bandushrew

The term "Waterfall" was not applied.

but it absolutely was very common to use the process that it implies.

many man-years of gathering requirements, building lists of features, interrogating stakeholders.

people knew they would never get a second chance to get what they wanted, so they would throw every feature in that they could think of.

Then the developers would build it. more man years building. mostly they tested as they went along, but....different features and areas of the app were often build in isolation, so the most you could say was that you had tested what you had built.

the stakeholders were consulted with screenshots, and sometimes the app, but the Big Fear was new features and additional requirements (which would cause massive contractual headaches) so any contact was VERY carefully controlled.

Also it was assumed every project was massively valuable IP, so detailed designs and features were held very close to the chest..again, any contact was VERY carefully controlled.

Eventually, after months or years of effort the various parts of the app would be "merged". omg the cluster fuck that would occur, the compromises, and arguments, the agonizing...

..then more testing..

Once that was completed the brilliant new creation would be seriously unveiled to the users to cheers and relief.

Finally, the contractual battles would begin as the paying company realised they had asked for entirely the wrong thing, and the development company tried desperately to cover their ass and make a profit.

The single biggest problem that Agile fixes isn't the testing, its the disconnect between what the client wanted and what the developers actually deliver.

"During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work."

nope. Ive been using apple software for 20 years.

apple software has ALWAYS been crap. its just also been less crap than the opposition.

hell, before OS X, a crashed app would force you to restart the entire computer....

I still remember long afternoons debugging a CodeWarrior application, and having to restart after every successful replication of the problem...

"A few influential people did."

yup, that was us.

Sorry, I am not sure what point you are making with the second line.

We do care. I get really annoyed at this argument.

We cared so much about the welfare of our fellow man, that we passed laws ensuring that companies needed to run safe, healthy, ethical and environmentally friendly environments.

We did this despite the prospect of higher costs, because we cared.

Companies then moved their manufacturing (and mining!) to other countries, where they could continue to abuse the people and their environment in peace to ensure bigger profits for themselves.

Somehow this is now our fault again.

Tracking and maintaining a record of every single company whose goods we should avoid is HARD, and most of us already have too many things we need to do.

We have consistently indicated that we want our government to help us ensure that the goods we consume are produced ethically, safely and in an environmentally friendly way.

The problem is that there is no will at the government level to do this.

yup. I have four kids, two sisters and a partner.

Sometimes I need to work through ALL the names to get to the right one..

pap...hil...sam...ji...joan..KIM could you please....

" single purpose hospitals would be a bad idea - what if you're delivering a baby and the mother starts bleeding profusely?"

you would clearly need to provide immediate care, but then move them on as soon as possible to a general purpose hospital.

Here in NZ we already do something like that specifically for birth - mothers have the choice of using a midwife and having a home birth, and the midwives move the mothers on to the hospital only if problems present.

"The first criteria means the incentive is to get as many students enrolled as they can, "

"but the second one means that no one will enroll if the school's quality falls off."

that statement needs to be qualified, I think. something like "no one will enrol if the school's quality falls markedly below that of its (also private) competitors"

It doesn't need to be the best, just good enough that parents who live in its catchment area have no incentive to travel further to a different school.

"Hospitals work for care when you have enough time to decide and can look up average costs and results. Certainly not appropriate for car accidents or gunshot victims, but it works if you're getting a early-stage tumor removed and can afford to wait a week."

heh. thats a pretty specific use case.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, it would be interesting to see "hospitals" focused on single purpose delivery....literally birth, or early stage tumors etc....

I bet there would be savings available if certain kinds of treatments were treated along a production line.

To me the only sensible way to judge privatization is to look at the incentives that are created.

Prisons - If we assume the corporation profit comes from prisoner rent, the private corporation is incentivized to encourage more prisoners and longer sentences.

Im not convinced that is a healthy incentive, and the evidence seems to show it is not.

School privatization - Where does the profit come? if it is based on children/hour then the corporation is incentivized to have more people attending school for longer periods.

that again sounds like a problem to me - you COULD achieve it in positive ways, but you could also achieve it by not teaching anyone anything....or by teaching at a slower rate...

Hospital privatization - This just sounds like a total cluster fuck to me, assuming the corporation makes its profit from rent/medical treatment then the incentives are there to keep patients as long as possible and undergoing as much treatment as possible, while actually curing as few problem as possible...

Some things, are just not meant to be privatized IMO.

That is a really insightful comment, thanks.

Its not lacking. it is easily possible for users to get refunds from apple.

I have no idea why the developer isn't just asking them to go to apple for a refund.

Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.

"You cannot expect the populous to be sufficiently educated on the intricacies of foreign policy and global threats. So my proposal would be for the lawmakers to propose a better form of oversight which includes strict provisions for surveillance, especially the domestic variety. These provisions also cannot hamstring the NSA or the like; there has to be balance."

but then, if you and I (the "populous") aren't allowed to know what they are trying to achieve, or how they are doing it, how on earth are we supposed to have any faith in the oversight that "lawmakers" provide?

I cannot overstate how strongly I abhor the "you cannot expect the populous..." type arguments when used to continue keeping them in the dark about matters for which THEY HAVE ULTIMATE RESPONSIBIILITY.

if "the populous" is expected to select lawmakers based on the quality of the job they do, then "the populous" sure as HELL needs to have the information on the intricacies of foreign policy and global threats made available to them, and the response that their lawmakers support.

>I mean choosing function names based on length because you didn't bother to write an actual hash function? AMAZING.

Context: "This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember the few function names."

THere were a lot of 'if' statements in your post :) The problem is:

(1) We do not know what the NSA is doing (2) We cannot trust what they say they are doing, because they are perfectly willing to lie about it.

"Who cares about having a "light show" in their house?"

People do - "mood lighting" is already a thing, that is why we have dimmers on some light switches now. Going further than that we can change lighting color, create patterns etc.

Many people, including myself and my kids, would LOVE to have that in their houses.

But only if it was easy, it needs to come essentially for nothing, ie, to be builtin from the start.

"What does that even have to do with the internet?"

Internet Of Things I have always understood to mean "Things that we can talk to and control using our devices, possibly over the internet" but in terms of the internet as it is widely understood, not much really. I am not sure I understand the question?

"We already have huge televisions that aren't very expensive. If we want the whole wall to be a TV, we can get a projector. A wall covered in individually-addressable LEDs is probably not going to be cheaper than a wall covered in televisions or just a big projector."

Right, and who knows whether that specific leap of imagination is realistic, I certainly do not - but I was not trying to make you want a TV in your wall, or even arguing that it specifically was a good idea, it was merely one possible example to make a point.

"The question the parent was asking was "Why hasn't anyone shown me a concept that makes me think, 'Now I want an internet of things in MY house!'?"

Yes. and I was attempting to suggest that one possible reason is that our imagination is balking because we keep looking at what we have in our houses now - all of which is extremely functional and works fine according to our expectations and desires, which have been moulded by what is available and by what has always been available.

ie, we are looking at our existing house infrastructure, the idea of an IoT and saying "but the Internet Of Things is not going to give me a faster horse, so why would I want it?".

I think I am doing a bad job of explaining myself, so I will bow out :)

I believe that the main reason it is hard to see the benefits is that we dont yet have the interesting infrastructure inside that house that an IoT will allow.

ie, I think it is actually too early in the IoT life cycle to really visualise the impact it will have.

Let me explain - currently our lighting and applicances are designed entirely around the idea that they will be manually operated and standalone pieces of equipment.

Once that assumption is taken away, and houses are built with a different assumption, suddenly magic begins to happen - imagine that instead of a few lights in the lounge, there was a ceiling and walls covered in thousands of LED lights that could be independently controlled via the internet. The average home could literally have lighting shows. An entire wall could be utilised as alternately a television or a photo viewer, even a wall in every room.

etc, etc. Use your imagination here. The point is that the impact of an IoT on the average middle class house as they are built today is currently pretty small because neither the house nor the contents of the house were designed with an IoT in mind. Once we actually have an IoT houses will be build from the ground up with different assumptions .

At least, that is my opinion.

tl;dr: The IoT has a chicken and egg problem.

being unemployed, with no access to resources you can use to build things, is a very different environment than being unemployed with full access to things you can build.

Money has beenb poured into education, but not spent on actually teching people.

check out the budgets for the universities, and tell me where the money has gone.

VCS is being used, so the criticism is unfounded:

"i would suggest that you ask questions first or be quiet the postfix author is using a VCS but he do not need to provide access to you or me "

Anyone can criticise anything for any reason.

Criticism is so easy to generate that it is worth absolutely nothing.

The process they use works for them.

I guarantee that I could come into your place of work and criticise pretty much everything you do, pointing out that there is a better way of doing it (because there will be, from some angle).

This is not useful, and whether or not I am correct on any specific point it is unlikely to be well received.

The NDA did not cause the rapists to go free. The fact the police broke the law did that. they should not have done it.

Ideally they would capture a rapist without breaking the law.

It is definitely insensitive, and it is clearly not constructive.

I dont think that insensitive is the same thing as offensive?

I must admit, I am completely failing to understand the apparent outrage.

I keep feeling like I am missing something, would anyone be willing to explain it while they downvote me?

Calling that offensive is a real stretch, IMO.

I am fascinated that it warranted a firin'

This is the first time you have responded to it. You were ignoring it.

honestly, that is not where we disagree. We disagree entirely on the primary function of the internet.

You apparently see it, already, as just a series of walled gardens.

Unfortunately your lack of awareness around what it does, is driving your uninformed opinions around what kinds of protection it needs.

For the sake of my own sanity, I am gonna assume that you are simply playing devils advocate.

It is successful content creators who have a lot of leverage. Aspiring content creators (and distributors) have none.

"These are just all for-profit companies hoping to make a bunch of money off consumers."

Unfortunately you have completely ignored all discussion of The Internet being a communications platform, and not merely a commercial platform.

Ignoring that point entirely has allowed you to continue making your own point, which is to refute the idea that we should care what happens to a bunch of for profit internet companies.

I agree with your point, FWIW, once once a company reaches the size of a Facebook, or Netflix I don't care what happens to it.

I do care desperately that individuals are able to easily create and distribute content to each other, of any kind.

The Internet as a communications platform that is available to everyone, for everyone, is what is endangered by the proposed anti-NN measures.

The health risks for sex workers was purely a hypothetical situation that showed the general class of the problem.

The point of it being a communications platform is that there is an infinite variety of cases of exactly that kind of problem, potentially leading to an infinite variety of 'targeted' laws. Aside from the incredible inefficiency of attempting to deal with them one at a time, practically speaking it is just not going to happen.

Cable companies will not have any incentive to specifically demand payment from small entities like that. They will just degrade the service they provide for everyone, and make special cases for those who pay the appropriate amount of money.

This will massively damage the internet as a communications platform, it will cause huge problems for small content creators who are trying to get a start, and the need to make deals with a wide range of ISPs will crush small businesses, and startup entrepreneurs.

Netflix is a fantastic example of this.

It is, right now, big enough to be able to move largish amounts of money around to solve its delivery problem. A few years ago, it was not, and - this is important - it would never have gotten to the size it is if the anti-NN measures that are being proposed now were taken back then.

Snapchat, WhatsApp, the list goes on for companies that started small, and were able to grow because they did not need to pay ISPs individually to have their content delivered to the ISPs customers.

MineCraft has been responsible for millions of downloads of its product, probably causing Comcast customers to consume thousands of GB of bandwidth from Comcast. At what point would the distributors of MineCraft have needed to pay Comcast a bribe to ensure its bits were delivered without interruption?

You are either being very disingenuous regarding the effect of these measures, or you genuinely do not understand them.

Assuming it is the latter, i suggest you do a little more reading.

Please, let us get the framing of the problem right.

Netflix already pays for the bandwidth they consume.

I, as a netflix customer and a customer of Comcast, already pay for the bandwidth that I consume.

Comcast, for some reason I cannot fathom, wants the right to force Netflix to pay additional money for the bandwidth that I, as a paying customer of Comcast, consume on Comcast's network.

Because The Internet is not primarily a commercial platform, it is primarily a communications platform.

One absolutely magical aspect of the internet as it is today, is that I can stand up a server - on my desktop, on a VM in the cloud, on a physical server, wherever - and my friends can access it from all over the world. Poor indian farmers with smartphones can use my server to get data about the local market for rubber, rich financiers can use my server to educate themselves about the likely effect of new financial laws, Strip Club workers can access my server and learn about new health risks.

All of that goes away once I need to pay Comcast a bribe to persuade them to provide access to my server for their customers.

This has nothing to do with whatever commercial opportunities the Internet may or may not provide for Big Business, and I really dont care much about those.

In time my little server may start to make a profit, maybe that is my motivation when I begin or maybe not, but regardless of my original motivations The Internet is magical technology that lets people from all over the world communicate.

that is the functionality I care about, and that is the functionality that anti-Net Neutrality laws massively threaten.

I love the implication that it is somehow incumbent on NN supporters to educate you about how the internet works.....and the additional implication that there is a single set of laws that govern it.

If you actually understand neither the technical details, or the legal aspects, maybe you should take responsibility for educating yourself?

or, at the very least, avoid making deprecating comments about those who know more than yourself?

Because, as much as possible, we dont want ISPs to discriminate against any website, whether it is discrimination based on politics, or commercial interests.

I have no care about whether Apple can get its websites shown - Apple can take care of itself.

I do care whether I or other entrepreneurs can continue to publish our ideas without suddenly needing to bribe ISPs to not ruin the experience of customers using the site by throttling bandwidth as soon as it gets popular.