Posts by veti 3434 posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
In other words, engineers are no longer writing public-facing documentation themselves.
Result, I'd say. Engineers in my experience hate doing that, and they suck at it anyway. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they sometimes put these little bombshells in on purpose to persuade their employers to give the job to someone else.
Politicians should be trained in anything but politics.
Learning politics teaches you how to gain and hold power. That's the last thing we want those bastards to be expert in. Better if they have some actual beliefs or ideals, then we can decide which of them we like the most.
The thing about sanitised HTML - at a casual glance, it's very hard to differentiate from common, iQuery-infested HTML.
What he says is true: even good devs with sound instincts find it very hard to resist the lure of "diagnostics" or "feedback". I've done it myself. PDF avoids temptation.
Well, yes. But in practice, that's what will happen most of the time. Especially if you employ minimum wage bouncers.
If the software says it's 97% sure, you'd have to be both pretty sure of your own perception and confident in your own authority to overrule it. I imagine people employed for this purpose are rarely either of those things.
"Agile" has become confused and conflated with "scrum". Scrum appeals to management precisely because it allows them to maintain the same illusion of control as waterfall, but in truth it's not particularly well suited to agile development.
Anytime you hear about "sprints" or "standups" as part of "agile" methodology, this confusion has happened. But the inconvenient fact is that scrum works best, and produced all its greatest success stories, when it was parachuted in as an emergency measure to fix a failing waterfall project. Trying to treat it as an independent methodology that can replace all other development methods - misses the point epically.
With such a small sample size, the question of how the sample was selected is very important.
I'm ppretty sure that, given the resources of a smallish consultancy, I could arrange for surveys to show any level of burnout you care to ask for, just by selecting the interview subjects correctly.
Oh, come on. When did certification ever solve - well, anything really? Are you trying to reinvent ISO9001?
Self certification is as good as its enforcement, which is to say, generally it takes complaints from suitably motivated agitators to make any improvement. How would you foster a climate in IT where whistleblowers are celebrated and welcomed by their next employer?
External certification means a whole framework of oversight board, advisors, auditors... Who would pay for all that, and why?
Basically, the big effect of either one is to favour the bigger established players who can put the appropriate effort into making sure the required boxes (and only those) are checked. Most startups and smaller players - including, most likely, the most genuinely exciting companies to work at - would be excluded because they've got more interesting things on their minds.
The Zero was an amazingly fast and agile opponent, and it's quite understandable that the US pilots in their big clunky Wildcats and Avengers and Buffaloes felt hopelessly outmanoeuvred by them.
But the Zero was agile because it had no armour, unlike the Americans. It's like the old saying, "You may be lucky fifty times, but I only need to get lucky once".
The way America won the Pacific war was a wonderful illustration of why military preparedness - doesn't actually matter that much, if you're as large as that. The USA was actually better off for not having a large pre-existing military establishment - it meant it could gear up its unmatched industry and produce the right equipment for the war it actually found itself in, rather than one some strategist had dreamed up twenty years earlier. Japan never had a hope in heck of overrunning the USA - a brief glance at any atlas would have told everyone concerned that much - and without doing that, there was no way of stopping them from eventually out-producing Japan.
Really, you'd need to do a very thorough inspection just before the test, to separate the test damage from the "gremlins" you speak of. Might be easiest to give it two six-month overhauls virtually back to back, with the test in between.
To an extent, just about every article you see on El Reg (and every other trade-related news outlet) is somebody trolling us. In this case, Veracode [who? - Ed] has done a study for its own purposes, and decided to release the findings in the hope of drumming up business for themselves.
The difference between open and closed source in this context is about your relationships. Closed source comes from an identifiable vendor, if they're shipping shit you can do something about it (complain privately, complain publicly, take legal action, shift vendors, stop paying them, whatever). Open source doesn't allow for any of those remedies, the only thing that "works" is to fix it yourself - at unknowable cost, and then you have a potentially difficult choice about whether to fix the source library (so that your competitors can also benefit from your hard work) or not (so that your version becomes forked, and you won't benefit from anyone else's fixes even if they do happen).
I've been saying for years that "maintenance" is by far the largest and most lucrative part of the software lifecycle. A company that neglects to maintain its own commercial products - is pissing away its best asset.
A lot of software engineers hate to admit this (because maintenance is both boring and hard, much harder than writing sexy new code), and I expect to attract the usual downvotes from those people. But it's true.
You absolutely should do all that, yes. But if you're sure of what you're doing, you've already made several changes without a hitch, you're anxious to get home early. .. It's possible to get sloppy.
And even if you don't, all it takes is to miss a line in the part of your query you highlight before pressing F5. Been there, done that.
Partisan bullshit.
In 2019-2020, Congress passed at least 250 bills with broad bipartisan support. (Meaning, a clear majority vote including significant numbers from both parties.)
I haven't found any figures for the current Congress, but I don't see why it should be significantly worse.
Of course most of these bills died without ever being tabled in the Senate, but that's another story.
Depends on the size of your glass and the strength of your wine. Both of these have been trending upwards (in average) for many years, and are now about 50% higher than the average levels when I was a kid. (Which, compounded, means "a glass of wine" contains more than twice as much alcohol as it did.)
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