Yes, this Daniel Pearl.

I can understand your point of view, but it doesn't change the fact the Japanese government had begun the process of feeling for surrender. What ground soldiers did is separate from what the politicians wanted to do. Did LBJ want American soldiers massacring civillians at Mai Lai? No, but insane shit happens in war. The soldiers that tortured and murdered your grandfather were war criminals, and one can only hope that those Japanese soldiers either committed sepiku or were brutally beaten & killed by American marines.

I find Stanislaw a little hard to read at times (i.e., boring), but after reading a couple of his books from the library and ready to give up on him, I finally read Solaris. And wow, Solaris is different from the movies. It's not really about the planet, or what happens to George Clooney on the planet. It's a question about "Can science ever really know the unknowable?" The book is more like a future history of research into the planet Solaris and the failure of humanity to understand the how or why of the planet. Humanity meets an intelligence (Solaris), and neither side can understand or communicate with each other. Very haunting for me.

Seconding "End of Eternity". In fact, I was scanning the replies looking for just this reply. :-)

I think you misunderstand the term audiophile here. Originally, it did mean someone like you who liked good sound. Now, it means a pretentious half-twit who measures the quality of his system by the price he paid than the performance it delivers.

There is studio equipment, which is awesome and any true audiophile would have bought, and there is Best Buy/Amazon.com/etc. "audiophile" equipment which is actually sub-par compared to the studio equipment but costs 2 to 5x more than than the studio equipment.

Yes, that's the impression I got too. Although Honeywell's behavior suggests they want Nest out of the market entirely. For starters, they didn't serve papers to Nest -- Nest found out via the press release from Honeywell. Also, Honeywell wants Nest to simply cease & desist. I wish these kinds of lawsuits never happen -- a legitimate claim being used to obliterate a true innovator. If I was Honeywell, I would have used Coase's theorem to negotiate with Nest, pointing out that Honeywell was in the right, but they should work together to find a mutually beneficial outcome.

Yup. Our company overloads our managers to the point they get 200+ e-mails a day. My company is stupid, and with any luck, I will be getting out soon. *knock on wood* Lots of companies are like that. Thus the popularity of the stand-up meeting: all signal, no noise. E-mail: 99% noise.

Interesting. Because when we were in modified waterfall, we had to allow changes or the clients would not be happy. Change happens in custom Enterprise software development. If you are working in a "product" shop, bless you. You are probably much happier than me. I have to deal with users who have conflicting ideas of how they do their own jobs. In fact, they have imaginary ideas about the business requirements which we find out half way through is wrong. Change is our environment. Management wants us to be able to react to changing user requirements quickly, document & cost them, etc. With the modified waterfall, there was a huge bureacracy to do that, and people would argue if it was a "clarification", "discovered requirement", "scope increase", etc.

Which again points to an important point about any process you follow: it must match your reality. If you are working in products, you have the luxury to aim for a relatively well defined set of requirements for a given release. You could probably do well from modified waterfall or some sort of iterative waterfall. For us, management's #1 priority is to make our clients happy and give them custom developed software that meets their needs, even if the clients don't even understand their needs. For us, agile is a better fit. For you, something else.

What do we do? We talk to each other. Emails, IMs, the occasional skype call, and very rarely a face-to-face so we can whiteboard. It's all ad hoc, entirely as needed, and only the people who need to be present are invited.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

You're doing Agile right.

I've been pushing my department of developers from using the corporate approved modified waterfall method, which has lead to massive budget overruns since corporate pushed it down on us, to an Agile-like process (You do know you are allowed to modify Agile to your environment?). The last two projects we did that way came in under budget and only slipped the original schedule due to client-introduced requirement changes.

One of the things we did was the 2-minute stand-up meeting (there were only 3 people for that project). Kept it focused to: What I did yesterday, what I will do today and what problems I'm having. When we had the weekly meetings, we usually found out about roadblocks a week after they happened. Now, the project manager found out things within 24 hours and could fix them quickly. "Yeah, the users aren't available for testing so they're going to put it off--" "I'll talk to [their manager] and get it fixed."

So when I read all these skeptics and haters, I'm shocked. For those of us who used stand-up meetings, they are so much better than the old sit-down 1-hour meetings. Then I dug into the criticism and I think I know what's the problem: cargo cult management. That's where clueless managers follow the form without understanding the motivation or why it works. So the punishments, like singing and running a lap, makes my skin crawl. The agile manifesto explicitly says People over Process. Just a simple "You're late!" is sufficient. I've read other Agile horror stories on Slashdot over the last two years, and it seems like those shops followed the motions without understanding the why. One guy complained that he saw a bug but wasn't allowed to fix it because of some bullcrap like "You don't have the token to work on that". WTF? That's not Agile! If something's broken, anyone is allowed to jump in and fix it. But that shop seemed more interested in following the liturgy than actually being Agile. Remember the first rule of Agile:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

The Agile horror stories I'm hearing are teams choosing processes and tools over people.

Did you even read Wikipedia before you posted?

I've followed Wired since its launch in the 90's. Sometimes they've had good articles, but mostly they publish SHOCK science articles. Contrarian articles. Anything to attract attention. Except that when you read the frakking article, you see the scientists/engineer/expert they are talking to is a fringe player that most of his peers thought was wrong and the writer blowing up something that really had no bearing. How many of these great SHOCK and CONTRARIAN articles have panned out over the last 20 years? Precious few. Pop Sci does a much better job.

Wired's writers are so desperate for an attention grabbing story that they will glom on to anything that can be spun into an article that goes against the grain or seems to rebel. They won't do a good job of checking basic facts, they don't investigate if the claims stand up. Hell, they don't even check to see if the logic in their article makes sense -- as per this article. As others pointed out, the article is mostly about pharma and medical science. All the examples I read in that article was about pharma and medical science. The writer ignored things like the mathematics of quantum physics being proved ever more correct, and relativity. The only "science" failing to deliver more results is medicine.

The whole reason medical "science" is failing has been a topic for the last 10 years. Basically it comes down to the industrialization of medical research where university profs spend their days hoping to make a discovery which can be turned into a billion dollar idea for a company. Because of that pressure, other researchers have noticed that a lot of lab results never pan out in production. The current thinking is that over-wishful thinking and too much pressure makes medical researchers take shortcuts with their data to make a discovery seem real or more relevant than it is.

THAT would have been a good article, and the late Omni magazine would have had a good article or two on that. Instead we have Wired: Omni without the good taste.