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Comment much more time to be spent on req spec (Score 2) 403

Outsourcing doesnt have to be to a foreign country, it happens all the time. There are organizations with big IT departments that choose to pay outside company to do the work. Is that a good idea? It depends, as with everything. You have to realize that you will spend much more time on specifying and verifying the implementation of requirements, interfaces, etc. than if the developers were in-house. If you don't do that then you're going to fail. This increase of specification cost, is due to communication problems with external parties. If you are prepared to stop coding and start managing - why not go for it. Just be careful and precise with requirements, including non-functional ones (performance, etc.). Always mention that you won't pay if it doesnt adhere to the spec and good practices. If you are going to own their code later on, you should also enforce some standards, frameworks used, etc... You do see where I'm going? You can outsource the grunt work, not the thinking.

Comment Re:We are the borg ...... (Score 1) 121

this is not true, read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman. There are experiments that show that quality of human thinking degrades very quickly when multitasking. Therefore some system that can detect such situation would be very good for activities that require long attention span and are prone to interruptions.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you go about testing a storage medium?

g7a writes: I've been given the task of testing new hardware for the use in our servers. For things like memory I can run it through things such as memtest for a few day's to ascertain if there are any issues with the new memory. However i've hit a bit of a brick wall when it comes to testing hard disks there seems to be no definitive method for doing so. Aside from the obvious S.M.A.R.T tests ( i.e. long offline ) are there any systems out there for testing hard disks to a similar level to that of memtest or any tried and tested methods for testing storage media ?
Open Source

Big Data's Invisible Open Source Community 49

itwbennett writes "Hadoop, Hive, Lucene, and Solr are all open source projects, but if you were expecting the floors of the Strata Conference to be packed with intense, boostrapping hackers you'd be sorely disappointed. Instead, says Brian Proffitt, 'community' where Big Data is concerned is 'acknowledged as a corporate resource', something companies need to contribute back to. 'There is no sense of the grass-roots, hacker-dominated communities that were so much a part of the Linux community's DNA,' says Proffitt."

Comment Analytic Hierarchy Process (Score 3, Insightful) 304

Try Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It's very well described in reference to software development in "Lean Software Strategies" book (which I recommend btw).

Basically you dont rank priorities of projects/tasks not on absolute scale, but on relative scale (project A vs project B, etc.) based on gut feelings, discussions with stakeholders, CFOs, etc. You end up with a matrix you have to solve to get normalized new absolute weights of each project/task.

I had the opportunity to use it once for new project kick off, I liked it and will use this method in the future. The book presents this method in context of other case studies, and it certainly has been used in many other situations.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Forging a Head: The Upside of Scientific Hoaxes 201

An anonymous reader writes "In a very funny piece over at Science Careers (published by the journal Science), scientist-comedian Adam Ruben suggests that a lot of good can come from a well-intentioned hoax. 'Hoaxes have infiltrated science for centuries,' Ruben writes, 'from fake fossils (Piltdown Man, archaeoraptor, Calaveras skull) to fake medical conditions (cello scrotum, the disappearing blonde gene) to fake animals (Ompax spatuloides, Pacific Northwest tree octopus, Labradoodle).' In contrast to fraud, Ruben argues, such hoaxes do a great service to science by illustrating 'failures of our most important tool: our skepticism.'"

Comment get away from CMM if you can (Score 2, Informative) 200

Let me recommend a book : "Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers". It containes throrough analysis of craft, mass and lean production strategies and their reflections in software (CMM being on the mass side = already obsolete approach). If you can't abandon CMM because of market conditions, think about embracing CMM with as much lean as possible as Peter Middleton describes, and find auditors who would understand and allow you advance on CMM scale without sacrificing productivity and adding waste to your process. In terms of tools, good issue tracking system with customizable workflows is what I recommend.
Iphone

Submission + - Adobe Advises Apple to "Go screw yourself" (theflashblog.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: Apple's recent decision to restrict the languages that may be used for iPhone and iPad development has provoked some invective from Adobe's platform evangelist Lee Brimelow. He writes on TheFlashBlog, 'This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D.' He ends his post with, 'Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple. Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.'
Unix

Submission + - SCO vs Novell: Novell wins

Aim Here writes: Breaking News: According to Novell's website, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the jury in the SCO vs Novell trial has returned a verdict: Novell owns the Unix copyrights. This also means that SCO's case against IBM must surely collapse too, and likely the now bankrupt SCO group itself. It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing...
Programming

Submission + - Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

theodp writes: Ted Dziuba can't wait for NoSQL to die. Developing your app for Google-sized scale, says Dziuba, is a waste of your time. Not to mention there is no way you will get it right. The sooner your company admits this, the sooner you can get down to some real work. If real businesses like Walmart can track all of their data in SQL databases that scale just fine, Dziuba argues, surely your company can, too.
Databases

Submission + - Digg says yes to NoSQL, bye to MySQL

donadony writes: After twitter, now is Digg who decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Casandra, an opensource project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database. Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008 and is licencied under Apache Licenses.
The reason of this move as explained by digg is that their primary motivation for moving away from MySQL was the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced them into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead

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