This is a good illustration of the folly of top-down "waterfall" methodology. Too much micro-planning in advance, no action.

It's just more eco-bullying, plain and simple. I, for one, am sick and tired of these deluded incompetents trying to bully others who demonstrably understand more about it than they do.

Yeah, but they didn't just skip version 9. According to Microsoft's internal versioning scheme for Windows, Windows 8.1 is actually v6.3. Microsoft decided to skip 6.4, 7, 8, and 9.

So no, this is unlikely to be the result of anything other than Microsoft finally saying, "Let's have our internal versioning scheme match the marketing versioning scheme, and just make all references to Windows show 'version 10'."

In that sense, I think it's also about setting realistic expectations. With almost anything you want to do, there's some limit to how fast it can be done, even with unlimited resources. Limiting the resources available below the optimal level will increase the amount of time to accomplish things. So you can't take a project that will take 6 months to complete, cut the resources to keep the budget low, and then set a project schedule for 3 months and expect it to work.

After a certain point, providing big bonuses doesn't make things happen faster. It just encourages people to cut corners to meet the technical requirements for the bonus, even if it means providing a useless end-product at the end of it all.

First, that doesn't seem to be what the article is saying. Second, I don't really believe that it's true.

When I say "don't believe that it's true", I'm saying, "I don't believe that the removal of managers necessarily gets work done faster." I'm not talking about programming specifically-- I'm not a programmer, and managing programmers is not my expertise-- by my general experience is that a lot of people think managers are just wasting everyone's time, when the reality is more that most people don't understand what managers do. Unfortunately, this sometimes includes managers.

A good manager often spends his day trying to figure out how to remove obstacles so that the people he's managing can just do their jobs. For example, the summary says, "The article encourages managers to let devs contribute to the process and say 'No' if the specs are too vague." That sounds right to me. First, a good manager will of course listen to the people he's managing. That doesn't mean doing whatever they say, but when I have managed programmers, I assume that they know what they're doing better than I do, so if they say there's a problem of some sort, there's a problem of some sort. I wouldn't always go with their recommended solution, but would I listen to their explanation of the problem and try to come to a solution that addressed the programmers complaint as well as meeting the business needs we were trying to address.

If specs are too vague, that seems like the sort of thing a good manager would help to work out. For example, I might suggest talking to the programmer, trying to figure out which aspect of the specs are too vague, and then meeting with the stakeholders to try to clarify the specs. I wouldn't necessarily make the developer get involved in the process of clarifying them, since unless they're needed for the discussion, they probably have better things to do.

But being a good manager is pretty difficult in general. It's often not clear what needs to be done, or how it ought to be done, and it's your job to figure that out. It's pretty much impossible to be a bad manager without annoying people, but even the best managers might seem annoying or clueless because you don't see what they're doing for you. Sometimes good managers are only noticeable in their absence-- when they go away, you suddenly go "Oh jeeze, things are falling apart a bit here. How was it that we never had these problems before?" And the answer is, you were having those problems, but your manager was dealing with them when you weren't paying attention.

That is very definitely NOT what I wrote. Don't try to put words in my mouth. That practice is at least as evil as anything you have accused me of doing. I ask again: look in a mirror much? Do you know what the word "hypocrisy" means?

Here is the difference between YOU and ME (and nothing whatever to do with this "Winterfox" person): at least I acknowledge the behavior that I actually do engage in, regardless of whether you think I should apologize for it. You, on the other hand, seem to be blind to your own transgressions.

I did NOT claim I never "escalated", if you want to use that word. What I stated was that I won't apologize for it, IF I felt it was actually justified.

Let's be clear: I really don't give a damn about your philosophy.

I am not a pacifist. Attack me and I will attack back, and feel NO remorse for doing so. I don't care whether you want to call that escalation. Do you understand that? I don't care. Trying to go there isn't going to get you anywhere.

INVARIABLY, the people here on Slashdot who harass me in this manner have been people who failed to show I was wrong, but felt they were right anyway, and got all butthurt because I wouldn't admit I was wrong and validate their feelings.

Nope. Doesn't work that way. Show me or get stuffed. If I think I made a mistake -- as I may have once here in this thread, go back and read -- I will admit I may have been wrong and ask for pardon. But if I am pretty sure I have not made a mistake, you will not get an apology from me.

It's that simple. I don't give a rat's ass about political correctness or what other people think. I speak the truth as I best know it, without spin. If I am shown to be wrong, I will admit it. That's all there is to it. If your feelings get all hurt because of that, probably best to just not engage me at all.

For books, maybe. But it really just obfuscates the issue for software because they just swapped out "free" for "get", while still barely giving a nod to the DIFFERENCE between actually free, and "free trial but you have to pay to unlock the full version".

Granted, they did add an indicator for "in-app purchases", but made it as unobtrusive as they reasonably could. In my opinion, that is dishonesty. Or at best, being honest only very reluctantly and begrudgingly.

This seems to be most reasonable of the responses so far.

EFF has mentioned that when the end-to-end encryption is implemented, and then IF it passes their tests, they will update their Secure Messaging Scorecard for it. Right now its score is rather dismal: 2 of 7.

Currently there are only a few text messaging apps that get full points: TextSecure, Silent Text, OTR (Windows), CryptoCat, and something called ChatSecure which I had not heard of before.

Some people objected to CryptoCat being awarded all points, in that it hadn't been fully audited yet. EFF replied that it passed tests to their satisfaction.

I did not list phone apps such as Redphone because they're primarily voice not text per se.

We have been over all of this before. I am going to publish my proof that you were wrong, in time. Nothing has changed, and your insistence on a formula from me that is 100% irrelevant to the proof that you were wrong changes nothing.

Period. The end. You will get no more response from me to this continued HARASSMENT.

Public Service Announcement

Dear readers:

It is against my policy to respond to the person who made this comment. Ever since I challenged his incorrect answer to a question of physics several years ago, he has been rude and insulting, jumping into conversations that did not involve him for the sole purpose of insulting and harassing me.

That is my statement. You may make your own judgment.

I didn't say it was. But when research grant $$ is favorably awarded to research on a particular "side" of an issue (which has shown to be the case, rather extremely, over the last decade or so), then researchers tend to research only one "side" of that issue. Read the GAO report.

It doesn't have to do with "conspiracy", it has to do with political pressure. That's only "conspiracy" if you consider all Democrats or Republicans or members of any other party to be co-conspirators.

Researchers are human. They follow the $$ like anybody else.

Really. You're writing about other people's attitude, and you start it off that way? Do you not own any mirrors? Sounds like blatant hypocrisy to me.

When I believe that someone else has been unjustifiably rude or insulting, I have no problem with responding in kind. I can be wrong sometimes, and when shown I am wrong, I also have no problem apologizing. There are innumerable examples of that here on Slashdot over the years.

The qualifier is that first I must be shown to be wrong. "Shown" is the operative word. Merely saying I am wrong doesn't make it so. Show me real evidence, and barring contrary evidence I will accept it.

Hey... there are extreme Libertarians who are out of touch with reality, in exactly the same way there are extreme Democrats and Republicans who are out of touch with reality. There is nothing unique about Libertarians in that regard, and judging them all by the positions of an extreme few is as erroneous as judging all Democrats and Republicans the same way.

The actual Libertarian principle in regard to that subject is that polluting somebody's back yard is doing them harm. Another of the central principles is that one of the primary functions of government is to prevent people from doing harm to other people. Further, contrary to what many people say, the Libertarian principle regarding government regulation is that government should regulate only when it's necessary to do so.

But if you put those together, the result is that if it is necessary for government to regulate pollution in order to prevent people from polluting other peoples' back yards, then it should. Ideally that should be voluntary, but if voluntary doesn't work then the government must regulate it.

Does that really sound so outrageous to you?

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood and being an asshole, but I can't quite wrap my head around this post. "Hi everyone, I'm a random anonymous person on the Internet. For reasons I won't explain, I've decided I don't like Linux, and I want to try BSD. My needs are that I really want to play 3 specific games and run Firefox." I'm not even seeing where he actually asks a question, but timothy wants to know how Mr. Anonymous can fix his undisclosed Linux problems by moving to BSD.

Well, let's see. First, since you're apparently just running games, who cares what OS you're using? Does your current OS play those games? If yes, keep it. If not, look to see what operating system supports those games, and choose one of those operating systems to try out. Firefox and some kind of view player? I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Somehow the issue of hardware support isn't raised.

You know what? Use PC-BSD. AFIAK, it's basically the only BSD distribution, aside from Mac OSX, that's specifically targeting desktop use. Or maybe, since you only need a web browser and a couple of games, you should use whatever OS runs those games and stop worrying about it.