Exactly. This should include not making promises to your customers without consulting the team, and not consulting the team and then disregarding their time and effort estimates just because the customer wants it now. When you try to motivate your team with impossible deadlines, it tends to have the opposite effect. Hopefully you learned this from Dilbert, if nowhere else.

That makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

I didn't know black holes are considered theoretical. I'm no astronomer, or physicist, or anything like that, but I was pretty certain we had concluded there are black holes in our universe, due to these voids we view that appear to suck up all light passing them. I thought the only theoretical part was that we can only speculate on the actual make up and physical properties of them since we can't see or touch them. I'm fairly certain they are not actual, physical, holes, but I thought we had proved something existed that we labeled as "black holes."

just my public school powered opinion.

How very true, making things slightly more difficult, but on the other hand, what risk management is without strange and unpredictable problems? Hopefully someone made a nice flow chart to handle those issues, using short timeouts and catching invalid responses as part of the solution. I would have (hopefully!). Although as a customer, $0.00 shipping sounds good :) Might make me come back too, if they don't try to charge me later for it.

If it's important enough they should have a backup. I know it's not always within budget, but their website doesn't have to crash because the USPS service is unavailable, it could simply fall back to an acceptable solution, such as a fixed price, an estimation table, or an error message that says the USPS shipping estimator is down and shipping will be calculated at the time of shipment, or they can try again later. Yeah, they'll lose some business, but they can lose less business with a decent backup.

I agree with babbs. It's a great staring point without requiring much of a background in computer science. It begins with a basic explanation of how brains function, moving on to good explanations of various methods for modeling that function. It's more math based than anything else, but includes source code also.

i disagree partly. I ONLY check post on the client IF I feel the need to stop the post and display an error message immediately. Otherwise i see it as wasted code prone to bugs because if you check your post on the client side, you ALSO have to check it on the server side anyway (even if only for security reasons) which gives you 2 different copies of the same code that you have to make changes to. twice as many places to make mistakes and create security holes.

not the first time i've seen a joomla site /.ed. pretty sure its not the server.

I'm all for the end result and the reward system is a great idea, as long as you don't mind that these people will probably make millions by being the first to know of the prior art to major patents and then give you a very small percentage for doing all the work for them.