I like to moderate week-old comments, when I get mod points.
Imagine the poster's surprise: "Hey! I got modded up for a comment I wrote last week!"
Gives me a warm feeling: two parts happiness, one part mischief.
Software developed by non-software companies tends (in my experience) to disappoint on all three counts: quality, price, and speed of delivery.
For starters, non-software companies typically suffer from the All Three fallacy: they want it good, cheap, and fast. No "pick one" principle here: they want it all. Over-optimistic projections then give way to crappy software and extended disappointment.
The core problem, however, is that software companies are better at creating software (forgive me for stating the obvious) because they specialize in creating software, which puts non-software companies (newspapers, banks, whatever) in the second ranks at best.
Related observation: non-software companies have been hot for "Agile" over the past several years; in my experience, every last one of them is not taken seriously, or indeed is treated with rich and deeply-felt contempt, by every last developer at that company. (Personally, I try to let it go, write it off as inevitable industry marketing jargon.)
Agreed, we want:
1) A continuous mapping and quantification of the Military Industrial Complex, complete with relations to people, and businesses up and down the chain.
2) Continuously updated Corporate to Lobbyist to Politician studies, with full exposure.
About your assertion that "These people are only in power because _we_ allow them to be"
The powerful either have power to begin with, or they take it. Either way, they won't give it up, and if you try to take it from them, they will fight you. Since they have power -- and I don't -- they will tend to win. Indeed, because I believe they will win, I don't even begin.
For everyone today who says "Bad Guys run the world, let us liberate ourselves from our corrupt overlords", I remind you: we said the same thing in the nineties, and the eighties, and the seventies, and the sixties. And the thirties. And the teens. And the eighteen-nineties. And so on -- the American Revolution, for example.
I'm not saying "Give Up" -- but let's not comfort ourselves with false optimism. If you declare revolutionary intent, do so in pragmatic terms, with specific achievable goals. No idealism: a successful revolution demands hard-headed realists.
What is inconvenient is when people who have nothing to say -- nothing better than sarcasm and "meh", anyway -- insist on saying it anyway.
Example: "But warming is caused by man. Got it."
Tell me something interesting, useful, relevant, meaningful. Then you get my attention and respect, regardless of how similar or different my opinion is from yours.
... 'business logic' that never made any sense in the first place. What is actually being done is multiple individuals' interpretation of a tremendous mass of confusing and conflicting rules combined with unwritten assumptions and word of mouth 'folk wisdom' that may or may not bear any relation to what is documented.
Well said -- right on target -- my thoughts exactly.
“This very distinguished philosophy professor came out on the platform in front of this gang of students and took a bit of chalk and scrawled up a proposition in symbolic logic on the board. He turned to the audience and said, ‘Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll agree that that’s obvious?’ “Then he looked at it a bit more and started to scratch his head and after a while he said, ‘Excuse me!’ And he disappeared. “About half an hour later he came back beaming all over his face and said triumphantly, ‘Yes, I was right — it is obvious!’”
I learned the "say no" trick.
Yes! I also learned the "say no" trick, and use it to good effect.
Ask them how much money is on the table, and then calculate your team's rough cost per sprint. The key is for you to learn their language, and their tools.
Yes!
You communicate with anyone by speaking to them in their own language. Maybe they understand your language as well, all good and fine. But the best way to reach someone is to speak his language.
Money people speak money. If you want to get through to them, speak money.
For that matter, if you are a developer who doesn't speak money, you might want to learn -- it's a useful skill with a variety of benefits.
[Agile]... it's about committing to the work items you've estimated into your current sprint.
Mod parent up.
Commit to your short-range deliverables. Restate your commitments daily, keep your team informed.
The upshot is that builds are usually late, not properly tested and developers get the flak when things go wrong. I suspect the answer is political, but how do we make things better?
"Get the flak" -- in other words, someone (the business line) expresses anger.
Anger happens when people have expectations, and these expectations go unmet.
The answer is: Lower Your Expectations. (Management, I am looking at you.).
I'm guessing you can't actually say this to management, without coming off as sarcastic. But I am quite serious, this is basic psychology. If my expectations are lower, then my unhappiness (when things go wrong) is also lower.
It's entirely possible that your organization cannot improve processes. Maybe what the company is doing right now is the best it can do. Let's not get all "Rah-Rah, We Can Do It" -- maybe you can't do it, maybe the effort is a waste of time. After all, the people before you were not idiots, yet look where things are today.
If you can't fix the problem, you can at least minimize your unhappiness, and help your colleagues do the same.
The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is
.019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification). The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Source: The Rosetta Project
We need more like him: Stewart fuckin' Brand.
See also Long Now Foundation.
Red Scares, plural.
1919 - 1921
1947 - 1957
That's just the USA. No doubt other countries have similar histories.
Fish have prion diseases -- Mad Cow for fish.
Feeding little fish to big fish may compound the problem, just as feeding "downer" cows (wobbly, unstable, sick cows) to healthy cows may be contributory to Mad Cow.
Shouldn't there be a way to calculate how efficiently a man can be weaponized -- through training, drugs, surgery, cybernetics, social engineering -- so the State can induct the best candidates into service?
(Nickie Haflinger, I'm thinking of you.)
The best laid plans of mice and men are held up in the legal department.
