I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first 100 pages. It was trying soooooo hard to be cool & edgy it turned me off. It was a like an Ritalin-addicts pastiche of William Gibson.
I think everything he wrote from from Cryptonomicon on are his best works. The Baroque Cycle was fantastic! It's kind of sad that it's Snow Crash that gets all the attention.
He scares the left because he's basically about leaving the states to their own resources, and most states (especially the Red States), don't generate enough GDP to do anything on their own. Also, state politics are notoriously corrupt and prone to special interest groups (see California). The U.S. Federal government is the easiest institution to create a social safety net, control big corporations, etc. The things Ron Paul wants to let go of.
I think you misunderstand the term audiophile here. Originally, it did mean someone like you who liked good sound. Now, it means a pretentious half-twit who measures the quality of his system by the price he paid than the performance it delivers.
There is studio equipment, which is awesome and any true audiophile would have bought, and there is Best Buy/Amazon.com/etc. "audiophile" equipment which is actually sub-par compared to the studio equipment but costs 2 to 5x more than than the studio equipment.
This looks like a case where a company successfully innovated in the marketplace, and then took out patents to help secure their position.
The position adopted by the author of TFA was not subtle and, in my view, does not help the discussion.
Yes, that's the impression I got too. Although Honeywell's behavior suggests they want Nest out of the market entirely. For starters, they didn't serve papers to Nest -- Nest found out via the press release from Honeywell. Also, Honeywell wants Nest to simply cease & desist. I wish these kinds of lawsuits never happen -- a legitimate claim being used to obliterate a true innovator. If I was Honeywell, I would have used Coase's theorem to negotiate with Nest, pointing out that Honeywell was in the right, but they should work together to find a mutually beneficial outcome.
Gee wouldn't it be better for the developers to notify the manager IMMEDIATELY that the users were available for testing so they're going to put it off? You need to have a daily meeting to communicate?
Yup. Our company overloads our managers to the point they get 200+ e-mails a day. My company is stupid, and with any luck, I will be getting out soon. *knock on wood* Lots of companies are like that. Thus the popularity of the stand-up meeting: all signal, no noise. E-mail: 99% noise.
And that's the problem of Agile in a nutshell - you open up for not meeting schedules because you have to be agile, allowing changes. So you either deliver an unfinished product or go over time. Seriously so. The correlation between not meeting deadlines with a finished product and Agile is so high it converges towards 1. Really.
You can't have something for nothing, and in Agile you pay for your gains by not being able to deliver a full product on time. If upper management aren't informed of this, they need to be.
Interesting. Because when we were in modified waterfall, we had to allow changes or the clients would not be happy. Change happens in custom Enterprise software development. If you are working in a "product" shop, bless you. You are probably much happier than me. I have to deal with users who have conflicting ideas of how they do their own jobs. In fact, they have imaginary ideas about the business requirements which we find out half way through is wrong. Change is our environment. Management wants us to be able to react to changing user requirements quickly, document & cost them, etc. With the modified waterfall, there was a huge bureacracy to do that, and people would argue if it was a "clarification", "discovered requirement", "scope increase", etc.
Which again points to an important point about any process you follow: it must match your reality. If you are working in products, you have the luxury to aim for a relatively well defined set of requirements for a given release. You could probably do well from modified waterfall or some sort of iterative waterfall. For us, management's #1 priority is to make our clients happy and give them custom developed software that meets their needs, even if the clients don't even understand their needs. For us, agile is a better fit. For you, something else.
What do we do? We talk to each other. Emails, IMs, the occasional skype call, and very rarely a face-to-face so we can whiteboard. It's all ad hoc, entirely as needed, and only the people who need to be present are invited.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
You're doing Agile right.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
