I agree with the "small cardinality... perhaps ideally cardinality one" comment. That is to say that the Customer in the Agile sense must speak with one or close to one voice. If influences outside of the team are pulling you away from doing work that the Customer has prioritized then that is a failure of management.
We had such a problem at my current company until we convinced our Customer team that production bugs (Excepting service outages) had to be prioritized with other stories. If they were more critical than the new feature they would be worked on first. That was up to the Customer to decide. So, outside forces feed stories to the Customer, but it is still up to the Customer to decide what is most important to work on.
In the hypothetical scenario the customer introduces a critical story in the middle of an iteration. This can and does happen in Agile projects. The only problem is that the team may not be able to deliver something that it thought it would because it will be spending effort on the new story. That is ok. The primary goal of Agile is to give the customer the ability to prioritize work and manage the creation of business value.
Also this aversion toward "context switching" isn't particularly Agile. The idea behind TDD, evolutionary design, and small time-boxed tasks is to work in small chunks. I would argue that the ability to "context switch" developers while still developing value incrementally is the whole point of the Agile approach.
I was always what you call a "role player." I suppose that is why I feel that what the computer gaming world calls RPGs bears so little resemblance to what I think of as an RPG. There have been games where the characters and the story they told took central stage, but for the most part computer RPGs do seem to be about gaining levels and gathering items. I've always preferred "adventure" games and FPS games because I feel more "in character" playing them.
I still have plenty of both, and expect to for the rest of my lifetime. Sure, downloaded content will become more important as time goes on, but I don't think it will ever replace discs anymore than the computer replaced paper. In fact, plenty of people download content just to burn it to disc just like plenty of people print Word and PDF documents, and even webpages.
The value of HD-DVD is that now you can have content that is of the same quality as or better than what you can get over-the-air or on cable/satellite. I don't see that as trivial, and I don't see it as going away. My HD-DVD drive is in the mail, and I already own a couple discs. Plus, Netflix will send me HD-DVD content without any increase in my subscription cost. I'm sold.
I can't always know everything that I would like to about every federal/state/county/city candidate, judge, ballot initiative, etc. For example, here in California today's ballot was four full pages (Two sides of two cards.) So, I have a simple set of rules that I follow:
For candidates for office: 1) If I know which candidate I intend to vote for I vote for that person.
2) Otherwise, I vote based on party affiliation:
a) For federal offices I may vote *against* a candidate from one party if I don't like that party by voting for the opponent with the best chances of winning. Even though that candidate may not be affiliated with my party.
b) In all other cases I vote for the candidate my party has nominated.
c) If my party has not nominated a candidate:
1. I vote against the encumbent (I call this my "fresh start" rule. YMMV.)
2. If I don't know who the encumbent is then I abstain.
For ballot initiatives: 1) Only vote yes if I feel that I understand what is being proposed and believe that new legislation will have a positive impact on the issue without creating undue tax burden.
2) Otherwise I vote no.
So, in a worse case scenario where I found myself at the poll with no idea what was going on, I would just vote for everyone who was listed as a member of my party (Libertarian in case anyone cares,) vote no on all the initiatives, and abstain from the rest. While this would never happen, because I go to lengths to be informed, I still feel that I would be making a positive contribution in this hypothetical scenario. The point is that I know what I believe in and I can use that to create general guidelines even if I am not informed on every issue.
It is worth looking at the way that Python is used in the game industry. Quite a lot of shops use it in a heterogeneous environment where the core functionality, e.g. graphics, physics, control/hardware, etc are in highly optimised C with inline assembly but Python acts as a glue pulling them all together and scripting most of the actual gameplay. There are books on this, but it is more than just theoretical. I interviewed at a shop that does exactly this for the console games they produce.
If you've ever written code before Dive into Python is the way to go. It is free on the web and also available in print from APress. I am a big fan of books of this style which assume that you already have some knowledge of basic programming and focus on the specifics of the new language.
It's not all that different from our own English speaking culture. Look at some of the ridiculous things we do with French or Italian words in order to make something sound stylish or sophisticated. Sure there are plenty of English speakers who also understand these other languages, but it is nonetheless true that people will buy a product with a cool sounding name (or slogan) without having any clue what it really means.
Except that when we talk about the tenth amendment in this context we should also consider the ninth: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The question is, what types of privacy do people reasonably expect? And don't these reasonable expectations essentially amount to "unenumerated" rights?
To be fair, I said "often". No generalization is 100% true, and it is certainly the case that there is high quality music in any genre and there is also celluloid drivel in any genre. The two examples I gave were punk and hip-hop, but I could have used any music from the 1950s or later (Since the advent of the "rock star" phenomenon).
Music is an odd thing, in that one cannot 'sell' a piece of music in the same way one would sell a car. The customer either likes the piece of music he hears, or he does not. No amount of salesmanship will get him to change his mind, as it boils down to personal preference.
I disagree with this fundamentally. A lot of people, especially young people, buy music for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the actual music but have more to do with a certain image or subculture. I grew up listening to punk, and while some of it actually does qualify as good music, much of it is less about the content and more about expressing an opinion on the culture (Kind of like/.;-) Rap/Hip-hop music too is often about an image - the clothes, the cars, the attitude, etc. - and not about the quality of the music. All of these things are expressed outside of the music as well. e.g. by the artists appearances, actions, and speech on radio/television, live concerts, etc. This "artistic image" is a kind of marketing and has always been exploited and/or manipulated by the recording industry. In this regard, there is quite a bit of salesmanship in the industry, and the artists are to a large degree dependent on the industry to get that image out via appearances in other media.
Except that religion and science *originate* from the same idea: supposition based on observation that can then be tested against the body of available evidence. And, both science and religion are susceptible to the same flaws: we stop testing our suppositions against new observations and they become dogma. Thus what is, or was, science can become religion (And vice versa, if we test it and improve it.)
This notion of "Faith" as belief that does not have to be (or cannot be) tested is the scariest part of Christianity, IMO. While the scriptures have a lot to say about it I am not convinced that the modern interpretation is exactly what was intended. Even if it was, it is bullshit. But, the subject is a matter of debate even among religious scholars. For example, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith
I write software for a living. In my industry a product is "finished" when it implements all of the features that it was intended to implement within a certain threshold of quality (e.g. there are probably some bugs, but it functions *as intended* in almost all situations.)
Finished doesn't mean perfect, and it *certainly* doesn't mean that they wrote everything you would like them to the way you would like them to.
Microsoft has released some great products over the years, but their products are never feature complete. i.e. They always say that they will release certain features and then end up claiming that they will instead put those features in a future release. Their quality standards are also somewhat lower than the rest of the industry (Though that seems to have improved somewhat in the last few years.) They, e.g. release software of alpha quality as a beta and then release beta quality as a gold release.
"Stack computers, are basically like rack computers, except you can't pull out the one at the bottom."
Right, if you pull them from the bottom they are called queue computers. For stack computers it is preferred that you take and replace from the top....Either way you save a lot of money on the actual rack.
Except for the fact that by all available accounts Vista is way behind schedule and full of bugs, just like every Windows release ever. I am not a typical Windows detractor. I use it at work every day and at home (Although I also use Linux and OS X.) But, the fact remains that Windows is always behind schedule, above and beyond what is typical for the industry, and Apple is usually far more punctual. I wouldn't be surprised if 10.5 beats Vista to market. I also wouldn't be surprised if 10.5 is actually *finished* when it does come to market. I would be *extremely* surprised if Vista is finished when it comes to market (It would be unprecedented in Microsoft history.) Or, if it comes out anywhere near the (currently) projected date (There would be no precedent for that either.)
No one is saying that we shouldn't prosecute people for doing "crazy shit" or that we shouldn't take the circumstances (e.g. drug use) into consideration when we prosecute the "crazy shit." But, do you *really* want to live in a country where you are prosecuted for some theoretical "crazy shit" that you might have done based on some statistical correlation with the aforementioned circumstances?!?! Because, you do live there, and that is the problem.
I've had the same problem, which is why I started using Yahoo calendar and now Google calendar instead. Still, I am hopeful that the final release will meet my needs better than these do (Though the advantage of having a calendar available on any browser is significant.)
It's not Adobe's fault. Try removing the MS Journal Viewer via the add/remove programs control panel. The journal viewer is useless unless you have a tablet PC, and for some reason it causes Acrobat to lock (If Acrobat locks, look for wisptis.exe in your Task Manager. If it is thrashing, this is your problem.)
Evolution isn't done with us. Hominids have been around something like 4 million years, and in our current form around 300,000. The entire history of civilization is about 15,000 years - roughly equivalent to a speck of fly shit on the evolutionary time line.
Modern evolution moves at a slow pace, because the threats to human life today are relatively few, and our most significant threats don't prevent us from reproducing. For example, in the US and Europe all roads seem to lead to myocardial infarction. Since this generally doesn't kill us until we reach our fifth decade or so, we can have plenty of fat, diabetic kids before our own metabolic disease kills us. In the poorer parts of the world the biggest threats are AIDS and malnutrition, but again, they manage to crank out puppies well before their inevitable demise.
So, in order for evolution to progress at a higher rate we need greater selection pressures, and in layman's terms that means we need to start dying off faster. I'll offer a handfull of likely scenarios, some that we cause ourselves, others that we have no control over:
Nuclear winter: we blow enough stuff up to put a bunch of debris in the atmosphere that stays there for a number of years. This turns industrial agriculture to shit. We are forced to return to subsistence farming and other old school techniques. Those of us in heavily industrialized areas like the coasts of the US will be in deep shit, and probably have to start eating each other (Of course, a lot of us will already be blown up, and the places where we lived will have radioactive fallout lasting for decades.)
Artificial Climate Change: We'll keep pumping crap into the air, so that all the kids in our favorite equatorial vacation spots have severe asthma by the time they're school age. Species will become extinct at rates that haven't been seen since the time of the dinosaurs. The ocean levels will rise, eventually destroying low lying coast cities. Agriculture will become increasingly difficult to sustain. Oh yeah, this one's already happening.
Major volcanic event(s): This is very similar to what I described above for a nuclear winter, except that mother earth can do this one all by herself, as the evidence shows she has done before. Some folks think that this is what killed the dinosaurs, although many think that an asteroid precipitated that (Which could also happen again).
Old fashioned ice age: Mother earth can produce climate change all on her own. She has done it many times before, and the next time is a question of when not if. Again, if we can't grow food to feed billions of us many of us will die. Those who are in the best position to feed themselves will be most likely to pass their genes on to future generations.
All of this to say, basically, that it's not technology's effect on evolution that we should be worried about per se. Eventually, mother nature will have the last word, whether or not we press her hand.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two kinds of programmers - Those who understand the following quote, and those who don't:
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
-Donald Knuth
I agree with the "small cardinality... perhaps ideally cardinality one" comment. That is to say that the Customer in the Agile sense must speak with one or close to one voice. If influences outside of the team are pulling you away from doing work that the Customer has prioritized then that is a failure of management.
We had such a problem at my current company until we convinced our Customer team that production bugs (Excepting service outages) had to be prioritized with other stories. If they were more critical than the new feature they would be worked on first. That was up to the Customer to decide. So, outside forces feed stories to the Customer, but it is still up to the Customer to decide what is most important to work on.
In the hypothetical scenario the customer introduces a critical story in the middle of an iteration. This can and does happen in Agile projects. The only problem is that the team may not be able to deliver something that it thought it would because it will be spending effort on the new story. That is ok. The primary goal of Agile is to give the customer the ability to prioritize work and manage the creation of business value.
Also this aversion toward "context switching" isn't particularly Agile. The idea behind TDD, evolutionary design, and small time-boxed tasks is to work in small chunks. I would argue that the ability to "context switch" developers while still developing value incrementally is the whole point of the Agile approach.
I was always what you call a "role player." I suppose that is why I feel that what the computer gaming world calls RPGs bears so little resemblance to what I think of as an RPG. There have been games where the characters and the story they told took central stage, but for the most part computer RPGs do seem to be about gaining levels and gathering items. I've always preferred "adventure" games and FPS games because I feel more "in character" playing them.
I still have plenty of both, and expect to for the rest of my lifetime. Sure, downloaded content will become more important as time goes on, but I don't think it will ever replace discs anymore than the computer replaced paper. In fact, plenty of people download content just to burn it to disc just like plenty of people print Word and PDF documents, and even webpages.
The value of HD-DVD is that now you can have content that is of the same quality as or better than what you can get over-the-air or on cable/satellite. I don't see that as trivial, and I don't see it as going away. My HD-DVD drive is in the mail, and I already own a couple discs. Plus, Netflix will send me HD-DVD content without any increase in my subscription cost. I'm sold.
I can't always know everything that I would like to about every federal/state/county/city candidate, judge, ballot initiative, etc. For example, here in California today's ballot was four full pages (Two sides of two cards.) So, I have a simple set of rules that I follow:
For candidates for office:
1) If I know which candidate I intend to vote for I vote for that person.
2) Otherwise, I vote based on party affiliation:
a) For federal offices I may vote *against* a candidate from one party if I don't like that party by voting for the opponent with the best chances of winning. Even though that candidate may not be affiliated with my party.
b) In all other cases I vote for the candidate my party has nominated.
c) If my party has not nominated a candidate:
1. I vote against the encumbent (I call this my "fresh start" rule. YMMV.)
2. If I don't know who the encumbent is then I abstain.
For ballot initiatives:
1) Only vote yes if I feel that I understand what is being proposed and believe that new legislation will have a positive impact on the issue without creating undue tax burden.
2) Otherwise I vote no.
So, in a worse case scenario where I found myself at the poll with no idea what was going on, I would just vote for everyone who was listed as a member of my party (Libertarian in case anyone cares,) vote no on all the initiatives, and abstain from the rest. While this would never happen, because I go to lengths to be informed, I still feel that I would be making a positive contribution in this hypothetical scenario. The point is that I know what I believe in and I can use that to create general guidelines even if I am not informed on every issue.
It is worth looking at the way that Python is used in the game industry. Quite a lot of shops use it in a heterogeneous environment where the core functionality, e.g. graphics, physics, control/hardware, etc are in highly optimised C with inline assembly but Python acts as a glue pulling them all together and scripting most of the actual gameplay. There are books on this, but it is more than just theoretical. I interviewed at a shop that does exactly this for the console games they produce.
If you've ever written code before Dive into Python is the way to go. It is free on the web and also available in print from APress. I am a big fan of books of this style which assume that you already have some knowledge of basic programming and focus on the specifics of the new language.
It's not all that different from our own English speaking culture. Look at some of the ridiculous things we do with French or Italian words in order to make something sound stylish or sophisticated. Sure there are plenty of English speakers who also understand these other languages, but it is nonetheless true that people will buy a product with a cool sounding name (or slogan) without having any clue what it really means.
Wife: honey, did you remember to take the trash out?
Husband: what is the Bugzilla number? Did you assign it to me?
Except that when we talk about the tenth amendment in this context we should also consider the ninth:
h e_United_States_Constitution
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The question is, what types of privacy do people reasonably expect? And don't these reasonable expectations essentially amount to "unenumerated" rights?
I also think that we should always consider the founders' intents when discussing these things. Some interesting background here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_t
It seems to me that the ninth and the tenth amendment are two of the most ignored/abused pieces of legislation in the history of the country.
To be fair, I said "often". No generalization is 100% true, and it is certainly the case that there is high quality music in any genre and there is also celluloid drivel in any genre. The two examples I gave were punk and hip-hop, but I could have used any music from the 1950s or later (Since the advent of the "rock star" phenomenon).
I disagree with this fundamentally. A lot of people, especially young people, buy music for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the actual music but have more to do with a certain image or subculture. I grew up listening to punk, and while some of it actually does qualify as good music, much of it is less about the content and more about expressing an opinion on the culture (Kind of like /. ;-) Rap/Hip-hop music too is often about an image - the clothes, the cars, the attitude, etc. - and not about the quality of the music. All of these things are expressed outside of the music as well. e.g. by the artists appearances, actions, and speech on radio/television, live concerts, etc. This "artistic image" is a kind of marketing and has always been exploited and/or manipulated by the recording industry. In this regard, there is quite a bit of salesmanship in the industry, and the artists are to a large degree dependent on the industry to get that image out via appearances in other media.
Not sure about pizza, but the Cluck U Chicken on MD 175 makes really, really good wings.
Except that religion and science *originate* from the same idea: supposition based on observation that can then be tested against the body of available evidence. And, both science and religion are susceptible to the same flaws: we stop testing our suppositions against new observations and they become dogma. Thus what is, or was, science can become religion (And vice versa, if we test it and improve it.)
This notion of "Faith" as belief that does not have to be (or cannot be) tested is the scariest part of Christianity, IMO. While the scriptures have a lot to say about it I am not convinced that the modern interpretation is exactly what was intended. Even if it was, it is bullshit. But, the subject is a matter of debate even among religious scholars. For example, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith
We are fighting it over there so that we don't have to fight it over here.
1. Stick it to the man
2. ???
3. Profit
I write software for a living. In my industry a product is "finished" when it implements all of the features that it was intended to implement within a certain threshold of quality (e.g. there are probably some bugs, but it functions *as intended* in almost all situations.)
Finished doesn't mean perfect, and it *certainly* doesn't mean that they wrote everything you would like them to the way you would like them to.
Microsoft has released some great products over the years, but their products are never feature complete. i.e. They always say that they will release certain features and then end up claiming that they will instead put those features in a future release. Their quality standards are also somewhat lower than the rest of the industry (Though that seems to have improved somewhat in the last few years.) They, e.g. release software of alpha quality as a beta and then release beta quality as a gold release.
"Stack computers, are basically like rack computers, except you can't pull out the one at the bottom."
...Either way you save a lot of money on the actual rack.
Right, if you pull them from the bottom they are called queue computers. For stack computers it is preferred that you take and replace from the top.
Except for the fact that by all available accounts Vista is way behind schedule and full of bugs, just like every Windows release ever. I am not a typical Windows detractor. I use it at work every day and at home (Although I also use Linux and OS X.) But, the fact remains that Windows is always behind schedule, above and beyond what is typical for the industry, and Apple is usually far more punctual. I wouldn't be surprised if 10.5 beats Vista to market. I also wouldn't be surprised if 10.5 is actually *finished* when it does come to market. I would be *extremely* surprised if Vista is finished when it comes to market (It would be unprecedented in Microsoft history.) Or, if it comes out anywhere near the (currently) projected date (There would be no precedent for that either.)
No one is saying that we shouldn't prosecute people for doing "crazy shit" or that we shouldn't take the circumstances (e.g. drug use) into consideration when we prosecute the "crazy shit." But, do you *really* want to live in a country where you are prosecuted for some theoretical "crazy shit" that you might have done based on some statistical correlation with the aforementioned circumstances?!?! Because, you do live there, and that is the problem.
I've had the same problem, which is why I started using Yahoo calendar and now Google calendar instead. Still, I am hopeful that the final release will meet my needs better than these do (Though the advantage of having a calendar available on any browser is significant.)
It is a windows thing, but, as I mentioned, it is useless unless you have a tablet pc. See here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/evalua tion/overviews/pctools.mspx#ECAA
It's not Adobe's fault. Try removing the MS Journal Viewer via the add/remove programs control panel. The journal viewer is useless unless you have a tablet PC, and for some reason it causes Acrobat to lock (If Acrobat locks, look for wisptis.exe in your Task Manager. If it is thrashing, this is your problem.)
Evolution isn't done with us. Hominids have been around something like 4 million years, and in our current form around 300,000. The entire history of civilization is about 15,000 years - roughly equivalent to a speck of fly shit on the evolutionary time line.
Modern evolution moves at a slow pace, because the threats to human life today are relatively few, and our most significant threats don't prevent us from reproducing. For example, in the US and Europe all roads seem to lead to myocardial infarction. Since this generally doesn't kill us until we reach our fifth decade or so, we can have plenty of fat, diabetic kids before our own metabolic disease kills us. In the poorer parts of the world the biggest threats are AIDS and malnutrition, but again, they manage to crank out puppies well before their inevitable demise.
So, in order for evolution to progress at a higher rate we need greater selection pressures, and in layman's terms that means we need to start dying off faster. I'll offer a handfull of likely scenarios, some that we cause ourselves, others that we have no control over:
All of this to say, basically, that it's not technology's effect on evolution that we should be worried about per se. Eventually, mother nature will have the last word, whether or not we press her hand.