Right now one of the easier fields to break into with only a Bachelors degree is bioinformatics and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA is always looking for programmers to come work for them in the various cancer research groups. As the others have already pointed out though, in research there is a ceiling in place if you don't have a Ph.D and realistically a research-based (i.e. thesis) Master's degree is going to be needed if you actually want to have career progression somewhere without having the Ph.D since there are enough people with them being graduated these days.
That doesn't make it right, nor does it justify a furtherance of those policies. And you're making a false equivocation -- an apples to oranges comparison. There's quite a bit of difference between human experimentation and entertainment. If you can't see that, you should really have your vision checked out. But thank you for playing the Let's Godwin This Because I Don't Want To Deal With the Real Issue game!
Binestar was on topic in brining up the Dachau experiments so Godwin's Law doesn't really apply here since the comparison wasn't inapproprate. I supose that Unit 731 could have been used as well, but the usefulness of their research wasn't quite as extensive as what was being done in Germany at the same time. If we wanted to look at something "closer to home" you could use the Tuskegee syphilis experiments but again, the research was not nearly as useful and thus the controversy was colored in a different light. If you ever take a course in bioethics this topic gets discussed at length and the use of the Dachau experiments was the canonical point of discussion.
Bullshit. They knew this deadline was coming since 2010, they had plenty of time to implement the required software and chose to delay. They should all be hit with the full force of penalties under the law. I don't get excused if I'm too lazy to obey the law, why should they?
When have you ever heard of a major government software project being delivered on time? If anything, we should be shocked and impressed they are only one year behind schedule.
Serious question, but are you sure you could even catch a "backdoor" if there was a serious attempt to introduce one into the code? Ignoring the obvious fact that nobody is going to have something like,
// Backdoor begins here.
But if something were to be introduced that allows for keys to be generated in a predicable manner or that allows for something like the biclique attack to eliminate more bits off the key space and bring the time down to "manageable" (for a nation-state). History has shown us that the NSA is usually a couple years ahead of the game when it comes to cryptography and it would be naive to think they aren't looking for ways to decrypt things so are you really sure that if they some advanced maths and knew what to introduce that the code wouldn't pass the sniff test?
Granted this question might also depend upon the type of code they are submitting, if it's outside of the core cryptographic algorithms then it is unlikely to be a potential attack vector and it should be fairly obvious if it was doing something suspicions.
You are not paid by your employer, that's an economic fallacy. You, as an employee, add some amount of value to the goods and services provided by the company, and *that* is where your pay comes from.
I don't see how that is an economic fallacy. The employment contract I have says that the company will pay me $DOLLAR_AMOUNT on twice monthly basis and in exchange I offer my time and knowledge to them a JOB_TITLE. There nothing in the contract that says that my pay is contingent upon the company selling product or being profitable. In fact most start-up companies gamble that the employees they hire will ultimately allow them to be profitable which breaks the equation you have.
Also, there are a lot of jobs at a company that do not directly contribute to the profitability of the company via the goods and services offered but in fact are part of the sunk cost of doing business. For example, accountants generally don't generate goods or services that generate profits for the company, but ultimately, you are going to be a tough spot if you try to run a company without accountants managing your books.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Those two always bother me though because when it comes to software development it always seems like there is an exception to every rule. Something like Ukkonen's algorithm is both hard to explain and a good idea and that's just the first one to come to mind.
They effectively do. And by "high school level", I don't mean "I just barely passed the required courses", I mean "I did well enough to get into a science degree in college".
Like I said, most high schools do offer college prep courses, but there is no universal "track" that you can take through high school. There are just too many school districts and educational requirements that vary on a state-by-state basis to really make any sweeping declarations about them.
Anthropology is a very mixed bag, like most humanities.
Except that because of it being a mixed bag it's not really a considered part of the humanities. The NSF considers it to be a STEM field. However, it is a broad enough field that it effectively kind of straddles the line between humanities and STEM with different disciplines being more on one side or the other.
Most science departments have given up on the humanities to teach anything useful. They teach their own writing classes, their own logical reasoning, and their own rhetoric (scientific talks).
Do you have actual evidence to support that claim? Logical reasoning excluded since it can be tough to decide where it belongs, it's news to me that "most" of the science departments are teaching their own writing and rhetoric classes. For one thing, I don't see that succeeding given how university inter-departmental politics work and I'm even more skeptical that most STEM departments would even be that effective at teaching writing and rhetoric. I can see workshops on writing being done (been to some myself) and likewise for scientific talks, but for a STEM department to attempt to teach general writing and rhetoric would be doing a disservice to its student. Don't forget, rhetoric is not the same as giving a scientific talk and its a field onto itself for a reason.
What's reasonable is that they should be roughly one educational level ahead in their chosen field compared to another field. So, if you're an anthropology college grad, you should know as much science and math as a good high school science and math major. If you're a history Ph.D., you should have a good college level understanding of at least one scientific field. Etc. If you don't, don't call yourself an educated person.
I'm not sure that really makes much sense though since you pretty much just said that someone with a Bachelors degree in a STEM field only needs about as much of a background in the humanities as a high school graduate. Also, most high schools (in the United States at least) don't have different tracks for STEM vs. non. At best you have some college prep classes of which the humanities are usually the more rigorous classes.
Also, I think you might have missed one of the points I made earlier. Most people with degrees in the humanities, especially if they are cross disciplinary, already likely have an extensive STEM background since it is hard to be good at them without some sort of hard science or math background. Anthropology is actually a lousy example of someone that would need additional STEM education since it effectively is a STEM education.
The fact that a humanities degree can be a catch basin for people that didn't really want to go to college in the first place or feel that you have to have a college degree to get a head doesn't really help, but the fact of the matter is that more often than not people with a STEM degree could do well with some more humanities (espically some writing classes, everyone needs more of those it seems like) than they generally care to admit.
Personally I can think of a lot of reasons for a physics major to study some history (i.e. "Don't do what that guy did.") but that's quibbling a bit.
However, the point that I was trying to get across is that advanced knowledge of calculus and some of the other examples that you gave really isn't meaning for to the vast majority of people and even within the STEM fields people are resistant such studies. As such, the âoereasonable understanding ofâ still needs to be defined. Saying that they need to have an understanding is all well and good, but without defining the parameters of what a resonable understanding would be, it's not very useful to say that.
Calculus is required as a foundation to understand the world around you, and that's why it should be required.
This might be true, but in all fairness and practicality, do you really think that three years worth of college level calculus are needed by everyone? The more advanced you get with mathematics the less likely you are going to need to use it on a daily basis unless you are doing something that requires the maths already. Also, most people are going to "plug and chug" which makes deep intimate knowledge of a calculus something that they forget about as soon as the final exam is collected.
... without demonstrating a reasonable understanding of statistics, calculus, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
Can you define what you mean by a reasonable understanding of those? For the most part I can't think of any reason for a English major to really need any of the advanced math and ideally high school level physics and chemistry should be enough for them as well.
I can see a good historian or anthropologist seeking out a combination of those of statistics, calculus, physics, and chemistry on the basis of what they are interested in and a fairly high level survey course would be of use to them. You may or may not be surprised how some historical mysteries have been "solved" in part due to the application of physics or chemistry to explain why something happened the way it did.
Also, I tend to feel that the "Everyone needs to know computer science!" tends to be played up way to much these days or that the people trying to make the argument are using the wrong terms. The vast majority of people do not need to know how to write a proof using a finite-state machine (computer science) even though knowing how to write a basic automation script (basic programming) might be useful for most people.
Except since we don't live on other planets you only have a sample size of one which is what the grandparent was implying. In other-words, the planet that humans live on has a moon that is capable of eclipsing the sun - crazy coincidence, planetary evolutionary or design feature?
Maybe you are very mature, but let's face it, most gamers do act like 13 year old boys.
Maybe the 13 year old boys are acting like 13 year old boys, but that just means they are acting their age. But for the rest of the people out there that play video games I doubt that statement is really that valid any more. Don't forget that the Atari 2600 came out in 1977 and that means that even if you were born the same year it came out, you would be roughly 36 years old. Those that grew up playing that console are likely in their mid-40's at this point!
I think the problem is that we really need a better definition of what a "gamer" is anyway. Sure there might be a limited market of hard core players, but the even the ESA says that the average age of players these days is 35 years old.
Lets get past this whole idea of "gamers acting like 13 year old boys" and admit the fact that the vast majority of players are in fact adults and would like to be treated as such, thank you very much.
Is 'alcoholism' classified as mental or physical these days?
It's been awhile since I last read about the classification so take this with a grain of salt, but I think it's technically considered to be both. Physical in part because you can develop of a physical dependency that requires detox and mental because you develop a habitual way of drinking and associate a drink with given situations.
But those are the exceptions. RPGs tend to do far better than other genres, most other games will lose value even if unopened.
Indeed, I've noticed that trend with RPGs as well and platformers tend to do fairly well as well with racing games and FPS games seemly doing the worst. Rare SHMUPS seem to do very well but I'm willing to bet that is more to do with low production than anything else.
Awhile back I started tracking the value of my collection (mostly RPGs) and other than a couple of stand outs (e.g. Valkyrie Profile, Persona: Revelations Series, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, etc.) it seems like unless you are getting the games for cheaper than their original retail prices you really aren't going to be making that much money on the used market I suppose you are right about people buying the old classes to replay or play with their children though, very few of the obscure games seem to be that valuable even though they are rarer than say Final Fantasy VII which seems to enjoy fairly stable prices.
You can build a perfectly suitable "one room shack" by slapping some canvas & boards as temporary walls around the first story of a steel-beam skyscraper. Sure, it'll be one of the most over-engineered one room shacks in history, but that shack is architected for future expansion, which is why those giant steel beams are being used as support members, rather than scrap 2-by-4's.
If you find that you've reached the 20th floor only to realize that all your steel beams are only able to carry 20% of their expected load, then that is a failure of your architects, who failed to provide a design for a building which will be 100 stories tall, but which must get built just a couple stories at a time.
I think what the grandparent was trying to say is that a lot of Agile projects tail to give people proper time to actually do some initial architecture of the project before people jump into the sprints. Realistically, you need to combine waterfall with Agile methodologies since large projects need to have a solid foundation to work off of that might take a couple months to put in place.
To go back to the building analogy, if you are building a skyscraper you are digging a basement and putting footings and everything else in before you even build the first floor.
Depending upon what type of software you are writing, if you aren't doing some fairly detailed requirements analysis then you are setting yourself up for failure. Case and point, medical devices and financial systems. In both cases you can't just go in there and change things on a whim as there is paperwork that is involved with documenting why you are even making the change in the first place.
It sounds to me like the direction they are taking the project (waterfall model for the back-end and Agile for the front-end) is likely how they should have approached things in the beginning. User interfaces need a lot of iterations to get "right" but for the back-end code, as system like this likely already has a body of knowledge to draw on for what needs to be done so Agile wouldn't necessarily gain you anything.
Except the D-Wave is at least an actual product that you can purchase and use - efficiency versus a classical computer or any lack there of aside they at least have something and are trying to open about it.
My Steorn perpetual motion machine on the other hand tells me that the E-Cat is moot.
Why doens't it compute? If someone delivers a perfect specification you should be able to deliver software that meets it without any bugs and any flaws would rightly be a bug in the spec as opposed to the software itself. The problem is that most specs don't take into account edge cases or even worse they want you to interface with $DEVICE_OR_SOFTWARE which introduces a giant hole for the bugs to com in through.
I think this is a typical case where implementing Agile can lead to much better project management.
Sure that might be a good point, but how do you write up the contract for a situation like that? Unless there is an agreed upon endpoint for the project the customer can keep iterating indefinitely without paying anything additional. Going into the contract you need to know what the final product is so you can estimate your time and come up with a bid and you also need to know what the final product should look like so you know when the project is complete.
Once you add the need to stay connected, you have to control copying (Otherwise people could just burn DVDs or Torrent the game and apply a patch to unlock DLC content). You have to enforce updates (so everyone is on the same page with patches and content updates). You have to protect the console, otherwise why would a company like EA spend bazillions creating the best games for a platform that doesn't stop hacking or copying?
For games that are inherently multilayer that's all well and good but they already solved for that problem years ago with the install keys. Each game gets a unique key and you keep a database of the ones that have been issued already. If an unknown key shows up you ban it and if the same key connects from two different IP addresses you ban it as well. Diablo II and Starcraft used that system for years without much problem.
Also, the number of people that are running around and pirating the AAA games likely isn't enough to for amount of hassle that your customers are going through to just play a game. If I spend $60 for a game I should be able to just sit down, install it, and start playing with a minimal of fuss. If it's a single player game I should be able to pull out a laptop on an airplane and play the game. If the game is muli-player I either know what I'm getting into ahead of time when I buy the game or I just don't buy it.
First, one of the prized features of the Xbox platform is the Xbox Live services. You know, those services that match you up in games with friends and offers social and multimedia feature. YOU KNOW, the service that requires an internet connection.
This might be a fair point if we had a better idea of how many Xbox 360 owners never connect to the internet or are connected but only have the Silver accounts. There are a lot of people out there that only play single player games which means that most of the features that a Gold subscription account offers are completely useless.
Second, pick up ANY smartphone or tablet and realize these devices are constantly online. You may not need to be online to play, but the online services are there in the background making sure your Tweets and Facebook followers are aware of what you are up to and you are kept informed of the world.
True in the case of the smart phone but not so much in the case of the tablet even though the use case might be much smaller for those tablets that aren't online. However, not everyone has Twitter or Facebook running in the background all of the time or even wants people to know what they are doing. A lot of people don't care what their friends "Angry Birds" score is nor do they want to go out there and tell people about theirs. Also, there is a big jump from a smart phone or tablet that is online to a camera and microphone in your living room that is always online. There are major security implications that bear consideration. You can't put an attractive target like that in someones living room without hackers and other such folks wanting to crack it.
I know that in that RARE circumstance where there might be an internet outage or you take your Xbox One to the cottage and want to play some games on a rainy day might be a bummer if the game won't let you on because it can't phone home, but I doubt that will be an issue for most people out there.
Rare for some people, not so rare for others. But what's the point in buying an entertainment device if it can't entertain you when you actually want to be entertained. This is the whole reason that DVRs and time shifting shows became popular - the consumer of the entertainment wants to dictate when, where, and how they are entertained. The device itself should not be the one driving that decision.
The problem is that when I pull out my old PSOne I can put the disk in and sit down and play a game without any issues where as with the newer consoles if you have online activation the life cycle of that game is tired to the activation servers which might be turned off a year after the game came out. Since a lot of people that grew up with the NES, SNES, and similar systems are now having children of their own, they can sit down with their kids and introduce them to a game that they enjoyed as a child. Will the children that grew up with the Xbox One be able to do the same thing? For that matter, a year or two after you played a game would you even still be able to play it if you wanted to?
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Right now one of the easier fields to break into with only a Bachelors degree is bioinformatics and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA is always looking for programmers to come work for them in the various cancer research groups. As the others have already pointed out though, in research there is a ceiling in place if you don't have a Ph.D and realistically a research-based (i.e. thesis) Master's degree is going to be needed if you actually want to have career progression somewhere without having the Ph.D since there are enough people with them being graduated these days.
That doesn't make it right, nor does it justify a furtherance of those policies. And you're making a false equivocation -- an apples to oranges comparison. There's quite a bit of difference between human experimentation and entertainment. If you can't see that, you should really have your vision checked out. But thank you for playing the Let's Godwin This Because I Don't Want To Deal With the Real Issue game!
Binestar was on topic in brining up the Dachau experiments so Godwin's Law doesn't really apply here since the comparison wasn't inapproprate. I supose that Unit 731 could have been used as well, but the usefulness of their research wasn't quite as extensive as what was being done in Germany at the same time. If we wanted to look at something "closer to home" you could use the Tuskegee syphilis experiments but again, the research was not nearly as useful and thus the controversy was colored in a different light. If you ever take a course in bioethics this topic gets discussed at length and the use of the Dachau experiments was the canonical point of discussion.
Bullshit. They knew this deadline was coming since 2010, they had plenty of time to implement the required software and chose to delay. They should all be hit with the full force of penalties under the law. I don't get excused if I'm too lazy to obey the law, why should they?
When have you ever heard of a major government software project being delivered on time? If anything, we should be shocked and impressed they are only one year behind schedule.
Serious question, but are you sure you could even catch a "backdoor" if there was a serious attempt to introduce one into the code? Ignoring the obvious fact that nobody is going to have something like,
// Backdoor begins here.
But if something were to be introduced that allows for keys to be generated in a predicable manner or that allows for something like the biclique attack to eliminate more bits off the key space and bring the time down to "manageable" (for a nation-state). History has shown us that the NSA is usually a couple years ahead of the game when it comes to cryptography and it would be naive to think they aren't looking for ways to decrypt things so are you really sure that if they some advanced maths and knew what to introduce that the code wouldn't pass the sniff test?
Granted this question might also depend upon the type of code they are submitting, if it's outside of the core cryptographic algorithms then it is unlikely to be a potential attack vector and it should be fairly obvious if it was doing something suspicions.
You are not paid by your employer, that's an economic fallacy. You, as an employee, add some amount of value to the goods and services provided by the company, and *that* is where your pay comes from.
I don't see how that is an economic fallacy. The employment contract I have says that the company will pay me $DOLLAR_AMOUNT on twice monthly basis and in exchange I offer my time and knowledge to them a JOB_TITLE. There nothing in the contract that says that my pay is contingent upon the company selling product or being profitable. In fact most start-up companies gamble that the employees they hire will ultimately allow them to be profitable which breaks the equation you have.
Also, there are a lot of jobs at a company that do not directly contribute to the profitability of the company via the goods and services offered but in fact are part of the sunk cost of doing business. For example, accountants generally don't generate goods or services that generate profits for the company, but ultimately, you are going to be a tough spot if you try to run a company without accountants managing your books.
This guy sounds like he could benefit from reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin.
I wouldn't be supprised if "Clean Code" is what prompted the article in the first place.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Those two always bother me though because when it comes to software development it always seems like there is an exception to every rule. Something like Ukkonen's algorithm is both hard to explain and a good idea and that's just the first one to come to mind.
They effectively do. And by "high school level", I don't mean "I just barely passed the required courses", I mean "I did well enough to get into a science degree in college".
Like I said, most high schools do offer college prep courses, but there is no universal "track" that you can take through high school. There are just too many school districts and educational requirements that vary on a state-by-state basis to really make any sweeping declarations about them.
Anthropology is a very mixed bag, like most humanities.
Except that because of it being a mixed bag it's not really a considered part of the humanities. The NSF considers it to be a STEM field. However, it is a broad enough field that it effectively kind of straddles the line between humanities and STEM with different disciplines being more on one side or the other.
Most science departments have given up on the humanities to teach anything useful. They teach their own writing classes, their own logical reasoning, and their own rhetoric (scientific talks).
Do you have actual evidence to support that claim? Logical reasoning excluded since it can be tough to decide where it belongs, it's news to me that "most" of the science departments are teaching their own writing and rhetoric classes. For one thing, I don't see that succeeding given how university inter-departmental politics work and I'm even more skeptical that most STEM departments would even be that effective at teaching writing and rhetoric. I can see workshops on writing being done (been to some myself) and likewise for scientific talks, but for a STEM department to attempt to teach general writing and rhetoric would be doing a disservice to its student. Don't forget, rhetoric is not the same as giving a scientific talk and its a field onto itself for a reason.
What's reasonable is that they should be roughly one educational level ahead in their chosen field compared to another field. So, if you're an anthropology college grad, you should know as much science and math as a good high school science and math major. If you're a history Ph.D., you should have a good college level understanding of at least one scientific field. Etc. If you don't, don't call yourself an educated person.
I'm not sure that really makes much sense though since you pretty much just said that someone with a Bachelors degree in a STEM field only needs about as much of a background in the humanities as a high school graduate. Also, most high schools (in the United States at least) don't have different tracks for STEM vs. non. At best you have some college prep classes of which the humanities are usually the more rigorous classes.
Also, I think you might have missed one of the points I made earlier. Most people with degrees in the humanities, especially if they are cross disciplinary, already likely have an extensive STEM background since it is hard to be good at them without some sort of hard science or math background. Anthropology is actually a lousy example of someone that would need additional STEM education since it effectively is a STEM education.
The fact that a humanities degree can be a catch basin for people that didn't really want to go to college in the first place or feel that you have to have a college degree to get a head doesn't really help, but the fact of the matter is that more often than not people with a STEM degree could do well with some more humanities (espically some writing classes, everyone needs more of those it seems like) than they generally care to admit.
Personally I can think of a lot of reasons for a physics major to study some history (i.e. "Don't do what that guy did.") but that's quibbling a bit.
However, the point that I was trying to get across is that advanced knowledge of calculus and some of the other examples that you gave really isn't meaning for to the vast majority of people and even within the STEM fields people are resistant such studies. As such, the âoereasonable understanding ofâ still needs to be defined. Saying that they need to have an understanding is all well and good, but without defining the parameters of what a resonable understanding would be, it's not very useful to say that.
Calculus is required as a foundation to understand the world around you, and that's why it should be required.
This might be true, but in all fairness and practicality, do you really think that three years worth of college level calculus are needed by everyone? The more advanced you get with mathematics the less likely you are going to need to use it on a daily basis unless you are doing something that requires the maths already. Also, most people are going to "plug and chug" which makes deep intimate knowledge of a calculus something that they forget about as soon as the final exam is collected.
... without demonstrating a reasonable understanding of statistics, calculus, physics, chemistry, and computer science.
Can you define what you mean by a reasonable understanding of those? For the most part I can't think of any reason for a English major to really need any of the advanced math and ideally high school level physics and chemistry should be enough for them as well.
I can see a good historian or anthropologist seeking out a combination of those of statistics, calculus, physics, and chemistry on the basis of what they are interested in and a fairly high level survey course would be of use to them. You may or may not be surprised how some historical mysteries have been "solved" in part due to the application of physics or chemistry to explain why something happened the way it did.
Also, I tend to feel that the "Everyone needs to know computer science!" tends to be played up way to much these days or that the people trying to make the argument are using the wrong terms. The vast majority of people do not need to know how to write a proof using a finite-state machine (computer science) even though knowing how to write a basic automation script (basic programming) might be useful for most people.
Except since we don't live on other planets you only have a sample size of one which is what the grandparent was implying. In other-words, the planet that humans live on has a moon that is capable of eclipsing the sun - crazy coincidence, planetary evolutionary or design feature?
Maybe you are very mature, but let's face it, most gamers do act like 13 year old boys.
Maybe the 13 year old boys are acting like 13 year old boys, but that just means they are acting their age. But for the rest of the people out there that play video games I doubt that statement is really that valid any more. Don't forget that the Atari 2600 came out in 1977 and that means that even if you were born the same year it came out, you would be roughly 36 years old. Those that grew up playing that console are likely in their mid-40's at this point!
I think the problem is that we really need a better definition of what a "gamer" is anyway. Sure there might be a limited market of hard core players, but the even the ESA says that the average age of players these days is 35 years old.
Lets get past this whole idea of "gamers acting like 13 year old boys" and admit the fact that the vast majority of players are in fact adults and would like to be treated as such, thank you very much.
Is 'alcoholism' classified as mental or physical these days?
It's been awhile since I last read about the classification so take this with a grain of salt, but I think it's technically considered to be both. Physical in part because you can develop of a physical dependency that requires detox and mental because you develop a habitual way of drinking and associate a drink with given situations.
But those are the exceptions. RPGs tend to do far better than other genres, most other games will lose value even if unopened.
Indeed, I've noticed that trend with RPGs as well and platformers tend to do fairly well as well with racing games and FPS games seemly doing the worst. Rare SHMUPS seem to do very well but I'm willing to bet that is more to do with low production than anything else.
Awhile back I started tracking the value of my collection (mostly RPGs) and other than a couple of stand outs (e.g. Valkyrie Profile, Persona: Revelations Series, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, etc.) it seems like unless you are getting the games for cheaper than their original retail prices you really aren't going to be making that much money on the used market I suppose you are right about people buying the old classes to replay or play with their children though, very few of the obscure games seem to be that valuable even though they are rarer than say Final Fantasy VII which seems to enjoy fairly stable prices.
But those are the exceptions. RPGs tend to do far better than other genres, most other games will lose value even if unopened.
Indeed, I've noticed that trend with RPGs as well and platformers tend to do the
You can build a perfectly suitable "one room shack" by slapping some canvas & boards as temporary walls around the first story of a steel-beam skyscraper. Sure, it'll be one of the most over-engineered one room shacks in history, but that shack is architected for future expansion, which is why those giant steel beams are being used as support members, rather than scrap 2-by-4's.
If you find that you've reached the 20th floor only to realize that all your steel beams are only able to carry 20% of their expected load, then that is a failure of your architects, who failed to provide a design for a building which will be 100 stories tall, but which must get built just a couple stories at a time.
I think what the grandparent was trying to say is that a lot of Agile projects tail to give people proper time to actually do some initial architecture of the project before people jump into the sprints. Realistically, you need to combine waterfall with Agile methodologies since large projects need to have a solid foundation to work off of that might take a couple months to put in place.
To go back to the building analogy, if you are building a skyscraper you are digging a basement and putting footings and everything else in before you even build the first floor.
Depending upon what type of software you are writing, if you aren't doing some fairly detailed requirements analysis then you are setting yourself up for failure. Case and point, medical devices and financial systems. In both cases you can't just go in there and change things on a whim as there is paperwork that is involved with documenting why you are even making the change in the first place.
It sounds to me like the direction they are taking the project (waterfall model for the back-end and Agile for the front-end) is likely how they should have approached things in the beginning. User interfaces need a lot of iterations to get "right" but for the back-end code, as system like this likely already has a body of knowledge to draw on for what needs to be done so Agile wouldn't necessarily gain you anything.
Except the D-Wave is at least an actual product that you can purchase and use - efficiency versus a classical computer or any lack there of aside they at least have something and are trying to open about it.
My Steorn perpetual motion machine on the other hand tells me that the E-Cat is moot.
does not compute.
Why doens't it compute? If someone delivers a perfect specification you should be able to deliver software that meets it without any bugs and any flaws would rightly be a bug in the spec as opposed to the software itself. The problem is that most specs don't take into account edge cases or even worse they want you to interface with $DEVICE_OR_SOFTWARE which introduces a giant hole for the bugs to com in through.
I think this is a typical case where implementing Agile can lead to much better project management.
Sure that might be a good point, but how do you write up the contract for a situation like that? Unless there is an agreed upon endpoint for the project the customer can keep iterating indefinitely without paying anything additional. Going into the contract you need to know what the final product is so you can estimate your time and come up with a bid and you also need to know what the final product should look like so you know when the project is complete.
Once you add the need to stay connected, you have to control copying (Otherwise people could just burn DVDs or Torrent the game and apply a patch to unlock DLC content). You have to enforce updates (so everyone is on the same page with patches and content updates). You have to protect the console, otherwise why would a company like EA spend bazillions creating the best games for a platform that doesn't stop hacking or copying?
For games that are inherently multilayer that's all well and good but they already solved for that problem years ago with the install keys. Each game gets a unique key and you keep a database of the ones that have been issued already. If an unknown key shows up you ban it and if the same key connects from two different IP addresses you ban it as well. Diablo II and Starcraft used that system for years without much problem.
Also, the number of people that are running around and pirating the AAA games likely isn't enough to for amount of hassle that your customers are going through to just play a game. If I spend $60 for a game I should be able to just sit down, install it, and start playing with a minimal of fuss. If it's a single player game I should be able to pull out a laptop on an airplane and play the game. If the game is muli-player I either know what I'm getting into ahead of time when I buy the game or I just don't buy it.
First, one of the prized features of the Xbox platform is the Xbox Live services. You know, those services that match you up in games with friends and offers social and multimedia feature. YOU KNOW, the service that requires an internet connection.
This might be a fair point if we had a better idea of how many Xbox 360 owners never connect to the internet or are connected but only have the Silver accounts. There are a lot of people out there that only play single player games which means that most of the features that a Gold subscription account offers are completely useless.
Second, pick up ANY smartphone or tablet and realize these devices are constantly online. You may not need to be online to play, but the online services are there in the background making sure your Tweets and Facebook followers are aware of what you are up to and you are kept informed of the world.
True in the case of the smart phone but not so much in the case of the tablet even though the use case might be much smaller for those tablets that aren't online. However, not everyone has Twitter or Facebook running in the background all of the time or even wants people to know what they are doing. A lot of people don't care what their friends "Angry Birds" score is nor do they want to go out there and tell people about theirs. Also, there is a big jump from a smart phone or tablet that is online to a camera and microphone in your living room that is always online. There are major security implications that bear consideration. You can't put an attractive target like that in someones living room without hackers and other such folks wanting to crack it.
I know that in that RARE circumstance where there might be an internet outage or you take your Xbox One to the cottage and want to play some games on a rainy day might be a bummer if the game won't let you on because it can't phone home, but I doubt that will be an issue for most people out there.
Rare for some people, not so rare for others. But what's the point in buying an entertainment device if it can't entertain you when you actually want to be entertained. This is the whole reason that DVRs and time shifting shows became popular - the consumer of the entertainment wants to dictate when, where, and how they are entertained. The device itself should not be the one driving that decision.
The problem is that when I pull out my old PSOne I can put the disk in and sit down and play a game without any issues where as with the newer consoles if you have online activation the life cycle of that game is tired to the activation servers which might be turned off a year after the game came out. Since a lot of people that grew up with the NES, SNES, and similar systems are now having children of their own, they can sit down with their kids and introduce them to a game that they enjoyed as a child. Will the children that grew up with the Xbox One be able to do the same thing? For that matter, a year or two after you played a game would you even still be able to play it if you wanted to?