Refactoring can be a continuous process -- you don't have to stop and tear down your entire project. I've seen companies do refactoring sprints where no new features were worked on, and they never seemed to be particularly successful. It always seems to work better when you're making small changes to a few classes or functions to support a specific feature or to fix a reported bug. Refactoring does require a decent understanding of the system you're working on, and on high-turnover projects most programmers haven't worked on the system long enough to do it effectively. The underlying problems are complex and don't really fit well into a paragraph, or even a few paragraphs.
It always boils down to understanding the system and having the will to fix it, though. I've worked for companies that were crippled by their bad software. In those companies, no one could explain how the entire system worked, end-to-end. The problems were always "Somebody else's problem" because each team would point their finger at some other component that they didn't know anything about, and that component owner would come back and say "That's not OUR problem!" Meanwhile the companies would not be able to effectively grow or take on new customers because the entire product generation process was so cumbersome and slow.
This is the core of the problem, here. I've been in the software industry since '89 and see the same patterns again and again. The software you're working on was always rushed. They rushed it out the door with incomplete (or no) understanding of the problems they were trying to solve, the business model and in a lot of cases, of writing software at all. They crapped out one giant piece of software with no way to verify its outputs and then went into maintenance mode where they were constantly putting out fires and digging the hole deeper and deeper. There was never time to stop and fix things ("Pay down technical debt") because there was always another emergency, another fire to put out.
A lot of these projects had no way to test changes other than to push them up to production and see what happened. The worst offenders had systems that were so tightly coupled that you could only run data start-to-finish through the entire system, which made setting up test systems difficult. In some cases, no one in the company had a complete understanding of the full system.
Even in such situations, it's still possible to drive quality in the system. It requires a whole lot of reading and understanding -- you need to know and understand the business driving the software, the requirements of the business and customers and you have to understand a lot of very convoluted code. You also have to be able to verify changes worked as expected and introduced no other bugs without having to push the software all the way to production to do so. But most of all you have to have the will to actually improve things rather than accept that this is just how this project is. Quite frequently the team in place doesn't have a lot of incentive to have that will -- if the software is ever actually good, it would threaten those fat paychecks they collect for maintaining the mess.
To be fair to them, there really aren't that many companies that want to do business with the US government and all the companies that do are probably equally as incompetent. So whether you hire this incompetent company to manage what should be some of the most secure assets in the country or another incompetent company, the outcome will most likely still be the same. It's not like there are any sort of... "laws," dictating their security, quality control or processes. Well, I guess there are, but it seems like the most profitable thing to do is ignore them and hope you don't get caught.
Thank God now all we have to worry about is Zika, Cickengunya and Dengue Fever! With an occasional bout of Ebola thrown in for good measure! Life couldn't be better!
That sounds like a rehash of the Hero 4, with a gee whiz feature that a large part of their target demographic won't be able to use. You know what I want? I want a full 360 degree VR camera. One that doesn't pose a snag hazard when a parachute gets deployed and won't throw off my aerodynamics. Somewhere out there is a company with the vision to create such a thing, and I'll purchase my next camera from that company.
Preach it, Brother! I memorized one fucking mnemonic back in grade school and I really don't want to have to come up with another one! Of course the next headline will probably be that it's not a planet, it's a space station...
I heard a story a while back that there was a town where the people use sausages to operate their cell phone when it gets too cold. Having spent the last 6 months working with a mobile test automation framework, I think it would be easier to build an Arduino-powered robot equipped with a sausage and a camera. A mobile-testing abomination, part meat, part machine! Because fuck, Apple sure doesn't make it easy to test on their shit! Naturally, you'd have to replace the sausage every so often, when your sausage robot starts getting smelly. That's just a design consideration, really.
Way to solve that problem. Do they also have a solution to the problem of all those dead rats decomposing under Chicago that they're going to have in a couple of months?
Nope! Not at all! No one's going around exposing entire generations of entire countries to neurotoxins and diabetes. And asbestos. And exploding cars. Hey here's an idea, what if we made the exploding cars... out of asbestos?
I don't want much, really, just a stock android phone that doesn't suck, is regularly updated and has a slot for a MicroSD card. Google's pushing cloud hard and it seems like they're going out of their way to discourage external storage. I could buy a Samsung device, but I hate Touchwiz and also hate having to install some buggy ROM image that fucks up the camera and bluetooth more often than not. It doesn't seem like there's a device out there that's everything I want and I really don't think I'm setting such a high bar.
Ultimately what it boils down to is that Apple and Google don't have their customer's best interests in mind. Their platforms exist only as a way for them to leverage their advertising to a captive audience. It doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult to find someone on alibaba who'd be willing to build a truly open phone platform. Perhaps it's time someone did.
I was looking last month and couldn't find an encoding standard that all browsers support. Google wants you to drink their kool aid, and seems to only support VP8 and 9 and ogg audio formats. IIRC, Firefox and IE both support h.264 and AAC. None of the browsers seem to support UDP streaming at all.
If I want to do zero-latency live streaming to just a few endpoints outside the browser, I found that mpeg2video and aac streaming over UDP encodes and transmits with the least amount of lag. Near as I can tell, it's pretty much instantaneous, over the fast LAN I'm working on. In theory, I could play that with the VLC plugin in-browser, on browsers that still support it. But so far I haven't seen that actually work.
I have to admit that I didn't play around with flash all that much. It does seem like it's pretty much universal. Perhaps I should take another look at it...
The browser has never been a good platform for development -- http is stateless, slow and insecure. Ever since we've started, we've been working around deficiencies in the platform. The only thing that could be described as "good" about it is that everyone has a browser.
So now a near-universally deployed platform that you can target for real development. Should it be a surprise that we do so?
Yeah! Because what's better than one Dyson sphere? TWO Dyson spheres! Or perhaps at some point your civilization gets to the point where building a Dyson sphere is the equivalent of a baking soda volcano elementary school project. "Oh look! Little Johnny made a Dyson sphere! Isn't that just the most adorable thing?"
Oh yeah! Mid 40's here and have been skydiving since 2012, and really gearing up on flying a wingsuit out of the plane for the last couple of years. Funnily enough life's been pretty awesome since then, so I'm in no hurry to rush into BASE, much less Wingsuit base, which seems like it has a ridiculously high fatality rate. I know three amazing wingsuit pilots, one who was my AFF instructor back in 2012, who have gone in this year. I think they were all trying to fly that ridiculous run in Charmonix. Cave diving and surfing the waves from collapsing glaciers in Alaska are similarly hazardous and awesome. There is no shortage of potentially deadly hobbies to get into!
Given the blatantly false hype on the game right up to the day before the launch, I'd say the refunds are preventing a much more expensive class action lawsuit that could very easily be won by the players by just running the trailer footage alongside the actual gameplay footage. What was promised was not delivered, and the only reason you had as many preorders as you did was due to the promises of the developers. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it and pissed off again, maybe I'll pen a letter to the FTC asking them to look into it!
They're really the only people who actually want to do Government contracts. For everyone else, it's just too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it.
Since it's, you know, those guys, I'm sure their IT solution for NASA involves Citrix somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
It always boils down to understanding the system and having the will to fix it, though. I've worked for companies that were crippled by their bad software. In those companies, no one could explain how the entire system worked, end-to-end. The problems were always "Somebody else's problem" because each team would point their finger at some other component that they didn't know anything about, and that component owner would come back and say "That's not OUR problem!" Meanwhile the companies would not be able to effectively grow or take on new customers because the entire product generation process was so cumbersome and slow.
A lot of these projects had no way to test changes other than to push them up to production and see what happened. The worst offenders had systems that were so tightly coupled that you could only run data start-to-finish through the entire system, which made setting up test systems difficult. In some cases, no one in the company had a complete understanding of the full system.
Even in such situations, it's still possible to drive quality in the system. It requires a whole lot of reading and understanding -- you need to know and understand the business driving the software, the requirements of the business and customers and you have to understand a lot of very convoluted code. You also have to be able to verify changes worked as expected and introduced no other bugs without having to push the software all the way to production to do so. But most of all you have to have the will to actually improve things rather than accept that this is just how this project is. Quite frequently the team in place doesn't have a lot of incentive to have that will -- if the software is ever actually good, it would threaten those fat paychecks they collect for maintaining the mess.
To be fair to them, there really aren't that many companies that want to do business with the US government and all the companies that do are probably equally as incompetent. So whether you hire this incompetent company to manage what should be some of the most secure assets in the country or another incompetent company, the outcome will most likely still be the same. It's not like there are any sort of... "laws," dictating their security, quality control or processes. Well, I guess there are, but it seems like the most profitable thing to do is ignore them and hope you don't get caught.
Thank God now all we have to worry about is Zika, Cickengunya and Dengue Fever! With an occasional bout of Ebola thrown in for good measure! Life couldn't be better!
Now we're going to have to come up with a love song for that.
There's going to be a lot more cancer, then? I guess if everyone dies of cancer, that could technically be considered a "solution"...
That sounds like a rehash of the Hero 4, with a gee whiz feature that a large part of their target demographic won't be able to use. You know what I want? I want a full 360 degree VR camera. One that doesn't pose a snag hazard when a parachute gets deployed and won't throw off my aerodynamics. Somewhere out there is a company with the vision to create such a thing, and I'll purchase my next camera from that company.
Solution: Added new "Battery on fire" battery icon status.
Problem solved!
The phone wants to remind you that it could explode under the current circumstances, but chooses not to.
Preach it, Brother! I memorized one fucking mnemonic back in grade school and I really don't want to have to come up with another one! Of course the next headline will probably be that it's not a planet, it's a space station...
I heard a story a while back that there was a town where the people use sausages to operate their cell phone when it gets too cold. Having spent the last 6 months working with a mobile test automation framework, I think it would be easier to build an Arduino-powered robot equipped with a sausage and a camera. A mobile-testing abomination, part meat, part machine! Because fuck, Apple sure doesn't make it easy to test on their shit! Naturally, you'd have to replace the sausage every so often, when your sausage robot starts getting smelly. That's just a design consideration, really.
Way to solve that problem. Do they also have a solution to the problem of all those dead rats decomposing under Chicago that they're going to have in a couple of months?
Most of those seem to also have on-board microphones. Given what they can determine with microphones these days, that seems like the greater risk.
YouTube's been increasingly itchy since Google took over. Perhaps it's time we start scratching.
Nope! Not at all! No one's going around exposing entire generations of entire countries to neurotoxins and diabetes. And asbestos. And exploding cars. Hey here's an idea, what if we made the exploding cars... out of asbestos?
HEY! He got 20 HOURS of free dialup with that CD that came in the mail!
Ultimately what it boils down to is that Apple and Google don't have their customer's best interests in mind. Their platforms exist only as a way for them to leverage their advertising to a captive audience. It doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult to find someone on alibaba who'd be willing to build a truly open phone platform. Perhaps it's time someone did.
If I want to do zero-latency live streaming to just a few endpoints outside the browser, I found that mpeg2video and aac streaming over UDP encodes and transmits with the least amount of lag. Near as I can tell, it's pretty much instantaneous, over the fast LAN I'm working on. In theory, I could play that with the VLC plugin in-browser, on browsers that still support it. But so far I haven't seen that actually work.
I have to admit that I didn't play around with flash all that much. It does seem like it's pretty much universal. Perhaps I should take another look at it...
A voodoo divining rod is all you need for probable cause. Which is all you really need, if most of your department's income is from civil forfeiture.
So now a near-universally deployed platform that you can target for real development. Should it be a surprise that we do so?
Yeah! Because what's better than one Dyson sphere? TWO Dyson spheres! Or perhaps at some point your civilization gets to the point where building a Dyson sphere is the equivalent of a baking soda volcano elementary school project. "Oh look! Little Johnny made a Dyson sphere! Isn't that just the most adorable thing?"
That headline should read "Media Company Facebook is Telling The World that it's not a Media Company".
Oh yeah! Mid 40's here and have been skydiving since 2012, and really gearing up on flying a wingsuit out of the plane for the last couple of years. Funnily enough life's been pretty awesome since then, so I'm in no hurry to rush into BASE, much less Wingsuit base, which seems like it has a ridiculously high fatality rate. I know three amazing wingsuit pilots, one who was my AFF instructor back in 2012, who have gone in this year. I think they were all trying to fly that ridiculous run in Charmonix. Cave diving and surfing the waves from collapsing glaciers in Alaska are similarly hazardous and awesome. There is no shortage of potentially deadly hobbies to get into!
Given the blatantly false hype on the game right up to the day before the launch, I'd say the refunds are preventing a much more expensive class action lawsuit that could very easily be won by the players by just running the trailer footage alongside the actual gameplay footage. What was promised was not delivered, and the only reason you had as many preorders as you did was due to the promises of the developers. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it and pissed off again, maybe I'll pen a letter to the FTC asking them to look into it!
Since it's, you know, those guys, I'm sure their IT solution for NASA involves Citrix somehow.