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Comment CMMI - religion masquerading as whatever it is (Score 5, Insightful) 200

Listen. I've spent far too many of my working years dealing with companies that have caught religion of some sort. It doesn't matter which one it is, be it ISO, CMMI, Six Sigma or some virulent form of agile (yes SCRUM people, I'm talking to you); its a religion. Instead of focusing on the business and developing sound processes that fit the business model and the company culture these companies put in place this huge infrastructure hoping that this will make them automatically successful.

It doesn't.

It does kill whatever passion there is though. Yes that goes for agile too but in other parts of the company than the one you might be sitting in.

These days I have a good rule that works - when a company tries to sell me services based on being CMMI level 5 I tell them to far, far away and preferably perform some acts that are illegal in several states. After having dealt with a couple of them I have realized that the only genuine thing generated is a huge paper trail and innovation is dead or dying.

As to your question - I don't know and I don't care. I can only make the friendly suggestion that you look for work in a place that doesn't focus on religious adherence to principles defined elsewhere. I promise you that it'll be more fun, challenging and ultimately interesting.

Censorship

Pakistan Court Orders Facebook Ban Over Mohammed Images 949

jitendraharlalka writes with this excerpt from Al Jazeera English: "A Pakistani court has issued a ban on the social networking site Facebook after a user-generated contest page encouraged members to post caricatures of Prophet Mohammed. The Lahore High Court on Wednesday instructed the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to ban the site after the Islamic Lawyers Movement complained that a page called 'Draw Mohammed Day' is blasphemous. ... 'We have already blocked the URL link and issued instruction to Internet service providers,' Khurram Mehran, a spokesperson for the PTA, said."

Comment I'll buy one (Score 1) 617

once someone has bothered jailbreaking it. Prior to that - no chance of me spending my cash on it as my interest in feeding Mr Murdoch and his ideas is exactly zero.

It's an interesting step. I think we will see devices down the line (add cameras, eye tracking and general inventiveness) that come close to a cut down version of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" ideas. But right now it's nowhere near that. Just an interesting piece of hardware that I can use as a glorified screen/reader/remote. Which is pretty much what I will do. If someone hacks the damn thing.

Comment Bad for coding, good for debugging (Score 1) 198

I absolutely see where this would be useful but it's just another concept that can alleviate some of the burdens of certain parts of our (?) work. For coding, all out, no-holds-barred, i-need-to-get-this-out-of-head coding you need something that is structured around packages and classes/interfaces. Whether you have to create it yourself or you started with UML (you fancy person you) or a whiteboard doesn't matter. You want to write the code, test cases and move on. I am a believer in making mistakes and correcting them rather than overanalyzing at the beginning and that has worked well in all sorts of environments, whether it has been carrier grade telecom stuff or enterprise widget work. Doesn't matter. Get an initial design, hammer in the functionality and iterate. However, in that type of scenario Code Bubbles doesn't really help. Where it does help is in debugging and documenting, I can certainly see how this would be enormously useful in that situation. The problem is that you don't normally shift between IDEs that way. Some do, I don't and even though I don't necessarily kill the people working for me if they do it, it adds a lot of maintenance overhead to deal with dual project structures.

Anyway, if this ever gets into IntelliJ I'll be happy clam I think.

Space

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Books

Comic Books Improve Early Childhood Literacy 127

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading. 'A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words,' says Tilley. 'But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words.' Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format."
Robotics

Robot Controlled By Human Brain Cells 86

destinyland writes "There's a new experiment from the British researchers who created a robot controlled by cultured rat neurons. They're now using a line of human brain neurons to control robots. The neurons are placed onto a multi-electrode dish that registers the neurons' electric signals. 'Every time the robot nears an object, the electrodes generate signals to stimulate the brain. In response, the brain's output is used to drive the wheels of the robot left and right so that it avoids hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer — its sole means of control is from its own brain.'"
Security

Cyber-criminal Left In Charge of Prison Computer Network 389

samzenpus writes "A 27-year-old man serving six years for stealing £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet was recruited to help write code needed for the installation of an internal prison TV station. He was left unguarded with unfettered access to the system and produced results that anyone but prison officials could have guessed. He installed a series of passwords on all the machines, shutting down the entire prison computer system. A prison source said, 'It's unbelievable that a criminal convicted of cyber-crime was allowed uncontrolled access to the hard drive. He set up such an elaborate array of passwords it took a specialist company to get it working.'"

Comment Re:Google dodged the point (Score 1) 150

But seriously, this argument is wholly inane and false.

1: IE6 - it would break intranet sites. NO it wouldn't as it wouldn't get used unless the proper meta tag is IN THE PAGE. Is this insanely hard to understand? IE6 would keep chugging along until a page that asked nicely for the plugin came around. Then it would be used. The intranet would remain untouched.

2: IE7 - upgrade to IE8. Do you have any idea of how many organisations are avoiding upgrading to IE8 specifically because they aren't sure that everything is going to work properly. You are arguing that they have to upgrade (to a product that is measurably worse than the competition at handling new, javascript-heavy web applications) rather than take advantage of a plugin that will solve their immediate pain point (performance for certain apps) while not disturbing their current setup.

3: Veiled attempt at tricking users into using Chrome instead of legitimately gaining marketshare.
Please, enlighten me - exactly how does one "legitimately gain marketshare"? This is just plain old stupid. Market share is built by providing a good product and having people use it. Time will tell if Chrome Frames is a good product and if people will use it. You are not the judge of what is a legitimate route to market or not. Sorry. The arbiter of that is the market.

Comment Re:So, which side (Score 3, Interesting) 150

Ummm. Not many users? Do you completely fail to comprehend how HARD Google could push this on IE6/7 users if they wanted to? And with their allies and partners I think they would have a very good chance of doing an 80-20 conversion on that user base. That's what's up for grabs, not the measly IE8 percentage points. IE6 and IE7 users accessing Youtube, google.com, gmail, google docs et al being gently pushed to install the plugin. Good thing too in my opinion. The sooner we can get that crap out the door and onto the crap heap of history the better for everyone.

Comment On voicemail (Score 1) 383

1: The major reason for voicemail and related services (slamdown notifications where you get a text message stating that someone called you but didn't leave a message) are NOT the minutes you spend but rather call completion. You see, calls that don't terminate when your terminal is not online (a not uncommon occurance in crap networks like the US ones, you would not believe how much time a normal handset in a metropolitan area is offline) are a loss since you don't get missed call information. There is a very, VERY well understod business case for voicemail services and how they affect the average revenue per user.

2: What customers SHOULD do is require that all operators allow them to connect to Google Voice type services, i.e. a service provider that will let them govern the way they receive information and control the modus in which they respond themselves.

3: The charging model of US operators is completely insane compared to the rest of the world. How the hell can you put up with it? Seriously?

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