Yeah, it's still racism couched in the nicest possible way. Chinese people are very prejudiced against dark skinned people, particularly "Blacks" and "Indians". If they rented out people of all colours it would be a different story but obviously white people are superior to everyone else except the Chinese...
The Brits might have a bit of a disagreement with that!!!!
You get harassed for "being white", I get harassed for "being black",... Kinda makes me sick we live in the 21st century and still have to deal with this crapola.
Hell, in my divorce, I got harassed for being a man, and for being concerned for my kids. While married, I got harassed for having an autistic child. And I'll stop it right there. Sometimes I feel as though people harass me just for existing.
Will we ever grow up as a species? Or will we always be not much better than our simian cousins? No better than the howler monkeys, who love to sling poo at passers-by?
And when the next mass-extinction event comes along and wipes out the Human Race, will the Universe even bother shedding a tear, I wonder?
Did you ever get to play with an Amiga runing SVR5 flavor of Unix? The Amiga was actually the first Unix box you could get back in those days for anything less than $5000. It was a great pity Commodore dropped that project. Actually, there were a lot of kick-ass cool stuff us Amiga engineers were planning and developing for that wonderful machine, but Commodore upper management shit-canned a lot of it.
Then, when the "PeeCee" started getting some of those abilities, it was a day late and a dollar short for Commodore. Finally, Commodore upper management caught half a clue, but it was way too late in the game, and had shut down too many plants to get enough of the hot new Amigas off into the hands of eager customers. The rest, you know. May Commodore rest in peace.
the incompetent can be easily caught. Perhaps these were even decoys for the competent operation still running.
Took the words right out of my mouth. You'll never know if you have a real competent spy around. Those Russians are very shrewd when it comes to this. Many years ago a US statesman was given a "gift" -- a wood carving supposedly made by children -- when he went to Russia. When he got back, he hung it up in the very conference room, he hung the thing up on the wall.
Over time, they noticed that discussions were slipping out of the room to the Russians, so they had the room checked for bugs. They could find nothing. And yet secrets still kept slipping.
They eventually checked the "gift" -- turned out it had a passive resonant circuit attached to a capacitor that had a diaphragm modulated by sound. How it was activated? Externally by a radio source at 300 MHz. It was quite ingenious, because there were no electronics as such-- just a tube with the diaphragm attached at the end.
The US guys couldn't figure it out, so they consulted British scientists!!! Can you believe that? Man, how stupid the US gov can be sometimes.
The US's track record is seriously lacking, past and present. Obama is just as war-mongering as Bush, if not more so. Thus I've dubbed him, "Bushbama". Not to be confused with "Bushbaby". Well, Obama is hardly a *baby* Bush.
Well, you'll need more tin foil than just for a hat, considering they are planning to install the T-ray render-your-ass-naked scanners in all US airports, where perverts will be looking at you, your wife, and your kids rendered digitally naked as they walk through.
And yes, it's more than just a conspiracy. It's actual fact. And the sheeple in this country don't seem to care, either.
Going to have to figure out how to build a portable EMP device to render the pervert's toys useless.
I can't give any weight at all to the ridiculous historical claims. Yawn. The people who lived there in the past are dead. The people there now have the only reasonable claim "I was born here". So the people in the refugee camps need to be given something else, but something of comparable quality.
That's whats so damning about situations like these. Same can be said for the native "Americans" vs. the settlers that came here and took their land. It began peaceful at first; then got ugly. And no one alive then is alive today, but look at the state of affairs with the aborigines.
I've had similar problems with prototypes I've written being judged by the quality of the UI. I've found that if you can make the UI obviously appear to be of prototype quality, the problems of premature quality judgments based on the UI go away. For prototype I did in Swing a number of years ago, I replaced the standard look and feel with the NapkinLF, which made the entire UI appear to be drawn on paper. The UI still worked, but the appearance made it obvious that it was still a work in progress. It made people realize that the application was a prototype.
I wish NapkinLF was around when I was playing around with Swing on this project way back when.
They were using this GUI layout application, and I was coding the GUI by hand. Of course theirs would always look sweeter -- at first, anyway.
And then they wanted me to fit my framework for their GUI layout application, which generated shitty code that was completely incompatible with what I was doing. But I was going to find a way to make it work anyway. I always do.
I think most GUI layout apps are crap, at least the ones I've seen over the years. Unless you write code to what they had in mind, you're completely lost.
The fight against domestic terrorism will become, without the slightest doubt, a tool for those in power to silence and remove those who would stand up for our rights as they become chiseled away - because terrorism is not a threat against life and liberty, in the government's eyes, it's a threat against the governing establishment.
Alas, very true. But well, the US government is already too big and too powerful for its own good. And I can say exactly the same thing about China and probably quite a few others.
We need a common-mode solution to an ever growing and vexing problem.
Same reasons criticizing Israel gets you labeled an anti-Semite - stupidity and ignorance.
And merely asking probing questions about the "Holocaust", like exactly where that "6 million" figure came from, will get you landed as a "holocaust denier".
It's a sad day when it's wrong to challenge and inquire.
The only solution to Israel that doesn't involve genocide is find a place for the Palestinians.
The countries that attacked Israel in all the wars could all stand to lose some more land considering how they contributed to the Palestinian's problem then by helping strand them and now by lamenting the situation without offering them a home.
Of course ideally we'd bulldoze both sides' holy places to remove their justification for fighting.
Well, the whole Israel affair goes all the way back to just after WWII. Basically what is now Israel took that land over from the Palestinians or whomever was there before. I believe the UN was behind it, and it was badly planned with little consideration for the indigenous folks there.
Which evolved, of course, into the mess you have today.
It's going to be rare that, on your first use of these services, you can make a decision based on a close call, evaluating code quality, UI design, and so on. No, you'll be evaluating "did the project get completed AT ALL?". And you'll learn a lot about how to find people using these services, and how to write better specs yourself, so that you don't waste everyone's time in the future.
Oh yeah, tell me about it. I've seen too many projects die and wither on the vine. And it was always due to either bad management or unrealistic expectations. The worst of the lot that I was personally a part of was this Revenue project at Conrail. (Remember them?)
Back then, I was just a consultant working on a part of a major project to redo the revenue tracking system that was originally based on Cobol running on mainframes. That was my only direct contact with mainframes in my career, and quite frankly, I never want to be near one of these beasts ever again.
I recall writing email on the mainframe interface once, and had mistyped a line. I could not figure out how to delete the line, so I asked one of the "old hats" there.
I watched in in moral shock and disbelief as he had to do several keystrokes and go through 2 or 3 screens just to delete a SINGLE LINE OF TEXT!!!!!!
But I digress.
That project was horribly managed, and went nowhere. And then management had the gall to call us all into a meeting to tell us: "You have all failed". "You", meaning all the contractors and developers. Oh, management couldn't possibly be at fault could they?
And to show how the sheer insanity had progressed to utter lunacy, they had us all to change the names of the files of our source code on our PCs to be like the filenames on their mainframes. Basically, 2 letters followed by 4 digits. So "WHATTHEF.CPP" would be renamed to "WF3377.CPP". This effort was supposed to make the entire project more "manageable." In those days, PCs could only handle 8.3 characters (thank you Microsoft!!!), and it was hard enough to know what a file was when the name had to be limited to 8 characters. But now only 2 meaningful characters? I went insane.
Needless to say, I quit. I already had another job lined up on that day they told us we "failed".
And a year later, Conrail finally closed its doors forever. Good riddens!!!!!!
It fits right in with the terrorists hate our way of life, if you criticize us because you think we aren't doing a good job you hate our way of life and must therefore be a terrorist. Off to political prison for you commie.
What's this "we" shit, jingoist?
It's quite clear to anyone who has been paying attention -- and I don't mean a CNN couch potato, either -- that what they hate is US government involvement in manipulating their countries, supporting their enemies, and the myriad of other hegemonic things US gov does around the world. They never seem much of the US civilian "way of life" -- that's too abstract and removed from them. What they do see is what's right in front of their noses -- US troops blowing up their villages, bombing their camps, cutting off supplies, manipulating their governments, etc. THAT is what they're responding to. They could care less that you might love watching baseball or I might love to take a walk through the woods.
Then again, I do recall an open admission on the part of the US government a number of times that they would try to manipulate and influence perception by infiltrating various groups and online establishments to "sow seeds of propaganda".
You have half of the solution there. Yes bring some of our troops home. But there are many places that they are doing good and bringing good will to America both past and present. Hitler is the most obvious example but there are others.
Hitler? Well, there's the packaged story we are all fed about that time; then there is what actually happened. Stalin was a real bad-ass, worse in many respects than Hitler. And yet the US and Great Britain allied with him. So it was a choice of which bad-ass to align yourself with. Stalin's overall plan was to allow Hitler to mop up Western Europe, then he'd come in and mop up Hitler. He was quite surprised when Hitler came over and kicked his butt!!
Why, after all this time, do we still have so many troops deployed in so many areas of the world? Why isn't there a push to allow these countries to develop to the point where they can take care of themselves so that the US can bring those troops home? Why oh why do we still have troops deployed in Japan to this day? Hello. Did I miss something?
It is clear that there is much more going on than just "doing good", whatever that is supposed to be. The US loves its hegemonic place in the world, and is not about to give it up. Even if it means plunging the country into an unrecoverable economic situation.
Better to wait until a later stage when everyone has had a chance to think about what they really want.
To me, this is an alarming statement. So basically you got your infrastructure in place without considering what they really want. This means your infrastructure is a commodity, nothing special to the project. The GUI part, on the other hand, might have significant consideration of the work flow other than just a pretty face.
It seems your mentality is to produce command line apps. If a real GUI app is expected, it's very likely your infrastructure, even if it's really superior for its own reason, might not be able to integrated with a good GUI.
It's interesting you got +5(insightful) for your comment. But it's as surprising as why this year is still not the year for Linux Desktop.
A properly-designed infrastructure will interface with the GUI just fine. The GUI, though, is the easiest part to change, and it will change quite a bit over its life cycle. The whole idea behind spending the effort on the infrastructure is so that it can support an ever-changing GUI without much complaint.
And like I said before, it's the business requirements that should be driving both. Marketing will have a VERY strong say.
Growing your Military Industrial Complex destroys wealth. Building up your manufacturing and production to meet the civilian market grows your wealth. It's that simple. And something the United States is totally lost on.
So, the U.S. wasn't the wealthiest country in the world in the second half of the 20th century?
What you don't seem to be aware of is that your proposed strategy for the U.S. to follow is the one that most Western European nations have been following since the late 1960s. It hasn't worked as advertised for them. There have been more terrorism attacks in Europe against Europeans than in the U.S.
How do you define "wealth"? Seems to me that the US is the most in debt in the world. Well, I suppose debt can appear to be "wealth" until the "devil" calls in his due.
You tell me what happens to the US "wealth" when China decides it doesn't want to prop it up anymore. Indeed, what's happening now! These aren't exactly great economic times if you haven't noticed. So where's all that "wealth" of which you speak?
You've never actually studied international ethics, have you. Your proposal is very noble, but incredibly naive.
International Ethics? Are you kidding? Can you really say with a straight face that any country behaves ethically in the global arena?
Alas, there is what should be, and then there is what is. I don't think I am the naive one here. Governments all have one and only one mission: to see their own self interests. "Ethics" is the fiction you feed your citizens so they won't riot against you. Right up there with bread and circuses.
I've found that competitive design pays off better than competitive development. It's easier to refactor code than it is the complete design of a piece of software, so it's more important top get it right the first time. For code just use paired programming or a decent code review process (or both).
Oh I despise the "paired programmers" approach! Well, unless the pair are reasonably matched in competence and ability, I see no good coming out of it. And since I've been writing code for the past 30 years and have gotten rather good at it, I can't even conceive of who would be a good "match" for me in that scenario. If anything, I would wind up *teaching* rather than *coding*, which is how it usually goes anyway.
Oh right, there is no one on God's green earth that is intelligent and experienced enough to be your match.. please.
Be a little more conceited.
When I'm being honest, I'm "conceited". Were I to hold something back, I am committing a "lie of omission". If I were to flat out lie, then I would be dishonest.
Finally, I want to mention that not giving the GUI enough attention from the beginning is not good also. I'm a believer that function and form are closely tied together. You can design the best infrastructure in the world, but slapping a GUI on top of it as an afterthought will result in crappy user experience. Also there are a lot of times where certain UI functions, although may seem trivial, actually translates to significant backend design changes. As you mentioned, the GUI is what the user interacts with, and to them it's actually the GUI that represents the application, so it *is* what the application is about to them.
I would agree with this in principle. GUI should NEVER be just an afterthought, but it should not drive everything, either. And yes, there are definitely times that some specific GUI requirement may need significant support from the backend, particularly in high demand environments.
Better to wait until a later stage when everyone has had a chance to think about what they really want.
If people doesn't now what they want of the software, how do you know you're building the right architecture for them?
Because I spend the time to understand the business. Once you understand that, you've got 80% of what you need. Then you can lead them to the solution that is best suited for them.
Many business types really don't know what they really want, or more importantly, what they really need. It takes a lot of effort and skill to keep them all on the same page, to manage expectations, and to also keep the systems types informed and aware, and the developers on their toes.
Even when they think they know what they want, I still have to spend time to learn the actual business so that I can understand if they are being realistic or not. You'd be surprised how many can be totally way off the mark with their expectations.
The front-end is the whole point of the program. If it isn't driving the backend development, you are doin' it wrong. Companies who let the backend drive development get blown away whenever something new comes along.
Ever hear of MVC? The front-end and the back-end should be decoupled, really. In an ideal situation, the GUI developers should not have to care much about what is going on at the backend. Just talk to the API. The backend needs to be able to handle the load and other issues that the front-end will need.
You should be able to rework the front-end quickly without too many changes to the back-end. If you can't do this, then something is wrong with the overall design.
It's the business requirements that should be driving both the back-end and the front-end. The front-end should not be leading the show. The back-end needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the ever-changing front-end without too much fuss. Since the front-end is the most dynamic part of the operation, if it were driving the back-end, the back-end would never get done!!!!!
I've had to be called in many, many times in the past and present -- and got paid good for it -- to clean up the mess created with the front-end lead the back-end. It's a quick way to nowhere. Yes, you get instant gratification, but it's a Faustian bargain at best.
This is horrible advice! Your method is why we have such shitty software and is why companies like Apple are stealing Microsoft's lunch! Yes the backend is important and you shouldn't neglect it, but the GUI is what drives the design of the backend! It is, in essence, the high-level requirements document for the entire application stack! If you don't have the GUI design, how the hell do you even know what the bowels of the application should be doing!?
I would think the business requirements are what drives the design and implementation. How can you design a GUI when you don't even have the basic business requirements down solid? Hello. Did I miss something?
It's the least important as far as overall functionality, but it's what everyone sees and reacts to.
The GUI is the most important because as you say, it the part that actually gets touched by non-programmers. The UI should drive the design of everything below it--including the database schema , the middleware, and things like the messaging protocols.
I would strongly disagree, of course. When you are dealing with LARGE projects, you can't even begin until you have the business requirements down solid. I'm not talking about a silly mom-and-pop website here. I am talking about a major enterprise application. I would never, for example, design a database schema solely on the GUI. Makes no sense. There's a lot of backend processing that
must take place -- billing, customer management, data stores, and the like. Is the enterprise centrally located, or scattered around the globe? How much data will they have to share? Synchronization, presentation, backup, hardware to support it all. Do you use a sharded database, or a cluster configuration? How does the data have to interact? How does the front-end communicate with the back-end? Is it totally an "intraweb" application? Or will there be an external website? What will be the traffic load? What is the network infrastructure needed to support it? What about high-availability issues? How much redundancy will you need to give a 100% uptime (or dammed near it)? What are the cost tradeoffs? What can the business afford? What are the details of the business operation? How does that need to be supported by the application? What about security issues? Credit card data involved? How do you meed the compliance requirements? And on and on and on.
Only a fool would focus on the GUI first. Yes, it's important, but there are so many other details to get right first. I have seen too many cases where an unscrupulous/clueless developer worked on the GUI first, made it look real good, sold management and the owners on it, only to be found out later there was no attention paid to WHAT REALLY MATTERS. And so the project died.
Well, it is clear whom I am NOT going to hire on my next major project!!!!
To be honest, you sound like a hot-shot junior fresh out of school with only a couple of year's experience. The GUI is the easy part -- probably the easiest of all. Getting all the other stuff that I mentioned right is the hard part. It what separates the men from the boys.
I am currently working on a small project -- a trading platform that I will use personally. It quite literally took me less than a day to do the GUI part, and a couple of weeks to do the real part that matters -- datafeeds, sending executions to the brokerage, getting the acknowledgements back, and keeping track of the trades. I can change and fiddle with the GUI on the fly, and basically I wanted the GUI to be as simple-minded as possible. Basically, into a trade with a single click, and out of a trade with a single click. The software does all the annoying stuff, like figure out what the limit order will be, what the stop out will be, adjust the stops as the trade progresses, and so on.
Why did I write this rather than use the GUI apps the brokerage provides? Simple. Their application sucks.
So you were given explicit requirements, instructions on how to 'win' in this competition, but you decided to go against these requirements and concentrate on something that was not as important to the stake holders instead and now you are complaining that competitive programming does NOT work?
You are the proof that competitive programming DOES work, it's just you failed in that competition.
You are putting many words in my mouth here. You don't know all the details and are making assumptions. But whatever. It was a long time ago anyway. If an empty GUI with no infrastructure will get it done, you the man!
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Yeah, it's still racism couched in the nicest possible way. Chinese people are very prejudiced against dark skinned people, particularly "Blacks" and "Indians". If they rented out people of all colours it would be a different story but obviously white people are superior to everyone else except the Chinese...
The Brits might have a bit of a disagreement with that!!!!
Hell, in my divorce, I got harassed for being a man, and for being concerned for my kids. While married, I got harassed for having an autistic child. And I'll stop it right there. Sometimes I feel as though people harass me just for existing.
Will we ever grow up as a species? Or will we always be not much better than our simian cousins? No better than the howler monkeys, who love to sling poo at passers-by?
And when the next mass-extinction event comes along and wipes out the Human Race, will the Universe even bother shedding a tear, I wonder?
Silly Humans. The Entire Lot of us.
Then, when the "PeeCee" started getting some of those abilities, it was a day late and a dollar short for Commodore. Finally, Commodore upper management caught half a clue, but it was way too late in the game, and had shut down too many plants to get enough of the hot new Amigas off into the hands of eager customers. The rest, you know. May Commodore rest in peace.
Long Live the Amiga!
Hell, who cares??
Where do I sign up for one of these jobs?
I mean..almost a type of welfare job for white guys!! I could be a token whitey for the right price!!
You slut.
the incompetent can be easily caught. Perhaps these were even decoys for the competent operation still running.
Took the words right out of my mouth. You'll never know if you have a real competent spy around. Those Russians are very shrewd when it comes to this. Many years ago a US statesman was given a "gift" -- a wood carving supposedly made by children -- when he went to Russia. When he got back, he hung it up in the very conference room, he hung the thing up on the wall.
Over time, they noticed that discussions were slipping out of the room to the Russians, so they had the room checked for bugs. They could find nothing. And yet secrets still kept slipping.
They eventually checked the "gift" -- turned out it had a passive resonant circuit attached to a capacitor that had a diaphragm modulated by sound. How it was activated? Externally by a radio source at 300 MHz. It was quite ingenious, because there were no electronics as such-- just a tube with the diaphragm attached at the end.
The US guys couldn't figure it out, so they consulted British scientists!!! Can you believe that? Man, how stupid the US gov can be sometimes.
The US's track record is seriously lacking, past and present. Obama is just as war-mongering as Bush, if not more so. Thus I've dubbed him, "Bushbama". Not to be confused with "Bushbaby". Well, Obama is hardly a *baby* Bush.
And yes, it's more than just a conspiracy. It's actual fact. And the sheeple in this country don't seem to care, either.
Going to have to figure out how to build a portable EMP device to render the pervert's toys useless.
I can't give any weight at all to the ridiculous historical claims. Yawn. The people who lived there in the past are dead. The people there now have the only reasonable claim "I was born here". So the people in the refugee camps need to be given something else, but something of comparable quality.
That's whats so damning about situations like these. Same can be said for the native "Americans" vs. the settlers that came here and took their land. It began peaceful at first; then got ugly. And no one alive then is alive today, but look at the state of affairs with the aborigines.
I've had similar problems with prototypes I've written being judged by the quality of the UI. I've found that if you can make the UI obviously appear to be of prototype quality, the problems of premature quality judgments based on the UI go away. For prototype I did in Swing a number of years ago, I replaced the standard look and feel with the NapkinLF, which made the entire UI appear to be drawn on paper. The UI still worked, but the appearance made it obvious that it was still a work in progress. It made people realize that the application was a prototype.
I wish NapkinLF was around when I was playing around with Swing on this project way back when. They were using this GUI layout application, and I was coding the GUI by hand. Of course theirs would always look sweeter -- at first, anyway.
And then they wanted me to fit my framework for their GUI layout application, which generated shitty code that was completely incompatible with what I was doing. But I was going to find a way to make it work anyway. I always do.
I think most GUI layout apps are crap, at least the ones I've seen over the years. Unless you write code to what they had in mind, you're completely lost.
The fight against domestic terrorism will become, without the slightest doubt, a tool for those in power to silence and remove those who would stand up for our rights as they become chiseled away - because terrorism is not a threat against life and liberty, in the government's eyes, it's a threat against the governing establishment.
Alas, very true. But well, the US government is already too big and too powerful for its own good. And I can say exactly the same thing about China and probably quite a few others.
We need a common-mode solution to an ever growing and vexing problem.
Same reasons criticizing Israel gets you labeled an anti-Semite - stupidity and ignorance.
And merely asking probing questions about the "Holocaust", like exactly where that "6 million" figure came from, will get you landed as a "holocaust denier".
It's a sad day when it's wrong to challenge and inquire.
The only solution to Israel that doesn't involve genocide is find a place for the Palestinians.
The countries that attacked Israel in all the wars could all stand to lose some more land considering how they contributed to the Palestinian's problem then by helping strand them and now by lamenting the situation without offering them a home.
Of course ideally we'd bulldoze both sides' holy places to remove their justification for fighting.
Well, the whole Israel affair goes all the way back to just after WWII. Basically what is now Israel took that land over from the Palestinians or whomever was there before. I believe the UN was behind it, and it was badly planned with little consideration for the indigenous folks there.
Which evolved, of course, into the mess you have today.
Don't get me wrong -- I would love it if I had someone that was complementary to my own abilities. That would be a rare person these days.
It's going to be rare that, on your first use of these services, you can make a decision based on a close call, evaluating code quality, UI design, and so on. No, you'll be evaluating "did the project get completed AT ALL?". And you'll learn a lot about how to find people using these services, and how to write better specs yourself, so that you don't waste everyone's time in the future.
Oh yeah, tell me about it. I've seen too many projects die and wither on the vine. And it was always due to either bad management or unrealistic expectations. The worst of the lot that I was personally a part of was this Revenue project at Conrail. (Remember them?)
Back then, I was just a consultant working on a part of a major project to redo the revenue tracking system that was originally based on Cobol running on mainframes. That was my only direct contact with mainframes in my career, and quite frankly, I never want to be near one of these beasts ever again.
I recall writing email on the mainframe interface once, and had mistyped a line. I could not figure out how to delete the line, so I asked one of the "old hats" there.
I watched in in moral shock and disbelief as he had to do several keystrokes and go through 2 or 3 screens just to delete a SINGLE LINE OF TEXT!!!!!!
But I digress.
That project was horribly managed, and went nowhere. And then management had the gall to call us all into a meeting to tell us: "You have all failed". "You", meaning all the contractors and developers. Oh, management couldn't possibly be at fault could they?
And to show how the sheer insanity had progressed to utter lunacy, they had us all to change the names of the files of our source code on our PCs to be like the filenames on their mainframes. Basically, 2 letters followed by 4 digits. So "WHATTHEF.CPP" would be renamed to "WF3377.CPP". This effort was supposed to make the entire project more "manageable." In those days, PCs could only handle 8.3 characters (thank you Microsoft!!!), and it was hard enough to know what a file was when the name had to be limited to 8 characters. But now only 2 meaningful characters? I went insane.
Needless to say, I quit. I already had another job lined up on that day they told us we "failed".
And a year later, Conrail finally closed its doors forever. Good riddens!!!!!!
It fits right in with the terrorists hate our way of life, if you criticize us because you think we aren't doing a good job you hate our way of life and must therefore be a terrorist. Off to political prison for you commie.
What's this "we" shit, jingoist?
It's quite clear to anyone who has been paying attention -- and I don't mean a CNN couch potato, either -- that what they hate is US government involvement in manipulating their countries, supporting their enemies, and the myriad of other hegemonic things US gov does around the world. They never seem much of the US civilian "way of life" -- that's too abstract and removed from them. What they do see is what's right in front of their noses -- US troops blowing up their villages, bombing their camps, cutting off supplies, manipulating their governments, etc. THAT is what they're responding to. They could care less that you might love watching baseball or I might love to take a walk through the woods.
Then again, I do recall an open admission on the part of the US government a number of times that they would try to manipulate and influence perception by infiltrating various groups and online establishments to "sow seeds of propaganda".
So, exactly whom it is do you work for?
You have half of the solution there. Yes bring some of our troops home. But there are many places that they are doing good and bringing good will to America both past and present. Hitler is the most obvious example but there are others.
Hitler? Well, there's the packaged story we are all fed about that time; then there is what actually happened. Stalin was a real bad-ass, worse in many respects than Hitler. And yet the US and Great Britain allied with him. So it was a choice of which bad-ass to align yourself with. Stalin's overall plan was to allow Hitler to mop up Western Europe, then he'd come in and mop up Hitler. He was quite surprised when Hitler came over and kicked his butt!!
Why, after all this time, do we still have so many troops deployed in so many areas of the world? Why isn't there a push to allow these countries to develop to the point where they can take care of themselves so that the US can bring those troops home? Why oh why do we still have troops deployed in Japan to this day? Hello. Did I miss something?
It is clear that there is much more going on than just "doing good", whatever that is supposed to be. The US loves its hegemonic place in the world, and is not about to give it up. Even if it means plunging the country into an unrecoverable economic situation.
Better to wait until a later stage when everyone has had a chance to think about what they really want.
To me, this is an alarming statement. So basically you got your infrastructure in place without considering what they really want. This means your infrastructure is a commodity, nothing special to the project. The GUI part, on the other hand, might have significant consideration of the work flow other than just a pretty face.
It seems your mentality is to produce command line apps. If a real GUI app is expected, it's very likely your infrastructure, even if it's really superior for its own reason, might not be able to integrated with a good GUI.
It's interesting you got +5(insightful) for your comment. But it's as surprising as why this year is still not the year for Linux Desktop.
A properly-designed infrastructure will interface with the GUI just fine. The GUI, though, is the easiest part to change, and it will change quite a bit over its life cycle. The whole idea behind spending the effort on the infrastructure is so that it can support an ever-changing GUI without much complaint.
And like I said before, it's the business requirements that should be driving both. Marketing will have a VERY strong say.
Growing your Military Industrial Complex destroys wealth. Building up your manufacturing and production to meet the civilian market grows your wealth. It's that simple. And something the United States is totally lost on.
So, the U.S. wasn't the wealthiest country in the world in the second half of the 20th century? What you don't seem to be aware of is that your proposed strategy for the U.S. to follow is the one that most Western European nations have been following since the late 1960s. It hasn't worked as advertised for them. There have been more terrorism attacks in Europe against Europeans than in the U.S.
How do you define "wealth"? Seems to me that the US is the most in debt in the world. Well, I suppose debt can appear to be "wealth" until the "devil" calls in his due.
You tell me what happens to the US "wealth" when China decides it doesn't want to prop it up anymore. Indeed, what's happening now! These aren't exactly great economic times if you haven't noticed. So where's all that "wealth" of which you speak?
You've never actually studied international ethics, have you. Your proposal is very noble, but incredibly naive.
International Ethics? Are you kidding? Can you really say with a straight face that any country behaves ethically in the global arena?
Alas, there is what should be, and then there is what is. I don't think I am the naive one here. Governments all have one and only one mission: to see their own self interests. "Ethics" is the fiction you feed your citizens so they won't riot against you. Right up there with bread and circuses.
Understand the verisimilitude that rules the day.
I've found that competitive design pays off better than competitive development. It's easier to refactor code than it is the complete design of a piece of software, so it's more important top get it right the first time. For code just use paired programming or a decent code review process (or both).
Oh I despise the "paired programmers" approach! Well, unless the pair are reasonably matched in competence and ability, I see no good coming out of it. And since I've been writing code for the past 30 years and have gotten rather good at it, I can't even conceive of who would be a good "match" for me in that scenario. If anything, I would wind up *teaching* rather than *coding*, which is how it usually goes anyway.
Oh right, there is no one on God's green earth that is intelligent and experienced enough to be your match.. please.
Be a little more conceited.
When I'm being honest, I'm "conceited". Were I to hold something back, I am committing a "lie of omission". If I were to flat out lie, then I would be dishonest.
There is no way I can win here.
Finally, I want to mention that not giving the GUI enough attention from the beginning is not good also. I'm a believer that function and form are closely tied together. You can design the best infrastructure in the world, but slapping a GUI on top of it as an afterthought will result in crappy user experience. Also there are a lot of times where certain UI functions, although may seem trivial, actually translates to significant backend design changes. As you mentioned, the GUI is what the user interacts with, and to them it's actually the GUI that represents the application, so it *is* what the application is about to them.
I would agree with this in principle. GUI should NEVER be just an afterthought, but it should not drive everything, either. And yes, there are definitely times that some specific GUI requirement may need significant support from the backend, particularly in high demand environments.
If people doesn't now what they want of the software, how do you know you're building the right architecture for them?
Because I spend the time to understand the business. Once you understand that, you've got 80% of what you need. Then you can lead them to the solution that is best suited for them.
Many business types really don't know what they really want, or more importantly, what they really need. It takes a lot of effort and skill to keep them all on the same page, to manage expectations, and to also keep the systems types informed and aware, and the developers on their toes.
Even when they think they know what they want, I still have to spend time to learn the actual business so that I can understand if they are being realistic or not. You'd be surprised how many can be totally way off the mark with their expectations.
The front-end is the whole point of the program. If it isn't driving the backend development, you are doin' it wrong. Companies who let the backend drive development get blown away whenever something new comes along.
Ever hear of MVC? The front-end and the back-end should be decoupled, really. In an ideal situation, the GUI developers should not have to care much about what is going on at the backend. Just talk to the API. The backend needs to be able to handle the load and other issues that the front-end will need.
You should be able to rework the front-end quickly without too many changes to the back-end. If you can't do this, then something is wrong with the overall design.
It's the business requirements that should be driving both the back-end and the front-end. The front-end should not be leading the show. The back-end needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the ever-changing front-end without too much fuss. Since the front-end is the most dynamic part of the operation, if it were driving the back-end, the back-end would never get done!!!!!
I've had to be called in many, many times in the past and present -- and got paid good for it -- to clean up the mess created with the front-end lead the back-end. It's a quick way to nowhere. Yes, you get instant gratification, but it's a Faustian bargain at best.
This is horrible advice! Your method is why we have such shitty software and is why companies like Apple are stealing Microsoft's lunch! Yes the backend is important and you shouldn't neglect it, but the GUI is what drives the design of the backend! It is, in essence, the high-level requirements document for the entire application stack! If you don't have the GUI design, how the hell do you even know what the bowels of the application should be doing!?
I would think the business requirements are what drives the design and implementation. How can you design a GUI when you don't even have the basic business requirements down solid? Hello. Did I miss something?
The GUI is the most important because as you say, it the part that actually gets touched by non-programmers. The UI should drive the design of everything below it--including the database schema , the middleware, and things like the messaging protocols.
I would strongly disagree, of course. When you are dealing with LARGE projects, you can't even begin until you have the business requirements down solid. I'm not talking about a silly mom-and-pop website here. I am talking about a major enterprise application. I would never, for example, design a database schema solely on the GUI. Makes no sense. There's a lot of backend processing that must take place -- billing, customer management, data stores, and the like. Is the enterprise centrally located, or scattered around the globe? How much data will they have to share? Synchronization, presentation, backup, hardware to support it all. Do you use a sharded database, or a cluster configuration? How does the data have to interact? How does the front-end communicate with the back-end? Is it totally an "intraweb" application? Or will there be an external website? What will be the traffic load? What is the network infrastructure needed to support it? What about high-availability issues? How much redundancy will you need to give a 100% uptime (or dammed near it)? What are the cost tradeoffs? What can the business afford? What are the details of the business operation? How does that need to be supported by the application? What about security issues? Credit card data involved? How do you meed the compliance requirements? And on and on and on.
Only a fool would focus on the GUI first. Yes, it's important, but there are so many other details to get right first. I have seen too many cases where an unscrupulous/clueless developer worked on the GUI first, made it look real good, sold management and the owners on it, only to be found out later there was no attention paid to WHAT REALLY MATTERS. And so the project died.
Well, it is clear whom I am NOT going to hire on my next major project!!!!
To be honest, you sound like a hot-shot junior fresh out of school with only a couple of year's experience. The GUI is the easy part -- probably the easiest of all. Getting all the other stuff that I mentioned right is the hard part. It what separates the men from the boys.
I am currently working on a small project -- a trading platform that I will use personally. It quite literally took me less than a day to do the GUI part, and a couple of weeks to do the real part that matters -- datafeeds, sending executions to the brokerage, getting the acknowledgements back, and keeping track of the trades. I can change and fiddle with the GUI on the fly, and basically I wanted the GUI to be as simple-minded as possible. Basically, into a trade with a single click, and out of a trade with a single click. The software does all the annoying stuff, like figure out what the limit order will be, what the stop out will be, adjust the stops as the trade progresses, and so on.
Why did I write this rather than use the GUI apps the brokerage provides? Simple. Their application sucks.
So you were given explicit requirements, instructions on how to 'win' in this competition, but you decided to go against these requirements and concentrate on something that was not as important to the stake holders instead and now you are complaining that competitive programming does NOT work?
You are the proof that competitive programming DOES work, it's just you failed in that competition.
You are putting many words in my mouth here. You don't know all the details and are making assumptions. But whatever. It was a long time ago anyway. If an empty GUI with no infrastructure will get it done, you the man!