People like to draw the comparison with civil engineering, where an engineer may be liable (even criminally) if, say, a bridge collapsed. But this isn't really the same thing. We're not talking about software that simply fails and causes damage. We're talking about software that fails when people deliberately attack it. This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge -- he should have planned for a bomb being placed in just such-and-such location and made the bridge more resistant to attack.
I'll be the unpopular one and say that except even then,
1. IRL you'd have a good chance to catch the terrorist. Someone would see them trying to attach the bomb, there'd be traces, etc. I've yet to see many programmers think of implementing the equivalent as logging and monitoring.
Probably the worst offender I've seen in this aspect was a site where deleting your user also cascaded through all foreign keys and erased any trace that you ever existed, or done anything. Contracts, debts, messages, everything would just disappear in a black hole. We're talking about a B2B site where contracts started at millions of dollars. But you could just delete your user and any trace that you ever accepted that contract would simply disappear.
Sorry, but that's beyond "I'm not a civil engineer" and into the realm of being a clueless fucktard.
2. Most of these exploits are known to already happen every day, and are really just maliciously triggering a bug that is already there. If you want a more apt comparison with civil engineering, it's not terrorists with bombs, but someone driving a car into a bridge pillar. Sure, it can also happen maliciously, but it is a fault you're supposed to prevent either way.
3. Even terrorist attacks are often taken into account in civil engineering. See the WTC which was actually supposed to withstand an airplane impact from a smaller airplane than those actually used. Or I was talking to someone who actually does simulations for an airport so they can improve their layout and lessen the damage in case someone does detonate a bomb there. Etc.
So basically, yes, RL civil engineers actually have to think of such scenarios too. Unlike the average retrained burger-flipper programmer type who just finds excuses for why he doesn't.
4. The real reason why the most extreme terrorist attacks aren't taken into account in RL civil engineering projects is a calculate risk. If probability of an attack times damage done is less than what it costs to reinforce the bridge more, the decision can be taken to not reinforce more. But it's an actual calculate risk, not a stupid excuse to do a crap job.
And more importantly software doesn't have the same "the probability is too small" factor to justify such a decision. An XSS exploit or SQL injection being actually exploited isn't as rare as a terrorist attack. In fact, it's almost certainty. The same excuse simply doesn't apply.
4. In the end all this is missing the point: you're there to deliver what the paying customer wants. If he's ok that his site will resist everything except every single script-kiddie who wants to pwn it, sure, you don't have to do that. If he actually expects security, you're there to deliver security, not lame excuses.
5. And I doubt that the hourly rate is the problem either. I've seen a site done by ridiculously overpaid consultants from a major corporation, where they only checked your rights when they generated the links to other pages, but not when you actually access those pages. Trivial exploit: choose to change your user's password, edit the user ID in the URL of that page to user 0 (it was the admin), change the password. Now log in as the admin of that site and do whatever the f-word you wish. Seriously, stuff like that makes me actually wish there _was_ liability in some contracts.
Well, all hard drives can fail sooner or later, and there's a reason for the M in MTBF. The problem with IBM Deathstars wasn't just that they failed (all do), but that their failure rate was disproportionately higher than any other brand at the time. And yeah, I had one of those fail on me too.
That said, I don't seem to have much of a problem with failing WD drives. I have a Raptor of each of the 75 GB, 150 GB and 300 GB varieties, all of them since that particular series was launched and all three still seem to chug along just fine. But that's a non-representative sample too, so don't take it as more than a personal anecdote.
You know, with all the hearing of finding water here, traces of hydrocarbons there, etc, I'm starting to think that NASA is looking for the wrong thing. Forget water, me I'd set the spectroscopes for stun... err... I mean for beer. You're not going to get Joe Sixpack all excited and lobbying his representative to pay for your next rocket just because you found traces of water on Beta Bumfuckii, much less for some ark ship to colonize it. Beer, now, that's a worthy resource for the space age. That's how you get Joe to not only volunteer for the one-way trip on such an ark, but chip in for the ticket. Sure, it'll be a hard life in the frozen beer mines of Orion 5, but it's for the future of humanity;)
On the contrary, information wants to be all in one place. Like, locked behind a paten... err... behind the event horizon of a black hole.
We can only hope nobody tells Richard Stallman about it, or he'll probably sue reality for infringing on the rights of those bits. Mind you, he and reality had parted ways a long time ago anyway, but at least it was on mostly friendly terms;)
Hmm, well, I'm not in America TBH. Over here they still need a warrant. You mean the PATRIOT idiocy is still in full swing? Damn, sorry of I accidentally misled anyone then.
1. Exactly who is "your generation"? You make it sound like it's some uniform Borg collective, where everyone does the same things and realizes the same things. In reality, for every suburban white kid who grew with Facebook and with doing this or that thing, there'll be at least two who grew with fundamentally different experiences. The guy judging you may not be the guy who grew up with porn, college toga parties, and SW like you did, but some guy who grew up sleeping with his arms crossed out of fear that otherwise he might touch himself accidentally at night and JESUS SEES HIM. And who thinks that SW is the work of the devil because it teaches people a different religion. (As opposed to, of course, those of us who think only the prequels and the wookies are the work of the devil because they ruin the whole setup and moral underpinnings of the original trilogy;)
2. Don't underestimate hypocrisy and group-think. People who grew up doing X, and even people who do X every night, might want to see you hanged, drawn and quartered for doing X too.
Preachers who watch gay porn at night (or in a few cases even got caught actually having gay sex), didn't go, "meh, I did it too, and it doesn't affect my work." They then went to the pullpit and preached that gays are an abomination, and the Lord sent us aids as punishment.
Communities who buy far kinkier porn, asked that some porn producer or sex shop owner be jailed for it. They didn't go, "meh, I watch worse stuff at home and it hasn't affected my work or relationships yet", they went more like, "OMG, lock him up for spreading that sin and corruption."
People who did pot in college, and sometimes a long time after it too, push to have others drug tested and fired if they as much as ever were within a mile of someone smoking pot. Or push for tougher drug laws if they're politicians.
Basically the way people react to X has _very_ little to do with "I did X too and didn't affect me", and a lot more with "do I want to be seen as supporting X, or as the guy who's tough on X?" The same guy who might actually chug more beer in a week than you do in a month, may well fire you for appearing on Facebook or youtube drunk in a pool of your vomit once, because that's the company image he wants, and/or that's the kind of guy he wants to be seen as.
Actually, the feds are the least of my worries. If they want to come over and see what I've been looking at, they're more than welcome to come type stuff in my Mozilla's "awesome bar". Let's just say that if you start with "ana", you'll get "anandtech"... in about the 100'th position in the list, but hey;)
I'm more concerned with Google basically having a huge mass of Curly, Larry and Moes who seem to have full access to the production data, if they think looking through it will help squeeze 1ms off the search or push a better targetted ad. I remember reading about how someone tracked a user's session through the search, including exactly what they searched for, and the pages on the topic they read on Google Books. That to me opens a far greater possibility of abuse than the feds coming and demanding your data.
The feds need a warrant, for a start, meaning that they had to convince a judge that there is a good reason. Johnny Nerdrage trying to find some dirt on his ex-girlfriend's (*) new boyfriend, or Jack Mole just tying to help his best buddy pick a good employee, don't have any such safeguards.
The feds have rules for what they can use that data for, and what data they can use. If they find out you have some chronic medical condition, they're not exactly going to call your employer and go "guess which of your employees is gonna have a lot of sick days soon!" Some John Doe just looking for some dirt, might not follow anything even remotely similar.
So, yes, I don't care if the feds get my search data or my emaisl with a warrant. But 10,000 nerds browsing and mining it as they see fit, now that gets me a lot more uncomfortable.
(*)... actually she's just a girl who lived next door and never pulled the blinds before undressing;)
Sure, that's what the Government and their Illuminati masters want you to believe. So you're wearing roughly a metallic hemisphere on your head, right? Sure, it reflects mind control rays coming from upwards and back, but what about rays coming from the front, hmm? Right, those get reflected and focused, like by a telescope mirror, inside your brain. And do you think that the proliferation of WiFi hotspots and police radars and whatnot at ground level is just a coincidence? Hmm? Wake up, people!;)
Yes, but that's the whole point: not all guilds are like that. A top level raiding guild, maybe. A social guild who doesn't even care about raiding, I can tell you first hand that there is no paranoia and nothing to hide. And even among the raiding guilds, some did post youtube videos of how to beat some new boss within 24h of its being added to the game. Even if _some_ would maybe fit his idea of secretive group trying to not get caught, painting all guilds with that brush is silly.
If he found a common behaviour of all guilds, it would more likely be a common characteristic of human groups, competive or non-competitive alike. Especially since, again, they have no null hypothesis there. There is no non-competitive group to compare to. Essentially all groups they actually studied acted the same. They're just trying to paint them all as the secretive clandestine type so they can make the headlines and get the grant.
E.g., while the PR stunt... err... I mean press release mentions guilds and gangs, the way I read it that's _all_ the data they had. They _only_ studied WoW guilds and gangs, they have no other data about any other group. For all we know, it might be how all human groups work.
Especially in their light of claiming that it's specifically about competitive groups: "[i]He defines competitive groups as organisations that have features like a need to protect themselves from other groups. They develop their own rules, carry out clandestine acts and share a desire not to get trapped.[/i]" But I see no null hypothesis there. If some dynamic is specific to such groups carrying out clandestine acts and trying to not get caught, then where is the measured delta compared to _non_competitive groups?
And it seems like a particularly non-supported claim to anyone who actually has some experience with the multitudes of types of WoW guilds. There are PvP guilds, twink guilds, raiding guilds, but also social guilds where pretty much they only share a chat channel. I've even been in a social laid back guild where "epic" was as forbidden as the sterotypical four-letter-word in guild chat, because most of the higher levels were already refugees from raiding guilds that got torn apart by greed and raiding drama. There are guilds who are in willy-waving contests with each other, and guilds who cooperate. Etc. There's entirely too much behaviour variation to paint them all with his "competitive group" brush.
And I'm really not getting the vibe of carrying out any activities that they try to keep secret. On the contrary, your average willy-waver would shove his achievement list down everyone's throat if he could. There are people building whole sites and basically virtual shrines to the greatness of their virtual selves, and their online exploits. How the heck _that_ resembles the behaviour of groups engaged in clandestine acts and trying to not get caught, is truly beyond me.
Basically while they may have measured some elements of human group dynamics, the claim that it's about clandestine activities and stuff, seems to me like just a PR stunt to hopefully get the CIA's money. Just claiming that you've built yet another sociology model makes you yet another of those soft science colleges, while making a grand claim about predicting international terror cells gets you in the news.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with ego. I, for one, always wanted to be called The High Priest Of The Sun. But then the barstards switched from Sun to IBM servers:p
Now I'm thinking that depending on which opening you drop those 87 kg of TNT into someone's body, this may finally be a thread where the goatse link isn't off-topic;)
Well, point taken for the hardware bugs. But, as I was saying, some bugs are really independent of those. I just can't imagine how a pathing or AI bug would depend on the video drivers or whatever. I would very much expect a reviewer to mention those.
Actually, the vast majority of the bugs I've encountered in various games were just plain old fashioned bugs in their code, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the drivers or hardware configuration. They were script bugs (e.g., a dialog option remaining active when it should be gone), pathing bugs, collision or physics bugs, balance problems, AI bugs, interface problems, the occasional race condition, memory leaks, etc.
E.g., if you think that any hardware or drivers could stop WoW from having bugged enemies that evade every single attack, I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell.
Even when installing a different version of the drivers solved anything, it is often just a case of moving the timings a bit so the race condition hits you at a different time, or some call with wrong parameters that only incidentally doesn't crash a particular driver version, or various such. In short, still program bugs, rather than actual driver bugs.
That's really what annoys me about the PC. Too often that variability in drivers or hardware is used just as a blanket excuse to do a half-arsed QA job before releasing, or as a blanket excuse for reviewers to not mention the bugs.
Except you just illustrate the problem: something that's just "good enough" (which really just means "mediocre") gets an 8 out of 10. I'm sorry, but in a perfectly linear scale, "mediocre" would mean a 5. That's the kind of a number you could punch in a formula and get a correlation or anything else.
Plus, if it were just a case of a honest review and the bad ones being already cancelled, the results would look much like the right half of a bell curve. You know, the curve with the below average ones removed. For virtually any sitze out there, it doesn't. It looks like a bell curve centered on 8 or 9, and which pretty much starts at 6 or 7. Sorry, that's not a case of the bad ones being already removed, that's a clear sign of an offset scale. It's what you get when the occasional "something that's truly bad" means you get to give a 5 or a 6, not a 1 or 2.
And then there is the occasional reviewer whose curve looks like two spikes. The kind who churns 90% to 99% scores all year long, and then occasionally picks up some 10 year old freeware game so he can give _something_ a 5% score and fix his street cred. Or publishes a yearly smack-talking "top 10 worst games of all time" -- conveniently all 20 years old and from publishers which are no longer in business -- just to show that he's that unbiased and can give a low score too.
But again, that's not being unbiased and fair at all, it's just trying to compensate one crap (or dishonest) job with another one skewed in the other direction. If it were a real fair and unbiased and non-skewed job, you'd get one bell curve centered in the right place, not two spikes centered near the extremes of the scale.
What do you make of people who are performance oriented until the point inwhich they reach mastery? Eh?
Actually, the problem is that for most actual skills and tasks there is no such thing as mastery. IRL there is no 450 skill points limit, that you can reach and then relax. And most RL problems are multi-dimensional problems where there is no perfect solution, but least worst compromises. And definitely not where you can max one aspect and proclaim that the others don't matter, which is what OCPD cases... err... perfectionists usually do.
RL "perfectionists" tend IMHO to be one or more of the following:
A) the real, honest kind: people who never finish. I still remember someone who, on the day before the deadline, was still working on his perfect XML parsing project for that project. (A tiny part of the project's functionality, and one he shouldn't have been doing himself: there's Xerxes.) There's _always_ one more optimization that can be done, one more clever trick that can be tried, one more label that would look better one pixel lower, etc. It's harder than you think, being a real bona-fide perfectionist.
B) the fake kind, which are basically just arrogant. They do a crap job, and then proclaim it to be perfect, just because they're that good in their own opinion. Often these are actually an illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the least competent tend to grossly overrate their skills and competence, just because they're not competent to do that judgment. They don't even know what they don't know. And conversely the most competent tend to underrate themselves, because they do have some clue of all the things they don't know.
C) the kind who'll redefine the problem to get a "perfect" solution. As I was saying RL problems are usually multi-dimensional, and increasing one aspect often loses you another. E.g., making a car engine more powerful also turns it into a gas guzzler. E.g., too many options in a GUI can actually make it less usable, or at least harder to also make it usable. Etc. A lot of OCPD kinds take such a variable and genuinely don't seem able to comprehend that it can take other values than 0 and 100%. Either you hit 100% or you're doing a crap job. But they can't hit 100% in all either. So they basically just pick one aspect and proclaim it the only thing that matters, and proclaim everyone who cares about the other aspects to be a clueless idiot. Unfortunately the actual best compromise for an actual user is rarely that. These guys tend to complain a lot that the users are clueless idiots.
D) the bitter whiner. These people rarely make something they'd rate perfect, and some don't even produce anything at all for years, but they complain about everyone and everything else. These people aren't as much into achieving perfection, as into just having something to whine about. Their very criteria for what perfection actually means, are fluid and disposable, often to the extent that they're simply the opposite of what everyone else is doing. E.g., I actually worked with one who, after he had converted the whole team to Linux (not that it was hard in a team of complete nerds) and thus lost that reason to complain, promptly switched to BSD and proclaimed both Windows _and_ Linux to be mainstream crap for idiots. He caused an indentation war fighting for the holy cause of _three_ space tabs, he fought to change the directory where the build script left the built executable, etc.
And a few other archetypes.
And just so it's not completely off topic: you can see the same in MMOs too.
A) There are people who are genuinely trapped into the neverending treadmill of needing every single achievement, every single pet, completing every single quest (even if it's 70 levels below them), paying 1000 gold on the Savory Deviate Delight recipe just because they _must_ have all the recipes in game, etc. Not because they actually need them, but because anything els
You know, while all the modern day equivalents are better at _some_ times, I think the downsides the rest of the time get overlooked.
For example, yes, moving around by foot or horse all the way to Jerusalem was a lot slower, not to mention having all those pesky Saracens in the way who felt that they should continue to keep their country;) Nowadays you could take a plane and be there in a couple of hours.
But the downside is that you weren't expected to make that trip more than once in your life, and arguably most people got away with never doing it at all. Nowadays just because it's possible to travel faster, for a lot of people it means they're _expected_ to do it all the time. So when (other) people go, basically, "bah, quit complaining about leg space, be glad you can fly at all nowadays", my answer would be: yeah, but in ye olde days I wouldn't be expected to go over there in the first place.
To go back to the examples you actually used:
E.g., sure, pizza delivery is faster by moped than by foot or horse, but in ye olde days actually you wouldn't have to do it. People would have to come to your pizzeria, if they wanted a pizza. Effectively nowadays someone has to be out on their bike, no matter if it's scalding hot or massive rain, to deliver pizzas.
E.g., sure, it's easier to send an e-card or email nowadays, but it also created a culture where you're expected to spend more time with email and e-cards, than they spent writing an old fashioned letter in any other age. Communication at a distance was something for _very_ close friends, and for when you actually have something to say. You might write to someone once a month or a week and include just the more important thoughts or events of that interval. There is plenty of old correspondence which was actually good enough to be sold as a book. And at any rate, you had time to actually think an answer worth writing down.
The wake up call about modern day communication was when I first had a consulting job at a company where they gave me a computer with Outlook configured to act like a retarded kid trolling for attention. It wasn't even content to signal that a new email had come, but it then resorted to try to draw my attention with a big tooltip in the lower right corner. God damn it, it has an email and it wants attention RIGHT NOW! At the time it was a shock that someone would expect that I immmediately abort any other activity, right in the middle of a line of code even, and give email its attention the very second it arrived. And there are people who'll call if you didn't answer their email in 5 minutes. WTF?
The new uber-convenient form of communication didn't just become a more convenient replacement for the old, but an unholy pact with the devil. It eats up more time than the old one ever did, and created some expectations and a sense of urgency that just didn't use to be there.
Or, to go back in the land of my own examples, I was surprised to read in a study waay back, that with all the modern conveniences and time-saving devices, a modern woman actually spends more times on house chores than her ancestors ever did. The idea that this is easy, and that is easy, and that other thing is easy too, and so on, has created a sense of expectation to do them all to an extent where they all combined actually take up more time and energy than ever.
The short version is that the MMO genre started there, but basically that's not what most people want. And that like communism or anarchy, it requires a different kind of human to work than the ones we actually have.
E.g., UO tried hard to have a world where animals have realistic reproduction cycles, and you need two wolves to get one more wolf. But some people then made it their quest and goal in life to make wolves extinct, just so they can shaft the other players that way.
E.g., UO tried hard to have a realistic econom, with finite resources like ore. Though they did have the foresight to create more ore when items made of that metal are removed from the game (including sold to vendors.) You know, so a realistic supply and demand would work. But some players took it upon themselves to ruin it for the others, e.g., by hoarding iron items in their bank, just so ore wouldn't spawn for the crafters any more. Not to corner the market later or anything, but just to be the fuckwit who keeps others from enjoying the game they paid for.
E.g., UO tried hard to have a player-based justice. Except they had to eventually grudgingly admit that there is nothing you can do in character, to someone who sees their character as just a disposable harrassment tool.
To get to your examples: Nations having hierarchies sounds good when you're the first player, but not as the guy who started on a 5 year old game and where every rank above you is fillled with people who seemingly never quit. Some group of fucktards somewhere will make it their goal in life to get those postions just so they can then leave their account running without ever logging in, just so _you_ can't get them.
(And if you think they wouldn't pay money just to inconvenience someone else, in UO there was a brisk trade where people just kept buying accounts to scam, cheat and grief and get banned. Sure, they lost the money, but they made a few people miserable.)
Additionally, you don't seem to talk about quests for example. Sure, if your MMO is just a mindless repetitive work simulator, like in the pizza example, it's easy. But that's been done already. See, UO again. Most players these days want lots and lots of quests and _story_. Double so the casual gang. And no, "you're a pizza boy, now go grind and ding" doesn't quite cut it.
And those story quests don't mix well with persistent world changes. If someone saved the princess and she doesn't respawn right back in the tower, now what? There are 10,000 other players on the server. What will _those_ get instead of that quest? Are you planning to pay designers to write 10,000 different quests there, so the other players get something of comparable difficulty to do? Didn't think so.
Basically until we have an AI Dungeon Master which can generate passable story arcs and quests on the fly, a different one for each player, that idea is really a no go.
Or we could just apply Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to mallice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
While some collusion _is_ possible there, it could also be that they just listened to the wrong crowd. That's also a "welcome to reality" kind of thing. A vocal minority can often seem like they're the majority, or at least representative enough for a majority of players. It's not just a Second Life or selling goods issue, it's that a tiny number of vocal people can generate more posts and whole circle-jerk treads, than the vast majority... who's too busy playing the game or coding flying penises for Second Life and doesn't bother much with posting.
Just look at almost any gaming board and you can see the same phenomenon: a minority of fanboys or malcontents can generate more posts than everyone else combined. And if left to their own devices, can actually gang up on anyone saying otherwise and try to drive them off. It can be about off-line single player games too (about half a dozen fanboys were enough to insult anyone who had a problem with Morrowind, back when that launched), online games (just read the Stalker boards in COV and you'd think that (A) 99% of the players want only PvP, and (B) everyone agrees that Stalkers should be able to one-shot any other class, including tanks), etc.
And occasionally you see some game screwing up spectacularly, because they listened to the wrong crowd. Without any anti-communist ideology being involved at all. E.g., it seems Vanguard owes half its screw ups to listening too much to the gang that, basically, went, "I've played WoW for 2 years straight and raided every night, and then discovered that everything about it sucks and only an idiot kiddie would like it." If you figured out by now that whoever makes such a claim, just called himself an idiot kiddie, and that only an even bigger idiot would take design advice from a self-confessed idiot... well, then you'd be smarter and more perceptive than some designers;)
Nevertheless, I fail to see why XP and generally the "Agile" crowd has to compare itself only to the Waterfall Model, every single time. It's getting like listening to the Creationist crowd: they can't even make their point without devolving into just bad-mouthing Darwinism. WTF of a claim is it, anyway? "Yay, we're better than a methodology known to be the absolute worst at least since 1970"? There's a difference between it being alive in some places, and acting as if that was the only alternative to the "Agile" stuff.
I mean, BDSM is still alive and kicking, but you don't see stuff advertised as, basically, "come to our massage parlour, it's better than being whipped and crucified." Anal rape is, supposedly, still alive and kicking in prisons, but you don't see stuff hyped as, say, "our laxatives are better than being ass-raped." Copro-fetishes are very much alive and kicking, but you don't see stuff hyped to the effect of, "eat at Moraelin's Diner, our food tastes better than shit."
Yet somehow for picking a methodology, it's apparently enough to know that it's better than the worst. Oookaaay.
Here's my request to whoever out there feels a need to proselytise for XP or whatever offpring of it: Pick up, say, Steve McConnell's book, take your pick about which of his variants sounds the best and most workable, and convince me that your agile method is better than that. You know, make a claim to the effect of "we're better than some of the best other methodologies", not "we're better than the absolute worst."
Or it could be just an indication of a management failure.
A couple of years ago I was brought in to save a project that was hopelessly behind schedule and getting nowhere. Pretty quickly I got the idea that whenever I check something into CVS, it gets re-checked by a really helpful girl there, richly decorated with comments. (Now I do comment classes and methods extensively, as well as places where higher elven magic was used, but I do _not_ write stuff like that now I'm iterating through a node's children. If you need a comment to understand that "for" loop, then there's something deeper wrong with my code.)
But, anyway, stuff like a line that said "if (currentNode.isRootNode())" had been decorated with the obviously helpful comment "// when the current node is the root node". I'm still at a loss as to what extra info is conveyed by that comment, since just reading the code out loud gets you almost the same sentence and definitely the same meaning.
And it went like that for every single line. Every single assignment, trivial loop, etc, was dutifully duplicated in that line's comment.
Turns out, they were asked to comment their code extensively, and judged basically by quantity. So she was just abiding by the rules.
Actually, yes, it's a strawman
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, I hope you realize that -- since it's referenced even in the review here -- the 1970 article by Royce which described it (albeit not actually using the term "waterfall") was a description of a dysfunctional process which doesn't work right for software. That article wasn't a formalization of the waterfall model, but a critique of it. (And a modification to something that works better, at that.)
It's not even the only one. Several authors and books exist about making software development work, _long_ before there even was such a thing as the XP manifesto or the word agile.
So at the very least we have the first strawman: that we needed the Agile crowd to come along and wake us up to the fact that the waterfall doesn't work. It was widely known that it doesn't work, at _least_ since 1970. You know, the fun times before microprocessors and personal computers and when even Unix was still just a cutesy personal experiment.
The model actually doesn't come from computing but from RL construction and partially manufacturing. That's the place where the costs get prohibitively higher if you discover a mistake after you built the whole building. And while _some_ misguided MBAs have always tried to treat programming like a generic assembly-line operation -- including using methodologies like this one, which are utterly inapropriate -- it's hardly been the standard, de facto and de jure methodology in computing. The pretense that somehow if you're not doing a crap^H^H^H^H agile job, you're one of those using the waterfall model (never mind that it was discredited for 3 decades already) is the strawman that irks me the most. Yes, some islands of insanity exist. You have my sympathy if you work for one. No, it's not the standard in programming. No, we don't need a wakeup call or extreme methodologies to know it doesn't work. We knew that already. At least since 1970.
And in reality even the places which go somewhat waterfall-y... well, let's just say that any place that's ever had a change request or made a version 2.0 of a product, essentially has iterations. Not the best form of them, to be sure, but it is iterations. Requirements change after code has been written too.
Oh, THAT strawman
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh, right, yet another valiant effort at demolishing a strawman of the Waterfal Model... which never really meant the carricature opposed by the "agile" crowd, and wasn't applied that way. Ever heard of iterations? Right. Apparently the agile crowd still never heard that anyone else uses those.
Oh yes, if you just want to "destroy earth", wiping out all human life is a far easier task than the micro-black-hole route. With a tiny fraction of that uranium and some cobalt, you can do a much better doomsday device.
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I'll be the unpopular one and say that except even then,
1. IRL you'd have a good chance to catch the terrorist. Someone would see them trying to attach the bomb, there'd be traces, etc. I've yet to see many programmers think of implementing the equivalent as logging and monitoring.
Probably the worst offender I've seen in this aspect was a site where deleting your user also cascaded through all foreign keys and erased any trace that you ever existed, or done anything. Contracts, debts, messages, everything would just disappear in a black hole. We're talking about a B2B site where contracts started at millions of dollars. But you could just delete your user and any trace that you ever accepted that contract would simply disappear.
Sorry, but that's beyond "I'm not a civil engineer" and into the realm of being a clueless fucktard.
2. Most of these exploits are known to already happen every day, and are really just maliciously triggering a bug that is already there. If you want a more apt comparison with civil engineering, it's not terrorists with bombs, but someone driving a car into a bridge pillar. Sure, it can also happen maliciously, but it is a fault you're supposed to prevent either way.
3. Even terrorist attacks are often taken into account in civil engineering. See the WTC which was actually supposed to withstand an airplane impact from a smaller airplane than those actually used. Or I was talking to someone who actually does simulations for an airport so they can improve their layout and lessen the damage in case someone does detonate a bomb there. Etc.
So basically, yes, RL civil engineers actually have to think of such scenarios too. Unlike the average retrained burger-flipper programmer type who just finds excuses for why he doesn't.
4. The real reason why the most extreme terrorist attacks aren't taken into account in RL civil engineering projects is a calculate risk. If probability of an attack times damage done is less than what it costs to reinforce the bridge more, the decision can be taken to not reinforce more. But it's an actual calculate risk, not a stupid excuse to do a crap job.
And more importantly software doesn't have the same "the probability is too small" factor to justify such a decision. An XSS exploit or SQL injection being actually exploited isn't as rare as a terrorist attack. In fact, it's almost certainty. The same excuse simply doesn't apply.
4. In the end all this is missing the point: you're there to deliver what the paying customer wants. If he's ok that his site will resist everything except every single script-kiddie who wants to pwn it, sure, you don't have to do that. If he actually expects security, you're there to deliver security, not lame excuses.
5. And I doubt that the hourly rate is the problem either. I've seen a site done by ridiculously overpaid consultants from a major corporation, where they only checked your rights when they generated the links to other pages, but not when you actually access those pages. Trivial exploit: choose to change your user's password, edit the user ID in the URL of that page to user 0 (it was the admin), change the password. Now log in as the admin of that site and do whatever the f-word you wish. Seriously, stuff like that makes me actually wish there _was_ liability in some contracts.
Well, all hard drives can fail sooner or later, and there's a reason for the M in MTBF. The problem with IBM Deathstars wasn't just that they failed (all do), but that their failure rate was disproportionately higher than any other brand at the time. And yeah, I had one of those fail on me too.
That said, I don't seem to have much of a problem with failing WD drives. I have a Raptor of each of the 75 GB, 150 GB and 300 GB varieties, all of them since that particular series was launched and all three still seem to chug along just fine. But that's a non-representative sample too, so don't take it as more than a personal anecdote.
You know, with all the hearing of finding water here, traces of hydrocarbons there, etc, I'm starting to think that NASA is looking for the wrong thing. Forget water, me I'd set the spectroscopes for stun... err... I mean for beer. You're not going to get Joe Sixpack all excited and lobbying his representative to pay for your next rocket just because you found traces of water on Beta Bumfuckii, much less for some ark ship to colonize it. Beer, now, that's a worthy resource for the space age. That's how you get Joe to not only volunteer for the one-way trip on such an ark, but chip in for the ticket. Sure, it'll be a hard life in the frozen beer mines of Orion 5, but it's for the future of humanity ;)
What, you're saying it's just me? ;)
On the contrary, information wants to be all in one place. Like, locked behind a paten... err... behind the event horizon of a black hole.
We can only hope nobody tells Richard Stallman about it, or he'll probably sue reality for infringing on the rights of those bits. Mind you, he and reality had parted ways a long time ago anyway, but at least it was on mostly friendly terms ;)
Hmm, well, I'm not in America TBH. Over here they still need a warrant. You mean the PATRIOT idiocy is still in full swing? Damn, sorry of I accidentally misled anyone then.
There are only two problems there.
1. Exactly who is "your generation"? You make it sound like it's some uniform Borg collective, where everyone does the same things and realizes the same things. In reality, for every suburban white kid who grew with Facebook and with doing this or that thing, there'll be at least two who grew with fundamentally different experiences. The guy judging you may not be the guy who grew up with porn, college toga parties, and SW like you did, but some guy who grew up sleeping with his arms crossed out of fear that otherwise he might touch himself accidentally at night and JESUS SEES HIM. And who thinks that SW is the work of the devil because it teaches people a different religion. (As opposed to, of course, those of us who think only the prequels and the wookies are the work of the devil because they ruin the whole setup and moral underpinnings of the original trilogy;)
2. Don't underestimate hypocrisy and group-think. People who grew up doing X, and even people who do X every night, might want to see you hanged, drawn and quartered for doing X too.
Preachers who watch gay porn at night (or in a few cases even got caught actually having gay sex), didn't go, "meh, I did it too, and it doesn't affect my work." They then went to the pullpit and preached that gays are an abomination, and the Lord sent us aids as punishment.
Communities who buy far kinkier porn, asked that some porn producer or sex shop owner be jailed for it. They didn't go, "meh, I watch worse stuff at home and it hasn't affected my work or relationships yet", they went more like, "OMG, lock him up for spreading that sin and corruption."
People who did pot in college, and sometimes a long time after it too, push to have others drug tested and fired if they as much as ever were within a mile of someone smoking pot. Or push for tougher drug laws if they're politicians.
Basically the way people react to X has _very_ little to do with "I did X too and didn't affect me", and a lot more with "do I want to be seen as supporting X, or as the guy who's tough on X?" The same guy who might actually chug more beer in a week than you do in a month, may well fire you for appearing on Facebook or youtube drunk in a pool of your vomit once, because that's the company image he wants, and/or that's the kind of guy he wants to be seen as.
Actually, the feds are the least of my worries. If they want to come over and see what I've been looking at, they're more than welcome to come type stuff in my Mozilla's "awesome bar". Let's just say that if you start with "ana", you'll get "anandtech"... in about the 100'th position in the list, but hey ;)
I'm more concerned with Google basically having a huge mass of Curly, Larry and Moes who seem to have full access to the production data, if they think looking through it will help squeeze 1ms off the search or push a better targetted ad. I remember reading about how someone tracked a user's session through the search, including exactly what they searched for, and the pages on the topic they read on Google Books. That to me opens a far greater possibility of abuse than the feds coming and demanding your data.
The feds need a warrant, for a start, meaning that they had to convince a judge that there is a good reason. Johnny Nerdrage trying to find some dirt on his ex-girlfriend's (*) new boyfriend, or Jack Mole just tying to help his best buddy pick a good employee, don't have any such safeguards.
The feds have rules for what they can use that data for, and what data they can use. If they find out you have some chronic medical condition, they're not exactly going to call your employer and go "guess which of your employees is gonna have a lot of sick days soon!" Some John Doe just looking for some dirt, might not follow anything even remotely similar.
So, yes, I don't care if the feds get my search data or my emaisl with a warrant. But 10,000 nerds browsing and mining it as they see fit, now that gets me a lot more uncomfortable.
(*) ... actually she's just a girl who lived next door and never pulled the blinds before undressing ;)
Sure, that's what the Government and their Illuminati masters want you to believe. So you're wearing roughly a metallic hemisphere on your head, right? Sure, it reflects mind control rays coming from upwards and back, but what about rays coming from the front, hmm? Right, those get reflected and focused, like by a telescope mirror, inside your brain. And do you think that the proliferation of WiFi hotspots and police radars and whatnot at ground level is just a coincidence? Hmm? Wake up, people! ;)
Yes, but that's the whole point: not all guilds are like that. A top level raiding guild, maybe. A social guild who doesn't even care about raiding, I can tell you first hand that there is no paranoia and nothing to hide. And even among the raiding guilds, some did post youtube videos of how to beat some new boss within 24h of its being added to the game. Even if _some_ would maybe fit his idea of secretive group trying to not get caught, painting all guilds with that brush is silly.
If he found a common behaviour of all guilds, it would more likely be a common characteristic of human groups, competive or non-competitive alike. Especially since, again, they have no null hypothesis there. There is no non-competitive group to compare to. Essentially all groups they actually studied acted the same. They're just trying to paint them all as the secretive clandestine type so they can make the headlines and get the grant.
The claim still sounds suspect, though.
E.g., while the PR stunt... err... I mean press release mentions guilds and gangs, the way I read it that's _all_ the data they had. They _only_ studied WoW guilds and gangs, they have no other data about any other group. For all we know, it might be how all human groups work.
Especially in their light of claiming that it's specifically about competitive groups: "[i]He defines competitive groups as organisations that have features like a need to protect themselves from other groups. They develop their own rules, carry out clandestine acts and share a desire not to get trapped.[/i]" But I see no null hypothesis there. If some dynamic is specific to such groups carrying out clandestine acts and trying to not get caught, then where is the measured delta compared to _non_competitive groups?
And it seems like a particularly non-supported claim to anyone who actually has some experience with the multitudes of types of WoW guilds. There are PvP guilds, twink guilds, raiding guilds, but also social guilds where pretty much they only share a chat channel. I've even been in a social laid back guild where "epic" was as forbidden as the sterotypical four-letter-word in guild chat, because most of the higher levels were already refugees from raiding guilds that got torn apart by greed and raiding drama. There are guilds who are in willy-waving contests with each other, and guilds who cooperate. Etc. There's entirely too much behaviour variation to paint them all with his "competitive group" brush.
And I'm really not getting the vibe of carrying out any activities that they try to keep secret. On the contrary, your average willy-waver would shove his achievement list down everyone's throat if he could. There are people building whole sites and basically virtual shrines to the greatness of their virtual selves, and their online exploits. How the heck _that_ resembles the behaviour of groups engaged in clandestine acts and trying to not get caught, is truly beyond me.
Basically while they may have measured some elements of human group dynamics, the claim that it's about clandestine activities and stuff, seems to me like just a PR stunt to hopefully get the CIA's money. Just claiming that you've built yet another sociology model makes you yet another of those soft science colleges, while making a grand claim about predicting international terror cells gets you in the news.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with ego. I, for one, always wanted to be called The High Priest Of The Sun. But then the barstards switched from Sun to IBM servers :p
Now I'm thinking that depending on which opening you drop those 87 kg of TNT into someone's body, this may finally be a thread where the goatse link isn't off-topic ;)
Actually, I'd rather think of the bees, but then there are already too many sons of a bee ;)
Well, point taken for the hardware bugs. But, as I was saying, some bugs are really independent of those. I just can't imagine how a pathing or AI bug would depend on the video drivers or whatever. I would very much expect a reviewer to mention those.
Actually, the vast majority of the bugs I've encountered in various games were just plain old fashioned bugs in their code, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the drivers or hardware configuration. They were script bugs (e.g., a dialog option remaining active when it should be gone), pathing bugs, collision or physics bugs, balance problems, AI bugs, interface problems, the occasional race condition, memory leaks, etc.
E.g., if you think that any hardware or drivers could stop WoW from having bugged enemies that evade every single attack, I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell.
Even when installing a different version of the drivers solved anything, it is often just a case of moving the timings a bit so the race condition hits you at a different time, or some call with wrong parameters that only incidentally doesn't crash a particular driver version, or various such. In short, still program bugs, rather than actual driver bugs.
That's really what annoys me about the PC. Too often that variability in drivers or hardware is used just as a blanket excuse to do a half-arsed QA job before releasing, or as a blanket excuse for reviewers to not mention the bugs.
Except you just illustrate the problem: something that's just "good enough" (which really just means "mediocre") gets an 8 out of 10. I'm sorry, but in a perfectly linear scale, "mediocre" would mean a 5. That's the kind of a number you could punch in a formula and get a correlation or anything else.
Plus, if it were just a case of a honest review and the bad ones being already cancelled, the results would look much like the right half of a bell curve. You know, the curve with the below average ones removed. For virtually any sitze out there, it doesn't. It looks like a bell curve centered on 8 or 9, and which pretty much starts at 6 or 7. Sorry, that's not a case of the bad ones being already removed, that's a clear sign of an offset scale. It's what you get when the occasional "something that's truly bad" means you get to give a 5 or a 6, not a 1 or 2.
And then there is the occasional reviewer whose curve looks like two spikes. The kind who churns 90% to 99% scores all year long, and then occasionally picks up some 10 year old freeware game so he can give _something_ a 5% score and fix his street cred. Or publishes a yearly smack-talking "top 10 worst games of all time" -- conveniently all 20 years old and from publishers which are no longer in business -- just to show that he's that unbiased and can give a low score too.
But again, that's not being unbiased and fair at all, it's just trying to compensate one crap (or dishonest) job with another one skewed in the other direction. If it were a real fair and unbiased and non-skewed job, you'd get one bell curve centered in the right place, not two spikes centered near the extremes of the scale.
Actually, the problem is that for most actual skills and tasks there is no such thing as mastery. IRL there is no 450 skill points limit, that you can reach and then relax. And most RL problems are multi-dimensional problems where there is no perfect solution, but least worst compromises. And definitely not where you can max one aspect and proclaim that the others don't matter, which is what OCPD cases... err... perfectionists usually do.
RL "perfectionists" tend IMHO to be one or more of the following:
A) the real, honest kind: people who never finish. I still remember someone who, on the day before the deadline, was still working on his perfect XML parsing project for that project. (A tiny part of the project's functionality, and one he shouldn't have been doing himself: there's Xerxes.) There's _always_ one more optimization that can be done, one more clever trick that can be tried, one more label that would look better one pixel lower, etc. It's harder than you think, being a real bona-fide perfectionist.
B) the fake kind, which are basically just arrogant. They do a crap job, and then proclaim it to be perfect, just because they're that good in their own opinion. Often these are actually an illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the least competent tend to grossly overrate their skills and competence, just because they're not competent to do that judgment. They don't even know what they don't know. And conversely the most competent tend to underrate themselves, because they do have some clue of all the things they don't know.
C) the kind who'll redefine the problem to get a "perfect" solution. As I was saying RL problems are usually multi-dimensional, and increasing one aspect often loses you another. E.g., making a car engine more powerful also turns it into a gas guzzler. E.g., too many options in a GUI can actually make it less usable, or at least harder to also make it usable. Etc. A lot of OCPD kinds take such a variable and genuinely don't seem able to comprehend that it can take other values than 0 and 100%. Either you hit 100% or you're doing a crap job. But they can't hit 100% in all either. So they basically just pick one aspect and proclaim it the only thing that matters, and proclaim everyone who cares about the other aspects to be a clueless idiot. Unfortunately the actual best compromise for an actual user is rarely that. These guys tend to complain a lot that the users are clueless idiots.
D) the bitter whiner. These people rarely make something they'd rate perfect, and some don't even produce anything at all for years, but they complain about everyone and everything else. These people aren't as much into achieving perfection, as into just having something to whine about. Their very criteria for what perfection actually means, are fluid and disposable, often to the extent that they're simply the opposite of what everyone else is doing. E.g., I actually worked with one who, after he had converted the whole team to Linux (not that it was hard in a team of complete nerds) and thus lost that reason to complain, promptly switched to BSD and proclaimed both Windows _and_ Linux to be mainstream crap for idiots. He caused an indentation war fighting for the holy cause of _three_ space tabs, he fought to change the directory where the build script left the built executable, etc.
And a few other archetypes.
And just so it's not completely off topic: you can see the same in MMOs too.
A) There are people who are genuinely trapped into the neverending treadmill of needing every single achievement, every single pet, completing every single quest (even if it's 70 levels below them), paying 1000 gold on the Savory Deviate Delight recipe just because they _must_ have all the recipes in game, etc. Not because they actually need them, but because anything els
You know, while all the modern day equivalents are better at _some_ times, I think the downsides the rest of the time get overlooked.
For example, yes, moving around by foot or horse all the way to Jerusalem was a lot slower, not to mention having all those pesky Saracens in the way who felt that they should continue to keep their country ;) Nowadays you could take a plane and be there in a couple of hours.
But the downside is that you weren't expected to make that trip more than once in your life, and arguably most people got away with never doing it at all. Nowadays just because it's possible to travel faster, for a lot of people it means they're _expected_ to do it all the time. So when (other) people go, basically, "bah, quit complaining about leg space, be glad you can fly at all nowadays", my answer would be: yeah, but in ye olde days I wouldn't be expected to go over there in the first place.
To go back to the examples you actually used:
E.g., sure, pizza delivery is faster by moped than by foot or horse, but in ye olde days actually you wouldn't have to do it. People would have to come to your pizzeria, if they wanted a pizza. Effectively nowadays someone has to be out on their bike, no matter if it's scalding hot or massive rain, to deliver pizzas.
E.g., sure, it's easier to send an e-card or email nowadays, but it also created a culture where you're expected to spend more time with email and e-cards, than they spent writing an old fashioned letter in any other age. Communication at a distance was something for _very_ close friends, and for when you actually have something to say. You might write to someone once a month or a week and include just the more important thoughts or events of that interval. There is plenty of old correspondence which was actually good enough to be sold as a book. And at any rate, you had time to actually think an answer worth writing down.
The wake up call about modern day communication was when I first had a consulting job at a company where they gave me a computer with Outlook configured to act like a retarded kid trolling for attention. It wasn't even content to signal that a new email had come, but it then resorted to try to draw my attention with a big tooltip in the lower right corner. God damn it, it has an email and it wants attention RIGHT NOW! At the time it was a shock that someone would expect that I immmediately abort any other activity, right in the middle of a line of code even, and give email its attention the very second it arrived. And there are people who'll call if you didn't answer their email in 5 minutes. WTF?
The new uber-convenient form of communication didn't just become a more convenient replacement for the old, but an unholy pact with the devil. It eats up more time than the old one ever did, and created some expectations and a sense of urgency that just didn't use to be there.
Or, to go back in the land of my own examples, I was surprised to read in a study waay back, that with all the modern conveniences and time-saving devices, a modern woman actually spends more times on house chores than her ancestors ever did. The idea that this is easy, and that is easy, and that other thing is easy too, and so on, has created a sense of expectation to do them all to an extent where they all combined actually take up more time and energy than ever.
The short version is that the MMO genre started there, but basically that's not what most people want. And that like communism or anarchy, it requires a different kind of human to work than the ones we actually have.
E.g., UO tried hard to have a world where animals have realistic reproduction cycles, and you need two wolves to get one more wolf. But some people then made it their quest and goal in life to make wolves extinct, just so they can shaft the other players that way.
E.g., UO tried hard to have a realistic econom, with finite resources like ore. Though they did have the foresight to create more ore when items made of that metal are removed from the game (including sold to vendors.) You know, so a realistic supply and demand would work. But some players took it upon themselves to ruin it for the others, e.g., by hoarding iron items in their bank, just so ore wouldn't spawn for the crafters any more. Not to corner the market later or anything, but just to be the fuckwit who keeps others from enjoying the game they paid for.
E.g., UO tried hard to have a player-based justice. Except they had to eventually grudgingly admit that there is nothing you can do in character, to someone who sees their character as just a disposable harrassment tool.
To get to your examples: Nations having hierarchies sounds good when you're the first player, but not as the guy who started on a 5 year old game and where every rank above you is fillled with people who seemingly never quit. Some group of fucktards somewhere will make it their goal in life to get those postions just so they can then leave their account running without ever logging in, just so _you_ can't get them.
(And if you think they wouldn't pay money just to inconvenience someone else, in UO there was a brisk trade where people just kept buying accounts to scam, cheat and grief and get banned. Sure, they lost the money, but they made a few people miserable.)
Additionally, you don't seem to talk about quests for example. Sure, if your MMO is just a mindless repetitive work simulator, like in the pizza example, it's easy. But that's been done already. See, UO again. Most players these days want lots and lots of quests and _story_. Double so the casual gang. And no, "you're a pizza boy, now go grind and ding" doesn't quite cut it.
And those story quests don't mix well with persistent world changes. If someone saved the princess and she doesn't respawn right back in the tower, now what? There are 10,000 other players on the server. What will _those_ get instead of that quest? Are you planning to pay designers to write 10,000 different quests there, so the other players get something of comparable difficulty to do? Didn't think so.
Basically until we have an AI Dungeon Master which can generate passable story arcs and quests on the fly, a different one for each player, that idea is really a no go.
Or we could just apply Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to mallice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
While some collusion _is_ possible there, it could also be that they just listened to the wrong crowd. That's also a "welcome to reality" kind of thing. A vocal minority can often seem like they're the majority, or at least representative enough for a majority of players. It's not just a Second Life or selling goods issue, it's that a tiny number of vocal people can generate more posts and whole circle-jerk treads, than the vast majority... who's too busy playing the game or coding flying penises for Second Life and doesn't bother much with posting.
Just look at almost any gaming board and you can see the same phenomenon: a minority of fanboys or malcontents can generate more posts than everyone else combined. And if left to their own devices, can actually gang up on anyone saying otherwise and try to drive them off. It can be about off-line single player games too (about half a dozen fanboys were enough to insult anyone who had a problem with Morrowind, back when that launched), online games (just read the Stalker boards in COV and you'd think that (A) 99% of the players want only PvP, and (B) everyone agrees that Stalkers should be able to one-shot any other class, including tanks), etc.
And occasionally you see some game screwing up spectacularly, because they listened to the wrong crowd. Without any anti-communist ideology being involved at all. E.g., it seems Vanguard owes half its screw ups to listening too much to the gang that, basically, went, "I've played WoW for 2 years straight and raided every night, and then discovered that everything about it sucks and only an idiot kiddie would like it." If you figured out by now that whoever makes such a claim, just called himself an idiot kiddie, and that only an even bigger idiot would take design advice from a self-confessed idiot... well, then you'd be smarter and more perceptive than some designers ;)
Nevertheless, I fail to see why XP and generally the "Agile" crowd has to compare itself only to the Waterfall Model, every single time. It's getting like listening to the Creationist crowd: they can't even make their point without devolving into just bad-mouthing Darwinism. WTF of a claim is it, anyway? "Yay, we're better than a methodology known to be the absolute worst at least since 1970"? There's a difference between it being alive in some places, and acting as if that was the only alternative to the "Agile" stuff.
I mean, BDSM is still alive and kicking, but you don't see stuff advertised as, basically, "come to our massage parlour, it's better than being whipped and crucified." Anal rape is, supposedly, still alive and kicking in prisons, but you don't see stuff hyped as, say, "our laxatives are better than being ass-raped." Copro-fetishes are very much alive and kicking, but you don't see stuff hyped to the effect of, "eat at Moraelin's Diner, our food tastes better than shit."
Yet somehow for picking a methodology, it's apparently enough to know that it's better than the worst. Oookaaay.
Here's my request to whoever out there feels a need to proselytise for XP or whatever offpring of it: Pick up, say, Steve McConnell's book, take your pick about which of his variants sounds the best and most workable, and convince me that your agile method is better than that. You know, make a claim to the effect of "we're better than some of the best other methodologies", not "we're better than the absolute worst."
Or it could be just an indication of a management failure.
A couple of years ago I was brought in to save a project that was hopelessly behind schedule and getting nowhere. Pretty quickly I got the idea that whenever I check something into CVS, it gets re-checked by a really helpful girl there, richly decorated with comments. (Now I do comment classes and methods extensively, as well as places where higher elven magic was used, but I do _not_ write stuff like that now I'm iterating through a node's children. If you need a comment to understand that "for" loop, then there's something deeper wrong with my code.)
But, anyway, stuff like a line that said "if (currentNode.isRootNode())" had been decorated with the obviously helpful comment "// when the current node is the root node". I'm still at a loss as to what extra info is conveyed by that comment, since just reading the code out loud gets you almost the same sentence and definitely the same meaning.
And it went like that for every single line. Every single assignment, trivial loop, etc, was dutifully duplicated in that line's comment.
Turns out, they were asked to comment their code extensively, and judged basically by quantity. So she was just abiding by the rules.
Actually, I hope you realize that -- since it's referenced even in the review here -- the 1970 article by Royce which described it (albeit not actually using the term "waterfall") was a description of a dysfunctional process which doesn't work right for software. That article wasn't a formalization of the waterfall model, but a critique of it. (And a modification to something that works better, at that.)
It's not even the only one. Several authors and books exist about making software development work, _long_ before there even was such a thing as the XP manifesto or the word agile.
So at the very least we have the first strawman: that we needed the Agile crowd to come along and wake us up to the fact that the waterfall doesn't work. It was widely known that it doesn't work, at _least_ since 1970. You know, the fun times before microprocessors and personal computers and when even Unix was still just a cutesy personal experiment.
The model actually doesn't come from computing but from RL construction and partially manufacturing. That's the place where the costs get prohibitively higher if you discover a mistake after you built the whole building. And while _some_ misguided MBAs have always tried to treat programming like a generic assembly-line operation -- including using methodologies like this one, which are utterly inapropriate -- it's hardly been the standard, de facto and de jure methodology in computing. The pretense that somehow if you're not doing a crap^H^H^H^H agile job, you're one of those using the waterfall model (never mind that it was discredited for 3 decades already) is the strawman that irks me the most. Yes, some islands of insanity exist. You have my sympathy if you work for one. No, it's not the standard in programming. No, we don't need a wakeup call or extreme methodologies to know it doesn't work. We knew that already. At least since 1970.
And in reality even the places which go somewhat waterfall-y... well, let's just say that any place that's ever had a change request or made a version 2.0 of a product, essentially has iterations. Not the best form of them, to be sure, but it is iterations. Requirements change after code has been written too.
Oh, right, yet another valiant effort at demolishing a strawman of the Waterfal Model... which never really meant the carricature opposed by the "agile" crowd, and wasn't applied that way. Ever heard of iterations? Right. Apparently the agile crowd still never heard that anyone else uses those.
Oh yes, if you just want to "destroy earth", wiping out all human life is a far easier task than the micro-black-hole route. With a tiny fraction of that uranium and some cobalt, you can do a much better doomsday device.