Fine. get 51% of the "owners" to agree to the course of action. Once you've crossed that threshold, then you've got a point.

The problem is that American politics is a team sport. The bigger problem is that team sport mentality is just accepted as the norm.

Politics -- as voting -- should be a dry, boring act. Back when 30% of the electorate was actually engaged, it was. Now, demagogues fill the airwaves with outlandish accusations, turning countrymen against each other.

After all the demagoguery that is constantly being used to rile some people who are genuinely distressed because they've lost their job/house/life, I worry some of these people are genuinely confused; the enemy is no longer Osama -- it's now Obama.

As I recall, they were 'torn to shreds.' Rumor was, they were going to be split up. We were all talking about which company Microsoft would still be after it split up -- would it be the OS creator or would Bill Gates want to hold on to the other lucrative software...

Then prezitend bush took over.

Suddenly the DOJ folded up the case & MS didn't see any real penalties for actually being found guilty of abusing their monopoly.

So it sounds like someone decided to upgrade the hardware storing the data without making a backup.

Any 'good people' involved should have had a plan. The plan should have included some back-out procedure (which implies step 1 is that data replication takes place and is verified). If management didn't want to pay for the the physical requirements of the plan, then I hope that the systems engineers got it in writing (via submission and rejection of a written plan). For something this critical, doing the paperwork not only makes it much easier to respond to problems when they occur, it means there's a nice big paper CYA there when management decides to do things on the cheap.

So I agree, management is just as culpable as the guy(s) who decided to do this without having a proper plan in place.

I still can't get over the fact that so much relied upon one single SAN operating. It's just insane.

This is an issue of irresponsibility. Plain and Simple. The company responsible for maintaining the data should -- at the very least -- have had some full system backup from last month. If they had some old backup somewhere at least you could chalk it up to systems failure or bad backup tape or bad admin or something.

But the fact that there is no backup anywhere indicates brazen negligence on the part of everyone responsible for the data. Everyone who had a part in designing the system and managing the system is culpable. The most ridiculous part of this is the over-reliance on server-side data storage by the sidekick designers.

And I forgot to mention that Unity doesn't provide access to native library calls. So, for instance, there's no way to bring up the iPhone keyboard from within a Unity app. This could very well be changing -- and may have already changed, but last I knew Unity apps on iPhone were severely crippled by this.

But that's just a symptom of the real problem with using Unity as the basis for development -- you're relying on a closed platform from third-party with relatively low vested interest in the platform. If a platform doesn't make fiscal sense for Unity to continue publishing and updating, as a Unity developer you have very little recourse. I'm not pretending that it's any different for Apple and NS libs, but Apple has much more invested in the success of the platform, so it's much more unlikely that they will discontinue support of the platform.

Unity is nice, but the end result is massive bloat. It's a nice way for a developer or company to get into the iPhone market without having to learn Objective C, but I don't think they've 'nailed it.'

I've seen extremely simple applications take 18 - 24 MB space on an iPhone. That's with no textures, no graphics no nothing except basic 3D objects being rendered. An equivalent app developed in Objective C takes 10% - 25% of that.

18 - 24MB doesn't seem like a lot until you think about the fact that all that is all being loaded into the very limited available memory. There's very little room to make something that takes advantage of Unity's framework. And the fact that Unity is trying to do garbage collection in a separate thread means that the performance of the App goes down.

You're right, they're doing some cool stuff -- and the fact that it's cross-platform capable makes it that much better. But personally, I decided to put in the little bit of time it took to learn Objective C and the discipline to retain and release over putting my eggs into Unity's basket (that one was an easy choice).

Perl was so. fricking. awesome. back when the only choices were shell scripts or compiled apps. It was such a leap forward. Who wouldn't be excited about Perl back in the '90s

But we're far beyond the sophistication of Perl. I'm not saying that you can't do some pretty fricking awesome things in Perl, but that Perl doesn't do many of the meta-tasks that we've come to expect in languages. These supporting features don't necessarily make things run or run fast, but rather help developers in the process of creation and maintenance. The industry has grown up and the black magic of hacking has been codified into the craft of coding.

And Perl isn't alone here, C++ is undergoing the same process.

'Ship early and ship often.'

But it's definitely no silver bullet; it's not for every project, nor every developer, I've been disappointed to see how integration of Agile via scrum derail projects and upended a department where inexperienced / low skilled developers got overwhelmed by the shift in focus from doing it 'perfectly' to shipping. There's a subtle but significant shift in responsibility from the project manager to the developer. Lots of guys don't like it and really can't handle having things so visible; they're used to being able to hide behind the complexity of their work for days or even weeks without really having any accountability. Agile gives them nothing to hide behind.