Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Saudi copes with low prices for at least 8 yrs (Score 2) 141

I remember when those fuckers (OPEC) were terrified to let it go over $25 a barrel. It's not "low" now. It's just low enough to fuck over the competition from fracking wells in North America. Maybe if they keep it where it is for two or three years, the current round of investors in North American fracking companies will lose a fuck-ton of money and be a little more shy about investing in the technology next time OPEC lets it spike up.

They let it run a little too long this time, though. Hybrids and electrics have had a chance to get a foothold in the market, and some people are already starting to think about how pure electric vehicles and ones with fuel cells could potentially change how electric grids work. It wouldn't take a very big push for countries to start adopting electric vehicles powered with Clean Atomic Energy. And that'll plunge us into the next ice age lickety split, once global warming starts to reverse. Hah, didn't see THAT coming, did you?

Comment Re:I have grown skeptical of these experiments. (Score 1) 219

I thought about that as well, having done a similar exercise in a similar training. It's pretty rare that a team encounters a problem that only one member of that team can solve. I stayed on a project from 2000-2005 and got so familiar with the code base and the capabilities of my team that I could estimate the times pretty accurately based on the team member doing it. The manager could ask me how long something would take and I'd say "About 3 days for me, or about 2 weeks for John." Those numbers could easily be reversed if it was a piece of the code I hadn't looked at very much and John had. Sometimes they'd still elect to have John make that change, if I had several tasks that needed to get done, but it was pretty easy optimize the team's performance by mostly keeping them in the parts of the code that they knew.

Were there any tasks that only one person could have achieved? Very few, really. There was some work around making the code more stable that I ended up doing. That involved changing how the code was launched, building the code base with electric fence and using a a debugger to find the locations of core dumps. I feel like that's stuff any programmer can do, but the rest of the team didn't seem to have any experience with that process. But agile is also willing to accept a half-assed job if a half-assed job meets the needs of the business. It really doesn't matter to agile if someone on the team gets pulled in every weekend because the program can't run without constant hand-holding, as long as the business' needs are being met.

Comment Re:Time to abandon normal phones? (Score 4, Interesting) 217

I run some software on my android phone that sends calls with numbers not in my contacts list straight to voicemail. If they're important enough, I'll call 'em back. Most of the time they're some very-low-quality recruiter or the newspaper asking me to pay to have them litter in my driveway.

Back in the ol' Landline days, I ran a SIP gateway that went to an asterisk system. It would always ask you to press 1 if you weren't a telemarketer and 2 if you were. Option 2 would politely tell you to fuck off. I never got a telemarketing call after that. I'm guessing the VRU confused most of the robo-calling software they used. After a while I got fancy with it and installed SIP software on the cellphone I was using at the time. So if my phone connected up with the wireless network, it would register with the asterisk server and the asterisk server would ring the phone. If the phone was not available because I was away from the house, calls would go straight to voicemail. If you were on a whitelist, the asterisk system would ask you to hold on and then dial out over VOIP and connect the call to my cell phone. The software on my phone now works pretty well but I miss the power I had with Asterisk.

Slashdot Top Deals

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Working...