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Admin
A library? Now you're anonymizing. Surely you're talking about Linux.
Admin
I recall that being a major point in a large lawsuit - was it the Ford Pinto - a cute little car that had a tendency to explode in minor rear-end collisions (and, co-incidentally, had also tended to slip from Park to Reverse all by itself!). No, I think it was another, but it's name escapes me. It was air-cooled, had bushes instead of crankcase bearings, was rear-engined, and had too light a rear axel, which tended to break at speed. It's the case that brought Ralph Nader into the public eye, with his book, "Unsafe at any Speed". All of that was enough info for a google search: the car was the Corsair.
Him, wikipedia states that it was the Pinto.
Anyway, in the lawsuits about that car, the calculation that you quoted was revelaled. It lead the jury to impose crushing Punitive Damages. Still, companies still seem to use that excuse today, and enormous damages are still occasionally imposed. It seems that the judge reduced the Punitive Damages back to within that calculation's boundries. Hmm. Alive and well, I think.
Admin
By "this", I assume you mean having users be the only testers, and furthermore having them "test" in a production environment.
Admin
> Everything I've ever heard of the banks disagrees with these kind of articles.
I lost faith in banking software when the ATM I was using decided to spend its spare time during the transaction to print several receipts of big ascii art smiley faces...
Admin
The Pinto was the one that had the rear-end explosion problem. The Corsair was the "Unsafe At Any Speed" car, 12 or so years earlier.
...phsiii
Captcha: enterprisey
Why, yes, I am, thank you...
Admin
I disagree, I think this is actually a good strategy. You will always, at some point, have to map knowledge of the result set's identifiers and datatypes into your presentation layer. Concentrating all this code into a separate object mapping data layer allows it to be tested independently. I find code that does not use an intermediary object will invariably end up having many typobugs and invalid casts as the system evolves.
Admin
Ford Pinto?!?!?!?
the word "Pinto" here in brasil, means the same as "Dick"...
"Oh look! it's the new Ford's Dick!"
i guess that's why they never released it here...
Admin
When i read today's post I thought they were talking about an old company I worked for. They had some major software that ran at the london stock exchange, they would lose money all the time, I mean the software would. I have to say I believe everything in this story is 100% true based on my own experience.
To me your reply sounds like upper mangement response to ignorance and technical incompetance. Banks are the worst full of clowns and cowboy consultants
Everything I've ever heard of the banks totally confirms this kind of article
Admin
And the company still has customers?
Admin
"After all, the Certain Developer followed the software development methodology pioneered by The Executive Three (President, VP, CTO)"
It's the 3 Retardeers
Admin
They really need to get the management out of the release cycle. They should also invest in version control. Not the software, but the discipline.
They Make it Up,
They Make it Interesting,
They Make it GOLD,
They should make it away...
CAPTCHA: tps - tyranical property syndrome
Admin
I totally agree with you. However, the real big WTF is that current software development tools do not offer adequate support for explicit design pattern implementations.
Admin
Actually, it was the Corvair. The Corsair is a plane
Admin
Well, some users actually want to be testers. Of course not when buying of-the-shelf software, but when a large system is made specifically for them, they want to monitor the progress (not by trusting the "95% finished" reports, but hands-on) and they want to be able to give feedback early (i.e. when it runs into the development budget and is not considered a change request with costs). Obviously, there is the challenge that such feedback can complicate the project, overturning plans and invalidating the design. So many project managers might prefer the sink-or-swim approach.
Admin
I've worked with US, European and Asian banks and exchanges for <i>quite some time</i> and I really have no idea how the above poster comes by his wacky ideas. Maybe it's some kind of religious cult, or perhaps it's a drug in the water that gives people faith in the financial system? Maybe the poster attended some kind of 'merchant banking boot camp' at the age of 5, and there was indoctrinated into believing in stable, well-managed financial markets? Or maybe he isn't really a human, but some kind of alien whose million-year quest is to log onto forums across the galaxy and be sarcastic? Or perhaps 'everything he's ever heard of the banks' simply consists of one homeless guy who stands at a street corner and yells "Banks generally produce and use a high quality of software!" all day.
A more interesting question would be 'why does the finance industry have such a high tolerance for unstable software compared to the other industries'? And it's answerable; it has to do with competitiveness, a tendency to believe in 'the next big thing', and the fact that when disaster occurs nobody actually directly dies (investors may lose money but investing was their decision). It also has to do with the particular relationship between IT and business in the relevant institutions.
Admin
This does happen, you would be surprised what banks accept. Software that leads the day has been described as like being beaten with a wet towel in a customer survey. I found it rather funny when the system I worked on sudenly had to be made work so that a reboot wasnt required every night, programming quidence up to then had been agh sure its grand we will just bounce the server. In the end the bank accepted the need for a reboot as magic memory leaks happened all over the shop.
I find it hard to belive that someone hasnt been sucessfull in stepping into the fray in financial software, however I think its impossible as bank trusts the big vendors who deliver shit on a stick.
And just to let you know its happens Europe, Asia and bless your cotton socks in America too.
Admin
Pffft you!
How about a "platform architect" in a C# shop who spends close to 2 hours arguing how interfaces slow down execution "because you're now passing everything through an interface class" [sic]? Same guy never heard of ORM, hates normalization "because it clutters the view in SQL Server Enterprise Manager", uses quasi-hungarian notation (all non-String variables are prefixed with the ever-so-helpful 'obj', while Strings are of course 'str'), somehow manages to write a design document without a single UML (all diagrams consist of boxes, where box can be anything from a class to a module to a server to a datastore to another physical location - yes, I'm serious), and thinks MVC is a type of packaging material (the only pattern he ever heard of is pinstripe). Oh, and let's not forget he never, *ever*, used a memory profiler ("you can see memory usage in task manager") or a CPU tracer ("you can see CPU usage in task manager").
Sadly, I could go on...
Admin
I'm working at "this" company at the moment. It's not quite as bad as the one in today's WTF, but most of our clients have slightly differing versions of the software etc.
Needless to say, unless things improve I won't be here much longer (i.e., I'd better start looking for new jobs pronto...)
Admin
...assuming that the puiblic get's to know about the accident and it's cause. Therefore, in the real world, variable D is added to the multiplication, representing the probability the company will receive the blame for the accident.
Admin
Just my $0.02...
Traders/Brokers/Market Makers have the attention span of a gnat; all they can see is the next trade. Forget next year, next quarter, or tomorrow; long term planning for these folks involves their next trip to the bathroom.
When they ask for software, they want it for the trade they need to do for the customer they have on the phone *now*. Everyone gets paid by bonus (financial folks, software managers, programmers). Nobody cares that the software will be better if we take the time to do it right; they get paid better if they deliver more quickly. Don't worry about fixing the bugs, we can circumvent QA and source repository requirements to get the emergency-release-du-jour/hour out more quickly.
Multiply this across frequent releases, business users, development groups, etc, and you wind up with unmaintainable spaghetti that is re-org'd to the next manager to deal with. If you try to fix stuff, you are the one slowing things down.
After a few times of getting dinged at bonus time, you relent, and just try to keep your little corner as clean as possible, and insulate yourself from other peoples' messes as best you can. For me personally, it's a matter of professional pride, so I put in the time to do my stuff correclty, and always add a wrapper layer to puke legible errors to deflect the blame to the system/component that caused the error, instead of the one that detected it.
Not saying I approve, only that I've lived with it for a long time.
Admin
O_o wtf?!
So "someInt" would be "objSomeInt", and "someChar" would be "objSomeChar"?
WTF is the point of that? If you're going to use Hungarian notation (for some reason), use it in a way that's at least somewhat helpful to the reader.
Admin
> all diagrams consist of boxes, where box can be anything from a class to a module to a server to a datastore to another physical location - yes, I'm serious
This sounds rather like the chap we had a few years back ; that was at a VB shop, so the obj and str nonsense would make sense....
His design documents consisted of the same Word document, with certain key words replaced ; class names, tables, etc.
His diagrams consisted of - yes, five identical, plain, titled boxes stacked on top of each other.
Not possessed of a ginger buzzcut and a bizarre fetish for Thai ladyboys, is he?
Admin
Well, there's simple way to handle this... As everyone knows, Make's syntax has quite a few WTFs of its own. These days, a lot people consider Make somewhat outdated, and are moving to other build systems like Ant, SCons, Rake, and other heavy competitors. The push is clearly toward more organic, programmatic build environments with sane, programmer-friendly syntaxes...
"Good morning, gentlemen. The programmers have been hard at work to roll out our new build process to increase the flexibility and programmer-friendliness. It uses GNU Autotools, with some small additions, because we felt bare Autotools wasn't powerful enough. There's additional backend codenamed Nondependant Object Oriented Development Linking Environment, which does a lot of magic for us, generating the M4 scripts for autoconf automatically and patching the resulting "configure" scripts on the fly. Each module has been ported to use this new build process already; we made it as flexible as possible, so each developer could choose their own scripting language for their own modules - it's time to pick the best tool for the job. We have quite a bit of Perl there, some Ruby, a few PHP configuration scripts, a few Python ones, a couple were in raw C++, a few in Lua, a few even used funny ones like ObjectRexx and that funny guy from the basement wrote his 4000-line configuration package in a hybrid of RPG and Fortran IV, like the rest of his module. The way his module converts IBM JCL to Bourne shell for inclusion in "configure" is truly a marvel to behold... Oh, and thanks to the fact we hired that one GNU expert who had nothing better to do, you can now play text adventure games while configuring the build. Neat, huh?"
There. The VP can then write their own build module in Basic for all they care...
Admin
I consider ORMs and UML pretty much crap as well.
Admin
Dear sweet lord....
Of this, are software configuration management's nightmares made. However, despite being in SCM at a company that actually thinks its worth having somebody doing that full-time, I still see this kind of attitude. Sometimes it's on programs with insane schedules, such that there's is absolutely no way in hell to test before shipping, so they have been known to test and ship *concurrently*. And of course then there are the engineers who think "it's just an R&D program, why do we need configuration control?" Or the one engineer I dealt with who was convinced rigorous testing was unneccesary because the product was not "safety critical". (It was a product designed to be an autonomous lethal weapon, so I had a pretty hard time with that argument. Fortunately, my bosses sided with me on that one.)
Admin
Maybe he meant it's okay if it killed things accidentally since that was its job anyway? Then again, maybe he was just scared to be anywhere near it when it was tested.
Admin
You worked on the ED209?
Admin
<just wondering>
Doesn't a PBH (performance black hole) crush all ones and zeroes at the event horizon and eventually spew out a thin line of green dollars at the speed of light? (in the competition's direction, of course).
</just wondering>
if(CAPTCHA.equals("whiskey")) EndWith.Cheers();
Admin
YOU NOW HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY.
Admin
I think the meaning of "brillant" is lost on you.
Admin
Noit really. Brillant conveys your conclusion but not your reasoning. Have a nice day.
Admin
I worked with Paul Tomblin at this place.
It is absolutely true. I also worked later at an investment bank that used the product. They had 3 people dedicated full time to supporting this one product. 6 people supported all other software used on the trading floor.
Admin
Hmmmmm..... upstairs office on the main street of Canandaigua?
If so, I inteviewed there. The interview primarily consisted of them asking me about C string manipulation functions, and then asking to write a quicksort.
I quickly decided that any company that thought that asking a developer with 10+ years of experience *only* about syntax and CS-101 programming tasks were appropriate interview questions was probably not someplace I'd want to work.
Admin
Well i am sure that the Certain Developer must have made some real progress in the company!!! after he did what was asked of him.......
Admin
They used to be there, but they moved closer to Rochester before I was hired. I believe I was the only developer ever hired there who *wasn't* asked to write a sort algorithm in the interview, which is just as well because I didn't remember that CS-101 shit.
Admin
I wonder if they have a "pointy-haired" boss?
Admin
I don't think anyone else has suggested this...
Put unit tests in the Makefiles, and do test-driven development.
It's not an excuse to ship broken code, but at least this way, it'll be more likely that the make "won't work" if the build is actually broken.
Admin