Also, it is not against "processes" (with small "p"). A build system is itself a process, a source control software also enforces a process. The manifesto is against Process with a capital P. It is hard to explain
I don't think its really hard to explain, though I think the best explanations I've seen are in books that focus on "lean" methods rather than "agile" ones (which, really, aren't all that different; the principles are largely similar, though "lean" seems to focus on an enterprise wide approach that lean software development applies to software development, while "agile" seems to focus on software development with applications to the broader enterprise particularly the interface between software development and business):
It is important to have clear processes that people follow, because otherwise you have wasteful churn as extra effort is spent doing everything ad hoc. But you have to respect the people doing the work to the point where they are expected, on encountering a problem with the existing process, to call a halt, propose and test an alternative, and then that alternative, if it is an improvement, is adopted as the new process.
That is, just as software being developed needs to be developed in small increments and able to respond to emergent discovery of requirements, so the processes used in software development (and, really, throughout the enterprise) need to be able to be adapted rapidly in response to emergent requirements. And, to do that, the people that do the work have to own the processes by which the work is done.
This is opposed to devotion to enshrined Processes that are treated as received wisdom and not subject to question or revision by the people actually involved in doing the work.
It doesn't matter which methodology you use, if your goal is constantly changing you won't get anything finished, almost "by definition".
If you are really doing agile, you are scoping your iterations so that each iteration is a complete unit of work that delivers value to the customer whether or not the requirements for any later unit of work change (or whether any later unit of work even happens at all.)
A major part of the value of Agile is this aspect, which is important for both assuring quick delivery of value (even though it is small increments of value), and manages the risk associated with change.
If you are still doing big-bang, all-or-nothing projects, but applying internal iterations that don't deliver independent value as a technique for organizing work as an alternative to waterfall-style development, you are doing something that looks like Agile within the technical staff, but doesn't look at all like Agile externally, and particularly (while it may be somewhat more efficient in terms of completing a big-bang project, and may have some value in that regard) doesn't realize the principal benefits of Agile methods in terms of delivering value quickly and providing the real ability to mitigate the costs of changing requirements.
On the other hand, its also probably as "Agile" as many shops are able to implement, since its as much as you can get without the pull to change culture outside of the development shop. Which is why the real need isn't agile software development but agile, or lean, business methods more generally. Having software development being "agile" while the rest of the enterprise (or even, just the interface between "business" and "software development") isn't acheives, well, not quite nothing, but a lot less than having the whole system geared to adapt to change effectively.
You certainly can have a legal system without a state or government.
You can have a set of rules without a state of government, but its not a legal system in any meaningful sense unless it is backed by the compulsory power of an agency that acts as a state or government, even if it calls itself something else (e.g., a church.)
A divided congress is probably a good thing for people who don't like random horseshit one-sided laws.
But a bad thing for people who are in a country facing real problems, and what government to take something like a strategic approach to addressing those problems, rather than either doing nothing or adopting self-defeating, incoherent policies.
The economy got fucked when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House in 2006.
The economy was fucked in the recession of 2001, and got more fucked in the "recovery" after that recession, which started more than 5 years before Nancy Pelosi became speaker in 2007, because of federal tax and other policies which resulted in the bottom roughly 2/3 of the income distribution seeing decline during the "recovery", while the only segment seeing gains was the top 1%. This hollowed out the economy so that, when the housing market collapsed (which hollowing out the economy helped happen, though the scams in the financial industry -- which Republican-driven deregulation in the late 1990s [which, to be fair, Bill Clinton signed rather than fighting] made possible) there was nothing else strong in the economy, and the whole thing came crumbling down.
It's a big challenge for Obama - he's more "ideologically pure" than Clinton was
That's ridiculous. The reason Obama was able to get a healthcare reform bill passed where Clinton failed is precisely because Obama was more willing to compromise on the basic structure of reform (there is a reason that much of the progressive base calls the plan that passed "insurance reform, not health care reform" and "a sellout to the insurance industry".)
Certainly, he's been more devoted to advancing new legislative initiatives that serve liberal goals than Clinton was after the Republican takeover in 1994, but he's been less "ideologically pure" in his approach to doing so than Clinton was when he had a Democratic Congress (which is saying a lot, because Clinton was pretty much the archetypical Democratic Leadership Council moderate, compromising Democrat to start with.)
If he wants to be reelected, he'll have to run to the right.
More likely, he'll have to do what every successful President seeking reelection with at least one house in the hands of the other party has done, and run strongly against whatever that opposition majority is doing.
I don't think this will compete with much of anything; there's no real market for Chrome OS, and I doubt there ever will be. As I understand it, the target audience is people who:
Type too much to use a tablet. Only use web apps.
Well, yes and no.
Chrome OS, yes, only support apps that run through the Chrome browser. But one of Google's focuses with the Chrome browser, even before they announced Chrome OS, was to enable browser-hosted apps to do things that, at the time Chrome was introduced, only native apps could do. Browser based storage (now part of HTML5), pushing javascript execution speeds, Native Client, and all the other features Chrome have pushed have been about enabling the browser as a full-function application platform.
Anybody who doesn't type enough to need a built-in keyboard would probably find a tablet (either iPad or Android-based) easier to use (not to mention more capable due to native app availability)
Yeah, if you don't need a keyboard, a tablet is more useful than a netbook (of course, a number of vendors are putting together Chrome OS-powered tablets, too.) As far as capability, what can native apps do on iPad or Android that Chrome OS apps can't do?
and since you can use a keyboard with most of those devices for when you need to type frequently, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose a web-only device like these.
A netbook is a much more convenient form factor than a tablet + a separate keyboard if you have to type frequently. As for web-only, well, perhaps that will be a limitation that impacts some users, but, again, Google has been working hard with Chrome and Chrome OS to reduce the distinction between the browser and any other application platform.
So, this Taiwan-based company gets their product to market first, before acer and hp. I wonder why?
Like the rumored Google-branded product (made by the Taiwan-based Inventec), the rumored Acer and HP products that are supposed to follow it are also made by a Taiwan-based company (Quanta).
Strictly speaking, they're legal in nature. It's possible (though unlikely) to have a legal system in the absence of a political system
Strictly speaking, it is not possible to have a legal system without a political (="of or relating to the state, government, the body politic, public administration, policy-making, etc") system.
Why should a crime that involves computers suddenly have a special category, when other forms of crime do not?
So, your argument takes as a premise that we don't already have "property crimes", "drug crimes", "organized crime", "violent crime", "sex crimes", "financial crime", "war crimes", "crimes against humanity", and all kinds of other specialized subdivisions of crime besides "cyber crime"?
It is voting to maximize your expected value from government. Whether that's a difference between a small positive value and a large positive value, a negative value and a positive value, or a large negative value and a small negative value, its all, in net, the same.
Others — most of us, in fact — refer to phishing, which is the first step in theft of real money from real people and institutions, as "cyber crime." It's time for that to stop...This isn't just email. This isn't a war. This isn't "cyber." This is crime.
Should we also stop calling crime that affects property "property crime", and crime that involves violent acts "violent crime", and crime that involves criminal organizations "organized crime".
Because, you know, all that is crime, too. In fact, as with "cyber-crime", the fact that it is crime is why it has "crime" in its name. Adding a more specific adjective to a noun doesn't negate the basic meaning of a noun.
I wonder if the folks over at the W3C were recently gifted with free MSDN subscriptions...
No, instead Microsoft just used the submission process establish for HTML5 and handed them a set of tests Microsoft wrote to highlight the features of HTML5 currently supported by IE.
Surprisingly enough, IE does pretty well on those tests.
Dear W3C, there exists a good test for HTML5 already: http://html5test.com/ [html5test.com] - use that F*sake.
W3C has a test submission process for HTML5 conformance tests. If someone submitted those, they might get used. AFAICT, the tests to date have been submitted by Microsoft and have about the same coverage (presumably, because they are the same tests) as the tests Microsoft did in house and used to announce itself as the most HTML5 compliant browser a while back.
IE 9 is currently the most HTML5 compatible browser - but are they only testing the new HTML5 features?
From the coverage of the tests, they seem to be pretty close to the features that were tested in Microsoft's own compliance tests, which were then submitted to the W3C for inclusion in the W3Cs test suite.
The new fedoraproject.org site uses 4 icons (freedom, friends, features, first) in the same colors as the Windows logo
They are not in the same shades as the windows logo, they are only the same "color" on a loose assessment.
that can be pieced together like the Windows icon.
For very loose values of "like the Windows icon". They are four icons that could (as could any four icons) be placed in a 2x2 grid, but if you do that, it won't look like the Windows icon, because the four icons on the same shapes as the colored regions in the Windows icon.
Kind of odd.
Its actually not really that odd that the display of four colored icons would chose colors that are shades of red, yellow, green, and blue. (For an explanation, see the color opponent process theory.)
As a scientist who has a fair bit of coding experience, including LabVIEW, ++ this.
What particularly annoys me about visual code like LabVIEW is that you can't diff. So change tracking is a pain in the arse, and forget distributed development.
This no doubt may be a problem with LabVIEW, but since the visual "code" shown in the interface has to be linearized somehow to be processed, there's no reason an environment with a visual code interface couldn't support diff (and translate the linear diff into, e.g., highlighting, etc., on the visual code display.)
Visual environments are inherently just interfaces to underlying linear code, and the only reason they don't support equivalents of tools that exist for linear code is because no one has bothered to develop the equivalent of those tools.
Of course, different people have different degrees of proficiency with visual environments vs. linear code, so it would certainly be good for any visual environment to also provide direct access to the linear code as well, with no bias as to input mechanism (that is, anything that is syntactically valid in the linear representation should be representable in the visual environment, and vice versa.)
In any event, it would make good sense for programming environments to be able to handle Unicode source.
At the same time, it would be sensible for programming languages not to require code to use characters that are not easily entered from common keyboard layouts.
Note that this is exactly the state already with some common programming languages: e.g., Ruby from 1.9 accepts source in any of a wide variety of encodings, including the various Unicode encodings, and can accept identifiers in characters that aren't available in ASCII.
But none of the standard syntax or identifiers in the core or standard-library use such characters.
In many states, third party candidates have to jump over a major hurdle to even get on the ballot.
Ballot access, while a real issue, isn't the big problem minor parties face. The major reason minor parties aren't viable even where several of them have permanent ballot access like the major parties is because, for almost every elected office in the US, elections are done with vote-for-one ballots in single-member districts where the winner is selected either by plurality or by majority with a runoff between the top two vote-getters in the event there is no majority on the first ballot.
Consequently, any informed voter concerned about the results of the immediate election has a very strong incentive to vote for the least objectionable of the two candidates that appear to have the broadest support going into the election.
Change the electoral rules to eliminate that incentive, and third parties would be viable. Preference voting with almost any remotely sensible victory rule would be a step in the right direction. Combining that with small (3-5 member) multimember districts for legislative and similar bodies (using Single Transferrable Vote or some similar mechanism) where single winners aren't a necessity would go even further.
Heck, with preference voting without a loser-elimination step, using the first two-candidates past the majority threshold as the first and second winners in Governor/Lt.Governor and similar elections would make sense. Note that multiwinner schemes like that and STV in small multimember districts for legislative elections not only increases the number of viable parties, but also increases the candidate choice within each party at the general election (as each party is likely to run as many candidates as seats contested.)
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Also, it is not against "processes" (with small "p"). A build system is itself a process, a source control software also enforces a process. The manifesto is against Process with a capital P. It is hard to explain
I don't think its really hard to explain, though I think the best explanations I've seen are in books that focus on "lean" methods rather than "agile" ones (which, really, aren't all that different; the principles are largely similar, though "lean" seems to focus on an enterprise wide approach that lean software development applies to software development, while "agile" seems to focus on software development with applications to the broader enterprise particularly the interface between software development and business):
It is important to have clear processes that people follow, because otherwise you have wasteful churn as extra effort is spent doing everything ad hoc. But you have to respect the people doing the work to the point where they are expected, on encountering a problem with the existing process, to call a halt, propose and test an alternative, and then that alternative, if it is an improvement, is adopted as the new process.
That is, just as software being developed needs to be developed in small increments and able to respond to emergent discovery of requirements, so the processes used in software development (and, really, throughout the enterprise) need to be able to be adapted rapidly in response to emergent requirements. And, to do that, the people that do the work have to own the processes by which the work is done.
This is opposed to devotion to enshrined Processes that are treated as received wisdom and not subject to question or revision by the people actually involved in doing the work.
If you are really doing agile, you are scoping your iterations so that each iteration is a complete unit of work that delivers value to the customer whether or not the requirements for any later unit of work change (or whether any later unit of work even happens at all.)
A major part of the value of Agile is this aspect, which is important for both assuring quick delivery of value (even though it is small increments of value), and manages the risk associated with change.
If you are still doing big-bang, all-or-nothing projects, but applying internal iterations that don't deliver independent value as a technique for organizing work as an alternative to waterfall-style development, you are doing something that looks like Agile within the technical staff, but doesn't look at all like Agile externally, and particularly (while it may be somewhat more efficient in terms of completing a big-bang project, and may have some value in that regard) doesn't realize the principal benefits of Agile methods in terms of delivering value quickly and providing the real ability to mitigate the costs of changing requirements.
On the other hand, its also probably as "Agile" as many shops are able to implement, since its as much as you can get without the pull to change culture outside of the development shop. Which is why the real need isn't agile software development but agile, or lean, business methods more generally. Having software development being "agile" while the rest of the enterprise (or even, just the interface between "business" and "software development") isn't acheives, well, not quite nothing, but a lot less than having the whole system geared to adapt to change effectively.
You can have a set of rules without a state of government, but its not a legal system in any meaningful sense unless it is backed by the compulsory power of an agency that acts as a state or government, even if it calls itself something else (e.g., a church.)
But a bad thing for people who are in a country facing real problems, and what government to take something like a strategic approach to addressing those problems, rather than either doing nothing or adopting self-defeating, incoherent policies.
The economy was fucked in the recession of 2001, and got more fucked in the "recovery" after that recession, which started more than 5 years before Nancy Pelosi became speaker in 2007, because of federal tax and other policies which resulted in the bottom roughly 2/3 of the income distribution seeing decline during the "recovery", while the only segment seeing gains was the top 1%. This hollowed out the economy so that, when the housing market collapsed (which hollowing out the economy helped happen, though the scams in the financial industry -- which Republican-driven deregulation in the late 1990s [which, to be fair, Bill Clinton signed rather than fighting] made possible) there was nothing else strong in the economy, and the whole thing came crumbling down.
That's ridiculous. The reason Obama was able to get a healthcare reform bill passed where Clinton failed is precisely because Obama was more willing to compromise on the basic structure of reform (there is a reason that much of the progressive base calls the plan that passed "insurance reform, not health care reform" and "a sellout to the insurance industry".)
Certainly, he's been more devoted to advancing new legislative initiatives that serve liberal goals than Clinton was after the Republican takeover in 1994, but he's been less "ideologically pure" in his approach to doing so than Clinton was when he had a Democratic Congress (which is saying a lot, because Clinton was pretty much the archetypical Democratic Leadership Council moderate, compromising Democrat to start with.)
More likely, he'll have to do what every successful President seeking reelection with at least one house in the hands of the other party has done, and run strongly against whatever that opposition majority is doing.
Your source says "the stock market". The stock market is not "the economy".
(If you look at personal income, every segment of the economy does better under Democratic Presidents, period.)
Well, yes and no.
Chrome OS, yes, only support apps that run through the Chrome browser. But one of Google's focuses with the Chrome browser, even before they announced Chrome OS, was to enable browser-hosted apps to do things that, at the time Chrome was introduced, only native apps could do. Browser based storage (now part of HTML5), pushing javascript execution speeds, Native Client, and all the other features Chrome have pushed have been about enabling the browser as a full-function application platform.
Yeah, if you don't need a keyboard, a tablet is more useful than a netbook (of course, a number of vendors are putting together Chrome OS-powered tablets, too.) As far as capability, what can native apps do on iPad or Android that Chrome OS apps can't do?
A netbook is a much more convenient form factor than a tablet + a separate keyboard if you have to type frequently. As for web-only, well, perhaps that will be a limitation that impacts some users, but, again, Google has been working hard with Chrome and Chrome OS to reduce the distinction between the browser and any other application platform.
Like the rumored Google-branded product (made by the Taiwan-based Inventec), the rumored Acer and HP products that are supposed to follow it are also made by a Taiwan-based company (Quanta).
Strictly speaking, it is not possible to have a legal system without a political (="of or relating to the state, government, the body politic, public administration, policy-making, etc") system.
So, your argument takes as a premise that we don't already have "property crimes", "drug crimes", "organized crime", "violent crime", "sex crimes", "financial crime", "war crimes", "crimes against humanity", and all kinds of other specialized subdivisions of crime besides "cyber crime"?
Would you perhaps like to reconsider that?
All distinctions involving crime, including (perhaps most especially!) the distinction between "crime" and "not-crime", are political in nature.
It is voting to maximize your expected value from government. Whether that's a difference between a small positive value and a large positive value, a negative value and a positive value, or a large negative value and a small negative value, its all, in net, the same.
Should we also stop calling crime that affects property "property crime", and crime that involves violent acts "violent crime", and crime that involves criminal organizations "organized crime".
Because, you know, all that is crime, too. In fact, as with "cyber-crime", the fact that it is crime is why it has "crime" in its name. Adding a more specific adjective to a noun doesn't negate the basic meaning of a noun.
No, instead Microsoft just used the submission process establish for HTML5 and handed them a set of tests Microsoft wrote to highlight the features of HTML5 currently supported by IE.
Surprisingly enough, IE does pretty well on those tests.
W3C has a test submission process for HTML5 conformance tests. If someone submitted those, they might get used. AFAICT, the tests to date have been submitted by Microsoft and have about the same coverage (presumably, because they are the same tests) as the tests Microsoft did in house and used to announce itself as the most HTML5 compliant browser a while back.
Not with the standard, just with the conformance test suite.
Well, at leat "almost fully compatible with" the elements of the standard covered by the first set of tests included in the conformance test suite.
Which tests were submitted to the W3C by...guess who?
(hint: see here.)
From the coverage of the tests, they seem to be pretty close to the features that were tested in Microsoft's own compliance tests, which were then submitted to the W3C for inclusion in the W3Cs test suite.
To highlight this: see here.
Notice that the only directory here is "Microsoft"?
They are not in the same shades as the windows logo, they are only the same "color" on a loose assessment.
For very loose values of "like the Windows icon". They are four icons that could (as could any four icons) be placed in a 2x2 grid, but if you do that, it won't look like the Windows icon, because the four icons on the same shapes as the colored regions in the Windows icon.
Its actually not really that odd that the display of four colored icons would chose colors that are shades of red, yellow, green, and blue. (For an explanation, see the color opponent process theory.)
In states where changes to the electoral system require action by elected representatives, that's probably true.
In states where those changes could be produced by citizen initiative, its less true.
IME, people that have complex ideas to communicate and the available tools to draw frequently draw diagrams to communicate in day-to-day life.
And, often, people that lack handy tools use gestures to convey visual representation that the viewers mind will translate into a visual picture.
This no doubt may be a problem with LabVIEW, but since the visual "code" shown in the interface has to be linearized somehow to be processed, there's no reason an environment with a visual code interface couldn't support diff (and translate the linear diff into, e.g., highlighting, etc., on the visual code display.)
Visual environments are inherently just interfaces to underlying linear code, and the only reason they don't support equivalents of tools that exist for linear code is because no one has bothered to develop the equivalent of those tools.
Of course, different people have different degrees of proficiency with visual environments vs. linear code, so it would certainly be good for any visual environment to also provide direct access to the linear code as well, with no bias as to input mechanism (that is, anything that is syntactically valid in the linear representation should be representable in the visual environment, and vice versa.)
At the same time, it would be sensible for programming languages not to require code to use characters that are not easily entered from common keyboard layouts.
Note that this is exactly the state already with some common programming languages: e.g., Ruby from 1.9 accepts source in any of a wide variety of encodings, including the various Unicode encodings, and can accept identifiers in characters that aren't available in ASCII.
But none of the standard syntax or identifiers in the core or standard-library use such characters.
Ballot access, while a real issue, isn't the big problem minor parties face. The major reason minor parties aren't viable even where several of them have permanent ballot access like the major parties is because, for almost every elected office in the US, elections are done with vote-for-one ballots in single-member districts where the winner is selected either by plurality or by majority with a runoff between the top two vote-getters in the event there is no majority on the first ballot.
Consequently, any informed voter concerned about the results of the immediate election has a very strong incentive to vote for the least objectionable of the two candidates that appear to have the broadest support going into the election.
Change the electoral rules to eliminate that incentive, and third parties would be viable. Preference voting with almost any remotely sensible victory rule would be a step in the right direction. Combining that with small (3-5 member) multimember districts for legislative and similar bodies (using Single Transferrable Vote or some similar mechanism) where single winners aren't a necessity would go even further.
Heck, with preference voting without a loser-elimination step, using the first two-candidates past the majority threshold as the first and second winners in Governor/Lt.Governor and similar elections would make sense. Note that multiwinner schemes like that and STV in small multimember districts for legislative elections not only increases the number of viable parties, but also increases the candidate choice within each party at the general election (as each party is likely to run as many candidates as seats contested.)