Here’s a case where Windows 98 “beats” out Mac OS X.
My employer is big on Scrum-flavored Agile Software Development. This is not a critique of “Agile” practices (if you want one Steve Yegge won’t let you down). I just don’t have enough experience organizing software projects to judge if this whole “Agile” thing is working well or not. But I do think the choice of the word “Sprint” to denote a unit of work is harmful.
A sprint is unsustainable. Fully recovering from a true-sprint takes a long time. To be ready to sprint again, you must rest for far longer then the sprint lasted. And you’re pretty useless (at least running-wise) while you rest. These are simple things that we learned as kids on the playground. This is what “sprint” means to people.
Calling repeated multi-week units of sustainable and quality work a “sprint” makes no sense whatsoever. Worse, it subtly encourages over-exertion and behaviors that are detrimental to a project.
It might be argued that in the context of Scrummy-Agileness, “Sprint” is a technical term, divorced from the common parlance. Whatever. Words don’t change meaning overnight, and they are almost never their own antonyms. Word-choice is known to influence people.
Sure, word-choice alone isn’t enough to derail a project, or sink a methodology. That’s why this isn’t a criticism of “Scrum”, which will ultimately stand or fall for other reasons. But there are plenty of much better terms to describe a chunk of work, that will help long-term productivity. Wouldn’t you rather work for a company that evaluated how effective a “Play” was?
Do you know what the real difference is between a Mac and a PC?
It’s not just the OS. A platform always stands or falls on third-party development. The difference is that Mac software tends to be well designed, and Windows software tends to suck.
–Mike Lee, being “an elitist Mac-fan wanker”. Some interesting comments so far.
To complete this picture you need a USB thumb-drive on the far right.
I don’t close cabinets after I open them. Every cabinet in my kitchen is open.
This is an inverse of a few other people’s quirks.
You have to re-open any cabinet you close to use it again. Leaving them open is faster, and it lets you more quickly scan their contents. If you are ashamed of what’s in your cabinets…. fix that problem, don’t cover it up with a cabinet door!
There is only one exception to this rule. My bathroom cabinet gets closed, but only so I can use the mirror on it.
Now this all makes good sense. But, I can’t help but wonder if I do this because it’s the right answer … or for some other reason, and the rest is just rationalization.
It is rather worrying that:
a) PayPal broke something so fundamental as subscription payments. Don’t they have proper testing before they roll out changes?
b) It still wasn’t fixed 12 days later.
c) PayPal seem completely unresponsive to requests for information from developers when problems occur.
According to Andy Brice
Is this the 1924 version to Molly Millions (at least from the neck up)?
Yesterday at about 8:30 AM CDT, my email account vgable@mail.utexas.edu was deactivated, with no forwarding service provided, cutting me off from an unknown number of contacts. What did I do to deserve this? Well, I graduated, but my alma mater is too cheap to offer forwarding.
The email address I check the most often is:
