I can't even remember the last time an advertisement online compelled me in favor of buying anything.
Not only have I never bought anything through online ads, I try to avoid purchasing products that I see advertised through online ads.
Seriously, the advertising model on the internet is very screwed up at a times.
I agree, if by "at times" you mean "nearly all the time."
Then wait and see how much of the internet survives, since most of them will have put "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" signs and left.
Which, on the whole, would be an improvement.
OK, that's a difference. But it's a meaningless difference.
Actually their acceptable ads (which you can turn off with a single checkbox and they even offer the option on first install) is exactly what I've been saying for years should be the only ads allowed due to security concerns,
I disagree. The "acceptable ads" rules that Adblock Plus uses allow the very thing that I object to the most about online ads: the tracking. So their "acceptable ads" are completely unacceptable to me.
Until ads stop spying on me, I will block every single one of them that I can.
is reformed in the House bill, which does away with it over six months and instead gives phone companies the responsibility of maintaining phone records that the government can search." Obama criticized the Senate for not acting on that legislation, saying they have necessitated a renewal of the Patriot Act provisions.
What nonsense. Moving the storage task to the phone companies does absolutely nothing to make the collection less nasty. Enacting the "reform" is, at best, no different than just renewing the Patriot Act as it is. But that's "at best". In reality, it's even worse, as requiring the telecoms to keep this data guarantees that the telecoms will use that data -- so the end result is an expansion of the the amount of spying that is being inflicted on us.
(registration requires bi-annual smog checks for all gas cars already).
No, it doesn't. It is required for all gas cars that live in the greater Portland and Medford metropolitan areas, but is not required anywhere else in the state.
Maybe 20 years ago... New toll systems have few manned toll booths and don't require traffic to slow or stop.
Yes, but that's in exchange for the massive privacy invasion that results from using toll transponders and/or license plate readers. I don't see that as an improvement at all. It's just the opposite.
Good god, no.
Toll roads are the purest of evils. We need much less of them, not much more. A better solution is to fund road maintenance out of the general fund. Everyone benefits greatly from well-maintained roads, after all, even if they never drive at all.
But you know, development isn't about making developers 100% happy. It's about product.
Of course I know (and agree) with this. However, when (as has been my experience) agile actively makes developers unhappy in addition to reducing productivity, the product will inevitably suffer.
My experience (both as a PM and developer) has been that Agile projects tend to take longer to produce a worse product.
If the developers have no measurable yardstick to judge their progress, or middle management collects a bunch of meaningless metrics which don't help the development process
True, but all of that has little to do with Agile specifically.
None of those are failings of waterfall at all. There is nothing about waterfall that requires you to make ironclad decisions at the very start, and there is nothing that prevents you from adapting the course of development as the project proceeds.
In other words, you aren't describing waterfall in your comment. Yes, I'm invoking the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, since that is usually what is invoked when Agile is criticized.
The real truth is that all methodologies can be done well or poorly, including waterfall and agile. The difference that I've seen in practice is that it's incredibly hard to implement Agile correctly (such that I've never seen it done), but implementing waterfall correctly is not a huge chore.
I'll split down the middle of this. In the agile shops I've worked in, there has been a consistent strong aversion to producing documentation that is actually useful: design specs, etc. However, there has also been a consistent trend to dramatically increase the amount of worthless documentation: documenting the process itself (encouraged by tools like Version One).
And when you begin a large software development effort with 50 other developers???
I agree with your underlying point, that if the team consists of just one or two developers, then process becomes less important (but still important). However, if the team consists of 50 developers, that's a serious problem all by itself, no matter what process is in use.
Serious developers don't care about the process and don't want it in their way
This can't be overstated. A great process is a process that is nearly invisible to developers, allowing us to get on with the development with minimal friction. Agile presents a great deal of friction. It is a process apparently designed to please middle management at the expense of developers.
No matter how long or short they are, standups are worthless (except, I suppose, if the team is dysfunctional to begin with). In a well functioning team, everything that is supposed to be accomplished in a standup is accomplished in real-time as it happens. So there's nothing new to be said in the stand up.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
