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Comment That makes sense. (Score 1) 13

Cultural engagement and it's "lower" form, escapism, basically represent tribal social engagement and exploration of the unknown/new, you know, the things we previously evolved to be good at. That this sort of activity provides purpose, meaning and connection and thus educes stress totally makes sense.

I personally see and experience an amplified version of this in close embrace social dancing (massive health benefits, scientifically proven) and due to my diploma and experience in performing arts. It basically makes me 15-20 years younger than my peers.

Comment Oh, please, not again. (Score 5, Interesting) 85

First of all, the singular term is "agility" not "agile". Second of all, agility isn't a means, it's the end. The actual goal. And "agile software development" is a thing and will remain a thing in teams and "projects" where it fits and makes sense. Those are scenarios with experienced teams booked on a well-seasoned and under control stack with which every team-member has solid experience to basically take on any task in the scope of the project.

Agile software development is the _solution_ to the problem of clients not knowing what they want and developing a piece of software that isn't military, medical, space, aeronautic, nuclear, mission-critical embedded or some other hardcore stuff. This is why agile software development is most often used in web development and generic user-facing software for vertical markets. Because that's precisely where you find customers who are usually overwelmed with formulating the requirements of a piece of software to be programmed.

And no, it's not at an "end" and no, it's not "dead". Perhaps the fad with dimwitts has died and they've moved on to another new buzzword, but that would be a good thing.

Agility or Agile Software Development is still alive an well for anyone actually aware what those terms really mean. See the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development for further details.

Congratiulations, you are now ahead of 99% of the buzzword crowd. You're welcome.

Submission + - The first segment of the Fehmarnbelt megatunnel project is placed.

Qbertino writes: The Fehrmarnbelt Tunnel is a European construction megaproject building a tunnel between Denmark and Germany, crossing the Fehmarnbelt in the Baltic sea. The first segment of the tunnel has now successfully been placed in its designated spot. This is a yet unseen next-level engineering feat achived by the Danish Sund & Baelt construction company. It took 14 hours and used a massive pontoon ship built specifically for this project. The tunnel segments are 217 meters long, weigh more than 73.000 metric tons and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3mm. The tunnel will eventually consist of 89 of these segments, be 18 km long and connect the Danish city of Rodby with the German island Fehmarn with five individual tunnel tubes, 2 for cars, 2 for trains and one rescue & maintenance tunnel. Crossing time will be reduced from a 45 minute ferry crossing to 7 minutes by train or 10 minutes by car and cut the travel time between the German city of Hamburg and the Danish Capital Kopenhagen down to 2,5 hours. The projects planned completion is set for the year 2029. German news Tagesschau has some details and a neat animation showing details, the German technews site heise.de has some further details.

Comment If only it were _for_ the neighborhood (Score 1) 162

If the data center is primarily intended for use by (exclusively or nearly exclusively) the people in the neighborhood, sure, it could make sense. I know this is quaint and out-of-date but one can imagine a neighborhood squid cache, NNTP server, modern Netflix cache, etc for the neighborhood. Have it be connectable by a high-speed neighborhood LAN, to share the 'hood's WAN.

Just a classic neighborhood network coop, but with some added caching services, which is what would cause it to be called a "datacenter" instead of a "router." ;-)

As if that would really happen. And that's sure not what this is.

Comment The usual question: what did they do? (Score 1) 45

Once again, I'm not shocked by the percentage laid off, but I'm shocked by the number of individuals. If 700 people was 14% of their workforce, then this company had about a hundred times as many employees as I would have guessed. Not that my guesses are particularly well-informed, but when I look at what this company's product appears to be and compare it to my own experiences, I can't help but make guesses that are apparently 99% off! (I'm that dumb!?)

What do employees at these large companies do all day? Why were they hired in the first place, or why weren't they laid off many years ago? I just don't get it.

I don't mean it as a put-down of their products, but on the surface it just doesn't look like their thousands of employees do anything bigger or more complicated than my dozen-developers-sized team (which is, itself, much larger than the teams I've been on in previous decades). Is everyone's productivity just .. eaten up by labor-not-scaling problems? Do I need to really read the Mythical Man Month instead of treating it as distant folklore that I'll some day get to?

Or is the answer in some other direction? Part of me thinks I should just drop it, and accept that I really don't know jack shit about the profession I've had for the last 40 years.

Comment Before I condemn it... (Score 1) 184

I can't really say it's bad for it to be doing these seemingly-bad things, until I know the answer to this: what is the app's intended purpose? Why would/should a person use it?

If it's intended to inconvenience/expose/punish users for trying to find out things about the White House, then maybe the application is doing the right thing.

Comment The classic web development problem. (Score 1) 184

This is what made the Web so successful and omnipresent while at the same time introducing this type of epically dimwitted security nightmares:

The Web has nice pictures you can click on, meaning everybody has an opinion about it and wants to develop with and for it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but most web "developers" (emphasis on the quotes) have no idea about how the web actually works and what secure-by-design actually entails.

That's when you get this sort of thing, roughly 70%-80% of the time.

It's super frustrating and can get you severely depressed if you aren't aware of the cultural reasons for this problem. I've been doing non-trivial web development for 26 years now and have learned to live with this problem, but it still is just as annoying as it was in the year 2000, even though I've since notably updated my zen-skills in dealing with these types of people and projects. The upside is that by now I (mostly) get do decide who I work with and those are people who pay me fair and do listen when I say that an idea for a web solution is a bad one and has security issues built in no matter how much the juniors or marketing think it's awesome.

That said, I still consider the Web superiour to most other ways of doing software, for the simple fact that it is 100% open standard, human readable, truely 100% cross-platform and FOSS all the way through. And I wouldn't have it any other way doing professional software development. Fixing and replacing abysmally shitty code every odd project is a downside I'm willing to take with that.

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"Would I turn on the gas if my pal Mugsy were in there?" "You might, rabbit, you might!" -- Looney Tunes, Bugs and Thugs (1954, Friz Freleng)

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