Go re-read why worse is better http://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html and realize any form of micro-architecture has long since been destroyed by the formidable drive of the monolithic design and it's ability to be simultaneously horrible and intractably irremovable from the minds of the vast majority of engineers, along with being faster to get out the door and therefore meeting all requirements of the business people who actually shove all this garbage down our throats.

I read a lot of summaries on slashdot on topics I know nothing about, but they usually give me some idea what's going on. This one is giving me no clues but sounds really interesting. I'm not stupid, I just know the software and not the physical medium for squat, please explain this down to relatively smart persons laymans terms someone?

I think possibly the biggest thing people ignore when they hear zuckerburgs story and get stars in their eyes if they're coders imagining their story the same or alternatively non-coders and think any frat kid can write code is that these guys were going to frigging Harvard. These guys were never just some college kids, to begin with they were A) raised well-off with every benefit you could have B) smart enough to be writing code before college C) smart enough to have been accepted to harvard D) smart enough to not even be struggling while they were there.

I'm sorry, but these dudes were all smarter than most everyone before they became rich, and they became rich because of that. Facebook hardly had anything to do with it, these dudes would have become rich one way or another because that's what happens to people who can meet all 4 of those circumstances, and I mean all people who can meet those 4 criteria. Period. So just stop comparing anything at all about the guys who started Facebook (or classically Bill Gates because he was a drop-out, sorry again; he went to fucking Harvard.) to the rest of anything. You're talking about 0.0001% of people and comparing them to everyone the hell else, just stop, it's stupid.

There's such a huge variety in the industry, I've seen it stuck to at multiple companies I worked at, and then absolutely not at all at others. It just depends, and what works varies just as much. At the end of the day, it's the people who've completed the "Learn to program in 10 years" book that get the job done well regardless of the bullshit surrounding them, so long as they completed the book that is, so many people seem to spend 10 years on chapter 1 and then proclaim "I finished the book!", wrong.

This is dead true. engineered software has very valuable place, but yeah this shit was all born of the free-form creativity of a bunch of math geniuses, continuously for decades until someone made money off of it, and an industry was born trying to formalize it so they could just put the magic in a bottle and sell it as a potion.

haha true that. I would say at the end of the day it's not the methodology screwing everyone up, it's everyone that's a screw up as in, up into management that's screwing everyone up. PM's.. pfleh, what a waste of space, but then when you don't have enough skilled engineers on your team to keep everyone organized in the same direction, a good pm can help. Finding a good PM though is way harder than finding a good engineer, at least most engineers got into it because they liked coding, PM's got into it because they "like people or something, really wasn't sure what I wanted but tried a bunch of different things and this one kind of seemed to fit" (translation I got a job doing it and it paid better than the other jobs I'd gotten, even though I have no idea what I'm doing and don't plan to study any history or industry results about the job to get better)

Thankyou. Honestly, proper agile takes a lot of discipline and skill, at the end of the day I think you can't do proper agile without at least 50% of the involved team having completed the "Learn programming in 10 years" book rather than the 21 days version. You have to have seen all the shit that doesn't work over and over again for so long before you can even begin to do any of the stuff that works, and catch people trying to do the same tired crap, getting stuck in design meetings that spin forever or the alternative of just jamming out a bunch of garbage without talking to anyone, wasting everyone's time asking every step of the way how you should do each little thing or structuring an entire module according to your own hair brained ideas and never looking at the rest of the systems structure to see how crap yours will integrate, spending a week fulfilling requirements nobody wrote but you thought were just important for your little piddly irrelevant piece of the puzzle or not being thorough enough in seeing the big picture so as to catch the shit that needs to be done but wasn't written down or even mentioned. So many ways to eff it all up, so many ways. So yeah, "Learn programming in 10 years" then help a team be agile properly and it'll work out far better than some wankers "learn daily standups in 2 days to solve all your problems" garbage or "waterfall because it's worked for everyone since the 70s!", or "agile, as in, just go get it all done without the requirements or any help whatsoever, better be good because I heard agile is good!".

I think honestly the biggest cause though hands down of all this type of just-get-it-done crap comes from MBA's being too good to actually do any work, more less any work *for* lowly developers, it's supposed to be the other way around! Therefore they never generate specs or requirements because they're supposed to be telling other people to do work, not doing work themselves, why else did they go to school to become SOOO smart?? Between those schmucks and the "programming is cool, I'm going to be the next zuckerburg!" weeners, the industry is rife with people utterly clueless. But I guess that just mirrors the real world...

Which is the same "NO" we get from management when we ask for reqs because "Just make it do what I said, you know, be social and friendly looking with some feeds or something". If we SE's weren't so smart to begin with, this industry would honestly come crashing to it's bloody knees or rather, just run completely differently, you know, where other people do their jobs rather than us doing everyone's.

You forget the other part of the equation, the corporotocracies where they have BA staffs that don't write requirements either, I guess MBA's are above all that work mumbo jumbo and just hang out while telling the devs to do something useful without giving us any bloody specs at all ever. It's not just startups that are running without requirements, it's the entire industry anymore. I don't know why, this used to be a given expectation of a dev's job that they would get requirements, but I guess somebody at some point decided we could just generate wealth for our masters without the slightest bit of input at all.

I guess it doesn't help that enough of us are smart enough to actually do just that, but still, it's bloody annoying!

Wrong.

You think the word "googling" entered common culture only for geeks?

Non-geeks know exactly what google does: Find whatever piece of information they want when they enter it into a little box thingy and hit that search button. Only geeks like you are so cut-off from the real world as to not be able to see google through normal-people eyes and only see the megalithic insano-tech company that normal people could never begin to grasp. What they can grasp that you didn't realize is that it finds them anything they want to find, and they don't even think anything other then that. They were trusted for this reason. Plus all the geek friends of normals wet themselves when they hear about google so the normals trust them that much more.

I said maybe millions because I didn't feel inclined to do the math to figure out what 5-10 years ranges in hours and took a wild ass stab heh, 5-10 years being my other wild-ass stab of guessing how long it's been since their last real outage having not followed. Wasn't trying to be hyperbolic, but since it turned out I was, maybe I can become a pundit or something, sweet!

People need to quit looking at whole numbers and think about this in real terms.

One hour. That's all, they lost business for one hour, they're still up for many thousands (maybe millions) of other hours incurring the revenues consistently.

As for everyone who says "but it's so much money!" you're missing the point, absolutely no reasonable business anywhere is spending so much on just running their business that one hour of lost revenues is actually going to cause so much as a blip on their books.

Think of it like this, if one day to another can fluctuate 5% just through pure randomness not even counting cyclicalness, their revenues fluctuate 1.2 hours worth at random. Do you think to any company 5% less business on one day is enough to stir any real bother? That's .7% of the business they do in one week.

Suddenly losing one hour of business among the countless in uptime they've had doesn't seem like such a big deal, if you want to report "wow amazing amazon makes X hourly" great maybe it's interesting to somebody, but "amazing amazon was down for an hour and lost X" is just dumb because one hours loss doesn't mean anything in real terms to the business or it's shareholders.

You just said the magic word, Amazon. Yes the duopoly can be broken, and there's only one company in position to break it anytime within the next hand full of years.

People tend to forget (or maybe this is just /.) that these are consumer devices, and you know what the most important part of a buying decision is in the wildly large majority of people who buy them? Perception of the company. Why do you think Android overtook RIM? With sufficient continued revenue RIM would have continued to innovate, but instead Android was made by Google ever coveted of companies that consumers abound thought was some kind of genius company they liked and trusted, while RIM was the company that helped business people do work, and corporations keep their employees on a leash, not a very positive perception to consumers.

So, Amazon. Yep, people the country over are constantly buying every other thing from them, my wife gets all our toilet paper/paper towels/diapers from them, and they make it easy for her (non-technical) and affordable. If they made a move on this market, consumers would be nothing but excited about the opportunities, and not a few consumers that know of them, all consumers because we all know of them, and nearly all of us like them.

That's because they make so much more to eat when they fall

Yes, this is exactly why I agree there should be hardware patents but not software patents.