I use greylisting to reduce spam volume, and I whitelist outgoing mail servers for domains that a) have trouble with greylisting and b) publish SPF records. In other words, I use SPF given existing trust for a particular domain, but only if not relying on SPF causes problems. I thought I hadn't set up SPF records for my own (vanity) domains, but apparently I have... not that I particularly notice. It's just not a big deal.
A decent quality scientific calculator and enough training with it that they can start using to discover the joys of solving problems. I think I had my first solar powered scientific calc when I was about ten. A handful of years later in high school I moved up to a more complicated graphing model. I'm sad to say I don't have the original calculator but I still have the latter. It served me well through high school, college admissions exams, and then a bachelors degree in the sciences. Of course these days I write boring but comparatively lucrative line of business web apps, so the most complicated math I ever have reason to do can be done with gcalctool in simple mode.
I won't get into the emacs-vs-vi wars of TI/HP/whatever, but get them a solid useful tool that can be used for most any science endeavor and you'll have done them a favor, imho.
(And yeah this might not be appropriate for the 7 year old, but I'd wager the 9 year old is mature enough or on the cusp of it...)
My point isn't that Eve is a paragon of perfect architecture, it's that the system works. Geographic decomposition is not so flawed that e.g. it requires you to shard your game and set up server queues that ultimately piss people off.
I'm also not arguing that it's the only or best way to go, but it may very well be right for a particular game anyway.
Heh, no. I'm an MMOG server programmer, and I know a fair number of others, and a lot of us have backgrounds in distributed computing, with plenty spending time in academia before being lured into games. That game companies mostly hire people with game design degrees is a falsehood propagated by the institutions that offer those degrees. For one thing, there simply aren't enough people going through those schools to feed the industry's need for fresh meat; for another, the quality of programmers fresh out of any school is generally insufficient.
As for fundamental design flaws... eh. I've heard plenty of that kind of talk from (for example) Project Darkstar; it's easy to say that, it's a lot harder to actually do the research to understand all the options and the inherent flaws in each. Interestingly, even EVE Online - lauded for its one-world approach - uses geographic decomposition too, and it works just fine most of the time (and now they've got a system for dedicating special hardware to the corner cases).
I'll admit I have yet to hear anything positive about AMD/ATI's proprietary Linux driver, and it's been a while since anyone seemed to say nice things about the open source X.org driver either. Mine has integrated Intel graphics, and it works great; I can't play 3D games, but a) I program on this laptop, not game, and b) it runs Linux; how high should your hopes really be?
I previously had a T21, and yes, the keyboard was a little better - I guess your mileage may vary how much worse you think it is.
Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but the original poster seemed pretty clear about the intent to run Windows: this may bother you, but that doesn't mean it's a problem for someone else. For myself, I never intended to run Windows (much less Vista) on this laptop, but it seemed like an acceptable tradeoff for the rest of the laptop.
I hadn't thought about alternative keyboard layouts; that sucks. It's definitely something to take into account. Similarly I can't say anything about Lenovo support; definitely something else to take into account.
I'm typing this response from a Thinkpad R500
Thinkpad docks are solid and have been around a long time, as have hotswap bays; some stuff like memory card readers are already present. Ubuntu works very well with both suspend and hibernate, many models support dual monitors via the dock (I think mine supports dual external monitors via the VGA and DisplayPort connectors, but haven't tested more than one external monitor; according to documentation two external monitors via the dock aren't supported), and the built-in LCD's resolution is extremely reasonable at 1680x1050.
And, of course, the keyboard is one of the best in the business (although I've heard vi users complain about the placement of the Esc key, getting proper spacing between F1 and Esc on a laptop isn't easy).
You know the magic has gone out when everything is reduced to a dichotomy between miniscule speed increases and enormous manageability increases. Of course the answer is obvious when it's phrased that way; of course it's a false dichotomy. At the very least, "readability" is in the eye of the beholder; performance, usually a bit more objective.
Perhaps that's why it's not glorious work anymore.
...not that I ever looked at it as glorious stuff to begin with...
The ScrumMasters responsibility is to support the Organization to implement Scrum, thats all.
Right, of course. They are, as scrummasters say, involved in the project. They aren't fully committed the way the developers are, the ones who could lose their jobs if the project goes south.
And that's where the snake oil alarms go off; the scrummaster is someone that, according to scrum, is committed to the project in a visceral way. It's just not true, and it's dishonest right around the part where the scrum evangelist's job is on the line.
As for my own situation... I'm barely affected by scrum at all; supposedly we do it, but I can get my job done without caring what process is being used. I notice that we have more meetings now than when I wasn't in an organization doing scrum, and that interrupts my programming time; but overall it doesn't have much noticeable effect of any kind.
Scrum doesn't slow our project down, it doesn't accelerate it; it has zero effect. And that's the most damning thing - scrum doesn't matter. If it doesn't matter, why bother buying books, going through training, hiring more people... why spend all that money?
So then what's the product owner? How many different titles and concurrent positions need to be held by facilitators at once?
...if [test-driven development] is cut from Scrum, the project is doomed to fail...
I'm not going to argue against the value of test-driven development, but lack of test-driven development doesn't doom any project. Letting bugs get out the door can doom a project, but there are many-many ways of preventing that other than compulsive unit tests.
I have written a thesis about this problem - almost all project that "used agile development" methods and then failed, were trying to cut too many corners and modified a developed methodology breaking it in the process.
Yes, yes, if a project is agile but modified the Holy Process as defined in some book, and then failed, the failure is because they didn't follow the process. I covered this already. However, you make clear even in this one sentence that you aren't prepared to argue the opposite - that a survey of successful agile projects will show them using scrum (or XP, or...) precisely and without modification. The danger, as you put it, comes from cutting "too many" corners.
Simple question: do you agree that scrum masters should be fired if their project fails? After all, clearly the project wasn't following scrum properly, and it's the scrum master's job to make sure they are, so clearly the job was not done. In fact, the scrum master's failure caused the failure of the entire project! So, what should be done with the scrum master of a failed project?
I've worked with scrum, and it sucks. It only works if people work together, are largely self-organising, and don't deliberately chuck roadblocks into other teams paths to get them off their own joblist.
I believe the latter of those in particular gives away pretty bad organizational problems, scrum or no. They would probably manifest themselves just in a different way if you tried to do things different on the surface.
And a team that works together, is largely self-organizing, and doesn't deliberately screw other teams is worth its weight in gold without scrum, too.
You actually have to do it more or less properly for it to work.
No, you really don't. You need the other ingredients: a self-organizing team that works together and with the other groups in a company. You add scrum to that, you've got a great team. You add a few bits of scrum to that, you've got a great team. You add some standard corporate culture to that, you've got a great team. Are you seeing the pattern here?
I'm a big fan of a team following good processes (testing your work, gathering feedback, being realistic in schedules), I'm a big fan of a team being invested in their work, and I'm a big fan of open communication. Scrum argues for some of the same things, and it's good that these scrum proponents are arguing for all of these things. But you don't need a scrum master to get the good stuff, and I don't think scrum will turn a bad team into a good team - it will just turn a team that isn't doing scrum into a team that isn't doing scrum right.
No, it's not. "I know you tried to do scrum, but you had a failed project, so you did it wrong."
In my experience, scrum is just snake oil. I don't think it's very good to begin with, but worse is that a) everyone modifies scrum to some extent to fit their organization and b) if a project using slightly modified scrum fails, it was because they modified scrum.
Of course, the solution always seems to be hire more good scrum masters, who are "rarer then you would think!" That's really the part that is snake oil, in my mind. It's a business model for consultants, and the trainers of those consultants. This is even more clear with the scrum model's insistence that a scrum master has a "pig" role.
Maybe all the scrum organizations should promote the idea that every time a scrum project fails (yes, even with modifications, which is how it always works), the scrum master gets fired. Here, "fails" should probably mean over budget or over schedule, by a dollar or a day. That might give the scrum master a role where they feel like their bacon is on the line. But of course that won't happen; scrum masters aren't team leads (as you point out), they're not managers, they're just coaches... one more person not doing the actual work who has to be involved, but with less accountability and more power than anyone else in the project.
Depending on what you're browsing. SomethingAwful? NYTimes.com? Stack Overflow? It can't hurt to encrypt the traffic and make it harder to sniff. Banking, buying stuff from Amazon? Sure, PKI is important there to maintain a chain of trust that makes it harder for your identity and money to be stolen.
Right now, we have the second half, and that's it.
Why is there any unencrypted HTTP traffic going around? Encrypt everything, absolutely everything, traveling over the wire. Then, when it's important, you should also worry about whether the machine on the other end is who they say they are.
To program is to be.
