someengineer

One thing about Agile that I don't see mentioned much is that it provides a way for bad managers to marginalize the effects of low performers among their groups, though at the expense of high performers.

Every company has "cowboy" programmers who break shit and ruin their coworkers' lives with massive 1am check-ins, and a lot Agile seems designed specifically to put up road blocks to prevent this from happening. Managers love it because it provides an escape from dealing with problem employees directly. Most of the vehemently anti-Agile people I've worked with were grossly overconfident in their abilities and difficult to work with, which I think supports this idea.

Unfortunately, the only way for this non-management technique to be effective is to do it dogmatically with no deviations (otherwise the cowboys will always have some excuse for why it shouldn't apply to them), and this is where things start pissing off the actual talent.

A common pattern in embedded C is to use something like "goto fail" instead of assert, wrap your function calls in this sort of macro, and then do error handling in one place at the end of the function.

Apparently Apple is unaware of this technique...

Intel is indeed moving to LLVM for this reason and being totally transparent about it.

From https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/05/27/why-we-cho...

--- LLVM is distributed under the Illinois Open Source License, which is nearly identical to the BSD license and is very open for use both by open-source and proprietary projects. Some other projects, such as Open64, are licensed under more restrictive licenses like the GPL, which were not compatible with our own licensing model. ---

So, what RMS feared is exactly what's happening with Clang, and he's right in terms of pushing the GPL to prevent this sort of thing.

Now, whether or not this is actually bad is another question. Personally, I think this sort of bleeding between proprietary and open source ultimately improves the ecosystem as a whole.

I don't suppose there's any plans for a Word export feature, is there?

Unfortunately, a lot of consulting jobs require all docs to be in MS Word format... Infuriating I know.

The point the article is making is that all the problems the anti-agile crowd complains about are less related to agile and more to a dogmatic adoption of specific tools. I think the point the author misses is the irony of the whole thing. The anti-agile people get annoyed at something like religious demands for 100% unit test coverage, so they instead adopt their own extreme, narrowly focused rules like refusing all TDD. This is how flame wars work.

I've seen agile methods be most effective at companies where software developers are a minority. Scrums and sprints can be very useful when you've got many outside interests hammering at you for various feature requests and bug fixes. Done right, it keeps the software group's priorities aligned with the company's.

Though everyone'll flame you about "the future", you're probably right.

If you read the PLOS One acceptance criteria:

http://www.plosone.org/static/publication

you'll notice that scientific merit doesn't show up in there. The official policy is that if the methods and analysis are sound, then it will be accepted regardless of how irrelevant the actual study is. This is well known in academia and has resulted in a generally negative opinion of the journal among publishing researchers.

edit: I'd also like to point out that this isn't the case for all PLOS publications.

Totally agree. His reply is an overly polite response to a rather snarky rant on why the Linux devs should just shut up and accept the author's massive merge. Giant projects like the Linux kernel just don't work that way.

To elaborate on why you can typically avoid derivative control for thermodynamic processes:

There's no natural resonance in the system caused by energy-storing elements. For instance, if you drop a cold egg into a pot of water at exactly 80 C, it won't overshoot and go up to 85 C before settling to 80 C. Mechanical systems on the other hand often have "spring-like" behavior that causes them to resonate at certain frequencies.

If you want to get hardcore with the control design then you could look into fuzzy logic controllers. It's common in high-end appliances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_control_system