? Software fails all the time, and for many, many reasons. And if if a program is logically correct, the hardware upon which it must run can certainly fail to execute instructions correctly.
I hope you are not a software manager. If you are, you are completely and totally ignorant of modern software development processes and I pity anyone who works for you. Furthermore, as I pointed out in my previous post in this thread. the programmer is, by definition, the person least responsible for problems in shipping code. Unless your company takes a programmer's untested work, burns it to a CD and ships it to customers, you've just completely ignored all the other people involved in software development. For example, the quality assurance folks whose job it is to find bugs. Not to mention the architects and designers who are responsible for making sure that basic design is correct before a programmer even touches a keyboard, and a host of other people who have a role in producing quality software. If we are going to punish people, shouldn't everyone involved share in the responsibility?
Linus said it best: "How should I know if it works. That's what QC is for."
Get an education. Work in the field for a while. Then come back and perhaps we can have an intelligent dialog.
y drafting contracts that hold developers responsible when bugs creep into applications.
Arguably the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I'm old enough to have heard a lot of stupid shit.
Anybody who honestly thinks that scary looking contracts are going to keep the engineers in line
Is a moron who would have been a candidate for early-term abortion if we could only predict such things. The reality here is this: if you try to put engineers (especially software engineers) into a situation where every line of code they produce might put them in court, you're going to find yourself with a severe shortage of engineers. There are many things that creative minds can do, and if you make a particular line of work too personally dangerous nobody will enter that field.
More to the point however, only completely drain-bamaged organizations actually ship alpha code, which is obviously what we are talking about in this case. Because if we're not, if we're discussing production code that was overseen by competent management, conceived by competent designers, coded by competent software engineers and tested by competent QC engineers (you do have those, don't you?) then blaming the programmer alone is absolutely batshit insane, and will serve no legitimate purpose whatsoever.
Modern software development, much like the production of a motion picture, is a complex team effort, and singling out one sub-group of such an organization for punishment when failures occur (as it happens, the ones least responsible for such failures in shipping code) is just this side of brain-dead.
And I mean that about the programmers being the least responsible. Unless management has no functioning cerebral cortex material, they will understand and plan for bugs. You expect them, and you deal with them as part of your quality control process. Major failures can most frequently be attributed to a defective design and design review process: that sort of high-level work that happens long before a single developer writes one line of code. The reason that engineers who build bridges are not put in jail when a bridge fails and kills someone is because there are layers and layers and layers of review and error-checking that goes on before a design is approved for construction. It's no different in a well-run software team.
If your team is not well run, you have a management failure, not a programmer problem.
I had stupid people, I really do. And people that propose to punish programmers for bugs are fundamentally stupid.
Comcast sent me a fairly comprehensive nasty-gram on the subject.
There's a reason why I, and for that matter most of my friends, got off Comcast-down-to-the-depths-of-Hades at the first opportunity. A private FTP server whose only purpose is to allow the owner of the account to access his own files is not the same as offering a public server. Not that the likes of Comcast care about that ... they just want anything other than browsing and email the hell off their network.
I swear, Comcast is the most incredible non-ISP that I've ever encountered.
Just drop cabin pressure, everyone will fall asleep eventually.
Might be a little hard on people with heart conditions though.
This would have seriously pissed me off when I was traveling to India.
This seriously pisses me off, period.
Thanks for the play-by-play breakdown of your experience reading his post. Fascinating.
Thanks for the play-by-play breakdown of your experience reading my post. Fascinating.
This definitely qualifies as "News for Nerds".
It really depends on the situation and the time on your hands.
For the average project inheritor, the situation is almost always dire, and the amount of time available is usually pretty close to zero. Nothing but good management will ever change that. Consequently I'm not holding my breath.
I am article submitter O.P. and not retard I am programmer with Master DEgree in Computer Science from Indian Institude of Technology and If I am retard why does IBM give me 40.000,00 lines of code? American IBM cannott do it so they give it to me because of my education in India IBM paies me 2 Mexican paysos for every line of code I fix that American coder screw up and I need food and room like American does. If American wants money than American should do job correct the first time and not have to send it to INdia to get all the work done correct. As AMerican teenager say DONT HATE THE PLAYER HATE THE GAME
The good news is that he's not a technical writer.
I could not disagree anymore with your statement.
If you're not disagreeing anymore, presumably that means you're agreeing. Or something.
His soul has gone up on the roof and gotten stuck there.
And I'm sure he's spinning in his grave over that remark.
I feel like I'm feeding a troll here, but someone mod'd this up. So someone actually thinks you were saying something worthwhile, and I just don't see it.
On the other hand, some people just are that lucky, and never have to wade through three or four feet of someone else's leftover muck.
and you tossed back on the street where you belong? What the hell?
Hey ... play nice.
You are one sick fuck. Enjoy your visit from the FBI.
If you make a credible threat against the President, I would expect a visit from the Secret Service (dunno what's so secret about it, everyone seems to know about it.)
On the other hand, we're still allowed to say we don't like our President, even call him a traitor if we want, without government interference. Free speech and all that.
And take the battery out when not in use.
Nah, my G1 takes too damn long to boot ... but theoretically if you're running a phone with an open-source OS it shouldn't be too difficult to patch it so the damn GPS isn't remotely accessible. Better yet, just make it always report that you're at home. Yeah, that wouldn't be so hot if you get shot by some carjacker and left for dead, but you can't have everything.
Getting blown up by terrorists.
True enough ... the problem is that the government will simply say, "yes, but just imagine what would have happened if we hadn't spent all those billions of taxpayer dollars on security, pawed through all that underwear, and stolen all those laptops."
How many unruly passengers would be pacified by the plane's WiFi?
Gas masks for the cabin crew, and a cylinder of knockout gas for the passengers would be just as effective, and would avoid the monthly service charges.
We could make air travel even safer by making the planes travel slower
I read that line, and my first thought was, "Oh God, he's one of those". Then I read the rest of your comment and realized you were being sardonic.
Opponents say the rules could raise the cost of shopping online and add hassles for fliers.
... somebody, somewhere, wants exactly that.
Exactly. We can't wait. *pumps shotgun*
You're going to need a bigger gun.
I think it's funny that "Duke Nukem Forever" and "Did Not Finish" have the same acronym.
or "Dropped Numerous Features", or maybe "Deadline Needs Flexibility".
I always learned it like this:
1) Make a guess, very generous one. Make sure there's plenty of space. 2) Double it, as you will need an equal amount of time for testing and bugfixing when you're done writing. 3) Double it again, as Murphy will make sure everything will fail, which will lead to inevitable delays. 4) Multiple by PI
Now you're pretty close to a realistic estimate!
Back when I was a contract developer, I would often take my original estimate, double it, and then add thirty percent. That used to work well for me for some reason.
No, because the people who actually do software development know that using "parametric tools to estimate development schedules" means guessing the future based on an approximation of the past...
...and often, that approximation of a past development event is substantially different from the project for which you want an estimate.
As investment firms usually disclaim: past performance is no guarantee of future performance.