Comment Re:"there's not much to indicate difficulty" (Score 1) 278
s/wall/bridge/
s/wall/bridge/
When the client starts as "we want to build a wall", your first step is to reformulate it as "we want to go from side A to side B of the river". This way, you can notice that the right solution is to buy a ferry boat.
They fully expect you to know their needs and usually have a very hard time communicating them because a lot of things that make no sense to you are obvious to them because it's their daily bread and butter. And hence these things will be sorely missing in the specs.
That's why requiring a big upfront whole signed specification is useless. Users may not know what they want exactly, but they're very good at knowing it when they see it; they know exactly what problem they want to solve.
Your job is to understand the problem well enough to build a solution; and showing the working result to the user is the only way to know if you understood the problem, and if the solution is good enough. That's why iterative design works, and waterfall doesn't.
you find a small yellow star with 8 or 9 planets
I see what you did there
You are naive. This piece of software has probably not seen one single competent analysis even now.
You'd be surprised. The union of people who are competent with IDA Pro (and similar tools) and people interested in Bitcoin is a surprisingly large set. Find a provable backdoor in an application like this and you've got yourself a very good candidate for at least a DEFCON talk, maybe a job at Matasano.
That is the airlines problem.
The more workarounds a person finds for not travelling (calls, emails, etc.) the less the cost to the ticket buying company; assuming they manage to keep productivity the same.
I assume the dues are tied to the estate of the person.
They're reclaiming it from the inheritance which should not have been passed down.
The largest diesel ship engines can kick out 80MW of power (100,000 hp) which is right in the middle of the marine nuclear range (40MW to 100MW is common).
The main benefit to nukes, as currently used on surface ships, is the size of the fuel tank.
Right. So 5 years from requiring a NoSQL DB, and hardware/software advancements in that period will likely give another 3 years of easy growth with just a basic Pg installation.
If it was 10m text/blob records per day, that would be a different animal; but it's probably 1/10th of that.
Close your IR eye and open your normal vision eye.
Same idea as pirates moving their patch from one eye to the other when going from surface to inside the dark ship.
Back in the day (1980s), I helped run an emergency food pantry in Southern California. At the time, Sol Price (founder of Price Club, which I believe is one of the constituent chains that merged to become CostCo) donated pallets of dried milk to us to redistribute. In general, these were pallets where there had been damage, so some of the packages were not usable - the vast majority of the packages, however, were fine.
At our pantry, that donation made up a substantial part of what we gave out to people, especially those with children.
I always thought it was both generous and great business sense for them to donate that food. After all, Price Club got a tax write off, there was less waste, and the hungry people got food without it impacting Price Club's sales.
Why does the single comment that hit the spot go unanswered? There's a reason why programing tools are called ''languages'' - before problem solving or building architectures, programming is a form of *communication*: we try to express the ideas in our heads in a form that needs to be interpreted, either by the machine, by your fellow team programmers, or the system users. All them need to be able to make sense of the program's effects (at different levels), even though their understanding will be different.
There's no right way to write a program, because programing is not as much writing "a" solution to "a" problem as saying new things about the world. Until developers understand this, they will remain flabbergasted, wondering why their project's requirements change so much.
since the comment is not executed, there is no guarantee that it reamains correct
As the purpose of comments is to explain *why* a part of code was created (and why it was written in that particular way), it not being executable shouldn't matter much, as completely repurposing a bit of code rarely happens. (Generalizing it yes; abandoning the original purpose of a routine or function is uncommon).
The best comments are those targeted for the programmer reading them, not the machine that must execute the code; and letting fellow programmers know why you needed that piece of code in the first time is invaluable, even if what the code does changes over time.
Return your geek card (and your low ID at once). Calligra has been talked about many times at Slashdot. It's a fork and renaming of the KOffice suite, the original KDE clone of MS Office.
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.