Or a timeline that wasn't "tight"? I didn't intend to blame PM's with my original post... it's the whole idiot beauracracy that's to blame. I know there are complete moron PM's out there who attended a two-week PM-ing seminar who think that's enough to qualify them, and a lot of great ones who understand that there's inherent complexity going on, but eventually you seem to bump into one of the "top decision makers" who ignores what we've ALL been saying for the past, oh, thirty years or so. Makes you wonder how these people become top decision makers...
What drives me crazy is the fact the EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAS EVER WRITTEN A PROGRAM SAYS THE SAME THING ABOUT PROJECT PLANNING (all of which is covered in this book), yet the people who schedule, manage, and plan software projects (at least the ones who've never written a program) STILL think we're all lying to them and that if they just push hard enough, offshore enough, get people to work enough unpaid overtime, etc. etc. etc. they'll reach that mythical man-month.
Spoken like somebody who's never written a program. The 1000 blue collar slobs who "actually build the thing" are the compiler, the linker, potentially code generators, forward engineering UML tools, etc. If some programming-related task doesn't require any engineering, it's been automated.
Don't worry, though - you're in good company. Everybody who knows how it's done it actually out there doing it. All the incompetents get promoted out of harms way. (Mostly out of harms way... as long as they're not allowed to participate in hiring decisions as you seem to imply you are).
I bet that if, instead of Janet Jackson, they had a Christian evangelist show up and do a 15-minute sermon, that the same people who are now crying "censorship" would thing that this was an inappropriate thing and start complaining
Yep, that's right, they would. I would. You would. I could go on all day about the things they could have shown during the superbowl (football being one of them) that would irritate the shit out of me. They could have had the ensemble from queer eye for the straight guy come out and give somebody a gay makeover. They could have brought out the Dixie Chicks. They could have had Robin Williams appear.
So, what's the difference? The difference is, none of those things is against the law. I'm a whole lot more offended by the "queer eye" cast than I am by Janet's boobie... but nobody would have fined anybody for that.
Starting to get it yet? Who the hell are you to say the you have the "right" to live in a boobie-free world if I don't have the "right" to live in a Christian-evangelist, homosexual makeover, country-music, Robin Williams, football-free world? I'm annoyed by all of these things, and I might even go so far as to say I don't want my kids to be exposed to them. Why does your "right" not to see boobies trump my "rights" to have the entire fucking world cater to me?
Doesn't the quote "the U.S. government is one of the largest patent holders in the world, owning the rights to 20-30,000 patents" (from Ken Brown's reply) pretty much underscore the commitment to top-notch research at the Alexis de Toqueville institute?
"Hey, Bob! How many patents do you think the US government holds? 20,000 or so?"
not guaranteed unless all possible code paths are taken during development
Exactly - as I said, if the paradigm is followed correctly (maybe "completely" would have been a better choice of word?), that would be the case. It's just that it's not not feasible to do so.
"Glassnose Syndrome"? Is this your term, or is this something that's been published/studied/researched elsewhere?
I've always had sort of an intuitive notion, partly based on experience and observation, that being too IDE-centric produces "bad code" - code that resists change, can't be reused outside the context in which it was written, relies on everything else being in a specific (undocumented) state at a specific time, etc... but this is hard to get across to other people - especially project managers (who can't understand why any programming takes longer than a couple of hours - "all you're doing is typing, after all! I thought we hired you because you knew this language.") or beginners (who already know everything, of course - "I used this IDE in college, and all of the 'Hello World' assignments I got from my professor worked great! You old-timers need to get with the 21st century.").
Can you expand a bit more on "glassnose syndrome"? Where it gets its name, what the symptoms are, what the effects are, etc?
I have to agree... this sounds as revolutionary as "Junit". Yes, if you follow the paradigm correctly, you'll produce 100% bug-free code, but it would take so long to follow the paradigm correctly, you'd never get anything done. Not to say that it doesn't look like it might be useful, but I think they're being disingenuous about the amount of work that's going to go into using it.
Nobody would look at at architects model of a bridge and say "that looks good, go toss it in the river and we'll use it", but we seem to do it all the time in software
Well, the obvious moral is, build little tiny prototypes. Put them in a Barbie house to make them look like they're being used.
Damn, dude, you got me all excited - you didn't mention that it's open source, but for windows only. I'm still searching high and wide for an unrar program (free or not) that I can actually run on my Debian distro (that doesn't require a very very Redhat-specific version of libstdc++ as the download on the winrar site does).
Of course, 7-zip is open source (but for windows)... maybe I'll actually have to break down and figure out the RAR protocol from the sources and write my own Linux port. Unless somebody knows something I don't know
You know, I had started to wonder if I was the only one... I can't figure out exactly what it is, either, but I've always been the top tech guy at every job I've ever had. I can always point to at least a half dozen people who work longer hours, are easier to get along with, stayed at their previous jobs longer, had been at this job longer, knew x technology or y platform better than I did, but for some reason I've been offered a job at almost every interview I've ever gone on (I've turned down many more employers than have turned me down), have never been out of work or fired, always been promoted faster than the people around me, always been asked for advice on the best direction to go when solving problems (even on stuff I don't know anything about, which can be disconcerting), always had my opinion respected, always given my choice of what work I do and what work I don't feel like doing... my greatest fear is that I've just been fooling everybody this whole time and they're going to catch on someday.
I do think I'm a damned hard worker, like you said - maybe that really is the key? Damn, it would be a shame if I wasted all those years of cynisicm...
Or "perhaps"... have you ever considered the possibility that the explanation is over your head? Perhaps... that you might need to spend four years studying the theory in order to "get" the explanation? What, exactly, do you think we were doing for the four years we spent getting our degrees? Do you think you're so infinitely smarter than we are that you can grasp in a fifteen-minute overview concepts that we spent four years just learning the basics of? And the funny thing is... if you respond to this, you'll probably respond in indignation, with no clue as to why I find this attitude so insulting. (Don't worry, though - the "sum up the knowledge you've spent your life attaining in a 30-minute overview" attitude is common - very prevalent among management).
Usually, the reason the book or the teacher told them to do it that way has to do with increased flexibility, better resistance to change, better memory management, faster processing, etc. These are things that you don't learn by trial and error alone. What's that you say? Memory management and speed optimization is a waste of time? Processors are so fast that it's not worth saving a couple thousand clock cycles? Memory is so cheap you can just use it as you need it? Portability is for canoes? Yeah, I've probably spent many, many years of my life cleaning up the mess you left behind doing things "expediently".
I guess I should be fortunate, though - with enough people running around doing things wrong because it "looks the same to me, and I should know, since I've been looking at it for a while now" leaves plenty of job security for those of us who understand the theory and can apply it.
But think about this... they've had "smokers are jokers" and "dopers are dopes" and "users are losers" seminars since I was a little kid (which was a long time ago... I'm typing this with one hand and holding my own son with the other). If called on, you dutifully toed the party line and said "smokers are jokers!" (or whatever the hell stupid marketing slogan they had come up with), or be sent to the principal's office.
Net effect? A nation of kids who resented the brainwashing so much that they picked up cigarettes, pot, drugs, etc. that they might not have touched if the school administration hadn't made not smoking/doping/using look so lame.
Reminds me of the South Park episode where the anti-smoking campaign came to South Park and a group of extremely gay presenters ended the presentation with "and if you don't smoke, you'll end up just like us!". In the next scene, the boys were outside, smoking like their lives depended on it.
A lot of this comes from ridiculous presumptions about how long this stuff takes (a version of this is my sig, in fact). Yes, I was hired to know how computers work so that the boss and the users wouldn't have to - but that doesn't excuse absolute cluelessness, either. The managers seem to be thinking, "Well, shit, I could draw a web page/user interface/human genome project with drawing paper and crayons in like a half hour - and these people have computers to help them, plus training to back that up! If it takes longer than, like, five minutes, they must be ripping me off!"
Of course, nobody ever considers the fact that we all say the same things regarding deadlines... it's sort of like a nation of auto users who say, "Oil has been sitting in the ground for 65 million years - the oil in my car should last at least that long without needing to be changed. The mechanics who say it needs to be changed every 3000 miles are just trying to rip me off!"
This is sort of an Americanism, actually. Most of us, even those who know better, pretend that sleep is a "luxury" and that "real mean" don't really need to sleep. That somehow you're a "better" person if you work non-stop.
They run bits on the news every once in a while about how damaging this really is - sleeping for five hours a night when human beings need 8, skipping meals when humans need to eat, working constantly when humans need to rest...
And this is what the "don't complain about your job because there are children starving in Africa right now" crowd doesn't seem to get. "They" (i.e. non-programmers) hate us. They hate us with a hate that's palpable, and sometimes hangs in the air with a form you can practically reach out and touch.
They hate us because they hate computers. We represent the forward march of technology, which they fear, and they despise us for it. Unfortunately, they also need us - even if you got a non-programming job, eventually somebody would figure out that you knew computers and you'd end up supporting the computer systems (for less money than you would have made if you interviewed as a "computer guy"). And "they" would begin to hate you again.
And it's this hate that's stressful. Yes, I'm sure the stress of wondering whether or not you're going to eat this week is probably greater, but the stress of knowing that absolutely everybody you work with hates your guts, not because of anything you did or failed to do, but becaues of what you've chosen to learn, is a pretty legitimate source of stress too.
P.S. For just the reason you posted, joesoundbyte, I go out to lunch every day, no matter what's going on, so I can get my hour away from the office; I bring a book to read so I've got something to do.
... hacking a CRT monitor. I believe that the safety warning should probably be a bit bolder, especially considering the earlier, prominent advice about static energy and grounding.
I suddenly have this mental image of Wile E. Coyote standing over an open monitor, covered in black soot, smoke swirling off of his head...
I had reams of problems getting my AC'97-compliant (Intel 80210) sound card working with the OSS modules that come bundled in kernel 2.6. However, when I installed ALSA, everything worked like a charm; I think this is, once again, an outside observer identifying a flaw in "Linux" when he really just means an oversight in the standard distros. Once they start bundling ALSA, we'll catch up (to Windows 95, anyway).
I'm still not following how this would stop us. (Us? I mean them - them!) Ok, each phone (computer, DVD player, etc.) has a public key, signed by a private key, so the DRM hardware or software can now verify that the public key is legitimate. But if the file itself is not encrypted, using strong crypto, I can play it on any platform I want. It's trivial to write a software mp3 player that decodes MP3 files and send the proper signals to the audio card (well, ok, maybe not trivial, but people have done it in OSS).
So, assuming that non-DRM hardware still exists (which the law, in the US at least, may outright ban - we've let Ashcroft stay for four years, so we'll pretty much put up with anything), I can play a "DRM protected" file, since the file itself is still just an MP3 file. In other words, there's nothing to unlock.
Now, on the other hand, if the file itself is encrypted, it has to be encrypted for a specific public key (or a specific symmetric key). They're not going to manufacture a special version of every CD in the United States for each computer. So anyway - the OS & the hardware can collude all they want... as long as the contents of the file are unencrypted, it can be played, and if they are encrypted then the original poster is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Or a timeline that wasn't "tight"? I didn't intend to blame PM's with my original post... it's the whole idiot beauracracy that's to blame. I know there are complete moron PM's out there who attended a two-week PM-ing seminar who think that's enough to qualify them, and a lot of great ones who understand that there's inherent complexity going on, but eventually you seem to bump into one of the "top decision makers" who ignores what we've ALL been saying for the past, oh, thirty years or so. Makes you wonder how these people become top decision makers...
What drives me crazy is the fact the EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAS EVER WRITTEN A PROGRAM SAYS THE SAME THING ABOUT PROJECT PLANNING (all of which is covered in this book), yet the people who schedule, manage, and plan software projects (at least the ones who've never written a program) STILL think we're all lying to them and that if they just push hard enough, offshore enough, get people to work enough unpaid overtime, etc. etc. etc. they'll reach that mythical man-month.
Spoken like somebody who's never written a program. The 1000 blue collar slobs who "actually build the thing" are the compiler, the linker, potentially code generators, forward engineering UML tools, etc. If some programming-related task doesn't require any engineering, it's been automated.
Don't worry, though - you're in good company. Everybody who knows how it's done it actually out there doing it. All the incompetents get promoted out of harms way. (Mostly out of harms way... as long as they're not allowed to participate in hiring decisions as you seem to imply you are).
I bet that if, instead of Janet Jackson, they had a Christian evangelist show up and do a 15-minute sermon, that the same people who are now crying "censorship" would thing that this was an inappropriate thing and start complaining
Yep, that's right, they would. I would. You would. I could go on all day about the things they could have shown during the superbowl (football being one of them) that would irritate the shit out of me. They could have had the ensemble from queer eye for the straight guy come out and give somebody a gay makeover. They could have brought out the Dixie Chicks. They could have had Robin Williams appear.
So, what's the difference? The difference is, none of those things is against the law. I'm a whole lot more offended by the "queer eye" cast than I am by Janet's boobie... but nobody would have fined anybody for that.
Starting to get it yet? Who the hell are you to say the you have the "right" to live in a boobie-free world if I don't have the "right" to live in a Christian-evangelist, homosexual makeover, country-music, Robin Williams, football-free world? I'm annoyed by all of these things, and I might even go so far as to say I don't want my kids to be exposed to them. Why does your "right" not to see boobies trump my "rights" to have the entire fucking world cater to me?
Doesn't the quote "the U.S. government is one of the largest patent holders in the world, owning the rights to 20-30,000 patents" (from Ken Brown's reply) pretty much underscore the commitment to top-notch research at the Alexis de Toqueville institute?
"Hey, Bob! How many patents do you think the US government holds? 20,000 or so?"
"Ummm, yeah.. maybe 30,000"
"Ok, yeah, 20 - 30,000. That ought to cover us."
Well, damn - I wish somebody had said something sooner... I just threw out a whole diaper genie worth of potential air conditioning...
Better be, 'cause competition won't be an option anymore.
not guaranteed unless all possible code paths are taken during development
Exactly - as I said, if the paradigm is followed correctly (maybe "completely" would have been a better choice of word?), that would be the case. It's just that it's not not feasible to do so.
"Glassnose Syndrome"? Is this your term, or is this something that's been published/studied/researched elsewhere?
I've always had sort of an intuitive notion, partly based on experience and observation, that being too IDE-centric produces "bad code" - code that resists change, can't be reused outside the context in which it was written, relies on everything else being in a specific (undocumented) state at a specific time, etc... but this is hard to get across to other people - especially project managers (who can't understand why any programming takes longer than a couple of hours - "all you're doing is typing, after all! I thought we hired you because you knew this language.") or beginners (who already know everything, of course - "I used this IDE in college, and all of the 'Hello World' assignments I got from my professor worked great! You old-timers need to get with the 21st century.").
Can you expand a bit more on "glassnose syndrome"? Where it gets its name, what the symptoms are, what the effects are, etc?
I have to agree... this sounds as revolutionary as "Junit". Yes, if you follow the paradigm correctly, you'll produce 100% bug-free code, but it would take so long to follow the paradigm correctly, you'd never get anything done. Not to say that it doesn't look like it might be useful, but I think they're being disingenuous about the amount of work that's going to go into using it.
Well, the obvious moral is, build little tiny prototypes. Put them in a Barbie house to make them look like they're being used.
Damn, dude, you got me all excited - you didn't mention that it's open source, but for windows only. I'm still searching high and wide for an unrar program (free or not) that I can actually run on my Debian distro (that doesn't require a very very Redhat-specific version of libstdc++ as the download on the winrar site does).
Of course, 7-zip is open source (but for windows)... maybe I'll actually have to break down and figure out the RAR protocol from the sources and write my own Linux port. Unless somebody knows something I don't know
Haha, ok, you got me there. But I do think I spent more time studying theory than I did studying phys ed.
You know, I had started to wonder if I was the only one... I can't figure out exactly what it is, either, but I've always been the top tech guy at every job I've ever had. I can always point to at least a half dozen people who work longer hours, are easier to get along with, stayed at their previous jobs longer, had been at this job longer, knew x technology or y platform better than I did, but for some reason I've been offered a job at almost every interview I've ever gone on (I've turned down many more employers than have turned me down), have never been out of work or fired, always been promoted faster than the people around me, always been asked for advice on the best direction to go when solving problems (even on stuff I don't know anything about, which can be disconcerting), always had my opinion respected, always given my choice of what work I do and what work I don't feel like doing... my greatest fear is that I've just been fooling everybody this whole time and they're going to catch on someday.
I do think I'm a damned hard worker, like you said - maybe that really is the key? Damn, it would be a shame if I wasted all those years of cynisicm...
Or "perhaps"... have you ever considered the possibility that the explanation is over your head? Perhaps... that you might need to spend four years studying the theory in order to "get" the explanation? What, exactly, do you think we were doing for the four years we spent getting our degrees? Do you think you're so infinitely smarter than we are that you can grasp in a fifteen-minute overview concepts that we spent four years just learning the basics of? And the funny thing is... if you respond to this, you'll probably respond in indignation, with no clue as to why I find this attitude so insulting. (Don't worry, though - the "sum up the knowledge you've spent your life attaining in a 30-minute overview" attitude is common - very prevalent among management).
Usually, the reason the book or the teacher told them to do it that way has to do with increased flexibility, better resistance to change, better memory management, faster processing, etc. These are things that you don't learn by trial and error alone. What's that you say? Memory management and speed optimization is a waste of time? Processors are so fast that it's not worth saving a couple thousand clock cycles? Memory is so cheap you can just use it as you need it? Portability is for canoes? Yeah, I've probably spent many, many years of my life cleaning up the mess you left behind doing things "expediently".
I guess I should be fortunate, though - with enough people running around doing things wrong because it "looks the same to me, and I should know, since I've been looking at it for a while now" leaves plenty of job security for those of us who understand the theory and can apply it.
But think about this... they've had "smokers are jokers" and "dopers are dopes" and "users are losers" seminars since I was a little kid (which was a long time ago... I'm typing this with one hand and holding my own son with the other). If called on, you dutifully toed the party line and said "smokers are jokers!" (or whatever the hell stupid marketing slogan they had come up with), or be sent to the principal's office.
Net effect? A nation of kids who resented the brainwashing so much that they picked up cigarettes, pot, drugs, etc. that they might not have touched if the school administration hadn't made not smoking/doping/using look so lame.
Reminds me of the South Park episode where the anti-smoking campaign came to South Park and a group of extremely gay presenters ended the presentation with "and if you don't smoke, you'll end up just like us!". In the next scene, the boys were outside, smoking like their lives depended on it.
A lot of this comes from ridiculous presumptions about how long this stuff takes (a version of this is my sig, in fact). Yes, I was hired to know how computers work so that the boss and the users wouldn't have to - but that doesn't excuse absolute cluelessness, either. The managers seem to be thinking, "Well, shit, I could draw a web page/user interface/human genome project with drawing paper and crayons in like a half hour - and these people have computers to help them, plus training to back that up! If it takes longer than, like, five minutes, they must be ripping me off!"
Of course, nobody ever considers the fact that we all say the same things regarding deadlines... it's sort of like a nation of auto users who say, "Oil has been sitting in the ground for 65 million years - the oil in my car should last at least that long without needing to be changed. The mechanics who say it needs to be changed every 3000 miles are just trying to rip me off!"
This is sort of an Americanism, actually. Most of us, even those who know better, pretend that sleep is a "luxury" and that "real mean" don't really need to sleep. That somehow you're a "better" person if you work non-stop.
They run bits on the news every once in a while about how damaging this really is - sleeping for five hours a night when human beings need 8, skipping meals when humans need to eat, working constantly when humans need to rest...
...Spoken like somebody who's never actually worked as a "salaried" programmer...
And this is what the "don't complain about your job because there are children starving in Africa right now" crowd doesn't seem to get. "They" (i.e. non-programmers) hate us. They hate us with a hate that's palpable, and sometimes hangs in the air with a form you can practically reach out and touch.
They hate us because they hate computers. We represent the forward march of technology, which they fear, and they despise us for it. Unfortunately, they also need us - even if you got a non-programming job, eventually somebody would figure out that you knew computers and you'd end up supporting the computer systems (for less money than you would have made if you interviewed as a "computer guy"). And "they" would begin to hate you again.
And it's this hate that's stressful. Yes, I'm sure the stress of wondering whether or not you're going to eat this week is probably greater, but the stress of knowing that absolutely everybody you work with hates your guts, not because of anything you did or failed to do, but becaues of what you've chosen to learn, is a pretty legitimate source of stress too.
P.S. For just the reason you posted, joesoundbyte, I go out to lunch every day, no matter what's going on, so I can get my hour away from the office; I bring a book to read so I've got something to do.
I suddenly have this mental image of Wile E. Coyote standing over an open monitor, covered in black soot, smoke swirling off of his head...
To quote RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1):
15.7.1 Denial of Service Attacks on Proxies They exist. They are hard to defend against. Research continues. Beware.
In other words - duh...
I had reams of problems getting my AC'97-compliant (Intel 80210) sound card working with the OSS modules that come bundled in kernel 2.6. However, when I installed ALSA, everything worked like a charm; I think this is, once again, an outside observer identifying a flaw in "Linux" when he really just means an oversight in the standard distros. Once they start bundling ALSA, we'll catch up (to Windows 95, anyway).
I'm still not following how this would stop us. (Us? I mean them - them!) Ok, each phone (computer, DVD player, etc.) has a public key, signed by a private key, so the DRM hardware or software can now verify that the public key is legitimate. But if the file itself is not encrypted, using strong crypto, I can play it on any platform I want. It's trivial to write a software mp3 player that decodes MP3 files and send the proper signals to the audio card (well, ok, maybe not trivial, but people have done it in OSS).
So, assuming that non-DRM hardware still exists (which the law, in the US at least, may outright ban - we've let Ashcroft stay for four years, so we'll pretty much put up with anything), I can play a "DRM protected" file, since the file itself is still just an MP3 file. In other words, there's nothing to unlock.
Now, on the other hand, if the file itself is encrypted, it has to be encrypted for a specific public key (or a specific symmetric key). They're not going to manufacture a special version of every CD in the United States for each computer. So anyway - the OS & the hardware can collude all they want... as long as the contents of the file are unencrypted, it can be played, and if they are encrypted then the original poster is correct.
Plus, she's a chick, and they always get lipstick and fingernail polish and stuff on the screen, covering up the useful parts of the UI.