Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Yet another reason to abandon physical media. (Score 2) 107

> If you watch your movies via streaming, this is not an issue. 2015 people, 2015.

Yes. In 2015 there's still plenty of stuff that's not available via streaming or is only available at a price that most people aren't interested in paying.

Some us actually use this stuff and don't merely talk about it.

Comment Re:Leonard Nimoy is why we have nice things (Score 0) 411

The ginormous geniuses I've met don't seem to consider themselves intellectuals, geniuses, or whatnot. I've started pointing out that I'm a genius after recognizing that genius is a matter of technique, and so geniuses can be made: we can turn roughly 100% of the population into geniuses by proper training, with strikingly little effort. As such, one of my future political plans is to tweak the education system to normalize geniuses, bringing the baseline up to something most people believe is an inherent force of genetic superbrainism. Maybe then people will stop pestering me or, worse, trying to hire me with the justification that I'm smart and they want smart people on their team; they have smart people, if they would just act like an intelligent species.

Now, having understood that the only thing that ever stood in the way of my dreams was myself, I must go learn to draw. I realize now that I can't draw because I've never put in the exact same effort that career artists and famous painters put into the subject, and so never learned to draw; it's not that I can't, but that I simply decided not to. That changes now.

Comment Re:ignorant hypocrites (Score 1) 347

A core dump is two projects: find out what's wrong, fix it. You cannot estimate how long it will take to fix a problem until you know what the problem is.

How are you an expert when you consider a core dump to be a reasonable place someone would try to estimate bugfix time from? You can't estimate until you can plan the work, until you can draw a work breakdown structure and show what must be done. Even projects are chartered with a big budget and time estimate based on "this is 3x bigger than something else, so it takes 3x longer and is 3x as expensive", and then broken down into work that all comes together and says "okay, it's only going to be 2.1x as expensive and take 2.3x as long". That initial budget estimate? It comes from a dozen or five dozen or hundreds of prior projects, all with varying times, so you can say, "Stuff of this size and complexity has a low-water mark of like 5, a high-water mark of like 11, and tends to take more like 7.2" and decide how important the project is and thus if you want to budget for more like 5 or more like 11--and the same goes for the broken down work.

You can't even estimate what a bugfix is from a core dump. Someone brings you a core dump and says, "I need a bug fixed." They may as well bring you a blueprint and say, "I need a house built." Until you open the damn blue print up and see if you have a 1200sqft row home or a 4500 sqft Victorian, you have no fucking clue what you're doing, and can't tell them how long it's going to take. Once you unroll the damn thing, you can give them a ballpark estimate by glancing at the paper once; take a few hours to study the blueprints and work out what work actually needs to be done, and you can give them a better estimate.

Comment Re:Simple methodology (Score 1) 347

Then, I recorded over/under for every project and found (over about 24 programmer data set) that programmers consistently overshot or undershot their estimates. So after a few projects, I had a pretty good idea of their deliverables.

Doing it right.

Made worse by the fact the indian contractors said "I'll do my best" for "no- you are batshit crazy" and then things fell apart when the indians were unable to deliver.

This is a cultural thing. Asian cultures are strongly hierarchical: you always agree with the guy above you. Never argue. You need to either read the cues or break them of that.

Comment Re:Simple methodology (Score 1) 347

A good project manager uses historical data and the expert judgment of the project team to estimate the complexity of the project and determine the time required to perform the work. This is done in many ways: projects are compared to similar projects and scaled to size for a ball-park figure; projects are broken down into work packages, themselves broken down into activities and tasks, all of which the project team estimates the complexity and time required for, accounting for how long it took them to do similar things; time variance from historical data and current contexts are accounted for, providing a low, most-likely, and high mark (2 weeks in the best case scenario; most likely, based on prior work and known information, 3.5 weeks; some disaster scenarios bring in a 9 week estimate--that kind of lag HAS happened).

The more work is done, the more accurate estimates for budget and time become. Agile projects deliver in phases, iterations, and increments, and so can estimate work later in the project based on risk events earlier in the project--opportunities that cut time and can be exploited to cut more time, threats that cost time and may further cost additional time. In this way, "Historical Information" even includes work performance information for the parts of the project already completed.

It's all probabilities.

Comment Re:It's not just the fragmentation (Score 3, Insightful) 136

Meanwhile, there is this PC platform that wiped out all of it's other bespoke competitors probably before you even touched your first computer. PCs are MUCH more diverse than Android phones. But if you started whining about "fragmentation" to PC developers they would look at you like you grew a second head.

Slashdot Top Deals

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz

Working...