Re:Agile development in engineering?
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
I ask you that you go into it with an open mind. Agile stuff has been treated as an overhyped bogeyman (look at all the posts here) and understandably many of us geeks are very cautious to approach it. However, if you pull the layers of hype and bullshit away, you recognize that it's just a different mindset that guides the work. This mindset happens to work a lot better with people and software (I am now convinced of this).
I'm hoping that you have a good instructor for training. But also, I am hoping that you have access to that instructor for questions afterwards, because that's really the most useful part. Every kind of training I've seen presents idealized examples to some degree, but a smart instructor will be able to tell you how you can work your situation.
For example, for varied skill sets, once you make up your team, try to take on a mix of stories (simplified use cases) that *approximately* reflects the skills breakdown. For example, if you have only two people that can touch your matrix code, take only on one or two matrix-work-intensive stories per sprint. After all, you have to be realistic.
(However, maybe a third person on your team would like to learn this matrix code. By sitting that person down with the matrix code expert and going through several dev tasks together, that person may learn something and may pick up these skills. Sure, it will feel slower at first, but now you have greater versatility in your team.)
If you are primarily doing fixes, then just reflect that in your wording of the stories. For example, we had to do some work to improve the startup performance of our product. We came up with stories that said, "As an administrator, I want my server to restart in less than X seconds." When we did some loose estimates, we realized that this was too much work to fit into a one-week sprint. So we split it into "As an administrator, I want my server to restart in less than X seconds, on Windows" and "... on Linux." This is because after doing some investigation, we realized that there was a lot of different work to be done for Windows vs Linux. This is not a perfect split of user stories (you want to keep such platform details out as much as possible), but that's OK. Do what works for you.
I have resolved to myself that, if I can help it, I am never again going to work at a place that does old-school waterfall. My team right now is in the middle of a transition to a Scrum-esque approach. We are running into plenty of problems, our team members have varied skills and some are much more versatile than others (Etc etc). However, it's already a better situation than what we had before.
So far, I am enjoying working off a prioritized product backlog, concentrating on getting smaller features DONE DONE, working in short iterations (2 weeks), and having the team who is fairly open to "let's change it if it doesn't work".
For one, many times before, spend months nailing down a long list of requirements, estimating the whole freaking thing, arguing between product management and engineering, cutting things to try to fit a set of features into some deadline (based on start-of-project estimates). Our product management would fight to keep certain things in that were important but not that important (because they did not want them to get dropped until the next release, that was many many months away). The developers (including me) would sit there, pulling estimates out of our collective ass for a ton of features, with barely any information for some of them.
Then we'd write extensive software requirement specifications (SRS) based on what was agreed to be implemented. The QA would go off to write test cases based on those SRSs. Of course, the use cases in these requirements were too detailed in some respects and not detailed enough in others, and completely missing the boat in yet other aspects. But, since they were signed off as "complete", we spent the rest of the project following what was agreed upon in the beginning instead of adjusting to the new proc
The problem is that now you're at the mercy of the cop. Not sure how they are where you live, but between me and my friends here in good old Massachusetts, we have been illegally searched by a pissed off statie, many times pulled over for bullshit reasons (were not the ones speeding, were not the ones peeling out in a nearby parking lot).
Do you ever play a little much with the radio in your car, looking too long trying to dial in a specific radio frequency? OK, so that's an instance of distracted driving that's as bad as typing a text message for the same 10 seconds, for the same basic reason that you are not paying attention to the road. Have you been involved in a really intense conversation (fighting with your girlfriend, e.g.) while driving and were deep in that instead of thinking about what's around you?
Have you ever spent too long starting at the windshield-mounted GPS screen trying to figure out just where the hell it's telling you to go? Distracted driving. Have you spent too long fishing around in your car for that gadget or sandwich or whatever else you were trying to get?
Anyways, distracted driving is a driver's mindset. You are either aware of the fact that you are not looking at the road when you do certain things and then you do your best to NOT do those things. Or you are not aware and you do other dumb things, in addition to texting.
So what now? I am sitting at a red stoplight, which I know takes at least a minute to switch. I can't take 10 seconds to text someone that I'll be late? It's perfectly safe and the worst thing is that I'll get honked at if the light turns green before I pay attention. I have made a thoughtful, careful choice. Yet according to the law, I am as bad as a drunk driver. Fuck yeah America!
In my opinion, it would've been more effective to start education campaigns and enforcing extensively a simple moving violation ticket. Nobody wants to get a moving violation because your insurance rates start going up (no matter whether you were ticketed for a 5mph over or running a red light). With enforcement and public education, you would've had much higher impact than by declaring that you can face a 15 year jail sentence.
The only people who are truly happy about this are the lawyers who are about to get a lot more business than DUI defense.
Traffic fatalities rates have actually been steadily going down in the recent years and are lowest they ever were. I think this is mostly due to better cars (for example, stability control reduces accidents by about 30%, we have better tires, fewer old cars on the road that can't make a good evasive maneuver).
Cloud computing must work terribly, which explains why services like Amazon EC2 are totally going out of business, making no money and have no customers.
It's next to impossible to change the speed limits, which are set unrealistically low. We have highways (Masspike here in the US) that were built for a safe 80mph using car technology from the 60's and the 70's--yet, we will never see this speed here, because soccer moms are going to cry murder and "think of the children."
The fact is that the police enforces 80mph on the Masspike as the de facto speed limit. If you are doing over 80mph, you are getting pulled over guaranteed, but 75mph and nobody will touch you (unless the officer is having a bad day, or, these days, a budget crisis). The police knows that these speeds are safe and even the state police chief acknowledged that people speeding moderately do not present a problem.
The other fact is that we will never get the speed limit changed to 80mph to acknowledge what's going on now.
Lack of attention, people not looking where they are going, not checking their mirrors --- these are the factors that cause accidents and kill.
But, of course, getting people to actually pay attention while driving is a much more difficult task than jumping on a horse of "speed kills" and spending taxpayer dollars on bullshit measures like these.
I think that cases where.22s are blown are not going to be thrown out just on a faulty breathalyzer argument. Those people are usually detained and then have their blood tested at the police station. Anyone who is that drunk (and is clearly very dangerous) is going to have a way high reading even two hours later. So, in those cases, there should be a mountain of evidence.
Breathalyzers reasonably have a 30% margin of error, sometimes even more, depending on physiological differences between people. People get DUI tickets at a sobriety checkpoint for drinking two glasses of wine with dinner and registering enough to be over a 0.08, or worse in some states, a 0.06 BAC limit. That's ridiculous.
Try a different pair of shoes. Go to a running store and tell them you get shin splints... I've known several people who have switched to different kinds of running shoes and shin splints went away.
I agree... marathons seem ridiculous to me. 26 miles, hours and hours of beating yourself up? People throw up during and after marathons because their body is so stressed. That's not right! That's dumb!
Many people running marathons are misguided. They run a marathon for the sake of pushing themselves past the limit. Most of us geeks know that there's a limit to how much you can push things and there's no point in going beyond it. You can make an overclocking analogy here...
It's a hobby that some take up because it has societal respect/recognition (who's going to make fun of you for running 20 miles in one day?), and they quickly disregard things like, you know, safety, progressing at a safe pace, etc. Instead, they think "my body hurts but I just gotta keep going!" And then fail.
I do think that running is good though. I just began running at the age of 26, after not ever having done that, and I enjoy runs of moderate distances, along somewhere nice and scenic. 3 miles is perfect. 5 miles is probably as long as I'd really want to continuously run. I've done 7 miles in a day, but that was a 3 mile run and then two 1.5 miles after a long break (and I still had energy and motivation).
I find running enjoyable, surprisingly so... I stream some live Internet radio over 3G on my phone, which helps keep my interest up, and then I just run and enjoy the fact that I'm getting a good amount of exercise. Plus sometimes you do need to be able to run somewhere for some short distance! (like a couple of city blocks) It's nice to be able to do that without running out of breath so quickly.
This is very true. I still don't like sports and don't play any sports. Not that I wouldn't start in the future if I got into something, but there is absolutely zero athletic skill required to go the gym.
Once I realized that everyone is as self-conscious in a gym as I am, it kinda took a large edge of going to it.
I went to Dick's, purchased some decent looking activewear shorts & shirts, a comfortable sets of shoes, and, bam, now I have been going to the gym, losing weight, having a fine time (listening to music you enjoy helps a lot) AND enjoying looking at myself in the mirror (self confidence booster right there!).
Plus I can tell a girl now I go to the gym, which is maybe a dumb thing, but beforehand, not being able to say that or talk about it was a point of intimidation and a point of lack of confidence. Any girl, and I'm not talking just about the superficial bitches, likes a guy that takes care of himself.
By the way, I am not looking to become buff, just to loose some weight and gain some strength and endurance. I already feel better physically. So what's not to like?
I'm sure I'll look better as time progresses, but that's not my main objective. My motivation is to be stronger and have better endurance, so I can do things without running out of breath so fast, etc. For example, I can go hiking with friends and not fall over on my ass everywhere.
I got my music selection down: drum'n'bass for the treadmill, dubstep for the rowing machine.
I took a geek approach to it. Basically, everything I do has some kind of explanation behind it. Nothing is unscientific. Nothing is "oh this is good for you just because."
Cardio? (Running on the treadmill, bike, rowing machine, etc) -- OK, that keeps your heart running at a high rate (the ranges for those rates are all defined and easy to find... I try to keep mine between 155 and 175), so that your body can burn fat. Makes sense.
Weights and crunches? I am lucky to have a gym at work, and the guy that runs it worked with me on a program that exercises all my muscle groups. I can make numerical progress over time (be able to say lift 5 lbs more here). He explained each exercise and which muscle group it works. It all makes sense.
These are all the things that will give you confidence that you were lacking before. If you have never made it to a gym, give it a shot. Go and make that initial purchase of gym clothing & shoes (like I did)--it gave me a mental investment and that initial kick to go (well I just blew $200, I better go now!). Then when you get there, just get on that treadmill and after 5 minutes of easier walking, turn it up and get sweating. Take a hot shower at home afterwards and you'll be coming back for more.
Yes, Nissan (like many other auto manufacturers) does not release a list of troubleshooting CEL codes, so when something that's not standard goes wrong, you won't be able to figure it out, unless you have the dealership's diagnostic system (or Google for the code and hope to find someone who's run into this). And you can't diagnose ABS, airbags and other systems without a proprietary interface either, so good luck getting that figured out at your local mechanic. Off to the stealership you go.
Wow, I put in "renegade", after attempting to search for the Renegade Miata Club (those three terms were producing 0 hits), and it still reported 0 results!
0 results for Renegade! I mean, come on!
So then I turn off safesearch and I got some results. Oh wow, no thank you!
Just look at Java opensource software. Eclipse, Spring and Hibernate are some of the most innovative opensource projects, massively used by the biggest corporate giants to boot.
I RTFA'd and it's basically a list of new input device methods. Big deal. You can put the flyest multi-touch interface on Windows, and while you can move the windows around with both your hands, you will still get pissed off that you get interrupted in the middle of your browsing session with "Do you want to remember this password?" (Firefox), that you can't undo that "transfer shares" action in Quicken, that setting up automated backups in Windows is still hard, and using them to recover is harder.
None of these get solved with all the fancy new shit in the TFA.
One of the most important UI advancements is UNDO. It is an old feature, but it's surprisingly missing from so many apps (being a developer, it's not so surprising to me though). So as far as I'm concerned, one of the key improvements in usability of the 21st century would be more apps getting Undo functionality on all the actions.
The truth is that designing the entire user experience well (not just pretty) is a difficult task. It's difficult to make things simple and effortless. And whether you're commanding that user experience via a plain old keyboard and mouse or a Minority-style hand-manipulation screen is a really small part of the equation.
I haven't seen one good Symbian phone. I have a coworker who develops on the platform and all the test phones are slow and frustrating to use. It's like: "Oh, another Symbian phone? *groan*"
Why is that?
That's why Symbian is afraid. They know their product can't compete well enough on its own merits, and so they resort to disparaging others.
... but law enforcement angle is not so fun and is the real problem. Potential for misuse is huge. There's already enough bored suburban police looking to make up a budget shortfall. I just don't trust local police to remotely stall cars responsibly. Why bother pulling out and putting on the blues when they can call in and stall your car that drove 40mph into an unmarked 35mph zone? Incompetent low-wage OnStar operator disabling the wrong car by accident? They won't care. This is a serious tool--where's the due process?
I can't imagine people wanting to choose vehicles with OnStar with such a "feature."
is that with our computers today, all that it takes a run-of-the-mill PEBKAC to screw things up.
One day, we'll look back at PC security of today and laugh at the crap one had to go through just to not have your typical PC go down in flames.
Just a thought.
Re:Still gimped "Squirt"...
on
ZOMG New Zunes
·
· Score: 1
Simple answer is that the non-trivial effort to "squirt" isn't worth the gimped 3 plays.
3 play limitation kills feature, MS doesn't get it
on
ZOMG New Zunes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This random 3 plays limitation has a terrible uncertainty feeling. The 3 plays are so arbitrary when it comes to how people listen to music, or evaluate it. That's why it's a stupidly thought-out limitation: MS just doesn't get it.
Firstly, how are the 3 plays counted? What if I start listening to the song while working, but then I take the headphones off while a coworker asks a question? If I forget to hit pause, the song will finish playing, but I won't hear it. What if I'm scanning through songs on shuffle in my car, I hear this song come on, but 30 seconds into it, I decide to keep scanning. Does that count as a play? Who knows? There is uncertainty.
So if someone transfers me this song, I have to WORRY about pausing the song before taking off my headphones, or WORRY about not accidentally playing it and "squandering" a play? It's like having a text editor with no undo. This is worrying about stupid stuff. Who the heck wants to worry? I want to listen to music. I don't want uncertainty.
Secondly, people don't simply evaluate music by listening to it X number of times. Often, when listening to music, we may not be concentrating on it, or we may not WANT to put in the effort to think about it. It's the nature of portable music players: we don't have that "I'm in a store, evaluating things" mentality while using them. Yet, the 3 listen count forces that upon us. Listening to a song 3 times in a music store is enough to evaluate it, but that just doesn't fit the casual listening environment of a portable player.
So of course nobody really cares about this squirt feature.
Slashdot Mirror
I ask you that you go into it with an open mind. Agile stuff has been treated as an overhyped bogeyman (look at all the posts here) and understandably many of us geeks are very cautious to approach it. However, if you pull the layers of hype and bullshit away, you recognize that it's just a different mindset that guides the work. This mindset happens to work a lot better with people and software (I am now convinced of this).
I'm hoping that you have a good instructor for training. But also, I am hoping that you have access to that instructor for questions afterwards, because that's really the most useful part. Every kind of training I've seen presents idealized examples to some degree, but a smart instructor will be able to tell you how you can work your situation.
For example, for varied skill sets, once you make up your team, try to take on a mix of stories (simplified use cases) that *approximately* reflects the skills breakdown. For example, if you have only two people that can touch your matrix code, take only on one or two matrix-work-intensive stories per sprint. After all, you have to be realistic.
(However, maybe a third person on your team would like to learn this matrix code. By sitting that person down with the matrix code expert and going through several dev tasks together, that person may learn something and may pick up these skills. Sure, it will feel slower at first, but now you have greater versatility in your team.)
If you are primarily doing fixes, then just reflect that in your wording of the stories. For example, we had to do some work to improve the startup performance of our product. We came up with stories that said, "As an administrator, I want my server to restart in less than X seconds." When we did some loose estimates, we realized that this was too much work to fit into a one-week sprint. So we split it into "As an administrator, I want my server to restart in less than X seconds, on Windows" and "... on Linux." This is because after doing some investigation, we realized that there was a lot of different work to be done for Windows vs Linux. This is not a perfect split of user stories (you want to keep such platform details out as much as possible), but that's OK. Do what works for you.
I have resolved to myself that, if I can help it, I am never again going to work at a place that does old-school waterfall. My team right now is in the middle of a transition to a Scrum-esque approach. We are running into plenty of problems, our team members have varied skills and some are much more versatile than others (Etc etc). However, it's already a better situation than what we had before.
So far, I am enjoying working off a prioritized product backlog, concentrating on getting smaller features DONE DONE, working in short iterations (2 weeks), and having the team who is fairly open to "let's change it if it doesn't work".
For one, many times before, spend months nailing down a long list of requirements, estimating the whole freaking thing, arguing between product management and engineering, cutting things to try to fit a set of features into some deadline (based on start-of-project estimates). Our product management would fight to keep certain things in that were important but not that important (because they did not want them to get dropped until the next release, that was many many months away). The developers (including me) would sit there, pulling estimates out of our collective ass for a ton of features, with barely any information for some of them.
Then we'd write extensive software requirement specifications (SRS) based on what was agreed to be implemented. The QA would go off to write test cases based on those SRSs. Of course, the use cases in these requirements were too detailed in some respects and not detailed enough in others, and completely missing the boat in yet other aspects. But, since they were signed off as "complete", we spent the rest of the project following what was agreed upon in the beginning instead of adjusting to the new proc
The problem is that now you're at the mercy of the cop. Not sure how they are where you live, but between me and my friends here in good old Massachusetts, we have been illegally searched by a pissed off statie, many times pulled over for bullshit reasons (were not the ones speeding, were not the ones peeling out in a nearby parking lot).
Do you ever play a little much with the radio in your car, looking too long trying to dial in a specific radio frequency? OK, so that's an instance of distracted driving that's as bad as typing a text message for the same 10 seconds, for the same basic reason that you are not paying attention to the road. Have you been involved in a really intense conversation (fighting with your girlfriend, e.g.) while driving and were deep in that instead of thinking about what's around you?
Have you ever spent too long starting at the windshield-mounted GPS screen trying to figure out just where the hell it's telling you to go? Distracted driving. Have you spent too long fishing around in your car for that gadget or sandwich or whatever else you were trying to get?
Anyways, distracted driving is a driver's mindset. You are either aware of the fact that you are not looking at the road when you do certain things and then you do your best to NOT do those things. Or you are not aware and you do other dumb things, in addition to texting.
So what now? I am sitting at a red stoplight, which I know takes at least a minute to switch. I can't take 10 seconds to text someone that I'll be late? It's perfectly safe and the worst thing is that I'll get honked at if the light turns green before I pay attention. I have made a thoughtful, careful choice. Yet according to the law, I am as bad as a drunk driver. Fuck yeah America!
In my opinion, it would've been more effective to start education campaigns and enforcing extensively a simple moving violation ticket. Nobody wants to get a moving violation because your insurance rates start going up (no matter whether you were ticketed for a 5mph over or running a red light). With enforcement and public education, you would've had much higher impact than by declaring that you can face a 15 year jail sentence.
The only people who are truly happy about this are the lawyers who are about to get a lot more business than DUI defense.
Traffic fatalities rates have actually been steadily going down in the recent years and are lowest they ever were. I think this is mostly due to better cars (for example, stability control reduces accidents by about 30%, we have better tires, fewer old cars on the road that can't make a good evasive maneuver).
Cloud computing must work terribly, which explains why services like Amazon EC2 are totally going out of business, making no money and have no customers.
You use the search engine to search for stuff you want to find.
Then you measure accuracy by looking at your face:
1) smiling face
2) frowny face
3) monitor been punched because you're on the 10th page and there is still nothing relevant
It's next to impossible to change the speed limits, which are set unrealistically low. We have highways (Masspike here in the US) that were built for a safe 80mph using car technology from the 60's and the 70's--yet, we will never see this speed here, because soccer moms are going to cry murder and "think of the children."
The fact is that the police enforces 80mph on the Masspike as the de facto speed limit. If you are doing over 80mph, you are getting pulled over guaranteed, but 75mph and nobody will touch you (unless the officer is having a bad day, or, these days, a budget crisis). The police knows that these speeds are safe and even the state police chief acknowledged that people speeding moderately do not present a problem.
The other fact is that we will never get the speed limit changed to 80mph to acknowledge what's going on now.
So yeah, how can I change the law?
Lack of attention, people not looking where they are going, not checking their mirrors --- these are the factors that cause accidents and kill.
But, of course, getting people to actually pay attention while driving is a much more difficult task than jumping on a horse of "speed kills" and spending taxpayer dollars on bullshit measures like these.
I think that cases where .22s are blown are not going to be thrown out just on a faulty breathalyzer argument. Those people are usually detained and then have their blood tested at the police station. Anyone who is that drunk (and is clearly very dangerous) is going to have a way high reading even two hours later. So, in those cases, there should be a mountain of evidence.
Breathalyzers reasonably have a 30% margin of error, sometimes even more, depending on physiological differences between people. People get DUI tickets at a sobriety checkpoint for drinking two glasses of wine with dinner and registering enough to be over a 0.08, or worse in some states, a 0.06 BAC limit. That's ridiculous.
Try a different pair of shoes. Go to a running store and tell them you get shin splints... I've known several people who have switched to different kinds of running shoes and shin splints went away.
I agree... marathons seem ridiculous to me. 26 miles, hours and hours of beating yourself up? People throw up during and after marathons because their body is so stressed. That's not right! That's dumb!
Many people running marathons are misguided. They run a marathon for the sake of pushing themselves past the limit. Most of us geeks know that there's a limit to how much you can push things and there's no point in going beyond it. You can make an overclocking analogy here...
It's a hobby that some take up because it has societal respect/recognition (who's going to make fun of you for running 20 miles in one day?), and they quickly disregard things like, you know, safety, progressing at a safe pace, etc. Instead, they think "my body hurts but I just gotta keep going!" And then fail.
I do think that running is good though. I just began running at the age of 26, after not ever having done that, and I enjoy runs of moderate distances, along somewhere nice and scenic. 3 miles is perfect. 5 miles is probably as long as I'd really want to continuously run. I've done 7 miles in a day, but that was a 3 mile run and then two 1.5 miles after a long break (and I still had energy and motivation).
I find running enjoyable, surprisingly so... I stream some live Internet radio over 3G on my phone, which helps keep my interest up, and then I just run and enjoy the fact that I'm getting a good amount of exercise. Plus sometimes you do need to be able to run somewhere for some short distance! (like a couple of city blocks) It's nice to be able to do that without running out of breath so quickly.
All of ten minutes and it's basically free, massive publicity with almost no effort.
Do you think you would've known about this new ISS module if it weren't for Colbert?
This is very true. I still don't like sports and don't play any sports. Not that I wouldn't start in the future if I got into something, but there is absolutely zero athletic skill required to go the gym.
Once I realized that everyone is as self-conscious in a gym as I am, it kinda took a large edge of going to it.
I went to Dick's, purchased some decent looking activewear shorts & shirts, a comfortable sets of shoes, and, bam, now I have been going to the gym, losing weight, having a fine time (listening to music you enjoy helps a lot) AND enjoying looking at myself in the mirror (self confidence booster right there!).
Plus I can tell a girl now I go to the gym, which is maybe a dumb thing, but beforehand, not being able to say that or talk about it was a point of intimidation and a point of lack of confidence. Any girl, and I'm not talking just about the superficial bitches, likes a guy that takes care of himself.
By the way, I am not looking to become buff, just to loose some weight and gain some strength and endurance. I already feel better physically. So what's not to like?
I'm sure I'll look better as time progresses, but that's not my main objective. My motivation is to be stronger and have better endurance, so I can do things without running out of breath so fast, etc. For example, I can go hiking with friends and not fall over on my ass everywhere.
I got my music selection down: drum'n'bass for the treadmill, dubstep for the rowing machine.
I took a geek approach to it. Basically, everything I do has some kind of explanation behind it. Nothing is unscientific. Nothing is "oh this is good for you just because."
Cardio? (Running on the treadmill, bike, rowing machine, etc) -- OK, that keeps your heart running at a high rate (the ranges for those rates are all defined and easy to find... I try to keep mine between 155 and 175), so that your body can burn fat. Makes sense.
Weights and crunches? I am lucky to have a gym at work, and the guy that runs it worked with me on a program that exercises all my muscle groups. I can make numerical progress over time (be able to say lift 5 lbs more here). He explained each exercise and which muscle group it works. It all makes sense.
These are all the things that will give you confidence that you were lacking before. If you have never made it to a gym, give it a shot. Go and make that initial purchase of gym clothing & shoes (like I did)--it gave me a mental investment and that initial kick to go (well I just blew $200, I better go now!). Then when you get there, just get on that treadmill and after 5 minutes of easier walking, turn it up and get sweating. Take a hot shower at home afterwards and you'll be coming back for more.
Yes, Nissan (like many other auto manufacturers) does not release a list of troubleshooting CEL codes, so when something that's not standard goes wrong, you won't be able to figure it out, unless you have the dealership's diagnostic system (or Google for the code and hope to find someone who's run into this). And you can't diagnose ABS, airbags and other systems without a proprietary interface either, so good luck getting that figured out at your local mechanic. Off to the stealership you go.
Useless!
Wow, I put in "renegade", after attempting to search for the Renegade Miata Club (those three terms were producing 0 hits), and it still reported 0 results!
0 results for Renegade! I mean, come on!
So then I turn off safesearch and I got some results. Oh wow, no thank you!
Just look at Java opensource software. Eclipse, Spring and Hibernate are some of the most innovative opensource projects, massively used by the biggest corporate giants to boot.
I RTFA'd and it's basically a list of new input device methods. Big deal. You can put the flyest multi-touch interface on Windows, and while you can move the windows around with both your hands, you will still get pissed off that you get interrupted in the middle of your browsing session with "Do you want to remember this password?" (Firefox), that you can't undo that "transfer shares" action in Quicken, that setting up automated backups in Windows is still hard, and using them to recover is harder.
None of these get solved with all the fancy new shit in the TFA.
One of the most important UI advancements is UNDO. It is an old feature, but it's surprisingly missing from so many apps (being a developer, it's not so surprising to me though). So as far as I'm concerned, one of the key improvements in usability of the 21st century would be more apps getting Undo functionality on all the actions.
The truth is that designing the entire user experience well (not just pretty) is a difficult task. It's difficult to make things simple and effortless. And whether you're commanding that user experience via a plain old keyboard and mouse or a Minority-style hand-manipulation screen is a really small part of the equation.
I haven't seen one good Symbian phone. I have a coworker who develops on the platform and all the test phones are slow and frustrating to use. It's like: "Oh, another Symbian phone? *groan*"
Why is that?
That's why Symbian is afraid. They know their product can't compete well enough on its own merits, and so they resort to disparaging others.
... but law enforcement angle is not so fun and is the real problem. Potential for misuse is huge. There's already enough bored suburban police looking to make up a budget shortfall. I just don't trust local police to remotely stall cars responsibly. Why bother pulling out and putting on the blues when they can call in and stall your car that drove 40mph into an unmarked 35mph zone? Incompetent low-wage OnStar operator disabling the wrong car by accident? They won't care. This is a serious tool--where's the due process?
I can't imagine people wanting to choose vehicles with OnStar with such a "feature."
They are forcing the buggy new comment system (Which I don't like) on us. I can't uncheck it either.
Can't wait for the "disciplined computer user" licenses, we can lock all those computer illiterate retards out!
is that with our computers today, all that it takes a run-of-the-mill PEBKAC to screw things up.
One day, we'll look back at PC security of today and laugh at the crap one had to go through just to not have your typical PC go down in flames.
Just a thought.
Simple answer is that the non-trivial effort to "squirt" isn't worth the gimped 3 plays.
This random 3 plays limitation has a terrible uncertainty feeling. The 3 plays are so arbitrary when it comes to how people listen to music, or evaluate it. That's why it's a stupidly thought-out limitation: MS just doesn't get it.
Firstly, how are the 3 plays counted? What if I start listening to the song while working, but then I take the headphones off while a coworker asks a question? If I forget to hit pause, the song will finish playing, but I won't hear it. What if I'm scanning through songs on shuffle in my car, I hear this song come on, but 30 seconds into it, I decide to keep scanning. Does that count as a play? Who knows? There is uncertainty.
So if someone transfers me this song, I have to WORRY about pausing the song before taking off my headphones, or WORRY about not accidentally playing it and "squandering" a play? It's like having a text editor with no undo. This is worrying about stupid stuff. Who the heck wants to worry? I want to listen to music. I don't want uncertainty.
Secondly, people don't simply evaluate music by listening to it X number of times. Often, when listening to music, we may not be concentrating on it, or we may not WANT to put in the effort to think about it. It's the nature of portable music players: we don't have that "I'm in a store, evaluating things" mentality while using them. Yet, the 3 listen count forces that upon us. Listening to a song 3 times in a music store is enough to evaluate it, but that just doesn't fit the casual listening environment of a portable player.
So of course nobody really cares about this squirt feature.
How much money do you realistically get for your CDs? How many CDs have you really sold? How much effort are you willing to put into it?
Used music stores buy used CDs at cheap as all heck prices ($2 each last one I went to).
I haven't sold any CDs I didn't like, it's just not worth it.