Shooting rockets into space is "cheap advertising"? Damn. Someone should let McDonalds know about this so they can get to work building some McRockets. Surely cheaper than just buying advertising space, right?
The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea.
That depends entirely on what your actual goals of space exploration are. I support both manned and unmanned space exploration, but for two entirely different reasons. Robotic missions are best for long range exploration and scientific discovery. Naturally, you can cut many, many expenses when you don't have to support a human life, or have to worry about a return voyage.
I want humans going into space for perhaps less logical reasons: an innate desire to explore and settle the universe. One could also argue, from a purely logical point of view, that there's no immediate benefit to gathering pure scientific knowledge about other solar bodies if it's not going to have an immediate practical impact on life at home. But then, we humans aren't purely logical creatures.
As such, I think it's probably best to consider ALL space exploration as a very, very long-term investment in our species, one in which we're unlikely to see a real payoff even in our lifetimes. In the very long term, humans are going to be better off if we can leave the planet and establish permanent, independent colonies on other worlds or in space. It's the exact same argument as learning more about the larger universe and how it works. I simply feel it's worth doing for its own sake.
The "homeless problem" in Seattle isn't really represented by transitory homeless, like are describe here, families with women and children, although certainly that does account for some percentage, of course. The bulk of the problem is a bit tougher to deal with: the perpetual homeless, mostly men (roughly 6:1 men/women ratio, with under 1% being minors, out of an estimated 10,000 pop, of which about half are "unsheltered"), many with some form of mental illness, and many with substance addictions. Unless we as a society decide that some people are unable to live responsibly on their own and should be institutionalized, we'll have permanent homeless. Even if you build free housing, you can't force someone to live there if they choose not to, for whatever reason.
So for the past few decades we've been shuffling them around from temporary site to site. Or a few entrepreneurial homeless find little niches in a tent nestled in some bushes in an industrial park somewhere, and no one wants to try to kick them out for fear of getting knifed by a semi-crazy person (and because it's effectively a crime to evict them now). And my sister-in-law has to passes by a homeless man on her way to work who's sunning himself on a public lawn and masturbating to a magazine, and everyone else has a similar story. And on it goes.
It's an ugly truth, and we've been kicking this can down the road for a generation now, because we're apparently too "compassionate" to institutionalize people that need it. Who knows... maybe it *is* more compassionate to let these people live as they want... If there were an easy answer, I suppose we've have already solved it.
So, kudos to Amazon for being willing to help, I guess, but it's not going to put much of a dent in Seattle's larger homeless problem if they're only going to take homeless families. I certainly don't blame them for this, because few people want a large population of the "ugly" homeless housed near them. Seattle's government is really the only ones who have the authority to rectify the situation, and all they've done is to talk endlessly about the problem. A year or two ago the Seattle mayor declared some sort of "homeless state of emergency", but like a lot of things he does, it's more about political perception than actually getting everything done. So far, it seems like its been private charities and organizations that have done the most and best work in helping these people.
No, the question is whether they should be regulated. Appraisals have specific regulations, so if people are using this service in lieu of actual appraisal services...
To me, this seems a bit like Uber claiming "we're not a taxi service" while blatantly offering a slightly different sort of taxi service. Just because they claim "this isn't an appraisal service" doesn't mean it actually *isn't* an appraisal service. They may end up winning if there's a legal definition of "appraisal" that they don't match, of course. I really don't know enough about appraisals or this case to have much of an opinion.
This is a problem I typically have with programming tests. To be perfectly honest, I test horribly. The problem for me is that the way one takes programming tests is always vastly different than the environment in which one normally codes. For me, the worst are whiteboard-type tests. I can't remember when I've ever written actual code on a whiteboard at work (diagrams plenty, code no). The point is, unless you're working in an environment you're accustomed to, the difficulty of the problem is artificially magnified.
More to the point, I don't recall being in many "high stress" programming situations at work, perhaps aside from tracking down some maddening bugs, which requires more patience and doggedness than anything else. No one is going to die if some feature doesn't ship in the next 60 minutes. I do my best coding when I can take my time and calmly think about the problem, rather than giving snap answers. In the working world, if I don't know something technical, I just look it up and do my own research, or ask a colleague if that leads nowhere. And I'm terrible at coming up with the "clever programming tricks" that people seem to love to put on programming tests, but which typically have little value in actual production.
You're welcome to that opinion, but I'm obviously not going to agree with it. And I suspect you'll have about as much success with that narrow redefinition of open source as convincing everyone to call Linux "GNU/Linux".
Nice troll. Or else profoundly ignorant. Although funny how often the two seem to go hand in hand.
But just to clarify, open source != GPL. Not all open source projects are copyleft like the GPL. If people want to distribute their software projects under the GPL, companies need to respect that license. But many open source licenses are much more permissive, meaning they can be used in both open and closed source projects. I personally chose the MIT license for my own open source projects (nice and simple: do what you want, and don't sue me), but there are a lot of other permissive licenses as well, like BSD, Apache, zlib, Boost, etc.
If you want to deliver proprietary software and keep your source closed, you can use permissive licensed software, or you can suck it up and write your own. The entire point of GPL'd software is that it HAS to remain open source. That's why many advocates of free software feel strongly about how the GPL works, because it ensures any contributions or improvements remain open source as well.
Instead, what you're seeing is the rise of Microsoft's Project Centennial, which is the conversion of Win32 apps of *any* flavor into a Window Store App (essentially, they run in a container), which is how MS Office is added to the store.
Maybe that continuity is limited to their desktop platform. I don't have any experience writing to their mobile platforms. It sounds like you *wish* you didn't either.
"When Microsoft changes the API?" Microsoft, if nothing else, is pretty good about supporting older APIs. Even when they're deprecated, they generally continue to function. Is there some specific example you're thinking of that I can't remember?
Flight sims are a pretty niche market. I used to spend a lot of money on HOTAS controllers (flightstick, throttle, and rudder pedals). The screen was always the limiting factor for any sort of true immersive quality. You really need to be able to look around to acquire and track targets if you're trying to fly a fighter with a bubble canopy. So, for these enthusiasts, I completely believe that VR will do well. And of course, any sort of cockpit-based game seems likely to benefit equally well, like racing sims, mech fighters, space flyers, and even amusement park sims (rollercoaster and ride previews).
One of these days, when the price drops to something reasonable, I might try pick it up again. For everyone else though, it currently requires a monster computer (although this will improve in time), and outside of the gee-whiz factor, there's really not a compelling reason to embrace it.
So, yeah, phasing out Win32 in favor of Windows store apps is Microsoft's wet dream, of course, as you see with Windows 10 S.
The problems is this: no one is writing UWP apps. The idea used to at least make a tiny bit of sense when there was a promise (however slight) that MS might have a foothold in the mobile market. Now that UWP covers only Windows 10 and Xbox One, there's not as compelling an argument to make for its "cross-platform" capabilities. So, companies that want to target Windows only still write native or C# Win32 apps. Anyone who wants true cross-platform will probably use another technology altogether. Essentially, UWP is sputtering out.
Instead, what you're seeing is the rise of Microsoft's Project Centennial, which is the conversion of Win32 apps of *any* flavor into a Window Store App (essentially, they run in a container), which is how MS Office is added to the store. So, as you see UWP != Windows Store Apps anymore. This provides some of the benefit of store apps, like increased security and ease of distribution / updates / installation (something many Linux distros have enjoyed for a while), without having to completely rewrite applications.
We'll see if this makes a difference in the long-term strategy of getting software in the store. I remain skeptical, and believe Windows native applications are far too entrenched in the ecosystem to ever realistically be abandoned. At the very least, MS will always need a "Pro" version that you can actually use for software development (and to run all that pesky "legacy" software), so there's really little chance you'll ever see a complete abandonment of the traditional Windows desktop in the foreseeable future.
They seems to be rather brain-dead when it comes to designing interfaces. The new Xbox Amazon streaming app was re-designed a while ago, and of all things, they managed to screw up the transport controls. All they had to do was copy any one of the dozen other examples out there, but they apparently had to be "special".
Can you imagine the astronomical cost (no pun intended) of a deep space mission were this "miles from California" tax actually implemented?
Best quote:
The Franchise Tax Board proposal said certainty about tax treatment “will lead to increased activity in the industry and will foster an atmosphere of growth and prosperity once present during the golden age of California’s aviation industry, thereby creating jobs as the industry thrives in this state.”
I'm curious... do they have the authority to even tax what occurs outside of their state territory?
You know, I disagree vehemently with those who proclaim OO an abject failure. But I'm always a bit bemused with people who feel the need to build OO into everything, whether it needs it or not. The trick, of course, is to use it as it makes sense.
One of the problems with OO is that poorly designed programs can be much worse to grok the logic and flow of than poorly designed procedural programs, mostly because of how scattered the logic can be throughout an object hierarchy.
A much more modern* trend is to avoid deep class hierarchies whenever practical, preferring instead to try to use smaller, more reusable objects that are only responsible for a single task, and use composition of objects. This allows you to more easily test each individual component and assure correctness of behavior, and then build on that behavior. These days, a lot of my classes are very shallow, either a single class, or perhaps derived from an interface class to hide implementation details when necessary.
Class hierarchies still have their place on occasion. There are still cases when you must manage a number of types of related-but-different objects with a lot of common properties. But if you keep this paradigm to a minimum, you'll be a lot happier with OOP, and keep your code more manageable.
* If you consider the last 15 years or so "modern"
I think a more honest answer is that they're afraid of ebooks cutting into their traditional business market. It's the same reason digital games cost as much as physical media. They don't want to piss off the retailers (who can retaliate by not displaying their wares as prominently), and in truth, it's not in their best interest to undercut them either.
Digital is frightening to publishers, because they well understand that the cost of copying a digital copy is $0, and has no intrinsic value by itself. As such, many of them have been dragged into the digital age kicking, screaming, colluding, and price-fixing...
Here in Seattle's 405 loop, our DOT added tolling to the HOV lanes with this sort of variable pricing about a year and a half ago. Result? $10 for a one-way trip during rush hour for just 15-20 miles or so (not exactly sure of the distance). They hit the max price they promised the public, and was STILL too crowded.
Please learn from our mistakes. This doesn't work. People HAVE to get from Point A to Point B at a certain time every day, because their job demands it. It's going to happen, no matter what financial disincentives you put in the way.
Yes, at Amazon.com, though obviously its only limited to searching for their products (which is practically everything). They display "sponsored results" that look just like the results you were searching for. It got so annoying that I configured some special rules in adblock-origin to strip out some of that crap, so I don't even know if they still do that.
I spend a lot of money at Amazon. It's really annoying that they feel they need to monetize my eyeballs as well.
Here's a thought: Elect some actual civic leaders in Seattle instead of the loony crop of social activists and grandstanders currently in leadership positions.
At this moment, Mayor Murray's next big thing is implementing a new soda tax. Oh, but he's now considering taxing diet sodas too, because someone told him that black and poor people drink more regular soda than white and affluent people, and we wouldn't want a racist, regressive tax. And Councilwoman Sawant is actively encouraging protesters to illegally shut down freeways and airports this May Day. Should make for a fun commute. But hey, love those rainbow crosswalks!
The problem with software development is that unless you've done that exact same task before, you really have no idea what's involved. And if you HAD done that exact task before, you wouldn't need to be doing it again, as you could re-use most of your previous work. Unlike with, say, constructing a building, once software is well-built once, it doesn't have to be built a second time, at least within the same company, or if its open source.
Management is also to blame on occasion. I put together a schedule for a videogame project for a major publisher, and the schedule was rejected, saying it wasn't detailed enough. They wanted finer-grained breakdowns of tasks, so instead of one to two week tasks, they wanted one or two day tasks. The only problem: the game wasn't even designed yet - only a rough idea of the genre and licensed property we were using. So, someone (not me, thankfully) dutifully put together a bullshit schedule with fine-grained bullshit tasks, and as the due dates arrived, we simply checked off those tasks in our official project management software.
In the meantime, we had our own spreadsheet with our real tasks and timelines that we used internally, although we tried to match up major milestones as best we could. Since it was a hard deadline, we finished the core game systems as soon as possible, ruthlessly cut extraneous features, and still delivered on time. I'm sure the publisher's producers still think it was their detailed scheduling that kept everything on track.
Sure, that's a good point. And like I said, if that works for you, I've got no beef with it. Me, I program videogames for a living, so I think the title "programmer" or even the more specific "videogame programmer" works better for me.
Language changes over time, whether people like it or not. "Hacking" is what people know as computer crimes ("cracking" never caught on), "literally" now also means "not literally", and 99% of the population will use "begging the question" incorrectly, no matter how many times you-few-who-know-better correct them.
It's probably inevitable that "engineer" will come to encompass more than the traditional engineering professions. I look at the list, and I notice "Management Engineering". Who knew that was a thing?
Not all of us incorrectly use that title. As a rule, I always call myself a "programmer" (or these days, I guess a "senior programmer" is more accurate) rather than a "software engineer". I think it's a more honest description of what I do.
I don't get my panties in a wad about what other programmers call themselves, but I can understand why certified/licensed engineers don't appreciate the watering down of a title they worked hard for. I guess it's the same sort of annoyance programmers feel when someone calls HTML a "programming language".
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't that be "non non non"?
Shooting rockets into space is "cheap advertising"? Damn. Someone should let McDonalds know about this so they can get to work building some McRockets. Surely cheaper than just buying advertising space, right?
The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea.
That depends entirely on what your actual goals of space exploration are. I support both manned and unmanned space exploration, but for two entirely different reasons. Robotic missions are best for long range exploration and scientific discovery. Naturally, you can cut many, many expenses when you don't have to support a human life, or have to worry about a return voyage.
I want humans going into space for perhaps less logical reasons: an innate desire to explore and settle the universe. One could also argue, from a purely logical point of view, that there's no immediate benefit to gathering pure scientific knowledge about other solar bodies if it's not going to have an immediate practical impact on life at home. But then, we humans aren't purely logical creatures.
As such, I think it's probably best to consider ALL space exploration as a very, very long-term investment in our species, one in which we're unlikely to see a real payoff even in our lifetimes. In the very long term, humans are going to be better off if we can leave the planet and establish permanent, independent colonies on other worlds or in space. It's the exact same argument as learning more about the larger universe and how it works. I simply feel it's worth doing for its own sake.
The "homeless problem" in Seattle isn't really represented by transitory homeless, like are describe here, families with women and children, although certainly that does account for some percentage, of course. The bulk of the problem is a bit tougher to deal with: the perpetual homeless, mostly men (roughly 6:1 men/women ratio, with under 1% being minors, out of an estimated 10,000 pop, of which about half are "unsheltered"), many with some form of mental illness, and many with substance addictions. Unless we as a society decide that some people are unable to live responsibly on their own and should be institutionalized, we'll have permanent homeless. Even if you build free housing, you can't force someone to live there if they choose not to, for whatever reason.
So for the past few decades we've been shuffling them around from temporary site to site. Or a few entrepreneurial homeless find little niches in a tent nestled in some bushes in an industrial park somewhere, and no one wants to try to kick them out for fear of getting knifed by a semi-crazy person (and because it's effectively a crime to evict them now). And my sister-in-law has to passes by a homeless man on her way to work who's sunning himself on a public lawn and masturbating to a magazine, and everyone else has a similar story. And on it goes.
It's an ugly truth, and we've been kicking this can down the road for a generation now, because we're apparently too "compassionate" to institutionalize people that need it. Who knows... maybe it *is* more compassionate to let these people live as they want... If there were an easy answer, I suppose we've have already solved it.
So, kudos to Amazon for being willing to help, I guess, but it's not going to put much of a dent in Seattle's larger homeless problem if they're only going to take homeless families. I certainly don't blame them for this, because few people want a large population of the "ugly" homeless housed near them. Seattle's government is really the only ones who have the authority to rectify the situation, and all they've done is to talk endlessly about the problem. A year or two ago the Seattle mayor declared some sort of "homeless state of emergency", but like a lot of things he does, it's more about political perception than actually getting everything done. So far, it seems like its been private charities and organizations that have done the most and best work in helping these people.
No, the question is whether they should be regulated. Appraisals have specific regulations, so if people are using this service in lieu of actual appraisal services...
To me, this seems a bit like Uber claiming "we're not a taxi service" while blatantly offering a slightly different sort of taxi service. Just because they claim "this isn't an appraisal service" doesn't mean it actually *isn't* an appraisal service. They may end up winning if there's a legal definition of "appraisal" that they don't match, of course. I really don't know enough about appraisals or this case to have much of an opinion.
This is a problem I typically have with programming tests. To be perfectly honest, I test horribly. The problem for me is that the way one takes programming tests is always vastly different than the environment in which one normally codes. For me, the worst are whiteboard-type tests. I can't remember when I've ever written actual code on a whiteboard at work (diagrams plenty, code no). The point is, unless you're working in an environment you're accustomed to, the difficulty of the problem is artificially magnified.
More to the point, I don't recall being in many "high stress" programming situations at work, perhaps aside from tracking down some maddening bugs, which requires more patience and doggedness than anything else. No one is going to die if some feature doesn't ship in the next 60 minutes. I do my best coding when I can take my time and calmly think about the problem, rather than giving snap answers. In the working world, if I don't know something technical, I just look it up and do my own research, or ask a colleague if that leads nowhere. And I'm terrible at coming up with the "clever programming tricks" that people seem to love to put on programming tests, but which typically have little value in actual production.
You're welcome to that opinion, but I'm obviously not going to agree with it. And I suspect you'll have about as much success with that narrow redefinition of open source as convincing everyone to call Linux "GNU/Linux".
More reason to avoid open source software.
Nice troll. Or else profoundly ignorant. Although funny how often the two seem to go hand in hand.
But just to clarify, open source != GPL. Not all open source projects are copyleft like the GPL. If people want to distribute their software projects under the GPL, companies need to respect that license. But many open source licenses are much more permissive, meaning they can be used in both open and closed source projects. I personally chose the MIT license for my own open source projects (nice and simple: do what you want, and don't sue me), but there are a lot of other permissive licenses as well, like BSD, Apache, zlib, Boost, etc.
If you want to deliver proprietary software and keep your source closed, you can use permissive licensed software, or you can suck it up and write your own. The entire point of GPL'd software is that it HAS to remain open source. That's why many advocates of free software feel strongly about how the GPL works, because it ensures any contributions or improvements remain open source as well.
Um, yes, I'm aware.
Instead, what you're seeing is the rise of Microsoft's Project Centennial, which is the conversion of Win32 apps of *any* flavor into a Window Store App (essentially, they run in a container), which is how MS Office is added to the store.
Maybe that continuity is limited to their desktop platform. I don't have any experience writing to their mobile platforms. It sounds like you *wish* you didn't either.
"When Microsoft changes the API?" Microsoft, if nothing else, is pretty good about supporting older APIs. Even when they're deprecated, they generally continue to function. Is there some specific example you're thinking of that I can't remember?
Flight sims are a pretty niche market. I used to spend a lot of money on HOTAS controllers (flightstick, throttle, and rudder pedals). The screen was always the limiting factor for any sort of true immersive quality. You really need to be able to look around to acquire and track targets if you're trying to fly a fighter with a bubble canopy. So, for these enthusiasts, I completely believe that VR will do well. And of course, any sort of cockpit-based game seems likely to benefit equally well, like racing sims, mech fighters, space flyers, and even amusement park sims (rollercoaster and ride previews).
One of these days, when the price drops to something reasonable, I might try pick it up again. For everyone else though, it currently requires a monster computer (although this will improve in time), and outside of the gee-whiz factor, there's really not a compelling reason to embrace it.
So, yeah, phasing out Win32 in favor of Windows store apps is Microsoft's wet dream, of course, as you see with Windows 10 S.
The problems is this: no one is writing UWP apps. The idea used to at least make a tiny bit of sense when there was a promise (however slight) that MS might have a foothold in the mobile market. Now that UWP covers only Windows 10 and Xbox One, there's not as compelling an argument to make for its "cross-platform" capabilities. So, companies that want to target Windows only still write native or C# Win32 apps. Anyone who wants true cross-platform will probably use another technology altogether. Essentially, UWP is sputtering out.
Instead, what you're seeing is the rise of Microsoft's Project Centennial, which is the conversion of Win32 apps of *any* flavor into a Window Store App (essentially, they run in a container), which is how MS Office is added to the store. So, as you see UWP != Windows Store Apps anymore. This provides some of the benefit of store apps, like increased security and ease of distribution / updates / installation (something many Linux distros have enjoyed for a while), without having to completely rewrite applications.
We'll see if this makes a difference in the long-term strategy of getting software in the store. I remain skeptical, and believe Windows native applications are far too entrenched in the ecosystem to ever realistically be abandoned. At the very least, MS will always need a "Pro" version that you can actually use for software development (and to run all that pesky "legacy" software), so there's really little chance you'll ever see a complete abandonment of the traditional Windows desktop in the foreseeable future.
They seems to be rather brain-dead when it comes to designing interfaces. The new Xbox Amazon streaming app was re-designed a while ago, and of all things, they managed to screw up the transport controls. All they had to do was copy any one of the dozen other examples out there, but they apparently had to be "special".
Can you imagine the astronomical cost (no pun intended) of a deep space mission were this "miles from California" tax actually implemented?
Best quote:
The Franchise Tax Board proposal said certainty about tax treatment “will lead to increased activity in the industry and will foster an atmosphere of growth and prosperity once present during the golden age of California’s aviation industry, thereby creating jobs as the industry thrives in this state.”
I'm curious... do they have the authority to even tax what occurs outside of their state territory?
Well, good luck with that California.
You know, I disagree vehemently with those who proclaim OO an abject failure. But I'm always a bit bemused with people who feel the need to build OO into everything, whether it needs it or not. The trick, of course, is to use it as it makes sense.
One of the problems with OO is that poorly designed programs can be much worse to grok the logic and flow of than poorly designed procedural programs, mostly because of how scattered the logic can be throughout an object hierarchy.
A much more modern* trend is to avoid deep class hierarchies whenever practical, preferring instead to try to use smaller, more reusable objects that are only responsible for a single task, and use composition of objects. This allows you to more easily test each individual component and assure correctness of behavior, and then build on that behavior. These days, a lot of my classes are very shallow, either a single class, or perhaps derived from an interface class to hide implementation details when necessary.
Class hierarchies still have their place on occasion. There are still cases when you must manage a number of types of related-but-different objects with a lot of common properties. But if you keep this paradigm to a minimum, you'll be a lot happier with OOP, and keep your code more manageable.
* If you consider the last 15 years or so "modern"
I think a more honest answer is that they're afraid of ebooks cutting into their traditional business market. It's the same reason digital games cost as much as physical media. They don't want to piss off the retailers (who can retaliate by not displaying their wares as prominently), and in truth, it's not in their best interest to undercut them either.
Digital is frightening to publishers, because they well understand that the cost of copying a digital copy is $0, and has no intrinsic value by itself. As such, many of them have been dragged into the digital age kicking, screaming, colluding, and price-fixing...
Here in Seattle's 405 loop, our DOT added tolling to the HOV lanes with this sort of variable pricing about a year and a half ago. Result? $10 for a one-way trip during rush hour for just 15-20 miles or so (not exactly sure of the distance). They hit the max price they promised the public, and was STILL too crowded.
Please learn from our mistakes. This doesn't work. People HAVE to get from Point A to Point B at a certain time every day, because their job demands it. It's going to happen, no matter what financial disincentives you put in the way.
Yes, at Amazon.com, though obviously its only limited to searching for their products (which is practically everything). They display "sponsored results" that look just like the results you were searching for. It got so annoying that I configured some special rules in adblock-origin to strip out some of that crap, so I don't even know if they still do that.
I spend a lot of money at Amazon. It's really annoying that they feel they need to monetize my eyeballs as well.
Here's a thought: Elect some actual civic leaders in Seattle instead of the loony crop of social activists and grandstanders currently in leadership positions.
At this moment, Mayor Murray's next big thing is implementing a new soda tax. Oh, but he's now considering taxing diet sodas too, because someone told him that black and poor people drink more regular soda than white and affluent people, and we wouldn't want a racist, regressive tax. And Councilwoman Sawant is actively encouraging protesters to illegally shut down freeways and airports this May Day. Should make for a fun commute. But hey, love those rainbow crosswalks!
the CEOs of the outsourcing firms have been caught a few times complaining about lazy Americans.
Gosh, it's not like they have any incentive to portray American workers as lazy, right? So surely it MUST be true.
The problem with software development is that unless you've done that exact same task before, you really have no idea what's involved. And if you HAD done that exact task before, you wouldn't need to be doing it again, as you could re-use most of your previous work. Unlike with, say, constructing a building, once software is well-built once, it doesn't have to be built a second time, at least within the same company, or if its open source.
Management is also to blame on occasion. I put together a schedule for a videogame project for a major publisher, and the schedule was rejected, saying it wasn't detailed enough. They wanted finer-grained breakdowns of tasks, so instead of one to two week tasks, they wanted one or two day tasks. The only problem: the game wasn't even designed yet - only a rough idea of the genre and licensed property we were using. So, someone (not me, thankfully) dutifully put together a bullshit schedule with fine-grained bullshit tasks, and as the due dates arrived, we simply checked off those tasks in our official project management software.
In the meantime, we had our own spreadsheet with our real tasks and timelines that we used internally, although we tried to match up major milestones as best we could. Since it was a hard deadline, we finished the core game systems as soon as possible, ruthlessly cut extraneous features, and still delivered on time. I'm sure the publisher's producers still think it was their detailed scheduling that kept everything on track.
Next up: shocking story of wasteful millionaire that *doesn't* spend hours clipping coupons to save pennies.
Sure, that's a good point. And like I said, if that works for you, I've got no beef with it. Me, I program videogames for a living, so I think the title "programmer" or even the more specific "videogame programmer" works better for me.
Language changes over time, whether people like it or not. "Hacking" is what people know as computer crimes ("cracking" never caught on), "literally" now also means "not literally", and 99% of the population will use "begging the question" incorrectly, no matter how many times you-few-who-know-better correct them.
It's probably inevitable that "engineer" will come to encompass more than the traditional engineering professions. I look at the list, and I notice "Management Engineering". Who knew that was a thing?
Not all of us incorrectly use that title. As a rule, I always call myself a "programmer" (or these days, I guess a "senior programmer" is more accurate) rather than a "software engineer". I think it's a more honest description of what I do.
I don't get my panties in a wad about what other programmers call themselves, but I can understand why certified/licensed engineers don't appreciate the watering down of a title they worked hard for. I guess it's the same sort of annoyance programmers feel when someone calls HTML a "programming language".