We just finished a two-month experiment with Extreme Programming on my team of six. We really made a strong effort to do it right, because we saw an advantage in going the whole nine yards, and because we also saw the instability of a partial implementation. We spent a couple of weeks up front reading the books (pro and con), debating the issues, and coming up with a plan, then we did four 2-week iterations. The result was an unqualified success. Productivity shot way up, morale improved, and we are much happier with the quality of the code. Now we are laying down plans to continue this way indefinitely. We had a few skeptics at the start of the process, especially on the topic of pair programming, but now they are strong advocates. Upper management is very happy and wants to expand the practice.
If you are interested in XP, you must understand that it takes a lot of discipline to do it right. You will need a lot of up front time to talk about and change your habits, and some patience while you work through a new process. If you have people on your team who don't like to roll up their sleeves, or who aren't competent, XP will not fix them. If your senior people have no desire to slow down enough to mentor less experienced members of the team, XP won't work there either. The process requires a certain amount of intelligence, cooperation, and altruism. If your team is lacking in any of those areas, be prepared for failure. If your team has those qualities, hang on and enjoy the ride!
This is the third time that I've been in an XP implementation, and each time has been a fantastic experience. It's nice that XP really works, but the best part of all is that it is just plain fun.
So here is a story about a guy who is interested using technology to help him live his personal morals while remaining connected to the internet.
This could be a great opportunity for understanding and discussion. Istead, the slashdot community has latched on to the combined theme of religion and pornography and has used the opportunity to heap derision and ridicule on a group of people simply because they think differently.
It seems rather hypocritical to demand tolerance for your own personal views and then in turn refuse to tolerate views other than your own.
Now for an actual comment on the story: I would say this idea boils down to obtaining self-control by making all of your private actions public. I think such an approach can be viewed as only a means to an end, because as a final solution it is fundamentally flawed. This is because true self-control is the thing that is manifested when nobody else is looking. True self-control must ultimately come from within.
By this logic, we should have dropped 3.5" floppy disks ages ago, but they remain useful after more than two decades.
DVD's are bigger, sure, but CDR's are cheap, ubiquitous, and useful. To supplant CD's we'll need something cheaper, ubiquitous, and more useful. I'm thinking that next step will be to bypass media altogether with high-bandwidth remote storage.
When programming alone, I find that the "zone" is an elusive beast that can be found for about an hour or two each day, on average. Some days more, some days less.
Pair programming, a subset of extreme programming, largely eliminates this problem for me. When I pair up with another developer, I can regularly find the zone each day and stay in it for 4-6 hours. As a project manager, I introduced extreme programming and my team quadrupled their output overnight. And this is with six of us sitting in a garage with cheap office furnature.
An automobile is rated at 70 dBA at 20 meters. This generater generates 72 dBA from just one meter. This sucker is LOUD. You won't be seeing it in the office any time soon, that's for sure.
I've personally mentored several kids from late grade school to high school seniors. Here are some things I've learned:
1) Be careful not to overestimate the understanding of your students. Over the years, certain computer concepts have become second nature to me, but most average students have a really hard time with them. I'm talking about things like if-then statements, functions, and loops. If you want to teach programming concepts, try to keep it extremely simple.
2) A lot of people seem to really grasp on to the concepts of customization, paramaterization, and formatting. That is why a formatting language like HTML is so readily picked up and embraced. On those lines I might suggest POVRAY or MIT's LOGO programming language as something to consider.
3) The more you can incorperate graphics into your presentation, the more it will captivate your audience. Digital manipulation of video and audio can keep kids busy for hours.
I am flabbergasted that computer text to speech still sounds like a "drunken swede in a garbage can". Would someone please explain this to me? Why is it so incredibly difficult to synthesize a human voice that sounds even remotely intelligible?
It seems as if this technology is following a strange inverse of Moore's law where it gets better by only half as much each year.
I came from Intel where people generally got docked or rewarded based on their work hours because the management model was so broken that work hours were just about the only metric they could use to rate employees. I went through two death marches at Intel. The first was particularly bad and the overal moral of the employees never recovered.
The most infurating thing about the notion of hours at Intel is that the management viewed long hours as a sign of a good worker. In my mind long hours are a sign of poor planning, period.
I am now the VP of technology at a small startup company with a technical staff of six. I tell my employees right off the bat that we don't do long hours here. I take time to very carefully plan our projects and tasks about two months ahead of time. This way, there is never any reason to go into crunch mode. Currently we are six days ahead of schedule. Knowing this helps my staff work more carefully; and more importantly, it lowers the stress we are under so we work harder and maker fewer mistakes.
Finally, if my co-workers are staying past five, I encourage them to go home and I look at my planning to see if something I missed is creating an artificial pressure to work long hours.
Who moves there head around to look at stuff on their computer monitor. Try this out for five seconds and you'll see how annoying this is. A successful device will need to go off eye movements.
Not exactly cooperative, but provides at least 22 minutes of good clean sweaty fun.
Materials: Trashcan, bouncy ball, soft projectile
Rules:
- in the middle of a 10-15' circle is a trash-can or similar receptacle.
- One person (the "it" person) stands near the trashcan in the middle with a dense, soft object he can throw (a baseball glove or a flipper)
- Everyone else playing stands on the edge of the circle trying to bounce the ball into the trashcan.
- The "it" person tries to prevent the ball making it into the trashcan by throwing his object at the ball. He can never touch the ball with his body or bat the ball with the soft object.
- Once a person bounces the ball into the trashcan, they get to be "it"
Let's do some math:
Accelerate at 1 G for two days...
10m/s * 60 * 60 * 24 * 2 = 1728 Km/s
Mars is about 20 light minutes away at its most distant point so...
20 * 60 * 300,000km = 360,000,000 km
At the aforementioned velocity you could cover the distance in...
360000000 / 1728 = 208333 secs
That's about 2.5 days, no puree.
I saw some segments from the DVD on a pbs fundraiser and it looks like they have replaced a lot of the cheesy special effects with more modern space photography and the like. It's still the same old Carl Sagan, though, and BOY does he look young!!
The earth is big and heavy, so all the really valuable heavy metals like gold, platinum, etc. tend to sink deep into the Earth so they end up being relatively rare on the crust. Most asteroids, however, are fairly homogeneous collections of the heavy material that made our solar system, so they are chock full of the valuable heavy metals. For instance in the case of Gold, meteorites have concentrations about 50 times greater than in the Earth's crust. I got this information from
Webelements under the geology link for gold.
I think voters should have to prove that they are competent before they can vote in an election. On the ballot should be some simple questions like: Which of the following people are running for this office? or... Match the following platform positions with their respective candidates. Only votors who can competently answer questions about the candidates should have their votes counted.
I've heard quite a bit about 3-D printers, but I've never seen an online image of what they can do. Anybody know where some good pictures are of the output of these puppies?
This article was kind of a wake-up call for my SETI thinking. I think it is a reasonable notion to start thinking thart aren't many (or any?) smart ET's out there.
*BUT* it does pose some interesting possibilities in the way of human colonization of the cosmos. Run through the calculations and you will quickly find that terraforming a planet would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. But perhaps, as the article suggests, primitive life is almost certain to arise on any earth-like planet, and multicellular life is the true rarity. Well, that might mean that there are gobs and gobs of inhabitable, pre-terraformed planets with oxygenated atmospheres ripe for the taking!
WRT storage technology, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned FRAM. Ferroelectric RAM is nonvolatile and much denser than flash; as dimensions sink, it's even denser than regular DRAM. Which is why the big memory houses are furiously searching for a way to reliably manufacture it.
I share your frustration. FRAM is actually being researched and produced by big companies such as SAMSUNG in densities as high as 4Mb. You are not correct, though, to say that FRAM is denser than flash. Remember that flash can store two bits in a very small memory cell. So far, flash has also proved more scaleable than FRAM, which is why you see flash densities today orders of magnitude better than FRAM even though FRAM is an older technology. A good reference for reading about non-volatile memory technologies can be found at
EDN Access
I don't have think we have too much to worry about. I checked under the topic spirituality and came up with channels like "dreamcast-gods" and "mp3-heaven". And for some reason, nearly all the channels it scans seem to be in Spanish.
Perhaps the signal/noise ratio on IRC is way too low to worry much about privacy.
... when it gets love handles! I mean, what are these guys thinking?? We're supposed to jump up and down for a few extra megs and a colorful bulge?
And here is the thing that really chaps my hide: Memory is down under $1/meg these days and the best we can get in a Palm is 8MB? Talk about price gouging!
Now, I do coding, gaming, graphics editing, etc. at home and I hardly use even half of my 12 Gig HD. My biggest problem is data integrity, not storage space. Hard drive manufacturers, are you listening? Here is what we need:
Better Fault tolerant drives! A standard disk drive has 2 platters/ four heads, right? Well, why not implement an internal Raid 5 with four disks, one for each platter side? Then your 80 gig drive would turn into a 60 gig raid 5 array. If one of sides should go bad, the user could be alerted and could transfer the data to a new hard drive before the data is _really_ lost when one of the other sides craps out.
For those interested, a very level-headed, well researched FAQ on "Cellular Phone Antennas and Human Health" can be found at http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/ cop/cell-phone-health-FAQ/toc.html. It is very good reading for anyone concerned about this topic.
Slashdot Mirror
There is another article on his web site that is quite a bit more interesting on "Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It"
http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliability.htm
I think this article is better reading and deserves another round on slashdot.
Who/what will last longer: Gordon Moore or His Law?
We just finished a two-month experiment with Extreme Programming on my team of six. We really made a strong effort to do it right, because we saw an advantage in going the whole nine yards, and because we also saw the instability of a partial implementation. We spent a couple of weeks up front reading the books (pro and con), debating the issues, and coming up with a plan, then we did four 2-week iterations. The result was an unqualified success. Productivity shot way up, morale improved, and we are much happier with the quality of the code. Now we are laying down plans to continue this way indefinitely. We had a few skeptics at the start of the process, especially on the topic of pair programming, but now they are strong advocates. Upper management is very happy and wants to expand the practice.
If you are interested in XP, you must understand that it takes a lot of discipline to do it right. You will need a lot of up front time to talk about and change your habits, and some patience while you work through a new process. If you have people on your team who don't like to roll up their sleeves, or who aren't competent, XP will not fix them. If your senior people have no desire to slow down enough to mentor less experienced members of the team, XP won't work there either. The process requires a certain amount of intelligence, cooperation, and altruism. If your team is lacking in any of those areas, be prepared for failure. If your team has those qualities, hang on and enjoy the ride!
This is the third time that I've been in an XP implementation, and each time has been a fantastic experience. It's nice that XP really works, but the best part of all is that it is just plain fun.
This could be a great opportunity for understanding and discussion. Istead, the slashdot community has latched on to the combined theme of religion and pornography and has used the opportunity to heap derision and ridicule on a group of people simply because they think differently.
It seems rather hypocritical to demand tolerance for your own personal views and then in turn refuse to tolerate views other than your own.
Now for an actual comment on the story: I would say this idea boils down to obtaining self-control by making all of your private actions public. I think such an approach can be viewed as only a means to an end, because as a final solution it is fundamentally flawed. This is because true self-control is the thing that is manifested when nobody else is looking. True self-control must ultimately come from within.
By this logic, we should have dropped 3.5" floppy disks ages ago, but they remain useful after more than two decades.
DVD's are bigger, sure, but CDR's are cheap, ubiquitous, and useful. To supplant CD's we'll need something cheaper, ubiquitous, and more useful. I'm thinking that next step will be to bypass media altogether with high-bandwidth remote storage.
When programming alone, I find that the "zone" is an elusive beast that can be found for about an hour or two each day, on average. Some days more, some days less.
Pair programming, a subset of extreme programming, largely eliminates this problem for me. When I pair up with another developer, I can regularly find the zone each day and stay in it for 4-6 hours. As a project manager, I introduced extreme programming and my team quadrupled their output overnight. And this is with six of us sitting in a garage with cheap office furnature.
An automobile is rated at 70 dBA at 20 meters. This generater generates 72 dBA from just one meter. This sucker is LOUD. You won't be seeing it in the office any time soon, that's for sure.
I've personally mentored several kids from late grade school to high school seniors. Here are some things I've learned:
1) Be careful not to overestimate the understanding of your students. Over the years, certain computer concepts have become second nature to me, but most average students have a really hard time with them. I'm talking about things like if-then statements, functions, and loops. If you want to teach programming concepts, try to keep it extremely simple.
2) A lot of people seem to really grasp on to the concepts of customization, paramaterization, and formatting. That is why a formatting language like HTML is so readily picked up and embraced. On those lines I might suggest POVRAY or MIT's LOGO programming language as something to consider.
3) The more you can incorperate graphics into your presentation, the more it will captivate your audience. Digital manipulation of video and audio can keep kids busy for hours.
I am flabbergasted that computer text to speech still sounds like a "drunken swede in a garbage can". Would someone please explain this to me? Why is it so incredibly difficult to synthesize a human voice that sounds even remotely intelligible?
It seems as if this technology is following a strange inverse of Moore's law where it gets better by only half as much each year.
I came from Intel where people generally got docked or rewarded based on their work hours because the management model was so broken that work hours were just about the only metric they could use to rate employees. I went through two death marches at Intel. The first was particularly bad and the overal moral of the employees never recovered.
The most infurating thing about the notion of hours at Intel is that the management viewed long hours as a sign of a good worker. In my mind long hours are a sign of poor planning, period.
I am now the VP of technology at a small startup company with a technical staff of six. I tell my employees right off the bat that we don't do long hours here. I take time to very carefully plan our projects and tasks about two months ahead of time. This way, there is never any reason to go into crunch mode. Currently we are six days ahead of schedule. Knowing this helps my staff work more carefully; and more importantly, it lowers the stress we are under so we work harder and maker fewer mistakes.
Finally, if my co-workers are staying past five, I encourage them to go home and I look at my planning to see if something I missed is creating an artificial pressure to work long hours.
All of us here work around 40 hours per week.
Gee, what did the paper clip fail? Maybe because users feel humiliated by the notion that they are so stupid they have to ask a paperclip for help!!
Who moves there head around to look at stuff on their computer monitor. Try this out for five seconds and you'll see how annoying this is. A successful device will need to go off eye movements.
Not exactly cooperative, but provides at least 22 minutes of good clean sweaty fun.
Materials: Trashcan, bouncy ball, soft projectile
Rules:
- in the middle of a 10-15' circle is a trash-can or similar receptacle.
- One person (the "it" person) stands near the trashcan in the middle with a dense, soft object he can throw (a baseball glove or a flipper)
- Everyone else playing stands on the edge of the circle trying to bounce the ball into the trashcan.
- The "it" person tries to prevent the ball making it into the trashcan by throwing his object at the ball. He can never touch the ball with his body or bat the ball with the soft object.
- Once a person bounces the ball into the trashcan, they get to be "it"
Play until you are to tired to stand up.
-e
Let's do some math:
Accelerate at 1 G for two days...
10m/s * 60 * 60 * 24 * 2 = 1728 Km/s
Mars is about 20 light minutes away at its most distant point so...
20 * 60 * 300,000km = 360,000,000 km
At the aforementioned velocity you could cover the distance in...
360000000 / 1728 = 208333 secs
That's about 2.5 days, no puree.
I saw some segments from the DVD on a pbs fundraiser and it looks like they have replaced a lot of the cheesy special effects with more modern space photography and the like. It's still the same old Carl Sagan, though, and BOY does he look young!!
The earth is big and heavy, so all the really valuable heavy metals like gold, platinum, etc. tend to sink deep into the Earth so they end up being relatively rare on the crust. Most asteroids, however, are fairly homogeneous collections of the heavy material that made our solar system, so they are chock full of the valuable heavy metals. For instance in the case of Gold, meteorites have concentrations about 50 times greater than in the Earth's crust. I got this information from Webelements under the geology link for gold.
I think voters should have to prove that they are competent before they can vote in an election. On the ballot should be some simple questions like: Which of the following people are running for this office? or... Match the following platform positions with their respective candidates. Only votors who can competently answer questions about the candidates should have their votes counted.
I've heard quite a bit about 3-D printers, but I've never seen an online image of what they can do. Anybody know where some good pictures are of the output of these puppies?
This article was kind of a wake-up call for my SETI thinking. I think it is a reasonable notion to start thinking thart aren't many (or any?) smart ET's out there.
*BUT* it does pose some interesting possibilities in the way of human colonization of the cosmos. Run through the calculations and you will quickly find that terraforming a planet would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. But perhaps, as the article suggests, primitive life is almost certain to arise on any earth-like planet, and multicellular life is the true rarity. Well, that might mean that there are gobs and gobs of inhabitable, pre-terraformed planets with oxygenated atmospheres ripe for the taking!
I share your frustration. FRAM is actually being researched and produced by big companies such as SAMSUNG in densities as high as 4Mb. You are not correct, though, to say that FRAM is denser than flash. Remember that flash can store two bits in a very small memory cell. So far, flash has also proved more scaleable than FRAM, which is why you see flash densities today orders of magnitude better than FRAM even though FRAM is an older technology. A good reference for reading about non-volatile memory technologies can be found at EDN Access
An affordable self-contained video camera system that can fit in the nose cone of a model rocket just got another step closer. Ohhh, yes.
Perhaps the signal/noise ratio on IRC is way too low to worry much about privacy.
And here is the thing that really chaps my hide: Memory is down under $1/meg these days and the best we can get in a Palm is 8MB? Talk about price gouging!
Now, I do coding, gaming, graphics editing, etc. at home and I hardly use even half of my 12 Gig HD. My biggest problem is data integrity, not storage space. Hard drive manufacturers, are you listening? Here is what we need:
Better Fault tolerant drives! A standard disk drive has 2 platters/ four heads, right? Well, why not implement an internal Raid 5 with four disks, one for each platter side? Then your 80 gig drive would turn into a 60 gig raid 5 array. If one of sides should go bad, the user could be alerted and could transfer the data to a new hard drive before the data is _really_ lost when one of the other sides craps out.
For those interested, a very level-headed, well researched FAQ on "Cellular Phone Antennas and Human Health" can be found at http://www.mcw.edu/gcrc/ cop/cell-phone-health-FAQ/toc.html. It is very good reading for anyone concerned about this topic.