While there is some truth to what you say, there's also something to be said for professional ethics. I'd argue that, as a professional, OP is obligated to at least try to convince his management of the necessity of software development best practices.
After all, you don't trust and electrical engineer that hasn't tested his circuit. You don't trust a mechanical engineer that hasn't stressed his design. Why on earth should you trust a software engineer that hasn't tested his code?
The software is good enough to get the device working, and it's the performance of the device that makes the company money, the software just has to work ``well enough'' the device is where the money is made.
That's all well and good, but how do you know the company's software is "good enough"? By the OP's own admission, there is little in the way of coding standards, testing, or any other sort of formalization. For all you know, there could be 10 critical flaws in the software right now, but you just haven't encountered them.
The entire reason we have formalized development practices and testing methodologies is to allow us to say with some degree of confidence, "The software is good enough." Without that, you can guess, but you don't know.
Wrong customer. In this case, the "customer" is the rest of the company that has to use the software. The grandparent is simply saying, "Don't go ahead and change your entire software development practice without telling anyone outside of your division," which is fairly good, if somewhat obvious, advice.
even the food would disappear from the local supermarket, as it will be more in the personal intrest of the owner to simply keep it himself
Except that it wouldn't. Here's a hint, people have been bartering since before civilization, and, odds are, not all of them were doing it out of sheer altruism. As long as Alice can grown tomatoes better than Bob, and as long as Bob can grow wheat better than Alice, there'll be trade.
Who said anything about the limit being artificial? San Fransisco, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and many other seaside towns have barriers, such as natural features, or other towns that limit their expansion. The prototypical example is Manhattan - the housing there is sharply limited because Manhattan is an island.
Who's to say that it wouldn't be relatively clear-cut? The M/I complex in this country is actually concentrated in a few cities (all of whom are strongly supportive of the government). It wouldn't take much to secure those areas, and work outward from there.
I'm not a neocon, and I resent any comparison to such. I figure I'm a realist. If things really got that bad, I suppose I would take up arms against the government. But I certainly wouldn't have any illusions about being able to force a victory in my lifetime.
Imagine if the entire supply line, from start to finish, was inside 'enemy territory'. Imagine if troops (and even their families) were constantly coming under fire, even on their supposed R&R. The weapons factories, the trucking system, the entire M/I complex is hideously vulnerable if it has to operate while surrounded by armed foes.
Except that it'll never work like that. Any revolt will be undertaken by a relatively small minority. Even if the minority is large enough to require martial law to suppress, it'll hardly be large enough to pose a threat across the entire US.
The size of the US is a disadvantage for the insurgents as well as the government. Long distances reduce coordination and communication between individual cells. Supply lines will at least by equally difficult for both sides, and will actually probably be worse for the insurgents, given that they're less advantaged in terms of manpower and equipment. Also, unlike in Iraq, the insurgents in the US probably will not have the advantage of having sympathetic governments on the border.
Same thing goes for run-of-the-mill cops and judges, bureaucrats and politicians. It's easy to get away with being a cruel public official if the population has no choice but to take it. It's quite another if many of them are armed, and you risk getting capped by some victims's spouse or parent or loved one every time you step outside.
While it might put the fear of God in individual officials, such a strategy would be extremely counterproductive in the long run. The distant officials in Washington would simply use local recalcitrance as a justification to push through even more draconian laws and regulations, much like the British government pushed through even more draconian taxes after the American rebels tarred and feathered the tax collectors initially sent to collect the Stamp Act taxes.
The number of people killed annually in crimes or accidents involving firearms is truly appalling. But if the 20th century has shown us anything, it's that those casualties are nothing compared to those that can be inflicted by a government that becomes the enemy of its own people.
I wholly agree. While the US government is still a long, long way from becoming anything close to the enemy of the people (or even any specific minority of the people) it has taken some troubling steps in that direction. The last time this happened (with Nixon, Hoover, and that crew) Congress grew a spine and put in restrictions (now removed - what Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away). Time will tell if such restrictions will be re-imposed in light of the scandals that are sure to develop in light of the extraordinary expansion of executive branch power in recent years.
That's precisely what I'm saying. The presence of a standing army has allowed the army to rise in sophistication and weaponry to the point where an organized citizen militia will not pose much of a threat.
That's why the Republicans are so relaxed about Second Amendment rights. They know that, if push really comes to shove, they send in the tanks and roll right over the citizen militias anyway. And, in the meantime, they've got one more wedge issue that they can use to drive voters into their camp.
You fail to understand that the 2nd Amendment is less about fighting a Bosnia/Iraq style guerrilla war/resistance, but is instead a provision for a scenario a lot more like what happened to JFK, etc.
Yeah, except that it never works that way in real life. After every assassination, security laws are tightened and more restrictions are put into place. Look at what happened after the last such attempt on Reagan - we got the Brady law.
why do people cheat in any game? its the triumph of ego over id.
You've got it backwards there. According to Freud, the (super)ego was the "higher" area of the mind, responsible for conscious, rational thought. The id was the subconscious, responsible for our baser impulses. Therefore, he would have viewed a cheater's conduct as the triumph of id over the ego, not the other way around.
As I posted above, all the situations you linked to involved troops of a foreign occupier, fighting far from home, against an intensely motivated, nationalistic home army. A better analogy would be the US Civil War, where, despite the guerrilla-like tactics of the South, the North won through the brute power of its military-industrial complex.
Its a completely different situation. First, American soldiers, by and large, don't know Arabic. This means that they're dependent on a relatively small pool of translators, which can be (and are) targeted for assassination and intimidation. Once its translators have been killed or scared off, the US Army is blind, deaf and dumb - making for a much easier target.
Second, there's the lack of cultural knowledge. Even if all American soldiers spoke perfect Arabic and perfect Kurdish, they'd still have a hard time in Iraq, just like you'd have a hard time (initially) after moving to a new city. It takes time to learn the local culture, the local slang, and which neighborhoods are the trouble spots. A local with years of experience is going to fit in much better than the interloper, even if the two have identical skin color and speak the same language.
Finally, there's the problem of supply lines. All the resources for our troops have to be shipped out from the US. While airlifts can rush troops into a conflict area, it is extremely difficult to supply an army by air. Therefore, the US has to rely on ocean shipping, which is cheap, but very slow.
Fighting an insurgency on home soil, the US army would be subject to none of these disadvantages. Language and cultural barriers would be slim, and the problem of supply lines would be significantly ameliorated. Meanwhile, the insurgents would have to find safe havens, which would be significantly more difficult, given that the US is a larger country, and has a significantly larger interior region that would be relatively safe from border raids.
Sorry, but I have to agree with the grandparent. The 2nd Amendment was effectively repealed the moment we got a standing army, complete with its own military-industrial complex. The fact that you own a.30 caliber (or even a.50 caliber) rifle becomes relatively unimportant when you consider that the government has a permanent force of tanks, artillery, and aircraft, combined with sufficient troops to operate them.
At best, all we could hope for is an Iraq-style insurgency, but even that would require significant foreign aid for the insurgents.
Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses.
Well, it already happened once in 2000, and again in 2004. How many times does the popular candidate have to "mysteriously" lose before people wise up?
I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but if I were planning to subvert a democratic process I'd always engineer wins by one or two percent, rather than absolute blowouts.
While crappy requirements can create bad code in any language, perl makes it possible for one to have bad code even with good requirements. As for practices, well, you can produce readable assembly if your practices are strict enough and your programmers are disciplined enough. One of the main factors in language choice is how much work one has to do to enforce best practices. Good languages can enforce best practices without seeming overly limiting. Perl fails that test.
And that's the main disadvantage of TIMTOWDI. You end up with two or three poorly maintained libraries and insufficient documentation, versus one well documented, extensible framework.
Fine. Lets compare "mobile internet devices", then. There's been no reports of Blackberries having these issue, nor the Symbian based Nokia e90, nor the Windows Mobile based Samsung Blackjack. All of these smartphones are also marketed as mobile internet devices, and all of them manage to deliver the same functionality without these specific problems, while costing much less than the iPhone.
Even if you do an apples-to-apples (pun totally intended) comparison, the iPhone still loses. Why should I purchase an iPhone, when I can get a Blackjack that is more open (easier for me to code and load applications for) and cheaper? Apple's answer has been to point at the instability and problems with the underlying Windows mobile architecture. Now that their own operating system has shown the some of the same flaws, they arguably lose their only marketing point supporting the iPhone.
Apple fans certainly didn't complain when the media hyped the iPhone as the be-all and end-all of cell phones. Now, they complain about the iPhone getting increased scrutiny when it develops problems. Smells like sour grapes, if you ask me.
Apple doesn't want feedback. It's a privilege to use their products, if you don't like it, you know where to take it.
Indeed. Apple's entire design philosophy can be summarized by, "Steve Jobs knows your wants better than you do." Its one of the reasons I stay away from Apple products.
The real reason that these iPhone problems are getting so much media attention is because of the hype of the iPhone itself. It's not any more complicated than that.
But why did the iPhone have so much hype? It was because Apple kept advertising its intuitiveness and ability to "Just Work" right out of the box. I think it is news when Apple products don't "Just Work" like they're supposed to, since that's the reason Apple asks consumers to sacrifice features and configuration options.
See, that's just it, though. Its a Catch-22. If you buy CDs and DVDs, you give them money and increase their power. If you fail to buy CDs and DVDs, the *AA attributes their losses to piracy, regardless of whether any piracy is actually occuring, and pushes through ever more draconian laws.
After a certain point, the law becomes meaningless, since everyone is a violator, and egregious violations are indistinguishable from petty violations. Its as if you set the speed limit on a major thoroughfare to 5 kph.
Iraq and Afghanistan are not works in progress, they are epic failures, puppet governments whose legitimacy are not recognized by their own people.
Now, while Iraq may not be a complete success, it certainly isn't as much of a failure as it was in, say, 2006. Things are improving, and violence is decreasing. While the war isn't won, it no longer looking unwinnable.
You didn't liberate China, WE liberated China. You had very little to do with the Sino-Japanese war, there were maybe a few thousand American pilots fighting in China. That's IT. WE held off the Japanese long enough so you could finish them off.
First, the Japanese really weren't all that interested in the core of China, since there weren't very many resources there. They were mainly interested in the wealth of Manchuria and Southeast Asia (aka IndoChina). Second, while the Chinese may have "held off" the Japanese army, you certainly weren't in any place to win. If it hadn't been for American naval might cutting off Japanese supply lines, combined with the liberation of Manchuria and Korea by Soviet troops (Operation August Storm), most of China might well we considered a part of greater Japan today.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is some truth to what you say, there's also something to be said for professional ethics. I'd argue that, as a professional, OP is obligated to at least try to convince his management of the necessity of software development best practices.
After all, you don't trust and electrical engineer that hasn't tested his circuit. You don't trust a mechanical engineer that hasn't stressed his design. Why on earth should you trust a software engineer that hasn't tested his code?
The software is good enough to get the device working, and it's the performance of the device that makes the company money, the software just has to work ``well enough'' the device is where the money is made.
That's all well and good, but how do you know the company's software is "good enough"? By the OP's own admission, there is little in the way of coding standards, testing, or any other sort of formalization. For all you know, there could be 10 critical flaws in the software right now, but you just haven't encountered them.
The entire reason we have formalized development practices and testing methodologies is to allow us to say with some degree of confidence, "The software is good enough." Without that, you can guess, but you don't know.
Wrong customer. In this case, the "customer" is the rest of the company that has to use the software. The grandparent is simply saying, "Don't go ahead and change your entire software development practice without telling anyone outside of your division," which is fairly good, if somewhat obvious, advice.
even the food would disappear from the local supermarket, as it will be more in the personal intrest of the owner to simply keep it himself
Except that it wouldn't. Here's a hint, people have been bartering since before civilization, and, odds are, not all of them were doing it out of sheer altruism. As long as Alice can grown tomatoes better than Bob, and as long as Bob can grow wheat better than Alice, there'll be trade.
Who said anything about the limit being artificial? San Fransisco, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and many other seaside towns have barriers, such as natural features, or other towns that limit their expansion. The prototypical example is Manhattan - the housing there is sharply limited because Manhattan is an island.
Who's to say that it wouldn't be relatively clear-cut? The M/I complex in this country is actually concentrated in a few cities (all of whom are strongly supportive of the government). It wouldn't take much to secure those areas, and work outward from there.
I'm not a neocon, and I resent any comparison to such. I figure I'm a realist. If things really got that bad, I suppose I would take up arms against the government. But I certainly wouldn't have any illusions about being able to force a victory in my lifetime.
Imagine if the entire supply line, from start to finish, was inside 'enemy territory'. Imagine if troops (and even their families) were constantly coming under fire, even on their supposed R&R. The weapons factories, the trucking system, the entire M/I complex is hideously vulnerable if it has to operate while surrounded by armed foes.
Except that it'll never work like that. Any revolt will be undertaken by a relatively small minority. Even if the minority is large enough to require martial law to suppress, it'll hardly be large enough to pose a threat across the entire US.
The size of the US is a disadvantage for the insurgents as well as the government. Long distances reduce coordination and communication between individual cells. Supply lines will at least by equally difficult for both sides, and will actually probably be worse for the insurgents, given that they're less advantaged in terms of manpower and equipment. Also, unlike in Iraq, the insurgents in the US probably will not have the advantage of having sympathetic governments on the border.
Same thing goes for run-of-the-mill cops and judges, bureaucrats and politicians. It's easy to get away with being a cruel public official if the population has no choice but to take it. It's quite another if many of them are armed, and you risk getting capped by some victims's spouse or parent or loved one every time you step outside.
While it might put the fear of God in individual officials, such a strategy would be extremely counterproductive in the long run. The distant officials in Washington would simply use local recalcitrance as a justification to push through even more draconian laws and regulations, much like the British government pushed through even more draconian taxes after the American rebels tarred and feathered the tax collectors initially sent to collect the Stamp Act taxes.
The number of people killed annually in crimes or accidents involving firearms is truly appalling. But if the 20th century has shown us anything, it's that those casualties are nothing compared to those that can be inflicted by a government that becomes the enemy of its own people.
I wholly agree. While the US government is still a long, long way from becoming anything close to the enemy of the people (or even any specific minority of the people) it has taken some troubling steps in that direction. The last time this happened (with Nixon, Hoover, and that crew) Congress grew a spine and put in restrictions (now removed - what Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away). Time will tell if such restrictions will be re-imposed in light of the scandals that are sure to develop in light of the extraordinary expansion of executive branch power in recent years.
That's precisely what I'm saying. The presence of a standing army has allowed the army to rise in sophistication and weaponry to the point where an organized citizen militia will not pose much of a threat.
That's why the Republicans are so relaxed about Second Amendment rights. They know that, if push really comes to shove, they send in the tanks and roll right over the citizen militias anyway. And, in the meantime, they've got one more wedge issue that they can use to drive voters into their camp.
You fail to understand that the 2nd Amendment is less about fighting a Bosnia/Iraq style guerrilla war/resistance, but is instead a provision for a scenario a lot more like what happened to JFK, etc.
Yeah, except that it never works that way in real life. After every assassination, security laws are tightened and more restrictions are put into place. Look at what happened after the last such attempt on Reagan - we got the Brady law.
why do people cheat in any game? its the triumph of ego over id.
You've got it backwards there. According to Freud, the (super)ego was the "higher" area of the mind, responsible for conscious, rational thought. The id was the subconscious, responsible for our baser impulses. Therefore, he would have viewed a cheater's conduct as the triumph of id over the ego, not the other way around.
No, the joke will be on you when you find yourself bundled into the black van for your free, all expenses paid trip to sunny Guantanamo Bay.
As I posted above, all the situations you linked to involved troops of a foreign occupier, fighting far from home, against an intensely motivated, nationalistic home army. A better analogy would be the US Civil War, where, despite the guerrilla-like tactics of the South, the North won through the brute power of its military-industrial complex.
Its a completely different situation. First, American soldiers, by and large, don't know Arabic. This means that they're dependent on a relatively small pool of translators, which can be (and are) targeted for assassination and intimidation. Once its translators have been killed or scared off, the US Army is blind, deaf and dumb - making for a much easier target.
Second, there's the lack of cultural knowledge. Even if all American soldiers spoke perfect Arabic and perfect Kurdish, they'd still have a hard time in Iraq, just like you'd have a hard time (initially) after moving to a new city. It takes time to learn the local culture, the local slang, and which neighborhoods are the trouble spots. A local with years of experience is going to fit in much better than the interloper, even if the two have identical skin color and speak the same language.
Finally, there's the problem of supply lines. All the resources for our troops have to be shipped out from the US. While airlifts can rush troops into a conflict area, it is extremely difficult to supply an army by air. Therefore, the US has to rely on ocean shipping, which is cheap, but very slow.
Fighting an insurgency on home soil, the US army would be subject to none of these disadvantages. Language and cultural barriers would be slim, and the problem of supply lines would be significantly ameliorated. Meanwhile, the insurgents would have to find safe havens, which would be significantly more difficult, given that the US is a larger country, and has a significantly larger interior region that would be relatively safe from border raids.
And why the hell would two people be using a single voting machine simultaneously?
Sorry, but I have to agree with the grandparent. The 2nd Amendment was effectively repealed the moment we got a standing army, complete with its own military-industrial complex. The fact that you own a .30 caliber (or even a .50 caliber) rifle becomes relatively unimportant when you consider that the government has a permanent force of tanks, artillery, and aircraft, combined with sufficient troops to operate them.
At best, all we could hope for is an Iraq-style insurgency, but even that would require significant foreign aid for the insurgents.
Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses.
Well, it already happened once in 2000, and again in 2004. How many times does the popular candidate have to "mysteriously" lose before people wise up?
I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but if I were planning to subvert a democratic process I'd always engineer wins by one or two percent, rather than absolute blowouts.
While crappy requirements can create bad code in any language, perl makes it possible for one to have bad code even with good requirements. As for practices, well, you can produce readable assembly if your practices are strict enough and your programmers are disciplined enough. One of the main factors in language choice is how much work one has to do to enforce best practices. Good languages can enforce best practices without seeming overly limiting. Perl fails that test.
And that's the main disadvantage of TIMTOWDI. You end up with two or three poorly maintained libraries and insufficient documentation, versus one well documented, extensible framework.
Fine. Lets compare "mobile internet devices", then. There's been no reports of Blackberries having these issue, nor the Symbian based Nokia e90, nor the Windows Mobile based Samsung Blackjack. All of these smartphones are also marketed as mobile internet devices, and all of them manage to deliver the same functionality without these specific problems, while costing much less than the iPhone.
Even if you do an apples-to-apples (pun totally intended) comparison, the iPhone still loses. Why should I purchase an iPhone, when I can get a Blackjack that is more open (easier for me to code and load applications for) and cheaper? Apple's answer has been to point at the instability and problems with the underlying Windows mobile architecture. Now that their own operating system has shown the some of the same flaws, they arguably lose their only marketing point supporting the iPhone.
Apple fans certainly didn't complain when the media hyped the iPhone as the be-all and end-all of cell phones. Now, they complain about the iPhone getting increased scrutiny when it develops problems. Smells like sour grapes, if you ask me.
Apple doesn't want feedback. It's a privilege to use their products, if you don't like it, you know where to take it.
Indeed. Apple's entire design philosophy can be summarized by, "Steve Jobs knows your wants better than you do." Its one of the reasons I stay away from Apple products.
The real reason that these iPhone problems are getting so much media attention is because of the hype of the iPhone itself. It's not any more complicated than that.
But why did the iPhone have so much hype? It was because Apple kept advertising its intuitiveness and ability to "Just Work" right out of the box. I think it is news when Apple products don't "Just Work" like they're supposed to, since that's the reason Apple asks consumers to sacrifice features and configuration options.
Vista: It Just Works (on tomorrow's hardware)
See, that's just it, though. Its a Catch-22. If you buy CDs and DVDs, you give them money and increase their power. If you fail to buy CDs and DVDs, the *AA attributes their losses to piracy, regardless of whether any piracy is actually occuring, and pushes through ever more draconian laws.
After a certain point, the law becomes meaningless, since everyone is a violator, and egregious violations are indistinguishable from petty violations. Its as if you set the speed limit on a major thoroughfare to 5 kph.
Iraq and Afghanistan are not works in progress, they are epic failures, puppet governments whose legitimacy are not recognized by their own people.
Now, while Iraq may not be a complete success, it certainly isn't as much of a failure as it was in, say, 2006. Things are improving, and violence is decreasing. While the war isn't won, it no longer looking unwinnable.
You didn't liberate China, WE liberated China. You had very little to do with the Sino-Japanese war, there were maybe a few thousand American pilots fighting in China. That's IT. WE held off the Japanese long enough so you could finish them off.
First, the Japanese really weren't all that interested in the core of China, since there weren't very many resources there. They were mainly interested in the wealth of Manchuria and Southeast Asia (aka IndoChina). Second, while the Chinese may have "held off" the Japanese army, you certainly weren't in any place to win. If it hadn't been for American naval might cutting off Japanese supply lines, combined with the liberation of Manchuria and Korea by Soviet troops (Operation August Storm), most of China might well we considered a part of greater Japan today.