They are a gimmick. If you want to use post-it notes for a burn chart or a RTM, go for it. What does forcing everyone to go stand there for 15 minutes a day accomplish? As he mentioned when stuff happens it's always dealt then and there by interaction between team members. No one waits for the next day's stand up, nor should they. If someone needs help or has a question they do it in real time, not at the stand up.

If he gets hit by a bus as a team lead they'll have to replace him, and any one of half a dozen main techniques for tracking the design and development of requirements suffice for the hand off as good or better then post-it notes. SCRUM/AGILE didn't invent communication between team members nor tracing requirements in a visible format. It's just a catchy name that over the course of a months long process wastes about 5% of your total project time because everyone in the meeting already knows everything that matters to them that's going to be said in the stand-up most of the time.

My point wasn't that it monitors people's time. It's that the daily standup puts an expectation that "every" day you "will" be at "this" spot for "this" amount of time. And I find that overbearing.

Now look, where I would appreciate scrum is in a creative design process. Where people are bouncing "ideas" off each other. If say I was building a new MMO, I could see the design phase using scrum because you're inventing systems and processes.

Or even "maybe" if I were working on a 3D engine where all the developers are off doing their own thing and with just a limited direction on what they should be doing. Or even "maybe" at Amazon where everything is SOA and the team leads might do a daily stand-up to see what each other are up to.

The problem is in the typical business world it serves no purpose. Which is where it's taking over and what a lot here have the most experience with as that's where a large % of developers exist. We automated business processes. Without solid requirements that are already broken up for tasking you can't guess what the software is supposed to do and developers and analysts should be working closely on a regular/as needed basis. I don't even like the weekly meetings that are very common on medium to large projects. We just all go over the stuff everyone already knows because we all talk all the time.

If you do not have access to good requirements, 15 minutes a day standing up will not get them for you. If you aren't sure what you're supposed to be coding there is no magic process to code the right thing.

I've consulted about half that time, and worked privately about half that time. Currently private and managing in-house and contracted resources on the project. I do think that same way with consultants. I try and create a very positive work environment. With any new team member I always start off saying I don't baby sit. If there's somewhere you have to be I expect you to be there without me needing to ask you. I'm not going to monitor your time, just your work, when you need to stay late I expect it (now with contractors I certainly do have to limit that at times due to limited hours/dollars on a contract, but I've had plenty of times contractors worked extra hours without billing though I never have asked for that). If you burn me than I'll have to baby sit you. And I've never had to baby sit anyone once. It's just always worked. I think people appreciate being treated like an adult and respecting that they don't live to work, they work to live.

I've run development projects for about 15 years now. I've always considered development a creative process. And as such I've always avoided too much structure in developers time. I'm not going to say to anyone, "Every day at 9:30 we're going to spend 15 minutes talking about yellow post-it notes". There will be meetings. But overall I treat developers as professionals, I'm not monitoring their time. I'd rather have 35 hours of productive time then 50 hours on the clock of which 10 is spent avoiding work and another 10 not giving their all. And I'd rather they stay until is needed without needing to be asked when the time comes because they appreciate the freedom they get normally. Basically, I measure productivity and not timesheets. I have no problem approving a timesheet that is "short" on hours as long as I feel the production was there. Some people like working late and come in late. Some early and leave early. Some like to skip out after 37 hours a week, but if they're productive why do I care?

I might be lucky and through many stops have it always work for me. But overall a process development is simple. Get me good requirements. Do a good design. Develop with good practices and patterns. Test it. Deploy. More than that is a solution looking for a problem IMO.

I've had several developers come in early and stay late and not do as much work as someone that always sneaks out a little early. What's the big deal unless their pay levels are off? The stand up's just seem childish and are a fad. I hope!

Seems to me we had multiple reactors hit with a giant earthquake AND tsumani and aside for the major news not a lot of people died. Seems evidence to build more nuclear for me. I swear the anti-nuclear hippies must be funded by big oil cause I can't see any reason not to keep building safer and safer plants till energy is basically free.

I have the Iconia A500, wife has the Asus Transformer.

To me these are the two best Android tablets out there (the prime will probably change that but at a cost of course). They are not bloated. They have the hardware specs you'd want. All the I/O you would want. And both can be found for under 350 right now. We both spent a lot of time making the choices and trying everything under the sun including the iPad 2. If the iPad 2 was the same price I'd still pick either the Acer or Asus over it.
I also think the Kindle Fire is nice and have several hours use on one. For $200 you can't beat the hardware, but the lack of I/O, camera, mic, etc.. won't work for many. If book reading and web browsing email was the primary use I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

He or she is an AC that posted complete drivel. A normal end user wouldn't have posted that. Seriously, think. End user. Posted what he posted? No. And for someone on the inside they posted.

While there may have been big gains his post amounted to a made up press release. Woah what times it be when such non-technical fluff is taken as truth on the interwebs. It's not a MS vs *nix, it's that their post was garbage.

Think of the app issue. If they weren't rewritten they aren't going from Windows to *nix. So are they web apps? Did the webservers change? If the webservers changed then did the software just come over like say java or php?

Again, his post was so clearly made up AC crap it's not even funny.

Your post sounds pretty unbelievable. The Finance databases are now always available? So they moved the database servers from Windows to *nix? I'm not going to point fingers but if you can't keep a Windows DB server up it's a people problem not a software problem. Though personally unless it's MS SQL I wouldn't have had it on a windows server anyways. But still, that's interesting that your database servers were moved and now are stable. Interesting as in what assclown was admining them before?

Log-in's I can see. Windows XP load slow but the 10 minutes are login scripts and bad people writing scripts

What apps? The ones that were completely rewritten to run natively on your new *nix environment? *boggle*

Sorry you no longer have exchange. It's easily the best mail server out there.

Sucks you still have 2001 concerns in 2011. Most places aren't hammered with virus every week.

Glad your happy, but I don't take your post at face value. At least not with the drivel you wrote about.

How is that insightful? The US is one of the most free societies on the planet. We aren't censored from a damn thing. Like pretty much every developed nation there's been a merger of the corporate world with politics. You might not like the policy, but we're not censored here.

Thanks. If it is KIC10593626 then you should see it np at that site assuming it's visible from where you are since it's apparent magnitude is almost 12. http://palebluedot.whitedwarf.org/stars/10593626 I have a MK-66 which is a 6" Mak-Cass and can see up to about magnitude 12 in my yard on a good night, and about 15 at a dark spot. A 20" on a dark site should go well beyond that in the high teens.

I've looked a bit this morning and can't find anymore info about the star itself. What its apparent magnitude it? What constellation its in? Etc. All I can figure out is its referred to as Kepler 22 which only makes sense in relation to the program. But I'd love to be able to try and see the star through a telescope.

As of right now it's a novelty and nothing that others have to catch up to.

Just because something sounds cool doesn't mean it actually is useful. It's possible this changes how people use mobile devices, but I'd rather doubt it, and I'm not seeing any evidence of it. I am seeing *some* people that like playing around with it. But for the most part they still pick up their phone. For the same reason the voice features on the Android have always been underutilized. Talking isn't always convenient. If it gets your question wrong you're going to waste more time correcting it then it would have taken to just look it up yourself, and looking it up yourself is very quick anyways.

So you're saying there's an 18m wormhole that makes these things get there "faster" than light. Or that they aren't capable of measuring to within 18 meters at that scale? I'd say that isn't very likely and I'd have a hard time imagining it. What I could imagine is that there's a mistake somewhere or equipment issue possibly. But repeated 15k times, and I fully trust the people at CERN OPERA to measure within 18m.