> I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.
I love pointless struggle! I could read it for hours.
Funny part is, all this fuzz about FTL goes on and on because people don't understand what time and distance are. Explain that, and the babbling stops.
Takers?
Oh yes.
Throw in "automate the acceptance tests" between the usage agreement and coding, just for good measure. Well, actually to free the developers from ever worrying whether they met the goals or broke any planned functionality again.
Really. It's not that hard:
- Expect for the commandline,
- Netcat for network,
- Selenium for web,
- Robot framework for graphical user interfaces.
Googleable, deadwooden and professional help are available on all of above.
It's a world I'd love to live and work in where programmers were engineers providing precise solutions to actual problems!
In my experience, after building sufficient trust in a team, good collaboration in software development and most of ICT administration only requires face to face contact every once in a while, such as beginnings and ends of sprints if that's how you organize. IRC or other such persistent communications channel is actually preferable to ensure continuous virtual presence of everyone concerned.
When things don't work and when you enhance your ways of working (such as in retrospectives), face to face contact is essential. Otherwise you need extraordinary trust between communicating parties or it will degrade, taking honest communication and traceability with it.
Say, doesn't most of free software development happen in quite a distributed manner? Maybe only rudimentary trust is required when there is low to no gain from cheating, motivations are pure and results are clearly visible?
Personally though, I find it really boring to sit in an office alone. Some company is great to have around. It keeps your mind open and makes it really easy to start pair work on small problems.
Currently I work on our own product with my boss as my sole team. Thus, I voted "Not As Many As I'd Like"
Those insensitive clods.
In reality everyone is miserable.
"In reality everyone is happy" is equally true.
Only if you tune your meter so that it covers the variation available rather than some idealistic edge of scale, you get variation. Such as people varying between misery and happiness, nobody quite stably at either end, as moods tend to be dynamic in living things. Then you can inspect people who tend more towards one end than the other, on a reasonable timescale, not whole life, since we do tend to learn and grow.
I know people from many walks of life from many places on Earth and do not perceive a clear correlation not to mention idea of causality (used to nurture one though) between how you live and your happiness or misery. Yes you have to have basic needs fulfilled, after that it's up to your ability to react constructively to your environment; a lot about communication and sympathy, it would seem. I'd risk a guess that those would even expand to one's success at work as well.
As usual, reality is rather more complex and boring than extreme one-liners
I agree (would mod up but gave up modding way back). However this is an interesting and probably reoccurring problem: extending the wealth of public net wisdom with precision data from local context (organisational or task-centric rather than geolocational).
A proxy adding local content into pages loaded from outside as suggested in Re:Solution by mcrbids would solve some of the problems you mention:
* The wikipedia content will always be out of date
* it's fetched from real sources in real time
* Changes made to wikipedia content don't get fed back into wikipedia
* this changes to risk of unintentionally publishing private information - how hilarious!
* Trying to load the wikipeida DB locally is a headache due to its shear size
* not done; could instead cover the whole of outside web with one solution.
This problem remains:
* Creates confusion as to what is and is not company information
I guess you'd be best off injecting a (user-hidable) "widget" layer that would contain all the local information needed, thus providing clear separation of local and global content. Least breakage of existing layout that way, I hope.
I assume here that we restrict our proxy to embed HTML (possibly including Javascript) into well parsing HTML pages only, so as to avoid breaking things as much as possible - inevitable to happen sometimes anyway.
Updating the contents of another window based on browsed content would require either
* a single sign-on solution to target references to correct user's desktop (seen in updaters of multiple applications views in medical solutions for instance) or
* a browser-specific local hack to study each page url and content and to fetch related information from local database based on those.
OT, adding such meshing into Google Wave would probably prove an interesting challenge
Count me in on any efforts, I've waited for those over ten years as well.
Those, a pair of data gloves and the laptop in my back pack that's already always there anyway.
For simpler tasks than Eclipse, a modern phone would provide enough of a CPU.
Prolonged battery life from walking movement powered generator or solar panel jacket.
Some reason for hiking.
Thank you for writing my viewpoint for me.
My jobs seem to be increasingly about solving problems with bright colleagues rather than stomping away untested code.
Then again, when you have your problems solved and only tests and code to write, I've found commuting most effective. Hands free, no-one requiring your attention. I'd rather not drive a car (not even a cdr) to work, that would slow me down tremendously.
"If you observe him closely, you will find that a geek approaches non-computer avocations in a fanatical way and always with the certainty (in keeping with an outsized opinion of himself) that he can master any subject with a dilettante's effort. In fact that seems to be the whole point of the rare excursion into non-computerized activity. Once his shallow sense of mastery is satisfied he ceases to progress in the avocation because really hard work bores him.
This is the geek as you might find him on Slashdot and in other forums arguing about Firefox or Linux or whatever his latest petty obsession is, and as I find him walking past my office day-in and day-out acting like a child. I tell you these people make feminists seem charming.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
